The cows freeze in Minnesota with friend Molly Perkins in this revisit to the Coen Brothers’ 1996 folktale noir. Themes of faith, deception, encounters with the inexplicable, Scandinavian roots, and ecstatic truth are all discussed, along with highlights of favorite supporting cast members and a head-to-head comparison of psycho killers Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem).
A fake folktale about the choices we make and our inability to make sense of it all. Yet, unlike in other Cohen films, and unlike the characters in this, we the audience are shown enough to find our way through the chaos and understand how the disparate elements fit together. It’s a compelling trick that makes this film the optimistic sibling to No Country’s unrelenting nihilism or A Serious Man’s quizzical frustration.
I’m not sure I 100% agree with your police work there, Lou.
Join the two cows on their journey into the world of fantasy basketball-star-crossover vehicles, featuring guest Vishal Dave! It’s 1996 and Michael Jordan is fresh back from retirement, ready to take on the Monstars and save the NBA from a bunch of talentless hacks. Is there a tragic emptiness at the core of Space Jam, marked by Jordan’s self-destructive quest for dominance? And how does it compare to what might be its polar opposite — Kazaam, a rapping genie movie about a child who comes to accept the imperfections of his parents, starring the ebullient Shaquille O’Neal? Tune in to find out and dig in to some mid-nineties pop classics!
Space Jam
Sometimes all a celebrity hero athlete wants is to live a normal life among the non-sycophantic, except when that person is Michael Jordan, whose legendary competitiveness never met a bet he wouldn’t double down on. Here, the stakes become life and death when MJ wagers a lifetime of having to please fans for the chance to win back his friends’ powers and save the Looney Toons. Not a smart move, but you don’t get to the top without some ill advised bets on yourself.
Kazaam
Max has three wishes and three father figures to boot, but he isn’t sure whether he ultimately wants to save his biological father, accept his adoptive father, or make friends with his genie father. Shaq is winning as the titular Kazaam, even when making a fool of himself rapping and shooting sparks out of his boombox.
Shoulda seen us last night in Malick’s limo, just chillin, eat goat eyes, just chillin.
The cows are joined by Mattia Acetoso to discuss the feature debuts of Wes and Paul Thomas Anderson. What might we learn about these original and influential directors’ first films? Both movies center around misfits who retreat from a random and often harsh reality to form their own surrogate families and find new ways of living. Along the way, genres are subverted, narratives obfuscated, and souls redeemed.
Just hear me out. It’s called hinckley cold storage. Here are just a few key ingredients: dynamite, pole vaulting, laughing gas, choppers. Can you see how incredible this is going to be? Hang-gliding, come on!
The two cows discuss the social complexity of female high school friendships and the sexual politics of teen horror in their reappraisal of these two ’96 classics. They explore how cliques can provide social insulation as well as opportunities for emotional manipulation, and consider how the “horror movie rules” encode a Puritanical ethics towards sex and drugs while also aiming to satisfy the male gaze by providing copious instances of such behavior.
Despite its meta-horror trappings, there’s a story about friendship and grief and a cautionary tale about getting in with a bad crowd simmering underneath Scream. Sidney is struggling to come to terms with the fact that her mom might not have been as innocent as she imagined, helped along in this regard by her loyal friend Tatum, and maybe, were it not for the impatient machinations of her boyfriend Billy, she would have realized on her own terms that condemning Cotton Weary (has their been a better name in the history of film?) won’t change the fact that her mom was who she was and is now gone.
A bad apple Billy is, all the way through, poisoning the minds of everyone around him, including Sidney, whom he gaslights relentlessly, but also his partner in crime Stuart, whose pathetic motive (peer pressure) betrays a perhaps singular devotion to his rotten friend. Billy’s foil is the weirdo third wheel Randy—probably the best-hearted of the bunch—who has a thing for Sidney (maybe he recognizes the “scream queen final girl” in her all along) but for that reason will never have the kind of connection with Sidney that she shares with Tatum. Correctly identifying the killer before the halfway point, Randy’s all knowing persona (he is right that they are in a horror film and thus subject to horror tropes, even convoluted metatextual ones) makes him the Cassandra to Sidney’s Demeter.
The two cows start their journey through 1996 at its blockbuster peak, revisiting Roland Emmerich’s game-changing blow everything up alien disaster extravaganza, Independence Day. What made the 1990s such a fertile time for disaster flicks, and what makes ID4 one of the best movie star vehicles ever? The cows also explore neoconservative themes of US military dominance on the world stage, and discuss the case for Randy Quaid being the emotional center of the film.
Picture, if you will, a more innocent time, when a summer blockbuster in which NY, DC, and LA are gratuitously destroyed, giving rise to a post-Cold War neoconservative fantasy of a world united around American exceptionalism and ingenuity, starring a nerdy, unambitious, Jew and a brash black sitcom star and helmed by an openly gay director known for schlocky sci-fi action, could be the movie hit of the year. Welcome to 1996.
The cows take a drive with Abe and Agnes Callard and Ryan Clark into David Lynch’s fantastical and depraved version of Los Angeles. What mysteries will they find in Club Silencio, or on the set of the Sylvia North Story? What explains the continued appeal of Lynch’s absurdist masterpiece? How does he deploy narrative and filmic tropes to subvert his audience’s expectations and what are we to make of the often frustrating and contradictory results?
Things get scary when the two cows are stranded in a motel on a rainy night with James Mangold. What makes a good twist? What’s the appeal of Agatha Christie? Is this a movie about white guilt, or flaws in the criminal justice system? Tune in to find out!
The cows revisit 1994’s Best Picture winner, Forrest Gump. Is it a conservative agenda piece, portraying Forrest’s racial colorblindness as the envisioned end of racism in America, or is it a sober reflection on the history of violence and racism baked into contemporary America and American cinema? Is Jenny’s the story of an entire generation’s complex relationship with shifting power dynamics and its reckoning with an inability to impart lasting social change? Tune in for this and much more in our longest episode yet!
The cows go back to Titanic and explore how Cameron weaves together themes of love, memory, duty, and class into a massive scale disaster flick. Is Titanic, which was at the time the most expensive and highest grossing movie ever, secretly an anti-capitalist propaganda piece? Or is it just the pinnacle of Hollywood bombast? Tune in to find out!
What is the disaster at the center of the ultimate disaster movie? Most obvious is the literal disaster of the sinking ship, thousands of lives lost, the collective horror and suffering of so many forced to endure the freezing waters. But many less obvious disasters lurk beneath the surface, like the massive bulk of a looming iceberg.
One is the disaster of Rose and Jack, who met and fell in love under the most challenging of circumstances, and were granted only a few days with each other. For many of us, the choice to have loved and lost (and ensuing responsibility of maintaining the memories of that love for the rest of your life) and to have never so-loved may not be so obvious.
Another is the disaster of capitalist/industrialist hubris — the downfall of the late modern aristocracy and the beginning of the darkest period of the 20th Century, one marked by two world wars flanking a worldwide economic depression.
Yet, perhaps most disastrous of all is that the lessons of industrial capitalism, with all its excesses and evils, were lost in a series of failed 20th Century Communist experiments. The opportunity for exploring a new way of living was, in that moment, a real possibility, squandered by the same human tendencies that keep our contemporary global market an efficient system of exploitation.
Here, we have James Cameron’s depiction of another way of living: Rose is saved by Jack from the clutches of a capitalist mindset that subjugates everyone around her. In throwing the Heart of the Ocean away, she repudiates this entire mindset, choosing instead to forge her own path, focusing on her adventures and relationships rather than accumulating wealth and power for its own sake. That Cameron puts this subversive stuff in what was at the time the most expensive movie ever made is an ironic touch that might have earned him a blacklisting by the HUAC had this movie come out fifty years earlier. // Blobcat
The two cows journey into the madness of toxic masculinity, pairing the madcap Nicolas Cage classic “Vampire’s Kiss” with the recent Kitty Green masterpiece, “The Assistant.” How do artists use hyper-realism and non-realist expressionism to depict challenging and often elusive problems? What is the significance of using vampirism as the framing device to portray workplace misogyny? And how can we cope with the moral harms toxic masculinity imposes on those of us forced into the orbit of a serial predator?
Well, the fact is, I did murder someone last night. I turned into a vampire. It’s a long story.
Cows in the Field 