Podcast Like It's ...

Phil and Emily are joined by writer Jude Ellison Doyle to open up Richard Kelly's The Box (2009). Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play a cash-strapped 1976 couple handed a simple, horrible deal by a scarred stranger (Frank Langella): press the button on the box, collect a million dollars, and somebody you don't know dies. What starts as a Twilight Zone morality test (via Richard Matheson's "Button, Button") spirals into NASA, Mars, and a very literary sense of damnation.The three dig into Kelly's whole deranged sensibility after Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, whether he's fully in on his own material, how he writes women, and why a studio thriller this strange even got made. There's a real case here for reading The Box as a big, glossy panic attack about being broke in America. Heady, funny, and a little unhinged same as the movie.Follow the show & guest:Podcast Like It's... - https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeitsPhil Iscove - https://www.instagram.com/pmiscoveEmily St. James - https://www.instagram.com/emilystjamsJude Ellison Doyle - https://www.instagram.com/byjudedoyle💜 Patreon (bonus episodes & video): http://patreon.com/Podcastlikeits

Phil and Emily are joined by Mitchell Beaupre, editor and podcast host at Letterboxd, to dig into Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy (2008). Michelle Williams stars as a woman driving to Alaska for work who gets stranded in a small Oregon town when her car dies and she loses her dog, and the film turns that small catastrophe into one of the quietest, most devastating portraits of American poverty the 2000s gave us.The three of them get into why Reichardt is so good at trapping her characters, and us, in situations that tighten without anyone noticing, how the movie looks at the unhoused with a clear eye instead of pity, and where it lands in the show's Reichardt run. There's a detour into Richard Kelly and The Box, a bit on how Williams does more with a single look than most actors manage with a monologue, and Mitchell's case for why this one stays with you long after the credits.Follow the show & guests:Podcast Like It's... - https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeitsPhil Iscove - https://www.instagram.com/pmiscoveEmily St. James - https://www.instagram.com/emilystjamsMitchell Beaupre - https://www.instagram.com/mitchellbeaupre💜 Patreon (bonus episodes & video): http://patreon.com/Podcastlikeits

Phil and Emily are joined by journalist and author Josephine Riesman to continue their Richard Kelly Reichardt mini-series with the magnificent disaster that is Southland Tales (2006). And there is no better guest for it: Josie wrote the definitive deep-dive on this movie and once spent three hours walking Venice Beach interviewing Richard Kelly himself.Set in an alternate 2008 where nuclear attacks on Texas have tipped America into a surveillance-state apocalypse, Southland Tales unleashes Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, and a cast of SNL alumni across a sprawling, end-of-days Los Angeles on the Fourth of July. It premiered at Cannes as an unfinished cut on DVD, got booed into oblivion, made a legendary $374,000 against a $17 million budget, and then quietly became the cult object that fans swear is more true than the reality we actually got..The gang digs into why a movie this incoherent is also this irresistible. Emily makes her case that it is what you would get if Philip K. Dick novelized Robert Altman's Nashville, while Phil counters with "Magnolia with a head injury." Josie reveals what Kelly told her about that surreal Justin Timberlake lip-sync to The Killers, the tie-in graphic novels, the Cannes catastrophe, and why he has a reason for every baffling choice, even the ones that never made the final cut. Plus its eerie kinship with Children of Men and The Handmaid's Tale, and the thin line between satire and prophecy.Misunderstood masterpiece or beautiful trainwreck? On America's 250th birthday, it might be the only movie that fits. This is the way the world ends.Follow the show & guests:Podcast Like It's... - https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeitsPhil Iscove - https://www.instagram.com/pmiscoveEmily St. James - https://www.instagram.com/emilystjamsJosephine Riesman - https://www.instagram.com/josie.zone💜 Patreon (bonus episodes & video): http://patreon.com/Podcastlikeits

Phil and Emily are joined by critic and editor Isaac Feldberg to continue their Richard Kelly Reichardt mini-series with Kelly Reichardt's quiet breakthrough, Old Joy (2006). Isaac edits at Letterboxd Journal and writes for RogerEbert.com and Fangoria, and as a former Eagle Scout, he might be the perfect guide to a movie about two guys going camping.Made for roughly $30,000 and shot in the forests east of Portland, Old Joy follows old friends Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London) on a weekend trip to a hot spring deep in the Cascades. Almost nothing happens, and somehow everything does. It became Reichardt's calling card, earned rapturous reviews including four stars from Roger Ebert, and announced one of American cinema's most quietly essential filmmakers.The gang gets into why Reichardt remains a beloved secret, the kind of filmmaker fans swear will one day get a Criterion box and a wave of "how did we not know about this?" They dig into the ache underneath the film's radical simplicity, the suspense of a friendship that can't quite say what it means, the tender and unspoken queerness running through it, and why these two men sound less like a Richard Linklater hangout and more like real life. Plus Lucy the dog, "the John Cazale of canine performers," the perfect Old Joy double feature, and the image of a slug on a mossy boulder that Ebert never forgot.Why do we remember the small moments more than the big ones? Old Joy has a few answers. Come sit with it.Follow the show & guests:Podcast Like It's... — https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeitsPhil Iscove — https://www.instagram.com/pmiscoveEmily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjamsIsaac Feldberg —https://www.instagram.com/ijfeldberg💜 Patreon (bonus episodes & video): http://patreon.com/Podcastlikeits

Phil and Emily are joined by actress Fiona Dourif to launch a brand new mini-series, Richard Kelly Reichardt, with the cult classic that started a thousand dorm-room arguments: Donnie Darko (2001).Richard Kelly's debut premiered at Sundance, opened the same day the Patriot Act was signed into law, and promptly bombed in theaters before Drew Barrymore's Flower Films, a $4.5 million budget, and a generation of video-store rentals turned it into a phenomenon. The gang digs into why it became the movie every college bro swore was a misunderstood masterpiece, and whether it actually holds up a quarter century later.They get into the big stuff: the tall bunny named Frank, the pocket-universe time-loop mechanics, and that gut-punch ending where Donnie chooses to sacrifice himself. Emily, who has seen this more times than almost any movie in her life, untangles Kelly's "ironclad" explanation, why she prefers the simpler emotional read, and why the director's cut overexplains everything. Fiona connects it to American Beauty and Magnolia, the search for God after religion, and her own time-bending turn in Christopher Nolan's Tenet. And the whole table takes on modern film-discussion culture's obsession with mapping every rule instead of just living inside a story that doesn't quite make sense.Plus: baby Noah Wyle, the most unhinged high-school teacher ever written, and a stacked early-2000s cast that keeps making you hit pause. Does Donnie Darko hold up, or did it age like the 25-year-old screenwriter dialogue it's built on? Listen and decide.Follow the show & guests:Podcast Like It's... — https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeitsPhil Iscove — https://www.instagram.com/pmiscoveEmily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjamsFiona Dourif — https://www.instagram.com/fionadourif💜 Patreon (bonus episodes & video): http://patreon.com/Podcastlikeits

Phil and Emily are joined by writer Elias Isquith (Necessary Fictions blog) to close out the Angelina Jolie Action Films of the 2000s miniseries with the loudest, messiest entry yet: Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted (2008).James McAvoy plays a cubicle drone recruited by Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman into a secret fraternity of assassins that takes its orders from a magical loom. Yes, a loom. The movie was a surprise hit the summer it opened alongside WALL-E, weeks before The Dark Knight blew everything away, and none of them had seen it since theaters. Rewatching it in 2026 was a very different experience.The conversation digs into how Wanted plays like a proto-incel power fantasy, a movie that negs its audience for 110 minutes and then stares into the camera asking "what the fuck have you done lately?" They trace the line from Fight Club and The Matrix to this film's confused politics, where the message is "be free and take charge of your life" but also "obey the magic loom or die." Emily breaks down the gendered self-loathing baked into so many films aimed at young men, and Elias connects the movie's hyper-individualism to the toxic masculinity pipeline that would migrate to social media just a year later. They also talk about Angelina Jolie's decision to kill off her own character, why the film's structure feels like a video game with half-assed cutscenes, and how Zack Snyder somehow handles this same territory with more nuance.Follow the show & guests:Podcast Like It's... — https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeitsPhil Iscove — https://www.instagram.com/pmiscoveEmily St. James — https://www.instagram.com/emilystjamsElias Isquith — NecessaryFictions.blog - https://www.instagram.com/eliasisquith💜 Patreon (bonus episodes & video): http://patreon.com/Podcastlikeits