Drat Pack

It's September, which means it's back to school season, which means that we get to drink our way through a really crappy movie about high schoolers! In our latest episode, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris watch sad sack misfit Freddie Highmore mope his through his senior year of high school in 2011's The Art of Getting By. That is to say, he would be moping his way through it if he hadn't neglected to do...

As the Summer of Weddings closes, we decide to put some fresh eyes on some of the depictions of adulthood from movies and TV we watched and loved as kids versus how we feel about them today (surprise, we hate them!). Mostly, it's a great excuse for Leigh to force Brendan and Chris to watch the truly cringeworthy film Dream for an Insomniac. Perhaps it should have been obvious to 12-year-old Leigh,...

Quick! What would you do if you were secretly in love with your horrible best friend's fiancee for years and never told him, but then he told you he was also in love with you for years and never told you, but he seems to have no real interest in figuring out what he wants to do and his wedding is quickly approaching and also Jim Halpert keeps yelling at you? If your answer was "dither for weeks wh...

In which we take nonromcom movies we already watched for this podcast and romcomify them, so there are romcoms where we had naught but noncoms to begin with. Rom! Continue reading →

Our Summer of Weddings and Margs swaggers onward with a rom (?) com (??) that's somehow so shitty it nearly circles back around to having something to say about masculinity and relationships (ALMOST). Listen in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they watch and discuss 2008's My Best Friend's Girl starring Dane Cook, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, Alec Baldwin and a bunch of other poor bastards. Think ba...

Our Summer of Weddings and Margaritas rolls on relentlessly like some fire-breathing atomic bridezilla, but for this episode we take a breather to focus on the subject of subtext in movies and how it relates to the viewer's interpretation of the film and how a fandom can then take that and run manically with it all over fanfiction.net. As the movie Luca provides the starting point for this discuss...

Mon dieu! Le mariage- elle est trop grand! Alors, une question: que se passe-t-il lorsque les parents adoptifs divorcés d'un jeune homme adopté, sa mère biologique conservatrice et plusieurs autres membres de la famille à peine développés assistent tous à son grand mariage? Eh bien, rien de drôle, c'est sûr. Rejoignez Leigh, Brendan et Chris alors qu'ils regardent The Big Wedding en 2013, un remak...

Two years ago, in the Before Times, we did this sort-of game thing where we prepared lists of movies that at least one person had seen but at least one other person had not. We then used that list to try to describe what we thought the plots of these movies were to see how close our cage impressions were to the real thing. With the long-awaited adaptation of Dune probably coming to theaters this f...

Please, please, don't confuse 1994's I Love Trouble with Nothing But Trouble, though both are equally unpleasant movies (albeit in wildly different ways) and both spend about the same amount of effort on compelling romance. For our nicest episode ever, we watch this aptly-forgotten Charles Shyer / Nancy Meyers romantic (?) crime thriller (??) starring Nick Nolte, Julia Roberts, and a whole lot of...

With vaccines becoming readily available and the CDC spinning out new guidelines at a bizarre rate, it seems like our long international nightmare might finally be nearly over (but just that one). For this mini episode, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris all take a look back on how they spent their pandemic quarantines. What did we binge? What did we watch that we never thought we'd end up watching under n...

On this episode of Why Did We Watch This, we welcome back both Michelle Pfeiffer and Catherine Zeta-Jones for their fourth (!) appearance in one of our movies (in so much as you can call it an appearance if they never actually show up on screen, but at least they both actually tried unlike the rest of the cast). That's right, we're watching Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, the (mostly) hand-drawn...

Going off of our generation's love of 1980s nostalgia, it's a sore spot that we're not getting the glut of weird-ass original fantasy movies we were getting during that decade. In a world where the majority of fantasy movies that are kind of close to original are live-action remakes of Disney fairy tales, there's a lot of fantastical crap to wade through. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris all try to think...

We can all agree that two people in relationships acting as though they're having some sort of affair is pretty questionable, but what if the universe itself demands that these half-dimensional wisps of character sketches should be together for some inexplicable reason? Well, then you'd have Serendipity, a charmless 2001 romcom starring John Cusack, Kate Beckinsale, and a lot of other wasted talen...

In an effort to do justice to those characters long shunted to the side for various reasons, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris talk about their favorite side characters in movies and TV shows. Who are these champions of protagonist support, so often doing the heavy lifting of keeping the plot interesting or the jokes a-popping? Why are they often so much more interesting than the leads they're so thankles...

Imagine, if you will, a world where Disney was so desperate for a franchise that they threw a bunch of cinematic spaghetti at the wall and ended up with "a sort-of prequel to a movie we don't own but not really and it will star James Franco and be directed by Sam Raimi and cost over $200 million." Well, you don't have to imagine it, you just have to struggle to remember that yes, in fact there was...

WE'RE BACK with consistently better sound quality (comparatively speaking) and a mini episode that mandated we actually put effort into this. That's right, it's the return of the Pitcher's Mound and this time Leigh, Brendan, and Chris are all attempting to pitch feature-length adaptations of fairy tales. FUN FACT, many fairy tales don't follow any sort of story structure and it can be very difficu...

In advance, we apologize for the questionable audio of this podcast and the questionable decision to have a bunch of bros make a movie about how they're suffering in the friend zone. But also it's Christmas (yes, once again, as time isn't real) and we've got Julie Hagerty! Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris for 2005's Just Friends, a Ryan Reynolds romcom with the least rom that's ever been in an annua...

With the entire world on fire and everything going to hell, it can be comforting to take solace in movies (and television) you're familiar with rather than risk feeling new sensations by indulging in the unfamiliar. For this mini, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris discuss their rewatching habits- what movies they liked but will never want to see again, and what they turn to whenever they need the visual e...

Lace up your hoverboots and strap on your black villain cape complete with voluminous sleeves, it's time for Why Watch Ascending! That's right, we're kicking off 2021 with the Wachowski's 2015 sci-fi-space-opera-which-feels-like-a-fan-fic-but-somehow-isn't, Jupiter Ascending! Join the three Dratpaxus siblings Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we discuss how a movie can have too much plot and yet too li...

UP ON THE KNEES OF A SERGEANT MAJOR RIDE THROUGH THE WOODS WITH THE WIND IN YOUR HAIR SILVER BELLS ON A STOLEN REINDEER WHILE WE RACE TO THE CASTLE OVER THERE It's our usual lazy day look back on the year in review, an awful awful year full of awful awful movies and some pretty good drinks. What were our favorites and what should be consigned to the dustbin of oblivion? Look, listen and find out,...

Finally, the prophecy has been fulfilled. No, not the prophecy that a human would become the elf king and lead them all to salvation (hey, not at all played out or uncomfortable!), but the prophecy that we made ages ago when we said we'd do The Christmas Chronicles 2 as a follow-up to the OG Christmas Chronicles episode we did two years ago. So, here it is. And there it lies like a glossy piece of...

December is almost upon us, and with it a plethora of original holiday-related programming. Instead of focusing on of of the ones with a Christmas ghost or some other supernatural hook (next time!), we discuss a Netflix original miniseries we all found ourselves binging very very quickly, Dash & Lily. As another adaptation based off of a jointly-written Rachel Cohn and David Levithan young adu...

Back in the Before Times when movies were actually a thing you could go to, it was customary for studios to start dropping Oscar bait movies in late fall and continue throughout the holiday season. It's always fun to look back on which ones never ended up getting the little golden men they were angling for, and for our November episode we look at a recent example, 2013's The Secret Life of Walter...

OOOOOO PRETTY SNARKY, EH? It's been over a year (or maybe like three months time isn't real anymore who knows) since the finale of Game of Thrones aired and disappointed nearly everyone with its rushed plotting, shoddy characterizations, and shots of Dany making it look like she has dragon wings. Since then, we've all entered into a collective pact to not think about it anymore. Well, we're smashi...

Welcome, boys and GHOULS, to our annual Halloween Spooktacular featuring The Haunting! Yes, this is Jan de Bont's 1999 CGI-encrusted remake of Shirley Jackson's classic story of horror and pulsating doors, not the 1961 classic, or the Netflix series based off the same source material, or The House on Haunted Hill, or the remake of The House on Haunted Hill, or The Legend of Hell House. Leigh, Bren...