The Robert Zemeckis Hall of Fame, and ‘Here’

Sean is joined by Ringer editor-at-large and ‘Press Box’ host Bryan Curtis to discuss ‘Here,’ the new wildly experimental movie from Robert Zemeckis chronicling thousands of years of history in one corner of the world (1:00). Then, they build the Zemeckis Hall of Fame, choosing 10 movies from his roller-coaster canon to enshrine (46:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Bryan Curtis Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Video Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Everybody lies, but most of us don't like to talk about the lies we tell. Until now. From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Phillips. In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about their best tales of deception. From changing an entire family history to building an award-winning Hollywood career on a lie. You can listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Sean Fennessey?

  This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail-biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with the big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

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• 2:10Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fantasy and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about boomer exceptionalism. Today on the show, we are talking about one of the most fascinating, persistent, and inconsistent filmmakers in movie history. I'm talking about Robert Zemeckis, whose new film Here, which stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, in a reunion of the Forrest Gump creative team, is in theaters right now. Joining me to talk Zemeckis here, some of the craziest gimmicks in movie history, it's Brian Curtis. Hi, Brian.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Great to be with you, Sean.

• 2:39Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks for being with me.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  On this freighted day in American history.

• 2:42Sean Fennessey?

  It is election day. We are recording on election day, but as you helpfully pointed out, there's not really anything for us to do right now.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:48Sean Fennessey?

  We should just talk about this guy.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  And Tom Hanks' character in Here talks a lot about tax rates.

• 2:53Sean Fennessey?

  He does.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  How do you think he's voting today?

• 2:55Sean Fennessey?

  Ooh, boy. Feels like red at the top, blue down ballot. What do you think?

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Possibly.

• 3:01Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of a humanist, but also a bottom-line guy. So, uh, yeah, this is an interesting opportunity for us to not know the future, but to talk about the past. That's really what Here is all about.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  The deep past.

• 3:12Sean Fennessey?

  In some respects, Here is a movie that I, and perhaps I alone, have been aggressively looking forward to. I am deeply interested in the mission of Robert Zemeckis as a technology-forward, emotions-forward filmmaker. And you might think that those two things are in contrast with each other, but Zemeckis has been working very hard, pretty much since the very beginning of his career, to reconcile ideas of sentimentality and nostalgia with the technology that is inherent in filmmaking. So Here is, as I said, this kind of reunion of the Forrest Gump collaborators. It's not just Hanks and Wright. It's also Alan Silvestri, the composer.

• 3:53Sean Fennessey?

  It's also Don Burgess, the cinematographer, and Eric Roth, the screenwriter. This is also an adaptation, as Forrest Gump was, of Winston Broome, Groom? Winston?

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Winston Groom.

• 4:04Sean Fennessey?

  Groom's novel. Uh, this is adapted from a graphic novel called Here by Richard McGuire, which takes place, almost entirely, in one panel, one corner, one station, in the U. Universe on this planet over centuries of time. And this movie does the exact same thing. It is a kaleidoscopic snapshot of one place. And everyone that has lived there occupied that space, particularly focusing in on one family and their story from the middle of the 20th century all the way up until the 21st century. I will start by asking you, what did you think of the movie here?

• 4:42Speaker 03

  It is going to be very hard for us to do adequately convey to listeners how crazy this movie is.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  What a massive swing across space and time this movie is. Holy moly, Sean. I went in knowing the gimmick, knowing what he was trying to do a little bit, but I mostly avoided any reviews or anything like that, even the trailer. And I sat there mouth on the floor of the Chinese theater in Hollywood. Knowing what am I watching? I mean, this feels like if I were a magazine writer coming to you and saying, you know what, instead of writing about the Clippers new arena, I'm going to write about everything that's happened on that patch of land since prehistory.

• 5:26Sean Fennessey?

  Would be a good idea for a piece.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  It would be. Well, you would have looked at me and you would have given that kind of, you know, editor's smile and gone, well, that's ambitious.

• 5:33Sean Fennessey?

  Try it.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  Try it. That's what Robert Zemeckis and Eric Roth did with this movie.

• 5:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so it's, um, you know, it's a movie that is very, very, very technology forward insofar as there is a series of cutting, but there is no moving. The camera is stationary at all times in this one space. So I think the best way to understand the movie and the, one of the cases for the movie as this is, as a sort of a theater piece, as like a proscenium where you are looking out onto the performances of many people's, many creatures' lives over hundreds and thousands of years in that space, rather than as your standard issue narrative film. Because there is a narrative about a couple and their life from the 50s and 60s all the way up and through the 2000s.

• 6:23Sean Fennessey?

  And I liked that part of the story. But that isn't ultimately the mission of the story. I think the mission of the story is to thematically convey that no matter what time in history we are in, that place is a profound but often overlooked aspect of our lifestyle. One of the reasons why I like the movie is it made me realize something that is very simple but oddly impactful, which is that in your life, especially when you're roughly the age that we are.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Which is to say, middle-aged sentimental creatures.

• 6:55Sean Fennessey?

  Very much so.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Increasingly sentimental creatures.

• 6:57Sean Fennessey?

  Very much. And, and, and being a parent is an interesting contribution to this movie too. But you don't realize until, say, you buy a house or you rent a home and you're in that space for a very long time, that in fact, like, huge parts of your life take place only in two or three or four places across a decade, two decades, five decades. You know, I, my office in my house and my living room are two places where I just spent an inordinate amount of time alongside the one weird room here in the Spotify office where I spend all of my time. And if you take those three places, I can chart huge moments of my life across those three spaces. And this movie is reckoning with that very idea.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yes. And there's also this selfishness, isn't there, that this is my spot. This is my family's memories and will be forevermore. I feel that way about where I live. I know you feel the same way. My mom still lives in the same house in Texas that I grew up in. I live in one house, still there. So when I go home, I'm like, here are my childhood memories, preserve Zemeckis style.

• 7:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  All in this place. Good memories, some horrific memories, everything in one place. But of course, that is our, you know, selfishness. That is our, you know, not look through time. So what Zemeckis is trying to do here is pull the camera way back and go, guess what? That meant something, perhaps something even greater to a person before you and the person before that, and the person before that, when there was not even a home standing in that spot.

• 8:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. This is very personal, but I, I actually, thinking about it helped me like the movie more. So when my mom passed away, we sold her home, which is the home that I grew up in, the only house I ever lived in. And We sold the home to my brother's best friend. And so he was recently married and was starting his life. And he renovated the home and he tried to make it, you know, in his own image. And you, I would see photos of it or I would drive by and I'm like, that's weird. That's like, that is my house, but it isn't my house. That very curious feeling that kind of scratches at your heart. And then he decided, and I hope he doesn't mind me talking about this, that the house wasn't big enough.

• 9:03Sean Fennessey?

  So he tore it down and he rebuilt it in the space where my house was. And of course it's his house and he bought it and he is, he can do with it that he, whatever he wants. But watching a movie like this, where you see one generation pass a home off to another generation. And their inherent frustrations with it, but their inability to make real change in their life against it. I was like, this movie is incredibly deep. Like there was a real profundity to the movie. Now what's happening in contrast to it is this bizarre thing that's been going on with Zemeckis, where he's had a roughly 20 year cold period. With the exception of a couple of movies here and there that people seem to like in particular, Flight.

• 9:44Sean Fennessey?

  But now, once one of the most reliable Hollywood entertainers now has this kind of like stench around a lot of the projects he takes on, in part because he's obsessed with this technology and in part because he's got this real sentimental streak. He really does have this boomer emotionality to a lot of the movies that he makes. And this almost feels like the culmination of those two things colliding. And yet, I feel like it's one of the more sophisticated movies he's ever made.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  Yes, there's a tension there, right? Because it is ambitious and strange in that way and very, very hard to describe. This is a guy for his entire career who want to make hits. He was not trying to make personal obscure films.

• 10:25Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  He comes in, in the eighties with George Lucas, who went to USC like Zemeckis did. Spielberg, who very much became his mentor in Hollywood and produced a lot of his early movies. And said, I want to make big hits like those guys.

• 10:38Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  I want to make movies everybody wants to watch. So now we are coming in this 20 year run where he said it's been a bit of a cold streak. Also, when he's just been consumed by technology. Talk more about that. And he makes this movie that no one watched this weekend. Partly because it is a very, very hard movie to wrap your mind around either in a description. You did a wonderful job there. And watching it, it's hard to wrap your mind around.

• 11:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so you know, you just mentioned to me before we started, like even just remembering who are all of the figures that appear in this film is kind of difficult after you've seen the movie because it's essentially like a living history through seven stages that are captured. You've got dinosaurs and the origins of life on our planet.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 11:23Sean Fennessey?

  You've got the Lenape clan, which is a Native American clan that is portrayed in the film. I think it's somewhere in the 15th or 16th century, though it's, I don't think it's clarified in the movie when they are living in that space.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  No, we didn't get a little inner title there.

• 11:37Sean Fennessey?

  We did not.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  The 15th century.

• 11:39Sean Fennessey?

  We've got William Franklin, who is Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, who also was a loyalist to the crown in the 1770s.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:50Sean Fennessey?

  In opposition to his father, with whom he had a complicated relationship. The decision to portray that is strange, and we can talk about it if you'd like. Then we have a couple named John and Pauline Harder, one of whom is a pilot. And they move in in roughly the turn of the 20th century and up until about the era of the Spanish flu in the 1920s. And then we meet Leo and Stella, who are a very horny young couple, one of whom is an inventor and the other his cheerleading supporter. And this guy goes on to invent the lazy boy chair. We do see a contemporary couple, Devin and Helen Harris and their son, a black couple who move into the house presumably after our primary figures, which is the young family.

• 12:36Sean Fennessey?

  So the young family spends roughly 60 years in this house, in this space, in this living room, their living room in their home is where we see their, their life.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  They are our main characters. If they're our main characters in this movie, they are them.

• 12:49Sean Fennessey?

  Truly, and so they are portrayed by Paul Bettany and Kelly Riley, who play Alan Rose. Al is a, a man like many men who came home from World War II and began a life in a suburban neighborhood and during the rise of the suburbs in America. I guess this home is outside of Pittsburgh. I couldn't totally figure out where in Pennsylvania it was. You know, William Franklin was the former governor of New Jersey, but I think that that was when New Jersey was a little bit bigger. I'm trying to, a little hard to do some of the geography of this movie as well.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  This movie is not helpful. This is all we should note, you doing research after the fact.

• 13:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  The movie explains none of this.

• 13:26Sean Fennessey?

  Which, what did you think about that choice to sort of just drop consistently? Because it is cutting not in a linear fashion. So the movie doesn't play out in the way that I described where the introduction is fairly linear of showing us new characters, but then he's cross cutting all the time back and forth of these people's various lives.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  And you just sort of have to figure out who they are and figure out what they're about. I mean, I just want to pause for a second. Just think of the list you just gave. Those are the characters in this movie who are existing across a period of thousands of years. This all really happens. That, that sounds like parody.

• 13:57Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  That is, that is what is, this movie is about.

• 14:01Sean Fennessey?

  And some of it is, and the other thing that's interesting is some of it is quote unquote, real and some of it is apocryphal. Like, I don't believe that Leo and Stella were the inventors of the lazy boy chair. In fact, I think it was somebody in Michigan. But so he's taking some dramatic license with some of these things, but then the, the facts of William Franklin seem to be relatively true to what's portrayed in the movie. But yeah, I mean, this is, as ambitious as it gets in a Hollywood movie, what he is attempting to do, both the very formal, static nature of the storytelling and also this like rich, long tapestry that he's trying to show us in these flashes. Some of it works better than other parts. I think because roughly 80% of the story is dedicated to the young family, it still has an ultimately recognizable structure.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:47Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen some varying reports about the comfort with the de-aging technology. So obviously Tom Hanks and Robin Wright's characters are introduced at a fairly young age. I think they're roughly 17 or 18 when we start to see them.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Horny teenagers.

• 15:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, they're horny teenagers. Robin Wright visits their family home because she's dating Tom Hanks's character and...

• 15:09Sean Fennessey?

  They have sex on the couch, they get pregnant, they soon get married, they go through the the stages of life. What did you think about the de-aging stuff?

• 15:16Speaker 03

  It's very, very strange.

• 15:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Um, it reminded me a little of De Niro and the Irishman. And also Harrison Ford in Andy Five, where you have, you know, this crazy combat scene. And then you see him walking and he has like a bow legged like my grandfather's senior softball team walks, you know, you're like, oh, you're not in fact thirty, however many years old right now. Hanks has a little bit of that, just like his carriage and his gait. It's really strange.

• 15:42Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  The first shot you see of him when he's sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. And it's Tom Hanks, like recognizably Tom Hanks, kind of maybe like not even bosom buddies Tom Hanks, but.

• 15:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, younger than that.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Younger than that.

• 15:55Sean Fennessey?

  It seemed like they did something to affect the timbre of his voice. So his voice is a little higher and younger.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:01Sean Fennessey?

  But you're right that they can't escape. And this has been true of all of those movies that you talked about where older actors are portraying their younger selves. But they still move like men in their fifty, sixty, seventies or eighties. I don't know what to do about that. On the flip side. I thought Robin Wright was like borderline immaculate. Like I bought her de-aging like entirely.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Yes, more so than Hanks is weirdly.

• 16:23Sean Fennessey?

  And I don't know, maybe because we're less familiar with her or we're less familiar with how she moves. You know, Hanks has been so central to our movie watching experiences over the last three decades. But she, her, her younger version just looked better to me.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  It did. I have to say for Hanks, we need to give an award to an actor who is able to fight through the de-aging process and be an actor.

• 16:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Like, that's some amazing skill.

• 16:45Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 16:46Speaker 03

  And I'm watching this movie and I'm like, this is recognizably a Tom Hanks performance. Even if this is like this, there's this technology that's almost strange and troubling and kind of hard to fight through.

• 16:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  He's performing his ass off. He's good.

• 17:00Sean Fennessey?

  Is there a world in which this movie works better if you have different actors playing the younger versions of these characters?

• 17:06Speaker 03

  Maybe so. Though I'm going to have a whole list for you of ways this movie would have worked better. And I think that's probably down the list. I would like to say about something about Zemeckis and technology because this is a very, very interesting fascination of his.

• 17:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Gets way into motion capture.

• 17:20Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  After the turn of the century, uh, makes the Polar Express, which is a huge hit, and then decides, I'm going to make lots of movies like that.

• 17:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  I'm done with humans. And this is funny, right? Because this is a guy whose movies in the eighties and nineties were humanistic, Spielberg-y, to use that word again, right? They are about people that have this energy to them and this real, these kind of cool characters and, and, and things like that. And it's almost like, if you remember Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where he had the humans and the tunes, he picked the tunes.

• 17:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  He's like, my, my, my career is with the tunes. Everything is gonna be like created on a computer.

• 17:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he does. It's true, but there are a lot of movies in the last 20 years where he goes back to the raw, real feeling of a certain kind of humanity, like Flight and The Walk in particular. I don't like those movies equally, but they are both very much about, movies about human spirit. And so he's kind of constantly toggling. The motion capture stuff, I think, is pretty widely derided at this point. I continue to think The Polar Express is downright creepy.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  I think it's terrible. It's a terrible movie.

• 18:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's really not good. I tried to re-watch it last night and I could not get into it at all.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  Remember when it gets to the North Pole and it looks like a city that's been cleared out during COVID?

• 18:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  And you're like, this is not my idea of the North Pole.

• 18:35Sean Fennessey?

  But so you're right that it's kind of like this rejection of the thing that he was so good at, which is pure entertainment. You know, like he was, he's one of the great movie entertainers.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Basically a rejection of people.

• 18:45Sean Fennessey?

  It, it totally is. I would not say that here is a rejection of people, but it is an attempt to do what he's always trying to do, which is basically like, find some new expression by way of the tools of the trade to evolve the, the, the story form.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  And the question you ask is, does that help us here? Because I'm watching this movie and even the backdrops in the scenes with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright's characters, I'm looking at this going, is that a real set? Or is that CGI? I can't tell.

• 19:19Sean Fennessey?

  I honestly can't tell either.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  That's not a great thing for a movie. And I'm not saying that because the CGI was so immaculate. I'm just like, I don't know what I'm watching. It feels like I'm watching AI.

• 19:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's why I'm using the theatrical, uh, verbiage, because it's the same way when you go to see a stage play.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  But some of those are real couches and real lamps and things on a stage.

• 19:36Sean Fennessey?

  Really real couches on the set. I mean, there's certain points.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  But how much of the rest of it was real?

• 19:39Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. I genuinely don't. I mean, I don't think any of the quote unquote background, the sort of through that picture window out the back door. I don't think any of that that's going on as well.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  But if we're making a movie about a place, a plot of land and a house, it seems like making it a real house, or at least as much like a real place as we can, would be helpful in helping us as viewers understand the value of this real estate.

• 20:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good note. I don't know if I agree, though, because I think that that is sort of beyond the point that he's trying to make, which is that those are just things, that the space is what matters. Like, what we're describing here is like-

• 20:12Speaker 03

  But what if it's a space on a computer? You can't buy, well, I guess you can now.

• 20:15Sean Fennessey?

  Sure you can, yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  But I just, I just think it's, it's, what's happened with him in a way is, you've just crossed this line into technology. And again, I don't think all the movies are bad. I even think some of the mocap stuff is kind of interesting in a way, but I just look at it and I'm just like, I've lost some connection here. And you're doing this in service of storytelling. I think that's interesting and I think it's really ambitious, but something, some, some human connection to the human characters has been lost in the process.

• 20:42Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. Do you think that that's just a product of enormous success and then being insulated and then becoming obsessed with these tools?

• 20:49Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, you know, most directors his age, and I would say this is a compliment, are just trying to remake their old stuff.

• 20:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  He's not.

• 20:55Sean Fennessey?

  He's not.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  You know, he has been talking about doing a Back to the Future musical, the movie, which seems like a wretchedly bad idea.

• 21:02Sean Fennessey?

  Let's not do that.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  But he's not-

• 21:03Sean Fennessey?

  I seem to recall Aaron Rodgers recommending that musical, though, at the end of Hard Knocks. Do you remember that little-

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Did that happen?

• 21:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  That sounds perfect, yeah. Um, but you know, to his credit, he's trying to do new stuff. So I don't know if he's just trying to push so far away from what he did in the past, maybe?

• 21:18Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think you're right. I mean, I, I am just, I think significantly more sympathetic to someone who is his age, who is just trying to do something new all the time. Um, the same is true for Flight is a much more human story, but what he's doing in terms of the near plane crash sequence is as like thrilling and challenging as anything he's done before. So I'm really impressed by that. And then the flip side of it is- I was just completely moved by the movie and I don't know what to say like it is absolutely a life insurance commercial like it is truly the sort of like most gloopy sentimental gosh we sure do turn out like our parents or gosh like raising children is difficult

• 21:59Sean Fennessey?

  or gosh making a living is hard or what is my purpose in this world or god it is so hard to stay in a stable relationship or man it's terrible how you know our physical health dominates how we live our lives and we need to really take care of ourselves but we have these stresses like it's all of these very familiar overworked emotional but pat renderings of common life and still watching the young family I was like this is feels weirdly if not real and not surreal but interested in a form of reality it was like a remembrance of reality the way you would look back on your memories they don't look exactly like the world they look like there's a little bit of a halo effect or

• 22:44Sean Fennessey?

  a little bit of a cloud around the memory but inside the center of the memory is a distinct experience and maybe that experience was oh my god my parent had a stroke or maybe it was the day I got married or maybe it was the day I lost something and I found it between the couch cushions it's just got a weird knack for returning to those very specific moments maybe it was just the moment in which I saw it but I totally connected to the movie.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  It is really funny because it is somewhere between a life insurance commercial and a movie you see on the IMAX at the science museum.

• 23:13Sean Fennessey?

  Oh totally I said I I thought it was more like the hall of presidents at Disney you know where you're like this is sort of like a rendering of real life but we know it's fake.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Yes I connected with it on on the grounds you stated I wish it was better I wish the writing of this movie was better the writing of this movie is not good man it's really not good um there's a scene in the early 20th century where a husband comes back to his wife and he says and I wrote this down how is the suffrage going that that really happened in this movie.

• 23:46Sean Fennessey?

  Are you saying John Harder did not speak that way?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  There was another one where you mentioned a black family buys the house. It's clearly 2020. They don't say this, but we don't know this family at all. We barely know their names. Uh, we've seen like one or two just fleeting glimpses of them. And then we see the dad sitting down with the son and talking about police brutality.

• 24:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  That's a very serious topic. But I'm like, this is so patronizing. This is the one note that we know about this family. And then spoiler alert, their housekeeper slash nanny dies of COVID. So I was like, well, you've gotten 2020 into this movie. And that's it. And then, and then they sell the house and we're like, okay, that was weird.

• 24:29Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, this is an unusual situation where, um, I won't disagree with any criticism of the movie. The, the dialogue is incredibly leaden and overspoken. The Paul Bettany character who plays Al Young, the, the patriarch of the family. He's just constantly over explaining everything in, in his experience.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Sean, can we talk about Paul Bettany's performance? He's bad in this movie.

• 24:53Sean Fennessey?

  He's, I think badly miscast. Um, Paul Bettany is a very like-

• 24:57Speaker 03

  It's not good acting. Whatever it is, whatever happened, it's bad.

• 25:00Sean Fennessey?

  But he's an actor who has like a roguish charm and is like a very alive-

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 25:07Sean Fennessey?

  As a performer, has a sense of humor. So to make him like a cranky, um, you know, alcoholic father is just miscast. And he's very miscast. I would say he's the only of the performances that I really didn't think were very good. There's some really talented actors who give, are given nothing to do. Like Michelle Dockery is the suffrage, suffragette that you're referring to. And she has like nothing to do in this movie, which is very strange.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  And there's so much plot here.

• 25:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Not only is it badly written, but things just start happening and you're like, well, who is that? There were, there were multiple instances where people died in this movie. And I'm like, who was that?

• 25:38Sean Fennessey?

  See, I personally liked that though, because- What I learned to do very quickly while watching the movie was turn off my narrative expectation.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 25:47Sean Fennessey?

  And just to see this as a series of portraits, not as like the true exploration of all of these lives, because that would be impossible. More just to say, a lot can happen in one space over a period of time.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Totally. But shouldn't we have just picked like three families?

• 26:03Sean Fennessey?

  I wonder. I don't know.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  I think it's a better movie. I think you could argue you could do it all with the Tom Hanks family, with the two generations, and probably convey that same idea, making it the same way, using that theatrical conceit you talk about, and just setting the camera right there. Maybe you could do it with them. You probably need a couple of other families. But I think if you're gonna bring characters on screen, you should just, you should give them something. I mean, you know, I understand the point about the portraits, but we mentioned the family at the end. The native people in the thing. We see them procreating. We see them like looking at the moon. We see them like admiring a hummingbird that's in this movie. And then we see a funeral. And I'm like, this again is like an exhibit at a science museum.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  This feels very patronizing to me. This does not feel like you've made these real characters or real people that I can identify with. They're just going through life stages on the screen.

• 26:56Sean Fennessey?

  I think you're right. I think that all of those things are there as matching tools against the young family. In fact, often there are genuine match cuts where you have one character looking up at the moon and then another character looking up at the moon in the cut. I liked that as a tool. Again, like-

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Is that like when you go shopping for a house, they're like, hey, sorry, we're bound to tell you this, that the previous owner died here?

• 27:18Sean Fennessey?

  Well, yeah.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  They died peacefully upstairs. They always try to put it the best possible way.

• 27:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Another baby once looked up at a moon in this house. I can't even explain my generosity towards this movie.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I understand it, because I watched this movie for two hours or however, was it hour forty-five?

• 27:35Sean Fennessey?

  Two hours? Hour forty-five, yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  And I never, I was never bored. I'm gonna be honest, there were times I started laughing during this movie out loud, not at the movie. I mentioned a hummingbird that we see with the native people. At the very end, it comes back like a feather in Forrest Gump, and there's just this hummingbird, once again CGI, because of course, CGI hummingbird's great. I just lost it. I mean, that just killed me. And I'm sitting there just laughing out loud. Apologies to anybody who was at the Chinese theater at 1:30 yesterday. But I'm laughing so hard because I'm like, that's so bad, man. I mean, there were, there were a lot of moments in the movie that I just thought were so corny and so, and so weird.

• 28:13Sean Fennessey?

  Let me ask you this.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Me out of the bigger point the movie was making.

• 28:17Sean Fennessey?

  Do you like Forrest Gump?

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 28:20Sean Fennessey?

  Do you see this as a, it's clearly not a structural sequel, sequel to Forrest Gump, but do you see it in the same lineage of storytelling?

• 28:29Speaker 03

  I think it's easier to care about the characters in Forrest Gump.

• 28:31Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  I think it's easier to care about Forrest and Jenny and Forrest Gump. And that, and that I think is one of the differences here.

• 28:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  We get some, you mentioned, we get a lot of the Tom Hanks family.

• 28:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  But it's mostly just like, here's an important event in our life, next scene.

• 28:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Here's an important event of our life, next scene. You could keep going and go, eventually somebody gets dementia and they, because they stopped remembering things and we just like, now you have dementia. And I'm like, I barely knew you before this, you know, and I would be sad, but I didn't, I didn't know you all the way. So I just think it would be, it's easier in his other movies. There, there is, you're right, there's a thread of storytelling through a lot of his work. This is not a huge deviation in that way, or that, that boomer ethos you talk about, but it's easier to know the characters in the other movies.

• 29:14Sean Fennessey?

  Well, the one thing that I'll say that I think somewhat undercuts our common understanding of Zemeckis's point of view is that all of his movies are tinged with like a real genuine sadness that like the dreams that were promised to his generation are not going to come true. And one of the things I like about the young story is that, I guess this, we're heading into spoiler territory, but you know, things for Hanks and Wright's characters don't really work out the way that they had hoped they would. And in fact, they reach an interesting endpoint that I think is common, but you don't see portrayed because it doesn't have like, there's no drama to its arc.

• 29:52Sean Fennessey?

  It is just a life lived, maybe not portrayed with as much nuance or depth as we would necessarily like, but I really liked this idea of like. A couple that starts with all the hopes and dreams in the world and they slowly but surely grow apart. And then they stay apart and maybe they can reunite and still share things, but that there is an overness to their time together and to what they contributed into what happened in that space. And I don't know, I don't, I don't think it was sophisticated necessarily, but I didn't think it was as corny as everyone would like to believe that every Zemeckis thing is. The same way that at the end of Forrest Gump, it's like Jenny's dead.

• 30:36Sean Fennessey?

  That is in some way, it's like an, a bit of an awkward tragedy, that entire movie. It's been funny reading Robin Wright talk about quite, you see that interview in the New York Times with her talking about Jenny and how people are like Jenny is the villain of Forrest Gump. And she's like, well, no, it's not that, but she was selfish. But even, even she's not talking about like the abuse that she experiences at the hands of her father's character in that movie. I think, I think Forrest Gump is both ridiculous, sentimental, boomer crap and also like beautiful and special.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:07Sean Fennessey?

  And I feel the same way about this movie in many ways.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it, it's funny and you're right about the, the ending of this movie, or at least the ending for the Hanks clan. It does deviate a little bit from the life insurance thing and it does hit some of those Zemeckis. This is not the McFly family being like, oh, dad's a, dad's a winner now.

• 31:21Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right, right.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  He's got Biff out there washing the car. This is the opposite. And that, and that, and I did like that about this movie because it did, it did show that, you know, just because you have the space where the turkey is served and the Christmas tree is set up and you know, you're watching TV together and all that stuff, it doesn't turn out happy.

• 31:38Sean Fennessey?

  It doesn't mean you are happy, which is an interesting portrayal.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Also the late in life divorce or separation, I feel is something that happens a lot and does not happen a lot in movies or television.

• 31:46Sean Fennessey?

  That, that's exactly what I'm saying. I just think that's a very common thing, increasingly so now, where people could kind of like can't afford to break up when they have children, but then when they finally can afford to, they do. And so I'm, I'm, I, I liked that part of the story. Look, this movie made $5 million on 2,500 screens. Like it is, it is a true bomb.

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Mine was empty, my screening. How about you?

• 32:11Sean Fennessey?

  It was, I would say about half full on a midday on a Friday. So that wasn't bad.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  I think we had like five people.

• 32:17Sean Fennessey?

  I wouldn't say-

• 32:17Speaker 03

  The one had a dog, so I don't know if that counts. It's a six.

• 32:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's not ideal. I'm really against dogs in the movie theater, by the way. I really hate that.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Dog, dog was shaking a lot, so you could hear the, you know, the collar, you know, the dog would go, uh, and you hear the collar jingle.

• 32:28Sean Fennessey?

  Because they didn't know how to process this incredible technology.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  I guess. Maybe they saw the hummingbird and wanted to leap onto the screen.

• 32:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a, it's, we're, we're, we're gonna talk about his, his Hall of Fame, Zemeckis, and kind of what he's contributed to movie culture over the last almost fifty years. This isn't gonna be at the top of the list. I could see a world-

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Or the middle of the list, for me.

• 32:52Sean Fennessey?

  Well, the middle is tricky.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 32:55Sean Fennessey?

  Cause he's got-

• 32:55Speaker 03

  I'm ready.

• 32:56Sean Fennessey?

  He's got twenty-four films. It's definitely not his twelfth best film, but it's the first of his films that I've genuinely liked in a while.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  So if we do all twenty-four, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:05Sean Fennessey?

  That's what I mean. If you do the full stretch.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  There's definitely worse than this.

• 33:08Sean Fennessey?

  For sure.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Uh, and worse recently.

• 33:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, definitely. Like, I, did you see Pinocchio, the movie, like, the Pinocchio that came out last, I mean, that's, it's dreadful.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  I know. And, and also just like the sad, like, thing of like, oh, you're just like the, the easiest IP Disney play. There's no, we'll make Pinocchio. Oh, what a great idea that is. I, I would just like to under, underline what you said about this movie, about being ambitious. First of all, yeah, in a proper country, we have more filmmakers adapting books and novels, uh, and not just, you know, superhero stories.

• 33:39Sean Fennessey?

  Agreed.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  This is a graphic novel. Uh, movies are better, I think, generally, when there's lots of adaptations of books, because you get novelists pumping new ideas into the bloodstream. I'm really happy with this. I was there on day one for Welcome to Marwen, because I saw the commercials, I'm like, this looks batshit. This looks awful, but I wanna see it because somebody is trying to do something here. And I went and saw it on the first day, I think I was alone or nearly alone in the theater that day. This may be more nuts than, than Welcome to Marwen, um, at least in terms of storytelling.

• 34:10Sean Fennessey?

  I think they're at the top of the heap in terms of his bold leaps.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  But I'm much happier to see a bomb or a, for me, a miss like this, than a miss that's just made like, I just messed up the superhero movie, or I messed up the Venom movie or whatever. I mean, I'm just so happy that we can live in a culture that will cultivate this kind of stuff.

• 34:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, and I try, I try, I know it's hard for people who listen to the show to believe this, but I try to not grade on a curve as much as I can. I am definitely grading this movie on a curve. Because Zemeckis has- Kind of broken my heart quite a bit over the last 20 years. And I think about my, my life as a movie fan. And I think about how important his eighties movies were to expanding my imagination and getting me excited about what a movie could be. That when he still makes another movie that I'm like, I didn't know a movie could be this. I didn't know a movie could take place in one place, in one angle, across thousands of years. Is it a good version of that idea? It's debatable. Most people will say no. I say yes, but it's new.

• 35:13Sean Fennessey?

  It is something genuinely new 100 years after we've been making movies. So I, I, I dig that about it.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  I totally agree. I wish it were better, but it is something new.

• 35:22Sean Fennessey?

  I was having a hard time coming up with like the craziest gimmicks in, in movie history. Like there, there's some obvious ones, right? Like 3D is an obvious gimmick.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  But then came back.

• 35:31Sean Fennessey?

  It, which, yeah. And it's still sort of back. Will you ever take your kids to a 3D movie these days?

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Sure. Why not?

• 35:37Sean Fennessey?

  I just don't want anything on my head when I'm watching a movie.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:40Sean Fennessey?

  You know?

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Touching stuff post COVID. I know we can't get COVID from 3D glasses, but I just also am just a little bit more of a germaphobe than I used to be.

• 35:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it seems uncomfortable.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  It was also weird when James Cameron brought it back. Remember like, wow, we're going back to Captain EO technology?

• 35:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  And we were, and it was weird. And then all movies became 3D and you didn't really need movies to be 3D.

• 35:59Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, you can see, I saw Avatar in 3D and it was for me, like mind bending.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  It was awesome.

• 36:05Sean Fennessey?

  Amazing experience.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  But then remember every action movie was just

• 36:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  necessarily 3D after that. And it was kind of like eh.

• 36:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Don't know that we need this.

• 36:12Sean Fennessey?

  We, I, and I don't feel that we need it really now. Have you done any of the like more contemporary versions of this stuff? Like, um, Amanda and I did an episode earlier this year about 4DX, uh, 4DX. And, um, gosh, what was the stretched screen that's across the three panels?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:30Sean Fennessey?

  The, the adjoining walls.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  I have not done that, no.

• 36:33Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Um, I mean, those are more recent examples, but then you've got like in the fifties, you had William Castle making all of these horror movies. And he's got, you know, Percepto and Emergo and

• 36:43Speaker 03

  He's the guy in Matinee?

• 36:44Sean Fennessey?

  He's the guy in Mat- well, it's loosely based on him.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:47Sean Fennessey?

  Um,

• 36:47Speaker 03

  That's fun. And the ant man comes out.

• 36:49Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  The, the theater.

• 36:51Sean Fennessey?

  The best one that he did was, um, he took out a life insurance policy for people in the event that they died or had a heart attack because of how scary his film was. And he would have a nurse come out to like, support anyone who fainted during the playing of one of his movies. It was like a thousand dollar life insurance policy. He had a lot of great examples of that. John Waters did Oderama, um, which was sort of like a play on the William Castle style stuff. One thing that I liked was Clue having multiple endings.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  That was so cool. And I first saw that on tape, so I did not do the thing where you had to go to multiple theaters to see the ending.

• 37:27Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't see it in theaters either, but I would have loved that. And I think that, I really think movies should be trying to do things like that again to get like repeat viewing and just to create like a sense of fun, you know, the idea of like what ending am I gonna get and what are the other endings is really exciting. And if we're gonna be making all these fucking superhero movies, like have some fun with it, you know, like show us a different, you know, stinger at the end rather than the one that we saw the first time around.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  I completely agree. And you and I saw this movie, both of us, as paying customers.

• 37:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  And when you are a paying customer, as opposed to a critic who's seeing a movie for free at a screening at the studios here in LA or whatever, you just relate to it completely differently.

• 38:05Sean Fennessey?

  Definitely. I love listening to the crowd.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  I do. I love listening to the crowd and I also just love like being like, I have now paid fifteen dollars to, and if I bought popcorn and everything, it's like thirty bucks to watch this. So you gotta impress me. You gotta do something for me here because I could just be at home watching any movie in the world for this price.

• 38:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  For much less than this price, any movie in human history. So why am I here? So I agree with you, more chances, more weirdo stunts.

• 38:32Sean Fennessey?

  You mentioned, uh, before we were recording popcorn buckets. This to me is like, this is the, the vanguard of the movie going experience right now where Dune Part Two comes along, you get your massive sandworm popcorn bucket, Terrifier Three comes around and you get your Art the Clown popcorn bucket. You know, obviously this is one way to just generate more revenue for a, you know, flailing theatrical exhibition business, but it's also kind of related to what we're talking about, the kind of gimmicks of movie going and movie culture expanding into the real and the tactile. Like, do your kids wanna get popcorn, like special popcorn buckets when they go to the movies?

• 39:10Speaker 03

  I don't know if they know about the buckets. They do see the toys that are there and have you noticed there are toys for every movie?

• 39:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  So like the John Krasinski If movie had toys. Like, anybody who bought a toy has already forgotten about if.

• 39:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, wasn't great.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  It had toys. And also, have you noticed that there's now Cheeto flavored popcorn at just about every chain theater you go to? And they'll often have, here's the Cheeto popcorn, and here's the fiery hot Cheeto popcorn. And these are just Cheetos mixed with, this is not Cheeto flavored, this is often just Cheetos mixed with popcorn. It's the crudest way to get you to buy stuff.

• 39:43Sean Fennessey?

  What's your, what's your go-to popcorn food? Or, excuse me, your go-to movie theater food?

• 39:47Speaker 03

  A bucket of popcorn.

• 39:48Sean Fennessey?

  Just bucket of popcorn soda?

• 39:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't like to mix and match with the candy.

• 39:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  First of all, candy is loud.

• 39:54Sean Fennessey?

  This is why I eat sour candy.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Ooh, okay.

• 39:56Sean Fennessey?

  No noise.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 39:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Cause I swear, whenever anybody in front of me, and there was somebody yesterday, opens a box of candy, every time it's the crinkle, and then the crinkle, and then they're reaching deeper into the movie thing, and I'm just, I'm just going like crazy.

• 40:10Sean Fennessey?

  You gotta, you gotta open the, the plastic intently.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 40:15Sean Fennessey?

  Wide open, and then you dump into one hand, so it doesn't make any noise. You don't have to reach in. You just let it pour in your hand. I, I'm big on don't make noise in that movie theater, yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, same.

• 40:24Sean Fennessey?

  I've thought a lot about this, probably too much about this.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Absolutely same.

• 40:26Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I don't know, were there any other gimmicks that you can think of? Like, found footage in theory, like, that's like more like here, where it's sort of like a formal choice that is made that makes the movie watching experience more fun?

• 40:38Speaker 03

  That's interesting. How about the stinger at the end of the movie?

• 40:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's a good, that's a gimmick.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  A way to keep you around for the entire movie.

• 40:43Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Also, we've seen it places like the NewBev here, we're bringing back the pre-show entertainment.

• 40:47Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  I don't mean the excruciating credit card commercial. I mean, like, hey, it's a Three Stooges short.

• 40:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Or, hey, it's a cartoon. And that's fun.

• 40:55Sean Fennessey?

  I love that.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  It's like, hey, we're back in the 50s again. And it's like another reason to go, because if I watched this on streaming, if I waited, I wouldn't see this. I wouldn't see this, these cool old trailers and stuff.

• 41:06Sean Fennessey?

  I was sad to see that, that Pixar had discontinued their shorts program, because that was also a modern version of that, where you'd get a four-minute Pixar movie before your 90-minute Pixar movie, and they don't do that anymore either. Um. A day at the movies used to be a day at the movies. And now if it's a day at the movies, it's just because you have 12 minutes of commercials beforehand. It's not ideal.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  It's terrible with kids too. Oh, my God. I mean, kids that are squirmy anyway, and you're just like, folks, we have like 20 more minutes of this to go.

• 41:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  And then they finish their food. This happened to me when I saw the Wild Robot with my kids this weekend. All the food was gone during the previews and the commercials. And then I was like, now what do I do? Like, I'm out.

• 41:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny, that's my entire strategy is I eat my full snack before the movie starts, which Amanda and I talk about all the time.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 41:53Sean Fennessey?

  But I think that's just because like, I'm almost like fueling up for the, for the fight, for the race.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you want to pay attention when the movie comes on. You don't want to be.

• 42:01Sean Fennessey?

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• 42:46Sean Fennessey?

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• 43:30Sean Fennessey?

  With so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help finding what fits for you. So, you can check coverage off the list and spend more time debating movie rankings. Go online at StateFarm.com or use the easily accessible app to get help from one of their local agents. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. So we had a funny moment this weekend. We live somewhat nearby. Years ago, when you moved to South Pasadena, you recommended to me a video store called Videotech. That video store has since moved closer to my house now.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  It's like had the Sean movie nerd tractor beam propelled it across suburban Los Angeles.

• 44:04Sean Fennessey?

  So I go there regularly, maybe every couple of weeks. I always bring my daughter because she likes all the video games there and also loves to be able to pull movies off the shelf. I'm trying to encourage physical media appreciation in my home, as you probably know. And who did I run into when I was in there? But you.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  It was me. And I had just, I brought my son, who's 11. I just told him, hey, you know, Sean, my friend from The Ringer and I are gonna do this podcast, but there's this one Robert Zemeckis movie I can't get on streaming, so I'll have to go. And we walk in and there you are. This was as on-brand Sean as you have ever been. And Sean is just in an LA video store, a video store with very, very deep cuts.

• 44:37Sean Fennessey?

  It's an amazing video store, Videotech, in case anybody on the east side is interested in a video store. It's so great.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  It's so great. But there you were with your lovely family and we got to have a little moment before we do the Zemeckis pod.

• 44:48Sean Fennessey?

  It was very sweet. And you were trying to track down the very first Robert Zemeckis feature, right?

• 44:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:52Sean Fennessey?

  So I don't know, do, what, what do you, what does Zemeckis represent to movies? Like, who, who is he when we look at, you know, 78 is his first feature. So we are literally in the fifth decade of his career.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  We are. You know, it's funny, I kept, when I was thinking about this, kept going back to an only in movie reviewing word, which I would never use in normal life, but just kept coming to me with Zemeckis, which is antic. There's just this certain antic energy to his movies.

• 45:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Starting at the very beginning, you know, car chases, you know, 1.21 gigawatts, you know, like there's, there's just this great crazy energy to his movies.

• 45:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  And then, of course, as we talked about, just this great kind of humanistic streak as told through mainstream movies. You know, as, you know, again, very much in the, in the, in the mode of Spielberg, I think. Sometimes he out Spielberg Spielberg, as we'll get to on this list, there are moments where it was like, oh, that's a movie Spielberg would have made, but he had gone off in a different direction or he couldn't quite get there anymore.

• 45:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I feel like one of the things that happens is they're in this interesting Kind of neck and neck thing where Spielberg is always sort of like the elder and the better. But they're they are kind of neck and neck in the eighties in terms of experimentation and exploration. And then the Jurassic Park and Schindler's List year happens. And Spielberg is just kind of off to the races and Zemeckis is kind of left in the dust behind him.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Think of it a different way, though. Zemeckis makes Back to the Future in nineteen eighty five. That's basically when Steven Spielberg stops directing Steven Spielberg movies for a while.

• 46:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  And tries to be different and respectable.

• 46:30Sean Fennessey?

  Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, all that.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  And you could argue that Zemeckis sort of steps into the void.

• 46:35Sean Fennessey?

  He does.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  And, you know, in eighty five, Back to the Future is kind of the last great Spielberg movie that just is produced rather than directed by Spielberg. So it is a funny kind of give and take.

• 46:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Spielberg's had the had the had the belt for a while here, but they are very much twins.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  I mean, he's a he's a better director, no doubt about it.

• 46:51Sean Fennessey?

  Zemeckis tells a story about how, you know, when he was a student. He wrote to Spielberg and Spielberg was just like, absolutely, come on down, let's have, let's have lunch, let's have, let's have a conversation when he was just a kid at USC. And that they formed this interesting partnership. And, you know, the second half of his career is is is quite strange. I mean, I think there's maybe more hidden gems than he gets credit for, or at least more interesting experiments. But the lows are pretty low and.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  And just kind of depressing.

• 47:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and it does feel like it has tainted what was once one of the signature filmographies in movie history.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they're all they're always going to be downers.

• 47:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  For anybody and sometimes periods of downers. This is a long period. And it's also to me, just like, I mean, more than anything, more than just like making sure his Hall of Fame cases is perfect. It's just like, I wish I had seen more Zemeckis movies that were like the other Zemeckis movies.

• 47:46Sean Fennessey?

  And it's one of those, I mean, Bill is fond of this construction, but like if he had died in two thousand.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Right after Castaway.

• 47:52Sean Fennessey?

  Right after Castaway, you this, this is one of the greatest filmmakers ever by far.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  Unbelievable two decade run.

• 48:00Sean Fennessey?

  And so now we look at it a little bit differently. So the Hall of Fame is interesting here for this one. So we've got, he's directed, I think, twenty three films. And he's got one screenwriting credit that I think is worth at least discussing here.

• 48:11Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 48:12Sean Fennessey?

  So let's start in seventy eight. You went to Videotech and you rented I Want to Hold Your Hand. Did you watch I Want to Hold Your Hand?

• 48:16Speaker 03

  I did.

• 48:17Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, what'd you think?

• 48:18Speaker 03

  I really liked it.

• 48:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's really good.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  A lot of American graffiti in I Want to Hold Your Hand with this kind of the world of kids that is only once in a while rubbing up against the world of adulthood. This is when the Beatles go on the Ed Sullivan Show, nineteen sixty four. And you got a gang of of kids who are in around New York. They actually live quite a far away from New York. But have to be there and have to be in the company of the Beatles. The Beatles are not in the movie. They're just kind of always slightly off screen or you're kind of seeing the backs of their heads. It's a really good, clever, wonderfully alive movie.

• 48:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think it's a really fascinating um launch point for that anti-sensibility that you're talking about too, because it's a really energetic movie. It's a movie about like a youthful exuberance, obsession.

• 49:06Sean Fennessey?

  This kind of like odd sense of like desire and like sexuality pent up in people's expectations of what the Beatles are and how it relates to them. Really good early Nancy Allen performance in the movie.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  She's wonderful.

• 49:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's a darn good movie. You know, it is. It's not like it's some lost film. It's on. It's in the Criterion Collection.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  It's in the Criterion and works in the era's tour era of American life.

• 49:28Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, great point. Totally.

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Because that's what this is, just a different version of it.

• 49:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's it's it's a tricky one. Now, now, in the in the parlance of the Hall of Fame's here on the big picture, to me, this would be a yellow. So we will start out and we'll say, I think this could be a green. It could also be a red. Red would be out. Green would be in.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  Why the system you have here? Red, green, go, red, stop. Okay, I think I got it.

• 49:51Sean Fennessey?

  I uh

• 49:52Speaker 03

  Yellow, I'm not sure.

• 49:53Sean Fennessey?

  Explaining it to you if you want, if it's confusing at all.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Yellow, press the brakes.

• 49:59Sean Fennessey?

  But we may need, we'll we'll circle back to it. I like, I usually like to put the debut in. I tend to think that the debut, if it's a success in this movie, is a success. Should go in. Nineteen forty one's his next film. He's he's partnered with Steven Spielberg. This is Spielberg's big studio comedy movie set during World War Two. A famous bomb, a famous miscalculation in the career of Spielberg. Zemeckis did co-write this with Bob Gale, his longtime co-screenwriter. And it's a significant movie for Zemeckis because it kind Of like confirms him in Hollywood as having this big screenwriting credit despite the failure of this movie. There are like, there's been some recent attempts to reclaim 1941. I I'm not one of those people like.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Same dude.

• 50:44Sean Fennessey?

  Not a movie I think has ever worked personally.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  No, it's just, I it's just, it's just kind of nothing.

• 50:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  It really is. And I I remember it took me a long time to make it all the way through 1941, even as a Spielberg person, because I would start it and be like, why am I watching this?

• 50:58Sean Fennessey?

  It's just a register that he's not comfortable in and you can tell right away and he doesn't know how to modulate the performances to get the kind of like, it's a mad, mad, mad, mad world thing he's going for here, you know?

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:08Sean Fennessey?

  Does not write for this kind of a thing. And that script, it's almost impossible to tell whether it's any good or not, because the movie is just all off.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  Totally agree.

• 51:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so that's a red.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  That's a red.

• 51:16Sean Fennessey?

  Red means stop, Brian.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  That's stop. No.

• 51:19Sean Fennessey?

  1980, the next year, used cars.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  Love this movie.

• 51:23Sean Fennessey?

  So this is like a cable classic for guys like you and I.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  It's so fun.

• 51:26Sean Fennessey?

  Um, on all the time about a couple of used car salesmen starring Kurt Russell.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Also written with Bob Gale.

• 51:32Sean Fennessey?

  Also written with Bob Gale and a movie that like. It's the indie band getting signed on the major label, you know, like it's not quite a blockbuster. But it's a sign of things to come in terms of like attitude and energy. And that like very odd sense of humor that is in all of his movies.

• 51:51Speaker 03

  Yes, sexuality again, it's very over sex movie. It's funny, it comes out two years after Animal House and the same year as Caddyshack. Is very much of a piece with the Harold Ramis oeuvre.

• 52:02Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  Which is we, the, the, the young, uh, you know, the, the, the not rich are going up against the swells and we're going to get one over on the swells.

• 52:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  But it's a really fun movie.

• 52:13Sean Fennessey?

  It is. Great Jack Warden performance in this movie.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 52:15Sean Fennessey?

  And yeah, you're right. It is like, it's in league with like Caddyshack, you know, it feels like it's has that similar kind of vibe to it. I I I would, I I think this movie is a green.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  It's a green, it's an absolute green.

• 52:26Sean Fennessey?

  We might be on like a, an incredible green run coming here.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  And this movie feels like it's ripe for rediscovery, too.

• 52:33Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Really, really good young Kurt Russell performance, too. Like, he, he's awesome.

• 52:36Sean Fennessey?

  Very funny, very comfortable in this mode. Um, okay, 1984 Romancing the Stone, a massive hit.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  One of the worst titles in movie history.

• 52:46Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it's.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, I love the uniqueness, but like, dude, that is like, it's a line of dialogue that Danny DeVito says. I rewatched it this week. I totally forgot about that. This is kind of like the Amazon Prime Day Indiana Jones. And he makes this movie because he can't get Back to the Future made, because used cars and I want to hold your hand have not made enough money.

• 53:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  So he has to do studio work. This is like not his movie.

• 53:10Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  But he makes a really good movie and it's a really fun, crazy romance caper in South America.

• 53:16Sean Fennessey?

  He's great at adventure. Most of his best movies are adventures. And this is kind of a classical adventure. You've got Kathleen Turner coming off of, you know, body heat and a handful of exciting performances. Michael Douglas, ready to like truly emerge as a proper movie star.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. He's so good in this.

• 53:32Sean Fennessey?

  And it is sort of a straight down the middle sort of a movie. Like, there's no complex contours to the way the story is told.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 53:39Sean Fennessey?

  But it's still entertaining, still works.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  I forgot in the eighties, until I watched it this week, how many movies just had just continuous machine gun fire? Where nobody gets hit. That was big in the eighties. And also, South American bad guys. The big, very big eighties subject.

• 53:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Very, very notable for both of those.

• 53:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, very easy for us to write those things off as not quote unquote, the real world.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  No, a big green for me, though, on Romancing the Stone.

• 54:04Sean Fennessey?

  Romancing the Stone, definitely green. 1985 Back to the Future, um.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Safely, this is a green, Sean.

• 54:11Sean Fennessey?

  I, I agree. It's one of the, it's like talking about Willie Mays or something, where you're just like, well, it's just the best thing that ever happened.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Well, it's great. Yeah.

• 54:20Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I just, I was obsessed with Back to the Future. I still think it's great. It's kind of remarkable the way that it's a movie that is about the past with a kind of like retrofuturism style to it. That doesn't feel like it ever ages.

• 54:36Speaker 03

  No.

• 54:36Sean Fennessey?

  There's something odd about the, you know, temporal um hold that it has on us. You know what I mean? Like, it's never really gonna go away. It's gonna, like, I assume your kids have dug it and since you've shown it to them.

• 54:48Speaker 03

  One hundred percent. And we live near one of the locations in the movies. So that's kind of a big deal.

• 54:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  But yes, and I would say the Zemek is filmography, a lot of stuff ages very well. It holds up, and a lot of it's the special effects actually hold up. They don't try to outkick their coverage at the time. So they actually look really good later. Um, this movie, I read in the Wikipedia page, Bob Gale looked back at his dad's yearbook, his high school yearbook. And he said, what would it have been like for me to know my dad when we were in high school? Would we have been friends? Would we have hung out? Or would I have just been like high in the hallway and that's it? Like, or was it just blood that unites us? Or would we have just been like, and like, that's a fascinating idea. And for all the gigawatts and everything else in this movie, that's, that's the great conceit. That's a great idea.

• 55:34Sean Fennessey?

  It is, but like, I think that's true of most of the great movies that he's made where there's something very simple and human at the center of it. But he's very good at the scaffolding of the story that he puts around it.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  The contraption.

• 55:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  And they talk about this movie, cuz he couldn't get it made, Ian Gale just kept rewriting it and rewriting it, and it became more complex. And then it's just this beautifully complex, funny, great movie by the time it got to the screen in eighty five.

• 56:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and, and to your point earlier, just great that Spielberg supported this and believed in it and allowed for something that is, that seems conventional and normal now because it's been such a part of American culture for forty years. But it's a very weird movie. I mean, it's a, the whole idea is very strange. All the stuff with Leah Thompson and Michael J. Fox is incredibly strange.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  So strange.

• 56:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but it really works.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  It works, it's so good.

• 56:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Back to the Future's in, Hugh Fame Roger Rabbit. So um, two weeks from, to, to, two weeks from yesterday, I'm hosting um, a series of screenings.

• 56:35Sean Fennessey?

  At the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana. Um, very excited about this. They asked me like program.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  That's a very cool.

• 56:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, very cool theater. Um, I encourage people to come out to it. They look for like four different types. One of them is an all time classic. One of them is a movie ripe for reexamination. One of them is a cult movie. So my loose idea for it was unlikely detectives. And so the four movies that are programmed, let me see if I can remember this properly. Long goodbye, Robert Altman's all time classic. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Big Lebowski.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 57:12Sean Fennessey?

  And Under the Silver Lake. Under the Silver Lake is my movie that I think needs a second look, that I think is a very seize the future kind of a movie in the age of QAnon and conspiracy. And always looking for um, the truth online. But who for I picked Who Framed Roger Rabbit and I'll be at the screening of Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the Frida. Because I think this might be the single most influential movie in my life until I saw Pulp Fiction.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 57:40Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I think that this is the movie that I watched the most times, that I thought about the most, that hit me at a time, you know, I was pretty young when I saw this movie and it is this collision of childlike entertainment, cartoons, animation.

• 57:57Sean Fennessey?

  With Humphrey Bogart movies, you know, with like real hard bitten noir, which is something I really like.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Sexy.

• 58:03Sean Fennessey?

  There's a hot movie in many ways and not just because Jessica Rabbit is a kind of like life changing concept.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Horny this movie was.

• 58:10Sean Fennessey?

  Very horny. Um, and another movie that is very ornate and complex in the world that has been created and the way that it exists and the another thing that like another movie that really has aged well in terms of how it looks and the interaction between the cartoons and the human people like it's a movie that should not work at all. On paper, it seems like a terrible idea and yet it's so good. It's so entertaining. It's so smart, so such fun to watch. I'm really, I don't think I've ever seen it on a big screen, so I'm super excited to show the movie at this festival.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  I completely agree. I mean, in 1988, just think of what a swing this was. I mean, now we'd say, okay, you know, with CGI, like you can make it work with it after Jar Jar Binks. I think we see the path to humans talking to animated characters, but just think about this, how they made this movie. I looked this up. If you adjust the gross for Who Framed Roger Rabbit in constant dollars, which people should do unless they want to lie to their readers, which a lot of people seem to want to lie.

• 59:07Sean Fennessey?

  You're always on this, yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  I know. Hey, I'm a trade publication, but I want to lie. Why not? This movie made $937 million in $2024. A movie starring Bob Hoskins, Sean, made $937 million.

• 59:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  That's unbelievable.

• 59:25Sean Fennessey?

  It's another movie, though, that has a lot of Steven Spielberg to thank because all of the animated characters that appear in this movie from all of the various studios, various IP. This will never happen again, but because Spielberg was so powerful and so beloved, he could call the studio chiefs of every studio and say, hey, can I get, you know, the Warner Brothers cartoons in this movie? Can I get the Disney characters in this movie? Can I get Betty Boop in the historical 20s cartoons in this movie?

• 59:52Speaker 03

  She's so good.

• 59:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, she is. Um, I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It's definitely green. If you came in here and said you hated it, I still would make it green. I'm just telling you, it's a very important movie to me.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  You ain't gonna get any argument from me.

• 1:00:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, this is the first interesting hinge point. Back to the Future 2. We are headlong into the franchise era of Hollywood. Sequels are more important increasingly as we get through the 80s. Of course, Back to the Future being the phenomenon that it was, Galen Zemeckis wrote a sequel to the movie. They did not plan on writing a sequel. And you can tell when you see the end of Back to the Future and then the beginning of Back to the Future 2, because they famously said, we would not have put the girlfriend in the car if we knew there was going to be a sequel. Movie I really, really, really loved as a kid that when I've returned to have not liked as much as an adult. Where were you at on Back to the

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a light green for me.

• 1:00:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  It was fun as a kid because it was like, what are they gonna do? And you get to see the future, which was really cool instead of seeing the past in the first one, but it it does feel like they're constantly like riding themselves into corners and then writing themselves out of corners.

• 1:00:53Sean Fennessey?

  Agreed.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  It it's cool that it exists. It's better than it could have been.

• 1:00:58Sean Fennessey?

  For sure.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Um, so it's it's a green for me, but it it's sort of on the edge.

• 1:01:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a big hit and it um, it really certifies him as like a master of Hollywood. It's it's mega success. You know, they they made these two movies back to back, part two and part three, and they were conceived as a complete trilogy. Three is more of an homage to uh, westerns and it's a trip back. Uh, movie that I never like was confused by as a kid and remained a little bit confused by. I get why he wanted to make it and what

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:01:30Sean Fennessey?

  Appealing to him about it, but it never really fits. Nothing against Mary Steenburgen, who I think is great in this movie. Um, doing her best to convince us that she's in love with Christopher Lloyd, but uh, two, I would say I agree is in and three would be not in for me.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, three to me is always just like, it's a movie. It's it's fine. It's totally fine, but they just wanted to make a third movie. There's a really weird era of Hollywood where you look at the top grossing movies of the year and it's like Crocodile Dundee two is on the list for some of these years. You're like, what the hell was going on? So you had to make a Back to the Future three. I mean, there was no choice. The economic imperative was you must make this movie. Um, and it just kind of there for me.

• 1:02:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, high concept, low impact comedies um, were very, very popular at this time, so it's not surprising that there are three of them. Nineteen ninety-two Death Becomes Her, a movie that got past me when I was a kid. I probably only saw for the first time within the last ten years. That is renowned for its extraordinary special effects.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:27Sean Fennessey?

  And makeup. And also a movie that I think has a lot to say that still resonates about

• 1:02:35Sean Fennessey?

  beauty standards and our conception of

• 1:02:39Sean Fennessey?

  who should look how and when and for how long. And I assume you have not seen the movie The Substance, which came out this year.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 1:02:46Sean Fennessey?

  I would say The Substance is a sort of spiritual sequel to Death Becomes Her in many ways about aging women in Hollywood.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Put that on the poster. The spiritual sequel to Death Becomes Her.

• 1:02:56Sean Fennessey?

  I think some people have have made that comparison, so I'm not the first to say it. There are some people who really like this movie. I would say I'm mixed on it. Um, I don't love it. The performance style is really outlandish and really surreal.

• 1:03:10Sean Fennessey?

  What do you, what do you think?

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  That I'm going to mostly punt this to you because I just have not seen this movie in a really long time. But what I remember about it was surreal and just kind of overacted so much that I almost couldn't get into it and never really wanted to go back to it.

• 1:03:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a tricky one. Early David Koep's script. It was a pretty big hit. $55 million budget, $150 million at the box office. That's really good.

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  And also again, cool that he made this. Again, he's on this wild winning streak at this point.

• 1:03:40Sean Fennessey?

  I get the impression that after doing a third Back to the Future movie, he was like, I'm only doing what I like. I'm only, I'm only doing swings. If I'm making a movie, it's because it represents a new stripe, a new experimentation for me. And that this is a big announcement of like, I'm done fucking around with, you know, sequels and IP and all that other stuff. Like, I'm trying something fascinating every time out. I'm inclined to give it a green, but with regret because it pushes him into a series of experiments that start to go sideways in the 2000s. Why don't we yellow it? Death Becomes Her for now.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  Okay, I like that.

• 1:04:16Sean Fennessey?

  Force gum. We've already talked about it somewhat here.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  You've done whole pods about this, trying to pull it apart.

• 1:04:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  I mean, I just go back, I'm, this, this, it is what it is, flaws and all. I go back to my original, you know, moment in the theater, seeing it back in the day, and had the same experience with Pulp Fiction that year. So we'll take it for what it's worth. But I was like, this is awesome, man. This is, this is great. And I still go, it's still green for me.

• 1:04:42Sean Fennessey?

  Me too.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  It's, it's, it's wild, right? And pulling this guy through time and space through the 20th century is something to watch. So it's an absolutely great movie.

• 1:04:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it is for me too. I mean, obviously he won best picture and best director. So it's got to go into his Hall of Fame.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:04:58Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  It wasn't that bad.

• 1:04:59Sean Fennessey?

  It, no, it's not. I think it's a movie that was a, was a worldwide phenomenon. And then for 20 years was pilloried for not being Pulp Fiction. And then I would say in the last 10 years, as folks like me and you have gotten into their 40s and are starting to look at the movie again with new eyes, we're sort of like, yeah, it's sentimental. Yeah, it's kind of treacly. Yeah, it's like, you know, maybe a little bit insensitive to how some of the characters are portrayed. Yeah, maybe that technology where, you know, he shakes JFK's hand isn't as good as you want it to be. But there's still something, I don't know, there's still a little bit of magic in that movie.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I think a lot of magic in that movie. I really do. I mean, it's, it's again, it's not something I would put on all the time, but it's a, it's a top five Zomek's movie for me.

• 1:05:44Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so we've got two, four, six greens and two yellows. We're heading into an interesting phase. Contact.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:05:56Sean Fennessey?

  This is very high on the Bill Simmons no-go list. Bill Simmons does not like this movie.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  It's an absolutely the opposite of a Bill Simmons.

• 1:06:04Sean Fennessey?

  I think it is like one of the coolest and bravest movies ever made by a major studio, by a major filmmaker. It, it is very similar to here to me, where it's sort of like. We're gonna look straight down the barrel of sentimentality. What does a woman and her relationship to her father mean to the universe? God, space, science, love, like it is trying to be everything.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  To Matthew McConaughey, playing Palmer Joss with that accent, that's unbelievable.

• 1:06:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, to, to the, the priesthood. Um, there's, there's so many huge ideas in the movie. And there's also some like pretty typically clunky, like Hollywood storytelling stuff where we're trying to like race ahead to get to things or cast certain characters aside. Um, again, some of the way that the, the sort of like the, the journey that she takes in the final act of the movie has not aged as well, like it looks kind of like a screensaver at times. But I love how bold the movie is. And so like, I'm constantly impressed by his reaching for something, even if it doesn't always get there.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, I saw this movie in college and remember the opening scene where you're close in on earth and the camera pulls back and it's like three minutes of going out of the solar system and then out of the universe and then back, back, back, back, back. And we see the immensity, a little bit like here in that way, right? He's daring to show us like the enormity of the universe. Everybody in the theater just started laughing. I mean, just laughing uproariously. And what I'm sitting there is, you know, as a film nerd, college kid, I'm just like, why is everybody laughing? This is not funny. This is not supposed to be hilarious. But I agree with you. It is brave. It's not my favorite movie of his.

• 1:07:45Sean Fennessey?

  Mine either.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  It reminds me a little bit of Interstellar where I think it probably would have worked better with a different cast. Both of those movies oddly involve Matthew McConaughey.

• 1:07:52Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  But like, I think.

• 1:07:54Sean Fennessey?

  As a Texan, that's interesting for you to be rejecting.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  Right. I know. Strange, right? But like, I almost think like a different actor or actress with a little more, I don't know, just a different relationship with the audience that might've worked a little bit better. Cause it's kind of a cold movie in a lot of ways, an intellectual movie.

• 1:08:08Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  But it is, but it is an absolute green for me and no, no doubt about it.

• 1:08:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I was gonna, I was gonna pitch a yellow to you because I don't really know how the final stretch of this is gonna shake out.

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  But I mean, did you like, I mean, did you like this better? Would you put this in the player over Back to the Future 2? I would.

• 1:08:26Sean Fennessey?

  I think I'd rather watch this now than Back to the Future 2. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what matters more to his career, you know, so like the Hall's of Fame or it's just like Apex Mountain, like, is it about what are the most important movies in his career? Or is it about what are the movies of his that we like the most?

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Sean Fennessey?

  Somewhere in the middle ultimately is what I'm trying to accomplish here.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  Totally. And again, anybody, if somebody else had made this movie, imagine that, right? Like, we're, we're putting him on the mountain of like, you made Back to the Future, dude. You made all this stuff and you're gonna go make other things. If somebody like Ron Howard had made this movie or something, I think we'd be like, this is, you know, this would have been yuck.

• 1:09:02Sean Fennessey?

  I totally agree. I mean, I, I'm grateful that he did make it. All right, I'm gonna yellow it for now. We'll come back to it. I lean, I lean green though, for sure. 2000 What Lies Beneath, big hit.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:09:15Sean Fennessey?

  This is his Hitchcock movie, essentially.

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  The ultimate Entertainment Weekly movie, because the announcement was more interesting than the movie. Remember when you used to get the magazine, be like, Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer together with Robert Zemeckis, what could go wrong? And then the movie come out, you'd never read, wait, wait, what happened to that thing that was you were writing all that stuff about?

• 1:09:32Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it did well at the time, and I think it was well liked. It was also, you know, during a period where like Harrison Ford could do no wrong, you know, he was making hit after hit after hit.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  You're just starting to get to the end of Harrison Ford.

• 1:09:42Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  In retrospect.

• 1:09:43Sean Fennessey?

  It is. I, I'm okay on this movie. As a, as a horror movie snob, I think it is like relying on some like typical tropes and is not as surprising or as exciting as you want it to be. There is, you know, the reveal was good. I, I, I didn't see it coming in whatever when I was 18 when this movie came out. It was really like, oh shit, which I think is one of the reasons why it became such a hit, is that people like, you gotta go see this, some wild shit happens at the end. It doesn't feel as good returning to it.

• 1:10:17Speaker 03

  No, it's a yellow for me because I don't really like it, but I would watch it. If you told me, hey, before the returns come in tonight, let's go watch What Lies Beneath, I think I'd be like, I'm in.

• 1:10:25Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, maybe you should do that. 2000 Cast Away. Automatic green, I think.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  Easily. To me, it's the second best movie behind Back to the Future.

• 1:10:34Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 1:10:35Sean Fennessey?

  Good take.

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  Rewatching it this week, I watched Roger Rabbit and I loved Roger Rabbit.

• 1:10:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Um, I felt more with this movie. Roger Rabbit is, appeals to me as an intellectual exercise because it's just so, it's just so like goo- good and it's audacious and cool.

• 1:10:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  I watched this movie, weird last act in all, and I'm like, this is awesome. The plane crash is unbelievably believable.

• 1:10:55Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Twenty plus years hence.

• 1:10:57Sean Fennessey?

  One of the best sequences of the century, yeah.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  So good. The life on the island is, like, you just watch it like, I believe this man is stuck on this island and this is a real island.

• 1:11:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

  This is a thing.

• 1:11:06Sean Fennessey?

  It's so funny, though. I mean, it's just so, like, it's just Hanks carrying it. Like, the filmmaking is obviously wonderful, but everything on the island, ninety-nine percent of other actors trying to do that, just you would not sell it.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  It would have been a mess.

• 1:11:19Sean Fennessey?

  Just a complete testimony to his greatness. You know, Bill and I are always joking about Hanks versus Cruise on the rewatchables and stuff, but this is one of those, like, irrefutable. Only Tom Hanks could have done this and made it feel, um, not just believable, but real.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  Can you imagine Tom Cruise talking to Wilson?

• 1:11:37Sean Fennessey?

  No, no.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  Come on!

• 1:11:38Sean Fennessey?

  It couldn't work. Uh, I, I did rewatch it this week as well. One of the few Zemeckis movies I did rewatch. And I, I stumbled but was fascinated by the ending this time around. In the past, you're so hung up on like, what's gonna happen with, will he reunite with Helen Hunt? But to me, it's that final, like, six minutes after he leaves and he goes driving and he finds himself at this intersection.

• 1:12:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:02Sean Fennessey?

  Foxy gal with red hair gets out of the truck and she's like, where are you headed to? And he's like, it is once again, Zemeckis trying to import this sense of like, lost philosophy inside of an otherwise kind of conventional entertainment. I really appreciate that he's like, taking a hundred and fifty million dollars from studios and being like, life is like an intersection. Sometimes you go left, sometimes you go right. Sometimes you go straight and you crash land on an island. And like, that is actually how it feels to be alive sometimes. It's obvious and sentimental, but weirdly true? So, I have a lot of, I have a lot of space for, for those intentions. Um, and I agree, Cast Away is automatically in. Two thousand four, The Polar Express. Now, this movie stinks, right?

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Made a fortune.

• 1:12:47Sean Fennessey?

  It's a huge hit. And motion capture is a very important part of movie making today. Now, this isn't the first movie to do mocap.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  It's coming off the Star Wars prequels.

• 1:12:58Sean Fennessey?

  So you've got Star Wars prequels, you've also got Lord of the Rings. So those two films, you know, Gollum, everything that happens with that. You've got Planet of the Apes movies coming, you know, you've got a few things coming. You've got, obviously, like in the Marvel films, there's mocap. You've got some things coming that this is like bedrock filmmaking style for important movies to come. You could make a case that this movie, semi demonic as it is, has an import to movie history.

• 1:13:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. And it comes at a really interesting crux point where we're just crossing over the CGI threshold.

• 1:13:34Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  The world has changed. I mean, to me, that's the big river in my movie going live. Pre-CGI and then CGI.

• 1:13:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  And there's some crossover period where it's kind of half in and half out.

• 1:13:43Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  But now we're over the threshold. Partly because of the prequels, partly because of the Lord of the Rings, which are huge hits. And then he makes this movie and it's like, oh, wow. This is, this is a thing now. This is, to me, the opposite of here where Tom Hanks cannot fight through this technology.

• 1:13:57Sean Fennessey?

  He can't.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  He's not Tom Hanks anymore.

• 1:13:59Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  I mean, think of that, you built a contraption that Tom Hanks couldn't smile through. That's kind of a thing.

• 1:14:07Sean Fennessey?

  I know. I mean, a part of it is just a testimony to where the technology is at the time. You know, the technology, three years later, he makes Beowulf and it's a little better, but the story is a little bit more kind of mythological.

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Sean Fennessey?

  And so even though the renderings are deeper, they're also more otherworldly because of the kind of story that's being told. A Christmas Carol is even better, but also it's a worse movie. It's like, like kind of a freakish disaster. So if you told me like, all three of these movies should be relegated to the dustbins of history and we shouldn't talk about them and they're not good and we don't want to re-watch them, I would be okay with that. There is a part of my technocratic mind, though, that is like to not acknowledge it at all would be odd. I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  I mean, Polar Express feels important. The other two feel like he just had a hit and then he just kept going on this role. I mean, when was the last time you heard somebody talk about Beowulf or Christmas Carol?

• 1:14:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, never. Because Christmas Carol, also a hit, though. I mean, it was a Disney movie.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  And I remember Beowulf, like, watching that in the theater and being like, mostly happy with that, you know?

• 1:15:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's okay.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  With Ray Winstone is like, you know, a happy day at the theater for me. But I just was like, that's, and I remember it was before, you know, Game of Thrones and everything. So we didn't have a lot of things in that kind of, you know, castle world.

• 1:15:18Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  Um, it did sort of herald that sort of way that the movie going and television went.

• 1:15:24Sean Fennessey?

  I completely forgot that, uh, this was his reunion with Crispin Glover as Grendel.

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:15:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Speaker 03

  I did not know that either.

• 1:15:31Sean Fennessey?

  And they famously had a falling out, you know, because he's cut out of two and they had a dispute and cut out the back of the feature too.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  Grendel.

• 1:15:38Sean Fennessey?

  He's a pretty good Grendel.

• 1:15:39Speaker 03

  I mean, I have grayed out almost all these movies, and I think Polar Express is, just as you described, terrible but important.

• 1:15:45Sean Fennessey?

  I'll yellow Polar Express, just for the sake of this conversation. Um, okay. We're gonna red Beowulf in a Christmas Carol. No offense to Jim Carrey. 2012 Flight.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Do we skip over Mars Needs Moms when he like, basically bankrupted a whole because the technology then had just completely worn out?

• 1:16:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, he didn't direct that movie, right?

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  He was the overlord of the little mini studio, I think. Uh, Flight to me is, he's back, it's his back, I'm back movie.

• 1:16:13Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Um, the Denzel performance is incredible, as I needn't say because it's so obviously good. Second half of Flight to me is a pretty conventional recovery story. I liked the first half of that movie a lot more than I liked the second half, but it's an absolute green for it.

• 1:16:26Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, I agree, but so then, let's just take, Flight is, I think, excellent feature, is one of the great Denzel performances. It, I don't like the needle drops and the like, some of that boomer essentialism comes back there where it's just like Joe Cocker feeling all right and, you know, sympathy for the devil and just like, really like the most obvious, turns on Sirius XM one time, kind of like 70s channel stuff. But it's grounded by that great performance. John Goodman, also great in that movie. And that, that near-crash sequence is so thrilling. It's also like, kind of, it's maybe the most adult movie that he's ever made. You know, you remember, it opens with Denzel in that hotel room and the girl is naked and, you know, like, he's just had a

• 1:17:08Sean Fennessey?

  Long night where he's like doing cocaine like it's there's something not just I'm back but like I'm not a kid like I don't have a child like sensibility I'm a man and here's how I see my pain and my some of my struggles also Zemeckis famously a pilot and so his experience as someone who flies is kind of essential to this story in the way that a lot of his work is like getting up in an airplane and you're taking a chance every time you get up in an airplane and if something goes wrong you could crash you know like it's a it's an easy movie to project a lot of um personal intention against so I really really like it.

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  But that's the thing he was always a little thornier than Steven Spielberg.

• 1:17:46Sean Fennessey?

  Definitely, yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  He was always you know you mentioned Roger Rabbit was like that there's always more built into these movies with him with that.

• 1:17:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  By the way, the plane stuff is amazing. We talked about Cast Away, we talked about this, there's a crash plane in Romancing the Stone.

• 1:17:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:17:59Speaker 03

  Uh, there's a pilot who dies in uh here.

• 1:18:01Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  A big through line through his work.

• 1:18:04Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely. Speaking of uh being up in the air, 2015, The Walk, which is a film about the famous tightrope walk between the Twin Towers that was initially rendered in a great documentary and this is a sort of docudrama about that experience Philippe Petit, I believe the

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:18:22Sean Fennessey?

  Tightrope Walker's name is. Uh, Joseph Gordon Levitt portrays him. I remember this movie being really formally cool and exciting and really bland as a story. I did not re-watch it. It feels like the movie that has maybe the like smallest reputation of any movie that he's made.

• 1:18:41Speaker 03

  It could it's right up there and and I think the documentary was the reason for this.

• 1:18:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  We had reached a sort of time in movie going where you could actually see documentaries and documentaries that were hits were kind of widely available for the first time.

• 1:18:52Sean Fennessey?

  Man on wires.

• 1:18:53Speaker 03

  Man on wires, the book. Yeah, I was in the documentary and so it was like, oh, why do I need to see this?

• 1:18:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  I just saw the documentary and it was fantastic.

• 1:19:00Sean Fennessey?

  And it's also um part of the thrill of the documentary is that this is something that a person actually did and we have footage of the person actually doing it. So movie magic is unnecessary in this particular case. Yeah, it's it's an odd movie that like some of the heist style sequence stuff about actually getting up into the towers is cool and well done but um it's kind of slight in his career. So I'll say red. I did revisit Allied last night and thought it was pretty good.

• 1:19:27Speaker 03

  I'm so glad you did because this is this is actually one of my this is actually a movie to me is this it's not perfect.

• 1:19:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's not.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  It's very flawed, but I enjoyed the hell out of Allied.

• 1:19:35Sean Fennessey?

  It looks

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  Great, uh huh.

• 1:19:37Sean Fennessey?

  Great.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  Sumptuous.

• 1:19:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and it's like, it's a really rare example of the way that this kind of digital photography can look so beautiful and the way that the set design and the costuming. And just having two knockout beautiful stars in Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard. And it, the, the thing that hit me while I was watching it is this was a time in the 2010s and there were a bunch of movies that were like this, but the two movies that popped into my head. And I'm not equating them, but were David Ayer's Fury, which was also a Brad Pitt movie. And Martin Scorsese's Silence. That were like, we have all of this incredible technology. And so we can make period pieces that feel hyper real now, that have like this extreme modernity to them.

• 1:20:22Sean Fennessey?

  But they're set in a different time. And this is another movie that's like that. This movie at times is almost like a video game.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:20:27Sean Fennessey?

  But.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  It's like Casablanca, the video game.

• 1:20:29Sean Fennessey?

  Totally. And while I don't think it's, I'm not even sure if it's good, but I really liked watching it this time around.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  He's really, really good. Who is the British actor in this movie who plays the kind of functionary? He's also in Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Splo- Spy, excuse me, playing almost the exact same role.

• 1:20:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Simon McBurney.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Simon McBurney. I love Simon and McBurney.

• 1:20:49Sean Fennessey?

  He's great.

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  He's like a treacherous bureaucrat in movies and you know he's treacherous because of his thinning hair. I don't know. I'm not sure if you have one guess why I picked up on that particular.

• 1:20:58Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean?

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  Affectation. But I love him whenever he's in movies. I remember him coming up on the screen. I just smiled really big.

• 1:21:03Sean Fennessey?

  He is excellent. Uh, as an act of generosity, I would yellow Allied. I don't know if it's gonna make the cut here.

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  Sure. But, but, but again, if you told me, let's go watch this right now, I'd.

• 1:21:12Sean Fennessey?

  Worth checking out if you haven't seen it and you had, had, you know, written off Simakis completely. 2018 Welcome to Marwen.

• 1:21:20Sean Fennessey?

  Another example of a film that is a remake of a documentary.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. I forgot about that part.

• 1:21:28Sean Fennessey?

  How do, how do we describe Welcome to?

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  I don't know, man.

• 1:21:31Sean Fennessey?

  So it's about a man struggling with PTSD.

• 1:21:37Sean Fennessey?

  Who creates this world of figurines? That allows him to cope and to communicate about his trauma. And so he has this like little village that he makes. Steve Carell plays the man in this film. The figures in this world are.

• 1:22:00Sean Fennessey?

  A World War II pilot and the kind of surrounding figures in within that world. And so this man who's experienced PTSD like kind of slips in and out of that world. And then there are like these physical manifestations of the figures that he interacts with throughout the movie. It's basically like a man talking to his army men.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  And then the technology here is it's not just man talking to army men. We will go in with the army men.

• 1:22:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  They will come to life.

• 1:22:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, uh, it's, it's based on a documentary called Marwin Call, which is a, just a heartbreaking movie. Um, and an amazing portrait of a person working through an enormous amount of pain. This movie is also about that. It is about a person working through an enormous amount of pain, but it is so fucking weird.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  It's so weird.

• 1:22:47Sean Fennessey?

  And inscrutable at times.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  Yes, and not like, it is just, again, it's very, very hard to just wrap your arms around this movie. Again, if you just, if we just described like the scene by scene, people who hadn't seen it wouldn't believe us that this exists.

• 1:23:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's bizarre. I mean, it's a.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  It was also right at the end of Steve Carell's run, I feel.

• 1:23:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  He had been in the Tad Friend New Yorker profile zone. He'd had some hits, some hits that he was tangentially a part of. And then all of a sudden, this is felt like when it ended.

• 1:23:13Sean Fennessey?

  Well.

• 1:23:14Speaker 03

  Or the first wave of it ended.

• 1:23:15Sean Fennessey?

  He would, he was in the, the midst of making this very strong pivot into serious feature films. So he does, uh, Foxcatcher, Freeheld, The Big Short, Battle of the Sexes, Last Flag Flying, Beautiful Boy, Vice, and Welcome to Marwin, all in succession.

• 1:23:36Speaker 03

  What a run.

• 1:23:37Sean Fennessey?

  That's a four year period where he's making big movies with big auteurs, almost all of which are very serious about big ideas, half of which are, you know, big, short, big movie, very successful movie. Foxcatcher, Oscar nominated film.

• 1:23:54Speaker 03

  The rest.

• 1:23:56Sean Fennessey?

  But ma- man, some of this shit didn't work at all.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it was, it was part of that run for him, I think of that.

• 1:24:02Sean Fennessey?

  It was.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  It was like he was, he looked like he could become one of the biggest actors in Hollywood.

• 1:24:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:24:07Speaker 03

  He went a different way and, and.

• 1:24:08Sean Fennessey?

  He's really retreated in some ways. I mean.

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Sean Fennessey?

  He, he hasn't made a movie in which he appears on screen with the exception of the cameo in Astrid City as the hotel man, the motel manager, and he only did that part because Bill Murray couldn't appear in that movie. He was the last minute fill in. But irresistible, the Jon Stewart directed election comedy drama.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:24:31Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a really a huge failure of a movie. That's really the last movie he made and the movie he made before that was Welcome to Marwen. So you're right that that was, this is basically the end of Steve Carell bankable star.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:43Sean Fennessey?

  And what a way to go.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  What a way to go. It's a strange, again, I was there opening night. I had to see it.

• 1:24:49Sean Fennessey?

  Big time red. 2020 The Witches, pointless film. Um, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  Who was weirdly hot at this point. Didn't Roald Dahl get hot again?

• 1:25:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I think he's sort of persistently hot in a way.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  He's had some dips, yeah.

• 1:25:08Sean Fennessey?

  I, I've been wondering.

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  Roald Dahl IP.

• 1:25:11Sean Fennessey?

  Do you, do you read any of those books to your kids? I've been wondering how they will hit with.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  I try, you know, we, we have definitely James and Giant Peach and stuff, but it's like, it was weird. I mean, it was, it was almost like they couldn't quite follow it or couldn't quite, weren't old enough for it. It was fine. Show them that movie.

• 1:25:24Sean Fennessey?

  Matilda, um, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the BFG, trying to think of the key ones, James and the Giant Peach, of course. It's a couple of other ones. Those books were just a big rotation in my life between the ages of like six and 10. I was reading those books all the time.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  But we had like 10 years of these movies.

• 1:25:44Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  Either remakes or first shots at it.

• 1:25:46Sean Fennessey?

  I know. The Witches, you know, there is an original film that is directed by, is it Ken Russell? I feel like it's Ken Russell. Um, that is downright horrifying, like incredible, uh, makeup effects, Angelica Huston as one of the witches. This is a movie that like haunted my dreams when I was nine years old. Um, I think Anne Hathaway is having so much fun in this movie, but it's not very good. It's kind of pointless. And it was like straight to streaming during COVID. Most people ignored it. It's as if it doesn't exist in many ways. Two years later, basically the same exact thing happens again.

• 1:26:17Speaker 03

  And I just, you just feel sad for everyone involved.

• 1:26:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's a bummer. It is. I mean, it is a Tom Hanks collaboration. He plays Geppetto in this adaptation of Pinocchio and it.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  Doesn't that feel like a poster that's appearing in a comedy of a movie that didn't actually happen?

• 1:26:29Sean Fennessey?

  It does feel like a fake movie, a hundred percent. Um, most people also haven't seen this. It was critically destroyed. It also came the same year as Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, which was very well received.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  It's like when we had the talking pig movies and we had the competing Pinocchios.

• 1:26:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's the good one and the shitty one. Um, that's obviously red. And then 2024 here, which.

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  Are you going green or are you going yellow?

• 1:26:53Sean Fennessey?

  No, I, I, look, like it's not good, but it's good to me, damn it. You know, like we're in the mold of wrestling. Like it's kind of a professional wrestling situation where I'm like, Robert Zemeckis still has this weird electrical power to my mind.

• 1:27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Sean Fennessey?

  That I, I, I felt he hadn't really gotten to it in quite this way since Cast Away.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  Hmm, that's interesting.

• 1:27:17Sean Fennessey?

  I like Flight, I like Allied. I haven't had that feeling of like, this motherfucker has something to say.

• 1:27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, those were more straightforward.

• 1:27:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:27:26Speaker 03

  Dramas.

• 1:27:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  This is, this is definitely going for the old, and like I said, even of me having more negative reaction to it, I watched the whole thing. You know, I was laughing during some of it, but I didn't, I was not bored during that movie at all. I was, I was compelled and I think anybody watches it will be compelled.

• 1:27:42Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I don't think you can in good conscience make it green, so I'm not going to make it green. Despite my, um, appreciation for what he was going for. So that takes us to the end of our journey. So at this point right now, we've got two, four, five, six, seven, eight greens.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:28:00Sean Fennessey?

  We have two, four, six yellows.

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  And Allied was the latest yellow we had, which is 2016.

• 1:28:08Sean Fennessey?

  Correct. So I'm gonna read you the yellows and we can, we can do some bargaining here.

• 1:28:11Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:28:12Sean Fennessey?

  1978's I Want to Hold Your Hand.

• 1:28:14Speaker 03

  It's a green for me. I mean, it's a, it's a, it's an early, it feels like a very much a, you know, apprentice, young filmmaker film, but I really like it. I think, I think everybody likes, you know.

• 1:28:23Sean Fennessey?

  I like it too.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  Works in the ears to her.

• 1:28:26Sean Fennessey?

  We're gonna make somebody unhappy here, cuz I think 1992's Death Becomes Her, 1997's Contact, 2000's What Lies Beneath, 2004's The Polar Express, and 2016's Allied. Allied is out. We're not putting Allied in. I like it. We gave our recommendation. I would say What Lies Beneath is out.

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:45Sean Fennessey?

  It was a big hit, but it's largely iterative of a lot of different movies.

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree. It doesn't feel essential, even though it was a hit.

• 1:28:53Sean Fennessey?

  Polar Express, I made my case for its import. I don't want it in the Hall of Fame. That's really what it boils down to.

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  I'm glad.

• 1:29:00Sean Fennessey?

  Which then takes us to Contact and Death Becomes Her. Now, there's two sides of the same coin.

• 1:29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess I'll lobby for Contact, cuz I just think it's, again, part of, part of the thing here is there's so many good, great movies,

• 1:29:14Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:15Speaker 03

  that you don't really have to have Contact in there to make a, you know, a full, uh, old country buffet of cinema. But I, I think Contact's a really good movie, like, you know, again, it's, I, I like it. I think it has some, a lot of flaws, but, but that, I'd fight for that.

• 1:29:29Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  But I, but I totally, if you left it out, I'd be like, okay, I'll go watch Back to the Future again and Romancing the Stone and I'll be happy.

• 1:29:35Sean Fennessey?

  This is a tricky one. Is Back to the Future Part Two essential?

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  It's right on the edge for me. Again, there, there's something like, look, Back to the Future, Cast Away, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump, Flight, Romancing the Stone, Used, Used Cars, did we get Used Cars in the great?

• 1:29:49Sean Fennessey?

  Cars is in there.

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  I mean, you, we're, we're really good here, right? So it's like.

• 1:29:53Sean Fennessey?

  This is an interesting one, though, cuz it's like, there are roughly 12 important movies in his career, and then there are another 12 that are various levels of easy to ignore and they suck. So, in some ways, this is a, a good test case for the value of this project.

• 1:30:12Sean Fennessey?

  I guess we can cut Death Becomes Her and keep Part Two in and put Contact in. Contact, I think, is the boldest thing that he's tried to do in this format. It's like, it is a combination of the sincerity of Forrest Gump with the, like, outlandish, science-forward ideas that are fascinating most of these other movies. The sort, it's like him actually putting on screen the can we do it of what's happening behind the scenes of every movie he's made. So that would mean our Hall of Fame would be I Want to Hold Your Hand, Used Cars, Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future Part Two, Forrest Gump, Contact, Cast Away, and Flight.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  It's a damn good list, man. Don't you think?

• 1:30:58Sean Fennessey?

  Very watchable movies.

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  Oh, that is a Hall of Fame worthy Hall of Fame.

• 1:31:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, let's do that. Any closing thoughts?

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  First of all, I hope Robert Zemeckis directs more movies.

• 1:31:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  I hope he has the means to direct more movies because we're now entering a zone where it's like, is he gonna get the budget he needs to do this kind of stuff?

• 1:31:17Sean Fennessey?

  I've been saying on the show recently that Sony has been doing such a good job of getting people to go out to the movies to see their movies because they're the only studio that doesn't have a streaming service. And so theatrical experience is very important for them. So like, even if their movies aren't very good, like Anyone But You, I didn't think was very good, but a lot of people want to go see that movie. It became kind of a cultural phenomenon and it brought rom-coms back a little bit. And they've done this over and over and over again, like Venom 3 is now like having great holds. You know, people are like, actually, I do want to see Venom 3. Like, they're very good at this, Sony, but they couldn't get people to see this movie. They couldn't find a way to communicate. I actually, so I, I, I watched the trailer to Here and I was like, I feel like this is gonna be a, like a Zemeckis classic, whether it's a all humans classic, it's got the bones of what

• 1:32:02Sean Fennessey?

  he does well. And, you know, scored with a, you know, the Yes song, which is just like the most perfect, like my dad likes this song more than anything in the world kind of situation. But I never once for a minute thought anybody would want to go see it in a movie theater. And they don't, and they didn't. And now that question of will he make, keep making movies, he probably still has the juice to get certain things done, but he said publicly, he can't get that Back to the Future musical done. They won't make it. So.

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  And probably for the best. I mean, who cares, right? Like, do we, do we want that? I mean, I mean, if it, if it, if it got him another movie after that, maybe. But I'm also wondering what he wants to make at this point. Because I think this whole, the, the experience of going through the filmography with you, I don't know that I have a great answer to that question. There's some ambition there. I could also see him just going back and making a straightforward, old school Robert Zemeckis, you know, or maybe something like Flight, you know, maybe something a little bit more in that key.

• 1:32:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, I think part of what's so exciting about him as a director is there's No, like, oh, that's just like a classic Robert Zemeckis movie. It's like you, unless you came up with Who Framed Roger Rabbit, you couldn't come up with Who Framed Roger Rabbit. You couldn't just invent here in your mind. Like, it takes, he is a, he has a very special brain for pushing movies forward.

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:33:13Sean Fennessey?

  And so I, I really, I, I respect what he's been doing.

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  I do. I do too. And it's just weird when that becomes divorced from commercial success. Because like I said, he was doing that special brain and they were all hits.

• 1:33:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  Big hits.

• 1:33:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  Monster, nine hundred thirty seven million dollar hits. I mean, that's like, that's crazy. So again, when, when it becomes separated from that, then it, then it does get a little bit weird.

• 1:33:33Sean Fennessey?

  You love that adjusted for inflation situation.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  I do. I, I just, I mean, cause people, you know, Sean, I mean, don't you see these tweets? And they're like, Venom is the highest grossing movie of all time. I know it's not. That's bullshit. You are lying.

• 1:33:44Sean Fennessey?

  Are you slandering Venom right now?

• 1:33:46Speaker 03

  Well, you know what I mean? Like, they do this and it's, it's the highest grossing superhero. And I'm like, no, it's not. It's not. It's just, we just can do the calculator here.

• 1:33:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's very true. Uh, thank you, Brian Curtis.

• 1:33:57Speaker 03

  Thank you, Sean.

• 1:33:58Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Jack Sanders. Thanks to our producer Bobby Wagner for his work on today's episode. Next week on the show, we are discussing Clint Eastwood, speaking of boomer essentialism, and the film Juror Number Two. We'll see you then.

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

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