And with a blink of an eye another month has passed! This means it is time to check in on our activities over at the Uncut Gems Podcast and its Patreon bonus stream to see what we have been up to in July.
Our 2026 mission of discussing 80s cinema from a number of angles moved officially from comedy into what we termed Summer Action Solstice: three months of discussions about action movies from the era. We decided to begin this part of the year with an entire month of buddy cop action movies, a microgenre that owes its origin to The Odd Couple and Freebie and the Bean (and if you listen to the show you will know that we have a tendency to refer to both on occasion) but blossomed in the mid-80s. Thus, we chose to discuss Running Scared, Dragnet (which kind of served as a natural extension of an entire month of SNL-adjacent chats as well), Stakeout and Tango & Cash. Of course, we had to leave a few titles to one side, specifically because we have already discussed Lethal Weapon (arguably one of the most well-known movies in this space) in the past and we do have plans to talk about 48 Hrs a little bit later in the year where it will fit just as well. However, we did choose to include an extra conversation, a Bonus Tie-in available to our Patreon supporters, where we talked about one of the most iconic and perhaps important movies that influenced this trend, Beverly Hills Cop.
Episode 284 (Running Scared)
Episode 285 (Dragnet)
Episode 286 (Stakeout)
Episode 287 (Tango & Cash)
Bonus Tie-in 62 (Beverly Hills Cop) (full episode on Patreon)
The 80s Icons series also added an episode, where we finally found an opportunity to talk about objectively the biggest movie of the decade (and the biggest movie of all time at the time), which is Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
80s Icons 07 (E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial) (full episode on Patreon)
Finally, our Mike Nichols Marathon inched ever closer (sic!) to its conclusion. We talked about his 2004 adaptation of Closer that equally revisits spaces Nichols built his career on and probes new depths in the human condition.
Flasz On Film 
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