This week: our first "Intermission"-style episode! What We Watched in 2015: Part I spends most of its time covering this year's releases, from the good (Mad Max, Inside Out, Ex Machina, Hannibal, Daredevil) to the bad (Avengers: Age of Ultron, Terminator: Genisys) to the contested (Inherent Vice). We also briefly delve into past releases that we saw for the first time this year (The Babadook, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, etc.). It's certainly the most fun we've had with an episode so far.

Next week will see the release of the second episode we recorded yesterday: the first of three planned episodes devoted to the leadup to The Force Awakens. We cover Comic-Con, speculate a bit, and in general just nerd all over the place.

Nicely done, man, that looks great.

Weirdly enough, Pigeon is actually a liberal, he just wants to avoid controversy--I explained to him after that episode that no one really cares. Jb is...interesting. We basically have him on because he's very knowledgeable about Star Wars and comics, but he's also a young earth creationist, strong conservative, etc. We don't plan on having him on for most political movies, we just had to make an exception for Star Wars.

I noticed your tweets on the same, I'm curious as to which aspects you single out as regressive?

The first thing I thought when I saw the announcement was "Shit, Doc's gonna spontaneously combust."

That question was actually asked of a crew member on RotS. The response was "They're lightsabers, not mood rings."

So the Casino Royale commentary went horribly wrong, with Charles' file failing to save properly. The resulting attempt at salvaging his audio is far too hit and miss for this to serve as a proper episode, but I'll be damned if ten hours of frantic cleanup is going to waste (long story short, I had to amplify his audio bleed by like 70 decibels and then noise-remove it as best as possible). Thus this week's episode, approximately 3/4 of a proper commentary, is entitled Episode 6.5: The Casino Royale Tapes.

So sorry, Pav. That's devastating.

Speaking of the different turns of phrase used in the film, I think I've fallen in love with the word "schlanger".

He's going home today!!!

Belated appreciation: this album and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly are what finally allowed me to break through a musical barrier and appreciate rap, and your review was the reason I picked up the former. Thanks so much for that!

I think it may have less to do with the format and more to do with that particular genre of it. I was never a comics reader when I was a kid, but I've been able to dive into Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman's stuff just fine. The new Star Wars series too. Standard superhero comics, however, still throw me for a loop. I think it's a combination of, in a lot of cases, the overly saturated art and the gee-whiz dialogue; it's really damn hard to take them seriously when coupled together.