The first show of 2025 find Dean and Phil in good form and discussing a wide array of topics including the landscape and geography of NY’s Central Park, nature photography, the It Ends With Us controversy and lawsuit, and the near future of motion picture distribution both theatrically and via streaming. The truncated nature of this year’s mad dash Awards Season will get analyzed before the Netflix series “Man on the Inside” gets reviewed. Then, your friends in podcasting roll up their sleeves to re-examine Netflix’s 2018 film The Christmas Chronicles and offer their thoughts on the Ralph Fiennes-Juliet Binoche starrer The Return as well as the brilliant Nickel Boys and the reviled (and misunderstood?) Joker: Folie a Deux. Finally, thoughts regarding the suicide of filmmaker Jeff Baena are offered and Ralph Fiennes closes the show by being very “demure”.

Because Phil hosted “Leif Erikson Day 1953” at Friendship Auditorium in Los Angeles on Sunday night, he took a much needed day off on Monday. And so, this week’s installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour is one day late … Your friends in podcasting reconvene and compare notes on their respective “Live Events of the Week”, including upcoming comedy shows everyone in the Detroit area can enjoy at Go Comedy! Phil also reveals details of a party he attended in the actual Salem’s Lot house! In “Celebrity Deaths”, Dean and Phil remember the “King of Confetti”,  an opera soprano, an unsung blues artist, a punk rock icon, a pioneering actress of stage and screen, and a delightful character TV performer. After a discussion of a little-known Buster Keaton classic “talkie”, the subject shifts to comic book movies. Martin Scorsese’s (perceived) indictment of such movies, Cynthia Erivo’s (sure to be Oscar-nominated) portrayal of Harriet Tubman and Todd Phillips’ Joker, a fascinating mess of a psychological period piece and villain origin story, all get analyzed.

Recorded at 6 am (Pacific) on a Monday morning, this 70 minute conversation between your friends in podcasting is a heartfelt, insightful, irreverent exploration of such topics as knife-wielding homeless, the NFL, The Joker, backstage yoga, the important life skills improv training can teach, the key to artful conversation, the danger of reading “news” online (especially on social media), curiosity, empathy, grief, The King of Comedy and more! Oh, and don’t forget to check out Dean’s live, improv, streaming comedy series, Gravity Hole!