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.

Twenty years of movies, twenty episodes, one final destination: a soul-crushing office park somewhere in generic suburban America. Office Space is Nic's pick to close out 2 Dads 2 Decades, and honestly, there's no better way to go out: a movie that gave an entire generation its workplace vocabulary before most of them had set foot in a workplace.
Both dads know this one cold. For Nic, it was the put-it-on-before-you-go-out movie, the kind of thing you'd seen so many times the early parts were automatic. Steve caught it the same way a lot of people did: Comedy Central, late night, dorm room, falling asleep to the DVD menu looping.
The conversation that follows is the kind you have when everyone already knows the movie and nobody needs the plot explained. Steve flags that Office Space might be the first film with an all-white cast and a completely sincere hip-hop soundtrack -- not ironic, not parodic, just what the characters actually listened to. They spend serious time on Gary Cole, who both dads agree is the secret weapon of the whole thing (Nic floats a case for listing him above David Herman in the opening credits and has a point). They argue, affectionately, about whether "no-talent ass clown" is a Mike Judge original or pre-existing slang, and land on Judge. Steve admits he has legitimately come around on Michael Bolton the musician, cites "Time, Love and Tenderness" as a genuine banger, and is not apologizing for it.
There's a lengthy detour about going to a county fair hypnotist with his daughter that Nic will never fully live down. John C. McGinley pulling taffy with his hands while Bob Slydell beams with excitement over a guy who does nothing. Lawrence and his bottle opener. The printer dying to "Still" in a field. The Jump to Conclusions Mat getting the contempt it deserves.
The federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison line? Yeah, they clock it. Doesn't hold up.
What does hold up is Peter figuring out he'd rather swing a shovel outdoors than update bank software. Sometimes the answer really is that simple.

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.