Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a timey-wimey movie set in a Kyoto coffee shop. It is also completely scrappy and adorable and I loved it.
Two Nerds got really really excited about Station Eleven, so excited we ended up talking for almost two hours. We watched the show at a perfect time. Our kid had a class on Shakespeare, so there was a lot of Hamlet discussion in the house already. Indeed, I decided to pick up the book again because the kid and I drove down to watch the most recent staging of Hamlet at the Guthrie. There's other metatexts in the show, but Hamlet is definitely the most important one. Something something, the rest is silence.
Two Nerds finish up their re-watch of the Twilight Saga movies with Breaking Dawn. The filmmakers split the fourth and final book in the series into two films, so we decided to put them back together in this podcat. Which ended up making a super-sized episode, because we definitely have some things to say. Breaking Dawn has some of the most memorable scenes from the series, both good and bad. The pregnancy and childbirth are wheels-off bonkers, but everything involving the Volturi and Michael Sheen is an utter delight.
Continuing on with our Twilight movie festival, we watched Eclipse. Of the four movies, we have the least to say about this outing, though I'm not sure why. Maybe because the series hasn't really gone off the rails yet; maybe because not a lot actually happens.
Two Nerds continue on to the second of the Twilight movies: New Moon. We get really excited when we glimpse a bunch of movie posters in a scene in a theater, but that turns out mostly to be a dead end. We also chat about how the Romeo & Juliet intertext is trash, and how awesome both Michael Sheen and blowing your clothes off into to confetti is.
Two Nerds decided to watch the Twilight Saga again, because this whole series is fascinating and enjoyable on its own terms, while also being 100% bonkers. Twilight is actually the least bananas of any of the movies (or books the movies were based on), though it still managed more than a couple moments of complete WTFery. So, to address a couple things said in this podcat: The review I mention from my Goodreads days can be found here, and Catherine Hardwicke -- the director of Twilight -- did indeed direct a film called Thirteen, about how complicated adolescence can be for girls.
Two Nerds decided to watch 28 Days Later again, partially because I wanted to see how closely it mapped to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids -- from which writer Alex Garland avowedly lifted the opening -- and partially because I have a thing about child zombies. (You can read my round-up here.) We talk a lot about child zombies and how they tend to be used very specifically and pointedly in narrative, and I manage to get up on my hobby horse about Hershel from The Walking Dead.
Two Nerds recorded a whole ass podcat about the movie Nope, then my damn phone ate it. So to console ourselves, we went ahead and watched all the Mummy movies -- The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns, The Scorpion King, The Mummy (2017), and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. This may seem like a non sequitur, but there's a connection between Nope and The Scorpion King: The family in Nope are horse trainers, and worked on The Scorpion King before the director decided to go with camels. Then one of the main characters, O. J., wears a The Scorpion King hoodie all through the third act. I'm still not sure why this detail in Nope, but it was fun to do a deep dive into grave robbers getting themselves cursed.
It’s been a hot minute since Two Nerds saw the movie Moonfall and recorded a podcat about it. I went back to finish my degree, and then there was a bunch of other life stuff that sucked up our emotional energy. But now, degree in hand, we’re back! Just to help you follow along at home: though I eventually remember his name, the person I’m called Not!GeorgeClooney is Patrick Wilson. At the end of the podcat, Richard notes he’ll watch this movie again when he forgets he’s seen it. Turns out, about four months is how long it took him to forget Moonfall was a movie that exists, let alone that we’d both watched it.
Beginning a year ago, Two Nerds went on journey to watch all the movies in the Halloween franchise. It's been quite a ride, finally terminating in Halloween Ends, which wraps up the most recent trilogy begun with 2018's Halloween. The original Final Girl gets her final showdown with Michael Myers.
Two Nerds didn't go into Tales of the Walking Dead, the anthology series set in The Walking Dead universe, expecting much. Whoo boy, did the the series exceed expectations, and then some. The unique stories in Tales of the Walking Dead have a lot of fun in what has been an often joyless landscape, twisting in genres and shifting through time.
I'm not saying that Two Nerds are always entirely sober, but certainly for this, our discussion of the film Morbius, we were half in the bag. Bit it was ok ok because it was Morbin time.
Slogging on through the Halloween movies, Two Nerds watched the most recent Halloween (which brings the count up to three whole ass movies titled Halloween), and its sequel, Halloween Kills. These two movies dispense with every single Halloween sequel so far, and are instead direct sequels to John Carpenter's original Halloween. Most importantly, these films jettison any familial connection between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, which was introduced in Halloween II, and was most decidedly not part of Halloween itself. Not including the Rob Zombie Halloween, these are probably the most competent Halloween movies to date, which -- and I know this is a bitchy thing to say -- isn't that high of a bar to clear.
Two Nerds got a request we watch Automata, a steampunky short about a human private detective, his robot partner, and a murder mystery. This made us consider what robots do, as a trope, and what questions narratives with robots tend to pose. Mostly, we came back to the concepts of sentience, autotomy, and humanity, and how the robot shows those concepts in tension with one another. We speak at length about the middle section of a film called Doomsday Book, which concerns an enlightened robot, Blade Runner, the novel Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, the various androids in the Alien franchise, and droids in the Star Wars universe.
As this is the final season of The Walking Dead -- a series which has taken myriad twists and turns over the years -- Two Nerds decided to go back and watch the first season of Walking Dead again. It was a rewarding exercise because it turns out that season really holds up, but then also because of how much has changed, and we didn't quite notice while it was changing. The biggest difference was the zombies themselves: first season walkers are tool-users the way they are in OG Night of the Living Dead (which is the first modern zombie film) but really aren't in any other season. Zombie stories often comment on the construction of society, and to that end, domesticity, and it was very edifying to go back to origins and see where that series began, and where its ending.
In which Two Nerds discuss the fourth of the Scream franchise, which was made a decade after the other 3, and evinces a slightly different sensibility than the rollicking meta-irony of the first three.
Two Nerds decided to do a deep dive into the Scream movies, as the fifth installment was just released, 25 years after the first. The first three Scream movies, all directed by Wes Craven, constitute a trilogy, while the fourth was made after a significant hiatus. In this podcat we discuss the first three only. The Scream movies had come up while we were talking about the new Matrix movies and the Halloween franchise: Like The Matrix, they're absolutely made out of the 90s. As such, they introduce a level of irony not in evidence in the Halloween movies.
Two Nerds was contacted by a friend of ours recently who put in some requests for podcat subjects. On the list were some titles we'd already tackled, like Another Earth and Shane Carruth's Primer, and some we hadn't yet, like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. This got us thinking about movies which are mindbenders: often high concept, maybe a little arthouse, and definitely out to blow your mind. Science fiction can be especially fruitful for mindbending, as it allows the artist latitude to mess with reality itself, to present extreme circumstances and and mine them for their philosophical possibilities.
Rather than retread old ground, we took as our subject two mindbenders we hadn't discussed yet: 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Shane Carruth's second film, Upstream Color. (We also watched 2010, but I wouldn't call that one a mindbender.) We definitely make mention of Aronofsky's The Fountain a bunch, as that's a mindbender both of us keep coming back to (even though objectively it's a pretty infuriating movie?)
Either way, prepare to have your mind blown.
As Gen Xers, Two Nerds have some pretty Strong Feelings about the Matrix movies, so it was with some trepidation we watched The Matrix Resurrections. A late-period fourth movie appended to a long-completed trilogy almost never goes well (e.g. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Also ominous: only Lana Wachowski returned to helm the film. Though their careers have been diverging a little in the past decade, the Wachowskis are a filmmaking pair like the Coen Brothers or Merchant-Ivory: it's hard to imagine them apart.
We were very pleasantly surprised, which seems a funny thing to say about such a furious film. Lana Wachowski is pissed as hell, and she very clearly shows you why and with whom.
