Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast

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What kind of a host invites you to his house for the weekend and dies on you?

Despite its status as a benchmark of late 80s pop culture, the film Weekend at Bernie's sounds like it should never have been greenlit. Two lowly young insurance employees find their boss dead of an apparent overdose at his beach house--and pretend he is still alive. The mafia boss wh...

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You're the vulgarian, you fuck!

Tracie expected to enjoy revisiting the classic comedy A Fish Called Wanda, but she forgot just how much of this film's humor was derived from cringe comedy (John Cleese speaking Russian in his underwear when a large family stumbles upon him) and punching down (the dubious "comedy" of making fun of Michae...

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Pop quiz, hotshot!

As Emily tells Tracie this week, the 1994 film Speed is, in a word, BONKERS. This pop culture icon of the early 1990s not only gave us the impossible bus jump that we've always wanted from the movies and catapulted Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves to mega-stardom, but it also offered a pretty darn good romance plot in among the explosions, hig...

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I'm not sure that it's business of yours, but I do like to waltz with a log driver.

Tracie and Emily welcome six-time Webby Award winner Aaron Reynolds (of Effin Birds fame) to the podcast this week to share his deep thoughts about the animated short The Log Driver's Waltz. Created by the Canadian National Film Board in 1979 and aired between gaps in ...

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Okay, Joan Wilder, write us out of this one.

On this week's episode, Tracie revisits the 1984 film Romancing the Stone. Both Guy girls loved this film in their childhood, enjoying both the romance and comedy of seeing Kathleen Turner's Joan Wilder go from hapless writer to confident and capable badass. Baby Emily, as a budding writer, especially loved how ...

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And if I don't see you: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!

Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show, based on a screenplay by Andrew Niccol and starring Jim Carrey, was praised for its pop culture prescience because it came out just before the explosion of reality television. But as Emily argues on this episode, that cultural commentary misses the...

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When I was a little kid and I got scared, the Rain Man would come and sing to me.

Join us this week as Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1988 film Rain Man, for which Dustin Hoffman won the Oscar for his nuanced portrayal of autistic savant Raymond Babbitt. This comedy/drama, written by Barry Morrow and directed by Barry Levinson, was singled-handedly respon...

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"It's like we say in St. Olaf—Christmas without fruitcake is like St. Sigmund's Day without the headless boy."

On this week's episode, Tracie and Emily prove that you can go home again to beloved pop culture from the 1980s, as long as you're talking about The Golden Girls. The episodic adventures of Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia we...

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You cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it. Ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love...

The (relatively) recent news that Stephen Colbert's show was cancelled put Emily in mind of the fate of Stephen Fry's character Gordon Dietrich in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is why she decided to revisit this pop culture mashup that...

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Hockety pockety wockety wack! Odds and ends and bric-a-brac!

In revisiting this classic Disney animation from 1963, Tracie found that the charm she remembered from her childhood wasn't nearly as charming this time around. While the comedy of Merlin, Archimedes the Owl, and Arthur (known as the Wart) was still humorous, the film feels more like a series of uncon...

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"To die would be a grand adventure!"

Emily is delighted to welcome her dear childhood friend--and lifelong Peter Pan enthusiast--Jenn Book Haselswerdt to the podcast this week to discuss Steven Spielberg's 1991 film Hook. Although this fantasy film suffers from a lack of editing as well as some lazy 90s pop culture stereotypes regarding fatphobia and ...

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Though it's now consistently named #1 on IMDB's top 250 list of classic movies, Frank Darabont's 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption started out as a commercial flop with no pop culture cache. It's understandable why Shawshank struggled to find its audience: there's no romance or women, the storytelling is slow with anything resembling actio...

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I have my eyes... I have my cunning... and I have my strength.

This obscure sword-and-sorcery fantasy film from the early 1980s was a staple of the Guy sisters' formative pop culture years because it was on regular rotation on HBO (which people jokingly claimed stood for "Hey! Beastmaster's on!"). This week, Tracie delves back into the bizarre fi...

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Draw me like one of your French girls...

This week, Emily finally introduces Tracie to the pop culture juggernaut Titanic, which the elder Guy sister somehow completely missed. Even in 1997, Emily appreciated how the spectacle, costumes, special effects, and even the storytelling serve writer and director James Cameron's purpose, because the rich girl/poor boy ...

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It was a run-by fruiting!

Revisiting the beloved 1993 Robin Williams film Mrs. Doubtfire this week was a reminder to Tracie that you can never go home again. Though she was expecting some early nineties transphobia (and was mostly pleased at its absence), she was horrified to realize the film's plot relied on a kind of men's rights activist feminist backla...

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Two things I love to do: fight and kiss boys!

This week, Emily revisits another of the silly Pygmalion movies from the Guy girls' childhood: Michael Gottlieb's 1987 film Mannequin, starring Kim Cattrall, Meshach Taylor, and Andrew McCarthy. While the story of an underemployed Philadelphia artist who falls in love with a department store mannequin is as ins...

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So, what would you little maniacs like to do first?

This week, Tracie takes a deep dive into Weird Science: yet another of the John Hughes movies that helped to define Gen X pop culture. This 1985 teen comedy is a modern retelling of Pygmalion, the Greek myth that finds a sculptor falling in love with his artwork that comes to life. Except in this version, Anthony M...

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Welcome to Earth.

The 1996 Roland Emmerich-helmed film Independence Day was one of the touchstone movies for Emily's generation, so her flabber was absolutely gasted to learn Tracie had never seen it until a few years ago. Just in time for the 4th of July, Emily walks Tracie through what made this movie such a monumental hit in the U.S. and abroad, despite its ...

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25 cents per day, plus expenses. No case too small!

Adam Gwon, Emily's childhood friend and award-winning musical theater writer, joins the Guy sisters today to share how Donald Sobol's Encyclopedia Brown had an outsize influence on his understanding of storytelling. The delightful format of each short Encyclopedia Brown mystery--which gave the reader all ...