two writers talk movies & culture
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!
Discussed:-Â Revolutions podcast–Â Remember Sports–Â Big Energy Poets: Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change
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!!
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.
“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.
LeBron is great. The new Space Jam made us mad.
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 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.
Topics covered: capitalism, climate change, radical feminism, the relationship between language and political action, Kant, Joe’s philosophy of everything.
“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 social media-sourced movie making.
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.
Reality 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.
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 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 (!).
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.
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 that, ok?
See the other episodes in our labor series: Harlan County, U.S.A (1976), The Assistant (2019), American Factory (2019), Matewan (1987), & our interview with Chanelle Gallant.
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.
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 / police procedural / small town tragedy / family drama too. In this episode we cover nailing dialects, career-topping performances, copaganda, trauma’s aftermath, and the need for more amateur sleuth stories. And Wawa!
“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 Kim, Shamier Anderson, and Toni Collette (inspired by the story) has similar ambitions, but falls about 200 light-years short of truly tackling any of it. It’s a diverting field trip into outer space, but we didn’t find it to be the philosophical challenge it thought it was being. We ain’t easy to please!
HERE IS A GIF
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, invitations to join a cult, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.
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 it wants to be, lobbing some sharp-tongued critiques, and thinking through the stories we tell ourselves while living through crisis.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always, send yr comments, questions, invitations to join a cult, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.
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 bars of our youth and what life is like now as a couple of olds. Gotta say — happy to still be around.
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 suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.
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.”
It does not refer to the experience that a viewer might have in watching this movie. Good Time is a tense, increasingly disturbing couple hours that follows Pattinson’s character during one night in New York City as he tries to get his younger brother out of jail after a bank robbery gone wrong. It’s a maddening descent into chaos and immorality. It’s Pattinson at his very best. We were wholly unprepared. But we had fun talking it out!
^DO NOT LET BORROW CAR TO RETRIEVE ACID
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 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 positive since its release. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller, has won or been nominated for numerous awards, has sold over half a million copies by year’s end, and Netflix has plans to produce an adaptation directed by Ava DuVernay.
We……did not receive it as warmly. The book gave us a LOT to dig into, however. Charisse Burden-Stelly’s review, “Caste Does Not Explain Race” offers an extremely sharp critique of the book that helped inform our thinking on Wilkerson’s arguments, and we highly recommend you read her piece (even if you don’t plan to read the book!).
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 wherever you do your podcast business.
