Like Mother, Like Son, Like Movies

This is the second part of our discussion about films featured at Oscars 2022. We will first go through the rest of the films in Best Picture category and then talk about some of the few other ones worth mentioning. At the very end we reveal our favourite film from the awards ceremony.

In this episode we are going to talk about the films that were featured in the Best Picture category of Oscars 2022. We will go through them one by one and give our thoughts. Getting through all of them is way too big discussion for one episode, so this is just the first part.

I had never had that much interest in the Bourne movies, so when I got inspiration to check out some movie franchises I was positively surprised and felt stupid to have never seen them before. My mother has enjoyed them already before so this gave us a chance to talk about them. So we will go through every Bourne movie starting with The Bourne Identity (2002) and ending with Jason Bourne (2016).

We open up our episode with deeper discussion of Thomas Vinteberg's Another Round (2020). After this we indulge ourselves with several topics, including the interesting production behind the series In Treatment, my mother's experience with the first Star Wars (1977), my own experience with Sodebergh's Ocean's movies. At the end my mother gives a comment on Paolo Sorrentino's The Hand of God (2021) and her struggle with currently ongoing tv shows.

In this casual discussion we are going to go over several topics from our recent viewings. We start off with Emerald Fennell's award winning comedy thriller Promising Young Woman (2020). After that my mother gives her review of the "Soprano story" The Many Saints of Newark (2021) and I mention something about Netflix's hit series Squid Game that I have not seen much talked about. We close things off by talking about Gaspar Noé and share our thoughts on two of his recent movies: Lux Æterna...

On our second part exploring our favourite movies of 2020 we concentrate on my mothers list. There are some natural overlap with my list, but I'm definite that she will surprise you with some of the titles she mentions. And if you stick at the very end she will reveal which movie became her new favourite movie of all time.

This is the first part in our list exploring personal favourites of 2020. We both had a handful of recommendations which we also wanted to comment on, so instead of one big episode we decided to release them as two part episodes. I was able to see 76 movies and these are 11 that made my very top of the list. Unfortunately because of the time limit, I couldn't mention all the recommendations. So if you are interested and looking for good movies, check out my Letterboxd list.

Denis Villeneuve's cinematic adaptation of Dune has been winning over critics as well as the box office. Considering the troubled history of adapting the book, releasing a satisfying singular vision is an achievement by itself. Next to this monumental release, the opinions of some son and mother can't help to feel little bit insignificant. All we can really do in the end is talk about our experience that - like my mother points out - has been years in the making. In the discussion we explore...

With Small Axe (2020) British filmmaker Steve McQueen contributes to the ongoing evolution of merging the line between cinema and television even more. The series of films (presented as a mini-series) tell five distinct stories set in West Indian community in London from 1969 to 1982. We explore our experiences watching them in a discussion that gets also little bit emotional.

This time instead of talking about a specific movie, we are going to talk about watching movies during the quarantine in 2020. Liisa describes her troubles with the library and how certain series helped her survive. Aharon shares his evolution towards streaming services and how big changes in his life pushed him to become more open about how we watch movies.

During most of 2020 we took a quiet break from podcasting. When we finally felt like recording again it was difficult to get back on it. But thankfully we have the annual Academy Awards to cheer everybody up and get the discussions flowing. We do our traditional predictions and reactions while giving bits of opinions on the topics at hand.

Despite of its interesting premise, Alexander Payne's 2017 sci-fi satire Downsizing failed to impress both critics and the audience. It was criticized for it's poor plot, uninteresting use of the genre, dull protagonist and the portrayal of an Vietnamese refugee character. For us the level of hatred this film got was baffling, to say the least. My mother, for example, honored it as one of the best movies of the year. So we are definitely seeing something different than everyone else...

Terry Gilliam's 1995 time travel epic 12 Monkeys is in many ways very relevant topic to discuss these days. While being simply an awesome movie and must see, we concentrate in our talk mainly on the philosophical aspects of the story and how it compares to other movies as Mad Max, Vertigo and of course Chris Marker's original La Jetée (1962).

We go through our favourite movies of 2019 with some honorary mentions and other memorable experiences.

Last time the Oscars gave us such a depressing event that we almost didn’t want to do our annual reaction episode this year. Somehow we found the energy and settled for the most thrilling awards ceremony since Moonlight (2016) winning best picture.

Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci star in Martin Scorsese’s Netflix release The Irishman (2019) which was a very long crime drama movie. We start the episode with a story of how hard it was for Aharon to find a moment to watch this movie. We continue with a discussion on the length and editing. Then we move on to the de-aging technology. And finally with some nice closing thoughts on the magic of cinema.

In which we are having more relaxed time and discuss first hand thoughts about movies we saw recently. Aharon tells a story about how several movies he saw tied together and Liisa is dying to get into Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019).

In this epic episode we discuss three adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express starring his most famous character, Hercule Poirot. We talk about our history with Agatha Christie’s stories, Belgium, how the adaptations portray Poirot and which one of them truly captures the full potential of this particular crime story. Because of Poirot’s famous country of origin, we thought a great chance to invite our friend Vincent Gebruers and give his local perspective on these...

We found ourselves this time surprisingly talking about J. A. Bayona’s 2016 dark fantasy film A Monster Calls, adapted from the novel of the same name. While I had both negative and some positive feelings about the movie my mother simply didn’t understand why we were talking about this movie. Nevertheless like usual we managed to dig ourselves deep into fairy tales and children in cinema.

So here we are again. The Academy Awards were given while we avoided the news until we sat down and hosted our own Oscar special during which we revealed the winners. This year we wanted to include into the discussion also the movies from 2018 that didn’t get any attention in the Oscars and which we would definitely recommend people to see. So this time we will first go through a handful of Oscars winners and the other half we will dedicate to our own recommendations.