Myopia Movies

Something is rotten in Middleton, and everyone thinks it’s Frances. Pranks are piling up across town, the adults are furious, and the only person who believes her innocent is a childhood imaginary friend who has shown up unannounced with some alarming news: the Boogeyman is real, he’s loose, and he’s framing her.

This week we revisit a Disney Channel Original Movie from the golden age of tweens, slumber parties, and a weirdly high number of adults who refuse to listen to teenagers. We riff on the logic of the Boogeyman’s master plan, the town’s astonishing lack of due process, and why nobody ever just checks under the bed.

Grab a flashlight, keep your feet off the floor, and join us.

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Directed by Kenneth Johnson

Starring: Erin Chambers, Ty Hodges, Robin Riker, Steve Valentine, Stephen Tobolowsky, Jake Sakson

A whole town has vanished. Snowfield, Colorado, is empty except for a few corpses, a ringing phone, and a vibe that says "don't touch anything." Naturally, we touch everything.

This week we riff on Phantoms, the 1998 adaptation of Dean Koontz's horror novel. Two sisters (Joanna Going and Rose McGowan) roll into town and find it deserted. Then they find Sheriff Ben Affleck, who is very serious about all of this. Then a scientist (Peter O'Toole, who is clearly there for the paycheck and the vibes) shows up to explain that the answer is an ancient shapeshifting horror from beneath the earth. Liev Schreiber is also here, to remind us that this was a very strange moment in everyone's career.

We discuss:

Grab your snacks, check that your phone line isn't dead, and join us for another round of riffing.

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Six women charges with murder in Cook County and somehow they're the ones putting on the show. This week we're strapping ourselves into fishnets and existential dread for Rob Marshall's musical about murder, media, and the sweet, sweet payoff of celebrity homicide. Renée Zellweger discovers that shooting your boyfriend is basically an open mic night, Catherine Zeta-Jones proves prison is just improv with worse lighting, and Richard Gere spends two hours doing legal tap-dancing — sometimes literally. Queen Latifah runs the cell block like a landlord who takes cash only, and every single musical number is somebody's fantasy sequence because apparently nobody in 1920s Chicago can process trauma without a spotlight. We're riffing courtroom theatrics, jazz-hand justice, and a plot that boils down to "fame forgives everything." All that jazz, none of the remorse.

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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!

Directed by: Rob Marshall

Starring:

Renée Zellweger

Nomi Malone wants to dance. She wants it so bad she'll claw, thrust, and pool-vomit her way from a Vegas diner to the top of the Stardust Casino's marquee show — and we're along for every glitter-caked, oddly joyless step of it. Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas set out to make the ultimate NC-17 spectacle and instead produced one of the most gloriously, bafflingly bad movies ever released by a major studio. We're talking about the lap dances that look like seizures, the dialogue that sounds like it was translated into and out of three other languages, and a steak dinner scene that has somehow entered the pop-culture canon.

Join us as we dissect Showgirls — a film so committed to its own vision of sleazy excess that it looped back around into something like camp genius. Is it satire? Is it just bad? Is Elizabeth Berkley giving the bravest performance of 1995 or the most unhinged? We riff, we argue, we never quite agree.

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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Starring: Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi, Alan Rachins, Gina Ravera, Lin Tucci

A movie about a songwriter who is too shy to sing, solved by putting her on a bar in wet jeans. Violet Sanford flees New Jersey for Manhattan with a demo tape and roughly nine dollars, gets robbed, gets hired at a saloon whose entire business model is "hydrate the patrons against their will," and discovers that the cure for stage fright is a crowd of drunk men chanting. Meanwhile her father drives down from the Garden State to yell about it, and Adam Garcia keeps showing up like a Australian golden retriever who learned to make omelets.

Bruckheimer looked at Flashdance, said "what if less plot and more hose," and cashed a check. We're here for the fire code violations, the LeAnn Rimes of it all, and the moment John Goodman quietly outacts the entire soundtrack. Also: nobody in this bar is ever served a drink. We counted.

Can you fight the moonlight? Findings inside.

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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!

Directed by David McNally

We're digging into the vault for this one. The Plastics are back, Gretchen is still trying to make fetch happen, and so are we. Join us as we revisit our take on the 2004 teen comedy that somehow became both a cultural touchstone and a Broadway musical — because Hollywood ran out of ideas and humility.

Does Mean Girls hold up? Is Regina George actually the hero? Why does a grown adult math teacher have this many emotional breakdowns? We had questions in 2014. We have more questions now.

Remastered for clarity. The opinions are messier than ever.

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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!

Directed by Mark Waters

This week on Myopia Movie, we got a full moon coming up! We watched Ginger Snaps, where a Canadian teenager gets bitten by a werewolf on the same night she gets her first period...turns out puberty was always kind of a horror movie, we just needed the claws to make it official.

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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!

Directed by John Fawcett

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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!

Here are the film credits for Encino Man (1992):

Director: Les Mayfield

Cast:

This week on Myopia Movie, we got a candy-coated murder cover-up coming up! We watched Jawbreaker, where three impossibly glamorous high school mean girls accidentally kill their best friend with a birthday prank gone wrong and then spend the rest of the movie handling it with all the grace and subtlety you'd expect from teenagers who peaked in the "Flawless" clique... turns out 1999 had a lot of feelings about popularity, and somehow all of them involve Judy Greer stealing every scene she's in.

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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!

Directed by Darren Stein

This week on Myopia Movies, we got a yearbook coming up! We watched Can't Hardly Wait, where a lovesick teenager spends an entire graduation party trying to work up the nerve to talk to his crush...turns out 1998 had a lot of feelings about the last day of high school and a surprising number of them involve Jerry Springer references.

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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!

Directed by Harry Elfont, Deborah Kaplan