two writers talk movies & culture
Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Drive My Car is a quiet, slow moving, tender movie that rewards patience and an attentive regard for the smallest moments. We digress at times during our conversation (as always), so get ready to hear our thoughts on the craft of fiction, finite friendships, and suffering, oh, suffering.
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 this house, we stan Robert Pattinson. Even when (especially when) he plays an angsty, brooding, eyeliner-wearing, journal-writing Bruce Wayne who probably listens to The Cure.Â
The movie theater was packed when we got there and we were worried The Batman was sold out. Turns out, all the teenage girls and their moms were there for BTS Permission to Dance on Stage. They were positively giddy. Honestly, we’re happy for them.
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.
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.
We were a wee bit disappointed in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s newest film, Big Bug, which is maybe why we spent most of this conversation talking about the end of empire and fabulist futures. But we connect it all back to the movie somehow, we do!
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.
We watched Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley and decided that the U.S. is a carnival, everyone wants to be lied to, and Bradley Cooper is the perfect creep. Step right up!!
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.
Mr. Paul Thomas Anderson is back, this time with an oddball love story that’s soaked in nostalgia, the 70s, and the screwy exuberance of being young and confused. The pants are tight. The music is excellent. And waterbeds abound.
Thanks to slfhlp for providing SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.
As always send your comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Spotify.
Years 2020-2021 must have really done a number on us because we found Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up kinda sweet (and dark and funny and incisive and tragic too). May 2022 bring us the opposite of a comet hurtling towards the Earth.
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.
It’s a race to the bottom! After the season 3 finale of Succession, we talk psychosexual drama, morality mental exercises, critiques of the ruling class, assistant labor, Cousin Greg’s ethical collapse, tragedy, comedy, squishy sympathies, and which Roy family member we’d be (Joe = Kendall/Shiv; Cheryl = Marcia).
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.
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.
Is The Pizzagate Massacre the best movie about the Trump era, as this Vice News article contends? We say….possibly? It’s certainly a scathing indictment of Alex Jones-type media personalities who peddle the kind of mistruths that lead to actual, tragically real violence. The movie drops us squarely into an environment of hyperparanoia, total distrust, white supremacy, and guns-as-the-answer-to-everything. There are lots and lots of guns. Join us on this disturbing journey into the psyche of a subculture.
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.
Squid Game, it turns out, is not a show about having a good time eating calamari, but a murderous series of increasingly violent competitions that serves as an allegory about global capitalism and the bone-crushing misery it inflicts on the 99%. Who knew?
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 were not fans of Wes Anderson’s newest quirky romp, The French Dispatch. We were not fans at all.
Dune. DUNE!! We’ve been waiting to watch this one and whoo boy, do we have things to say. We get deep into Denis Villeneuve’s top-notch world-building, the ecstatic experience of surrendering to beauty, the huge problem of the chosen one savior narrative, space witches, sandworms, climate disaster, and Timothee Chalamet’s jawline. One of our big takeaways – there are no good imperialists!
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 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.
Two For Space Jam, Please 
