Author and critic Zack Handlen made the mistake of offering to return for Pandorum , 2009's "what if we stuck a bunch of grimy Jell-O to some warehouse walls and filmed a live-action 'Space Madness' meets Event Horizon " sci-fi. The movie starts out well -- good atmospherics; good partner chemistry between Quaid and Ben Foster -- but as Zack notes, most of the interesting stuff happened before the movie started. And after we find out the enemy isn't a giant snacky space arachnid, well, it's a to...
Jun 01, 2023•39 min
Extra Hot Great's Dave Cole is back to help us list the many complaints prompted by 2009's dreadful and boring live-action take on G.I. Joe , including attempts to elevate an already-fine cartoon, suboptimal explosions and fight scenes, pointless origin stories, creepy side views of Quaid holograms, and the movie putting SDB in the position of defending Transformers 2 . G.I. Joe lifts scenes almost wholesale from Star Wars , Apollo 13 , and others, and it still sucks -- but is DQ perfectly cast,...
May 25, 2023•33 min
Jeb had never seen a SpongeBob -isode before, and the good news is, he no longer has "incipient dread" about his child possibly enjoying it one day! The bad news...isn't really bad, or specific to this particular 12 minutes of SBSP content, because it involves the show not knowing whether it takes place underwater or on the surface, and Dennis Quaid's inconsistently accented Grandpappy is therefore obliged to fall for middle-school-theatre "set dressing" designed to convince him that Mr. Krabs i...
May 18, 2023•12 min
Horsemen seems to have gotten memory-holed immediately after the fest circuit (or...during production by much of the below-the-line talent?), and with good reason -- it's bafflingly poor, studded with visual clichés, its actors apparently undirected, its script evidently without access to a Bible despite basing its tortuously contrived serial-killer procedural plot on more than one book therein. It's got a grieving-family subplot that should have come to the foreground, and a couple of actors --...
May 11, 2023•36 min
[NB: Due to file-corruption issues, this episode's sound isn't stellar; apologies for any inconvenience!] Critics were kindly disposed towards The Express , a well-meaning Ernie Davis bio-pic that seems to count on knee-jerk positive responses to 1) sports movies that 2) defy bigotry. It's done well, mostly, even though the dialogue really isn't how people speak to each other, mostly, and the traditional football-feelm structure wastes certain excellent actors while giving others more than they ...
May 04, 2023•27 min
[NB: Due to file-corruption issues, this episode's sound isn't stellar; apologies for any inconvenience!] For a third-choice star in a first-draft action movie, Dennis Quaid's quite good in 2008's Vantage Point , a fridge-magnet-poetry "thriller" script whose "what if In The Line Of Fire + 24 + Dave gave DQ the adrenaline trots" logline invited multiple weary comparisons to Rashomon in (uniformly negative) reviews. Despite dialogue some film student shook out of the Michael Bay Presents: Boggle ...
Apr 27, 2023•22 min
Dennis Quaid fiiiinally nails the frumpy-prof part in 2008's Smart People -- but in the service of a first-draft story about damaged, pedantic, chafey people whose immaturities don't line up. One of those film-fest darlings you never hear about again until it shows up on one of the lesser Showtimes at 3:30 PM on a weekday, Smart People retreats from interesting ideas, keeps key decision-making scenes offscreen, expects us to believe a Revenge villain got a poem accepted to The New Yorker , and w...
Apr 21, 2023•30 min
We understand why Dennis Quaid wanted to do 2007's Battle For Terra ; it's unclear why BFT wanted him . The star-studded, labored comment on corruption and colonization -- you know, for kids! -- doesn't maximize Quaid's talents (or screentime), and while it's better than a lot of animated kiddie content, neither of us is planning to watch a bunch of retro-3D'd sperm with forehead jewelry fighting to survive again. Davey & Goliath exposition, broadly modular dialogue, how you get a G rating w...
Apr 13, 2023•22 min
We're thrilled to welcome This Had Oscar Buzz co-host (and TWoP Idol co-recapper emeritus) Joe Reid to the podcast to dig into American Dreamz , a satire of both competitive singing shows AND mid-aughts American politics that does one thing quite a bit better than the other -- and puts all three of us in mind of better movies like Dr. Strangelove and Dick . Cheney slapstick, peak Chris Klein, when Hugh Grant's doing more than he should, the custody battle over the set's one Dick Casablancas wig,...
Apr 06, 2023•42 min
Welcome to the ( really ) long-awaited seventh season of Quaid In Full -- and to the chaotic, unrealistic, and utterly Nickelodeon Yours, Mine & Ours . Critics in week-before-Thanksgiving mode weren't terribly charitable to this 2005 remake of the Ball/Fonda original, but despite the first film's cultural anxieties not really translating to the 21st century; beleaguered stunt pets; Chekhov's sailboat; an utter lack of clean-up or food-logistics credibility; as many family-film tropes as bad ...
Mar 30, 2023•25 min
You've seen 2004's Flight Of The Phoenix before -- not just the Jimmy Stewart verzh from the '60s, but every "ragtag group with various animosities bands together to beat insurmountable odds, with an assist from ILM CGI" flick before it. As NOT the best pilot we ever saw, Dennis Quaid's Frank Towns throws John Wayne, Barth from You Can't Do That On Television , and a crappish Bill Clinton imitation into a blender to assay a backstory-free brat to whom everyone from Dr. House to EMT Riley to Eowy...
Apr 07, 2022•39 min
Or, How To Not Exactly Succeed In Corporate Satire While Actually REALLY Trying . We might have felt differently about In Good Company if we didn't live in the Republic of Bezos, in a timeline with Succession , but we do, we do, and a movie that tries to send up corporate machinations really needs to have an R rating to work with. Still, this gentle, dated, clueless-about-BFAs-and-NYU "Hallmark movie for boys" isn't unpleasant, and DQ is quite good in it despite being obliged to dribble a basket...
Mar 31, 2022•30 min
Defector.com's David J. Roth returns to talk about The Day After Tomorrow , which was marketed as an Important Must-See back in 2004, and almost uniformly savaged by critics who seem not to have understood the point of AN ACTION MOVIE. But your commentators all quite enjoy it, despite all the Hollywood Sciencing, the lonesome death of a Law & Order -verse stalwart in a Paramus mall court, direwolf Colorforms, protagonists stopping to look at the special effect that's trying to kill them for ...
Mar 24, 2022•30 min
Remember The Alamo (...sorry; we had to) -- 2004's "featureless sphere of re-consideration" of one of the country's most notorious battles starring Dennis Quaid as Sam Houston? If you do, our condolences, although despite a bloated runtime, racist music cues, a script that makes the dad from The Conjuring recycle cannonballs, and a misapprehension of what's actually still interesting about this chapter of history, we didn't end up with a super-low overall rating. DQ, however, doesn't seem to kno...
Mar 17, 2022•49 min
Semi-on-demand PBS educational series Freedom: A History Of US is nigh-on impossible to find, and based on the episode we did track down, "A War To End Slavery," that's mostly a good thing. Casting the Civil War in the broadest, blandest terms and narrated by Katie Couric as though she's reporting on these battle picnics live, Freedom Colon boasts an all-star cast, and (we suspect) a Koch-funded director who was not empowered to ask for second takes or kibosh ill-advised accent experiments. Not ...
Mar 10, 2022•22 min
Did anybody in this movie...see a movie? Today we're contemplating 2003's Cape Farm , aka Cold Creek Manor , aka 33 1/3 Short Sound Drops That Shouldn't Have Made SDB Laugh . A putative thriller in which Dorff On Golf somehow manages to haul a dead pony into a swimming pool, our "city slicker" hero tries to charm the psychotic locals with Brandy Alexanders, children have eyeteeth the size of quarters, and a cemetery is added to the kids' chore wheel, Cold Creek Manor is mostly bad -- but at leas...
Mar 03, 2022•39 min
Welcome to MASTADQ: Mark And Sarah Talk About Dennis Quaid! Mark Blankenship slid into the guest chair (not a euphemism) to discuss Far From Heaven , the line between melodrama and tragedy, and how Todd Haynes's 2002 homage to Douglas Sirk and "women's pictures" lets the paintings that are Cathy and Frank Whitaker become real. Sarah revisits a ten-year-old review that wasn't fair to Quaid's performance; Jeb files his ratings from his score-poisoning sickbed (and unearths another DQ-blocking runn...
Feb 24, 2022•46 min
Liz Roscher of Yahoo! Sports and Kevin Goldstein of Fangraphs defied the MLB lockout to join us for The Rookie , an above-average baseball movie about Jim Morris's midlife journey to the majors that is therefore below average generally. How's Dennis Quaid's pitching form? How's his dad-cap form? Is the fictional Jim Morris a solid DILF but a bad high-school coach? Why didn't the nuns in the (interminable) first act go off in the third? And does the movie make the lede in the obit, or get crowded...
Feb 17, 2022•41 min
We went into Dinner With Friends expecting a filmed TED Talk on the Rashomon of a disintegrating marriage; instead, we got the American Kennel Club metaphor wheel, disproportionate anger about balsamic vinegar, and a surprising argument in favor of casting Andie MacDowell -- AND Dennis Quaid, who turns in a pretty Quaidy performance either despite or because of Remy McSwain blocking. We had our issues with the 2001 TV movie (Quaid as a food writer who can't pronounce "pomodoro," for one; the dea...
Feb 10, 2022•45 min
Zack Handlen joins us for 2000's Soderbergh Oscar magnet Traffic , which at least one of your co-hosts forgot Dennis Quaid was even in, much less that he played a sleazy Mob-fixer lawyer whose wardrobe erodes really weirdly over the 2.5-hour runtime. Is Quaid miscast? Is this the last time we'll contend with Topher Grace on this podcast? Which plotline is the weakest here, and does Traffic suffer from breaking ground we've seen covered a thousand times since thanks TO Traffic ? All these questio...
Feb 03, 2022•33 min
If YOU had a time desk, you too would invite Rolling Stone 's chief TV critic, Alan Sepinwall, to burn messages into it about Frequency , the year-2000 time-travel/father-son therapy/serial-killer thriller that kicks off QIF's sixth season. Twenty minutes of clumsy exposition to lead off, "special" effects, Pissy Cop Wife tropes, Chekhov's Mets trivia, Qing Of Queens accentry, and repeated violations of the prime directive AND quantum physics...the movie has zero business working, and yet, we're...
Jan 27, 2022•39 min
Defector's David J. Roth pulls up a seat on the second footballiest day of the year as we talk about Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday , a 157-minute "exploration of boundaries of filmmaking by peole who are permanently on LSD." Whether it's a #poppyfieldsmovie, why it looks so cheap, which Al Pacino(s) we get in this performance and what the F he's wearing, whose performance is most affecting (spoiler: LT's), what that smell is (spoiler: amyl nitrate), and much more in our discussion of a film th...
Nov 24, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Short Cuts waterboarded with sno-cone syrup... Love Actually from factory-irregular parts...a catastrophically premature Magnolia ...it's Playing By Heart , which is 40 minutes too long, coy about a meaningless end reveal, and contains very few believable situations or lines of dialogue. How desperate is Angelina Jolie to get a reaction from her wooden scene partner? Why is James Bond obliged to deliver Intercourse PA jokes that are beneath even SDB? Why in god's name didn't Quaid and Anthony Ed...
Nov 18, 2021•30 min
We're moving into the DILF era for Quaid with 1998's The Parent Trap , which is too long, too loud, and too blithe about the Unsolved Mysteries segment that is this family's narrative...and yet its "welcome unreality" is charming, and so is Quaid. And so is our guest, Tara Ariano, who joined us for a discussion of everything from LiLo charisma wattage to Elaine Hendrix's score-settling hair to whether this is a poppy-fields movie. Turn your Hallmark brains on and welcome Dennis Quaid's teeth bac...
Nov 11, 2021•28 min
It's DQ's directorial debut, a TNT movie called Everything That Rises -- and while there's no discernible connection to Flannery O'Connor, the flick's surprisingly good. Okay, the transfer we watched was very bad, and the dialogue's laconic sarcasm was a little TOO uniform across characters, but between Harve Presnell; an unnecessary but amusing barroom brawl; and Quaid being too busy directing to overact, the thing won us over. It's Hallmark meets Cormac McCarthy, plus the debut of Ask A Horse ...
Nov 04, 2021•32 min
Our journey through the constipated-avenging-angel portion of DQ's c.v. continues with Savior , a harsh, weird, budge allegory of war and human connection set in the Balkans. Jeb adds to his collection of hall-of-fame Skarsgard quotes, Sarah doesn't know how sniping works, and a sociopath in a Luke Perry t-shirt trolls everyone, including the accent coach, in an all-new Quaid In Full. Overall score: 7 QQQ score: 2.5 Days since a lost Kuffs accident: 14 SHOW NOTES Get EVEN MORE Qontent (...sorry)...
Oct 28, 2021•32 min
Time is a flat Quaid in our Switchback episode: this miscast, dour late-'90s bag of action clichés is allegedly a remake of a German film called Kidnapped , but we can't find any corroborating evidence of that...or of Quaid's essential Quaidiness, as his Special Agent Hoint LaGlower roams the country trying to find the son someone -- Danny Glover? Jordan Catalano? -- snatched in the opening flashback. Fake map streets, Twitter fights, when you have to poo but you're on a call, useless car chases...
Oct 21, 2021•35 min
Kevin Smokler joins us for the third least Quaidy project QIF has covered to date: Gang Related . It's Tupac Shakur's last film, and he's very good, but it's also three or four different films patched together into a quilt of dropped threads and tone problems -- and it's NOT very good, despite an all-star cast, a couple of hilarious line readings, and a guy we'll call Nott William Winters. And as for Quaid, well, if you ever wondered what it might look like to throw Andy Dufresne's Shawshank tes...
Oct 14, 2021•42 min
For some reason, Dennis Quaid's PG-13 energy was deemed a good fit with the most famous kids' show of all time, which is how "Uncle Tommy From Da Bronx" ended up helping Telly learn about telling the truth and trusting your friends. After a review of the show's astronaut credibility from an actual child, we talked about Allan Sherman, Scully's cellphone, and whether Sarah's dad is a changeling. Don't scream "HELP" unless you really need it: it's an all-new Quaid In Full. Overall score: 7 QQQ sco...
Oct 07, 2021•26 min
Welcome back! Return with us now to those Dragonheart days of yesteryear, as Quaid, Connery, Dina Meyer, and two-bucks-a-pound wigs team up to challenge The Old Code at Medieval Times Bratislava. David T. Cole joins us to discuss bottle-rocket accentry, the Harrison Ford you can afford, giving yourself up to stupid shit, post-zipline trauma, and what happens when a little Quaid alien gets trapped inside the John Hurt that is the one true knight. Overall score: 5.33 QQQ score: 8 Days since a lost...
Sep 30, 2021•38 min
