The 10 Best Movies at the Telluride and Venice Film Festivals. Plus: Nathan Fielder’s Stunning Elizabeth Holmes Doc.

It’s time for one of our favorite episodes of the year: the fall film festival report! Sean and Amanda break down all of the best things they saw this year at the Telluride and Venice film festivals, the general vibes, and what it all means for the Oscar races going forward. (0:00) Intro (3:22) ‘Artificial’ trailer (6:22) The secret screening of Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary stuns at Telluride (23:30) The festival vibes report (40:50) The best movies from Telluride and Venice Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan®. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there®. It's on Prime. 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.

• 0:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy.

• 0:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:17Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about the fall film festivals. On today's show, I am back in L.A. and ready to report on my annual sojourn to the Telluride Film Festival. Amanda is still in Venice, Italy, and ready to report on the proceedings there. We've seen all the major movies that played, and we'll give you our favorites and not-so-favorites on today's episode. But first, some movie news, right after this.

• 0:40Sean Fennessey?

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• 2:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Dobbins, what time is it where you are?

• 2:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Ciao, big guy. It's 6:00 P.M. It's cocktail hour.

• 2:49Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, good for you.

• 2:50Amanda Dobbins?

  So this Negroni was purchased, it was sold pre-mixed in a plastic bag, and then in a little paper envelope, and then I poured it into this glass. It's pretty good.

• 3:02Sean Fennessey?

  That sounds horrible, but okay, I'm happy for you. I'm happy you've got some social lubrication for this conversation show. Hopefully, things will go great. Have you been having a nice time in Italy?

• 3:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's been great. I'm very pro-Italy. This has been a very fun experience of a festival. And it's of the, this is my third time here. I would say that the crowd control is the best that it's been. The logistics are the best that it's been. This weekend had a fun party atmosphere to it. There were people around. I was seeing people I know. I've run into friends. And you know, maybe some of that is just that I've been coming long enough that I have festival friends and know the route. But it hasn't rained here, which is great. Last year, Yassie and I had to wade through a lot of light flooding. I almost got stuck on the Lido after J. Kelly.

• 3:57Amanda Dobbins?

  And I navigated the regatta with no problems. You know about the regatta?

• 4:03Sean Fennessey?

  I do, because I've seen the film The Social Network.

• 4:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Didn't you know about the Venice regatta?

• 4:07Sean Fennessey?

  Well, no, I mean, yes.

• 4:08Amanda Dobbins?

  That one's not in Venice. Every year, smack dab in the middle of the Venice Film Festival, they hold a historical regatta, and they close the main waterway, the Grand Canal in Venice, which is also like, you know, closing Fifth Avenue in New York or something. Like, they close the main street. And they also close many of the shuttles to and from the island where all of the films are. But I was not stopped, and I got a shuttle that worked, and I saw the films. And that's what I do.

• 4:39Sean Fennessey?

  We will talk about those films. Every year, when you go to this festival, you come on the pod and you start describing it, and you give me more and more reasons to never go. It's just amazing. There are so many things that make no sense about the Venice Film Festival. We'll get into all that. Before we talk about the rest of our experiences at the festival, one of the things that you were hoping would be at the festival that you're at is the Luca Guadagnino film Artificial, which is the since-dispensed-with-by-Amazon portrait of Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, co-founder, I should say. And we have a new trailer, or teaser trailer, for the film. This movie has been a subject of much discussion, I think, in the world of movie nerds, but I'm not totally sure if this film has quite reached the public at large.

• 5:24Sean Fennessey?

  And so we got the first look at it now. It's coming out later this year from Neon. There's going to be a screening of the film at the New York Film Festival in one month. You've just watched it. I'm very curious for your thoughts on it, given that you're a Luca, I don't know, completist, defender?

• 5:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I'm not a Luca completist because I did not make it to his seven- or eight-hour documentary about Berluci here at the festival. I saw a four-hour documentary, so you know, I'm doing my best, but seven was a bridge too far. So nor do I have any of Luca Guadagnino's Zara Home collection, which I don't know if it's for sale yet.

• 6:01Sean Fennessey?

  I see.

• 6:01Amanda Dobbins?

  But the images were released, so I'm an aspiring completist. I thought it was a good teaser. I mean, it's a minute. It's just, I mean, it's, you know, pure editing, and you just, you get kind of one-shot flashes of everything except for Andrew Garfield doing his best, Jesse Eisenberg walking through the Square of Harvard and the opening of Social Network. You know, they are leaning into the homage of, and trying to draw a line from that film to this film. I'm okay with that, because that's one of my favorite films of my lifetime. I would really like to see this movie. I think it would have fit in at the Venice Film Festival this year and some of the movies that I've seen.

• 6:45Amanda Dobbins?

  But, you know, you get what you get, and you don't get upset.

• 6:50Sean Fennessey?

  I love when you speak to me like I'm a toddler.

• 6:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, that's what they teach us in the Montessori way.

• 6:55Sean Fennessey?

  I'm aware. I have heard such wildly different reactions to the movie from people who have seen it. I have been told that this is going to be one of the funniest movies of the year. I've been told this is one of the bleakest movies of the year. I totally agree with what you're saying about its clear connectivity to the social network and the idea that OpenAI and the AI rush feels like a kind of two decades later extension of what Mark Zuckerberg helped to launch in the world of social media in the 2000s. I hope this is good. I don't, you know, I don't really know what to say. Garfield, Yur Borasov, you mentioned that you saw a four-hour documentary, which I know is about Elon Musk. He is portrayed here in this movie by Eck Behringholtz. Monica Barbaro is in the film.

• 7:40Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty excited. It sounds like it's going to come at the end of the year and then go wide to the public at the beginning of 2027. So it's still a long ways away, but so far, so good. Okay.

• 7:53Sean Fennessey?

  Where would you like to start? Would you like me to start?

• 7:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I did. I taught you about the regatta, so you can teach me about, you know, how one gets into a secret screening.

• 8:04Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, sure. That, maybe we should, we should probably just talk about that.

• 8:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, yeah.

• 8:09Sean Fennessey?

  Well, we're going to do a whole conversation about the summer at the movies on Friday. So from here on out, it's all Fall Film Festival stuff. If you don't want any of it spoiled for you, I understand. I won't be spoiling any of the movies. Amanda won't be spoiling any of the movies. We'll just be talking about what we liked and why, and what the atmosphere was like. And, you know, Telluride, it's pretty safe to say, was defined this year by a secret screening. Doing some press beforehand, the director of the festival, Julie Hunsinger, in an interview with Variety noted that there was a true TBA on the calendar, a to-be-announced film, which is something that happens every year. There are always TBAs on the calendar. Sometimes it's a, you know, a smaller film, an independent film that hadn't been previously announced. Sometimes it's just a repeat of a movie that had been playing really well across the festival.

• 8:53Sean Fennessey?

  One of the great things about Telluride is that the films play three, four, or five times.

• 8:59Sean Fennessey?

  So in this case, this was a true TBA. Nobody knew what the movie was. And it became the talking point in every line at every movie over two and a half days. What is it? What is it? What is it? Many guesses, many wrong guesses, lots of anticipation and speculation. I think it created a little bit of a sense of anxiety at the festival because everyone was starting to get worried if they could get in to the screening. Which, you know, the Werner Herzog Theater, which is one of the primary theaters at the festival, is fairly big. I want to say it has maybe a 600 person capacity, maybe more than that. But it's not huge. And there are thousands of people at the festival in this tiny town in Colorado.

• 9:40Sean Fennessey?

  And I did know what it was, which was very strange. Because every single conversation that you have with people, they're like, do you know? Do you know? Do you know? And I knew it was going to be a big deal, but I don't think I anticipated quite how big a deal it was going to turn out to be.

• 9:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you? What was your strategy when people asked you?

• 9:59Sean Fennessey?

  I know, and I'm sorry, but I can't say. And I was so lock and key with it the entire time. And I was, honestly, I'm proud of myself. I felt like, I feel like I could work for the government now.

• 10:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, if you want to, I guess. I think you did a great job. I question, at some point, I think that you should have just started lying and just been like, I don't know. And I understand that, you know, knowledge is, you know, currency and it's, it's very cool. And I actually got angry text messages from friends of ours asking if I knew. So that, because you wouldn't tell them. And I also kept a secret, just so everybody knows. But I, it's kind of annoying. It's sort of like the extended version of, yeah, well, I've seen this movie six months ago, but we can't talk about it for a while.

• 10:49Sean Fennessey?

  Of course, of course. You know what? Annoying is just a part of life for me. There's not really anything I can do about that. The problem is, is if you tell one person you know, then it gets out pretty quickly that, oh, well, Sean knows. And so, accounting for that was, it was fine. It was honestly fun to hear people guessing. And the guesses were myriad. They were, is it the new Terrence Malick film? Is it Frank Ocean's A24 movie? Is it Zac Efron's movie Famous? Is it, there were movies that haven't even been shot yet that were being guessed about. It became clear that it was a documentary at a certain point because of the way that the information had, had spread. And then it ultimately was revealed that it was a Nathan Fielder project. And then it was a Nathan Fielder project about Elizabeth Holmes. Now, to some people, I think that that would be really, really exciting.

• 11:32Sean Fennessey?

  Somebody like me who loves Nathan and has been kind of, you know, venerating all the projects he's been doing since Nathan for You. I mean, I think other people were like, a documentary? And, and it's three hours long? And about Elizabeth Holmes, who like, has already gone through the content meat grinder in so many ways, books and television shows and podcasts. And, you know, her story has been told so many times. So anyway, um, by the time we were in line to get into the movie, which was on Sunday night, which is not quite the end of the festival, but more or less is kind of the closing evening. I would say about 50% of the people in the line that I was in felt like they had a handle on what the movie was. And so then it became this question of, well, this better be good.

• 12:16Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like, because when you get in line at Telluride, you do have to sometimes wait an hour, two hours. I saw a film at the theater where the, where the, you can see everything, the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim film played, at 12:45 PM. And so I arrived at that theater at 12:00, and there were people who were already in line for a 6:15 showing of the secret screening. That's, that's really early.

• 12:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I think you saying that you arrived 30 minutes early for the first screening of this is the most obnoxious thing that you've said on this podcast.

• 12:48Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, that's not, that's not what I said. I said to the, to the 12:45 screening earlier in the day, I showed up 30 minutes early.

• 12:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Of, oh, a movie that was not that movie? Okay. Because I was going to be like, that's, listen.

• 12:59Sean Fennessey?

  No, I showed up two hours early.

• 13:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I've never been to Telluride. Okay, all right.

• 13:01Sean Fennessey?

  No, I showed up two hours early. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and I'm, you know, I'm very fortunate as a member of the press and somebody who, you know, knows a lot of the people that were trying to get people into the screening that like, I didn't have a hard time getting in. It did become a fairly exclusive line though, because the way the Telluride works, as I've talked about many times over the years, is there's a group of people who are called patrons. They have very special passes. They pay a lot of money for those passes. They get first rights into the door. So because of their passes, they are the supreme leaders of Telluride. The press gets treated very well at Telluride. I love my experience there. We're not quite at that high tier, but in the right circumstances, you can get in somewhat early into screenings.

• 13:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Sean Fennessey?

  Then there are people who, of course, are celebrities and work in the movie business. And I've not seen so many people from so many studios that didn't make the movie at a screening like this. On top of the fact that, you know, all the stars, like, you know, Jordan Firstman and the Casablanca Kid, we're all there. You know, like, a whole, a whole raft of famous people were also in the screening room. So I don't know how many regular festival goers got in. Maybe 100? Maybe less? Not a lot. So this was a fairly exclusive room. And the film only played once. And it was three hours. And so you effectively had to give the entire seven hours of the last night of the festival over to this movie. So a lot of people were like, this better be good.

• 14:24Sean Fennessey?

  And it was fucking amazing. And, um, you know, it's so rare that something that everybody is like, oh my God, I hope this is good. I hope this is good for it to be good. It's such a rare feeling, Amanda.

• 14:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I am, I'm quite jealous. I, we were texting because many, much of the A24 team, and Lance Oppenheim, who also directed Primetime, which debuted here at Venice on Saturday night, the 5 PM slot. And it was like, the big, scenic premiere of the week. And, and the big party of the week. And it was really fun. But so I met Lance, I met his entire family, congratulated them on Primetime, and they were in Venice, like, at midnight local time, Venice. And then made it to, and like, all traveled and made it to Telluride in time for this premiere. So like, I had an inkling and was just incredibly jealous and remain incredibly jealous.

• 15:20Amanda Dobbins?

  And everyone working on the team now knows when I land in Los Angeles, so that I can then see it in Los Angeles. And I'm going to send some more follow-up texts as soon as we're done recording. Hi, guys, I love you. That said, I didn't even read your entire newsletter because I don't want to know anything. Yeah. All I know, like, I've watched the teaser and I know that, I know what Nathan Fielder said as soon as he walked on the stage, which you can share with people. And I kind of don't want to know anymore.

• 15:47Sean Fennessey?

  I know, and I'll try to respect that and be careful in this conversation. Because I think it's fascinating to me how quickly the teaser went viral. And I think it kind of indicates the curiosity that drives so much of the movie. And I think the teaser is, in some ways, an accurate reflection of the film, and in other ways, a little bit of a wrong footing of what the movie is. And is a really great draw into the story. But it does start out as what it looks like, which is Nathan Fielder shooting a sort of a hybrid of a lot of the work that he's done on the rehearsal and on The Curse and on Nathan for You. And as a sort of like snapshot of Elizabeth Holmes in the final days before she goes to federal prison.

• 16:31Sean Fennessey?

  And then the film goes in many, many other directions from there. I thought it was like a fascinatingly form-breaking approach to telling a story. It's three hours for a reason. It's sort of a bifurcated story. The first half is what it looks like. The second half, it goes in wild directions. You know, before the film started, Nathan and Lance came out after Julie introduced them. And Julie was like giddy and ecstatic introducing the movie, which is also dangerous to kind of set people up, that you're like so excited to have something. And then they came out and, you know, they're both very low-key, downbeat, you know, Nathan doing his kind of like, hey, hope you guys like this, you know, even though you've all been waiting, you know, 72 hours to see this movie.

• 17:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Lance jet lagged, as previously discussed.

• 17:14Sean Fennessey?

  Although I also spoke with him after the film, and he seemed more awake than I was. So I was impressed. And the movie played like gangbusters. And it became pretty much the only thing that anybody wanted to talk about in the ensuing 24 hours of the festival. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. I do think that some of this is, of course, the natural festival high of you make a big trip to go somewhere and you want it to be worth it. Like you were describing your experience in Venice and how it's been like a good Venice. And you've had like a good slate of films and you see friends that you like and...

• 17:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, films and experience, yes.

• 17:47Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. But, and that's part of it too, is the films sometimes matter just as much as the experience. And this was kind of a fusion of those two things. This was an event and it was a movie. And those two things colliding in this way, I think were really exciting and gratifying. To me, as somebody who really loves documentary and is fascinated by the form of documentary, the fact that this is something that felt part of a lineage and also very new, I really enjoyed. I love portraits of complex people who we don't know whether we should trust or not. And what is the true self, I think is kind of the... Overarching concept of the movie. I'm trying to be very careful here. Now, when the movie ended, Lance and Nathan came out for an interview, which was moderated by Emma Stone, which is just some like classic Telluride shit. You know, like Emma Stone's here, she's

• 18:31Sean Fennessey?

  gonna do the Q and A. And she was a very good moderator and asked five very simple and straightforward and good questions. And when the film ended, I watched a bunch of people leave the screening and not sit for the Q and A, which I found baffling because I've never wanted to hear a Q and A more after a movie. However, one thing I should mention is they did bag our phones at this screening, which has never happened to me in film festival history. So no one had access to their cellphone for almost five hours. So I guess some people were desperate to just race out and tweet about what they had just seen or something. But-

• 19:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Or like check in with their family, you know?

• 19:08Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. Yeah, okay. That's generous.

• 19:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, whatever.

• 19:11Sean Fennessey?

  These people don't give a fuck about their family. They went to Telluride to watch movies.

• 19:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I guess it's true. I don't know. I still remember bartering with the Spider-Man press people about like, I'm really pregnant and I need my phone in case something happens.

• 19:22Sean Fennessey?

  I remember that. I remember that. So anyway, you know, we didn't have our phones. We were a truly captive audience. And in the conversation afterwards, they talked about how they still don't really know what to make of what they made and how they made it. And to see them so unguarded about that, and especially Nathan, who, as much as he is a filmmaker and a TV show impresario and a documentarian, is also like, he's a character, you know, he's a performer. And he-

• 19:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. That's part of his art. That's part of, well, his art and his work and his, however you want to define. I mean, it is art, but it's also journalism and also, you know.

• 20:01Sean Fennessey?

  I always think of it as anthropology.

• 20:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Cultural criticism. Yeah.

• 20:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I always think of it as him trying to kind of understand human relationships and interactions and reactions. And this movie is a huge part of that project. But they both were, and Nathan even more so than Lance, were still a little bit, just about gobsmacked about what they had done. And this project, I think it started in 2023. It's been going on for a number of years. And they stopped after a period of time and then came back to it. And you can see that it was, in the making of it, it was something that they were figuring out in real time, especially the second half of the film. They kind of got to the end of the moment when Elizabeth Holmes goes to prison and had to think about where they wanted to go next. And it's an extraordinary thing. And I'm really happy to have been in the room. I feel very lucky to have been in the room.

• 20:47Sean Fennessey?

  The cool thing is, in addition to this kind of simultaneous release of that teaser that you mentioned, the movie's coming out soon, which I think is great. It's coming out in October. And thank goodness, I think kind of like lording this over people would not only be obnoxious for me, but even from the studio and the people who made it, there's this kind of urgency to want to see this thing, which is really cool. And now it immediately falls into the category of like, well, now it's been overhyped. But I just have to give you like an honest reaction to how I felt in the room, which was, we were buzzing.

• 21:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. No, I was watching from afar. And until, with some envy, and until Sunday, it had seemed like the festivals were kind of, we had many of the same films. Many went from Venice to Telluride. You know, we had Liam and Noel Gallagher and Oasis on Saturday night. And, you know, I'll talk about that. And so-

• 21:39Sean Fennessey?

  I'm jealous of that.

• 21:40Amanda Dobbins?

  They were, it was like, it was even. And we were having different experiences. But like, you were in the mountains and I was having a tremendous number of spritzes. And like, life was good. And, you know, and then it was like, the whole primetime crew, like, left. And the energy shifted. And I was like, I really want to be, I really want to be seeing this.

• 22:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Amanda Dobbins?

  And also somehow, I'm like, still in Venice. So I can't see it yet. I can't believe, this happens every year. Why am I still in Venice?

• 22:08Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know.

• 22:08Amanda Dobbins?

  It's okay.

• 22:09Sean Fennessey?

  You extended again this year. You were like, I think one more day I have to see something. I was like, good lord.

• 22:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, honestly, I extended at this point so that we could record. And we didn't have to record so late, because it takes like a full day to get back home. But I should have come home on Monday. But that's okay. I really want to see it. Let's, let's talk about Oscars.

• 22:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You know, people have been bringing this up. I saw Clayton Davis of Variety immediately after the movie. And invariably, that conversation just started right away. And Clayton and I were sort of talking about, there's one component of the movie that I do not want to spoil for people, that I think kind of shatters this conversation in a really interesting way. So I'm not gonna do, I'm not gonna talk about that.

• 22:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 22:48Sean Fennessey?

  Is it gonna be eligible for the Best Documentary? It will be. The documentary branch is a little-

• 22:55Amanda Dobbins?

  It's weird.

• 22:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. They're a little tricky when it comes to celebrity focused stories, which this sort of is. They're a little tricky when it comes to true crime. They're a little tricky when it comes to celebrity filmmakers. So, and because this is so form breaking, maybe they'll embrace it, maybe they won't. It's a little hard to say. I heard people talking about Best Picture. That seems like a reach to me. I would campaign for it. It's right near the top of my favorite movies that I've seen this year. Like, we'll be talking about it quite a bit. I've already had to like, look at the October schedule and be like, oh, fuck, I gotta break this and start all over again, because we're gonna do at least one conversation about the movie itself. It is, but it is unique. I mean, it's a Nathan Fielder project. Like, it's not inherently mega commercial. But what it is, is it's something new in the mix. And something that I had texted you, and that you and I

• 23:40Sean Fennessey?

  have been talking about for months, is that it's so weird how it seems like, for the most part, the awards calendar and our expectations of what's coming feels hugely settled right now, with the exception of like, two or three movies. Like I said to you, Digger and Dune are two movies that nobody has seen. Maybe Werewolf, but probably not. But everything else, we kind of know what it is. I guess you could put Artificial on that list. A handful of movies are yet to be seen. But this was the first thing in a while where I was like, oh, this could upend some of our expectations of what's happening this season. I don't know. I mean, from afar, do you have any thoughts on it?

• 24:19Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I think we were also hungry for that, right? Is that we even, we went into the festivals and we identified, you know, okay, this premiere, this premiere, this will get this lot, this lot. And for the most part, we'll talk about them individually, but the films met our expectations. And so you're kind of assigning everything, doing your little draft board. And it's clear, but it's, I think it's been confusing and also just a little narratively frustrating to us. Like, we have six months of a show to do and we already know everything. Like, what, you gotta give us something else? Like, give me a fall, give me a fall thing. So that's very, that was, that's the genius of a surprise drop.

• 24:59Sean Fennessey?

  It is. And, you know, that actually kind of speaks to a little bit of the vibe. For me personally, a Telluride, which I think is quite different from other people. So because we had the chance to go to the Cannes Film Festival this year, roughly 40% of the slate at Telluride I had already seen. And so it created a different kind of experience for me where I didn't see as many movies as I usually do. The timing didn't work for as many things. And there were frequently times when I would look at the calendar and be like, seen that, seen that, seen that, seen that, and then not really have anything to do. Which-

• 25:26Amanda Dobbins?

  What did you do?

• 25:27Sean Fennessey?

  Hung out with friends, had a meal. I don't usually eat a lot of meals. So I had some meals. Thank you. Yeah.

• 25:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm so proud of you.

• 25:33Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you. I also was sick the entire weekend, which was not ideal. But I powered through. I kept my head up. Anyhow, because of that, I think that it was a very, very good Telluride. Like, if you came into the festival, like, almost everyone there, not having seen Club Kid, or Fjord, or La Bola Negra, or Minotaur, or the huge number of Cannes titles that came over.

• 25:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:56Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I would say specifically, Club Kid and La Bola Negra played huge at the festival. People loved both of them. And I'm not super surprised by that. But it was clear that those movies are going to have a life after this.

• 26:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's Club Kid season. I'm ready.

• 26:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And I saw Jordan Firstman and Alex Koko in the airport before we got on the plane to go. And we were talking, and they were like, oh, I feel like people are forgetting about the movie. And I was like, you're gonna be fine.

• 26:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Nope.

• 26:23Sean Fennessey?

  You're gonna be fine. Don't worry, guys. People are gonna see the movie. They're gonna love the movie. They had Reggie, the young actor who plays the kid in the movie.

• 26:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I know. I saw.

• 26:30Sean Fennessey?

  He was there. He was doing great.

• 26:31Amanda Dobbins?

  So his Instagram account is still managed by his parents, but they did a reel of like, his highlights at Telluride. It's great. Great stuff. Can't wait.

• 26:41Sean Fennessey?

  He was charming everybody. So the vibe there was good. I mean, you know, we can get into the new movies. Like you said, we have a lot of crossover for some of the films that played at the festival. But in general, I thought the vibe was good. The weather was very good. Everyone seemed happy. It's my happiest place on earth. I thought it was, at the end of this year, despite being really sick, I was like, I will, I will come here until I die. Like, this is a thing that I just want to be a part of my life.

• 27:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I know. Remember like, a week ago, when you suggested that we switch places at some point?

• 27:08Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, no.

• 27:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you're never, you're never gonna do that. I also, I mean, listen, I, like, I have this on lock now, and I'm really proud of myself. But I've thought about just how much you would be weeping and bitching, like, everywhere I've gone, this festival.

• 27:22Sean Fennessey?

  Well, you're stronger than I am.

• 27:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I was like, I can't even, yeah, I am. And, you know, you don't, the lions are not a thing here. Instead, you have spritzes. So that's really nice. Or go on a boat. But you would hate the boat. Do you get seasick?

• 27:34Sean Fennessey?

  No, no. I grew up on Long Island. Seasick? What are you talking about? I grew up on boats.

• 27:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Look, I-

• 27:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's an island.

• 27:41Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't, it is an island, but you don't really take the boat to go anywhere.

• 27:44Sean Fennessey?

  I took a boat to school every morning. Six hours across the Long Island Sound.

• 27:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Congratulations.

• 27:50Sean Fennessey?

  So I guess the last thing I'll say about just the general mood and atmosphere is, I think- I do think that The Odyssey like put a little bit of a dent in some of the vibe, which was for like the Oscar stuff that you're describing.

• 28:10Sean Fennessey?

  But in a good way, where it was sort of like, let's just enjoy what we have here. Instead of it being like a series of conversations. Cause you know, there are a lot of awards pundits at the festival. There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and strategizing that six month calendar from this point forward. We do plenty of it on the show, but it became more of a like, did you like it or did you not like it? And there were a couple of titles like Elsinore, for example, where it was like, kind of the only conversation about it is, is Andrew Scott a best actor contender? But not really a lot of movies led with that, which I was grateful for, at least for me. And also just that having gone there now, I think eight or nine years.

• 28:50Sean Fennessey?

  I have a lot of friends there. Like you said, you said you have your, your Venice friends. And so there's-

• 28:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And made new ones too, which is really fun.

• 28:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's great. So, and I, and I met so many, so many young people in the student symposium, just like young people in their twenties who were just like, this was my big splurge for the year. I heard you talk about it on the show. I really wanted to be here. Every person there is so fucking nice. Like, it's just the most pleasant, convivial, sincere collection of movie nerds. So I, I, once again, I had a wonderful time. What was the, what was the actual vibe like in Venice?

• 29:23Amanda Dobbins?

  So I think last year I mentioned that it was pretty, last year was very oversubscribed. And it seemed like none of the logistics were in place and there were too many people and not enough boats and not enough spaces at a festival where you really do have to have the logistics nailed down because you can't just walk everywhere. Like you do have to take a boat. The Lido is its own island, separate from like the Venice that you see on postcards. So this year, I'm happy to say, and I wonder if it's because this year was also the Art Biennale, which is only every other year.

• 30:01Sean Fennessey?

  Right. And you, you had been there when that was happening before, right?

• 30:04Amanda Dobbins?

  No, you know what? This is my first year. The other two years I've been on the off years.

• 30:09Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, okay.

• 30:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And so the Biennale, the, you know, the, the openings and all the, the big part of the festival happens, I think in May or June, earlier in the summer, but the pavilions are still open. And so it seems like the infrastructure is just kind of held over and in place. And so it's been, it's been a fun vibe. I think there were slightly lower expectations movie wise, because the lineup was, you know, most of the big Hollywood, uh, expected movies were not on the lineup. And so I, you know, I heard of a couple of journalists who even switched from Venice to Telluride because they couldn't justify it.

• 30:53Amanda Dobbins?

  But with low expectations comes, you know, the possibility to have a lot of fun and to see movies you like. And then other, you know, the, it just wasn't as stressful this year. It was everyone just kind of rolling in and out of stuff. I have also met a lot of young people who, and a lot of Italian young people who apparently listened to The Big Picture.

• 31:14Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, ciao.

• 31:15Amanda Dobbins?

  And then, ciao! And made their way here. So, so that's very fun. And then Saturday was really fun. Saturday was a jam because everyone, as soon as the schedule was released, we all identified, okay, primetime has a 5pm Saturday premiere. And that's like, that is in fact primetime at Venice. And there's, that's also kind of like, that's not going to Telluride, probably. So because of the way the schedule works, Saturday is too late to get to Telluride in time.

• 31:53Sean Fennessey?

  So you're like, this is, this is our centerpiece event.

• 31:56Amanda Dobbins?

  This is, this is gonna be it. And you know, and like Pattinson will probably be there and they'll use his star power and you can just kind of like feel it going. And so, you know, 5pm on Saturday also leaves time for a great 824 party, which definitely happened. And then I realized also that Oasis, Don't Look Back in Anger, the documentary about the recent tour, was premiering afterwards. I was like, oh my God, they're gonna get Liam and Noel. So I did not, I only went to the primetime premiere.

• 32:22Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 32:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Which I had a great time at. And then, listen, the parties remain unmatched. Thank you guys so much for everything that you do.

• 32:32Sean Fennessey?

  Are you thinking parties as a concept right now? What are you?

• 32:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm thinking of the 824 parties as a concept. And like I said, I met Lance Oppenheimer's entire family. They were like, we haven't slept in a week. We were so nervous. They were so sweet. So that was really fun.

• 32:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And I had seen, so I didn't go to the Oasis premiere, but I did see it in the morning. I did start crying at like 8:45 in the morning while singing at the like top of my lungs a long to this concert.

• 33:01Sean Fennessey?

  Were people singing along in the movie?

• 33:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Not really, but I was.

• 33:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. That sounds kind of obnoxious if you were the only person singing along.

• 33:07Amanda Dobbins?

  At a very low volume. Like I wasn't like up there waving my phone doing, don't look back in anger. Like, what are we talking about? I was just kind of, you know, I was, I was, I was having a good time. I was in the moment of this very wonderful documentary.

• 33:22Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 33:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and so as we left the Lido on Saturday night to go to our party, like the Oasis premiere people were arriving. And I didn't see Liam and Noel arrive on their water taxi as I had a few hours before, but it was, it was convivial. It was like, this is the place to be for about six or seven hours.

• 33:42Sean Fennessey?

  It seemed in the photos that they were, they were warm to one another. They seemed to have embraced each other.

• 33:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, one of the most moving things of the documentary, because it's, it's the whole tour. And so it's, you know, they filmed every show. And it's just the montages of every single time they walked on stage, Liam grabbing Noel's hand and holding it up and Liam holding hands together. And the, the, the rediscovered, if not love, I mean, love, yes, the way that they express love of this movie is so moving. It was incredible.

• 34:16Sean Fennessey?

  That's great.

• 34:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't believe it.

• 34:17Sean Fennessey?

  I'm supposed to see it this week. I'm looking forward to it.

• 34:19Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, I mean, it's a delightful time. So yeah, they're in decent spirits. I mean, not decent enough to get Noel to like wear real pants instead of jeans, but whatever. It's a Noel, you are the Noel, I'm the Liam. It's just how life goes.

• 34:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm very proud of that fact.

• 34:36Sean Fennessey?

  So it was a good vibe, is what you would say.

• 34:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. It was good and it was a fun vibe. Now everyone's like, why are we still here? And why are we seeing like junky movies? I saw two movies this morning in competition that I, we don't really need to talk about on this podcast.

• 34:48Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow. Interesting. We won't even utter their names.

• 34:51Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, we can. They're company directed by Casey Affleck, Affleck, and Bunker directed by Florian Zeller, starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz.

• 34:59Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's good to know that, that, that those were not successful in your opinion.

• 35:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I didn't, I mean, it's a beautiful home in the, in Bunker. It's like a really, really great home.

• 35:09Sean Fennessey?

  As you know, I am a Florian Zeller denier. I have never really, I've never really understood.

• 35:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and I was thinking about you and the sun, like 30 minutes into this movie, I was like, no, this is, we just, we don't got it. There are a couple of interesting scenes, but I thought it was silly and inept, so.

• 35:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, that's, I think that speaks to the film festival experience, which is you go in knowing there's probably going to be two or three, two or three things you're gonna love. You go, there's two or three things you know you have to see that are like, it's a part of the reason you went. And then a lot of it is a coin flip. You know, a lot of it is, we don't really know which way this is gonna break. And so there is a lot of risk taking that comes into it. And a lot of, do you have the same kind of schedule, time management? Cause I see that you're seeing like two, maybe three movies a day. When I'm really going hard at a film festival, I'm trying to see four and maybe even sometimes five, if I'm really crazy. This year I only saw four on one day, but the, the schedule stack strategy is challenging at Telluride to make sure that you get to see what you want. And I missed some stuff this year that I regret missing.

• 36:12Sean Fennessey?

  How, how was that for you at Venice?

• 36:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's really, really hard to do four in a day. I did three in a day and that was from begging a lot of publicists to get me tickets to premieres. Because the way it works here is there are press screenings, there are market screenings, and then there are public screenings and, and premieres that are also open to the public, which is cool. So you can get, you can buy a ticket and roll up to the Oasis Don't Look Back in Anger premiere, which I just, I, I'm excited for all of those people.

• 36:44Sean Fennessey?

  And your seat is reserved?

• 36:46Amanda Dobbins?

  In the premieres, yes.

• 36:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you get an assigned seat. And so, and you know, the press screenings work differently, but they, they only show three press movies a day. They parcel them out over the course of the festival. And so, you know, they'll do two press screenings on premiere day for each movie. And then there will be like one makeup at a later date.

• 37:10Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 37:10Amanda Dobbins?

  But then everything else is public. And so you're competing with other people and it's hard to get tickets. And there is a ticketing platform, Allah, the Cannes ticketing platform that I'm sure you still have nightmares about. And so it's, it's, it's hard to make the schedule work where you can get four every day.

• 37:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Amanda Dobbins?

  It's just, and, and then when you add in the logistics of it's, it's hard to stay on the Lido, um, because it's a small island with not that much accommodation. So the getting back and forth to it with the boats, you know, stacking three is the sign of a good day.

• 37:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that sounds challenging. I mean, one of the wonderful things about Telluride is just the conquerability of it. You know, the fact that it is essentially seven or eight theaters that are spread across this small town and you can walk roughly three quarters of a mile all the way across town and just make it and bounce. And for example, on Saturday, I saw four movies and none of them were in the same theater. So I was constantly walking back and forth. And sure, I got 15,000 steps that day, but it was totally manageable and not that hard. And still giving yourself time to eat and wait in line for the appropriate amount of time that you needed to.

• 38:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 38:22Sean Fennessey?

  And so.

• 38:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Are you eating in line?

• 38:25Sean Fennessey?

  Sometimes if you're down at the Herzog, they have a hot dog stand. So it's like very efficient to just grab a Gatorade and a hot dog, just power up, get some protein, get in a movie. But, uh, that's like the best you can do. There's, there's a pizza, there's a pizza place in Telluride called Brown Dog Pizza, which is like a great pizza place, but it's, you would think that it's like Spago in 1984. Like it is like just full of people. The line is like, it's like a two hour wait to get a seat at a pizzeria.

• 38:50Amanda Dobbins?

  But there aren't like official, like cantinas or like pop up places.

• 38:54Sean Fennessey?

  Not really. I mean, it's such an, it's an unincorporated town, you know, like you can't bring in the big businesses. There's no sponsors like that.

• 39:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, right. I guess they're the sponsors because listen, here's the thing, you can get a spritz and some potato chips literally anywhere. I, I snuck one into part two of Musk last night.

• 39:10Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, wow.

• 39:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And they just, and the potato chips come, I mean, it was four hours long.

• 39:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and like part two was, was Trump and Twitter. So I was like, I'm going to have a spritz for this.

• 39:20Sean Fennessey?

  So you can bring a, like a drink into the screening.

• 39:22Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I poured it into a water bottle. Okay. It was like teenage behavior, but like, do, do you understand?

• 39:28Sean Fennessey?

  A Poland Spring vodka screwdriver? Wow.

• 39:31Amanda Dobbins?

  So it was like day seven, I'm still in Venice because they spread the movies out. So you're still in Venice. I'm homesick and I have to watch two hour, two more hours of Musk, Trump and Twitter. And I was like, I'm going to have a spritz. The spritz also no gin. So this is kind of, this has been my trick, this, this, um, this festival. But yeah, that part's amazing. Just everywhere you go, they're like here, and the potato chips just come with the drink.

• 40:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Because I was sick, there was zero alcohol consumption over the weekend, which is probably a good thing, honestly.

• 40:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 40:06Sean Fennessey?

  But yeah, I'm trying to think of what else I should share that is notable from Telluride before we get into the movies themselves.

• 40:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you hike?

• 40:15Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I don't usually have time.

• 40:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I'm not, I'm not averse to it at all. Um, part of, part of the interesting thing, I was just posting photos on Instagram. It's just like, you are in the middle of town. You are surrounded by epic natural beauty. I mean, the, the town is surrounded on both sides by two mountain ranges and there are rivers wherever you walk. And so you are really in the heart of what you would go hike to seek. You know what I mean? It's not, it's not like you have to go to find it. Now there, there is an entire part of the festival that happens on top of the mountain where you take a gondola up. And there are two theaters up there now. One of them is called the Chuck Jones Cinema, and they added a second one this year called the Marvin. And I don't usually go up there, but if you go up there, there's a large hotel up there where a lot of the celebrities and filmmakers stay. And.

• 41:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, interesting.

• 41:01Sean Fennessey?

  That, that sort of, it sort of splits the festival in two. I don't like the theater as much on top of the mountain, so I try to avoid it as much as possible, but there are a lot of people who spend most of their time up there. Um, and up there, there's also lots of hiking and cycling and you can go fishing and there's a lot of things you can do. So a lot, and that's the funny thing too, is when you're there, there are a lot of people who just live there or who are just visiting the town to hang out with no intention of seeing any movies because there's parties and restaurants.

• 41:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, yeah, same here.

• 41:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So even though it is not, you know, a world famous global capital like Venice, it still is like drawing a lot of, I, I guess like looky loose for lack of a better word, you know, just like regular folk who are like, I'm going to see what's going on in this town this weekend. So it's an interesting collection of people that are attending as opposed to like, when you're at the New York Film Festival and you're like, okay, well, these people are here just to go to the screening at the Lincoln Center, you know?

• 41:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I mean, that's fun about it. There are also people who seem to come here just to be adjacent to the festival, you know? And so, and by people, I mean, like companies and also there are art exhibits and there are parties and there are, you know, pop ups and, and all sorts of stuff. So it's, I mean, it's a lot. But it's pretty great.

• 42:18Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. We're very lucky to be able to go do this. So let's, let's tell people about the movies because that's what they really want to hear about. It's interesting how the amount of overlap that we have on our lists, especially right at the top.

• 42:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Sean Fennessey?

  So you got the movie Ink and then I got the movie Ink.

• 42:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 42:37Sean Fennessey?

  And Ink is the new movie from Danny Boyle. It is a portrait of Larry Lamb, who is a, was an enterprising Fleet Street, British newspaper editor in the seventies and eighties. And he, thanks to the financial capital and encouragement of one Rupert Murdoch, helped to redefine journalism in England. And perhaps as the film makes a point 100,000 times over the course of two hours, changed the very nature of our media and interactive culture.

• 43:16Amanda Dobbins?

  It makes the point and also, well, yes, it makes that point. And then also somehow doesn't totally land it, but that's okay.

• 43:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So, you know, you and I both have this movie in the number five slot, which I find to be really interesting because we're both big Danny Boyle fans.

• 43:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Sean Fennessey?

  You know, we love 28 Years Later. Uh, we talked about why we have, you know, he hasn't been on the show before and, you know, like what his career means and all this. This is a movie that makes a ton of sense for him on paper and I found it to be incredibly engaging and entertaining. I, it was like very energetic from the opening moments when, when the sprint song hits and you know, after this wonderful sequence between Jack O'Connell and Guy Pearce, who play Lamb and Murdoch at a dinner table. I was like, boom, we're in like a fly in Danny Boyle movie. I was pumped. And I, but I will say by the time we got to the end of the movie and some of the decisions that were made, I was like, sir, we know. You know, like we, we do, we do know.

• 44:12Amanda Dobbins?

  And also, and there's one specific decision that you're talking about that I'm like, sir, this movie didn't earn that totally. I know you wanted it to, and I don't know whether that's the source material or whether the script or, or just pulled back a little bit. So I completely agree. I think it's good, not great. I think, um, the review I gave to a friend of ours was, I also used the word incredibly engaging, really loud music, everyone looks handsome.

• 44:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 44:38Amanda Dobbins?

  And I would like to say right now that it is not too late for Jack O'Connell to test for James Bond. It is not too late. This man wears a tux in the movie and he can wear the tux.

• 44:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I, I have some complicated feelings about him right now. Cause one, he's like, he's a freight train as an actor. He is like so charismatic and locked in, but he's in a little bit of a dangerous area that I'll call the Nick Cage zone, where he's like really big all the time now. And there are very few moments of quiet reflection happening in any of his performances. And maybe that's the kind of film performances he wants to give, but you know, this film, 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple, Sinners, Back to Black, Ferrari, like these are the last few movies he's made, many of which are good movies or interesting, and his performances are good, but they are high octane, like mega performances. And he's, he's on a precipice here.

• 45:36Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not encouraging him to like make a quiet chamber piece or anything, but there were times when I was like, we, this is really cranked hard.

• 45:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, the whole movie is cranked hard.

• 45:46Sean Fennessey?

  It is, it is.

• 45:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, and the whole movie is cranked hard, just like as a, and as, as an aesthetic and energetic strategy as to make up for the fact that it's like people in rooms talking about printing things on paper without, you know, a smoking gun, really.

• 46:03Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 46:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, and even the smoking guns, which there are some things in this moment where I'm like, is this real? Did this really happen?

• 46:11Sean Fennessey?

  Well, like what, for example, what, what, what, what strained credulity?

• 46:15Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, not in that way. I was just like, I can't believe this is happening and I assume that this is real and this is pretty gripping. So that, I mean, there are stories within it and stories that they cover.

• 46:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Like it's really good. I just, I, there's something, I think it doesn't totally land the plane and that we wanted to, you know, coming out, the comparisons were, it has a little bit of social network and it has a lot of Wolf of Wall Street, but like it's not in a league with either of those movies.

• 46:41Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 46:42Amanda Dobbins?

  It has, it has the blueprint and is doing a lot of the things, which means that I really like it, but it's, it is much like Jack O'Connell's performance, going big just as much as possible, um, to, to just try to hold your attention rather than like offering any sort of nuance.

• 47:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think, I think we're on the exact same page. Like I really liked it and I think when the movie comes to Netflix, it's just so watchable.

• 47:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's just, it's going to do really well. I don't think it's quite like an Academy Award movie or anything like that. I thought Guy Pearce was very good. And actually the way that Murdoch is, was portrayed, I'm not, I'm not a Murdochologist. I'm not, I haven't read any biographies of him. He's not somebody who's like life and career has fascinated me in any way, although I know its impact is profound. I, I liked seeing this sense of resistance or concern at a turning point in his career as he is about to kind of change culture forever because of his financial capital and insight into, I guess what I'll call like the outsider perspective, coming into establishment media and trying to upend it. And the way in which it's being upended is to.

• 47:52Sean Fennessey?

  Corrupt its decency, I guess, for lack of a better phrase. And showing Murdoch as this really hot tempered Australian, who also knows, deep down, something about this isn't right. And so the dynamic between him and Lamb and Lamb becoming really more of the like arch villain of the story in a lot of ways.

• 48:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 48:12Sean Fennessey?

  Um, is, was really fascinating. I like that, that stuff the most. Once again, I was like, this movie could have been told through the eyes of Claire Foy, like another Claire Foy performance where I was like, she's so good. And she's clearly like a composite woman who represents like five women that Larry Lamb worked with. And I feel this way about her in so many movies where I'm like, maybe just like, let her have the movie for a change, but I don't, what, she's your girl. So what'd you think?

• 48:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, yeah, I mean, she does the most that she can with what is like a non-part. You know, she is, she is the girl and she's meant to embody the, the ways in which women at this period had some say, but not enough say, were used against, like, were used as, as tools to make more money and were sort of complicit, but also taken advantage of. And then, you know, she exits, you know, stage right. So it's like, it is, it is what it is. It's not really interested in investigating her, but she's very good. And again, also looks really hot. She's wearing all the seventies clothes.

• 49:15Sean Fennessey?

  She's beautiful in the movie.

• 49:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Really good.

• 49:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 49:17Sean Fennessey?

  No, I know. It, it is.

• 49:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is its own pleasure.

• 49:20Sean Fennessey?

  I completely agree with you. It's a fun festival movie in that specific way, too, because it's not a dour existential drama, human drama. It was, it's a, it's a rock and roll movie in a lot of ways, the way a lot of his best movies are. And it features a lot of the formal stuff that you've seen in the movies from him over the last 10 years. The step printing, the slow motion, the speeding up the, the frames, you know, the wild camera angles, shifting, you know, film stocks. Now, one of the things that I didn't totally know, though, I did sense while I was watching it, that came out after the fact is that Boyle said he used generative AI for some of the sequences in the movie. And he's come under fire for this, for obvious reasons.

• 49:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's very, as soon as we saw, I saw it, it's there, he uses some old photos and then like animates them. And frankly, it looks like a, like a filter that Instagram keeps trying to get you to use.

• 50:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 50:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, and it was so clearly, I was like, oh, you didn't need this. And I like can see what it is, but it also looks like a screensaver and it's on the screen for two seconds. So like, I don't know. Didn't he also say that he used mice, used it for mice?

• 50:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes.

• 50:23Amanda Dobbins?

  But I don't remember the mice.

• 50:25Sean Fennessey?

  I do remember the mice. Um, you know, it's one of those things, it reminded me a lot of the Steven Soderbergh, John Lennon documentary in the conversation we had about that can, where it was sort of like, you've made an interesting film here. This film could be a success. You've also layered on top of it, generative AI that is noticeable. And you've kind of undermined some of the notions of what you're trying to convey.

• 50:44Amanda Dobbins?

  That is true. I will say that the Steven Soderbergh movie is like 50% generative AI. And it was like the point. It was like, that, that was the experiment, right?

• 50:53Sean Fennessey?

  It wasn't 50%. It was, there was a lot more than in this movie, but it wasn't 50%.

• 50:58Amanda Dobbins?

  It was like a lot. And it was, and, and part of that enterprise was, and you know, this is like me sort of defending my guy, Steven Soderbergh, but like, it's, they're tapes, it's audio, we don't have video for it. So let's see whether we can use this tool to, to animate. And the answer I felt was no, which we said at the time, and I felt like you tried it and let's not do it again. But it was a lot more than this. This is two seconds.

• 51:24Sean Fennessey?

  There is, but it's one of those things where if you make that choice, then that becomes definitional to the movie. And when people ask about it now, they're like, oh, there's AI in it. But it's like, that's not what the movie is at all. It's a, it's a two hour docu-drama with a ton of energy. Um, so yeah, I, I'm not surprised we're on the same page about this. I do think that people are going to generally enjoy this movie.

• 51:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I think so. Incredibly watchable.

• 51:45Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay. Let's take a quick break and then we're going to get into the rest of our top fives. This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with the big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime.

• 52:17Speaker 05

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• 53:00Speaker 05

  High performance energy for burning the midnight oil in the garage and pedal to the metal human horsepower for the streets. Go ahead, crack open a can of NASA Energy and get after it.

• 53:12Sean Fennessey?

  All right. So I, I had a film tied at five along with Ink, and you, you have this film.

• 53:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Tied at four.

• 53:19Sean Fennessey?

  Tied at four.

• 53:20Amanda Dobbins?

  So we can like 4.5 it and talk about it right now.

• 53:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So the film is called Everest, The Other Side. It's a National Geographic documentary from Chai Vasarelli and Jimmy Chin, who are a very well-known pair of documentarians who have made a number of extremely successful films, including The Rescue and Free Solo and NIAID, the narrative feature film.

• 53:48Amanda Dobbins?

  That you saw instead of eating dinner with Ethan Hawke.

• 53:51Sean Fennessey?

  Once ruined one of the, what could have been one of the best nights in Telluride film history for me. Um, this movie is about a man named Jim Morrison, not the lead singer of The Doors, but in fact, a, a mountain climber and skier of some renown who I'd never heard of. And this movie, like all of Jimmy and Chai's movies, looks incredible, has pulverizing emotional moments, is about people whose psychologies I don't understand at all. Like I have no idea what compels people to do the things that they do in these films. And also I had some like, frankly, like ethical misgivings about.

• 54:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Should it exist?

• 54:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Should it exist? It's an incredible movie that I'm not sure it should exist.

• 54:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Amanda Dobbins?

  And this.

• 54:36Sean Fennessey?

  I wept like three times watching this movie.

• 54:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, because it is about the mountains and they talk about the power of the mountains. And I felt like that was like.

• 54:44Sean Fennessey?

  Family as well, Amanda. Jesus Christ.

• 54:46Amanda Dobbins?

  It's definitely about marriages. So I, so I saw it. I knew nothing about the story either going in. And I, and I don't think that we should say anything else. And if you're at all interested, if you liked Free Solo, if you want to listen to the barn room and episode, we're going to do about this when it's widely available. Um, don't, I would recommend that you not read anymore and just see the film, which is pretty astonishing and is the, probably the, the movie most this festival where when I run into people and it's like, what have you seen? What have you liked? It's either, you know, I said, have you seen this? And someone says, oh my God, yes. Or someone says, no. And I'm like, I'm not going to say anything, just go.

• 55:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Because there is, there is much to discuss. As I texted you, like I walked out of the theater and texted you and I was like, we gotta talk about this right now, my guy.

• 55:39Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 55:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Because there's, I mean, it's, it's a really rich and incredibly upsetting text. But I, I couldn't believe what I was watching a lot of the time.

• 55:48Sean Fennessey?

  I'm, I'm trying to think of like what, what we can give to people. Well, one, I, you know, this is rare, but I think it is very much worth seeing on a big screen because of the epic photography. Um, the, at the center of the film, this guy, Jim Morrison, he wants to scale the north face of Everest. That is his mission in the film, which is something that very, very few people have ever done, that requires an enormous amount of capital, both human and financial, and is, is deadly, is, it is a risk of life. And this movie is in many ways, like a lot of the Chai and Jimmy movies, these, there's an exploration of the psychology of a person who wants to do these things. However.

• 56:29Sean Fennessey?

  Jim Morrison's personal story is so powerful and overwhelming at times, the way that it's unveiled in this, in the film.

• 56:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:38Sean Fennessey?

  But I never felt like I could really get to the bottom of the psychology of what he was doing, or if I could, I was like, I didn't, I wasn't happy about it. I was like, kind of angered by it. And, and that is such an unusual combination of feelings, you know?

• 56:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. That's so interesting, because I felt like I got to a place where I understood his psychology, but every other single person in the movie.

• 57:01Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:01Amanda Dobbins?

  I had a lot of thoughts and questions for.

• 57:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 57:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, and I also found myself angry. I found myself angry at my husband, just by the transitive property, after seeing this movie and like called him. And then I was also honestly, like a little bit angry at you too, because I was like, this is like some Sean bullshit. Like they, like, some of these people live in Telluride. So I was just like, ah.

• 57:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Yeah. It is a very Telluride movie. There are a lot of moments where you can see, like, you, you would walk out of the movie and see what we were seeing, showing, showing the film.

• 57:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's like, it's so engaging. And, I mean, I guess even that question of, should it exist is interesting. And, and it's a should it exist in a more traditional documentary sense, which, you know, I know is, we started this conversation by talking about a movie that played at Telluride that just blew up what a documentary means. But this, to me, is still, is walking on the edge. And, um, I, you know, it does exist. So I would encourage people to see it. And then, I guess.

• 58:03Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's interesting, you know, one of the movies that was here at, um, at Telluride was Tenzing, which is the, a portrait of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary and their attempt to scale Everest. And Apple's putting that out. It's a feature film. And, you know, it's like a pretty successful portrait of a historical event. It's, it's right down the middle, but it tells that story very well from, from Tenzing's perspective. And one of the things that this movie is attempting to do, Everest, is at least be generous and thoughtful about the role that Sherpas play in this world. But the movie just feels so exploitative of what the work that they do. And that the whole.

• 58:41Amanda Dobbins?

  It's crazy.

• 58:42Sean Fennessey?

  The whole enterprise of this, where like incredibly wealthy people attempt to conquer these natural, this natural beauty, but they need the help of people who like need to do this work to make money, is a, is a very dicey thing.

• 58:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And who go ahead of them. It's so, and then there's, and there's more, like, we, you do have to put this on the schedule. I'm sorry.

• 59:02Sean Fennessey?

  For a conversation. I know. Yeah. No, I know. I know. It was, it's such a rich movie. And, and it is in a lot of ways, like a culmination, I think, of what Jimmy and Chai have been doing. And Jimmy is, is a huge participant in the film.

• 59:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 59:12Sean Fennessey?

  He participates in, in scaling the mountain with Jim Morrison. So, you know, I, I'm with you. Like, I was fascinated. I was completely engaged. I was moved. Like, it did all the things that you want a movie like this to do. And I'd also spent an hour being like, I don't think this is okay. And that.

• 59:32Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I'm not sure I do either.

• 59:33Sean Fennessey?

  That's art, I guess. You know, that's life.

• 59:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I'm, I mean, but like, what's not okay? Is like, what's happening in the movie not okay? Is the making of the movie not okay? Like, how much does the making of the movie inform what's happening? And, you know, so, I, people should see it.

• 59:49Sean Fennessey?

  I agree with you. I agree with you.

• 59:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Or they should see it. Or if you're interested, see it. And then we're gonna yell about it.

• 59:54Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Um, okay. So what is the other half of your number four?

• 59:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I paired it with the other documentary that I saw, which is previously discussed, was Oasis, Don't Look Back in Anger, which is Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace followed Noel and Liam through rehearsals, and then seemingly all of the tour, um, that Oasis embarked on these last years, the reunion tour. And it is, it's not reinventing the form. Um, and there, there is, there are fan testimonials kind of sprinkled throughout, which I think that like, they are as creative and original as like a fan testimonial of like what Oasis means to me can be. But, you know, they're in there. So it's like,

• 1:00:43Amanda Dobbins?

  but they have access to rehearsals. They have at least one sit down with Liam and Noel together.

• 1:00:52Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 1:00:53Amanda Dobbins?

  And they're backstage, they're on the side of the stage, you get like, they're behind the stage. So you get reaction shots. You get a lot of like Noel turning around and playing the guitar with his back to the crowd, because he's like overcome. You get Liam and, like, it's, it's like, it's really good. And they use the good archival, I mean, Liam Gallagher is so important to me, just like so spiritually important to me. Um, and I was reminded, you know, reminded of that once again. It's, I, I thought that it was just like, well, I'm of a certain age. I went to the show in there, at the Rose Bowl, when they played in Los Angeles. Um, like, maybe this is just for old people that I

• 1:01:35Amanda Dobbins?

  like teared up. But then everyone I talked to was kind of like, no, I teared up too.

• 1:01:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Again, it's, it's, you know, it's not like historical, but also it kind of is. It's beautiful.

• 1:01:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, I love Oasis, so it's a no brainer for me. I don't have to think twice about going to see it.

• 1:01:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:50Sean Fennessey?

  I am, I think it was interesting too, that the, you know, the band had another moment during the World Cup, you know, the fact that the, the English national team and Wonderwall, and the way that that kind of like went back into the culture, six months after their reunion tour was in the culture, was cool. And there is something really interesting about these guys to me, and I guess we'll talk about it maybe later this week, if I get a chance to see it before, um.

• 1:02:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Sean Fennessey?

  Before we record again, were instantaneous, like mega stars who were trying to be mega star, rock stars, but also so clear how derivative they were. And they were getting dinged for their being derivative, but also their derivations were so satisfying and exultant. And, and like, the fact that we can be okay with that, you know?

• 1:02:32Amanda Dobbins?

  So internationally resonant. And much of the movie is, it reminds me a little bit about like, when we talk about this show, and we're like, why are young people listen to this? And Liam and Noel are kind of like, they weren't around the first time. But it's really special. Um, and they're like, fairly sincere about it.

• 1:02:50Sean Fennessey?

  Anything to compare us to Liam and Noel, you love it. Uh, okay, that's good.

• 1:02:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I need all of those windbreakers, because then I got to see the windbreakers every color. I mean, that's the other thing, because you didn't go to the shows. I mean, it's like, it is like a well-recorded.

• 1:03:03Sean Fennessey?

  Concert doc.

• 1:03:04Amanda Dobbins?

  And you get kind of concert doc. And you get a lot, you get a lot of the full songs, and it looks cool, and it's loud. And, um, you know, it's like definitely better than a Taylor Swift documentary, concert documentary. So, uh, I loved it. Thank you, Noel and Liam.

• 1:03:18Sean Fennessey?

  Um, number four for me is Tender Loving Care, which is like the complete emotional inverse of everything we've been talking about so far. This is reportedly Mike Lee's last film. Um, it stars Cato Flynn and Miriam Bailey. Cato Flynn having a big moment. She's on Widows Bay, which I know you haven't seen, but, um, she's wonderful on that show as, I guess, a, a woman who works in local government, who is sort of bewitched, haunted, and constantly at the center of some crazy stuff. She's been working with Mike Lee for a long time. I forgot she was in Happy Go Lucky, like almost 20 years ago. Um, and she plays a woman who is turning 40, single, has just moved back in with a friend. Her life is

• 1:04:03Sean Fennessey?

  kind of at a crossroads. She's just been dumped by her boyfriend who went back to, who's going back to her, his ex-wife. And her parents are getting older. And it's a portrait of who you are at, in your late 30s, and also what it's like to watch your parents slowly, and then quickly move into the last phase of their life. Um, and you know, like all Mike Lee movies, it's like very closely observed, highly specific, utterly intimate. This one is very sad. Um, I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was like also kind of a callback to a lot of the movies that he was making in the 70s and 80s, that is very different from when he was making these like explosive international arthouse hits

• 1:04:44Sean Fennessey?

  in the, in the 90s and 2000s. Um, O'Flynn and Bailey are fucking amazing. And it's very similar to me to Hard Truths, which came out, you know, a couple of years ago.

• 1:04:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:53Sean Fennessey?

  Which like, kind of got right up to the precipice of the awards race and never totally got there. This movie's from the same studio. You know, I hope that this movie gets more attention and love, but it is a small English domestic drama. And so it's a little bit of a harder sell, you know?

• 1:05:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm, I am really looking forward to seeing it. Um, I've waited too long on Hard Truths and, and much of Mike Lee's work. So, uh, let's, let's get it in the mix.

• 1:05:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we'll talk about him more definitely as the year goes on. I think this one is coming out in December, and, um, is very much worth your time. Okay, what's, what's next for you?

• 1:05:26Amanda Dobbins?

  So, this might be a little controversial. Um, and I want to talk about it. So I have Possible Love at number three.

• 1:05:34Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:05:34Amanda Dobbins?

  So, um, Possible Love, which you've not seen yet, but.

• 1:05:38Sean Fennessey?

  I'm seeing it today.

• 1:05:39Amanda Dobbins?

  It's imminent. Um, is the new Lee Chang Dong film, is First Since Burning. And everyone, by about Friday, everyone at the festival was like, okay, so Possible Love is going to be the best movie at this festival. Um, this, like, this is it, like masterpiece incoming. And I, I saw the movie, and I think that it is like empirically excellent. Like, it is, it is undeniably very good. And I have some sort of, like, I have a little bit of distance from it, as I did from Burning, that I'm trying to work through. And so I think I've crystallized it for you.

• 1:06:17Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:06:18Amanda Dobbins?

  And you're gonna understand this comp, and everyone else is gonna have to wait until they've also sat through Ryosuke Hamaguchi's All of a Sudden to understand it. But I think this has the whiteboard problem. So this is a movie about two couples, one who is wealthier, one not as wealthy. Um, and the, the husband of the, the poor couple was fired from his job at a factory after participating in strikes. And so it's a little bit about, and then the wife of the other couple is making a documentary about, um, you know, unemployment and class, and the, and labor and strikes, and, and all of these big themes. And so, you know, it's about how these two.

• 1:07:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Couples kinda entangle from there, which is very interesting, but it, so it is about like big heady issues. And Ian, all of a sudden, we've talked a lot about the whiteboard scene, which is 30 minutes when people are diagramming how capitalism works. And there is a segment in this that is more interview and it's the character who's making the documentary, making the documentary and kinda interview styles, but there is just a lot of very straightforward educational, uh, theoretic discussion that I found myself kind of hitting a speed bump

• 1:07:43Amanda Dobbins?

  on, even though it's essential to what comes next.

• 1:07:49Sean Fennessey?

  But this is something that you did like in All of a Sudden, right?

• 1:07:52Amanda Dobbins?

  And that's the thing. I liked the whiteboard and all of a sudden I was like, I think how other people bumped on the whiteboard, this is my whiteboard.

• 1:07:59Sean Fennessey?

  I see.

• 1:07:59Amanda Dobbins?

  And that, and that doesn't mean that it doesn't all come together and it does. And it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's so good. It's really good. And I think you're really gonna like it.

• 1:08:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm such a huge fan of his films.

• 1:08:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, that's the other thing is that I did also, I like, I recognized that Burning was excellent. And like, I didn't like feel it in my veins, you know, for whatever reason. So I think that's maybe a me issue, but it's very, very, very good. And it is South Korea's selection for the Oscar. I'm certain it'll be in the international feature conversation. And I was very glad to see it.

• 1:08:37Sean Fennessey?

  That's great. I'm really looking forward to it as well. Um, and yeah, it's, it's a, it's, there's just generally a very interesting Netflix slate this year that feels very different from what they usually have, where they have like one big, famous Titanic auteur, Scorsese, Quarone, Campion, like, it's not, that's not what their slate is this year. And they acquired La Bola Negra out of, out of Cannes. Um, they have this movie and I think they developed, you know, like, I think they've always been on this film as far as I know. I'm not quite sure. Maybe it started with some South Korea funding and they, they came in on it. But, um, Inc. is another movie too, or they came in and they acquired it. Like, they didn't

• 1:09:16Sean Fennessey?

  have that big movie at the middle of their slate that was meant to be the dominant champion.

• 1:09:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:09:23Sean Fennessey?

  And, um, so all of those, the way that those pieces fit together fascinates me.

• 1:09:29Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I'll talk about my number three, which was maybe the most joyful movie going experience that I had over the weekend, which was the debut, which is Jesse Eisenberg's new film as a director, his third feature. It stars Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti. Julianne Moore plays a housewife who auditions for a local community theater production of a musical that is made up that Eisenberg wrote the, um, words and, uh, the lyrics and music for. Giamatti plays the local community director. And I thought this was gonna be the, just

• 1:10:11Sean Fennessey?

  the episode of The Simpsons where Marge auditions for Streetcar Named Desire, Streetcar Named Marge, famous Simpsons episode. And in some ways it is that. And it's also way more absurdist and Kaufman-esque. I thought of the European filmmaker Aki Kurosaki watching the movie. It's, it's not quite as like down the middle crowd pleasing as I expected. However, it has a few moments and a performance from Julianne Moore that are so

• 1:10:46Sean Fennessey?

  exciting and fun and funny. And like, there's a moment in the middle of the movie where Moore's character is giving a performance and she's being coached by Giamatti. And, and when that sequence ended, it was nearly a standing ovation in the Palm Theater at Tell uride. I've not heard a, such a mid-act break of appreciation for a performance for what Julianne Moore is doing in the scene, pretty much in my history of going to Telluride. And so if you, if you like her, it is her at all the levels, you know, sad and distraught, manic and funny, wildly over the top, wildly sensitive and thoughtful. It's the fucking

• 1:11:31Sean Fennessey?

  whole shebang. It is like the total Julianne Moore package. And Giamatti obviously is always very, very compelling and, and, and strong and interesting. The movie, if you, I was talking with Kyle Buchanan about this movie and he was making some notes about its general story coherence, all of which I think were completely fair and did not bother me in the slightest because I thought of it as this like heightened absurdist experience. If you go in with like, does this make sense, brain?

• 1:12:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:12:03Sean Fennessey?

  May not work as well. The other thing is for Amanda Dobbins purposes, you know, this is a film about, about local community theater.

• 1:12:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. So what's the ratio of singing to, and so what's the ratio of singing to not singing? And what's the ratio of like waiting for government, like Christopher Guest style situations to?

• 1:12:20Sean Fennessey?

  That's an interesting comp. I, it doesn't have that like, um, faux documentary feeling that guest movies do where it's sort of like, we're sort of mocking these people, but we sort of love them. Like this is a movie about, it's a more heartfelt movie than that. Um, it's hard to say whether the actual musical is like meant to be bad, good, or bad, good, like, or good, bad. Um, and so like, there is plenty of time, you probably see three to five full musical song and dance performances, but a lot of the film is actually the sort of like rehearsing of those sequences and seeing what it's like to do that work. And, and it's in a comic way, but it is very specific about like, if you dedicate your

• 1:13:04Sean Fennessey?

  time to community theater, this is what you have to do to put on a good show. And I know that that's, that's a, a danger area for you, you know?

• 1:13:14Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true, but this is like, this is a film about that. So there's some distance from it. I think when there's no self-awareness is when, and when there's total vulnerability is when I get upset. And there's, there's someone standing in the way of this.

• 1:13:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Amanda Dobbins?

  It seems like Julianne Moore is gonna win an Oscar for it. So, you know, who cares what I think?

• 1:13:35Sean Fennessey?

  I'm a little reluctant to just be like, it's done. She's got it. But like, that, that, that was one of the few movies where people came out and they were like, boom, number two for her. You know, she should have had number two for Safe and Boogie Nights and End of the Affair and all these other movies she should have gotten it for. Um, but she's, she's just completely remarkable. And, uh, the movie is a lot of fun and I liked it quite a bit. And it played really, really well at the festival. And until the Fielder film, I would say that was probably the movie that had the most like, did you see it? Did you see it? Like, it was a very tough ticket. A lot of people got shut out of it. I think they only showed it twice, which is a pretty low number. Um, Eisenberg seemed like so nervous

• 1:14:18Sean Fennessey?

  beforehand, as he always does. And I was just like, what are you nervous about, man? Like, you got it? Like, you got the juice? Um, but yeah, it was great. And Emma Stone and her company produced the movie. So she was there supporting the film. Uh, Giamatti, I sat behind him during the film and he was just having a ball, laughing through the whole film, having a really good time. It's always funny to be watching a movie with someone who's in the film and you never know if they've seen it before or what, or how, how they choose to support a movie. Some people don't like to look at themselves. Um, but it was a good time. Okay. Uh, number two for you. How much are you gonna talk about this?

• 1:14:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Not too much because it's coming out pretty soon.

• 1:14:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Amanda Dobbins?

  And I don't wanna step on people, but it's similar to the way that until,

• 1:15:01Amanda Dobbins?

  um, the, the Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes doc, the debut was sort of the movie. Um, primetime was, was the movie here. Primetime was the, have you seen it? Have you seen it? Are you going to see it? When are you gonna see it? What do you think about it? And this is, so this is Lance Oppenheimer's narrative feature film, um, about Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, uh, starring Robert Pattinson, along with Skylar Gisando and Merritt Weaver and Phoebe Bridgers. And it worked for me. It like, it worked for me. It did. I, like, I felt kinda skeezy afterwards in some ways, you know, it, like, it, it

• 1:15:40Amanda Dobbins?

  goes in, um, and tries to, to recreate not just the, the moment and the moment in media that we were all a part of, you know, it's like, it's maybe not in conversation with Inc., but there are media executives of various eras portrayed in all of them. And those decisions and what the decisions that you're making for ratings or, um, in terms of what's permissible to air and what's not, and how far you'll go is a, is a consistent theme. So, uh, so it worked on that level. But I mean, I just like Robert Pattinson. Like, I'm, I'm here for you. I've always been here for you. It's like-

• 1:16:25Sean Fennessey?

  Did you meet the man?

• 1:16:27Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I would never meet Robert Pattinson. Come on, you know that. Um, though he did, he and Suzy Waterhouse, his partner, stayed at the, they were at the party the whole time. I've never seen celebrities like stay that late at a party and seem to be having a great time.

• 1:16:41Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:16:41Amanda Dobbins?

  From afar.

• 1:16:42Sean Fennessey?

  You didn't roll up. Um, Rob, what's, what's cooking, bro?

• 1:16:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I was at the party. I talked to, I talked to everybody else. Like I said, like I, you know, I was like, I was there.

• 1:16:49Sean Fennessey?

  I'm a podcaster. I'm a mom. What's happening?

• 1:16:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Never. I'd rather die.

• 1:16:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I heard he's cool. Your husband's met him. He's profiled him.

• 1:17:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sure he's cool. Yeah, no, Zach is like, he's my favorite. He's interviewed him multiple times and he's like, yeah, he's the best. He seems great. And also Jennifer Lawrence says he's a big gossip. Like, I know we'd have a lot to talk about, but that's, you know, that's not how I-

• 1:17:11Sean Fennessey?

  You fucking blew it, Dobbins. You blew it.

• 1:17:13Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, that's not how I roll. I had a great time at the primetime party. You don't need to worry about me.

• 1:17:19Sean Fennessey?

  I'm glad.

• 1:17:19Amanda Dobbins?

  So anyway, I just, this performance is so fucking out there in the best way. And watching it, I was like, you know, do you remember the interview that Peter Sarsgaard gave during Jackie about the first day that Natalie Portman came to the set and he said, and did her voice and he said, oh, this is what you're doing. And you have like 18, oh, this is what you're doing moments in the performance, but they all kind of come together. I don't know. It's really, it's really fun to see a master at work. And that master is Robert Pattinson. And I thought that-

• 1:17:56Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think he will be recognized for this work? Cause he's obviously having an amazing year.

• 1:18:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. So a game that I was trying to play for, and I don't want to say too much about the movie, but so I mentioned Skylar Gazando is in it and he is, there's a case for him in lead as well. It is not quite a two-hander, but there is a lot. He's great. Merritt Weaver's great. Everybody's great. But the way the story is constructed, he does a lot and he carries a lot of the emotional weight of the movie.

• 1:18:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:18:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And so at one point I was sitting there trying to game it in my head. And I was like, okay, so can you put Skylar Gazando in lead and Pattinson in supporting? And then Pattinson just walks? And I don't like, I don't think you can do it.

• 1:18:41Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:18:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I think they really are co-leads. If they do it, I won't complain. Um, but-

• 1:18:47Sean Fennessey?

  Fraud defines the Oscars, in my opinion.

• 1:18:50Amanda Dobbins?

  And I don't care about category fraud. And, but, but it is, I think it would make more sense in voters' minds as, you know, that completely wild supporting performance. And just going for it. But I hope he'll be recognized in lead. I think, I mean, it is really out there. That's what I like about it. You know, and I know that more people really enjoy, like, get these beggars out of here. And we haven't even seen Dune. So it could go some other way.

• 1:19:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Amanda Dobbins?

  But I thought it was just rad.

• 1:19:22Sean Fennessey?

  It's really interesting because obviously he's developed, like, I think there's a huge appreciation for him as both a star and an actor, which is unusual, right? That doesn't happen very often. When someone is like, put him on the poster, open the movie guy, who also is like a leading progenitor of his craft. And he's never been nominated for an Academy Award. He's in five movies this year. He's kind of staked his claim alongside Tom Holland, Zendaya, I don't know, Sydney Sweeney, like a handful of people who are just like, this actually is the future of the business in terms of who you're putting on the poster. And it would be cool to see him recognized, but it also feels like his taste is why he's not being recognized, but that's why he should be recognized. You know, it's that perfect paradox of the Oscars.

• 1:20:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I completely agree. And that's why I was like, sitting there, literally in the room, engineering, like, okay, so if we do supporting, then are they going to understand it a little bit more? And we, can we kind of like sneak this really cool thing by him?

• 1:20:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:16Amanda Dobbins?

  But that's a testament to the movie as well, that it like, it builds the architecture for him to be really, really out there.

• 1:20:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and for it to make sense and also still be really surprising. And I like, I haven't just been like, oh, that many times in a single movie, in a, in a cool way. I'm such, I'm a fan.

• 1:20:38Sean Fennessey?

  That's very exciting. Um, I'm seeing it soon. So hopefully, you know, we'll do a whole episode about the film. I think about this movie and, and you can see everything. And obviously an insane moment for Lance Oppenheimer, who's only 30 years old to have these two movies, which I think will be two of the most talked about of the fall. Um, and as somebody who's been like, really a big fan of his since I saw Some Kind of Heaven, whatever, a few years back and had him on the show to talk about Ren Faire. It's also very rare to see a young filmmaker, but also that's kind of been the story of this year too, of like 20 somethings and 30 somethings kind of emerging and bursting through. And the thing I've been thinking about with both of his movies is, how commercial are both of these movies? Like-

• 1:21:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:21:16Sean Fennessey?

  Is, is, because primetime obviously it sounds like it's pretty edgy and-

• 1:21:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:21:20Sean Fennessey?

  Confrontational.

• 1:21:21Amanda Dobbins?

  And, you know, it premiered here in Italy, where it's really not clear that that many people, uh, non-Americans know what To Catch a Predator is.

• 1:21:31Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right.

• 1:21:32Amanda Dobbins?

  You may have seen reported that Jeff Zucker has a cameo.

• 1:21:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:21:35Amanda Dobbins?

  And this, I, I knew that was kind of silence in the room because no one, no Italian knows who Jeff Zucker is. Like, no Italian remembers the primetime wars. There's a, there's a whole plot line about how they have to be lost, you know?

• 1:21:49Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right.

• 1:21:49Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sure they had lost in Italy, but like, I don't really think they carried in the same way. So-

• 1:21:55Sean Fennessey?

  What do you make of the decision to send that film to Venice? And nowhere else? Cause it's not playing anywhere else.

• 1:22:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I, from what I understand of the Telluride crowd, I don't know that they would have felt, I think it's like the wrong kind of edgelord movie.

• 1:22:13Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:22:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, and that, you know, uh, what is, I keep, I keep wanting to call the Elizabeth Holmes movie, um, Now You See Me, but it's not Now You See Me.

• 1:22:22Sean Fennessey?

  You can see everything.

• 1:22:24Amanda Dobbins?

  You can see everything. Uh, it would be amazing if she starts doing magic and then Rosalind Pike shows up with a South African accent. Anyway.

• 1:22:32Sean Fennessey?

  Well, there is a kind of magic in the movie. I'll say that.

• 1:22:36Amanda Dobbins?

  So you can see-

• 1:22:38Sean Fennessey?

  I, not to interrupt you, but, no, no, no. I just, Nathan and Lance told the, told the story about where they came up with the idea for the movie. And it was when they went out together to the Magic Castle here in Los Angeles. And they went into my favorite room in maybe all of the city, which is the close up magic room. And that's where they saw something. They heard the name Elizabeth Holmes uttered in that room. And that led to the making of the movie. Sorry to interrupt you.

• 1:22:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Well, there we go. So I was, you know, picking up something. But so you can see everything at least has the veneer of like, Elizabeth Holmes is like a true story. And that was like exposed in the Wall Street Journal. And, you know, like, so the retirees are like, have some grounding from which to be pushed into weird, unexpected territory. Primetime, I'm sure they remember Chris Hansen, but it's, it is purposefully a sleaze fest the whole time. So I think that there is something that, you know, Italians, even if they don't know who Jeff Zucker is, are not quite as, uh, prudish in the same way. And also they got the star spot. Like, I do really hear that was the thing. And

• 1:23:43Amanda Dobbins?

  he's, was like in all the slideshows and like, he was like the biggest star here.

• 1:23:48Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:23:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And they can still do that. So to me, it makes sense. I mean, is it not going to be at New York? I know it'll be out by New York already.

• 1:23:55Sean Fennessey?

  It's coming out September 25th.

• 1:23:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's also very smart, right? You do one, you get like a star push for a movie of this size that is like, not huge, not as commercial as Dune, um, also starring Robert Pattinson. I think it's really smart to get the, to get the runway and then go.

• 1:24:12Sean Fennessey?

  Can't wait to see it. Great sell. Um, my number two is your number one. So this is nice. We can talk about this movie, um, which is Wild Horse 9, which alongside the debut, I would say was the biggest film at Telluride.

• 1:24:26Amanda Dobbins?

  And same, same here.

• 1:24:28Sean Fennessey?

  And it premiered at Venice. And then the folks from, from the film came over overnight in the same fashion as the Oppenheimer team came for, uh, to Telluride. And we've talked about it a little bit. This is a new Martin McDonagh film. It stars John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell, Parker Posey. It is about two CIA agents in Chile in the 1970s, uh, after Allende's election. And they visit Easter Island to see, as Malkovich's character calls them, the big heads. And there, I'm very excited to see that this movie is so high

• 1:25:08Sean Fennessey?

  on your list. I think it is wonderful. It is a very specific thing that I love. And I have been calling it The American in Bruges, which is one of my, is my favorite Martin McDonagh film. Um, but there is a component of this movie that I did not know about that made it a wonderful exploration of the American project, um, that I don't want to ruin for anybody either. That I think I've seen in a lot in the reviews and stuff, but I, I feel like you should preserve that for yourself. So what did you think of it?

• 1:25:37Amanda Dobbins?

  It's true. Well, though, I mean, that reveal is, you know, that's kind of one of my favorite things in the world across genres and across times is here in white men be invested in that, you know? That's like my comfort thing.

• 1:25:52Sean Fennessey?

  That thing. Yes.

• 1:25:52Amanda Dobbins?

  So-

• 1:25:53Sean Fennessey?

  I thought of you when I saw it.

• 1:25:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I was just like, oh my God. This is, and you know, the way, I feel like this, this marriage of subjects of just, not just that thing, but, um,

• 1:26:07Amanda Dobbins?

  The CIA in Chile and so Americans destabilizing a foreign government, which has a very cynical viewpoint on and Malkovich's character is at a late phase of life. And all of these, like, all of the plot choices and the subject choices put through the ma- are like the perfect, Martin McDonagh is who I want to interpret them.

• 1:26:35Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:26:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, the blend of cynicism and there goes that dream and wistfulness and, like, is a perfect marriage in these movies. And I think Malkovich just, like, gives an incredible performance. And we should say that, you know, just like Julianne Moore in the debut, everyone's like, well, Malkovich gets the Oscar. Sorry, Matt Damon. Better luck next year.

• 1:26:56Sean Fennessey?

  It was the same thing in Telluride. That's exactly it.

• 1:26:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, and it's hard to argue with when you watch it because it's so winning and he's so funny and heartbreaking. But I really like this as a McDonagh film. Like, I felt like-

• 1:27:13Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly.

• 1:27:13Amanda Dobbins?

  He, like, his spin is the right spin on this. And sometimes, like, the balance is, I mean, he's very talented. I like all of his movies, but the, like, all of the balance is just right here.

• 1:27:26Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's a really interesting movie to put into his filmography. And I guess we'll get into it later when we do an episode about it when it comes out this fall. But, you know, he received such a claim and such blowback for Three Billboards, and it does feel like him circling back a little bit to some of the ideas in that movie and trying to put a slightly different gloss on it. But he's consistently telling these stories through the eyes, usually of two white guys. It's two white guys, an older guy and a younger guy. That's usually the dynamic in his movies. The older guy knows a little bit more, the younger guy is a little bit more energetic. In this particular case, I think you can make the case there's nobody better with his dialogue than Rockwell. And Rockwell, while Malkovich is giving a performance that will be about the totality

• 1:28:11Sean Fennessey?

  of his work and about what we know about him as this kind of, like, trick, explosive trickster figure of American cinema and the American stage, Rockwell is forced to carry the movie in a lot of ways and be the, like, the fulcrum for this aging CIA agent and who is reckoning with his history and the things that he has done. And the two of them are just phenomenal together. The movie also looks beautiful. I think it is perhaps the most artfully made McDonagh film, the most cinematic McDonagh film. And choosing to tell an American story in foreign lands, which is a prism through which to see how America runs the world.

• 1:28:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:28:53Sean Fennessey?

  You know? And the fact that we think we can just kind of drag our ass into any city or country and make people do things the way we want to do them, I thought was a fascinating idea. I think you can read it unfavorably, too, and say, why is this film about what happened in Chile in the 1970s about these two white Americans? I think that's the wrong reading of the movie, but I think people will read it that way. And we should probably prepare ourselves for that.

• 1:29:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sure they will. And there is also, there's some joke lines baked into the movie, I think, to preempt or provoke those exact people.

• 1:29:25Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 1:29:26Amanda Dobbins?

  To know that they're coming, but they're funny.

• 1:29:29Sean Fennessey?

  One criticism that I have read of the movie, which I think is fair but doesn't bother me, is that some of its sort of perspective, like, it's lens on the events and history does not feel like contemporaneous to the story. It's sort of like, it's an ex post facto reading of how some people might have talked about things. But again, like, I see it similar to the way I see the debut, where I'm like, you're in kind of a fantasia of history. You're not in what's meant to be a literal reading of events that happened. And so if you're going into that worrying about, you know, the translation of the times doesn't bother me as much.

• 1:30:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I also, I also think that remove is wise and also like an honest reflection of, you know, McDonagh's not an American. So telling a story about Americans but set not in America is probably like a more accurate representation of the perspective and gives him more room than if you're, for example, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, and you're trying to, you're claiming to represent, like, the actual US itself.

• 1:30:35Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:30:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Rather than like a perspective away from the US.

• 1:30:39Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's a great point.

• 1:30:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think we do often find that films about the US are received very differently in, you know, the United States and elsewhere because clearly we have different understandings. So, like, to me, it's smart.

• 1:30:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, just a quick testimony to how much I like this movie. I had a chance to see it the week before Telluride, and it was revealed as the patron screening, which is sort of like what usually is the secret screening at Telluride. It's the first film that is shown to all the patron pass holders and also to the press that happens very early on, on Friday afternoon. And I sat through almost the entire thing a second time, like, less than a week later. So, yeah.

• 1:31:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it's wonderful.

• 1:31:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's really good, really good. And we'll talk about it more as time goes on. And then, of course, for me, my number one is You Can See Everything. I did write about it a bit more on the Substack. So if people want to read a little bit more, I tried not to spoil really any particular details of the movie and talked more about how I see it as like a real confrontation with what we think documentary is. And specifically, this idea that the two most popular forms of documentary right now are the authorized, you know, the participant is driving the creative, you know, that is frequently about a famous person.

• 1:31:49Amanda Dobbins?

  The producer.

• 1:31:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And then the other strain of it is true crime and the wave of true crime documentary that, you know, is on Netflix but is also on Hulu and on HBO Max and like that. And the reason that those two things are so popular is because, or they're so prevalent is because they're so popular. Like, they are what people want. And this movie is kind of about those two things. And it really tangles with those two modes of documentary and also completely detonates them in such an interesting way. So I tried to get into that a little bit when I wrote about it, so you can check it out on Projections. Let's do some honorable mentions because we did see some other films.

• 1:32:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Sean Fennessey?

  And I'll start. I saw The Liberation, which is the new film from Guy Nativ that stars our friends Carrie Coon and Tracy Letts.

• 1:32:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Tracy was there.

• 1:32:35Sean Fennessey?

  Well-

• 1:32:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Tracy was here with Venice, was here with me and Venice last year.

• 1:32:39Sean Fennessey?

  I know.

• 1:32:39Amanda Dobbins?

  And now you get Tracy and Carrie both.

• 1:32:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:32:42Amanda Dobbins?

  And a great Carrie performance. I'm pissed.

• 1:32:44Sean Fennessey?

  Full disclosure, I dined with Carrie and Tracy, so I am not objective about this film. But I was on the record about Carrie Coon before I met her, so I feel comfortable saying that I think she's incredible in this movie. The movie is based on the director Nativ's real-life grandmother, who, in the middle of her life, while working at a bank, joined a cult and completely upended her family and left her family to join this cult. And the, his grandmother was a survivor of the Holocaust and had a lot of unprocessed trauma. And Coon plays the grandmother figure, Tracy plays her husband.

• 1:33:27Sean Fennessey?

  They have two children, played by Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young. The leader of the cult is Lily James.

• 1:33:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 1:33:34Sean Fennessey?

  Who is very good in the movie. I like the movie and don't love the movie. And it's interesting because what I think I don't love about it is something that I think is a very artful choice but makes the movie not cohere for me, which is that the movie is very focused primarily on Coon's characters, not her decision so much as like what actually happens when she joins and what the cult is about. But the movie doesn't explain hardly anything about how the cult started, where Lily James' ideas came from. Like, that same true crime cult documentary style that I was just talking to you about, we've come to expect a certain form of explanation in those stories, and the movie withholds

• 1:34:19Sean Fennessey?

  that from you. And I found it a little maddening. The other thing is that it's a very sad and depressing story, and there's just no way around it. Like, it's just a tough, tough story. And so you're not going to come out of a film festival screening at 10:30 PM and be like, let's go party. It's not that kind of movie.

• 1:34:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:35Sean Fennessey?

  But, and Tracy is very good in the film as well. He has a modest part, a couple of really good laugh lines that broke up the doom-like tenor of it. And so it was fun seeing them. It was really fun to see Carrie in, like, the prestige movie atmosphere, where it was like, Carrie Coon, Oscar nomination. There was another example of that, where when you came out, that was the conversation that people wanted to have. And obviously, she's very worthy of that sort of a thing. So I liked the movie. I didn't love it, but I think it's very much worth seeing for the performances. What's one of your honorable mentions?

• 1:35:02Amanda Dobbins?

  So we have, we have one honorable mention that's the same, which is fucking faster.

• 1:35:07Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah. You did see this.

• 1:35:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Werner Herzog's. I did see it.

• 1:35:09Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:10Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:35:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I was, I was charmed by it.

• 1:35:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean-

• 1:35:13Sean Fennessey?

  It's pretty odd, even by Werner Herzog's standards.

• 1:35:15Amanda Dobbins?

  It's weird, you know? And the, it, the first, the title card is that it's dedicated to David Lynch, which also, you know, I was like, oh, right, this is, this is going to be weird. And then I, it's going to be out there. And I was so charmed by the Rooney and Kate Mara performance. And, you know, they are in the whole movie together. I don't really want to say too much more than that, but so many great moments, such a cool thing for them to do. I like them both individually as actors. I like that they are engaging with, you know, their fame and also the idea of being sisters.

• 1:35:55Amanda Dobbins?

  And I can't say that it, like, revealed a lot to me about this, what it means to be a sibling or a person in the world. I'm an only child, so I have limitations there.

• 1:36:06Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:36:07Amanda Dobbins?

  But that's okay. Like, I still enjoyed it. And, and I, like, there's, there's one scene with a forklift that I just think is triumphant. And I'll think about it every time I see a forklift.

• 1:36:18Sean Fennessey?

  There's a lot of really fun stuff in it. I saw it very late at night, and it was a little challenging in the final third of the movie, where it takes a digression to Ireland that I felt was a little far afield. But you're totally right about them are sisters. Like, they're, what they do in the movie is not something I've seen before. And it's just rarely you can say that about a movie. I've not seen a performance like the one that they're giving. And I use the singular performance very specifically.

• 1:36:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Sean Fennessey?

  We should talk about Elsinore.

• 1:36:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:49Sean Fennessey?

  So this is the film about Ian Charlison, the British actor who performed at the National Theatre whilst struggling with HIV and AIDS. The movie is directed by Simon Stone, who is mostly known as the theatre director, stars Andrew Scott as Charlison. Charlison, you know, is an actor who, like, you would know, he was in Gandhi, he's well, I guess, best known for Chariots of Fire. He did some Hollywood stuff, but he also had a big career in the English theatre. And he is-

• 1:37:23Sean Fennessey?

  The movie is so strange because it's just so obviously one of the most committed performances from an actor you'll ever see in a movie. And it also mirrors what's happening, like what the character is doing in the movie. And Scott is a favorite of ours and he's phenomenal in the film. But the film is like, and a lot of people are comparing it to 90s Miramax films where you've got these kind of like very heartfelt docu dramas about artists struggling at a certain period in history. And is that, but the movie has this very weird editing style that is montage plus we don't have it in the edit that you can feel as a viewer where like there were just too many sequences to me of just like Andrew Scott walking into buildings, wandering on

• 1:38:06Sean Fennessey?

  top of a roof, reciting his lines, you know, looking in the middle distance from his apartment, you know, like shots of the book of Hamlet, you know, where he's been studying, like a lot of just like

• 1:38:19Amanda Dobbins?

  That stuff.

• 1:38:20Sean Fennessey?

  Un cinematic things where you're like, we're trying to find the movie in this story.

• 1:38:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:38:26Sean Fennessey?

  That, and then there are other sequences where it's just like for 30 seconds unbroken, Andrew Scott doing Hamlet.

• 1:38:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Sean Fennessey?

  And you're like, okay, this is the, this is the movie, right? Like this is, this is the magic tree. This is the special effect. Like you don't need to do anything, like stop cutting, just like hold on this moment because this is something that we would want to watch. And that is actually what the idea of the movie is, is like what you would want to watch when somebody really takes it over. One thing that's very funny about this, which is a true story, is that, you know, Charleston came in for Daniel Day Lewis, who walked off stage in the middle of a performance of Hamlet and then never performed on stage again. So it is sort of like the sequel prequel to the Daniel Day Lewis legend, you know, which I mean, and I think David Sims actually may have even spoken about this exact moment in history when we did the Day Lewis Hall of Fame.

• 1:39:12Amanda Dobbins?

  He did, yeah.

• 1:39:13Sean Fennessey?

  And so that, that's very like a very fun, it's like, that's the opening moments of the movie. It's the first minute of the movie is Day Lewis and then what that means for Charleston. But um, I just don't think the film is very good at all, but I thought that the performance was extraordinary. And so what it felt, feels like to me is actually what usually happens in the context of the Oscar race is in movies starring women, the best actress race is usually like, oh, this film's not going to be nominated for best picture, but it will get a lone nomination. You know, the Renee Zellweger and Judy situation where it'll get one nomination and it might even win.

• 1:39:46Amanda Dobbins?

  The Julianne Moore and Still Alice situation?

• 1:39:47Sean Fennessey?

  Julianne Moore and Still Alice, yes. It is, and that, I mean, that happens every year in best actress, but this is that, this is what that feels like to me.

• 1:39:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Well, I'll still see it for Andrew Scott.

• 1:39:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. What's next for you?

• 1:39:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, this is not a new film, but I, for the first time, I went to our piles at Letterboxd had an event and so I went to see Three Colors Blue.

• 1:40:07Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:40:08Amanda Dobbins?

  The Kristof Kizlowski movie. Yeah, it was amazing, like on a rooftop. It was, I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about it, so they can post or whatever, but they said I could log the movie, which I did.

• 1:40:19Amanda Dobbins?

  And since Possible Love is like alleged, like has been described by Lee Chang Dong as like a very loose, inspired by one of the Decalogs episodes.

• 1:40:32Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

• 1:40:33Amanda Dobbins?

  By Thou Shall Not Covet. It's like, it's been in some of the materials or in some of the interviews, just that it's in the air. So I thought, given, given that, I could at least include this movie that I saw while here in Venice that just absolutely rocks.

• 1:40:47Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's so cool. And I believe they chose it because it was the, the shortest Golden Lion winner with the highest rating possible, but it stars Julie Apple Noche. It did win the Golden Lion here. It's wonderful. If you haven't seen it, it's, it's also the first and sort of an unofficial trilogy. I'm going to seek out the other two.

• 1:41:05Sean Fennessey?

  Come borrow my Blu-rays, my four case.

• 1:41:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And then also just the, the view is absolutely amazing from that rooftop.

• 1:41:10Sean Fennessey?

  Nice. That's fun.

• 1:41:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Don't worry about it.

• 1:41:12Sean Fennessey?

  That's really great.

• 1:41:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:41:14Sean Fennessey?

  I guess the last film I'll mention is The Disciple, which was quite interesting for me. I think this film premiered at Sundance, but Netflix picked it up. And this is a movie about the world of the Wu Tang Clan, specifically about a member of the extended Wu Tang affiliates, Silver Rings. Netflix did a smart thing at the festival that I did not totally get to participate in, which is that a lot of the movie is about the creation and delivery of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which is a Wu Tang album that, of which there is one extant copy and virtually no one has heard. It was released in 2014. It was acquired by Martin Shkreli.

• 1:41:56Sean Fennessey?

  You may remember the infamous pharmaceutical oligarch who was brought down on fraud charges. I don't know if he's still in prison, but he is the guy who bought this album. The album was created to be owned by one person with an 88 year license fee, non-distributive license fee. The movie is also a portrait of Silver Rings, this guy who is a Moroccan Dutch guy who grew up, as I did, obsessed with Wu Tang, but unlike me, flew himself to New York multiple times just to sit outside the offices to hope to meet the people who are associated with Wu Tang, especially RZA. And eventually he found himself in the inner circle of Wu Tang in the 2000s and he worked as a tour manager. He worked as a rapper. He worked as a producer.

• 1:42:40Sean Fennessey?

  He worked as a, a general confidant and affiliate. And the movie is like, it's an immigrant story. It's an outsider story. It's about a guy who's desperately trying to find out who he really is and who he wants to be and how art inspires him and moves him. And some of that, that stuff is fine. Like, it's like pretty standard, not the most revelatory thing in the world, but I enjoyed it. What Netflix did that was smart, which I failed to participate in, was they did a listening party for the album, which very few people have heard.

• 1:43:09Amanda Dobbins?

  And you didn't go.

• 1:43:10Sean Fennessey?

  I, because I was sick and I fell asleep and

• 1:43:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, it's tough.

• 1:43:14Sean Fennessey?

  And I didn't

• 1:43:14Amanda Dobbins?

  We got one of these every year.

• 1:43:16Sean Fennessey?

  I know, and I didn't wake up, but I was really sick. And if I did not sleep, I would have had a really hard time at the festival and I have a lot of regrets and I'm hoping that they'll play the album again. But, you know, eventually the album did go back kind of into the, into the ether. And the film explores a lot of the decisions that happened around that and some of the controversies around that in an interesting way. But it was just a great film festival stunt and I'm sorry that I didn't get to participate in hearing the record, but I've spent so much time in my life listening to Wu Tang albums that I was like, of all the, of all the days to get wildly ill. Nevertheless, I persist. The Disciple is pretty cool. I think if you're a Wu Tang fan, it's a must watch because it explores like an outer ring of the group that we don't hear talked about nearly as much, like the, the Bs and the affiliates

• 1:43:59Sean Fennessey?

  and all the, the international crew of people who are associated with the group. So that was really the last big thing that I saw. I almost saw 10 movies at the festival this year, which is, might be a low for me. Now I've seen, I have seen 27 movies that were at the festival, but so many of those were pre-screened or at Cannes or whatever. So I feel like I have my arms around the festival. And as I said, La Bola Negra, Club Kid, Minotaur, Fjord, those movies played great. My one sadness was my checkout time was really early and so I had to miss the Making Marie Antoinette screening.

• 1:44:31Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I would have been really upset if you saw that and I didn't.

• 1:44:37Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Okay. So then you can feel fine about that.

• 1:44:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, like I would have been excited for you and I did see the new Paul Schrader.

• 1:44:44Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah. And it didn't come up. And it didn't come up here in this conversation.

• 1:44:47Amanda Dobbins?

  It didn't come up. It did not come up. Maybe the single worst performed movie I've ever seen.

• 1:44:53Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:44:54Amanda Dobbins?

  But

• 1:44:54Sean Fennessey?

  He had quite a weekend, Paul Schrader. A lot of, a lot of unfortunate comments.

• 1:44:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but you also begin to wonder whether it's intentional.

• 1:45:01Sean Fennessey?

  I've always felt that with him.

• 1:45:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Anyway, tough scene over there.

• 1:45:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:08Amanda Dobbins?

  So I got to see that and you, you missed Marie Antoinette. Did you see Musk? Have you seen Musk?

• 1:45:13Sean Fennessey?

  No, it wasn't shown at Telluride.

• 1:45:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:45:16Sean Fennessey?

  What did you, what'd you think?

• 1:45:18Amanda Dobbins?

  So I, I mean, I'm mixed on it. It is, it is comprehensive. It's four hours long. It should be comprehensive and it's very convincing and it's like deeply researched. I wouldn't say that there's a lot of new material in it, but it does a good job of bringing together all of the reporters who have been reporting on his antics for the past 20 years in all the, you know, the various tentacles that he has now, because it's a little bit of everything. And so it synthesizes and I think, and it, in a good way. And so if you have not been paying attention or, you know, it, it kind of puts everything in one place in what is, it's being described as damning. And like, I, I think I already knew that, but it is very damning.

• 1:46:04Amanda Dobbins?

  It makes some structure, it, it uses two devices and they're, and they're kind of related. So Elon Musk did not participate in this documentary, obviously, as many people connected with him did not. This, Alex Gibney said that he had

• 1:46:22Amanda Dobbins?

  He like, a lot of people said no, out of fear or, you know, NDAs or whatever the case may be. But so, he does not have Elon Musk, he does have all of the recorded things that Elon Musk has ever said, which is a lot, because this is a man who likes press and attention. And so, they make, because of Elon Musk's belief that we're all in a simulation, and it's like a video game, and whatever, blah, blah, blah, they make an Elon Musk avatar. And so, they feed all of his quotes, and then edit it together. You know, they edit, they use his quotes, it's his real words, and this kind of like

• 1:47:04Amanda Dobbins?

  eerie, purposely fake, weirdly handsomer than Elon Musk, so I don't know what they were thinking about there. But like, they, it's like, it's like Elon Musk, like, after GLP-1, they've like, really defined the cheekbones. But, but, but it's also clearly, like CGI, and he's in a gaming chair, and so, he's, this avatar is narrating the whole movie, and then also, the movie is structured as the video game, the simulation with Elon as the first-person shooter. So, they use a lot of video game animation.

• 1:47:37Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 1:47:37Amanda Dobbins?

  And I just personally, it's, it's a clever idea, and it does provide some structure, and is obviously in keeping with some of the ways that Elon Musk thinks and talks about himself, which is the purpose of the documentary. It's, it's just not fun to watch, in my opinion. Like, this is a purely aesthetic note, that I was like, this is irritating, and kind of junky-looking.

• 1:48:01Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:48:01Amanda Dobbins?

  And that is possibly the point, because I think those are also two words that you could use to describe pretty much everything Elon Musk has put into the world, including the Tesla 3, which like, what hap, just like, put buttons back on the car, what's wrong with you guys? So, I, but, you know, it's interesting, it is like, it's a storytelling choice, but aesthetically, just really soured me on some of the experience. I also, this is, this will be released in theaters, but like, it's four hours, it's a classic, like, watch at home, when it's streaming over a couple of nights, and you can watch all of

• 1:48:38Amanda Dobbins?

  it. And, again, it's like, very, very deeply researched, and, and convincing. But, I don't know, I just, the video game stuff, it's not for me, in any, in any genre.

• 1:48:53Sean Fennessey?

  Understood. We thank you for your service of sitting through the whole film. I'm, I love Gibney's movies, you know, I've watched almost all of them, and I think he's really interesting. And the fact that we're talking about Everest, and you can see everything, and the vanguard of documentary filmmaking, and what it is, and where it's going, you know, he's somebody who I think, modernized the form, got a lot of people interested in documentary, and then I think the world, kind of like, the commercial component of the world, kind of passed him by, while he held on to a lot of what most interested him, in terms of interrogating systems and power, right? Like, that's really the big theme of a lot of his work. And, so I'm very, I'm very interested in it. I wouldn't say I'm, I'm like, Musk is kind of like Murdoch to me, where I'm like, I know, I don't really

• 1:49:37Sean Fennessey?

  want to spend a lot of time in that world.

• 1:49:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:41Sean Fennessey?

  Though I, although I would never underestimate that, those people's power and influence, and corrupting power.

• 1:49:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And the programming of Inc., and Primetime, and Musk, all together, you know, there, like, there is a through line, one of the galling, but, I guess, interesting parts about Musk is that, in the second half, when he becomes like, a right-wing, you know, media personality, they just have a lot of, of that footage, and I, like, I don't watch any of that stuff, I've never seen it in any, you know, I, like, you see tiny clips, and it's, it's not like I enjoy watching it, but as a, as the media analysis, and the media through line, and, and then, does draw, I think, in a stronger way than Inc.

• 1:50:27Amanda Dobbins?

  does, the conclusions of what the media influence then can do to the rest of the way that we live.

• 1:50:34Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:50:35Amanda Dobbins?

  So, it's good, but, you know, there's an avatar.

• 1:50:40Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, good to know.

• 1:50:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm good. Only James Cameron can do that.

• 1:50:44Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I guess that's right, I guess that's right. Um, let me just take a look at my telleride list, to make sure I've given you everything that you need to hear about. I guess there were a couple of other movies that played here that seemed to do well, like, The Only Living Pickpocket seemed to do well, John Turturro was here, and he was also similarly, working through the, the stages of, of Oscar candidacy. I did see a couple of really good documentaries as well, beforehand. One is called Zero Intention of Living Quietly, which is about Adam Pearson, the actor from A Different Man.

• 1:51:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:51:19Sean Fennessey?

  And I thought that was a really interesting story, and really well-told. I also saw a Carl Sagan documentary, called We Are Made of Star Stuff, that was all about his life, and, and pursuit, that I thought was kind of revelatory, and a little bit unsparing about some of the things that he weren't so great in his life, that I really appreciated. You know, Pavel Pavlikowski stood behind me online, getting on the plane yesterday, heard him speak.

• 1:51:41Amanda Dobbins?

  That's cool.

• 1:51:41Sean Fennessey?

  He's six foot four, very strikingly handsome man, Fatherland was there. That's pretty much it. You happy you went? You ready to come home?

• 1:51:50Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm ready to come home. It's gonna be a long day tomorrow, and then, I don't know whether I'm gonna have time to see any more movies before Thursday. Though, did you see that we just got a Resident Evil invite?

• 1:52:03Sean Fennessey?

  Oh my god, did we really?

• 1:52:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:05Sean Fennessey?

  When is it?

• 1:52:06Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, but now I gotta figure out childcare, and all sorts of stuff. It's okay.

• 1:52:11Sean Fennessey?

  Jeez, okay.

• 1:52:12Amanda Dobbins?

  So, you know, it begins.

• 1:52:14Sean Fennessey?

  Begins.

• 1:52:16Amanda Dobbins?

  It begins again.

• 1:52:17Sean Fennessey?

  I've got a school function that evening, that's not ideal.

• 1:52:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Zach's in New York, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.

• 1:52:23Sean Fennessey?

  Gosh, and then easy being us.

• 1:52:24Amanda Dobbins?

  It's his turn.

• 1:52:25Sean Fennessey?

  Now, it's so easy being us. Uh, well, Amanda, this is always one of my favorite episodes of the year, so, thank you for your service.

• 1:52:31Amanda Dobbins?

  You too.

• 1:52:32Sean Fennessey?

  You'll be back later this week, and we will talk about, I think we should do it in two parts. We can talk about a bunch of movies that we've missed from August and September, some of which you've seen, some of which I've seen, we'll bounce back and forth, recommend a few things. You know, there's been this really fascinating thing, where like, Coyote vs. Acme has been a nice success, you know, the movie Buddy has been a nice success, so like, weirdly, the end of August and beginning of September had a couple of interesting storylines. We'll go over the results of the summer movie preview game, which are effectively concluded now, right? Because we're, it's gonna be September 11th, and, and then, we'll also just hang out, you know?

• 1:53:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:53:09Sean Fennessey?

  Sound good?

• 1:53:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I know, it sounds great, I can't wait to be home.

• 1:53:12Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, safe travels, buddy. Thanks to Jack Sanders, for his work as the producer of this episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for production support. We'll see you later this week.