This week’s show begins with plenty of mystery as Phil riddles Dean about a hidden Japanese teahouse and a vintage movie ad from the late 1970s! Then, Dean and Phil tackle a wide array of topics including a commemoration of Japanese internment, the latest lawsuit involving Alec Baldwin and Phil’s encounter with Malcolm McDowell. In “Celebrity Deaths” the brilliant comedic character actor Barry Humphries and the accomplished classical musician-turned-journalist/memoirist Blair Tindall get remembered. Haven’t heard of them? Trust us, you know their work! Finally, Dean and Phil have three movie recommendations, including new films from China and Korea, and an unearthed and restored excellent film noir from Argentina.

Welcome to August 2022! Because Dean and Phil are both on the road, this week’s show is a bit of a pastiche (even more so than usual!). After a brief cold open from Turlock (cue Lord Turlock!), six actors, two musicians, a young comedian, and an iconic pop art sculptor get remembered and hailed in “Celebrity Deaths”. Then, after the break, Dean interviews the “real-life Dana Scully”, longtime FBI agent Kathy Stearman who wrote the book “It’s Not About the Gun: Lessons from My Global Career as a Female FBI Agent”. Oh, yeah, and there are multiple excerpts from David Naughton’s chart-topping disco hit “Makin’ It”. Don’t ask us why, just enjoy!

Last week, Dean and Phil ran out of time while discussing a vampire show from Norway that Dean has discovered and is enjoying. They kept recording, however, so this week’s show starts (as a cold open!) with that brief and hilarious discussion. Once the show proper starts, your friends in podcasting send love and best wishes to a dear friend who is having surgery this week. Then, they leap into discussions of the latest show business news, including the IATSE strike authorization vote that might lead to the halt of most television and film production, the resolution of Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit against Disney, James Bond saving the global box office, Venom: Let There Be Carnage setting the domestic box office ablaze, and the #1 worldwide box office hit of 2021 that neither Dean nor Phil have seen or even heard of! Phil and Dean then discuss Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and the importance of taking the time to do “nothing”, and what “Loki” season 1 might be telling us about the existence of multiverses. Finally, Dean and Phil celebrate the lives of a pioneer of Japanese anime, one of the best funk and soul bandleaders of all time, a character actor beloved on both the small and big screen, a groundbreaking singer-turned-activist, and two very popular comedians.

In “Live Event of the Week”, Dean previews an interview with a very musical guest coming up on next week’s show, and Phil reviews a stage show he first spoke about in episode #265! After that, they tackle the coronavirus, and how it’s affecting movie-going, film distribution, family travel and handshake lines! A ground-breaking, and little-known trailblazer of the movie industry gets championed 25 years after his death and that leads into “Celebrity Deaths” wherein a chart-topping singer, a beloved TV mom, a jazz great and the creator and longtime host of “Inside the Actors Studio” get remembered. All that, plus we get MUCH better acquainted with Dean (and a little bit better acquainted with Phil)!

With the Oscars coming up this weekend, the book will finally close on the year in cinema 2019 … The Best Picture nominees are 1917, Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Parasite. The top performing films at the US Box office released in 2019 (ranked from 1 thru 10) were Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: Episode 9 – The Rise of Skywalker, The Lion King, Frozen II, Toy Story 4, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man: Far from Home, Aladdin, Joker and Jumanji: The Next Level … Would any of these films make Dean and Phil’s lists of the best films of 2019? Find out this week as your friends in podcasting count down their Top Ten Films of 2019!

This week’s show is a little more than one day late, but we think it proves worth the wait! Dean gets things started with a “Live Event of the Week” review of Madonna in concert (in Chicago) and a preview of his own Halloween night improv episode of “The X-Files” (in Detroit). In “Celebrity Deaths” the lives and accomplishments of a giant of the U.S. Congress, a country music radio legend, a television creator and a sitcom star are remembered. This leads to a brief discussion of two current television series that are absolute crushing it (the second of which is a must-see for fans of “The X-Files” and which leads to an appraisal of the tone shifts in “The Lone Gunmen”)! A short while back, Dean and Phil dipped their toes into the National Basketball Association’s strained relationship with China and posited that rough days could be ahead for Hollywood in its never-ending quest to open the Middle Kingdom. And that was before Quentin Tarantino got involved! So, this topic gets re-visited and re-examined before Dean and Phil launch into an all-out analysis of the restored “classic”, The Cotton Club Encore.

This week’s show begins with the re-visiting of topics from 12 years ago this week, as your Friends in Podcasting discuss how the box office and box office reporting and the importance of foreign markets for American movies has changed. A great actor who appeared in more than 100 movies, making all of them better, died this weekend, and as Dean and Phil celebrate his career, it leads to a discussion of the just-released El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. Also in “Celebrity Deaths”, Dean and Phil regale with stories of a bona fide World War II hero and the first man to “walk” in space. This leads to a discussion of the Brad Pitt space adventure Ad Astra

The world really took it on the chin this week with abominable violence in Brussels and the deaths of a groundbreaking rapper, a gentleman actor-turned-union leader, and one of the most influential figures in the history of comedy. Your friends in podcasting will try to make sense of all of it, while celebrating new voices in comedy, a great new sci-fi film, and challenging their own industry to send bolder, more clear messages that discrimination anywhere will not be supported.

Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness – When the world is at its worst, they tend to be at their best.