Box Office GROSS: The Top 50 Hit Films of 2006

The man, the myth, behind our intrepid theme song, Cory "Ether Diver" Casciato joins us to pick apart the absolute juggernaut that is WEDDING CRASHERS , to try and figure out why on Earth this, of all films, was the first R-rated comedy to ever hit $200 million at the box office. Was it simply the power of Vince Vaughn's motormouth coke energy and Owen Wilson's laconic charm? We...

In one of our absolute best episodes yet, our wonderful longtime pal David Neary joins us to discuss one of the most picked-apart films on our list, Tim Story's 2005 adaptation of FANTASTIC FOUR ! We discuss the series' comic origins, the difficulty with adapting these earnest, perennially-arguing Silver Age characters to modern screens, genre's cinema's fundamental buy-in w/r/t su...

No one in our recent scheduling chaos has been bounced around more than Katie Conaglen but we’re so glad we finally got to record because she is absolutely essential to picking through the befuddling wreckage that is Nora Ephron’s BEWITCHED , an adaptation of the 60s sitcom seemingly no one wanted to make and no one had a good angle on, but what they eventually settle on is a BAFFLING misfire and...

We make up for being a day late by bringing you the most hotly anticipated episode of this entire project in Steven Spielberg's harrowing, gargantuan WAR OF THE WORLDS and offering up two of the most prestigious and amazing guests we've had so far, the brilliant and prominent critic Bilge Ebiri ( Vulture/The New Yorker ) and one of the smartest and funniest guys running these Twitter stree...

This journey was TOO TREACHEROUS FOR GUESTS. Rob & Brian go guest-less as we discuss the astonishing success of the nature documentary MARCH OF THE PENGUINS .! We dig into the deep history of documentaries that found themselves as box office successes, we debate the moral and entertainment validity of the format, its strange transition from France to America, the long cultural tail of Morgan F...

Our brilliant and beloved pal Katie Stebbins joins us to deconstruct HERBIE: FULLY LOADED , a bizarre attempt to resurrect a justly forgotten old-school Disney property for a modern era, and the result has the same stupid issues its forebears did. We dive deep on the entire LOVE BUG franchise, lament how queer black woman directors are rarely allowed to fail upward like their white male brethren,...

We snag up two of my favorite Newfoundlanders, the great Doug Tilley of the vast Cinema Smorgasbord podcasting episode, and contributions from the lovely TJ Dobbin, who was so wonderful on the SIN CITY episode, as we go DEEP on the origins of the Caped Crusaders with BATMAN BEGINS . We discuss how much of a not-sure thing a new, serious Batman film was in the post-Schumacher wilds, Liam Neeson&#39...

Longtime friend of the show Scott Nye ( @railoftomorrow ) joins us to pick apart Doug Liman's MR. & MRS. SMITH , a staggering mess of a movie seemingly designed to draft off of its main characters' couples' charisma, but in a bizarre reversal, they were both dating other people and only became a couple after this film, which also fueled a tabloid mania that pushed this empty, broke...

The great SCOUT TAFOYA ( The Unloved, But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, The Black Book: An Anthony Mann Reader ) joins us for a lively conversation on all manner of topics centered around Ron Howard's period boxing drama CINDERELLA MAN . We discuss strong performances from Crowe, Zellweger and Giamatti, Howard's nebulous positions on topics political and soci...

Folks! The great Jeb Lund (@Mobute), the OTHER host of the delightful It's Christmastown podcast with he and David Roth, stops by to interrogate the poisoned faux-macho nightmare that is the Adam Sandler-starring remake of THE LONGEST YARD. I gleefully relish the opportunity to reference the who's who of bizarre mid-2000s roster of cameos, from pro wrestlers (Stone Cold Steve Austin! Goldb...

We have finally arrived at our top film of the year and it is a massive movie that casts an even more massive shadow over the psyches of so many, especially Rob, for so many different reasons. I felt a little too emotionally unattached, so to take on this massive undertaking, I call upon the biggest STAR WARS fan I know: MY WIFE, Amber Crews! We delve into all of our incredibly different roads to...

Our delightful pal Kev Koeser of the Tasting Menu and Total Massacre podcasts jumped in in a pinch to help us talk about a REAL nothing of a movie, the essence of money-making Childrens Film Product: MADAGASCAR ! Our first top-10 entry, we discuss Dreamworks' race to beat Disney to the "talking animal travels abroad" punch, and how the creative team behind this movie is so, so, so mu...

Box Office GROSS return to the world of unhinged, justly forgotten rom-coms as we go DEEP, deeper than deep, AS DEEP AS LEGALLY ALLOWED, longer than the film itself, in fact, on the nightmarishly bad MONSTER-IN-LAW . We plumb the depths to find answers to so many pressing questions, such as: why the hell did screen legend Jane Fonda choose this garbage as her return to cinemas? Why do all JLo'...

Hoo boy, this week is a doozy. We journey back in time to cover the 2005 Academy Award Winner for Best Picture, CRASH, its overaccomplished cast, its heinously manipulative plotting, its hilariously facile look at American racial politics, its string of irritatingly "funny" wannabe-Tarantino monologues. We bring in one of our longest-tenured internet pals, the great Shaun Swayne, to simu...

It took us fourteen episodes but we invite the great Jesse Hawken ( JUNK FILTER ) to be our guest as we have finally arrived at a REAL GROWN-UP MOVIE on this project: Sydney Pollack's political thriller THE INTERPRETER. , a movie that is basically completely forgotten now because it is not really equipped to deal with the political implications of its general premise, but a handsomely made, pr...

FOLKS, Ep. 13 is our first DOUBLE GUEST episode, but the AMITYVILLE series was just gonna be too big for one person. I called upon two of my great friends, longtime cinephile pal Daniel Gorman AND somehow more of a Cinemasochist than me Steve Carlson, who has somehow watched upwards of FORTY Amityville-branded slopfests. We got into every inch of the AMITYVILLE franchise, from its specious origins...

We welcome the great Matt Lynch ( The Suspense is Killing Us , Scarecrow Video) back to the show and mirroring his previous appearance ( Constantine ), he shows up for another surprisingly delightful action movie: Sahara ! We delve into the psychotic hack misogyny of author Clive Cussler, the violent changes in Matthew McConaughey's cultural legacy and the unfairly maligned reputation and ludi...

FOLKS, today we bring you our first truly relevant, iconic, influential film that we've covered on this project, Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller's "SIN CITY", and we went DEEP with special guest, our brilliant and learned animation and comic scholar TJ Dobbin as we worked to untangle the complicated artistry, the dubious influence and the rancid misogyny of this messy, ground...

This one is TOO CONTROVERSIAL FOR A GUEST! Rob and I dive together into the HOT WATERS of "Guess Who", a story of RACIAL DIVISION, UNEXAMINED HOMOPHOBIA, TOXIC MASCULINITY and the fundamental vagaries of your child dating Ashton Kutcher. We had a blast delving into this stupid slapstick farce, that has so little to do with the browbeating liberal-lecture classic "Guess Who's Com...

Did you know "The Ring" was based on a novel? Did you know film adaptations of both "Ring" and its sequel novel "Spiral" were released ON THE SAME DAY in Japan? Did you know the latter went so poorly but the American remake succeeded so wildly that now, confusingly, there are THREE SEPARATE FILMS that could conceivably call themselves "the second Ring movie"...

Episode 8 is our first animated film, somehow the fifteenth highest grossing film of the year despite being maybe the most obscure movie we've covered so far, Ewan McGregor and Robin Williams in "ROBOTS"! You ever wanted to hear a bunch of androids straight out of "Rollie Pollie Ollie" make SEX JOKES??? You ever seen a lady with an ass so big that her farts make street ligh...

Now I expected a lot of things on this project: I expected a lot of pain and suffering, especially from the early months. What I did NOT expect was the quality to be so low that our episode on the ultra-low-effort Vin Diesel 'tough guy takes care of kids' comedy THE PACIFIER became a total lovefest, because the film had the temerity to have a plot that goes from A to B to C and all the cha...

This one is a DOOZY, folks. We had to call in the big guns: the great Jane Altoids (@staticbluebat) joins us for "BE COOL", an unhinged hothouse nightmare of a nominally breezy crime comedy that has been entirely forgotten by the general public for very good reasons, but juuust squeaked into the lower rungs of our project. We go LONG as there's so much to pick apart with this one, a...

We, shockingly, have our first GOOD movie this week, and we have the great Matt Lynch (@colonelmortimer, Letterboxd, The Suspense is Killing Us, Scarecrow Video) to cover maybe the only good movie for months in either direction: Keanu Reeves in "CONSTANTINE". We discuss its tangled backstory of its creation, striking performances from actors expected (Keanu, Tilda Swinton, Peter Stormare...

On our fourth episode, Rob and I have our first divergence of opinion about the quality of a movie on our list, our biggest hit so far, the 11th highest grossing film of 2005, but I'm writing the copy here so I can refer to it as the absolutely demented, scattershot romantic comedy "HITCH", starring Will Smith, Kevin James and Eva Mendes. We delve into the film's awkward 2005-ass...