I've got a new regular gig blathering about movie shows on the
Do Some Damage podcast. Every couple of weeks I'll talk to host
Steve Weddle about a couple of related films he's almost certainly never seen (he never sees any). I'll share space with
Chris Holm talking about music and
Holly West on TVs.
For my first segment I talked about
Lynne Ramsay's
You Were Never Really Here based on the novella by
Jonathan Ames about an ex-soldier who makes a living finding trafficked children and killing their abductors with a hammer. It's stylish and super cool and could be the standard bearer for this type of gritty avenging angel fare for years to come. It's muscular and masculine, but it's a far cry from a lot of similarly concerned macho pulp. Props to Ames's fantastic book, but the hero who made a fucking amazing movie here is Ramsay.
So, for my second pick I wanted to highlight another film made by a woman in a male-dominated genre. I thought about looking at badass shit from
Kathryn Bigelow or
Ida Lupino, but chose instead to look at
Elaine May's 1976 crime hangout-picture
Mikey & Nicky starring
John Cassavetes and
Peter Falk as a couple of at-odds buddies spending a night in Philadelphia trying to avoid getting whacked by
Ned Beatty.
Like
You Were Never Really Here, Mikey & Nicky is concerned with masculinity - male friendships and conflict as well as their attitudes toward women and sex. It's a picture deserving the conversational company of peers like
Husbands, Mean Streets or
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
The
first episode is available now and I'll be back in a couple weeks with thoughts on another pair of somehow-related crime pictures (one new, one older). If you tune in, I'll try to include information on where you can find my (older) picks streaming.
Mikey & Nicky is currently
streaming on Filmstruck.
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