Ticket Stubs

What better way to follow up last week's episode on an elegant period piece drama about the mid-20th century (see Jackie) than yet another exploration of the immutable soft screams of love gained and lost with Carol, Todd Haynes's 2015 masterpiece? But before we get there...this week's Blue Plate Special has us talking some football and sharing some belated joy over the Las Vegas Raiders' remarkable Thanksgiving Day overtime victory against the Dallas Cowboys, taking issue with the general existence of the new Disney Plus release of the legacyquel Home Sweet Home Alone, and finally settling once and for all what exactly qualifies something as a "Christmas movie." Upon finally arriving on the firmly closed doorstep (real Harge Heads know) of the week, we dive into what makes Haynes one of the singular artists of his generation while discussing how the contrasting presences of stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara make for a most compelling duo.

Feel free to skip to 2:23:52 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

We thought we'd follow up last week's lengthy labyrinth of an episode on the events of November 22, 1963 with a more quiet and graceful remembrance of the same day and its lasting after effects with 2016's Jackie. But before we take yet another stroll down the American Century's middle period...this week's Blue Plate Special finds us discussing our recent experience seeing legendary rock band Genesis early on their ongoing The Last Domino? tour before transitioning to some thoughts on Wes Anderson's latest The French Dispatch. The film of the week inevitably sparks a discussion on recent trends in biopics and period films over the past decade and how exactly Natalie Portman's brilliant performance and Larrain's icily precise direction at once subvert and compliment the very sort of myth making historical fictions have been forging for centuries.

Feel free to skip to 1:46:18 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

Was it Lee Harvey Oswald on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository with a Carcano Model 38 carbine rifle? Perhaps David Ferrie years before in a Floridian swamp owned by the CIA with a decaying Thompson submachine gun? Wait, what about a forever anonymous gunman, in effect a shadow indicative of forces far beyond our understanding (much less control) armed with the potent mysteries inherent to the ever evolving demands of the American Century? All we know for certain is that President John F. Kennedy died in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, a day that forever changed the nation. This week's subject film, 1991's JFK, attempts to make the abstract concrete in an exploration of American fault lines that would soon threaten to cripple the country in the decade(s?) to follow. Listen as we walk through our own reflections of the assassination and its enduring legacies before diving into the conspiratorial cinema of Oliver Stone. Does the movie's technical brilliance distract from its logical and ethical discrepancies? What relationship does this film hold to a citizenry ever more comfortable with tin-foil-hat philosophizing? Where can we find any additional scenes, alternate takes, blooper reels, etc. of John Candy's performance as Dean Andrews? Indeed, if any exists, #ReleaseTheDeanAndrewsCut.

We don't intend to definitively answer any of the aforementioned questions but we promise you there's plenty to sort through in this jam packed, 6.5 hours long episode.

Feel free to skip to 2:49:01 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

If you're looking to hear a slew of above average Sean Connery impressions...then we have the podcast for you! We take our first ever dive into the canon of Alfred Hitchcock with his late career masterpiece from 1964, Marnie. But first: this week's Blue Plate Special has us gobbling up the sumptuous new release Spencer before we take issue with both the meme-ification of film culture and the nonstop media coverage of and obsession with the Smith family. Upon eventually getting around to Marnie, we reflect on the place Hitchcock's filmography in not only the larger history of film but our own lives and how this film's leering brilliance plays into some of the director's most problematic aesthetic impulses.

Feel free to skip to 2:04:21 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/marnie-is-the-cure-for-hitchcock-mania

In honor of the film's forthcoming golden anniversary, this week's subject has us grappling with the celebrated auteurism of Stanley Kubrick and his iconoclastic vision of a dystopian future, 1971's A Clockwork Orange. But first...the Blue Plate Special forces us to confront an even more alarming cultural product: the forthcoming presence of a Buzz Lightyear origin story. Seriously, why??? Thankfully, a new segment-within-a-segment allows the two of us to fan the flames of some recent cinematic line-reading obsessions we have indeed deemed worthy of your undivided attention: i.e. things we've been burning on (shout out to friend of the pod Jim Rome), Upon finally journeying through the sickening path of destruction wrought by today's subject film, we situate A Clockwork Orange within the wider spectrum of all things Kubrick, attempt to engage with the deceptively facile binary of anarchism or fascism such a satire attempts to suggest, and compare the film to the many other cinematic acts of nihilism shockingly routine and welcome in the larger cultural moment of 1971.

Feel free to skip to 1:38:22 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

In our final installment of the first annual edition of Spooktober Spooktacular, we get lost trying to catch our bearings within the shoestring labyrinth of Herk Harvey's single feature film, Carnival of Souls. But before we get there...this week's Blue Plate Special finds us digging through the sugar, *spice*, and everything nice associated with the recently released adaptation of one of science fiction literature's crown jewels, Dune. After digging our way out from under the sandworms, we gleefully plunge ourselves into the inviting abyss of our 1962 subject film, a haunting cult classic that should've been the beginning of a long and fruitful career for its director but instead slowly found its audience amongst late night channel surfers and the midnight movie faithful. As fate would have it, its haunting aura is one that's endured for six decades now: good luck exorcising its power anytime soon.

Feel free to skip to 1:55:10 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

The fourth edition of this year's Spooktober Spooktacular finds the hosts with the most conjuring the known universe's preeminent bio-exorcist: Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice! Being our second discussion involving director Tim Burton (listen to an earlier episode where we mulled over his 2001 Planet of the Apes remake for the first), we find joy in exploring the filmmaker's breakthrough hit that help solidify his place as one of 80s Hollywood's brightest new talents. But first...this week's Blue Plate Special loads up on a host of new trailers- ranging from Home Sweet Home Alone to forthcoming spandex spectacles The Flash and The Batman- before we discuss the studied mediocrity of the most recent additions to the never-ending Michael Myers saga: 2018's Halloween and the recently released Halloween Kills. We miraculously escape the cold, dead clutches of The Shape to rightly celebrate our titular subject of the week, the 1988 cult classic which provided audiences with an iconic Michael Keaton performance, a signature blend of the macabre and the farcical, the rich musical combination of Danny Elfman and Harry Belafonte, and the culmination of a star's oeuvre that ends up landing them as the second inductee into the Overlapping Dialogue's Hall of Fame (aka The Immune). It's a jam packed episode honoring one of our very favorites so dig out your copy of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased and get to studying!

Feel free to skip to 2:40:07 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

Whoever said a little bit of traveling never hurt anybody's clearly never found themselves evading a certain family from Texas with a troubling dual interest in chainsaws and massacres. The latest edition of October's Spooktober Spectacular has us tackling Tobe Hooper's at once exploitative and memorable 1974 descent into the southern fried abyss. But first...this week's Blue Plate Special finds us discussing the unconventional theatrical distribution strategy of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's recent festival darling Memoria before we work through our feelings on No Time to Die, the latest in the never ending 007 franchise, and its place in the canon of all things James Bond. We finally get to the scorching and downright pungent BBQ shack that is our subject film, one of the very heights of the horror genre that has us masochistically coming back for seconds again and again.

Feel free to skip to 2:01:00 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

Queue up the subtitles because we're tackling our very first foreign language film in Overlapping Dialogue's (admittedly short) history! This month's Spooktober Spooktacular takes an unexpected detour with an episode dedicated to Michael Haneke's psychological horror thriller Funny Games from 1997, a movie that's by no means for the faint of heart. But before arriving to the metatextual mayhem...this week's Blue Plate Special has us diving in headfirst with our takes on both the trailer for (spiritual) friend of the pod Paul Thomas Anderson's forthcoming film Licorice Pizza and the simultaneous theatrical and HBO Max release of The Many Saints of Newark, the highly anticipated prequel to the landmark television drama The Sopranos. Eventually, we get around to punishing ourselves with a discussion on the many ways in which our subject film produces maximum discomfort and where it falls in the pantheon of the gleeful nihilism of the 1990s, all while questioning the narrative and aesthetic impulses exercised by Haneke and company. Where such efforts successful, indulgent, or something in the middle? Spoiler alert: go ahead and place your bets on the final option...

Feel free to skip to 2:18:00 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.

Hope you brought a flashlight and ironclad will because things are about to get...spooky. This October, we'll be spending time with the wide-ranging spectrum of horror cinema, from the lightly-accented to the outright terrifying. Our first entry has us visiting the welcome 1982 collaboration between horror icons George Romero and Stephen King, Creepshow! But first, this week's Blue Plate Special finds us mourning the loss of independent film legend Melvin Van Peebles, questioning the announcement of a partnership between the Roald Dahl estate and Netflix, and finding delight in the Criterion Collection home video release of Deep Cover. Upon reaching the old dark house at the end of the abandoned driveway, we delve into the delights and pitfalls of the anthology horror genre, rank the various segments both ahead of time and throughout the movie, and in general have fun with the goofy and almost bygone chills such an enterprise works to inspire.

Feel free to skip to 1:35:56 for the beginning of our audio commentary.

As always, please like, subscribe, rate, and review us on all of our channels, which include Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube! Contact us at [email protected] with your questions, comments, and requests.