Make Me A Nerd with Mandy Kaplan

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Twelve Percent and Worth It: Sphere with Kynan Dias

August 10, 2026

Every so often a guest arrives having chosen not the safe pick, not the crowd-pleaser, but the one movie they have been quietly waiting years for somebody to ask them about. Kynan Dias picked Sphere. It's a 1998 Barry Levinson picture starring Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson, adapted from a Michael Crichton novel, and it currently sits at twelve percent on Rotten Tomatoes. (Twelve. Out of a hundred. Mandy looks this up, then spends a while working out how to raise it polit...

Neverland Has Xenomorphs Now: Alien Earth with Rick London

August 03, 2026

Rick London came for Alien: Earth — Noah Hawley's reportedly quarter-billion-dollar fever dream about corporations, immortality, and dying children installed in adult bodies — and he came prepared to defend every last drop of the show's frankly staggering liquid output. (There is a lot of liquid. Mandy counted. It was her first note, and the most consistent theme of her entire viewing experience.) What Rick did not anticipate was that Mandy would arrive with a theory about Willy Wonka.Somewhe...

A Desire for More Cows: Arrival with Justin Jaeger

July 27, 2026

The instant a movie is pitched to Mandy as "aliens come to Earth," she has already changed the channel, mentally relocated to a spa, and started a calmer life. So naturally, this week she sat down with Arrival, a film she spent years confusing with The Martian (fair), which she also assumed was basically the plot of Project Hail Mary (it is not), a book that gave her an actual, physiological anxiety response somewhere around page 100. This is a person who cannot watch a character face death w...