Joe Hall and Cheryl Quimba watch movies then say things about those movies. They have strong feelings about Todd Haynes, Korean horror, class warfare, and how not to make a twenty-first century rom com. They're basically Siskel and Ebert, but with nothing to lose.
Sinners is a blood-soaked, music-drenched, powerful and mystifying horror-thriller. And there are two Michael B. Jordans! Two!!
I know this might sound crazy. I don't want to alarm you. Do you remember a TV show we used to watch together? It was called ... The Pink Opaque.
We got feedback. We reconsidered. That's how we do.
We finished the Cold Harbor file. Please enter the room.
Our feelings about this one: mixed. Our love for Bong Joon Ho: eternal. Also, we have a Patreon! It's fun over there. Check out patreon.com/twoforspacejamplease to see how to access bonus content and get ahold of a thing we made that's real and physical and can be held in your actual hands.
Tip of the day: If you find yourself stranded on a strange and mysterious planet, be very careful with any and all goo.
It’s 2016 and the U.S. is one big washed-up porn star. Happy new year. Also, we have a Patreon! It’s fun over there. Check out patreon.com/twoforspacejamplease to see how to access bonus content and get ahold of a thing we made that’s real and physical and can be held in your actual hands. Thanks to slfhlp for … Continue reading "Episode 121 – Red Rocket (2021)"
Oh, Francis Ford Coppola. If only you could have failed better.
So. Much. Yelling. In. Russian. We watched Sean Baker's heartrending, tragi-comic new film and then dug into the class conflict / representations of sex work / weaponized wealth of it all.
Neptune Frost is an Afrofuturist fever dream, replete with otherworldly poetry, song, color, drums, wise birds, wheel men, mystical hackers, dancing miners, and a technological/earthly joy. And we're so glad we watched it.
Join us as we meet Thelma, 93, adorable grandma and certified badass. It's the action comedy we never knew we needed. Also, we have a Patreon! It's fun over there. Check out patreon.com/twoforspacejamplease to see how to access bonus content and get ahold of a thing we made that's real and physical and can be held in your actual hands.
What counts as justified, rational action in a lethally warming world? Inquiring minds want to know.
A review of Janet Planet calls it "not a movie to be explained," and so this episode is more of the pondering/wandering variety. It's summer. We're here for it.
Cheryl's still working on her treatise, "A Unified Theory of Action Movies and Why They're Her Problematic Fave," but we get into some of its broader points after watching this adrenaline-fueled Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle.
Cheryl is seriously considering shaving her head. #TheMadMaxCinematicUniverse #ImperatorFuriosa #girlboss
Muscles, muscles everywhere. In The Iron Claw, pro wrestling is the stuff of melodrama and inconceivable tragedy. Join us in the ring.
Wooboy. Buckle up, folks. This ain't going to be pretty.
It started with a student story about phrogging. It ended with us watching a 20-year-old Korean movie that had us reflecting on class, small appliance repair, and the utter beauty of not talking.
Dune: Part Two was a Dud: Part Two. We have our reasons.
This was (obviously) a heavy conversation. We covered the banality of evil, the ways we remember atrocity, familial protectionism, gradations of complicity, small acts of resistance, and the practice of viewing present-day horrors through the lens of future generations. It's a lot. We muddle through, together.
The chilly, cerebral courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Fall dares to ask -- Is marriage itself a complex exercise in litigation? (Follow-up question: Does blasting a 50 Cent song at eardrum-blasting volumes justify murder??)
Are kitchen appliances sexy? What does bisexual lighting mean in 2023? We're asking the tough questions, folks. Our instigator - Please Baby Please, a movie so campy it should come with its own three-person tent.
In the first minute of this episode, Joe called May December "a banger." Let me be clear - this movie is not "a banger." But it made us feel weird and unsettled and disturbed and maybe that's ... good ...?
We returned after a few months of...stuff...to talk about the 2023 documentary Israelism.
It's time for a movie adapted from a long sci-fi poem written as a critical response to the United States' bombing of Hiroshima. Aniara means despair.
We didn’t expressly set out to do it, but we took a stance on Barbenheimer and watched Oppenheimer first. We had sooooo many things to say about this movie about a war criminal feeling bad for his crimes (bomb-and-cry). It was late but we were jazzed to talk about war movies, anti-war movies, and what … Continue reading "Episode 100 – Oppenheimer (2023)"
We're back and we watched The Blackening and had a lot of fun talking about why this horror-comedy / comedy-horror worked. Turns out -- you need good writing and good performances to make a good movie. Easy. Also, Joe reveals a secret! As always, spoilers abound.
We get real loopy talking about the zany Filipino meta-action movie, Leonor Will Never Die, and somehow get on a tangent about our love for Star Trek because, well, the heart wants what it wants. Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro. Get in touch with Joe & Cheryl at … Continue reading "Episode 98 – Leonor Will Never Die (2022)"
Roll for initiative and grab your arcane spells — we watched Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and we got all chaotic neutral with it. Thanks to slfhlp for providing us some SICK BEATS for our intro and outro. Get in touch with Joe & Cheryl at twoforspacejamplease @ gmail.com and subscribe on iTunes or Spotify.
The Last of Us made us angry. Do with that what you will.
It's 1984 but it's also 2023 and we're afraid of dying and fumbling our way to survival and it's goofy and tender with an airborne toxic event still keeping us up at night.
After a looooong hiatus, we're (finally!) back. And we missed you. We watched Triangle of Sadness, one of the more recent iterations of the increasingly popular eat-the-rich theme, and talked all about representations of class struggle, villianizing billionaires, and the kinds of dismantling capitalism stories we wish were being made.
We brought our appetites for the absurdist dark comedy that is The Menu - and we left satisfied!
The Banshees of Inisherin asks of its audience - how many fingers would you cut off to get your former best friend to leave you alone??
Join us for a brief stay at probably the worst Airbnb experience of all time. We grit our teeth (and sometimes closed our eyes) and watched Barbarian!
Vesper is viscous, gooey, slipshod, and visceral. Ferny plants shoot lethal, glowing pink darts that burrow into you and turn into insects. Scavenging pilgrims build rubbish towers high into the sky. A floating orb holds the consciousness of a bedridden man, and a 13-year-old girl plays with plants to have some shot at survival. Yes, we enjoyed this one
Our biggest piece of advice if you're planning a hurricane party with your friends in a mansion for the weekend - Put. Away. The swords. We watched Bodies Bodies Bodies and talked about funny horror and killer parlor games. And also - what are people in their twenties like again??
Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal is bizarre, uncomfortable, emotional, surprising, and deeply, deeply weird. This show was HBO being cool with spending millions to let a guy confront his anxiety through helping others confront their own anxieties - which is ok by us!
This week we're coming at you from our neighbor to the north - Canada! We watched The Gray Man, starring Ryan Gosling (a Canadian!) as a CIA assassin named Six who learned a little too much about his employer and so is on the run in a cat and mouse chase across Europe. The movie was wildly expensive to produce and is wildly mediocre. Do better, Netflix.
Special episode alert! We've got two guests joining us -- New York State Assemblymember Jon Rivera, and Ethan Powers -- to review Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. We laugh, we cry, we disagree, we spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what's going on with Tom Hanks. Are you lonesome tonight?? Well, come join us! sorry :(
It's 1997 and our queens Parker Posey, Toni Collete, and Lisa Kudrow are at the height of their powers playing temps trying to survive in a mind-numbing cubicle hellscape. Clockwatchers, another entry in our ongoing series on labor movies, feels prescient in its representation of disposable workers that sadly still holds true today. Bonus: we reminisce about a few of our own past jobs! There's some, uh, pallet smashing.
For this episode we joined the Bob's Burgers crew in their quest to pay one month of their business loan payment and solve a grisly murder. It's sweet and gross and comforting and touching. The Belchers - they're just like us!
In Alex Rivera's 2008 sci-fi drama Sleep Dealer, people are plugged into a global computer network via nodes on their bodies, work involves controlling your robot avatar in another country, and memories are sold to pay back student loans. It's the near future!!
Hey, it's Joe. I'm not used to writing these episode recaps and, well, we watched the 2021 movie The Humans (based on the 2015 play) and it was, uh, full of sad but also enduring humans.
Once you get us started, we can talk about work until the cows come home, or until it's 5 o'clock and time to ride the brain-blending elevator down to the floor where you get to be a human again. We talk Kafka, fluorescent lighting, bad design, worker solidarity, personal sh*t, and waffle parties. It's Severance time, baby.
In Everything Everywhere All at Once, we get a bedraggled, fed up, middle aged, Chinese immigrant wife and mom as our protagonist (played by the incomparable Michelle Yeoh), and she gets to kick actual ass as she tears through an IRS building while being audited. So yeah, we liked it.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car is a quiet, slow moving, tender movie that rewards patience and an attentive regard for the smallest moments. We digress at times during our conversation (as always), so get ready to hear our thoughts on the craft of fiction, finite friendships, and suffering, oh, suffering.
In this house, we stan Robert Pattinson. Even when (especially when) he plays an angsty, brooding, eyeliner-wearing, journal-writing Bruce Wayne who probably listens to The Cure.
Sometimes you're in the mood for a movie that's good-bad. Kimi is good-bad, with a shockingly simple storyline that has three bad guys killed by a nail gun at the end. What more could you want?