Read it and Weep

Left Behind is an inexplicable remake of the 2000 Kirk Cameron stinker, and the latest in a series of Hollywood’s half-assed movies for the religious right that feature bumbling atheists learning tough lessons at the hands of intellectually and morally superior evangelicals. Like Christian music, the actual quality of the performance is less important than every single line being about Jesus, and in that, this Left Behind succeeds magnificently.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, Left Behind imagines a world in which God discovers a manufacturing defect in all of the evangelical Christians (which here represent a far, far higher percentage of humanity than in real life) and magically recalls them all to Heaven, leaving behind piles of neatly folded clothes and a bunch of tense arguments. Moments after all the boring religious people disappear, the entire world falls into chaos! Cars crash, planes fall out of the sky, and every single atheist (and Muslim and Catholic and non-apocalyptic Christian) immediately starts looting. Like the only thing holding us back from stealing TVs is the mere presence of religious nuts. That’s pretty much the whole thing. Meet some dumb characters, oh look! a pile of clothes!, looting and havoc, the end.

Drew Barrymore had to break out of her type casting as a child actor who could only do cute movies. After Doppleganger, everybody knew she had range; she could also be in completely insane movies.

Doppl follows a woman who killed her parents as she gets in wacky adventures with her new roommate. All the fun comes crashing down when her doctor reveals he’s been impersonating her and everybody else using a series of rubber masks and then Barrymore one-ups that be showing she’s actually two identical alien worms with sword-hands. Yes, that’s a faithful summary of the movie. It’s weird.

Thanks to Lauren for sponsoring and also for pointing out that members of the cloth (is that what they’re called?) also listen to our show!

And Portland wishes goodbye to Shane Torres who does a great radio show where he interviews artists about their day jobs.

This is the worst book. It is about a rapist killing people. Did I mention he’s a rapist? It’s about a rapist. He’s the hero.

TRIGGER WARNING FOR EVERYTHING

Thank you for sponsoring, Dick. No refunds.

The year is 1986, the problem is the cold war, the solution is a giant talking war robots. It’s all well and good until one of those war robots accidentally gains sentience and starts making friends with the locals after a lightning strike causes him to Short Circuit!

Like a lot of things, it’s flawless if you ignore the racism. Except for Fisher Stevens in brown face, it’s a really fun romp through the 80s including optimism about robotics, fear of the military industrial complex, and the love between war robot and a trash compactor.

Thanks to Dave from California for sponsoring his annual guilty pleasure!

Everybody knows the story of Robin Hood: a wiley young fox stealing from king lion and a his servant snake to give to the other creatures of the forest. It’s a good story and what it didn’t need was a dour remake starring Gladiator.

But such a thing does exist. It’s got all the right pieces, good actors, good director, and a good forest to shoot in. But for some reason the pieces don’t come together. It lacks any semblance of fun and replaces much of the action with political speeches.

Thanks, Nathan from Durham for sponsoring this episode and setting us out to solve the mystery “How did this go wrong?”

Computer animation in the 90s was so bad, the creators of Veggie Tales opted for vegetables because they were easier to draw than people. The primitive animation also smoothed over all the slavery in the Old Testament.

We sat down with Angela Webber, one half of the nerd-folk band The Doubleclicks, to talk about her childhood (and some adulthood) favorite show, Veggie Tales. We watched four episodes:

It was a great overview of the weird world of singing religious vegetables that will stick with us for a while.

If there’s a crime in Baltimore, The Wire will solve it. If there’s a crime ripped from the headlines, Law & Order will solve it. If there’s a crime involving Germanic animals, Grimm will solve it. But if there’s a crime involving a Marine’s body falling out of the sky, you need the fine folks at NCIS.

N.C.I.S. is the Navy Criminal Investigation Service, a fictional group of super cops who solve military crimes using magic screens and invasion of civil liberties. And nerdy, pacifistic comedian Jackie Kashian has a guilty pleasure for this procedural for some reason. So we discussed police tropes, potential spinoffs, and the finer points of aging heart throbs.

If a group of hillbillies steal your hands, don’t despair. If you put your mind to it, you won’t just make waves, you’ll make… Vibrations!

That’s what happens to TJ, an up and coming musician. But his new raver friends make him new friends and he’s better than ever before. Now he’s not just a guy, he’s a Cyberstorm! Who cares that he treats his whole family like shit? He knows where he belongs because all the world is a rave!

If you missed this movie in 1996, don’t despair. You can count on us to summarize it for a really long time along with our helpers (and the fine people who brought this movie to our attention) Matt & Kseniya from I Love Bad Movies.

The best way to protest the new, terrible Ninja Turtles movie is to watch the old terrific (but only because we were kids) Ninja Turtles movie. So that’s what we did.

And what joy it brought to us. Remember how much they loved pizza and making sassy early-90s pop culture references? We love those things too! And remember how they were made out of thick rubber suits so they couldn’t really move? That’s still fun today!

The movie doesn’t really hold up, but who cares? It’s fun, and none of the money goes to Michael Bay, which is radical.

Chris and Tanya LOVE the Step Up movies. Alex and Stephen do not really care for the Step Up movies. There’s only one way to solve this: dance battle!

Step Up: All In is the fifth (!) movie in the dance battle series. Loosely plotted around some young adults who are sad they don’t get to have fun for a living, the characters and dialogue are just stall tactics between increasingly epic dance numbers. The finale is an everybody-wins feel-good steam-punk dancethon in Las Vegas featuring thousands of pounds of sand AND pyrotechnics. And the good guys win and everything is lovely.

Since this was all for Chris and Tanya, they walk us through the finer points of ice-bucketing your blisters and keeping your elbows clean. If the podcast isn’t good enough for you, we’ll just rehearse some more. 5-6-7-8!