Hey, did you hear about how the UK publisher of the Roald Dahl books did some weird overcorrections that no one seems to have asked for and removed words like “fat” or the mystery of why women might wear wigs from their most recent editions? Or how Disney apparently is censoring language from the streaming version of The French Connection, lest you be shocked that New York cops in the 70s tossed around racial slurs? Well, we did and we decided to talk about it, so please Hollywood allow us to record introductions to this sort of material placing it in context, our prices are cheap. Also we introduce the second movie of our Summer of Murder Mystery and the drink we’ll be guzzling to make it feel like a well-paced plot.
96 – Radioland Murders
The sweaty misery of summer is finally upon us, and what better way to forget our reality than the comforting escapism that only murder can provide? (We see you, Albert Camus’s The Stranger!) Our Summer of Murder Mystery kicks off with the forgotten 1994 mystery / slapstick comedy / farce / comedy of remarriage / so much other crap, Radioland Murders, straight from the minds that brought you American Graffiti (and Howard the Duck). Leigh, Brendan, and Chris dive into this exhausting mess of over-the-top shtick and antics, attempting to make some sense of what the hell this movie was supposed to even be. Truly, there’s something for everyone here (provided you are a baby boomer who loves old radio programs and farcical comedy), including an appropriately old-timey cocktail accompaniment, so heck, give it a watch and you’ll probably find SOMEthing that works for you.
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95.5 – Raiders of the Lost Media
In this Why Watch mini episode, we’re living in the Land of the Lost! And by that, we mean we live in a world where we were initially promised that streaming content online would allow unimaginable access to movies and television, only to find shockingly that we actually live in a world where exclusive content can be taken down and hidden on a hard drive somewhere to suit the whims of large horrific media conglomerates. While the concept of “lost media” is nothing new, we seem to be entering an entirely different way of classifying things as such. For example, what happens when you spend a bunch of time and money making a Batgirl movie, then your new corporate overlord decides to bury it in a box somewhere for tax purposes? Anyway, we use recent events stemming from these sorts of decisions as a springboard to talk about a variety of topics related to what happens when you can no longer watch something legally (or indeed, if you’re not allowed to ever see it at all). As is fitting for such a mysterious topic, we also reveal the theme of our summer block of movies along with an old-timey drink to accompany our next subject, which will surely bring you back to the time when media was mostly considered lost because no one thought to record it or left the film in a shoebox in Argentina or something.
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95 – Dead Again
When an amnesiac woman and a hardboiled detective with a very heightened American accent discover through the magic of hypnosis that they were married in a past life (until a grisly murder by scissors cut things short), how long will they be able to maintain a relationship until one of them is dead… AGAIN? The answer, mercifully, is about 90 or so minutes. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they watch the 1991 neo-noir (?) gothic romance (??) mystery thriller (???) Dead Again, directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, which affords him the luxury of going over-the-top in two separate roles. What’s the deal with all the lame pop psychology? What the hell is this movie going for in terms of tone or plot? Could anyone have taken this post-modern puree of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles and made it into something consistent and entertaining? Well… we try to! Also our good friend Faith is back AND she brought cookies to accompany our cocktail, so hey, at least this has that going for it!
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94.5 – Hot Takes for My Real Friends, Real Takes for My Hot Friends
As the weather starts to heat up, the temperature of our takes go right with it! Get all warm and toasty with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we present a deeply-held opinion in the form of an absurdly hot take, and then attempt to defend it calmly and rationally. Slip on your oven mitts before you pick up your phone after listening to this, because these takes are… rather hot!* Also as per usual there’s a new drink recipe to accompany our next movie, so be sure to listen to that far more lukewarm bit before you scald yourself on these takes, babyyyyy!
*Editor’s Note: These takes may be less hot than previously stated.
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94 – Bride Wars
Fourteen years ago in a city not very far away.…
BRIDE WARS
Episode I
THE FEMININE MENACE
Turmoil has engulfed the nuptials of Emma Allan and Olivia Lerner. After a minor clerical error results in their separate weddings being booked on the same day at the same venue, their friendship is in dispute.
Hoping to resolve the matter with a series of trite and vapid pranks, the two would-be brides have stopped all semblances of judgement and maturity.
While their two-dimensional friends and boring fiancees endlessly debate this humorless chain of events, CHRIS REVELLE has secretly dispatched his fellow Why Did We Watch This? hosts, LEIGH DELAHANTY, and BRENDAN DRISCHLER, to discuss the lamentable 2009 romantic comedy (?) Bride Wars, much to the chagrin of all parties….
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93.5 – The Great Gamification
It sure seems like video games, the hot new trend among today’s youths, are here to stay! In fact, it seems that these have become so popular, they’ve started to transform motion pictures into video games! It’s true! Granted, some of these adaptations have been… questionable in quality, to say the least. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they think back upon some of the video games we’ve played based on movies, and then have a discussion about what video games based on movies we’ve covered for this podcast might be like. How many of these shitty rom coms could have been mildly more interesting dating sims? Find out! And speaking of shitty rom coms, we kind of have one of those coming up next, and trust us, you’ll want to be drunk for this one.
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93 – The Bourne Legacy
How do you keep your franchise going when the lead actor has no interest in reprising the main character and you don’t want to recast them? Well, you simply shift focus to another character who has never been shown or mentioned before and has similar abilities to your former main character but got them through science and magic rather than practice and training. Feeling sweaty yet? Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we watch 2012’s The Bourne Legacy, a tangent with big hopes and dreams that does all of the above and sadly much more. Perhaps if you watched any of the previous Matt Damon outings and wished that there had been less punching and more middle-aged white men yelling while looking at computers, you’ll find yourself in this movie’s heretofore undiscovered target audience. If not, well, at least we had a pretty good martini to drink while we tried to make sense of everything.
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92.5 – Looking 2.5 Score
For our latest mini episode, we present part two of a part two mini episode. No, just go with it, it’s okay. Rather than cover all of our second Looking to Score discussion from four weeks ago as one long episode, we decided to do it in two for your listening convenience. This time, we’re ostensibly covering a piece of orchestral dance music by Stephen Sondheim and a ballet piece reconceived in a wildly different context for an animated movie. Also, we bullshit a lot about our next movie without having even seen it and introduce a cocktail that (much like said movie’s protagonist) should undergo a fascinating transformation as you watch it! Please, sip slowly for full effect.
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92 – Willow
In our latest episode, we return to that fertile well of 1980s fantasy movies and pull out a big sloshy bucket of Willow, George Lucas’s long-gestating story about a little person who wants to be a wizard and some other magic shit as filtered through the generically-competent lens of Ron Howard. Listen in as Leigh, Brendan, and Chris talk about a movie that we were all dimly aware of but had never seen before, despite being made of a lot familiar tropes that we have, indeed, seen many many times before. Topics for discussion include the ambitious and occasionally confusing world being featured, the sheer amount of acting that’s going on, and why Sorsha is one of the worst female characters we’ve encountered in quite a while (and we’re watched a LOT of terrible rom coms). And of course, despite having to record this episode virtually thanks a to grab bag of illnesses, we enjoy a lovely purple cocktail to temper things slightly. Remember, please don’t drink if you plan to STEAL A BABAAAYYYY.
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91.5 – Looking 2 Score
Our oft-featured discussion on film music (and music from other forms of media) returns with a mighty vengeance in our latest mini. LISTEN, won’t you, as we discuss some scores used in both movies and video games and try to avoid having this episode taken down for copyright infringement by talking over the music. It’s hard! Also, next episode will tackle a movie that seems to be a beloved cult classic in some way but none of us had actually seen until recently. Naturally, we’ll be drinking a themed cocktail to help us get through a potentially-messy 80s fantasy world.
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91 – How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
It’s time for our annual Valentine’s Day rom com episode, and nothing says romance like two duplicitous people enacting horrific deceptions upon each other in an attempt to advance their positions at work. This horrific web of deceit is the plot that forms the backbone of 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, starring Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, and a bunch of supporting actors in thankless roles. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they revisit this beloved (?) romantic comedy that’s just slightly heightened enough to be mildly interesting but just unpleasant enough to leave you slightly loathing everyone involved here. Take your shoes off and breathe out as we discuss the state of the rom com in 2003, the cinematic forefathers of a romance built entirely on a horrible foundation of lies, and our continued reevaluation of Kate Hudson’s career. Perhaps fittingly, our themed cocktail this month is almost entirely alcohol, so get ready to frost yourself pretty hard.
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90.5 – K-Drama Conundrums: A Love Day Special
Look, Valentine’s Day is fast approaching and we couldn’t think of any rom com con(versation)s to have, so Leigh very kindly whipped up yet another round of our patented (patent pending) game where we have to decide what titles are real and what ones are fake. But THIS time, there’s an eastern Asian twist to it, as all the titles are for K-Dramas (or J, or other countries, there’s fertile ground here). As Brendan and Chris know not a lot about this topic, it becomes a real guessing game and so anyone could win! Not that there’s anything to win here, but still, bragging rights are something. Also, our re-evaluation of the Kate Hudson canon continues with our upcoming February rom com episode.
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90 – Midnight at the Magnolia
What if we kissed 😘 at the Magnolia 🎹 at midnight 🕛 on New Year’s Eve 🎉 as part of an elaborate lie 😳 that was in actuality not a lie because we have been in love for our entire lives 🙈???
What do you do when you’re a pair of radio hosts who are both secretly in love with each other but unable to admit it, despite the fact that everyone else in your life already believes you’re destined to be together someday anyway? If your answer is “create an elaborate charade designed to boost your radio show profile while jointly promoting your family business,” congratulations, you’re qualified to host a morning show on 98.8 BREEZE FM in Chicago. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they (remotely) watch and discuss the 2020 Netflix Lifetime-pastiche Midnight at the Magnolia, a half-hearted attempt to do to New Year’s Eve what Hallmark has done to Christmas. We talk about the perils of the “friends to lovers” trope, the challenges of doing a romcom where everyone already assumes the two characters are together, and the nightmarish world where your families have been champing at the bit for years for you to marry your best friend. And of course, the two of us who aren’t testing positive for the coronavirus drink a cocktail that, much like Jack and Maggie, combines two distinct flavors that might not seem to work together BUT DARN IT, THEY DO!
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89.5 – The Closing of the Year VI
That’s right, we’re back again with our end-of-the-year lazy finale episode, the Closing of the Year! Listen in as we talk about the previous year, including favorite and least favorite movies and drinks, and discuss a little bit about what the next year will bring. More themed summers! Crazier cocktails! Long lost lovers reappearing during multiple weddings! And a moratorium on made-for-TV holiday romcoms that will go into temporary effect after our first movie of 2023, so don’t worry, we’re not planning some sneaky wild stealth retheming of our podcast or anything.
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89 – A Date by Christmas Eve
At long last, our Holiday Spectacular episode focuses on a real piece of made-for-TV Christmas trash with the nebulously named A Date by Christmas Eve! Is it about a young lady attempting to find a date before Christmas only to realize love was in front of her all along? Uh, well, no, that would make a lot more sense, though. Look, so there’s this lady who works for a Christmas dating app and then a sexy cougarish Mrs. Claus makes the app magic so that the lady can warp reality to teach people lessons and stuff and for some reason no one is terrified by the implications of all this. But hey, that’s Christmas, baby. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they try to make sense of this overstuffed piece of mass market holiday nonsense and discuss the genre in general, the horrifying undertones of this ostensibly frivolous romcom, and how all these movies seem to already think apps are magic. Also, mulled wine cocktail, natch. Happy holidays!
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88.5 – Hallmark Christmas Movie Generator Game II
In which we play round two of last year’s winter party game, the Hallmark Christmas Movie Generator Game! We’ve got all the same hats and slips of paper, but this time with a NEW category to make our titles even more cumbersome and difficult to find when scanning through a list of vague nonsensical titles on Hulu. Naturally, we also introduce the subject of our 2022 Christmas Spectacular, where we finally dip our toes into the made-for-TV holiday movie cesspool. Truly, it was destined to happen. Unsurprisingly there’s still yet another mulled wine cocktail to accompany it, because why wouldn’t there be.
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88 – The Sword in the Stone
Journey with us, won’t you, back in time to both medieval times and 1963, a veritable dark ages for the citizens of England and the Walt Disney studios. For this episode, we cover the movie that sits at the center of this Venn diagram, The Sword in the Stone. Is this a charming bit of nostalgic fun, or weak effort built upon an episodic screenplay and boring protagonist? Spoilers, it can be two things. Turn into a fish along with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss what led to the disjointed visual style of this movie, the wet sheet that is young Arthur, and what lessons we were supposed to learn by being turned into squirrels (just that fat old horny lady squirrels are funny???). To adequately do justice to this movie, we also make THREE different cocktails, so like us you should get pretty drunk while watching this, perhaps even drunk enough to not notice that three different actors play Wart at various points throughout this film (jk there’s not enough alcohol in the hemisphere to have that slip by unnoticed).
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87.5 – Pitcher’s Mound – Modern Updates of Classic Lit
Yes, we’re sorry, we know it’s Halloween but we have no more ideas for Halloween mini episode topics. We’re open to suggestions! Until then, we’re going to do another Pitcher’s Mound mini where we each pitch an updated modern adaptation of a classic piece of literature / drama. That’s right, until Hollywood gets its act together and makes the teen comedy version of Cymbeline that we’ve all been clamoring for, we’ll just have to put our own ideas out into the ether. So please, don’t steal our contemporary high school version of The Great Gatsby. It would just be impolite. Also next up, we tackle the oldest movie we’ve ever covered (and also possibly the shortest) in our return to the Disney animated canon, this time focusing on their middling ’60s output.
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87 – Vamps
For our annual Halloween Spooktacular, we chose a movie so terrifying, so unnatural, so deeply unsettling- oh, wait, no, it’s just Vamps, a 2012 horror (?) comedy (??) movie (???) about vampires, written and directed by Amy Heckerling. Ah, you might think, at least the idea of vampires filtered through Clueless sounds fun! Well, you’d be wrong, because Amy has left her “good movie” period and become firmly lodged in her “I got a lot of grievances to get out” period. Join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss what vampires might conceivably be useful for in fiction, who Amy Heckerling has it out for this time, and why the hell the crux of this movie is about a vampire spontaneously deciding she wants to settle down and have a baby. Well, raise a baby, not like “have a baby for dinner” like Lucy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Remember, the only thing scary here is how trite the whole endeavor is.
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86.5 – Superheroes, Rebels, Elves, and Dragons, Oh My!
Part of the Golden Age of Television™ we now find ourselves inundated with is that so many large conglomerates are now spending absurd amounts of money on streaming-friendly television extensions of their media brands. What does this mean for you, the viewer? Well, it means that right now you’ve got four separate franchises (Marvel, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and Lord of the Rings) currently screaming for space amongst your literal and figurative bandwidth. And much like the alignment of the planets that portends a seismic shift in Disney’s Hercules, all four of them have something launching at about the same time. Join in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss the four shows represented by these terrible mega-corporations and what ones they think are worth your eyeballs glazing over for. Also, we announce our upcoming Halloween Spooktacular movie- truly, the only thing more frightening that the capitalist nightmare we find ourselves trapped in.
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86 – Home Again
When you split up with your husband and are faced with the challenge of starting a new life, do you up and move away? Do you try to find yourself? Do you invite three sweet well-mannered boys into your guest house and use them for child care / tech support / sex? Well, if you’re Reese Witherspoon in the 2017 Hallie Meyers-Shyer romantic (?) comedy Home Again, you sort of half-heartedly do all of the above at various points but don’t really commit to any of them. Pull up a Pottery Barn cushion and join Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we hang up a bedsheet in the back yard and dig into what exactly makes this movie tick. Is it the Meyers-lite vibes? Is it the lack of focus on any particular moment in the protagonist’s life? Is it that these boys have barely two traits to spread between themselves? In a word, yes. In another word, KITCHENS!
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85.5 – Pitcher’s Mound – YA Our Way
We say hello to our movie for next month and bid farewell to our Sweet and Sour Summer of Teen Angst with the inevitable conclusion that actually, we could do it way better than the pros. We’ve each come prepared with a pitch or two of our own for the next big YA franchise for some second-rate director to snatch up and butcher into a mid-budget movie, and the buzz words are flying. Upstairs/Downstairs in space? Black powder fantasy with dragons and tech? Twin Peaks Americana meets fairy tale? The Goodreads commenters will have a field day with this!
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85 – She’s the Man
Shakespeare gets a modern makeover complete with low-slung cargo shorts and asymmetrically-cut tops in this teen take on Twelfth Night, 2006’s She’s the Man. In a category brimming with Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Easy A, is there room for yet another similarly updated YA comedy? The answer, of course, is not really, especially if ends up being as dull and dated as this one. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris cover the weird gender role ideas, Amanda Bynes’s straight-out-of-The–Amanda–Show performance, and the general pitfalls of trying to do a modern take on classic lit. We also conclude our Sweet and Sour Summer of Teen Angst with one final lemony cocktail, and a promise that we’ll probably move back to more adult fare next time. Well, comparatively speaking.
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84.5 – Sorry Not Sorry for Watching
At long last, our horrible secret comes out- it turns out we thought some of the movies we suggested for this podcast were actually good and just used this whole thing as an excuse to force a discussion about a “bad” movie we secretly liked. We air our dirty laundry to each other and confess our deepest truths about movies like The Girl from Monday and Tomorrowland and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As part of our sinful confession, we also reveal our next and final Sweet and Sour Summer of Teen Angst movie and cocktail, so hold on to your gendered clothing for this next episode.
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84 – Beautiful Creatures
Our Sweet and Sour Summer of YA Angst marches on like a june bug in a Southern pride parade with 2013’s Beautiful Creatures, a country-fried slice of supernatural teen drama stuffed with a bunch of heavy-hitting actors in turn stuffed with all the scenery they devoured. What might otherwise be a pretty rote YA adaptation becomes considerably more interesting by making the brave choices to swap the expected gender roles and also not really explain anything very well. Come sit a spell on the veranda with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss the vague and confusing world of the Casters, a YA story that seems to remove all agency for its female protagonist, and the weird details from the source material were apparently lost in translation. And also there’s yet another lemonade cocktail that’s so sweet and boozy, you’ll think your dining room table has begun to rotate rapidly while two other people rotate outside you in the other direction. Stop it! Lena, stop it. Stop it, Lena! Lena!
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83.5 – Blasé YA
As part of our process of determining movies for our Sweet and Sour Summer of YA Angst, we went through several lists of movies based on young adult novels that never quite took off or flopped miserably. Naturally, we ended up watching multiple potential candidates and came across several movies that we found fascinating in some way but didn’t merit a full discussion. Maybe they were actually good! Maybe they just sucked so much that no one wanted to talk about them! Anyway, on that note, please enjoy our discussion of three YA novels that were not the hits the studio may have hoped they were- 2014’s Vampire Academy, 2016’s Fallen, and and 2018’s Every Day. Which one of these was the secretly good one? Hint: it’s the one we spend the most time talking about! Also our summer of teen angst continues unabated with our next piece of country-fried cinematic supernatural nonsense (and yet another lemonade cocktail to accompany it).
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83 – 13 Going on 30
Nothing says “fun and fizzy tween comedy” like one where a baby Jennifer Garner wishes to be “30, flirty, and thriving” and has her consciousness propelled forward into a multiverse governed by a monkey’s paw where she has achieved all her dreams but has destroyed all that is sweet and pure about herself in the process. That’s right, our retroactively-themed Sweet and Sour Summer of Teen Angst kicks off with 2004’s 13 Going on 30, a 2004 movie nostalgic for 1987 viewed by a bunch of 2022 millennials nostalgic for 2004. Leigh, Brendan, and Chris view a movie considerably better than most of the other ones done on this podcast but still filled with inexplicable and murky moments. What cruel universe would grant a teen girl’s wishes but force her to live in an ironic dark timeline? What the hell is Poise about and how will that at all translate to a spur-of-the-moment reworking of the entire magazine? Why would Jennifer Garner throw a shrimp tale on the floor of the bank lobby where her work party is held? All this will be discussed along with a sweet and lemony summer cocktail (and apologies for the weird audio, we had an air conditioner running because it is simply too hot).
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82.5 – Part of That World
Summer is finally here, and with it the exciting promise of traveling to new locales (or just sitting in front of the air conditioner on your phone watching movies, both are good options)! Using that as a starting point, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris decided to talk about the fictional worlds of films that they’d most like to live in and why. Will Leigh deign to visit Brendan when he moves to Coruscant? Listen and find out! Also we kick off our summer movie and drink theme, and all the sweet and sour vibes it entails.
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82 – The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Journey with us back to the distant year of 2010, a time when Walt Disney Pictures was wildly desperate to launch another multi-million dollar franchise that would convince teenage boys to give them money. Enter The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, an ostensible live-action adaptation of a Fantasia segment that would reteam National Treasure director Jon Turteltaub with National Treasure scenery gnawer Nicolas Cage. Audiences at the time didn’t take to the idea of Nic Cage wearing a flowing wig and leather duster casting magic goop at Alfred Molina, but we sure did! Listen in as Leigh, Brendan, and Chris discuss aspects of a movie they all mostly liked, from the use of magic to the performances to the locale (you know, it’s almost like New York City should be the fourth-billed character in the movie!). Don’t worry, we have some bad stuff to talk about as always along with our fixes AND of course there’s a really great summery cocktail for you to enjoy as you listen to OneRepublic’s “Secrets (Jay Baruchel Tesla Coil Remix).”
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