The 10 Wildest Reboots in Movie History and ‘The Bride!’ Plus: A ‘Secret Agent’ Second Look and the Best Doc Contenders.

On today’s show, Sean and Amanda break down Maggie Gyllenhaal's fascinating new movie, ‘The Bride!,’ starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale. They commend the film for its ambition and vision, highlight some of its utterly confounding fatal flaws, and debate the value of projects that reimagine old source material with modern ideas and context (4:17). Next, they make a list of their favorite reimaginings and reboots of all time (42:51). Then, they revisit Kleber Mendonca Filho’s ‘The Secret Agent,’ starring Wagner Moura. They explore why they found a rewatch of the movie to be incredibly rewarding, celebrate its singularity, and explain how Moura’s towering performance centers the entire story for the audience (54:53). Finally, they cover the Oscar-nominated films for Best Documentary this year and critique the current state of the voting branch and what types of movies it rewards (1:29:26). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan®️. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there®️. Drivers wanted. Learn more at vw.com 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm pro football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit MDDAllies.com to watch my story.

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• 1:46Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fantasy.

• 1:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 1:48Sean Fennessey?

  And this is the big, picturesque conversation show about brides, secret agents, and true stories. Today on the show, we are discussing "The Bride!" Maggie Gyllenhaal's bold new reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein. And we will run through the history of bold movie reboots. We will also revisit best picture contender The Secret Agent, one of the very best films of 2025. And finally, we will dig into all five contenders for the Best Documentary Prize at the Oscars this year and talk about the state of that category. Programming note: Amanda, we're going live on Netflix twice this month, twice. The first time, what are we doing?

• 2:22Amanda Dobbins?

  A mailbag.

• 2:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. What kind of questions do you want to get in your mailbag?

• 2:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, not ones where I have to recast things or tell you about movies where my opinions have changed. Guess what? They have it.

• 2:33Sean Fennessey?

  Mine have sometimes. I'm an open-minded man. You can email us at [email protected]. What's that email address?

• 2:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Bigpikmailbag, I did it right this time, at gmail.com.

• 2:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. Once you've sent that email, you can tune in and watch us on Netflix on Monday, March 9th, at noon Pacific, 3:00 PM Eastern, where you can watch us answer those questions. We'll also talk about the Pixar movie Hoppers. And then, on March 15th, after the Academy Awards, we will also go live. We will not be answering your questions. We will be answering our own questions about whatever transpires. I can't stop thinking about what's going to happen on March 15th, but I'm not going to talk about it today. We're going to talk now about The Bride.

• 3:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Or on Monday.

• 3:15Sean Fennessey?

  Or on Monday, yes, because that mailbag is anything but Oscars. Thank you for reminding me. Um, okay, we will do it all right after this.

• 3:23Sean Fennessey?

  This episode of The Big Picture is presented by State Farm. Sure, being an expert at movie trivia is impressive. You know what's even more impressive? Being smart about saving money. And a great way to do that is by saving when you choose to bundle home and auto with the State Farm Personal Price Plan. Bundling, just another way to save with the Personal Price Plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Okay, Amanda.

• 3:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:52Sean Fennessey?

  Haven't seen you in 24 hours.

• 3:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, maybe more.

• 3:56Sean Fennessey?

  We've both seen the film The Bride.

• 3:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:59Sean Fennessey?

  There's been no relevant movie news since then, so I think we should probably just dive right into this movie. What do you think?

• 4:04Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't want to talk about, uh, Barbra Streisand possibly performing a tribute to Robert Redford at the Oscars? Um. I, I, I gasped and then texted you immediately. Yeah.

• 4:15Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I think it's nice.

• 4:17Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I don't, I feel really overwhelmed by the thought of it. And I don't really usually like the, you gotta have an in memoriam tribute, but I always feel that they're like a little overly sentimental.

• 4:28Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:28Amanda Dobbins?

  And there's like, when there's an interpretive dance movement, I'm like, I love dance, but also I don't really think that expressed my grief for all the art and artists that we lost this year. Uh, but there's something about the possibility of Barbra Streisand singing, like, "Memory" from "The Way We Were" to Hubble, or in "Memory of Hubble", that, to me, it was just, I was like, wow, "The Way We Were" is still powerful. My reaction to it was like, oh, I guess now I'm an old person and I'm in tears.

• 4:58Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I did feel like a very old fashioned idea for the Academy Awards, which is not a bad thing. Um, I was thinking, we didn't speak about the in memoriam from the Actor Awards, but I was kind of curious who would get, as Bill Simmons likes to call it, the hammer, the final note. And this was a year where we lost, among many other people, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, and Diane Keaton, in addition to Robert Redford. And Redford went last at the Actor Awards, and he will probably be last at the Oscars, and that will probably segue to a Barbra Streisand performance. You know, sounds good.

• 5:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. You don't think she'll soundtrack the whole thing?

• 5:32Sean Fennessey?

  You think she'll sing through the entire in memoriam?

• 5:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, they've done it before.

• 5:36Sean Fennessey?

  I think I'll sing through the in memoriam and then she can come in for memory. I think that, what would I sing? "Limp Bizkit's Nookie"? What do you think would be the most appropriate song for me to sing?

• 5:45Amanda Dobbins?

  That would be funny.

• 5:46Sean Fennessey?

  Um, let's go to "The Bride".

• 5:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:49Sean Fennessey?

  So, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, her third feature film. It is based on Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, sort of. Uh, it stars Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale alongside Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Penelope Cruz. The story of the movie is, as such, in 1930's Chicago, Frankenstein's monster asks Dr. Euphronius to create a companion for him. Together, they give life to a murdered woman known as, quote, "the bride", sparking romance, police interest, and radical social change. I ask you now, what do you make of "The Bride"?

• 6:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I would prefer not to, which is sitting right there, if you've seen the film, which most of you haven't. You, Sue, I think you and I are on different pole, on like, different points of the same spectrum of this. And you're a little more positive, and I'm a little more negative. But I can see your point that there are things to, if not like, then admire. It's a big swing, right? This is a very, um, ambitious, like, stuffed and possibly overstuffed tribute to a lot of things that we enjoy, including cinema, Jessie Buckley.

• 7:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Noir, though, even though that's the silliest part of the movie, that like, there's a lot in here. There is a lot. There are a lot of set pieces. There's a lot of dancing. There is a lot visually. There's certainly a lot of performance. So everyone's trying a lot of things and it's good when people try, right? And it's good when filmmakers try. And once again, you know, an original-esque, not really original, but

• 7:31Sean Fennessey?

  It's not.

• 7:31Amanda Dobbins?

  You know,

• 7:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's IP.

• 7:33Amanda Dobbins?

  At least

• 7:33Sean Fennessey?

  We can say that.

• 7:34Amanda Dobbins?

  At least a writer-director, like, trying to do something interesting.

• 7:39Sean Fennessey?

  A strong vision.

• 7:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And being given a big budget and, like, using the whole screen is, it is what we root for. So I'm not mad that it happened. But there is something that is so essential to the project and so embedded in the nature of

• 8:03Amanda Dobbins?

  not just the script, but like, why this movie exists, that I think is so stupid that I, like, I ultimately can't give it a pass.

• 8:13Sean Fennessey?

  I, I completely understand what you mean. I respect your point of view. I went into this movie with rock bottom expectations because of a lot of the, the fact that it has been pushed multiple times. We've got our first look at it almost a year ago at CinemaCon. I think it was meant to be a fall release. It got bumped to the spring of 2026, in part because maybe Jessie Buckley was going to be on the gravy train to an Oscar win for Hamlet, but probably more specifically because this is a little bit of a dumping ground ahead of the Academy Awards in terms of the release schedule. There was talk of bad audience test scores. There's talk of reshoots. It's got the vibe of a disaster. And this is a kind of a testimony to the expectation game for me, because I went expecting

• 8:58Sean Fennessey?

  a very bad movie, and I think this is a very messy movie, but has a lot of things that I like. And I would much rather have the studios giving audacious filmmakers a lot of money to, to try something, as you said, than 88% of the franchise garbage that we get on a regular basis. And so even though we can talk through specifically what is ineffective, or, or in some cases, I think quite dumb about the movie, there's so much that I really enjoy. There's so much style. There's so much fearlessness. There's so much.

• 9:31Sean Fennessey?

  Abandon, I would say, in terms of what it's trying to accomplish. There's plenty of stuff that is like feels tacked on and you can you can sense that. But I have been reading some of the reactions to the movie and I get why people are like, this is a bad Jessie Buckley performance. To me, it is not. To me, it is she's doing what she's being asked to do. And and the movie that this movie reminds me of is Babylon. And I love Babylon and Babylon is a little messy and Babylon's all over the place. And Babylon's a little like bing, bing, bing on your nose with your metaphor sometimes.

• 10:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 10:01Sean Fennessey?

  But

• 10:01Amanda Dobbins?

  And Babylon loves the movies, too.

• 10:03Sean Fennessey?

  And it does. And there's a lot of overt references to movie history and the way that cinema is interconnected and that that's like a series of recreations. We're going to talk about The Secret Agent later in this episode. It's a movie that's not dissimilar. You know, it's a movie that is using a lot of the hallmarks of older films and trying to recontextualize with political and social intent. Secret Agent's more successful in that respect.

• 10:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Sean Fennessey?

  But I think I I just had more fun than I expected to. And I I I'm thinking about this movie. There's another movie that I thought of a little bit, which is Don't Worry Darling, which I think is somewhat similarly stuck because its primary idea about feminism and and a powerful female consciousness.

• 10:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 10:48Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of like holds the movie back from like unleashing itself into a real genre of feat.

• 10:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 10:54Sean Fennessey?

  I think this movie is more successful personally, but I think they're going to end up in basically the same place critically, socially.

• 11:01Amanda Dobbins?

  They both they both have like not a fundamental flaw, but the the fundamental theory behind their existence, the like, the take, the interpretation is quite similar. And to my mind does not hold up in either case. I mean, you know, Don't Worry Darling at least has the panache of the reveal being that it's like Harry Styles is Jordan Peterson in a in a room. That's funny. If if silly and undermining of the entire project.

• 11:35Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, the bride as a feminist retelling.

• 11:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And what it is fine, though I would like to talk about the concept of a feminist retelling and what we're achieving when we do that. But the way that it executes it is so heavy handed. And as you said, sometimes tacked on and so.

• 11:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Like ultimately unnecessary and. And frankly, not doesn't achieve what I think it thinks it sets out to achieve.

• 12:11Amanda Dobbins?

  That it's just kind of like, I don't know, I don't know how to get on board with the project because it also announces it so clearly. There's a framing device that I understand is a reference to the Bride of Frankenstein, but also feels silly, tacked on and like a total failure all at once.

• 12:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, okay.

• 12:33Amanda Dobbins?

  And then it's cooked into the rest of the movie. That's the other thing is that you can't. I like the, it's a foundation that is, it does not work.

• 12:43Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm. So we spent a lot of time on our Wuthering Heights discussion, talking about like the source material.

• 12:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Sean Fennessey?

  And like what changing the source material sometimes does to a project. And by pulling too much out, you can strip a movie of its thematic strengths and that that makes the movie feel more flimsy. That was my feeling about Wuthering Heights in part. That was part of what I struggled with. This movie, I would say, is sort of working in reverse where it's operating from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, where, you know, in the novel, there's an attempt to create a female counterpart for Frankenstein, but that before that, that that corpse is revivified, it's destroyed. In 1935, there's a sequel to Frankenstein, the James Will film Bride of Frankenstein, where Elsa Lanchester plays the bride.

• 13:29Sean Fennessey?

  That character is actually reinvigorated, but she's wordless and screeches and doesn't really have agency, to use a contemporary language. This is a movie that attempts to kind of like. Reposition that, to correct that.

• 13:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:48Sean Fennessey?

  You know, to give that character more of her own point of view. I wouldn't say it's, it's not dopey. I do think it's wildly overstated at times in the movie. And I don't, I'm not sure if there was a subtle way to do this because there's no subtlety in the movie whatsoever. It's just sort of, as you said, you're like, I'm not on board, so I just can't.

• 14:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I mean, like, my fundamental question is, is why? Like, I, like, who, who cares? I mean, I, like, I get it. I suppose we need to.

• 14:15Sean Fennessey?

  Evening the playing field of the history of monsters in the movies and who gets, who gets to be messy? Like, I think that's really what the movie's about. It's like, who gets to be like, a messy person who gets to do terrible things? And Frankenstein and the Wolfman and Dracula get to do those things. Why doesn't the bride get to do those things?

• 14:29Amanda Dobbins?

  But the bride isn't doing terrible things. She's, you know, inciting like a revolution against the 1930s Chicago mafia and like, literally screams the words "me too" multiple times at a character.

• 14:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and then there's a whole interlude where like all the women take to the streets. Like, what, what?

• 14:48Sean Fennessey?

  I, I mean, I think there are some things that she, her character gets to do, Jessie Buckley's character. One is to have like, a strong sexual desire on screen that is not otherwise communicated in movies like this. That is obviously a very not so latent metaphor for women having the ability to just say loud and proud, this is something that I want.

• 15:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 15:08Sean Fennessey?

  Also, the idea that she, you know, early in the film, there's a violent encounter after they go to a nightclub where Frankenstein, you know, after someone attempts to sexually assault the bride, Frankenstein has to save her. And he kills the two men who are trying to assault her. And then later in the movie, she saves him. She's the person responsible for protecting her family, her, her duo. And, you know, it's very diagrammatic, the way that it's attempting to kind of like, right those wrongs.

• 15:40Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think a lot of this, that stuff is really what I caught into in the movie. What I caught into in the movie is when it's like, this is an explosive show. Here's a dance sequence.

• 15:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Sean Fennessey?

  Here's a dramatic and oftentimes metafictional retelling of Hollywood history. Here is, I, I think the performances are very funny and on point. I do know why they're getting some negative feedback, but these are monster movies. Like they're supposed to be ridiculous and big and loud. And I don't, I, I didn't struggle with any of those things, those aspects of the movie.

• 16:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I found not Jessie Buckley's performance, but I found the character of the bride incredibly annoying.

• 16:18Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 16:19Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and, but that was because within like written in the character. And I would like to talk about this framing device and the Mary Shelley of it all, because it starts, there's an extended prologue where Jessie Buckley is in kind of like black and white, like in, in the void. Um, as Mary Shelley.

• 16:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Talking direct to camera.

• 16:40Sean Fennessey?

  An unboxing girl, if you will.

• 16:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. And she's, and then like similarly like has lost control of reality. She's cackling and this, and this British accent being like, just wait. And is doing exposition for what, you know, what has happened and also how she, Mary Shelley is involved in this reanimation of the bride. Now she gets another chance, but it's intercut with the Ida character, who's also Jessie Buckley, who is the corpse that is reanimated as the bride.

• 17:17Amanda Dobbins?

  But the movie makes the choice to have, to really literalize that this is Mary Shelley also has some agency. Mary Shelley can be a creator too. And so she inhabits Ida's body. And so half the time, like the Ida character or the bride is sometimes taken over by Mary Shelley's accent. So she speaks either in, you know, a Chicago accent or like doing her best American flapper or.

• 17:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Sometimes as Mary Shelley.

• 17:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 17:50Amanda Dobbins?

  In a British accent. And it's just, this switching back and forth is incredibly irritating.

• 17:56Sean Fennessey?

  It, it, it, it is.

• 17:58Amanda Dobbins?

  And that's not her fault. That is, I mean, that is written for the character. She is, she is doing, she is giving a performance of what was conceived. So I don't hold it against Jessie Buckley.

• 18:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Amanda Dobbins?

  But like, what? And why? And can I leave? Because this is really annoying?

• 18:14Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I kind of enjoyed it. I, I, I realize that this is, there's an aspect of this whole movie, and I am so comfortable being a hypocrite in this.

• 18:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Sean Fennessey?

  That is like key jangling fan service for movie bros, um, or movie gals. And it's like, do you like that this person has named this because it's a callback to a name of a famous person? Or do you like that the movie is like a exploration of the split personality and literary creations? And how much, how much of the bride is really Mary Shelley and how much of the bride is her own thing? And like, the movie is trying to kind of tangle with these actual ideas in a way that is like a little bit complot 202 class.

• 18:51Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it's, it's 101.

• 18:53Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, sure.

• 18:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sorry, we didn't, we didn't.

• 18:55Sean Fennessey?

  You need to have read Frankenstein.

• 18:57Amanda Dobbins?

  I guess so. Yeah, you can do that in high school.

• 19:00Sean Fennessey?

  Um, yeah, but probably, probably you don't.

• 19:03Amanda Dobbins?

  When we were in high school.

• 19:04Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, probably you don't at this point. You can listen to the audiobook. Um, so I don't, I don't, I don't pretend to like defend its artistic merits. It just, I found it kind of amusing. I found what she was doing kind of amusing. And I know it's going to be a big turn off for a lot of people. And it is essential to the way that the character is written. I, I think like whether or not it's purposefully annoying is an interesting thing to talk about because I think, you know, being a messy bitch, right? Like, that's like the whole movie. Like, I don't, I don't know if Maggie Gyllenhaal has literally said that in an interview, but there's intent here.

• 19:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 19:38Sean Fennessey?

  And there's a, there's a whole, there's a whole 15 plus years of, you know, post Vice culture that is defined by that, right? That's, that's like a point of view culturally.

• 19:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 19:48Sean Fennessey?

  That this movie is trying to, you know, subsume into a monster movie. I get it. Like, I'm okay with it.

• 19:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, but it like, it was, it was always pretty annoying at the time. I mean, I like, I understand, I suppose that it has to be like a branch of our feminism or whatever that like, but that doesn't mean that I want to sit and watch all of it, or that I need to be asked to. And also, you know, sometimes the messy bitches are funny. Like, Meg Salter forever. You know, that's, that-

• 20:18Sean Fennessey?

  We failed to discuss her at the actor awards. She was the funniest thing there.

• 20:22Amanda Dobbins?

  But that, oh, yeah, there was a TV award, but it was about Hammett. So it can be done well.

• 20:27Sean Fennessey?

  It was about Jessie Buckley. Jessie Buckley helped me out here.

• 20:31Amanda Dobbins?

  They didn't cut to Jessie Buckley once.

• 20:33Sean Fennessey?

  They did not.

• 20:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, because I think there's, I mean, there's no sense of humor in this. That, I mean, and that is a real, it is for, for its bigness and for its going for it-ness. There is, there's no self-awareness. It is really like, we're all in. And I can appreciate that. I, like, I don't think Jessie Buckley is not the problem, to me. The character is the problem.

• 20:59Sean Fennessey?

  I get it. There's, there's one other aspect of this that I find appealing, that I think most normal people don't see the same way. I, you know, Siskel and Ebert talked about this at times, film critics have talked about this over the years, but when you professionally watch 200 new movies a year-

• 21:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 21:18Sean Fennessey?

  -a lot of things start to feel very the same. And when something like this comes along, this is not really like any other movie. It doesn't mean it's successful all the time, but it feels different, and that that activates your mind in a different way. It makes you see something differently. I found the movie to be too long. I found the plotting and the pacing to be very poor. I found the tacked-on kind of detective story to be a huge bungle and a huge waste of Peter Sarsgaard and Penelope Cruz, who are like, Academy Award-nominated phenomenal actors who have, have like, very little to do in this movie. But, and, and I'll tell you this too-

• 21:52Sean Fennessey?

  Um, this movie also reminded me a lot of Joker and Joker Folia Do.

• 21:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Looks like them.

• 21:57Sean Fennessey?

  The bad parts of Joker Folia Do, and to me, what I found to be the good parts of Joker. And part of the reason for that is the movie is shot by Lawrence Schur, who shot both of the Joker movies, and the music is by Hildegard Guanadeter, and she did this music for the Joker movies.

• 22:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:10Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and it's edited by Dylan Tichner, who is PTA's longtime editor. He hasn't worked with them on the last couple of movies, but he edited all of Paul Thomas Anderson's classics. So I found that there was like a level of craft here while also feeling like it's really chopped up and they're kind of like on this journey through America in the 1930s, you know, also a huge homage to Bonnie and Clyde, that's intrinsic to this story too. And it starts to just feel like really episodic about an hour in, and then you feel the weight of it bagging down. But when the movie is kind of like stroking its chin all the way up until the Me Too finale, which I did not enjoy, um, I kind of enjoyed it. I kind of enjoyed it like spinning its wheels about what it thinks it is and trying to like

• 22:54Sean Fennessey?

  use a $80 million studio movie to be like, how do I really feel about the way that female characters are supposed to be in movies? Uh, I don't know. I, I think that there was something like the intent is interesting, the execution is interesting, and I didn't have a bad time. That's kind of where my head is at with the movie.

• 23:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. The execution is interesting. I did also, to, to keep it in the DC Universe, spend a lot of time thinking of Birds of Prey.

• 23:19Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 23:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, which, you know, and, and some of that is all of the production, um, decisions and, and there's like a slight greenness to some of it and even the makeup, um, and whatever the stain is that Jessie Buckley has on, you know.

• 23:35Sean Fennessey?

  The sort of bile stain on her face.

• 23:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, but I had forgotten that the subtitle of Birds of Prey was, or the fabulous emancipation of one Harley Quinn, which is, there's just a little bit of like girl power, re-irrigination, you know, reimagination here that I'm definitely allergic to.

• 23:53Sean Fennessey?

  It's the yassification of The Bride. It is.

• 23:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. It's, which is just, it's, why do we need that? What, like?

• 24:01Sean Fennessey?

  What's the alternative? Would you have enjoyed more of straight up modern remake of The Bride?

• 24:09Amanda Dobbins?

  You mean the, a modern remake of the-

• 24:10Sean Fennessey?

  Guillermo del Toro's The Bride.

• 24:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, what happens in it?

• 24:14Sean Fennessey?

  The same shit that happens in, it's a remake of the James Whale movie.

• 24:17Amanda Dobbins?

  So she just doesn't say anything?

• 24:19Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. I mean-

• 24:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Kind of what happens in Guillermo del Toro's, the, you know, Frankenstein, but the bride is just Elizabeth.

• 24:25Sean Fennessey?

  Right. That's true.

• 24:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And her death scene is very beautiful.

• 24:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, it's impossible to do that, the one for one thing that I'm suggesting, but I think because this is just so different from-

• 24:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Sean Fennessey?

  What you would expect a studio to do. We're gonna get like another version of this. There's this funny thing happening with Warner Brothers where they have a mummy movie coming out in April.

• 24:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 24:43Sean Fennessey?

  And it's a modern set story. Jack Rainer is the star of it. And it's about a little girl who disappears and clearly makes contact with a mummy. And so they're using the same, you know, Karloff, Universal, 1930s frameworks, but they're trying to set it in a modern time. And Universal's been trying to do this for years and years. You may have called The Dark Universe, didn't go over so well. We saw The Invisible Man. We'll talk about some of these movies when we get to the reboot stuff, but this kind of like old IP, like not new IP, like old, like a hundred year old IP, is stuff that still has enough recognizability that it's powerful.

• 25:19Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I get all of that. I bump on like the, the feminist retelling of it. I, I genuinely,

• 25:26Amanda Dobbins?

  and I, and I had some time during this film to think about this, but this is a thing right now, right? And I mean, it's, it's not new, but the book Cersei, I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's a, it was like a huge like book club bestseller, which is reimagining, it's not even reimagining The Odyssey. It's just kind of like, what's up with Cersei? She's just a character, you know, and like what she's, what is she up to and how does she feel and what was her experience? And there are like a million of these. There's the Penelope ad, which is the Margaret Atwood version of The Odyssey. There's like everything having to do with Lady Macbeth. There are like, there, there's been a whole like cotton industry after Cersei of

• 26:09Amanda Dobbins?

  books. Like there's one about the Julia character from 1984. There's one of like Rosalyn from Romeo and Juliet. Like you could argue that the Da Vinci Code is about Mary Magdalene. Like this is not a thing, which it's not a new thing, but what does this character who is like not really explored in this like canonical piece of literature?

• 26:31Amanda Dobbins?

  What's going on with her? And what if we either told it, not even told it from her perspective, but what if we like gave her agency? What if we gave her a personality? What if we gave her whatever? What if we gave her a life and her own story? And I genuinely don't know if I think that that is like a useful project or not. I genuinely, because the result is always, not always, but the result doesn't change the framework of in which these characters are created and the world in which they're created, or really even their experiences. And so I'm just like, what are we? What do we learn from this? Like, what do I learn from The Bride? Like, women can be messy too?

• 27:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, that's fine, just make a movie about a messy person? I don't know what rewriting Frankenstein or the parts of the Odyssey. By the way, apparently Cersei ends with her marrying Telemachus, which, sorry, spoiler alert. I mean, is that improving things?

• 27:34Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know, I haven't read the book.

• 27:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sorry to just like bring you into feminism corner for a minute, but I just, it's where we are. What are we doing? What do you want Alice watching?

• 27:44Sean Fennessey?

  These are all salient questions. I haven't read any of these novels. And I would say I'm somewhat studied on feminism, but certainly not an expert. I think artistic recombination is really fascinating to me. I was obsessed with hip hop for exactly this reason. I think that like the history of music being redefined and recombined is just like moves me. And I feel the same way about movies. I find a lot of movies that do this. Literature, maybe a little bit less so, but I just don't read as many novels as I did when I was, you know, 20 years ago. So I guess, I don't know that it can like accomplish anything. And I don't even know if what's the point of this is something

• 28:26Sean Fennessey?

  that really occurred to me while watching The Bride. I don't know that like I would show this to Alice before showing her the original Bride of Frankenstein and be like, this is the real story of The Bride. I don't know that we need to like rewrite those things, but I do think that recontextualizing stories has value. There's a very long history of this in the movies. Now, the primary reason that this happens, and the reason that I think this movie happened is...

• 28:52Sean Fennessey?

  Maggie Gyllenhaal just made a movie about a messy woman.

• 28:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and it was great.

• 28:56Sean Fennessey?

  The Lost Daughter is exactly what you're describing, and it's an adaptation, but it is clearly, it is, it's what interests her. It's like thematic core of the kinds of stories that she wants to tell. And it felt like she wanted to tell a story on a much bigger stage and much bigger scale. And the only way to do that in Hollywood right now is to find IP, is to find a property that you can show to a studio and say like, I'm gonna do a crazy story about female identity in the aftermath of Me Too, but I'm gonna do it using these monsters that everybody, that people are familiar with. And you're gonna, I'm gonna justify the budget that I need by doing that. I get it. Like, she's kind of playing the game that has been set in front of her.

• 29:36Sean Fennessey?

  And you can say it's unsuccessful, of course, but I think whether or not like we need more feminist retellings is so tough because you can't go back 500, 1,000, even 70 years and say like, well, we can't, what were the books that should have been written if this woman wasn't forced to be a housewife?

• 29:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. So you're saying because we're all slaves to IP, or because we're all trapped in IP world?

• 29:58Sean Fennessey?

  I think it just helps sell everything.

• 29:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I get all of that, but that doesn't make it like good or useful.

• 30:04Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 30:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is just sort of, and I just, I think it's pretty silly. And, and I think that, I mean, this is the thing, if you have to do IP, just do the next chapter and start a new character. Like, I put in here as a joke, just like, for, but not really as a joke, just Force Awakens it, but, which is a bad movie in a lot of ways, but the Rey of it all, they just made a girl a Jedi, and they just made it about her. And you said that your daughter was very excited to like, get to Rey. I remember seeing Rey in theaters, and I don't care about any of this stuff, but I was like, I understand what it means to see with the woman with the lightsaber. Then they saddle her with a bunch of other stuff. But the idea of just making a character that,

• 30:48Amanda Dobbins?

  if you need to keep the world and you keep the IP, just like, create something, create something new.

• 30:55Sean Fennessey?

  I, I really, I think you're right about that. I think it's very insightful, since I've just been rewatching those movies.

• 31:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Sean Fennessey?

  To J.J. Abrams's credit, that first movie does not go out of its way to say, "But she's a girl, and girls can do it." In fact, the most memorable and exciting and still like hair-raising moment in that movie to me is at the end of the film, when the planet is collapsing and it's Kylo Ren versus Finn and Rey. And Kylo Ren is reaching for the lightsaber and trying to use the Force to pull it, and it whips past him.

• 31:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it goes to her.

• 31:31Sean Fennessey?

  It doesn't go to Finn, it goes to Rey, and she catches it. And no one says anything. They just start fighting, and she beats him.

• 31:38Amanda Dobbins?

  It's magical. I remember that moment.

• 31:40Sean Fennessey?

  That was fantastic, yes. But this movie doesn't do that. There's no lightsabers in this movie.

• 31:47Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's fair to say like, we could just do a new story that is in the same world. That's a different mission than I think what a lot of filmmakers try to do. Like, I was trying to think of like, what is like the right framework for this episode? And I couldn't figure it out for the longest time. And then it dawned on me that this actually happens like every year. There's always one of these. And you mentioned, you know, the feminist retellings in literature, but how many of them are there just for Jane Austen novels? Like, we have all of these kind of like re-imaginings and setting them in contemporary times or different times.

• 32:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but those aren't, those were movies about women written, or those, you know, those were textually about the woman from the beginning. And they need updating in like many other ways. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't, A, either be examining the ways in which women and people of color and everybody who is not, were like sidelined or experienced like real shitty lives for a really long time. But this thing where we're reclaiming a character that didn't matter, and then just like reclaiming from what? Is it like, what are we reclaiming? That's all.

• 32:58Sean Fennessey?

  Have you seen Rosaline?

• 33:03Sean Fennessey?

  The Caitlin Dever movie, it was a Hulu movie like

• 33:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:06Sean Fennessey?

  Four or five years ago.

• 33:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:07Sean Fennessey?

  Just sort of like.

• 33:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is like.

• 33:09Sean Fennessey?

  It's about Romeo's ex, right? It's about the girl who Romeo doesn't go with.

• 33:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Which can be funny. There is one truly great example of this, which is the 2011 McSweeney's article. I don't know if you've read this. It's a classic. I regret to inform you that my wedding to Captain Von Trapp has been canceled.

• 33:26Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't, I haven't read it.

• 33:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's just about, it's like literally imagining the Baroness from The Sound of Music, writing the letter, being like, so this nun who sings and hangs out. It's really genuinely funny, but I think it is telling that like the best example I can come up with of this sort of retelling is the McSweeney's article.

• 33:46Sean Fennessey?

  I want to, I want to talk more about what movies try to do with this, but um, this is a Christian Bale movie and he is playing Frankenstein. And on 99% of the time, it would be called Frankenstein starring Christian Bale.

• 33:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Sean Fennessey?

  And he is the second lead of the movie. He gets to be the primary character at the beginning before we meet our bride. But what did you think about what he was doing in the movie?

• 34:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I was fine with it. It was quieter than what Jessie Buckley was, is doing.

• 34:14Sean Fennessey?

  Certainly true.

• 34:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Um.

• 34:15Sean Fennessey?

  Kind of a cucked Frankie.

• 34:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's, that's okay. And I, I do like it when very big, like male stars are just like, sure, I'll just like show up on the side while you guys do whatever. I'm, I am charmed by that and, and I appreciate that. And I, he wasn't, he's a little weird in a good way. I, I appreciated the slightly subtler interpretation here.

• 34:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And I think maybe that's one of the reasons why Buckley is so big is that they're playing two different notes. And you know, frankly, there are a lot of relationships like this where one partner's very loud and the other partner's not so loud. And uh, I, I thought it was kind of clever. I don't know. I have a warm feeling about this movie, mess and all.

• 34:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, you like monsters.

• 34:57Sean Fennessey?

  I do like monsters.

• 34:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's the other thing. I was just kind of like, I don't know. I there, that part of that is also the buy-in. And I did spend some time in the movie thinking about like. Is this really that much worse than Del Toro's Frankenstein? And like, in what ways is it worse? And it is ultimately incoherent, like just from a basic.

• 35:21Sean Fennessey?

  See, I think it's coherent. I just think it's a little eye rolly. Like, I think what it's doing is like, I think the plot makes sense. I think it's clearly been reshot and reconfigured. But like, it does, the movie makes sense to me in terms of what's happening.

• 35:34Amanda Dobbins?

  They like, and then Benny reanimates them and then they gotta run away. And then, sure, it's, yeah, I get that it's Bonnie and Clyde. Like, that's not that hard, but I think everything, all of, all of the, the political or the ideological stuff that it's added in. Like, I'm still not sure where Mary Shelley is in space and time and how she's inhabiting the body and then when she's kicking in and then.

• 36:05Sean Fennessey?

  This is not, it's not a literal, it's a movie about reviving corpses and turning them into a happy couple. Like, it's a, you got, it's a flight of fancy.

• 36:12Amanda Dobbins?

  But the flight of fancy was not coherent to me. Like, it just, it was not, it, it, it seemed pieced together. That's all.

• 36:19Sean Fennessey?

  Um, so there's been some speculation that this film could Norbit, Jessie Buckley.

• 36:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 36:26Sean Fennessey?

  You, listeners may recall, Eddie Murphy was riding on a train to Oscar glory for the film Dreamgirls in the Best Supporting Actor race. He won some precursors and then he released his legendary comedy classic, Norbit, in the spring before the Academy Awards happened. And many believe that it literally tanked his Oscar chances and he lost that Academy Award. And he actually talked about it recently in his Netflix film, Eddie, which was kind of interesting. I think maybe it's called Being Eddie.

• 36:56Sean Fennessey?

  But just the fact that he had an awareness of it and felt a little burned by it, I thought was notable. You know, Oscar voting closes today, Thursday, when we're recording. I don't really think this is gonna have any impact on Jessie Buckley.

• 37:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I wanted to ask you, do you think that the bride or the late breaking campaign against Jessie Buckley for her anti-cat stance?

• 37:18Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know anything about that.

• 37:19Amanda Dobbins?

  So this just absolutely erupted on social media in the last two days. And it's an anecdote about how when Jessie Buckley moved in with her husband, her husband had cats and the cats were not welcoming to Jessie Buckley.

• 37:35Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 37:36Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think even pooping on her pillowcase. And so then she issued an ultimatum that it was the cats for herself.

• 37:44Sean Fennessey?

  See, I thought this story was about Maggie Gyllenhaal. This story was about Jessie Buckley?

• 37:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 37:48Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 37:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And so, but now there's just a Jessie Buckley is a monster because the cats had to be rehomed. And this is, you know how the animal internet is, you know? Like, I still think that this is part of, this is a secret part of the Mardi Supreme resistance is like, what happened to the dog? And now Jessie Buckley doesn't like cats.

• 38:08Sean Fennessey?

  Right. Well, if you had to choose, dog or cat? Cause you're out on birds, we know that. You can't do a bird.

• 38:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, but like, what am I choosing to live with? To be responsible, I can't be responsible for anything else. I'm responsible for enough things right now.

• 38:21Sean Fennessey?

  2019 Amanda, dog or cat? You gotta take one.

• 38:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I like spending time with dogs more, but again, this is, my husband does not respond to dogs. Well, as you know.

• 38:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I do know that.

• 38:34Amanda Dobbins?

  And I would choose to live with my husband, so I guess I choose a cat.

• 38:38Sean Fennessey?

  I was raised with cats and dogs. I had a German shepherd growing up, cane.

• 38:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 38:45Sean Fennessey?

  Changed my life, made me care for things beyond myself. Taught me responsibility. I loved him, he was beautiful. I also had three cats growing up, three different cats, all of whom. Died, not on my watch, on my mom's watch technically, but um.

• 39:00Amanda Dobbins?

  So yeah, they're teaching your responsibility until they die and then it's your mom's problem, huh?

• 39:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, well, I've been reflecting on this specifically because our daughter wants a cat.

• 39:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 39:10Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and she wants a dog too, and we're not ready for that, but um, I feel like losing three cats as a young person made me feel like they were more disposable, whereas only losing one dog, I was like, I haven't had a dog in my life since I was 12. And I'm wait, I've been waiting and I feel like I'm gonna wait till I'm like 50, but when I get a dog, that's gonna be my dog, that's gonna be my homie, like that's gonna be the person that I spend a lot of time with. And uh, I, I, I kind of understand where Jessie Buckley's coming from, because it's like you entered into a new experience and you signed on for the husband, but not the cats, but I like cats, I'm not anti-cat.

• 39:49Amanda Dobbins?

  I think the cat was not, if the cat wasn't allowing, the cat was not welcoming her.

• 39:55Sean Fennessey?

  I see.

• 39:56Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, they couldn't cohabitate.

• 39:57Sean Fennessey?

  Got it. This is the only movie podcast where you can get this discussion. I just want everyone to know that.

• 40:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sorry if we're, we're speaking to the entirety of the Oscars experience, listen.

• 40:06Sean Fennessey?

  You're right. That's exactly what this is.

• 40:07Amanda Dobbins?

  So what do you think is gonna be more hurtful, the bride or no cats?

• 40:10Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, clearly the cats.

• 40:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, the cats thing is just really, yeah.

• 40:12Sean Fennessey?

  The cat stuff is divisive. This is like a big swing and oh, she missed, whatever, it happens.

• 40:16Amanda Dobbins?

  It happens, it's not her fault.

• 40:17Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, Box Office, this movie's tracking for somewhere between 14 and 18 million.

• 40:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 40:24Sean Fennessey?

  It's not great for an 80 million dollar movie.

• 40:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know if this is gonna go in like the plus column, you know?

• 40:31Sean Fennessey?

  No, I don't think so.

• 40:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Paramount starts looking under the hood?

• 40:33Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 40:33Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, I don't think there're gonna be like more of these.

• 40:35Sean Fennessey?

  Probably not another Maggie Gyllenhaal joint coming from David Ellison anytime soon. I did think this would, was a good moment to kind of take a, take a breath and look at the Pam, Abdi, Mike DeLuca era, because I think this is the end of phase one. This is the last movie from the initial green light bonanza that they set out where they were just like filmmaker forward, audacious stories, we're making movies that other studios won't make at certain budgets. So like, let's just quickly go through the lineup. Companion, Mickey 17, The Alto Knights, Minecraft Movie, Sinners, Final Destination Bloodlines, Technically F1, but not really, Technically Superman, but not really, Weapons, The Conjuring Last Rites,

• 41:19Sean Fennessey?

  One Battle After Another, Wuthering Heights, and The Bride.

• 41:23Amanda Dobbins?

  You heard it here first. Mike and Pam are good at their jobs.

• 41:28Sean Fennessey?

  It's pretty good. I mean, you know, I think The Conjuring: Last Rites and Final Destination: Bloodlines being like a massive successes in addition to a Minecraft movie makes a lot of this feel even better. Where you're like, you guys did your IP things and you did them in ways that were effective enough that we could like talk about them on the show. And people, you know, a lot of families went to go see those movies, but they don't, they're not like lasting things. But then having the two leading contenders for best picture and then even, you know, The Alto Knights, which was reportedly a David Zaslove project.

• 41:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 41:58Sean Fennessey?

  They don't have any stain on them from that one. Superman, you know, was obviously more of a James Gunn DC Studios thing, but a relative success. The weather heights has turned out to be not as big as I expected it to be. I don't think it's a loss by any means. And it's really interesting that Emerald Fennell made that choice to go with Warner Brothers instead of Netflix, where she could have gotten more money, maybe upfront.

• 42:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 42:23Sean Fennessey?

  But it's definitely not a loss for them. I think it was generally financially successful. We didn't really like it that much. The Bride will probably be the biggest L that they take.

• 42:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Even more than Mickey 17? What was Mickey 17's box office? Because this is in, this is in the Mickey 17 spot. And I think we are having the same kind of conversation about this film that we did Mickey 17 last year, which is like, we really, we do like that filmmakers get to do this and some things worked better than others.

• 42:55Sean Fennessey?

  Mickey 17 made $133.5 million globally.

• 43:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 43:01Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think The Bride's gonna get past that.

• 43:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't think so either.

• 43:06Sean Fennessey?

  I also think like, if you want to put kind of Metacritic scores up against each other.

• 43:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I think Mickey 17 is a more successful movie than this is.

• 43:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, they're kind of the same to me.

• 43:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, well, I mean.

• 43:16Sean Fennessey?

  Like, I'm like, this is, this is different. And, and some of it isn't working and some of it is like too politically on the nose. It has the same issue.

• 43:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely. And I really bumped on that with Mickey 17 as well.

• 43:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, but, but there's so much invention and visual dynamism and just the musical sequences alone in the bride. I'm like, I don't know, this is pretty like 1930s movie musicals.

• 43:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Jake Gyllenhaal as Fred Astaire? Yes.

• 43:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that was really entertaining.

• 43:43Sean Fennessey?

  It's half baked.

• 43:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I think he was singing too. He was doing his own.

• 43:45Sean Fennessey?

  I think he was. Well, yeah, we know from the, the John Mulaney and the sack lunch bunch that he's a, he's a real performer.

• 43:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you remember, he hosted SNL? It was the Dreamgirls year. And because he did, I am telling you, I'm not going, in his monologue. And it was, it's incredible. It's not online anymore because of music rights, but I'll never forget how good he was.

• 44:11Sean Fennessey?

  We might need him in a musical. Mickey 17 landed at 72 on Metacritic. Do you want to guess what the bride is on Metacritic right now?

• 44:16Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it's definitely in the 50s.

• 44:18Sean Fennessey?

  55.

• 44:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 44:20Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Well, I wanted to mention the reimagining thing because I think it's really interesting and I appreciate the framework and the context around the feminist retellings of classic literature because I think it's important to a lot of these stories. You know, it's easy to point to something like Clueless or 10 Things I Hate About You. I think of those more as remakes.

• 44:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Those are remixes or, or up, or, yeah, they're remixes. They're modern remixes.

• 44:39Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 44:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 44:40Sean Fennessey?

  There's something different that happens. And I think maybe the most famous version of this is Hook.

• 44:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Sean Fennessey?

  Which is Steven Spielberg's dramatic, kind of fast forward in the story of Peter Pan, where a grown up Peter Pan goes back to Never Neverland to confront Captain Hook and the Lost Boys and rediscover his inner childhood.

• 45:05Sean Fennessey?

  A movie that I was obsessed with as a kid, revisited in my twenties and disliked. And I probably need to look at it again.

• 45:13Sean Fennessey?

  Julia Roberts' Tinker Bell.

• 45:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I do remember that.

• 45:15Sean Fennessey?

  Very notable.

• 45:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Tinker Hell.

• 45:17Sean Fennessey?

  Tinker Hell.

• 45:18Amanda Dobbins?

  That was mean.

• 45:18Sean Fennessey?

  That was, was that the headline?

• 45:20Amanda Dobbins?

  It was definitely.

• 45:21Sean Fennessey?

  The blurb in Entertainment Weekly?

• 45:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly. But this happens over and over again, and I think this stuff is kind of fascinating. Like Cronenberg's The Fly is a really good version of a reimagining. It's sort of a similar story to the original movie, but in the 1980s in particular, there were a lot of horror stories like this, like John Carpenter's The Thing is a riff on The Thing from Another Planet, but it, or The Thing from Another World, but it's not the same specifically. Weird Science is basically The Bride of Frankenstein. It's brought to life by two horny boys.

• 45:55Sean Fennessey?

  The Wiz.

• 45:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 45:57Sean Fennessey?

  You know, a reinvention, a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz. Your beloved You've Got Mail, which I did not realize is based on a story and is not just the shop around the corner. Did you know that?

• 46:09Amanda Dobbins?

  The, no.

• 46:10Sean Fennessey?

  So it, I'm going to look this up right now. Please vamp while I do so.

• 46:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I would say that it is, it's as much a shop around the corner update as it is. I like, what are they, what are they switching around to like, tell the story in a new way?

• 46:29Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe not from the movie, but I think from Parfumery, which is the, that is the, I want to say it's a, it's not German. I don't know what.

• 46:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Parfumery would, would be French.

• 46:41Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think it's a French novel. It's Miklos Laszlo is the author. He's Austrian.

• 46:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 46:48Sean Fennessey?

  And it's an Austrian story that I think Lubitsch was basing his story on. And so I think just even the, the sort of like conventions of what's happening in You've Got Mail, the use of technology.

• 47:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 47:01Sean Fennessey?

  The fact that like, something can be based on something and then based on something else, and you put it in a blender and it becomes something else.

• 47:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally, yeah.

• 47:07Sean Fennessey?

  And that, and it's not a spoof, like it's not a Mel Brooks movie. It's actually based on the material, but is changing things in the material.

• 47:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 47:15Sean Fennessey?

  Is an interesting example of that. I'm trying to think of like some. What like, what are some more audacious ones like Cruella? Is a little bit of what you're talking about with the feminist literature where?

• 47:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Well, there's, there is a whole fairy tale thing. Where? And, and it does have to do with like feminist retellings, but they are more often focused on the villain.

• 47:35Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:36Amanda Dobbins?

  And-

• 47:37Sean Fennessey?

  Maleficent is this as well.

• 47:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. Um, and what's up, what's up happening in Snow White and the Huntsman?

• 47:44Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I think it's focused more on the Huntsman character in the Disney film is sent to kill Snow White.

• 47:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 47:52Sean Fennessey?

  But then that character is made more heroic in that story.

• 47:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. So that's like a, that's a not all men, uh, retelling.

• 47:59Sean Fennessey?

  Could be.

• 48:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 48:00Sean Fennessey?

  Could be.

• 48:01Amanda Dobbins?

  That's really says so much. But yeah, the, the fairy tales are doing the, the villain. So that to me seems more examining. I mean, definitely is like social, social norms. And there's a feminist element to it also. But some of it is that you get away from some of the princessy stuff, which is how we've tried to free ourselves from the, you know, the fairy tale trap over time is interesting and kind of sad. And then also it's a little bit like a storytelling, reimagining like story conventions and like, let's think about like the bad person and what is the bad person doing?

• 48:40Sean Fennessey?

  There's a really clever and wildly unsuccessful version of this called Dracula Untold. Are you familiar with this movie?

• 48:46Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 48:46Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, 2014 movie starring Luke Evans. He plays Vlad the Impaler, AKA Dracula. But he is forced to transform into the evil monster Dracula. Because, um, his family and his nation is under the threat of the Ottoman Sultan. And so he needs to build up all of his powers and his army so that he may battle the Sultan.

• 49:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. How's it work out?

• 49:10Sean Fennessey?

  He wins.

• 49:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 49:11Sean Fennessey?

  And then he lives forever as Dracula.

• 49:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, good. Is he unhappy about that?

• 49:15Sean Fennessey?

  Well, all Draculas are kind of sad.

• 49:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 49:18Sean Fennessey?

  You know, they have, they have an internal woe.

• 49:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 49:21Sean Fennessey?

  Much like myself.

• 49:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean Joker's not unlike this, right?

• 49:25Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's very, very much in, in keeping.

• 49:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Aside from the fact that the same team worked on Joker and The Bride.

• 49:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, yeah, I think.

• 49:34Amanda Dobbins?

  But that's about like, but what if we tried to understand this, this sad man who's an insult?

• 49:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Arthur.

• 49:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 49:41Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he just, he can't strike up a conversation with Sassy Beats.

• 49:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 49:45Sean Fennessey?

  You know, she won't talk to him. He just wants to find love. You know, he likes to ride the subway.

• 49:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 49:50Sean Fennessey?

  Sometimes there's some stockbrokers on the subway and you hate that. Hate to be bullied as a grown man on the subway. There's a lot of other examples, like another really mean eighties movie is The Blob, which is a remake of the Steve McQueen movie from the fifties, The Blob. I really like the Elizabeth Moss starring the invisible man, Lee Whannells.

• 50:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Sean Fennessey?

  Which is a real, I think a real clever reimagining that also has a lot of social import.

• 50:13Amanda Dobbins?

  It does.

• 50:14Sean Fennessey?

  But makes it strong enough that the thriller aspects are what is at the front of it. You know what I mean? It's not like this movie exists because it's, this is, we're putting it, this, using this milieu and this time in history where, you know, ideas about sexual assault and gender control and all of these things that are kind of in the culture are sort of like the background, like the set piece for a scary movie about an invisible guy.

• 50:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. It's not, it's, it's implied or like a, a possible interpretation of the text as opposed to like written in the text. It is also, there aren't also 45 other things going on in the movie.

• 50:52Sean Fennessey?

  It's very kind of restrained, like down the middle.

• 50:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 50:55Sean Fennessey?

  This is a 90 minute thriller. Invasion of the Body Snatchers keeps doing this. There have been four versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original from the fifties, then the Philip Kaufman film in the seventies, which is really more about like kind of the paranoia of that era of history. And then Abel Ferrara's Body Snatchers in the nineties, and then the kind of bungled Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman movie, The Invasion from the two thousands. And I think just like that inherent feeling of being replaced lives on forever and you can reimagine it in a lot of different ways. Ponyo, did you know Ponyo is a reimagining?

• 51:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Of, of what?

• 51:30Sean Fennessey?

  Of, of The Little Mermaid.

• 51:31Amanda Dobbins?

  I didn't.

• 51:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 51:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, well, see, you know, that's again, we're trying to fix the fairy tales.

• 51:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, there's a Ponyo exhibit at the Academy Museum right now.

• 51:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I've heard it's great.

• 51:39Sean Fennessey?

  Absolutely delightful.

• 51:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Sean Fennessey?

  Would highly recommend all parents take their kids to see it. And honestly, if you don't have kids, you also would probably love it if you like Miyazaki. Big Lebowski, it's kind of like Dashiell Hammett novels, The Long Goodbye.

• 51:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Sean Fennessey?

  Bogart, all those things, but then set amidst the low level angst of the Gulf War. I don't know.

• 52:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, The Long Goodbye for that matter, but yeah.

• 52:02Sean Fennessey?

  Totally, totally. Mirror Mirror?

• 52:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, yeah. So what happens in that one? So is that the Julia Roberts one?

• 52:09Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 52:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so.

• 52:10Sean Fennessey?

  Julia Roberts and Lily Collins.

• 52:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 52:13Sean Fennessey?

  And Julia Roberts.

• 52:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Not Lily James.

• 52:14Sean Fennessey?

  Not Lily James.

• 52:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Lily James is in the other one, the other Cinderella.

• 52:18Sean Fennessey?

  Lily James is in the other Cinderella, yes.

• 52:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Because they came out around the same time.

• 52:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, I think Mirror Mirror came first, directed by Tarsim Singh, director of The Fall and The Cell, two of the most beautiful movies of the last 25 years.

• 52:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 52:32Sean Fennessey?

  And I believe it is really more focused on the queen, played by Julia Roberts, the evil queen.

• 52:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 52:38Sean Fennessey?

  And it is that shift in perspective. That's the other version of it is not just what about this woman who is sidelined in the story, but it's like, you know, I guess it is similar to Cruella in that way.

• 52:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, right, right.

• 52:48Sean Fennessey?

  That villain retelling. I seem to recall that movie being quite poor.

• 52:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Mirror Mirror?

• 52:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Didn't revisit it for our conversation.

• 52:56Amanda Dobbins?

  I was just happy that Julia Roberts was back.

• 52:58Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's great.

• 52:59Amanda Dobbins?

  And now she's, The Fall is always in her letterbox for, so that's nice that that happened.

• 53:03Sean Fennessey?

  Is that true?

• 53:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:04Sean Fennessey?

  Did she say that?

• 53:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Sean Fennessey?

  That's beautiful.

• 53:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, it's great. So listen.

• 53:08Sean Fennessey?

  Well, The Fall is great.

• 53:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Sean Fennessey?

  You know who the biggest Fall fan I know is?

• 53:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Who?

• 53:11Sean Fennessey?

  Joanna Robinson.

• 53:13Amanda Dobbins?

  That, yeah.

• 53:13Sean Fennessey?

  Checks out. Last Man Standing? Probably haven't seen this one. Bruce Willis, late 90s,

• 53:22Sean Fennessey?

  19th century, Western gangster movie that is a remake of Yojimbo.

• 53:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so not the Tim Allen sitcom.

• 53:29Sean Fennessey?

  Nope.

• 53:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 53:30Sean Fennessey?

  Never seen that.

• 53:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Me either.

• 53:32Sean Fennessey?

  Rob Zombie did this with Halloween. First Halloween bad, second Halloween good.

• 53:38Sean Fennessey?

  That's my take. Don't at me. I don't know. What else? What's the best version of this? What's the absolute most clever, insightful, essential reimagining we've ever gotten?

• 53:54Amanda Dobbins?

  The Da Vinci Code.

• 53:55Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thank you for taking this so seriously.

• 53:59Amanda Dobbins?

  It's in the Louvre.

• 53:59Sean Fennessey?

  I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 54:01Amanda Dobbins?

  You think it's still there? Or you think it was heisted too? Did anyone check?

• 54:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I've only seen the movie once. Don't really know what you're talking about.

• 54:08Amanda Dobbins?

  It's the Holy Grail, which is actually a chalice. That I think like Christ drank from, but may maybe.

• 54:19Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's what the, that's what the original is. And then in Da Vinci Code, the chalice is actually the womb. That's what it is. Because yeah, it's the feminine sacred. That's yeah, it's women. That's why it's reimagining. We did it. We fixed Christianity.

• 54:38Sean Fennessey?

  You may recall there was a years long running bit on this show about the Holy Grail.

• 54:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I was gonna ask if you were gonna bring that to Steven Spielberg.

• 54:47Sean Fennessey?

  Some questions about the Last Crusade?

• 54:48Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I was, no, if you were just gonna start with, I don't believe in the Grail. You don't care about it.

• 54:52Sean Fennessey?

  You think I should only make statements to him?

• 54:54Amanda Dobbins?

  But do you care about it now that I've told you that in the Da Vinci Code, it's about the womb and women's power?

• 55:00Sean Fennessey?

  Do I care about it?

• 55:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Does it? Now are you like, sure, the Holy Grail, I'm into it.

• 55:03Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, it's not real, so I don't know what you're asking me.

• 55:06Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't know, but so then, then the implication of that in the Da Vinci Code is that there is like a line of descendants of Christ and Mary Magdalene. And then like, the Holy Grail is like all among us. Maybe the Holy Grail is in you.

• 55:17Sean Fennessey?

  So you, when you go to the bookstore and you look for the book, The Da Vinci Code, that book can be found in the fiction section, which is, means it's not real. Some guy made it up. The name's Dan Brown.

• 55:29Amanda Dobbins?

  It's a reimagining. See?

• 55:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. It was some, there was somebody had an imagination. In the 15th century, they came up with the Holy Grail. That's not something that happened during Christ's time on earth.

• 55:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Don't you think it's earlier than that?

• 55:40Sean Fennessey?

  I thought it was roughly around that time.

• 55:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Holy Grail. Let's just Wikipedia this real fast. Okay, 1190.

• 55:48Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, okay.

• 55:49Amanda Dobbins?

  There we go.

• 55:49Sean Fennessey?

  12th century. Pretty good.

• 55:51Amanda Dobbins?

  A mysterious grail appears in Percival, the story of the Grail.

• 55:55Sean Fennessey?

  Intriguing. This episode is brought to you by Volkswagen. There is such a thing as becoming too comfortable in your day to day. But our favorite films with stories that make us change the way we think, they weren't made by people content to just sit back and watch the world pass by. This is your sign that you shouldn't either. From us, VW and the other drivers out there, grab the wheel. Do what you love, even if it means taking the road less traveled. Learn more at VW.com.

• 56:23Sean Fennessey?

  Let's go to The Secret Agent.

• 56:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 56:25Sean Fennessey?

  Done yeoman's work so far.

• 56:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Thought that was productive.

• 56:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 56:30Sean Fennessey?

  Well, The Secret Agent is a movie that we did talk about very briefly back in November, when Claber Mendoza Filio was on the show. And that was a wonderful conversation and I would encourage people to go back and listen to that after listening to this conversation that we're going to have, in part because the movie is now available on Hulu. It only opened in a very select few theaters in the fall. It was hard to see. We waited a long time to get through it on the show in any depth. I'm excited to just do so with you now. I've now seen the movie three times. This film stars Wagner Moura, Carlos Francisco, Tanya Maria, Robirio Dionis. It is essentially, though I don't think we can contain its multitudes in this very brief summary, in 1977, Marcelo, a technology teacher,

• 57:11Sean Fennessey?

  moves from Sao Paulo to Recife during Carnival to escape his violent past and start over. He finds the city full of chaos and his neighbors begin to spy on him.

• 57:22Sean Fennessey?

  You rewatched it?

• 57:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:25Sean Fennessey?

  What was your takeaway on a second watch?

• 57:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I think the first time that you watch it, you're trying to figure out what is happening. Like, and not in, not in the bride in coherent sort of way, but just in a, this is a film that is structured untraditionally and doesn't have a lot of like capital E exposition. You know, it's not saying to you, so we are here in 1970 something Brazil. And here is the political structure in Brazil, or lack thereof. And here is where these people are and here's what they do for a living and where they're going. You're thrust into this world. And to me, what is most memorable and exciting about this movie

• 58:11Amanda Dobbins?

  is how vividly it creates that world and how the exposition it gives you is about. Like a place and time and people. And so you don't, you can infer what you need to know about a military dictatorship, or even like what the character's job is, or what the character's name is. You know, the, the actual

• 58:35Amanda Dobbins?

  facts and characters and plot, as you mentioned, are not, you know, immediately obvious, but also beside the point. And so, once I understood the arc of the story, and kind of understood where everything was going for my first watch, the second watch, I could just really revel in like these amazing set pieces and this creation of a world that I know very little about, but really feel completely immersed in. And so, obviously, the opening sequence at the gas station is, you know, a short film all its own and like chilling and memorable. And, and its own form of exposition. In some ways, like you know, everything that you need to know in those first 15 minutes.

• 59:16Sean Fennessey?

  This is the way this world works.

• 59:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. But you know, like the, the carnival scene and all the scenes at the movie theater and this recreation of life. And, and thus, these like very fully realized wonderful people. Like, there's a reason that we gave Tanya Maria, who plays Donia Sebastiana, the, um, the big pick, the alternative Oscar. And that she's just, you know, been such a reference point because it is a, it's a small performance that is instantly someone you not only remember, but want to spend time with. And like, so I don't know that much about these people at the end of it, but I feel like I really understand everything that is created.

• 1:00:02Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's a magical movie.

• 1:00:04Sean Fennessey?

  It is really magical. It's very complex because it does a lot of different kinds of movies happening all at the same time. And I compared it to The Bride because I do think that.

• 1:00:16Sean Fennessey?

  Film student brains, and I think both Maggie Gyllenhaal and Mendoza have film student brains, tend to do that recombinant thing where they're kind of pulling a lot of influences very much, sometimes on the surface, sometimes more deeply ingrained in the stories that they're telling. This is a very deeply ingrained version of that, where that opening sequence that you talked about, set at the gas station, is like pure Alan Paculoff. Like, it is a 70s conspiracy thriller, where you're like, it's very tense, no one is explaining what is going on, there's a dead body in sight, and we're worried for our character. We're like, this is, he has to, it is Warren Beatty in The Parallax View. Something is not right here, and he has to get free. And that's an incredible sense of mood and atmosphere

• 1:00:58Sean Fennessey?

  that he shows you right off the bat in the movie. But then, as the movie begins to unfold, and we start to learn a little bit more about Marcello, it becomes very clear that it's a movie about a man trying to get back to his son, which is a different kind of dramatic story. And then it's also a movie about this kind of found family of dissidents and exiles who have found themselves in Recife, in Dona Sebastiana's home, and they're in safe harbor, and they're trying to figure out how they can stay free and stay safe for the rest of their lives. And then it becomes a different kind of political thriller, almost like a gangster movie with a hitman, and this ornate plot around trying to capture a man, and we don't really know why they want to capture him until very far into the film. I mean, almost two hours and 10 minutes, when we start to learn really who Marcello

• 1:01:42Sean Fennessey?

  actually is, and how he became ensnared in this, in this plot. So the movie is extraordinarily complex, but it's not a breakneck thriller. It's a very

• 1:01:56Amanda Dobbins?

  languid.

• 1:01:56Sean Fennessey?

  languid, yes, slow-paced. And it really, it's not just that it doesn't reveal anything to you, it like, really lets you sit in the world. Now, sometimes that doesn't work for me in, in films. And this is the rare case, because I think what you're describing, which is like, the idea of holding back on information, it kind of like, gets you leaning forward, and forward, and forward. And I, I think it's like, a pretty magical act of synthesis.

• 1:02:21Amanda Dobbins?

  I think also, just the way it communicates.

• 1:02:26Amanda Dobbins?

  The way it embraces that pace and it like uses that time and the downtime really well. I had forgotten that right after the gas station,

• 1:02:38Amanda Dobbins?

  the Marcelo character is just driving to Chicago, baby, please don't go. And you're just, and you kind of get some, you get some carnival scenes. You get some like some hallucinations like along the road or are they? And you don't totally know what you're seeing and it's, it is moving slowly. Like he's just driving and I think they're showing some of the credits, but you're also completely wrapped and it's not telling you what is happening, but it is telling you a lot about the world that you're in. So I don't know, I think there is something about, it knows exactly what it wants to create and how you want to feel, how it wants you to feel in a way that I like caught instantly,

• 1:03:21Amanda Dobbins?

  even though I honestly couldn't tell you still, like Marcelo or Armando's like total political history and employment history, like I have most of it, I think, but I couldn't diagram it for you. I don't think it matters.

• 1:03:34Sean Fennessey?

  We can talk through some of it and kind of where, where, what they reveal to us and what we think he is, why he is in, he's being pursued.

• 1:03:43Sean Fennessey?

  But I agree with what you just said about hearing that Chicago song. And then honestly, there's such interesting choices of Brazilian music throughout the film, this kind of Brazilian pop, Brazilian folk throughout, that does the same thing in the movie, I think that the, the use of Hollywood movies does for the movie, which is that it shows you the ways in which popular culture and, and popular art can suffuse people's lives, can change their feelings about things, can create a sense of dread, this idea of Jaws, and to a lesser extent, the omen as these hovering gods over the movie. And this idea of like, you're being pursued by something that is bigger and more dangerous than you is just such a sexy, you know, film essay idea that, that Mendoza has put his

• 1:04:26Sean Fennessey?

  arms around. And the Chicago song is sort of the opposite, right? Which is like, in that time in popular music, you could like seek escape with a pop song like that.

• 1:04:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Sean Fennessey?

  But there is something kind of lurking around the corner beyond that escape that is really interesting when that sort of masked face comes up when he's driving early on and you're like, oh my gosh, what is going to happen to this man? So I found that part of it really fascinating. It's also like all of Mendoza's movies, or at least all of his scripted films. It's got this phantasmagoric genre thing going on that is way outside of the real world construct of the rest of the movie. In this case, it's this leg.

• 1:05:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Sean Fennessey?

  There's a, there's a leg that has been discovered in the body of a shark at the beginning of the film, and that leg kind of takes on a life of its own. And it goes on kind of a spree at a certain point in the movie, and it takes us into these, it's one of a series of side quests that the movie goes on to, which is one of the reasons why it's so long in language, where we're just like, okay, so we're just following a leg in this park, which is sort of like a gay cruising meetup space, and kind of like a space for where people can really live and be themselves while living under the fascist thumb of this regime that is happening in Brazil in 1977. That is just another thing where I'm like, no other director is doing this. This is singular. You know, there's not, and when we talked about Baccarat in 2020, it was the same thing.

• 1:05:45Sean Fennessey?

  There are aspects of that movie that feel like it just turns into a horror movie for 10 minutes and then stops being a horror movie for a while. That is a really bold stroke that I really like.

• 1:05:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but it's also, it's still grounded and it's still like, it's a very realistic leg. And even the way it's filmed, you know, it's like hopping around like a leg would, and you see all of the wounds or that you like, you get it like an over the head shot of it's of how the muscles are moving. And it's like very gross and a little funny still. And just like moving as if that is really happening. And then it's reported in the papers. And then the char, so the other characters, the dissidents, in a like very lovely emotional scene, the scene starts off with them reading it as it's, it's not like fantastical in

• 1:06:37Amanda Dobbins?

  the world of the story, or it's no more fantastical than anything that else that is going on in this time of mischief as the film introduces it. And also, I hadn't realized, as Donia Sebastianas says, she gives a toast and she says, and may there, you know, may this child grow up in a Brazil with less mischief.

• 1:06:56Sean Fennessey?

  Right. The, it's a really interesting choice, too, because it's based on a true thing that happened in the 1970s. In Recife, the Pernambuco Daily was writing about this leg as a way to kind of like disguise censored news about police violence, corruption, homophobia, that they would use these, like an active metaphor. To communicate to the reading public like,

• 1:07:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:07:19Sean Fennessey?

  Here's what's really going on in your city right now. And here are the ways in which you're being controlled by the nation state, which is so interesting to literal, to literalize that. You know what I mean? The movie making that to manifesting that idea that is only meant to be read, you know?

• 1:07:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, but it is also, it is then also literalizing like that violence and, but not actually showing the actual, it would be a very different movie. If you saw in that cruising park, people being arrested or people being beaten or like the state actually, you know, coming through.

• 1:07:53Sean Fennessey?

  Right, instead of just kind of getting kicked by a straight leg.

• 1:07:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and, and when they discuss it later, like we, it's communicated that like we all know what it means.

• 1:08:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:08:02Amanda Dobbins?

  And we all like, understand what it's meant to represent. But the, the film really does recreate these like great terrors and violence and people being kidnapped and murdered and in a, in a not like mythical, but a mythical sort of way.

• 1:08:20Sean Fennessey?

  I think so, yeah, I think so. I think, you know, I feel like we've compared every single movie this season to one battle after another. But this is a very similar movie to one battle after another, right? It's about kind of like two secret societies, one operating in pursuit of revolution, one operating in pursuit of like taking full control over the people. And the lengths that one will go to and the lengths that the other will go to. And then the long-term ramifications of that kind of internecine battle in a community. And it's really fascinating. Mendoza's previous film is called Pictures of Ghosts. It's a documentary that is sort of like a memory doc about him thinking about Recife and being in Recife in the seventies. And it's a really interesting kind of like, I think it's probably better seen after seeing The Secret Agent, actually.

• 1:09:04Sean Fennessey?

  But um, the fact that so much of this is just true and also comes one year after I'm Still Here, which is also exploring a similar time, you know, the same time in Brazilian history. And that movie had a very, very ground level impact on a single family and a single woman. And this movie is very much about the person who we're going to talk about momentarily and his character. But it also is about this wide community and the people in, in Doña Sebastiana's home and the people who work where Marcelo goes to work and the ways in which they live with the police force and the community that is affected by these crimes that start happening around his existence in the city. It's just a very, it's very big.

• 1:09:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Sean Fennessey?

  It's unusual for a movie to be able to contain this many ideas and things and strands and kind of make them feel coherent. And I think the number one reason why they feel so coherent is because Wagner Moura, the whole movie's on his shoulders.

• 1:10:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Sean Fennessey?

  And he's not in every scene, but if you don't have him, you can't flow through all this other stuff.

• 1:10:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And he, he is carrying it and carrying like so much of the emotion and fear and, and like narrative thrust.

• 1:10:19Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:20Amanda Dobbins?

  While also gliding and observing and appreciating though the, everyone else that he sees, and he is really like the audience's vehicle and entrance into everything else that we learn. But um, I was really struck by the, the carnival scene on rewatch and Wagner Moura enters it and it's just like a recreation of a street and like a joyful parade moment. And you know, and Udo Kier, the late Udo Kier is kind of in the, in the background dancing as well. It's a real slice of life and you watch Wagner Moura like behold it and appreciate it. And then he gets in the mix and he starts dancing too.

• 1:11:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And you know, and it's, and it's an appreciation and an involvement that like comes from experience. It's lovely. So, but he definitely, his character threads everything together and the, the appreciation for everything around him that the, he gives the character, like I think extends to the audience.

• 1:11:23Sean Fennessey?

  I think so too. He's a very warm actor. He's very easy to connect to. He's giving a handful of different kinds of performances in the movie though, because there are plenty of times I feel similarly about his kind of introduction to Doña Sebastiana's world where he feels very warm and he's kind of like excited to be welcomed into a space and to meet all these new people. He finds a, a girl that he's interested in, you know? He makes friends very quickly. He gets kind of acclimated to this little mini utopia that she has going on, but then... For a lot, long stretches of the movie, he's anxious, he's nervous, he feels under threat. He's, he is giving like a parallax view or clout kind of performance where he has to be

• 1:12:03Sean Fennessey?

  very watchful, very quiet, be very careful not to make a mistake so that he can survive in these circumstances. And then also he's carrying with him this burden of just not being able to be with his son.

• 1:12:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Sean Fennessey?

  And he sneaks off early in the film to go have a moment with him. And then the movie eventually brings that thread back around in, I think, a very beautiful way. And so what it ultimately leads to is an actor, we've been talking about Michael B. Jordan, playing two roles. He plays Smoke and Stack in Sinners. This is kind of three roles. It's, it's, it's two men, but two iterations of Armando, who is the original version of Marcelo before he has to change his identity. And then later Fernando, his son, at the end of the film. And he looks different in all three. He's got a different haircut. Even his complexion looks different. He feels like a different person. And the same way that when we were talking with Wesley about what MBJ does to kind of

• 1:12:57Sean Fennessey?

  shift intonation and posture and communicate that these are two men. Mora does the same thing here in a really, really impressive way. And that's part of why four months ago, we were like, this is one of the best, best actor races of all time. Cause you've got multiple examples of this throughout this race. But, you know, I've always liked him as an actor. I interviewed him at Sundance in like 20, when did we go, 2020?

• 1:13:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:13:21Sean Fennessey?

  And yes, and I forget what movie it was that he was in that I spoke to him for. But you can see why he's so well liked and why there is still a contingent of people who think he's going to win the Oscar.

• 1:13:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Sean Fennessey?

  Because he's just a very magnetic person and he seems very decent.

• 1:13:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely.

• 1:13:40Sean Fennessey?

  You know, a lot of famous people can't tell they're not so nice.

• 1:13:43Amanda Dobbins?

  There was a, there was a story at one of the Oscar events where he went up to my former colleague JD One, who was recently laid off at the Washington Post. And he, like, it was a day later and he knew about this and was like, he can afford, you know, Bezos can afford this and not that, like very engaged with like the world around him.

• 1:14:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Amanda Dobbins?

  And remembering that of her, so.

• 1:14:04Sean Fennessey?

  Well, the story even of him and Mendoza getting together is so cool because, you know, Mendoza was a film critic for years. He talked about it when he was on the pod and he met Mora as a critic. And they kind of just clicked. They they struck up a friendship, not when he was, you know, an exciting Brazilian filmmaker, but just a guy who was kind of covering festivals where they interacted with each other. And they kept up a relative correspondence. And I think it was Mora who who was like, I'm ready for us to do something together. And so that, you know, the film's clearly written with him in mind. And he's just absolutely phenomenal in this movie. I do think this is one of the craziest Best Picture nominees of all time.

• 1:14:44Amanda Dobbins?

  The sense that there's just a lot going on and it's a-

• 1:14:46Sean Fennessey?

  International feature, not from Europe, all kinds of different genre styles.

• 1:14:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:14:55Sean Fennessey?

  A movie that I wouldn't say has a satisfying feel good aspect to it. It is a historical drama in a way, but to your point, it doesn't, it never really situates us comfortably.

• 1:15:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, though I I feel that I know a lot more about this time period from this film than I did from I'm Still Here.

• 1:15:14Sean Fennessey?

  I totally agree. And one of the, I, you know, I was a little more resistant to I'm Still Here because I felt like it was a little bit more traditional.

• 1:15:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:15:22Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and and tightly focused in a way that I found more similar to more Oscar movies in the past. And this movie having all of these tributaries of story and ideas and and kind of manifestation of metaphorical ideas inside of the movie makes it a very odd product. And, you know, I think it's also a movie that definitely plays better on a big screen. Um, I I-

• 1:15:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm sure that's true, though. I have watched it at home and, you know, and was wrapped.

• 1:15:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:15:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And-

• 1:15:50Sean Fennessey?

  I really, really, really liked it on the big screen. And I think it it's that language pace is a little more challenging.

• 1:15:55Amanda Dobbins?

  There is a projectionist who is a major, many important scenes happen at the local movie theater.

• 1:16:00Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:16:01Amanda Dobbins?

  So a movie theater is is a part of the last scene of the movie in its way. So I like, I get it. It is, it's a, it is a movie nerd movie.

• 1:16:10Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:11Amanda Dobbins?

  And I do think we have an increasing number of movie nerds voting for Oscars.

• 1:16:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very good point. Um, just in the run up to the movie.

• 1:16:20Sean Fennessey?

  Mendoza cited Robert Altman, Brian De Palma, Sam Peckinpah, Scorsese and Spielberg as big influences.

• 1:16:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:16:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's nice for me.

• 1:16:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Same.

• 1:16:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's very, very wonderful to hear. But he also, he's been programming some films related to it, including John Borman's Point Blank, which has a similarly kind of like fractured editing style and is also a memory movie. So I think that's a really cool one. Iliopetri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, which totally the kind of like pursuit, the sense of mystery and paranoia you can feel. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I've never seen Hector Bumbeko's Lucio Flavio, but this makes me want to go see a movie like that. So that's very cool. Stylistically, it's actually not as complex as I thought it was going to be when I rewatched it. Like, it's a lot of singles, a lot of close-ups, a lot of two shots. There's some slick camera movement with some of the action sequences, especially like

• 1:17:11Sean Fennessey?

  the big pursuit and shootout near the end of the film. But it's not athletic, as you used to describe it. Like, it doesn't, even though it has these flights of fancy, structurally, I didn't find it to be kind of zany in terms of its craft.

• 1:17:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, no, no, no, no. It is recognizable and it's production design and costume design are excellent, but still like very realistic. You know, they are trying to recreate this area, this time and place in Brazil and like teach us about it. The costumes are unbelievable.

• 1:17:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think, you know, they are based on real pieces of clothing. But I was like, I clocking like random shirts in one of the like, the ID office scenes. I mean, like, I wonder how I would find something like that and what am I going to Google? There is, but you can, you know, see the textures. You can see all of the places, the office, the apartments, the, it feels very, very lived in. And again, like not fantastical.

• 1:18:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think the movie also does a nice job of not over explaining, but showing us. The kind of class and regional differentiations in that country at that time in history, which I think still persists to this day, which is sort of like the north versus the south.

• 1:18:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:18:29Sean Fennessey?

  The idea of communist influence versus capitalist influence and how those two things are colliding. And then, let's like use that to talk a little bit about maybe actually what's going on with Marcelo, AKA Armando, and then getting us to the end of the movie. So it's revealed late in the film that the man who has hired the hitmen to go after Marcelo is in fact an industrialist, a business owner.

• 1:18:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:18:55Sean Fennessey?

  In Brazil, who, as he describes, has Italian origins, but wants to control, you know, the ways and means of making transportation effectively. He's trying to control technology that would then influence their ability to build cars in a certain way and build other machines in a certain way. And that Marcelo, AKA Armando, plays is a professor, is an intellectual. He's a scientist. He's a person who develops things. He's developed a patent.

• 1:19:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:19:23Sean Fennessey?

  That could be very, very powerful for this man to get control of. This man visits the university, which is a public university, and comes in and kind of bullies his way into a form of control. And he's trying to eliminate people who will be standing in his company's way in their ability to make profit off of the work that's being done at this publicly funded university. So it's this real like head-on collision of like social civic service versus capitalism. And that sends eventually Marcelo into exile, where he becomes Marcelo. And the movie makes a really interesting choice, which is that he's pursued and we see him be pursued by this hitman, who's terrifying in the movie, who's sort of hired by the hitmen. But Marcelo doesn't die in the face of that. He dies later.

• 1:20:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:20:09Sean Fennessey?

  And we don't see him die.

• 1:20:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And we, do we know if it's days or weeks or months later?

• 1:20:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's unclear.

• 1:20:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. We don't really know what happens with his son. We don't know, do we know where he's killed?

• 1:20:22Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think so.

• 1:20:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Sean Fennessey?

  All we really know is that the movie has a framing device, not unlike Mary Shelley and the Bride, where.

• 1:20:30Sean Fennessey?

  Two young women working at a university are reviewing historical information about Brazil at that time, and they come upon the story of Armando and a lot of the materials, the recordings that he made while working with agencies in an attempt to basically be in witness protection. And they review all that material and that allows them to learn more about him and to learn more about his family. And eventually, one of the women who takes a real interest in this case takes what she's discovered to a blood transfusion center and she has blood taken and arranges a meeting with Armando's son, also played by Wagner Moura. And they have a conversation and she just said, here's what I found, take it or leave

• 1:21:14Sean Fennessey?

  it. And in the course of that conversation, they talk about his family history and how he sees and understands his family and his parents.

• 1:21:21Amanda Dobbins?

  And memory and.

• 1:21:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. And we learn that he died, his father, but I don't think any specifics, right?

• 1:21:30Amanda Dobbins?

  No, we see a newspaper clipping.

• 1:21:33Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:21:33Amanda Dobbins?

  That's, that's how we learn. And so, and we do see it in a marked difference to most of the other dead bodies that we see. I guess we do see some like very grotesque shootout and flesh melting off. But, you know, I'm thinking about the recurring image of a body lying somewhere with a piece of cardboard or a piece of newspaper over it. And in this one, you see Armando and like you see his face and you see him, but it is a newspaper photograph. And I think there's a caption that's like, it's believed to be some sort of hit job.

• 1:22:05Sean Fennessey?

  Right. Which is, that's a really good point about the cardboard and the newspaper.

• 1:22:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:09Sean Fennessey?

  And the idea of this kind of collision of that, especially that moment where the younger hitman is murdered by the other hitman late in the film and then in the barber shop, and then the barber shop owner comes in and puts a newspaper over his face and a kind of like spiritual act of like kind of covering him and protecting him in the aftermath of his death. And that collision of like faith, Christianity inside of a country that's maybe leveraging some of that faith against the people.

• 1:22:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, and also the headline that is on that newspaper is like the Carnival death toll is 92.

• 1:22:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:22:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and rising or whatever. So all of this is happening, you know, of the backdrop of many other deaths and many other, much other corruption and many other like people having problems. There's, there's a whole subplot.

• 1:22:59Amanda Dobbins?

  That I found like very moving and very upsetting that happens at the ID office. When there's a deposition that's scheduled for very early in the morning. So that the, the rich woman giving the deposition about the death of, the daughter of someone who worked for her. So that she doesn't have to deal with press and she doesn't have to deal, um, she's getting special treatment.

• 1:23:23Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:23:24Amanda Dobbins?

  And you see her and you see all the other people at the ID office responding to this in their own way. And it says everything about how this country is being run. And also like all of the other tragedies that are happening just off screen, run of the mill every single day.

• 1:23:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And it does feel like it is a daily series of tragedies at this time in history. And then at the very end, in that moment with his son Fernando, as, as he's escorting this woman out, he tells her, as you mentioned, that this blood center where he works as a doctor, is where the movie theater is where he got to see Jaws. And we learned earlier in the movie that he has been obsessed with trying to see the movie Jaws.

• 1:24:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:24:05Sean Fennessey?

  That Jaws, I think to this day is the ultimate test of when is your child ready to see a certain kind of movie? It is the, the movie that you, the young kids say, I want to see this, I want to see this, even though they know they're going to be terrified. And no doubt was the case for, for Mendoza. And he's kind of filtering that idea and that, you know, being able to see that movie. And in the movie Fernando says, I've been scared of this movie all the way up until the moment that I saw it. And then after I saw it, all the fear went away. And first of all, who can relate more, just absolutely, it must be a great movie goer. But just like a really, deeply felt and, and considerate and emotional and complex series of emotions about

• 1:24:48Sean Fennessey?

  the way that we reckon with terrible things that have happened in our lives. And for somebody like me, the way that they're often interwoven with my consumption of art and how much I think about it.

• 1:24:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And, and what you remember and what, and how you remember and what.

• 1:25:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, what stays as the construct of your actual life?

• 1:25:10Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's also introduced in this idea of coincidence. Because the woman who goes to visit him has family there and, you know, and that's part of the reason she's wanted to come. And he says, here's the real coincidence. Where I saw that movie theater, where the fear ended is this place where he's working now. And, you know, he says that he didn't really want to speak with her. And he says, really, I think of my grandfather as my actual father. I mean, which is sad and heartbreaking. And so it's beautiful and nothing is like handed to you on platter. Right? Even that, you know, he said, he says the thing about the movie theater and that just holds on the blood bank for a while.

• 1:25:52Amanda Dobbins?

  And the last, you just watch him walk back through the fluorescent lighting. And you're just sitting there thinking about what's there and what's not there.

• 1:26:01Sean Fennessey?

  His performance when he's talking to her.

• 1:26:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:04Sean Fennessey?

  Is so interesting because it's restrained but shattered at the same time. Like, you can tell he's really trying to hold back from losing it. Because he has been able to kind of put this away. Like, this story, this aspect of his life is something that he doesn't want to deal with because it's so painful to him. And he has made peace with the fact that Alexander is his real father. And that that's how he just sees his life. But that she has dredged something up that is very painful. But she's also done this extraordinary thing for him at the same time, which is she's given him access to his father's voice and his story and how he felt and why some of these things happened in the way that they did in a way he could never understand before.

• 1:26:44Sean Fennessey?

  And the movie is very, very similar, almost in direct connection to I'm Still Here in that way. Where the ending of I'm Still Here with the flash forward and the older woman thinking back on her experiences and then her family being gathered in this, you know, we can be flip about generational trauma. But this is actually when it's okay to use that. Where it's like, it's real world circumstances, but creating like an imagined story and using those real world circumstances to kind of infuse a story with more weight, with more heft.

• 1:27:14Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it's the kind of movie that talking about it just makes you admire it more. I think it's a real, real achievement. I look, I really look forward to seeing what Mendoza does. He's, he's sort of a really interesting movie thinker.

• 1:27:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I hope more people will, actually. It's still this feel like it's the least seen of the Best Picture documentaries, which is just a matter of logistics and...

• 1:27:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I'm hopeful. I think both It and Did Sentimental Value also go live at the same time on Hulu? I feel like they both went up around the same time. And so, you know, that's kind of the consequence of the Cannes conversation that we had, where Neon scooped up these four movies and, or five movies, and there was only so much that they could do to get attention around them.

• 1:27:56Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that The Secret Agent is?

• 1:28:00Sean Fennessey?

  I guess we don't want to spoil our Oscar picks. I don't really know what to do in international. I think I do. Revisiting the movie, I'm like, this is fucking good.

• 1:28:08Amanda Dobbins?

  It's wonderful.

• 1:28:09Sean Fennessey?

  This and Sentimental Value are like, they're so close for me.

• 1:28:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree. I, I do think we, as an Oscar community, have overlooked the fact that Sentimental Value has four acting noms.

• 1:28:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Screenplay, international director and Best Picture. Casting was, it was not nominated in casting despite having four acting noms. I, I think.

• 1:28:34Sean Fennessey?

  I don't remember.

• 1:28:35Amanda Dobbins?

  And so it's quite strong. And I do think also that in terms of the nominations, the nominating process is that it is a, it's a smaller body of voters.

• 1:28:47Sean Fennessey?

  The Secret Agent is nominating casting.

• 1:28:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, yeah, as it should be.

• 1:28:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:52Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's a smaller group of voters who are doing the nominating just because of who signs up and who agrees to watch all the international features. So you do wonder if it goes wide. To the, to the entire voting body, whether more people will, whether sentimental value, though apparently it's still renting, it's not on Hulu until March 23rd, according to the Googling that I just did.

• 1:29:16Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, that's notable.

• 1:29:17Amanda Dobbins?

  But that doesn't, I mean, that doesn't matter for the Oscar voter.

• 1:29:20Sean Fennessey?

  No, for the Academy, we didn't even mention the whole, you know, the update about how you, you do have to watch the films to vote.

• 1:29:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Or you would at least have to click that you have.

• 1:29:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Amanda Dobbins?

  But you have to click through each one. So there's like a added.

• 1:29:31Sean Fennessey?

  Steps, physical steps.

• 1:29:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Element of guilt.

• 1:29:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, yes. You think that's gonna work?

• 1:29:35Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:29:37Sean Fennessey?

  You think people will just vote?

• 1:29:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I think so. I think they're, I think they'll probably vote later. So that's kind of interesting. Like, maybe the cat story really will affect Jessie Buckley because it came out later in the window. But, uh.

• 1:29:49Sean Fennessey?

  Perhaps. It's funny, I, I've got one more movie to watch that is Oscar nominated that I have not seen. I've seen all the shorts. I've seen all the animated features. I've seen, as we mentioned, all the documentaries we'll get right into momentarily. And I haven't seen Kokuhou.

• 1:30:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 1:30:09Sean Fennessey?

  Which is nominated for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

• 1:30:11Amanda Dobbins?

  But you have seen the Matthew McConaughey fire movie.

• 1:30:14Sean Fennessey?

  I have The Lost Bus.

• 1:30:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's on my list.

• 1:30:17Sean Fennessey?

  You're really getting into the makeup, though, the effects category.

• 1:30:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, listen, I'm trying to do it all as well.

• 1:30:22Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I have four documentary shorts left.

• 1:30:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:30:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I have two animated features because I forgot that I hadn't seen all of those because I thought I was so ahead by having seen three of them before, you know, nominations.

• 1:30:33Sean Fennessey?

  Dun, dun, dun, little Amelie and Arco.

• 1:30:36Amanda Dobbins?

  It's fine. That's, you know, it's.

• 1:30:37Sean Fennessey?

  That's like three hours of movie. It's okay.

• 1:30:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I also, I'll just turn them on with my children, you know, we'll consume them together. And then.

• 1:30:43Sean Fennessey?

  Knox might like Arco.

• 1:30:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I have, I've seen all the documentaries, seen all the international features. So I have Kokuhou and The Lost Bus.

• 1:30:55Sean Fennessey?

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• 1:31:37Sean Fennessey?

  That's LinkedIn.com/thebigpicture. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. There's nothing better than having friends who support whatever you're into, like re-watching a director's entire catalog in the lead up to their latest release. And like those friends, State Farm is there to help you feel supported by helping you choose the coverage you need. With so many coverage options, it's nice knowing you have help finding what fits for you. So, you can check coverage off the list and spend more time debating movie rankings. Go online at StateFarm.com or use the easily accessible app to get help from one of their local agents. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Let's talk about best documentary.

• 1:32:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:32:17Sean Fennessey?

  We have not covered any of these movies on this show at all, except for a handful of quick mentions in the January 2025 Sundance episode. That's notable because literally, all five of these movies premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

• 1:32:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38Sean Fennessey?

  And that's something that's been talked about quite a bit in recent years, that Sundance is the true launchpad, the true power of Sundance. In the 2020s, has been as a space for documentary. And we've mentioned how Cannes is the new birthplace of big Oscar campaigns and the way that Venice and Berlin and Telluride and all of these other festivals, Toronto, New York have to respond to that primacy. Sundance has obviously come down in some respects as a launchpad for scripted films. And it's not quite the thing that it was in the 90s. But for documentaries, it's still extremely powerful and predictive. I find that interesting when I think about the documentaries I saw this year. I didn't see everything, obviously, because I only watched virtually, so I missed a lot of stuff. I don't know that I see five, but I don't know that I would have predicted these five a few months ago for this category.

• 1:33:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't think we did when we-

• 1:33:25Sean Fennessey?

  No, did we get two out of five, maybe?

• 1:33:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Maybe three, but the third one differed between us.

• 1:33:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's gonna be hard for us to have extended conversations of all five of these movies, and I don't think that's what we'll do here. I am kind of curious when you look at the nominees-

• 1:33:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I would like to, I'm ready. I've seen all of them, I've got opinions.

• 1:33:41Sean Fennessey?

  I do too, and we can tell, I just mean like, we're not gonna have a 40-minute conversation about each movie.

• 1:33:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:33:46Sean Fennessey?

  But based on what's nominated here-

• 1:33:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:49Sean Fennessey?

  How do you feel about the state of the best documentary category in the branch?

• 1:33:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Not good, bud. This is a real, this is a sort of a disaster, I think, and I don't, so the five films, as is the documentary branches want, are about like, very important and deserving topics. And I don't want to diminish the topics themselves, the subjects of the documentaries, and/or the fact that documentaries should be about important things, like, you know, I like a fun, you know, romp through Martin Scorsese's life as much as the next person. And I thought that was really well-made and fascinating, but I, it's not that they're not fun, that's not the problem, it's that I have a sort of

• 1:34:37Amanda Dobbins?

  serious ethical and/or filmmaking concerns with almost all of them.

• 1:34:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, I am, my, my concern is more around the idea of the branch only being interested in these kinds of stories. That in a way, in an attempt to kind of confirm an identity around what makes for a great documentary, there's no room for anything that has some of that experimentation, a different tonality, something that I think you're finding more and more in Best Picture, which is just a lot of different kinds of movies getting nominated for Best Picture now, and I've really enjoyed that, and I think we've generally just been a little bit higher on what Best Picture has been in the last three or four years, because it seems like there's variation, and this feels like the third or fourth year in a row where

• 1:35:25Sean Fennessey?

  it's five very serious, I think mostly well-made movies about very serious issues in the world.

• 1:35:33Sean Fennessey?

  But that there is a kind of drabness and darkness and we are all screwedness to these films and that that kind of communicates to the world at large at this award show that the best you can do in documentary is take the most severe story possible. For example, the awful nature of the prison system in some states and in for the most case nationwide and that that is the only kind of thing that merits the highest prize. There was a period of time when this was not true at the Academy Awards. There was a period of time when folks like Morgan Neville were being awarded for for their films, you know, 20 Feet from Stardom is a memorable one.

• 1:36:16Sean Fennessey?

  Searching for Sugar Man is another example of this. Amy is another example of this. That was a wave. That was an era. And then maybe they over indexed that era.

• 1:36:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:36:24Sean Fennessey?

  And the kind of like musical or biopic kind of thing. And then there's been this dramatic overcorrection to that kind of starts with American Factory, which is a terrific movie, but.

• 1:36:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Amazing.

• 1:36:36Sean Fennessey?

  But but I think kind of sets the tone. And with the exception of My Octopus Teacher, most of the movies that win here are movies of great social import. And so.

• 1:36:46Amanda Dobbins?

  You're in trouble with animals internet again. I'm still, they didn't thank the octopus.

• 1:36:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Amanda Dobbins?

  And they they won the Oscar and they so.

• 1:36:53Sean Fennessey?

  I know, I hear you.

• 1:36:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm I'm out.

• 1:36:55Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, let me let me just give the nominees here.

• 1:36:57Amanda Dobbins?

  The one more thing I would say though about that is that I do find at least, and I wonder if you're the same way, you spend more time consuming documentaries across the board than I do.

• 1:37:04Sean Fennessey?

  I watch a lot of documentaries.

• 1:37:05Amanda Dobbins?

  You watch a lot of documentaries, but because these are serious subjects and these are things that I take really seriously and that they are important, I do find I'm watching them more as journalism than I am as as film. And I like, I definitely have notes on some of like the filmmaking choices in these, but.

• 1:37:23Sean Fennessey?

  Well, four of these five movies effectively are journalism.

• 1:37:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and I have some issues with their journalistic standards.

• 1:37:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Amanda Dobbins?

  So that that's a that's a real problem, but I do find that I have-

• 1:37:34Sean Fennessey?

  But that isn't what doc is.

• 1:37:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:36Sean Fennessey?

  You can't, you can't, you can't, I know what you're saying, but you can't conflate the two. Like it can, they can do acts of journalism in documentary, but that's not ultimately the purpose of documentary.

• 1:37:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but I sort of like, these are so important. Like you can't do accidental journalism, in my opinion, like I, I-

• 1:37:49Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's intentional, but that's not the totality of the film experience. And that to me is what's lacking in the movies.

• 1:37:54Amanda Dobbins?

  But I'm holding against them, their accidental and not exactly rigorous journalism as a result.

• 1:37:59Sean Fennessey?

  I think there are definitely some instances in this slate that where I fully agree with you. So let's go through them one by one. The Alabama Solution, which is directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman. Very small side note, one Andrew Jarecki, a very acclaimed documentarian. Probably best known for the jinx, the HBO mini series, which is at a minimum wildly entertaining and also had real world results.

• 1:38:25Amanda Dobbins?

  We'll never forget watching that finale live.

• 1:38:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Charlotte Kaufman is the daughter of Lloyd Kaufman, the longtime impresario behind Troma Entertainment. A kind of like B movie independent machine that I have admired for many, many years. And it's fascinating that she, this is what she's doing with her career. So the movie is about incarcerated men in Alabama who, you know, by acts of protest, expose the awful conditions within the prison system in the state of Alabama. And it's a six year investigation. It utilizes a lot of footage filmed by the incarcerated individuals. It shows the inhumane conditions, rat infested cells, no air conditioning, drug use, violent deaths.

• 1:39:10Sean Fennessey?

  Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray are the two men who are sort of at the center of the story. There's one significant death that kind of animates this movement. And the, the family members who were affected by that death, kind of pushing for change within the system. The film spends a lot of time speaking to the incarcerated figures, but then also gives you some of the political context of Alabama at that time and the leadership and the reason why things are the way that they are.

• 1:39:37Sean Fennessey?

  I will say, I think this is a very sturdy, classical.

• 1:39:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:39:42Sean Fennessey?

  Very well intentioned, very well made, unfussy, unflashy, but I would say a little technology forward version of an American documentary, issues documentary.

• 1:39:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Sean Fennessey?

  It's not a bad movie.

• 1:39:54Amanda Dobbins?

  No, not at all. And I would say this is, it's an, it's an effective platform. And this, but this is, this is platforming a very worthy issue and the work of a lot of people, both inside the system and outside, um, in order to raise greater awareness of not just Alabama's prison system, but as you said, the United States system in general, um, gives the appropriate Alabama context. But it's, you know, and it does have, I thought the way that they used the mostly FaceTime footage, uh, was effective.

• 1:40:26Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 1:40:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Added something new to it, but it, other people are doing the work.

• 1:40:31Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:31Amanda Dobbins?

  For this. And, and the work has been being done for a while. And so they're just trying to give a voice to it. And I think they give like an effective voice. I agree. It's not the most innovative. Though again, I liked.

• 1:40:42Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:43Amanda Dobbins?

  The way that they used the footage. Um, and it's very clear. And I didn't have any of the ethical concerns that I had with some other footage.

• 1:40:51Sean Fennessey?

  Agreed.

• 1:40:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Because the activists, um, the incarcerated men who are working on this are, like, they're leading the project.

• 1:40:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:40:59Amanda Dobbins?

  So, uh, you know, it's really tough to watch. It's, it's horrible. I'm, I'm, I'm glad that, I'm not glad about anything, but I think it's important that I saw it.

• 1:41:08Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. I think it is, it is very standard.

• 1:41:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. A thousand percent.

• 1:41:14Sean Fennessey?

  As somebody who has produced documentaries for HBO, there is a certain strand of HBO issues oriented documentary. There's a long history of it. This feels also very much in keeping, I think with a lot of like, um, frontline style documentaries that you would find that often find their way into the Academy Awards where, um, Not only are its intentions good, but its issue is urgent. And you can feel the humanity of the people that are affected by the story. I don't think it's as kind of like structurally or even intellectually as riveting as I would like for something like this to be. That's, that's really more of just a subjective point of view where a film like this matters. But is this a question of like, what is the purpose of this award? Is the movie like this raises to me?

• 1:41:59Sean Fennessey?

  I, I found that it had like a lot, lot less deftness relative to something like American Factory. It's kind of operating in the same vein.

• 1:42:05Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, it's like an information dump rather than a narrative thrust. And I mean, there is narrative within it because they're telling you what has happened over time, but it is very expository. And very much like, and then this, and then this, as opposed to you not knowing what's going to happen.

• 1:42:24Sean Fennessey?

  It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a good, it's a good documentary. And, and is the one that I think makes sense as a nominee. I can't remember if you and I both picked this to be nominated. I think just because I felt like the on paper of it, I was like, this just makes sense for what they've been going for recently. I'm curious to hear what you think of Come See Me in the Good Light, which is directed by Ryan White, full disclosure filmmaker I've met with many times, somebody I really know personally and like very much. The movie is about two folks trying to contextualize and come to terms with a terminal cancer diagnosis. The Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson and their partner Megan Faley and the way in which they're sort of working through this period in their lives where they're

• 1:43:04Sean Fennessey?

  coping with this very, very painful illness. I wasn't crazy about this movie when I saw it at Sundance and I'm not crazy about it now.

• 1:43:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Same. I, I think some of that is kind of personal preference with how you deal with emotions, relationships and, and cancer for sure. I will say, I thought, I hadn't seen.

• 1:43:31Amanda Dobbins?

  The moment where you're logging on to a medical portal to get your results captured on film in this way, and that is like a

• 1:43:39Sean Fennessey?

  Happens multiple times in this film.

• 1:43:41Amanda Dobbins?

  And it is used, they understand the, I mean, of course, they understand the import of the moment, they're there, but it is a like very modern phenomenon that is so strange. And I think the experience of it, and even the conversation they have after one bad portal results, where Andrea Gibson is like, I feel better now because it was the anticipation. And then their partner is like, no, no, no, no, I feel way worse because I prefer the hope. So I thought that was cool. And I think, you know, there are moments of, not cool. I mean, it was devastating, but I was like, huh, I've lived that and I know a lot of people have, and I haven't seen it before.

• 1:44:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And it illuminates something about our modern life that, that like I respond to. But I think everything else, I just, I don't, my relationship doesn't look like their relationship, like in many ways, but just the way that they are so emotionally open. I'm not an emotionally open person. We know that so that I didn't respond to that. And then, or it's not that I didn't respond to that. It's very sad and they look like they had a loving relationship. But I think also.

• 1:44:55Sean Fennessey?

  The movie is very brave. I think Andrea in particular is very brave.

• 1:44:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:59Sean Fennessey?

  To say that they want to put this stage of their life on camera. It's interesting because this movie premiered at the same Sundance where a movie called Andre is an idiot premiered, which is a movie about a man who also was given a colon cancer diagnosis and captured it. And the last days of his life, the last weeks, months, years with his life and his family are also in it. That movie has a completely different tone. It is more the story of like a madcap kind of marketing and commercials expert who is kind of like unwinding intellectually what it means to be at the end of his life. And this is very much about the single crisis of knowing you're going to die. And then the paired crisis of being in a relationship and having that be, and that something that these two people were looking for, for their entire lives.

• 1:45:43Sean Fennessey?

  And they found each other and some of what, some of their love over time is captured in archival, and then some of it is captured in extraordinarily intimate detail in this, you know, contemporaneous footage.

• 1:45:56Sean Fennessey?

  It's a tragic set of circumstances. I've lost many people to cancer. It is the worst thing you can ever go through. I didn't really like spending time going through it.

• 1:46:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I remember what I was gonna say, which is, I don't know whether you've experienced in any of your many cancer experiences of loved ones, but sometimes people like to start a cancer blog. Do you know about this?

• 1:46:18Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:46:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Or a medical treatment blog, where if it's sort of a prolonged process, and the theory is instead of having to like, update every single person, "Well, this is how it's going, and we got this, we got that," which like, is exhausting and, you know, and nobody wants to do that. So instead, you just write, there's like, a central place where you can go and kind of keep an update of it, and that way, everyone can know, and everyone can like, support you on the journey, which I think is a really, like, lovely idea. And I've never had cancer, I've had other medical things, and I just, it's not what I really, I don't, the sharing and the openness of it all just is not how I would process it.

• 1:47:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think I'm, let's make him as a surprise, a little more open than you are at times, but not this open.

• 1:47:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:09Sean Fennessey?

  And I think there's also just, frankly, something about being a spoken word poet that is very performative and sort of like, both metaphorical and straightforward about who you are and how you define yourself. And a lot of their work, both of these poets, is interwoven in the story in a way that is meant to communicate, that isn't meant to define them.

• 1:47:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30Sean Fennessey?

  And I think for some people, this will be the most devastating movie that they see all year.

• 1:47:35Amanda Dobbins?

  It is devastating. Let's not be real about that.

• 1:47:37Sean Fennessey?

  I know, but it's sort of ordained to, I think Ryan White captures moments of intimacy that are mind blowing, especially at the end of the movie, where you're like, he's there with them.

• 1:47:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:47:48Sean Fennessey?

  At the worst possible time, and they're not saying, "Turn the camera off," which is itself, like, I think that is essentially what's being celebrated here, is the subject's willingness.

• 1:47:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 1:47:59Sean Fennessey?

  And their braveness to do this.

• 1:48:01Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think those scenes, the observed scenes of those two people in these incredibly impossible moments of their life and of their relationship are by far the best part of the movie. It does also use like, a lot of direct to camera.

• 1:48:15Sean Fennessey?

  Don't love a lot of that stuff.

• 1:48:16Amanda Dobbins?

  It uses a lot of Gibson's performances, and all of like, the framework.

• 1:48:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Feels conventional, but but but when they are just living, what it does capture is very, very raw and memorable.

• 1:48:33Sean Fennessey?

  I I think sometimes it's OK to just say like, subjectively, I just didn't really like watching the movie.

• 1:48:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Sean Fennessey?

  And I found myself feeling that through a bunch of these where I was just like, this isn't really giving me what I want. And it's not, I can give you 20 other docs that I liked this year, that I think some of which were about meaningful issues, some of which were more.

• 1:48:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:52Sean Fennessey?

  Intellectually explorational. But let's go to Cutting Through Rocks. So this is directed by Sarah Kaki and Mohamed Drazra Enyi. This is a movie that follows the first woman elected to council in a conservative Iranian village. Her name is Sarah Shah Verdi. And it's a character study. And over eight years, the film documents her fight against patriarchy, challenging child marriage and promoting education for girls by teaching them to ride motorcycles and often facing backlash. What did you think of this one?

• 1:49:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Rooting for Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, I think Sarah.

• 1:49:25Sean Fennessey?

  Sarah.

• 1:49:28Amanda Dobbins?

  An amazing character. And I did think that this is pretty much all observed. There is, there's no talking heads. There's a tremendous amount of access.

• 1:49:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:49:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And.

• 1:49:43Amanda Dobbins?

  And like, what is communicated is not just like this one person's character, but the nature of the village. And I thought, you know, we live in a time where I don't, I really, really feel like I don't know a lot about what's going on in Iran. You know, like, and there's not a lot of.

• 1:49:59Sean Fennessey?

  Well.

• 1:50:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I mean, I know, I know some of it.

• 1:50:01Sean Fennessey?

  Now more than ever.

• 1:50:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Now more than, now more than ever. I know that I think that the US shouldn't be bombing it. But that's, that's, that's applicable, applicable across the world.

• 1:50:09Sean Fennessey?

  On that, we agree.

• 1:50:12Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 1:50:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I and and again, much like Secret Agent, there's not like someone there being like, so here is how this council works and here are like the rules and here and I did feel like I was learned, I I did feel like it like put me in this place and mostly without condescension, observed what was going on and really grounded it through this character who's like a one on one. So I was like, I didn't dislike it.

• 1:50:45Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I I just thought it was, it felt very similar to a lot of other films like this that I've seen before. I to me, I was, it is another very important story. And I think the rights of women in that country in particular, I've been the subject, there's been dramatic protests in that nation for for years over this issue. And it's an extremely relevant story, but it's not one that, and she is an interesting person, but it's not one that like really shed light on anything for me in any way. And I also felt that from a structural or craft perspective, you know, it's an important slice of life in a way, you know, it's about

• 1:51:26Sean Fennessey?

  an important person, but I didn't come away from the film feeling like changed in any way or informed in a new way. I I felt, I guess, somewhat connected to her. It's just that I didn't think that the film was extraordinary in any way.

• 1:51:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I think they found, like, you do have to find the right person, right? Even though there are billions of people on this earth, like not, they they found like a not a singular character, but the right character, it's like very representative. And I'm like, really rooting for her. And even her face and the way that she responds to her brothers and to, there's a great scene where I believe, as someone in her family, I believe it's her mother, but comes in and she's just having trouble. None of the men in the village will listen to, will take any of her advice. And she's told again and again by everyone, like, you just have to compromise, like, you just have to listen to all these people, which is, you know, sort of depressing. But I, the older woman says to her, I mean, just

• 1:52:25Amanda Dobbins?

  think about how many people over time, how many men over time have lost power and how they've lost power and how, so maybe you need to like try a different way so you aren't like them. And I was like, this is an interesting, I don't know, I thought that the specifics were right in this one.

• 1:52:42Amanda Dobbins?

  But I agree that it's, you know, it's not like earth shattering.

• 1:52:46Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:46Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not American factory, but what is?

• 1:52:48Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think all five of these movies, I'll say four of these movies lack kind of dynamism that I'm looking for in the form at this stage of my life. Again, this is a subjective point of view. This is how I feel as somebody who has watched hundreds and hundreds of documentaries over the years. I often respond to kind of issues oriented ideas with, you know, Errol Morris is my hero because he often takes a very unusual approach to unpacking complex incidents. And this is similar to his work in that it is focused on an individual who helps explain something, but it lacks maybe some of the interrogation that I think is very valuable in some of these situations. And the movie doesn't really give us, it kind of just assumes you're like, well, of

• 1:53:33Sean Fennessey?

  course this woman wants this and here's why, but we're only going to show you this period of her life and she's never going to look into the camera and tell you why she thinks something. And that's just not what I would have, that's not how I would have made a movie about her, but that's, you know, this is personal preference. Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

• 1:53:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:53:50Sean Fennessey?

  This is a real bugaboo for you, so I'm excited to hear you talk about it. This is directed by David Bornstein and Pavel Talikin. A Russian teacher secretly documents his school becoming a war recruitment center during the Ukraine invasion, revealing the ethical dilemmas educators face with propaganda and militarization. Follows Pasha Talikin, a beloved lighthearted teacher in a small industrial town near the Ural Mountains.

• 1:54:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:54:18Sean Fennessey?

  Thoughts on this one?

• 1:54:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. So the film begins with Pasha leaving Russia.

• 1:54:30Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:54:31Amanda Dobbins?

  And he is receiving instructions on how best to smuggle these tapes out of Russia in a safe way from the documentarians who he's working with. And so we are set up with the understanding that what he is doing and what we are about to watch would be of objection to the Russian regime, government, what are we, whatever we're calling it. And that-

• 1:55:00Amanda Dobbins?

  By doing this, Pasha has been in enough danger that he needs to leave Russia in order to make these, this footage available.

• 1:55:10Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:11Amanda Dobbins?

  And then we watch a film in which he has secretly recorded many of his young students talking to camera by name, everyone in his village, and they're all still in Russia.

• 1:55:21Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And identified.

• 1:55:24Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:25Amanda Dobbins?

  But he's left Russia so that he can show us these tapes.

• 1:55:28Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:29Amanda Dobbins?

  How is this not endangering every single person in the?

• 1:55:32Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so you mentioned this to me before we were recording. And do you think that the children are endangered by the fact that they are featured in the film?

• 1:55:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, this is a, this is a movie about, this is a film about propaganda and the Russian government wanting to tell exactly one story and to indoctrinate every single person in its country and every single student to its view of its attacks on Ukraine and the world at large. So at one point, he films the classroom, which he's filming secretly, and he has a, I think, I don't know whether it's a Russian democratic flag or some sort of subversive Russian flag up in the classroom, and all the kids are hanging out in there. And he's talking about how it's just like, Ben, you know, which, rock on. Like, I'm with the kids, but how does it not, if they're associated and this, it's

• 1:56:26Amanda Dobbins?

  so dangerous for this to be, you know, shown in Russia that he has to like leave and smuggle it out? Like, I just, we aren't thinking about anybody else? I don't understand. And no one's even talked about it. Like, I was Googling for any sort of.

• 1:56:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I hope they're okay. They probably are, but like, did we not, we didn't think about this for a second?

• 1:56:46Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I'm not sure if there is actually any real world consequences for anyone who was filmed by him. So I'm not sure if that specifically concerned me while watching it. I do think that part of my hang up with the movie is that Pasha is kind of an odd bird, and it does feel like he has imagined like a little bit of a hero's journey for himself.

• 1:57:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:57:08Sean Fennessey?

  In a way that I found a little bit off putting because. He's exposing something, but it's what's being exposed here, I would say, is not shocking if you have read about the way that Putin operates in Russia and the way that that regime has been managed for decades. And so he is showing us something, but he's showing us something in like, what I find to be a slightly vanglorious way.

• 1:57:32Amanda Dobbins?

  1,000%.

• 1:57:32Sean Fennessey?

  Look at what I'm doing.

• 1:57:33Amanda Dobbins?

  1,000%.

• 1:57:34Sean Fennessey?

  And then I'm leaving.

• 1:57:35Amanda Dobbins?

  And then I'm leaving and I like, and, and I, I think that we're responding in, you know, in the same way to this as a person, and this is a project that's undertaken by one person who has made himself the hero of the own story.

• 1:57:48Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:57:48Amanda Dobbins?

  And seems to think that he's like, really, he doesn't think he's the only person suffering, but it's, it is constructed around his experience. And I'm a little concerned for everybody else.

• 1:58:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:01Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I at least wanted to ask the question.

• 1:58:04Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's, it's somewhat similar to Echorus, the, the documentary that won best, best doc seven or eight years ago, which was about the whistleblower who had worked on the, on, you know, providing steroids and enhancements for Russian athletes in the Olympics. And the way that he kind of came forward and revealed the ways in which a lot of that worked. And that man was very valorized in that film in a similar fashion. He didn't make that movie. Someone else made that movie. Someone else told that story. Pasha, I think there's something very strange about some of his into, into camera.

• 1:58:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. What she's, he's doing after he's like, answered a random documentary email.

• 1:58:43Sean Fennessey?

  Inquiry.

• 1:58:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, inquiry. And so he is, he starts the project while still living in Russia.

• 1:58:50Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:58:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and is already conceptualizing what he's going to do in the context of, I'm the narrator of this story.

• 1:58:58Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:58:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Quite literally, because he's into camera.

• 1:59:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I mean, I.

• 1:59:01Amanda Dobbins?

  His mother is the librarian. His mother is there in a lot of the footage.

• 1:59:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:59:09Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know that those people are in danger per se.

• 1:59:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know if they're in danger, but like-

• 1:59:14Sean Fennessey?

  It's impossible to know, but to me, it was more just that there is a kind of solipsism in this movie that thinks it is kind of an issues expose and ultimately becomes a character study of a guy who I think has a little bit of a hero complex, but then his heroism is to show us something that is no doubt bad. That the propaganda machine and the way in which this school that has been, you know, historically this very healthy, comfortable, safe space for education has been transformed into like a militarized zone. It's a way to teach children to become more excited about serving their country and joining the military and fighting the good fight against their evil counterparts in Ukraine.

• 1:59:55Sean Fennessey?

  All of that is valuable and interesting in some ways, but the person who is at the center of the story, I felt a little self-serving.

• 2:00:05Amanda Dobbins?

  1,000%.

• 2:00:07Sean Fennessey?

  So, yeah, I mean, I did not enjoy the film.

• 2:00:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And that this is nominated instead of 2,000 meters, Tondrevka.

• 2:00:20Sean Fennessey?

  Not ideal.

• 2:00:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Not what you want.

• 2:00:21Sean Fennessey?

  No, it's not ideal.

• 2:00:24Sean Fennessey?

  The fifth nominee is The Thorniest, I'll say.

• 2:00:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 2:00:28Sean Fennessey?

  The fifth nominee is The Perfect Neighbor, which is directed by Gita Ganbir. It is about a seemingly minor neighborhood dispute in Florida that escalates into deadly violence. Police body cam footage and investigative interviews expose the consequences of Florida's stand your ground laws. This is the story of a woman named Susan Lorenz, who shot another woman named Ashique Owens, and kind of the lead up to that murder that is captured primarily through police body cam footage, not entirely, but primarily. And this movie, which I did see at Sundance and was very moved by, I was struck by it. I found it to be quite shattering.

• 2:01:12Sean Fennessey?

  I've seen the film a second time. I've read a lot about it and listened to podcasts about it, including our friend Wesley Morris's episode.

• 2:01:21Sean Fennessey?

  And I have a very queasy feeling about it without detracting from its power and I think similarly what it's attempting to expose, but the way in which it does so.

• 2:01:34Sean Fennessey?

  Makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I'm curious how you feel about it.

• 2:01:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree. I think that, you know, it is formally very inventive or, um, and fascinating. And also emotionally and civically like devastating, like a really, really, really difficult watch. And when I feel queasy, which I do, it's hard for me. I haven't teased out how much of that queasiness is just because of what I watch, which is, I didn't, you don't actually see a woman be shot, but you hear a 911 call and you, or you see ring camera footage of her child calling.

• 2:02:22Amanda Dobbins?

  You see her children be told that she is not coming back. And that's captured on body cam footage. So that, I mean, that is just absolutely shattering to watch.

• 2:02:32Sean Fennessey?

  The, the latter scene you described is like, is the most pained I've been watching a movie in the last year.

• 2:02:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely awful. Um, and it's, there is also something awful. If, if necessary, but isn't necessary about like the, that this footage exists, it exists number one, because a terrible, terrible thing happened. But also because we now just have surveillance footage.

• 2:02:59Sean Fennessey?

  Everything's on camera.

• 2:03:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Everything is on camera and not just on camera, but on police body camera footage. So you're watching this through the perspective of the cops who have done nothing and showed up, you know, and showed up too late. Well, but, and that's not, that's not true because you've seen other footage, but.

• 2:03:17Sean Fennessey?

  It, it's the role of the police officer. And this is really interesting. When you, for me, when I sat down to watch the movie, I thought it was going to be a different kind of thing. I thought it was going to be a police brutality movie. I thought it was going to be a movie about acquiring this footage and then showing us the ways in which the community, the police. Disrespect and abuse their power. And it's sort of the opposite. It's about the lack of intervention in these circumstances and the way in which that ultimately led to someone's murder. And the fact that there had been these series of 911 calls made in both directions about, you know, this conflict that this older white woman has with her, the children of her neighbors, and the way in which she feels that she is being menaced and that they're kind of running roughshod over her property, whereas the perspective of the community is that this

• 2:04:01Sean Fennessey?

  is kids being kids. And we can see throughout the telling of this story that this woman, Susan Lawrence, is unwell, not racist and prone to violence and aggression, like, you know, abusing private property and kind of breaking a gate, for example, which is one of those like a clue that something is not right here. I think that the police in this movie are simultaneously like let off the hook, but also not really, it's not really examined, like what the procedures should have been or could have been, because we're only getting, the film is edited. It's not a 1900 hour collection of body cam footage around these events.

• 2:04:47Sean Fennessey?

  It's, there's a very manipulated series of footages that are showing us what, how they're responding to these complaints. And they don't do enough. That's very clear. My real sense of unease around the movie is just this, like, compliance with the aftermath of this, and then this is something that will live forever for these families, for the people who are affected by this. The levels of consent around this for young children and whether or not this should be not just the document, but the most watched documentary of 2025, which I think it's got to be, you know, give or take your few true crime serial killer stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's right up there because it's on Netflix. And

• 2:05:30Sean Fennessey?

  Because it's so shattering, it makes me feel worse about it, you know, because it's so real and so raw. And then I think also, when we spoke to Wesley about it earlier this week, too, the kind of like yada yada-ing, the speeding up of the conclusion of the story around Susan's fate, which felt kind of tacked on, and that he described it as like, it felt like there was like a deadline or something to reach.

• 2:05:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:50Sean Fennessey?

  And then the movie, which is so kind of patient through the execution of this eventual crime, and then speeding through the conclusion of it.

• 2:06:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, it's patient through everything that leads up to the murder, to the night itself. And then it spends a while on her interrogation.

• 2:06:12Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Which, again, you're just watching that security cam footage.

• 2:06:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 2:06:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Or, you know, investigator, not security cam, but investigator room footage.

• 2:06:24Amanda Dobbins?

  But so, again, you're watching from the perspective of the detectives, who are both like, slow to act. And, you know, some of it, and then, and then like so polite to her throughout the whole thing. And so it's both invasive and also, and, and strange and like unmediated, and also the way that it's mediated is both through this system that the film thinks that it's indicting, but is maybe not effectively.

• 2:07:02Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I feel like it's-

• 2:07:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, also, it's maybe-

• 2:07:04Sean Fennessey?

  It's almost like boosting it.

• 2:07:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:06Sean Fennessey?

  It's like, look what we can do with this new level of technology unintentionally, in a way. It's like, well, I will use these powers to show us the real truth of these incidents.

• 2:07:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:07:16Sean Fennessey?

  But by doing so, you kind of effectively rubber stamp them in a way that feels like a little unexamined on the filmmaker's part. The movie has a real, it's a real pickle. Because like, there's some, there is something undeniably powerful about what she has done. The way that the film is cut, the way that it makes you feel. I can't change how it made me feel the first time I watched it. I was, it ruined my week. Like, I was, felt so bad about it. I don't remember what I said on the pod, but I think it really is-

• 2:07:48Sean Fennessey?

  A very, it effectively communicates what it wants to, but the ways in which it does it, I have some concerns about. And it's the kind of thing that like, there will be a lot of copycats of this approach to filmmaking too. And this is considered like a sort of more elevated version of this kind of a story. I can only imagine what will happen with this kind of a story in even less skilled hands. I don't know. I mean, this won the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival, and it was a big sensation. I think it was over the summer when it was released. And, you know, drawing attention to the stand your ground laws, I think, has great value, because they're insane. Just the murder itself in this movie, which threw a door.

• 2:08:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, though again, I don't really think that it, it doesn't even, it, it doesn't really serve the stand your ground stuff. It explores unintentionally or not, like, the failures of, like, policing and how, how we manage a community in this, or we don't in this country.

• 2:08:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And, you know, and then it also explores like what it means to have body cam footage and surveillance footage and how, how we should or shouldn't use it. Like, those are interesting questions. But it does, to Wesley's point, yada, yada, the stand your ground stuff. They're like, oh, hey, did you Google that? She's like, I guess so. And then we don't even see the, the trial. We don't, it's sort of an afterthought.

• 2:09:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I don't know. This is a very odd collection of movies to me.

• 2:09:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:22Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe more unusually than I typically feel.

• 2:09:27Sean Fennessey?

  The race is also kind of a, kind of in a weird spot. Every single precursor for this award has gone to a different film. I can remember a time where that was the case. The PGA went to My Mom Jane, which is not nominated. Mariska Hargitay's documentary about her mom Jane Mansfield, which is- Pretty good. Um, the DJA went to 2000 meters to Androvka, which you mentioned. The BAFTA went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin. The Cinema I honors-

• 2:09:52Amanda Dobbins?

  They're just really striking out this year.

• 2:09:53Sean Fennessey?

  Tough one for BAFTA, yeah. Um, Cinema I honors went to Come See Me in the Good Light. The CCA went to The Perfect Neighbor. And the IDA went to The Tale of Cillian, which was not nominated. That was from the filmmakers who made Honeyland, which was nominated some years ago. Um, you know, it didn't take me very long to come up with 10 movies I would have nominated over these movies. Now, some of them fall under that category of sort of celebrity documentary that we know has been discounted amongst the doc branch. And I understand why that is, that there is a kind of fluffiness to that filmmaking. I agree with you about Mr. Scorsese. I found that that was a very compelling and deep character portrait of a person who we care about a lot. But its skill was part of the reason why.

• 2:10:37Sean Fennessey?

  I don't even know if it was eligible in this category because it was more of a mini-series. But it is conceived fully as a film and it was originally supposed to be a two-hour film. The same is true also for PES himself. I don't know if you saw that, the Paul Rubens doc series. It was a four-hour documentary that Matt Wolfe made that I thought was like, if it were considered as a film, would have been like a great rejoinder to the celebrity concern because you can sense Paul Rubens' discomfort and at times anger with the process of being profiled in a documentary. And in that film, he does not reveal that he has cancer while the film's being made, and he dies in the middle of the movie. Like, they don't get all the footage and they have to finish the movie effectively without him.

• 2:11:19Sean Fennessey?

  It's a really interesting exploration of his life and what an interesting artist he was and somebody who loved Pee-wee as a kid.

• 2:11:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:26Sean Fennessey?

  Very cool. Um, but what were some other favorites that you saw this year that you thought should have been here?

• 2:11:31Amanda Dobbins?

  The Laura Poitras documentary about Seymour Hersh, Cover Up, was the big, I guess it was the snub in this category?

• 2:11:44Sean Fennessey?

  I think so, yeah.

• 2:11:46Amanda Dobbins?

  And I don't really understand why this didn't make it. I guess it is more traditional in that it's about a like a person who has then experienced and reported on the great breadth of human tragedy in our in his lifetime.

• 2:12:02Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:03Amanda Dobbins?

  But he really has, and I think it gets enough out of him as a subject, plus brings his work to life in pretty like upsetting, if standard ways.

• 2:12:18Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:19Amanda Dobbins?

  That you'd think it would check the, this is a.

• 2:12:23Sean Fennessey?

  I'll tell you why I think it's not nominated.

• 2:12:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:27Sean Fennessey?

  Hirsch is portrayed as a murky individual in the movie, who has done incredible things, has exposed the worst corruption in America.

• 2:12:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:36Sean Fennessey?

  And the way the government works, and has also made mistakes. And the movie does spend some time on his mistakes, the things he got wrong.

• 2:12:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:43Sean Fennessey?

  The ways in which his career has kind of had this very strange, winding path. He's a substacker now.

• 2:12:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:48Sean Fennessey?

  He's not at the height of his powers of the New York Times. And part of the reason why I love the movie is the movie shows all that. And Laura Poitras, who has been documenting the documenters for the last 20 years.

• 2:12:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:59Sean Fennessey?

  As a, as a, as a documentarian, is showing like the real challenge of this work, in addition to the real ornery nature of Seymour Hersh. I think it's an amazing movie.

• 2:13:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Same.

• 2:13:12Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not stunned it's not here, as opposed to something like The Perfect Neighbor, which really makes you feel something, you know? And if you had to choose.

• 2:13:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 2:13:20Sean Fennessey?

  If you had to choose one Netflix movie, the one that makes you feel is the one that they're probably gonna go with. You know, I had, we, we saw My Undesirable Friends win precursors and at the critics awards and thought that was gonna get. But I think that just the epic size of that movie, which is five hours in length, and it's just a part one, which is gonna be on movie, actually, I'm glad it's actually getting distribution on April 3rd. People should check that out. That movie is very similar to Cutting Through Rocks.

• 2:13:54Sean Fennessey?

  But I think much deeper in terms of conveying what it's like to trying to make change within your country and also just a better movie about being in Russia than Mr. Nobody.

• 2:14:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:14:05Sean Fennessey?

  Again, more complex. Did you see Mistress Dispel?

• 2:14:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I did.

• 2:14:09Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:14:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I want to talk about it forever and I know that like no one's seen it. It's available to stream on Criterion.

• 2:14:16Sean Fennessey?

  Fascinating movie, about a thing I've never heard of.

• 2:14:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Same, and a fascinating movie about psychology. So it's set in China where there is apparently a custom of hiring what is translated as a mistress dispeller to break up an extramarital affair.

• 2:14:37Amanda Dobbins?

  The movie starts by saying everyone, everything that you are seeing is real and unscripted. Everyone involved parties, agreed to participate at the beginning and the end of the film as they came to understand, you know, the role of the mistress dispeller and the film itself. Fascinating. I start, I was, an amazing way to start a documentary, especially after all the conversations we've just had about all the other documentaries and I was really leaned in and then I found myself, I don't believe any of this.

• 2:15:07Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, you think it's fake?

• 2:15:08Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it's not that I don't think it's fake, but I, because I believe them. But then it leads to what is like a very interesting, it's a married couple and the woman learns that her husband is having an affair and she hires a marriage dispeller who's just like, you know, Dr. Becky for marriage in China. And, and but that's a, that's a parenting Instagram guru.

• 2:15:36Sean Fennessey?

  It's very like, here's how we do this.

• 2:15:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and here's what we're gonna do. And she's even talking about like, if you present this idea psychologically this way, then this person will respond this way. And we are going to manipulate all of these people into no longer having an affair and being happy in your marriage. And then it shows just like a lot of incredibly long, open psychological conversations that are had between all three parties and this marriage dispeller.

• 2:16:07Amanda Dobbins?

  And I was just like, who is agreeing to talk to someone else like this, this openly about their life?

• 2:16:12Sean Fennessey?

  You can feel it in the first conversation between the husband, when the woman is introduced as a friend early on in the film.

• 2:16:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:16:21Sean Fennessey?

  The openness the man has

• 2:16:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 2:16:23Sean Fennessey?

  with this relative stranger is so surprising.

• 2:16:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:16:26Sean Fennessey?

  And they're being captured on camera.

• 2:16:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but so and then they also

• 2:16:29Sean Fennessey?

  And you're like, what is this?

• 2:16:29Amanda Dobbins?

  But then they also said everyone involved agreed at the beginning. So I'm like, so does he know? And he's a great, like, what's going on here?

• 2:16:37Sean Fennessey?

  It is

• 2:16:37Amanda Dobbins?

  It's still fascinating.

• 2:16:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's kind of a what's it of a movie, but it's so interesting.

• 2:16:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 2:16:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Amanda Dobbins?

  I definitely want to know more and I liked talking about it.

• 2:16:45Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know that I'd be like, this movie is vital and everyone must see it in the same way that the Doc Branch kind of feels about their nominees. But I never saw anything like this before.

• 2:16:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:54Sean Fennessey?

  This is really kind of, it's kind of the bride of this group of movies that we're talking about here. I'm glad you watched it. I'm glad I watched it too. I think it's really interesting. Another movie that I came out of Sundance loving and feeling like was super important was Predators, which was about how to catch a predator and the ways, you know, the ways in which

• 2:17:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I remember you talking about this.

• 2:17:13Sean Fennessey?

  the TV, you know, industry and this apparatus of this show kind of ensnares these potential sex criminals by using actors to bring them into these traps. And then the kind of like the knockdown effect that that has on what we perceive as entertainment in our culture. That movie is really, really well done and I don't think really ever got over the hump in terms of audiences. Also Zodiac Killer Project is another movie that I liked a little bit. I may have talked about it after Sundance. It's a movie about a guy who was gonna make a true crime documentary about a serial killer. And he's gonna adapt a book that was covering these murders. And he lost the rights to the book at the last minute.

• 2:17:56Sean Fennessey?

  And so he improvised and said, I'm gonna make a movie that is sort of like a parody or a commentary on what a true crime documentary is actually like. And so what he does is he's like, he'll go to a place and be like, if I were making this movie, I would go to this place and you would hear voiceover in which I would say this. And then I would show you archival footage that shows this person at this point in time. And then there would be newspaper covers. And he's kind of like dissecting and deconstructing what we get in true crime docs. It's very clever. There's no chance a movie like this would ever be nominated in the category. But stuff like this should be on the radar more of the branch, I think.

• 2:18:32Sean Fennessey?

  Couple of other ones, I mean, Megadoc.

• 2:18:33Amanda Dobbins?

  My beloved Megadoc.

• 2:18:34Sean Fennessey?

  Also on the Criterion Channel.

• 2:18:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Back in the news.

• 2:18:37Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I don't think, has a making of movie documentary ever won best doc? I don't think so, even though they're my favorite thing.

• 2:18:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, this is, this is an incredible one because it's a making of documentary, but it's also about the, the mystery of Francis Ford Coppola.

• 2:18:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:18:52Amanda Dobbins?

  And the, and the legacy of, of Hollywood and, and what we do after the fact. And also like, you know, we are living in the era of all of the, the 80 something directors.

• 2:19:06Sean Fennessey?

  No doubt.

• 2:19:06Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, trying to make one last or two last or however many last works.

• 2:19:11Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny, if this were nominated, people would be like Hollywood is up its own ass. But if it's not nominated, you're like, what the hell? What about Hollywood?

• 2:19:19Sean Fennessey?

  Raul Pex Orwell two plus two equals five is a movie that I thought was not great, but was at least interesting, which is sort of like using George Orwell's writing to explore the myriad ways in which he was extremely, extremely prescient about where the world was going. And Damien Lewis is literally reading his words and you're seeing images from around the world of the ways in which they've been manifest and that he had this incredible vision.

• 2:19:43Sean Fennessey?

  Khalil Joseph's Black News Terms and Conditions, which is a movie that you can't watch now, apparently, is not on VOD, not on the streaming service, not in theaters, but it was also a 2025 Sundance movie that is this kind of wild interpretation of

• 2:20:00Sean Fennessey?

  black figures throughout the 1800s, redefining the way in which they should be seen, told in this really dramatic, unusual documentary style that also kind of smacked me during Sundance, but then I think maybe because it doesn't have proper distribution, didn't go through in the same way. Very quickly, just for anybody listening, Cover Up's on Netflix. Mistress Despiller's on Criterion. My Undesirable Friends will be on MUBI. Mr. Scorsese is on Apple. Predators is on Paramount Plus. Zodiac Killer Project is on VOD. Peewee as himself is on HBO. Orwell two plus two equals five is on VOD and Megadoc is on Criterion as well. Almost all these are accessible.

• 2:20:43Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think is going to win in this category? Don't tell me.

• 2:20:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Haven't decided yet. Do you, do you feel like, are, how many of your picks are locked in right now? It is March 5th.

• 2:20:52Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know what the fuck I'm gonna do.

• 2:20:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Can I just say also?

• 2:20:55Sean Fennessey?

  Well, less than, less than 15, for sure.

• 2:20:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Because along with the cat discourse, we had a, my, my friend, um, Daniel Dodario from Variety wrote a, "Why are the Oscars so late in the year?" piece again. So we once again had the, "Why have the Oscars not happened yet?"

• 2:21:10Sean Fennessey?

  10 days.

• 2:21:10Amanda Dobbins?

  "Why have the Oscars not happened yet?"

• 2:21:12Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. You know my take on this. It's the week between-

• 2:21:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I completely agree.

• 2:21:16Sean Fennessey?

  The conference championships and the Super Bowl.

• 2:21:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree.

• 2:21:19Sean Fennessey?

  The week between. Nobody cares about the Pro Bowl. There's nothing going on in sports at that time, otherwise.

• 2:21:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Isn't that usually when the Grammys are?

• 2:21:26Sean Fennessey?

  Fuck them.

• 2:21:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree. Kick the Grammys out.

• 2:21:29Sean Fennessey?

  This is way too late.

• 2:21:30Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I'm losing my mind. But so your picks are not locked in?

• 2:21:36Sean Fennessey?

  Not even close. What about you?

• 2:21:37Amanda Dobbins?

  No, not at all.

• 2:21:38Sean Fennessey?

  And there's, there's major categories where I don't know what I'm gonna do. I've never felt this way before.

• 2:21:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you feel excited or stressed right now? Cause we're getting to the point where it's, it's entertaining, but also then the prospect of being wrong enters the chat.

• 2:21:52Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I don't, I don't care about being wrong as much this year. Um, I think, I think it's been really fun. I think the last few weeks have been fun.

• 2:22:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:00Sean Fennessey?

  And I think that's rare for us. I do think it's been going on for too long and I wish this were a little bit more compressed, like you said, but, you know, going to DGA, seeing PGA play out, watching BAFTA be a fucking fiasco, and then the actor awards being really interesting. It's been a good season. It's been cool.

• 2:22:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:18Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I want it to be over with, but it's been cool.

• 2:22:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:21Sean Fennessey?

  So I'm kind of excited. We were just talking about April. It's like we got some fun episodes planned for April. There's a couple of big movies coming out that I'm excited to talk to you about. But, uh, not done yet. So remember, live, no more Oscars on Monday on Netflix.

• 2:22:38Amanda Dobbins?

  12 PM PT, 3 PM Eastern Standard.

• 2:22:43Sean Fennessey?

  That's right. You can email us at [email protected]. We will be here answering your questions. We'll talk about Hoppers. You haven't seen Hoppers yet?

• 2:22:50Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I have to figure out what I'm gonna take knocks.

• 2:22:52Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:22:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Cause I-

• 2:22:53Sean Fennessey?

  Excited? Is he, is he aware of this?

• 2:22:54Amanda Dobbins?

  He is. Lots of billboards. And so he wants to know what Hoppers is about and I don't really know. So I know they, it's animals and-

• 2:23:02Sean Fennessey?

  It's actually quite complicated.

• 2:23:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, great. I love it.

• 2:23:06Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to Jack Sanders for his work on this episode. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh for production support. Don't forget to send questions to the mailbag. We'll see you on Monday.

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• 2:24:04Speaker 07

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