Episode 304. We watched Ti West's horror trilogy of X, Pearl, and Maxxxine. These movies take us from a 1970s adult film shoot turned deadly to a farmgirl's suffocating small town life in 1918 to the neon sleeze of 1980s LA. We discuss the sense of history in each of the films, repeated patterns of aging and feeling trapped and becoming the person you swore you wouldn't become, dual roles and special effects makeup, if character actor Toby Huss has become too well known to just be used for a couple minutes, and screaming at a scarecrow.

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Episode 303. We kick off October with a look into DC Comics' dark magic side, reading Paul Dini's run on Zatanna. Our heroine is both a working stage magician and one of the most powerful magical beings in the universe, as she juggles solving supernatural crimes with maintaining her performance schedule. We discuss how Zatanna is more iconic than any actual real world female magicians, the story's sense of place in San Francisco, killer puppets, Brother Night, and the "please, just let me sleep" genre of heroes.

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Episode 302. How has Kyle never seen Zodiac? That's the real mystery. Shametember corrects this error as we discuss David Fincher's 2007 true crime thriller. This movie follows the investigation into the Zodiac killer across decades through the perspective of detectives, journalists, and the few survivors of his attacks, all based on real accounts. We discuss the unnerving atmosphere and bizarre side-stories that are just as haunting as the main mystery, the atypical plot structure and pacing, Jake Gyllenhaal looking like a human Muppet, and how we see Fincher continue these themes in his show Mindhunter.

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Episode 301. Shametember kicks off this year with a movie that Melissa has somehow never seen -- 2003's Looney Tunes: Back in Action, from Joe Dante, the director of the Gremlins films. In this live-action and animation hybrid, Bugs and Daffy join a globe-trotting adventure with an aspiring stuntman who needs to save his action star father from the villainous chairman of Acme. We discuss the frantic plot and non-stop visual gags, celebrity cameos, product placement, Steve Martin's confounding performance, and our desire for a new version of Looney Tunes that's a surreal psychological drama starring Jesse Plemons as Porky Pig.

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Episode 300! To celebrate our 300th episode, we're breaking our usual episode format to imagine a theme park based on the movies, shows, comics, and audio fiction we've covered in the past 299 episodes. Ideas include: High School Land, a Speed Racer roller coaster, a Mission:Impossible stunt spectacular, a carnival booth that will tell you if you're going to hell or not, a secret chicken restaurant that you can only find if you bribe a newsie, a town of endless parades, and a walkaround Michael Clayton breaking up fights between other characters.

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Episode 299. We are not numbers! We are free podcasters!! Our topic this episode is the 1967 British sci-fi mystery show The Prisoner. After suddenly resigning from his intelligence bureau, a spy known only as Number 6 is kidnapped and imprisoned in the eerily idyllic Village, where he's challenged with bizarre mind games until he gives up whatever terrible secret made him resign. We discuss the rotating cast of actors playing the Village's leader Number 2, the killer bubble, the mod coastal fashion aesthetic, a truly strange series finale for the ages, the show's place in TV history and its continuing influence, and who we would want to see in the oft-rumored Christopher Nolan adaptation.

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Episode 298. French cinema month concludes with the 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. It's the 1950s in a quaint French town, and young Genvieve is despondent over her boyfriend being sent off to war, and coming to terms with marrying a more sensible man whom she should love but doesn't. We talk about how the movie is sung through in its entirety and defies common musical structure, the vibrant color palette, why Genvieve's mom doesn't just marry the suitor herself if she adores him so much, and how we wish the movie was more about the industry specifics of umbrella design.

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Episode 297. In honor of the Paris Olympics, we're covering French cinema this July, starting with Titane. This is a 2021 horror movie about a woman who has sex with a car and becomes pregnant with a car baby. We discuss how strange the movie is beyond just this initial premise, the murder spree, the dance sequences, and a firefighting brigade made entirely of orphan boys.

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Episode 296. We continue our tradition of watching a Nic Cage movie every 4th of July weekend, and it's Christmas in July with the 2000 magic realism holiday rom-com The Family Man. Jack Campbell is a successful businessman living a solo jetsetter lifestyle when he's transported to an alternate world where he stayed with his college sweetheart and settled down in the suburbs. We discuss how the story fails to stand out in the catalogue of Christmas movies, the lack of compromise in the family vs. career struggle, the inexplicable and underutilized cowboy father-in-law, actual angel Don Cheadle, and whether or not this was the movie that Kyle vaguely remembers watching someone else watch on an airplane once when he was a kid.

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Episode 295. We donned our aprons to talk about the first two seasons of the culinary dark comedy The Bear, in preparation for season three later this month. When a world class chef has to return home to Chicago and take over his late brother's failing sandwich shop, the whole staff struggles to adapt to their personal loss and new professional goals as they work to revamp the restaurant under a punishing deadline. We discuss the show's mix of dread and coziness, the well-rounded peripheral characters, the frenetic editing, a car full of discarded Arby's cups, and how the "Seven Fishes" episode will be studied for decades to come.

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