Medium Literate

This week we’re talking about Wicker and Wildwood, two fantasy movies that start with W, take place in the woods, and otherwise have almost nothing in common! But we love a theme so it’s Cottagecore Week, baby!
We get into why Wicker worked so well as a cozy little fairy tale, why the movie is less about sex than the marketing would have you believe, Olivia Colman serving as everyone’s inspiration to make this movie, Alexander Skarsgård really reveling in messing with the weird edges of what his handsomeness does to people, and the very simple idea that maybe you should just like your spouse.
Then we move on to Wildwood, an unbelievably beautiful stop-motion movie that took 16 years to make. We talk about the level of craft, why Emily liked it more than Monika did, why this might be one of the most violent children’s movies we’ve seen in a while, and our ongoing complicated relationship with Portland, Oregon.
(Also, we recorded this on Halloween night and gradually lost our minds. This really isn’t our greatest work.)
Spoilers for Wicker and Wildwood throughout the episode!
00:00 Intro
03:12 Wicker
32:59 Wildwood

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Emily and Monika are some of the several people who saw Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun this week, and it's not a huge mystery why it didn't resonate with critics or audiences. Based on the Booker Prize-longlisted novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, this adaptation starring Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams misses the mark on what made the book so beloved. Monika read the book so she's here to lead us through a conversation on all the big differences between the book and the movie, and where it went wrong.
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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/christian-larssen/happy-street
License code: B9EXR1D9EIBQLKXT

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Emily loved Clayface. Monika did not love Clayface. But she also didn’t hate it (which is honestly much more annoying?)
This week we’re talking about DC’s extremely gooey villain origin story, a movie with a clunky script, some genuinely great body horror, and enough cool shape-shifting stuff to keep Monika from fully turning against it.
We get into why Emily apparently loves origin stories despite having no interest whatsoever in comic book movies, why the actors are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, Matt Hagen’s descent from charming movie star to sewer-dwelling pile of skin, and the important question of what technically qualifies as a jump scare.
Plus Monika gives her thoughts on Street Fighter, Emily reports on The Devils, and we disagree about the new Sense and Sensibility.
Spoilers for Clayface!

Episode chapters:
01:49 Street Fighter
11:26 The Devils
19:36 Sense and Sensibility
39:21 Origin Stories and Clayface

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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/christian-larssen/happy-street
License code: B9EXR1D9EIBQLKXT

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The biggest movie event of the year that was only announced a few weeks before its release has finally arrived. Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes documentary is as fascinating a project in execution as it is a log line, and we're very excited to talk about it this week. The movie's three hour runtime spans several years and several states as it digs into the truly strange people at its center. Emily and Monika disagree many times on what a situation really means, and that's the fun of it, because literally no one knows what's true, not even the filmmakers themselves.
***** SPOILERS FOR YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING THROUGHOUT THIS EPISODE
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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/christian-larssen/happy-street
License code: B9EXR1D9EIBQLKXT

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This week we’re talking about Whalefall, the surprisingly sincere survival drama starring Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin that takes a pretty ridiculous premise and turns it into a moving story about fathers, sons, grief and maybe most importantly: how much we should respect and fear the ocean.
We get into why the father-son story actually worked for us, Austin Abrams’ continued reign as our nation’s foremost "talking-to-himself" actor, Josh Brolin’s natural gift for playing a salty sea dog, and the strange tenderness of watching a man slowly develop an emotional connection with the whale whose stomach he is currently trapped inside.
Plus: Monika give her full 4DX report because she experienced it for the first time. What's it like to cry while your chair violently shakes and sprays water in your face? Monika can now answer that!
Major spoilers for Whalefall throughout.
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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/christian-larssen/happy-street
License code: B9EXR1D9EIBQLKXT

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