Latest / Critically Acclaimed Network / Critically Acclaimed #363 | The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, The Serpent's Skin, Forbidden Fruits, The Drama

Transcript

Critically Acclaimed #363 | The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, The Serpent's Skin, Forbidden Fruits, The Drama · Critically Acclaimed Network

0:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to critically acclaimed V movie review podcast where one of us just went to Hawaii.
0:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It was me.
0:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I went to Hawaii.
0:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Whitney.
0:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's my son Spring Break, a friend of us did us a very kind favorite.
0:27
[SPEAKER_00]: We got to go to Maui, just stay on the island of Maui.
0:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's really nice.
0:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been the Maui, I like that island.
0:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's really nice.
0:34
[SPEAKER_00]: We took a tour through a chocolate factory, run by like a grumpy old snot.
0:40
[SPEAKER_00]: What did I do to stick it?
0:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The CEO of the company told us about how he was not allowed in talk that competitions anymore because he was too good.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that sounds like they sounds like what really Wonka would actually be.
0:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no, no, he was like the opposite because he's not whimsical at all.
0:54
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a point.
0:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if you take away the whimsy, Willy Wonka's just an asshole.
0:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Also Willy Wonka is set in England.
1:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that's true.
1:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're 100% correct.
1:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that tropical island that's known for growing cacao beans.
1:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes in England Yeah, you import some
1:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you also hire slaves.
1:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's true.
1:14
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of problem.
1:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That's pretty fucked up.
1:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's pretty fucked up.
1:18
[SPEAKER_01]: It's pretty fucked up anyway.
1:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Speaking of fucked up, we'll talk about some movies.
1:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I've had some fucked up movies.
1:23
[SPEAKER_01]: My name is William to the onion.
1:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a thumb critic.
1:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I write for the rap and everybody calls me Vibbs.
1:28
[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Whitney Sybel.
1:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I too am a thumb critic.
1:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I contribute to slash film.
1:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have a cute nickname.
1:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I needn't one.
1:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, you can call me a cute nickname if you like us.
1:40
[SPEAKER_01]: We're we're finding our we're finding our feet again after being off the earth for about a week and And yeah, this time on critically acclaimed we're gonna be reviewing explosion We're gonna be reviewing the super Mario Gallic C movie
2:01
[SPEAKER_01]: who we're gonna be reviewing the new indie trends super hero horror romance the serpent skin we're gonna be reviewing a new movie about why you shouldn't touch those you know those oranges call for bitten fruits it's not about oranges okay I'm sorry it's about lines it's about a cup of which is in a
2:28
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll turn towards Julius nearby, at least.
2:30
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no reference to aren't Julius.
2:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The characters are only after fruit, but there's nobody named Orange.
2:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And then lastly, we're going to be reviewing the new film The Drama, starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.
2:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And ordinarily, we usually do, like, the bigger releases up front.
2:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And then work our way down towards a smaller releases, so they have, like, real multi themselves.
2:54
[SPEAKER_01]: We're doing a little differently in this episode, because the drama,
2:57
[SPEAKER_01]: is one of those movies where the marketing hid the premise from the audience like like the first real plot point they consider a spoiler personally I think that's kind of bullshit.
3:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a good way to tantalize you in but it does make it make it very difficult for us critics to talk about the movie without it constituting a spoiler right however it's been out for a few days and so we feel as though there's really good chance people seen it we can
3:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, the premise, but we'll stay away from the end of the episode, in case anyone doesn't want to know yet.
3:34
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you do, we're going to kind of just dive right into that.
3:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you want to skip right ahead to sort of non-spoilery thoughts, if you look at the time code, we have got our movie review roundup, where we give all of our movies our ultimate.
3:48
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, C plus C C minus rating, so you know how we really felt, no matter what we end up talking about in the show.
3:57
[SPEAKER_01]: But on that note, we always start with the biggest movie, the movie that made the most money just because I suspect that's what a lot of people want to hear about because it's the most people saw.
4:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And that film, let me check to see how
4:17
[SPEAKER_00]: For Ben Bruke, for it's made about 2 million.
4:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It's pretty cool.
4:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Super Mario Galaxy made like four hundred and fifteen million so I bet it costs like four hundred and fourteen million So I think only about a hundred million on this one.
4:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So I mean there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are are there are there are there are are there are there are are there are are there are are there are are there are there are are there are are there are are there are are there are are there are are there are are there are
4:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in my day.
4:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Back in like the 70s when they were making and do 80s when they're making slasher sequels planted the apes sequels the the budget for each progressive film was usually lower and lower because they assumed interest would gradually.
5:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so they just are trying to make as many of these sequels as cheaply and as quickly as possible to sort of milk everything drive very fast and then the entire series would die out.
5:19
[SPEAKER_00]: half a billion they figure they can spend 200 million the next one and make a billion.
5:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The last super Mario Brothers movie made a billion dollars.
5:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The super Mario Brothers movie is not much of a movie.
5:34
[SPEAKER_00]: it's distracting chewing gum.
5:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a felt fills your mouth.
5:39
[SPEAKER_00]: You spit it out.
5:39
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not a lot to be learned from it.
5:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
5:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels more like an exercise in Nintendo's branding.
5:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people really flocked to it because it was sort of a little bit more accurate to the animated characters seen in Mario games these days.
5:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was very respectful.
6:00
[SPEAKER_01]: of the franchise that a lot of people grew up with and have a lot of fielty to and who look because you recall in the 90s I don't give a shit I think they understood bear mine tendo
6:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Gave away, not giveaway, but they kindly lent the rights to make a super Mario movie to an American studio in 1993.
6:26
[SPEAKER_01]: 1993.
6:26
[SPEAKER_01]: No, this was actually the second feature length, super Mario movie.
6:31
[SPEAKER_01]: There was an animated film in the 1980s that was released in Japan and never officially released in America.
6:37
[SPEAKER_01]: The fun to run YouTube.
6:38
[SPEAKER_01]: You can find out on YouTube and someone blessed them because they never did a thingless subtitles, either.
6:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone added those.
6:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also, but it's also like this animated movie, and I'm going to digress real fast this because I think it's interesting.
6:53
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of the things that we take for granted about Super Mario were in that original animated movie for the very first time, such as the idea that Luigi is taller than Mario.
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, that was starting, originally they were the same sprite, just pal-swap, boom, now Luigi is dollar.
7:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, the first time Mario like picked up Bowser by the tail and swung them around, which is now standard Bowser fighting behavior, a lot of the games, a lot of little things started in that movie, but it also breaks a lot of rules like Princess Peach gets married at the end.
7:27
[SPEAKER_01]: to a character we've never met in any other media and wasn't he like a dog that was yeah there was a dog there was a dog in that movie that followed Mario and Luigi around and it was just this comic relief dog never shut up in any of the games that i'm aware of
7:43
[SPEAKER_01]: uh, and then it turned out at the end.
7:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Ha ha, I almost like the end of spirit on the way.
7:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Ha ha, I was actually a prince, and I was turned into a dog, and I was supposed to marry the princess this entire time.
7:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Mario, for saving me and letting me marry the girl you had a crush on.
7:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And Mario was like, oh man, I'm going to go back to running the grocery store I run.
8:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I think Bowser ends up working there too.
8:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Weird fucking film, but in any case,
8:07
[SPEAKER_01]: In 1993, they went the rights to an American studio to make a Super Mario Brothers movie.
8:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just looked it up.
8:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The name of that dog is Kibi Dango, and this is not a familiar case.
8:19
[SPEAKER_00]: This little blue thing, the big red nose, and I don't think I've ever seen it.
8:22
[SPEAKER_01]: There's the exact name of the movie in there, because I forgot it.
8:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Super Mario Brothers, Peach Hemi, Kushutu, Diasakusen.
8:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, which is translated to Super Mario Bros. Princess Peach Rescue Operation Exclamation point.
8:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Makes sense.
8:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a fun watch and but it's kind of forgotten and always bothers me and people say you know that the first Super Mario Bros. movie started Bob Hoskins.
8:45
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I know the second one did.
8:47
[SPEAKER_01]: The second one was the live action one with Bob Hoskins and John like was a homo and Dennis Hopper and, you know, Hollywood in their wisdom.
8:58
[SPEAKER_00]: However much that is is up to you can decide for yourself, but in there, they thought they knew what to do because Mario was pretty thin as a concept Mario is is a game Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
9:26
[SPEAKER_00]: memory in the computers to do like whole cutscenes and movies that explain stories and characters.
9:32
[SPEAKER_01]: But they just had print dialogue on there like there were stories.
9:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
9:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The only motivation was sort of in the setup in Super Mario Brothers, the original game for the NES.
9:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The princess has been kidnapped.
9:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll pray for the princess.
9:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an eye-entry tale.
9:46
[SPEAKER_00]: You're on the brave night.
9:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Go save a princess that's been rescued.
9:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Been kidnapped by a dragon.
9:50
[SPEAKER_01]: The world doesn't actually make any sense.
9:52
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a coherent metaphor for anything.
9:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
9:54
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a plumber because in the previous game he kind of been a plumber.
9:57
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... and uh... here we have it that and i guess it's sort of like this absurd comedy twist on the night air entry tale because instead of him being a knight he's not wearing a suit of armor little little chubby plumber guy is working class guy it's the same as the same mentality that give us elmeriachi
10:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Where Robert Rodriguez, figuring out what he wanted to make.
10:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he sold his body to science.
10:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And like they like used him as like for like experiments and stuff and they took the money and he made this independent movie called El Mariachi and his premise was, I'm going to take a character from like that everyone kind of recognizes in the culture, like the sort of the cliche of the wandering Mariachi.
10:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And what if that guy was actually a
10:38
[SPEAKER_00]: bad ass.
10:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's kind of what it was plumbers and so the 1993 movie comes along and like they're like okay well there's not much to the game so we can have fun with it and so they decided to change a whole bunch of stuff and make it look very different and come up with a justification for all the game mechanics Mario doesn't just jump on you he has like super jumping sci-fi boots and just kind of a steam punk aesthetic to it it takes place in an alternate and
11:03
[SPEAKER_00]: dinosaur dementia.
11:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it's there's a lot of fun stuff.
11:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a lot of stuff.
11:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is barely recognizable is anything related to the game.
11:11
[SPEAKER_00]: There's yeah, the game terms are applied to a new premise, which is about dinosaur evolution.
11:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It came out out around the same time as.
11:20
[SPEAKER_00]: the first super Nintendo Mario game which had dinosaurs in it that Yoshi yeah so and Yoshi is a character in the movie as well there's like a little reptile in the movie yeah he looks more like a drastic park creation yeah super those maybe I dig that movie I know I don't know it's it's I've all I enjoyed it when it came out I thought it was really kooky
11:40
[SPEAKER_00]: the complaints that it wasn't like the game.
11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought we're really sort of trillish.
11:46
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's my thing with that.
11:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were two complaints about the movie.
11:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I think when I came out, one was that it wasn't a lot.
11:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Like the game, which I want to have a brief conversation about that.
11:56
[SPEAKER_01]: The other one was that kind of stupid.
11:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know what it is?
12:00
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a fair comment that that's not your taste, that's fine.
12:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a weird,
12:06
[SPEAKER_01]: worky bizarre what the fuck were they thinking kind of film?
12:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And I like how it turned out because that's fun, but I understand that's not what you're in the mood for in a mainstream blockbuster.
12:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a little too weird for a lot of people.
12:19
[SPEAKER_01]: When it comes to fealty, mm.
12:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I am a firm believer, and we've talked about this a lot, the adaptation process.
12:25
[SPEAKER_01]: That when you move a work of art from one medium to another, it's very rare that it translates perfectly.
12:32
[SPEAKER_01]: There's things you have to do.
12:34
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to adjust it for the amount of time it takes or the amount of visual action.
12:41
[SPEAKER_01]: It's easier to have a car chase in a movie than it is in a book, for example.
12:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So you want to sort of take the parts of the story
12:49
[SPEAKER_01]: that makes sense in the new medium and all and adapt around the parts that don't necessarily make sense or don't work quite as well so that it will make the most of the new movie version in this case.
13:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I do believe.
13:04
[SPEAKER_01]: that I think people should have freedom to adapt.
13:07
[SPEAKER_01]: However, I also believe that at some point, that we can disagree on where that point is, at some point you change so much of the text, so much of the original material, that it wasn't worth buying the property.
13:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
13:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's so its own thing, it's so not what people who are already fans of it would want to see,
13:29
[SPEAKER_01]: that you are at the very least risking pissing them off and I don't think that's an unreasonable thing.
13:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a fan of a thing.
13:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to change so much that it's unrecognizable.
13:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I can appreciate that.
13:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's a deal breaker is up to you, but I think that's at least a legitimate critique.
13:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose so, but here's the thing, if you take something
13:58
[SPEAKER_00]: and you alter it beyond recognition.
14:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's now something completely different.
14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But you still made a great film.
14:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I like that film.
14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't matter if they changed everything about it if what they changed it into was something really intriguing and fun.
14:17
[SPEAKER_01]: But there is a trick with that, though, because the movie that people see,
14:22
[SPEAKER_01]: is in some way related to the movie they thought they were going to get.
14:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, sometimes you go to a movie, you know, nothing about it, it can be whatever it is, and you're just accepted.
14:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
14:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But if going into it, you have a pre-existing idea of what that is.
14:35
[SPEAKER_01]: You've read that Shakespeare play.
14:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You've read that book.
14:38
[SPEAKER_01]: You've played that video game.
14:39
[SPEAKER_01]: You bought those action figures.
14:40
[SPEAKER_01]: You have a pre-existing relationship to it, and a pre-existing understanding of how that operates.
14:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the movie is different than that, whether it's better or worse, there was a certain amount of cognitive dissonance you have to move past.
14:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Now some people don't have a huge problem with that.
14:58
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do think it's understandable that some people might be averse to something that is so far a field of what they thought they were paying to see.
15:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I find that when this happens and the movie is still good or at least interesting or even bad but entertaining, philosophy I don't really ascribe to but it's easy enough to talk about.
15:23
[SPEAKER_01]: usually finds its audience later.
15:25
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a time 15 years ago where the general rule of thumb about the Super Mario Brothers movie from 1993, or Super Mario Brothers the movie is what it was called, was a piece of crap.
15:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And most people seem to ascribe to that and then some point over the last decade and a half or so, it started to become,
15:45
[SPEAKER_01]: less controversial to say that it's good, good in spite of itself, better than we remembered, deserves another look.
15:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And now I think it is at the very least a, uh, an established cult classic.
15:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it's mainstream, but I still think that I think it's okay for a lot of people.
16:02
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of you are very comfortable saying I like this movie and they're not going to get shouted down.
16:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we covered a lot of this in our review of the Super Mario Brothers movie and also we did a whole commentary track for Super Mario Brothers, the movie, the one from 1993, but we so yeah a lot of this is ground we've covered before but we bring it up because
16:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But whatever other failings they have, they are safe.
16:37
[SPEAKER_01]: They are extremely safe adaptations.
16:39
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're a fan of Mario in the vast majority of his pre-existing forms, not the live action movie, but like pretty much any of the games.
16:48
[SPEAKER_01]: You will walk into the last animated movie and the new animated movie.
16:54
[SPEAKER_01]: and see that.
16:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And that will not be fucked with in any meaningful way, the most they did that was actually like actually kind of controversial for a bit was Mario didn't have the thick Italian accent.
17:06
[SPEAKER_00]: get they changed to voice actors and the super marvellers movie they cast Chris Pratt ah the the established Italian American actor yeah Chris Pratt although um it was uh oh gosh what was his name um Charles Martin that Charles Martinette was was the voice of Mario and all the games he's a voice actor just higher him
17:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't understand why.
17:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And he had like a cameo in it.
17:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he had already retired from the part by the time they made the movie though.
17:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe there was his choice.
17:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I still think it's weird because considering how safe they were playing everything else to have Mario not sound like Mario was the closest thing they had to be.
17:41
[SPEAKER_00]: and Charles Martinette also known in Italian American.
17:44
[SPEAKER_01]: No, but he's grandfathered in.
17:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
17:48
[SPEAKER_01]: As somebody named Piveyani, what would you say?
17:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if you're gonna, there's that.
17:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm okay with Charles Martinette keeping it because he's been pretty, you know, pretty cool about it.
17:58
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're gonna replace him,
18:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's my thing isn't a tiny American.
18:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't talk about it a lot because my Italian American heritage is I know a lot of Italian Americans who have a much closer connection to their Italian heritage than I do.
18:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do have some connection to it and I noticed when I was a kid
18:19
[SPEAKER_01]: that a time Americans didn't have the best representation in media like the majority of the time like we got rocky good one okay we but we also had the godfather interested characters not role models no
18:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Mario Mario was, in a way, a little like Rocky and that he was a plucky underdog he would never think would be able to succeed fantasy kingdom against the dragon.
18:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's not only a rare, very Italian American hero, he's also a working class hero, and he's also traditionally usually to one degree or another effect guy.
18:56
[SPEAKER_01]: we didn't have a lot of those heroes either.
18:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So I love Mario, like I have a lot of affection for Mario as an icon.
19:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, which is all he really is.
19:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as simple.
19:07
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not not much of a, we know these background things, but he doesn't have hopes or dreams.
19:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't have much of a personality.
19:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
19:13
[SPEAKER_00]: in the Super Mario Bros. movie, and this is where we're going to get into Galaxy, because in the Super Mario Bros. movie, the first elimination animated film, he did have a bit of an arc.
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He started his life on Earth, discovered a magical pipe that sort him across dimensions into the mushroom kingdom, the fantasy kingdom, overseen by little mushroom people, and their princesses and dragons,
19:38
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... there's a lot of bizarre video game conceits in this kingdom that we just don't yet that are just we know them from the game so we just sort of accept them in the market power up blocks because they're all just don't please floating power blocks don't make any sense yeah it's fine uh...
19:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But he was like a little, like you said, he was a little bit of an underdog.
19:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He was able to go to this fantasy kingdom and prove himself as a hero and gain magical powers and be to drag it.
20:04
[SPEAKER_01]: At the very least at the beginning of the movie, they established that in the real world, he and Luigi were having trouble being respected.
20:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
20:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Nobody thought their bombing business was gonna do any good.
20:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone thought they were kind of shiftless nobody is including their own parents.
20:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's, so it's not much, but it's not the hang of your head on.
20:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an arc.
20:23
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes from underdog to dog.
20:26
[SPEAKER_01]: There you go.
20:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, he turns into a little blue dog with a big bright nose.
20:31
[SPEAKER_00]: There you go.
20:32
[SPEAKER_00]: In the Super Mario Galaxy movie, which is based on a Nintendo Wii game, which I didn't play.
20:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We're skipping past all the Mario games I play.
20:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, wow.
20:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going forward to one that I didn't play.
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I never finished Mario Galaxy, but I did play it.
20:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's similar.
20:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, as soon as we got to Nintendo 64 and that 3D stuff,
20:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like kind of out.
20:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I quit early on.
20:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very old school And it's pretty good in the play Prince of Persia sands of time ones, and he was like nope.
20:57
[SPEAKER_01]: No, okay.
20:58
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I'm not gonna do that one Like what is that?
21:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to jump out.
21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Nope.
21:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Nope.
21:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Not gonna do it Okay, one of the best 3D platformers we ever had the hell with it.
21:07
[SPEAKER_00]: No, all three.
21:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
21:08
[SPEAKER_00]: No 3D platformer is worth a damn Not one they're all they all suck every last one
21:15
[SPEAKER_00]: your god of war can go suck it.
21:18
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the best thing about kind of words on a place.
21:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay.
21:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's not okay.
21:21
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
21:21
[SPEAKER_00]: What's your favorite game?
21:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It sucks.
21:24
[SPEAKER_00]: No, the old man Whitney says so.
21:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
21:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, Whitney is a bit of a jerk.
21:29
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I just, I.
21:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Just play games.
21:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very difficult for a platformer to function in three-dimensional space because in a two-dimensional space you're entirely aware of all your surroundings and distance and a three-dimensional space that's a lot more important.
21:43
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to put the point out.
21:45
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to put the point out.
21:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The character themselves now becomes a visible obstacle to the actual game blind.
21:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless it's first person, which is also very frustrating.
21:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you have to look like... Where are my feet?
21:56
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to turn your head to look.
21:58
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you ever played the platforming sections in half-life, too, you're like, what the fuck?
22:00
[SPEAKER_01]: What were you even thinking?
22:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did we do this?
22:02
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will go to bed for Prince of Persia, Super Mario figured out the trick very early on and also, uh, that you think portal technically qualifies as a platforming.
22:05
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's puzzle platformer.
22:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play play
22:19
[SPEAKER_00]: I played a game of portal like I got pretty far in it.
22:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I only played one game and I got pretty far and then but just lost interest.
22:27
[SPEAKER_04]: Ah, bummer.
22:28
[SPEAKER_00]: But I I also did committed the sin of doing what I do with most games and that I turned the sound off and listened to music And there was like evidently a lot of my narration on this so you miss so much good stuff I forgot you did that so that
22:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Fucking hurts.
22:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's like yeah, I watched singing in the rain, but I watched it with the music off.
22:48
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I just I just wanted to get the did you see that thing someone put online There was apparently like in book talk.
22:54
[SPEAKER_01]: There's like younger book readers who were saying that they never read the prologue or the epilogue because if that stuff was important it would be and I quote in the book
23:06
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just named prologue and epilogue.
23:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they're all part of the book.
23:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Man, that's not like, it's not like the acknowledgements.
23:13
[SPEAKER_01]: You can skip the acknowledgements.
23:14
[SPEAKER_01]: That's fine.
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So people like you're part of it and then portal you got to, you know, I don't have like contempt for the medium or anything, but I'm just inexperienced.
23:23
[SPEAKER_00]: You had contempt for the medium before.
23:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose a little bit, but it used to be a lot of groundpeer about this.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Point being, once we get to the Super Mario Galaxy movie, we're going to be traversing the galaxy in a way that they did in Super Mario Galaxy, the game, actually leaving the planet soaring to other planets, other dimensions, and
23:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Mario's arc through all of this.
23:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You would think as, you know, a dimensional trafaly.
23:49
[SPEAKER_00]: There's gone to the mushroom kingdom, but now we see in the intro that he's also going to other kingdoms.
23:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He goes to like this, the desert.
23:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, sure, sure, sure skull desert, where every character has a sugar skull and he goes into this inverted pyramid.
24:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's, his experience world traveler.
24:05
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... which means when it now that he's going out into the galaxy there's very little off there's no idea there's no there's no supermerber there's wonder
24:17
[SPEAKER_00]: which I've played and nearly beat.
24:19
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good match.
24:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a really good game.
24:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the side scrolling Mario's still keeping up with those.
24:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, they play like a dream.
24:27
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing is, that's something that I was really thinking about a lot when I was watching Super Mario Galaxy moving.
24:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Because real fast, the plot, there was another princess.
24:36
[SPEAKER_01]: She's kidnapped by Bowser Jr.
24:38
[SPEAKER_01]: They have to find her in safer.
24:41
[SPEAKER_01]: That's basically it.
24:41
[SPEAKER_01]: There's more to it but not much.
24:44
[SPEAKER_01]: But as I'm watching this, I'm thinking to myself, you know, it's all very pretty.
24:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Good animation.
24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks nice.
24:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Richard doesn't even pretend otherwise.
24:53
[SPEAKER_01]: So why don't I feel it?
24:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't love the last one.
24:59
[SPEAKER_01]: But I thought it was that even though it was like safe and mediocre, but it was in some respects narratively competent, what is keeping me from enjoying this even on that level?
25:09
[SPEAKER_01]: What makes that movie look good?
25:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Create a super Mario Galaxy.
25:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It's that arc we were talking about.
25:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's the arc.
25:15
[SPEAKER_01]: It's about, it's two things, really.
25:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, really all boils down to this.
25:20
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not interested in telling a story.
25:23
[SPEAKER_01]: No, you're not even a simple story.
25:25
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just telling it.
25:26
[SPEAKER_01]: They just want to show it.
25:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's not the same thing.
25:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So the moment in the Super Mario Brothers movie where Mario, I think it's separated from the Wii 2 Elder in the pipe, when Mario lands in the Mushroom Kingdom, there is at the very least a,
25:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like it.
25:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Look how pretty it is.
25:42
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a few scenes in the supermarket where there's movie where he lands there He looks around.
25:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It looks like the video game.
25:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not much all to us, but there's all to him.
25:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's pretty.
25:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean the premiums look amazing.
25:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and he's looking around.
25:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He meets these characters.
25:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are you and he goes into the city and he's really like kind of confused and there's all this bustle there's this is a sense of
26:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he's gone somewhere at the very least.
26:02
[SPEAKER_01]: They're telling the story.
26:04
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not just showing up.
26:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Then he showed up with the mushroom kingdom.
26:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he walked over here.
26:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, no, then he showed up to the mushroom kingdom.
26:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And he felt this simple.
26:13
[SPEAKER_01]: He went to the mushroom kingdom.
26:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And he is now faced with obstacles far beyond what he thought he was capable of.
26:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And has to prove himself in a larger ground.
26:24
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not much, but it's something.
26:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Super Mario Galaxy comes around and
26:29
[SPEAKER_01]: only one of the characters in this movie and there's several major ones.
26:34
[SPEAKER_01]: There's Mario, there's Luigi, Yoshi's now in this, we've got Princess Peach, we've got Princess Isit Fiona, what is it?
26:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Rosalina, Rosalina, I knew it was an Ona, which is weird because I said the wrong thing.
26:47
[SPEAKER_01]: But there's the Princess Rosalina, there's Bowser, Jr. who's now a major character and there's Bowser.
26:53
[SPEAKER_01]: None of them have a journey.
26:55
[SPEAKER_01]: The closest one who has a journey is Bowser.
26:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Go at the land of the last movie was shrunk down and they've been keeping him in like a little miniature castles like a prison.
27:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Like a dollhouse.
27:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And when we meet him in this movie, he's been like, put in the effort.
27:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Going into therapies, talking about how he's trying to be kind, but he saw his anger issues and he explodes occasionally, but then he apologizes.
27:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But he's consistent about that.
27:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And I respect that, honestly, because a lot of people go to therapy and they don't actually want to do the work.
27:22
[SPEAKER_01]: He's doing the work, it is a journey, and he might be on it for the rest of his life, but he's doing the work, and I'm like, okay, they made Bowser a little interesting.
27:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And then over the course of the film, he devolves into exactly who he was at the last movie.
27:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's a negative character arc.
27:37
[SPEAKER_00]: well he he does a backslide and i think that's complete backslide yeah and i think that's fine because it was done at the behest of his own sun so it's like his own bad parenting game back to him um i was trying i was so trying so hard to get my fingernails into something in his mind because it was like nothing in this film yeah but i was trying to see Bowser Junior as like one of those ultra
28:01
[SPEAKER_00]: like right-wing conservative zoomers like these young guys or you feel like the current administration isn't going far enough in terms of racism, even more evil in the generation that came before it, essentially juicing up the generation that came before and getting to be even more evil than they would ordinarily.
28:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Like dad abandoned the maga movement, but his son is now ultra right-wing and his dragon and back into it.
28:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like I was trying to see that
28:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't quite play like it's not it's not really in there.
28:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It's also such a minor part of the movie It's only one character.
28:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, if other characters had similar arcs and they're struggling with we could overcome A legacy of some kind we could explore that as a thesis and that's something I was thinking about because I was thinking about in the Super Mario Brothers movie the previous one Mario had a A strained relationship with his own father.
28:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I know it's mostly resolved by the I'm but he's still grew up with his dad under estimating him
28:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So I thought, okay, so maybe Mario who doesn't trust Bowser, Luigi says, hey, Bowser's trying to be a better person, we should put some faith in him and Mario's like, no, I don't trust him.
29:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And then maybe Bowser trying to be a good dad to his son, even on an evil level, Mario could maybe recognize that and say, you know what, my dad didn't do that for me.
29:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
29:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I have complicated feelings about Bowser, or maybe I've grown to respect Bowser.
29:25
[SPEAKER_01]: You could have done that, they don't.
29:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Mario's only Ark in this movie, it's not an Ark.
29:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Mario's only thing in this movie is he wants to ask Princess Peach out.
29:34
[SPEAKER_01]: That's it.
29:35
[SPEAKER_01]: He had no obstacle to that.
29:38
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no obstacle.
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: He's interested.
29:39
[SPEAKER_00]: She's interested.
29:40
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no obstacle.
29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a little shy.
29:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's that's not really a lot to hang a movie on.
29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's not that shy.
29:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know, sort of like romantic gift with a heart on it.
29:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he's these years of that.
29:52
[SPEAKER_01]: This, they would have gone out Mario and Peach.
29:56
[SPEAKER_01]: They would have kissed or had a romantic moment.
29:59
[SPEAKER_01]: at some point, whether this movie happened or not.
30:03
[SPEAKER_01]: If Bowser Jr. had never shown up, maybe would have taken him a couple more weeks, they would have got there.
30:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
30:09
[SPEAKER_01]: They even introduced this chaos element, where when they're in outer space, and they're trying to find Bowser Jr.'s planet, where he has a big doomsday weapon, which he never even aims at anything.
30:18
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really hilarious.
30:19
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got this big doomsday weapon.
30:20
[SPEAKER_01]: There are still zero stakes.
30:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, in order to get there,
30:29
[SPEAKER_01]: play by Glenn Powell, which is from a different video again called Star Fox, but Nintendo and technically they've all existed in the same universe before Super Smash Bros. and we've introduced the idea that they're multiple dimensions, so whatever, I don't care about that.
30:43
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a cameo from Pikmin, familiar with the Pikmin show up.
30:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of the characters from Super Mario 2, the American version of Super Mario 2, another Japanese version, which came over on America as the Lost Levels.
30:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are different games.
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my point.
30:59
[SPEAKER_01]: The Japanese version was deemed too difficult to Super Mario 2 in the Americas, so they took another game, changed the sprites.
31:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's Super Mario 2, which is why Super Mario 2 is very different mechanics.
31:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't keep panic.
31:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
31:11
[SPEAKER_00]: So those characters show up, which is fun.
31:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like those characters.
31:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I like the game, I'll say.
31:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the characters are just designs.
31:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just There's and the problem is the games are so absurd.
31:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like you're in this fantasy kingdom, but there's no rhyme or reason really to the fantasy kingdom It's sort of invented its own aesthetic
31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's no underlying metaphor or there's nothing, so you put the characters from Super Mario Bros. 2 together and it's just another cluster of monsters that have no relationship to one another.
31:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like they're all fraught and they're not even in court or it's not like they're like teeming up with Bowser Jr.
31:44
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like a little side thing, but just gives Princess Peach an opportunity to beat some people up and then the movie can continue as if that never happened.
31:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, literally that scene lifts entirely out of the movie if a monkey didn't steal Toadstool's backpack with eight minutes left out of this movie and you never know what was going I'll say this that sequence where they're fighting in the casino takes place in this weird sort of gravity Nexus yeah, where it's on the interior of a six-sided cube and each Each fast it has its own gravity it's like the dance from royal wedding
32:18
[SPEAKER_01]: from Royal Wedding with Fred Stair when he dances on the street.
32:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
32:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Or if you want to break into electric boogaloo.
32:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That too, yes, yes.
32:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's break into when they did that, right?
32:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Should I break in one?
32:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I might have been the first break.
32:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the first one is on the ceiling.
32:30
[SPEAKER_01]: The first one is wearing dances like in front of the liquor store and there's that magic bit with the brim or what up?
32:36
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the break-ins.
32:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The break-in movies are pretty fun by it.
32:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Big and movies are really fun.
32:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd rather watch either break-in than I watch Super Mario Galaxy because they're,
32:45
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just there's nothing happening.
32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this is this is a more a movie based on brand recognition Sure, it's about looking at these characters doing adventurous things my 10 year old son like to sure because he liked seeing Mario do stuff Mm-hmm.
32:59
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a fan of a bar.
33:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if you're a fan of Yoshi Here's Yoshi Yoshi each things with his tongue and says his own man.
33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: No, she has nothing to do Yoshi has no eyes will not be in the movie
33:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little unusual that Yoshi is such a big presence in this movie, because in the first movie, we saw whole herd of those animals.
33:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, forgot about that actually.
33:22
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a sequence where they're traveling across land after land.
33:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There's like a whole herd of these Yoshi.
33:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they make a big deal out of this one being a guy.
33:29
[SPEAKER_01]: The way they treat him in this movie, you think he was the only one.
33:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so that's really, really.
33:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yoshi only says his own name, has it like a distorted, high-pitched voice.
33:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet they hired Donald Glover to that part like you never know was not like a good paycheck I guess but it's like when um if you see the trailers for the new masters of the universe moving the human Moving oh yeah, I think it did.
33:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, okay So whatever we'll see it when we see it I hope it's good Nicholas Galatina's playing human that's good casting.
33:57
[SPEAKER_01]: He's great.
33:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope he's a big star but
33:59
[SPEAKER_01]: The latest trailer for that, I happen to see, and Skeletor is in it.
34:04
[SPEAKER_01]: He man's archenemesis.
34:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the cartoons, you may recall that Skeletor had kind of a high-pitched kind of star-screen, like voice.
34:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah!
34:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah!
34:15
[SPEAKER_01]: He man!
34:16
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's kind of like, it could be made threatening, but it could also be a joke to make it high-played up.
34:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The cast Jared Leto, to be in Seely, to be entirely CG, and then his voice is just some generic British dude.
34:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Why are you paying Jared Leto, who is box office poison by the way, his face all boggling?
34:37
[SPEAKER_01]: People do not want to see him in movies.
34:40
[SPEAKER_01]: They have spoken.
34:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you're gonna pay him a lot of money because he's a name, he's an Oscar winner.
34:49
[SPEAKER_01]: When really you could have gotten literally anyone else to do that.
34:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And it probably would have been better.
34:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And it probably would have been, again, we're looking at my name brand recognition, would have been recognizable as Skeletor.
35:00
[SPEAKER_00]: My point was the brilliant start.
35:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Alan Oppenheimer played the voice of Skeletor.
35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Nice.
35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I've won with Starfax, so we're going back to it.
35:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's still kicking, he's 95.
35:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Kevin, don't get it, get him back, he's just going to use his voice.
35:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Starfax is in this movie and they introduced him as kind of a Han Solo type.
35:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, we got to rent his money in Falcon and they even say like, yes, I came from another galaxy and I got stuck in this one and I'm trying to find my way back home and I'm like, oh, wow, an arc, a journey, we're going somewhere.
35:31
[SPEAKER_01]: None of that is addressed ever and then he like has kind of like a like Princess Beach is very impressed with him and you think when Mario shows up he's going to be like oh competition for a little bit and then and then they toy with that for a brief second like Mario looks at Star Fox and it's like
35:46
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, oh, look at how cool he looks and he's like, you're awesome.
35:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That's sorry, but it's like, thanks, man.
35:51
[SPEAKER_01]: You are, too.
35:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a cute joke.
35:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to pretend that's not cute.
35:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to pretend that's not a wholesome, but also you came this close to having a story.
36:00
[SPEAKER_01]: You came this close and you just backed off immediately.
36:03
[SPEAKER_00]: If the rest of the movie had a story, that would have been cute.
36:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest of the movie does it.
36:07
[SPEAKER_00]: In the first movie, Princess Peach is talking about looking for a family.
36:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, she's she's the only human on the mushroom in the mushroom kingdom or humanoid, I guess, and she's looking for her past.
36:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So you think this would be, oh, it's going to find Princess Rosalina Rosalina
36:25
[SPEAKER_01]: three seven five princess Rosalina.
36:26
[SPEAKER_01]: She's going to like this is my journey.
36:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to find out about my past.
36:29
[SPEAKER_01]: That comes up like once.
36:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, you that should be driving her.
36:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
36:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, she wants to save the day, but this is personal right.
36:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And she meets her sister and they don't have any meaningful interactions.
36:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So we don't know how she feels about any of this.
36:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Backstories for
36:43
[SPEAKER_01]: them by reading a book.
36:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's how this, that's how this movie designed for children, this giant CG color and light show is going to release its narrative.
36:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone reads a book.
36:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Somebody reads a book.
36:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey kid, it's turn off the movie.
36:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Turn off the movie.
37:01
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a phenomenon in comedy films.
37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: where you might want to comedy and you find it quite light and amusing, but you never laugh.
37:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually, it's more affable than it is funny.
37:14
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a good time, but not actually being hilarious, yeah.
37:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I will say that the Super Mario Galaxy movie only ever aims to be affable and wholesome.
37:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just trying to show these characters having some kind of adventure.
37:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a movie, it's not a story, it's really frustrating how
37:32
[SPEAKER_00]: little is actually happening in the script.
37:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a lot of fun sequences of a lot of action-color and movement of characters you enjoy seeing.
37:45
[SPEAKER_00]: If you like watching somebody else play a video game,
37:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes I like that, but you can maybe like this, well, you can buy the game.
37:53
[SPEAKER_01]: No, you can watch Twitch through the street market for this.
37:57
[SPEAKER_01]: People already do that.
37:59
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't need to spend the money on that.
38:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And you're going to get to know someone because they're going to be playing a talking the whole time.
38:05
[SPEAKER_01]: You will have more of an emotional connection to watch this show.
38:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Do watch Super Mario Galaxy on Twitch.
38:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Then watch the Super Mario Galaxy movie.
38:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is my thing with this movie.
38:15
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like completely incompetent or anything.
38:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, the animations are very, very pretty.
38:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And if all you care about is going like, oh, I recognize that, well, it'll do that.
38:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's an incredibly low bar.
38:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I think as critics, we should have higher standards than that.
38:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But I remember reading some, I know this is poor form to quote other critics, but this is something that I've taken from reading Roger Ebert.
38:38
[SPEAKER_00]: When he was talking about, I think I was talking about the Ninja Turtles.
38:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And how he felt the Ninja Turtles didn't have a lot of personality or character, defined only by the color they wore in the weapon they used.
38:51
[SPEAKER_00]: There means a violence, was their character to find and trade.
38:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a little harsh.
38:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It would only take a kid to really kind of explain the subtle personality difference.
39:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think they're subtle.
39:03
[SPEAKER_01]: One of them is a sparky rebel.
39:05
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them is like a good excuse to hear out.
39:07
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them is a party dude and one of them is a nerd.
39:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That's simple.
39:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Those personality traits were kind of juiced up as the franchise traveled along.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: But his argument was kids deserve good movies.
39:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree with that.
39:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea, I love this arguments that I sometimes will still see to this day from people who, when you give a bad review or you pan a film that was made with a children's audience in mind.
39:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Or even just general blockbuster, like mainstream.
39:38
[SPEAKER_00]: generic entertainment yeah so don't and the the argument goes um it's it doesn't have to be good yeah because it's a movie for kids and i would say don't kids deserve good movies don't kids deserve movies that inflame their imaginations or make them think about us sort of stories and characters and actually teach them some look everyone likes junk food now and then
40:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
40:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
40:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not junk food like I know.
40:05
[SPEAKER_00]: There's good news of your stomach a little bit.
40:08
[SPEAKER_01]: We've all had like, ooh, a new flavor of Dorito.
40:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, this one isn't good.
40:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
40:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you can do that.
40:14
[SPEAKER_01]: There's still standards in that.
40:16
[SPEAKER_01]: No, you take a drink.
40:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, I think that.
40:20
[SPEAKER_01]: considering how much time and money is spent on a movie like Super Mario Galaxy movie, the lack of ambition to make it work as a film and not just an advertisement for stuff you've already bought, is a little lazy.
40:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And by a little lazy, I mean extremely lazy.
40:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And by extremely lazy, I mean annoying.
40:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but I agree.
40:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I think movies for kids should
40:42
[SPEAKER_01]: We should have good ones.
40:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And if people enjoy ones that aren't good, that's fine.
40:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that makes them necessarily good, unless you can come up with a cogent defense.
40:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember when Roger Ebert would look down on Tom's exchange and edge turtles or like other things that I was very, very fond of.
40:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would read his take on it.
41:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I would read
41:06
[SPEAKER_01]: what he, his rationale for why they were bad and I would say to myself, I see this very differently and it made me want to be a critic because I wanted to articulate what I saw the other people didn't see.
41:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and what's frustrating to me is that when I'm seeing defenses of this movie, I'm not seeing anyone say,
41:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, I think there's something, I think there's something interesting, interesting story in here.
41:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there's something interesting, stylistically, I think this movie is doing something challenging with the way we handle like brand promotions, at least that would be something I could hang my hat on.
41:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not doing any of that, and no one is making that defense.
41:44
[SPEAKER_01]: So defense, I've seen more than anything else.
41:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And I talked about this in the this week's newsletter or their Patreon, patreon.com slash critically acclaimed network.
41:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
41:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, was, and this is something I get a lot.
41:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Anytime I do reveal like this is very specifically the quote, it's a kids movie, it's not.
42:01
[SPEAKER_01]: blank.
42:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Fill on the block.
42:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not citizen can.
42:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not citizen can.
42:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not Shakespeare.
42:07
[SPEAKER_01]: I wrote down as many of those as I could.
42:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, a list of everything.
42:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not.
42:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
42:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
42:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope we see if I can find it on my phone here.
42:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, okay.
42:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Here we go.
42:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and this is where I see this.
42:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is like almost exclusively from Instagram.
42:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I know my review, uh, which was a negative, went pretty far and wide on Twitter, but I'm not on Twitter anymore.
42:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I just didn't see that.
42:28
[SPEAKER_01]: According to the commenters, the Super Mario Galaxy movie is not a Christopher Nolan movie.
42:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Citizen Kane, Amelia Perez, which is an interesting choice, the godfather, HamNet, Hoppers.
42:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not Hoppers.
42:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not.
42:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not even as good as another kid's film.
42:46
[SPEAKER_01]: That just came out.
42:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not.
42:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Megalapolis, which I thought everyone agreed was pretty bad.
42:53
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not one bed left or another.
42:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not Oppenheimer.
42:56
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not Oscar Winning.
42:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not Oscar worthy.
42:58
[SPEAKER_01]: These are people defending it, by the way.
43:01
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not Shindler's list.
43:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not Shakespeare.
43:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not the Shawshank Redemption.
43:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not sinners.
43:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not Slumdog millionaire.
43:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not quote some five dollar Russian French film about a horny dog and explains the values of slavery from 1938.
43:15
[SPEAKER_01]: It's my favorite George Couture.
43:16
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very specific.
43:19
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also not the wild robot and nor is it a Zack Snyder movie, which I actually think in some respects, it kind of is.
43:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not gonna fight you, it isn't any of those things.
43:32
[SPEAKER_01]: But you're not making a sound very good.
43:35
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not making a sound like it's trying anything.
43:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the difference between things.
43:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It's okay for this movie to be bad, right?
43:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It bad is a choice.
43:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You can be a kids movie that's actually very emotionally affecting or at the very least really involving, you know, like I just really invested in these characters and what they're up to even if it doesn't mean much.
43:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And as little as I felt in the previous Super Mario Brothers animated movie, I felt even less of Super Mario Galaxy.
44:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It really felt like it was just going through the motions and it's just.
44:09
[SPEAKER_01]: One thing they teach you when they teach you like how to like pitch a story, how to like tell someone like a summary of the book you're writing or the screenplay or your rate of your writing is don't just say and then this happens and then this happens you want things to drive the story so that we're invested in what happens next regardless of whether it's even if it's a non-secretor like oh no that's such a huge obstacle they now have to overcome.
44:38
[SPEAKER_01]: fine.
44:38
[SPEAKER_01]: You can do a whole bit on an asteroid with a giant worm.
44:41
[SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't meet.
44:43
[SPEAKER_01]: That's has nothing to do with anything, but it's preventing them from reaching their goal.
44:47
[SPEAKER_01]: But the fuck is the goal here?
44:52
[SPEAKER_01]: stop the bag stop a bad guy like they're much more like the stakes of that like they say he has a doomsday weapon but like but like in Star Wars well they're just going to kill everybody they want to dominate everybody they want a fascistic government so they're it's not just will we or will we not die it's how will we live
45:14
[SPEAKER_01]: is at stake.
45:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And in Super Mario Galaxy, if Bowser Jr. succeeds, I don't know man, seems like he's kind of just going to hang out on his own planet.
45:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, yeah, he can't get that from Selena.
45:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That's bad.
45:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We should stop that.
45:24
[SPEAKER_00]: But like he longs for destruction.
45:26
[SPEAKER_00]: That that's his goal is to destroy the universe.
45:28
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like evil look cat.
45:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he just wants the universe to be destroyed.
45:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Was he of all the cat from earthworm gym?
45:36
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
45:36
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
45:37
[SPEAKER_00]: That's interesting.
45:39
[SPEAKER_00]: videos.
45:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I like her.
45:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I like her through him gym, but like it because the creator is a dick.
45:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, huge.
45:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
45:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, don't give him money.
45:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't give him a cent on your money.
45:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
45:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, we shouldn't move on.
45:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I think our points is well taken.
45:52
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to save the drama for last.
45:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to talk about forbidden fruits or should I go into serpent skin?
45:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell me about serpent skin.
45:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really.
45:59
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not the one you called me to see.
46:02
[SPEAKER_00]: You gave me a screener and it's just the time never manifest.
46:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard when you're an adult and you have a lot of responsibilities and in your case, a whole day job.
46:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I do work nine to five.
46:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't.
46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Simply can't watch movies that much.
46:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So the Serpent Skin is a new film from director Alice Mayo McKay.
46:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope I'm pronouncing her middle name correctly.
46:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is very forthrightly.
46:24
[SPEAKER_01]: At the beginning of the movie, it doesn't say a
46:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like Gregor Racky says a heterosexual film by Gregor Racky.
46:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's definitely got that vibe.
46:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And the serpent skin stars Alexandra McVicker, as a young woman, trans, who moves in with her sister in the big city.
46:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
46:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And
46:49
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems like this is gonna be like one of those like wallflower kind of things or like oh she's like new in the big city It's kind of got that twilight vibe on move to this town.
46:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm such an outsider turns out fucking awesome like immediately There's this cookie tattooed guy He was in a band who lives in her building First night they hook up
47:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, nice.
47:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going great.
47:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And right before they hook up, she even just says, just say, no, I'm trans.
47:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, cool.
47:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, absolutely.
47:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So he's open-minded.
47:18
[SPEAKER_01]: This guy is such a catch.
47:19
[SPEAKER_01]: This is awesome.
47:20
[SPEAKER_01]: He is not full of interest.
47:22
[SPEAKER_01]: She meets after getting a job at a cool record store.
47:26
[SPEAKER_01]: The record store is held up by a criminal, feeling money for the register.
47:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And then Star Fox shows up and everybody's like, cool, no, she scans him.
47:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it makes his head explodes like it makes his head explode but she what are they caught something that they'll call it scan and they call it like Like like you're like popping or something like that, but basically, but basically yeah, she looks really eyes Her eyes glow and this is such a low budget move.
47:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It's got such a great low budget vibe.
47:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's it looks like what a full moon picture is gave directors cut to someone interesting like that That we're dealing with here
48:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Which can be a good thing.
48:09
[SPEAKER_01]: It's fun.
48:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a fun thing.
48:11
[SPEAKER_01]: So she like her eyes go all weird and then his like And then like he runs off scared and he's face is bleeding and it turns out that there is a tattoo artist in this town who has been dreaming about her And I really like this moment early on where first you're not sure if this character is real or if she's only being dreamed And then the tattoo artist said, you better be real
48:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I like that a lot and then they meet and then she's basically explains like this is just a cool thing We can do it's a little unclear if she means all queer people or all trans people, but apparently Like we got superpowers You got superpowers Yeah, can make people's heads explode.
48:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, you can make people sense of y'all kind of superpowers basically and they They they develop their superpowers and they decide to just sort of amuse themselves they find like
49:00
[SPEAKER_00]: like queer conversion therapy like flyers and they burn them with their minds there's like a pregnant woman at a park who's not to smoke and they're like doing this cigarette out of her mouth likely um but this reminds me of a book i read called fly boy action figure comes with gas mask that sounds like something you'd read yeah yeah it's it sounds like something you would read based on the title alone uh no i i flip i mean the title drew me in but i flip through it and bought it on that because it was a lot of interest to me yeah
49:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it was about two college kids who found that they had superpowers and all they did was like, one of them could make things disappear.
49:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Just look at them and just proof they're just gone forever.
49:39
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
49:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So they do things like take down, make all the billboards and town disappear.
49:45
[SPEAKER_00]: That kind of stuff.
49:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this movie, the Serpent Skin, is very, very clearly inspired by a variety of pop culture.
49:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Media, in particular, the sort of young chosen one superhero genre.
49:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
49:56
[SPEAKER_01]: We got a lot of twilight in here.
49:57
[SPEAKER_01]: You got elements above the vampire slayer in here.
50:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So much so that that guy, she slept with that the beginning.
50:02
[SPEAKER_01]: She falls low with that tattoo artist and there's meant to be together on their grain.
50:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But that guy's married at the beginning, halfway through the movie, something supernatural happens.
50:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And now he is turned evil and is like,
50:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Sucking like the minds out of you not killing them, but he's like second their whole mind out basically No, they're just husks Um, and when he like transforms into a demon, it's this vampire makeup from Buffy like it's very very much Okay, we're really playing into it Um
50:28
[SPEAKER_01]: But all of those stories, all of those things, and some of them are more celebrated than others, some of them are considered better storytelling than others.
50:36
[SPEAKER_01]: But they all have a lot of sort of recurring light motifs.
50:41
[SPEAKER_01]: They all have stories about like sort of,
50:45
[SPEAKER_01]: the sense of puberty about like becoming someone bigger, someone stronger and more powerful, uh, being in things.
50:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, very, very excellent, very much like, you know, are my, the things that make me feel different are the things that also give me power, literally in these, in these cases.
51:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a serpent's kiss is very, very much playing with that, but it's also trying to avoid a lot of the more obvious cliches about it, like the whole thing like, oh, I got superpowers.
51:09
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to get into a bunch of fights.
51:11
[SPEAKER_01]: No, there's like one time where she really scans the hell out of someone, and I'm fry fricking up with the column, but we'll say scan through the scans the hell out of someone, and eventually they really have to stop this guy.
51:20
[SPEAKER_01]: But how they're gonna do it isn't just like kill him.
51:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and they're much more Certain things like hey, they see people have psychic powers and they it's like telekinesis and they can get inside of each other's minds That it probably make fucking better, right?
51:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's in there too.
51:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah
51:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really, really great to see this kind of media.
51:43
[SPEAKER_01]: This is fundamentally about the outsider.
51:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So much of the media we consume is about feeling different and that turns out your awesome.
51:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Luke Skywalker felt he was destined for greater things.
51:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Super Mario thought he was a plumber.
51:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yadda Yadda.
51:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, it's so rare to see one of these done well that is actually outside or art.
52:05
[SPEAKER_01]: OK, yeah.
52:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It's gone so mainstream this idea
52:09
[SPEAKER_01]: your rebellious face is now corporate sponsored.
52:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, this is something I noticed happening with a lot of media discourse throughout the sort of mid to late 2000s.
52:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea, because I grew up watching things like Tim Burton movies, which was the very fond of Tim Burton when I was a teenager.
52:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Who I ran out of, I mean, which always worked in the studio system.
52:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He always worked in the studio system, but I liked that he told stories about
52:37
[SPEAKER_00]: weren't eager to make their way in.
52:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They actually found their bliss being outside of it.
52:45
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't want to be cool.
52:46
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't want to get invited to all the parties.
52:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
52:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the parties are where the dick heads hang out.
52:50
[SPEAKER_00]: We're actually going to stay outside and create this cool quirky universe where we all live.
52:55
[SPEAKER_00]: From PB to Edward Scissorians, all of these Tim Burton characters kind of embodied that you thought.
52:59
[SPEAKER_01]: For a sense of context, if you want to look at a film that is very much considered, at least in its text,
53:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Sort of the ultimate version of this would be revenge of the nerds.
53:07
[SPEAKER_01]: They're nerds.
53:08
[SPEAKER_01]: They get revenge on the cool kids, right?
53:11
[SPEAKER_01]: They're just as bad if not worse.
53:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
53:12
[SPEAKER_01]: In the actual text of the film.
53:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
53:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether the film would do that or not.
53:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you go into, you know, sort of punk rock heavy metal.
53:20
[SPEAKER_00]: These artistic genres that deal with.
53:24
[SPEAKER_00]: hatred of, and even the destruction of the inside, that these, you get to be a creature from the outside or a violent punker, and you just get to smash the shit that kicked you out, whether it's based on resentment or just because that system doesn't work for anyone.
53:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It could be political, it could be personal.
53:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The inside was to be a shoot, and then in the late 2000s there came this idea that the inside can incorporate everyone.
53:51
[SPEAKER_00]: That outsiders are now appearing in stores and you see this in a lot of Disney pictures about how they eventually come to be accepted by everyone and they come to be on the inside And I was always uncomfortable with that because I grew up with this notion that the outside was where you want to be and it seems like we're coming back around to that again in the 20s
54:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I think so.
54:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I think everything went so mainstream.
54:13
[SPEAKER_01]: People do want to feel like they're into something cool that nobody else is into.
54:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And there has been a general flattening of the culture that we haven't seen, I think, since almost like the 60s where there was only so many TV stations and there are only so many artists who could get mainstream radio airplay.
54:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And now the algorithm does that even if the options are still available to you.
54:35
[SPEAKER_01]: It flattens out all of your choices.
54:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, for something unusual.
54:42
[SPEAKER_00]: You get to find something personal.
54:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A subculture.
54:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You get to find.
54:46
[SPEAKER_01]: We're finally getting, there was a line that lines are, they told me once.
54:50
[SPEAKER_01]: We were watching something old, old, Christmas special.
54:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was, um,
54:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it was like the king family Christmas extended giant family of like ultrawide Cruners who have been somewhat forgotten by pop culture history, but they were huge for a while and he just he said something that I've always stuck with in which was this is back
55:12
[SPEAKER_01]: when we hit there was a culture to be counter to.
55:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I finally come back around to that where it's just like now we now have a culture culture because the half of my feet is like independent comics.
55:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I'm right at that's my feet.
55:24
[SPEAKER_01]: But like, you know, half the things that I'm looking at.
55:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm exploring the serpent's kiss is really got on my radar because of Louise weird or possibly word, but she's serpent skin, right?
55:35
[SPEAKER_01]: What do I say?
55:36
[SPEAKER_00]: You said serpent's kiss.
55:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, serpent skin.
55:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
55:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an S.K.
55:41
[SPEAKER_01]: and I, I'm not wrong.
55:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm wrong.
55:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm wrong.
55:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just not, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not,
56:07
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that's where the money is.
56:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I've seen more of the Galaxy's making all the money, but I think about a film like the Serpent's skin.
56:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think about, I think some people might say, oh, that's that's so outside of it.
56:21
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not for me.
56:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a doesn't interest me.
56:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think about that scene from the Devil Wears Prada.
56:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It's great, same diverse product.
56:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this the monologue about the color blue?
56:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
56:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, just how fashion trickles down to the people.
56:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, and how the way it's just saying she's, she's like, looking at down her nose, at least people and they're talking about all these like, you know, ultra snooty fashion shows, they're going on a france or whatever like that.
56:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And Maryle says, oh, I see.
56:47
[SPEAKER_01]: So you think this has nothing to do with you.
56:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And what you don't know is that that's, that's sweater that you're wearing.
56:54
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not blue.
56:55
[SPEAKER_01]: That's serulian.
56:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And it went through this long trail of like with signers.
57:00
[SPEAKER_01]: It was through the art house aesthetic and the art house version that in movies would be called art house.
57:08
[SPEAKER_01]: It went through that.
57:09
[SPEAKER_01]: and filtered its way into the mainstream.
57:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, the stuff that you think is mainstream actually started from the weird, from the outsiders, from filmmakers who actually cared about what they were doing and were inspired by people who were doing something different and then took that and made that something more mainstream.
57:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And that more people can respond to, which I don't think is necessary because we had access to the serpent skin and it's fucking great.
57:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The outside is the head of the serpent.
57:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The center of the mainstream, the most popular thing, is the ass.
57:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the cool way to go where the shit comes out.
57:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me, well, I go on my Gen X rant.
57:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone, you might want to, I take five.
57:53
[SPEAKER_00]: So, no, we're talking about the Super Mario Galaxy movie, how it's just, you know, commercial diarrhea.
57:59
[SPEAKER_00]: We're, we're as, you're talking about this film about, a trans superhero psychics.
58:06
[SPEAKER_00]: exploding people's heads, but also just kind of exploring what it's like to be an outside or being okay with it.
58:11
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
58:12
[SPEAKER_00]: This, this, this, this is the kind of movie that we're going to, that the mainstream is going to try to imitate in 10 or 15 years.
58:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're not going to do it successfully.
58:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It might make a lot of money, but there's not going to be anything or artistically left to explore because it was just said, you just reviewed this movie.
58:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
58:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It's here now.
58:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We have these.
58:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's very interesting the metaphor you use about how, you know, the art house cinema, especially like the ultra indie, some dances to mainstream for a film like Serpent Skint.
58:47
[SPEAKER_01]: that you called that the head of the snake and you called hollywood the ass of the snake because in a way this is an oriboros this is a snake in its own tail because the serpent's skin is very much influenced by a lot of the mainstream crap well you said it's it's taking that and it's turning it it's recycling it into something that actually represents what it probably always meant
59:09
[SPEAKER_00]: There's this phenomenon called culture jamming, which is to take pop media, remix it, re-edited, and you might also call it a YouTube poop if you like.
59:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It gets rebranded for every generation, but the idea is you can take pop media and remix it and re-edited it and in so doing you're essentially unlocking the truth inside.
59:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're putting the pieces together in the correct way.
59:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I love seeing these YouTube poops and these uh, media call it a big better than this stuff.
59:37
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's the name of the phenomenon.
59:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually YouTube poops.
59:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It's called YouTube poops.
59:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not good going that.
59:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Look up YouTube now.
59:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to do that.
59:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an actual phenomenon.
59:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And even that's data.
59:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's by the way.
59:46
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be a good one.
59:47
[SPEAKER_01]: But I got, I got, I got a, I got a, I got a, I got a remove that brand distinction where you just call searching for anything googling.
59:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I got to stop doing that.
59:57
[SPEAKER_00]: No, just, yeah, search it.
59:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Look it up.
59:59
[SPEAKER_00]: You can use any technology.
1:00:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, but the idea that we can if I think I get something gross out of this, I'm going to be so mad.
1:00:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You can take popular media and turn it into something else, turning it into something actual meaningful because what we're doing is taking it.
1:00:12
[SPEAKER_00]: out of its meaningless context, and locking it into something different and giving it some kind of new meaning.
1:00:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I don't know if you're correct.
1:00:19
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a real thing.
1:00:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Real thing.
1:00:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, it's already dated.
1:00:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure it's called something else now, but yeah.
1:00:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, video matchup or a collage film.
1:00:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, YouTube.
1:00:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like there are times when we come, but there's like 20 years old that term.
1:00:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but like we come up with something new or something fresh or like a new way to look at, a pre-existing thing.
1:00:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And then sometimes it ends up with like the worst label.
1:00:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's montage.
1:00:49
[SPEAKER_01]: That's editing.
1:00:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a fundamental part of the filmmaking process.
1:00:53
[SPEAKER_01]: You're talking about re-exing or mashing off of your life.
1:00:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You could have.
1:00:56
[SPEAKER_01]: We went with YouTube, Boobs.
1:00:58
[SPEAKER_01]: What were we thinking?
1:00:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like when we like, oh listen, we have this new kind of like wave of horror that is very severe and very violent.
1:01:07
[SPEAKER_01]: What are we going to call it, portrait porn?
1:01:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Damn.
1:01:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Surely.
1:01:11
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a more graceful look.
1:01:12
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:13
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:14
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:15
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:15
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:16
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:17
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:18
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:19
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:22
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:23
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a more graceful look.
1:01:25
[SPEAKER_01]: even joyable.
1:01:27
[SPEAKER_01]: People are supposed to people are supposed to want to show porn.
1:01:30
[SPEAKER_00]: You take it's instead of sex porn.
1:01:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It's torture porn.
1:01:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You remove the sex.
1:01:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But the whole guy is too scary in its place.
1:01:35
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's supposed to scare you.
1:01:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It's supposed to, I, I firmly believe that if you boil it down to like the mainstream like culture, there's like drama and comedy, right?
1:01:45
[SPEAKER_01]: There's art, you're supposed to take seriously in our, you're not supposed to take seriously.
1:01:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, right?
1:01:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there's the other side of
1:01:53
[SPEAKER_01]: to foresighted plan, whatever the fun.
1:01:56
[SPEAKER_01]: The foresighted plan.
1:01:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, like, drama and humor are by willing to be.
1:02:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Drama humor are somewhat intellectual and that you have to sort of relate to people in order to feel their feelings and you have to understand the concept of absurdity in order to understand how humor works.
1:02:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Even if it's innate, you still have to understand it.
1:02:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:02:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the other part of that cinematically is that there are
1:02:19
[SPEAKER_01]: movies that are designed more than anything else.
1:02:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Forget plot, forget jokes.
1:02:25
[SPEAKER_01]: They're trying to elicit an emotional or a visceral response.
1:02:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the two sides of that coin are enjoyment and revulsion.
1:02:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So I would argue that a film like hostile is revulsion and a film that
1:02:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't, I think they're kind of opposite, they're all part of like a cinematic medium that's designed only to get a visceral impact, but they're trying for very, they're trying for opposite things.
1:02:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think those, that's a key distinction.
1:03:01
[SPEAKER_00]: They are, but I, I find that a certain kind of artistic daring, we're way off in the weeds here.
1:03:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care.
1:03:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fine.
1:03:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I think, I think there's a, get a stock in what this is good.
1:03:08
[SPEAKER_00]: There, there's a tendency to think of art.
1:03:12
[SPEAKER_00]: All art films, especially mainstream films, but in general, but all art, even wider speaking,
1:03:19
[SPEAKER_00]: uh, to draw you in.
1:03:21
[SPEAKER_00]: You hear that phrase a lot from critics.
1:03:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They draw you in it immerses you.
1:03:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of power.
1:03:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It compels you.
1:03:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You're kind of like, physically push toward the screen in some kind of way to be sort of immersed in this fictional world that's being created for you.
1:03:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And surely we've all had the experience where we're seeing something that is just so revelatory or just so hypnotic in such a way that we do feel kind of like Ver, at least temporarily immersed within this piece of art.
1:03:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't even have to be a film.
1:03:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I can be a piece of music.
1:03:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Video games, attempt this almost all the time.
1:03:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:03:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I find there's a lot to be admired about a work of art whose very function is to push you out.
1:04:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Is to reveal you is to take all notions of artistry and good taste and deliberately defy and defy all of those rules.
1:04:15
[SPEAKER_01]: You're a film critic in the universe of the movie of Clockwork Orange Defending the Ludovico Technic.
1:04:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, I think there's a lot going for it here in the juxtaposition of the horrifying imagery and Beethoven's night is actually there I don't even say you're wrong, but I do think it's interesting that we still have to take into account as critics what is the intent of the the author that's Because you have to read as we watch this right because I think I'm watching a your book or I film yeah
1:04:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I'm not disgusted he's not doing it right.
1:04:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like I film like that is supposed to disgust and then you have a film like the Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Galaxy movie, which is supposed to be very inviting.
1:04:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It's supposed to be immersive and yet you and I people who want a movie version of this and watch it's a kind of emotional engagement with this.
1:05:02
[SPEAKER_01]: But anyway, we have a very low bar for that.
1:05:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the tiny you spit that
1:05:07
[SPEAKER_01]: at least for me, made me feel, you know, a modest amount of repulsion, where I was just like, this is, you're forcing me away.
1:05:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to enjoy you.
1:05:18
[SPEAKER_01]: You're very pretty.
1:05:19
[SPEAKER_01]: You're very inviting.
1:05:21
[SPEAKER_01]: All of your sound effects have been like fine tuned over decades to be just like just wonderful reminders of how seeing days you could have put the bare minimum effort into this, story wise,
1:05:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And I end up, but a movie like Serpent's kiss, which doesn't have all of that serpent skin, damn it, it's been it again.
1:05:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I am so sorry, the serpent skin, the movie like Serpent's skin, doesn't have all of that technical flash.
1:05:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Doesn't have that that sheen that we tend to think it was very inviting, but in its low fidelity,
1:06:01
[SPEAKER_01]: is actually significantly more inviting.
1:06:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And that way that I think the best indie, especially indie genre films tend to do because if you watch like an indie genre list, there's a certain sense of authenticity.
1:06:13
[SPEAKER_01]: When you watch like an indie drama or an indie comedy, it's only very realistic, you know, there's a sense of reality that we're getting here, but in the serpent's skin.
1:06:23
[SPEAKER_01]: There's obviously we're dealing with the supernatural and we're dealing with the mythology and all this kind of stuff and so that's not realistic.
1:06:30
[SPEAKER_01]: But what I'm connecting to very personally is the metaphor, the allegory, and also when I find this is particularly true in genre cinema of a low budget, I'm connecting to the filmmakers.
1:06:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, I can see the sea.
1:06:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So I can see the wires.
1:06:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I can see it like it's like when you're watching the evil dead Yeah, that's the flying eyeball has a wire on it.
1:06:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I do not care I am invested in that highball flying across the room and into so it's mouth and that's in there That they tell the story of their own making exactly and I am aware that people who are very passionate about what they were doing
1:07:01
[SPEAKER_01]: made the serpent's skin.
1:07:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And even if they didn't have a ton of money to do it, and it could have looked a little a little more polished or a lot more polished even.
1:07:10
[SPEAKER_01]: That lack of polish is more immersive to me in terms of not necessarily the narrative, but in terms of the experience of watching the movie, then superficial gloss just by itself is.
1:07:23
[SPEAKER_00]: some prints are going to be more interest like that is a little bit of great on your movie.
1:07:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You can see the fingerprints on it.
1:07:30
[SPEAKER_00]: That's always going to be more interesting to me than something that's been polished to a high shit.
1:07:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's like to be fair.
1:07:36
[SPEAKER_00]: There are highly polished movies that I do enjoy.
1:07:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, they look at their make-and-be great.
1:07:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes movies have a little bit of grit on them and they would do better with a bit of... Oh yeah, there's no, this is not a universal rule.
1:07:46
[SPEAKER_01]: No, but we're talking about how art can work and how
1:07:53
[SPEAKER_01]: that a giant budget movie can also vice versa.
1:07:55
[SPEAKER_01]: The thumbprint thing, maybe think of something I think about a lot when I want everyone to think about how many works of art you've never seen in person.
1:08:05
[SPEAKER_01]: You've seen pictures of the Mona Lisa, right?
1:08:08
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you see the picture, unless you've got like the most high resolution version of it, if you're really scanning, but you're not going to see the brush strokes the way that you would if you was in person.
1:08:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the with the light falls on it so you can get the benchy painted the way you can look at a work of art and you can see the brush stroke and you can just feel like okay at some point someone did
1:08:27
[SPEAKER_01]: this, the site little twist or something like that, with exactly the wrong color, would've been, it's why I love Impressionism.
1:08:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It's nice, I love it.
1:08:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, we should move on, my point is this movie is, again, this is for a particular audience, I think some people don't necessarily care for the ultra low budget genre aesthetics, some people think it just looks kind of cheap.
1:08:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I recommend that you give it a try and work through that because there's something very genuine and very interesting here, something that,
1:08:55
[SPEAKER_01]: connects to the mainstream art that we've all been absorbing since we were kids whether we intended to or not and finds a way to make it personal again and actually seems to sort of unlock the power of it.
1:09:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:09:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell me about forbidden fruits.
1:09:09
[SPEAKER_00]: forbidden fruits.
1:09:10
[SPEAKER_00]: This is also another very low budget film.
1:09:13
[SPEAKER_00]: This was put out, um,
1:09:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, this was produced by Diablo Cody, uh, it was, uh, Corridon, directed by Meredith Alloway, based, uh, and also covered in by Lily Houghton, based on her play.
1:09:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I had to look up the title of the play.
1:09:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, of the woman came the beginning of sin and through her, we all die.
1:09:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Love the title of the play.
1:09:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's some point, uh, in this movie, um, one of the main characters played by Lily Ryan Hart, uh, put on a tank top with the whole title, printed on it.
1:09:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you, did you like stand up in the audience and share?
1:09:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I was looking up the movie so I knew what that meant, but for a lot of people it's just going to be like sort of a biblical reference I get my whole thing as anytime someone says the name of the movie that I'm watching in the movie.
1:09:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a clap I think I what the tone is.
1:09:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I did it during faces of death and I was like, yeah What are these faces faces of death?
1:10:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I wish it was like a layered blur mirror line.
1:10:07
[SPEAKER_01]: There's this one Steven Segal movie called Half Pass Dead, which I I know I've seen, I remember nothing about it.
1:10:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I just remember that in my head there was a line of dialogue from this movie that isn't there.
1:10:18
[SPEAKER_01]: What time is it?
1:10:19
[SPEAKER_01]: What time is it?
1:10:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's half past dead.
1:10:22
[SPEAKER_01]: They haven't, why doesn't that end there?
1:10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: That should be in there.
1:10:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a terrible one, moving on.
1:10:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, forbidden fruits takes place in a mall in Dallas, Texas, specifically in a store called free Eden, a significant name, inside free Eden.
1:10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And we see this in an opening montage.
1:10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: We meet Apple, Fig, and Cherry.
1:10:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Apple is played by Lily Ryan Hart, who is one of the Riverdale's biggest played by Alexander Ship.
1:10:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I like Alexander ship, but just she makes some interesting choices.
1:11:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And Cherius played by an actress named Victoria Pendretty, she's a star, she's fantastic.
1:11:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And they have sort of a Mean Girls vibe.
1:11:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They're all very well dressed.
1:11:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The costume designing in this movie, spawn on.
1:11:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't just go to the mall.
1:11:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They designed costumes for these characters.
1:11:19
[SPEAKER_00]: They communicate everything we need to know about them.
1:11:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We know right away, just by looking at their fashion and the way people regard them, that these characters are witches.
1:11:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Somehow we just know.
1:11:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They're like catty mean girls.
1:11:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and they're led by I think you can just say Mean Girls.
1:11:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Mate, yeah, it's kind of in there.
1:11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: They're, they're, they're kind of cruel, but they're very highly respected.
1:11:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And they explain and sort of in dialogue that there is this hierarchy within mall workers.
1:11:48
[SPEAKER_00]: We also learn that they have some very specific rules.
1:11:51
[SPEAKER_00]: These three women with each other, they're not allowed to date men.
1:11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not allowed to date in the food court.
1:11:58
[SPEAKER_00]: That is very good.
1:11:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Very specifically the food court.
1:12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Anywhere in the mall is fine.
1:12:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But this young woman, whose name is Pumpkin, technically a fruit.
1:12:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I was about to ask, yeah.
1:12:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt like that was a fruit.
1:12:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's got seed.
1:12:11
[SPEAKER_01]: It's got seeds on the inside.
1:12:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:12:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It was why strawberry isn't a fruit.
1:12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Strawberry is not, yeah.
1:12:17
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, watermelon is a berry, but it's like, I think a strawberry is not botanically a berry.
1:12:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Comic.
1:12:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Pumpkin who's played by actress a little bit, little a tongue.
1:12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: She works at like the Wetzel's pretzels.
1:12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they're called like salt daddy.
1:12:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I forgot what it was.
1:12:34
[SPEAKER_00]: She follows them around.
1:12:36
[SPEAKER_00]: She's really, really interested in these people.
1:12:38
[SPEAKER_00]: She offers them uh, pretzel bites and there's like a little bit of weird back and forth.
1:12:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you take the pretzel bites?
1:12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the ritual for accepting them?
1:12:47
[SPEAKER_00]: She follows them into free Eden and she said, no, you can need to come back and eventually it's revealed that she wants to leave the pretzel place and get a job at free Eden, okay?
1:12:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Working at free Eden isn't just a job, it's a process.
1:13:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to go through an initiation ritual.
1:13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, you have to go through magical initiation, ritual in the back room where they pour blood.
1:13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: They cut themselves and pour blood into like this, a jewel and crusted cowboy boot.
1:13:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They have to go into the changing room and confess their sins to the ghost of Marilyn Monroe, who is their daddy.
1:13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: They take off their underpants and squeeze them out into the boot and then you have to drink it.
1:13:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so this is a retail establishment animal, right?
1:13:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
1:13:33
[SPEAKER_01]: What's the turnover in a place like this?
1:13:35
[SPEAKER_01]: You go through all of that and then you have to go work at Suncoast?
1:13:38
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing, we don't, I started to get the impression that these people have been working here for like a century.
1:13:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Like these are, I don't think these are around them.
1:13:45
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but like the, the freedom is like the latest iteration.
1:13:49
[SPEAKER_01]: There doesn't, there hasn't been around them.
1:13:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be like at least the mid 20 and they do talk it's lithic terms about Sharon the manager and we never see Sharon.
1:13:59
[SPEAKER_00]: We always we'll see our hands.
1:14:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I feel like trash from barbans there
1:14:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, do we never see Trish?
1:14:07
[SPEAKER_00]: If you seem to have a star, I don't remember.
1:14:08
[SPEAKER_01]: She's the one that they talk about all on the plane and I don't remember one, that's fine.
1:14:14
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a bit of a funny, if you got it, quickly.
1:14:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Trish has played by, we don't see her face until I got it.
1:14:18
[SPEAKER_00]: In the very, until the end of the movie, but Trish has played by Gabriel Union in this movie.
1:14:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Her name is in Trish and this movie.
1:14:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Trish is in the first.
1:14:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Or sorry, Sharon in this movie.
1:14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I look at Gabriel Union, she's great.
1:14:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're kind of sinking into this world.
1:14:31
[SPEAKER_00]: This very campy, over-dressed kind of sub-jamey, babbit level of camp in the world of witches in forbidden fruits.
1:14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And we actually start to learn that pumpkin actually has a little bit of an ulterior motive.
1:14:48
[SPEAKER_00]: She starts to so discord amongst this coffin.
1:14:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh no.
1:14:52
[SPEAKER_00]: And her motivations for doing so will eventually be revealed.
1:14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, this is an incredibly low budget movie.
1:14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: They clearly just went to the local mall and asked if they could shoot during the off-hours, kind of like chopping mall.
1:15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm, I, Victoria Pendretti, there's no better way to put this has Leneaquigli energy.
1:15:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that kind of, aggressively, like a little bit bubbly, but very charismatic kind of screen presence.
1:15:19
[SPEAKER_00]: She just steals everything she's in.
1:15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:15:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Lily Reinhardt is actually the weak link in this movie, she's she's very lovely they dress her very well She has a little bit of this sort of queen be energy, but we need somebody who had who could Nationed this role.
1:15:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We need a little bit more John Watersish kind of a wildness to her character And it's a little bit too stealing and tight-lipped for this to really come across as like a camp classic But this is the the grounds were playing on and I admire
1:15:51
[SPEAKER_00]: This universe, it's created, especially on such a low budget, this idea of mall witches who have their own fashion and their own rules and how the magic and the fashion are kind of like, so tightly interlaced, we don't even acknowledge their interlacing, they're just sort of one in the same.
1:16:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I like all of that.
1:16:11
[SPEAKER_00]: This however is one of those films that could use another layer of polish.
1:16:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little too long for one.
1:16:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We kind of explore the same thing over and over again.
1:16:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Once we've sort of figured it out, it starts spinning.
1:16:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It's wheels.
1:16:24
[SPEAKER_00]: We learned that there was a member of their coven, a young woman named Pickle, who might still be living in the walls of the wall.
1:16:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Pickle or fruit?
1:16:33
[SPEAKER_00]: cucumbers or fruit.
1:16:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if it has seeds, it's a fruit.
1:16:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
1:16:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But technically speaking.
1:16:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
1:16:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I just found out that fish isn't a real thing.
1:16:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Fish?
1:16:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:16:45
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no actual.
1:16:46
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
1:16:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Fish is not like a specific classification of animal.
1:16:53
[SPEAKER_01]: It's basically just anything in the ocean that swims.
1:16:56
[SPEAKER_00]: is a fish.
1:16:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there isn't like this is not a fish or this is a fish.
1:17:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Fish is a very blank turn.
1:17:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, it's like, it's like bug bug.
1:17:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
1:17:06
[SPEAKER_01]: A bug used to be an insect or an arachnid.
1:17:08
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just kind of this larger sort of net.
1:17:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:17:11
[SPEAKER_01]: This is my understanding.
1:17:13
[SPEAKER_01]: If someone is of the science,
1:17:15
[SPEAKER_01]: if we have a geologists list yes or anyone who maybe has done more reading than I have about stuff that isn't movies uh and you want to clarify how fish works because i've seen multiple podcasts and tv shows be snooty about this now as if it's something we all should have always known like like tomato is a fruit
1:17:36
[SPEAKER_01]: That is well known, that's like when you're watching a movie and some of those, you know, and actually the mask in Halloween was a William Shadner, a mask that painted white.
1:17:43
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not even trivia anymore.
1:17:45
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just standard knowledge.
1:17:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone knows tomato is a fruit.
1:17:50
[SPEAKER_01]: A cucumber's a fruit?
1:17:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about, okay, novel.
1:17:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole fish thing, someone just started talking about that a month ago.
1:17:59
[SPEAKER_01]: That is very new.
1:18:01
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't get to be snobby about that one.
1:18:03
[SPEAKER_00]: you're being informative assuming it's accurate if it's not accurate someone please correct me moving on but yeah i i i admire how they did a lot with a little i like the universe they created this weird kind of campy whichy uh sort of pseudo feminist uh fashion obsessed corner of the galaxy i like all of that um it could
1:18:31
[SPEAKER_00]: What the film is lacking is a certain degree of queerness.
1:18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: There's these four women who are kind of forming this coven together.
1:18:39
[SPEAKER_00]: You would think that there'd be a little bit of queer energy between these women, a kind of attraction between them, using their feminine energies to sort of explode through the world.
1:18:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's also something that's kind of lack of it.
1:18:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, does it feel like it's supposed to be in there and they're not addressing it, or does it feel like everyone is had a row and that's not what you'd expect?
1:18:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, it feels like they're not addressing it because they're, they, they're, these women are constantly complementing each other.
1:19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: There's scenes where they're undressing in front of another.
1:19:05
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a little bit of sexual tension that I think is not being leaned into in a way that I kind of expected.
1:19:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I would, I admire what the director, Meredith, all the way is doing.
1:19:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But I, maybe I was just sort of thinking too much of Jamie Babin.
1:19:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Who's a criminal filmmaker, right, to sort of bring that energy to it.
1:19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Fair enough.
1:19:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the last film they were reviewing is pretty big relics.
1:19:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Once again, this is the drama, I'll warn you when we get to the spoiler portion, but it will be very soon.
1:19:34
[SPEAKER_01]: The drama is a new film from that one guy.
1:19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: His name is Christopher Borgley.
1:19:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and he directed that Nicholas Cage movie the other year was Dream Center.
1:19:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Dream Center, yeah.
1:19:48
[SPEAKER_01]: That movie starred Nicholas Cage as a very mild manner and a neurotic college professor.
1:19:54
[SPEAKER_01]: He was like an entomologist or something, or maybe a behavioral, it's like always something.
1:19:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Nerd, for no reason that anyone can ascertain,
1:20:04
[SPEAKER_01]: has started popping up into everyone's dreams, whether they've met him or not, like all over the world.
1:20:10
[SPEAKER_01]: People started dreaming of this guy, play by Nicholas Cage, and this gives him a sudden, very unexpected brush with celebrity, which of course,
1:20:22
[SPEAKER_01]: gradually turn sour and it is a none to subtle metaphor for people becoming accidentally internet famous because they happened to be in a video or they happened to find a whole family.
1:20:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, especially people who didn't intend it.
1:20:39
[SPEAKER_01]: movie raise a lot of questions.
1:20:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I wasn't a huge fan because I didn't think the answers were terribly interesting, but we're off to the races again, because Board Lee's latest film, the drama stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.
1:20:51
[SPEAKER_01]: They meet.
1:20:53
[SPEAKER_01]: They fall in love.
1:20:54
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a meat cutish.
1:20:57
[SPEAKER_01]: They fall in love.
1:20:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're going to get married.
1:20:59
[SPEAKER_01]: This is all the beginning of the movie.
1:21:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And then right before, like a week before the wedding, they are having dinner
1:21:08
[SPEAKER_01]: They're testing the entree.
1:21:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to serve it their own wedding.
1:21:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
1:21:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And they've just been drinking wine and like, oh, maybe we'll try this time.
1:21:13
[SPEAKER_01]: There's something else.
1:21:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll get them kind of tipsy.
1:21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And they all decide to, well, they don't all decide.
1:21:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it a Lana Hiam?
1:21:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Lana Hiam.
1:21:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:21:21
[SPEAKER_01]: She plays the, uh, the maid of honor.
1:21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:21:24
[SPEAKER_01]: She basically convinces everyone to,
1:21:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Do a party game in which everyone, these are all best friends.
1:21:30
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no judgment here.
1:21:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to go around the table revealing the worst thing they have ever done in their whole lives.
1:21:39
[SPEAKER_00]: which seems like a movie can drive us.
1:21:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure that's a thing people have done.
1:21:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if that's a group activity.
1:21:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like that's something you might do with your partner before you get married.
1:21:48
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something, yeah, like, you know, it's a very interesting friend.
1:21:51
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a reason why, it's a Catholic thing, but the reason why confessional is private.
1:21:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
1:21:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like everyone.
1:21:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Because in theory, you feel really bad about it and if everyone knows the absolute worst thing you've ever done, they might judge you for it, even if that's not who you are anymore.
1:22:07
[SPEAKER_01]: although maybe you do deserve it.
1:22:08
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it depends on the context, right?
1:22:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, they all go around the table.
1:22:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people's stories are worse than others.
1:22:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they get around his end day up.
1:22:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And then day is thing that she confesses is extremely shocking.
1:22:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And it makes Robert Pattinson question whether or not he really knows her and whether or not he wants to get married to her, whether or not he's a love author and it makes her best friends hate her.
1:22:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're about to explain what that thing is, even though the trailers
1:22:32
[SPEAKER_01]: do not talk about it, but we cannot discuss this movie in any detail, like literally any detail, without at least telling you the Insighting Insighting Insighting Insighting.
1:22:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're afraid of spoilers, you can skip ahead to the review round-up down where you can call it a day, and that's fine, and we love you.
1:22:45
[SPEAKER_00]: What you confess is the worst thing the other people did were worse.
1:22:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, they're back because there was, there were things that actually did.
1:22:57
[SPEAKER_00]: There were the, yeah, what she confesses is that when she was a teenager, she went through a very dark, depressive, disconnected period where she started to spend a little too much time online and became very drawn to the, what she called it, the aesthetics of school shooters.
1:23:19
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
1:23:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And she actually had a gun in her home, her father had a rifle.
1:23:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Yep.
1:23:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And she brought it to school with every intention of committing murder.
1:23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:23:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, something happened where she didn't.
1:23:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Hmm.
1:23:33
[SPEAKER_00]: She didn't commit murder.
1:23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And she never did anything like it again.
1:23:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And she even dedicated the rest of her life to protesting and fighting for gun reform.
1:23:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
1:23:42
[SPEAKER_00]: This is an interesting arc that a real person might go through.
1:23:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:23:46
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a really,
1:23:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously, the reality of that is extremely terrible and it's happening and it has been happening far too often and it's terrible and it's disturbing and the people who do it, that's a whole thing.
1:24:02
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's someone who thought about something doing something terrible and didn't, and never did.
1:24:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And the question is, is the temptation to do something that terrible?
1:24:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Sully you as a person or at least in the eyes of the people.
1:24:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's the thing.
1:24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the eyes of the people that knew you that really concerns me about this movie because this doesn't become about her arc.
1:24:25
[SPEAKER_00]: She actually she's completed her she's completed her arc and she's surrounded by people who offer her no understanding.
1:24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah
1:24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: and rather than call them out on it, the movie stays with them expecting us to share their feelings.
1:24:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, that we would look at this person and see them as now a horrendous monster who had this impulse, these impulse of thoughts as a teenager, specifically teenage, specifically were focused on Robert Pattinson, who was, again, was literally just about to marry her and granted,
1:24:56
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a revelation.
1:24:57
[SPEAKER_01]: This is something I didn't know about you.
1:24:59
[SPEAKER_01]: This might cause some doubts or no, something that needs to talk about.
1:25:02
[SPEAKER_01]: That, that is reasonable.
1:25:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The scene where he says, tell me more about what you were going through.
1:25:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:25:08
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to understand this.
1:25:10
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
1:25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Never comes.
1:25:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's not true.
1:25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: He does.
1:25:13
[SPEAKER_00]: But he makes her uncomfortable.
1:25:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He makes her really uncomfortable.
1:25:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He throws this in her face.
1:25:18
[SPEAKER_00]: He gets really nervous around her.
1:25:21
[SPEAKER_01]: He's initially, he tries to make it seem like he's being sensitive and he just wants to understand and he has to go through every detail even the things that she's gone through already and it's just judging of terrible memories.
1:25:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But the way he's doing her is doing her really uncomfortable.
1:25:38
[SPEAKER_01]: No, the way he's doing it is a very selfish way.
1:25:40
[SPEAKER_01]: You obviously, you would want to.
1:25:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I would like to understand this more before we get there.
1:25:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think that's not in a reasonable conversation.
1:25:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I have even though it's a very tough conversation, I have.
1:25:50
[SPEAKER_01]: This movie very specifically wants to have this conversation about the way we judge other people, the dream scenarios are very similar, the way that we look upon judge and decide how we feel about other people on how that kind of creates a narrative around them, whether there's anything to do with them, very much on board, at least mind.
1:26:13
[SPEAKER_01]: When I wrote my review, and I made the decision not to discuss the thing because I actually think, in the end, for all the good it does this movie, what she confesses to or what she confesses to almost doing.
1:26:29
[SPEAKER_01]: is almost irrelevant because it's an intellectual exercise to boardly.
1:26:33
[SPEAKER_01]: He just wants to talk about what if someone, she could have thought about killing her parents.
1:26:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:26:38
[SPEAKER_01]: She could have thought about doing any other horrible thing and almost do it.
1:26:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And then did.
1:26:44
[SPEAKER_01]: and the question is, there's almost doing something, make you a bad person, and we can have that conversation.
1:26:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That might even be an interesting conversation, especially considering Robert Pattinson really really takes this too far.
1:26:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Over the course of the movie, he gradually implodes.
1:27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of the film, he goes insane thinking about it.
1:27:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, it's his problem.
1:27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have no sympathy for his arc.
1:27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Because he is such a terrible person now,
1:27:12
[SPEAKER_00]: This would have been handled a lot more with a lot more nuance and subtlety by Neil Abut, brackets, pejorative.
1:27:21
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the kind of like shocking, like shock drama, of Neil Abut wrote on a regular band.
1:27:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Neil Abut made some movies I really like, and I think
1:27:32
[SPEAKER_00]: in the company of man is a good explosion of a misogyny in the workplace.
1:27:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I think your friends and neighbors is a good explosion of just general hatred within romantic relationship.
1:27:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, just end of the near of respect to social acceptability, social acceptability, how terrible people really are.
1:27:50
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's actually really critical, but it's cynical, but I think it's a great film.
1:27:54
[SPEAKER_00]: But I feel like in other later films, he tried to go too far into
1:28:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I think he lost whatever edge he had.
1:28:04
[SPEAKER_01]: I think he kind of used it all up and didn't have a lot left or later.
1:28:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And he can try to hit it again and never found the right piece.
1:28:11
[SPEAKER_01]: The person I was thinking about the most when I was watching the drama.
1:28:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Because more than anything, like this intellectual moral ethical exercise, not with standing.
1:28:21
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a story about
1:28:23
[SPEAKER_01]: upper-crossed, I think they're New Yorkers, big city people, upper-crossed big city people, well-educated, but not wise, and their relationships exploded.
1:28:32
[SPEAKER_01]: First, I thought the most about was Woody Allen.
1:28:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that's also fair.
1:28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's something about, Woody Allen would have turned the rubber patents in character, though, his, like, his hysteria would have even seen as, like,
1:28:42
[SPEAKER_01]: it absurd or commit it right and and like it hit you'd be the but he would be the buttock no no I think he would be the buttock the joke or I think and I want to talk about sort of the the uh macro narrative or the whatever the super narrative of this um you'll get a films that Woody Allen and I know Woody Allen these terrible and I'm he but he made these movies and they were influential before people you know finally turned on uh too late uh but from the crimes and misdemeanors
1:29:12
[SPEAKER_01]: something like match point or even selling Manhattan where there are these main characters who do something truly terrible and don't have any consequences for that because the the point of the story it is the story they don't say but here's the thing that when you're watching those movies especially when you're watching Manhattan specifically Manhattan is one of Woody Allen's like more serious
1:29:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Dramedy, but leaning more towards serious relationship movie, isn't the most of his movies where, and which Alan played the Woody Allen character, he was playing himself.
1:29:50
[SPEAKER_01]: And his love interest was like 16 or 17.
1:29:54
[SPEAKER_01]: 17, yeah, played by Merrill Heming.
1:29:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Who was also a teenager.
1:29:58
[SPEAKER_01]: That movie doesn't consider that romance terribly creepy.
1:30:03
[SPEAKER_00]: No, not for a second.
1:30:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
1:30:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people will say that's a little unwise to him, but it's not seen as like illegal or creepy or that it or that it stains him and their eyes.
1:30:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you watch that movie not knowing any of the context, you might be able to intellectualize it and say, well, we're asking tough questions, aren't we?
1:30:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And then once you know any of the context, you realize, is this just confessional?
1:30:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's hard to watch a film like there's certain Woody Allen films that I think it is possible to watch without being like stabbed in the eyes with what we know about Woody Allen.
1:30:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but a lot of his movies that's not possible.
1:30:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think Matchpoint and Crenson semesters and any movie about basically getting away with murder, literally figuratively, has that feeling.
1:30:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I'm watching the drama, I'm thinking about how Woody Allen handled in a very intellectual way.
1:30:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And a comedic way, and I think the drama understands that this is darkly humorous of the way that Robert Pattinson is dealing with it.
1:31:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm watching this movie, and I'm thinking to myself, am I giving boardly too much credit?
1:31:12
[SPEAKER_01]: If I take this as like an intellectual, like an interesting intellectual exercise
1:31:19
[SPEAKER_01]: is the moral compass of this film actually off in a way that is deeply uncomfortable.
1:31:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there are things about this movie that I think are interesting and that I think Brown Pattinson is really going full-bore in this and I can respect that.
1:31:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not good for the movie, but he is putting the energy in.
1:31:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I kind of like the movie he's in better, but I feel like he's doing the video.
1:31:49
[SPEAKER_01]: There are things that I kind of like about this movie and was able to get invested in.
1:31:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing that I don't that really turn me off, because it basically, when you deal with the movie with this much controversial material, this much subject matter, we're going to really delve into the possibilities of potential consequences.
1:32:08
[SPEAKER_01]: How it ends is going to be very important for what we take away from it.
1:32:15
[SPEAKER_01]: How do the characters turn up?
1:32:17
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the storytellers overall point?
1:32:20
[SPEAKER_01]: What are they trying to convey here?
1:32:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they going to leave it ambiguous?
1:32:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Then we're just having a conversation.
1:32:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they going to come to a conclusion?
1:32:28
[SPEAKER_01]: The conclusion that the drama comes to, I do not buy for one fucking second.
1:32:32
[SPEAKER_00]: No, they try to wrap it up, and it needs to end messy, and it doesn't, yeah, it almost does, it gets messy along the way.
1:32:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Really?
1:32:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish it had been a little, a little messier.
1:32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that we're looking at Robert Pattinson through all of this and his neuroses and he's trying and Christopher boroughly is trying to present him as like kind of the sympathetic figure that we're supposed to completely relate to.
1:33:03
[SPEAKER_00]: He really wants to be loving and forgiving, but there's something about him that he can't forgive these impulses that is why it's all about him.
1:33:10
[SPEAKER_00]: We're never looking at her.
1:33:13
[SPEAKER_00]: We're never looking at her result.
1:33:14
[SPEAKER_00]: She's a mystery.
1:33:15
[SPEAKER_00]: She's a mystery, and there's something really unsafe about this.
1:33:19
[SPEAKER_00]: They cast Zendan, that's wrong.
1:33:21
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of context for the real life, you know, something that we're not addressing about and they they talk and dialogue about how
1:33:32
[SPEAKER_00]: shooters tend to be white men straight white men the vast majority and and here is a a black teenage girl yeah
1:33:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Considering that's yes and outlier at most and she only ever talks about how she was kind of drawn to the aesthetics of it That's kind of an interesting notion the something about the violence is the way it presents Well, it's also the isolation that she feels it feels like only people who are going to these extremes understand that isolation because she's ostracized Yeah, why is she ostracized the fact that we're not looking at her as a person that we're not looking at
1:34:11
[SPEAKER_00]: her role in shootings and her absorption of violence as a young black woman.
1:34:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it is.
1:34:19
[SPEAKER_00]: makes her seem like a little bit more like an object.
1:34:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like that the filmmakers are just handling her so irresponsibly.
1:34:28
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
1:34:28
[SPEAKER_00]: We're directing all of her all of our higher at this symbolic black woman and the violence that she might have committed.
1:34:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're not.
1:34:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're focusing on the white guys feelings about that.
1:34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
1:34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than her as a character.
1:34:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Which is one of the reasons why, even though she did, you know, if I found out someone I knew had
1:34:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I would that would that would be surprise I would think about that might want to have conversation about that But if they didn't it's been their whole life trying to make the opposite of that happen my instinct overall would be that's someone who changed
1:35:04
[SPEAKER_00]: That's somebody who did, yeah, thought about what they did change their life that for the better they explained very explicitly Yeah, she devoted her life to Stopping gun violence and went to all these protests.
1:35:17
[SPEAKER_00]: They bring it up.
1:35:18
[SPEAKER_00]: There was multiple times.
1:35:19
[SPEAKER_01]: There were there elements of the story that were about how like I almost did this thing and then this other thing happened that made me More empathetic and made other people more empathetic towards me and that and that isolation that led her to only
1:35:33
[SPEAKER_01]: perceive other outsiders who are going to these streams as people who understand what she's feeling started to go away.
1:35:40
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not having that series conversation.
1:35:42
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not talking about how, like she's in a small town, what appears to be almost not entirely white school.
1:35:49
[SPEAKER_00]: That level of ostracization is she's in a battery.
1:35:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And well, they're not doing a really bad.
1:35:58
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not doing into that aspect of it at all.
1:36:00
[SPEAKER_01]: If anything, it feels like they're trying so hard.
1:36:04
[SPEAKER_01]: to make sure that they can talk their way out of this person being a bad person.
1:36:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:36:11
[SPEAKER_01]: That ultimately, I cannot sympathize with Robert Pattinson.
1:36:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because, okay, yeah, that's a shocking revelation.
1:36:18
[SPEAKER_01]: She's exactly who you thought she was.
1:36:21
[SPEAKER_01]: She just went through something terrible.
1:36:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That's it.
1:36:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he never even says, oh, well, that explains why you reacted that way to this one thing that one time.
1:36:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he never offers her any understanding.
1:36:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think the filmmakers are even trying to give her all.
1:36:38
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Zindaya is giving more to this role than the script is, or the filmmakers.
1:36:44
[SPEAKER_01]: She's the only person who's looking at this character like they're a human being.
1:36:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's basically after the first 10 minutes.
1:36:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And like,
1:36:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's not great.
1:36:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I have to review this one very quickly after I saw it.
1:36:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a film that, you know, I'm gonna think about that.
1:36:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Not necessarily whether I like it, but certainly like what's it doing, how is it doing?
1:37:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's going after a lot.
1:37:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wish I'd had a little bit more time to really put my gestive, but just put my thoughts cogent.
1:37:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, because again, there are things, I don't think this is like, there are things in this movie that I think are interesting.
1:37:20
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if I had had 24 more hours to think about it before I had to turn in this review, my review would have been a negative unwrapped tomatoes.
1:37:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
1:37:29
[SPEAKER_01]: As it was, I was like, I'm intellectually intrigued enough that despite my reservations, I think there might be something we're seeing here.
1:37:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And the more I've thought about it, the more I realize, well, I still think they're intellectually, it points of intellectual interest, and other works.
1:37:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it brings up an interesting conversation.
1:37:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Topic of conversation.
1:37:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a health apprentice.
1:37:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It'd be a great play.
1:37:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But it would look, it's a one act play.
1:37:51
[SPEAKER_01]: That's where we around that dinner table?
1:37:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:37:54
[SPEAKER_01]: That would've been fine if it was just the conversation.
1:37:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:37:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to give him some time to throw a line of himes confession back in her face because she gets off light.
1:38:02
[SPEAKER_00]: She gets off very light.
1:38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: She does something really.
1:38:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I think what actually did something there she did something actually terrible and she feels no remorse.
1:38:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:38:09
[SPEAKER_00]: She feels like, oh, I was fine.
1:38:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:38:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But then dad deserves to be punished.
1:38:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:38:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The black woman deserves to be punished.
1:38:16
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of messed up.
1:38:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of messed up.
1:38:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The movie is smug.
1:38:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The movie is the live.
1:38:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not.
1:38:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not really thinking through its premise.
1:38:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not fair to its characters.
1:38:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It is an unkind film.
1:38:28
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true.
1:38:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And while there can be some art can be drawn from stories of cruel people, you were just arguing in favor of repulsion.
1:38:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:38:37
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, if I know the film is trying to repulse me, I'm going to be on its wavelength.
1:38:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if I'm revolted by it, I at least understand what's doing.
1:38:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes a film wants to repulse me, does, and I still hate it.
1:38:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Human sent to be three.
1:38:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, you did two good job.
1:38:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you did exactly what you wanted to do and now I hate you for it.
1:39:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you over hit it a bit.
1:39:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The drama is trying to stimulate me.
1:39:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It's trying to bring me into some kind of moral quandary.
1:39:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not smart enough to address it to a moral quandary.
1:39:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like the feeling that the film is positioning itself as smarter than I am.
1:39:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And I can't walk out of thinking, well, what if I'm smarter than you?
1:39:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because that's the thing.
1:39:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I the movie is asking you what would how would you feel at the end of all this and I felt a certain way very shortly after the revelation and just a little bit more context and no matter what else happened on the movie my opinion ever changed and so I'm just kind of annoyed that no one else is particularly
1:39:45
[SPEAKER_01]: thoughtful.
1:39:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Nice.
1:39:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Just thought.
1:39:47
[SPEAKER_01]: You can be evil and thoughtful.
1:39:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:39:49
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, just like that's the thing that's frustrating.
1:39:51
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, this is a movie where I'm actually going to be giving it, again, round tomatoes is a binary.
1:39:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Not a fan.
1:39:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes it's very, very simple.
1:39:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely don't like it.
1:39:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely do like it.
1:40:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Anything in the middle.
1:40:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I sometimes find myself airing on the side of positivity too much.
1:40:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we're grating being kind.
1:40:08
[SPEAKER_01]: a little later.
1:40:10
[SPEAKER_01]: This is one where pretty quickly afterwards.
1:40:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, I would have, I would have changed the tone and tenor of my review a little bit.
1:40:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:40:17
[SPEAKER_01]: The things that I said that the way I'm saying are interesting, but I don't think it ultimately comes together.
1:40:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So I review on this podcast is going to be different.
1:40:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:40:24
[SPEAKER_01]: In terms of it's in terms of how I label it.
1:40:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You got to, got to, yeah, think about it a little bit more.
1:40:28
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, spoilers over.
1:40:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's do our review roundup.
1:40:31
[SPEAKER_01]: This is where we review our movies on a scale of C minus to C plus a C minus as a movie.
1:40:36
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't recommend that movies below average.
1:40:39
[SPEAKER_01]: A C is a movie that is average.
1:40:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Makes back.
1:40:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Just kind of myth, some good to myth.
1:40:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And then a C plus is above average.
1:40:47
[SPEAKER_01]: These are movies that we definitely recommend.
1:40:49
[SPEAKER_01]: They are above average movies, whether they're good or great.
1:40:53
[SPEAKER_00]: on that note, Whitney, the drama, the drama is a C-minus.
1:40:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I could not get on this film's wavelength.
1:41:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't like the way it dismisses actual human themes for this nearly mouth neurosis that I don't relate to.
1:41:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think I was a little close to getting it on its wavelength than you were, but it's still C-minus.
1:41:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it, it,
1:41:15
[SPEAKER_01]: raises some interesting topics and doesn't know how to explore and very well and ultimately in trying to try to find some kind of way to discuss a very serious, controversial topic in a way that it doesn't in a way that sort of challenges your morality, they ended up making the morality pretty cut and dry.
1:41:35
[SPEAKER_01]: But the characters and we don't realize it, which is frustrating.
1:41:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see for bitten fruits.
1:41:44
[SPEAKER_00]: a little bit stronger in terms of its themes.
1:41:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought Lily Ryan Hart could have brought a little bit more energy to it, but I love the world that it's constructed.
1:41:51
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Oscar-worthy costume design.
1:41:54
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of fun, little singers, and one-liners.
1:41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It does speak with its own language.
1:41:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I love all of that.
1:42:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a high thing.
1:42:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Alright, the serpent's skin is a C++.
1:42:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a shabby genre film, but it's shabbyness I think is part of not just its charm, but overall it's actual point, which is to take back the concept of outsider stories from the mainstream, and tell a fundamentally transversion of a story that
1:42:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:42:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And I found it just, both surprisingly chill and yet really riveting.
1:42:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because of that.
1:42:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I will catch up with this one.
1:42:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:42:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to talk about it at that point.
1:42:44
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
1:42:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And then lastly, the super Mario Galaxy movie.
1:42:49
[SPEAKER_00]: See minus.
1:42:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a sea minus isn't it colorful energetic.
1:42:54
[SPEAKER_00]: All of the video games do all the video games stuff, but yeah, there's nothing to this movie.
1:42:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I see what people like it.
1:42:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I see what people like it.
1:43:00
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not the standard by which I am judging it.
1:43:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I would like it to be something more, more than just affordable, please.
1:43:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's not even halfable, more than just reminding me of that a thing exists.
1:43:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:43:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Like actually like you didn't have to tell much of a story.
1:43:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I would have been like, maybe I would have only given you a seat, but I would have been like, yeah, it's okay.
1:43:18
[SPEAKER_01]: If it had just put a little effort into storytelling, that puts almost none.
1:43:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And that laziness is extremely off-putting to me.
1:43:27
[SPEAKER_01]: That is it for critically acclaimed.
1:43:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, everybody, for listening.
1:43:30
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll be back next week, or with reviews of such films as faces of death, the new quasi reboot of the cult horror curio, this time directed by Daniel Goldhauber, of cam and how to blow up a pipeline fan.
1:43:47
[SPEAKER_01]: We also have a, yeah.
1:43:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and full disclosure, we once interviewed the creator of Faces of Death.
1:43:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Or I guess he was actually an interview.
1:43:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean it was a Gaston or podcast, because he was a film critic with his wife.
1:43:57
[SPEAKER_01]: He was working as a film critic towards the last few years of his life, John Alachwarz.
1:44:01
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a nice guy.
1:44:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we also have a new version of Hamlet, starring Riz Ahmed and a bunch of other stuff as well.
1:44:08
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you for your body for listening.
1:44:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Come back in next week for that.
1:44:12
[SPEAKER_01]: please subscribe if you haven't already.
1:44:14
[SPEAKER_01]: If you want more podcasts, a lot more podcasts, a giant history of plethora podcast that's not a words work.
1:44:23
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1:44:26
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1:44:33
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1:44:35
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1:44:45
[SPEAKER_01]: We also have a letter show.
1:44:48
[SPEAKER_01]: We've got mail where we encourage you to write in and we answer your questions.
1:44:52
[SPEAKER_01]: We respond to your criticism.
1:44:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you big mad at us for how we criticized Super Mario or anything else?
1:45:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have strong opinions about fish?
1:45:03
[SPEAKER_01]: or the fruit status of cucumbers, let us know, our email address is letters at criticallyclamed.net, Whitney, what is our PO Box?
1:45:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, send us a physical letter of postcard, but if you liked it, the critically acclaimed network PO Box 641565, Los Angeles, California, at 9 to below 64.
1:45:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and we're on social media, I'm at William DeBionney.
1:45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm at William DeBionney.
1:45:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that when you sign up, I'll be sure is.
1:45:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And, um, I guess that's it.
1:45:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:45:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we'll get everyone to put it.
1:45:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Never forget everyone's a critic, yeah.
1:45:32
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't go to the midnight show.
1:45:36
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm sorry I wet.