Dean Haglund is back from Stockholm and he has brought tales of family mysteries with him! Because Dean is also jet-lagged, Phil Leirness figured this show was the perfect time to ask him about the science of combatting jet lag, about Melbourne, and about wildlife in Australia. Wildlife in Los Angeles, from bears to coyotes to one famous mountain lion, gets celebrated as well. Phil’s suspicions surrounding the lawsuit currently blocking Paramount’s merger with Warner Bros. get discussed. The recent “Deep Dive” Dean and Phil did into 1950s film noir gets re-visited and in the process, the work of writer A.I. Bezzerides, and the early works of Stanley Kubrick get dug into, while an email from Maurice Terenzio about an early work by great noir director Joseph H. Lewis gets shared. Dean watched a whole bunch of current or recent releases on his long flight back from Europe (3BHK, F1, Michael and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die) and Phil shares his thoughts about the current documentary about the late, great poet Mary Oliver. Even more movies than this get discussed, corrections get made and mea culpas are offered!

On this second episode of Year 20 (“the year we get it right!”), Dean and Phil have crime on their minds! They start with an appreciation of director Jules Dassin’s classic film noir Night and the City. Then a Hitchcockian thriller, Mirage, by Edward Dmytryk, the man largely responsible for Jules Dassin getting blacklisted gets analyzed. Both films show telltale signs of having been directed by men with quite different experiences of the Hollywood blacklist. A neo-noir that never disappoints is Robert Altman’s Philip Marlowe adaptation The Long Goodbye. Dean and Phil discuss the film as a “satire of melancholy” and share many stories about the filmmakers and actors’ remarkable approaches to telling the story. Another 1970s mystery film, the ill-fated Agatha about the real-life disappearance of the great mystery novelist Agatha Christie for 11 days in 1926 gets reviewed. The final suspense picture on the Chillpak crime blotter this week is Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterful The Wages Fear. Dean reviewed it several weeks back, and now it’s Phil’s turn to compare and contrast it with William Friedkin’s 1977 adaptation of the same source material, Sorcerer. Finally, one new blockbuster, the crowd-pleasing The Devil Wears Prada 2 gets analyzed both as a legacy sequel and as a very hopeful harbinger for the summer movie season.