Two Nerds Sitting on a Couch

Two Nerds sat down to watched the recent film Voyagers with some excitement, because there are a vanishingly small number of actual generation ships in film. There are oodles of long haul ships, like the Nostromo, where its crew and passengers are put in hibernation of some kind. There are precious few fictional voyages where the ship's population will live out their entire lives on board, and whose children will, and grandchildren; where the destination is so far away that it will take lifetimes to get there. (I'm also talking film, not books, because there are tons of generation ship narratives in print.) Unfortunately, Voyagers was so infuriatingly bad we had to turn it off in disgust and read the wiki to learn the ending. I'm glad I didn't actually watch that; I would have thrown a clot. In this episode we discuss some of the other generation ship films out there -- most specifically Aniara -- and a couple generation ship books -- notably Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora. 

Two Nerds finally watched Two Distant Strangers, an Oscar-winning short film which takes the Groundhog Day premise of a single, repeating day, and applies it to a situation where a white cop shoots a Black man over and over again. (So content warning for racist violence.) We watched a lot of Groundhog Day-like narratives a while back, and the way Two Distant Strangers centers Black America makes the central premise feel very very different. One film it reminded me of was a local Minneapolis film from 2018 called Black, which was retitled Black in Minneapolis and rereleased in 2020. 

1993 was a good year for movies about the nascent Internet, apparently, because both The Net and Hackers were released that year. Two Nerds sat down and watched both. Both are very 90s time capsules, but Hackers is significantly more fun. Two Nerds talk about aol, 90s optimism, 20 lb laptops, our eternal love of Matthew Lillard, and so much cyberpunk. 

We've been on hiatus for a bit, but we're back with one of my favorite movies by one of my favorite writers: Pontypool. Tony Burgess adapted the screenplay from his novel, which is titled called Pontypool Changes Everything. Pontypool is kind of a zombie movie, though the mechanism of transmission and specific expression of the contagion is unusual: whatever is making people violently attack each other is transmitted by language. 

Our other listener asked if we'd done a podcast about The Fifth Element, so we watched it again. You guys, that was totally off the hook. Apparently, in the intervening decade or so since the resident nerds last viewed The Fifth Element, we'd also seen a bunch of other stuff which has made us seriously rethink what was going on in that movie. Most specifically: the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune and the 1981 animated anthology Heavy Metal. We totally owe you one, Michael.

If anyone has suggestions for what we should watch next, give us a shout. I can't say we'll freak out as much as we did here, but anything's possible. 

Two Nerds decided to watch Cell, the movie adaption of the same-named Stephen King novel, which is about a pulse sent over cell phones which makes anyone who hears it homicidal. (King also co-wrote the screenplay.) This is our second foray into zombie narratives, which is pretty funny because the "phoners" of Cell are unusual zombies, more in the line of the hacked people in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. 

Two Nerds sat down and watched the newest Zach Snyder movie, Army of the Dead, which is really exciting me because zombies are 100% my wheelhouse, and this the first zombie movie we've discussed. Like a Zach Snyder film, this podcast got a little out of hand in terms of run-time. Listening to this again, I realize the zombie allusions come hot and heavy, so I'm going to try to keep a running total of the various references we make. It's also a lot. 

Army of the Dead, dir. Zack Snyder

Night of the Living Dead, dir. George Romero

Cell, Stephen King

28 Days Later, dir. Danny Boyle

Serpent and the Rainbow, dir. Wes Craven

I don’t name it, but the movie where the zombie braaaaains thing comes from is called Return of the Living Dead, dir. Dan O’Bannon

I Am Legend, dir. Frances Lawrence

Night of the Comet, dir. Thom Eberhardt

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

Zone One, Colson Whitehead

Zombie in a Penguin Suit, dir. Chris Russell

Land of the Dead, dir. George Romero

Zombieland, dir. Ruben Fleischer

Again, I don’t name it specifically, but the Danish zombie film I mention is What We Become, dir. Bo Mikkelson

Dead Set, created by Charlie Brooker, of Black Mirror fame

Brazillian remake is called Reality Z, creator Cláudio Torres

The World According to Garp, John Irving

The Italian Job, dir. F. Gary Gray

Ocean’s Eleven, dir. Steven Soderbergh

Suicide Squad, dir. David Ayer

Deadwood, created by David Milch

Newsflesh series, Mira Grant

We don’t name it, but Resident Evil: Extinction, dir. Russell Mulcahy, is the one with zombie birds

Aliens, dir. James Cameron

Dawn of the Dead, dir. Zach Snyder

The Passage, Justin Cronin

The Strain, creator Guillermo del Doro

The Girl with All the Gifts, M.R. Carey

Two Nerds recently learned of a new cut of 1993's super bonkers Super Mario Bros. movie, put together by the fine people at The Movie Archive. This new cut restores 20 minutes of excised footage, making the movie, if anything, more bonkers. The copy I watched was on the Internet Archive, but that appears to have been taken down. There's a mirror available here, but I don't know how long that will stay up either. 

Two Nerds watched the most recent movie in the Conjuring universe, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, which is the third to focus on Ed & Loraine Warren, and the eighth overall. We also recently watched The Exorcist and Poltergeist, as all deal with spiritual possessions of one kind or another. 

Two Nerds watched three movies that are about the justice system (or policing more generally) in futuristic dystopias: Demolition Man, Judge Dredd, and Robocop. The first two are very similar: both mid-1990s, with Sylvester Stallone as the lead. Both were (at least partially) reactions to Rodney King and the L.A. Riots. We included Robocop, which was made earlier in 1987, as a contrast with the other two. Robocop ended being the most upsetting of the three, as so many aspects of its dystopia are just, like, regular in contemporary America.