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

Two for Space Jam, Please

Episode 62 – The Lighthouse (2019)

iven 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.....).

Episode 61 – The Chair (2021)

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.

Episode 60 – Bong Joon-ho’s Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)

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!

Summer Break! / Culture Mixtape

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!!

Episode 59 – Old (2021)

"A Filmed Adaption 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.

Episode 58 – The Green Knight (2021)

Episode 57 – Space Jam: A New Legacy aka Two For Space Jam 2 Please

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.

Episode 56 – The Atrocity Paradigm (2002)

 "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. 

Episode 55 – Zola (2021)

eality 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.

Episode 54 – Reality Bites (1994)

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 (!).

Episode 53 – Minari (2020)

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 … Continue reading "Episode 52 -Norma Rae (1979)"

Episode 52 -Norma Rae (1979)

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 … Continue reading "Episode 51 – Mare of Easttown (2021)"

Episode 51 – Mare of Easttown (2021)

“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 … Continue reading "Episode 50 – Stowaway (2021)"

Episode 50 – Stowaway (2021)

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 … Continue reading "Episode 49 – Nomadland (2020)"

Episode 49 – Nomadland (2020)

Joe Hall and Cheryl Quimba watch movies then say things about those movies. They have strong feelings about Todd Haynes, Korean horror, class warfare, and how not to make a twenty-first century rom com. They're basically Siskel and Ebert, but with nothing to lose.

hubhopper

Two for Space Jam, Please

hubhopper