There are two Carolinas in the USA. North and South. Phil is exploring both of them. So, this week’s show was pre-recorded quite a few days earlier than usual. In it, Dean and Phil discuss The Actor’s Gang, a well-respected theater company and training ground for talented performers (like their pal, Steve Benaquist). Dean and Phil continue to talk about the late, great artist David Hockney, his love of smoking, and the ways in which he taught the world to think of Los Angeles, namely as it pertains to light. Light and its interplay with shadows is absolutely top of mind for your friends in podcasting and they go deep into film noir, talking about such great actors as George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Edmond O’Brien, and Edward G. Robinson, and such great directors of noir as Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak. The movies They Drive by Night, The Killers and Scarlet Street all get appraised. Finally, Phil holds court about the 1980 neo-noir The First Deadly Sin, which was the final motion picture produced by Frank Sinatra, and the final lead performance for Sinatra as an actor. It was supposed to have been directed by Roman Polanski, which has Phil asking, “What if it had been?” He also suggests another young director (at the time) who would have been a better choice than the film’s eventual director, Brian G. Hutton. Nevertheless, Hutton did director a couple of Dean’s favorite movies, so Phil shares the quite interesting details of Hutton’s career.

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).

On this week’s episode, Dean and Phil answer the following questions: 1) Was Vincent Van Gogh a mathematics genius? 2) What does a Frisbee have to do with airline aviation? 3) Does Phil’s hatred of The Fall Guy know no bounds? Then, a review of the neo-noir pastiche Love Lies Bleeding leads into a brief discussion about distributor A24’s output. The recent Chillpak discussion of Joaquin Phoenix bailing on his planned collaboration with Todd Haynes, caused Phil to revisit Todd Haynes’ 2002 almost-masterpiece Far From Heaven, and the death of the legendary leading man Alain Delon led Phil to watch three of the actor’s greatest successes on the big screen this week. The result is not only a discussion of Le Cercle Rouge, Purple Noon and La Piscine (aka The Swimming Pool), but a full deep dive into “heist” pictures, film critics, and more.

Year 15 of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour gets underway with a free-wheeling installment that has your friends in podcasting, Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness, demonstrating much of what they do best, tackling such a wide array of topics as fear, hypocrisy, and irony before sharing stories about non-celebrities being “mistaken” for famous show biz individuals. Some of these stories are hilarious. Some are disturbing. Some are both! With news of the Coen Brothers “breaking up”, Phil and Dean begin a deep dive into appreciating the brothers’ output and legacies. This includes hilarious stories involving Brad Pitt and George Clooney. It also includes a Coen-themed round of the Vintage Movie Ad game. Finally, Phil shares thoughts about two very interesting films released in 2020 that might have slipped under your radar and Dean offers up his review of a brand new film that Amazon hopes might launch an action-franchise starring the great Michael B. Jordan.