Frame Work

Send us Fan Mail We rank things out and try to figure out what we learned about the elusive Mr. Fincher.

Send us Fan Mail James Gunn tries to bring some Troma energy to superhero hijinks, and the guys are sort of here for it, but a little lukewarm?  We try to figure out if that is because vulgar violent superhero excess has become ground too well-trodden to be shocked by, or because Gunn himself has done better versions of similar material, or he is operating within the fundamentally compromised DCEU...

Send us Fan Mail Joon is back, Al is cranky, Gary Oldman is miscast, and our journey through the David Fincher filmography is complete.

Send us Fan Mail In which we talk up our personal favorite entries that fell off the consensus Best list.

Send us Fan Mail Joon Kim drops out of a sky portal to help the guys make a definitive (sure, why not?) ranking of the ongoing megalith that is the MCU.  In this installment, we talk throught our consensus top 5 of this genre-unto-itself, while next week will feature us each stumping for a personal choice that did not make the cut.  

Send us Fan Mail The guys welcome Brett Blake to the podcast in order to finally put to bed all the controversy surrounding the Star Wars sequel trilogy to bed.  It is mostly a reasonable, civil discussion of differing philosophies on the meaning and handling of franchise IP in the streaming era, that may eventually take a hard swerve into all advocating for the genocide of all septuagenarians.  S...

Send us Fan Mail Fincher goes streaming by returning and refining his preoccupation with serial killers into potentially the final word on the subject, the two season wonder MINDHUNTER.  The guys are into this one.

Send us Fan Mail The guys just talk about Tim Robinson's oddball sketch show I THINK YOU SHOULD LEAVE for an hour.  It's fun.

Send us Fan Mail Can a movie set 4 years ago qualify as a period piece?  Is Hawkeye ugly?  How much damage can your hero shrug off before the entire onscreen world falls apart?  What is a Kang?  These questions and more are not-quite answered in today's exciting installment.

Send us Fan Mail Joon Kim returns to yak about the LOKI show on Disney+, the unique challenges it meets with aplomb, its perfunctory action scenes and sublime Owen Wilson presence, how it stacks up against prior Marvel shows and finally a group therapy session to process anxiety at the daunting deluge of Marvel content to come.

Send us Fan Mail We're talking all our favorite snobs, bullies, sex pests, bureaucrats, supervillains and...golfers?   

Send us Fan Mail Brendan Leonard joins us to discuss Fincher's satirical thriller.  We're talking media satire, marriage as a fraud upon the public, where Fincher and author/screenwriter Gillian Flynn's real allegiances lie, and the ultimate battle of the sexes as Kim Dickens faces off against Tyler Perry.

Send us Fan Mail Chris Prentice returns to discuss the meteoric rise of possibly the biggest, most unlikely and unique star in the history of Hollywood:  Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger.  No one did it like him.  Is that because he is a one-of-a-kind talent, or because he is just an inhuman brick that can only play cyborgs believably?   And is KINDERGARTEN COP actually better than PREDATOR?  No. It&ap...

Send us Fan Mail Elisabeth Rappe joins the guys to talk about Fincher's opening to an aborted trilogy, which somehow operates as a triptych of films unto itself.   Rated "S" for Stellan Skarsgaard, Serial Killers, Sexual Assault, and Superfluous Swedish-ness.  

Send us Fan Mail It's all accents, ACAB and antiheroes as the guys sit down to talk about HBO's latest prestige murder mystery, and slip quickly from fooling around with "wudder" and "hewgies" to Jean Smart's septuagenarian play for total dominance of TV to how MARE seems to have  completely sidestepped the debates around "copaganda" despite Mare hersel...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, the guys contemplate an alternate reality where the Oscars are biased toward broad, capital-C Comedies rather than stately costume dramas and respectful biopics.    Which is very important cultural commentary, and definitely not just an excuse to talk about how incredible Bill Murray is in KINGPIN.

Send us Fan Mail If you are trying to be an asshole, is it even possible to fail?

Send us Fan Mail The guys welcome old internet friend Brad Millette to begin the long journey through the catalogue of epic single player RPGs the Bioware company has produced over the last quarter century.  First up is the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons port, Baldur's Gate, which we find to be something of an beta test for what the Bioware model we will come to recognize in the future.

Send us Fan Mail Joon Kim makes a triumphant return to help try to crack the case of BENJAMIN BUTTON.  Who thought this movie needed to be 3 hours long?  What drew Fincher to material so spectacularly ill-suited to his talents?  Where did the sudden godlike omniscience in Benjamin's narration come from, or disappear to?  Why did Eric Roth turn in a script without having cracked the nature mai...

Send us Fan Mail As a sort of counterpoint to all the fawning they did over Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy, John and Al look at another adaptation of an epic fantasy series that fell flat on its face.  Both have some intense love for Stephen King's magnum opus, despite wildly different views of the ending stretch.  Where they agree is that the 2017 film version is enough to make even the m...

Send us Fan Mail Fincher hit an artistic high and commercial low with the epic serial killer docudrama ZODIAC.   We look at the exacting period detail, the protean versions of the Avengers and True Crime genre it represents, murderer's row of character actors, the off putting squirreliness of Jake Gyllenhall, and whether there is actual closure to be gleaned from this movie about the lack of...

Send us Fan Mail It's dancing barons versus singing fishwives as Joon Kim drops in once more to compare the world building of the MCU and DCEU.

Send us Fan Mail The giant-sized LOTR conversation concludes with a lot of gushing over the performances, spurred by Al's contention that the trilogy has a dozen Alec Guinness-es littering its sprawling cast.  Other topics include (of course) the multiple ending meme and enduring influence over blockbuster filmmaking.

Send us Fan Mail The guys continue to rain praises on the production design, unique humanism, special features, location work, and wizard fights of the LOTR trilogy.

Send us Fan Mail The long-prophesied SnyderCut of JUSTICE LEAGUE is upon us, and the guys are not impressed.  After an hour of pondering the merits of "mature" superhero stories, unfiltered artistic visions, Steppenwolf's makeover,  and the ambiguous mourning of musical Finnish fishwives, we switch to a quick recap of the WANDAVISION finale (1:04:00) and the premiere of FALCON AND T...