A Few Good Men (1992)

Nic's wife Jeanie has seen A Few Good Men at least ten times all the way through, and she stops for it every single time it turns up on television, so when she leaned on Nic to make it his pick, he made it his pick. She also came along for the ride, becoming the first guest in the history of the show, and she immediately proved her worth by lodging a formal complaint about Tom Cruise eating an apple during a work meeting. Finish your apple before your interview. It's not complicated.

Nic caught the 1992 Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin courtroom machine in bits and pieces on cable in high school, back when an R-rated movie could air on TNT forever. Steve, a former stage actor and an unapologetic Sorkin guy who will tell you The American President is the best thing the man ever wrote, was thrilled to be made to watch it. He also shows up with a theory: Danny Caffey is just a nerdier Pete Mitchell, another Tom Cruise character with a dead, celebrated father whose exact job he now holds. Steve looked hard for a third example and came up empty.

From there it's the small stuff, which is the good stuff. Steve declares Cruise's softball swing dogshit and can tell from the mechanics alone that nobody's dad ever screamed at him on a Little League field. Nic wonders whether the Marine Silent Drill Platoon is a waste of a guy who could be doing something more useful, and gets briskly corrected about which branch he's actually thinking of. There's a run at "hella not guilty" as a legal strategy, a demand to see the line item for how much the military spends on custom yellow tape, and a three-way pile-on about the line where Jo explains that Marines stand on the wall so nothing's going to hurt you today. Nobody in the room can stand it.

Nic figures the whole thing should have ended with the cast holding hands and bowing. Steve has a word for that. It's a curtain call.