becoming friends with...

becoming friends with...

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becoming friends with... episodes

  • becoming friends with...primetime (2026, Our Feature Presentation)

    have a seat. first, sorry to anyone who might have been looking for this yesterday (or today if you are me reading this right after it's typed out). but, if you are reading this, you grabbed it before i had a chance to put my notes together on the back half of saturday's show. it was our first "in the theatre" review and that felt exciting. made for a really fun one. anyway, this day has been too horrible for me to be charming, so enjoy the actual show and check back later to see if this message has been replaced. we love you and we really appreciate the support. tell everyone you know to do the same and then stare at them until they do it. be awkward. take care. stay safe.

     

    - byron j.

    33 min
  • becoming friends with...the devil's candy (2015, Before The Film)

    chris is on a cruise, so it’s just rene and i tonight. that means less chris hansen (booo) and a lot more records (huzzah).

    so…if cocaine is the devil’s candy and weed is the devil’s lettuce, what’s heroin? we don’t settle it, but we give it a half-assed effort.

    what you watching: apple tv’s widow’s bay, hbo max’s foul-mouthed true-crime doc a killer story, and whether documentaries should ever be dramatized. that covers morgan spurlock, michael moore, and nathan fielder, plus the butthole surfers doc’s puppet recreations (go see the hole truth and nothing butt whenever you can) and ai slowly sneaking into movies. that obviously leads us to lanterns, batman’s worst villains, christian bale’s batman smoking in the background of nolan’s odyssey (totally real), and the time a bar back at caravan of dreams in fort worth handed a wide-eyed, teenage doorman rene his first (and only?) virginia slim. hashtag vagina slime.

    then i bitched about tom segura and showed rene some clips from the new james austin johnson special (better than the odyssey). david fricke, bob dylan’s protest songs, and brian cox as the voice of mcdonald’s.

    mind grapes starts with tilly norwood, the ai “actress,” and her perfect piers morgan appearance. also, why is piers morgan? then corey worthington, the australian teen who threw a 500-person party and refused to take off his famous glasses…my new hero. and then, whatever the opposite of that is…david lee roth’s “shark week” sturgis promo…which is definitely not overplayed by me in any way, shape, or form. it was the right amount. he did a tedx talk with alex van halen for some reason and went on a six minute roth rant about ozzy and he just goes “good job, dude.” then music talk: how much of what you listen to is actually new? somewhere near 25%, if we’re lucky. we go through what’s been on repeat: jaga jazzist, sharks keep moving, misha panfilov, domi and jd beck, john coltrane, brad mehldau, joe henderson, isaiah collier, slint, serengeti, and my full butthole surfers revival, with a new appreciation for paul leary and his guitar noodling. we also cover how the flaming lips spent a whole tour as beck’s backing band, rene’s pitch for an animated show where a love supreme turns into a city, and our own sequel to cats. you won’t like it. i love it.

    coffee song: billy idol’s “eyes without a face.” iI was stuck in rene’s head all week, so now it’s in yers.

    send us fan mail at [email protected]. chris would especially love the letters.

     

    - byron j.

     

    #becomingfriendswith #BFW #ComedyPodcast #MusicPodcast #DavidLeeRoth #VanHalen #BillyIdol #EyesWithoutAFace #ButtholeSurfers #PaulLeary #IndependentWormSaloon #HoleTruthAndNothingButt #JamesAustinJohnson #TillyNorwood #CoreyWorthington #JagaJazzist #Coltrane #BradMehldau #Serengeti #Slint #WidowsBay #AKillerStory #framed #coffeesongs #mindgrapes #trailertrash #becomefriendswiththepod #becomingfriendswith #bfw #EatTheRich #blessed #moreurinetalk

    1 hr 57 min
  • becoming friends with...the devil's candy (2015, Our Feature Presentation)

    chris is on a cruise, so it’s just the two of us, and you wouldn’t believe how much it was!!

    we come back from the break with zz top’s “rough boy” (still hilarious, that’s here) and a heartfelt rest in peace to drummer frank beard, whose name i get wrong only once. trailer trash takes on delirium (1979), a vietnam-vets-turned-vigilantes exploitation movie with an absolutely unhinged trailer, so we’ve already filed it away for an exploitation series. framed is all over the place as usual…we go from carlito’s way to s.w.a.t. to a guy ritchie frame that filled us with rage. we do parts of that monologue in sling blade, talk terrence malick’s the tree of life (dinosaurs, volcanoes, brad pitt), martin mcdonagh’s in bruges and seven psychopaths, and i mention my undying love of the incomparable parker posey.

    then the feature: the devil’s candy, sean byrne’s heavy-metal possession horror film. or sean hayes. sean haynes. david byrne. the blue’s clues guy steve burns. we do eventually get the director’s name right. ethan embry plays a struggling metalhead painter who moves his family into a cheap texas farmhouse, and pruitt taylor vince is the man in the red tracksuit who is the reason the home was so cheap. hilarity ensues. no. horror. horror ensues. and nary a shirt on embry.

    some highlights:

    • how byrne’s brutal long takes follow up the loved ones without the sophomore slump
    • the blood looking more and more like paint as the film goes on\
    • the suitcase scene, where the movie shows you nothing and it’s still horrific
    • ray’s flying v drone and why it should have been the whole score (the chug)
    • metal as the private language between a father and daughter
    • the father-daughter thread running through both of byrne’s films
    • the crucifix, the voices, and whether it’s the devil, the house, or neither
    • ethan embry’s wig, his abs, his chest tattoo, and lack of shirt
    • was metallica was the right call, and why this movie has a smell

      • we friends?

      yes. it’s a great, genuinely upsetting movie that doesn’t need to make a million statements to creep you out. but lose metallica. always solid advice.

      also watched the trailer for byrne’s shark-killer film dangerous animals, preview our halloween theme (horror about things pretending to be human, and yes, we need your help naming it), and debut a brand-new segment: rapid fire questions for rene. it hits every big life question…didya poop? front or back? is that glint the beach shine coming off yer zipper? it's blinding me.

      if you like horror, metal, cult movies, or two guys arguing about colin farrell, pull up a chair. but like and subscribe first. don’t make it weird. i will send rene after you.

       

      - byron j.

       

      #TheDevilsCandy #SeanByrne #EthanEmbry #PruittTaylorVince #MetalHorror #HorrorPodcast #CultFilm #Delirium1979 #Exploitation #ZZTop #FrankBeard #SlingBlade #TerrenceMalick #InBruges #MovieDiscussion #becomingfriendswith #BFW

      1 hr 14 min
    • becoming friends with...The Loved Ones (2009, Before The Film)

      tonight on an all nude becoming friends with... we're on a lil side quest. a little something we picked up on the way to the main quest, like a mysterious brownie from a stranger in a parking lot of a phish show. we discuss the loved ones (2009), Sean Byrne’s debut feature, in the second half...that's here:

      before that,

      a phone call from probably possibly satan, david lee roth is back in tiktok form, launching a cowboy persona to publicly rank cartoon women, and the entire ed sheeran tour imploding one quitting band at a time. plus jurassic world rebirth as flaming garbage, the new resident evil as a miracle, why the night sky isn’t bright, a seven-year-old wiener dog named frida, an itemized history of dogs eating butter (and shit), finally, we play to catch a predator bingo where the only winner is our good friend chris hansen, and say a goodbye to duncan sheik that we mostly hum.

      no lore required. no homework. bring snacks. you will want snacks. just a side quest. in and out. maybe.

       

      #DavidLeeRoth

      #DiamondDave

      #vanhalen 

      #WilmaFlintstone

      #edsheeran 

      #macklemore 

      #HindsHall

      #RogerWaters

      #LoopTour

      #Staind

      #AaronLewis

      #LimpBizkit

      #UncleKracker

      #ChoctawCasino

      #StainedBiscuitTour

      #tocatchapredator 

      #chrishansen 

      #DatelineNBC

      #PredatorBingo

      #jurassicworldrebirth

      #ResidentEvil

      #zachcregger 

      #Andor

      #diegoluna

      #RogueOne

      #bookoflife 

      #1899 

      #DarkNetflix

      #miracleworkers 

      #DanielRadcliffe

      #BobbyMoynihan

      #DuncanSheik

      #BarelyBreathing

      #VirginMegastore

      #OlbersParadox

      #SpaceFacts

      #stonerthoughts 

      #WienerDog

      #DachshundsOfInstagram

      #FridaKahlo

      #GarryShandling

      #nfl 

      #koreanfilm 

      #hopemovie

      #becomefriendswiththepod

      #becomingfriendswith

      #bfw

      #EatTheRich

      #blessed

      #moreurinetalk

      2 hr 21 min
    • becoming friends with...The Loved Ones (2009, Our Feature Presentation)

      we come back with korn. not popcorn. korn. so, there is apparently a gathering of the korn, and it stands in direct opposition to the gathering of the juggalos. This is where the movie half begins. that's related to the loved ones, yeah? anyway, then we head into some staples before the movie chat.


      trailer trash — another italian one...cheap enough that we’re not convinced any of it is real, about a serial killer who ate what was left of his mother, with a helpfully narrated detour into the limbic system and childhood brain damage. we can't tell if the monster is meant to be human or maybe just wearing a human. more human than human. less human than human. then we venture to species, which immediately gets slotted as the b pick that is so obviously is.


      framed — you know, guessing movies off single frames, and we force it as far from the track as we can. one still looks so much like mel brooks, terry gilliam, and bedknobs & broomsticks that the actual answer, chitty chitty bang bang (yes, we sing it), feels like cheating. we debate the pronunciation of pinocchio, i reveal a super popular franchise i've never seen a single film of (not that big of a surprise coming from me), a legitimate photo-op pitch to recreate a four-man barrister-wig tableau as a promo (i called the barrister wig), and then just e.t., which everyone gets instantly, repeatedly, without effort. they didn't even show him until the last frame. slimy little shithead.


      our feature presentation: the loved ones (2009) — chris’s pick (although it was named in passing than anything else), and none of the rest of us had seen it. it's australian, so we knew the shape of the pain going in. what wasn't as expected was the ultraviolence not being the grossest thing in it...it's the father and daughter: a man visibly restraining himself, a girl in a prom dress telling him it’s fine, and a mother figure in the corner who may not be a mother at all. and there’s a drill and some boiling water. there’s bleach poured down a throat that i assumed was chekhov’s gun and turned out to be just another tuesday. because there’s a pit of previous attempts.


      so we take it apart: how every single adult in this movie is either condoning something or glorifying something, how the cop and the grieving mother are quietly tangled together, how the missing brother is sitting in the cellar the entire time and one of us only figured that out from a plot summary afterward. how grief here spreads like an infection, leaching from one family into the next. how holly is the only person in the film with any empathy left and gets handed everyone else’s healing to do for them. how the escape sequence is the most satisfying thing in the movie right up until you remember you don't know where lola is...and then bang. and how lola is running all of it — that the dad has been wrapped around her finger for years, which is why the prequel we pitch on air ends with them taking the brother. (a24, blumhouse, hit us up. [email protected]

      also this:

      that wolf creek 2 limerick standoff scene followed by a ten-question australian history quiz where every wrong answer costs a finger. stop it with the fingers, you guys.

      i issue a short, confident obituary for bruce willis, who is absolutely not dead, while rene and chris discuss last man standing. i never saw it.


      trailers for the devil’s candy (2015) (leading to a potential plan to run sean byrne’s whole filmography), dangerous animals, noroi: the curse, and miike’s audition which got a hard no from us all. that leads to me ranting about why the cat in obsession did not need to be shown to be effective.

      we meet and fall in love with cc pazzini, the four-inch-tall steampunk mascot cici’s pizza has hired to represent the inventor of the unlimited pizza buffet. dude looks like the mighty boosh, paul f. tompkins, and melissa mccarthy all mushed together. did he invent pizza, or did he invent the buffet? no clear answer is given.

       

      the only known is that we will be chrisless for the devil’s candy next week. tell us how you feel about that and anything else in these ways:

      https://www.becomingfriendswith.com

      send gripes to bfw.gripe

      send yer symptoms to bfw.doctor we prescribe a movie

      voicemails by email, profanity encouraged, photos absolutely not, no matter what rene says.

      thanks for listening. we love you.

      1 hr 18 min
    • becoming friends with...Heaven & Hell (1980) (Before The Film)

      before we get anywhere close to heaven or hell, there’s two hours of this nonsense: a sean connery voicemail, not one but two cameo pep talks that both go sideways, and an oral history of every song the coward american radio stations quietly stopped playing in september 2001. because of the 9/11. (check out the intro on YT, there’s more wild 9/11 happenings).

      we open up our new inbox ([email protected]) and then run through the whole pre-show run sheet like children lost at play:

      • y’all watch anything? — our lil way of breaking in the show. chris can’t stop watching wecrashed even though he’s not sure it’s good (as i type, i know recall seeing this, but not when we talked about it on the show), which spirals into jared leto’s tommy wiseau-adjacent accent and a genuinely angry appreciation of the big short. rene saw onslaught, loved it, and rates it “go see it” on a scale where the middle is “mid” and the bottom is a fart noise. that leads to carpenter’s assault on precinct 13, the ice cream man scene played back frame by frame, and a detour through silo, dark matter, and a full sliders excavation: our sweet jerry o’connell, the floating-heads poster where one cast member is clearly holding in a fart, the mayor mccheese playground you could climb inside, and the uncanny young jeff bridges (daniels?) from tron: legacy, who may just also be the one and only chris hansen.
      • mind grapes — rene called into another podcast doing good will hunting, left a voicemail as sean connery, and they aired it. and then we played that tape. perhaps we’ll send them the clip to play on their next show and we will all slip into a tragic, yet comical metaverse. i then he pulled up the old clear channel memo — the 162 songs (plus EVERY rage against the machine track) that program directors flagged as “lyrically questionable” after the 9/11 — and we go line by line trying to find any logic in it. six AC/DC songs. “walk like an egyptian.” “lucy in the sky with diamonds.” even, for some godforsaken reason, louis armstrong’s “what a wonderful world,” which we will be retroactively protesting forever. fuck clear channel. plus i booked the great kevin mcdonald of kids in the hall fame on cameo for a pep talk and advice, and gets four minutes of the man rambling about how he’s not sure if he’s watching the right thing, deciding we seem charming, and then promising to email cameo and get my money back. he’s a beautifully sweet man.
      • tasers and tears — rene returned the favor and booked the actual, living breathing, human man chris hansen, who opens with “what, you’re expecting robert pattinson,” wishes us luck getting guys out of the manosphere, and clarifies that when he says have a seat, we’re not in any trouble. then we break down a takedown when hansen revisits the bust of a 32-year-old math tutor in Fairfield, Connecticut…the never-ending gum chewing, the tactical turtleneck, and the great unanswered question of who was supposed to eat the cupcakes. please god tell me they didn’t go unmunched upon.
      • coffee song — chris brings oingo nboingo’s “little girls” and the corresponding music video…we argue about unreliable narrators, whether it’s a sympathy song or a horror song, and how very few in 1981 had any idea what elfman was doing.

        • finally, we stumble into break before our feature presentation…make sure to check that out. it dropped tuesday. look for new podcasts every tuesday and thursday in the morning. live shows are saturday night on patreon, twitch, and YT…though they sure do like to yank us off air for having a good time, man.

        seriously, thanks for listening…please like and subscribe. it’s the only way we’ll eventually get paid to do this. reach out at bfw.gripe or bfw.doctor and we’ll read it on air. check in on each other and be well until next week.

        ⁃ byron j.

        1 hr 42 min
      • becoming friends with...Heaven and Hell (1980, Our Feature Presentation)

        An angel gets thrown out of Heaven, comes back as a Hong Kong cab driver, gets gunned down, and then has to fight his way out of the underworld with a girl named Red Dress.

        That’s the movie. It’s somehow stranger than that sounds.

        This week I drag Rene and Chris into Heaven and Hell (1980), also known as Shaolin Hellgate — the divisive, borderline-unhinged Shaw Brothers picture Chang Cheh shot on and off across five years while the studio’s empire was drifting toward television, then ended on a high with the Venom Mob and dumped into theaters. I picked it blind...started with Wu-Tang and worked my way to Shaw Brothers, and finally landing on this because of the crazy nature of the shooting schedule and being released during the Shaw Bros. transition to TV. My first note... “this movie is already crazy.”

        So we get into all of it: the glitter-rain fountain sets that play like a stage musical, the Bob Fosse fever-dream dance numbers, the color-coordinated gangsters straight out of The Warriors, three separate sets of opening credits for Heaven, Earth and Hell — and then the roughly 80% of the runtime that is just Hell. Paper-mâché pig noses. Fruit-roll-up flesh peels. A gambling hell where demons rifle through your wallet. A man who keeps getting his fingers cut off so he’ll never do it again. A guy sentenced to be split in half so he can fight himself forever. And the nail-through-the-throat shot that genuinely made all three of us flinch, which we slow-mo, freeze-frame, and argue about for a solid stretch.

        My burning question: how much of Quentin Tarantino’s whole thing is sitting right here? Go Go Yubari’s haircut, the Jack Rabbit Slim’s dance contest, the arterial spray — it’s all on screen in 1980. or 1994?!!???!

        Also in this half:

        • Trailer Trash — The Hidden (1987), and pitching a disguised-alien/body-snatcher series for October
        • Framed — guessing movies off single stills, which detours hard into which Jodie Foster performance is the most checked-out, and the emerging genre of A24 gritty Revenge of the Nerds reboots
        • A Jodorowsky tangent, the mystery of “Crippled Warriors,” a real story about an art teacher and a paper cutter, and the definitive verdict on the Ronco bagel slicer
        • Letterboxd ratings: a 3, a 3.5, and a 4
        • Next time: The Loved Ones

          • gripes to BFW.gripe, symptoms to BFW.doctor (we are not doctors), everything else to [email protected]. thanks for listening. we love you. please make sure to like and subscribe.

          1 hr 39 min
        • becoming friends with...shaolin soccer (Our Feature Presentation)

          The boys dive into Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer (2001), the cult martial-arts sports comedy that Miramax butchered on its way to American shelves and is now quietly held by Paramount in its streaming library. Tracing the film’s rocky journey — from the trailer that spoils the ending, the 23 minutes Dimension Films chopped for the US distribution (including the Golden Leg Fung flashback and key Sing/Mui scenes), and all the way to how Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax sat on it before piracy forced their hand.

           

          From there, it’s a full breakdown of why this “live-action Looney Tunes” still holds up: the surreal tonal shifts that recall Michel Gondry and Boots Riley, the Kill Bill-style scoring, the Rocky IV training-montage energy, and a shared cast with Chow’s follow-up Kung Fu Hustle. There’s quite a debate over the film’s best performance (Small Brother’s egg-eating scene gets singled out), discuss the makeover sequence and its satirical intent, and land on the same conclusion: this is a movie built for kids and adults alike, packed in slapstick laughs and layered enough for repeat viewings. Family-movie-night approved, according to Rene who watched it again with his wife and kids the night before recording.

          1 hr 9 min
        • becoming friends with...shaolin soccer (Before The Film)

          Before we ever get to Shaolin Soccer, buckle up, because this is the half of the show where the wheels fall off. We open with a live rendition of the Become Friends With theme that may or may not have accidentally invented a weekly remix tradition, immediately pivot into a Kevin Smith ruse discourse nobody asked for, and somehow end up debating whether Kevin Smith owns a thesaurus.

          From there it’s trailer chaos: The Guest gets a genuine, heartfelt recommendation sandwiched between jokes about British guys doing American accents, Onslaught gets roasted for its “weak” German accent, and Surviving the Game’s poster turns into a 10-minute fever dream about Gary Busey’s face, Rutger Hauer cosplaying Teddy Roosevelt, and a full Charles S. Dutton Roc retrospective. Naturally this spirals into competing cuts of Alien 3, a deep dive on the Assembly Cut chestburster debate, and a completely unhinged detour into a Busey movie called Bulletproof where every line of dialogue is just the word “Butthorn.”


          Mind Grapes brings the actual news: Columbia House is finally, actually going out of business (yes, it was still alive), a guy at a Korn concert gets internationally memed for a moment he insists was medical, and a young man loses a hand to a firework in the most quotably tragic TikTok of the year. The segment closes out with the premiere of a brand-new recurring bit — a To Catch a Predator “wine tasting” hosted by our resident predator-content sommelier, complete with pizza commentary, a homemade marriage contract, and easily the most unhinged live commentary track of the night. None of it makes sense together. All of it is exactly the vibe.

          1 hr 56 min

        About becoming friends with...

        From the publisher's feed

        welcome to the most podcast where everything is great. you are welcome here!! episodes drop on random thursdays, so get yer heart right, catch up or revisit EVERY episode, and check out https://bit.ly/m/becomefriendswiththepod for all sorts of fun. we love you!!