Pass the Salt! 

This week, Andi and Lise chat about the movie Salt (2010) starring Angelina Jolie as a kickass action heroine who may or may not be a Russian sleeper agent. Jolie – Evelyn Salt – is an agent with the CIA who may also have been trained in Russia as a child and placed in the U.S. for a day when she and several others would activate to enact circumstances to create war between Russia and the U.S. As viewers, we’re trying to figure out where her loyalties lie as she runs from the CIA after a Russian agent shows up at CIA headquarters allegedly to defect and ostensibly activates her. Pulse-pounding excellent espionage thriller with lots of twists and turns. Also, Jolie should be in all the action films. 

Salt trailer 

Shout-outs: 

Lise recommends that we go watch Wandavision, available on Disney Plus and Hulu. It’s a miniseries based on the Marvel comic character Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff). It shared continuity with the Avengers universe, but you don’t need to have seen all the Avengers films to enjoy it. Set after Endgame, Wanda and Vision are living a nice life in the suburbs, but things are not as they seem. 

Andi is feeding her lifelong fascination with the Soviet Union and is reading Adam Higginbotham’s 2019 Midnight in Chernobyl, about what happened at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine in 1986 that resulted in the worst nuclear disaster in history that may have contributed to the end of the Soviet Union. Absolutely gripping and horrifying.