two writers talk movies & culture
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, love that the heroes are ordinary folk, and that at the center of all the adventuring is a strong ethic of care. Would recommend!
We’ve been on a run of excellent movies and Harlan County, U.S.A. is no exception. This 1976 documentary about a yearlong strike of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky is riveting, powerful, and one of the best depictions of collective organizing we’ve seen. A must-watch for every person out there who has to work to survive (i.e., most of us) and time to must-watch. (Also, we say to heck w/the both-sides-ism of later labor docs like the Obama produced American Factory. To heck!)
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.
All we have to say is WATCH THIS MOVIE!
Actually, here’s a little more:
Bacurau is one of the best movies we’ve seen in years. This 2019 Brazilian film is strange, funny, dark, and galvanizing, and it’s impossible to adequately capture its brilliance with a few choice adjectives. At first blush, it’s the story of a small village in Brazil (set sometime in the near future) grappling with things like lack of access to water and a corrupt and annoyingly unhelpful mayor. Not a lot of surprises there. But about halfway through the movie, the story starts to swerve off the rails in a direction that we just did not see coming, and the ending is a first-rate lesson on crafting the perfect cinematic third act.
There are a lot of surprises that we completely spoil in our conversation, so if you have any intention of watching this movie, wait to listen to this episode until after you watch.
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.
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is a Western like no other, an immigrant story like no other, and a moving, funny, tragic tale of friendship born out of the need to survive and some stolen milk. It was just the movie to watch as we huddled up in a snow-covered cabin and turned the calendar page to 2021.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
Write us?
As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.
We took a sharp left turn and watched John Carpenter‘s 1988 action/sci-fi flick, They Live.
The movie’s IMDB description is all you really need by way of introduction:
“They influence our decisions without us knowing it. They numb our senses without us feeling it. They control our lives without us realizing it. They live.”
And by “they,” we mean…media savvy aliens with fancy watches that look like Skeletor. It was a wild ride!!
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.
What are other critics saying? “No offense, but They Live is probably the stupidest film ever to take ideology as its explicit subject. It’s also probably the most fun.” –Jonathan Lethem
Now, a GIF dump.
We were long overdue to watch a truly good movie, and Merawi Gerima‘s poetic, quietly moving Residue, about a young filmmaker who returns home to DC to write a script about his neighborhood after being away for years, is a truly good movie. It’s an ode to childhood, an elegy for a city, and the best examination of gentrification we’ve seen yet.
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.
Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy, based on the 2016 memoir of the same name by J.D. Vance, is bullshit, and we take a little time to talk about why.
Referenced:
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Of special note:Amy Adams and Glenn Close have been nominated 13 times for an Academy Award between them, but neither have won yet.
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.
Do we think in Twitter? Can we truly opt out of social media? Have we become machines of our machines? The Social Dilemma has us tackling these questions and so much more. Boot up your brains for a big honking episode. PS – we both shut down our Facebook accounts!!!
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.
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.
Two For Space Jam, Please 