Latest / The Bechdel Cast / Holes with Korama Danquah
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: On the Bechdel Cast. The questions asked if movies have
- 0:04Speaker 1: women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and
- 0:07Speaker 1: husbands or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy, Zephyn Beast.
- 0:12Speaker 1: Start changing it with the Bechdel Cast.
- 0:16Speaker 2: Hello Bechdel Cast listeners.
- 0:18Speaker 1: Hello Jamie and Caitlyn.
- 0:20Speaker 3: Here a little plug at the top.
- 0:22Speaker 1: It's all coming together, It's all happening. I am going
- 0:25Speaker 1: to be going on a book tour for the paperback
- 0:30Speaker 1: release of my book Raw Dog, The Naked Truth about
- 0:33Speaker 1: Hot Dogs.
- 0:33Speaker 2: Ever heard of it?
- 0:35Speaker 1: It is coming out in soft cover this may. If
- 0:39Speaker 1: you're hearing this, it is out right now. If you
- 0:42Speaker 1: are the kind of person that doesn't want to spend
- 0:44Speaker 1: twenty eight dollars out of book, fair enough, we have
- 0:46Speaker 1: a more affordable option. And if you haven't purchased the
- 0:49Speaker 1: book and you know, maybe you're able to now, you know,
- 0:53Speaker 1: it's also a great gift. I've sound so desperate. The
- 0:55Speaker 1: thing is, it's a soft cover book, and people love those, and.
- 1:00Speaker 3: I love a flaccid book.
- 1:01Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a floppy little book. And if you do
- 1:05Speaker 1: have the hardcover and you're a completionist, there is also
- 1:09Speaker 1: a brand new ForWord that I wrote, and also the
- 1:13Speaker 1: acknowledgments have been adjusted to acknowledge that my agents were Zionists,
- 1:18Speaker 1: so I don't really thank them anymore. So there's a
- 1:21Speaker 1: thrilling edition there as well. But there is new stuff
- 1:24Speaker 1: in the book and it costs less, and we love that.
- 1:28Speaker 1: I will be going on tour throughout the country to
- 1:32Speaker 1: promote the new book, and if you're a Bechdel head
- 1:35Speaker 1: and you're in the area, this is a really great
- 1:37Speaker 1: chance to come and hang out. It's all I'm at bookstores.
- 1:42Speaker 1: I did kind of bigger shows the first time around,
- 1:44Speaker 1: but this time we're just chilling. So you kitling with
- 1:47Speaker 1: your permission. I'm just going to rattle off some dates.
- 1:50Speaker 1: What if I was like, no, no, click, I'm going
- 1:55Speaker 1: to go pee.
- 1:57Speaker 3: No please, by all means tell us okay.
- 2:01Speaker 1: May thirteenth, twenty twenty five, almost my birthday. So I
- 2:05Speaker 1: know I'm missing your birthday. It's an act of violence.
- 2:09Speaker 1: I will be at North Fig Bookshop in Los Angeles,
- 2:12Speaker 1: hosted by friend of the cast Julia Clair May fourteenth.
- 2:16Speaker 1: I will be at Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky. On
- 2:20Speaker 1: May fifteenth. I will be at the Cambridge Public Library
- 2:24Speaker 1: in Massachusetts with the Harvard Bookstore, and I will be
- 2:28Speaker 1: in conversation with one of my dear friends, PBS's own
- 2:32Speaker 1: Tory Bedford. On the nineteenth of May, I will be
- 2:37Speaker 1: in Portland, Maine at Longfellow Books, hosted by friend of
- 2:41Speaker 1: the cast Mayo Williams. I am very very excited. On
- 2:45Speaker 1: the twentieth, I will be going down to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
- 2:50Speaker 1: my home state. Know they're going to be begging, They're like,
- 2:53Speaker 1: where are they? I will be at the Midtown Scholar
- 2:56Speaker 1: Bookstore and Cafe in conversation with Joe Piazza. Then on
- 3:01Speaker 1: May twenty first, I will be at the Fountain Bookstore
- 3:05Speaker 1: in Richmond, Virginia. And on May twenty second, I will
- 3:10Speaker 1: be at Coppersfield Books in Pedaluma, California. And finally, on
- 3:16Speaker 1: May thirty first, I will be at Marin Country Mart,
- 3:20Speaker 1: which is also with Coppersfield's book in Larkspur, California. So
- 3:24Speaker 1: if you live in those areas, please come out. I
- 3:27Speaker 1: would love to see you. I'd love to chat. Please
- 3:29Speaker 1: recommend your favorite hot dog. Let's talk Beck tol cast,
- 3:33Speaker 1: Let's do whatever. And there will be dates announced later
- 3:38Speaker 1: in the summer. So if you would like a show
- 3:41Speaker 1: or a signing to happen in your town, please reach
- 3:45Speaker 1: out and I will send it to my publisher and
- 3:48Speaker 1: be like, see, I should go there. Anyways, that's a
- 3:53Speaker 1: great it's begging works sometimes and we'll link this full
- 3:59Speaker 1: thing and that isscription. But see you soon. I'm making
- 4:03Speaker 1: a little outfit and that's the Jamie Loftus promise.
- 4:07Speaker 3: I can't wait to see.
- 4:09Speaker 1: So if you click the link in the description, it
- 4:11Speaker 1: will take you to the full page where you can
- 4:15Speaker 1: register to go to these events. They are all free events,
- 4:19Speaker 1: so come and hang out and provided that I get
- 4:21Speaker 1: my shit together in time, there will also be speakers
- 4:24Speaker 1: from local unions at all of these signings, So come out,
- 4:27Speaker 1: make some friends, come hang out, and uh, let's eat
- 4:30Speaker 1: some hot dogs.
- 4:31Speaker 3: Beautiful. We'll throw the link to be able to access
- 4:35Speaker 3: registration for the events on our link tree as well
- 4:39Speaker 3: link tree slash Bechdel Cast, so there's no excuse not
- 4:43Speaker 3: to come.
- 4:44Speaker 1: It's free, it's fun. I'll be wearing a little outfit.
- 4:47Speaker 1: Come buy the book, yay, enjoy the episode the Bechdel Cast.
- 4:52Speaker 3: Dig It All on, dig It dig It Out, dig.
- 4:57Speaker 1: It I Wow, I rewatched music video and it seared
- 5:02Speaker 1: into my brain.
- 5:03Speaker 3: Oh wait, I didn't know about the music video.
- 5:05Speaker 4: Oh, Caitlin show, you didn't know about ship?
- 5:10Speaker 1: Pause the show it just started.
- 5:12Speaker 5: But it's so good.
- 5:14Speaker 1: They're having such a nice time. The boys are having fun.
- 5:18Speaker 3: Okay, I believe it.
- 5:19Speaker 1: That's the most important thing about the music video. And
- 5:21Speaker 1: also the song is great and oh my gosh, two
- 5:25Speaker 1: thousand and three, what a time School of rock an
- 5:27Speaker 1: holes be serious? Wait, sorry, I you singing that song
- 5:34Speaker 1: just really put me in a great mood. And I
- 5:35Speaker 1: forgot what I was gonna say. Oh well, oh, I
- 5:38Speaker 1: was gonna say, we need to bring back movies where
- 5:41Speaker 1: there's a song during the credits that summarizes the movie
- 5:45Speaker 1: you just watched. Yes, you need that. We need to
- 5:49Speaker 1: bring it back. Maybe it is back in kids' movies.
- 5:52Speaker 1: And I'm just no longer a child. I hope it
- 5:54Speaker 1: never stopped. I find it difficult to believe that there
- 5:58Speaker 1: is a credit. This is like a Will Smith grade
- 6:02Speaker 1: credits song.
- 6:03Speaker 3: True Wild Wild West, Men in Black.
- 6:06Speaker 1: Yeah, the list goes on. I think I'm not actually sure.
- 6:11Speaker 3: Might be just those two.
- 6:12Speaker 1: It might, but they're impactful, impactful, welcome, to the Bechdel Cast,
- 6:18Speaker 1: Do I think one of the one of our our
- 6:21Speaker 1: longest holdouts for a beloved movie.
- 6:24Speaker 3: Hold out whole out, whole.
- 6:27Speaker 2: Again?
- 6:30Speaker 3: We have our holes out on this episode.
- 6:33Speaker 1: During this children Yes, we have our holes out during
- 6:36Speaker 1: the Children's Prison Industrial Complex movie episode. My name's Jamie.
- 6:42Speaker 1: Locked is my holes not in a way? It's away?
- 6:46Speaker 3: So are mine talking about that?
- 6:47Speaker 6: No?
- 6:47Speaker 1: The hole in my damn face I is going to
- 6:51Speaker 1: be flapping.
- 6:52Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's like that line from Titanic when the.
- 6:55Speaker 1: Wave you out shut that out? Yeah? All right, well
- 7:01Speaker 1: things have already is already erupting. What's your name?
- 7:06Speaker 3: My name is Caitlyn Durnteme awesome. And this is the
- 7:09Speaker 3: Bechdel Cast, a podcast where we examine movies through an
- 7:12Speaker 3: intersectional feminist lens, using the Bechdel Test simply as a
- 7:17Speaker 3: jumping off point. But Jamie, what is it though?
- 7:21Speaker 1: Well, I'll tell you. The Bechtel Test is a media
- 7:26Speaker 1: metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, often called the
- 7:29Speaker 1: Bechdel Wallace Test. Created as a test in response to
- 7:33Speaker 1: the fact that queer women were never in movies at all,
- 7:37Speaker 1: it has since been sort of more generalized into what
- 7:43Speaker 1: we use. Our version of the test requires that two
- 7:47Speaker 1: characters of a marginalized gender with names talk to each
- 7:49Speaker 1: other about something other than a man for two lines
- 7:53Speaker 1: of dialogue. This is an interesting case. This is an
- 7:57Speaker 1: interesting case. We're spiritually this know this movie passes the
- 8:01Speaker 1: Bechtel test to.
- 8:02Speaker 3: Me, sure, but it is. But there is.
- 8:07Speaker 1: I think there's two women and one is dead. They
- 8:10Speaker 1: don't exist on the same timelines. So it's a challenge.
- 8:14Speaker 1: It's a challenge. Patricia Arquette and Sigourney Weaver are separated
- 8:17Speaker 1: by generations, true and political differences.
- 8:22Speaker 3: Yes, all of the above. Yeah, well, we'll talk about
- 8:25Speaker 3: that further, but we'll also talk about so many other
- 8:28Speaker 3: things because this is a rich text.
- 8:30Speaker 1: Yes, because it is a perfect movie.
- 8:32Speaker 3: It's so good. And joining us for this discussion is
- 8:38Speaker 3: writer actor. She's in an upcoming horror comedy movie called
- 8:42Speaker 3: Bad Karaoke. You know her from our past episodes on
- 8:47Speaker 3: Us Get Out and Cheetah Girls. It's Carama Donquay.
- 8:52Speaker 6: Welcome, Thank you for having me again. I would like
- 8:57Speaker 6: to just issue a correction right off the bat. Five
- 9:00Speaker 6: women in this movie.
- 9:02Speaker 1: That's true because there there's a lawyer Stanley's mother. Yes,
- 9:06Speaker 1: what else we got?
- 9:08Speaker 6: There's there's the former student of kissing Kate Barlowe, whose
- 9:12Speaker 6: name is said. And I think it passes because they
- 9:18Speaker 6: talk about how she used to be a student.
- 9:22Speaker 5: Right, yeah, okay, we're going to talk about the treasure.
- 9:24Speaker 6: So legally it passes, not just to you, Jamie, not
- 9:29Speaker 6: just spiritually.
- 9:31Speaker 1: Okay, that is that is a relief.
- 9:33Speaker 5: But it was it was tight.
- 9:35Speaker 1: It was very close, and they made us wait to
- 9:37Speaker 1: the very end. Then.
- 9:39Speaker 3: But I think maybe the lawyer and the warden also talk.
- 9:43Speaker 1: I think they're talking about Stanley.
- 9:45Speaker 5: Yeah, they're talking about the boys at all times.
- 9:48Speaker 1: We're talking about the crime as a.
- 9:50Speaker 5: Boy of man is a.
- 9:52Speaker 1: Man, no women and children. This is getting complicated. Thank
- 9:57Speaker 1: you Karma for solving the podcast right at the top.
- 9:59Speaker 1: And now we you just talk about the movie itself
- 10:01Speaker 1: because this is a rich text. Thank you for coming
- 10:05Speaker 1: onto the Wholes episode. Can you tell us about your
- 10:08Speaker 1: history with this movie, the book, the Holes Expanded universe.
- 10:13Speaker 6: I'm gonna start with something that sounds like it's not related.
- 10:16Speaker 6: I promise it is related. So recently, I was at
- 10:18Speaker 6: a family friend's house and one of her neighbors came
- 10:21Speaker 6: over and she was like, why do I know you?
- 10:24Speaker 6: And my friend Jackie was like, oh, well, Karama used
- 10:27Speaker 6: to come over all the time when we were little,
- 10:30Speaker 6: and she didn't have cable at her house, so she
- 10:32Speaker 6: would come over here. And so I had like a
- 10:36Speaker 6: cable friend, as many kids who didn't have cable had.
- 10:39Speaker 6: And I watched this at my cable friend's house when
- 10:42Speaker 6: I was growing up, and I would see the Diggot
- 10:44Speaker 6: music video on Disney Channel all the time. I still
- 10:48Speaker 6: knew all the words. I don't know if I can
- 10:50Speaker 6: say them on the podcast. I don't want to get
- 10:52Speaker 6: you guys in trouble for singing too much of it.
- 10:55Speaker 6: But when he started spelling like a MP at the TI,
- 10:59Speaker 6: I was like, yes, yes, this is rap music, this
- 11:02Speaker 6: is real rap music.
- 11:04Speaker 5: Migos step aside.
- 11:06Speaker 1: Yes, it's all happening on Radio Disney. They even had
- 11:10Speaker 1: a band named De Tent Boys. Yes, yeah, this was
- 11:15Speaker 1: a single they were. I mean, this was run Ragged
- 11:18Speaker 1: on Radio Disney in the early two thousands, and I
- 11:22Speaker 1: was a.
- 11:22Speaker 6: Radio Disney kid when I moved to Ghana. When I
- 11:24Speaker 6: was little, my dad would send me cassette tapes of
- 11:28Speaker 6: like just hours of Radio Disney because I missed it
- 11:30Speaker 6: so much.
- 11:31Speaker 5: It's really sweet, I know, but also like scary that
- 11:34Speaker 5: the mouse had that much of a hold on me.
- 11:38Speaker 1: Yeah, the mouse will find you wherever we go. But
- 11:41Speaker 1: this is a rare I'm excited to talk about the
- 11:44Speaker 1: production of this movie because this seems like a very
- 11:46Speaker 1: rare Disney movie where it seems like they were relatively
- 11:49Speaker 1: hands off with this, and the director said it was
- 11:52Speaker 1: basically like creating an independent movie with Disney money, which
- 11:56Speaker 1: is cool. I'm excited to get into it because I
- 11:59Speaker 1: was surprised at because I reread. I got mostly through
- 12:03Speaker 1: the book to reread it before, and it's they've changed
- 12:08Speaker 1: so little because for once, they let the author write
- 12:11Speaker 1: the screenplay.
- 12:11Speaker 3: They never do that.
- 12:12Speaker 5: And also the main thing that they change.
- 12:15Speaker 6: I actually am for it because the main thing that
- 12:19Speaker 6: they changed for people who either haven't read the book
- 12:22Speaker 6: or don't remember the book is that Stanley is a
- 12:25Speaker 6: pretty chubby kid in the book, and.
- 12:28Speaker 5: Through digging he actually loses a lot of weight.
- 12:31Speaker 6: But they didn't want to put Shila buff in a
- 12:32Speaker 6: fat suit, and they didn't want to subject a child
- 12:35Speaker 6: to a major like Christian Bale weight shift. So I
- 12:40Speaker 6: think that that is actually, like, I'm all for a
- 12:43Speaker 6: fat representation in film.
- 12:45Speaker 5: I love that representation in film.
- 12:47Speaker 6: I think that this was the better choice in this
- 12:49Speaker 6: instance because I don't like fat suits. I think that
- 12:51Speaker 6: they're dehumanizing, and I don't like torturing children.
- 12:56Speaker 1: So they still tortured the children a little bit, but
- 12:58Speaker 1: mostly with heat. Yes, But but yeah, no, I totally agree.
- 13:02Speaker 1: I forgot that that was sort of the most major change,
- 13:06Speaker 1: and I don't Yeah, it's I felt like rereading the
- 13:10Speaker 1: book that it was, you know, I don't think meant
- 13:14Speaker 1: to be a cruel outcome, but it's sort of lent
- 13:18Speaker 1: this morality to Stanley's weight loss and and sort of
- 13:22Speaker 1: presented it as a well, at least he's not chubby anymore,
- 13:25Speaker 1: in a way that I felt like was not good
- 13:28Speaker 1: representation if they had adapted it in that way. On
- 13:32Speaker 1: top of what you're saying, the thing that was changed
- 13:34Speaker 1: that I wish it stayed was there was more context
- 13:37Speaker 1: for stan Lee's arrest. I get why they have to
- 13:42Speaker 1: keep it focused on zero, but he was like really
- 13:45Speaker 1: severely bullied in school, and they show like how his
- 13:49Speaker 1: bullying very much factored into his arrest, and like fear
- 13:54Speaker 1: of standing up for himself stuff. But other than that,
- 13:59Speaker 1: it's basically all they're They're dropping damns, they're cussing.
- 14:03Speaker 6: Uh.
- 14:03Speaker 1: The adults are a series of unfortunate events, level evil
- 14:08Speaker 1: like it's great. So okay, so you so you you
- 14:12Speaker 1: watched it at cable friend's house.
- 14:14Speaker 6: Yes, that was a frequent rewatch because they would run
- 14:17Speaker 6: it on Disney Channel a lot. And I was a
- 14:20Speaker 6: big fan of Lewis Accer, the author. I was a
- 14:24Speaker 6: Wayside Stories girl from Wayside School.
- 14:28Speaker 5: Loved it.
- 14:28Speaker 6: Good Wayside School gets a Little Stranger my favorite of them.
- 14:33Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah, I gotta reread.
- 14:35Speaker 6: But I was a big fan of like that sort
- 14:38Speaker 6: of universe of like wacky but real. And I remember
- 14:42Speaker 6: distinctly Lewis Sacer had like three kids in the Wayside
- 14:45Speaker 6: School that had the same name, and I don't remember
- 14:47Speaker 6: their name, but he would describe one of them as
- 14:50Speaker 6: being tall and fat, and it's the first time it
- 14:51Speaker 6: occurred to me that somebody could be tall and fat.
- 14:54Speaker 6: But it was always like a very neutral descriptor. It
- 14:56Speaker 6: was just like, these are the way the kids look,
- 14:58Speaker 6: And I was like, whoa people can look all kinds
- 15:01Speaker 6: of ways that's wacky. So opened my mind up a
- 15:06Speaker 6: lot and a lot of love for this movie. I
- 15:09Speaker 6: have a lot of love for adaptations, specifically. I know
- 15:12Speaker 6: that you guys probably remember, but our listeners maybe don't that.
- 15:15Speaker 6: I used to be a co host of a podcast
- 15:17Speaker 6: called Popcorn Book Club where we talked about page to
- 15:21Speaker 6: screen adaptations, and I would constantly talk about Holes on
- 15:25Speaker 6: that podcast. We never covered it, but I was like, guys,
- 15:27Speaker 6: Holes is the perfect adaptation film. It is so true
- 15:30Speaker 6: to the original text, and when it is not true
- 15:33Speaker 6: to the text, that is.
- 15:34Speaker 5: True to the spirit of it. It is amazing.
- 15:37Speaker 6: And one of our co hosts had never seen it,
- 15:38Speaker 6: and I was just like, I don't know how you're
- 15:40Speaker 6: breathing air on this planet being an adult woman of
- 15:44Speaker 6: a certain age who has never seen Holes.
- 15:46Speaker 1: It is like a It is weird. It does feel
- 15:49Speaker 1: like it's such a beloved millennial classic, but I wonder
- 15:53Speaker 1: I don't know if kids are still finding it. I
- 15:55Speaker 1: hope they are probably not. I mean the unfortunately, the
- 16:00Speaker 1: shil abuff of it all does make it a harder
- 16:02Speaker 1: sell because he's a fucking monster. I think he's like
- 16:07Speaker 1: fourteen when this was, you know, child stardom should be illegal.
- 16:14Speaker 1: But that's a conversation for another day. But okay, I
- 16:19Speaker 1: also was a huge fan of the book and the movie.
- 16:23Speaker 1: I forget when I think this was just like at
- 16:26Speaker 1: every school in the early two thousands, like every kid
- 16:30Speaker 1: read these books read wayside school. There's a kind of
- 16:34Speaker 1: I had to look it up to be like, what
- 16:36Speaker 1: was that Lewis Sakar, he wrote, it's a B side,
- 16:40Speaker 1: Dogs Don't Tell Jokes. I remember reading Dogs Don't Tell
- 16:44Speaker 1: Jokes because it is about a child's stand up comic
- 16:46Speaker 1: who pees his pants, and I was like, wow, aspirational
- 16:49Speaker 1: me someday. And I guess that Dogs Don't Tell Jokes
- 16:54Speaker 1: had an impact on me because he's like, I had
- 16:57Speaker 1: to check the plot. Gary Boon, who calls himself Goon,
- 17:02Speaker 1: is the self proclaimed clown of his seventh grade class.
- 17:04Speaker 1: He never stops joking despite the fact that nobody laughs
- 17:07Speaker 1: much and he has no real friends. So he joins
- 17:10Speaker 1: a talent contest as a stand up comedian, and he
- 17:12Speaker 1: roasts everybody, and he hurts a lot of feelings, and
- 17:17Speaker 1: then he learns that being a stand up comic parentheses
- 17:20Speaker 1: evil is not the way to.
- 17:22Speaker 3: Go well at least a roast comedian.
- 17:25Speaker 1: It's true. Yes, he literally goes full roasting at the
- 17:27Speaker 1: store and then learns those people don't like that.
- 17:32Speaker 6: I think we need to wallpaper men's bathrooms in comedy
- 17:36Speaker 6: clugs with the pages.
- 17:38Speaker 1: Of this book with dogs. Don't tell you don't be
- 17:41Speaker 1: like Gary. It did not help him make friends just
- 17:44Speaker 1: like you. So but yeah, big lewis a car fan.
- 17:49Speaker 1: I mean, like you're saying, krama, the wayside school books
- 17:52Speaker 1: were so silly and like fantastical, and the fact that
- 17:56Speaker 1: he wrote holes as well, I mean, the range incredible.
- 18:00Speaker 1: I loved the book, loved the movie. Of course, Being
- 18:04Speaker 1: ten when this came out, I had a crush. I
- 18:08Speaker 1: had a crush on zero zero was my big time crush.
- 18:11Speaker 1: Cleo Thomas. I had a picture of him in my room. Yeah,
- 18:17Speaker 1: loved the song. But then, I mean, it's a great
- 18:19Speaker 1: movie to come back to, not only because there are
- 18:23Speaker 1: more crushes for you as you age, like today Hill,
- 18:27Speaker 1: who I know we're going to be talking about quite
- 18:29Speaker 1: a bit. He can fix that. But but just like
- 18:35Speaker 1: what a beautiful like you're saying, like, what a beautiful
- 18:37Speaker 1: adaptation it is. How it weaves together like five storylines
- 18:41Speaker 1: in this really effortless way, and that it is an
- 18:46Speaker 1: anti carceral children's book that is four kids but adapted
- 18:51Speaker 1: in a way that doesn't talk down to them. And yeah,
- 18:55Speaker 1: it's an amazing movie. I'm so excited to talk about it.
- 18:58Speaker 6: It's a real testament to the fact that people are like, oh,
- 19:01Speaker 6: kids can't understand that. Kids can't understand that, and no,
- 19:04Speaker 6: you just can't explain it, right, You're just not good
- 19:08Speaker 6: and explain there is a way for kids to understand
- 19:11Speaker 6: literally everything, Like, sorry, there are kids who are soldiers
- 19:15Speaker 6: in war in some parts of the world, Like they
- 19:18Speaker 6: can understand things. The way to explain it to them
- 19:21Speaker 6: is the issue. And I think that this is a
- 19:24Speaker 6: really good way to explain the school to prison pipeline,
- 19:29Speaker 6: issues with incarceration and just institutional racism.
- 19:34Speaker 5: Just all of this stuff is very.
- 19:35Speaker 6: Clearly outlined in a way that is developmentally appropriate.
- 19:41Speaker 3: Totally.
- 19:41Speaker 1: Yeah, and like puts a face in a name to
- 19:44Speaker 1: these issues. And I think the like maybe the only
- 19:49Speaker 1: unhoused character that I saw in movies as a kid
- 19:53Speaker 1: that is not played as a joke or as a
- 19:56Speaker 1: personal failing or you know how often we see on
- 20:00Speaker 1: like it's just it's so good, it's doing so much,
- 20:03Speaker 1: and then it has the audacity to be a really
- 20:05Speaker 1: good movie, I know. And what a cast. Anyways, Kaitlyn
- 20:08Speaker 1: wants her history with Holes.
- 20:11Speaker 3: Okay, I read the book in the late nineties, because
- 20:15Speaker 3: it was published in ninety eight. I probably read it
- 20:18Speaker 3: in ninety nine. I would have been a tween at
- 20:21Speaker 3: the time, and I loved it. And then the movie
- 20:25Speaker 3: came out a few years later and I saw it
- 20:27Speaker 3: in theaters. I would have been I think a junior
- 20:31Speaker 3: senior in high school at that point, so I was
- 20:35Speaker 3: old enough that my big crush was Dula Hill and
- 20:40Speaker 3: still to this day.
- 20:41Speaker 1: You're Not Made of Stone, Yeah, but.
- 20:43Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought it was such an incredible story. And
- 20:47Speaker 3: then we got the movie on DVD and I watched
- 20:50Speaker 3: it with my sister on repeat, and I chose this
- 20:56Speaker 3: movie for my not to be a bit but it
- 21:01Speaker 3: is my birthday episode. Oh yay, So this is like
- 21:09Speaker 3: my birthday pick. That's how much I love this movie.
- 21:12Speaker 3: I don't think it's without its flaws, but I think
- 21:15Speaker 3: the flaws are few and far between, especially considering it's
- 21:18Speaker 3: a movie from the early two thousands and that was
- 21:22Speaker 3: just a flawed time yeah, so, yeah, I deeply love
- 21:29Speaker 3: this movie and I'm so excited to talk about it.
- 21:34Speaker 6: I will say embarrassingly, I was twelve when it came out,
- 21:37Speaker 6: so my crush was Shilah buff which has not aged Well.
- 21:42Speaker 1: My Kurt wouldn't convict you. It made sense at the time.
- 21:45Speaker 1: He was on Even Stevens.
- 21:47Speaker 6: Loved Evan Stevens. My dance teacher. My dance teacher choreographed
- 21:53Speaker 6: Even Steven's Influenza. I remember when she had to miss
- 21:56Speaker 6: class because she was doing Even Steven's Influenza, and I
- 22:00Speaker 6: was just like, that's so cool.
- 22:03Speaker 1: Wow, that show was cooking. I think about the song
- 22:06Speaker 1: about going to space a lot. We went to the
- 22:09Speaker 1: Moon in nineteen sixty.
- 22:10Speaker 5: Nine, not nineteen seventy, the year before four.
- 22:14Speaker 1: Uh huh oh no, it's a millennial circle jerk episode. Well,
- 22:20Speaker 1: here's the thing.
- 22:20Speaker 3: I was one of the Friends without Cable as well,
- 22:23Speaker 3: So I've never seen a single episode of Even Stevens,
- 22:26Speaker 3: and I think I probably was aged out of it anyway.
- 22:29Speaker 3: But yeah, I don't know what you guys are talking about.
- 22:31Speaker 1: I know, I don't think there's any need to return.
- 22:34Speaker 1: It was just the age of the musical episode Even
- 22:37Speaker 1: Stevens had a musical episode and it was iconic, memorable.
- 22:42Speaker 6: Yeah, it was called Influenza, as one of the main
- 22:44Speaker 6: characters had the flu and so she was like having
- 22:46Speaker 6: a fever dream and everybody was singing in the fever dream.
- 22:50Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, fine, but this is uh.
- 22:53Speaker 1: I think this is Shia Labuff's first movie.
- 22:56Speaker 6: It's introducing in the credits. I was like, oh, like
- 22:59Speaker 6: I was. I was a little emotional. I was just like, wow,
- 23:02Speaker 6: that's where it all started.
- 23:03Speaker 1: Yikes, and oh that it had gone another way. But
- 23:09Speaker 1: the kids, I mean, it's very famous adult cast and
- 23:12Speaker 1: then a bunch of kids outside of chilah Buff I
- 23:14Speaker 1: think mostly unknowns. I think Cleo Thomas had done some stuff.
- 23:17Speaker 1: I saw he was on Kids Say the Darndest Things,
- 23:21Speaker 1: so he was child starring out. But so Gourney Weaver,
- 23:24Speaker 1: John Voight, Tim Blake Nelson, Henry Winkler. I remember my
- 23:29Speaker 1: mom being like, that's the Fonds because we will watch
- 23:32Speaker 1: Happy Days on Nick at night and I was like,
- 23:34Speaker 1: why isn't he cool anymore?
- 23:37Speaker 3: And earth A Kitar the Kid, Oh my god.
- 23:41Speaker 1: One of her final film performances Delay Hill Patricia Arquette,
- 23:45Speaker 1: and they managed to make the movie for seventeen million dollars.
- 23:48Speaker 1: Don't know how that worked, but yeah, they brought a
- 23:51Speaker 1: bunch of kids to the desert and made one of
- 23:54Speaker 1: the greatest movies of all time.
- 23:55Speaker 3: Yes, let's take a quick break and then we'll come
- 23:58Speaker 3: back for the cap.
- 24:10Speaker 1: And we're back.
- 24:12Speaker 6: Okay.
- 24:12Speaker 3: Here is the story of Holes. We open on a
- 24:18Speaker 3: place that we will learn is a juvenile detention facility
- 24:24Speaker 3: where teenage boys are out in the hot sun digging
- 24:28Speaker 3: holes in the dirt. One of them purposefully gets bitten
- 24:32Speaker 3: by a rattlesnake so that he can be sent home,
- 24:35Speaker 3: and that's going to open up a spot at this facility.
- 24:39Speaker 1: And you're all like, immediate. I hadn't seen this movie
- 24:41Speaker 1: in a couple of years, and I was like, oh,
- 24:43Speaker 1: from moment one, they're not fucking around.
- 24:48Speaker 5: This is a dark, cold open.
- 24:51Speaker 6: I would rather potentially die, literally die.
- 24:56Speaker 1: Than another hole, which was added for the mo It
- 25:00Speaker 1: does not happen in the book. They're just like something
- 25:03Speaker 1: something barf bag. But they started as a full on,
- 25:05Speaker 1: like active You're just like okay, okay, director of the Fugitive,
- 25:11Speaker 1: Let's Go. Let's Go.
- 25:13Speaker 3: Also one of my favorite movies.
- 25:15Speaker 1: I've never seen it. I just thought it was like,
- 25:17Speaker 1: what a this is? I think his first and only
- 25:19Speaker 1: children's movie.
- 25:20Speaker 3: I think so yeah, because he had been known for
- 25:23Speaker 3: action movies.
- 25:23Speaker 1: Collateral Damage came out like so weird.
- 25:28Speaker 3: It does happen in the book that barf bag gets bitten,
- 25:32Speaker 3: but it happens off screen, Like you don't see that
- 25:34Speaker 3: scene play out. They just reference it after the fact.
- 25:37Speaker 3: But in any case. We cut to stan Lee Yonnat's
- 25:41Speaker 3: the fourth played by Shilah buff who is on his
- 25:45Speaker 3: way to this facility because he was wrongfully accused and
- 25:50Speaker 3: arrested for stealing a pair of shoes that seemed to
- 25:54Speaker 3: have fallen from the sky and land on his head.
- 25:58Speaker 3: And he goes on to say that he has bad
- 26:00Speaker 3: luck and he always seems to be in the wrong
- 26:02Speaker 3: place at the wrong time, which his family blames on
- 26:06Speaker 3: a one hundred and fifty year old family curse. We
- 26:09Speaker 3: meet his mom played by Chavon Fallen Hogan, and his
- 26:14Speaker 3: dad played by Henry Winkler, who is an inventor trying
- 26:18Speaker 3: to find the cure for foot odor. We also meet
- 26:22Speaker 3: his grandfather, all of whom Stanley has to leave behind
- 26:26Speaker 3: when a judge sentences him to eighteen months at the
- 26:32Speaker 3: detention facility called Camp Green Lake, where there used to
- 26:37Speaker 3: be a lake, but it dried up long ago and
- 26:40Speaker 3: now it's a barren wasteland as far as the eye
- 26:44Speaker 3: can see. At Camp Green Lake, Stanley meets mister Sir
- 26:50Speaker 3: played by John Voight, who tells Stanley that he's expected
- 26:54Speaker 3: to dig one hole in the dirt every single day.
- 26:58Speaker 3: It has to be five feet deep, five feet in diameter,
- 27:02Speaker 3: and this will build character quote unquote, I love.
- 27:05Speaker 1: How instantly, Yeah, like how instantly it is clear to
- 27:09Speaker 1: kids and anyone how ridiculous this is. Or it's like
- 27:12Speaker 1: that line where it's like, yeah, you bring a boy
- 27:15Speaker 1: to camp and you make him dig a hole every
- 27:17Speaker 1: day and he turns into a good boy, and that's
- 27:20Speaker 1: our belief. You're like, ah's that is just describing prison.
- 27:24Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm just like, yeah, holes they make you so wholesome.
- 27:30Speaker 2: They didn't even try. They didn't even try. It was
- 27:33Speaker 2: right there.
- 27:35Speaker 1: They're like, no, dig a hole, be a good boy.
- 27:38Speaker 3: You're like, okay, right. Mister Starr also tells Stanley to
- 27:42Speaker 3: beware of yellow spotted lizards, who are highly poisonous and lethal,
- 27:48Speaker 3: and if one bites you, you will die a slow
- 27:51Speaker 3: and painful death.
- 27:53Speaker 1: Really good two thousand and three, CGI on the Lizards.
- 27:57Speaker 1: You're like, there was a tennis ball there.
- 28:01Speaker 5: You can almost steel the tennis.
- 28:03Speaker 1: Energy with a racket.
- 28:09Speaker 3: So then we meet Stanley's counselor, doctor Pandanski played by
- 28:13Speaker 3: Tim Blake Nelson, who assigns him to d tent where
- 28:18Speaker 3: Stanley meets other incarcerated teens who he'll be digging holes
- 28:23Speaker 3: next to. They all have nicknames like x Ray, Zigzag, Squid, Armpit, Magnet,
- 28:31Speaker 3: and Zero Zero, who doctor Pandensky is especially cruel to
- 28:37Speaker 3: because he thinks Zero is unintelligent and worthless.
- 28:41Speaker 1: Doctor Pandanski is such a fascinating care again, just like
- 28:45Speaker 1: another adult pretending to be good who is actually fucking
- 28:49Speaker 1: awful and talks shit about the kids he's supposed to
- 28:52Speaker 1: be taken care of behind our backs. The first second
- 28:55Speaker 1: he gets I think again, I've only seen it in
- 28:58Speaker 1: series of unfortunate events, like adults who are as bad
- 29:01Speaker 1: as it seems.
- 29:03Speaker 6: And also from jump we get that he is very
- 29:06Speaker 6: much about calling the kids by their government names, even
- 29:09Speaker 6: though they have names and they'd like to be called
- 29:11Speaker 6: And then like it's giving what your name is Toby,
- 29:14Speaker 6: what's your name? Not like that?
- 29:17Speaker 5: And except for zero, he keeps.
- 29:19Speaker 6: Calling zero zero, and it's like, there's nothing going on
- 29:23Speaker 6: up there, your little dumb dummy.
- 29:25Speaker 1: Right, And he like explicitly says that he feels comfortable
- 29:28Speaker 1: doing that because no one is looking out for zero
- 29:32Speaker 1: and so he doesn't matter, like it's just like it's
- 29:36Speaker 1: I don't know. I thought it's a good performance too,
- 29:39Speaker 1: because he's really putting on the hateful guidance counselor vibe
- 29:44Speaker 1: big time. And then you find out at the ante
- 29:46Speaker 1: never got.
- 29:46Speaker 3: His degree, and you're like, fuck this guy, right, So
- 29:51Speaker 3: stan Lee settles in and starts to learn the ropes.
- 29:55Speaker 3: He reveals that the shoes he was accused of stealing
- 29:59Speaker 3: belonged to Livingston, a famous baseball player, who had donated
- 30:04Speaker 3: those shoes to be sold at a charity auction to
- 30:07Speaker 3: raise money for an unhoused shelter. And so that's why
- 30:11Speaker 3: it was like such a huge deal that Stanley is
- 30:14Speaker 3: presumed to have stolen them and why he's sent to.
- 30:17Speaker 1: This and he, like the famous baseball player literally calls
- 30:22Speaker 1: a child a horrible person in court. So I was like,
- 30:25Speaker 1: easy man, easy, He's like twelve.
- 30:30Speaker 3: So then we flash back to Stanlee with his mom, dad,
- 30:34Speaker 3: and grandpa, who talk about the family curse how Stanley's
- 30:38Speaker 3: great grandpa made a fortune in the stock market but
- 30:42Speaker 3: was robbed by a famous outlaw kissing Kate Barlow due
- 30:47Speaker 3: to the family curse and his bad luck. We'll find
- 30:52Speaker 3: more about the curse soon, but back to the present,
- 30:55Speaker 3: Stanley starts digging his first hole. He's told that if
- 30:58Speaker 3: he finds anything that the warden thinks is interesting, he
- 31:02Speaker 3: could get the rest of the day off. So he
- 31:05Speaker 3: starts digging and it's hot and difficult and grueling, and
- 31:12Speaker 3: then we flash back to stan Lee's no good, dirty, rotten,
- 31:16Speaker 3: pig stealing great great grandfather, Elia Yell Nats, who lives
- 31:22Speaker 3: in a small village in Latvia. He's in love with
- 31:25Speaker 3: a woman named Myra Menke, who he wants to marry,
- 31:29Speaker 3: but her father wants her to marry a different man
- 31:32Speaker 3: because that guy is offering him his biggest pig in
- 31:35Speaker 3: exchange for his daughter because women equal property. So Elia
- 31:42Speaker 3: goes to a fortune teller named Madame Zarni played by
- 31:47Speaker 3: the legend earth A Kit.
- 31:48Speaker 1: Who I only knew at the time as you're like
- 31:50Speaker 1: it's Easma from the other movie. And then later you
- 31:54Speaker 1: find out she is a legend.
- 31:56Speaker 5: Yeah, like the President was scared of her at one point. Legend.
- 32:01Speaker 1: Oh my god, so good.
- 32:04Speaker 3: Yes, And she tells Ellia to carry a baby pig
- 32:08Speaker 3: up a mountain and let it drink from the stream
- 32:11Speaker 3: while he sings to it over the course of I
- 32:14Speaker 3: don't know, a few weeks or something, and it will
- 32:17Speaker 3: make the pig grow and then he'll have a pig
- 32:19Speaker 3: to offer Myra's father. And then Madames Roney says, okay,
- 32:23Speaker 3: when you're done with that, Now you have to carry
- 32:26Speaker 3: me up the mountain so I can drink from the
- 32:28Speaker 3: stream and get strong. And if you fail to do that,
- 32:31Speaker 3: I will put a curse on your family for always
- 32:34Speaker 3: an eternity.
- 32:35Speaker 1: That line read really stuck with me, always an eternity,
- 32:39Speaker 1: Like it's such a good read.
- 32:42Speaker 3: Yeah, And Ellia forgets to honor this promise before he
- 32:48Speaker 3: immigrates to the US, hence the yell NAT's family curse.
- 32:54Speaker 3: Back to Stanley, he finishes his first hole and then
- 32:58Speaker 3: it's either the next day or a few days later,
- 33:01Speaker 3: but Stanley finds a fossil in his hole and shows
- 33:04Speaker 3: it to Pendanski hoping that the warden will find it
- 33:07Speaker 3: interesting and that he'll get the rest of the day off.
- 33:10Speaker 3: But the warden is not interested in fossils. Now, x Ray,
- 33:15Speaker 3: who's kind of the leader of the boys who live
- 33:18Speaker 3: in Dtent, tells Stanley to give him anything else he
- 33:23Speaker 3: finds since x Ray has like seniority. Then we flash
- 33:28Speaker 3: back to one hundred or so years ago when there
- 33:32Speaker 3: was a lake in this location. We meet Sam played
- 33:37Speaker 3: by Julae Hill, who is an onion farmer and he
- 33:41Speaker 3: sells all kinds of medicinal onion based remedies. And then
- 33:46Speaker 3: we also meet a school teacher who makes spiced peaches,
- 33:50Speaker 3: Mss Catherine played by Patricia Arquette.
- 33:53Speaker 1: And you're like, these actors are hot. I wonder what
- 33:56Speaker 1: will happen.
- 33:58Speaker 3: Yeah, the two of them are vibing and they exchange,
- 34:03Speaker 3: you know, onions and peaches. Then we also meet this
- 34:07Speaker 3: rich prick named trout Walker, who has taken a liking
- 34:12Speaker 3: to Miss Catherine and will return to this storyline. But
- 34:17Speaker 3: in the meantime, back in the present, Stanley's peers finally
- 34:22Speaker 3: give him a nickname, Caveman, so he's like one of
- 34:26Speaker 3: them now. Then he learns that zero the kid who
- 34:32Speaker 3: mostly keeps to himself. He only seems to talk to
- 34:36Speaker 3: caveman slash Stanley, and we find out that he cannot read,
- 34:40Speaker 3: so Zero asks Stanley if he'll teach him to read,
- 34:44Speaker 3: but Stanley says that he's too tired at the end
- 34:47Speaker 3: of every day and he just wants to chill. The
- 34:50Speaker 3: next day, Stanley finds something peculiar while he's digging his hole.
- 34:56Speaker 3: It's this like small golden cylindrical tube that looks like
- 35:01Speaker 3: it might be a bullet or a shellcasing of some kind,
- 35:05Speaker 3: and it has the letters KB engraved on it. So
- 35:08Speaker 3: Stanley gives it to x Ray per his request, who
- 35:12Speaker 3: shows it to Pandanski, who calls the warden, and we
- 35:16Speaker 3: finally see the warden on screen, who turns out to
- 35:19Speaker 3: be a whoa whoa whoa woman?
- 35:23Speaker 5: What women can be bad too?
- 35:27Speaker 2: Lewis Nakara is not afraid to say it.
- 35:29Speaker 1: Oh her nail polish. That is such a good detail
- 35:35Speaker 1: at Oh that scene in the book like really stuck
- 35:38Speaker 1: with me where she puts on her evil lady nail
- 35:41Speaker 1: polish and then slaps John backhands John voy she's doing it.
- 35:45Speaker 1: I didn't never realize she's also wearing a sports braw
- 35:48Speaker 1: In that scene, You're like, this is nuts, Like she
- 35:54Speaker 1: just finished doing like yoga on zoom and then she
- 35:56Speaker 1: like almost kills John Voyd.
- 35:59Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty awesome. That happens a little later. First, yes,
- 36:03Speaker 3: we meet her, it's so Corney Weaver. She gives x
- 36:06Speaker 3: Ray the rest of the day off for finding this
- 36:09Speaker 3: interesting item, and then she orders everyone to dig around
- 36:13Speaker 3: x Ray's hole, thinking that that's where the bullet thing
- 36:17Speaker 3: came from, but we all know that it came from
- 36:20Speaker 3: a different hole of Stanley's. Then we flash back to
- 36:24Speaker 3: Miss Catherine and Sam. He helps her fix up the schoolhouse.
- 36:30Speaker 3: If there's a leaky roof or a broken window. He says,
- 36:35Speaker 3: I can fix that, and they're falling in love. And meanwhile,
- 36:39Speaker 3: that rich fuck trout Walker wants to take Miss Catherine
- 36:43Speaker 3: out for a picnic, but she declines and he does
- 36:47Speaker 3: not handle rejection. Well. Yeah, and one night he sees
- 36:51Speaker 3: Miss Catherine and Sam kissing in the schoolhouse.
- 36:54Speaker 1: Because he sees her crying and says, I can fix that.
- 36:58Speaker 2: It's really that would work.
- 37:00Speaker 6: On the iphear I folded like a lawn chair, Like
- 37:04Speaker 6: I'm done, let's close the windows.
- 37:07Speaker 1: We're having a party, one of the most popular letterbox reviews.
- 37:12Speaker 1: Will someone tell mister I can fix that that my
- 37:14Speaker 1: pussy's broken?
- 37:19Speaker 3: Yeah, oh my god, that's amazing.
- 37:22Speaker 1: I also love that there is this It's like, not
- 37:26Speaker 1: it's a whatever, like one of a million themes in
- 37:29Speaker 1: this movie, but that even in the flashbacks, there is
- 37:32Speaker 1: this theme of literacy and gate keeping education because she
- 37:38Speaker 1: also teaches night classes to the same men who are
- 37:41Speaker 1: fucking creeping on her. But it's like the movie isn't
- 37:45Speaker 1: I don't know. The movie is saying like, these guys
- 37:47Speaker 1: are awful, but also they are you know, like at
- 37:51Speaker 1: a disadvantage as well.
- 37:53Speaker 6: And she believes that despite the fact that they are awful,
- 37:56Speaker 6: they deserve the you know, privileges that literacy Ford's one
- 38:00Speaker 6: in society, right. And on top of that, she's reading
- 38:04Speaker 6: the kids like an Edgar Allan Poe poem and Sam
- 38:09Speaker 6: can the poem and I'm like, oh, Stallar, we love it,
- 38:14Speaker 6: love it. He's so fine.
- 38:16Speaker 1: I think it is. I think it is an one
- 38:18Speaker 1: of those Edgar Allan Poe poems that is like about
- 38:20Speaker 1: fucking his cousin. But the spirit of it.
- 38:23Speaker 2: It's the spirit of it it's fine.
- 38:26Speaker 1: Annabel Lee was redeemed by delay Hill also.
- 38:29Speaker 6: Petition to start calling them Edgar Allan Poems. I just
- 38:33Speaker 6: feel like it's it's.
- 38:34Speaker 3: Cleaner, it's right there.
- 38:35Speaker 1: Yeah, it's that's your ear doing justin Timberlake in the
- 38:39Speaker 1: social note and then just stomp out of the room.
- 38:46Speaker 6: Right.
- 38:46Speaker 3: So, yes, this is a white woman and a black
- 38:49Speaker 3: man kissing in Jim Crow, Texas. So trout Walker sees this.
- 38:55Speaker 3: He alerts the town people, who start a riot. They
- 39:00Speaker 3: burn down the schoolhouse, they go after Sam. Miss Catherine
- 39:04Speaker 3: tells the sheriff, who has no intention of stopping any
- 39:07Speaker 3: of this.
- 39:08Speaker 1: No, he just like hits on her.
- 39:10Speaker 3: He harasses and prays on her.
- 39:14Speaker 6: I've been called slurs in my life. I gotta say
- 39:16Speaker 6: Onion Picker was scarily slurry when he was like, kiss
- 39:21Speaker 6: the onion picker.
- 39:22Speaker 1: I feel it, Yeah, onion Picker with a hard R.
- 39:26Speaker 3: That's a lot, yeah yeah yeah. And right after this,
- 39:31Speaker 3: the racist mob catches up to Sam. They kill his
- 39:35Speaker 3: beloved donkey Mary Lou, and they murder Sam. We cut
- 39:40Speaker 3: back to the present. The boys are still digging collectively
- 39:45Speaker 3: while the warden supervises and clearly expects them to find something,
- 39:50Speaker 3: but nothing else is found because, to quote Raiders of
- 39:54Speaker 3: the Lost Arc, they're digging in the wrong place. Wow,
- 39:59Speaker 3: so thank you so much.
- 40:01Speaker 1: It's a little Seinfeld edge to that.
- 40:05Speaker 3: That's just how they say it in the movie. That
- 40:07Speaker 3: was unintentional, but the warden has them returned to digging
- 40:13Speaker 3: individual holes when no other items are found. Back to
- 40:19Speaker 3: the past, Miss Catherine pays another visit to the sheriff
- 40:23Speaker 3: and kills him for not preventing the racist mob murdering Sam.
- 40:29Speaker 3: And this is the start of her becoming the famous
- 40:32Speaker 3: outlaw kissing Kate Barlow. We cut back to the present.
- 40:37Speaker 3: Magnet steals mister Sirr's sunflower seeds from his truck and
- 40:43Speaker 3: Stanley takes the blame for it. And so this is
- 40:45Speaker 3: the scene, Jamie, that you were talking about where mister
- 40:47Speaker 3: Sir takes Stanley to see the warden, but rather than
- 40:51Speaker 3: getting in trouble, the warden smacks mister Surr's face while
- 40:55Speaker 3: she has wet rattlesnake, venom nail polish on.
- 40:59Speaker 2: Ooh ooh wah.
- 41:02Speaker 1: It is a very like feminist You know, you could
- 41:05Speaker 1: make your arguments against it, but it's just such a
- 41:07Speaker 1: good idea that I will not be hearing criticisms of
- 41:11Speaker 1: the snake Venom nail.
- 41:12Speaker 6: Pasha, and Mister responds by saying, all I do is
- 41:16Speaker 6: give you love and affection.
- 41:21Speaker 3: Yeah, it's implied that he has a crush on her
- 41:23Speaker 3: because he's always like fixing his hair when he's about
- 41:25Speaker 3: to see her and stuff.
- 41:27Speaker 1: It's also it's another I mean John Voyd, another bad man, yes,
- 41:32Speaker 1: who gives a really great performance in this It's true.
- 41:36Speaker 3: Yeah. So Stanley returns to his hole and he discovers
- 41:41Speaker 3: the Zero finished digging it for him, and so Stanlee
- 41:46Speaker 3: offers to teach Zero to read after all, and in exchange,
- 41:51Speaker 3: Zero will help Stanley dig his hole every day. So
- 41:54Speaker 3: they start lessons and Zero is like, by the way,
- 41:58Speaker 3: my real name is Hector's Zerny, And we're like, hmm,
- 42:02Speaker 3: where have we heard the name Zarny before. So then
- 42:07Speaker 3: Hector tells Stanley about his past, how he and his
- 42:11Speaker 3: mom moved around a lot, then they became unhoused and
- 42:16Speaker 3: one day his mom had to leave him somewhere and
- 42:20Speaker 3: she didn't come back, and Hector never found out what
- 42:24Speaker 3: happened to her. And he says, if I could, I
- 42:26Speaker 3: would hire a whole team of private investigators to find her.
- 42:29Speaker 3: We'll put a pin in that. The other boys meanwhile
- 42:32Speaker 3: resent that Stanley is getting help digging his hole, and
- 42:37Speaker 3: a fight breaks out and it culminates in Hector hitting
- 42:42Speaker 3: Pendanski in the head with a shovel and running off.
- 42:45Speaker 1: That Zero is the best character.
- 42:48Speaker 3: Oh, he truly.
- 42:50Speaker 1: Beats the shit out of you. Oh he's so great.
- 42:52Speaker 1: There's a quote from Because there was a There was
- 42:55Speaker 1: a I think it was like two years ago. There
- 42:57Speaker 1: was a short oral history for the twentieth anniversary, and
- 43:01Speaker 1: Cleia Thomas says Zero is not the most Disney friendly character.
- 43:04Speaker 1: Like he was grabbing eight balls ready to fight. He
- 43:07Speaker 1: hit a guy with a shovel, he choked somebody out.
- 43:09Speaker 1: I keep thinking about how this character I'm playing might
- 43:11Speaker 1: be the biggest gangster in Disney history. It was crazy,
- 43:15Speaker 1: and I kind of forget how like Zero, I mean,
- 43:17Speaker 1: he stands up for himself. He's the coolest.
- 43:19Speaker 3: It's awesome. So Zero aka Hector runs away from camp.
- 43:25Speaker 3: The warden, Mister Cyr and Pandanski discuss deleting Hector's 'errony's
- 43:30Speaker 3: files and pretending like he was never at Camp Green
- 43:33Speaker 3: Lake because he's a ward of the state. There's no
- 43:37Speaker 3: known family looking for him, so they're like, we can
- 43:40Speaker 3: just basically delete his existence from ever having been here.
- 43:45Speaker 3: So Stanley's thinking about Hector now being out in this
- 43:49Speaker 3: barren wasteland with no water, no food, no shelter from
- 43:54Speaker 3: the elements kind of thing, and he recalls his grandpa
- 43:57Speaker 3: telling him about his great grandpa who kissing Kate Barlow,
- 44:01Speaker 3: robbed and left stranded in the desert for sixteen days,
- 44:06Speaker 3: and how he apparently found refuge on God's thumb, whatever
- 44:12Speaker 3: that means. Then a new kid named Twitch arrives to
- 44:18Speaker 3: take Hector's spot at the camp and he helps Stanley
- 44:23Speaker 3: steal mister Sirr's truck, which Stanley drives off to find Hector.
- 44:28Speaker 3: He almost immediately drives it into a hole, but Stanley
- 44:33Speaker 3: keeps going. He runs off away from camp and he
- 44:36Speaker 3: finds an overturned boat in the dirt where Hector's hiding out.
- 44:41Speaker 3: Hector offers Stanley some Splosh, which is the one hundred
- 44:47Speaker 3: year old spiced peaches that Miss Catherine made and gave
- 44:51Speaker 3: to Sam. Because this is Sam's boat.
- 44:55Speaker 1: It's all connected.
- 45:00Speaker 3: So I think the worst part of this movie slash
- 45:03Speaker 3: book story in general is the words.
- 45:06Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they.
- 45:07Speaker 3: Really needed to do a second draft on that. But anyway,
- 45:11Speaker 3: I think it's.
- 45:12Speaker 6: A fun word for kids, but like as an adult
- 45:14Speaker 6: and like it sounds too much like things.
- 45:17Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I don't want to.
- 45:19Speaker 5: Think about Hector's rony drinking things.
- 45:25Speaker 1: I also is like, I feel like I have looked
- 45:28Speaker 1: this up on past years, like can peaches like last
- 45:32Speaker 1: like that?
- 45:33Speaker 3: I think if they're preserved properly, right, maybe I.
- 45:36Speaker 5: Just assume it's a little magic.
- 45:38Speaker 4: Also, to be fair, he gets immediately ill from that's true.
- 45:42Speaker 1: He just started throwing up the passing for days. That's true.
- 45:46Speaker 1: That's true.
- 45:47Speaker 3: So Stanley and Hector try to figure out what to
- 45:51Speaker 3: do next. In the distance, they see a mountain that's
- 45:55Speaker 3: sort of in the shape of a thumbs up, and
- 45:59Speaker 3: they think maybe that's what Stanley's great grandpa meant about
- 46:02Speaker 3: finding refuge on God's thumb. So they head there. They
- 46:06Speaker 3: climb the mountain. It's a long difficult journey. Hector gets
- 46:10Speaker 3: stick along the way from drinking this blush. So Stanley
- 46:13Speaker 3: carries Hector Zarny aka Madam Zarroni's great great great grandson
- 46:20Speaker 3: up the Mountain to drink from the water they find there,
- 46:25Speaker 3: which effectively lifts the yell NAT's family curse. They find
- 46:31Speaker 3: a bunch of onions and eat them because also this
- 46:35Speaker 3: was Sam's secret onion garden. Again it's all connected. And
- 46:41Speaker 3: then also at this exact moment back at Stanley's house,
- 46:45Speaker 3: Stanley's dad finally invents the cure to foot odor and
- 46:49Speaker 3: the secret ingredients peaches and onions.
- 46:53Speaker 1: I don't yeah, again, there you have to magic it
- 46:55Speaker 1: a little bit to be like onions cure or did
- 46:58Speaker 1: it just make odor smell.
- 47:02Speaker 5: They were boiled? I don't know. I believe.
- 47:05Speaker 1: I believe that the fawn's cured foot oder.
- 47:08Speaker 5: I'm not a chemist.
- 47:10Speaker 6: I don't know what's in the onion that interacts with
- 47:12Speaker 6: the peach that makes.
- 47:13Speaker 3: It smell real, because a caramelized onion has a very
- 47:17Speaker 3: sweet night true's and taste.
- 47:20Speaker 1: It is beautiful that the legacy of their love cured foot.
- 47:24Speaker 5: I wanted to cry a little bit.
- 47:26Speaker 1: It's really nice.
- 47:28Speaker 3: Yeah. So, while Hector and Stanley rest and recover, Hector
- 47:33Speaker 3: reveals that it was him who stole Clyde Livingston's famous
- 47:37Speaker 3: baseball shoes and it's his fault that Stanley got arrested
- 47:41Speaker 3: and sent to Camp Green Lake, but Stanley is not upset.
- 47:45Speaker 3: He's just like this is destiny, and he suggests they
- 47:48Speaker 3: go back to camp and dig one last hole in
- 47:52Speaker 3: the spot where Stanley originally found that gold tube, which
- 47:57Speaker 3: he thinks is probably a tube of lips stick and
- 48:00Speaker 3: that the KB stands for Kate Barlow. Meanwhile, back at camp,
- 48:06Speaker 3: a lawyer that Stanley's family hired played by Roma Mafia
- 48:10Speaker 3: shows up to collect Stanley, but the warden kind of
- 48:14Speaker 3: shows her away and tells her to come back with
- 48:16Speaker 3: a signed court order. Obviously because Stanley's not there. He
- 48:20Speaker 3: ran away, so she has to make up an excuse.
- 48:23Speaker 3: And now the warden and mister sirr and Pandansky are
- 48:26Speaker 3: panicking because they assume Stanley is dead out in the desert.
- 48:31Speaker 1: Yeah, and he quote unquote matters because his family has
- 48:35Speaker 1: secured a lawyer, right.
- 48:36Speaker 3: Yeah. We flash back to kissing Kate Barlow being approached
- 48:41Speaker 3: by Trout Walker and his wife wanting to know where
- 48:46Speaker 3: she buried all the loot she stole.
- 48:48Speaker 1: She somehow found Turn of the century like hair Bleach's
- 48:52Speaker 1: a she's got a new wig.
- 48:54Speaker 3: Well, she's out in the sun all the time, and
- 48:57Speaker 3: it's true.
- 48:57Speaker 2: It looks good.
- 48:58Speaker 1: It looks good.
- 48:59Speaker 3: Yeah, but Kate is like you and your family can
- 49:03Speaker 3: dig for the next one hundred years and you will
- 49:06Speaker 3: never find my treasure. And that's what Camp Green Like
- 49:10Speaker 3: is all about, because the warden is a descendant of
- 49:14Speaker 3: Trout Walker and she is using unpaid child prison labor
- 49:19Speaker 3: to dig holes to search for Kissing Kate Barlow's treasure.
- 49:24Speaker 3: Stanley and Hector returned to camp and they start expanding
- 49:28Speaker 3: the hole where Stanley found the lipstick tube and they
- 49:32Speaker 3: find a treasure chest. But just then the warden, Mister
- 49:36Speaker 3: Sir and Pandanski show up and catch them, but they
- 49:39Speaker 3: can't really do anything because they realize that the hole
- 49:42Speaker 3: is filled with a dozen of those highly lethal yellow
- 49:45Speaker 3: spotted lizards that are crawling all over but not attacking
- 49:49Speaker 3: Stanley and Hector because they've eaten all those onions, which
- 49:53Speaker 3: are a natural lizard repellent.
- 49:56Speaker 1: Hey, for a movie about holes, there's not a single
- 49:59Speaker 1: hole in the plot of the movie. There's true, everything
- 50:05Speaker 1: is explained, yea, and it all is like a cross
- 50:08Speaker 1: generational Oh, it's so good.
- 50:13Speaker 3: A few hours later, Stanley's lawyer returns the warden makes
- 50:18Speaker 3: up a story about how Stanley broke into her cabin
- 50:21Speaker 3: and stole her trunk, but Hector is like, no, this
- 50:25Speaker 3: trunk belongs to Stanley. It's got his name on it,
- 50:28Speaker 3: and sure enough, the name Stanley Yellnatz is carved into
- 50:32Speaker 3: the trunk because this is the treasure that belonged to
- 50:35Speaker 3: his great grandfather. This means Stanley and Hector are free,
- 50:41Speaker 3: as are all the other boys, because Camp Green Lake
- 50:45Speaker 3: is shut down and the warden, Mister Sir, and Pandanski
- 50:49Speaker 3: are arrested. It also starts raining in this area for
- 50:53Speaker 3: the first time in one hundred years, in a scene
- 50:57Speaker 3: that felt a lot to me like a movie that
- 50:59Speaker 3: we have either just released or were covering soon, The
- 51:03Speaker 3: Shashank Redemption Where when and now? Okay, now I always
- 51:09Speaker 3: mix up Tim Robbins and Tim Robinson, but anyway, Tim Robbins.
- 51:14Speaker 1: Very different guys, so different.
- 51:16Speaker 3: But their names are too similar. Anyway, Tim Robbins when
- 51:19Speaker 3: he spoiler alert, finds freedom and it's pouring rain and
- 51:23Speaker 3: he's like, ah, so it felt like that to me anyway.
- 51:27Speaker 5: Wow, I was gonna watch that movie.
- 51:30Speaker 3: So yeah, sorry for spoiling now. A thirty year old movie,
- 51:34Speaker 3: it reigns.
- 51:34Speaker 1: Then he goes.
- 51:35Speaker 3: Ah, okay, So we cut to Stanley and Hector at
- 51:41Speaker 3: the yell NAT's house. They open the trunk. It's full
- 51:45Speaker 3: of gold and jewels and stocks and bonds. Question Mark,
- 51:49Speaker 3: I don't know what those papers are.
- 51:51Speaker 1: And for some reason, Stanley is the one that knows
- 51:53Speaker 1: about how money has appreciated over the last like century,
- 51:57Speaker 1: because his mom's like, Stanley, what do you think? I
- 51:59Speaker 1: was like, what is daily know about banking? He's you know,
- 52:02Speaker 1: he's in middle school, but he knows.
- 52:05Speaker 5: He takes math class.
- 52:06Speaker 1: I believe that He's like, it's worth at least a
- 52:09Speaker 1: million dollars. I was like, good, good math on your
- 52:11Speaker 1: feet man's and and I really it'll it like makes
- 52:15Speaker 1: me so much of the end of this movie makes
- 52:16Speaker 1: me tear up. But the fact that, like, even before
- 52:19Speaker 1: they know Zero is a Zeroni and connected to the
- 52:23Speaker 1: history of their family, they agree to give him half
- 52:27Speaker 1: of whatever is in there, and it's like mm hmmm, collective,
- 52:31Speaker 1: I know it's great and.
- 52:32Speaker 5: Like, no, no fight the parents.
- 52:35Speaker 6: Ye have windos to Hector, one for us, one for
- 52:38Speaker 6: mister Saroni, one for us, one for mister Sni And
- 52:42Speaker 6: then the grandfather embraces Hector and kisses him.
- 52:45Speaker 1: And I'm just like, oh, it's really nice, so nice.
- 52:50Speaker 3: And then Hector uses some of his money to hire
- 52:53Speaker 3: a team of private investigators to track down his mom,
- 52:57Speaker 3: which he does, and they reunite and embrace and that's
- 53:00Speaker 3: also very sweet and tearful. And then the movie ends
- 53:04Speaker 3: with all of the boys from d tent at Stanley's
- 53:08Speaker 3: nice new house with a pool. They gather around the
- 53:11Speaker 3: TV to watch a commercial where that baseball player Clyde
- 53:16Speaker 3: Livingston is the spokesman for Splosh, which is stan Lee's
- 53:22Speaker 3: dad's product for treating foot odor.
- 53:26Speaker 1: The end, and You're like, sure he's also I didn't know.
- 53:30Speaker 1: I guess that that guy, the guy who plays Clyde
- 53:33Speaker 1: Livingston was Rick Fox. Yeah, but he played for like
- 53:36Speaker 1: the Celtics and the Lakers, and like was a pro athlete.
- 53:39Speaker 1: Didn't know, I don't know enough about sports.
- 53:41Speaker 6: Why didn't then make him a basketball player?
- 53:44Speaker 1: So because because like Mike had just come out, they're like,
- 53:47Speaker 1: there's two basketball shoes of it's played out in children's media.
- 53:51Speaker 6: Fair.
- 53:52Speaker 1: That's honestly my guess, but I have no idea.
- 53:55Speaker 3: Yeah, anyway, so that's the movie. Let's take a quick
- 53:58Speaker 3: break and we'll come back to discuss.
- 54:11Speaker 1: And where back. I wanted to say just the one
- 54:15Speaker 1: thing about this movie, and I didn't finish rereading the book,
- 54:20Speaker 1: so I don't remember or I don't know like how
- 54:22Speaker 1: this is dealt with in the book. There is like
- 54:25Speaker 1: in a movie that is shockingly not Disneyfied in most ways.
- 54:29Speaker 1: The ending does feel a little Disneyfied to me, but
- 54:33Speaker 1: only in the one scene where you know, it's so
- 54:36Speaker 1: critical of justice and of the school to prison pipeline
- 54:41Speaker 1: and all of these things that you never see discussed
- 54:43Speaker 1: in media, much less children's media. But at the end
- 54:46Speaker 1: when you know, it's like, oh, well, it's just that
- 54:49Speaker 1: the state didn't know that this is how the prison
- 54:53Speaker 1: was being run, but now that they know, they're gonna
- 54:56Speaker 1: take care of it, and like that was the only
- 54:59Speaker 1: sort of disney fire plot point for me. It was like,
- 55:02Speaker 1: because that is sort of what you're taught of, Like, oh, well,
- 55:04Speaker 1: if you're if they're doing something bad, it's only because
- 55:09Speaker 1: surely nobody knows it's not inherent to the system that
- 55:12Speaker 1: it's a part.
- 55:13Speaker 3: Of I did fully reread the book a couple days ago. Yeah,
- 55:20Speaker 3: I mean me reading a book. Wow, good, thank you.
- 55:24Speaker 3: But I tend to agree. There is a moment in
- 55:29Speaker 3: the movie which it does feel very cathartic, when like, yeah,
- 55:34Speaker 3: the warden and mister sir and like the officials at
- 55:37Speaker 3: the camp are arrested and humiliated and all this stuff
- 55:43Speaker 3: that doesn't really happen. In the book, there is a
- 55:45Speaker 3: reference to how Camp Green Lake gets shut down and
- 55:48Speaker 3: will be converted into a Girl Scout Camp.
- 55:51Speaker 1: Which at one point was going to become a Disney
- 55:54Speaker 1: Plus series.
- 55:55Speaker 3: I think it's still in development.
- 55:58Speaker 1: I'm sorry, what isn't that bizarre? I was kind of like, yeah,
- 56:02Speaker 1: I'd watch it. I don't know.
- 56:03Speaker 6: They could have just kept making Bunked. I don't understand
- 56:06Speaker 6: they canceled Bunked a show Camp. And also, this is
- 56:10Speaker 6: my listen. If you are a Disney executive, call me,
- 56:14Speaker 6: because I think that we I know that everything's a reboot,
- 56:17Speaker 6: even Fascism right now, but I think that we need
- 56:20Speaker 6: to reboot Bug Juice.
- 56:22Speaker 2: And I was gonna say, a great camp show.
- 56:25Speaker 6: I don't know why, because like it's unscripted, it's gonna
- 56:27Speaker 6: be super cheap to produce.
- 56:28Speaker 5: It's you know, get those kid influencers started early. I guess.
- 56:34Speaker 1: Bug Juice was so awesome. Kids shows were really gross,
- 56:39Speaker 1: like I because that was like Baby Survivor.
- 56:44Speaker 3: I have never heard of this. I don't know what
- 56:46Speaker 3: you're talking about, but yeah.
- 56:48Speaker 6: It was like a camp reality show. It was like
- 56:51Speaker 6: kids at Summer Camp, and it was like the trials
- 56:53Speaker 6: and tribulations of the drama of summer Camp.
- 56:56Speaker 5: So I'm like, if you want to make a camp show, either.
- 56:59Speaker 6: Bring back the script camp show that you literally just canceled,
- 57:02Speaker 6: or you know, you have to renegotiate everybody's contract blah
- 57:05Speaker 6: blah blah, or bring back Bug Juice a show that
- 57:10Speaker 6: needs to be brought back.
- 57:11Speaker 5: I think about this all the.
- 57:12Speaker 1: Time because I don't and you're totally right, it like
- 57:15Speaker 1: it fits influencer culture absurdly. Well, yeah, huh.
- 57:19Speaker 3: So the Disney plus TV adaptation that's I think still
- 57:23Speaker 3: in development. I don't know much about it, but basically
- 57:27Speaker 3: it's an adaptation of the book. So it's not necessarily
- 57:31Speaker 3: about like fun summer Camp. It's about like prison labor camp.
- 57:36Speaker 3: But it is like a quote unquote all female reboot,
- 57:40Speaker 3: which I don't know how that will go exactly.
- 57:45Speaker 1: That's what makes me think it is not going to
- 57:47Speaker 1: be made because I feel like that time has come
- 57:49Speaker 1: and gone and what so has Disney plus making like
- 57:52Speaker 1: original content ruined it?
- 57:55Speaker 6: Yeah, I think both All Lady Goes to My was
- 58:01Speaker 6: the start of the death knell, and then Katy perry
- 58:05Speaker 6: Space Journey is like.
- 58:07Speaker 5: The final nail of the coffin.
- 58:09Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a wave of feminism that ended when
- 58:12Speaker 1: Katy Perry went to Space because it was just like
- 58:14Speaker 1: what feminism? What are you even? What are you saying?
- 58:18Speaker 3: I hate it?
- 58:20Speaker 1: Woman should space tourism anyways?
- 58:23Speaker 3: Yes, And then I would say the other big adaptation
- 58:26Speaker 3: change from the book in general and especially at the end,
- 58:32Speaker 3: is that Stanley feels a lot more confident at the end,
- 58:37Speaker 3: and he likes himself now and now he has friends.
- 58:40Speaker 3: And this is part of a larger adaptation change that
- 58:45Speaker 3: we alluded to it at the beginning of the episode,
- 58:49Speaker 3: which I would like to talk more about, which is
- 58:51Speaker 3: the fat erasure of Stanley's character. So basically, in the book,
- 58:58Speaker 3: Stanley is fat. In the movie, he is thin. In
- 59:03Speaker 3: the book, it's mentioned that Stanley is teased and bullied
- 59:07Speaker 3: at school by his peers for being fat. Sometimes his
- 59:10Speaker 3: teachers will kind of subconsciously fat shame him. He doesn't
- 59:15Speaker 3: have much self confidence or friends. As a result, over
- 59:20Speaker 3: the course of the book, he does lose some weight
- 59:23Speaker 3: due to strenuous activity of digging holes every day. It
- 59:27Speaker 3: doesn't ever say how much weight he loses, but it
- 59:30Speaker 3: does say that by the end of the story he
- 59:33Speaker 3: has more confidence, he has friends, he likes himself. It
- 59:37Speaker 3: is not super clear in the book exactly how much
- 59:41Speaker 3: of his confidence boost, if any, correlates to his weight loss.
- 59:46Speaker 3: But even so, I do remember that readers of the
- 59:51Speaker 3: book they appreciated there being representation of a fat protagonist
- 59:55Speaker 3: who is likable and compelling, who is at the center
- 59:58Speaker 3: of this really you know, interesting and layered story, who
- 1:00:03Speaker 3: has an arc. And I remember a lot of the
- 1:00:05Speaker 3: criticism about this movie when it came out that, you know,
- 1:00:09Speaker 3: audiences were disappointed that that aspect of the character was
- 1:00:13Speaker 3: completely erased. They wanted to see on screen representation of
- 1:00:16Speaker 3: a fat protagonist, but instead the movie cast a thin
- 1:00:21Speaker 3: actor in Shila buff And I know that the choice
- 1:00:25Speaker 3: to cast a you know, a thin actor in this
- 1:00:27Speaker 3: role and to not have to have, you know, like
- 1:00:32Speaker 3: someone wear a fat suit or anything like that totally valid.
- 1:00:35Speaker 1: But Also, it's like they could have just cast a
- 1:00:38Speaker 1: fat actor.
- 1:00:39Speaker 3: Right, because the thing is like, if they wanted to
- 1:00:40Speaker 3: emit something, why did it have to be his fatness.
- 1:00:44Speaker 3: If anything, they could have omitted his weight loss.
- 1:00:46Speaker 1: Right, that was the Yeah, that would be ideal, right, Like,
- 1:00:49Speaker 1: at the end of the day, it.
- 1:00:50Speaker 6: Is about the confidence. And the thing about being fat
- 1:00:53Speaker 6: is that, for the most part, being fat is not actually,
- 1:00:59Speaker 6: in my opinion, as a fat person, that bad.
- 1:01:03Speaker 5: I'm hot, I am fine with the way that I look.
- 1:01:07Speaker 6: The problem with being fat is society and the way
- 1:01:11Speaker 6: that society treats fat people. And the problem with Stanley
- 1:01:14Speaker 6: being fat is the fact that he's getting teased. He
- 1:01:17Speaker 6: has no confidence because adults and children alike are making
- 1:01:20Speaker 6: him feel bad about his body. And like the nineties
- 1:01:24Speaker 6: was also a peak heroin chic, the early two thousands
- 1:01:28Speaker 6: was like low rise.
- 1:01:29Speaker 1: Genes also experiencing another unfortunate reboot.
- 1:01:33Speaker 5: Yeah, the rise of.
- 1:01:35Speaker 6: Like skinny talk is terrifying. It's like anemia Tumbler all
- 1:01:40Speaker 6: over again.
- 1:01:41Speaker 5: It really, it really.
- 1:01:43Speaker 6: Is like very disconcerting to encounter, and like, I find
- 1:01:47Speaker 6: myself having thoughts that I haven't had in twenty years,
- 1:01:49Speaker 6: and I'm just like stop it.
- 1:01:52Speaker 5: But I'm okay, I'm good. But every now and.
- 1:01:55Speaker 6: Then I'm just like, like, I'll read the can of
- 1:01:58Speaker 6: a Lacroix and I'll feel bad about myself because looks
- 1:02:02Speaker 6: actually are really weird of fat Shamie, because they really
- 1:02:05Speaker 6: yeah with them, they say zero carbs, zero.
- 1:02:09Speaker 3: Fat, zero, zero guilt or something like that.
- 1:02:14Speaker 5: It's innocent.
- 1:02:16Speaker 1: Oh my god, it does say equals innocent yea.
- 1:02:21Speaker 5: And sometimes it gets to me.
- 1:02:23Speaker 1: Polar would never, polar would never.
- 1:02:25Speaker 5: Yeah, a spin drift couldn't catch them.
- 1:02:28Speaker 1: No, absolutely not. No, I Caitlyn, that's a great point.
- 1:02:32Speaker 1: Like it's because I did feel like, I guess what,
- 1:02:35Speaker 1: I I agree with you, Karama that you know, putting
- 1:02:39Speaker 1: child above in a fat suit would have aged the
- 1:02:41Speaker 1: movie terribly. Yeah, but I did feel like in the
- 1:02:46Speaker 1: portion of the book that I finished that there was
- 1:02:48Speaker 1: it was like one of the faults of the book
- 1:02:51Speaker 1: to me. I've I thought anyways that Lewis de Carr
- 1:02:54Speaker 1: was sort of putting some morality towards the weight loss
- 1:02:59Speaker 1: in a way that just felt kind of out of
- 1:03:00Speaker 1: step with a lot of what the book is doing.
- 1:03:03Speaker 3: Totally and right. If there was again anything to omit
- 1:03:08Speaker 3: from the adaptation, it could be the weight loss, or
- 1:03:13Speaker 3: at least the implication that his boost and confidence correlates
- 1:03:16Speaker 3: in some way to his weight loss.
- 1:03:18Speaker 6: I do also think that, like we are looking at
- 1:03:21Speaker 6: this very much with twenty twenty five eyes, and I
- 1:03:24Speaker 6: think that having a kid that was fat on screen
- 1:03:28Speaker 6: be made fun of for being fat was something that
- 1:03:31Speaker 6: was like also going to be considered like damaging, like
- 1:03:34Speaker 6: putting this fat kid in the public eye, And I
- 1:03:36Speaker 6: think that it ultimately would have been damaging.
- 1:03:39Speaker 5: For that kid.
- 1:03:40Speaker 6: Sure, And I know that like Heavyweights was a movie
- 1:03:43Speaker 6: that came out in a similar era.
- 1:03:46Speaker 5: I can't remember exactly what your Heavyweights.
- 1:03:48Speaker 3: Came out, Yeah, late nineties, I think because he isn't
- 1:03:52Speaker 3: Keenan Thompson in it, so it's like, yeah, Keenan era,
- 1:03:56Speaker 3: I think baby Keenan's in it.
- 1:03:57Speaker 5: Yeah.
- 1:03:57Speaker 6: But the thing about Keenan is it was always okay
- 1:03:59Speaker 6: for him to be fat because he was funny, do
- 1:04:01Speaker 6: you know what I mean? Whereas like with Holes, it's
- 1:04:04Speaker 6: more of a dramatic turn and you're sort of like
- 1:04:09Speaker 6: the hero of this drama. And I think that I
- 1:04:13Speaker 6: think that I would have loved if it were different.
- 1:04:16Speaker 6: But I also kind of understand why it was the
- 1:04:18Speaker 6: way that it was with.
- 1:04:20Speaker 1: The time that it came out, and adding that to
- 1:04:24Speaker 1: I mean, I think I'm sure that I'm but I
- 1:04:28Speaker 1: the only young fat actors that I remember knowing of
- 1:04:33Speaker 1: as a kid were Keenan Thompson and Lori Beth Denberg
- 1:04:36Speaker 1: and that was it. And so if the you know,
- 1:04:40Speaker 1: directive is to cast Stanley yell Natz as a known actor,
- 1:04:44Speaker 1: that might have been hard also because of how of
- 1:04:48Speaker 1: how prejudiced Hollywood is in the first place, where the
- 1:04:50Speaker 1: most well known child actors are you know, finn Totally.
- 1:04:54Speaker 6: This is before Nicki Blonski changed cinema.
- 1:04:58Speaker 1: It was a few years away, in just three years.
- 1:05:02Speaker 3: So the filmmakers spoke to this adaptation change in an
- 1:05:08Speaker 3: interview in two thousand and three. So it was Lewis
- 1:05:11Speaker 3: Sacker and director Andrew Davis were interviewed by Phase nine. Sure,
- 1:05:18Speaker 3: I don't know exactly what that is, some kind of
- 1:05:20Speaker 3: film publication, but anyway, precisely, they were asked how they
- 1:05:28Speaker 3: searched for the right kids, like the right child actors
- 1:05:31Speaker 3: for the characters. Lewis Sacker says, well, the character of
- 1:05:35Speaker 3: Stanley in the book is overweight, Shia is not, but
- 1:05:39Speaker 3: this wasn't integral to the story. The point was more
- 1:05:42Speaker 3: that he felt like an outsider, but he could display vulnerability,
- 1:05:46Speaker 3: and Shia conveys the right amount of emotion and vulnerability
- 1:05:50Speaker 3: and quirkiness, so the overweight thing wasn't important to that.
- 1:05:55Speaker 3: I say, did you read your own book? Lewis, Like,
- 1:05:58Speaker 3: what are you talking about?
- 1:06:00Speaker 6: As a misguided take, I would say I can pretty
- 1:06:04Speaker 6: much bring any topic back to how much I dislike
- 1:06:06Speaker 6: Leah Michelle. But of course, for me Funny Girl the adaptation,
- 1:06:11Speaker 6: I thought that Beanie Feldstein was better casting because the
- 1:06:15Speaker 6: whole thing about Funny Girl is that Fanny Brice is
- 1:06:19Speaker 6: supposed to be not conventionally attractive. And while Leah Michelle,
- 1:06:24Speaker 6: because she is half Jewish, does have similar features to say,
- 1:06:29Speaker 6: like barbar streisand in the original the way that that
- 1:06:33Speaker 6: was written for twenty twenty forge or whatever year it was,
- 1:06:36Speaker 6: twenty twenty two, she's conventionally attractive.
- 1:06:39Speaker 5: She's like a hot lady.
- 1:06:41Speaker 6: Our beauty conventions have changed, but we still hate fat people.
- 1:06:45Speaker 6: And I think that Beanie Feldstein's casting was far more
- 1:06:49Speaker 6: in line with who Fanny's supposed to be as an outsider.
- 1:06:53Speaker 6: So I think that on the one hand, Lewis is
- 1:06:55Speaker 6: right in that what matters most is that he's an
- 1:06:57Speaker 6: outsider who gains confidence. But we don't get that from
- 1:07:02Speaker 6: Shia abuff In any way, Like they didn't write something
- 1:07:04Speaker 6: in that made it happen, Like he didn't have a list,
- 1:07:06Speaker 6: he didn't have some sort of like physical disability or
- 1:07:09Speaker 6: something that like that would have helped with the holes.
- 1:07:13Speaker 3: But you know what I mean, Yeah, or even if
- 1:07:16Speaker 3: it's just like he has a lack of confidence for
- 1:07:19Speaker 3: a reason that has nothing to do with his appearance
- 1:07:22Speaker 3: or ability or anything like that, and it's just that
- 1:07:25Speaker 3: it wasn't replaced with anything. Yeah, Yeah, So that's just
- 1:07:28Speaker 3: that whole part of his character is erased. And maybe
- 1:07:32Speaker 3: Lewis Sachar is saying something like, well, you know, Stanley's
- 1:07:36Speaker 3: fatness does not define him as a character, which is true,
- 1:07:40Speaker 3: but it doesn't sound like that's what he's saying. He's
- 1:07:42Speaker 3: just sort of like, I need to make an excuse
- 1:07:44Speaker 3: for why we didn't cast a actor.
- 1:07:47Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels like a very like hollywoody thing, which
- 1:07:51Speaker 1: to at least to Lewis Skar, I'm sure that Lewis
- 1:07:54Speaker 1: Akar is not the one making the final casting decisions, no, right,
- 1:07:58Speaker 1: I know that he. I think he was a pretty
- 1:08:00Speaker 1: around the movie. I think that that is like a
- 1:08:02Speaker 1: better suited question for the director than which the writer.
- 1:08:06Speaker 3: Which the director answers a question, a follow up question,
- 1:08:10Speaker 3: which was didn't you consider a fat suit, and director
- 1:08:14Speaker 3: Andrew Davis says, yes, we did, but in the book
- 1:08:18Speaker 3: he loses weight as the story evolves and as he
- 1:08:22Speaker 3: digs the holes, et cetera. And we shot the movie
- 1:08:25Speaker 3: out of continuity, so that wouldn't have worked.
- 1:08:28Speaker 2: That's the reason.
- 1:08:29Speaker 3: Yeah, youre right, And I think that was like I
- 1:08:31Speaker 3: remember that also being a reason that they gave for
- 1:08:34Speaker 3: not casting a fat actor to begin with, because it's like, well,
- 1:08:38Speaker 3: movies are shot out of chronological order. So if a
- 1:08:40Speaker 3: character is losing weight progressively, but the movie is shot
- 1:08:44Speaker 3: out of order, then how how do we manage that?
- 1:08:47Speaker 1: It's all very two thousand and three. I mean, I
- 1:08:49Speaker 1: will say that, like not to give this movie a pass,
- 1:08:52Speaker 1: but that this feels very thoroughly in step with how
- 1:08:57Speaker 1: fatness was treated in movies at this time.
- 1:09:00Speaker 3: For sure, shallow how oh yeah.
- 1:09:02Speaker 1: Right, like this like the same couple of years God,
- 1:09:05Speaker 1: I still have managed to never see Shallow.
- 1:09:07Speaker 5: How oh, I won't see that movie because I love
- 1:09:09Speaker 5: myself too much.
- 1:09:12Speaker 1: That's one of those movies where it's like, I know
- 1:09:14Speaker 1: we'd have a lot to talk about, but I don't
- 1:09:15Speaker 1: want to subject to anyone to have it to watch it,
- 1:09:18Speaker 1: including myself.
- 1:09:20Speaker 3: Fair it's horrid. I have seen it, and.
- 1:09:23Speaker 1: It's like been free on YouTube for a thousand years
- 1:09:26Speaker 1: because no one would watch it on purpose. But in
- 1:09:29Speaker 1: any case, yes, I wasn't aware that they had been
- 1:09:33Speaker 1: asked about it directly.
- 1:09:35Speaker 3: And then the other thing is that there is a
- 1:09:38Speaker 3: fat character in the movie Armpit laid by Byron Cotton
- 1:09:42Speaker 3: ar MPI to the t well, yes, of course.
- 1:09:46Speaker 5: Is that you're smelling dog?
- 1:09:47Speaker 3: That's me okay, Well, that's the thing.
- 1:09:49Speaker 1: That was a lyric. That was lyric.
- 1:09:51Speaker 3: The main thing we know about him is that he
- 1:09:54Speaker 3: has body odor. He doesn't. He's implied to not have
- 1:09:58Speaker 3: very good hygiene. Every and teases him about this. And
- 1:10:02Speaker 3: also the movie goes out of its way to show
- 1:10:04Speaker 3: at least once to show him struggling with a physical
- 1:10:07Speaker 3: task of some kind.
- 1:10:08Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 1:10:09Speaker 3: So basically the only fat character on screen is attached
- 1:10:13Speaker 3: to all these very harmful reductive tropes. Yeah, associated with fatness.
- 1:10:19Speaker 1: So which sucks for a lot of reasons. I mean
- 1:10:21Speaker 1: the actor, because I don't think I don't a lot
- 1:10:23Speaker 1: of these kids didn't go on to perform at least
- 1:10:27Speaker 1: in movies very much. But Byron Cotton is so good,
- 1:10:30Speaker 1: he's so charming, and also like it also just doesn't
- 1:10:34Speaker 1: it's so clearly fat phobic because you got to think,
- 1:10:36Speaker 1: all these kids are stinky, They're not being taken care of,
- 1:10:41Speaker 1: and it's not their fault, Like they all share a
- 1:10:44Speaker 1: single shower stall like there, of course, hygiene is poor
- 1:10:47Speaker 1: and they only get like four.
- 1:10:49Speaker 3: Minute shower tokens or something.
- 1:10:51Speaker 1: Yeah, and add that to the average hygiene habits of
- 1:10:55Speaker 1: a young boy in the best circumstances, like, yeah, all
- 1:10:59Speaker 1: these kids are stinky.
- 1:11:01Speaker 6: Yeah, and they're wearing the same work clothes three days
- 1:11:04Speaker 6: in a row.
- 1:11:06Speaker 3: Right.
- 1:11:06Speaker 1: I did want to talk a little bit about the
- 1:11:08Speaker 1: production of this movie, because there is child Okay, one
- 1:11:14Speaker 1: of the hills that I love to die on day
- 1:11:17Speaker 1: in and day out is child labor laws, and there's
- 1:11:23Speaker 1: I think that this movie technically followed child labor laws,
- 1:11:26Speaker 1: but to me, say that child labor laws are not
- 1:11:28Speaker 1: restrictive enough because they I mean, obviously the kids have
- 1:11:31Speaker 1: to go to school all this stuff, But they were
- 1:11:33Speaker 1: literally in the middle of the desert in heat as
- 1:11:36Speaker 1: much as one hundred and fifteen degrees, shooting for ten weeks.
- 1:11:41Speaker 1: And I have a couple of quotes from that. It
- 1:11:43Speaker 1: was a business insider oral history where they didn't speak
- 1:11:47Speaker 1: to everybody, and you know there's certain like you know,
- 1:11:50Speaker 1: like I don't want to know what child a buff says.
- 1:11:53Speaker 1: He's not in it. But it's like Lewis Sakarr, the director,
- 1:11:57Speaker 1: and then a couple of the cast members I think
- 1:11:59Speaker 1: Tim Blake Nelson, and then a few of the boys,
- 1:12:01Speaker 1: including Miguel Castro who plays Magnet and my crush Cleo Thomas.
- 1:12:09Speaker 5: Well I met once.
- 1:12:11Speaker 1: Actually what is he nice?
- 1:12:13Speaker 5: It was very nice. I was like, is he t zero?
- 1:12:18Speaker 5: He was really sweet.
- 1:12:19Speaker 6: I was on a show on Hulu called Reboot, and
- 1:12:22Speaker 6: at the premiere of Reboot he was there and I
- 1:12:25Speaker 6: was like, what are you doing here?
- 1:12:28Speaker 1: Also, you're great in Reboot. I was like I think
- 1:12:31Speaker 1: I like gasped and like messaged you immediately, like how
- 1:12:35Speaker 1: could you not have told me? Actually?
- 1:12:37Speaker 6: I actually had a really sweet interaction last night with
- 1:12:40Speaker 6: somebody at like an actor mixer thing for my agency,
- 1:12:44Speaker 6: and this like younger actor at my agency.
- 1:12:47Speaker 5: She's like in her twenties. She's not like a child,
- 1:12:50Speaker 5: but she came up here. She's like, I really loved
- 1:12:52Speaker 5: you in reboot and you made me want to go
- 1:12:53Speaker 5: to UCB. And I was just like, I'm literally gonna
- 1:12:57Speaker 5: cry right now.
- 1:12:58Speaker 6: Thank you so much. I feels good about my career
- 1:13:02Speaker 6: and that made me feel so much better.
- 1:13:04Speaker 1: Like moments like that find you when you need it.
- 1:13:06Speaker 2: That's really yes.
- 1:13:08Speaker 5: But yeah, Cleo was very nice.
- 1:13:10Speaker 1: He introduces something like I know you're I know I'm
- 1:13:14Speaker 1: aware of.
- 1:13:14Speaker 2: I know the classes, but I would lose it.
- 1:13:17Speaker 5: I would still still crushworthy.
- 1:13:19Speaker 1: I would say yeah, I followed it. I followed him
- 1:13:22Speaker 1: on Instagram today. I was like, he still got it.
- 1:13:24Speaker 6: I was gonna say slides DMS and I remembered, like
- 1:13:27Speaker 6: a fully engaged with adults.
- 1:13:29Speaker 2: He would get it.
- 1:13:30Speaker 1: This Cleo Thomas has been promoted to my Hall Pass.
- 1:13:35Speaker 1: But so this is a quote from Miguel Castro, who
- 1:13:39Speaker 1: also talks about how like the casting process and how
- 1:13:43Speaker 1: they really did. I mean, I think that being unwilling
- 1:13:46Speaker 1: to cast a fat actor of Stanley is the standout
- 1:13:49Speaker 1: bad thing that they did, because it seems like they
- 1:13:51Speaker 1: tried to really find young actors who like fit the role,
- 1:13:57Speaker 1: and also that the movie was not being aggressive whitewashed
- 1:14:00Speaker 1: in a way that I would not put past two
- 1:14:02Speaker 1: thousand and three. I do think ultimately centering a story
- 1:14:06Speaker 1: about the school to prison pipeline around a white character
- 1:14:09Speaker 1: as a little suss but we'll get there. But just
- 1:14:12Speaker 1: in terms of the production, Mila Castro said, he's also
- 1:14:17Speaker 1: very funny, but he said, I remember one day was
- 1:14:19Speaker 1: one hundred and nineteen degrees. I thought they were going
- 1:14:21Speaker 1: to cancel the filming, but we all agreed to knock
- 1:14:23Speaker 1: it out. I was hallucinating and I started seeing water
- 1:14:27Speaker 1: a swimming pool. The production team gave us thermometers to
- 1:14:31Speaker 1: check the temperature of our holes. If the holes hit
- 1:14:33Speaker 1: over one hundred and twenty five degrees, we had to
- 1:14:36Speaker 1: get out of there. That day, some of our thermometers
- 1:14:39Speaker 1: broke one thirty And it's like, you can't make kids
- 1:14:43Speaker 1: do that. You can't make kids, they just said. And
- 1:14:47Speaker 1: they had to do like a boot camp, basically re
- 1:14:50Speaker 1: enacting the movie holes so that they would be able
- 1:14:52Speaker 1: to do it on the production, so it ended up
- 1:14:54Speaker 1: being like three to four months of them sort of
- 1:14:58Speaker 1: just having to go methad, which is like, do that
- 1:15:01Speaker 1: if you want as an adult, Like I just you
- 1:15:04Speaker 1: can't make kids go method at a prison camp.
- 1:15:07Speaker 5: Like that's we all agreed is bad.
- 1:15:12Speaker 2: Yeah, it's.
- 1:15:14Speaker 6: It's giving Mikey Madison saying that she and Sean Baker
- 1:15:18Speaker 6: decided together not to have an intimacy coordinator, and I'm like,
- 1:15:22Speaker 6: I don't think that that's your call as a no.
- 1:15:25Speaker 6: I think it's your call as a yes, but it
- 1:15:26Speaker 6: can't be your call as a no. That's like not
- 1:15:29Speaker 6: having a stunt coordinator. Like even Tom Cruise, as dedicated
- 1:15:33Speaker 6: as he is to doing these outrageous stunts, has a
- 1:15:37Speaker 6: stunt coordinator.
- 1:15:38Speaker 3: Right right, Yeah, it feels like adults knowing that they
- 1:15:43Speaker 3: have power over children and being like, no, we got
- 1:15:46Speaker 3: to keep going. The show must go on, let's go,
- 1:15:49Speaker 3: let's go kids.
- 1:15:49Speaker 6: Don't you want to make the movie? Don't you want
- 1:15:51Speaker 6: all of your friends to watch this cool movie?
- 1:15:54Speaker 3: Right?
- 1:15:55Speaker 1: It's just I don't know, I don't understand like production risk,
- 1:15:59Speaker 1: Like even if you were heartless and you don't care
- 1:16:02Speaker 1: about putting a child in a one hundred and thirty
- 1:16:04Speaker 1: degree whole like that production insurance. I don't know. I
- 1:16:08Speaker 1: was just I was curious. I was like, I wonder
- 1:16:11Speaker 1: how they kept the whole school. The answer they didn't.
- 1:16:13Speaker 1: They didn't, so that is unfortunate. What I will say
- 1:16:16Speaker 1: that is positive about the production, just something that I
- 1:16:20Speaker 1: admire is that Andrew Davis, the director, who mostly had
- 1:16:23Speaker 1: done action movies up to this point, was really set
- 1:16:27Speaker 1: on keeping the story basically not dumbing the story down
- 1:16:32Speaker 1: for kids, and that Disney, after I think a few
- 1:16:36Speaker 1: initial like are you sure you want to include A,
- 1:16:39Speaker 1: B and C, he was like, no, I will not
- 1:16:41Speaker 1: make the movie if you keep bugging me, and really
- 1:16:45Speaker 1: pushed to have Lewis Karr write the screenplay and basically,
- 1:16:49Speaker 1: along with a producer, taught Lewis Decarr how to write
- 1:16:53Speaker 1: a screenplay so that they could preserve the integrity of
- 1:16:57Speaker 1: the story. And I don't know, just like I knew,
- 1:17:00Speaker 1: you know, Crame, you're a writer. Like it's just like that.
- 1:17:03Speaker 1: I don't know how they pulled it off, and I'm
- 1:17:05Speaker 1: so glad that they did well.
- 1:17:06Speaker 6: I feel like he has a really strong understanding of
- 1:17:08Speaker 6: story to begin with, So I feel like it was
- 1:17:11Speaker 6: like he was at the water.
- 1:17:13Speaker 5: They just had to show him how to drink, you
- 1:17:14Speaker 5: know what I mean?
- 1:17:15Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, And that's what they were sort of like.
- 1:17:17Speaker 1: They were like, he's a great writer, he just needs
- 1:17:19Speaker 1: to understand the format. And I guess throughout production, like Lewis,
- 1:17:24Speaker 1: the Carr had a lot of input and if he
- 1:17:26Speaker 1: wanted something changed or adjusted like Andrew Davis, had no questions.
- 1:17:31Speaker 1: I was like, wow, no one respects writers. That's cool. Yeah,
- 1:17:34Speaker 1: that's right. That was my takeaway.
- 1:17:37Speaker 5: He's also in the movie.
- 1:17:39Speaker 1: Yeah, mister bold, Oh that's him.
- 1:17:42Speaker 2: Yeah, cute.
- 1:17:44Speaker 1: Sweet.
- 1:17:45Speaker 5: I wish they had shown him with like a bust
- 1:17:47Speaker 5: down wig.
- 1:17:48Speaker 3: Later because the onion juice it worked. The onion juice
- 1:17:53Speaker 3: cured his boldness.
- 1:17:55Speaker 5: I just want to know if it works. It's like
- 1:17:57Speaker 5: a Sweet Todd situation.
- 1:17:59Speaker 3: Mister No, I think Sam's onion remedies worked one hundred percent.
- 1:18:05Speaker 6: You would have loved Arawan, Oh my god, Oh he
- 1:18:09Speaker 6: would have.
- 1:18:09Speaker 1: He would have been making billions at the Ariwuan.
- 1:18:13Speaker 3: Wow.
- 1:18:14Speaker 1: Yeah. I love cameos like that. And not to keep
- 1:18:16Speaker 1: going back to series of unfortunate events, but it is
- 1:18:18Speaker 1: my favorite. And that is a terribly adapted movie that
- 1:18:22Speaker 1: the author was very upset about. So it's just like
- 1:18:25Speaker 1: there's so many examples of you know, heavily sanitized, Like
- 1:18:29Speaker 1: all the dark themes in that movie are basically played
- 1:18:32Speaker 1: for comedy instead of because the you know, Nickel I
- 1:18:35Speaker 1: think it was Nickelodeon productions in that case were like,
- 1:18:37Speaker 1: it's too scary for kids, they won't be able to
- 1:18:39Speaker 1: handle it. And that's how you get Jim Carrey count
- 1:18:43Speaker 1: all off.
- 1:18:44Speaker 6: I met the boy from that movie.
- 1:18:47Speaker 5: I didn't know it was him. I just happened to
- 1:18:49Speaker 5: be sitting.
- 1:18:50Speaker 1: All my childhood crushes.
- 1:18:51Speaker 6: I just happened to be sitting next to him. We're
- 1:18:53Speaker 6: instagram like mutuals now. I happen to be sitting next
- 1:18:57Speaker 6: to him. Last summer when I went to New York
- 1:18:59Speaker 6: City and I decided to use my free will and
- 1:19:01Speaker 6: my adult money to go see Cats.
- 1:19:03Speaker 2: The Jellicle Ball, and he was there.
- 1:19:06Speaker 5: And he was there in the front row, right next
- 1:19:08Speaker 5: to me.
- 1:19:09Speaker 2: Oh my god.
- 1:19:10Speaker 6: He had a friend who was in it. He had
- 1:19:12Speaker 6: never seen Cats before. I had seen Cats before.
- 1:19:16Speaker 3: Of course.
- 1:19:17Speaker 6: I will just say I think the Cat's the Jellical
- 1:19:19Speaker 6: Ball was actually genius and a really amazing production because
- 1:19:24Speaker 6: they used ballroom culture and I was like, oh, this
- 1:19:27Speaker 6: is this is actually the only way this show makes sense.
- 1:19:30Speaker 1: That is actually a great adjustment.
- 1:19:33Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's like Paris is burning bust cats.
- 1:19:37Speaker 5: Yes it's gay cats.
- 1:19:38Speaker 2: I'm in that's so good.
- 1:19:40Speaker 1: Yeah. Liam Aiken, Yes he's sucking and like, I'm a yapper,
- 1:19:46Speaker 1: so I'll talk to anybody that's unfortunately sitting next to me.
- 1:19:48Speaker 6: And he was such a trooper about it, and I
- 1:19:51Speaker 6: was like, Oh, your friend's in it. Who is your
- 1:19:53Speaker 6: friend playing? And he was like, oh, she's Skimbleshanks And
- 1:19:56Speaker 6: I was like the railway can.
- 1:19:58Speaker 1: The best Cat's god best number.
- 1:20:02Speaker 5: I was like, that's a good cat, you've.
- 1:20:04Speaker 2: Good taste and friends.
- 1:20:06Speaker 1: I can't believe you're hang out with Skimbleshanks. Oh my god.
- 1:20:09Speaker 1: Yet another like Horny Child's thing on my wall. I
- 1:20:13Speaker 1: had like achin for Liam, that's so funny. Wow, I'm
- 1:20:20Speaker 1: glad that he's And he did turn into my dream
- 1:20:22Speaker 1: adult in that he was friend row at the Jelicable
- 1:20:26Speaker 1: and like I never.
- 1:20:28Speaker 6: It never it came up that he was an actor
- 1:20:29Speaker 6: because we were just talking and I was like, oh,
- 1:20:31Speaker 6: I'm an actor too, and blah, blah blah. And I
- 1:20:33Speaker 6: didn't know until I like looked him up after he
- 1:20:35Speaker 6: walked me into the subway because I was like, I
- 1:20:37Speaker 6: don't know where I'm going, And I looked him up
- 1:20:40Speaker 6: to see if his star meter.
- 1:20:41Speaker 5: Was better than mine.
- 1:20:42Speaker 6: It was, and I was like, oh, snap, this is
- 1:20:45Speaker 6: the guy from Stepmom, one of my favorite movies of
- 1:20:47Speaker 6: all time.
- 1:20:48Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
- 1:20:49Speaker 6: And then I was like, oh, I had a series
- 1:20:50Speaker 6: of unfortunate events a movie that I did not care.
- 1:20:52Speaker 1: About, but Stepmom, good for him, Good for him.
- 1:20:56Speaker 5: Have you guys done? Stepmom? Sorry, we should talk about
- 1:20:59Speaker 5: the movie.
- 1:20:59Speaker 3: No, we haven't, but it's on our list.
- 1:21:02Speaker 1: I think would be down. I've seen it because jennam
- 1:21:04Speaker 1: Alone is in it too, right, baby jenneral alone? Yeah,
- 1:21:08Speaker 1: but well, I guess back, I guess.
- 1:21:11Speaker 3: I mean speaking of a movie that you know, like
- 1:21:16Speaker 3: doesn't sanitize the more serious themes, or at least not extensively. Yeah,
- 1:21:22Speaker 3: this movie, it addresses a number of social issues such
- 1:21:27Speaker 3: as race, class, incarceration in all of the storylines I
- 1:21:34Speaker 3: think that are intersecting. So there's these two main storylines
- 1:21:39Speaker 3: from the past, one from the present. In one of them,
- 1:21:43Speaker 3: it's Stanley's Great, Great grandfather Elia Yellnetz. He is seeking
- 1:21:49Speaker 3: out the help of Madame Zaroni. In the book, Madame
- 1:21:53Speaker 3: Zaroni is described as being a word that is used
- 1:21:58Speaker 3: as a slur to describe Romani people. She's played by
- 1:22:02Speaker 3: earth a kid.
- 1:22:03Speaker 1: Yeah, she's like believe Egyptian. In the book too, they
- 1:22:07Speaker 1: explicitly say that she is an immigrant from Egypt.
- 1:22:10Speaker 3: Right, and curious what your thoughts are. But I couldn't
- 1:22:14Speaker 3: help but feel that there are hints of like the
- 1:22:17Speaker 3: magical Negro trope at play here, because she's presented as
- 1:22:22Speaker 3: being this mystic type of person. She places a curse.
- 1:22:26Speaker 6: I agree there's a little magical Negro happening, but I
- 1:22:30Speaker 6: don't mind it. And I don't know if I'm supposed
- 1:22:33Speaker 6: to say that out loud, but I don't because also
- 1:22:37Speaker 6: I feel like it's a lot of the time, like
- 1:22:39Speaker 6: when curses are happening, it's like, oh man, we got
- 1:22:42Speaker 6: cursed for no reason, and nobody at any point is like,
- 1:22:46Speaker 6: oh man, we got cursed for no reason. They're like, my,
- 1:22:48Speaker 6: no good, dirty rotten pigs stealing great great great grandfather.
- 1:22:53Speaker 6: It's like this was a deserved curse. Everybody's mad at
- 1:22:56Speaker 6: the great great grandfather for not doing what he promised
- 1:22:59Speaker 6: he would do. And it's like, you got the help
- 1:23:02Speaker 6: that you want, it you ended up not getting with
- 1:23:04Speaker 6: the girl, and now your butt hurt and you're gonna
- 1:23:05Speaker 6: go on a boat to America. You realize on the
- 1:23:08Speaker 6: boat to America, oh snap, I forgot to take the
- 1:23:10Speaker 6: old lady up the hill and you don't take a
- 1:23:12Speaker 6: boat back.
- 1:23:13Speaker 5: I would have been on the next boat.
- 1:23:14Speaker 1: Back personally, right, I did. Yeah, that is I guess
- 1:23:19Speaker 1: I hadn't registered that that. At very least. The family
- 1:23:23Speaker 1: is not like fuck, Madame Zeroni. They're like, he made
- 1:23:26Speaker 1: a deal and he didn't keep his end of it.
- 1:23:28Speaker 6: Yeah, at no point where they're like, oh, Madam Zaroni
- 1:23:30Speaker 6: was the worst. They're like, yeah, no, that's that's fair.
- 1:23:34Speaker 3: It's like a European white guy neglecting to pay a
- 1:23:39Speaker 3: black woman for services rendered and he gets cursed about it,
- 1:23:44Speaker 3: and it is fully deserved.
- 1:23:46Speaker 6: And I also think that, you know, the the curse
- 1:23:49Speaker 6: being broken because finally the services that were promised were
- 1:23:54Speaker 6: rendered in a way with this new generation, it's it's
- 1:23:58Speaker 6: very much speaking like the promise. I think that with
- 1:24:01Speaker 6: them being explicitly black, even though it's like somewhat ambiguous in.
- 1:24:06Speaker 5: The book, like if if she's Egyptian or if she's Romani.
- 1:24:09Speaker 6: It's very much about like, oh, the promise is that
- 1:24:11Speaker 6: America has made to black people and sort of like
- 1:24:15Speaker 6: how those have been broken and there I think that
- 1:24:19Speaker 6: there is going to be a curse on this country
- 1:24:21Speaker 6: until something happens to make it right. Whether it's reparations,
- 1:24:26Speaker 6: whether it's something else, I don't know, And like I
- 1:24:29Speaker 6: don't even think that I would be entitled to reparations
- 1:24:32Speaker 6: because my parents are immigrants. Like I'm not saying it
- 1:24:34Speaker 6: for personal gain, and I'm saying it for justice reasons,
- 1:24:37Speaker 6: but justice. Like the movie is very clear in teaching
- 1:24:41Speaker 6: kids like hey, if you promise something to somebody and
- 1:24:44Speaker 6: then you don't do it, that's a bad thing. And
- 1:24:47Speaker 6: then later we were all like, yeah, no, it makes
- 1:24:49Speaker 6: sense that they're cursed. And then later it's like, oh,
- 1:24:52Speaker 6: I'm going to make this right. And he didn't make
- 1:24:54Speaker 6: it right to do things better, Like he didn't make
- 1:24:59Speaker 6: it right because he's like, oh, this lift the curse.
- 1:25:01Speaker 6: It was completely selfless. His friend was hurt and he
- 1:25:04Speaker 6: wanted to make him better totally, and like when you
- 1:25:07Speaker 6: do the right thing for the right reason. Good things
- 1:25:10Speaker 6: happen to you in movieland unfortunately not always in real life.
- 1:25:13Speaker 5: But I think that more people tried it, we'd find
- 1:25:17Speaker 5: out in real life.
- 1:25:19Speaker 3: Right yeah, right, So yeah, that's that storyline. And then
- 1:25:22Speaker 3: it also intersects heavily with the Stanley Hector Zerny storyline
- 1:25:28Speaker 3: in the present. And then the third storyline is the
- 1:25:33Speaker 3: Miss Catherine aka kissing Kate Marlowe and Sam in I
- 1:25:39Speaker 3: think it's like turn of the century, like late eighteen hundreds,
- 1:25:42Speaker 3: early nineteen hundreds. Again, it's Jim Crow era Texas. She
- 1:25:48Speaker 3: is a white woman, he is a black man. They
- 1:25:50Speaker 3: fall in love. They kiss during an era when that
- 1:25:54Speaker 3: was illegal in Texas and in many other states in
- 1:25:58Speaker 3: the US. They are seen this racist mob forms. All
- 1:26:03Speaker 3: this violence is inflicted. They murder Sam. The sheriff does
- 1:26:08Speaker 3: nothing to stop them. In all likelihood, the sheriff was
- 1:26:11Speaker 3: a clan member. And then this leads to you know,
- 1:26:15Speaker 3: Catherine ak Kate becoming an outlaw getting revenge. She kills
- 1:26:21Speaker 3: the sheriff. It makes you wonder why she doesn't kill
- 1:26:23Speaker 3: trout Walker also, but I guess it's because the story
- 1:26:27Speaker 3: needs him to live long enough to produce offspring, so
- 1:26:29Speaker 3: that the warden can be a character since trout Walker's
- 1:26:34Speaker 3: her grandfather.
- 1:26:36Speaker 6: Right. Also, I think that there's sometimes there's power in
- 1:26:40Speaker 6: letting someone suffer.
- 1:26:42Speaker 3: Oh true, because he by the end of his life
- 1:26:44Speaker 3: he is miserable.
- 1:26:45Speaker 5: Yeah, he's obsessed.
- 1:26:46Speaker 6: He's a man completely possessed by the idea of finding
- 1:26:50Speaker 6: this treasure where he's torturing his granddaughter, right, so built
- 1:26:54Speaker 6: to dig these holes and she's you know the TikTok
- 1:26:57Speaker 6: sounds that has spawned a million video.
- 1:27:00Speaker 5: I'm tired of this grandpa it is.
- 1:27:06Speaker 1: I thought that, like that was an interesting Again, like
- 1:27:11Speaker 1: this movie is good at like providing context for the
- 1:27:14Speaker 1: villains without overly empathizing with them, because what she does
- 1:27:20Speaker 1: to deal with the uh trauma of the holes is
- 1:27:24Speaker 1: that she becomes like a prison warden and opens a
- 1:27:28Speaker 1: prison and outsources the labor to disenfranchised children. So it's
- 1:27:33Speaker 1: not like it's an excuse for anything that she's doing.
- 1:27:36Speaker 1: But I like little beats like that, I feel like
- 1:27:39Speaker 1: are sort of what elevates this movie a lot if
- 1:27:42Speaker 1: because I think that's like helpful for kids to have
- 1:27:44Speaker 1: context but not excuses for how you know, oppressors become
- 1:27:49Speaker 1: oppressors when it speaks.
- 1:27:50Speaker 6: To the way that white women will pass on the
- 1:27:53Speaker 6: violence enacted upon them by white men to black people,
- 1:27:58Speaker 6: because you know, not everybody is black in the camp,
- 1:28:01Speaker 6: but they do make it a point to have if
- 1:28:03Speaker 6: you're a number of black kids, because that is unfortunately
- 1:28:06Speaker 6: who is getting these harsher punishments. And even if you
- 1:28:09Speaker 6: think about Hector and Stanley, Stanley is getting this punishment
- 1:28:14Speaker 6: because he stole from allegedly stole shoes from a homeless
- 1:28:18Speaker 6: shelter and they were like this famous guy's shoes, and
- 1:28:21Speaker 6: this crime was like more egregious in that way. Hector
- 1:28:25Speaker 6: got nabbed for stealing shoes from Paylass.
- 1:28:27Speaker 3: Right, shoes that probably cost twenty dollars kind of thing,
- 1:28:30Speaker 3: not even.
- 1:28:31Speaker 5: In three pay less shoes fifteen at most.
- 1:28:35Speaker 2: Right right?
- 1:28:36Speaker 1: I miss pay Less every day rip rip to a
- 1:28:40Speaker 1: real story.
- 1:28:41Speaker 6: The payless where I used to buy my Easter shoes
- 1:28:43Speaker 6: is now an axe throwing place.
- 1:28:45Speaker 1: Oh my god. So it's like gentrification on gentrification. I
- 1:28:50Speaker 1: thought it was interesting that Pala's got shouted out by name.
- 1:28:53Speaker 1: I'm like, did they pay for that?
- 1:28:54Speaker 5: I don't know, they shoes worth stealing? Paylas there is.
- 1:29:00Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I'm curious what you both think
- 1:29:02Speaker 1: of this, Like Camp Greenlake is a diverse but I
- 1:29:06Speaker 1: would say mostly non white body of people, which I
- 1:29:09Speaker 1: think makes a lot of sense if you look at
- 1:29:12Speaker 1: prisons unfortunately, especially the school to prison and Pipeline. I
- 1:29:17Speaker 1: do feel like, while I do love Stanley Yelnatz, centering
- 1:29:22Speaker 1: this story on a white character does not to say
- 1:29:27Speaker 1: that this does not happen to white kids, but it
- 1:29:29Speaker 1: happens disproportionately less. And so while I think you can
- 1:29:35Speaker 1: make the argument that Zero is a dual protagonist by
- 1:29:39Speaker 1: the end of the movie, but he's not at the beginning,
- 1:29:42Speaker 1: and so I don't know. I don't know, it's a pick.
- 1:29:46Speaker 1: And then there's all of these kids that you get
- 1:29:49Speaker 1: a little bit of their story. I don't know. I
- 1:29:52Speaker 1: think you get a little more in the book, which
- 1:29:53Speaker 1: is kind of to be expected, but you get like
- 1:29:57Speaker 1: you don't really know why most of the kids have
- 1:29:59Speaker 1: been put there. It was a really They do add
- 1:30:02Speaker 1: that Magnet is there because he was trying to literally
- 1:30:05Speaker 1: free a dog from a breeder, which is great practice.
- 1:30:10Speaker 1: Shout out Magnet, and that there is I think it's
- 1:30:13Speaker 1: zig Zag maybe is there because he has mental health
- 1:30:17Speaker 1: issues that are not being treated, and which is you know,
- 1:30:20Speaker 1: another thing you see all the time is someone with
- 1:30:23Speaker 1: a mental health crisis being sent to prison instead of
- 1:30:26Speaker 1: being given help. And so like you are given. I
- 1:30:30Speaker 1: think kind of a sampler platter for lack of a
- 1:30:35Speaker 1: better descriptor. But I do wish that we got a
- 1:30:38Speaker 1: little more than one line for a lot of characters,
- 1:30:42Speaker 1: because I don't know. I mean, do we know why
- 1:30:44Speaker 1: Armpit is there? Do we know? I experalized there? Like
- 1:30:46Speaker 1: we get, some characters get the context. Authors don't.
- 1:30:51Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think we know.
- 1:30:52Speaker 3: This doesn't provide any more context in that regard, but
- 1:30:55Speaker 3: I will share a quick paragraph from the book. Quote
- 1:31:01Speaker 3: Stanley was thankful that there were no racial problems. X Ray,
- 1:31:07Speaker 3: Armpit and Zero were black, he Squid and Zigzag were white.
- 1:31:12Speaker 3: Magnet was hispanic. On the lake, they were all the
- 1:31:16Speaker 3: same reddish brown color, the color of dirt. Unquote. So
- 1:31:21Speaker 3: that's pretty much the only thing the book has to
- 1:31:24Speaker 3: say about any racial or racialized dynamics.
- 1:31:29Speaker 1: In that timeline, at least because.
- 1:31:32Speaker 3: Yea, and I couldn't help think about another movie as
- 1:31:38Speaker 3: I was rewatching holes, which is the movie Nickel Boys
- 1:31:42Speaker 3: that I saw recently, so as far as a book
- 1:31:46Speaker 3: slash movie about young men or teen boys being incarcerated
- 1:31:51Speaker 3: and sent to a work camp. There is a version
- 1:31:56Speaker 3: of this story that is written and made by white people,
- 1:32:01Speaker 3: a la Holes. And then compare that to a version
- 1:32:05Speaker 3: of this story that was written by black people, a
- 1:32:08Speaker 3: la Nickel Boys, which is a novel from twenty nineteen
- 1:32:13Speaker 3: by Coulson Whitehead adapted to a twenty twenty four film
- 1:32:16Speaker 3: written and directed by Ramel Ross. Very different movies obviously,
- 1:32:21Speaker 3: Where Nickel Boys. I don't know if either of you
- 1:32:23Speaker 3: have seen it, but yeah, Nickel Boys is totally much heavier.
- 1:32:29Speaker 3: It does a lot more to shed light on the
- 1:32:32Speaker 3: horrors of the racism, exploitation, violence, abuse present in a
- 1:32:40Speaker 3: detention facility like this versus Holes, which acknowledges these things
- 1:32:46Speaker 3: to some degree, but it's center's whiteness. It's framed more
- 1:32:50Speaker 3: as this like almost a fun adventure, folk tale type
- 1:32:55Speaker 3: of story that is largely about a white boy, kind
- 1:33:01Speaker 3: of like his redemption arc of like, oh I have
- 1:33:04Speaker 3: to carry as a rony up a mountain kind of thing.
- 1:33:07Speaker 3: So I just think it's interesting to kind of note
- 1:33:09Speaker 3: the differences between two similar premises written by two very
- 1:33:15Speaker 3: different perspectives, and how they kind of manifest at different times.
- 1:33:19Speaker 5: To sure for sure, Yeah, I think that sometimes the
- 1:33:23Speaker 5: messenger matters as much as the message.
- 1:33:26Speaker 6: And I do think that in two thousand and three,
- 1:33:30Speaker 6: for a kids movie to send this message, I think
- 1:33:34Speaker 6: you need to see this happen to a white kid
- 1:33:37Speaker 6: who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,
- 1:33:40Speaker 6: because when black kids are in the wrong place at
- 1:33:42Speaker 6: the wrong time, people are like, well, what were they
- 1:33:44Speaker 6: doing there, Why weren't they there at the right time,
- 1:33:47Speaker 6: Why weren't they in a different place?
- 1:33:49Speaker 5: And I think.
- 1:33:51Speaker 6: That it's kind of similar for me to my favorite
- 1:33:56Speaker 6: movie about racism, Pleasantville. Yeah, it is a movie about
- 1:34:01Speaker 6: racism with not nary a single person.
- 1:34:05Speaker 1: Yes, however, wild that they.
- 1:34:08Speaker 5: Did that, but like wild that they did it and
- 1:34:10Speaker 5: did it well.
- 1:34:11Speaker 3: I think one of my favorite movies.
- 1:34:13Speaker 1: It's a great movie.
- 1:34:13Speaker 6: It's a really good movie. And I think that there
- 1:34:16Speaker 6: are people who would not have gotten the message if
- 1:34:22Speaker 6: it were a straight and maybe wouldn't even have watched
- 1:34:24Speaker 6: the movie if it were straight up, Like, hey, this
- 1:34:28Speaker 6: is about segregation in the nineteen fifties, which is what
- 1:34:32Speaker 6: it is.
- 1:34:33Speaker 5: It is a movie about segregation in the nineteen fifties,
- 1:34:35Speaker 5: but the colored people are literally in technicolor. Yeah, and
- 1:34:42Speaker 5: I love that, and.
- 1:34:43Speaker 6: I love that that was an idea that somebody had,
- 1:34:45Speaker 6: And it's like, sometimes, what if this happened to white people?
- 1:34:49Speaker 6: Is the way to get the message to people that
- 1:34:52Speaker 6: are like, hey, wait a minute, And it's like the
- 1:34:54Speaker 6: last few lines of that poem, that's like, oh, and
- 1:34:57Speaker 6: then they came for me and there's nobody to stand
- 1:35:00Speaker 6: up for me, And it's like, what if this were
- 1:35:01Speaker 6: to happen to you?
- 1:35:02Speaker 5: You need to think about if this happens to you.
- 1:35:04Speaker 6: Not to say that all of the audiences are white,
- 1:35:07Speaker 6: but in filmmaking, for better or for worse, white is
- 1:35:11Speaker 6: seen as the default and you can put any experience
- 1:35:14Speaker 6: on top of it. And I do think also there
- 1:35:18Speaker 6: are things that are true about this story. I do
- 1:35:21Speaker 6: think that even with the expensive lawyer, if it were Hector,
- 1:35:25Speaker 6: or if it were another black kid, it would have
- 1:35:27Speaker 6: taken longer than literally a day after hiring a lawyer
- 1:35:31Speaker 6: to get.
- 1:35:31Speaker 5: Him out of there.
- 1:35:32Speaker 3: Definitely, no matter.
- 1:35:33Speaker 6: How hard that lawyer was working, I feel like the
- 1:35:35Speaker 6: judge would be like, no, I'm not overturning this. I
- 1:35:38Speaker 6: don't care, he's already there. The holes are good for
- 1:35:41Speaker 6: character whatever, do you know what I mean? Because like,
- 1:35:44Speaker 6: while I was watching, when they said this into eighteen months,
- 1:35:47Speaker 6: I was like, that is six times as long as.
- 1:35:50Speaker 5: Rock Turner got ah.
- 1:35:52Speaker 1: Yep, Well, when you put it that way, it.
- 1:35:56Speaker 6: Was an unreasonably long sentence, and I don't even know
- 1:35:59Speaker 6: how long those other kids.
- 1:36:00Speaker 5: Are sentenced to.
- 1:36:01Speaker 1: I was gonna say, I would be really curious what
- 1:36:04Speaker 1: the other sentences looked like, because it didn't seem like
- 1:36:06Speaker 1: that was a default sentence by any means.
- 1:36:10Speaker 5: Right, and like x Ray had already been there for
- 1:36:12Speaker 5: six months.
- 1:36:12Speaker 6: Also, x Ray's nickname is my favorite because it's because
- 1:36:15Speaker 6: he's got the big glasses, but also his name.
- 1:36:17Speaker 5: Is Rex and like genius.
- 1:36:22Speaker 1: Yeah, that is like peak kid brilliance. Yeah, I that's
- 1:36:28Speaker 1: that's a good point, especially where like you're saying, in
- 1:36:32Speaker 1: children's media often still, but like especially in the two thousands,
- 1:36:36Speaker 1: you know, you're taking the like default protagonist for for
- 1:36:42Speaker 1: a movie like this and making the worst possible thing
- 1:36:45Speaker 1: happen and demonstrating that it was through no fault of
- 1:36:48Speaker 1: his own. And then it's sort of I don't think
- 1:36:50Speaker 1: this is like intentionally done. I would guess more that
- 1:36:53Speaker 1: this is just a Lewis Karr self insert to begin. Yeah,
- 1:36:56Speaker 1: I'm not totally sure, but you know the director and
- 1:36:59Speaker 1: the writer if if you don't know, they're both white.
- 1:37:03Speaker 1: But yeah, that it's almost like by seeing that happen
- 1:37:06Speaker 1: to Shilah buff it creates this runway to understand that
- 1:37:11Speaker 1: this is happening to every single kid in this place,
- 1:37:14Speaker 1: and I think, like what you lose there? That I
- 1:37:17Speaker 1: don't want to come down too hard in this movie
- 1:37:18Speaker 1: because it's doing so much I have literally never seen
- 1:37:21Speaker 1: in kids movies. True, but that it doesn't bring up
- 1:37:25Speaker 1: the fact that the black kids at this camp would
- 1:37:29Speaker 1: have a far worse time, and that I guess the
- 1:37:32Speaker 1: closest you get to understanding that is through Zero. But Zero,
- 1:37:37Speaker 1: I mean has compounded issues. I think that the movie
- 1:37:41Speaker 1: sort of makes it out to be more that he's
- 1:37:44Speaker 1: unhoused an award of the state and therefore they don't
- 1:37:47Speaker 1: have to care about him and they don't really touch race,
- 1:37:52Speaker 1: which is bizarre because this movie is willing to discuss racism.
- 1:37:56Speaker 1: That's literally the whole Sam and Kate story. But I
- 1:38:00Speaker 1: think it's.
- 1:38:01Speaker 6: Very much a Colorblind two thousand. It's like, Wow, racism used.
- 1:38:04Speaker 5: To be so bad.
- 1:38:06Speaker 1: Now any kid can go to jail.
- 1:38:10Speaker 6: I will say, just because we talked about kissing Cape
- 1:38:13Speaker 6: Barlowe and Sam, I'm really glad that they didn't hang him.
- 1:38:16Speaker 6: I know that they said they were going to hang him,
- 1:38:18Speaker 6: which would have been I think more historically accurate, but
- 1:38:20Speaker 6: I was so glad that they did not show him
- 1:38:22Speaker 6: getting hanged, and that it.
- 1:38:23Speaker 1: Was shown too, like, yeah, yeah, I think that that
- 1:38:26Speaker 1: was handled very gracefully.
- 1:38:28Speaker 6: And I think that not just for the kids, for
- 1:38:31Speaker 6: me and my little heart, I couldn't have handled it.
- 1:38:34Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 1:38:35Speaker 6: And then the other thing I was gonna say was
- 1:38:37Speaker 6: we were just talking about like the kids at the
- 1:38:39Speaker 6: camp and at the beginning, at the very beginning of
- 1:38:42Speaker 6: the cold Open, when barf Bag sacrifices himself to the snake,
- 1:38:48Speaker 6: they are singing dig It at the beginning, and it
- 1:38:51Speaker 6: feels like the song sixteen Tons to me, like there
- 1:38:53Speaker 6: was a very similar vibe and it was sort of like,
- 1:38:58Speaker 6: you know, same deal as like working and you're never
- 1:39:01Speaker 6: going to get out of it, but they're also joking
- 1:39:04Speaker 6: around and like the background music is digg it. The
- 1:39:08Speaker 6: kids are not singing diggt in universe, and the kids
- 1:39:11Speaker 6: are joking around, and it really gives us a sense
- 1:39:13Speaker 6: that they are kids, and every point it shows them
- 1:39:17Speaker 6: being kids and it's not like this sort of hardened
- 1:39:20Speaker 6: criminal thing. Like the only kid that you really get
- 1:39:23Speaker 6: that sense from is the kid who's like watching TV
- 1:39:27Speaker 6: in the like mess hall or wherever, who gets into
- 1:39:30Speaker 6: a fight.
- 1:39:30Speaker 5: Yeah, and even with that, he's like a slightly older kid.
- 1:39:33Speaker 1: It's he's visibly a little bit older and God only
- 1:39:36Speaker 1: does how long he's been there too that part.
- 1:39:39Speaker 6: But yeah, I think that there's a norm of adultifying,
- 1:39:41Speaker 6: particularly incarcerated kids and especially black kids, where it's like, oh,
- 1:39:47Speaker 6: they're not normal kids, they're criminals. And like some of
- 1:39:50Speaker 6: the kids did do things that are crimes. Like I
- 1:39:53Speaker 6: mean technically, you know, Magnet did a crime, although innocent.
- 1:39:58Speaker 5: Let them go right, h M.
- 1:40:01Speaker 3: The puppy, he.
- 1:40:01Speaker 1: Literally saved a puppy from a horrific practice, like come.
- 1:40:06Speaker 5: On, and like Twitch stole a car, but he's a
- 1:40:09Speaker 5: little boy.
- 1:40:10Speaker 6: Yeah, he's like I just want to go zoom and
- 1:40:13Speaker 6: it's like, okay, well maybe we should take this kid
- 1:40:15Speaker 6: go cart.
- 1:40:18Speaker 1: There's so many like ethical solution, I mean, which is
- 1:40:21Speaker 1: the story of incarceration. But it's just it's so and
- 1:40:24Speaker 1: I love I do. I this was the first time
- 1:40:27Speaker 1: I watching the movie that I really was like, I
- 1:40:30Speaker 1: guess paying closer attention to Pendance Key specifically. I think
- 1:40:35Speaker 1: it's like such a well written character where he is
- 1:40:39Speaker 1: being presented as the nice guy, but over the course
- 1:40:43Speaker 1: of the movie is so clear that he's not the
- 1:40:46Speaker 1: nice guy. He is the he like tortures zero because
- 1:40:49Speaker 1: he doesn't think that he will get in trouble for
- 1:40:52Speaker 1: not being kind to him, and he's right, and the
- 1:40:55Speaker 1: whole you know government name thing he like explicitly ties
- 1:40:59Speaker 1: your government to your like that's the name you will
- 1:41:03Speaker 1: contribute to society under. So that's your name, and saying
- 1:41:07Speaker 1: when he's when they're doing like group or whatever. And
- 1:41:10Speaker 1: that's where we find out about Magnet and his puppy
- 1:41:15Speaker 1: is that you know, he is repeating these I think
- 1:41:19Speaker 1: very like it's giving DNC to me, Like he is
- 1:41:24Speaker 1: he is saying, like, no, what you did was a crime.
- 1:41:27Speaker 1: It's against the law, and therefore it's bad. And it's
- 1:41:30Speaker 1: just like, you know, the place he works for doesn't
- 1:41:34Speaker 1: work if you challenge an institution, and so he while
- 1:41:38Speaker 1: he is like I think that, like mister sir calls
- 1:41:41Speaker 1: it like that, like touchy feely, fuzzy stuff, blah blah blah. Yeah,
- 1:41:44Speaker 1: but all Pendansky does is pretend to care. Like we
- 1:41:49Speaker 1: don't see him ever defend any of the kids. We
- 1:41:52Speaker 1: don't see him protect them, Like he folds the second
- 1:41:56Speaker 1: that someone with more power than him asks him to
- 1:41:59Speaker 1: do something.
- 1:42:00Speaker 3: He's a coward.
- 1:42:02Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 1:42:02Speaker 6: And also just his response when like everybody's like, don't
- 1:42:07Speaker 6: teach Hector to read, which is wild, that's that arc
- 1:42:13Speaker 6: I was like, whoa, hold on, hold on, why don't
- 1:42:15Speaker 6: we want Hector to read?
- 1:42:17Speaker 5: Like I get why you don't want him to dig
- 1:42:19Speaker 5: the hole?
- 1:42:20Speaker 1: But it's another great like it's so good. There's a
- 1:42:25Speaker 1: really good video essay that I was rewatching by I
- 1:42:30Speaker 1: believe Yaharazade or I hope I'm saying her name right,
- 1:42:34Speaker 1: Yaharazide called holes in the prison industrial complex and she
- 1:42:37Speaker 1: like ties that explicitly to like, the kids aren't doing
- 1:42:41Speaker 1: anything wrong. They're being told that they are going to
- 1:42:43Speaker 1: improve themselves, so why would you get in trouble for
- 1:42:47Speaker 1: literally reading? But again, it's like the institution is based
- 1:42:50Speaker 1: on barring Zero from the education he deserves because then
- 1:42:55Speaker 1: it's easier to exploit him. And like, just right darkest.
- 1:43:00Speaker 6: About the theme of literacy is that they keep the
- 1:43:04Speaker 6: shovels in uh ad, that says live library.
- 1:43:08Speaker 1: I thought it was a good touch.
- 1:43:09Speaker 6: Yeah, I had to pause it, but I was like,
- 1:43:13Speaker 6: oh no, I didn't notice that before.
- 1:43:15Speaker 5: That's very upset.
- 1:43:17Speaker 1: Yeah, there, And also that the oppressors of this movie.
- 1:43:22Speaker 1: It is kind of a funny, like woman can do
- 1:43:25Speaker 1: it too, and you're like, it's true, but it's you know,
- 1:43:29Speaker 1: the people at the top of this operation are white,
- 1:43:32Speaker 1: and they're all sort of representing different kinds of oppression,
- 1:43:37Speaker 1: where like mister Zur and Panansky are equally bad, but
- 1:43:41Speaker 1: they are presenting a different approach to being pro incarceration.
- 1:43:46Speaker 1: Like I it's just it's so well written. And then
- 1:43:50Speaker 1: the snake nail Polish, I mean, hello.
- 1:43:55Speaker 5: Love the snake nail Poli.
- 1:43:56Speaker 6: I love the idea of like the women in this
- 1:43:59Speaker 6: story having these weapons like kissing.
- 1:44:02Speaker 5: Kate Barlowe is.
- 1:44:02Speaker 6: Known, Yes, she shoots people, but then she kisses them
- 1:44:05Speaker 6: and that's what she's known for. Is this red lipstick
- 1:44:08Speaker 6: mark that she leaves behind is her sort of like signature,
- 1:44:12Speaker 6: and then the warden has her nail polish that she
- 1:44:16Speaker 6: then uses to like put these men in line. And
- 1:44:19Speaker 6: this idea and like poison being traditionally a preferred method
- 1:44:23Speaker 6: of like violence for women.
- 1:44:26Speaker 5: I thought that was really interesting. And you know, there
- 1:44:29Speaker 5: are a lot of women in here, but they make
- 1:44:32Speaker 5: it count. Wh Yeah, when they're hurting people, they make
- 1:44:35Speaker 5: it count.
- 1:44:36Speaker 3: And I don't even mind that they're not the many
- 1:44:39Speaker 3: women in this movie.
- 1:44:41Speaker 1: Well, I mean it's about especially because it's about like
- 1:44:44Speaker 1: a gendered incarcerated like it makes sense. I do think that,
- 1:44:48Speaker 1: you know, it is good. I guess we got Orange
- 1:44:51Speaker 1: just the new Black. You know, it's there was media
- 1:44:54Speaker 1: down the line about incarcerated women, which is equally important
- 1:44:57Speaker 1: to talk about.
- 1:44:58Speaker 3: And maybe more with this Disney Plus reboot, which I
- 1:45:03Speaker 3: wrote down the.
- 1:45:03Speaker 1: Joke I'm calling it it's not happening.
- 1:45:05Speaker 3: Well, if it does, they should call it Girl is
- 1:45:08Speaker 3: the New Boy. And that's the amazing joke I wrote down.
- 1:45:13Speaker 1: Really good.
- 1:45:13Speaker 6: I hope that it gets green lit and that they
- 1:45:16Speaker 6: hire me, and then I want to write the episode
- 1:45:18Speaker 6: about when one of the girls gets her first period
- 1:45:20Speaker 6: in the middle of digging her hole, and everybody else
- 1:45:23Speaker 6: has to help her finish digging her hole because she
- 1:45:25Speaker 6: has cramps.
- 1:45:26Speaker 5: And that's womanhood and that's solidarity.
- 1:45:29Speaker 1: Hire me, that is Disney solidarity. Yeah, as long as
- 1:45:35Speaker 1: they bring back Sigourney Weaver, because that, I mean that
- 1:45:38Speaker 1: character would get out of jail. It lickety split, I guess.
- 1:45:42Speaker 1: The other just contrasting the yeah, because you really only
- 1:45:45Speaker 1: get like one woman in each timeline, because you have
- 1:45:48Speaker 1: Madam Zeroni in one timeline kissing Kate Barlowe in another timeline,
- 1:45:52Speaker 1: and Sigourney Weaver, I mean, Stanley Yale's mom is barely
- 1:45:56Speaker 1: in it.
- 1:45:57Speaker 3: Like I do.
- 1:45:59Speaker 1: Like that they go out of their way to show
- 1:46:01Speaker 1: again that like all of these kids we are led
- 1:46:04Speaker 1: to believe are from poor backgrounds to different degrees, but
- 1:46:08Speaker 1: like it, Stanley is from a family that's just scraping by.
- 1:46:12Speaker 1: They're almost getting evicted, and you still see that there
- 1:46:16Speaker 1: is like he is emotionally cared for and loved, which
- 1:46:20Speaker 1: I think often you know, like poor parents are made
- 1:46:22Speaker 1: out to be negligent. I think you can say, although
- 1:46:25Speaker 1: we don't get to know Zero's mom at all, I
- 1:46:29Speaker 1: did appreciate that again, like an unhoused character literally, the
- 1:46:34Speaker 1: two unhoused characters you get in children's media if you
- 1:46:38Speaker 1: were a kid at this time are Zero and Aladdin,
- 1:46:42Speaker 1: and they are They're both characters who when they take
- 1:46:46Speaker 1: we know why they're doing it, is like because they
- 1:46:49Speaker 1: need to survive, and the movies, their respective movies don't
- 1:46:52Speaker 1: pass judgment on them for doing that. And I appreciated that.
- 1:46:56Speaker 1: I wish we could have known her more, but that
- 1:47:00Speaker 1: the movie takes care to say that Zero's mom wasn't negligent.
- 1:47:05Speaker 1: It was all of these systemic issues that separated them
- 1:47:09Speaker 1: from each other. And again that's just like I wish
- 1:47:12Speaker 1: that that had almost been emphasized more by letting us
- 1:47:14Speaker 1: get to know her, because you know, like unhouse characters
- 1:47:18Speaker 1: are so rare outside of punchlines and getting the full
- 1:47:24Speaker 1: context for And also that like Zero took the shoes
- 1:47:27Speaker 1: because he was living at the shelter, and you know,
- 1:47:31Speaker 1: I don't know, I just I kind of forgot about
- 1:47:34Speaker 1: that portion of his character, and I really thought it
- 1:47:39Speaker 1: was handled quite well.
- 1:47:41Speaker 6: Also, he probably wouldn't have taken the shoes if he
- 1:47:44Speaker 6: could have read so rightly, because he said that he
- 1:47:48Speaker 6: did not know that they were Sweetfeet's shoes he just
- 1:47:53Speaker 6: liked them and he took them. And I think that
- 1:47:55Speaker 6: the you know, the weight of taking those shoes would
- 1:47:57Speaker 6: have been different. Could he have read like the little
- 1:47:59Speaker 6: thing that said, oh sweet feet whatever.
- 1:48:01Speaker 1: His name is, shoes because he just needed shoes. Yeah,
- 1:48:04Speaker 1: like you're saying like he got arrested for taking from
- 1:48:07Speaker 1: a paylist. Like the kid just needed shoes and he
- 1:48:09Speaker 1: wasn't being provided for. I just ah, I love Zero's character.
- 1:48:15Speaker 6: And the shoes were donated to the shelter, so he
- 1:48:18Speaker 6: was living at the shelter, those shoes were in.
- 1:48:20Speaker 3: His mind for him, right, Yeah, totally. I also think
- 1:48:23Speaker 3: it's interesting that there is acknowledgment that even though Stanley's
- 1:48:28Speaker 3: family is poor, they are still more socioeconomically privileged over
- 1:48:35Speaker 3: Zero and his family, because there's that moment that Zero's describing,
- 1:48:39Speaker 3: Oh yeah, my mom would sometimes have to like leave
- 1:48:41Speaker 3: me at a park, you know, I would go to
- 1:48:43Speaker 3: Laney Park, and Stanley's like, oh yeah, I used to
- 1:48:46Speaker 3: go there all the time parentheses for fun with my family,
- 1:48:50Speaker 3: and Zero says, yeah, I used to sleep, you know,
- 1:48:53Speaker 3: in the tube under the swinging bridge or something. And
- 1:48:56Speaker 3: you see the look on Stanley's face is like whoa
- 1:48:59Speaker 3: like his privilege is checked. And yeah, I just appreciate
- 1:49:04Speaker 3: that the movie acknowledges that class difference. And I also
- 1:49:08Speaker 3: think it's really effective in the Pananski character finding Zero
- 1:49:13Speaker 3: so worthless. Part of the reason he has it out
- 1:49:16Speaker 3: for him is that Zero can't read, and Pandanski treats
- 1:49:21Speaker 3: that as as though it's a personal failure of Zero's.
- 1:49:24Speaker 3: Oh he if he can't read, he must not be smart.
- 1:49:27Speaker 1: But it's so clearly is because he can't. And it's
- 1:49:31Speaker 1: like Pandanski acts as if because Zero can't read, he
- 1:49:34Speaker 1: also cannot hear, like it is just like it is
- 1:49:38Speaker 1: so oh, he's like to me, to me on this
- 1:49:41Speaker 1: viewing the most evil character in the movie, because he's
- 1:49:44Speaker 1: a fucking coward, like he does think he's a good person.
- 1:49:48Speaker 1: I very least don't think mister sirr or Sigourney Weaver
- 1:49:53Speaker 1: are like I'm an amazing They're like, yeah, I'm a
- 1:49:54Speaker 1: piece of shit and I and I don't care if
- 1:49:57Speaker 1: children die. I think Pandanski goes home at the end
- 1:49:59Speaker 1: of the night is like I'm doing right by these boys,
- 1:50:02Speaker 1: and there I'm better and there's I mean, I feel
- 1:50:06Speaker 1: like every kid encountered a teacher like that who is
- 1:50:11Speaker 1: like cruel to and not no disrespect to the teachers,
- 1:50:16Speaker 1: Like but but I mean, I clearly remember the art
- 1:50:21Speaker 1: teacher at my elementary school who would pick on kids
- 1:50:23Speaker 1: and say it was like for their own good and
- 1:50:25Speaker 1: clearly had no issue with I'm like the art teacher.
- 1:50:29Speaker 6: Come on, Teaching is a tough job, and I'm so
- 1:50:33Speaker 6: glad that there are people who are committed to doing
- 1:50:35Speaker 6: it and doing it well.
- 1:50:36Speaker 5: Few are and.
- 1:50:36Speaker 6: Fewer people because administrators at schools are making it so
- 1:50:39Speaker 6: much more difficult, and then the turnover is getting outrageous.
- 1:50:44Speaker 6: But there's always one teacher who is like, I just
- 1:50:49Speaker 6: want to be able to have beef with children, and.
- 1:50:52Speaker 1: You're like what, And so often I feel like they're
- 1:50:54Speaker 1: in administrative positions. Now I'm just projecting my mom's entire career,
- 1:50:58Speaker 1: but like like it's yeah, I don't know, Pandanzky piece
- 1:51:03Speaker 1: of shit. And then I do like that they add
- 1:51:05Speaker 1: the bit at the end of like he doesn't even
- 1:51:07Speaker 1: have a degree, because what, like what teacher would agree
- 1:51:11Speaker 1: to work there that isn't fraudulent?
- 1:51:15Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So a lot of that I found to
- 1:51:18Speaker 3: be very effective in the movie. There is a joke
- 1:51:23Speaker 3: that rubbed me the wrong way. At the very end
- 1:51:26Speaker 3: where whatever officials show up with Stanley's lawyer, I don't
- 1:51:31Speaker 3: know if it's like DA's or something, but it's like
- 1:51:36Speaker 3: people with some kind of authority, and one of them
- 1:51:40Speaker 3: recognizes mister Sirrh and mister Surr gets arrested because he's
- 1:51:43Speaker 3: in violation of his parole and there is a reveal
- 1:51:47Speaker 3: of his real name, mister Surr's real name, which is
- 1:51:51Speaker 3: marian Sevillo, and the boys are like, marian, I didn't
- 1:51:55Speaker 3: know that was a man's name, and he's like, it
- 1:51:58Speaker 3: isn't and it's meant to like escalate him and be
- 1:52:01Speaker 3: one more layer of humiliation for him because he has
- 1:52:05Speaker 3: a quote unquote woman's name, And it just felt like
- 1:52:08Speaker 3: a cheap joke that was below the movie in general,
- 1:52:13Speaker 3: I think.
- 1:52:13Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, I didn't love it.
- 1:52:16Speaker 5: And it's like it's genuinely not funny.
- 1:52:19Speaker 1: No, no, yes, not for nothing.
- 1:52:21Speaker 6: I'll admit when a joke is like, oh this is problematic,
- 1:52:24Speaker 6: but also I giggle a little despite myself, But like
- 1:52:28Speaker 6: the Merry joke is not even there's nothing funny about it.
- 1:52:31Speaker 6: It's not even like a silly sounding name. It's a
- 1:52:33Speaker 6: very normal sounding name that is just oh, girls have it.
- 1:52:37Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just a yeah as a Jamie. He's fine, fine, right,
- 1:52:44Speaker 1: it's actually it's great having a gender fluid name. It's fun. Yeah,
- 1:52:48Speaker 1: that was not great, but I think, you know, a
- 1:52:51Speaker 1: comparatively small.
- 1:52:53Speaker 3: Totally yeah, one of the few blemishes on an otherwise
- 1:52:56Speaker 3: perfect movie.
- 1:52:57Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's everything I had.
- 1:53:02Speaker 6: I wanted to say something about the music. Obviously we've
- 1:53:05Speaker 6: talked about dig it. There is a lullaby. We didn't
- 1:53:08Speaker 6: really talk about the lullaby very much. That when Elia
- 1:53:12Speaker 6: was taking the pig up the mountain, he had to
- 1:53:15Speaker 6: sing to the pig, and it was like if only,
- 1:53:19Speaker 6: if only at the woodpecker's size, the bark on the
- 1:53:21Speaker 6: trees were as soft as the sguise.
- 1:53:23Speaker 5: There's something about wolves. I don't remember the rest of it.
- 1:53:27Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know he's supposed to sing it when
- 1:53:31Speaker 3: he takes Madame Seroni up, which, as we all know,
- 1:53:35Speaker 3: drop the ball on that.
- 1:53:37Speaker 5: Should it turned around taken the next boat. I stand
- 1:53:39Speaker 5: by that.
- 1:53:40Speaker 6: And then I think that it's really sweet that Stanley
- 1:53:44Speaker 6: does sing this song when they get to God's Thumb
- 1:53:48Speaker 6: and when Hector is drinking the water and it makes
- 1:53:52Speaker 6: him strong, and that's kind of like the last piece
- 1:53:55Speaker 6: of sort of breaking the curse.
- 1:53:58Speaker 5: And the other thing is.
- 1:54:00Speaker 6: They did a like studio song version of that song
- 1:54:05Speaker 6: in the end credits, if you stay till the very
- 1:54:09Speaker 6: end of the credits there they do that song as
- 1:54:11Speaker 6: the last one, and then there's a scene of Zero
- 1:54:15Speaker 6: saying like Madam Zeroni's line that if you forget to
- 1:54:19Speaker 6: come for Madame Zeroni, your family will be cursed forever
- 1:54:23Speaker 6: and all it.
- 1:54:25Speaker 4: Yeah, however, the kid's voice, so he does a line
- 1:54:29Speaker 4: reading of that, and it's very cute, but the song
- 1:54:32Speaker 4: actually kind of slaps and it's giving, like very early
- 1:54:35Speaker 4: two thousand's, late nineties.
- 1:54:37Speaker 6: Like soft rock, sort of like a Matchbox twenty Moby.
- 1:54:41Speaker 2: There's a Moby.
- 1:54:42Speaker 1: Song in it. I did not know that that's of
- 1:54:45Speaker 1: the time there is bravely a Moby's song.
- 1:54:49Speaker 6: But so I looked at I rewound the video and
- 1:54:52Speaker 6: I looked at who because I always like reading the
- 1:54:55Speaker 6: little music things and I wasn't paying attention, and I
- 1:54:57Speaker 6: saw that it was by somebody called like fiction Plane
- 1:55:01Speaker 6: or something like that, and hold, then I wrote it down.
- 1:55:04Speaker 6: I don't know why I'm pretending that I can't read.
- 1:55:07Speaker 6: Uh yeah, fiction Plane. They sang the song if Only,
- 1:55:12Speaker 6: and the lead singer of fiction Plane is a man
- 1:55:16Speaker 6: named Joe Sumner, who is Sting's son.
- 1:55:21Speaker 1: No way, yeah wow. And Sting was in the Disney
- 1:55:26Speaker 1: Expanded Universe because of Emperor's New Groove. I wonder if
- 1:55:31Speaker 1: he pulled some strings there, if he pulled some stings
- 1:55:35Speaker 1: Sting some stings there, if anyone ever, I think it's
- 1:55:40Speaker 1: it's It is occasionally re uploaded to YouTube. There is like,
- 1:55:44Speaker 1: I don't know why I find it so compelling. Well,
- 1:55:46Speaker 1: it's an interesting documentary about production. But Sting was originally
- 1:55:51Speaker 1: like The Emperor's New Grave Groove. The production of that
- 1:55:53Speaker 1: movie is fascinating.
- 1:55:54Speaker 5: But it was.
- 1:55:55Speaker 1: Originally a much more serious story and then turned into
- 1:55:58Speaker 1: David's Bade comedy. But Sting wrote this really like he
- 1:56:03Speaker 1: thought he was doing Elton john and The Lion King.
- 1:56:05Speaker 1: So he wrote all of these serious stories, and his
- 1:56:09Speaker 1: wife was making a documentary, assuming like, oh, we're gonna
- 1:56:13Speaker 1: you're gonna be like Elton. You're Elton john Ning, so
- 1:56:16Speaker 1: I should document this, and you just see the production
- 1:56:19Speaker 1: completely fall apart. There's so many shots of Sting being
- 1:56:23Speaker 1: bummed out in his mansion because he's like, they deleted
- 1:56:25Speaker 1: in another one of my songs, or I think he's British.
- 1:56:28Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, he's British.
- 1:56:31Speaker 1: But but it's so interesting. It's specific watching Sting slowly
- 1:56:35Speaker 1: realize all of his music is going to be deleted.
- 1:56:37Speaker 1: And it's actually a David Spade comedy. If you ever
- 1:56:42Speaker 1: wanted to see Sting become really depressed in the space
- 1:56:45Speaker 1: of eighty minutes, it's an interesting documentary.
- 1:56:48Speaker 6: Why would I want them to do that? Did Joe
- 1:56:50Speaker 6: Sumner's father?
- 1:56:53Speaker 1: My theory is that Disney was like, we we got
- 1:56:57Speaker 1: a tossing a bone, we got a tossing a bone,
- 1:56:59Speaker 1: we did a so Dirty on Emperor's New Groove, another
- 1:57:02Speaker 1: Earth a Kit joint. Yeah, it's all connected, it really is.
- 1:57:07Speaker 6: But yeah, seeing that and like the song was actually
- 1:57:09Speaker 6: really interesting because I found it to be very moving
- 1:57:12Speaker 6: and it was just sort of like, what if the
- 1:57:15Speaker 6: bark on the trees was as soft a disguise? What
- 1:57:17Speaker 6: if things were easy? What if life was different? And
- 1:57:20Speaker 6: I was just like, yeah, what if what if? Joe?
- 1:57:24Speaker 5: And just the the Sting reveal was very surprising to.
- 1:57:29Speaker 1: Me, just when you didn't think Sting was going to
- 1:57:31Speaker 1: get his way into the holes expanded universe. There he is.
- 1:57:35Speaker 5: And then I like did some digging.
- 1:57:41Speaker 6: I did some digging on Joe Sumner and I saw
- 1:57:44Speaker 6: that he later invented an app in like twenty ten
- 1:57:48Speaker 6: or twenty eleven that enabled people who go to concerts
- 1:57:54Speaker 6: to upload their videos to this app, and all the
- 1:57:57Speaker 6: people that went to the concert would upload their yes
- 1:58:00Speaker 6: that they took and it would basically create a concert
- 1:58:03Speaker 6: movie with the different angles that people oh did and the.
- 1:58:07Speaker 5: Apps until like twenty sixteen and bring it back.
- 1:58:10Speaker 2: That's cool.
- 1:58:11Speaker 1: Yeah, that would do so much better now too, right,
- 1:58:14Speaker 1: I think like, bring it back?
- 1:58:16Speaker 5: Yeah, Joe, if you're listening, bring it back.
- 1:58:19Speaker 1: Joe biggest fans, We're big fans. I'm sorry to make
- 1:58:22Speaker 1: fun of when your dad was upset about and for
- 1:58:25Speaker 1: his new groove. I would have been upset too, But yeah,
- 1:58:29Speaker 1: I just wanted to.
- 1:58:30Speaker 6: Bring that little factory because I thought that was fascinating,
- 1:58:33Speaker 6: very interesting and unexpected.
- 1:58:35Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 1:58:36Speaker 3: Does anyone have anything else they want to talk about?
- 1:58:40Speaker 5: No, I'm good, I got it.
- 1:58:41Speaker 1: I don't think so. Yeah, I'm going to reread Wayside School.
- 1:58:45Speaker 1: That's my I.
- 1:58:46Speaker 3: Love those books so much. I haven't read them in
- 1:58:48Speaker 3: like thirty years.
- 1:58:50Speaker 1: So they're so silly.
- 1:58:53Speaker 3: Well, as we discussed, the movie does pass the Bechdel test,
- 1:58:58Speaker 3: albeit briefly. It passes. It passes a pass as far
- 1:59:03Speaker 3: as our nipple scale, though, where we rate the movie
- 1:59:07Speaker 3: based on a scale of zero to five nipples, examining
- 1:59:12Speaker 3: it through an intersectional feminist lens. Oh boy, I don't know.
- 1:59:18Speaker 3: I feel like, are sure it applies.
- 1:59:20Speaker 1: Our scale is kind of tricky to apply here. I mean,
- 1:59:23Speaker 1: I think in terms of like intersectionality, this movie does
- 1:59:27Speaker 1: well in that it brings up issues I've never seen
- 1:59:30Speaker 1: brought up in uh children's movie about like justice and
- 1:59:35Speaker 1: oppression and school to prison pipeline, and this movie is
- 1:59:40Speaker 1: doing so much.
- 1:59:42Speaker 3: I agree.
- 1:59:43Speaker 1: You feel like the nipple scale is like difficult to
- 1:59:45Speaker 1: apply here.
- 1:59:45Speaker 6: It is.
- 1:59:47Speaker 5: Yeah, I give it.
- 1:59:51Speaker 1: I would say I give it five wholes.
- 1:59:54Speaker 3: File Okay, so not the nipple scale today is the
- 1:59:58Speaker 3: whole scale zero to five holes.
- 2:00:01Speaker 1: This is the movie holes. So I'm giving it five holes.
- 2:00:03Speaker 3: Yeah, say I'm giving it five holes the end.
- 2:00:07Speaker 6: If I had to give it on a scale of
- 2:00:09Speaker 6: zero to five holes, holes, yes, five holes, six holes.
- 2:00:13Speaker 6: Even I know I'm an extra hole because they did
- 2:00:17Speaker 6: one last holes like one.
- 2:00:19Speaker 1: Last job, and the bonus hole could forget.
- 2:00:23Speaker 6: If I genuinely had to do it on a nipple scale,
- 2:00:26Speaker 6: I think I would actually give it, like surprisingly, like
- 2:00:28Speaker 6: three and a half nipples, like a lot of nipples
- 2:00:31Speaker 6: for a woman free.
- 2:00:33Speaker 7: Movie one woman per decade, just because like when we
- 2:00:38Speaker 7: talk about intersectionality, yes we're talking about women and representation
- 2:00:43Speaker 7: of women, but the things that matter at the end
- 2:00:46Speaker 7: of the day are deconstructing these systems and it's talking
- 2:00:49Speaker 7: about how these systems are flawed and bringing attention to
- 2:00:53Speaker 7: these systems that do affect women.
- 2:00:55Speaker 6: And even though they're showing it in the context of
- 2:00:57Speaker 6: it affecting teenage boys, unless you're Disney US, it still
- 2:01:03Speaker 6: is something that is I think, and that positive for
- 2:01:07Speaker 6: intersectional feminism. So like I because there aren't that many women,
- 2:01:11Speaker 6: I can't give it five nipples, And because you know,
- 2:01:16Speaker 6: at the end of the day, it's like this camp
- 2:01:18Speaker 6: was the problem, not like the whole system. The state's
- 2:01:22Speaker 6: not the problem. The camp is the problem. Right, But
- 2:01:25Speaker 6: like three and a half nipples still pretty solid showing
- 2:01:29Speaker 6: there for a movie again, like half a.
- 2:01:32Speaker 1: Woman in it, truly, I mean, and yeah, I hope
- 2:01:36Speaker 1: that I wish that this movie led to more media
- 2:01:42Speaker 1: like or just kids media that addressed issues like this,
- 2:01:46Speaker 1: but it is still, twenty plus years later, pretty singular
- 2:01:50Speaker 1: for the issues that because I mean, like if if
- 2:01:54Speaker 1: a story like this kid, because I loved Nickel Boys,
- 2:01:57Speaker 1: but it's very much not a movie for children.
- 2:01:59Speaker 3: And well, if you count Paddington Too, that's I mean,
- 2:02:04Speaker 3: I mean Paddington and Paddington Too are again indictments of
- 2:02:09Speaker 3: the prison industrial complex of like anti immigrant hate and racism.
- 2:02:15Speaker 3: So it's true that Paddington movies do it.
- 2:02:18Speaker 1: So that's two there. But yeah, no, I mean, I
- 2:02:22Speaker 1: I I don't know. It's it's a very special movie.
- 2:02:25Speaker 1: I agree like it kind of broke the nipple scale
- 2:02:27Speaker 1: in my head. But I think your your rationalization makes
- 2:02:30Speaker 1: a lot of sense.
- 2:02:31Speaker 3: Grama totally thank.
- 2:02:32Speaker 1: You for engaging with the show in a way that
- 2:02:33Speaker 1: we were not willing to.
- 2:02:36Speaker 5: That's what I'm here for.
- 2:02:37Speaker 6: I ask the hard questions, how many nipples does this
- 2:02:40Speaker 6: movie really deserve?
- 2:02:41Speaker 3: Thanks for thanks for poking holes in our system by.
- 2:02:49Speaker 6: I will also say Utopia tries not like this particular
- 2:02:54Speaker 6: set of issues, but Utopia does.
- 2:02:56Speaker 1: Try to be like haters.
- 2:02:59Speaker 3: Yeah, I would. It tries and it fails.
- 2:03:01Speaker 5: Yeah, I didn't say it succeeded, but he tried. Yeah,
- 2:03:04Speaker 5: there's some deep.
- 2:03:05Speaker 6: Laws there where it's like, okay, but yeah, some people
- 2:03:08Speaker 6: are predators.
- 2:03:11Speaker 5: No, but like they tried to fix racism with.
- 2:03:16Speaker 1: Animals, they're like, we didn't quite. Disney was like, we
- 2:03:19Speaker 1: didn't quite do it with holes. Let's let's try the
- 2:03:23Speaker 1: animal copaganda movie.
- 2:03:24Speaker 6: There.
- 2:03:24Speaker 1: I do appreciate ultimately, and I feel like I'm talking
- 2:03:28Speaker 1: a lot of shit. I'm trying. I am trying to
- 2:03:30Speaker 1: get work. But anyways, that Disney was very hands off
- 2:03:35Speaker 1: with this movie, because I think if Disney had been
- 2:03:37Speaker 1: hands on with this movie, we would have gotten, you know,
- 2:03:40Speaker 1: whatever this movie's version of Jim Carrey's count Oloff was.
- 2:03:45Speaker 1: I think that it is like critical to the story
- 2:03:47Speaker 1: working that you are scared for these kids and that
- 2:03:50Speaker 1: you understand where they're coming from, and that their antagonists
- 2:03:53Speaker 1: are you know, elevated, like the mister Sir is goofy
- 2:03:58Speaker 1: in some ways, but not so goofy that he ceases
- 2:04:01Speaker 1: to be scary.
- 2:04:02Speaker 3: And yeah, totally, I think that.
- 2:04:05Speaker 6: It's really a testament to the fact that like, you know,
- 2:04:09Speaker 6: we talk a lot of shit generally, we not the
- 2:04:11Speaker 6: three of us, but we society talk a lot of
- 2:04:13Speaker 6: shit on these major corporations. And it's proof that they
- 2:04:16Speaker 6: are capable of making these thoughtful movies and they can
- 2:04:23Speaker 6: do it if they.
- 2:04:24Speaker 1: Want to, right, So it's like, so why aren't they
- 2:04:26Speaker 1: doing it?
- 2:04:27Speaker 6: And it is also sometimes commercially successful when they do it,
- 2:04:31Speaker 6: and I think that it's a good reminder, like, hey,
- 2:04:33Speaker 6: remember when you did this thing and you did it
- 2:04:35Speaker 6: the way the creatives asked you to and it was
- 2:04:38Speaker 6: wildly successful and it had a lot of a listers
- 2:04:40Speaker 6: in it, and people are still talking about it twenty
- 2:04:43Speaker 6: years later as a like shining example of the way
- 2:04:46Speaker 6: to do things.
- 2:04:47Speaker 5: What if you rebooted that, What if you rebooted that spirit?
- 2:04:51Speaker 1: They're like, well, no, let's do cgi dogs for Lady
- 2:04:54Speaker 1: in the trimp. Let's do that One's.
- 2:04:57Speaker 5: That word that's a joke, right, that's that's a joke.
- 2:04:59Speaker 1: Oh no, that's exit that. It came out five years ago. Unfortunately,
- 2:05:02Speaker 1: it's very scary. It's a scary watch. It's scarier than
- 2:05:05Speaker 1: mister sir.
- 2:05:06Speaker 5: I did think a.
- 2:05:07Speaker 6: Lady in the Tramp earlier because The Boy Dog is
- 2:05:10Speaker 6: another example of a house representation in children's media.
- 2:05:14Speaker 1: Forget I believe, I believe Lady in the I think
- 2:05:17Speaker 1: Lady is Tessa Thompson.
- 2:05:20Speaker 3: Sure, I never saw it.
- 2:05:22Speaker 1: I think I was the only person that's yeah, it's
- 2:05:26Speaker 1: Tessa Thompson and Justin Thurreau.
- 2:05:28Speaker 3: And you're like, yeah, I was too busy gearing up
- 2:05:33Speaker 3: for the live action Pinocchio Disney reboot.
- 2:05:37Speaker 1: So shout out to the Pinocchio Wars on the Matreon.
- 2:05:41Speaker 1: When speaking of which, Okay, let's wrap it. I'm hungry,
- 2:05:43Speaker 1: let's wrap up the show.
- 2:05:44Speaker 6: I just wanna say one last thing. Disney has been
- 2:05:47Speaker 6: good to me personally, and I do you think follow
- 2:05:49Speaker 6: the checks and I I'm just gonna say another thing
- 2:05:54Speaker 6: and I forgot, So it doesn't matter.
- 2:05:56Speaker 3: Disney is good to me and that it made and
- 2:05:58Speaker 3: or my favorite show.
- 2:06:00Speaker 1: I will say there, Disney is still making cool, weird
- 2:06:02Speaker 1: stuff like I mean, you mentioned Bunked as a great example.
- 2:06:06Speaker 1: I just finished work. I hope it gets renewed for
- 2:06:10Speaker 1: all manner of reasons. But like a super silly kids
- 2:06:13Speaker 1: show called Stugo. So if you have a kid, and
- 2:06:18Speaker 1: I think I would say like the Seven or eight range.
- 2:06:21Speaker 1: That's a very silly, fun show that's on the Disney
- 2:06:23Speaker 1: Channel right now. It's like speaking to your point, Grama.
- 2:06:26Speaker 1: They can do it, so why not do it more?
- 2:06:28Speaker 1: Because people like it. This movie did make its money
- 2:06:31Speaker 1: back and then some. It made believe seventy one million
- 2:06:35Speaker 1: dollars off of a seventeen million dollar budget. But as
- 2:06:40Speaker 1: is the way with many movies that have a lot
- 2:06:45Speaker 1: of like author involvement and Disney being hands off, it
- 2:06:49Speaker 1: does seem like the price for that was that everyone
- 2:06:51Speaker 1: took a pay cut, because you cannot have a stacked
- 2:06:54Speaker 1: cast like this for seventeen million dollars without a serious
- 2:06:59Speaker 1: pay cut and throwing kids into one hundred and thirty
- 2:07:03Speaker 1: degree holes. So while it is amazing that this is successful,
- 2:07:07Speaker 1: I do feel like there is always some sort of
- 2:07:09Speaker 1: exchange of like, oh, you want to make your perfect art,
- 2:07:12Speaker 1: here's four dollars, bitch, you know. Like, but but I'm
- 2:07:16Speaker 1: glad that this cast. I mean, I just feel like
- 2:07:18Speaker 1: it's a perfectly cast movie. It's so good, it's.
- 2:07:20Speaker 6: Very well done. I hope they do more holes in
- 2:07:25Speaker 6: the world.
- 2:07:25Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Karama, thank you so much for coming back.
- 2:07:28Speaker 1: You've covered such an interesting wide variety of movies on
- 2:07:31Speaker 1: the show.
- 2:07:33Speaker 6: I'm saying on the record, bring me back for Stepmom
- 2:07:36Speaker 6: if you ever get around.
- 2:07:37Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely yes, And then so it'll be it's two
- 2:07:40Speaker 3: Disney movies, two Jordan Peele movies.
- 2:07:43Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and then now and step in the future
- 2:07:46Speaker 1: starting a new chapter.
- 2:07:48Speaker 6: I'm gonna be like Tarantino. He said he was gonna
- 2:07:50Speaker 6: like do eight movies and then never come back.
- 2:07:52Speaker 1: Which you can't wait for that part, right, He's really
- 2:07:57Speaker 1: dragging out the last one.
- 2:07:59Speaker 5: I ever come back.
- 2:08:01Speaker 3: No, you can come back after that, please do if
- 2:08:04Speaker 3: you want. Anyway, where can people check out your stuff?
- 2:08:09Speaker 3: Follow you on social media, etcetera?
- 2:08:11Speaker 6: Yeah, at Karama Drama, on all the platforms that you
- 2:08:15Speaker 6: might use. I started talking about libraries recently on my
- 2:08:20Speaker 6: TikTok because I'm a big, big slat for libraries, love them.
- 2:08:24Speaker 5: I have for library cards.
- 2:08:26Speaker 1: Wow, hell yeah.
- 2:08:27Speaker 6: You can have a lot of library cards and get
- 2:08:29Speaker 6: a lot of different things with them.
- 2:08:31Speaker 5: I highly encourage you to go get do it for
- 2:08:34Speaker 5: Hector Zeroni.
- 2:08:35Speaker 1: The Hector Zerni Memorial Library.
- 2:08:37Speaker 6: Go get a library card. Where can you guys be
- 2:08:40Speaker 6: found using your.
- 2:08:41Speaker 5: Library cards or not?
- 2:08:43Speaker 6: Uh?
- 2:08:43Speaker 1: You could? You can find us on mostly just Instagram
- 2:08:47Speaker 1: these days. At Bechdel Cast, you could follow our Patreon
- 2:08:51Speaker 1: aka maatreon at patreon dot com slash Bechdel Cast. We
- 2:08:55Speaker 1: have shouted out The Pinocchio Wars, one of our best series,
- 2:08:58Speaker 1: but we've had it since twenty seventeen. So for five
- 2:09:00Speaker 1: dollars a month, you get two bonus episodes every single
- 2:09:04Speaker 1: month and access to our back catalog which goes back
- 2:09:07Speaker 1: almost ten years, so there's a lot of spicy content.
- 2:09:11Speaker 1: That's actually where you will be able to listen to
- 2:09:14Speaker 1: us discuss the prison industrial conflicts for a second time
- 2:09:17Speaker 1: if you so choose, because we are covering Shawshank Redemption
- 2:09:20Speaker 1: over on the Matreon this month, which is Holes for
- 2:09:23Speaker 1: grown ups.
- 2:09:25Speaker 3: Yes, I basically decided that for my birthday month, I
- 2:09:27Speaker 3: wanted to do Holes, Shawshank Redemption and Oh Brother, Where
- 2:09:33Speaker 3: Art Though? Which is a movie about three men escaping
- 2:09:36Speaker 3: from prison, and one of them is Tim Blake Nelson
- 2:09:39Speaker 3: who's also in Holes, So it's all connected, just the
- 2:09:43Speaker 3: way the plot of Holes is.
- 2:09:44Speaker 5: And both movies feature down in the river to pray.
- 2:09:47Speaker 4: Right Yes wow, yeah, it thinks that they changed it
- 2:09:51Speaker 4: to valley because there's no water.
- 2:09:55Speaker 3: Yes, so that is what's happening over on the Matreon.
- 2:09:59Speaker 3: As it is my birthday this month, it would be
- 2:10:01Speaker 3: a nice little gift to me and to the podcast
- 2:10:05Speaker 3: in general if you subscribe to the Matreon if you
- 2:10:09Speaker 3: haven't already listeners and.
- 2:10:11Speaker 1: Uh, with that, let's go to the yell NAT's pool
- 2:10:15Speaker 1: and watch a shoe commercial with our best friend, a
- 2:10:19Speaker 1: basketball player playing a baseball player.
- 2:10:22Speaker 3: Okay, bye, bye bye. The Bechdel Cast is a production
- 2:10:29Speaker 3: of iHeartMedia, hosted by Caitlin Derante and Jamie Loftis, produced
- 2:10:33Speaker 3: by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Mola Board. Our theme song
- 2:10:37Speaker 3: was composed by Mike Kaplan with vocals by Catherine Volskrosenski.
- 2:10:41Speaker 3: Our logo in merch is designed by Jamie Loftis and
- 2:10:45Speaker 3: a special thanks to Aristotle Acevedo. For more information about
- 2:10:49Speaker 3: the podcast, please visit link tree slash Bechdel Cast