The 2025 Dumpuary Extravaganza. Plus: Steven Soderbergh Returns!

Sean and Amanda are joined by Yasi Salek to discuss ‘Better Man,’ the bizarro Robbie Williams biopic in which he is rendered as a CGI chimpanzee (1:00) and ‘One of Them Days,’ the Keke Palmer and SZA action comedy produced by Issa Rae and directed by Lawrence Lamont (29:00). Then, Yasi departs and Sean and Amanda explore ‘Back In Action,’ the spy-action-comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx that jumped up to number one on Netflix (53:00). Next, Chris Ryan joins to weigh in on ‘Wolf Man,’ ‘Flight’ Risk,' and ‘Presence,’ a trio of movies of wildly different quality from three accomplished directors (1:06:00). Finally, Sean is joined by Steven Soderbergh to discuss his 35th feature film ‘Presence,’ a tense thriller experimenting with point-of-view and form (1:40:00). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Yasi Salek, Chris Ryan, and Steven Soderbergh Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Video Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 3:10Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessey.

• 3:11Speaker 04

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 3:12Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture A Conversation Show about Dumpuary. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Steven Soderbergh. His new film, Presence, is in theaters now, and we'll talk about it later in this episode. It's a POV-driven story, a ghost story. The camera is literally the ghost in this movie. Had a good time talking with Steven, who of course Amanda is in love with. What?

• 3:30Speaker 04

  Spoiler.

• 3:31Sean Fennessey?

  Why is that a spoiler?

• 3:32Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 3:33Sean Fennessey?

  It's in the marketing material.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, but like, if you sit down... That you're in love with him is in the marketing material. Well, that is on record. And he... See, look, I just get tongue-tied when I talk about Steven Soderbergh. Sean asked him one of my questions, and I'm really excited to hear what he said. But yeah, I don't know. I would... If you're gonna watch Presence, just watch it.

• 3:52Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, just watch it. Also, listen to my conversation with Steven. Please stick around. After we talk today, we're talking about a bunch of new movies. We have multiple guests. Later in the episode, Chris Ryan will show up to talk about some dude-ly films that are hitting theaters. But we're joined by a special guest in studio, Yasi Salek. Hi, Yasi.

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Hi, Sean.

• 4:11Sean Fennessey?

  How are you doing?

• 4:12Speaker 04

  Hi, Yasi. I'm great.

• 4:13Sean Fennessey?

  Hanging in there?

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Best year of my life.

• 4:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, great. Wonderful. You're here for a very specific reason, because one of the movies that was released this January, this Dumpuary, is called Better Man. I think Better Man came up when we... Did it come up when we talked about Moana 2?

• 4:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:28Sean Fennessey?

  And you were like, I'm interested in this.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:29Sean Fennessey?

  What is this?

• 4:30Speaker 04

  I really, since I saw the, on twitx.com a while back, I was like, what's this? I'm intrigued.

• 4:38Sean Fennessey?

  And Amanda, what is Better Man?

• 4:41Speaker 04

  So it is a biopic about the British musical star Robbie Williams, wherein Robbie Williams is played by a CGI monkey. I'm sorry, just not to be like, split hairs, but it is a chimpanzee. I actually, as I was saying monkey, I was like, I don't actually think that I have the right classification here. I have also been calling it monkey movie, but then I did a bit of research and it is a chimpanzee. Monkeys have tails. This is a chimpanzee. It does not have a tail.

• 5:15Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. Okay. So I don't, I don't think I understood that delineation.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  I didn't either.

• 5:19Sean Fennessey?

  Is there a meaningful difference in the execution of the movie? If this were a monkey, would it be closer to a Planet of the Apes style tail?

• 5:25Speaker 04

  I mean, honestly, when I thought about that, it was more just like, a tail is so unnerving. So I think that they made the right choice.

• 5:33Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I can assure you, this is no less unnerving.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Then you have to. It's too much with the tail. Then you have to adjust the wardrobe for the, yeah, exactly.

• 5:40Sean Fennessey?

  That's true. That's true.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  You know, and the chimpanzee, I almost said monkey, I'm sorry, is dressed like a, all the other humans around him.

• 5:48Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  Sexily. Yeah. I mean, he's, he's.

• 5:51Sean Fennessey?

  Hot, hot chimpanzee?

• 5:53Speaker 04

  No, I'm just saying they're dressed sexily. That's the whole, the long, for the take that portion of.

• 5:59Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, sure. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I mean, let's talk about Robbie Williams before we get into the actual movie itself. Because Robbie Williams is a name that I think many people between the ages of 30 and 60 have probably heard.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 6:13Sean Fennessey?

  He is quite famous in the UK, significantly less famous in the United States. He did make an attempt to break through in the US, which didn't really take. But he has been kind of in the firmament of celebrity in the United Kingdom for a long time.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  Oh, and the United Kingdom very much so. Yeah.

• 6:29Sean Fennessey?

  Um, this movie is a pretty significant risk in the United States. We'll talk about that risk that was taken, but you know, I, I think you and I have had mostly the same experience with Robbie Williams, which is that I'm sure we were aware of and had heard Take That songs. And then when he went solo. He came through with Millennium, which is of course a kind of morphed adaptation of a James Bond song, delivered in the style of like a Frank Sinatra dance ballad.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah. Everything that you just said was like a really, really normal.

• 7:02Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of accurate, though?

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Yes, it is. I mean, Robbie Williams is, despite Millennium and despite that's all. What about Angels, you guys? Angels is the bigger. How have you never?

• 7:14Sean Fennessey?

  Well, what charted higher in the US? You gotta consider where we were. We basically grew up in a suburban existence, watching MTV all day.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah. So I got Millennium and that's it.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  And also.

• 7:26Sean Fennessey?

  Are you whisper singing Angels?

• 7:28Speaker 04

  I don't wanna like unleash my full singing voice here. I don't think the big picture is prepared for that.

• 7:34Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  I don't know what charted higher.

• 7:37Sean Fennessey?

  You had a very different experience than we did with Robbie Williams.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't like, don't very, like, it's not my favorite artist that I had as posters on my wall. Take That did not exist to me.

• 7:46Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  Same. Yeah, because that was, I went to high school partially in Singapore, because I am the most interesting woman in the world. And I moved there in like 97, which is when Robbie Williams went solo. So Take That, nothing to do with me. But he was very big on MTV Asia. So I knew Angels, I knew Millennium.

• 8:07Sean Fennessey?

  And you liked them?

• 8:09Speaker 04

  I just knew them. No, I don't, it wasn't, I wasn't, you know, I was listening to, I was listening to some real, some real shit, some real guitar based shit.

• 8:18Sean Fennessey?

  Same.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  But I knew it, like, it was in the ether. Like, I know those songs when I hear them, they're very familiar to me.

• 8:24Sean Fennessey?

  He, you know, there were a number of other, obviously, this is sort of at the, I guess, sort of the tail end of the Britpop explosion when he came along.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, because I think Be Here Now came out in 98.

• 8:37Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, 98, okay. So after.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Am I wrong?

• 8:40Sean Fennessey?

  I don't even remember.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  I think it's 98. Bobby can fact check for us. Sorry, I'm not allowed to ask. I was just in the middle of fact checking. Angels charted higher. Yeah, that's right. Angels is like a huge song.

• 8:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, got past me.

• 8:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. No idea what that is. Be Here Now is 97. Weeks on the chart.

• 8:56Sean Fennessey?

  97.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Millennium only, only peaked at 70.

• 8:59Sean Fennessey?

  Two and it was only on the chart for four weeks.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's also not unrelated, honestly, because Britpop died in 1997 as a result of multiple factors, including be here now, including Noel Gallagher going to 10 Downing in his fuck ass blazer and his dumb haircut and being like, okay, cool. Yeah, by the way, old episode of the podcast where just absolutely Liam Gallagher slander. I think it was the brutalist. Yeah. And you and Adam Neiman were just like team Noel. He's the artist. And I just, I think there are a lot of different definitions of art.

• 9:31Sean Fennessey?

  I don't disagree.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  I did enjoy that episode because, you know, I love I'm brutalist bitch.

• 9:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I know.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  And then also then you guys had like a mini bands playing in the middle and I was like.

• 9:39Sean Fennessey?

  Well.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  It was a good episode, but you know, once again, Liam rules.

• 9:44Sean Fennessey?

  You will have plenty of time after you see Oasis live to really delineate who is the true artist in Oasis. There was no, there's no, there's no counterpoint, no brother figure in the Robbie Williams story.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  No, but oh, I was gonna say is like Robbie Williams going solo is not, not part of Britpop dying, I think.

• 10:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's tangentially connected, for sure.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  It's the we ushers in this sort of like new pop thing that happened.

• 10:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think like Jamiroquai is a part of that. There are a few UK artists who like infiltrated America. And there was this expectation that like there would be a long stream, the same way that there was in the sixties.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Well, Spice Girls also come out, I think in 96 or 97.

• 10:24Sean Fennessey?

  Very connected. And all of that stuff is happening. I regarded it with some curiosity and not a ton of interest. There wasn't exactly, British pop is not my favorite kind of music. But this is, I mean, this was, we're talking about stuff that was happening 28, 29, 30 years ago. So this is a very odd subject for a wide release film in the United States. And yet, amongst some people in our lives, this is among the most beloved movies that's come out despite its huge commercial failure in the US.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  But don't you feel, and not to regurgitate X.com takes, but is not the commercial failure a great deal because no one knows who Robbie Williams is here? Like, I'm sure the monkey chimpanzee aspect has something to do with it, but. Yes, of course. And I think even watching it as a person who knew Millennium and, you know, I actually loves a music biopic. I was like, okay, but who is this person? Who are any of these people and like, what is Take That? I literally just Googled Take That and learned that Gary Barlow is one of this. Okay, but Gary Barlow is someone I've seen on like Graham Norton for like 20 years and have literally never known who he was. That's my.

• 11:41Sean Fennessey?

  Well, he's a part of this film in the story.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wasn't paying that close attention to that. I have to be honest. He's like the main antagonist besides the. Oh, that's true. That's why Gary and he goes to the house and he's like, Gary, I hate you.

• 11:53Sean Fennessey?

  Same Gary.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  I, you know, like.

• 11:55Sean Fennessey?

  But that's a good point.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Say Gary Barlow 45 times in the movie. So I wasn't like, oh, that guy from, you know, the talk shows that I watch. So yeah, no one knows who he is and, and I, and even watching it, you're kind of like, okay, a lot of this is cool. But also like, why? And, and who are these people and what are these songs? And, you know, and, and I think that's the thing. The music isn't as well known here. So. That to me, I think is the like hardest, cause to bring up a complete unknown. You enjoy it so much because you know the song.

• 12:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  And that's why I was like, honestly shocked how much I loved Better Man because I did not know most of the songs. And I still loved it and I was like, wow. And I didn't know that much of the story and I still love it. And I was like, that means it's so good. Cause but music biopics really just like kind of cheaply play on your like fondness for the music.

• 12:47Sean Fennessey?

  They often do. They often do. There, there's one specific aspect of this that is different. Aside from the chimpanzee aspect, which is that Michael Gracie is the director of this movie. Michael Gracie's last movie was The Greatest Showman, which had a kind of a similar arc of like immediate failure. And then it became a huge box office success over an extended period of time at this same time of year. Came out in December, didn't do well, and then for whatever reason, held on at the box office and then was kind of claimed as. Kind of like a goofball, postmodern musical masterpiece. Better Man is sort of trending in that same direction. It's never gonna make the amount of money that The Greatest Showman did. But Michael Gracie is actually a very interesting figure.

• 13:30Sean Fennessey?

  He kind of has a similar background to someone like James Cameron, where he was a VFX artist, working behind the scenes on movies for a long time. Always had a very dynamic, creative, visual sensibility. The reason why he took this movie on, we can talk about in a little bit. But he's a director who has like an incredible energy in his movies. I don't really love the script of this movie, but I had a lot of fun watching it. Because, man, it's like so thrilling at times, the way that it's made. Like, the camera is flying all over the place. The dance sequences, the choreography, the way that CGI is deployed.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  That take that sequence. The rock DJ. Yeah, come on, a rock DJ, yes.

• 14:08Sean Fennessey?

  Incredible. One of the great movie scenes of the year. Super fun and exciting and creative. And, you know, this movie was nominated for Best Visual Effects Oscar. And so the issues that I have with it, aside from not really knowing those songs and not having that pleasure hit that you're talking about when you hear a song you love. No, I like chimpanzees and I like movies with monkeys and chimps in them as well. I don't really get, I didn't feel emotionally connected to whatever Robbie Williams's plight was, which was like, guess, child neglect? And then the quest for fame? Like, it did, the stakes seemed weirdly, really low on this movie.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  You know how art is like a mirror?

• 14:48Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  I feel like I'm learning a lot about you right now.

• 14:53Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, how so?

• 14:54Speaker 04

  No, just that we're like such different kinds of entertainers.

• 14:58Sean Fennessey?

  You think I'm an entertainer?

• 14:59Speaker 04

  I think I'm an entertainer.

• 15:00Sean Fennessey?

  I wouldn't dispute that, nor would I dispute it about you either.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:05Sean Fennessey?

  Well, what do you mean? Because you do reflect on the child neglect and feel seen by that story?

• 15:10Speaker 04

  We don't have to get into that, just on the tail end of my house burning down. We've had a lot of topics to discuss. We can, we sure can. I think it was like, I said this in my Letterboxd review, that's right, you guys. I have a Letterboxd.

• 15:24Sean Fennessey?

  Just scoping for dudes.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  That's right, get on here, babe. Oh, yeah, that would be good. Though I'm less comfortable with the Letterboxd. Community? As a meet-cute. Sure. Destination than like the rest. I'd like you to start there. Yeah. You know? I'm just trying, I'm just trying to get more followers. Okay, alright. Um, I thought it was like literally Jungian, the way it, can I just have a little, a little spiel on the monkey?

• 15:49Sean Fennessey?

  Good.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  The chimpanzee. First of all, number one, Robbie Williams looks like a monkey.

• 15:54Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:54Speaker 04

  So already, it's working.

• 15:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Resemble, he has a facial resemblance.

• 15:59Sean Fennessey?

  He does, but we all do technically.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  No, but like more than most people.

• 16:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, you need to pull up a photo, like, look at it.

• 16:05Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  Number two, he, his whole thing was being dehumanized.

• 16:11Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  By being a clown and an entertainer.

• 16:14Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  So, okay, we're dehumanizing with a monkey. And he hated himself. And yes, part of that, I think, was child neglect, if you want, or just sort of like the value system foisted upon him by his father, who thought being famous and a star was the most important thing in the world and abandoned him to seek his fortune. But also, that's, sometimes that's just how you're built, you know? And I just thought it worked so well on all those levels. And that was his plight. His plight was just that he, he hated himself and he thought that if he could get enough other people to love him, he would stop hating himself.

• 16:50Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  Which is a very common, I think, trope.

• 16:52Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know very many people who don't feel that way.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  Right, but like in, in fame, but you didn't connect with it? Are you not a person that felt, ever felt that way?

• 17:00Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's always hard when someone who's just tremendously successful and rich is like, I tried really hard to be famous and then I got famous. Like, that's not really, it's one of the reasons why I don't really like music biopics.

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:12Sean Fennessey?

  Is that they're often rooted in these sort of, you know, self mythology around one's own success.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:20Sean Fennessey?

  So, it's a kind of a bland story. It doesn't mean that the way he was feeling isn't valid.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:25Sean Fennessey?

  And it doesn't mean that child neglect and the desire to kind of like authorize your parents' expectations of you isn't a real thing in people's lives. It is. As the structure of a movie, it's just kind of boring. Like, I knew where this was going the whole time.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  So, I'm with Yasi in that I think The chimpanzee, I'm really trying hard here.

• 17:46Sean Fennessey?

  I know, I think we can just shorthand monkey, it's okay.

• 17:49Speaker 04

  Like, the monkey construct is very clever, both in terms of the story and also like in what you expect with a music biopic. And I like a music biopic, but they are formulaic and so and they do often hinge on this like, I really tried to be a star or be an artist and then all these things, often including my mean dad, like held me back and then I made it, but there were consequences of it. I mean, you know, that is the story of a lot of famous people. I find that interesting. I think like the monkey thing is a clever way to do it. I also think they like do pull off the monkey thing in the context of the movie. My problem is like the inherent contradiction that like Robbie Williams is not that famous to me, you know?

• 18:33Speaker 04

  And so like I'm watching all of this and I'm like, okay, well, like you had a decent amount of success wherever you are. And I remember Millennium, but I'm like, you know, that's

• 18:44Sean Fennessey?

  that's the disconnect.

• 18:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:46Sean Fennessey?

  He really was like Justin Timberlake. Like for a cop, like he was so famous in the UK.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 18:55Sean Fennessey?

  So the story does make sense in the context of his life and the UK. It just like maybe doesn't translate to us. I don't know. Okay. My other thing was like, I don't mind when a plot is wrote in the music biopic. Especially because like, would you have wanted it to be like, it's a chimpanzee? And we have this crazy different plot? Like, I feel like almost like too much

• 19:16Speaker 04

  Well, it's

• 19:17Sean Fennessey?

  subversion of the of the form. I think part of it is because unlike Bob Dylan or Elton John or other people who have gotten this treatment before, I'm not as familiar with the details of Robbie Williams's life. So to learn that this movie about a significantly less famous person was greenlit with a hundred and ten million dollar budget and this big conceit, I would have hoped, and the movie is really audacious in almost every other way. Yeah. So it being so audacious in every other way is a credit to it and a reason why I like it. Like generally I would recommend this movie. It's a cool movie. It's much more different than Rocketman, but.

• 19:53Sean Fennessey?

  The script itself is like-

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Why does this podcast have to turn against Elton John? You know? I love you, Ashley, and I'm really happy that you're here. But we just don't have to take two shots. He deserved a better-

• 20:03Sean Fennessey?

  I agree, that's the thing.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  I hate music biopics across the board. They're almost all bad.

• 20:08Sean Fennessey?

  That's why this movie-

• 20:09Speaker 04

  That's fine.

• 20:09Sean Fennessey?

  I'm holding this movie to the same standard.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  I think it's better than all of them. Because, here, I'll tell you why. I think the failing that most music biopics have, in my humble music expert opinion, is they're too self-serious.

• 20:23Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  And it's embarrassing.

• 20:26Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is not that. It's fun. It's fun.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  And because of that, it's kind of able to, like, Trojan-horse in, to me anyways, more poignancy and more feeling because it's not beating you over the head with- Every time I watch a music biopic with the- I don't know, I made a list, I was like, what are the good ones? They're just so like, you're like, okay.

• 20:47Sean Fennessey?

  They are tremendously serious. You don't think this movie is that fun, though?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  No, no, it's really, really fun. And then at some point, he goes solo and he's just like on a boat singing his like sub-par solo stuff to some woman that I've never heard of, who I think was also, was she was like- Nicole Appleton from All Saints Day. I have heard of Nicole Appleton. Add a baby with Liam Gallagher.

• 21:08Sean Fennessey?

  You needed to look at the cast list here, so you could just see who the real people were. Because you're probably, I felt the same way. I'm familiar with most of these people.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  But I'm familiar with them in a, like, my diseased, immoral brain still reads the Daily Mail. You know, and so it's like- In so many ways, you're an Anglophile, yet you did not know about Robbie Williams. Graham Norton, the Daily Mail. I knew like a little bit about him, but it's like, you know, you read the headlines and you're like, okay, well, that's some local politics, you know? Like, that doesn't apply to me.

• 21:34Sean Fennessey?

  That's a great way of describing it. I just saw this morning a photo of Liam and Hugh Grant at the same table circa 1998, when he was still dating Elizabeth Hurley.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  I could just go back in time.

• 21:46Sean Fennessey?

  And I, you know, you more so than me, but I felt like I understood that axis of celebrity in the UK. And Robbie Williams was just on the outside.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:54Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he was the Karen Bass to the Gavin Newsom conversation that we're having.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  I think you're confusing it. I think you understand that axis of fame in America. In the UK, they were just as famous.

• 22:04Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I, that's true. I just wasn't there.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  Robbie Williams set like records.

• 22:09Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not disputing his level of success. I think it's all in the context of an American movie podcast, basically. And this movie being distributed by Paramount. Like, this isn't an independent film with a small budget.

• 22:18Speaker 04

  I mean, I kept thinking about Mamma Mia in this, which, you know, was, have you still not seen Mamma Mia?

• 22:26Speaker 04

  Really? I don't want to spoil it for you, but like Meryl Streep just like screams the winner takes it all at Pierce Brosnan, like in Greece. Okay. I mean, it's, it's worth seeing. A secret thing about me is I hate musicals. Well, I mean, I kind of do sometimes do, but that's okay. But this is, this is more.

• 22:43Sean Fennessey?

  That's more your exception on the modern musicals. You like classic musicals.

• 22:47Speaker 04

  That's true. Yeah. But like, I do like classic musicals. Do you like ABBA? Yeah, I mean, just as much as the next red-blooded. Sure, right. So, I mean, it's just that. Just enjoyable, yeah. Yeah. And I love Meryl Streep.

• 22:59Sean Fennessey?

  Why is, but why did it remind you of Mamma Mia?

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Because Mamma Mia, like, I mean, it did well here, but for a long time, it was like the most successful movie in the UK, like, ever. It made $465 million internationally to like 100 here. And like, I think all of that was Brits being like, yo, let's go see Mamma Mia again.

• 23:20Sean Fennessey?

  In theory, Sweden as well.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  And Europe, just all Europe. Yeah, but, but it was like, it was like a huge, huge outside success in the UK. So I was like, oh, maybe they think that this is, you know, that they can Mamma Mia this. But I don't know why you would, as an American movie studio, why you would invest so much in its American release. The business of it, I don't understand. That's a real, you.

• 23:43Sean Fennessey?

  We could talk about that briefly. I mean, Matt Bellamy had this in his newsletter a couple of weeks ago, which I thought was interesting, which was that Michael Gracie agreed to the deal with Paramount to distribute this movie at a certain number, which I think was 25 million. Because Paramount wanted him to make another movie that is reportedly more commercial, according to Matt.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  So he was like wheeling it. He was wheeling and dealing.

• 24:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Maybe he loves Robbie Williams.

• 24:04Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm sure he does. Michael Gracie's Australian, but clear, you know, he's clearly very tapped into the material here.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  It's the Queensland, is it not?

• 24:12Sean Fennessey?

  But that movie, Nevermore.

• 24:15Sean Fennessey?

  Feels like it is going to be the end result of the Better Man thing happening, or maybe the movie doesn't happen because of the Better Man performance. For the record, Better Man has not been a big hit in the United Kingdom either.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  No, it's not.

• 24:26Sean Fennessey?

  It has not performed that well in Robbie Williams' country.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Do you think it's the chimpanzee?

• 24:30Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. I mean, I think it's a hard sell. I think, I wonder if this, I don't know what level of celebrity Robbie Williams has right now, but I wonder if it was 10 years ago, if it actually would have done better when he was a little bit closer to the apex of his success.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Right, but you couldn't do that then.

• 24:47Sean Fennessey?

  That technology?

• 24:48Speaker 04

  No, you just couldn't, you can't reflect on your life.

• 24:51Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, he would have been too young, you think?

• 24:52Speaker 04

  One minute later, yeah.

• 24:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  Did you see, you know, he made also a docu-series.

• 24:57Sean Fennessey?

  I did not see that.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  That came out last year.

• 24:59Sean Fennessey?

  Did you watch that?

• 25:00Speaker 04

  I watched half of it.

• 25:01Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  It's also quite, it's, it's, doesn't, it leaves out some of this, again, I only watched half of it, that's really more family stuff than this, but it's also like, he's so likeable. Like, he's so, he's so self-aware. That's the other thing, it's like, the other music biopics, I'm like, ah, you're so not self-aware.

• 25:19Sean Fennessey?

  There's a fine line between self-aware, post-modern entertainer and smug guy.

• 25:27Speaker 04

  I think he's both.

• 25:28Sean Fennessey?

  As someone who literally is operating in that space at times, um, I-

• 25:31Speaker 04

  You're an entertainer.

• 25:32Sean Fennessey?

  I, well, maybe I am. Um, I, I actually, I feel connected to Robbie Williams in some ways in that respect, but I don't think, the kind of music that he makes, which is, it is explained to us very well in the movie, which is like, his dad is obsessed with Sinatra and Tony Bennett and these kind of classical American crooners. When you listen to Robbie Williams, basically putting like, a syncopated drum machine behind an attempt to sound like Frank Sinatra with a British accent.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  Do you know who played drums on Angels?

• 26:00Sean Fennessey?

  Who played drums on Angels?

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Chris Cherick from The Laws.

• 26:02Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, okay.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  Sorry, there you go.

• 26:03Sean Fennessey?

  Good note, real band-splain moment there.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  A real drummer.

• 26:05Sean Fennessey?

  Um, it's just an odd kind of music. There's not, he doesn't have a lot of contemporaries. You know, like, there's Michael Bublé, and then I guess Harry Connick Jr. and a handful of- People in the tradition of crooning, but like, that's not really a pop style that works in America. And certainly not one when you're like, also, it's produced by, you know, it's influenced by Massive Attack or whatever. So I think that's part of the issue here.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:31Sean Fennessey?

  Is that whatever Robbie Williams makes, it never really fit in our collective heads in America. And so that is just a gap that I also would have a harder time getting over watching a two hour movie about a guy who makes music like this. Honestly, does that make sense?

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Of course. Can I say one thing about Liam Gallagher?

• 26:49Sean Fennessey?

  Of course. This is a safe space for Liam fans, as you know.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  I don't know if I said this to you, but one thing I was blown away by, we both recently watched, what's the terrible creation movie we watched? It's called Creation Stories.

• 26:58Sean Fennessey?

  Creation Stories, sure, yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Spoiler, we will be podcasting about eventually. There's also a actor playing Liam Gallagher in that movie. And this is, I think, okay, do you guys not agree that almost always when an actor plays a real person, the actor is always hotter? Hmm, yeah. It's pretty. Typically, yeah. Ninety-nine.

• 27:17Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good, it's a good rule of.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  They round up, yeah.

• 27:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  They have not been able to get an actor hotter. Like every time I'm like, Liam Gallagher is 10 times hotter than this person. Why couldn't you? He's so gorgeous that they actually can't do that for him. I also, the Oasis casting in this film took me out of the movie. I would agree with you. No, it's not bad. I mean, and it was also, it was a commentary on Noel that I was like, okay, I, you know, I see what you think of Noel Gallagher. Robbie Williams. They were so mean to him in the press. And like, I like it, you, I didn't, there was some stuff you had to kind of know for it to hit. And there's a lot of it I didn't, but like, I don't know if you guys remember the part where he's like eating chips a bunch on, after he like, breaks up with Nicole Appleton, goes back home and he's like horking down chips. Cause he got really fat. Oh.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  When he was hanging out with Oasis, he got really fat. And I think. They were like trying to nod at that, but they didn't want to like, it was hard to make the monkey fat, I guess. But I was like, that is, he didn't get fat. And the fat suit, they did that, but that part was really good. Can I ask something? I don't remember, when you're saying chips, are you saying? Sorry, crisps, crisps. Okay. Crisps. Well, you know. In the parlance of.

• 28:24Sean Fennessey?

  Potato chips, not french fries.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  The salt and vinegar, the lick. I cried so much.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  Oh, right, the lick, yeah.

• 28:30Sean Fennessey?

  So, "Want You Back," that never made its way to you, either of you guys, the "Take That" song?

• 28:35Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 28:35Sean Fennessey?

  "Want you back for good." "Want you back, want you back, oh, want you back for good," you know?

• 28:39Speaker 04

  They made it to you? How?

• 28:41Sean Fennessey?

  I'm just, we're the same age. I'm surprised it didn't, maybe it just wasn't playing in, on MTV Asia. I mean, I was pretty sure I heard that.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  Was it a TRL? That was prior to me listening.

• 28:48Sean Fennessey?

  It's pre-TRL.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. Right, so that's the thing.

• 28:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but I was watching MTV.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  And that's where like the, like even the several years make. They did not put that on MTV.

• 28:56Sean Fennessey?

  Um, where else would I have heard that song? Maybe Z100, maybe?

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it might have been the radio.

• 29:01Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe the radio. I honestly think it was on MTV. I could be wrong about that.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  I, I did.

• 29:05Sean Fennessey?

  It was not on 120 Minutes, I assure you.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  I did see this film with a Scottish person.

• 29:09Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  And she was obviously loved it, but she also was like, this was Harry Styles. Like, I can't express to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She was trying to say to her daughter, who's 14, who was like, I don't.

• 29:17Sean Fennessey?

  That makes complete sense.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  She was just like, I don't understand what, like a 15-year-old girl watching that was so amazing, but she actually liked it. But I, to her credit, but I was like, wow, watching her with no context.

• 29:27Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  Who is Oasis? Like, the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:31Sean Fennessey?

  But in, in the same, in terms of the construction of the band too, and I thought some of that was interesting with Damien Harriman as the, you know, the Svengali who brings the group together. That's like a very familiar American trope with the Lou Pearlman's of the world who do that too. The other thing that's weird, you've seen "Enora"?

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:45Sean Fennessey?

  You know, "Enora" opens with this "Take That" song during this strip club sequence.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  Oh, that's right.

• 29:50Sean Fennessey?

  This will be the greatest day, you know, like.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:52Sean Fennessey?

  That song that recurs through is also a "Take That" song, so "Take That" at the movies is crazy.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  But I didn't. Back in the Renaissance, in the. I wasn't like, oh, this is a "Take That" song when "Enora" started.

• 30:02Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I knew it was, but I wasn't like, I'm a "Take That" super fan. I'm not. I couldn't name three "Take That" songs, but it's unusual that "Take That" would have such a strong presence here in our culture. Um. You know, this movie made a million dollars domestically.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, tell me what you want.

• 30:18Sean Fennessey?

  A million dollars on 1,200 screens. It's cost 110 million dollars. I think it made like 12 or 13 in the UK, so that's bad.

• 30:26Speaker 04

  We're not done yet.

• 30:28Sean Fennessey?

  You think it's gonna bounce back after this pod?

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Me and Bobby Wagner and Jack Sanders, we're on a campaign, babe. And we're gonna get, we're gonna turn the folks around. We're film influencers.

• 30:36Sean Fennessey?

  So Bobby and Jack, both huge fans of Better Man.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  That's right, my guys.

• 30:40Sean Fennessey?

  Bobby, you didn't love it as much as Jack did, I don't think. It was not like the best movie I saw of 2024, but I'd say it's better than your average movie that makes it into this episode of this podcast. That is for damn sure. That's the thing that is actually an interesting point about this episode, which is that there are weirdly a lot of good, but not great, but good movies this January.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  You're rudely calling them dumpuary?

• 31:01Sean Fennessey?

  Which we call dumpuary. But as I said, it's not about, we're not dumping on these movies. They were dumped into the landfill of January release.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  Where people traditionally do not go to the theater, hence the one million dollar box office.

• 31:15Sean Fennessey?

  You said it was December. It was released in limited engagement in December to qualify for awards.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  For awards, yeah.

• 31:22Sean Fennessey?

  It only, it opened wide two weeks ago. If only I was on the Academy voting, we'd have a different outcome. One other important Michael Gracie note for my household, which is that it has been reported that he's gonna direct the live action Tangled next. So Tangled is the Rapunzel animated feature that Disney put out 15, 20 years ago that I remember taking my little sister Grace to, who's been a guest of this podcast.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  Hi, Grace.

• 31:48Sean Fennessey?

  When she was like eight or nine. And is now my sister, my sister, my daughter's favorite movie. And my daughter.

• 31:54Speaker 04

  My daughter, my sister. That's intense, yeah.

• 31:57Sean Fennessey?

  Well, younger sister gets complicated. But Rapunzel is a possession in my household. Tangled is a very fun and pretty creative movie for recent vintage Disney. And frankly, I'd like to see what Michael Gracie could do with it.

• 32:11Speaker 04

  What's the tangled setup? So it's, is it just Rapunzel or what's the twist?

• 32:15Sean Fennessey?

  She's locked in the tower.

• 32:16Speaker 04

  But she's a girl boss. It's if Rapunzel was a girl boss.

• 32:18Sean Fennessey?

  She's got more girl bossy qualities, but she's not full girl boss because she's locked in a tower.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  Okay. But how does she get out? By the patriarchy. Does she liberate? Does she lock in the tower of the patriarchy?

• 32:30Sean Fennessey?

  No, by a Mother Gothel.

• 32:31Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 32:32Sean Fennessey?

  A mother figure.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Oh, it's girl on girl crime.

• 32:36Sean Fennessey?

  Siphoning power from Rapunzel's hair.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Does, how does she, does she liberate herself?

• 32:42Sean Fennessey?

  With the help of a, a man named Flynn Rider.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  Okay, what's Flynn Rider's deal?

• 32:49Sean Fennessey?

  Flynn Rider is a, is a bandit.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  He's a, he's a, he's a male ally.

• 32:55Sean Fennessey?

  He has ally qualities. I, in my home, often my daughter will say, I'll be Rapunzel and dad, you be Flynn. Which, and then we'll play as Rapunzel and Flynn. Um, Flynn, I think, is he voiced by Zachary Levi? I think he is, which is not ideal.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  That's tough.

• 33:13Sean Fennessey?

  So we don't want that casting in real life. I think Mandy Moore is Rapunzel.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  My neighbor, my old neighbor. Oh, she is?

• 33:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, a couple of bangers in the soundtrack too. Anyway, Tangled, for whatever reason, it's in that middle tier of like The Princess and the Frog. And there's a bunch of movies made in the last 10 years.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  And Donna Murphy is Mother Gothel, AKA the instructor from Center Stage. Where are you on Center Stage, the film? I haven't seen it. Okay, that's okay. It's all right.

• 33:35Sean Fennessey?

  Donna Murphy has an absolute showstopper on the soundtrack to Rapunzel as well, or Tangled as well. Anyway, I, I would like to see it. Michael Gracie direct Tangled live action. I, I need one good Disney live action movie before I die. So maybe that could be the one.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Can I ask a Sean Fantasy style question?

• 33:51Sean Fennessey?

  Cool, sure, go for it.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  What are your guys' favorite music biopic and most disappointing music biopic?

• 33:58Sean Fennessey?

  Hey, we definitely did an episode about this, but I can't even remember what it was hooked to.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Listen, you love Rocket. Because Elton John is your guy. I I do love Elton John and I just Sean was took some swipes at him. Oh, I was listening. And I think that that is disrespectful.

• 34:15Sean Fennessey?

  No, I took some swipes at the better man or Never Too Late documentary, which I thought was Benel.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 34:21Sean Fennessey?

  I think Elton John is an amazing artist.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  He is a king. Thank you. So I enjoyed Walk the Line. I've never wavered on that. Great movie. Yeah. So that's where I am. And I and as a result, I also enjoyed A Complete Unknown, Walk the Line, too. I loved it. Yeah.

• 34:35Sean Fennessey?

  Well, we're gonna pod about one of the best ones.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  Okay, so you're gonna.

• 34:38Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if you want to spoil that or not.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  Me and you.

• 34:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can spoil it. It's I think it'll be pretty soon, so.

• 34:44Sean Fennessey?

  Connected to your ongoing Britpop series on BandSplain.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  No Robbie Williams episode. Sorry, guys.

• 34:51Sean Fennessey?

  We're gonna do a conversation about 24 Hour Party People, which is more of a music biopic about a label.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:56Sean Fennessey?

  And an era in England.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, like a scene, almost. Yeah.

• 35:01Sean Fennessey?

  That one's really good. I mean, you know, there's a couple that are good. I like Control.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  I hate Control. You know that. You know.

• 35:08Sean Fennessey?

  You did mention that to me.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Speaking of self-serious.

• 35:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it is very self-serious.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Make a photo book, Corb Jean.

• 35:12Sean Fennessey?

  We'll talk about that when we talk about 24 Hour Party People. I don't, you know, like, these movies are self-serious, but like Coal Miner's Daughter, What's Love Got To Do With It.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:19Sean Fennessey?

  The sort of earlier additions of this before they became so rote.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:23Sean Fennessey?

  I think, but it's usually all of those movies, just like this movie, except in this case, it's a CGI chimpanzee, are built on that central performance. And if the person embodies and captures the thing that you like, the way that Joaquin does in Walk the Line, or the way that Timothee Chalamet does in A Complete Unknown.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  Val Kilmer in the Doors movie. Oh, my God.

• 35:43Sean Fennessey?

  That movie's not very good, but Val Kilmer is incredible.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  But it does that thing where it's like so not good that it transcends into this piece of art that is so singular and wonderful. Because it's crazy.

• 35:53Sean Fennessey?

  What about Eight Mile?

• 35:55Speaker 04

  Does Eight Mile count if the person plays themselves?

• 35:58Sean Fennessey?

  Good question.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  It's a good one, though. I I think it counts.

• 36:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's not an Eminem story. It's a, you know, he's not, he doesn't become Eminem.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Right. It's kind of fictionalized.

• 36:07Sean Fennessey?

  It's a fictional, loosely adapted from his life. I still think very good movie.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  I loved it. Yeah, important. Lumps spaghetti, Ben. It's hard still. I like Amadeus. Yes, not. Yeah.

• 36:18Sean Fennessey?

  Different version of music, but it is. That's a good one.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there's like Down for Glory, right? Like, that's a good one.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  Gary Busey, Buddy Holly's story?

• 36:26Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty good. Gary Busey's very good in it, yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  I like Love and Mercy.

• 36:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's good. The Brian Wilson.

• 36:31Speaker 04

  I haven't seen that one. Oh, it's nice. Yeah.

• 36:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's a good one. That one, and on that one also kind of breaks.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 36:36Sean Fennessey?

  The mold in terms of the way the story is told. La Bamba, that's a good one.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  La Bamba's great.

• 36:40Sean Fennessey?

  Um, there's been some. I think most of the best ones. Sid and Nancy is great. Yeah, we're naming a lot of movies from the eighties and nineties, you know? Like, it's hard to find recent stuff. What about Behind the Candelabra?

• 36:50Speaker 04

  I didn't see it. Liberace?

• 36:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Liberace. That's a great movie. No? On the Soderbergh episode, you're dissing?

• 36:55Speaker 04

  I like it, but it's just not my. You love Elton John, but you don't love Liberace? Oh, that's interesting. I just thought, you know, that it was good.

• 37:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  I think it's over indexed on the Soderbergh. Worst one? Last Days, I'll say it. For me personally. Most disappointing for me. I almost walked out of the theater.

• 37:11Sean Fennessey?

  Uh.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  I love Mr. Vincent, but what are we doing?

• 37:14Sean Fennessey?

  Isn't that one the kind of quasi Kurt Cobain?

• 37:16Speaker 04

  The fake Kurt Cobain one? No.

• 37:17Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of similar to the Eight Mile thing, except not portrayed by Cobain, obviously. Um, I don't love it, Last Days.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  There's like a tw- what felt like a 12 minute scene of him, like, on heroin, making mac and cheese, and I was like.

• 37:30Sean Fennessey?

  He does look, he does look like Kurt.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  He does. Great, great casting.

• 37:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  It's not the best movie.

• 37:35Sean Fennessey?

  Tell you what I don't like is Elvis.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  Didn't see it. Not interested. I, I mean, I would agree, though Austin Butler's very good in it, so.

• 37:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  I mean, Back to Black is the most recent. Like, I, I was so offended.

• 37:47Sean Fennessey?

  That one's a bummer.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  And the way that it, I still can't believe.

• 37:50Sean Fennessey?

  Bunch of Baftanoms for that movie, did you see?

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Listen, you can't. Those were for Amy Winehouse, not for that movie. I didn't see it, but.

• 37:57Sean Fennessey?

  Marisa Bella will be back in Black Bag. Very excited about that.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  She's the hot girl from industry. Yes.

• 38:02Sean Fennessey?

  Among many hot girls, but yeah.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  Well, one of the hot girls, but like, she is.

• 38:06Sean Fennessey?

  She's the leading hot girl, yes.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, love her.

• 38:09Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm, it's just not a great, it often produces exciting performances and also often produces bad movies.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  It's just like.

• 38:17Sean Fennessey?

  Bad Better is not a bad movie.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  But they want it because they make money out of the. Not just Sean Vanessa. Fun to watch all the people recreate moments that, you know, you weren't there for. Like, listen, the Aretha Franklin biopic was really bad when they start writing respect or arranging respect in the studio. I was like, it's respect. Yeah. You know?

• 38:38Sean Fennessey?

  You know what's an interesting example of this that is now 10 years old, which is crazy to think about, is Get On Up, the James Brown movie.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:45Sean Fennessey?

  Which I think is kind of a mess of a movie, but has this wild Chadwick Boseman performance in it and is worth it just for that.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's not ideal. Should we pivot away from Better Man? Anything else you want to say about it?

• 38:58Speaker 04

  No, I loved it. Go see it in the theaters. Let's, let's respect Robert Williams.

• 39:01Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Jack Sanders said before we started recording, better than A Complete Unknown, Better Man.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  I, I honestly. I loved A Complete Unknown. I know that's not a popularly held. I also argued with my, my Scottish friend, who's like the biggest Bob Dylan fan, shout out Chloe. I was like, I think you're mistaking what this is. Like, you think you need to understand that this is a fun time at the movies and not a piece of art. Like, and if you go into it that way, it's so fun. A complete unknown. A complete unknown. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, of course.

• 39:30Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. I agree. Yeah. I don't have a lot bad to say about A Complete Unknown.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Did Timothy Chalamet learn guitar and how to sing and everyone's impressed by that? Yeah, so did all my ex-boyfriends. Cool. They're not amazing and deserving of, you

• 39:42Sean Fennessey?

  Their own biopics?

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Many people learn how to play guitar and sing.

• 39:45Sean Fennessey?

  How many of them have won the Best Actor Oscar?

• 39:48Speaker 04

  That's what I'm saying.

• 39:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Not very many.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  Step up.

• 39:52Sean Fennessey?

  All right, let's pivot. Another movie. Another, another example, I think, of a good movie that is sort of dumped, but it's also maybe just smart programming from a studio's perspective. That's One of Them Days, which came out last Friday, the 17th, which is directed by Lawrence Lamont, written by Cyrida Singleton, who was the showrunner on the last season of Rap Shit on Max, produced by Eustace Ray, notably, who created Rap Shit, and starring Kiki Palmer, SZA, Maude Apatow, and Cat Williams, among many others.

• 40:22Sean Fennessey?

  This is a movie that feels like it was teleported in from 1998.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 40:27Sean Fennessey?

  In the best way possible.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's great.

• 40:30Sean Fennessey?

  Extremely fun. I've seen a couple of comparisons to movies like Friday. I've seen Gregoraki's Smiley Face as a, you know, comparison point. I think a lot of like. Bill Murray buddy comedies from the eighties.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:43Sean Fennessey?

  You can see, you can see a lot of the, um, uh, like Romeo and Michelle sprung to mind while watching this. Obviously, Girls Trip is an influence on the movie.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  Bridesmaids.

• 40:53Sean Fennessey?

  Bridesmaids. Um, it's about two friends who are roommates who, um, are late on their rent and need to make money all across one day. That's basically the whole plot of the story. Kiki and SZA are the, are the friends.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  It's like the plot of Friday, basically, with like two tweaks or whatever.

• 41:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, we gotta get money, otherwise we're gonna kick out of our place or killed by a gangster.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Large gangster, yeah.

• 41:12Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and I don't, this, I don't know how deep a conversation this needs to be. This movie's got super funny set pieces, great cameos, the jokes are good.

• 41:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:21Sean Fennessey?

  We have mentioned, like, when will Kiki Palmer be, like, elevated into a place where she, that she deserves to be in? This is like a perfect use of her talents.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Okay, can I say one little thing about that?

• 41:32Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  I love Kiki Palmer. I did love this movie, but I was a little bit like, oh, man, I feel like we almost lose something when she's the straight man.

• 41:40Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 41:40Speaker 04

  Because she's so.

• 41:41Sean Fennessey?

  She can be so funny.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  She's so funny when she's like bigger and more wacky. And not saying she doesn't, she's gorgeous, she can totally play the main person. But I was a little bit like, oh, like, this did handicap a little bit of like what she's capable of on the other side. Right.

• 42:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's an interesting point, cause she, she gets moments where that jumps out in the movie, especially when SZA is not on screen. And it's more trained on Kiki.

• 42:11Sean Fennessey?

  But that's a, that's actually like a, it's an art. It's an art, like Bill Murray and Chevy Chase and all those guys.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  Totally, yeah, yeah.

• 42:16Sean Fennessey?

  Even Will Ferrell to some extent, like those leading men who get to be at the center of these madcap comedies often have to be able to do both. They have to be the relatable everyman and they also have to have the slapsticky, big performance style. It's a test of a true kind of movie stardom.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  And she did great.

• 42:33Sean Fennessey?

  I think she did it in this movie.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  She also has great chemistry with SZA. And SZA was surprisingly great. SZA was hilarious, but it is also, you know, she is playing off of Kiki Palmer. So like, Kiki Palmer has the ability to like ground it and make it.

• 42:47Sean Fennessey?

  Agree.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Make them work. Uh, just like really funny.

• 42:50Sean Fennessey?

  Did you know SZA was gonna be an actor? I don't think, is this her debut?

• 42:54Speaker 04

  Yes, it is.

• 42:55Sean Fennessey?

  She did him kind of, kind of amazingly good?

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Phenomenal for her first one. Really, really, really, really funny. Um, her hot ones, or their hot ones, they did like a three person hot ones with Issa Rae. Oh, my God, it is genuinely really, really funny.

• 43:08Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, it's a good idea.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, she was very good. Like, all the bits are good, you know? Like, the biscuit stealing and the payday loans lady, who I just want to shout out. Her name is Keela Monorosa-Meja, and she is incredibly funny. She stole the show, I believe. She really, really did.

• 43:25Sean Fennessey?

  She was extremely funny in the last two seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. If you didn't see those, she has a great part in the second to last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  But like, every character and bit that shows up, and every time, like, you know, another obstacle gets thrown at them, because that's the structure of the movie. Like, they all work. They're all very, which is rare. So, I was quite amused with it. The heed was not taken, took me out. I love Cat Williams.

• 43:49Sean Fennessey?

  I do, too. His part in particular, you know, he's obviously like, has been, has had an amazing comedy career tinged with a certain kind of straight talk, social commentary. It's funny when he gets to do, basically, his act inside of a movie. This happens from time to time. It happened on Atlanta, when he had that guest spot in Atlanta. But, you know, he's kind of just doing a Cat Williams routine about why you should never do a payday loan. And it's really great, really funny.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  And he's like, I feel like, isn't there like, some like, archetypal story trope of like, the shepherd, or, you know, the goddess? Isn't it the goddess? I know my brother's obsessed with those ways you structure stories, and how a person comes in.

• 44:31Sean Fennessey?

  Blessing the Northman, you know?

• 44:33Speaker 04

  He calls it the goddess, yeah.

• 44:34Sean Fennessey?

  Attempting to get to Valhalla with the person who guides you along. In a way, in a way.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  And he popped up at every corner to like, guide them. Yeah, absolutely.

• 44:41Sean Fennessey?

  And like, if you, this is a very grand statement, but there is a kind of odyssey-like approach to this. Like, Lil Rel Hallery is like, one of the tricksters, you know?

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Hero's journey.

• 44:51Sean Fennessey?

  It is a hero's journey, truly.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Also a beautiful LA thing. I mean, I think you're from here. Like, for me, I was like, this is so, all of it is so familiar. That Norm's, I've been to so many times.

• 45:00Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, La Cienega, that's the best. I love that Norm's. It is a very LA movie, and it is just a very nostalgic kind of comedy that you could reliably get two or three or four of these in movie, in theaters every year. I think I read that this is the first all-black female comedy made by a studio since Girls. Trip, which sounds insane because Girl Trip was such a breakout. Um, but this movie did what basically every movie like it does every time, which is sort of overperforms the projections at the box office. Because there's obviously black audiences that want to go out, show out for these movies. I saw it at the Regal LA Live on Wednesday night. Sold out at eight P M. On a Wednesday.

• 45:41Speaker 04

  That's fun.

• 45:41Sean Fennessey?

  And I like, people want movies like this, you know?

• 45:44Speaker 04

  They're good. They're fun. Okay. Can I just say something that your soul is going to leave your body? Um, you neglected to warn me that it ends with their house burning down.

• 45:55Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think I knew when I asked you to do it.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  Just a little too soon, Shaw.

• 45:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm sorry. I apologize about that. Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  I was like, not this.

• 46:03Sean Fennessey?

  You're gonna have a lot of traumatic experiences at the cinema because of this incident.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  I actually just made me laugh. I was like, oh, really? Interesting. Um.

• 46:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  Can I say one other thing that was the one part I couldn't suspend my disbelief for?

• 46:16Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 46:16Speaker 04

  That art is bad, babe.

• 46:18Sean Fennessey?

  SZA's character's art. Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 04

  They're like, this is, okay, wait, I buy six hundred fifty dollars.

• 46:22Sean Fennessey?

  Would that be the first time that bad art became popular?

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Hmm. Sure. Yes, fair.

• 46:27Sean Fennessey?

  We just talked about Robbie Williams, you know?

• 46:28Speaker 04

  Right. Oh, my God. The disrespect. Angels is a sensation.

• 46:33Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, all right.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Hit.

• 46:35Sean Fennessey?

  On our Robbie Williams, you're gonna be doing great. People, you're gonna be lauded for your respect for Angels.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  Making a lot of appearances on various subreddits, so you know.

• 46:43Sean Fennessey?

  You have been?

• 46:43Speaker 04

  Yes, I should say the one from the big picture where someone was like, Yasi's Alex house burned down. Unhappy face.

• 46:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  Oh, I first heard of her on the big, big episode about Hot Frosty. She was hilarious. And I was like, thank you.

• 46:56Sean Fennessey?

  You gotta be careful receiving feedback from Reddit and valorizing it.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  Speaking of the Hot Frosty episode, my neighbors also came and they were like, hey, Yasi was very funny on the Hot Frosty. Yeah. Thank you. Gina and R S, they're listening. They're fans. Hi, guys. Thank you so much. So it's not just Reddit, you know? Thank you for my opportunity to shine.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  Support for Yasi and Hot Frosty is everywhere.

• 47:16Sean Fennessey?

  This is what happens when you turn your life over to cinema, though, you know? You find new voices and new people.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  I was there, you know, you saw my New Year's resolution. I was hot on Letterboxd. I was averaging a. Film a day and then we had some personal tragedy, but we're back now.

• 47:29Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so you're back to the cinema tonight?

• 47:32Speaker 04

  Maybe not tonight.

• 47:32Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so the other movies that we're talking about in this episode, I want to know which of the movies you will go see.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 47:37Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 47:38Speaker 04

  Great, I love this.

• 47:38Sean Fennessey?

  So, after you depart, Amanda and I will talk about Back in Action, which is on Netflix.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  Which is what?

• 47:44Sean Fennessey?

  Stars Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 47:47Sean Fennessey?

  It's the number one movie on Netflix as we're recording.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  I love her wine. Oh, so you're an Aveline person? Yes, because it is very healthy. Well, is it healthy or is that just the marketing? I think. Yeah, no, no, I mean, it's true. We talked a lot about this. I'm a health influencer, as you guys know, so Bobby knows.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  No, I just, anecdotally, you know, R of one, as they say, I feel better when I drink that. Okay. That's a huber. And it's organic. My initial understanding of it was that it's sugar free, which, as Sean pointed out, is not possible for alcohol. I don't think it's sugar free, but I do think it has like less tannins. Don't quote me on this. Aveline wine is great. There's three flavors. It's like red, white, and rosé. So yeah, I'll see it. I actually really like Cameron Diaz. I think we did it as a part of our taste test.

• 48:34Sean Fennessey?

  I believe we did.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:35Sean Fennessey?

  I don't really like him very much.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  And it's co-owned with.

• 48:38Sean Fennessey?

  Was it rosé or white? It was rosé.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Uh, they have both.

• 48:41Sean Fennessey?

  They have both.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  We just made what we tried. Arguably way too late in the process to really assess. To understand. To assess it. No, no, but so.

• 48:48Sean Fennessey?

  We had assaulted our tongues by then.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  So we had like a nice time. Which is so bad. It's co-owned by Catherine Power, who founded Merritt, the makeup brand. And that's how my love affair. Well, no, I already liked Merritt, but then Vanessa and Merritt was listening and sent me stuff, so send some stuff to Yasi Merritt. I did. I did. I sold my makeup. Yeah. I mean, if any makeup brands are listening, skincare, I'm open to packages. I have a P O box. Um, yeah, I'll see that one. What, I can't be a burnt down house influencer? She really does.

• 49:22Sean Fennessey?

  I hope many people send you things, honestly.

• 49:24Speaker 04

  As I said, as I told you, Sean, on one hand, did I lose all of my personal belongings that I loved and treasured for 30 years? Yes. On the other hand, I love attention. Conflicting.

• 49:34Sean Fennessey?

  Real devil's bargain here for you.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:37Sean Fennessey?

  I think you'd rather have your belongings.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, but you gotta look at the bright side.

• 49:40Sean Fennessey?

  Well, let's try to get, let's try to send Yasi as much shit as possible.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  You want some wine, too? Yes. Which flavor do you want?

• 49:47Sean Fennessey?

  Which flavor?

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Of the red, white, or rosé.

• 49:50Sean Fennessey?

  Is that how it's described? That's what you say when you show up to Napa.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  Me and Amanda are Somali. I don't know if you know that about us.

• 49:57Sean Fennessey?

  You're certainly drinkers.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  Wow, the shade.

• 50:01Sean Fennessey?

  I'm a drinker.

• 50:02Speaker 04

  Catholic jumped out right there.

• 50:04Sean Fennessey?

  Just IDing, spotting my own in the wild.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 50:09Sean Fennessey?

  Any closing thoughts?

• 50:10Speaker 04

  What, did you want to ask me more movies?

• 50:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Presence, the ghost story that Steven Soderbergh is directing.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  You know that I unfortunately don't, it's not that I don't like them, I'm a weak, weak person who cannot handle horror movies, especially. It's not really horror.

• 50:24Sean Fennessey?

  It's not.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  It's like. But it's like. Because I'm the same way. Oh, you saw it? Yeah. It seems like it's riddled with jump scares, which is the one thing I. No.

• 50:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's not, it's kind of the opposite.

• 50:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, then I'll definitely, because you know. You're kind of like, okay, I get it. My girl Julia Fox is in it and we stan Julia Fox.

• 50:37Sean Fennessey?

  Amusing casting, yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  She's very funny. Okay, I'll see that.

• 50:41Sean Fennessey?

  What about?

• 50:42Speaker 04

  And I love Lucy.

• 50:43Sean Fennessey?

  Wolfman? Speaking of your horror concern.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  That's gonna be a no from me, dog. I also skipped that one. Flight Risk? Directed by Mel Gibson, starring Mark Wahlberg. I think it's like.

• 50:55Sean Fennessey?

  Takes place entirely on a three-seater plane.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  Okay. It's like, you know how Mark Wahlberg was like, if I'd been on the nine 11 plane, I would have.

• 51:03Sean Fennessey?

  Thought about this.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  Saved it, yeah, I would have saved it, which is like a real Mark Wahlberg quote. It's, they turned that into a three-seater plane movie. It's like a maga. He said, not only would he have saved it, he said, it wouldn't have gone down like that. That is the quote.

• 51:17Sean Fennessey?

  Great. Incredible that you had that at your fingertips, Bob. Love it.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  I think about it, no joke, every day of my fucking sad life. God grant me 10% of the, the self-confidence of Mark Wahlberg.

• 51:28Sean Fennessey?

  Done wonders for his life.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now he just wakes up at 2 a.m. to work out. Do you know about that as well? Oh, yeah, oh, sure. Is that part of your health plan? No, I, you know what, I came, I had a, we don't have to get into it, but I had a dalliance with procuring some black market peptides from a sinister gay man in West Hollywood prior to the house burning down that really set me back on the right path of like, you need to find Jesus and, and stop being so insane. Okay, with like the peptides.

• 51:56Sean Fennessey?

  You're, you're, you're still insane, telling that story here is truly crazy.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  No, I think it's not illegal.

• 52:02Sean Fennessey?

  No, I didn't say that.

• 52:03Speaker 04

  Um, but then I was like, maybe just be normal a little bit. I mean, you can never be totally normal, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm not counting my protein grams anymore. That's, you know, if that says anything. That's, I'm, I'm not either. I was trying. Yeah. Then, yeah. But we need to be free from the shackles of cottage cheese, you know? I can't take it anymore. I'm tired. We only have so much life left. And now it's fiber, so. It's just like, I'm so tired. Fine, I'm gonna breathe in the toxic air and I'm gonna have microplastics and that's fine. I used to do bags of drugs that I found in trailers backstage at Coachella. I'm doing great.

• 52:37Sean Fennessey?

  This is, this has been a revelatory appearance by you.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  My dad doesn't listen to this show. Okay, I'm not gonna see that movie.

• 52:44Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's the whole list. Yasi, thank you so much.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me. I had such a wonderful time. Got your finally pod with Amanda, who I have a huge fan of. You'll be back soon, right?

• 52:54Sean Fennessey?

  Won't be the last time.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, Bridget Jones.

• 52:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, Bridget Jones.

• 52:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're on the spreadsheet. Do you know that? Do you have access to the spreadsheet? No, and I don't. Well, you're on it.

• 53:01Sean Fennessey?

  I will not be granting you access to the spreadsheet.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  I don't have access to your spreadsheet.

• 53:03Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, is, are you a Paddington person?

• 53:07Speaker 04

  Oh my god, babe, am I a Paddington?

• 53:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that episode is, that's a Paddington and Bridget Jones episode.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  Wow, yeah. I love Paddington. Do you know how much Paddington shit I bought when I went to the UK? It was like my suitcase was full of Paddington shit. Did you know that there was a recent Gap-Paddington collaboration? If you're looking, I, I don't know whether they made adult sizes. It's mostly for kids. I can fit into a kid's small. Yeah, it's very big in my house with the children, so. But it's, it's a good stuff. They made a duffle coat, a Paddington duffle coat. It's, it's honestly a good coat. You should check out the sizes. I want a Paddington Gap.

• 53:38Sean Fennessey?

  Sounds like you're headed to the Gap immediately after this recording.

• 53:41Speaker 04

  Is it currently on stores? It was for December, so maybe now it's on sale. Also, if anyone at Gap is listening, Yasi would love some Paddington for Gap materials. Paddington the bear is listening. I would love a hug.

• 53:54Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, Yasi.

• 53:55Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, guys.

• 54:07Sean Fennessey?

  This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Amazon Prime. What pairs with a good comedy? The cozy blanket arriving with Prime. What pairs with a nail biting thriller? Snacks arriving with Prime. What pairs with the big game on Prime Video? That new couch arriving with Prime. Whatever feeling you're after, Prime helps bring it to life with great entertainment and fast shipping that delivers what the moment calls for. From streaming to fast shipping, it's on Prime. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not so great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that, bull spend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO?

• 54:52Sean Fennessey?

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• 55:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, we're back. It's just me and you. How you feeling?

• 55:24Speaker 04

  Great.

• 55:24Sean Fennessey?

  Do you feel like you're back in action? You know, you've got two children in your home. You know, you're a lady, a lady in the world.

• 55:31Speaker 04

  Please to announce that Back in Action is actually an autobiographical film of what happened when I tried to institute Monday night movies with my three-year-old son.

• 55:41Sean Fennessey?

  Not going well? No, it's too bad. I did, I thought of you while watching this new film, which is-

• 55:46Speaker 04

  That's an insult. I thought this sucked.

• 55:49Sean Fennessey?

  It's very bad.

• 55:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:50Sean Fennessey?

  So this movie is directed by Seth Gordon, who's made some kind of funny movies in the past, Horrible Bosses. It's about two CIA spies who retire, played by Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx. They also happen to be married. And then they get sucked back into the world of espionage and thrills and MacGuffins. And also, it's a funny comedy with lots of hand-to-hand combat.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  I thought of you because it's also about raising a teenage daughter.

• 56:18Sean Fennessey?

  I don't have a teenage daughter.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  Well, soon you will.

• 56:21Sean Fennessey?

  One day I shall.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the little boy is just like, hey, look at my cool wearable technology. You know, he's not a problem, but Cameron Diaz is working through a lot with her mother.

• 56:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  Who is played by a British Glenn Close.

• 56:34Sean Fennessey?

  Glenn Close affecting a British accent, not a British woman who is Glenn Close.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  That's correct. And then Cameron Diaz is also trying to work through her relationship with her teen daughter.

• 56:46Sean Fennessey?

  Here's what, here are some notes I've made about this film. I'd like to share them with you.

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:50Sean Fennessey?

  This is a Mr. And Mrs. Smith meets Family Switch action comedy, AKA Red Notice for Moms.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  I, I object to this slander against moms.

• 57:02Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Here, okay? Like, I am, I, I too am a mom. Not all moms.

• 57:06Sean Fennessey?

  Not all moms, unless you're Cameron Diaz in this film.

• 57:09Speaker 04

  Not all moms.

• 57:11Sean Fennessey?

  This is a subgenre that I am calling Walbergalia.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah.

• 57:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's not a flower. It's not a city in Luxembourg. It's a breezy, semi-competent, weightless form of wallpaper movie.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 57:26Sean Fennessey?

  There's nothing wrong with it, but the better the talent associated with a movie like this, the more enervating this movie can be. Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx are way too good for this movie.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, they're not good in it.

• 57:41Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, they're not anything in it. They're not really asked to do anything then other than just like be charming the way they would be charming in a commercial for vodka. That's really what it kind of feels like they're doing.

• 57:50Speaker 04

  Even broader than vodka because it's family. Like, it's family and it's supposed to be about, like, I love my mom.

• 57:56Sean Fennessey?

  For potato chips, you know?

• 57:57Speaker 04

  Sure. Yes, exactly.

• 57:59Sean Fennessey?

  It is a mass consumption product.

• 58:01Speaker 04

  They have like a little bit of that thing that they're reading lines as if they just need to get to the end of them as fast as possible, which is what I associate with, like, it's how I would act.

• 58:13Sean Fennessey?

  Are you sure you weren't watching it at 1.5x on Netflix?

• 58:15Speaker 04

  No, I wasn't. Can I tell you something? I watched this while taking a bath and...

• 58:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's the chilling visual.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  You don't, no one asked you to visualize it, okay?

• 58:25Sean Fennessey?

  Sorry, my mind is so strong.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  And so I would say like the 30 minutes where there where I was just like in the bath, really engaged.

• 58:34Sean Fennessey?

  Not to, I'm really reluctant to explore this more deeply, but like laptop perched on the bath.

• 58:40Speaker 04

  iPad in the shelving, the shelves that we had built, like directly on one side of the bath.

• 58:47Sean Fennessey?

  There's, you know, that very famous image. I don't know if you've ever seen it from A Nightmare on Elm Street where Heather Langenkamp is taking a bath and she sees Freddy Krueger's hand emerge from the bathtub.

• 58:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 58:58Sean Fennessey?

  I picture that, but the iPad appearing from the water, screening back in action for you.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  No, it was just, it was set on the lowest little shelf.

• 59:06Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 59:07Speaker 04

  And I watched about 30 minutes when they go to London while, and I had started it earlier and then got in the bath and that part I was really locked in. And then it was time to get out of the bath and, you know, kind of do my nighttime routine. So I just kept it going on the shelf. So I wouldn't say that I was like deeply engaged, but I do think I was watching it the way that most people watch a Netflix film, which is like while doing other stuff.

• 59:37Sean Fennessey?

  This is one of the best, most recent examples of like the wheat and the chaff of real movie and Netflix movie.

• 59:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:42Sean Fennessey?

  Cause there's a lot of people here who've worked on Hollywood movies, big productions. Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx are huge stars. I mean, they are really incredibly famous.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  Cameron Diaz hasn't been making movies for almost 15 years.

• 59:54Sean Fennessey?

  That's where I'm going with this.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  And so this is also her back in action, you know, this is about her.

• 1:00:00Sean Fennessey?

  Very much. It's framed around her going back into action, not just the character. It's been 11 years since she was in a movie role. She took a long break, I guess, to get married, start her wine business. She has, she has a family?

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, she has a family. So she's been spending time with them.

• 1:00:15Sean Fennessey?

  You know, this movie comes one year after Argyle. And when we talked about Argyle, we talked about wink action. There's something going on with this subgenre.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:00:27Sean Fennessey?

  Where this, this is, it's like mutating in real time. This movie is now part of this ongoing thing that is happening where big movie stars in the aftermath of John Wick, and maybe we should have called it Wick wink action. Are now participating in these movies, and this movie has a ton of it, where you've got either like famous movie stars or their stunt doubles in lots of hand to hand combat.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Yes, and it's really their stunt doubles because the cuts and the wigs are like very obvious.

• 1:00:57Sean Fennessey?

  Very obvious in this movie.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Sean Fennessey?

  But then now later this year, we've got Love Hurts,

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:01Sean Fennessey?

  The Kiwi Kwan, Ariana DeBose movie that feels very similar, though Kiwi Kwan doesn't use as stunt double as often as many of these other actors. Nobody 2 is coming out with Bob Odenkirk, and then this Jack Quaid movie Novocaine. And, you know, there's a long lineage of this stuff, Atomic Blonde and the Wick movies and the Leach and Stahelsky movies. But now they've kind of found it into this like very silly, serious style of action movie. And this is a really low form of it. And it being the movie where Cameron Diaz comes back is just kind of strange because she had a very up and down movie career, but she was in a part of a lot of great movies.

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  Yes, and very funny.

• 1:01:40Sean Fennessey?

  A great comedian, and that's something I want to ask you about is like her career and kind of where she fits in. Because she's been like multiple Golden Globe nominee, she's been in some very well.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Okay, J Lo.

• 1:01:50Sean Fennessey?

  Well, but you know, she was, hard to forget, like she was nominated for Vanilla Sky. You know, I think she was nominated for Being John Malkovich, like she was in good movies.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  Yes, she was.

• 1:02:01Sean Fennessey?

  And her career took like a more broad comedy direction over the last 10 years when she started doing like Bad Teacher and Sex Tape. And she was in the Annie musical, and then that's when she stepped away. But through the first 15 years of her career, she was a staple figure. And I started writing down like generationally what she was like lineage wise, what she was a part of. And I was like, is it Carol Lombard or Claudette Colbert? Is it Jane Fonda or is it Diane Keaton? Is it Kathleen Turner or is it Meg Ryan? Like she was always kind of straddling the line between sex pot, daffy woman, like independent minded, you know, I don't need a man type figures.

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:02:43Sean Fennessey?

  And, you know, to her credit, like she really kind of bounced around between all those kinds of identities. And then now she's just in like this slop.

• 1:02:51Speaker 04

  She's like a mom, yeah.

• 1:02:53Sean Fennessey?

  You know, just like, she looks, she looks great, she looks beautiful. Jamie Foxx too, he's like 57 years old, he looks like he's 30.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  They look great, and I will say it, like the one time I laughed was during one of those action sequences, which are just like really bad and so obviously like cut and cut around the two actors. And, and also like weirdly violent.

• 1:03:14Sean Fennessey?

  Very violent.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  For, and I'm just like, I, what did you think that I was tuning in to watch? But anyway.

• 1:03:20Sean Fennessey?

  But can I pitch a theory about that?

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:22Sean Fennessey?

  That these sequences are in these movies because they want you to look up from your phone.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:03:26Sean Fennessey?

  That you're like not paying attention to the dialogue and then something crazy happens.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  That's when I stopped watching.

• 1:03:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Speaker 04

  For the most part. I was just like checking in for the plot points, uh, which are bad, except.

• 1:03:37Sean Fennessey?

  Plot points.

• 1:03:37Speaker 04

  Well, the, the one surprised me because I was only paying like 20% attention.

• 1:03:41Sean Fennessey?

  The Kyle Chandler one.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  Listen, stop spoiling shit for people.

• 1:03:44Sean Fennessey?

  Telegraphed from a mile away.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  It was gonna be Andrew Scott.

• 1:03:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  Because.

• 1:03:50Sean Fennessey?

  The most like, if you've seen one spy movie ever, you know what's happening in this movie.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  Once again, I watched him get shot in the bath.

• 1:03:58Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  And then I got out.

• 1:04:00Sean Fennessey?

  He wasn't shot in a bath. You were in the bath.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  I was in the bath.

• 1:04:02Sean Fennessey?

  When he was shot in the film.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then I got out and I had to do my like red light mask.

• 1:04:06Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  So, and it's really hard to, do you know about this?

• 1:04:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you're, you're conjuring the substance right now, so.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  I'm not injecting anything. It's just me, both weeks of, you know.

• 1:04:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Did I tell you that Eileen tried to watch The Substance last night?

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:04:23Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't go well.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  No, she didn't like it?

• 1:04:24Sean Fennessey?

  No. She, after 30 minutes, she said, there's too much injecting going on in this movie.

• 1:04:28Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:04:28Sean Fennessey?

  And then I said, it gets a lot worse than that.

• 1:04:30Speaker 04

  No, it does. Um.

• 1:04:31Sean Fennessey?

  I think she bailed.

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  The injections were fine, but you know, I lived through a lot of that. Anyway, I, I was doing my mask, my red light and blue light mask at once. So it's kinda like hard to see the screen, you know?

• 1:04:44Sean Fennessey?

  So you were doing them while the movie was on?

• 1:04:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. It's very respectful.

• 1:04:49Speaker 04

  I mean, I was like washing my face. I was brushing my teeth. You know, I was doing all of the things.

• 1:04:53Sean Fennessey?

  AirPods are no, oh, no, no, AirPods. You don't have AirPods.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. The, the good reminder to help me like order those. Yeah, those had some ash in them, so they're gone.

• 1:05:00Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Um, it's fine. I had washed them already, you know? So they weren't performing at the highest level. So I missed the, I was surprised by the

• 1:05:09Sean Fennessey?

  By the twist.

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  But I tended to be like, I was like, okay, you're doing another junkie action sequence. I can look away. The only one I did watch was the one where the teen daughter is watching it. And I guess the son is too. And at one point, Cameron Diaz, and I do actually think it is Cameron Diaz who head butts someone.

• 1:05:26Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  Cause they like

• 1:05:27Sean Fennessey?

  In the club, you're talking about?

• 1:05:28Speaker 04

  Uh, no, I would have said this was like at the rest stop.

• 1:05:31Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:05:32Speaker 04

  And I do think that she's head butting.

• 1:05:36Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:37Speaker 04

  And then the teenage daughter is like, mom. And Cameron Diaz, like while moving is like, honey, she's fine. You know, it wasn't that hard or something. And I thought that was funny and I laughed and it was just, that was like the one glimmer of like real Cameron Diaz. And then it went away and she had to like feel anguished because her mom was Glenn Close.

• 1:05:59Speaker 04

  Who was an MI6 officer and, and then sent Cameron Diaz to boarding school. So then she was CIA. Why couldn't this just be American?

• 1:06:09Sean Fennessey?

  I think Glenn Close wanted to have some fun. That's the impression I get. Well, also you've got Andrew Scott as the MI6 officer. And so the way that he

• 1:06:16Speaker 04

  And I guess like London tax credits?

• 1:06:18Sean Fennessey?

  Perhaps.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Sean Fennessey?

  Perhaps. It did get us Jamie Demetru in the movie. I don't know if you are familiar with him. Uh, British comic actor. His sister, Natasha is in What We Do in the Shadows and is absolutely hilarious on that TV show.

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:06:31Sean Fennessey?

  Both of them are great. He's innocent in this movie. This movie is very bad. Glenn Close, you didn't see, I assume because you were on leave, Lee Daniels is The Deliverance, did you?

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  I did not.

• 1:06:42Sean Fennessey?

  This is a horror movie that Lee Daniels made that was released on Netflix in September.

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  It was, it was good. You liked it?

• 1:06:47Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's terrible, but you know what? I shouldn't say that. It's not terrible. It's just wild and ridiculous. There has not quite been a horror movie like it before, but Glenn, it's a almost entirely all black cast except for Glenn Close, who is A woman in the deep south, living within a black community and affecting

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:08Sean Fennessey?

  A black community attitude.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11Sean Fennessey?

  And it's funny and weird and stupid. And it's just a lot. And she's, she's, she's having fun right now. She's doing whatever she wants to do, knowing that she will never win an Academy Award.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  You think it's never now?

• 1:07:25Sean Fennessey?

  Well, if you keep taking on parts like back in action and the deliverance, you will not win.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  And hillbilly allergy.

• 1:07:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  Which I haven't forgotten.

• 1:07:31Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm, very strange.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  This is like really, really bad. And I, I thought a little bit of Spy Kids, Bobby, while watching it.

• 1:07:38Sean Fennessey?

  Damn, shots fired.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  Uh, because, well, I mean, it's the, the parents were spies and the kids like at the end sort of save the day. The, the kids aren't involved, but that's the problem. It's like, it doesn't quite get to Spy Kids, but it's trying to have like the family tone. But then it's also trying to do weird, fake, super violent stuff. Like, what are we doing?

• 1:08:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Spy Kids has way more charm than this movie for sure. Um, yeah, it sucks.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  Really bad.

• 1:08:07Sean Fennessey?

  This is the true dump your candidate of this discussion today.

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  Two thumbs down.

• 1:08:11Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, well, great seeing you.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  Thanks so much.

• 1:08:16Sean Fennessey?

  He's gonna bring in CR now, I think. How do you feel about that? You wanna say anything about Presents? You've seen Presents, right?

• 1:08:20Speaker 04

  I, I have. It was great. And, and thank you to the kind people at Neon, right? Who sent it to me like three weeks after Si was born and I did watch it. But I, you know, my brain at that point, I don't think I have like an elevated, there's a reason I'm not gonna sit in on the conversation with you guys, but I liked it. I mean, you know what? I like it when Steven Soderbergh tries things and it's a very, just my guy trying things again.

• 1:08:42Sean Fennessey?

  Very much is. I'll talk about it with Chris now, along with Wolfman and Flight Risk. Thanks, Amanda. Let's go to CR.

• 1:08:56Sean Fennessey?

  Chris Ryan is here, headed to the Super Bowl. Congratulations.

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  Thanks, man. You're always so benevolent about your praise of Philadelphia and Philadelphia sports.

• 1:09:07Sean Fennessey?

  Tricky, tricky Super Bowl for a lot of fans.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  I understand.

• 1:09:10Sean Fennessey?

  Unless you're from Philadelphia or Kansas City, we say congratulations to you guys.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  I think that these are two of the four best teams in the league.

• 1:09:16Sean Fennessey?

  Agreed, agreed. Well-earned, no question, but not the most exciting. But I'm happy for you. I'm happy to have you here in Dumpuary. It would not be Dumpuary if you were not here on the pod with me. And we've got three titles to discuss in a short period of time. You gotta get out of here. You got another pod to do. What are you talking about on the watch today?

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  We're talking about Severance and we're talking about the agency. And we'll probably just talk about Vic Fangio and whether or not he can legally become our fathers.

• 1:09:41Sean Fennessey?

  I see. In the meantime, speaking of fathers, let's start with Wolfman.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Also, you take your time, man. Andy can wait.

• 1:09:48Sean Fennessey?

  All right. Thank you. I appreciate that. I know that's not how you really feel, but I appreciate you saying that. Wolfman is a story about fathers in many ways. This is the new film directed by Lee Whannell. This is his, I guess, his third consecutive movie for Blumhouse now.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Upgrade Invisible Man and now this.

• 1:10:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, his fourth directorial feature. He's got his start as a writer working with James Wan many years ago. You may remember him from the film Saw, where he was one of the victims in that movie.

• 1:10:15Sean Fennessey?

  Wolfman is an adaptation of Wolfman. It's one of the most legendary, universal monster movies that we have. What Whannell did with The Invisible Man, I thought was fairly ingenious. One of the last films released wide before COVID hit. That movie did pretty good business and I think very smartly centered the lead monster into the villain role of the movie. This movie sort of attempts to do the same thing. It stars Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, and it's a very contained, constrained, intimate horror movie. It's not done well at the box office and has not gotten good reviews. And yet, you saw the film and you texted me. And what did you say?

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  I said I liked it. And what I think I mean is that I think I can make the case for it.

• 1:10:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  Is this the substance for guys who care about macros?

• 1:11:01Sean Fennessey?

  I have a totally different read on this film, but please fire away.

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Um, I think I can make a couple of different, like, what this movie is about in theory. Arguments more than I can make an argument about why it might be an enjoyable film to watch.

• 1:11:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  A bunch of the movies we're gonna talk about today feel like leftover COVID movies that, like, are two-handers, three-handers, limited sets, or very isolated sets. So this is shot in New Zealand. Couple of the other films we're gonna talk about just feel very like, we got a room for you guys to go into after you test, and we'll shoot it and we'll fix it later. This is like, I think it was very much, at least the story itself feels rooted in that experience, whereas the other ones feel like they maybe suffered from, or the, especially one of them feels like it's suffered because of that. But yeah, like, I just feel like this movie could be about a monster movie about killing your dad, a movie about the impossibility of connection with anyone other than blood. Or a movie about blue collar cosplay gone wrong.

• 1:12:01Sean Fennessey?

  The last one is a good bit. I'm not sure it's in the text. My reaction to the movie, which I don't think is very successful for a variety of reasons, is that it's a decent drama about not fucking up your kids.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:14Sean Fennessey?

  The core, one of the core ideas of the movie that opens with Abbott's character as a young, as like a 10-year-old boy, traversing the forests of the Pacific Northwest with his father, who is mindful of the dangers of life.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  You could say that, yes.

• 1:12:27Sean Fennessey?

  He's a, he's a sort of a paranoid about what could happen. And I guess the implication is, is that his wife has died somehow in a tragic way.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  Apparently there was a cut scene from the movie where she has MS, I think, or ALS.

• 1:12:40Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. And so that has created a sense of isolation and paranoia in this father figure, who then hands it down to the Christopher Abbott character. You know, through a series of phantasmagoric events, we learn that there is a lycanthropoc disease going around in this part of the Pacific Northwest. Christopher Abbott's character has to go back with his wife Julia Garner and their young child.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  To save their marriage.

• 1:13:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, to save their marriage.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Because she loves working too much.

• 1:13:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, she's a journalist.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  It's like the San Francisco Chronicle or something.

• 1:13:09Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. And-

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  She keeps getting scooped by the Times. It's an amazing scene where she just walks into the apartment. She's not using AirPods or headphones. She's like on the phone. And she's like, are we just gonna get scooped by the Times again?

• 1:13:22Sean Fennessey?

  Would you say that that's how you feel listening to competing TV pods?

• 1:13:26Speaker 02

  No, I don't. I want- Everybody to succeed. And I also just think that if you just do your thing, the people will come.

• 1:13:33Sean Fennessey?

  You actually do believe that. And I appreciate you saying it out loud.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Do you feel that way about film pods?

• 1:13:37Sean Fennessey?

  I used to be so competitive and now I'm like, we got what we do. And when I feel good about it, I feel actually.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  There's only one Amanda, you know?

• 1:13:43Sean Fennessey?

  Honestly, true. That is how I feel. There's no one could possibly replicate whatever's usually happening in that chair. And God bless her for it. The problem with the movie for me ultimately is that it's not scary.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Sean Fennessey?

  Um, we can debate whether or not it's effective as a Wolfman movie, which is often like such a heavy metaphor for the sort of feral nature of masculinity and our inability to communicate. And so we turn into animals and all these things that, you know, you can find all going all the way back to the 41 Lon Chaney version of the movie, which is an excellent 70 minute classic monster movie.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's been really hard to make a good werewolf movie and especially a good Wolfman movie. There was one, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago, that Joe Johnson directed starring Benicio del Toro.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:25Sean Fennessey?

  Um, which has some cool monster effects, but is more of like a chamber piece and more of a historical story. And I don't think works quite as well.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  There's the Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson one.

• 1:14:36Sean Fennessey?

  Wolf, of course. Um, I think an American Werewolf in London is probably the best loved of the more recent vintage, but that's going back almost 40 years.

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  I'm a, I'm a big fan of Dog Soldiers. I mean, we're getting into just werewolf movies, not Wolfman movies, but.

• 1:14:49Sean Fennessey?

  Wolf, the just like normal guy turns into a Wolfman thing is hard to do. Now this movie, the actual makeup effects are good, but I didn't like the transition.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's a kind of a slow transition into the Wolfman and it becomes much more about, you know, I heard my friend Elric Kane said this on his podcast, that this reminded him a lot of The Fly, where Brundle Fly and the Fly like very slowly starts to become a fly.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:13Sean Fennessey?

  And Christopher Abbott very slowly becomes a Wolfman in this movie. And I, I just wanted to see him just be full Wolfie. You know, I wanted to see him be Teen Wolf.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:15:22Sean Fennessey?

  And he never does that.

• 1:15:23Speaker 02

  There was like a moment in the beginning of the movie where, uh, so the Julia Garner character, the Christopher Abbott character and their daughter Ginger, or, you know, they're on their way to his late father's farm, which he hasn't been to in decades. They get lost and a mountain man who is also living there, who I take it to be like the kid, who was like the son of their family friend and like the radio chatter, gets in the truck and all of a sudden introduces this element of like mystery, because it, you can't quite tell if this guy's friend or foe. He's sort of on one hand seems to. Be mocking their urbane, snowflake kind of tenderness, but is also like, you should be happy about that. Because that means you've had a good life and like, you're not like made hard to the world.

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  And that guy leaves the film quickly. And I thought that the rest of the movie kind of, there's nothing wrong with the performances. I think Abbott and Garner are two of the kind of like finer actors of their generation in a lot of ways.

• 1:16:17Sean Fennessey?

  They're a big reason why I was super excited.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  And Abbott brings a ton to the like, the early scenes and even you can tell it just goes for it in the transformation. He's like, I watched hours and hours and hours of animal videos to try and get like the, the gate down, but there was something kind of like, they needed another thing in this movie.

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  They needed something that like, demanded that the two adult characters interact with or something like, there was something missing from that element. And like you said, there was something missing from the scares. There was like two good set pieces, but they're kind of devoid of suspense.

• 1:16:52Sean Fennessey?

  The car and then headed on to the top of the greenhouse.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  The car and the greenhouse, yeah.

• 1:16:56Sean Fennessey?

  That was very effective. I thought the two best sequences of the movie were the opening sequence with the sort of the hunting spy tower and the fear of kind of what was below. And then that sequence that you just described where they come across this guy who he hasn't seen in many years.

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  I've seen other people ask this, but um, so we can just talk about these openly, right?

• 1:17:11Sean Fennessey?

  I guess so. I mean, this movie's gonna be on streaming in like a week.

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, other people have mentioned this, but why if the guy is like, I'm so, you have to understand like, everything could be taken from you. To like, his Blake's dad in the first scene is like, everything can be taken away from you. Why does he have him in this incredibly dangerous, remote part of Oregon?

• 1:17:30Sean Fennessey?

  I think he's just trying to teach him to be a survivalist. That was my impression was that you gotta see up close what you're up against. And I wouldn't say that that's my parenting style. But um, trying to avoid wolf contact wherever possible. Nevertheless, uh, I think, you know, the other, the other challenge is just, Julia Garner's just too young for this part, you know, she's like,

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Sean Fennessey?

  She was 28, I think, when they made this movie and she's the daughter of an eight-year-old kid and she's a high-powered journalist, like, I just don't think I really bought their relationship. I didn't really buy her. She's a really, really talented actor, but she's in an interesting pivot point of her career where she's played kind of like the trickster younger woman.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Sean Fennessey?

  And now she's going into full-blown.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  My 30s.

• 1:18:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  I can't have it all. Yeah.

• 1:18:18Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I mean, she doesn't ultimately in this movie for a variety of reasons, but you know, I would have liked for this to have been better, especially because you and I were both, I, we were both really enthusiastic about upgrade, which did we see together at South by?

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  I don't think we saw it together, but we saw it at the same South by Southwest.

• 1:18:33Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  I heard the next Megan is supposed to be upgradey vibes.

• 1:18:38Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39Sean Fennessey?

  Terminator style.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that sounds exciting. And Invisible Man, I thought was ingenious. And so this is a bit of a step down, and that's really unfortunate.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  Did you notice that in this movie Abbott's character is like all Carhartt-ed out in the beginning, like, but like fashionable Carhartt?

• 1:18:50Sean Fennessey?

  I did.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  And then by the end of it, he's wearing a US Marines fatigue shirt.

• 1:18:56Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  And has become Wolf. Like, he's gone from the like, you don't get this? He's gone from the like, you can buy this.

• 1:19:05Sean Fennessey?

  You're kind of in throwing fits territory here, you know? Shout out to throwing fits. Like, it's like, what a man's wear can tell us about the man? You're, you're, you're, you're giving us some, some Derek guy, die, work, wear?

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. No, I think it's interesting that this guy is like an unemployed writer.

• 1:19:22Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  Who's wearing all of the like, couture ma of like a working class, like, I get after it guy.

• 1:19:28Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:19:29Sean Fennessey?

  You think this was class commentary about my culture is not your costume?

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  But then by becoming the Wolf, he actually earns his, his wardrobe.

• 1:19:38Sean Fennessey?

  Can I pitch something at you? I feel like if you could, you would take the Wolf shoes. Like, you, if you could become a Wolf man, you would do it. Is that right?

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Been an amazing version of this is like guys who opt in to being the Wolf man?

• 1:19:54Sean Fennessey?

  It's kind of like getting blackpilled.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Sean Fennessey?

  But for feral activity.

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:58Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  Wolf-pilled.

• 1:19:59Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. You want to, you want to move on?

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:20:02Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of Wolves, Flight Risk.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:20:06Sean Fennessey?

  We saw this film together.

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  This movie eats absolute shit. Like, this movie- Movie might actually be a crime against cinema.

• 1:20:14Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, it's very bad.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  There's, uh, I, there's open and naked use of AI in like the first.

• 1:20:21Sean Fennessey?

  You think that moose was AI?

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  It looked like the moose or like an animal from like a really bad Coke Christmas commercial where they're like, we used AI to make this.

• 1:20:29Sean Fennessey?

  This was something I was saying when I was talking about the brutal AI controversy where I'm just like, this is happening in movies all the time and we just don't know because the filmmakers are not telling us. And now we're getting to a point where things are appearing in movies and you're like, huh?

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  I guess it's like, that's not a moose. So is it like animation or CGI?

• 1:20:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you know, was it the same artist who built Thanos, you know, drafting this moose?

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  These craftsmen are listening to the big picture. It's really, I wonder if Sean.

• 1:20:54Sean Fennessey?

  Like, why am I catching strays in this shitty Mel Gibson movie? Mel Gibson directed this, this movie.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  And let me just say, so eats absolute shit, crime against cinema, like et cetera.

• 1:21:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, down the list.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Didn't, didn't move an inch during the entire film. Yeah.

• 1:21:07Sean Fennessey?

  I, I was riveted knowing it was bad.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Sean Fennessey?

  But I, you and I are both prone to getting up to go to the bathroom during a movie. Neither of us did.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  Well, you were like, I was like, you want a candy before we start? You bought tickets. I'll buy, I'll buy the food. And you're like, you know what? I, I plan on getting up. I heard this isn't very good.

• 1:21:23Sean Fennessey?

  And I didn't.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  Reader, no, you didn't.

• 1:21:25Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't have a single Sour Patch Kid that night. Um, this movie stars Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery and Topher Grace. This, that was the aspect of it that had me going in, hoping it was going to be good. When I saw the trailer at CinemaCon, I told you and Amanda, this is a cool idea for a movie. It's a pretty good contained, and we were still in sort of the post-COVID environment. And I was like, I get what this is.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:47Sean Fennessey?

  This is a movie that was made probably in 2022, maybe even 2021. And it was because there were a lot of protocols and restrictions. So the studios were looking for scripts that could be made cheaply and in contained environments, like you said at the beginning. And this one takes place largely on a four-seater airplane.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Sean Fennessey?

  Um, it's about a US marshal who needs to transport a witness in a mafia case, essentially.

• 1:22:10Speaker 02

  You can tell it's the mafia case because they're testifying against a guy named Moretti.

• 1:22:14Sean Fennessey?

  Moretti.

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:15Sean Fennessey?

  Um, so Moretti has done bad. Topher Grace is his accountant. He's given Charles Groden in, uh, Midnight Run, but not really.

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Do you think the mob still has accountants like that?

• 1:22:25Sean Fennessey?

  Um.

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  Or it's like some like square?

• 1:22:28Sean Fennessey?

  Pencil pushers like I move money around for the mafia. You think they've deployed AI to do their accounting? They've just figured out like, you know, this, this took down Capone. Let's be a little careful. Fair, fair point. Um, in the process of this transport from, I guess, the, the, the wilderness of Alaska. Alaskan tundra. Yeah. And now I don't know where he plans. To eventually get to Seattle to testify against Moretti in the case that the US government has been building against him. As they are about to take off, the pilot gets on the plane. That pilot, of course, is portrayed by Mark Wahlberg. Is he a pilot? He is. Is he the pilot? He's not. He is in fact, not just a hitman sent to kill this testifying witness, but he is an absolute sociopath. Yeah.

• 1:23:11Sean Fennessey?

  Who is there to plunder, pillage and destroy both of these people that are on the plane with him. This is the most committed Mark Wahlberg performance in several years. I wouldn't say it's a good Mark Wahlberg performance, but every time he talked, I was like, what is going on here? Yeah. This person is a cra- there's some of the most vile and aggressive threats made in this movie. I didn't see in the original script. This has been discussed a little bit online, but this was a blacklist script. Uh, Jared Rosenberg, I think, wrote it. And. Pretty clip, pretty like solidly built. Yeah. And what it lacks is the constant threats of sexual violence that Mark Wahlberg's character spouts, which is just definitely like an interesting wrinkle to throw on it.

• 1:23:53Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Wahlberg wears at one point a toupee under a hat, which I guess is supposed to be either this hitman's act of vanity or is. He's in a disguise? He's in a disguise, but when he's bald, it's quite obviously a bald cap. Yes. Like. No, it's not. He shaved his head. Mark Wahlberg shaved the front and back of his head. I read this. Mark Wahlberg shaved his head and it looks like a bald cap because he has an enormous head. Yeah. But that's just his head and that's one of the reasons why he's a movie star. And did he say why he did it? Or what was about the character? The part. Okay. What? Um, I guess just that this guy's an absolute crazy person and there's some sort of a false equivalency to bald people.

• 1:24:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I guess so. I don't really know. Uh, a really strange movie. Yeah. A movie that I desperately wanted to know what was going to happen, even though I knew I would be disappointed by its conclusion. Yeah. But the entire time was thinking over and over and over again about all of the silly decisions that the Michelle Dockery character is making and her like unwillingness to either taze Mark Wahlberg's character to death or into submission for the entirety of them. Like the idea of being on a four-seater plane with an absolute sociopath.

• 1:25:09Sean Fennessey?

  Who's talking, yeah. Who's taunting you and letting him just hang there and figure out a way to escape is ridiculous. Um, Michelle Dockery, interesting times for her. Uh, one of my faves, Lady Mary from Downton Abbey. Fantastic in the film The Gentleman. Yes. And you know, I think she's in the, she's also in a kind of a pivot point of her career. Uh. She's done a fair amount of TV. Yeah. She's done a lot of TV. She's done network TV in the US. She was just, I was just reading last night that she was in a, um, Stephen Knight mini-series in the UK. I guess they don't even call it mini-series, it's a series, a six-episode series about music in the eighties. Yes, this town. This town, which I, I never saw. It has not come out over here. I've tried my best. To, to, to see it or to talk about it? To see it, yeah. Jason Mantzoukas and I were just talking about this. Oh, really? Yeah, it looks really cool.

• 1:25:53Sean Fennessey?

  When is this town coming? I'm like, damn dude, I don't like, it's about the like two-tone ska movement in Birmingham in the eighties. Which sounded really exciting. Um, so she's obviously doing, still doing cool stuff. She's a little, little, uh, saddled with some tough script situation here. You know, her American accent, not always the greatest in the world. There is a, I said to you, I think after we walked out, like that had Shyamalan vibes, like the way people talked and the sort of oddness of the characters.

• 1:26:20Sean Fennessey?

  That's still the quality, yeah. Um, yeah, she, I mean, for people who want to see Dockery in good stuff, she's in The Gentleman, she's in Godless, which is a, a really incredible Scott Frank series, um, western.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, Topher, I mean.

• 1:26:35Sean Fennessey?

  Topher Gray.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Well, let's actually, let's do this. When the film ended. There was some light applause in the theater we were in.

• 1:26:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  As the directed by Mel Gibson card flashed. I don't know if it was in direct relation to Gibson as a filmmaker or just the satisfactory ending of the film for the theater that we were in.

• 1:26:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  I mean, it's like, I guess.

• 1:26:57Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe they were just celebrating his ambassadorship to Hollywood, um, which President Trump recently granted him unknowingly, apparently, to Mel Gibson. Did you know that, that he didn't know that was coming?

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  I didn't.

• 1:27:06Sean Fennessey?

  Did you hear what his response to that was?

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  I saw that he was like daddy's home or daddy's back and he's taking the belt to like.

• 1:27:11Sean Fennessey?

  Here's the thing. Mel Gibson's personal history is downright disgusting.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Sean Fennessey?

  He always had a good sense of humor and his response to the news that he had been granted an ambassadorship was very funny, which was, does it come with a residence? Because his house had just burned down in Malibu. Uh, that was his public statement about this.

• 1:27:28Speaker 02

  You have to laugh, yeah.

• 1:27:29Sean Fennessey?

  Mel Gibson, um, probably the single weirdest directorial filmography in movie history. I'm gonna read to you now the films that he directed. Let's do this in, in order here.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:27:41Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, he breaks out in 1993 with The Man Without a Face, which I saw in movie theaters.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  I completely forgot about the existence of this film. This is like a huge premier magazine movie.

• 1:27:51Sean Fennessey?

  Massive movie at the time. Young Nick Stahl as a, a young boy who comes across a, a badly burned man.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:59Sean Fennessey?

  Who, you know, he learns to love and teach him how to have empathy or whatever. Totally middling drama. Follows that up directly with Braveheart, one of the biggest movies of the 1990s, a Best Picture winner, a film that very quickly got etched into the history of American movies.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17Sean Fennessey?

  He waits a solid nine years to follow that film up with The Passion of the Christ, the most successful independent movie ever made.

• 1:28:24Sean Fennessey?

  An extraordinarily violent portrayal of the death of Christ. He then, a few years later, makes Apocalypto, arguably his most accomplished movie. Controversial movie in some ways, still a success. And then his career goes down, you know, really dark, terrible path after he gets pulled over in Malibu. He makes a bit of a comeback as a director with Hacksaw Ridge.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:45Sean Fennessey?

  Which is like widely acknowledged by the Academy. I think it was nominated for Best Picture. Andrew Garfield was nominated for Best Actor in that movie, a war film in 2016. And then nine years go by, nothing.

• 1:28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55Sean Fennessey?

  And now Flight Risk.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  Well, 2016 to 2025 is an interesting time in American history.

• 1:29:03Sean Fennessey?

  It certainly is. You could make the case that this is a well timed return for him.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:29:09Sean Fennessey?

  You could say it's odd that he wasn't given a chance in 2017.

• 1:29:15Sean Fennessey?

  I, you know, apparently the resurrection of the Christ is coming. His next, his sequel to The Passion of the Christ.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  Are you serious?

• 1:29:22Sean Fennessey?

  Film he's been working on. Apparently it's coming this year.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  Do you think he did Flight Risk to prove that like you can insure me like I will?

• 1:29:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's a good theory. I think it's a good theory. I believe the resurrection of the Christ he is funding, so.

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

  Because it's worth mentioning that while he has been in, let's just say director jail, whether that's true or not. He has been making four to five straight to P to VOD B-movies a year.

• 1:29:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Bandit, Hot Seat, Confidential informant, Desperation Road, Boneyard. Now, he has made one very good film, which is Dragged Across Concrete. I will say he and Vince Vaughn are amazing in that. That was 2018, but for the most part has been in the wilderness for the last decade.

• 1:30:12Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I think with the exception of Father Stu, which is when he first collaborated with Mark Wahlberg.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:17Sean Fennessey?

  A few years ago, I don't think he's made a studio movie because Dragged Across Concrete is not a studio movie. Not since The Expendables 3. Oh, no, I'm, I'm, I'm wrong. It's actually Daddy's Home 2 when he and Mark Wahlberg connected, which I know is your favorite film of 2017. Where he, where he played his dad. Have you seen this?

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  I have not seen either Daddy's Home.

• 1:30:41Sean Fennessey?

  Daddy's Home 2 stars Will Ferrell and John Lithgow as father and son, and Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson as father and son.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  So it's just meet the parents?

• 1:30:53Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. I haven't seen it.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:30:54Sean Fennessey?

  Is Flight Risk the worst movie ever directed by an Academy Award winner?

• 1:31:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's gotta be up there.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  That's a really great question.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  How in deep do you want to get into this question? I'll just call up best directors.

• 1:31:09Sean Fennessey?

  Should we revisit the early works of John Ford? And just see how those 1920s silence stack up to Flight Risk? It's gotta be way up there.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  I mean, it's impossible to tell just based on like, looking at the names. Cause I don't have their filmographies in front of me. Haggis has made some shit, right? Has Paul Haggis never made?

• 1:31:30Sean Fennessey?

  I think Crash is his worst movie. Like In the Valley of Ella is not a bad movie.

• 1:31:36Sean Fennessey?

  Anyway, maybe some fodder for the listeners at home to think about. Flight Risk, I wouldn't recommend it, and yet tremendously watchable. This is the power of Dumpuary. This movie is doing fairly well at the box office.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  And that's, that's the thing is that this is, it's a real best of times, worst of times part of the year. Where all of the big films from the previous year are being endlessly circulated and celebrated. But deep down secretly, that little demon inside of you just wants to watch Wolfman and Flight Risk.

• 1:32:05Sean Fennessey?

  What about Presence? How do you think that figures into the equation? Because it is a genre movie. It is from a legitimately talented best director winner. Two movies from best director winners this month.

• 1:32:17Sean Fennessey?

  And Steven Soderbergh, who's the guest on this episode of the show, along with you and Yasi.

• 1:32:23Sean Fennessey?

  It's written by David Koep. This is the second of three collaborations between Steven Soderbergh and David Koep. Who is, I think you could say, very much in the conversation for most successful screenwriter of the last 35 years. Been written many, many, many hit films over the years. Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Calianni Lang are the stars of the movie. It's a movie about-

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  Julia Fox is also in it as a real estate agent.

• 1:32:44Sean Fennessey?

  How'd you feel about her performance?

• 1:32:45Speaker 02

  I thought she was born to do it.

• 1:32:47Sean Fennessey?

  She was very funny. A family becomes convinced they are not alone after moving into their new home in the suburbs. And we very quickly learn that this is a perspectival movie seen through the eyes of a ghost. And since Steven Soderbergh is a camera operator on all of his movies, he is literally the ghost moving through this house. The movie is set almost entirely inside of this house, just like all of these other films we're talking about here today, which are very intimate. What'd you think of Presence?

• 1:33:15Speaker 02

  Awesome movie, incredible movie, really actually quite, quite moving at the end. Not unlike, like No Sudden Move, which is one of my favorite movies of the decade that sort of were directed during the great Max straight to streaming run in 2020. I feel like this really lingers after it's gone. And you start thinking about the distancing techniques that he uses formally. So the idea that there's not a lot of traditional coverage of what would have been family dinners, family arguments, family moments of intimacy, like you don't get like close up medium.

• 1:33:54Sean Fennessey?

  Nothing over the shoulder.

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

  It's all like this wandering eye, which you know is a ghost because of like the sort of setup to the film, like because of like the promotional materials and the ideas. But it really started making me about like self-surveillance and about the idea of like how much intimacy we have with each other without really knowing each other because you like know where people are and know what they're doing and like the the son who turns out to be something of a bully is sharing with his mom the photos he's taken of this victim victimized girl and laughing about it. And it's just such a thought provoking piece over the course of what 82 minutes or something like that.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  And on top of it all, it's like a rock solid screenplay that has like really intriguing elements of like what's Lucy Liu's character's deal and Chris Sullivan's does a fantastic job as like dad of the year. And I don't know, I just love this movie.

• 1:34:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's really, really good. And I think the screenplay is pretty smart. So Soderbergh told me that it was his idea and he brought it to Cap and Cap fleshed out the story of the family.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  Was he like, I want to do a ghost story from the perspective of ghosts?

• 1:35:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. And it was like all in one house. This house is, you know, he seemed to have like the really the bones of the story clearly. But I think they make a good choice by signaling a lot of things about why families are the way that they are without coming out and saying them. For example, in the story, Lucy Liu's character has clearly, whether she's committed a crime or there's some sort of like financial fraudulence in play.

• 1:35:29Sean Fennessey?

  We never really get the details of it.

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:35:31Sean Fennessey?

  Like, that's actually not the point. The point is that there was all of this subterranean activity, even within families, even within the deepest relationships. And the only people who would know about them are the people who are in the house. And even then, what you keep from your kids, what you keep from your spouse. We saw, there's that one sequence where Chris Sullivan's character goes outside to have a phone conversation on the balcony, which is like riveting.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:52Sean Fennessey?

  Even though you have no idea what he's talking about.

• 1:35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's calling like a lawyer friend to be like hypothetically if X, Y, or Z was happening. There's so many scenes that essentially build this statement that if this is a horror movie, the horror movie is being a family.

• 1:36:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  The horror is you're in this house trapped with these people and how much can you actually ever really know another person?

• 1:36:11Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  So, the son who's supposed to be a star athlete seems to be something of a sadist. The daughter who, while is like in recovery from a friend of hers losing her life to a drug overdose, also is still using. The mom, who is like this alpha-driven lawyer, is, has like borderline inappropriate affection for her son.

• 1:36:36Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  And then the father is just bouncing around, trying to make sense of it all, and basically living a life of utter loneliness. And it's like a pretty staggering portrait of a family, made all the more so because of the brevity of the film and also the visual language that it's speaking in, because you're not getting the traditional, oh, this is this guy's standalone monologue scene that's on his face and this is his award reel. It's just, it just makes you think so much about film language and it makes you feel, think a lot about family and death.

• 1:37:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's very, it's very sophisticated and very simple at the same time, which has become really Soderbergh's trademark over the last 10 years in particular. And I asked him about this, and I couldn't tell when I asked him about it whether or not he had seen these movies, but it made me think a lot about Nickel Boys and Here, which are also movies very much about perspective that are shot in confined circumstances for the most part. And, you know, Nickel Boys specifically is also a first-person movie. These are not the first two first-person movies ever made, but they're both really audacious.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Sean Fennessey?

  And upend our expectations of a traditional narrative movie. It's not your, you know, usual like whodunit, the way that like The Lady in the Lake is. And- This, this is like, to me, this is kind of charting a path for what movies for adults can be, which is that like, this movie was made very modestly. You know, like, he shoots and edits these films.

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  As he goes, yeah.

• 1:37:58Sean Fennessey?

  He did it clearly in a matter, in less than a month. They need a good script and a solid cast and you need to be, just be able to execute. He talked about like the shoes he had to wear to walk through the house while, while wearing it.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 1:38:11Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like, there were very specific choices that were made that you wouldn't, you'd really have to think hard about. But it's a movie that I think does reward thinking hard about it. The actual, like, mystery of the movie, I think, is fine. It serves its purpose. If you're going in expecting jump scares and a deathly presence with a ghost story, it's not quite that kind of story, so you should adjust your expectations.

• 1:38:30Speaker 02

  No, but it does have a pretty cool twist.

• 1:38:32Sean Fennessey?

  It does, it does. Anyhow, really good.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you, I mean, I'm sure you discussed this with him to some extent, but where your head is at on this period of Soderbergh, this, I think, that he'd had his straight to streaming era of like The Laundromat and High, uh, High Flying Bird. High Flying Bird or?

• 1:38:54Sean Fennessey?

  High Flying Bird.

• 1:38:54Speaker 02

  High Flying Bird.

• 1:38:55Sean Fennessey?

  The Laundromat, No Sudden Move.

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Sean Fennessey?

  The Meryl Streep film, which is escaping me.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  People Will Talk.

• 1:39:01Sean Fennessey?

  People, People Will Talk?

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  Let Them All Talk.

• 1:39:03Sean Fennessey?

  Let Them All Talk.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  Let Them All Talk.

• 1:39:05Sean Fennessey?

  And then Kimmy. And Kimmy was his first movie with David Cap. And I think the question, I think the new conversation starts with Black Bag.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:14Sean Fennessey?

  Black Bag is coming out in less than two months. It's a spy thriller starring two huge movie stars in Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett.

• 1:39:23Sean Fennessey?

  You know, also written by Cap and it focuses putting it out. This is his first theatrical release in, since, is it Logan Lucky? I mean, is that possible?

• 1:39:33Speaker 02

  You might be right.

• 1:39:34Sean Fennessey?

  That's a long time. You know, that's, that's almost 10 years that he hasn't been in movie theaters. So I'm curious to see if that begins a new stretch.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, also, I, I haven't seen it. I can't wait to see if he, knowing it's going into theaters and knowing it's getting a wide theatrical release, like, comes back to the middle formally a little bit.

• 1:39:54Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, we could use him in terms of those kinds of movies right now.

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  But I don't know if that interests him. And I maybe he's just like, actually, I'm I'm out here and I'm like, creating a new kind of visual language to make narrative films here. Not a new one, but a one that I'm teaching people to like these odd lens choices and, you know, like these kind of like doing away with certain aspects of coverage and and the crutches you think you need to get through a scene like I don't have them.

• 1:40:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, the thing, the thing that we can say is that since he came out of his retirement, I guess Unsane was his last theatrical release, by the way, which is in 2018. So when he, since he came back with Logan Lucky in 2017, he's made one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 features in seven, in seven and a half years.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Sean Fennessey?

  He's also made Mosaic and Full Circle and Command Z. So three TV series and these films.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:01Sean Fennessey?

  So I guess Magic Mike's Last Dance was a theatrical release, so I'm misspeaking here, but it was, it was commissioned to be a streaming only movie that they decided to put into movie theaters.

• 1:41:11Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know, it's, it's a fascinating stretch, but it never felt like he was really in the zeitgeist with any of these movies. And I think that's maybe the thing he doesn't care about as much.

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, it's also been cool to think about how we're going to look back on this era of movies in general, because I feel like I banged the drum for a few of these films pretty hard, but none of them have the cult classic vibe that Haywire does.

• 1:41:36Sean Fennessey?

  It's true.

• 1:41:37Speaker 02

  And I don't know why that is. I don't know why it is that like a film that was released straight to Max or a movie that's, let's just say buried somewhere in the Netflix library that was really provocative, like The Laundromat, or Beautiful, like.

• 1:41:52Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, you know why? It's because most people don't know these movies exist because they went straight to streaming.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  But wouldn't, conversely, like they're just at people's fingertips. Like if you have, if you, you have the surface that shows White Lotus and the surface that has Stranger Things, like. I know.

• 1:42:05Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I feel very strongly about this.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Sean Fennessey?

  You gotta put the movies in movie theaters to make them real movies. I did ask Soderbergh about that. I think if a movie like Kimmy had gotten a month in movie theaters and gotten commercials during the NFL playoffs, there would just be a different idea of it in people's heads.

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:19Sean Fennessey?

  And it would be more likely to achieve that cult status that you're talking about. Now, it doesn't mean that all of them do. Magic Mike's Last Dance did get in. I think people were kind of like, this doesn't feel totally fleshed out. It's OK.

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. It seems like you guys wanted to do these three dance sequences and then build a movie.

• 1:42:31Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly. Um, but Kimmy, No Sudden Move, Let Them All Talk, High Flying Bird, Laundromat. These are all good movies.

• 1:42:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:38Sean Fennessey?

  They're all interesting. They're all dynamic. They're all different. They're not the same. And yet, they don't have this big weight. It doesn't feel like Presence is necessarily gonna have this big weight either, but it's very much worth people's time. So, you know, Soderbergh, he's, he's in his 60s. He's still as interesting as a filmmaker as he's ever been.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:55Sean Fennessey?

  Any other thoughts?

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  No, let's get to your conversation with him.

• 1:42:57Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, Chris.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  To be continued, Sean.

• 1:43:00Sean Fennessey?

  Let's go to my conversation now with Steven Soderbergh.

• 1:43:14Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by the Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo. The Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo is built for travel. You can earn rewards wherever you book, your favorite hotel site, your go-to airline, and more. You get five times points with hotels, four times with airlines, three times on restaurants, and other travel, and one point on other purchases. Whether it's a big vacation or a quick getaway, from booking your stay to that first meal when you arrive, you're turning your trips into rewards with the Autograph Journey Credit Card from Wells Fargo. Learn more at wellsfargo.com/autographjourney. Terms apply. Steven Soderbergh is here, back on the show after a few years. Steven, Presence is your 35th feature. I'm not sure if this has been announced to you or if you're even aware of that. Yeah, 35. How do you feel about that?

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  I, I, I'd have to go back and, and see whether, how that's being calculated.

• 1:44:04Sean Fennessey?

  OK.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  Is one movie or two?

• 1:44:06Sean Fennessey?

  I think I counted it as two.

• 1:44:07Speaker 02

  OK, that's good. Did you put behind the candelabra on there?

• 1:44:10Sean Fennessey?

  I did.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:44:13Sean Fennessey?

  Can I tell, can I tell you some famous filmmakers 35 films?

• 1:44:16Speaker 02

  Please?

• 1:44:17Sean Fennessey?

  There's not a lot of examples here. Bergman's, I believe, was Cries and Whispers. Hitchcock's was Notorious. John Huston's was Escape to Victory. Jean-Luc Godard's was King Lear. What, what do you make of 35? Not a lot of people get to 35, it's a huge accomplishment.

• 1:44:34Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I'm in the, uh, volume business. So, uh, it works for me, but I think one of the reasons that I've been able to work at that rate is the, the internal philosophical debate that a lot of young filmmakers have to engage in about whether they are writer-directors or whether they are directors. And I decided that I was not a writer-director, that I had written, but that I was not a writer. And when I, when I realized that and accepted that, everything got better.

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  The work got better, my life got better, and so

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  if that wasn't the case, Bergman being the exception, but he's a freak.

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  You know, you, you, your, nobody's well is that deep. Like, you can't, you can't come up with something good every nine months. Um, so I just decided I want to work with writers and, and, you know, that's, that's why I can move quickly from one thing to the next.

• 1:45:53Sean Fennessey?

  It's an elegant segue to my next question, which is that this new film presence is the second of three David Cap scripts that you're adapting into a feature. Um, you've both worked in Hollywood for decades, but you had not worked together, right? Up until Kimmy?

• 1:46:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we knew each other, we've known each other since, uh, nineteen David's movie Apartment Zero was at Sundance the same year as Sex Lies. So we'd known each other a long time and I knew who he was before that. He already had a very strong reputation as a talented young writer. And I'd read scripts of his before Sundance. So we became friendly after that, almost worked together in the mid nineties on a ghost movie, strangely, that we abandoned because we couldn't figure out the third act. And stayed friends.

• 1:46:49Speaker 02

  And then a few years ago, he was, he was living in London and I was visiting London. And we had a drink and he said, hey, I've got this idea about a woman who's a, you know, a voice analyst for, you know, one of these companies. And here's something that she thinks is suspicious. And I said, please write that. And that kind of got us, that kind of got us going, you know? And, and it's, it's a risk when you work with someone that you've been friends with for a long time. I've seen relationships not survive a movie.

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  But we, we, we, we managed to sail through the first one. And so I pitched him a second one, Presence. And when that was finishing up, he said, I just finished this other script. What do you think? And I said, I want to do that too. I'm, I'm very anxious about the fact that I'm going to have two movies in the marketplace within six weeks of each other, both written by David. And even though they're radically different films, I, I just, I'm,

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  I'm concerned that for the, for the, you know, niche of audience members that are aware of my presence as a filmmaker, what a year they can handle, but like two in six weeks is just really pushing it.

• 1:48:25Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't seen Black Bag. I'm really looking forward to it. I do, I do suspect that there's a kind of a theme of surveillance in all three of these movies. Is that fair?

• 1:48:35Speaker 02

  Well, in the case of Presence, there is certainly eavesdropping and you are certainly a voyeur. Um, the difference I think is that, is the intention behind that, that point of view. And in the case of Presence, um, it's clear very early on, it's not threatening. And it has, it has no intention to harm anybody. Um, and so you, you sort of take it on, your, your, your concern about your complicity

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  is altered a little bit because it's clear this thing is vulnerable and this thing is kind of afraid also.

• 1:49:22Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  Um, and so I hoped it would, it would, you know, not make you feel as uncomfortable as you might if you felt like this had bad intentions.

• 1:49:33Sean Fennessey?

  When you say you pitched it to David, did you pitch him this concept of this kind of perspectival ghost? Or was that his construction? Where did that come from?

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  I gave him, I gave him a handful of pages to read that, that basically just set up the, the idea, um, and described how, how the point of view would work. And that was it. I mean, he, I said, it's, this thing is in the house. We are the thing. And it starts out vacant, a family moves in and. The family is really fucked up and that was it, literally. And he built out all of it. I didn't know who it was. He, when I got to the end of the first draft that David wrote, I was surprised.

• 1:50:19Sean Fennessey?

  So when you're thinking of a concept like that, are you mapping in your mind already specifically how you're going to technically execute on that concept when you come up with it? Or are you waiting until you get to the script to say, okay, here are the challenges and here's how I'm going to physically, you know, um, realize this, this script?

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  It's rare for me to know exactly how I want to shoot it i- i- in its, in its, you know, larval stage, but in this case, there was only one way to shoot it. So that was kind of hardwired into the idea itself. Um, and I liked that it was, it, it's a real movie idea. This doesn't work in any other format, even television. Like it can't be a play. It doesn't work as a book. Like it's a, it's a real movie idea and those are, those are rare. Um, but normally I, if I've responded to a piece of material and just thought I want to do this,

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  there's then a process of how do I, who, who, what director do I need to be to execute this in an optimal way? What are the rules? What's the toolkit? Um, what, I'll start watching things that are in the same space uh, to look for ideas about what I want to do or what I don't want to do. Um, but that's, this was rare. Like it was, it can only be this.

• 1:51:52Sean Fennessey?

  I'd love to hear more about the actual physical making of it. Are you, what kind of camera are you using? Is it, is this the iPhone with lenses? Are you holding the camera and moving through the space as you're making it?

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  It's a Sony A7, which is, uh, which looks, uh, which has the sort of form factor of a still camera. It just looks like a still camera. Um, but it's got a, it's got a big sensor and it's the same sensor that they use in their, their high-end movie cameras. Um, it is attached to a Rone. Stabilization device, which looks like a U, basically with the camera sitting in the middle of it. Um, and I'm walking around with this in my little like ninja slippers that have a rubber grip on the bottom. Uh, uh, which was weird and.

• 1:52:47Sean Fennessey?

  I had a question about what shoes you wore while you were making it. I was genuinely curious because you can't make noise.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had to be as quiet as I can and I, and I really did need grip, you know, because I'm going up and down these stairs a lot. Um, and so it turned out to be, you know, the perfect tool for the job. It looks, it looks stunning. I just. Uh, I just came back from checking a, a print at the Dolby, uh, theater here in New York and it's just, I, I just can't believe how good the image looks, uh, generated by this, this camera. Um, and so, you know, for me, this, this emergent developing technology is,

• 1:53:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I just don't know how I would execute the film without this specific gear. Like I don't, anything any bigger than that. I can't get back into the closet or I'm going to fall down the stairs and I wanted it to have a certain visual quality. I did not want it to look like something that was shot inexpensively. I wanted it to have a very velvety kind of feeling. So it's just, it's, it's, I, I, I feel so lucky. I've seen this gamut, you know, of going from only film to this, like it's incredible.

• 1:54:19Sean Fennessey?

  It made me think a lot more about the physical act of filmmaking, knowing that someone was holding something to execute making it, but also it made me think a lot about how you, the sort of like blocking and choreography inside of one space like this that you have to do. Was it meaningfully different? From how you would do it on another feature because of the way you need to see the the frame?

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm usually operating the camera, so I'm used to having a somewhat intimate relationship with with the cast. But this was next level. And, you know, my a- a- all of the, all of the busted takes, all of the takes that are not, that are NG as they're written on the script notes were because of me, because I made a mistake. And so that was a new, that was new, is feeling that sort of level of performance anxiety. Uh, but it was also really pleasurable, you know, because it was, it was, it was a real

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  dance. It was choreography and that's kind of fun to figure out. Um, I wish, normally I come out the other end of, of making something and feel like I picked up a couple of new things that I can bring to solves, uh, that I can bring to the next project. I mean, that's, that's, you're trying to learn. You're always trying to learn. As of right now, I'm not sure what I can take from presence to use going forward because it was so specific in its demands and its requirements.

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  And they don't really fit, uh, most things. And so I don't know, maybe two years from now, I'll be trying to solve a problem and I'll go, oh, I can steal from what I learned on presence. But right now I feel like it's kind of a one-off.

• 1:56:24Sean Fennessey?

  I thought of two other 2024 movies while watching presence. I don't know if you've seen either of these movies, but there's, there's Ramel Ross's Nickel Boys and there's Robert Zemeckis's Here. And they're both, they're different executions from your film, but they have some things in common as well. And like, other than Lady in the Lake, I couldn't think of another movie that used a similar strategy. There was a studio movie, basically, in the last hundred years. I'm sure there were some that you looked at, but. It's interesting to me that like it does feel like form even in mainstream movies is kind of changing pretty dramatically right now and the way that the camera moves and what the audience sees and how they see it like there's still somewhere else to go here. And your movie really revealed that to me like what do you think accounts for that

• 1:57:09Sean Fennessey?

  and these some of these changes in the last couple of years?

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  I'm not sure and I'm also not sure that there isn't a sort of a line or a tipping point in terms of film grammar beyond which you start to lose people. You know what I mean? Like you take, let's just talk pure staging. Like there's, there's, there's, there's nobody on the planet who has the pure staging ability of Steven Spielberg.

• 1:57:41Speaker 02

  If, if you made it any more complex, it would become incoherent. He is right up against, you know, how far you can go in terms of visual complexity and still have people understand where they are and what they're looking at. So I do think there's a sort of narrative equivalent of that. I'm just, that's a purely visual, you know, context. But I'm wondering in terms of story, form and all that, if, if there isn't, it's sort of like language. It's like written language. There've been people who've experimented with it, but basically you've got to, for the most part, put sentences together that people can understand. You

• 1:58:26Speaker 02

  know what I mean? And, and I do think it's sort of similar with film. Now, that being said, I think it's absolutely mandatory that we keep pushing at that line because I don't think, I, I do think there's always a little bit of wiggle room and, and a little bit of a workaround. And so I, I,

• 1:58:50Speaker 02

  I I hope everybody will, I hope filmmakers will still continue to push like, well, what's what's possible? You know, the line is whether the audience taps out or whether they lean in. You know, that's really what it comes down to. And the good news is, you know, we have, we have a few markers to judge, you know, where people are tapping out and when they're leaning in. Part of it is economic, is box office. And part of it is cultural, you know, uh, how people write about films and what the people who write about films think.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  Um, you know, so I, I like, I like thinking about that and, and trying to place myself somewhere within it. Um, you know, the limey, I'll never make anything I think as purely abstract as the limey. And, and while I'm happy that people seem, the people that have seen it seem to like that film. Nobody saw that film. Like it was, it's not a commercial movie. It's just not.

• 2:00:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's interesting that you say that though, because you, you are able to maintain like genre elements often, or at least like narrative frameworks within all of these experiments that you do over the years. And I think maybe, maybe people who are film fans are more willing to go on journeys with someone like you or someone whose name they know and say, well, at least I'll be willing to see something different. Like, do you feel like you are like actively ledger, lever, leveraging that at this stage of your career?

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  Oh, no, uh, well, I mean, not consciously. That's not something I would think about. Um, but I'm, I'm very,

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  it, it, it may shock some people when they look at the list of things that I've made to hear me say, I'm very, very conscious of the audience. Um, and I think about them a lot. Um, and, and you talk to anybody that I work with, you know, if we're, if we're trying to make sure. Sure that we're doing the best version of something, I will often invoke the audience. And say, I don't think the audience is gonna understand X unless we make that more clear. Um, or I think we're gonna lose the audience when that character does Y. And we need to, or how do we feel about that, you know?

• 2:01:23Speaker 02

  Um, at the same time. I ca- I can't be completely driven by. What will give them pleasure, meaning. If I see the thing a certain way, and I think it has to be that way. But it may mean sacrificing a certain section of the audience. I will sacrifice that section of the audience to make it the way I think it should be.

• 2:01:54Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  Um, you just have to be smart about the scale of the thing. You know, um, when I think about Solaris. Which, which I don't feel for me creatively is entirely successful. Um, one of the things that frustrates me about it is we should have made it for really cheap.

• 2:02:16Speaker 02

  It wasn't hugely expensive. It was like mid-range budget, but I look back on it and go. I should have made, you know, it shouldn't have cost forty, it should have cost nine. You know, it would have been better for the movie and, and. And people would have, I think, been more able to sort of take it on.

• 2:02:35Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:36Speaker 02

  Um, part, you know, because it looked and felt like a big studio movie, but what it was doing in a plot, character. Atmosphere sense was not at all. And so they were kind of confused and.

• 2:02:49Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know, I try to be smart about that because if you if you miss uh too many times in a row, you know, it's it starts to get difficult. I want to ask you about that, but the one other thing kind of more formally in the movie that I thought was very interesting that I want to hear you talk about is the editing style, which is not typical, you don't have your typical dissolves or match cuts or things that you see filmmakers deploy to kind of get the narrative momentum of the story going. It has this kind of abrupt style, cutting from sequence to sequence. Why did you make that choice? It seemed like the easiest and simplest way to

• 2:03:32Sean Fennessey?

  indicate uh the passage of time. And if you were to go back and analyze the the length of the black gaps between scenes, they're calculated very specifically to give you a sense of how long it's been since the last scene. Some of them are very, very fast, which means we're talking a couple of hours. And some of them are long, which means weeks. And so it was it was a sort of problem solve where I felt, yeah, what are the transitions between scenes? Like, I gotta figure that out. And then, once I decided, okay, I'm gonna cut to black, I thought, oh, great.

• 2:04:17Sean Fennessey?

  That's an opportunity to actually help the audience understand the grammar of the filmmaking and the storytelling here. They will, at a certain point, whether they can articulate it or not, they will begin to understand that the length of the black has meaning and it will help orient them. So, you know, those kind of things are fun to to think about. Yeah, it was really interesting. Presence is getting a theatrical release and you've just come out of this six-year period where you're primarily making work for streaming services. Magic Mike's Last Dance did play in theaters, but I I believe was not originally intended to. Correct. What did you learn about how those films and series were received in the wider world by going to streaming the way that they did?

• 2:05:03Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, well, I didn't.

• 2:05:05Speaker 02

  But I don't read anything anyway. So my only way, my only, my only

• 2:05:13Speaker 02

  method for judging how things are going is the degree to which people say yes or no to me. That's the, that's the only way I can tell how it's going. And so I don't, I just don't read stuff. I think it's not, it's probably not good for you. The, the year of traffic and Aaron Brockovich was, was so, uh, off the chart that I decided this would be a really good time to just stop reading anything that has your name in it. Cause it's only gonna get worse. And that's, I've stuck to that and it's, uh, it's working for me.

• 2:05:53Sean Fennessey?

  That is interesting. Well, let me ask you this, even though you haven't read this, there's an accepted wisdom that films that get theatrical release have a stronger chance to kind of imprint in the culture. Because there's maybe a marketing budget, there's the feeling amongst audiences that the movie is quote unquote more real. That it is not a streaming movie that can then disappear in some way. Does that make sense to you? Do you buy into that?

• 2:06:15Speaker 02

  That makes sense to me. I think, I think what I did, because it's sort of related to something that I've learned through experimentation. In this case, the release of Logan Lucky, in which we spent all of our money on, on everything except buying TV ads.

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  Turns out, if people don't see an ad for your movie on TV, as opposed to like on a social media platform, they don't think it's a real movie. And I think this is sort of that thing. Um, there, there's a kind of legacy, you know, street cred that comes with putting a movie out in theaters. I mean, we know empirically for a fact that, um, a movie that has had a theatrical life, when it shows- goes up on a platform draws more eyeballs um so what that what that says possibly um is

• 2:07:19Speaker 02

  that that we we value that we place a value on that experience that we may not be consciously aware of I happen to think it's really good for us to be in a theater together just watching one thing at a time that I think it's it's just good for you I think it's a good like brain reset to look at what stared to stare at one thing for a couple of hours with 300 other people I think that's I think it's good for you um but there must be some value whether

• 2:07:56Speaker 02

  it can be quantified um or not or this wouldn't be true that people don't perceive movies as being somewhat having some weight that's different than things that don't go out theatrically and the fact that they draw these eyeballs so you know the good news is lately in the last year or two uh in the in the indie space but also uh to some extent across the board young people are going to the movies

• 2:08:30Sean Fennessey?

  that is very exciting here in Los Angeles it's kind of amazing what's happening with young people but that's a whole other topic I'm thinking of the movies you've made in recent years I love the little callback to um the Meryl Streep characters novel that's in presence that is a great little bit that I didn't realize until I watched it a second time but it did have me thinking about let them all talk and High Flying Bird laundromat Kimmy no sudden move all these movies you've made that I'm the kind of guy who likes to like have all the filmmakers movies on a shelf somewhere you know so that I can feel like I've got the complete filmography and even last time we talked I think we were talking about how like the recut Kafka and a new version of Schizopolis and all like the potential for all of these things to be out in the world and I look at the Soderbergh shelf

• 2:09:15Sean Fennessey?

  and it's it's incomplete right now and I'm like wondering how do you do you think about that do you care about that

• 2:09:20Speaker 02

  yeah I mean it's well I think about it in the sense that I have a shelf too and I have I I hope it won't make me seem too self oriented to to admit that I have one copy of of the films that I've made on a shelf with the other films. Um, and it is we, you know, we're filling the gap with the box set, which is coming. Um, but there's there's the series of films for which there are no physical. Copies and it is weird like it's it is weird. I I. I can't really justify, you know, calling Warner and saying. I personally would feel so much better if you guys would.

• 2:10:02Speaker 02

  Put these out on Blu-ray, but um, you know, it's it's. I I will argue, I can argue the other side, which is conversely. Most of the discs on those shelves um. Are things that either are are hard, still impossible to find on streaming. Um, or don't exist in that world. In in the optimal format that I've I've acknowledged now that. Almost everything is available and in pretty high quality and that I died when I. You know, I went through and did a.

• 2:10:45Speaker 02

  Swedish death clean on of my discs. Because I'm like, I'm if I want to see that movie, I'm going to order it up.

• 2:10:54Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. Okay. Um. My colleague Amanda is a huge fan of your culture diaries. We've talked about them before, but she had a very specific question, which was you have a. A real knack or affinity for. Female authors and seemingly based on those diaries and especially sort of. You know, literary fiction um written by women and she's just wondering like, where do you get your recommendations? How do you decide what fiction to read?

• 2:11:18Speaker 02

  It's very serendipitous. Uh, talk to friends, uh, read reviews. Uh, you know, sometimes a good artwork can can do the trick. Um, reputation, uh, you know, so it's there's there's no real logic. To it. Um, but I find. I find novels. In particular, to be really, really immersive in a, in a way that's unique. I don't know, they feed, they, I get something from them that I don't get from any other, you know, form,

• 2:11:59Speaker 02

  uh, creative form. So I don't know why I hadn't really thought about the, the, I hadn't genderized my list.

• 2:12:09Sean Fennessey?

  She did, not me.

• 2:12:10Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, the way Amanda just did. Um, but I'm, I'm really just going, uh, there, there, I'm just sort of floating in a direction, but without any real, uh, intention.

• 2:12:24Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I'm sure you've been asked about this today, so I apologize, but you know, David Lynch's passing crosses my mind. I, I think, did you know him at any point in your life?

• 2:12:32Speaker 02

  I, I met him. Yeah. I spent an afternoon with him, uh, like 20 plus years ago. He was really fun. Um, it's a, it's a real, it's a real loss. Um, but what a great body of work he left behind, uh, for us to continue to enjoy, you know, that's, that's, it's impossible to duplicate. And he was impossible to imitate. And so, yeah, he's one of those, he's one of those people.

• 2:13:04Sean Fennessey?

  That's why these shelves matter. This is what I'm saying, Stephen, you know, I've got, I've got the shelf at home and now I can go home and revisit the work tonight.

• 2:13:11Speaker 02

  Um, there you go.

• 2:13:12Sean Fennessey?

  We end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? You watch things all the time. Have you seen anything great lately?

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

  Wow. Um, I tell you, there's, there, I really liked September 5.

• 2:13:26Sean Fennessey?

  Please tell me what you liked about it.

• 2:13:28Speaker 02

  I had no notes.

• 2:13:33Speaker 02

  Um, I just thought it was, it knew exactly what it was and, and it knew exactly what it was doing. And so when I, when I say I have no notes, I mean, wow, he didn't make a.

• 2:13:49Sean Fennessey?

  Single mistake from my point of view. And, and I was, I found it fascinating and I thought it was just really smartly executed. So, and I feel like that it's, hasn't gotten as much sort of chatter as, as some other movies. It's a great recommendation. Steven Soderbergh, thanks as always. A pleasure and to be continued, I hope. Hopefully. Thank you, sir. See you soon. Thanks to Steven Soderbergh. Thanks to CR. Thank you to Amanda and thank you to Yasi.

• 2:14:30Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Jack Sanders and our producer Bobby Wagner for his work on today's episode. Later this week, Amanda and I are going to dig into The Brutalist and we're going to rank some Best Picture nominees with Joanna Robinson. Brutalist, yay, nay? Yay. Yay. Do you feel like, has there been a massive change in Best Picture ranking since the last time we did? I don't want to give away my hand. I mean, scandals anew bursting every day. So probably by the time we record on Thursday, who knows? What will Oppo Research have for us by then? Yeah. How will, how will Emilia Perez be felled once more? You know, we'll see. Will you have seen the film by next Thursday? The second half of the film? Yeah. Maybe. Okay. Am I on the pod? Do I have to?

• 2:15:15Sean Fennessey?

  No. And frankly, I don't care. See you next time.

• 2:15:18Speaker 03

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