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The Christmas Shoes · This Film is Lit

• 0:04
  Speaker A: This Film Is lit, the podcast where we finally settle the score on one simple. Is the book really better than the movie? I'm Brian, and I have a film degree, so I watch the movie but don't read the book.
• 0:15
  Speaker B: And I'm Katie. I have an English degree, so I do things the right way and read the book before we watch the movie.
• 0:22
  Speaker A: So prepare to be wowed by our expertise and charm as we dissect all of your favorite film adaptations and decide if the silver screen or the written word did it better. So turn it up, settle in, and get ready for spoilers because this film is lit. Sir, I want to buy these shoes for my mama, please. It's Christmas Eve, and these shoes are just her size. Could you hurry, sir? Daddy says there's not much time. It's the Christmas shoes, and this filter film is lit. Hello, and welcome back to this Film Is lit, the podcast where we talk about movies that are based on books. It is our Christmas 2024 special. We're talking about a made for TV film.
• 1:15
  Speaker B: We're kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel.
• 1:18
  Speaker A: Some of the bigger Christmas movies, we'll. We'll figure it out, but.
• 1:22
  Speaker B: Well, we're gonna have to go back to the Christmas Carol.
• 1:24
  Speaker A: Well, I think. I think definitely gonna go back to the Christmas Carol. Well, and there may be some others that. Yeah, we're gonna do some. Cause we're running out. You would think there'd be way more.
• 1:34
  Speaker B: Than there are things, but there's not.
• 1:37
  Speaker A: Yes, but we do have, I believe, every one of our segments. No, guess who.
• 1:40
  Speaker B: We don't have a guess who.
• 1:41
  Speaker A: Okay, no guess who this week, but we have every other one of our segments. So we'll jump right in. If you have not read or watched the Christmas Shoes, which I imagine will be quite a few people because it's not particularly easy anymore. So here is a summary in. Let me sum up. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. This summary is sourced from Wikipedia. Attorney Robert Layton visits a local cemetery before Christmas. He sees a younger man wearing a Boston Red Sox cap visiting a grave years earlier. In the days leading up to Christmas, workaholic Robert sees a pair of red shoes having fallen out of a delivery truck. He returns the shoes to a store owner named Tom Wilson. When Robert's car fails to start, Tom tells Robert about a repair shop owned by Jack Andrews, whose wife Maggie has congestive heart failure and needs a transplant. Robert's wife Kate takes over Maggie's volunteer job directing the local school's Christmas choir. Nathan, Jack and Maggie's young son, overhears Maggie telling Kate that she and Jack would go dancing on their anniversary. Nathan goes to Wilson's store and finds the red shoes that Robert returned and saves money to buy the shoes by collecting empty cans. Nathan opens up about Maggie's story to his teacher Dalton Gregory, a neighbor of Robert's mother, Ellen, who consoles him, counsels him, consoles him, probably both, I don't know. Ellen gives Nathan her son's old Red Sox cap, then writes a note and puts it in Robert's childhood lunchbox. Maggie does not receive a heart transplant. Ellen sees Dalton loading bags of cans into his cars and says she is going to leave the Christmas lights on for a while. When the lights are still on the next morning, Dalton discovers that Ellen has died. Dalton tells Nathan that his wife died 11 years ago and then directs him to find some cans in the alley. On Christmas Eve, Nathan rushes to Tom's store and Robert arrives Shortly after they convince the store clerk to open the door. Nathan wants to buy the shoes, but the clerk tells him that he doesn't have enough money. Nathan explains that he wants the shoes for his mother so that she will be beautiful in heaven. Robert pays for the shoes and overjoyed, Nathan runs home. Robert leaves the store without the last minute gifts that he had planned to buy and unable to start his car, he asks Tom for a ride. Nathan gives Maggie the shoes. Robert and Tom arrive at the new location for the Christmas concert and discover that Kate as well as her and Robert's daughter Lily are caroling for Mag. Robert and Kate reconcile. The family sees the light go off in Maggie's room. Robert sees the package his mother Ellen had sent and reads the note inside. Back in the present, Robert tells the young man that he likes his Red Sox cap. After the younger man leaves, Robert sees the red shoes on the grave and realizes that the younger man is now a grown Nathan and calls after him, but he has driven off. Robert smiles. The end.
• 4:17
  Speaker B: That is a sum of that was all like mostly?
• 4:20
  Speaker A: Yeah, it was pretty correct but it.
• 4:21
  Speaker B: Was like out of order.
• 4:23
  Speaker A: A little out of order, yeah, but it was mostly correct.
• 4:25
  Speaker B: It was mostly right.
• 4:26
  Speaker A: There is your summary of the film the Christmas shoes Katie, I got some questions. Let's get into them. In Was that in the book?
• 4:34
  Speaker B: Gaston? May I have my book please?
• 4:36
  Speaker A: How can you read this? There's no pictures.
• 4:39
  Speaker B: Well, some people use their imagination.
• 4:42
  Speaker A: So does the story open up the film? As I read in the summary there opens up kind of with a in present Time. And then we flashback and get the actual main narrative. And I wanted to know if the story or if the book did the same thing with Robb starting with Rob Lowe visiting a cemetery before we flashback the actual story. I also, at the very beginning of the film, discovered that Rob Lowe's character in the movie is named Robert, which was great for me because I was only ever going to call him Rob Lowe. So it's his real name and his character name, which is great.
• 5:13
  Speaker B: Yes. The book and the movie start out exactly the same with Robert visiting the cemetery on Christma, although we don't know whose grave he's visiting until the end of the story in the book.
• 5:24
  Speaker A: Same thing in the movie.
• 5:26
  Speaker B: I'm pretty sure he says something about his mom at the beginning.
• 5:29
  Speaker A: Oh, does he? Oh, Rob's. Yeah.
• 5:30
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 5:31
  Speaker A: Yeah, I guess. Yeah, you might be right. I can't recall. But yeah, that actually does sound correct. So then we cut, after we flash back in time, kind of the events that kick off our narrative somewhat, although I don't know how much it matters. It's.
• 5:45
  Speaker B: It doesn't really matter.
• 5:46
  Speaker A: This part's kind of interesting, but Rob Lowe is out on the street and a truck drives away. And as it's driving away, a box falls off the back. And it's a box that has these red shoes in it. And I wanted to know if the events of the book are also kicked off by Rob finding a pair of truly hideous shoes after they fall off of a truck.
• 6:07
  Speaker B: No, this does not happen in the book. We do not encounter the shoes until Nathan tries to buy them at the end. And honestly, I didn't really mind this. They're kind of operating as a bizarre Chekhov's gun, which is maybe the most interesting storytelling choice the movie made throughout the entire thing. And it also doesn't really matter. So it doesn't disrupt anything.
• 6:33
  Speaker A: No. Yeah. Rob Lowe just has him and keeps saying he's gonna take him back to the store and forgetting for a while, and then does take them back to the store, and then that's how they are at the store. But that's the whole thing. Yeah.
• 6:46
  Speaker B: My beef with the shoes is that they don't look like shoes from 1985. No, they have that, like, floral, like, Asian quote unquote fabric. I don't know. I'm sure that fabric has a name. I don't know what to call it. That's, like, so late 90s, early 2000s. It was, like, really big in that era. And then the heel is, like, a little too chunky. And the toe is a little too rounded for them to be shoes from the 80s. So a description of the titular Christmas shoes from the book. Okay, they look completely different. The shoes were shiny, silver, aglow, with red, blue, and green rhinestones and shimmering sequins.
• 7:30
  Speaker A: So that sounds equally hideous, just in.
• 7:32
  Speaker B: Different way hideous, but very 80s, more 80s.
• 7:36
  Speaker A: The sequins definitely makes it more 80s, whereas the one in the movies are very much.
• 7:42
  Speaker B: They. They look like sho you could have purchased in the late 90s, which is.
• 7:47
  Speaker A: What they are, because that is when this movie was made. So. Yeah, that makes sense. So then we're introduced to our main family, which is Nathan, the son. And then Jack and Maggie are the mother and father.
• 8:00
  Speaker B: I mean, we're following, like, two main families.
• 8:02
  Speaker A: Sorry. Yeah, that is the two main families, but this is the one that the boy from the store family, the literally, the boy from the Christmas shoes song. And Rob Lowe would be the dude, the guy who's singing, I guess. But in this opening scene, we're introduced, and it's kind of setting up where our characters are starting here. And Jack really wants a pet dog. He really wants a puppy.
• 8:25
  Speaker B: No, Nathan does.
• 8:26
  Speaker A: Sorry, Nathan. Yeah, sorry, Jack sounds like a little kid's name to me more than Nathan. So, yeah, Nathan wants a dog really bad. A puppy. But his dad is like, no, you're not getting a puppy. And when his son's asked, why not? His dad walks into the other room and then carries out a small fish bowl that has, like, six dead goldfish floating in it and sets it on the table and is like, there you go. That's why we're not getting a puppy, because you killed your fish. And I was like, man, this dad seems like a real asshole. And he. He's not as much of an asshole the rest of the movie, but the. The setup here, and I. I guess it is kind of the journey he goes on is to learn to be, like, a better dad, gentler with his son and a better dad. Yeah. And, like, that's kind of his arc.
• 9:12
  Speaker B: Yeah. Because they do get a puppy at the end. We see them.
• 9:16
  Speaker A: So that is his arc. It's just, man, he seems like a real big jerk in this opening scene, and I wanted to know if it came from the book.
• 9:22
  Speaker B: No, the scene does not come from the book. And I, too, found it incredibly strange. Like, y'all just have been letting this entire bowl full of dead goldfish sit around rotting in your house for two weeks. Because I'm pretty sure he says it's been sitting for two weeks.
• 9:37
  Speaker A: It's like two weeks.
• 9:38
  Speaker B: Like, forget Nathan. Nobody in this house is responsible enough for a puppy. And to address the idea of Jack being an asshole in this scene. So a big part of my beef with the song the Christmas Shoes is that because I'm gonna have to talk about.
• 9:59
  Speaker A: Because the song does make an appearance in the film. We'll get to that later. But it's not. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
• 10:04
  Speaker B: So part of my beef with the song is that because there's so little context, I spent a good chun of my, like, younger years interpreting the line, could you hurry, sir? Daddy says there's not much time. As the little boy saying, my dad sent me out to buy these shoes and told me to hurry because we don't have much time left.
• 10:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I.
• 10:28
  Speaker B: Which, like. Which always really pissed me off because, like, what kind of asshole are you to send your kid out on Christmas Eve while his mother is actively dying to get a pair of shoes for her? Okay, so it helped me a lot that both the book and the movie set this up as like a secret plot by Nathan.
• 10:49
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 10:50
  Speaker B: To go get the shoes on his own. But all that to say I was actually pleasantly surprised by Jack in the book because he seems like a pretty good guy. There's a scene where he's crying about his dying wife and starts to like, wipe his eyes so that Nathan won't see him crying. And then he stops and self corrects and he's like, no, it's not bad. If Nathan sees me crying, that's good actually. And I really appreciated that. Like, it still feels ahead of its time somehow. And the movie didn't quite take me back to square one with how I felt about the dad character. But the characterization was like, not my favorite.
• 11:28
  Speaker A: I will say after this first scene, he's mostly fine and seems like a guy just doing his best. But this opening scene, he just seems like an asshole.
• 11:35
  Speaker B: Yeah, the opening, like a giant asshole thing is like, weird.
• 11:38
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I was like, that's a. Yeah. Completely unhinged. And the mom just kind of like, oh, you. The whole thing. And I'm just like, no, this is weird. Don't. But again, after that, he kind of seems fairly normal and just like a dude trying. So then we cut to Nathan at school and I couldn't figure out what was going on in this scene. Initially he is in class and it's. His teacher is like reading from a book, like reading a play or something. And for some reason, Maggie, Nathan's mom, is there. We'll find out later that she is a volunteer, like, choir teacher. I'm still not sure why she's in this room in this moment, but she's there in the classroom. And as he's. The teacher is reading, Nathan, like, starts acting out. He, like, rolls up a ball paper and throws it at another kid or whatever. And so the teacher calls him to the front of the classroom and makes him read in front of everybody. And then at the end of the scene, Maggie, like, chimes in and talks about how she used to have magical shoes in a seemingly out of. No, I. This whole scene is so strange to me. I will say, overall, this movie was not that. Actually not like, as bad as I was expecting, but this scene was very weird to me. Does any of this come from the book? Why is she there? Also, when he starts acting out with his mom, literally in the classroom, I was like, no, that's like, the one time.
• 13:04
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 13:07
  Speaker A: Any of that from the book?
• 13:10
  Speaker B: Oh, none of that is from the book. There is a mention that Maggie used to sometimes volunteer as, like, a room mother, but. But when the book starts, she's already sick enough that she hasn't done that for a long time. So we never, like, see her volunteer at school. In the book, the magic shoes thing is kind of from the book. There is a scene where the teacher has all of the students share their favorite Christmas memories. And then the one that the teacher shares is how when she was a kid, she got a pair of shoes for Christmas that made her feel like they were magic because they were really cool shoes or something. Okay. And that's kind of where Nathan gets the idea to buy Maggie a special pair of shoes. But that's pretty much where the similarities end here.
• 13:55
  Speaker A: It's also particularly weird cause this scene doesn't. This isn't the scene where Nathan gets the idea.
• 14:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, they add in a secondary scene later for him to get the idea.
• 14:06
  Speaker A: And so this scene with her talking about the shoes and, like, she just starts kind of crying in the middle.
• 14:10
  Speaker B: It's such a strange, very odd scene. And then.
• 14:14
  Speaker A: Because you also just don't know why she's there even once. I know she's a teacher, like a choir volunteer. I'm still not sure why she was in the classroom in that moment. I don't know. It's a weird scene. Well, sorry, I was going to bring.
• 14:26
  Speaker B: Up the kid who, like, made the face.
• 14:30
  Speaker A: Yeah. Because then after she says her little spiel, it cuts to a kid who just like.
• 14:34
  Speaker B: Just like a random kid in the.
• 14:35
  Speaker A: Class looking at her, like, with a blank stare on his face. Like, what? It's interesting. So then we are introduced to. We've already seen him, but Rob Lowe's character, Rob Robert, who is a lawyer in this small town. And it's a pretty classic setup where we find out that he, like, he misses a bunch of important stuff in his family's life because he's so committed to his job. He's a workaholic. He spends hours upon hours in the office working. And one of the things that I thought was really strange about this premise of this movie, and I guess we'll probably talk more about it later when we actually get to the conclusion, is that I initially could not tell. So the traditional premise here would be he's a workaholic, he's spending too much time in the office. And what his job is as, like, a high power lawyer is doing, like, shitty lawyer stuff. Like he, you know, is. Yeah, I don't know, doing like, corporate mergers or just boring stuff either. Boring stuff that, like, is generic and just making him money. Or, like actively evil stuff like, you know, I don't know, like suing, like, single mothers or something like, you know.
• 15:47
  Speaker B: That would be trying to get the orphanage shut down or something.
• 15:50
  Speaker A: That would be like the traditional setup. But the movie very early on kind of implied, and this is why I asked the question, that his job is like, he's helping some farmers do something, like fight some lawsuit from some big organization or company or something. And I was like, wait a second. So is he a good. And it took me quite a while because then later on they do some more legal jargon later in the movie. And I wasn't quite sure, like, who's he helping? And it gets even more complicated. But ultimately. So I think the movie kind of tries to have both ways where it's like. Because ultimately what we will find out is that what he is doing is that he is helping a bunch of farmers who live in their town fight back against this big company called, like, Purity or something, which is an environmentalist organization, apparently, because this movie. Oh, my God, it's gonna take me forever to get through this. But environmentalist organization that it wants to close a bunch of farms because they're supposedly, they're the farming irrigation is messing with a local lake which is harming an endangered fish population in the lake. And so Rob Lowe is trying to help these farmers prove that they're not actually harming these fish. Or if they are, who cares? Because the fish suck. I think he kind of alludes to at one point. So they get this weird premise where the movie wants us of ultimately revealed at the end that Rob Lowe is actually working for, like, what the movie wants us to think is a good cause. I think it's a little telling. And part of the weird sort of, like, crypto fascism of this movie that is, like, hidden under the surface is that the organization, the bad guy is like, an environmentalist organization that has, like, ulterior motives that really, they don't care about the environment. They just want to snatch up land for cheap and sell it or whatever and enrich themselves. Which to me, felt like one of those little plot points. I'm like, okay, yeah. But the thing that. So all that aside, the thing that's really interesting is that in the movie's universe, Rob Lowe, the work he's doing and the thing he's burning the midnight oil for is to, like, a good thing to help all these. He, like, has to do this work to keep these farmers from losing their land. And I wanted to know if that whole element came from the book, because the movie kind of has to. Is trying to have its cake and eat it here, too, by having him be a workaholic who needs to learn proper work, life balance. But also the work he's doing is super important, and he's a great man for doing all the work he did when we get to the end. Anyways. What come from the book?
• 18:34
  Speaker B: So he is a lawyer in the book, and I feel like the movie went much harder on trying to make him, like, quote unquote, one of the good lawyers. In the book, he works for, like, a big law firm, and he wanted to be, like, a hotshot courtroom guy.
• 18:53
  Speaker A: Right.
• 18:53
  Speaker B: But he got stuck doing all of their bankruptcy cases. So now he's the bankruptcy guy, and that doesn't interest him.
• 19:00
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 19:01
  Speaker B: And so the book goes more the track of, like, keeping it kind of vague of, like, exactly what, like, they say bankruptcies, but that doesn't ever get into, like, do we think this is a moral thing or not? Yeah, I. I kind of struggled with his characterization in the book for a slightly different reason. Because in the book, it seems like he doesn't enjoy his job at all. Like, it doesn't seem like he likes people doing what he does or, you know, he doesn't seem, like, particularly ambitious in his career. But then everyone around him insists that his job is, like, the only thing he cares about.
• 19:45
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's.
• 19:46
  Speaker B: And it just felt. And I'm like, okay. I was, like, reading it and trying to figure out. I was like, maybe this, like, weird dissonance between, like, what we hear from his perspective versus, like, what everybody else is saying about it is the point. But it really bugged me because I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take away from it.
• 20:04
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's weird. That is weird in a different way than what the movie does is because at least you understand in the movie that why he's doing what he's doing. Like, ultimately you figure out that, yeah, he's doing what he think, you know, what seemingly is a good cause helping these. At least in the movies universe, helping these small farmers keep their farms. But. But yeah, that's really weird. I don't.
• 20:30
  Speaker B: It was, like, very strange because, like, we would. The book jumps around from perspectives and it utilizes both first person and third person.
• 20:41
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 20:41
  Speaker B: And the only time we're in. I think the only time we're ever in first person is in Robert's point of view. So whenever we're, like, in his point of view, he, like, thinks about how he doesn't really enjoy what he's doing and he doesn't really have any desire to, like, embiggen his career beyond where he is. And, like, he wishes that he had started his own law firm, but it's, like, too late for him to do that. And then. But then, like, when we're talking to other characters, they're like, well, y'all. You. Your work is your mistress and all you care about is your work. And I'm like, does he, though? Because it doesn't seem like he does.
• 21:22
  Speaker A: That's very strange. Anyways. Yeah, that. That part. And we'll get more to this later with the movie's version of it because at the end it's like, oh, yeah, okay. I guess he was right the whole time. I don't like.
• 21:34
  Speaker B: Whatever.
• 21:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, okay. But so the. We get introduced to the. One of the main plot points, which is that we find out that Maggie, Nathan's mom, has been dealing with some exhaustion and stuff lately, and she thought she was sick and had the flu, but the doctor shows up and goes, actually, your. Your heart is dying. Yeah, for. Because just congestive heart failure. Myocarditis. He says the end. Literally the only thing they can do is a heart transplant.
• 22:05
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 22:06
  Speaker A: So I guess she had some sort of congenital, I guess, thing or something. I don't know. Anyways, is that how. Why his. I assume his mom is dying in the book as well? Because that's the whole premise of the song. Is his mom dying from myocarditis. In the book?
• 22:22
  Speaker B: No, in the book, she's dying from ovarian cancer.
• 22:25
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 22:26
  Speaker B: And I kind of have mixed feelings about this change. Ultimately, I guess it doesn't matter. I do think the idea that she could have gotten a heart transplant thus avoiding her death is, like, surface level interesting.
• 22:41
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 22:42
  Speaker B: Like, they. They do a little bit of, like, a. An attempt at, like, a dramatic irony there, I guess. But the movie, like, speed runs it, so it ends up not really being interesting.
• 22:56
  Speaker A: It just kind of happens very quickly.
• 22:57
  Speaker B: Like, oh, well, they're like, oh, we're gonna go get the heart.
• 23:00
  Speaker A: Yeah. And she goes to Boston or whatever.
• 23:02
  Speaker B: And then, like, two minutes later, they're like, never mind.
• 23:04
  Speaker A: Get the heart. Now she's dying.
• 23:06
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 23:07
  Speaker A: And there's nothing we can do. And there's never going to be another heart. And, like, she's going to die before, and it's just like, okay. Which that was. I don't think I have a note about that. But the scene where after she does the. They, like. They tell her, like, oh, we couldn't do the heart transplant because the donor had, like, hepatitis B or something like that. The doctor there goes, well, they're like, well, I guess we'll just hope for another one. And the doctor goes, no, no, you won't.
• 23:32
  Speaker B: There's nothing's not going to be art.
• 23:35
  Speaker A: I mean, okay, that might be tr. But I don't think a doctor would say that like that right in that moment.
• 23:42
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, and it.
• 23:45
  Speaker A: Would depend a lot on the doctor, I guess. But I think the doctor and the doctor might say it's very unlikely. There's very. You know, it's very unlikely. But he's just like, no, we missed the window. You gotta die. Go home and die now. And they're like, okay. And they just leave and take her home to go die. It's like, all right.
• 24:02
  Speaker B: Yeah. No, I don't. I just. I felt like the movie was trying to do something interesting, but then they just, like, immediately undid that.
• 24:11
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 24:11
  Speaker B: And we were back to square one. And she's still dying.
• 24:14
  Speaker A: Yeah. It doesn't really matter.
• 24:16
  Speaker B: So, like, what was the point?
• 24:17
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. But because Maggie is very weak from. And is dealing with the health issues that she is, she decides she needs somebody to replace her as the school choir teacher. And it just kind of happens. Like, Rob Lowe's wife Kate, comes in one day to, like, check on her daughter, like, drop her daughter off or something like that. Because Rob Lowe and his wife, they Have a daughter that goes to the school and is, like, in Maggie's choir class. And she shows up, and Maggie has, like, a fainting spell or whatever. And Kate is like, oh, are you okay? And Maggie goes, can you take over? I need you to take over. And she's like, what? And Maggie just immediately is like, you do this? And I'm like, that is a huge ass out of nowhere to this random.
• 25:08
  Speaker B: Woman they've met one time before this.
• 25:12
  Speaker A: And she's like, you have to teach these kids to sing. You said you were a music major that one time. We had a conversation a day ago. And she's like, okay, I guess I'm the choir teacher now. And I wanted to know. That came from the book.
• 25:27
  Speaker B: That does not happen in the book. There's never any mention of Maggie being a volunteer music teacher, choir director. And there is no choir in the book, actually. So that's all movie stuff.
• 25:41
  Speaker A: All right. So during the time where Maggie and Jack have to go to Boston for the potential heart transplant, Nathan spends time with his teacher, Dalton. And Dalton's neighbor is Rob Lowe's mom, Ellen. Yes, I believe I nailed that. And so Dalton takes Nathan over to visit her because he's like, oh, she likes kids. She'll be. You know, she'll entertain him for a while or whatever. And they go over there, and she, like, shows him, like, her son's room, and it's Rob Lowe's old room.
• 26:17
  Speaker B: Untouched since his childhood.
• 26:18
  Speaker A: Yes, untouched since his childhood. And she, like, this is where she gives him the Boston Red Sox cap that we will see later and we saw at the beginning. But I wanted to know if this element came from the book of Rob Lowe's mom befriending Nathan without Rob Lowe realizing. Cause I will say that the way that the movie ties these two narratives together is not like. Like the worst thing in the world. Yeah, it's like a fairly tight screenplay that gets all of our main characters, like, revolving around. Revolving around each other in a way that's at least a little bit compelling. And I wanted to know if it came from the book.
• 26:51
  Speaker B: This particular thing does not come from the book. No, the two families paths do, like, cross, like, intersect some in the book, but they're not nearly as, like, intertwined as they are in the movie. Like, Maggie and Kate don't become friends. Their kids don't go to the same school that we know of. And Nathan never meets Robert's mother. Okay, I'm neutral on this change, I guess.
• 27:16
  Speaker A: Yeah, it seems like it would be fine. Yeah, I was just kind of. Good. Sorry.
• 27:21
  Speaker B: Like, it's similar in the book. It's just more so in the movie. And both the book and the movie's approach, I think, work fine.
• 27:28
  Speaker A: I think the thing that impressed me in the movie is that it feels like a very contrived, like. It could feel like a very contrived, like, ridiculous thing that all of these characters, like, are only interact with each other, but in ways where they don't realize that they're interacting with, like, the spouses of. And you know what I mean? But I think the movie actually does a pretty good job of making it feel believable.
• 27:51
  Speaker B: Well. And I think it works because Rob Lowe is supposed to be a workaholic who never talks to his family.
• 27:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's fair. Yeah.
• 27:59
  Speaker B: And I think that's the only reason it doesn't feel contrived to me.
• 28:04
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. But like I said, I was actually kind of impressed with the way they wove it all together. And. And like, thematically, it kind of works where we're getting Rob Lowe's mom bemoaning the child that Rob Lowe used to be.
• 28:18
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 28:18
  Speaker A: But that kind of mixes with the childhood of Nathan and the trauma he's about to go through. And then Rob Lowe goes through that when his mom dies, like, right before. I don't know. It kind of work in a way in this weird interlocking jigsaw puzzle. It kind of all works in a way that I was like, again, it's not. My issues with the movie, I guess, are different, but it's the screenplay itself I thought was like, okay, yeah, it's fine. Yeah. Like a relatively competently pieced together screenplay. So then I've mentioned a scene earlier, but then we get the scene where Nathan gets the idea to buy his mom Christmas shoes. And it's when Kate comes over one day and her and Maggie are talking. And Maggie tells Kate about how her and Jack used to go out dancing on their anniversary and she would wear these special shoes that. Like dancing shoes for their anniversary date every year. And so when Nathan hears this, he's like, well, I gotta get her some special shoes. And I wanted to know if that's how that happened in the book.
• 29:22
  Speaker B: No, this conversation does not happen in the book. As I mentioned earlier, his idea comes directly from his teacher's story about her childhood shoes being special and magical. I think this scene is good.
• 29:38
  Speaker A: Yeah, I like the movie's version, I think, where it's a cause to me, it makes more sense that the kid then Directly ties it to his mom and his dad.
• 29:46
  Speaker B: I agree. Yeah.
• 29:47
  Speaker A: Oh, I should get this for her. Whereas if the teacher telling that story, I can still see it. It's not like it doesn't make sense in the book, but. But it's definitely closer.
• 29:56
  Speaker B: Yeah, it is a little more directly tied together in the movie, I think. I do think that the movie should have scrapped the earlier scene in the classroom.
• 30:06
  Speaker A: Yes. No, I agree completely. That scene was just, as we mentioned earlier, just completely weird and awkward in every way, in my opinion. But just everything about that made no sense. I don't know why she's there. I don't know why. Yeah, very strange. I gotta ask if this line is in the book because holy shit. It actually feels to me kind of weird. Maybe it's not. I don't know. I don't know. It's hard with. And I think that's the biggest thing with this movie is that this movie is so maudlin and so like, I had a note about it later, but this movie is just like misery porn in a way. That is what makes the movie bad and makes it feel like it has this weird dark energy to it.
• 30:48
  Speaker B: The kind of dark sugar sweet sentimentality.
• 30:52
  Speaker A: To it that feels very manipulative and very. It doesn't feel like you're hearing like a genuinely moving story. It feels like you're being manipulated by a writer to feel sad is what it feels like. But anyways, I wanted to know if the. There's this line where Nathan is talking to his mom and again, at this point they basically said like, yeah, she's going to die and relatively soon. And he tells her, every time I feel my heartbeat, I'm going to think of you. And I wanted to know if that came from the book because while I get the sentiment, that also feels like a very mean thing to say to a woman dying of heart failure. It's a little kid. It's not like it's fine. I just like there's a level I couldn't help but be like, oh, okay. I guess. I don't know.
• 31:47
  Speaker B: I don't think this line is from the book. I didn't have an ebook copy this time, so I tried to flip through and look for it and I did not find it. I guess it makes a little less direct sense in the book because she's not dying of heart failure.
• 32:06
  Speaker A: Right.
• 32:06
  Speaker B: So we don't have that kind of.
• 32:08
  Speaker A: Like a direct reference.
• 32:09
  Speaker B: Yeah, it wouldn't be a direct.
• 32:10
  Speaker A: But that also makes it less.
• 32:12
  Speaker B: That makes it less. Less mean.
• 32:13
  Speaker A: Weird.
• 32:14
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 32:14
  Speaker A: Or like less. I don't know. Yeah. Feels like less mocking, but again, clearly not the point. It's just. I don't know, it's just a weird. So it is now Christmas Eve and Nathan needs to go buy the shoes. He's been collecting cans. Dalton's helped him collect cans. And he has. He has some money and he thinks he has enough, so he runs to the store because his mom is like mere moments away from death.
• 32:39
  Speaker B: Death.
• 32:40
  Speaker A: And so he runs to the store right before they close, gets inside. Rob Lowe comes in with him. Rob Lowe kicks over the box and like the kid thinks the shoes are gone because the store is a madhouse because it's Christmas eve at like 5pm or something like that and the stores are mad out. But Rob low kicks a box and the kid like, it's like, oh, it's the shoes. And the kid goes and tries to buy the shoes. And when he gets to the counter, the guy, he puts all his money on the counter and the dude counts it up and the shoes are $20. And he's like, you're $5 short. Because the kid has like $15. And I wanted to know if in the book the kid came up like $5 short. Because in the movie, the scene is. The movie acts like Rob. Like, they're like. Rob Lowe turns to the kid who's crying and is like. The kid is like. I explains the whole story about how his mom is dying and how he wants these shoes for his mom to go to heaven or whatever. And there's this moment where the camera hangs on Rob Lowe. And the implication in that moment is that Rob Lowe may not buy these shoes for this kid. And then he decides to. And it's like this. The movie reflects it as like this moment of triumph that. That like it's this big moment of growth and change for Rob Lowe that he gave this kid $5 to buy these shoes. And I wanted to know how that scene played out in the book, if it was similar and. And all that.
• 34:08
  Speaker B: It is. He's more like $10 short in the book. But like potato, potato. I actually thought. And I don't. I don't know what's worse, cuz you've described like the movie kind of hanging on Rob.
• 34:23
  Speaker A: We get this shot where he like, after the kid finishes his story, Rob low. The camera like pushes in as he's like. And you could tell it's like this is the moment he's thinking is. He's like, am I gonna.
• 34:34
  Speaker B: Am I gonna. Am I Gonna buy these shoes for.
• 34:38
  Speaker A: This dying kids or this kid's dying mother? Or am I just gonna be like, fuck off? Which again, is not a thing. Rob Lowe's character has been in the movie.
• 34:48
  Speaker B: No, no. Like, that's the weird and the same in the book. Just works too much. He's not Scrooge. He just works a lot and is kind of like disillusioned with his life in general.
• 34:59
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 35:00
  Speaker B: He's not like an ass.
• 35:03
  Speaker A: And so this crying and it's just such a weird. And again, it's $5, so it's not even like it's a big ask. It's like an easy. Like, oh, yeah, here you go, here's five. I don't know. It's. It's wild.
• 35:15
  Speaker B: I don't know, because in the book, it's. It almost ends up being like a nothing moment in the book, which is. I don't know if that's better or worse because I kind of. The whole point of the song is that this is like a thing that makes the narrator change his viewpoint, I guess, which is what happens in the movie. But then in the book, it's kind of just like this moment of like, nothingness, and he just buys the shoes. And then like a second later he's like, I have to go home and make up with my wife.
• 35:50
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 35:51
  Speaker B: And I was kind of like, okay, what just happened, though?
• 35:55
  Speaker A: Like, why does buying these shoes trigger that moment other than, like, I guess the story makes him go like, oh, I need to cherish my time with my loved ones. Ones. Because this kid's mom's dying and like, oh, my loved ones could die. I guess is the idea.
• 36:08
  Speaker B: I guess. I guess I. I've had the song and the book and the movie now, and I still don't understand what it is about purchasing the shoes that makes this character change his entire worldview. I don't feel like it's adequately explained in any of these three mediums.
• 36:33
  Speaker A: Well, it's definitely not in the song. And like I said, I literally think it's more. So I think the idea is not the buying of the shoes. Buying of the shoes are the signifier of the change. And the change is that he heard this kid's sad ass story and went, oh, I guess people can die. And that's sad. And so I should not. I should spend more time with my family. Yeah, right. So that you would think that also.
• 36:57
  Speaker B: You would think that that would be the catalyst that made him go, oh, maybe I should treat. Treat my wife better.
• 37:03
  Speaker A: I'd like, spend more time with my family. Yeah, I. I don't know, man. I don't know. Also, does his mom die in the book?
• 37:11
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 37:11
  Speaker A: Okay. I didn't ask that. I meant to ask that.
• 37:13
  Speaker B: I did have a note about it later. But, yeah, it's very similar. Okay. And she is, like. She's. She dead at this point in the book? I think she is.
• 37:22
  Speaker A: This is the shoes buying thing, so it should have to be, because it's like, the end of the movie, essentially, or the end of the story, unless the book's different.
• 37:30
  Speaker B: There are some, like, slight moving of things around between the book and the movie, but it's, like, so slight that I'm getting confused.
• 37:36
  Speaker A: Yeah. I don't think. I don't think her dying would have almost had to have happened before Christmas Eve. Buying the shoes night, right?
• 37:42
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 37:43
  Speaker A: Like, she would have had to have.
• 37:46
  Speaker B: Yeah. Because then, yes, his mom's already dead at this point in both the book and his mom we're talking about. Yeah, yeah. Bravo's mom.
• 37:55
  Speaker A: Oh, definitely in the movie. Yeah.
• 37:56
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 37:57
  Speaker A: It happened in the scene before this. Why are you so confused?
• 38:01
  Speaker B: I'm trying to keep two stories about two different moms about two different dead moms. I have four dead moms on my hands. Okay. And the book and the movie are just slightly different enough that I'm getting confused.
• 38:20
  Speaker A: You did have a look on your face like it was that woman doing the math. Like, when I was like. And you were like, no, she's dead. Dead. She's dead by this point. And you just had this look of just.
• 38:31
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, okay. It was confusing because in the book, they have, like, two separate Christmas events at his mom's house, and there's one where they leave and she's fine, and then there's another one where they leave and then she dies the same night. So I kept getting, like, confused about, like, what happened, which time.
• 38:54
  Speaker A: Gotcha.
• 38:54
  Speaker B: And, like, when those separate things occurred within the larger plot line.
• 39:01
  Speaker A: Yeah. Do you have anything else to say about this starter?
• 39:06
  Speaker B: Yeah, I just want to say for the record that if there were a kid trying to buy something in front of me in a line at a store, and they were $5.
• 39:15
  Speaker A: Oh, short. That's the other thing.
• 39:16
  Speaker B: I would not make them tell me their whole sad story to earn the $5. I would just buy the item. Just be, like, character here.
• 39:26
  Speaker A: Yeah. That's the other thing is that, like, the moment the kid was like, I'm trying to buy clearly some, like, adult woman.
• 39:32
  Speaker B: Clearly, like, a gift and not Like.
• 39:34
  Speaker A: A candy bar or something. But even then, I would still just buy.
• 39:36
  Speaker B: You know, even then, I would probably just buy the kid the candy bar.
• 39:39
  Speaker A: But you know what I'm saying? Like, it's very clearly like he's buying this for somebody else or whatever. And then it's like, five. I don't. Here's five dollars, kid. Like, what?
• 39:48
  Speaker B: And now. And to be totally fair, if that happened in front of me and then the kid, like, immediately started, like, crying inconsolably, I probably would be like, hey, kid, what's going on? Yeah, What's. What's happening?
• 40:02
  Speaker A: Are you okay?
• 40:04
  Speaker B: But I would just buy the item. What are you doing, Rob? Low.
• 40:09
  Speaker A: Weird. Yeah, it's. Yeah. The fact that it takes this whole big. Yeah. Anyways, it's. Whatever. So then he gets the shoes. He rushes home with the shoes. He gets there just in time. His mom is still alive. And I wanted to know if this line came from the book. And I don't know why, but I found this line very funny in the movie. And it's not a funny line, but for some reason, the way he says it and in that moment. And I think it's because the movie is so intentionally emotionally manipulative and taking itself so seriously.
• 40:41
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 40:41
  Speaker A: That these lines then read as kind of comical because it's so. It's trying so hard to make you sad that I'm just like, okay. But the kid has the shoes, and he. He brings them to his mom and says. I think as he's, like, putting them on her, he goes, I bought you these shoes to wear in heaven. And I don't know why, but that line got me. And I want to know if it was in the book.
• 41:05
  Speaker B: I went back and looked at that scene in the book, and Nathan definitely does not explicitly say to Maggie that he bought her the shoes to wear in heaven, although that is why he bought them.
• 41:17
  Speaker A: Okay. Right. Yeah. So we get a bunch of stuff happens, but Rob Lowe leaves the store. His car won't start, so he gets a ride. He needs to go meet up. He's trying to get to the Christmas concert. And the store owner guy is like, oh, didn't you hear? The Christmas concert got moved. Come with me. And they walk and they end up at Maggie's house because Kate has brought the entire Christmas choir to Maggie's house to, like, carol and, like, sing outside because she can't leave. And obviously he's dying inside. But the other thing, and I think it's what another element that makes the movie Reed so intentionally Manipulative. This big climactic, like, emotional moment. So Rob Lowe gets there. They're singing. The shoes have just been given inside. Very nice. And then we're outside, and Rob reunites with his wife, and he has. They have this big exchange where he kind of, like, they apologize to each other, basically, and they reunite. But this is all playing out, like, literally in the exact moments that Maggie is inside dying.
• 42:19
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 42:21
  Speaker A: And it's such a strange because they're, like, right outside, they reunite, and they have this big, like, hooray, we're back together. And then they turn and look at the house, and the living room light turns off, signifying that Maggie has died. Like, at the exact moment that they have reunited in their love for each other. And I needed to know if those moments were so intertwined and on top of each other in the book, because I thought that was an insane choice.
• 42:54
  Speaker B: Okay, so do Robert and his wife reunite, literally, as Maggie is dying in the book? Technically, yes.
• 43:06
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 43:06
  Speaker B: Because after buying the shoes, Robert goes home and he apologizes to Kate and he tells her that he wants to work on their marriage. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That same night, Maggie is in her house dying.
• 43:22
  Speaker A: Right.
• 43:22
  Speaker B: However, Robert and Kate are not literally standing outside of her house having this.
• 43:29
  Speaker A: Loud conversation as she. She shuffles off her mortal coil just inside. It's so weird. It's. I don't know, but there's an element, like, it's like. It's one of those things where, like, I can see what the screenwriter was thinking of. Like, well, it's sweet. We'll have them all come there. Everything will happen at the same place. Also, it's a nice moment. Like, the idea of all the kids.
• 43:49
  Speaker B: Coming, singing for all of them. And I actually. I do have, like, that specific note in my. Better in the book that, like, the idea.
• 43:56
  Speaker A: Or better in the movie.
• 43:56
  Speaker B: Or better in the movie. Yeah. Like, the idea of taking the choir that she directed there to, like, Carol outside of her house because she's sick is very sweet. But the way that it all coincides.
• 44:08
  Speaker A: And happens, I feel like they should have done that. Gone there, Caroled. She passes. And then later we, like, cut. And they're, like, at home later that night, and then they have their moment and. Or something.
• 44:22
  Speaker B: I don't know, something different.
• 44:24
  Speaker A: The fact that they have this triumphant, like, we did it. And then they turn and they're like. Like, she's dead. You're like, oh, no. And it's like. It's just a very interesting choice to me also.
• 44:38
  Speaker B: I just want to say, for the record, that the movie was afraid to show her die.
• 44:44
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 44:45
  Speaker B: And the book was not. We were with Maggie every moment. We hear her death rattle in the book, and we're with her every second up until she dies.
• 45:00
  Speaker A: Yeah. Well, it's because they have to. Because the way the movie changed it. It would be even more insane if we were, like, watching her die. And then we cut the. Rob Lowe and his wife. Like, it's. Yeah. Anyways, and then my last question here was, earlier, we saw Rob Low's mom, before she passed away, start writing a letter, but we never saw, like, her finish it or what it said, writing a letter to Rob. Robert, Rob Lowe. And then at this point, everything is resolved. And it's like the day after Christmas or something. And Rob Lowe. Oh, that was the other thing. At the. I forgot to mention at the Christmas. At the. At the Christmas concert, the farmers are there.
• 45:42
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 45:43
  Speaker A: And they come up to Rob Lowe and his wife and go, ma'am, I just wanted to let you know that your husband's a great man who, if he hadn't done all of those hours of labor that he did, we all would. Would not have homes or jobs right now.
• 45:57
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 45:58
  Speaker A: And basically just throws it in her face, like. So, actually, if you think about it, your. Your husband. It's a good thing that he, like, missed your.
• 46:06
  Speaker B: It's actually. It's good that your husband is a workaholic.
• 46:09
  Speaker A: Oh, my God.
• 46:10
  Speaker B: It's just a wild place for the movie to go.
• 46:13
  Speaker A: So funny. Which, again, completely feels like it undercuts the whole point. Not undercut, but it's just like. But then if he. He. If it was good that he did all that, then what are we doing here? What's his arc? I guess to learn to, like, work a lot, but also love his family. I don't know. It's. So. It's. Anyways, but my last question is. So he gets this letter. He gets a package. It's, like, wrapped up, and he opens it, and it's his old lunchbox. And inside the lunchbox is this letter. And I wanted to know if that happened in the book. Cause I was trying to figure out how he got that packet, that lunchbox with the letter. I guess she sent it to him. Is that the idea? Cause I don't think. Yeah, I was like. Cause she's dead. Like, she was writing the letter, and then she died. Right. That same night. I think maybe it's not that same night. Oh, maybe it. Okay.
• 47:00
  Speaker B: I think it was earlier.
• 47:01
  Speaker A: I think it was an earlier scene. Well, then. Never mind. Then it works. I thought she, like, wrote the letter and, like, and then died. I'm like, well, how did it get mailed?
• 47:08
  Speaker B: Like, how did he get it? Yeah, okay, but that makes more sense. So there is a letter in the book. And in the book, his mother writes it after the family leaves her house on Christmas Eve, and that's when she passes away. And then Dalton finds the letter and gets.
• 47:27
  Speaker A: Which I think could also be what happens.
• 47:29
  Speaker B: Fine. And now I believe what happens in the movie is that after the scene where Ellen shows Nathan his, like, childhood bedroom.
• 47:39
  Speaker A: Cause that's when she writes the letter.
• 47:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, that's when she writes the letter and puts it in the lunchbox. And then we do see, like, a brief scene when he's in the office when his, like, secretary or whatever brings in the package and he just, like, sets it on a shelf and I guess, presumably, like, forgot about it and didn't open it until after she died.
• 47:57
  Speaker A: Okay, I. I missed that. I didn't see that part where he got the package. Okay. But I thought. That being said, I thought it was actually a kind of a clever way and a pretty effective way to tie the beginning.
• 48:10
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 48:11
  Speaker A: Or the frame.
• 48:12
  Speaker B: He's reading the letter, and then we, like, transition to him. To him reading it at her grave.
• 48:18
  Speaker A: Which is where we started the film. And I was like, okay, yeah, that'll come back.
• 48:21
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's a very tidy way to transition back to the beginning.
• 48:26
  Speaker A: Yeah, I thought that worked really well. So. Okay. I do have one question that I wanted to talk about in Lost in Adaptation.
• 48:32
  Speaker B: Just show me the way to get out of here, and I'll be on my way.
• 48:37
  Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
• 48:39
  Speaker B: And I want to get unlost as soon as possible.
• 48:41
  Speaker A: So in the movie, Rob Lowe is, like, dead set on buying this house, this new house. They already have a very nice house, but he's. They. He wants a bigger house. And I couldn't figure out what his deal was because the movie teases us that it's going to, like, go into what his whole deal is and why he feels this way, but it never does. So, like, I. I don't understand. Because he's like, we got to buy this house. And. And. And. But they're like, well, we can't afford it unless she gets a job. His wife gets a job, but she doesn't want the job because then she won't have as much time to spend with the kids. And he barely spends any time with their daughter, and she wants to. Also wants to Teach at the. Or volunteer at the school or whatever. But there's this one, so we're trying to. I'm trying to figure out, like, okay, so why is he so obsessed with buying this house? Because, like. So I guess the idea is just that he has this idea that he needs to be, like, successful and needs to, like, make a bunch of money and provide for his family or whatever. But at one point in the movie, she confronts him about it and is like, well, why do you even want. You know, like, he. He's like, look, I'm doing this all for us as a family. And, like, that's why I work so much. It's for us. And she's like, is it for us? Like, we don't. We just want you around or whatever. So. And. And I don't. She says something to him about, like, his dreams or something, and he responds by saying to her, you don't even know what my dreams are like. Cause she's like, oh, well, it's just your dream to have this big house or whatever. And he's like, well, you don't even know what my dreams are. And this is, like, one of the things that makes them realize that their marriage is not great, which obviously, clearly. But I don't. The movie then never explains to us what his dreams are like. That scene, to me, felt like a very important moment that was going to lead to a realization or a discussion of what his dreams are. What is it that he wants to do? Why is he pursuing all this money or whatever? Does any of that ever get expanded on in the book? Do we know more about why he's.
• 50:35
  Speaker B: The way he is kind of in the book, they've already bought the fancy house in the nice neighborhood. Like, they already live there. And the whole idea is that when we meet Robert in the book in 1985, he's already done all of the things that he thinks he's supposed to do. He's got, like, the fancy house and the fancy neighborhood and the fancy job and the fancy car, and he has, like, a wife and two kids, like, E.T. cetera, et cetera. But he's still unhappy. Yeah, his dream in the book was to start his own law firm, which I think I mentioned. But again, like, by the time we meet him, he feels like it's too late to start over and do that. He does end up doing that after he learns the error of his ways. But that's neither here nor there. The bit about dreams is kind of in the book, but it's more about Robert like not knowing what Kate's dreams.
• 51:35
  Speaker A: Are, which is also what's happening in the movie.
• 51:38
  Speaker B: And he's very insistent throughout a good chunk of the book that he's been working hard to provide her with everything that she wants, but he doesn't actually have any idea what she wants. Yeah, because he doesn't talk to her.
• 51:54
  Speaker A: Right. So I also think maybe what's happening there in the movie is that in that moment. And maybe it just didn't read this way to me that I thought he did. So maybe what the way that scene's supposed to read is that when she confronts him and throws that back at him and then he says, like, you don't even know what my dreams are. Maybe what's actually happening in that moment is he's realizing that he doesn't know what his dreams are and that we're supposed to get that he sort of has like an internal cris of meaning in that moment. It didn't really read that way to me. It read more as like a. He's depressed that like, his wife. Him and his wife have clearly not been community. Like, you know, that their relationship is so strained and bad that she doesn't, like, know what his dreams are and that. But like, I read that scene as he has dreams and the movie's not telling us what they are. But maybe what it is is that he doesn't have dreams and he's realizing. And that is. That's sort of making him reevaluate his life. Maybe.
• 52:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, I guess, maybe. I mean, I do think that in both the book and the movie, what we're meant to get is that Robert is having, like you said, a crisis of self. A crisis of realizing that he's not really, like his life hasn't really turned out how he thought it would and how he wanted it to, but it's just so poorly done in both that it kind of ends up confusing.
• 53:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think the movie does a great job at establish if that's what's going on. I don't think the movie does a great job of establishing that because I. I was not entirely clear that that was what was happening because it felt like. No, he actually does, especially because it. I mean, it resolves with him just like continuing to do the work that he seems to like doing and is good at and then succeeds at it. And then the people he was doing the work for thank him and said, it's a great thing. You did all the work for us. And there's Never any discussion of, like, oh, and now I'm gonna. Cause that would actually be a thing that would be interesting if he had that crisis of kind of meaning. And then at the end there is the thing of like, he's gonna open his own law firm or he's gonna, I don't know, spin off and he wants to stop doing this big corporate law and he's gonna do like small business. I don't know, whatever. Like, that would be like something that would then reinforce the idea that he has gone on this journey of like.
• 54:15
  Speaker B: Right.
• 54:16
  Speaker A: But in the movie as it is, it's like he seems to have. If you interpret that scene as him having this crisis of meaning and like, oh, and have dreams, he then never there. Nothing happens with it. Like, he continues to work the same job, doing the same thing.
• 54:28
  Speaker B: The farmers thank him and he realizes that that actually was his dream. I guess.
• 54:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. And maybe that. Maybe that is it, but it's just. It's not. And I think that's really what boils down to me. What? Cause before we get all your stuff, I'm just gonna talk. I actually did not hate this movie as much as I thought I was going to. It's not a great movie, but it's also not like, on a surface level, it wasn't as.
• 54:54
  Speaker B: It's not like, bad enough to be interesting.
• 54:57
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I don't even mean like, technically it's like a perfectly serviceable TV movie. Like it looks okay for the time and all that sort of stuff. But I mean, from like a moral standpoint, like what the books or what the movie's doing didn't actually feel as. At least on a surface level. Like there's not a lot of like, overt weird, like, message preachy, like religion stuff or. You know what I mean? Like, I was expecting more of like a very specific, like pushing a Christian message or something. And it doesn't really feel so much of that in the movie. It feels more of just like a story about a kid dealing with a trauma and like losing his mother.
• 55:38
  Speaker B: And.
• 55:38
  Speaker A: You know what I mean? It just feels like we're kind of doing all these other things. But I think what makes it weird is that the more I think about it, the more the, like, the more sinister the movie feels to me. And I think part of it does go back to some of that under the surface stuff like that when you kind of peel back the layers of like, what he. Lawyer wise, like what he's fighting for and stuff, you're like, wait a second. So like environmental companies are evil. Like, there's some weird baggage there.
• 56:08
  Speaker B: That clearly there's some pretty odd baggage there.
• 56:11
  Speaker A: But anyways, I think that the thing is that, like, because the narrative is because, like, nothing happens with Rob Lowe. And like he doesn't really change at all over the course of the movie.
• 56:23
  Speaker B: He doesn't really have an arc.
• 56:24
  Speaker A: It makes the whole thing just feel even more empty. Like even more of an empty emotional manipulation. Like this whole story then with the kid and the mom dying in the shoes. Cause that is kind of the secondary story. Almost like Rob Lowe's story is kind of the main story.
• 56:42
  Speaker B: I mean, as per the song, right?
• 56:45
  Speaker A: He is the main character.
• 56:46
  Speaker B: He is the main character. And the story with the little kid and the dying mom exists solely within this narrative to give him a spark, to get back his Christmas spirit.
• 56:58
  Speaker A: And so I think the thing that makes it feel even more like while on the surface I was like, nah, it's not even that bad. It's not that sinister. It's really not even saying anything that gross or weird or whatever, I think that's true. But the fact that it's not saying anything and that Rob, or not even that it's not saying anything. The fact that Rob Lowe, who is the protagonist of the film, his arc is so nothing. Like he doesn't have an arc. He just. He decides to start talking to his wife more. I guess. Like that's the arc is like, oh, I'm gonna be there for my kid more. But he keeps the same job. I guess he just gets a slightly healthier work life balance, I guess.
• 57:35
  Speaker B: I mean, one would hope. I guess.
• 57:37
  Speaker A: I guess that's the idea that then makes the secondary plot with the kid and his mom feel like extra weird and manipulative. Because it's not even in the service of like a grand life altering change for Rob Lowe. He experiences. We write this heart wrenching tale of a young mother, like, being ripped away from the family on Christmas night. Like as this kid sobs trying to buy shoes for his dying mother. That we write this insanely overwrought, emotional, manipulative story just so that Rob Lowe learns to like, take a weekend off now and then. Like, it's kind of even more insane.
• 58:22
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, I agree. It's like kind of even more evil and insidious.
• 58:29
  Speaker A: I don't know if like, at least if it had been like a Scrooge thing where he goes from like abusing his workers and then he's like, becomes like the nicest guy in town that everybody Loves. You know what I mean?
• 58:42
  Speaker B: Right.
• 58:43
  Speaker A: At least then she died for like a bigger, grander purpose. She literally died in this movie. Because again, it's not her narrative and not the case.
• 58:53
  Speaker B: So that Rob lows to come home in time for dinner. Yeah.
• 58:56
  Speaker A: So that Rob Lowe will like, you know, go. You know what, guys? That work life balance is really important. I gotta. You know, last Christmas I learned a really important message as I stood outside this 33 year old dying woman's home. And I thought to myself, I should work a little less.
• 59:14
  Speaker B: I'm still gonna work.
• 59:15
  Speaker A: I'm still gonna work a lot because.
• 59:16
  Speaker B: The work that I'm doing is really important and really good person for doing it.
• 59:22
  Speaker A: It's such. It's so just like, what are we even doing here Again?
• 59:28
  Speaker B: You got me.
• 59:29
  Speaker A: Cheese. Oh, God. All right. That was all I had. It's time to find out what Katie thought was better in the book. You like to read?
• 59:39
  Speaker B: Oh, yes, I love to read.
• 59:41
  Speaker A: What do you like to read?
• 59:45
  Speaker B: Everything. I thought that it was funny that you were talking about the movie, like not having a ton of like, weird messaging, like kind of surface level or whatever. Odd messaging. I thought that the movie had kind of a weird mothers should stay at home message. Wasn't like super present in the book.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker A: Okay. I don't think it's not like explicit in the movie. It's just sort of implicit to the universe of the movie that both Kate and Maggie don't have jobs and don't. Yeah.
• 1:00:26
  Speaker B: Cause like Maggie. Maggie is a stay at home mom in the book. But I do think it makes a little more sense in the book because they have two kids, one of whom is like a baby still.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
• 1:00:38
  Speaker B: So like, sure, girl, stay home with your baby. Yeah. But I feel like it makes less sense given how like, financially in dire.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker A: Straits they seem to be.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker B: They seem to be that, like her kid is in school all day. Like you could go get a part time job instead of volunteering at the school for free.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. It's. Yeah. No, you're not wrong.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker B: And then like Kate in the book actually does work part time. Like we see in the movie. Rob Lowe is essentially trying to like, force her back into the workforce.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker B: And she doesn't want to work. But then in the book, she. She actually does. She does like freelance marketing, they say.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker A: Okay.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker B: So I don't know, I just thought it was kind of. Of odd.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker B: I really liked the part in the book where Kate tells Robert that she wants a divorce. I thought it was very ballsy. Cuz like, her husband's a lawyer and he's just like. Like she goes up to him and she's like, this isn't working out. After the holidays, you need to find another place to live. And I was like, I think I love her. Which she doesn't ever actually really tell him she wants a divorce. In the movie, they kind of like footstep around it.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker A: Yeah. Not. Not explicitly. Like, the closest we get is there's the moment where he's like, I'm gonna buy the house or something. And she says, then you're gonna do it alone or something. Like there's an implication.
• 1:02:14
  Speaker B: Yeah, there's an implication. Not explicit, but a topical thing that happened in the book. It is explicitly. There's a scene where we're explicitly told that Maggie and Jack's insurance is not going to cover everything she needs with her cancer treatments. Because of course, why would they. Because why would health insurance cover your health needs?
• 1:02:39
  Speaker A: Why would it?
• 1:02:44
  Speaker B: The scene where Robert is rude to Jack in the mechanic shop is in both the book and the movie. He. I thought he was way meaner in the book and I kind of appreciated that on the level of like. It was like the only scene where I felt like he was as much of an asshole as everyone else insisted he was.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, the thing that's interesting is in the movie, nobody insists he's an asshole. Yeah, everybody's like, oh yeah, he works a lot. But like, nobody thinks he's like an.
• 1:03:13
  Speaker B: Asshole, but he is kind of an asshole.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker A: But particularly in those, those scenes. Yeah, like that scene in particular where he's interacting with Jack at the thing. He's kind of a jerk. Like he, you know. Yeah, but again, it's also one of those things where it's like. Yeah, it's also mechanic. Like, that's another. Like the things that Rob Lowe's complaining about in that scene is like a thing that like every human being on the planet has complained about that it feels like your mechanic is charging you too much money for whatever the thing. No, I would. Most people would never complain to the mechanic space because, you know. But. But I did think that was kind of funny. I was like, we have like two notoriously, like untrusted jobs here. Like, duking it out. We have a lawyer versus a mechanic.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker B: The scene where Ellen like, gives Robert a talking to in the kitchen after their like, Christmas party thing is from the book. I thought it was better in the book. There was a little bit more attention paid to it. I think she also has a line about. They get into talking about. Robert gets defensive, and he's like, well, I've done everything that she wants, all of this stuff for her. I got her the house and the car and the blah, blah, blah. And his mom's like, well, you're not giving her any attention. And that's the only thing that anybody has ever wanted since the beginning of time is attention. And I was like, you know what? You're right. You're correct on that count.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker A: That is kind of a deep thought. Like, kind of a, you know, a compellingly. Yeah, like, it's universal thought for. To come from a book like this.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker B: It's not like, if I encountered that in a better piece of media, I probably wouldn't be super impressed by it.
• 1:05:09
  Speaker A: Right, right.
• 1:05:10
  Speaker B: But encountering it in this specific piece of media, I was like, you know what? Go off. You're right. She also tells him. She takes him, like, up to her. Her room and she shows him this, like, fancy pipe that she bought for his dad and was, like, saving it for a special occasion to give him. But then he died before she could give him the pipe. And so, like, the message is like, like, don't waste time or whatever. But I was hoping that the pipe would make an appearance because then at the end of the book, Robert has the pipe and, like, randomly starts smoking the pipe at the end of the book. And I just really wanted to see Rob Lowe smoke, like, an oldie time pipe.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker A: That would not fit Rob Lowe's.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker B: No, it wouldn't. That's why I wanted to see it happen. And I'm a little disappointed it didn't.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker B: So my. My last kind of thing that I want to say for the book. And this is gonna sound kind of dark, but stay with me. By far and away, the best parts of this book were when Maggie was grappling with being at death's door, when we're like, in her perspective and she's thinking about the fact that she's dying.
• 1:06:30
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:06:31
  Speaker B: There were some sections that were so profoundly sad that I, like, got a little lump in my throat that I couldn't believe I was reading something like this in this particular piece of media at one point. I'll just read a little short segment. So she's at the point where she's on at home hospice, basically. They have a hospital bed set up in their living room like we see in the. In the movie. And so she's in the living room and her mother is at their house baking cookies with Nathan in the kitchen. Maggie struggled to sit up listening as her mother and Nathan cut out each cookie with precision. These were the last smells of Christmas, the last smiles of her little boy, the last squeals of her baby girl that she would ever experience. She didn't want to commit them to memory, but rather she wanted to be fully present in the here and now and love with all her soul. And something about, like, yeah, the last, like, smiles and like, sounds of her children, like, really fucking got me. I was like, that's, like, deeply sad.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker A: It absolutely is. Yeah. And like I said, the movie is deeply sad. But it's just. I think maybe there's a layer of. In the book, you don't. Because you're not getting all of the, like, manipulation that comes along with film of, like, the score and the.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker A: Everything else that it won't feel. Cause in the movie, a lot of that stuff. And we also obviously don't get anything quite nearly that, like, compelling or whatever. But, like, in the movie, you just feel like you're being manipulated so hard that it's like. It's hard to take any of that stuff seriously. Whereas in the book, you're just reading a book, like, so you get. Your brain gets to process. It kind of however makes it, you know, however you want to. All right, let's go ahead and find out what Katie thought was better in the movie. My life has taught me one lesson, Hugo, and not the one I thought it would. Happy endings only happen in the movies.
• 1:08:51
  Speaker B: I thought Nathan had a little more personality in the movie than he did in the book. He also seems to be aged up a little bit. I think I felt like he was maybe 8 or so in the movie. I think he's more like five or six in the book. I liked the decision to make Dalton the schoolteacher. They were separate characters in the book. The schoolteacher was a woman named Doris. But I thought that was a really efficient way to cut down on the number of characters.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker B: And with the, like, extra connections between the families. That made a lot of sense the movie leaves out. There's this whole section when we meet Dalton, who is also a black man in the book, as he is in the movie, but when we meet him, there's this whole section about how, like, not only is Rob Lowe's mom friends with a black family, but she was friends with them in the 60s, which means she's, like, an extra good white lady. And I was like, please, give me a fucking break. Please, book, give me a break. I thought Maggie and Jack dancing as she's dying was Very sweet. One of the moments in the movie that I thought was also very sad.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, I agree.
• 1:10:10
  Speaker B: Another line that the movie cut when Rob Lowe is apologizing to his wife for being a horrible workaholic. He says to her, I realized that the greatest possible gift I could give to you or the girls would be myself. And, like, I understand. I understand. He's talking about, like, being around more and, like, giving them more attention. But that specific line, that phrasing. Yeah, I was, like, wheezing reading it. We talked about the choir singing. I did think that was nice. Although it got a little maudlin when they were still out there singing as she literally died. And we already kind of talked about this. But there is notably less, like, on the surface religion in the movie than there is in the book. There's almost none in the movie.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker A: It's very generic, like, classic Christmas movie, like. Like, God stuff, just like, oh, oh, she's going to heaven. But it's also like, a little kid talking about, like, his mom dying. So, like, most of the religion talk is kind of filtered through him in a way that makes it feel like it's not the movie preaching and more so just like, little kids, like, coping. That's how they cope with, you know. Yeah. It doesn't feel. Other than when the song plays and we get the going to meet Jesus tonight or whatever. Like, I think that's the only time Jesus is mentioned is when the song.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. And, yeah, there is, like, notably quite a bit more religion in the book than there is in the movie.
• 1:11:49
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. As. As Christiany, kind of vaguely Christiany movies go, this is, like, the least of those that I've ever.
• 1:11:56
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's not, like, terribly effective from that.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, I was again, I was expecting a lot more of it, and I was like, oh, it's really not that much. Okay. All right. That was everything Katie thought was better in the movie. Let's find out what the movie nailed.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker B: As I expected, practically perfect in every way. A specific thing that drove me insane in both the book and the movie is that Robert and Kate say each other's names way too much when they're talking to each other. Oh, my God. There was one section in the book where Robert's talking and he says Kate, like, every other sentence. I was like, please stop.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker A: Maybe it's intentional because their room is, like, bad, like, struggling. Like, the effect that they say their actual name so much indicative of, like.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker B: A. I guess so. Because I feel weird when I say your name.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, we Almost never.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker B: We almost never call each other by our name.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker A: I will occasionally, like, yell out Katie to, like, get your attention, like, if.
• 1:12:57
  Speaker B: I need to get your attention.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker A: But when we're talking to each other, I almost never say, okay, Katie. Like, yeah, I almost never.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker B: The conversation that Maggie and Nathan have about the fact that she's dying, I thought was pretty similar. Specifically, the line, he's not taking me to heaven, he's receiving me is from the book. And also Nathan, like, crying and begging Maggie not to go or to take him with her to heaven. Talked about Ellen dying. Moderate beef that I had with both the book and the movie was that they don't even have Nathan say the same lines as the song. When, like, they, like, what is even the point of this song fic if you're not gonna have him say the line from the song?
• 1:13:49
  Speaker A: It's fair. I mean, he says similar lines.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker B: He says similar lines. But I. I do. I just feel they should have just had him quote the song. Because that's what we're here for, right?
• 1:14:00
  Speaker A: Right. Maybe they felt it would be too on the nose. Maybe too. That would be too cheap.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker B: Too much. Too much after everything else. That would be too much.
• 1:14:09
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:14:12
  Speaker B: Robert pays for the shoes, and then he abandons all of the Christmas gifts he had picked out. That is from the book Grown Up. Nathan is in medical school.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker A: Yes, they mentioned that. I assume the implication being he's going to cure.
• 1:14:26
  Speaker B: I mean, in the book, he does say he's studying oncology. Yeah.
• 1:14:30
  Speaker A: I assume the idea would be, like, his mom dying.
• 1:14:33
  Speaker B: He's going to prevent this from ever happening to any other child.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:14:38
  Speaker B: And then Robert sees the shoes and realizes who Nathan is. But then he's already driven away. The end.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker A: There you go. All right, we got a few odds and ends before we get to the final verdict.
• 1:14:59
  Speaker B: I realized this as I was perusing Wikipedia while we were watching the movie, but I never made the connection that Kimberly Williams Paisley is married to Brad Paisley.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker A: I found that. I saw that doing the research for the prequel episode.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker B: Yeah, I also spent way too much time trying to figure out when she uses his name, because the 10th Kingdom, which came out in 2000, credits her as Kimberly Williams Paisley. And this movie, which came out in 2002, credits her with Kimberly Williams, but she didn't actually marry Brad Paisley until 2003. Question mark.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker A: The credits on IMDb are never correct. That's the reason.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, but if you go back and you look at the original poster for the 10th kingdom, it credits her as Kimberly Williams. Paisley.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker A: That can't wait. What?
• 1:15:49
  Speaker B: That's what I'm saying.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker A: It can't be the original poster. Then. It has to be a no.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker B: I remember. I remember being like, how does that even make sense?
• 1:15:59
  Speaker A: They didn't get married until. That's what I'm saying. Somebody please explain to me this is. That's because what's happening here is you're having a Berenstein Bears moment. This is a. This is a whatchamacallit.
• 1:16:12
  Speaker B: No.
• 1:16:12
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 1:16:13
  Speaker B: No.
• 1:16:13
  Speaker A: It has to be. What do you mean, no? If they got married in 2003 and then the 10th kingdom came out in 2000, and I got news for you. You didn't see a poster that said Kimberly Williams Paisley on it. It makes literally no sense. Unless she was using his name three years before they got married.
• 1:16:31
  Speaker B: Maybe.
• 1:16:32
  Speaker A: Is that what you're saying?
• 1:16:33
  Speaker B: I don't. I mean, I guess. Okay, I'm gonna prove you wrong. And I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna prove you wrong.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker A: I hope I'm wrong because that would be. I need to know the story then, because, like, what. What's going on there?
• 1:16:48
  Speaker B: I don't know. That's what I want to know. What happened there?
• 1:16:52
  Speaker A: All right. I couldn't figure it out if this was, like, court ordered for Rob Lowe or if Rob Lowe is, like, low key Christian or something. I honestly don't know. I also realized, like, maybe it's just like, at the time he wasn't doing much.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker B: Like, I don't think he was doing.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker A: Much before Rob Lowe kind of reignited.
• 1:17:11
  Speaker B: His career later on, like way before Parks and.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker A: Yeah. Significantly before. So I. Yeah, I think we were maybe in a period of his career where he wasn't, like, doing that much.
• 1:17:21
  Speaker B: Maybe a little hard up for work.
• 1:17:22
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, that could be. Could be.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker B: He's also low key, kind of terrible in this.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker A: I think he's maybe the worst person. I don't think. I didn't think he was that bad, but I. I will say, in comparison, I thought actually everybody else was pretty good. Yeah, I thought, like, the kid was good for the most part. I mean, he has some moments, but he's a little kid. I thought Kimberly Williams was great, and I thought the guy who plays Jack was really good. I thought everybody was good. Like I said, Rob Lowe, I think may be the worst, but I think even him had some good moments. I thought the acting was pretty okay. Overall, I was impressed because, again, I had very low expectations going in. One of the things that Cracked me up is that Rob Lowe wants to buy this big fancy new house. But in the house we see them living in, when we see.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker B: It's a very nice house.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker A: It's a very nice house. When we see in the kitchen, I'm pretty sure I would was like, is that. Does this motherfucker have a salamander in his kitchen? And I looked and he does. At least I'm pretty sure that's what it is.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker B: Please explain to the people what a salamander is.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker A: It is. It's a thing that's generally only in like commercial kitchens. Yeah, you can get them obviously in residential kitchens. They're just very rare. It's essentially just a broiler, but it's an open air broiler that is usually up at like head level like, like the his. And this is how a lot of them are in like kitchens are in like the vent hood area of like over their stove. And it's basically a small broiler, kind of like an air fryer, but like an open one, essentially. And in restaurants, from my understanding, they're primarily used to like finish some dishes. Like you could like a broiler, like you would. But I think you can also set them to have like multiple temperatures. And it's like also act as like a basically like a warming station to like keep food warm. So you can put like a whole plate of food in there under there and keep it warm. And then maybe on the other half, half it's set to broil so you can like finish broiling dishes or. Anyways, I was just like, that's a very specific like again, like normally commercial kitchen thing to have. And Rob Lowe has one in his residential kitchen. I was very jealous. But apparently this house is not good enough for them.
• 1:19:24
  Speaker B: Well, maybe he has to have one because he works so late. They have to keep his dinner warm for him.
• 1:19:32
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:35
  Speaker B: Speaking of, so the movie takes place like somewhere near Boston because they go to Boston to get her heart transplant and like Boston Red Sox and all that. But I think the book, they never say, but I think the book must be set in the Midwest because at one point Robert comes home late from work and he eats a leftover hamburger patty and a glass of milk for dinner. Yeah, that's classic Midwest.
• 1:20:01
  Speaker A: Absolutely. Did he have that hamburger on a couple pieces of wonder bread?
• 1:20:06
  Speaker B: He didn't want to bother with bread, so he just ate it by itself. He ate a naked hamburger patty and a glass of milk.
• 1:20:13
  Speaker A: There you go. Donna Vanliere is from Ohio.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker B: There you have it.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:20:17
  Speaker B: There you fucking have it.
• 1:20:20
  Speaker A: Yeah. I love the montage in this of Rob Lowe, like, early on when he's, like, working late, and we get, like, this short montage of him. It's when he's missing the Christmas concert over whatever. And it's just a lot of shots of him, like, standing and, like, running his hands through his hair and, like, at points, looking out the window and chewing on pens. He does a lot of chewing on.
• 1:20:39
  Speaker B: He's really burning the midnight oil.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker A: Yeah. It is, like, the most generic, like, cliche. I'm working late. Mod times.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker B: And it almost like, it makes me think, like, are we supposed to assume that he's just working late on purpose because he. He can't face his family?
• 1:20:57
  Speaker A: No, I think the idea is that he literally just has too much work to do and so he has to work late. I think. Yeah. That essentially, he just. He. In order to get all the work done for this case, he has to work late, I think.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker A: Is the idea.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker B: But also, we never see him work.
• 1:21:14
  Speaker A: He is working. He's looking at papers. He's running his hands through his hairs. He's got a graph thingy that he's looking at. You don't know what lawyers do. He's getting his arguments together.
• 1:21:27
  Speaker B: Oh, another fun fact that I. I found out while I was perusing Wikipedia, is that his mom, played by Shirley Douglas.
• 1:21:36
  Speaker A: I figured she had to be somebody. She looked like a famous old actress. Like, I was like, you used to be an actress. Everybody knew, probably, who was married to.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker B: Donald Sutherland, and she's Kiefer Sutherland's mother.
• 1:21:46
  Speaker A: Oh, look at that. Huh. I thought it was very funny that it felt like. Speaking of Rob Lowe's mom, I thought in the first scene where we're introduced to Dalton and Ellen together and find out that they're, like, neighbors, I got the vibe that there was an implication that Rob Lowe's mom was trying to sleep with Dalton. And Dalton is like, I gotta leave. I gotta go. I got the vibe that she was like, you could stay. And I was like, is that what we're doing? I think that might be what we're doing. But another thing, I mentioned this in the prequel, that one of the people in the film is John Dunsworth. For people who don't know he plays. The thing he was most known for was probably, I guess, maybe something I don't know of, but was playing Mr. Leahy on the Trailer Park Boys, who's, like, the head of the alcoholic head of the manager of the Trailer park that they live in. And it was so funny seeing him in this. When he shows up, he is maybe the most absurd out of character for what I've ever seen him as role that I could imagine him being. He is a heart surgeon in this movie and he's the one who shows up and is like gonna do the heart transplant and then comes in and talks to them when they can't do it or whatever. And it was just very funny to me seeing Mr. Leahy be a heart surgeon.
• 1:23:12
  Speaker B: I talked about how they don't use the lyrics from the actual song when Nathan is explaining why he needs to buy the shoes, but he does in the Movie call Robert Mr. He's like, please, mister. And I was like, me and kids just don't call adult men Mr. Like they used to. It's given newsies.
• 1:23:34
  Speaker A: We must go back. This is what we've lost. Kids saying mister, Excuse me, mister as they tug on your coattails. Yeah. But then my favorite, both of us burst out laughing at this and it legitimately so funny, he gets the shoes and as he's running home, we cut to a slow motion running montage, snow falling around him and he's booking it home with that box of shoes. And the song kicks in and starts playing and we both lost it. I couldn't believe we got a slow motion running montage set to the actual Christmas shoes.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker B: Know, I don't know why I wasn't expecting the song to be in the movie.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker A: I don't know.
• 1:24:20
  Speaker B: This caught me so off guard. It did.
• 1:24:23
  Speaker A: Me too. Honestly, I was like, oh yeah, I guess it would be.
• 1:24:26
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:24:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. I will say I. It's funny because I do think the. The cinematic score motif is like a play on the like chorus of the song I'm pretty sure we were talking about during the episode. But yeah. Then no, they just full on play like like a minute and a half of it or something like that.
• 1:24:44
  Speaker B: Not like a ton of it, but.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker A: Like, like mainly the chorus.
• 1:24:46
  Speaker B: Yeah. Kind of the main chorus.
• 1:24:48
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:24:50
  Speaker B: My last note here, I just need to call this out. So the way that this book is set up is that at the beginning of each chapter there's like a little inspirational quote.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:25:02
  Speaker B: At the start of it. I don't think there are any actual like bible quotes, but it's mostly like religious quotes from other writers.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker B: The last chap, the author quotes herself at the beginning of the chapter.
• 1:25:20
  Speaker A: It like it says like Donna.
• 1:25:22
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 1:25:24
  Speaker A: That's insane. That's unhinged. Death's power is limited. It cannot eradicate memories or slay love. It cannot destroy even a threadbare faith or permanently hobble the smallest hope in God. It cannot permeate the soul and it cannot cripple the spirit. It merely separates us for a while. That is the only power death can claim. No more. Donna Van Leer. That's truly, like, tricky just quoting yourself.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker B: Also, like, very clearly extrapolated from the Princess Bride.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker A: Donna yeah, that is. Yeah, yeah, that is. I thought it sounded familiar. Now that you mention it, that is very similar to the Princess Bride. Wesley's speech about death and the Princess Bride. Oh goodness. Before we wrap up, we want to remind you can do us a giant favor by heading over to Facebook, Instagram, threads, Goodreads, Blue sky, any of those places interact with us. We'd love to hear what you had to say about the Christmas Shoes. We'll talk about that on the next prequel episode. You can also head over to Apple, Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you're watching and enjoying listening to our show, drop us a five star rating and write us a nice little review and head over to patreon.com thisfilmo get access to bonus content. All kinds of good stuff. Early access to or not early access, but early schedule of like what we're doing for the coming month. Bonus content at the $5 level. We just released our episode on the Nightmare Before Christmas. Spoilers weren't as glowing of a review as maybe you would expect, but I'll, I'll leave it at that. I'm just gonna tease it that way to make people like feel like, wait a second, what? I gotta go listen. But yeah, that's our Christmas bonus episode. And at the $15 a month level, you get access to priority recommendations where if you have something you'd really like for us to talk about, Support us at 15 bucks a month, recommend it, and we will add it to our list asap. But now, Katie, it's time for the final verdict.
• 1:27:23
  Speaker B: Sentence passed, Verdict after. That's stupid. Both the book and the movie versions of the Christmas Shoes are like, like the most predictable versions of this story humanly possible. You could make any random prediction about any detail, and if you have a single shred of media literacy, you'll probably be right. One of the perks that we do on Patreon at the I think at all the levels is reading notes. I don't know how many of our patrons actually read the reading notes. I assume almost nobody because they're usually not that interesting. This time, I highly recommend the reading notes because it's full of me going like page 59. Oh, I bet this is gonna actually be Jack's Mechanic Shop page 60. Yep, it's Jack's Mechanic Shop, just over and over and over in my notes. Reading the book did make me want to die a little. It was so predictable and so maudlin to bust out a vocab lesson. The best word to describe it might be lugubrious. Luckily, it was very short. The movie wasn't much better. Again, predictable. Again, maudlin and lugubrious, both riding the line of misery porn. Luckily, it was also pretty short. I do understand that these qualities are in line with the genre conventions for both the book and the movie. And I suppose the song. Which brings me to the next thing I'll Both the book and the movie are better than the song. Having some expanded backstory for the little boy buying the shoes helps tremendously, although none of these properties can shake the stench of the miserable guy who must learn the true meaning of Christmas via the suffering of others. Here's what I'll say the book is not very good. The movie is also not very good. But the book had brief moments here and there that made me believe that Donna Van Lear might just be a decent writer. Underneath all of the saccharine melodrama and religious propaganda, the movie felt more like a bunch of people going through the motions of making a sappy TV Christmas movie. Especially you, Rob Low. And for those reasons, I guess I'm giving this one to the book. Merry Christmas.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker A: Fantastic. Katie, what's next?
• 1:29:59
  Speaker B: We are taking next week off as is our end of the year custom. And then we are kicking off 2025 with 2003's film adaptation of the first three books in a Series of Unfortunate Events.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker A: Yes, very, very interesting. That one will be fun. We'll talk more about it on the prequel, but we'll have thoughts about that. But we'll get into that on the next prequel episode and we'll also hear what you all had to say about the Christmas shoes. Until that time, guys, gals, no boundary.
• 1:30:34
  Speaker B: Pals and everybody else keep reading books.
• 1:30:36
  Speaker A: Keep watching movies and have a very merry Christmas and a happy Holidays and keep being awesome.