Two very different movies. Two very different nights. And somehow, the perfect way to kick off a new year.

Jason starts with a New Year’s Eve review of Avatar: Fire and Ash — a three-hour, seventeen-minute marathon that became less about the plot and more about surviving until midnight. VIP seats, 3D glasses, popcorn dehydration, and a surprisingly solid four-star verdict.

Barry follows with Stephen King’s The Long Walk, starring Mark Hamill and Cooper Hoffman. It’s dark, relentless, and closer to a psychological endurance test than a traditional adaptation. Well acted, bleak, and memorable for all kinds of reasons.

Along the way, we talk about movie runtimes, recap culture, the rise of “time-filler films,” and why some stories stay fun while others stick with you for days. There’s also tea, Bushmills 12, motivational lamps, and a teaser for the return of chicken roulette.

Grab a drink and settle in — this one covers a lot of cinematic ground.

This week we’re joined by The Movie Guy for a breakdown of PRIMATE, a Cujo-style horror flick about a rabid chimp, a cliffside mansion, and one very bad night. We get into the creature effects, the surprisingly intense gore, the oddly used deaf-dad subplot, and why a 90-minute runtime was probably the smartest thing about the film.

Along the way, we debate pool-based survival strategies, the logic of rabies rules, and which parts of the movie unintentionally made us laugh. And in true Two Shot Tuesday fashion, the episode somehow pivots to ketchup, mustard, and one of the strangest domestic coincidences Jason has ever experienced.

It’s chaotic, funny, and very us — enjoy the ride.

It starts with a Rip From the Headlines that grabs our attention — “Mercury, the planet that shouldn’t exist” — and sends us down an unexpected space rabbit hole.

In this episode of Two Shot Tuesday, we talk about why Mercury raises real questions, how little we understand about our own solar system, and why scale and time in space completely break human intuition. The conversation drifts into asteroid belts, ringed worlds, space tourism, and whether space exploration is about spectacle or something much bigger.

We wrap by looking ahead to Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, and why space stories — real or fictional — keep pulling us back in.

Pour something and come along for the ride.