Damage Done

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.