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FKA Muub Tube - Ralph and Owen bring the film form into focus.

tv & film film reviews

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00:11:13

Owen apologises for dissing Tokyo Story

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2021/05/27

It's actually pretty good. Ralph is on strike.

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00:50:56

The Wishing Tree

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2021/05/21

Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze is the subject of this week’s episode. His folk pastoral The Wishing Tree, with its blend of slapstick and sacrifice, enchants the boys in unequal measure, but they also dig up his Soviet satire Repentance for (partial) inspection. By the halfway mark, zapped of zeal after a year of lockdown film-watching, the boys digress into grassier pastures.

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00:57:34

Maurice Pialat w/ Paige Murphy

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2021/05/12

Who's the daddy? Between the young, flighty romance of À Nos Amours and the earnest soul-searching of Under the Sun of Satan Maurice Pialat carved out a brusque editing style - balanced by tender naturalistic performances. Writer Paige Murphy joins the boys to unpack Pialat's contradictions, spiritually, sexually and cinematically.

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01:07:28

Godard Special: The Sublime/Sexy Era

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2021/05/06

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror”. These lines are uttered, by Jean-Luc Godard himself, in 1983’s Prenom Carmen. Wild of hair, cigar to his lips. A Delphic oracle treading a tightrope between madness and cinema. In the years between 1983 and 1993, Godard turned his camera away from the screeching confections of his revolutionary period, and began to ask bigger and more transcendent questions. Like God. Like the relationship of man and woman. Like love (be it blue-balled or consummated)

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01:05:25

Robert Altman w/ Blu Hunt

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2021/04/28

Insider? Outsider? Shakeitallaboutsider? Robert Altman’s career was prolific and paradoxical, but what makes his films so memorable? Perhaps it’s the cat food in The Long Goodbye, or the all-yellow motel in 3 Women, maybe it’s Elliot Gould stuffing his shoes with banknotes at the end of California Split, or the off-kilter interrogation scene in The Player? Joining Owen and Ralph this week is actress Blu Hunt, who shares her own Altman journey and helps us diagnose Hollywood’s Discourse disease.

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01:05:37

Michael Snow w/ Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Daniel Neofetou

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2021/04/23

Who’s afraid of structural film? Not special guests Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Daniel Neofetou, who join the boys this week to discuss the adventurous career of Canadian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. What is a film when the film is concentrated, elongated, and entirely the sum of its parts? They look at Wavelength (1967), La Region Centrale (1971), "Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), and Cityscape (2019), among others, with a digression via music,

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00:55:39

Godard Special: The Marxist Era

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2021/04/15

Out of the ashes of Mai '68 rises a very irritating phoenix, the didactic docu-diatribes of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin and their comrades at the Dziga Vertov Group, who take the collective blame for British Sounds (1969), Wind from the East (1970) and Tout Va Bien (1972). Ralph and Owen pore over the methodology behind the madness, wondering whether a cinema of displeasure can ever liberate an alienated people. Two wrongs don't make a left, guys.

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01:09:12

Early Pedro Almodovar w/ Lucy Bull and Matt Copson

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2021/04/08

Since his debut in 1980, Pedro Almodovar has become Spain's most cherished auteur. Trashy and transgressive in his trademark Technicolor, Almodovar's cinema of darkly comedic and twisted telenovelas has sensually probed the darker corners of Spanish modernity. Passion, sexuality, drugs, and insanity. His is a world of melodramatic matadors, diffident directors, pouting pimps, and star-crossed lovers, all of whom are searching for something special - and they'll do anything to get it. This is

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01:08:22

Godard Special: The New Wave Era

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2021/04/01

Part 1 of 3: Owen and Ralph delve deep into Jean-Luc Godard’s energetic first decade, a treasure trove or cinephilia, aesthetic innovation and frustrated romance. From the frisson of Breathless to the acid satire of Weekend the boys explore how the Cahier critic became France’s most accomplished auteur. And this is only the start… Full list of films covered: A bout de souffle, Vivre sa vie, Le Mépris, Band a part, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Week-end Part of a three-part retrospective on

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01:08:23

Stan Brakhage w/ Daniel Neofetou

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2021/03/26

Birth, sex, marriage, death. The movement of the stars and the planets, the chopping down of a tree. For Stan Brakhage, the prolific high priest of American experimental cinema, the entirety of existence was under the lens - something both beautiful and mortally terrifying. This week, the boys are joined by friend of the pod Daniel Neofetou to dissect some of Brakhage's most essential works: Anticipation of the Night (1958), Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Mothlight (1963), and Dog Star Man

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00:52:04

Marlen Khutsiev

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2021/03/17

The swinging sixties clashes with Soviet strictness under the auspices of Marlen Khutsiev, a lesser known Russian auteur, a one-man Russian new wave. We review Ilych’s Gate (1965), its more popular re-cut I Am Twenty (1988), and its flirty follow-up July Rain (1968). Watch out for obnoxious laddish banter, not just from the boys, but from a young Andrei Tarkovsky, whose callous cameo nearly steals the show.

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01:02:26

Catherine Breillat

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2021/03/11

“Eros and Thanatos, sitting in a tree”, fumbling, groping, and pulling away. This is the psycho-sexual world offered to us by French auteur Catherine Breillat; a controversial figure in European cinema, both celebrated and castigated for her “shock jock and cock-block” sensibility. In a career that has truly spanned the decades, Breillat has cast an unwavering eye at the subjects of sex and desire, of violence and power. This week, the boys go eyes deep; taking a long, hard look at two of her most

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00:52:32

L'Avventura

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2021/03/05

Hello, hello, hello, what's all this then? A disappearance, on an Italian island, and the waves that this disappearance makes - and does not make - among a very loosely knit group of bourgeois 'friends'? Why, it's Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura. A film that divided its critics, and then united them (a bit like Italy itself, really). But is it good, actually? Unsurprisingly, yes - yes it is. The boys explain why. Plus, a preview of the new cringey Fassbinder biopic 'Enfant Terrible'.

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01:03:21

Can't Get Adam Curtis Out of My Head

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2021/02/25

Adam Curtis is back with ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ perhaps his most ambitious documentary series, an emotional history of the modern world, a rich tapestry of complex protagonists and a lot of moody archive and electronic music. Were the boys intellectually energised or did they overdose on the Curtis Kool-Aid?

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00:48:21

Ben Rivers

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2021/02/18

This week, the boys wade through the slow anthropological cinema of Ben Rivers - a man obsessed with society and those who live at its edges. A hunchback, a musician, a salty old sailor - a hippie with a finger in his arsehole. Expensively shot, intellectually minded, and glacially paced, are Ben's banks bursting, or do these Rivers run dry? The boys review A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, Slow Action and The Hunchback.

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01:12:51

Ulrich Seidl

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2021/02/11

All the lonely people, where do they all come from? ‘Austria’ you might say, especially if, like Owen and Ralph you’ve spent the past week watching the films of Ulrich Seidl. Whether it’s the mail order bride-doom of The Last Real Men, the heavy petting of Animal Love or the subaltern sex tourism of Paradise Love - Seidl dignifies these desperate souls with attention and acceptance.

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00:53:48

Lux Aeterna

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2021/02/04

In Lux Aeterna, art-house ingénue Gaspar Noé tackles the dynamics, egos, and erotics of cinema itself; turning the lens on his own (literally) pulsating practice. In a tight 50 minutes, the French-Argentinian filmmaker dissects a failing film set filled with inflated egos and questionable ethics. But is this aesthetically-charged and critically-toothed survey of cinema just another pretentious pump and dump, or is it something deeper? The boys decide.

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01:06:00

Come and See/The Painted Bird

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2021/01/28

A lone boy is jolted into manhood by the tribulations and traumas of WW2 in Eastern Europe. This is the premise of both Come and See (1985) and The Painted Bird (2019). The boys dig into this deadly double bill with fighting spirit, and find the fine line between epic and exploitation.

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00:45:46

Ham on Rye

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2021/01/23

This week, the boys are joined by the pod’s weird-suburbia correspondent Daniel Neofetou to discuss Ham on Rye, an unsettling meal comprised of adolescent yearning, unspoken ritual, and a side of small-town ennui. Fancy a bite?

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00:49:49

The Hourglass Sanatorium

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2021/01/15

Ralph introduces Owen to one of his favourite films, The Hourglass Sanatorium by Wojciech Has, an exuberant but mournful dream journey, transcending linear time and reconciling personal relationships with collective trauma.

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