Frame Work

Send us Fan Mail The guys decamp to Middle Earth/New Zealand to talk over the crowning achievement of blockbuster filmmaking in the 2000s, Peter Jackson's epic, maximalist adaptation of LORD OF THE RINGS.  In part one, we look at the miraculous realization of Gollum, the cascading successes the production pulled off in each area of the story's world, and a few dozen other things.   This...

Send us Fan Mail Joon Kim returns to talk about Fincher's most overlooked film, the Hitchcockian (if you're feeling generous) potboiler PANIC ROOM.   

Send us Fan Mail The boys welcome Gwen Sisco to the program to break somewhere between 2 and 5 rules of Fight Club, depending on how strict you get about the "two men at a time" and "no shirts" policies.

Send us Fan Mail Joon Kim drops by to discuss the impressively Lynchian highs and bafflingly  doofy lows of the first 7 episodes of WANDAVISION.

Send us Fan Mail "You know what is not an appropriate theme for a birthday party?  Your Father's Suicide."

Send us Fan Mail Fincher's breakout film still packs a transgressive wallop after 25 years, and the guys are here to dig into its unique blend of theatrical abstraction and sincere humanity, the interplay of banal and baroque evil, how it incepts you it thinking it is much more gory than it is the Spacey factor, and how completely the best Batman movie was ripping it off.

Send us Fan Mail Frame Work branches out into gaming, with a look at the most sneakily influential piece of culture of the last half century, the OG table-top role playing game, Dungeons & Dragons.  The original idea was to examine its role in shaping  the video game industry, but before that the party finds a great deal to unpack about the creation of the game, its strange method of encouragi...

Send us Fan Mail The guys begin a look at the filmography of David Fincher by welcoming Bill Heidrich to discuss and defend his divisive debut, a franchise sequel/ender that somehow manages to be completely compromised  and utterly uncompromising at the same time.

Send us Fan Mail Before kicking off their next David Fincher series with the deeply imperfect ALIEN3,  John and Al geek out over Ridley Scott's perfect creature feature ALIEN and James Cameron's perfect sequel ALIENS.   They gush over the incredible creature design, intricate world-building, forgotten plot twists, and Cameron's facility at making R-rated movies for kids.  

Send us Fan Mail John embarks on a semantic quest to define the genre of Adventure films, leading Al through a series of puzzles and pursuits that hits all the notes one would expect:.  The correct pronunciation of "Cary Elwes".  Historical revisionism.  The quality of Charlie Hunnam's agent.  The relationships between The Goonies and Da Vinci Code.  And more talk of the 1990s, Arma...

Send us Fan Mail "Donnie, got us an internet that loves ranking movies!  OBLIGE him."

Send us Fan Mail The guys discuss the generally amiable mess that is WW84, the definition of nitpicking, and the whole misbegotten affair that is the DC Cinematic Universe.

Send us Fan Mail The guys welcome their Kiwi Kompadre Ben Hansen, aka Bucho, to explain the finer points of CLONE WARS and defend the light, crowd-pleasing delights of THE MANDALORIAN from the Dark Side of Al's incessant negativity.   Subtopics include video gamification of TV, justic for Pedro Pascal's skull, a thirst for villains,  and the truly daunting mass of Star Wars series that h...

Send us Fan Mail John and Al talk up the latest, messiest season of FX's shockingly great "adaptation" of the Coen Brothers' crime classic, before doing a quicker, Boba Fett-centric check up on The Mandalorian  (70:45).

Send us Fan Mail John and Al attempt to chart the history of rowbuts on film, and how a genre long defined by allegorical significance is beginning to clash with a modern reality where computer intelligence manifests as less Kunta Kinte from ROOTS and more Jerry Lundegaard from FARGO. 

Send us Fan Mail John and Al wrap up the QT catalogue with the surprisingly respectful, oddly wistful but still jarringly and gratuitously violent ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD.  We talk about what it means to respect or disrespect the memories of Sharon Tate and Bruce Lee in 2020, the eroding differences between film and TV, the oddball structural choices, and whether its possible for the endin...

Send us Fan Mail Finally, two white guys talk about LOVECRAFT COUNTRY.   The main focus is in how it disappointed in the scares department, which leads to more general discussion of horror and how hard it is to do it in the TV format.

Send us Fan Mail The guys welcome Chris Prentice to parse the underpinnings of the American Western, whether Michael Madsen is actually good,  truth and lies, Tarantino's age-blindness, Netflix's clumsy editing,  and arguably the most provocative and least coherent ending of QT's career.

Send us Fan Mail John and Al look at the finale season, assess what went wrong, what made people mad, and compare it to the other Epic Saga finales of 2019.

Send us Fan Mail John and Al look back on Game Of Thrones , and attempt to map the cultural genome that allowed it to rise to the very peak of Peak TV.

Send us Fan Mail John and Al welcome Jesse Perry to talk about Tarantino's sloppiest piece of provocation, DJANGO UNCHAINED.  They talk at great length about the film's great length, speculate on different iterations the movie could have taken, manage to avoid saying the N-Word, even once!

Send us Fan Mail The guys abandon all pretense and just fawn over Tarantino's self-proclaimed "masterpiece" for 90 minutes.  Topics of said fawning include spies, interrogations, Brad Pitt's accent, the power of cinema, and just what the hell Mike Myers is doing here anyway.

Send us Fan Mail Topics of conversation include Slasher films, the appeal of overwritten dialogue, whether or not this is in the conversation for all-time best Kurt Russell performances,  some consideration of the environment this film was released in, and where Quentin’s head might have been at the time regarding Uma Thurman, Weinstein, and his own legacy!

Send us Fan Mail The guys welcome their first guest, long time internet-friend Joon Kim, to talk about the chatty, somewhat flabby conclusion to Tarantino's gonzo epic of samurai/western/anime/exploitation/superhero indulgence.

Send us Fan Mail Tarantino let's every wild, indulgent impulse he restrained in JACKIE BROWN loose, and the guys are here for it