two writers talk movies & culture
This week we’re coming at you from our neighbor to the north – Canada! We watched The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling (a Canadian!) as a CIA assassin named Six who learned a little too much about his employer and so is on the run in a cat and mouse chase across Europe. The movie was wildly expensive to produce and is wildly mediocre. Do better, Netflix.
Sometimes you’re in the mood for a movie that’s good-bad. Kimi is good-bad, with a shockingly simple storyline that has three bad guys killed by a nail gun at the end. What more could you want?
Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
Get in touch with Joe & Cheryl at twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Spotify.
In one jarring scene of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, cattle rancher Phil Burbank, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, roughly castrates a bull with a knife, then with his bare hands. This is maybe a representative scene for much of the tense hypermasculinity/repressed sexuality at play in the movie, or maybe it’s a way of showing the violence that Phil is capable of. It’s a taut, tight, suspenseful Western — with a twist ending (that we very helpfully spoil!).
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.
“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.
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.
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, they both stay in their fancy clothes entirely too long after getting home.
We get waaay off course during this conversation and spend some time talking about their gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows and the general nature of sadness. But that’s what you’re here for, right???
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.
Two For Space Jam, Please 