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 true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, a movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film in the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Scott Tobias here with...

Genevieve Katsky, Tasha Robinson.

Keith Phipps.

On the first half of this episode, we discussed Joe Dante's Gremlin's Two, the new batch, an anarchic and idiosyncratic sequel to his hit comedy.

In this episode, we're looking at Deadpool 2, which doesn't reinvent the original Deadpool, so much as amplify its

violence and vulgar self-awareness. Deadpool 2 was directed by David Leach, one of the stuntmen

turned directors behind the John Wick movies, and so perhaps it's fitting that it kicks off with

a home invasion and a death for which the hero feels responsible. Early in the film, Wade Wilson, aka

Deadpool, played by Ryan Reynolds, and his girlfriend Vanessa, played by Morana Baccarin,

are shown committing themselves to each other and discussing baby names for their first kid,

so of course Vanessa gets immediately killed. Deadpool tries to commit suicide, but alas, his indestructibility is a curse he has to live with. In the absence of the family he intended to create with Vanessa, Deadpool strikes out and acquires a mutant outcast surrogate family of his own, starting with a boy named Russell, a.k.a. Firefist, played by Julian Denison, who you'll remember as the kid from Hunt for the Wilder

People.

Russell has pyrotechnic powers, but he's been living in a kind of miserable orphanage

for young mutants.

Other deadpool friends include Colossus, a Russian with titanium skin, and Domino,

played by Zazi Beetz, whose helpful superpower is Luck.

Their nemesis is Cable, played by Josh Brolin, a cybernetic soldier from the future who comes

back to kill Russell before the boy grows up to kill his family.

...