Even we are impressed at the ground covered in only 74 minutes this week by your friends in podcasting! They start by going deep into the improvisational jazz of Sun Ra and dissecting comments Sonny Rollins made in a podcast about jazz being “ a music of freedom”. The Coen Brothers’ 1991 masterpiece Barton Fink gets revisited at 35 and is found to be better than ever. The film genre of neo-noir gets analyzed, and the all-too-overlooked Hickey & Boggs (directed by Robert Culp and co-starring Culp and Bill Cosby) gets championed as an outstanding exemplar of that genre. The death of certain kinds of horror tropes are foremost on Dean’s mind after seeing Scream 7, whereas Phil is intrigued by the new generation of horror exemplified by the current box office sensations Backrooms and Obsession. Then, Dean and Phil switch genres yet again, and examine cinematic comedy through two documentaries (Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! and Marty, Life is Short), one all-time classic (Some Like it Hot) and two current releases in theaters (I Love Boosters and The Sheep Detectives).

Great theaters and great comedy are on the minds of your friends in podcasting. First, Dean and Phil pat themselves on the backs for taking the time at the beginning of the year to preview the film that ended up winning the Palme d’Or at the just-completed Cannes Film Festival. Then, they finally, after a break of months, return to the Time Out list of the “100 Greatest Movie Theaters in the World”, and share their connections to some of the very top selections. From great movie theaters to one of the most historic live television stages in the world, the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, Stephen Colbert’s farewell to the “Late Show” gets analyzed and his return to late night television the very next night in Monroe, Michigan (on Public Access television) gets celebrated. Finally, two of the most legendary comedy filmmakers of all time get compared: Mel Brooks and Ernst Lubitsch. The “Lubitsch Touch” gets explained and the all-time great comedy film To Be or Not to Be gets discussed in fascinating detail.

On last week’s show, Phil introduced what will be a recurring segment for the near future: The overlooked films of 2020. This week, a unique, uniquely painful, esoteric and funny take on both the family drama and the con-artist picture, as well as a superhero movie that really did deserve to be overlooked! Last week, Dean panned a Tom Clancy adaptation written by Taylor Sheridan. This week, another new Taylor Sheridan-scripted actioner gets discussed, this one directed by Sheridan and starring Angelina Jolie. “Celebrity Deaths” is a long-standing segment of the show, but never before have Dean and Phil discussed an actor who worked for 9 decades and died at 106! Phil, is, as listeners will know, a state certified Violence Prevention Specialist. In the wake of the horrific hatred and violence being directed at members of the AAPI community, he decided to augment his training by taking bystander intervention training. He will report on this training, and offer up tips that everyone can use to both #stopthehate and #spreadthelove. And speaking of spreading the love, over the past couple months, your friends in podcasting have begun to check in “on air” with friends of the show who have appeared on past episodes, to see how the year plus of pandemic life has treated them. This week, the great storyboard artist Rob Consing drops by. He discusses the big movies he has been working on, including Morbius and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and he competes against Dean in a round of our new, and apparently popular, vintage movie ad game (where Dean tries to guess the movie from the ad copy Phil reads)!

A long-promised “Top Ten” show proved to be so fascinating to your friends in podcasting that they turned it into a 2-part epic! Boasting films from (almost?) every decade of feature filmmaking, this week’s installment will begin the countdown of Dean and Phil’s All-Time Top Ten Comedy Films! There are bound to be crowd-pleasing favorites, silent classics, independent gems and studio blockbusters. So, keep those Netflix queues handy!