The Review

In a possibly-soon-to-be-post-Roe v Wade world, our hosts Sophie Gilbert, Megan Garber, and Hannah Giorgis thought it'd be worth re-examining the Judd Apatow/Seth Rogan comedy "Knocked Up," to discuss the way the movie treats women's bodily autonomy, angry reactions from men, and abortion. Megan also wrote recently on what it says that the movie simply edits direct mention of abortion out — and what that portended for the future of Roe, even fifteen years ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Apple TV+ dystopian thriller Severance is one of the most acclaimed shows of the year. Its grim take on the furthest extreme of "work-life balance" speaks to our strained pandemic-era relationship with the workplace and, according to our critics, offers a gripping throwback to an era of prestige TV before (as David Sims sees it) Netflix ruined everything. Spencer Kornhaber, Sophie Gilbert, and David Sims go down the elevator to Lumon’s basement to talk waffle parties, real-life workplace anxieties, and what dystopian sci-fis they recommend besides Severance. Further reading: Sophie: 'Severance' Makes the Workplace Eerily Dystopian David: The Netflix Bubble Is Finally Bursting Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shirley Li, David Sims, and Spencer Kornhaber discuss the hit action comedy Everything Everywhere All at Once. At a time when every show or movie has a multiverse, how does this film’s “verse-jumping” manage to be so cathartic it made us cry? The trio follows up on last week’s discussion of Turning Red to unpack how this movie uses a multiverse to convey the experience of an immigrant family. They also unpack Michelle Yeoh’s incredible career and how the film’s unique mix of silliness and sentiment gave her an opportunity she’s waited years for. Further reading: Everything Everywhere All at Once Is a Mind-Bending Multiverse Fantasy How Hollywood's Weirdest Filmmakers Made a Movie About Everything Everything Everywhere All at Once Is a Masterpiece Coming Soon: The Northman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Hannah Giorgis assess the state of pop music following the Grammys. While the much-derided awards have improved at celebrating the diversity of modern music, they still tend to reward safer throwback sounds. And modern music as a whole seems to be going through a nostalgic phase—just look at Silk Sonic’s retro soul, or Lady Gaga’s big-band ballads, or even Olivia Rodrigo’s pop-punk influences. The trio reviews the Grammys, debates pop music’s retro obsession, and explains why we’re in a moment with more sound-recycling than usual. With streaming tracking all our listens, is old music killing new music? Or is the industry finally seeing (and monetizing) a type of listening we’ve always done? And with a backward-looking mainstream intersecting with a Tik-Tok-ification of pop stardom, where do we expect music to go next? Further reading: How Jon Batiste's Album of the Year Win Broke Grammys Expectations Is Old Music Killing New Music? An Artist Who Makes Me Excited About the Future of Music Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

West Side Story is a work with some huge names behind it: Leonard Bernstein wrote the musical, Stephen Sondheim the lyrics, and Shakespeare the source material Romeo and Juliet. And sixty years after the classic 1961 film dominated the Oscars, another name was added to that list: Steven Spielberg. The big names behind West Side Story don’t just have status in common though; they’re also all white men telling a story of Puerto Rican migrants in New York City. That lack of diversity among the creative team is evident watching the original film sixty years later. The Puerto Rican characters are portrayed by white actors, often in broad stereotype and brownface. Even Rita Moreno, who portrayed Anita and was born in Puerto Rico, was forced to wear dark makeup. The 2021 update escapes many of the dated and problematic aspects of the 1961 version by grounding the story in real history. Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner used the period setting of slum-clearance era New York to give the rival gang members more real-world motivation and less stereotyping. In doing so though, the remake may lose some of the kaleidoscopic dreaminess that made the old Hollywood original the classic that it is. David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Spencer Kornhaber compare the two versions ahead of an Oscars weekend in which West Side Story is up for seven awards. Further reading: Spielberg's West Side Story Is an Undeniable Triumph How Stephen Sondheim Changed Musical Theater When a Hit Musical Becomes a Bad Movie Why West Side Story Abandoned Its Queer Narrative What Stephen Sondheim Knew About Endings Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s Japan’s most Oscar-nominated film ever—and its first to be up for Best Picture. It enters the final weeks of awards season as the first non-English-language film to be picked at Best Picture by all three major American critics groups (including the New York Film Critics Circle, for whom one David Sims tallied the results). And its Oscar run comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of international film. Drive My Car won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, an award whose last two winners were Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Minari’s nomination was controversial as a film set in Arkansas that deals with very American experiences around immigration and isolation. In both English and Korean though, Minari was put in the “foreign language” category. Reflecting on that recent history then, should Drive My Car’s success offer some hope for international film? After Parasite’s 2019 Golden Globe win, director Bong Joon Ho urged viewers to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles.” Are audiences closer than ever to that goal? The language of Drive My Car isn’t just remarkable for its domestic success too: Based on a story by Haruki Murakami and directed Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the film is also a deeply moving examination of language itself. David Sims, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz came together to unpack the film, its message about how we communicate with one another, and why it resonated as widely as it has. They also discuss their love for Murakami, despite his gendered flaws and storytelling crutches. (“And then the phone rang and it was a secret agent!”) Further reading: An Electrifying Adaptation of Murakami's Drive My Car Drive My Car Pushes the Limit of Language How Haruki Murakami's Translators Shaped His Early Novels Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sophie Gilbert, Spencer Kornhaber, and Shirley Li discuss the Hulu series about “the greatest love story ever sold” and ask: Is Pam & Tommy just repeating the exploitation it depicts? Or is its retelling of internet history revealing something new about our current culture? The sex tape at the core of the show is effectively the first instance of revenge porn online. It opened up questions of celebrity and privacy that we’re still grappling today. Now, shows like Pam & Tommy (with which Pamela Anderson was not involved) similarly raise questions about where the line is with telling a public person’s private story. The series also falls into a familiar category these days of the modern reconsideration of 90s culture: Framing Britney Spears, several American Crime Story iterations, even Girls5Eva and Yellowjackets. What is it about this era that’s drawing us to it? [Note: Spoilers through episode 6 of Pam & Tommy.] Further reading: Sophie Gilbert’s review: Pam & Tommy and the Curse of the '90s Bombshell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is the first in a new three-part miniseries from The Experiment—“SPAM: How the American Dream Got Canned.” During World War II, wherever American troops spread democracy, they left the canned meat known as SPAM in its wake. When American GIs landed overseas, they often tossed cans of SPAM out of trucks to the hungry people they sought to liberate. That’s how producer Gabrielle Berbey’s grandfather first came to know and love SPAM as a kid in the Philippines. But 80 years later, SPAM no longer feels American. It is now a staple Filipino food: a beloved emblem of Filipino identity. Gabrielle sets out on a journey to understand how SPAM made its way into the hearts of generations of Pacific Islanders, and ends up opening a SPAM can of worms. Listen and subscribe to The Experiment here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“I’m an unnatural mother.” It was this one line that drew first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal to adapt the 2006 Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter. Her new Netflix film of the same name examines motherhood and its secret shames. Starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, the movie portrays a woman at two different points in her life: Colman as a present-day professor on holiday in Greece, and Buckley as a mother with two young daughters decades earlier. Arriving two years into a pandemic whose burden has fallen especially hard on parents, the movie received a fiercely polarized reaction. David Sims, Sophie Gilbert, and Shirley Li analyze The Lost Daughter and the questions it raises. Is anyone a “natural mother”? How far does society expect women to sacrifice for their children? And how did they react to the film as parents? Further reading: Shirley’s interview with director Maggie Gyllenhaal: The Lost Daughter Understands the Secret Shame of Motherhood Sophie on a trend: The Redemption of the Bad Mother David ranked it #9 in his list: Best Movies of 2021 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam McKay’s disaster satire is many things at once: a parable of our distracted society, a primal scream of a warning, and a broad comedy from the writer/director of Anchorman. Such a delicate balance has made the star-studded Netflix film a polarizing movie. Critics, audiences, and activists have both savaged and praised the movie, with cycles of backlash highlighting the difficulty of sending a funny yet urgent message. But of course, isn’t that what political satires have done for decades? Or has reality become so absurd that it’s now beyond parody? As McKay told David Sims, he wrote the story about a planet-killing comet (and our society’s inability to act collectively to stop it) as a climate change metaphor. But after the script was done, production shut down for the pandemic and he watched the follies of a real disaster surpass his fictional one. Sophie Gilbert, Spencer Kornhaber, and David Sims unpack Don’t Look Up and whether modern satire can make a difference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After its record-setting opening weekend, the third Tom Holland Spider-Man is already the most successful movie of 2021. David Sims, Shirley Li, and Spencer Kornhaber debate Marvel’s continued dominance of moviegoing — Will it continue? Do we want it to? For a film that navel-gazes about the various Spider-mans (Spider-men?) of the past two decades, what is No Way Home telling audiences about how comic-book movies have evolved? (And, of course, who is the best Spider-Man?) David’s review: The Joyful Pandering of 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' - The Atlantic Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Sims, Shirley Li, and Spencer Kornhaber try to decipher House of Gucci — what exactly is the new Ridley Scott film? Comedy? Tragedy? True-crime family epic? And what does the Lady Gaga / Adam Driver vehicle say about the state of movies? Only a few weeks ago, Ridley Scott’s well-reviewed The Last Duel flopped catastrophically and the director blamed younger generations’ attention spans. The trio discusses whether big-budget adult dramas have a future in theaters, and what these two very different movies seem to predict. They also break down the very loud performances given by Lady Gaga and Jared Leto (“Boof!”), as well as favorite minor characters from the film. Further reading: David’s reviews of House of Gucci and The Last Duel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices