Why Did We Watch This The Drat Pack

What better way to celebrate 100 years of existence as an entertainment corporate entity than by making a film so crammed full of back-patting references to your own history that you forget to actually make a compelling movie? According to The Walt Disney Company, there is apparently no better way. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they watch the 2023 animated movie Wish, a wild misfire of a feature that doesn't include logic, memorable characters, or good music, but hey, at least there's seven characters who remind us of the dwarfs, right? We try to break down exactly went awry here, covering topics such as "What the hell is the logic behind wishes in this world?" and "Really, what is anyone's actual personality?" and "Why did the animated aesthetic break so many brains?" And we actually come up with some (truly, only some) answers here! Also we drink a cool fruity cocktail that's a perfect drink for the prelude to summer, so hey, it wasn't all a loss! Continue reading →

It's been a week or so since The Idea of You has premiered on Prime, and the world has not been the same since (or maybe it has, we do this stuff in advance). But since only one of our hosts has seen it, we didn't want to spend a whole episode talking about that. Instead, we're talking about the something related to it- the concept of age gaps in relationships in media. What do we think about them? Do they feel gross? Are they actually fine? Are they, like so many other subjects, something that can done both well and horribly? (Spoiler alert: yes.) Listen up as Leigh, Brendan, and Chris go into all of this nonsense and briefly mention our next episode's movie topic, one you're probably going to wish was a lot better than it ended up being. Continue reading →

At long last, a movie that seeks to answer the age-old question, “what if doors were towels?” Listen in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we go down under to knock on 2023’s comic fantasy The Portable Door, an Australian adaptation of the first book in a long-running British series about what if magicians used their magical powers for mundane purposes / profit (we guess???). On the bright side, it offers Christoph Waltz and Sam Neill going full ham and cheese as two corporate wizards. On the dark side, boy do we have some story and tone issues to dig into here (along with some very frustrating goblin prosthetics from The Jim Henson Company). On the drink side, we have an effervescent spring-inspired cocktail to make everything better! How many more sides could you want??? Continue reading →

It's a game! Look, we like things with less pressure, so games are fun for us to do. This time, we turn our slightly-drunken eyes to that beloved cinephile website, Letterboxd. Fans as we are of its sometimes intelligent, sometimes glibly entertaining user reviews, Brendan has assembled a list of short, pithy reviews for movies we have covered on this podcast and challenged Leigh and Chris to guess the movie the blurbs refer to. It's a game! It's fun! Also we cover our next movie, a fantastical YA-adjacent adaptation about a door that's portable. No, we hadn't heard of it, either. Continue reading →

Alors! What do you get when you take the bones of the 1963 comedy / romance / thriller Charade and filter them through a Nouvelle Vague sensibility? Well, you certainly get something worth talking about, one way or another. Listen in as Leigh, Brendan, and Chris crack open The Truth About Charlie, Jonathan Demme’s 2002 attempt at doing just that. We run the gamut on this one, covering what Demme’s original intent was, why Mark Wahlberg looks like a such a lost dope in his little beret, and if the central conceit of creating a French New Wave adaptation of Charade even makes sense (kind of, but also not)! Naturally, there’s also a drink involved (and truly, a movie of this length with so much to cover really necessitates some kind of liquor). Continue reading →

So a few weeks back we had a brief rumination about if a rom-com has failed if it's not actually very funny, and so we decided to speak on that for a bit. For example, are there rom-coms that are actually funny? Of our favorites, which ones fall closer to rom than com (or manage to skillfully split the difference)? Is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World by definition a rom-com (technically, yes!)? Sure, this might have been better around Valentine's Day as opposed to St. Patrick's Day, but planning is hard and shut up! We also introduce the focus of our next episode, which aptly enough, is a remake of a movie that kinda drains much of the rom and com aspects of the original. Get ready for some truths dropping in two weeks! Continue reading →