Drat Pack

Shakespeare gets a modern makeover complete with low-slung cargo shorts and asymmetrically-cut tops in this teen take on Twelfth Night, 2006’s She’s the Man. In a category brimming with Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Easy A, is there room for yet another similarly updated YA comedy? The answer, of course, is not really, especially if ends up being as dull and dated as this one. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris cover the weird gender role ideas, Amanda Bynes’s straight-out-of-The–Amanda–Show performance, and the general pitfalls of trying to do a modern take on classic lit. We also conclude our Sweet and Sour Summer of Teen Angst with one final lemony cocktail, and a promise that we’ll probably move back to more adult fare next time. Well, comparatively speaking.

At long last, our horrible secret comes out- it turns out we thought some of the movies we suggested for this podcast were actually good and just used this whole thing as an excuse to force a discussion about a “bad” movie we secretly liked. We air our dirty laundry to each other and confess our deepest truths about movies like The Girl from Monday and Tomorrowland and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As part of our sinful confession, we also reveal our next and final Sweet and Sour Summer of Teen Angst movie and cocktail, so hold on to your gendered clothing for this next episode.

Our Sweet and Sour Summer of YA Angst marches on like a june bug in a Southern pride parade with 2013’s Beautiful Creatures, a country-fried slice of supernatural teen drama stuffed with a bunch of heavy-hitting actors in turn stuffed with all the scenery they devoured. What might otherwise be a pretty rote YA adaptation becomes considerably more interesting by making the brave choices to swap the expected gender roles and also not really explain anything very well. Come sit a spell on the veranda with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss the vague and confusing world of the Casters, a YA story that seems to remove all agency for its female protagonist, and the weird details from the source material were apparently lost in translation. And also there’s yet another lemonade cocktail that’s so sweet and boozy, you’ll think your dining room table has begun to rotate rapidly while two other people rotate outside you in the other direction. Stop it! Lena, stop it. Stop it, Lena! Lena!

As part of our process of determining movies for our Sweet and Sour Summer of YA Angst, we went through several lists of movies based on young adult novels that never quite took off or flopped miserably. Naturally, we ended up watching multiple potential candidates and came across several movies that we found fascinating in some way but didn’t merit a full discussion. Maybe they were actually good! Maybe they just sucked so much that no one wanted to talk about them! Anyway, on that note, please enjoy our discussion of three YA novels that were not the hits the studio may have hoped they were- 2014’s Vampire Academy, 2016’s Fallen, and and 2018’s Every Day. Which one of these was the secretly good one? Hint: it’s the one we spend the most time talking about! Also our summer of teen angst continues unabated with our next piece of country-fried cinematic supernatural nonsense (and yet another lemonade cocktail to accompany it).

Nothing says “fun and fizzy tween comedy” like one where a baby Jennifer Garner wishes to be “30, flirty, and thriving” and has her consciousness propelled forward into a multiverse governed by a monkey’s paw where she has achieved all her dreams but has destroyed all that is sweet and pure about herself in the process. That’s right, our retroactively-themed Sweet and Sour Summer of Teen Angst kicks off with 2004’s 13 Going on 30, a 2004 movie nostalgic for 1987 viewed by a bunch of 2022 millennials nostalgic for 2004. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris view a movie considerably better than most of the other ones done on this podcast but still filled with inexplicable and murky moments. What cruel universe would grant a teen girl’s wishes but force her to live in an ironic dark timeline? What the hell is Poise about and how will that at all translate to a spur-of-the-moment reworking of the entire magazine? Why would Jennifer Garner throw a shrimp tale on the floor of the bank lobby where her work party is held? All this will be discussed along with a sweet and lemony summer cocktail (and apologies for the weird audio, we had an air conditioner running because it is simply too hot).

Summer is finally here, and with it the exciting promise of traveling to new locales (or just sitting in front of the air conditioner on your phone watching movies, both are good options)! Using that as a starting point, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris decided to talk about the fictional worlds of films that they’d most like to live in and why. Will Leigh deign to visit Brendan when he moves to Coruscant? Listen and find out! Also we kick off our summer movie and drink theme, and all the sweet and sour vibes it entails.

Journey with us back to the distant year of 2010, a time when Walt Disney Pictures was wildly desperate to launch another multi-million dollar franchise that would convince teenage boys to give them money. Enter The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an ostensible live-action adaptation of a Fantasia segment that would reteam National Treasure director Jon Turteltaub with National Treasure scenery gnawer Nicolas Cage. Audiences at the time didn’t take to the idea of Nic Cage wearing a flowing wig and leather duster casting magic goop at Alfred Molina, but we sure did! Listen in as Leigh, Brendan, and Chris discuss aspects of a movie they all mostly liked, from the use of magic to the performances to the locale (you know, it’s almost like New York City should be the fourth-billed character in the movie!). Don’t worry, we have some bad stuff to talk about as always along with our fixes AND of course there’s a really great summery cocktail for you to enjoy as you listen to OneRepublic’s “Secrets (Jay Baruchel Tesla Coil Remix).”

For this mini episode of Why Watch, we tackle one of the cultural zeitgeist’s most pressing issues- who are your sweetest bois? Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss their favorite gentle boys of pop culture, those sweet boys who are defined by their willingness to show kindness and help others rather than immediately punch the shit out of someone (look, some of them also do that too but hey, all gentle behavior must have limits). Also our next full-length episode’s subject is brought up along with an accompanying cocktail that will hopefully sort of look like electricity or Tesla coils or magic, I don’t know, there’s options here!

Our reigning queen of The-Consistently-Great-Thing-in-the-Bad-Movies-We-Watch, Michelle Pfeiffer, once again drifts into the focus of our podcast as the lead of a romcom (!) co-starring Paul Rudd (!!) and directed by Amy Heckerling (!!!) that was buried in the direct-to-DVD pipeline (!V). That’s right, on this episode we’ll be discussing the 2007 scattershot May-August romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman, a movie that you’ve probably never heard of and for good reason. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we discuss the weird power imbalance, the shitty gender dynamics, and a heaping helping of Hollywood satire that was dated by the time Amy Heckerling typed it into Final Draft. And this time, we got TWO variations on a themed cocktail to make this whole awkward affair go down a little easier. Trust us, when you see Tracy Ullman monologuing as Mother Nature about how women don’t want to have babies anymore, you’ll understand the real reason we needed two drinks.