Cozy Quilt Cinema

This week on Cozy Quilt Cinema, Michelle and Beth discuss John Carney's 2007 indie darling Once, the quiet, music-drenched story of an Irish busker and a Czech girl who fall into something between friendship and love. They talk Glenn Hansard and Markéta Irglová's real-life history, the ick factor versus the movie's actual restraint, busking as eulogy, community in a building with one shared TV, an...

What does it mean to know exactly who you are when the whole world is handing you a beige palette and wondering why you won't use it? This week, Beth and Michelle are joined by award-winning filmmaker and author Polly Schattel, whose new trans-centered novel Crater Girl is out now, to discuss the 1997 French-Belgian film Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink), directed by Alain Berliner. Seven-year-old...

Three queer people and one gloriously unashamed 1994 film. Beth and Michelle bring returning guest Pat Green back to the blanket fort for a Pride Month deep dive into The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, the drag road trip that keeps giving the longer you sit with it. We find there are two love stories buried under all those feathers and sequins. Bernadette and Bob, Tick and his family...

We finally watched Love, Simon (2018) and gave it our first-ever perfect score, 9 of 9 on the Stitch Count! This week we're curling up with the story of a kid counting down the days to graduation with one big secret, a string of anonymous emails that turn into something like falling in love, and a Ferris wheel ending that had us both tearing up. We talk about what it means to live in a closet that...

Some movies entertain you. Some movies find you at exactly the right moment and crack something open. Boy Meets Girl (2014) is both. This week Beth and Michelle curl up with Eric Schaeffer's tender, sex-positive trans romantic comedy set in small-town Kentucky, the story of Ricky Jones, a 21-year-old trans woman with big dreams, a best friend named Robby, and a chance encounter with a Southern deb...

Pieces of April (2003), written and directed by Peter Hedges on a shoestring budget and two digital camcorders, is a small film that quietly breaks you open and leaves you with the pieces. Katie Holmes plays April, the black sheep, the first pancake, preparing Thanksgiving dinner for an estranged family that has never really seen her, using an oven that doesn't work, in a building full of stranger...

What does it cost to be truly seen by another person and what does the world do when it doesn't know what to do with you? This week, Beth and Michelle climb into the blanket fort with two extraordinary guests to unravel Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom (2012): a story of two lonely twelve-year-olds who decide to stop waiting for the world to make sense and just run toward each other instead. We tal...

This week we're curling up with a film that, we believe, has been misread by its own trailers for twenty-five years. Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), directed by Sharon Maguire, written by Helen Fielding, Richard Curtis, and Andrew Davies, and starring Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, and Hugh Grant is not, it turns out, a film about a clumsy woman falling into love. It's a film about a woman falling in...

What happens when the woman who's been doing everyone else's job for seven years finally finds herself in her element? Sam Raimi's Send Help (2026) answers that question in the most gloriously unhinged way possible and Beth and Michelle are here for every morally complicated minute of it. Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien survive a plane crash. Only one of them was prepared for it. This is survival...

It's 2001 and Y2K didn't end the world, so Ivan Reitman sent aliens to finish the job. One rapidly evolving cloaca at a time. Beth and Michelle cozy in with Evolution (2001), the Ghostbusters-adjacent sci-fi comedy starring David Duchovny, Orlando Jones, Julianne Moore, and Dan Aykroyd doing the most Dan Aykroyd thing anyone has ever done on screen. They remembered this one being funnier. They wer...

It’s a rainy weekend so why not curl up on the couch with us and watch Bridesmaids (2011) and you’ll see why this movie has been living rent-free in our hearts for over a decade. Yes, there's a woman shitting in the street in a wedding gown. Yes, someone pukes on the back of someone's head. But here's the thing you won’t get until you are well into it, Bridesmaids is secretly a film about grief, s...

Beth and Michelle pull a worn, half-forgotten quilt from the top shelf and shake out the dust — because So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) has been sitting up there for thirty years, and it is absolutely still warm and cozy. Mike Myers plays Charlie Mackenzie, a San Francisco beat poet with a talent for bad poetry, worse timing, and an ironclad gift for self-sabotage. When he falls hard for Harri...

Beth and Michelle turned the air conditioning on for this hellish comedy. Harold Ramis' Bedazzled (2000) is the Y2K fever dream where Brendan Fraser sells his soul seven times over seeming more doomed but likeable with every wish. They dig into Elliot Richards's spectacularly bad attempts to shortcut his way to love, the over-the-top basketball scene that deserves its own micro-trial, and Elizabet...

Michelle grabbed the blanket and Beth poured a cup of Earl Grey for this one. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) is the quintessential British RomCom that managed to make a funeral the most romantic thing in the film.   They wade through the charmingly wet world of Hugh Grant’s Charles and his eccentric band of misfits, from confessions in the rain to the devastating emotional toll of W. H. Auden...

Get in, loser, we’re going podcasting. This week on Cozy Quilt Cinema, we’re wearing pink and revisiting the 2004 cult classic, Mean Girls. Written by Tina Fey and starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, and Amy Poehler, this film is a mosaic of early 2000s nostalgia and sharp social commentary. We’re pulling the threads of high school hierarchy, from the "Burn Book" drama to the tactical survival...

Pack your kitbags, this week on Cozy Quilt Cinema, we’re heading down under to dust off Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 epic, Australia. Starring Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley and Hugh Jackman as the rugged "Drover," this film is a cinematic patchwork quilt, stitching together a Western, a wartime drama, and a sweeping romance. It’s an emotional discussion about the logistics of that 1,500-head cattle dr...

Beth and Michelle talk about being into proximity of and dealing with addiction. Sometimes the coziest stories aren't about perfect lives, easy endings or passionate romances. They are about broken moments and the people who help stitch us back together. There is no easy answer, and no one gets cured, they only learn how stand back up if they fall. This is a film about addiction, accountability, a...

Beth and Michelle ride into the Wild Wild West,  a bizarre Western-steampunk mashup starring Will Smith and Kevin Kline that somehow turns buddy-cop charm, Civil War styled gadgetry, and a giant mechanical spider into one of the strangest major box office flops of the late ’90s. For fans of the classic TV show, it was a disappointment. For fans of Men in Black, it lacked the magic of nostalgia. So...

Within Black Lake there lurks a predator, it glides silently through calm, dark water. Beth and Michelle do a flailing back‑roll entry into Lake Placid, which is what they wanted to call it but the name was taken. They dog‑paddle frantically through a creature feature that can’t decide if it’s a horror movie, a romcom, a sitcom or a very specific kink for sarcastic paleontologists. They marvel at...

Dark Harbor feels wet, soggy and very critical, like a mother-in-law who fell out of the boat. Then it becomes a quiet, intimate, and simple projection of wife-killery. This week, Beth and Michelle discuss the 1998 psychological thriller that hides its sharpest twists behind the completely unexplored gotcha of homophobia. We explore the film’s slow-building tension, constant mockery and shifting p...

As Beth and Michelle travel down the back roads of this home we love so much, we feel a mighty wind's a-blowin’. It's one of our favorite mockumentaries traveling around the bend. We discuss the loss of an icon, Catherine O'Hara and how much she meant to us as fans. And we enter the nostalgia vortex of a New York bound model train.   The Stitch Count: The Castellini Test: Pass Inclusivity & Ga...

Beth and Michelle go downtown, where the guys are drips. Downtown, where they rip your slips. Down on Skid Row, where they follow the Greek Chorus as they underscore and narrate the romance of Seymour and Audrey. We will follow along through the abuse, the dismemberment and murder and have some laughs along the way. This comedy is as dark as the soot which coats the walls of Seymour's basement roo...

Beth and Michelle camp out on the couch for a movie that is deeper than it appears. While it has the energy and surface of an over the top comedy about avoiding death and eternal beauty quickly becomes a story of misogyny masquerading as feminine empowerment. It's surprisingly easy to love this film and also be revolted by the message it unintentionally alludes to. Wondering how this film will far...

Beth and Michelle reassemble the blanket fort in Iceland where they follow the story of Fire Saga, a musical journey of persistence, loss and of finding your true joy. It has daddy issues, mommy issues, maybe or maybe not sister issues, but nothing another rousing round of Jaja Ding Dong won’t brush away for another time. Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/julien-schwar...

Beth and Michelle discuss a new(er) movie this time, the 80s is so whack. It’s a rollicking fun movie filled with family intrigue and honest emotional discoveries that will keep you riveted to the screen. How is it going to rate against our standards? I think you can deduce that, dear Watson.   Music by Melody Ayres-Griffiths from Pixabay   On a serious Note: To demand answers and accountability f...