Drat Pack

What if we kissed at the Magnolia at midnight on New Year’s Eve as part of an elaborate lie that was in actuality not a lie because we have been in love for our entire lives ???

What do you do when you’re a pair of radio hosts who are both secretly in love with each other but unable to admit it, despite the fact that everyone else in your life already believes you’re destined to be together someday anyway? If your answer is “create an elaborate charade designed to boost your radio show profile while jointly promoting your family business,” congratulations, you’re qualified to host a morning show on 98.8 BREEZE FM in Chicago. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they (remotely) watch and discuss the 2020 Netflix Lifetime-pastiche Midnight at the Magnolia, a half-hearted attempt to do to New Year’s Eve what Hallmark has done to Christmas. We talk about the perils of the “friends to lovers” trope, the challenges of doing a romcom where everyone already assumes the two characters are together, and the nightmarish world where your families have been champing at the bit for years for you to marry your best friend. And of course, the two of us who aren’t testing positive for the coronavirus drink a cocktail that, much like Jack and Maggie, combines two distinct flavors that might not seem to work together BUT DARN IT, THEY DO!

That’s right, we’re back again with our end-of-the-year lazy finale episode, the Closing of the Year! Listen in as we talk about the previous year, including favorite and least favorite movies and drinks, and discuss a little bit about what the next year will bring. More themed summers! Crazier cocktails! Long lost lovers reappearing during multiple weddings! And a moratorium on made-for-TV holiday romcoms that will go into temporary effect after our first movie of 2023, so don’t worry, we’re not planning some sneaky wild stealth retheming of our podcast or anything.

At long last, our Holiday Spectacular episode focuses on a real piece of made-for-TV Christmas trash with the nebulously named A Date by Christmas Eve! Is it about a young lady attempting to find a date before Christmas only to realize love was in front of her all along? Uh, well, no, that would make a lot more sense, though. Look, so there’s this lady who works for a Christmas dating app and then a sexy cougarish Mrs. Claus makes the app magic so that the lady can warp reality to teach people lessons and stuff and for some reason no one is terrified by the implications of all this. But hey, that’s Christmas, baby. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they try to make sense of this overstuffed piece of mass market holiday nonsense and discuss the genre in general, the horrifying undertones of this ostensibly frivolous romcom, and how all these movies seem to already think apps are magic. Also, mulled wine cocktail, natch. Happy holidays!

In which we play round two of last year’s winter party game, the Hallmark Christmas Movie Generator Game! We’ve got all the same hats and slips of paper, but this time with a NEW category to make our titles even more cumbersome and difficult to find when scanning through a list of vague nonsensical titles on Hulu. Naturally, we also introduce the subject of our 2022 Christmas Spectacular, where we finally dip our toes into the made-for-TV holiday movie cesspool. Truly, it was destined to happen. Unsurprisingly there’s still yet another mulled wine cocktail to accompany it, because why wouldn’t there be.

Journey with us, won’t you, back in time to both medieval times and 1963, a veritable dark ages for the citizens of England and the Walt Disney studios. For this episode, we cover the movie that sits at the center of this Venn diagram, The Sword in the Stone. Is this a charming bit of nostalgic fun, or weak effort built upon an episodic screenplay and boring protagonist? Spoilers, it can be two things. Turn into a fish along with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss what led to the disjointed visual style of this movie, the wet sheet that is young Arthur, and what lessons we were supposed to learn by being turned into squirrels (just that fat old horny lady squirrels are funny???). To adequately do justice to this movie, we also make THREE different cocktails, so like us you should get pretty drunk while watching this, perhaps even drunk enough to not notice that three different actors play Wart at various points throughout this film (jk there’s not enough alcohol in the hemisphere to have that slip by unnoticed).

Yes, we’re sorry, we know it’s Halloween but we have no more ideas for Halloween mini episode topics. We’re open to suggestions! Until then, we’re going to do another Pitcher’s Mound mini where we each pitch an updated modern adaptation of a classic piece of literature / drama. That’s right, until Hollywood gets its act together and makes the teen comedy version of Cymbeline that we’ve all been clamoring for, we’ll just have to put our own ideas out into the ether. So please, don’t steal our contemporary high school version of The Great Gatsby. It would just be impolite. Also next up, we tackle the oldest movie we’ve ever covered (and also possibly the shortest) in our return to the Disney animated canon, this time focusing on their middling ’60s output.

For our annual Halloween Spooktacular, we chose a movie so terrifying, so unnatural, so deeply unsettling- oh, wait, no, it’s just Vamps, a 2012 horror (?) comedy (??) movie (???) about vampires, written and directed by Amy Heckerling. Ah, you might think, at least the idea of vampires filtered through Clueless sounds fun! Well, you’d be wrong, because Amy has left her “good movie” period and become firmly lodged in her “I got a lot of grievances to get out” period. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss what vampires might conceivably be useful for in fiction, who Amy Heckerling has it out for this time, and why the hell the crux of this movie is about a vampire spontaneously deciding she wants to settle down and have a baby. Well, raise a baby, not like “have a baby for dinner” like Lucy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Remember, the only thing scary here is how trite the whole endeavor is.

Part of the Golden Age of Television we now find ourselves inundated with is that so many large conglomerates are now spending absurd amounts of money on streaming-friendly television extensions of their media brands. What does this mean for you, the viewer? Well, it means that right now you’ve got four separate franchises (Marvel, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Lord of the Rings) currently screaming for space amongst your literal and figurative bandwidth. And much like the alignment of the planets that portends a seismic shift in Disney’s Hercules, all four of them have something launching at about the same time. Join in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss the four shows represented by these terrible mega-corporations and what ones they think are worth your eyeballs glazing over for. Also, we announce our upcoming Halloween Spooktacular movie- truly, the only thing more frightening that the capitalist nightmare we find ourselves trapped in.

When you split up with your husband and are faced with the challenge of starting a new life, do you up and move away? Do you try to find yourself? Do you invite three sweet well-mannered boys into your guest house and use them for child care / tech support / sex? Well, if you’re Reese Witherspoon in the 2017 Hallie Meyers-Shyer romantic (?) comedy Home Again, you sort of half-heartedly do all of the above at various points but don’t really commit to any of them. Pull up a Pottery Barn cushion and join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we hang up a bedsheet in the back yard and dig into what exactly makes this movie tick. Is it the Meyers-lite vibes? Is it the lack of focus on any particular moment in the protagonist’s life? Is it that these boys have barely two traits to spread between themselves? In a word, yes. In another word, KITCHENS!

We say hello to our movie for next month and bid farewell to our Sweet and Sour Summer of Teen Angst with the inevitable conclusion that actually, we could do it way better than the pros. We’ve each come prepared with a pitch or two of our own for the next big YA franchise for some second-rate director to snatch up and butcher into a mid-budget movie, and the buzz words are flying. Upstairs/Downstairs in space? Black powder fantasy with dragons and tech? Twin Peaks Americana meets fairy tale? The Goodreads commenters will have a field day with this!