Like Mother, Like Son, Like Movies

This is the second part of our discussion about films featured at Oscars 2022. We will first go through the rest of the films in Best Picture category and then talk about some of the few other ones worth mentioning. At the very end we reveal our favourite film from the awards ceremony.

I had never had that much interest in the Bourne movies, so when I got inspiration to check out some movie franchises I was positively surprised and felt stupid to have never seen them before. My mother has enjoyed them already before so this gave us a chance to talk about them. So we will go through every Bourne movie starting with The Bourne Identity (2002) and ending with Jason Bourne (2016).

We open up our episode with deeper discussion of Thomas Vinteberg's Another Round (2020). After this we indulge ourselves with several topics, including the interesting production behind the series In Treatment, my mother's experience with the first Star Wars (1977), my own experience with Sodebergh's Ocean's movies. At the end my mother gives a comment on Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God (2021) and her struggle with currently ongoing tv shows.

In this casual discussion we are going to go over several topics from our recent viewings. We start off with Emerald Fennell's award winning comedy thriller Promising Young Woman (2020). After that my mother gives her review of the "Soprano story" The Many Saints of Newark (2021) and I mention something about Netflix's hit series Squid Game that I have not seen much talked about. We close things off by talking about Gaspar Noé and share our thoughts on two of his recent movies: Lux Æterna (2019) and Climax (2018).

On our second part exploring our favourite movies of 2020 we concentrate on my mothers list. There are some natural overlap with my list, but I'm definite that she will surprise you with some of the titles she mentions. And if you stick at the very end she will reveal which movie became her new favourite movie of all time.

This is the first part in our list exploring personal favourites of 2020. We both had a handful of recommendations which we also wanted to comment on, so instead of one big episode we decided to release them as two part episodes. I was able to see 76 movies and these are 11 that made my very top of the list. Unfortunately because of the time limit, I couldn't mention all the recommendations. So if you are interested and looking for good movies, check out my Letterboxd list.

Denis Villeneuve's cinematic adaptation of Dune has been winning over critics as well as the box office. Considering the troubled history of adapting the book, releasing a satisfying singular vision is an achievement by itself. Next to this monumental release, the opinions of some son and mother can't help to feel little bit insignificant. All we can really do in the end is talk about our experience that - like my mother points out - has been years in the making. In the discussion we explore the perspectives of someone who didn't know anything about Dune beforehand and someone who is familiar with the book and it's previous adaptations.

With Small Axe (2020) British filmmaker Steve McQueen contributes to the ongoing evolution of merging the line between cinema and television even more. The series of films (presented as a mini-series) tell five distinct stories set in West Indian community in London from 1969 to 1982. We explore our experiences watching them in a discussion that gets also little bit emotional.

This time instead of talking about a specific movie, we are going to talk about watching movies  during the quarantine in 2020. Liisa describes her troubles with the library and how certain series helped her survive. Aharon shares his evolution towards streaming services and how big changes in his life pushed him to become more open about how we watch movies.