Show Notes
This week on Podcast Like It’s the 2000s, Phil Iscove and Emily St. James continue their Pixar of the 2000s miniseries by diving into Brad Bird’s The Incredibles with critic and writer Libby Hill. Released in 2004, The Incredibles sits at a fascinating crossroads for Pixar part family sitcom, part mid-century spy fantasy, and part superhero deconstruction years before the genre would dominate Hollywood. Phil, Emily, and Libby unpack why the film’s action sequences double as character studies, how its superpowers function as metaphors for family roles, and why the movie still feels sharper than most modern comic-book adaptations. They also discuss the film’s complicated nostalgia, its cultural blind spots, and why The Incredibles managed to “get away with” things that live-action superhero movies still struggle to pull off. Along the way, the conversation touches on Brad Bird’s direction, Pixar’s voice-acting process, the film’s critical and commercial legacy, and where The Incredibles sits in the larger Pixar pantheon especially when compared to its sequel.
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Phil and Emily are joined by critic Sonia Saraiya, back for the first time since Charlie Wilson's War, for Pan's Labyrinth (2006), the fourth stop in the October Guillermo del Toro mini-series. In 1944 Spain, eleven-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) arrives at a rural outpost with her pregnant mother to live under Captain Vidal (Sergi López), a Francoist officer hunting the last Republican guerrillas, and finds a faun in the ruins who tells her she is a lost princess with three tasks to complete. It earned six Oscar nominations and won three, got four stars from Ebert and a 98 on Metacritic, and lost Best Foreign Language Film to The Lives of Others, which Phil is still relitigating.
Phil and Emily are joined by author and journalist Lin Codega, co-founder of Rascal News, to continue their Guillermo del Toro mini series with Hellboy (2004). Ron Perlman plays a demon raised by the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (John Hurt, Selma Blair, Rupert Evans, Jeffrey Tambor), and when Rasputin is dragged back from the dead to bring on the apocalypse, the world's most reluctant harbinger of doom has to decide who he wants to be. Doug Jones is Abe Sapien, and yes, the panel has opinions on that.
Phil and Emily are joined by Vulture TV critic Roxana Hadadi for the second stop in the October Guillermo del Toro mini-series, Blade II (2002). Wesley Snipes's half-vampire Daywalker teams up with the Bloodpack, an elite vampire hit squad built to kill him (Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen among them), to hunt the Reapers, a mutant strain that feeds on vampires and humans alike. It opened March 22, 2002 against Ice Age and the E.T. re-release, made $155 million on a $55 million budget, and got three and a half stars from Ebert, who called it a brilliant vomitorium of viscera.
Phil and Emily are joined by Monica Castillo, film critic for The A.V. Club, to open a Halloween-season mini-series on all five of Guillermo del Toro's 2000s films with The Devil's Backbone (2001). In the last week of the Spanish Civil War, twelve-year-old Carlos is left at a remote orphanage run by Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), where an unexploded bomb sits in the courtyard, the groundskeeper Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) is hunting for hidden Republican gold, and a drowned boy named Santi is still whispering in the halls. It opened against Harry Potter and Monsters, Inc. and made $6.5 million on a $4.5 million budget, and Phil is watching it for the first time.
Phil and Emily are joined by film journalist and podcaster Blake Howard (One Heat Minute Productions) to close out the 2000s Best Actress Oscar follow-ups mini-series with Michael Mann's Public Enemies (2009). Johnny Depp's John Dillinger robs Depression-era banks and romances Marion Cotillard's Billie Frechette while Christian Bale's Melvin Purvis and Billy Crudup's J. Edgar Hoover build the modern FBI around catching him. It opened July 3, 2009 against Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and made $214 million on a $100 million budget, and Phil, who left the theater disappointed that summer expecting Heat meets The Untouchables, has come all the way around on it.