Dean and Phil knew they were going to be celebrating the career of the great actor and star James Caan on this week’s show and then the floodgates opened, with many beloved character actors exiting the stage, so after a brief and hilarious cold open, Season 3 Episode 23 begins with “Celebrity Deaths”. Then, the whole concept of “celebration” as a lost “art” gets explored, before your friends in podcasting use it as a springboard to discuss several current television series and a handful of truly brilliant performances. The big screen will not be ignored either, as the cinematic output of Edgar Wright gets examined through the prism of his recent ghost story (Last Night in Soho) and a baseball comedy classic from the 1970s gets revisited.

Seven important notes about this week’s show:

1) It’s our 600th episode!
2) It features a brand new version of the theme song appropriate to Dean’s relocation to the Motor City.
3) A horrible recording problem leads to a few choppy transitions at the start of the show and to an extremely bad electronic hum during the first 25 minutes or so of the show.
4) We have done the best we can to get rid of the hum and to at least make these first 25 minutes listenable, and you will want to bear with us as those minutes contain very personal conversation between Dean and Phil about things they love lost in the current SoCal fires, what they love that is seriously threatened by those fires, and about a great Canadian actor of Dean’s acquaintance who died this month. There is also a great story about baby diapers!
5) Several amazing movies get discussed – including the Sandra Bullock starring post-apocalyptic, action-horror vehicle Bird Box, the Coen Brothers rather amazing Western anthology feature The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Alfonso Cuaron’s seminal black-and-white memory piece Roma and Dean and Phil’s very own The Lady Killers, which Dean has finally seen!
6) The show is 72 minutes long, with about 45 minutes of that boasting clean audio!
7) We wish you all a “Malkovich Hug”!