It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with...

Keith Phipps. Scott Tobias.

Genevieve is off at a memorial service for a certain movie docks and that got kicked with the power of a punch, but she should be back on an upcoming episode.

Last week, we broke the rules and

talked about Fight Club, David Fincher's adaptation of Chuck Pollanick's scabrous novel about a suffering

every man who becomes a sort of modern folk hero. Kind of. The things that Fight Club was

exploring back in 1999, the lost feeling of a generation of men who didn't feel like they'd been

raised to be janitors

and insurance adjusters and airplane cleaners, all gets brought up again in Riley Stern's new movie

The Art of Self-Defense, a dark comedy about a nervous, weak young man named Casey, played by

Jesse Eisenberg, who has a personal crisis when he's attacked on the street. Looking to reclaim

his man, he enrolls at a martial art school run by a man known as Sensei, played by Alessandro Nivola. Sensei quickly decides Casey is his ideal student, and he brings him in on a secret underground scene of fighters who engage in their own version of the kind of transgressive tactics that Tyler Durdon plays with in Fight Club. Both of these films are ultimately about the catharsis of violence and about what it means to be a man in the modern world, and about how easy it is to fall for a charismatic leader who claims to have all the answers. They're both about the appeals of conformity and the horrors and dangers of it. The art of self-defense isn't as stylish as fight Club, but it's a similarly hard-to-market film

that's much funnier, darker, and weirder than it originally looks.

And while it doesn't mimic Fight Club's famous twist, it does rely on some twists of its own to tell the story.

We'll be back in a minute to talk about how these two films totally fight with each other.

Or maybe get along with each other like brothers.

We'll see. I'm taking my first class today.

Your new white belt?

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