We've all been there. A major movie is mentioned, you shrug sheepishly, and someone says,

I can't believe you've never seen that. Look, nobody can see everything. This is just a part of life.

But today, we make a dent in our own lists of classics we somehow had not yet gotten to.

I'm Aisha Harris.

And I'm Linda Holmes.

And today on this encore episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour,

we're talking about some of the classic movies we've never seen until now.

Joining me and Aisha today is Andrew Limbong. He's the host of NPR's Book of the Day podcast and a reporter for the Culture Desk. Hey, Andrew. Yo, yo, yeah, what's up? What's up? You know, not too much, but we're going to talk about some movies if that's okay. Yeah, hell yeah. Let's do it. Also, with us, we are always delighted to have our friend writer Kat Chow. Welcome back, Kat.

Hi. So good to be on. We asked everybody to bring a classic movie you recently saw for the first time. Now, when we say a classic, that can mean a lot of things. An iconic award-winning performance, a director's masterpiece, a cultural staple. That's the gist. Let's just get started. Andrew, I'm going to start with you. What did you

bring? All right. So I picked the movie Aaron Brockovich. I did this John Grisham profile. So I've

been very interested in like legal thrillers and legal movies. And then also I

recently just watched Notting Hill for the first time. And I was amazed. I don't know, well,

I don't know. Hold on. I don't know if you're going to like this take. No, no. I was amazed at

how absolutely smoked Dulea Roberts got by Hugh Grant in that movie.

She's so, like, cold and unfeeling.

And Hugh, Hugh, like, my boy Hugh, you know, my friend, my pal, he's, like, firing on all

cylinders with all this charisma and charm.

Like, dude, this guy's awesome. He doesn't really need this girl that's like got a boyfriend. Like, we can just leave it. Anyway, I love Julia Roberts, and I've been meaning to like watch something where she was like really on fire. And I remember Aaron Brockovich being came out in 2000. I remember being a kid and people were like talking about it. All the grownups are like, oh, this and this, but I just never got around to seeing it. And she obviously, you know, won the Oscar and I watched that speech again. And that was very cute and charming. People know what it's about, right? It's like the true story based off a woman that, you know, she becomes like a legal assistant who helps take down or helps almost take down. That's a very important note. She helps almost take down

this evil company that's polluting the city. It does feel like a movie written for Julia

Roberts to just like dunk on people. And like that's it. Like everything else about the movie

just doesn't do anything other than aim towards that one task,

which is fine if you just want to watch like highlight reels and clips and stuff like that.

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