Tag: Oscars

Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 20 Episode 21

Posted on by PHIL19

If we know anything after almost 20 years of podcasting, it’s that people love hearing “production meetings on the air”! If that’s true, then what a show we have for you, with not one, but THREE production meetings – two of genuinely hilarious varieties and the third pertaining to movies like Backrooms, Exit 8, Universal Language and the television series “Severance”. In between those meetings, Dean and Phil share the thoughts of a loyal listener and roll up their sleeves to roast almost everybody involved in the “will they or won’t they” Paramount/Skydance merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. The glory of the once great Paramount Pictures gets re-visited using the all-time Hollywood classic Sunset Boulevard and the just-released season finale of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” season 4 as the gateway for this exploration. Come for the analysis, stay for the story about Phil stealing something! As if that all weren’t enough, Dean and Phil go deep on a perplexing television movie from 1974, its famous writer, its all-star cast, and its legendary cinematographer. Finally, Stop! That! Train! gets fully appraised.

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 20 Episode 20

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Hindsight, like this episode, is 20/20 (Year 20 Episode 20, get it?) and so Dean and Phil begin this week’s show with a clip from the long-running ABC news magazine show “20/20” from the mid-1980s and remark upon just how contemporary those clips sound! From there, the upcoming “Blade Runner 2099” television series gets previewed and the latest in the lawsuit surrounding Paramount’s on-hold merger with Warner Bros. gets analyzed (and laughed about). Phil wants to know why Dean isn’t watching the terrific “Lanterns” on HBO. The brilliance of director Zach Cregger and the success of his new Resident Evil get appraised. Then, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner (just in time for its return to cinemas, this time in black and white) and DC’s Supergirl both get reviewed. Finally, the great Ang Lee and his landmark Sense and Sensibility get reappraised (just in time for a new adaptation to get released).

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 20 Episode 19

Posted on by PHIL19

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!

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 20 Episode 2

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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.

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 20 Episode 1

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Welcome to Year 20 (“the year we get it right!”). On this, their overall 988th installment, Dean and Phil really put the “Hollywood” into “Chillpak Hollywood Hour” with showbiz news, analysis, previews and reviews. It starts with a discussion of the long-running series “Supernatural”. Then in the “Lawsuit of the Week” the supposed end of the It Ends With Us lawsuits gets discussed. The surprising details of the SAG-AFTRA deal with the AMPTP get analyzed and the fact that it (most likely) means no labor stoppage for the next four years gets celebrated. Some fascinating rules changes for next year’s Oscars get dissected, and some seemingly terrific, but certainly intriguing, news regarding Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia” movie for Netflix gets hailed. The Cannes film festival gets previewed. As does the American Cinematheque’s Bleak Week festival. Finally, two current theatrical releases get hailed as modern masterworks and the plans for a new episode of “Deep Dive” get finalized.

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 19 Episode 48

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In his final show from his current trip to the East Coast, Phil regales with thoughts of Easter and tales of cherry blossoms. Dean explains why he did not see Project Hail Mary. An email from a friend of the show leads to further discussion of the 1978 sci-fi cheese-fest Starcrash and to the entire concept of “guilty pleasures” getting analyzed. An email from another good friend of the show causes Phil and Dean to go deep into dead actors taking roles away from living ones and into the exact role Doja Cat played in denying Timothee Chalamet a Best Actor Oscar. Then, Dean and Phil turn their attention to the big show biz news of the weekend: the Writers Guild of America striking an unexpected deal with the AMPTP, and the latest headlines to come out of the Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively lawsuit. Finally, the proceedings wrap up with your friends in podcasting sharing personal recollections of the 31st greatest movie theatre in the world right now according to Time Out.

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 19 Episode 45

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This week’s show begins with Dean and Phil discussing the World Baseball Classic and sharing (and answering) an email from a loyal listener who wanted to celebrate the recent 25th Anniversary of Dean’s series “The Lone Gunmen”. Recorded on Sunday morning before the Oscars (and before the big “Firefly” announcement), the bulk of the discussion surrounds what Dean and Phil are looking for at Hollywood’s big night. They discuss how talented filmmaker and entertaining video host Ryan Casselman might just have devised scientific formulae for “decoding” Oscar voting. The controversy surrounding Timothée Hal Chalamet’s comments regarding ballet and opera get full analysis. Then, five films go under the microscope, including two by classic thriller director Henri-Georges Clouzot, two tales of nuclear paranoia from Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow, and the multi-Oscar-winning 1983 classic Tender Mercies.

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 19 Episode 44

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After comparing notes on their forthcoming respective travel plans, Dean and Phil roll up their sleeves and discuss the 25th anniversary of “The Lone Gunmen” series. Then, in what will be a multi-week exploration, they begin to delve into Time Out’s list of the 100 Greatest Movie Theaters in the World that are still in operation. The movie business is foremost on their minds these days, and they pose some of the big, perplexing questions regarding the possibly sinister and definitely nonsensical merger of Paramount with Warner Bros. Then, because it’s STILL awards season, they tackle the really odd, almost desperate nature of the recent SAG-AFTRA “Actor Awards” on Netflix. As a bonus, you will learn what the following phrases uttered by Dean Haglund in this episode actually mean: “We made the Ramones cry!” and “funky, artisanal whatever”.

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 19 Episode 43

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Dean and Phil discuss the fallout from Paramount supposedly closing the deal to acquire Warner Bros. and its assets. They celebrate the feat that Richard Linklater became the first-ever American filmmaker to achieve this week. They review three new genre films: a horror sequel (28 Days Later: The Bone Temple), an homage/deconstruction of 1960s Eurospy movies (Reflection in a Dead Diamond), and a sci-fi comedy that gives genuine 1980s “feels” (Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die). They revisit the much-loved “classic” Field of Dreams. In honor of Dean’s first wedding anniversary that takes place this month, Phil offers previews of two forthcoming cinematic marriage stories. Finally, the big casting news for the reboot of “The X-Files” gets analyzed.

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Chillpak Hollywood Hour – Year 19 Episode 40

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It’s part two of a special two-part episode! 2025 was a truly great year in cinema and Dean and Phil have a great many topics to discuss as they each reveal their Top 5 films from the year that was (consult Year 19 Episode 39 for their #10 thru #6 selections). Afterwards, they take a look at, perhaps, the most promising fantasy film to be coming out in 2026! So, keep those streaming queues handy. Your friends in podcasting may just be coming up with some titles you will want to track down!

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