Stealing the Remote

’Twas the day before Valentine’s Day when the podcasting girlfriends discussed the Kung Fu Panda trilogy! We go over Orientalism, first cinema experiences, Puss in Boots versus Dead Poets Society, how Glee can help you learn English better than any teacher, fatphobia, pear-shaped pandas, Jar Jar Binks and Drunken Fist wushu, Rebel Wilson, Fate: The Winx Saga casting, animating female anthropomorphic animals without boobs, my bullet...

My girlfriend stayed mostly awake for three hours to watch Zack Snyder’s director’s cut of Watchmen! We discuss the deconstruction of superheroes as pathetic, the many shades of moral grays in all its characters, the threat of nuclear war and the current state of Trumpian politics, and somehow we still have fun. Also, can anybody tell me what Carter or Kennedy looked like?
In this episode’s Trailer Time, I show her the Teaser f...

Come and witness the first structured episode of Stealing the Remote! My lovely girlfriend Mijntje has notes and we barely get off-topic while discussing the trippiest biographical musical out there, Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman! We dissect my lack of knowledge about Elton John, her crush on Richard Madden, and how much I hate that guy.
In this episode’s Trailer Time, we watch the trailer for Lasse Hallström‘s Chocolat, which un...

My girlfriend had somehow never seen Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman despite living on this planet as a person of the female variety, so what better occasion to get her caught up than the release of its sequel, Wonder Woman 1984? She fawns over Chris Pine, compares the plot to Tom Shadyac’s Bruce Almighty and explains her complicated relationship with glasses. I bring up CGI, fangirly characterization complaints and continuity issues. ...

My girlfriend made me watch Nancy Meyers’ The Holiday and we decided to record an episode about this pure feel-good romcom on the night of the week with the highest number of cargo trains possible passing my dorm! She gushes about Jack Black and the one black character who has two seconds of screen time, while I gush about... Jude Law? Thankfully, she also points out I’m not limited to my current sexuality, and I still mostly liked...

It's my turn again! My lovely girlfriend Mijntje watched David F. Sandberg's Shazam! along with me so I could prove to her that DC Films had a fun, funny, festive Christmas movie in its catalogue. Depressing, my ass. We cover the Fawcett Comics history briefly and without research, profess our love for the Marvel Family as well as the casting director, and talk about Stanley Tucci, for some reason.
On this episode's Traile...

Welcome back to the new and possibly improved but probably equally middle-of-the-road Stealing the Remote! For season two I have asked, manipulated, and/or bribed my lovely girlfriend Mijntje to join me on my quest to make people watch movies I like. Somehow, she then tricked me into watching a movie she liked: Tom McGrath's Megamind!
What I can nitpick about a movie made for superhero fanatics like myself? When did my girlfrie...

We return with the fifth installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom! In our second take on this movie, we decide whether to let nature take its course or save the dinosaurs, I wonder if Hollywood isn’t just an island, and Mom remembers my toy dinos fondly. Bryce Dallas Howard’s running on heels is scrutinized, Mom steals my jokes and we briefly mention the chapter on The Silence of the ...

After an unplanned hiatus, we return with a movie nobody has heard of: Lukas Dhont’s Girl! We discuss the casting controversy while I’m breathing heavily from running up and down a single flight of stairs before recording, Mom remembers the music video for Wrabel’s “The Village”, I start ranting about the writer-director in a monologue that will go down in this podcast’s history as the longest time I’ve gone on uninterrupted, and w...

Back for another comic book movie, I lure Mom in with promises of Colin Firth without spoiling/warning that he violently kills dozens of people! In our episode on Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman: The Secret Service we talk for a bit about my mom’s legs, she confuses the first scene for the second scene and vice versa, and I rely completely on what she tells me about Pygmalion; the Shaw play, not the myth, as there are decidedly fewer sta...

We make our triumphant return to form with a superhero film that requires me to explain the history of the genre in order to make Mom understand this wasn’t actually that mediocre for the time it was released: Bryan Singer’s X-Men! Having been on vacation to Israel, where we visited Yad Vashem, we get into our happiest episode yet, as we extensively discuss the Holocaust and when it is appropriate to use that as character motivatio...

We’re back with a movie that’s my own age! We explain where we’ve been for a month – the answers are disappointing, I assure you – and dive into Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting. We earned the Explicit rating on this one. Mom brags about her memory and recalls her high school students watching this wholly appropriate film about heroin, while I mistake the amount of boys in my elementary school for the amount of girls (trust me, it was r...

Welcome back to your regularly scheduled episode where Effie is in charge! (Well, almost regularly scheduled.) Mom talks about our recording time for a bit, as well as those other Avengers you may have heard about, and her childhood Halloween dreams from before Halloween was a thing here. The word coiffure gets thrown around, so on behalf of Mom: please excuse her French. More apologies are also issued about her English – feel free...

It’s Mom’s turn again in this episode! We know she promised a funnier film, but what you got is David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. After joking around about Mom’s new boyfriend wrecking our recording schedule, we get into the credits, the music, and the general handsomeness of Omar Sharif. We discuss some Russian history, Boris Pasternak, and whatever a Stadtpalais is in German. Also included is a short reminder on what a stepsister actu...

This time we discuss Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men, yet another dystopian vision of the future, because the ultimate goal of this podcast, as it turns out, is to depress Mom. She shares some childhood memories and we conclude I am a likeable person. Mom drags in Son of Man, Soylent Green, and Sophie's Choice and I try to understand how films I've never heard of are related to the subject matter at hand. She gushes over some of t...

This week we get around to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, the most expensive arthouse sequel ever! I was suffering from a sore throat and had no voice after a night out; don’t worry, I edited out most of the painful coughing I had to deal with. We try to remember what the Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner was about (something something what is humanity), talk about whether or not Harrison Ford is a replicant (it’s probabl...

Welcome back for our episode about Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri! If in your culture it’s still acceptable to wish you a happy New Year in February, happy New Year; if not, have a nice Tuesday, I guess. After putting our New Year’s resolution out there to upload more consistently from now on, we venture into remembering what our target audience even was. Don’t worry, we still spoil basically every...

Today mom and I discuss Kenneth Branagh’s Thor and Joe Johnston’s Captain America: The First Avenger! After the shortest coming out I’ve ever done, given how there’s no room for asking questions immediately in this one-way street of a medium, we dive into the local weather. In our end segment What Did We See Without Being Forced?, we talk about A Ghost Story, Suburbicon, Bordertown, The Punisher, and Murder on the Orient Express. M...

Right on time for our latest episode, Zack Snyder’s (or let’s be real, Joss Whedon’s) Justice League is finally here! I took my mom along for my third viewing and we’re here to give our opinions: mom was glad that she liked one of my comic book movies again, but didn’t know what she signed up for, as I have a lot of issues to work through with this film. In a truly legendary role reversal of our usual good cop-bad cop, I ask mom ab...