Valerie and Helen welcome first-time guest Marisa Macias to talk about fifth-time (to the podcast) Richard Curtis classic Notting Hill, gay awakenings, and who the most well-known Welsh person in America is. It's nice! Surreal, but nice.

You fell in love with us on the radio* -- you weren't expecting it, and you couldn't help it. It was the sound of our voices, the things we said. And suddenly, you knew -- you weren't satisfied with the chick flick discourse your other relationships were providing.

Have yourself A Merry Little Ex-Mas. Or at least a podcast episode about the 2025 movie of that name, which is what this is.

After going almost a full year without covering a new Lindsay Lohan movie, we were desperate -- and fortunately for us (and you!! wink! 😉!!) the universe gave us Freakier Friday. Nothing was going to stop us from covering it -- not even the fact that we haven't covered Freaky Friday. Beloved Lindsay-Lohan-correspondent Sarah Norton joins us as we gush about -- but don't fully spoil -- this highly relatable tale about waking up in your mother's body just two days before she is due to marry this really handsome British chef guy. Just like we did when we were kids. 

It's mwa-ha-ha season yet again, and if you thought Diablo Cody had mwa'd her last ha with Jennifer's Body, we are like annoyingly excited to correct you by talking about the 2024 "coming-of-rage" dark rom-com Lisa Frankenstein -- a piece seemingly made exactly for our '80s-minted eyes, and a movie that is, if Lisa Frank should somehow be reading these show notes, really just a straightforward remake of Weird Science and nothing to do with her intellectually property in any way ha ha

We are a podcast that often covers peoples' underrated comfort movies, and this time we finally tackle the long neglected Valerie-comfort-watch (and Jesse-Spencer vehicle!) Uptown Girls. If that's not a comfort movie for you, 1) why not, it's sweet and fun, and 2) we hope you take some comfort in the knowledge that we'll talk about a different movie next month.

Probably. 

OK, there's a non-zero chance this will just be an Uptown Girls podcast moving forward.

Dear listeners -- some of whose names we know -- thank you for helping us celebrate Valerie's birth month by listening to our episode covering 1990's Joe Versus the Volcano. We forgot how wonderfully bonkers this movie was. Thank you for listening. 

For the month of 'ly in the year of our lord '25, we assigned ourselves some summer school. Kind of a lot of summer school, in fact. 

For June, we really wanted to bring you something queer. Like gay queer. And I believe we've done that, but also, as a fun bonus, it turns out we've brought you something weird queer as well. So this episode -- and this movie -- lives in that cozy, perfect, Venn-diagram-intersection of good queer things. 

We talked about Yorgos Lanthimos's gorgeous dark/etc. comedy, The Favourite. To make an otherwise unsettling Pride month better. But still kind of unsettling. But, like, unsettling in a cool way. Happy Pride.

We gave you exactly one month's notice that we were going to cover the underrated 2002 cutie vehicle Two Weeks Notice for May ("Sandy summer," we called it, very cleverly). So if this surprised you, I don't know what to say.