Drat Pack

THE WHY WATCH CREW SPEAK! One month after Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker premiered to a resounding critical "Oof," Leigh, Brendan, and Chris finally do what every other podcast did like two weeks ago and gather together to try to make sense of whatever the hell that movie was supposed to be. Spoiler alert: it's not great! There's a lot of J.J. Abrams nonsense to sift through here, l...

Dans notre dernier épisode de Why Did We Watch This, nous tournons notre regard critique vers la France et leur film Le Pacte des Loups de 2001, qui présente de nombreux acteurs français et une monstruosité générée par ordinateur recouverte d'une armure de cuir. Et apparemment, ce n'est pas un film de loup-garou! Quel titre trompeur! Rejoignez Leigh, Brendan et Chris alors qu'ils sirotent du vin c...

As always at this time of the year, we are tired and have a bunch of other stuff to worry about, like shopping for presents and the distressingly low box office intake of Cats. So, we present for you all our annual year in review where we talk about our favorite and least favorite movies and drinks. Also since we forgot to mention in the actual episode, we're kicking off 2020 with Brotherhood of t...

Snow hides a lot. It's like the Spanx of weather. And ironically, no amount of snow (and there ain't much) can hide the problems of Netflix's 2019 holiday ephemera offering, Let It Snow. Yes, friends, it's yet another direct-to-streaming Christmas movie, this time a baby Love Actually set in a midwestern town that seems to shut down in a panic upon receiving two inches of snow. Cozy up with a mull...

At what point is a mini episode no longer a mini episode? Probably at this point. This point, when you have what is ostensibly a "mini" episode that's longer than some of our actual episodes. In our defense, there's a lot to cover here! With the Christmas season upon us, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris gather in front of a roaring fire to discuss the glut of direct-to-streaming-service holiday movies av...

For this episode, we take you back to the halcyon days of 2014, when it seemed like a novel idea to make a live-action adaptation of a Disney animated movie but a slightly more stale idea to make it like Wicked but Sleeping Beauty. That's right, we're talking about Maleficent, Disney's revisionist fairy tale starring Angelina Jolie's prosthetic cheekbones and that guy from District 9 who we were a...

In our latest mini-episode, we we cover the sequel to a movie we'll be doing for our next full-length episode. It's like Memento, but instead of your favorite Christopher Nolan trappings it's got Angelina Jolie and her prosthetic cheekbones. That's right, we paid money to see Maleficent: Mistress of Evil in theaters, which is more than most of America is doing. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we...

For our Halloween spooktacular this year, we're not going to be a ghost movie podcast, but a podcast with ghost movies in it. And if that means anything to you, you may be familiar with Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro's 2015 half-written love letter to gothic fiction that Universal Studios would really rather prefer you to think was a horror movie. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris whip up a tea cocktail...

It's finally happened. We've run out of things to say about scary movies for Halloween. It's a real kick to the shins, it is! Anyhow, in lieu of that and springing from a tangent about horror films, we all talk about the things in film that make us not want to see a movie with no further information needed. No matter how open minded we try to be about these things, there's always a genre, director...

For our extra special forty-seventh episode (sure, why not?), we're trying something no podcast has surely ever tried before- having two special returning guests to total FIVE white people talking over each other about a movie. It's okay, though, since three are women and that's still more than any other podcast has ever had on together at the same time. And what a movie for us all to discuss! We...

Friends, nostalgia is the most dangerous drug and none of us can get enough of it! But, for about forty minutes anyway, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris will doff their nostalgia goggles and discuss times they revisited a movie they loved growing up and later revisited. Will it hold up like so many movies broadcasted incessantly on Comedy Central in the early 90s? Or will it be more like rewatching the 1...

Nothing says instant chemistry like the classic pairing of a heterosexual woman and a gay man, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of our modern complicated times. And nothing makes a more compelling case for why this premise alone is not enough to hang a story on than 2015's Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List, a movie that's as wildly unlikable and messy as the millennial burdens at its peanut butter center....

Finally, an entire episode dedicated to the songs and performances of Tone Loc! Whether it's "Funky Cold Medina" or showing up for one scene in FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Tone Loc has- oh, wait, never mind. It's about tone. Tone in cinema. Like movies feeling "big" or "intimate" and the cultural and critical baggage that entails, that kind of thing. Also our upcoming back-to-school movie and...

In Hollywood, nothing is a more surefire hit than an adaptation of a book from the 1890s that the majority of your audience probably haven't read but are maybe familiar with just from cultural osmosis. Once you've locked in this successful blockbuster, be sure to alienate fans of the source material by also removing any sort of subtext or metaphor that the original novel had so that no one ends up...

Whether telling an impossible ad intellectually-stimulating tale using the realities available to us through science fiction or wringing jokes from a mom wanting to fuck her son who was sent back in time by his elderly scientist friend using wildly unsafe experiments funded by aiding international terrorists, time travel movies have been an important part of film history for decades. As a prelude...

With all the political turmoil that surrounds us every waking moment of our lives, what better way to forget your troubles than an action movie with Clive Owen and Naomi Watts where, uh, it turns out it's not really an action movie but a windy conspiracy thriller about how a large untouchable bank is making the entire world miserable just for the sake of profits? Yes, it turns out The Internationa...

For this mini episode, we decided to do something a little different and play a game that would lead to discussion. Well, it's kind of a game and kind of a discussion, but not like in the strict sense of either. Well, there are actually aspects of both to it, but- look, we work from a list of capital-I Important Films and ask those amongst us who have NOT seen the movie in question to try their be...

"I'm here to reap souls and eat peanut butter, and I'm all out of peanut butter!" says Brad Pitt as Death as he shows up at Anthony Hopkins's door, shortly before macking on his vacant-eyed daughter and mocking old Jamaican ladies. Or something like that. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris pour some classy cocktails and sit through all three hours of this ponderous meditative slog, then discuss the source...

With the impending summer movie season upon us all, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris decide to kick it off with a mini episode about when movies make you cry and scared and feel stuff. Mostly the first one, I think because we were all in a certain mood seeing how the movie we're doing next is a delightful romp about death and life and all that frivolity. Also we prepare a recipe for a classy cocktail tha...

As the weather becomes more pleasant and your social media timelines are full of endless memes about how it's gonna be May, only one thing is on the mind of America- unquestionably, the prom! Whether you're a high school senior, some sophomore who really shouldn't be involved in all this anyway, or a lumpy and uncompassionate adult, the prom is probably the thing around which your entire life has...

Disney took an old film of great acclaim / Can you imagine that? / And made a sequel that's more of the same / Can you imagine that? / New actors but a similar plot / In some ways charming but sort of not / There's decent choreography but also BMX / What was with those guys biking on the ramps? / When Leigh saw that sequence on a plane she said we had to chat / So we all watched this Poppins pic /...

For this episode, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris discuss a stirring biopic that tells the story of Ethan Hawke's mother Leslie and the struggles of raising a young child alone while- wait, sorry, it's not that, it's a very 80s medieval movie with all the perils of a fairy tale adaptation despite not actually being based on any existing one. We talk about the rules of the world, the many paper-thin char...

Whether you're a movie maker, a dungeon master, or just some kid who is haphazardly slapping together some Legos without any sort of regard for the instructions and DAMMIT TEDDY THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE TAJ MAHAL DOES THAT LOOK AT ALL LIKE THE TAJ MAHAL TO YOU???, world building is a big thing to consider. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris talk about world building as it relates to movies, from good one...

Ladies and gentlemen! We have gathered you all here in the accusing car because there has been a murder! Thankfully, we only lost Johnny Depp, so... don't strain yourselves trying to work out who may have done it. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris don their mustache guards to discuss 2017's Murder on the Orient Express, directed by / starring / production designed within an inch of its life by Kenneth Bra...

As a prelude to our Mystery March episode (which is a thing we just made up now), Leigh, Brendan, and Chris talk about detectives in pop culture, be they Sherlock Holmes or, uh, other. Also there's some stuff about whether or not you should be able to solve a mystery while watching / reading it and a lot of stuff with TV procedurals. Anyway, you've got two weeks to start growing a ridiculous musta...