More Than One Lesson

In this episode, Reed and Nathan discuss Jonathan Glazer’s surreal Under the Skin.

Releasing this week on most VOD platforms is a strong and haunting story of a woman’s struggle to maintain her agency and her sanity as she wrestles with sudden grief and the apparent threat of indefinite captivity. Kindred is the debut feature from director and co-writer Joe Marcantonio and starring Tamara Lawrence, Fiona Shaw, and Jack Lowden. It owes an immediate and apparent debt to Rosemary’s Baby, but manages to forge its own unique path with some deliberate shifts in key elements.

“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Dying – or drama – and comedy have one key thing in common. Both of them tend to work best when they are treated seriously. Even when the comedy is a very silly parody. Throughout the 1980’s, the team of David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams demonstrated how to do this right with Airplane!, the all-too-short-lived TV series Police Squad!, and that show’s much more successful spin-off film, The Naked Gun. They achieved this through brilliant writing and equally brilliant casting, emphasizing sincerity from the performances. Dramatic actors such as Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack, and Leslie Nielsen delivered utterly ridiculous dialogue with complete seriousness in Airplane!, and that very simply is why it worked. If Nielsen had said, “I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley,” pulling a goofy face, it would have killed the joke. The makers of Cup of Cheer would have done well to heed that lesson.

In this episode, Reed and Nathan discuss Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Since its release in 1978, John Carpenter’s original Halloween has been one of the best-loved and most imitated horror movies ever made. Carpenter and his producing partner, Debra Hill felt that there was nowhere to take the characters or the story beyond the first film. However, with Universal clamoring for a sequel, they reluctantly wrote the screenplay for Halloween II. Released in 1981, Carpenter- who did not direct this time around- was deeply dissatisfied with the finished product, declaring it, “an abomination and a horrible movie.” The sequel received poor reviews but performed fairly well at the box office. The film ended with Michael Myers seemingly burned to death after an explosion, as though Carpenter and Hill were telling the audience, “He’s dead now, so it’s over.” Halloween III would be a new beginning and set up a viable and very creative franchise for years to come. That was the plan anyway.

In this episode, Reed and Nathan discuss the animated classic It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Tyler and his wife Jenny have recently adopted newborn twin boys. While this is an exciting (and exhausting) time in their lives, adoption is a fairly expensive endeavor and one that we initiated before COVID shut down the economy. So they are having a fundraiser to cover some of their adoption expenses. ​ ​Please check out the link below for more of their adoption story and to see how you may be able to help.

Click Here to Help

In this episode, Tyler discusses Cyrus Nowrasteh’s Infidel and Roland Joffe’s The Mission.

Infidel, the controversial political thriller, is actor Jim Caviezel’s second team-up with director Cyrus Nowrasteh. Going into this movie, I was far from sure what to expect. On one hand, Jim Caviezel has a keen eye for quality projects and has rarely steered me wrong. On the flip side, the film is executive produced by Dinesh D’Souza, the director of such politically-charged gems as Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party and Death of a Nation: Can We Save America a Second Time? I was eagerly informed by many friends on both sides of the political aisle that this meant “bad.” So, is this another Jim Caviezel-led Christian movie to add to your Jim Caviezel Christian movie VHS collection? Or are all my friends right?! Let’s discuss. 

In this episode, Tyler discusses Thor Freudenthal’s Words on Bathroom Walls and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind.