Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Tracie Guy-Decker, lover of animation, Muppets, religious allusion, fantasy, and feminism & Emily Guy Birken, storytelling nerd, finance writer, mental health advocate, and pop culture aficionado
120 episodes
3 days ago
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Well, that was absurd, let's eat dead bird! Just in time for Thanksgiving, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about the 1995 "romantic" comedy Home for the Holidays. Although the dysfunctional dynamics of the Larson family makes for realistic and funny storytelling, the romance between Holly Hunter's Claudia and Dylan McDermott's Leo seems to imply that women are just lacking a handsome man's tongue down their throat, no matter...
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Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Well, that was absurd, let's eat dead bird! Just in time for Thanksgiving, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about the 1995 "romantic" comedy Home for the Holidays. Although the dysfunctional dynamics of the Larson family makes for realistic and funny storytelling, the romance between Holly Hunter's Claudia and Dylan McDermott's Leo seems to imply that women are just lacking a handsome man's tongue down their throat, no matter...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Well, that was absurd, let's eat dead bird! Just in time for Thanksgiving, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about the 1995 "romantic" comedy Home for the Holidays. Although the dysfunctional dynamics of the Larson family makes for realistic and funny storytelling, the romance between Holly Hunter's Claudia and Dylan McDermott's Leo seems to imply that women are just lacking a handsome man's tongue down their throat, no matter...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. On today's episode, the Guy sisters welcome Emily's friend and co-author Joe Saul-Sehy, co-host of the wildly popular Stacking Benjamins podcast, to talk about the 1987 Oliver Stone film Wall Street. Even though it has had an enormous impact on the culture of finance (and Emily has written in the realm of finance for 15 years), neither of the...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. You mean I'm gonna STAY this color? On this week's episode, Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1979 Steve Martin film The Jerk, a comedy that never failed to delight the Guy sisters' father, no matter how many times he watched it. And for good reason. Martin's broad physical comedy and cultural commentary rooted in racial stereotypes conceals multiple layers of storytelling and humor in the tale of dim-witted Navin R....
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. We're releasing this episode (108) four days early in honor of Halloween! There are certain RULES that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. In December 1996, teenaged Emily learned to love horror movies when she saw Wes Craven's Scream in the theater. Twice. Unlike most pop culture specifically created for her demographic, Scream offered feminism, cultural commentary, badass women as protagonist...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. 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 who ordered Bernie's death sends the enforcer back to kill him agai...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. 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 Michael Palin's stutter), both of which made the film painful to rewatch. Wanda has some truly ...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. 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, high-speed chases, baby carriages full of cans, and shockingly high ...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. 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 children's programming (because there were no commercials!), this three min...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. 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 the storytelling made it clear working as a novelist translated to pra...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. 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 point. Reality TV may be the storytelling backdrop of The Truman Show...
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. 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 responsible for introducing autism to American society, it also pr...
Send us a text "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 weren't written with the Guy sisters in mind (they were in elementary school when the show debuted in 1985), but they loved the snappy comedy, the...
Send us a text 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 took Alan Moore's graphic novel response to 1980s Thatcherism and updated it with early 2000s American angst over Bush-era ...
Send us a text 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 unconnected events rather than any kind of storytelling. The only named woman in the story is Madam Mim--although looking fo...
Send us a text "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 distracted dads, Jenn explains how magical it felt to see this love letter to Peter Pan in the theater as a child. While the stor...
Send us a text 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 action occurring in the final 30 minutes, and nearly the entire film takes place within the walls of a prison. But just as the story takes its ti...
Send us a text 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 five act storytelling choices that animate the journey of Marc Singer's Dar, a prince stolen from his mother's womb by an evil priest--p...
Send us a text 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 romance allows us to see the entire ship. But Cameron's purpose doesn't seem to amount to anything more than "thi...
Send us a text 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 backlash, where every woman and girl in the movie represented a different feminist stereotype, from the humorless social worker to...
Send us a text 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 insubstantial as dandelion fluff, the film slipped some delightfully subversive and progressive gay representation into the mov...
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture Podcast
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Well, that was absurd, let's eat dead bird! Just in time for Thanksgiving, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about the 1995 "romantic" comedy Home for the Holidays. Although the dysfunctional dynamics of the Larson family makes for realistic and funny storytelling, the romance between Holly Hunter's Claudia and Dylan McDermott's Leo seems to imply that women are just lacking a handsome man's tongue down their throat, no matter...
