Double Feature — Thief (1981) & Angel’s Egg (1985) Picked by: John (Thief) · Sean (Angel’s Egg)
Thief
John picked Thief cold — Michael Mann’s debut feature, a Chicago heist film with James Caan as a professional thief trying to buy his way out of the life. John gave it a 60, noting it had the right bones but didn’t fully land for him, roughly on par with Unstoppable on his personal scale and below Excalibur. Jim Belushi appeared in a supporting role and earned the observation that he was very tan for a Chicago guy.
(Full Thief discussion scores pending — only John’s score of 60 is confirmed from this session.)
Angel’s Egg
Sean picked this one because he’d never brought an anime film to the club. It had been sitting on his backlog a while and got randomly pulled. He didn’t realize until right before the call that it was directed by Mamoru Oshii — the same director as Ghost in the Shell — and that the character design came from Yoshitaka Amano, the same artist behind Final Fantasy VI. Once he saw it, both connections were obvious.
The movie is 71 minutes of near-silent Gothic animation: a young girl wanders a dead, flooded world carrying a large egg she guards obsessively. A mysterious wanderer crosses her path, follows her, and eventually breaks it. That’s essentially the plot.
Sam watched it sober and caffeinated and came out genuinely baffled. He tried to read the symbols in real time — fish shadows as spearmen, the fossilized bird, the stone arks drifting past — and kept waiting for a payoff that didn’t arrive. His most useful read: the whole thing felt like Waiting for Godot, people creating meaning in a world that has none, with the girl’s endless water-drinking as her own Sisyphean loop. John went online for interpretations afterward and found Redditors reaching hard, then noted the director himself apparently said he doesn’t know what the movie means either — which put him in a David Lynch frame of mind.
Sean’s interpretation landed cleanest: the setting is purgatory. The girl still believes the egg means something; the wanderer is a cynical drifter who’s given up. When he breaks the egg — whether deliberately cruel or a kind of mercy — she passes on to whatever comes next. He also clocked the Berserk and Dark Souls DNA immediately, said it felt like the right thing to put on while he was already playing Dark Souls 2, and noted the final shot — a symmetrical arch rising from underwater — might be the keel of Noah’s ark viewed from below, which would make the fish shadows above the water real.
What everyone agreed on: it looked stunning, the Gothic architecture and empty city were a feast, and 71 minutes was exactly long enough. John said if it were any longer it would have been a waste of his time. Sean said they could have put more meat on the bone but liked what was there. Sam loved the Bloodborne-adjacent world design and wished someone would make a Gothic film where the world is actually alive.
The bell scene — one bell, ringing for what felt like six full minutes — got special mention. John started hitting the arrow key on his keyboard to see how long it would last.