2 Dads 1 Movie

Steve Paulo & Nic Briana
  • 5.0 (22)
  • Film Reviews
  • Updated Weekly

A podcast where two middle-aged dads sit around and shoot the shit about the movies of the '80s and '90s. One each episode.

  1. 13h ago

    So I Married An Axe Murderer (1993)

    Steve didn't fall in love with So I Married an Axe Murderer so much as marry into it. He caught the 1993 Mike Myers comedy in high school, thought "that wasn't bad," and moved on. Then he met his wife, who'd spent years trading quotes from it with her dad, and suddenly the whole thing landed. Two decades later, "negatory, good buddy" and "we've got a piper doon" are load-bearing phrases in his house. So yes, this one's Steve's pick. Nic shows up as a guy who knew every joke and had somehow never seen the ending, a casualty of what he calls the pregame movie, the thing playing while everybody gets ready to go out. What they get is a tour of a San Francisco that no longer exists. Nic identifies Roads Cafe as the real-life Vesuvio in North Beach and pegs the crowd as the Gen X version of the Foot Clan lair from the Ninja Turtles movie, all skate ramps and free cigarette machines. Steve is certain these people and the people in Singles would have hated each other on sight, and separately declares the cappuccino tracking shot the second-greatest follow shot in cinema history, behind only Henry and Karen walking into the Copa. Then the nitpicking, which is most of the fun. Steve cannot let go of the Band-Aid on Nancy Travis's finger, present in every scene, explained never. Nic diagnoses Myers's haircut as a pumpkin pie minus one slice, and objects to the "hello" bit on the grounds that he already has a hello guy in his life and it's Steve. Charlie dumped a woman for smelling exactly like vegetable soup, which triggers a full referendum on which soups a person could acceptably smell like. Nic clocks the honeymoon resort's name, Poet's Corner, as a neighborhood in Pleasant Hill. Steve gears up to nail the film on Bay Area geography and comes up empty, which visibly wounds him. Plus Phil Hartman as Vicky, Charles Grodin politely declining to have his vehicle commandeered, and a rigorous physics debate about surviving a rooftop hatchet fight after taking one in the nuts. Some movies you love on sight. Some you marry into. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    So I Married An Axe Murderer (1993)

  2. Aug 12

    Bloodsport (1988)

    Every kid who ever fed quarters into a Street Fighter II cabinet owes something to Bloodsport (1988), a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie made for $1.5 million that pulled in $63.5 million and earned its star a Razzie nomination for Worst New Star — which he lost, to Ronald McDonald, for playing himself in Mac and Me. Nic brought this one. He caught it in his young teens, back when it was getting passed around and there just weren't many movies about guys with wildly different fighting styles punching each other in a basement. Steve had never seen it, which is funny for a man who logged thousands of hours as a Ken player and once went eight or nine deep on a single quarter at a computer camp arcade — still, he says, the highlight of his entire life. So the whole episode is Steve connecting dots in real time. Guile is Frank Dux. Johnny Cage's splits are Van Damme's splits. Chun-Li is right there in Chong Li's name, one vowel away. Along the way there's Bolo Yeung wearing a South Korean flag while playing a character named like he's Chinese, a handler in half-tint aviators and a gold chain that Nic immediately claims as his kind of guy, and a young Frank Dux who climbs through a window in a New York Giants shirt and a San Francisco Giants hat. Steve cannot name a single human being on earth who roots for both. They clock the koi pond and blindfold training that get replayed later in case you forgot ten minutes ago. Steve counts the splits (five, contractually). He also calls Chekhov's dead best friend on Ray Jackson and stays mad it never fires. Nic maps out the kick where Frank boots a guy behind his own shoulder like a pirate punting his own parrot, which Steve figures would break your collarbone to maybe tickle the other guy's nose. Chong Li says brick don't hit back. He's not wrong. And then the closing title card claims 56 consecutive knockouts in one tournament, so Steve did the math on how many entrants that would take. Seventy-two quadrillion. Roughly nine million Earths' worth of people. Frank W. Dux: the elementary school kid who swore his dog was actually a wolf, except this one got a movie out of it. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    Bloodsport (1988)

  3. Aug 5

    Summer Rental (1985)

    There's a certain kind of movie you watched a thousand times as a kid on a VHS tape you personally wore out, and then discovered nobody else on earth remembers. For Steve, that's Summer Rental — the 1985 John Candy vacation comedy directed, improbably, by Carl Reiner. Mention it to people and they say, oh, the one with Dan Aykroyd? No. That's The Great Outdoors. Nic had the same crossed wires: he saw this one as a kid and liked it, but somewhere along the way his memory fused the two, so he showed up half-expecting the giant steak. Lobsters in this one. Mr. Surf and Turf himself. It's Steve's pick, and it takes Nic about thirteen minutes to sour on the protagonist. Jack Chester is an air traffic controller in 1985 Atlanta, which means, as Nic works out in real time, he scabbed through the 1981 strike. "I don't like Jack Chester anymore. Not a man of the people." Steve's response: let's go ahead and end it now. They don't. What follows is a tour of a movie that's at minimum a delight to describe — the hard-boiled egg that detonates across a car interior, a dash-mounted cup holder Nic sincerely admires, an Alan Silvestri score Nic awards a Steve point, and Richard Crenna as Al Pellet, a man Nic pegs as the villain on captain's-hat evidence alone ("that good '80s butthole look"). Rip Torn's Scully runs a floating restaurant where the fresh grouper, sautéed to a golden brown with a teasing hint of Dijon, comes out of a freezer chest as fish fingers that Nic figures have been frozen since the Carter administration. They split hard on the frisbee-to-the-groin gag: Nic considers it an insult to everyone involved, Steve shrugs it off as hacky. Plus detours into Nic's fishing charter nemesis who would not stop saying "a three-hour tour," Steve's Disneyland norovirus, and Steve's dad-brain snagging on a three-year-old aboard a racing sailboat with zero life vests. Mint-flavored toothpicks to hold us over. Welcome to Citrus Cove. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    Summer Rental (1985)

  4. Jul 29

    The Fifth Element (1997)

    In 1997, Luc Besson spent $90 million on a movie about a New York cab driver, a supreme being in thermal bandages, and four elemental stones that spend the entire runtime in the wrong hands. It made $264 million. That's The Fifth Element, and it's Nic's pick, partly because the show had somehow gone this long without a Gary Oldman movie. Nic saw it several times in theaters in '97 because he worked at one, quoted it into the ground with his high school friends, and still remembers a buddy reading the poster tagline aloud as "it must five it be found." Steve saw it once, found Chris Tucker aggressively annoying, and only warmed up to it years later in college, roughly the same way he eventually made peace with the Bob Hoskins Super Mario Bros. movie. Most of the episode is two dads trying to describe things that resist description. The benevolent aliens are giant turtles, or possibly something Gary Larson drew, waddling around because their spacesuits won't let them raise their arms. The Mangalores are just the pig guys. Zorg wears a plastic plate on his head that covers no wound and serves no purpose, so it has to be fashion. Jean Paul Gaultier did the costumes, which explains the flight attendants but not the cops, who land somewhere between Judge Dredd and the sumo suits from a corporate team-building retreat. The background population of the future consists entirely of overweight cops and supermodels, a world Nic diagnoses as "the King of Queens universe." Then there's the nitpicking, which is half the fun. Steve cannot forgive Zorg for flying away from Flohston Paradise without ever opening the case, and Nic points out that he doesn't leave a Taco Bell window without checking his bag. There is a phone book in the 23rd century. Human skin, according to the film's scientists, is grown by blasting a body with slightly greasy solar atoms. Nic's wife Jeannie clocked that the match meant to save all humanity had obviously already been struck, and this was after she watched the diva's concert dissolve into a firefight, turned to him, and said, "I'm sorry, I hate this." Leeloo Dallas, multipass. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    The Fifth Element (1997)

  5. Jul 22

    The Big Lebowski (1998)

    In 1998 the Coen Brothers spent $15 million on a shaggy detective story where almost nothing happens, a rug gets peed on, and a middle-aged stoner named the Dude drinks nine White Russians while getting mistaken for a millionaire. That's The Big Lebowski, and it's Steve's pick, a movie he first caught the second it hit Blockbuster in college, when he showed up mostly for John Goodman and left with a lifelong favorite. He brought it to the pod half worried it might be a Boondock Saints situation, the kind of thing you loved as a teenager that curdles on rewatch. Good news: it held. Nic, meanwhile, comes to this one with actual credentials. He reveals he's descended from bowling royalty, his great-grandfather Archie Walsh, a New England candlepin legend enshrined in a Hall of Fame that Nic estimates is roughly the size of an armoire in the corner of a Holiday Inn. Steve counters with his own dad's bowling trophy, the one topped by a little guy bowling backward through his own legs, awarded for finishing dead last. From there it's a loving tour through everything that makes the movie tick. The dads marvel at how the Coens hand rich, pointless backstories to characters onscreen for three minutes, chief among them Larry's dad being a famous TV writer stuck in a steampunk iron lung, which sends Nic on a tangent about where exactly he'd like to be positioned in the house should he ever end up iron-lung-bound (spoiler: a back room, not the foyer). Steve offers up "Sobchaking," his personal verb for when you're not wrong, you're just an a*****e, man. They clock Walter debating the tenets of National Socialism, the "say what you will" bit, purely to win a fight he's already lost, and both hold their breath through the second dream sequence, the two-minute bowling-porno-musical detour nobody needed and everybody is glad exists. There's Larry's homework, a Folgers can, and a stranger who orders a good sarsaparilla. The Dude abides. So did the dads. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    The Big Lebowski (1998)

  6. Jul 15

    First Blood (1982)

    In 1982, a drifter walks into a small Washington town looking for lunch and leaves it looking like a war zone. That's the setup for First Blood, Nic's pick this week, and the movie that gave the world John Rambo before the sequels turned him into a bow-and-arrow-wielding action figure. Nic came to the franchise backwards, through the bigger, splashier Part II, and only got around to the original years later. Steve, somehow, had never seen any of the Rambo movies front to back, just absorbed them by cultural osmosis, so this was a real first watch for him. What they found is a much quieter, sadder movie than either of them expected. Rambo shows up in town just trying to find an old war buddy, gets run out by a small-town sheriff who takes real issue with the flag patch on his jacket, and things spiral from there into arrests, flashbacks, and a jailhouse meltdown that turns into a one-man guerrilla campaign in the woods. Steve and Nic both get a kick out of Stallone's specific brand of unintentional comedy, the overexplaining, the simpleton sincerity, and they spend real time on the film's inventory of found objects: a tarp poncho, a stolen jacket turned scarecrow decoy, and eventually a truck with a machine gun in the back, which both dads agree is the turning point where the movie really takes off. Richard Crenna's Colonel Trautman gets singled out as the MVP, especially his opening monologue about what Rambo was trained to survive, and the dads dig into how much of the back half is really a two-hander between Trautman and Sheriff Teasle arguing about whether to let this man go or bring in two hundred body bags. They also trade theories on real-life Rambo inspirations, argue about how many rats is too many rats for one movie, and land in different places by the end: Nic still fully charmed by the character, Steve a little more skeptical once Rambo starts terrorizing a town that mostly just wanted him to leave. Grab a torch, mind the rats, and enjoy the ride. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    First Blood (1982)

  7. Jul 8

    The Birdcage (1996)

    The Birdcage is Steve's pick, and it's not close: this is a movie he and his wife Heather have been quoting to each since they first met, Steve having fallen in love with it as a theater kid in high school. Nic, on the other hand, had never seen it, despite a stated lifelong allegiance to who he now insists on calling "Bobby Williams" (a nickname that is, delightfully, sticking around for good). The 1996 comedy sends the dads to a South Beach drag club where Armond Goldman (Robin Williams) and his partner Albert (Nathan Lane) have to butch things up fast when their son brings home a senator's daughter. Steve and Nic get a kick out of the crash course in masculinity that follows: pinky down, don't dribble the mustard, and please, for the love of God, walk like John Wayne (who, it turns out, walked hella gay the whole time). Hank Azaria's Agador provides steady comic relief, and one particularly unhinged batch of sweet and sour peasant soup nearly gets referenced as often as the mustard bit does. Both dads agree Val, the son, is close to unbearable, though they land in very different places on the film as a whole this time around, more so than usual. Steve leans hard into the nostalgia, loving the parent-child dynamic even as he flags a couple of Robin Williams lines that hit differently in hindsight. Nic, watching cold and giving it his usual two-pass treatment, finds himself fighting a "Mrs. Doubtfire curse," where some of the best possible gags in this movie feel like they already happened in the other film few years earlier. Wine tannins get a genuinely educational aside, Christine Baranski gets her due, and by the time everyone's in drag sneaking past the paparazzi, this one's earned its spot as a South Beach classic. Come on, Gloria. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    The Birdcage (1996)

  8. Jul 1

    Troop Beverly Hills (1989)

    Shelley Long struts through 1989's Troop Beverly Hills in a fur coat, a cigarette holder, and a Rolls-Royce convertible, playing a soon-to-be-divorced socialite who takes over her daughter's floundering Girl Scouts knockoff mostly out of spite and boredom. It's Nic's pick, a movie his wife introduced him and his daughter to during the pandemic, while Steve grew up on it, owned it on VHS, and hadn't revisited it in over thirty years until this episode. Both dads geek out over the animated opening credits, designed, they discover mid-episode, by future Ren and Stimpy creator John K, and agree the original song "Cookie Time" is, against all odds, a banger. From there it's a parade of pure 1989: a rope bridge cut down by the cartoonishly evil troop leader Velda Plunder, a balance-beam rescue across a fallen log, a swamp full of water moccasins, and a cameo from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar that prompts Nic to point out this is the fourth time the podcast has run into Kareem across 68 episodes, against zero Tom Cruise sightings. Steve compares the movie's surprisingly restrained tailor character to Martin Short's Frahnk from Father of the Bride, while Nic marvels at the sheer volume of Beverly Hills cars on display and can't get over Velda referring to her victims as "little bimbesses." The two of them also build out a whole bit about Phyllis's pristine white mink coat being doomed the second it shows up on screen, debate whether the Lifesavers joke even works, and spend a solid stretch trying to figure out how anyone retied a rope bridge using nothing but rocks and good intentions. Nobody's holding this one up as a misunderstood classic, but it's exactly the kind of fully committed, cookie-selling, snake-fearing nonsense that sticks with you from childhood. Khaki wishes and cookie dreams, everybody. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    Troop Beverly Hills (1989)
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5
out of 5
22 Ratings

About

A podcast where two middle-aged dads sit around and shoot the shit about the movies of the '80s and '90s. One each episode.

Information

  • Creator
    Steve Paulo & Nic Briana
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    75
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    2 Dads 1 Movie