Drat Pack

What do you get when you take Patrick Dempsey, the writers of The Hangover, the director of The Lion King, and a group of esteemed and notable actors and lock them all up together in a bank overnight? Did you guess Flypaper? No? You’ve never even heard of it? Oh. Well, you get Flypaper, a 2011 crime comedy that opened at Sundance and then everyone forgot about entirely. Everyone but Leigh. So naturally, she, Brendan, and Chris decided to watch this sweaty heist flick and see what the deal was. Listen, won’t you, as we discuss what the hell the tone is trying to be, what’s Patrick Dempsey’s assortment of quirks supposed to amount to, and the answer to the question that was on everyone’s lips the summer of 2011- WHO IS VICELLOUS DRUM??? And then we try to fix the movie and drink a cocktail in tribute to the film’s unnamed Swiss miss (RIP Swiss Miss).

In our final episode of the Why Don’t We Watch This miniseries we talk about Shane Black’s The Nice Guys, a rollicking mystery comedy adventure set in the 1970s if your average film reviewer or podcaster named Chris is to be believed! Turns out when you watch a great movie that gives you great laugh per minute mileage, you don’t always have a lot to talk about! There will notably be much less enjoyment to be had two weeks from now when we tackle one of Disney’s “live action” adaptations of their original animated movies.

No, not that Beauty and the Beast, god forbid! The bad one. The one where all the charm and heart of the original animated classic was replaced with CGI glop and soulless autotune and Stanley Tucci as a harpsichord that shoots keys at people (we didn’t say EVERY change was bad). Leigh, Brendan, and Chris discuss the uncanny valley recreation of your childhood that has no reason to be other than to make over a billion dollars at the box office. Was there a way this movie could have been done well? Well, maybe. Was there ever a reason to do it? Well… no, but we made a drink to go along with it and discussed how we’d do it anyway.

In this continuation of our mini mini-series Why Don’t We Watch This, we discuss Strange Days. No, not the prolonged Kafka-esque fever dream that is 2020, the 1995 Kathryn Bigelow directed cyberpunk neo-noir film starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett. Heads up, this movie is Intense with a capital I, as in the optical organs you may want to avert, as we did, during some of the more violent and unpleasant scenes. If you are not okay with graphic depictions of physical and sexual violence, this may not be the episode (or movie!) for you. Otherwise, enjoy our humble addition to the many discussions and think pieces of this ever-timely would-be narrative of a systemically racist militarized police force wreaking on L.A. mired in a confusing virtual reality serial killer whodunnit.

It’s been over four months since we all started working from home, and it’s leaving us nostalgic for the things we used to be able to do, like physically touch our loved ones and ride public transportation to our places of work. Accordingly, we decided to put ourselves back in that state of mind by watching Jaume Collet-Serra‘s 2018 thriller The Commuter, starring an especially haggard-looking Liam Neeson as the titular character and Vera Farmiga as the woman who won’t stop trying to talk to him on the train, the most terrifying threat of all. A good premise is let down by some bad execution and lazy plotting, so we all do that thing we do and try to come up with ways this could have been the fun conspiracy movie it so desperately wants to be. Also, we have a COFFEE cocktail! COFFEE!! LIKE A COMMUTER DRINKS!!!

In which we continue our summer of watching things that are good but we haven’t all seen by watching Preston Sturges’s 1941 screwball comedy The Lady Eve, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda and a cartoon snake. Also we use this movie as a jumping off point to talk about our thoughts on screwball comedies (good!) and the weird way Nancy Meyers structures her movies so that you can’t tell where you actually are in the plot (I mean, your mileage may vary!). Also next episode we’ll do a complete 180 and talk about a very big and loud action movie, but for now just listen to us all talk about how much we like a movie whose plot twist is predicated on an action being so outlandish that it circles back around and becomes believable again. Good stuff!

What could be more timely than a comedy where a millennial sacrifices her entire identity to fulfil the mad whims of a wildly wealthy older white couple? Don’t worry! She’s white and kind of well off and doing this voluntarily, so it’s fun!!! Yes, it’s The Nanny Diaries, a film à clef based on the chick lit beach read where recent college graduate Scarlett Johansson for some flimsy reason chooses to be the live-in nanny to Laura Linney and part of Paul Giamatti while being wooed by privileged hunk Chris Evans. Do we really figure out what these reasons are, or why she won’t leave, or if this all is the sort of thing we really want to watch in the present climate? Not really! But we all had a wine spritzer cocktail we made for the occasion and then tried to make this movie into a better version of itself anyway, like the podcast equivalent of so many Donna Murphy guilt trips.

We continue our miniseries of indeterminable length with another movie that we enjoy watching JUST BECAUSE, Carl Reiner’s 1993 sex thriller parody, Fatal Instinct. Also we talk about parody movies in general and why some of them work better than others. And this one doesn’t always even work all the time! But hey, where else can you get Armand Assante and Sean Young screwing recklessly while spinning plates? Also we’re doing a summery chick-lit movie adaptation next, so get ready for that.

As the disgraced knight Bowen says, “Dreams die hard and you hold them in your hands long after they’ve turned to dust.” Similarly, when some of us revisited the 1996 fantasy / CGI test feature DragonHeart, we also found that our memories of a beloved childhood film had also turned to dust. Take away the once-impressive (?) computer-generated costar and you’re left with a pretty trite story bogged down with vague world-building and Dennis Quaid’s Irish (?) accent work. Can Leigh, Brendan, and Chris break down where exactly DragonHeart goes wrong and make it better again by putting half of their own hearts into the script or some similar strained metaphor? Can they drink the spiciest of all margaritas? Can they manage to talk about this movie without the air conditioner on? Listen and find out!

Look, we really enjoy watching a bad movie but sometimes even we have limits. So while everything in the world is going to hell, we thought maybe we should watch a GOOD movie that not all of us have seen. Ergo this exceedingly wordy minisode miniseries, Why Don’t We Watch This. And for our inaugural ep, we got some food and drinks and decided to watch the 1966 Cold War comedy, The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. For some reason, a comedy about people panicking over impending doom felt weirdly apt. Also, we appreciate how Alan Arkin is a god-damned smokeshow in it and reveal our first fantastical summer movie episode. Listen, won’t you?