Mission Creep

The cast of this movie is so incredible that Hank Azaria, Brendan Fraser, and Janeane Garofalo are merely scene-stealing cameo appearances!

Chili Palmer, minivan connoisseur, would be on the right side of the WGA writer's strike, is all we're saying.

What EXACTLY are Jerry and Dorothy on the well-lit front porch, in full view of any neighbors, before they go inside to be swept away by Chad-the-nanny's jaaaaaazzzzzz?

Can the king of the school turn a girl who wears a one-piece to the beach into a prom queen? Find out the answer in the best-ever adaptation of Pygmalion *! Also if I were to tell you that this movie features Gabrielle Union, Lil Kim, Usher, and Dulé Hill -- which it does! -- you would never in a million years be able to predict how white it remains. *except for literally all the others.

Look. It's actually insane that one of the top-five lines in movie history -- "If peeing your pants is cool, then consider me Miles Davis" -- is barely a top-three line in this very film.

What can we say about a film that has everything--love, death, a soaring score, the widest ties, a SHOCKING effort at a Jamaican accent? Plenty, as it happens! Join us!

Why would you remove a guy's face FIRST, and only then trim up his bangs??

I heard that you were feeling ill: headache, fever, and a chill. I came to help restore your pluck, because I'm the nurse who likes to spend inordinate amounts of time dissecting Ed Rooney's trauma, Ferris's own sociopathic tendencies, Charlie Sheen's louche and effortless sexiness, and whether Cameron is not the actual protagonist of this movie. Won't you join us?

In which it is revealed that what we had previously thought of as genre-defining artistry in the world of spy-based action films is really, basically, the Pilgrim's Progress on the levels of both the individual and the national soul. And never has the phrase "This is not who we are" been more laughably, enragingly false.

Enhance your calm! Velvety fascism is here!

Pop quiz, hot shot. Which movie features a college freshman reading Nietzsche by the pool, a lot of drug jokes that went over our teenaged heads, and a surprisingly underwhelming soundtrack? It's Clueless! Susan Haarman joins us LIVE and IN PERSON to talk about this classic adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma.

Is this an end-of-history movie or not? Is Arnold Schwarzenegger dreaming the whole thing or not? What is the political vision, and what are the stakes, of this film?

Andy describes the end of this movie as a "Deus rex machina" and I have not stopped chuckling about it since.

Welcome to Earth! Andy and I get together to remember a time when Will Smith wasn't yet a huge star, when Harry Connick, Jr. was just a crooner, and when Jeff Goldblum was still playing characters rather than "Jeff Goldblum." And we talk about the 90s geopolitics that made this movie possible, including Vietnam War memory, Clinton-era cosmopolitanism, and the role of aliens as an external and exis...

There is a huge question that runs throughout our conversation here: Should we understand romantic comedies as parables of a certain kind, or should we hold the characters in romantic comedies to a standard of psychological realism? But that's far from the only question on which Dr. Schultz and I find ourselves divided. Is Nora Ephron an object-oriented ontologist? Is the city of New York the true...

The holidays are upon us! Family members are heading to airports all across the country in order to reunite with their loved ones -- potentially even to rekindle marriages under strain. That means it's time for us to revisit everyone's favorite Christmas movie, 1988's Die Hard, starring Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Reginald VelJohnson and Bonnie Bedelia. We spend a lot of time talking about Ellis....

This episode is kind of bananas. In a good way, of course. What would it be like if Sisyphus could take a smoke break once in a while? Historically speaking, what pedagogical purpose did repeated Christological imagery serve for the church? What did this movie get right and wrong in its (then) fully hypothetical imagining of pandemic life? And what was the name of that two-person fighter arcade ga...

In which we try to make sense of so many things! This is a rom-com that is also an un-love story, featuring an anti-heroine. This is a film at least a little bit about how wealth is wasted on the wealthy. Is it good or an absolute aesthetic disaster that Julia Roberts's look in this movie is coming back? Is "cosmopolitan bliss" -- Dr. Schultz's wonderful phrase -- the happy ending that Julia Rober...

In which we talk about the original Terminator and T2 together. NO discussion of posthumanism or cyborg ethics or the late 20th century depiction of AI, but quite a lot about motherhood, the apocalyptic possibility of the death of a child, the ethos of friendship and care in opposition to authoritarian and genocidal forces. And above all, an answer to this question: To which particular piece of co...

Is it weird to think of The Matrix as agreeing with Leo Strauss's Plato on the moral worth of truth? Is the matrix itself -- and particularly the way that normies are subject to demonic possession by "agents" at any moment -- a metaphor for complicity in systems of oppression? How is keeping the faith in right relation with others involved in struggles for collective liberation? None of that was o...

How much coke could $100,000 buy in the mid-80s? Is Turner and Hooch the second-best buddy cop movie of all time? Can we describe this film as a neo-noir, grappling (literally, in the climactic scene) with the dueling ways that foreign wars return home -- through nihilistic crime facilitated by the deadly arts learned in the military and the true-believer heroic violence in defense of a good and p...

What does it mean when the protagonist of a 90s rom-com (or, as Jay calls it, a "romactionedy") is a Gen-X hitman whose efforts to woo the one who got away (or really, the one whom he foolishly got away from) are crucial to what he clearly understands as his own redemption? Are the movie's final 10 minutes -- in which John Cusack's character is simultaneously professing his love for Minnie Driver'...

What does education policy have to do with a self-serious vengeance flick like Face/Off? Almost nothing, which makes it an ideal break from our day jobs! In this episode, Jack and I talk about what moviegoing used to be like, the way that writers and directors imagined high-flying criminal masterminds in a world before the antiheroes of prestige television, and the rock-solid science behind face t...

This is the film that made Vince Vaughn a household name, that predestined major directorial futures for Doug Liman and Jon Favreau, that launched Ron Livingston into his cult-classic role in Office Space. Before everyone involved here was rich and famous, they were dumb guys muddling through dumb stuff in a dumb period of life. And they made a really well-crafted, really insightful film about it....

Celebrate Michael Bay's coming out party as Hollywood's preeminent pyrotechnical stylist as Ethan Hutt helps us remember the epic car chase that we had both forgotten, as well as all the great lines that we had not. More seriously, we wonder why the moral demand that Ed Harris's character makes on his national security bosses -- for recognition of the mortal sacrifices his covert operatives have m...