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Critically Acclaimed #358 | The 98th Annual Oscar-Nominated Short Films! · Critically Acclaimed Network

• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Greetings friends welcome back to critically acclaims This is a film review podcast where we talk about movies We also have a very special set of facts, right?
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: There it is stuff.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the stuff
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: My name is Whitney Sybel.
• 0:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm a film critic.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I contribute to slash film and with me as always is my far more Centrelating and interesting co-hosts.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, William, why don't you introduce yourself?
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hello, I'm more Centrelating and more interesting.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: However, Whitney's sexier.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: My name is William Bibiall, I am a film critic I read for the rap and everybody calls me bives and yes, Whitney is sexier.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is factually accurate.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've taken a poll.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uh-huh.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, this is a very special bonus episode.
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: A critically acclaimed, this is an episode.
• 1:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've been doing every year for like over 10 years now, even since before this was called critically acclaimed.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we had another podcast on another feed.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But every year at the Academy Awards, there are 15 nominees that are short subjects, best animated short, best live action short, best documentary short, and almost everyone in the audience hasn't seen one of them.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that is people in the audience for the Oscars telecast.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Honestly, I'd be surprised if most of the Oscars voters have seen them too.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are wonderful categories with incredible filmmaking, impressive stories, very pointed political statements, glorious animation, filmmakers who are destined for big things, or maybe famous filmmakers who have decided to do a smaller project.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's all really interesting stuff, and unfortunately, not enough people get a chance to see them because movies don't show short films at the theater the way they used to, and although we have stuff like YouTube and some of these shorts are on things like Netflix and Disney Plus, they don't get as much attention, so this is a great opportunity for us to explore all 15.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, as we say every year, this is a great sort of nesting ground for a lot of really marvelous creativity.
• 2:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really great to see new voices of rise.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the short format is a really fascinating form in a business that is dominated by films of a very specific length.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: We tend to think of movies being somewhere between 90 and 130 minutes.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think the average film is like 130 minutes, and that has forced us to not just write, but also think about movies in a certain way.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hmm.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have to see films as like having a three act structure.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You go to school.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You learn these screenwriting techniques at all of those techniques don't apply to the short film format and I think short films have a little bit more freedom to play because there's actually less of it rather than the other way around.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to the Academy Awards, the most creativity tends to be in the animation department because animation is such a broad medium.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It can incorporate so many different styles.
• 3:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we have one of the shorts this year is like a painted animation where I think they're painting on pains of glass.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's one that's CG, there's one that's stop motion.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: you get a lot of more visual variety from the animation department and then we have the documentary shorts which tend to be aggressive to the point of breaking your heart.
• 3:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: In terms of them trying to make a point, the short format for a documentary in particular.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: doesn't leave a lot of room to fuss around, so typically, this isn't a very silly trick, and there's at least one exception in the nominees this year, but typically, a lot of short documentarians use this format to hit you really hard and relatively fast.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they're trying to make a maximum impression in the least amount of time, usually in order to call attention to an injustice or an overlaps chapter of history or some tragedy that isn't being handled appropriately.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: these are a lot of these are message movies that doesn't make them bad it means they're a bit diadetic sometimes but and certainly they're not going to be everybody's cup of tea but that's true for any movie yeah and of course they're the live action shorts which
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of variety in there as well.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of them are sort of serious drama.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes they're experimental.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have a sci-fi short in this particular crop.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes, and I always love this, there's a funny one.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: One that's like a really elaborate sketch.
• 5:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just a short joke and it tells it great and then we get the fuck out.
• 5:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: those aren't usually the ones that win, but it's always nice to see them nominated because here's the trick with these programs and these programs are actually in theaters this weekend as of this recording courtesy of roadside attractions and you can pay to see all the live action shorts in one program all the documentary shorts in one program and all the animated shorts in one program
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: and I recommend you do so.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a great experience.
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: However, none of these movies were intended to be viewed alongside the other movies.
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: So watching them all in a row isn't necessarily the best experience, sometimes they're not, they don't really benefit from comparing to one another because they're
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: especially in the documentary category where you have a lot of really hard-hitting emotionally overpowering stories watching them all back to back-to-back can be exhausting and sometimes incredibly depressing and even in the cases where it isn't so emotionally heavy live action animation sometimes it can still be a certain amount of tonal whiplash
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's really important when you watch these because your life you're going to watch them at home you're probably going to, a lot of them are available online by a lot of them can only be seen in the program right now.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you watch them in the program, try to remember these are all intended to be seen on their own and comparing them to one another, even though that's what the Oscars are doing isn't necessarily doing the movie any favors.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's completely fair.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I,
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's frustrating to go if you piece me of these out if you watch them at home, which a lot of people do.
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In previous years, you were able to sort of buy packages of shorts that you could stream or download, and then watch them in whatever order you wanted and in whatever cadence you wanted.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And but when you go to see them in theaters there, of course, they have to line them all up and that's a little frustrating because now it's up to the programmers to figure out what a good playlist is for these particular shorts and now all of a sudden
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: because programming I've always felt is a form of criticism.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're commenting on the films themselves without even really trying to.
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now what's the solution?
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because you do the best you can see and on the big screen.
• 8:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, being able to see them I think is good enough.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, anyway you can highly recommend it and I will say this because we're going to go through each category all five films in the order in which they are in the program.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Usually we do have a medical, but since that's the way most people are going to see him is in the program and we have access to that program list thing We don't always know the order.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to use that format But I'm going to say it's right now.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I actually think this is An unusually good crop here often times.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I watch these 15 shorts and while there's some that are amazing and some that are simply very good There's usually like one or two that piss me off
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think any of them pissed me off this year.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think most of them were pretty solid So I think they're bad or that they sometimes that bad message or what something's both Sometimes I just think they're just not particularly well made and they're other nominees that
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're so incredible and didn't make the cut and it's really frustrating often times the animated category because the animated films tend to be a little shorter They will pad the runtime with some of the nominees or some of the films that were on the short list to be nominated and did make the top five and sometimes You watch those other shorts, and you're just like, well, that wasn't that nominated.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's way better This year because the animated shorts are a little longer overall.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's only one extra
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: uh... and it's pretty good but uh... that this year that that is in the case and then there been a few years where even the films that one are incredibly frustrating uh... there was a movie at one if not like what last year two years ago was an animated one called the war is over uh... which was a cg animated film about uh... carrier pigeons and world war one set to the john lennon yoko on a side that was
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: absolutely insufferably smugged.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is.
• 10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not going to want to miss the point like it's trying to turn war into something kind of heartwarming.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: All it really takes is people being friends and there's no war and that's that's not what John Lennon was saying.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, let's get to this this crop you're right there.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: There wasn't one like that in this year's crop What real fast?
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: What was the one a couple of years ago?
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was like a really bad tail some of the crypt episode About racism and it was like it was it was called skin
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was like it was like a tale from the crypt episode from like the early 90s that was clearly written by a white writer who was trying to make some kind of commentary about racism against black people and it had this twist ending that was really really terrible and
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it won in one in 2018.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it was the brutal always wins.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's not always true, but too often it's true.
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: We will mention, although I don't think this should be the point.
• 11:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've noticed that most of the coverage for these programs tend to be focused on here are all denominies.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And here's what we think is going to win.
• 11:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: We will mention that.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that's not the focus here.
• 11:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: The focus is the films.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: At the end of it, we will say which ones were our favorites.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we will say which ones that if you are listening to this so that you can get a leg up in your betting pool, we can give you our thoughts on that as well.
• 11:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's going to be a pretty minor part of it we're reviewing these films as films.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We agreed before the podcast began that we were going to start with the documentary shorts.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Kind of arbitrary.
• 11:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: We just decided that that was the best way to start.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Documentary short is the weird one.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you're going by the order that they're packaged in.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's what I'm going by.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what I'm going by, I think that's the one that makes sense, because that's almost what we're going to see them.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's four documentaries that are nominated this year, that are very hard-hitting exposés, news stories, memorials for the fallen.
• 12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... and it's called perfectly estrangedness yet and it is technically a documentary because they are just sort of of the cameras are just observing these donkeys but they also uh... thanks through editing and some really ethereal music it does feel scripted it feels like something feels like something david lynch might have shot really uh... just in sort of hit when he was in his more whimsical moods there's an absurdist quality to the juxtaposition yet
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, and it's these three donkeys and yeah, they sort of are wandering through a big sort of wide open natural space and there's this abandoned building and they find an observatory and the observatory opens up and they kind of peer through and kind of we get to see these animals sort of reckoned with the cosmos or just see it.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, it's, and it is, and it's, it's only about 15 minutes.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's, um, it's, it's very dreamy, um, it's, very, um, hypnotizing.
• 13:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, I,
• 13:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: That might sound really dull to sort of watching these donkeys walk around, but it is fascinating watching these animals just be animals and interact with sort of this facet of the human world and how there is this kind of disconnect, but a part way through the movie, the filmmaker sort of give you a sense that the donkeys for maybe brief fleeting moments in their own animal kind of a way are they understand what's what might be happening there.
• 13:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: then it's in the nature of the cosmos.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
• 13:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Perfectly astrangedness is the only documentary nominee this year that I would actually recommend you do watch well-high.
• 14:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, absolutely do not watch the others.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: They will ruin your night.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But perfectly strangeness is it's it's so odd in its construct.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: So peaceful in the way that it is presented.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no narration, it we're just following a couple of donkeys.
• 14:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're just meandering through the desert and they find the man made structure.
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's almost sweetly apocalyptic quality because there are no humans there.
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, so they're just sort of seeing these remnants of mankind and the parts, and not just any, it could have been a car, it could have been a gas station, it could have been, you know, a amusement park instead, they're looking at a place that humans created in order to better understand the natural world.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now the natural world has come to it.
• 14:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um,
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's incredibly pensive and it's very thoughtful.
• 15:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is also, and they really never lean into this and I'm glad they did, because I think they would have been overplaying their hand.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's also biblical quality, too.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you think about it, here are three soulful beings wandering through the desert guided by astronomy.
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: to a location that brings a greater understanding of the universe.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: There is a certain, you know, three wise men following a star to Jesus quality to this that I think is subtle, but I don't think is, I'm pretty sure someone thought of it.
• 15:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: The question I have about this movie and I like it a lot.
• 15:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a documentary, yes, I have a hard time believing
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: that the filmmakers just happened to be filming these donkeys and these donkeys just happened to go to this location.
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is clearly like they put the donkeys in this situation, right?
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, it's hard to say it could very well be staged.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They could have heard the donkeys to a certain location and just let them wander around.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Clearly the donkeys are unthreatened by their presence because they get the cameras right up close to them, like they're clearly walking right up to these animals.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like you'll found footage.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: How much they're actually sort of like hurting the donkeys to get certain shots?
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can be debated?
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm guessing a lot of it was observational at the very least It's not scripted.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're kind of at the very least improvising at and if you're improvising a movie it does ask is it anyway?
• 16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: quality, yeah.
• 16:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So whether or not it counts as a documentary, how much you want to stage or script something in a documentary film as a matter of some debate.
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure if you want to get into ideas of the purity of a documentary film.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to fall down that rabbit hole, but I do think that if you're thinking about these,
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: All these zones is documented, especially when one is very different than all the others.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're rest of them are reporting pieces.
• 17:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: This one stands out and it's such a different use of the form.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right, it's like comparing, we've got four, 60 minutes segments, and then we're going to pair that up with 10 minutes of coyana scazzi.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Those are all documents.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one is doing something incredibly different and one of something that is so much more found in the editing room, meaning is being impressed upon the images, pulled out of the images, created through juxtaposition of moments that didn't necessarily happen together.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, so this is a more experimental use of documentary.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not new, but a lot of people think of documentary is very conventional, uh, documenting of things that actually happened.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And here, we're stretching that a little bit.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, I can imagine some people bristling.
• 18:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: at this some being included, but I would hope most people would understand that the documentary form is very malleable on this totally qualifies, but I would really like to know more about the making of it.
• 18:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm just very, very curious exactly what they had to go through and to what extent they were actually staging this as opposed to just creating a space for this to happen.
• 18:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd be curious about, but I don't have that information in front of me.
• 18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I do like your observation, though, that it does feel kind of biblical.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not just in that, you know, the donkey is, you know, seen in a lot of Christ's stories, but it's also reminiscent of Ohazard Balthazar, which is a very, very much, very religious sort of experience film, Robert Bersand's movie, and one of the best movies ever made without bigsendration.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, so yeah, I'm we're watching these these donkeys sort of bond with the cosmos.
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like we're getting a secular version of who's hard.
• 19:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Balthazar where they're kind of bonding with the cosmos through observation tools rather than through like spiritual suffering like they do in Brasans movie.
• 19:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, secular, Balthazar.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it says our secular is so much where you want to do the hard one the correct the good pun was right there.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.
• 19:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I interviewed Alex Hirsch once about his animated series Gravity Falls and that series concluded with like an apocalyptic storyline about like an interspatial the interdimensional demon taking over the town
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I asked him, why did you call it odd McGetton, isn't that the cleaner pun, and he took me to school immediately, he was like, where'd McGetton's weirder?
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: right it doesn't shit you got me there man I just do that I at some point I'm going to find them I'm going to find the people who made the the beam movie lava-lantula which is about a volcano bound tarantula mm-hmm
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and grill them endlessly why they did not call it tarantulava because it's right there.
• 20:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm pretty sure I've met the director of that.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: He did a schmodown episode once.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm pretty sure he's on social media.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you can find him.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you can do it.
• 20:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't read just me.
• 20:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: No one at home asked that that feels like a weird
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: like like we're not asking anyone else to buy them.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is Whitney's journey.
• 20:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let him go on it alone.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is, this is my fight.
• 20:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we're gonna move on and this is gonna be a hard, right turn into tough territory.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because the next- And this is documentary is really heavy.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're gonna be talking about the devil is busy next.
• 21:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I've said before that I've actually
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... a technique when it comes to watching the films which i wasn't able to do this year because their pro they were programmed out but i'd always go for the documentaries first because they deal with such uh... heady and often very depressing subject matter they deal with they look death right in the eye they look at suffering right in the eye just the biggest struggles that humanity is going through and they also tend to be long they're the longest program every year uh...
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like maybe this year I was prepared because there's a lot of really hard stuff in the following four movies.
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this one, what I was seeing, what I was seeing this time around, however, wasn't the suffering.
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, maybe I've just sort of softened in my old age, but I kept on seeing the humanity.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like the devil is busy is a very depressing movie about the state of women's health care and access to abortion in the United States, especially since the overturn of Rovey Wade in 2022.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: but at the same time I was actually focused too much or not too much.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was focused on the sort of the main character of the piece, the one that documentarians are falling around, a woman named Tracy, who works at a health center in Atlanta.
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Atlanta, Georgia, yeah.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: she's still there and she's still doing it and it's getting harder and harder all the time but that she is still devoted to all of this and is actually and it will get to it but at the very end of the film she talks about sort of the way faith is being miswielded so there's like an additional element about religion in modern America as well.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, this is a, this is a cinema very day, mostly kind of approach, and it's basically a day in the life of an abortion clinic in Atlanta, Georgia.
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: We start with this woman Tracy, she's the security guard, and she gets there before the crack of dawn, every morning opens everything up, it sets out bottled waters and snacks
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: hungry and stressed.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: She checks every room before they open, just in case a protester has decided to sneak in and wait there all night to jump out and harass people.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: which they don't specifically say has happened before but the fact that she thought of it implies that it probably has, which is a horrifying thought.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then as the day progresses we see doctors and office workers and we find out how their job has been made.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: an already difficult job has been made incredibly difficult by the overturning of Rovi Wade, which allowed states to discern to determine their own rules about abortion rights.
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: In some cases, this is led to attempts to outright ban abortion.
• 24:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: In some cases, this is led to draconian and vague rules that lead a lot of doctors to be nervous about providing certain care unless they get like legal approval, but sometimes this
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: um yeah and and and there's uh there's a woman there's one of my one of the most like depressing sequences in it for me was the woman who was just in charge of scheduling and she's talking to someone on the phone and the person's just like okay and uh where are you uh how and when they get to the point where they ask uh how long have you been pregnant when was your last
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: menstruation.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's able to pinpoint down that this person is six weeks and one day pregnant.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Which means just one day over the limit.
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: One day what the Georgian law has dictated.
• 25:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, one fucking day over that limit and she's like I all I can tell you is there's one abortion clinic in Florida.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which means this person is going to have to travel all the way across the state of
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: from God knows where they started.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then on top of it all, there's this constant almost, it never quite fades into a drone, but there is this constant noise in the background of protesters.
• 25:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: where they're every day so much so that they know their names, screaming that everyone in that clinic and everyone going to that clinic is going to hell and people are moved to tears as they try to get in and just receive their healthcare regardless of whether it wasn't abortion.
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're saying, you know, these people are going to hell and Tracy
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: because this is health care.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she's a religious woman.
• 26:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a huge part here.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: She has to actually, she has found a way to reconcile this with her faith.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's important.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's something that is so, this, you're right, this movie is so much more about the heroism of doing this important life-saving job when everyone around you who's business,
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is not is telling you, you can't.
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, it's very inspiring.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's it's inspiring, but it's also a nitty gritty.
• 26:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has like you're talking about how the the scheduling, just sort of the everyday trials of having to work in this clinic and how it.
• 27:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I find it very interesting because the protesters who are spewing other horrific nonsense outside and who have like criminal records and we know they have criminal records because Tracy has gotten to know them.
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: To Tracy, these protesters are essentially like really shitty regular customers who come into your retail job.
• 27:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like yeah, that's that's kind of the effect they're having on her work.
• 27:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're just making everything really difficult.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: She hates dealing with them Clearly the police aren't going to come and scare these people off
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, they don't clearly.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's, yeah.
• 27:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she, and eventually, it's like this practical, it's practical, it's all this, like, really mind numbingly bureaucratic work.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then by the end of the film, it just sort of gets to her.
• 27:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: When she finally says, this, this is not what faith is.
• 28:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not what Christianity is.
• 28:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: This isn't what God wants for the world.
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that part is really moving.
• 28:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Interesting, but a trivia here.
• 28:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: This movie was co-directed.
• 28:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: by Crystal and Hampton and a filmmaker named Gita Gondever.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Gita Gondever is nominated for two Academy awards this year for two different films.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, she's nominated for this Academy Award for the Devil is busy, but she also directed the Netflix feature documentary, Perfect Neighbor.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: which is, some people say it's favorite to win.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that doesn't happen very often.
• 28:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not uncommon for a filmmaker to be nominated multiple times a year for the same film, like Rancoukler, Rotten-Directed Centers, he's up for both Oscars.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: She is nominated for two films that came out the same year.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's a really rare achievement.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like we're talking about like Michael Cretis and Steven Soderberg did that.
• 28:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's really cool.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's a very, very impredent, that's not getting talked about enough.
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: That is a huge, huge feather in someone's cap and good for, and this is a great documentary.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I haven't seen the perfect neighbor, have you seen that one?
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... no but i was just looking up uh... gaita gun uh... gone beer uh... and she uh... she's done a few interesting mini-series she did that Katrina film uh... just last year yeah yeah so we got to come here all her high water she did a film about synonym which is this weird self-help group from the nineteen fifties oh yeah
• 29:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Did you ever see it?
• 29:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was a film about synonon, like a narrative feature film starring Earth the Kit.
• 29:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I saw it.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I saw it.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fuckin' weird, man.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I saw it and it was especially weird because the Sennon on headquarters was in Santa Monica, California, about a thousand feet from the Santa Monica pier right along the Pacifico's highway.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know that because I've walked past that building so many times in my life, that's my hometown.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they found no idea, it was like, it's great, they filmed it later and I had no idea that this whole Sennon on it.
• 30:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So she did a,
• 30:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's really cool.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: A film called Board in Synanon, back in 2023, yeah, she's done actually a lot of really good, interesting documentaries, she's a very experienced editor, I hope she went something.
• 30:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Good for her?
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, honestly, just the thing is, and no shade to Crystal and Hampton, who's also nominated and if this one, I'd be very happy.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, she's not an outing for two movies, and I think that's cool trivia and find down.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: The next film is called Armed Only With a Camera, The Life and Death of Brent Reno.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: When you want to take this away, tell us about this one.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: OK, well, Brent Renoed was killed in Ukraine while covering and photographing the conflict there between Ukraine and Russia.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and there's this in 2022.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He has had been a photojournalist for a long long time.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had filmed a lot of conflicts and dangerous areas.
• 31:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was documentary survivors in Iraq during the Iraq war in like the early 2000s.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a very quick Haiti.
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right, he was there for the Haitian earthquake, which was in like the early 12th times.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the film kind of like,
• 31:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... doesn't it doesn't present it in a kind of like chronological order to sort of like almost like a found footage real of the stuff that he was working on while also cutting back to his brother who uh... directed the film and and in it together uh... his brother Craig who
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: one because his brother was so good about sort of filming the actual mayhem and showing the actual suffering wanted to have the camera pointed right at Brent's face in his casket.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Brent is in the film a lot.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: We see him dead.
• 32:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you have an aversion to
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: real death on camera or seeing dead bodies on camera really skip this one because we don't think right up on this dead man's face to be clear we don't see him die there is a difference but yes we're he but and this is something that
• 32:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, photojournalists, a lot of photojournalists, a lot of journalists, subscribe to is that they're trying to document the reality of a thing and a lot of us because we're not on the ground, because we're not in Ukraine, because we're not in the disaster zone.
• 32:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of these tragedies are very academic.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just like I hear these numbers on a sheet.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and you see the numbers and you're just like, well, that's a really huge number But Documentarians and photojournalists and journalists, you know, they're actually getting in there and getting the stories of every individual and every person is going through a horrible and and usually very sympathetic crisis
• 33:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what Brent Renaud did and Craig Renaud also helped him out with that sometimes.
• 33:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: But that's what they're trying to do now is by just showing you like he was killed by Russian soldiers shot in the back it turns out documenting a war zone.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they want you to really sit in that and the thing about this movie for me,
• 33:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: is that more than anything else, it's a eulogy, it's a memorial.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right, it's talking about his life, his childhood.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a sequence which, in theory, is very emotionally manipulative.
• 33:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure they left it in there because it was endearing.
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's a documentary, so I'm tempted to just not make say that's a critique, so which is an observation.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Whole sequence of Brent,
• 34:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: playing with his dog at various times and the dog is really cute and they dance and obviously the juxtaposition isn't it sad that he's dead it's incredibly sad that he's dead but for me this feels more like I mean it's deeply personal but it's more of like a great manpiece
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it ties someone into the overall photojournalist documentarian profession and ethos and that's a good thing but more than anything else this feels just like a deeply person This feels like something you would show at a funeral
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this does feel a lot like a film that was made for the people who knew him personally.
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like we're getting to know him, but we're getting to know him through the lives he touched and through his brother and through, yeah, to sort of his own family.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than, uh, I actually disagree.
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it is kind of a great man documentary.
• 35:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it is, uh, very sweet.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's very positive.
• 35:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not like this warsonal thing exposing like his vices or anything.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's actually the probably was trying to make that I used the wrong turn because I was actually agreeing with you on that.
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, okay.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: The great man I just need to say is this is a movie that shows how great he was.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I hear the term great man film, I think of like, uh, uh,
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of like a polemic, a hegeography of some flawless giant of American history.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not what this film does.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it does show him who he is.
• 35:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I agree it.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: clearly the filmmakers though aren't trying to manipulate you they're just trying to be sentimental about him which is fair because they're his family this is his brother and he's allowed to be sentimental
• 35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a film last year, it might have been a year before, where it was a father interviewing his teenager.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, over the years.
• 36:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And asked her, and asked her the same three questions every year for when she was like three until she was like 17.
• 36:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was really good.
• 36:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll look it up, hang on.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then that was really good, but that also felt a little bit like some of it was done for his own benefit and for the subjects benefit and not necessarily for a mass audience is benefit.
• 36:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: We just got kind of got to know this girl as she grew up from being very very young to going the way to college.
• 36:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was how do you measure a year by J. Rosenblad.
• 36:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was not in the 2020 to, yeah, it's good.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's really good.
• 36:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was very sweet, yeah, but it's so personal that it may not have the same impact as the others, but this one obviously has the greater sociopolitical context and the greater sense of tragedy, because it's person died.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's actually a good dovetail actually into the next one because the next one is, and I think this is my favorite of this lot, it's called all the empty rooms.
• 37:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this I couldn't do it.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: You couldn't do it.
• 37:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I like I watch the film, but gosh, this film destroyed me It destroyed it, but I think I think it really earns it and I don't think it ever over plays a tan, which is very impressive All the empty rooms is a documentary about TV journalist Steve Hartman and Steve Hartman's actually pretty well known
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you've seen them on TV, there's a really good chance you've seen him as the fun guy at the end of the news program, who's like, oh, hey, this squirrel learned how to water ski, like the fun stuff.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: He was considered the guy who's who lighten things up after a dead dark news.
• 37:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Somehow, as school shootings rose in frequency over the last 30 years.
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It somehow felt to him and I would say it talks a little bit more about how he ended up with this gig.
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's somehow felt to him he was doing like one essay a week.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Trying to find some sense of comfort or hope in this ongoing national
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: horrifying crisis, focusing on one person who did something heroic, for example.
• 38:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And over time he realized that he was telling the same story over and over again, and he didn't think he was making any impact, and so he and a photographer named Lou Bob decided to embark on a really interesting, very powerful project where they would contact families who had lost children to a school shooting.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And people who, and this is very common, left their child's room in tact, and they never like cleaned it out.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then they come in, they interview people, and they're very kind.
• 39:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then they photograph that room, their space, the way they had it when they were alive, to sort of preserve their memory, and capture all of these little details, which are,
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just like you see like a little dish on a nightstand with like some pennies and a friendship bracelet and you realize they were they were going to wear that, you know, they had plans and so it's really really devastating but also very quiet in a way that I think's very powerful.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: it's it's certainly devastating I mean I and I recognize that I probably responded so strongly to this because I have a ten-year-old son sure and how much of my you know a lot of my son's personality comes out in his room the way he keeps it the stuff he keeps in there you know the very specific blankets and stuffed animals and toys and books that he has so much of that is
• 40:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, denote who that person is and it's especially pronounced with little kids because they're a little messy.
• 40:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're they haven't organized their room.
• 40:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're just sort of figuring out, you know, the stuff they like.
• 40:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And seeing all of these things that kids put around them.
• 40:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: just to kind of realize that the kid is is just gone from the world is it just ripped my heart out You know the the posters of like the their favorite sports stars all of that was just so unbearably tragic.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were so many sponge bobs
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, everyone has a bunch of, there was a film from a couple of years ago, it's called In the Fade, it started Diane Kruger as a woman who lost two six-year-old son in a bombing.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that film does not pull any punches because her husband and her son both die, which means she not only has to deal with their deaths, but now has to plan their funerals.
• 41:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a scene where she's going, oh god, she's going casket shopping for her six-year-old.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, which uh, you know, so she goes into the cast itself is a whole story.
• 41:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 41:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a horrifying thought.
• 41:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then she goes into the casket show room.
• 41:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when I saw them panning around the casket show room and one of the caskets was shaped like a fire truck.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, I couldn't, I just burst into tears.
• 41:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, oh, my, my little kid loves fire trucks.
• 41:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now I get to bury them in a fire truck.
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good God.
• 41:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, I,
• 41:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate though that there's no, we're just sort of living with that satness though.
• 41:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're living in this state of mourning with all the empty rooms.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing sensational, yeah.
• 41:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they're not sensationalizing it.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're not even like outraged about it.
• 41:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This isn't going to move you to action.
• 41:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is just going to let you realize just how much hurt is still in the world because of these shootings.
• 42:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's important to remind viewers of that sadness, because if we don't, it's like we were saying before, it becomes statistics.
• 42:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It becomes the X number of people.
• 42:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're killed this year.
• 42:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, every one of those kids had a room, and their room had their stuff in it, and they were like fully formed human beings.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, at age nine, they are who they are.
• 42:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: just not like another just counting it and every single one of these is bringing it back down to a human level.
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 42:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate one of the the parents said that they kept their they didn't like fix up their son's room But they left they've been like left the dirty laundry on the floor Like right right where it had been dropped because they missed his stinking ass Yeah, like they didn't say they watched us underwear and socks.
• 42:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: They thought that was a little too far, but everything else they left
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's because, you know, they miss the scent of that person and that person has gone.
• 43:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the things that fascinated me about this because we tend to think of grief as very visible.
• 43:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Either your silence is speaking volumes.
• 43:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're just, you've been so quietly or you're outwardly crying or some, or you're angry or something.
• 43:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there is capacity for happiness and levity when they greet these journalists at the door, they're saying, oh, hi, it's nice to meet you.
• 43:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then as they talk, they are gradually brought back to that memory and to the fact that they have a living memorial in their house.
• 43:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mentioned that it was a good segue from that talk about how do you measure a year.
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: The photographer looped up every morning, photographs his daughter.
• 44:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And one imagines based on the context of the movie that he probably started this project as a cute way to keep track of his kid as she aged.
• 44:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now it's like, for all he knows is the last time he sees his daughter.
• 44:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 44:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that destroyed me.
• 44:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was the part of it that I was just like, oh god, that.
• 44:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: How did we let this happen as a culture?
• 44:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where that is something that is just in our heads, and that is something that is not impossible.
• 44:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: If I were to say,
• 44:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: which film is most likely to win in this category.
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I actually do think it's all DMT rooms and partly because it's great.
• 44:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: But also because unlike the others, it actually has something resembling a narrative in the way that it just very lightly dove tales in a story about Steve Hartman's career as a journalist who didn't do anything serious and ultimately did this incredibly beautiful project.
• 45:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that gives this movie a kind of a punctuation that some of the other documentaries which don't have an ending, they're still ongoing.
• 45:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't really have.
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think this one might hit a little harder as a movie.
• 45:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Regardless of whether or not it is the best documentaries.
• 45:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that's my theory about that.
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the last nominee is even more harrowing
• 45:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: This one's really fascinating, I think, because it is about the children, like the many many children who have died in Gaza.
• 46:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it doesn't follow the lives of the children, it follows the protests of how people in Gaza are trying to get facts about the deaths out into the world and to communicate them
• 46:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... we sort of get to see these organized protests where people hold up pictures of the dead children uh... to yell out their names and what i found you know very telling was that people who are walking past these protests kind of yelling at them and insulting them for a lot of reminding them of the death so uh... clear this is actually taking place in teleive
• 46:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, those are the protesters and they are the protesters are not in Gaza.
• 46:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're in Iran as well.
• 46:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just for clarity.
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and they are doing a silent protests where they take photographs of children who have been confirmed, uh, killed.
• 47:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, and they just hold of the pictures a little bit of factual information about the child.
• 47:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they're just standing there
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: to see these children as human.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: They are competing for attention anyway.
• 47:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: They actually don't see themselves as in any sort of disagreement with protesters who are actively protesting the hostage crisis in Gaza.
• 47:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: But these protesters repeatedly say that they don't see that as that that's important as well.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that should be settled.
• 47:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as they just stand there and they're just the resolute.
• 47:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not saying anything.
• 47:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: We see some people just walk by, not making eye contact.
• 47:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: A few people give them a passive glance and then a lot of people yelling basically that those children deserve to die and that these people are entirely misguided and they should not be humanizing these people.
• 48:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 48:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's really hard to watch.
• 48:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I understand that it's a politically fraught situation.
• 48:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: No one's pretending it's not, but all they're saying is that children shouldn't be dying.
• 48:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: That should be easy to get behind.
• 48:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've seen enough protests, and I've walked past enough protests that I didn't know was going on that I've been put in the position of like suddenly I'm at it a mall or something and I see the protest and I'm suddenly faced with a tragedy that I wasn't thinking about.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You weren't ready for it.
• 49:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when somebody says don't you think this is unfair?
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like My reaction would be to say oh, hang on.
• 49:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hadn't thought about this.
• 49:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: I could have a response prepared and I can understand why some of these people are like saying oh, this is a little awkward.
• 49:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's because, you know, they weren't prepared to talk about this today
• 49:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: They don't have to mention the capacity to just sit with this for 20 minutes and let it sink down.
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's hard.
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to do.
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 49:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think so it's a lot of those people who are just sort of walking by and ignoring it.
• 49:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're not ignoring the tragedy.
• 49:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're just sort of ignoring having to face a tragedy all of a sudden in public, which of course is the point of the protests.
• 49:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're trying to get people to think about this when they ordinarily wouldn't.
• 49:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, but I feel like it's an effective protest, I think the real tragedy of this film is the people who are yelling the people are stopping and saying that oh There is injustice where are the hostages?
• 50:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why are you holding up pictures of the hostages?
• 50:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: How about this?
• 50:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those kids are dead?
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and here's the thing other people are protesting that
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's people are working on that right now and these people support that as well.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's, you can be concerned about one injustice without saying the other injustices are invalid.
• 50:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you really wanted to make this competition, you could have that conversation, but the vitriol was which people respond to an unobtrusive,
• 50:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Attempt to raise awareness that like tiny children are dying by the tens of thousands and it's really horrifying to watch the documentary and see like, you know, early out of the documentary, they say that like 17,821 or whatever, I didn't write down the exact number.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Children are dead already and then they said there was a ceasefire, but yesterday the ceasefire broke and over one hundred children died last night And that number just keeps steadily rising until by the end of the documentary and the state they'd I'm sure the numbers got up But at the end of the documentary the number was over 20,000 Geez that's That should be sobering and there's a line in this documentary.
• 51:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I did write down that I think is
• 51:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: This for me is ultimately why I think this documentary is very important.
• 51:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's because it is cataloging the people saying that we shouldn't care.
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: The line was, one of the protesters said it will take generations to understand the denial
• 52:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: to show, and I'm not talking about necessarily pointing fingers at an individual and looking figure out who that guy or that woman was or whatever, I just, this is what, this was considering a normal reaction to a protest saying that children are dying to yell at the protesters and say that they're doing something immoral or at the best they're naive, right, it's really heavy.
• 52:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's out with me a lot.
• 52:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
• 52:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of these, I feel, I feel the most connection to the devil is busy.
• 52:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 52:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so...
• 52:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that one's really great, and I also liked all the empty rooms, just in terms of their sheer power and the things that we're saying.
• 53:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I admit all the empty rooms was just sort of an emotional reaction.
• 53:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do think there is usefulness to that, but it's also just me freaking out about dead children.
• 53:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what's not to freak out about?
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this is actually a really good, strong crop.
• 53:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: As we've said, this deal with really heavy subjects and really difficult emotions and real life tragedies.
• 53:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I feel like this year, there's so much more being captured in here.
• 53:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not just sort of bringing one's attention to a cause.
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really trying to, like, all of these films are trying to move and,
• 53:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: rather than just sort of educate or outrage.
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: There seems to be just so much more humanity than I've seen in this category in the past.
• 53:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I was actually, I like these movies.
• 53:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like these ones a lot.
• 53:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a good crap.
• 53:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can't say I had a good time watching them, but I thought I was exhilarated and moved by these movies.
• 54:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, these are all excellent films.
• 54:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think they all tackle, I mean, four of them tackle very difficult subjects.
• 54:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of them is Donkeys and Observatory.
• 54:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't mean that in a dismissive way, but it's clearly the odd one out.
• 54:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the rest of them were handling these very sensitive topics.
• 54:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think they're doing it mostly with a lot of earnestness, a lot of fairness, they're not overplaying their hand, even though the hand that they're dealt is
• 54:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: as I said, extremely heavy.
• 54:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would argue that all the empty rooms and devils busy are probably the most accomplished documentaries.
• 54:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: If either of them want to be very happy, but frankly, if any of them want to be happy, they're all good.
• 54:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The one, however, that I think in some ways the documentary is
• 54:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: paste oddly in a way that maybe is to its detriment and it kind of struggles to find a place to conclude.
• 54:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think the one that's going to stick with me is children no more.
• 54:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not just because it is about such an overwhelming
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: situation.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But because of the mirror it points up to people who refuse to engage with an inconvenient and ugly truth about what is going on and what they are at least tacitly approving up.
• 55:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's something that is not unique to that situation.
• 55:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of parallels in America right now.
• 55:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think about the people who aren't necessarily thinking about what's happening with the concentration camps that are being built and people are already in or what's going on with ice or the way USAID was defunded almost immediately in Donald Trump's campaign.
• 55:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now, countless children have died because of it.
• 55:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: To just brush that aside, it's like, no, we need to worry about the economy is just going to be so hard to explain, yeah, it already is, but in the future, when it's not normalized, it's going to be incredibly difficult to explain, and I think this documentary did a good job of illustrating that through this particular lens.
• 56:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank God, the live action shorts are a little lighter this year.
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are a little lighter this year.
• 56:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's like two that are pretty intense in the rest of the shorts.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 56:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the rest are fine.
• 56:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also pretty depressing.
• 56:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: This time we have like a comedy.
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have a musical.
• 56:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like there's there's some good ones in this, this badge.
• 56:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I really like most them a lot, not eloquently, but I like most them a lot.
• 56:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the live action short films.
• 56:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: The nominees, I should have listed the nominees for documentary, but you can look it up at the top.
• 56:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the nominees are the singers of friend of Dorothy Butcher's stain, two people exchanging saliva and Jane Austen's period drama, we'll start with a film called The Singers, which was written directed, I think shot and edited by Sam A Davis, and The Singers takes place entirely
• 57:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: in a very dark, shadowy, smoky tavern in the middle of the night.
• 57:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 57:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the middle of the night, it's like snowing outside.
• 57:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everyone's bundled up, cold, kind of miserable.
• 57:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a lot of mostly middle-aged and older men who have clearly have a lot of regrets because this is where they are in their lives.
• 57:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not anywhere else.
• 57:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: the ceiling is like coming down a little like there you can you expect to see it's the lag tide.
• 57:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ceiling is also like it's festooned with one dollar bills like they've been stapled to the ceiling so that there's this weird cave like texture to it and there's
• 58:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Amongst all of the one one dollar bills.
• 58:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's one one hundred dollar bill hanging around, which is a secret kind of a plot point Yeah, it's a secret no one knows no one really notices that it's there, but it's there and a guy comes in
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he doesn't have any money to buy a drink, but he starts asking if he could bump a drink off somebody and no, it's going for it And the bartender says You can't you can stay if you want but you got to stop bothering the customers and the guy says What if I don't have any money?
• 58:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: What if an exchange for a beer?
• 58:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I sang for you And the guys and the bartender says
• 58:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to do that, but finally the guy manages to talk it up a bit and arrange a sort of an impromptu singing competition with his old guy at the bar who is clearly you know, not long for this world, but he used to sing, and the bartender says, fine, if you can prove that you can sing better than this guy, anyone who sings better than everyone else,
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: You don't only get a free beer, I'll give you the $100 bill.
• 59:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the old guy sings House of the Rising Sun and it is haunting, I don't even like that song really, but like he has such a haunting rendition of it.
• 59:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then that guy turns out as a great piano player and he sings a much more a little lighter song and then another guy whips out unchanged melody,
• 59:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he sings it with such solveness.
• 59:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of people forget because most people associate unchain melody.
• 59:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: uh... with the movie ghost which repopularized it in the early nineties it was the song they played while patchy crazy into me more like had sex while sculpting with clay weird scene of the abstract uh... but that song and chained melody actually was an Oscar nominated song from a movie called unchange in the nineteen fifty's and the movies almost completely forgotten but it's a prison film the song yet song is out last of the movie
• 1:00:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a prison film, unchained was about men in prison and unchained melody was a song one of them saying about not being sure if the woman he loved is waiting for him or not.
• 1:00:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a really depressing song and this movie really really really brings it out.
• 1:00:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love this short, I love the way that like these guys who are completely not communicating and stuck in their own heads and reliving their past are given an excuse to express themselves through art and what it reveals about them and how it kind of in livens their lives for one night is genuinely wonderful.
• 1:00:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's so, it's so great.
• 1:00:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is just about sort of the moving power of music.
• 1:00:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about how in this cave-like dive bar, with these guys who are all, you know, they all have drinking problems.
• 1:01:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them is addicted to cocaine.
• 1:01:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't have money for coke.
• 1:01:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're not living sort of like their best lives right now.
• 1:01:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the only thing they can kind of have to do at the end of the day is have a little bit of booze and drift off.
• 1:01:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then...
• 1:01:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: When they begin to sing, we realize how much soul and love and art there is in all of these people and how they're just by singing to one another.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not after a while, it's not even about the contest.
• 1:01:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're just trying to show off that each of them has a very unique talent.
• 1:01:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like that each of them sings a little bit differently.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them is just kind of a booky wookie song.
• 1:01:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them sings kind of a
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: they all have brushed up against the glories of music and we get to see it all come out of them.
• 1:01:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's so great.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, everyone has a song in their heart whether they're a great singer or just had something to express.
• 1:02:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Davis never loses this very
• 1:02:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: almost pergatorial atmosphere to it.
• 1:02:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the song lifts people out of that, at least briefly.
• 1:02:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's just, it's such a beautiful film about communication and masculinity.
• 1:02:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I, I will say this.
• 1:02:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I actually think the ending specifically where they cut it off, it gave me a laugh, but it was so brilliant.
• 1:02:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it just made me feel like, you know,
• 1:02:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's show me like what this film was really trying to say and talk about in a way that is very entertaining And yet also just very moving.
• 1:02:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a really good movie.
• 1:02:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love this movie.
• 1:02:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that one was followed by a friend of Dorothy, which is about a woman named Dorothy, but there's gayness all over this isn't there.
• 1:02:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's quite a bit.
• 1:03:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mario Margillus who you have a very outspoken lesbian actress and it also has a small role for Stephen Fry and
• 1:03:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dorothy is the main character and it is about her friend in fact it opens after her death and Stephen Fry plays the executor for Will and we see these two young men one of them is this like really kind of bratty guy and a nice suit who just wants to get it get his money and get out of there I mean, yeah, that's that's her grandson and then the other is a young man named JJ
• 1:03:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he and the the grandson doesn't know this this guy doesn't know who he is and we do learn that's uh and then we see in flashback how this young man JJ got to know Dorothy and it turns out uh what was it he just sort of kicked his uh his football into her yard and what did you get it yeah he he like he kicked his football into her backyard he wanted to get it back
• 1:04:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, can you open a tin of prunes I'm having trouble back here and so he agrees to like help her open her prunes so she can stay regular and then it turns out that she
• 1:04:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: He gravitates towards one plane, but particularly, and I don't know if he knew it, or if it's just the filmmakers being cheeky, but he gravitates towards one of the gayest places he could possibly pick.
• 1:04:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she clocks that immediately.
• 1:04:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's bent, isn't it?
• 1:04:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He just bent, yeah, which is queer holocaust drama.
• 1:04:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very intense.
• 1:04:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've seen the movie based on that play.
• 1:04:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I haven't seen that.
• 1:04:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Cool.
• 1:04:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: She realizes he has an interest in art.
• 1:05:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: She also immediately recognizes that he's queer, even though he doesn't seem to really know.
• 1:05:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he doesn't seem to really realize that he's into the arts.
• 1:05:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: He says he does a little acting in school, but it's like a hobby.
• 1:05:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she tells him to just read a bit from a play and it turns out he's got some talent.
• 1:05:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: and they just form a friendship.
• 1:05:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a really cute bit.
• 1:05:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's like a montage of like, him coming over, opening a can of prunes every day and they talk theater.
• 1:05:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then there's this one really cute bit where I feel like opening can of prunes and they walk out of the frame and you see his football is still in the backyard never even bothered to get it.
• 1:05:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's really good story, Tom.
• 1:05:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: This movie is, you know, it's professionally made.
• 1:05:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: The acting is wonderful, it's very, very sweet.
• 1:05:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: extremely predictable, like you know, I've seen everything I'm going to like this before.
• 1:05:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:05:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, in fact, oh, there was one thing that was with Joan plow, right?
• 1:06:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mm.
• 1:06:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was almost identical to this.
• 1:06:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:06:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I guess it was, um, it was just about an older woman who forms like a very important friendship with a younger man.
• 1:06:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, the younger man was
• 1:06:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, oh, but yeah, it was pretty much the exact same story in, in, in, feature film form.
• 1:06:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm here with Marglies as a wonderful actor.
• 1:06:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: She rarely gets to take center.
• 1:06:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's great.
• 1:06:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:06:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: She has a great monologue in this about, like, it's her grandson comes over because she had some trouble when needed his help and he's, he helped.
• 1:06:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he's not.
• 1:06:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's as he's a selfish kid who only cares about money here.
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is Mrs. Paul for you at the Claremont.
• 1:06:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you remember Mrs. Paul for you at the Claremont?
• 1:06:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: That sounds familiar.
• 1:06:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've probably seen this, but just I was with Joan Plowrite and Rupert friend was the young man.
• 1:06:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ah, yeah, that sounds wrong.
• 1:06:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: 2005 so it's pretty young at the time yeah um and her grandson's not like a horrible person he's just the stuck up guy he cares too much about money and he's not really spending any time with her and she has a speech to JJ about how you know she she needs help didn't need that much help yet and what she wants more than anything else is for someone to treat her like she's not a burden and to just be her friend
• 1:07:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's relationship to have.
• 1:07:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's incredibly sweet and it's wonderfully active.
• 1:07:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's incredibly sweet.
• 1:07:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: She needs that.
• 1:07:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: She understands who she is.
• 1:07:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: She understands who her husband was.
• 1:07:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I love million Mary of Margotless.
• 1:07:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've seen a lot of movies.
• 1:07:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've seen her in TV shows.
• 1:07:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think she's pretty great.
• 1:07:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But
• 1:07:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like her overwhelming personality might have taken away from the drama of this short because she's not some desperate person who needs contact.
• 1:08:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's the kind of person who will go into a store and have three friends before she leaves.
• 1:08:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's just that charismatic.
• 1:08:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing missing from her life.
• 1:08:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: She seems to have done it.
• 1:08:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's good point, actually, and I think it's slightly undermines the premise a little bit, not so much that I believe it, but it undersells the dramatic element of that.
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you don't want to overplay that either, because then it feels like your family's being neglectful.
• 1:08:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: But, um,
• 1:08:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a tricky balance.
• 1:08:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think they quite nail it and I think as as well made as to say it's good for them for being nominated and I know some people who think this is a lock to win because it's so sensitive and speaks to older Academy voters queer Academy voters.
• 1:08:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I do think the fact that this feels like.
• 1:08:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: an extremely unremarkable story regardless of how well told it is for me that holds it back from being great especially compared to these other nominees which I think are all quite excellent well there there is an argument to be heard about how a great short is one that does essentially the same thing a feature does
• 1:09:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: that this could have been a feature, they could have added more plot points, they could have had some flashbacks, they could have really padded it out, entered it into a 90 minute feature film with these same actors.
• 1:09:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: We essentially just got the same story and however long this was like 20 minutes.
• 1:09:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like a lot of people want to reward short films that do that, that do the same thing that a feature film does.
• 1:09:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Which, you know, it's a little unfair because it's a different medium.
• 1:09:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
• 1:09:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, the thing I think about when you bring that up because they can be typically not always, but typically likes to reward live action shorts that feel like little mini features.
• 1:09:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's extremely common for those to win.
• 1:09:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And those are bad movies, or even that they weren't the best movie that particular year.
• 1:10:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it's not necessarily working within the specific medium that they have.
• 1:10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the other thing that I think about, when I think about how a film like this, you're right, you could totally take this short and pat it out into a feature.
• 1:10:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there are certainly shorts that have been turned into features and the features felt
• 1:10:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: excellent with plash you know when they when the damage is all couldn't get that script made into a feature he made a short to sell people on the premise and then that short turn it a movie both were able to work very well for something like a friend of Dorothy I think about how this could have been a feature you could have added subplots and more characters but the fact that it's so much
• 1:10:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: more effective than it's that's so impactful in what is it like 25 minutes give her take yeah um twenty twenty two minutes twenty two minutes you can get that entire story that some people would have added to feature life in twenty two minutes for me calls attention to the failings of the feature film format that feature films aren't necessarily inherently better they're just easier to sell
• 1:11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're easier to sell.
• 1:11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of the length we're used to.
• 1:11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I remember, I got into a big argument with a coworker once about sort of the importance of story.
• 1:11:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I've said on podcast before, how story is actually kind of interchangeable in a lot of films.
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you go to films, the story needs to function, I suppose, but we're not there necessarily to see a good story, where they to see good characters, good moments, good action sequences, good climaxes,
• 1:11:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: often we forget the finderies of the actual plot of a movie because we're too busy uh... focusing on singular moments uh... he says you know these are these masterful story the story is always the most important thing no it's really the telling and i pointed to him
• 1:12:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: us these sort of animation companies that can can reduce movies down to like 30 second snippets that are actually condensed whole stories into the span of a TV commercial.
• 1:12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hmm.
• 1:12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: This and I realized how much dead weight there is in so many feature films when you can literally tell the story like the actual hit all of the plot points you need to in less than a minute.
• 1:12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can some things up really, really easily.
• 1:12:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Life is immaterial.
• 1:12:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just about the storytelling and this one tells the story perfectly well.
• 1:12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's unremarkable, but it does it well.
• 1:12:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it does it incredibly well.
• 1:12:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if we're just celebrating the quality of the filmmaking, then, you know, there's there's nothing to complain about here other than the story isn't as original as it could be.
• 1:12:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I agree with your point that I think if you just care about story, there's a lot of unnecessary chaff in a lot of features.
• 1:13:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of our longtime listeners who pursued criticism and became an excellent critic in her own right.
• 1:13:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bill and her grade did a wonderful project where she
• 1:13:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Trimmed the Batman, Matt Reeves' Batman movie.
• 1:13:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh God, I love her voice.
• 1:13:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's such a brilliant, it's such a brilliant work.
• 1:13:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's great work, she's great anyway, but yeah.
• 1:13:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's such a great work of criticism.
• 1:13:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: She stripped that movie of most of its subplots, a lot of its runtime and of sound,
• 1:13:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: She turned it into a shorter silent feature of a black and white silent feature with intertitles like an old silent movie.
• 1:13:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what she revealed in that project, it's editing as a form of criticism and I love it, is that a lot of that movie isn't serving the film.
• 1:14:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not serving the characters, it's not necessarily serving the theme, it's not serving even the plot.
• 1:14:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you can't, and that's it, and I'm not saying you can't put a whole lot of movie in a movie.
• 1:14:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Some of my favorite movies are big wet sloppy kisses that are longer than I probably need to be.
• 1:14:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: That got no objection to that.
• 1:14:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if you care about the economy storytelling, a lot of our even was popular movies really aren't following that and might benefit from it.
• 1:14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, let's let's get back to the shorts.
• 1:14:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
• 1:14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's there's our little little rant about the short film format.
• 1:14:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right.
• 1:14:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: The next one is called Butcher's Stain.
• 1:14:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is another film that takes place in Tel Aviv.
• 1:14:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: This one's obviously functional.
• 1:14:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it is about a butcher in a grocery store.
• 1:15:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: His name is Samir.
• 1:15:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's played by an actor named Omar Samir.
• 1:15:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is an Arab Israeli.
• 1:15:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: He is working for a minimum wage because no one else is willing to.
• 1:15:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's not treated great.
• 1:15:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's called into his boss's office one morning and she says, in our break room, we have posters of the hostages in Gaza.
• 1:15:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: to support them and their families, one of our other co-workers is like related to someone who is a hostage.
• 1:15:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And every morning, people have come in and see that those posters have been torn down.
• 1:15:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it's across the wall, they're on the ground.
• 1:15:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's really offensive, it's hurting people's feelings, and someone told me that they saw you do it.
• 1:15:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Samir says,
• 1:15:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't do it, why would I do that?
• 1:16:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she says, if you just confess, well, I'll let it go.
• 1:16:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just, I just need to know that, you know, and then what happened again and then we're good, right?
• 1:16:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I understand this, you feel probably really complicated about that.
• 1:16:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, I didn't do it.
• 1:16:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he is in, he's in such, this is, this is,
• 1:16:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: almost like a separation and it's in terms of a simple, just, a simple quandary becomes an insurmountable obstacle because he only has so many options here.
• 1:16:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: He could go the easy route, confess to something he didn't do, but he didn't do it.
• 1:16:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: So whoever else is doing it, if they do it again, he's going to be seeing this actively defined and he could get fired or worse.
• 1:16:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: If
• 1:16:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, someone else said he did, and he could get fired or worse, he's kind of screwed, no matter what he does now.
• 1:17:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we're watching him navigate that really, really tricky situation.
• 1:17:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's kind of spying on his coworkers, trying to figure out who has it out for him.
• 1:17:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and there's also a subplot of random out who read it amount who did someone actually think he did this Someone out to get him and meanwhile, there's also a subplot which turns out to be very thematically important In which he is divorced his wife was remarried and he's supposed to have like legally the court is ordered He's was to have time with his child and they keep managing to take that away from him Just oh you were five minutes late and we had to make a call so now he's coming with us for a whole week But I was supposed to have him this week
• 1:17:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:17:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's in such a lot.
• 1:17:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's in such a hard place and he's such a really wonderful actor Omar Samir.
• 1:17:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's incredibly versatile and evocative and he's able to wrestle with the the internality of what I really difficult struggled.
• 1:17:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's God and all the different elements of this internal and external that are weighing on him.
• 1:18:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I really felt this movie really deep in my gut.
• 1:18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I felt a deep in my gut just because I went through something kind of personal.
• 1:18:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was accused of theft at one of my jobs, one of my co-workers, evidently saw me stealing.
• 1:18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't.
• 1:18:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll have you know.
• 1:18:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I was accused of it and that was that put me in a really awkward spot about having to defend myself for this crime that evidently there was a witness for.
• 1:18:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was a little bit put off by this film because of its conclusion, though.
• 1:18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It comes to a very simple conclusion that I had kind of figured out right at the start.
• 1:18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like a yelled out one happened.
• 1:18:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:18:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right at the start of the movie.
• 1:18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a reveal.
• 1:18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, well, oh, well, this is what happened in that scenario.
• 1:18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I had to wait through the whole film to come to the conclusion that I had already figured it out and that
• 1:18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: made the drama like so trifling at the end of all this like all of the pain he was going through is very real But it all seemed to be like it seemed to to wrap up too neatly and seem to be a little bit too much of like a punch line.
• 1:19:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like it took a lot of the power away from the drama that I had just witnessed so I wasn't a big fan of this one I can see that I can see that and I don't want to reveal what it is because it is
• 1:19:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you don't see it coming to stress, it's a short film, let it have its one surprise.
• 1:19:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that didn't bother me.
• 1:19:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think maybe I picked up on it a little later than you did.
• 1:19:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't bother me because I think the point isn't that revelation.
• 1:19:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the point is that that revelation may be a material that the world that he has found himself in.
• 1:19:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: socially, politically even within his own family has built itself up, maybe even been designed to make his pursuit of his own goals fruitless.
• 1:20:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So for me, excuse me, I saw something almost, uh, almost catch 22 ask about it.
• 1:20:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
• 1:20:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, I guess I liked it more than you, but I thought it ultimately.
• 1:20:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think if it was longer, it definitely wouldn't have worked.
• 1:20:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's another one that you probably can't tell the story over a whole feature.
• 1:20:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a short.
• 1:20:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: It belongs as a short, I think it hits hard as a short.
• 1:20:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, excuse me, the next film, you told me, you texted me unannounced.
• 1:20:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just to let me know that this was your favorite of these live action shorts.
• 1:21:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not just my favorite of the shorts that might be one of my favorite films of the year.
• 1:21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is like, um, it's called, um, two people exchanging saliva.
• 1:21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a French film.
• 1:21:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's easy to draw a parallel between this film and like, your Ghost Lanthimos.
• 1:21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was reminded a lot of the lobster.
• 1:21:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh... because it takes uh... but you're going to say most did have a film this year was called bugonia and it wasn't as good as this short uh... two people exchanging saliva takes place in a very odd uh... glitteringly black and white uh... alternate version of france where kissing another person is punishable by death a immediate death too they see you can say that people show up
• 1:21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they put you in a cardboard box and just drive you to a cliff and hook you off and that's that's the way this universe works.
• 1:22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also a lot of financial and business transactions involve a lot of facial slapping.
• 1:22:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's no money change.
• 1:22:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It seems to be the currency.
• 1:22:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's no money changing hands.
• 1:22:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you go to like the corner shop and get yourself like a soda and a sandwich, the payment is one slap in the face.
• 1:22:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: 50 slaps in the face to the extent that having a bruised face is a symbol of social class
• 1:22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it and there's scenes of people like painting on bruises as sort of like their their makeup.
• 1:22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is this weird kind of site of sort of sci-fi concept.
• 1:22:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the middle of all this, the story is about a young clerk at a department store who starts developing a string a very palpable romantic regard for an older woman who comes in and visits all the time.
• 1:22:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So
• 1:23:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Carol Heights, 451.
• 1:23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if you want to see Yargo's lengthy most make a really great looking black and white version of Carol, and you want to get it done in like 30 minutes.
• 1:23:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Great.
• 1:23:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if this movie will do it for you did it for me, I loved how strange it was.
• 1:23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love this weird dissection of social interaction.
• 1:23:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love the idea of translating pain and harm directly into currency.
• 1:23:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a pretty damning capitalist message.
• 1:23:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea that we are allowed to have violence and pain in exchange for goods and services while having to repress every single one of our physical sexual romantic urges is a pretty good bleak commentary on where we seem to be in a kind of a prudish society.
• 1:23:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, I, I, I, I, I get I dug a lot of it.
• 1:23:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I dug this whole movie.
• 1:23:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was really great.
• 1:24:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I, I like, I think I'm looking a little less than you, but it is really great.
• 1:24:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, I think I think that's what was directed by Natalie Mustiata and Alexandra Singh, and I think they have a wonderful sense of
• 1:24:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: the world that they are creating and how in some ways it's very relatable and in some ways it's extremely odd.
• 1:24:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got to, I got a real alphabile kind of quality here where we're really creating a sci-fi dystopia out of very minimal elements.
• 1:24:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a great sense of play, great sense of production design that doesn't really call too much attention to itself, it's not like, ooh, look at that, it's like, that's kind of weird.
• 1:24:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the performances are really really wonderful.
• 1:24:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The young shopkeeper, her name is the character's name is Malais, and she's plays.
• 1:24:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's played by Luana, Bajrami, who was a, who had a small role in Portrait of a Lady on fire.
• 1:24:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the wealthy client on Jean is played by Zer, Amir Ebrahimi, and they're just, they understand this material.
• 1:25:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: They know exactly
• 1:25:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: the love that they're not speak its name and physicality that they're not be physical quality of this there you get the the sense of love and desire not lust not like I want to jump your bones that would be understandable just the desire for intimate like positive physical contact because there is none in the society
• 1:25:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like a tender, simple, little kiss.
• 1:25:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: The fact that that amount of emotional physical intimacy is completely forbidden and not, then it'd've been come up with an excuse.
• 1:25:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, oh, yes, there was a plague, and that's why I went to do this now.
• 1:25:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, it's just taboo.
• 1:25:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: No.
• 1:25:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the social taboos that could get you thrown in prison or even killed are abstract, arbitrary, and completely nonsensical.
• 1:26:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and the more you call attention to like we're going to make it something even more nonsensical than that just calls attention to how absolutely absurd it is That there are laws that have been laws against Queerness being trans Anything even remotely regards to our identity or the way that we because you've romance with others might only
• 1:26:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the only thing keeping me from this being my favorite.
• 1:26:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: My favorite is singers.
• 1:26:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the only thing that's been being my favorite is that I feel as though the allegory is almost too obvious for how long this short is.
• 1:26:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like it's the absurdity is hard to pull off over and extended period of time when there aren't any other distractions.
• 1:26:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this is one where if you wanted to make it even a minute longer than this, I think you would have needed more going on.
• 1:27:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: A bit more for subplot.
• 1:27:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a rival at work who wants this customer's business and might be romantically jealous.
• 1:27:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's implied.
• 1:27:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: You might have had to build that out a little bit more and justify
• 1:27:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: a longer runtime, and maybe you could have improved the movie as it is, but it's still really excellent, and it's a wonderfully well-defined vision, and I would recommend anyone see it as great.
• 1:27:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this is, I like this better than a lot of the features I've seen.
• 1:27:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just I appreciate the level of absurdity.
• 1:27:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's, it's about sort of hiding queerness because it is about queer characters.
• 1:27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But you could also extrapolate this out just in terms of repressed sexuality in general.
• 1:27:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
• 1:27:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They could have made the characters a, a heterocouple.
• 1:27:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it would have played just as well.
• 1:27:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, maybe not just as well, actually, it's stronger with a queer couple, right?
• 1:27:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that's the contemporary allegory.
• 1:27:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the most relevant, arguably.
• 1:28:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think that makes sense.
• 1:28:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, it's, it's, they're not even, we're it out by the idea of a queerness.
• 1:28:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just any kind of tenderness between two people.
• 1:28:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've seen, uh, on Jean is married.
• 1:28:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's a clearly a loveless bullshit professional marriage.
• 1:28:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: who wants that, so it's really, really, really excellent.
• 1:28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our final film in the live action shorts category, I don't think this is the best film in the category, but it is my favorite.
• 1:28:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: because I had a wonderful time watching Jane Austen's period drama.
• 1:28:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It this hit me every single thing about this hit me from the fact that it is a spot on satire of sense and sensibility, which is my favorite Jane Austen movie and one of my favorite movies of its ilk.
• 1:28:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also just a really solid gag that they milk for everything it's worth.
• 1:29:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's consistently funny and it knows exactly when to end.
• 1:29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's so damn hilarious.
• 1:29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's really silly.
• 1:29:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a movie that came out last year called Thackam Hall, which was kind of a Zuckerbrother's style spoof of like Downton Abbey type British dramas.
• 1:29:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has the same kind of vibe to it, it's this like slapstick kind of comedy.
• 1:29:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's takes place in an imaginary Jane Austen kind of a world.
• 1:29:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about a handsome bloke who is about to overcome all of the misunderstandings he's had with the young heroine.
• 1:29:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their names are Estrogenia and Mr. Dickley.
• 1:29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's where we are, that's the humor, it's all about genitals and sex and embarrassing sexual slang.
• 1:29:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as he is proposing to her, he notices that she has a patch of blood on her white dress.
• 1:29:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he thinks she's been injured when really she's just begun her period.
• 1:30:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now she and her sister are having a debate about whether to tell him about menstruation, which men do not know about, it's simple to discuss, or to slaughter a chicken, get more blood and really sell it.
• 1:30:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are those are the two of you.
• 1:30:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He thinks you're injured.
• 1:30:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He thinks it's it's enhancing it if you think's you're injured So we have to we have to lie about your menstruation and we have to make sure it looks more like an injury than it did before it's lit and Estrogenia doesn't want to do that.
• 1:30:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: She wants to explain a period and they say no.
• 1:30:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: We don't we don't explain Periods to man the mystery is my part of our tradition.
• 1:30:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah
• 1:30:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But this, there's a moment in this short.
• 1:30:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's my favorite joke from the last year in anything and it's just, there's the, there's the, there's like the Kate, but he called it.
• 1:31:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's the Emma Thompson and the Kate wins.
• 1:31:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's, and then I forget who played the little sister in sense and sensibility off the top of my head, but it's that character and there's just a moment.
• 1:31:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: where she's running down a hallway with a chicken in one harm and a brandishing and knife in the other like Chuck E. from Child's Play and she's just screaming women's business!
• 1:31:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's no one questioned it, it's women's business.
• 1:31:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fuck, that's funny.
• 1:31:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's so fucking funny.
• 1:31:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The whole short is on YouTube, a lot of these are available online if you just want to see like one or two.
• 1:31:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: This one's on YouTube, very easy to find.
• 1:31:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: it is the one joke to be clear it's like a really it's the best Saturday night life sketch at Saturday night life didn't do and Saturday life probably wouldn't have done it for like 12 minutes but it is perfectly constructed the the satire of Jane Austin and again specifically the movie sense of sensibility directed by angley is spot on Julia acts co-wrote co-directed with Steve Pinder and also plays
• 1:32:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: She has got him a Thompson down to a fucking T. Like, she's just, she's nailing that impersonation.
• 1:32:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's so fucking good.
• 1:32:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: This brought me so much joy.
• 1:32:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's really kind of sweet and innocent and satirical.
• 1:32:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very pointed about really just what Jane Austen was talking about in general.
• 1:32:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just being able to talk about a few things that he couldn't.
• 1:32:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: and I think it's great.
• 1:32:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am so glad it's nominated.
• 1:32:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Will it win?
• 1:32:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Although certainly not.
• 1:32:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: The fun one almost never wins.
• 1:32:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: If it wanted to be really happy fun, the fun one wins if it's the only fun one for just depression films about geosuffering and misery, then the fun one would win.
• 1:33:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But because there are other comedies and other light films this year, I don't think this is to the yeah, this is a trifle.
• 1:33:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's cute.
• 1:33:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a Mad TV sketch.
• 1:33:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would do well on television.
• 1:33:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It feels like it escaped from history of the world part two.
• 1:33:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the follow-up.
• 1:33:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:33:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which I would have been the best sketch in that whole show.
• 1:33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 1:33:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I guess I'm not a robot.
• 1:33:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was kind of the fun moment, but it was pretty grim.
• 1:33:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you know what?
• 1:33:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: The wonderful story, Henry Sugar.
• 1:33:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was a fun one.
• 1:33:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was good.
• 1:33:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was fun.
• 1:33:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was a silly...
• 1:33:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, well, yeah, it's mostly silly.
• 1:33:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of sorry, the right place.
• 1:33:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I'm trying to go back see if there's any others that are woof, gotta go way the far back.
• 1:33:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was a phone call.
• 1:33:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was a depressing one.
• 1:34:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.
• 1:34:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you have to go back to 2010's God of love to find another, just find one.
• 1:34:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talked about that in one of the recent episode of the All-Mighter.
• 1:34:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know it's wonderful.
• 1:34:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you, you're just definite 100%
• 1:34:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but by a country mile and I think it was really, really great.
• 1:34:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Although I did like the singers as well.
• 1:34:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that's just a really beautiful moving little piece.
• 1:34:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the singers is the one that really stood out to me as just a really impressive, really interesting story.
• 1:34:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a simple story, but it's told in a complicated way that's really revelatory.
• 1:34:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I thought the filmmaking was very distinct.
• 1:34:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: They had a wonderful look to it.
• 1:34:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: There was unlike anything else in the category.
• 1:34:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, but the one I'm going to watch the most often is Jane Austen's period drama.
• 1:34:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am going to show that to people because I do so many people who love, love, love Jane Austen movie, love a period piece, uh, um, and it's just nailing it.
• 1:35:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love it to pieces.
• 1:35:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: It makes me really happy.
• 1:35:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um,
• 1:35:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah.
• 1:35:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right.
• 1:35:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we're two categories down.
• 1:35:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: One category to go.
• 1:35:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this program has an extra short in it as well that wasn't nominated.
• 1:35:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll talk about that last.
• 1:35:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are the nominees for best animated short film.
• 1:35:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The nominees are the three sisters forever green.
• 1:35:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: The girl who cried pearls.
• 1:35:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Butterfly, aka Papalon, and Papayon, yeah.
• 1:35:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Papyons, all right.
• 1:35:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Retirement Plan.
• 1:35:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the last short to round out the program is an animated film called A-Roo, which I didn't see.
• 1:35:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was the most interesting clue to my program, yeah.
• 1:35:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's a bummer.
• 1:35:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: OK, well, I'll mention it.
• 1:35:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not...
• 1:35:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it was right to not nominated, but it is very good, and I'll mention a little bit at the end.
• 1:36:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, good.
• 1:36:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: The first animated short film.
• 1:36:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: on the program.
• 1:36:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called the three sisters, which was directed by previous Oscar nominee Constantine Bronsett recently.
• 1:36:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: He did, he was nominated a long time ago for a movie called Lavatory Love Story, but a few years ago he was nominated for a film about Russian cosmonauts called We Can't Live Without Cosmos, which was really great.
• 1:36:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, that wasn't good one.
• 1:36:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, his new film is called The Three Sisters.
• 1:36:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is about three sisters who live on a very tiny island, like a comically tiny island.
• 1:36:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: They live in three little houses, and when they're buying their groceries and people who bring it to them by a boat, their entire life savings falls into the ocean.
• 1:36:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: in the end find it.
• 1:36:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the only way to survive is I can have to rent out one of their rooms, a big burly sailor shows up to rent one of their rooms and all three of the sisters start changing their behavior and getting really competitive to try to earn his affections.
• 1:37:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for a while, I thought this was going to go in kind of a tragic direction.
• 1:37:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like someone was going to like, they're going to kill each other, something like that.
• 1:37:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or it's going to have a certain, like, oh, jealousy.
• 1:37:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone's going to get hurt.
• 1:37:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:37:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not that.
• 1:37:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's actually really, very sweet.
• 1:37:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's just about their previously unappreciated need for further companionship and how much that brings out their lives.
• 1:37:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I know so how much men can be shits.
• 1:37:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the man like the big sailor guy is like, he's a big burly sailor.
• 1:37:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's very gruff and he kind of treats them kind of poorly, but I get the impression that that was like part of the shared experience that these women had with this guy.
• 1:37:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: They all kind of like party together.
• 1:37:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a little bit of a light animosity, but it's not the center of the drama.
• 1:38:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's it's really simple.
• 1:38:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's done with like sort of stick man characters So it feels very very whimsical just in its design.
• 1:38:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That would not.
• 1:38:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It feels a lot like a jok-totty kind of set out.
• 1:38:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't go stick man.
• 1:38:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it has a lot more to do with like um You know back in like the Middle Ages before like perspective became a much more important part of painting a lot of paintings and people and backgrounds very flat
• 1:38:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like it's got that quality to it, it's kind of like older story book quality.
• 1:38:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very charming.
• 1:38:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The most interesting thing about it, I think, is this is a fine film, but I don't think it's very interesting.
• 1:38:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: The most interesting thing about it, actually, is that Constance and Bronzehead directed it under a pseudonym.
• 1:38:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't tell anyone that he made this.
• 1:38:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: He invented an alias and sent it out to various festivals and things in a very Stephen King Richard Bachman way, just to see if it would get treated differently than if it was made by a guy who'd have been nominated for two Academy Awards.
• 1:39:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And sure enough, it got an Oscar nomination and then right afterwards he revealed that it was him.
• 1:39:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's kind of fun.
• 1:39:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I guess on some level, you know, it is a meritocracy.
• 1:39:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe a little bit more than I was willing to give it credit.
• 1:39:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then again, maybe it's coincidentally just happened to be a good year for a film like this.
• 1:39:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's really sweet.
• 1:39:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's good for them.
• 1:39:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: It just doesn't sound really about much.
• 1:39:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just cute.
• 1:39:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: The next one is a tear-jerker, kind of shamelessly, called forevergreen.
• 1:39:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: This one is a CG animated short about an orphaned bear in the woods, who is adopted by an anthropomorphic pine tree.
• 1:39:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: They have a wonderful kind of family relationship.
• 1:40:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: The bear starts to corrupt a bit and then the bear discovers the wonders of human trash.
• 1:40:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the bear goes off.
• 1:40:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: The date hardships in particular.
• 1:40:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and the tree, and it's all silent, but the tree is just like, oh no, my son smoked pot and I'm gonna lose him forever.
• 1:40:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: The tree's like, no, no, no, no, no, and the bear's like, no, I want garbage in my life.
• 1:40:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the bear goes to get the garbage.
• 1:40:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then that leads
• 1:40:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, and it's somewhat contrived, but again, it's a storybook.
• 1:40:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a parable, uh, you know, there's a point to it all kind of way to disaster and then tragedy.
• 1:40:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then it all ends in a biblical quote, just in case you weren't sure that it was being didactic.
• 1:40:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Although I will say that I think the quote, and I don't object to it, they're being a biblical quote.
• 1:40:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I can stuff out.
• 1:40:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the quote that they latched onto,
• 1:40:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: which I can't mention because it's a spoiler.
• 1:40:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the quote that they liked onto is actually not the healthiest message to take from this movie.
• 1:41:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's like, I think I don't even remember.
• 1:41:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was, yeah, I got to admit, I, I checked out of this movie really early on.
• 1:41:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, something about it's, it's done in CG, but it's done with sort of the frames pulled so it's made to look like stop motion.
• 1:41:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, more like stop motion.
• 1:41:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very common.
• 1:41:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's common, man.
• 1:41:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:41:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: the sort of big-eyed, very scary, stylized character design was too slick for its own good.
• 1:41:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've seen this in like Disney and Pixar does this a lot, and Pixar makes very good shorts by the way, Disney is very good at their animation, but they're so clean and so without grit that
• 1:41:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: when they try to make a design look kind of stylized or sketched, it still looks too clean.
• 1:41:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm watching this movie.
• 1:41:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like this is just like a studio picture.
• 1:41:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You did it too well.
• 1:42:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're adding all of this mod when music.
• 1:42:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's about the cute, poetic, big-eyed bear.
• 1:42:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like this is, this is way too treatly.
• 1:42:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's way too sentimental.
• 1:42:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just an empty soul.
• 1:42:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is supposed to be about
• 1:42:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: sort of the sweet shell silverstein giving tree kind of vibe that the tree gives to the bear.
• 1:42:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:42:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I didn't sense any kind of immediacy or emotional honesty at all felt very contrived.
• 1:42:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was not a fan of this one at all.
• 1:42:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I wouldn't go that far.
• 1:42:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I see your point.
• 1:42:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would argue that it's not, I don't get a sense of insincereity from it.
• 1:42:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I get a sense that it's trying to be
• 1:42:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: very appealing to a lot of different people and with that some of the personality got stripped away.
• 1:42:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: What we have is a very professional production that was not done by professional studio.
• 1:42:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's somebody people who worked on films like in Canto and Zutopia, but this is their own project.
• 1:43:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: They worked on it for years.
• 1:43:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think more than anything and I don't think this is necessarily sort of thing that should win any Academy Award.
• 1:43:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But more than anything,
• 1:43:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's proof that they know how to make a movie.
• 1:43:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, if you were just like, we're going to make it.
• 1:43:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a good demo realized.
• 1:43:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a fantastic demo real.
• 1:43:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It shows that they know how to tell a story visually.
• 1:43:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: They know how to craft memorable emotionally.
• 1:43:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: emotionally open, characters, out of things like bears and trees.
• 1:43:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think it is incredibly accomplished.
• 1:43:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: In many ways, this for me is the animated categories version of a friend of Dorothee, where we're telling a story that really any mainstream studio, any very conventional film maker could have told.
• 1:43:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're doing it at a short form.
• 1:43:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're showing how good we are doing it.
• 1:44:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think you're doing it good.
• 1:44:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this is a good movie.
• 1:44:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's ambition just isn't terribly fascinating.
• 1:44:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just we're going to tell a good storybook thing.
• 1:44:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've seen other animated shorts in this category that felt like, you know, we're kind of going for a go.
• 1:44:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Graffalo.
• 1:44:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Graffalo is a great example of this.
• 1:44:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I try to remember that actually one, but that was like a big story book about like a tiny animal Talking itself out of getting eaten by a lot of predators by saying it's friends with a giant monster called the Graffalo turns out the Graffalo is real And that's a very much a story book and that was really really wonderful This isn't wonderful, but this is this is well made Yeah, so
• 1:44:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's, it's probably, yeah, it's my least favorite of the five, but I don't think it's bad.
• 1:45:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it's bad, I just don't think it amounts to very much.
• 1:45:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's a great proof of concept and if you were just like, hey, should we hire these two guys to direct your animated movie?
• 1:45:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we would probably do a good job, yeah.
• 1:45:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're you're talking about it.
• 1:45:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: How this feels like a demo reel.
• 1:45:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was reminded of a short from a long time ago.
• 1:45:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was Chris wedges short.
• 1:45:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chris wedges who did the Ice Age pictures before he did those movies.
• 1:45:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He actually won an Academy Award for a short film called Bonnie.
• 1:45:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was a very short CGI film.
• 1:45:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was back when CGI shorts were still a little bit of a novelty.
• 1:45:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was about an elderly rabbit with a walker just sort of shuffling around her kitchen while a firefly flew around her head.
• 1:45:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: She kind of had memories of her late husband.
• 1:45:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this was in 1998 after Jerry's game won, yeah.
• 1:45:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's right, yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And
• 1:46:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's, uh, there's not a lot going on in that short.
• 1:46:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's clearly just used to exploit kind of nuke types of CGI lighting, new kinds of character designs, uh, new kinds of like angles and animation software.
• 1:46:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a proof of concept kind of a film, but guess what?
• 1:46:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chris Wedge got feature film jobs after that.
• 1:46:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I guess maybe, um, uh, the directors of this, their names are Nathan Engelhardt and Jeremy Spears.
• 1:46:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll get a job.
• 1:46:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look at some kind of feature film.
• 1:46:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a classic example of the nomination as the award.
• 1:46:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I suppose it might win.
• 1:46:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd be a little disappointed if it did, because I think the other films, maybe not so much three sisters, although I'll do like it.
• 1:46:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the other three films are a lot more interesting.
• 1:46:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But...
• 1:46:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like, yeah, that's what it is.
• 1:46:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Your nomination is getting you attention.
• 1:46:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: And good for you, I guess.
• 1:46:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, it's not terribly interesting.
• 1:46:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: The next nomination, an nominated film, however, I think is very interesting and incredibly realized.
• 1:47:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called the Girl Who Cried Pearls.
• 1:47:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Here we go.
• 1:47:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a Canadian stop motion film.
• 1:47:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, it starts off in, uh, a big fancy room and a young girl, uh, finds a little box like a ring box that you would keep like an engagement ring in it, and it has one pearl in it.
• 1:47:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And her grandfather shows up and says, I see you found the prize of my collection.
• 1:47:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'll tell you why.
• 1:47:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the rest of this film was a story about when he was a child.
• 1:47:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: uh... many years ago in Montreal in a very decends the inversion of Montreal very lots of raga muffins and squaller uh... and he was it's almost like the box trolls
• 1:47:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, it's got that vibe and sort of it's level of like Dickensian Phil, like it's almost comedic and how dirty it is.
• 1:47:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's not, it's not that kind of fantasy with like fun monsters or anything like that, but yeah, if you remember the box trolls or something just kind of inherently kind of gross about it, but it was also kind of mesmerizing.
• 1:48:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, he's a poor rag and muffin.
• 1:48:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's living in an abandoned apartment and in the apartment next door.
• 1:48:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a family dealing with an abuse of parent.
• 1:48:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the young girl who lives next door is very upset and every night she cries herself to sleep.
• 1:48:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as he is spying on her like Frankenstein, spying on that family, he sees that when she cries, her tears turn into pearls.
• 1:48:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
• 1:48:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And again, she literally cries pearls.
• 1:48:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now he, again, is impoverished, and she is just hiding the pearls.
• 1:48:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: She doesn't get to see the value of them.
• 1:48:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So he like, puts a hole in the wall, takes a pearl, goes to a pawn shop, pawn shop owner is an asshole.
• 1:48:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the pawn tip owner is immediately recognized that this is a weirdly perfect pearl.
• 1:48:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, there's something just uncanny about it.
• 1:49:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he low balls the guy, but basically says if you bring me more, I'll pay you quite a bit of money and this will get you out of the institution, even though this guy's probably going to make thousands of thousands of dollars.
• 1:49:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: But now the boy is in a quandary because the only way to get the pearls is for this girl to be miserable and what he would like is to make her happy and like buy her chocolates and things.
• 1:49:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And therein lies the dilemma, a great ending on this story.
• 1:49:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Two great endings on this story, if you ask me.
• 1:49:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the overall ending to the plot is excellent.
• 1:49:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I love that it ends on a really interesting question that doesn't get answered and makes you wonder.
• 1:49:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's it's really, really engaging just
• 1:49:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: just fascinating and impeccable and evocative.
• 1:50:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm deeply enamored of this short.
• 1:50:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this one's really great.
• 1:50:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's really great.
• 1:50:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love the design.
• 1:50:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love the narration.
• 1:50:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The stop motion is really smooth.
• 1:50:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It almost feels like they're puppets.
• 1:50:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I've seen anything like an stop motion animated film with this level of articulation and movement.
• 1:50:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: view the way they kind of get around a lot of the detail is you look at the faces and the faces are static.
• 1:50:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lips don't move when the characters speak, but the bodies are so expressive that doesn't really matter.
• 1:50:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everything is really kind of stained and scuffed, but it also has kind of a mythic quality as well, or maybe not mythic.
• 1:50:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm more like a fairy tale.
• 1:50:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was reminded of like reading like raw dolls.
• 1:50:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this definitely gets a raw doll quality, yeah.
• 1:50:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, Roll Doll was a little bit of a missing throat.
• 1:50:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a little bit more tragic.
• 1:50:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of like a melancholy to this film that I greatly appreciate.
• 1:51:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, I'm just deeply fond of this.
• 1:51:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I want people to discover it on their own.
• 1:51:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I don't even got into much more detail because while a lot of these shorts have like a twist or some kind of kicker at the end, this one is actually just really focused on telling, I mean, they came up with a great story.
• 1:51:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a great tale.
• 1:51:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: on a variety of levels, which I would love to talk about more, but I don't want to ruin it.
• 1:51:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think they just really know how to tell it beautifully, and it would make me incredibly happy of this one.
• 1:51:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: But weirdly, I mean not weirdly, but like the one film that I'm hearing from a lot of pundits that they think is the most likely to win this year,
• 1:51:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's actually a French film called Butterfly, a papillon, papillon, sorry.
• 1:51:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's directed by Florence Mialla, and it's a very expressionistic.
• 1:52:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's painted with oils and pastels on glass.
• 1:52:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's an expressionistic biopic.
• 1:52:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: of real-life Olympic swimmer Alfred McCasch, who was a Jewish French Algerian butterfly swimmer with the butterfly stroke, who competed in the 1936 summer games in Nazi Germany and then things got worse.
• 1:52:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, quite that, in fact.
• 1:52:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, it could be more like there's definitely a world in which this movie
• 1:52:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's even harder on those bits and I'm glad they didn't because it could have just been I I've seen short films that go for just Here are the nightmares of the world and we're gonna hammer them home for so long that it becomes almost numbing Here they're focused on
• 1:53:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: the way that everything, the joys in this man's life, and the horrors this man's life, always kept coming back to the water and swimming, in his relationship to the water and swimming, even the tortures in the concentration camp.
• 1:53:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's very affecting.
• 1:53:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not really a narrative in the way that a lot of the other ones are.
• 1:53:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's something just kind of flowing about it.
• 1:53:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's not interested in a lot of the conventions that we typically associate with a lot of biopic because it is so expressionistic, but it's very powerful.
• 1:53:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
• 1:53:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, it's, it's very abstract, um, but not so abstract that you can't tell what's going on.
• 1:53:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I kind of appreciate, um, the amount of storytelling clarity that comes from this really dreamy animation style.
• 1:53:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've always kind of like this style just in terms of, uh,
• 1:54:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: just a look of it, you know, because it's done with paint, you just have to do it in order.
• 1:54:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You just have to paint over the previous frame as you take pictures of these paints that are on glass and things kind of wash into each other.
• 1:54:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've always kind of liked that just because of how I don't want to say, I don't really describe this.
• 1:54:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has like a very unconventional look, but I've seen it a lot before.
• 1:54:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it's not the kind of style that one typically would use to tell a story because it is so abstract in it just in its look one might think that it's more well-attuned to dreams or exploration or kind of experimental film butterflies the first one I've seen where it actually has a little bit of not just a story to it but a really palpable story of a real person and you can tell what's going on at all times
• 1:54:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and how uh... and i was looking up a little bit about the the subject of this because it is a biopic uh... alfred uh... uh... how do i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't commit to one and if i'm wrong please can't yeah i i i i look to my and evidently he is uh... one of only three olympian athletes who competed in an olympic game
• 1:55:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: having survived the Holocaust.
• 1:55:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot going on here, but it is about sort of the survival of it and the movement back into the water and all of these, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh
• 1:55:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: physical drives that this guy has that sort of allowed him to survive.
• 1:55:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it feels very and you know, it is inspiring.
• 1:55:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very moving, but it's also very bleak because it is about, you know, a concentration camp.
• 1:55:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, my only thing with this movie, the only thing that kept me, and this isn't even a bad thing.
• 1:56:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just the way I was engaging with it.
• 1:56:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: The thing that kept me from getting fully immersed in it was my hyper awareness of the meticulousness of its creation, to look at each of those frames of pastel and oil and the staggering amount of effort, like you really can't like, a lot of animation studios, you can be like, okay, you work on this shot and I'll look on this shot, it's like that is not a fucking option.
• 1:56:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: You have to micromanage this thing and just do it all yourself in the level of patience and focus and craft that you have to not only have but sustain to create a film like this.
• 1:56:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I find that, that complexity, that achievement, almost distracting from the story.
• 1:57:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, you know, there's a, who wasn't who said that every movie is documentary is documentary about it's on making.
• 1:57:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a good dart.
• 1:57:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sounds like a good dart.
• 1:57:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 1:57:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: For a movie like this, I'm very hyper aware of that.
• 1:57:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so a lot of the time, I'm just sort of wondering at the craft, and it's not necessarily to the advantage of the story being told, but I didn't do that bonus points in that, because that's just my, that's like a tick.
• 1:57:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: TIC, it's like a little quirk of the way that I engage with this kind of animation sometimes.
• 1:57:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's a wonderful film.
• 1:57:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a wonderful film, but if you're anything like me, you might be so impressed by the craft that the story might not be the thing you're focusing on.
• 1:57:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's very much about the story in this case, because the story is very powerful.
• 1:57:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then the last film is is a really very different one and then much it's got a great point It's got a great sense of humor There's a certain melancholy to it, but it's very much plotless.
• 1:58:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called retirement plan Tell us about retirement.
• 1:58:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: This this one's pretty great.
• 1:58:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's one's pretty great because I think this is a really relatable A really relatable film
• 1:58:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, dominal glee sin is the narrator, and it is essentially just a litany of things that the main character wants to do once he retires like what's the retirement plan and it essentially
• 1:58:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: spells out a life where he didn't get around to doing all of the things that he wanted to do.
• 1:58:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was probably too busy, so now in retirement he's going to do things like, learn a language, find the right sport, exercise a little bit, go out and travel and travel a lot more, go camping.
• 1:58:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, maybe don't go camping.
• 1:58:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: This camping isn't fun for me.
• 1:59:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That kind of stuff.
• 1:59:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's one I like where it's like I'm going to learn how to cook a leak and it shows a picture of him with green onions and then it replaces it with a picture of an actual leak and it says also learn what a leak is.
• 1:59:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: That was a very leaks and green onions are very different.
• 1:59:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very, very charming and yeah, that's the whole piece.
• 1:59:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a list.
• 1:59:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's almost like a poem.
• 1:59:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just a list of when I'm retired I'm going to go to a museum and I'm going to want to be there.
• 1:59:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's all about little moments in your life that you don't always appreciate, but also the big stuff.
• 1:59:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as you're watching it, it's only seven minutes long.
• 1:59:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, the only conclusion you can draw after hearing a list this law is that this guy isn't living now, are there something really sad about that?
• 1:59:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and if he doesn't live through retirement age, anything can happen, okay, by a car who knows.
• 1:59:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's gonna not have any fun.
• 1:59:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that can't, that can't but be impactful, I think.
• 2:00:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because I think we all do that to some extent, about one thing or another.
• 2:00:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, that's sort of like the underlying tragedy of it, but there's also a sense of whimsy to the film as well.
• 2:00:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like, especially at the end, it's like I'm going to retire and then, yeah, and we get to see him, you know, going through retirement, getting older and older as this sequence goes on, and eventually there's even like a conclusion and aftermath and what he continues to want to do.
• 2:00:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it just is a little bit silly.
• 2:00:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is kind of an acknowledgement in this kind of rye British Isles kind of a way, kind of a way that And yes, it's kind of sad we're not living for the now, but
• 2:00:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: isn't it funny that we continue to make plans?
• 2:00:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Isn't that whimsical?
• 2:00:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we still have these unrealized thoughts.
• 2:00:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a good way to acknowledge that.
• 2:00:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's got a very, very lovely, very unassuming, very lightly animated quality, and I think, I think, I think, honestly, a lot of the reason why this works is Donald Blasin's performance.
• 2:01:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He, I think he gets it.
• 2:01:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think he knows
• 2:01:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: like I think he understands that there's something a little sad about this, but the fantasy is so important to have things to look forward to even if they're a commonly large number of things.
• 2:01:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think it's delivery is absolutely wonderful.
• 2:01:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll get a lot.
• 2:01:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's compared to the others.
• 2:01:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's not much to it.
• 2:01:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Again, there's no narrative to speak of, but it's really, really great.
• 2:01:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Really, really, really, really good short.
• 2:01:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and then there's anything else I want to say about retirement plan before I talk us through a really quick.
• 2:01:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, okay.
• 2:01:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's it.
• 2:01:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right.
• 2:01:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: The last short on the program, which again, which again was not nominated, but I assume it was on the short list, is a, is a new film from Cartoon Saloon, which is an Irish animation company that has made some of the best feature, animated features of the last 15 or so years.
• 2:02:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: They did the secret of Kells.
• 2:02:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: They did song of the sea.
• 2:02:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: They did the bread
• 2:02:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: great animation studio and they have kind of a signature style, a certain, almost gandy Tartakovsky-esque sort of angular blockiness, but that never the less is extremely expressive in performance and color and often detail like you look at the movie, excuse me, look at the secret of Cells, the level of complexity of the
• 2:02:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: A-Roo isn't that complicated, but it still has that wonderfully expressive quality.
• 2:03:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is about a young Viking girl, and she wants to go off with her family to war, swing a sword, be a warrior, and she's told you're too small.
• 2:03:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's not told no, she's not told you can't because you're a woman, just you're a little kid.
• 2:03:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: We can't really do that yet.
• 2:03:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But she really wants to and then one day the Vikings wake up and their well has gone dry So no more water in oh dear.
• 2:03:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're just quite bad And so all of the Vikings in there in their heroism and they're in their Desired to like rush into battle and be the one to confront the problem.
• 2:03:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: They all try to get in the well They're all too big and then finally it's like
• 2:03:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right, here's your shot.
• 2:03:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they drop her down the well and she discovers sort of a magical is a magical discovery and the discovery is both beautiful and also very sad and I'm not going to go any further with that because it's actually pretty short and there's not much more to it than that.
• 2:04:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 2:04:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is impeccably crafted, cartoon saloon, these folks know what they're doing.
• 2:04:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: They've really got their particular style down to, I don't wanna say a science, because that's not doing it justice, it's an art form.
• 2:04:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: But like they know what they do and they do it so well.
• 2:04:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the first film directed by Giovanna Ferrari.
• 2:04:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: character design is wonderful, the performances are wonderful.
• 2:04:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: The only thing for me that keeps it from being a standout on this program is that, well, it is a complete story, it does end in such a way that suggests the full story has yet to be told, like this is like the first chapter of something, and as a result it feels a bit more like a pilot.
• 2:05:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: A pilot
• 2:05:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like this would be a great show.
• 2:05:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's where they wanted to go with it.
• 2:05:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd be like, okay, I've been treated to see where this would go from here.
• 2:05:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if it never goes anywhere in your point is the possibilities and for you to muse upon them, fine, but it just doesn't have the impact, I think that the other five do.
• 2:05:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it is quite lovely.
• 2:05:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you get chance to see it in this program or outside of this program, I do recommend that it is good.
• 2:05:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: On that note, Winnie, what is your favorite animated film in this program?
• 2:05:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: out of of this group of the girl who cried pearls I feel like it's it's just the most striking I like the story the best it has a good mood to it is it's a little a little dowron tragic but also really fascinating yeah this is my favorite one is very very to repeat myself rolled doll yeah um i'm fine of all of them i i don't think there's a dud in the month even forever green which i think is at least just an impression for the press of calling card
• 2:06:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, for ever green is the only one that I think was just of this whole program all three programs that's just kind of a box it would be the least interesting winner and I think that would be a bummer and I when I look at like what what will or should win and academy award I mean what will these a popularity contest you go by that but what should I think not just about which one's great because there's an argument to be made that most of not all of the nominees are great.
• 2:06:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, for me, it's what deserves a special statue for its greatness, like what went above and me.
• 2:06:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, and I think there's an argument to be made for Butterfly, uh, and the Gorilla Grite Pearls.
• 2:06:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, I know butterflies probably hitting people a little harder.
• 2:06:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's what I'm hearing, but I agree with you.
• 2:06:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the grilled cried pearls is the real standout here.
• 2:06:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is such an interesting film from a craft perspective, and it's in service of not just a good story.
• 2:06:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because in a short film, you can get away with a good story, maybe a good story with a real kicker of an ending.
• 2:07:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a great story.
• 2:07:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad I heard this story, this story is just memorably crafted, pointed, fascinating and raises some questions, I didn't answer that I'm just thinking about.
• 2:07:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, yeah, so I love it to pieces.
• 2:07:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the one though much like Jane Austen is like the one I'm going to revisit the most often I think the one I'm going to think about the most the one that's actually going to become like a bit of a part of my personality is retirement plan because I think it's it's at something very human and relatable.
• 2:07:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And also a bit of a cautionary tale, so I will, I will endeavor not to, but not to waste my time, but not, but not pre not preaching.
• 2:07:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not polemical, just like a kind of in that, uh, rye British way.
• 2:07:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very unassuming, but I think still, but I think that subtlety actually makes it more impactful, because you're going to think about it.
• 2:07:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's a lot of like cautionary tales.
• 2:07:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh, and then this person died doing something tragic, why often is that going to come up?
• 2:08:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: One day, I'm gonna do this fun thing, and you realize that you could literally do it now if you really wanted to.
• 2:08:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's every day.
• 2:08:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I guarantee you, every day, there's one thing that occurs to you.
• 2:08:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe it's a little thing, maybe it's a big thing, but it occurs to you and you're like, I would like to do that not today.
• 2:08:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's going to add up over time.
• 2:08:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I think retirement plan is the one that's going to stick with me the most.
• 2:08:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd love it if it won.
• 2:08:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I think this the grilled bread rolls is the best.
• 2:08:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: So those are the Oscar nominee in shorts.
• 2:08:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There we go.
• 2:08:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: We did all 15.
• 2:08:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm 16.
• 2:08:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: You did six to the clock.
• 2:08:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: The clear the 15 nominees.
• 2:08:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: One bonus that just happens to be part of the program.
• 2:08:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: We will, the Oscars are unusually late this year, usually they're at the end of February beginning in March, here they're like in mid-March, so we will eventually, like a week or two, do our full Oscar predictions episode, which we do for fun, it doesn't actually mean anything, but it's fun.
• 2:09:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll do that later and we'll bring these up again when that time comes.
• 2:09:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: But until then I highly encourage you to go see these movies if you have the the time and the availability if they're playing near you They're playing a three separate programs.
• 2:09:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can see one or all three and they're worth doing there's there's really I mean I know there was like one that you really didn't like but none of them were terrible, right?
• 2:09:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, the only one I didn't like was for evergreen, and that's, and again, it's not offensive, I just think it's kind of bland.
• 2:09:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:09:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a really unusually strong crop.
• 2:09:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, for all three categories.
• 2:09:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even even the really like ordinarily harrowing documentary shorts felt like they had so much more humanity this year than than ordinarily.
• 2:09:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, like in previous years you brought this up actually in previous years it really felt like a lot of the films about human misery.
• 2:10:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're so focused on getting us to feel the misery.
• 2:10:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: that it was punishing to watch them in a way that may have been effective, but also made me resent the filmmakers for putting me through that in an unproductive way.
• 2:10:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And here, that's in there, but there's also a lot of focus on the people who are trying to make things better, even if it's, even if it's futile.
• 2:10:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there's something about that that just, you know,
• 2:10:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: It struck a better balance, I think, of we're making aware of all the horrors, but there's still good in the world, even if it's not enough.
• 2:10:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that really made a lot of difference, and I made these movies a lot more palatable.
• 2:10:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, thank you for listening.
• 2:11:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for being a listener, decrytically claimed.
• 2:11:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: We hope you enjoyed the show.
• 2:11:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: We do this episode every year.
• 2:11:08
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• 2:11:10
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• 2:11:11
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• 2:11:18
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• 2:11:23
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• 2:11:29
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• 2:11:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, yes.
• 2:11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's that.
• 2:11:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you want to talk about anything we discussed in this episode and any of these movies and any of the topics, any elements of the industry or just anything else you want to talk about or questions you want us to answer our email address is letters that critically claimed.net.
• 2:12:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: We might read your email and I'm coming up instead of we've got mail, but if you write us a letter on a postcard a piece of paper, but in a package, I don't know, whatever you want to do and you send it to our PO box, we're guaranteed to read it on the air.
• 2:12:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and check your till the emails because we get a few too many of those, but we will, if you put in the effort to give it to our PO box, we will read it on the air.
• 2:12:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Whitney, what does our PO box?
• 2:12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, uh, set it to the critically acclaims network, PO Box 641565 Los Angeles, California, and nine to blow six four.
• 2:12:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very, very much for listening.
• 2:12:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're on the social media.
• 2:12:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is that willing to be on you and at Whitney Sybel?
• 2:12:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know how it works.
• 2:12:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yes, uh, that is it for us, uh, have a great, everything, uh, salute your shorts and never forget everyone's name.
• 2:12:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I want to go to the midnight show.
• 2:12:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry, what?