The Celluloid President

Rob Reiner's "LBJ"

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2110618/fan_mail/new] Rob Reiner's "LBJ" is a meticulously accurate rendering of the five tumultuous days from President Kennedy's assassination to the newly installed President Johnson's address to a joint session of Congress. While not avoiding LBJ's earthiness and aesthetic flaws, the movie seems to want to rehabilitate Johnson's tarnished legacy, while surprisingly taking a less charitable view of his longtime nemesis -- Robert F. Kennedy.

Meryl Streep is "The Iron Lady"

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2110618/fan_mail/new] Meryl Streep pulls out one of her best accents to play Margaret Thatcher in the 2011 biopic "The Iron Lady." Jim and Gary both agree that Streep is a great actress and that Thatcher was one of the major figures of the last half of the 20th Century, but they are not completely aligned on the use of scenes where Thatcher is shown to have dementia. Jim also reminisces about the time he met her in Number 10 Downing Street.

Robert Altman's "Nashville"

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2110618/fan_mail/new] In their second podcast about movies from 1975 -- designated by Netflix as the greatest year in movie history -- Gary and Jim discuss Nashville, the sprawling epic about country music and politics. It's one of the most cynical movies of the Seventies and also secretly one of the funniest. But is it as smart about politics as it thinks it is?

Warren Beatty's "Shampoo"

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2110618/fan_mail/new] Warren Beatty has long insisted that his sex farce "Shampoo" set on the night in 1968 when Richard Nixon was elected President, was a political satire. But was it really, or does it tell us more about the 1970s than it does the 1960s?

Netflix's "Death by Lightning" --The Assassination of James Garfield

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2110618/fan_mail/new] "Death by Lightning is a four-part Netflix series about the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881, which despite sounding pretty esoteric, is an absorbing depiction of a moment in time during the Gilded Age.  Jim and Gary discuss whether this event has any lessons for us today and wrestle with the important question: what's up with all the beards?