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Make Me A Nerd with Mandy Kaplan

Make Me A Nerd with Mandy Kaplan

By: TruStory FM
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Summary
 Hey folks. Mandy Kaplan here. I’d like to share a bit about my intentions and mission for MMAN if you’ll indulge me. You will? Huzzah!

Look, I am a lot of things. I’m a writer, actress, mother, and lover of musicals and cats, but NOT Cats, The Musical. Give me a little bit of credit, would ya? So...throughout my life, I’ve been surrounded (and intrigued) by all things nerd. A sister who plays D&D, a Star Wars-obsessed husband, friends who love anime, comic books, video games, and...well, you get the picture. Somehow, I have always held it all at arm's length. Not to get too deep, but maybe I never thought I was smart enough to follow it. Or maybe I have control issues and have never been able to embrace fantastical things like dragons and time travel. Until now!

So, with an open mind and heart, I am ready to join this massive (and beautifully inclusive) club and GEEK THE #%$ OUT! It’s time for all my wonderfully strange friends to baptize me into NERD-DOM. Please join me on this journey. Who knows? Maybe you’ll discover or remember a side of yourself along the way. Or at least make fun of me as I try!© TruStory FM Art Social Sciences
Episodes
  • Sinners with Rhonda Smith

    Sinners with Rhonda Smith
    Nov 2 2026
    Mandy Kaplan turned off Sinners a few minutes in, the same week everyone she knew was calling it the best movie of the year. She has been apologizing for that ever since, and this episode is the formal version. Her guide is Rhonda Smith, an Atlanta actress and IT professional who runs the ATL Movie Club and has now seen the film four times, the fourth one the night before recording so she could be fresh. Rhonda brought details. Smoke always wears blue and Stack always wears red, and one of them is left-handed, which Mandy had not clocked despite taking notes. There's a man on a white horse outside the church at the end. The beams in that church are, according to Rhonda's research, arranged as a tribute to Chadwick Boseman, which lands a little differently on a host who has never seen Black Panther.They argue about whether Sinners counts as a musical (Mandy: basically yes; Rhonda: no) and agree completely about the cut from Remmick leaving the ground to the dance floor, which Mandy calls the best filmmaking decision in the movie. Mandy reads a prepared fun fact about Al Capone's hiring practices and demands a sting for it. Hailee Steinfeld gets a full defense that starts at Pitch Perfect. And Rhonda closes with a theory about vampire eye colors that she found online and then went back to the film to confirm, which is the whole ATL Movie Club philosophy in one move. Press play.Guest SpotlightRhonda Smith is an actress and voiceover performer based in Atlanta, originally from Detroit, with a day career in information technology. She started going to movies alone in Houston, started a movie club with friends after moving back to Detroit, and restarted it in Atlanta when her friends there asked why they couldn't have one too. The ATL Movie Club now has more than 200 members across Facebook and Instagram and still meets in person about once a quarter to go through one film at a time.ATL Movie Club on Instagramrhonda-smith.comRhonda M. Smith on FilmFreewayReference LinksFilmsSinners (2025)Get Out (2017)Us (2019)Black Panther (2018)Fruitvale Station (2013)Pitch Perfect (2012)True Grit (2010)Interview with the Vampire (1994)PeopleRyan CooglerMichael B. JordanHailee SteinfeldMiles CatonJack O'ConnellWunmi MosakuDelroy LindoLudwig GöranssonRobert JohnsonConcepts and BackgroundChoctawHoodooCross Road Blues (the Robert Johnson "deal with the devil" legend)Chicago OutfitList of accolades received by SinnersMusic"Pale, Pale Moon" — Brittany Howard, from SinnersSinners Soundtrack playlistMake Me a Nerd Episodes MentionedSecond Breakfast for Mandy: A Lord of the Rings Rundown with Richard HellsternSensual Creatures: Vampires, Frilly Shirts, and Interview with a Vampire with Jonny Lee Jr.Dracula with Lester Ryan ClarkTwilight with Ben RaffleA Supernatural Crash Course with Krissy LenzFact-Check CornerFlags on what was said on air. Nothing here changes the transcript."It won for cinematography and music. It won Oscars." True, and there were two more. Sinners won four Oscars at the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, 2026: Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Best Original Screenplay (Ryan Coogler), Best Cinematography (Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the first woman to win that category), and Best Original Score (Ludwig Göransson). It went in with a record 16 nominations."She says her father was African American." / "Or grandfather or something." Neither. At least one source describes Mary as one-eighth Black, which would make it a great-grandparent. "Ryan Coogler made the film in like six different formats." The release did include unusual formats: IMAX 70mm (15-perf) in about ten U.S. theaters and a separate 70mm 5-perf run, plus standard IMAX and digital. Rhonda's "panoramic one where it was all the way around you" is referring to Regal’s “Screen X” format which includes screens on the left and right walls of the theater with extra wide footage. And the format with “blood spraying on you” was not actually blood, but water — along with wind and movement — in the 4DX format. Which was ABSOLUTELY CRAZY — ed.Vampire eye colors (red for Remmick, yellow for the hive, sapphire for Stack and later Mary). The makeup department confirmed custom lenses for Remmick, Stack, and Mary, with Coogler's only stipulation being red for the villain. The rank-based system Rhonda describes is a fan reading; the makeup interview neither confirms nor denies it."Sammie's character is loosely based off of a blues player named Robert Johnson." Supported. Several reviews, including The Independent's, connect Sammie to the Robert Johnson crossroads legend. Rhonda's "I don't know if that's true or not" about the legend itself is the correct hedge. But the coolest addition to this story which they didn’t talk about on the show was in the post-credits scene introducing the elderly Sammie Moore character playing a show in a small blues club. The actor portraying Sammie in that scene was the absolutely legendary blues musician, Buddy Guy. For ...
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    46 mins
  • Brazil with Andy Nelson

    Brazil with Andy Nelson
    Oct 26 2026
    Andy Nelson has been sitting on this one. He's been talking about movies on The Next Reel since 2011, and when Mandy asked him to come back and pick anything, he chose the film he has loved most for his entire adult life, because he suspected (correctly, it turns out) that it would require a Xanax. Terry Gilliam's Brazil is a comedy about paperwork. It is also a horror movie about paperwork. A man is arrested in his living room because of a typo, his wife signs for him in triplicate, and the government is very sorry for the inconvenience. Mandy, a mainstream mom with a documented sensitivity to bleak world-building, spent large portions of the film feeling nauseous, anxious, and deeply disturbed, and then cackled out loud at a plumbing joke. That is the whole experience of this movie, and Andy has seen it countless times.What neither of them expected was how little of it would feel hypothetical. The forcible removals, the bombs people step around to finish lunch, the machines that do everyone's jobs badly: Mandy keeps circling back to the fact that she might have enjoyed this ride in a different decade, and Andy, who has carried this film around since high school, hears his favorite jokes land differently in real time. There's also a cameo from Robert De Niro that Mandy considers a bait-and-switch, a Jim Broadbent plastic surgery subplot she diagnoses as a Real Housewives lunch, a studio-mandated happy ending that Criterion preserved as a warning, and a brand-new nightmare creature Mandy would like to name a band after. Press play.Guest SpotlightAndy Nelson is a partner at TruStory FM and co-host, with Pete Wright, of The Next Reel, now in its sixteenth season. He also hosts Cinema Scope, where he brings in an expert to go deep on a single genre, subgenre, or movement, and Movies We Like, which invites industry guests to talk about a favorite film. Before and alongside podcasting he has spent more than 25 years in film, TV, and commercial production, with writing, directing, and producing credits on shorts, indie features, and documentaries, and he teaches screenwriting, producing, editing, and podcasting.Andy Nelson on TruStory FMThe Next Reel Film PodcastCinema ScopeMovies We LikeLinks & ReferencesThe FilmBrazil (1985) on LetterboxdBrazil (1985 film) on WikipediaTerry Gilliam's FilmographyTerry GilliamFilms directed by Terry Gilliam on LetterboxdTime Bandits (1981)The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)The Fisher King (1991)Twelve Monkeys (1995)Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)The Brothers Grimm (2005)The Zero Theorem (2013)The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)Monty PythonMonty PythonMonty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)Life of Brian (1979)Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)Michael PalinGraham ChapmanJohn CleeseEric IdleTerry JonesSpamalotCastJonathan PryceRobert De NiroKatherine HelmondJim BroadbentKim GreistThe Battle Over the CutSidney Sheinberg — the Universal executive who ordered the "Love Conquers All" recutOther Films MentionedBattleship Potemkin (1925) — the Odessa Steps images Andy says Gilliam is quotingIdiocracy (2006)Blade Runner (1982)Steel Magnolias (1989)A Fish Called Wanda (1988)Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986)Evita (1996)The Breakfast Club (1985)Showgirls (1995)What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)Jurassic Park (1993)Television & StageThe Big Bang TheoryThe Handmaid's Tale (novel)The Handmaid's Tale (TV series)The Penguin (TV series)Miss Saigon...
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    48 mins
  • Stargate with Jonny Lee Jr. • Ancient Aliens, but More Fun

    Stargate with Jonny Lee Jr. • Ancient Aliens, but More Fun
    Oct 19 2026
    Until this week, Mandy Kaplan did not know the word "Stargate" existed. Not the 1994 movie, not the ten seasons of television that followed, not the conventions full of people who can spell Goa'uld on the first try. (She has also never seen an Avengers movie, and she would like that noted as a point of pride.) Fortunately, Jonny Lee Jr. was nine when the film came out, bought it on VHS and then again on DVD, and owns the complete box set of the series, which makes him about the most qualified tour guide you could ask for on a trip through an ancient Egyptian wormhole.Mandy, being Mandy, arrives with theories. Stargate, she argues, is The Wizard of Oz with better pyramids, and she has a He-Man episode to back it up. She also spots a Sesame Street icon wandering the dunes and takes the film's biggest emotional line to task for ending in a preposition. Jonny, meanwhile, has the job of explaining parasitic worm-gods to a woman whose only professed interest in worms is the tape variety. (He handles it with grace.) Somewhere between the Snuffleupagus sighting and the high school teacher who sued over his screenplay, he makes a real case for why Stargate is the gateway for people who swear they don't like sci-fi: it was never really about the technology. Press play.Guest SpotlightJonny Lee Jr. is an actor and singer, a performer in Mandy's long-running Los Angeles cabaret Miscast: Right Singer, Wrong Song, and one of Make Me a Nerd's original guests. He has already walked Mandy through Zelda, Sailor Moon, and Anne Rice's vampires. This time he brings his number-one sci-fi movie, the one he found as an elementary schooler obsessed with Egyptian and Greek mythology and couldn't believe someone had made. He's seen it six or seven times and watched the TV series through three times over.Instagram: @jonnyleejrOn TruStory FM: All of Jonny's episodesSee him live: Jonny joins Mandy for the 49th Miscast: Right Singer, Wrong Song on Sunday, November 8, at 7:30 PM at The Pico in Los Angeles.Reference LinksThe MovieStargate (1994) — LetterboxdStargate (film) — Wikipedia. Production history, the lawsuit, and the box office run.The Stargate score by David Arnold — YouTube Music. The opening credits music Mandy couldn't stop talking about.The FranchiseStargate SG-1 — Wikipedia. Ten seasons, starting on Showtime in 1997.Stargate Atlantis — WikipediaStargate Universe — WikipediaMythology of Stargate — Wikipedia. Where to read up on the Goa'uld, the parasitic worm-gods Jonny explains.The Movie's Cast and CrewKurt Russell — Colonel Jack O'NeilJames Spader — Dr. Daniel JacksonJaye Davidson — RaDjimon Hounsou — Horus, Ra's guardFrench Stewart — Lt. Louis FerrettiRichard Kind — Dr. Gary MeyersRoland Emmerich — director and co-writerThe Series' Cast and CreatorsRichard Dean Anderson — Jack O'Neill on SG-1Michael Shanks — Daniel Jackson on SG-1, and per Jonny, the hotter DanielBrad Wright — SG-1 co-creatorJonathan Glassner — SG-1 co-creator, and the "somebody else" Jonny was reaching forReal-World Rabbit HolesThe Stargate Project — Wikipedia. The U.S. Army's psychic-spying program Jonny remembered.Strategic Defense Initiative — Wikipedia. Reagan's "Star Wars."Ancient astronauts — Wikipedia. The pyramids-built-by-aliens idea that predates the movie.Mask of Tutankhamun — Wikipedia. The inspiration Jonny sees in Ra's retracting helmet.Also MentionedThe Crying Game (1992) — Letterboxd. Mandy's homework assignment for Jonny.Interview with the Vampire (1994) — Letterboxd. The film that knocked Stargate off the top of the box office.The Wizard of Oz (1939) — LetterboxdMasters of the Universe (1987) — LetterboxdSphere (1998) — LetterboxdLabyrinth (1986) — LetterboxdThe Da Vinci Code (2006) — LetterboxdThe Breakfast Club (1985) — Letterboxd. The first assignment in Jonny's reverse Make Me a Nerd.Schindler's List (1993) — LetterboxdAvengers: Age of Ultron (2015) — Letterboxd. Spader as Ultron, unseen by Mandy.Indiana Jones — WikipediaMr. Snuffleupagus — WikipediaJohn Hughes — WikipediaRicky Schroder — Wikipedi...
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    43 mins
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