2 Dads 1 Movie

Steve Paulo & Nic Briana
  • 5.0 (23)
  • 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. 2d ago

    Se7en (1995)

    It’s not technically a horror movie, but as Steve says right out of the gate, it’s scary as f**k in so many ways. That’s Se7en, David Fincher’s 1995 trip through a rain-soaked, never-named city (“a shittier New York without any of the cool shit,” in Nic’s words), and it’s Steve’s pick for Shocktoberfest. He first saw it in college during a brief stint as a film major, when someone insisted it was the perfect introduction to Fincher. Nic caught it around senior year of high school, when the lucky households with HBO and Cinemax were dubbing their own VHS copies. For this episode he watched it twice, once to feel it and once with notes. Dedication. Both dads agree the title, with that little 7 jammed in the middle, is impossible to say out loud. They also agree that in a movie stuffed with horrific imagery, the thing that sticks with everyone is a ceiling full of pine tree air fresheners. Nic still brings it up every couple of months whenever something stinks. From there it’s a gleefully grim stroll through the sins. Morgan Freeman’s switchblade gets a Best Supporting Actor campaign, his bedside metronome gets declared psychotic, and Steve, who dabbles in screenwriting himself, swoons over the names Somerset and Mills, which sound like either a wine cooler or a law firm. A cop getting annoyed at a detective for asking questions spirals into “Where you going with that wrench, plumber?” Nic is personally offended by Mills rolling around with his dogs on a newspaper-covered floor in his work clothes. He calls Marquis de "Sade" the only joke in the whole movie and declares the home darkroom “the official hobby of creeps.” Steve puts his writer hat back on to ask why Tracy would tell her husband’s partner of two days that she’s pregnant, and Nic nominates that scene as your official Junior Mints and bathroom break. There’s even a detour into the FBI tracking library books, once the stuff of mid-’90s conspiracy nuts and now, per Nic, “prematurely correct.” Seven sins, one switchblade, and about a thousand little pine trees. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    Se7en (1995)

  2. Oct 7

    The 'Burbs (1989)

    Tom Hanks has a week off work, a new neighbor who drives his garbage to the end of the driveway, and a firm plan to stay home and drink "a couple hundred beers." That's The 'Burbs (1989), Joe Dante's suburban paranoia comedy and the kickoff to Shocktoberfest II: Electric Boogaloo. It's Nic's pick, off a listener request from about a year ago (the schedule runs well into 2027, so get your requests in early), and he'd never seen it. Steve wore it out as a kid, a dozen or so viewings between ages 10 and 13, possibly on LaserDisc, and then didn't touch it for three decades. Is it even a horror movie? Steve consults the official scale he worked out with his 8-year-old daughter: spoopy, spooky, scary, horror. This one mostly lands at spoopy, though the ice pick stuff left young Steve legit scared of the one sitting in a drawer at home. From there it's a happy stroll down one very nosy block. Nic crowns the poodle the official comedy dog of the '80s (the chihuahua gets the '90s), and Steve's pretty sure this particular poodle is the same dog from The Silence of the Lambs. Nic's research turns up a writers' strike that left Hanks, Bruce Dern, and Rick Ducommun improvising a whole lot, plus the news that Bubbles the chimp was hanging around set, courtesy of Corey Feldman's friendship with Michael Jackson. Steve would like to know why nobody threw a little hat on him and found him a part. Also on the docket: Nic's tip for talking your way out of a traffic stop (do not do this), Nic's dream where his landlord is Steve, a surprisingly thorough sardine debate in which Nic defends the fish and Steve learns something about fillets, and Steve's actual research into whether a basement furnace needs to go to 5,000 degrees. (A crematorium runs about 1,800. So, no.) And Nic lands on a real truth: the most inaccurate thing in cinema is how long it takes to dig a hole. Does a childhood favorite hold up after thirty years away? What does a first-timer make of it? Pull up a folding chair. It's the best show on the block. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    The 'Burbs (1989)

  3. Sep 30

    Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

    What if a hitman went to his 10-year high school reunion? That's the entire pitch for George Armitage's 1997 action-rom-com Grosse Pointe Blank, and Steve thinks it's so perfect that nobody can ever make it again. It's his pick, and it comes with baggage: as a high school junior he took a girl to see it on a date. She was his junior prom date. She did not feel the same way. They stayed friends. Not everybody's for everybody. Nic saw it in theaters too, still owns both volumes of the soundtrack on CD, and came in honestly wondering whether 17-year-old Nic just had questionable taste or whether this thing is a classic. John Cusack plays Martin Blank, a killer so committed to honesty that he tells literally everyone what he does for a living, and nobody believes him (Nic's daughter could not get over this). Nic calls Joan Cusack, as Martin's secretary, the Robert Horry of the movie, hitting every big shot. Steve's favorite gag is two feds faking out Dan Aykroyd's Grocer so he dives back into a bathroom stall for nothing. The soundtrack gets its due. Steve calls the Live and Let Die cut to convenience-store muzak one of his favorite transitions in movie history, then mourns a Specials recording of "Pressure Drop" he can't find on any streaming service. Nic offers to burn him a CD. Steve isn't sure he still owns a CD player. Nic reminds everyone he doesn't understand the microphone he's talking into. Elsewhere, Nic would happily trade one police tank for a Main Street radio station, and Steve names the one scene that popped him out of the movie (a therapist's answering machine blaring mid-session). He also admits that if a long-lost friend turned up standing over a dead body, he'd be gone. Dude, deuces. And Steve needs Nic to remind him that their own 20th reunion already happened. They literally hung out there together. And Nic has a theory: Debbie dumps Martin, moves to Boston, tells Will Hunting all about her ex-assassin boyfriend, and that's how you get Jason Bourne. It's cinema. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

  4. Sep 23

    Breakdown (1997)

    A guy's Jeep dies in the Arizona desert, his wife hops in a friendly trucker's cab to go call a tow, and then she just never comes back. That's Breakdown (1997), Jonathan Mostow's lean, mean Kurt Russell thriller, and it's Nic's pick by way of listener Matt DeLuna. Nic knows this one cold. He was working at Blackhawk Movies 7 in Danville when it opened, ducked into it on shifts, owned it on video, and quoted it endlessly with his buddy Todd. Steve had literally never heard of it. He was sold before the credits finished, though, because the thing runs 93 minutes, and this show has turned both dads into true believers in the 90-minute movie. Then J.T. Walsh and M.C. Gainey pop up, which kicks off a tribute to the great initialed actors of our time. (CCH Pounder gets bonus points for having three.) Steve goes hunting for plot holes and comes back with basically one: a Jeep that just drove in from Massachusetts with 245 miles on the odometer, somehow already needing oil. Nic figures Jeff is pouring in vanity oil so he looks like he knows what he's doing at a gas station. Then Amy's snack run goes on trial. Snowballs, Moon Pies, powdered donuts and a Yoo-Hoo in the desert heat, with not one salty thing in the bag. Steve is personally offended. Nic notes that an animal probably wouldn't eat a Snowball. Combos, Bugles and Gardettos are entered into the record, and the donut sweepstakes (win $90,000 or 90,000 donuts, your call) gets the full treatment, right down to the tax bill on a truckload of expiring pastries. There's also a diner parking lot that looks like the cars were dropped from an airplane, a husband describing his missing wife by the brand of her sweater, a henchman who can't help freelancing while he plays dumb, and Steve's case for J.T. Walsh's quietly terrifying, totally ordinary evil. Steve calls it a one-note movie and means it as a compliment: ratchet, ratchet, ratchet, and then it just stops. No epilogue, no six months later. Just a Jeep that deserved better and a bag of snacks that didn't. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    Breakdown (1997)

  5. Sep 16

    The Princess Bride (1987)

    Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride (1987) is Steve's pick, and for him it's less a movie than a load-bearing wall. He caught it on TV before he was ten, spent high school and college watching theater kids quote it at each other, and counts William Goldman as a personal screenwriting hero. Nic got there later, in high school or after, having grown up in what he describes as a no-VCR, no-cable log cabin where his dad was busy typing up his manifesto. What follows is a very happy stroll through Florin. Steve's daughter still calls the movie "Princess Buttercup," while his son, currently convinced Raiders of the Lost Ark is the greatest movie ever made, never really got into it. Nic clocks young Fred Savage's Walter Payton jersey, Steve spots the Fridge Perry poster, and the case is closed: this kid is a Bears fan. From there, grandpa and grandson are simply Kevin Arnold and Columbo. Steve decides Humperdinck's perm belongs to a lady who works the front desk at the local orthodontist. Nic shouts out Mr. Hoover, their old high school history teacher and Andre the Giant superfan. And Steve's Wallace Shawn impression gets so good that Nic starts openly dreaming of a copyright strike. There's a surprising amount of real-life peril, too. Steve's high school production of the Scottish play, with actual steel broadswords, got canceled over safety concerns (he was Banquo, and at one point the corpse yelped). Years later, a friend set Steve's wool coat on fire in a Walnut Creek coffee shop. On set, Andre's enormous hand doubled as a hot water bottle. Cary Elwes woke up in the hospital, still in costume, after Christopher Guest stopped faking a knockout. And Mandy Patinkin bruised a rib trying not to laugh at Billy Crystal. Meanwhile, Nic's wife Jeanie cannot deal with Westley's mustache. Nic calls the albino torturer the most in-need-of-Carmex person he's ever seen. And the dads both want in on Fezzik's hangover soup. As Steve says in his mock promo for this very episode, it's inconceivable that you won't enjoy it. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    The Princess Bride (1987)

  6. Sep 9

    Do the Right Thing (1989)

    Seventy-eight episodes into a show about '80s and '90s movies, Nic realized they had never once done a Spike Lee. Then a buddy of his (white guy, mid-forties, Seattle) mentioned that Do the Right Thing was the movie he quoted most as a kid, and that settled it. Nic had seen it once in college and remembered liking it without it ever really sticking. Steve had never seen it at all, and watched it the day before they recorded, so you're getting a guy still slightly vibrating. What they found is the hottest day in Brooklyn history and about nine things to argue about. Steve reads the whole movie as secretly Greek, with Señor Love Daddy on one end and the three corner guys on the other, a two-headed chorus that comments on everything and acts on nothing. He also slots it in as the second sweatiest movie they've ever covered, behind Predator, since Nic won't hear an argument against Bill Duke squeegeeing his own face with a disposable razor. Then there's the pizza, which becomes its own subplot. Nic has grievances, numbered: the flimsiest box he's ever seen, a pie that looks like something the Ninja Turtles would eat, and the green can of Kraft parmesan, which he identifies as the cheese you use if you're racist against Italians. He would know. His Irish grandfather came home from the war that way. Steve, fresh off a pizza-making class on a work trip to New York, watches Danny Aiello bury the dough in flour and starts pleading with the screen. They split on the Wall of Fame. Steve has zero sympathy for Buggin' Out's demand and total sympathy for the boycott. Nic points out that Buggin' Out is carrying the whole history of Black America on his shoulders, all day, every day. And when it gets heavy, they let it. Steve teared up two hours after the credits, and his wife is the one who reframed it for him: despair is a luxury. Hottest block in Brooklyn, worst pizza ever put on film, and nobody gets out clean. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    Do the Right Thing (1989)

  7. Sep 2

    Mallrats (1995)

    Kevin Smith followed Clerks with actual Miramax money, a whole mall, and Stan Lee, and thirty years later the result still splits every room it enters. Mallrats (1995) is Steve's pick, and he is not casual about it. He grabbed the VHS off a Blockbuster shelf around '96 purely because the cover art looked like a Star Wars poster, went straight from there into the rest of Smith's filmography, and dressed as Silent Bob for two different Halloweens in college, beard and wig and coat, pantomiming smoking weed and falling asleep if anyone asked him where Jay was. Nic had never seen it. He's on record as not a Smith guy, and about halfway through the movie his wife Jeanie grabbed his leg and told him that for his own health he wasn't allowed to watch any more Kevin Smith films for a while. He says he spent the runtime feeling like Ethan Suplee in front of the Magic Eye poster, standing there unable to see what everyone else claimed was right in front of him. Fair warning: this ends up being the widest the two of them have ever landed apart, and it isn't close. Which somehow doesn't stop it from being a great hang. They agree Shannen Doherty handles Smith's dialogue better than anybody else in the cast. Nic clocks Ben Affleck's enormous suit as the look of a Talking Heads cover band frontman. Steve has the entire DVD commentary loaded and ready, including the story of a network cropping a Coca-Cola cup out of a scene over a Pepsi deal, and the delicious fact that William Atherton passed on this as beneath him and then went and made Bio-Dome. There's a tangent about Magic Eye books as the official Christmas gift of relatives who don't really love you, a full defense of the stinkpalm as a small price to pay for the smiting of one's enemies, and genuine admiration for Brodie's ruling that the cookie stand is an autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking. Steve says Kevin Smith makes movies you either love or hate, with almost nobody stuck in the middle. Exhibit A was sitting right across the table. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    Mallrats (1995)

  8. Aug 26

    A Few Good Men (1992)

    Nic's wife Jeanie has seen A Few Good Men at least ten times all the way through, and she stops for it every single time it turns up on television, so when she leaned on Nic to make it his pick, he made it his pick. She also came along for the ride, becoming the first guest in the history of the show, and she immediately proved her worth by lodging a formal complaint about Tom Cruise eating an apple during a work meeting. Finish your apple before your interview. It's not complicated. Nic caught the 1992 Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin courtroom machine in bits and pieces on cable in high school, back when an R-rated movie could air on TNT forever. Steve, a former stage actor and an unapologetic Sorkin guy who will tell you The American President is the best thing the man ever wrote, was thrilled to be made to watch it. He also shows up with a theory: Danny Caffey is just a nerdier Pete Mitchell, another Tom Cruise character with a dead, celebrated father whose exact job he now holds. Steve looked hard for a third example and came up empty. From there it's the small stuff, which is the good stuff. Steve declares Cruise's softball swing dogshit and can tell from the mechanics alone that nobody's dad ever screamed at him on a Little League field. Nic wonders whether the Marine Silent Drill Platoon is a waste of a guy who could be doing something more useful, and gets briskly corrected about which branch he's actually thinking of. There's a run at "hella not guilty" as a legal strategy, a demand to see the line item for how much the military spends on custom yellow tape, and a three-way pile-on about the line where Jo explains that Marines stand on the wall so nothing's going to hurt you today. Nobody in the room can stand it. Nic figures the whole thing should have ended with the cast holding hands and bowing. Steve has a word for that. It's a curtain call. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

    A Few Good Men (1992)
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5
out of 5
23 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
    83
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    2 Dads 1 Movie

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