This week on the podcast, we discuss two sci-fi-ish romantic comedies, Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man, which was one of our favourite films from the Berlinale earlier this year, and Richard Curtis’ About Time, about which we have complicated feelings.
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This episode features Editor-in-Chief Alex Heeney, Executive Editor Orla Smith, and staff writer Lena Wilson.
About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013)
Domhnall Gleeson stars as Tim, a sweet but awkward man looking for love. On his 21st birthday, his father, played by Bill Nighy, informs him that the men in their family can travel back in time to moments in their lives to redo them or just relive them. Tim decides to use this newfound power to try to find himself a girlfriend, with his tactics varying from well-meaning to manipulative to not really understanding how relationships work. Eventually, he meets and falls in love with Mary (Rachel McAdams) and the film becomes about the limits to time travel and redoing your life once you’ve made major life decisions, like having children. Like most Richard Curtis films, the romance is kind of the Macguffin, because this is really the story of the love between a father and son and an excuse to have a cast of supporting characters, here played by folks like Tom Hollander, Tom Hughes, Vanessa Kirby, Margot Robbie, Richard E. Grant, Richard Griffiths, and Joshua Maguire.
About Time is available on VOD, and streaming on Netflix in the US
I’m Your Man (Maria Schrader, 2021)
Synopsis: Cuneiform researcher Alma (Maren Eggert) is asked to test out a new AI robot, Tom (Dan Stevens), who has been designed to be her perfect man. For three weeks, he’ll live with her and learn from her, and at the end, she’ll write a report about the experience, evaluating what he’s like as a partner. She’s annoyed by the inconvenience, and decided to put him up in her spare room, treat him unkindly like a robot, and hope he’ll leave her alone. But when she faces a major loss in her career, while still grieving from personal loss, she decides to take comfort in Tom, and has to deal with how that conflicts with her personal values.
I’m Your Man is available on VOD in Canada and the US, and on Curzon Home Cinema in the UK.
Show Notes
- Read Alex’s review of I’m Your Man
- Register for The Seventh Circle, a symposium on gender, sexuality, and disability in horror cinema.
- Sign up for updates on the first book to ever be published on the films of Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier
Related Episodes
- Ep. 110: Brief encounters: Weekend and End of the Century
- Ep. 92: Commodifying Women: Sugar Daddy and An Easy Girl
- Ep. 89: Coming of Age at Forty: Spinster and The Forty-Year-Old Version
- Ep. 73: Explorations of rape culture in Promising Young Woman and The Assistant (Members Only)
- Ep. 61: Toxic male privilege in The Riot Club and What Richard Did (Members Only)
