Total Movie Recall
by Steve Albertson & Ryan Mixson
Total Movie Recall is a free-wheeling film nostalgia podcast in which hosts Steve Albertson & Ryan Mixson each have painstakingly assembled a list of movies that have touched them in some way at a specific moment in their lives. The hosts alternate rolling dice at the end of each show to determine which film will be explored in the following episode. TRM is produced independently in Los Angeles and Denver.
Episodes
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TMR 066 – Full Metal Jacket
This week on Total Movie Recall, we go to the suck. Steve develops a thousand yard stare reserved for veterans of nightmare wars and mediocre podcasts. Ryan chalks up another point in the Irresponsible Father column, reflecting on his father's prudent decision to let him watch this vision of...
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TMR 065 – Harold and Maude
This week on Total Movie Recall, we watch the first Manic Pixie Dream Girl ever on screen, who is not a girl at all, but is most decidedly a woman. It's the perfect post-2020 movie, and not just because of the constant suicides. It's twee and precious and we absolutely loved it. Harold & Maude...
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TMR 064 – The Neverending Story
This week on Total Movie Recall, we learn that while some stories never end, mothers do, and that's the beginning of how a serial killer is made in this unflinching look inside the mind of one disturbed little boy. Hang in there with us, listen to this, and watch it again and try to tell us you...
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TMR 063 – Wild Things
Ah, the good ole days of passing around R rated spank tapes. This movie is so trashy, it gave Charlie Sheen HIV. Wild Things (1998) d. John McNaughton Starring: Kevin Bacon Neve Campbell Matt Dillon Denise Richards Daphne Rubin-Vega Bill Murray When teen debutante Kelly fails to attract the...
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TMR 062 – From Dusk Till Dawn
Remember the innocent 90s, when white directors thought they had the N-word pass for some reason? What do you think their "woke" movie would look like? Probably like this, where the N-word is replaced by horrific rape and Mexican jokes. This proto-edgelord movie was looked at as such a good time...
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TMR 061 – Napoleon Dynamite
This week on Total Movie Recall, we try to decide whether this is a charming, unique film about staying true to yourself, or a nightmarish descent into the insanity that comes with living in a barren, desolate landscape like rural Idaho, where the Uncle Ricos of the world keep subterranean…
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TMR 060 – Dolemite
This week on Total Movie Recall, these two born-insecure honkies break down the seminal Blaxploitation movie of 1975 and do a pathetic job of trying to reconcile its progressive vision of black empowerment with the misogyny of the pimp game. It gets complicated. Dolemite (1975) d. D'Urville…
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TMR 059 – Who Framed Roger Rabbit
This week on Total Movie Recall, things get Freudian as they did for every little boy who stared confusedly at Jessica Rabbit and wondered what was happening to them. Handsome, chiseled leading man Bob Hoskins soldiers on in spite of the bleeding ulcer all that booze gave him, and Christopher…
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TMR 058 – The Princess Bride
This week on Total Movie Recall, we take a hard pivot from all the toxic masculinity of weeks past and Steve shows his gentle, romantic side. Somehow, Ryan makes this about his sad sack heartache but in the end, everybody calms down and moves on with a nice mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich.…
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TMR 057 – Heat
This week on Total Movie Recall, Ryan stares out the window of his furniture-less modernist home at the endless, uncaring ocean while Steve sleeps on the floor with his hand gripped around his pistol. The pseudo-philosophy of this movie seems deeper than it is because it's endlessly reflected in...
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TMR 056 – House Party
This week on Total Movie Recall, two white guys talk about hip hop culture in a totally convincing way when they put on their mustard-colored overalls to go to the House Party. Steve, a sentient walking issue of Pitchfork, schools Ryan on the infinite subgenres of hip hop while Ryan, to no one's...
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TMR 055 – Any Given Sunday
This week on Total Movie Recall, the pressures of competing at a professional level with all the concussions, cocaine, infidelities, and painkillers almost make Steve request to be traded during the free agency period after he and Ryan bicker about Oliver Stone's divisive 1999 film, Any Given...
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TMR 054 – Kung Fu Cult Master
This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan discover that there's actually an antidote to getting punched really, really hard. The cultural divide proves too much for Ryan in this wild, fantastic, hallucinatory Kung Fu epic of many names. The story is incomprehensible, the fights are...
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TMR 053 – The Devil's Advocate
This week on Total Movie Recall, it's Steve's turn to not get it when Ryan forces him to snooze this way through the 1997 hambone, The Devil's Advocate. This movie has it all -- a grand guignol of sex, violence, operatic depictions of Hell and Satan, Keanu swinging and missing, Pacino putting his...
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TMR 052 – Cabin Boy
This week on Total Movie Recall, Ryan gets his hipster comedy credentials revoked after Steve makes him pay $3.99 to watch the 1994 not-so-classic comedy, Cabin Boy. Ryan simply cannot understand the cache this movie has in the "alt-comedy" world, or as he likes to call it, the "non-comedy" world...
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TMR 051 Holiday Special – The Nightmare Before Christmas
This week on the Total Movie Recall Holiday Special, Steve and Ryan visit the mopey, gothy early 90s when Generation X looked to the high school Gloom King Tim Burton to express their so dark vision of Christmas. Stop motion animation is such a labor intensive craft that creates beautiful visions...
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TMR 050 – Children of Men
This week on Total Movie Recall, things get grim and a little too close to 2020 reality for comfort. Definitely don't watch this movie if you're fresh out of rehab, which Ryan can tell you all about. The future is bleak, but if it's also as ruggedly handsome as Clive Owen is and has the greatest...
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TMR 049 – Thriller & An American Werewolf in London
This week on Total Movie Recall, our bodies go through some changes that we don't know how to deal with as we take in a John Landis double feature with Thriller & An American Werewolf in London. We really just need somebody to talk to about it. What's that, Dad? You're busy? Okay, I'll just go on...
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TMR 048 – The Sixth Sense
This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve holds Ryan's hair back while he cries and dry heaves and rocks back and forth like his cat just died, because there has never been a movie more perfectly designed to make him cry like The Sixth Sense. Misunderstood children? Check. Put-upon mothers just…
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TMR 047 – Return to Oz
This week on Total Movie Recall, we acknowledge that The Wizard of Oz is, yes, a classic. However, it's missing a certain je ne sais quoi, and we try to put our fingers on exactly what it needed. We conclude that classic, whimsical children's film needed more childhood lobotomy, forced...
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TMR 046 – Leprechaun
This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan wonder why kids are scared of the stupidest boogeymen. The Leprechaun haunted Ryan for his entire childhood, waiting in dark corners, making it unable for him to pee in the middle of the night. If only he had watched the movie when he was seven…
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TMR 045 – Labyrinth
This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan put on their codpieces and fret over the innocence of teenage girls around David Bowie. Don't get us wrong, we love this movie, but why does this charming children's tale have a character named after the part of the anatomy responsible for...
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TMR 044 – The Willies
This week on Total Movie Recall, the age of innocence is over, and somehow what was supposed to be a fun episode about a trashy, campy, forgotten 90s horror movie becomes a despairing yawp into the empty air about the power structures that let abusive, predatory men get away with everything.…
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TMR 043 – Aladdin (1992)
This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan offend approximately 1/7th of the world's population, which has historically gone very well. Ryan's love of fairy tale settings don't truck with Steve, who favors Disney's gritty, street-level crime drama Aladdin. Ryan gets vulnerable about the...
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TMR 042 – Killer Klowns from Outer Space
This week on Total Movie Recall, one man's fun trash is another man's not-fun trash. Steve gets typically indignant at Ryan's casual, cruel dismissal of somebody's labor of love, and Ryan reaches heretofore unplumbed depths of his warped psyche, exploring the lingering effects of watching movies...
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TMR 041 – The Sandlot
This week on Total Movie Recall, we take a big shit on Boomers and their cheap nostalgia for a "better time." A time when a bunch of baseball-loving kids' black friend would have had to walk home to his segregated neighborhood. A time of nuclear anxiety because our megalomaniacal leaders were...
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TMR 040 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
This week on Total Movie Recall, Ryan takes us on a journey through time and memory to show us his origins as a film-lover, a man, and, lo, a human. Sure, he could have said his favorite movie was some snooty, intellectual piece of New Hollywood cinema, but that would be a lie. It's a VHS that…
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TMR 039 – Scarface (1983)
This week on Total Movie Recall, we destroy our nasal septums with 1983's Scarface. Ryan presents a cogent, detailed thesis on this film's central character as a metaphor for the all-eating, never-satiating, soul-crushing machine that is capitalism, and Steve counters with "No he's not." Touché...
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TMR 038 – Babe: Pig in the City
This week on Total Movie Recall, we watched the Sophie's Choice of talking pig movies — Babe: Pig in the City. You might remember it as a sweet children's fantasy movie about cute talking animals, but that's just your brain trying to protect you from the harrowing nightmare that is this film.…
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TMR 037 – Amelie
This week on Total Movie Recall, we find a new zest for life in 2001's Amelie. Steve gets wistful recalling his time working in a porn shop, and Ryan reveals his ignorance about Paris. But is it ignorance? Don't we kind of all know what Paris is really like? Smelly and smoky and rude? Not…
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TMR 036 – Starship Troopers
This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan watch the most subtle satire ever made — Starship Troopers. What exactly is this movie skewering? We're not sure. We thought we might have figured it out with the Nazi uniforms and Leni Riefenstahl shots and Aryan actors, but then we got distracted…
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TMR 035 – Raising Arizona
This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan stare into the eyes of a childless middle age and watch 1987's Raising Arizona. Steve has a good laugh watching what he sees as a silly, light comedy and Ryan is gripped by yet another existential crisis watching a moving meditation on fatherhood,...
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TMR 034 – The Cable Guy
This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan light a candle for all the former child stars doing porn and robbing gas stations and lament the end of trashy 90s television — the genital warts of American society. We watched The Cable Guy and discovered that Americans would rather have their...
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TMR 033 – The Devil and Daniel Johnston
This week on Total Movie Recall, we stare into the void and find out that hipsters are terrible people that treat the mentally ill like zoo animals and Ryan swears he'll never wear skinny jeans again. Steve declares that the word "genius" is thrown around way too much and that it should only be...
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TMR 032 – The Fly
The Fly (1986) d. David Cronenberg Starring: Jeff Goldblum Geena Davis John Getz This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan enter the telepod together and come out as a new, single entity — the Brundlehost. They get sentimental revisiting the powerful tragedy of David Cronenberg's The Fly…
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TMR 031 – Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult
Naked Gun 33 1/3 (1994) d. Peter Segal writers: Pat Proft, David Zucker, Robert LoCash Starring: Leslie Nielsen Priscilla Presley George Kennedy O.J. Simpson Fred Ward Kathleen Freeman Anna Nicole Smith This week on Total Move Recall, Steve holds Ryan's white, cisgendered, ignorant feet to the…
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TMR 030 – Suspiria (1977)
Suspiria (1977) d. Dario Argento written by: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi Starring: Jessica Harper Stefania Casini Flavio Bucci Udo Kier Joan Bennett This week on Total Movie Recall, we test our feminist bona fides and flex our rigorous academic muscles dissecting the precise and not-at-all...
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TMR 029 – Mad Max (1979)
Mad Max (1979) d. George Miller Starring: Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky Joanne Samuel as Jesse Rockatansky Hugh Keays-Byrne as Toecutter Steve Bisley as Jim Goose Tim Burns as Johnny the Boy Roger Ward as Fifi Geoff Parry as Bubba Zanetta The Interceptor, a modified 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT coupe…
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TMR 028 – Donnie Darko
Donnie Darko (2001) d. Richard Kelly Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal Jena Malone Drew Barrymore Maggie Gyllenhaal Mary McDonnell Katharine Ross Patrick Swayze Seth Rogen Noah Wyle This week on Total Movie Recall, in a long time coming, Ryan finally loses his effing mind as Steve shoots a time/space...
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TMR 027 – Ghostbusters II
Ghostbusters II (1989) d. Ivan Reitman Starring: Dan Akroyd Harold Ramis Bill Murray Ernie Hudson Sigourney Weaver Annie Potts Rick Moranis Peter MacNicol On this week's episode of TMR, Steve and Ryan watch 1989's not-quite-classic sequel Ghostbusters II. Ryan talks about the time he broke his...
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TMR 026 – Ninja Scroll
Ninja Scroll (1993) d. Yoshiaki Kawajiri This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan go toe-to-toe with their verbal martial arts prowess—leaping from rooftop to rooftop, through bamboo forests and dodging ninja stars and killer bees. Steve goes into hyperdrive with tales of sex, drugs and...
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TMR 025 – The Sword in the Stone
The Sword in the Stone (1963) d. Wolfgang Reitherman Produced by: Walt Disney Starring: Rickie Sorensen Sebastian Cabot Karl Swenson This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan relive the vile union of a pedophilic wizard and his would be king pupil. Ryan remembers a simpler time when he'd…
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TMR 024 – Oldboy
Oldboy (2003) d. Chan-wook Park Starring: Min-sik Choi Ji-tae Yu Hye-jeong Kang This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan take on the roles of Oedipus and Sophocles as they regress deep into their subconscious to cope with the brutal realities of Seoul's gritty underbelly. Steve comes to...
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TMR 023 – High Fidelity
High Fidelity (2000) d. Stephen Frears Starring: John Cusack Iben Hjejle Todd Louiso Jack Black Lisa Bonet Catherine Zeta-Jones Joan Cusack Tim Robbins This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan compare the soul sapping abyss of their previous relationships with that of Rob from High…
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TMR 022 – The Goonies
The Goonies (1985) d. Richard Donner Writers: Steven Spielberg (story) Chris Columbus (screenplay) Starring: Sean Astin Josh Brolin Jeff Cohen Corey Feldman Kerri Green Martha Plimpton Ke Huy Quan Robert Davi Joe Pantoliano Anne Ramsey This week on Total Movie Recall, we go back to a time when...
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TMR 021 – The Rocketeer
The Rocketeer (1991) d. Joe Johnston Starring: Billy Campbell Jennifer Connelly Timothy Dalton Alan Arkin Paul Sorvino This week on TMR, we flash back to the Art Deco past and get into a big fight about... well, exactly what Art Deco is. A movie about a remarkably mentally healthy Howard Hughes;...
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TMR 020 – Battle Royale
Battle Royale (2000) d. Kinji Fukasaku Starring: Tatsuya Fujiwara Aki Maeda Takeshi Kitano Chiaki Kuriyama This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan finally have the psychotic break that was inevitable since this show began. They watch the 2000 Japanese classic "Battle Royale" and have PTSD...
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TMR 019 – The Untouchables
The Untouchables (1987) d. Brian De Palma Starring: Kevin Costner Sean Connery Andy Garcia Robert De Niro Billy Drago This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan throw Italian and Irish racial slurs around like its 1929. Steve tells us about growing up as a little street scamp on the mean...
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TMR 018 – Before Sunrise
Before Sunrise (1995) d. Richard Linklater Starring: Ethan Hawke Julie Delpy This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve and Ryan drop their ironic, cynical pose and reveal the wounded romantic inside. Steve tells us how this movie helped him during those in-between-relationship periods of booze and…
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TMR 017 – The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project (1999) Starring: Heather Donahue Joshua Leonard Michael C. Williams This week on Total Movie Recall, Steve & Ryan participate in the most horrific thing imaginable - spending a week alone in the woods with three insufferable film students. The guys talk about how…
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About this show
Total Movie Recall is a free-wheeling film nostalgia podcast in which hosts Steve Albertson & Ryan Mixson each have painstakingly assembled a list of movies that have touched them in some way at a specific moment in their lives. The hosts alternate rolling dice at the end of each show to determine which film will be explored in the following episode. TRM is produced independently in Los Angeles and Denver.
Hosted by
Steve Albertson & Ryan Mixson