Movie Time with Joe and Cheryl

We're back.

We watched Krisha, the debut feature from new-on-the-scene director Trey Edward Shults, on the recommendation of John Waters (or, specifically, his Top 10 Films of 2016 list), which honestly is not a bad way to pick out a movie (we'll get to you next time, Tickled).

Krisha takes place over the course of one harrowing Thanksgiving, when the titular character returns home for the holiday after ten years away from her family. The reunion is bittersweet, to say the least, and Krisha's gradual breakdown -- and its cataclysmic effect on the family, especially her stoically anguished son (played by the director Shults) is a mighty thing to behold. Highlight: a slow-motion scene of steaming turkey juices spilling out of a giant roasting pan. This movie's a stunner.

Bonus content: We also discuss "Pizza and Warfare," a keenly moving chapbook by Nikki Wallschlaeger that we could have talked about for days.

--Cheryl

We're baaack! And after our accidental hiatus, we've decided to change things up around here. Rather than focusing on new and recent movie releases, we're expanding our scope to include older films, movies by directors we

love or want to learn more about, more indie, weirdo, and art house stuff, clusters of movies centered around various themes, and generally anything that catches our interest. We'll still do big, stupid blockbusters sometimes because it's fun to talk shit and/or heap praise on the latest Planet of the Apes, but on the whole it's going to be a beautifully varied mishmash of American and international cinema through the ages from here on out. And as always, we're open to suggestions! ([email protected])

First up: We watched A Touch of Sin from Chinese director Zhangke Jia (2013). The movie is divided into four separate vignettes centered on four different characters--a resentful mine worker in a small, corrupt town; a migrant on a motorcycle with a gun; a spa/brothel receptionist who defends herself with a pocket knife from her married lover; and a young hospitality worker at an upscale hotel that doubles as a brothel. We talk about what the movie says about violence, work, justice, collectivism, and the particular pains experienced by a country transforming from communism to capitalism.

--Cheryl

Sergei Loznitsa's Maidan is a movie about revolution that, for a large portion of its running time, shows people making sandwiches, milling around a public square, and shoveling debris. These shots are punctuated by scenes of violence, with protesters physically clashing with riot police amid billows of tears gas and flaming barricades.

There is no narrator and there are no interviews. It serves as a record of the civil uprising that occurred in the Ukraine's capital of Kiev the winter of 2013-14 against President Yanukovych's regime. We found Maidan at turns boring and terrifying and galvanzing, and it tells, with no words at all, very important things about collective action and resistance.

Somehow ELLE, the newest film from the gloriously ever-surprising Paul Verhoeven (RoboCop, Total Recall, Showgirls, Starship Troopers) is tagged in IMDB as a comedy, drama, and thriller. Drama and thriller we can understand, yes, but...comedy? Whatever humor there is in ELLE is dark and bleak, the bits of dialogue you chuckle at with your nails dug into the seat as you're bracing for the next violent blow.

Isabelle Huppert, as Michele, gives a heart-stopping performance as a successful businesswoman who is raped by a masked intruder. She then undertakes a secret investigation to identify her attacker, all the while juggling the various social and personal responsibilities that comprise her day to day life.

This was a tough one to watch and a tough one to talk about. I still don't know how I feel about it. If you do: listen & tell us! -- Cheryl.

Who doesn't love a good ol' linguist-saves-humanity-from-self-destruction flick??? On the first day of 2017 we watched Arrival, a movie about making utterances, deciphering symbols, and forging understanding with wholly foreign beings when nearly all hope is lost. The good news: it's possible. Here's to a brighter year, world.

We watched Robert Eggers's The Witch a very long time ago but didn't post our talk because soon after a dangerous, desiccated apricot was elected to the highest office in the land and it felt weird and wrong to be talking about an invented horror while a real one was unfolding. But after a while we (mostly Joe at first) noticed some interesting commonalities between the kind of paranoid, Puritanical hysteria explored in the 1630s New England of The Witch and today's social climate, so then we thought that is something worth talking about too. So we recorded another (very) brief talk to stitch to the main talk and to partially explain our absence. And we also decided that movies are crucial! And art is crucial! And producing and talking about and trying to understand it all is crucial! Especially now. So expect more movie-talking in the very near future

British director Andrea Arnold's vision of contemporary middle America is young, fragile, hopeful, precarious, and achingly lovely. American Honey joins the long illustrious list of "American ___" movies (Beauty, Psycho, Gigolo, Pie), and tells the story of Star, an 18-year-old girl with nothing to lose, who joins a ragtag crew of teenagers that roam the country in a white van to sell magazines (of all things) door to door. Shia LaBeouf plays Jake, Star's love interest and co-dreamer, and -- honestly -- his performance is so good that you'll forget he has a foot-long braided rat tail. This movie -- and the ways in which it portrays people living in poverty as so much more than bleak cases -- moved us.

We wanted to shake things up a little so this weekend we went to see Don't Breathe, the Fede Alvarez horror-thriller flick that's currently getting butts into movie theater seats across the nation. Cheryl admits to not having seen a horror movie since 1999's The Blair Witch Project (oh how the time goes, apparently they're making a second one?) because she gets nightmares like a small, frightened child. Joe is tougher but probably still wouldn't break into a blind Gulf War veteran's home on a block of abandoned houses in the middle of the night to steal $300,000. But maybe the opportunity just hasn't come up yet.