Sarah is brilliant and Alex complements her nicely, for the most part. I like to listen to episodes for movies that I’ve seen at least a month prior (there’s way too much plot summary if you just watched the movie yesterday, and I think it’s generally more fun to use the podcast to refresh your memory).
Listen first to the episodes of movies you’ve loved as a child or teenager, while watching some films that you’ve always meant to see, and then circle back to the podcast for newly watched stuff after some time has passed.
Don’t listen to episodes on media that you don’t have good vibes towards, because this podcast is all about seeing the good in movies, so your criticisms and negative experiences will mostly not be validated, or will only be validated in brief caveats (like, Charlie’s Angels is really lovely except for all of the brown/black/yellowface lol!). If anyone involved in the show reads this review, please think through whether or not a “feelings podcast about movies” really needs to attempt to be so uniformly positive.
Ratatouille was a similarly painful experience where the guest no longer liked the movie on her most recent viewing and basically no one knew what to do with that. Analyzing why something doesn’t work or hold up can actually be really interesting but the hosts had blinders on and kind of kept doing the toxic positivity show anyway even though it was bizarrely disconnected from the guests experience.
Along those same lines, listening to Alex call season one of And Just Like That lovely made me want to claw my own eyes out and it made me reconsider my Patreon subscription but I ultimately came back. Only a white man who hadn’t really seen SATC could straightforwardly enjoy AJLT. Everyone else was cringing through the whole thing.
But when it’s good, and it’s for a movie that you love, it’s good… so I’m still giving it 5 stars. Skip episodes liberally to find the gems.
