two writers talk movies & culture
It’s Dirty Dancing. DIRTY DANCING. DIRTY DANCING!
Dirty.
Dancing.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
We dive deep into Craig Foster’s man-octopus love story/documentary My Octopus Teacher. Polysemousness! Anthropocentrist narrative arcs! The leftovers of transcendentalism! Learning from the animal other! Cool octopus pics!
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
WHY CAN’T ANYONE ELSE TAKE A MENTAL DUMP AND/OR LET THEIR FORMAL FREAK FLAG FLY ON FILM?! we ask in our conversation about Charlie Kaufman’s 2020 I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
We did sports words and thoughts over the 2020 Netflix-ESPN documentary The Last Dance, about Space Jam actor Michael Jordan and several non-Space Jam actors on the Chicago Bulls as they pursue excellence in 90s earth basketball. Cheryl rises to the moment. Joe gets sportsbrain trying to talk about sportsbrain. Enjoy. Stay safe. Pray the rims return to American stanchions.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
We talk about 2019’s The Assistant, an icy, realist examination of a tyrannical boss, sexual abuse, and complicity in the workplace.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
We don’t have anything to say about the show that most people are watching or recently watched and are experiencing as a gummy cavity where their time was: Floor Is Lava.
Don’t watch it. Or do. Nothing matters. Floor is lava.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
Book club is back. We discuss the first chapter of Jackson Rising (Daraja Press, 2017) and Cooperation Jackson’s expansive vision. We don’t do Patreon or merch or anything here, but if you’re a fan of the podcast, we’d love it if you donate to Cooperation Jackson or Buffalo’s Black Love Resists in the Rust.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
What does it mean in the year of our Lord 2020 to seek out media that is not produced by profit-driven, morally bankrupt, corporate machines?Â
Means TV — self-billed as the world’s first worker-owned, post-capitalist streaming service — is here to help answer that. They’ve got documentaries, shorts, news, cartoons, satirical Buzzfeed-y life hack videos, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We checked out some of their offerings, including a documentary about Matewan and Appalachia’s labor history, a moving and spare film about a Syrian refugee trying to get by in New Jersey, and shaggy animated videos about two cats in revolt against their owner. It’s all a wild ride, and worth exploring. We talk media consumption, worker-owned collectives, and fighting the good fight while having fun.
It wasn’t until after we recorded our conversation about Netflix’s Tiger King that we realized the hit documentary series is a mirror and what it shows is inscrutable. But that didn’t stop us! We cover labor, misogyny, Edward Said, spectacle, captivity, electoral politics, exploitation, the exotic-animal-owner-as-colonizer, polyamory, true crime, and lions, and tigers, and bears. Oh my.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
While we’re all marooned at home baking bread in sweatpants and trying to make friends with our very legitimate and mounting anxieties, Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor had an on-fire Zoom conversation about coronavirus capitalism and how to beat it. Haymarket Books (as always, a model publisher for the people) hosted, and thousands of people tuned in. Their conversation of course sparked our own conversation about how to think through what’s happening now and where we need to go from here.
Watch their talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lxwLHRKaB0&t=7s. Then listen to us get rrrlll political up in here.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
For some reason we’ve been watching movies about pandemics to escape from the pandemic. We thought we’d take the Bruce Willis/Brad Pitt time-traveling, plague-spewing 12 Monkeys for a ride. We found it mostly underwhelming, so we spent the majority of the episode talking about what the FUCK is going on in the world right now, our feelings, etc. etc. Come cope with us.
We’re all going to die. It took a cartoon about a writer struggling toward happiness and an alcoholic horse man / former sitcom actor (and a cat-mother-agent-former-girlfriend-of-3-boys-in-a-trench coat) ruining other people’s lives then almost terminating his own to get us to confront this seriously for the first time in a few years. THIS IS A VERY FUN EPISODE. Please join us for the BoJack Horseman finale.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
Thriller novels: where JK Rowling goes to be a piece of shit and politicians like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich dramatize their world view in the stupidest possible ways! The Obamas are too good for that: they’re diving into the movie biz via their partnership with Netflix. Their first entry is the 2019 American Factory, which works really hard toward mediocrity despite a number of compelling moments. WHO COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED THAT?
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
Welcome to the holiday edition of Two For Space Jam, Please! We backed our dump truck up to Cats, a movie about…Cats? Cheryl makes a spirited defense of this inflamed jellicle. Joe does not. The conversation ends w/a hostage scenario in which an armed intruder breaks into our home, puts a gun up to one of our heads, and asks the other to choose between watching Cats and Marriage Story. What do we choose? Do we choose? Dear listener, press play to find out.
In our secret holiday bunker, we drank a bottle of wine, watched Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart, and then forgot to talk at all about Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. But Cheryl has a whole lot to say about female friendship. We feel this is in the spirit of the movie.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
Class struggle! The haunted houses of the rich! The myth of hope in capitalism. Half of us crying. We talk about Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
We were thrilled to sit down with Chanelle Gallant in Toronto to talk about her brilliant essay, “Fuck You Pay Me,” in Pleasure Activism (see Episode 13), her book-in-progress about sex as a form of unpaid work, and, of course, Hustlers. In the conversation, Chanelle references the crucial work of Kate Zen (Twitter, articles on Truth Out, and Kate Zen on Hustlers); Red Canary, which supports the grassroots organizing of migrant sex workers; and the Toronto-based group Butterfly, which “provides support to, and advocates for, the rights of Asian and migrant sex workers .” Check it out.
We review Succession through the second season. We didn’t mean to. It just happened. I’m hoping oligarchs won’t be relevant in two years so we don’t have to review it again. Who knows!
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send us yr mail at twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
The one where we talk about J.Lo looking phenomenal at 50, the honesty of a lap dance, and how the whole world’s a strip club.
After our discussion our comrade Chanelle recommended some reading–a piece by Kate Zen that adds some crucial context and insight into the film’s representation of Destiny: “Constance Wu’s real-life ‘Hustlers’ inspiration and the problem with model minority redemption narratives.”
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send us yr mail at twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
We dip into the vault to watch John Sayles 1987 labor classic, Matewan, the based-on-fact story (and here’s a hilariously biased company version of the story for kicks) in which Mingo County coalminers enter a deadly struggle with their bosses and their thugs for improved conditions. We talk labor in cinema, dramatizing solidarity and organizing, what the labor films of the future might look like, and Cheryl-super-crush Will Oldham and his gorgeous kissable lips. Solidarity forever! And thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send us yr mail at twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.
Two For Space Jam, Please 
