'28 Years Later': Death, Zombies, and One of the Year's Best Movies

Sean and Amanda are joined by Chris Ryan and react to a myriad of different movie news headlines, including the Academy’s decision to give Tom Cruise an honorary Oscar, Glen Powell’s casting in an upcoming Ron Howard firefighter film, and the first trailer for ‘Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere’—starring Jeremy Allen White (3:54). Then, they unpack Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s highly anticipated zombie horror sequel, ‘28 Years Later.’ They celebrate its exhilarating filmmaking and the interesting decision to shoot on an iPhone, explore why Boyle and Garland complement each other’s work so well, and consider where this ranks amongst Boyle’s filmography (22:22). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Look, it's not that confusing. I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs That Explain the 90s. Except we did 120 songs. And now we're back with the 2000s. I refuse to say aughts. 2000 to 2009. The Strokes, Rihanna, J Lo, Kanye, sure. And now the show is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s. Wow. That's too long a title for me to say anything else right now. Just trust me. That's 60 Songs That Explain the 90s: The 2000s. Preferably on Spotify.

• 0:35Sean Fennessey?

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

• 1:18Sean Fennessey?

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

• 1:57Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Sean Fennessey.

• 1:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 1:59Sean Fennessey?

  And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about zombies and other things. Today on the show, we are digging into 28 years later, the third film in the 28 zombie series, a reunion of the original 28 Days Later's team of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, a favorite of this show. CR is here to break it down.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  The real alpha.

• 2:19Sean Fennessey?

  In more ways than one. We will get into that. But first, a programming reminder. If you are listening to this show, you are listening to the 799th episode of this show, which means Monday will be the 800th episode of The Big Picture, which is a big number. Is it a meaningful number? I say yes. And so we are doing a mailbag?

• 2:39Amanda Dobbins?

  What did we do for 750?

• 2:41Sean Fennessey?

  I don't remember.

• 2:42Amanda Dobbins?

  You have the archive?

• 2:43Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, I don't actually, as you know. It was destroyed.

• 2:46Amanda Dobbins?

  So that's gone?

• 2:46Sean Fennessey?

  That's gone, yes.

• 2:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Holy shit.

• 2:48Sean Fennessey?

  Wait, that might be saved, actually, but I'm not gonna look back at this exact moment. Um, so if you want to email us, anything about movies, we gave you an advice episode recently, no more advice, at least for now. Amanda is taking that advice directly on her IG, which is @AlphaZombieGirl. You can find her, DMs are open. You can email us at [email protected]. That's [email protected]. Will you be emailing us, Chris?

• 3:16Speaker 03

  No, but I want to know when do either I get my own solo mailbag for Big Pick?

• 3:21Sean Fennessey?

  Solo mailbag?

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Me, Tracy Lutz and Joanna Robinson get to do a third chair mailbag.

• 3:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's a good idea.

• 3:29Sean Fennessey?

  You guys have like nine podcasts. Why do you need more podcasts?

• 3:33Speaker 03

  I find the questions in Big Pick are very provocative and fun, yeah.

• 3:36Sean Fennessey?

  You're saying you don't get good questions from your listeners?

• 3:38Speaker 03

  We get fine questions.

• 3:39Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  A lot of them are like, I am a doctor and the pit is good, and it's not really a question.

• 3:44Sean Fennessey?

  I see.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Which I appreciate their feedback, though.

• 3:46Sean Fennessey?

  Why do you think you don't get good questions?

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Maybe because Andy and I answer all questions just with our pod.

• 3:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's beautiful.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  There's no mystery.

• 3:53Sean Fennessey?

  That's probably what it is. Uh, if Tracy Lutz would like to do a solo episode.

• 3:57Amanda Dobbins?

  A mailbag?

• 3:58Sean Fennessey?

  He could.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  But not me.

• 3:59Sean Fennessey?

  He's allowed.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:00Sean Fennessey?

  He's allowed. You? Keep working. Keep putting up those shots.

• 4:07Amanda Dobbins?

  In case you're wondering, it appears that episode 750, which I think is a rounder number, or like a more significant number, was Moana 2, and I believe also Hot Frosty.

• 4:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and where were you for that episode? Sitting at home.

• 4:20Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true.

• 4:21Sean Fennessey?

  Where was I? Grinding tape on Moana 2 with my precious daughter and Yasi and Rob. Yeah, that was a fun episode, but not really monumental, so maybe we'll make Monday fun. We'll also talk about Elio and maybe How to Train Your Dragon as well.

• 4:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I was gonna ask you about that. So am I going to see Elio in like 20 minutes, once this is done?

• 4:38Sean Fennessey?

  Hopefully this episode is longer than 20 minutes, but I'm intending to see it on Sunday.

• 4:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I just, I mean, I gotta work it into the schedule, so.

• 4:45Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, okay. Well, you're passing off your children shortly, you know, in 24 hours, and when you do, you can go right to a children's movie by yourself.

• 4:52Amanda Dobbins?

  How great.

• 4:53Sean Fennessey?

  That sounds exciting.

• 4:53Amanda Dobbins?

  What a time to be me.

• 4:54Sean Fennessey?

  You did it. You had a bit of a break from the episode this week, and so a raft of news came across the trans- we've seen where you've hit a little bit of this stuff on the watch this week.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  We did deliver me, yeah.

• 5:05Sean Fennessey?

  Let's just talk about Tom Cruise's Oscar. So he's getting an Academy Award.

• 5:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Sean Fennessey?

  He's getting an honorary Academy Award.

• 5:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 5:13Sean Fennessey?

  And he's getting it along with a number of other folks, Debbie Allen, the choreographer, Win Thomas, production designer, one other person, Dolly Parton, of course.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Dario Argento.

• 5:24Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, Dario Argento. I wish that were the case, alas. Maybe next year, Dario. So I noted this on X.com, this is awfully reminiscent, potentially, of the Paul Newman situation, where in 1986, after not winning Best Actor, after being nominated many times, he was given an honorary Oscar for his good works in film, and then the next year, he won for The Color of Money.

• 5:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Co-starring Tom Cruise.

• 5:48Sean Fennessey?

  Co-starring Tom Cruise, which we know now, next year, Tom Cruise will be appearing in an Alejandro G. Inarritu movie called...

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Judy?

• 5:57Sean Fennessey?

  Roughly Judy, but I think that's a fake title for this film, which is a film about a man who the entire world hinges upon.

• 6:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 6:05Sean Fennessey?

  That is, I think, a comedy.

• 6:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 6:07Sean Fennessey?

  Now, Inarritu, you know, not a big favorite of this podcast, but is someone who often directs actors to Academy Award nominations, directed Leonardo DiCaprio to an Academy Award win. Do you think that the Newman will happen here, where Cruise will win and then win again?

• 6:22Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 6:23Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  I don't. Part of it is a feeling, part of it is a... I really wonder with the Inaritu movie, is he gonna subject himself to a regular press run?

• 6:35Amanda Dobbins?

  No. I don't wonder about that. I think that he will not.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  So can you win an Oscar without having to play the game?

• 6:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's an interesting question. You don't think so?

• 6:45Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't think he'll do a press tour, or I don't think he'll win an Oscar.

• 6:47Sean Fennessey?

  If he doesn't do the press tour, do you think he can win that Oscar then?

• 6:51Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't, but I don't think he's gonna do it anyway, because I don't think he's gonna win it anyway. I mean, I understand the Paul Newman comp, but Paul Newman was nominated for like 45 Oscars.

• 7:02Sean Fennessey?

  I think it was eight.

• 7:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, that's a lot, and I think Tom Cruise has had, and that's more than Tom Cruise.

• 7:08Sean Fennessey?

  I think Cruise is three?

• 7:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. So the Academy has never really taken him seriously in the same way that they took Newman seriously, even if they never gave him the Oscar. And I just, there's too much downside for him to be like on a podcast.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 7:27Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, I don't know whether he can do it. So I don't think it'll happen, but I'm still holding out for stunt Oscar.

• 7:34Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like Brad Pitt, his win showed us the path for Tom Cruise, which is that he's famous enough that he did a kind of the minimum amount and made the most of the minimum amount. Every time he had to give a speech, he appeared to be gracious. He had one good joke for every speech. You know, praised his co-stars and collaborators endlessly, and then talked about his journey as a person minimally, but effectively. I don't, you know, who knows with Judy? I don't know what that movie, if that movie's gonna be good or not. But I think you could, if you're famous enough, I think you can do it. If you're Mikey Madison, you have to pound the pavement. You have to do interviews. You have to get out there and show everyone who you are. Everybody knows who Tom Cruise is, for better or for worse. So I'm not writing it off. That's all I'm saying.

• 8:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 8:18Sean Fennessey?

  Let's talk about Tom Cruise in Training, Glenn Powell.

• 8:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Sean Fennessey?

  So Glenn Powell this week signed up for a firefighter movie from Ron Howard. Ron Howard already made a firefighter movie. It's called Backdraft.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  It's pretty good.

• 8:29Sean Fennessey?

  Solid film.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:30Sean Fennessey?

  And that's, I guess he wants to go back. Imagine if he made another film about the guy from A Beautiful Mind. And he was just like, he's, he's, he's going again. He's looking at that story one more time.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Apollo 14.

• 8:42Sean Fennessey?

  Glenn Powell, very busy man right now. He, this year has The Running Man. Possibly has Huntington from May 24, though it seems like that's going to go into 2026. He signed up for the Untitled J.J. Abrams Puzzle Movie. He's got a Judd Apatow movie on deck. He's got a Barry Jenkins movie on deck. Top Gun 3 is being written, according to Christopher McQuarrie, and now this firefighter movie. Plus, he's going to be a TV star shortly.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  This Chad Powers show.

• 9:08Sean Fennessey?

  Forcoming Chad Powers football show. And there's also talk of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre TV adaptation.

• 9:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Which you tweeted about from the San Diego Zoo.

• 9:17Sean Fennessey?

  Did I? What did I say?

• 9:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Didn't you?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Uh, I just know that Taylor Sheridan has now thrown his, thrown his name in the ring for that franchise.

• 9:26Sean Fennessey?

  He wants in on that.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  I mean, like, there's a big, like, bidding war going on for the rights to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

• 9:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Sean Fennessey?

  I tweeted from the San Diego Zoo?

• 9:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I think so. Or maybe you just texted from the San Diego Zoo.

• 9:37Sean Fennessey?

  I think it was just a text. It's amusing that you confuse those two things. I don't recall tweeting about this story.

• 9:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. It's just like, oh, Sean is with his child somewhere and has an opinion about a movie, you know?

• 9:50Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I don't know if it was at the zoo. That seems unlikely, to be honest, given what my experience was like at that zoo. Glenn, overexposed?

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Well, I would say to-

• 10:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Hold your tongue.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  From my, from my POV, I wonder if you could have told Glenn, Glenn Powell, this is what your lineup is going to be? Would he have gone back and been like, I don't need to do a Chad Powers TV show for the Manning Brothers?

• 10:12Sean Fennessey?

  It's possible.

• 10:13Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I, I, I think you're right.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  It sounds the most disposable of these projects.

• 10:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's the, it's the horror movie that Dejan Genu made before she won the Academy Award.

• 10:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 10:22Sean Fennessey?

  You know, it's the, what is the house at the end of the street? Isn't that the Jennifer Lawrence movie where it was like, oh yeah, remember when she made this in 2014? Better get it out soon. She was the winner of the Academy Award for Silver Linings Playbook. Uh, I think he's gonna be fine.

• 10:33Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm happy for him.

• 10:34Sean Fennessey?

  These are mostly good projects.

• 10:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Sean Fennessey?

  Little, always a little skeptical of the J.J. Abrams project.

• 10:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I.

• 10:40Sean Fennessey?

  Personally.

• 10:40Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, I, you and I are on record on that. There were set photos from it recently, like he was wearing a vest. Um, I saw a tweet that said, I'm sorry, I can't remember who had this very smart thought.

• 10:52Sean Fennessey?

  It was Jim Twitter.

• 10:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Jim Twitter tweeted.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  After he asked you for some advice.

• 10:58Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you for all your skincare thoughts, Amanda. Here's a take on Glenn Powell.

• 11:03Amanda Dobbins?

  And it was just like Glenn Powell, like crosses another job off his like Barbie job list.

• 11:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Firefighter, it's good, it's funny.

• 11:13Sean Fennessey?

  We love our can.

• 11:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Tornado chaser, I love him, he's the best.

• 11:17Sean Fennessey?

  Two can titles going to November 7th. One is Dime I Love, the Jennifer Lawrence movie, which we talked about. That movie acquired for $24 million, which that's a lot of money for that movie, based on the reviews that I read.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  The stuff that I read about this movie makes it sound like the play that Scarlett Johansson is doing in Marriage Story. Where they're like, we pretended to be otters and, and then one otter wore the other one. You're like, what? What's this movie about?

• 11:43Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's about a woman experiencing postpartum depression. But with also some animal role play, I suppose. When Ramsey never won to make a simple.

• 11:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Marriage Story, in my experience.

• 11:55Sean Fennessey?

  So Sentimental Value, the other, you know, big can film from, uh, Joakim Trier is also going to November 7th. You know, I just walked out of the movie theater for 28 years later, where I saw an extended trailer for Predator Badlands. That's coming out on November 7th, I'm very excited about that. We just talked about The Running Man, that's also coming out on November 7th. So that's a busy day.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:14Amanda Dobbins?

  It is. I, I wonder if things will shift slightly. I mean, and also you have to assume Dime I Love and Sentimental Value will be limited and then.

• 12:21Sean Fennessey?

  Good point.

• 12:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Going wide.

• 12:22Sean Fennessey?

  I think that is likely. Be the case. However, The Running Man and Predator Badlands, those two movies have the exact same core demo, which is me and Chris and some other guys. And

• 12:33Speaker 03

  I even watched the Predator animated.

• 12:36Sean Fennessey?

  Jim Twitter.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Or not anime, but the animated, I don't know.

• 12:38Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, it was great.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was really good.

• 12:40Sean Fennessey?

  Killer of Killers?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I really enjoyed that. So you watched an animated film, but only because it had predators in it?

• 12:44Speaker 03

  I low key watch animated stuff, but very selectively and never what society tells me I have to watch.

• 12:50Sean Fennessey?

  By announcing on a podcast that you do something, it is not low key. This is important to understand that that is not low key.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  My entire thing is pretend like I'm not on a podcast.

• 12:59Amanda Dobbins?

  How do you find your way there?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 13:02Amanda Dobbins?

  How do you find your way there to these animated films? Like, what is your decision criteria?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  I'm a relatively complete, I'm a completist when it comes to Predator.

• 13:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I know. You once acted out one of the films in my office.

• 13:15Amanda Dobbins?

  No one else is there.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  The other day, Sean, me and Zach went and saw Die Hard With A Vengeance at the movie theater and Zach was relating Knox, asking him questions about what he was doing. And he was like, I'm going to see a movie with Sean and Chris.

• 13:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  He's like, what's the movie called? He said, Die Hard With A Vengeance. And then I was like, did he ask what it's about? And he was like, no. And I was like, I really want to explain Die Hard With A Vengeance to Knox.

• 13:41Sean Fennessey?

  We're not that far away from that being the case.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  There used to be these things called payphones.

• 13:47Sean Fennessey?

  Will you go full rewatchables when that happens? Will it be like in our picking nits category, we're pointing out here the failure to understand.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Do you know Doris Burke is? Okay, so.

• 13:57Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay. One more piece of news, two more pieces of news.

• 14:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Sean Fennessey?

  One.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Three more pieces, but it's one that's not on the doc.

• 14:03Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, you've got one tucked away.

• 14:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 14:05Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Doris. Uh, first trailer for Springsteen colon Deliver Me From Nowhere, which is coming out October 24th, written and directed by Scott Cooper. In case you couldn't figure it out, this movie is about Bruce Springsteen. Uh, at a very particular moment in his career, he's played by Jeremy Allen White and is about the conception and recording of Nebraska. His famed sort of acoustic, desolate, one man album, uh, in the, which is recorded essentially simultaneous to Born in the USA.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Prior to, I think right after The River and before Born in the USA, but it's, as Jeremy Strong explains in this film trailer, it's what he had to do to heal the world.

• 14:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, and.

• 14:44Amanda Dobbins?

  First himself.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  He had to heal himself.

• 14:46Amanda Dobbins?

  He had to heal the whole, yeah.

• 14:48Sean Fennessey?

  And knowing what we know now, that the world hath been healed. Do we need this movie? Because we're healed.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Fuck, yes.

• 14:57Sean Fennessey?

  So you're fired up.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  You're out. Yeah.

• 15:01Amanda Dobbins?

  That's great.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  I wasn't moved, but I was like, first of all, he does a very convincing rock version of Springsteen's moves. So shout out to Jeremy.

• 15:09Sean Fennessey?

  This is one of my biggest concerns with this movie is that he looks bang on in the Born to Run stuff.

• 15:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 15:15Sean Fennessey?

  But that's not what this movie is about.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  We don't know what this movie is about, though.

• 15:19Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I won't spoil what I know about it, but that's not what it's about.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  You think it's about his dad?

• 15:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, yes, there are flashbacks to his daddy issues. That was when I was like, uh oh, I mean, sure, but they put it in the trailer.

• 15:33Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's about the tortured artist conceiving of an important work. And that work is not Born in the USA.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  I think it's about John Landau.

• 15:43Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I'm looking forward to Jeremy Strong's work in this film. It's amazing that he's going from Roy Cohn to John Landau. Like, what other guru figures can he hop from? You know, how much Scott Cooper stock do you have? I think is the question you should ask yourself.

• 15:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't have a lot, but I am also, I'm open to this type of movie. And then was also like, uh oh, when I saw the flashbacks to the, you know, and then sincere Jeremy Strong is a little, little tough for me. And so once he is.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  So when he's like listening to the music on headphones.

• 16:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, once he's the voice of God being like, he's gonna heal the world, I was, oh, okay.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  That's actually.

• 16:23Amanda Dobbins?

  This is how we're going.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Live footage of me listening to Rosillo travel logs.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Just like, I can't believe.

• 16:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Is there a new one?

• 16:32Speaker 03

  No.

• 16:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 16:33Sean Fennessey?

  The supporting cast of this movie is pretty great. Steven Graham, Odessa Young, Paul Walter Hauser, Gabby Hoffman, Marc Maron, David Krumholtz. That is, that's a lot of my hitters right there. So I'm obviously looking forward to it. I had a lot of angst about A Complete Unknown last year and because I love Dylan so much and that turned out to be false and unnecessary because that was a pretty good movie. I'm a little more skeptical of this, but I have less skin in the game with Bruce. So, you know, we'll check it out. We'll do an episode about it.

• 17:00Amanda Dobbins?

  That seems emotionally responsible.

• 17:02Sean Fennessey?

  Will you listen to only Bruce from now until the film comes out all summer?

• 17:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. loves Bruce.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Do you have a favorite Bruce Springsteen album? I asked Andy this.

• 17:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm not getting into this with all of you. You just start clowning each other about Tunnel of Love and I was like, okay.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  No, it's just a very Andy pick to say Tunnel of Love.

• 17:19Sean Fennessey?

  That was Andy's pick?

• 17:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, I didn't work it.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  It was Andy's pick and I knew it was Andy's pick from like his face. I was like, it's Tunnel of Love.

• 17:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Sean Fennessey?

  You like called the shot?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:28Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I mean, I get that as like, like a move that you would put in print to be like, actually it's Tunnel of Love, but sincerely believe it's Tunnel of Love?

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Ask him.

• 17:36Sean Fennessey?

  Bruce Springsteen. Okay. Anyway, Catherine Bigelow is finally putting a movie out. Speaking of October 24th, same day as this Springsteen movie, A House of Dynamite is hitting Netflix. It is scripted by Noah Oppenheim, who's Chris's favorite former news executive from NBC and also the author of Jackie and Zero Day.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Zero Day.

• 17:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Which you did watch.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  All of.

• 17:56Amanda Dobbins?

  How did it conclude? Can we say that now?

• 17:58Speaker 03

  It was Lizzie Kaplan is AOC and she participates in a coup against the president.

• 18:04Amanda Dobbins?

  No, he did not tell me this.

• 18:05Sean Fennessey?

  He told me this and I broke down laughing.

• 18:07Amanda Dobbins?

  So Lizzie Kaplan-

• 18:09Speaker 03

  She's a leftist congresswoman who unites with a centrist congressman played by Matthew Modine to shake America out of its stupor.

• 18:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 18:18Sean Fennessey?

  Is it possible that it is a foretold documentary? Like, is it in play, what you just described?

• 18:24Speaker 03

  I fucking hope House of Dynamite is not a foretold documentary.

• 18:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And what's Bob De Niro doing?

• 18:28Speaker 03

  He's a former president who runs a kind of special counsel investigation into the cyber attack.

• 18:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 18:36Sean Fennessey?

  This, this is sort of related, this Bigelow movie, because this Bigelow movie is about a missile is launched at the United States. We don't know where it's come from and now the White House needs to determine who fired it and how to respond. And it's, you know, it feels like a TikTok thriller. Not TikTok, the social media app, but a ticking clock.

• 18:53Amanda Dobbins?

  With C's.

• 18:54Sean Fennessey?

  With C's. Thank you. Well put. Um, Indris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee, our boy Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Jason Clarke. First Bigelow movie since Detroit, which is eight years ago.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 19:10Sean Fennessey?

  So. Interesting.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Close to the same layoff Danny Boyle has had for features, right?

• 19:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good point. Very, very similar. I think Danny Boyle's 2019?

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:18Sean Fennessey?

  Was yesterday. So he, this is eight years away for a Best Picture winner and one of the signature filmmakers of the 21st century. Uh, pretty exciting.

• 19:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm open. I mean, topically, you know, we'll see how it goes.

• 19:31Sean Fennessey?

  I would imagine this is in the running to be at Venice.

• 19:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I, I, I am excited about that.

• 19:37Sean Fennessey?

  So you may be seeing it sooner than all of us.

• 19:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  You know, it'll be fucking sick if the missile comes from space.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Everybody's like, oh, it's a geopolitical thriller. And it's like, no. Martians.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Martian shot one right at us. And now he just has to go into space and kill them.

• 19:59Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, that could, it could be that.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:01Sean Fennessey?

  That could, that would be quite a swerve from Bigelow's previous work, but you never know. Uh, you had a final piece of news you wanted to share.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  There is a rumor on the internet. Oh, great.

• 20:09Sean Fennessey?

  Here we go.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  That. Uh, the teaser for The Odyssey is going to be playing before.

• 20:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I did see this.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Jurassic, Jurassic Park.

• 20:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Jurassic world rebirth.

• 20:18Sean Fennessey?

  So I'm glad you brought this up. So.

• 20:20Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, can I tell you where I learned this?

• 20:22Sean Fennessey?

  Where'd you learn it?

• 20:23Amanda Dobbins?

  From my new favorite, uh, Instagram account. Hold up. You guys did not respond to my Shrek Instagram that I sent you?

• 20:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that was sent to me and Bobby.

• 20:31Amanda Dobbins?

  I know, but you didn't respond.

• 20:33Sean Fennessey?

  I, I've, I've had quite a journey the last few days. I apologize. If you could only imagine what I've been doing in the state of Georgia.

• 20:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean.

• 20:41Sean Fennessey?

  You'll hear all about it in private.

• 20:42Amanda Dobbins?

  You know what? I can't, which is sort of the problem. Um, okay. So that was a reel by movie watching girl. So shout out to her.

• 20:50Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that's your alt?

• 20:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, yeah, that's what she knows how to like make reels.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Movie watching alpha mama.

• 21:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Anyway, good materialists content over that I don't want to spoil, but it's really good.

• 21:05Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah, that is.

• 21:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I was, I mean, it was genuinely good.

• 21:08Sean Fennessey?

  That was.

• 21:08Amanda Dobbins?

  And then, have you seen materials?

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Not yet.

• 21:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Material? Okay. Well, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

• 21:12Sean Fennessey?

  Marxism.

• 21:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  No, I've just decided that I unconditionally support the film. And don't want to see it?

• 21:20Sean Fennessey?

  We were engaged in one of the best text exchanges of the year with a colleague about the film. I won't reveal who that colleague is, but maybe you can guess out there if you're a listener of the Ringer Podcast Network. So here's the thing I did. I assume we're going to get invited to a screening of Jurassic World Rebirth.

• 21:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 21:35Sean Fennessey?

  But in the event that we're not.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  You've rejected that invite.

• 21:38Sean Fennessey?

  No, I have not. I want to see the movie. I bought a ticket and I have never seen this ticket offered before, but I bought a ticket for an 8 a.m. screening on July 2nd, the day the film is being released. And that I assume we will record based on the episodes that we have coming in the next couple of weeks. So if you would like to join me at the 8 a.m. screening of this movie. At the AMC Americana.

• 22:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, 8 a.m.

• 22:03Sean Fennessey?

  We could see the Odyssey trailer. If it's not on the internet yet and talk about it on that episode.

• 22:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  I'll try to make that work.

• 22:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 22:13Sean Fennessey?

  And now that requires waking up early and getting our children out the house and everything.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  I can wake up early. I just might be out. I might be out of the state, but I will try to come back for that.

• 22:21Sean Fennessey?

  You'll be out of the state?

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 22:24Sean Fennessey?

  Where are you going?

• 22:24Speaker 03

  To Portland.

• 22:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Again?

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Again.

• 22:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you were just there.

• 22:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, come back.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Okay, but there is also some speculation.

• 22:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I was gonna ask you to bring some donuts from.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  From Portland?

• 22:40Amanda Dobbins?

  No, from all time, near your home.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  There is some speculation that this would be the last opportunity this summer for it to air before a Universal film. I think, or something like that.

• 22:54Sean Fennessey?

  I believe historically Nolan typically just does those like minute long teasers that have very little footage in them. So you know, the famous like Heath Ledger doing the Joker laugh in the Dark Knight trailer, for example.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Dunkirk teaser is insane. It's really good.

• 23:06Sean Fennessey?

  That's like the ticking. Yeah.

• 23:08Amanda Dobbins?

  So this will just be you reading the Odyssey in the original Greek with.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Honestly.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  There's very few times where I've ever been like, we should go live, like walking out of the movie theater, but this is one of them.

• 23:22Sean Fennessey?

  It's honestly, if you want to talk strategy on the show, it's better as a standalone piece of content.

• 23:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 23:28Sean Fennessey?

  You know what?

• 23:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 23:30Sean Fennessey?

  Let's just let it flow.

• 23:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 23:31Sean Fennessey?

  We're gonna let it all flow. Let's, speaking of flowing.

• 23:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Sean Fennessey?

  Let's flow into the zombie state.

• 23:37Sean Fennessey?

  Twenty-eight years later. So I've just seen this movie. I have not had a lot of time to sit with it. You guys got a chance to see it earlier this year? Did you see it yesterday?

• 23:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I saw it yesterday.

• 23:45Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  I saw it Tuesday.

• 23:47Sean Fennessey?

  As I said, written by Garland, directed by Boyle. Boyle's first movie in a long time. Boyle, a filmmaker who, I don't, I honestly don't know a lot of your thoughts about him because we've only had one movie of his come out since we've been doing the show.

• 24:00Amanda Dobbins?

  And it was yesterday.

• 24:01Sean Fennessey?

  And we hated it.

• 24:02Amanda Dobbins?

  I just absolutely melted.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  You guys weren't doing the show during Steve Jobs? No.

• 24:06Sean Fennessey?

  No, that was fourteen, I think, or fifteen.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  I thought it was fifteen.

• 24:09Sean Fennessey?

  So. You know, Chris and I have a shared love of a lot of his movies.

• 24:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 24:14Sean Fennessey?

  He's definitely a huge favorite of mine, but he has been in this kind of, I don't know, if he's like, in exploratory period, he did some television. You know, in twenty twelve, he did the Olympic ceremony. Like, he's, he's kind of been.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  I think he did some theater stuff.

• 24:27Sean Fennessey?

  He did some theater, yeah. He's been doing a lot of other projects. And in the sort of early to mid nineties, established himself as kind of a linchpin character, who we don't usually identify with the typical Hall of Famers of this show. But I think if he were more active in the last ten years, we probably, his name would come up more. But anyway, this is, um, you know, he made this Twenty-Eight Days Later film twenty-three years ago. With Garland. And that was, came off of him adapting Garland's novel, The Beach. For the two thousand film with Leo, which I just re-watched, and which actually pairs very interestingly with this movie, which I'll get to. So this new movie stars Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, Alfie Williams, who is really the star of the movie. He plays Spike, the young boy at the center of the story.

• 25:14Sean Fennessey?

  Shot by Anthony Zodmantel again. This is their seventh collaboration, though I've never seen a movie like this from the two of them. It was shot on an iPhone 15 Pro Max, which I believe is the phone I'm holding in my hand right now.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:28Sean Fennessey?

  That's the iPhone that I have.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  But some of the rigs that they use are unbelievable, where it's like a giant ring of iPhones.

• 25:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  So that they can capture some of the, the specific action that they're trying to do.

• 25:39Sean Fennessey?

  And, and we should talk about the way that they capture the action because it is pretty extraordinary. You know, in our document here, it says the past movies that have been shot on the iPhone include Tangerine, High Flying Bird, Unseen. Obviously, Soderbergh has been doing a lot of work with this. Usually in those movies, it's about the kind of claustrophobia that, or surveillance that you find from, you know, the phone existence. This movie kind of explodes that whole concept. It makes things massive and wide.

• 26:09Sean Fennessey?

  Scored by Young Fathers, a kind of a rock hip hop Scottish group. And the story is this, 28 years after the rage virus escaped, a medical research laboratory survivors have found ways to co- to exist amidst the infective. One group lives on an island connected to the mainland by a single heavily defended causeway. When a father and his son leave the island on a mission into the dark heart of the mainland, they discover the secrets, wonders and horror of the outside world. Amanda, what did you think?

• 26:36Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not that heavily defended, but anyway.

• 26:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's a good point.

• 26:39Amanda Dobbins?

  When you just think about it. You don't want to start with him? I mean, I'm happy to start.

• 26:43Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think you should start.

• 26:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, well, we know, we know what you think, in a, in a positive way. I guess it's not as interesting to start with me because I'm there for everything like besides the spinal cords, you know? And like, two thumbs up for the spinal cords, like they.

• 27:00Sean Fennessey?

  You mean the gore and viscera?

• 27:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but like the, and, and quite literally, they, they had many of them. And you saw them being removed in various ways. And that was cool. I mean, it was gnarly as fuck, but that's the point. But whether I respond to it is about everything outside. It is like, have you created a, like a believable world? Like, do I believe in these characters? Am I emotionally invested? Does it have any sort of ideas or anything to, to say, you know? How does it look? Does it? Um, you know, is it pretty? Basically, I thought it was pretty great. I was, I was definitely emotionally invested. I cried. I was mad about crying and I do want to talk about that.

• 27:39Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 27:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, it is a day that ends in Y, and so I have some notes on Alex Garland's female characters, but, um, you know, that's okay.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  The third of them.

• 27:52Amanda Dobbins?

  But, you know, infected or not, as it, as it turns out, but I thought it was like very moving, like very assured, it like incredible and engrossing to look at. Um, great performances, pretty great setup, great third act cameo, which not, not even a cameo really, but we'll, we'll get to that when we get to it. So I'm, I'm very pro.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  Uh, extraordinary.

• 28:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Like I just thought probably my favorite of the year, one of my favorites of the year up there with sinners and, and warfare and black bag, uh, bursting with ideas, social ideas about society, ideas about infection and disease, ideas about national identity, ideas about filmmaking and genre. Unbelievable. Like every scene I felt like was vibrating with an energy that is really lacking from genre film or blockbuster films. And I was riveted. I, I thought it was really funny. I too was brought to the edge of tears. Like I was really moved by the second act or I guess the beginning of the third act.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  And I can't believe like the sleight of hand that this movie, I, I thought this movie was going to be a warrior movie about Aaron Taylor Johnson kicking ass. I had no idea that this was going to go like fucking full warhorse on us.

• 29:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  It's, it's a coming of age story set in like a full car environment. It's amazing.

• 29:16Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. But also, I mean, there is a lot of that viscera that you're describing, but it's very much a fallen empire movie. It's sort of about like what happens in the aftermath.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Of Brexit.

• 29:27Sean Fennessey?

  Two hundred years of power and wealth, and then this turn towards isolationism and.

• 29:34Sean Fennessey?

  To have that idea be so obvious on the surface, but then to actually spend time to like, explore what it means and the ramifications of people and to watch someone leave the island in the film as the young boy and his father do at the beginning of the film. And then, and we will spoil this movie, though I think clearly we all highly recommend it. It's definitely one of the best movies of the year. To then have another character leave the island too, and then see the ramifications of another person leaving and then just try to like reckon with what is trying to be communicated here about the idea of Brexit specifically, but I think around the world, the sort of like, the fact that they are being isolated from a rage virus, um, I think like says a lot about how the filmmakers view the contemporary environment. But the movie doesn't skimp at all on the hardcore genre stuff.

• 30:18Sean Fennessey?

  There is a kind of elegiac tone to a lot of what's happening and the sadness between the parents and the child, but there's a giant mega zombie with a huge swinging dick in this movie ripping people's vertebrae out. I mean, it is literally the two things that we are always asking for, which is like, if you can give us our genre and then pack inside that genre, some deep theme, um, which this movie has a ton of. It's, it shouldn't be surprising. Like, I feel like Yesterday is the blip, and then when you start going through all Boyle's movies and you're like, oh yeah, they're all kind of like this. They all feel weirdly transgressive.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Twenty Eight Days Later is about a post nine 11 Western world, right? Like it is, he's, he's able.

• 31:00Sean Fennessey?

  Waking up to the destruction.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, translate like a moment in time into a genre movie, uh, with so much creativity.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  I thought that like, there was a really sly expository dump in the beginning of the movie where they mentioned that, uh, continental Europe has like fixed it. Like they're like, they've like contained it and moved on.

• 31:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It is also.

• 31:23Sean Fennessey?

  It's a retcon of the, of the second film.

• 31:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And it's, and it's like titles and they're just like, yeah, the second movie did not happen.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  But it's also, but it's also kind of like very telling about, I think, the way Boyle perhaps sees contemporary British life of like, all these other places that have like, we self inflicted wounded ourselves and now like these other places, you're going to have to go there to get a doctor.

• 31:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's an interesting choice to set it in the Highlands of Scotland too, and the, the, the identity of Scotland.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  That's the beginning, then it moves down into northeast England.

• 31:53Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right. The way that the movie is made, it it looks unlike any movie I've ever seen. And so I was hoping like, maybe we could try to like unpack how they did this thing. I haven't read anything about the production of the movie. I didn't want anything spoiled for me after we saw that first trailer that we talked about on YouTube like three months ago. Yeah, with the Rudyard Kipling poem.

• 32:14Sean Fennessey?

  But there's two huge choices. One is obviously shooting it with an iPhone, which gives it this kind of like hazy on the edges and then tight focus in the center of the frame. And then there's the editing style, which particularly in the action sequences is this sort of like, like skip, freeze, cut, action, which is very strange and takes like a second to get used to. Cause this is a movie that's largely about like bow and arrow murder of zombies. It looks very like Robin Hood in the first thirty minutes and then kind of morphs into something significantly more disgusting. But I don't, how did you feel, you know, as someone who doesn't watch these movies all the time?

• 32:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 32:58Sean Fennessey?

  But I assume you felt something significantly different from your standard issue zombie movie.

• 33:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, are you, I mean, I had, so I watched Twenty Eight Days Later and then Twenty Eight Weeks Later, like in succession this week. That's how I've been spending my week.

• 33:14Amanda Dobbins?

  And, you know, Twenty Eight Days Later is also like, this style of filming is is very famous. And so it's like very low quality digital cameras in two thousand and two.

• 33:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 33:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Which, you know, serves the story and is very cool, but like, if you're watching it at home on your TV now, it is like kind of borderline unwatchable.

• 33:34Sean Fennessey?

  It looks like shit.

• 33:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, it looks like really, really, I mean, you can, you can get a sense of what they were trying to do with the style. And it like clearly is, you know, this style is serving the movie, but you're just like, what am I looking at? Like, how can I see this?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Is that Killian Murphy walking across the, yeah.

• 33:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and oh, that bus is on the side, like, you know, um.

• 33:53Sean Fennessey?

  It did feel very different in theaters.

• 33:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 33:56Sean Fennessey?

  Because in theaters, they struck prints of the digital video. So it was the weirdest looking thing. I mean, I remember vividly. And then when you watched it at home, it didn't have the same power.

• 34:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. But so it was interesting to go from, from that experience and and that style of filmmaking to like to iPhone world. And obviously, and you can like see things a lot better. But there's just a scope to this that like I thought was very beautiful and like does serve the story in terms of it's an isolated island, but like you're like considering like the larger world. So and then the zombie stuff, I just, I mean, they really, really like blood. And

• 34:41Sean Fennessey?

  This is way gorier than

• 34:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Way, way gorier. And it's, you know, I like, I guess I have a quote unquote, queasy stomach about this stuff, but really I just kind of like, don't look. The way that I react to things is like, oh, okay. So now we're in the like, you know, eyeballs are gonna start exploding things. So I'm just gonna like, look over here. And I like, just kind of look down. And so I can like, kind of see it in my periphery. Then I could still see a lot of blood in the periphery. That's kind of the thing. It's like, can you look away and like, no, you can't really totally avoid this one. But even I can tell that it is, you know, it's both gnarly and very impressive.

• 35:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I was wondering if it was like purposely done that way as a sort of, maybe not a comment, but like a, an elevation of the sensory overload that we've experienced in the last 20 years that like, to really be blown away by something like this, you kind of need to go in super high definition video, right up close into the eye of the zombie as the arrow penetrates, and then freeze the camera for one second. Like, it felt like the same way that's an aesthetic choice that he made to shoot on digital video to show you like, kind of a grainy, broken down world. And what would, what would it be like if you tried to capture it on the last remaining camera? That in this movie, it's sort of like, there's, there's literally one character with an iPhone, the last iPhone before it loses all of its battery. And

• 36:02Amanda Dobbins?

  He's like, check out my fiance.

• 36:05Sean Fennessey?

  That part is great.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  It's amazing.

• 36:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Why does her face look like that? My friend, when she eats scallops, that was genuinely really funny.

• 36:11Sean Fennessey?

  But these like aesthetic choices are kind of like informing the big ideas of the movie, which makes it more fun and more interesting to kind of unpack in the aftermath, but also just sitting there and watching it. It's just, it's more exciting.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. The British critic Frank Cremode said that this film was a combination of Ken Loach's Kes with Cannibal Holocaust. And I thought that was like a pretty, pretty awesome way of looking at it. Not only is it shot in this very distinctive way, but it's cut, and the visual language overall is really distinctive where

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Uh, Boyle's cutting in like Laurence Olivier's Henry the Fifth and infrared shots of the infected crawling around the forest.

• 36:52Sean Fennessey?

  I loved that.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  And, um, you know, these kind of surreal, almost like folk horror kind of images of the alpha on the horizon and his minions rising up and he's playing with a lot of genre, not only tonally, but visually like mixing in all these different kinds of, uh, I don't know, like vernaculars of film that I've really responded to.

• 37:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Two movies that I thought of while watching it, one was Sorcerer, which kind of like plunges you into this hellscape and you're just stuck there and you're on a mission to try to get out with your life. And then the other one was The Lighthouse, because The Lighthouse has a kind of similar, um, it's like a, an emotional torrent on top of you of all around you at any moment, something terrible could happen. And similarly, you know, weaving in the folklore aspect of that story and the idea of being like just on the periphery of impending doom. But it's pretty audacious for a mainstream studio horror movie that is the third in the series to completely pivot stylistically and to be hitting you with this, like, like you said, dropping into the infrared, especially going into dream sequences.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 37:59Sean Fennessey?

  Where Jodie Comer's character is, you know, you know, eye level in the, in the water, speaking to her son through a dream.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  With red eyes.

• 38:07Sean Fennessey?

  With red eyes. Like, this is very, um, I don't know, kind of dark and haunted and unusual kind of stuff. So I was like blown away by all those choices. And then the story is a very interesting trio of acts, like very clearly dad, mother, holy spirit. You know, like those are the kind of, there's the, the sacrament is really being explored here, all the way up to the upside down cross that is shown at the end of this film and the bone temple that we explore very briefly. Um, let's start with the first one. So the first one is a story about a father and a son, and the father's teaching his son how to hunt, how to hunt the infected.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  And there's, it's, it's basically a village rite of passage that like boys of a certain age get brought out into the world for the first time and.

• 38:53Amanda Dobbins?

  And yeah, and they lose, you know, learn the rules of protecting and what it means to be. And then, and then there's like a celebration afterwards.

• 39:01Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 39:01Amanda Dobbins?

  It's, it's like a bar mitzvah or a, you know.

• 39:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, totally. It's like, and Vikings are referenced. It's very much like the Viking conqueror training their son. Um.

• 39:12Sean Fennessey?

  I saw some people saying that this part, this section didn't work, but I thought it, I mean, I thought this was incredible.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 39:18Sean Fennessey?

  I thought this was like breathtaking.

• 39:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Sean Fennessey?

  It's pure excitement. Aaron Taylor Johnson, always happy to see him, thought he was very good in this.

• 39:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I guess it is like the most standard, for lack of a better word, of the three. Like, they start you with a pretty much, okay, it's like, it's a dad and a son, and they do a great job at communicating, like, the tension and the, you know, the expectations that the kid doesn't really feel like he can live up to. And then, you know, then they hunt zombies for a while.

• 39:45Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:46Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's, like, the movie hasn't totally, like, turned on its side yet in this act, but I thought it, like, it was very emotionally affecting, like, when the dad gets up to something that maybe he shouldn't get up to, I gasped.

• 39:59Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I was like, oh, you know, and it's like, come on, that's screenwriting one-on-one. It's like, not surprising, but it has the punch that you need. And then, I don't know, those, those slug zombies were really ugly, so, um, it, it works. And then it lays the foundation for everything that just kind of gets, like, weirder and weirder, as you, in a good way, as you go along.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  I, uh, I thought that the Causeway chase on the way back to the village was like one of the most amazing things I've seen this year. Um, and this kid spikes, uh, loss of innocence coming through probably the most universal thing, which is finding out your dad's a liar.

• 40:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  And that your dad is like a flawed human being. And, and, you know, he comes back and he's being celebrated in this village, and he can't get over the fact that his dad is making up stories about his accomplishments. And this is like a very big pub culture thing, like, I saw a guy out there, six and a half feet tall, I kicked him in the nuts, and I, and you're like, no, he didn't, he ran away, you know, like, uh, that, that really was so perfectly, like, staged, I thought.

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• 42:19Speaker 05

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• 42:22Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. And even just the, I don't, I assume that that causeway is a real place, like a real location that they discovered.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was a Jude Law mini-series that had like a similar premise of like this causeway is only open once a day and, you know, it's like he's on an island looking for someone. It was a couple of years ago on HBO. It's pretty, pretty cool. Just can't remember the name of it.

• 42:41Sean Fennessey?

  But just visually, the way that that's captured is, is remarkable and so propulsive and in the, in the light, in the dark. And also like-

• 42:48Speaker 03

  See the, the water kicking up as the alphas chasing them?

• 42:50Sean Fennessey?

  Exactly. Yeah, there's like, there are a number of times where he goes really, really wide with the camera, but like the overhead shot of seeing the alpha chasing them and there, you can see the kind of distance in their footsteps. Like on the moon, yeah. Um, and then there are so many of those Vista shots that you were talking about, Chris, where the sort of like you can feel the camera, you can feel just an iPhone camera moving like this and giving you the panorama as suggested on your phone that- I think actually weirdly like situated me more in the action than some more recent act. We've been talking about a lot of action movies this year with Ballerina and Working Man, Amateur Accountant 2. There's been a lot of like pure classical action. And a lot of it, because it's hard to stage these scenes, is has so much cutting

• 43:34Sean Fennessey?

  that you feel like you're watching like a a whole day's shoot.

• 43:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Sean Fennessey?

  As opposed to a sequence like this where you feel like you're like locked inside of the moment. So I found that like really impressive and just fun. I feel like you're right, though. It is the most standard. It's like it's what you expected the whole movie to be.

• 43:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly.

• 43:49Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and the fact that it kind of neatly pivots away from that when this boy does lose his innocence and realizes that, you know, something is wrong with his mother and the doctor exists somewhere on the island. And that's where that, you know, the origin of the fire on the island that he locates. And I guess that's is that just like an old man who lives in their house on the island?

• 44:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I thought that was her. I thought that was like an uncle or something like that.

• 44:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, okay. Um, and he shares the the history of Dr. Kelson?

• 44:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Mm hmm.

• 44:18Sean Fennessey?

  And then Aaron Taylor Johnson's character, his father, also shares the history of Kelson. And that is a chilling sequence when he recalls being a young boy and stumbling upon Kelson's menagerie of death.

• 44:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm. Right.

• 44:31Sean Fennessey?

  And then the boy decides.

• 44:35Amanda Dobbins?

  That shot also is really.

• 44:37Sean Fennessey?

  The corpse is lined up so perfectly. Um, again, like, you know, this is small stuff.

• 44:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Memorable. No, it's good. Yeah.

• 44:45Sean Fennessey?

  This is how you stage a movie like this. This movie is pretty expensive and you can see where some of the money is spent. But like a sequence like that where you're like, yeah, we have like 300 extras and they all have to lay on the ground. You know, like it doesn't look cheap or digital or.

• 44:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 44:56Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and then that pivots him to, you know, bringing his mother back across the causeway so that he can discover the doctor and find out what's wrong with her. What did you think about Jodie Comber in this movie?

• 45:06Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought she was sensational. I she is amazing. And like I said, I was really invested. I like as, you know, as soon as she meets her fate or it becomes clear that she's going to, I was like really, really upset. Now, obviously, like I am a mother to two small boys. So I was just like, no, I can't. This is horrible. Um, but I think I don't know if it's like a hugely developed character.

• 45:31Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, that that's okay. Um, she and the performance, like I think gives it a lot of life and soul. Um, so I thought she was great. I was.

• 45:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know. When can we talk about like the the turn?

• 45:48Sean Fennessey?

  Um, as soon as you want. We can talk about it right now.

• 45:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I just, you know, it happens very fast that she's just like, okay, I guess I gotta go die now. You know?

• 45:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Amanda Dobbins?

  I was, I was like, I think that we would be preparing our son a little bit more for this.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  I guess it's.

• 46:04Sean Fennessey?

  They prepared him with a morphine blow dart.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Sure. I wonder, I mean, like, so when it first, when her characters first introduced and her maladies first introduced, I was like, it's really fascinating. Like, what would you do with untreated depression in a situation like this? Like, I thought she was suffering from something like that. And then as the movie goes on and she has more like lapses in cognitive awareness, you're like, oh, it seems like it's more significant than that even. But yeah, like the, the, the sacrifice. I, I just think that you can't have the, the Jodie Comer character conversation without the Ralph Fiennes character conversation.

• 46:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Well, because of what he says about the Memento Mori, about remembering.

• 46:46Sean Fennessey?

  It comes before that though, because I, I think the most important, you know, you can feel, let me go back. I really love Alex Garland's movies that he directed.

• 46:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:56Sean Fennessey?

  If you, if I were to lodge a criticism against them, it would be that they are very schematic conceptually. And that you can feel him moving the characters.

• 47:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 47:07Sean Fennessey?

  To help make points. Now, I would say warfare and civil war personally, I felt that less than I have in the past. But that he has this like diagrammatic approach to story and structure. This has that too. A new child is born and so one must die. Like that is really in the, you know, in the.

• 47:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 47:24Sean Fennessey?

  literate understanding of genre filmmaking as soon as they, and I do, maybe a science corner is in order for the birth of a zombie child.

• 47:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 47:33Sean Fennessey?

  That is not, a birth of a child of a zombie mother and uninfected.

• 47:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 47:38Sean Fennessey?

  I, I can't logic through that very well.

• 47:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 47:41Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, you're not as learned in the ways of the zombie.

• 47:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, the infected. Well, I have, I've seen all of them recently. So actually, when I was watching Jodie Comer, I was like, oh, is she infected? But it's like some mutation.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 47:54Amanda Dobbins?

  That that's where it's like the second one where, or she is like a carrier, but you know, like.

• 47:58Sean Fennessey?

  You thought that's what she originally had.

• 47:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I thought that's where it was going instead of where it went. Yeah. So that train scene where an infected woman gives birth to a baby and you see the baby emerging from the, you know, vaginal canal, which shout out that. Like, I thought that all that was good. Here's what I didn't like about it.

• 48:18Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 48:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, number one, it's basically, there's a moment before where, you know, you hear this wailing and it's like unmistakable. It's like, oh, great. Okay. The, the, the one pregnant infected woman that we saw it like wandering around earlier is giving birth. Like, you know it instinctively.

• 48:38Sean Fennessey?

  The zombie virgin Mary.

• 48:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. And so she's, I mean, it is, it is. She's the zombie virgin Mary.

• 48:46Sean Fennessey?

  How did that baby stay alive after she got infected? Make it make sense, Alex.

• 48:52Amanda Dobbins?

  They, well, they do. We'll get to that. But so she's there, she's giving birth and she's obviously like in distress because I guess like the rage virus is not an epidural. And Jodie Comer walks in.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  What? I'm actually just resisting doing Tucker Carlson with Ted Cruz with you.

• 49:10Amanda Dobbins?

  What?

• 49:10Speaker 03

  You're talking about zombie births? You don't know what you're saying?

• 49:15Sean Fennessey?

  How do you know there isn't a zombie epidural?

• 49:18Amanda Dobbins?

  But so, and so she.

• 49:19Sean Fennessey?

  You want to eliminate all these zombies?

• 49:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And so she's like freaking out and, and she's like clearly in pain and Jodie Comer goes in and like reaches her hand out. And there's this moment where it's like, what's implied is like this holy thing or this, you know, amazing thing that is happening, which is like childbirth is like more powerful than the rage. So they're holding each other and they're like connecting as people who have given, you know, birth. And it's like for a moment.

• 49:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Two mamas.

• 49:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Sean Fennessey?

  They find each other on a train.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  You and me were not so different.

• 49:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And then, and then the baby is born and then she's like.

• 49:56Sean Fennessey?

  If only we could stop raging for a minute, we could get, just get along.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:00Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't civil war teach us that?

• 50:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, no, this is my problem. And I like, listen, I.

• 50:06Sean Fennessey?

  I love that shit. This is theatrical.

• 50:09Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it's fucking stupid. Here's why. No, it's not. No, no, because I like I like I have like carried two kids. So I get to say this is like, I, you know, I'm glad that I did. But like, it has nothing to do with like the preservation of your your humanity or like some, you know, magical thing like giving.

• 50:28Sean Fennessey?

  Childbirth?

• 50:29Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it doesn't. And there are like plenty of people.

• 50:31Sean Fennessey?

  What do you mean by that?

• 50:33Amanda Dobbins?

  It just it it's like it's implied. It's like, oh, well, like, you know, like, here comes this baby and this is so special that like she's not. She's not dangerous in this moment. She's not infected like they can connect as like human beings or whatever. And it's like, oh, because like, ooh, childbirth, like how powerful.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  You know who agrees with you?

• 50:49Amanda Dobbins?

  What?

• 50:49Speaker 03

  That Swedish guy.

• 50:52Amanda Dobbins?

  And I just like, I don't think that that is, you know.

• 50:55Sean Fennessey?

  I think there's a slightly different way to read it.

• 50:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Sean Fennessey?

  Which is that the act of childbirth is so painful that it would it would stem the rage for a minute because you couldn't be.

• 51:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. But then it's like Jodie Comer and her like having like this ooh mama's moment, you know, it's like, eh.

• 51:11Sean Fennessey?

  I get it. I get it. I can understand why that would.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  To her point.

• 51:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 03

  And and we've brought this up a couple of times. I was blown away by how much Garland is in this movie. And it's a testament to his emergence.

• 51:23Amanda Dobbins?

  And that and it was also like when that was happening. I was like, all right, okay.

• 51:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very it's equal footing, I think, between Boyle and Garland.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  The nature is healing and changing stuff from the beginning of the film is right out of annihilation.

• 51:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. I mean, men was the was the setup for the folklore stuff.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  Definitely elements of men. There's definitely elements of civil war. I mean, he's definitely got his his ideas and it's.

• 51:46Sean Fennessey?

  His hobby horses.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  I was texting with with um someone about this, but it feels like they complete each other. Like Boyle without Garland is is got it's a kind of up and down situation. If he's got a Sorkin script, it's amazing.

• 52:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 52:00Speaker 03

  If it's yesterday, maybe not so much. And Garland without Boyle is just maybe a little too like fuck all people.

• 52:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 52:07Amanda Dobbins?

  It's true.

• 52:07Sean Fennessey?

  Very, very cynical. Yeah. Boyle brings a little bit of humanity to some of Garland's stuff.

• 52:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Except for the baby. Okay, here are my two other. Obviously, like the. Baby not being infected and Ralph Fiennes has a throwaway line about placenta. So that's, you know, at least they put in some science in there. I like placenta is pretty powerful, I guess.

• 52:26Sean Fennessey?

  But, but the placenta is inside the infected person's body.

• 52:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. I, I mean.

• 52:32Sean Fennessey?

  How does the infection work?

• 52:34Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, they didn't explain that. That's true, but I agree with you.

• 52:37Sean Fennessey?

  To your point, I think it's all, it's all just fanciful zombie storytelling and I know that, but it's funny to pick, pick the nit.

• 52:44Amanda Dobbins?

  We, yeah. And then, well, the other thing about the baby that didn't even piss me off, but I was like, this is, we're, this is verging on children of men plagiarism at the very end. And I was like, hold on, hold on, can we do this?

• 53:01Sean Fennessey?

  Crossing the river.

• 53:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, crossing the river and then, and like the last night and her name is, you know? And it, and it's Jodie Comer's name. And I was like, okay, I like that movie too.

• 53:12Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe a stealth homage or maybe a quiet.

• 53:14Amanda Dobbins?

  It's true. I guess it is also like, we all are just retelling the Bible, I guess.

• 53:18Sean Fennessey?

  This movie to me has deep.

• 53:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, of course. Of course it does. It starts, you know, in a church.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Wizard of Oz is in here.

• 53:25Sean Fennessey?

  So then let's talk about Ralph Fiennes. Ralph Fiennes eventually, um, mother and son arrive. Actually, he is, he saves them as they are being stalked by.

• 53:34Speaker 03

  They get saved a couple of times, yeah.

• 53:35Sean Fennessey?

  Is the insinuation that the zombie mother was impregnated whilst infected by the alpha?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 53:43Sean Fennessey?

  And so that, that he was the father.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  Whether you guys read this as there are two alphas in the film. There's the one that gets killed on the causeway. And then there's the other one that's hunting.

• 53:55Sean Fennessey?

  I think the idea is that there are more and they're starting to like grow and.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  They're kind of like precinct bosses, you know, like.

• 54:01Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. Yeah. If that's how you want to think about it. Um, this guy's been watching a lot of Italian crime movies. So I think that. The Fiennes character is interesting. Again, a little bit of a schematic, like what if there was a guy who had all the answers?

• 54:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 54:17Sean Fennessey?

  To fix everything. And also, he collected skulls, but it's so beautifully rendered. And Ralph Fiennes, the minute he shows up, the movie, which is already kind of like, sitting at an eight out of 10, just goes like whoop. Like as soon as he starts talking, because he's, he's just the most dialed in actor right now. He's on a 10 year streak of everything he does is so enthralling.

• 54:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Almost 30.

• 54:37Sean Fennessey?

  I hear you.

• 54:38Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and also, but it is true.

• 54:40Sean Fennessey?

  He's in a late style period where-

• 54:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh my god, it's Ralph Fiennes.

• 54:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Like now, now I'm sitting up straight and now it's happening. Yeah.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  He's the closer. He can do the most of the least amount of screen time.

• 54:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, it's very exciting to see what he does. He's covered in iodine, which apparently repels the zombies. And he has developed a morphine cocktail that also neutralizes them, which is, in a, in a dumber movie, I would be like, this is so stupid.

• 55:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 55:06Sean Fennessey?

  But in this movie, I was like, yeah, that's, that's just something that happens. This is how we neutralize zombies. This makes total sense. This guy's a genius.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  And do you think that the reason why he doesn't kill the alpha after neutralizing him the first time is because of the physicians do no harm?

• 55:19Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, do, yeah. I think so. I think he's trying to coexist with the infected.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  I think for our, our real zombie heads out there, they may be like, you, you just can't leave, you can't leave the alpha standing there, man. Like-

• 55:31Sean Fennessey?

  No, and it comes back to bite him.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 55:33Sean Fennessey?

  To some extent.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  Almost.

• 55:34Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, almost.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Um, this is, this is the part of the movie that took on like a real Shakespearean quality for me. Uh, I thought-

• 55:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it literally does a Yorick joke, so.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  Well, and then, there's a lot of, like, Spike is Prince Hal and, you know, like getting ready to rise up to save England and stuff. Um, but the stuff about death, I thought was extraordinary for a movie like this.

• 55:58Amanda Dobbins?

  It was really beautiful.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  And the idea that, you know- I just the whole idea of like the skulls being like everyone has seen things and heard things and said things and it's like they have their own story. I thought that the culmination of her going away and the sparks coming up in the air and the music was like up there with like, what do you see in Sunshine as like the high points of Boyle cinema? Like honestly ecstatic.

• 56:24Sean Fennessey?

  I was waiting for the worm to turn. I kept waiting for the like rug to get pulled out from under me at that moment because it is such a sincere and emotionally deep snapshot inside of a movie that is otherwise relentless and pretty mean. And he doesn't do that, but he does give you in the aftermath of that, a kind of coda setting up the next film.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Right. And then you're like, okay.

• 56:48Sean Fennessey?

  Which is to me, this is like, how best to put this? It's like putting a chocolate covered banana on top of a completed sundae. Where it's like, I like a chocolate covered banana. Sometimes there can be a little bit too much sweet.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  I think some people would say it's like putting a strawberry popsicle on top of it's like a completely different flavor profile.

• 57:12Sean Fennessey?

  That's a better way of putting it. So, you know, eventually, um, the young boy returns the baby to or brings the baby to the island where he's grown up.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Spike returns the child to the to the village.

• 57:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, in like a in a litter in like a Moses basket, you know, sitting outside the thing.

• 57:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, a Moses cart, handheld cart that he picked up from Target and.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  A Moses signature baby basket.

• 57:35Sean Fennessey?

  And Spike, like all great folkloric heroes must strike out on his own, on his own personal mission to to find himself and to become presumably a great leader.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Just have a simple piece of fish roasted over the fire.

• 57:46Sean Fennessey?

  He's hunting and fishing all by himself. He's got his bow and arrow. Zombies, uh, lay a siege trap on him. They attack, he runs away and he is greeted at an impasse by several pastel wearing, were they Scottish? Ninja, Teletubby warrior, zombie warriors?

• 58:09Speaker 03

  Basically, and for for a more British savvy viewer, a British Jimmy Savile lookalike, who I guess in this timeline would not have been revealed to be a child sex.

• 58:18Sean Fennessey?

  Well, but I don't even know. I wonder if that was meant to be like a wink and a nod. Speaking of, I need to have you watched Shifty yet, the Adam Curtis?

• 58:26Speaker 03

  No.

• 58:26Sean Fennessey?

  Film? Okay, so Adam Curtis, the great documentarian, has a new film that I watched on YouTube. I don't know if it's still there called Shifty, and it's about kind of like the the loss of his innocence, like the desecration of England and the world in the late 20th century. And the first person that you see in the documentary is Jimmy Savile, who was TV presenter and kind of British pop personality, who was revealed to be a very unsavory character in real life. And I, when I saw them dressed like him with the bleach blonde hair, the kind of mopish hair, and the, you know, the crooked teeth. I was like, so are these guys child predators?

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:05Sean Fennessey?

  Who also double as zombie warriors? It's it's obviously a huge record scratch in the middle of this otherwise like very kind of stately and emotional and deep thematic film that goes right into, um, what's the Cameron Diaz, Danny Boyle movie with Ewan McGregor?

• 59:20Speaker 03

  Uh, Lifeless Ordinary?

• 59:21Sean Fennessey?

  Lifeless Ordinary, where like a Lifeless Ordinary is a little bit more like, you know, what if, what if every scene was like, we changed the dial on the radio station?

• 59:28Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 59:28Sean Fennessey?

  Like it felt like him just turning the dial a little bit.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so the Jimmy character that Jack O'Connell plays has been, it's obviously that's in a preamble section of the film. These children get attacked by the infected while they're watching Teletubbies. And it turns out that the child who escapes becomes Jack O'Connell character. Throughout the film, there's graffiti on houses and on dead bodies that says Jimmy or Jim, you know, like.

• 59:55Sean Fennessey?

  The upside down hanging zombie.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  He is essentially becoming like a kind of evangelical figure on the northeast England countryside uh, during this time period.

• 1:00:05Sean Fennessey?

  So I thought it was fun. It's obviously the style of filmmaking is very different. I feel like Danny Boyle is a little bit less comfortable in this kind of filmmaking style.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Costa directed it.

• 1:00:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it doesn't, it didn't, doesn't feel like the rest of the movie, that final action sequence. Cause what did you think of this sequence?

• 1:00:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I, it took me a minute and I was like, okay, no, that is Jack O'Connell, you know? And then then I was amused by that. Then I was like, am I watching Robin Hood? Um, and then I.

• 1:00:32Amanda Dobbins?

  It was fine. Like it's, you know, it feels completely of a different movie and it feels like it's setting up the next movie, which in fact we know it is.

• 1:00:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:00:39Amanda Dobbins?

  So it was sort of, it was all very obvious. But I really saw it mostly as a coda as opposed to the third act of the movie. And I, and I was still just, you know, emotionally wrapped up and also being like, does children of men have like, you know, copyright rights here?

• 1:00:57Sean Fennessey?

  Also written by a British author.

• 1:00:58Amanda Dobbins?

  It's true.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  I think the only disappointment I had about that sequence was self-created because for a second I was like, he's gonna get to the impasse and fucking Killian Murphy's gonna be standing there like.

• 1:01:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I did actually think that was it.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  And it's gonna rule so hard and I'm so susceptible to this shit. And it was, but it was okay. I thought, I, I know your mileage is gonna vary on this. There are some people who are like, this left a bad taste in my mouth and I thought it ruined the movie. I wouldn't go that far.

• 1:01:23Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't feel that way.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  But, um, I thought it was appropriate to make like yet another crazy left turn because the movie does that so many times.

• 1:01:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:01:33Sean Fennessey?

  So the, I just watched The Beach yesterday.

• 1:01:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Sean Fennessey?

  And I had, I don't, I don't think I had seen it since I saw it in theaters in 2000 and I was a little disappointed about it. I don't know if you guys have seen it recently.

• 1:01:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I have not since.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  I don't think I've seen it in a while.

• 1:01:48Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, Leo season.

• 1:01:49Sean Fennessey?

  So, you know, that film is in a way about a lot of the same themes. It's about this kind of quest for safety and isolation in a more perfect place. It's also a subterranean and then not so subterranean cult movie, you know, where Tilda Swinton's character is essentially like leading this commune, this private community in to their own kind of Valhalla utopia. And this movie kind of has that on the front end and on the back end. It's like the island connected to the causeway is truly quarantined from the rest of the world and, and traversing across the causeway is a, is a risk to explode your beautiful utopia.

• 1:02:30Sean Fennessey?

  And then the, the second half of the film is Jimmy, the essentially a cult leader, a violent cult leader with his merry band of pastel wearing Teletubbies slaughtering zombies all across the land. And so I, I just love this as this kind of like closing loop from The Beach, which is where Garland and Will started working together into this movie. And the fact that this idea, which in 2000. Was clearly meant to be like a reflection of wayward Gen Xers who are like, I don't want to join society. I don't want to do what my parents told me to do. What I want to do is find my own little corner of the universe and live inside it the way I want to, free of judgment with people like me. And that, obviously, that dream was not sustainable

• 1:03:15Sean Fennessey?

  here, at least in America, and probably not in England either. And now, even more so, the whole point of this movie is like, wherever you turn, there's a zombie. There's danger around every corner. Like, there's no escaping the realities of modern life. And so, like, I echo what you're saying about Garland and Boyle, which is like, they just kinda...

• 1:03:34Amanda Dobbins?

  They bring up...

• 1:03:34Sean Fennessey?

  They just bring the best in each other. Exactly, exactly. So, it's just a very exciting movie.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Can I throw a couple more things on the fire before we leave?

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  They bet the whole movie on this kid, and they won the lottery.

• 1:03:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:46Sean Fennessey?

  He's terrific.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  He's up there with like, a kid from adolescence in kid performances that I've seen this year.

• 1:03:53Sean Fennessey?

  Alfi Williams is his name.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Edwin Riding plays a Swedish soldier who is marooned on the British Isles.

• 1:04:03Sean Fennessey?

  Why? How did those guys get there? What happened there?

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  You can, there's, earlier in the movie, there's a scene where there's a patrol boat in the water, and they, like, I think even the dad points out, like, oh, that's probably French.

• 1:04:14Amanda Dobbins?

  It's the blockade. Yeah.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  And there's like a quarantine patrol. And then he explains, like, we sunk, and we wanted to go anywhere but here, because no one ever gets off this place.

• 1:04:23Sean Fennessey?

  Got it, okay.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  But he brings a very welcome sense of humor, and also like, a very funny, like, the modern world's like, has kept going while all this crazy shit in these movies is happening. And he's like, my buddy drives for Amazon. I should be driving for Amazon right now. Like, that way I wouldn't be stuck...

• 1:04:42Sean Fennessey?

  To prove a point, I joined the Navy.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the idea that...

• 1:04:46Sean Fennessey?

  And his OnlyFans fiance.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  That, like, yeah, like, that there's a woman out there with lip fillers while the British islands are, like, coming apart from rage virus. It's a little on the nose, but it's also like, pretty amazing.

• 1:05:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  And so, I love that, and love the gas station sequence. I thought that was really cool.

• 1:05:06Sean Fennessey?

  Hell.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. The missing S on the signage, and then the, is it the methane?

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  Butane.

• 1:05:12Sean Fennessey?

  The butane.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  Something, yeah. Benzine.

• 1:05:14Sean Fennessey?

  Benzine.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  Benzine. Is there anything else?

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  No, I guess that was it. Oh, the Young Fathers score. Fucking incredible.

• 1:05:23Sean Fennessey?

  I mean Boyle is like very famous for having the best soundtracks on all of his movies.

• 1:05:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:05:28Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe barring yesterday, um, have the best soundtracks.

• 1:05:32Sean Fennessey?

  But I thought this was a really inspired and unusual choice.

• 1:05:35Amanda Dobbins?

  It was very cool.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Sean Fennessey?

  To have a band with some kind of like vocal addition, but not defining like they weren't just pop songs in the middle of the movie. Like there were long extended sequences of instrumental and then you would eventually hear some singing, but it was all kind of synced very carefully. So you didn't feel like you were getting needle drops specifically. The last song in particular pals is my favorite, the one that hits over the closing credits, but I highly recommend people check that out some more.

• 1:06:04Sean Fennessey?

  Where does this stand for Boyle? I think this is his 14th movie. So let's, let's, let's pull up the filmography. You think it's up there?

• 1:06:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, don't you? I mean.

• 1:06:17Sean Fennessey?

  I think so. I mean.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  Probably top five for me. I, I would have to like watch it again, but.

• 1:06:23Sean Fennessey?

  Trainspotting, very important to see her, of course.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  Shallow grave is very important to me.

• 1:06:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Steve Jobs is important to you.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Steve Jobs and sunshine.

• 1:06:30Sean Fennessey?

  We all like Steve Jobs, sunshine, a personal favorite of mine.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  I got a lot of time for T2.

• 1:06:37Sean Fennessey?

  T2 is fun. I, I would take this over T2.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Sean Fennessey?

  In terms of sequels in his canon.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  What about, where would you put trance?

• 1:06:45Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's an island that you and I live on. And I live happily there. I drink my ties every day.

• 1:06:53Sean Fennessey?

  I've given birth to so many takes about trance and it's wonderful finale featuring the great Rosario Dawson.

• 1:07:00Sean Fennessey?

  I, I really enjoy that movie as a modern noir and, uh, but I think it's divisive. I think a lot of his movies are pretty divisive because he takes these big swings. This is a, this 28 years later, it's got a lot of swings in it, you know? You mentioned the birth sequence, the giant dick zombie, you know?

• 1:07:20Amanda Dobbins?

  The Teletubbies and just the kid massacre to open this movie?

• 1:07:23Sean Fennessey?

  Child murder.

• 1:07:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that was, I was like, oh, okay.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  You guys for fucking it out.

• 1:07:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I was, I was like, oh, that's how it's gonna go.

• 1:07:31Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think you actually see any children.

• 1:07:33Amanda Dobbins?

  You see them go in the room.

• 1:07:35Sean Fennessey?

  There's a lot of blood.

• 1:07:36Amanda Dobbins?

  And they look so scared and that's worse, obviously.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Moms get slaughtered?

• 1:07:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Amanda Dobbins?

  But, but it's them sitting in the room, watching Teletubbies and like weeping. Where I was like, well, this is terrible. I hate this.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Gang was like, let's go.

• 1:07:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Did you ever, like, what do you know about the Teletubbies?

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  Nothing.

• 1:07:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Nothing. You?

• 1:07:54Sean Fennessey?

  I'm familiar with their work.

• 1:07:55Amanda Dobbins?

  You are?

• 1:07:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I was babysitting when the Teletubbies really hit their prime. And that was a, that was a unique time.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  Does that have the intellectual heft of Bluey, or no?

• 1:08:04Sean Fennessey?

  The op-

• 1:08:05Amanda Dobbins?

  No, opposite.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  It's like brain dead.

• 1:08:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but it's like, it is like, brain dead to the point that you are reaching like a nirvana of sorts. You know, I think it is.

• 1:08:14Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's interesting, but-

• 1:08:15Amanda Dobbins?

  There is a lot, and also like a lot of drugs, definitely, involved in the creation.

• 1:08:20Sean Fennessey?

  The creators, no doubt.

• 1:08:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, of that.

• 1:08:22Sean Fennessey?

  There's something perfect about trying to literally inoculate your children from the oncoming rage virus by putting them in front of Teletubbies. Like, it's a very smart choice.

• 1:08:34Sean Fennessey?

  And then neatly closed with the outfits at the end of the movie.

• 1:08:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Sean Fennessey?

  I think this could be top five.

• 1:08:41Amanda Dobbins?

  I definitely.

• 1:08:43Sean Fennessey?

  Where do you guys stand on 127 Hours?

• 1:08:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Nah.

• 1:08:45Speaker 03

  I haven't revisited it in a long time.

• 1:08:47Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, I mean, an experience, to be sure, but I don't need to revisit it, you know?

• 1:08:52Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  I watched some Steve Jobs since Tuesday, when I saw 28 Years Later, and Steve Jobs still rocks.

• 1:08:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Sean Fennessey?

  Should be a rewatchables. Should be a rewatchables. Not on our list. 25 for 25. Did we consider it?

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  Is there a Danny?

• 1:09:06Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  No, I guess there wouldn't be a Danny.

• 1:09:07Amanda Dobbins?

  No, but they're, listen.

• 1:09:10Sean Fennessey?

  You could have made the case for 28 Days Later or Sunshine for, to me.

• 1:09:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I thought you meant that Steve Jobs was not on our list. And I was like, it was never gonna be on our list, but-

• 1:09:18Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:09:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:19Sean Fennessey?

  But I think I did put it on the long list.

• 1:09:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, but it can't for, it's fine, we'll get into it later. I don't wanna spoil, thanks.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  Because of Apple?

• 1:09:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's it. Because of Apple. Yeah.

• 1:09:31Sean Fennessey?

  Because of its relationship to female characters?

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  Because Amanda only uses Trump phone now?

• 1:09:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I was thinking a lot about Kate Winslet's accent while you were talking about Steve Jobs.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  Oh, the Polish lady she plays, yeah.

• 1:09:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, she tries really hard.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  Top five Garland female characters.

• 1:09:45Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, he made his daughter the iPod, so a top five.

• 1:09:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  Natalie Portman in Annihilation.

• 1:09:51Sean Fennessey?

  Female characters.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Well, all the ladies in Annihilation.

• 1:09:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  The robot lady, uh, Alicia Vikander.

• 1:09:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:09:59Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:09:59Sean Fennessey?

  Her name's Ava.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  Jessie Buckley in, in Men.

• 1:10:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  Kirsten Dunst.

• 1:10:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. Cause she needed to buy that green dress so she could feel like a woman. Um.

• 1:10:13Sean Fennessey?

  That's what Kaylee Spaney's character told her to do. She did it for other reasons.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Um.

• 1:10:21Sean Fennessey?

  She was thinking about u- uniting the country with her beauty.

• 1:10:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Great, alright.

• 1:10:25Sean Fennessey?

  Using her feminine wiles to bring America back together.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  Reaching across the aisle.

• 1:10:31Sean Fennessey?

  Ayo.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  You know.

• 1:10:32Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, why can't Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump do that right now, you know? And give birth to democracy, am I right?

• 1:10:38Amanda Dobbins?

  I just really, really dislike you.

• 1:10:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, where's, where's fucking Bernie and the dead Senator Trent Lott? You know, why can't they come together?

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  Infected Trent Lott is the alpha out on the hill.

• 1:10:53Sean Fennessey?

  Why can't Strom Thurmond and Jimmy Carter's corpses reunite, reanimate? And bring democracy back to this country?

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Don't spoil Alex Garland's Elden Ring, man.

• 1:11:04Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I'm, I'm glad you brought that up. So Alex Garland is adapting a video game Elden Ring, which is a very popular video game that I don't know anything about.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm not gonna pretend to know anything about.

• 1:11:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Elden Ring.

• 1:11:13Sean Fennessey?

  E L D.

• 1:11:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I know how it's spelled.

• 1:11:15Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, alright, alright. Okay, mama. Um.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  Why'd you say it like that?

• 1:11:21Sean Fennessey?

  Cause she, I know she doesn't like that.

• 1:11:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't like it when like someone's selling me something and they're like, "Hey mama, you got this." They're like, "Hey mama."

• 1:11:29Sean Fennessey?

  "Hang in there mama."

• 1:11:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:31Sean Fennessey?

  "We got two bath towels on the way."

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  Or just that whole thing?

• 1:11:35Amanda Dobbins?

  There has been like a whole, like the, like girl, like the girl boss mama.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:11:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Thing has really happened in, in marketing over the last 10 years.

• 1:11:45Sean Fennessey?

  Your kids pull ups are on the way mama.

• 1:11:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Sean Fennessey?

  Hang in there.

• 1:11:47Amanda Dobbins?

  You got this mama, yeah. Um, it was primarily during like prenatal workouts. And then anytime you buy any sort of mom product, yeah.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  I've programmed my Alexa to respond every time I order something on Amazon to respond to me as Wayne Jenkins. It's just like, "Hey, you know what, big dog, we're sending you that nickeret, don't worry about it."

• 1:12:09Sean Fennessey?

  Wayne Jenkins Alexis, a gold idea. I honestly, Bernthal should be contacted about that immediately. Have you learned anything about Elden Ring?

• 1:12:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm so, no, I'm like on the third paragraph. It's third person perspective, characters, players freely roaming its open world.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Linear hidden dungeons can be explored. Okay. But like, what happens? I don't, this is, you know what, when I was listening to you guys talk about Last of Us, which is obviously a show I'll never watch. But you were like, this diverges from the game, or this is what happens in the game. I like.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  I just did the research.

• 1:12:43Amanda Dobbins?

  What are, no, no, not that.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, what is the game? Like, what is, what is, what's the point?

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  Specifically has a lot of cutscenes, so there's a lot of like filmed narrative.

• 1:12:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  Uh, of Flash of Us.

• 1:12:54Amanda Dobbins?

  So you just, so you're really just like watching?

• 1:12:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Someone like a game?

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  But then you have parts of it that you play. So like, and I think what Last of Us does is it puts you in the feet, the shoes of characters that you would ordinarily consider your antagonist. It's like, all of a sudden, I'm Keelie Fever.

• 1:13:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay. Okay.

• 1:13:14Sean Fennessey?

  You know, in an open world game, you explore the entire terrain that the creators have made. So you're like going all over the place that it's made.

• 1:13:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, it's like the Sims, right?

• 1:13:22Sean Fennessey?

  It is, in a way, yeah. Where you have, you have, you have free rein to explore your own.

• 1:13:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. And so you're just playing by like, now I'm gonna build a house and now I'm gonna.

• 1:13:30Sean Fennessey?

  If that's a feature of the game, I guess so. I don't play any games anymore.

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  What happened to Alex Garland retiring?

• 1:13:37Sean Fennessey?

  I pressed him on that issue and he was like, he was like, I was not lying. It is true. I have retired, but also I have an idea.

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  It was the Tyrese Halliburton cap strain of directorial retiring.

• 1:13:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Who do you, who do you got in game seven?

• 1:13:50Speaker 03

  Oklahoma City. I'm sorry.

• 1:13:52Sean Fennessey?

  Why are you sorry?

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  I just think, don't think they're gonna lose at home.

• 1:13:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, you don't have to apologize for that.

• 1:13:59Sean Fennessey?

  I think, I find that to be a fascinating industry story. This guy who's like theme, theme, theme in every movie.

• 1:14:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:14:08Sean Fennessey?

  Making a video game film for A24.

• 1:14:11Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 1:14:12Sean Fennessey?

  That's like, that is where. The industry lies right now. That's, this is the way to, we are like exiting comic book era and firmly in video game era. And what was the most recent movie that I, well, it was Ballerina, where I was like, this feels like I'm watching someone play a video game. And that vibe, that experience of movie watching, I think will increasingly infect narrative.

• 1:14:39Amanda Dobbins?

  So I guess they're like dragons in this. It's sort of, it seems medieval.

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  It's like, it's like Game of Thrones.

• 1:14:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I like, I've, I've read like a 3,000 words on Elden Ring and I can't just be like, okay, like what time period?

• 1:14:49Sean Fennessey?

  You read 3,000 words just while sitting there?

• 1:14:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I was skimming.

• 1:14:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:14:52Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, looking for like proper nouns or anything.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  You got this, mama.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  Your copy of Elden Ring is on the way.

• 1:15:01Amanda Dobbins?

  I was just trying to understand.

• 1:15:02Sean Fennessey?

  I could have gotten you Elden Ring for Mother's Day. What a missed opportunity this was.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  Um, are you excited for the Bone Temple?

• 1:15:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's a good way to close this conversation. So Nita Costa is directing the next film.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  In production currently.

• 1:15:16Sean Fennessey?

  The director of The Marvels. And the Candyman reboot.

• 1:15:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:15:21Sean Fennessey?

  Two films I did not care for.

• 1:15:25Sean Fennessey?

  Not an English filmmaker.

• 1:15:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Sean Fennessey?

  And this is a decidedly English story thus far. It's an interesting choice. Can be done, obviously. And it is next year. It's dated for.

• 1:15:35Amanda Dobbins?

  That's what they say.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  They just haven't funded the third one.

• 1:15:38Sean Fennessey?

  This movie is.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Which Boyle would direct.

• 1:15:39Amanda Dobbins?

  So do, what do we know? So it's Spike? And.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Allegedly Killian, but you would have to imagine there's a lot of Jack O'Connell in the second one.

• 1:15:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, right, right. Any Rafe? Or he's just there attending his?

• 1:15:52Sean Fennessey?

  We, he leaves the movie alive, as far as we know.

• 1:15:54Amanda Dobbins?

  But that's not the Bone Temple.

• 1:15:57Sean Fennessey?

  You have to assume it is.

• 1:15:58Amanda Dobbins?

  That's what I thought.

• 1:15:59Sean Fennessey?

  There's another temple full of bones? It'd be weird.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  I, I assumed that that was the Bone Temple, but I don't know. Maybe it, it's all about getting back to the Bone Temple.

• 1:16:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:16:09Sean Fennessey?

  Where is, um, where's our young lad headed? Is he walking across mainland England?

• 1:16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're on mainland England.

• 1:16:16Sean Fennessey?

  But that, like, that's what his intention is to go across the country?

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, I, I think the island is supposed to be off the water. Because the Angel of the North, that big statue that's out there is up in Tain, I think. So I think they're supposed to be up in the northeast. Jodie Comer does a Jordy accent in this film. So I think it's supposed to be in northeast.

• 1:16:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Tain, you're right.

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:40Sean Fennessey?

  So, but so he's just trying to cross the country?

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  I don't know what, I don't think he's, he's not released his itinerary.

• 1:16:50Sean Fennessey?

  What would Wayne Jenkins say about his itinerary?

• 1:16:52Amanda Dobbins?

  No, how can he intend to cross, he doesn't know what the country is, you know?

• 1:16:55Sean Fennessey?

  Great point.

• 1:16:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, he doesn't.

• 1:16:57Sean Fennessey?

  So what's he fucking doing?

• 1:16:58Speaker 03

  It's also funny because there's.

• 1:16:59Amanda Dobbins?

  He's just gonna keep walking until he can't see the ocean. That's what, you know?

• 1:17:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  I felt like his, his brain should have fucking exploded when he saw an iPhone. Cause he was like, what's a frisbee?

• 1:17:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  And then the guy's like, here's my girlfriend on my phone.

• 1:17:11Amanda Dobbins?

  And he was like, why does she look like that? So, but you know, they didn't have any service.

• 1:17:16Sean Fennessey?

  She looks like that.

• 1:17:21Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think this movie's gonna be a big success? Cause obviously they're, they got the sequel going. This is, was a weird case where they funded the movie and then Sony bought it. Or at least bought the rights to distribute it. It wasn't financed originally by the studio. I assume that the studio is behind the second one.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  Do you know what I'm a big believer in right now?

• 1:17:38Sean Fennessey?

  Not caring?

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  Old fashioned word of mouth.

• 1:17:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  And I think that.

• 1:17:42Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  I have not met someone who walked out of this film and was like, that sucked. I've, I've heard some, that was not for me. I've seen some withering critiques of it.

• 1:17:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  But across the spectrum, people are loving the alpha and what he's swinging with. And I think.

• 1:17:56Sean Fennessey?

  Would you let the alpha impregnate you?

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  I do think honestly.

• 1:18:01Sean Fennessey?

  Answer the question.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  Uh, Sinners is a really good test case where I think there was an initial, like, everybody's gonna go out and do their part.

• 1:18:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Doesn't get.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:18:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Is not infected. It's inoculated. Yeah.

• 1:18:13Sean Fennessey?

  That's a great way of thinking about it. Forget about the placenta. Like, what about those, those guys, these guys?

• 1:18:17Speaker 03

  Shooting something different. I don't know. I have no idea.

• 1:18:20Sean Fennessey?

  Do you know how sex works?

• 1:18:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, if it's like bloodborne, then it, you know, is probably like separated and the placenta does kinda.

• 1:18:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Clothes off a wall, you know? And you like.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  I would honestly pay a thousand dollars to watch you interview Alex Garland about zombie OBGYN.

• 1:18:42Amanda Dobbins?

  You're the same blood type as your kid.

• 1:18:44Sean Fennessey?

  But we didn't know that the zombies could get erections and stimulated.

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  They're evolving.

• 1:18:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:18:49Sean Fennessey?

  You know?

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  They're they're procreating because it's a it's a natural imperative to do so. But let me just say, I do I do think that Sinners is a really good example of like a great word of mouthful.

• 1:19:01Amanda Dobbins?

  You're trying to steer.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  We fucking asked. I thought it was a good point.

• 1:19:05Sean Fennessey?

  You just sat down in my chair for a minute. That was great. I was trying to explore how this fucking zombie baby got bored.

• 1:19:10Speaker 03

  Zombie seed. What do we know? And I'm like.

• 1:19:13Sean Fennessey?

  This is a podcast, bro. What do you? Uh, I think you're right. Something something's happening at the movies, man.

• 1:19:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 1:19:21Sean Fennessey?

  People are loving going to the movies. Now, they only want to go to horror movies and kids movies, but I'm I'm OK with that.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  That works for all three of us.

• 1:19:28Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, for its audience, materialists did get a lot of people to the theaters. Everyone I know, and then everyone wanted to yell at me.

• 1:19:35Sean Fennessey?

  They completely tricked the audience by making a rom com trailer and got, guess what? Put asses in seats. You know what that tells me? Make a real rom com.

• 1:19:43Amanda Dobbins?

  I agree with you.

• 1:19:44Sean Fennessey?

  Make a real classical rom com with young movie stars and put it in a movie theater. Am I right?

• 1:19:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I accept.

• 1:19:49Sean Fennessey?

  OK.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  One more question. This film was heavily embargoed until the day before its release.

• 1:19:54Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't understand this. I actually think it hurt the movie.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  I I agree.

• 1:19:59Sean Fennessey?

  Did not like this strategy.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  I hope people go see it before they listen to us because the the wonder that I felt when I was like, this movie's about Spike? Was really cool.

• 1:20:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I mean, fortunately, this is coming out a little later than our episode usually would. And, you know, it does seem like people are excited to see it. It's like tracking pretty well for a movie of this kind, which is exciting. I I'm very curious to see like what the exit scores and all that stuff are because horror audiences tend to vacillate and it is, I think you can watch this movie and never think of Brexit and it's a great experience. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't have to be that, even though we talked a lot about that in this conversation. But if you go to a movie looking for the ideas, there's so much to pull from.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  I was going up to lots of guys in the men's room at The Grove and be like, what did you think about that trenchant metaphor about Brexit? Right, man?

• 1:20:50Sean Fennessey?

  So you were for Brexit?

• 1:20:53Sean Fennessey?

  You weren't?

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  No, I wanted to stay brothers with the EU.

• 1:20:56Sean Fennessey?

  Stay together. Okay, cool. I'm in. Any closing thoughts?

• 1:21:00Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, I'm really trying to figure out what like the endometrial lining would do, you know, in the infected situation. So that's, I haven't been listening to anything you said for 10 minutes.

• 1:21:10Sean Fennessey?

  Got it.

• 1:21:10Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm gonna have an incredible

• 1:21:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yet another episode of this podcast.

• 1:21:15Sean Fennessey?

  Solo science corner? So what would you want the theme to be of your solo mailbag?

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  The real you guys. Ask me anything about Sean and Amanda.

• 1:21:26Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 1:21:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think people would want to listen to that, actually.

• 1:21:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:32Sean Fennessey?

  And what would you reveal? What's one tidbit?

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  It's one of the great pleasures of my professional life.

• 1:21:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:21:36Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that sounds like a boring podcast.

• 1:21:37Amanda Dobbins?

  That's not good.

• 1:21:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Sean Fennessey?

  Well, reminder again. Mailbag. Monday.

• 1:21:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Ask us questions, movie questions. Please don't send us too many like, hey, conceivable whole movie and then cast it out. And then also director and writer because

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  This is, you've opened yourself up to wanting all this input, but then you want to curate the input?

• 1:22:04Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, I just, it's like, I like, I have a few movie ideas and I've shared them on previous mailbag episodes and it's like, you know, I'm out.

• 1:22:12Speaker 03

  Are you worrying about IP theft?

• 1:22:14Amanda Dobbins?

  No, no, no, no. I know, it's just like I have already shared all my ideas.

• 1:22:18Sean Fennessey?

  We're not movie creators.

• 1:22:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, in previous mailbags.

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:22:20Amanda Dobbins?

  So I don't have any more. So like my ideas are getting bad, you know?

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:22:25Amanda Dobbins?

  So it's like, you know, a columnist only has so many columns.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  The CR mailbag has no restrictions.

• 1:22:32Sean Fennessey?

  Funny, you keep getting questions from doctors.

• 1:22:35Speaker 03

  I should ask some of these doctors about zombie procreation.

• 1:22:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Sean Fennessey?

  That would be a great episode.

• 1:22:41Sean Fennessey?

  Extend an invitation to one of your doctor friends.

• 1:22:43Speaker 03

  To the cast of The Pit.

• 1:22:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. What does Noah Wiley think about the alpha's ability to impregnate a zombie woman?

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  Noah Wiley was definitely like, this is about Brexit.

• 1:22:53Sean Fennessey?

  We should merge the world of The Pit with 28 years later. That would actually be thrilling.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  Those guys would be incredibly useful in this movie.

• 1:23:02Sean Fennessey?

  I, I would also like to not cast any films or create the films, but otherwise, you know, I think it would be useful to talk about movies right now. I think that's a better line of conversation for us to sort of like, what has come out this year? What has been, what's interesting? What are we seeing? What do we think is like really happening? Like, I think that stuff kind of comes up like anecdotally in discussion, but it's probably better driven through questions. And I think, you know, you're a tea leaf reader.

• 1:23:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Am I?

• 1:23:28Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Sean Fennessey?

  I think you understand the game.

• 1:23:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, thanks so much. That's very kind of you.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  No one sees the angles like you do.

• 1:23:36Sean Fennessey?

  You said that so seriously.

• 1:23:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought you were gonna say nice things only about it. What?

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  Hang on there, mama.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  Odyssey is coming next year.

• 1:23:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I am really excited for the teaser trailer and seeing it with you at 8 a.m. So I need you to come back from Portland.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:23:53Sean Fennessey?

  I'd like to thank you both for recording late on a Friday afternoon. I was awake at 5:30 a.m. Eastern today, and here I am at 3:30 Pacific.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  After having gone through 28 years later and then driven quite a far away.

• 1:24:06Sean Fennessey?

  I flew on a plane.

• 1:24:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:08Sean Fennessey?

  And then I landed and I drove straight to the Ontario Mountain Village Regal Cinema.

• 1:24:12Amanda Dobbins?

  How was that experience?

• 1:24:14Sean Fennessey?

  It was nice.

• 1:24:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, good.

• 1:24:15Sean Fennessey?

  It was fairly empty.

• 1:24:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:16Sean Fennessey?

  At my 10:40 a.m. screening. Very hot, very hot. 15 degrees hotter than out here.

• 1:24:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:23Sean Fennessey?

  And then drove here and sat with you guys and had a great time. So thank you for that. Thanks to our producer, Jack Sanders, for his work on this episode. And yeah, we'll be back with a mailbag. We'll see you then.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  I was doing the Princess Diana wave because it's about England.

• 1:24:35Sean Fennessey?

  Keep that in the episode, please.

• 1:24:55Speaker 06

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