Falling in Love Montage

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. 

“This is what an entire diaspora of edgelords is to going to base their personality on.”
-Bill, The Brain

“When I smoke locker-weed, I just gotta dance, y’all.” 
-Helen, The Basketcase

“Did you ever have Saturday school? …If it’s expunged, you don’t have to tell us.”
-Valerie, The Criminal

We came together on a non-school-day to discuss one more (the last?) ’80s movie mentioned by Olive in Easy A. Its chick-flickness may be dubious, but we were still delighted to have our good friend Bill O’Donnell back on to talk about the John Hughes for-real classic The Breakfast Club.
We learned a lot about ourselves — and a whole lot about the effects of athletic tape on hairy buttcheeks.

Helen’s whiny and pee-filled dog Walter also makes a cameo toward the end.

Check out Bill on our When Harry Met Sally episode!
Check out Bill’s cousin Lisa Genova’s new book Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting!
And download and/or stream our 100th episode — 16 Candles — to help us contribute to Stop AAPI Hate and RAINN!

We needed a little break from the problematic ’80s, so just for the heck of it, we decided to visit the problematic ’90s — and 1999’s beauty-queen black comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous. But we’ll be back with more John Hughes next month!

Unless Kirstie Alley stops us. 

OK, we dragged our feet a little getting to our 100th episode — and getting to Sixteen Candles. We know John Hughes’ directorial debut is considered a landmark teen comedy, one that is loved and celebrated. And even coming upon our own celebratory landmark, we couldn’t find much to celebrate in this stale cardboard cake of a movie.

That said, our discussion of the film’s major problems isn’t incredibly thorough or personal, and we maybe back off of some things for which we should hold the filmmakers more accountable. 
The hosts of Falling in Love Montage are acquainted with sexual assault, and we recognize that — no matter the decade or your age — we (womxn and men) sometimes lack the language to describe what’s happened to us. Sometimes we’re conditioned to believe nothing did. Sometimes we’re shamed into not disclosing.
Also, as white people growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, we were party to perpetuating stereotypes we learned through cultural osmosis and films like this one. It is our place to hold ourselves accountable, and in this and many cases, that means accepting a larger responsibility for our complicity — and recognizing it, listening, and doing better.

We can’t pretend that our discussion of a panty-centric coming-of-age movie or these show-notes about that discussion makes any real difference. But we can promise you that we will donate $1 to https://stopaapihate.org/ and https://www.rainn.org/ for every download of this episode up to 500 downloads.

Thank you for being with us, whether this is your 100th episode or your first. 

Note: Valerie mentions a Vox article in this episode. She actually means this excellent New Yorker article.