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”.