Episodi
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Reality TV, or at least TV that vaguely resembles reality, takes over the podcast this week. First, Neal Pollack welcomes in Rick Ellis, from the Too Much TV sub stack, to discuss Neal's thesis that TV food competitions have reached their "decadent endgame." Rick doesn't quite agree. His thesis is that Jeffrey Zaslav and the other Warner Brothers Discovery executives who run the Food Network have just realized they can make more profit by producing fewer episodes.
They both criticize, somewhat lightly, that Top Chef has become little more than a feeder ramp for bad Food Network shows. Rick, much to Neal's surprise, has little bad to say about 'House of Knives,' which Neal considers to be the absolute nadir of the food competition genre. Neither of them are willing to offer any praise to 'Wildcard Kitchen,' which feels phony and derivative. Regardless, this is the deepest dive into the politics and machinations of food competition TV as you're ever likely to hear anywhere.
More discussed in the zeitgeist is 'Love Is Blind,' which recently concluded its 8th season with a couple of high-profile jiltings, one at the altar itself, because the betrothed couldn't agree on politics. In both cases, it was liberal women rejecting conservative or at least apolitical men. Neal and guest Rachel Llewellyn parse what this actually portends for society. It used to be the case that people in romantic relationships could disagree on politics, at least as regards some issues. Love Is Blind is really just a symptom of a larger societal illness where people are no longer allowed to disagree. Many of them simply exist in different realities entirely. These are sad times, especially if you're competing in a cooking show against someone who you might want to marry but cannot because you hold different political opinions than they do on important issues of the day.
Enjoy the podcast!
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Has Steven Soderbergh retired? Because his retirement looks an awful lot like making two movies a year. BFG Chief film critic Stephen Garrett, who knows more about film on Tuesday than you'll know in a lifetime, has interviewed Soderbergh several times and says that "retirement" is really more of a euphemism for DIY filmmaking. With 'Black Bag', an admittedly $50 million studio picture, he brings the DIY mentality to a star-studded spy drama that's loaded with wit and sexiness and everything else that's missing from movies for adults these days. Stephen and Neal Pollack liked it somewhat, even though it's really a condensed version of a clever streaming show about spies.
Stephen feels like the stars, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, have zero sexual chemistry, but Neal feels the heat from Rege Jean Page and especially Marisa Abela, who plays a horny young surveillance analyst. It's a clever, fun, tight thriller. And modest. Enjoy.
South By Southwest (SXSW) is in the past now, and despite what you might hear, it's not dead. But the Austin-based cultural festival has trimmed back the bloat somewhat, condensing the struggling tech and music festivals and placing the booming film and TV festival more front and center. That's certainly not a problem for veteran SXSW heads Neal Pollack and Pablo Gallaga, who between them saw more than a dozen movies and waited in more than a dozen lines.
Tune in for Neal and Pablo's comprehensive breakdown of where SXSW is going, and where it's been, and also a very detailed breakdown of the new Tim Robinson movie 'Friendship.' They liked it, maybe they wanted to like it more. If you meet Neal anywhere in public after May, when the movie comes out, you will have to have a similar conversation. That's why you need to follow BFG. You'll be able to talk about anything in the culture.
Enjoy the podcast!
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Episodi mancanti?
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We lead off this week's podcast with a detailed discussion of what works and what doesn't work in Bong Joon-ho's sci-fi satire 'Mickey 17.' On the one hand, it's a Bong Joon-ho movie, his first feature since winning the Oscar for 'Parasite.' This film, says Stephen Garrett, is well on the spectrum with his other over-the-top sci-fi satires, 'Snowpiercer' and 'Okja.' It's a big swing. Neal Pollack really disliked Mark Ruffalo's villain performance, and really didn't care for the excessive voiceover by Robert Pattison, though he agrees with Stephen that Pattinson carries the movie as Mickey, a poor schmuck in the future who allows himself to become a corporate clone slave. This movie is the definition of a "March release," somewhere between Oscar bait and summer blockbuster. They don't always hit.
Daredevil is on Disney+ now, but this is no Disney-friendly show. 'Daredevil: Born Again' is the most violent and brutal content the Marvel Cinematic Universe has yet produced, which is actually completely necessary. Daredevil is a violent character, trying to protect a violent city. Scott Gold joins Neal to break down all that's good about 'Born Again,' which is a lot, but in particular they single out Charlie Cox, as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and Vincent D'Onofrio, once again owning his role as Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. If you're Marveled out, you're Marveled out, but this is still peak Daredevil.
Enjoy the podcast!
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This is how good the Book and Film Globe podcast is: five days before Sean Baker stood in front of the world and used his glorious Oscar moment to urge people to see movies in the theaters, host Neal Pollack and guest Jacob Harper discussed Sean Baker's campaign to get people to see movies in theaters. It was also a great relief to hear Neal say that Anora was the "favorite" to win Best Picture, because obviously it did. But the quest to return people to the theaters–and to have them behave themselves once they get there–continues. We will continue to support a push for a 90-day theatrical window. It will help us arrange our schedules.
In addition to his great conversation with Harper, Pollack welcomes in Stephen Garrett, as he does almost every week. Pollack and Garrett discuss the amazing career, and very strange death, of the actor Gene Hackman. Hackman was one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation, a paragon of gruff, realistic acting in an era where film actors feel more plastic than ever. The celebration of his life, and the mourning of his death, gives us some hope.
Our hope is a bit more muted for James Bond, now the intellectual property of Amazon. But contributor Jamie Mason isn't quite as worked up as the rest of the world. Bond has become a bit too self-serious over the years, and maybe this changing of the guard will give us all a chance to rediscover what is fun and kitschy about Bond. We can get some period pieces. The spinoff shows won't necessarily be a disaster. James Bond is not George Smiley, and Sir Ian Fleming was not John LeCarré. Make James Bond fun again, that's what we say.
Enjoy the podcast!
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This week on the BFG podcast, Stephen Garrett is stateside to offer his totally objective opinion on this year's Oscar nominees. He and Neal Pollack get into it right away because Stephen insists that 'Emilia Perez' is an actual Oscar contender. Neal insists that there has never been a more canceled movie in Oscar movie. Everyone hates Emilia Perez. Neal is convinced that Timothée Chalamet is going to win best actor, though Stephen asks him to throw on the brakes. They both think that Demi Moore is going to win Best Actress, the closest we get to a sure thing this year. The Oscars are actually kind of a tossup, Neal and Stephen know more than the average person but also no more than anyone else. Get in your bathrobe, pour some wine, and watch along with us.
A couple of Max (HBO?) shows are on the table this week. Matthew Ehrlich is here to dish with Neal about the incredible Season 3 from 'The White Lotus'. Who is going to die? What's up with Patrick Schwarzenegger's abs and Parker Posey's accent? What is Lisa from BlackPink doing here? Where did Greg get all his money? Why do we talk about this show like these are real people? The White Lotus is so back!
As far as real people go on TV, they don't get any realer than the people on 'The Pitt,' Max's hit medical drama that is so much like ER, it stars Noah Wyle and was basically created by the same team, minus Michael Crichton. Paula Shaffer, sounding fabulous, joins Neal on the podcast to discuss this new frontier of "competence porn." It is gripping and emotional. They have their favorite doctors. Paula likes Noah Wyle, who doesn't, but is also partial to intern Trinity. Neal is considering spraining his ankle or something just to have a few minutes getting to know Dr. McKay. This show is so realistic, it almost makes you want to go to the emergency room. In Pittsburgh. Almost.
Enjoy the podcast!
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At the Book And Film Globe podcast, we rarely take a particular political stance–with the exception of campaigning to keep movie theaters open during COVID and decrying all kinds of censorship. We'll be encouraging you to read books, watch movies, and enjoy streaming TV as the nuclear winter hits. Culture marches on.
Therefore, it's with complete neutrality that we report that Donald Trump has taking charge of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, along with taking charge of America, The Gulf of America, and, to some extent, the rest of the world. Neal Pollack welcomes Michael Washburn to discuss the cultural implications of Trump taking over the Kennedy Center. Michael says "there are other voices out there in America" that have not had the opportunity to appear at the Kennedy Center. Neal is unsure about what those voices might be. "What is a Donald Trump-run cultural center going to look like?" he wonders. We'll spend the next four years trying to unravel the answer for that question.
It's not that mysterious, on the other hand, what the MCU is going to look like the next four years. It will look exactly the same as it always has, and will continue to make hundreds of millions of dollars a movie no matter how inconsistent the narrative or the quality of its movies. Neal and Stephen Garrett don't make any claim that 'Captain America: Brave New World.' This "very non film-festival movie" kicks off the MCU's 2025. Neal wonders why they changed the name from "New World Order" to "Brave New World." "Oh no," he says. "You might make Donald Rumsfeld's ghost mad."
"This is a new movie and there's a brave new hero," Stephen says. We guess that's technically true, though as Neal points out, it's really a stealth sequel to a 2008 Hulk movie that happens to feature a new Captain America. Anthony Mackie is actually kind of a dour new hero, and the movie continually moves away from potentially interesting storylines to focus on Harrison Ford turning into a Red Hulk. Spoiler alert, it's in every trailer and on every poster. And it features a villain who has a cauliflower head.
Enjoy the podcast!
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It's a typically great show this week as host Neal Pollack welcomes the heavily compromised but still insightful Stephen Garrett, who worked on the trailer for the Brazilian Oscar nominee I'm Still Here. But Stephen would have to have a heart of stone to not like this beautiful and thoughtful movie, and he doesn't. Neal is full of praise for the film's passionate defense of human rights, and its beautiful elegy for a time and place that's no more. And they are both enthralled, as is everyone else, by the lead performance of Fernanda Torres, who, like her character in the movie, has called attention to herself through sheer force of will. A great film.
Also great, though much less serious, is Companion, a new Black Mirror-style robot sex thriller-comedy (yes, that's a genre now) from writer-director Drew Hancock. Neal welcomes Pablo Gallaga to the podcast for a chat about Companion, and neither of them can find much to criticize, though Neal, still a relative horror noob, seems to like it a bit more than Pablo. But neither of them have anything negative at all to say about Sophie Thatcher, the film's star, who gives a smashing, star-making performance as Iris, a thinking, murderous sex android with a heart of gold, or at least a heart.
No one knows what to think about Severance, now streaming in its second season on Apple+, other than that it's the most interesting show on TV right now. Scott Gold joins Neal on the podcast to talk about Ben Stiller's puzzlebox, to praise the cast, particularly Britt Lower and John Turturro, and to hope against hope that Severance doesn't go the way of Lost and that Stiller knows where he's going with this incredibly surreal, and funny, workplace comedy that is about way more than being a workplace comedy. Your innie will love it, and so will your outie. We will allow you both to listen to this episode.
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It's a typically great show this week as host Neal Pollack welcomes the heavily compromised but still insightful Stephen Garrett, who worked on the trailer for the Brazilian Oscar nominee I'm Still Here. But Stephen would have to have a heart of stone to not like this beautiful and thoughtful movie, and he doesn't. Neal is full of praise for the film's passionate defense of human rights, and its beautiful elegy for a time and place that's no more. And they are both enthralled, as is everyone else, by the lead performance of Fernanda Torres, who, like her character in the movie, has called attention to herself through sheer force of will. A great film.
Also great, though much less serious, is Companion, a new Black Mirror-style robot sex thriller-comedy (yes, that's a genre now) from writer-director Drew Hancock. Neal welcomes Pablo Gallaga to the podcast for a chat about Companion, and neither of them can find much to criticize, though Neal, still a relative horror noob, seems to like it a bit more than Pablo. But neither of them have anything negative at all to say about Sophie Thatcher, the film's star, who gives a smashing, star-making performance as Iris, a thinking, murderous sex android with a heart of gold, or at least a heart.
No one knows what to think about Severance, now streaming in its second season on Apple+, other than that it's the most interesting show on TV right now. Scott Gold joins Neal on the podcast to talk about Ben Stiller's puzzlebox, to praise the cast, particularly Britt Lower and John Turturro, and to hope against hope that Severance doesn't go the way of Lost and that Stiller knows where he's going with this incredibly surreal, and funny, workplace comedy that is about way more than being a workplace comedy. Your innie will love it, and so will your outie. We will allow you both to listen to this episode.
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The entertainment world doesn't stop moving just because of political upheaval. It marches on! On this week's podcast, host Neal Pollack talks with contributor Stephen Macaulay about the ever-changing world of AI and how it's affecting Hollywood productions. Topics covered include The Brutalist AI language-enhancement "controversy" and a new ruling from the U.S. Copyright Office that will influence how Hollywood uses AI going forward. Nuance is good when it comes to issues like this, and few entertainment business reporters are more nuanced than Macaulay. A great conversation, well worth your ears.
Our other Stephen, one Stephen Garrett, went to the Sundance Film Festival this year, like he does every year. It's the second-to-last Sundance, and it was a cold Sundance to boot, so there's a kind of wistfulness to his report. Some of the Sundance content will be coming to TVs and movie theaters soon, and Stephen is on top of what you should see, or shouldn't see. But mostly, you should see everything. That's kind of the BFG mantra.
Enjoy the podcast!
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This week's podcast goes back in time in more ways than one. Gillian Gaar meets Neal Pollack in the pod-dome to discuss her terrific piece about the movies of 1975. Among the topics discussed: How 'The Godfather, Part II' is still incredibly watchable today, how the stars of Robert Altman's 'Nashville' wrote and performed their own songs, how 'Jaws' birthed the blockbuster movie but still featured long scenes of guys talking on a boat, and how Norman Jewison's 'Rollerball' managed to make a fake sport exciting and visceral while still providing a pointed critique of our cultural acceptance of violence. It was an important year from movies, the year the industry really started to pivot from one era to another.
'Star Wars: Skeleton Crew', a TV show on Disney+, hearkens back to a time when new Star Wars content was fresh and exciting and filled kids with wonder. Scott Gold joins Neal to talk about the ultimate tween Star Wars pirate adventure, a fun, exciting romp through a fictional galaxy that doesn't take itself too seriously, and features Jude Law chewing every ounce of scenery imaginable. "Space Goonies," directed by leading Hollywood talent. No notes.
Enjoy the podcast!
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This week, the BFG Podcast pays tribute to David Lynch, of whom there is nothing bad to say. Stephen Garrett's wife and daughter may not be into Lynch, but Stephen and Neal Pollack (and Neal's wife Regina) loved him, and so does most of the rest of the world. Stephen buries the lead and talks about the time he interviewed Lynch at a film festival, and the story is as idiosyncratic as the rest of Lynch's work. We cover as many bases as we can, from 'Mullholland Drive' to 'Dune' to 'Wild at Heart,' spending some time lingering on Lynch's relationship with Steven Spielberg. It's a great conversation about a great American artist.
Not so great is 'Wolf Man,' a sad horror dud from Leigh Whannell, who made the entertaining 'Invisible Man' reboot in 2020. But this is not entertaining, says Pablo Gallaga, despite decent performances and good visual effects. It's just not entertaining, and not scary enough. And Neal continues to warn the world that werewolves are real and should not be used for our amusement. But is the world listening? No!
Enjoy the podcast. And for god's sake, watch a David Lynch movie!
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From the highbrow to the lowbrow, it's a veritable brow rollercoaster on this week's podcast. First, we go high. Neal Pollack welcomes in Stephen Garrett to discuss Brady Corbet's 'The Brutalist,' the most fun you'll have at a three-and-a-half hour movie about architecture and Holocaust trauma this year. Neither Neal nor Stephen have a cross word about this thoroughgoing work of art, starring, according to Nikki Glazer, "two-time Holocaust survivor" Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce, giving a signature performance as a weird Pennsylvania industrialist. Neal also points out that, in this era of heightened antisemitism, it's nice to see a movie that pays respect to the trauma of Holocaust victims and that treats the founding of the state of Israel as something that was politically good and necessary. It's a great film, with great music, and it includes a 15-minute intermission!
Now our brows dip low as Neal welcomes Paula Shaffer to discuss the recent crossover episode between 'Abbott Elementary' and "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia,' which surprisingly go together as well as chocolate and peanut butter. Paula and Neal then go down the rabbit hole of TV crossover history. She introduces him to Poobala.com, the rabbit hole of rabbit holes.
Did you know that Mr. Carlin from 'The Bob Newhart Show' was also a patient on 'St. Elsewhere?' That's correct. And since St. Elsewhere, we later learned, existed only in the imagination of an autistic middle schooler, that means that The Bob Newhart Show, along with Cheers, Frasier, and hundreds of other shows, also only existed in his imagination. To further tangle the web, it was later revealed that 'Newhart' was just a dream that existed in the world of The Bob Newhart Show. So was Newhart also in Tommy Westphall's imagination? Or was St. Elsewhere part of Bob Newhart's dream life? Are we nothing but a dream ourselves?
These are the kinds of questions we try to answer on Book and Film Globe. Enjoy the show!
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Games take the podium on this week's edition of the BFG Podcast. Show host and perennial game-show contestant Neal Pollack welcomes Jessica Babbitt, who was recently his opponent (or at least their teams faced each other) on Amazon Prime's 'Pop Culture Jeopardy!' This is a unique view into the sick and twisted minds of game-show contestants. Just kidding, it is about as wholesome a conversation as you'll ever hear. But you will learn how to prepare for a quiz show, how to work with a team on a quiz show, and how impossible it is to ring in on the buzzer in Jeopardy when you're up against eight other players. Neal and Jessica are two of the most delightful dorks you'll ever meet, and this is a nice audio treat for people who love Jeopardy! and want to someday realize their Jeopardy! (or Pop Culture Jeopardy!" dreams.
But only the sickest and most desperate among us would want to play 'Squid Game,' which is kind of the point of the mega-hit Netflix show. Season 2 of Squid Game is now available. Omar Gallaga joins Neal on the podcast to talk about the many ways in which the sequel to one of the most popular streaming shows of all time follows up, and even improves on, the original. There hasn't been a drop-off in quality at all, which is kind of amazing. Squid Game 2 heightens the stakes, ramps up the tension, and adds even creepier and more original games than the first season. We offer no advice to surviving Squid Game other than: Stay alive, and hide under your bed at night.
Come to think of it, that might be decent advice to succeeding at Jeopardy! as well. But Jeopardy! is more fun, and you can usually grab drinks with your opponents after the taping.
Enjoy the show!
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Movies are back. Even though for some of us they never went anywhere, now they are really back. The holidays were a buffet of filmgoing fun. But at BFG, we mostly ignore the children's fare and focus on what the grownups like.
No one is more grown-up than Count Orlok, Nosferatu himself. He's a real oldy-moldy. Two night dwellers themselves, Neal Pollack and Stephen Garrett find a lot to admire in Robert Eggers's atmospheric take on the vampire legend. But Stephen finds the movie kind of silly and not very scary, and neither of them are really down with Lily-Rose Depp's literally convulsive performance as the vampyr's eternal love object. But then Willem Dafoe shows up and seems realize what kind of movie he's in, and things get kind of fun anyway.
A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic, is pretty fun from the outset. Jim Arndorfer joins Neal on the podcast to pick some nits at the Dylan legend as James Mangold tells it, but even the crankiest Dylanologist has to admit that the movie hums along on a vibe of good feeling and great music and really magnetic performances from pretty much the entire cast. Neal thinks it's going to be Best Picture. It's hard to argue. It's always hard to argue with him.
Things get pretty sexy when Stephen Garrett returns to the Pod Dome to talk about 'Babygirl,' a sort-of comedy starring Nicole Kidman as a robotics CEO with some pretty repressed kinky desires. A foxy intern shows up and gives her what she wants and then some. The move is sort of provocative but also kind of ridiculous. In the end, it's thin characters stuck in a fun conceit, but the screenplay never quite delivers and the sex, frankly, isn't kinky enough to carry the premise So sayeth our male critics who always satisfy every desire.
Enjoy the show!
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Let's have some real talk: This was not the best year ever at the movies. When you combine lingering production delays from the pandemic with the very real aftereffects of the Hollywood strikes, you had pretty slender pickings when it comes to big-studio pictures. That said: BFG still went to the movies, all year long! We covered all the film festivals, and saw every film we could, major-release and indie. There are still directors giving us intense personal visions and entertaining us with giant tentpoles. The world of entertainment is changing, but this year's relatively weak crop could still be just a blip.
Stephen Garrett, who sees every movie in the world, and Sara Stewart, who used to but has backed off to attend graduate school and pursue an actual career, join perpetual cinephile Neal Pollack to talk about their picks. Everyone loved Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and Stephen and Sara try to persuade Neal that Dune 2 is great. Sorry, Neal finds Dune 2 boring. Neal himself loved The Apprentice and Challengers. For his art-house pick, he went with La Chimera. Stephen loved The Brutalist and Queer. Sara goes hard in the paint for Dev Patel's Monkey Man.
And because this is Book and Film Globe, Jewish-themed movies came up. Sara was a big fan of Between the Temples, which we've discussed exhaustively on this site. Neal and Stephen went for the more Oscar-friendly 'A Real Pain.' Other movies, selected by our critics but not discussed on this episode, include 'I Saw the TV Glow,' Dahomey,' 'Eno,' and 'His Three Daughters.' Finally, Neal gets real squeamish about 'The Substance.' Sara and Stephen both loved it, but Neal cannot tolerate movies where things come out of other things. It's a lot for him. And if movies in 2025 feature things coming out of other things, he'll assign them elsewhere.
Enjoy the show!
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The year has ended, somewhat mercifully, and it wasn't the best year for TV, either. Strikes, endless streaming service turnover, and leftover COVID production and script delays led to one of the oddest and most scattershot years in TV history. Our TV critics, Matthew Ehrlich, Omar Gallaga, Scott Gold, and Neal Pollack cover it all.
There is plenty of good to mine. Omar loved shows like 'Fallout' and 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith', but he and Neal talk in detail about Julio Torres's 'Fantomas' and John Mulaney's 'Everybody's In L.A.' Scott pops in to join the Shōgun discourse. Neal had problems with the Anglo lead, Cosmo Jarvis, but Scott and Omar both assure him that the Japanese cast takes over by the end.
Scott's favorites included Guy Ritchie's 'The Gentlemen,' and both he and Neal fanboy over Theo James for a few minutes. It's the rare TV continuation of a movie that actually improves on the original. Neal's picks include the Australian sitcom 'Colin From Accounts,' which he and Omar both agree is totally delightful.
Now for the bad news. Matthew Ehrlich thinks 'The Perfect Couple' is ridiculous, a bad Netflix version of Succession that includes a cheesy murder mystery. He's also not high on the new network procedurals, like 'Elspeth,' 'High Potential,' and 'Matlock,' which like AI wrote them. In addition, he offers a counter-attack on 'Hacks,' which does a disservice to the memory of Joan Rivers, and he offers the perspective that Rivers was actually friends with Donald Trump and might have been a victim of cancel culture if she had lived to see the day.
Omar likes Hacks, but has his pans too, and he and Matthew take turns battering the "icky" and weird and unappealing Baby Reindeer, which is getting praise around the joint but does not meet our approval.
Neal then goes off on several shows, including 'Last Bite Hotel,' a weird semi-horror-themed Food Network show starring Titus Burgess, 'The Acolyte,' and especially the new season of Doctor Who, which featured a character who was literally the spirit of Christmas, and some gross, weird, "Space Babies."
Here's hoping for a better 2025 for all TV viewers! A new season of The White Lotus is coming.
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As we lurch toward 2025, our podcast continues to cover the waterfront of 2024's pop culture. First up, Scott Gold joins Neal Pollack to talk about 'Dune: Prophecy.' Neal wonders, why does this Max show have to take place 10,000 years before the Dune movies. That seems like a long time. Scott says it is but a grain in sand in the vastness of the universe. How would he know that? But he's also definitely right. And the show is not boring, full of palace intrigue and creepy space witches and genuine moments of horror to go along with the incredibly expensive and vivid set design and Shakespeare-level performances. Dune: Prophecy will not be for everyone, but it's definitely Game of Thrones set in space.
Decidedly not Game of Thrones in space, but almost as weird (in a different way) than Dune: Prophecy is Queer, the new William S. Burroughs adaptation from director Luca Guadagnino, who's never afraid of a challenge. Stephen Garrett joins Neal on the podcast to talk about Daniel Craig's radiant performance as a midlife seeker who desperately wants love, and also drugs. There is plenty of unrequited love in the film, and plenty of requited drugs. The really amazing part is that everyone in 1948 could just afford to kind of hang out and do whatever they wanted. This is the dream, really, and also kind of the nightmare. A brilliant adaptation of an unadaptable book.
And that's all of the podcast for this week. Isn't that enough?
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Neal Pollack sounds the alarm on this week's episode of the BFG Podcast, and brings in the big guns in the form of Richard Rushfield, columnist for The Ankler. Together they form a united front against the scourge of people talking, singing, texting, and otherwise being rude in movie theaters. Shame on Cynthia Erivo and Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson for encouraging people to misbehave during their smash hit blockbusters. Cringe as Neal and Richard discuss their strategies to humiliate offenders. Imagine what it must be like to be members of their family. Glory is theirs, but a hero walks a lonely road.
Writer and comedian Sheri Flanders joins Neal next to discuss yoga. That's right, yoga, in the form of 'Breath of Fire,' a compelling Max documentary about the cultish kundalini yoga. The documentary needed an edit and the cult of kundalini needed a bucket of cold water dumped on its head. But it's a tragedy and a story worth knowing. Come to listen to Neal talk about the true meaning of yoga. Sheri wisely does not follow Neal into the light. She has three crystals and that's all she needs.
Omar Gallaga is very disappointed in the syrupy mess that is 'A Man on the Inside,' the Ted Danson Netflix "sadcom" based on an Oscar-nominated documentary. Both Omar and Neal have a lot of negativity toward this show, which, despite an amusing setup, quickly sinks into stereotype and refuses to engage realistically with the problems that seniors actually face in our society, which paradoxically might have made it funnier. Instead, Neal recommends the movie 'Thelma', airing on Hulu, which has a similarly high-concept premise but is in fact much more grounded in the real lives of senior citizens who outlive their friends, their spouses, and pretty much everyone else. It's a problem without an easy solution, and 'A Man On The Inside' just pours on the sap.
What a great episode! Thanks for listening to the pod.
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We go big on the podcast this week as the biggest movie week of the year is upon us. Neal Pollack and Stephen Garrett, childhood best friends turned mortal film-critic enemies, come together to discuss 'Wicked,' the blockbusteriest blockbuster of the year. Battle lines draw immediately as Neal favors the performance of Ariana Grande, a theater kid who is clearly playing her dream role. Stephen prefers the more nuanced performance of Cynthia Erivo, who Neal finds a bit pretentious. They both agree that there's no reason on Earth why this needs to be two movies, and that there's a lot of filler set in a "Hogwarts without magic." But some of the musical numbers are lavish and fun. Neal is also disappointed that the monkeys do not wear diapers.
There's no such disappointment when it comes to 'Gladiator II.' Stephen thought the sequel was fun but unnecessary. Neal, on the other hand, really appreciates a movie that features CGI baboons, sharks, an angry rhino, Denzel Washington, and a monkey wearing a diaper. He calls star Paul Mescal an "angry barista". An instant camp classic, that's what we say.
Bobby Hilliard joins Neal to discuss something very disgusting, the 'Terrifier' movies, which Neal is too scared to see. Bobby worries, and with good reason, that the antics of Art the Clown are desensitizing audiences to the worst possible violence imaginable. There are things in the 'Terrifier' movie so horrible, you couldn't begin to imagine them. Bobby warns Neal that there's nothing even remotely humanizing about Art the Clown. He has no Freddy Krueger, Jason Vorhees, or Michael Myers backstory. It's irredeemable gore, with absolutely no reason to exist other than to make audiences go "ewwww". Terrifier 3 made more than $80 million at the box office. Someone is digging it.
Our podcast is unlimited. Enjoy, and Happy Thanksgiving!
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As we continue to process the cultural fallout from the 2024 Presidential election, writer and podcaster Meghan Daum stops by the pod-dome to talk to Neal Pollack about the strange phenomenon of writers and creative people leaving Twitter for Bluesky, seeking a safe space from the MAGA storm. But there's no escape, Meghan and Neal conclude, and then proceed to talk shit about people getting MFAs, and about how the world has labeled them ideological traitors. But whatever the trend is, Neal concludes, he's going to miss that train and fail to cash in. That's the one constant in life.
Meghan and Neal pivot to talking about the rise of Justine Bateman, who Meghan thinks is doing witty work right now on Twitter, providing "director's notes" for liberals having crying meltdowns over the Trump election. But let's be clear, Meghan says, Justine is one phone call away from being on Joe Rogan. She is not our friend. She has moved far beyond our reach. That's another important lesson to glean from recent weeks.
Onward to less self-deprecating topics. Stephen Garrett appears to discuss 'Anora,' which both he and Neal agree is a funny but also serious modern take on the hooker with a heart of gold motif, a kind of hyper-realistic Pretty Woman set in Coney Island. Neal considers this an Oscar contender, Stephen is maybe a little more reluctant to hand off the statuette. But they both agree that Anora is a real crowd-pleaser.
As is 'A Real Pain', from writer-director-actor Jesse Eisenberg. Neal takes the lead on this one, saying it's nice to see a movie that takes generational Holocaust trauma seriously, yet is also still funny and meaningful. And both he and Stephen agree that Kieran Culkin steals the show and deserves the praise that's about to rain down on him for the next few months.
Justine Bateman does not then make a surprise appearance on the podcast.
Enjoy the show!
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