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  • Dwight Eisenhower is under "Pressure"
    2026/06/16

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    In the brand new movie "Pressure," General Dwight Eisenhower has to decide whether to launch the D-Day invasion in the face of an incoming storm that could make it impossible to convey Allied troops across the English Channel. And to make things more complicated, his meteorologists can't agree on a weather forecast. Jim and Gary admire Eisenhower's leadership skills and discuss whether it's important to get all the details right in a movie made about an historical event.

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    1 時間 5 分
  • Rob Reiner's "LBJ"
    2026/05/05

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    Rob Reiner's "LBJ" is a meticulously accurate rendering of the five tumultuous days from President Kennedy's assassination to the newly installed President Johnson's address to a joint session of Congress. While not avoiding LBJ's earthiness and aesthetic flaws, the movie seems to want to rehabilitate Johnson's tarnished legacy, while surprisingly taking a less charitable view of his longtime nemesis -- Robert F. Kennedy.

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    1 時間 13 分
  • Meryl Streep is "The Iron Lady"
    2026/03/27

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    Meryl Streep pulls out one of her best accents to play Margaret Thatcher in the 2011 biopic "The Iron Lady." Jim and Gary both agree that Streep is a great actress and that Thatcher was one of the major figures of the last half of the 20th Century, but they are not completely aligned on the use of scenes where Thatcher is shown to have dementia. Jim also reminisces about the time he met her in Number 10 Downing Street.

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    1 時間 7 分
  • Robert Altman's "Nashville"
    2026/02/20

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    In their second podcast about movies from 1975 -- designated by Netflix as the greatest year in movie history -- Gary and Jim discuss Nashville, the sprawling epic about country music and politics. It's one of the most cynical movies of the Seventies and also secretly one of the funniest. But is it as smart about politics as it thinks it is?

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    1 時間 5 分
  • Warren Beatty's "Shampoo"
    2026/01/15

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    Warren Beatty has long insisted that his sex farce "Shampoo" set on the night in 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected President, was a political satire. But was it really, or does it tell us more about the 1970s than it does the 1960s?

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    1 時間 7 分
  • Netflix's "Death by Lightning" --The Assassination of James Garfield
    2025/12/19

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    "Death by Lightning is a four-part Netflix series about the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881, which despite sounding pretty esoteric, is an absorbing depiction of a moment in time during the Gilded Age. Jim and Gary discuss whether this event has any lessons for us today and wrestle with the important question: what's up with all the beards?

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    1 時間
  • Peter Sellers in "Being There"
    2025/11/19

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    In possibly his greatest movie role, Peter Sellers plays Chance, a simple-minded gardener whose mundane observations are taken as oracular epigrams and metaphors that take the political establishment by storm. "Being There" has a lot to say about our gullibility and our habit of hearing what we want to hear. Once widely lauded as a hilarious and biting commentary about politics, the movie is now rarely in the conversation about great political films but it is as timely today as it was in 1979.

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    1 時間 1 分
  • Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster in "Seven Days in May"
    2025/10/21

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    Jim and Gary discuss whether a military coup was possible in the early 1960s, as Hollywood seemed to think. "Seven Days in May" is a political thriller that JFK wanted to see made because he was worried about the power of the military. The result is a tense drama in which Burt Lancaster plays a rebellious Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Kirk Douglas as his skeptical senior aide. Will the Constitution be upheld or trammeled?

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    1 時間 4 分