Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel embrace their changing lives and discuss the groaners that have come to define one of the most common and commonly lampooned interpersonal relationships: the dad joke. We trace the special characteristics in the relationships between parents and children that confound and distort humor. We follow the forms of parental jokes as, transposed, they go on to distort relationships between adults. We frame several theories of dad joke phenomenology, relying on several different definitions of the term, chief among them the Dad joke that gives, inviting the listener to be smart; the Dad joke that takes, asserting a mocking superiority; the Dad joke from affability, projecting nonthreatening helpfulness, and the Dad joke from isolation, calling up animals, foods, and everyday objects as subjects to replace a lack of shared experience and perspective. Kindness and yearning and cruelty, hope and fear and Donald Duck: all are Dad, and all are Joke. Plus, learn the newest form of dad joke, and be ready to spring it on your coworkers, like a slinky during a fire drill. Call us oldheads, call us Overthinkers, just don’t call us collect, because like a broken iPad, we don’t accept the charge.
Matt Wrather and Pete Fenzel sequester themselves for another storied two-hander as they consider Conclave, a pope-ular and mer-curial film with an all-star cast and an uneasy dramaturgy. See the movie first so as not to spoil the plot, then join us to discuss what genre it is or might be, and what it might be saying about order, patriarchy, tension, progress, and how much your artistic identity might change when you swap out the synth strings and bring in the real ones. We discuss the schema of archetypes these wily cardinals in their extended negotiation might represent, either in culture war or popcorn movie phantasmagoria. We consider the role of women in the movie and the film’s symbolic final shot. We wax on a performance of tantalizing complexity from Ralph Fiennes and the stunning set design and sometimes-controversial camerawork. We lament the poor showing of the Tucci gang when the Tooch needed them most. We recognize our show’s inevitable slide into solely Isabella Rosselini oriented material. And while we do not advise watching this sumptuous piece of visual art on your cell phone, for the podcast that will do just fine.
Pete Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather use the recent Oscar-winning movie The Brutalist as a jumping-off point to talk about the profound effect of built environments on our lives. We may not have seen this movie, but we’ve all been in buildings, and we have opinions about them.
Our architectural survey starts in New Haven, CT, where the ugliest building on Yale’s campus is ironically (or appropriately?) the architecture school.
By Ɱ – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=125929427
From there we visit another surreal Brutalist environment: the office building that serves as a phantasmagorical battleground of the video game Control.
Less phantasmagorical, but still brutal: Boston City Hall.
By andrewjsan – https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewsan/6776358460/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=101393496
More ecclesiastical, but VERY brutal: Newman Hall, a Catholic church in Berkeley, CA.
Less brutal, more gentle: we visit the animals at Franklin Park Zoo and Smolak Farms, and get frustrated by need to backtrack back to your stroller that you left by the entrance to the gorilla enclosure.
Mark Lee and Pete Fenzel take up a solemn two-hander to commemorate film legend Gene Hackman in the wake of his tragic passing. Mark and Pete share a discussion of his unmistakable personal style, his trademark skill and grace, and how to act on film with your entire face. We track the archetypical Gene Hackman character – not superman, not everyman, but this man. We marvel additionally at Hackman’s command of stillness and silence and his complementary ability to bark nuclear launch orders in roiling rage. We dig deeper on perhaps Hackman’s finest performance, as spiraling wiretapper Harry Caul in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, the 1974 Palme d’Or winning spy film about burgeoning surveillance society, paranoia, modes of masculine self-delusion, and the misplaced confidence in one’s techy knowhow in a war of all against all. But we’re all there for the moustache.
Matthew Wrather faces hostile interlocutors Peter Fenzel and Matt Belinkie, who want to know why he’s so crazy about the so-called “comedian” Stewart Lee. Wrather takes them back to the first time he saw anything by Lee, a simpler time for streaming rights when Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle Series 3 was streaming on Netflix. He sets them to watch S3E2 (“England”), S4E6 (“Childhood”), and S3E1 (“Shilbottle”). Belinkie likes all the comedies except stand-up, and Pete wonders why Wrather is even so into this guy. The answer? The death of the post war social-democratic ideal and concomitant decline in the stature of the liberal public intellectual. Sometimes comedy is tough going. But I suppose it made me who I am today.
The gang takes this show all the way to Broadway, with Matt Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matt Wrather celebrating Audra McDonald’s tour de force as Mama Rose with a look through the many adaptations and themes of Gypsy: A Musical Fable, by Arthur Laurents, Jule Style and Stephen Sondheim, based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. Is it, as some critics claim, among the greatest American book musicals ever made? What would that even mean were it to be true? What does it have to do with King Lear? How does the fictionalization of its true story deal with reality vs. fantasy vs. the human condition? We discuss a paradox at the heart of many of the truly great theatrical parts: when they are played by the greatest actors in the greatest ways, do they ever really truly fall apart, or plunge from the heights into desperate ruin? What sort of dignity and sympathy does the ultimate fictionalized stage mom engender that may or may not be due to her historical antecedent? Who did it how, and how did it best? And where did Belinkie get a half-bottle of mead on a Tuesday? Everything’s comin’ up Otis!
Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather (temporarily regaining the throne as the host of the program!) undertake the annual tradition of interpreting the commercials and halftime show of the Super Bowl. This year, they find a strange landscape of dislocation and confusion: no one is where they are supposed to be. Either you look up and see a strange face—replaced, as with David Beckham and Matt Damon, or aged, as with Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan—or else you realize that you are the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time, like the inimitable Walton Goggins. The theme continues through the halftime show, with Kendrick Lamar playing the game of America while Uncle Sam keeps insisting he’s doing it wrong. But there is one social dislocation that is defiantly celebrated, in a trio celebrating the physical and economic strength of women.
Some of the most fascinating movies are the big hits that somehow faded from our collective memories. Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Matthew Wrather revisit Disney’s fascinating Dick Tracy, a 1990 kids movie that was heavily promoted at McDonalds and features dozens of people getting mowed down by Tommy guns and the line, “You don’t know if you want to hit me or kiss me. I get a lot of that.”
This movie has an astonishing array of talent behind it. Warren Beatty’s previous directorial effort, Reds, won him an Oscar for Best Director and nominations for Best Actor and Best Screenplay. He’s joined here by Al Pacino (who would be nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his scenery-chewing and self-mocking villain), and Madonna at the height of her fame (she produced an entire concept album to promote the film). Mandy Patinkin, Paul Sorvino, Dick Van Dyke, Dustin Hoffman, and even Kathy Bates show up, most nearly unrecognizable.
But maybe the real stars are Stephen Sondheim, who contributed several delightful songs and picked up an Oscar for “Sooner or Later,” and above all cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, a legend who does astonishing work with matte paintings, giant sets, and ingenious trick photography. This movie is truly one-of-a-kind, and even if it doesn’t entirely succeed, it’s hard not to be nostalgic for a time when Hollywood could take big risks on creative people trying something new.
Matt Belinkie, and Pete Fenzel, and Matthew Wrather rummage through the sci-fi spare parts that comprise Section 31, the Emperor Philippa Georgiou spin-off movie that you never knew you wanted, because you never wanted it. Assembled under the aegis of Star Trek, this up-tempo outing hacks together the remnants of a possible streaming series shortened by Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar win and mutually agreed upon better things to do into what can only be described as “A Paramount Plus Original Movie.” The jaunty action comedy that starts with the protagonist killing her own family and a 90s video game cutscene narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis beams to and fro among a stinging slam on traditional Trek institutional optimism, a potpourri of borrowings from other more successful movies and shows across genres, and a pastiche of wild guesses at what “the kids are into these days.” The Matts, and Pete track influences, predecessors, ways to approach considering what this movie is or might be for those who watched it or liked it, and how different works balance the eclectic and the shared in the construction of fictional teams of misfits.
Matt Belinkie (Good Matt), Matt Wrather (Evil Matt), Mark Lee (Good and Evil Mark at the Same Time), and Pete Fenzel (Fenzel, Walk With Me) honor the passing of the cinematic visionary David Lynch by watching and talking about Blue Velvet, his 1986 neo noir art cinema comeback in the wake of That Dune With Sting. We overthink the parallel and sometimes unrelated questions of how we find Lynch’s work compelling and if we enjoy our time watching it. We dive into psychological schools, genre influence, mastery of two worlds, how Laura Dern Is Queen, and symbolic dualities of light and color, seeking to ensconce our brains in the film’s language to “crack its code.” But Lynch was not a filmmaker seeking to be understood, and sometimes there’s just a dark-bearded man in an orange coat holding a giant empty frappuccino on the train in the winter who may or may not kill you. It’s a strange world, after all.
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