Category: YGHI

#57: Close-Up/Austin Powers

We’re back for the first time in a long time, with a discussion of Abbas Kiarostami’s seminal quasi-documentary Close-Up and Mike Myer’s era-defining comedy Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Also, Rob is pretty sure he mixed up Steven Wright and Steven Weber, but he is too lazy to go back and check. Only one of them was in So I Married an Axe Murderer, and it is not the one who was in that one episode of Party Down.

#56: Tetsuo/Hard Boiled

We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus as we’ve been pursuing our post-grad degrees (Rob to help the nation’s youth, Matt to imprison them) but Rob forgot he had this one sitting on his hard drive for, like, several months. He doesn’t remember if he edited it, but he does remember he did an impression of Matt for WAY too long, but he promises he does eventually drop it. Anyway, it was topsy-turvy month, so the films on the docket are Shinya Tsukamoto’s body-horror cult classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man and John Woo’s operatic action classic Hard Boiled.

#53: The Third Man/Cobra

This month’s picks present two, uh, dissimilar responses to evil in the world. In the first, Carol Reed’s classic postwar noir The Third Man, Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles reunite a decade after Citizen Kane to wade into a morass of moral ambiguity from which no one emerges clean. In Sylvester Stallone’s Cannon Films copaganda flick Cobra, all the problems in the world can be solved by a bullet. Also: we debate whether or not Jake Gyllenhaal looks weird.

#52: The Man Who Would Be King/MacGruber

Join us for our April discussion of The Man Who Would Be King, John Huston’s Connery/Caine joint that’s simultaneously a pretty great movie about racism and also pretty racist. We also take a look at the film that killed the SNL movie, MacGruber – Rob’s favorite movie about Will Forte dancing around with a piece of celery in his ass, and Matt’s favorite movie period. (Also, director Jorma Taccone was 33 when he made the movie, not 23, which is significantly less special. Please draw no assumptions about Rob’s ability to do basic math from this.)

#50: Wake in Fright/Juwanna Mann

Our friend Jared joins us as a guest, because he’s who we could get, as we descend into madness twice over, with the seminal Australian New Wave freakout Wake in Fright and the forgotten NBA cross-dressing comedy Juwanna Mann. We also forget Ben Affleck played Batman, which probably says something about what we thought of his performance. Finally, and it’s weird to have to note this but here we are, this was recorded before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Matt does a little Slavic race science that probably never would’ve played all that well and certainly doesn’t amid a shooting war, but I forgot what the timestamp on it was so I didn’t edit it out. That’s the level of dedication and hard work we strive to bring to you, folks.

#42: Midnight Run/The Avengers (1998)

We begin a month of nice, easy, comfortable movies with the buddy road movie Midnight Run, starring Robert de Niro and the late, great Charles Grodin (recorded before his passing). Then Matt proves he didn’t understand the assignment with the Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman spy-show adaptation The Avengers, a film that proves its legacy as “no, the other one” is well-earned.