‘The End of Oak Street’ and the Top Five 'Twilight Zone' Movies. Plus: Will Poulter!

A very special occasion (a potentially good dinosaur movie) requires very special company, which is why on today’s show, Sean is joined by Chris Ryan and Mallory Rubin to discuss David Robert Mitchell’s ‘The End of Oak Street.’ Before transporting back to the Mesozoic era, they cover Mallory’s trip to D23 and react to myriad announcements, most crucially the casting for the upcoming X-Men movie. Then, they briefly discuss ‘The Last House’ (a film they found utterly dreadful) before diving into ‘The End of Oak Street’ (a film they found wildly entertaining and incredibly fascinating). Later, they each provide their top five favorite ‘Twilight Zone’ movies. Finally, Sean is joined by actor Will Poulter to discuss his new film, ‘Union County,’ and why he’s pushing himself out of his comfort zone with roles that scare him. (0:00) Intro (1:07) CR and Mal join the show! (4:28) X-Men casting announcements (21:12) ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ trailer reaction (27:42) Mal’s ‘Starfighter’ trailer reaction (31:47) Other D23 announcements (38:14) ‘The Last House’ (48:05) ‘The End of Oak Street’ (1:17:16) The top five 'Twilight Zone' movies (1:45:27) Will Poulter joins the show! (2:26:45) End-of-show outro Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Will Poulter, Chris Ryan, and Mallory Rubin Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fantasy and this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about dinosaurs, cosmos, and what to do if you're mysteriously transported back to the Mesozoic Era. On today's episode, I'll be joined by Chris Ryan and Mallory Rubin to discuss the new dinosaur thriller, The End of Oak Street, a rollicking new movie from It Follows and Under the Silver Lake director David Robert Mitchell. Later in this episode, I'll be joined by Will Poulter, the extraordinarily versatile and gifted actor who stars in a tough and powerful new movie called Union County, about a young Ohio man in recovery participating in a county mandated drug court program. The movie is made with largely non-professional actors and is a fascinating collision of the real world and the created. Poulter is a smart actor with great taste, always looking for material like this. He came here with a great story to tell. I hope you'll stick around for

• 0:59Sean Fennessey?

  that chat. But first, let's talk about some important movie news that starts with the letter X with Mal and CR right after this.

• 1:06Speaker 01

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• 3:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Mallory, welcome back.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Hello, thanks for having me. What a pleasure.

• 3:10Speaker 05

  It's his show. You should, you know.

• 3:12Sean Fennessey?

  Looking me in the eyes the entire time.

• 3:14Speaker 05

  What's up with Big Picture turning into Inside the Actor's Studio?

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 3:19Sean Fennessey?

  I like talking to artists. What's wrong with that?

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Are we gonna do a little bit of tape breakdown on the Ash on Anything mailbag? You know, I'd like to, I'd like to share some thoughts.

• 3:29Sean Fennessey?

  What do you want to get into?

• 3:29Speaker 04

  I just thought it was an absolutely riveting, astonishing, and dare I say exquisite listen, and I found it inspiring and aspirational. I know why you're asking. I listened to it in the car over a few commutes.

• 3:42Sean Fennessey?

  You mean like in the boudoir?

• 3:43Speaker 04

  No, I listened to The Watch in the bath, and I think Chris feels protective that I have chosen to consume The Watch in that very relaxing, intimate way.

• 3:52Sean Fennessey?

  Sure, yeah.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  There's just not like any old Irish guy talking on a podcast and you know, you jump in the bath.

• 3:57Sean Fennessey?

  What is it about the Irish in podcasting? Why do we got it like that?

• 4:00Speaker 05

  You, me, JFK, yeah.

• 4:03Sean Fennessey?

  He would have been a hell of a podcaster.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  When was the last time the three of us podcasted together? It's been a minute.

• 4:07Sean Fennessey?

  Just the three of us?

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Just the three of us, not the three of us and other people. Complete Unknown might have been it.

• 4:13Sean Fennessey?

  No kidding.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, because Gladiator 2 and that Complete Unknown, we're like very close together.

• 4:17Sean Fennessey?

  Did we not have a trio pod last year? That's so sad.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  I feel like that's just a mistake and that's something we should allow to happen again.

• 4:24Sean Fennessey?

  If only we were allowed to make decisions about who gets to appear on episodes. How many times have you and I been invited to The Watch together?

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Zero. Zero.

• 4:32Sean Fennessey?

  What does that tell you?

• 4:33Speaker 05

  It tells you that Andy's at Prima Donna, and it takes a lot of maintenance to just get him ready at 10 a.m. You have no idea how many shots he takes, what kind of rider he has.

• 4:43Sean Fennessey?

  Shots like this or like shots like this?

• 4:45Speaker 05

  Vitamin B, you know, HGH, all the things that we have to pump into him to get him coherent.

• 4:50Sean Fennessey?

  You should let him know that Mal and I like know how to podcast.

• 4:54Speaker 05

  I know. Well, you don't watch television anymore.

• 4:56Sean Fennessey?

  Mostly true.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:58Sean Fennessey?

  What am I, what am I up on right now? What am I up to date on?

• 5:02Speaker 04

  You haven't watched Lanterns.

• 5:03Sean Fennessey?

  I have not yet seen the finale of Dragon, but I've seen, I saw the first seven episodes.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Okay. That's pretty good for you, pace-wise.

• 5:10Sean Fennessey?

  What did I just finish? What did I just watch and finish? I can't remember. I'm not watching a lot right now. I will watch Lanterns.

• 5:16Speaker 05

  Did you watch Beef Season 2 recently?

• 5:17Sean Fennessey?

  I watched Beef Season 2, which I enjoyed. I thought a little bit went off the rails, but I enjoyed.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  Furious?

• 5:21Sean Fennessey?

  No, but I will. It is actually, literally, I'm going on vacation this weekend and we're gonna, Eileen and I are gonna watch Furious. And I have been deleting episodes as soon as you and Andy start talking about them. Hey, thanks for being here. So you just came back from Anaheim?

• 5:37Speaker 04

  That's right. I was just there on Friday night. That was enough.

• 5:40Sean Fennessey?

  You were there for D23. What is D23, Mallory?

• 5:43Speaker 04

  D23 is the Disney convention to announce and celebrate all sorts of Disney things. I had never been, and I decided this year after San Diego Comic-Con, assuming that I did not come back from San Diego Comic-Con with COVID, which is what happened last year, that I would go. I would make my maiden voyage to D23 this year. And I was committed. Chris saw me last week. We had some wonderful podcasting experiences together last week with the Talk of Thrones finale rewatchables, and he was like, "You seem not well." And I was like, "Nothing will keep me from D23. Not my psychic break, not my debilitating exhaustion, nothing. I will be there." And then

• 6:24Speaker 04

  I went and I was like, "I don't need to go again." That said, that said, we got some big news.

• 6:29Sean Fennessey?

  We did. We got a lot of news.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  Sean and I got it the same second you did.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:35Sean Fennessey?

  We were sitting together drinking beer in my home, and you were in Anaheim.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  Getting COVID-20.

• 6:43Sean Fennessey?

  So we got an X-Men cast, and you have been podcasting about X-Men, you have been podcasting about X-Men. I just podcasted about X-Men last week.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  You sure did.

• 6:53Sean Fennessey?

  We all love the X-Men. I think we're all, we're all very excited about the forthcoming X-Men movie. And some of the casting announcements were made. We know that Jake Schreier is going to be directing the movie, and we knew going into this that Samara Weaving would be playing Emma Frost. We knew Kit Connor would be portraying Cyclops. And of course, we knew Sadie Sink would be portraying Jean Grey because of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Everything else, I would say, was mostly rumored and unconfirmed. And there was one thing that I think it's fair to say could be considered surprising, but even then, this is a person that we knew the MCU had been targeting for a very long time. So I'll give, I'll give the list, and then I want to get your reactions to this, this roster so far of Charles Xavier's X-Men. We'll start with Charles Xavier,

• 7:38Sean Fennessey?

  who's going to be portrayed by Christopher Abbott.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:40Sean Fennessey?

  Probably best known for his work on Girls, but I think a very, an exciting and very adventurous film actor who-

• 7:47Speaker 05

  Very serious man.

• 7:48Sean Fennessey?

  Very serious actor. Great work on Broadway, made a lot of independent films over the last 10 years or so.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  I saw him off-Broadway, not a big deal. We can just skip right past.

• 7:57Sean Fennessey?

  Did you see him in theaters in Craven the Hunter?

• 8:01Speaker 04

  I did.

• 8:02Sean Fennessey?

  As the foreigner?

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Day one.

• 8:04Sean Fennessey?

  I was there as well. Didn't work out great. He was fine in it.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  He was pretty interesting, actually. Not as interesting as Craven's abs, obviously, but-

• 8:11Sean Fennessey?

  In addition to Professor X, we've got Indian Averetti is playing Rogue. We've got Maya Boyd as Storm. And the most significant news, I think, is probably Adam Driver is portraying Nathaniel Milbury, aka Mr. Sinister.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 8:28Sean Fennessey?

  You say what?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  So The Midnight Boys Pew Pew talked about this on their pod. Joe and I podded this morning about the D23 news and the excellent Lanterns premiere. And I think all of us had the same reaction to being in the room for the announcement, which was just a very weird, anticlimactic, muted response. People were-

• 8:47Speaker 05

  They're where the NBA draft is now, where it's just like five minutes before the pick. They're like, "The Hornets will be taking Conk nibble."

• 8:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was just a very quick progression of saying the performers' names. They came out, they said nothing, and then it was over. And there was like genuinely, no joke, way more excitement in the room for Bluey and Camp Rock 3, not a thing that I knew about or understood until Joanna explained it to me. So that was strange. I think that the Driver, the Adam Driver, because that, he was on video. That was a clip that they played a fun little bit. Like, I thought, you know, when everyone said to be there, they meant on set, right? And he's alone, they pan out. And he did the Magneto bit. He like leaned in to the rumor mill that people had speculated that he would be playing Magneto. I will say that without naming names, multiple people

• 9:35Speaker 04

  around us were like, "Wait, so is he Magneto?" Because he said Nathaniel Milbury, not Mr. Sinister, and not everybody knew that alias. So people were like confused. It was a little bit weird. There's the reception in the room, and then there's just the excitement for the cast, and I think this is exciting casting. I will say, I am a, Joanna introduced me to Heartstopper a few years ago, and I think it's excellent. And I, the second I saw Kit Connor, like in one scene, I texted Joanna and multiple friends, "This guy's gonna be mega famous." Like, I just think he's an incredibly talented young actor. I love Sadie Sink. Charlie on Girls is one of the more formative-

• 10:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, a problematic Mal boy, yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  Heroin Charlie or prep Charlie?

• 10:18Sean Fennessey?

  They're all kind of interesting, right?

• 10:20Speaker 04

  Part of the experience of loving Charlie is the journey, you know? And so, yeah, I have not seen obsession because I'm scared, but obviously that, I understand that that is very exciting. Maya Boyd, a Broadway performer, but new to a movie of this magnitude, obviously.

• 10:39Sean Fennessey?

  By far the least known of the crew.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think this is a really exciting cast. My expectation certainly is that we have more news to come. I don't know if you believe that the Charles Melton turned-down beast thing is real. I was very-

• 10:48Sean Fennessey?

  Certainly seems like it.

• 10:49Speaker 04

  I was, I am obsessed with Charles Melton, so I was really hoping that he would be in this new franchise. Anyway, I think that the cast is very promising. More to come. How many more reveals to come for the first film is an interesting question.

• 11:05Sean Fennessey?

  I assume you and Andy talked about this.

• 11:06Speaker 05

  We did. Yeah.

• 11:08Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you don't have to repeat yourself here necessarily.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  I'll say something different than what I said on the pod, which is something I was saving for the big picture.

• 11:14Sean Fennessey?

  Nice.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  Sometimes I do this.

• 11:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's special.

• 11:18Speaker 05

  The casting is secondary to the way this movie winds up looking and the way this movie winds up feeling to me. Like, they could have cast this with the collected cast of Heat 2, and it's not gonna matter if it looks like Doomsday. And I think that this is almost more crucial to me than Marvel turning the page on the V1 Avengers, like the Mark Ruffalo era Avengers and the Hemsworth Avengers, is turning the page on how these movies maybe get made and how they look and how they feel. The best example of that going forward, I think, the touchstone should be Brand New Day, which by no means is licorice pizza in terms of its feel for human life, but...

• 12:03Sean Fennessey?

  If only it had a little bit of that energy in it.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  That was a strange... If I was like...

• 12:06Sean Fennessey?

  The one thing missing from Brand New Day was an age gap romance.

• 12:10Speaker 05

  As it was coming out of my mouth, I was like, "That's interesting. That's the first movie you thought of." That's not a superhero movie.

• 12:16Sean Fennessey?

  Is that because that movie made you want to visit a high school?

• 12:19Speaker 04

  No, do you know what I think it was? On some level, subconsciously, it's that Cooper Hoffman had been rumored to be an X-Men.

• 12:24Speaker 05

  It might have been that, and it might have also just been like, Michael Baumann shot that, Michael Baumann shot Tony. I'm just thinking about... It's just a lot of spaghetti up here.

• 12:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, okay. You're making an interesting point. And to me, I'm very excited for X-Men, and I really liked Thunderbolts, and I think Jake Schreier's good. So like, I'm probably gonna like this movie.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  I hope so, yes. I feel the same way.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  I thought Thunderbolts was great.

• 12:45Sean Fennessey?

  X-Men is very sacred to us. I really, I'm in the middle of X-Men 97, season two. That is the show I was watching that I couldn't think of.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Good show.

• 12:53Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm loving it.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:54Sean Fennessey?

  And I loved the first season, and it is tapping into a very primal teenage me version. And now I like, I literally pulled out the graphic novels over the weekend when the news hit the show to Alice. Like, here's Days of Future Past, here's, you know what I mean? Like, here's Dark Phoenix. So I'm very invested in that, in that very kind of adolescent way. That, with that said, this casting feels very much to me like a sop to Gen Z. And I think what they're doing is looking at the success of the Spider-Man films since Holland came on. And one of the reasons why the last two movies have been so massive is you've got young people who've been on the journey with these actors since the beginning. So if you were 14 when Homecoming came out, you're at the stage of life now where a lot of these characters are going in these movies.

• 13:38Sean Fennessey?

  And there's something very shrewd about that. That is going to make, I think, this version of the X-Men feel dramatically different from Bryan Singer's X-Men movies, and really more like YA. And I don't mean that pejoratively, but this is a younger cast. It's a very, it's a relatively unknown cast, and the things that they are known for are things like Heartstopper, which is appealing to a very... Stranger Things, Obsession, like, these were hot Gen Z things.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  I would say there's nothing more millennial than girls, and both Adam Driver and Christopher Robin are girls temples.

• 14:11Sean Fennessey?

  There's a counterpoint to that, which is if you look at the two hyper-seasoned actors that they've cast here, they're like, they're credibility boosters, they're very serious figures. You know, they both take their work very seriously. We know that about them. They both present as they're gonna be the grownups in the room, quite literally, in these stories. So it'll be interesting to see how those two worlds kind of interact.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just have a couple of questions about like, the mechanics of how they're gonna do this version of, whether it's phased storytelling or not. Like, they're probably not gonna use Disney Plus as a spackle for plot. So there probably won't be a Hellfire Club series to introduce these people, right?

• 14:49Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I have some thoughts on that, but keep going.

• 14:51Speaker 05

  They're probably, if I had to guess, these characters will be relatively well-introduced in the two Avengers films. And so the first X-Men movie...

• 15:01Speaker 04

  I don't think so.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  You think it's gonna be like Charles Xavier's...

• 15:04Sean Fennessey?

  I think you might even get in Secret Wars.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:06Sean Fennessey?

  A little bit.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  I think that gets to the younger cast, right? And the meta quality there of like, not only leaning into the ability to grow with the Spider-Man comp, which I think is exactly right and great, and, you know, ultimately very appealing for the idea of like, creating and fostering a new generation of fandom, rather than just continuing to make movies for a bunch of increasingly fatigued and beleaguered moviegoers who are like, "This isn't as good as the thing I used to love." There's a natural element to the Secret Wars, post-Secret Wars reset of saying, "Okay, the universe is taking shape and form anew, and we're doing that with characters who are figuring out their powers as the MCU is figuring out the next stage of storytelling." So I think that's appropriate and exciting.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  It actually feels to me like, it gives me more confidence than the idea of continuing to try to like, layer on and connect to these extra strands of threads of a tapestry that has now existed for... Guys, we're a couple of years away from 20 years of the MCU. It's 2026. Iron Man came out in 2008. Like, we need to move on to the next phase of things. And so that, I think, is actually a good choice.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  Me too.

• 16:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I'm curious to see with Mr. Sinister being the lead villain, how much of this is really an X-Men movie? Because Mr. Sinister is very Gene and Scott-focused as a character. We know Gene and Scott, they're announced here. We have already been introduced to Gene in these movies. And, but no Wolverine, no Nightcrawler, no Colossus, no Angel, no Iceman. Forget about Banshee, or Bishop, or Cable, or any of those other characters.

• 16:45Speaker 05

  I have not forgotten about Bishop and Cable, by the way.

• 16:47Sean Fennessey?

  If you really like Bishop and Cable, you need to be watching X-Men 97, season two.

• 16:51Speaker 05

  I do.

• 16:51Sean Fennessey?

  They're getting a lot of, lot of, lot of energy. But, and I wonder if they're gonna keep the team a little smaller. Maybe Beast will come in.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:58Sean Fennessey?

  You know, maybe Angel will come in, or maybe we'll get a Wolverine near the end of the film. But like...

• 17:04Speaker 04

  No Wolverine would be really... The biggest questions, obviously, I think, are Wolverine and Magneto. Is Magneto not gonna be cast in this first movie?

• 17:11Sean Fennessey?

  I don't feel that way.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  It's what Joanna said this morning. I think I'm coming around to this. This was not where I was initially.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  I also really liked the way Brand New Day was like, here's the star of the movie, here's the co-stars of the movie. This is the pyramid of importance within this plot. There is not a D-plot of two people doing a MacGuffin journey to bring something back to Spider-Man that doesn't really matter. Like, they need to get away from that kind of storytelling, which they box themselves into, because they have 12 actors in Avengers who all need like, plot service, and they wind up acting against tennis balls in Atlanta and saying like, "No, bring it over here," you know?

• 17:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, they do it in London now, but sure.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  Sure. But like, my point being is like, if they were to start as a love story between these two kids who get fucked up by this guy...

• 17:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's where I think they're going.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:00Sean Fennessey?

  That is exactly where I think they're going.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Even just, I don't know, how much of how they spend the first 30 seconds of a four-and-a-half-minute D-23 panel really matters, and what does that tell us? I don't know. But they did introduce Gene and Scott before Charles.

• 18:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 18:15Speaker 04

  Which felt like it was signaling something. And then to end on Sinister, I agree, it felt like the bookends of the announcement were, you know, that character set and that pairing. And the idea of building your new franchise initially around young charismatic stars like Kit Connor and Sadie Sink, I think, makes a lot of sense. I don't know that you can wait too long to bring Magneto and Wolverine into the era of X-Men and the MCU, but one movie is interesting.

• 18:44Sean Fennessey?

  It's a fascinating choice. I was thinking about what you said with there not being a Hellfire Club TV show, for example. So we know that next year, there's only one Marvel movie. It's just Secret Wars. In 2028, when this X-Men film is coming in May, that will be followed in succession by Ghost Rider, and then Black Panther 3. And then we'll be back on the three Marvel movies a year schedule. And it was the expansionist mentality that I think really felled the Marvel enterprise. And I'll be very curious to see, because I think it's not hard to imagine a world where Doomsday and Secret Wars and X-Men are all big hits.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 19:21Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe diminishing returns on the Avengers films relative to the previous two Avengers films, but still, those movies are gonna be very, very big. And then all of a sudden, Marvel will be feeling itself again. And then they'll be like, "Well, what if we do need to do the Colossus origin story in animated form on D+?" Like, these things always come in waves and cycles, and so I'm kind of curious to see...

• 19:41Speaker 05

  I don't think there's any way to make those movies in a cost-effective way, or make those shows in a really cost-effective way. I think that's what they figured out, that even something like Wonder Man, which had all this affection for it critically, and I think even among the fans who found it, but ultimately, like, Disney decided not to do it because it was a real Excel sheet for them, where they were like, "This show costs too much for the amount of people who watch it, and it's not germane, it's not essential to have this as a building block going forward for our plans for Marvel." I think they could change their mind again, just the same way all of, you know, entertainment could be like, "We're diving back into streaming TV as a platform to connect theatrical events."

• 20:23Speaker 05

  And especially if movies become more and more this sort of like, not boutique, almost like luxury live experience of something, and then like, TV is kind of where the grinders are. I don't know if that's ever gonna happen, but...

• 20:37Sean Fennessey?

  It's almost like the dynamic amongst podcasters as well.

• 20:39Speaker 05

  That's right. Just gotta make that rent money.

• 20:44Sean Fennessey?

  Kanish over here.

• 20:46Speaker 05

  I always got that bread truck for you if you want it. My point really was just that I could see a world where they're making Ghost Rider, Black Panther, X-Men movies, and they don't have that much to do with each other. They're like, that they're, we are in a post, post-credit sequence world. And these stories are maybe a little hermetically sealed. Like, I'm sure we'll have team-ups, I'm sure, you know? But I could see a world in which we're not doing a lot of like, you better stick around for the second post-credit sequence to see Charlize Theron, who's never gonna show up again.

• 21:21Sean Fennessey?

  It's probably a good idea to at least take a break from that after Secret Wars, which is kind of the ultimate, like, the er team-up story.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:28Sean Fennessey?

  So, do you think, do you think Vision Quest will be like the last TV show we see for a long time from Marvel?

• 21:33Speaker 04

  I think you're both right. I think what Chris is outlining feels currently like the plan. And I think you are right that the impulse to go right back to the thing that worked before until it didn't will be really strong.

• 21:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  If the overall enthusiasm is at a fever pitch again. I, again, I don't really know why I'm putting so much stock in like, these feige presentations at these conventions, but I was really struck at Comic-Con and for the Marvel Hall of Fame panel, when he came out and was like, "We're not here to talk about TV." Literally said that. And I just thought that, now, again, he's like trying to muster enthusiasm for Endgame Encore, and then, of course, Doomsday, and, you know, they had the Ghost Rider and Black Panther 3 announcements at that panel, a little Spidey tease before people had seen that movie. So it was, there was a lot of film-centric footage and conversation to highlight, but "We're not here to talk about TV" felt like a signal of intent about where Marvel is right now.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  I thought the Vision Quest trailer that they showed at D23 was one of the highlights of the entire night. It looks wonderful. Wandavision was great. Agatha was great. There's a version of Marvel from a couple of years ago where the third piece of that trilogy is like really central to how people are talking and thinking about Marvel. And I would say this is very much being presented as the conclusion of a thing, not the continuation of a thing. Now, that said, like, Wiccan and Speed are in the MCU now and will be a part of things moving forward. So even the installments that are positioned as conclusions, or to Chris's point, as separate, still present characters, if not maybe as many active plotlines that connect to other things, because it is inherently a connected universe.

• 23:10Speaker 04

  I don't know. I mean, I think that there's, there's no question, you're right, that Doomsday and Secret Wars will be huge. Question is whether they'll be good.

• 23:19Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. I think we can pivot that conversation into the, the second trailer that was released.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:24Sean Fennessey?

  Now, you guys got a chance to see this at Comic-Con.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 23:28Sean Fennessey?

  Correct?

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 23:29Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the one that was communicated to us as a huge improvement

• 23:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:32Sean Fennessey?

  on the first one. And I ask you, Chris, is it a huge improvement on the first one?

• 23:37Speaker 05

  Emotionally and dramatically, yeah. Yeah. I was, I was interested to find out what they are yelling about. I'm seated.

• 23:44Sean Fennessey?

  You now are interested to find out.

• 23:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I didn't know, like, the, the first one is-

• 23:49Sean Fennessey?

  Did you do this?

• 23:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, fucking, if it's important, start screaming about it. Like, I liked to see, like, they have been doing kind of the inert, like, I don't know really what I'm looking at, but-

• 23:59Sean Fennessey?

  A lot of posing.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  Yeah. And now, like, even though it looks like it is, I think Andy said it looked like it was shot in Harrenhal, uh, it is-

• 24:08Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's generous.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  It, it at least had-

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Did anyone fuck their mom?

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Dramatic stakes that it was suggesting.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Dream about it.

• 24:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's not the whole Victor Von Doom thing, right? His relationship to his mom. Yeah, that's a big part of it. Yeah, for sure.

• 24:20Speaker 05

  I'm kind of about that.

• 24:22Sean Fennessey?

  That's, isn't that one of his motivating forces? Is he's can't really live up to the expectations for him? He's always second best.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  I always want to call him VVD, but that's the name, the nickname of Liverpool's beloved centerback, Virgil van Dijk.

• 24:37Sean Fennessey?

  I think Victor Von Doom preceded him-

• 24:39Speaker 05

  He did.

• 24:39Sean Fennessey?

  -in the VVD power rankings, if I had to guess.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  Perhaps.

• 24:42Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I thought this was a little better. I don't know if it was like some dramatic improvement on what I saw before, because it was shot in front of a giant fucking green screen. I guess the throne room scene is like a real room, like, that had furniture in it, but like- The movie definitely has me interested in what the story's gonna be.

• 24:57Speaker 05

  Marty Supreme, Jack, what's his face?

• 24:59Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, Jack Fisk. Yeah, Jack Fisk marvels the Avengers Doomsday. Um, and it was nice to see Pedro Pascal acting-

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:07Sean Fennessey?

  -and not wandering around like he's on Ambien, like he did in Fantastic Four. That was, um, you know, I was interested in that. It does make it seem like, obviously, I, I like the theory, maybe, that maybe it was Van who said this, maybe it was you who said this, that it feels, there's just like, this looks like maybe the first five minutes of the movie.

• 25:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just think that all this, like, "The Fox, X-Men are back." It's like, come on.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:27Sean Fennessey?

  Most, in, in all likelihood, many of those characters will be annihilated fairly early on.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  I would think so.

• 25:32Sean Fennessey?

  And the "What did you do? Did you do this?" was all about killing many, many heroes, presumably.

• 25:37Speaker 05

  Channing Tatum's Gambit.

• 25:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, which, and we will mourn him on this show. But, I don't know. The Russo's, you know, they have a visual style. It's not the greatest style, and they don't have the same level of anticipation, at least from me, that they had going into the previous two films.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 25:57Sean Fennessey?

  We'll see how it goes.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:58Sean Fennessey?

  It's gonna be a popular film.

• 26:00Speaker 04

  Oh, no question.

• 26:01Sean Fennessey?

  But-

• 26:01Speaker 04

  No question.

• 26:02Sean Fennessey?

  Will it be good, as you said, is really the big question.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  I mean, I hope so. I really want it to be. I, I'm, I'm, I thought that this trailer was a market improvement over the first one, which I considered quite worrying. Uh, I, I don't know. I heard Downey break out the Lot Varian accent, and I felt like possibility still existed in the world. I felt alive. I don't think that was your reaction to it.

• 26:27Sean Fennessey?

  No, I thought it was very silly.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  Do you think we'll get any No Mask Downey? Or is this a Mandalorian situation?

• 26:33Speaker 04

  You know, they're giving us so much, like, eye, so much eyeball in the trailer. Maybe, I do think they will find it very difficult to resist having our Avengers, who know Tony, see Downey's face. Like, I don't think they'll be able to resist that.

• 26:50Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  Right? So-

• 26:51Sean Fennessey?

  That feels inevitable.

• 26:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Will it be, will it be Cap? I know they're not, like, saying that Peter's in this movie. Will it be Peter? Uh, I think that that seems very likely to happen at some point. How scarred will the face be? We'll find out. We'll find out. Yeah, it's, it definitely is like a, it's like a Fantastic Four movie, which makes sense, obviously, given Doom, but because they had to, you know, change the plan from Kang to Doom, it doesn't have the, like, Thanos equivalent of we built across the Infinity Saga to this thing. So it makes sense to-

• 27:24Speaker 05

  Feige tried to walk that back a little bit, though. He was like, everybody's always like, "You guys, you guys pebbled Thanos across 10 movies." He's like, "Thanos would show up for like five seconds, sit in a chair," and everybody's like, "What great storytelling."

• 27:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it wasn't all like, I mean-

• 27:39Sean Fennessey?

  It wasn't a perfectly orchestrated plan, but there was a plan. This is like, we have to fix a problem.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:43Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and that doesn't mean it won't turn out to be good. It's a little interesting to use Doom now, in a moment when they are, they feel a little up against the wall, because he is kind of like, there's a case that he is the great comic book villain.

• 27:56Speaker 05

  I agree with you.

• 27:57Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and-

• 27:58Speaker 05

  And so they make Apocalypse, right?

• 28:00Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 28:01Sean Fennessey?

  Well, again, watch X-Men 97, season two, you know? They're, they're, they're doing it all there.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  But you see that, to your point about Doom is a great villain, you see that moment, you know, I think when the RDJ is coming back news came out, there's the like, you know, "Inside us all, we have two wolves," and there's, okay, Downey, like, is the MCU for many people exciting? I think also it felt like the most morally and creatively, like, bankrupt decision in the history of cinema.

• 28:22Sean Fennessey?

  Sweating, the sweetest thing of all time.

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Right? Those maybe could both be true at once. You see Doom, uh, stick his hand out and stop. Thor stops, Thor, and it's like, this is sick. Maybe this will be sick. So there were a couple of moments like that in the trailer that, that did get me hyped and get me jazzed. I agree with you guys that visually it looks appalling, and the fact that it will be coming out the same weekend is possibly one of the most visually astonishing movies we've had the pleasure of watching.

• 28:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  Doom Part III is, you know, that's not a comparison that I think is gonna benefit Doomsday, but at least we get to see it in Infinity Vision.

• 28:57Speaker 05

  I think there's a lot of cap maintenance going on right now.

• 29:00Sean Fennessey?

  A lot of cap maintenance?

• 29:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. These two movies get them all off the books.

• 29:05Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  Then we got all these young kids-

• 29:06Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  On good deals. Because you can't make these movies for less than-

• 29:09Sean Fennessey?

  They went over the second apron.

• 29:10Speaker 05

  $200 million because of everybody's quote.

• 29:13Sean Fennessey?

  They were like, "We can make Eternals."

• 29:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:15Sean Fennessey?

  And you're like, "No, you can't. And you're gonna be in cap hell for the next five years." And, you know, now, here we are.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:20Sean Fennessey?

  We're gonna get cleared out. Next year, only three superhero movies. Beyond the Spider-Verse, next summer.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  Can't wait.

• 29:25Sean Fennessey?

  Man of Tomorrow, next summer.

• 29:27Speaker 04

  Pretty excited.

• 29:28Sean Fennessey?

  And Secret Wars in December. And that's it.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  Hope it's great.

• 29:30Sean Fennessey?

  That's the only time you'll have to hear us talk about superhero movies on this show.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  Secret Wars is gonna nail back-to-back years like that? They're not gonna delay it at all? They can't delay it.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  I don't think they can delay it. I don't think they can delay it.

• 29:41Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Starfighter?

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:43Sean Fennessey?

  Did they show a trailer to you?

• 29:45Speaker 04

  They showed a teaser trailer.

• 29:46Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 29:46Speaker 04

  And it was fucking electric.

• 29:48Speaker 05

  What was it?

• 29:48Sean Fennessey?

  I've heard real mixed reports about this. I'm curious.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  No, not a joke. Not a joke.

• 29:53Sean Fennessey?

  It looked like Drive? Be ser, be real.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  This, it's very much a trailer about the starship. Like, it is very much framed as, so, we, we learn, uh, Ryan Gosling's character's name is Cade Oberon.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  Cade Oberon?

• 30:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. Exciting stuff. Great name, sick name, cool name.

• 30:10Speaker 05

  Pitch for the Mariners?

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, he's gonna be right there. He's gonna slot in after Brian Wim, I think. Um-

• 30:20Sean Fennessey?

  Or a George Kirby guy myself.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  I love, I love George Kirby. Love. I've had Logan Gilbert, Kirby, and Wu on the AL Only Keeper League that Jeff and I co-managed for the last few years. It's been a delightful experience. We've yet to win a title.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  And most of those tweets are about his AL Keeper League now.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  Well, he has, he has Kate Anderson as a keeper, so, which is like unbelievable. So annoying.

• 30:38Sean Fennessey?

  Is Kate Oberon, is he in the bullpen, or like, where does he pitch?

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:42Sean Fennessey?

  High-low ridge reliever?

• 30:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. He's a, he's a setup guy. Um, so he's got this sick, like, leather jacket with this kind of skull sigil on the back, and, uh, the kid-

• 30:52Sean Fennessey?

  Seriously?

• 30:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. The kid who, I thought from the initial image they released, looked like a young child.

• 30:57Sean Fennessey?

  Or farming our youth.

• 30:58Speaker 05

  That's my shit.

• 30:59Sean Fennessey?

  This is incredible.

• 31:00Speaker 05

  Get your own shit.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  The, I thought the kid was much younger, based on the image they released. He seems to be like a teen.

• 31:07Speaker 04

  It was a quick trailer and it was very much like, you know, fastest starship ever built. Can it be flown? Kind of a vibe.

• 31:15Sean Fennessey?

  What's your favorite Sean Levy film?

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Hmm. I like a few of his episodes of Stranger Things quite a bit. I enjoyed, obviously Deadpool and Wolverine.

• 31:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's number one for you?

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Quite loved the pegging joke in Deadpool and Wolverine, thought that was inspired.

• 31:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, why is it funny when Olivia Wilde does it and not when Sean Levy does it, Chris? Answer me that.

• 31:33Speaker 05

  What's the, what's the one that went straight to Adam's song? What was that about?

• 31:37Sean Fennessey?

  The Adam Project.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  The Adam Project.

• 31:38Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 31:40Sean Fennessey?

  I'm sorry. Uh, I kind of like Real Steel. Did you ever see that one? Hugh Jackman?

• 31:46Speaker 05

  Based on a Twilight Zone episode.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  No.

• 31:48Sean Fennessey?

  Written by Richard Matteson. Um, we will get into that shortly. Okay. So you're pumped for Starfighter.

• 31:53Speaker 04

  I thought it looked great. I mean, we didn't see much and I was also hoping that they would play it again.

• 31:57Speaker 05

  They trotted that kid out there?

• 31:58Speaker 04

  No. No. Gosling was out there. He like switched jackets. Yeah, the kid, the kid who, who was like supposed to be his, you know, lone wolf cub kind of, uh,

• 32:06Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that's the vibe they're doing.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  And I thought he was gonna be much younger, but he seems to be like a full on teen. So I don't know.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  They haven't tried that before.

• 32:11Sean Fennessey?

  We just did this men learning growth.

• 32:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know. The visuals looked, looked good. Um, we, they really barely showed anything. Obviously this is set in the future of the timeline.

• 32:20Sean Fennessey?

  Five years later, apparently, after Rey.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, post first order. So that's new. That's exciting. It's get to play in a different slice of the, the canon, a different slice of the timeline.

• 32:28Sean Fennessey?

  And how do you feel about the theory that it's all leading back to the big Rey Kylo story down the line? That like, they're not going to do the, the search for Ben Solo, hunt for Ben Solo, but they will bring all them back.

• 32:41Speaker 05

  Dave Filoni was like, that's not happening.

• 32:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, I mean, that seems completely possible. I don't know. They, they can't stop making movies about the same characters. We are old.

• 32:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  It's, next year's 50 years of Star Wars. Fifty, five zero, fifty.

• 32:57Sean Fennessey?

  How do you feel?

• 32:59Speaker 05

  I feel pretty much the same. Yeah.

• 33:01Sean Fennessey?

  Dead inside?

• 33:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I, I don't, I mean, like, it's funny to just kind of just be sitting here at nearly 50 years old, talking about this thing that's been in my life the entire time. But I guess in some ways, most people would say, what a lucky, what a lucky guy.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  What do you think more people will be celebrating next year? 50 years of Star Wars or 50 years of CR?

• 33:20Speaker 05

  Why not do it the same? Do it the same day?

• 33:21Sean Fennessey?

  On the same day?

• 33:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:23Sean Fennessey?

  Should we get a big, what's the biggest movie theater we could possibly get to pile in and watch A New Hope together?

• 33:28Speaker 05

  Why don't you get me the Millennium Falcon?

• 33:30Sean Fennessey?

  You want me to purchase it? Who owns the Millennium Falcon?

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Well, there is one at Galaxy's Edge.

• 33:35Sean Fennessey?

  But that was a re, a re-cre, as they say.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  But we can, we could still go and sit in it to celebrate Chris's birthday.

• 33:40Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think, would you enjoy that?

• 33:42Speaker 05

  I really don't care for Anaheim very much.

• 33:45Sean Fennessey?

  That's why you weren't at D23. Um, a couple of news and notes out of D23. The Bluey movie, announced for August 6th, 2027.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  Thumbs down by Andy Greenwald's younger daughter.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Oh no, that's upsetting. I've never seen a second of Bluey.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  Trailer, the different rendering of it.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 34:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It does have the heightened, we have a slightly different animation style that differs from the TV show, which I'm not sure I totally understand. But, um, I have a lot of faith in Joe Brum, the creator and writer and director of this movie.

• 34:15Speaker 05

  Is that coming to your life yet? Hardcore?

• 34:17Sean Fennessey?

  Bluey?

• 34:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:18Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, Ben, for years.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  Oh, before, pre-Alice, you were just rocking Bluey episodes?

• 34:22Sean Fennessey?

  No, no. I mean, Alice is five years old. We've been watching it since she was like two years old. Um, I wouldn't say we watch it very much now. But if we popped it on, she would be wrapped.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 34:32Sean Fennessey?

  Um, you know, the fascinating thing about Bluey, of course, is that every episode is eight minutes long.

• 34:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:36Sean Fennessey?

  So the idea of a 90 minute film is sort of antithetical to the magic of the show.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 34:41Sean Fennessey?

  We shall see. Uh, that movie will make $500 million easily. It is, that is one of the most encoded things for all parents of the last 15 years that exists. Tangled live action. Huge news for Alice, horrible news for this podcast. I'm gonna have to do an episode about this movie, which I'm sure will be terrible.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  But Catherine Hahn is in it, so that's exciting. She rules.

• 35:00Sean Fennessey?

  She's great. Diego Luna is great. Katrina Balf is great. You, will you be on that episode? March 31st, 2028?

• 35:06Speaker 05

  I'll be here.

• 35:07Sean Fennessey?

  You'll be 50 by then.

• 35:10Sean Fennessey?

  Pixar, four titles.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  This was the highlight of D23 by, I think, a comfortable margin, the Pixar presentation.

• 35:16Sean Fennessey?

  We already knew Gato was coming.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:18Sean Fennessey?

  Next year. You're excited about that.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  It's about a mafia cat, a cat in the mafia?

• 35:22Speaker 04

  That's correct. About a cat who was in the cat mafia in Venice, Italy. And, um, when they, when the Pixar presentation started, I, I just kept, I was like, Gato, Gato, Gato. A while ago, I texted Sean Mahoney and Joe, Gato first pick in the, the 2027 House of Our Hype Draft. Nobody replied, uh, but I'm on the record and, uh,

• 35:42Speaker 05

  You know what I love about you is that you, you don't take disinterest as a side of hostility. Like, so you, you text a thread.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  It just means I have to work harder to make this a shared experience.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  You text a thread with literally zero other Baltimore Orioles fans on it, updates about like an Orioles minor reliever.

• 35:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  And nobody responds ever. We don't even heart it.

• 36:02Sean Fennessey?

  I find, I find it comforting. I will never respond to it, but I find it comforting.

• 36:06Speaker 05

  Three unanswered texts of like, screenshot of the standings, screenshot of a guy's batting average. And it's just like, I don't know.

• 36:11Sean Fennessey?

  Here's how Gunner's doing. I don't care.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  You did respond once this season, actually twice. It was about Pete and then.

• 36:19Sean Fennessey?

  Pete Alonso.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  You sent me a very rude, very rude follow up about Gunner's OPS. Um, and I think I took a brief pause from sending Oriole updates, but now I'm back.

• 36:28Speaker 05

  And now you're back.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Now I'm back. Um, Gato looks amazing. They showed an extended clip and a trailer. Just looks great. Just looks tremendous. And the hand painted animation style looks beautiful. It looks lovely.

• 36:38Speaker 05

  I will see this film in theaters.

• 36:40Speaker 04

  I can't wait.

• 36:40Sean Fennessey?

  You will. Are, will you be looking for?

• 36:43Speaker 05

  My wife likes cats a lot.

• 36:44Sean Fennessey?

  And, but will you be looking for an underage wife figure à la Apollonia from, from The Godfather that you can admire?

• 36:54Speaker 05

  I was on the, the sort of like more safe side of that.

• 36:58Sean Fennessey?

  I wouldn't say so.

• 36:58Speaker 05

  Spectrum of opinion, I think.

• 36:59Sean Fennessey?

  You were?

• 37:00Speaker 05

  I think so. I think Bill was the one who was like.

• 37:02Sean Fennessey?

  Jack, let's play the tape. Godfather Rewatchables episode. Let's run that clip.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  I thought it was also a time when I don't think we understood, maybe people were listening to that podcast.

• 37:10Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I think what you said on the episode was, I would frequently whip it out and stare at myself in the mirror during those scenes.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 37:17Sean Fennessey?

  Is that what you said?

• 37:18Speaker 04

  It is. I remember, I remember listening to it.

• 37:21Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Incredibles 3?

• 37:23Speaker 04

  Wonderful news.

• 37:23Sean Fennessey?

  That's coming out. Peter Stone directing, not Brad Bird, who has a movie later this year for Netflix called Raygun, and then a film called Ghost Market?

• 37:29Speaker 04

  This looked amazing.

• 37:31Sean Fennessey?

  I liked the, the, the log line, the idea.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, they showed some footage from this as well. It looked fantastic. Uh, the kid who I believe was described by Pete Doctor, if memory serves here, I'm going off the dome. Uh, the kid is a, the protagonist is a content creator from Chicago. And he goes to Hawaii and winds up in the ghost market. Looked great.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  What's the ghost market?

• 37:52Speaker 04

  A, a market.

• 37:53Sean Fennessey?

  Dark web.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  Run by ghosts.

• 37:55Speaker 05

  I'm asking pointedly because I had had an unanswered pitch in at Pixar called Wet Market. That was about a bat.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Wet?

• 38:02Sean Fennessey?

  Not a penguin.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  Wet? Wet?

• 38:06Speaker 05

  It's a joke.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  Wet?

• 38:07Speaker 05

  About, yeah. Wuhan.

• 38:11Sean Fennessey?

  Will you be going to Coco 2 in 2029?

• 38:14Speaker 05

  I haven't seen Coco 1, so I would be lost.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  Should we sing Remember Me to him right now?

• 38:19Sean Fennessey?

  Let's not.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Will they flag the podcast for?

• 38:21Speaker 05

  Copyright violation?

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Copyright infringement?

• 38:23Speaker 05

  Wouldn't that be fair use?

• 38:24Sean Fennessey?

  Disney is litigious in that respect.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Only if we're commenting on it as we go.

• 38:27Speaker 05

  We used to be Imagineers.

• 38:29Speaker 04

  Coco is a wonderful movie and seeing Miguel aged up as a, as a teen in the, uh, in the, the little glimpse of the animation that we got was very emotional. Great film.

• 38:40Sean Fennessey?

  Disney Animation, um, I guess confirmed Frozen 3 in 2027, similar to The Bluey movie. This, this will be one of the biggest movies. Chris and I were talking about how 2027 is an interesting year for movies and there's a lot of stuff, but it feels very adolescent. Many of the biggest movies, especially like that, that's something we have, like Minecraft 2, movies like Frozen 3, like they're, they're going to be very big, but it's not going to feel like having The Odyssey, for example, in the center of the culture. Um, Zootopia 3 also announced as incoming. And then, you know, on Hulu, we're going to get Romeo and Michelle 2 for the olds. How does that feel?

• 39:15Speaker 05

  It's crazy that like Fox doesn't, it's kind of doesn't exist.

• 39:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, they're mostly an IP engine.

• 39:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:23Sean Fennessey?

  Um, with the occasional original story. They're, you know, they're putting out Whalefall.

• 39:27Speaker 05

  The thing that I noted that was, uh,

• 39:30Sean Fennessey?

  Whalefall, you in on that? You know about that?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, I'm excited.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  The big thing from the Fox side that I noticed was that, uh, I know that Alien Earth is doing a second season, but that there is no current Alien film planned.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  Eyeball Jockey.

• 39:44Speaker 05

  Because they've basically shelved Romulus.

• 39:46Sean Fennessey?

  Right, the Romulus sequel.

• 39:47Speaker 05

  Because they can't figure out the director's relationship to Ridley Scott, apparently, allegedly.

• 39:52Sean Fennessey?

  We'll talk about that more very soon on this show.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  Romulus was great.

• 39:55Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  You saw Romulus?

• 39:56Speaker 04

  I did. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 39:58Speaker 05

  God damn.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  As you know, my, my tolerance for horror when it is in a genre wrapper is much higher. I don't know why.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  And if no cats are involved.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  I, I don't like seeing the harm befall a cat. Yeah, that'll be, this is a problem for today's discussion.

• 40:11Sean Fennessey?

  Excellent segue. Before we talk about The End of Oak Street, I thought we could talk briefly about The Last House.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, this was homework you added on Saturday.

• 40:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and I appreciate you participating. I know you're a very busy woman. CR, of course, had already watched this terrible film. Um, the movie though is fascinatingly timed because it is a somewhat similar premise to The End of Oak Street. And I, The End of Oak Street made me think of The Twilight Zone, and this is a very Twilight Zoney kind of movie. Um, it's, it's directed by Louis Leterrier, who most recently directed on the big screen Fast X, which is an absolute travesty.

• 40:43Speaker 05

  They got the Now You See Me franchise rolling.

• 40:45Sean Fennessey?

  He, he's, among other things, he made, he made a Hulk film.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 40:50Sean Fennessey?

  And this is a Netflix movie. It is the number one movie on Netflix right now. It stars, uh, oh my gosh, Greta Lee.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  And Wagner Mora.

• 40:58Sean Fennessey?

  And Wagner Mora. And it is about a family of four who are suddenly sealed inside their home with no way out.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Family of five. Don't forget the dog.

• 41:05Sean Fennessey?

  Family of five, sure. Not a human being, but all right. Must work together to survive against both their dwindling resources and the mysterious looming threat that is keeping them trapped.

• 41:15Sean Fennessey?

  Were you happy that I asked you to check this film out?

• 41:17Speaker 04

  I mean, I thought this movie was quite poor, quite poor. I was worried it would be too scary for me and that was not my experience with it, though I did find it. We're going spoilers?

• 41:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm, who cares?

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Great. Um, Chris, and we're, we're already spoiling End of Oak Street, or do we want to, we wait for that?

• 41:31Sean Fennessey?

  Let's wait for that spoiler.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Okay, I'll keep this very general. Chris, who is a good, good friend of mine.

• 41:37Sean Fennessey?

  This Chris?

• 41:38Speaker 04

  This Chris. A person who I have worked with and known and loved for 13, going on 14 years.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  I would say the same about you, except there's a notable distinction here. You asked me to do the pod. Chris knew that we were doing the pod together. You, who had seen Oak Street, did not tell me that cats were

• 41:56Speaker 05

  in peril.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  eaten by dinosaurs in the movie.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  That's a spoiler.

• 41:59Sean Fennessey?

  Is that confirmed?

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Yes. Oh, yeah. Dinosaurs are eating a cat on the porch.

• 42:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  A lot of cats run out of houses and we don't see everything that happens to all of them.

• 42:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I thought one of them was happening behind the...

• 42:08Speaker 04

  But the one orange tabby is just being eaten.

• 42:10Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah, right.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  On the porch. And Chris, when I saw him for Rewatchables last week, and these are not, while the cats are very meaningful to me, they were not primary characters. So I think it doesn't count as a spoiler. There's just a lot of chomping and eating in the movie. Chris said to me, second I saw him, walked in to record Rewatchables and he said, "I want you to know that I saw the end of Oak Street and some bad stuff happens to cats. I don't have the exact timestamps for you, but here are the scenarios." You did not share a similar warning with me. The reason I mention this in the last house discussion...

• 42:40Sean Fennessey?

  How old are you?

• 42:40Speaker 04

  I'm 39. I'll be 40 years old next month.

• 42:43Sean Fennessey?

  I know. What are we gonna do to celebrate?

• 42:44Speaker 05

  What are we gonna do to celebrate you? What spaceship are we renting out for you?

• 42:48Sean Fennessey?

  I wouldn't have brought that up.

• 42:51Speaker 05

  The cats or the 40?

• 42:52Sean Fennessey?

  No, I'm glad that Mal said it.

• 42:55Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 42:57Sean Fennessey?

  You gotta own it. That's the whole thing with 40. You gotta own it.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  That's fine. I'll be dead in a few months, probably, but uh...

• 43:02Sean Fennessey?

  It's not true. Don't say things like that.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  Here's the thing Chris didn't tell me. Not only did he not tell me...

• 43:07Speaker 05

  Okay, so I didn't tell her about something that happened to a pet in The Last House.

• 43:12Speaker 04

  He didn't tell me about the dog. And I specifically asked him, does anything happen to the dog? And he said he didn't remember, which I find shocking, given the level of...

• 43:18Speaker 05

  There is a new phenomenon. It's not even new. I just am ready to start talking about it. It's a phenomenon where, instantaneously, everybody in the country watches the same two dumb streaming movies every weekend and doesn't remember a single thing about them.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 43:32Speaker 05

  So, prior to The Last House, a great cinematic achievement called Devil's Mouth, The Devil's Mouth, starring Catherine Watson?

• 43:41Sean Fennessey?

  Nope.

• 43:42Speaker 05

  Catherine?

• 43:44Sean Fennessey?

  Newton.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  Catherine Newton. Who's Catherine Watson?

• 43:47Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I think you're thinking of Catherine Waterston?

• 43:50Speaker 05

  No, I know I'm not thinking of that, but that's probably why I got the name screwed up. And Lana Condor, from All the Boys I've Kissed Before?

• 43:58Sean Fennessey?

  All the Boys I've Loved Before.

• 44:01Speaker 05

  They play two chicks who go to Thailand.

• 44:03Sean Fennessey?

  It's 250.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  But I can still rap all the lyrics from Rockham's No The Ledge.

• 44:08Sean Fennessey?

  That's true.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  They go to Thailand to go swimming in some caves and get attacked by sharks. And the night it came out, like, several men in my chat were just like, "I've already logged this."

• 44:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  And that's happening with The Last House, too.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Do you remember what happened to the sharks?

• 44:22Speaker 05

  I do. I do. I don't remember exactly.

• 44:25Sean Fennessey?

  I had so much more fun with The Devil's Mouth than I had with The Last House. The Devil's Mouth is not good, per se.

• 44:32Speaker 05

  No, but it's like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade compared to this.

• 44:35Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  My goodness. What a comment.

• 44:38Sean Fennessey?

  There's significantly more esteemed actors in The Last House, and that's part of the fake-out. And it feels like old-school streaming bad movie thing, where it's like, coming off of, you know, award nominations, Greta Lee and Wagner Morra are cashing in by making a Netflix movie that has an $80 million budget and kind of looks like shit and is boring.

• 44:56Speaker 05

  It felt so COVID-y to me.

• 44:57Sean Fennessey?

  Very. And I think there's something in the idea about it being COVID-y. Like, it does seem like, premise-wise, there's something about social distancing that's part of this story, where you can't leave your house, you're trapped inside your house with your family. And how much do you really love your family? And can you survive when you're in these circumstances? But that also is something that, like, we don't want to really be thinking about. And I wouldn't say it's an Eddington-style, like, searing portrayal of the challenges of social distancing.

• 45:19Speaker 05

  Put that on the poster. I wouldn't say this is Eddington.

• 45:23Sean Fennessey?

  To some people, that might be your feeling. But it's just a dumb streaming movie. And what I didn't realize, and we can spoil it, is like, this is just like a big, crackin', Lovecraftian, monster movie.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:32Sean Fennessey?

  And I thought it was gonna be more drama than CGI monster movie.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:39Sean Fennessey?

  And, but it's not a good CGI monster movie either. It's not terribly creative. It had a little bit of that feeling of, like, the third act of War of the Worlds, you know, when they go into Tim Robbins' house?

• 45:47Speaker 04

  No question. Very similar.

• 45:49Sean Fennessey?

  And just like, a real budget version of that. This movie's, it's not good, and it is actually lowering the standard in a way that I find unfortunate. It doesn't mean that there can't be bad movies that we can enjoy all the time. There can be, but the low effort required

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:08Sean Fennessey?

  to get across the line in a movie like this kind of bums me out.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  It wasn't like, fun bad, right? It wasn't leaning into and embracing being bad. It thought it was doing something actually, like, interesting and dramatically compelling. I thought, to the COVID, like, social distancing point, I mean, it did come up against just a couple times doing something interesting, like the conversation that Anne and Jason, the husband and wife, the Greta Lee and Wagner Morra characters have about, you know, and Past Lives is maybe one of my 10 favorite movies of the century. So I was like, "Let's go." Greta, and this was just a bit of a letdown on that front alone, obviously. But the moment where she's like, "You're happier. Like, we are trapped in this house, the world is over, and you're happier now." And he's like, "Yeah," kind of. Like, there are interesting

• 46:55Speaker 04

  ideas inside that if maybe explored more fully and teased out, or more centrally positioned as the focus, could have been compelling. But it is actually just really weird voiceover taking us into the sentient rain locked us in our house. Also, I think Chris's point about the way people are engaging with a movie like this, and maybe you're looking at your phone, you log it, "Did you even remember that Cass, the beautiful golden retriever, ran out of heart pills and had to be shot in the fucking head?"

• 47:26Speaker 05

  I didn't remember.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  By the Jason character, who had a secret gun, and then chopped up into pieces and put it in the freezer so that they could have the meat on hand in case they needed to eat him one day, because their homegrown tomato farm might not be sufficient? And then that meat is taken out and cut up and cubed up for the animal traps that they're using to lure all of the wild animals who have reclaimed the earth? This brings me to, is it okay to watch a movie like this and not think about it to this level of detail? Sure, but I had a hard time doing this. Drove me fucking crazy. Why are they able to get through the chimney? The little kid, when she goes up, first of all, if you're I'm not a parent, but if you're the foundation of your house and the chimney are crumbling, don't send your daughter up.

• 48:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you gotta get out of the house.

• 48:13Sean Fennessey?

  You mean just the logic of it not being sealed, like everything else is sealed?

• 48:15Speaker 04

  Exactly. Her hand breaks through, and right away, Adam and I paused it, had like a 20-minute conversation about, "Why is the hand breaking through?" And then, of course, it has to do so that they can procure food and work the traps and the fishing chair, connecting to his prior life as a free fisherman out in the wild, et cetera. They, you use the fire poker to bash the window open, you drill holes in the door, any breach immediately seals. This is the mythology of how the world works, how the sentient rain works. But he could just, they could just go in and out of the chimney, the rain doesn't seal the chimney.

• 48:46Speaker 05

  You know what? It's really interesting to hear you talk so passionately and detailed, in such a detailed fashion about this film, because I do think that this is a lens through which you view a lot of stuff. So I'm fascinated to know whether or not you applied the same discipline to Oak Street and whether or not it lived up to your scrutiny.

• 49:03Speaker 04

  I just can't believe you didn't remember what happened to the dog. Can't believe it.

• 49:06Sean Fennessey?

  Couple of closing notes on The Last House. I can't do better than David Ehrlich's review of this movie, which is so wonderful in IndieWire, locating the fact that this is a literalization of the chubby rain idea from Bowfinger. This is the idea from Bowfinger, which is maligned as a dumb sci-fi concept in a movie that was made over 20 years ago, sprung to life. The review was very funny. I highly recommend it. And it's hysterical that they only have two DVDs in their house.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  That was good. That was good.

• 49:35Sean Fennessey?

  And yet another Netflix movie extolling the virtues of owning a lot of physical media, because you might be stuck without any internet and you won't be able to stream movies anymore.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  Crumbled up the old Netflix red envelope. Good little bit there.

• 49:47Speaker 05

  The problem for me would be, it may not be Annie that we were stuck with,

• 49:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  but it would be 85 movies about an Italian police commissioner who walks around with his shirt off.

• 49:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but then your son would know what it means to be a man.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. That sounds like you're set.

• 50:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, don't watch The Last House. It's not very good. But it is interesting that it is coming, it came out the exact same week as The End of Oak Street, which is a movie that I have been anticipating for a very long time. Card-carrying David Robert Mitchell fan, love, it follows, love under the silver, like, love the myth of the American sleepover. And this is also a movie that has been redated multiple times.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 50:24Sean Fennessey?

  Tale of bad test scores from audiences, tale of reshoots. It's been in the ether for a very long time. And it's a movie that got kicked out of Warner Brothers' very successful 2025 into 2026. It feels extremely inspired to me by a lot of Twilight Zone stories, especially The Odyssey of Flight 33, which is the one where a flight from, I think it's from New York, from London to New York, is traveling overnight, and it crosses some sort of jet stream barrier, and all of a sudden is transported back millions of years. There's this great, like, establishing shot where the plane lowers and we see dinosaurs right underneath them. This movie stars Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, and Christian Convery.

• 51:09Sean Fennessey?

  It's about a mysterious cosmic event that rips Oak Street, a suburban, anywhere town, into someplace unknown. The Platt family soon discovers that their very survival depends on sticking together as they navigate their now unrecognizable surroundings, which are, of course, dotted with dinosaurs.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:25Sean Fennessey?

  Because they go to prehistoric times.

• 51:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:27Sean Fennessey?

  Chris, I'll start with you. What did you think of The End of Oak Street?

• 51:29Speaker 05

  Well, I was terrifically entertained by it. It has a couple of gear shifts and twists and turns that I think are few and far between in major blockbusters these days. And I've been fascinated to read about the film. It's a movie that has kind of grown in my estimation the more I've thought about it, because there's so much discussion about, like, "That was good, but was it kind of like a ton of effort put into a movie that's kind of, you know, like, why did we need a 1980s Amblin porn dinosaur movie?" And if you believe in Mitchell as a filmmaker, and you believe in his project and what he's been kind of interrogating, like, you have to ask yourself with him, "Why did he do that?" Right? And that's been

• 52:11Speaker 05

  a really cool question to not only ask myself, but to read other people's takes on it. So I think it's a really, aside from being just like a pretty... Pretty whiplash, fun, summer blockbuster is very thought provoking.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  I, I agree. I had a good time at the movies. You know, it definitely was more, I think when I saw the, I was intrigued by the concept and then when I saw the first trailer, I was like, oh, I don't know if this like, looks very good, actually.

• 52:37Sean Fennessey?

  It's not a very good trailer.

• 52:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And my enthusiasm really diminished after that. And then I started to get excited again, uh, as we were talking about doing the pod. And then I saw the runtime and now I am never ever, uh, my, my, my enthusiasm has never diminished by seeing like a two and a half, three, three and a half. You know, I like to watch like the four hour Lord of the Rings extended editions every year. My podcasts are three hours. Runtime still scare me, but I was like, oh, like this is basically an hour and a half.

• 53:06Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  Like when you factor in credits, right? So that was interesting and it changed what I was expecting the movie to be in terms of pace and flow. And then the movie was exactly that. It's very much a concentrated little adventure, to the point where actually it takes a few minutes to, I think, get into it because it opens as a family drama, before the action really picks up.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  It ends with some really thought provoking questions that made me like it way more. So I think the fact that it presents as a dinosaur film is an adventure, a family chase. Uh, can we escape our reality is suddenly swapped out movie, but also is a kind of in a couple ways, not, not is its primary ambition and intention, but as in a couple areas is like a kind of existential and philosophical question about what sort of life you choose to live or grant to somebody else. I had a good time at the movies. I enjoyed talking about it with a couple of people after. And I will like happily rewatch it again in the future. And there were little touches inside of it,

• 54:10Speaker 04

  like the way that the dinosaurs were furry or had their feathers that I thought made it like feel, I don't know, very much connected to a certain storytelling history and tradition, but also like specific. It felt like its own rendered thing.

• 54:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I, I really like this movie and I'm fascinated by it. And there is definitely a part of me that also wants to see the clearly extant two and a half hour cut of the movie. Not because I think it will be better. It probably won't be better.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:37Sean Fennessey?

  But I can feel some of the ideas that Mitchell is trying to project and hold on to. And then I can also feel very smartly, a movie machine making a very entertaining movie. And both of you guys are like, this is like a fun movie.

• 54:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:51Sean Fennessey?

  It's like a good time at the movies and it is that. And it does have some underlying darkness, but you can see the way that it's pitched from the very beginning of the movie. It shows us a block party in any town, USA. And a man turns to Ewan McGregor, who plays the patriarch of the family. He's like, you have a beautiful family. And then we see very quickly in short order that like, actually this family is kind of falling apart. You know, that Anne Hathaway's character is working on this Erica Young-esque novel about wanting to flee and find her own personal freedom away from the family structure in America. We see that Ewan McGregor's been, character's been laid off and that, you know, he's delivering pizzas to make ends meet. We see these.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Sneaking drinks.

• 55:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. He's got a drinking problem. We see.

• 55:29Speaker 05

  He's got a lot of shame.

• 55:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Two, two young kids in kind of crisis about who they are and whether or not they're like, they fit in and they feel good enough. And, you know, are they bullies or are they the bully? Or like, how do they fit into this ecosystem? So it is like very much the, the myth of the American suburb, right? Like it's a continuation of a lot of the stuff. And then the movie a little bit dispenses with that. And it's like, actually put all these foibles aside. This is what's going to bring this family, family together. And then the movie takes on a very Amblin Spielbergian tone. Right? Where it's all about a family in crisis, getting over that

• 56:01Sean Fennessey?

  to combat dinosaurs in their, in their hometown.

• 56:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. I, I will say that one of the things I admired about this movie is that for as many camera moves, is it like crib from Spielberg or even the spirit of Spielberg's visual storytelling, I think maybe more than any one camera, you know, movement or split diopter shot that, that comes up a couple of times. I thought it was an interesting critique and or variation on the idea that like, these things are not wonderful creatures who are themselves as disoriented as us in this new world. Like they're killing monsters. And so it turns into pretty much a broad daylight horror movie for, uh, for most of it. And there's a little bit of night stuff, but it's a lot of like,

• 56:46Speaker 05

  oh, the woman at the barbecue just got eaten. And oh, this, you know, this guy who, you know, there, there's a lot of random and concerted moments of like real violence that I kind of admired the movie for, because I could feel the roller coaster that the crowd was on in the, in the theater that I saw it in, where they were like, I, this is what this, this movie is about how they're going to learn to love each other, right? Oh, fuck.

• 57:10Sean Fennessey?

  It's the best component of the movie. There are a few shocking moments. There's one in particular, and we will spoil the movie, but there's one in particular, very early on, at the discovery of the dinosaurs where Anne Hathaway's character and Ewan McGregor's character, after a blackout power outage throughout the neighborhood, they learn that the water is no longer running the morning after. And they're trying to figure out, their dog has gotten off his leash.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  Starbuck.

• 57:34Sean Fennessey?

  Starbuck.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  Shout out Battlestar Galactica.

• 57:36Sean Fennessey?

  They start roaming the neighborhood in a way that you could in a neighborhood where you knew all your neighbors and you could comfortably cross over through people's backyards and things. Where a dinosaur is discovered. It's a bird like dinosaur covered in feathers. And this is a very feral, violent creature.

• 57:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:51Sean Fennessey?

  And it starts chasing them. And while it's chasing them, it pivots and attacks a neighbor. And it's one of the great hardcore mean kills I've seen in a movie in a while.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Just eats her head like a fucking Milk Dud.

• 58:05Sean Fennessey?

  It's just shocking when it happens in a great way.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  Cracked up.

• 58:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  Like I, so we, Adam and I went to see this on Saturday and the theater was full, completely full. And the crowd was having, to, to your point, Chris, a great time. Now that kill, like it made me laugh in a really kind of like rib deep way. And like when we were driving home, Adam was like, it was pretty weird that you were like maniacally laughing as all these people were being eaten, but that was the, I don't know, there was something about the surprise of the heightened violence that I just found incredibly entertaining. I like how you mentioned earlier, so the surprise of a moment like that, you mentioned earlier, just kind of like dispense with the myth of this, this like a seemingly picturesque American family. You think of something like the way that they have to in order to seek shelter right away from that,

• 58:53Speaker 04

  these threats that are becoming clear and apparent in real time, they have to literally like tear down their house. Right? This, this symbol of the life that they've made, they have to use the pieces of it, much like in The Last House.

• 59:07Sean Fennessey?

  They're connected. They have to close themselves off from their community, you know, they're not working together.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  They have to pull the, the planks of wood off the wall in order to board up the windows, et cetera.

• 59:15Sean Fennessey?

  Very clever.

• 59:15Speaker 04

  It is, it really is.

• 59:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. There's a lot of stuff like that throughout the movie that is very clever. And to me, at first I was like, oh, he's going for Spielberg. The Michael Giacchino score is very John Williams.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:25Sean Fennessey?

  And then it, the, the thing with Amblin that is great to me is that it's both. It's also Joe Dante. It's also Gremlins. Like there is a, those kinds of movies, they tend to leaven the outrageous with the warm. And this movie is trying to do both of those things. I don't know if the original version was a bit more cynical or downbeat or harder than the one that we get. Because we do head towards a slightly sunnier.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  This is a divorce movie, as many Spielberg movies are divorce movies, but it's

• 59:54Speaker 05

  told more explicitly from, I think the POV of the, the, the wife, you know, who's

• 59:58Sean Fennessey?

  Very much.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  We're the one, we're going into rooms with hers. So you kind of watch it from Anne Hathaway's perspective. And she's, you know, she's throwing 99 in this movie. She's great.

• 1:00:10Sean Fennessey?

  What a summer. For my gal.

• 1:00:12Speaker 05

  What I really liked about it, both in the human moments, like the, you know, Hathaway losing her book in the basement to the flooding. Or, um, her reaction to her husband's optimism that they're going to figure out.

• 1:00:26Sean Fennessey?

  I love this. That's a great piece of writing.

• 1:00:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. That they're going to like, it's okay. We're just going to sit tight. And it's going to like, what took us here will take us back. And she's like, what are you talking about? And like, and he's like, God will abandon us. And she's like, you only go to church once a year. Like, why are you telling them lies? I like that stuff. And I also like the fact that the reactions that we were feeling from our theater mates. Were based on a subversion of expectations as much as it was spectacle. So 99% of versions of this movie would just be like, check out the fucking dinosaur. We CGI'd it to an inch of its life and it's so incredible and its scale is amazing.

• 1:01:10Speaker 05

  But they wouldn't have the stones to be like, and then the dinosaur did this. And now where does the story go from here? It would have just been such a linear storytelling exercise. And I felt people reacting, not just to like, damn, that's a big dinosaur to, ah, I didn't, they built up this character and took them away. Or we, you know, didn't think that this character was gonna be a bad guy or a good guy. And like, that's old school nuts and bolts. And that is also Amblin, which is just like, guys who think really, really, really hard about the mechanics of screen stories.

• 1:01:46Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  I like with Denise, the Anne Hathaway character, the way that like, so you get, one of the great dinosaur kills is Mel, the neighbor on the roof. And, you know, we see them pecking and pulling, but then when we kind of shift angles, it's just this like blood smear.

• 1:02:03Sean Fennessey?

  It's the next morning. I love that. The shot of his roof covered in blood.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  Incredible stuff, but well.

• 1:02:09Sean Fennessey?

  Again, very mean spirited and well done.

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, well before then, well before then. Denise is like, if you threaten my dog, if you look at him the wrong way, I'm gonna fucking kill you. So there's the violent intent and the little like, kind of heartbeat of some nefarious element between the people in these seemingly happy houses, well before you get to the actual tearing apart limb from limb via dinosaur. Even something like when Denise and Greg are, one of the stretches where the TRX comes, knocks the car in, the fire catches. The fact that they have to escape, there's peril in that moment. It's a very tense, you know, your heart is pounding, are they gonna be okay? But you're not done with that. The whole fucking neighborhood is on fire.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  They're like, there's a little brief comic beat of, did we do that? Maybe? And then there's the moment where Brian is like, mom, like, where are we gonna go? What are we gonna do? They're coughing, the air is getting thick, they're being choked out. There's the threat of the dinosaur, but also the thing that they caused, trying to escape and stay alive.

• 1:03:11Sean Fennessey?

  Another brilliant idea about the mess that humans make of the world.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  Great touches like that. I don't know, and there were little details, like, I thought the kid who played, I thought both the kids were great. I thought the kid who played Brian, Christian Conroy, was like, he had just such an expressive face. He was, he was wonderful.

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  I also like the fact that he was somebody with some unchecked violent urges or whatever it is that's happened between him and this other kid in the neighborhood. And also that like, they give him this stupid bow and arrow that is completely useless throughout the movie, more or less, and.

• 1:03:41Speaker 04

  And he can't shoot it. Like, he doesn't know what to do with it. Little touches, like, I don't know, the initial, when the parents break back in through the front door and shot at Justin Time to escape the first potential death bite, and he like pisses his pants. And it's, of course you would. But nobody, there's no discussion, nobody stops to comment. Little choices like that, I think, made the urgency of the moment feel really heightened. It's like, we just have to get out of here. We can't talk about the fact that you need to like, change your pants.

• 1:04:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, no, it's a great point. I think there are constant, like a series of moments that show, you know, kind of man's inability to combat this, to your point about them just being straight up monsters, that if we were in a, encountered dinosaurs, it would not be Jurassic Park. It would be.

• 1:04:23Speaker 05

  It wouldn't be, the brontosaurus is so cool, it's eating a tree, you know?

• 1:04:26Sean Fennessey?

  I just showed Alice that scene the other day, and she was like, this is incredible. And I was like, we can't watch any other scenes from Jurassic Park yet. We can only watch this one, because she saw the trailer for Oak Street, that's why she wanted to see it. But so, in this movie, you know, you mentioned the bow and arrow, there's a, there's a gun that plays a prominent role, though that gun is mostly useless. And there's a notable sledgehammer that we think is impactful, and in fact, is not at all. And, you know, full spoiler warning here, because I think we have to talk about a very critical event in the movie, so if you haven't seen Oak Street and want to, you can turn the pot off, or fast forward maybe 10 minutes. But Ewan McGregor's character is shockingly, and I'll say thrillingly, killed about two thirds of the way through this movie. After we have finally become fully invested in this story, and we feel that this family

• 1:05:10Sean Fennessey?

  is finally working together, and maybe transcending some of the challenges of the first act of the movie.

• 1:05:15Speaker 05

  At a moment in the movie where you probably, I had a little voice in my head being like, are we really gonna do 90 minutes of them just avoiding injury from dinosaur? And how many other neighbors, faceless neighbors can get their heads bitten off? So I was delighted to see this. They also, it truly explains that the pitch that Ewan McGregor is at throughout this film, which is like, I don't really care if this guy dies. You know, like, not in like a callous way, but you're just sort of like, this guy's not helping, you know?

• 1:05:48Sean Fennessey?

  He's a little ineffectual.

• 1:05:49Speaker 05

  Yes. And also, the instant he dies, you're like, well, he's gonna come back in some way. You know, like, this movie is.

• 1:05:56Sean Fennessey?

  Did you think that? I actually thought that they were gonna pay off him dying in a way that.

• 1:06:01Speaker 05

  That's where I, with all due respect, the bad robot part of it kind of comes in, and like, inability to ever let anything go, you know?

• 1:06:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we should talk about that. Any thoughts? Well, I just wanna say, with no disrespect to Ewan McGregor, I don't think he's very good in this movie. I think he's also opposite Anne Hathaway, who's just in the zone right now. I know, I know you love him, I know he's very important to you. He should just stop doing parts as Americans, like, he's not American and his American accent is not.

• 1:06:27Speaker 05

  It was strange.

• 1:06:27Sean Fennessey?

  It's distractingly bad.

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  Yes, it was strange.

• 1:06:30Sean Fennessey?

  It doesn't mean he's not an incredibly gifted actor, because he is.

• 1:06:33Speaker 05

  He's in the Patrick Wilson part.

• 1:06:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  And I understand, like, he's, he's a very good actor.

• 1:06:39Sean Fennessey?

  They needed more of a star, right, than a Patrick Wilson type, somebody who can put on the poster and be like, oh, shit, Obi-Wan.

• 1:06:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:45Sean Fennessey?

  Which I get. I think he's kind of the weak link, and yet, I still was emotionally affected by his death scene. I thought it was very impactful. Anything you wanna say about it?

• 1:06:55Speaker 04

  I thought that he did a good job of, you know, you used the word shame earlier, conveying this. And like, there was an interesting dynamic inside of the family too, of like, the mother and daughter and father and son, or more often, the allied pairs inside of the family unit.

• 1:07:08Sean Fennessey?

  I love that scene when he comes home from the deliveries at the beginning.

• 1:07:11Speaker 04

  Help me take this off.

• 1:07:11Sean Fennessey?

  They take it off.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Your mom doesn't like to look at you.

• 1:07:13Sean Fennessey?

  Why are you still smoking? Like, all that stuff is like, that's also very specific, real stuff. Like, it's in, it's from a bigger movie with more stuff going on and the dynamics, but it's specific in a way that I appreciated.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, and even like, you know, the, mentioning the god thing earlier, and like, you only go to church on Sundays, but then Brian, the son, is like, well, I believe, I believe in what dad is saying. So they captured a lot of that well, and I thought that he convincingly played the dad to that son, most of all. And a husband who you can see, you know, he's handsome, he's wearing the hell out of that terry cloth polo and short shorts, and you understand, maybe the spark that, that he and Denise once had. And believe that when he, you know, throws himself on top of her to cover her in the back of the car, that they could like, find that again, if she just saw a little bit of something. The confrontation, the, I think my favorite beat from his character in the movie, before

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  the leg chomp into full body chomp, was actually the moment where he's like, I read your novel. Because that really deepens the sense of what he's keeping, what he's not sharing. He's not only withholding his own shame, and I got laid off, and I'm not enough of a provider for the family, it's, I know you think that too, but I'm too embarrassed to confront that and tell you, and you're too embarrassed to tell me, and that makes me more embarrassed. That felt like really true to life in a way that I thought he actually, and they as a, as a married couple, you know, conveyed to us quite well. But then you have the other parts that he's bringing of like, oh buddy, there's the sweetness with the kids about the dog, but he's also like, leave the dog.

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  You kind of have to be like, wait, this isn't what they need from you?

• 1:08:55Speaker 05

  Um, I thought, I thought it was probably where the rest of the movie was, was this like, to your point, like, this juxtaposition of not only that opening barbecue scene, but everything that we bring into these 80s nostalgia movies of like, man, it was just so much better back then. You knew your neighbors, like, you know, you were out till the streetlights went on.

• 1:09:15Sean Fennessey?

  That's all a big lie.

• 1:09:16Speaker 05

  And it's all bullshit. You know, and these people are all miserable with each other, and way too armed, and probably drinking too much, and, you know, trickled down economics were starting to impact the ability of guys like this to have jobs or whatever. It's not a social commentary, per se, but.

• 1:09:30Sean Fennessey?

  Subterranean, a little bit.

• 1:09:31Speaker 05

  I feel like there's more of that in there, and if you've seen Something Like It Follows, which has like, a folk horror, not folk horror, but like, a folklorish horror element, in terms of like, an urban legend that comes to life.

• 1:09:43Sean Fennessey?

  But also in an urban setting, like a kind of bomb down Detroit.

• 1:09:46Speaker 05

  Where is this? And like, what happened here that something like this could permeate? Yeah, it's, it's the question he asked.

• 1:09:52Sean Fennessey?

  Silver Lake's the same thing. Silver Lake is like, we're all being controlled by insidious forces, and we're being made to feel crazy because we can't figure out who these forces are, but they're there. But the, the sort of rabbit hole, the, you know, mouse maze is the whole problem of this thing, is you get caught up with the maze and you don't think about the wider question. So he has a lot on his mind, and this movie, it kind of, kind of like, skips through it at the end, and I just wanna cite the eel.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 1:10:26Sean Fennessey?

  Snake sequence, before we talk about the ending really quickly, which I just thought was like, very visually inventive and fun and exciting and scary and silly all at the same time.

• 1:10:33Speaker 05

  And also a moment where everybody was like, she is stabbing that fucking eel.

• 1:10:36Sean Fennessey?

  And very visceral, right? Speaking of your laughs, Eileen, I saw it with Eileen again on Friday, and she was laughing really hard during that scene, because Hathaway is just going so hammer on that eel. I really enjoyed that, the ending.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:10:49Sean Fennessey?

  So, we learn, after a little tease about Carl Sagan's Cosmos, from Maisie Stella's character at the beginning of the movie, that in fact, this is a kind of wormhole time portal scenario. The entire neighborhood has been transported to prehistoric times by a wormhole, and wormholes are cropping up in this town, and the only way to get back, seemingly, is to jump through one. McGregor and Hathaway's characters opt not to jump in to one they spot earlier in the film without their children. And then at the end, after McGregor's been killed, they go to the roof of Mrs. Valcourt's house.

• 1:11:25Sean Fennessey?

  Hardest I've laughed this year in a movie is when Convery jumps off the roof and misses the portal and falls and breaks his ankle. Hysterical stuff.

• 1:11:34Speaker 04

  Incredible.

• 1:11:34Sean Fennessey?

  Just a great movie moment. I loved it.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Sean Fennessey?

  They find their way back up to the top of the roof. Mrs. Valcourt, R.I.P. She gets killed by some alligator, crocodile, dinosaurs.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  Tough one.

• 1:11:45Sean Fennessey?

  And they jump through and they jump through and they land back in 1982.

• 1:11:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:50Sean Fennessey?

  What, an hour before the event, 20 minutes before the events?

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, right on the precipice. Yeah.

• 1:11:54Sean Fennessey?

  And Denise, smart gal that she is, has a strong idea, which is that she's gonna call as many people as she can to try to evacuate them from the town before the event happens and she's gonna order a pizza.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:12:08Sean Fennessey?

  And have her husband deliver the pizza to them on the outskirts of town. We don't see any of that. We just see it presented as a possibility and then there's a flash forward at the end. And we show that Denise has not just saved this, members of this community, though not all of them, and I wonder how many of them she did save. How many phone numbers did she have memorized of her neighbors is an interesting question.

• 1:12:29Speaker 05

  Different time. Probably like at least eight or 10, right?

• 1:12:32Sean Fennessey?

  Probably. She's also written a successful book.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  Called The End of Oak Street.

• 1:12:37Sean Fennessey?

  About her experiences at the end of Oak Street. She has grabbed alternate universe Greg and brought him into their experience, but this is a Greg without the PTSD of the events that were portrayed in the film. This is a simple man who was a bad husband, who was unemployed.

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  But witnessed the, the white light thing. He knows that like.

• 1:13:00Sean Fennessey?

  Something happened, but he, and he saw dinosaurs, but mostly on TV.

• 1:13:04Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:13:05Sean Fennessey?

  And in addition to that, a character who we have not mentioned is Jeanette.

• 1:13:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Sean Fennessey?

  Who is a young girl who has been orphaned during the dinosaur onslaught and joins the family in this film. And she also escapes and her family is alerted by Denise at the end of the movie.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  Jeanette went to get her family.

• 1:13:25Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, Jeanette, that's right. Jeanette raced off to get her family.

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Sean Fennessey?

  And we learn in a very, very fast moment.

• 1:13:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:31Sean Fennessey?

  At the end of the film, that not only did Jeanette save her parents, but she saved alternate universe Jeanette. And there are now two Jeanettes in this new version of Oak Street.

• 1:13:42Sean Fennessey?

  So it's a lot to take in, in a very short period of time. I feel 100% certain, certain with no actual factual knowledge that this is not the way the film ended the first time around.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  Oh, okay. Interesting.

• 1:13:53Sean Fennessey?

  I found this ending very amusing. It did leave me a little bit like the film we'll talk about later this week, that there's a little bit of the market tested. How can we make everybody a little bit happier on the way out the door?

• 1:14:07Speaker 05

  It felt kind of JJ-ish to me.

• 1:14:10Sean Fennessey?

  Uh huh.

• 1:14:11Speaker 05

  It also.

• 1:14:12Sean Fennessey?

  J.J. Abrams who produced the film.

• 1:14:13Speaker 05

  Opened up a Pandora's box of narrative and ethical questions that you could ask, which is essentially that Denise has gone through a loop, right? Like she escaped the lost world to get back to her suburban town outside of the blast radius. Saved some people, but not everybody.

• 1:14:33Speaker 04

  Including herself and her kids.

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, she does.

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:14:37Speaker 05

  Right. This is the thing is that what she doesn't do is create like a chain reaction where it's the responsibility of each Denise to bring more people out of the, the zone. Like she's just like, we'll do my neighbors, we'll do my husband, Jeanette's family, Jeanette's guy. But it seems as though they stop with that and allow a world to be decimated by dinosaurs and environmental change or whatever. And then the government gets involved.

• 1:15:05Sean Fennessey?

  But she wasn't the author of the ethicist column. She was just a woman trying to survive with 20 minutes to go.

• 1:15:09Speaker 05

  Saying that that is something that modern storytelling usually pours over and that this is like, there are two Jeanettes. It's pretty cool.

• 1:15:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  The prestige TV version of this becomes like the, the Apple TV plus show Dark Matter where like every version of the alternate history with your family is something you get to glimpse in this. But I, I think that, I actually thought it was interesting that the movie kind of allowed, yeah, allowed you to consider the question.

• 1:15:33Sean Fennessey?

  Fucking TV show.

• 1:15:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:34Sean Fennessey?

  This is the exact kind of high concept premise that would be dragged out over three seasons and be fucking unbearable to me. And the idea that it's like, it's a 92 minute movie full of gnarly kills and it's fun is, this is almost exactly what I want. The movie is not perfect, but the fact that it chooses to be this is a great relief to me. I'm sorry.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, no. I, so I obviously would, would welcome and, and love the six to eight to 10 episode version of that that does really like deeply mine all of those questions or the, the novel version that would spend a lot of time parsing the ethics and the existent, you know, just the quantum like mechanics of it all. I thought inside of this movie, the fact that we just are like, huh, I have some things to think about now was very effective. Of course they want Greg to be there to complete their family, but in order to bring Greg to them, they deprive the other versions of themselves of Greg and they deprive that Greg of being with his family.

• 1:16:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  So do they make it out this next time? Does that Denise Audrey Brian set and start making out without Greg?

• 1:16:41Speaker 05

  Two years later, so they have not, there's not 20 Denise's at this barbecue. So they stopped saving people the first time.

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  Well, who knows? Who knows when they jump through the portal where it takes them, right? Like who knows?

• 1:16:52Sean Fennessey?

  Like what else is different in that world?

• 1:16:54Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, or like where they pop out if they go, you know, is it like a, like the, the TVA with your timelines and stuff? But what chance do they have without Greg in the sledgehammer moment? These are all interesting questions. I think the fact that they.

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  Doesn't care.

• 1:17:06Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I really don't.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  It's just interesting that she sent herself and her kids back in because in order to spare them, then they'd all be sharing Greg. Fascinating. Seeing the two Jeanettes at the end, I thought was a great touch. The fact that Jeanette saved, of course, her parents and her family, but also herself. One of those Jeanettes is with Audrey. They have hit it off in the, the course of, of the movie of escaping the dinosaurs. I was waiting for a moment.

• 1:17:34Sean Fennessey?

  You think romantically?

• 1:17:35Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:36Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty clearly indicated that, right?

• 1:17:37Speaker 05

  And the kid, the son is like, oh, I guess I'm out.

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly. Another L for Brian.

• 1:17:43Sean Fennessey?

  Tough one. Tough scene for Brian. Breaks his ankle.

• 1:17:48Speaker 04

  This is not in the movie at all, obviously, but I'm, I do wonder if like, does the two and a half hour version? Not actually. I don't actually think this was ever in the movie, but like, is there a stinger where Audrey, who goes to Cornell to study with Mr. Cosmos himself, Carl Sagan is like in the future, the, cause here's the thing, the movie doesn't try to answer it all. And fact goes out of its way to say, there are no answers. Where'd the fucking portal come from? Who's doing the experiments? And I'm like, is it Audrey? Did future Audrey create the tech that opened that portal?

• 1:18:17Sean Fennessey?

  House of our territory here. I don't, I don't need that though.

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  No, we didn't need it.

• 1:18:21Speaker 05

  What Sean and I would do if we had this scenario is we would be like Denise one gets Denise two out to saddle her with Greg so she could go to New York and become Joan Didion.

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is literally the plot of Dark Matter. Are you watching Dark Matter? Literally spoilers.

• 1:18:38Sean Fennessey?

  Watching Dark Matter?

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  Well, I had read that, I had read that book, so I wanted to watch the show.

• 1:18:43Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:18:43Speaker 04

  And Jennifer Connelly is one of the great loves of my life. So I was.

• 1:18:48Sean Fennessey?

  Is it Jason Clarke? Is he the star? No.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  It's Joel Edgerton. Yeah. Uh, but he does play a character named Jason. Uh, Jason one and Jason two is, is part of that, which is why.

• 1:18:57Sean Fennessey?

  Jason Clarke in an Apple series of some kind?

• 1:18:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, he was in one that came and went. I can't remember what it was like about, like a hostage negotiator or something like that.

• 1:19:04Sean Fennessey?

  There sure are a lot of those shows. Apple, they're making a lot of shows. Ted Lasso, you guys caught up on that?

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  Haven't started the new season.

• 1:19:10Speaker 05

  Saving it for myself, like to binge the whole thing.

• 1:19:14Sean Fennessey?

  So, uh, long time listeners of this show know that I'm a huge fan of The Twilight Zone. Twilight Zone is the, I think probably the entry point for me into science fiction, fantasy storytelling. Um, my dad was a big fan. He showed me a lot of episodes when I was a kid. And of course the sci-fi channel has run a marathon of Twilight Zone episodes on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day for many, many, many years. They still do it, I believe. Um, and I love movies like this where they're just like really high concept sci-fi fantasy thriller stories that can be explained in one sentence and often lead to outrageous circumstances with a real moral underpinning, a real.

• 1:19:58Sean Fennessey?

  And I think this movie has that. I think maybe it doesn't always land the plane, so to speak.

• 1:20:03Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:20:03Sean Fennessey?

  Um, in terms of what message it's trying to convey, but it's been interesting because, you know, you many years ago, when we were all working together at Grayland, put me onto Black Mirror. You were watching Black Mirror when it was airing in the UK.

• 1:20:15Speaker 05

  I was watching it illegally. I'm not too, too proud to say.

• 1:20:19Sean Fennessey?

  You, well, statute of limitations is up. You're free.

• 1:20:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and that show obviously heavily inspired by this Twilight Zone and brought a point of view about technology into the storytelling there.

• 1:20:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Sean Fennessey?

  And that show is still going.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  It sure is.

• 1:20:31Sean Fennessey?

  Um, three to four to six new episodes every, what, 18 to months to two years at this point? I was explaining that to my dad when I was on vacation and he was like, I never heard of it. I was like, you never heard of Black Mirror?

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  Did you boot up San Junipero for him?

• 1:20:44Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think that's one we would watch together. Um.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  Great episode.

• 1:20:48Sean Fennessey?

  But these movies are, are coming back, I would say in a big way, these kinds of stories. And I, just thinking about what are some movies that would be eligible for this kind of conversation, a bunch have happened in recent years, including it's What's Inside, which was on Netflix, The Invitation, Bird Box, Vivarium, Don't Worry Darling, Companion, Nope. I'm thinking of Ending Things, Barbarian, Black Bear, Begonia, Backrooms, other films with B titles. Like there's a lot of movies like this.

• 1:21:14Speaker 05

  I mean, Obsession is a Twilight Zone episode.

• 1:21:17Sean Fennessey?

  Very much so.

• 1:21:18Speaker 05

  Guy gets what he's wishes, wishes for.

• 1:21:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. He gets a magical object and uses the magical object to make something that goes terribly awry. So it's so interesting because this movie did fine at the box office, but it was kind of buried in mid-August in the aftermath of two of the biggest movies of the year.

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33Sean Fennessey?

  And I, I would say it sunk my spirits just ever so slightly, the fact that it didn't really work.

• 1:21:39Speaker 04

  Your box office high.

• 1:21:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Speaker 05

  Tough, tough time of the summer. I mean.

• 1:21:43Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:21:44Speaker 05

  It's just like.

• 1:21:44Speaker 04

  School is starting for a lot of people or it's like the last week of summer.

• 1:21:47Speaker 05

  At the AMC that I went and saw this at, and it was pandemonium for like Paw Patrol.

• 1:21:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:21:52Speaker 05

  Spider-Man.

• 1:21:53Sean Fennessey?

  I'm writing about this in the Substack this week about like, what is the right time to release a movie?

• 1:21:58Speaker 05

  Well, also.

• 1:21:58Sean Fennessey?

  Cause there's so many movies that have come out.

• 1:22:00Speaker 05

  Idea of this like trickle down effect of movie theater, like, you know, do they need to have a movie in between? Cause there was a couple of weeks ago between Spider-Man and Odyssey, and I think people were like, how is there not a new fucking movie? Everybody's so used to going to the theaters right now. And now it looks like it's just like, yeah, they were probably right to just clear, steer clear of brand new day entirely.

• 1:22:21Sean Fennessey?

  That's exactly right. I mean, this was two full weeks after Spider-Man and Spider-Man is still going super strong. And I think also the Odyssey only went down like 25% or something. So obviously they've encountered these two big movies, but there is a real appetite for movies like this, generally speaking. Um, any, any general thoughts on them before we share our list? We can do our list quickly, one through five.

• 1:22:39Speaker 05

  Curious about, uh, whether or not there was something to the.

• 1:22:45Speaker 05

  Easy to explain, but high concept premises for all these films that I think seems to be very in vogue for almost any genre right now, even down to romantic comedy with the one night only thing.

• 1:22:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:56Speaker 05

  Where you're not going to get a lot of, nor have you ever really, because it's a misunderstanding of cinema history to be like, Mikey and Nikki is what we used to make, but like saying, what is your movie about and be like, ah, it's two guys and they're having a tough night. That's not enough anymore. You gotta be, it's like two guys, but they have a robot maid, you know?

• 1:23:18Sean Fennessey?

  That would be the 2026 version.

• 1:23:19Speaker 05

  Mikey and Nikki and Companion? Who says no?

• 1:23:21Sean Fennessey?

  Would watch.

• 1:23:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, so I wonder whether or not there's something about the slick box, the Twilight Zone episodes come in that-

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

  Chris loves a slick box?

• 1:23:33Speaker 05

  Jesus, Mallory.

• 1:23:39Speaker 05

  That's just disgusting.

• 1:23:40Sean Fennessey?

  I'm leaving that in 100%. She cut that out, make it a social clip. I agree. What's your slick box Hall of Fame?

• 1:23:49Sean Fennessey?

  1 through 10?

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Speaker 05

  I'm glad it was the last time-

• 1:23:58Sean Fennessey?

  International symbol for you have my physical attention.

• 1:24:03Speaker 05

  I'm trying to think of the last time anyone's referred to it as that.

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  Slick box?

• 1:24:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. Like Robert Mitchum? Like who, who's the last person who like genuinely referred to a woman's waiting privates?

• 1:24:17Sean Fennessey?

  Excuse me? That's somehow way more upsetting than slick box.

• 1:24:21Speaker 04

  Wait, you are? How dare you?

• 1:24:23Sean Fennessey?

  Waiting privates?

• 1:24:27Sean Fennessey?

  I'm honestly astonished. It only took Mal minute 85 to get her freak on.

• 1:24:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:31Sean Fennessey?

  That was the alternative title for Full Metal Jacket, actually.

• 1:24:34Speaker 05

  Was I making a good point or are we glad that we derailed it?

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  You're always making good points, I think. Always, always. You were talking about companions and the premise of the movie and how you need that extra element now.

• 1:24:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it seems like that most movies need some sort of like, explain it to me on an elevator ride kind of thing.

• 1:24:50Sean Fennessey?

  This is a penetrating point that you're making.

• 1:24:52Speaker 04

  Sure is. Could have slid right in with that logic. I would just note quickly before we do our top five, that a lot, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the things, not to offend you, that popped into my mind right away here were television shows in terms of just like-

• 1:25:05Sean Fennessey?

  Twilight Zone is a TV show.

• 1:25:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, and the concepts that you think of that kind of like, oh, a debtor or, you know, paying, like, I don't know, obviously, you know, Lost, and you mentioned Black Mirror, but the Lost, Dark, The Prisoner, things like that. Like, that's the stuff that just pops into my mind right away.

• 1:25:21Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely. I think there's something to me about the anthropological quality of the Twilight, and there's a reason they keep relaunching the Twilight Zone every 20 years in an attempt to kind of revive this wonderful delivery system. I didn't say slick box, a delivery system for these ideas. But they're-

• 1:25:37Speaker 05

  That's actually my preferred nomenclature for a woman's privates.

• 1:25:44Sean Fennessey?

  Excuse me, dear. Is your delivery system clean?

• 1:25:51Speaker 05

  You fucking corrupt everything you touch, you know? Like, you're like the reverse Midas.

• 1:25:55Sean Fennessey?

  You're like Rogue, but bad.

• 1:25:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I've got enough gray hair, enough streaks of gray now, so.

• 1:26:01Sean Fennessey?

  Not, almost a Southern Belle, not quite.

• 1:26:04Speaker 04

  Not quite.

• 1:26:04Sean Fennessey?

  Will it be Southern Belle Rogue? Or more Goth Rogue?

• 1:26:09Speaker 04

  That's a good question. Does the, I don't, what do you think?

• 1:26:11Sean Fennessey?

  Well, Indy is, where's she from?

• 1:26:13Speaker 05

  Please don't make her do like an SEC accent. That's all I'm saying.

• 1:26:17Sean Fennessey?

  What, she's a huge fan of Auburn?

• 1:26:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, War Eagle.

• 1:26:21Speaker 05

  Sure. I just like, put her on-

• 1:26:23Sean Fennessey?

  Do you love when Gambit says, mon cher?

• 1:26:26Speaker 05

  No, I don't love Gambit at all.

• 1:26:27Speaker 04

  Well, he will after X-Men 97.

• 1:26:29Sean Fennessey?

  Or do you, are you participating in the X-Men character rankings that the Midnight Boys are doing?

• 1:26:34Speaker 05

  Oh, it was an Ask.

• 1:26:36Speaker 04

  Well, the Gambit, it was a, it was a big, it was a big Gambit.

• 1:26:38Speaker 05

  I've watched Charles talk about it online, but I've not been asked to participate.

• 1:26:42Sean Fennessey?

  You think Gambit is outside the top 25? X-Men characters?

• 1:26:46Speaker 05

  For me, yes.

• 1:26:48Speaker 04

  Crazy, dig.

• 1:26:49Sean Fennessey?

  You don't think so?

• 1:26:49Speaker 04

  25? No. Even Charles, Charles walked it back.

• 1:26:53Sean Fennessey?

  He said 22.

• 1:26:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah. Midnight Boys cooking lately. Really like the drive to-

• 1:26:57Speaker 04

  Midnight Boys are the best. They're the best.

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• 1:28:18Sean Fennessey?

  I like these movies, some of the biggest movies of all time you could deem Twilight Zone movies, and also there's a lot of hidden gems that have these ideas. Titanic? Well, that's based on real events.

• 1:28:27Speaker 05

  What if it went down?

• 1:28:28Speaker 04

  I like it. That is a logline.

• 1:28:30Sean Fennessey?

  That would have occurred to Rod Serling since it actually happened 40 years before the creation of the Twilight Zone.

• 1:28:35Speaker 04

  What feels like it, what's necessary for a movie to be eligible for this? Is it like, we don't, there has to be an element of like, we don't realize what's going on and neither do the characters. How important is that?

• 1:28:46Sean Fennessey?

  There has to be something broken about the world that makes the world not quite like our own.

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  Right. Something about the reality has fundamentally shifted.

• 1:28:52Sean Fennessey?

  And I think moral recompense is a big part of it. There has to be a sort of like, there is a kind of dawning realization moment where not only is the world not like our own, or not like what we perceived it to be, but there are consequences to that.

• 1:29:06Speaker 04

  Are we allowed to have picks on our list that are the same as each other?

• 1:29:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  Or no? Because I have one that's the same as yours.

• 1:29:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and you should talk about it.

• 1:29:18Speaker 04

  Groundhog Day. I probably would have had that at higher on the list. I put it at five because I wasn't sure if I was allowed to include it because it's on your list, spoiler.

• 1:29:26Sean Fennessey?

  No, that's okay. I mean, I think it is one of the greatest examples of it, and it's an uncommon version of it. This is number two on my list because it's comic.

• 1:29:34Speaker 04

  It's hysterical. I watched this movie 700 times when I was a kid.

• 1:29:41Sean Fennessey?

  Me too.

• 1:29:41Speaker 04

  Probably. I just, it was one of the movies along with Clueless and Rescuers Down Under that I was just, every other weekend when I would go to my dad's house, childhood divorce. I was just booed up all the time. It was just a big part of my life and I think that the comedy paired with the premise, it was a great way to be entertained, but also to get your mind turning when you were a young person. So indelible to this day.

• 1:30:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. You like Groundhog Day?

• 1:30:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. Pretty good movie. Really good.

• 1:30:17Speaker 05

  That was my new character. How many, how many, how long do you think you'd let me get away with that being my character?

• 1:30:23Sean Fennessey?

  Just restrained guy?

• 1:30:24Speaker 05

  Just guy who's like, yeah, I thought it was good.

• 1:30:28Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, you're, you're definitely not allowed to do that ever.

• 1:30:33Speaker 05

  Here's my thing about Groundhog Day. The hilarity comes from the attention to detail and the premise. The hilarity comes from, what's, what does Tobolowsky say when he steps in the puddle every time? Whoopsie.

• 1:30:46Sean Fennessey?

  No, he says, oh my God, what is, I can do the entire Ned Ryerson spiel if you want me to do that, but I can't do, you know, watch out for that step because it's a doozy.

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:58Sean Fennessey?

  Needle nose Ned, Ned the head. Come on, buddy. Case Western High. Don't tell me you don't remember me. I sure as heckfire remember you. Tough scene there where we had, we did Groundhog Day rewatchables with Issa Rae during COVID.

• 1:31:09Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:10Sean Fennessey?

  Me, Bill and Issa, which was really fun, but I didn't feel comfortable enough with Issa because I didn't know her to do all the Stephen Tobolowsky bits. So I'm happy to do more of them here with you if you'd like.

• 1:31:20Speaker 04

  Great. The floor is yours.

• 1:31:22Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, I'm done. Groundhog Day is really, really funny and very affecting.

• 1:31:27Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:27Sean Fennessey?

  And the character does feel real change. Okay, what's your number four?

• 1:31:30Speaker 04

  Oh, jeez. Okay, my number four, I don't know of how strongly I feel about the exact order. This could go in any order.

• 1:31:36Sean Fennessey?

  That's fine.

• 1:31:37Speaker 04

  I have Get Out next. Have you heard of it?

• 1:31:40Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen it.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  You picked some hitters today.

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  Have you heard of it? It feels like a Pele movie has to be on the list, right?

• 1:31:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, very clearly inspired by the Twilight Zone, so much so that he attempted to reboot it.

• 1:31:51Speaker 04

  Exactly. Felt like the sunken place needed to be present on the list. Did you consider anything from the Pele canon on your top five?

• 1:31:58Sean Fennessey?

  I had Us on my long list, which I think is, feels the most Twilight Zony to me of all of his movies. This sort of like, what if doppelgangers arrived and what they would tell you about how the world really works? Like, they're sort of like underworld of that movie, which is such a thorny movie and is like, maybe not totally narratively thought through or like executed or explained properly to your point about Oak Street earlier, but has so much invention. I mean, Get Out and Nope also have just incredible amount of invention.

• 1:32:27Speaker 04

  My next film is one of my favorite movies from the last decade, Arrival, one of my favorite Villeneuve movies. He's my probably favorite filmmaker right now.

• 1:32:38Sean Fennessey?

  Is that true?

• 1:32:38Speaker 04

  I think so. I've been thinking about it a lot with him and Nolan because doing the whole Nolan rewatch has been such a joy and he's obviously in the, you know, at the top of the list as well, but I just love Villeneuve's movies. Absolutely love them. And I think Arrival is gorgeous. I'm like reluctant to say why I picked it because it is a spoiler, but I guess what I will say without getting into, how can I do this without spoiling this wonderful movie for people who haven't seen it? It's not just, oh, the aliens are here. There is an element to it about how we perceive how a certain character, Amy Adams' character, perceives time. And when all of that clicks into place

• 1:33:20Speaker 04

  and you realize either when you're, when you're reading the excellent tetrag short story on which the film is based, or watching the movie, it is a really gobsmacking, gut wrenching examination of the choices you make and the decisions you make about your life when you have a certain degree of awareness out of time and sequence with what other people know. It is really just great.

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  It's still probably, I don't know if it's his best movie. I really, I really go back and forth, but it's among his best films. It's among the best films of the century.

• 1:33:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, what would you have at the top of the list right now? Doom Part Two?

• 1:34:01Sean Fennessey?

  Of my favorite Villeneuve?

• 1:34:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're a big Enemy head. I love Enemy.

• 1:34:03Sean Fennessey?

  Sicario is the best film he's made.

• 1:34:05Speaker 04

  No, of course you do.

• 1:34:09Sean Fennessey?

  Eileen and I rewatched Blade Runner 2049.

• 1:34:11Speaker 04

  That movie's great.

• 1:34:11Sean Fennessey?

  And that's a movie that I was not very big on for a very long time, but I really liked it on a revisit. And that's been, that movie's very culty now, I think, among young people who are younger than us. That's a huge film.

• 1:34:22Speaker 04

  Love that movie.

• 1:34:23Sean Fennessey?

  Enemy on day one, I was in line saluting it. And yeah, the Doom movies, we'll see, I think, how three turns out, I think, will impact that conversation.

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  I don't have a single doubt.

• 1:34:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Speaker 04

  Not one.

• 1:34:35Sean Fennessey?

  We saw, Amanda and I saw the first seven minutes and it was beyond, it was absolutely thrilling.

• 1:34:41Speaker 04

  I will be astonished if that's not my favorite movie of the year, astonished.

• 1:34:45Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay, number two.

• 1:34:46Speaker 04

  Another one I don't want to spoil and thus that makes it difficult to explain why it's on here. My number two is Moon from 2009, a movie that I absolutely love, incredible Sam Rockwell performance. Really, really great. We actually, we recently had a, um, an opportunity to talk about this, Chris, on the, on the space movies draft that we did for, for House of R. This is a Duncan Jones film. Um, how do I talk about this without spoiling it? I kind of have to spoil it. It's really hard to explain why it's on here, otherwise. It is a movie that presents an interesting, very compelling twist about identity. I'll leave it, I'll, I'll say that because I don't want to, I don't want to blow it for people who haven't seen it. Though I bet, bet most listeners of this podcast in particular have seen Moon.

• 1:35:30Speaker 04

  Uh, confronting a different version of yourself and learning about that version, about you and about the larger apparatus that allows things like that to happen. Very Twilight Zone-y and just a really great piece of science fiction. I think it's fantastic. Uh, and then my number one is The Truman Show, which again, the order of this list could change, but I knew Truman Show had to be in the top five here. You know, the idea that your life is being filmed for other people's entertainment. The reason I think it ends up being really high on my list, in addition to just being on it, is because not only does it, I think, really honor and meet the prompt of something that could be the premise of a Twilight Zone episode, but is also kind of right away,

• 1:36:12Speaker 04

  really its own fully realized thing that then becomes a reference point in its own right. It's the one that like got in my head the most when I was young. This came out in 98, so I was, uh, let's see, I was 12. So I saw this when I was like in middle school. I watched it a bunch of times and I constantly, for like years after that, this is a really incredible, like Loki-esque seismic narcissist thing to say, but I would just walk around being like, are people filming me? Is my life a reality television show?

• 1:36:40Sean Fennessey?

  I'm looking at you now.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:36:42Speaker 05

  It kind of is now, you know? Lots of people at D23 just being like, world star.

• 1:36:48Speaker 04

  World star? Look at you, you know what that makes me think of? Matt Borkus, he used to say world star a lot.

• 1:36:52Speaker 05

  Did he really?

• 1:36:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, Miss Suckey.

• 1:36:53Sean Fennessey?

  A name I've not heard in a long time. Uh, okay, CR, top five.

• 1:36:58Speaker 05

  Uh, let's go number five with a movie that's coming out in theaters in a couple of days, but premiered last year on Letterboxd's newfound video store shelf, or whatever they were calling that, where you could stream films from Letterboxd. And it's It Ends, which is a young director named Alexander Alms foray into a very, very beloved subgenre for me, which is road trip horror. Um, or loop and also sub, subgenre, time loop horror.

• 1:37:26Sean Fennessey?

  Have you seen this?

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:37:27Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty cool.

• 1:37:28Speaker 05

  This is about a group of friends who are on a, a road trip before they all go off to different points in their, in their young adult lives. And the road trip never ends. They wind up on a loop and they have to figure out what the rules of this looping road are and why, why they're there and how they get out and what, what their options are for dealing with that. And it's, it's very much like, what if, what if your road trip went awry? Um, number four, not unlike, uh, Groundhog Day.

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  It's a great pick.

• 1:37:57Speaker 05

  I picked Field of Dreams, which is a very, very beloved and sweet movie. Mallory and I share this, this film being among our favorites, obviously.

• 1:38:03Speaker 04

  The best.

• 1:38:04Speaker 05

  Uh, the Field of Dreams classic in Iowa just relaunched the Phillies season, so I'm very grateful.

• 1:38:09Sean Fennessey?

  Relaunched the Phillies?

• 1:38:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, rebooted it. I think it rebooted it, yeah.

• 1:38:13Sean Fennessey?

  Is Bryce still playing right field?

• 1:38:15Speaker 05

  I mean, he's just working through some stuff.

• 1:38:17Sean Fennessey?

  Is he playing right field?

• 1:38:18Speaker 05

  Uh, they're moving him around a lot.

• 1:38:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Is that, you think that's a good choice?

• 1:38:22Speaker 05

  He just has like a lot of pain that's, that's difficult for him to manage, I think.

• 1:38:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I can relate.

• 1:38:27Speaker 04

  Same.

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  Uh, Field of Dreams has a Twilight Zone premise. It's like, what if a guy was out in a cornfield and heard a voice that told him to build a baseball stadium?

• 1:38:34Speaker 04

  So I should have picked this, this is a great, didn't occur to me.

• 1:38:37Sean Fennessey?

  The representation of a delusional man slowly breaking.

• 1:38:40Speaker 05

  There you go, an acid casualty from the hippie days.

• 1:38:43Sean Fennessey?

  Could be.

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  Whose excesses have come back to, to haunt him.

• 1:38:46Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's a reading of the film. You know, there's that, God, what is the movie that is a very upsetting thriller that is cut to seem like a charming romantic comedy? Is there like a version of Taxi Driver that's just like, he's the taxi driver?

• 1:38:57Speaker 05

  Oh, right.

• 1:38:57Sean Fennessey?

  There's a version of Field of Dreams that is cut like Zodiac.

• 1:39:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, where it's like, and it's like, his daughter's like, dad. Yeah. Uh, Field of Dreams, uh, number three for me is 1968's The Swimmer.

• 1:39:08Sean Fennessey?

  This was sitting at number one on my list and I took it off at the last second. Happy to see you put it on there.

• 1:39:12Speaker 05

  Uh, an adaptation of a, of a adored and hallowed John Cheever story.

• 1:39:17Sean Fennessey?

  Which we will be discussing. No Amanda, we will talk about Cheever as much as we damn well please today. Short stories rise today.

• 1:39:23Speaker 05

  Today?

• 1:39:24Sean Fennessey?

  Today. Well, right now.

• 1:39:25Speaker 05

  Well, my 50th birthday is already, already going to be a celebration of the American short story.

• 1:39:29Speaker 04

  I heard about it on this podcast and he did declare, I listened, I listened to this pod, just FYI.

• 1:39:34Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think men and women should read Cheever stories?

• 1:39:36Speaker 04

  Of course I do, yeah. Uh, I hope to be invited to participate in the, in the grand reading of the short stories.

• 1:39:42Sean Fennessey?

  That would be rough if you were not invited to CR's 50th. What would that say?

• 1:39:45Speaker 04

  Chris's life, uh, I would be very hurt, very hurt to not be included.

• 1:39:49Speaker 05

  I'm gonna have a rave, I've decided.

• 1:39:51Sean Fennessey?

  A rave?

• 1:39:52Speaker 04

  Like with like ecstasy?

• 1:39:53Speaker 05

  Starts at midnight.

• 1:39:55Speaker 04

  It'll be, it'll be bad.

• 1:39:58Speaker 05

  No, uh, number three, The Swimmer, directed by Frank.

• 1:40:02Sean Fennessey?

  Perry.

• 1:40:03Speaker 05

  Perry, uh, who's a director I've just kind of gotten into honestly with The Last Summer, which got released on 4K recently or on Blu-ray recently. Um, The Swimmer stars Burt, stars Burt Lancaster as this guy Ned, who's at a pool party in the suburbs. This is very Mad Men-y, if you're interested.

• 1:40:19Sean Fennessey?

  Have you seen this on Reddit?

• 1:40:21Speaker 05

  And he's, uh, he's hanging out and he's like, looking out at the suburban landscape, the suburban lawns. He's like, I bet I could swim all the way home, just jumping in people's pools.

• 1:40:31Sean Fennessey?

  Eight miles.

• 1:40:32Speaker 05

  And it's.

• 1:40:32Speaker 04

  Oh my goodness.

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  Turns out to be something of an allegory for the, the experience of life. And, and then perhaps literally.

• 1:40:40Speaker 04

  Intriguing.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  Goes through some sort of transformation as he does this.

• 1:40:43Sean Fennessey?

  This is a rare case of a thing that I read when I was 15 and then I watched the movie and had completely forgotten that I'd read it. And then halfway through the movie, I was like, oh.

• 1:40:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53Sean Fennessey?

  I know exactly what this is. Um, wonderful movie.

• 1:40:57Speaker 05

  Awesome movie.

• 1:40:57Sean Fennessey?

  Very upsetting though.

• 1:40:59Speaker 04

  She is.

• 1:40:59Speaker 05

  Number two, Shutter Island.

• 1:41:01Speaker 04

  You're in a real Shutter Island camp.

• 1:41:03Speaker 05

  Uh, you know what? It's a fucking awesome film.

• 1:41:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:07Speaker 05

  And this is Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Dennis Lehane's thriller, where Leonardo DiCaprio, uh, is going to investigate a crime at a mental institution on an island off New England, where is he the criminal?

• 1:41:20Speaker 04

  This movie rules.

• 1:41:21Speaker 05

  This movie's great, one of the great twists.

• 1:41:25Sean Fennessey?

  So very sad movie.

• 1:41:26Speaker 05

  Very, very sad movie.

• 1:41:27Sean Fennessey?

  Truly one of the saddest movies of the 2010s.

• 1:41:29Speaker 05

  Awesome Ruffalo performance. Uh, and finally, my last Twilight Zone inspired film is The Game, David Fincher's, uh, how fucked up are yuppies movie about a rich man in San Francisco who has everything so his brother gets him an experiential night of excess and violence for his birthday? So real that he forgets and or disbelieves that it's a, it's a game at all.

• 1:41:53Speaker 04

  Incredible pick.

• 1:41:54Sean Fennessey?

  Mel, I think I've asked Chris this before, but would you do The Game?

• 1:41:59Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, of course.

• 1:42:00Sean Fennessey?

  You would?

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, for the experience.

• 1:42:02Speaker 05

  No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't. The first thing I would do if I was doing The Game with you is I'd be like, make your own food.

• 1:42:08Speaker 04

  Fuck, that's a wrap.

• 1:42:10Sean Fennessey?

  Make your own food.

• 1:42:11Speaker 04

  That's a wrap. I can make my own food, I just prefer not to. You know what I tried to do the other day?

• 1:42:16Sean Fennessey?

  What?

• 1:42:18Speaker 04

  Do the homemade ice cream thing with the frozen melon and the heavy cream that you pour into it? Cause I'd been served a lot of Instagram reels.

• 1:42:26Speaker 05

  Oh, you got TikTok pilled for your food?

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  Then I did it with the pineapple and it was, uh, it was delicious, but it was a lot of work for one spoonful.

• 1:42:34Speaker 05

  I know, this is the thing with.

• 1:42:35Speaker 04

  Then I went back to DoorDash.

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  Cooking for two is very tough.

• 1:42:37Sean Fennessey?

  Cause it's a lot of effort.

• 1:42:38Speaker 05

  It's a lot of effort to be like, in the time that it took me to make this, eat it and cook and clean it up, I could have just gone to.

• 1:42:45Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like the trick there is, and I say this as a person who doesn't really cook very much anymore, but when I did in my twenties, I cooked a lot more before Eileen learned how to cook. Um, I try to make things that keep, that you always, you pretty much only make meals.

• 1:42:58Speaker 05

  Meal planning.

• 1:42:58Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, obviously I learned from someone else who told me this, but it was always like, make food that you can eat for three, four, five days in a row after that.

• 1:43:05Speaker 04

  But this is so contrary to one of the famous Sean Fennessy mantras, which is, I work too hard to eat leftovers.

• 1:43:11Sean Fennessey?

  I don't eat the leftovers, but other people enjoy the leftovers, so the food's not going to waste.

• 1:43:15Speaker 05

  If it just hasn't been prepared yet?

• 1:43:17Sean Fennessey?

  If it hasn't been prepared yet?

• 1:43:18Speaker 05

  Well, there's a big trend in, in like food content right now of like making stuff to be frozen. And then it's like, now you have your burrito filling right here. You just throw it right in the pan.

• 1:43:29Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I don't think that's leftovers, no.

• 1:43:32Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:43:32Speaker 04

  No, that's just getting ahead on the week.

• 1:43:34Sean Fennessey?

  Cause it hasn't been fully baked.

• 1:43:37Speaker 05

  So why don't we start our own food delivery service called Slick Box Inc.? And it's just like, people get frozen burrito fillings from us.

• 1:43:45Sean Fennessey?

  And we would put little box stations around and just say, reach into my box. See what's inside.

• 1:43:50Speaker 04

  Slide right in.

• 1:43:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:43:52Speaker 04

  I think this is a billion dollar idea, genuinely.

• 1:43:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yep, no need to grease up.

• 1:43:56Speaker 04

  Seed investment indeed.

• 1:43:57Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. It's wet inside.

• 1:44:01Speaker 05

  Why don't you give us your list, Rod Serling?

• 1:44:05Sean Fennessey?

  You know, Rod Serling lived in Ithaca. And first of all, Alan Sepinwall has a great book coming out about Rod Serling very soon, biography of the man. And there's a, there was a documentary that premiered, I think it's South by Southwest, about Serling called Serling, but I don't think it has, it has been acquired yet. I'd encourage people to look into that. Serling, of course, didn't just write The Twilight Zone, he also wrote movies like Planet of the Apes, which might be the single best Twilight Zone-esque movie. I didn't pick it, but I wanted to honor it. My number five is The Vast of Night, which we talked about quite a bit during COVID, came out in

• 1:44:37Speaker 05

  One of my favorite movies that came out that year.

• 1:44:39Sean Fennessey?

  2020, Andrew Patterson, who has a new movie

• 1:44:41Speaker 05

  He back.

• 1:44:42Sean Fennessey?

  Out this week called The Rivals of Amziah King, starring Matthew McConaughey.

• 1:44:46Speaker 05

  Did you like that film?

• 1:44:47Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it was less successful than The Vast of Night, which is about two teens in New Mexico who find themselves on a radio program, maybe or maybe not making connection with life beyond our own.

• 1:45:00Speaker 05

  It's really good.

• 1:45:00Sean Fennessey?

  You haven't seen this movie?

• 1:45:01Speaker 05

  No, you'd like it a lot.

• 1:45:02Sean Fennessey?

  Terrific movie, incredibly well made, even though it's very modestly budgeted and really feels like a totally original voice. Highly recommend for you now.

• 1:45:10Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:45:11Sean Fennessey?

  Number four is a movie that I think our friend Brian Raftery put me on to, or maybe it was Tracy Letts, or maybe not. I can't remember who put me on to it, but it's called Repeat Performance. It's from 1947, it predates The Twilight Zone. It's a film noir, it's about an actress who, the movie opens with her at a New Year's Eve party, and she's just murdered her husband.

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:45:36Sean Fennessey?

  And she goes to the party and pretends like nothing has happened, but she knows something is wrong. And she somehow sort of magically enters a time loop. And we see variations on the experience that she's had. This is an extremely modern movie made 80 years ago. Features great performances by Lewis Hayward and Joan Leslie as the, as the woman at the center of the story. It's based on a novel that came out in the 40s.

• 1:46:02Speaker 04

  Sounds great.

• 1:46:02Sean Fennessey?

  Relatively anonymous director, Alfred L. Worker, but

• 1:46:06Speaker 05

  Never heard of this movie.

• 1:46:06Sean Fennessey?

  It's really, really good, and I highly recommend you check it out. Number three is The Quiet Earth, another movie that I got put on to recently. New Zealand film directed by Jeff Murphy about a man who wakes up. This is not unlike many, many stories like this, in effectively an apocalyptic scenario. Everyone is gone, no one has survived. Why is that? Not unlike Night of the Comet is like this, there's a lot of movies that are, The 28 Days Later, obviously is like this. This one being set in New Zealand, you see some like particular cultural differences that are portrayed, but really chilling and very, very well made movie. My number two is Groundhog Day, of course. And number one is Seconds, which is a science fiction dystopian melodrama.

• 1:46:51Speaker 05

  Frankenheimer?

• 1:46:52Sean Fennessey?

  It's John Frankenheimer directed it. It is, it stars Rock Hudson. It's about a man who receives a phone call from a friend who he thought was dead. And the man says, there is a procedure that you can get that will put you in a new body and a new life. And you can be happier, more beautiful and richer than you ever possibly imagined. And Rock Hudson says, sounds great, sign me up. And he signs up and there are devastating consequences for this decision. Very traumatic. It's sort of, it is sort of Shutter Island before Shutter Island in a lot of ways. But I thought I would just try to give a couple of recommendations that are a little off the beaten path.

• 1:47:26Speaker 04

  Fantastic.

• 1:47:27Sean Fennessey?

  But you know, there's a whole host of movies. M. Night Shyamalan's career is indebted to this, you know? Edge of Tomorrow is a great version of this. Memento, to your point about Nolan, is very much one of these kinds of movies.

• 1:47:37Speaker 05

  The Invitation.

• 1:47:38Sean Fennessey?

  The Invitation, yes. Many Stephen King stories, you know, The Mist to me is a very specific version of it. Palm Springs, a rom com that has a very Twilight Zoney premise. And I also wanted to give a quick shout out to directors I know you like a lot, Benson and Moorhead.

• 1:47:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54Sean Fennessey?

  Who, you know, somewhat unfortunately to me have been subsumed into the Marvel machine. And now only seemingly direct episodes of Daredevil and, what was it?

• 1:48:04Speaker 05

  Moon Knight.

• 1:48:05Sean Fennessey?

  And Moon Knight. But they had a run of five movies in the 2010s.

• 1:48:09Speaker 05

  They still come back to it, though. I feel like they haven't like completely left.

• 1:48:13Sean Fennessey?

  They haven't made a movie in four years.

• 1:48:15Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:48:15Sean Fennessey?

  Which is the longest gap that they've had, because they've been making these TV shows, but they made these films, Resolution, Spring, The Endless, Synchronic, and Something in the Dirt, that are all terrific, ground level, high concept sci-fi movies that I highly recommend you check out.

• 1:48:30Speaker 05

  Endless and Spring specifically.

• 1:48:30Sean Fennessey?

  Those are the two best, I agree with you.

• 1:48:34Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's it.

• 1:48:35Speaker 04

  Great stuff.

• 1:48:36Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you both for being here. Let's go now to my conversation with Will Poulter.

• 1:48:44Sean Fennessey?

  Will Poulter is here, very excited to talk to him. I want to start a little bit early in your career before we get into Union County, because I think it might inform some of the choices that you're making now. So you started working as a teenager, before you were a teenager really. And I always ask actors and filmmakers, what was the first thing you saw that made you want to do the work? Do you remember seeing something and making you think, I could do this?

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  Wow, yeah, that's such a good question. It was probably, if I'm being honest, it was probably kind of like a series of black and white kind of westerns. I can remember as a kid, sitting like irresponsibly close to the TV and watching black and white westerns just nonstop. And I think maybe at the age that I was watching them, I wasn't even necessarily sure what was real and what wasn't, if that makes sense. I think that was probably my sort of earliest form of kind of like inspiration, I guess.

• 1:49:42Sean Fennessey?

  Do you, do you, did you have family members who liked that kind of thing?

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  I don't even think I did necessarily.

• 1:49:48Sean Fennessey?

  That like primal cowboys thing that you see on TV?

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and obviously like, you know, I think in fairness, there's a lot of, there's a lot of messaging within those films that is, you know, retrospectively quite problematic and, and, and isn't necessarily accurate whatsoever. But I think if I'm honest, that's probably the first sort of exposure I had to film before I even necessarily knew that it was film. And, and then I think, you know, within that, I sort of started to kind of admire different performances and gravitated to the ones that felt more kind of authentic and whatever else. And then I think, you know, I've spoken about this so many times before, but I think the, the first film that I was very aware of being a film that was probably the biggest influence on me was Hook, which remains my favorite film of all time.

• 1:50:36Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:37Sean Fennessey?

  What is it about Hook that clicked for you?

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  You know, I

• 1:50:40Sean Fennessey?

  Just wanted to be a Lost Boy, or?

• 1:50:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think so, a little bit.

• 1:50:44Sean Fennessey?

  You have a little Rufio energy.

• 1:50:45Speaker 02

  I got it.

• 1:50:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  I don't, that's the best thing that anyone's ever said to me. I, I think I did want to be a Lost Boy. I think that being a kid at school who didn't necessarily gravitate towards traditional kind of academic subjects, certainly didn't excel at any of them. And then seeing imagination and play being celebrated so much, creativity being championed in this space that was Neverland and by this group that was The Lost Boys. I was like, oh, I think those are my, I think those are my people over there. So it was a little bit of that. There was also some stuff, I think, you know, in relation to Peter and his relationship to his son, Jack, that kind of mirrored me and my dad's a little bit.

• 1:51:29Speaker 02

  And, and so, yeah, psychologically, I could have a field day on that, on that film, but it was, it was definitely the one that kind of grabbed me, grabbed me by the heart from early.

• 1:51:38Sean Fennessey?

  This was something I thought about, thinking about you choosing to make Union County, which is when you're a teenager and you're working, how much were you thinking about not just how to learn about the craft of acting, even before you're, maybe you're studying it in school, but also how to have some agency in your career where you're getting to do things that you want to do, when maybe you're not even old enough to know what you want to do?

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Man, still kind of figuring it out as I go along, to be, to be honest. And I think, I mean, I can't speak for anyone who's trained, because, because, because I, I'm not, I wouldn't want to speak for anyone anyway, but I, everyone's experience is different. But I think regardless of whether you've trained or not, my, my understanding is that you don't necessarily have the blueprint or a kind of guidebook as to how to handle the career side of things. You do put that in the hands of agents and managers and, and often your family play a, a, you know, influential role. I know I was very lucky that my family sort of didn't really have an interest in entertainment

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  and media, but were very supportive of me doing it, because I think they took one look at my grades and were like, well, he's not gonna, he's not gonna do much else. And

• 1:52:51Sean Fennessey?

  But did you raise your hand and say, I want to do this? Was it that active a choice?

• 1:52:55Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 1:52:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I did really. And my family, for the most part, are in sort of like healthcare sector in caretaker roles or like full blown medics. My mom was a nurse and my, my dad is still a professor of cardiology. And so they were very much in that direction. And I think they just saw at a young age that I was not necessarily showing signs of following in their footsteps, but I had this like passionate interest in drama. I mean, like nauseatingly so, like I was that precocious kid who was just always performing all the time and doing impressions and this, that and the other. So they were like, okay, he wants to do drama, big, big shock. And I just got very lucky that when, when the first opportunity rolled around, which was Son of Rambo, which is my first film, my mom and dad were incredibly supportive

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  and, you know, they, they allowed me to do it. And the school that I was at were kind of cool with me taking that time. And it was during my summer holidays, to be fair, but it worked out. And then the next thing I did that sort of required, I guess, some kind of disruption to my family life was was Narnia and my mum came with me. So did my little sister. And I'm so grateful to them forever for doing that. My dad did like a sabbatical in Australia, like, so all of these things, you know, required, I guess, my family to make really major sacrifices and I don't take that for granted either. And and between them and agents that I've been with basically ever since two thousand and ten, the same team.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  They've just been incredibly helpful and supportive and I am very, very fortunate with the system I have around me.

• 1:54:31Sean Fennessey?

  I'm curious about that right now then, because from the outside, it seems like you you're very adventurous in the kind of things that you're trying to do, very varied. Your filmography, film and television is kind of all over the place. Seems like you have a real interest in filmmakers, but maybe you can demystify the process, at least for you, because we hear that actors, they get scripts from agents and they read them and they decide that they want to make a movie or not. Like, is it just that simple for you? Do you go hunting for talent that you like and try to connect with them? Like, how do you chart a career in your thirties when you you have, you know, some clout? You're accomplished.

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  That's kind of you. I mean, I I don't know. I mean, you know, if I can use, you know, Union County as an example, which was written and directed by Adam Meeks, that that came to me in sort of short film format, together with the screenplay for the for the feature. And Adam, at that point, had not yet made a feature film. And so inherently, just on paper, you know, in the context of things that might, you know, arrive on your desk, so to speak, there's already certain like risk attached to that, right? And so you're you're you're reading the script, trying to analyze it, you know, kind of in isolation of the director's sort of level of experience, just like, what is the quality of the script?

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  And it was so beautiful. And so then what the short film did, I think, was provide something of a kind of proof of concept for how this very uniquely kind of crafted story would would work. And the short film, Union County by the same title, really was, you know, an exhibition of just how

• 1:56:11Speaker 02

  Adam might go about making the making the feature. And really, the combination made it a sort of undeniable kind of opportunity for me. And sort of the last remaining question, even though I had a strong instinct based on how it was crafted, the last remaining question for me is, how is this story that is going to be made in collaboration with a recovery community and involve the contributions of real participants of this recovery program? You know, how is the director going to go about that? Is he going to practice the sort of sensitivity and respect and level of care that I think is required? And within about five minutes of talking to Adam, I I knew that was the case.

• 1:56:52Speaker 02

  The other thing, and I've said this to Adam as well, the other thing that I really appreciated is that, yes, he's a first time filmmaker, but there wasn't so much deference that he was gonna like, kind of willingly just sort of give it away to me. He was like, I want to meet you and make sure that we're on the same page. Because Adam's perspective, I think, was, I care deeply about this. And I'm not just going to hand it off because you've done a few more movies than me and it's my first time. I'm going to make sure that, you know, me and you are going to sort of really link arms over this and and do this together. And that was further sort of affirmation of the fact that he was the guy I wanted to to work with, if that makes sense.

• 1:57:31Sean Fennessey?

  It does. So why did he want to make it with the community? And why did you want to make it with the community? Like, why was that intriguing to you personally? I know Adam is from Ohio and he's seen it firsthand, what is portrayed in the film, but for both of you, I'm curious about that.

• 1:57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's a really good question. As you say, Adam's from the area and he's had friends and family kind of affected by the epidemic, the opioid epidemic, which was really kind of taking a hold of folks, you know, around the time that he was out there visiting family. So his grandmother had got sick, I believe, in two thousand seventeen, two thousand eighteen, and he was seeing, you know, the effects of how this opioid epidemic was, you know, impacting people. And at that time, he was, you know, spending a lot of time in the area and he was at a folk music concert in somebody's house, which is kind of actually like more of a typical thing in Ohio than than than maybe other places.

• 1:58:31Speaker 02

  And it's it's a beautiful thing that is something of a kind of like cultural practice out there. He was introduced to Annette Dio, who is the real life director of this adult recovery program in in Ohio. And, you know, I think Adam's experience, like I was speaking for him, but, you know, we've sat side by side a lot of Q and As. And one of the things he sort of says is that, at that time, he didn't have to look far to see how the opioid epidemic was, you know, contributing to a lot of kind of like devastation, a lot of like irreparable damage. But in the headlines, there was less attention being paid to the recovery efforts and the success that was being had and the way that certain folks were getting back up on their feet.

• 1:59:16Speaker 02

  And when he was introduced to Annette and had the opportunity to kind of walk through the recovery space and see the facilities, meet some of the service providers and speak to participants of this program, he was thinking, this is something of a counter narrative to what is going on right now. And there's an opportunity here to sort of shed light on this really workable and really effective program that is helping people get back on their feet. And the best way to do that is to make it, you know, with the community as opposed to about. There's a distinct difference, I think, particularly in the entertainment industry, you know, sometimes I think we're all at risk of sort of descending on an area and kind of even inadvertently sort of exploiting or extracting information

• 2:00:01Speaker 02

  and not necessarily being as careful or as considerate of what that does to the community who are the sort of subject matter, if you like. And Adam's approach was always to be very conscientious about making sure that the film was only ever sort of capturing, platforming and celebrating the success of the program, but not infringing on the process for the participants. You know, the path of recovery for the participants in this community is is hard enough. And, you know, no one needs to be burdened with the responsibility to shoulder narrative beats or invent a dramatic moment or whatever else.

• 2:00:40Speaker 02

  And so I think his approach was always to make it, you know, in collaboration and sort of weave the fictional elements into what is an otherwise kind of uninterrupted process. And yeah, it was something that I think, you know, he just did with like the utmost diligence and conscientiousness. And he did it really in collaboration with Annette Dio, who, because she is the real life director of this program and also kind of one of our lead actors, she was able to sort of bridge the two worlds and and make it happen. And they're sort of our two leaders in that regard.

• 2:01:17Sean Fennessey?

  So but what, why did you want to do it, though? Like, what is interesting to you about working with non-professional actors, working within a community that is being portrayed in a, you know, fictionalized but seemingly very authentic version of that story? Because it does feel very different from doing a studio movie, for example.

• 2:01:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I think,

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  well, it provided me with an opportunity to sort of spend time with and speak to people with the lived experience of what, you know, I was sort of being tasked with kind of representing. And I think, you know, I'm very, very lucky that the doors were kind of opened in that way. Annette Dio has such an immense amount of trust and respect within the community. She's kind of heart and soul of her community and, you know, everything sort of orbits around her a little bit. And so there's this sense, you know, in the local area, if you're goodbye Annette, you're kind of good with us sort of thing. And we were all benefactors of that. And the reason I think I wanted to be part of this way of doing it is that I think

• 2:02:22Speaker 02

  the alternative has been done and it feels a little bit less humanizing on screen. It feels like often it runs the risk of sort of reaffirming sort of certain stereotypes or contributing to some of the stigma that exists. Whereas I think by allowing folks with lived experience to sort of represent themselves, to the extent that they do in this film, you know, we we kind of avoid that to a large degree. And I think that what Adam does really, really well is he he wasn't interested. He wasn't interested in sort of dramatizing or fictionalizing,

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  you know, as as much as possible. It was about capturing the kind of mundane realities of recovery. And that in itself cuts against the grain of how we often focus on the subject of addiction and recovery in TV and film. And for me, as an actor, to be a part of that was just so exciting. I felt like I got a much better understanding of the subject matter as a result. I think I got closer to my character and was able to do something that just felt more authentic.

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  And in summary, like as a collective, I think we truly felt this sense that we all made it together as opposed to this sort of slight disconnect or sense of like segregation between sort of cast, crew and and and real life participants. It was all sort of, it all became kind of one. That's not to conflate what Noah and I were doing to the difficulty of what the participants were doing in recovery. I mean, their work was continuous and is continuous and far, far harder, obviously. But the the spirit in which we all made it was sort of shared.

• 2:04:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I I had an interesting conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio about one battle after another. And they talked about how in that film, more than you would realize, a lot of the actors were non-professional, especially in the sequences in Back to Cross. Many of the people that that Leo's character is encountering are people who just live there and who they brought in and how it changed the energy and dynamic of the movie. And I'm curious for you, when you're working in a similar fashion, even though it's a much more contained environment focused on this specific community, what does it mean as an actor to be working in that atmosphere instead of one that's? Say not Guardians of the Galaxy three, you know?

• 2:04:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it's funny. Before we embarked on this process, like we had an opportunity to go out sort of six, seven months before and walk the space and meet folks within the recovery community. And, you know, they were very generous with their stories and, you know, sharing. And, and I think I began to get really, really nervous at the prospect that I was gonna sort of have to sort of match the level of like naturalism or authenticity when it came to play my character Cody. And, you know, you could say on the one hand that, you know, someone with lived experience

• 2:05:27Speaker 02

  kind of representing themselves in a sort of docu-fiction context. They're going to be sort of doing something that is almost like impossible to match. And, and I'd agree. There's been plenty of times I was like, dang, I'm really behind the curve here. But oddly, and this is kind of the genius of what Adam did, I think, because Annette is such a unicorn of a human being, both as a therapist of 39 years and being so exceptional at her day job, and then also an amazing actor, it's like.

• 2:05:55Sean Fennessey?

  And she has a background in theater, right? So she sort of understands the dynamics of what's going on here in addition to the work that she does.

• 2:06:01Speaker 02

  Correct. Yeah, yeah. She's also, she's also, you know, she studied acting for, I think, three years before becoming a therapist as well, which was very handy. But because of all that, there was this sort of commitment to a character that we built out well in advance. And I think being an independent film, having, you know, the constraints of both time and money very much sort of present at all times, we had to prioritize the right sort of things early doors. And that was, you know, story and character. And the sort of things that actually often with bigger budget stuff falls down, you know, the list of priorities and sometimes by the wayside. We sort of committed to what our characters looked like and felt like.

• 2:06:42Speaker 02

  And then when we arrived to shoot the project, it sort of felt less like, okay, well, let's try and match the level of authenticity and realism here. And it felt more like, let's just try, like, let's trust fall into what is a very real environment as these characters. And because it was so immersive and there were so few signifiers of the fact that we were actually on a film set, like we, we traveled light, you know, and we weren't a big crew. And there weren't that many cameras. And I mean, honestly, in any given scene, there were, there were much less cameras and much less lights than there are in this room, you know, not to, not to pull.

• 2:07:20Sean Fennessey?

  They have to work very hard to make me look human. Yeah.

• 2:07:24Speaker 02

  That's not true. This is, this is in for me, apparently, just to make me look human. But, you know, so that is to say that the acting challenge was actually reduced. Like in a way, I had to do less acting than I've ever had to do because I felt very much connected to my character. I had been so lucky to be kind of welcomed into the community by the folks that I'd gotten to know quite well at that point. And there were sort of less reminders that we were acting and we were making a film. So the task was made about as easy on us as you could possibly hope. And, you know, credit to Adam, I didn't do a lot of takes in the sense that like, if I felt like I'd done it once and we'd got it, like, I, I kind of was like, I'm so happy to move on if you are. And I hope I never put him under like the caution that way.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  But I just, you know, I didn't have to repeatedly do things, you know, that, that were like difficult or, or trying. And often we didn't have that opportunity anyway because, for example, the court hearings that happen every Monday and are part of the program. We shot five consecutive court hearings across the 25 day shoot. And those approximately run for about 90 minutes. And the way we would do it is that the court hearing would happen as it does in reality. And that Noah and I as fictional characters in that setting would be called up kind of randomly. And we would sort of flip over into the scripted material for that moment, maybe some improvisation.

• 2:08:51Speaker 02

  And that relies massively on Judge Bragg, who is the real judge in that program and is also happens to be an exceptional actor.

• 2:09:00Sean Fennessey?

  His voice, his voice like still rings out because he's so often off camera. When he's communicating and the camera stays so closely on anyone who is speaking to him in this interesting way, but he has this like very resonant, memorable tone, the way he's engaging. And it's like all about personal accountability with his character and seemingly him in real life in a way that it, you know, it stuck with me.

• 2:09:21Speaker 02

  I think so. Yeah, yeah. No, me too. It's, it's, it's, um, it's quietly very authoritative, but it's, it's also a reflection of, I think, how the program operates, which is in a very humanizing compassionate way as well. And it's a difficult balance to strike and he does it beautifully. But in those court hearings, you know, they run for 90 minutes. And if we went up and made our contribution, we'd rarely sort of jump in and shoot it again or go for more coverage because I think Adam wanted it to feel every bit as sort of real and, and for it to be captured in the same way that any of the other participants were being sort of observed.

• 2:10:04Speaker 02

  And, you know, they weren't asked to repeat, you know, the process. And so it almost became something that maybe I sort of took advantage of as well. I was like, I don't want to repeat it either.

• 2:10:16Speaker 02

  So all of that is to say, it kind of, it all helped make it feel more, more real. And then importantly, you know, there was a, there was a policy all the way through, which is, you know, for any of the real participants, if at any point they didn't want to be filmed or they didn't want to participate, it was a raising of the hand. And, and it was kind of a non-negotiable situation where, you know, no one was, of course, made to be, you know, filmed if they didn't want to. And, and I really mean it when I say like Adam was so conscientious about that.

• 2:10:44Sean Fennessey?

  There's an interesting dynamic too, in those sequences that you're describing where your character in particular is very taciturn and very withdrawn. And you can almost feel him, you processing kind of what is at play for the rest of your life. And many of the real life participants, the non-professional actors are incredibly charismatic and are storytellers and are like given a chance to shine. They're humanized, obviously, but there's all, it feels like there's some, there's a dramatic strategy at play in a way where we're sort of like, we're being kept at bay from you. And you don't have some long traumatic monologue that explains things. So I'm kind of curious to just hear a little bit about how much you and Adam talked about that.

• 2:11:26Sean Fennessey?

  And if that was a very purposeful choice to try to have both effectively.

• 2:11:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah, I suppose with Cody, my character, you don't necessarily sort of learn all that much about him until he gets a little further along in the program and begins to kind of share in some of the NA meetings. And then you sort of start to learn a little bit more of his backstory as he, you know, attempts to kind of reconnect with family members and, and, and kind of take various steps in the, in the recovery process. One of the things I really appreciated about how Adam had kind of sought to represent Cody, in particular in tandem with Jack, is kind of offer up these two sort of different

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  versions of people who had, had, you know, similar kind of social experiences up until that date. You know, kind of relatively comparable sort of lived experiences up until the point that you meet them. And yet, even though they're brothers by way of the foster care system, they are incredibly different while wrestling with a very similar issue of substance use disorder. And it manifests in very different ways. And, you know, I think Noah plays Jack with this kind of gregarious, infectious, charismatic quality that is just amazing and kind of lit up every room. And then I think Cody, by contrast, you know, is very reserved, as you said.

• 2:12:59Speaker 02

  Internalizes a lot, doesn't express much, is kind of very much a man of few words. And the way that Noah and I talked about this and Adam and I talked about this kind of together is that in a way you're seeing sort of two different styles of avoidance. You know, Jack is someone who will talk about anything and everything except for his trauma and his relations to substance use disorder. And Cody is someone who I think will kind of not talk about anything at all if he can help it. And, and, and avoid, uh, in, in that way, Jack is sort of distracting by talking a lot. And Cody is avoiding by not talking much at all and, and really kind of not addressing the problem.

• 2:13:42Speaker 02

  And that was important, I think, to show different styles of substance use disorder. You know, I think if we accept that there's a lot of stigma and there's a lot of stereotyping around addiction and folks who do experience substance use disorder, it's really important if we're going to be humanizing the subject that we show, you know, a lot of individual experiences. And we, we sort of, we sort of have an appreciation for the individualism in every case.

• 2:14:14Speaker 02

  And I, I think about it often as I do with mental health. You know, I think sometimes there are certain personalities that you wouldn't assume are struggling or dealing with something because of their presentation, because they are outgoing and they seem to be really, really happy. But it's important not to mistake that for someone who isn't masking or isn't actually, you know, practicing some kind of avoidance of their own feelings.

• 2:14:38Speaker 02

  And I think the same thing applies to substance use disorder in a way. And I think that's what the characterization really kind of was, was sort of supposed to do. If, if, if I've interpreted it correctly, and that's definitely the, the way in which Adam and I discussed it.

• 2:14:55Sean Fennessey?

  Did you and Noah decide to do this together? Is there, was there, because obviously you were in Warfare together. I don't know if you knew each other before that, Love Warfare, by the way.

• 2:15:02Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:15:03Sean Fennessey?

  And so I was kind of curious like how that came about.

• 2:15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was pretty like magic bit of alchemy, really. I had, I met Adam, having read the script for the feature and having watched his short, was blown away, was blown away by my meeting with him, was just sort of really hoping that he wanted to do it with me because it felt like a very, very special, quite kind of fast sort of meeting of intentions and, and passion for the subject. And in the last sort of five to 10 minutes of our meeting, he said, by the way, what do you, what do you think of Noah Centeneo? And I was like, oh, my God, I love, I just, I just worked with Noah on Warfare and we got so close. And, and he said, um, he said, okay, well, yeah, there's a conversation about him maybe kind of playing Jack.

• 2:15:51Speaker 02

  And I thought, wow, to have this sort of pre-baked kind of understanding of each other.

• 2:15:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:56Speaker 02

  And, you know, having kind of spent such intimate time with each other, like we worked it out and for about two months, we spent 17 hours a day with each other.

• 2:16:06Speaker 02

  You know, and, and in a very intense environment that is almost designed to make you bond kind of at a accelerated rate. So arriving again in Ohio, playing these characters with this pre-baked understanding of each other was, was amazing. And I was so glad, you know, Noah was the one to play Jack. I, I, I think he's extraordinary in the movie. I think he's so amazing in it.

• 2:16:26Sean Fennessey?

  He really is. I, I'm curious about the parts that you're picking at this phase related to this movie because I feel this is true in Warfare 2. The first part of your career, it felt like it was very easy for you from, from my distance to be charismatic, to pick parts where you're funny, where you're engaging, or where you're more comfortable being the heel, or you have like, you have a lot to do, a lot to chew on, a lot of dialogue.

• 2:16:51Sean Fennessey?

  And it seems like the last few projects, and maybe this is in The Bear a little bit too, but more restraint, a little quieter, not as worried about showing off how entertaining you are. And I don't know if that's a purposeful choice on your part, if that's something you think about as an actor, but it, it strikes me as I look at the last few things that you've done.

• 2:17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that's interesting. I mean, I think I, I definitely appreciated the challenge that lied in Warfare and, and in, and in, um, in Union County in that regard, also in, in The Bear to, to a degree. Scary though, as well, like, like the, uh, I think I, I've sort of come to terms with this idea that the creatively speaking, you know, the things that scare me and feel like I maybe can't actually do it are the things that I should challenge myself to do. And you may end up with egg on your face doing that for sure. And, and God knows I probably have and, and will, but I, I think that there's something

• 2:17:53Speaker 02

  that I am trying to embrace, this idea that like a little bit of fear and even maybe a little bit more fear around the idea that you can do something or can't do something is, is exactly what you should be trying to embrace. Cause it may actually bring the best out of you. Like I felt, I felt like potentially unprepared to, to, to, to do it at the point that I did it, Union County. And I think I threw my everything into Warfare, but I felt really scared by the challenge and, and kind of unprepared. And so, but that, that was the kind of thing that maybe in the past I would have sort of run from or panicked over. And I'm trying to kind of not do that.

• 2:18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and, and I'm, and I'm, I'm enjoying that, actually, I'm enjoying that challenge. It's, it's, uh, creatively, it's keeping it kind of really interesting and, and rewarding. And it's, it's forcing me to, I think, um, yeah, I don't know, just, just unearth stuff that I didn't necessarily know that I had, maybe.

• 2:18:57Sean Fennessey?

  You've, you've worked with a pretty cool collection of filmmakers and I'm, I'm, I wonder if you, do you go looking for established people who you really want to work with, like, you know, Bigelow and Inaritu and Ari Aster? And you can go down the, the list of people you've worked with, but then if there's somebody like Adam who is effectively is unknown, effectively first time filmmaker. And then, you know, like I said, you have some ability to help movies get made, especially at that scale. So what's the responsibility to do that work? What's the responsibility to just challenge yourself with exciting established filmmakers? What's the responsibility to do studio movies that probably pay well and, and allow you to do more of those other two things? How do you think about that balance?

• 2:19:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a good question because I feel like, you know, in the case of Union County, you know, I feel so lucky. And, and I think there's like this mutual kind of understanding between Adam and I, where it's like, maybe on one hand, he's like, oh, you know, great that you attached to my first film, you know, that, that helps. So you and Noah are attached to the film, helps get it made. But at the same time, in equal measure, if not more, I'm like, dude, thank you for giving me this opportunity to play this character, to have this experience, to, you know, spend time in this community, to meet some of the most incredible people I've ever met. I mean, Annette Dior alone, I said this the other day, I was like, even putting the film aside, the fact that I got to interact with a human that good and, and call them a friend

• 2:20:25Speaker 02

  is like the biggest win in the world. And, um, you know, I think it definitely works both ways. And, and Adam, I think is such an extraordinary talent. I really think like the sky is the limit for him. And I just feel lucky that I got to start working with him at the beginning of his career. I think in terms of identifying who I want to work with next, or, or, you know, if I'm so lucky is to choose, um, which I'm not in that position where I can just obviously just sort of pick who I want to work with. But, but, um, certainly the filmmaker is a massive, massive part, you know, the director, writer-director in this case is a massive, massive part of the consideration because that relationship is so important and so intimate and so vulnerable.

• 2:21:10Speaker 02

  And, you know, I, I rely so heavily on, on my directors and, um, you know, I, I carry information that they've passed on and advice that they give with me long after I'd finished working with them. Like I cherish those relationships. And I've been really lucky to work with some amazing people who are very experienced. And then also some people who are kind of like, you know, first time or second time filmmakers. And in a way, it's not even so much, of course, their experience kind of textures what your experience is with them. But the most important thing for me is always like, you know, what is the, what is the story? What is the story that's being told?

• 2:21:54Speaker 02

  What is the like social application of that? What are audience members is going to kind of experience from hearing it and, and, and living with it in the outside world? Whether that's as simple as like putting a smile on people's face and, and having a laugh and, and experiencing some escapism to thinking, being encouraged to think very differently about, you know, a subject as sensitive and important as substance use disorder, like thinking about who the kind of stewards are of that story and whether you can serve those stories, whether also you're the right person to do it with them.

• 2:22:27Speaker 02

  And I think also like, you know, the, the character side of things is very personal and instinctive. It's like, am I the right person for this? And there's plenty of times where it's kind of ineffable. I'm like, I, I don't, I can't put my finger on it. I'm just not the right person and I don't know why, but I don't think it exists in my tool belt. And, and there's other times where I'm like, it might exist in my tool belt.

• 2:22:48Speaker 02

  It scares me that I might not get there. And I think now I'm sort of trying to force myself to maybe grab a hold of that tool and go to work a little bit.

• 2:22:57Sean Fennessey?

  You don't have to tell, tell me the parts, but have you ever done a part where you thought you were right and then you did it and you were like, oh, I made the wrong choice? And then vice versa, did you ever turn anything down and then see it and think I could have done that?

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  Well, it's interesting. I've turned things down, seen it, seen other actors do it and thought, yeah, they nailed it. I like, I don't know if I could have done that, um, for sure.

• 2:23:20Speaker 02

  Have I done something? I mean, listen, yeah, I mean.

• 2:23:23Sean Fennessey?

  You can be modest and say, you know, sure, I, you always could do better, but like genuinely, you know.

• 2:23:28Speaker 02

  Gosh, yeah. I mean, yeah, I, well, I feel that with every project, just to be clear. But, um, yeah, I don't know if there's like, I feel like more often than not, if I've stepped away from something or, or said like, I'm not the person for the job. I feel, I felt like vindicated only because inevitably like more often than not, someone else has filled the role and done a great job at it. And it's been like affirming. I've been like, yeah, that's, that's what I, that's what I hoped it looked like for the people involved, but I, I wasn't the right person at the time. I think that just now I'm trying to not allow self doubt to creep in too much. Cause I think if I look back on some of those occasions, even though the result was affirming, it was still a lack of confidence or, you know, a, a self doubt that held me back.

• 2:24:13Speaker 02

  And now I'm like, oh, maybe I won't write myself off too quickly and I'll try and push myself outside of my comfort zone a bit more. Cause I've been, been doing it a bit more and, and enjoying it and loving the experiences that I've had.

• 2:24:26Sean Fennessey?

  I think of you as a very versatile actor. Is there a kind of movie you would like to make, a certain genre that you have not yet made?

• 2:24:32Speaker 02

  I really have tried to be like genre and medium agnostic, if that makes sense. Like I don't actually care if it's TV film or theater. Other than the time zone, like I haven't like been able to afford to do theater, frankly. Like I know a lot of actors will be able to like relate to that, but, um, I've tried to be like kind of agnostic as much as possible.

• 2:24:54Sean Fennessey?

  That's interesting because it look, it almost feels like you're spinning a wheel, you know, and you're like comedy, action film, sensitive drama, you know, like you really do have a variety of, of different types of projects that you've worked on.

• 2:25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks, man. I mean, I, yeah, I, I suppose I'm being genre agnostic, but then also, yeah, simultaneously trying to, I guess.

• 2:25:15Speaker 02

  I guess trying to kind of like vary it for my own sake as much as anything else as well, just for different experiences and to challenge myself. But really, I'm drawn to story and character. So wherever that presents itself in whatever medium and with whichever creatives I'm sort of drawn to like, um, you know, and then there are some people that maybe at the risk of contradicting myself, I do like seek to work for like, I asked to work for Cristora on The Bear. Like I watched The Bear and I asked him if I could have a part. I was like, I will peel a carrot in the background for two minutes. Please let me in sort of thing. And, um, he then, you know, went above and beyond and blessed me with this like unbelievable role that kind of changed my life. Um, you know, uh,

• 2:25:59Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that that part changed your life? That's so interesting. I, why do you say that?

• 2:26:03Speaker 02

  It didn't necessarily change my life in the context of my career, I don't think, but it changed my life in terms of affirming that food and cooking was like something that like fed my soul and like was this creative endeavor separate from, or used to be separate from my job, but like was and can still be kind of separate from my life as an actor that, that really feeds me and, and also if you pun the pun, like also can feed other people, like is this beautiful practice of being able to like create something, you know, through emotional expression, using memory, using experience, and then share that to sort of impact someone else in the same way.

• 2:26:47Speaker 02

  Like I regard cooking as kind of like the most, as a non-professional fan of the, of the world. Uh, I, I regard cooking as kind of the most complete human art form. The reason being that as an actor, I can appeal to people's sense of like sound and sight in order to kind of affect them emotionally or tell my story. But if I'm cooking for someone, or I should say if a professional cook or a chef is cooking for someone, I think that, I hope I'm not speaking out of turn by saying that you have access to far more senses and you can impact someone emotionally in a, in a, in a wider range of ways.

• 2:27:31Speaker 02

  So you can appeal to their sense of smell, you can appeal to their sense of touch, you can appeal to their sense of taste as well as, as well as sight and sound, actually. You can have all of those sensory experiences in, in one moment. And just as you can watch a film, TV show and be moved because it represents your experience, you know, authentically or renders an emotion really, really, um, clearly, uh, you know, conjures a sense of nostalgia, brings back a memory, food can do exactly the same thing. And, um, The Bear really helped me realize that, made me realize, I, I, I thought I loved food just because food tastes good. Um, but I, I, I love food because it's fundamental to the human experience and it is, I think,

• 2:28:16Speaker 02

  you know, cooking and eating is the most kind of like sensory, complete experience we have.

• 2:28:21Sean Fennessey?

  That was beautiful. Um, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they've seen? Have you seen anything you like recently?

• 2:28:30Speaker 02

  Wow. Um, I've been really fortunate because with Union County, we've gone around to all these amazing independent movie theaters, uh, around the country and, uh, around Ohio specifically. And it's really kind of affirmed my just love and faith in like independent films. So, um, my thinking is to, uh, mention something within that, within that vein. Um, uh, although I'm tempted to also mention a documentary that I've seen recently.

• 2:29:06Sean Fennessey?

  Just say both, just say both.

• 2:29:06Speaker 02

  I can say both.

• 2:29:07Sean Fennessey?

  Of course.

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  Um, I saw, uh, a film called Omaha by Cole Webley.

• 2:29:13Sean Fennessey?

  Oh my God. Devastating.

• 2:29:14Speaker 02

  Isn't that beautiful film though?

• 2:29:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29:17Sean Fennessey?

  Very, very similar to Union County, very tough movie.

• 2:29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, a tough film, but beautiful.

• 2:29:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Um, John McGarry, he's amazing in that film.

• 2:29:26Speaker 02

  John McGarry gives an amazing performance, as do those two young children.

• 2:29:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:29:30Speaker 02

  Um, I think it's a really beautiful film, I think made for a very, very limited budget and done beautifully well. And then I saw an amazing, um, documentary called Come and See Me in the Good Light, which I believe was, uh, Oscar nominated, um, last year. And, um, so it's, it's relatively well known, but, um, yeah, stunning. Like talk about laughing and crying and, um, uh, so those are the two that are kind of top of mind right now.

• 2:29:55Sean Fennessey?

  Will, thanks for doing this.

• 2:29:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

• 2:30:03Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Will, thanks to Mallory and CR. Listen to The Watch, House of R.

• 2:30:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:30:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Tailgate you on that these days?

• 2:30:09Speaker 04

  Man, I tried out. You heard me on Bill Simmons on Sunday night talking.

• 2:30:13Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't hear it, how'd it go? I didn't, I didn't hear it. Was it good?

• 2:30:19Speaker 04

  I was good, yeah.

• 2:30:20Sean Fennessey?

  You were good on it?

• 2:30:20Speaker 04

  I talked a lot about Eric Morris and the system he's running at Oklahoma State.

• 2:30:24Sean Fennessey?

  I think I have to watch college football this year because of the Jets.

• 2:30:26Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, of course, yeah.

• 2:30:28Sean Fennessey?

  So like, actually, maybe this is a different episode, but I need a cheat sheet for who, who we're, who we're looking at.

• 2:30:33Speaker 04

  I mean, this takes me back to the Grantland days.

• 2:30:35Sean Fennessey?

  And he doesn't want to play there though. Dante, he doesn't want to play in New York.

• 2:30:38Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:30:38Sean Fennessey?

  And he certainly doesn't want to play for the Jets, even though the color scheme is like, you could just flip right over.

• 2:30:42Speaker 04

  It's wonderful.

• 2:30:43Sean Fennessey?

  You know?

• 2:30:44Speaker 04

  Just wonderful.

• 2:30:44Speaker 05

  Do you think we should start? Did you, have you been following the Jaden Daniels NIL story?

• 2:30:49Sean Fennessey?

  I have.

• 2:30:50Speaker 05

  Where even though he has left LSU, he's like, you guys can't use number five, you can't use my picture, all this stuff.

• 2:30:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Speaker 05

  I want to start doing that with pods.

• 2:30:56Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:30:58Speaker 05

  You know, like if somebody does the Charlie Rose imitation and I'm not there, I'm like, you have to take that pod down.

• 2:31:03Sean Fennessey?

  This is a guy who's getting a little agitated by the third chair bit.

• 2:31:06Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:31:07Sean Fennessey?

  A li-

• 2:31:07Speaker 05

  First of all, how dare you bring that up this late?

• 2:31:10Sean Fennessey?

  A little bit.

• 2:31:10Speaker 05

  And honestly,

• 2:31:11Sean Fennessey?

  A little bit.

• 2:31:11Speaker 05

  What Will Poulter gave to this pod, you shouldn't be desecrating it with this shenanigans, these, this nonsense.

• 2:31:17Sean Fennessey?

  What? I'm, I'm, I'm merely citing that the heat is on.

• 2:31:22Speaker 05

  The heat, the H is on.

• 2:31:23Sean Fennessey?

  That Van, Van walked in this room.

• 2:31:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:31:26Sean Fennessey?

  And he, he turned the volume up.

• 2:31:27Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:31:28Sean Fennessey?

  And he said, listen clearly to what I'm saying.

• 2:31:31Speaker 05

  The reason he did that is because he also said, I am the prince who was promised.

• 2:31:35Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:31:35Speaker 05

  And I am going to take over Bill.

• 2:31:37Speaker 04

  But you said it in high Valerian, right? Yeah, with some new eye makeup.

• 2:31:41Speaker 05

  You've been waiting on this topic, not that I really want you to.

• 2:31:44Speaker 04

  Third chair?

• 2:31:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:31:45Speaker 04

  Hmm. I, to me, there's no greater person in the world than you. So I, with love and respect to Tracy, who I think is wonderful. There's, there can only ever be one answer.

• 2:31:56Sean Fennessey?

  This isn't who's a good person.

• 2:31:58Speaker 04

  Well, I think, I think that Chris is.

• 2:32:00Sean Fennessey?

  He is a good person. I agree. You're a good person.

• 2:32:02Speaker 04

  Just the best podcaster as well.

• 2:32:04Speaker 05

  I like, I like, iron sharpens iron.

• 2:32:09Speaker 04

  I asked Chris at the end of the.

• 2:32:11Speaker 05

  It keeps me, it keeps me sharp. It keeps me good, good and ready for my appearances on this pod.

• 2:32:16Sean Fennessey?

  What did you learn from Friedland about podcasting?

• 2:32:18Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting question. Yeah.

• 2:32:19Speaker 05

  Uh, that I'm not that funny.

• 2:32:23Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 2:32:24Speaker 05

  That he's, that, that.

• 2:32:25Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 2:32:26Speaker 05

  That I'm funny, but he's funny.

• 2:32:29Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very generous response.

• 2:32:31Speaker 04

  He's incredibly funny, but so are you. You're a great comic, great comedian.

• 2:32:35Sean Fennessey?

  How many more years will you pod?

• 2:32:39Speaker 05

  How many more years do you want to pod?

• 2:32:40Sean Fennessey?

  Over, under nine?

• 2:32:41Speaker 04

  Nine? Oh my God. Holy shit.

• 2:32:46Speaker 05

  I'll pod for nine more years.

• 2:32:47Speaker 04

  I'd like to be employed. I'd like to have a career, earn an income.

• 2:32:50Sean Fennessey?

  But nine years ago, you never would have thought podcasting would have been your career.

• 2:32:55Speaker 04

  I know. When will I pivot to a quiet life? Nobody gives a shit what I have to say, you know?

• 2:32:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's so not true. I'm asking you because I'm interested.

• 2:33:01Speaker 05

  I think, I think, I think the arc of the universe is bending towards you.

• 2:33:05Speaker 04

  I, I, I asked Chris at the end of Talk the Thrones, are you excited for next season? And he said, I'm on a year by year contract with Talk the Thrones on the, into the mic, on the record, on the public record.

• 2:33:15Sean Fennessey?

  I respect that.

• 2:33:16Speaker 04

  So, you know, who knows? Once Chris is out, I'm out. That's, that's how I feel about it.

• 2:33:20Speaker 05

  No, but you still talk about those episodes for hours without me. It's just that you like my,

• 2:33:24Speaker 04

  Strong, happily, yeah.

• 2:33:25Speaker 05

  You know, whatever energy I bring to those recast.

• 2:33:27Speaker 04

  The everyman energy that you bring. Um, how long will I podcast? I will podcast as long as you all will have me, you know? That's the answer.

• 2:33:33Speaker 05

  I think that you've been creating like a sense of scarcity with yourself where you're just like, oh, at any, you know, when I retire, when I leave.

• 2:33:39Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, I haven't. I'm in, I'm in it for the long haul.

• 2:33:43Speaker 05

  What's the long haul mean?

• 2:33:45Sean Fennessey?

  Eighteen months?

• 2:33:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:33:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Maybe less.

• 2:33:48Speaker 04

  Will you still be podcasting when you have to wear like a still suit to do it? You know?

• 2:33:53Sean Fennessey?

  Because of the environment?

• 2:33:55Speaker 04

  That, or because you're incontinent, you know? Like, either.

• 2:34:01Sean Fennessey?

  I, I got some bad news for you. Been there for a long time.

• 2:34:05Speaker 05

  He's been pissing himself this entire time.

• 2:34:07Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay. Well, thanks everybody for listening along at home. Uh, CR will be back on this pod. He's, he's really putting in the hours. That's why he's third chair.

• 2:34:16Speaker 04

  Third chair.

• 2:34:16Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, we're going to talk about Tony.

• 2:34:18Speaker 04

  No thoughts about Pete Alonso that you wanted to, to share?

• 2:34:20Sean Fennessey?

  He's doing exactly what I told you he would do. Isn't he doing exactly what I told you he would do?

• 2:34:24Speaker 04

  He has 27 home runs.

• 2:34:25Sean Fennessey?

  I said, the first two years of this contract, he will be an above average first baseman.

• 2:34:30Speaker 04

  He's been excellent.

• 2:34:31Sean Fennessey?

  Probably be a three and a half war player.

• 2:34:33Speaker 04

  He's got a 3.4 right now.

• 2:34:34Sean Fennessey?

  There you go.

• 2:34:35Speaker 04

  But there's still time.

• 2:34:36Sean Fennessey?

  Um, there's still 30 games or so, right?

• 2:34:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:34:38Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, but he, you know, back half will be a little challenging. I wish I had him on the Mets right now, that's for sure.

• 2:34:43Speaker 05

  If the Dodgers, not only like athletically, but financially collapse.

• 2:34:48Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:34:49Speaker 05

  Would you revel in it even though that probably also means that we're about to head into an economic depression?

• 2:34:54Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting question. Hmm.

• 2:34:58Sean Fennessey?

  My answer is yes.

• 2:35:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think so too.

• 2:35:05Speaker 04

  You guys are NL fans, so, you know?

• 2:35:07Speaker 05

  So you want the Dodgers to be.

• 2:35:08Speaker 04

  Over here in the American League, I'm, I'm not worried.

• 2:35:10Speaker 05

  Huh.

• 2:35:11Speaker 04

  We got eight teams, you know, south of 500 fighting for the third wild card over here in the AL.

• 2:35:16Sean Fennessey?

  Here's my real zag, and I'm very sorry, Jack, but just hang in there. Um, I think we're like three months away from it being curtains for the Dodgers no matter what. Like the Bets Fall Off happened, Freddie's 30, gonna be 38.

• 2:35:28Speaker 05

  Otani.

• 2:35:29Sean Fennessey?

  Otani, you know, how, how is that going to age?

• 2:35:32Speaker 05

  Right. Well, Otani, it's just like any, any moment, one thing that he does just throws off the other.

• 2:35:39Sean Fennessey?

  They've already got three $25 million plus pitchers who can't pitch, right?

• 2:35:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:35:46Speaker 05

  This is such, they're going to fucking win the World Series.

• 2:35:49Sean Fennessey?

  That's absolutely correct.

• 2:35:50Speaker 04

  You guys are crazy.

• 2:35:50Speaker 05

  But.

• 2:35:51Speaker 04

  Anytime they need more players, they can sign or trade for anyone they want.

• 2:35:53Speaker 05

  When I woke up this morning.

• 2:35:54Speaker 04

  And they still somehow have like one of the best farm systems.

• 2:35:55Speaker 05

  And there was an article about like how like the stadium is empty, people are booing, you know, Tucker, he's getting mad, Scoobles sucks, you know?

• 2:36:05Sean Fennessey?

  How has Scoobles been since he went over to LA?

• 2:36:07Speaker 05

  He's only like pitching like, and he's mid.

• 2:36:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:36:09Speaker 05

  But.

• 2:36:09Speaker 04

  But that's the thing about the prospects is they dupe these other organizations into thinking that they have good prospects and then they trade for elite players every year.

• 2:36:17Sean Fennessey?

  Who's the single best player they've traded in the last 10 years?

• 2:36:19Speaker 05

  Didn't the Red Sox get somebody out of this best thing or no?

• 2:36:21Speaker 04

  Dean Kramer in the Manny Machado trade. That's, that's not actually the answer, but what'd you think about the Orioles trading Dean Kramer after he asked Pete Alonso, can you see?

• 2:36:29Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, I noted that with interest.

• 2:36:31Speaker 04

  Incredible. That happened.

• 2:36:33Speaker 05

  He was like, you're fucking blind old man and they talked him out?

• 2:36:36Sean Fennessey?

  He was thrown over the first, yeah.

• 2:36:37Speaker 04

  He's like, can you see?

• 2:36:38Sean Fennessey?

  And Pete was surprised, yeah.

• 2:36:40Speaker 04

  He was gone.

• 2:36:40Speaker 05

  Anyway, I think it's really bad for the economy if, if it turns out Mark Walter's been stealing from insurance annuities, but it's incredible content.

• 2:36:49Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks for listening to The Big Picture. We'll see you later this week.

• 2:37:11Speaker 01

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