Drat Pack

Finally, we answer the question that has plagued humanity for like 15 years or so- who watches Watching the Detectives? Also, what is Watching the Detectives and is there a good reason no one has heard of it despite the pretty great cast? To fully dive into these difficult conundrums, we Unite the Five and drag out good friends / returning guests Meghan Coyne and Faith Johnson to dissect this 2007 romantic (?) comedy (??) starring Cillian Murphy, Lucy Liu, and a surprising amount of other funny randos. What makes this movie fail at nearly everything it attempts to do? What separates a screwball comedy heroine homage from a shitty manic pixie dream girl? Were the producers of this movie right to bury it in a New Jersey landfill so that no one would ever know this lame attempt existed? Also, how do you make a themed cocktail for a movie when the internet has mislead you as to what this movie is actually about? Well, you try your best. Now, please join us in listening to us talking about us watching Watching the Detectives.

With Halloween in our rearview mirrors and the evil demonic spirits we brought to our mortal realm after spending the night in that haunted house safely turned to statues when the first rays of dawn touched them, we can focus on the future: movies that we thought would suck but then didn’t! Now that we have created a Horrible New Normal and studios are starting to put bloated expensive crap back in theaters where it belong, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris discuss movies they saw that they fully expected to not be good but somehow were. You can call this the Paddington Principle. Also we start preparing for our next full-length episode, with a few old friends returning for a movie no one has ever heard and a autumnal update of a hardboiled gumshoe standby to drink along with it.

For our annual Halloween Spooktacular episode, we dredge the the cruddy marshes of early-2000s horror films and pull up 2005’s White Noise, a real piece of crap you might be dimly aware of because Michael Keaton was in it. Keaton stars as a widower who believes he can hear his dead wife speaking to him through the static of his phone, prompting him to phone in his performance for the next 70 minutes. Get yourself into a suitably spooky mood (but not too spooky because this isn’t really much of a horror movie despite all evidence to the contrary) and listen to Leigh, Brendan, and Chris moan about the movie’s weird understanding of electronic voice phenomenon, its steadfast commitment to ensuring no character aside from Michael Keaton have an identity or wants, and how it winds up being a pilot for a CBS procedural for about half of the running time. Also we make a white Russian because of course what else would you make for this, and get slowly drunker as we all pitch our own versions of this that are inevitably more suited to being a “horror movie.” Also please don’t listen to the silent parts of this podcast at boosted volumes lest you hear a bunch of grumpy ghosts naming streets near you.

In our latest minisode game premise, Leigh combs through the dregs of forgotten early cinema for movie names that seem just implausible enough and combines them with a list of her own fictional titles, then forces Brendan and Chris to wrack their brains in an attempt to determine which ones are real and which ones are fake. Games are fun and they don’t require all of us to do preparation for an episode (just Leigh), so we hope you like this frivolous bit of nonsense (and that you still like things similar to it when we try to do it again at some point). Also we try a really bizarre flavor of ice cream from a local ice cream parlor because why not and we introduce our upcoming 2021 Halloween Spooktacular movie! It sounds pretty crummy! Get spooked!

It’s September, which means it’s back to school season, which means that we get to drink our way through a really crappy movie about high schoolers! In our latest episode, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris watch sad sack misfit Freddie Highmore mope his through his senior year of high school in 2011’s The Art of Getting By. That is to say, he would be moping his way through it if he hadn’t neglected to do pretty much any of his school work for the whole year, having I guess not realized that this might somehow negatively affect him or something, whatever. Also there’s a whole lot of emotions and Emma Roberts shows up to teach Freddie Highmore that if a blank slate of a girl loves you, I guess it fixes your depression or something. We discuss our own teen angst, the horrible horrible characters, and we throw together a cocktail at the last minute in a manner befitting Freddie’s insufferable baby slacker character. Can any amount of alcohol and creative fixes actually improve this movie? Listen and find out!

As the Summer of Weddings closes, we decide to put some fresh eyes on some of the depictions of adulthood from movies and TV we watched and loved as kids versus how we feel about them today (surprise, we hate them!). Mostly, it’s a great excuse for Leigh to force Brendan and Chris to watch the truly cringeworthy film Dream for an Insomniac. Perhaps it should have been obvious to 12-year-old Leigh, but any movie that sets you on a beret phase is probably not a movie you should be sourcing any aspirational ideas of adulthood from.

Quick! What would you do if you were secretly in love with your horrible best friend’s fiancee for years and never told him, but then he told you he was also in love with you for years and never told you, but he seems to have no real interest in figuring out what he wants to do and his wedding is quickly approaching and also Jim Halpert keeps yelling at you? If your answer was “dither for weeks while indulging in flashbacks and refusing to make any of your own choices,” then congratulations, you’re as well-equipped as the idiots in this movie are. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we conclude our Summer of Weddings with 2011’s Something Borrowed, starring Kate Hudson, Ginnifer Goodwin, John Krasinski, and a JCPenney Sunday morning men’s shirt ad that was struck by lightning and achieved some minimal level of self-awareness. It’s a meandering and belabored romcom crawling with a bunch of rich white dummies who are incapable of making even the slightest decisions and a plot so unintentionally ill-conceived that at no point will you ever be sure what trope it’s attempting to indulge in. It’s a sunny piece of crap, to be sure, but a fascinatingly inept one ripe for discussion and improvement! Dream of your own doomed wedding as we discuss the stupid stupid characters and the various ways this plot could go whilst throwing down frozen margaritas to end our Summer of Margs. PUSH IT!

In which we take nonromcom movies we already watched for this podcast and romcomify them, so there are romcoms where we had naught but noncoms to begin with. Rom!

Our Summer of Weddings and Margs swaggers onward with a rom (?) com (??) that’s somehow so shitty it nearly circles back around to having something to say about masculinity and relationships (ALMOST). Listen in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they watch and discuss 2008’s My Best Friend’s Girl starring Dane Cook, Kate Hudson, Jason Biggs, Alec Baldwin and a bunch of other poor bastards. Think back on our nation’s brief early-2000s love affair with the comedic stylings of Dane Cook as we cover the woefully unfunny jokes, a plot that somehow unintentionally makes everyone awful, and direction so lacking in nearly any sense of style that the movie seems to have burst forth fully-formed from the nostril of a coke-addled producer. Also, there’s the most basic-ass margarita you could ever imagine, one only fitting for a movie that can’t even muster the energy to be mediocre. On behalf on the city of Boston, we’re very sorry we allowed this movie to be shot here.

Our Summer of Weddings and Margaritas rolls on relentlessly like some fire-breathing atomic bridezilla, but for this episode we take a breather to focus on the subject of subtext in movies and how it relates to the viewer’s interpretation of the film and how a fandom can then take that and run manically with it all over fanfiction.net. As the movie Luca provides the starting point for this discussion, please be aware there are obviously spoilers for that movie (but really if you haven’t watched it yet, you should just do it, it’s very cute). Unsurprisingly, a lot of this ties into queer readings of ostensibly not-queer movies and the thrills and/or perils of shipping characters. In contrast to Luca, our next full-length episode’s movie is a real piece of crap, and we’ve got a suitably basic drink to accompany it (please be sure to take notes when we describe with painstaking clarity the many complex and varied steps necessary to create this craft cocktail).