Two for Space Jam, Please

Vesper is viscous, gooey, slipshod, and visceral. Ferny plants shoot lethal, glowing pink darts that burrow into you and turn into insects. Scavenging pilgrims build rubbish towers high into the sky. A floating orb holds the consciousness of a bedridden man, and a 13-year-old girl plays with plants to have some shot at survival. Yes, we enjoyed this one

Our biggest piece of advice if you're planning a hurricane party with your friends in a mansion for the weekend - Put. Away. The swords. We watched Bodies Bodies Bodies and talked about funny horror and killer parlor games. And also - what are people in their twenties like again??

Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal is bizarre, uncomfortable, emotional, surprising, and deeply, deeply weird. This show was HBO being cool with spending millions to let a guy confront his anxiety through helping others confront their own anxieties - which is ok by us!

This week we're coming at you from our neighbor to the north - Canada! We watched The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling (a Canadian!) as a CIA assassin named Six who learned a little too much about his employer and so is on the run in a cat and mouse chase across Europe. The movie was wildly expensive to produce and is wildly mediocre. Do better, Netflix.

Special episode alert! We've got two guests joining us -- New York State Assemblymember Jon Rivera, and Ethan Powers -- to review Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. We laugh, we cry, we disagree, we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what's going on with Tom Hanks. Are you lonesome tonight?? Well, come join us! sorry :(

It's 1997 and our queens Parker Posey, Toni Collete, and Lisa Kudrow are at the height of their powers playing temps trying to survive in a mind-numbing cubicle hellscape. Clockwatchers, another entry in our ongoing series on labor movies, feels prescient in its representation of disposable workers that sadly still holds true today. Bonus: we reminisce about a few of our own past jobs! There's som...

For this episode we joined the Bob's Burgers crew in their quest to pay one month of their business loan payment and solve a grisly murder. It's sweet and gross and comforting and touching. The Belchers - they're just like us!

In Alex Rivera's 2008 sci-fi drama Sleep Dealer, people are plugged into a global computer network via nodes on their bodies, work involves controlling your robot avatar in another country, and memories are sold to pay back student loans. It's the near future!!

Hey, it's Joe. I'm not used to writing these episode recaps and, well, we watched the 2021 movie The Humans (based on the 2015 play) and it was, uh, full of sad but also enduring humans.

Once you get us started, we can talk about work until the cows come home, or until it's 5 o'clock and time to ride the brain-blending elevator down to the floor where you get to be a human again. We talk Kafka, fluorescent lighting, bad design, worker solidarity, personal sh*t, and waffle parties. It's Severance time, baby.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, we get a bedraggled, fed up, middle aged, Chinese immigrant wife and mom as our protagonist (played by the incomparable Michelle Yeoh), and she gets to kick actual ass as she tears through an IRS building while being audited. So yeah, we liked it.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car is a quiet, slow moving, tender movie that rewards patience and an attentive regard for the smallest moments. We digress at times during our conversation (as always), so get ready to hear our thoughts on the craft of fiction, finite friendships, and suffering, oh, suffering.

In this house, we stan Robert Pattinson. Even when (especially when) he plays an angsty, brooding, eyeliner-wearing, journal-writing Bruce Wayne who probably listens to The Cure.

Sometimes you're in the mood for a movie that's good-bad. Kimi is good-bad, with a shockingly simple storyline that has three bad guys killed by a nail gun at the end. What more could you want?

We were a wee bit disappointed in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's newest film, Big Bug, which is maybe why we spent most of this conversation talking about the end of empire and fabulist futures. But we connect it all back to the movie somehow, we do!

t the U.S. is a carnival, everyone wants to be lied to, and Bradley Cooper is the perfect creep. Step right up!!

Mr. Paul Thomas Anderson is back, this time with an oddball love story that’s soaked in nostalgia, the 70s, and the screwy exuberance of being young and confused. The pants are tight. The music is excellent. And waterbeds abound. Thanks to slfhlp for providing SICK BEATS for our intro and outro. As always send your comments, questions, … Continue reading "Episode 74 – Licorice Pi...

Years 2020-2021 must have really done a number on us because we found Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up kinda sweet (and dark and funny and incisive and tragic too). May 2022 bring us the opposite of a comet hurtling towards the Earth. Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro. As … Continue reading "Episode 73 – Don’t Look Up (...

Happy holidays!! Here's a li'l treat.

's a race to the bottom! After the season 3 finale of Succession, we talk psychosexual drama, morality mental exercises, critiques of the ruling class, assistant labor, Cousin Greg's ethical collapse, tragedy, comedy, squishy sympathies, and which Roy family member we'd be (Joe = Kendall/Shiv; Cheryl = Marcia).

played by Benedict Cumberbatch, roughly castrates a bull with a knife, then with his bare hands. This is maybe a representative scene for much of the tense hypermasculinity/repressed sexuality at play in the movie, or maybe it's a way of showing the violence that Phil is capable of. It's a taut, tight, suspenseful Western -- with a twist ending (that we very helpfully spoil!).

Is The Pizzagate Massacre the best movie about the Trump era, as this Vice News article contends? We say....possibly?

Squid game, it turns out, is not a show about having a good time eating calamari, but a murderous series of increasingly violent competitions that serves as an allegory about global capitalism and the bone-crushing misery it inflicts on the 99%.

es Anderson's newest quirky romp, The French Dispatch. We were not fans at all.

Dune. DUNE!! We've been waiting to watch this one and whoo boy, do we have things to say. We get deep into Denis Villeneuve's top-notch world-building, the ecstatic experience of surrendering to beauty, the huge problem of the chosen one savior narrative, space witches, sandworms, climate disaster, and Timothee Chalamet's jawline. One of our big takeaways - there are no good imperialists!