Double or Nothing! - LOVE AND BASKETBALL (2000)

02/14/23 • 58 min

Happy Valentine's Day listeners - to celebrate, your hosts dive into one of the most kinetic and tender love stories put to film, in Gina Prince-Bythewood's debut Love and Basketball! Doubling as star athletes and conflicted lovers, Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps deftly explore the grief of professional failure, the loss of the family unit, the forfeiture of one's dreams - and never letting their love for each other die out through it all. Check up as we dribble through this film's magnificent lighting, novel narrative structure, and unabashed love for portraying black success in every department. As the ball rolls around the rim, stay tuned for an inspired Billy Beane moment as your hosts get off a thesis on sports films everywhere!
Roxane Gay's Essay - Love and Basketball: For Your Heart

Previous Episode

Eternal Cycles of Change - TRON: LEGACY (2010)

Every end is a new beginning, and what Kevin Flynn refers to as biodigital jazz, your hosts view as a deeply spiritual, meditative encounter with the digital and non real. Helmed by Joseph Kosinski, an architecture student now responsible for one of the most slickly directed and highest grossing actioners of all time, had his roots in a similarly precise big swing that resurrects a past icon onscreen. In spite of its lack of commercial inertia, Legacy has since become an enduring film for many of its fans, a stunning display for its cutting-edge soundtrack and CGI, and a film on the vanguard of our increasing proximity to digital filmmaking. As your hosts peek through the aperture, join them on ribbons of light as they extol the virtues of uncanny valley, the religious notions of removal and reconstitution, and postmodernist tension in one of the great father-son tales ever spun. It's an episode of infinite possibility!

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The Capturing Of Heaven - PRINCESS MONONOKE (1997)

Death haunts every corner of this sprawling, environmental epic from Studio Ghibli. Whether it is the exploration of its eponymous revenge spirit, nature's ability to survive through all adversity, or a protagonist marked from death, every aspect of Hayao Miyazaki and crew's filmmaking rises to meet fate, be it real-life climate calamity or our own struggle to live in harmony with the world. Join your hosts as they aim to capture a piece of this uncompromising masterclass, from the fidelity of its animation, attention to gender roles, and "nihilistic" sense of time, in a much more philosophical episode than usual! Much like its gorgeously animated and nuanced deities - Princess Mononoke will certainly endure for generations to come.
Kristen L. Abbey's Article - "See with Eyes Unclouded": Mononoke-hime as the Tragedy of Modernity