Dean traveled to D.C. and Virginia. Phil traveled to New Orleans, Mississippi and Memphis. Therefore, this seemed like the perfect week for a pre-recorded Top Ten show! As this is the 10th year of Netflix original movies, your friends in podcasting spend the entire hour discussing their all-time favorite Netflix films. Ordinarily, Dean and Phil have some overlap between their lists. This time, they have no favorite films in common! Butter the popcorn and keep those Netflix queues handy because you are bound to learn about some movies you didn’t know about, or pay attention to, when they were released!

Happy Birthday to our friend in podcasting, Phil Leirness, who is celebrating many returns of the day in New Orleans today! Before departing Los Angeles, and before Dean Haglund departed the environs of Detroit to head to the nation’s capital for Thanksgiving, they convened via zoom to record this week’s show. In it, they discuss their travel plans, before Dean regales with tales of his recent improv performance (with Gary Jones) in San Jose. Then, a discussion of Dean’s forthcoming European wedding leads to Phil revealing his new plans for Arctic Circle adventures and a follow up to last week’s discussion of the Aurora Borealis. Several new or recent movies get reviewed, including My Old Ass, Deadpool & Wolverine, and His Three Daughters, as well as the 2020 Oscar winner for Best Documentary (My Octopus Teacher) and a horror film from 1988 that was one of the first starring roles for both Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi (The Lair of the White Worm). Finally, in an almost-all-jazz edition of “Celebrity Deaths”, four jazz greats and two Bee Gees drummers get remembered!

Because of some crazy travel plans (London! New York! Tokyo!), the next three episodes of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour promise to be unusual even by our standards! This week’s topics include a forthcoming Broadway revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross”, the crazy, big screen experience Megalopolis, the lineage of Longlegs director Oz Perkins (and a bit about one of the film’s stars), and a “smart house” thriller from Canada, Red Rooms. The North American tour of (“the Modfather”) Paul Weller becomes “The Live Event of the Week”. The deaths of master stone carver Simon Verity, best-selling mystery novelist Nelson DeMille, beloved actor James Earl Jones, and the utterly peerless legend of the stage and screen Maggie Smith all get discussed. Art, architecture, mythology, philosophy, movies, television, music and more on this week’s show – in other words, something for everyone, right?

We hope you are hungry this week because Dean and Phil are serving up Detroit-style pizza, Japanese-Italian fusion, and red, white and blue margaritas! They discuss their 4th of July activities, celebrity sightings of a Supreme Court Justice and a former President of the U.S., modern and contemporary and text-based art, and a classical music “Live Event of the Week”. In “Celebrity Deaths”, one of the greatest screenwriters of all time and a beloved musician-turned-comic actor-turned artist both get remembered. A television show set in Tokyo and another set in Detroit both get discussed. Then Dean reviews the latest movie featuring everyone’s favorite Detroit cop, the brand new Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F and Phil previews three very cool sounding movies that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May. All in all it is a delicious and nutritious feast for the senses (at least your hearing) and for your funny bone!

This week’s episode finds Phil in the “DMV” (DC-Maryland-Virginia) area and Dean safely ensconced back in Michgan. Phil quizzes Dean about Renaissance man Martin Mull, iconic Winnipeg musician and broadcaster Ray St. Germain, two Oscar-winning composers, and an Oscar-nominated documentarian. Dean and Phil also sing the praises of perhaps the greatest actor to NEVER get nominated for an Oscar! Such streaming fare as “Tulsa King”, Season 4 of “The Boys”, “Ripley”, Season 2 of “Tokyo Vice”, and Richard Linklater’s Hit Man all get reviewed as well.

Dean will be heading to Los Angeles this week and plans to deal with a “haunted vacuum”? Paramount Pictures (and its parent company) are for sale. Dean and Phil discuss the ramifications of this. Many great films premiered in competition at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Dean and Phil examine the award-winners. A film festival favorite available now on Netflix is Richard Linklater’s dark romantic comedy Hit Man. Dean and Phil discuss it. Then, they take a deep dive look at three “art house” films of recent vintage and use that dive as the vehicle for exploring the function, importance and failure of critics. The films in question are Joanna Hogg’s ghost story The Eternal Daughter and Jane Schoenbrun’s coming-of-age psychodramas We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and the current theatrical release I Saw the TV Glow.

This week’s show begins with a correction about the great Death Race 2000 (discussed two episodes back) and about the talented filmmakers behind it. Then, in “What We’re Reading”, Dean discusses the Beatrice Hyde-Clare Mysteries and Phil reveals his thoughts inspired by Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality. These thoughts, in turn, lead to stories about UCLA great Bill Walton, who died this past week, and the Integratron, which Phil visited before last week’s show. After discussions of Multiverse theory, sound baths, and the wit and wisdom of John Wooden, focus shifts to a staggering array of movies and television shows. The movies include Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, the Egyptian comedy Voy Voy Voy, the Canadian vampire film Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, and the great Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman. The television shows are “The Mandalorian”, (followed by a deep dive into the entire Star Wars small screen universe), “Star Trek: Discovery”, (followed by an examination of a fatal flaw that has doomed “Star Trek” at various points in its history), and the genre mash-up Colin Farrell vehicle “Sugar” (for Apple TV +). After that, a question from a loyal listener like you (yes, YOU!) leads to a discussion about the large screen format ScreenX. Finally, in “Celebrity Deaths”, Phil quizzes Dean about a convicted felon-turned-actor and a two-time Oscar Winner for Best Picture!

The best thing about being podcast-only (again) is that for the first time in years, Dean and Phil can produce shows of whatever length tickles their fancy. Indeed, this week’s Chillpak Hollywood Hour gives you more than 10% more “hour”! The show begins with a cold open, wherein Phil reveals that he is not the only filmmaker who gets upset when other filmmakers don’t follow the rules they themselves have set up for a particular movie. In this instance, it’s Quentin Tarantino taking a much-loved modern horror classic to task. Then, Phil briefly revisits his recent travels to Catalina and Dean’s forthcoming travel plans, revealing that Dean has added a NYC trip to the mix in order to see a little-known, conceptual gem of a gallery. Phil previews where he will be spending Independence Day this year, and how a re-watch of Jim Jarmusch’s early classic Mystery Train has him jazzed to visit Memphis (and Graceland!) again this November. Standing ovations at Cannes, the impending financial train wreck that is Kevin Costner’s multi-part big-screen Horizon: An American Saga, and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two all get discussed. Phil then reveals the latest news regarding a potential defamation lawsuit against Netflix and “Baby Reindeer” and explains why he is willing to now give the show and its creators the benefit of the doubt. After discussing the brilliance of actor Dabney Colemna and how Phil once ruined a birthday party for the 9 to 5 star, the “Funniest Man in America” and a groundbreaking recording engineer get remembered before “Celebrity Deaths” turns into a quiz testing Dean’s cultural/show biz literacy. Finally, after a brief musical interlude, Dean re-joins the festivities, this time from London, where he files a “boots on the ground” report. Phil concludes by previewing next week’s show, including an extraordinary adventure he took to the Integratron!

It’s April Fools’ Day, and what better way to celebrate than by spending an hour enjoying the spirited, irreverent conversation of two fools who have been changing the way people listen to the internet since May of 2007? This week, Dean and Phil discuss the stand-up comedy of Ali Wong, the performance artistry of Laurie Anderson, the beauty of the Fox Theatre in Detroit, the Orpheum Theatre in DTLA, the significance of the Tower Theatre just down the street from the Orpheum, and the Apple Store it now houses. They dig into “True Detective: Night Country”, and celebrate the great Japanese suspense picture Woman in the Dunes, marveling at the fascinating life of its director, Hiroshi Teshigahara. Two Francis Coppola epics, one disastrous, one just completed, both go under the microscope, and in “Celebrity Deaths”, two all-time great actors get remembered.

Awards season is finally behind us and Phil is finally back in Los Angeles, and normalcy is restored on this week’s episode, or at least as much as “normal” is ever on our audio menu! Dean and Phil will reveal any thoughts they have about last week’s Oscars as well as if or how they celebrated St. Patrick’s Day this weekend. In a “Live Event of the Week”, Phil will regale with stories about seeing the great indie rocker Hamilton Leithauser at the legendary Cafe Carlyle. Five movies get discussed: the current smash hit Dune 2, a possible future cult favorite Argylle, the recent Marvel flop The Marvels, the interesting Nicolas Cage vehicle Dream Scenario, and the brand new, utterly brilliant performance documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus. All that, plus a groundbreaking stunt performer and a British actor of stage and screen get remembered in “Celebrity Deaths”.