Two for Space Jam, Please

Alternate, more accurate titles for Good Time:

Extremely Stressful Time

Nerve-Wracking Time

On Edge Time

Don’t-Watch-This-Alone Time

Apparently, the title of Benny & Josh Safdie’s 2017 film, starring Robert Pattinson, is prison slang and refers to the reduction in an inmate’s sentence for good behavior. The life you lead after you’re released is your “good time.”

It does not refer to the experience that a viewer might have in watching this movie. Good Time is a tense, increasingly disturbing couple hours that follows Pattinson’s character during one night in New York City as he tries to get his younger brother out of jail after a bank robbery gone wrong. It’s a maddening descent into chaos and immorality. It’s Pattinson at his very best. We were wholly unprepared. But we had fun talking it out!

^DO NOT LET BORROW CAR TO RETRIEVE ACID

Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.

As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.

We took a break from movies this week to discuss Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, published in August 2020 by Random House. In it, Wilkerson contends that racism in the United States is closely akin to the caste system in India and the violence of Nazi Germany. The book’s reception has been overwhelmingly positive since its release. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller, has won or been nominated for numerous awards, has sold over half a million copies by year’s end, and Netflix has plans to produce an adaptation directed by Ava DuVernay.

We……did not receive it as warmly. The book gave us a LOT to dig into, however. Charisse Burden-Stelly’s review, “Caste Does Not Explain Race” offers an extremely sharp critique of the book that helped inform our thinking on Wilkerson’s arguments, and we highly recommend you read her piece (even if you don’t plan to read the book!).

Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.

As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.

Sam Levinson’s 2021 Malcolm & Marie is a pandemic movie in that it’s about two people at home who fight, cry, and make mac & cheese. It’s also not a pandemic movie in that it opens with them returning from Malcolm’s movie premiere, presumably with lots of people hugging and breathing on each other. Also, they both stay in their fancy clothes entirely too long after getting home.

We get waaay off course during this conversation and spend some time talking about their gorgeous floor-to-ceiling windows and the general nature of sadness. But that’s what you’re here for, right???

We were in the mood for something FUN for a change so we watched the 2021 Korean space action-adventure flick, Space Sweepers. It’s got scavenger space trucks, a motley crew of likable misfits, a Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk-type on steroids, and a cute little girl who just might be a weapon of mass destruction. We, of course, love that the heroes are ordinary folk, and that at the center of all the adventuring is a strong ethic of care. Would recommend!

We’ve been on a run of excellent movies and Harlan County, U.S.A. is no exception. This 1976 documentary about a yearlong strike of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky is riveting, powerful, and one of the best depictions of collective organizing we’ve seen. A must-watch for every person out there who has to work to survive (i.e., most of us) and time to must-watch. (Also, we say to heck w/the both-sides-ism of later labor docs like the Obama produced American Factory. To heck!)

Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.

As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Google Play.

All we have to say is WATCH THIS MOVIE!

Actually, here’s a little more:

Bacurau is one of the best movies we’ve seen in years. This 2019 Brazilian film is strange, funny, dark, and galvanizing, and it’s impossible to adequately capture its brilliance with a few choice adjectives. At first blush, it’s the story of a small village in Brazil (set sometime in the near future) grappling with things like lack of access to water and a corrupt and annoyingly unhelpful mayor. Not a lot of surprises there. But about halfway through the movie, the story starts to swerve off the rails in a direction that we just did not see coming, and the ending is a first-rate lesson on crafting the perfect cinematic third act.
There are a lot of surprises that we completely spoil in our conversation, so if you have any intention of watching this movie, wait to listen to this episode until after you watch.

Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.

As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow is a Western like no other, an immigrant story like no other, and a moving, funny, tragic tale of friendship born out of the need to survive and some stolen milk. It was just the movie to watch as we huddled up in a snow-covered cabin and turned the calendar page to 2021. 

Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.

Write us?

As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.

We took a sharp left turn and watched John Carpenter‘s 1988 action/sci-fi flick, They Live. 
The movie’s IMDB description is all you really need by way of introduction:

“They influence our decisions without us knowing it. They numb our senses without us feeling it. They control our lives without us realizing it. They live.”

And by “they,” we mean…media savvy aliens with fancy watches that look like Skeletor. It was a wild ride!!

Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.

As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.

What are other critics saying? “No offense, but They Live is probably the stupidest film ever to take ideology as its explicit subject. It’s also probably the most fun.” –Jonathan Lethem

Now, a GIF dump.

We were long overdue to watch a truly good movie, and Merawi Gerima‘s poetic, quietly moving Residue, about a young filmmaker who returns home to DC to write a script about his neighborhood after being away for years, is a truly good movie. It’s an ode to childhood, an elegy for a city, and the best examination of gentrification we’ve seen yet.

Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.

As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.

Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy, based on the 2016 memoir of the same name by J.D. Vance, is bullshit, and we take a little time to talk about why. 

Referenced:

 Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll

An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Of special note:Amy Adams and Glenn Close have been nominated 13 times for an Academy Award between them, but neither have won yet.

Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro.

As always, send yr comments, questions, and movie suggestions to twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you do your podcast business.