Pip: The Last Movie Guy — where even the documentaries have better narrative structure than most feature films.
Mara: Hugo Pagan Soto has been watching closely this week — films about exile and memory, about timelines that fold back on themselves, and about the messy, mythologized business of making a Hollywood legend.
Pip: So, stories about how stories get told. Let’s start with memory — and what cinema does when it refuses to let the past stay buried.
Memory And Time In Cinema
Mara: The question anchoring both films in this segment is deceptively simple: who gets to tell a story, and from where in time do they tell it?
Pip: Edward Said: Between Worlds opens exactly there. Director Maiken Baird makes a pointed structural choice — no outside historians, no commentators. Said speaks for himself, through archive recordings and family footage.
Mara: The film draws directly from Said’s own words. Here he is on the Palestinian cause: “I firmly believe that the historical and moral sufficiency of the Palestinian cause will ultimately survive and overcome any attempt to distort it.”
Pip: And Baird’s formal choice mirrors that conviction — letting Said narrate his own legacy is itself an act of the argument he spent his career making.
Mara: The review frames it precisely: the decision to exclude journalists and academics is not merely formal, but deeply consistent with Said’s own thinking, given how much of his academic work exposed how the West controlled the narrative surrounding the Middle East.
Pip: Home movies filmed by Said’s father offer a glimpse of Jerusalem before the Nakba of 1948. That’s rare material — a Palestinian perspective on a conflict whose dominant narrative has historically come from somewhere else entirely.
Mara: The Age of Goodbyes works a different angle on the same territory. Edmund Yeo’s film, adapted from Li Zi Shu’s novel, runs multiple timelines in parallel — a grieving man named Kai discovers a book, falls into the story of a woman living through Malaysia’s 1969 racial riots, and finds his own grief reflected there.
Pip: Memory as inheritance rather than recollection — that’s the film’s real claim.
Mara: Exactly. The review describes how “the chronology of events arrives like the memories of the characters, seemingly blurring the boundaries between past and present, between the real and the mystical.” Caves function as literal portals between time periods.
Pip: Two five-star films, one week apart, both insisting that the past doesn’t stay where you put it.
Mara: Which is maybe the most honest thing cinema can say about how memory actually works. Speaking of stories that refuse to stay buried — the Rocky origin is next.
Hollywood Origins And Mythmaking
Mara: I Play Rocky asks what it costs to drag a legend into existence — and whether Hollywood can examine its own myth-making without flinching.
Pip: Peter Farrelly’s answer is: yes, but make it funny enough that the flinching feels like a feature.
Mara: The review’s verdict on Anthony Ippolito’s performance is unambiguous: “He is not imitating Sylvester Stallone; he embodies him.” Body language, physicality, vocal tone — the assessment is that Ippolito achieves what Stallone himself could not playing himself.
Pip: That’s a real claim. And the film earns it by not chasing heroism — it tracks the making of a hero, frame by frame, which is a different and harder thing.
Mara: The review closes by quoting V for Vendetta: “The best of endings. The kind of ending that only celluloid can deliver.” Farrelly apparently agrees — and builds toward exactly that.
Pip: Hollywood looks at itself, finds the underdog story inside the underdog story, and raises it like a trophy.
Mara: Exile, inherited memory, the myth that gets made in a editing room — this week’s films all circle the same question: whose version of the past survives?
Pip: Next time, we find out what else The Last Movie Guy has been watching. Don’t touch that dial.