Episode 97: My Life with the Walter Boys (S1E4-5)

We return to Silver Falls, Colorado for another hearty helping of Walter Boys, where seven teenage boys, one transplanted New York City girl, and approximately zero well-developed supporting characters continue to grind their way through a love triangle nobody asked for. Episode 4 is titled "Nineteen" (there's a reason, you'll figure it out about three seconds before the show tells you), and Episode 5 is titled "Thanksgiving," because when you're two-for-two on uninspired titles, why start trying now?

Before we get into it, Liz unveils her long-promised trope bingo board - 24 squares including Emily Good Ideas, Quirk Chungus, Chekhov's Teapot, Toby Tucker, "Am I a f-ing bet?", and the ever-reliable "how are they affording that?" We workshop squares, argue about overlap, and debate what the loser has to make for dinner. Then we plunge into two episodes where Jackie breaks a teapot, breaks a curfew, jumps onto a circuit breaker panel with the confidence of a licensed electrician, and very nearly breaks both Walter brothers in a single 48-hour period. Scott is unconvinced. Liz is annoyed by everyone. Nobody can remember which brother is which.

Peak Dumpster Moments:
◆ Jackie, during a massive Colorado storm, fixes a whole-house power outage by flipping one 30-amp double-gang breaker - which Scott takes personally
◆ The English teacher, Mr. Chaudry, asks the guidance counselor out and threatens to put a little icing on her cake
◆ A truth-or-dare round at an unsanctioned lake house party with a comically oversized fire pit
◆ "I wanna put my mouth on your mouth"
◆ Mark Blucas wields a Butler of Sheffield elk-handled knife to carve the turkey. We question whether production would ever let Mark Blucas hold an actual sharp object.
◆ Haley shows up with a hairdo so structurally ambitious it constitutes a jumpscare

The Tangent Files: A detour into Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. The goth band auditioning at the Lark launches a prolonged effort to remember the name of Richmond's favorite band from The IT Crowd. Uncle Richard arrives for Thanksgiving looking like he's fresh off a Joseph A. Bank East Coast Convention. Liz delivers a full-throated sermon on the madness of eating Thanksgiving dinner at one in the afternoon. We also learn that "Treehenge" is apparently a real thing, or at least as real as "Manhattanhenge," which is dubious.

The Verdict: Scott notes that the Thanksgiving episode is measurably better-produced than its predecessors, though both hosts remain united in their disdain for roughly every character except for George Walter, who is essentially Mark Blucas being a dad. We crown the show a fingerling potato - interesting-looking, structurally puzzling, and nobody asks for them at dinner. Scott concurs. A finger blasted fingerling, if you will.

Coming Up Next: I'll Be Seeing You by Lurlene McDaniel, a 1996 weepy about a 17-year-old named Kyle who is blinded in a chemistry experiment explosion (apparently he poured the water into the acid) and the 16-year-old girl with a facial deformity who falls for him in the hospital. The cover features Kyle in Vietnam-bandana eye-gauze sporting a near-Hasselhoff quaff and 17-year-old forearms that could only belong to a Hobbit. Also: a pair of completely unnecessary background crutches. We dive in.

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Episode 96: Leaving Las Vegas

Dumpsterpiece Theatre takes a sharp detour from its usual diet of romantic comedy slop to tackle a genuinely good (and devastating) film. Nic Cage plays a Hollywood screenwriter who cashes in his severance check, packs a suitcase full of liquor bottles and heads to Vegas to drink himself to death. Elizabeth Shue is the escort who falls for him anyway. It's bleak. It's heavy. We watched it so you don't have to, though in this case you probably should.

We run the inflation math on a 1995 hooker, debate whether a liquor store can legally sell one man that much alcohol, and try to figure out how someone survives weeks without food on nothing but bottom-shelf vodka and the occasional screwdriver. There's a spirited defense of Nic Cage as a legitimate actor, an Always Sunny comparison that writes itself, and a motel called the Whole Year Inn that Ben's booze-addled brain reads very differently. Scott shares the tale of a Vegas cab driver who handed him a brothel catalog before he'd even left the airport, and we learn that Nic Cage turned down the role of Harry in Dumb and Dumber to make this film - a casting what-if that briefly breaks our brains.

Peak Moments:
◆ Ben packing for his big move: every bottle of liquor in the hotel room goes in the suitcase. Clothes? One shirt. Priorities.
◆ The rental agreement that comes with a very specific monthly payment arrangement. "I accept your terms."
◆ A poolside romantic getaway that goes sideways when Ben tries to retrieve his "drinky" and obliterates a glass table. "I'm like a prickly pear."
◆ Julian Lennon shows up as a bartender. French Stewart is apparently somewhere in this movie as "Businessman Number Two." Neither of us spotted him.
◆ A cab driver delivers one of the most callous lines in film history to a visibly beaten woman. We are not okay.

The Tangent Files: A discussion of first-person-POV spiral movies produces a surprisingly deep list including Elijah Wood as a serial killer, a Tokyo drug dealer who experiences the afterlife through his own blinks, and a dance troupe whose sangria gets spiked with LSD. We also learn that the author of the source novel got his start writing an episode of Rugrats - and was disgusted by the editorial changes. There's a Laserdisc rabbit hole involving a rumored unrated cut, eBay listings between $200 and $1,000, and the open question of whether you can even find a player anymore. Scott may or may not be shopping.

The Verdict: A well-acted, well-written film that makes you never want to drink again. One of those movies you see once and say "I'm good." We put it in the same category as Requiem for a Dream Too heavy for the dumpster scale, so Liz decides to debut the Potato Poll instead. This one's a blue potato.

Coming Up Next: My Life with the Walter Boys - a hard left back into our regularly scheduled programming, assuming we can remember any of their names. Cole, Alex, Benny, Qbert, Filthy Dave, Dirty Sanchez... we'll figure it out.

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Episode 95: People We Meet on Vacation

Netflix rolls another rom-com off the assembly line with People We Meet on Vacation, and this one checks so many formula boxes we're officially proposing trope bingo cards. You've got your opposites attract, your one-bed situation, your rain kiss, your declaration of love blocking traffic - the works. The anamorphic lenses make half the shots look like someone smeared Vaseline on the camera, and the title doesn't make any sense. We have thoughts about that.

We dig into the When Harry Met Sally parallels, debate whether you could actually lock your keys in a 2016 Subaru, question why a man in his early thirties throws out his back from a gentle reach, and have a serious disagreement about saxophone in music. There's a chainsaw-carved Bigfoot that becomes the emotional backbone of the entire film, a wedding officiant making some bold wardrobe choices that nobody acknowledges, and a climactic romantic scene that one of us believes got completely torpedoed by wooden acting. We also spend some time on the logic of chasing a jogger through a neighborhood when you could simply wait on his porch.

Peak Dumpster Moments:

◆ A gas station wishing well that exists solely as a plot device to strand our leads at a motel with - you guessed it - only one room available. The other room has "a big stain on the floor." Subtle.

◆ A proposal that happens with suspicious speed after a friend-zoning. We have opinions about the ethics of this.

◆ One of us gets genuinely distracted by an outfit involving red cowboy boots and what can only be described as genie cosplay.

◆ Mr. Yeti: therapist, confidant, load-bearing emotional prop. You'll understand when you see it.

◆ The big romantic payoff features the line "You're not a vacation to me. You're home." We award it the Pulitzer it deserves.

The Tangent Files:

A casual mention of Jameela Jamil playing Poppy's boss spiraled into a full investigation of her coming out as "sapiosexual" - which, as far as we can tell, just means having standards. This led to the discovery that the opposite is called "morosexual," that Jameela once had an accidental orgasm DJing on top of speakers at a farmers' ball, and that WebMD has an entry for all of this. We also revisited the legendary Tuscan Whole Milk and Three Wolf Moon reviews on Amazon - one of which is miraculously still live with 3,100 reviews including "In the beginning God created the heavens and the shirt." A Niagara Falls hotel tangent revealed bed bugs, a $200 fine for eating a sandwich at a public table, and the fact that Canada will not let you keep the Do Not Disturb sign up for more than a couple of days.

The Verdict: It doesn't make your eyes bleed, but it doesn't make you feel much of anything either. Taylor Swift is contractually present. The title still doesn't make sense. 2 out of 5 dumpsters / 3 out of 5 dumpsters.

Coming Up Next: Leaving Las Vegas - Nic Cage drinks himself to death in the desert, Elizabeth Shue is a seen-it-all hooker, and we may or may not end up doing a full Battle of the Vegases.

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Episode 94: My Life with the Walter Boys - S1E2-3

We're back in Silver Falls - population: one of every kind of person, apparently - for episodes two and three of My Life with the Walter Boys. The chaos of the pilot has not subsided. The character count has not decreased. The timeline still makes no sense. And somehow, nobody in this house has thought to split the bathroom schedule between two floors until now.

Episode two kicks off with a prank war. (Bleach requires dwell time. This is not up for debate.) This also prompts a detour into some deeply questionable personal hair history - we're talking bleached locks, a thin mustache, and a chin strap that lasted approximately one week but has lived rent-free in someone's memory ever since.

Meanwhile, Silver Falls continues to flex its improbable progressivism via the Lark Café, which is apparently serving vegan flapjacks and quinoa-based items to a population of football-worshipping ranchers without a hint of irony. Nobody questions this. Nobody should have to.

Episode three, "The Cole Effect," brings us homecoming - and with it, the show's most accurate nature documentary moment: Alex carefully constructs a romantic straw-loft moment with Jackie (pulling exactly one piece of straw from a girl completely covered in the stuff), only for Cole to materialize like an apex predator and force the cheetah to slink back into the tall grass. He warmed her up for you, man. That's just tragic.

Peak Dumpster Moments:

• Jackie's bleached hair is magically back to normal by the next morning. She apparently found an exact L'Oreal match for her hair color, purchased it, applied it, and dried it before going to bed - all off-screen and without comment.
• Mark Blucas probably did not actually drive the bobcat. They took the keys out. They put the sound in post.
• Cole auctions himself off at the homecoming fundraiser with full crowd-work energy - and a grandmother outbids everyone at $500. She's not dead yet, and she knows what she wants.
• Haley's solution to a cash-strapped wedding: sell the dress. Will's response: dramatic exit. The dress was kind of fugly anyway.
• The family's vet is being paid in persimmons. George has thoughts about this.
• Cole is failing every class. The school has not contacted the parents. Nobody is checking Canvas.
• Alex and Cole have apparently both liked the same girl before, with Cole always winning. Isaac's reaction: "Again?" The drama is geological in depth.

The Tangent Report: A conversation about the Walter family's apple farming operation - and their catastrophic moth infestation (not moss, moths, like "I love lamp") - spiraled into a full live reading from AppleRankings.com, where the Arkansas Black Apple earns a 23/100 and the descriptor "a teeth-shattering oddity," and the Newtown Pippin apple pulls a 19/100 with the tagline "Long Island's sand-filled condom" - and somehow ranks #3 for cider. The Sweet Tango, for the record, is nearly perfect. The Holy Grail.

Coming Up Next: People We Meet on Vacation - a Netflix rom-com featuring Alfie from Emily in Paris, the girl from The Good Place, and Cameron from Ferris Bueller. It looks bad. We can't wait.

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Episode 93: After Ever Happy

We're back in the After-verse with the fourth installment, "After Ever Happy" - a title that is grammatically, philosophically, and spiritually baffling. Picking up immediately after the bombshell revelation about Hardin's biological father, we watch our favorite rage-fueled protagonist do what he does best: set things on fire. Specifically, his mom's living room couch. With whiskey. Which, as anyone who's taken high school chemistry knows, absolutely cannot ignite from a half-empty bottle of 40% ABV liquor. But sure, let the couch go up in flames while Christian takes the fall because he's got "good lawyers."

What follows is 90 minutes of emotional whiplash as Hardin and Tessa break up and get back together with the reliability of a faulty light switch. London party scene? Shirtless Hardin in nothing but a leather jacket. Ubers? They keep canceling on him (relatable king). Tessa's dad? Found in the bathroom with the most pristine-looking heroin overdose in cinematic history. And every single emotional breakthrough? Happens in Carol's backyard greenhouse. Every. Single. One.

Peak Dumpster Moments:

• The Bulgarian doctor returns with zero bedside manner. No preamble. No comfort. Just vibes.
• Hardin's childhood flashback features a kid who looks absolutely nothing like him. Different coloring, different features. The casting director was on lunch.
• A fake text message with font size 75 that looks like it was designed for someone's great-grandmother's Jitterbug phone.
• A throwaway party line that DEMANDS a full origin story we'll never get.
• The captions credit Ken's dialogue to "Christian." Wrong dad, subtitle team.
• Five months of character development conveyed entirely through Tessa getting bangs.
• Hardin wrote a book called "After" and Tessa's review of the manuscript is chef's kiss: "No one wants to read this sick sh*t."
• The ending is literally just "To Be Continued." That's it. That's the movie.

The Verdict: Still a 4.8 on IMDb, forever hovering in that "not quite a 5" zone these films call home. At least Hardin's going to AA now. Baby steps. One more movie to go, and we're told it's the worst one yet. Can't wait.

Coming Up Next: Back to My Life with the Walter Boys, because we clearly enjoy suffering.

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Episode 92: Danielle Steel's Star (1993)

We're back in the Danielle Steel cinematic universe with "Star" - one word, one syllable, maximum trauma. Peak 90210 Jenny Garth plays Crystal Wyatt, a 16-year-old aspiring singer who catches the eye of Spencer Hill, a Vietnam vet who's also finished law school. Cue the jailbait math: if he went to Nam at 18, served, then completed undergrad AND law school... we're looking at a minimum seven-year age gap. But sure, let's give her a heart-shaped necklace from Zales and tell her not to marry someone who doesn't deserve her.

The first 20 minutes are an escalating trauma speedrun: Dad dies of pneumonia, brother-in-law rapes her in the barn, mom doesn't believe her, Crystal grabs a shotgun, and her brother Jared catches a stray bullet trying to intervene. Tom's response? "Call the sheriff, honey." On himself. Then Crystal hops a bus to San Francisco like nothing happened.

What follows is 15 years of star-crossed near-misses, time jumps that would give Christopher Nolan whiplash, and a love triangle featuring Terry Farrell (filming Deep Space Nine simultaneously) as Elizabeth - the power-hungry Wall Street fiancée whose father tells her not to make Spencer "feel any worse" after he cheats. Spencer disappears to China for earthquake relief... for TWO YEARS. Crystal gets a sleazy manager named Ernie who ends up murdered (she definitely did it). And somehow, through it all, Jenny Garth doesn't age a single day while Spencer gets... reading glasses.

Peak Dumpster Moments:

• "Who the F is Trang?" - a character mentioned once, never explained, universally despised by Crystal's mother
• "Get your fingers out of the ham!" - the wedding reception line that launched a thousand questions about leftover logistics
• The violins vs. thunderbolts breakup speech that contradicts itself mid-sentence
• Director Michael Miller's signature move: the slow-motion post-coital fall-back-onto-the-bed shot (he directed Daddy too - the man has a brand)
• Elizabeth's father essentially saying "he cheated in a different zip code, it doesn't count"
• Spencer reading Crystal's Dear John letter while comforting a random Asian child in China
• Crystal's son is named Zeb. Short for Zebulon. We will not be taking questions.
• "You didn't tell me about the boy." "You didn't ask." - Crystal, mother of the year
• The Variety review noting that every scene except the sex scenes lasts "about as long as a commercial"

Behind-the-Scenes Gems: Jenny Garth didn't do her own singing - that's Megon McDonough, a folk singer who opened for John Denver at Carnegie Hall at age 17 and was a founding member of "Four Bitchin' Babes" (real group name). Craig Bierko, who plays Spencer, famously turned down the role of Chandler Bing on Friends despite Matthew Perry telling him to take it. Career choices!

The Verdict: More bananas than Daddy, with time jumps that make zero sense and a body count that includes a brother, a rapist, and a sleazy manager. IMDb gave it a 5.6, which feels generous. At least Daddy had Ben Affleck.

Coming Up Next: We're diving back into the After series with the fourth installment, After Ever Happy. The blurb promises "a shocking truth about a couple's family" and Tessa withdrawing from "absolutely everything, even her soulmate." So, you know, light viewing.

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Episode 91: My Life with the Walter Boys S1E1

We're kicking off a new series, and it's Netflix's My Life with the Walter Boys - a chaos tornado of unexplained children, green screen car rides, and production choices that suggest the insurance company had some very strong opinions about open flames. Based on the 2012 YA novel (3.76 on Goodreads, so you know we're in for quality), this is the fish-out-of-water tale of Jackie, a Type-A New York princess whose family dies in an accident that is never explained. Piano falling from a crane? Helicopter crash into the Hudson? Fashion atelier inferno? Since the show doesn't tell us, we're left to speculate.

Jackie gets shipped off to live with the Walters - a Colorado ranching family with eight biological children spanning a 20-year age gap, two cousins whose backstory remains a mystery even after two full seasons, and a casting director who apparently reached into a bowl of people soup and started pulling. The "twins" look nothing alike. The children look nothing like the parents. And presiding over it all is Mark Blucas - son of Blucas, of the ancient Blucas line - poking an unlit grill with a spatula because liability is a thing.

Peak Dumpster Moments:

• The glass of "lemonade" that looks like warm piss
• Mark Blucas grilling on an obviously unlit grill
• The green screen car scenes so tight they can't even show the vehicle from outside
• Grace's mid-episode recap of all the Walter boys, proving Matt Damon right
• The prop snake that's "insanely smaller" when the kid picks it up versus when Jackie held it
• Uncle Richard's Jos A. Bank special with the oversized jacket
• Cole emerging from the pool in slow-mo glory
• The spaghetti dinner where Mark Blucas dumps a colander of noodles that maybe feeds six people into a bowl for thirteen

Production Deep Dive: Filmed entirely in Calgary, Alberta. Zero Colorado. The school looks like "a generic office park in Glendale, right next to the heating refrigeration business." They can't show what sport the boys are watching on TV because the TV is literally behind a wall. The empty ice cream bag prop. The styrofoam container that could never fit in that refrigerator. This is the Temu version of Summer I Turned Pretty.

The Verdict: Four and a half dumpsters. It's generic, it's tropey, the acting is questionable at best, and the casting is baffling. But we've got nine more episodes to go, so we'll see if that needle moves.

Coming Up Next: We're going back to Danielle Steel with Star (1993), starring a young Jenny Garth as a San Francisco singer struggling to achieve stardom. Because apparently you had to pay your dues with a Danielle Steel movie to make it in the '90s.

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Episode 90: Young Einstein

G'day and Happy New Year! We're kicking off 2026 with Young Einstein, the 1988 Australian fever dream where Albert Einstein is reimagined as a Tasmanian apple farmer who invents the formula for putting bubbles in beer (E=mc²), discovers rock and roll by watching kids play hopscotch, steals Newton's laws, and invents surfing for good measure. This aggressively Australian film was a childhood staple for one of us, and we're diving back into the slapstick madness brought to you by a man who legally changed his name from Greg Pead to Yahoo Serious.

Peak Dumpster Moments:

• Preston Preston, the mustachioed villain who steals Einstein's formula and screams "There's a bushman in my carriage!" at the train conductor
• Marie Curie infiltrating the asylum to rescue Albert by wearing a "very convincing hat and beard" and pretending to be his father - straight into the men's showers
• The kitten pie scene that traumatized an entire generation of children (don't worry, Albert saves them from the oven just in time)
• The lunatic asylum featuring zombie-like inmates shuffling in circles, a very masculine nurse, and mystery green slop for dinner - "This is how I thought all asylums really were as a kid"
• Darwin presenting at the Academy of Science with his beagle, while Sigmund Freud's date is literally his mother
• One of the Wright Brothers is inexplicably Black

The Yahoo Serious Rabbit Hole: We dig into the wild story behind the man himself - from art school expulsion to DIY filmmaking to a spectacularly failed lawsuit against a certain search engine. His GeoCities-era website still exists and it is a journey. We also settle the debate: is Yahoo Serious the Australian Carrot Top or the Australian Pauly Shore? (Spoiler: yes.)

Credits Deep Dive: We combed through the end credits and found some absolute gems hiding in there. Let's just say the crew included some very specific "specialists" and one very distinguished beagle.

The Verdict: Zero dumpsters. Yes, really. This is pure nostalgia fuel - goofy, slapsticky, and packed with random animals (cockatoos, wallabies, bearded dragons, koalas, kittens in pies). It's no Citizen Kane, but honestly, have you tried sitting through Citizen Kane? Rosebud is a sled. There, we saved you two hours. Go watch Young Einstein instead.

Coming Up Next: My Life with the Walter Boys - a Netflix series that will have you tearing your hair out at the decisions these characters make. It is very much a dumpster piece. Prepare yourselves.

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