Shows
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastAvalon: Deep Thoughts About Family, Money Psychology, and Waiting to Cut the TurkeySend us a text"Where are the people who know where the people are?"On today's episode, Tracie introduces Emily to the 1990 Barry Levinson film Avalon, the director's love letter to Baltimore and his own Jewish immigrant family. The movie follows the Krichinskys from 1914 through to the 1960s as the large, tight-knit, extended family moves, changes, assimilates, and fractures. As a lifelong Baltimorean and the great-great-granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant from Europe, Tracie feels seen by Levinson's story, and she recognizes the ways in which American culture, money, and changing technology have altered f...2025-05-0651 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastPretty Woman: Deep Thoughts About Bodily Autonomy, Realism, and Who Gets to be HumanSend us a text“We say who; we say when; we say how much.”This week, Emily takes a deep dive into Pretty Woman, the 1990 blockbuster romantic comedy that catapulted Julia Roberts to stardom. The film was originally written as a tragic story about awful characters, and many people (including those close to the Guy sisters) lamented the Hollywood happy ending as “unrealistic”–but Emily argues that by giving Vivian and Edward the fairy tale ending, the film offers a feminist blueprint for knowing one’s worth. While the movie does not offer a nuanced view of sex...2025-04-2955 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastGalaxy Quest: Deep Thoughts About Fandom, Tropes, and Science Fiction StorytellingSend us a textBy Grabthar’s hammer, you shall be avenged!The 1999 film Galaxy Quest was almost tailor made for the Guy sisters and their dad–all lifelong Trekkers. The sci-fi satire pokes gentle fun at Star Trek, lightly skewering everything from the story tropes to the actors to the fans, all while offering a lovely tribute to folks who get really enthusiastic about their favorite media. The film also does one of our favorite things: it takes the craft of sci-fi storytelling seriously without taking itself seriously. But as Tracie points out in her...2025-04-2253 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastBill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure: Deep Thoughts About Destiny, Work, and How to Engage with HistorySend us a textStrange things are afoot at the Circle K.In 1989, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure introduced Emily to a baby-faced Keanu Reeves–and to the idea that two easy-going dopes could change the world by encouraging us all to be excellent to each other. In this episode, Emily shares how this surprisingly well-crafted comedy teaches us that destiny can’t be achieved without putting in the work and why it’s important to look at history from the perspective of average people, not just rulers. While the film is a product of its time...2025-04-1549 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastLilo & Stitch: Deep Thoughts About Animation, Found Family, and...American ImperialismSend us a textOhana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.In addition to dazzling her with its old-school hand-drawn animation and delighting her with its sweet and funny story, the 2002 Disney film Lilo & Stitch introduced Tracie to indigenous Hawaiʻian culture. The writing and directing team of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois traveled to Hawaiʻi for extensive artistic and cultural research and sought the input of native Hawaiʻians, including voice actor and friend of the show Tia Carrere, to write this story. The result is a touching tale of...2025-04-0853 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastIn & Out: Deep Thoughts About Toxic Masculinity, Barbra Streisand, and Coming Out in the 1990sSend us a textDoes anybody here know how many times I had to watch Funny Lady?The 1997 film In & Out, directed by Frank Oz (yes, the one who voices Miss Piggy) and starring Kevin Kline, Joan Cusack, and Tom Selleck, has mostly been forgotten–but this feel-good comedy had a lasting impact on Emily. When she saw it in the theater as an undiagnosed neurodivergent 18-year-old, she was confused as all hell when Kline’s character comes out at his wedding (to a woman) about three-quarters of the way into the movie, despite his prot...2025-04-0252 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts About LadyhawkeSend us a textI talk to God all the time, and no offense, but He never mentioned you.On this week’s episode, Tracie traces some of her earliest ideas about romance to the 1985 Richard Donner film Ladyhawke. Although both contemporary and retrospective reviews are scornful of the anachronistic, Alan Parsons-produced, synthesizer-heavy soundtrack (so unrealistic in a film about a woman cursed to live as a hawk during the day!), Tracie and Emily are more interested in why the film takes away the leading lady’s agency when it otherwise gets a lot right abou...2025-03-2559 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts About the MummySend us a textWhat is a place like me doing in a girl like this?The 1999 Brendan Fraser film The Mummy has an extraordinarily beautiful cast, a delightfully bonkers plot, and a whole heap of unexamined colonialism, racism, and othering. Emily shares with Tracie the historical background of the West’s fascination with Egypt–which led to little Emily’s own interest and delight in all things Egyptological. But the Egypt we encounter in films like The Mummy has little to do with the real history of ancient Egypt (check out all the white actors...2025-03-1856 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts About SpongeBob SquarepantsSend us a textWho lives in a pineapple under the sea?When SpongeBob SquarePants debuted in 1999, 23-year-old Tracie was not the intended audience for everyone’s favorite absorbent and yellow and porous hero–but she was charmed and entertained by the show that became a Millennial and Gen Z touchstone. This week, Tracie talks about how SpongeBob gave a generation a framework for understanding capitalism, motivation, community, and absurdist humor. She also explains how challenging the medium of animation may have encouraged the current batch of newly-minted adults to confidently break rules that don’t work...2025-03-1152 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts About Silence of the LambsSend us a textI do wish we could chat longer, but... I'm having an old friend for dinner.On today’s episode of Deep Thoughts, Emily revisits what is arguably the most influential film of our lifetime: The Silence of the Lambs. Although director Jonathan Demme and lead actor Jodie Foster illuminate the spectrum of misogyny women experience, from casual workplace putdowns to the violent treatment of women as objects, the film does this at the expense of our trans siblings. To its credit, the movie attempts to differentiate the murderous Buffalo Bil...2025-03-041h 04
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts About Dead AgainSend us a textIt's the karmic credit plan: buy now, pay forever.Tracie shares her deep thoughts about the 1991 Kenneth Branagh film Dead Again on this week’s episode. Branagh brought intelligence, style, and some pretension to this noir homage that tells the tragic love story of Roman and Margaret Strauss–who have apparently been reincarnated as Mike Church and the amnesiac Jane Doe he calls Grace. While the movie hits all the right mystery beats while you’re watching, Branagh’s story insists on false binaries that do the audience’s thinking for them. And...2025-02-2554 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about Chasing AmySend us a textYour mother’s a tracer!Emily was very confused by the 1997 film Chasing Amy when she was an undiagnosed neurodivergent 18-year-old–in part because she was (and still is) crap at reading subtext and in part because the film accidentally illuminates the reality of bi-erasure. This week, Emily tells Tracie about what this well-meaning film about a cis-het white man learning to let go of his insecurities gets right about LGBTQ representation, what it gets wrong, and how it reinforces the division of emotional labor in textual and metatextual ways. The sist...2025-02-111h 16
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about BigSend us a textOkay…but I get to be on top!Tracie loved revisiting the 1988 Penny Marshall-helmed film Big this week. Tom Hanks’ performance of a 12-year-old boy wearing a grown man’s body is laugh-out-loud funny, and the film asks some profoundly important questions about how grownups can hold onto their childlike joy and wonder. But the love story between Hanks’ Josh Baskin and Elizabeth Perkins’ Susan–an actual adult woman–never sat well with either Guy girl. The sisters discuss how this film would not work if it were gender-swapped, why it seems to reinf...2025-02-041h 07
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about Groundhog DaySend us a textWatch out for that first step, it’s a doozy!This week, the 1993 film Groundhog Day is the vehicle for Emily to talk about the three most taboo subjects: religion, politics, and money. Not only is Bill Murray’s Phil Connors a favorite of scholars and commentators who talk about religion and film, he also has some interesting lessons to teach us about working for political change against huge obstacles. (Also, Emily’s a money nerd, and the truth is everything can be about money–especially when you’ve written a mini-viral...2025-01-281h 06
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about Mr. MomSend us a textThe next thing you know, you're strung out on bedspreads.One of the rare childhood films that the Guy Girls remember watching with both their mom and their dad, the 1983 John Hughes film Mr. Mom was in some ways an incredible progressive look at gendered work. There were only 6 (as in, one less than seven) self-reported stay-at-home dads in the U.S. in 1983, so Michael Keaton’s Jack Butler journey from incompetent, unemployed, and resentful primary parent to master homemaker and better dad truly was revolutionary. But as Tracie points out th...2025-01-211h 15
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about AlienSend us a textI admire its purity. A survivor…unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.After many references in previous episodes, on this week’s show, the Guy Girls finally tackle the iconic 1979 film Alien. Ridley Scott’s masterpiece gave Tracie and Emily a role model in Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver to be smart, tough, vulnerable, and right. While many commentators have explored the ways this film works as an allegory for rape and loss of bodily autonomy, Emily’s analysis takes it a little deeper, comparing the words and actions of the v...2025-01-141h 04
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about Big Trouble in Little ChinaSend us a textWe’re reasonable Guy(girl)s, but we’ve just experienced some very unreasonable things!The 1986 film Big Trouble In Little China elicits some deep thoughts from Tracie in this week’s episode. The interwebs ask whether BTILC is woke or problematic, and we suggest the answer is ‘yes.' While the campy depictions of Chinese and Chinese-American culture are over-the-top and dripping with stereotypes, they do not make their subject the butt of the joke, and in fact seem to be winking at the audience. At the same time, Jack Burton...2025-01-071h 08
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts About When Harry Met SallySend us a text“I’ll have what she’s having.”On this week’s episode of Deep Thoughts, the Guy sisters revisit the iconic 1989 rom/com When Harry Met Sally. Even though Meg Ryan’s Sally Albright offers a badass portrayal of a happy spinster who makes no apologies for wanting what she wants, a young Emily instead internalized the idea that being “high maintenance” was a sin. Though the story does offer some important pushback against the confidently wrong pronouncements made by Billy Crystal’s Harry Burns, Crystal’s performance is so funny and charming that it...2024-12-311h 09
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about The Muppet Christmas Carol with Erika Plank HaganSend us a textLight the lamp, not the rat!Just in time for Christmas, the Guy Girls welcome Emily’s dear friend Erika Plank Hagan to the show to discuss The Muppet Christmas Carol. There’s a reason this musical (and surprisingly faithful) adaptation of the Dickens morality tale is so beloved: not only does Michael Caine act his face off with his Muppet co-stars, but the framing of Gonzo playing Charles Dickens allowed Brian Henson to go all-in on the frightening aspects of the story without losing the littlest viewers. Erika shares how this...2024-12-241h 06
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts About The ToySend us a textThat's U.S., not you ass!The Guy girls remember the 1982 Richard Pryor film The Toy with a great deal of fondness, in part because it was on heavy rotation in the Guy household through their childhood. But a film about a billionaire’s young son “purchasing” a black man to be his toy for the week has some pretty chilling implications that the movie itself doesn’t do enough to acknowledge. In this week’s episode, Tracie shares how rewatching this movie in 2024 is both better and worse than she ex...2024-12-171h 01
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about The GooniesSend us a textThe Goonies never say die!One of the most quintessential Gen X films, The Goonies, makes for some significant mind furniture: good, bad, and kid-shaped. Richard Donner’s beloved 1985 film gave Gen X kids on-screen peers who talked like we did. They cursed and talked over one another and were cruel and sweet and they went on fabulous adventures. It also gave us unhealthy fatphobia, contradictory messages about greed, and a legendary pirate named after a penis. A lot about this film will garner cringes from contemporary viewers, but Emily notes th...2024-12-101h 12
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about Office Space TEASERSend us a textIt’s not that I’m lazy. I just don’t care.In this special, patron-exclusive bonus episode, Tracie brings her deep thoughts about Mike Judge’s 1999 film, Office Space. There’s a reason this film about bullshit work has remained so beloved for a quarter century. Judge accurately reflects–and lampoons–a lot about what it feels like to work to live. There’s also quite a bit about 1990s culture that this film reflects without lampooning it at all, including casual sexism, casual racism, and, once Tracie and Emily recognized Milto...2024-12-0315 min
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about Planes, Trains and AutomobilesSend us a textThose aren’t two pillows…Just in time for Thanksgiving, Emily finally watches one of the most beloved buddy comedies of the 1980s: Planes, Trains & Automobiles this week. After intentionally skipping this film when it was first released (because it appeared to feature gross-out and cringe humor), Emily is surprised and delighted to find the John Candy and Steve Martin comedy offers a nuanced look at how to see past our class-based differences. While John Hughes’ script provides a lot of the movie’s warm heart, it’s Candy’s performance that makes t...2024-11-261h 04
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about Airplane!Send us a textWe picked the wrong week to give up horse tranquilizers…The Guy Girls have fond memories of the 1980 comedy Airplane!–specifically, they remember their dad helplessly snort-laughing at this three-gags-a-minute parody of 1970s-era disaster films. The movie still delivers solid belly laughs, but not everything is as funny four decades later. Tracie examines how jokes about pedophilia, misogyny, racism, and homophobia in the movie punch down instead of skewering the powerful and absurd, and the sisters lament the fact that the Zucker brothers (and Jim Abrahams) question everything–except the idea that a...2024-11-191h 11
Deep Thoughts About Stupid Sh*t: A Pop-Culture PodcastDeep Thoughts about Men in BlackSend us a textYou know what the difference is between you and me? I make podcasting look gooooood.This week, Emily dives into the remarkably subversive 1997 film Men in Black. Despite looking like nothing more than an entertaining summer blockbuster that merged sci-fi and comedy, MiB actually asks the audience to rethink what they know about immigration, xenophobia, race, policing, government, and even the buddy-cop genre. Tracie and Emily truly enjoy revisiting this old favorite that seems especially prescient in the current political climate. Take a listen and we promise not to u...2024-11-121h 09