Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Don’t you…forget about me…Don’t Don’t Don’t Don’t! In this reprise of episode 23, Tracie takes another look at the 1985 John Hughes film The Breakfast Club. This classic Gen X teen movie passes the Bechdel test and explicitly names the prude-or-slut trap of female sexuality. It also treats Claire and Allison like prizes for the boys in the film and assures the audience that we’re not so different from each other–by featuring...
Aug 18
1 hr 4 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Hold on to your butts. On this week’s episode of Deep Thoughts, Emily shares her analysis of the 1993 film Jurassic Park, a pop culture phenomenon that offers a surprising level of feminism. Emily describes the social thrill of being the target audience for a summer blockbuster (she was 14 when it came out) and her discomfort with how Michael Crichton's original book portrayed the only two female characters as an annoying ch...
Aug 11
1 hr 12 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Tale as old as time? It’s old, alright. True as it can be? Hmm, about that... Beauty and the Beast is an old and not-so-necessary model for romantic love. Hiding in the remarkable Howard Ashman score to this 1991 film is a not-like-other-girls feminism and a reified classism that isolates poor Belle and gives her no choice but to fall for her captor. The sisters grapple with the conditioning from this movie (and so ma...
Aug 4
50 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. It smells like the funk of 40,000 years in here! In today’s episode, Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the iconic and groundbreaking 1983 music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. From the way the mini film subverts expectations to the meaning behind the horror tropes it relies on to how to contextualize Jackson’s immense talent with the troubled and abusive life he led, the Guy girls explore what it means that a novel...
Jul 28
54 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Sometimes you wanna go Where everybody knows your name This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie revisits the must-see-TV comedy that was always on at the Guy Sisters' house: Cheers. This powerhouse of 80s and 90s pop culture, created by the Charles brothers and the late James Burrows, is genuinely funny: the pilot episode is used by TV writers to teach efficient storytelling to establish a new sitcom. And while t...
Jul 21
1 hr 1 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion Grease is the way we are feeling This week on Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Emily revisits one of the classic movies of her Gen X childhood: Grease. This musical comedy was set in high school, but all of the lead actors were in their 20s and 30s, which may help explain why much of the lessons about romance, performing adulthood, and gender expression sailed over her head as ...
Jul 14
1 hr 3 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. I am standing here beside myself. For this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie returns to one of the beloved movies from her and Emily's shared Gen X childhood: Short Circuit. The sisters remembered the charming robot Number 5 who gained sentience, the romance between Newton (Steve Guttenberg) and Stephanie (Ally Sheedy), and the funny malapropisms from Ben, the Indian character played by Fisher Stevens...
Jul 7
57 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. “…all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings.” This week, Emily revisited everyone and their aunt’s favorite late-90s advertisement, er, romcom, You’ve Got Mail. The film was a feature-length commercial for America Online starring two of the biggest names in romcom, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. With the biting interactions that lead to romance between Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) and Joe Fox (Hanks), this Nora Ephron-...
Jun 30
58 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. No-one said anything to me about the full monty! For this week's episode of Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit, Tracie returns to the 1997 British comedy The Full Monty. The film is a meditation on masculinity from multiple angles, including economic, sexual, psychological, physical, parental, and societal, as well as a treatise on the political aftermath of Thatcherism that left an entire generation of British men without jobs...
Jun 23
55 min
Send us a message! Include how to reach you if you want a response. By the Power of Grayskull! On Deep Thoughts About Stupid Shit this week, Emily returns to her first pop culture crush: He-Man, aka, Adam, prince of Eternia. As a very small child, she loved the cartoon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and she was somewhat disheartened to learn that this beloved staple of her Gen X childhood was created specifically to sell He-Man toys. The animation, storytelling, and even the cultura...
Jun 16
51 min
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