Read it and Weep

Pulp noir, a hard-boiled mystery novel about a down-on-his-luck private investigator. It's fun if a bit standard. Oh, I forgot to mention, the PI in question is a dinosaur in a human costume.He's not the only one. Anonymous Rex is about the dinosaur-in-human-suit subculture that makes up 5-10% of America. Why? Don't ask because he'll never tell you. But for whatever reason dinosaurs decided that the best way to survive was to pretend to be extinct, all the while dressing up in elaborate latex costumes and pretending to be mammals.It's weird. Too weird for Tanya, on the edge for Alex, and Nick just wishes there was more graphic sex. That's Nick's Deal.PS: Happy birthday, Monica!

Are you worried you're not that cool? Don't worry, you can always write a fantasy novel where a person, suspiciously similar to you, is the coolest.That's what John G. Stockmyer did with the Bandworld series. In the first book, Under The Stairs, a history professor loses his cat and tracks him to another dimension where history professors are treated like kings. It's not a terrible book, though the treatment of women is pretty reprehensible. Other than that, it's pretty fun.Congrats/thank you again to Jon from Norway who won this sponsorship during our International Live Show!

Grown Ups 2 is a bad sequel to a bad movie, made almost entirely of poop jokes and sexism. But that alone wouldn't elevate it to the pantheon of bad-movie pop culture. What did that was two brave men and their painful journey to become podcast legends.Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery are comedians from New Zealand who set out to make a whole new kind of bad-movie podcast. Rather than jumping from topic to topic each week (like we do), they created The Worst Idea Of All Time by watching the same movie, Grown Ups 2, every week for a year. Every week. I watched it once and almost passed out from the pain, but they do it every week. And it's amazing. The result is beautiful and strange and hilarious.We didn't make them watch it again for our show, but their 47 times (and counting) was more than enough for them to share more wisdom about the film than anybody involved in it knows. Listen to this and then go back and listen to their show. You won't be disappointed.H/T to Anders for pointing Tim and Guy out to us.

It's the 80s and the middle of the AIDS epidemic and there's a lot to be sad about. There's also a lot to be happy about because there are amazing clever people wandering around New York being delightful. HBO captured all of that nuance in its award-winning miniseries Angels In America.Sometimes it's hard to talk about a topic we all enjoyed, but we have no trouble here including our new segment called Pizza Segment and a very special Lightning Debate. Thanks Sean for sponsoring and trying to persuade us about magical realism and fast talking!

It's finally here. The white whale of a topic, the one we've been promising for what feels like decades, Four Weddings! If you haven't stayed in a hotel recently, here's what it's about: four brides are forced to complain at other peoples' weddings. And it's delightful.Joining us is Colleen (who isn't doing anything awesome on the Internet at the moment, according to her) our favorite reality show junkie. And just like when she talked to us about Hoarders, this is something she actually watches. It's kindof a guilty pleasure, but also kinda just a pleasure.And it is for us too. We've all got lots of opinions about weddings, and the 12 we watched for this only gave us more opinions.

It's a tradition in the United States for movie studios to pump out good enough Christmas movies every year. Since ABC Family's motto is "Good Enough", they're no exception.Desperately Seeking Santa is a half-assed Christmas rom-com from 2011 wherein a cold-hearted business woman is melted by a sexy Santa with abs. For a while you think they aren't going to get together but then they do! It's a Christmas miracle.Thanks to our little Christmas Miracles, newest Meat Buddies Helene Rousset and Keith Anderson. Hope you have a great holiday season whatever you do with it and we'll see you in two weeks.

Remember childhood? That was fun, right? Except the parts that weren't? That's how the 80s cartoon Duck Tales is too.Based on a reformed Scrooge McDuck and his three great nephews Hewis, Lewis, and Dewis, Duck Tales is a classic mass-produced Disney animated show with 60 episodes in each of its two seasons. It's really fun if you have nostalgia-colored glasses.This is the first in our new series of episodes called First Loves where we examine some of our favorite early media. This is Ezra's First Love and you can hear the love in his voice with everything he says.

The Truth about Charlie is a remake of the 1963 film Charade mashed up with Francois Truffaut's 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player. If you were guessing that those two movies shouldn't be mashed up, you were right.Truth follows the ex-wife(?) of a murdered spy(?) and her new boyfriend(?) a criminal(?). Really, it's a movie where the audience, the characters, and the film maker were all confused as to what was going on. Starring Mark Wahlberg in a berret.Thanks to Vicente for sponsoring (I hope this movie's been taken down a peg now) and Leighann, our newest Meat Buddy. Welcome to Meat Town, everybody!

If you love the Hunger Games, then you must be excited about the final movie! Too bad, because Lionsgate split it in half so you can pay twice as much and get a bunch of filler and an anticlimax! So get ready to half enjoy Mockingjay Part 1In the future, wars will be fought through child-actors on TV making commercials under duress. Sure, there's some shooting here and there but mostly it's just TV. And Catniss, former Hunger Games star, doesn't like being on TV so she hides in a hole the entire movie (which, again, is only half a movie).It's infuriating but it'll work. And good for them. Hollywood's been so put upon in recent years with all their record profits. It must be exhausting.And speaking of profits, thanks a ton to Ken for becoming our newest Meat Buddy! If you want to help keep this zepplin in the water, go to read-weep.com/meatbuddies and join the supporters group!

In the final installment of the Hunger Games trilogy (of books, all movie trilogies are now 15 episodes long), Suzanne Collins brings the revolution in for a landing. But it's a rocky one if you're not a fan of weird politics, dumb leaders, and moping teenagers.Mocking Jay features the climax of the revolution that our hero, Catniss, wasn't really involved in. And she continues to not be a big part in this one where she' basically a mascot for one of two incompetent leaders. The other side is using her ex boyfriend as their mascot and the entire war is fought by proxy with these two child figureheads. The side with giant lizard people and hovercraft loses and everything's fine, if you ignore a bit of PTSD.It's fine, really. And at least it's over and we know the answer to "will they or won't they?" Now there are just a bunch of movies to watch.Thanks to Emily and the Baroness Von Moneybags for becoming our newest Meat Buddies!

It's our first ever International Live Show, featuring reviews of two excellent combo movies: Wolf Cop and Teen Witch. Thank you so much to everybody who participated in the chat live with us.Here's the video if you'd like to see our pretty faces:

Whenever a great evil was unleashed in the 80s, it seemed the only way to stop them was a rag-tag group of children. The Monster Squad is about one such crisis.The squad is a group of kids who are obsessed with the Universal Monsters(tm). Wouldn't you know it, those monsters turn out to be real and the only thing standing between them and world domination would be somebody with an intricate knowledge of their franchises. And a virgin. And a holocaust survivor. That last part is kinda weird.Thanks to Paul for thoroughly researching his favorite childhood movies and settling on this one! It's getting nice and spooky up in here!

Left Behind is an inexplicable remake of the 2000 Kirk Cameron stinker, and the latest in a series of Hollywood's half-assed movies for the religious right that feature bumbling atheists learning tough lessons at the hands of intellectually and morally superior evangelicals. Like Christian music, the actual quality of the performance is less important than every single line being about Jesus, and in that, this Left Behind succeeds magnificently.If you're not familiar with the concept, Left Behind imagines a world in which God discovers a manufacturing defect in all of the evangelical Christians (which here represent a far, far higher percentage of humanity than in real life) and magically recalls them all to Heaven, leaving behind piles of neatly folded clothes and a bunch of tense arguments. Moments after all the boring religious people disappear, the entire world falls into chaos! Cars crash, planes fall out of the sky, and every single atheist (and Muslim and Catholic and non-apocalyptic Christian) immediately starts looting. Like the only thing holding us back from stealing TVs is the mere presence of religious nuts. That's pretty much the whole thing. Meet some dumb characters, oh look! a pile of clothes!, looting and havoc, the end.

We're going to be doing our first ever International Live Show on October 25th at 1pm PST (4 EST and who knows GMT). We're watching Halloween-themed movies and we need suggestions. Get to voting in the comments!

Drew Barrymore had to break out of her type casting as a child actor who could only do cute movies. After Doppleganger, everybody knew she had range; she could also be in completely insane movies.Doppl follows a woman who killed her parents as she gets in wacky adventures with her new roommate. All the fun comes crashing down when her doctor reveals he's been impersonating her and everybody else using a series of rubber masks and then Barrymore one-ups that be showing she's actually two identical alien worms with sword-hands. Yes, that's a faithful summary of the movie. It's weird.Thanks to Lauren for sponsoring and also for pointing out that members of the cloth (is that what they're called?) also listen to our show!And Portland wishes goodbye to Shane Torres who does a great radio show where he interviews artists about their day jobs.