Last week, you voted on the sci-fi movies community watchlist. The votes are in, and now you can see the final results. Congratulations to this month's winner, Ben L.

Corky and her lover scheme to steal millions of dollars from the mob.

→ Leather. Fucking every character in this film loves leather. I swear, the Wachowskis must have reused several of the costumes from Bound in their 1999 smash hit, The Matrix. So. Much. Leather.

→ Joey Pants. AKA Joe Pantoliano. The dude who trades the whole world for a juicy steak in The Matrix. Without a doubt one of the most fun actors, cast often in the nineties as a foul-mouthed, arrogant prick.

→ Eroticism, lesbianism. That the film prominently features a lesbian relationship without trivializing it is quite an anomaly, considering it was released in the mid-nineties. There’s a reason the film is much cherished in the queer community.

→ Neo-noir, heist. The dialogue is corny. The camerawork, unmistakably Wachowski. The heist, planned before your very eyes.

The Wachowski’s Bound is a good time.

Part of the reason I like it, no doubt, is that I can watch Joe Pantoliano get angry all day long. Your author submits that if you don’t like seeing Joey Pants angry, you lack a certain part of the soul, that special spark the rest of us share as a universal element of the great human experience.

More importantly, this movie is a brilliant little time capsule. Within it, a litany of classic movie tropes.

There’s the film noir femme fatale, played to perfection by Jennifer Tilly. There’s the heist planning scene, where the lead characters are shown experiencing the heist going off without a hitch. There’s the mobster that says “capeesh” a whole lot. There’s a mob grunt who always seems to get too angry and take things too far, portrayed by Christopher Meloni. No character reads as absolutely trustworthy.

And yet, despite its fixation on cinematic tropes, the film subverts the testosterone-dominated film noir genre by pitting the mob against two strong, gay female characters, instead of, I don’t know, Nic Cage.

The whole thing is stylish, twisty, fun, and (I’ll say it) sort of hot. And you can see these little cinematographic flourishes that the Wachowski’s would go on to re-use in The Matrix.

I recommend it. Obviously. Because the premise of this newsletter is that we recommend movies. And I’m writing about this one. I’m not sure why or how, but I seem to have forgotten how to conclude recommendations today. Capeesh? Capeesh.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say "oh, neat."

→ The film barely avoided an NC-17 rating. Jennifer Tilly says of the Wachowskis: “They went back [to the ratings board] eight times. You're only supposed to go back three times, but they were like, 'Oh, well, we're from Chicago. We don't really know.”

→ Author Susie Bright served as a consultant for the film’s depiction of lesbian sex. The film is often lauded for its articulate portrayal of strong female, LGBTQ+ characters. Jennifer Tilly explains: "We didn't want it to be like a Penthouse vision of lesbians where they're wearing high heels and pearls and lingerie…”