BFG Podcast #048: Stacey Abrams, ‘The Lost City,’ Top Chef…and More!

In this week’s exciting edition of the BFG Week in Review podcast, we do not cover last night’s Oscar ceremony. That’s coming soon in what we like to call a “Special Edition” of the show. However, we do cover other things ongoing in a culture, and there are a lot of them.

First, William Schwartz stops by the Pod Dome to discuss why politician Stacey Abrams plays an idealized version of herself in the season finale of ‘Star Trek: Discovery.’ When celebrities appear on shows, it should be goofy, not lionizing. Both Schwartz and host Neal Pollack lament that Star Trek no longer occupies the central place in our culture that it once did. What was once seamlessly progressive is just another woke signpost.

A wild Stephen Garrett appears to talk with Neal about many movies, including ‘The Lost City,‘ which he found goofy fun at first but ultimately kind of a drag, and the Nicolas Cage vehicle, ‘The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent,’ which both he and Neal found appropriately meta, pretty funny, and not too annoying. Meanwhile the erotic thriller ‘Deep Water,’ an adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel, comes in for a massive roasting. Neal has special fun with one of the screenwriters, Zach Helm, who once wrote a manifesto talking about how he’d never compromise his artistic values. And now he writes a late-era Adrian Lyne thriller about a wife who bites penises.

Finally, Daniel Cohen returns to the cast to talk about food. He laments that this season of ‘Top Chef’ doesn’t have any noticeable villains, though there have been several entertaining eliminations, including a chef making Asian food who has clearly never made Asian food before, and a guy trying to make vindaloo for Padma Lakshmi. Bonus content: They discuss Guy Fieri’s ‘Tournament Of Champions.’ Cooking competitions are a universe onto themselves, and we cover them hungrily at BFG.

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