100 - The Centennial

100 - The Centennial

Episode 100: The Centennial After nearly three years and a genuinely alarming 1.1 terabytes of backed-up audio, Dumpsterpiece Theatre hits its 100th episode and celebrates the only responsible way: by refusing to watch a single new thing. Instead, Scott and Liz take a victory lap through episodes 51–100, ranking the best and worst of the bunch, hate-watching a reno show that should be under federal investigation, and reading back a master catalog of every rabbit hole they've ever fallen into. No plot was harmed in the making of this episode, largely because there isn't one. Peak Dumpster Moments: ◆ Dueling Mount Rushmores that collapse over definitions almost immediately ◆ Liz defending Idea of You as a 40-year-old woman living vicariously ◆ The Walls of Shame, where Horse Sense earns a rare bipartisan conviction (#needs more horses) ◆ "You Can't Turn That Into a House," the bargain-basement HGTV knockoff and OSHA fever dream ◆ A tiny-home rant from two committed maximalists The Tangent Files: The centerpiece is the tangent of tangents: a full audit of fifty episodes' worth of digressions. Bonus: the catalog dutifully calls out Liz's persistent crushes Liz also renews her campaign for a mandatory Joshua Jackson film, spiraling into whether he voices a horse named Trenton's Pride in Racing Stripes. The Verdict: As a movie, unrateable; as a milestone, a full five dumpsters - three years of two people technically not reviewing films, lovingly archived across 10-terabyte hard drives. Special recognition to the producers: Oberon, who contributes by taking scratch breaks, and Elvi, the diva who scored her own "catio" portal this year and now must be bribed back indoors with turkey. Coming Up Next: Episode 101, where the victory lap ends and it's back to My Life with the Walter Boys (Season 1, Episodes 6–7) with a running tally of everything the production won't let Marc Blucas do.

099 - Horse Sense

Episode 99: Horse Sense We saddle up for a 1999 Disney Channel offering starring Joey Lawrence and Andrew Lawrence - but, in a genuine travesty, not the third Lawrence brother, who is relegated to an uncredited cameo as a cowboy giving the stink-eye at an airport. Horse Sense follows Michael, a spoiled Beverly Hills college kid who's flunking class, gifting his trust-fund girlfriend Gina anniversary watches, and backing his Porsche into strangers, until his parents sentence him to a month of ranch labor in Montana - or the Europe trip gets canceled. It is a movie titled Horse Sense that contains shockingly little horse until roughly the final 30 minutes, leading to our working theory that the entire equine budget was being saved for the third act. What follows is a fairly leisurely fish-out-of-water arc - manure, branding, wolf watch, a stampede - that we mostly use as a launchpad for arguing about 1999 cellular infrastructure and the contractual obligations of former Blossom cast members. Peak Dumpster Moments: ◆ Horses rationed like wartime sugar until the last reel ◆ Michael's cell phone getting flawless service in the literal middle of rural Montana in 1999 - which sends Scott into a full cellular-coverage rabbit hole he is still mad about ◆ "Stampede. Loose seal." - calling 911 during a cattle stampede ◆ Twister, the 6'5" handlebar-mustached ranch hand who gives off gay prison vibes ◆ The montage of moving a manure pile twenty feet by hand, followed by the reveal that there was a tractor the entire time ◆ Michael attempting to pitch the ranch hand on a pyramid scheme, who correctly identifies it as "gambling" ◆ A horse tied to a parking meter - and fed a quarter - because this ranch town apparently lacks a hitching post ◆ Joey Lawrence's apparent "no whoa" contract clause, which he honors while calling Tommy "Buddy" approximately five million times ◆ The film prompting us to ask Claude how conservation easements actually work (for the record: you can still profit) The Tangent Files: Liz confesses she has never seen the single most famous episode of Seinfeld and "must've fallen asleep" during it. We unearth that Michael's mom is Ms. Jacobs from Dawson's Creek, which detonates Liz's enduring Team Pacey allegiance and a pitch to review a Joshua Jackson film "to be very thorough." Scott goes spelunking through his yellow Nokia brick phone and the Cellular One conglomerate to definitively call BS on Montana coverage, then graduates to twelve-foot mesh satellite dishes ("can't hide money") and Starlink. Elsewhere: 2026 beef prices and the horror of $42 Costco hamburger patties, Leonardo DiCaprio's strict under-25 dating ordinance, a childhood of quicksand fear that never once materialized, and a fully imagined future where Michael and Gina marry into a Xanax-and-Maserati existential crisis. The Verdict: A solid three and a half dumpsters. Pretty darn slow until the last five minutes, when it suddenly remembers it has a plot and lifts a surprisingly poignant monologue (cribbed from Twister) about the vanishing pride of the independent rancher - a sentiment that has, if anything, aged into being more true. Liz hands the horsemanship a C-minus for the pavement-galloping and a "wild" horse so tame it has clearly been handled before. Not a hateable watch - the internet apparently agrees, with one British reviewer generously declaring it "Not a Load of Manure." Coming Up Next: Episode 100. The centennial. It's taken us nearly three years to get here and we're keeping the milestone a surprise because we don't know what we're doing - then it's back to My Life with the Walter Boys and a running tally of everything they won't let Marc Blucas do. IMDB [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219813/] Rotten Tomatoes [https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/horse_sense]

098 - I'll Be Seeing You by Lurlene McDaniel

Episode 98: I'll Be Seeing You by Lurlene McDaniel Dumpsterpiece Theatre cracks open a 1996 Lurlene McDaniel paperback and finds exactly what you'd expect: overdramatic teenagers, medically detailed suffering, and one girl's heroic commitment to making everything worse for herself. I'll Be Seeing You follows 16-year-old Carley Mattea - hospitalized with an infected broken leg from a rollerblading incident - and Kyle Weston, a chemistry club enthusiast who burned his corneas (and some of his chest) trying to make homemade rocket fuel. He's temporarily blind. She has a facial deformity from childhood tumor surgery. They meet in the pediatric ward of Knoxville General Hospital, which in 1996 apparently had rooms the size of studio apartments and a staff that dispensed sleeping pills like breath mints. Rather than tell the cute blind boy about her face at literally any of the dozen natural opportunities, Carley instead constructs an escalating tower of lies that includes: dodging his parents, refusing to let him touch the left side of her face, conscripting her hot sister Janelle into a wheelchair-based impersonation scheme, inventing a fake jealous boyfriend named Jon (who is actually her sister's boyfriend), and orchestrating a coffee shop viewing arrangement where Kyle can look at the wrong girl from across the room and then leave. We are genuinely impressed that Lurlene did her ophthalmological homework on acid versus alkaline chemical burns. Lurleen's teenage boys, however, remain consistently terrible, with Janelle's boyfriend Jon delivering the all-timer: "You're not normal, but you're all right, Carly." Peak Dumpster Moments: ◆ Carley's parents leave their hospitalized teenager alone for days because the hospital is 60 miles away and they have a bookstore to run - different times, folks ◆ Kyle's chemistry club origin story. Rule one of chemistry club: don't talk about chemistry club. ◆ The sister switcheroo: Janelle sits in a wheelchair with a blanket over her legs and is told to "just mimic my voice" - a plan with zero chance of working on a guy whose other senses are heightened ◆ Carley invents a fictitious boyfriend whose name is… Jon. Which is also the name of her sister's actual boyfriend. Or was it George Glass? ◆ The Mudpie coffee shop sting operation, where Kyle agrees to "see her from a distance". ◆ Liz reads aloud the line where Kyle expresses regret that they didn't meet two years later, when plastic surgery would have made Carley "more acceptable." Bad timing, Kyle. ◆ Kyle reads books on quantum theory. On audiobook. ◆ John's apology to Carley for calling her a dog face boils down to "sorry you heard that, but your sister's hot and I don't want you ruining this for me" ◆ Dr. Chafoo. We just enjoy saying Dr. Chafoo. The Tangent Files: Liz discusses the new busy-mom buzzword "Maycember" (or Maytember?), which Scott firmly does not believe is a real thing. Justin Timberlake's DUI situation comes up. We then take a hard left into the Fisher-Price PXL 2000, the Home Alone 2 Talk Boy, the lost art of recording songs off the radio, and the ideal silence gap between mixtape tracks. Scott cops to once owning a "For Your Consideration" bootleg of Fellowship of the Ring, plugs the LOTR 25th-anniversary theatrical re-release, and concludes that Peter Jackson is, fairly, sitting on his pile of money. And Scott's "Who are you?" Airbnb incident - the time he sat up in bed and demanded, in perfect theatrical diction, to know who was in the room - is dragged out of the archives and entered into the canon. Coming Up Next: Horse Sense (1999), a Disney Channel movie starring Joey Lawrence and Andrew Lawrence — but not the third Lawrence brother, which is a travesty. A spoiled city kid gets sentenced to ranch life with his cousin and aunt. Liz is anticipating terrible horsemanship. The trope bingo board may make its debut. Yee-haw. Goodreads [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/127438.I_ll_Be_Seeing_You] Interview with Lurlene [https://www.bookpage.com/interviews/8063-lurlene-mcdaniel-ya/] Author Page [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/19817/lurlene-mcdaniel/]

097 - My Life with the Walter Boys S1E4-5 [Netflix]

Episode 97: My Life with the Walter Boys (S1E4-5) We return to Silver Falls, Colorado for another hearty helping of Walter Boys, where seven teenage boys, one transplanted New York City girl, and approximately zero well-developed supporting characters continue to grind their way through a love triangle nobody asked for. Episode 4 is titled "Nineteen" (there's a reason, you'll figure it out about three seconds before the show tells you), and Episode 5 is titled "Thanksgiving," because when you're two-for-two on uninspired titles, why start trying now? Before we get into it, Liz unveils her long-promised trope bingo board - 24 squares including Emily Good Ideas, Quirk Chungus, Chekhov's Teapot, Toby Tucker, "Am I a f-ing bet?", and the ever-reliable "how are they affording that?" We workshop squares, argue about overlap, and debate what the loser has to make for dinner. Then we plunge into two episodes where Jackie breaks a teapot, breaks a curfew, jumps onto a circuit breaker panel with the confidence of a licensed electrician, and very nearly breaks both Walter brothers in a single 48-hour period. Scott is unconvinced. Liz is annoyed by everyone. Nobody can remember which brother is which. Peak Dumpster Moments: ◆ Jackie, during a massive Colorado storm, fixes a whole-house power outage by flipping one 30-amp double-gang breaker - which Scott takes personally ◆ The English teacher, Mr. Chaudry, asks the guidance counselor out and threatens to put a little icing on her cake ◆ A truth-or-dare round at an unsanctioned lake house party with a comically oversized fire pit ◆ "I wanna put my mouth on your mouth" ◆ Mark Blucas wields a Butler of Sheffield elk-handled knife to carve the turkey. We question whether production would ever let Mark Blucas hold an actual sharp object. ◆ Haley shows up with a hairdo so structurally ambitious it constitutes a jumpscare The Tangent Files: A detour into Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet. The goth band auditioning at the Lark launches a prolonged effort to remember the name of Richmond's favorite band from The IT Crowd. Uncle Richard arrives for Thanksgiving looking like he's fresh off a Joseph A. Bank East Coast Convention. Liz delivers a full-throated sermon on the madness of eating Thanksgiving dinner at one in the afternoon. We also learn that "Treehenge" is apparently a real thing, or at least as real as "Manhattanhenge," which is dubious. The Verdict: Scott notes that the Thanksgiving episode is measurably better-produced than its predecessors, though both hosts remain united in their disdain for roughly every character except for George Walter, who is essentially Mark Blucas being a dad. We crown the show a fingerling potato - interesting-looking, structurally puzzling, and nobody asks for them at dinner. Scott concurs. A finger blasted fingerling, if you will. Coming Up Next: I'll Be Seeing You by Lurlene McDaniel, a 1996 weepy about a 17-year-old named Kyle who is blinded in a chemistry experiment explosion (apparently he poured the water into the acid) and the 16-year-old girl with a facial deformity who falls for him in the hospital. The cover features Kyle in Vietnam-bandana eye-gauze sporting a near-Hasselhoff quaff and 17-year-old forearms that could only belong to a Hobbit. Also: a pair of completely unnecessary background crutches. We dive in. IMDB [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8323628/episodes/?season=1&ref_=tt_eps_sn_1] Rotten Tomatoes [https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/my_life_with_the_walter_boys/s01] Metacritic [https://www.metacritic.com/tv/my-life-with-the-walter-boys/season-1/]

096 - Leaving Las Vegas

Episode 96: Leaving Las Vegas Dumpsterpiece Theatre takes a sharp detour from its usual diet of romantic comedy slop to tackle a genuinely good (and devastating) film. Nic Cage plays a Hollywood screenwriter who cashes in his severance check, packs a suitcase full of liquor bottles and heads to Vegas to drink himself to death. Elizabeth Shue is the escort who falls for him anyway. It's bleak. It's heavy. We watched it so you don't have to, though in this case you probably should. We run the inflation math on a 1995 hooker, debate whether a liquor store can legally sell one man that much alcohol, and try to figure out how someone survives weeks without food on nothing but bottom-shelf vodka and the occasional screwdriver. There's a spirited defense of Nic Cage as a legitimate actor, an Always Sunny comparison that writes itself, and a motel called the Whole Year Inn that Ben's booze-addled brain reads very differently. Scott shares the tale of a Vegas cab driver who handed him a brothel catalog before he'd even left the airport, and we learn that Nic Cage turned down the role of Harry in Dumb and Dumber to make this film - a casting what-if that briefly breaks our brains. Peak Moments: ◆ Ben packing for his big move: every bottle of liquor in the hotel room goes in the suitcase. Clothes? One shirt. Priorities. ◆ The rental agreement that comes with a very specific monthly payment arrangement. "I accept your terms." ◆ A poolside romantic getaway that goes sideways when Ben tries to retrieve his "drinky" and obliterates a glass table. "I'm like a prickly pear." ◆ Julian Lennon shows up as a bartender. French Stewart is apparently somewhere in this movie as "Businessman Number Two." Neither of us spotted him. ◆ A cab driver delivers one of the most callous lines in film history to a visibly beaten woman. We are not okay. The Tangent Files: A discussion of first-person-POV spiral movies produces a surprisingly deep list including Elijah Wood as a serial killer, a Tokyo drug dealer who experiences the afterlife through his own blinks, and a dance troupe whose sangria gets spiked with LSD. We also learn that the author of the source novel got his start writing an episode of Rugrats - and was disgusted by the editorial changes. There's a Laserdisc rabbit hole involving a rumored unrated cut, eBay listings between $200 and $1,000, and the open question of whether you can even find a player anymore. Scott may or may not be shopping. The Verdict: A well-acted, well-written film that makes you never want to drink again. One of those movies you see once and say "I'm good." We put it in the same category as Requiem for a Dream Too heavy for the dumpster scale, so Liz decides to debut the Potato Poll instead. This one's a blue potato. Coming Up Next: My Life with the Walter Boys - a hard left back into our regularly scheduled programming, assuming we can remember any of their names. Cole, Alex, Benny, Qbert, Filthy Dave, Dirty Sanchez... we'll figure it out. IMDB [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113627/] Rotten Tomatoes [https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/leaving_las_vegas] Metacritic [https://www.metacritic.com/movie/leaving-las-vegas/]