Mary Versus the Movies

"Indie Month" closes with a look at John Waters' breakthrough film Polyester, an homage to the "women's films" of the 1950s. We talk about kitsch, the suburbs, and Mary gets to gloat.

We watched Steven Soderbergh's breakthrough indie hit, and came away appreciating it as a fairly standard drama that dances around some ideas around intimacy, while not really surprising us much with its content--the title is far more salacious than the film itself.

This episode could've been two hours, because holy cow does Richard Linklater's breakthrough indie comedy provoke a lot of thought about the nature of work, generational angst, conspiratorial thinking, religion and pop culture, and whether withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy. For Dennis this was a trip down memory lane into his own Gen X youth, for Mary this was a real excavation of a lot of ideas, all wrapped up in a funny, thoughtful package.

Also, yeah, getting the "explicit" tag just because of a music cue we use.

Jim Jarmusch's Neo-noir-beatnik-comedy is a favorite film of Dennis's, and a staple of the 1980s indie film scene, so it's time for Mary to finally sit down and watch. Silly, stylized, and warm, "sad and beautiful" as one character says, it stars Tom Waits, John Lurie, and Roberto Benigni as three men stuck in a Louisiana jail for accidental crimes who try to find a way to live with each other.

It's an old-fashioned Christmas in the Smoky Mountains when Dolly Parton runs away from L.A. and ends up running afoul of a sleazy sheriff, a jealous witch, seven orphan, and Lee Majors as a a mountain man named Mountain Dan. It's a cornball affair, but very Christmassy.

Our Christmas-themed month continues with this not-exactly-Christmasy Japanese World War II movie starring David Bowie and set in a POW camp. However, this film about repressed desires, honor, toxic masculinity, and regret carries some potent themes, even if it's light on conventional Yuletide joy.

We're bending the rules a little here to bring you an early Muppets Christmas special, and one of the few Mary's never seen. Make some cocoa, curl up by the fire, and listen to us talk about the Muppets, John Denver, Jimmy Carter, vaudeville, Jack Benny, Old Time Radio, whether God has a wife, and more.

It's a Thanksgiving Miracle--we thought we'd seen this movie, but it turns out we hadn't, and now we know why it's a holiday classic. Is it John Hughes' best film? Maybe! Does it contain one of the funniest scenes in comedy? Arguably! And has travel in America actually gotten worse since the mid-1980s? DEFINITELY. So join Steve Martin, John Candy, and Mary and Dennis as we hit the road in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

This British satire is half a good movie and half a ham-handed play for an American audience unfamiliar with the tv series this was based on. The part of the film that posits the prime minister of the UK is a dangerous madman is a not-bad homage to Doctor Strangelove, while the American plot involving Michael Richards as a master-of-disguise terrorist is pretty dire. But at least the movie features a deadpan Peter Cook, Alexei Sayle in a Hawaiian shirt, and Rik Mayal destroying a wax museum.

This is the notorious film that got Lisa Bonet thrown off The Cosby Show. Initially rated X for a scene that honestly is pretty tame by today's standards, it's a fascinating blend of noir and horror, starring Mickey Rourke as a private eye collecting on a debt for the Devil, played by Robert De Niro. It has some sketchy racial and religious elements, but overall is a stylish head-scratcher.

In what is sure to become a Halloween tradition for us, we watch the comedy-horror film An American Werewolf in London and absolutely fall in love with it. Part gothic horror, part romance, part buddy-comedy, this is the second film we've watched from John Landis, and easily one of the best films for the podcast.

Spooky Month continues with our special guest, author and relationships specialist Alana Phelan (@hellolibrarian)! We sit down with Alana to watch the first Nightmare on Elm Street film. Will this be as quippy as we expect? Does the Simpsons parody spoil the ending? And just how is he killing these kids in their sleep? Find out on our latest episode.

Kicking off October's Spooky Month, it's The Witches of Eastwick, a comedy where Jack Nicholson's greasy ponytail is somehow able to pull down a harem that includes Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer. Directed by George Miller, who has one of the oddest filmographies for a guy with only nine feature films, and based on a novel by John Updike. It's a romp of a movie, so light some candles, pour some wine, and pull out your spellbooks for this.

We wrap up Back To School month with 1986's Real Genius. It's a PG Animal House meets War Games in this comedy about college students building a weapon for their professor only to realize the horror of what they're actually doing. Lightly satirical, with Val Kilmer as a Looney Tunes protagonist up against a William Atherton at his most arrogant. This movie was a really fun surprise for Mary, while confirming for Dennis that this is a better film than he remembered.

Folks, we had some problems with Hoosiers.

Will this be the episode that loses us listeners? Probably!

We're back with another Steve Martin film, this time his homage to the singing cowboy pictures of from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Unfortunately, he's working with John Landis on the backside of his directing heights, and we end up with a slightly-bloated mess, and that's even before tackling the sketchy themes of the movie. Still, it has some great music from co-writer (?!) Randy Newman.

And with that, Season 1 of MVM comes to an end! We are on a brief hiatus, and will be back in a week or two.

Timed to coincide with the current film The Green Knight, this episode has readings in Middle English, an increasingly-irate Mary expounding on the meanderings of medieval literature, and some truly terrible music. Medieval literature and Arthuriana is very much Mary's wheelhouse, so buckle in, and avoid any Sean Connerys you see carrying an axe.

David Byrne's mockumentary about a small Texas town, starring John Goodman, was a fun surprise--Dennis called it "Koyaanisqatsi as a comedy", and to Mary was a marriage of Wes Anderson and The Church of the SubGenius.

"They don't make 'em like that anymore" is a very tired sentiment, but it's been a while since we've seen a movie in theaters about working class girls coming of age, and this is a good one. Come for the dissing of Connecticut's pizza, stay for the mangled Antonio Gramsci references.

This space-western that never goes into space, starring nobody in particular, and featuring all the crisp cinematography of an episode of Airwolf, is easily the worst film we've watched for this podcast. There's a lot of spleen-venting in this episode--you've been warned.

This Amy Heckerling comedy starring Michael Keaton was a favorite film of Dennis's when he was younger--will it hold up to his own memories? Or will Mary be unable to see what's so funny about this gangster parody?

It's MTV meets Brave New World meets Rocky Horror meets the Bible in this 1980 musical extravaganza that we still can't make up our minds about, because wow, that ending really took us right out of it. And yet... we like it? We found so much to talk about whether this movie succeeds or fails that this episode is longer than our usual fair.

We had mixed feelings about this forgotten coming-of-age story set in 1963 Myrtle Beach, SC. The film is enjoyable, but a combination of Southern Pride and 1980s sexual politics left us a little unmoored. 

CW: talking about an attempted sexual assault that happens in the film.

We went into 1980's Xanadu thinking "this is gonna be a bad movie", and folks, we were both very right and very wrong. Is the acting wooden? Is the plot almost too simple? Is the directing middling at best? Yes, yes, and yes. But is the music great? Is there plenty of dancing? Does it have Gene Kelly rollerskating? Oh, absolutely. Unfortunately, the disco-fever-dream revival of 1930s musicals was a still-born genre, one that very few people embraced, but it has definitely has two converts in Mary and Dennis.

Our first guest! Mary's sister Anne comes by to talk about 1985's Silverado, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, and starring Kevin Kline, Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Brian Dennehey, and on and on and on. By the 1980s, the Western was dead, but that wasn't going to stop Kasdan from indulging in a little nostalgia for the genre. And while neither Mary nor Dennis had ever seen it, the film intentionally hews close to Western tropes so much that it didn't really matter, we could see where this was all going.

Things get personal on this episode, which is a little shaggier than most. What happens when Mary decides to watch the beloved children's film My Neighbor Totoro, written and directed by the great Hayao Miyazaki, and is reminded of painful childhood memories? Well, it's not our funniest episode, but it's definitely our most emotional.

We go a little long on this one, but come on, it's John Carpenter's The Thing, one of the greatest sci-fi horror films of the last 50 years. The story of men stationed in Antarctica, trying to figure out which one of them is a shape-shifting alien, is a thrilling exercise in paranoia, where the audience is as much in the dark as the characters.

Sean Connery is a marshal investigating a rash of suicides in a space mining colony in this somewhat obscure 1981 sci fi film. Mary was pleasantly surprised by this story of corruption described as "High Noon in Space". Is this one of Connery's best films? Is this one of Peter Boyle's worst characters? All these questions and more.

We didn't know what to expect with this obscure comedy from 1981; little did we know we had on our hands one of the biggest bombs in film history. A friend of the show called it "Nashville meets Cannonball Run", and she wasn't wrong. Is it good? Is it bad? Yes.

We were left pretty astonished by Werner Herzog's epic adventure film about the world most reckless opera fan.

As an homage to film noir and classic Hollywood, this movie was built for Mary. As a Steve Martin-Carl Reiner comedy, it was built for Dennis. Two great tastes are pretty tasty together in the 1982 film that mixes and matches films from all over the studio system into a story of murder, Nazis, and java.

We really don't know what to make of David Lynch's space-opera adaptation of Frank Herbert's cult sci-fi novel Dune. As critic Nathan Rabin would ask, is it a Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success? Too long? Too short? And why in the world was Sting cast? We really never answer these questions, because we're too baffled by the whole experience. So come and experience Dune, starring Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Max von Sydow, Patrick Stewart, and many more in what the studios thought would be "Star Wars for Adults".

Who knew this screwball comedy starring Rosanna Arquette, Aiden Quinn, Mark Blum, and most famously Madonna, would turn out to be a real gem of a movie? Definitely not Mary and Dennis, who were pleasantly surprised. Sit back, dream of a different life, get amnesia, and enjoy a trip through a pre-Giuliani New York City.

Now updated with new music! For reasons!

Even Stephen King, who wrote and directed it, admits Maximum Overdrive is the worst film connected to his body of work. Do Mary and Dennis think he's right? Well, yeah, but only because Mary can't remember anything about the TV movie The Langoliers. Join Emilio Estévez, Yeardly Smith, and a mostly forgettable cast as they take on some very angry trucks and an extremely coked-up Stephen King.

What is there to say? One of the most famous "bad movies" ever made, and somehow Mary has never seen it, not even while flipping channels on cable, which is where everyone else encountered the Patrick Swayze masterpiece, which flopped in theaters.

Did Cher totally deserve an Oscar for her performance? Is Nic Cage's performance turned to 11? Should Danny Aiello just stay in Sicily? Is this the best movie we've covered so far? Does the moon really hit your eye like a big pizza pie? The answers to these questions and more can all be found in this episode.

Mary muscles her way into Predator, and Dennis reminisces about the late, great premium cable channel PRISM. Also, choppers are gotten to.

In our first episode, Mary and Dennis tackle the 1980 workplace farce 9 to 5, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Dabney Coleman. It's a story of sex, revenge, and the power of collective action. It also completely missed Mary growing up, despite her mom apparently identifying pretty closely with the film.