Two Nerds Sitting on a Couch

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a timey-wimey movie set in a Kyoto coffee shop. It is also completely scrappy and adorable and I loved it.

Two Nerds got really really excited about Station Eleven, so excited we ended up talking for almost two hours. We watched the show at a perfect time. Our kid had a class on Shakespeare, so there was a lot of Hamlet discussion in the house already. Indeed, I decided to pick up the book again because the kid and I drove down to watch the most recent staging of Hamlet at the Guthrie. There's other metatexts in the show, but Hamlet is definitely the most important one. Something something, the rest is silence.

For this episode of Two Nerds, we're joined by a "subject matter expert," our kid, Traveller. Traveller was super into Five Nights at Freddy's when he was a wee child, so he's got the lore-dump for us. I gotta say, I did not expect the places FNaF lore ended up going, boy howdy. And just to save you a search, I looked up fan-made song which ended up as the end credits music in the FnaF movie. It's by The Living Tombstone, and a version of that song can be found here.

Two Nerds finish up their re-watch of the Twilight Saga movies with Breaking Dawn. The filmmakers split the fourth and final book in the series into two films, so we decided to put them back together in this podcat. Which ended up making a super-sized episode, because we definitely have some things to say. Breaking Dawn has some of the most memorable scenes from the series, both good and bad. The pregnancy and childbirth are wheels-off bonkers, but everything involving the Volturi and Michael Sheen is an utter delight.

Continuing on with our Twilight movie festival, we watched Eclipse. Of the four movies, we have the least to say about this outing, though I'm not sure why. Maybe because the series hasn't really gone off the rails yet; maybe because not a lot actually happens.

Two Nerds continue on to the second of the Twilight movies: New Moon. We get really excited when we glimpse a bunch of movie posters in a scene in a theater, but that turns out mostly to be a dead end. We also chat about how the Romeo & Juliet intertext is trash, and how awesome both Michael Sheen and blowing your clothes off into to confetti is.

Two Nerds decided to watch the Twilight Saga again, because this whole series is fascinating and enjoyable on its own terms, while also being 100% bonkers. Twilight is actually the least bananas of any of the movies (or books the movies were based on), though it still managed more than a couple moments of complete WTFery. So, to address a couple things said in this podcat: The review I mention from my Goodreads days can be found here, and Catherine Hardwicke -- the director of Twilight -- did indeed direct a film called Thirteen, about how complicated adolescence can be for girls.

Two Nerds decided to watch 28 Days Later again, partially because I wanted to see how closely it mapped to John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids -- from which writer Alex Garland avowedly lifted the opening -- and partially because I have a thing about child zombies. (You can read my round-up here.) We talk a lot about child zombies and how they tend to be used very specifically and pointedly in narrative, and I manage to get up on my hobby horse about Hershel from The Walking Dead.

Two Nerds recorded a whole ass podcat about the movie Nope, then my damn phone ate it. So to console ourselves, we went ahead and watched all the Mummy movies -- The Mummy (1999), The Mummy Returns, The Scorpion King, The Mummy (2017), and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. This may seem like a non sequitur, but there's a connection between Nope and The Scorpion King: The family in Nope are horse trainers, and worked on The Scorpion King before the director decided to go with camels. Then one of the main characters, O. J., wears a The Scorpion King hoodie all through the third act. I'm still not sure why this detail in Nope, but it was fun to do a deep dive into grave robbers getting themselves cursed.

It's been a hot minute since Two Nerds saw the movie Moonfall and recorded a podcat about it. I went back to finish my degree, and then there was a bunch of other life stuff that sucked up our emotional energy. But now, degree in hand, we're back! Just to help you follow along at home: though I eventually remember his name, the person I'm called Not!GeorgeClooney is Patrick Wilson. At the end of the podcat, Richard notes he'll watch this movie again when he forgets he's seen it. Turns out, about four months is how long it took him to forget Moonfall was a movie that exists, let alone that we'd both watched it.

Beginning a year ago, Two Nerds went on journey to watch all the movies in the Halloween franchise. It's been quite a ride, finally terminating in Halloween Ends, which wraps up the most recent trilogy begun with 2018's Halloween. The original Final Girl gets her final showdown with Michael Myers.

Two Nerds didn't go into Tales of the Walking Dead, the anthology series set in The Walking Dead universe, expecting much. Whoo boy, did the the series exceed expectations, and then some. The unique stories in Tales of the Walking Dead have a lot of fun in what has been an often joyless landscape, twisting in genres and shifting through time.

I'm not saying that Two Nerds are always entirely sober, but certainly for this, our discussion of the film Morbius, we were half in the bag. Bit it was ok ok because it was Morbin time.

Slogging on through the Halloween movies, Two Nerds watched the most recent Halloween (which brings the count up to three whole ass movies titled Halloween), and its sequel, Halloween Kills. These two movies dispense with every single Halloween sequel so far, and are instead direct sequels to John Carpenter's original Halloween. Most importantly, these films jettison any familial connection between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, which was introduced in Halloween II, and was most decidedly not part of Halloween itself. Not including the Rob Zombie Halloween, these are probably the most competent Halloween movies to date, which -- and I know this is a bitchy thing to say -- isn't that high of a bar to clear.

Two Nerds got a request we watch Automata, a steampunky short about a human private detective, his robot partner, and a murder mystery. This made us consider what robots do, as a trope, and what questions narratives with robots tend to pose. Mostly, we came back to the concepts of sentience, autotomy, and humanity, and how the robot shows those concepts in tension with one another. We speak at length about the middle section of a film called Doomsday Book, which concerns an enlightened robot, Blade Runner, the novel Autonomous by Annalee Newitz, the various androids in the Alien franchise, and droids in the Star Wars universe.

As this is the final season of The Walking Dead -- a series which has taken myriad twists and turns over the years -- Two Nerds decided to go back and watch the first season of Walking Dead again. It was a rewarding exercise because it turns out that season really holds up, but then also because of how much has changed, and we didn't quite notice while it was changing. The biggest difference was the zombies themselves: first season walkers are tool-users the way they are in OG Night of the Living Dead (which is the first modern zombie film) but really aren't in any other season. Zombie stories often comment on the construction of society, and to that end, domesticity, and it was very edifying to go back to origins and see where that series began, and where its ending.

In which Two Nerds discuss the fourth of the Scream franchise, which was made a decade after the other 3, and evinces a slightly different sensibility than the rollicking meta-irony of the first three.

Two Nerds decided to do a deep dive into the Scream movies, as the fifth installment was just released, 25 years after the first. The first three Scream movies, all directed by Wes Craven, constitute a trilogy, while the fourth was made after a significant hiatus. In this podcat we discuss the first three only. The Scream movies had come up while we were talking about the new Matrix movies and the Halloween franchise: Like The Matrix, they're absolutely made out of the 90s. As such, they introduce a level of irony not in evidence in the Halloween movies.

Two Nerds was contacted by a friend of ours recently who put in some requests for podcat subjects. On the list were some titles we'd already tackled, like Another Earth and Shane Carruth's Primer, and some we hadn't yet, like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. This got us thinking about movies which are mindbenders: often high concept, maybe a little arthouse, and definitely out to blow your mind. Science fiction can be especially fruitful for mindbending, as it allows the artist latitude to mess with reality itself, to present extreme circumstances and and mine them for their philosophical possibilities. Rather than retread old ground, we took as our subject two mindbenders we hadn't discussed yet: 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Shane Carruth's second film, Upstream Color. (We also watched 2010, but I wouldn't call that one a mindbender.) We definitely make mention of Aronofsky's The Fountain a bunch, as that's a mindbender both of us keep coming back to (even though objectively it's a pretty infuriating movie?) Either way, prepare to have your mind blown.

As Gen Xers, Two Nerds have some pretty Strong Feelings about the Matrix movies, so it was with some trepidation we watched The Matrix Resurrections. A late-period fourth movie appended to a long-completed trilogy almost never goes well (e.g. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). Also ominous: only Lana Wachowski returned to helm the film. Though their careers have been diverging a little in the past decade, the Wachowskis are a filmmaking pair like the Coen Brothers or Merchant-Ivory: it's hard to imagine them apart. We were very pleasantly surprised, which seems a funny thing to say about such a furious film. Lana Wachowski is pissed as hell, and she very clearly shows you why and with whom.

Completing the B-movie "trilogy" Two Nerds began when we watched Cosmic Sin and Breach, we sat down and watched Apex, a movie in which a group of rich jackholes hunt a strangely blasé Bruce Willis. Apex ended up being one of a long line of adaptions of the 1924 short story, "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell. Examples include the 80s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, The Running Man; Surviving the Game with Rutger Hauer and Ice-T; even an episode of OG Star Trek. (You can catch our discussion of Cosmic Sin and Breach here.) Things got a little more bonkers when we screened The Hunt, another recent adaption of "The Most Dangerous Game", in which rich woke liberals hunt "deplorables". This premise made The Hunt a target for the right wing outrage machine before anyone had actually seen the movie, which ended up delaying the release by half a year and sending it straight to streaming. This is actually hilarious, because The Hunt's satirical subjects are more left than right; it's never the hunters in these sorts of movies who are the good guys, it's always the hunted. But it's an outrage machine, not a carefully considered comment machine, so.

Continuing with our deep dive into the Halloween movies, Two Nerds discuss Halloween H20 and its sequel, Halloween: Resurrection -- in which Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode -- and Rob Zombie's reboot of the Halloween franchise. The series reaches a nadir with Halloween: Resurrection, but Zombie absolutely breathes new life into the material

This Halloween, Two Nerds foolishly decided to watch all the Halloween movies. This installment covers Halloweens one through six, which exist on the same timeline, more or less. These movies cover roughly two decades of horror filmmaking, and it's interesting to watch the changes, if nothing else. Also, a whole mess of actors who will go on to more notable careers get their starts in movies where they die horribly before the opening credits.

Part the second of our discussion of Denis Villeneuve's take on Frank Herbert's Dune. We discuss the film after the Atreides land in Arakeen: how terrifying lasguns are, what a badass Duncan is, how funny coffee services are, and one spicy hot take about Game of Thrones. Enjoy!

Two Nerds crawled out of their mouse hole to go to the actual movie theater to see Denis Villeneuve's new Dune adaption, which is the the first time we'd been to the theater since the pandemic started. This was definitely the movie to break the seal for: a landscape picture on a galactic scale. We fairly loved Villeneuve's take on Herbert's classic, even if there were some things we wish had made it from the page to the screen.

In which we discuss the SyFy channel's miniseries which encapsulates the second two of the Dune trilogy by Frank Herbert: Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. Though the production was written, produced, and largely acted by the same people, the clunkily titled Frank Herbert's Children of Dune was significantly better than it's predecessor, Frank Herbert's Dune. Though I think the miniseries isn't essential viewing for anyone other than Dune stans, it does feature a tiny baby James McAvoy in his first major role, and largely shirtless to boot.

Continuing in our exploration of all things Dune, Two Nerds discuss David Lynch's 1984 film adaption of Dune, which was famously troubled production, critical failure, and pretty bonkers. It was also hugely formative for me. There are at least several cuts of the film out there, and we watched two of them: the 2 hour theatrical version, and the 3 hour version which was cut for television, disowned by Lunch, and has the director credited as Alan Smithee. (The Alan Smithee version also credits the writer as Judas Booth, as Lynch felt he'd been both betrayed and assassinated by the producers, lol.)

In which we discuss the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, which details Alejandro Jodorowsky's efforts to make a movie version of Dune in the 70s. Some of the stories told by Jodorowsky are so bonkers as to strain credulity, but he's an incredibly entertaining raconteur. Jodorowsky's concept was way too out there for the money people in Hollywood at the time, so the film was never produced. However, Jodorowsky and his producers gave all the major studios a Tolstoyesque book with extensive concept art which storyboarded the entire film. The documentary argues this chapbook ended up influencing a huge number of science fiction films in the late 70s and 1980s, and it's not hard to see echoes in film even now. One quick correction: I refer to Jodorowsky as Mexican, which is partially true. He was born in Chile, but has spent most of his adult life dividing time between France and Mexico.

In the second installment in our series on all things Dune, Two Nerds discuss the 2000 SciFi (before it became SyFy) channel's miniseries entitled Frank Herbert's Dune. It's ... not great: seriously mis-cast, with weird pretentions of theatricality, but a totally gonzo lighting designer. The late 90's stylings of the production design were pretty fun, even if mostly this series misses the mark.

With the premiere of the Villeneuve Dune just around the corner, Two Nerds have decided to revisit all things Frank Herbert. This first outing is a discussion of the book Dune and Frank Herbert's work more generally. We touch on the Dune series, God Emperor more specifically, and The Dosadi Experiment. We also discuss Herbert's complicated legacy: One of the reasons we both love Dune is because of Herbert's takes on religion, ecology, and politics, while acknowledging his works may not resonate because of misogyny, fat-phobia, and homophobia.

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.

We went into the movie Bliss pretty cold. The really quite terrible blurb said something about how maybe reality is a computer simulation, and that sounded close enough to our theme of alternate realities that we gave it a go. Like Colossal, its TV Guide entry poorly describes what is actually going on in the movie. The movie features cameos by Bill Nye the Science Guy and continental philosopher Slavoj Žižek, whose name I mangle several times. Yet again, we mention The City & The City, China Miéville's novel about two cities which are superimposed over one another, but are barred from interacting physically with one another.

Back in the day, you could tell if a Bruce Willis movie was going to be any good depending on whether he had hair or not. Given the movies Cosmic Sin and Breach, that rule of thumb no longer applies. Both movies involve space zombies of varying origins.

The subject of this episode is the ways faith and/or religious doctrine is used differently in explicitly Christian films like The Remaining or Left Behind, and films that use religious lore more like mythology. In this instance our example is a movie called The Possession, but movies like The Exorcist or The Prophesy would fall into this category as well.

Two Nerds discuss two movies that deal with parallel universes: the not very impressive Alpha Gateway, and the absolutely delightful Coherence. We also talk a bit about Counterpart, a previous podcast subject, and China Miéville's The City & The City. While it seems like time travel narratives, especially those that go back in time, focus on regret, parallel universe stories focus more on the question of the essential self.

Two Nerds watched both the 1995 and 2021 Mortal Kombat movies back to back, then sat down for a little chat. The 1995 Mortal Kombat was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who also wrote all and directed most of the Resident Evil movies to date. (Apparently there's a prequel coming out this year called Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which he isn't involved in.) The 2021 Mortal Kombat is much less goofy than the first iteration --  it's definitely going for a more naturalistic tone -- but that's not always successful. Partially because there's only so much realism you can wring out of a movie based on a video game about an interdimensional kick-punching contest, and partially because why would you want to? 

As part of our exploration of parallel worlds, Two Nerds discuss the spy thriller series Counterpart. J.K. Simmons plays a double role as Howard Silk, each of whom are members of a shadowy U.N. agency in two different versions of reality. One is a stupendous badass, and the other a colorless drone. The two versions of reality are in something of a cold war with one another, and the two U.N. agencies -- and the two Howard Silks -- are on a slow-moving collision course. It's such a good series.

Two Nerds sat down with our Gen-Z consultant (aka oldest son, Leo) to watch Monster Hunter, a Paul W.S. Anderson movie based on the eponymous video game series. We'd never played any of the games, so Leo was on hand to nitpick inconsistences. I think the resident Nerds were more inclined to be forgiving of Monster Hunter's failings, because we're old in not invested in the source material, but Leo made a very compelling case that a lot of the potential was squandered.

Two Nerds watch the first episode of HBO's The Nevers, a steampunk Buffy the Vampire Slayer slash X-Men hybrid. The Nevers was created by Joss Whedon, who then apparently "stepped away" some time after all the allegations about his behavior on the set of Justice League. Whatever his involvement, the series is undoubtedly Whedonesque, with familiar character types and relationship dynamics. As a steampunk series, there are also easy comparisons to Carnival Row, which was incredibly beautiful and hopelessly boring; His Dark Materials, which is a great book series, disastrous movie, and uneven HBO series; and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which has great art direction but still bugs me. Salman Rushdie's Booker prize winning novel Midnight's Children gets discussed in the same breath as X-Men, which made me have an attack of the giggles. We're on the hook for episode two, but The Nevers wasn't amazing or anything.

Two Nerds have spent the last few episodes discussing time travel, repeating day, or otherwise timey-wimey narratives. Adjacent to that (and often overlapping) are stories that explore parallel worlds. In this outing, we discuss the movies Sliding Doors and Another Earth, and touch on a series called Counterpart. Sliding Doors is a rom-com from 1999, and Another Earth a melancholy indie movie from 2005. Counterpart is something like a spy thriller, with two alternate Earths in a cold war of sorts.

Two Nerds were lovingly trolled by our listener, and ended up watching Knowing, a predestination wig-out starring Nicolas Cage, which was described by Richard as "Kirk Cameron's screenplay and directorial adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard writing Childhood's End." It made us have some Serious Feelings. This one's for you, Ian.

In a very special episode, Two Nerds discuss the most recent (and possibly the last) MonsterVerse movie: Godzilla vs Kong. We decided to make a theme of it, so we also watched a movie called Colossal, which is about a giant monster who appears randomly in Seoul, Korea, and whose motions are tied to a young woman in the States. Colossal ended up being considerably more intense than we expected. We also mention the other MonsterVerse movies -- Godzilla, Godzilla: King of Monsters, and Kong: Skull Island -- and the Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie. CW: domestic violence, alcoholism