Drinking Night with a Movie Problem: Recent Episodes
Laura & Matt
Aww, the not-Disney classic that has no formal distribution. Today it's famous for being the movie that got John Lasseter fired from Disney. Was it any good?
Laura and Matt watch the 2000 movie by Spike Lee that caused and continues to cause a stir: Bamboozled.
The power went out, so we went to the theater to watch 28 Years Later, a triumphant return of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland. It's a bit disjointed, but each story within the runtime has some great moments.
Tonight we watched the chronically scattered We Live in Time, great performances, and gorgeous cinematography.
Matt and Laura watch 4 tech billionaires show just the extent of their hubris (and the limits of their competence) as one of their latest apps pushes the world to the brink.
Does The Social Network hold up 15 years later? Is the cinematic portrait of Mark Zuckerberg more or less damning? We sat down to watch this classic, and, spoiler, it does!
Forgot to publish this summer watch: Milk! All about Harvey Milk. An M, I, L, and a K, we're talking about Milk!
We breezed through the two seasons of Arcane this week, admiring the art, the plot, and the style. Season 1 has a tighter story, but it's great to see the show returning, and we're looking forward to the next story with Fortiche and Riot.
Coming to you from Prague, we stepped into the theater to watch Waves, an awesome movie covering the radio broadcasting the end of the Prague Spring. A hell of a ride.
Laura and Matt revisit the noir genre with a 90's take on 50's detective dramas. Watch out Guy Pearce, that is Lana Turner!
After a weekend watching Challengers, we sat down to catch Luca's earlier work, Call Me Your Boyfriend. I mean By Your Name.
Early Jackie Chan bursts onto the scene as one of the ensemble cast of My Lucky Stars. Full of jokes and great choreography and directed by Sammo Hung, a friend from the Beijing Opera, this movie is just delightful.
Laura & Matt continue their trek with more Hong Kong cinema! Tonight's movie is 'Internal Affairs' - an undercover cop cat-and-mouse thriller from the early 'aughts.
Flying through Oscar nominations, we take a minute for 2 gems: Alexander Payne's Holdovers - a warming indie romp with an Oscar-worthy performance by Giamatti, and Robot Dreams, a shockingly charming indie animated film! Totally deserving of its nomination. We're rooting for these.
A poignant indie film about what could have been.
It's the Sunrise Trilogy meets Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Four best picture nominations down, six to go, think we'll make it?
Adam Driver, an ex-marine, stars in a film that captures the events of gross misconduct by the CIA over the past decade. From torture to lying to Congress, we revisit the legacy of John Brennan and Diane Feinstein, who's actually quite competent in the bipartisan effort to reveal the truth. A great starting point for contemporary history, but ultimately a film that hopefully inspires people to dig a little deeper in The Report.
Join Matt and Laura for a magical adventure through Japan! Our titular heroine Suzume comes of age as she grapples with typical teenage things like getting a boyfriend, forging an identity independent of a parent figure, and releasing a giant worm from the otherworld through a magical door that will cause catastrophic earthquakes killing thousands if she can't convince her new cat to stop goofing off and be a mystical keystone again.
Matt and Laura talk the American car culture of the 1970s, the loneliness and vulnerability of the empty American West, and attempted vehicular homicide.
Laura and Matt watch Don Siegel's 1971 Civil War film. Equally interesting and off-putting ... Matt and Laura both thought the first had had potential, but we both struggled to suspend our disbelief in the later. Because 12 is old enough for kisses??
Laura & Matt take a trip to Alamo Drafthouse to see the new Napoleon movie! Laura has opinions on the awkward horse moments, Matt has opinions on the historical accuracy, but they both agree the Austerlitz sequence is crazy-well shot!
Peak 80s, peak hair, peak grunge, peak Kiefer Sutherland. He bleeds charisma. And this movie is the most excellent horror film we've seen this year.
It's spooky season! Criterion suggested the cult classic, House. It's 50% actual horror and 50% early internet cutout lolz random humor. But done in the 1970s! How time-consuming. Definitely worth watching over and over again.
A few weeks ago we podcasted about Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette in preparation for Priscilla, but alas, it was caught in my outbox for far too long!
The 1963 epic that supposedly takes place in 40 BC but feels a little anachronistic. It is the definitive epic, a scale to marvel all of cinema, and kind of makes you wonder if they had so much money for boats and goats, why didn't they write a more complex character study for Cleo and her loverboys?
As Matt wraps up his Ulysses S. Grant biography, Laura insisted on the movie about "you know, when Simba was leading the first black soldiers."
The film holds up in some ways, but there are a few awkward "Pocahontas" moments.
Still, the soundtrack is outstanding, the cinematography compelling, and the battle scenes epic.
Matt and Laura tackle the internet phenomenon that is the bomb! Our conclusions: Oppenheimer suffered from RDJ's framing device (controversial, I know), Barbie didn't take itself seriously for 30 seconds and you shouldn't either, and Elemental was surprisingly good for a complete flop at the box office.
We broke our rule about 'no contemporary' because we've been slammed with personal. So here's to Nimona! An easy watch, absolutely adorable.
Now is the spring of our greatest content with Ian McKellen in Richard the III. It's the right amount of camp, an ungodly amount of gloss, and very 90s special effects. But here's to a movie about the 1400s, written in the 1590s, recontextualized in the 1930s, filmed in the 1990s, and analyzed in the 2020s!
Wes Anderson sums up his own aesthetic in his Magnum Opus: To be frank, I think his world vanished long before he ever entered it. But he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace.
SO! Matt & Laura watch the quintessential Wes Anderson movie, and Matt quietly plots to get her to watch I <3 Huckabees as a follow-up.
Argo! Best picture and an all-around great film that focused such a spotlight on the American effort, the Canadians felt understandably underrepresented. But the movie still shines with excellent editing and a great script.
The year is 1992. Operation Desert Storm is greenlit. Dances With Wolves just won Best Picture. But the streets are their own battle as Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes exchange hoops and wit on the basketball court. This movie bleeds 90s culture, so in the world are they going to remake it for a 2023 audience? TBD ....
Matt and Laura are back! And so are Shrek and Donkey! It's kind of a long story, but, well, now they're sexy!
That is a donkey quote Matt got to put in when Laura let him write the description and now he insists on keeping it because the film revolves around Shrek getting a glow-up to try to fit in with his new human in-laws. Please read as a film reference and not a sign that anyone in this household is attracted to Shrek or Donkey. Well, maybe Donkey a little.
The first of two (or more?) Devito & Schwarzenegger classic films, Twins! Wouldn't it be funny if those two were twins? Well now you don't have to guess, you can watch the 1988 hit, Twins! Does this movie have plot holes? Yes! Is it laugh out loud funny? Not really! But hey, it's charming when the muscle man and the chonky boy wear the same suit.
I'm going to ask you a very pointed question: which movie has the worst knife fight? Are you team Matt with Saving Private Ryan, or team Laura with All Quiet?
Tonight we watched the most excellent classic camp: Clue. We'd like to say, Tim Curry's greatest performance of his career, but it's Tim Curry, so it's one of a dozen brilliant acts.
Warlord! I mean Lord of War! A spectacularly cynical film about a gun-runner at the collapse of the Soviet Union. Spoiler, it's dark bro.
Spielberg's masterpiece: Schindler's List. What is there to say? The cinematography is emotional, the soundtrack is gut-wrenching, and the subject matter is devastating.
We watched Barbarian over the weekend! A great indie horror, a little split over the theme, but asking the good ol' question: who is the real monster!?
The Menu is a movie with a split personality. Is it exploring the dark recesses of an obsessive artist, or is it uncovering class distinctions in the modern world? What was supposed to be a half-hearted midnight movie kept us up past our bedtime :)
We watched the cult classic that just keeps getting remade and remade and remade: Ghost in the Shell. Heavily influenced by Bladerunner and cyberpunk dystopia, Major is 99.8% cyborg and 0.2% human wondering if she really is a person. The movie is spectacularly produced, the animation, the art direction, the music, the compositions, the special effects, they're all incredible! The #deep pontifications about what it means to be human are ... tried. Still, a phenomenal watch and highly recommended.
Tonight we sat through the dappled truth in Rashomon! Laura's memory of Rashomon was a movie about a murder told through three lenses. But upon a rewatch, it appears to be less about the murder and oddly about Rape & Reputation.
Happy New Year! We're back from a great holiday adventure and sit down to watch TENET, Nolan's latest time-traveling visual spectacular. Laura went in with such low expectations, the film was an absolute delight, a confusing delight. Matt was simply confused.
Dive into the streets of LA with Jake Gyllenhaal playing a totally normal human with emotions and empathy as he films crime scenes for a local news channel. It's a dark film, but it's an industry!
Martin Scorsese's beautiful, resonant Silence takes center stage on our projector. It's a compelling film with a lot of #deepthoughts and not a lot of subtlety. Highly recommended!
This weekend we watched the utter chaos of the two Gremlins movie, and boy are they WILD!
Tonight we caught Entergalactic, the Kid Cudi Netflix special that has taken another leap into 2D textured 3D animation, and BOY does it look good!
We finally sat down to watch last year's Best Picture, Coda. A super charming movie about a hearing girl with a deaf family and her struggle to break away. It's full of interesting characters, witty dialogue, and a beautiful exploration of the hearing vs deaf communities.
Do you remember the news story about a bunch of kids stuck in a cave in Thailand? Apparently Ron Howard made a movie about it! And he didn't include Elon Musk's theoretical submarine!
1949, Japan is reeling from it's role in WWII, and a director turns his lens on a woman who would later become an icon: Setsuko Hara. Here's to the Young Lady is a more obscure film that mirrors Gone with the Wind as a "country bumpkin" romances a class act who's wealthy family has fallen on harder times. It's a nice time capsule, though the Nice Guy (TM) is strong in this one.
Matt and Laura sit down to watch the story of two brothers fighting for Irish independence in the 1920s.
Matt and Laura sit down to watch the contemporary classic, Philomena. Based on a true story crossing 3 countries and 5 decades and featuring the most terrifying real life villain we've ever seen.
We sit down to watch Linklater's 2006 Philip K. Dick adaptation: A Scanner Darkly. A curious film about cognitive disassociation and getting really, really high. Just as Keanu's brain lobes fight to dominate his reality, this movie is equally split between a post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and the prequel to the Pineapple Express.
Let's rewind to 1941 when Disney released its classic film Dumbo. Since it was a huge financial hit, and kids movies were scarce, it was rereleased throughout the century and has saturated our culture with a cute flying elephant. But it's kinda the OG Boss Baby. There's a ton of great things happening around the movie and in the studio, but the plot is pretty plotless.
Laura and Matt watch Kurosawa's post WW2 film, in which he explains to Japan how very, very, extremely bad that whole "going to war" idea they just had was. Less than a year after the war ended.
Matt and Laura watch the latest Edgar Wright film, because nothing says 4th of July like a British movie! But seriously, the master is at it again, great execution. The plot gets a little convoluted, but boy everything else, the cinematography, the editing, the performances, make up, costumes, MUSIC, SOUND EFFECTS! It's awesome.
Tonight, Matt and Laura somehow stumbled into the heart of the African jungle. Congo! Cue the drum beats and paper thin plot. It's a gem. A sparkly, time capsule that probably made a ton of money, but raises a few ethical concerns.
'ello! We sit down to watch the cult classic, This Is Spinal Tap. The grandfather of mockumentaries, the predecessor of the meme movie, the film that paved the way for Christopher Guest, Taika Waititi, and the Scary Movies. Because this movie is "such a fine line between stupid, and uh…clever."
Matt and Laura turn up Pride Month with a screening of Kinky Boots, a movie about a drag queen who ... wait no, it's about a factory owner who needs to save his dad's company and find a new girlfriend with the help of his drag queen best friend. (We definitely ship Lola/Sarah-Jane <3)
Rated explicit for soft swearing.
Tonight we sat down to watch Minari, a film about a Korean family that moves to Arkansas to farm vegetables. But it's so beautifully written with great characters, nothing but rave reviews on our end.
We're back! A Drinking Night with a Movie Problem Story! After a short hiatus, we watched the 1993 Spielberg dinosaur film to rival the 1993 Spielberg film ... Jurassic Park. The plot is weak, but the animation holds up! And we have a theory about New York animated movies in the 1990s. Cheers!
The trilogy of epic cuteness! It gets by on a LOT of charm, the first movie is pretty solid, the second has the skeleton of a great story, and the third is a bit confusing. But boy oh boy, do we love Toothless.
Laura & Matt return to 1982, a time when nerds did not rule the cinematic universe, to see what a movie targeting nerd subculture looks like when nerd subculture really wasn't mainstream. Suffice to say there are reasons it wasn't.
Robin Williams part deux! After Good Morning Vietnam, and a bit of last week's The Lives of Others, we pivot to a poetic masterpiece with 90s special effects that hold up surprisingly well.
Matt and Laura watch a guy watching a guy. The 2006 Best Foreign Film winner that explores the lives wrecked by the surveillance state of the German Democratic Republic (the eastern one). And spoiler, it's not just the artists who's lives are ruined.
Flagging for explicit because I say the F word a few times and we discuss a scene with quite, QUITE questionable consent.
After last week's animated flik, we sit down to watch Studio Ghibli's 1991 "lost film," Only Yesterday. It's an earlier take on the concept of core memories with gorgeous backgrounds and uncanny smiles.
Matt shocks Laura with the fact that he, after 24 years, has not seen A Bug's Life. But there's a simple solution! Ultimately a great movie, but does struggle with 2 different conflicts: Flik unable to fit in with the rest of the colony, and the ants of the colony versus the oppressive Hopper.
Spoilers for Seven Samurai. Thanks Matt.
Adapted from Ken Kesey's classic novel, we watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The verdict? It's an exploration of order and chaos through maternal and paternal energies, and distilled through 1960s sex politics. So it's a little dated, but that's history!
Oh la la, we roll back to the 70s with this weirdly, wildly bizarre animated feature film about #coexistance.
West Side Story. A 1960s perspective of 1950s racial violence remade in the 2020s. Did it work?
Note: this recording discusses the plot of the film which includes an attempted rape, and a sex scene.
We sit down to watch the classic 80s film, Willow. It made Matt sad. Laura remains obstinately optimistic.
Matt and Laura sit down (actually stand up) to talk about Jason Blevins' short documentary, I Never Had Dreams of My Son, published by the New Yorker.