2 Dads 1 Movie

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.

In 1997, a 26-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson somehow talked New Line into $15 million and final cut, then spent it on a two-and-a-half-hour epic about a well-hung busboy who becomes a porn legend, falls apart on cocaine, and winds up pushing a dead Corvette to the only father figure who ever actually loved him. That's Boogie Nights, and it's Nic's pick. It's his favorite movie of 1997 and one of his all-time favorites, the kind of thing a film-nerd drama buddy (shoutout Matt Chilbert) presses into your hands and says you have to see this. Steve, meanwhile, had never gotten around to it, which is wild for a guy who counts There Will Be Blood among his favorite films ever and watched One Battle After Another on the flight home from a work trip to New York.
So this one's a treat: Nic finally brought Steve something he loved, maybe the first non-thriller pick that really landed for him.
What you get is a loving, frequently filthy stroll through Anderson's San Fernando Valley. The dads geek out over how basically every speaking part in the first five minutes is a face you know cold, Luis Guzmán, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, Heather Graham, William H. Macy, and how each of these characters gets kicked around by the straight world before finding a home in Jack Horner's porn family. They clock the Star Wars deep cut buried in Buck's stereo sales pitch, swoon over Dirk explaining that his shirt is "imported Italian nylon," and spend a good while on Philip Seymour Hoffman turning Scotty J into the most heartbreaking guy at every party (the clipboard-chewing, the sad slice of wedding cake). Burt Reynolds saying "the Mr. Torpedo area" instead of the actual words gets its due, plus the backstory on how Leo passed for Titanic and handed Mark Wahlberg the role of a lifetime.
And then there's the nitpicking, which is honestly half the fun. Steve files a formal grievance about Eddie's pool dive not being a real jackknife. Nic cannot get past Jack fretting over whether a baby's going to pee in the pool (sir, is that really your top concern?). They both white-knuckle the Alfred Molina scene, flinching at every single firecracker, which, as it turns out, wasn't even in the script.
Consenting adults are consenting adults, the music is perfect, and somewhere under all the cocaine and chaos is a genuinely sweet movie about people who just want a family. Welcome to the Valley.

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.

Nic picks the movie, and he picks one that wormed into his teenage brain during the blockbuster-video era of the mid-'90s: 1995's Desperado, Robert Rodriguez's stylish, blood-spurting follow-up to El Mariachi and the second chapter of his unofficial Mariachi trilogy. Back then it played like a revelation. Two guns at once. A ponytail with strategic strands falling out. Salma Hayek crossing the street so beautifully two cars crash trying to look at her. The question this week is whether any of that still works, or whether it lands in the Boondock Saints-shaped pit of "I can't believe I thought this was cool."
Steve, an admitted college-era insufferable film student, somehow never got around to this one despite worshipping Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, so he comes in fresh. What he finds is an Antonio Banderas vehicle so committed to looking awesome it occasionally forgets about gravity, physics, and bullet trajectories. Both dads spend a happy stretch cataloguing the moves: the wrist-flicking gun mime, the guitar-case rocket launcher operated like a Little League catcher dropping into stance, Danny Trejo dialing a payphone with the tip of a throwing knife. The cold open belongs to Steve Buscemi and his "world-class turds" speech. Quentin Tarantino swans in to tell a piss joke and later gets shot in the head for his trouble. The squibs work overtime.
Then comes the second half, and both dads start finding cracks. There's a "make it look like an accident" line that derails Bucho's whole logic. There's a sex scene followed by El Mariachi inexplicably wearing his boots in bed. And there's a late-breaking family revelation that lands somewhere between homage and shrug. Whether any of it costs the movie its swagger is for Steve and Nic to argue. Desperado doesn't always make sense, but neither does throwing a knife into a bulletproof limo like it's a grenade.

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.