Movies
- Praised for its social commentary on capitalism, consumerism, and propaganda
- Enjoyed the action scenes, particularly the extended fight scene
- Appreciated the movie’s rewatchability and cult classic status
- Discussed the open-ended nature of the film’s conclusion
- Noted connections to modern issues like wealth inequality and climate change
- John: 85/100
- Sean: 83/100
- Sam: 88/100
- Watch “Bound” (1996) for the next movie discussion
Watched: The Odyssey 🍿
Yea, this movie ruled. But I also got the chance to see it in all its glory, on a 70mm IMAX screen. Was not a local screening, took 90 minutes there and back to see it in the best format, which is as long as the movie itself. It was still worth it, even with a fire alarm interruption halfway into the movie. If you have a chance to see this movie and its Greek myth epic at scale, it’s worth it. Too bad there are only like 40 (if even?) theaters to see it the way Nolan intended. But there’s plenty of that commentary to be found. Still, worth seeing in a movie theater where the story and scale keep you glued and in motion.
Picked by: John Why: Found it on Instagram reels — a quick montage of films, high ratings, Korean, went in completely blind. That combination has worked for John before. It worked again.
The Conversation
John went first and was already sold before the conversation started. Two hours twenty minutes, didn’t check his phone once. He called it “brutally beautiful” — a phrase he attributed to a reviewer and immediately adopted. His shorthand for the film was Korean John Wick, or “June Wick” as he put it, which he was proud of. A special agent’s fiancée is murdered by a serial killer in the opening minutes; he dedicates himself to hunting the killer down, letting him go, hunting him again, letting him go, and repeating — the GPS tracking device he forces the killer to swallow being the operational spine of the whole film. John loved the catch-and-release structure, loved the moment the killer ends up in a taxi driven by two cannibals who use the exact same lines on him that he uses on his victims, and loved the ending, which he had been mentally wagering on the whole way through. He gave it a 90, tying Dead Ringers for the highest score he’s ever given.
Sam was more measured. He’d seen enough revenge films that the premise didn’t feel fresh, and Katie tapped out partway through, which meant he finished the last 25 minutes separately. But he stayed engaged throughout because the killer was genuinely believable — he put him in the Javier Bardem/Anton Chigurh category of pure-evil characters who don’t operate by any rules you can reason with. His read of the film’s thesis: you think you can beat someone like this, but you’ve already lost the moment you engage on their terms. The protagonist gets more people hurt, allows the killer to assault more victims, and ends the film as something closer to a monster than a hero. He connected it to No Country for Old Men — not because the films are alike exactly, but because both center on the same idea that unadulterated evil doesn’t play fair and can’t be contained by a revenge narrative. Sam gave it a 75.
Sean landed at 72, appreciating more than he was fully won over. He thought the violence had genuine weight early on — the Achilles scene made everyone flinch, the laxative scene was the most disgusting thing in the movie by his estimation — but that the film kept adding genres (thriller, martial arts, horror, revenge procedural, Saw-style cat-and-mouse) until the tension got diluted. He compared it to Saw directly, which he meant as a compliment on the “want to play a game” structure, but noted the tone shifts made it hard to know when to be afraid versus when to just enjoy the action. Still a fun watch, especially arriving immediately after Toys, which he acknowledged may have inflated everyone’s baseline.
A few specific moments: the cannibal sequence, which John compared to a Red Dead Redemption side mission, got singled out as the point where the film escalated into something stranger and more memorable than a standard revenge thriller. The reveal mid-film that the fiancée was pregnant — which the protagonist didn’t know — restarted everyone’s emotional investment right when it was starting to flag. The final guillotine trap, the killer’s family arriving, and the ending’s ambiguity — grief finally breaking through versus Joker-coded laugh-cry of a man who became what he hunted — got the most discussion. John and Sam landed on opposite interpretations and both were defensible.
The female characters got acknowledged as basically set dressing, which the group noted and moved past. The direction and cinematography got genuine praise — close-ups that worked, gore that felt purposeful rather than gratuitous, and a sense of formal control that kept the brutality from feeling cheap. No capital punishment in South Korea since 1997 came up as relevant context; the killer knows he’ll live, which is part of why the protagonist’s revenge logic breaks down.
Toys (1992)
Picked by: Sam Why: A clip about modern drone warfare kept resurfacing online, and the source kept turning out to be this 1992 Robin Williams movie. Sam looked it up, saw it was Robin Williams' personal passion project — his would-be Willy Wonka anti-war comedy — and figured it was worth the watch. It was not.
The Conversation
Sam came in with the most generous read of the three, which at a 65 is still not saying much. His hook was the drone warfare prescience — children in a room playing video games to remotely destroy things, the general pitching cheap unmanned weapons to the US military, a throwaway line about the Israelis being very interested in the technology. In 1992. Sam noted that Ender’s Game was published in 1985, so Toys got there first even on the page. He also genuinely liked the sets — René Magritte by way of Windows XP, big open fields and Technicolor whimsy — and had enough affection for the premise to finish the movie. His verdict was that a really good anti-war comedy was buried somewhere in here and never got out. He gave it above Angel’s Egg and felt a little sheepish about it.
Sean was less charitable. He liked Michael Gambon as the villain General Zevo — expressive eyes, genuine menace — and appreciated the military commentary every time it surfaced, which wasn’t often enough. Everything around it was nails on a chalkboard: the repetitive music, the incoherent world-building, the toy factory that seemed to exist in a void with no customers and no stakes. His research turned up that the production had such a hard time marketing the film that they just put Robin Williams in a field in costume and told him to ad-lib for commercials. Those commercials, Sean reported, were significantly more entertaining than the movie. He called it “creatively ugly” and “a curious misfire” and gave it a 44. He also gave Robin Wright one point just for looking good in the silly costumes throughout.
John was most methodical. He went in with a scoring rubric: five points per genuine laugh. He counted eight funny moments — the bumper cars at the funeral, the three-and-four-star general bit, LL Cool J sprinting through a field mid-prayer, the fake vomit practical effect (“we’re under attack by crossword puzzles”), the collapsing room, Robin Williams deflecting the bathtub confession, the robot sister reveal played completely straight, and the very last line which hit him so hard after two hours of exhaustion that he may have cried a little. Eight moments × five points = 40. Everything in between was him hitting the arrow key on his keyboard to see how much was left.
The final toy battle drew particular fire from all three. The military drones have ballistic missiles and excellent treading. The opposition is rubber ducks and wind-up animals. “Sheep to the slaughter” was the phrase used. The fact that the good toys somehow win this engagement was treated as an insult to everyone’s intelligence.
Roger Ebert called it “all dressed up with nowhere to go” and gave it two and a half stars out of four. The group thought that was generous. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 20%. Sam noted this was still better than it deserved. John noted that Redditors online inexplicably love it, and then let that information sit there.
The core problem, everyone agreed, was that no one said no to Barry Levinson or Robin Williams at any point in production. Levinson spent years getting this movie made. At some point during those years, a redraft might have helped. The script never figured out whether this was a kids' movie, a dark satire, or a surrealist art film, and so it lurched between all three without committing to any of them.
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.
Catching up on old movies reviewed. Here is Zulu
Picked by: John Why: Looking up actors he liked in modern films and tracing them back — Michael Caine came up, and outside of Batman the top of his filmography was Zulu. Good ratings, historically relevant, and a genre the club hadn’t touched yet: British military cinema.
The Conversation
John came in genuinely torn. He respected everything about it — the acting, the cinematography, the Technicolor, the score — but felt the runtime in a way he hadn’t with Dead Ringers. “I felt the length” was how he put it. Two hours eighteen minutes, one location, and a battle that comes in waves. He found the repetition of it — here they come, boom boom boom, there they go, repeat — more exhausting than tense by the end. His honest summary: good, not great. Nothing bad to say, nothing that made him love it.
Sam had a different read. He’d actually seen pieces of it on cable as a teenager — remembered Michael Caine (without knowing it was Michael Caine) barking volley commands — and found the wave structure psychologically effective rather than tedious. It put him in the headspace of the soldiers: the Zulus aren’t trying to win each charge, they’re wearing you down. He compared it to Saving Private Ryan in structure — severely outnumbered protagonists with nowhere to go — and appreciated that the film was more interested in military strategy than chaos. He also called out the theatrical quality of the deaths, every kill a clean stage-fall with no blood, and filed it under the movie’s era rather than a flaw.
Sean was the most enthusiastic of the three. He went in expecting to be bored and was hooked almost immediately, even through the long opening wedding scene. He praised the cinematography repeatedly — “so many shots you could just distill and have work as a good photograph” — and gave credit to how clearly the film lays out both sides' strategy without editorializing. The ending landed for him too: the Zulus salute the survivors and walk away, no triumphant score, no flag-waving. For a 1960s movie to hit that note, he said, was impressive. His second film in the 90s club, at 92.
A few threads worth pulling out: John noted that the Zulus were given surprisingly respectful treatment for a film of its era — the opening 20 minutes is their wedding ceremony, the film never calls them savages, and the actual descendant of one of the battle’s chieftains appears in the cast. The Boers who show up, abandon the post, and ride off immediately got the opposite treatment. Sam connected that to the real South African history — the blood feud between Afrikaner settlers and the Zulu that predated and outlasted the British entirely.
Sean made the Helm’s Deep connection — Peter Jackson allegedly drew directly from this film when staging the siege at Hornburg — and John confirmed he’d read the same thing. It tracks: the cresting-over-the-hill shot, the torchlight, the waves of attackers from a single direction. Sam called out that Zulu was probably the original of a type that’s been cheaply copied many times since, including a Middle East version he half-remembered from Amazon that ended with everyone dead.
The color sergeant with the giant mutton chops got a shoutout. So did Hook, the thieving hospital orderly who ends up carving his name in the wood at the end. Sam kept thinking he was someone from Jumanji. He was not.
Michael Caine, for his part, wore eyeliner. Sam confirmed bronzer was also probable. Sean observed that the Technicolor was really popping. John agreed, then spent the last ten minutes of the call trying to find the single frame where a Zulu extra looks directly into the camera. He never found it.
Tough Flicks: Dead Ringers
Picked by: Sam
Why: The last of Sam’s backlog of prestige arthouse picks — Cronenberg’s most acclaimed film, a critical darling that barely made back its budget and somehow became a horror landmark anyway.
The Conversation
Sam came in a little lost — soft dialogue, no subtitles, and two Jeremy Irons performances that start out deliberately indistinguishable. He rewatched the first thirty minutes before the call just to get his bearings. “I was confused and I just started enjoying it anyway,” which is honestly a pretty good endorsement for any movie.
John, on the other hand, watched it on his big fancy Audio-Technica headphones in one unbroken sitting and came in hot. “I fucking love this movie. Phenomenal fucking movie.” He never once felt the two-hour runtime. He was also the one to connect the dots for Sam on the drug arc — how Claire’s departure triggered Beverly’s spiral, which pulled Elliot down after him. “One woman destroyed their brotherly relationship,” he said, “and she was the three uteri.”
Sean watched it in thirty-minute chunks over a few nights on the Roku, which somehow still left him gripped enough to look up the Howard Shore score on YouTube afterwards. He didn’t know Shore did Lord of the Rings until that moment, which felt like a genuine revelation. He also noted that Jeremy Irons deserves serious credit for how clearly distinct the two brothers become by the film’s second half — you start out confused, and then suddenly you just know who’s who without thinking about it.
The consensus standout: Jeremy Irons acting against himself. John put it plainly — he was essentially the only actor in two-thirds of the film, doing the straight man, the drug addict, and both at once. He got scooped out of an Oscar for this (too weird, too uncommercial), then won Best Actor the following year and thanked Cronenberg in his speech. The Chicago Film Critics gave it to him in real time, even if Roger Ebert only gave the movie two and a half stars — “a collaboration between med school and a supermarket tabloid,” which Sean argued was kind of the point.
A few highlights from the conversation worth noting: Sam floated a Cronenberg Easter egg theory — Beverly eating something oddly shaped early in the film, and whether it matched the fleshy connective tissue Claire bites in the nightmare sequence. “Is David up to some tricks here?” John went looking for the timestamp. Sean had noticed the pizza too. Nobody could confirm it, but nobody could rule it out either.
John also admitted that mid-film he briefly wondered if the twins were the same person — a Patrick Bateman-style break, one man’s full schizophrenic episode. They’re not. But the fact that the movie earns that question without ever confirming it is part of what makes it work. Sam compared their bond to Where the Red Fern Grows — one goes, the other can’t survive it. John thought that was interesting. He was right.
Sean brought up the production angle: getting Jeremy Irons in the same frame as himself was apparently groundbreaking for 1988 technology, and it holds up. The seam only shows in the first few minutes, and then your brain just accepts it. The apartment design got a mention too — sterile, muted, brutalist 80s Toronto. Sam noted that Cronenberg strips the frame of everything except Jeremy Irons, which forces you to just watch him. The only real color in the film is red, which shows up exactly when it needs to.
The Verdict
John called it his best score yet — a 90, ahead of It Happened One Night, the first film in the series to crack that threshold. Sean came in at 88. Sam gave it a 78, still processing, possibly revisiting. He was lost for a good stretch of it and is honest about that. The average lands at 85, tying They Live and Cure at the top of the Tough Flicks all-time list.
Roger Ebert gave it two and a half stars. The Chicago Film Critics gave Jeremy Irons Best Actor. The movie is in every serious top-100 horror list.
Sam put it best: “I’m glad I watched it.”
Tough Flicks #11 — Touch of Evil (1958)
Picked by: John Why: He’s been digging into older critically acclaimed films — after Chinatown, this one surfaced as another noir set along the Mexican border. His first Orson Welles movie.
The Conversation
The group was unanimous on one thing: Orson Welles absolutely stole this movie. Playing the corrupt, grotesque Captain Hank Quinlan, he was so repulsive and so magnetic that everyone agreed he was the best part of the film. John couldn’t believe how good Welles was as an actor — “I hated that motherfucker” being the highest compliment he could give. Sean pointed out how Welles dominated every scene he was in, with the constant crosstalk and background noise making it all feel alive.
The iconic opening tracking shot got everyone hyped. Sean recognized it immediately as one of those “Best Shots in Cinema History” compilation staples — the camera following a car with a bomb through the busy border town in one long, unbroken take. The group agreed the direction was masterful: every shot had a purpose, reflections in windows, characters lurking in the background, no wasted frames.
The big revelation came from Sam, who floated a theory that blew John’s mind: did Hank Quinlan strangle his own wife? The movie drops hints — Quinlan is oddly knowledgeable about strangulation as a murder method, his partner reacts with shock after the killing of Uncle Joe, and the fortune teller subplot suggests a complicated grief. Sam argued the film was “saying it without saying it,” and the group loved that kind of subtle storytelling compared to modern films that spell everything out.
Speaking of Uncle Joe — John was a big fan. Charming, funny, bent the rules but didn’t seem like a true villain. At least until things went south. The drinking scene also stood out: after the movie establishes that Quinlan has been sober and living on candy bars, he quietly orders a double bourbon, the music stops, and his whole demeanor shifts. John rewound that scene.
Where it lost points: everyone agreed the Susan subplot dragged the movie down. Janet Leigh’s character had almost nothing to do with the main plot — half her scenes were about being tired and trying to go to bed. The motel sequences split the room: Sean found the Night Manager grating, while Sam thought he was basically Buster Bluth from Arrested Development and loved him for it. John admitted to pulling out his phone during the hotel scenes.
The Charlton Heston casting got a laugh — a white guy playing a Mexican detective with a dyed mustache and the occasional Spanish sentence thrown in. The group acknowledged it was brownface by today’s standards, but noted his performance was solid regardless.
Sean closed the night with a fun trivia drop: Janet Leigh is Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother. The room was appropriately stunned.
The Verdict
A rock-solid noir elevated by one of the all-time great villain performances from Orson Welles. The direction and cinematography are film-school caliber, and the core mystery works well. It just gets weighed down by a meandering subplot that the whole group wished had been trimmed. Strong 79 — not quite at the level of They Live or Cure, but a worthy addition to the Tough Flicks canon.
John came in at 85 and got talked down to 80 by his own crew. That might be a first.
Tough Flicks: They Live (1988)
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