Welcome to a truly great episode and it all starts with an alternately touching and hilarious cold open! In “Celebrity Deaths”, Dean and Phil remember a jazz music pioneer, an actor who was an important influence on Dean, and a versatile, prolific, Oscar-winning filmmaker. Last week’s Oscar nominations get analyzed, as does the ensuing anger surrounding supposed “snubs”. After the break, the great film critic Luke Y. Thompson joins the fun, discussing how critics, like performers, can get “pigeon-holed”. He offers up thoughts on the Oscar-nominated The Zone of Interest and the underrated Beau is Afraid, and hips you to a black and white sci-fi comedy that is well worth your 68 minutes! He even talks about toy reviews and toy photography! And trust us, this episode offers a lot of laughs! Find links to all of Luke’s articles and reviews at https://linktr.ee/lytrules. And learn about his work as a toy collector, photographer and reviewer at https://www.eql.com/media/adult-toy-collecting

 

This weekend, Dean and Phil recorded one VERY LONG conversation that will be edited into the next two installments of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour. The next time they record, they will be together in Dean’s Motor City-adjacent stomping grounds! This week, you will hear your friends in broadcasting and podcasting discussing the new cinematic releases Medusa Deluxe, Afire and Barbie as well as a new Taiwanese film on Netflix (Marry My Dead Body). You will hear the latest developments in the negotiations between the writers and the media companies (and yes, there HAVE BEEN negotiations!). You will hear another in Dean’s suggestions of vintage television shows you might wish to binge while your favorite new shows will be gone for a while. There is an email with a correction from a loyal listener that itself gets corrected! And because everyone loves a sequel, Dean and Phil follow upon last week’s all-music edition of “Celebrity Deaths” with another all-music edition, as they discuss the lives and legacies of many music notables that died over the past weeks. 

Welcome to an excellent installment of your Chillpak Hollywood Hour that begins with tales of springtime before a couple of great soapbox moments courtesy of the “sensitivity editing” of Agatha Christie and newspaper headline treatments of black men in the media. An actress who starred in many beloved projects, a screenwriter behind crowd-pleasing movies, a singer in a legendary doo-wop band and the designer responsible for the way Phil smelled throughout his teens and twenties (!) all get remembered in “Celebrity Deaths”. Dean champions Cocaine Bear, Elizabeth Banks, and the return of Nicolas Cage (not that he went anywhere). Phil regales with amazing original casting choices for a couple of popular recent films before launching into an appreciation of the fable-making on display in John Wick: Chapter 4.

Your friends in podcasting are celebrating 100 episodes of broadcasting! That’s right, this is their 100th episode since moving their franchise to Odysy Radio! Dean and Phil celebrate this milestone by sharing personal stories of on-set safety in the wake of the emerging details behind the fatal shooting on the set of Rust. They discuss society’s need for “instant eulogies” in the wake of another friend’s death. They discuss the latest news on the big-screen Dune and review the latest from Wes Anderson. All that, plus the return of the “Live Event of the Week”! Finally, Clint Eastwood is celebrating 50 years as a filmmaker, and Dean and Phil get in on the action by “programming” a “Directed by Clint Eastwood” film festival – 5 double features you might want to watch!

Pop quiz: What do an Oscar-winning writer-editor, four dead actors, the story of how William Shatner became a star, 3 hilarious movie ads from the 1980s, anti-trust lawsuits pitting writers against actors, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards, a graphic novel, and the brother of presidential assassin James Wilkes Booth have in common? They are all a part of this week’s episode of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour!

From the ridiculous to the sublime, from the heartfelt to the hilarious, prepare to point the compass of your brain to a journey on the map of the entire infinite during this week’s installment of YOUR Chillpak Hollywood Hour! Phil shares heartfelt thoughts about “Star Trek” and “Star Trek: Discovery” and then, he and Dean have a ball unpacking the desire on the part of an Oklahoma Lawmaker to declare a “Bigfoot hunting season” in his state! Two of the greatest actresses of all time get celebrated, as Phil shares touching remembrances of Cicely Tyson and hilarious first-hand accounts of Cloris Leachman. Dean has championed filmmaker Christopher Nolan for conveying different perceptions of time before, and longtime listeners of this show will remember that the very first time Dean and Phil welcomed a guest, it was the late, great Philip Newby who wanted to discuss how time gets depicted in movies. So be warned, as Dean and Phil discuss 2020’s Tenet, it gets mind-blowing! And when they get into celebrating one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most underrated masterpieces, the show becomes a master class on the subjects of suspense and tension!

A true prodigy, singer-songwriter EmiSunshine earned national attention before she was ten years old. Now, still shy of her sixteenth birthday, EmiSunshine is a skillful and soulful purveyor of the music genre known as Americana. After playing one of her brand new tunes, Dean Haglund interviews her in the first half of this week’s show and she even shares a ghost story! In the second half of the show, Dean reviews Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man and Phil shares with Dean a hilarious story about a mutual friend’s adventures in screenwriting. Finally, Dean and Phil celebrate the peerless cinematic legacy of the great Max Von Sydow. Something for everyone? We like to think so!

This week’s epic, 80 minute long show begins with an hilarious update about Phil’s medical adventures before the return of “Live Event of the Week”, where classical music, Dean’s forthcoming live comedy show, and a sordid chapter of the Los Angeles Breakfast Club’s history get discussed. Then, the Chillpak Morgue is opened as character actress Sylvia Miles, heiress Gloria Vanderbilt and Jim Pike, lead singer of famed 60’s vocal group The Lettermen, are remembered in “Celebrity Deaths”. And speaking of “Lettermen”, David Letterman has returned to Netflix with season 2 of his series “My Next Guest …” Phil raves about an episode featuring Ellen DeGeneres, on that boasts a cameo by Clint Eastwood, which gets Phil thinking about Clint’s acting career. HIs films Where Eagles Dare and The Bridges of Madison County get discussed. And those are far from the only movies Dean and Phil discuss. They re-examine the classic Hong Kong actioner The Killer on its 30th anniversary. They also analyze the recent box office failures of several previously unassailable cinematic franchises and offer suggestions of what franchise producers and studios can learn from the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as from the John Wick and James Bond series of films. 

Phil is back from Washington, D.C. with stories of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, Civil War Re-enactments, and high school baccalaureates. Dean is back from X-Fest 2, which was like a high school reunion for him, “X-Files” style. He has tales of being reunited with his fellow “Lone Gunmen” with “Spender”, with “Krycek” and with Frank Spotnitz. He also discusses Legos and his graphic novel as well as future plans to explore Chicago. Then, actress-singer-producer-activist Chase Masterson joins Phil for part 1 of their conversation.

Dean previews this weekend’s X-Fest convention all about “The X-Files”, and discusses the latest on his streaming comedy series “Gravity Hole”. In “Celebrity Deaths”, Dean and Phil celebrate the great singer Leon Redbone, the last of the Mohawk code talkers from World War II, and the socialite whose conviction and subsequent acquittal of murder formed the basis of the Oscar-winning Reversal of Fortune. Phil hips Dean to the breaking news about the Canadian genocide of indigenous women, and they commiserate over the latest mass shooting in the USA. They share an email about the (non-existent) Bowling Green Massacre. They assess the current state of movies in theaters, on HBO, via Netflix, and more, especially through the prism of reviewing two new comedies, a western revival, and one of the longest-developing projects in recent Hollywood history. Because next week’s show might be a mostly a pre-recorded interview, this week’s show is an extra 12 minutes long, offers something for almost everyone, and is jam-packed full of podcasty goodness!