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. Of course we also get into the ways the movie is in dialogue with contemporary #MeToo discourse, its Rashomon-like narrative structure, and lots more, but rest assured – we dig deep into the hair game here.
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 Spotify.
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 be deeply problematic, so forgive us for the few minutes we spent up on the old soapbox. Couldn’t help ourselves!
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 Spotify.
Inside is a discomforting and very funny field trip into the head of the comedian Bo Burnham 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. Highlights: “Face Time with My Mom (Tonight),” “Welcome to the Internet,” and the sketch where he’s a Twitch user playing the video game that is his life and he makes his player cry a lot.
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 Spotify.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the 2018 film by Chinese director Bi Gan, is indescribable. Can 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 yer gullet, bursting ye” — is something Willem Dafoe’s character shouts at Robert Pattinson’s character at one point during the 2019 Robert Eggers film The Lighthouse, and it’s also the general vibe of the whole movie. We had fun talking about this ocean-drenched misery fest!
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 Spotify.
We watched the Netflix series The Chair and of course had some strong feelings, especially given 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…..).
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 Spotify.
Bong Joon-ho’s 2000 feature film debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite, is a master class in dark comedy. It begins with a barking dog, ends with a professorship bought with cash in a cake 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.
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 Spotify.
We’re taking a li’l break to see family and such and to mark the end of sad vax summer, but 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!
Looking: tales must contain haecceities that are not simply emplacements, but concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects.
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!!
Looking: Between the extreme slowness and vertiginous speeds of geology and astronomy, Michel Tournier places meteorology, where meteors live at our pace: “A cloud forms in the sky like an image in my brain, he wind blows like I breathe, a rainbow spans the horizon for as long as my heart needs to reconcile itself to life, the summer passes like vacation drifts by.Looking: Aeon: the indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened.
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 Spotify.
The survival of the commune is the reproduction of all its members as self-sustaining peasants, whose surplus time belongs precisely to the commune, the work of war etc.
“A Filmed Adaptation 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 involving bandits, an undead saint, giants, a talking fox, a magical belt, and a dangerous trudge toward his own beheading. We were into it.
PS – Cheryl mispronounces “Gawain” throughout the whole episode so….apologies!!
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 Spotify.
The survival of the commune as such in the old mode requires the reproduction of its members in the presupposed objective conditions.
Production itself, the advance of population (this too belongs to production, necessarily suspends these conditions little by little; destroys them instead of reproducing them etc., and, with that, the communal system declines and falls, together with the property relations on which it was based. [Ed note: not exactly].