At long last, a movie that seeks to answer the age-old question, “what if doors were towels?” Listen in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as we go down under to knock on 2023’s comic fantasy The Portable Door, an Australian adaptation of the first book in a long-running British series about what if magicians used their magical powers for mundane purposes / profit (we guess???). On the bright side, it offers Christoph Waltz and Sam Neill going full ham and cheese as two corporate wizards. On the dark side, boy do we have some story and tone issues to dig into here (along with some very frustrating goblin prosthetics from The Jim Henson Company). On the drink side, we have an effervescent spring-inspired cocktail to make everything better! How many more sides could you want???

It’s a game! Look, we like things with less pressure, so games are fun for us to do. This time, we turn our slightly-drunken eyes to that beloved cinephile website, Letterboxd. Fans as we are of its sometimes intelligent, sometimes glibly entertaining user reviews, Brendan has assembled a list of short, pithy reviews for movies we have covered on this podcast and challenged Leigh and Chris to guess the movie the blurbs refer to. It’s a game! It’s fun! Also we cover our next movie, a fantastical YA-adjacent adaptation about a door that’s portable. No, we hadn’t heard of it, either.

Alors! What do you get when you take the bones of the 1963 comedy / romance / thriller Charade and filter them through a Nouvelle Vague sensibility? Well, you certainly get something worth talking about, one way or another. Listen in as Leigh, Brendan, and Chris crack open The Truth About Charlie, Jonathan Demme’s 2002 attempt at doing just that. We run the gamut on this one, covering what Demme’s original intent was, why Mark Wahlberg looks like a such a lost dope in his little beret, and if the central conceit of creating a French New Wave adaptation of Charade even makes sense (kind of, but also not)! Naturally, there’s also a drink involved (and truly, a movie of this length with so much to cover really necessitates some kind of liquor).

So a few weeks back we had a brief rumination about if a rom-com has failed if it’s not actually very funny, and so we decided to speak on that for a bit. For example, are there rom-coms that are actually funny? Of our favorites, which ones fall closer to rom than com (or manage to skillfully split the difference)? Is Scott Pilgrim vs. the World by definition a rom-com (technically, yes!)? Sure, this might have been better around Valentine’s Day as opposed to St. Patrick’s Day, but planning is hard and shut up! We also introduce the focus of our next episode, which aptly enough, is a remake of a movie that kinda drains much of the rom and com aspects of the original. Get ready for some truths dropping in two weeks!

What happens when you toss Tony Scott, Richard Kelly, the true story of a model-turned-bounty hunter, and an eclectic mess of talent into a blender with a heaping helping of meth? Well… nothing conventional, that’s for sure. Team up with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they are pummeled into submission by 2005’s Domino, starring Keira Knightley and directed by Tony Scott at his most manic. We take a look at the aggressive direction, a defiantly non-linear screenplay, and the vague feeling of unpleasantness that hits you when viewing a movie playing fast and loose with reality that’s also based on a real person who died under tragic circumstances during production. It’s a lot to talk about! Thankfully we also made a spicy (and suitably very yellow) cocktail to keep things rolling.

It’s a game! We play another game! Leigh takes slightly-vague top comments from trailers of recent movies on YouTube and Brendan and Chris try to guess what movie the trailer in question is for. It’s fun! We like games! Also as always, our next movie is mentioned and we share a recipe for an appropriately spicy and yellow cocktail to accompany it. Games!

Ah, the early 2000s! A special time in the history of cinema that spawned a plethora of high-concept romantic comedies. One need only look to Mark Water’s 2005 effort Just Like Heaven, in which Mark Ruffalo must deal with that bane of all apartment subletters, being haunted by the ghost of Reese Witherspoon (except she’s maybe not actually dead, it’s a whole thing). Plop yourself down on a comfortable couch with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they discuss the perils of balancing the frivolous with the emotional, the vague rules of the afterlife (or the almost-afterlife), and the question of why Reese’s character seems weirdly racist toward Asian people. All this mess and hot toddy cocktails aplenty, too!

With January 2024 now well underway, we decide to discuss those lies we all tell ourselves we’ll commit to in the new year- that’s right, it’s time for resolution chat, babyyyyyy! But what with this being a podcast ostensibly about movies and other media, we’ve all made some specifically entertainment-related resolutions. Also like, those will probably be more fun than saying you’ll “improve yourself” and all that other crap. Will we read more books? Will we finally finish a particular video game? Will all those Criterion Collection movies bought during Barnes & Noble sales finally get watched? Listen and find out!

As a snowstorm hits the northeastern United States, we prophetically chose to watch a movie that deals with a freak blizzard that keeps two twenty-somethings snowed in after initially looking for a quick hook up. That’s right, as you surely can guess, it’s 2014’s Two Night Stand, a low-stakes sort-of rom-com directed by Mike Nichols’s son. Get snowed in with Leigh, Brendan, and Chris as they remotely watch this movie (thanks, Covid!) and discuss how rom-coms have mutated over the last decade or so, our thoughts on Miles Teller, and the genuinely unhinged act-three-romantic-gesture (truly, it’s nuts). But, uh, at least there’s a cocktail (actually, we didn’t actually get to drink our cocktail, thanks Covid!). Remember, please mask up and stuff!

Look, we’ve done this seven times now, so we don’t need to mince words. We talk about our favorite movie of the year, our least favorite movie of the year, and then do it again but with the drinks we made. Look, it’s the end of the year! We’re trying to relax! Also our first movie of (shudder) 2024 is thrown into the ether along with a hot wintery drink to accompany it. Now please, it’s Christmas, go eat some cookies or something.

If nothing captures the true spirit of the holidays like being stuck in an elevator for an extended period of time, then 2015’s Christmas Eve is sure the holly jolliest piece of bland seasonal ephemera we’ve encountered yet! Sadly, there’s very little of said holiday spirit actually to be found here, unless you count “Patrick Stewart does a one-man Christmas Carol” or “musicians play some Christmas music” or “doctor and nurse snipe about the existence of God while an orderly tries not to piss himself.” For our annual holiday spectacular, Leigh, Brendan, and Chris briefly touch upon religious cinema, the perils of making a movie from the pitch “what if Love Actually but trapped in elevators,” and how New York looks very similar to eastern Europe. We also manage to capture the true spirit of the holidays (inebriation) with a seasonally-appropriate spritzer. Seasons greetings!