Latest / Critically Acclaimed Network / Critically Acclaimed #344 | Tron: Ares, Deathstalker, Good Boy, The Smashing Machine, Play Dirty, After the Hunt, Anemone, Orwell: 2+2=5, Vicious, 100 Meters

Transcript

Critically Acclaimed #344 | Tron: Ares, Deathstalker, Good Boy, The Smashing Machine, Play Dirty, After the Hunt, Anemone, Orwell: 2+2=5, Vicious, 100 Meters · Critically Acclaimed Network

0:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Greetings friends welcome back to critically acclaims the film review podcast where we have good taste and we have bad taste But mostly good taste so good things blow up My name is Whitney Sibel.
0:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I am a film critic.
0:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I contribute to slash film with me as always is my far more intelligent and far more simply to co-host William What don't you introduce yourself you're also a lot less sick than I am so why don't you?
0:36
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true take it for the healthy people
0:38
[SPEAKER_01]: That's true.
0:39
[SPEAKER_01]: My name is William Bibbiani.
0:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I am a film critic.
0:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I write for the rap.
0:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm just going to take the compliment this time.
0:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I am more attractive and intelligent.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, this is our podcast, or we review movies.
0:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Here in the critically claimed network, we had a bit more of a break than we intended.
0:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I was out of town and then family stuff.
0:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a whole thing.
0:58
[SPEAKER_01]: But we're back.
0:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And we have so many movies to catch up on.
1:01
[SPEAKER_01]: You wouldn't believe it if it wasn't
1:05
[SPEAKER_01]: happening now because it's going to believe it.
1:09
[SPEAKER_00]: We've had some pretty pretty big marathas before.
1:12
[SPEAKER_01]: This time on the critically acclaimed podcast, we're going to be reviewing Tron Aries Death Stalker.
1:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Good boy, the smashing
1:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Delicious.
1:38
[SPEAKER_01]: 100 meters.
1:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And, or well, 2 plus 2 equals fun.
1:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, or we'll do what's 2 equals 5.
1:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't know.
1:50
[SPEAKER_01]: If you tell me it's not fun, you tell me it's not fun.
1:53
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not fun.
1:54
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to get to that one.
1:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, snap.
1:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
1:57
[SPEAKER_01]: But, yeah, that's a lot of moves to catch up on.
1:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're going to leap right in because as we already mentioned,
2:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Whitney's sick.
2:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wanted to get to bed at a reasonable hour.
2:08
[SPEAKER_00]: As you can hear, um, I don't think I'm quite to the point where my voice is like sultry bedroom voice.
2:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just sick voice at this point.
2:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So, uh, I'll tell you.
2:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Just sort of raspy and stuffed up.
2:23
[SPEAKER_00]: That does it for you.
2:24
[SPEAKER_00]: It does it for me.
2:25
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you want to talk about first, William?
2:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Well,
2:33
[SPEAKER_01]: the elitron in the room.
2:36
[SPEAKER_01]: That's stupid.
2:36
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not doing that.
2:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
2:37
[SPEAKER_01]: We're talking about tronaries.
2:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm dronaries.
2:40
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a new tron.
2:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And boy is it.
2:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Tron is Disney's
2:48
[SPEAKER_01]: God, Disney just really wants to make this fucking thing work, don't they?
2:52
[SPEAKER_00]: They, they, they human are trying and every time they've tried to make a Tron movie and this includes the first Tron.
2:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like visually impressive or at least unique in some way.
3:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't do that grade at the box office.
3:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It kind of accrues a cult audience over the years, mostly is centering around.
3:13
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really groundbreaking soundtrack.
3:16
[SPEAKER_00]: and then couple decades pass and they try again and this is now their third attempt since 1982.
3:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, to make a future film.
3:24
[SPEAKER_00]: There's also been some like tie-in games and, um, that was an animal to V series at one point.
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so they've been trying to make it happen for a long time and it's just every one episode.
3:35
[SPEAKER_01]: every once in a while uh uh Hollywood gets a bug up its butt and it tries to there isn't a demand but they try to generate a demand like we're we're really really really really sure.
3:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I know you say you don't want chai Courtney but we're gonna give you chai Courtney.
3:55
[SPEAKER_01]: He's gonna be in everything.
3:59
[SPEAKER_01]: everything.
4:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after like 20 jy-court and he's they're like, okay, that didn't work.
4:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But Disney is just like doing that every 15 to 20 years.
4:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Just well, maybe maybe they're finally ready for jy-court and he takes up this time with stron.
4:16
[SPEAKER_01]: If you've never seen the original Tron,
4:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Come out in 1982.
4:20
[SPEAKER_01]: This was at a time when Disney was having sort of a crisis of identity, and was just trying new things.
4:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And, oh, dude, they're credit.
4:28
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of ambitious things.
4:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you look at the black hole, which was their sort of, let's do our own Star Wars.
4:34
[SPEAKER_01]: But what if we made it terrifying?
4:37
[SPEAKER_01]: But also had the Q robots, but they also had Q robots.
4:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's all over the place.
4:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Tron, what I like about Disney in the 1980s is they were really trying to diversify for the first time.
4:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Like they were finally getting away from their brand.
4:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Because their brand was failing.
4:54
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of their animated films were tanking.
4:57
[SPEAKER_00]: They just weren't the big market presence that they were in the 1940s, 1950s.
5:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the time everyone was like the fox and the hound in this economy and then they said no Not in this economy and then they tried to make the black calderen that came out after Tron, but it was a big big bomb Just all these things are losing money and Tron was one of these big bold experiments that kind of lost a little money It was a big merchandising banana It did it hey like it it wasn't it didn't tank
5:29
[SPEAKER_01]: But if it was huge, they would have exploited it more.
5:32
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the thing.
5:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And people look at it like, you know, if you look at the numbers, it didn't do bad.
5:36
[SPEAKER_01]: No, it didn't do great though.
5:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Tron was the super ambitious idea to try to push computer graphics into cinema before really they were ready.
5:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's our Jeff Bridges as a computer programmer who gets digitized and thrown inside a computer program.
5:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And inside the computer program, every computer program is anthropomorphized and running around that it turns out that they've got this whole religious system, where they worship their programmers like their guys.
6:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So here's a god who has been like reincarnated on the grid and it's all very pretty.
6:15
[SPEAKER_01]: The score was by Wendy Carlos who was a pioneering trans musician who did a lot of the early electronic stuff for like a clockwork orange and the shining and you know all of it was in many ways ahead of its time.
6:31
[SPEAKER_01]: but it wasn't particularly well written, it wasn't particularly exciting a lot of the time, like it just, it didn't crack whatever code they were going for and so it did okay and then it just vanished because people didn't care that much.
6:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, after a while, it had just enough of a cult.
6:51
[SPEAKER_01]: People like it was very distinctive.
6:53
[SPEAKER_01]: People recognize Tron, even if they've never seen Tron.
6:56
[SPEAKER_01]: So eventually Disney started like passing around ideas for a new Tron, and they finally gave almost 30 years later, a sequel to a filmmaker who would go on to become one of the most successful filmmakers of the last five, 10 years.
7:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's Joseph Kazinsky.
7:13
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... who's known best now for top dynamic and for f one but i will say this for joseph kizinski he didn't phone tron legacy and he tried a lot of stuff in that movie it's packed full of ideas it's got music by default punk it's extremely pretty and i'm actually very fond of it
7:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm less fond of it.
7:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the visuals were pretty cool.
7:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought the soundtrack was pretty cool.
7:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it brushes up against a couple of interesting ideas, but it's still based on this really absurd premise.
7:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of hard to take.
7:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like faux theology pretty seriously when it's still based in this idea that if you go into a computer program,
7:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Or if you go into a computer system, the grid, the programs there in, the things that people write to execute functions are anthropomorphic, conscious, humanoid beings with computer circuitry on their body.
8:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's still based in this really gross misunderstanding of the way computers work.
8:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That was unique to 1982 and that they're trying to continue that doesn't quite work for me and
8:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's difficult to sort of follow the plot.
8:27
[SPEAKER_00]: There's all these extra characters.
8:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remembered at the very end, there was this notion that although a laser can sort of digitize a human being, they can also be reintegrated at some point.
8:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like a transporter pattern on Star Trek.
8:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But then at the end of that movie, a computer program, an anthropomorphic computerized being, is also able to be extracted into the real world.
8:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And if that just raised all these questions, like, what does it made of?
8:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it a, is it made of plastic?
8:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Can these lasers create like flesh and brain and consciousness?
9:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where the interesting questions actually started to begin.
9:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care what the programs are going on inside the computer.
9:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Their programs just delete them.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They're fine.
9:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have those to be for these programs.
9:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so that's that right there is an, and I'll grant you this is not terribly brilliant or highfalutin, but that right there is like saying, I just don't understand why we're supposed to care about this Frankenstein monster.
9:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's dead, kill it.
9:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't care about that.
9:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, and I get that, but I don't feel like that's, that's what they're getting at.
9:29
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that they're getting it.
9:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I granted.
9:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, their idea of how sophisticated a computer program was, especially in the early 80s, is really laughable.
9:40
[SPEAKER_01]: On the fact that the average mainstream audience member did know anything about computers and you could tell computers could do anything and they'd believe you But nowadays we're we're all better versed in computers than that.
9:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And we all know how we're like the entire universe of Tron
9:55
[SPEAKER_01]: could fit on a digital watch, not even an eye watch, like an Apple watch, just a good old fashion digital watch that you get for five bucks out of a vending machine like this.
10:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And unfortunately, as computer technology has evolved, I feel like Trump legacy didn't address that, they they kind of wrote their way around modern computers by saying all of these computers were
10:22
[SPEAKER_00]: the Jeff Bridges character.
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They were air.
10:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I've got Kevin Flynn.
10:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, they were never connected to the internet.
10:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
10:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, that's how they were able to explain that.
10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: In this one, they're just sort of in a system, I guess.
10:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not really explained.
10:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're on to try and areas.
10:37
[SPEAKER_00]: We still have this idea that computer programs or anthropomorphic beings, they take vocal orders from their users who are typing into basic, which is a little odd.
10:51
[SPEAKER_00]: the villain of this piece a characters play by Evan Peters, who is the grand son of the David Warner character from the original drawn right, which I'm pretty sure makes in Killian Murphy's son.
11:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Killian Murphy's son and Jillian Anderson's, he's Jillian Anderson's son, uh, we people forget this Killian Murphy, you know, he's drawn legacy for like two scenes and he played the son of the bad guy from the original Tron and it was very, very clear that they were setting him up to be more important and like Tron 3, that's Killian Murphy wasn't pretty big actor already, he'd already been in like Batman begins in 20 days later and stuff, people knew who he was.
11:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Like you saw him in the movie and he was like, oh, hey, I know that guy.
11:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've just skipped over that.
11:38
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not doing that anymore.
11:40
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be a new guy, but it's still related because of reasons.
11:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, Jillian Anderson, he is here because I guess we couldn't get Kelly and Murphy back.
11:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're kind of, we're not pretending trying like she didn't happen, but we're overlooking as much of it as possible because,
11:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Jillian Anderson is technically Killian Murphy's sister, but she has a British accent and he doesn't.
12:04
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot is not explained and it doesn't really matter.
12:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Not now, anyway.
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But we have Evan Peters on one side and then we have on the other side of things a benevolent computer programmer played by Greta Lee and she has almost no character whatsoever other than she's mourning the death of her sister who died recently.
12:25
[SPEAKER_01]: She has a backstory that backstory is explained to her by a male character who is known for 30 minutes and then explains how she should complete her story arc and that's her entire bit.
12:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, she gets to run around.
12:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, let's run.
12:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of her dialogue is explaining the way some of the stuff works.
12:45
[SPEAKER_00]: and already I was I was already uncomfortable this right away because we are essentially back in sort of ready player one territory where the two warring factions in this movie are two ultra-rich corporations just one is the bad one and one is the good one.
13:03
[SPEAKER_00]: the good one wants to do good for the world, but it's still this big rich corporation.
13:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, the Evan Peter's character has a device that actually should be changing the world in an astonishing way and is never addressed.
13:18
[SPEAKER_00]: He has a 3D printer that can 3D print
13:23
[SPEAKER_00]: large-scale functioning fully powered and fully armed battle machinery like high-tech battle machinery that is like hover yeah tanks that has hovercraft technology and can form these like force field walls things that don't actually exist in real life but his 3D printer can make these and also make
13:43
[SPEAKER_00]: fully functional humanoid androids, I guess, out of this laser technology.
13:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what they're made of.
13:50
[SPEAKER_00]: They're explained like the power usage.
13:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, if you ever actually bought like a product that was made in the 3D printer, you know, it has like a certain um almost brittle kind of plasticy texture, not not displacing, but like so I imagine that's what Jared Leto's skin feels like.
14:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose I wish they had made him look more plastic when he was printed out in the computer he can look like Jared let all that's fine.
14:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, no, no he looks pretty plastic cuz cuz it's Jared let out.
14:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, Jared let out plays the areas.
14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't act very much to be perfectly.
14:22
[SPEAKER_00]: He plays a character named Aries who is Evan Peters security program and he is going to be rented out to the highest bidder for war efforts.
14:32
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a story.
14:33
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to do?
14:34
[SPEAKER_00]: He's got to machine.
14:35
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got a machine that can make literally anything.
14:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And he decides to make tanks which we have.
14:46
[SPEAKER_01]: and super soldiers because we're still pretending people care about that plot point, we're still pretending that's a thing that is ever going to be important to anybody.
14:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very different way they try.
15:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand trying to demonize, you know, private weapons contractors.
15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fine.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's it's so old.
15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not an exciting plot point anymore.
15:11
[SPEAKER_01]: The big plot point though, is that these things are like dark man's face.
15:16
[SPEAKER_01]: They have a time limit on them.
15:17
[SPEAKER_01]: So he can only make them in real.
15:20
[SPEAKER_01]: for 29 minutes and then they just dissolve.
15:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Now he and Greta Lee are in like a race to find what they call like a permanent code, which will make these like digital creations real permanently.
15:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm still thinking,
15:40
[SPEAKER_01]: you've already got amazing technology here.
15:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Like we can solve that problem later.
15:44
[SPEAKER_01]: There's so many things you could do with this that are still useful.
15:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But instead, you're focusing only on these very particular.
15:52
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, how can you create so many things and still have a crisis of imagination?
15:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's bizarre, but she finds the permanence code.
16:00
[SPEAKER_01]: He decides he needs to get that permanence code.
16:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And so he turns his computer programs real, gives them some light cycles, and sends them after her in the real world, which it turns out would have been a lot less effective than just sending some regular people, because there's a 29 minute
16:19
[SPEAKER_01]: like delay on this and then they just sort of evaporate and also this calls like a spectacular amount of attention to his criminal enterprise whereas if he just had some people driving around in cars, no one would have known.
16:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, here, and there's an easy way to avoid this.
16:34
[SPEAKER_00]: They only live for 29 minutes.
16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Move an hour out of town.
16:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, I'm solved, you know, there's a plot point later on where like, oh, no, they're coming for Greta Lee and everyone else is working to solve this problem.
16:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's like, I know, I'll distract them.
16:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And she just starts running around town.
16:50
[SPEAKER_01]: No, opposite direction.
16:54
[SPEAKER_01]: That way for 30 minutes and you're good like we're done here.
17:01
[SPEAKER_00]: There should have been a marvelous scene where it's like the program is like racing at super fast speeds on its late cycle It's going and it's going and it's going and then griddle is just sort of standing there in the road and then watches it dissolve like 10 feet from her It's like nope 30 minutes out of town
17:17
[SPEAKER_01]: You must think that we're supposed to be caring about it because this is all just plot.
17:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing that we're supposed to be caring about here is that Aries, the program played by Jared Leto, is becoming self-aware.
17:27
[SPEAKER_01]: He's starting to defy his programming.
17:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And every time he is brought into the real world, he gets more and more into it.
17:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And he tells Greta Lee after some rigmarole.
17:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, we have 30 minutes I need you to turn me into a real boy.
17:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the basic gist of it.
17:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Will Jared Leto become a real human being, over the course of this movie.
17:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and honestly, I think that's the least interesting thing you could do with Tron.
17:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I, I, I would appreciate a story about an Android trying to find its humanity.
18:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I've seen plenty of stories like that.
18:03
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a big thing.
18:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a big thing.
18:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a big thing.
18:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a big thing.
18:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's cool.
18:06
[SPEAKER_01]: That's literally the oldest Frankenstein.
18:09
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... but what you mean is it's ancient it's literally ancient what you need is if you're gonna tell that story you need an actor who can plan android well like kind of this in human mechanical being but then also communicate that there's like a twinkle of humanity pushing through all of that
18:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like even, and it doesn't take a lot.
18:33
[SPEAKER_00]: There's, um, I think of like Peter Weller in Robocop.
18:37
[SPEAKER_00]: His face is obscured for most of that movie.
18:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But you still kind of get it in subtle line readings and, uh, you know, the way he like pauses before he do think he does things.
18:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he's like really processing it.
18:48
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not, he's not behaving robotically.
18:51
[SPEAKER_01]: He's questioning things.
18:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's, it's, it's,
18:54
[SPEAKER_01]: tricky, otherwise anyone could do it, and we've all seen people play robots badly, but there's a lot of people who can, a lot of people who can just say like, I had no personality and I'm starting to have one, and I need to show literally a spark of life, and Jared Leno is not that guy.
19:13
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not, he doesn't have that kind of human dazzle.
19:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He's actually kind of a very cold actor I've always thought.
19:22
[SPEAKER_00]: He can do impressive work.
19:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose from time to time, but he's not like a big blockbuster type of an actor.
19:28
[SPEAKER_00]: At least not the way the Hollywood seems to be treating him.
19:31
[SPEAKER_00]: He can't open a warbius.
19:33
[SPEAKER_01]: and it goes on the run with like Greta Lee and they're supposed to sort of interact with each other or it's supposed to see more of his humanity.
19:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And the movie I kept thinking about is John Carpenter's Star Man, which also starred Jeff Bridges.
19:45
[SPEAKER_01]: As an alien who landed on earth and had to like go on a road trip with Karen Allen to meet up with his mother ship, but it was all a big sort of ET for adults.
19:53
[SPEAKER_01]: What if ET was a fully grown guy and had a love story is basically that whole movie.
20:00
[SPEAKER_01]: But Jeff Bridges knew how to play that.
20:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Jeff Bridges is weird.
20:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Jared Leto, for all of like, every time they try to make a big deal out of like, oh, he's so method or whatever, he's not that weird.
20:14
[SPEAKER_01]: He never really seems like he's making very interesting choices as a filmmaker, even when he was given cart blanche to play the Joker.
20:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, they literally put deranged on his forehead, like it's all surface.
20:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I don't, I don't have too many problems with his Joker because the Joker wasn't a huge part of that movie was in.
20:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought it was an interesting take, you know, this sort of like club dwelling, new money version of the Joker, like some kind of some kid who just like, Yeah, it's like newvo reach Joker.
20:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a fine approach.
20:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I have no problem with it, but it's not the approach that a problem with it was his acting.
20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: But here, I think he's to use an old crit phrase.
20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a charisma black hole.
20:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He just has no personality to it.
21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we're going to be spending the most of the movie with this Aries character, we're going to need a little bit of charm, and I'm just not getting it.
21:10
[SPEAKER_00]: the closest they came was this really absurd scene where he visits the old fashion grid from the 80s so we get to sort of a little bit of a visual flashback and he has a little speech about how he thinks that DePesh mode is the greatest thing since Mozart.
21:27
[SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting actually because it that's a bit where he's talking to someone and he's saying
21:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, everyone says Mozart is the great physician, but personally I prefer to pass mode and they ask why and he tries to explain it and then he's like, oh, I don't know.
21:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't.
21:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I just do.
21:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the old Apple Jacks defense, you know, I do like Apple Jacks so they don't taste like Apple's.
21:49
[SPEAKER_01]: We just do.
21:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And then someone tells him to his face that that's the most human thing.
21:57
[SPEAKER_01]: he's done is be in articulate about stuff he likes and I'm watching this and I'm like are you saying film critics are in human?
22:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you saying that like computer programs can never do what we do or are you just saying that it is inherent to the human nature that we are unable to express ourselves which is a hilarious thing to express in what is technically
22:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, that whole scene baffled, deeply confused by it.
22:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I will say this with this movie, and I find this movie very frustrating.
22:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the idea of moving the action from the grid into the real world kind of misses one of the key opportunities in Tron, which is to show us something very, very pretty, and we get a lot less of it and this is a result of that.
22:48
[SPEAKER_01]: But I will give them a movie this.
22:50
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a score by nine inch nails that fucking shreds.
22:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The score is great, there's a great one, a song called as a live as you want me to be, the place over the credits.
22:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That's unassailable.
23:01
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just a great song.
23:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I still think that punk's score for a tron legacy is like more like it's probably more my favorite, but it's really fucking good, and It's not good enough to like I'll tell you to see the movie, but you don't have to see the movie Here's some cool electronic shit from nine inch nails You can listen to that anytime and honestly, it's probably better in a vacuum
23:25
[SPEAKER_01]: because this movie, it's frustrating, because in many ways it's competent, but it's competent at telling something completely vapid.
23:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's so, which you will about Tron and Tron, like you see, they were trying not to be vapid.
23:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether they succeed, we can agree that.
23:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But they were trying to have ideas.
23:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And here, it's like they're running from the ideas, because they just want to do familiar territory,
23:53
[SPEAKER_01]: with as little Tron is possible.
23:55
[SPEAKER_01]: I guess the save money.
23:56
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
23:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, zero Tron because Tron is the name of a character who's not in the center.
24:01
[SPEAKER_01]: That's also true.
24:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's something that is that this is like the thin man at this point.
24:05
[SPEAKER_01]: The thin man is was only in the first thin man movie, but they kept calling them the thin man because that was the branding.
24:11
[SPEAKER_01]: And here we are.
24:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Tron was the Bruce Box Lightning computer program.
24:15
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right.
24:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they brought them back for legacy in a kind of an odd way.
24:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think they made that unnecessarily complicated, but they didn't bring them back.
24:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is just like this isn't Tron.
24:25
[SPEAKER_01]: This is literally not Tron.
24:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Dron isn't the name of anything that actually appears in this movie.
24:30
[SPEAKER_01]: This should have just been called Eris or the grid or something.
24:33
[SPEAKER_01]: This is, again, you're stuck with the branding, but you can't make the choice.
24:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Eris, a Tron adventure.
24:41
[SPEAKER_00]: There you go.
24:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, response, like, is still with us, right?
24:44
[SPEAKER_01]: He could have at least given him a cameo.
24:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he's still around.
24:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why, uh, because they wanted to tell this to the other.
24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: There's only a few things that I like about this movie.
24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: You have great actors like Greta Lee and Jillian Anderson, and they're not given anything of interest to do.
24:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Really, you have these wonderfully big ideas, like these science fiction devices that could change the nature of existence, and we're just telling this kind of action story about, like,
25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, backing into systems and trying to get a permanence code, uh, you have a really fantastic soundtrack, uh, they have a really terrific scene in a video arcade.
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I want, whenever there's a scene in a video arcade, I want them to zoom in real real close on all the pinball machines, just so I can take like a good strong gander at them and then they,
25:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Literally have Jody Turner Smith just flip them over as she's charging through the room.
25:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm like, no No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
25:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Why doesn't this one?
26:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Why doesn't Jared let out until he starts gaining sentience and he went then only barely?
26:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, it's just weird.
26:06
[SPEAKER_01]: You changed the entire way that this universe works to make it less interesting.
26:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it also, it, it seems a little bit odd because the big race, the big McGuffin, is that permanent code.
26:19
[SPEAKER_00]: But as I mentioned before, we already had that because, um,
26:29
[SPEAKER_01]: right they're going they're trying to like find like they're going on this is like scavenger hunt to find the sight missing piece of code find her
26:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
26:38
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what the plot should have been to have been trying to track her down.
26:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you actually have a connection to something.
26:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you have like, instead of just having like this random MacGuffin, you have a person.
26:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we can actually catch up to her.
26:50
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been like 15 years.
26:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Since she's been a real human being or whatever, whatever organism she is.
26:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how it works, but like she's been in the real world that long.
27:01
[SPEAKER_01]: That's interesting.
27:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Unlike this one, so it's a pain in the ass and I'm not a fan, I know it's interesting to me because like a lot of critics didn't like it either.
27:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Matt Zoller sides loved it, he gave it four stars, really really thinks it's great, you know what, we don't we don't disagree on a lot.
27:25
[SPEAKER_01]: But we disagree on this one, but more power to him.
27:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I respect any credit because willing to take a stand and say I'm movie everyone else hates is great or vice versa You provided you have a good justification and he does.
27:36
[SPEAKER_01]: I disagree with it, but he has a good argument.
27:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, but I have been seeing a lot of people online
27:45
[SPEAKER_01]: And like the Instagram read it, Blue's got whatever saying that listen, the critics didn't like Toronto, Toronto, like you see either, and those are called classics.
27:54
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Toronto areas must be great.
27:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not how it works.
27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I mean, it has no guarantee.
28:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Critics are right more often than they're not on stuff like this.
28:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you don't see a lot of people saying that like, you know, the critics were wrong about the Adventures of Pluto Nash, that movie, that movie kills.
28:11
[SPEAKER_01]: That's one of the best movies ever made, like we're mostly right.
28:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also not the same critics who were reviewing movies in 1982.
28:19
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and also Ron Eres does a lot of things differently.
28:21
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not the same film over and over again.
28:24
[SPEAKER_01]: I would be very surprised.
28:26
[SPEAKER_01]: if in 10, 20 years, tronaries has the cult following the tron, like you see he has.
28:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd be a star.
28:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And tronaries he doesn't have that big, a cult following.
28:37
[SPEAKER_01]: You may have the dust that almost no one went to see tronaries.
28:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it was not a hit.
28:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's very, very small.
28:43
[SPEAKER_01]: It's loud, but it's small.
28:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's the frustrating thing about tron.
28:49
[SPEAKER_01]: If they can figure out a way to make tron cheap,
28:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it might be worth Disney's wild to keep it going, but these are inherently expensive movies.
29:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And they cannot seem to crack the code to get, like, normies out to see Tron, and this is not the thing that will do it.
29:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Certainly not, like, oh, you know what Tron needed this entire time, Jared Leto.
29:17
[SPEAKER_01]: That was what was missing.
29:18
[SPEAKER_01]: We would go with Jim Bridges this whole time.
29:21
[SPEAKER_01]: That hack.
29:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We need share talk.
29:26
[SPEAKER_01]: We should move on.
29:27
[SPEAKER_01]: We should move on.
29:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about a much more creative movie.
29:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not going to go as far as to call it like an instant classic or anything like that, but I'm watching this and I'm thinking, this is so much more imagination than pretty much almost any blockbuster I've seen in recent memory.
29:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is Steve Kusansky's Death Stalker.
29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the remake of Death Stalker.
29:47
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the fifth Death Stalker movie I believe.
29:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that stalker was a series of sorghum sorcery movies that Roger Corman produced in the 1980s, and I thought I had seen these movies.
30:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was wrong.
30:04
[SPEAKER_01]: there's so many kind of generic sword and sorcery dungeons and dragons the postcon on the barbarian kind of action movies in the 1980s that it's very easy for them to kind of bleed together and to the best of my knowledge I actually haven't seen
30:21
[SPEAKER_01]: any of the death stalker movies.
30:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I was mostly conflating it with the sword in the sorcerer which is a very cool film by the way and you should all see that movie.
30:31
[SPEAKER_01]: But sword in the sorcerer and then maybe like the barbarians or like there's a couple of randoms in there but I actually never saw death stalker.
30:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you seen any of the original death stalkers?
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw the first one, I mean, it's been a long time, I've seen the first, and I think the second one is the one with Monique Gabrielle, that's the one, I've seen that one.
30:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
30:52
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you remember about them?
30:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I realize it's a long time ago, but what do you remember?
30:55
[SPEAKER_01]: What's your cultural memory?
30:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, these are, the first one was directed by James Sparta, Delhi in Italian import.
31:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that the guy did the Louvre ignore her, killies?
31:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, maybe so.
31:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I'll look at that.
31:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it was like an international co-production with, like, filmed in South America.
31:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the second one, I know, was a Jim White Norseky film.
31:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think it was all of the, yeah, easy.
31:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, all of the weird purviness that comes with Jim White Norseky movies.
31:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, and so, yeah, and that's the one with Monique Gabrielle.
31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and the second one especially has kind of, um, kind of a whimsical tone.
31:43
[SPEAKER_00]: They were trying to make it a little bit more playful than a lot of the, the certain sandal films of the time.
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really remember the plot or anything just that it was another sort of trickle down from the success of Conan the barbarian really.
31:59
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... for the record uh... james subarthe dot sparked a lot of sorry sparked a lot he's are only directed to films but was like the second unit or system director on a ton of films that you've seen he was uh... he worked on uh... billpact and frailty uh... okay worked on the marlin brando island of doctor maro uh... you've seen his work he just not the kind of person gets a lot of credit for it
32:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So, good friend, he worked on Beast Master for crying out loud.
32:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
32:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
32:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So anyway, the death stalker movies, though, not particularly popular, were popular enough to get three sequels.
32:41
[SPEAKER_00]: They made money, apparently, and these were corpsman productions.
32:45
[SPEAKER_00]: They were all pre-sold, so yeah, of course they made money.
32:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, but not every corpsman movie got a sequel as my point.
32:51
[SPEAKER_01]: There was clearly something to this.
32:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And it gets ahead a bit of a cult and one person who was a huge fan of death stalker,
33:01
[SPEAKER_00]: with slash from guns and roses which to be fair these are fun movies these are ones you stay up late you have a couple drinks you you stay up late with some buddies and you just kind of dish on them and have a good time and they got plenty of violence and attractive people in very little clothing it's just a hoot you know well listen fair enough my point is this slash from guns and roses I imagine he's doing okay
33:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Money was I think you're probably produce other movies if you wanted to this is what he wanted to make and I know there was a kickstarter campaign to like round out the budget or whatever But like that he really wanted to make a death stocker movie, and you know what God bless him
33:44
[SPEAKER_01]: God bless them of all the fucking movies so it'd be like I became like the work I became the new bucket head like I became the world's greatest guitar player and what I'm gonna do with all that money I'm gonna make like a big remake of Dracula no one else cares but me but I want it
34:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm going to do it.
34:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And he didn't direct it or anything.
34:05
[SPEAKER_01]: He got the, and honestly, I feel make room such a huge fan of now, Stephen Kostanski, who flew on to our radar with Psycho Gorman about five years ago, which is still one of my favorite horror comedies of the 2020s.
34:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
34:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Psycho Gorman is really, really fantastic.
34:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He's Steve Kostansky is part of this filmmaking collective called Astron 6.
34:30
[SPEAKER_00]: That also has also made films like, I think their first big one was Father's Day.
34:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like 20, 20, 11, it was the other kind of underground thing.
34:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they do manborgs, they did manborgs as well.
34:48
[SPEAKER_00]: That was Astron's, that was actually Steven Kostiansky.
34:51
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the soul director on that one.
34:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They did a film that got a little bit of a claim in the mid 2010s called The Void.
34:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They were behind a really awful, frequent, a leprechaun, that was also Astron 6.
35:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Wait, was that the one?
35:08
[SPEAKER_01]: That wasn't the one with, no, no, okay, did you see his because what happened was there were all of the work Davis's leprechauns.
35:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there was the really, really bad one with Horan Swaggle.
35:20
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the one, which I didn't say.
35:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that the one?
35:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh wait, no, it was another one after that, which I've never seen.
35:26
[SPEAKER_00]: they did the one after that.
35:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, leprechaun origins is a really awful one.
35:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's almost unwatched.
35:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, like it's so bad.
35:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I have not, that was the one with leprechaun returns.
35:36
[SPEAKER_01]: For all I know, leprechaun returns is great.
35:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I have not seen leprechaun returns.
35:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So I can't speak to that one.
35:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you have, but I haven't seen that one.
35:44
[SPEAKER_01]: But now that I actually knew, I actually didn't realize Steven and Kastansky did this until it was like writing my review of Death Stalker.
35:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm making sure I credit him.
35:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, oh shit.
35:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually don't have to see that, but now I have to, but I don't know what I'm talking about.
36:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry.
36:03
[SPEAKER_01]: What I'm going to see, Mr. Staniske, is that he, as I very mentioned the filmmaker, but also, he's very committed to realizing fantastical things through practical mediums.
36:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Psychogormatic is full of like mighty morphine power-ranger type monster costumes, except
36:20
[SPEAKER_01]: incredibly imaginative and incredibly pretty when they want them to be and grow task when he wants them to be and it really does have this handmade quality that most even like even lower budgeted movies don't have anymore like the 80s everything felt handmade because it was handmade.
36:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And now everyone's using, you know, CGI has gotten to the point where it's easier to do competently with a lower budget and people are relying on it a lot and I don't blame them, but because they ask these movies feel like everything is hand-made extremely well.
36:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And everything in Death Stucker looks really cool.
37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, and that was the thing with PsychoGorman as well.
37:05
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the real, the big strength that Death Stalker and PsychoGorman have over a lot of their B movie counterparts.
37:12
[SPEAKER_00]: These movies are made for a song.
37:14
[SPEAKER_00]: They are dirt cheap and you can tell.
37:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They're doing things like shooting out in the park, but the directors are trying to do as much as they can to make these things look and feel interesting.
37:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I said this to my wife while we were watching this remake of Death Stalker.
37:32
[SPEAKER_00]: there's a whole sort of wave of neogrind house movies that are just awful awful movies that didn't quite understand why we like these kinds of B movies, why we like these cheap films.
37:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think what a lot of the newer grind house movies try to capture is they try to manufacture camp, which is something you can't do.
37:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They try to
37:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They try to make sort of the humor in the outrageousness of everything, a deliberate part of the structure.
38:07
[SPEAKER_01]: They're trying to give you something to feel better than on purpose.
38:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it can be something to laugh at.
38:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And those movies that we love from the 70s and 80s that have that quality, they weren't made with that mentality.
38:22
[SPEAKER_01]: They just wanted to be cool.
38:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why we can maybe chuckle at them.
38:26
[SPEAKER_01]: But we still feel a connection to them because they feel sincere.
38:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, there's a lack of sincerity to a lot of these post-grind house movies, like post like the Tarantino Rodriguez grind house where they're just trying to copy it aesthetic, but they're trying to kill superior to it, and they're not
38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't understand that the reason we like cheesy B movies is because they're based in this earnest need to entertain.
38:51
[SPEAKER_00]: They're made by people who are, even if they are kind of making these for cynical reasons or at least trying to make as good a film as possible.
38:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Heck, Jim Moinorsky had that, he, he'd, he'd, he'd.
39:01
[SPEAKER_00]: made a lot of really sleazy movies, but he was genuinely there to try to make an entertaining film.
39:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like that's what Kostanski is getting at when he's making films like Death Stalker and when he's making films like Psycho Gorman.
39:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He has no money.
39:18
[SPEAKER_00]: but he's going to make a really fun death stalker film that has ridiculous elements, but a good sense of humor, a really charismatic lead actor.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I was really surprised at how good Daniel Bernhardt was in this.
39:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he's a guy who's just played like action movie guy.
39:36
[SPEAKER_01]: You'll like see him in one of the John Wick movies is Guy John Wick fights.
39:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Turns out he's really charming.
39:42
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a really fun lead.
39:44
[SPEAKER_01]: He could totally carry more movies.
39:47
[SPEAKER_00]: yeah he's really great so you have a charming lead you have some fun really fun monster effects but they're also really cheap like these are clearly just like Halloween masks there's a scene early on where death stalker that's the name of the character has to fight this like two headed monster and like the months the heads are like these big monster faces in its chest and uh and you can tell that there's just an actor behind one of those masks like
40:15
[SPEAKER_00]: to make the jaw work.
40:16
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no articulation in any of these creatures.
40:18
[SPEAKER_01]: But it doesn't look cheap.
40:19
[SPEAKER_01]: It looks like, and it looks like it, like, it doesn't look like you could put this in a James Cameron movie or anything like that.
40:26
[SPEAKER_01]: But it clearly love winded into this.
40:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, if you were at a costume party and someone showed up in that thing, that guy's getting laid.
40:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone's like, wow, good job, like holy shit, like it's really impressive and like, by modern movie standards, maybe less so, but I would, there are certain monsters in that stocker that I think actually hold up really, really good.
40:53
[SPEAKER_01]: There's this, um, undead race of like bright red zombie nights called the Dreddites, and they look fucking badass.
41:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they have suits of armor, but they look like they're made of blood.
41:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really cool looking.
41:10
[SPEAKER_00]: They're made like the one of the bad guys throws like a little like it looks like a testicle, frankly.
41:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They just sort of tosses it on the ground and they grow up out of the ground and wouldn't you know it?
41:22
[SPEAKER_00]: That's exploited to a really interesting degree, you know, there's, they take that room with it.
41:28
[SPEAKER_01]: The plot of this movie is really, really simple.
41:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Death stalker is a badass, but he's like an amoral badass.
41:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the beginning of the movie, he steals off of a dying guy, not trying to save his life.
41:41
[SPEAKER_01]: An amulix looks expensive, but he doesn't realize is that it's cursed.
41:46
[SPEAKER_01]: and it won't leave him.
41:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like throw it into a pond and it comes back somehow and everyone wants to kill him for it and he just wants to get rid of the damn thing.
41:56
[SPEAKER_01]: So throughout the movie a whole bunch of like monster assassins is coming after him.
42:01
[SPEAKER_01]: There's like
42:02
[SPEAKER_01]: a teleporting mummy with a buzzer on a chain like scorpion from world down that that's what I've got to do I got no objection that it's straight out of a he man cartoon and I think that as a compliment in this case it just it feels so marvellously absurd just everything this movie is marvellously absurd he teams up with a not very good wizard played by Laurie field voiced by
42:32
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... who uh... what do you call it something right is like the patent singularity we're eventually patinized it will be in everything yeah that this is uh... this is actually a term i wife came up with yeah if if you um... if any tv show or anything reaches like a moderate amount of success then patinized walls will be drawn to it at some point he's gonna show up in your project it's got to show up on your game show you know whatever it is patinized walled is the new Michelle Forbes
43:02
[SPEAKER_01]: if that makes sense to anybody.
43:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Michelle Forbes would just eventually show up on any show and the show would be better for it.
43:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Pat and Oswell, I don't know if the show is always better for it, but he's always fine.
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: He's always fine.
43:13
[SPEAKER_01]: He's always committed.
43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He's committed.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: He's game.
43:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He has a marvelous time doing whatever it is he does and he's you know, very big on like nerdy projects like he's on the new mystery science theater.
43:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He's in the Gizmo plaques episodes.
43:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He's right.
43:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he plays son of TV's Frank and he also is one of the writers.
43:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he just does it because he loves it.
43:35
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think he has any sort of anything going for this gig other than an affinity for mystery science theater.
43:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and I respect that.
43:45
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, if they go on a quest, they fight a bunch of monsters, there's a prophecy, there's a magic sword.
43:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Plot-wise, it's kind of nothing remarkable.
43:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It's efficient, it's effective, it does what it needs to do.
43:58
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's all a delivery system for just the way we're gonna do it.
44:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And the way they're gonna do it is with good humor, like legitimately funny humor, memorable monsters.
44:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm watching part of this movie
44:14
[SPEAKER_01]: When you watched the original Star Wars, before there was any other Star Wars, that movie felt so lived in that you got the sense that there was stuff happening offscreen that was important, and that made it feel more epic.
44:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Like when Obi-Wan Kenobi mentioned the Clone Wars in the original Star Wars episode four, he doesn't mention what that is.
44:40
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just the thing.
44:42
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just the, if you were there, you'd know about that.
44:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it just feels really alive.
44:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And although Deaths Docker is obviously infinitely cheaper, it's got that too.
44:52
[SPEAKER_01]: There's one shot.
44:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember very distinctly, and I was like, they might need to go that hard.
44:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this the chance?
44:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, there's just there's a whole bunch of shots of just the protagonist walking through a forest or walking across a plane or whatever and you know, we've seen that a million times Lord the ring says a billion of those and this is again, a very low budget movie you did not have to go that hard, but like they're just walking in the foreground and in the background, there are two giant Kaiju fighting.
45:21
[SPEAKER_01]: We never see them again.
45:23
[SPEAKER_01]: We never see them again.
45:24
[SPEAKER_01]: This is not important.
45:26
[SPEAKER_01]: This is just a thing that happens here.
45:29
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not even making eye contact.
45:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, you know what, just let them do their thing.
45:33
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not part of this.
45:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We have our own shit going on.
45:36
[SPEAKER_01]: It's little things like that.
45:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Ironically very gigantic thing that make the stocker feel really like a labor of love like I compare Well, you look at some like Jurassic World rebirth.
45:52
[SPEAKER_01]: It's got so much money and yet it's so uncreative
45:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Like there's a couple of fun bits for whatever like that, but it doesn't really feel like anyone's like really excited to be here and do something new.
46:03
[SPEAKER_01]: With Death's Doctor every single thing feels like, yeah, we're doing this today.
46:08
[SPEAKER_01]: To the point where I found myself questioning myself, cause I think a lot of times when you watch like a relatively low budget genre film, and you say to yourself, that filmmaker's good.
46:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I hope they make more movies.
46:20
[SPEAKER_01]: But my question is this, I don't know if I want Steven Kostanski to have a bigger budget.
46:26
[SPEAKER_01]: He wanted me to see what he could do with it because he might go nuts and make something really fascinating But I'm not sure that would make him better
46:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, well, I felt that way, there's been a lot of films recently that are trying to capture sort of like this erasable aweshocks kind of down home tone, but they're coming from gigantic studios and they're just not, they can't do it, just by dint of their budget.
46:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Somebody somewhere in an office had to put a green stamp on these things, which makes it seem less edgy and daring, even if the dialogue is identical.
47:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I'm really bugged by what happened to James Gunn for instance.
47:10
[SPEAKER_00]: He's, uh, he started out as this really kind of kind of filthy filmmaker, he wrote screenplays for like trauma movies, uh, he, and it wasn't until he started, uh, working on like Scooby-Doo that he sold out.
47:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So I, I kind of see him, he was the punker that sold out.
47:27
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have done so much more interesting with his career.
47:31
[SPEAKER_00]: but he needed the money and now he's like doing the almost the opposite of what he did at earlier in his career.
47:37
[SPEAKER_01]: To be fair, to be fair, I have read one of his original drafts of Scooby do.
47:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It was so much more interesting before the studio gave him notes.
47:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It actually, and actually was a lot funny here.
47:49
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a little bit more diverse.
47:50
[SPEAKER_01]: It was still very mainstream, but it felt
47:55
[SPEAKER_01]: with what we thought of him as at the time, and then I could see that that got shaved down.
48:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's that's my there.
48:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I particularly liked in the original draft at the big reveal at the end of like, who was the real bad guy along?
48:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It was done not.
48:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, to ask himself.
48:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like Don Nots was trying to kill Scooby-Doo.
48:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, let's kill it.
48:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
48:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, that's so much more fun than just CGI scrappy.
48:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so much more fun.
48:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Sorry, it was worth saying, but I see your point.
48:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And...
48:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just, I don't want, I don't want a Kostanski to go full James Gun.
48:33
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm sure he'd be happy to do so.
48:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure there's a lot of filmmakers who are making these low budget films is a means to make bigger budget movies, but as somebody who likes really creative low budget schlock, I want them to stay in that realm just for personal reasons.
48:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
48:53
[SPEAKER_01]: I would argue that Seth Stalker isn't quite as inspired as Psycho Gorman.
48:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Psycho Gorman's doing something like very original, very much its own thing, and that Stalker is queuing to a pre-existing tradition, but it's a very fun version of it, and I like it a lot.
49:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's super, super fun.
49:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's super, super creative.
49:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just, I'm so happy to see this kind of movie again.
49:19
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... that is you know just a low budget sort of sorcery film that i enjoy um... it's kind of odd that uh... two uh... two of these kind of neo-grindhouse films that i really really loved came out this year and they're both remakes there was this one and there was the remake of the toxic avenger
49:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like both of those movies really understood what made the originals appealing in that they were supposed to be kind of dirty and the fact that these are also, these remakes are also kind of low budget affairs really helps them along, they're using practical makeup effects, the makeup effects are great in both cases, these are just fun, they're fun in a way that I don't get from a lot of movies anymore.
50:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just glad that that spirit and that tone survives.
50:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it felt for a while like we were getting moving away from it?
50:10
[SPEAKER_01]: We have a lot of movies to review, so we should move on.
50:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you tell me and we both watch it, but why don't you get us started on Good Boy?
50:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so Good Boy, first of all, this is like a really good idea for a tales from the crypt episode and it's barely a movie because it's like 72 minutes.
50:29
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... but uh... this is about uh... dog the main character is a dog have played by uh... i forgot what's the name of the dog no the name of the uh... the character is in dog i think it's also i think it's in the al double check but i pretty sure it's it's the same uh... hold on yes in the place himself
50:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
50:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Indy is this dog.
50:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Indy is living with a fellow named Todd and Todd has some kind of lung ailment.
51:03
[SPEAKER_00]: We hear him have conversations on the phone with his sister and his sister is like, I don't want you staying out in that cabin by yourself.
51:10
[SPEAKER_00]: and all of these scenes are told from Indies perspective.
51:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, it's almost like a, a Yossager Ozu film or the camera is deliberately kept really low or down to the ground as if you're sitting.
51:21
[SPEAKER_00]: This is all from the dog's perspective.
51:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And,
51:25
[SPEAKER_00]: he's out in the cabin in the woods, there's some hunters around, he's clearly kind of going through the thought processes of whatever this disease is he has and it's clearly very bad.
51:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Something awful is happening to his body and he's like maybe he's not going to recover.
51:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And also at the same time there's this wet mossy creature stalking around in the woods where this guy is staying.
51:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And Indy is really distressed by this
51:54
[SPEAKER_00]: mossy monster that's like banging on the door and trying to get to his owner and his owner seems like kind of oblivious like only Indie can see this thing and it doesn't take you very long to figure out that the monster is how indie perceives his owner's Disease.
52:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a personification of his disease.
52:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
52:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, whether whether that's literal or figurative.
52:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like maybe there is a supernatural presence, but it's definitely a metaphor, or is that literally all this is?
52:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Regardless, this is a haunted house story from the perspective of the dog.
52:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Just as an elevator pitch, great idea.
52:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and it's so simple that they can't the the only way to fit a lot of plot into this is to make a lot more of the human characters and I think that would have been a big big distraction.
52:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just Todd trying and he's good to his dog.
52:48
[SPEAKER_01]: You loves his dog.
52:49
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just trying to like, you know,
52:51
[SPEAKER_01]: live out as much of his life as he can and occasionally his sister calls and she's worried about him and he just it just makes him what a hermit even more and Indy and there's a and his sister even mentions
53:04
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, the idea that your dog can sense when there's something wrong with you maybe before you can or sometimes the idea that dogs can or animals can sense the supernatural, a lot of people believe that.
53:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we're just playing off of the fact that the dog is far more sensitive than the human and the question is can the dog protect his human?
53:28
[SPEAKER_01]: from whatever it is, is it an exterior malevolence, is it just a representation of what's inside?
53:34
[SPEAKER_01]: The dog is trying to be, and I'm gonna tear up just thinking about this.
53:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It's trying to be a good boy.
53:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It's trying to be a good boy.
53:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Try to be really good boy.
53:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I was watching this movie, and I did something that I never do.
53:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I started talking to the dog.
53:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Not like MST3K.
53:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Just like, no, it's okay, you're doing a good job, buddy.
53:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not your fall, man.
54:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're fall, you're gonna, you're gonna.
54:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like that bit in the Simpsons, where Homer is watching the director's cut of free willy.
54:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, jump willy, jump with all your might.
54:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That's me watching Good Boy.
54:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm so invested in this dog.
54:15
[SPEAKER_01]: This dog.
54:17
[SPEAKER_01]: gives, as far as I'm concerned, one of, if not the best performance of the year.
54:29
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a feat of editing.
54:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like that's what's going on here.
54:32
[SPEAKER_01]: They filmed the dog doing a lot of stuff.
54:34
[SPEAKER_01]: They're trying to get the dog to do something specific.
54:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a trained dog.
54:39
[SPEAKER_01]: So they just had to get hours and hours of footage, trying to get like the 70 minutes of dog footage that they needed, but they nail it between the dogs, the dogs just got a very expressive face between that and the lighting, and the score, and the sound effects, and some very, very good editing, it creates a complete performance.
55:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was thinking about this, I was like,
55:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Is the dog giving a good performance or is this just great editing?
55:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I realize that in a cinematic sense, all performances are great editing.
55:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless it's all done in one shot, everyone is having their performance edited to find the right pieces.
55:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I don't really think about that too much.
55:25
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't try to call too much attention to that because it feels like it takes some of that creativity away from the actor, but the editors are finding the parts that work.
55:34
[SPEAKER_01]: best.
55:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
55:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So, most great performances are also a feed of editing and sometimes those great performances are have things in them that weren't scripted or even we're like a little bit that like the actor did when like before they yelled, you know, cut or or bones began and like there's a line in almost famous.
55:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember very distinctly where um,
56:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Kate Hudson asks Patrick Fuget to go on the road with them of like, follow along the Spanton concert.
56:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, no.
56:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he pauses and he says, ask me again.
56:14
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not in the script.
56:15
[SPEAKER_01]: He was asking her to give him his line again, and Cameron Crow said, that's great, because that actually fits.
56:23
[SPEAKER_01]: That's like he would like, he would turn it down, but then he'd second guess himself, and they're like, okay, let me try that again.
56:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
56:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's, but that's, you can, you can credit him for that same, because he did, he did do it, but that was editing.
56:34
[SPEAKER_01]: My point is this, this is a great performance, even if it is mostly editing.
56:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was so much more invested in Indies Plight.
56:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And I cried.
56:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after I saw the movie, I was in the pharmacy, like later that day.
56:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And I remembered one of the last lines of dialogue in the movie.
56:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And I cried again, like right in the middle of the store in public.
56:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And I didn't care because it was just so good.
56:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It's such a sweet sad.
57:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing terrible happens to the dog by the way.
57:04
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not a spoiler.
57:05
[SPEAKER_01]: You should just know that some people won't see it if they get some bad habits of the dog.
57:09
[SPEAKER_01]: This isn't like a cruel movie to the dog.
57:11
[SPEAKER_01]: The dog is, the dog's going to be okay.
57:15
[SPEAKER_01]: But whether anyone else is, I won't tell you.
57:17
[SPEAKER_01]: But the dog is not a victim of anything here.
57:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, it's so funny that fucking hard break you out.
57:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this movie.
57:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I, I feel like it's, it's a little bit weak as a movie.
57:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I think once you figure out what the premise is and just sort of a dog is trying to protect his owner, uh, then you're just sort of waiting for it to kind of play out.
57:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh
57:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Indie is a very sweet dog.
57:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Indie is a very cute dog.
57:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The scene that really shocked me is there's a scene in the shower Where Indie has gone outside.
57:51
[SPEAKER_00]: I think I forgot what I think if I want some mud and his owner takes him inside and It's like coughing he has a lung ailment and then he coughs blood onto the dog and the poor dog is like what that was that?
58:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very sweet moment.
58:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very shocking moment.
58:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a very horrific moment
58:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I really dug it.
58:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think I was quite as moved as you were, just because you know, Indie is after all just a dog.
58:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm close to this one.
58:20
[SPEAKER_01]: My dad died of cancer and his dog was by his side the entire time.
58:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I really connected with that.
58:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've got a lot of people
58:36
[SPEAKER_01]: to one degree or another.
58:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And yeah, to me, this was, I mean, that part, it's a bit of a soccer punch, you know, maybe it's a little easy, but it's actually incredibly complicated.
58:46
[SPEAKER_01]: They shot this movie over, I just checked, four hundred days.
58:52
[SPEAKER_01]: to get 72 minutes of that dog.
58:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
58:56
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a lot of effort.
58:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Like they said, they did not slap this thing together.
58:59
[SPEAKER_01]: They worked really, really hard to get this effect.
59:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's a credit for it.
59:03
[SPEAKER_01]: So I love it a lot.
59:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's great.
59:07
[SPEAKER_01]: All right.
59:08
[SPEAKER_01]: We've reached the point where we've seen different movies.
59:12
[SPEAKER_01]: There's several of them are quite big.
59:15
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you want to talk about?
59:16
[SPEAKER_01]: We want me to talk about it.
59:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, tell me about the smashing machine, because this is what I missed, and I want to hear about it.
59:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so the smashing machine is the movie, where the rock is going for an Oscar.
59:33
[SPEAKER_01]: That doesn't make it bad movie, but that's very, very clearly what we're doing here.
59:38
[SPEAKER_00]: remember some critics when that movie cop land came out in the mid-90s the Stallone movie they wanted it to be advertised as Stallone X exclamation point and I and I feel like that's that's what's going on here with with Dwayne Johnson it's like Dwayne Johnson acts do they want to say that Stallone started his career acting
1:00:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he was Oscar nominated for Rocky.
1:00:04
[SPEAKER_01]: He tried to be an interesting actor for a long time.
1:00:07
[SPEAKER_01]: He found his way into incipid blockbuster stuff, which was the majority of his output from the mid-80s to the late 90s.
1:00:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:00:18
[SPEAKER_01]: for better or worse.
1:00:19
[SPEAKER_01]: But Dwayne Johnson, he's had a few memorable roles here and they're in a few smaller independent movies where he tried to, you know, not call attention to it and just do the job.
1:00:32
[SPEAKER_01]: But mostly he's a movie star in a classical mold.
1:00:36
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind we don't have a lot of anymore.
1:00:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Where you go to a Dwayne Johnson movie to see him be Dwayne Johnson.
1:00:43
[SPEAKER_01]: That's it.
1:00:43
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a likable fellow on camera.
1:00:46
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got a distinct presence.
1:00:49
[SPEAKER_01]: He's convincing when he's kicking butt.
1:00:51
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got a really good sense of humor.
1:00:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he's the liver he's very good.
1:00:55
[SPEAKER_01]: He's kind of a natural in front of a camera.
1:00:58
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a good movie star.
1:01:00
[SPEAKER_01]: He's often in bad movies, but he's very prolific.
1:01:02
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not all gonna be winners when they're good.
1:01:04
[SPEAKER_01]: He's very good in them.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah.
1:01:08
[SPEAKER_01]: He is decided that he really wants to try to push against that and try to listen.
1:01:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been doing so much acting.
1:01:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to try a real role.
1:01:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And he ends up in this biopic of a fighter named Mark Kerr.
1:01:25
[SPEAKER_01]: who was an early success story in ultimate fighting, the ultimate fighting championship UFC.
1:01:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Before it became what it is today, which is this huge cultural pop cultural sports phenomenon when it was still trying to get respect and on the international stage.
1:01:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark Kerr was one of the early success stories.
1:01:50
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a really good fighter.
1:01:56
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the beginning of this movie, which was written and directed by Benny softy of the softy brothers.
1:02:01
[SPEAKER_01]: They made like Uncle James good time.
1:02:03
[SPEAKER_01]: They split up and they're making it on movies now.
1:02:07
[SPEAKER_01]: At the beginning of the movie, this is not like a underdog makes it big story.
1:02:12
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a big star learns humility story because at the beginning he can do it wrong.
1:02:18
[SPEAKER_01]: He's just preternaturally good at this.
1:02:21
[SPEAKER_01]: He comes out onto the scene.
1:02:22
[SPEAKER_01]: He never loses a fight.
1:02:26
[SPEAKER_01]: early in the movie.
1:02:28
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a fight, some things go wrong.
1:02:30
[SPEAKER_01]: A guy breaks the rules, but there's some confusion about whether he broke the rules.
1:02:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the end, Mark Kerr loses.
1:02:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And he doesn't know how to process that.
1:02:39
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't know how to kneel with that.
1:02:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And it starts really unraveling him.
1:02:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And we realize that all of this, you know, all this pain, all of this endurance tests, all these endurance tests that he's gone through, have led to him being addicted to pain killers and probably other things.
1:02:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know all those details.
1:02:57
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't go on a list of everything that he's addicted to, but he's, he's an addict.
1:03:02
[SPEAKER_01]: He's in a relationship with a woman played by Emily Blunt and it's starting to go sour.
1:03:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, at this point, we've seen this movie.
1:03:12
[SPEAKER_01]: is a biopic about a real celebrity who had a substance abuse problem, had dysfunctional relationship, potentially an abusive relationship, and either deteriorated until their tragic, the tragic end of their career or worse their life, or they made something other themselves than to come back story.
1:03:44
[SPEAKER_01]: What I like about this movie, I don't think it's a great movie, but what I like about this movie is that Benny Safty is not interested in the melodrama and he underplays all of this movie.
1:03:57
[SPEAKER_01]: To the point where it doesn't make a much of an impact, which is probably, you know, but probably miscalculation probably overdid it a little, but he doesn't want this to be sensational.
1:04:07
[SPEAKER_01]: He wants this to be a story of actually pretty mild,
1:04:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Like Mark Kerr is not a larger than life personality.
1:04:17
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a pretty chill dude, and it's about him making mistakes, learning to deal with those mistakes, being in a bad relationship, realizing that he's in a bad relationship and he can't be a part of it anymore, or maybe he will be because they're just so enmeshed.
1:04:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And I respect that.
1:04:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I respect that this is going through a lot of familiar stuff and an unfamiliar way because it's about a guy learning humility and not about a guy becoming a huge success.
1:04:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Dwayne Johnson is good here.
1:04:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Is he amazing?
1:04:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe not, but he's really, really good.
1:04:53
[SPEAKER_01]: He's giving you good performance.
1:04:55
[SPEAKER_01]: There is an element of the film, though, that I think they over did.
1:05:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a distraction.
1:05:01
[SPEAKER_01]: They give Dwayne Johnson
1:05:04
[SPEAKER_01]: some makeup like a forehand appliance to like adjust his overall like sort of appearance.
1:05:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, just a little bit.
1:05:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a little bit.
1:05:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Just a little more like the real guy.
1:05:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:05:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And he does.
1:05:14
[SPEAKER_01]: He does look more like the real guy.
1:05:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll grant you.
1:05:17
[SPEAKER_01]: But the problem is, Drain Johnson's look is so well known.
1:05:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Every scene.
1:05:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Begins with me going.
1:05:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that that is Duane Johnson?
1:05:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, cool.
1:05:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it's it's it's this weird like almost uncanny valley thing where it's like Yes, he doesn't look like Duane Johnson and maybe that's giving him a bit of a boost in the acting department gives him a little bit of freedom On the other hand, I fucking know that's Duane Johnson and you're just distracting me like
1:05:53
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a school of thought on this where like, you know, is it how unnecessary is it to become a mimic, to look exactly like the person that you're playing?
1:06:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think it is.
1:06:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's about capturing the spirit.
1:06:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Jim Carrey doesn't look a lot like Andy Kaufman.
1:06:08
[SPEAKER_01]: But he acts a lot like Andy Kaufman.
1:06:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he is that person and man on the moon.
1:06:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Anthony Hopkins does hardly looks a damn thing like Richard Nixon Oh, he is nothing at all.
1:06:20
[SPEAKER_01]: He's an amazing performance as Richard Nixon It's not an impersonation.
1:06:24
[SPEAKER_01]: He's doing an acting job This is on the cusp of that and I feel like the makeup is
1:06:31
[SPEAKER_01]: it's an albatross here.
1:06:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's completely unnecessary to have gone as far as they did, and I think it's ultimately a distraction, and I think that's a shame, because it's, I think it's going to hide the fact that Dwayne Johnson is doing real acting, because it feels like he's hiding behind an appliance.
1:06:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Dwayne Johnson is very good in this movie.
1:06:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Should he win an Oscar for it?
1:06:51
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd rather give it to Indie the dog.
1:06:55
[SPEAKER_01]: That sounds like an insult.
1:06:56
[SPEAKER_01]: The dog is just that good, but like I've seen better performances this year.
1:07:00
[SPEAKER_01]: He's very very good though, and I'm going to say good for him Good for him.
1:07:05
[SPEAKER_01]: He pushed himself.
1:07:06
[SPEAKER_01]: He stretched himself and it turns out he's a really good actor when he's given them a cereal I hope it is more the movie is just okay
1:07:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
1:07:16
[SPEAKER_01]: The movie is just okay.
1:07:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you're describing.
1:07:19
[SPEAKER_00]: You're describing the appliance and reminded of performances and films like Like Judy the Judy Garland movie.
1:07:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, with Renee Zellweger.
1:07:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like I know what Judy Garland looks like and I know what Renee Zellweger looks like This is clearly just a big elaborate makeup job and yeah
1:07:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It was fine and I think Renez is one of the few times I thought Renez Elwegg are like really kind of stretched as a performer or a little bit.
1:07:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really good in that movie.
1:07:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:07:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:07:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, it's like, you didn't have to go quite so hard.
1:07:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I would have bought it without all of that makeup, you know?
1:07:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like sometimes like we're showing off a little bit of what we're going for the makeup basket.
1:08:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure that wasn't everyone's intention.
1:08:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But again, we're foregrounding this and I think it would have been a lot better to
1:08:10
[SPEAKER_01]: be more minimal with it because it is, I found it in a distraction, and I shouldn't have been distracted.
1:08:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I shouldn't have been immersed.
1:08:19
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's not a huge critique.
1:08:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's still good.
1:08:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you just look at the poster, if you look at the poster, they picked an angle where he looks as much like the rock as possible.
1:08:30
[SPEAKER_01]: But in the movie, if you just look at a random shot from the movie, you might not realize it's the rocket first.
1:08:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and Kudos for that.
1:08:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, it's a bit more complicated conversation with that.
1:08:43
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you want to talk about next?
1:08:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you also saw, um, because you saw a couple of films that I didn't see.
1:08:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, as did you.
1:08:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I'm doing what I'm going to talk about played dirty.
1:08:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, what does play dirty because I, I didn't get to see this one either, and I'm not even really sure what it is.
1:09:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and here's the thing, um, that's not a good sign because Amazon is hoping this is going to be the start of a huge franchise for them.
1:09:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Play dirty is a new film from Shane Black.
1:09:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Shane Blanc has a movie you don't sell the guy did kiss kiss bang bang the nice guys the guy who wrote lethal weapon long kiss good night the last boy's got you know one of the most like recognizable screenwriters of the late half of the last bit of the 20th century and a very well respected director now the predator notwithstanding he's had a new film from Amazon and it is an adaptation
1:09:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Don West Lake is a prolific novelist to erode a lot of crime novels about a consummate professional named Parker, who unlike the people around him who were very much victims of their own foibles, their own humanity, their greed, their lust, their laziness, whatever, Parker is always on point, always professional, no one knows how to deal with them and he just weaves in and out of every story, like a samurai in a movie.
1:10:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, he's been adapted to the screen multiple times before, um, perhaps most famously in the Mel Gibson movie payback.
1:10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: which was a remake of Point Blank, right?
1:10:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
1:10:33
[SPEAKER_01]: John Boyman's Point Blank was, I actually don't even think it was the first adaptation, but it was probably the best known adaptation for a long time.
1:10:41
[SPEAKER_01]: That started Lee Marvin as the main character and in that story, there's a big heist, he's screwed over, he's left for dead, and he comes back to get his cut.
1:10:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And everyone's like, oh, we'll give you, we'll give you all the money.
1:10:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Just stop killing us.
1:10:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want all the money.
1:10:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I want my cut.
1:11:01
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the deal.
1:11:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Do we had an arrangement?
1:11:05
[SPEAKER_01]: We are professionals.
1:11:06
[SPEAKER_01]: We do this the right way.
1:11:08
[SPEAKER_01]: And people just don't know how to process that.
1:11:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And I love that about the character.
1:11:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I haven't read a lot of the Parker stories, but I'm just a huge fan of everything that I read.
1:11:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I think point blank is a classic.
1:11:18
[SPEAKER_01]: He's been adapted a few other times, Jason Statham played Parker and a movie called Parker.
1:11:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not good.
1:11:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I've seen point blank and I've seen Parker.
1:11:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't see payback, the one with Mel Gibson.
1:11:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Payback is interesting because it was taken away from the filmmaker and really significantly re-shot and also recolor graded.
1:11:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So the theatrical cut is very different from the director's cut.
1:11:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think either of them are amazing, but I do think the director's cut is better, at least get the tone of it better.
1:11:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Robert DuVall has played this character for crying out loud, um, uh, good-dard did a movie that was based on a on a Parker novel, like these, these stories have popped up a lot.
1:12:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Amazon bought the rights to all the Parker stories and they want to turn this into a big franchise for them.
1:12:14
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't believe them for that.
1:12:15
[SPEAKER_01]: That's, that's not a bad idea.
1:12:17
[SPEAKER_01]: They haven't adapted one of the books though.
1:12:20
[SPEAKER_01]: They've just sort of
1:12:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Don a new Parker story, which has a lot of similarities to other Parker stories.
1:12:27
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is a new story in the Parker universe.
1:12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a vibe.
1:12:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, it's like when they ran out of James Bond novels to adapt, they just started making James Bond-ish stuff.
1:12:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Like Golden Eye is a James Bond movie.
1:12:43
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not based on a James Bond novel, but they got the gist of it.
1:12:47
[SPEAKER_01]: They captured the essence of it.
1:12:49
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what they're going for here.
1:12:53
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a big heist at the beginning of the movie, Parker is left for dead, again, and he goes off to
1:13:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Find the person who screwed him over and killed one of the few people he considered a friend and it turns out She's like a great Rosa Salazar by the way really great actor Turns out she has already spent all the money to set up a new bigger heist and if he wants his money back he has to help her
1:13:23
[SPEAKER_01]: do this new bigger high so he teams up with lucky stand field and keegan michael key uh... and a bunch of other people to pull off a big epic heist uh... and piss off basically the leader of this like sort of fictional crime organization played by tonic chaloup okay this is all very parker this is all this is all in the right van whether it's good
1:13:54
[SPEAKER_01]: The problem with play dirty isn't that, you know, we've seen this kind of like quippy-highest thing before, isn't that it's too long it is?
1:14:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Isn't that it feels, it's almost like Amazon has like a style and that style is shiny but uninteresting.
1:14:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it looks like it's professionally done not by an art style as well.
1:14:19
[SPEAKER_01]: It looks like it's professionally done but not by an artist.
1:14:23
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, not by someone was something to say.
1:14:26
[SPEAKER_01]: The problem with this movie is Mark Walberg.
1:14:32
[SPEAKER_01]: He's Mark Walberg, he plays Parker.
1:14:35
[SPEAKER_01]: This is some of the worst casting I've seen since Dane the Han in Valerian in the city of a thousand planets.
1:14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that way, but I agree.
1:14:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He just... Dane Dunha does not the actor to get to play like a console or a type.
1:14:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I've heard people argue like, how can you possibly know someone is miscast?
1:14:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Really?
1:14:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's easier when it's a character who has like some kind of previous cachet, we've seen other people play that character.
1:15:05
[SPEAKER_01]: They've been a lot of books about them or something like that.
1:15:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And we can have some sense of what makes that character tick.
1:15:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I honestly think it's a lot simpler than that.
1:15:14
[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of movies you can tell what a character is supposed to be within the narrative and you can see sometimes that the actor they got doesn't have that vibe.
1:15:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Valerian, Dane de Han, played like a sexy, fun, like Bruce Campbell type.
1:15:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like a party boy, but he's not that kind of actor.
1:15:35
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like a more brooding serious very nuanced actor.
1:15:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Like try to imagine like James Dean playing Peter Quill and Guardians of the Galaxy.
1:15:47
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a great actor.
1:15:48
[SPEAKER_01]: He's in the wrong film.
1:15:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:15:50
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not his thing.
1:15:51
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not his stick.
1:15:52
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not what he does.
1:15:52
[SPEAKER_01]: He's misplaced.
1:15:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Mark Wahlberg.
1:15:56
[SPEAKER_01]: has, he's done some acting before.
1:15:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he's good in the departed.
1:16:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I think he's really good in that horror movie fear with Reese Witherspoon.
1:16:04
[SPEAKER_01]: He can act, but he's not a great actor.
1:16:07
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't have like a very wide range.
1:16:10
[SPEAKER_01]: And he has spent the majority of his career building this persona of a laid-back guy.
1:16:19
[SPEAKER_01]: He's very chill, you know?
1:16:21
[SPEAKER_01]: He's like, what?
1:16:23
[SPEAKER_01]: No, like he's just,
1:16:25
[SPEAKER_01]: He's supposed to be very aftable, very every man.
1:16:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And unfortunately Parker is not written that way.
1:16:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Parker is written like the toughest motherfucker in the room.
1:16:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Parker is written like Tashira Maffoni or young Clint Eastwood, someone who just commands respect is intimidating without doing literally anything.
1:16:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And Mark Wahlberg can't do that.
1:16:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And every time the script demands that he do that,
1:16:53
[SPEAKER_01]: He looks like a guy who isn't a tough guy, trying to act like a tough guy, which means he's entirely wrong.
1:17:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he's way off, and I'm looking at the smoothie that I realized that almost any other actor in this movie.
1:17:09
[SPEAKER_01]: would be a better Parker.
1:17:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Le Keech's standfield is in this movie.
1:17:12
[SPEAKER_01]: He'd be a better Parker.
1:17:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Rosa Salazar is in this movie.
1:17:15
[SPEAKER_01]: She'd be a better Parker.
1:17:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Thomas Jane is in this movie.
1:17:19
[SPEAKER_01]: He'd be an okay Parker.
1:17:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Like Mark Wahlberg is completely wrong for this.
1:17:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And the movie itself is like just okay, he brings it down.
1:17:32
[SPEAKER_01]: He brings it way down because it's all based around him
1:17:38
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, just airtight professionalism and Mark Wahlberg cannot exude that at this point in his career.
1:17:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe there was a time when he could.
1:17:47
[SPEAKER_01]: We're past that because he could not pull it off and the entire thing falls apart as a result.
1:17:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a terrible, no, it's not terrible, but it never works.
1:17:57
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a damn shit.
1:17:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:18:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, what, I'm, I'm so baffled by the ups and downs of Shane Black's career.
1:18:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:18:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, he, um, he, he, at one point was like the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood, you mentioned the successes, he did things like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
1:18:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He clearly likes film noir and really witty characters who say really clever things.
1:18:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I love Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
1:18:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I even like the longest good night, these big sort of high octane action pictures that he would do, because he would bring a little bit of wit to it.
1:18:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he, rather famously, was cast as an actor in the movie Predator, specifically so the director would have him around to do rewrites on the script.
1:18:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not his script, but he's often credited as being the one who made it sort of an interesting story.
1:18:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That may be incredible, but that is the story told most often, yeah.
1:19:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
1:19:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have no trouble believing that story, even if it is a possible.
1:19:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels right.
1:19:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels right.
1:19:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And you watch Predator and you can kind of see a Shane Black Ian sort of quality to it.
1:19:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he like his type of screenwriting I guess fell out of fashion.
1:19:18
[SPEAKER_00]: He had trouble getting some work and then he would rise again.
1:19:21
[SPEAKER_00]: He made kiss kiss bang bang.
1:19:22
[SPEAKER_00]: That didn't it wasn't a huge hit, but it kind of put him back on the map again.
1:19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It was cradly.
1:19:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It claimed it made Robert Denj, Jr.
1:19:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Rostar after he had fallen way off the map.
1:19:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It had multiple times like his career started to pick up steam again and then substance abuse got in the way and then he picked steam again got in the way.
1:19:42
[SPEAKER_01]: his big bang is what brought him back and made him someone that Marvel looked at and said that could be Iron Man.
1:19:48
[SPEAKER_00]: That was, yeah, no, a bazillionaire thanks to all of those Iron Man movies, he said.
1:19:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but yeah, then he made the nice guys and that was pretty good.
1:19:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't as big hit and and that's what he falls off again and now he seems to be trouble having fun having, you know, getting good jobs again.
1:20:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, he did Iron Man, especially in the middle there, which was made a lot of money, but a lot of people didn't like it very much, because it played a little fast and loose with the Marvel formula.
1:20:18
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, in the middle there, he did the predator, which a lot of people were very excited about because like, you know, Fred, he would be reaching with Fred Decker, and they'd worked on Monsis vibes together.
1:20:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, it really seemed like that was going to be like,
1:20:34
[SPEAKER_01]: two predator what like some of the better alien sequels were to alien we're probably going to get this thing on track and that was a huge whiff.
1:20:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Just totally way off.
1:20:45
[SPEAKER_01]: He vanished.
1:20:46
[SPEAKER_01]: There was some scandal because he'd like cast someone who was like a sexual predator in the movie and that sucked and like he lost a lot of respect for that and he should have.
1:20:57
[SPEAKER_01]: But, um, yeah, this feels like him trying to get back in everyone's good graces with, frankly, I'm moving the feels very safe.
1:21:05
[SPEAKER_01]: This feels like it should be in his wheelhouse.
1:21:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the kind of thing that maybe he would have written in the 90s, uh, but it would have been better in the 90s.
1:21:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it would have had some edge to it, it would have had some personality, this feels like all the interesting things about this movie are sanded way the fuck down and the only things that really pop out are, you know, there's a few supporting actors who are having good time, there's, it's still, you know, there's still elements of Parker, which, you know, it's hard not to get excited about, it's just a great character and such a great world that Wesley created.
1:21:42
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's just a bland boring version of it, and it's really hard to imagine anyone getting excited about seeing any more of these this way.
1:21:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's such a pity, because...
1:21:53
[SPEAKER_00]: This seems like the ideal place for Shane Black to shine.
1:21:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it feels like a match made in heaven, right?
1:21:59
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels kind of perfect, and it's way off.
1:22:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I think Mark Wahlberg's just the wrong person for it.
1:22:04
[SPEAKER_01]: There was some talk apparently about getting Robert Danny Jr.
1:22:07
[SPEAKER_01]: to star as Parker, and that would have been a little bit difficult for the character, but I know Danny could play it.
1:22:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:22:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I think this is just this, sometimes when you're trying to make a big movie,
1:22:20
[SPEAKER_01]: The studio wants to get a big star, and after a while, if you can't get exactly the person you want, you get the biggest star you can get, and that can change the movie dramatically.
1:22:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes you rewrite it around that actor, and it works.
1:22:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Other times, it just fucking doesn't, and this fucking doesn't.
1:22:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it unwatchable?
1:22:42
[SPEAKER_01]: No.
1:22:44
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like,
1:22:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that, that not very good remake of the Italian job, Mark Wallberg was in.
1:22:51
[SPEAKER_01]: That's like kind of like a fun kind of cape or thing.
1:22:54
[SPEAKER_01]: If that's like a three-star generic, or a nice movie, this is like, two at best.
1:23:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So like, it's not awful, but I don't, this is, I doubt this is gonna be anyone's favorite movie anytime soon.
1:23:08
[SPEAKER_01]: But I'm happy to move on.
1:23:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you tell me about after the hunt?
1:23:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, after the hunt is the latest film from Luca Guadanino and this is trying to go really hard on it's another film that's really trying to examine where we are now.
1:23:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a film very much about sort of the generation gap between essentially Gen Z and Gen X.
1:23:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The Julia Roberts plays a philosophy professor at Yale, and she, her assistant professor is played by Andrew Garfield, and they both speak in these very highfalutin terms, and in early scene in this movie, they're talking about,
1:23:52
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, the various modern political philosophies with some younger people and the younger people are sort of accusing them of being insensitive whereas the gen Xs are accusing the young people of being too sensitive and that's sort of the conversation where it goes back and forth.
1:24:07
[SPEAKER_00]: There tables are piled up with philosophy books.
1:24:12
[SPEAKER_00]: They're they're really kind of like the self-styled intelligentsia and they like being that.
1:24:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Julia Roberts has an assistance like a T.A.
1:24:25
[SPEAKER_00]: is played by A.O.A.
1:24:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Dibbery, and she is friends with the Dandre Garfield character.
1:24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: She leaves the party with the Dandre Garfield character, and then the next morning goes to Julia Roberts and says in kind of vague terms that
1:24:43
[SPEAKER_00]: He did something.
1:24:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He did something.
1:24:45
[SPEAKER_00]: He crossed a line.
1:24:47
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't say these terms, but he sexually assaulted her.
1:24:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And so Julia Roberts ends up going to the underground field character who in a speech where he sounds like the guiltyest person imaginable,
1:25:03
[SPEAKER_00]: explains that no no he didn't sexually assault her he actually caught her in a plagiarism scheme and was going to expose her and she is now manufacturing this assault to discredit him and now Julie yeah so it's this he said she said sort of thing and Julia Roberts has to choose where she's going to go with us now
1:25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the plot of the movie, but the movie starts to look away from a lot of that actual plot in those machinations for a lot prolonged periods as we zero in on the Julia Roberts character.
1:25:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And Julia Roberts does a really fantastic job in this movie because her character is a fucking mess.
1:25:43
[SPEAKER_00]: uh we learn that like she was drinking in a party but we learn that she actually drinks every day we see that she's sick with something or maybe she's drinking too much at school because she's seen like throwing up a lot at school and we start to learn more and more about
1:26:00
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of her past and the chilly relationship she has with her husband is played by Michael Stoolbark and it feels like it occasionally as we're sort of exploring this character she'll occasionally come back to this conflict between her TA and her assistant professor you know he gets ousted but we're not really sure what her motivations really are and we
1:26:24
[SPEAKER_00]: kind of what a terrible person the Io adibary character is it's I feel like this is a movie that is just as confused about shit as its characters it's really trying to cover a lot of ground in terms of where we are politically and where we are in terms of the different political philosophies
1:26:52
[SPEAKER_00]: functions better when we look at it as a character piece.
1:26:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It's made by look at what any of you.
1:26:56
[SPEAKER_00]: He's Italian.
1:26:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels very European.
1:27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was Roger Ebert who once said or pointed out anyway.
1:27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: That, uh,
1:27:08
[SPEAKER_00]: American films tend to be about plot and story, whereas European films tend to be about characters.
1:27:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like this is a film that is trying to explore a lot of these things through a plot, but it's not so interested in the plot as it is the mixed up head spaces of its characters.
1:27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it's necessarily coming to any kind of salient conclusions.
1:27:31
[SPEAKER_00]: some of it feels a little bit muddled or a little bit like poorly thought out.
1:27:37
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, we're not really trying to explore the story of all of this so much as we are trying to really get under the skin of who these people are.
1:27:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we're getting a lot of really interesting character work.
1:27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: all throughout from all of the characters.
1:27:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael Stoolbark has some really wonderful speeches about the state of their marriage.
1:27:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I owe a delivery.
1:27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: We are not really sure how much she's putting on, like how much of her character is an affect.
1:28:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Andrew Garfield is great in everything and he plays kind of this sleazeball character that we don't trust at all and we think it's kind of the is a horrible, you know sexual assaulter and at the middle of this we have Julia Roberts
1:28:19
[SPEAKER_00]: She's not quite as rich as, like, Lydia Tarra, but she's in that camp.
1:28:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, there's a lot going on.
1:28:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really fascinating, but I'm not sure if it really holy works in any kind of meaningful, like, super meaningful way.
1:28:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I didn't see this, but it's one of those movies that it feels like, the way you describe it makes it feel like it's trying to be a film everyone's going to talk about.
1:28:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, like we're gonna, well, that's the thing.
1:28:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a frothy issues, man.
1:28:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's where part of it is, but I think it's wise and that it just sort of sticks with being a character piece at the end of the day.
1:28:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
1:29:00
[SPEAKER_01]: My point is that I feel like the concern I think is that a lot of people in the audience are going to watch a movie like that and.
1:29:09
[SPEAKER_01]: really start questioning what are you trying to say here?
1:29:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Because these are real issues that people are really trying to work through and improve our situation, improve the way we handle these conversations.
1:29:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And it just seems like they're just, it sounds like they're, if not diving, then at least waiting into some murky waters.
1:29:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and then to the point where the audience is going to ask, like, are they handling this topic to my satisfaction?
1:29:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, and everybody's going to have a viewpoint, and I feel like sometimes it can really work well, or at least be very bracing when a filmmaker or an artist is trying to tackle modern-day politics without the benefit of hindsight.
1:29:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I said this a lot when we reviewed Eddington.
1:29:58
[SPEAKER_00]: because Eddington was about just where we were in this country just a couple of years ago.
1:30:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's covering a lot of interesting ground, but it is just repeating a lot of what we just went through as if it's like this ancient document.
1:30:11
[SPEAKER_00]: When it's like we all remember it, we didn't necessarily need that reminder for something like Eddington.
1:30:19
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like after the hunt avails itself a little bit better because it really is sticking with the people in the story rather than trying to be this really important political polemic.
1:30:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's just following characters who just happen to be stuck in a lot of the discourse discourse with a capital D. Right.
1:30:42
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a tricky one because like I want to like.
1:30:45
[SPEAKER_01]: We do this thing when we like I've seen a movie and you have on our vice versa where you know obviously I yield the floor and but I do want to like maybe Talk about something I want you're bringing up some interesting ideas and I kind of want to just kind of sus out a bit more of what the movie is doing and this really just feel like the kind of movie where
1:31:08
[SPEAKER_01]: given what it tackles in the fact that you can't really, you know, go into too much detail about exactly what happens.
1:31:15
[SPEAKER_01]: It might be better off if I just see the damn movie before we have like a main vocalization because it sounds like it's especially given the top of quality, like it's difficult to have a vague conversation about that without the thought things of the film.
1:31:28
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I guess I'll leave it there.
1:31:32
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, it's looking quite a gneneo.
1:31:35
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'll see anything he does.
1:31:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like, and like, look, all of the cook got in the news films, he gives a lot of marvelous attention to like background detail and atmosphere, just any room you walk into is just so rich with detail.
1:31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, in the opening, seeing me know exactly where we are because we're in this very warm, well, money department and there's just books stacked up everywhere and there's people sort of lounging around and he edits in such a way where people are having conversations with just looks within the other conversations.
1:32:06
[SPEAKER_00]: all of that is really skilled and I think that's always embracing and exciting to watch.
1:32:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Well fair enough.
1:32:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Moving on.
1:32:17
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw a little film called The Nemanny.
1:32:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell me about a nomeni a nomeni a nomeni a nomeni Tell me about a nomeni.
1:32:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, do you not want to talk about this movie now?
1:32:35
[SPEAKER_01]: I do it's it's a bit
1:32:38
[SPEAKER_01]: A neverty is a movie that has a lot of historical and cultural context, which I'm not an expert in.
1:32:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So I feel like I'm on the outside looking in at a lot of this movie, and that's not necessarily a terrible place to be, it's an audience member, but I do feel a little as though, you know, I'm going to temper my review by admitting, this is not my field.
1:33:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
1:33:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Anemony is a film that was directed and co-written by Ronan Day Lewis.
1:33:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And if that sounds like, hey, that sounds like Daniel Day Lewis.
1:33:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, that's Daniel Day Lewis's son.
1:33:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Daniel Day Lewis co-wrote the movie and stars in it after not being in a film for eight years.
1:33:36
[SPEAKER_00]: years since Phantom Thread came out and I don't know how to process that the last 10 years have been really hard i remember that uh... Daniel de Louis uh... it's not so shocking because he said he was going to retire and uh... if if we recall he said he was going to be a cobbler uh... he's going to be a cobbler in the 2000s
1:33:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's going to retire to become a cobbler, but it keeps coming back and you know he doesn't have to act and I appreciate that there's this assumption we make as non celebrities that everybody who becomes a celebrity would like to stay that way in perpetuity and not a lot of actors necessarily want that sometimes they get into it for different reasons or they realize their career is going where they didn't want it to so they retire and we always ask why did they how could they possibly retire I want to see them more of their work.
1:34:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to see Daniel Day Lewis make more movies.
1:34:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm really frustrated with directors who are so stingy with their projects, they only come out with a film like ever one that every 10 years.
1:34:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, to be fair, a lot of those filmmakers would like to do more, but shit happens in this industry.
1:34:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, but I'm also reminded of filmmakers like Stephen Soderberg, who, for some reason, can make two movies in a year.
1:34:52
[SPEAKER_01]: And also, well, he says he's going to retire.
1:34:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and it says he's going to retire.
1:34:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So the fact that he would come out of retirement to take Louis to star in a film of his sons, you know, that's, okay, he clearly has faith in his son or just wants to do his son a favor or just loves his son.
1:35:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, again, he could love his son.
1:35:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like he's passionate about it.
1:35:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:35:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so the plot's pretty minimal.
1:35:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Sean Bean and Samantha Morton have a teenage son.
1:35:27
[SPEAKER_01]: At the beginning of the movie, their teenage son has just been in some kind of, sort of violent altercation and they're worried about their son.
1:35:33
[SPEAKER_01]: But here's the thing.
1:35:36
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not Sean Bean's son.
1:35:38
[SPEAKER_01]: He's Sean Bean's brothers son.
1:35:41
[SPEAKER_01]: His brother is out of the picture.
1:35:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Sean Bean married.
1:35:45
[SPEAKER_01]: his brother's ex-wife or lover, that's a little vague, and not sure what their relationship was.
1:35:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's been raising this kid all by himself with the wife, but like without the original dad.
1:35:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And now that the boys in a lot of trouble, Sean Bean seeks him out, and this character who's played by Daniel Day Lewis has been living the life of a recluse.
1:36:14
[SPEAKER_01]: for many years, and now that his son meets him, he's going to come out of retirement and start acting again.
1:36:29
[SPEAKER_01]: He's not going to do that, but it's sort of like, this feels like we're making it with it's kind of about Daniel D. Louis a little bit.
1:36:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
1:36:39
[SPEAKER_01]: But, yeah, so a lot of them will be is Danodalos and Sean Bean in a cabin in a forest.
1:36:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And excavating for a mine.
1:36:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, and, you know, they're tack by ghosts.
1:36:53
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not a tack by ghosts, so though there is a lot of like spectral imagery here.
1:36:58
[SPEAKER_01]: We're in a sort of a liminal space a lot of the time.
1:37:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And they're going to just sort of interact.
1:37:07
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not talkative people.
1:37:09
[SPEAKER_01]: They actually don't talk a lot.
1:37:10
[SPEAKER_01]: They only really talk when they get drunk.
1:37:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And when they get drunk, Daniel DeLouis gets monology.
1:37:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And he tells these vivid stories, some of which may or may not be true.
1:37:25
[SPEAKER_01]: But over the course of it, we're trying to figure out what happened here.
1:37:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did he know about of his family?
1:37:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did he leave society?
1:37:33
[SPEAKER_01]: There's some talk that he might be a murderer.
1:37:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Is he on the lamb or was he just accused of something and then left out a shame?
1:37:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And these are questions that aren't really answered until towards the end of the movie.
1:37:49
[SPEAKER_01]: What the movie is, more than anything else.
1:37:52
[SPEAKER_01]: because it is structured very much unlike unconventional movie.
1:37:56
[SPEAKER_01]: It actually doesn't have a lot of forward momentum a lot of the time.
1:38:00
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a story about purgatory.
1:38:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, more than maybe, maybe literally maybe not, but this is a story about someone who has done something he thinks is wrong and he cannot move on from it.
1:38:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And he is punishing himself, but he is also like right on the cusp.
1:38:21
[SPEAKER_01]: maybe of either returning to civilization or finding some sort of inner peace or redemption.
1:38:29
[SPEAKER_01]: But he keeps shying away from it out of guilt and shame.
1:38:32
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very careful.
1:38:34
[SPEAKER_01]: OK.
1:38:35
[SPEAKER_01]: OK.
1:38:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It's also a film about the troubles, which is a pretty broad historical period of active conflict.
1:38:50
[SPEAKER_01]: uh, in and around Northern Ireland and I am not an expert in that, I don't know a ton about that and I really do feel like if you're Irish, this movie might hit a lot harder because it definitely has a lot to say about that particular chapter in relatively recent history.
1:39:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And the scars that it left and the way that it tore people apart and brought eronically some people together, the sort of moral bruising that it left behind.
1:39:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And I find that all very, very fascinating, but I just genuinely feel like this movie assumes I know more about it than I do.
1:39:46
[SPEAKER_01]: like it's just it's just taking it for granted and I feel like I've kind of jumped off of the deep end and I barely know how to dog battle in parts of this man which again it's not a terrible place to be it's actually kind of fascinating but at least me a little unequipped to talk about how effectively it deals with that topic so what I all I can really do is look at how earnest to the
1:40:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Ronan DeLuis has an interesting eye.
1:40:18
[SPEAKER_01]: He's very pastoral, but very, he's definitely operating a lot of subconscious levels.
1:40:26
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of imagery in the movie that's a little hard to explain some of it.
1:40:30
[SPEAKER_01]: We get a little more context for later.
1:40:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Others not so much.
1:40:35
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's really trying to throw us into a very internal,
1:40:43
[SPEAKER_01]: like confused psychological headspace in this film.
1:40:46
[SPEAKER_01]: We're very much inside Daniel DeLouis's head in a lot of it.
1:40:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And again, I don't always have the context I feel to explain even some of the imagery in the movie.
1:40:57
[SPEAKER_01]: But I do know that, you know who's a good actor?
1:41:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Daniel DeLouis.
1:41:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he's still got it.
1:41:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Like I don't think this is one of his best roles.
1:41:07
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... but i do believe that he's fully committed here and he's giving a very impassioned performance of the form of city clearly believes in and thinks it's a great uh... i find shan beans work really impressive here he's actually in many respects quite like a sounding board for dandel day louis he's giving dandel day louis space to work
1:41:33
[SPEAKER_01]: and not giving a ton of return.
1:41:37
[SPEAKER_01]: He never feels like he's competing with Daniel Day Lewis, which honestly, given the fact that you're working with an actor who was typically considered one of the best actors ever, and who is really making a meal with some of these scenes, I admire the restraint.
1:41:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Sean Bay is very under-appreciated actor for that exact reason.
1:41:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, for sure.
1:41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Although, a sign of a good actor is, oh, I guess, can be that generosity that, uh, he, you know, of course, yeah, Daniel Day Lewis steps onto the stage and probably a little bit intimidating as his co-star, but if he's going to be there with his co-stars, he's going to let them match him and play the scene with him, rather than just, you know,
1:42:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Let himself dominate.
1:42:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, and again, I'm not accusing Daniel Day Lewis of doing that.
1:42:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just Daniel Day Lewis is given such a juicy role Then Sean Bean is not he's actually a much more reserved Character and it can be very difficult not to disappear
1:42:42
[SPEAKER_01]: and a movie like that next to someone like that.
1:42:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Especially in a movie where very little happens, it's not like there's a car chase in the middle or something like that, the keep us like the keep our blood pumping.
1:42:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Like no, it's just them in a room talking about whether Daniel Day Lewis has read a letter yet.
1:42:58
[SPEAKER_01]: Like that's a significant chunk of the movie.
1:43:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not going to say that I was necessarily riveted, but I was intrigued and I was invested.
1:43:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and I think Daniel is a great work.
1:43:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Sean Bean is doing great work.
1:43:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I think Samantha Morton She's not in it a lot, but she's fantastic in it.
1:43:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, it's an interesting film.
1:43:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it a great film?
1:43:22
[SPEAKER_01]: No But I at least not based on what I know.
1:43:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have all the context, but I do think this is an interesting film And I think there's an interesting sort of meta narrative here about someone who
1:43:36
[SPEAKER_01]: doesn't want to participate being forced to participate again.
1:43:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And it feels like this is something that's happened the Dan of the Louis many times where he says I don't want to do another movie I'm good and then for one reason or another he is brought back into it and he gives a million percent like you can tell it's taking it out of him no wonder he wants to quit but he keeps getting pulled back.
1:44:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's something kind of interesting.
1:44:03
[SPEAKER_01]: And I can't wrap my head around that because that's the context I have.
1:44:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how much of that is intentional.
1:44:08
[SPEAKER_01]: There's subconscious.
1:44:08
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't feel like it's meta in any way, but it is kind of in there.
1:44:13
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that's interesting.
1:44:14
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, it's an interesting film.
1:44:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's okay.
1:44:18
[SPEAKER_01]: It movie doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be amazing.
1:44:21
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd rather have an interesting film than like a very well-made dull film.
1:44:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, like tronaries.
1:44:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like, and they functionally technically looks good.
1:44:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like the design is fine.
1:44:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:44:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know nothing except like sometimes when when nine of snails was doing stuff, but they weren't improving the story or the emotions or anything, they just gave me something cool to listen to.
1:44:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank Christ, I for something.
1:44:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, we got three movie
1:44:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see, I can talk about Orwell, if you like.
1:45:00
[SPEAKER_00]: What's that?
1:45:02
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
1:45:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:45:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Documentarian Raul Peck made a new film.
1:45:07
[SPEAKER_00]: He's perhaps best known for his recent James Baldwin documentary.
1:45:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I am not your Negro.
1:45:14
[SPEAKER_00]: But he also did films on Lamumba.
1:45:16
[SPEAKER_00]: He did a young Carl Marx.
1:45:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is his attempt, like after the hunt, to really kind of sum up where we are right now.
1:45:28
[SPEAKER_00]: like where are we as a people where are where is where is the human race at this moment and he stages it through not just not just George Orwell's writings specifically his writings about 1980 his novels 1984 an animal farm but also his biography it's about sort of his life and
1:45:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And what Relle Peck is doing is he is clearly taking a lot of...
1:46:08
[SPEAKER_00]: like news footage and things that are actually going on in the world right now and finding that things are pretty effed up everywhere.
1:46:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything is awful.
1:46:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And we see sort of the rise of authoritarianism here in the United States.
1:46:28
[SPEAKER_00]: We see the rise of authoritarianism all over the world and how authoritarian governments historically throughout history as observed and recorded by Orwell back in the forties.
1:46:38
[SPEAKER_00]: have operated by the same playbook, how they've been going through the same kinds of pressing a certain of persecuted groups or pressing, you know, minority is our pressing, certain kinds of dissent or controlling the news.
1:46:53
[SPEAKER_00]: All of these things have been a big big part of authoritarian regimes.
1:46:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you've read 1984, you see all of those things playing out in a science fiction context.
1:47:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really cool to see a lot of these things being seen through film adaptations of animal farm in 1984.
1:47:10
[SPEAKER_00]: We see a lot of clips from those, and we see the language sort of playing itself out.
1:47:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And then Real Peck will rather dammingly cut directly to an actual politician, essentially just repeating the things that he wrote, or that Roger Dorawell wrote in
1:47:26
[SPEAKER_00]: in 1984.
1:47:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The two plus two equals five is something that's from the book 1984.
1:47:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea that the state can declare whatever facts they want and the citizenry has to agree to it and there's a all-as-seem in 1984 where they force the main character Winston Smith to repeat over and over again that two plus two does not equal for because the state says so two plus two equals
1:47:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
1:47:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And that phrase to plus two equals five has been used historically, not just in Orwell, but other places as well.
1:48:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
1:48:04
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Hector Star Trek used that one as well.
1:48:06
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a, the, there are four lights seen.
1:48:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very much two plus two equals five.
1:48:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
1:48:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So, it's, it's certainly not a fun watch.
1:48:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of what role Peck is going through has been sort of floating through a lot of, a punditry and essays that have been coming out of political writing in the United States throughout the last decade since the rise of Trump, our current authoritarian.
1:48:32
[SPEAKER_00]: uh... this regime is really taken hold of a lot of foolish authoritarian damning horrendous uh... philosophical practices and just run with them out in the open just very obviously so a lot of authors and a lot of pundits and
1:48:52
[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of essayists and writers have been writing endlessly about the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration and I feel like this is not so much any kind of new interpretation of this stuff and a lot of orwell has been mentioned in a lot of modern essays in the last decade, but it is a really fantastic
1:49:13
[SPEAKER_00]: and very damning encapsulation of a lot of these ideas.
1:49:17
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea that all of these authoritarian regimes are just sort of going by the Orwell playbook.
1:49:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, here it is.
1:49:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's Orwell's actual words.
1:49:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's actual like, oh, who is it?
1:49:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Who reads Orwell's letters as famous actor?
1:49:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Damien Lewis.
1:49:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Damien Lewis reads, he's sort of like plays the voice of Orwell in all of his letters.
1:49:40
[SPEAKER_00]: and okay and the film however isn't just sort of this non-stop fire hose of damnation which is it is because it's hard to take but they it does sort of modulate itself by giving us a lot of the biographical information if who or well was how he grew up how he developed how he realized at one point when he was a young man that he was a child of privilege.
1:50:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And that a lot of his points of view work kind of skewed toward being the colonialist.
1:50:11
[SPEAKER_00]: He's a British man.
1:50:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:50:13
[SPEAKER_00]: What happens when a British man goes to India?
1:50:15
[SPEAKER_00]: You can either just say, oh, well, this is ours, or you can say, oh, shit.
1:50:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We shouldn't have done that.
1:50:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let me ask you, let me ask this question.
1:50:22
[SPEAKER_01]: What is the ratio here of documentary about George Orwell versus documentary about how orwellian things are now?
1:50:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mean, those things are intertwined, aren't they?
1:50:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I mean, that's a good one.
1:50:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's a well-tested, you know, like you can do that.
1:50:41
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but a lot of what he wrote was a commentary on the rise of this kind of regime that we're seeing right now.
1:50:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like we're only able to recognize a lot of these things because of what Orwell wrote.
1:50:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's incredibly significant that we're going into Orwell right now in the year 2025.
1:51:04
[SPEAKER_00]: it's a very smart film it's very intellectual it forces you to pay attention also forces you to know a lot because it's not just talking about specifically the election of Donald Trump although he is a big part of this movie it's also about you know bullson arrow and other authoritarian regimes that have just sort of been rising up all over the planet if you know a lot about that if you pay attention news then you're going to be really beyond this film's wavelength and I think
1:51:31
[SPEAKER_00]: heart-stoppingly distressing for the last decade.
1:51:35
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people are going to be on this film's wave life because they have been paying attention.
1:51:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
1:51:39
[SPEAKER_01]: The other thing I just want to know is, and I feel you address this a little bit, but I would like some more clarity.
1:51:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Obviously there's movies talking about things, a lot of people are discussing already, a lot of
1:51:55
[SPEAKER_01]: reporters and essayists and newsletters and television, John Oliver, whatever, is it in your opinion doing anything distinctly new or does he have any new insights or is it just a strong encapsulation of it?
1:52:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, well, like I said, what it, what it gives us is putting it into a broader historical context.
1:52:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, a lot of the SAS are trying to just sort of report on it and say how awful it is.
1:52:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we're talking about John Oliver, talking about Tana Hisi Coates, we're talking about, you know, every writer at the Atlantic, the, the authors who have not count out and told the company line and tried to become part of this regime and, you know, pay them off.
1:52:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's
1:52:46
[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of the sort of recent legal troubles like Jimmy Kimmel isn't mentioned in this film it was done before that scam broke yeah but it would have been right but yeah like things about that like there's a lot of like lawsuits that the Trump administration and other that has been sort of collecting a lot of money from media companies that kind of thing all
1:53:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's going to give you a good solid understanding, if nothing else, as to what's really going on out there.
1:53:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It feels like it's like it's not cracking anything open, but it is drawing us a map.
1:53:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's going to be really, really important, especially given how chaotic everything is right now.
1:53:38
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just going to let us see what's been going on.
1:53:41
[SPEAKER_01]: It's tricky for me because I'm trying to pay as much attention as I can and there's just so much happening all at once, it's like that speech and and or like that's how they get away with things.
1:53:53
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just like one thing you can deal with.
1:53:55
[SPEAKER_01]: There's too much to deal with and so they get away with a lot of it.
1:54:01
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like what I'm looking for in a lot of what I feel is dismissive to refer to as the discourse, but I can't think of it better word right now.
1:54:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, is I'm looking for, I'm seeing a lot of people reporting it and cataloging it and contextualizing it and all of that's good and all of that's valuable, I just want to know what to do.
1:54:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't want someone to tell me like what to do.
1:54:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't want to be able to just like a follower, but I would like instead of just saying, here's what's happening and it's bad and it's happened before.
1:54:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It was predicted, it's like, how do we move past this point?
1:54:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, how do we fix all this?
1:54:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And I find it frustrating how little it is because I feel like there's a result, I feel like there is a sense of despair.
1:54:55
[SPEAKER_01]: or read something to this effect.
1:54:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It ultimately makes me feel even more like unmoored in history, and I'm just sort of floating around waiting for events to shift, like they inevitably will to some degree.
1:55:12
[SPEAKER_01]: But I would like to be there when that happens and I want to know how we can get there and I feel like that's something that and that's not as silly as documentaries job, but personally, I'm just I would very much like that.
1:55:26
[SPEAKER_00]: I would like more of that, please.
1:55:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Just waiting for something dramatic to happen.
1:55:32
[SPEAKER_00]: we're waiting for something to solve this.
1:55:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm reminded of a film called The Oath from the First Trump Administration by I guarantee that's the comedian and that was about a guy who was just incessantly doom scrolling and things had gotten really bad in this country and the the very Trump-like president in that movie was asking for like a nationwide oath of loyalty and
1:55:56
[SPEAKER_00]: that movie ended with what I think all doom scrollers want, which is the end of the scroll.
1:56:03
[SPEAKER_00]: They want to reach the bottom of the page where everything is just suddenly taken care of in a very positive way in one fell swoop.
1:56:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Like at the end of that movie, it's like,
1:56:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm not going to give it away just you know a lot of the problems are just sort of magically solved all at once and everything and just sort of falls into place in this kind of almost magical kind of a way and I think that's what we're all waiting for and
1:56:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, that's not the way authoritarianism works and and it feels like are we are we trapped in this wash of history Yeah, we're we're at a high tide right now.
1:56:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And we just don't like feeling there's there's it's somebody's talking about things make you feel helpless.
1:56:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and that's and I'm not I'm not even saying that's an accurate it's just
1:56:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Not doing me any favors, but I would say this documentary, this isn't a critique of that documentary, just like with this general wave.
1:57:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And,
1:57:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:57:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, how do they do how do the 1984 is a very bleak book because it ends with the main character Winston Smith having his will broken by the regime and he actually loves big like genuinely loves big brother at the end of that book and so we're kind of there and think of the end of animal farm you know all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others
1:57:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, we're describing these times as Orwellian because we don't see a light at the end of the tunnel.
1:57:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like this, that's not this film's job though, this film is about recognizing how these things function, how these things operate, how petty it is, but also the horrors to prepare for as we lie, that lie ahead.
1:57:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that bleak?
1:57:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
1:57:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it going to make you feel good or empowered?
1:57:51
[SPEAKER_00]: No.
1:57:54
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just sort of the reality of what we're living in right now.
1:57:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I don't necessarily need to feel good or even empowered, but I would like to get the sense that we're not just cataloging how it all faded out.
1:58:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be nice to be a little constructive.
1:58:09
[SPEAKER_01]: But, you know, that's, again, it's not the documentary's job.
1:58:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just going to have my conversation.
1:58:14
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, let's move on.
1:58:15
[SPEAKER_01]: We got two more movies.
1:58:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll be pretty efficient about them.
1:58:19
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a new horror movie from Brian Bertino, and if that name sounds familiar, it's because he wrote and directed the strangers, the good one.
1:58:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I've only seen the second one.
1:58:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so the strangers, I mentioned this recently.
1:58:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I just reviewed the strangers chapter two, Renny Harlin rebooted the strangers franchise.
1:58:47
[SPEAKER_01]: There are only two movies originally, but he rebooted it as like a shot all at once trilogy.
1:58:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And his version is not good.
1:58:56
[SPEAKER_01]: so far.
1:58:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it may be it's all going to come together in part three, but it's not looking good.
1:59:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The original Strangers is sort of a masterfully efficient horror movie starring Scott Speedman and Live Tyler as a couple who right at the start of the movie, they're coming home from a marriage proposal gone very wrong.
1:59:19
[SPEAKER_01]: and they go back into their home and their home is like he had made it all up romantically and it's covered in rose petals and instead they're fucking miserable and they're so distracted by their relationship woes that they don't notice that there are people in their house in creepy vass just like behind them a lot and it's that's genuinely creepy a lot that creeps a lot of people out because that's not good I don't like that at all um
1:59:47
[SPEAKER_01]: But basically it boils down to, there's a home invasion and it's all very random.
1:59:52
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not like important.
1:59:55
[SPEAKER_01]: They're not trying to solve a problem.
1:59:56
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just, they were home basically.
2:00:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
2:00:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's sort of, it could happen to you, regardless of who you are.
2:00:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something that I think is genuinely scary.
2:00:09
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think this trainer says a very good job of evoking that.
2:00:14
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got another movie here called Vicious about why you should never open your door in the middle of the night.
2:00:23
[SPEAKER_01]: OK.
2:00:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Dakota Fanning stars.
2:00:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's mostly just her.
2:00:28
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a few scenes with other people, but it's mostly her.
2:00:34
[SPEAKER_01]: She's home alone, middle of the night.
2:00:36
[SPEAKER_01]: She, her life is kind of falling apart and she can't keep a job.
2:00:40
[SPEAKER_01]: She's got a big interview tomorrow and she's just trying to, like, stay motivated but it's very, she's very depressed and nothing's really going well.
2:00:47
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a knock at the door and it's Katherine Hunter, great actor.
2:00:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And she's a little out of it.
2:00:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Not really making a lot of sense.
2:00:58
[SPEAKER_01]: She's carrying a box and also like one of her hands is bandaged up.
2:01:04
[SPEAKER_01]: and decode a phoning trying to be like a decent person says, why don't you come in and you can use my phone.
2:01:09
[SPEAKER_01]: That sounds like what you need, you need to use my phone.
2:01:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I got to understand this.
2:01:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you and they sit down and Catherine Hunter says a few very anecdomatic things.
2:01:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And then she says, I'm going to begin now, which is a very creepy thing to suddenly say in the middle of a conversation, middle of the night, with a stranger and she explains,
2:01:31
[SPEAKER_01]: uh... she's vague but she explains uh... this box is yours now uh... and you're gonna die and i'm gonna go wait what yeah it's really it's and it turns out uh... that it it this is a curse situation where she's been given a cursed object and she has to feed this box three things
2:01:56
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a box and an hour glasses inside the box and the hour glass is pouring out if she doesn't feed the box what it wants Before the hour glass comes it follows out something very bad is going to happen All right, I won't tell you what it is because there's not much to the movie, but she has to do it She has to give the box in succession Let me sure get the order right Something she hates
2:02:25
[SPEAKER_01]: something she needs and something she loves interesting and the box will know if she's lying all right and she is tormented by the monetizing it's a great premise it's she's tormented by demonic voices and basically taunting her and mocking her for when she gets it wrong and bad things happen and I love this premise it's a great setup
2:02:55
[SPEAKER_01]: tantalizing is a great word for it because it makes you think in the audience what would I put in that box.
2:03:01
[SPEAKER_01]: That won't kill me or the people I love or you have forced or like I get an arm cut off.
2:03:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It's only really terrible happens to you basically.
2:03:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So like I gotta put in something I hate.
2:03:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Well let's assume for a second that I'm self aware enough to know what I truly hate.
2:03:16
[SPEAKER_01]: How do I put that in the box?
2:03:19
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not necessarily like, oh, I hate this beanie baby.
2:03:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I've always hated this beanie baby.
2:03:23
[SPEAKER_01]: They put it in the box and it's fine.
2:03:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, no, the box needs you to be real.
2:03:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And the box needs to know like, you know, you can't just like put something you kind of need in the box.
2:03:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It's got to be something you need.
2:03:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
2:03:42
[SPEAKER_01]: And the amount of like suffering that Dakota fan and goes to is he tries to basically she's basically being forced to figure all your shit out in one night if she wants to survive if that's even what the box wants.
2:03:55
[SPEAKER_01]: This might not be like a case of divine intervention where at the end of it, it's like a saw movie and it's like, oh yes, I finally I've run through the gauntlet and I'm a better person now.
2:04:06
[SPEAKER_01]: It might not be a kind box, it might not be benevolent and they wrote.
2:04:11
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, oh, you suffered, but you came out at the end of a better person, not necessarily.
2:04:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
2:04:18
[SPEAKER_01]: So, great premise, and if you're gonna have a movie where it's pretty much just one person being tormented in a house, that person had better be a great actor and Dakota Fanning is.
2:04:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's been it's been a minute since I've seen her in like a really good role or anything, but like she's a really great actor and she can make this work, she can sell this so her terror is our terror and Brian Bertino, he he falls back on some kind of lazy horror movie tropes like, oh, no, there was a zombie type thing in the closet and it's like, okay, well, that's
2:04:55
[SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of hacky, that's not really doing anything for me, but then he finds it again, and there's like a really creepy mirror gag and like there's a bunch of like there's stuff in the movie that makes it feel like there's a lot a lot at stake here where we're not really pulling punches.
2:05:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, at the end of the movie we might be pulling some punches, I don't want to spoil it, but I and I feel like it kind of.
2:05:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Here's my problem with business because I think a lot of it's actually genuinely creepy and I was genuinely unnerved and I was mentally and psychologically invested in it because Blossom Brown-Britino created a situation that excites the imagination.
2:05:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Ultimately, I think
2:05:35
[SPEAKER_01]: whatever is on Bertino's mind here, whether it's a metaphor or an allegory or cautionary tale or whatever gets really muddled by the end.
2:05:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm not entirely sure what he's getting at.
2:05:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe he's not getting it much, which is okay but not great.
2:05:59
[SPEAKER_01]: or maybe he is getting it something and it's getting a little lost because of how much incident he's got to throw in this thing to keep an otherwise pretty straightforward premise exciting and lively so it never quite comes together and is great but I was genuinely engrossed here and I was genuinely creeped out and that's a lot of it's hard to do honestly
2:06:29
[SPEAKER_01]: the horror of isolation even when you're in your own space in a way that I think two filmmakers do and that's impressive.
2:06:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So I like it a lot is a great now but it's good and it's scary and I hope some people find it and realize that's a creepy ass movie.
2:06:46
[SPEAKER_01]: So there you go.
2:06:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay and then lastly I saw a new anime movie called 100 meters
2:06:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, which like, like 100 meter dash exactly like 100 meter dash that's literally what it's okay.
2:07:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, okay.
2:07:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I, uh, I'm unfamiliar with the manga on which this is based.
2:07:10
[SPEAKER_01]: It's uh, written by, uh, and art by, uh, an artist named Uwoto, uh, who had previously done something called Orbe on the movements of the earth apparently it's kind of a big deal.
2:07:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's, they want some awards.
2:07:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, but I'm coming in this fresh.
2:07:28
[SPEAKER_01]: 100 meters is the story of track-and-field athletes.
2:07:34
[SPEAKER_01]: We made a bunch of them, but it's mostly the story of two, and they meet when they're in elementary school.
2:07:42
[SPEAKER_01]: One is predator naturally fast, whatever they do a race in gym.
2:07:46
[SPEAKER_01]: He's always, you know, he always laps everybody.
2:07:49
[SPEAKER_01]: He's the 100 meter dash.
2:07:50
[SPEAKER_01]: He's done.
2:07:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone's behind him.
2:07:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone's amazed.
2:07:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my God, you're so amazing.
2:07:55
[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, and then he literally runs into a new kid in town, who is always running has no particular gift for it, has no form to speak of, but whereas this kid runs because it comes naturally to him and he likes it, this new kid runs because he's desperately trying to escape a reality
2:08:25
[SPEAKER_01]: OK, and so he's running like from something and he's running to achieve an element of escape and over the course of their the story is they grow up and we follow them until I think at least they're like mid 20s um we see what this sort of
2:08:46
[SPEAKER_01]: For one of them it might be obsession for another it might be a past time, but either way it's something that they use to define themselves.
2:08:52
[SPEAKER_01]: We see how defining yourselves through a simple act like the 100 meter dash turns into gradually whether they realize it or not an existential crisis.
2:09:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I run straight line, 100 meters faster than anyone else, and I game self respect from that and the respect of others, and I gain fame, and I value winning, and all I'm accomplishing is coming from here to their fast.
2:09:30
[SPEAKER_01]: there's a high they get from that.
2:09:33
[SPEAKER_01]: There is something very intoxicating about it and over the course of their lives they realize that they don't know necessarily why they do it and what they get out of it and what it means and is it actually ultimately a hollow exercise?
2:09:53
[SPEAKER_01]: That's so interesting to me.
2:09:54
[SPEAKER_01]: I really, I feel like the sports genre, especially since Rocky came out, has been kind of codified.
2:10:01
[SPEAKER_01]: There's always this underdog kind of vibe for the most part.
2:10:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Kudos to the Sashin machine for kind of doing that in reverse, making it about success to less success and making that into a narrative.
2:10:11
[SPEAKER_01]: But even so, it's generally kind of a linear path that we're following.
2:10:18
[SPEAKER_01]: 100 meters is not super concerned with the race.
2:10:21
[SPEAKER_01]: We see it.
2:10:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's sometimes it's important who wins and who doesn't because it affects someone else psychologically.
2:10:28
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's about why we do it, why do we bother?
2:10:31
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we hope to gain from athleticism?
2:10:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Not just exercise, but like on a transcendent level.
2:10:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do people look up to us?
2:10:41
[SPEAKER_01]: for doing this.
2:10:42
[SPEAKER_01]: What do we get out of it?
2:10:43
[SPEAKER_01]: What do I have to offer?
2:10:45
[SPEAKER_00]: God help me if this is a long distance runner.
2:10:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but like is this all I am?
2:10:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that it?
2:10:52
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a scene where one of the characters is like he's an adult now and
2:10:59
[SPEAKER_01]: He's worried he might have to be able to run again because of an injury and his career as like his day job is kind of dependent upon his celebrity and if he loses that he might lose like literally everything because this is all he's built for himself and he's on a playground just like sort of like this is where I grew up and he sees a couple of kids running and they're talking about trying to get faster and he gives him a little bit of advice.
2:11:24
[SPEAKER_01]: about how to run a little faster, and as he's talking to them and giving them advice, he starts uncontrollably crying, because that's all I've learned.
2:11:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's so fucking tragic, but in such a philosophical way, and I think that's just a really
2:11:54
[SPEAKER_01]: around doubt and in some cases denial, the kid who runs obsessively and without form, the only reason he succeeds is because he pushes himself so hard that he's literally destroying his body.
2:12:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he just sees ignoring pain, he's ignoring signs of actual danger to himself.
2:12:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Just to accomplish.
2:12:19
[SPEAKER_00]: What the fuck?
2:12:19
[SPEAKER_00]: What the fuck is the brought up in my alley?
2:12:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think it's really fun.
2:12:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Marvelous.
2:12:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really interesting.
2:12:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Conventionally dramatically satisfying.
2:12:28
[SPEAKER_01]: In a way that I think we've grown used to from sports, but we know.
2:12:32
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think you really need to be ready for that, because if you're expecting any kind of like, they even play with it in the middle of where it feels like it's going in that direction
2:12:43
[SPEAKER_01]: If you're going in expecting a conventional sports narrative, you might walk away disappointed or think it's a dull film.
2:12:49
[SPEAKER_01]: But if you go in expecting sort of a psychological drama about the futility, but also the grandeur of physical expertise, athleticism.
2:13:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, maybe it's not great.
2:13:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really interesting.
2:13:07
[SPEAKER_01]: And I really admire it for going where it goes and having difficult conversations and some really tricky character stuff.
2:13:14
[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, I really like it a lot.
2:13:16
[SPEAKER_01]: And I recommend it a lot, but it is with a caveat, that if you're a fan of most sports movies, be ready for something a little different.
2:13:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
2:13:27
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is it!
2:13:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god, what a long episode.
2:13:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's review our movies.
2:13:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been going on for a second here.
2:13:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, I know.
2:13:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew we were sick.
2:13:34
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's try to, I'm so sorry.
2:13:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's try to crank this thing out.
2:13:38
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're doing a review roundup.
2:13:40
[SPEAKER_01]: We review movies on a scale of C- to C-plus.
2:13:44
[SPEAKER_01]: A C-plus is the highest rating we can give a movie that is a movie that we recommend.
2:13:48
[SPEAKER_01]: A C-plus means it is above average.
2:13:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Which means a C is average.
2:13:52
[SPEAKER_01]: That's just an okay movie.
2:13:54
[SPEAKER_01]: or maybe it's a mix bag.
2:13:56
[SPEAKER_01]: But most movies average out to about a C. And then C-minus is a movie with considered below average.
2:14:03
[SPEAKER_01]: These are movies that, maybe they're not terrible, but we don't recommend them.
2:14:07
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to go out of our way and say, you should see this.
2:14:10
[SPEAKER_01]: But you know what, see what you want to see?
2:14:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Let us know when we're wrong.
2:14:13
[SPEAKER_01]: We're always interested.
2:14:14
[SPEAKER_01]: So on that note, what are you going to reverse order?
2:14:18
[SPEAKER_01]: 100 meters, I'm giving a C plus.
2:14:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what's on my best ones of the year list or anything, but I just, I really appreciate its intellectual and existential approach to a genre that is typically defined through physical activity in melodrama.
2:14:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Vicious, I'm giving a very high C, too.
2:14:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, it's it's very very scary.
2:14:42
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't quite come together in the end as well as a movie so straightforward probably could But I ultimately think the code of fanning really carries it well, and it's very very interesting and I was Invested in it for most of it.
2:14:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it runs out of steam eventually, but it's it's a genuinely creepy film All right, where we got here or well tubeless two goes five
2:15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm giving it a C plus like it's it's not going to make you feel good, but it will make you feel like you have a handle on things as they sort of continue to burn a little bit.
2:15:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, C plus it's it's exhilarating.
2:15:20
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really insightful.
2:15:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It's really intelligent and it's also an interesting portrait of a really good author.
2:15:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So all of that is part of this movie.
2:15:30
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, a nemony, a great performance of Daniel Day Lewis, an interesting directorial job from someone who's going after something very atypical.
2:15:41
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm giving it a high C. I think it's sometimes a little impenetrable and I know some of that might be my fault, but I also think that either it's biting off more than it can chew or it should have been off more.
2:15:56
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like it's something that's only holding it back just a little bit, but I do think it's interesting film and I do think it's a really, really great acting showcase, not just for Dan O'Neill Lewis, but also Sean B. and it's Samantha Morton.
2:16:06
[SPEAKER_01]: So if you're like movies or the acting, definitely we're checking out, if you're like movies or the plot, maybe not so much, but it's definitely not bad.
2:16:16
[SPEAKER_01]: After the hunt.
2:16:18
[SPEAKER_00]: After the hunt, it's a sea.
2:16:20
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's some really good performances in here.
2:16:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they're trying to get at something that I don't think they're necessarily successfully getting at, but I admire the ambition.
2:16:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that it's such a lush and interesting character piece is definitely getting it a long way.
2:16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It is pretty slowly past, but I think that might be in its favor.
2:16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I think if it were a little too plot oriented, it would be a lot less interesting, but it's interesting.
2:16:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that's not a helpful word, but yeah.
2:16:48
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, let's see, play dirty.
2:16:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I was looking at my Rotten Tomatoes page, and I realized it was probably a little kind to this in my review because although Mark Wahlberg is a griegiously miscast, a lot of it is kind of fast pace, and there's a quickiness too, if it's not unpleasant or bull, but.
2:17:05
[SPEAKER_01]: up on further reflections, and I had an extra week to think about this, I'm going to scale it down actually to a C-mine.
2:17:13
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that it's terrible, it's that it's trying to be something very specific, a Parker movie.
2:17:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And the thing about it that doesn't work is the Parker part.
2:17:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be like, this is a great Spider-Man movie, but you cast exactly the wrong person with a Spider-Man and I never believe in Spider-Man for one second.
2:17:33
[SPEAKER_01]: That was not really a great Spider-Man movie, is it?
2:17:37
[SPEAKER_01]: There might not be a complete wash, but I don't think you did what you set out to do.
2:17:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So Mark Wahlberg has agreed to say miscast.
2:17:43
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a few fun things about it.
2:17:45
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a tough sit, but it doesn't work, unfortunately.
2:17:50
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm going to see you guys.
2:17:52
[SPEAKER_01]: The smashing machine, I'm going to give it a high C.
2:17:57
[SPEAKER_01]: I respect what it's doing more than I love what it's doing, but I do appreciate that this is trying to go through the celebrity sports biopic with a different sensibility and I think doing Johnson is doing an excellent job, although the overreliance on prosthetics as a means to
2:18:18
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, transform him, make him a little less distracting as a star, ultimately has the opposite effect, and I found ultimately a lot more distracting.
2:18:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So, that was in his calculation, but otherwise it's a pretty nice movie, just doesn't, it's never quite great.
2:18:33
[SPEAKER_01]: All right, good boy.
2:18:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Good boy.
2:18:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I like good boy.
2:18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's it's a cute.
2:18:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a short story.
2:18:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think it really stands as like an entire feature, but I do like that.
2:18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't give it a C. Okay.
2:18:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to have a good boy.
2:18:47
[SPEAKER_01]: C plus I agree.
2:18:49
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a novelty factor here, but I think the fact that it is like 70 minutes.
2:18:54
[SPEAKER_01]: really, you know, moving this thing to me longer than that.
2:18:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Frankenstein is 71 minutes.
2:18:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't need more than that.
2:19:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this understands exactly how much it can get out of this premise.
2:19:04
[SPEAKER_01]: And it does a great job of it.
2:19:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there's a real emotional cord of this movie that the filmmaker's understand and plus some that's a great fucking dog.
2:19:14
[SPEAKER_01]: That's such a good dog.
2:19:23
[SPEAKER_00]: That's darker.
2:19:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to give a C plus.
2:19:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, this is a film that it's a B movie that knows what it is.
2:19:29
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to see in B movies.
2:19:30
[SPEAKER_00]: What is we like about B movies.
2:19:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a bit of creativity, a bit of humor and no insufferable sense of
2:19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: self-awareness or irony that that sort of cuts into the actual meaning of the movie.
2:19:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I really really dug it.
2:19:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, see plus.
2:19:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's a very sincere B-movie But also has like the talent to back that up and to make the most of a very modest budget.
2:19:56
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels a lot bigger than it is
2:19:59
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, still, I'll never looking like it's genuinely big.
2:20:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It always feels really handmade, but everything it's handmade looks real cool.
2:20:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think it's, you know, ultimately the story is a bit cookie cutter, but on that they hang a lot of fun stuff.
2:20:12
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'll give it a seat plus as well.
2:20:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Very imaginative, although psychogoroman is a better movie.
2:20:17
[SPEAKER_01]: And then lastly, Tronaries.
2:20:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Turner is his big old C-minus, however cool the soundtrack is, you're going to get more just by listening to the soundtrack than you will just watching the movie.
2:20:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Jared Leto is not a good charismatic lead.
2:20:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like there's a lot of fun, big interesting sci-fi concepts that the film just doesn't ever bother to engage with, which is really frustrating, and ultimately yeah, just sort of feels kind of dull and empty.
2:20:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so yeah, that's it.
2:20:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Just to see
2:20:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I agree.
2:20:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I definitely recommend the soundtrack and I don't think you need to see the movie to appreciate the soundtrack.
2:20:54
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just good music, but and I'm frustrated because again, a lot of people, you know, would say that like, oh critics didn't like the first two trons either, but we didn't like the first two trons were different reasons.
2:21:06
[SPEAKER_01]: I think at the very least people admired the first two trons for their novel visual effects and their ambitious ideas and their great music while still acknowledging that it's very stuffy and very staggy and doesn't always make a lot of sense and it's kind of cold and a lot of ways.
2:21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Those movies had problems but they also had a lot of things to recommend them.
2:21:27
[SPEAKER_01]: the only thing I can think to recommend in tronaries is the sound track.
2:21:31
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't have very interesting ideas.
2:21:33
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't have a lot of ambitions, and because so much of it takes place in the real world, it's not even very pretty.
2:21:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Like there's a few bits that are really, it's just a bit like it looks just like a generic kind of Disney action kind of thing, and it just doesn't really have enough of a personality in its own.
2:21:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks to Greta Lee, great actor having a very underwritten
2:21:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It just, it doesn't bring anything to it, this is a passion project for him, apparently.
2:22:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Like he fought to get a producer, you know.
2:22:07
[UNKNOWN]: Why?
2:22:08
[SPEAKER_00]: What was it this year?
2:22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess he thought it was going to be a big money producer who's to say that.
2:22:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what it is.
2:22:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So disconnected from it.
2:22:15
[SPEAKER_01]: In a way that I wasn't even in Toronto, and like I see in those movies are a little detached.
2:22:20
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so yeah, I think it's, I think it's bad in different ways.
2:22:22
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a huge sea minus.
2:22:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, it's, maybe not the worst movie of the year, but it's, it ain't good.
2:22:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, and that.
2:22:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
2:22:31
[SPEAKER_01]: God bless us.
2:22:31
[SPEAKER_01]: That is it for critically claimed.
2:22:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you everybody for listening.
2:22:34
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2:22:36
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2:22:36
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2:22:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, no.
2:22:40
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2:22:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And then if you do know, thank you now.
2:22:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, play.
2:22:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
2:22:50
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2:22:50
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2:23:00
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2:23:25
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2:23:27
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2:23:34
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2:23:37
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2:23:40
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2:23:43
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2:23:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
2:23:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.
2:23:52
[UNKNOWN]: Woo.
2:23:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, I'm losing my voice now.
2:23:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Long episode.
2:23:57
[SPEAKER_01]: We're on social media at critical claim.
2:23:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Matt Williams to be on me.
2:24:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Matt Winnie-Sible.
2:24:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And we'll be back next week with more reviews.
2:24:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Until then, never forget, everyone is a critic.
2:24:09
[SPEAKER_01]: except Jared Leto in Tron.
2:24:12
[SPEAKER_01]: This he couldn't even explain why he liked to Pesh Mode.
2:24:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not that hard, man.
2:24:18
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a good band.
2:24:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to go to the Midnight Show.
2:24:24
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry I wet.