Tag Archives: Jordan Peele

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 370 – Nope

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Nope, Jordan Peele’s third film as writer-director, following his zeitgeist-capturing Get Out and complex, ambitious Us, invites its audience to speculate on audiences and spectacle. The kinds of things it wants us to think about are clear, and we discuss its themes of commercialised tragedy, fear of the audience, and photography as truth, among others – but what it has to say about them is at best muddled, and, more frankly, disappointingly uncritical. Like Peele’s previous films, Nope is a terrific conversation starter, but unlike them, its contribution to that conversation is weak.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 157 – Toy Story 4

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Following a break during which José has been exploring Argentina and Mike has been exploring John Grisham films, we reconvene with Toy Story 4, the latest in Pixar’s iconic animated children’s series. Mike’s seen it once already and is keen to revisit it.

José asks questions of the film’s messages, seeing the toys as faithful slaves, desperate for owners, and discarded once their value is exhausted. Mike argues for the characters’ internal lives and the idea that they are parents or stewards of their children. We at least agree on the Key and Peele characters, thoughtless and lazy stereotypes of blackness, and Mike suggests that the irony that Key and Peele bring to their personas might be intended to make their characters easier to swallow. And their characters have the effect of rendering in sharp focus everything that is white about the film, José picking up on what he sees a tokenism in the few human non-white or mixed race characters present.

Toy Story 4 finally makes something of Bo Peep, turning her into an action heroine, and we discuss feminism in the film and, again, whether this is simply tokenistic or not. And an argument ensues about whether the word “homeless” is appropriate to use with regards to her life, and what we can and should make of Woody’s fate.

And apart from all that, Mike laughed endlessly, and José laughed at Mike laughing endlessly! Despite there being much to pick apart, a great time was had by all in this charming, funny, and visually stunning film.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 144 – Us

Mirrors and doppelgangers and dual meanings and symmetries abound in Jordan Peele’s Us, in which a family of four is terrorised one evening by a family of four identical copies. Like Get Out, Peele’s 2017 debut, Us is hyper-aware of its genre’s ability to make use of bold metaphor to offer coded commentary on social issues.

We find more room for a variety of interpretations in Us than in Get Out, and our conversation ranges from talk of race and its importance or lack thereof, consumer culture and materialism, cultural items and icons, including and especially Michael Jackson, someone who embodies duality better than perhaps anybody, the 1986 charity event Hands Across America and the competing ideas conveyed by its imagery, and far more. We also find the time to discuss and praise Lupita Nyong’o’s incredible pair of central performances, creating two fully embodied characters, the technicality of her physical acting always perfectly evident but never distracting. She’s extraordinary.

We have our problems with it, including its structure, lack of scares, and some imagery that we find lacking in meaning or clarity, and it’s a less tight and cogent film than Get Out, which we ultimately agree is superior. But it’s ambitious, intelligent, witty, original and rewarding. See it.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.