It’s Election Day, but I’m honoring decorum by avoiding politics entirely on this week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie — mostly because my guest picked a movie that was made well before America slid into its current hellscape, and which, in any case, is deliberately untethered from anything resembling reality.
That’d be They Came Together, David Wain’s ruthless rom-com parody, which cast Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in a riff on You’ve Got Mail and every other movie that tried to ape its mechanical feelgood beats. Writer-director Jake Horowitz sees as an influence on his new film Cup of Cheer — which applies the same perspective to the Hallmark Christmas -movie genre, and which is available on VOD this Friday — so naturally we had plenty to talk about.
Give it a listen, and distract yourself from the aforementioned hellscape for 45 minutes or so! Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play and Stitcher and get the episode immediately, or download it directly from the web.
And then maybe check out the latest episode of NOW What, which finds me talking to Ryerson professor Tim Sly about where things stand on a COVID-19 vaccine, and what we can and should be doing to mitigate the spread of the virus until there’s one available. It’s not as depressing as I’d feared!
But it does bring us back to the U.S. election, I suppose. Which reminds me: I made a list of movies to watch instead of the poll coverage for NOW readers — two lists, actually, as you’ll see — so that might help. Anything for a break in the noise.