Station Eleven

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.