One month from their 18th Anniversary (of changing the way you listen to the internet!), your friends in podcasting are still recovering from their European Adventures and during this week’s installment they start by discussing the Marx Brothers, and end by revealing architecture and fine art discoveries they made while overseas. In between, they discuss the Netflix CEO declaring war on movie theaters, a movie soon leaving Netflix, and a quite lovely, moving film just released to theaters. And in “Celebrity Deaths” character actor Bruce Glover, king of the miniseries Richard Chamberlin, and movie star Val Kilmer all get remembered.

Phil is in Los Angeles, Dean is back in home in Detroit (or its environs) and normalcy is restored on this week’s show. Dean offers up his final thoughts about Lisbon, shares the status of his ongoing home renovations, and weighs in on the in-flight movies he availed himself of: John Woo’s remake of his own The Killer and a zombie dog horror film from South Korea. Phil weighs in on a once-great television series that has jumped the shark and a great spy film from Steven Soderbergh that is meeting with box office failure. The state of the box office, film distribution, and what can be done to fix all of it gets analyzed. Then, in “Celebrity Deaths” two great character actors, two chart-topping music-makers, a heavyweight champion turned grillmaster, and a philanthropist who championed architecture all get remembered.

If any week warranted an episode of epic length, it was the week that was. With Phil Leirness coming at us from the beaten and battered City of Angels and Dean Haglund coming at us from an air mattress on a hardwood floor not far from the Motor City, this week’s show covers a lot of terrain in a little more than 68 minutes. Your friends in podcasting discuss Copenhagen wedding plans and the role that city played in our understanding of quantum physics. They talk about the cold of New York City, the importance of heeding one’s intuition and the horrifying, almost unbearably sad events still ongoing in Los Angeles. Fires, bad behavior and the need for us to stop breaking things all get discussed before Dean and Phil finally put the “Hollywood” into Chillpak Hollywood Hour, briefly revisiting last week’s “Lawsuit of the Week” (involving It Ends With Us director Justin Baldoni and star Blake Lively). They re-visit (and double down on) their praise for Netflix’s “A Man on the Inside”, Dean sings the praises of both “So Help Me Todd” and “Elsbeth” before the discussion turns to recent big-screen efforts by Guy Ritchie and Clint Eastwood. Finally, in the return of “Celebrity Deaths”, Phil quizzes Dean about a former U.S. President, a billionaire businessman, a Shakespearean movie star, the Gold Leader from Star Wars, a Broadway legend turned sitcom star, and a folk music icon, before setting his sights on and saying good riddance to a notorious bigot. Trust us, if you have ever enjoyed our free weekly show that has been “changing the way people listen to the internet” since May of 2007, you won’t want to miss this one!

The first show of 2025 find Dean and Phil in good form and discussing a wide array of topics including the landscape and geography of NY’s Central Park, nature photography, the It Ends With Us controversy and lawsuit, and the near future of motion picture distribution both theatrically and via streaming. The truncated nature of this year’s mad dash Awards Season will get analyzed before the Netflix series “Man on the Inside” gets reviewed. Then, your friends in podcasting roll up their sleeves to re-examine Netflix’s 2018 film The Christmas Chronicles and offer their thoughts on the Ralph Fiennes-Juliet Binoche starrer The Return as well as the brilliant Nickel Boys and the reviled (and misunderstood?) Joker: Folie a Deux. Finally, thoughts regarding the suicide of filmmaker Jeff Baena are offered and Ralph Fiennes closes the show by being very “demure”.

Because of Dean’s peculiar living conditions at present, because of Phil’s adventures this week in the nation’s capital, and because of a message from a loyal listener (about plein air painting, about microphones, about Bing Crosby, about the body horror comedy/thriller The Substance), this week’s show will be full of fascinating, inspiring and hilarious conversation. The show will also include one of the saddest “Celebrity Deaths” Dean and Phil have ever discussed AND one of the most mind-blowing biographies of any celebrity they have ever remembered.

Your friends in podcasting have returned from travel adventures and have tales about art galleries in the nation’s capital and jazz clubs in the Big Easy. You will learn more about they year 1874, and more about the Marigny District of New Orleans, than you have ever heard before on this show! Much of this week’s episode involves movie box office news, movie award news, and movie reviews. In fact, two current releases and one recent release get deep-dive analyses: Conclave, Anora, and Longlegs.

Dean traveled to D.C. and Virginia. Phil traveled to New Orleans, Mississippi and Memphis. Therefore, this seemed like the perfect week for a pre-recorded Top Ten show! As this is the 10th year of Netflix original movies, your friends in podcasting spend the entire hour discussing their all-time favorite Netflix films. Ordinarily, Dean and Phil have some overlap between their lists. This time, they have no favorite films in common! Butter the popcorn and keep those Netflix queues handy because you are bound to learn about some movies you didn’t know about, or pay attention to, when they were released!

Because of some crazy travel plans (London! New York! Tokyo!), the next three episodes of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour promise to be unusual even by our standards! This week’s topics include a forthcoming Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross”, the crazy, big screen experience Megalopolis, the lineage of Longlegs director Oz Perkins (and a bit about one of the film’s stars), and a “smart house” thriller from Canada, Red Rooms. The North American tour of (“the Modfather”) Paul Weller becomes “The Live Event of the Week”. The deaths of master stone carver Simon Verity, best-selling mystery novelist Nelson DeMille, beloved actor James Earl Jones, and the utterly peerless legend of the stage and screen Maggie Smith all get discussed. Art, architecture, mythology, philosophy, movies, television, music and more on this week’s show – in other words, something for everyone, right?

It’s a Labor Day edition of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour and Dean and Phil regale with tales of the labor they had to put into Labor Day Weekend, and discuss the history of the day itself. Phil rants about the truncating of summer before he and Dean revisit the following topics from last week: Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s 11th hour bid to take over Paramount, the cinematic legacy of the great leading man Alain Delon, and the nonlinear nature of Strange Darling. Many classic and recent films get appraised, including the Ryan Reynolds-starring If and the 2014 indie neo-noir Man From Reno. On the small screen, the new season of “Only Murders in the Building”, the third season of “Slow Horses” and the rookie season of “Bad Monkey” all get discussed, as does the literary voice of author Carl Hiaasen. All that plus, Phil reveals some very interesting tidbits about his essays and podcasts at “The Voice of Los Feliz”.

When does an hour turn into 80 minutes? When it’s this week’s installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour! Dean is back in Michigan and has travel horror stories. Dean and Phil tackle the latest bizarre turn in the ongoing saga of Paramount changing ownership. An “all icons” edition of “Celebrity Deaths” involves the fascinating story behind the creator of Famous Amos, the hilarious reason Peter Marshall became the long-running host of “Hollywood Squares”, and appreciations of an 80’s music hitmaker, a groundbreaking and format-creating talk show host, and one of the greatest, most important leading men in movie history. Speaking of movies, Dean reviews the new Strange Darling, Phil tries to understand the failure of the recent Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and Dean and Phil close with an appreciation of the great Michael Powell. Then, before the show ends, Marc Hershon joins the festivities to celebrate what just might be the best show on television.