Cut and Splice: Reviewing, discussing and analyzing movies

In our first sanctioned episode of sorts, our friend LaJuan, who knows Terrence Malick, joins us for a discussion about this art house war movie. He also notified him about us discussing it and got his blessing. We give a 17 minute review before getting into spoilers.

Jason shares a meme that made the rounds where you have to pick one actor to disappear along with all their work between Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Sam Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Will Smith and Laurence Fishburne.

We had too much fun with this twist of a movie and also added a gimmick where Gil watched the last twist live before giving his reaction. We still kept it spoiler free for the first 19 minutes for those who haven't seen it and want a review only.

Our Licorice Pizza episode took us into a discussion about PTA's and other directors' way of moving the camera and choosing a shooting format for the look of their films.

Sparks fly again as Jason shares his distaste for PTA's latest while Matt and Gil do their best to defend it. We start with an 18 minute review and rankings of PTA's films before getting into spoilers.

Matt is off to project Oppenheimer with IMAX and we use the opportunity to ask some questions and discuss various movie presentations.

Matt chokes up several times while discussing this sad but life affirming tale about how life was like in East Germany. We give a 19 minute review for those who haven't seen it before getting into spoilers. We also discuss briefly how this movie beat out Pan's Labyrinth for best foreign film at The Oscars.

A short discussion we stumbled onto, while talking about Brando in The Godfather, about some of the greatest actors of all time and their different techniques.

We give a 17 minute review of the first two Godfathers and then delve into the details in an attempt to settle which is the better movie. Along the way we mildly spoil Star Wars and Game of Thrones, as well as bring up the various spoofs that were inspired by the franchise.

We talk movies adapted from other source materials including other movies. Along the way we discuss and mildly spoil the ending to Watchmen, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Fight Club and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

We didn't intend to make this a double episode but in talking The Lost City of Z, the stars kept beckoning us to compare it to Ad Astra. We give a 20 minute review before going into spoilers on both movies.

A portion of our Northman discussion led us into talking about times when certain parts call for a specific body type and how that tends to apply to men and women.

We give a 16 minute review before getting deep with spoilers on this assault of a movie. We get to talk some Hamlet/Simba comparisons as well as Robert Eggers filmography this far.

This time we draw inspiration from an article by Screen Rant and discuss acting in Nolan films. Here is the link to the article which we bring up during the episode: https://screenrant.com/christopher-nolan-movies-best-performances-directed/#al-pacino-as-will-dormer-in-insomnia

Our friend Andrew joins us again for this lively debate about the merits of the MCU with a focus on the first Avengers movie.

We chase our A.I. episode with a short discussion about our favorites from Spielberg. We also touch on the subject of adaptations again in comparing movies to the books or short stories they are based on.

Our first Spielberg film is one that split viewers, especially with that infamous ending. We give a 13 minute review before getting into the spoiler filled details. Along the way we also mildly spoil other Sci-Fi stand outs Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049. The discussion as expected also delved into our relationship to future AIs and the ethics that are involved.

In our RRR discussion we veered off for a few minutes to talk about the reputation Edward Zwick built for himself which lead us to discuss how important tone is in movies.

We start with a 23 minute spoiler free review before delving into this bombastically over the top movie.

We try to mostly stay on topic but Gil veers into a few great scenes and near the end we sing Mel Brooks' praises while mentioning some of his great opening scenes.

We compete with the running time of the actual ceremony while discussing most of the best picture nominees apart from "Triangle of Sadness" that sadly none of us saw in time for the recording.   We also cover a few other categories and Matt slightly spoils "Little Children" towards the end, but it was too fun of an ending to "cut that part".

We veered off into a short discussion about Time Travel movies and decided to share it as its own little nugget.

We couldn't go more than 18 minutes of reviewing before we had to get into spoilers about this trip through time of a movie.

We have a discussion about prominent directors who started out as actors.

Sadly and humorously, our first botched incomplete recording is for a movie whose story doesn't completely resolve. Yusuf, our film school friend and host of the podcast "In-Flight Entertainment", joins us for a 28 minute review before we get into the spoilers and what was left of the recording. Unfortunately the last portion of the episode didn't save correctly. More reason to have him back again...