‘Gladiator II’ Is Here. Are We Not Entertained?

Sean is joined by Chris Ryan and Mallory Rubin to discuss one of the most highly anticipated movies of 2024, Ridley Scott’s new film ‘Gladiator II.’ They work through their complicated feelings on the sequel (05:09), highlight some of the key standout performances (22:49), and predict its box office potential and Oscars chances (67:25). Then, they each rank their top five favorite legacy sequels of all time (76:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan and Mallory Rubin Producer: Olivia Crerie 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

  Did you know that scientific studies have found most people lie once every 10 minutes? In my new podcast, Truthless, I'm talking to people about the lies they tell. From faking illnesses in high-pressure moments to making up stories on national TV. From Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Phillips. Listen to Truthless on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:39Sean 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 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. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach, and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO?

• 1:24Sean Fennessey?

  LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So, cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. That's LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:58Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy and this is the Big Picture A Conversation Show about Gladiator 2. Chris Ryan and Mallory Rubin, my two most formidable warriors, enter the arena today to discuss one of the year's most anticipated films, Ridley Scott's follow-up to his 2000 Best Picture-winning film Gladiator. We'll talk about the film, its Oscar chances, our favorite legacy sequels.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22Sean Fennessey?

  Chris wants to talk more about the Christopher Nolan movie. We're trying to tamp him down a little bit. Just be easy. It's gonna be a couple of years.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Let me help you. Let me help you help this pod.

• 2:31Sean Fennessey?

  We can talk about some news. I did want to cite before we begin, is it possible that this trio, this triumvirate, this power core?

• 2:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:42Sean Fennessey?

  Has not recorded a podcast together in this formation since the Inglourious Bastards rewatchables five years ago?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  No, I think we've only ever been in crossover event drafts. I do not know the three of us have potted.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  What?

• 2:56Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't that possible? Isn't that right?

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Well, we've...

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Potted together.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  I'm floored right now. Right, because we've potted together a ton, but someone else has always been there.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  And also, when we pod, it's usually a competition, and I don't enjoy myself.

• 3:13Sean Fennessey?

  That's true. You want to have some fun today.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Not sure what he means.

• 3:17Sean Fennessey?

  You and I, obviously, we bring a certain kind of intensity to some of these episodes, but we very rarely just celebrate together and hang on mic. We hang all the time off mic.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  Yep. Yeah.

• 3:28Sean Fennessey?

  But on mic.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  It's usually you two hanging out, and then I'm like, looks like you had fun on Instagram.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  No, you're under an unhide blanket with a bunch of dumplings.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  And if I'm not fucking invited. That sounds great.

• 3:38Sean Fennessey?

  Go play the "I wasn't invited" card.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Can I ask you?

• 3:40Sean Fennessey?

  First of all, you live in Bumblefuck.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, and also, you're like, "I'm never, ever leaving my house." And I wanted to ask you a quick...

• 3:46Speaker 03

  I'm here today. Am I not here today with my two dear friends?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  When you get delivery food?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Does it taste good?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  It tastes wonderful. But now, to be fair, I have no point of comparison.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  I got a burger yesterday, delivery, and I was just like, "This tastes like shit."

• 3:59Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, because she only eats delivery.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Well, the burger, I mean, it requires a certain strategic approach. You have to be factoring in the delivery range. You have to be factoring in the wetness. Like, is it a place that...

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Do you eat this stuff or what?

• 4:14Speaker 03

  It depends. Like, you've always, Chris, you always need to think, is it as wet as it should be? Okay?

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Take what I'm saying seriously and think about it.

• 4:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  But if it's a place that puts a lot of, of sauce, a lot of toppings on the burger, like, maybe it's not as good of a candidate for delivery, or you're gonna need to deconstruct the burger, maybe toast the bun, perhaps ask for the sauce on the side. You have a lot to learn.

• 4:38Sean Fennessey?

  This is me grabbing the wheel back, driving the car back onto the road of film.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  It's good. It was a helpful 10-minute stretch where I just slowly adjusted the mic to where Jack wanted me to put it in the first place, and now we're ready to pod.

• 4:50Sean Fennessey?

  We are ready to pod. Is there any news that you'd like to discuss, Chris? Matt Gaetz, anything regarding that story?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  I want to talk about, about how, uh, much like Trump's cabinet, Nolan is building his own Avengers.

• 5:00Sean Fennessey?

  He certainly is, yeah. Fewer criminals in this, in this cabinet?

• 5:04Speaker 02

  We don't know.

• 5:05Sean Fennessey?

  Hard to say. Zendaya? How many crimes have you committed?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  I'd love to take a look at some of, uh, you know, her, her Venmos.

• 5:10Sean Fennessey?

  So, run down the list for me of the, maybe, maybe helicopter movie, maybe not.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Damon and Holland.

• 5:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Matt Damon and Tom Holland are in this film. You're a fan of them.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Hathaway, Hathaway and Zendaya.

• 5:21Sean Fennessey?

  Anne Hathaway and, and Zendaya.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Lupita Nyong'o and just announced Robert Pattinson.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Oh my god. Oh my god.

• 5:27Sean Fennessey?

  It's like-

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 5:28Sean Fennessey?

  Seven of the 28 most famous actors in Hollywood right now?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  And we don't know what this movie's about. 1920's vampires, spies, horror, or a Blue Thunder remake.

• 5:39Sean Fennessey?

  1920's vampires?

• 5:40Speaker 02

  That got thrown out there, but I don't buy that. That's way too close to Cougar.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  Well, what do you want it to be about? What do you think it should be about now that you know the cast?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  I want it to be Blue Thunder. I want it to be Blue Thunder.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  I want it to be 1920's vampires now that I know that's a thing.

• 5:50Sean Fennessey?

  I think it should be a Jan 6 movie.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Really weird energy from him today.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Is Sorkin doing that?

• 5:55Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I'm not, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I, I pray to God, no. Cause, cause my Q Shaman biopic has been in motion at Hulu for some time now, and I'm just waiting for the final green light.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  You know that Nick Cage is like, in, like, probably, he's so ready to be, be that guy.

• 6:10Sean Fennessey?

  Who's he gonna play? Mike Pence?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  No, he would play Q Shaman, but as long legs.

• 6:16Sean Fennessey?

  And how would that sound, Chris?

• 6:18Speaker 02

  It's Phil's, I can't take that.

• 6:20Sean Fennessey?

  Should we go right into Gladiator 2?

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Sure. Strength and Honor.

• 6:24Sean Fennessey?

  Strength and Honor.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:25Sean Fennessey?

  So this is, as I said, one of the most anticipated movies of the year. A healthy grouping of the original crew from the film is involved. Obviously Ridley Scott was the director of the first film. The cinematographer, John Matheson, is back. A handful of actors are back. Connie Nielsen, in particular, from the original film, Derek Jacobi. But we've got this new story. The new story is about a new warrior, who we come to learn is named Hano. His real name is Lucius. And, you know, I'm not quite sure how to navigate spoilers for describing the plot of this movie, because it's pretty well-known that this movie is very similar in structure and story to the original.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  I don't think we're spoiling Strange Darling. I mean, like, it's, I think it's actually, what you're worried about has been given away in the trailers.

• 7:08Sean Fennessey?

  Has it now, at this point? Okay, so, you know, Chris and I-

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's difficult to have any conversation about the differences or similarities or movie at all if we can't talk about that. And also, a couple of key things that happen at the end, which are basically some of the only things that make it different from the first film.

• 7:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, we'll put fencing around conversation around the third act specifically in spoiler warnings. But in order to talk about the movie in any meaningful way, we have to reveal who this central character is in the story, right? Would you guys agree with that?

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 7:38Sean Fennessey?

  And this is known to the public at large?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  I feel like it is, but like, I apologize to anyone. If you don't know anything about Gladiator 2 and plan on seeing it, pause this podcast and come back after you've seen it.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Go see the movie. Have a great night at the theater.

• 7:53Sean Fennessey?

  This thing that we're talking around right now, did you both sense that quite clearly when you sat down to watch the movie? That this is where the movie was going?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  I did not.

• 8:00Sean Fennessey?

  And what about you?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  So in the trailers, and just the marketing of the movie, it's clear who Lucius is in terms of the maternal line. That's very clear.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Who's the father, though?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  That I was not aware of.

• 8:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The Maury Povich in Gladiator.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. That was a, that was a surprise to me in the theater. And I will say, despite having rewatched the first Gladiator film, maybe three days before I saw it, it was, I found it actually slightly disorienting, where I was like, did I forget something crucial from the first movie, or is this an update slash retcon?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Which is also, you are not the kind of person to miss something crucial from anything.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  It, for a second, really sent me into like racing through my memory before I was like, no, okay, this is an update, let's roll with it.

• 8:48Sean Fennessey?

  Well, maybe you've set up a good place to start with just sort of what are your relationships to Gladiator? You were on the rewatchables episode, right?

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love that movie. Uh, I think it's a magical, awesome action movie. I think Crow is incredible, uh, and it's just like so transporting. It is probably like the version of like true old school Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking, like from that, from that era, from that 2000s era that I, I remember most fondly.

• 9:15Sean Fennessey?

  And how do you feel about it?

• 9:16Speaker 03

  I think it's sensational. I, I never tire of rewatching it. Like, it's one of those movies that completely transports you and sweeps you away the first time you see it. And then every time you revisit it, no matter how much time has passed, and at this point, we're talking more than two decades, you're like, is this gonna be as good as I remember? Right? And it's either as good or better. That's at least my experience to it. The performances are incredible. Obviously, uh, the, the artistry and the craft of the filmmaking, the set pieces, those moments, because so much of it is oriented around the action and the drama. Then those like, I mean, it's, the movie is bookended by two iconic, like pantheon speeches from Maximus that people still quote all the time to this day. And so it has this like emotional wallop.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Obviously, the framework of the film of like, when do you realize what the hand going through the wheat really means? Uh, it's a very affecting movie as well. It's, it's fascinating always to read or, or hear tales about the production and how, uh, hard it was to reach some of those points in terms of what the structure of the film was ultimately gonna be.

• 10:18Sean Fennessey?

  Significantly rewritten during production.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the resistance to some of the things that ended up being the most beloved aspects of the film. But yeah, I love the first Gladiator.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, real lightning in a bottle thing to Crow at that moment in that shape. Joaquin on his sedency there, like, you know, being able to patch together the Oliver Reed performance, even though he passes away during production. Like, I think if you simulated Gladiator 100 times, 98, 99 times, it's like.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Great Richard Harris performance, right at the end of his life.

• 10:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I similarly love it. It's not in my like absolute top tier Ridley Scott, but it is right at the top of that second tier of films. I think.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  I agree with that.

• 10:59Sean Fennessey?

  A useful way to think about it for me is it's arguably the last truly practical blockbuster. In that there's very little CGI.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, other than like the wide shots of Rome and stuff, right?

• 11:14Sean Fennessey?

  And even those are feel more handmade. It feels like a very practical kind of blockbuster. And it's right at the end, it's the summer 2000.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:23Sean Fennessey?

  And it's right before Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Spider-Man.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 11:27Sean Fennessey?

  And obviously those are, I would say, the three movies that probably change summer blockbusters for the next quarter century. And so the production design of that movie is beautiful. The costuming is incredible. And you got, like you said, you have Crow kind of basically giving the ultimate star performance in a film like that for our generation. There's probably not been anybody who's done the Swords and Sandals or the like Fallen Hero Rises kind of a story as well as he does in that movie. So it's a movie that, you know, it won Best Picture and was a box office success. I guess a little bit of controversy around that Best Picture win. It's maybe not considered like one of the greatest Best Picture wins of all time. But it's a movie that has a huge reputation and people love it. That was very funny. I don't know if you guys read Adam Neiman's piece on The Ringer about the original Gladiator.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  I did.

• 12:11Sean Fennessey?

  But his, you know, him connecting the relationship that Ralphie on The Sopranos had to the movie and how that was maybe a subtle dig at the, the sort of like alpha bro-ness of Gladiator and Gladiator fandom. I thought was very clever. Gladiator 2 is a movie that has been often on the menu for roughly 25 years.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:34Sean Fennessey?

  There have been many iterations of scripts over, over the time that they immediately went into development on doing a sequel, despite the fact that, of course, Maximus dies at the end. You and I have talked many times on pods about the never to be Nick Cave version of.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  You can see online still where Maximus fights his way through hell.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  I have no notes.

• 12:52Sean Fennessey?

  Would have been a very exciting movie. Would have been a very different kind of a film. You know, the movie was a DreamWorks movie back in 2000. They sold the rights to Paramount in 2006 when they were having some money troubles. And it's just been in a kind of state of development for a long, long period of time. It finally comes to us here now from Paramount and Ridley Scott. Chris, I'll start with you. What did you think of Gladiator 2?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  I was entertained.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  I was entertained. I don't think that I will rate it anywhere nearly as highly as I rate the original. And I think there are things about it that are like the most illustrative problems I have with modern blockbusters. A kind of like messiness of the writing, a kind of overreliance on CGI and special effects in situations where you're like, this completely takes me out of this. But ultimately, like a central performance from Denzel Washington, who I think in some ways is the star of the movie, that would make me even go back and see it again. I remember earlier this year just being like, this is going to be Top Gun Maverick. This is going to be fucking incredible. I'm going to see this five times in the theater. Mescal is going to be a huge star after this. And I think like,

• 13:59Speaker 03

  That part's happening.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  I'll be halfway right. You know what I mean? Like, we'll be halfway right about that. I think that this was like something that we just like, in my mind, I think I maybe overhyped myself a little bit. So that if I sound tempered, it's because of that.

• 14:11Sean Fennessey?

  What about you, Mel?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  As you will recall, because you were there on the podcast with me, I was so excited about this movie and so hyped about it that I forever broke and altered the rules of what was eligible to be included in our annual hype trap.

• 14:25Sean Fennessey?

  I do recall.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Take it with the sixth overall pick for the entire year. So I was very much looking forward to the movie. Let me tell you something, I had fun in the movies. I had a great, I had a great time. It is such an entertaining movie to watch. It's quite long. I treated myself to a robust meal at the multiplex. I got a five-piece chicken tender at the theater.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  So you ate a five-piece chicken meal while you were watching this?

• 14:50Speaker 03

  At an AMC, yeah. I was so hungry. I'm like, this is a long movie. I really got to like settle in. This is a chair that reclines. I'm going to get comfortable. I'm going to fuel up. Got the chicken tenders, got a popcorn, got some Sour Patch Watermelons, got a cherry vanilla Coke. Cause it was one of those soda machines that you can mix and match. Sat down. Saw our, our former colleague and beloved pal, Jason Concepcion, in the row in front of me. Delightful surprise. Turned the other way, saw our colleague, Charles Holmes, right there. Wonderful surprise. Had a blast watching the movie. And then couldn't stop thinking about whether the movie should have existed. Because it is just, I think the cast is incredible. Like a lot, genuinely, a lot of my favorite actors are in this.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Like Pedro, Pedro Pascal and Paul Meskell are two of the most important people in my life. Um, I don't know them.

• 15:41Sean Fennessey?

  They're not in your life. They're people you look at.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. It feels like they're in my life and they're very important to me. And I thought the performances were, were, were really wonderful across the board. Obviously quite, uh, can't be an extreme in certain, in certain circumstances. But it's just, the movie is so similar to the first one in terms of plot, structure, approach, focus, pacing, that it's difficult to not then land where you did. Which is like, if it's that similar, it's beckoning and inviting and, and forcing almost a, a comparison that would always be there for a legacy sequel. But like a direct, almost like one-to-one comparison.

• 16:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  And so the movie is not as good as the first one. That's, it's like, I think, hard to land in a different spot. But I had fun. What about you?

• 16:27Sean Fennessey?

  When we were, when we were talking outside, I said to you, how do you communicate that this movie is a huge disappointment to me and also incredibly entertaining?

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:36Sean Fennessey?

  You know, but it is like, it is very clearly a fun night at the movies.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:40Sean Fennessey?

  But the food that you ate at your screening is appropriate because this is an empty calories movie. It's just not ultimately a very serious movie. There's honestly nothing wrong with that. And it fits quite neatly, I think, into some of the late Ridley Scott tropes where he's like, "I'm gonna take on Napoleon and I'm gonna put a lot of jokes about fucking in it." You know, like that, that's kind of where his sensibility is at right now.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  He's doing, he's, it's a, if you, in Taken in a era, this is a real splatter of paint era for him. And I think, I try not to, I try, I'm trying to be better about, like, using, like, Off-screen journalism about like how the movie was made, or this bit that Ridley Scott says about like, I think he was talking about Prometheus recently, and he was just like, ah, we kind of fucked that up. And I was like, no, I've been thinking about Prometheus for 10 years, so you can just be like, it's good.

• 17:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Like, uh, but like.

• 17:33Sean Fennessey?

  Well, he does the opposite, where he like says that movies that everyone agrees are not good are good.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:38Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he'll be like, 1492 is one of my best.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  And in this case, he's insisting. He's insisting Gladiator 2 is like his best film. But it also sounds like, he's sort of like, I work on like the compositions and like the pre-visualization, and I'm worried about like this massive canvas, but I kind of let the actors just sort of do their thing. And I do think that that kind of comes across in the film. There's a little bit of a casualness of his grip on the rain is like a little loose, you know?

• 18:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's some inconsistency in the performance styles. Like, it's interesting to hear what you said about, because I don't know if I enjoyed the performances uniformly. One, I think one of the key flaws of the movie is that Lucilla, Connie Nielsen's character, who was in the original film, is really the emotional center of the movie.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 18:24Sean Fennessey?

  And I don't, I have liked Connie Nielsen in movies in the past. I, I just didn't think she gave a very strong performance in the movie, and so,

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:30Sean Fennessey?

  the movie really sags when you need her to convey that she is sort of like this bridge figure between two generations and the structures of power that define this era of Rome.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:41Sean Fennessey?

  So, immediately, as soon as she gets her first big moment in the film, and she in this film is, um, she's the wife of Acceus, who is a general who we see early on in the film in a siege in Numidia.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:53Sean Fennessey?

  Taking land in the name of Rome, and he returns home. And they have a moment together, and I was like, ooh, shoot, this is not that very like, every, the, the sort of like, the uniformity of performance style in Gladiator that makes it so effective, it's immediately all over the place.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  You know what, there was also like, uh, what, I don't know whether you would call it like a pyramid structure to Gladiator in terms of it's like the importance of each plot line of Gladiator, where it's like very clearly Maximus's movie.

• 19:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  And then secondarily, a story about a brother and a sister who were grappling with their father's death that the, the brother was responsible for and the sister is mourning. And then, on the third level, the Roman Senate, Roman society, this moment of change in this, in this empire.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  It's like a parallelogram in this movie where it's like, it's kind of Denzel Washington's movie, but it's also about these two crazy brothers who are ruining the city, but it's also about like, LaSilla rediscovering her connection to her son and also her love affair with this general who's got mixed feelings of it's, it's kind of all over the place. And at various points on the mixing board, I feel like he's like, this is going into the red and I'm going to basically put Paul Meskell in a cage for 40 minutes. Like where like, he's just like getting visitors, but not doing anything. And it's just kind of like, oh, rhythmically or like equalized wrong for me.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  But I, I really agree with that. And I think you're, you're hitting something key, which is like, to me, the issue isn't that it's not mapping onto the pyramid. It's that it's really trying to.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  But then not like actually just do something different.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  But the, you have your key figure who then connects to a family in turmoil and can they understand their respective motivations and get on the same page. And then they are connected to believers of power and some secret plot or stated ambition. And part of the reason that I, I think it felt much messier and less neat and tidy is like, I'll save, because you said to put a boxer, a boxer on the third act, I'll save some like character fade stuff for later, but even just in terms of like where we find Rome and then how that impacts all of these other aspects, these, these, these personal and political dynamics. It's like the question of what Rome should be. Rome's place, the Roman Empire's place in the world and the people who are driving that, that's still

• 21:16Speaker 03

  the big question. That actually is not different.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Okay. So we have a similarity. We have a comp. What's going to make this movie feel new? Let's just flip the thing. Right? Instead of here's Marcus Aurelius's dream of what Rome can be. It's a bastardization and a compromise and a failure to execute against that promise. So it's like disorienting because it's similar enough that again, it's like constantly inviting the comparison, but then the thing that is intended to make it feel like a distinct experience is simply just to flip it to the point where with a couple of the outcomes for certain plots. Lines and characters. I almost felt like it became impossible not to know what was gonna happen to certain people, whether it's a good thing that happened to them or a bad thing. Because you're like, well, the corollary in the first film ended here.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  It's basically has to be the opposite in this movie.

• 22:06Sean Fennessey?

  Well, OK, let me, I'll, I'll suggest what I think could have been a shift that would have been more interesting to me. And I, I wouldn't have rewritten the movie specifically in this direction. But you can see that it's something that is compelling Scott because he keeps turning towards it. Which is that the kind of counter idea to the typical hero's journey that we see from Maximus and that we do sort of see from Lucius in this movie is you could have turned the movie into a more kind of Caligula style portrayal of Rome at this over consumptive bacchanal stage of its history, where everything was too much all the time. And you've got this pair of brotherly emperors, Geta and Caracalla. And you've got this Macronus figure that Denzel Washington plays,

• 22:48Sean Fennessey?

  who is sort of like a rising power player in the, in the Republic. And more tightly focused on the way that that world worked.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Uh huh, yeah.

• 22:57Sean Fennessey?

  And then maybe introduced in the second act, a, a hero who needed to kind of disrupt what was happening inside of that space. But that's just not conventional enough for a traditional blockbuster. Like it's just not Joseph Campbell, so you can't.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  The pitch could have been, we're gonna do Gladiator from Oliver Reed's perspective. And we'll make a movie about Macronus, who wants to upend Roman society and finds his tool. And this guy who, in his, like, lurching for power and wanting this chaos, corrupts himself, betrays everyone, et cetera. That's fucking awesome.

• 23:36Sean Fennessey?

  Would have been a cool movie. It would be like if Lex Luthor could control Superman. Like that would, that is what the movie would have been.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  And so until he can't. And then that would have been really cool. But I think that, to your point, I see, I was gonna ask you a question. The way you were just talking. Do you think that this movie does something or doesn't do something that something like, say, Top Gun Maverick or Force Awakens did do? Because I would say those are similarly the same movie.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 24:01Sean Fennessey?

  They are.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, right. Force Awakens, which will maybe come up later on this podcast, is in almost every respect, mapped onto A New Hope. But like, OK, so we'll stick with Macrinus for a second. I think without question, the Denzel performance is like the most successful thing about the movie.

• 24:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's the best part of the movie.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  You're a fool.

• 24:19Sean Fennessey?

  Every time he's on screen, the movie is absolutely alive.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Absolutely wonderful.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Almost to a problematic point where like, why is my pulse racing?

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then like if he's not there for a second.

• 24:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and he's a very complicated character with some very raw ambition. But my friend David Sims texted me this morning, and he was like, the problem with the movie is is that we are rooting for Denzel Washington.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  OK.

• 24:37Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if that's where you should be.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  I don't know that it's a problem to root for him. I mean, I guess it is because you're supposed to be aligned with the people who are opposing him. But like, to me, the challenge was, OK, Proxmo. You're like, right, so this is this movie's Proxmo figure.

• 24:53Sean Fennessey?

  That's the Oliver Reed character.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  The Oliver Reed character. He ended up being righteous. He ended up making a final stand at the expense of his own life to help Maximus. So it was always clear, before we knew what Macrinus's true intentions are, that all of the excess that you're talking about, this like rot in Rome, was going to actually be the thing that he cultivated and used as his pathway to power, that he could not be trusted, that it wasn't going to be the same story. And so it's like, even though he was my favorite part of the movie, it was still dramatically less compelling because it felt inevitable that he was going to be a foe long before it was actually clear in the movie.

• 25:37Sean Fennessey?

  Completely agree. Because he is originally framed as the sort of, he purchases Lucius, and he makes, he trains him to become a warrior in his stead of warriors in the arena. And he's a kind of mentor figure to him, and he is making him promises on the expectation of his future relative to what he's able to accomplish in the Colosseum. But Denzel Washington is playing the part so insinuatingly throughout that his dark ambition is just barely underneath the surface. And so you are waiting and waiting and waiting for this inevitable moment. Now, I think like when those moments happen and they come, like the movie again, I'm like, this is like kind of rip roaring. This is actually the Ridley Scott with the safety off thing, the Prometheus, you know, birth sequence where you're just

• 26:22Sean Fennessey?

  like, whoa, this is really weird and intense and a little scary and funny and that odd blend of styles that he's able to kind of smash together in these big tent pole movies that I love. But I'm, I like completely forgot about Paul Meskell when all that stuff is happening. I'm like, is he even, does he even matter to this movie? Maybe that doesn't matter as much, but I think it keeps us less grounded. Yeah. Let's, let's talk about Paul Meskell a little bit.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Please.

• 26:45Sean Fennessey?

  So, um, an Irish actor of some renown, um, got his big break on normal people. Um, I think all three of us really like him. Obviously Mallory would like to have sex with him.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  So would you, though.

• 26:59Sean Fennessey?

  I, I know you recently saw him in person. You were struck by him, right?

• 27:05Speaker 02

  I was in an elevator with him and I was like, this guy, I, I had been stretching my back outside of the elevator because I was like, my bike, bike back was like, and a different guy was like, oh, I have a great chiropractor on Second Avenue you should go to. And the whole time Paul Meskell was just like, I can't wait for this conversation to be fucking over so I can get out of here. Like, so that was a cool moment for all of us.

• 27:27Sean Fennessey?

  His, his onscreen persona thus far, you know, in films like After Sun is very sensitive, thoughtful guy, All of Us Strangers.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Wonderful.

• 27:36Sean Fennessey?

  He is, you know, young millennial elder Gen Z heartthrob because of his simultaneous, like strapping classic matinee idle good looks combined with this kind of like gentle parenting sensitivity. This is a much different part for him.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 27:53Sean Fennessey?

  Very, very different from anything he's ever done before. He's asked to do certain things, particularly, I would say, speechify at a loud volume.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 28:00Sean Fennessey?

  That he doesn't have a ton of experience with.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Where we are, death is not. Yeah. That's what you say to us every day when you're, you're getting us ready to.

• 28:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. That's what I drop into Slack every morning, 6 a.m. Let's go, guys.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Time to crank.

• 28:10Sean Fennessey?

  Tonight we ride. I think he's like 80% of the way there in this movie. And I

• 28:18Sean Fennessey?

  I think he's, he might be miscast, or the character is not totally written the way that, the thing is, is that like, he's a wounded mama's boy, right? Like, that's a part of the motivation of the character, is that he is ultimately a kid who's been abandoned by his mother, and is cast out, and he has to build a life for himself, and build a family. And, you know, the same way that Maximus has an inciting incident with the murder of his family after he's, there's an attempt on his life by Commodus, after he kills his father. Similarly, Lucius loses his wife in that raid that Acceus storms on Numidia, and that sets his journey into motion. But he's motivated by something, which is this abandonment, that he won't let go of. That's a weirdly, that's a very Mescalian-

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:03Sean Fennessey?

  -character type.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:05Sean Fennessey?

  But I don't know if the movie, like, quite sells us on it. I don't know, what did you think of Mescal in the movie?

• 29:09Speaker 02

  I thought that he did the best he could with the material that he had. And with, by material, I don't just mean the script, I also mean, like, the positions that Ridley Scott put him in. There's something, uh, which we'll talk about soon, where he's frequently fighting, like, CGI animals. Like, frankly, like, a lot of his, like, accomplishments, like, never really match up to the first time we see Maximus-

• 29:35Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  -against the Germanic tribe.

• 29:37Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  You're just like, "Well, that's Ed Reed." You know what I mean? "I'll follow that dude into any game." "This is fucking incredible."

• 29:44Sean Fennessey?

  You put it on a platter for you.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  I love it, yes!

• 29:46Speaker 02

  And when he's just like, "On my command, unleash hell," you're like, "Well, whatever happens in the next two hours, I'm with this guy."

• 29:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  There's never, he never gets a moment like that in this movie. And I think that that is, that can't be his fault. But I think the moments where he could have pushed it to some sort of stratosphere, and like, galvanized, like, the audience to be like, "Oh yeah, this is his fucking movie." He just gets smoked by Denzel, and it's, there's no, that's a, that's a schedule loss, man. Like, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 30:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  But it, it is what it is! Yeah! You know?

• 30:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, they were in, in Alabama. Yeah, in prime time.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Roll tide. Interesting. So I have a slightly different feeling about this, which is like- That, again, he's an incredibly special and important person, very good-looking guy. Great thighs. You listed all of his, you know, famous movies, but you didn't list the place where he is most present for people, which is their Instagram feeds, where GQ posts pictures of him walking around various cities in short shorts all the time. So it's nice to see that guy.

• 30:47Sean Fennessey?

  Another in a long line of internet boyfriends.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Indeed, truly. The thing that you're citing, the absence of the Ed Reed, I would follow you into any hell, made total sense to me. And actually, like, the moments-

• 31:02Sean Fennessey?

  Because he's not a general.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  The moments then where, like, that happens, maybe on fast-forward, felt strange.

• 31:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Like, that actually is part of what was compelling to me, to find the protagonist in a very different place in his life. Not only because of that, your Campbell point, inherent inversion of the general who shouldn't be the chosen one, who is then picked by Marcus Aurelius over his own son to be entrusted. And Lucius is the prince, who has left this birthright behind. Initially, because I also thought this was kind of like a sloppily executed part of the movie, the reveal of the backstory and when and how and why Lucilla sent him away. And then the, like, "Out for a day of recreation with my pals and pursuers are here, so I have to flee." And then I guess he's just, like, lost from that point, but-

• 31:54Sean Fennessey?

  There's a reason why that is tremendously confusing, that we'll reveal a little bit later.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's not just that he then feels abandoned by his mother. It's that he embraces this other home, his wife, this community, and then begins to see Rome, not through the eyes of the prince and the heir-

• 32:14Sean Fennessey?

  But as an adversary.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  But as an adversary, right, as an adversary. Like, look at what this greed and this hubris and this incessant need to always, like, encroach and take and take and gain and grab does to people. And I thought that was interesting. Like, dramatically, that was actually one of the richer parts of the text, to the point where, like, the Pedro Pascal character, Acesius- He is also, this is like one of the reveals of the movie, right? That he is actually also in that frame of mind. He does not want to continue to lead other men to their deaths because of the greed of the reckless and insatiable twin emperors.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  He wants to challenge them, thwart them, do a coup, as they say on The Great, and then help usher in a different era of Rome, the era that his wife and her father wanted. But that was never like really allowed to breathe and tease, to be teased out enough? Like, I feel like actually if more of the focus had been on the fact that they were the under, like, the people who didn't actually occupy power and want the other things, like, I don't know, it just would have been...

• 33:27Speaker 02

  They were like the administrative class, yeah.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would have been more interesting, but that's not ultimately what happened. I wanted more Pedro. I didn't feel like we got nearly enough of him.

• 33:35Sean Fennessey?

  His character is quite strange. I similarly really respond to him as a screen presence. I know, I know he's very famous now, and The Last of Us has kind of put him into the stratosphere, but I think he's a terrific movie actor.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  He's great.

• 33:47Sean Fennessey?

  And this part feels underwritten and kind of cautious.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  He's quite good in the action scenes.

• 33:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  He is like a fantastic set piece actor.

• 33:56Sean Fennessey?

  Physical actor.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Which is like really actually a talent to be able to communicate like...

• 34:00Sean Fennessey?

  You buy it. It's the same thing when he was, when he's Red Viper, you're like, this is absolutely incredible in that series.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Totally. It's one of those funny things about Mando, where whenever you hear how like rarely he's on set and in the suit, and I'm kind of like, why?

• 34:12Sean Fennessey?

  Why? Yeah, we need him.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  He would be amazing, actually, out there doing that.

• 34:16Sean Fennessey?

  But that part feels like he only gets to have Maximus's bona fides as a leader and nothing else, really. He's kind of like, he's quite restrained in the sequences with Lucilla and even in the attempted coup conversations. And so you don't know what he's meant to do. And then you realize, basically, his story and that side story is just a tool to Lucius's story. It's not really a developed plotline, which is not necessarily the worst thing in the world, but... There are, I think you put it very well. There's just a lot of competing forces that makes the movie feel very uneven.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  And I think that there's, there's a world in which I, you know, I'm not trying, I'm trying to evaluate the movie we got, not the movie we wanted, or the movie we think we would have done better, like, developing.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  But I think that it's fair to say that this entire conversation is bracketed by this idea of like Hollywood's obsession with reviving properties, with keeping IP going, with, if you're gonna do that, like, they're just gonna be playing in a sandbox that's got pretty high walls. They're not gonna be messy. They're not going to say like, ah, what if this, what if this kid was just a brat?

• 35:18Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? And what if he was like, very easily manipulated, and all these different people were trying to like, force him into these different roles?

• 35:26Sean Fennessey?

  I'll tell you what, the movie I saw last night, that's the thing I liked about it. Just to give you a little teaser, is that the movie was unafraid to be like, this is what this person's really like. This is what it would be really like, which is, is kind of a brave choice.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  And that was wicked.

• 35:41Sean Fennessey?

  And that was wicked, yes. Elphaba, she really was a brat, you know? Anyway, um, I think you're right, there was like, opportunity here. It's a little bit bungled. I do think that when the Colosseum sequences are at their best, they're still like, as exciting as anything can possibly be. There is a bit of a challenge with this, because anytime Lucius or anyone else is fighting a human, I was like, this is movies, man. This is as exciting as spectacle movie going can go.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  Like, when he's just training and getting his ass kicked, but keeps getting up, you're like, yep, that's how he makes sure.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  The row, the rowing sequence?

• 36:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, it's like, it's legit inspired.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  But this is a Dr. Dolittle-ass gladiator movie.

• 36:24Sean Fennessey?

  It is. There's a lot of animals and creatures, and none of them are, there were no animals on set, Corey. Um, there are...

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Other than Dondas?

• 36:32Sean Fennessey?

  There, that's, well, we'll get to Dondas. There are fight sequences that feature baboons.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:37Sean Fennessey?

  A rhinoceros, and then...

• 36:39Speaker 03

  Sharks.

• 36:40Sean Fennessey?

  As suggested in the trailer, there is a shark battle sequence across boats.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  Shocking stuff, frankly, the sharks.

• 36:46Sean Fennessey?

  It has been declared that the likelihood of anyone during the Roman Empire times catching a shark, let alone transporting it, seems low.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  There's like a dozen in that water, too.

• 36:55Sean Fennessey?

  Quite a few sharks in there.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Like, you could walk across the sharks to get to the other side.

• 36:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I didn't think any of those three sequences were terribly successful. Rhenoceris probably the most successful of the three.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Probably, yeah. Fully in the trailer.

• 37:07Sean Fennessey?

  The baboons was just CGI. Like, it's just not... It just... I actually felt like we got dumped into Wicked or something, you know?

• 37:15Speaker 02

  There's like an interview with Paul Meskell where he's just like, "And it's these little men who ran and tackled me." And I'm like, "That would have been better."

• 37:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Because it was like, they needed green guys to like, come running up to him. And I was like, "That would have been chill if like, a bunch of dudes ran out."

• 37:28Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, the idea of using animals in general is not... There's a tiger component to the original film, you know? Like, that's not out of the realm of interest. But I thought all three of those just kind of felt like that condition that you're talking about, where it was like, we gotta have like, a certain kind of... The audience is expecting a certain kind of spectacle.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  I'll go further than that. I'm throwing down the gauntlet. You know, we recently went and saw Apocalypse Now on wonderful widescreen 70mm print. You've gotta have the real animals. I challenge all actors and directors that if you're gonna start, you gotta let a bunch of wild baboons attack Paul Meskell. And see where we get. They may disfigure him. He may no longer be the internet's boyfriend. You know?

• 38:10Speaker 03

  You do remember the plot point in that fight that hinged on him, then? He has to eat part of the baboon to beat it.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  I understand, but like, go for it.

• 38:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? What happened to method acting in this industry?

• 38:23Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think? Would you be willing to put Halo in the arena?

• 38:26Speaker 03

  I don't agree. No, I do not agree.

• 38:28Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  I'm glad that no animals were harmed in the making of this movie, and I'm glad that Paul Meskell's face was not harmed in the making of this movie.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  If you're not responding like the way Frederick Forrest responds to the tiger in Apocalypse Now, I frankly just don't believe you. You know? Like, if you're not like, that fucking tiger, motherfucking tiger, that's what he should have been like with baboons. Instead, he's like, "Oh, okay, baboons." You know, like...

• 38:48Speaker 03

  Here's the thing.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Like, what is up with that?

• 38:50Speaker 03

  But at the end of the day, all of... The most important people are lost not to a baboon, or a rhino horn, or even a shark, but to an arrow fired from far away, Chris. That's the real terror.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  Then we don't need all the animals. Like, why is most of the action in the Colosseum-

• 39:08Speaker 03

  This guy would not have lasted long in Gata's empire because it's all about the spectacle. It's all about the spectacle.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  I'm not against spectacle. I just want it to be real.

• 39:19Sean Fennessey?

  Some of it, I think, is just about the execution. You know, I have certainly, I really like Peter Jackson's King Kong. That's a CGI animal movie experience that I think is very effective. And there's a lot of attention and care put into the execution of how that creature looks. Sometimes they look good. Sometimes they don't look as good. As you said, it just took me right out of the movie. I was like, okay, so we're just like in Jurassic World 6. Like, it just didn't feel like a Gladiator movie. And I think, obviously, generationally, there's a certain level of acceptance in terms of what the visual presentation is of set pieces, too, that I think is a component of this, too.

• 39:55Speaker 03

  For sure. I think that ultimately, much like in the first film, even though there are a lot of grand, sweeping spectacles that are incredibly compelling in the first film, the most, like, heart-thumping, oh, my god, like, I feel like I'm inching forward on the edge of my seat and the tension is so high, are the intimate fights, right?

• 40:13Sean Fennessey?

  The one in particular in the emperor's party sequence where Meskell is one-on-one with the loser in front of the crowd.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, smashing through the cakes and like-

• 40:23Sean Fennessey?

  Fantastic. That sequence is great.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that's much, much more compelling and more effective than any of the baboon stuff. But the fact that you have the scaling up and scaling down and can kind of convey that whether you were in like a private chamber or an arena as massive as the Colosseum, the currency always is violence and entertainment, I actually found, like, effective.

• 40:47Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Keep the baboons safe. Keep them away from Chris.

• 40:50Sean Fennessey?

  What did you guys think of Fred Heckenberger and Joseph Quinn as the twin emperors?

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Oh, my god.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  That was the spiciest part of the Cheesecake Factory menu of acting that we did.

• 40:59Sean Fennessey?

  That was the Louisiana Pasta of this movie.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  That was just like chef's choice.

• 41:04Sean Fennessey?

  Two young actors, very promising young actors. Fred Heckenberger, White Lotus probably what he's best known for at this point. He's been in quite a few movies in the last couple of years. Joseph Quinn, most recently in A Quiet Place, Day One.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Stranger Things, of course, Eddie.

• 41:17Sean Fennessey?

  Is going to be in, uh, is gonna be Johnny Storm.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  A little movie called Fantastic.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Might play George Harrison in the Sam Mendes.

• 41:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. I thought that they were having the appropriate amount of fun in their sequences. And I thought that they were, they have compared themselves to doing John Lydon and Sid Vicious from Sex Pistols in their portrayal of these two guys, which I thought was kind of clever.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  They were in Denzel Washington's movie, and I appreciated that.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 41:37Sean Fennessey?

  They were. And that, those are the two performance styles. You've got Connie Nielsen and Paul Meskell trying to be quite ser- And Pedro Pascal. And Pedro Pascal being quite serious and staid and thinking about the republic and the future of power in this place. And then you've got demons fucking shit up on the other side.

• 41:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:52Sean Fennessey?

  And the demons were fun. Like, anytime they're on screen, I was having fun. And even though it is very outsized, there's a long tradition in Shakespearean performance, in, um, in Roman and Greek tragedies, to have characters that are outsized like this. So I enjoyed them.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Uh, just sensational stuff. Genuinely wonderful. Um, two performers who, who, who I love and enjoy. And yeah, it's like, I, you, I think you can argue that the, the tonal clash is deliberate, right? And that like, the fact that there are the, the more severe and measured and reserved performances tells you something about those characters. And the fact that these are, are so loud and, uh, bold tells you something about those characters and that the, the moments when they are forced into the same scenes together, then there's like a, you know, Mentos into a Coke bottle effect that is kind of interesting to watch. Um, I, I just, I, I do, uh, think that the scene of, are we talking about, I keep almost spoiling what happens to people.

• 42:47Sean Fennessey?

  We're very close.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 42:48Sean Fennessey?

  We're very, we're very close.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  I'll wait.

• 42:50Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that they tried to, was the anxiety of Commodus's influence weighing down these guys at all?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think in a weird way, like while I was watching it, I was like, these guys are doing late period Joaquin, you know? Like, they're doing the more like mannered, like crazy Joker shit, which I, I thought was cool because you kind of imagine-

• 43:13Speaker 02

  The way that that power would have like decayed over the decades and the way that these guys would have gotten dumber and more indulgent. Cause they just never learned like that, that, you know, like.

• 43:24Sean Fennessey?

  There's a sense of like inbreeding going on too. There's like something kind of wrong with these guys.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  Heckinger has like syphilis, right?

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, the disease.

• 43:31Sean Fennessey?

  It's like a mind rot.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  And his loins has made its way to his brain. Great moment.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  And I, I would say that like they're, that whole like side of the movie. Their kind of decadence and debauchery, Washington's macronus's manipulation of them. Where that goes is my favorite part of the movie, which is just so funny to be saying about a gladiator movie.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  But also it's interesting because there is no equivalent for the, for the, the, the two emperors of the wound that drives Commodus. There's no equivalent presented in the film.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  No, they're just fucking nihilists.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, of like, this is what drives me. My father didn't love me. My father, when I was young, told me what the, the four virtues were and I possessed none of them. And I knew from that moment onward that he like didn't love me or value me and that I, but here are my other virtues and oh, he chose Maximus over me. I guess I have to strangle him and then try to kill Maximus and take power. There's nothing like that. To the point where when they turn on each other, it's like, okay, I guess that's the thing is just that they don't want to have to be a, a well, shared act and also just that their whole life is about the party.

• 44:42Sean Fennessey?

  It, it feels like a very clear like Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And we even get, we get the, right? The Romulus, like the moment with the, but, but I, the reason I'm saying that is because actually it doesn't in any way dampen the effectiveness of the

• 44:56Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Character deployment in the film. And so actually maybe it's a case that like, I think often my impulse is to think we need, we need to understand more about the arc and the journey and the motivations. And it's like, maybe actually we. Maybe we need even less of that.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  You know, and like my gut response in a way to what you were saying earlier about orienting it more around Rome and that aspect of Rome. My first thought is like, well, both films, including the first one, have like genuinely no interest in the Roman people, like none.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  They're simply like a prop to stand in the, to stand at the Colosseum.

• 45:31Sean Fennessey?

  They are interested in how power operates in the city, though.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  Yes, in terms of the Senate and the idea of Rome. The idea of Rome is a character. The people of Rome are not characters in either film.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  And in some ways, that has always felt like a limit to me, but actually, I think once you try to start doing that, then you're just sort of like, this isn't HBO's Rome.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's communicated. That stuff is communicated largely through expository dialogue rather than like what you would expect from Ridley Scott, which is like, oh, this like incredible moment in the city center where you find out that these, like that the public has turned on the government. That happens a little bit in the Colosseum. It certainly happens towards the end of the film, but like

• 46:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  They start the movie being like, hey, we're like a little stretched thin. Like, we have to keep taxing these people to feed the army that you've got spread out all over the world.

• 46:18Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Like, you imagine that it's at a tipping point, but it looks just the same as it did in the 2000 film, where you're like, ah, it seems like everybody's having grapes and partying.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, except then you have the riots. It's like, oh.

• 46:30Sean Fennessey?

  That's what I was gonna say. The movie, though, does lean into this very interesting energy where, you know, obviously the inciting incident of the first film is the idea of Marcus Aurelius giving Rome back to the people.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 46:40Sean Fennessey?

  And turning it over really to the Senate.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 46:43Sean Fennessey?

  Which I think is an interesting and complicated idea in 2024 America, maybe internationally, politically, like what that even means to turn power to a government rather than to an emperor. And then in this film, you see this much more like aggressive rendering of populist outrage, which, again, like, I don't, the movie feels like oddly out of time in that respect. Like, who really wants to have power and why they want to have it? I don't need my Gladiator legacy sequel to be, to neatly map onto the American Electoral College, but I find it to be an interesting time for a movie like this to come out, in the same way that Conclave, which is like so heavily leaning into like, hey, isn't this just like this election cycle?

• 47:26Sean Fennessey?

  The movie could be read as like, um, as a misread on how politics is working right now. When in fact, like, we are in a kind of emperor state. We are in a time when that kind of, that idea feels more resonant. So, again, it just feels like one more theme that is like not totally thought through, like not totally explored, or it's just too much for any one movie to bear, to lean too far in any of these directions.

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• 49:10Sean Fennessey?

  We can officially start spoiling the movie. We've talked for 50 minutes. If you don't want to hear any, we've said quite a bit about it, but there are a few critical turning points that we'll discuss now. If you don't want to hear anymore, then you can fast forward 20 minutes, or you can go take a long walk or fuck off, I don't care.

• 49:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, those of you who have not fucked off, you know, the big revelation, which I certainly felt about 20 minutes into the movie was coming and then does is clearly communicated is that in fact, Lucius is Maximus's son.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:39Sean Fennessey?

  That he is the bastard child presumably of a, uh, of his relationship with Lucilla, which we learn about in the first film.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:50Sean Fennessey?

  There is a memorable moment in the first film where Lucilla and Maximus have a conversation about having sons.

• 49:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:56Sean Fennessey?

  Who are both eight years old.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:59Sean Fennessey?

  Which at the time of watching that movie, I wasn't like, wow, I bet that's Maximus's son. Um, there's not really any insinuation at all.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Well, it's also just like, that means Maximus was like fucking Lucilla right when he was having his own kid.

• 50:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Which is bad funny.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  But.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  That's strength and honor right there.

• 50:14Speaker 03

  But like, but like, okay, this like makes, uh, nothing is surprising about them making this choice. Of course, this is what ended up happening, but

• 50:24Speaker 03

  the first movie hinges on one thing. How Maximus feels about his family.

• 50:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  So this is like.

• 50:32Sean Fennessey?

  Of his wife and child hanging there and then that driving everything.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  Yes, and so even though it is equally apparent throughout the first film that he and Lucilla had history, obviously we do get a, a, a kiss, but just that they had history, that there was something between them, that it was, it was not going to work and it didn't last, that's all there. But the timing part of it, it, I, I actually find that like bizarre in terms of what it.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  I thought it was actually, I mean, they, they directly reference it in Gladiator 2. The much more transgressive idea is that he's Commodus's kid, a, a product of incest. And that is like lightly suggested in the first film, but certainly is overtly referenced in the second. And now obviously like. Well, you can take from that whatever you want, but that's the kind of like, this is a little bit fucking dangerous to do that.

• 51:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Like, this kid who's got like, just this, this terrible background and is now coming back to try maybe like, make something purer out of his, like, there's so many different.

• 51:33Sean Fennessey?

  Or burn it all down.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Or burn it all down because he's like, this whole thing is just a lie, like.

• 51:38Sean Fennessey?

  And I am the like, the, the, the inbred product of all of what's gone wrong with this idea of the Republic in the first place. That would have been a, that's a totally different movie. I mean, a completely different movie.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:49Sean Fennessey?

  It would have been an interesting idea. As soon as you get the cut of Lucius's jib though, actually, honestly, the first thing you see is his hand in the, in the wheat, you know, his hand in the barrel that's full of grain.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:01Sean Fennessey?

  And it's an obvious callback to Maximus walking through the kind of afterlife, feeling the wheat.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Well, those guys didn't have blue sky, so they didn't really have much to do with their hands. Like, it was either touch grains.

• 52:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. They couldn't, they couldn't refresh the.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  What else could they have touched?

• 52:18Sean Fennessey?

  And as soon as you, as soon as I saw his hands going in the grain, I was like, oh, I guess Maximus had another son that was not murdered.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Don't you just feel like Lucilla would have told Maximus this in the events of the first film?

• 52:32Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I mean, she didn't really have enough time. Like, I think that there was a world in which she could have helped him pursue what Marcus Aurelius wanted.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Which was for Maximus.

• 52:44Sean Fennessey?

  But that happens very quickly. You know, Commodus is, he's on it on that one. You know, like, the, the, the calendar invites were hitting. It was like, my dad's dead, we gotta chat, let's go, I gotta get chatted here.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Think in like, the conversation about their son, she could have been like, by the way, or like, you know, even in this movie, she references like, you were on his mind at the very end, now think back to the very end, Lucius is safe. By the way, he was, he was your son, I want you to know before you die.

• 53:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It's a bit of a janky storytelling thing in the movie.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's very.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Did that feel like a note to you? Did that, did that feel like somebody was like, we have to Skywalker this kid?

• 53:21Sean Fennessey?

  That's an interesting question. I feel like the movie started from that premise. I feel like it had to for them to justify it, but it is a classic case of retconning. I mean, there's just no other way to put it. Like, this was not in the text of the first film at all. And it's okay if it isn't. It's not like the worst thing in the world. But it got me immediately thinking back like, shit, when's the last time I saw Gladiator? Did I miss something?

• 53:43Speaker 02

  I had to go back and, yeah, like, I had to go back and just be like, as soon as we got out of the screening we saw, I was like, did I miss like some like, did I pee every single time I've ever seen Gladiator?

• 53:57Sean Fennessey?

  Where Lucilla was like, by the way, he's yours.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, or they're like, we're like, remember when we fucked eight years ago? Weird, I have a son. He's eight, you know, like.

• 54:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's not the worst thing in the world. So, you know.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  It's also weird because like, he's been traveling the globe the entire, like, you know, he's a little bit of an absentee dad anyway. He's like, you know, fighting dramatic tribes.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  They just won't let him go home.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:19Sean Fennessey?

  Much like Acacia's, yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:21Sean Fennessey?

  You're saying Maximus was not a good father.

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Well, I mean.

• 54:24Sean Fennessey?

  To his bastard son.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Either of them, or his acknowledged kids, yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  But you know what he did?

• 54:30Sean Fennessey?

  He really did more of the package.

• 54:32Speaker 02

  He gave him the gift of inherited, you know, combat sense, you know?

• 54:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's got great instincts.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  That's how Lucilla is just like, that's my son.

• 54:37Sean Fennessey?

  He's kind of a Bronny James, honestly. He's got some of the skills. You can see there's like, the DNA is there, but is it all there?

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  I found Paul Mescal very convincing as a fighter. Did you not?

• 54:50Speaker 02

  It's okay. When he fought people, yeah.

• 54:52Sean Fennessey?

  I just, I don't think he was put in a position to succeed. I would like to talk about Macronus.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Please, yeah.

• 54:59Sean Fennessey?

  So, obviously Denzel's best part of the movie. Denzel is in this weird, not a weird place, a hard-earned place where pretty much like Equalizer 6, I'm like, I will be there on opening night.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Good, because he's making them.

• 55:11Sean Fennessey?

  I know, I know, I know. But he just, I was looking back at his filmography from the last 20 years and I was like, it's this weird combination of, you know, he's been on this mission to make films like Fences to get August Wilson's films, plays in front of people. He is still occasionally doing this sort of Roman J. Israel-style character piece. And then he's doing big top blockbuster-y stuff. He's doing the Equalizer movies, he's doing Gladiator 2. He's really struck this harmonious balance in his 70s of being wildly acclaimed, multi-Oscar-nominated actor.

• 55:48Sean Fennessey?

  And the surest thing at the box office who doesn't really do Marvel movies. And also like a very weird guy who's like, I'm gonna make Macronus um, a bisexual freaky freaky guy and like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna like try, basically it's a new thing he's never done before.

• 56:04Speaker 02

  And he's also on one of the all time promo, promo campaigns.

• 56:08Sean Fennessey?

  He's obviously having a lot of fun promoting this movie, which he, it seems like he never has fun promoting movies. And for whatever reason, this time around, he did this Esquire as told two piece that is fascinating about his life and getting uh, sober and all this other stuff that's been going on.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Who's into Kevin Spacey.

• 56:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, taking shots at, you know, how he doesn't vote for Oscars anymore. But the movie itself, like, I think the thing I want to focus on is just, there is an outlandishness, an absurdity, like a, a, a fun having in his character that he doesn't have a ton of history with.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:39Sean Fennessey?

  You could say like Alonso, a little bit in Training Day is this, but there's something also under the surface there where like this guy's really fucked up. He's got a lot of problems.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Adam called this a prequel to Training Day.

• 56:49Sean Fennessey?

  It's probably the closest you could get, but he usually plays a very tight, forthright person.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:55Sean Fennessey?

  And that's not what this is at all.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  He loves Shakespeare. I think he sees this as a Shakespearean character. I think he brings an almost theatrical like stage presence to the movie, which the movie desperately needed. I also think that like, he gets to finally, not finally, but he gets to play someone, like you're saying, is like a villain that we are weirdly cheering for. And someone who is like, actually pretty messy. Like, he does not have like an overarching plan.

• 57:25Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  He is constantly taking advantage of the chaos of the moment. So when Uzius shows up, he's like, bang. When he gets closer to the emperors, he's like, gonna twist it this way. When he gets

• 57:38Speaker 02

  over the emperors, he's like, here's how I'm gonna flip these riots and they'll want me to be the person who's in charge of Rome. Like, I love how like, in the moment, this character was. It wasn't like, okay, I can see this is your arc. You're gonna do this and like, it's obvious that like, you'll wind up being this person. It's like, I didn't, watching the movie, I did not expect him to be the commodus of this movie, you know? And that's sort of where it kind of winds up in, in some ways.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Something that Joanna and I talk about a lot on How's Far when we cover any Rings of Power episode, any Lord of the Rings tale is, one of the reasons that Sauron is so compelling as villain is because he's the great improviser.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  You know, and that felt very-

• 58:16Speaker 02

  That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that's really good.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Very present here, like that ability to, because a lot of villains are plotters, plots and schemes, schemes and plots. But to be able to adapt inside of your ambition is just thrilling to watch.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  When you're seeing somebody do it with this level of ability. And it's particularly effective in the performance and in this film, because one of the things that you have to buy in any scene he's in, in any circumstance, is that the person he's interacting with does actually clock that they're being worked.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  But still falls for it.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  Or still gets swept up in it. Like, there are very few-

• 59:00Sean Fennessey?

  Or sort of so brain damaged that, you know-

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Or scared.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Or scared, right.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Or compromised.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  You know, like he, what if he takes over that senator's house because he has such a great debt from the fight?

• 59:10Speaker 03

  This is my house was like, that was, because that's personal and that's intimate and you could see how he would overpower him.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  But then the Senate scene.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  With the head.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  The great Daenerys, the first consul, and then Macrinus, the second consul scene. And then when it's just him in this room with all of these political operators, your expectation is that they will say to him, "Okay, what the fuck just happened? Let's fix this. How are we going to account for this lunatic?" But that's not what happens.

• 59:47Sean Fennessey?

  He slides right in.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  They're like, "Tell us what to do."

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  They're just immediately enthralled. And so that was- Fascinating to watch, whether it was a one-on-one interaction or a large room. You're almost like, how did it take him this long?

• 1:00:01Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  To reach this moment? I guess he needs someone like Lucius to be the tip of the sword that allows him to pierce the shield around those halls of power, but like, he, he does it with ease.

• 1:00:12Sean Fennessey?

  You were comparing the two brothers to Joaquin's Joker, but he's more of the Dark Knight.

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Sean Fennessey?

  Heath Ledger Joker character, where he's sort of like, is, he does not have a master plan.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  He doesn't have an ideology.

• 1:00:25Sean Fennessey?

  Develop quickly, and when they do, he manages to pull them off in fascinating ways. They're almost like so outlandish as to not be believed, but you're so sold on the performance. You're so invested in the actor who's bringing the character to life that you're like, sure, the Joker like implanted a phone in a guy's chest. I'm like, when did that happen?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  He's a cardiothoracic surgeon.

• 1:00:47Sean Fennessey?

  It's like, yeah, okay, I guess that that sequence makes sense.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, I really, really enjoyed Denzel.

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's, it's hard to not enjoy him at this age. It's also nice that he had fun making the movie. You can tell he had, he enjoyed himself.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  I, I feel like there's just not very many people who are as famous of him and as good of an actor of him, as him, and clearly can use his capital and his involvement in something to be like, whatever happens in this movie, I'm gonna do something really interesting.

• 1:01:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  And I get the feeling that he had a lot to do with the arc of that character, because this is a guy who's like, I do the Equalizer, I do all this other stuff. My kind of brand is locked. We don't have to worry about that. So I will play a bi schemer who gives dudes pounds when we like drink wine and laugh and wears earrings and is just bawling out and then we get, we're going full.

• 1:01:40Sean Fennessey?

  We're going full.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  Fucking gets chopped to pieces.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  And it's like, that's gutsy, man. That's not, there's no ego in what he does.

• 1:01:47Sean Fennessey?

  Has it crossed your mind? How perfectly this mirrors the Jake Paul, Mike Tyson fight, the end of this film.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  It has not crossed my mind.

• 1:01:56Sean Fennessey?

  I couldn't help, when I was remembering the plot of this movie, I was like, so, you know, the film ends and naturally this showdown between Macronus, who has built up this army, and this is a team of loyalists, and then Maximus's army, who is called back to Rome, and they learn that Lucius is in fact Maximus's son, and after a series of battles and Rome kind of going into shambles, there's this kind of epic showdown where these two armies are staring each other down. Lucius and Macronus are fated to battle in a river.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:28Sean Fennessey?

  And Macronus gets a couple of shots in, you know, and Lucius goes down, but at no point was I like, what if Macronus wins?

• 1:02:39Sean Fennessey?

  That's never going to happen when you're watching the movie. The same way when I was watching Tyson, I was like, from the moment he started, you know, throwing a flurry of punches that had no chance of landing, I was like, wow. Mike's either gonna get knocked out, or I'm gonna sit here deeply unsatisfied for the next 13 minutes.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:54Sean Fennessey?

  And that is exactly what happened. How did you feel about the ending?

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  You know, I did not feel like I was ready to sign up for Paul Meskell's, like, Academy of Roman, like, politicians. Like, I thought it was like, cool that he was like, here's my identity reveal, here's like my heritage reveal. It just felt a little like, kind of rushed. Like, Maximus had this very, like, this circular arc where he needed to get back to like going into heaven to follow his family, and he had to go through these trials to get there. And it just felt like very clean, the trajectory of that. This just felt like, so is this guy the emperor now? Like, or is he like the head of the senate? Like, I don't know, I don't even know. Maybe it's like, well, let's make a third movie, but I felt like I didn't really believe.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  With anything from emotionally from that moment, you know?

• 1:03:46Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, everyone is dead. So, right? Like at the end of the movie, Gracchus.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Most especially Derek Jacobi.

• 1:03:54Sean Fennessey?

  Macrinus, um, the two brothers.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Remember when Jacobi gets it? And I was just like, what the fuck?

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  I know. That's terrible.

• 1:04:02Sean Fennessey?

  I turned to you and I was like, damn, they really did 86 year old Shakespearean icon Derek Jacobi. Dirty in this movie. I was watching the original the other day and I was like, damn, Derek Jacobi looked fucking old when he was 62. And he's 86 now, making Gladiator 2. Great performance. Always, always very good.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, tremendous stuff.

• 1:04:21Sean Fennessey?

  What'd you think of the ending?

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  So, it feels very emblematic of the, the joys and the drawbacks of the film overall, right? It's the movie in miniature because

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  the actual fight between Macrinus and Lucius, I thought was honestly incredible. Again, like those intimate one-on-one, like hand to, hand to hand, it's visceral combat. Is just electric in, in these movies. And the fact that I agree with you that you know that Lucius will of course emerge victorious. That actually didn't bother me at all because I think for most of the movie, he thinks he's done, right? He's like, I dreamt I was, had already crossed the river again.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  You know? And so like it was, the emotional aspect of that for me was that just he decided to fight, decided to make the stand, decided to try to rally the troops and say, I could be Ed Reed to stick with your wonderful, uh, comp. The fact that these two giant armies are there, armies from the same place, right? Both different factions of Rome, uh, aligned to different people, with different people.

• 1:05:31Sean Fennessey?

  Sort of like Ringerverse, big picture.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:05:35Sean Fennessey?

  Showdowns, you know, 99 movie draft, that kind of energy.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Just so, um, the 99 movie draft that the Ringerverse swept, right?

• 1:05:42Sean Fennessey?

  What was that?

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Okay. Thought he was never gonna mention it again. And they're like literally. Just standing there.

• 1:05:50Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  Like, they do nothing. They don't come into play in the sequence at all. And there's something that's interesting about that. It's a reminder of the strength that is, in theory, at hand and on offer, and the question of whether people can tap into it or unify it. But it is this kind of just odd adjacency. From the Macrinus perspective, the thing I like about it is

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  we see not only what a operator he is, how he can maneuver, but the actual tactics at play throughout the film, right? Something like the fact that he definitely pieces together who Lucius is first, before Lucius's own mother, clearly, right? When he hears that Virgil, oh, the poet, his mind starts to race right away. Who is this guy? And so he is.

• 1:06:44Sean Fennessey?

  He also has, we learn later that because he was a slave who was owned by Marcus Aurelius, he has proximity to this world and this family.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  There's these, yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  Stories.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  So we can see, OK, he's a studier. He's an observer. He's clocking things people say, do, decisions they've made, who they are, where they come from. He does, unlike some of the other characters, have a direct tie. It's an interesting way to take a character like Marcus Aurelius, who, obviously, in the first movie, from Richard Harris's own mouth, we hear him say, like, was I this guy that they think I am? Like, he questions his own legacy. That's part of the fabric of the universe.

• 1:07:20Sean Fennessey?

  I like that part of the film.

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  Wonderful, yeah. But since then, both in the first movie and then in this one, he's mostly just propped up by other characters as the guy who had it right and had it figured out and who nobody else could properly then.

• 1:07:34Sean Fennessey?

  There's no nuance to what Marcus Aurelius represents to Rome.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Exactly, and so it felt crucial then for Macrinus to be a character who's like. The lesson I learned in my life was to take the person who put you in that place and become the opposite.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  I also think that's what the dangerously intoxicating idea of that character is to undo the myth-making of the first movie about strength and honor and the dream of Rome. This guy's like, that is all bullshit.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  Okay, but so then this gets to the ending, because I agree. This was fascinating to watch throughout, and then you get to the end, and you're like, but he never actually did it. He didn't earn any loyalty.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  They rode out because he told them to, but in the moment of active challenge, nobody stood for him.

• 1:08:22Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's debatable. That's an interesting idea. I mean, I'm very dubious of the framework of that character's history, which is that he is a slave who sort of earns his own freedom through his combat in the arena. And then by dint of the accumulation of wealth and strategy and relationships, he rises through the ranks to become ostensibly, even if it's for the last 12 minutes of the film.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  He's like a boxing promoter who becomes a politician, which is not entirely hard to believe.

• 1:08:46Sean Fennessey?

  But I am very skeptical of the like, I was nothing, and now I am at the very top. Like, it's an interesting season where Anora, like, one of the key ideas of Anora is like, there is no dream. Like, you don't start at nothing and then marry your way into an oligarchy. Like, that's just not how the world works. But maybe you're right. Maybe the movie is telling us, in fact, that like, it was all, he was a paper tiger. You know what I mean? There wasn't actually, he hadn't accumulated that.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  He had to dirty his own hands. Both of the emperors, he takes down literally with the strength of his own hands.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  But also, like, it's like, you have to do it yourself. Like, he almost doesn't want the fingerprints. He wants to pull, like, the puppet strings.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  It's interesting.

• 1:09:27Sean Fennessey?

  But he has that turn, though, when he decides to remove the emperors, effectively. And that, you can feel his brain rot kind of going into hyperdrive, the way the power often corrupts. Again, that whole macronist part of the movie is so interesting. That character's so interesting, the performance is so interesting. I just want to live inside that part of the world, and even though I admire Paul Mescal as an actor, I'm kind of like, eh, whatever.

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Sean Fennessey?

  I guess he won? That's fine.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Well, what do you guys think of the idea, then, of the third movie? That's already

• 1:09:56Sean Fennessey?

  Is it?

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  out there.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  It's not. I highly doubt it.

• 1:10:00Sean Fennessey?

  I, well, it's, okay, let's use that as a segue to a conversation about this movie's prospects and award stuff, too. Do you think it's gonna be a big hit?

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  You would know way better than me. I mean, it's doing very well globally, right?

• 1:10:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean eighty seven million dollars.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  Doing well globally. I think people need something to go see, you know, like.

• 1:10:18Sean Fennessey?

  But they have Wicked. This is opening in the same weekend as Wicked, which is going to be a sensation.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I really don't know. I don't think it's gonna be a failure, but I think it will be like

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  bigger than Twisters, but maybe.

• 1:10:31Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that's an interesting comment. Now, that movie didn't play well overseas, but played very well in America. This is a movie that could play better overseas, long term than in America. I'm not really sure.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  There's something strange about how, I feel like this movie has been an interesting litmus test where it's like, you can't just say it's like, pretty good. Like, people are either like, never has Ridley Scott achieved such brilliance. And I'm like, he made, like, Covenant is might maybe better than this. I don't know. But like, on the other hand, it's like, I don't want to say this is shit. Cause there's so much to it that's like.

• 1:11:04Sean Fennessey?

  You know what it is? I actually think that this movie is equivalent to Napoleon, but my expectations were low on Napoleon. And they were high on Gladiator two. But they're very similar kinds of movies. When the movie is at their best in terms of set piece and character development. I'm like, god damn Ridley Scott, the goat. Like, I love this guy's movie so much. And then when something feels really, really loose and unformed in the script. Which is true of all of his movies. You're like, oh, this is pretty messy and not very strong. I don't know. But like, I'm typically a big defender of late period Ridley. I really like The Last Duel. I really like House of Gucci. I really like Napoleon. I really like the Alien films. I'm mostly in the bag for everything he does. I think that this one just bears the burden of an all time classic preceding it. And so there's only so much that can be done in that respect.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Do you think it has any Oscar chances?

• 1:11:50Sean Fennessey?

  I do, I do.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Is Denzel Washington a favorite at this point for supporting actors?

• 1:11:54Sean Fennessey?

  He's in second place behind Kieran Culkin right now for A Real Pain.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:11:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, I, I did just see Edward Norton in A Complete Unknown. And I thought he was very strong in that movie.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Will Edward Norton be doing podcasts after?

• 1:12:09Sean Fennessey?

  Not this one, I don't think, based on our previous conversation. I

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  I was more, I was just like that, that run.

• 1:12:15Sean Fennessey?

  No disrespect to him, he didn't seem to be having a very good time.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Motherless Brooklyn, like he went on the all time pot run.

• 1:12:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe he learned a lesson or two about what, you know, yoke dickheads to sit in front of. I think it is mostly a like, we have to nominate Michael Caine because Michael Caine was good in a movie and he was in his seventies kind of a situation. But there's a world in which everyone just kind of remembers like, I like watching Denzel Washington more than any other person in movies. And that has been true for me for 30 years and he gets a third, that could happen.

• 1:12:45Sean Fennessey?

  The big questions to me are best picture, when we did a power rankings last week with Katie and Joanna, we did not include it. I, I genuinely don't know. I, I've never felt as confused by the slate of best picture potential nominees as I do this year. If you told me it was in, I wouldn't be shocked. A friend of mine who said he went to an academy screening of the movie recently and that people were really into it. Um, I think it's because Ridley Scott is capable of something in this kind of spectacle fashion that very few filmmakers are. And then we don't have a ton of big, dumb, fun, great blockbuster adult movies this year. Like Furiosa could have been one of those movies. It didn't totally live up to certain expectations.

• 1:13:32Sean Fennessey?

  The, the, the most pertinent one to me is best director. Because Ridley Scott has never won best director.

• 1:13:39Speaker 03

  It doesn't make any sense. This guy made Plaid Runner and Alien. What the fuck?

• 1:13:44Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you'd, you'd like to get it for Alien if you made Alien.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:13:46Sean Fennessey?

  One of the, one of the 15 or 20 most influential movies of the last 75 years. It's been this long journey of him not getting there. Ridley Scott's been nominated three times for directing. Can you guess the films?

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  obviously Gladiator is one. Is definitely one I know that.

• 1:14:02Sean Fennessey?

  Doman Louise is one, obviously Gladiator is one.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  It's not one of the

• 1:14:07Sean Fennessey?

  Did he get nominated for Black Hawk?

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  That's what I was gonna say, Black Hawk Down.

• 1:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  He did get nominated for Black Hawk Down.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  He was not nominated for Best Director for Blade Runner or Alien?

• 1:14:17Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think those films got any above the line nominations.

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  Absolute criminal madness and everybody should be ashamed of themselves.

• 1:14:24Sean Fennessey?

  This is a very, very tough thing that happened the year after the Gladiator Oscars. That's the year of A Beautiful Mind. And the Best Director slate that year was one of the best ever, except for one thing.

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  The person who won it?

• 1:14:40Sean Fennessey?

  So it's Ridley Scott for Black Hawk Down, it's Robert Altman for Gosfer Park, it's Peter Jackson for Fellowship of the Ring.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  Fuck yeah.

• 1:14:46Sean Fennessey?

  And it's David Lynch for Mulholland Drive, which is one of the single coolest nominations ever. And Ron Howard won for A Beautiful Mind. I like Ron Howard, I like a lot of Ron Howard. I don't like that movie very much, and it's a tough loss. So anyway, the point being, he hasn't won. Usually when this happens with people who have the footprint of someone like Ridley Scott, they just decide like, fuck it, like, we just gotta give him one. It's just important.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  This would be his Departed.

• 1:15:09Sean Fennessey?

  This would be his Departed.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Sean Fennessey?

  The thing is, the directors is very idiosyncratic. It's much smaller than a lot of the bigger groups, obviously much smaller than the actors group.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's leaned significantly more international, I guess Ridley is international, but he's a Hollywood filmmaker. And I know you guys don't really know, I don't really know.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  I feel like Denis Villeneuve is gonna get nominated before Ridley Scott if they're gonna do a blockbuster.

• 1:15:30Sean Fennessey?

  I wonder, I wonder.

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Sean Baker.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  And then he should win.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 1:15:36Sean Fennessey?

  Sean Baker, Brad Corbett.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Let's say Denis Villeneuve.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Villeneuve, yeah.

• 1:15:39Sean Fennessey?

  Denis Villeneuve, that's four. And then who's the fifth? I mean, John M Chu?

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:15:43Sean Fennessey?

  Ramel Ross for Nickel Boys? I don't know. This is, this is the group that has, you know, nominates like Pavel Pavlikowski now. You know, where they're just like, oh, wow, that, oh, he came out of nowhere. I guess you could make the case that Edward Berger would be that, but that was a focus movie. It's an interesting question because.

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  Who do you think the frontrunner is this year then?

• 1:16:02Sean Fennessey?

  Probably Sean Baker right now, but I still think that similarly is a deeply unsettled thing. And there is like an old guy's still got it thing with Ridley that you could make the case for, but if not, if not here.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Sean Fennessey?

  Then when is the question?

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  Well, he's making a ton of movies.

• 1:16:17Sean Fennessey?

  He is, he says he's making a great many more movies.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  I think this movie will do very well, I do not think this is the repeat business. Crazy, like, everybody goes and sees it three times, Top Gun Maverick.

• 1:16:30Sean Fennessey?

  Agreed.

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  I agree with that, because Top Gun Maverick was like, the kind of thing where, even if nobody wanted to go with you, you would have just gone again to see it.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  I think I did do that.

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. But, so I don't feel that way about Gladiator 2, but if someone asked me this weekend, hey, I'm gonna, like, do you want to go see Gladiator with me? I would go again, for sure.

• 1:16:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm gonna see it again for sure.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  Cause I had fun at the movies.

• 1:16:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I did too. I'm gonna see it again. I'm probably gonna see it again on the big screen. But it's not the thing you're talking about, where you were like, I need to go back to that place emotionally.

• 1:16:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:16:59Sean Fennessey?

  Where how that movie made me feel.

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  That's exactly what I do. That's exactly what I do.

• 1:17:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I, um, I think it will-

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Unlike Dune Part 2. Genuinely.

• 1:17:06Sean Fennessey?

  A movie that I felt I needed to see again.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I saw Dune so many times in the theaters, and honestly, I wish I had seen it more.

• 1:17:12Sean Fennessey?

  Dan sat in that chair and said he saw it 12 times in theaters, and then three months later, we asked him about that, and he said, I lied. I didn't see it 12 times.

• 1:17:19Speaker 02

  How many times did he say it?

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  All of that tracks for me.

• 1:17:22Sean Fennessey?

  He doesn't, he doesn't know. Uh, the categories where this movie will be nominated are production design, visual effects, costumes, and sound. Almost certainly.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:17:29Sean Fennessey?

  Everything else, I think, is up for debate. Probably Denzel. Probably Denzel.

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  Will Dondus be nominated in any category?

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  That would be special effects.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  We haven't talked about Dondus.

• 1:17:37Sean Fennessey?

  Animal performance is something I have advocated for. I think it would be great.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  But if you were an animal in movies, you would be furious at the CGI baboons taking-

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  And yet, Dondus-

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  We stand up for, like, workers' rights against AI.

• 1:17:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:51Speaker 02

  But what about animals' rights against CGI animals?

• 1:17:55Sean Fennessey?

  You hate animals.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Chris, Dondus wore a little diaper.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  Was he real?

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  And then took like a bunch of like-

• 1:18:00Sean Fennessey?

  Mostly real.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  What was it, like, gelatin fruit or something from the bowl and just nibbled on it?

• 1:18:05Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  That was real. That happened in this movie.

• 1:18:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. That wasn't movie magic.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  I thought it was.

• 1:18:11Sean Fennessey?

  That was a monkey shitting on Fred Heckinger's shoulder.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Climbing all over Fred Heckinger the entire time. Alright.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Yes!

• 1:18:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Fred Heckinger, when we went to the screening, he talked about training with the monkey a little bit.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  So he should be Denzel then for supporting actor.

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:18:21Sean Fennessey?

  Dondus?

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  No, Fred Heckinger.

• 1:18:23Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  Big Fred.

• 1:18:25Sean Fennessey?

  Is this a successful Legacy sequel? And what is a successful Legacy sequel? Obviously, we've raised the specter of Top Gun Maverick over and over again. That movie's gonna come up in our discussion of our favorites.

• 1:18:40Sean Fennessey?

  These movies have been around longer than I realized.

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Sean Fennessey?

  I started rooting around for like lists of the movies and you know it became clear that you know Macquarie and Cruise did not invent this concept, you know, that like Psycho 2 came out in 1983, some 23 years after the original.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Did you have a must be X amount of years after the original?

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, what's your definition for legacy sequel?

• 1:19:02Sean Fennessey?

  To me, I thought roughly 10 is a good framework.

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  But it could be nine, that's crucial. It could be nine, right? That's crucial for what I'm...

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  I think my top five is very much in the spirit of the idea, which is like director or filmmakers revisiting a work.

• 1:19:17Speaker 03

  Much later in the timeline.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Meditating on that work, but also iterating on it is not necessarily a direct sequel like it takes place a couple of years or days.

• 1:19:26Sean Fennessey?

  Right, in the immediate aftermath of the event. Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't have to be the same filmmaker, same filmmaking team. There's often going to be either a key character or a key actor who recurs in the next film.

• 1:19:37Speaker 03

  Right, but then paired with new characters.

• 1:19:39Sean Fennessey?

  A new generation typically.

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Sean Fennessey?

  But not always. I don't know, like in To Sir With Love 2, was there like a new younger version of Mr. Tibbs?

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Was there a second one of those?

• 1:19:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there was, directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

• 1:19:54Speaker 03

  But like, so when you talk about the difference between a sequel and a legacy sequel, that feels clear to everyone. There's no other thing we need to define. We're on the same page.

• 1:20:01Sean Fennessey?

  I think so, although we can explore it in our discussion.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  Here's a good, here's a good one. The Jurassic Worlds are legacy sequels, no.

• 1:20:10Sean Fennessey?

  No, the only movie in that franchise that is a legacy sequel is Jurassic World, because the next movie is a sequel to Jurassic World.

• 1:20:17Speaker 02

  Jurassic World is a legacy sequel to the Jurassic Park trilogy.

• 1:20:21Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  Empire and Return of the Jedi are just sequels to the first Star Wars. Force Awakens is a legacy sequel.

• 1:20:28Sean Fennessey?

  Phantom Menace is not a sequel or a legacy sequel, it's a prequel.

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:20:33Sean Fennessey?

  So this is complicated. This is what Hollywood had to ride.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  How do they not let us write Gladiator 2? You know, it's so weird.

• 1:20:38Sean Fennessey?

  We know it all.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  We're so chill.

• 1:20:42Sean Fennessey?

  These movies are really hard. There's a long list of movies here, some of which I like, but are considered big bungles. For example, The Godfather Part III. It's probably the most infamous example of a legacy sequel. A movie that we have a fondness for, certainly, we've talked about a lot. But that, and it was a big box office hit, got Oscar nominations, but is not remembered very fondly. Sometimes, they're Top Gun Maverick. They're the best movie of the year, they're thrilling, they're a huge success, and they remind us why the character and the star are at the center of our movie.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Sometimes even, I think in that case, maybe even eclipses the first film in terms of-

• 1:21:16Sean Fennessey?

  For me, it does.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  The emotional connection.

• 1:21:18Sean Fennessey?

  For me, it does. Let's just do our lists. I'll hold off on my number five, because I'm gonna let you talk about it.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:21:23Sean Fennessey?

  That sound good?

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  There was interesting overlap.

• 1:21:25Sean Fennessey?

  We did have a few that recur here pretty significantly. Mallory, you and I share two.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  I have two that are on your list, I have two that are on your list. You guys only share one, though. Is that right?

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I tried to, I tried to, this is not like, uh, these are, I've gone through and scientifically evaluated what the best movies are.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Just right off the dome.

• 1:21:41Sean Fennessey?

  Well, why don't you go first, then? Because yours is an important one to discuss.

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  Sure, I'll start with my number five.

• 1:21:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  Little movie that we mentioned 30 seconds ago called The Force Awakens.

• 1:21:51Sean Fennessey?

  Is this movie good?

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  I love this movie. It's not my, well, okay, the, we don't have time, really, to get into the sequel trilogy. Um, obviously, Rise of Skywalker is a blight on the history of cinema and our, our shared experience as fans and on society. We did. I love-

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  Would've made that my number one if it was eligible.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  Just to, just to be clear.

• 1:22:14Sean Fennessey?

  Somehow Palpatine returned.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  The Last Jedi is my favorite movie of the, the sequel trilogy. I think The Last Jedi is wonderful, and I think it is a better movie than The Force Awakens. I just want to get that on the record.

• 1:22:27Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. I hadn't, didn't realize.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  Beautiful film, wonderful film. But The Force Awakens, for, for the purposes of this exercise, is obviously the, the most appropriate selection.

• 1:22:36Sean Fennessey?

  I've only seen it once. I've only seen it once, I liked it.

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  You only saw The Force Awakens once?

• 1:22:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  I think I only saw it once, too.

• 1:22:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I enjoyed it.

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  Hard to believe.

• 1:22:44Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, it is everything that we're talking about here.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's fantastic.

• 1:22:47Sean Fennessey?

  Um, in terms of iterative of the original, but in ways that I found enjoyable. But I felt like I had no, whereas Last Jedi, I'm like, I need to watch this like six, seven times, try to figure out like what he was up to and what his ideas were.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  The third movie or the third movie in the sequels? Like, you said Last Jedi, do you mean Rise of Skywalker or Last Jedi? Wait, Last Jedi, the second one, yeah.

• 1:23:03Sean Fennessey?

  Because Last Jedi is- Kind of like upending a lot of our expectations of Star Wars movies, which was much more interesting to me than just repeating thematically, structurally, the same movie.

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think Force Awakens is on my list, not only because I enjoyed the movie, and think certainly in terms of kicking off a new trilogy in Star Wars. It is infinitely more successful than Phantom Menace was at doing that thing. Obviously, it maps on very closely in a number of key respects to A New Hope. We port over not just okay, in place of the Death Star, you have Starkiller Base. In place of Tatooine, you have Jakku. In place of RTDT, you have BB8, the icon, etc.

• 1:23:47Speaker 03

  Love BB8, love a droid. You, we have Han, right? We have Han Solo in this movie, we have Leia in this movie. We have these direct tethers and connections.

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  Speaking of who's the father.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  Indeed, we have the state of the, of the New Republic and politics across the galaxy. But then you have these, these new figures, the aforementioned BB8, Rey, of course, Hux. Kylo Ren, have you heard of him?

• 1:24:14Sean Fennessey?

  One of my faves.

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  The best, and the connection specifically inside of like the Kylo.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  Han storyline is, is I think emblematic of what makes it a very effective legacy sequel.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  I forget, do they want to be brother sister in these movies too?

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  Kylo and Rey?

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  No, they.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  They, like, they're lovers, right?

• 1:24:33Sean Fennessey?

  They bang.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  Inclined.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, we were close in A New Hope.

• 1:24:37Sean Fennessey?

  They kiss, isn't it implied that they bang?

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  Uh, no, they do, they kind of like have like phone sex, basically. You're thinking of the.

• 1:24:46Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah, that part, sailing mine mills, yeah, that's good, yeah, that's good. Enjoyed that, that was in Last Jedi.

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  Great, great movie. Yes, that's my number five.

• 1:24:55Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Chris, you've got a tie at number five.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  I do because I was interested in exploring the idea of making legacy sequels for two of the greatest films ever made.

• 1:25:04Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  So I have Exorcist III, William Peter Blatty's, you know, return to the world of the exorcist with a lot of the original kind of evil of the first film.

• 1:25:13Sean Fennessey?

  13 years after the second film.

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:25:16Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a very unusual formulation.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Very, and is a wonderful horror movie, just straight up, but also like really provocative about the ideas of the first film. And then probably controversially, I kind of like 2002 or the 2010, the year we made contact.

• 1:25:32Sean Fennessey?

  I think this is a take that's coming more into the mainstream, that 2010 is actually good.

• 1:25:36Speaker 02

  Uh, I saw that it was screening recently at like the Vista one day when I was going home. I, I really, Peter Hyams is just an excellent filmmaker and Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren are awesome in this. And you would, it is sacrilegious, the fact that they're like, we're gonna try and unpack and answer some of Stanley Kubrick's existential questions about, you know, life and.

• 1:25:58Sean Fennessey?

  It's much more, as I remember, loyal to Arthur C Clarke's.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03Sean Fennessey?

  Science fiction ideas and less in the metaphysical exploration of the molecular nature of life.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  They try to get to the bottom of that.

• 1:26:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  So I love those two.

• 1:26:13Sean Fennessey?

  Good picks. You're a coward for not choosing one.

• 1:26:15Speaker 03

  Expect it. I love a smuggle. I love a smuggle.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  You split, you often will be like, my number one film is five films.

• 1:26:20Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean?

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  United by.

• 1:26:22Sean Fennessey?

  Now, show me the evidence. My number four is Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Have you ever seen this?

• 1:26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  Absolutely not.

• 1:26:29Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so here's what I like about this movie. This is something that is very rarely done in these films. Texas Chainsaw Massacre, we talk about it all the time on the show, signature horror film. Certainly one of the scariest movies ever made, deeply upsetting portrayal of violence in the middle of nowhere. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is basically a slapstick comedy. Um, it completely changes the tone. It uses the same framework of Leatherface and the family and the pursuit of, you know, uh, capturing people and murdering them and serving them, but, um.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  Jeez. You ever seen this?

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely not.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  Have you seen Texas?

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  No. I kind of think I can handle it.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  No, I don't think you could.

• 1:27:05Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 1:27:07Sean Fennessey?

  This movie introduces new actors, much crazier sensibilities, same filmmaker, same, some of the same team that made the movie many, many years after the original. I think it's 12 or 13 years after the original. And also features Dennis Hopper, like a ludicrous performance. It's like kind of the hero of the movie.

• 1:27:28Sean Fennessey?

  So it's a great movie. If people haven't seen it and they're expecting like Mallory, something just like grisly and gross. It is that.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:35Sean Fennessey?

  But funny.

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  Maybe I'll just skip right to that one.

• 1:27:39Sean Fennessey?

  You could enjoy it as a standalone.

• 1:27:40Speaker 02

  You should watch them both back to back, but start at midnight.

• 1:27:42Sean Fennessey?

  I have fewer nice things to say about the subsequent Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. I think it goes into a bit of a

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  Did you like the Netflix one?

• 1:27:48Sean Fennessey?

  Fallow period. Not really.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  I rewatched it recently.

• 1:27:52Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't it like, uh, like wokenified?

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  No, what's wrong with you?

• 1:27:57Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't it like, we need to start a commune, like outside of social media?

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  It's about influencers who are trying to start like the new Marfa.

• 1:28:04Sean Fennessey?

  Give me a fucking break.

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  And in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre town and, uh,

• 1:28:09Sean Fennessey?

  I saw, I talked about, we talked with Alex Ross Perry about it.

• 1:28:13Sean Fennessey?

  It was like a DEI Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yeah, no.

• 1:28:19Sean Fennessey?

  That's like, that's exactly the kind of movie that will

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  That got Trump elected.

• 1:28:23Sean Fennessey?

  Honestly, yeah. Like we just, we just gotta do away with this shit where we're just like, what if it was about influencers? Like, come on, man. That's not, that's not useful.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  This is why PTA never makes contemporary films. He's just like, what do I have to say about this shit?

• 1:28:34Sean Fennessey?

  He doesn't have to worry about language policing. You want to talk about your number four or you want to wait?

• 1:28:41Speaker 03

  My number four is considerably higher on your list, right?

• 1:28:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:44Speaker 03

  So should we save it?

• 1:28:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we'll save it.

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  I'm actually astonished it's not on Christmas.

• 1:28:47Sean Fennessey?

  Did you want to say anything about DEI Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

• 1:28:51Speaker 03

  I'm content to not speak on that. Thank you.

• 1:28:54Sean Fennessey?

  What's your number four?

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  My number four is T2.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  Colin Trainspotting.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  You know, a film that I think kind of came and went despite the 90s film's huge impact on culture and stuff, but like, this was kind of like My Top Gun, you know, was like a very, very formative movie. I was, you know, even though Irvine Welsh continued to return to these characters, both in sequels and in a prequel, that is not really like, this is not Irvine Welsh. This is about the guys who were in Trainspotting kind of being middle-aged men now. And it's very much just like a reckoning with their masculinating mistakes they have made over the course of the characters' lives. Not literally Johnny Lee Miller and Hugh McGregor, but it's just a fantastic movie full of like, very, very poignant moments.

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  If you care about Trainspotting, but I think also just like, if you, if you enjoy like, very vivid, very like, Verity style filmmaking with like, Danny Boyle's sort of signature kind of like, throw everything at the wall style. There's like animated aspects of this movie, but this kind of, I think is underrated, frankly. And so I wanted to give it some love. And it was a very interesting, you could revisit Trainspotting and just be like, it's another caper, and they've got to get away with it. And they're all still on heroin. And it's like, some of them are sober, some of them are like, you know, it's really, it's really like.

• 1:30:16Sean Fennessey?

  Only seen it once, much like, uh, the last first Star Wars film. So I should probably revisit. Okay, I guess we'll go to me then. So my number three is Doctor Sleep.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, Director's Cut, though.

• 1:30:27Sean Fennessey?

  The Director's Cut. Mike Flanagan's sequel adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining, which the first time I saw, I did not like. And revisited The Director's Cut, which is not radically different, but is deeper and longer, and features more, I like that novel, and features more from the novel. And is, I think, a very good example of.

• 1:30:51Sean Fennessey?

  Using a familiar figure from the original film in Danny, the grown up Danny, speaking of Ewan McGregor. And introducing Abra Stone as the younger representation of the ideas that are at the center of the movie. And then the movie is just like, supercharged by having an insane Rebecca Ferguson performance as the villain of the movie.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  My wife.

• 1:31:11Sean Fennessey?

  That she just walks away with the movie and is absolutely thrilling. And there's a few things that Flanagan does, both like, structurally and in the way that he shoots it, that feel like a genuine, like innovation, like very different stylistically from Kubrick, but feels like a step forward.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and it's a movie that like, when I saw the director's cut, I was like, oh man, everybody's gonna be reclaiming this. Like you could tell this is kind of a big deal. And it was weird, weird that it would kind of bomb the way that it did. But now that Flanagan is in this interesting place where I feel like he's right on the verge of being an A-list director.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:43Sean Fennessey?

  Won the TIFF Audience Award. He's got all these Netflix series that a lot of people watched.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Sean Fennessey?

  And he's about to make more movies.

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  And he's, he's also like, basically the, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, where we were like, Stephen King needs a Kevin Feige to like, kind of bring all these things together.

• 1:31:57Sean Fennessey?

  He's basically doing it.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  That's what he's doing.

• 1:31:59Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  And he's doing The Stand, right? Stand or Dark Tower?

• 1:32:03Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:32:03Speaker 02

  Dark Tower.

• 1:32:04Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, he's doing Dark Tower, but he's also doing Carrie.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:32:07Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  An eight hour Carrie, which I don't know that I'm dying for.

• 1:32:09Sean Fennessey?

  I have some questions about remaking Carrie. There's, we have Carrie at home. It's called Carrie. And, uh, we don't need another one. We also have many other remakes that are not very good. Nevertheless, I do really quite like Mike Flanagan's films and TV shows. Okay. Now, what's your number three?

• 1:32:25Speaker 03

  My number three is also higher on someone else's list.

• 1:32:27Sean Fennessey?

  Why don't we just do it now, since you've had to sit out the last one?

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  Okay. My number three is Mad Max Fury Road.

• 1:32:33Sean Fennessey?

  This is my number one movie.

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  I would have put this on, but this is, I just wanted to be different.

• 1:32:36Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:37Speaker 03

  Not having this on a top five.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  I, and you were gonna fucking do that.

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  Legacy sequels at the Ringer.

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  I just wanted to spread the love to more films. You don't need five people being like, this is so dope.

• 1:32:48Sean Fennessey?

  I see you.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  The blood bag. Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  Man of the people. But that blood bag was dope, though.

• 1:32:53Sean Fennessey?

  Where did you land on Furiosa?

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  I thought it was okay.

• 1:32:57Sean Fennessey?

  See, if you're saying that, I feel more justified in my like, okay, it's okay.

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  I thought it was okay.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  I've said, I've, I've, I've mentioned that I thought Furiosa. Furiosa is better on rewatch.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  I have not revisited it yet.

• 1:33:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I've seen it twice. I almost rented the Chrome, the black and white version, which is on iTunes right now. And I would like to watch it in that format, too, because I quite like Mad Max Fury Road in that format, too. It looks really cool. Yeah, Fury Road is one of the greatest movies of the century.

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  That's it. That's all I have to say.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  I agree. I just wanted to say different thoughts.

• 1:33:31Speaker 03

  I have seen a lot of people, actually, it was around when Furiosa came out, watching Fury Road on airplanes on their phones recently, which it's nice to know that Fury Road is always with us. And I'm usually like, you don't have to go to the theater. Watch it at home if your TV is big enough and your speakers are loud enough person. But I found that slightly. It's like, let's watch Fury Road on the biggest screen possible.

• 1:33:51Sean Fennessey?

  I saw it at the Vista when it was originally released, and it was electrifying.

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Yeah. It's one of my favorite movie theater memories, seeing it for the first time.

• 1:34:01Sean Fennessey?

  CR number three.

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  I got Before Midnight.

• 1:34:04Speaker 03

  That's my number one.

• 1:34:06Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, my God, I didn't even realize that.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  I didn't even notice that. I'm sorry.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  It's fine. It's one of the most beautiful, it's one of the most beautiful movies ever made.

• 1:34:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, let's just start doing our stuff.

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  And honestly, Before Sunset could have been on this list, too.

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  It could have been. I kind of look at that as very much in conversation with the first one about like the mistake. Not that the third one is somehow different, but like very much about young love and like the night before the morning after, even though it stretched off a couple of years. Before Midnight, to me, is like everything, everything that I'm kind of like asking for from Gladiator 2, where I was like, have some guts and be like, what if these people wound up together and they didn't really like it?

• 1:34:41Speaker 03

  It's like an incredibly, incredibly brave, raw, real, and emotionally honest movie about what happens in relationships.

• 1:34:49Sean Fennessey?

  In fairness to Gladiator 2, easier to make that choice in a film the size of Before Midnight. You know, I think also.

• 1:35:00Sean Fennessey?

  We're in our middle age, you know, and it's a movie that like is a lot closer to what my life looks like. Hopefully not the absolute vitriolic disdain between me and my partner.

• 1:35:13Sean Fennessey?

  It's true. How do I, well, that's neither here nor there.

• 1:35:18Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't put this movie on my list, but I similarly love it. I'm like braced by it.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  I'm also just like the idea of being able to come back. This is similar to T2, uh, transpotting where it's like to do a meditation on these things that are really like a huge monument to youth.

• 1:35:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  And then come back and be like, what would it be like if these people just were 20 years older?

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, Linklater is one of my favorite filmmakers. The Before trilogy is one of my three favorite movie trilogies.

• 1:35:45Sean Fennessey?

  One of the other three, Lord of the Rings and the original Star Wars.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  And then whatever the next two Deadpools are.

• 1:35:51Speaker 03

  Probably. We'll see what gets elbowed out of the top three, but I just, I think all three of them are beautiful, but this is such a punch in the gut and I, I love that. It's like so deeply upsetting and it's impossible to escape the fact that the things that you love about the, the, the first movie, getting swept up in some exciting new possibility. The idea of discovery, but then a missed connection. And then it's like, well, what is life actually really like when people make their way to each other? You know, and it's like, it's this and I just love it. I think it's incredible. And I know, I know some people who, who don't like how upsetting it is. But that's what I love about it.

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  That's what I love about it.

• 1:36:35Sean Fennessey?

  I find the film to be very French. Where like a lot of French domestic dramas, you have people like looking at each other and being like, I hate you and I've always hated you. You know, it's like, there's a much more sort of like.

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  Do we have three children together?

• 1:36:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, honestly. Um, and I like that about it as well. Okay.

• 1:36:54Speaker 02

  That was my number three.

• 1:36:55Sean Fennessey?

  So that was Mallory's number one and Chris's number three.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  And we have the same number two.

• 1:36:59Sean Fennessey?

  Well, then we'll do my number two first.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  That's your number two is my number four.

• 1:37:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  Take it away.

• 1:37:04Sean Fennessey?

  That old game. This is Top Gun Maverick. We've mentioned it quite a few times.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  Dynamite movie.

• 1:37:08Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, excellent film. Just, I think it's the degree of difficulty in this film is actually quite higher. One thing we didn't say about Mad Max Fury Road to me is that Max is sort of incidental to that movie. And that by dispensing with the Max mythology, frankly, all of the movies kind of dispense with the Max mythology. But this one in particular is not really worried about connecting dots or making sure that you know that someone is someone's brother or father. It's more about the world and the experience. Top Gun Maverick is the opposite. Top Gun Maverick is like, we're doing the story of this guy from the original movie. And not only that, we're doing the guy's, his best, his dead best friend's son is the other guy in the movie. And so we, a lot of people who'd seen the original bring a lot of baggage to this.

• 1:37:54Sean Fennessey?

  Somehow this turned out to be like a for everyone blockbuster. I don't really know very many people that didn't like this movie. I'm not sure if I know one person that didn't like this movie, even the most cynical, bitterest, anti-franchise, anti-Tom Cruise.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  All this stuff in this movie that's supposed to be pulling on the heartstrings sucks. You're still like, goddamn, those planes were incredible.

• 1:38:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  And if you're like, the planes and like the stupid plotting of like, what country is this? You're like, man, when Val Kilmer shows up, I fucking cried.

• 1:38:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my god. Yeah. Also, just like, you know, when it came out and the state of the movie industry and COVID and like.

• 1:38:31Sean Fennessey?

  It helped a lot.

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  It, I think that's inextricable, certainly from its initial resonance and staying power. Like, people were just really glad to go share something together.

• 1:38:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:44Speaker 03

  But I think ultimately it's then has further elevated the movie's esteem that when you return to it later, absent that context of initially consuming it, it's, you're still just like, this is fucking amazing. It wasn't just that I was so ready to go sit in the movie theater and watch something again. Right? If that's how you saw it. It's just like, this is incredibly entertaining film.

• 1:39:05Sean Fennessey?

  It was very special.

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:39:06Sean Fennessey?

  So you guys both have the same number two.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  Logan.

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Desecrated by Devil and Wolverine.

• 1:39:11Speaker 03

  Three favorite, uh, well, yeah, was it? One of my three favorite comic book movies ever.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  Dark Knight, this, and?

• 1:39:20Sean Fennessey?

  Ghost Rider, Green Lantern.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  You got it.

• 1:39:21Speaker 02

  Oh, I was gonna say.

• 1:39:24Speaker 03

  Spider-verse.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:39:26Sean Fennessey?

  Sorry, what did you say? The Dark Knight? Spider verse and this are your three favorite?

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  It changes with time. It's

• 1:39:34Sean Fennessey?

  More than like Civil War.

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  Doctor Strange 2.

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  Winter Soldier.

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  Doctor Strange 2? Uh, not, not quite.

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  Hawkeye season one?

• 1:39:45Speaker 03

  I, I loved Hawkeye. Season one, I did.

• 1:39:48Sean Fennessey?

  Eternals?

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:39:50Speaker 02

  Andy still fucking mentions the Eternals.

• 1:39:53Sean Fennessey?

  It was beautiful how Brian Tyre and Henry was Oppenheimer. That was so incredible.

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  My top five certainly. But yeah, this is one of my, my five favorite comic book movies ever. It's wonderful. Great performance. Also a great example of a legacy sequel because you have like Daphne Keen. You know, the, I think what everything with Daphne Keen and Hugh Jackman and those characters and like the old and the new and the bridging across time is just pitch perfect.

• 1:40:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's very weird that she's grown up.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  I don't really know how to respond to that.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  Do you think that she should have stayed the same age?

• 1:40:24Sean Fennessey?

  No, I don't. I don't.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  Childlike Empress?

• 1:40:26Sean Fennessey?

  But I had not seen her in any movie at all since that movie came out and she's different.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  You weren't watching His Dark Materials on HBO?

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  Oh, she in that?

• 1:40:34Sean Fennessey?

  Was not.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  She's Lyra. Was she in that? She's the star.

• 1:40:37Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:40:38Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 1:40:38Sean Fennessey?

  Was she in any other films?

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  She was in The Acolyte this summer.

• 1:40:42Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't finish that.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  But does she play somebody with like a helmet on?

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  Oh, she's got, she's green.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Oh, she, she was green?

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  No, but not fully, not, not a full human.

• 1:40:54Sean Fennessey?

  She played, did she play Greedo?

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:40:57Speaker 02

  Does it bother, it doesn't bother you that they brought Jackman, Patrick Stewart to such a moving conclusion? And then they were just like, ha ha. Let's, let's fucking dig this guy's bones up.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  No, because I think that's the, that's the tone. That's the tone and intention of Deadpool and Wolverine and that's what happens in the multiverse.

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  Am I not allowed to be bothered? Is that your point?

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  You are allowed to be bothered.

• 1:41:19Sean Fennessey?

  No, just that you're a pretty easygoing guy.

• 1:41:21Speaker 03

  Not today.

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  Not today. Not about baboons or Wolverines.

• 1:41:28Sean Fennessey?

  I.

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  You don't like Logan?

• 1:41:30Sean Fennessey?

  No, I love Logan. I absolutely love Logan. I'm trying to think if I was bothered by that or not. I think I I view Deadpool and Wolverine as like the Mad Magazine issue about a Marvel movie. I don't really think of it as in that, because that generation, that era of Marvel movies, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. I was personally like, these are actually good. Like, I was going to the bat, like going to bat every week on the pod and being like, I promise, like, these are good.

• 1:41:54Speaker 02

  Screaming at Amanda.

• 1:41:55Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen so many fucking movies in my life. The idea of like them getting this kind of coordinated storytelling right? In succession over a period of years is fucking crazy and we have to acknowledge it while it's happening. And now, when you see what's happened in the last five years, you can kind of see, now Logan, even at the time, got a screenplay nomination.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a little bit outside of like the kind of.

• 1:42:17Sean Fennessey?

  It was made by a serious authority and not under the feige thumb or whatever, but it's a very, very good movie. I think you could make the case it's now a little overrated? Because of all that stuff? You know?

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:42:28Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I had a lot more fun at Infinity War than I did at Logan. I think Logan's a better movie. What was like, what was a more fun movie experience for me? For me, it was Infinity War.

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  Infinity War is the first one, Endgame's the second?

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  Correct. I saw Infinity War with you and you don't remember that we saw it together? We saw it the day it came out. Kills me. He has no memory of this. We saw it at the Ark Lane in Hollywood. Yeah, because it's gen- because it's one of my two favorite Marvel movies.

• 1:42:49Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, Chris is getting older. This is only gonna get worse, you know?

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  As stated, and it was a very, very, very important movie-going moment for me and Chris has no memory that we.

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  Mal, I just don't know, like, I remember seeing the movie. I just don't, what did we?

• 1:43:01Speaker 03

  That makes it worse.

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  Did we kiss afterwards? Like, what happened?

• 1:43:03Speaker 03

  If only. If only. I'm still waiting. All this time later.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  They got snacks. Let's make out. Like, I don't even know what it, I can remember getting up and be like, that was good, you know?

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  You bring this up like every nine months. I'm like, what the fuck? What happened that day?

• 1:43:20Sean Fennessey?

  You and Mal racing to a bomb shelter together because Vision got snapped is incredible.

• 1:43:26Speaker 03

  No, I mean, it's not what, that's not what happened.

• 1:43:29Sean Fennessey?

  We're learning so much on this pod.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Do you think my memory's getting worse?

• 1:43:33Sean Fennessey?

  No, I made a joke yesterday, we were on, the three of us were on a call together, and I don't remember what event we were discussing, but I, I think I literally said that was before my daughter was born, so that memory doesn't exist for me.

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  I was talking about you two, I remember, I was talking about finding, finding a picture on my phone.

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, me and Sean getting a cinnamon bun.

• 1:43:50Speaker 03

  At the vending machine at our old office, like, furiously shaking it. I have one picture where you're just like shaking the vending machine, it's like, what could this be for? And then the next picture where you're triumphantly holding a cinnamon, cinnamon roll.

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  Hot, like a honey roll.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, a honey bun, and Chris, Chris remembered.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  And you did not.

• 1:44:06Sean Fennessey?

  No, I gave that over to Alice, she can have all those memories that have just been siphoned from my mind forever.

• 1:44:12Speaker 03

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna find this photo again, and I'm gonna, it's gonna be my first post on Blue Sky.

• 1:44:15Sean Fennessey?

  I don't even remember there being a vending machine at the old office.

• 1:44:18Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, outside.

• 1:44:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, right, literally right outside our door.

• 1:44:20Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm sure I've dumped like roughly $840 into it over the course of our time there, but I have no, no recollection.

• 1:44:26Speaker 02

  I didn't use it that much.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:44:28Sean Fennessey?

  You're too good for that. You're, you're about the macros.

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  No, remember I used to go to that weird fucking Walgreens and come back with like 10 pounds of candy?

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  Oh yeah.

• 1:44:36Sean Fennessey?

  I do remember that, that was great, that was sick.

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  That was, yeah, your, your circuit was the Sweetgreen, the Tamarind Deli.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:43Speaker 03

  And it was...

• 1:44:44Sean Fennessey?

  And Rubies and Diamonds, you'd spend $14 on a coffee.

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  Oh my god, I love that Rubies and Diamonds, that afternoon routine of the, the coconut sea salt cold brew? And what was the iced tea? And then I would say, Chris, you want anything? And you'd say, green tea, no sweetener.

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  That was from Starbucks, yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  Right, and then, sure, and then you'd go to Sweetgreen, you'd say you want anything, I would say yes, and then, uh, at some point, a couple of years in.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  Oh yeah.

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  I had Venmoed Hugh $500 for all of the salads, and he would not accept it, and he would turn it to me.

• 1:45:16Speaker 02

  It was the craziest thing anyone's ever done, honestly. It was, if you wanna know like, how did Joker get the phone into this guy's chest? I was just like, what happened? And Mal was like, I feel like you always get me salads, and I'm like, doesn't matter.

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like a lot of lunches over the years, you know?

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  Like, I got her like eight salads, and she tried to give me $500.

• 1:45:34Speaker 03

  So I put a lot of toppings. I don't want to be in anyone's debt, ever.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  It was so fucking crazy. I bet I still have the Venmo notification where I was just like, "What are you doing?" And you were like, "I don't know, can I take it back?" And I'm like, "Take it back."

• 1:45:47Speaker 03

  It was when we were in offices next to each other, so like I did it from across the wall, and then he just like appeared around the door. And he's like, "Did you mean to send this to me?"

• 1:45:56Speaker 02

  I thought she was sending like 50 bucks. And even that, I was like, "No, that's too much money." The eight kale caesars I got you.

• 1:46:02Sean Fennessey?

  What did you, who did you think she could have possibly been sending that amount of money to? Like, who are some of the other candidates for that transaction?

• 1:46:10Speaker 03

  Great question.

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:11Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think your memory is getting worse. I think our memories are getting worse. Alright, we're getting old.

• 1:46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, we just have too much shit in there now.

• 1:46:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, agree, agree. We didn't really get a chance to talk about these final number ones. There's one more movie to talk about. So, my number one is Mad Max: Fury Road. Mal's number one is Before Midnight. Your number one, Chris, is my number five. What is it?

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  It's Color of Money, which I still think is the most magical revisiting of like a, and frankly, better than the original to me. Revisiting of like a text and like exploring like who this guy would have been after, years after The Hustler, returning to Eddie Felsen and just being like, "Now we find Paul Newman in his Twilight. Now we find Paul Newman bringing up like a new protege." And it's just like fucking Scorsese and Richard Price dealing. New Richard Price novel out now.

• 1:47:05Sean Fennessey?

  I saw that. Have you read it?

• 1:47:07Speaker 02

  I, I got a PDF.

• 1:47:08Speaker 03

  Do a book club.

• 1:47:09Sean Fennessey?

  You got a PDF?

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Sean Fennessey?

  From, from whom?

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  From his publicist.

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  A galley?

• 1:47:13Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:47:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's out.

• 1:47:14Sean Fennessey?

  Because you don't want to pay for it?

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  If he had accepted the Venmo.

• 1:47:18Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good point.

• 1:47:19Speaker 02

  You haven't paid for a movie in five years then, right?

• 1:47:21Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean?

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  When's the last time you were like, "I'm paying and not getting reimbursed for a film?"

• 1:47:26Sean Fennessey?

  I go to rep screenings all the time.

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  Oh, you don't expense those?

• 1:47:30Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  No, I'm not trying to catch you. I'm trying to say like, do you ever say like, "Tonight, I just give my money back to Hollywood."

• 1:47:37Sean Fennessey?

  What are you fucking talking about? You know how much physical media I buy?

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  Oh, that's true. That's true. That's true.

• 1:47:42Sean Fennessey?

  You know how much of my personal wealth I have dumped back into Hollywood?

• 1:47:45Speaker 02

  Well, you're like throwing away all your memories for your daughter. I thought you maybe saved some money for her too.

• 1:47:49Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, honestly, the one thing I should not be giving any more money to is Hollywood.

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  What are you putting your personal wealth into?

• 1:47:56Speaker 02

  Bitcoin.

• 1:47:59Sean Fennessey?

  How is the, how is the, as you get on in years, the cranking it? Is everything still, all is good?

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  What, masturbating or buying? Buying meme coins?

• 1:48:08Sean Fennessey?

  Cranking it and buying crypto are sort of like your two, those are your twin hobbies?

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I honestly, like, I probably spend way more time, like, on Bitcoin than I do cranking it, yeah.

• 1:48:19Sean Fennessey?

  I could have taken a turn there. Okay, great. Very good pod. Very nice to be reunited with you guys here.

• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  Sincerely, did you have fun?

• 1:48:26Sean Fennessey?

  Did I, on this pod?

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:27Sean Fennessey?

  Oh my, are you serious?

• 1:48:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  The best, I love you guys.

• 1:48:30Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I can't think of two-

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  Two of the closest people in the world to me.

• 1:48:33Speaker 02

  Do you think that when you ask, what did you think of Gladiator 2, like, or what did you think of Wicked? Or whatever, we should start, like, creating like a, like a rating system of some sort to just-

• 1:48:43Sean Fennessey?

  A rating system?

• 1:48:44Speaker 02

  Geolocate our take? It's like, I want to say that was a 7.25 out of 10.

• 1:48:49Speaker 03

  No. I think this is a podcast about nuance.

• 1:48:52Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I can't say I agree with that.

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  Three Mike and Ikes out of five.

• 1:48:57Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:48:58Sean Fennessey?

  Why does it have to be numerical? You know, why are we bound by-

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  How many cranks?

• 1:49:02Sean Fennessey?

  The traditional metrics. I think, you know, how many times will I watch this movie and consider whipping it out?

• 1:49:08Speaker 02

  Do I want Vivek and Elon to cut funding to this movie? No. So that was my like-

• 1:49:12Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:49:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I don't, no, I don't want to do that.

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:49:15Sean Fennessey?

  I think I sometimes, in the process of talking about a movie, I'll say like, oh, it's like a gentleman's six, or it feels like a seven out of 10. But I feel inconsistent in that. And I also, personally, on second watches or third watches of movies, change my opinion quite a bit. So I just mentioned the Dr. Sleep thing, where I watched that movie and I was like, oh, it's like three stars, two and a half stars.

• 1:49:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:49:36Sean Fennessey?

  And I watched it again and I was like, this is one of my favorite movies of the last 10 years.

• 1:49:38Speaker 03

  I assume, I expect and assume that when I watch Gladiator 2 again, I will like it even more.

• 1:49:43Sean Fennessey?

  More?

• 1:49:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:49:44Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's an interesting question.

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  Yes. I do too.

• 1:49:45Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think? You think so too?

• 1:49:46Speaker 03

  Because the little things that pull you out of it are just, you have accepted by that point. You understand that that's the texture consuming and then you can just, like you said earlier, like, watch it on its own.

• 1:49:54Speaker 02

  Cause I think the first time you watch it, you're like, let's fucking go, let's go. And then you're like, what? Like, I'll give it a Canadian five and a half.

• 1:50:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, well, an honor and a pleasure. Thank you both, Mallory. We can hear you on House of R.

• 1:50:12Speaker 03

  House of R, yep.

• 1:50:13Sean Fennessey?

  And nowhere else.

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  Only when I'm invited to join one of you on your podcast, otherwise just House of R.

• 1:50:19Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, where can we hear you?

• 1:50:21Speaker 02

  The, uh, the big picture.

• 1:50:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you've been, you've been, how many consecutive episodes of New York Near have you been on now?

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  I've, like, I, we can never make the schedules work, you know?

• 1:50:31Sean Fennessey?

  It's tough, it's unfortunate. Have you been watching Karl-Anthony Towns?

• 1:50:34Speaker 02

  No, I don't watch basketball anywhere.

• 1:50:36Sean Fennessey?

  That's tough. Two and 12, eh?

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  I have to go do this with Bill in like 20 minutes, so like, fuck off.

• 1:50:42Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Jack Sanders, thanks to our producer Bobby Wagner, thanks to Olivia Creary filling in for Bobby this week. Next week on the show, we will dig into the other huge movie this week, maybe the episode I should have done for the Friday, honestly, given the level of interest, but, uh, we'll be talking about Wicked.

• 1:50:58Speaker 03

  Wonderful.

• 1:50:59Sean Fennessey?

  Which is also Wicked Part One.

• 1:51:00Speaker 02

  Who's doing Wicked?

• 1:51:01Sean Fennessey?

  Critical guest, another important person in our life, Juliet Litman.

• 1:51:08Speaker 03

  Four of us have still not podded together.

• 1:51:10Sean Fennessey?

  That's true, you want to put that out in the world.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  It'll be the last pod we ever do.

• 1:51:13Sean Fennessey?

  In the history of The Ringer and Granlund, the three of us and Juliet have never podcasted together.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:51:20Speaker 02

  Have we never done a hottest take together?

• 1:51:22Speaker 03

  No, we have never done a podcast together. I would say famously or infamously inside of our, uh, our, our friend group, we did Inglourious Basterds without Juliet, as she likes to remind us.

• 1:51:34Sean Fennessey?

  That did happen. I have no, I have no rebuttal to that. But if you guys want to, if you check out Wicked Part One over the weekend and you want to get involved.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  Always say au revoir Shoshona to each other.

• 1:51:44Sean Fennessey?

  You do say that, yeah. So you were the key betrayer in that equation.

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess I was. I apologize to Juliet.

• 1:51:50Sean Fennessey?

  Will you watch, will you see Wicked?

• 1:51:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  I will.

• 1:51:54Sean Fennessey?

  You will watch it.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, definitely.

• 1:51:56Sean Fennessey?

  In a movie theater. Isn't Wicked more IP than Gladiator even? Like, isn't it a House of R episode?

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  Could have been.

• 1:52:04Sean Fennessey?

  You just chose not to?

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  It's a witch.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  Have to follow through on the hype draft.

• 1:52:06Sean Fennessey?

  Is this because it's about women? Or like, what's the issue?

• 1:52:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, we don't like women.

• 1:52:09Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  But we will be doing a lot of thighs-a-clock talk tomorrow.

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  Oh, Dune Sisterhood, prophecy.

• 1:52:15Speaker 03

  Dune prophecy.

• 1:52:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  We'll be covering that weekly.

• 1:52:17Sean Fennessey?

  You really got the title.

• 1:52:18Speaker 03

  On House Bar.

• 1:52:19Sean Fennessey?

  Right there.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  Dog, the only TV show that's good is Landman. It's, it's, it is honestly, it's, it's better than Spree. It's like so fucking good.

• 1:52:30Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks for listening.

• 1:53:27Speaker 04

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• 1:53:40Speaker 07

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• 1:53:44Speaker 06

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