2 Dads 1 Movie

Tombstone (1993) is thirty-three years old, R-rated, and apparently the rare nineties western that's stayed alive the old-fashioned way, through pure word-of-mouth quotability, no memes or GIFs required (okay, except Curly Bill's "Well... bye."). That's Steve's pick, and it's personal. He fell for it as a teenager, rewatched it a couple times a year for most of his adult life, personally converted a few college friends into believers, and married into a household where his wife is every bit as obsessed (she made a childhood pilgrimage to the actual town of Tombstone, Arizona). Nic, somehow, had never seen it, despite owning half the dialogue secondhand through an early-2000s rap verse that turned out to be wall-to-wall Tombstone quotes. Twenty years of bobbing his head along to "smoke wagon" finally paid off.What follows is a tour through one of the most stacked casts either dad has encountered on this show, and a healthy chunk of the runtime is just pointing at the screen going "wait, that's also..." Kurt Russell gets credit for what Steve declares the single greatest mustache in cinema history, right before Wyatt Earp introduces himself by stealing a man's chair, his ego, and a quarter stake in the local casino, all in one scene. Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday turns into the unofficial MVP of the episode, one-liner after one-liner, including the dads' shared appreciation for "I've got a gun for the both of you" as a legitimately sound tactical philosophy. They debate breaking out the "missing or artificial limb" tag for the first time in a while over Virgil's ruined arm, and Nic spends a solid stretch lobbying for Powers Boothe to become a hereditary title, like the Dalai Lama, but with a better mustache.Underneath the body count, though, both dads keep circling back to the quiet, weirdly tender friendship at the center of it, the kind neither expected from a movie this violent. Steve calls it a top-five all-timer. Nic, a lifelong westerns skeptic, leaves a convert.

BASEketball hit theaters in July 1998, about a month after Steve and Nic graduated high school, and promptly became the kind of pre-party background movie where, as Nic confesses, you're ultra familiar with the first twelve minutes and mildly surprised to learn there's a plot. It's Steve's pick to close out the penultimate year of 2 Dads 2 Decades (penultimate means second to last, as he likes to remind people), and both dads burned actual college hours trying to play the game in real life. The fatal flaw, they agree: psych-outs do not survive contact with reality.What the South Park guys and David Zucker actually built is a rapid-fire joke machine, and there are receipts from a vintage Parker and Stone interview claiming only about ten percent of the screenplay made it to screen. The dads also make the case that Matt Stone's "derp" here is the first derp in recorded media. A star is born. Then there's the money: a $25 million budget and an $18 million loss make this the biggest flop in show history, for a movie that cost more than the last five or six pod entries combined. The wall-to-wall athlete cameos produce a unified theory too: David Zucker simply has dirt on every '70s sports MVP. It really came out on O.J.Elsewhere, both dads reveal they independently wrote down every fake team name and compare lists like absolute dorks (Beers, Felons, Informants, Lemons). A locker room scene makes it two straight weeks of giant prosthetics on this podcast, prompting a sober review of the circulatory logistics; the phrase "dialysis erection" is used, and a CamelBak of blood is proposed. Nic recommends an Unsolved Mysteries episode for reasons that are, once again, hog-related, and Steve notes the pattern. And a full Xennial taxonomy session sorts the Steve Perry psych-out people from the Noonan people, settled by the Uncle Jesse test (Dukes of Hazzard or Full House, choose carefully).Twenty-eight years later, the game still doesn't work in real life. The Steve Perry psych-out? Undefeated.

The dads land at 1996 in the 2 Dads 2 Decades run, and Steve has picked the movie that turned him into the guy who browbeat an entire cast party into watching it in late '97. Swingers is Jon Favreau's debut screenplay, Doug Liman's debut feature, a $200,000 picture that spent half its budget on music, and the closest thing Steve has to a sacred text. Nic caught it weeks later through that same friend-group trickle-down, saw the older cool guys he wanted to be, and has been quoting it ever since.What follows is a deep-tissue tour of a movie about, as Steve puts it, hanging out. The Vegas detour where Mike doubles down on 11 and gets buried for it. Favreau's actual grandmother at the next blackjack table getting offered free breakfast. Vince Vaughn's actual dad winning at the hundred-dollar table because that's what two hundred grand gets you in 1996. The Glenlivet-Glenfiddich-Glengarry escalation. "Hold on, Voltaire." The cocktail napkin pitch where Trent calls Mike the guy behind the guy behind the guy and somehow makes it sound like a compliment.The pair circle the things that make this movie hit so specifically: Rob and Mike's salami-and-OJ depression breakfast, the gun-at-the-Dresden detour, the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy Copa-shot homage that Steve has clocked from a screenwriter's angle, and the answering-machine sequence that should be taught in film schools. They land hard on Trent as a character who's casually problematic and a genuinely altruistic friend in the same breath, with the movie clear-eyed about which is which. Steve confesses he tells his kids a sanitized version of "you're so money and you don't even know it" pretty much daily.Two middle-aged dads watching twenty-six-year-olds figure out how to be okay, and recognizing every single one of them.Vegas, baby. Vegas.

In 1994, a 23-year-old Kevin Smith maxed out every credit card he could open to make a movie about two guys talking shit behind a convenience store counter for 92 minutes. Steve has been a stan ever since.Clerks (1994) is Steve's pick, and he doesn't hide it. This was the movie that made teenage Steve start asking how movies actually get made. Nic, meanwhile, saw it once around '97, has only watched two other Kevin Smith joints in his entire life, and is essentially arriving as a tourist in the View Askewniverse. Two pretty different angles on the same black-and-white slacker artifact.The dads work through Dante's worst day at the QuikStop, where the rolling steel doors are gummed up, the cigarettes are flying, and basically everyone in this New Jersey town wants to buy a pack at all times. They appreciate the resourcefulness it takes to make a movie for $27,575, from "I assure you we are open" shoe-polished onto a tarp, to a three-person rooftop hockey game shot to sound like ten. They also can't ignore the limits of that resourcefulness, especially when Veronica is wrestling with Smith's dialogue like it's been dipped in Crisco. Steve has thoughts on what a more experienced writer-director would have rewritten on the fly.The Death Star contractor monologue gets full appreciation, mostly because the roofer who walks in to escalate it grounds the bit in something real. Olaf the metal singer gives us the phrase "making fuck" and earns a slow clap for ESL effort. Randall gets full credit for being the most committed kind of bad friend, and Caitlin Bree gets treated, as Nic puts it, fucking brutal for the crime of cheating on the worst guy in the world eight and a half times.Hi, can I get some cigarettes? Just cigarettes.

Some movies leave a line or two rattling around in your head for years. Wayne's World (1992) apparently colonized Steve's entire personality. The man is 46 years old and recently said "exsqueeze me, baking powder" on a Zoom call with his direct reports. In a professional context. With no apparent regret.Steve picked this one as a deliberate palate cleanser after two heavy weeks, and it's hard to argue with the logic. Wayne's World is pure fun: Mike Myers and Dana Carvey in their element, a film that knew exactly what it was and executed it with loose, irreverent precision. Steve saw it in the theater as a kid, timing that was, as he points out, essentially perfect. Nic came to it slightly later on video, but the effect was the same. His 14-year-old daughter is currently in her own SNL phase, which tracks.The dads cover a lot of ground: Bohemian Rhapsody as genuine discovery (Steve's dad came home with a Queen's Greatest Hits tape shortly after), the sublime product placement scene that has somehow gotten funnier with age, and the eternal geographic mystery of who actually owns the Mirthmobile. Steve unpacks the champagne moment in Benjamin's penthouse with a level of specificity that Nic refers to as "The Sommelier Corner", and the correction is not wrong. Nic delivers a complete biography of the actor who plays Old Man Withers, which is a career résumé consisting almost entirely of roles like "Jail Bum," "Wino," and "Wino" again. Three times.There's real affection here for the supporting cast, a genuine appreciation for Tia Carrere doing her own vocals, and exactly the right amount of time spent on the three-ending finale. Plus: where else are you going to hear a spirited defense of Terry as a model of positive masculinity?Party on, Wayne. Party on Garth. Party on, Steve. Party on, Nic. Same thing, really.

Steve picked Goodfellas (1990) to kick off the '90s leg of 2 Dads 2 Decades, and the dads immediately acknowledged the absurdity of trying to review a movie that is, by any reasonable measure, perfect. Both discovered Scorsese around the same time — sophomore year of high school, mid-'90s, right in the post-Pulp Fiction window where you suddenly cared about what a good movie was and started hunting down the classics you were too young for the first time around. Steve's wife loves it so much she once built a Spotify playlist by adding every song as it came on, which, given the density of the soundtrack, is basically an entire decade of doo-wop and Motown in one sitting.The conversation moves through the film chronologically, but the dads keep circling back to the mechanics — the way Henry Hill's narration and Karen's narration create entirely different textures, the efficiency of Scorsese using voiceover to compress what would take ten minutes of screen time into one, and the moral dissonance of hearing Henry explain mob protection as a neighborhood service while he's on screen pouring gasoline over a parking lot full of cars. Nic is fascinated by the bust-out of the Bamboo Lounge and the matter-of-fact cruelty of "fuck you, pay me," a phrase both dads recognize has outlived the movie entirely.Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito dominates the episode. The "funny how" scene — largely improvised, Nic notes — gets the reverence it deserves, but it's the smaller Tommy moments that really get the dads going: shooting Spider in the foot and then yelling at him not to make a big deal out of it, the christening joke after smashing a champagne bottle over a guy's head, and the gut-punch of his almost-making ceremony, where Pesci's quiet "oh no" in the empty room earns comparisons to the best practical effect in the film. Nic awards the ice pick murder of Maury a perfect 10 from the Lithuanian judge for its no-splash precision.Both dads marvel at the Copacabana tracking shot, the Billy Batts scene and the midnight visit to Tommy's mom for a shovel and a knife, and the way Scorsese's mother plays the old nonna so perfectly you almost forget there's a body in the trunk. Nic calls out De Niro's ketchup bottle technique — rolling it sideways in his palm — as something he and his friends adopted permanently. The May 11th, 1980 sequence gets flagged as one of the tensest stretches in the film, with Henry juggling guns, drugs, dinner sauce, a helicopter, and a woman who won't fly without her lucky Paddington hat.Lorraine Bracco's Karen gets the spotlight she deserves, and both dads are baffled she didn't win the Supporting Actress Oscar. The silent choking sob after Henry takes the gun from her, the scene at Janice's buzzer with two kids and a pacifier, and the voiceover about not letting someone else win — Steve calls it heartbreaking, and Nic doesn't argue.Steve says there's no fat on the bone even at two and a half hours. Nic says nothing about it will ever look off. The only quibble is the final shot of Tommy firing at the camera and the Sid Vicious version of "My Way," which Steve would've swapped for Frank Sinatra or, ideally, just Henny Youngman telling jokes over the credits. A small complaint for a flawless film — and one that, as both dads note, makes everything else in the genre better just for existing.

Beetlejuice (1988) is one of those movies where everybody thinks they've seen it more times than they actually have, and both dads discovered exactly that when they sat down with Tim Burton's PG-rated fever dream about dead suburbanites, haunted real estate, and a bio-exorcist with boundary issues.Steve picked this one, and it's personal. He was 8 when his parents took him and his brother to see it in theaters, and he credits Beetlejuice and Gremlins as the one-two punch that turned him into a horror kid. Nic's relationship with the film is fuzzier. He saw it young but suspects the Saturday morning cartoon warped his memories, much the way the Ghostbusters cartoon convinced a generation that Slimer was a main character. Revisiting Tim Burton after covering Pee-wee's Big Adventure earlier in the run, both dads are struck by what a bigger budget ($15 million, same as Wall Street) let Burton do with practical effects, puppetry, and that unmistakable Danny Elfman score. Nic pauses to note that Danny Elfman is the most perfectly named man in show business. If his name were Craig Winchester, none of this works.The conversation lingers on Michael Keaton, and rightly so. The makeup was largely his idea. A huge chunk of his lines were improvised. Nic calls the performance a cross between Freddy Krueger, the Heath Ledger Joker, and Ace Ventura, and honestly that tracks. There's a loving sidebar about the single PG-rated F-bomb (and accompanying crotch honk), which Nic reports his 5-year-old niece has faithfully committed to memory and recited back to her father in full. The MPAA giveth, and children taketh away.Both dads light up over the Banana Boat Song dinner party sequence and the way it builds from confusion to pure joy, only to completely backfire as a scare tactic. Steve confesses an early crush on Winona Ryder's goth Lydia that he traces directly to the first girl he dated in high school. And a brief, pointed observation about Jeffrey Jones lands with the kind of silence that says more than the joke did. Catherine O'Hara, meanwhile, gets nothing but love. Her "indoor outhouse" line, the Deo dinner party kickoff, and the immortal "they're dead, it's a little late to be neurotic" all get their flowers.Not everything holds up under the magnifying glass. The pacing drags in stretches. The shrunken head effect at the end is the weakest in the movie. The extras at Miss Shannon's School for Girls are, by both dads' estimation, not a single one of them under 45. But the stuff that works still works beautifully, and as Steve puts it, this is one of those movies that sticks with you so indelibly that it's just always there in the back of your mind. Six-and-a-half out of ten from the dads, and a reminder that there's still no better entry-level horror than the movies that started it all.

Steve brought a childhood favorite to the table this week, and Nic brought a grudge he didn't know he had. Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) is John Hughes's love letter to the perfect skip day — a senior with no car but a god-tier hacking setup, a best friend's dad's priceless Ferrari, and a city full of places most suburbanites never bother to visit. Steve first watched it on LaserDisc in elementary school and has seen it a few dozen times since. Nic? He'd seen it once, maybe, and knew the ska band Save Ferris before he knew what it was referencing.What follows is a spirited 90-minute argument about whether Ferris Bueller is a charming rogue or, as Nic puts it, a selfish, entitled con man running "Ferris LeVey's Day of Do What Thou Wilt." The dads agree on more than you'd expect: the parents are shockingly good people being ruthlessly exploited, Cameron Frye is the emotional core of the movie, and Ed Rooney is a man who abandoned an entire student body to stalk a teenager through the suburbs. They compare Ferris to Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can, note the convenient fantasy logic that lets nobody hear him when he breaks the fourth wall, and wonder why the real Abe Froman never showed up to claim his table. Steve drops a jaw-dropping Ferrari deep cut — a 1961 250 GT California sold at Pebble Beach in 2025 for $25.6 million, meaning the car in the movie is now worth more than the inflation-adjusted budget of the film itself. And yes, Ben Stein's economics lecture about the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act hits a little different in 2026.The parade scene becomes a full flashpoint. Nic's take: a teenager hijacking a German heritage celebration to lip-sync a Beatles cover while a marching band pretends to play along is grounds for a riot, not a standing ovation. Steve doesn't entirely disagree but has decades of goodwill banked. Cameron's poolside diving board stunt, Jeannie's clutch save at the back door, and Charlie Sheen's method-or-meth approach to looking strung out all get their due. Two dads, one LaserDisc classic, and a gap wide enough to park a kit car Ferrari in.

This week, the Dads continue their 2 Dads 2 Decades march with 1984's Ghostbusters.Steve has seen Ghostbusters well over a hundred times. He watched it on LaserDisc as a four-year-old, weekly through high school and college, and still has an autographed photo of Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis hanging on his wall. Nic's history is a little more modest: he saw it young, lost track of it in the no-VCR, no-cable wilderness of his childhood, and circled back in high school when everybody was passing tapes around and quoting lines at each other. Both dads came in hot for this one, and the conversation has the giddy energy of two people who know they're about to have a really good time.They dig into everything that makes the movie tick: how the practical effects hold up spectacularly because the ghosts actually affect the real world around them (proton blasts carve burning gashes in walls, Slimer eats real food off real plates), why Murray and Aykroyd are both operating at absolute peak here, and the way Dan Aykroyd's fast-talking pseudo-science sounds so confident you just nod along like he was a guy who walked into a building holding a clipboard. There's a deep appreciation for Ray Stantz's dangling cigarette, the eggs frying on Dana's countertop, and the fact that a concert cellist apparently makes enough to afford a corner penthouse on Central Park West. Nic, wearing his CPA hat, is particularly horrified by Louis Tully cheerfully broadcasting his clients' financial details at his own party, a fireable offense dressed up as Rick Moranis being delightful.The Huey Lewis plagiarism saga gets a full airing, including the detail that Ivan Reitman accidentally planted the song in Ray Parker Jr.'s brain by leaving it as a temp track in early footage. Steve mounts a passionate defense of the "Dr. Venkman, not Mr. Venkman" principle, rooted firmly in being married to a doctor. And there's a solid minute spent reckoning with the fact that Dan Aykroyd apparently wrote himself a ghost blowjob into a PG movie, which is a power move that transcends decades. The dads land firmly on the same side of this one: Ghostbusters holds up, the jokes still hit, the effects (minus one rough patch with the running gargoyles) still work, and the whole thing ends exactly when it should, with marshmallow raining from the sky and Louis Tully asking who does your taxes.

This week, the Dads dive into Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Cameron Crowe's undercover-journalism-turned-screenplay debut brought to life by first-time director Amy Heckerling. Both Steve and Nic trace their history with the film back to high school sleepovers and VHS rewatches, and the rewatch hits different through 2026 eyes. The killer soundtrack gets immediate love, with Jackson Browne's "Somebody's Baby" and the Cars' "Moving in Stereo" earning their permanent spots in the cultural memory bank. The Dads walk through the Sherman Oaks Galleria opening with genuine nostalgia for a time when malls were thriving ecosystems, not just an abandoned Sears and a DMV, and spend a solid chunk reminiscing about their own local mall in Pleasanton and the lost art of getting dropped off at 10 and picked up at 4.The conversation zeroes in on the film's surprisingly nuanced handling of its teenage characters. Steve highlights Amy Heckerling's direction of Stacy's first sexual experience as deliberately non-exploitative, noting the dissociative camera work that centers Stacy's discomfort rather than serving up male-gaze titillation. Both Dads appreciate that the film treats abortion matter-of-factly, especially given how close it was to Roe v. Wade. They dissect Mike Damone's "proto-pickup artist" advice to Mark Ratner, agreeing some of it is genuinely useful while the rest is manipulative garbage. Nic coins Damone's vibe as "unshakable dork confidence," and both Dads land on a nuanced read of his betrayal of Rat: Stacy has her own autonomy and chose Damone, but Damone still crossed the line by inviting himself inside. Nic pulls out the film's best hidden joke, Damone's handwritten expense ledger listing "abortion, $75" alongside a tentative Rod Stewart ticket purchase.Sean Penn's Spicoli remains the film's secret weapon, from "no shirt, no shoes, no dice" to ordering pizza directly to Mr. Hand's classroom. The Dads marvel at how Penn's performance walks the line between stoner savant and genuine comedic genius, wondering if 1982 audiences could have predicted the Oscar-caliber career ahead. Steve and Nic both land in similar territory on the film overall: Steve calls it a solid 80s time capsule that moves fast and still feels relevant in the underlying teenage chaos, while Nic admits the characters are more interesting than the plot, noting the comedy doesn't land quite as hard as memory suggests. Both agree it's a breezy, enjoyable rewatch, even if neither is rushing back for another round anytime soon.

This week, the Dads kick off their new 2 Dads 2 Decades series with 1980's Airplane!, and Steve arrives with the ultimate childhood credential: he first watched this movie at two years old on laserdisc. His parents reconsidered their parenting choices when three-year-old Steve looked up at them and said, "What a pisser." Nic's introduction came via TV broadcast around age eight, and both Dads credit this Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker classic with shaping their sense of humor. Steve went deep on the research, watching the 1957 disaster film Zero Hour! that Airplane! spoofs nearly shot-for-shot, and spends much of the episode pointing out how many "serious" lines are lifted verbatim from that film, including "I picked a bad week to quit smoking."The Dads marvel at the stunt casting that put four dramatic actors into their first-ever comedic roles: Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges (whose sons Jeff and Beau talked him into it), and Peter Graves. They dig into the gags that still land perfectly, from the white zone/red zone airport announcement bickering (performed by the actual married couple who did LAX announcements) to the Mayo Clinic doctor with mayonnaise jars behind him and a beating heart bouncing around his desk. The smoking ticket bit, the drinking problem visual gag, the line of passengers waiting to slap the hysterical woman with increasingly dangerous weapons, "We have clearance, Clarence. Roger, Roger. What's our vector, Victor?"—all rock solid forty-five years later. They also appreciate the details, like how the actress being slapped suggested making that line of attackers longer, which turned a good joke into an iconic one.But the Dads also wrestle with what hasn't aged well, from Captain Oveur's deeply uncomfortable cockpit conversation with young Joey to the Peace Corps basketball sequence that lands with a thud in 2026. Steve frames it this way: 1934's It Happened One Night is as far from Airplane! as Airplane! is from today, which helps explain why some jokes feel like artifacts from another era. Still, this is a movie where the sum of its parts outweighs the whole, a gag-a-second comedy that launched Leslie Nielsen's second act and taught a generation that deadpan delivery of absurd lines is an art form.

This week, the Dads take another step through JanuArnie with James Cameron's 1994 spy action-comedy True Lies, and Steve is practically vibrating with joy from minute one. He calls it possibly the most fun he's had watching any of the 45 movies they've covered together. The film doesn't let up for its full two hours and twenty minutes, and neither do the Dads, who find themselves completely won over by Cameron's crowd-pleasing magic. From Arnold emerging from a frozen Swiss lake with a perfect tuxedo under his wetsuit to subtitle parentheticals reading "perfect Arabic," the guys geek out over every slick spy detail while Tom Arnold's Gib provides running commentary from the surveillance van, lamenting his ex-wife who took the ice cube trays out of the freezer. What kind of sick bitch does that?Jamie Lee Curtis absolutely steals the show, and the Dads are here for it. Her legendary hotel room striptease gets the extended appreciation it deserves, with Steve and Nic marveling at her physical comedy chops and the sheer commitment of her performance. The dance is awkward and sexy and hilarious all at once, right down to her ankle buckling in those heels. Bill Paxton's sleazy used car salesman Simon earns equal time, spinning tales about being the mystery spy from the hotel shootout while eating a hot dog and declaring that "the 'Vette gets 'em wet." The Dads debate the impossibility of fast-forwarding and rewinding cassette tapes to precise dialogue cues and agree it's somehow less believable than anything involving nuclear warheads.Then there are the Harrier jets. Steve loved Harriers as a kid, and this movie delivers them in full glory for the entire third act, from bridge pursuits to Arnold blasting out an entire floor of a Miami skyscraper. A pelican tips a truck off a bridge. Jamie Lee Curtis beats Tia Carrere senseless with a champagne bottle that refuses to break. Dana steals the detonator key despite having zero spy training. It's gateway Arnie at his absolute peak, surrounded by James Cameron's bulletproof blockbuster instincts and a cast firing on all cylinders.

This week, the Dads kick off JanuArnie with 1987's Predator, and it's clear from the jump that Steve would die for this movie. As in, top ten favorite of all time, no notes, completely unhinged levels of love. Nick's right there with him, calling it the ultimate guys' guys movie and the perfect beer-chugging, high-fiving experience. They walk through the testosterone-soaked helicopter ride, Jesse Ventura's sexual Tyrannosaurus energy, and the absurdity of Arnold arriving dressed like he works at Target.The Dads marvel at the 72 on-screen deaths during the guerrilla camp assault, Blaine's legendary "I ain't got time to bleed" followed by Poncho's perfect reaction face, and the sheer gratuity of watching Arnold bend vines over his shoulders while making a bow and arrow. They note that Carl Weathers apparently had to take his shirt off just to help pull a rope, which tracks. Nic's wife gets a few good lines in, observing that there's "not a lot of dialogue, just a lot of big puss jokes" and that the unmasked Predator has "a Dark Crystal-ass looking face." The Dads dig into the film's clever creature design, the way the Predator adapts its tactics based on circumstance, and the deeply satisfying payoff of Billy's laugh getting replayed in the alien's dying moments as it finally gets the joke.They wrap by marveling at the fact that this movie stars two future governors, that the Predator suit actor also played Harry in Harry and the Hendersons, and that 80s action movies just hit different than anything made since. If it bleeds, we can kill it, and if it's Predator, it absolutely rules.