Nell and Matt's Obsolete Movies

Don’t call it an Easter Special, but we did spend Easter reviewing a film that’s about the ultimate battle of good versus evil, and how the quest for affordable real estate can suck a person into saving the fate of the Earth and all humankind. The Sentinel also has the added bonus of featuring some major 90’s actors in minor roles.

We watch the last CED Selectavision disc ever made and ruin many GenX childhoods in the process. Sometimes beloved things from our childhoods are just okay, and that’s okay.

For this episode we check out the late 90’s classic Run Lola Run and explore the question of what happens when the future becomes nostalgia.

We discuss a lost classic that predicted the worst of our dystopian world to mark the halfway point to the century mark. Very few films have made me laugh out loud. This was certainly one of them.

This film isn’t just bad. It’s beyond cringeworthy. I would call it socially irresponsible, an ideological misstep from an era when folks should have known better, and worse, we spend 10 dollars on the laserdisc.

We fired up our finicky laserdisc player to watch a Pink Panther movie. In our discussion we talk about what happens to a parody of a genre when the genre goes out of fashion. We also reminisce about our unsupervised early days with HBO and how this film made the sophisticated adult world seem a lot less threatening.

In this episode we revisit a film I was way too young to understand when I last watched it (in the 80’s), but Nell has seen several times AND even read the novel. Listen to find out if the director Mad Max pulled off making a film that is better than the book, or if 4 major stars is too many for this semi-forgotten film. Also, this is the episode where we add a 5th “Big Question” at the end, and it’s probably one we should have had for the previous 46 episodes.

Well, technically it’s John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, and it was Matt’s first time seeing the movie. We also realized halfway through that we unintentionally picked a perfect film for President’s Day. While you can totally enjoy Escape from New York as a straightforward action movie, we spend most of our time discussing John Carpenter’s savvy social critique.

For our Valentine’s Day special, we went with a movie we both have always loved, and in watching it again kinda sorta ruined it for ourselves. That said, we miss John Candy, and the idea of a movie about people who aren’t cool but totally nice finding love is a great idea. However, there’s things about Only the Lonely that made us think that the idea of the movie is better than the actual movie.

It was morning in America, and Working Girl was celebrated with 6 Oscar nominations and a whole lot of positive reviews. This rom-com meets female-centered Horatio Alger tale set in Lower Manhattan is a reminder of the anxieties and aspirations of the post-Reagan era. For Nell, this was an important aspirational movie, and Matt saw it for the first time in 2023 after being thoroughly jaded by the 21st Century.