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).

There may be tricks aplenty, but we can assure you, this week’s Season 2 Episode 99 will definitely be a treat for the listener! Before Dean and Phil can fully celebrate the spooky (like Dean’s live exploration this weekend of the haunted Wheeler Mansion), they have to discuss the truly horrifying – a real-life horror story ending in tragedy on the set of an independent film western that claimed the life of a talented young cinematographer. Dean shares a story from “The Lone Gunmen” of how he was almost killed on set! That will lead to remembrances of other talented individuals who died recently, including a beloved actor from TV and stage, the 7th friend on “Friends”, a longtime star of “The Andy Griffith Show” and the drummer for both Elvis Presley and Jerry Garcia! Then, it’s off to the movies, where your friends in podcasting discuss a handful of Halloween-appropriate classics before discussing the box office performance of Dune and review the film as well. Finally, it’s the return of the “Vintage Movie Ad” game, where Dean will try to guess the titles (3 remakes of horror classics and 3 sequels to modern horror classics) just from their ad copy!

It’s Dean’s birthday and we have a special, action-packed show! It gets under way with a famous movie star singing “Happy Birthday” to everyone’s favorite Lone Gunman. In “Live Event of the Week”, the return of Dean’s one-man improv “X-Files” show gets celebrated. Phil updates everyone on his most recent eye surgery before climbing his soapbox in the wake of the mass shooting in Gilroy and the seemingly ongoing war on humanity’s joy. 12 years ago, the summer of 2007 was Dean and Phil’s summer of 007 and they were discussing James Bond. This week, they talk about how the Bond producers have missed out on a seemingly huge opportunity and in “Celebrity Deaths”, your friends in podcasting remember a man who was a friend of Phil’s and the answer to an awesome 007 trivia question. They also celebrate the legacy of Rutger Hauer, and of a man whose life was synonymous with space exploration. This leads into a brief discussion about Moon landing “truthers”. Dean and Phil tackle the various ways movie theaters are looking to cure the box office apocalypse. They discuss Netflix’s deal with the Screen Actors Guild. They continue their ongoing discussion comparing the late Krzysztof Kieślowski and Quentin Tarantino, and, oh yeah, they review Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (spoiler free) and preview the “Star Trek” movie he might direct. Happy Birthday to Dean, and Happy Chillpak Hollywood Hour Day to all of you!