The Projectors

We wrap up what is left of the 2024 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees that we hadn’t gotten to yet with a nice little romantic drama about love, destiny and the nature of relationships. Nora left her childhood love, Hae Sung, in Korea when her family emigrated to Canada. They reconnect in their twenties online for a friendship with overwhelming emotion. Years later Nora has married a man she me...

We’re winding down February’s theme of WOMEN IN CRISIS and for our last vintage selection we got a case of Crisis in front of and behind the camera. We couldn’t wrap up without a little Hitchcock and the struggles of Tippi Hedren regarding some calculated aviary beasts. Alfred Hitchcock wanted Tippi to be his personal leading lady human doll that he could control and throw birds at. He got two fil...

We’re heading into the last leg of February’s theme of WOMEN IN CRISIS and the mental state of women this month has been pretty rough. Imagine being a housewife in the 1970s and you’re pretty much losing it. Sure, you can get away with being “eccentric” much of the time but eventually the mask slips and all the devotion in the world can’t get in the way of the struggle. You can question the intens...

We’re almost done discussing all of the Best Picture Oscar nominations and we’re talking about the other Sandra Hüller nominated movie in a VERY UNSPOILERY way. A crafty little mystery that is not so much about the mystery itself, but the culmination of pieces that form guilt and animosity in long term relationships. Did she kill her husband or did he do that himself? We’re going to the lovely Fre...

It’s WOMEN IN CRISIS month and we’re discussing several movies with several distraught women in them. Crisis comes in many forms and this movie has several obvious crisis layers to contend with. A fundamentalist government crisis. A crisis of war and an actual haunting. Persian style. For many in Islam, you don’t throw around the name of the fiend that haunts a mother and her child in this 2016  N...

It’s WOMEN IN CRISIS all month long and our classic film discussion today is a little bit different. Most of our selections actually have women going through a detrimental mental change Our heroine in this movie is being completely manipulated into thinking she is crazy. Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton, this tale coined a very common term to signify emotional and mental manipulation in a relat...

Breaking up is quite hard to do. Especially when you’re not yourself and controlled by some entity that makes you into a really bad parent. You can’t feel pain, that’s a plus, but poor Bob. Polish director, Andrzej Żuławski pulled directly from his life as a filmmaker and cuckold from Poland and set to make a psychological horror right by the wall of Cold War era Berlin. It’s the only Andrzej Żuła...

Some extra fun this month as we explore the rest of what we haven’t seen amongst the 2024 BEST PICTURE OSCAR NOMINATIONS. Well, we’re skipping the fun for this particular week because we finally get to the disturbing and unsettling Jonathan Glazer film about the Holocaust that centers specifically on its perpetrators. Perpetrators with wives and children and pets. Husbands who seek to rise within...

February’s official theme is WOMEN IN CRISIS and people went through a crisis getting this movie made and then people went through a crisis watching it. Our one “biopic” this month and who else could it be about than Norma Jean Baker AKA Marilyn Monroe. There’s a lot of Marilyn Monroe biopics to choose from but our theme is WOMEN IN CRISIS and never has the icon been portrayed in such a damaged wa...

So we’ve being doing special episodes of movies that we randomly generate the titles of from a website and there have been some ups and downs in the process. It broke our seal on Roman Polanski. We watched some suicidal Polish shit. It had Bob watching his first James Bond movie. It had us watching a CGI cartoon dog. Some real ups and downs when you randomly generate movie content to discuss. For...

It’s time to go vintage with our theme of WOMEN IN CRISIS and today’s movie discussion involves a certain director who should know a little something about that type of thing. Yes, we are definitely talking about Roman Polanski and his 1965 film, “REPULSION”, is his first English speaking film. It stars Catherine Deneuve as a young and beautiful French woman in London making her way while living w...

This month’s theme is WOMEN IN CRISIS and crisis is coming in a variety of ways. Sometimes women can go insane and maybe they need to be admitted to a facility but maybe they don’t really need to be in that facility? Perhaps it’s all just a trauma response because she might have a stalker. What kind of crisis is this? An insanity crisis or a stalker crisis? Maybe both? We’re discussing Steven Sode...

For some extra movie content this month we’re doing extra drops of the Best Picture nominees we missed leading up to the 2024 Academy Awards. It’s the first awards show we will sit and watch in decades. It’s been decades because this kind of award show stuff is boring as shit. The Golden Globes? I’ve never watched more than 5 minutes of that stuff. Movies are great but we take the circle jerking w...

All February we’re discussing movies about WOMEN IN CRISIS and we find ourselves in some strange Swedish territory. A mansion with very red interiors and sad women in white. In this big house a woman suffers from cancer and her sisters, one frigid and the other the opposite, must come to terms with their familial relationships and their own mental state. Then you have Anna, whose bosom is ready fo...

February’s theme is WOMEN IN CRISIS and that extends to all measure of crisis including matters of identity and personality and we finally cross the Robert Altman threshold for the show. You want to see some troubled women this month? Well, this surreal cult classic has three of them! Yes, we are discussing Altman’s 1977 film “3 WOMEN” starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek & Janice Rule. Milli...

New month, new theme. For February we will be watching and discussing the dramatic plight of women in certain film. Be is physical, mental, existential or spiritual we will be discussing WOMEN IN CRISIS all month. Things might get intense for our dramatic leads and why not start with our third Anime feature discussion so far with Satoshi Kon’s classic and influential “PERFECT BLUE” from 1997? A po...

IT’S OSCAR SEASON FOLKS and there’s a bitter buzz in the air about who got nominated and who didn’t but our side theme this month has us watching the remainder of the best picture nominees that we have yet to discuss. We talk about some rather forced cultural commentary surrounding the Barbie nominations and what exactly that commentary means. Then we get into one of this year’s THIRSTIEST movies...

It’s a good bet that this year will be a very dreary year. We’re trucking on into it so why not spend the year talking about no less than a dozen Lars von Trier movies? All throughout the year, mostly every month and maybe a few twice a month, we will be talking about a dozen movies by the Unsane Dane himself. A polarizing man. Controversial. His movies? Heavily contemplated, quite scrutinized and...

PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS (AKA DENZEL MONTH) has been a hell of a time and it’s been fun to examine the lives of such cornerstone actors in Paul Robeson and Denzel Washington. Those two men seem very different in personality but for this final edition of our theme, Denzel takes on a role that might be the closest to Robeson’s preferred type. A struggling, hardworking, family man trying to make ends...

Sadly, our five film examination of the legendary Paul Robeson for this month’s theme of PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS end here. But we go out on Paul’s personal pick for his favorite looking back on his unique career. We’re talking about the struggle and heroisms of miners in Wales and the singing stranger that came along to make their choir better and soothe the struggle. We’re talking about the 1940...

It’s the last full week of our PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS theme and we end it with Edward Zwick’s dripping military melodrama “COURAGE UNDER FIRE” from 1996. Denzel Washington plays a veteran military fellow who accidentally blasted his own men during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. The government puts a bow on it and sticks him in a desk job. Now he has to review for a posthumous Medal of Honor...

Our theme: PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS examines two significant black leading men from both ends of film history but just go ahead and call it DENZEL MONTH. We finally get to a Tony Scott film today. This over stylized, overwrought, over cooked hard action thriller is a wild ride that feels like it gets away with some goofy shit. Deceptively slow and visually rapid. Cuts like crazy and some very memo...

This month’s theme of PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS digs us deeper into the film history of Paul Robeson. Soured greatly on the post-production outcome of his previous British film, “Sanders of the River”, Robeson asserted more creative control for his follow up feature “JERICHO” from 1937. Directed by Thornton Freeland. Robeson stars as Jericho Jackson, a U.S. soldier in WW1 who accidentally kills a c...

This month’s theme is called PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS but we understand if you want to call it DENZEL MONTH because that’s mostly what it is. We’re capping off this week’s selections of lead characters holding power with the most recent film in our Denzel celebration. We’re talking about Joel Coen’s 2021 adaptation of Macbeth called “THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH” and it looks pretty amazing. It stars De...

This month’s theme of PORTRAITS OF THE ARTISTS has us analyzing two, distinct, black leading men but the majority of the month is dedicated to Denzel Washington. This week we watch some portrayals of powerful men and this one is based on a true story though many of the real life players involved might dismiss much of it but it makes Frank Lucas look swag so he’s the least of the refuters. Yes, Den...