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 Iden…

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 co…

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 …

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,…

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 c…

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 ge…

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 wat…

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 …

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).…

بقلم Aharon and Liisa Pelz

بقلم Aharon and Liisa Pelz

بقلم Aharon and Liisa Pelz

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).بقلم Aharon and Liisa Pelz

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 …

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…

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 …

Luc Besson’s space adventure The Fifth Element (1997) still holds up as one the most entertaining movies coming out from 90’s. Naturally the fans were excited when the director chose to revisit space with his 2017 film Valerian and the City of Thousand Planets. The movie flopped at the box office and was forgotten relatively fast. Oddly we found th…

Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016) is probably the hardest movie we had to talk about. It is a complex movie with very heavy subject matter. It’s a challenge to define the characters and their motives as confidently as the movie presents itself. But we knew it was a movie we had to get out of our system somehow. For my mother especially it was a major ex…

I became really interested in Lynne Ramsay’s movies and because I heard so much about We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) I decided to put it on the table for us to discuss. Little did I know Liisa was more than familiar with the movie and not very happy about it.Apart from Kevin we talk about psychopaths, mothers, Tilda Swinton and other Lynne Rams…

Prior to seeing mother! my own mother told that her primary goal with Darren Aronofsky's 2017 film was to see what he was all about. Apparently she never really got him. In the other hand I have been following him very closely ever since I saw Requiem for a Dream (2000). That said, it has been surprisingly fascinating (and confusing) to observe his…

Despite mentioning Haneke frequently in our podcast, we haven’t had the chance to have an episode dedicated to him solely. But with his recent drama set in Calais, France, which my mother honoured to be the (other) best movie of 2017, we finally got our opportunity to focus on him.We talk of course about Haneke’s style and techniques in storytellin…

After Ruben Östlund’s memorable Force Majeure (2014), we were looking forward to his next film, The Square (2017). Especially after it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival.A satire about the art world seemed like a welcoming subject, but oh boy, the movie did not sit well with us. And we knew we had to talk about it. If for nothing else, just…

To get the whole Wicker Man experience completely out of our system after our talk about the original Robin Hardy masterpiece, we decided to examine Nicolas Cage’s accidental comedy The Wicker Man (2006).Our focus is particularly on the differences between the remake and the original and how exactly the makers of the remake failed to conceive the c…

1st of May is around the corner and what would be a better way to celebrate Spring than talking about the greatest movie about the May Day, Robin Hardy’s masterpiece The Wicker Man (1973).Me and my mother both really love this film and have been waiting for the right time to share our thoughts about it. We dive into the ambiguous definition of the …

50 episodes later down our podcast series we go back to the beginning. In the very first recording we talked about Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Belezza (2013). Now we return to the acclaimed director with his movie Youth (2015), which my mother has been desperate to talk about.In addition we manage to also discuss the first season of his mini-serie…

Ruben Östlund has seemed like an interesting filmmaker and this film was on our movies-to-watch list for a long time. It was quite fascinating to see what would unfold during an avalanche in the French Alps.Next to the usual digestion of the film itself, we ended up talking about masculinity and the discussion about gender roles in general. And tow…

Despite being banned for 20 years of making movies, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi has found numerous ways of continuing making films. Both me and my mother have been fascinated of his current path and not only the various techniques he films his movies but also how he balances between documentary-like reality with fictional drama. We dive into his…

Continuing our tradition we entertain ourselves with the latest Academy Awards ceremony. Like last time we avoided the winner announcements and instead host our very own Oscar episode in which we go through selected categories and talk about our predictions and reveal the winner to each other as we go along.This year we had complex feelings towards…

We enjoy Jim Jarmusch’s films enormously and his quiet and meditative Paterson (2016) is definitely no exception. While arguably his most accessible film for general audience, he was able to bring a soft balance to the dominating hectic drama filled cinema. But above all it is a masterful portrait of poetry.During our discussion we praise the achie…

This time we dwell into a subject matter that both me, or my mother, have any experience about: college in United States in the 1980’s. Fortunately we are very familiar with the director, Richard Linklater, and his masterful career as a filmmaker. Upon viewing Everybody Wants Some!! we saw an opportunity to open a discussion on his films and how th…

After discussing in depth about Spectre with Vincent Gebruers, we spend a lot of times entertaining ourselves in all topics about Bond. One of the continuous comments that caught my interest was when certain movies were referred to as “James Bond copy cat movies”. This came up most notably whenever we dared mention the Mission Impossible series, wh…

This is the second part of our discussion on Todd Solondz’ career. Last time we started things off with Wiener-Dog (2016) and the various connections of themes and characters it opened to Solondz’s previous films like the cult film Welcome to the Doll House (1995) and Palindromes (2004).Now we concentrate on his arguably most famous movie, Happines…

We have been wanting to talk about Todd Solondz for a long time. For us, and arguably for most people, his twisted cinematic universe was introduced with Welcome to the Doll House (1995) and Happiness (1998). Understandably after watching them the audience might not want to see another film by him, or be left intrigued for more. Me and my mother fe…

Despite of our in depth discussion with my mother on the Japanese culture and thematic concepts explored in Martin Scorsese's Silence, we could not help no to dedicate another discussion on the matter.But instead of the usual mother-son chit chat, I sit down with Eddy Van der Borght, a professor at the The Faculty of Theology at VU University Amste…

Martin Scorsese is one of my mother's absolute favourite filmmakers. She always manages to go into the deeper levels of his narrations. She is also crazy about the cultural history of Japan. So when Scorsese utilises his thematic moral core to the Japanese culture and brings onscreen a massive epic religious drama, for sure we will have some though…

So my mother somehow finally got around to see Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Listen us remember our own personal introductions to Tolkien’s books and how we both couldn’t not get over the first page. And then how the movies won us over and why especially for Aharon the first trilogy has a special place in his hear…

Ever since my mother first mentioned her interest in Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man we have been looking into movies that deal with shrinking. For this grand episode we bring together all we have learned about downscaling.Keeping Jack Arnold’s amazing sci-fi adventure as the center focus, we go through its story beats and analyse the de…

Me and my mother have had an interesting history in following Denis Villeneuve's career so far. We had our first debate on his merits all the way back on our first episode and we settled some thoughts after seeing Sicario. And our stakes for him . as a filmmaker would just get higher for his first science fiction film. So finally our episode on Arr…

I had the unfortunate experience of going to see I, Daniel Blake in a bad mood. Despite agreeing a lot with what the movie wanted to say, I could not handle the preaching tone. So I came out of it conflicted. Nevertheless I have been ever since recommending everybody to go and see it.My mother on the other hand found deep connection with the story …

Continuing themes explored in our previous episode, Memories of Murder and La Isla Minima, about series of murders set against a political turmoil in the 80's, we discuss Pablo Trapero's Argentinian 2015 drama movie El Clan.Based on the real story about the Puccio family that kidnapped and murdered people in Buenos Aires, the movie gave us such a s…

Continuing our Oscar special from last year, me and my mother sit down next day after the Oscar ceremony without knowing the winners and discuss the people and films while reveling the category winners.This time we tried picking a handful of categories that interest us and for which we have time to dwell on. We start easy and move on to the bigger …

Just in time before the 2017 Academy Awards we sit down and talk about Barry Jenkins's instant classic, Moonlight. It is an incredibly intimate portrait of one mans life searching for his identity that is able to tell a very specific story of race and sexuality being in the same time as universal as you can get.We mainly just go over the details th…

My mother described Stéphane Brizé's The Measure of a Man as the best movie of 2015. So naturally I got more and more interested about it. And sure enough it was nothing less than that. A minimal but truthful narration through the casual life of an unemployed man trying to find the means for himself and his family in France. It is a grand work spea…

My mother has a natural interest in going back to the original versions of stories. After she has discovered that they might have been remakes or at least inspired from a previous source, she dives deep into the connections to see the whole evolution of the concepts.Some time ago she discovered that Martin Scorsese adapted his Boston crime thriller…

Swiss Army Man is the debut feature film by two friends called Daniels about a man and a corpse on a magical surrealist adventure. Many also knows it as the movie in which Harry Potter's corpse farts endlessly. We didn't really know what to expect from it. But in the end it turned out to be one of the best movies of 2016. Honest.Despite the juvenil…

By the time The Walking Dead started playing I got bored of zombies in pop culture. Then again my brother got a real kick for them along with The Walking Dead. And then there is our mother who has never seen a zombie in her life.So it was quite exciting when we found each other being really enthusiastic to go and see Yeon Sang-ho's first live actio…