LoFiTop5

Lizards and apes and gremlins, oh my! Welcome to our Top 5 Monster Movies episode, where we utterly redefine monsters to include “cute fuzzy CGI things who go through doors”, “weird CGI things with eyes in their hands”, and, of course, BrundleFly. Our lists also include a musical, a monster who lives in a flower pot and sings, a camouflage monster from outer space, and … the wind. Listen and play along to try to guess which monster has excellent “hand-eye coordination”!

Over the course of recording episodes, both JT and Jeremy noticed a recurring pattern of movies with far too low Metacritic scores - it particularly caught our eye when discussing Wall Street, with a mere 56 on the ol’ MC. Now it’s no perfect movie or anything, but if the Jaden Smith Karate Kid remake gets a 61, and Oliver Stone’s own take on JFK has a 72, well, #justsayin. And if Superbad has a 76, how does Ferris Bueller’s Day Off only get a 61? And we’d agree that the witty Midnight Run deserves its 78 score, but shouldn’t a classic like Beverly Hills Cop be sitting in the mid-80s? Enjoy our take on the absolutely criminally underrated movies of our times.

In this week’s “5 Questions About… Jojo Rabbit” we have a little chat about why it’s so poorly received on Metacritic (59?) and try to channel our best Taika Waititi in making our games a bit more outlandish than usual. Jeremy quizzes JT on some famous actors born with far-less famous names, including Oscar winners Krishna Bhanji and Caryn Johnson (definitely not who you think they are!), and even Oscar nominee Albert Einstein (from Broadcast News and Defending Your Life). We also have a lively discussion about up-and-coming Thomasin McKenzie, her phenomenal performance in this movie, and dive into if she’d have made a great Hermione or Katniss (yes and yes). It’s a better than so-so listen, and hopefully, we don't have any no-nos in our talk about Jojo.

This week the Kids don’t go Solo when discussing the Top 5 Movies With a Single Word in their Title. One Memento from the episode is almost getting Whiplash from the back-and-forths, almost like playing a game of Dodgeball. Babe, we gotta tell you these Goodfellas almost had to take an Airplane! to Casablanca (with a stop at a Casino) to get through all the movies they wanted to chat about. But they were inspired by great leaders, from Gandhi to Patton to Lincoln, the kind of faces we’d see at mount Rushmore. So unless you’re an Alien or suffering the summer Heat in Chinatown, check out this episode (maybe listen with your friend Harvey, or maybe Willow the Elf?) before we record again next Friday.

This week’s episode is full of all sorts of fun surprises, with Jeremy Scott from CinemaSins joining the guys to bring his unique perspective on movies we all wish we’d seen in theaters. We have our “didn’t see it because I’m an idiot” entries (Endgame???), “way too young for it” (Blade Runner), “wasn’t even alive for it” (Lawrence of Arabia), “just sorta missed it” (Bad Times at the El Royale) and even a “one of us was too busy partying in the dot-com era to see the Matrix!?!?” To be fair, we might be more embarrassed by some of the missed flicks on this list than we were for the Guy Crys ep! We’ve also added a new bit, hitting up our Twitter fans for some of their picks (@TheCinemaTicket’s choice of The Wild Bunch def a great one). Give a listen, and, please, no judgment - we’re saving Everything Wrong With the LoFiTop5 for another time. Also, please check out pre-ordering Jeremy’s (S) upcoming book on Amazon “Original Sin: From Preacher’s Kid to the Creation of CinemaSins (and 3.5 billion+ views)” and if you aren’t already a CinemaSins subscriber on YouTube, well, that’s an easy one to fix.

This week Jeremy and JT have 5 great questions about Total Recall (1990), in which we somehow draw connections to Inception, Minority Report, and Brazil, not to mention Karate Kid, Ghostbusters, and Clash of the Titans. We also put JT on the spot trying to differentiate between the illuminations of Bruce Lee, Gene Hackman, and, of course, Mr. T. We do formally adopt 1990 into the 1980’s - there's still cleary enough shoulder pads to go around. And yes, we do have a little chat about the third… mammary gland?

While everyone (who records this podcast) enjoys a good cameo, sometimes we like it, even more, when our fave non-actor gets a legit role in a movie - and doesn’t wreck the movie in the process (don’t worry, we won’t blame Mr. Ice for his appearance in TMNT2: The Secret of the Ooze). This week’s episode has your hosts debating the top 5 appearances of a non-actor in a non-cameo role in a movie. We have an interesting assortment of musicians (Madonna or Lady Gaga? Bowie or Eminem?) and athletes (MJ or Kareem?) and wrestlers and ballet dancers, not one but TWO game show hosts, and even … a senator!?!?

What if you made an episode of SNL, with a recurring gag of a 1950s era sci-fi movie, starring… and we’re just talking about half of the cast here: BB King, Steve Guttenberg, Rip Taylor, Ed Begley Jr, Kelly Preston, Roseanna Arquette, Ralph Bellamy, Andrew Dice Clay, Bernie Casey, Bryan Cranston, Bela Lugosi, Robert Loggia, David Allan Grier, Carrie Fisher, Howard Hesseman, Henny Youngman, Griffin Dunne, Phil Hartman, Arsenio Hall, and… John Travolta’s brother. Well, someone did, and it’s called Amazon Women on the Moon, and JT has 5 great questions for Jeremy on this 80s… masterpiece?

It’s pretty safe to say that any movie podcasters like ourselves would love an evening with a Steven Spielberg or a Martin Scorcese (aka Eyebrows), but what about the rest of Hollywood directors? This week the guys pick the five movies whose directors they’d want to have a beer with, whether via time machine or in today’s world. Some of the picks include the most-watched movie of all time, some pretty mediocre attempts at comic book movies, a few of our favorite indie directors, and one of those “everybody thinks it's Quentin Tarantino, but, no, it isn’t”. And of course, Christopher Nolan.

As we continue our Top 5 Questions about series, this week we hit up Breakfast at Tiffany’s (or as we’ve been referring to it when we text B@T). Topics this time include a little “who sung it” quiz for JT and a “how much did these popular items cost back in 1961" bit. We also have a (yes, another) discussion about how much we love Billy Zane and how he could fit into a modernized version of this phenomenal, thought a little flawed/tainted, film. And as is becoming the norm for us, we find ways to compare this classic with movies such as Short Circuit, Ace Ventura Pet Detective, Star Wars Episode One, and… Dumbo? Lastly, as is the case, some spoilers abound in the movie Jeremy had accidentally thought was a rom-com (hint: it's not).