Mary Versus the Movies

This movie is bad, it plays into dumb racial stereotypes, it's crude, it features Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise drugging and kidnapping Farrah Fawcett for laughs, Jackie Chan is mostly wasted, and Dean Martin looks like he's about to die. But it's nowhere near the worst movie we've seen, and has a sort of obnoxious charm.

Get ready for 30 minutes of incohate rage as Mary and Dennis endure a movie about a rich white child buying a poor black man and forcing him to be his friend. Fun for the whole family. Starring Richard Pryor, Jackie Gleason, and Ned Beatty, and directed by Richard Donner.

This week we have a special guest, our good friend, the librarian Kate Eckert (@katoukate), to talk about the Japanese comedy  Tampopo , a "ramen western" about a young widow and the truck driver who helps her become an expert ramen chef. We talk about food, sex, and old women who can't stop squeezing the merchandise.

This classic British gangster film is also a meditation on capitalism, crime, and the death of the British Empire. And weird as hell to watch post-Brexit. Featuring stunning performances from Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren, this film is easily one of the best we've seen for the show. Some come and listen to us talk about the IRA, gay mobsters, and how Remington Steel was not great.

We really enjoyed this romantic jungle adventure starring Kathleen Turner, Michael Douglass, and Danny DeVito--so much so, that this episode went on a little long. But when you're dealing with a surprise Robert Zemeckis film, that's gonna happen.

Mary had studiously avoided this Weird Al vehicle, convinced that his brand of parody music--not her thing at all--would turn her off to this movie. Is she right? Or is this a beloved cult movie that ultimately wins her over? Tune in as we talk about the nature of music in humor, the lost world of local television, and Dennis's History of America in the 20th century.

We were excited for this psychic comedy starring Jeff Goldblume, Cyndi Lauper, and Peter Falk, but folks, the vibes were bad. 

Mary is finally sitting down to the only pre-1990s Disney film she's never seen. We talk about 1970s rural entertainment, the sad state of Disney Pictures at the time, and whether Mickey Rooney should've been cast at all.

It's our first anniversary, and to celebrate, we're watching the Canadian comedy  Strange Brew , starring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob and Doug McKenzie, the breakout characters from  SCTV , who end up as the Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern of a sinister plot to take over the Elsinor Brewery.

There's several things to like in this comedy about a man down on his luck who ends up living with a rich family in Beverly Hills, but there's also something sour that doesn't sit right with us. We talk remakes, Venice Beach, jerk dogs, the problems with Whiggish History, and whether this house is a polycule.

This Eddie Murphy action-comedy about a Detroit detective navigating the wealthy enclave of Beverly Hills while investigating a friend's murder is an absolute blast. Come for the discussion of art market money laundering, stay for the ranting about Glenn Frey.

Part II of "Hey, which is this, Empire of the Sun or The Last Emperor?" concludes with Bernardo Bertolucci's epic biography of the last emperor of China, who wasn't exactly a great argument for the institution of monarchy. 

Part 1 of "Wait, which movie is Empire of the Sun and which is The Last Emperor ?" in which we watch Steven Spielberg's epic about a very young Christian Bale living out the worst possible version of Home Alone  in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.

We were surprised by how much we enjoyed Richard Donner's medieval fantasy about a knight who spends his night as a wolf and a lady who spends her days as a hawk. We just wish the music was very, very differernt.

Things get very silly when Dennis tries to get Mary to watch this Rutger Hauer film that he loved as a kid.

"Indie Month" closes with a look at John Waters' breakthrough film Polyester , an homage to the "women's films" of the 1950s. We talk about kitsch, the suburbs, and Mary gets to gloat.

We watched Steven Soderbergh's breakthrough indie hit, and came away appreciating it as a fairly standard drama that dances around some ideas around intimacy, while not really surprising us much with its content--the title is far more salacious than the film itself.

This episode could've been two hours, because holy cow does Richard Linklater's breakthrough indie comedy provoke a lot of thought about the nature of work, generational angst, conspiratorial thinking, religion and pop culture, and whether withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy. For Dennis this was a trip down memory lane into his own Gen X youth, for Mary this was a real excavation of a...

Jim Jarmusch's Neo-noir-beatnik-comedy is a favorite film of Dennis's, and a staple of the 1980s indie film scene, so it's time for Mary to finally sit down and watch. Silly, stylized, and warm, "sad and beautiful" as one character says, it stars Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni as three men stuck in a Louisiana jail for accidental crimes who try to find a way to live with each other.

Our month of Christmas-themed movies wraps up with Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, a lushly-filmed, sometimes dark, deeply-moving family drama about a brother and sister whose lives fall apart when their father dies and their mother remarries. With allusions to Hamlet and Charles Dickens, it's a heavy one, but then, some of the best Christmas stories are.

It's an old-fashioned Christmas in the Smoky Mountains when Dolly Parton runs away from L.A. and ends up running afoul of a sleazy sheriff, a jealous witch, seven orphan, and Lee Majors as a a mountain man named Mountain Dan. It's a cornball affair, but very Christmassy.

Our Christmas-themed month continues with this not-exactly-Christmasy Japanese World War II movie starring David Bowie and set in a POW camp. However, this film about repressed desires, honor, toxic masculinity, and regret carries some potent themes, even if it's light on conventional Yuletide joy.

We're bending the rules a little here to bring you an early Muppets Christmas special, and one of the few Mary's never seen. Make some cocoa, curl up by the fire, and listen to us talk about the Muppets, John Denver, Jimmy Carter, vaudeville, Jack Benny, Old Time Radio, whether God has a wife, and more.

It's a Thanksgiving Miracle--we thought we'd seen this movie, but it turns out we hadn't, and now we know why it's a holiday classic. Is it John Hughes' best film? Maybe! Does it contain one of the funniest scenes in comedy? Arguably! And has travel in America actually gotten worse since the mid-1980s? DEFINITELY. So join Steve Martin, John Candy, and Mary and Dennis as we hit the road in Planes,...

It's an episode of unbridled enthusiasm as we take on Jonathan Demme's romantic-screwball-comedy-meets-domestic-crime-drama Something Wild, starring Melanie Griffith, Jeff Daniels, and Ray Liotta, and littered with music from David Byrne, John Cale, Laurie Anderson, and a memorable appearance by New Jersey's post-punk legends The Feelies playing a high school reunion. We fell in love with this mov...