Mary Versus the Movies

This British satire is half a good movie and half a ham-handed play for an American audience unfamiliar with the tv series this was based on. The part of the film that posits the prime minister of the UK is a dangerous madman is a not-bad homage to Doctor Strangelove, while the American plot involving Michael Richards as a master-of-disguise terrorist is pretty dire. But at least the movie feature...

This is the notorious film that got Lisa Bonet thrown off The Cosby Show . Initially rated X for a scene that honestly is pretty tame by today's standards, it's a fascinating blend of noir and horror, starring Mickey Rourke as a private eye collecting on a debt for the Devil, played by Robert De Niro. It has some sketchy racial and religious elements, but overall is a stylish head-scratcher.

Halloween month comes to a close with this very silly movie that takes horror hostess Elvira from the boob tube to the big screen. It ain't high art, but it's a lot of fun.

In what is sure to become a Halloween tradition for us, we watch the comedy-horror film An American Werewolf in London and absolutely fall in love with it. Part gothic horror, part romance, part buddy-comedy, this is the second film we've watched from John Landis, and easily one of the best films for the podcast.

Spooky Month continues with our special guest, author and relationships specialist Alana Phelan (@hellolibrarian)! We sit down with Alana to watch the first Nightmare on Elm Street film. Will this be as quippy as we expect? Does the Simpsons parody spoil the ending? And just how is he killing these kids in their sleep? Find out on our latest episode.

Kicking off October's Spooky Month, it's The Witches of Eastwick , a comedy where Jack Nicholson's greasy ponytail is somehow able to pull down a harem that includes Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Directed by George Miller, who has one of the oddest filmographies for a guy with only nine feature films, and based on a novel by John Updike. It's a romp of a movie, so light some candles...

We wrap up Back To School month with 1986's Real Genius . It's a PG Animal House meets War Games in this comedy about college students building a weapon for their professor only to realize the horror of what they're actually doing. Lightly satirical, with Val Kilmer as a Looney Tunes protagonist up against a William Atherton at his most arrogant. This movie was a really fun surprise for Mary, whil...

Folks, we had some problems with Hoosiers. Will this be the episode that loses us listeners? Probably!

We went into this fearing a sleazy teensploitation skin flick; instead, it's funny, frank look at young people surviving high school and learning about sex and relationships, all set to a killer early 1980s soundtrack. It's also a real "hey, it's that guy!" kind of film, from new stars like Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Penn, and Forest Whittaker, to character actors like Vincent Schiavelli, to the f...

We're back with another Steve Martin film, this time his homage to the singing cowboy pictures of from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Unfortunately, he's working with John Landis on the backside of his directing heights, and we end up with a slightly-bloated mess, and that's even before tackling the sketchy themes of the movie. Still, it has some great music from co-writer (?!) Randy Newman. And wit...

Timed to coincide with the current film The Green Knight , this episode has readings in Middle English, an increasingly-irate Mary expounding on the meanderings of medieval literature, and some truly terrible music. Medieval literature and Arthuriana is very much Mary's wheelhouse, so buckle in, and avoid any Sean Connerys you see carrying an axe.

David Byrne's mockumentary about a small Texas town, starring John Goodman, was a fun surprise--Dennis called it " Koyaanisqatsi as a comedy", and to Mary was a marriage of Wes Anderson and The Church of the SubGenius.

"They don't make 'em like that anymore" is a very tired sentiment, but it's been a while since we've seen a movie in theaters about working class girls coming of age, and this is a good one. Come for the dissing of Connecticut's pizza, stay for the mangled Antonio Gramsci references.

This space-western that never goes into space, starring nobody in particular, and featuring all the crisp cinematography of an episode of Airwolf, is easily the worst film we've watched for this podcast. There's a lot of spleen-venting in this episode--you've been warned.

This Amy Heckerling comedy starring Michael Keaton was a favorite film of Dennis's when he was younger--will it hold up to his own memories? Or will Mary be unable to see what's so funny about this gangster parody?

It's MTV meets Brave New World meets Rocky Horror meets the Bible in this 1980 musical extravaganza that we still can't make up our minds about, because wow, that ending really took us right out of it. And yet... we like it? We found so much to talk about whether this movie succeeds or fails that this episode is longer than our usual fair.

We had mixed feelings about this forgotten coming-of-age story set in 1963 Myrtle Beach, SC. The film is enjoyable, but a combination of Southern Pride and 1980s sexual politics left us a little unmoored.  CW: talking about an attempted sexual assault that happens in the film.

We went into 1980's Xanadu thinking "this is gonna be a bad movie", and folks, we were both very right and very wrong. Is the acting wooden? Is the plot almost too simple? Is the directing middling at best? Yes, yes, and yes. But is the music great? Is there plenty of dancing? Does it have Gene Kelly rollerskating? Oh, absolutely. Unfortunately, the disco-fever-dream revival of 1930s musicals was...

Our first guest! Mary's sister Anne comes by to talk about 1985's Silverado , written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, and starring Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehey, and on and on and on. By the 1980s, the Western was dead, but that wasn't going to stop Kasdan from indulging in a little nostalgia for the genre. And while neither Mary nor Dennis had ever seen it...

Things get personal on this episode, which is a little shaggier than most. What happens when Mary decides to watch the beloved children's film My Neighbor Totoro , written and directed by the great Hayao Miyazaki, and is reminded of painful childhood memories? Well, it's not our funniest episode, but it's definitely our most emotional.

We go a little long on this one, but come on, it's John Carpenter's The Thing, one of the greatest sci-fi horror films of the last 50 years. The story of men stationed in Antarctica, trying to figure out which one of them is a shape-shifting alien, is a thrilling exercise in paranoia, where the audience is as much in the dark as the characters.

Sean Connery is a marshal investigating a rash of suicides in a space mining colony in this somewhat obscure 1981 sci fi film. Mary was pleasantly surprised by this story of corruption described as "High Noon in Space". Is this one of Connery's best films? Is this one of Peter Boyle's worst characters? All these questions and more.

We didn't know what to expect with this obscure comedy from 1981; little did we know we had on our hands one of the biggest bombs in film history. A friend of the show called it "Nashville meets Cannonball Run", and she wasn't wrong. Is it good? Is it bad? Yes.

We were left pretty astonished by Werner Herzog's epic adventure film about the world most reckless opera fan.

As an homage to film noir and classic Hollywood, this movie was built for Mary. As a Steve Martin-Carl Reiner comedy, it was built for Dennis. Two great tastes are pretty tasty together in the 1982 film that mixes and matches films from all over the studio system into a story of murder, Nazis, and java.