Some movies defy explanation. So against the mainstream, you wonder how it was pushed through production, let alone loved by fanatics. They are, simply put, cult films. This week, Br. Tito and I discuss this strange subgenre of filmmaking and discuss why certain films attract such a devoted audience.
Network television and major production companies can create awe-inspiring works of art, but they are often limited by industry standards, engrained expectations, and bottom lines. Not YouTube. On this platform, creators are in charge, meaning the world gets an incredible mix of informative, inspirational, and weird.
This week on Everyday Liminality, Br. Tito and I discuss the wonders of YouTube and a few of our favorite channels.
Imagine a world in which everyone is isolated from one another, in which people are so lonely and emotionally stunted that their only place of comfort is found in computers, video games, and anonymous online communication.
Okay. That’s probably not too difficult to imagine. But imagine it in “the future” where we have highly advanced artificial intelligence systems… Now we’re stretching things a bit!
Such is the premise of the 2013 movie Her. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, it is one of the most dynamic, creative, beautiful stories I have ever seen. Moving beyond the question of “is she human” almost immediately, the movie poses a far more interesting question: what actually makes the physical characters “human”? With ever advance in the artificial intelligence’s consciousness, emotion, existential crisis, and even love, there is a challenge to the human characters to reclaim a part of themselves that has been lost to isolation and loneliness, to communicate with one another in the way we were created to do.
Starring Joachim Phoenix, Amy Adams, Chris Pratt, and Scarlett Johansson (as the artificial intelligence voice), Her is well-acted and thought-provoking, but is definitely intended for a mature audience. With an R-rating for language, sexual content and brief graphic nudity, it is not exactly family friendly, but then again, most existential questions of our reality aren’t. If you can get passed some of its more graphic features, it is among the most important films of our age.
In a previous episode, Br. Tito and I discussed some of the greatest sports movies of all time and why we liked them. Given our love for sports, we thought it was a great episode, revealing how important the genre is to cinema. But we made one mistake: we never came to a definitive answer. What is the greatest sports movie of all time. In this episode, we set out to answer that question.
In place of the NCAA tournament championship that would have aired yesterday, we decided to have our own bracket. Picking 32 movies and placing them in four categories, we would have 31 head-to-head matchups to decided it all.
How would this work with only two people, you ask? It wouldn’t. Which is why we called on an old friend of ours to ensure that every game had a winner. It wasn’t always the right choice… but it was definitive. And ultimately, I think we came to the correct choice in the end.
If you’d like to follow along, or fill it out before you listen, our bracket can be found below:
One thing that originally brought Br. Tito and I together how many years ago was our love for the show Scrubs. It is an absolute classic, a longtime favorite of mine since high school. It’s wacky, it’s moving, it’s just absolutely relevant to every situation.
This week, in honor of the heroes that are working in hospitals saving lives, Tito and I decided to devote this week’s Everyday Liminality to the wonder that is the world’s greatest medical show. Hope you enjoy!
[Also, and completely by accident, hours after posting our episode, Zach Braff and Donald Faison, two of the leads in the show, released the first episode of their own “rewatch” podcast of the show. If you’re interested, it’s called “Fake Doctors, Real Friends. Be warned that the language is not appropriate for children.]
