Swingers (1996)

The dads land at 1996 in the 2 Dads 2 Decades run, and Steve has picked the movie that turned him into the guy who browbeat an entire cast party into watching it in late '97. Swingers is Jon Favreau's debut screenplay, Doug Liman's debut feature, a $200,000 picture that spent half its budget on music, and the closest thing Steve has to a sacred text. Nic caught it weeks later through that same friend-group trickle-down, saw the older cool guys he wanted to be, and has been quoting it ever since.

What follows is a deep-tissue tour of a movie about, as Steve puts it, hanging out. The Vegas detour where Mike doubles down on 11 and gets buried for it. Favreau's actual grandmother at the next blackjack table getting offered free breakfast. Vince Vaughn's actual dad winning at the hundred-dollar table because that's what two hundred grand gets you in 1996. The Glenlivet-Glenfiddich-Glengarry escalation. "Hold on, Voltaire." The cocktail napkin pitch where Trent calls Mike the guy behind the guy behind the guy and somehow makes it sound like a compliment.

The pair circle the things that make this movie hit so specifically: Rob and Mike's salami-and-OJ depression breakfast, the gun-at-the-Dresden detour, the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy Copa-shot homage that Steve has clocked from a screenwriter's angle, and the answering-machine sequence that should be taught in film schools. They land hard on Trent as a character who's casually problematic and a genuinely altruistic friend in the same breath, with the movie clear-eyed about which is which. Steve confesses he tells his kids a sanitized version of "you're so money and you don't even know it" pretty much daily.

Two middle-aged dads watching twenty-six-year-olds figure out how to be okay, and recognizing every single one of them.

Vegas, baby. Vegas.