The Week That Was - June 30, 2025

Talking about some '70s Pam Grier vehicles, WALL-E, Fried Green Tomatoes, and the new season of The Bear

We’re working through a couple shows, but a big one dropped toward the end of the week, so it jumped to the top of the queue. I also had an unexpectedly time-consuming edit that got in the way of things and ate up more than a day of my week.

TV

The Bear (Season 4) - We burned through this over the weekend, almost entirely on Sunday. Some people are cool and over this show. I’m not one of them. I think the show is really pretty great. Season 3 wasn’t as good as the first two, sure, but it all resonated with me. Season 4 was less frustrating than its predecessor, as the thrust for the season was clear from its onset. This just dropped, so I’m not going to talk a bunch about it here, since 90% of you will not have seen it all yet. I will say it was nice to see a season focusing more on growth than on the trauma that we let define us, which is definitely the territory Season 3 was built on.

There’s not a show that throws my back into a state where I’m psychologically reliving past trauma that gives me this much catharsis. It won’t fix me, but it doesn’t hurt me, and it does make me wish I was back working in a coffee shop or bar, and it makes me want to experiment more with cooking. There was a lot I liked this season, as I felt like the steps made to right past wrongs were emotionally affective moments spaced out adeptly throughout the season.

Also, just to touch on the soundtrack, which has to cost so much for this show, it was amusing to me to have “Tougher Than the Rest” thrown into the mix as Jeremy Allen White is about to be Bruce Springsteen. I think there was a cover of “Tougher Than the Rest” used too, but it’s not on that playlist. FX on Hulu, Disney+

Film

Black Mama, White Mama (1973) - The first of two Pam Grier/Margaret Markov flicks I watched this week, this was the better of the two. One of the apparent bevy of Filipino women-in-prison exploitation features of the era, directed by Filipino cult director Eddie Romero, this is still very early in Grier’s career, and the acting’s still a little choppy at times. Grier and Markov are fun together, and Sid Haig was as fun as he always is. The tripartite manhunt for Grier and Markov is a solid mechanism for continued ratcheting up of tension too. This is a fun ride. Prime, Pluto TV

Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) - Name me a more compelling queer-coded but chaste lesbian romance that empowers women so much that the film might fail the reverse Bechdel test that ALSO serves as a pro-cannibalism work of art. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

We did this one for the Unkind Rewind this week (listen here or wherever you get your podcasts), where our guest was Gabe Joyner of SVU Pod: Especially Heinous. While the edit was challenging, as I forgot to record the Zoom and didn’t have a central channel to sync everything to and then there was an issue that took me at least an hour to work through with one of the channels getting messed up for a moment that threw everything off for me, the episode of the pod is great. The movie is really fun too. I’d remembered absolutely nothing about the movie, aside from the cannibalism. There’s some wild stuff, and the convo with Sean and Gabe went to some really fun and weird places. Prime (through the end of today), VOD

WALL-E (2008) - We watched this on the 4K UHD Criterion Collection Blu-Ray release, and damn if it doesn’t look fantastic. This is probably my favorite Pixar movie. The balls to make a silent movie (at least for the first like 40 minutes of the movie) for kids and have it be about robots ostensibly falling in love, all told visually, is crazy. If you’d have told me that I’d love a kids movie about a mostly non-verbal Number Five from Short Circuit compacting trash in an abandoned post-apocalyptic world, I don’t think I’d have believed you before seeing this the first time, years ago. Brilliant stuff. Criterion Collection 4K Blu-ray, Disney+

Deep Cover (2025) - Improv comics are recruited to infiltrate organized crime in London. It feels like maybe they should have cast an actress to play the improv comedy teacher with more history in improv than Bryce Dallas Howard, but what do I know? This just wasn’t funny, and I think its genesis seems to have come from people who were looking derisively at improv, who then brought people in to strip some of the derision out. If that’s not true, it at least felt that way. I’m not precious about improv or anything, but this was not a fun ride. Prime

Night Shift (2023) - This was a random horror movie that was expiring on Starz, and it had Lamorne Morris, so I threw it on. It stars CW starlet Phoebe Tonkin, who is working her first overnight shift at a rundown motel that may or may not be haunted. It’s fine. Nothing special. Not necessarily recommending it, but I watched it, so there’s that. Kanopy, Starz, Plex

The Arena (1975) - Adding enslavement to the mix, this one has Margaret Markov and Pam Grier as women kidnapped and enslaved in Ancient Rome, merging the women-in-prison flick with sword-and-sandal feature. This is with New World Pictures, directed by Steve Carver, who went on to direct Mariska Hargitay in Jocks, along with Big Bad Mama. This had my hopes up, but The Arena doesn’t quite have the vim and vigor that Black Mama, White Mama did. Plex, Tubi, Pluto TV