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Doug Benson joins The Boys to play a famous movies game.

I don't know what that guy is smoking but I want some!

5/9 - Silence of the Lambs 5/16 - To Kill A Mockingbird 5/23 - Vertigo

playing thru

Can we get a Mantzoukas/Time Keeper crossover episode? Tick tock, Tick Tock Man!

I liked it quite a bit at the time but it also didn't leave much of an impression on me. I liked each scene as it was happening but I don't know that it added up to anything.

This is such a good point and brilliantly said - something I never noticed and I've seen the movie many times. The fewer investigative journalist outlets we have, the more evil people get away with in politics and business on a national and local level. Older movies that were serious about print journalism are hard to find but Sam Fuller's Park Row is a great one - Fuller was a reporter before he was a director and he financed and produced the movie himself. It' s about the early days of cut-throat (almost literally) tactics to jockey for readership and is really good. TCM shows it occasionally; they showed it at their film festival in 2018 and John Sayles introduced it, giving such a great history of journalism and Fuller.

Madonna is really exceptional in this one.

Rivers Edge is indeed strange but it’s a Thank God This Got Made. It’s based on a true story and features incredible performances by Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper. As it was Keanu’s first major role, it will never be lost to time. In fact, the cast is uniformly awesome: Ione Skye, Roxanne Zal, Daniel Roebuck and the little brother from Teen Witch!!

I think the metaphor of a “Cold War” was pretty well done, but nothing about the characters drew me in to the point where it transcended to a narrative level. It felt like metaphor without context (if that makes sense). I never really understood their codependency beyond “it’s there because I said so.”

511 minutes too short

Aye, but Russell Brand also says "Cor blimey, I got my Mr nobby caught in me Zippy Whip."

Fabrice Fabrice can not be done!!!!! He is FAR too funny to die. His huge personality goes far beyond some simple stereotype.

600 minutes! Wait...

Sweet baby Jeebus, TEN hours... I mean, thank you Scott and everyone involved in the past 600 episodes and in this celebration. This ten hour celebration. Thank you. C+

I actually loved the scene with the White House librarian! I think that very well could have been the way things went down, but more than that, I loved how they played the scene. Hoffman's all flustered and excited and walks up to Redford, and as he's telling Redford about it, Redford's already writing the story in his head, and thinking to ask for a comment on why she would change her story. That scene just shows how well the two of them dance together on screen, and how they worked together as a team. I don't think you need any backstory on these guys. The American public sure doesn't have a ton of backstory (though in today's age we can) for its journalists. You know what they write. And we as an audience know that Woodward had only been with the post a few months, and Bernstein had been there a while. Woodward was more buttoned-up, young guy who stuck more to the rules (the scenes of them debating what's fact and what's inference are fascinating), and was less willing to push boundaries, but was dogged in his fact-finding and super quick on his feet. Bernstein, on the other hand, while young, had been there for a while, was more of a free-wheeler (cared less about ironing his shirts), and was willing to blur ethical lines to get someone to open up for him - like when he was asking the secretary about her ex boyfriend, or the scene with the bookkeeper. He was willing to make people uncomfortable if it got him where he was going. Also, he was put on the case, not because he was the best, but because he had connections. And he was persistent. He was waiting outside the office when Woodward was called to cover the Watergate arraignment, and he spends that day in Florida to get the subpoena'd phone records. And he was a good writer. He knew how to write up a story so that it wasn't just telling the facts, it showed why it was important. One other thing I noticed about the movie was that it sets up a lot of juxtapositions of TV news vs. print journalism. The movie opens on TV coverage of Nixon flying to the capitol to address a joint session of congress, and the news reporter is giving the dullest of live reporting about how the President is getting to and entering the capitol, and the movie ends with a scene of Woodward and Bernstein set up at their desks with mounds of paper around them, diligently typing away as Nixon takes the nomination for re-election. My sense is the movie is getting at the necessity of print and investigative journalism in a time when everything is on TV. That also resonates now in our time of "fake news." The Washington Post and the New York Times fought significant legal battles in the 70's and this movie shows maybe better than any other the importance of journalistic investigations of the government to shine the spotlight on, oh, the administration using the intelligence community to commit widespread actual spying on political opponents. This probably is one of my top movies. I'm a politics nerd, which is why I moved to Washington, and I love investigations.. so this hits my sweet spot. But I also think it's important as a movie that I think really seemed to capture what it was like to get these mangled, loose threads of the investigation and put it all together. It's a factually dense movie with a lot of moving parts, and not much action, and maybe it's my own experiences at play, but I find it gripping when they're interviewing people to hear what they're going to say, and feel that excitement of not knowing whether the few people who know what happened are going to shut down on you. And, as a lawyer, people's memories get real hazy when you're trying to nail down facts and you have no 5th Amendment defense. Anyone who's seen a congressional testimony knows the "I don't recall" defense. The last thing I'll say is how much I appreciate that they used accurate filming locations around town. I really enjoyed the sight seeing. So many movies are "based in" Washington, but you never get to see it. Anyway, much of this is rambling, but I'm just in love with this movie.

I had mostly quit listening to the podcast because of past frustration with Paul--you obviously need to love his personality to be a regular listener. I should have remembered that the worst time to listen to any podcast is when it's talking about a favorite movie! I kept wanting to hit my head against my car window. I think the movie is perfect in accomplishing what it's trying to do. It might not be everyone's taste but I love the whole thing. So many classic/talented actors. Jane Alexander is a particular favorite. Movies about investigative reporters are in my wheelhouse in general. And classic 70s movies tend to be my taste. I love that they don't spoon feed the viewer. I love the grinding pace, it fits what they're trying to show. And the reporters have different personalities but they are both so ambitious and they figure out how to work together. My mom was obsessed with Watergate, she watched it on TV all day long, read every book, and my parents argued about some of the key players for years over the dinner table. Over the years, I've read many of the participants' books. As well as other Watergate books, including a bio of the Jack Warden character. But I'd never read a Woodward and Bernstein one until recently. I don't like what Woodward turned into, which started right after the Watergate success. Then because it's come up often in discussing Trump, I've been reading The Final Days, and I had recently read about a third of All the President's Men. I've seen the movie many times and I recognized that most scenes in the beginning the movie track surprisingly closely to the book. From the first appearance in court, and the other character' discussion of the background given to the two authors, and Woodward's phone call with Dahlberg -- dialogue is the same. The book also contains a footnote about the kidnapping Dahlberg mentions in the call (which is a famous one in MN). During the podcast, they said the director's name over and over and they pronounced it in a way I'd never heard before, then the guest came in and said it the usual way. That sort of thing wouldn't usually bother me but it probably hurt me more because they didn't properly appreciate the movie. I liked the guest. I feel a little bad that I didn't love The Post. It was hard to get around Tom Hanks, and I'll never be sure whether it is because I'm tired of Tom Hanks in general, because the real Ben Bradlee is so well known, or whether it's the Jason Robards Ben Bradlee I like even better than the real one. There was no way Tom Hanks was going to be able to please me.

I'm a huge fan of Unspooled and Paul & Amy, but I had a hard time with the dismissiveness of this episode. All The President's Men is a movie that requires patience, and I wonder if that's why the hosts found it frustrating. I've noticed that Unspooled has a sometimes less than critical enthusiasm for directors like Spielberg and Disney, brilliant artists whose seminal works are sentimental and deeply manipulative. At any given moment of Snow White and E.T., the viewer is told exactly how to feel and when to feel it. No patience is required and nothing is left to chance. The central promise of Spielberg and Disney is the escape of an eternal childhood. All The President's Men is about being a grown-up, how mundane and ordinary efforts can - with tremendous persistence - achieve extraordinary, historical results. Pakula forces us to spend a couple of hours being Woodward and Bernstein as they slog through mountains of lies and paper in a quest to get to the truth. All The President's Men is that rare mainstream Hollywood film that pulls back from conventionally obvious dramatic tropes as it asks its audience to work. That's not to say that Paul, Amy, or anyone else should pretend to like the movie if they don't. But I noticed that the cultural significance of this film - X Files, Zodiac, just about any police procedural on TV, the list goes on - got shorter shrift this time around, and received a less than fair hearing. Paul was right: Snow White is a kids' movie: it appeals to the eternal child in all of us. That's a beautiful thing, but it would be nice to see a movie like All The President's Men get credit for being brave enough to ask us to be grown-ups.

I agree that Amy and Paul seemed to have a strange view of this film. First, the claim that there's not enough to distinguish between Woodward and Bernstein is ludicrous. For starters, so much of their personalities are revealed with hair, makeup, and wardrobe, without a word of dialogue. Woodward is the perfectionist, with his hair immaculately in place, his shirt perfectly pressed, and his tie in a more perfect knot than I've ever been able to achieve in my life. Bernstein is the creative, whose extremely wrinkled dress shirt suggests he only wears one because he has to, and whose long hair suggests he feels some connection to 60s counter-culture even as he managed to work a desk job through it all. When they deal with people, either in person or on the phone, Woodward is a bit tense and wants to be precisely understood and to precisely understand the other party. Bernstein is loose and doesn't particularly care what the other party thinks of him as long as he gets what he wants. Woodward's manner of reasoning is much more deductive, where he'll reach a conclusion only if the facts lead there. Bernstein's reasoning is more inductive, where he's willing to make a leap of logic based on patterns and assume that as fact, which ends up fine in this situation because his instincts were always correct. And yeah, sure, Woodward is a bit WASPy, and Bernstein is clearly Jewish, but if that's the only thing you can point to in order to distinguish them, I don't understand what movie you were watching. I don't see how clearer they could make the differences between these guys without hitting us over the head with it (and some might argue that they do hit us over the head with it, like in the scene where Bernstein has his notes on napkins and tiny pieces of paper while Woodward disapprovingly chides him). This is an interesting question. I think at the time, and possible up to today, the fact that this actually happened makes it more interesting, and thus affects it in a positive way. I can see this changing over time for a couple of reasons, the first of which is a diminishing knowledge of the event. Now, as a product of a rural American public school, I know no history, and the only name from the administration mentioned in the film that I knew was Nixon himself. (This is the second time I've seen this film, and it's the second time I had to google whether Gordon Liddy is the same person as Scooter Libby. Answer: He's not.) But I still knew the broad strokes of the scandal: Nixon's men attempt to burgle the DNC, Nixon was aware of the cover-up, and he had to resign the presidency as a result. In 50 years, it's possible that viewers will know as much about the Watergate scandal as I do about the Teapot Dome scandal (which I assume had something to do with teapots...and domes). The term "Watergate" will no longer be synonymous with Nixon, but just with some type of scandal, or even more diluted, simply some type of controversy (I read that applications to journalism programs skyrocketed after this film, so I suppose it's those bozos we have to blame for idiotically using -gate as a suffix for everything). And the second reason I fear this might change over time is due to the declining civility in politics. I can imagine a 16-year-old who grew up indoctrinated in Trump country watching this film and thinking, "So Nixon sought to use any means necessary to bring down his political rivals, and then lied about it and covered it up. Isn't that what the President is supposed to do?" After all, Fox News would (and does) forgive Trump for far worse than what Nixon did. (Speaking of Fox News, I was figuratively yelling at the podcast when Amy and Paul were discussing 1976 films and neglected to mention the other film on the AFI list, Network.) Now, judging by the Letterboxd reviews I read, I'm probably not as high on this film as others on this board, although I have it in the top third of AFI films so far. I can see the argument that it's a vanilla in a freezer full of more novel flavors, but that's overlooking the fact that for a vanilla, the taste and texture are perfect, and who wouldn't want that perfect vanilla to have a place in their freezer? For those who say take it or leave it, I'd happily take it.

Good lord that's a bonkers ending.

Doesn’t someone kill a dog?

Ashton Kutchers finest comedy. All hail the Bearded Kutch!

This was fun in that it was just meant to be a shoot em up action movie. The straight to DVD prequels are hit or miss, but this one was fun all the way and plays well with the "blood sport for the masses" while being somewhat believable.

NOT the original, but the remake. I have yet to see it, but this looks like it's perfect HDTGM material: * Statham *"The rules are simple. There are no rules" *Loud ridiculous action http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU4TUCh-HwE

What down cool cat!