‘Hamnet’ and the 10 Best Performances of 2025. Plus: Kleber Mendonça Filho on ‘The Secret Agent.’

Sean and Amanda are joined by Joanna Robinson on today’s show to cover Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of ‘Hamnet,’ starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. They unpack their complicated feelings by highlighting the film's incredible emotional power, and also criticize aspects they found totally confounding (12:28). Next, they briefly discuss Kleber Mendonça Filho’s ‘The Secret Agent’ and celebrate Wagner Moura’s wonderful performance at the center of the film (48:46). Then, they share their individual top 10 favorite performances of 2025 (55:47). Finally, Sean is joined by Mendonça Filho to explain how some fiction work can discover even more truth than documentary, his thought process behind utilizing split diopter shots, and why he wrote the lead role of the movie specifically for Moura (1:45:46). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Kleber Mendonça Filho and Joanna Robinson Producer: Jack Sanders Shopping. Streaming. Celebrating. It’s on Prime. A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.® 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.

• 0:14Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Finacy.

• 0:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:16Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the Big Picture Conversation Show about Hamlet and the best performances of the year. Today, we will talk about Chloe Zhao's new adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's novel about the family life of William Shakespeare. Perhaps you've heard of the man. This has been an awards magnet thus far and features a particularly acclaimed performance from Jessie Buckley. Joanna Robinson is joining us to have those conversations. Hello.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  I'm thrilled to be here. What an honor to be sandwiched between two of my favorite people.

• 0:41Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you for being back here. Speaking of great performances, you will give one on this episode. Also, Kleber Mendonza-Filho will give a great one. He is on the show. We're going to talk about his new film, The Secret Agent, which also features one of the great performances of the year from Wagner Moura. This is a film set in 1977 Brazil. Lots of intrigue, lots of sharks, lots of unexpected absurdity and heartbreaking truth about life under the thumb of power. It's an awards film. It's a beautiful movie. You know, Filio, he was a film critic and a programmer, so he speaks our language.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  He's one of us.

• 1:14Sean Fennessey?

  He's one of us. And he was really great to talk to. I felt like I was hanging out with an older colleague when we were chatting, even though he's a genius and I'm a schmuck. We'll get into all that stuff very soon.

• 1:24Amanda Dobbins?

  This episode of The Big Picture is presented by Amazon Prime. You know how in every great holiday movie, there's that last minute scramble to make it all come together? From gifts to hosting essentials, Prime's fast shipping is always there for you during the holidays, especially when it's last minute and just can't wait. So if you need fast, free delivery that saves the day, it's on Prime. Head to amazon.com/prime to shop now.

• 1:47Sean Fennessey?

  Before we get into Hamlet, let's talk about some news. Really good news, really exciting news. A billboard went up. Don't you love when a billboard goes up and you think something cool is about to happen? A billboard went up. This time, it was a billboard for the new Steven Spielberg film, which may or may not be called Disclosure. This new movie stars Josh O'Connor, Emily Blunt.

• 2:13Sean Fennessey?

  Coleman Domingo, Colin Firth, Wyatt Russell, and we think it's about aliens. We don't know.

• 2:21Amanda Dobbins?

  It was rumored at some point, right?

• 2:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, there is a, there is a, there is a rumor going around that I don't think is true, that it is a quasi sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Now, I don't believe that specifically.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  They screened some footage at Universal, right?

• 2:35Sean Fennessey?

  Did they?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think some people saw some footage.

• 2:37Sean Fennessey?

  Was Richard Dreyfuss in that footage?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  There were some tones, familiar tones.

• 2:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean, isn't every Spielberg movie a quasi sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Said with respect.

• 2:48Sean Fennessey?

  Very fair point.

• 2:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And appreciation for his work and the plight of the divorced child.

• 2:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, a child looking up at the skies and wondering, why me, God slash aliens?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Slash dad?

• 2:58Sean Fennessey?

  I was happy this was, uh, this, this, this hit the world because, you know, we, we've done Spielberg episodes together, the three of us.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  We have.

• 3:05Sean Fennessey?

  And Spielberg, very, very important as a filmmaker to all three of us, and frankly, really to most movie fans. But, um, this new movie is a big old fashioned summer blockbuster coming June 12th, 2026.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:14Sean Fennessey?

  Your thoughts on the billboard?

• 3:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I appreciate a date. As you know, I'm a planner. Uh, like to get that calendar organized.

• 3:23Sean Fennessey?

  No vacations in June.

• 3:25Amanda Dobbins?

  The invites, like to send the family invites. So, thank you for the specificity. And it was in, was the billboard in Times Square?

• 3:35Sean Fennessey?

  I believe so.

• 3:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Have you ever, do you want a billboard in Times Square? Is that an ambition of yours?

• 3:40Sean Fennessey?

  Do I want a billboard?

• 3:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Like a video, like a big, like the big vertical video one?

• 3:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, of your face.

• 3:44Sean Fennessey?

  Of me?

• 3:45Speaker 02

  The like Frasier, the Frasier TV show one.

• 3:47Amanda Dobbins?

  And then you can like be posing in front of it, you know?

• 3:50Sean Fennessey?

  I, I could not want something less.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Talking about physical media?

• 3:53Sean Fennessey?

  I would rather drink bleach while watching Pete Alonso hit 500 home runs.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  What if you convert the masses and all the buskers and all the tourists of New York?

• 4:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Billboard for, four case.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:04Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's like a tower of, and you, and you get-

• 4:08Speaker 02

  It's just your little face peeping over a tower?

• 4:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Lifetime supply.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Unlimited, you, like, you are the king of, of four case. And then you get every edition forever.

• 4:17Sean Fennessey?

  Keep talking.

• 4:20Sean Fennessey?

  No, I don't want that. I, I, I'm more than happy to cede that real estate to Steven Spielberg. And any thoughts about this, this promotional moment?

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Um, I think, I think it's fun that there's mystery around it. I think that's really fun. Um, I have reservations around it because in our last, in our Spielberg conversations, I think we've talked about- Is this our favorite Spielberg era that we're in right now? I think David Koep being involved is both interesting and nerve making because we all loved Black Bag, but I don't think any of us loved the Jurassic Park movie that came out this year, except Amanda did.

• 4:53Amanda Dobbins?

  I had a nice time.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  I found a time at the movies.

• 4:56Amanda Dobbins?

  You know what? Jonathan Bailey met that computer brontosaurus on the island and he delivered emotion. And I responded to it.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  I think Amanda's gonna love this movie.

• 5:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Also, a brontosaurus took over Cobble Hill. Okay?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:11Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  What more could you ask for?

• 5:13Sean Fennessey?

  This is the kind of scintillating film insights that we expect from this show. I'm excited about this movie. We'll talk about it a lot more in the coming days.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  I don't know how you can have that take and then have the reaction that you just had to the trailer that we just watched. You can't be, well, I guess you can.

• 5:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, you can.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  I guess you can.

• 5:29Amanda Dobbins?

  You can, you can respond to dinosaurs.

• 5:32Sean Fennessey?

  You can contain contradictory multitudes.

• 5:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:37Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of the board.

• 5:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, the, well, that's Walt Whitman, right? Who?

• 5:42Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And speaking of that, the dinosaur, the brontosaurus in question, like, was, his park was right by the Brooklyn Bridge, speaking of Walt Whitman.

• 5:52Sean Fennessey?

  The brontosaurus in question?

• 5:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, sure. I think it was a brontosaurus. I'm not sure. I think, I do think that dinosaur, like, genealogy has evolved.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Would you list the brontosaurus as one of the top performances of the year?

• 6:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, he's not seen, you know?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  But it's evocative.

• 6:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's just the idea of what has happened to New York real estate that is interesting to me.

• 6:14Sean Fennessey?

  I'll bet it is.

• 6:15Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, it's of, it's of a world.

• 6:17Sean Fennessey?

  You just alluded to a new trailer that just hit this morning for another coming blockbuster, I don't, we'll see, I guess, for Supergirl.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Piece of IP?

• 6:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, this is the second film officially in the new DCU, James Gunn and Peter Safran's reimagining of the DC movies. Superman came out last summer, did very well.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  We all liked it.

• 6:38Sean Fennessey?

  People liked it. We liked it. This new movie is directed by Craig Gillespie. It stars Millie Alcock of Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon fame, who was terrific in the first season of that show, I thought. And she stars as Supergirl. And Mattia Shonarts is in this film, I guess, as the villain.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  What else would he be doing here?

• 6:55Sean Fennessey?

  A guy with some pins on his face?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:57Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Jason Momoa, probably in this film?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:00Sean Fennessey?

  As Lobo? What are your, what are your thoughts on the character Lobo?

• 7:02Speaker 02

  I know you've been waiting for Lobo, right? You've been counting the days?

• 7:05Amanda Dobbins?

  So, he's not Aquaman.

• 7:07Sean Fennessey?

  He is not.

• 7:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Even though this is, Aquaman is part of the DC Universe.

• 7:11Sean Fennessey?

  Well, we don't, we don't know who's gonna be portraying Aquaman.

• 7:14Amanda Dobbins?

  But he was previously Aquaman.

• 7:16Sean Fennessey?

  That was the DCEU.

• 7:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. Great.

• 7:19Sean Fennessey?

  This is the DCEU.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  That was the Snyder regime.

• 7:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, great.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  This is the Guniverse.

• 7:23Amanda Dobbins?

  So, Lobo, land, air, or sea?

• 7:27Sean Fennessey?

  Land?

• 7:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 7:28Sean Fennessey?

  He's an alien? He's an alien? Is he a bounty hunter? He's a bounty hunter sometimes. Well-known for his cigar chomping and his, sort of DC's answer to Wolverine.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Wolverine, yeah.

• 7:40Sean Fennessey?

  You know, like a, kind of a tough guy.

• 7:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Adamantium?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  No.

• 7:44Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that's what Logan has, but there's no adamantium in the DC Universe.

• 7:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I just wanted to make sure that I was remembering.

• 7:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 7:50Amanda Dobbins?

  So, that's Wolverine, and then Wakanda makes what?

• 7:55Sean Fennessey?

  Vibranium.

• 7:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  And in Avatar, it's...

• 7:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, unobtanium.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 8:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:00Amanda Dobbins?

  But, which is completely not referenced in Avatars 2 and 3. Well, I'm sorry, but they've moved on to, you know, other...

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Water and fire.

• 8:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but also other, even more unobtanium.

• 8:13Sean Fennessey?

  Whale brain juice.

• 8:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, yeah.

• 8:15Sean Fennessey?

  That's, that's what they're after in the second film, and perhaps in the third.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Great, um...

• 8:21Sean Fennessey?

  Welcome back!

• 8:24Speaker 02

  I hate Avatar.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  I hate Avatar.

• 8:28Sean Fennessey?

  Supergirl? Help me with Supergirl, come on, help me.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  No, I mean, it looks fun.

• 8:32Sean Fennessey?

  Does it?

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Like a fun, fun time in the movies, right? Like, it doesn't look, I don't...

• 8:37Sean Fennessey?

  It looks kind of standard, which is not what you want.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Well...

• 8:39Sean Fennessey?

  You want it to be special.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  It's interesting, I was interested to see if they were gonna try to sort of invoke the birds of prey, and they are, in a way that I'm surprised, because that film didn't go over super well, but doesn't this trailer feel like it was trying to do exactly what that film, uh, marketing campaign was trying to do? Um, but Millie Alcock is great.

• 8:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Um, and her, her like, tussle doesn't have her shit together, but her beachy waves look... Good hair is doing a lot of work in this trailer, so I think it'll be fun and fine.

• 9:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  That's what I think, but it won't have that extra juice that Superman had, which is James Gunn accessing a level of heart that that we weren't expecting he would, I wasn't expecting he would be able to get to.

• 9:20Sean Fennessey?

  I think you're right. It's an interesting gambit for DC in general to say, okay, on the heels of the relaunch of this with the biggest franchise, I mean, I guess the second biggest character, at least in the movie world. Now we're going to do Supergirl and Clayface and we're going to kind of lower the stakes a little bit.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:35Sean Fennessey?

  And lower the expectations because these are lesser known characters. They're smaller movies. Craig Gillespie is not really a filmmaker I have a lot of time for, to be honest with you. Tends to make zippy, entertaining, but very empty movies. And that's kind of the vibe I got from this trailer, but we'll see.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 9:49Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe we'll like it.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Fun, fun, fun time at the movies.

• 9:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 9:52Amanda Dobbins?

  You didn't want to ask my thoughts?

• 9:53Sean Fennessey?

  Well, what are they?

• 9:56Amanda Dobbins?

  I Googled something to get them ready.

• 9:57Sean Fennessey?

  What did you Google?

• 9:59Amanda Dobbins?

  So Jacob Elordi recently, recently gave an interview to Vanity Fair and he was asked about AI and filmmaking.

• 10:06Sean Fennessey?

  I see.

• 10:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And he gave the following answer, which does apply to my feelings about AI and filmmaking. But is also has a broader application. So as a human being, I have no tolerance. Not even being asked about it. I just have no interest in it at all because it's so fucking boring. It goes on. It bores me personally. As far as I'm concerned, I would much rather kiss on the beach and read a novel and be sunburnt.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  But Brontosaurus and whale brain juice you have a lot of time for.

• 10:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Some things bore me. No, also the whale brain juice. I like the whales in Avatar.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  But not the brain juice.

• 10:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. No, well, I think that they should get to keep their brain juice. I'm pro animals.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  I don't think that's a controversial statement.

• 10:51Amanda Dobbins?

  But um, I would like to stop having to talk about it.

• 10:54Sean Fennessey?

  I'm going the other way. I want more brain juice in my home.

• 10:57Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's just, it doesn't interest me. I would rather kiss on the beach and read a novel and be sunburnt. But you, you. Someone better make me that hat for Christmas.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  But you did like Superman more than you thought you would, right?

• 11:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I did. I liked the, I thought that David Corn sweat and Rachel Brosnahan were like very good and they like had a certain charm all, but like. Once it got away from the pretty essential goofy boy and really on it girl. And I don't know, I have some feelings. And like, the more we got into the lore and the world building and, and all of the fighting and the CGI river or whatever they're on, the less I was compelled by it. So it's just, it's one of these things, like the closer we get from the cortex and the more we get into the fan service, just the, the more I'm interested I am in a novel.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  Keep it grounded.

• 11:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  In like Brontosaurus and whale.

• 11:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. I mean, Brontosaurus were real people. I mean, animals.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 11:57Amanda Dobbins?

  And we brought them back, you know? So there was like a-

• 12:00Speaker 02

  It was science, Jurassic Park is science.

• 12:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly. Right. And as the, you know, premier science corner of the, of the internet.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:08Amanda Dobbins?

  That's, it speaks to my interest.

• 12:09Sean Fennessey?

  This is the premier science corner of the entire internet?

• 12:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Sean Fennessey?

  The one that you host on the show?

• 12:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's just me. Yeah, it's right here. This is the corner.

• 12:15Sean Fennessey?

  We haven't determined if science corner is asking questions or answering them.

• 12:18Amanda Dobbins?

  It is a vigorous discussion.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  With yourself?

• 12:22Amanda Dobbins?

  And sometimes with him.

• 12:23Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of checked out most of the time when she starts going off on that. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, impressions, reach, and reacts. But when they don't show revenue, well, that's a not-so-great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, why not invest in what looks good to your CFO? LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks. Reach the right buyers with LinkedIn Ads. You can target by company, industry, job title, and more. So cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn, the network that works for you. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get a $250 credit for the next one. Just

• 13:07Sean Fennessey?

  go to LinkedIn.com/thepickpicture. That's LinkedIn.com/thepickpicture. Terms and conditions apply.

• 13:15Sean Fennessey?

  Speaking of sticking to the text and staying grounded, let's, let's talk about Hamlet. Okay. This is, uh, this is a big one. This is one of the, this is one of the most important movies of the year. And I've said that a few times on this show this year, at least relative to something that we cover over a six month period, which is the Academy Awards and prestige film and serious filmmakers. We've had an Academy Award winner directing this movie. This is Chloe Zhao's first film since Eternals, a film that I thought was quite poor. Very bad. But coming off of Nomadland, a movie that I liked quite a bit, which I think has developed a little bit of a negative reputation as an Oscar winner, as a COVID era movie. Right. But I found a lot of sincerity and thoughtfulness in that movie. I thought that was a really interesting evolution of her filmmaking style.

• 13:57Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know, I'm, I try to be very open minded about her despite coming off of this MCU car crash, which she has also spoken about quite a bit. And she's taken on this interesting task. She's adapting a really well loved novel by Maggie O'Farrell about a tremendously famous person in our literary history. Hamlet Shakespeare. Hamlet Shakespeare. A person I did not know about, anything about. And I want to kind of foreground our conversation about this movie by saying that not only did I not know anything about the novel and had not read the novel before I saw the film, I didn't know anything about Shakespeare's life, not a single thing. I studied a lot of Shakespeare in college. I've read, I've read a lot of his plays. I've never read a single thing. I have many leather bound books. Smells of great mahogany.

• 14:44Sean Fennessey?

  But I, I just didn't know any of the biography. So when I sat down to watch this movie, it was, it was revelation, or at least perceived revelation based on what's inside of the novel. And I don't know, I still to this day don't know what's accurate and not accurate and so forth. It's not very accurate. Okay. That's helpful to know, I guess, although it ultimately doesn't matter. The film is shot by Lucas Zall, most recently shot The Zone of Interest. Film's edited by Zhao and Afonso Goncalves, who is also Todd Haynes's editor, one of the best editors in the world.

• 15:16Sean Fennessey?

  Music is by Max Richter, quite notably, and then, and then for a couple of reasons. The movie is about Shakespeare and his wife, Anyas, celebrating the birth of their son, Hamlet, and then...

• 15:28Speaker 02

  How much are we talking about is my question? How do you talk about this?

• 15:32Sean Fennessey?

  I think we have to talk about all of it, right?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, the film does open with a title card that says, in 16th century England, the names Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable. And then it ascribes the quote to the

• 15:52Speaker 02

  I believe it's the death of Hamnet and the birth of Hamlet.

• 15:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly. But anyway, the death of Hamnet is there on the very first title card.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's premise, I would say.

• 16:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. So also to say, we'll be spoiling the events of the film in this conversation because you just cannot talk about the movie without actually exploring what happens, particularly in the second half of the movie. So Joanna, since you're our guest, I'll start with you. What did you think of Hamnet?

• 16:17Speaker 02

  So I, I think it's really interesting when you talk about being an important film because I do think it's an important movie for, especially for like lovers of your podcast, for this inflection point we find ourselves in Hollywood and the love of going to the theater and what it means for, to share art together in a space. I think it is so important for that reason. I think it's the most important movie of the year for that conversation. I don't think it's the best movie I saw this year. I don't think it should win Best Picture or anything like that. But in terms of if you care about going to the movies, which I think people who listen to your podcast do.

• 16:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I hope so. We try.

• 16:54Speaker 02

  This, I don't think any other movie, not Babylon, one of your beloved, not Jay Kelly, which sort of purports to do it this year, has captured what that means in a communal space, the way that this movie does. So important with a capital I. But I also think, I've been a little dismayed by the way the wonderful people who worked on this film have been talking about this film. I think they're making it sound really unapproachable, really. They're talking about it in a high art kind of way, which I have a lot of space for, in a very sort of Mother Gaia goddess earth way. There's a lot of stuff that I worry is going to turn people off. And what I think this movie has to say about the universal idea of grief

• 17:39Speaker 02

  and the universal idea of how we use art to process that is really accessible. Something that Paul Meskell has said. And something my like drama teachers used to say is that you don't have to understand the words of Shakespeare at all. If it's done well, you get it emotionally, it impacts you. So you don't need to know anything about Shakespeare. You don't need to understand even the language of Hamlet in order to feel what happens at the sort of climax of this film, I would argue. And so I just hope that people think of it in a more accessible way than I worry it's being talked about. Does that make sense?

• 18:13Sean Fennessey?

  It does. I think it's a great advocacy for the film itself. Did you read the novel?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  I did.

• 18:17Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. And did you read the novel?

• 18:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I did and loved the novel.

• 18:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. So you both read the novel before you saw the film?

• 18:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. So what did you think of Hamlet?

• 18:23Amanda Dobbins?

  So I think Joanna makes a great point, and that is the best case for the film and it certainly locates what is best about the film and what is and what was best about the book, I felt as well, which is the ending. And the ending is spectacularly moving. I've seen the film twice. I have ugly cried both times. I think it really does reveal the power of of art and and seeing art together and, you know, it's like and art and grief, to your point. And so I I don't want to undersell that because once they're in the Globe Theatre,

• 19:05Amanda Dobbins?

  it's really amazing stuff. I found myself incredibly resistant to the rest of the film. And I think some of it is what Joanna located is that there is a real woo woo energy to the to the first hour and to the characterization of Agnes in particular, which

• 19:25Speaker 02

  The sort of like woods witch pedigree sort of thing.

• 19:29Amanda Dobbins?

  And then, but but then bleeds into the actual filmmaking and like respectfully, if I had to see that tree one more time, I was gonna light myself on fire. I get it, you know? It's like, it's beautiful and powerful and it has, it's, you know, connects to the sky, but also there are deep roots in the earth. And then there's like something unknowable down below, like wow, yeah, like, like, I get it. I've, I've been thinking a lot about what works for me in in Train Dreams, which is a not dissimilar movie, and what doesn't work for me in Hamlet. One of them is that I didn't read Train Dreams, the novel, and I did read Hamlet, the book, though I don't, I really don't think that my

• 20:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Concerns are about the adaptation or what it leaves out of the book. It is about just what the film chooses to emphasize and also how it communicates the information, which I found to be very obvious, very tell, don't show. And so there's something of just, it is a movie about grief, but it is, it ends a movie set in the 16th century, but it is, or maybe the 17th century. And, but it is like very post psychology, post therapy. Like, let me tell you that this is a movie about grief 45,000 times and we all need

• 20:54Amanda Dobbins?

  to, this, we are processing our feelings in a way that I, I guess I'm allergic to. And ultimately, when it just does let people and let the characters process feelings altogether, I, I think it's tremendously effective, but I was pretty impatient with the rest.

• 21:16Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen it twice now too, sort of, and I'll tell you a little bit later about my second movie going experience, which was interesting. The first time I saw it was in, over the summer and I saw it before the fall festivals. Like I said, I hadn't read the book and didn't really know what to expect. And I found the first hour a crushing bore. I found it really hard to act, to get inside the story. I found Zhao applying her filmmaking style, which is very bound by nature, the natural world and the way that kind of human beings both try to coexist and also trample on it. Just something that's like pretty consistent throughout Nomadland, throughout all of her films, The Rider. But it didn't, it felt like she was trying to get her arms around like maybe a more traditional

• 22:01Sean Fennessey?

  Hollywood style of filmmaking. We should note Steven Spielberg is the, one of the producers of this film. Felt like her trying to access some of the more distinct structures of like a prestigious Hollywood movie. Emily Watson as like a stern woman in a household, you know, like some things that just felt like you might see in a Miramax movie in 1996.

• 22:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Emily Watson's one scene is dynamite.

• 22:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So. But the.

• 22:27Sean Fennessey?

  The second half of the movie, the first time I saw it, absolutely just killed me. Like, I went from being like completely checked out in minute forty-seven and like thinking about my grocery list, which is something I really try hard not to do while watching films for this show, to being similarly like just devastated by it. And not just by the death of a young child, but by the communication of how some people choose to reckon with their feelings and how they cope. And I think it's a really interesting movie about coping. We use the word cope a lot in our culture as like, your team just lost in the World Series, cope.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:01Sean Fennessey?

  But, you know, there's a variety of versions of it. There's both Agnes and Shakespeare's version of it. There is even small things like actors trying to get performance right and trying to cope with feedback that I think is like pretty insightful and well-observed. And then I agree that like the final twenty minutes is just this absolute sledgehammer. Like, and it's, I don't want to overestimate how hard that is to do. Like, it's manipulative and there are manipulating factors that are applied to it. We can talk about the music, we can talk about the performance style. But to garner emotion is not to be overlooked. I think a lot of critics tend to say like, that's cheap. I don't see movie watching that way. I think if you can catch me, you can catch me, and that matters to me. So I find myself like really split on the movie.

• 23:45Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's like, good. I think it's good. I don't think it's great, I don't think it's bad, I think it's just good.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  I absolutely get that take. I would say the first hour and a half are so for me, and I understand that that particular strain of so for me is not for a lot of people. And I get that that is like, it's just a fastball down the middle for me. And then the rest of the movie is, I think, for everyone. And I am curious to hear about how you guys saw it, because I saw it at a festival screening in a room full of strangers. Like, I didn't go with anyone. I went, because I was working, went to the festival, surrounded by strangers. Weeping in a room with strangers? I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but heartbreak feels good in a place like this. You know what I mean? Just like, you can't underestimate how powerful that is. And-

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Chloe Zhao is a filmmaker that I have never responded very well to.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Not Nomadland, not The Rider, certainly not Eternals. I was really worried when I heard she was taking on Buffy Vampire Slayer, which is one of my favorite properties. I was like, no, no, thank you. And so I had maybe lower expectations for this than I would if it were a different filmmaker. But I think I find Jessie Buckley and Paul Meskell sort of like endlessly watchable personally. And what what they brought to this movie, when you hear them talk about the process of this movie, it's again, very woo woo, but also very based in the theater. And it sounds like both Buckley and Meskell brought a lot of their own ideas to the the the property.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  And Chloe Zhao was said, OK, go ahead. So some of the biggest moments for me, like William talking to his son, young son Hamden, and say, like, will you be brave? This moment that just like actually really got to me was an improv that Paul Meskell did in rehearsal. Or the whole closing sequence in The Globe, a lot of which was directed by Jessie Buckley improv. So there's a lot that these particular theater based performers brought to the table that I think overrode the sort of arid way that I usually respond to a Chloe Zhao property. These are very emotive performers and everything. They're famous for that.

• 25:54Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  So I think that helped me access it. But I don't, I'm not surprised to hear the way you guys felt about the rest of the movie.

• 26:01Amanda Dobbins?

  I like the performances too. I like, and I like both, which I think there may be some some feedback on.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Some split of any of them.

• 26:09Sean Fennessey?

  I did not like both.

• 26:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but I, what I liked about them was the the rawness. And there's a scene midway through the movie, which to me is possibly even more upsetting than the end scene, which is the when Jessie, when Anya, Anya says Jessie Buckley gives birth to twins and.

• 26:37Amanda Dobbins?

  The the the second twin is a surprise as it was in those days and also is not immediately visibly alive. And just there's a camera hold on Jessie Buckley in great physical distress, holding that child and working through all of it. And then when the the child does start crying, I'm I'm I'm getting really emotional, as you can see, but like the the the wonder and the fear and the what's going on in her face is like, you you can't re that that is astonishing. You can't like reproduce it. Um, sorry, excuse me. So it clearly really worked on me. But I also, at the same time, I'm like, I don't know if I think the characters are very good.

• 27:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, I think just the actual, like, the the ending scene where it's leading with her improv, I mean,

• 27:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I think it's the most amazing thing. And I think when she reaches out, again, I'm going to start crying. Like, it really works. But until that moment, I'm like, does this person have a head injury? Like, what's going on? Like, there is something that is so in conflict between their performances. And these two people on screen are so talented and so able to communicate,

• 27:49Amanda Dobbins?

  not even ideas, really, just emotion. And and and I think that's astonishing and an accomplishment. But I don't know if they are always tied to ideas or like the schema of a film.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  I don't disagree. I think it's like a very, again, I don't want to sound too sort of woo woo, but it feels a very primal performance. You know what I mean? They don't feel like fully formed characters. They feel like sort of elemental emotional thing. I do sound very woo woo talking about that. But I like that works on me, but I don't disagree with the critique that these don't feel like real people. This isn't a like biopic of William Shakespeare where you're going to walk away and saying like, I really understand who William Shakespeare is. That's not what this film is reporting to do.

• 28:28Amanda Dobbins?

  All of that until they get to Hamlet and like the actual architecture of the novel. Is like, straight up embarrassing, like, with, with, with, with the exception of the scene in which, like, Paul Meskell is doing, as Shakespeare is doing Hamlet rehearsals, and it's Noah Jupe is playing Hamlet. Yeah. And he keeps correcting him, and then he does it. And that was the one time where I was like, oh yeah, Paul Meskell, like, is trained in the theater and can, like, do Hamlet if he needs to do Hamlet.

• 28:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

• 29:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's really great, and he's really good in it. But every other, like, winking, I mean, you know, they jam in the rest of Silence somewhere.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Rosemary for Remembrance, yeah.

• 29:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sorry, I, do they have him recite to be or not to be in the book? I don't remember it, but I almost, and it's not Paul Meskell's fault, but what are we doing?

• 29:18Sean Fennessey?

  Well, yeah, I mean, it literalizes this idea of mortality that's in that speech where he's literally standing before the water and considering whether to give himself over to the earth, you know, and that's like, kind of a big theme of the movie is, we are a part of the earth and we are, like, coexisting, and we are meant to be living inside of trees and on the open land, but we're not, we're like, these kind of savages who build and destroy. And that's a, just a huge thing in all of Chloe Zhao's movies. And she's trying to, like, kind of hammer that, I think, on top of the dramatic framework of the novel and the characters. I don't know, Meskell to me does not emit vibrant wit. And like, that is something in Shakespeare that I, I think is a kind of vital component.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  You're a Joseph Fiennes guy.

• 30:00Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't say that, um, even though there's a little bit of Shakespeare in love in this movie. Not, maybe not enough, actually, um, maybe not enough, like, zip, in the film. Um, but I, I think when it is attempting to really make you feel, it really, I'll tell you another scene that I really liked that was along those lines, was, um, when he's writer's blocked, and he's drinking.

• 30:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:25Sean Fennessey?

  And he's sitting at the desk.

• 30:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Sean Fennessey?

  And he's like, I've had too much to drink, and he just doesn't know what to do, and he's just kind of like, got his head in his hands.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  And he's like, don't touch me.

• 30:32Sean Fennessey?

  And she's trying to help him, and she, there's nothing that, that she can say to him to help him.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:37Sean Fennessey?

  You know, we've all been there, you know, like, it happens. Like, that's a very relatable moment in that movie.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  It was interesting to me to hear what you guys thought about that. Because there is inside of this a story that I feel like you both really respond to, which is like the great man burdened with greatness. The like, I have to create the bomb or play table tennis or whatever it is. Or else I'll die. You know what I mean? And so like that part of it, it was like, I have to go to London or I'll die.

• 31:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's true, but that isn't what the movie is. Like that is an idea that is in the movie, but this is not William Shakespeare's movie. It's Anya's movie.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:07Sean Fennessey?

  And I, I, I more or less agree with all of the plaudits that Jessie Buckley is receiving. Listeners of the show know Jessie Buckley is one of my favorite actresses alive. I think she can do anything. I think she is absolutely magical. And I think she pretty much puts the movie on her shoulders in the final hour.

• 31:26Sean Fennessey?

  But it's interesting to have William Shakespeare and all of his words and works be so center of the structure of the story, but then not feel his energy, I guess. I, I, you know, maybe up until that final 20 minutes, when of course, like literally watching his work performed and then intrinsically woven into his life. Maybe some people will say they closed it like they landed the plane, they nailed it. But for the first hour and a half, I was like, this is, this doesn't even feel like Shakespeare at all to me.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  That, that thing that you're talking about in terms of like that, which I usually hate. I have an allergy to that magpie sort of, it's in, it's in Blue Moon a lot and it really bothered me in that movie. That sort of like, oh, I'm going to take that, I'm going to take that, I'm going to take that and put this into this great piece of work that you're all familiar with.

• 32:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  But there are, there's, there's a purpose to it inside of this one because it's important for her to recognize these shared things that have been in their lives that are now inside of this play. So like, it had a purpose to me more than a clever winking, winking, you know that this is a line from Hamlet. And that actor instruction scene, that's a Hamlet scene. You know what I mean? So there's just like, there are ways in which it hits you like an anvil and then there's a way in which it's sort of more subtly woven in, in a way. But like that kind of thing usually really bothers me.

• 32:37Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, sometimes it works and sometimes it really, really does not.

• 32:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Amanda Dobbins?

  As in the to be or not to be seen. I, and then, and then when they make poor Joe Allen, long suffering Joe Allen, just to show up and be like, we are looking for William Shakespeare. I was like, I mean, it's real. You know, Leo in Once Upon a Time, like, yeah, we know, we know who it is.

• 32:58Sean Fennessey?

  Let me tell you briefly about my two movie going experiences. This normally wouldn't be very interesting, but I'm gonna share it. The first time I saw it, I saw it on the lot at Universal, and it was at a theater I'd never been to before, and I got lost. And on the way to getting lost, I ran into Mia Lee Vicino, who works at Letterboxd, friend of mine, and she was also lost. And we didn't know where the fuck we were going. And we were very confused. We're kind of laughing like, oh, yeah, like, in theory, this is a huge movie, but we're just like stuck in the middle of this giant corporate park. And we walk in, and we were like 38 seconds late to the movie. And we sit down, and it's a weird screening room with like 25 seats, but they're kind of half couches, half lounge chairs. And, you know, that part might have been part of the reason why I was a little bit disengaged at the beginning of the film.

• 33:39Sean Fennessey?

  And then the film ended, and I saw Mia, and we were both just like, real mess. I'm really like, fuck. Like, this really hit me hard, you know. There, I think there's some very obvious parental parallels. If you have a kid, and you see what happens to Hamlet in the movie, it's really, really hard to watch.

• 33:56Amanda Dobbins?

  That kid. I mean, and then they also, you know, they literalize the, the Hamlet's father's ghost thing with, and they have.

• 34:04Sean Fennessey?

  So let me, let me use that as an entree to my second screening. So I saw the movie a second time last night at the Regal Pasero in Pasadena. It was me and about 13 other people. And we were watching the film all the way through, and we get to the final 20 minutes of the film, and there's the moment when the ghost emerges and, and starts speaking to Hamlet. And then the, the moment when the ghost is leaving the stage, and she says, turn around, come back, turn around. And right at that moment, the emergency alarm went off, and everyone had to leave the building.

• 34:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, my god.

• 34:34Sean Fennessey?

  Now, this was strange. So we went through the emergency exit in the movie theater, and we walked into this sort of back hallway, which was kind of an unfinished basement kind of vibe. And we went out to find one of the emergency exits to go out into the plaza of the movie theater. And as soon as that door opened, it sounded like there were gunshots. So the person who opened that door ran. And then everyone who was in my movie theater ran out. Now, it wasn't gunshots. It sounded like it was actually maybe ultimately just a truck loading, but because the emergency alarm had gone off, everyone was really freaked out, intense. And we were at the, the most critical emotional moment of the movie. The people who were coming out of the emergency exit with me in tears.

• 35:13Sean Fennessey?

  So we go down the other end of the hallway and we go around the exit and we get out into the plaza and then we go back to the lobby of the movie theater. And of course, we enter the lobby of the movie theater and the guy who's working there says, oh, sorry, false alarm. So the movie has been like effectively ruined for these people.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Ruined, I would say, yeah.

• 35:29Sean Fennessey?

  And for me, I was like, I have to go home. I'm not going to wait for them to rerun the reel. I've already seen this film. I know what's happening in the last five minutes of the movie. But all the other patrons did go back inside and watch the movie. And I was thinking about that and kind of like, um, a movie's power and how the movie the second time just felt way less effective to me. Because when that moment happened, it dawned on me how not emotionally crushed and devastated I was in those final 20 minutes. And I was looking around at people who felt the way that I felt in July, when I ran into Mia afterwards, and I was a mess. And then a second viewing does not make a film better or worse specifically. Rewatchability is not the clearest metric. But I was reflecting on it because I didn't know anything in the story. And so not having read it, I was like,

• 36:13Sean Fennessey?

  part of what really worked on me was just revelation.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:16Sean Fennessey?

  Was just understanding what influence this experience had on Shakespeare. Presumably, you guys can tell me if that's accurate or not, if he wrote Hamlet through this experience of loss.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but.

• 36:26Amanda Dobbins?

  According to the novel, at least, which again is.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  According to history, his son Hamnet died, he wrote Hamlet. That happens.

• 36:33Amanda Dobbins?

  That's what we know. Yeah.

• 36:34Sean Fennessey?

  So I think for me, just for me personally, I think all of those things coming together. The loss of a child, the way that you process Arthur Grief, the way that this character in particular kind of couldn't find a way to connect with the people he was closest to, but could connect with the artist who could realize his vision.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:50Sean Fennessey?

  All of that is fascinating. And then, once you've got it, I got it. I just, I.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, interesting.

• 36:56Amanda Dobbins?

  I will say, my second viewing, also at the Regal Paseo, but in the morning and no emergency.

• 37:02Sean Fennessey?

  A fine film.

• 37:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I was kind of like, it's not going to get me this time.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:07Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, it was like 11 a.m. after the Golden Globes nominations. And I was just like, I got this, I got this. And even going through the Globe scene, I was like, no, they will not, they won't touch me. And once Jessie Buckley reaches her handout and then everybody reaches their handout, I was like, well, there is something very primal here. Like, I'm gone, I got got. So I do think that they locate something very powerful in that last scene.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  What I think is really interesting, I love the discussions you guys have had this year about, there are so many movies this year that are about being a parent, right? There's a lot of mom movies, a lot of dad movies. There's something, I'm not a parent, I have no plans to become a parent. And there are sometimes those movies that are so focused on parenting that can be slightly alienating to someone who hasn't had that experience. And I just don't think that that's true of this movie because they're tapping into something true about grief and true about art that is universal.

• 37:58Sean Fennessey?

  I totally agree with that. I did want to talk a little bit about the Max Richter aspect of the film.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Dirty Pool, honestly.

• 38:06Sean Fennessey?

  Celebrate the composer. There is lots of original music in the film from Richter. The musical cue in that moment when Anas reaches forward and there's this big swell and thrum in the theater and the power of Hamid is being conveyed. On the Nature of Daylight is playing on the soundtrack, which is previously recorded music that we've heard before in films and television shows. And is a bit of a, considered a bit of a cheat sheet if you're trying to get...

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Skeleton keys.

• 38:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yeah, if you're trying to get people to feel things. So you said Dirty Pool.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  I did think so. I love this movie. I wept through that. When that track started playing, at this moment where I was already, they had me, I was like, you didn't need to, though. You didn't have to add On the Nature of Daylight on top of this. But Jessie Buckley said in a, I think it was a THR Variety interview, that she was like processing the scene, they shot over eight days, and she was listening to that track in her car. And she was just sort of like, this is the one. So there was like at least a slightly honest, organic way in which it came into the mix. But I...

• 39:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Eight days.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  I know, can you imagine?

• 39:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  But I... How many times did Paul Maslow have to kick himself in like white goo? But like, I think that...

• 39:22Speaker 02

  I think it would have been maybe even stronger to have an original piece of music there that we could forever identify with just that moment. And when we hear it, when you hear that Max Richter score going forward, we're like, oh, it's the end of him next score. It's gonna get me, you know?

• 39:36Sean Fennessey?

  Is it possible, though, that this becomes what that piece of music is best known for? Because most people don't know that. Most people don't really know this piece of music or wouldn't be able to name it at least or identify who composed it. And there was a part, and I think that maybe dovetails a little bit with the conversation of what this film is going to be and what it is.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  I just think Arrival sort of owns it. That's what I think.

• 39:58Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  And, you know, as similar-

• 39:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I wish that Arrival had a broader acceptance rate in the world at large, but I think that-

• 40:06Sean Fennessey?

  It was a successful film, though.

• 40:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, yeah.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  I feel like for the big pick audience, Arrival is like one of the great, like, should have been sort of movies.

• 40:15Amanda Dobbins?

  A thousand percent for me.

• 40:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's Amanda's favorite Nolan movie, yeah.

• 40:22Sean Fennessey?

  I, um, I, I guess you're right. And I guess, I guess Villeneuve going on to become like a huge deal means that maybe that movie has like a little bit more of a place in the legacy books or something.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:38Sean Fennessey?

  But I'm kind of curious what's gonna, what's gonna become of this film in particular. Like, a movie like this 30 years ago would make $200 million.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Well, that's because Harvey Weinstein would be behind it. And he's not. And so I'm actually, you know, from Telluride, Jessie Buckley was anointed as she's gonna win Best Actress.

• 40:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  I no longer feel that that is certain, and a lot of that has to do with sort of the way the campaign has already been orchestrated. I don't think they figured out a way to talk about this performance.

• 41:06Sean Fennessey?

  Rose Byrne coming?

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Rose Byrne is-

• 41:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean, so far.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  -kicking at her heels, you know what I mean? And so-

• 41:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know, though. I've watched a lot of TikToks of her and Paul Mescal doing absolutely every single charming thing possible.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Oh, they are. I mean, they're doing, they're doing the work.

• 41:21Amanda Dobbins?

  I think over time.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  I hope that's true, and I hope as more and more people watch it. But to that sort of communal viewing experience, I think if you see it in a theater with other people, this movie has you and Jessie has you.

• 41:32Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Like Jessie makes the case for herself if you see this movie in a theater.

• 41:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  If you watch it on a screener at home, middle of the day, if you're an awards voter and you didn't go to the theater, and this is something I always think about with awards, like, does this hit the same way if you got, if you got bored by the first hour and a half and you're not in it? And the ending happens and you're just sort of like, okay, it happened. Do you know?

• 41:54Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not, I'm really not sure. I think part of the reason why, at least from an awards perspective, it has a strong chance to do well is it is a counterpoint to a lot of the other films that are at the top of the heap, which are very male.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  I think it's gonna be nominated across the board. I don't, I'm not, I don't doubt that Chloe's gonna be nominated. I don't doubt that it's gonna be nominated for Best Picture. The mentality I had from an awards point of view, which is not maybe the most useful way to think about anything, but that Jessie Buckley was gonna win and that was gonna stand for the, we're honoring Hamnet.

• 42:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  With Jessie Buckley winning and then One Battle is gonna take everything else.

• 42:25Sean Fennessey?

  That was my perception as well.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Right. And I just, the last couple of weeks, I've just started wondering if, it doesn't feel as cemented as like the Renee Zellweger out of Telluride narrative did or something like that, where it's just sort of like, we're running the board.

• 42:38Amanda Dobbins?

  So strange.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  It was bizarre.

• 42:40Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe the single weirdest one since we've been doing the show.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  I don't understand how that happened. But she doesn't have like, the Olivia Colman, I can just like, talk my way to a win for something like this. The Mikey Madison, I'm new, isn't this interesting and exciting? The, I have a, I have a long career and you're awarding me for my long career. She's somewhere in the middle. And it's a challenging campaign and I'm, I'm, I think she's amazing. She's given some great speeches. She's been awarded in a lot of festivals and I'm, I'm pulling for her and I want, I want her to go all the way because I love her and I think she's incredible in this.

• 43:16Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, it's interesting that you say that. I, I, I still think it's her all the way down, but I, to me, I feel like weirdly Chase Infinity has as much of a chance to upend that narrative. The Rose Byrne performance is incredible. We've talked about If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. That's still a very small movie.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  No, I agree.

• 43:31Sean Fennessey?

  That's a hard movie just to get through, to your screener point.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  I agree. I agree.

• 43:35Sean Fennessey?

  Whereas, I'm not sure if Chase Infinity even is really in a lead actress role in One Battle After Another, but she's running a very good campaign right now. And she is, she is the Mikey Madison discovery for this year, so.

• 43:47Amanda Dobbins?

  The only thing about, to Joanna's point about if you're sitting at home in the middle of the day, trying to get through your screeners to vote, you can watch 30 minutes of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You and understand that Rose Byrne is doing amazing. Things and then turn it off. And I think.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  If you turn off Hamlet.

• 44:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, she's walking in the woods. I mean, she's wonderful. I think that, you know, she is your favorite, Sean, but she is a lot of people's like secret favorite. I think there are a lot.

• 44:13Sean Fennessey?

  There's a lot like she's Meryl Streep thing.

• 44:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, a lot of people have been waiting to vote for her.

• 44:18Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  She was nominated for the lost daughter.

• 44:20Amanda Dobbins?

  That's going for her.

• 44:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I agree. I think there is a like a little bit of a collective amongst cinephiles and people in the industry. That's just like, she has chosen one energy.

• 44:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 44:29Sean Fennessey?

  And this would be a way to kind of get, almost like get that out of the way early. Where it's like, let's just be cool with every time she shows up in a movie, she's really great.

• 44:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Sean Fennessey?

  You know, but she's not like a proper star. That's kind of why I compare it to Meryl Streep.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  And she doesn't want to be.

• 44:42Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? And so that's.

• 44:43Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't even know that she had a kid. I didn't even know she had a partner. Like, I didn't, I don't know anything about her, is my point. Like, even though she's somebody who I will always watch in a movie, but I learned it afterwards because she talked about it, about making this film and being a mother. But that's one of those things where like, usually you know a lot about the people that you're really interested in when you host a show like this.

• 45:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 45:02Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't know anything about her.

• 45:02Amanda Dobbins?

  She was pregnant when she walked on stage at Comic Con, just not Comic Con, Cinema Con, whatever.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And I said to you, oh, good for Jessie Buckley, she's pregnant.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  She's wearing a lot of loose menswear.

• 45:11Sean Fennessey?

  No memory of that.

• 45:12Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I mean, I just, and I said, I'm happy for her.

• 45:14Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, is Timothy Chalamet a father?

• 45:17Amanda Dobbins?

  No, though possibly. Stepdad, yes.

• 45:20Sean Fennessey?

  That's a really good point. Not possibly.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  The dad is stepdad.

• 45:23Sean Fennessey?

  They made their public debut this week.

• 45:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I still don't know if those children, if he's met those children, but. Different conversation, me too.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:30Sean Fennessey?

  Is Tyga the father?

• 45:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Hmm, no, isn't it Travis Scott?

• 45:38Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 45:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Kylie Jenner, Travis Scott, right?

• 45:40Sean Fennessey?

  That sounds right.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  This is not my area of expertise. Do we want to talk about Hamlet more? No, I'm just kidding.

• 45:45Sean Fennessey?

  What else do you want to say about Hamlet? Anything else?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I think, I think I've made the best case I can possibly make for this movie. I think I.

• 45:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I think you made a great case for it.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  And I think, honestly, if you just watched the last half hour, you know, you might get it. But I don't recommend that be the way that you ingest a piece of cinema.

• 46:06Sean Fennessey?

  I wonder if you watched just the last hour, though.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  But I would recommend going to like.

• 46:10Amanda Dobbins?

  When are you recommending people turn it on? Like, what scene?

• 46:14Sean Fennessey?

  4 a.m.

• 46:14Amanda Dobbins?

  No, what scene turns it for you?

• 46:18Speaker 02

  You have to see Hamlet like

• 46:20Sean Fennessey?

  Well, there's a really

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Alive.

• 46:21Sean Fennessey?

  There's a really interesting scene where Hamlet wakes up and he discovers Judith in bed, his sister.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:28Sean Fennessey?

  And she's ill.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:30Sean Fennessey?

  Camera is sort of very gently moving to the right in that room. And she, you know, Zhao creates this sense of dread in that sequence. And it's really effective. And it's very simple what she's doing, but you know, we already mentioned, if we didn't mention Jacoby Jupe, like he's incredible as Hamlet. For a young boy to be giving a performance like that is amazing.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  He's so good.

• 46:51Sean Fennessey?

  He's very, very good.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Noah Jupe, his brother, playing Hamlet is incredible. And he's, there's the, there's the moment of reaching out from the audience, right? Cause Agnes is having this personal response to this art and then has sort of swept the audience in with her personal response. And they're reaching out and Noah Jupe, as Hamlet, his moment of being an actor and seeing his impact, even though he doesn't even understand the full context of his impact and is sort of like shocked, but he continues the performance. Noah Jupe is like a stealth weapon of this movie. I think that not enough people are talking about. I just think he's really good. But that, the, the camera that you're talking about, Chloe Zhao has talked about how Zone of Interest was a huge inspo for the way she framed this movie and that she wanted

• 47:37Speaker 02

  it to make it feel theatrical. So she's giving you the whole, there's not a ton of closeups, other than like a few that you've mentioned. There's a lot of things that happen in the center of a, of a wide frame.

• 47:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there's a very memorable shot where you see Will and Hamlet, and Hamlet goes around the corner of the house, but the house is almost like a, you're almost seeing like the triangle of the house, the two, the meeting point of the two sides. And the, kind of the distance between them just going around that corner. It is Lucas Zall, like you can see him bringing his very particular eye to framing that sort of thing. And there, the other Chloe Zhao films don't really have that particular visual sensibility. They're like, the camera is much more flowing. It's much more like, um, In the, in the sequence where Hamlet does die, where it's like very handheld, sort of like moving in and out of focus.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:23Sean Fennessey?

  And it feels like very rough. That's a really hard scene to watch emotionally. But from a filmmaking perspective, that feels more like Nomadland to me.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:31Sean Fennessey?

  So it's this interesting collision of styles where like she, Lu Xiang is trying to evolve somehow and, and, but she's trying to maintain like what makes her her. It's a little part, I think part of why I bump on the movie a bit is that it is, it feels like it's kind of like a work in development for her. Even though it's so emotionally brutal and direct that to be trying to like evolve as a director with material that is this big is a little, is difficult to pull off.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  That's why I think it's, it's correct to honor this movie by giving Jessie Buckley an Oscar and not, I mean, I, there was some early fears in Oscar season that Hamlet was gonna come and steal the thunder from one battle or something like that.

• 49:12Sean Fennessey?

  Doesn't really feel that way right now.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Doesn't seem that way anymore.

• 49:15Amanda Dobbins?

  We've had it at number two in Best Picture power rankings, but I think it's gonna slide down next time.

• 49:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm curious. I do wonder, because there, there is, the one thing that this will, film will speak to in the older Academy. You know, there, there's still a lot of people who,

• 49:27Speaker 02

  dwindling.

• 49:28Sean Fennessey?

  They're, they're, they're dying.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:29Sean Fennessey?

  They're dying every day.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  We all die and that's what Hamlet's about.

• 49:32Sean Fennessey?

  That's absolutely right. Okay, let's talk briefly about The Secret Agent. So, as I said on the episode last week, this is right near the top of my top 10.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  It's wild.

• 49:44Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think this movie is really, really cool and it does something that, it does a couple of things that I really enjoy.

• 49:52Sean Fennessey?

  It's based in the real world.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:54Sean Fennessey?

  But it is using all of this wild genre convention and absurdity. And it's very silly, but it's also deeply sincere and painful. And also a kind of a thrilling crime movie and an assassination conspiracy plot. And a movie about corporate malfeasance and also about a dad just trying to get back to his son. It's a lot. It's a bit, it's a two hour and 40 minute boiling pot of stuff. It definitely feels like a movie made by a guy who is obsessed with movies. But I, I'm really into what, what this filmmaker is trying to do and the way that he's trying to mix everything all together and make it work.

• 50:35Sean Fennessey?

  And Wagner Moura, you know, I remember very vividly in 2018, we went to Sundance and, The only actor interview I did at Sundance in person was with Pagnomar. Just because I'd seen him on Narcos and I was like, he seems cool. And I don't usually book the show that way. I'm not usually like, I don't talk to actors very much, like much more filmmaker focused. But he just kind of had a vibe and I think this movie uses his like real sense of sincerity and mystery and sexiness really, really well. So I'm a big fan of this movie.

• 51:07Speaker 02

  Did you?

• 51:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, no, I finally caught up with it. I'm, I was very into it as well. I think what surprised me and what recommends it to me is that it is all of the like, you know, very sexy, exciting, like things that you said, it's a thriller, it's government conspiracy, but it is also just like a hangout movie. It is, it is very loose. It is about this world, the northeast part of Brazil in the seventies. And it has like a real sense of place, like the production design and everything is amazing, but you feel like you know these people. And so, and it is silly.

• 51:49Amanda Dobbins?

  It's you and Adam Neiman both compared it to one battle after another because of, you know, it's about dads and dads and, you know, political resistance. And I think that that's an apt comparison, but there is also a real Paul Thomas Anderson like vibe to it's, you know, it's clear that's where it comes from. And he's like recreating his world with a lot of love and like wry observation and a sense of humor in like a sort of absurdist way about what's going on. So it, you know, it's, it's weird to say it was a cool place to spend time because

• 52:30Amanda Dobbins?

  it is about a very dark period in Brazilian history and is also, as you said, about murder and corruption and loss.

• 52:40Amanda Dobbins?

  But like, Jonia Sebastiana, is that her name? What a, what a legend. I want to hang out with her forever.

• 52:46Sean Fennessey?

  I know, I know. What did you think?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Um, I did not love this film, but I lo-, I think I had the sort of Hamlet experience you guys had, where I love Wagner's performance, and especially like, there is an element of the story where the ending really, uh, underlines, without spoiling it, underlines what an incredible performance this is.

• 53:05Amanda Dobbins?

  It was, I was watching it, and I was like, this is really good, but are we sure about this actor? And then it flips, and I was like, oh.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. So like, I was, I, I was sitting here, I was like, I love Wagner, I'm never gonna be mad that he's gonna be nominated for an Oscar perhaps, or whatever, um, but I don't get why it's for this film. And then I saw the ending, and I was like, okay, I understand.

• 53:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I don't want to, this movie's been even far less seen in Hamlet thus far, so I don't want to spoil the additional devices that the film uses, but it's, it's pretty clever. There's a lot going on here, and I think this movie will not be for everybody, for sure. And it is extremely, like, indulgent in its runtime, but I like the hang. Like, like you said, I liked being around all of these particular characters, kind of find themselves living together in this, you know, uh, adopted community of refugees, so I, I, I think it's really cool.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  I think the One Battle comp is interesting, because the thing that I felt coming out of One Battle was, uh, dazed and amazed at how cohesive a movie that should feel so shambling felt. That's how I felt about One Battle. That's not how I feel about this movie, but what that means is that there are sequences in this movie that really, really worked for me. Like, when Wagner and his wife are at dinner with an absolute asshole, or, you know, there's like, there's just vignettes that work really, really well, but as a, but it is so all over the map with its tone, and, and which characters you're following in any given moment, that there were some moments where I was checked out. But then there were some moments where I was really dialed in, so.

• 54:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Shambling is, it is shambling. It's a good, but I, you know, I felt like the, the carnival scene, when the Wagner character just goes into that, I was like, this is great. That seems, you know, I'd like, I would, I would like to be a part of that.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  And the, the col-, the, the color tone, the like, Kodachrome, sort of like burnt golden coloring is great, too.

• 54:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  So.

• 54:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, let's take a quick break and talk about our favorite performances. Okay, and now it's time for a segment brought to you by Coca-Cola. This has been such a special year for actors that we love.

• 55:02Amanda Dobbins?

  There's something so joyful about watching actors you have a big relationship with at the top of their game, and those moments are even better with a Coca-Cola by your side.

• 55:10Sean Fennessey?

  So is there a performance from an actor that you have a big relationship to that you want to spotlight here?

• 55:15Amanda Dobbins?

  As we know, I'm an Olivia Colman diehard, ride or die since The Crown and also maybe other, anyway, she's been in a lot of things I love. And this year, in the United States, we should clarify, she was in Paddington in Peru as a nun borrowing heavily from The Sound of Music. And this was the first film I ever took my young son to in a theater. And so my son loves Paddington, I love Olivia Colman, we got to go together, he mostly behaved, and I thought she was very funny. It's a very classic, accomplished actor doing silly things in a big budget movie, and it brought me a lot of joy.

• 55:56Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great pick. I'm glad you mentioned your son. I am a son as well, a son of Ethan Hawke, one of my faves. We had our dad here on the show earlier this year. His performance in Blue Moon is absolutely wonderful, transporting, fascinating portrayal of a composer and writer of music for the stage at the, near the end of his life, truly heartbreaking, something we've never really seen from Hawke before. Nice to see that, you know, there's still moves inside of his bag, some things we haven't seen. And so he's definitely my pick. And whether it's on the big screen or in a bottle, joy is always better when it's shared with the people that you love. So refresh your holidays this season with Coca-Cola.

• 56:35Sean Fennessey?

  So the assignment was 10 performances each. The assignment was not, please predict the top 10 leading performances at the Academy Awards this year. I said, maybe one or two of those, and then the rest, let's have a little bit of fun. You like this exercise?

• 56:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I love this.

• 56:50Sean Fennessey?

  Did you used to do this on Little Goldman?

• 56:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know that I ever did this, but I feel like I did it with you guys last year.

• 56:55Sean Fennessey?

  Did you, you did do it with us? Yes, that's right.

• 56:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I was just making it an adjustment that I thought of in the car, because we have some overlap.

• 57:02Sean Fennessey?

  I changed one as well to avoid overlap.

• 57:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And I like the overlap, but, um...

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Oh, but the, oh, okay.

• 57:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I saw, but I made another one just to, to spread the wealth, as it were. But I kept a couple of the overlaps because I think consensus is, is fun.

• 57:18Sean Fennessey?

  That's fine by me. What was your number one last year? Do you remember?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't. I don't.

• 57:23Amanda Dobbins?

  What was my number one? What movies were last year?

• 57:25Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. Does anything matter?

• 57:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, Anora won last year.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  I was thinking about the, I was thinking about the films that, at the Oscars last year.

• 57:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 57:33Speaker 02

  And how like Conclave and Anora and Emilio Perez don't feel like they exist anymore.

• 57:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, yes.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Right?

• 57:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  I don't think that'll be true for like a One Bottle Sinners year.

• 57:41Sean Fennessey?

  Conclave does because the new pope saved cinema.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Hmm, okay.

• 57:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Sean Fennessey?

  That was tough how he went into, he, he, he took over the pope chair.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:50Sean Fennessey?

  And then he was like, all these filmmakers need to come to Italy and hang out with me. And then Netflix, Ball, Wonder Brothers.

• 57:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, and so.

• 57:56Sean Fennessey?

  What happened there?

• 57:59Amanda Dobbins?

  You know what?

• 57:59Sean Fennessey?

  There is no God. That's what happened.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  The church isn't gonna save us, I guess.

• 58:02Sean Fennessey?

  God damn it. Um, who wants to start?

• 58:07Speaker 02

  I'll start.

• 58:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Great.

• 58:08Sean Fennessey?

  I like that we did a similar thing.

• 58:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I like, uh, this, yeah, this, this is a good pick. I like this one.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  So I just wanted to highlight, uh, Jane Austen wrecked my life, which is a very small movie, a French film.

• 58:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Delightful.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Uh, just absolutely, really delightful. Didn't it make you feel like you were in the 90s?

• 58:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Felt like a 90s, like Next Stop Wonderland, sort of just like cozy indie film. I absolutely loved it. And the, the main actress, Camille Rutherford, I had never seen in anything. And I just thought she was just like perfect anchor of this, it's, it's not a dorky whimsical Jane Austen movie, but it is about a woman who works in, in, um, Shakespeare and Co., right? And, uh, and gets a fellowship to go, uh, work on her writing and, inside of the context of, of her Jane Austen fandom or whatever. Then there's debate about whether or not Jane Austen is actually a legitimate writer inside of it. But it's not like take your aunt and have some tea on some frilly doilies kind of movie. It's just like a movie movie about real people trying to be.

• 59:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  That's how it felt like to me.

• 59:10Amanda Dobbins?

  But this, this also is my culture, is indie movies with the words Jane Austen in the title. So it's really, I thank you. Thank you for honoring both of us.

• 59:19Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't seen this film.

• 59:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 59:20Sean Fennessey?

  I should check it out.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  It's really good.

• 59:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you know any of the novels that Jane Austen wrote? Pop quiz. Can you name all six of them? Go.

• 59:29Sean Fennessey?

  Emma?

• 59:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:31Sean Fennessey?

  Sense and Sensibility?

• 59:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Correct.

• 59:33Sean Fennessey?

  Persuasion?

• 59:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yep.

• 59:35Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 59:37Amanda Dobbins?

  You got three.

• 59:39Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's probably all I can name.

• 59:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, you're missing one really big one.

• 59:42Speaker 02

  The biggest one.

• 59:42Amanda Dobbins?

  The big one.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  The biggest one.

• 59:44Sean Fennessey?

  Pride and Prejudice.

• 59:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, four, okay.

• 59:45Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Those are all the ones that have film adaptations.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  And then the last two are locations.

• 59:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 59:51Sean Fennessey?

  One is like Thackeray Cottage.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 59:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 59:57Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know the other two. That was pretty good.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  Mansfield Park.

• 59:59Amanda Dobbins?

  And North Angarabi. Yeah.

• 1:00:01Sean Fennessey?

  Mansfield Park I've seen, wonderful, yes. Starring Frances O'Connor, who I love.

• 1:00:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Sean Fennessey?

  Um, what's the sixth one?

• 1:00:06Amanda Dobbins?

  North Angarabi. Probably like the least known.

• 1:00:09Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know that one.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  Her earliest.

• 1:00:10Sean Fennessey?

  Four out of six, not bad.

• 1:00:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, it's.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Needing to be prompted for Pride and Prejudice is a little tough, but other than that, I'm.

• 1:00:17Amanda Dobbins?

  So four out of six is one of like the.

• 1:00:19Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't know there was gonna be a test on this episode, okay?

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  And it wasn't Shakespeare.

• 1:00:23Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  How dare you?

• 1:00:24Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Amanda number 10.

• 1:00:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, um, I've cheated and, uh, I have three. It's a collection of performances under the umbrella of really accomplished actors having fun with some budgets. And it is, uh, Rosalind Pike in Now You See Me, Now You Don't, Coleman Domingo in The Running Man, and Tobias Menzies in F1.

• 1:00:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, this is the villain corridor.

• 1:00:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 1:00:45Sean Fennessey?

  I like it.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Coleman Domingo in The Running Man was just like.

• 1:00:47Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, this is.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  So good.

• 1:00:49Amanda Dobbins?

  This is a great tradition in history when our great, great actors, many of whom have British accents, show up just to be bad, bad guys in a movie.

• 1:00:59Sean Fennessey?

  It is, it is a great tradition. It's also a great tradition of I need to add a wing to my home.

• 1:01:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I need a cool million.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  I need a boat.

• 1:01:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yep, I need a boat.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm Tobias Menzies.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  enjoys his boat.

• 1:01:10Sean Fennessey?

  I do too.

• 1:01:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Do you think he got a smaller dinghy for Wicked for Good, like to go with his The Running Man boat?

• 1:01:15Sean Fennessey?

  I hope so.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Sean Fennessey?

  The, all three of these characters are utterly preposterous. They make no sense. They're very enjoyable. They're very charismatic in their own way.

• 1:01:24Amanda Dobbins?

  They all have the moment also where they get the one scene where they're like, oh, I see why you said yes to this.

• 1:01:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:01:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Or in Rosalind Pike's case, the accent.

• 1:01:34Sean Fennessey?

  Did you see Now You See Me, Now You Don't?

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Guess what I didn't?

• 1:01:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Can I tell you who she plays?

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Please.

• 1:01:39Amanda Dobbins?

  She plays a South African diamond princess.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:01:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, she does, and she is going for the accent.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Okay. On, on a scale of like Leo and Blood Diamond to an actual person from South Africa, where are we?

• 1:01:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Leo and Blood Diamond.

• 1:01:54Amanda Dobbins?

  But like.

• 1:01:55Sean Fennessey?

  I would recommend it just for that.

• 1:01:57Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, but like from the British accent to Leo and you know.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, just all over the map.

• 1:02:03Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, my number 10 is also themed. It's.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  These are great.

• 1:02:06Sean Fennessey?

  Comic relief inside of comedies. The funniest parts of a movie that I thought was pretty funny. Connor O'Malley in Friendship, My Beloved, just truly the funniest person on earth, best known for his viral videos and work writing on late night television shows, but. Entering the garage and berating Tim Robinson is one of my favorite things.

• 1:02:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Hysterical.

• 1:02:25Sean Fennessey?

  Also, I think we should still be in Afghanistan, probably the funniest line in the movie.

• 1:02:32Sean Fennessey?

  And then Danny Huston, I was a little bit more mixed on The Naked Gun. I really wanted to love The Naked Gun. But everything Danny Huston did, it's very similar to the Rosamund Pike performance where I'm like, this motherfucker committed to The Naked Gun.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  He's went all in.

• 1:02:44Sean Fennessey?

  He's really doing it and delivering absurd lines. He's also a very funny opposite Pamela Anderson, whose name, fake name escapes me is like. It's like Angela Spaghetti and Meatballs and he keeps calling her by her full name throughout the entire movie, but um. I, I, these two probably made me laugh more than anybody short of Leo in one battle. So that's my number 10. Okay, number nine, Joanna.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  This is the award for just playing himself, but he's always welcome. It's Michael Sarah and the Phoenician Scheme and The Running Man. Just when he shows up in The Running Man, my interest just went through the roof and I just had the best time in the minutes that he is there in that movie.

• 1:03:21Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think the movie is better if it's Michael Sarah in the Glenn Powell role?

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Sean Fennessey?

  Have you considered that?

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  I kind of do, yeah. I kind of do.

• 1:03:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Cause with wigs and accents?

• 1:03:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Sean Fennessey?

  Doing bits, you know?

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  With fake mustaches and everything?

• 1:03:34Sean Fennessey?

  A little bit less punching and kicking.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I had literally no idea what was happening when Michael Sarah was on screen. I was laughing.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Amanda Dobbins?

  But I did not understand.

• 1:03:42Sean Fennessey?

  He was the son of a dissident who had created a series of traps in his house in the event that the, the.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  A hot dog?

• 1:03:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I was, I.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  It was the Home Alone sequence.

• 1:03:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm not saying he was the problem.

• 1:03:53Sean Fennessey?

  His father was a police officer who left the force.

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  Thieves are involved.

• 1:03:57Sean Fennessey?

  And he became a hot dog vendor as a show of resistance to the encroaching media.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  But the moment that he. He like hits the button.

• 1:04:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  You know.

• 1:04:06Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't know why he was hitting the button.

• 1:04:08Sean Fennessey?

  Cause he wanted. Helping the super soaker.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  He wanted to kill a bunch of guys.

• 1:04:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think he, I think he just let the chaos take over, right?

• 1:04:14Amanda Dobbins?

  You can explain this as many times as you want. I'm not, never gonna like.

• 1:04:18Sean Fennessey?

  Huge pod for the running man so far.

• 1:04:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Sean Fennessey?

  Two, two performances out of the movie. Never would have guessed that.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  A movie that I didn't particularly enjoy. And then the Phoenician scheme, Michael Sarah was born to be in this role in a Wes Anderson film.

• 1:04:31Sean Fennessey?

  He's wonderful. His transformation from the, uh, the bug tutor to the spy is magic shit.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Really good, really good.

• 1:04:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Really good.

• 1:04:41Sean Fennessey?

  Great pick. Okay, Amanda number nine.

• 1:04:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I, this was originally two people, but then I cut it down to one because of overlap.

• 1:04:47Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:04:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, Jack Wade in Companion, which I think Companion is like the, I just wanted to get it in on one of our.

• 1:04:53Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you'll see that I did the same.

• 1:04:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, that's why I took the other person off. Uh, it's like very, very charming genre movie that totally works. He is, uh, it, I, it hangs on two performances, but he communicates the right amount of, um.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Smarm.

• 1:05:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Pathos and smarm, I would say. And he had like a little run, but this is the movie when I was like, oh wow, you are both Meg Ryan incarnate and your own person.

• 1:05:21Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh.

• 1:05:21Sean Fennessey?

  And Dennis Quaid.

• 1:05:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, sure. But yeah, but he brings like a little bit. And I was like, this is good for him.

• 1:05:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  Are you, are you a Novocain fan or?

• 1:05:30Amanda Dobbins?

  I saw it.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Amanda Dobbins?

  He was fine in it. Yeah. I was there. I thought, I was in the theater.

• 1:05:35Sean Fennessey?

  Did you see Novocain?

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:05:36Sean Fennessey?

  What'd you think?

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  I liked it. But I saw it like at home on streaming. So like low, it didn't feel like a real movie movie to me.

• 1:05:42Sean Fennessey?

  If you remove all the nepo baby stuff from Jack Wade, he just kind of does look like a guy who should be in a movie. Like he seems like a guy who should be in a movie in 1988.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Sean Fennessey?

  Or 1968. Like he just, he can hold a movie together and that is not to be underestimated.

• 1:05:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I think once.

• 1:05:55Sean Fennessey?

  He's very good in that.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  I think once he's done with the boys, I'm interested to see what happens.

• 1:05:59Sean Fennessey?

  Where he goes. Yeah.

• 1:06:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I didn't know he was in the boys.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  He's like the main character.

• 1:06:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Well, speaking of new wings on your house.

• 1:06:05Sean Fennessey?

  New, I just swapped this name in to avoid some overlap with you. But I've just put Chase Infinity from One Battle after another, which is pretty revelatory. And I think we're overlooking it now because she's like, whatever, like the brand ambassador for what, like Louis Vuitton or something. She's about to be like very famous.

• 1:06:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Chanel.

• 1:06:20Sean Fennessey?

  Chanel, thank you.

• 1:06:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, which is big because that's their, it's back.

• 1:06:24Sean Fennessey?

  Great. I'm excited for that.

• 1:06:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I would love to be a brand ambassador for Chanel.

• 1:06:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:06:28Amanda Dobbins?

  It's Sofia Coppola and Chase Infinity.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Chanel, are you listening? Amanda's ready.

• 1:06:31Amanda Dobbins?

  They're not because they haven't sent me any of the stuff. But yeah, I'm excited for her.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  Maybe the people of Chanel are huge Hamlet fans and they're listening to this episode.

• 1:06:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I think Chanel also dressed Tiana Taylor for a recent event, so they're, they're on the One Battle team, which is cool.

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  Chase Infinity coming from the worst plot twist in a television show that I've seen in the last couple of years.

• 1:06:52Sean Fennessey?

  Literally the center of the worst plot twist.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  The twist herself.

• 1:06:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  To this tremendous performance is just a real comeback.

• 1:07:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's pretty amazing and I think not just being able to hold her own, but the movie effectively becoming hers, like it becoming her emotional sense. Louis Vuitton.

• 1:07:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I'm sorry. And then it was Tiana Taylor who was Chanel. I wish that she were Chanel instead.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Chanel, Amanda's still interested in her.

• 1:07:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:20Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, I think she's terrific in this movie and it's very, it's always exciting when a new person arrives and can, can take a movie away from Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro and Leonardo DiCaprio. And, um, you know, Alan Segal was telling, he just interviewed James Cameron about the new Avatar film and he's publishing a piece soon. And, and he shared some thoughts about, uh, Chase Infinity's performance and what he responded to, which I'll, I assume is going in the story that Alan is writing.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:07:47Sean Fennessey?

  But, uh, a strong woman who knows how to wield a gun is something that Jim Cameron has explored before.

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  Some experience with.

• 1:07:54Sean Fennessey?

  And he had nice things to say about her work too.

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  Oh, great.

• 1:07:57Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay. Number eight, Joanna.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Um, so this is a dual award. Uh, so Freaky Tales, uh, a Boden and Fleck joint that came out this year, um, set in Oakland in the eighties and should have been sort of for me with Peter Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn. If you want to talk about Shaggy, this is like one of the shaggier films this year. It's like really mixed, but there is a vignette inside of it, uh, with Normani and Dominique Thorne, who play these girls who engage in this rap battle. And it's just, I loved it. Yeah. Peter Pascal is here, Ben Mendelsohn are here. Two of my favorite, most charismatic people.

• 1:08:32Sean Fennessey?

  Tom Hanks is there.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  Tommy, they're not holding it down.

• 1:08:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  But Dominique Thorne and Normani are, and, and they were just really, really fun. Uh, and just like, looking at them standing outside Grand Lake Theater, which is like my like theater palace in Oakland was just really, really fun. So.

• 1:08:48Sean Fennessey?

  I'm glad you mentioned it. We didn't even talk about this movie this year. I think it was a Sundance 24 film and then it got a release later this year. I don't think it's very successful. I also enjoyed Jay Ellis, though, as Sleepy Floyd in the final third of the movie. I thought he was very fun, too. He gets to be like a, uh, kung fu fighting, uh, defeater of home invaders. It's like, it's an entertaining enough movie that doesn't really work. Okay. Number eight, Amanda.

• 1:09:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17. This movie didn't totally work for me, but he did. He has to do a lot and I.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Swing, the biggest swing. This is the biggest voice swing outside of Rosamund Pike's.

• 1:09:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I find this man incredibly watchable. Yeah.

• 1:09:27Sean Fennessey?

  That's a good point.

• 1:09:28Amanda Dobbins?

  It's maybe the biggest swing, swing because it doesn't land quite like Rosamund Pike's does. I, uh, find this man very watchable, as do many people because he is Batman, but I, I like that he did it. I like his weird hot movie star vibe. I like that there are directors who still want to let him be really weird. Um, but not too weird. I, there was a note to dial the voice back slightly, right? From director Bong.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  That's the, that's the dial back.

• 1:09:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that we did in fact see the dialed back version. Anyway, um, I think it's cool when movie stars try things.

• 1:10:03Sean Fennessey?

  I fully agree.

• 1:10:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree.

• 1:10:04Sean Fennessey?

  I like the way that he is navigating his career. Did you guys watch the teaser for the drama?

• 1:10:08Amanda Dobbins?

  No, because I don't want any spoilers.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  I saw the engagement announcement, though, in the Boston Globe.

• 1:10:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, that was a very clever bit of marketing. Yeah. The drama, very excited about that.

• 1:10:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm very excited about it.

• 1:10:19Speaker 02

  But I was really excited about Mickey 17 as well.

• 1:10:21Sean Fennessey?

  Fair point. Christopher Borgli's last movie was Dream Scenario and the drama stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  Sure does.

• 1:10:28Sean Fennessey?

  That's a pretty big deal coming in April. My number eight is Inga Ibsdottir-Lilias, the Norwegian actress who plays Renata Rundvays sister in Sentimental Value, a film that I'm gonna say it once more. I really like that movie a lot. And I will not be talked down. I think it's simultaneously very funny and absolutely devastating. And

• 1:10:49Amanda Dobbins?

  I think she's wonderful in it.

• 1:10:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Don't you think she's gonna be nominated?

• 1:10:52Sean Fennessey?

  I do think she will be nominated.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  She has so many Oscars awards.

• 1:10:55Sean Fennessey?

  I do. When I saw the movie, I thought she would win. And now I feel like Tiana Taylor is a freight train in that category, which is surprising to me. But I think she's fantastic. And the scene in particular that I love the most is when Stellan Skarsgård's character, her father, goes to visit her in her apartment so that he can meet up with her son and ask him to participate in the movie that he's going to make. And she becomes very upset and remembers the feelings that she had when they made a movie together when she was a young girl. And that feeling of abandonment when he left and did not spend any time with her after that incredibly powerful experience when she was a young kid, not unlike some of the Hamlet experience in the movie. And, you know, this is a movie with some very celebrated actors, and I'd never seen

• 1:11:40Sean Fennessey?

  this actress before. And I thought she was by far the most real person in the movie.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:44Sean Fennessey?

  And very, very special. So that's number eight. Number seven, Joe.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  I think a theme on my list is sort of like highlighting great performances in movies that didn't work for me. So Kiss of the Spider Woman, a movie that I didn't think was gonna hit, didn't really hit for me. But Tonnatou, who plays sort of the the main character, despite what Jennifer Lopez would have you believe of of this film, Luis Molina is, I thought, was fantastic. And this, he's in the role that William Hurt played in the, you know, original film version. There's been, you know, musical stage version. This is the musical movie version. And he has to narrate basically the entire movie. And he is incredibly handsome, incredibly charismatic. I watched this, I had seen the the other version of Kisses Spider Woman years ago,

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  but I rewatched it after I watched this version. And watching William Hurt do a sort of like Swishy, queeny, like, really over the top version of this character. And then watching this queer man embody this character. I just thought this was like a really, really good, like, intro to a performer that I wasn't very familiar with.

• 1:12:52Sean Fennessey?

  This has been on my list and I still haven't watched. I've kind of been dreading watching because I know it's like well over two hours and it, you know, not a huge Bill Condon fan.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:01Sean Fennessey?

  And it's not gotten very good reviews. But I will watch it and in part because of the performance that you're citing, which apparently is quite good.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  Really, really good. Diego Luna is also here. Diego Luna, one of my favorite performers, is just completely overshadowed by this guy.

• 1:13:12Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 1:13:13Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Number seven.

• 1:13:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Number seven. Kiki Palmer and SZA, One of Them Days.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Which I meant to include on honorable mentions of our best movies of the year and forgot to. Just a really delightful comedy. And there's, you know, I think like the cute version of this list would just be putting SZA on it because she's sort of a breakout comedic star and she's really very funny in this. But the chemistry that she has with Kiki Palmer, who's so charming and is like driving the film, is very special. They're great together. This is a delightful movie.

• 1:13:46Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. I would love it if it was sort of like The Road To, Bob Hope style, where they just like did a new one of these every two years.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Morocco, Singapore.

• 1:13:54Sean Fennessey?

  That would be really fun.

• 1:13:55Speaker 02

  That would be great.

• 1:13:56Sean Fennessey?

  Because they're really, they're really fantastic together. SZA, who knew? Who knew?

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's the, it's not easy being a comic actress after, like, does SZA have training as an actor?

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  She's just a, she's a fun hang? Kiki Palmer, we know, like, we knew about it. We knew she could do that. Anyway, okay, number seven for me is Josh O'Connor. Just Josh O'Connor, just writ large.

• 1:14:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Sean Fennessey?

  Just everything Josh O'Connor's doing.

• 1:14:19Amanda Dobbins?

  This may come up again.

• 1:14:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  Might.

• 1:14:21Sean Fennessey?

  That includes rebuilding, that includes The Mastermind, that includes Wake Up Dead Man.

• 1:14:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Sean Fennessey?

  It even includes A History of Sound, a film I didn't really care for that much, but that I think he's good enough in.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Sean Fennessey?

  I'll just underline rebuilding because we haven't had a lot of time to talk about it, but that's just a movie that I thought was very affecting, very quiet. All three of these kind of core performances are very different. They are all fairly quiet and O'Connor has to listen a lot in these movies while also being inside of his own kind of narcissism. And it's so different because my wife just finished watching Wake Up Dead Man and she was like, that didn't, she didn't love it and she didn't love it in part because she felt like Joshua Connor didn't get to be sexy, right? In Challenger, she was like, this fucking dirtbag, this is where I'm feeling, you know? And to me, that was like a testimony to his greatness, you know, like that he can kind

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  She just wasn't watching me eat a churro all day long. That's her preference.

• 1:15:17Sean Fennessey?

  She enjoyed that, as did I, frankly.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, who didn't?

• 1:15:21Sean Fennessey?

  But his range is pretty, pretty cool to watch right now. And it's always fun when just by randomness of the schedule, a guy gets to be in four movies at one time. It's very, it's increasingly uncommon.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  But he's been doing multiple movies for the last couple of years. He's just really running it.

• 1:15:35Sean Fennessey?

  And we know he's now going to be in this Spielberg film, which is exciting. Okay, Joe, number six.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  Um, Odessa Zian for Marty Supreme.

• 1:15:43Sean Fennessey?

  Ooh, I had this on and took it off.

• 1:15:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  I, Pamela Adlon has graced us with some great performers, both out of her show and out of her loins. And I thought she was fantastic in Marty Supreme, a movie that I don't think I'm as high on as you guys are, but I thought she was just like really, really electric as Marty's like childhood friend who gets involved in several of the capers along the way and is very important because of the decisions that a lot of characters make in this movie. It is very important that you are emotionally with her through some of her decisions. And I just found her really appealing, really funny, really sexy, really all, all these things and just like absolutely mesmerizing.

• 1:16:25Amanda Dobbins?

  This is me right now, learning that she's Pamela Adlon's daughter. I had no idea, which is a credit to her. She's great.

• 1:16:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, she's fantastic in this movie. That character is very fun as well.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:38Sean Fennessey?

  Great pick, number six, Amanda.

• 1:16:40Amanda Dobbins?

  So I, this is my original number six, then I changed it because you had changed your list, because of your list, but then you changed yours, so I changed it back. So we're going with Tom Burke in Black Bag, which I think deserves its own number six. Black Bag, another movie that we all really enjoyed, but I think didn't make any of like the top, the top 10s, just because it's.

• 1:17:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I don't want to diminish Steven Soderbergh in his bag, making like a spy dinner party thriller just for fun, but that is its own thing now, you know? Let us not take it for granted.

• 1:17:15Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 1:17:16Amanda Dobbins?

  But Tom Burke is up against Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender, like, just Marisa Bella, really, quite literally.

• 1:17:26Sean Fennessey?

  Please.

• 1:17:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And he is so funny and commanding and the lie detector scene in particular with him, like, you know, he's the right amount of charming and smooth and amused and also what the hell are we doing that the film needs because everybody else is on one of those poles? And I guess he is sort of the audience stand-in in the movie, but that's a hard thing to be in a Soderbergh film where you're, they're poking everyone.

• 1:17:59Sean Fennessey?

  Well, he starts as the villain and evolves into something way different.

• 1:18:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Sean Fennessey?

  And you can never totally read him. It's just like him in The Souvenir where you're like, what is going on here?

• 1:18:07Amanda Dobbins?

  He's such a great actor.

• 1:18:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he is a good actor.

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  You know, he shows up in anything. He shows up in.

• 1:18:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Mank.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  Furiosa.

• 1:18:13Sean Fennessey?

  Furiosa, yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  You know, and you're sort of like, oh, wow, is this a great movie? And then he's gone and you're like, no.

• 1:18:17Sean Fennessey?

  Precisely. Okay, what is my number six? Let's peel back to my list. Oh, yeah, Sophie Thatcher from Companion, who you know from your days covering Yellow Jackets and who has also been having a big couple of years and I think it's been low.

• 1:18:31Speaker 02

  Book of Boba Fett, I'm sure.

• 1:18:32Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't see that one. I also enjoyed her in Heretic last year. I enjoyed her in The Boogeyman, which was not successful, but she was very good in it. And she's, you know, there's a little bit of Jamie Lee Curtis, I would say, in Sophie Thatcher, you know?

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  Interesting. Tell me why.

• 1:18:48Sean Fennessey?

  Well, very strong, but very vulnerable, very smart, very kind of fast-talking, but also is often in danger. And that's like a scream queen kind of persona, you know? She's kind of pursuing it. If you look at the projects that she's getting cast in, this movie is interesting because it's kind of like.

• 1:19:07Sean Fennessey?

  Lars and the Real Girl meets Terminator? And that's a clever idea for a movie. I feel, I agree with you. I think this is just a really fun, down the middle, you know, three star, six out of 10. Like, had a nice, really nice time watching this.

• 1:19:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Closer, you know? I went, huh, that's good. Yeah. Many times.

• 1:19:23Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and I, she, just like Jack Quaid, I'm like, just more movies with her. That would be great. If we could just get one of these a year with her, that would be exciting.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  She's definitely the performer out of Yellow Jackets who is making like the, the smartest choices. Book of Boba Fett aside, which was terrible. But like, she's making really smart choices.

• 1:19:37Sean Fennessey?

  Not on Ella Purnell?

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Ella Purnell is great, but she's, she's stuck in Fallout land for a little bit. So we'll see where she goes.

• 1:19:43Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's a book about Boba Fett?

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a, don't worry about it, honestly.

• 1:19:50Sean Fennessey?

  It's a Jonathan Franzen novel?

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  I would prefer you go to the beach and get sunburned and read a novel and kiss people and do all the other things that you want to do.

• 1:19:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, thank you.

• 1:19:57Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Joe, number five.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  Um, Josh O'Connor. Have you heard of him?

• 1:20:01Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:20:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  Wake up Dead Man.

• 1:20:03Amanda Dobbins?

  It's fine. I think you guys are, I think you guys are underrated because as you'll see, as we continue this podcast.

• 1:20:09Sean Fennessey?

  So specifically for Wake Up Dead Man?

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  Correct. I, I, I mean.

• 1:20:12Sean Fennessey?

  Did you like Wake Up Dead Man?

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

  I did medium.

• 1:20:16Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  I thought in terms of the, the Knives Out franchises, failed to do what the first one did, which is make a meal out of every single, like, there's so many wasted people in Wake Up Dead Man. There's so many people where you're like, why is Andrew Scott here? Like, what, what use are we getting out of him? Um, I love what Brolin did in this movie. But Josh O'Connor is actually having like a, a soulful journey inside of a Knives Out movie and a, and a soulful journey that impacts Daniel Craig in a meaningful way. And so I found it, it added, it's not my favorite Knives Out movie. I liked it better than two. But it is the sort of, the one I will be thinking about the longest, I think, because there's some real interesting things about faith and, um, community and

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  all kinds of things wrapped up inside of Josh O'Connor's performance.

• 1:21:04Sean Fennessey?

  This episode was supposed to be our Wake Up Dead Man episode. That will be on Monday.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:21:08Sean Fennessey?

  So we will get into it then.

• 1:21:11Amanda Dobbins?

  This episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by State Farm. Having people in your corner to help you makes all the difference. For example, I'm usually loathe to trust Sean and his movie recommendations. But after many months of him waxing rhapsodic about Train Dreams, I finally watched it, and I have to be honest, he was right. It was wonderful.

• 1:21:29Sean Fennessey?

  And like those people, State Farm is there to help you feel supported by helping you choose the coverage you need. Go online at statefarm.com or use the award-winning app to get help from one of their local agents. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 1:21:42Sean Fennessey?

  All right, Amanda, number five.

• 1:21:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Rebecca Ferguson, House of Dynamite. Tracy Letts, if you're listening, I declared you ineligible because of-

• 1:21:50Sean Fennessey?

  Conflict of interest?

• 1:21:51Amanda Dobbins?

  An anti-corruption stance that we're taking here on The Big Picture.

• 1:21:54Sean Fennessey?

  Are we? I can't say the same.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  But Chanel, if Chanel, if you're listening.

• 1:22:04Amanda Dobbins?

  They're making charve shirts. Do you know how much they cost?

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 1:22:07Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't have the budget for that. Anyway, I liked this movie more than Sean did, and I think what I really liked about it was the first third, which is the Rebecca Ferguson.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  Definitely the best.

• 1:22:20Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, yet another mom on screen just trying to do her best, and the world is making it quite literally impossible, and the ramifications are quite bad. And again, I felt pretty nauseous watching this. But I think that she is, it's a very unflashy performance, and she sets the stakes so high in this movie that I think much of it can't live up to it, but she's very good.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Sean Fennessey?

  She is very good. Some notes on her accent. Not really sure what state in the United States she's from. What do you think? Minnesota?

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  Tennessee.

• 1:23:01Sean Fennessey?

  Tennessee?

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  Maybe she's an army brat, moved around a lot?

• 1:23:05Sean Fennessey?

  New Mexico?

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Sean Fennessey?

  Definitely.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  That's her backstory.

• 1:23:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Uh, I like her quite a bit. My number five is Miriam Afshari, who plays Shiva in It Was Just An Accident, the Jafar Panahi film. And she plays a photographer and a woman who was engaged in the same capture and torture that the lead character in the film undergoes. I feel that this is the best written character in the movie and the best performance in the movie. The character who most clearly represents the rage and frustration and determination to find out the truth and to be, to find justice, but also to put the past in the past and the way that those two ideas are sometimes in conflict with each other.

• 1:23:51Sean Fennessey?

  And this is an actress I haven't seen before and she is absolutely incredible. And she had to perform as all the performers did in secret. This movie was made in secret, so that the Iranian government did not become aware of it. And she is felt the most like a real person in this thriller that is like sometimes absurd and very funny. She felt like the person who was engaged in the deepest pain in the story. Okay. Number four.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  Oh, this is me.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  So, Nuvall Vag, which is the Linkletter film that I liked most this year.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  Zoe Deutsch is the, is the sort of like face of this movie because she is a recognizable actor and she speaks English. But I think the revelations of this movie were Guillaume Marbec and Aubrey Dillon as Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Paul Belmondo, respectively. These are guys who have never acted before and I just thought they were fantastic, especially Guillaume Marbec was, as Jean-Luc Godard was just like...

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Eccentric, sexy, like, um, just captivating, uh, intellectual, but capricious and just like that pain in the ass that you understand why people put up with because when he is cooking, he is cooking. And I just thought he was, uh, it's essential that he works in this film. And I thought he was so, so good.

• 1:25:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  And I was just really shocked to learn that he had never acted.

• 1:25:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that is really surprising.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:21Sean Fennessey?

  They are both like spitting images of these two characters that they're playing too, which is presumably why they were cast, but I think later, man, needs to know what he's doing with actors.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:30Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  Did you guys, did you guys like Nuvavag or you were not?

• 1:25:33Sean Fennessey?

  That was fine.

• 1:25:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Charmed.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Amanda Dobbins?

  But he, that performance, he is annoying in an irresistible way that I think is like essential to the, to the movie and also, I mean, I was just gonna say recognizable. Like, it's just like, it's just, I mean, how many times have I been, you know, faced with that?

• 1:25:50Sean Fennessey?

  An annoying irresistible cinephile?

• 1:25:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:25:53Sean Fennessey?

  Could we build a podcast around that?

• 1:25:55Speaker 02

  When are you gonna make your movie, Sean?

• 1:25:57Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, certainly never. Um, okay.

• 1:26:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Number four.

• 1:26:00Sean Fennessey?

  Number four for you.

• 1:26:01Amanda Dobbins?

  This was the, the first names that I thought of when, uh, confronted with this spreadsheet.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  This is incredible.

• 1:26:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Assignment for performances, Tramell Tillman and Katie O'Brien, Mission Impossible, The Final Reckoning.

• 1:26:12Sean Fennessey?

  These are great picks.

• 1:26:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, listen, this movie, we can say it now, we're, we've, you know, we're several months from our emotional experience. It just doesn't work. I rewatched it on the plane, which-

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  This makes me happy. I feel like you have a moment of clarity.

• 1:26:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen, I, I watched it on the plane, um, uh, Thanksgiving because, um, I could watch it without sound because I have, you know, the, dealing with the children. And I texted Sean from the plane. I paid 30 bucks for wifi to text Sean to be like, yo, what was happening in this movie? What a mess. But then- Tramell Tillman and Katie O'Brien show up and I like I have pictures on my phone that I took of the screen being like my friends are here and he just when they come on the screen they're the only people who understand what the movie is supposed to be and are like bringing some flair to it and are also looking at Tom Cruise in the way that I think one should look at Tom Cruise after he's jumped into the sea and been rescued by divers.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  What does that look like?

• 1:27:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  She kind of went for it.

• 1:27:16Amanda Dobbins?

  It's like I you know and he's like framed Tramell Tillman is like framed in the door just so being like mm hmm.

• 1:27:23Sean Fennessey?

  He's like you must be out of your mind.

• 1:27:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Really, really great moments of levity in a film that is just way, way, way too tied up in itself. If all of the characters had been able to channel this, it could have been at least a good movie. Maybe? No, I don't know.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Have you also had a final reckoning with Mission Impossible?

• 1:27:48Sean Fennessey?

  I said it on the pod that we did. It's the heartbreak of the year for me. I mean, I love the Mission Impossible movies and the biggest testimony to the heartbreak is the fact that I've rewatched every Mission Impossible movie at least five times and I've only seen this movie once. In fact, you went to go see it with Jack a second time before we recorded. I couldn't make that second recording. I think maybe the episode that we did is slightly incoherent because I couldn't remember a lot from the first screening.

• 1:28:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And also the movie itself.

• 1:28:12Sean Fennessey?

  But that's part of the issue is the movie is kind of hard to understand because the script is such a mess and it's devastating. I love this franchise. I really believe in Macquarie as a writer and director and I think the movie stinks. So it sucks. But they're great and I agree with these picks. They're a lot of fun and there's two great action sequences in the movie and everything else is kind of risible. Okay. Number four for me. What is it? What did I write down? Oh yeah, I'm proud of this. ASAP Rocky in Highest to Lowest and Archie Medeque in Lurker are playing kind of the same role in reverse. They're both playing musicians, one aspiring, one accomplished. They're one is playing a young musician who is kind of looking up to someone who's reached a higher status of success in the music industry in the case of ASAP Rocky's character who's a rapper

• 1:28:57Sean Fennessey?

  who kidnaps his, you know, idol's son's best friend accidentally, leading to this, you know, intrigue throughout New York City. Archie Medeque plays a kind of like. Somewhere between Drake and Dijon-style LA hipster, hip-hop and R&B star, whom a admirer slash stalker enters the orbit of and eventually becomes, grows closer and closer to, until he grows too close. Lurker has not really been seen that much. I think it's one of the coolest debuts of the year. Archie Medecky, I thought, was absolutely terrible in Saltburn.

• 1:29:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Really?

• 1:29:34Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I think it was one of my least favorite performances of that year. And I think he's very, very good. Like, it's a really well-observed performance about what a person with power in a small room can do. And ASAP, man, he's just pure charisma, you know? The sequence when he and Denzel are kind of rapping back and forth at each other. I know a lot of people thought that movie was kind of a mess, but them on screen, I thought, were just fantastic. And he really holding his own against one of the very best.

• 1:29:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Washington, yeah.

• 1:30:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it was pretty impressive. Okay, number three.

• 1:30:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Wait, can I just let you know that ASAP Rocky is also a Chanel ambassador?

• 1:30:06Sean Fennessey?

  That's great.

• 1:30:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, newly named.

• 1:30:08Sean Fennessey?

  You keep making it sound like you belong amongst them.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  You don't think, when you think ASAP Rocky, you don't think Anna Vanodov?

• 1:30:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm tracking it.

• 1:30:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, noted.

• 1:30:16Amanda Dobbins?

  He was also very good in If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You.

• 1:30:19Sean Fennessey?

  He was. He was very good in that. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:22Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Joe, number three.

• 1:30:24Speaker 02

  Dylan O'Brien, Twinless. I loved Twinless. Like, sort of Jane Austen wrecked my life in another movie I'm gonna talk about in my number two. There are a lot of little films that I really, really loved this year. Twinless, I thought, was just extremely watchable. Dylan O'Brien is playing a dual role and, sort of similar to some other things that we've talked about inside of this very podcast, like, you don't appreciate how good one role is until you see the second role. And then you're like, wow, he's doing two very different things very convincingly. And they really just sort of complement and highlight each other. And, you know, he's like a slacker, extremely straight dude. And then he's just like a really kind of hilariously mean gay dude and really, really embodies both.

• 1:31:09Speaker 02

  And the twin who, you know, Twinless, the premise of this movie is one of the twins has died. And when he shows up, which is a good way into the movie, you understand why the loss of him was such a big deal for the characters around him, because he is so electric.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  I just love, I, I really think Dylan O'Brien, like Jack Quaid, should be in a lot of movies. And, uh, you know, his career has come and gone due to sort of like some, you know, injuries in his career, something like that, but I just think he's always really good. And I would like to see him in a leading role, man.

• 1:31:46Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't, I didn't like this movie at all, but I thought he was fantastic in it.

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Sean Fennessey?

  And is by far the best part of it. And he's also very good in Saturday Night.

• 1:31:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Sean Fennessey?

  As Dan Aykroyd, which is a very odd part for him to be playing, but he's terrific in that as well. Okay. Number three, Amanda.

• 1:31:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, in his rifle place at number three on this list is Josh O'Connor. For Wake Up Dead Man, the mastermind, uh, and all of the promotional materials that he's been doing, specifically for History of Sound and Wake Up Dead Man.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, he and like Paul Meskell did a lot of great work together, uh, off screen or on smaller screens.

• 1:32:20Speaker 02

  I feel like Paul Meskell burned a lot of his, uh, tolerance for the, the gamification of the press tour.

• 1:32:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:26Speaker 02

  On History of Sound. And so now he's at hand and he's like, I heard he did this this year.

• 1:32:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:32:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  I gotta do Two Truths and a Lie again.

• 1:32:33Amanda Dobbins?

  But he and Josh O'Connor have real chemistry. Did you see the one where, and I think Josh O'Connor is bringing out a lot of his natural charm. Did you see the red carpet poses?

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  Did you see the one? Yes, I saw it.

• 1:32:42Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a really good one. See?

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  Did you see the one? Yes, I saw it. I saw.

• 1:32:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, and but now, and now he's like doing ASMR with Andrew Scott for Wake Up Dead Man. Anyway, we'll talk more about Wake Up Dead Man. I, I was also, I'm, I'm not, I'm not gonna dislike it, but I was mixed on it. But I thought he was an absolute delight. And in addition to like the soulfulness that you're talking about, which he brings to every performance, including the mastermind, um, he's quite funny.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  He's very funny.

• 1:33:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And he and Daniel Craig have a real vibe. And my, my feedback for Wake Up, uh, Dead Man is like, please make Josh O'Connor a recurring character in the Knives Out franchise.

• 1:33:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:33:20Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, like we need a buddy comedy. But, so I think he's wonderful. I think he's really, really funny. And it, there is something charming about.

• 1:33:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Just everyone clearly feels the same way and like, he's in four movies, he's in every single TikTok. Like, people are bringing him, you know, Ratatouille gifts on the red carpet. We all are just kind of like, oh, that guy. I'm so glad to see him. It's nice to have one of those.

• 1:33:44Sean Fennessey?

  I was recently served the video of him during a Vanity Fair shoot, where he's with Sydney Sweeney and Daniel Dedwiler, and they're chit-chatting about their favorite shows. And he starts talking about how much he loves his gardening television show.

• 1:33:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:33:57Sean Fennessey?

  And, which I wish I could remember the name of it, but it's very adorable, little Joshua Connor voice. He likes to just sit down, watch a man, take care of flowers. That gives him a great sense of peace.

• 1:34:08Amanda Dobbins?

  The little smile that he does.

• 1:34:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he's great.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Can I share one quick thing about Wake Up Dead Man? I won't have the honor of talking to you guys about it in full. I watched it on an award screener. Those things are captioned. They're usually captioned very well, because these are award screeners. At one point, Daniel Craig says, "Telling the truth can be a bitter herb."

• 1:34:29Sean Fennessey?

  That's good.

• 1:34:29Speaker 02

  The close captioning said, "Telling the truth can be a belly rub." That's what the close captioning said. And I was like, wow, he defeated them with his accent. And we rewound it like five times. I was like, he said bitter herb, right? Not belly rub.

• 1:34:42Sean Fennessey?

  Really got the meaning wrong there, too.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:44Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay, my number three is my girl Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Anne Lee.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  Incredible. So good.

• 1:34:51Sean Fennessey?

  I gotta see this movie again. She's fucking nailing this, you know? Obviously, I haven't seen the Mamma Mia film, so not aware of her ability to sing.

• 1:34:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Or Les Misérables.

• 1:34:59Sean Fennessey?

  Or I have not seen Les Misérables either.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  We've never seen Les Misérables?

• 1:35:02Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:35:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I need the Amanda Seyfried Oscar nom to come through. One, because she deserves it. Number two, because then Amanda Seyfried's singing programming for Sean is gonna be incredible in 2026.

• 1:35:13Sean Fennessey?

  Should be interesting.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Have you seen her sing Joni Mitchell on The Tonight Show?

• 1:35:17Sean Fennessey?

  Well, yes. In fact, that was one of the most impactful things that happened in 2024. And I shared that video on the internet and I said, "God damn it, make this happen." Um, what is the instrument that she's playing?

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  The lap instrument? Dulcimer, I think.

• 1:35:30Sean Fennessey?

  Dulcimer, yeah. Incredible shit. Uh, she's amazing in this movie. This movie is ridiculous in a good way.

• 1:35:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:36Sean Fennessey?

  Um, it's a very over-the-top Fantastical portrayal of a real life religious movement. And it's, you know, breaks into fits of song at various intervals. And her commitment is why the movie works. I think if she's not working in this movie, then you don't buy it because she is the sort of religious leader slash cult figure at the center of this new movement. It's Mona Fastfold's new movie, the co-writer of The Brutalist and partner Brady Corby. Those two movies together, the ways in which they're deadly serious and the ways in which they're hilarious are fascinating to me. They're very much twinned. And we'll talk about it more in January, when more people get a chance to see it. Okay, number two, Jo.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  Newly minted Golden Globe nominee Eva Victor. This is my favorite moment of the Golden Globes announcements that Eva Victor got nominated for Sorry Baby. I loved Sorry Baby. This is her project, right? She wrote, directed and starred in this. This was a, this is a tough film to get your arms around, I think, and a tough film to land because it is dealing with something incredibly serious in a, in a oftentimes hilarious, oftentimes absurd, and then oftentimes devastating way. And I think she hits all of those notes. And it's not something that I thought the Globes was going to

• 1:36:54Sean Fennessey?

  I was shocked.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  Give any attention to. And it really, really made me happy. I thought this was such a, like a couple of other names on my list, like a really important announcement of someone whose work I am going to be following. I mean, I was aware of her on like TikTok and stuff like that, but just, I think everything that she makes, I'm going to be interested in checking it out going forward.

• 1:37:13Sean Fennessey?

  Great pick. I like this movie a lot, too. Okay, number two, Amanda.

• 1:37:18Amanda Dobbins?

  So when we were making these lists or our pre-chat, we decided that two and one would be like our, our serious ones or the ones

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  Like a bigger, actual, like a lead, a lead performance.

• 1:37:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, or, you know, the awards, one still with awards chances as opposed, as opposed to with respect to Trelawney Tillman and Katie O'Brien, like the fun picks.

• 1:37:38Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:37:38Amanda Dobbins?

  So I'm, I'm grouping my two moms together here. Rose Byrne and Jennifer Lawrence Rose Byrne, if, and in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You and Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love. These are my, two of my favorite movies of the year. We talked about them on the top five episode. And it has, it has been a year of Moms and Dads. And I think that these are the performances that I saw myself the most in. Because they are white women of similar to my age. So it's really, you know, that's, that's not surprising.

• 1:38:10Sean Fennessey?

  You do see color.

• 1:38:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, no, I was just, you know, I also really, um, I did also see myself in Tiana Taylor's One Battle After Another. We don't have any One Battle After Another. Oh, we do?

• 1:38:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, Chase Infiniti, right. But, um, I, I, to your point, I do think that she's gonna win Supporting Actress. And I definitely think she'll be nominated. So I was, you know, and, and I guess Rose Byrne is in the fight. I don't think Jennifer Lawrence is gonna be nominated.

• 1:38:33Sean Fennessey?

  Lead actress, you mean, lead actress. But you were talking about Tiana Taylor.

• 1:38:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm talking, I think Tiana Taylor will win Supporting. And that is a, that is a performance of motherhood that I also really related to. Although we have some significant differences, not just the color of our skin, but also, you know, our revolutionary involvement.

• 1:38:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Um.

• 1:38:48Sean Fennessey?

  You are even more violent.

• 1:38:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, that's right.

• 1:38:52Amanda Dobbins?

  But I, I think Rose Byrne will make it in. I don't know if Jennifer Lawrence will make it in For A Time I Love. Because it's a pretty crowded year and that movie has been overlooked or underseen. But I thought they were both great, and, and to the, to the Jessie Buckley point, like, very raw performances in different ways that got different emotions out of me. But that I, I recognized. So that it's like still very human. So shout out to both of them.

• 1:39:24Sean Fennessey?

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

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

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• 1:40:20Sean Fennessey?

  Great pick. I just realized I can double up on my next one. So my next pick is Lee Byung-hun, who people may know from I Saw the Devil or Squid Game. He gave two performances this year. The first performance that he'll probably be most recognized for is his work in No Other Choice, the new Park Chan Wook movie, which was my third favorite movie of the year and is an absolute masterclass in satire and action storytelling. The other one is K-pop Demon Hunters. And I remember vividly watching K-pop Demon Hunters for the first time and seeing his name in the credits and turning to my four-year-old and like telling her how excited I was about

• 1:41:03Sean Fennessey?

  this and she could not have given less of a fuck. And the part that he plays, I want to make sure I get the actual character down. He plays in this in K-pop Demon Hunters.

• 1:41:14Speaker 02

  We ma, they're like demon, right?

• 1:41:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's like the lead demon. Massive, like mountain demon. Which is kind of an interesting use of Lee Byung-hun.

• 1:41:25Speaker 02

  I had to spend so much time covering Squid Game last year in a way that was really tough for me, actually. And he's really good in a show that had a really bad second season, second and third season. I heard his voice in K-pop Demon, I was like, oh my God. He's here. He's incredible.

• 1:41:42Sean Fennessey?

  But he has, I mean, he has a really tall task in No Other Choice. He has to be funny, he has to be desperate, he has to be sad, he has to be violent, he has to be crazed, he has to be, you know. Uh, the scene, my favorite scene in that movie, without spoiling anything, is when he goes in for a job interview and the sunlight is beaming into his eyes.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:58Sean Fennessey?

  And he's trying to focus and trying to nail the interview and not say the wrong thing that his friend has told him not to say. And make sure that he presents himself in a way that he's an appealing job applicant. We've all been there.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  Um, it's, it's a tough spot.

• 1:42:11Sean Fennessey?

  And he's very funny and very discomforting in that moment.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like, it's a very arch movie, but he still has to be a real human in it.

• 1:42:18Sean Fennessey?

  Totally.

• 1:42:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:19Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay, number one.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

  Jessie Buckley, I'm not.

• 1:42:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  I just, um, I'll add her to your, your two moms and say, uh, a great year for moms who are going through it. And, uh, I already said everything I need to say about her. I just think she's tremendous. And I considered not putting her number one because I knew we would have talked about her for a while. But honestly, I just want to cement how I feel about her performance, so.

• 1:42:42Sean Fennessey?

  Great pick.

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

  Number one.

• 1:42:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43Sean Fennessey?

  We share number one.

• 1:42:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. It's Timmy. We share a number one with Timothy Chalamet himself, who is out here on the trail. Um, self-confident, much like, much like Marty Supreme. I, you know, having seen the film, I am wondering how method he's being right now on his promo tour, but.

• 1:43:00Sean Fennessey?

  Well, he did something really interesting.

• 1:43:02Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:03Sean Fennessey?

  He went on the podcast, What Do You Want to Talk About? Are you familiar with that podcast?

• 1:43:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, yeah, I listen to it every morning.

• 1:43:09Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, it's hosted by Cody Rhodes, WWE superstar.

• 1:43:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:43:12Sean Fennessey?

  And their conversation was all about professional wrestling and his relationship to professional wrestling.

• 1:43:18Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know what Timmy's cooking, but he's right inside my brain right now. Like, he, he is literally talking about the intersection between sports and entertainment that is a theme of Marty Supreme.

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29Sean Fennessey?

  That is the definition of professional wrestling.

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:32Sean Fennessey?

  And that is something that I have often cited while talking about people like The Rock and the way that wrestlers are more well-suited to converting to movies than any other athletic figure. Because being able to sell emotion is a, is a real challenge. And him like knowing the nitty-gritty about wrestling in a certain era and talking shop with Cody Rhodes, who's a world-class superstar. Just great shit. Marty is amazing.

• 1:43:56Amanda Dobbins?

  It's so, it's so good.

• 1:43:58Sean Fennessey?

  I know you're a little more mixed on it.

• 1:43:59Amanda Dobbins?

  That's good.

• 1:44:00Sean Fennessey?

  And yeah, I think, starting in that moment when he gave the sack speech all the way up until this moment, I do think he's been doing kind of a method thing.

• 1:44:06Speaker 02

  Do you, how do you feel about my theory that while he's doing his utmost to promote this movie, I don't think he actually wants to win Best Actor this year?

• 1:44:17Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think he cares that much.

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  I don't, well, I do think he cares, but I don't think he wants to go head to- I don't think he wants to go head to head with Leo.

• 1:44:26Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, maybe.

• 1:44:28Speaker 02

  I think he doesn't want to be seen trying and not beating Leo when he's trying to position himself as the next Leo.

• 1:44:34Sean Fennessey?

  I think we're gonna learn more about that in January and February after the movie comes out. I think what he's doing now is trying to draw a lot of attention to get people to go see the movie.

• 1:44:42Amanda Dobbins?

  He wants the movie to work.

• 1:44:44Sean Fennessey?

  To do well, yeah. And he knows what's riding on it and the power, he gets to basically be Leo if this movie opens well. You know, if this movie, if this movie works business-wise, it's not gonna be Titanic, obviously, but-

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  Do you think it will?

• 1:44:57Sean Fennessey?

  I have my doubts. I hope it does.

• 1:44:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it's a tough market, which I do also think he knows. I think he's incredibly savvy, you know? And he's a real student, not just of, you know, film and acting, but press tours and-

• 1:45:10Speaker 02

  Celebrity.

• 1:45:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Celebrity and is like, and is playing the game very well. So I think he understands what is at stake for him. And he also knows how many of like star projects this year have absolutely like fallen on their faces.

• 1:45:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. I think there may be a little something to the Leo thing. And I do know that there's a, there's a class of people who think that Leo is actually just gonna coast to number two here. I have felt like it's Chalamet the whole time.

• 1:45:35Amanda Dobbins?

  You mean, you mean a second Oscar as opposed to number two to Wagner Moura, which is what I thought you meant when you first said it.

• 1:45:41Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, no, no, no. Just, just that he took Oscar number two.

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  I think it will depend, if Marty Supreme is a big hit at the box office, then to me he's a threat. But to me, it also is not like he didn't go to the Governor Awards. Like, there's certain things that he's just not doing.

• 1:45:55Sean Fennessey?

  I know. I think he's trying to carve a new path.

• 1:45:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:45:57Sean Fennessey?

  I could be, and it might not work, and you might be right, it might be backfiring. But I think he's like, if we're gonna change the way this stuff is, there's a new way to do it. It's really bold and could be perceived as arrogant. And I'm sure that there are like classical awards systems that don't like this sort of stuff.

• 1:46:12Speaker 02

  I'm not upset about it. I mean, he can do whatever he wants to do. I was just sort of like, he didn't go last year and he missed.

• 1:46:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:46:19Speaker 02

  And I'm just sort of like, well, if you tried to carve your own path last year and you and you almost but didn't get it.

• 1:46:25Sean Fennessey?

  But as soon as Adrian Brody went on stage, everyone in the world was like, shit, we should have went with Timmy.

• 1:46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course, of course, yeah. So do you think it's going to be that like, it should have been you last year kind of win?

• 1:46:35Sean Fennessey?

  Those happen all the time.

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  They do, they do.

• 1:46:37Sean Fennessey?

  So that's very much in play. I don't know, we'll see. It's a fun race. It's a fun race because it's, you know, it's now the old master who is more than worthy of two. And the guy who like, the industry is on his shoulders and, you know, Zendaya and Tom Holland and a couple of other people. But it's like, if movies are going to keep going, like, he's not making fucking TV shows. He's only making big movies.

• 1:46:59Speaker 02

  There might be.

• 1:46:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Homeland and he's out.

• 1:47:00Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  There might be the idea that Best Picture and Director and other things are going to go to one battle, that perhaps both supporting categories, if you guys are right about Tiana Taylor, and then they feel like they need to award Marty Supreme. Again, I think it depends if Marty Supreme opens well.

• 1:47:19Sean Fennessey?

  We'll see.

• 1:47:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, let's go now to my conversation with Kleber Mendoza Filho.

• 1:47:29Sean Fennessey?

  Very happy to be here with Kleber Mendoza Filho. So I want to start by talking about your life with movies. So it's such a crucial component of The Secret Agent, but we see a lot of young people going to the cinema and receive in the film. Do you remember the first movie you saw?

• 1:47:46Speaker 04

  The first film I saw, and I know this because my mother always told this story, it was a Tom and Jerry marathon, right at the San Luis Cinema, which is one of the characters in The Secret Agent. And that movie palace opened in nineteen fifty-two. It's still open. It's it's one of the great movie palaces in the world, I think, today. It's absolutely intact and recently restored. And that's where I that's where I went to see my first film screening.

• 1:48:20Sean Fennessey?

  How old?

• 1:48:22Speaker 04

  This was nineteen seventy-three, so I must have been four, almost five years old.

• 1:48:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so then take me back to seventy-seven as a filmgoer then, since that's such a critical year for this film.

• 1:48:33Speaker 04

  Seventy-seven was a special, interesting year personally for me because we had a health crisis in the family. My mother, she she had a treatment for breast cancer at the time. And the family really tried to protect the two little kids, myself and my brother. I was nine at the time, my brother was seven. And my younger uncle, Ronaldo, he took us to the cinema many, many times, a crazy amount of times, basically to take us away from

• 1:49:10Sean Fennessey?

  An escape.

• 1:49:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, from from home. And that's that was an interesting moment because as a child, I wasn't really aware of what was happening. And and I was going to see lots of movies in in the downtown area in Hecithia, which I think explains my previous film, Pictures of Ghosts. Of course, I I was I grew I grew up and became a cinephile. And then I did journalism and became a film critic and, of course, a filmmaker. But at the time, it felt like a real discovery, not only of films, but also of, you know, the downtown area.

• 1:49:55Speaker 04

  I remember the smells and the colors. And filmgoing was a big part of being downtown, you know. I think the cinemas attracted thousands and thousands of people every week.

• 1:50:10Speaker 04

  And I have many memories of that time. And the interesting thing is, not only do I remember the films I saw at the time, but I also remember the films I never saw at the time. But I would see the posters and the lobby cards. And that really played with one's imagination. Because at the time, of course, we had no internet. And the only way to access films was in the cinema or maybe on television. But also outside, you know, in the hall, in the lobby, and in the windows on the streets. So that's how I first saw, you know, The Omen, which was rated 18 in Brazil at the time.

• 1:50:54Speaker 04

  And Jaws, which I only finally saw in the early 80s. And yeah, so many, so much of that iconography is very much part of my life, you know.

• 1:51:07Sean Fennessey?

  It's part of this film too, clearly.

• 1:51:09Speaker 04

  It's part of this film, yeah. There are many references of film posters in the background. And I like to say that for Pictures of Ghosts, which is a documentary and a film essay, the São Luís Cinema is shot like a character. But in this film, The Secret Agent, I think it's shot like an actor, as if it was acting.

• 1:51:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's very alive. I'm curious about the choice to make effectively these two films, which are very paired in some ways, but both memory movies in succession like this. Like, is it a certain time in your life, or why did it come at these times?

• 1:51:46Speaker 04

  It was never planned, because I spent, I did Bakura, of course, and it was released in 2019. And I had been playing with the idea of doing a film, which would probably be a film essay or maybe a documentary about film-going. And I had a lot of stuff in my own private archive and... And these films, you don't really write them. They exist on what you find, on the materials you find. And the more you find, the more you want to make the film.

• 1:52:28Speaker 04

  So after going after all my, you know, videos and photographs from at the time of university, I expanded and went into the public archives and the Brazilian Cinematech, and I just kept finding more and more stuff. And that's how Pictures of Ghosts became a film. But by then, I already wanted to develop something with Wagner Mordor. And then Pictures of Ghosts put me in the right mood to write the script for The Secret Agent. So they're very different films, but they're very close in heart, you know.

• 1:53:05Sean Fennessey?

  Was there ever a period where The Secret Agent was set at a different time? Or more of a modern story? Was it always set in this world?

• 1:53:11Speaker 04

  No, it would always be in 1977. I think because it's probably the first year I remember as a kid. And when you're a kid, I think you concentrate on things that as an adult, you wouldn't really pay attention. For example, today I don't know much about cars, but as a 10-year-old, I could tell you, you know, about all the different models and makes and details. So that came in handy for the, you know, for the production design

• 1:53:49Speaker 04

  and little details that would help make the film more lived in, let's say.

• 1:53:57Sean Fennessey?

  You mentioned Bakara. I felt this watching that film as well. But watching this movie, and one of the things that I love so much about it, is this unusual blend of...

• 1:54:09Sean Fennessey?

  Genre, almost exploitation convention. And in this film, a lot of history, a lot of personal reflection. And then this sense of absurdism. It's like a very delicate balance between all these ingredients.

• 1:54:24Speaker 04

  I think life in society can be absurdist. Can feel like an exploitation movie sometimes. I mean, just look at the news and so many nasty incidents and so much violence in the world. So I think when you sit down to write a script, it can go to many places. And I, I guess I grew up watching all kinds of genre cinema. I'm a huge fan of, you know, Carpenter, for example, John Carpenter.

• 1:55:01Sean Fennessey?

  Feel that in back row deeply.

• 1:55:02Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:03Speaker 04

  Um, you know, De Palma. I think Spielberg plays an important part in my, in my, um, in my years as a young cinephile also. But of course, I think a lot about, you know, Brazilian cinema from the 1970s and Australian cinema, of course. Something like Wake in Fright, I think, is very much, was very much in the back of my mind when I was writing the, the opening, 10-minute opening sequence and even shooting it also. So, yeah, I, I, I really believe that, for example, I, I really love documentaries.

• 1:55:48Speaker 04

  But I think you can be very truthful doing fiction. And I, I even think that some fiction work can even be more truthful than some documentaries. Not all of them, but some of them.

• 1:56:02Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:56:04Speaker 04

  I mean that you can use artifice and you can use genre conventions, but still, come up with an idea which is very honest and very truthful about life and about people and about the world. And, and this is something that I keep getting as a, as a reaction to, to some of my films and to this, to The Secret Agent. I mean, it's a narrative fiction and it's not based on a, on, on real life incidents.

• 1:56:37Speaker 04

  But there is a logic to it, which I think is very truthful about Brazil and about the world and about the passage, the passing of time.

• 1:56:47Sean Fennessey?

  It does feel at times like you're watching Wagner's character go through the experience and that it does at other times feel like you are watching the movie version of the real life Wagner's experience, which is an incredible blend. But you mentioned the first 10 minutes of Secret Agent, I wanted to ask you about that, actually. You've got very skilled as a filmmaker at creating dread. That's hard to do. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about designing a sequence so that we are feeling exactly what you want us to feel.

• 1:57:16Speaker 04

  I think your question, this is a very interesting question, but I really have to say that some of the things that we do as a filmmaker, some of the things that you do as a writer, they are, they come from your own style. And I, for example, I, my biggest, most wonderful surprise about The Secret Agent is how funny it is, or how humorous, can I say? But humor is not something that you go for, that at least I don't. Of course, some people say my next film will be a comedy, but I always feel like saying, how do you know?

• 1:58:01Speaker 04

  You shouldn't really pre-design comedy. Comedy is something that, it's like you go out with your friends to have lunch, or to have dinner, or to have a great conversation, and it turns out to be one of the funniest evenings in your life, but it was never planned. It's just the chemistry of what we all talked about and how we expressed ourselves that evening, and then it became a very, kind of a very funny evening. And I think dread is, dread probably, you can probably tell from reading a script that there might be some dread involved, but I think dread also has to, has to do with where

• 1:58:44Speaker 04

  the camera is and how the editing goes. And maybe the camera is a little bit to the right, a little bit more than maybe it should be, and that generates some tension. So it's kind of hard to answer the question. I think some of the situations are... Quite clear, but it's not really something that I'm planning. I'm pretty, oh, tomorrow's sequence will be full of dread. It doesn't really work like that.

• 1:59:17Sean Fennessey?

  Well, some filmmakers do work schematically, or at least they have an idea of the things that they want to accomplish. And I do think that the humor that you're talking about, in the example of someone like De Palma, it comes out of that feeling of dread where it feels so silly to feel so tight about what might happen to a character, but...

• 1:59:34Speaker 04

  Like in Carrie.

• 1:59:35Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly.

• 1:59:35Speaker 04

  With the bucket.

• 1:59:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes. And there's something kind of hilarious, even though that's such a painful sequence. But yeah, the other thing too that is related to that is you mentioned moving the camera to the right. There's some formal moves in the movie, you know, split diopter shots, things like that, that feel like they're almost active comments on the era in which the film is taking place and the films that were happening at that time. Did you make those choices for that reason?

• 2:00:02Speaker 04

  That's another interesting observation because I have used split diopter shots in previous films. One of them is a contemporary story, Aquarius.

• 2:00:15Speaker 04

  So it's more about using tools and aspects of film language, which for some reason, I wouldn't even be able to tell you why, they've been left behind. I don't know why, you know. It's like they've gone out of fashion. It's like a wonderful piece of clothing that you see, why it doesn't, I want to wear this, but, oh, but you're not supposed to. It's out of fashion, but I like it. So, but yeah, with The Secret Agent, taking place in 1977, of course, I thought of, you know,

• 2:00:54Speaker 04

  you know, blowout, I know it's 1981, but, you know, blowout and close encounters, you know, split diopter shots. And I love them. Well, if you use them in the right place, I think they can be interesting, you know. They might bring you some interesting reaction to the image on the screen, you know. You shouldn't use it all the time. You should save it for an interesting moment.

• 2:01:29Speaker 04

  But then it's out of intuition, you know. I might have an idea where I want to use it even as I write the script, but some other idea might come up during the shoot. And I might say to the D O P, "Afghania, can we bring the split diopter thingy?"

• 2:01:51Sean Fennessey?

  That's what I would have called it, too.

• 2:01:53Speaker 04

  And let's see how it looks, you know? Oh, it works. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, let's go for it.

• 2:01:59Sean Fennessey?

  That's interesting. I find that in a lot of those films that are using some of those moves, that they're often done for dramatic storytelling purposes in significant tension-filled sequences. In your film, at least one of them is a father observing his son and seeing them both in frame, in focus.

• 2:02:19Speaker 04

  It's tricky to almost psychoanalyze the film, but I'm happy to do it, I think.

• 2:02:24Sean Fennessey?

  That's why you're here.

• 2:02:25Speaker 04

  Yes. I think they've been apart for so long. And even when they're in the same room, they're still distant or far away from each other in a way. I've never even verbalized this. This is the first time.

• 2:02:43Sean Fennessey?

  That is the emotional impact that it has, though.

• 2:02:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then the other one, of course, is this man who's paid to kill someone. He gets increasingly closer to the person. So finally, they end up in the same shot in a very unusual way, which is with the split diopter shot. And I think it's very uncomfortable to see them so close to each other, even if via an optical effect.

• 2:03:14Sean Fennessey?

  So you mentioned that you were a cinephile and a critic and a programmer. And I think you were in your 40s by the time you made your first feature, right?

• 2:03:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was 42.

• 2:03:24Sean Fennessey?

  So I'm always interested in people who start a little bit later. And like, what impact do you think that would have had if you had, as opposed to if you had made a feature at 27?

• 2:03:35Speaker 04

  Well, I, I come from a city which, at the time, when I was in university, I, there was, there were no film schools. So I did journalism. I've always enjoyed writing. I've always been quite good at writing, even in school. Terrible in math, good in writing, in Portuguese and English and these things. And then, and then I, it happened what I expected. Journalism brought me closer to, to an idea of cinema.

• 2:04:10Speaker 04

  And, and for many years, I, I felt good being a film critic and, and I was already developing my little videos and short films. I, I always felt that being a film critic is one way of making films. And I, I don't want to sound like a crazy person, but it is, I think, because you, you spend so much time, not only watching, but thinking about films and trying to understand what films are trying to say and what, what do they mean? Why did he or she do this? And in a way, and you're part of the whole thing about cinema.

• 2:04:52Sean Fennessey?

  You're just sucking up to me now?

• 2:04:56Speaker 04

  But of course, I, my short films, they got more and more attention. And in the 2000s, yeah, that's when my short films became quite well-known in Brazil. And, and then I began to travel abroad also to international film festivals and, and get a lot of prizes. And, and at the time, I was perfectly happy making short films.

• 2:05:22Sean Fennessey?

  There was no intention of trying to transition to features when you were doing that? They weren't seen as like an on-ramp or something else?

• 2:05:27Speaker 04

  I kept hearing that question all the time. When are you gonna make a, you know, uh, you know, like a real film?

• 2:05:37Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm happy making my short films and they were, you know, I got quite a lot of recognition for them. And, but then naturally.

• 2:05:46Speaker 04

  I wrote the first feature, Neighboring Sounds. I wrote it in 2008 and got the funding. In Brazil, we have public funding. We got the funding in 2009. I shot it in 2010. And it did very well. And then I have only done, since then, only two other short films. Because once you get into the feature film train, it's hard to go back.

• 2:06:20Sean Fennessey?

  Why?

• 2:06:22Speaker 04

  I think I finally understood why people kept asking, you know, when are you gonna do a real film? But I have to say that I look at my short films. I give them the same importance as I give, you know, Bakwara or The Secret Agent. But unfortunately, the world doesn't think like that. And of course, you get more recognition, more attention. You travel more. And yeah, you're more seen, I think, making features.

• 2:06:56Sean Fennessey?

  We don't have an adequate distribution system for shorts. It's just not coherently communicated to the public.

• 2:07:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I agree. There are many attempts. There are nonprofits and even distribution companies. There is a short film world, and I've been part of it. You know, the Clermont-Ferland International Short Film Festival is the can of shorts. It's an amazing festival in France.

• 2:07:25Speaker 04

  Europe has amazing short film festivals. Brazil has many, many short film festivals. And as I said, you can be perfectly happy making short films. But if you make a film that gets noticed, like Neighboring Sounds did, it's a different ballgame.

• 2:07:45Sean Fennessey?

  How did you and Wagner cross paths?

• 2:07:48Speaker 04

  We met in Cannes 20 years ago. I was a critic, and I got to interview him. I liked him very much. Clearly a great actor and a really nice person, nice guy.

• 2:08:03Sean Fennessey?

  He's been on the show. He's such a lovely person, yeah.

• 2:08:06Speaker 04

  And he didn't have that kind of anxiety that some actors and actresses have, you know, like... Notice me and, you know, trying to be more than they are. Time passed, I went on to make my films. He saw Neighboring Sounds. And that was the first time that he reached out and said, I really think we should work together someday.

• 2:08:36Speaker 04

  And it took, took like 10 years for this to happen.

• 2:08:41Sean Fennessey?

  And you wrote this for him?

• 2:08:43Speaker 04

  I wrote it specifically for him. It's the first time that I, I write one film to develop with one actor.

• 2:08:50Sean Fennessey?

  What was that experience like? Was it significantly different from writing features before that?

• 2:08:54Speaker 04

  I think it is.

• 2:08:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:55Speaker 04

  I think it is because sometimes you even write, sometimes you're writing a script and you haven't, it's, it's not supposed to be with anyone in particular, but you end up,

• 2:09:11Speaker 04

  you, you can't stop thinking about someone, an actor or an actress. And then you write the role, thinking that maybe he or she will be interested. And, and then sometimes you kind of grow out of the idea and so,

• 2:09:27Speaker 04

  change my mind or, but with Wagner, it, it would always be with him. And in Telluride, some, one of the interviews we did together, there was a funny question that came out of nowhere. This guy asked, what was the plan B?

• 2:09:46Speaker 04

  And I, and, and he looked at me like a, like a jealous, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, you know?

• 2:09:54Sean Fennessey?

  You didn't answer? There was no plan B?

• 2:09:55Speaker 04

  There was no plan B.

• 2:09:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:56Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm telling the truth. I never thought about a plan B, in fact.

• 2:10:02Speaker 04

  And it, it's interesting because you, I kept, I, I know his work. I know the films he did and the television work he did and even theater. And, and I had, I had it mapped out in a way. And, and I wanted to maybe go somewhere else with him. And, and I'm very happy with, with the way it turned out. I think he's wonderful in the film.

• 2:10:26Sean Fennessey?

  He really is. He's an interesting figure because he's, you know, very classically handsome. And he has a lot of movie star quality and he can carry a movie on his shoulders as well. But I, I do feel like you tapped into something. Mysterious about him that I don't know if I had quite seen before. I don't know, did you develop it after you gave him the script? I mean, how do you figure out how to make that character work in that way?

• 2:10:51Speaker 04

  Well, I think as a cinephile, I'm fascinated by the idea or the understanding we have of what a film star is.

• 2:11:04Speaker 04

  So what is a film star? The film star is someone who occupies the shots, inhabits the frame in a way that is absolutely effortless. And it's always interesting. It's always interesting to look at him or her, depending on who the star is. And it doesn't, I don't think it's really connected to good looks. I mean, good looks are also part of what it is, of course. And I always knew that Wagner would be interesting in the film. And because the film has so many situations where he stares, he thinks,

• 2:11:49Speaker 04

  you can see the machines going on inside his head. And he suggests emotion, anger. I think he has a lust for life in the film, the character. He has love. I think this film has a lot of love, affection, even if sometimes it gets brutal and nasty. But I think it has a lot of love and Wagner is great at all of that.

• 2:12:21Speaker 04

  Showing affection and showing compassion and always being a good man. But not. Not naive in any way, just a good man who knows what's happening or is even trying to understand what's happening around him.

• 2:12:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that brutality too, because I find your films to be very sincere and deep, but also fairly practical about the heinous consequences of living under regimes that are dictatorial or under corporate power or any of the ideas that are in your feature films. How do you strike a balance between keeping the viewer involved in the story and getting it connected to the characters, but also making it clear what you mean, what you hope to communicate?

• 2:13:15Speaker 04

  Well, I think that if you're telling a story and you want to convey a true sense of life on earth, I think you should be loving when there is love and you should be brutal if violence is involved. Sometimes violence is in the words. If someone is afraid, you should feel afraid for them. I think a lot about how to portray violence, of course.

• 2:14:00Speaker 04

  It's an old theme in cinema. It's an ethical issue. It's a technical issue, aesthetic issue. I, of course, grew up, like so many of us, with wonderful teachers like Verhoeven, De Palma again, Argento. And that gives me a map of where I can go. Cronenberg, of course, major reference.

• 2:14:41Speaker 04

  And I don't think, I think that if, if a certain scene is about brutality, it should be brutal.

• 2:14:53Speaker 04

  I don't think I would make a film which is 100% violent. But when I say this, I think of a masterpiece like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is insanely aggressive and brutal.

• 2:15:11Speaker 04

  But that's a different kind of film.

• 2:15:15Speaker 04

  But the, but the films I make, I think they, there is always room for, you know, to giving the right treatment, what I consider the right treatment, to each individual situation. If it's a sexual situation, I think it should be erotic, you know, in terms of human sexuality and a moment of affection and tenderness and sexuality between people. It should be honest and frank. And the same thing about, you know, people talking or people waiting for a bus, you know. It should be conveyed in a way that you, you get it. It's involving, engrossing.

• 2:16:01Sean Fennessey?

  I wanted to ask you about Udo Kier. So you've worked with him on two films. He just passed away, film legend.

• 2:16:08Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he's just typically terribly entertaining in your movie. And his character is fascinating. And it does feel like a real excursion in the middle of the story. And I was hoping you could just talk about working with him and that sequence in particular.

• 2:16:22Speaker 04

  I love Udo Kier. Of course, I was shocked and saddened two weeks ago when he passed.

• 2:16:33Speaker 04

  But at the same time, I, I remembered so much. I mean, that was a man who had such a full life.

• 2:16:45Speaker 04

  Not only in terms of, you know, the history of cinema, the 200-plus films he made and all the stories that he would tell us, you know, with Fassbender, Barbara Sukova and Lars von Trier.

• 2:17:02Speaker 04

  Gaz Van Sant, which I think gave him one of his most beautiful roles in

• 2:17:13Speaker 04

  the wonderful film shot in Oregon with Keanu Reeves and

• 2:17:21Sean Fennessey?

  My Own Private Idaho.

• 2:17:22Speaker 04

  My Own Private Idaho, of course, which I saw last year again. But I was fortunate enough to work with him in two films, Bakudao and A Secret Agent.

• 2:17:34Speaker 04

  And it was just, I feel so lucky, all of us, you know, who got to know him. He was funny, he had great taste. He had this sarcastic humor, which, which was, I mean, we got along. It was, we were good friends and we would exchange messages. And, and he came to see The Secret Agent in late September at the Beyond Fest at the Arrow. And, and we sat together and that's when he saw the film. And he was, he was the same Wodo as always. And of course, I'll miss him very much. I was already thinking about him for the next film.

• 2:18:18Sean Fennessey?

  That's terribly sad. I mean, that sequence in particular, I'd love to just hear a little bit about it. There's something really, it's like a microcosm of the bigger idea of the film about what we believe about people.

• 2:18:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:28Sean Fennessey?

  And he plays this German man who has moved to Brazil.

• 2:18:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:33Sean Fennessey?

  After World War Two, and there's this assumption that he's an ex-Nazi or a Nazi.

• 2:18:37Speaker 04

  Well, but coming from the police chief who happens to be a fascist himself.

• 2:18:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, precisely. And he's in fact not that, he's quite the opposite. And I don't know, where did that sequence even come from? It really kind of, even in the, I love this film, but it's really stopped me in my tracks when I was watching it the first time.

• 2:18:55Speaker 04

  The sequence probably comes from

• 2:18:58Speaker 04

  The fact that Hisifti has a strong Jewish community. And when I was a kid, my father would go to a tailor, who was a Romanian tailor, I think in his seventies at the time. And I believe he was Jewish. I'm not entirely sure, but I believe he was Jewish. And Hisifti also has the first synagogue of the Americas. So it has a Jewish community. I have many friends, grew up with people from the community. And I thought that it's an interesting detour for Wagner's character,

• 2:19:40Speaker 04

  who is put in the position of having to bond with Ilkay, who's the police chief,

• 2:19:49Speaker 04

  who has this one-track mind. He seems to think that Hans is a very interesting character because, obviously, he must have fought in the Second World War for the Germans. In other words, he's a former Nazi soldier. But in fact, he doesn't get it. I mean, the far-right, I think, usually have a problem with contextualization and history. And I think that's where the idea came from. And of course, I think it's a strong scene because it's very much about identity. And sometimes, our identity is in our bodies.

• 2:20:31Speaker 04

  It could be a scar, it could be a birth sign, or maybe a tattoo. And he's treated like a circus attraction. And he also seems to be married to another man.

• 2:20:50Speaker 04

  Who tries to get him out of the situation. And it's, there was a lot going on in that sequence. And it was an amazing day when we shot the sequence in this incredible location in downtown Hacienda. And Udo was incredible. He was amazing. And he, he had some cards with the Portuguese words written in phonetically. And yeah, he's speaking Portuguese also in the, in the sequence.

• 2:21:22Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's an amazing moment and a great film. So, you know, nice to hear you speak about it. I did want to ask you before we wrap that, you know, this is a much bigger, I assume, exposure for you, film playing at Cannes and then getting this big release in the United States. And you have entered the awards season apparatus in a real way here. As someone who's been observing films, thinking about films, being very emotionally close to the world of films for so long, what is it like to have gotten to this place with something that you have made?

• 2:21:56Speaker 04

  To be honest, it feels good because I, I think that filmmaking is, is, is the whole nine yards. You know, it's, you, you think about a film like I'm thinking about a next film. The ideas are coming in. At some point you sit down and write. And then you, you get the funding. You prepare the shoot. You shoot the film. You start editing immediately. This film was edited in almost eight months editing. Morning and afternoon. From, from Monday to Friday. Then post-production.

• 2:22:41Speaker 04

  Then it's selected for Cannes. And then you begin to travel. And, and I think traveling is part of making films. I, I feel lucky to be able to meet so many people and get so many reactions and, and see so many other films and meet so many people that have been part of my life for, you know, for so long. So, you know. It's, well, it's hard work now, I have to say, because the award season.

• 2:23:15Sean Fennessey?

  They're hustling you around.

• 2:23:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, but Neon is doing a really good job, I think, and there is a lot of traveling. Last week I did, I was in New York and then I flew to London. And then Rome, Paris, Marrakech, New York again, LA now. Next is Mexico City. And then it just keeps going, but I'll, I'll be spending the last fifteen,

• 2:23:45Speaker 04

  fifteen days of December at home with my kids and watching films and with Emily, my wife.

• 2:23:52Speaker 04

  And then it starts again in January, but I'm, I'm in good spirits and I'm happy. You know, it's like, it's what I asked Santa Claus way back then.

• 2:24:03Sean Fennessey?

  I wish you well. I really hope you succeed in all of those things. You mentioned you'll be going home to watch films soon. We end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen? Are you, have you been watching things during your journeys?

• 2:24:16Speaker 04

  I was very lucky that one of the few days I was home, they were screening in Hessefie, Chantal Akerman's Jean Diehlmann with the restored 4K. And I gave myself the, the opportunity of spending three hours and 20 minutes in a 2:00 PM screening with 90 other people in the screening room. It was a great moment.

• 2:24:45Sean Fennessey?

  Do you remember how much time had passed since the previous time you'd seen the movie?

• 2:24:49Speaker 04

  I had never seen it in the cinema. I had only seen it on DVD, maybe 15 years ago.

• 2:24:56Sean Fennessey?

  What struck you seeing it that way?

• 2:24:58Speaker 04

  Just the texture of the image. You can see that this particular restoration, I found it really interesting because you cannot, you cannot, not only can you see the grain, but the sound, sounds like an old optical 35 millimeter mono soundtrack. You even get a little bit of the hiss, you know? That's. And it really felt like I had spent a full week with, you know, that woman in that apartment. It was a fascinating film going experience.

• 2:25:34Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great recommendation, Kleber. Thanks for doing the show.

• 2:25:36Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 2:25:42Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Kleber, thanks to Joanna.

• 2:25:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you.

• 2:25:45Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you to Amanda. Thank you to our producer, Jack Sanders, who's been freaking grinding this month. What are we doing next week? Oh, yeah, Wake Up Dead Man?

• 2:25:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 2:25:53Sean Fennessey?

  I want to do a mailbag.

• 2:25:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, along with that?

• 2:25:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, great. You're just throwing that in. That's very exciting.

• 2:25:59Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like there's a lot of shit going on right now. You know?

• 2:26:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Big Pick Mailbag at gmail dot com.

• 2:26:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, can we do that, Jack?

• 2:26:07Speaker 04

  Sounds good.

• 2:26:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, Jack is making us feel like I have to read 3,000 deranged emails, guys.

• 2:26:13Sean Fennessey?

  30 minutes of mailbag.

• 2:26:14Speaker 02

  Disney AI all the time. Yeah, that's the subject.

• 2:26:18Sean Fennessey?

  If you want to talk about Disney's investment in OpenAI, let's talk about it.

• 2:26:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Let me give some guidance. Questions, not comments. Thank you so much. Big Pick Mailbag at gmail dot com.

• 2:26:31Sean Fennessey?

  See you then.

• 2:26:50Speaker 05

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