Falling in Love Montage

If you want more Jack Black than you can shake a stick at, there’s no better choice than the Kung Fu Panda trilogy. But we’re talking about Nancy Meyers’s warm and fuzzy The Holiday this time, which Jack Black is also in (as well as Jude Law, Eli Wallach, and a couple of chick-flick all-stars). With this episode, we become the leading ladies of our own lives, by deciding that we can release a Holiday episode at the end of January in a pandemic. 

It’s the holiday season and the 107th episode of this chick-flick podcast — so really what choice did we have but to discuss 2000’s High Fidelity with our friend and Beta-Band-stan Shane Kearney? It makes sense if you consider our continued use of John Cusack as a 2021 coping mechanism, or if you know that one of our hosts wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for a meet-cute in a record store in Chicago.
Anyway, it’s one of our top-5 favorite male-led rom-coms, with one of our top-6 favorite guests of the year. Happy holidays.

Merriam-Webster defines “footloose” as “having no ties; free to roam about.” 

So yeah. It’s our podcast and our Octobermonth episode, and we wanted to talk about Footloose with our friend, return guest Ollie Brady. So we did.
It’s almost spooky how much everybody cut, everybody cut, everybody, everybody cut footloose.

Check out some of Ollie’s guest turns on the Media-eval Podcast!
The very talented Jon Biegen did our spooky intro music — hit him up if you want him to make music for you!

And if you want to hear us talk about an actually scary movie, don’t forget we covered Sixteen Candles back in April.

Happy JAN(uary?)-September in October! For this Sept. episode we happen to be releasing in Oct., we brought in Helen’s BFF Jan (Thrapp)! 

After 20+ years of friendship and 5+ years of Falling in Love Montage, we wanted Jan’s first visit to be really formidable, so we spent 2.5 hours (after cutting it down) talking about Onur Tukel’s 2016 satirical black comedy about formidable women, Catfight. 

Check out Catfight, currently streaming on US Netflix, and check your local county animal control for information about fostering animals.

It’s still technically August, which we all know is Valerie’s birth month, so for a special gift, we tackled Peter Bogdanovich’s 1993 dram-rom-com The Thing Called Love, starring Samantha Mathis and River Phoenix (in Phoenix’s last full role). If you’ve never seen it (and, statistically speaking, a lot of you will have never seen it) — don’t worry, we take plenty of silly, irrelevant tangents too.

Note: Helen’s audio is a little wonky at parts in this one, but it should still be listenable. And we know you’re only here for Dermot Mulroney’s hats anyway DID YOU KNOW DERMOT MULRONEY WAS IN THIS??

Enough of the ’80s, let’s visit “the ’80s”! Gena Radcliffe of Kill by Kill joins us to rap about the 1998 Sandler-Barrymore rom-com The Wedding Singer.

Check out the Kill by Kill podcast and Gena’s writings for The Spool.