Two for Space Jam, Please

There are very many bad hairstyles in Ridley Scott's The Last Duel. Our preliminary judgement puts Ben Affleck's bleached blonde number (in his role as Pierre d'Alencon) as the worst, but Matt Damon's mullet is a close second.

The 2021 Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle The Guilty, about an LAPD officer demoted to 911 operator who attempts — entirely over the phone — to save an abducted woman, is a no-good, very bad, dangerously pernicious movie, in the opinion of these two amateur movie critics right here. We found a lot (a lot) of it to … Continue reading "Episode 65 – The Guilty (2021)"

Inside is a discomforting and very funny field trip into the head of the comedian over the course of the pandemic. It's a musical comedy special (emphasis on musical) and the songs actually had us LOLing. The serious moments are very, very serious -- even grave -- and the wild tonal swings from hilarity to despair to absurdity to hope really reflect the emotional roller coaster that was 2020. High...

an we leave it at that? [Editor: No.] Ok, well...the movie is a visually arresting, moody, evocative, quietly exhilarating, poetic-but-not-surreal dreamscape in which a man searches for his long-lost lover through rubble, rain, and ruin. It's what happens when time collapses into the life of one lit sparkler. And its climax is an hour-long continuous shot!!

Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through...

iven Joe's own experiences of late in English departments of higher education institutions. We found a lot to like and a lot to completely shit on. (PS - there's a little something special if you keep listening past the end.....).

box, and in between includes sun-dried radishes, a shadow man in a basement, a high-speed chase through an apartment complex, and two murdered dogs. It's funny and tragic and surprising and stirring. We watched it on a DVD that came in the mail. O, those year 2000 days.

we wanted to post a mini-episode to talk about a few cultural products we've been really into lately. Let us know about the things you've been enjoying (or, alternatively, hating). We'll be back next week!

We did something we haven't done in about fifteen years and watched an M. Night Shyamalan movie. Old follows a family on vacation at a posh tropical resort where things take a nightmarish turn after they're taken to a secluded beach reserved for "special" guests and discover that they're aging extremely rapidly. Spoiler alert: Joe is an M. Night Shyamalan apologist!!

"A Filmed Adaption of the Chivalric Romance by Anonymous," emblazoned across the screen in old-timey font, is how we're introduced to David Lowery's The Green Knight. The film is based on the Medieval poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and we follow the legendary knight of King Arthur's round table as he takes part in a pretty fucked up "Christmas game." What follows is a fever dream involvin...

The new Space Jam made us mad.

We decided to take a break from movies to talk about the heaviest of heavy subjects -- evil. Using Claudia Card's 2002 treatise, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil as our jumping off point, we did our best to think through the present-day utility of this very loaded word. It's complicated.

"Ya'll want to hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It's kind of long but full of suspense." And so  Zola   begins. Based on an epic, viral 2015 Twitter thread written by A'Ziah King and dubbed by fans as #TheStory,  Zola  is INTENSE. We talk through the movie's representation of sex work, its multiple tonal registers, the stellar performances, and this new era (?) of s...

eality fucking BITES. It did in 1994, and it does in 2021 (maybe? That's debatable). We took a stroll down memory lane to watch the definitive Gen X movie and discussed the waning appeal of Troy Dyer, the enduring charm of Winona Ryder. and the cynicism of the post-9/11 moviescape.

We drove an hour out of Buffalo to spend the weekend in Rochester. We walked, we ate, we gawked, we frolicked. We watched Minari, a tender portrait of a Korean family trying their damnedest to start a farm in Arkansas without completely falling apart. An unbelievably cute little boy and a very funny grandma steal the show. Warning: we workshopped the ending (!).

What if we all will have one moment in each of our lives that is the equivalent of Norma Rae standing on top of a table in the middle of a textile factory silently holding above her head a cardboard sign on which she scrawled in black marker the single word “UNION”?Let’s be ready for … Continue reading "Episode 52 – Norma Rae (1979)"

Apparently on May 31, the evening of the final episode of Mare of Easttown, HBO Max’s servers crashed for several hours because the show’s popularity had grown so much that more people were logging on than the servers could handle. That’s successful word of mouth, babyyyy!! We couldn’t help but get caught up in this mystery … Continue reading "Episode 51 – Mare...

“The Cold Equations,” the 1954 science fiction story by Tom Godwin, was a genre-defining work that looked hard at the impersonal efficiency of modern technologies, the types of sacrifice we find acceptable in the name of “progress,” and the inevitability of death. The 2021 film Stowaway, directed by Joe Penna and starring Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae … Continue reading "...

Minimalist chic, Instagrammable #vanlyfe, Nomadland is not. It’s also not a portrait of a struggling itinerant worker, or a larger story about post-recession America as it slips through a fraying social safety net (or else, it does neither of these things successfully).So what is it? We’re not entirely sure, but we have some fun talking about what … Continue reading "Episode 49 &...

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets replicates the feeling of being in a crowded, boozy, pre-COVID dive bar so well that we were already dreading the next day’s hangover as the movie was winding down. BN, EP has some issues, which we did our best to unpack, but we also really digressed at points and got to talking about the … Continue reading "Episode 48 – Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets And,...

It was late and we were too tired to sleep so we watched Godzilla vs. Kong and it felt like walking into Earth’s hollow center where big things go smash and reasons don’t exist. Join us there. Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro. As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie … Continue reading "Episode 47 – Godzilla vs. Kong"

Alternate, more accurate titles for Good Time: Extremely Stressful Time Nerve-Wracking Time On Edge Time Don’t-Watch-This-Alone Time Apparently, the title of Benny & Josh Safdie’s 2017 film, starring Robert Pattinson, is prison slang and refers to the reduction in an inmate’s sentence for good behavior. The life you lead after you’re released is your “good time.&#...

We took a break from movies this week to discuss Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, published in August 2020 by Random House. In it, Wilkerson contends that racism in the United States is closely akin to the caste system in India and the violence of Nazi Germany. The book’s reception has been overwhelmingly … Continue reading "Episode 45 – Caste...

Sam Levinson’s 2021 Malcolm & Marie is a pandemic movie in that it’s about two people at home who fight, cry, and make mac & cheese. It’s also not a pandemic movie in that it opens with them returning from Malcolm’s movie premiere, presumably with lots of people hugging and breathing on each other. Also, … Continue reading "Episode 44 – Malcolm & Mar...

We were in the mood for something FUN for a change so we watched the 2021 Korean space action-adventure flick, Space Sweepers. It’s got scavenger space trucks, a motley crew of likable misfits, a Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk-type on steroids, and a cute little girl who just might be a weapon of mass destruction. We, of course, … Continue reading "Episode 43 – Space Sweepers (20...