S4E41: Blue Collar
Paul Schrader's directorial debut, Blue Collar explores three american auto workers' attempt to solve their problems by robbing their union office. Starring Richard Pryor 'playing straight', the entire movie is worth it for one spectacularly haunting scene.
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HANDS OFF LEBANON
Here are some fundraisers to support collective rebuilding and survival efforts on the ground in Lebanon.
-Beit El-Baraka started out as a food bank, but has grown to help people afford rent, cover their essentials, and live with dignity.
https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-directly/ or donate in general https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-now/
-LiveLove was a charity for a number of other matters, but since 2024 has been solely comitted to helping people displaced by Israeli attacks.
https://livelove.org/donate
-Lebanese Food Bank supports displaced and impoverished people
https://lebanesefoodbank.org/take-action/donate/
Solar Powered Lebanon is an initiative to restore people's power using solar panels, since larger infrastructure is at constant risk of attack.
https://fundahope.com/en/campaigns/solar-powered-lebanon
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FREE PALESTINE
My friend Ahmed still needs to feed his family and afford medicine. Anything you can kick in would be hugely appreciated.
https://chuffed.org/project/150817-please-help-ahmed-and-his-family-get-food-drink-and-medicine
And these are some more general links you can support collective efforts with!
-The Palestinian Communist Youth Union is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine
https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity
-Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla
https://www.waterislifegaza.org/
-Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also
https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848
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WEB DESIGN ALERT
Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here: https://www.tomallen.media/
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Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the everything app account
Comments (49)
i'm sorry devon but the joke about werewolf legs has activated the Furry Autism, because digitigrade legs absolutely do not "bend backwards"! a dog's hind legs have all the same joints in the same orientation as yours, just spaced out differently - what looks like a "backwards knee" on a digitigrade leg is directly analogous to your ankle. if you stand up on the balls of your feet and imagine having way longer feet and shorter calves, that's roughly what having werewolf legs would be like (sorry for tedious online Um Actuallying, but a lot of art and stories even within furry and TF enthusiast circles made by people who *ought* to know better get this wrong too, so it strikes a nerve lol)
Flashing back to being irrationally annoyed at my beloved Animorphs as a kid
The way I did The YouTube Face when they announced Fury Road episode
im SO hype for baby driver omgg that one changed my latently bisexual baby butch brain chemistry
Woody Allen didn't say that, Mel Brooks did. If you want more Yaphet Kotto and cars, you could do Midnight Run.
So long as your drifting back into Heist Season, The Town (2010) is a good heist movie with sk e great driving.
Praying for both versions of Pelham 123 because the Tony Scott movie does also have some interesting stuff in it 🙏
Okay y'all this is making me crazy. Maybe this is regional to the UK or something but where I'm living and where I've recently lived (Chicago and Minneapolis), for like fifty years, orange flagging is "anything goes / wildcard / freaky shit, unspecific." I helped found a small press and we do t4t kink magazines, some of which are flagging color themed, and we printed our first issue, broadly around kink in general, with an orange cover lol. Am I losing my mind???
Loved it, but I have to say: any list of Heist Movies©®™ that doesn't include Logan Lucky is incomplete.
I am very excited to listen to the Baby Driver episode, right after I watch the Well There's Your Problem episode on Chernobyl.
This would be the time to suggest a much more fun than F+F Car Man/Heist movie in Taxi (1998(Fr)).
"Caroline knows who the boss in my home." Unionise the wives! Down with management/husbands! EDIT: Since the SCUM system is now being updated for a modern context, may I request that the M score for Goldfinger be updated to a perfect (perfectly evil) ten? A textually advocated and successful so-called "corrective" rape just feels like it should score to make as the most misogynistic thing I've ever seen in any movie, and the fact that it is so despicable is causing later movies to score less misogynistic than I believe they probably deserve.
As soon as you brought up the right wing art joke, I thought of how my Twitter feed has been full of Charlie Kirk furry memes for the past 3 days
Completely unrelated, but I would quite like to see y'all have a critical look at the new Bond game and how it handles masculinity, violence, etc, in comparison to the movies.
I have been asking for mad max fury road for years and you have finally given it to me Abby Thank you
TonyTut
I did check letterboxd and, indeed, is one of the top 3 most popular reviews a snarky one liner gag about the dildo fight. Very well observed.
Jh
You love 1970's films, you love Yaphet Koto, you love working class jobs, you love tall women with strong jawlines, you are partial to a bit of space.... come on it is right there, it even has an egg cracking on the poster!
Amazing love the work as always. I have a suggestion, if we want to dig deep into the relationship between man and car perhaps we should consider the Stephen king movie Christine from 1983. Not good but I bet there’s a lot to talk about
Please please watch Bandits before heist season ends. It is my only wish
Last temptation of Christ for Paul schrader
I've been listening to a lot of old episodes I missed and am deeply in the Friday brain fog and when the SCUM change happened I was so confused as to how I missed it whenever this came out. Nobody should expect me to think at the end of the day, least of all myself
Have you seen Christopher Nolan interviewing Edgar Wright about Baby Driver? Truly one of the interviews of all time
I wonder if we'd get 'D&D: Honor Among Thieves' as a mainline episode (it is a heist film after all...) I'm still amazed they have yet to do 'Josie and the Pussycats'. It was in UK and Irish cinemas when 9/11 happened people!
Oh that would be fun! I also feel like they really excel at finding the ideology in films that are trying to be milquetoast
God, I am so hyped for The Blues Brothers. Edit: YES, FURY ROAD!
The moral is that Dudes Don’t Rock except for Yaphet Kotto.
We need some leftist heist movies that are revolutionarily optimistic. Andor technically counts as one of those, right? I'd love to see a heist movie about the early life of Stalin. I remember after listening to the episode on Inside Man, I made a comment about how there should be a heist movie where everyone is in on it, everyone in the bank is playing a part in robbing the bank, because the bank has screwed each of them over in some form, and they all conspire to be there on the day of the robbery to establish a false narrative to mislead the cops, access the vault, and move the money out. A proletarian heist.
Andor should definitely be done. There's a conversation to be had about the nature of TV storytelling and how it differs from cinema, because they are different things, and by the normal run of things TV, even good TV, especially good TV, is a different beast. But I would argue that Andor is structurally eight movies and then you have him walk into the opening scene of Rogue One. It's cinema. It's moving so fast it doesn't have time to be TV.
"The welfare or something" comment: a couple months ago, one of the guys I work with mention how tired he was of illegal immigrants getting free houses from the government. He then quickly added "not that I'm saying that's happening"
The mentality of these people is insanity. They can believe two completely contradictory ideas at once.
Oh my God, you need to do First Reformed.
Came here to say this!
After the never ending gruel of Fast and Furious movies, I'm glad we've earned unlimited desserts for the next few episodes.
If we are doing Richard Pryor movies may I suggest Silverstreak? Even of its more of murder mystery than a hiest film.
And trains!
Having worked manual labour jobs (only over a few summers to pay for university) I must agree with the depiction of foremen. Though I did have the joy of seeing a hard ass bite your head off for existing foreman turn into a total simpering kiss ass when the company's director showed up one day for inspection.
Fury Road let's gooooooooooo!!!
I hope they do more more of the Max Max series at somepoint too
The first appearance of the SCUM-R
Damien Darkblood Be gay solve crimes episode when? XD
am i crazy or wasn't this episode supposed to be baby driver?
I think maybe Abi's bonus pick is Baby Driver, but this week is a main line episode therefore it's Blue Collar
The narrative structure here really reminds me of the movie Sorry to Bother you from 2018 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5688932/). It's about a working class black man trying to get a better job. He ends up working at a telemarketing firm because he has really good 'white voice'. Hilarity ensues.
I worked at a plant that made fiberglass cloth. We melted marbles, extruded hair thin strands of glass, and spun it onto giant bobbins. If you grabbed the strands just right, you'd end up with a golf ball sized lump of semi molten glass. It was considered a right of passage to light your cigarette off this osha violation
[riff plays]🎶Shake hands with danger🎵
Help me out here, which one of my Prominent Leftist Podcasts covered this movie like 5 years ago? Wasn't Action Boyz. Maybe Trillbillies crossed over with someone else like Dave Anthony? Wait, was it Chapo? They did a double feature with this movie and "Gung Ho" starring Michael Keaton I have several pairs of whitey tighties because I'm a cheapskate and they were on clearance and they're like a quarter the price of dark colored briefs. After working hard in them, I rediscover why most people don't wear them.
Heists!