The Spiel

The time has come. The All-Spark is up for grabs and that can only mean one thing: We gotta talk about Transformers, executively produced by one Mr. Steven Spielberg. Wampler and Vespe couldn't do it alone, though, so they called in the calvary in the form of the very funny comedian, author, and actor, DC Pierson (Mystery Team, The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To, Captain America: Winter Soldier).

The plan is for DC to come back again and again until he's helped us cover every single one of the Transformers movies. In order to finish this journey, we must first take a step and that step is with the 2007 Michael Bay first film that kickstarted this shockingly huge franchise.

We talk through this movie act by act, ridiculous moment by ridiculous moment, and weigh the blockbuster spectacle of the era it was released in against today's quite different landscape. There's not a whole lot of robots peeing on John Turturro on the big screen these days and that's a damn shame.

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Chaos ensues as the wonderful, and James Beard award-winning, author Mallory O'Meara (Girly Drinks, The Lady from the Black Lagoon) comes on the show to discuss the extremely odd Amblin flick Joe Vs. The Volcano, starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan (three Meg Ryans, believe it or not), and directed by the famous writer John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck).

This movie is a favorite of Vespe's, but both other folks in the chat are newbies to it. We get personal, talk about what we'd do if we were diagnosed with the dreaded "brain cloud," and ask ourselves why there isn't way more sex happening in this movie.

So, pop open the nearest orange soda and strap in for this energetic, very funny, and oddly deeply personal conversation as we look at Joe Vs. The Volcano.

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Live from Corey Feldman's recording studio comes this in-person sit down interview with Corey and director Eugenio Mira, whose long lost collaboration, The Birthday, is finally getting a second life thanks to Drafthouse Films in theaters and on streaming.

Corey welcomed Josh and Vespe into his home for this interview where some pretty strict limits were put on us, but we rolled with it and get a very insightful chat about Feldman's creative process, his appreciation of pop culture art, and his budding friendship with Jordan Peele, who is instrumental in The Birthday's rediscovery.

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Celebrated genre author Stephen Graham Jones (The Indian Lake Trilogy, Mongrels, I Was A Teenage Slasher) is a huge fan of both Twister and Twisters, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, and shows up this week ready to talk about what made him laugh, cry, and jump for joy in both the 1996 original film and its 2024 sequel.

Topics include: An all new patented crazy wildlife story from Mr. Jones, how scary mother nature is, the frequent references to The Shining in Spielberg's work, how rad Bill Paxton was as a performer and a human being, and what pitfalls we all felt the sequel managed to avoid.

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Today's guest is the self-described World's Smallest Stuntman who has doubled everybody from Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings to Christopher Reeve's Superman and James Cameron's Aliens. Kiran Shah is also a poet and an actor who played a not so small part in Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark before going on to double Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Kiran looks back on his time working with Spielberg, how he had to lie to get his job on Raiders, as well as stories from all over his career, including being a bad influence on Christopher Reeve, working on Legend with director Ridley Scott and the great VFX legend Rob Botin, and the scariest stunt he ever did that had him doubling a small girl being blown into the River Siene.

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