Episodes

  • Meryl Streep is "The Iron Lady"
    Mar 27 2026

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    Meryl Streep pulls out one of her best accents to play Margaret Thatcher in the 2011 biopic "The Iron Lady." Jim and Gary both agree that Streep is a great actress and that Thatcher was one of the major figures of the last half of the 20th Century, but they are not completely aligned on the use of scenes where Thatcher is shown to have dementia. Jim also reminisces about the time he met her in Number 10 Downing Street.

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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Robert Altman's "Nashville"
    Feb 20 2026

    In their second podcast about movies from 1975 -- designated by Netflix as the greatest year in movie history -- Gary and Jim discuss Nashville, the sprawling epic about country music and politics. It's one of the most cynical movies of the Seventies and also secretly one of the funniest. But is it as smart about politics as it thinks it is?

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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Warren Beatty's "Shampoo"
    Jan 15 2026

    Warren Beatty has long insisted that his sex farce "Shampoo" set on the night in 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected President, was a political satire. But was it really, or does it tell us more about the 1970s than it does the 1960s?

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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Netflix's "Death by Lightning" --The Assassination of James Garfield
    Dec 19 2025

    "Death by Lightning is a four-part Netflix series about the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881, which despite sounding pretty esoteric, is an absorbing depiction of a moment in time during the Gilded Age. Jim and Gary discuss whether this event has any lessons for us today and wrestle with the important question: what's up with all the beards?

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    1 hr
  • Peter Sellers in "Being There"
    Nov 19 2025

    In possibly his greatest movie role, Peter Sellers plays Chance, a simple-minded gardener whose mundane observations are taken as oracular epigrams and metaphors that take the political establishment by storm. "Being There" has a lot to say about our gullibility and our habit of hearing what we want to hear. Once widely lauded as a hilarious and biting commentary about politics, the movie is now rarely in the conversation about great political films but it is as timely today as it was in 1979.

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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster in "Seven Days in May"
    Oct 21 2025

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    Jim and Gary discuss whether a military coup was possible in the early 1960s, as Hollywood seemed to think. "Seven Days in May" is a political thriller that JFK wanted to see made because he was worried about the power of the military. The result is a tense drama in which Burt Lancaster plays a rebellious Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Kirk Douglas as his skeptical senior aide. Will the Constitution be upheld or trammeled?

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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Mel Gibson is "The Patriot"
    Sep 4 2025

    Gary and Jim discuss the 2000 Mel Gibson film "The Patriot," which depicts the brutal war between the patriots and the British during the War of Independence. They agree that George Washington is a great but remote hero and that the movie itself is rough to watch. War is Hell indeed.

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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Hugh Jackman, as Gary Hart, is "The Front Runner"
    Aug 7 2025

    In 1988, Senator Gary Hart was the front runner to be the next President of the United States until he went for a three-hour cruise on the pleasure craft "Monkey Business." Hugh Jackman plays Hart in "The Front Runner," which asks an always relevant question: how much of a politician's personal life is relevant to his performance as a public servant?

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    1 hr and 4 mins