You're Gonna Hate It

We take a look at two studies of the performance of masculinity: Bernardo Bertolucci’s classic The Conformist, and Doug Liman’s rootin’ hootin’ Road House remake.

We’re joined by returning guest Jared this week to discuss two tales of oppression and resistance: Mel Gibson’s Best Picture winner Braveheart and the mid-2000s Comedy Central staple The Hebrew Hammer.

We discuss Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and the Steven Soderbergh silent, black and white cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

We return from our long hiatus to discuss John Ford’s elegiac revisionist Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the Steve Martin remake of The Pink Panther.

We’re back for the first time in a long time, with a discussion of Abbas Kiarostami’s seminal quasi-documentary Close-Up and Mike Myer’s era-defining comedy Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Also, Rob is pretty sure he mixed up Steven Wright and Steven Weber, but he is too lazy to go back and check. Only one of them was in So I Married an Axe Murderer, and it is not the one who was in that one episode of Party Down.

We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus as we’ve been pursuing our post-grad degrees (Rob to help the nation’s youth, Matt to imprison them) but Rob forgot he had this one sitting on his hard drive for, like, several months. He doesn’t remember if he edited it, but he does remember he did an impression of Matt for WAY too long, but he promises he does eventually drop it. Anyway, it was topsy-turvy month, so the films on the docket are Shinya Tsukamoto’s body-horror cult classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man and John Woo’s operatic action classic Hard Boiled.

The boys get wistful with Wong Kar Wai’s classic In the Mood for Love and then blow some shit up with the dark-as-night Michael Caine revenge flick Get Carter.

We double-dip into existential horror with the German Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the VOD cheapie The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu.

This month’s picks present two, uh, dissimilar responses to evil in the world. In the first, Carol Reed’s classic postwar noir The Third Man, Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles reunite a decade after Citizen Kane to wade into a morass of moral ambiguity from which no one emerges clean. In Sylvester Stallone’s Cannon Films copaganda flick Cobra, all the problems in the world can be solved by a bullet. Also: we debate whether or not Jake Gyllenhaal looks weird.