Peak Viewing

They said it couldn’t be done. They said two cis white men who liked movies couldn’t make it to 28 years of age without having seen Taxi Driver. And yet somehow that was true, until this week. Let’s just say right now is, uh, not the best time to be watching a movie from the perspective of a troubled, violent, lonely male figure, and as a result we’re not too thrilled about this film. Thankfully w...

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is Scorsese’s second (and ostensibly last) movie to center around a female protagonist, showing off a more sincere side to his filmmaking that we don’t always see. Alice’s struggles (beautiful rendered by an Oscar winning performance from Ellen Burstyn) have a timeless quality to them, even if aspects of the ending feel quite dated. We get into all that as well as p...

As the year 2025 starts to wind down and we look back, we gotta say: not a lot of good stuff happened this year! Despite that, we both came to the table this week with a list of some of our favorite art that came out in this year. Join and listen to us ramble about puzzle games, YouTube essays, LEGO sets, JRPGs, sad indie music, Warhammer podcasts, books about lonely people, and a very very large...

James Cameron’s long-awaited third Avatar film is here, and it sure looks and sounds a lot like the last one! Rather than simply re-release our Way of Water episode (which we could do given how similar these two films are), we come to you this week with all our freshest takes on Fire and Ash, AI-generated commercials, Odyssey trailers, franchise subtitling, hair on Pandora, legs on snakes and whal...

Babe wake up, a new Benoit Blanc mystery came out! Wake Up Dead Man is a movie with a lot of things on it’s mind: faith, truth, pragmatism, confession, Our Current Moment, judgment, guilt, compassion, sheep, wolves, all wrapped up in an extremely well told Biblical allegory. We’re big fans, even if we have a qualm or two. After making sure we spoil the ending of the movie in the first five minutes...

Mean Streets feels like an upgrade in (almost) every way from Scorsese’s first film, continuing a lot of the same kinds of characters and situations we saw there. Neither of us have been wowed yet in this miniseries, but we’re certainly getting a better idea of what Scorsese is all about! We also talk about directors and their fetishes, how hard it is to exercise, working with friends, and the lac...

Scorsese’s second film is similar to his first, in the sense that we can really only recommend it for completionism purposes. Outside of a few very impressive stylistic flourishes, the bulk of this movie is exploitation sensuality and violence. If that’s your thing, you’ll have a great time! If you wish the titular Bertha and her interiority were the focus, you’ll be let down! Other topics discuss...

Martin Scorsese, arguably one of the greatest living filmmakers, is an embarrassingly large blind spot for the both of us. To remedy this, our next miniseries will cover the first half or so of his career, of which we have seen very little! (Like, almost nothing. It’s bad.) While his first film Who’s That Knocking at My Door won’t be one we wholeheartedly recommend, it is interesting groundwork fo...

Settle in and pour yourself a tall glass of milk, it’s time to talk about Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein adaptation! This Netflix original is all peaks and valleys for us; some parts work, many parts do not. Some moments offer interesting twists on the novel, and some story beats unique to this film have us scratching our heads. We get into all of that, including our final ranking of Franke...

Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is… kind of amazing? We’re not exactly shocked that culture has spent the past 30 years ignoring this movie, but we’re certainly disappointed. This loud, melodramatic adaptation of the monster story is not only the most faithful in terms of plot, but also in terms of tone. As a result, we’re big fans! Just don’t ask us what was going on with those eels...

Two years ago, we watched Hammer’s rendition of The Mummy, and we were not impressed. One year ago, we watched Hammer’s rendition of Dracula , and we were blown away! This week, we watched Hammer’s rendition of Frankenstein, and we were, uh, somewhere in the middle? Between the frankly bad monster makeup, the lazy storylines, and the incredible mad scientist lab, it’s safe to say we have mixed fee...

Bride of Frankenstein is a solid contender for the most unhinged sequel of all time. It’s a marvelous blend of humor, horror, whimsy, and sadness that keeps you on your toes every minute. There’s little lab-grown people in jars, interesting reinterpretations of scenes from the novel, a picnic in a tomb, and almost five minutes of screen time for the titular character! We get into it all, including...

Monsters are back on the menu! After we had a grand time covering Dracula and Nosferatu films last year, this year we’re talking about Frankenstein to coincide with Guillermo Del Toro’s new spin on the old classic. We’re starting with 1931’s Frankenstein, the James Whale film that arguably set the standard for what Frankenstein would mean more so than the original novel. You better believe we’ve g...

Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World might be the most underseen movie we’ve covered on this show (well, maybe the most underseen this century ). Part of that obscurity is due to the Islamophobic times in which it was created, and part of it is that it’s simply just okay at best. Some of the questions we do our best to answer this week include: Could we write a 500-page report? How well did this...

Is Albert Brooks losing his edge? It’s the question posited by 1999’s The Muse, in which Brooks plays a screenwriter who feels left behind in a frustrating and absurd Hollywood. As he tells a story that would seem to be inspired by his own life, we find ourselves more disinterested than in previous films. Naturally, we take that feeling and channel it into several off-topic tangents! Mobile games...

Brooks follow-up to Defending Your Life is a smaller, simpler movie about what gets passed on from mother to son. As two sons of two mothers, we have some takes! While this is ultimately perhaps the least-relatable to us of this miniseries, we still discuss Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds’ chemistry, the multiple references to movies we’ve covered on this show, off-brand Snickers, document stora...

As Ari Aster put it, Defending Your Life is “the feel-good movie for people who identify as feeling routinely bad.” Albert Brooks vision of the afterlife may be fully realized and wondrous, but it’s what it has to say about our own plane of existence that is really profound. We discuss everything about it, along with what clips would play at our own trials, the one or two poorly aged jokes, and ho...

This week we talk about Lost in America, the mid-life crisis movie to end all mid-life crisis movies. Albert Brooks is skewering baby boomers who watched Easy Rider one too many times, and we’re asking the big questions. What age do you have to be to consider it a “mid-life” crisis? How much is the nest egg in 2025 dollars? What’s the deal with New York, New York? Could you live in a Winnebago lon...

Picture a man. Now give him all of the worst, most awful (non-violent) possessive traits you can imagine. Now picture a movie all about this man, and you might have something approximating Albert Brooks’ sophomore feature, Modern Romance. This damning indictment of the modern dating man was written decades before terms like “toxic masculinity” entered our everyday vocabulary, and for that reason i...

Today we embark on a journey through the comedies of Albert Brooks. His first film, 1979’s Real Life, is a wonderful send up of reality TV, a genre of entertainment that effectively didn’t even exist yet! We discuss the myriad of ways this movie was ahead of it’s time, the interconnected web of alt comedians in this time period, a few embarrassing film blinds spots we still have, and of course, th...

We’re taking one last dip into the Coens filmography with Ethan and Tricia’s new film Honey Don’t! This may not exactly be a "great" movie, but it’s enough of a step-up from Drive-Away Dolls that we both walked away somewhat impressed. We share our observations on audience reactions, IMDb plot keyword sickos, the hottest new addictive mobile game, and how we can no longer trust our own moviegoing...

Tony Scott’s 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 is unfortunately the kind of remake that has all the edges sanded off. What was once a story about corruption and scorn in the hearts of all men has been retooled into a tale of just two men, one on a righteous path and the other tumbling down the crime-ridden ravine. Are they different? Are they the same? What was Henry’s secret agenda from las...

Our shortest miniseries to date focuses on two films, the original from the 1970s and the remake in the late aughts. This week we’re talking about 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the original story of criminals hijacking a New York subway car. Samuel read the book, and he’s disturbed! Henry heard the dialogue, and he’s delighted! We discuss the flavorful style of this movie, from the pe...

Now that we’re done with the movies Joel and Ethan Coen made together, we move on to the “solo” projects. We already covered The Tragedy of Macbeth last year as part of our Denzel Washington miniseries , so it’s on to Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls, a lesbian road comedy made with his wife Tricia Cooke. This movie (which we both found to be equal parts strange, funny, and bad) has its fair share of...

This week we discuss the final (?) film Joel and Ethan Coen made together, a western anthology that is tonally all over the place. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs may not be our favorite movie from the two brothers, but there is something remarkable about seeing all their styles and themes blended into six particular stories. In this tangent-filled episode we also discuss Detroit: Become Human, the o...