The 900th-Episode Mega-Voicemailbag!

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve done it. On our 900th episode, we answer all of your questions about movies, the show itself, aioli, and everything in between (2:11). Then, Sean and Amanda briefly cover a handful of recent releases, including ‘You, Me & Tuscany,’ ‘The Christophers,’ and ‘Blue Heron’ (1:53:46). Finally, Sophy Romvari joins the show to discuss her debut feature film, ‘Blue Heron,’ and explain what informed specific technical decisions and the direction on set for this deeply personal project (2:10:08). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Sophy Romvari Producer: Jack Sanders Production Support: Lucas Cavanagh Talk to a State Farm agent today to learn how you can choose to bundle and save with the Personal Price Plan®️. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there®️. 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.

• 0:06Sean Fennessey?

  Hey, everyone. I have some news for listeners of the show. I am starting a newsletter. It's called Projections. It's on Substack. You can find it and subscribe at shawnfennessy.substack.com. I'll be writing on a weekly basis to start. Essays about new movies and happenings in film culture. Recommendations for new releases that fall through the cracks of this show. Dedicated physical media coverage on an ongoing basis. Stray reactions to casting, box office, and all other kinds of news. This isn't changing anything about what we are doing on The Big Picture. This is a relative, not a sibling exactly, but definitely a cousin. If you only know me as a podcaster. I spent roughly 15 years as a writer and editor in my career. First as a blogger, then as a music critic, then a features writer and story editor at magazines.

• 0:51Sean Fennessey?

  And since I formally stopped writing a movie column for The Ringer in 2019, give or take the occasional extended letterbox review, I've really been missing writing a lot, so I'm going back to it. And this will be a place where I'll host chats with subscribers, post quick reactions to the news, and maybe the occasional Mets panic note. Again, you can find Projections at shawnfennessy.substack.com. Thanks, as always, for following along with what we've been doing here over the years. I hope you'll check this out.

• 1:27Sean Fennessey?

  I'm Shawn Fennessey. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about 900 and going strong. Today on the show, we are celebrating our 900th episode with your thoughts, prayers, well wishes, and demented questions as we are doing another voicemail bag. Later in this episode, I will be joined by Sophie Remvari, the writer-director of Blue Heron, a finely textured personal feature debut. It's my favorite movie of 2026 so far. Sophie has been making fascinating short films for the past decade. Blue Heron is the announcement of a major new voice in movies. This special film blurs the modes of narrative filmmaking. Liked getting the chance to chat with Sophie about it. Go see the movie, listen to our conversation. Amanda and I will also talk about it here on the show. But first, we need to hear from you. It's all coming up right after this.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Born from the intensity of a night in the eternal city. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Masculine leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at Macy's.com.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting, and completely delicious. Simply, say yes to simple.

• 3:12Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, Amanda, happy 900.

• 3:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 3:14Sean Fennessey?

  How do you feel?

• 3:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, it's not 1,000, but like, it's, we're getting close.

• 3:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I like, I like, um, centennials.

• 3:22Amanda Dobbins?

  You do, you like round numbers.

• 3:23Sean Fennessey?

  I like round numbers. I like reaching milestones. I like feeling as though we're marking time.

• 3:30Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, 900 is pretty good. We did one for 300 and I was like, eh, you know.

• 3:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, and that was, we were what, 26 then? How old were we when that was?

• 3:38Amanda Dobbins?

  No, it feels great. It's nice, it's a nice round number. Our producer, Jack Sanders, got us all of this lovely stuff. Great, great producing, great set dressing. I feel, you know, I haven't had balloons for any, like, personal occasion in my life, like number balloons, like.

• 3:54Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that's just not something someone's done for you?

• 3:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and not that I would really want it in a personal context, but here it feels great.

• 4:00Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, because you don't want your age being exposed in balloon form?

• 4:03Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I think everybody knows that I'm 41 on Netflix, so yeah, congratulations.

• 4:08Sean Fennessey?

  You said those words, hell out. I'm really happy for you. Um, yeah, we're 900 episodes old. Been an interesting journey so far. I think we're about halfway done.

• 4:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that's why you're setting?

• 4:18Sean Fennessey?

  What do you think?

• 4:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Eighteen hundred?

• 4:21Sean Fennessey?

  Can we get there?

• 4:21Amanda Dobbins?

  At that point, we gotta go to two thousand. But like, have we mapped out? When do the Four Beatles movies? What episode number will the Four Beatles movies do?

• 4:30Sean Fennessey?

  It definitely won't be eighteen hundred.

• 4:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 4:32Sean Fennessey?

  That's only two years away. So if we can do nine hundred episodes in two years.

• 4:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 4:36Sean Fennessey?

  Things have gone terribly awry.

• 4:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 4:38Sean Fennessey?

  I think, no, I think we're doing good.

• 4:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 4:40Sean Fennessey?

  Um, and yeah, the prompt for this episode, there's no news you want to talk about, right? Is there anything you really want to get into that happened over the weekend?

• 4:46Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I don't think so. I, I, I did read Deadline.

• 4:50Sean Fennessey?

  Deadline.com.

• 4:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Congrats to Tom Hooper, who's directing Millie Bobby Brown's new film.

• 4:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, will that be on Netflix?

• 4:56Amanda Dobbins?

  About World War II, I believe, for Netflix.

• 4:58Sean Fennessey?

  World War II.

• 4:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, will you finally see a Tom Hooper film that isn't Cats?

• 5:01Sean Fennessey?

  Um, well, I have, I have seen The King's Speech, but I've not seen Les Mis. I've also not seen The Damned United, um, which is his soccer film.

• 5:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, right.

• 5:10Sean Fennessey?

  So.

• 5:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Michael Sheen?

• 5:13Sean Fennessey?

  I believe that's right.

• 5:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 5:14Sean Fennessey?

  And so, uh, you know.

• 5:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 5:16Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't think we'd be talking about Tom Hooper today. Didn't think that would come up. Didn't think that'd be a reason for celebration here on the nine hundredth episode.

• 5:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, you asked about the news. And that's really, if that's all the news we have, then let's get into it, you know?

• 5:26Sean Fennessey?

  Let's, let's just get right into the mailbag. So, as I said, voicemail bag, which means we had folks write in and, and, and Jack Sanders is going to help us read some of those questions. But we also had people call in. They called us at a special number demarcated for questions, hopefully mostly questions and not stray rants. But I'm sure we'll get a couple of rants here and there. Um, Jack, how do you want to do this? Where, where do we go first?

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Uh, just to let you know, I will not be reading the emails. I had a special guest read some of those emails for us. So the entire show will be entirely voicemails.

• 6:00Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Uh, just to note, if you submit a question with Go Braves, I immediately deleted it. That happened at least a dozen times. Sorry.

• 6:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Can I just say also that yesterday? The Braves and the Phillies were playing last evening and I did have Sean was at my home with his family and Chris Ryan was at my home and despite the me renouncing them on the record of this national podcast, I still got shit. So I don't know what else there is to do. Yeah, not from you, but that's because they weren't playing the Mets.

• 6:32Sean Fennessey?

  I really don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to talking about baseball right now. We've I've really never, never been in such a bad place with the sport in my entire life.

• 6:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Vegas was really up and down for you in that respect.

• 6:42Sean Fennessey?

  We are down, down right now. There's, there has not been an up in several weeks.

• 6:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And I keep saying to you, it's April 20th. Is that what it is? And it's we're not even a month in. We're not even a month in.

• 6:52Sean Fennessey?

  How many games in a row do you think the Mets have lost?

• 6:55Amanda Dobbins?

  I know it's like seven ish area.

• 6:57Sean Fennessey?

  It's 11.

• 6:58Amanda Dobbins?

  11. Oh, dear.

• 7:00Sean Fennessey?

  It's 11.

• 7:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that's bad.

• 7:01Sean Fennessey?

  That's extremely hard to do.

• 7:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Have they been? I know they played the Dodgers and that didn't go well.

• 7:05Sean Fennessey?

  That was tough, but you know, that happens. You when they played the Dodgers in LA, you get swept, it happens. You know, you play like the Giants, the Cardinals, you know, kind of middling teams in the sport and you lose, you start to feel worried in the beginning of the season.

• 7:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 7:19Sean Fennessey?

  Now we're just in a place where we're just, they're hopeless, truly hopeless. And as you say, it's April 20th.

• 7:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 7:26Sean Fennessey?

  There's time to turn it around, but I'd like to talk about movies.

• 7:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 7:33Speaker 05

  Hey, Sean and Amanda, this is Bob from Toledo, Ohio. Hey, calling in because I have a, I think a good hypothetical question. I'm here with my six month old daughter Violet. I have a hypothetical question. I know you guys have gotten plenty of questions about what films you'll show your kids. I want to switch it up and instead ask your respective children bring home their first boyfriend or girlfriend and they say, oh, I'm a big film buff. I love movies. And so, of course, you ask him what their favorite movie is. What would a red flag response be from them? And what would a green flag response be from them?

• 8:12Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  So, red flag, which one would make you kind of lean over to your son or daughter and say, I think you shouldn't see this person anymore?

• 8:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 8:20Speaker 05

  And green flag, you gain a lot of respect. And Sean, you probably show them your Blu-ray collection. Thanks a lot, guys. If you ever want, come to Toledo, do a, do a pod. This is the home of Katie Holmes. So you guys could do a great Hall of Fame episode. That would be an amazing 10 minute. So thanks a lot.

• 8:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Hey, first time writer-director, Katie Holmes, or at least director. I don't know whether she wrote the feature film.

• 8:42Sean Fennessey?

  Didn't she direct that film about, um, about hosting Thanksgiving? Isn't it like April something?

• 8:49Amanda Dobbins?

  She did write and direct Happy Hour, but let's see what else we have here.

• 8:53Sean Fennessey?

  I think she had another, maybe, maybe she was just the star. I thought she was the director of that film.

• 8:57Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm looking, I'm looking, but director, six credits here.

• 9:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think she's made some films.

• 9:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Rare Objects, Alone Together. She directed one episode of All We, of The Kennedys After Camelot.

• 9:08Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, sure.

• 9:09Amanda Dobbins?

  And then All We Had. I'm sorry, to Katie Holmes.

• 9:11Sean Fennessey?

  I can't remember that Thanksgiving movie that she made that was pretty good, too. I thought she directed that. Anyhow, Bob from Toledo, really interesting question, leaning right into some of our child-focused concerns on the show over the last few years. So the question was about, what's a movie that your child's potential partner, future imaginary partner would, could, would identify as their favorite movie? And what would be a red flag and what would be a green flag? So, red flag is like, you know, I'm assuming Alice is bringing a boy home. I think if, if a boy comes home and he's like Batman versus Superman Dawn of Justice, like that's, that's a red flag.

• 9:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Sean Fennessey?

  That's like, that's more red than Superman's cape. That's like, will you have to turn around and leave my home?

• 9:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Let me take it one further. Snyder Cut. Because then that indicates a level of

• 10:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 10:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, because someone's logged on, but they're making the wrong decisions.

• 10:08Sean Fennessey?

  But maybe that indicates a level of interest in autorism that I could explore with him. Maybe he could be turned.

• 10:15Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's evil autorism, you know, the hooks and also suggests an over familiarity with the internet and with posting and with

• 10:25Sean Fennessey?

  Could be.

• 10:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Subcultures that it's gonna, it's like

• 10:28Sean Fennessey?

  Ten years from now.

• 10:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but already been, so, oh, so you think in 10 years Snyder Cut will be like historical?

• 10:34Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe it'll be reclaimed.

• 10:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, okay.

• 10:37Sean Fennessey?

  By you? Maybe, uh, probably not.

• 10:39Amanda Dobbins?

  When, so when the person says Snyder Cut, will you then take them to your like bootleg DVD of the Snyder Cut?

• 10:48Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I think they, I think they sell it. I think you can buy it.

• 10:51Amanda Dobbins?

  But you don't own it.

• 10:53Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, I do have a Snyder stack. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a Snyder stack, you know? Fan of the Dawn of the Dead remake he made, kind of a fan of 300, everything else after that's kind of a mess.

• 11:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 11:03Sean Fennessey?

  Green flag is an interesting question. I think any of the kind of Gen X classics would be lovely to hear. You know, your Tarantino's, your PTAs, your Soderbergh's, your Spikes, you know? If any of those movies came across the transom and they're like, you know what I really love is Jackie Brown. I'd be like, now, now we're cooking with gas. Like, have you bought the ring yet, sir?

• 11:26Amanda Dobbins?

  But you wouldn't, you wouldn't feel threatened at all because then?

• 11:29Sean Fennessey?

  No, I think that would be magical.

• 11:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 11:31Sean Fennessey?

  I think that'd be wonderful. I mean, in all likelihood, movies will be dead by the time this happens, so I'm not too worried about it. Well, what about for you?

• 11:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I'm trying to think, so I, Snyder Cut, I would not receive with, with hope.

• 11:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I think probably any sort of, I mean, if someone's like Super Mario Galaxy, like, you know, blew my wig back, I would, that would indicate

• 11:53Sean Fennessey?

  Like a teenager, a teenager came home and said that and was like, my favorite movie is Super Mario Galaxy?

• 11:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I would be a little bummed about it.

• 12:00Sean Fennessey?

  Concerning.

• 12:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:02Sean Fennessey?

  It's a movie for seven year olds.

• 12:03Amanda Dobbins?

  I, well, I agree, so that's why I would have some issues with that. And I think probably

• 12:10Amanda Dobbins?

  If we'd spend the next 10 years doing video game movies and it's someone being like, you know, they didn't show us any real footage of Call of Duty, but they did show us Peter Berg being like, I have a, Taylor and I have a respect for, you know, special operations. So.

• 12:25Sean Fennessey?

  What if the person who came home was like, I don't watch movies, but I'm really into Lioness, season nine?

• 12:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, that would also be a red flag.

• 12:31Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 12:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Probably I don't watch movies would also be a red flag. Don't you think?

• 12:38Sean Fennessey?

  I, you know, it would be an interesting challenge for me.

• 12:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 12:42Sean Fennessey?

  It's not impossible. The, the, the way in which I'm raising my daughter, the idea of her being interested in someone who's like, I don't watch movies would be a little weird. But you know what? She might break away. She might, she might, she's gonna go find her own path. She might, she might be interested in something completely different.

• 12:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And it may also be that they are engaged in other types of culture and not movies specifically, because it's a different generation. It would be hard for me if someone came home and was like, I don't, I don't do culture, you know?

• 13:12Sean Fennessey?

  That would be an issue.

• 13:13Amanda Dobbins?

  So that, that would be like a real red flag.

• 13:15Sean Fennessey?

  I'm not interested in art.

• 13:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 13:16Sean Fennessey?

  But what if they came home and they're like, I'm really, here are my two passions, um, hacky sack and devil sticks. Would you be into that?

• 13:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Devil sticks?

• 13:23Sean Fennessey?

  You know, the devil sticks, like the two, the two sticks and you gotta balance.

• 13:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Um.

• 13:27Sean Fennessey?

  What if I started doing those things on the show?

• 13:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Can you do those? Are you good at those?

• 13:32Sean Fennessey?

  I used to do both.

• 13:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Sean Fennessey?

  Not, well, not really.

• 13:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Not well. I was gonna say like, do you have any sort of talent at it?

• 13:38Sean Fennessey?

  Professionally performing with devil sticks, like at a Grateful Dead show.

• 13:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Sean Fennessey?

  But I, I, I owned devil sticks as a young kid. Yeah. I had a hacky sack for sure.

• 13:46Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't want you to do that, cause then my sons will see a clip and be like, can I have those? So what's a green flag? I mean, I agree with you. Any of the, you know, of our classics.

• 13:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, generational seminal favorites.

• 13:57Amanda Dobbins?

  We are, you know, narcissistic people and we want to be pandered to.

• 14:01Sean Fennessey?

  That's exactly right.

• 14:02Amanda Dobbins?

  So I would throw in Sofia Coppola. I would throw in Nancy Meyers. I would throw in Nora Ephron. I would throw in, like, any of, like, the golden Hollywood classics. You know, if someone wants to be like, the Lady Eve or Singing in the Rain or whatever, I'd just be like, rock on.

• 14:19Sean Fennessey?

  13 year olds gonna come to your house and be like, my favorite movie is the Lady Eve?

• 14:22Amanda Dobbins?

  They're, they're sophisticated these days, you know? They have the internet. They have Letterboxd.

• 14:26Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 14:27Amanda Dobbins?

  But I don't, I don't know what they're up to. So.

• 14:29Sean Fennessey?

  Well, let's say, um.

• 14:32Sean Fennessey?

  Your son's future partner comes over and says, I've got 25,000 followers on Letterboxd.

• 14:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 14:39Sean Fennessey?

  You're like, this is exciting or this is concerning?

• 14:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I'd have to look at the profile, you know?

• 14:45Sean Fennessey?

  I see.

• 14:45Amanda Dobbins?

  And kind of see what we're doing, both from like a content, like what is the taste?

• 14:50Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 14:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Displayed, but also is this person a little too professional at it? That would weird me out at age 13, or maybe this is just someone with a passion. And if it's someone with a passion, that's okay.

• 15:03Sean Fennessey?

  Um, do you want to go to Toledo?

• 15:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure. I don't think I've ever been to Ohio.

• 15:07Sean Fennessey?

  To Toledo, to Ohio.

• 15:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't think so.

• 15:10Sean Fennessey?

  Have I been to Ohio? Maybe I haven't.

• 15:14Amanda Dobbins?

  Good luck. Six months, six months, things are turning, you know? Six, uh, with a child and

• 15:20Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, oh.

• 15:21Amanda Dobbins?

  They can almost like sit up, they can, they respond to you.

• 15:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I don't really, I don't really wish for anyone to have to experience zero to 18 months. I think that that's, that wasn't a pleasant time. I didn't enjoy it. Since then, it's gotten better and better every year. Um, the first, the first stretch, not my favorite.

• 15:39Sean Fennessey?

  Just putting that out there. But you know what, Bob?

• 15:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Hang in there, Dada.

• 15:42Sean Fennessey?

  Hang in there, Dada. Okay. What's next?

• 15:45Speaker 06

  What's up, guys? Matt here, big fan, longtime listener. On a recent episode of the Blank Check Pod, Tracy Letts was discussing with Griffin and David, how Sean and Amanda can from time to time, quote, "get weird regarding what is and what is not considered a key film within an actor's filmography." In particular, Tracy mentions he and Amanda's love for Witness and how, quote, "Sean gets a look on his face like his ass is sucking lemons when they praise it as a key film in Harrison Ford's career." I'm wondering, could Sean please do his best to recreate this face just so we as viewers can recognize it when we see it going forward?

• 16:28Sean Fennessey?

  I feel as though that is my resting face.

• 16:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, no, there's, I mean, there is an angry face that you get, but it's like, you're not going to be able to recreate it. And I know when I've really got you, and I actually do know when I have to start backing off.

• 16:41Sean Fennessey?

  But do you think that that's what the, the face that's being described is? Not, not you teasing me?

• 16:45Amanda Dobbins?

  A little bit, a little, because there is a little bit of disgust in the, in the, like, back off, you know, like you've gone too far face. Definitely nostrils flaring.

• 16:57Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 16:57Amanda Dobbins?

  And eyes getting a little wider and you like sit up a little in your, because you're spoiling for a fight.

• 17:02Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, and then you do look a little disgusted that anyone, uh, would think differently than you and or provoke you in this way. Um, so, uh, then normally like a little more color in your face also, but I don't think it's something, that's a different face. You're right. Sucking lemons is more just like, you know, general disinterest.

• 17:25Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's, yeah, I think it's like a, a mild disdain for someone's strongly held opinion.

• 17:30Amanda Dobbins?

  And impatience, like with me specifically, or just like, stop doing your bit. I don't want this anymore.

• 17:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, I, I certainly understood what Tracy was talking about. Um, Witness is an interesting example, which is a movie that I like, but that I find is, has kind of like, had like the horseshoe theory of praise, where now it's like, people are like, this is the greatest movie of all time.

• 17:49Amanda Dobbins?

  They built a whole barn.

• 17:50Sean Fennessey?

  I, I get it. I, I listened to your episode on Blank Check. It was wonderful. You were an amazing guest. Um, you know, I, I think Peter Weir is incredibly gifted filmmaker. I have no negative feelings. In fact, I looked on Letterboxd last week to see, what did I rate Witness when I watched it during COVID?

• 18:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Sean Fennessey?

  Four stars. Put a heart on it. I'm a big fan of the movie.

• 18:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 18:07Sean Fennessey?

  The, the point that I think Tracy was making when he made that comment, and the face that, that is being described is sort of like, is this movie a masterpiece? Which is like a haughty attitude.

• 18:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 18:17Sean Fennessey?

  About something.

• 18:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 18:17Sean Fennessey?

  I'm like, this is a very good adult crime drama for adults. And that's great. It's good to do that.

• 18:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 18:25Sean Fennessey?

  But the, like, the overextension of.

• 18:29Sean Fennessey?

  This movie deserves to go into the Hall of Fame for XYZ, for Amish films certainly, but for Harrison Ford, sure, we did.

• 18:36Amanda Dobbins?

  It's his only Oscar nomination, just by the definition.

• 18:39Sean Fennessey?

  But is that, is that correct? Like, is that right?

• 18:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, no, he should have several Oscars and all he has is a SAG Award that they made up. But like, I, you know, I, it's, it's really good. Since we brought up this segment of the Blank Check episode featuring Tracy Letts, he goes on to compare, he, he puts the films in context and he's like, I mean, it's obviously not a Kurosawa film, Witness, but if you're talking about how A Few Good Men and Pelican Brief are classics, and I said this to Tracy directly, and I, but I will say it now to the public at large, A Few Good Men and Pelican Brief are not equal.

• 19:14Sean Fennessey?

  They're not.

• 19:14Amanda Dobbins?

  They're not equal.

• 19:15Sean Fennessey?

  Nor did.

• 19:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay?

• 19:16Sean Fennessey?

  I certainly never indicated that they are.

• 19:18Amanda Dobbins?

  I like both of them. A Few Good Men, way up here, up high. Pelican Brief, it's just a legal thriller with Denzel and Julia Roberts. Like, we're having fun. One's very, very good. One's a little long and a little weird, but I like it.

• 19:33Sean Fennessey?

  Here's the thing about Tracy's comments. You know, a lot of people want what the big picture has. You've just gotta keep that in mind. What's next?

• 19:44Speaker 07

  Hello, big picture. Hi. Happy episode 900. This is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. I'm not saying this is now Blank Check. We're not seizing your podcast. I'm just introducing ourselves. Um, one of my favorite things about the big pick is how different Sean and Amanda's tastes can be. Sure. There are obviously zones of overlap, which are interesting to discover, but also I feel like there is lively discussion often in how different their sort of go-tos are in film watching. Uh, David, I feel like there are moments in the history of our podcast where one or the other of us has successfully sold the other on one of our favorite movies. Okay. I think about the moment where you finally got me to understand the Matrix sequels. There is a login screen.

• 20:28Speaker 07

  I don't know if you have a moment where I've successfully convinced you of anything. I feel like there's so many movies you probably should have. I was trying to put you on the spot and this was what I was trying to do. I want an honest answer. But while you're thinking about it, my question to Sean and Amanda is.

• 20:43Sean Fennessey?

  So many fucking things I have to look at now.

• 20:45Speaker 07

  Can each of you name a movie that you feel like the other one successfully got you to understand and appreciate in your time doing the podcast that you don't think you would have watched or really locked in on otherwise? This is, I'm trying to set up an opportunity for the two of you to appreciate each other. That's nice. Obvious example, Griffin. What is it? You have talked me into many a movie. Hotel Transylvania? Well, that's a good point. All three. That's three movies. That's a big three right there. Actually, that's actually a really good point. And it's also a good opportunity to call out Sean, who's been dismissive of the Hotel Transylvania trilogy.

• 21:20Sean Fennessey?

  They're trash.

• 21:20Speaker 07

  Or trilogy, if you will, during the Adam Sandler Hall of Fame.

• 21:23Speaker 07

  Movie not canon. Right. Movie doesn't count. Well, Sandler's not in it. Yeah. So my first question, I guess, is when are you guys going to do a Hotel Transylvania Hall of Fame? Yes, a Hotel Transylvania Maxisode. Yes. And my second question is, what are the movies that you thank each other for exposing you to and making you understand? Great question.

• 21:46Amanda Dobbins?

  That's nice.

• 21:47Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 21:48Amanda Dobbins?

  It's about healing here on the blank, on the big picture. Briefly taken over by the blank check. Good sequencing, Jack, on those. Mine's gotta be a horror movie, right?

• 21:59Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I will say, one of my favorite episodes we did, and I can't remember if it was the first movie swap that we did, but we, we did Sense and Sensibility and Spider-Verse.

• 22:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 22:08Sean Fennessey?

  And that was, I, I actually think when the show became sentient.

• 22:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 22:15Sean Fennessey?

  You know, or sort of like, our differences is like part of the programming strategy.

• 22:18Amanda Dobbins?

  It was an exchange of ideas.

• 22:20Sean Fennessey?

  And then, and then.

• 22:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Sean Fennessey?

  I think both of us were very open-minded and open-hearted about both of those movies. I think you really, I, I think I had not seen Sense and Sensibility, right?

• 22:31Amanda Dobbins?

  You hadn't.

• 22:31Sean Fennessey?

  And, and you hadn't seen Spider-Verse, right?

• 22:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Correct.

• 22:33Sean Fennessey?

  And those are two very specific kinds of movies that I'm usually a little bit allergic to, and you're usually a little bit allergic to. One, animated and superhero, me, costume drama, kind of literary adaptation, and.

• 22:48Sean Fennessey?

  Both films are, of course, hugely critically acclaimed and beloved, so it's not shocking that we both liked it. But I think it has led to some interesting tributaries of exposure in terms of the kinds of stuff that we're excited about over time. So that's the one that jumps into my mind. Not every movie swap has been as successful. You know, we have not always-

• 23:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you were quite rude about The English Patient.

• 23:12Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't love that movie.

• 23:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And I had already seen Fargo and appreciated Fargo, so that wasn't as effective. The most recent movie swap, I can't remember what I gave you. Oh, Mamma Mia. Yeah, but that was different.

• 23:26Sean Fennessey?

  Which was fun.

• 23:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, which was fun. And I think rounded out, again, we're working on, you know, your blank spaces, your blind spots. But I really liked The Strangers, which you gave me. And I do feel, especially as horror has been going in a more, well, you know, there are different tributaries, but you've been getting me on the more like psychological and like the types of horror movies that I would like.

• 23:53Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 23:54Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, really, like, everything having to do with Ari Aster. I mean, I love Midsommar. Like, I just straight up think that's a great movie. And that is not something that I would have sought out until this show.

• 24:01Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe 15 years ago, you wouldn't have thought that's a movie I'd like. That's a good, Ari is a really good example.

• 24:06Amanda Dobbins?

  So that, and I'm really, really glad that I have not missed out on all of his work. So I think, and that's an extension, right, of the movie swap of just like expanding a genre. You let me put Lost in Translation on 25, not Lost in Translation, you let me put Marie Antoinette on 25 for 25 over Lost in Translation, and you were gracious about it. And we're also like, I get it. I get why this is the one. So that was nice.

• 24:34Sean Fennessey?

  I'm a big fan of that movie. I've obviously come to appreciate and understand Sofia's work more, being, working so closely with you over the years and hearing you talk about her and what you like about her. And I think you just have an interest in certain aspects of movie making that are not always at the forefront of my mind. And so even if it's, even if it's movies that we like together, and I will say- Spending so much time with you, making so many episodes, like, our taste is definitely getting closer and closer over that time. Like, we're not getting further apart.

• 25:04Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 25:04Sean Fennessey?

  I'm sure for a variety of reasons, we're at similar stages of our life. There's like, an inherent kind of cultural sameness that you sometimes adopt, but also, like, you want to kind of be able to get along when you're making episodes all the time, too. Like, I don't want to be, like, sniping at you in every episode. That's not, to me, that's not fun.

• 25:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I do also think we just, we see more of the same movies.

• 25:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Now, that's honestly what it is, because our, our natural tastes, and when we're not doing it for work, are pretty opposite day.

• 25:32Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny, though, because last week, you saw a movie that I didn't see, and yesterday, I saw a movie that you didn't see.

• 25:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Sean Fennessey?

  We could talk about them both later in this episode. There still are these, like, paths that it's like, that's for Amanda, this is for me.

• 25:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, that's, you know, that's fine, and that's, that's how it works. You can't, you can't do it all.

• 25:47Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Amanda Dobbins?

  So, um, that was healing. That was nice. Do you think the rest of the mailbag is going to be that, that friendly?

• 25:54Sean Fennessey?

  Probably all divisive, um, mean-spirited.

• 25:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:57Sean Fennessey?

  Voicemails. Is that right, Jack?

• 25:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 25:59Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 26:01Speaker 08

  Hey, guys. This is Matt from Brooklyn, longtime listener, first-time caller, uh, proud DGA member, proud Jets hater. Sorry, Sean, go Pats. My question is quick and simple, okay? You were ranking either your most rewatchable movies or your favorite movies. What is your version of the number 16 limitless take? What is your number 16 limitless? Thanks, guys. I'll hang up and, uh, listen to your answer off-air.

• 26:31Sean Fennessey?

  Is the question about, um, 21st Century, like Bill's list was?

• 26:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, he didn't specify. Do you want it to be?

• 26:37Speaker 04

  He didn't specify, but maybe we should take it that way.

• 26:39Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. If it's, if we're not doing 21st Century, it's Congo.

• 26:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 26:43Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Frank Marshall's masterpiece adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel about, um, evil apes, diamond technologies, uh, Laura Linney being in charge.

• 26:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 26:57Sean Fennessey?

  Um, the CIA's desire to control Africa, and Dylan Walsh coaching an ape to learn how to speak.

• 27:06Sean Fennessey?

  That's, that's, that's, that's one of the worst movies ever made that is very important to me. And I just watched it again this year and had a grand old time. 21st century? Probably need to think about that for one second.

• 27:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I know, I'm, I'm trying to think here. I mean, you know, we've, we've made bits of most of the Amanda movies, but like, I don't really think that, you know, Thomas Crown Affair 1999 is eligible for this.

• 27:26Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 27:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, I, I mean, I think that it's too good and too widely appreciated. You know, people are getting on the, getting on that train. Apollo 13 is another one, but Apollo 13 is probably in my top 10 lifetime. It's released in 1995 and is also good. So.

• 27:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And people, most people agree.

• 27:45Amanda Dobbins?

  It was nominated for Oscars. So like, what is a really, I mean, I love plenty of trashy movies. I guess a lot of them are romantic comedies.

• 27:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, it's probably two weeks notice.

• 27:59Sean Fennessey?

  Good one.

• 28:00Amanda Dobbins?

  This Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant, um, early 2000s movie. He's a real estate developer. She is a do-gooder lawyer. Uh, they work together, violate all acceptable office romance norms and then ultimately fall in love and also save a community center. We'll say there's a, there's a brief Donald Trump cameo at the end.

• 28:23Sean Fennessey?

  Cool.

• 28:23Amanda Dobbins?

  We should probably, we could just edit that out. I would, I would pay for that DVD release. Is it on DVD or Blu-ray?

• 28:30Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, don't own the film.

• 28:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. That's your loss.

• 28:33Sean Fennessey?

  It is directed by Mark Lawrence. Not one of my guys. Got nothing against him, you know? A lot of people love music and lyrics. That's a beloved film.

• 28:40Amanda Dobbins?

  That's right. I think this one is better just because I like Sandy and, and Hugh Grant. Um, and they have good chemistry.

• 28:47Sean Fennessey?

  That's a really good pick. You know, I think my like, least reputable opinion is just that I think that Deadpool movies are really funny and I've always liked them. And I, I kind of loathe Ryan Reynolds' screen persona, and yet I think he is the perfect Deadpool. And I think those movies, which most people think are obnoxious, fourth wall breaking superhero garbage and hyper violent.

• 29:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 29:10Sean Fennessey?

  I wouldn't really like argue with that per se, but I just always have fun watching those movies. And would I put them, would I put any of them at 16 on my list? Probably not. But like, it was just reported over the weekend that Ryan Reynolds is writing another Deadpool movie. And what he, what he said was, I won't be centering Deadpool in my Deadpool movie, which is a very funny way of putting it. He's like, I'll make Deadpool a supporting character. Which is kind of amusing of him like continuing to move Deadpool out of the center of the movies that he is working on with that character. But I, I know that I can't look at you or any sincere movie lover.

• 29:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Sean Fennessey?

  And communicate about the greatness of Deadpool. It's just like you have a kind of lizard.

• 29:50Amanda Dobbins?

  For sure.

• 29:50Sean Fennessey?

  Curling its tail inside of your mind.

• 29:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Have you watched it enough times for it to be number 16? Like, I'm obviously working on like number 16 salt, but I haven't seen it enough times yet, right?

• 30:02Sean Fennessey?

  Like, here's the big challenge. Because of what our jobs are now and because of how I live my life, I, I can't re-watch movies all day long that I love. Like, I, of course, like so many people and so many listeners of the Rewatchables podcast, when I was in college, I watched the same 25 movies.

• 30:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Sean Fennessey?

  A dozen times, 25 times. I've seen The Big Lebowski, I've seen Clerks, I've seen Pulp Fiction.

• 30:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but those are all good.

• 30:25Sean Fennessey?

  They're all great.

• 30:28Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if, I don't know if one can replicate number 16 limitless. I think that is an individual accomplishment.

• 30:35Amanda Dobbins?

  That is, that's the magic of Bill Simmons.

• 30:37Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 30:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Number 16 salt.

• 30:40Sean Fennessey?

  Wait, Jack, what's yours?

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Probably go like Nacho Libre.

• 30:43Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, that's good. I like that one.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Cause I've seen that movie probably 50 times, 500 times.

• 30:48Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. Would you say you're a Jack Black person?

• 30:51Speaker 04

  No, I wouldn't.

• 30:53Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, cool.

• 30:53Speaker 04

  But I, I vividly remember renting that movie from the library almost every single weekend.

• 30:59Amanda Dobbins?

  That's very cute.

• 31:01Sean Fennessey?

  I rent from the library now. It's called Canopy.

• 31:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 31:03Sean Fennessey?

  What did I watch on Canopy? I watched a movie called Tomorrow to prepare for the Robert Duvall Hall of Fame.

• 31:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 31:08Sean Fennessey?

  1972 film, never seen it, never heard of it. Interesting movie. We'll talk about it next month. Okay, Jack, what's next?

• 31:15Speaker 09

  Hey, this is Chance Spivey from Waris, South Carolina. I'm just tuning into the show mainly because I just want to know, Sean, you know that aioli is mayonnaise? That's all. Bye.

• 31:31Sean Fennessey?

  Was that fellow's name Chance Spivey?

• 31:34Amanda Dobbins?

  From, I couldn't hear where in South Carolina.

• 31:37Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's in Waris.

• 31:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Waris, South Carolina? Well, now I'm just.

• 31:40Sean Fennessey?

  Chance Spivey from, that's, that guy's name is definitely Nate Golden from, you know, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. Chance Spivey, my goodness. Uh, what'd he say? He said aioli is mayo.

• 31:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Do you know aioli is actually mayo? It's flavored mayo. He knows this. So here, here's the real. There's no consistency to these food takes. They are capricious, irrational and annoying. Last night I had to do a separate dill bowl for this guy.

• 32:09Sean Fennessey?

  That was nice. That was kind of you.

• 32:11Amanda Dobbins?

  But it's on no one, Zach and I both remembered independently that Sean doesn't like dill. No broccoli, no salmon, no white condiments.

• 32:19Sean Fennessey?

  You're not around dill bowl.

• 32:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Dill bowl, yeah. It was fresh dill. It was dill from the farmer's market too, Sunrise Farms.

• 32:26Sean Fennessey?

  The meal was outstanding.

• 32:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you so much.

• 32:28Sean Fennessey?

  Some of your best work.

• 32:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you. You know, it's just what happened was we opened the Alison Roman cookbook and we said that.

• 32:34Sean Fennessey?

  Well, she knows what she's doing.

• 32:35Amanda Dobbins?

  She really does.

• 32:37Amanda Dobbins?

  So the, but the real reveal, the thing that makes me angriest about Sean's food preferences, and I learned this while he was eating an open faced sandwich in Stockholm, Sweden,

• 32:52Amanda Dobbins?

  was that it's not actually mayo that is the true deal breaker. It's mustard.

• 32:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Which I don't understand. I don't, and you would rather eat a dry sandwich than eat a sandwich with mustard. But if there is mayo or aioli, if it has flavor to it.

• 33:12Sean Fennessey?

  You remember in.

• 33:13Amanda Dobbins?

  But mustard does have flavor. It's just not a flavor that you like.

• 33:16Sean Fennessey?

  In, in old school Frank the Tank, Will Ferrell's character, you know, he drinks beer and he says, oh, you know, when it hits your lips.

• 33:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 33:24Sean Fennessey?

  And he, he kind of has this like convulsive orgasmic reaction to drinking beer. I'm that, but in reverse for mustard. I don't know why the, the neurons are firing in my mind saying, repel, repel. Whenever I taste mustard, but when I taste it, it's like I, my body goes into shutdown. I need to get it away from me. You know, no white drugs, no white condiments. Obviously one of the great catchphrases.

• 33:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Sean Fennessey?

  Am I inconsistent with it? Sure.

• 33:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 33:51Sean Fennessey?

  Mustard, mustard, I will never waver.

• 33:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Technically, in your defense, and I can't believe I'm defending this, an aioli is often not white. It has a color to it.

• 33:59Sean Fennessey?

  It's a beige.

• 34:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 34:00Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 34:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, or.

• 34:01Sean Fennessey?

  Or a Chipotle aioli that has a pinkish quality.

• 34:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I, well, that's the thing. And that's why we don't claim aioli in the no white drugs, no white condiments. You know, phylum.

• 34:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Here's the thing though, so often aioli will have dill. Like where are you on tartar sauce?

• 34:16Sean Fennessey?

  No, thank you.

• 34:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, okay, there you go.

• 34:17Sean Fennessey?

  In fact, I would never.

• 34:19Amanda Dobbins?

  All right, well, do you eat it like a po boy, though, in general? Or just dry?

• 34:25Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, I'm not like hanging in New Orleans on the regular. Uh, I guess I'm not opposed to it.

• 34:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Tartar sauce is remoulade, please. New Orleans people don't come for me, and tartar sauce would be more like fish and chip, you know, New England type thing.

• 34:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, if I get served fish and chips and they put a tartar sauce next to it, no, no, thank you.

• 34:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 34:43Sean Fennessey?

  I'm good.

• 34:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Remoulade?

• 34:45Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, yeah, I think so. Remoulade's white? It's not white?

• 34:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, it's, it's a cold mayonnaise-based sauce. I mean, I think it has a little, it's mayo, mustard, hot sauce, and spices.

• 34:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I used to be.

• 34:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Jack Hughes!

• 34:59Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know if I can eat that anymore. As I said, it's inconsistent, but I appreciate this attention to detail because frankly, these discussions have not been as common in recent years on the show.

• 35:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Well.

• 35:07Sean Fennessey?

  But that is, that's a real head to know about the, the, the no white drugs, no white condiments, and I appreciate that love, that attention to detail by you as well, Jack. Thank you.

• 35:18Speaker 06

  From Parker. Hey, Sean and Amanda, my wife and I have two daughters, seven and five, and we live in Austin, Texas. My undergrad was in film, so movies are a big part of our household. A few weeks ago, my seven-year-old came home asking if I knew about Star Wars. The boys in her class are fired up for Mandalorian and Grogu. My five-year-old added that the boys in her class play laser swords at recess. By the time we got home, we'd struck a deal. Watched episodes one through nine, then they each get to pick out their own lightsaber. We watched A New Hope as a family. It was a hit. The girls were pumped for Empire for the following Friday. Then disaster struck the next week at school. My seven-year-old went to school the next day and told a boy in her class, Thomas, that she'd watched the first Star Wars.

• 36:02Speaker 06

  Without hesitation, Thomas told her Darth Vader is Luke's dad. I kept my cool, confirmed it was true, and then watched my daughter burst into tears and run into her room. Heartbreaking. Now, I try not to be a petty person, but Thomas needs to learn his lesson for spoiling one of the great twists in movie history. Here's where you come in. And no, I can't pull a Blanchett and Tarr at the next school drop-off, as tempting as that may be. What is a canonical movie that a seven-year-old boy like Thomas is bound to see one day that I can show my daughters first with the explicit goal of sending my seven-year-old to school to ruin that movie for Thomas? I sincerely appreciate your help in plotting my revenge and restoring balance to the Force.

• 36:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Parker, you're a great dad.

• 36:47Sean Fennessey?

  That's very funny.

• 36:48Amanda Dobbins?

  This is beautiful. So three options come to mind. The first is that this happened to me, not about Star Wars, but Dark Knight.

• 37:01Amanda Dobbins?

  A young man who I was sort of dating at the time, which really puts everything that you need to know in one sentence.

• 37:09Sean Fennessey?

  That's sort of doing a lot of work.

• 37:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, just as soon as I said, and by the way, I'm going to spoil the Dark Knight. But I said, I'm going to see the Dark Knight and he was, and he said, oh yeah, she dies. And I was just like, what the fuck? Why would you say this?

• 37:22Sean Fennessey?

  She didn't even use the word Rachel.

• 37:23Amanda Dobbins?

  No, yeah. And then, because do you really know her name? Also, they had recast her, remember?

• 37:28Sean Fennessey?

  I, I, I sing her name.

• 37:30Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 37:31Sean Fennessey?

  I see women, I acknowledge them, I recognize their power.

• 37:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Maybe he even said Maggie Gyllenhaal dies to differentiate from the fact that Katie Holmes played.

• 37:40Sean Fennessey?

  Where's Rachel?

• 37:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 37:43Amanda Dobbins?

  So that was pretty messed up, but that seems down the road. It was effective though. I was very pissed off throughout the entire movie, just being like, well, I know she dies. There's no tension here.

• 37:52Sean Fennessey?

  What a weird response to immediately say she dies. Is that your first takeaway from the Dark Knight?

• 37:58Amanda Dobbins?

  As I said, sort of dating.

• 37:59Sean Fennessey?

  You could be like, the truck flips.

• 38:00Amanda Dobbins?

  We all make mistakes.

• 38:02Sean Fennessey?

  You know, Harvey Dent is Two Face.

• 38:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Listen.

• 38:05Sean Fennessey?

  Joker blows up a hospital. You know, like you could, you could go in any direction here.

• 38:08Amanda Dobbins?

  It's like, it's, it's a long game, the next two, but at some point this child will see both Sixth Sense and Psycho. And so you, you know, just, just ground it early on.

• 38:20Sean Fennessey?

  That would be a weird thing for two seven year olds to be talking about.

• 38:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, again.

• 38:23Sean Fennessey?

  You don't know this yet, but in seven years, you'll be seeing the film from 1960, directed by the master auteur, Alfred Hitchcock, Psycho.

• 38:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Sean Fennessey?

  In this film, a lowly motel proprietor will welcome a young woman in peril into his hotel.

• 38:43Sean Fennessey?

  Turns out, he's dressing up every night as his mother and murdering people who stay at the motel. What are you gonna do with that? What is it? What was the seven-year-old boy's name? Let's use his name. Let's use his full name on the podcast.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  The first name is Thomas.

• 38:56Sean Fennessey?

  I can't believe they even gave us that name.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  I have an idea that he gave us a fake name.

• 38:59Sean Fennessey?

  Hopefully, that's good.

• 39:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Thomas is a nice name. It was on my list.

• 39:03Sean Fennessey?

  Thomas?

• 39:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. That's quite patrician.

• 39:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that was Zach's feedback for a lot of names. It's fine.

• 39:11Sean Fennessey?

  This is my son, Thomas.

• 39:12Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm happy. I'm happy with where we landed.

• 39:16Sean Fennessey?

  I think, gosh, what's a more realistic? What's your third one?

• 39:20Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I said Dark May, Sixth Sense, Psycho.

• 39:23Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. What is something that is a little bit more in the realm of the seven-year-old viewership?

• 39:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Harry Potter, but presumably, Harry Potter has already been spoiled for him because he reads the books. I don't know.

• 39:37Sean Fennessey?

  I know, we're just about to start Harry Potter, so I guess I think five, six, seven is right in that zone when you read them. Jack, what comes to mind? Is there something that could be spoiled for a young boy and ruin their lives?

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Lucas had said Bing Bong dies in Inside Out.

• 39:50Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, great one. He's probably seen it.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  If he hasn't seen it, I would say the LeSean McCoy, Rip My Dog Tony Stark for Avengers Endgame, because that's probably coming up in four or five years.

• 40:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't even know. I don't know what that is.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  LeSean McCoy was a running back in the NFL, and he saw the Avengers Endgame early, and then he tweeted that out before people saw it, spoiling the film.

• 40:14Sean Fennessey?

  That is it. That's the best answer. The best answer is Tony Stark dies at the end of Endgame. That is the absolutely correct answer. And then the LeSean McCoy poll is also quite good.

• 40:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I also had a different, this was a friend of a guy I was actually dating.

• 40:29Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. What a checkered past for you.

• 40:31Amanda Dobbins?

  But so I remember, we were at some bar in Brooklyn, and this is about a TV show, but someone was on the third season of The Wire, and he just yelled out Stringer Bell dies, which is so messed up.

• 40:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, actually, if we can get a seven-year-old girl to tell a seven-year-old boy Stringer Bell dies to his face, then we've accomplished more than I ever could have imagined on this podcast.

• 40:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, anyway.

• 40:52Sean Fennessey?

  Hopefully, nobody listening to the show has not seen The Wire, one of the masterpiece achievements of our lifetime. Okay, what's next?

• 41:00Speaker 10

  Big Pick Fam, it's Avatar Man. Who's Avatar Man? I'm the number one Avatar fan in the goddamn land. And I got one question I need y'all to stand. Avatar, of course, altered the game. It put the whole stuff on screen up in 3D flame. Y'all even did a whole pod just watching the water, riding the wave of James Cameron. Oh, but here is the twist I'm presenting to goddamn you. If we wiped out Pandora, if we faded the blue, if these game-changing movies had never existed in the whole course of cinematic history, it's twisted. If instead of the world where the avatars play, Jim had given us two totally new joints, damn, what I think?

• 41:45Speaker 10

  Would you make that trade? Would you give up the Avatar crown to see what else Big Jim might have ended up laying down? So Sean and Amanda, I'll leave it to you. Would you rather have had two originals and never seen Avatar? Or goddamn, would you stick with the motherfucking?

• 42:05Amanda Dobbins?

  This is, I mean, bravo.

• 42:06Sean Fennessey?

  Avatar Man.

• 42:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Sean Fennessey?

  I salute you. Probably the greatest voicemail we have ever gotten or will ever receive.

• 42:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, that was, I'm moved. Um, the question is effectively, would you remove the three Avatar films from James Cameron's CV and replace it with two different James Cameron movies? If you could.

• 42:27Amanda Dobbins?

  So for me, this is less about losing the Avatar films themselves. I don't have the personal connection to the Avatar films that Avatar Man does.

• 42:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Well, one assumes, but we don't know.

• 42:39Amanda Dobbins?

  I guess that's true.

• 42:40Sean Fennessey?

  What if he's anti-Avatar, but has assumed the mantle of Avatar Man?

• 42:45Amanda Dobbins?

  That seems unlikely.

• 42:46Sean Fennessey?

  He didn't indicate one way or another, right?

• 42:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, he did kind of say the greatest. Yeah, cinematic achievements. Anyway, so what I'm doing is not necessarily to preserve Pandora and the whales and everything. But you have to think about what role the movies play in cinematic history, positive and negative. And I do see Chris Ryan's point that this is one of our great spectacle filmmakers who's just been like living in a blue land for 20 something years.

• 43:22Amanda Dobbins?

  On the other hand, those movies have made billions of dollars and sort of kept theaters afloat at a, a pretty dark time in, in cinema theater history and have like papered over a lot of holes.

• 43:36Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 43:36Amanda Dobbins?

  In the, in the finances of an industry and then allowed other great things to be made. So, you know, you do, do you want to take away $6 billion? Because I think whatever, I like, I love Big Jim.

• 43:53Sean Fennessey?

  I don't really care about the money.

• 43:55Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't care about the money?

• 43:55Sean Fennessey?

  I don't. I think it's an amazing accomplishment that he's been able to get people to come out for these movies, these original stories that he invented out of nothing. Um, and I think, to me, it, I think the first two movies especially are just a major achievement and I, I think they're really good. And I think we forced Chris to watch them under duress. But if he were with me in 2009 and saw the film wearing 3D glasses at the AMC in, in, in Lincoln Plaza like I did, that's one of my favorite movie going experiences. I thought it was amazing. I thought it was like, I thought I was witnessing the dawn of a new age of movies. I can only imagine how insufferable I would have been on this podcast if, after having seen the movie. I loved it. Now, is it a flawed story narratively? Does it borrow

• 44:37Sean Fennessey?

  from lots of other things that have come before it? You know, is it, um, is it a little oddly rendered and hard to watch at home? All that stuff is true.

• 44:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 44:47Sean Fennessey?

  But like, I think the first two movies are huge, huge, huge creative accomplishments. So I would never, I don't know, not to be too stick up my ass about it, but like, tell an artist, like, don't do that, do this. Like, I try, I try to avoid that if I can.

• 45:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:01Sean Fennessey?

  And in this case, now, the third one, I think you and I were both pretty mixed on, because it did feel a bit redundant to the second film and overlong, and it felt like it was spinning its wheels a little bit. It had some great stuff in it, but was not the level of achievement I thought the first two were. So if you told me you could lose the third one and replace it with one other Jim Cameron movie, I'm open-minded about that idea.

• 45:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 45:21Sean Fennessey?

  But I, I wouldn't take away Avatar for anything in the world. I mean, we were just, uh, joking around about Babylon with, um, with Matt Bellany and the idea of Avatar appearing at the end. But I think that it was like very justified that Avatar appeared at the end of that movie. It was like, it was a step in a progression of movie making around the world. So. And you know, what is the other movie gonna be? Is it an original story that James Cameron's gonna write? Well, sure, that could turn out to be The Terminator, or it could turn out to be True Lies. You know, like, I like True Lies.

• 45:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Sean Fennessey?

  But is True Lies a bigger deal than Avatar? Of course not.

• 45:55Amanda Dobbins?

  It might be to me, but I don't know. I don't know. But again, that's just because I agree with you that they are an accomplishment. But in terms of what I want to go to the theater to see.

• 46:06Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 46:06Amanda Dobbins?

  I might, I might prefer to see True Lies.

• 46:08Sean Fennessey?

  I get it.

• 46:09Amanda Dobbins?

  And certainly the possibility for Titanic or Terminator 2.

• 46:11Sean Fennessey?

  I think one of the things about signing on for a filmmaker's work and getting interested in it, it doesn't mean that you can't dislike anything that they make at any given point. But I think it's also trying to have some empathy for like, what's guiding them towards different choices in their career, too. So like, his interest in ecology and the environment and the world around him, like, all that stuff becoming a much bigger part of James Cameron's interests over the last 25 years is what led him to these movies. And it kind of makes sense when you think about how he's interacted with the world, the kinds of stories, this like sci-fi fantasy that kind of enlivened his interest in creativity as a young person. So, I don't know. I don't, I wouldn't want to, I don't mean to be so self-serious about it, but I wouldn't want to take it away from him.

• 46:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that's beautiful. You've always been an Avatar guy.

• 46:51Sean Fennessey?

  I like Avatar.

• 46:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Would you redo the Papyrus font?

• 46:54Sean Fennessey?

  It wouldn't have been my first choice.

• 46:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, yeah, all right.

• 46:57Sean Fennessey?

  It wouldn't have been my first choice.

• 46:58Amanda Dobbins?

  There we go.

• 46:58Sean Fennessey?

  But you know what? The Papyrus font led to billions of dollars.

• 47:02Amanda Dobbins?

  It did.

• 47:03Sean Fennessey?

  What's next?

• 47:04Speaker 11

  Hey, this is a message for Sean and Amanda. My name is Adam. I'm calling from Toronto. Longtime listener, first time caller. I have a two-part question for Sean and Amanda. First question is, without recourse to Google or a book or any notes that you've, you know, been passed by your producer or written on your hand, could you name all of the Canadian provinces and territories on air for the big picture? I want to know how many between the two of you guys could do.

• 47:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 47:38Speaker 11

  And hypothetically, if you were to ever come to Canada, which is the, you know, the big country above you guys, what is one thing you've always wanted to do in, in, in Canada? Skydiving off the CN Tower doesn't count. I think this is a really, you know, important set of questions for your 900th episode. And I look, I look forward to seeing them both answered on air.

• 48:08Amanda Dobbins?

  That was, of course, our pal Adam Maven. Okay, here's the thing that I recently, in addition to Blue Heron, which we're gonna talk about later, which is a Canadian film, also recently watched Myland Kicks, another Canadian film we're gonna talk about in a couple of weeks. So like, in the last week, I've been more saturated in Canada than I have in some time, having quite literally never been to Canada. So, okay, provinces. So Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Vancouver. Are we missing one? Yes, we are.

• 48:44Sean Fennessey?

  Is Alberta a province?

• 48:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, Alberta.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Vancouver is not a province.

• 48:51Sean Fennessey?

  Vancouver's a city.

• 48:52Speaker 04

  There are 10 provinces and 3 territories.

• 48:55Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know, I couldn't do the territories for you, I don't think. I mean, Nova Scotia?

• 48:59Speaker 04

  That is a province.

• 49:01Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Newfoundland?

• 49:03Speaker 04

  No.

• 49:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. So what's, what's, British Columbia?

• 49:10Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 49:11Amanda Dobbins?

  That's Vancouver, British Columbia. So that's what I was thinking of. I know that because of Vancouver, B.C., at the end of like half the films that we watch.

• 49:17Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know what we've named so far. I need, I need like a-

• 49:19Amanda Dobbins?

  I've said Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, you said Alberta, British Columbia.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  And Nova Scotia.

• 49:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Nova Scotia, so that's five. There are 10?

• 49:28Speaker 04

  There are 10 provinces, 3 territories.

• 49:31Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, can Adam name all 50 states? Is what I would like to ask.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  Good question, I don't know.

• 49:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, you know?

• 49:39Sean Fennessey?

  Um, you know, I just don't know.

• 49:42Amanda Dobbins?

  What are the other five?

• 49:45Speaker 04

  No, you've, or wait, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, you've named 6. I also have New Brunswick, Ontario, Prince Edward Island.

• 49:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Ontario, damn it!

• 49:54Sean Fennessey?

  Ontario, that's a terrible miss. We just needed to take more time on that, we would've gotten Ontario. I was thinking of New Brunswick for Newfoundland, my bad.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  The territories, I would, no shot. Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Yukon?

• 50:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yukon, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:09Sean Fennessey?

  Sure, the Yukon Territory, okay. Well, our apologies and our, our love and affection to the fine people of Canada. Maybe we will be seeing you-

• 50:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Maybe, don't know.

• 50:19Sean Fennessey?

  Later this year, maybe we will be seeing you later this year, maybe. What was the second part of the question?

• 50:23Speaker 04

  What is one thing you've always wanted to do in Canada? Skydiving off the CN Tower.

• 50:28Sean Fennessey?

  I wanna play the Rivoli.

• 50:29Amanda Dobbins?

  That's a good one. I can't, I can't top that one.

• 50:34Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, okay, what's next?

• 50:36Speaker 04

  Also, I think the 10th one that I missed was Labrador, I believe.

• 50:40Sean Fennessey?

  Labrador?

• 50:41Speaker 04

  I believe so.

• 50:41Sean Fennessey?

  That's the name of a Canadian province?

• 50:44Speaker 04

  I'm Googling just to make sure, to make all of our Canadian friends Newfoundland and Labrador, Canadian province.

• 50:50Sean Fennessey?

  I said Newfoundland.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Oh, right, they're connected, they're one.

• 50:53Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so I get, we get credit for seven?

• 50:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, we did good, we put up a good performance.

• 50:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 51:00Speaker 12

  Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg.

• 51:04Speaker 12

  Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg?

• 51:17Sean Fennessey?

  Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg?

• 51:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, where are you feeling? Where, where, where are you on your emotional roller coaster?

• 51:25Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's good.

• 51:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 51:27Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's, what do you think? You haven't seen it, so you don't, I-

• 51:29Amanda Dobbins?

  I haven't seen it, I had to have family dinner, we had lentils. I, I, um, I'm really nervous.

• 51:38Sean Fennessey?

  I know, I know.

• 51:39Amanda Dobbins?

  But every time I'm nervous about Jeremy Strong doing something, he's never the problem, he's always really good.

• 51:44Sean Fennessey?

  I, I agree, I think he, but his radar is not strong on when to avoid something though.

• 51:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 51:50Sean Fennessey?

  He will misstep at times.

• 51:54Sean Fennessey?

  He, he, he's a transformer, he's our, our closest transformer, like, for example, The Apprentice is a movie that I think is like, pretty unsuccessful. But his Roy Cohn is fascinating, it is like, it is a standalone art piece. And I kind of feel like this movie's gonna end up being somewhat similar. Where it's gonna be like, a predictable docu-drama about a lot of things that we already know. And there's gonna be some really interesting performances inside of it, but the movie's not gonna be able to get out of its own way. And I'm fine with that, and I think what Matt was saying on the show is true, which is like, there's a real chance that he is kinda gliding into a Best Supporting Actor nomination and maybe even a win, just because I do think that, for all his self-seriousness, he, he's really admired, people think he's a fucking good actor, and

• 52:40Sean Fennessey?

  also, Mark Zuckerberg, his, doesn't, does not, there's not a really high popular opinion of Mark Zuckerberg.

• 52:44Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 52:44Sean Fennessey?

  So him being the villain of this movie, I think will gratify at least a lot of people, um, in that community, so I'm interested, I'm paying attention, I really just wish it was like- Gosh, Kevin McDonald directing this movie instead of Aaron Sorkin, you know, just like a very seasoned professional maker of movies. That would, I actually would feel a lot better about it if it was just his script.

• 53:07Amanda Dobbins?

  As you know, I agree. I'd forgotten that Jeremy Strong is in Molly's Game.

• 53:11Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 53:12Amanda Dobbins?

  So that makes three Aaron Sorkin movies.

• 53:15Sean Fennessey?

  It's his guy.

• 53:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's his guy.

• 53:17Amanda Dobbins?

  That's beautiful.

• 53:18Sean Fennessey?

  Trial of Chicago Seven, how many times do you think you'll watch it before you die?

• 53:23Amanda Dobbins?

  I think I've seen it twice.

• 53:24Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, pretty good.

• 53:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Maybe I'll re-watch it before Social Reckoning. So that's three. Three is my answer.

• 53:30Sean Fennessey?

  Pretty good.

• 53:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 53:33Sean Fennessey?

  What's next?

• 53:34Speaker 13

  Hey, John and Amanda, this is Ben M. calling from Washington DC. I actually have a question for Amanda about rom-coms. I'm in a relationship with a woman that I love very much. We both love movies, but we don't always love the same kind of movies. Rom-coms are sort of like that middle of the Venn diagram for us. And we've watched all like the great all-time classics, or at least the modern classics, you know, like Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, like we've run the gamut. But wanted to know if there are any examples of rom-coms that you would recommend that are like, you know, you did Witness with Blank Check recently, and you talked about how that movie was huge when it came out, but it sort of fell out of the zeitgeist.

• 54:16Speaker 13

  So I was wondering, what are some of the like, what are like the five rom-coms you would recommend that maybe aren't as popular or relevant today, but are still like exceptional films and are worth watching for rom-com lovers? Because I love sharing movies with my girlfriend, with my partner. And I want to make sure that we're continuing to explore a genre that she really loves. So I really appreciate the insight. Thanks, Amanda. And Sean, I guess you could also answer too. Thanks, guys. Huge fan.

• 54:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Thank you, Ben. It was Ben, right?

• 54:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Ben, I have more than five, obviously. So I kept this list to modern rom-coms, but I would definitely recommend also checking out everything from the 30s and the 40s. One of my fondest memories of Early dating my now husband was, uh, we went out to dinner with some friends of his who became friends of mine. I caught the bad oyster, uh, had a, had a bad night. And then the next day, he very sweetly took care of me. And one of the things he did was he put on Philadelphia Story. So, you know, you don't have to really go deep cuts on that stuff, but, um, those are great. I'm defining modern period as everything after

• 55:26Amanda Dobbins?

  when Harry met Sally. So I apologize to the seventies and the eighties, Tracy Letts, like, don't email me. I mean, do Tracy, I always want to hear from you, but, um, in this case, this is more nineties, two thousands and, and later. So I already mentioned two weeks notice, but two weeks notice is a good one. Um, from the nineties, I'm going to throw out The Cutting Edge. I'm in it, which is a, um, Olympics romantic comedy, essentially figure skating, really, really good, written by Tony Gilroy. The American President, speaking of Aaron Sorkin, uh, 1995, starring Michael Douglas and Ed Benning, The President Falls in Love. Uh, I saw it four times in theaters with my dad. And you know what? Dave is a romantic comedy. Sure.

• 56:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Dave is wonderful. Uh, we also, you and I did a rewatchals about it with, uh, Bill Simmons. Okay. Then we have two weeks notice, Morning Glory, which I've talked about a lot. And that is written by Aline Brush McKenna, who also wrote The Devil Wears Prada and The Devil Wears Prada 2. And 27 Dresses, which I don't like as much. I think Morning Glory is, uh, Who wrote 13 Dresses? 13. I mean, pretty much live in my head. And let's see. And Morning Glory stars Rachel McAdams, Patrick Wilson, Diane Keaton and Harrison Ford. Maybe you've heard of them.

• 56:47Amanda Dobbins?

  What else do I have here? Um, Enough Said, the Nicole Holofender film is, you know, a little more left field in the rom com space. It's not quite as, as shiny, but it's a really, really, really beautiful movie. Uh, Set It Up. Star in Glenn Powell, that's one we all knew. It may also remind you of a website and media company that you consume content from. And Long Shot, which I think, which is the one where Charlize Theron is the Secretary of State and running for president.

• 57:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 57:20Amanda Dobbins?

  And Seth Rogen is her speechwriter. And no one saw this movie and we all really liked it.

• 57:25Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, often cited as the market indicator.

• 57:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 57:30Sean Fennessey?

  Of the downfall of the rom com theatrically released.

• 57:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 57:34Sean Fennessey?

  Now, I wanted to ask you about this related to this question.

• 57:39Sean Fennessey?

  I guess you could make the case the materialists kind of broke this up a little bit, but it does feel like this subgenre.

• 57:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 57:47Sean Fennessey?

  Is still a little theatrically threatened, imperiled.

• 57:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Challenged.

• 57:51Sean Fennessey?

  By streaming.

• 57:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 57:53Sean Fennessey?

  Streaming in particular, this is a category where people have just said, I'll just, I'll watch this on streaming. I'll watch the Netflix version on streaming.

• 58:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 58:00Sean Fennessey?

  I'll wait for it to come to whatever service I subscribe to.

• 58:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Sort of.

• 58:03Sean Fennessey?

  We've seen other movies kind of like beat back, like Fight Back the Dawn on this.

• 58:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 58:08Sean Fennessey?

  And come back, you know, the drama being successful recently is very encouraging for what people want to see at the movies. Do you think there's a world where rom coms can come back to, if not when Harry Met Sally, Peak Nora Ephron, at least even into that, you know, um, late stage Hugh Grant period, you know?

• 58:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 58:28Sean Fennessey?

  Mid 2000s.

• 58:29Amanda Dobbins?

  The Kate Hudson.

• 58:30Sean Fennessey?

  2010s, yes.

• 58:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, sure. And you'll notice I didn't, I really like Kate Hudson, but that era of rom coms is not on my classic list.

• 58:37Sean Fennessey?

  You know, J Law or J Lo and Sandra Bullock and like Reese Witherspoon, like the icons from that period of time.

• 58:45Amanda Dobbins?

  So first of all, I would argue that the drama is a romantic comedy.

• 58:48Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 58:49Amanda Dobbins?

  And, but it wasn't marketed as such. So what you're talking about is like, we're putting on the package like, hey, find love at the movies, which Universal is trying to do this year with One Night Only, the Callum Turner, Monica Barbaro movie from Will Gluck, who also did. Anyone but you, which again, like that is a romantic comedy. Those are both also being marketed more as sex comedies, which is, which is different. In, in most of these movies, people do have sex, but it's not like the, forgive the pun, thrust of the,

• 59:20Sean Fennessey?

  You don't show up for the decolletage.

• 59:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly. So the thing is, is that all of those Netflix movies, those aren't romantic comedies. Those are Hallmark movies. And that like, there is a difference in the eye of the beholder. And so I, the problem really, and not to step on Yumi and Tuscany, is that

• 59:43Amanda Dobbins?

  we have just, people will now accept, or people will slap on the label of romantic comedy to things that do not match, meet the criteria of like actually good writing, movie stars, some thought into production design and, you know, any sort of budget.

• 1:00:03Amanda Dobbins?

  So I don't, I don't know, I'm not that optimistic because it seems like everyone has realized you can just make a bad version for less and put it on streaming and people will watch it. And I'm kind of bummed out about that. There have been a couple TV versions of it, like Starstruck is probably the best romantic comedy that's been made in the last 10 years, and that is Rose Matafeo, like three season, but British series. And so each season is about two hours long, like a romantic comedy.

• 1:00:33Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:00:35Amanda Dobbins?

  I wish people would try, but I don't know. Hiring like directors and spending money on girl stuff. It's historically not been the, you know, what studios want to do.

• 1:00:46Sean Fennessey?

  It's true, but when you look at the origins of the genre and you look at what the kind of like collision of farce and witty repartee, right? And you got the

• 1:00:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Sean Fennessey?

  The hired hands in the 30s, the Ben Hecks of the world, writing a lot of those movies who are great at that rat attack dialogue. You got Ernst Lubitsch coming over from Europe. Then you've got, you know, folks in the 40s, Howard Hawks and lady later, Billy Wilder and all, all Preston Sturges. Like all, all those filmmakers who were so good at that work, like there was no like boy movie, girl movie thing. It was like, there were date night movies, you know, there were movies that you went to go see with someone who you were interested in or who you were married to, and they kind of. They gave, they gave both parties something interesting, exciting, fun, entertaining. And so I think part of like, I know it's a bit of a joke on this show of like, your thing, my thing, but you know, the Lady Eve is not for girls.

• 1:01:41Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I know.

• 1:01:41Sean Fennessey?

  It's for everybody. And When Harry Met Sally is not for girls. It's for everybody.

• 1:01:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but I'm just, you know, we just sat through a week of presentations that were just, what is the, what is the most that we can pack into a movie? What is like the most IP, the most recognizable names, the most explosions, the most video game tie-ins? Just like, this is, this, these are not movies, these are events, these are amusement parks.

• 1:02:05Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:02:06Amanda Dobbins?

  And like, obviously, we were at a convention for theater owners, they're playing to that particular audience. But I think what we've learned, the industry is about like, premium formats and getting everyone's attention for as much as possible.

• 1:02:19Sean Fennessey?

  And high, and high concept. And when you were talking to Matt about One Night Only, he was like, I don't get it, I don't get it. Why is it The Purge? But it's like, that's why it's The Purge. The Purge rom-com is happening because there has to be an extra layer.

• 1:02:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:02:31Sean Fennessey?

  To sell it, which I think is fine. I mean, as long as the movie is good.

• 1:02:34Amanda Dobbins?

  It's totally, it's totally fine with me. And hopefully that also, it, it looked, they at least filmed in New York City.

• 1:02:40Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 1:02:41Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, like, they at least hired real movie stars, like Will Gluck.

• 1:02:44Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think that was a real pizzeria that they were in in that sequence that we saw?

• 1:02:47Amanda Dobbins?

  I don't know about that. But I did see paparazzi photos of them on the street, you know, in New York. So they're at least trying for some of that. And I'm great with a premise. I mean, all of the things that I just named, like, have a premise of sorts. It's a, like, hockey player and a figure skater, and they've got to team up. Like, it's the Secretary of State and the, and a speechwriter. It's the president and a lobbyist.

• 1:03:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:03:09Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, it's, so premises are fine.

• 1:03:11Sean Fennessey?

  I love that. I mean, one of the things I think about growing up in the 80s and 90s is, is that you can almost feel the screenwriter pitching the idea in the room when you're watching the movie.

• 1:03:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Sean Fennessey?

  And sometimes that leads to a really fun movie. It's a movie. It's not a, it's not a documentary. It's supposed to have an idea that makes it exceptional so that you're spending time watching it.

• 1:03:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And the other thing about them is that romantic comedies are like a very set recognizable structure. They are a genre, just like any other genre. And then half the fun is is the premise or the situation, right? So Morning Glory is a newsroom. The cutting edge is the Olympics. Like there's, I did several political ones.

• 1:03:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, let's go somewhere where we don't usually go.

• 1:03:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, and someplace you don't normally have access to. Obviously, in the 90s, it was like 55 magazines, which is then why I became a magazine writer. So, you know, um, so I guess now it has to be influencers or whatever, but there are. But as much care is put is put into developing those worlds, right? And and making them real believable places. And you just don't get that on the streaming, in the streaming movies. So it's just about like spending money and hiring good talent.

• 1:04:15Sean Fennessey?

  It is.

• 1:04:16Amanda Dobbins?

  And as long as people keep watching, I don't know, whatever, on Irish Wish or whatever, then I don't know what the incentive is. I didn't see Irish Wish. I don't, I don't care about that stuff, you know? Like, I don't. I care about you.

• 1:04:30Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you.

• 1:04:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, but yeah, like, I don't, I don't like the Hallmark stuff. I want real romantic comedies.

• 1:04:35Sean Fennessey?

  I'm with you. What's next?

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  This next voicemail isn't precisely a question, but I do have a follow up. That will be a question afterwards.

• 1:04:43Sean Fennessey?

  Fire away.

• 1:04:46Speaker 14

  Yeah, g'day, CR. Um, mate, I'm here waiting at Sydney International Arrivals Hall. Hang on, is that you? Oh, no, that's just some old bloke in an Oakland A's cap. Anyway, mate, yeah, so when you get in, we've got a special surprise for you. Um, me and all the officer class members of the Australian Arm of the CR Army are going to put on that move reading at the Jan 6 Committee hearings. He says he wanted to see on the JMO pod. Um, and made a special, special edition. We've got a, uh, we've got a tattoo artist coming along so we can all get big with third chair for life shin taps. Uh, yeah, so, um, hopefully you get this when you get off the plane, mate. If you're trying to find me, I'm holding up a picture of Rain Groves.

• 1:05:30Speaker 14

  Says, uh, I've got a couple of moves I can make here. See you soon, Dickhead.

• 1:05:36Speaker 04

  So we had another question, another voicemail that was left, by the way, just amazing voicemail. Um, that was basically asking what makes CR so likeable? What makes him the best? Why does he have such a great approval rating? I thought this would be a nice way to clear out and show him some love.

• 1:05:54Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, it's weird to be getting these questions now. Like, I have actually answered questions like this in the past on the show. And have talked about like my history of my friendship with Chris. And I actually felt like in the past, I was like, still doing what I was doing in 2007, where I was like, is no one else seeing this?

• 1:06:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Totally.

• 1:06:12Sean Fennessey?

  This is the funniest person I've ever met. Um, and now it's, we're, we're over the mountain here.

• 1:06:18Amanda Dobbins?

  So everyone, everyone's seeing it?

• 1:06:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, we got the, we got the Australian army lining up, ready to just do battle.

• 1:06:24Amanda Dobbins?

  He gets a, he gets a welcome off the airplane.

• 1:06:28Amanda Dobbins?

  I do think like, but-

• 1:06:29Sean Fennessey?

  Like, is it unknown what is so great about Chris? He's on eight pods a week, like, we know.

• 1:06:33Amanda Dobbins?

  To a person, though, both as like, as a listener, but also the people in his life. Like, you talk about the moment that you met Chris Ryan, and you're like, wait, are you real? Like, is this really, really happening? How did I not, how did I not, how do I not already know you? And also, how are you, how are you, am I the only person hanging out with you? Because you're like, the coolest, funniest person in the world.

• 1:06:55Sean Fennessey?

  Everybody either wants to be or thinks they're his best friend. That's obviously something that has become even more clear as so many millions of people have spent time with him in their cars, doing the dishes and stuff like that. I think, um, you know, I'm also like a little selfish, like a little greedy with my friend. You know, I'm like, I really, I put the time in. I love this kid. Like, I really love this guy. So, uh, but I'm, I'm, I'm so happy that, see, our month was very special. That was very cool.

• 1:07:20Amanda Dobbins?

  It was.

• 1:07:20Sean Fennessey?

  Because, you know, you and I are as close with him as, as anybody. And, uh, he deserves to be feted in that way. But, I don't know, there's like also a lot more going on with Chris that he doesn't usually let out. He did a little bit on Talk Easy. Which, did you eventually listen to that or not?

• 1:07:36Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I still haven't. I've only seen the clips.

• 1:07:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it was nice to hear him in that, in that frame as well. But, um, the one thing that I'll say is-

• 1:07:48Sean Fennessey?

  This is gonna seem like it's undermining, but it's actually the opposite. Chris is unthreatening. And I don't know very many men who are unthreatening. Most men are like, kind of aggro and competitive and not supportive.

• 1:08:03Amanda Dobbins?

  True.

• 1:08:05Sean Fennessey?

  Chris is really positive and encouraging. And like, even if your joke is bad, he'll laugh at your joke. And if he knows you're interested in something, he'll ask you about it. And not performatively on podcasts, in life. Like, he's actually connected to you in a sincere way. And I think that that ports over to all the work that he does publicly. And people can feel that. Like, he's just not full of shit. And he's not anxious. And he's not worried about what you think about him or whatever. Or even if he is, it's completely masked by the infectious energy that he brings to things. So it's actually ultimately not surprising to me that we are where we are with this thing.

• 1:08:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Sean Fennessey?

  But it did take, from my vantage point, 20-plus years from people who, for Andy, it's 30 years. You know, like, it's people who've known him even longer than I have.

• 1:08:53Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true. Yeah, I mean, the thing about it is that the magic of Chris is that Rango Sheriff is possible and is there. And it's not even, you know, and the voices, and I can't even name all of the rewatchables characters that he does.

• 1:09:08Sean Fennessey?

  Sure, Robert Lowe is still my favorite.

• 1:09:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, but like, that is, that's just like, right. He can reach that at any point. It can come out whenever. And sometimes the best ones are just kind of like in passing, you know, when he's not even doing the full voice work. But he's not like that all the time. He is also just like a loving, like, friendly, reliable guy who knows like, a lot about the special forces, speaking of Taylor Sheridan.

• 1:09:36Sean Fennessey?

  He'll fit right in in Australia.

• 1:09:38Amanda Dobbins?

  And geopolitics, and soccer, and other things. Like- One of the, one of the great things about Chris is you can just be like text him and be like, so can you like bring me in on what's going on here with this British newspaper and or like Venezuela?

• 1:09:54Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:09:54Amanda Dobbins?

  And he's like, okay, so here's what the message boards are saying, you know?

• 1:09:58Sean Fennessey?

  If you want to know the breadth of his knowledge, it, don't go to the rewatchables or the watch or a sports podcast.

• 1:10:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:05Sean Fennessey?

  Go to Wait A Second.

• 1:10:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Sean Fennessey?

  His show with Jason Concepcion and Tyler Parker, those episodes are that, that's, that's where Chris is spending a lot of his free time.

• 1:10:12Amanda Dobbins?

  And he will, and he'll bring you in. He wants to share.

• 1:10:15Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. How do you think he really feels like deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down in his heart of hearts about the third chair controversy?

• 1:10:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, he's, he's welcoming. And I think, as you said, he comes, Chris isn't like a threatening guy, but he's also not threatened. He knows, you know, like it's, he's not in danger. He, he lets people come to him and I think that's his power. And that's his confidence. And I think he's going to be fine. I honestly think he doesn't spend that much time thinking about it. I think he's just on the message boards.

• 1:10:50Sean Fennessey?

  Could be. He did send me a note yesterday that said, I miss being on Big Pick.

• 1:10:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 1:10:55Sean Fennessey?

  Because it was, see, our month, I, my gift to him, our gift to him was to give him a little bit of a break.

• 1:11:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Do all our bullshit. Yeah.

• 1:11:01Sean Fennessey?

  You know, we gave him a little bit of a break as he was visiting all of the other spaces, but he'll be back with a fury, I think in May.

• 1:11:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. What's next?

• 1:11:09Speaker 06

  Hi, Sean and Amanda. This is from John and Carly from Chicago. My fiance and I are getting married this summer and bonded over the podcast when we first met back in 2019. My question is, which movie couple do you feel best encapsulates your respective marriage?

• 1:11:29Speaker 06

  P S. My fiance is a woman and she got me into physical media. Hashtag breaking stereotypes.

• 1:11:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 1:11:36Speaker 06

  Hashtag physical media. Hashtag open the schools.

• 1:11:45Amanda Dobbins?

  That's beautiful. And I'm glad, you know, representation matters. So that's really, that's great.

• 1:11:50Sean Fennessey?

  There are dozens of women.

• 1:11:52Amanda Dobbins?

  What do you think? Do you think they have a registry that's just like DVDs or Blu-rays that they want?

• 1:11:59Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know.

• 1:11:59Amanda Dobbins?

  And is this happening yet? Are there, are there physical media registries?

• 1:12:03Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm reluctant to share this, but when I was at a screening that we did a year ago or so, maybe, maybe one of the American Cinematheque screenings, someone, I was introduced to someone who was getting married and they were having a physical media themed wedding where the, the party gift, the favor.

• 1:12:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh.

• 1:12:22Sean Fennessey?

  Was a Criterion Collection Blu-ray and that they had gotten Criterion to kind of sponsor that wedding.

• 1:12:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Wow.

• 1:12:28Sean Fennessey?

  And they gave away like 75 Blu-rays, all individually curated for the guest.

• 1:12:33Amanda Dobbins?

  That's nice.

• 1:12:33Sean Fennessey?

  Which was a great, really beautiful idea that I liked. And I will share with other people. I cannot promise you the Criterion will participate with you. I think this person knew someone who worked there. Nevertheless, um, gosh, a couple that most represents our individual marriages?

• 1:12:48Amanda Dobbins?

  I think so.

• 1:12:49Speaker 04

  That's correct. I wa, I, I was really close to putting this in the doc to prep, but I thought hearing it in, in real time wouldn't be more fun.

• 1:12:56Amanda Dobbins?

  So I was afraid they were gonna say what represents like our dynamic. And we were having a conversation at CinemaCon where I was like, you know, I'm the ginger to his Fred, always backwards and heels. But you thought that that wasn't fair. And.

• 1:13:11Sean Fennessey?

  I didn't.

• 1:13:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. And that, so it was more of a Rosalind Russell Cary Grant sort of thing, which is really complimentary to both of us.

• 1:13:17Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 1:13:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is why I would say that out loud.

• 1:13:19Sean Fennessey?

  More accurate.

• 1:13:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20Sean Fennessey?

  A little bit of bickering. There's chemistry, independent minded.

• 1:13:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:13:24Sean Fennessey?

  You know.

• 1:13:25Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm solving crimes. That's fine. You know, that's, that's what I do. In, in cool hats.

• 1:13:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. I think I'm making important decisions, but you're doing the work. I think that was a better comparison.

• 1:13:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, okay. My marriage. I don't know. What's my marriage like?

• 1:13:39Sean Fennessey?

  Mine is kind of like, um, Dave and Hal 9000, I'll say.

• 1:13:50Sean Fennessey?

  And Eileen is like, why are you doing this to me?

• 1:13:54Sean Fennessey?

  And I'm like, I'm sorry, Eileen.

• 1:13:55Amanda Dobbins?

  That's funny. Uh, what's, what's mine?

• 1:14:00Sean Fennessey?

  Uh. Gosh, I didn't, how did not make a joke here? I've got so many good jokes.

• 1:14:05Amanda Dobbins?

  No, say the jokes. The jokes are funnier. Yeah, that's funny.

• 1:14:10Sean Fennessey?

  What are you guys like?

• 1:14:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh. Let's see.

• 1:14:15Sean Fennessey?

  Probably Shia and Optimus Prime in Transformers.

• 1:14:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that's, who's who?

• 1:14:20Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, you're Optimus Prime, obviously. Zack has got Shia energy, for sure.

• 1:14:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:24Sean Fennessey?

  Not in, not in, not in real life.

• 1:14:26Amanda Dobbins?

  We love, we love Zack.

• 1:14:27Sean Fennessey?

  That character.

• 1:14:28Amanda Dobbins?

  We're positive.

• 1:14:29Sean Fennessey?

  That character, I mean.

• 1:14:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, what are some other great duos?

• 1:14:33Sean Fennessey?

  Um. What about, uh, Linda Blair and Pazuzu?

• 1:14:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:14:39Sean Fennessey?

  In The Exorcist?

• 1:14:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, absolutely.

• 1:14:41Sean Fennessey?

  Is that accurate?

• 1:14:41Amanda Dobbins?

  That seems good.

• 1:14:42Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, you could be like, one of you is Harry and one of you is Sally, you know?

• 1:14:46Amanda Dobbins?

  But not really. That's also...

• 1:14:48Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 1:14:49Amanda Dobbins?

  That's not really, that's not how it went down. We weren't friends first. Uh, we also aren't, you've got mail? No, we weren't really friends.

• 1:14:57Sean Fennessey?

  You were lovers then, friends.

• 1:15:02Sean Fennessey?

  That's great.

• 1:15:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, let's see, we're not any of the Nora Ephron's. Um, cause I mean, you know, we could be Julia, Julia. Not Julie, we could be Julie and Stanley Tucci.

• 1:15:14Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe you're like, um, Anna Paquin and Matt Damon and Margaret?

• 1:15:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that has to be really... We definitely, we're sitting very quietly after we saw Margaret.

• 1:15:24Sean Fennessey?

  I'll bet you were.

• 1:15:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, I hope, yikes.

• 1:15:26Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, well, this was fun.

• 1:15:29Sean Fennessey?

  How about, um, Cap and Iron Man?

• 1:15:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, well, then who's dead?

• 1:15:36Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, well, Robert Downey Jr.'s back.

• 1:15:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, but not as Cap, as Doctor Doom.

• 1:15:42Sean Fennessey?

  He was never Cap. He was always Iron Man.

• 1:15:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, he was always Iron Man. Sorry, I didn't know that.

• 1:15:46Sean Fennessey?

  Spidey and MJ?

• 1:15:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Is MJ Kirsten or is MJ?

• 1:15:51Sean Fennessey?

  You tell me.

• 1:15:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Is?

• 1:15:52Sean Fennessey?

  They're both MJ.

• 1:15:53Amanda Dobbins?

  They're both MJ.

• 1:15:54Sean Fennessey?

  Zendaya and Kirsten Dunst.

• 1:15:56Amanda Dobbins?

  And then who was Emma Stone?

• 1:15:58Sean Fennessey?

  Emma Stone was Gwen Stacy.

• 1:15:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. I don't want to be her.

• 1:16:02Sean Fennessey?

  The good thing about Gwen Stacy, if you be her, and I'm happy to share this with you now, is, you know, there's, there's alternate tellings of the Gwen story.

• 1:16:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:16:10Sean Fennessey?

  And in Spider-verse, that's also Gwen Stacy, the Hailee Steinfeld character, the blonde

• 1:16:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:16:16Sean Fennessey?

  who Miles loves and is a part of a crime fighting partner with. And she's a hero.

• 1:16:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:16:22Sean Fennessey?

  And that Gwen in Spider-verse, I think is probably my daughter's favorite character. Spider Gwen.

• 1:16:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, great. Okay. I'd, I don't-

• 1:16:31Sean Fennessey?

  Ghost Spider.

• 1:16:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Ghost Spider? Okay, I don't, we don't really do ghosts in my house.

• 1:16:35Sean Fennessey?

  Well, she's not actually a ghost. I think it's more of speaks to her, her styling.

• 1:16:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Um.

• 1:16:42Sean Fennessey?

  I, I think you should also show your sons empowered women who have web, web shooters.

• 1:16:47Amanda Dobbins?

  That's, that's great that we had to have a long conversation this morning about how we don't shoot lasers at people. Um, and I was gonna have to take the Lego ship away.

• 1:16:54Sean Fennessey?

  Gonna have to disagree with you on that one. We do shoot lasers at people. And by we-

• 1:16:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Not in, not in real life, just in the movies. And we can't build a Lego ship to shoot our brother laser, shoot lasers at our brother.

• 1:17:05Sean Fennessey?

  Pete Hegseth might have something different to say about that.

• 1:17:06Amanda Dobbins?

  All right.

• 1:17:09Sean Fennessey?

  What's next? What was that? What was up the Australian? Oh, jeez. What was the Australian guy who was like JMO? Yeah, what about, oh, he didn't leave a name. That, he's not a subscriber to JMO. I have a list of all of the subscribers to JMO, and he's not on that list. So I, that was, that was an affront to what JMO has been accomplishing over these years. And we're making progress on that show, I feel. What's next?

• 1:17:32Speaker 15

  Hey, it's been David Grabinsky, longtime listener, first time caller. Just wanted to say, I wish I talked about the Gilmore Girls scene more in our interview about Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice. More specifically, I wish I asked Sean, who he thought was the best boyfriend for Rory. And also, I think you guys really underestimated the box office for Coyote versus Acme. If I know anything, it's this. Kids love legal thrillers. That guarantees at least 600 million domestic. But in all seriousness, I think you should both weigh in on the Rory Gilmore of it all. The people want to know, and the, the people is me. All right, thanks.

• 1:18:12Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:18:13Amanda Dobbins?

  So have you seen any Gilmore Girls?

• 1:18:14Sean Fennessey?

  I have. I've seen multiple episodes of multiple seasons, but I'm not.

• 1:18:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, so your, your prime options here are Dean.

• 1:18:22Sean Fennessey?

  That's the first boyfriend. That's the second boyfriend.

• 1:18:24Amanda Dobbins?

  And Logan.

• 1:18:25Sean Fennessey?

  So I'm not as up on Logan's the college boyfriend?

• 1:18:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, Logan is the college rich kid boyfriend and in the, and in Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice. Did I get the names right?

• 1:18:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, you did.

• 1:18:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Great. Um, it is argued that Logan is actually the best for Rory of the boyfriends, which is, which is correct.

• 1:18:44Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:18:45Amanda Dobbins?

  But is sort of controversial because he's like, he's a rich kid and Rory like drops out of school because of some trouble that they get into and her life is like very up and down when Logan's around and people blame him for that, but it's actually Rory that's the problem.

• 1:19:04Sean Fennessey?

  Well, thank, thank you to Ben David. Was, was he asking who would be the best, who was the best boyfriend for Rory?

• 1:19:09Amanda Dobbins?

  What's your opinion? Because that's the jam.

• 1:19:11Sean Fennessey?

  Well, the, the energy between Rory and Jess, I think is the most interesting energy.

• 1:19:15Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course. That's correct.

• 1:19:16Sean Fennessey?

  And that's what you want, right?

• 1:19:17Amanda Dobbins?

  That's correct.

• 1:19:18Sean Fennessey?

  Milo Ventimiglia, right? He was Jess.

• 1:19:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Sean Fennessey?

  And, and I thought the show was, was most interesting to me.

• 1:19:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Sean Fennessey?

  When he was in the mix, because he was like, you know, he's playing a Sean-esque role of challenging.

• 1:19:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Later on in the show, and it's when she is with, she's with Logan, she's in college. I think she actually, she's dropped out of college right now because they steal a yacht.

• 1:19:40Sean Fennessey?

  Geez Louise.

• 1:19:40Amanda Dobbins?

  And then she's, because his dad is a newspaper guy and tells her that she doesn't have it, what it takes to be a newspaper person. And so she spirals, she drops out of college, she joins the DAR, she starts living with her grandparents. It's like pretty dark. And so during that, she goes to Philadelphia and she goes to where Jess is, Jess is now living in Philadelphia and he is running like a small indie book imprint and they have like a coffee shop and they're doing like really cool stuff. I mean, it is like so in our alley.

• 1:20:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Obviously for us, Jess is the answer. I think that there are some younger kids who,

• 1:20:20Amanda Dobbins?

  I think that Jess is like too bad a boyfriend and that he's not nice to her.

• 1:20:24Sean Fennessey?

  He's not nice.

• 1:20:25Amanda Dobbins?

  He's not nice. And so that like Dean was so nice, but Dean's a loser with nowhere to go. He's really needy. Then he cheats on, on his wife with Rory. And it's like, I feel bad for him, but that doesn't mean that he's right for Rory. So I think.

• 1:20:41Sean Fennessey?

  So what happened? So it was Jared Padalecki and then he went on to be on, what was that show on?

• 1:20:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Smart something?

• 1:20:47Sean Fennessey?

  No, come on. What's the, you're saying Supernatural, right? Wasn't he on Supernatural, Jared Padalecki? Wasn't he on like 14 seasons of Supernatural?

• 1:20:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Jared Padalecki? I mean, I know what show you're talking about, but I don't, Supernatural, yeah.

• 1:20:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, he was on, I think he left Gilmore Girls and then went on, went to Supernatural for 15 seasons.

• 1:21:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:21:05Sean Fennessey?

  I'm going with, I'm going with Jess.

• 1:21:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I mean, the thing is, is that it's not Rory's, it's not Logan's fault that his dad is a jerk. And he tries to warn Rory about her. And honestly, Logan is like very smart and charming. And then he starts a business by himself and then he proposes to her and he's like ready to commit. And it's her issues. So I honestly kind of vote with, for Logan still. But you know, Jess would have wrecked my life for sure.

• 1:21:37Sean Fennessey?

  I.

• 1:21:37Amanda Dobbins?

  The thing is, is that Gilmore Girls, Girls is a show about two total narcissists in Lorelai and Rory. Like they're the problems.

• 1:21:45Sean Fennessey?

  Sure. Do you think, did Alexis Bledel, she did eventually show up on Mad Men, right?

• 1:21:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, she was.

• 1:21:51Sean Fennessey?

  She was Pete, was she Pete's future wife?

• 1:21:56Amanda Dobbins?

  I think so.

• 1:21:56Sean Fennessey?

  Is that how the series ended?

• 1:21:58Speaker 04

  Google AI says that's correct. I've never seen the show.

• 1:22:01Sean Fennessey?

  I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the idea of the real life couple of Vincent Carthizer and Alexis, Alexis Bledel being represented on screen. And that, and I like to think of that as Rory's spiritual partner.

• 1:22:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Um, I'm trying to think.

• 1:22:15Speaker 04

  Also, this is the take that the characters have on Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice, right? This is where they land as well?

• 1:22:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, they lay that Logan is the best for Rory.

• 1:22:24Speaker 04

  Oh no. So we're saying Jess and they say Logan?

• 1:22:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, so they say Logan is the best for Rory, which is true, but they also say that like Rory's a, that they're both spoiled. So they deserve each other. And I would argue that it's not, nothing's really Logan's fault. It's Rory's fault. So I think Logan is the best.

• 1:22:41Speaker 04

  Understood.

• 1:22:41Amanda Dobbins?

  But Jess definitely is our flavor.

• 1:22:46Sean Fennessey?

  What's next?

• 1:22:48Speaker 09

  What's up, guys? My name is Brent. I am 28 years old for Amanda. I live in San Diego. And my question is for Amanda. Amanda, I'd like you to recast X-Men. No, I'm just kidding. My real question is, congratulations on 900 episodes. How has the show changed and evolved in ways that you guys were not expecting? How has the show become different than when it started on day one in ways that you didn't think that it would change or evolve or grow? Big fan. Keep doing what you're doing. Thank you.

• 1:23:21Sean Fennessey?

  It's a nice question.

• 1:23:22Amanda Dobbins?

  It is nice. I'm 41 on Netflix, so.

• 1:23:26Sean Fennessey?

  That's a change.

• 1:23:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's an answer.

• 1:23:29Sean Fennessey?

  I, um, you weren't on the show when it started.

• 1:23:32Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true.

• 1:23:32Sean Fennessey?

  That's a huge change. A change for the better.

• 1:23:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Talking directors.

• 1:23:35Sean Fennessey?

  It was just me interviewing directors for almost a year. At least six months. And then you started coming on more. Other guests started coming on more. And then I want to say it was the fall of 18, maybe when you officially joined, I mean, it just started going to two a week.

• 1:23:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, and doing the Oscars.

• 1:23:53Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right. So that was almost eight years ago since that took place. So that's probably the single biggest change. And it led to the show becoming

• 1:24:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Sean Fennessey?

  as much about us nattering about this and that as it did filmmaking and movies and everything else.

• 1:24:09Amanda Dobbins?

  We do see a lot of movies.

• 1:24:11Sean Fennessey?

  A lot of movies. How has the show changed?

• 1:24:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, we did used to do this in a windowless room, just the two of us. And it would get really, really wacky sometimes.

• 1:24:27Sean Fennessey?

  It would.

• 1:24:27Amanda Dobbins?

  And I think that we still have that ability. And every once in a while, you let me steer things off the, off the rails. But there was a sort of a claustrophobic insane quality to the early episodes.

• 1:24:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. So when we went back into the studio with Bobby Wagner had moved to the East Coast. And it was literally just us. And I was pressing the buttons and Bobby was engineering the session remotely.

• 1:24:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:50Sean Fennessey?

  Where, yeah, we would get a little weird. And that was fun. I enjoyed that. I think it was very helpful for coping with whatever was going on in the universe at that time.

• 1:24:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I mean, we say that, but like. Like Frog Sheriff was also before the pandemic.

• 1:25:03Sean Fennessey?

  That was also on camera.

• 1:25:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, there was something about it that was still, we haven't lost it.

• 1:25:08Sean Fennessey?

  No, the design of the show, though, I mean, it hasn't really changed. I think it's a pretty honest reflection of how we feel about movies, what they mean to us and the ways in which they like drive us a little crazy, get us really excited about things.

• 1:25:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:25:21Sean Fennessey?

  I feel like we still have a lot of passion. I certainly have a lot of passion for it right now. I have not, I'm tired a lot, but I really like doing the show still a lot.

• 1:25:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I do too, and it's also, I, the other things have fallen away in a nice way, you know, I just don't watch TV anymore. I don't really have to. It feels great.

• 1:25:35Sean Fennessey?

  You know, the same is true for me, and that is one, one thing that has really changed.

• 1:25:38Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Sean Fennessey?

  Cause I am just really checked out on television and there's plenty of good shows or whatever, but I actually, per Chris's nudging, last night at your house, watched the first episode of Euphoria and I like Euphoria and I was like, do I need this?

• 1:25:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51Sean Fennessey?

  What's this giving me? And like, that show's more, more well made than 98% of all TV shows, but it just feels much more incidental and much less essential to my cultural consumption nowadays. And it doesn't mean that movies are like so much more important than they were five years ago. I think they're.

• 1:26:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Hopefully they are a little bit more.

• 1:26:10Sean Fennessey?

  It feels like they're tipping back towards something for sure.

• 1:26:12Amanda Dobbins?

  We're getting there.

• 1:26:12Sean Fennessey?

  But I don't think we're going back to 1995 anytime soon.

• 1:26:15Amanda Dobbins?

  No.

• 1:26:16Sean Fennessey?

  You know, what other things have changed?

• 1:26:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, we are now on camera.

• 1:26:22Sean Fennessey?

  We're on camera.

• 1:26:22Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 1:26:23Sean Fennessey?

  I'll tell you, a lot of people are aware of the show, which is, has upsides and downsides.

• 1:26:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Sean Fennessey?

  And I've had some nice conversations with some extremely successful, well-known people who are like aware of the show and that makes me want to die.

• 1:26:33Amanda Dobbins?

  That is a little weird.

• 1:26:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Cause I don't, I don't really feel that it's, it's for them. I appreciate them. I admire their work, but much in the way that I don't ever want to talk to a celebrity or someone whose work I admire. We're not doing it for them because they know more than we do.

• 1:26:50Sean Fennessey?

  Correct.

• 1:26:51Amanda Dobbins?

  And so this is for people who are as enthusiastic about movies from afar as we are. I guess another thing that's changed is that we've met the next generation. Do you think that the, the audience has gotten younger?

• 1:27:08Sean Fennessey?

  I'm consistently astonished by how young the audience is.

• 1:27:11Amanda Dobbins?

  And I just, I want to say like, I, I love you guys and I'm so grateful, but also like, we are two people in our 40s talking about movies. So like, anytime you feel like you need to graduate, like mom and dad love you and support you and it's okay.

• 1:27:25Sean Fennessey?

  I'm going the other way. You can never move out. You have to stay here forever.

• 1:27:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, pay for your phone until 25, okay?

• 1:27:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, you can keep the gas card if you don't move out of my house.

• 1:27:38Sean Fennessey?

  It was exact, I, I think exactly what I'll say to my daughter in about 20 years.

• 1:27:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Sean Fennessey?

  Um, okay, what's next?

• 1:27:45Speaker 16

  My name's Zeke. Um, I moved to LA about two years ago from New York City. I'm 27 years old. Uh, I've never really wanted a relationship or have been looking for that. Uh, but since I moved to LA, I feel like I'm more about my people. And now at 27, I really feel like I should start considering it and, you know, who I'm going to eventually be with, uh, for hopefully the rest of my life. So my question to you, Amanda, is what kind of factors should I be looking for? I really do love film and so often I feel like I'm looking for that shared interest. Uh, but I found that a lot of the times, uh, that's not really who I connect with the most. So yeah, just getting some advice and I feel like Amanda Dobbins and the Dobb Bob is who I should ask. Thanks.

• 1:28:27Amanda Dobbins?

  That's beautiful and it's nice that you're open at this point in your life. I do wanna, how are we switching from not interested in a relationship to suddenly settling down for the rest of our life? I do, that seems like a big swing, right?

• 1:28:44Sean Fennessey?

  Zeke's in Saturn Return, you know, I mean, that's, he's at that age.

• 1:28:47Amanda Dobbins?

  But I think probably, you know, meet some people first, you know, date, date around a little.

• 1:28:54Sean Fennessey?

  Speak to one person.

• 1:28:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Respectfully and be upfront about your intentions, but you know, you don't want to go from zero to.

• 1:29:02Sean Fennessey?

  It's not useful when meeting new people to say, I'm looking to be married.

• 1:29:07Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true.

• 1:29:07Sean Fennessey?

  They don't like that. They don't want that. They get nervous and scared.

• 1:29:11Amanda Dobbins?

  But it is also not useful to say, hey, I'm only going to spend three hours with you every two weeks and I won't respond to text messages.

• 1:29:23Sean Fennessey?

  I'll tell you what else is a challenge, telling them, hey, would you like to be my first relationship?

• 1:29:29Sean Fennessey?

  That's not, that's not gonna go well.

• 1:29:32Amanda Dobbins?

  So, yeah, I would cast around a bit, but the crux of the question is like, how shared do your interests need to be? And I have found that some overlap is good, but you know, separate things are nice. You can have shared bedrooms, separate interests. That's, um, that's, that's worked for us. Again, I still could not identify a Jawbreaker song, which is something that we learned on my episode of Bands Plan. That is one of my husband's favorite bands. But I think what you really, if movies are a very important part of your life, which if you're sending a voicemail into this podcast, I assume so.

• 1:30:11Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't need to look for like an exact, uh, copy of your own likes and your own letterbox. And in fact, I think that would be kind of weird and not be particularly interesting. But to go back to our first question of what's a red flag, what's a green flag? You probably want someone who's seen a movie in the last year, two years. Maybe not. Maybe movies are what you do on your own time and then you spend, there are lots, there are lots of different ways, but you don't have to find yourself. You don't have to find a carbon copy. And I actually, I think that would probably be pretty boring.

• 1:30:42Sean Fennessey?

  I think the biggest challenge or thing that is easy to, um, forget when you're in this situation, not that Zeke asked me, but I'll share my feelings anyway, is to continue to be open to the other person's interests. To like, you, it's, you're right, I think, to have your own like demarcated spaces and things where you don't need your partner to be interested. But if there is something that really matters to you, making sure that you're making yourself available and open minded about those other things. I find my, my wife is very good about this and very like, I, this morning I was playing the Rolling Stones for Alice. We were just like getting ready in the morning and Eileen came out of the bedroom and she was just like, "Sweet Virginia, I think maybe is the best Rolling Stones song." And I was like, "All right, this is like a nice little, this is our kickoff to our conversation about this." And then Alice was like, "What's Sweet Virginia?"

• 1:31:26Sean Fennessey?

  And then, you know, she didn't have to have an opinion about that. She, but she knew that that would get me perked up and interested in a conversation. And I find that that's helpful. But more importantly than anything, this is something I always think about is the person has to be able to make you laugh. Like, that's the thing that I, I need is like, I need somebody to like kind of snap me out of my shit and make, make me laugh a little bit.

• 1:31:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:31:50Sean Fennessey?

  So if you could, I would, I would search for that.

• 1:31:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, but don't, it's not comparing Letterboxd for us, that's all.

• 1:31:57Sean Fennessey?

  No, I couldn't even imagine trying to.

• 1:32:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Can you?

• 1:32:01Sean Fennessey?

  No, no, no, I can't. Okay, what's next?

• 1:32:06Speaker 09

  Hey, Sean and Amanda, this is Donnie from Athens, Georgia. Has there ever been a movie that you walked out on? I once saw X versus Sever and I had to take off after about 20 minutes. Thanks, gang.

• 1:32:21Amanda Dobbins?

  I wanted to leave Pain and Gain, but my husband wouldn't let me.

• 1:32:26Sean Fennessey?

  Pain and Gain? You guys were together when that came out?

• 1:32:28Amanda Dobbins?

  The Michael Bay, yeah.

• 1:32:30Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great film.

• 1:32:31Amanda Dobbins?

  It wasn't, it wasn't for me. I also was just kind of like, I get it. You know what I mean?

• 1:32:36Sean Fennessey?

  I do. And so much so that you watched, you and Juliette, watched me walk out of Last Christmas.

• 1:32:40Amanda Dobbins?

  That's true, yeah.

• 1:32:41Sean Fennessey?

  Which I did not think was very good.

• 1:32:42Amanda Dobbins?

  But you actually don't know how that ends, and I don't want to spoil it for the people at home.

• 1:32:46Sean Fennessey?

  You can look it up if I want.

• 1:32:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Except for Thomas, the seven-year-old with the fake name.

• 1:32:51Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, Thomas, yeah, your future son. I don't regret that. I don't walk out of a lot of movies.

• 1:33:00Sean Fennessey?

  I try to sit through and really get the, get what went wrong, even when things are going wrong. I will, I will check out on a movie at home.

• 1:33:09Amanda Dobbins?

  Right, but that's different. Once you've made the effort of going to the theater.

• 1:33:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I won't really leave. I don't really understand that.

• 1:33:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Festivals are slightly different because you're trying to see different things.

• 1:33:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I don't want to be rude. I've definitely walked out of, I walked out of a couple of movies when we went to Sundance, for sure. Because you're trying to navigate the timing of the day.

• 1:33:27Amanda Dobbins?

  There are a couple that I walked out of.

• 1:33:29Sean Fennessey?

  I haven't really walked out of.

• 1:33:30Amanda Dobbins?

  At Venice.

• 1:33:31Sean Fennessey?

  Too much. Maybe one or two things that tell you right over the years, but not really. Because there's also just like a quality factor most of the time. Sundance is, the slate is so big, it's like a crap shoot. You're taking a chance on things. We'll find out it can, you know?

• 1:33:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I guess so.

• 1:33:44Sean Fennessey?

  There's definitely going to be things that we're not clicking with.

• 1:33:46Amanda Dobbins?

  But yeah, but even there, because it's ticketed, it's not like you can leave and then go.

• 1:33:50Sean Fennessey?

  Jump into another thing. Good point.

• 1:33:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is the reason at festivals that you would do it. So, I quit books all the time, I just want to say that, for the record. And I feel like life is too short.

• 1:33:59Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks for letting me know.

• 1:34:01Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, if you're not clicking, move on. But that's only for books.

• 1:34:05Sean Fennessey?

  Cool.

• 1:34:07Sean Fennessey?

  This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Upsizing to a large popcorn? Smart move. Staying for the post-credit sequence? Smart move. Finding ways to be financially savvy? Very smart move. Maybe the smartest, especially when you choose to bundle home and auto with help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents. Bundling, just another way to save with the personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state. What's next?

• 1:34:41Speaker 17

  Hi, Sean. Hi, Amanda. This is Sarah, longtime listener, first time caller. Thank you so much for all of the accompaniment on dog walks and house cleans and kitchen activities. Huge Dog Mom member. I would like to ask a question that I hope has not been answered 700 million times. I apologize if it has. Like, if you had to cast someone to play each other, ideally civilly, who do you think would actually be a great casting fit? Like, if they were going to make a Big Pick movie? I don't know why they would, but if they would, who would you cast as each other? Thanks again. Love you both. Bye.

• 1:35:21Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, let's, we've done this.

• 1:35:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24Sean Fennessey?

  Let's do different decades.

• 1:35:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:35:28Amanda Dobbins?

  Then, then currently.

• 1:35:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, so 70s, I would just say Jane Fonda.

• 1:35:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, my God, that's so nice. Okay, 70s for you. I'm, it's, it's hard because I don't want to do like full character actor, but you know.

• 1:35:41Sean Fennessey?

  I'll tell you who I think would do a good job playing me. Michael Murphy. Do you know Michael Murphy? Yeah.

• 1:35:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, I, I can see that. Sure.

• 1:35:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:56Amanda Dobbins?

  The, the friend in, is that the friend in Manhattan?

• 1:35:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 1:35:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. I was gonna say, and this is nice, but I started just thinking through The Godfather, and I think. James Caan could do it.

• 1:36:08Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 1:36:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Which is nice for you. I'm being nice.

• 1:36:10Sean Fennessey?

  Wow, that's.

• 1:36:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, you gave me Jane Fonda.

• 1:36:12Sean Fennessey?

  That's very exciting.

• 1:36:13Amanda Dobbins?

  You gave me Jane Fonda, but there's just something like the, the, the fast talking, a little hot headed part of him that you could absolutely, you know.

• 1:36:20Sean Fennessey?

  A little more aggro than you'd expect. Yeah.

• 1:36:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:23Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think I could beat the shit out of Carlo like that convincingly?

• 1:36:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I do.

• 1:36:27Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:36:28Amanda Dobbins?

  That's, I mean, that's kind of what was, you know, and then you, you know, meet an untimely death, uh, but in a dramatic way.

• 1:36:33Sean Fennessey?

  Well, James Caan in Thief.

• 1:36:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:37Sean Fennessey?

  Is my platonic ideal performance.

• 1:36:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:36:41Sean Fennessey?

  Like that, to me, I've not seen a film more perfectly cast and I've not seen a character more perfectly realized.

• 1:36:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:50Sean Fennessey?

  You know, the Joe Boss of my own body, that, that guy.

• 1:36:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:54Sean Fennessey?

  You know, let's get on with this big romance. Like all of that stuff. The like, come on, let's go.

• 1:37:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, that's what I'm saying. You have a certain aspect of it.

• 1:37:03Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think I look like James Caan.

• 1:37:04Amanda Dobbins?

  I wish I looked like James Caan. Yeah, but if you cut the hair, you'd like, you style the hair and then at least he's tall enough, you know?

• 1:37:12Sean Fennessey?

  He's got that nice curl.

• 1:37:13Amanda Dobbins?

  It's just tall. You, it's pretty easy because you just put on the wig for anybody and then they have your head shape.

• 1:37:18Sean Fennessey?

  I put on the, somebody could put the.

• 1:37:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Someone puts on, yeah, someone puts on a Sean wig and then there was.

• 1:37:23Sean Fennessey?

  Do you sell those?

• 1:37:24Amanda Dobbins?

  No, I mean, we could. There was someone, maybe it was in Vegas last week or something, but you were standing next to me and then there was someone else who was like Sean from behind, like over on the other side of the room.

• 1:37:34Sean Fennessey?

  Handsome fellow?

• 1:37:34Amanda Dobbins?

  I was like very confused. No, it was Sean from behind. So he just had the head shape.

• 1:37:38Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:38Amanda Dobbins?

  You know?

• 1:37:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's a nice shape.

• 1:37:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Um.

• 1:37:41Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks, Jack.

• 1:37:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:37:42Sean Fennessey?

  Not of affirmation.

• 1:37:43Amanda Dobbins?

  You're just doing seventies? So now you want to do eighties?

• 1:37:46Sean Fennessey?

  Eighties. Um, Bonnie Bedelia?

• 1:37:53Amanda Dobbins?

  That's nice, but the hair is.

• 1:37:56Sean Fennessey?

  The hair is not great. She needs to get a straightener.

• 1:37:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Um.

• 1:37:59Sean Fennessey?

  But, but there's something attitudinal.

• 1:38:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. I can see it. I'm thinking eighties.

• 1:38:05Sean Fennessey?

  A very no bullshit actor, Bonnie Bedelia.

• 1:38:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. Um.

• 1:38:11Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm trying to think. Like, Michael Keaton, when you're being affable.

• 1:38:17Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 1:38:17Amanda Dobbins?

  But that's not that often. It's like, it's like, Michael Keaton is one half of you and James Connaughton is the other half. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:38:24Sean Fennessey?

  James Connaughton of the 80s is different than James Connaughton of the 70s.

• 1:38:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, that's true. Um, let's see. Anybody else?

• 1:38:31Sean Fennessey?

  I feel I'm pretty affable.

• 1:38:33Amanda Dobbins?

  Uh, but not with me. And that's the point. But so is this, is this a biopic about the big picture or about each individual person?

• 1:38:42Speaker 04

  I think she implied big picture because she says, I don't know why they would make a big pick movie.

• 1:38:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:38:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Sean Fennessey?

  I know why.

• 1:38:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:38:49Sean Fennessey?

  This is the story of our time.

• 1:38:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:38:51Speaker 04

  Exactly right.

• 1:38:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I'll give you, I'll give you Keaton.

• 1:38:54Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that's great. Uh, 90s?

• 1:38:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I think 90s is when my like, true answer comes onto the, onto the scene.

• 1:39:04Sean Fennessey?

  The person that you feel you are closest to?

• 1:39:07Amanda Dobbins?

  No, for you.

• 1:39:08Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:39:09Amanda Dobbins?

  The, like, the real answer is Edward Norton, who plays you.

• 1:39:11Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And, and that would be, I mean, it could be 90s or 2000s, but that's, that's the answer.

• 1:39:17Sean Fennessey?

  See, I feel like 90s Sigourney Weaver would be an interesting move for you, which is different than what we've talked about in the past.

• 1:39:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Um, I mean, I love Sigourney Weaver, so I would accept that.

• 1:39:27Sean Fennessey?

  You know, you can do sternness, you can be light, you can be Zul, you know, you can, you can be Ripley.

• 1:39:33Amanda Dobbins?

  What, but yeah, but is she doing that in the 90s when?

• 1:39:36Sean Fennessey?

  She's got not one, but two Alien films in the 90s.

• 1:39:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, sick.

• 1:39:39Sean Fennessey?

  Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection.

• 1:39:41Amanda Dobbins?

  But we accept Alien 3?

• 1:39:44Sean Fennessey?

  Um, we accept it.

• 1:39:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:39:45Sean Fennessey?

  We, we accept Alien Resurrection far less.

• 1:39:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:39:49Sean Fennessey?

  We don't, we don't love Alien 3. We wish, we wish it was more.

• 1:39:52Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm trying to think of other 90s people that could be you. Pullman, Bill Pullman?

• 1:39:59Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. I accept that. Yeah.

• 1:40:01Amanda Dobbins?

  But you can kind of see it, right? Yeah, exactly.

• 1:40:03Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 1:40:04Amanda Dobbins?

  And the hair, a little bit?

• 1:40:05Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:40:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Sean Fennessey?

  For sure. This is our Independence Day.

• 1:40:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:40:08Sean Fennessey?

  Remember when he said that, when he was in a fire jet?

• 1:40:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. He also gets dumped in Sleepless in Seattle. And, uh, yeah.

• 1:40:16Sean Fennessey?

  It's tough.

• 1:40:17Amanda Dobbins?

  But he gets the girl in while you were sleeping.

• 1:40:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Is he the brother in that?

• 1:40:20Amanda Dobbins?

  He's the brother. Yeah.

• 1:40:23Sean Fennessey?

  You got some Sandy energy as well.

• 1:40:25Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, thanks.

• 1:40:26Sean Fennessey?

  Right?

• 1:40:26Amanda Dobbins?

  I accept. Yeah.

• 1:40:28Sean Fennessey?

  Nineties Sandy.

• 1:40:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, yeah, but she's very winning.

• 1:40:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Sandy at sixty-one.

• 1:40:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Looking very good.

• 1:40:35Sean Fennessey?

  Knocked my socks off.

• 1:40:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Sean Fennessey?

  Just could not believe it. Just really special stuff.

• 1:40:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:40Sean Fennessey?

  Very happy for her. Okay, what's next? Let's do like a few more.

• 1:40:45Speaker 18

  Hi, big picture. My name is Rodrigo and I'm a big fan and listener and myself and my kids listen to the podcast every day on our way to school each morning. So my son Nico, who is nine, has a picture, has a question for you guys.

• 1:41:04Speaker 17

  Sean, Amanda, what is your favorite movie to watch with your kids?

• 1:41:09Speaker 18

  Happy nine hundred episodes. Bye.

• 1:41:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Nico, hi. Thank you for listening. Really. And I'm sorry for using bad words. Okay, my favorite movie to watch with my kids. This weekend, we watched Paddington again, the original, and Knox, my four-year-old, doesn't like Paddington two because the nuns are scary for him, but he likes the original very much.

• 1:41:39Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:41:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Even though, and it's funny, and I think that he and I enjoy the same things about it.

• 1:41:48Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:41:49Amanda Dobbins?

  We've oftentimes, we're watching movies and I think something's funny, or Knox thinks something's funny, but we both think the scene where Paddington, you know, comes sailing out of the bathroom on the bathtub is equally funny. And when Knox started laughing, he just, he cracks up and there's nothing better in the world than Knox laughing, like full belly laugh. So I like any movie that makes that happen, but Paddington is the most recent example.

• 1:42:13Sean Fennessey?

  That's a great answer. Truth be told, Alice doesn't re-watch a ton of movies anymore. She has at multiple stages of her life. The number one movie she probably re-watches the most now is Frozen 2, which is a movie I don't like.

• 1:42:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:24Sean Fennessey?

  But she loves Frozen and Frozen 2, as do many young children. The one, I would say the one that she has re-watched the most, that I like the most, is probably Moana. And that's the one that I have been most like, Disney's still got it. You know, I remember Jason Gallagher saying that to me years ago, at the beginning of The Ringer. And him being like, "Moana, dog, this is, you don't understand." Because his son at that time was very young and was really into it. And that, I could watch that movie any time of the day, and I think it's really, really great. But she's, I mean, we're now pretty, I looked at the list of movies she's seen. I think we saw The Land Before Time at Vidiums on Sunday.

• 1:43:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03Sean Fennessey?

  And that was the 136th movie she's seen. So, she's knocking some stuff out.

• 1:43:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:11Sean Fennessey?

  And she wants to see new stuff. She's constantly looking for something new. After we saw the movie, we went to the video store, and she's like, "What have I not seen? What have I not seen?" So, we don't re-watch as much. I was absolutely moved by that phone call, though.

• 1:43:24Amanda Dobbins?

  I know.

• 1:43:25Sean Fennessey?

  I'm like, a little worried about a nine-year-old listening to the show, but...

• 1:43:29Sean Fennessey?

  And I also, if something has changed about the show, that's the thing that has changed. It's just like, what our mentality is around movies, and how we think about it, and who maybe even is interested in the show. I would have assumed it would have been just like, burnt-out, sad, single bros in 2018.

• 1:43:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:43:46Sean Fennessey?

  And now, this is a family program? Like, this is a very different experience.

• 1:43:51Amanda Dobbins?

  It's very sweet. Thank you, Nico.

• 1:43:52Sean Fennessey?

  Thank you, Nico.

• 1:43:55Speaker 19

  Hello, all. The big picture. This is a question in regards to the High Council, and wondering what is required for entry to the Council, and how to maintain membership status in the Council. This is all just for the spirit of transparency and accountability for all members. Thank you very much, and have a good one.

• 1:44:17Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's not a club that has any sort of subscription fee. You know, there's no dues. There's not, you're not going to be judged on the size of your collection. First and foremost, it's about integrity and how you live in the world. Secondarily, you have to think of it more like a knighthood. This is really more of a royal court experience.

• 1:44:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:39Sean Fennessey?

  And we don't really have jousting in these modern times. But I think if you're willing to die on the sword for the future of physical media, you will at least be considered for membership. But, you know, I don't, I don't act alone. I don't operate alone on the council.

• 1:44:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, how many seats are there at the round table?

• 1:45:00Sean Fennessey?

  Well, we can build furniture as we've built shelves. And I'm not, this is not an exclusionary space.

• 1:45:08Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:45:08Sean Fennessey?

  What I want is, I want people to join us.

• 1:45:11Amanda Dobbins?

  All right.

• 1:45:11Sean Fennessey?

  I want, I want to take over.

• 1:45:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:45:13Sean Fennessey?

  These, these, these studios, you know, there was some, some awful news about the Disney Corporation last week, they've laid off a thousand people, including the home entertainment group, almost in full, which doesn't necessarily mean they won't be still making home entertainment. But the group of people who work really hard on that stuff are not there anymore. It's very sad. And so we're fighting, we're fighting back against that. That's what we're doing on the council, you know? And we're also being sad, middle-aged men. You don't have to be a sad, middle-aged man to be on the council. But it does help.

• 1:45:44Amanda Dobbins?

  And that's why you led with size doesn't matter. I'm talking about the collections, okay?

• 1:45:50Sean Fennessey?

  Size matters sometimes.

• 1:45:51Amanda Dobbins?

  I was gonna say, I was like, that's delusional, but that's okay.

• 1:45:54Sean Fennessey?

  Sometimes, well, you know, CR is at the beginning of his journey, his collecting journey. He was not, he was, he was welcomed warmly despite

• 1:46:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:46:02Sean Fennessey?

  the modesty of his collection, which has grown even since that episode. The High Council, I'd like to report, will return.

• 1:46:12Speaker 04

  How many more do you want to do?

• 1:46:15Sean Fennessey?

  One, two?

• 1:46:17Speaker 04

  This is a good one to end on.

• 1:46:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:46:18Speaker 04

  Uh, and I have a follow-up, kinda to make it a double part or two.

• 1:46:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:46:23Speaker 20

  Hello, Amanda and Sean. My name is Jack from Pittsburgh, birth year 2000, and I do know what voicemails are. My question is, could you guys assemble the Mount Rushmore of big pics most important movies? Which four movies have been the most important to the show? My guess is Die Hard with a Vengeance would be George Washington, but I'm excited to see yours. Thanks, guys.

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  We got another voicemail that I couldn't include, which was also asking about the Mount Rushmore big picture episodes. So I figured this, this two-parter, just what is most representative of this show is good to end on.

• 1:46:59Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, great, great question. One, I want to do more Mount Rushmore episodes. They say that those episodes don't work and they're incoherent. I disagree.

• 1:47:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:47:07Sean Fennessey?

  Specifically identifying which president a film is.

• 1:47:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:47:12Sean Fennessey?

  It's just a fun game.

• 1:47:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:47:13Sean Fennessey?

  And everybody needs to shut up and relax. All right? I'm coming up with games all the goddamn time.

• 1:47:18Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Sean Fennessey?

  Some of them are gonna be good, some of them are gonna be even better.

• 1:47:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Beautiful.

• 1:47:23Sean Fennessey?

  In this case.

• 1:47:23Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:47:24Sean Fennessey?

  It was better.

• 1:47:24Amanda Dobbins?

  All right.

• 1:47:25Sean Fennessey?

  Um, the Mount Rushmore.

• 1:47:27Amanda Dobbins?

  So.

• 1:47:28Sean Fennessey?

  Who's on Mount Rushmore? It's, uh, it's Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt?

• 1:47:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Teddy.

• 1:47:33Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Teddy Roosevelt.

• 1:47:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:34Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And FDR, I've got a giant head in my backyard.

• 1:47:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. Well, but I think wasn't.

• 1:47:38Sean Fennessey?

  Cause of the New Deal and all that.

• 1:47:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Didn't Teddy, like, buy the la- didn't Teddy, like, build Mount Rushmore and then put himself on it? Wasn't he involved in some of the parks?

• 1:47:46Sean Fennessey?

  I don't think that's what happened. I don't think so.

• 1:47:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Anyone, no one in the booth?

• 1:47:48Speaker 04

  You definitely should not be looking at me for that answer.

• 1:47:51Amanda Dobbins?

  You didn't get to this part in history class?

• 1:47:52Speaker 04

  History was not my strong suit.

• 1:47:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, let's see.

• 1:47:54Sean Fennessey?

  You said Teddy Roosevelt built Mount Rushmore?

• 1:47:56Amanda Dobbins?

  No, but like, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, wasn't he, didn't he, like, make a big push for national parks?

• 1:48:03Sean Fennessey?

  Well, that is true, yes.

• 1:48:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. So then, isn't it sort of, what am I look- oh, I'm looking at the National Parks Service.

• 1:48:09Sean Fennessey?

  No, this was 1927. So that's well after Teddy Roosevelt's time.

• 1:48:14Amanda Dobbins?

  But I, I'm just like, didn't he, like, lay the groundwork? Whatever. Okay. But look for it. Look for my upcoming book, How Teddy Roosevelt.

• 1:48:21Sean Fennessey?

  If you could remove.

• 1:48:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Grandfathered himself in.

• 1:48:23Sean Fennessey?

  If you could remove Roosevelt and put any American leader up, who would you put up there?

• 1:48:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Chris Ryan.

• 1:48:28Sean Fennessey?

  I said leader.

• 1:48:32Amanda Dobbins?

  Of the CR heads who are here in America and also Australia.

• 1:48:35Sean Fennessey?

  These are zealots. You know, I'm talking about men and women in organized society.

• 1:48:40Amanda Dobbins?

  I'm Teddy Roosevelt. I'm just trying, I'm also trying to show the limitations of this game when it comes to our understanding of American history, but that's okay.

• 1:48:49Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:48:50Amanda Dobbins?

  So you want to do movies or episodes first?

• 1:48:53Sean Fennessey?

  Um, movies.

• 1:48:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:48:56Sean Fennessey?

  Social networks going on.

• 1:48:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:48:58Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's Roosevelt.

• 1:49:01Amanda Dobbins?

  You think Social Network is Roosevelt?

• 1:49:03Sean Fennessey?

  I do. I do.

• 1:49:04Amanda Dobbins?

  Cause it laid the groundwork for the national parks.

• 1:49:08Sean Fennessey?

  No, because he was like a buccaneer Roosevelt.

• 1:49:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Sean Fennessey?

  You know?

• 1:49:11Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:49:11Sean Fennessey?

  Much like Mark Zuckerberg. He was forging a new path across this American terrain.

• 1:49:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:49:18Sean Fennessey?

  You know, he was, he was the wind and the lion.

• 1:49:21Amanda Dobbins?

  I love your interpretation of American history.

• 1:49:25Sean Fennessey?

  Got a free wheel in it here.

• 1:49:26Amanda Dobbins?

  What else, what else you got?

• 1:49:29Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I know you'd say Birth of a Nation for George Washington, but I would never allow that, of course, because of the terrible ideas in that film.

• 1:49:35Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:49:35Sean Fennessey?

  Um, Casablanca, I think is Washington, probably.

• 1:49:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. You would do Casablanca over Singin' in the Rain?

• 1:49:42Sean Fennessey?

  Nope. Yes, I would do, I would do Casablanca and I would do Singin' in the Rain as Jefferson.

• 1:49:47Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:49:47Sean Fennessey?

  Those two presidents are sort of close together historically.

• 1:49:50Amanda Dobbins?

  All right.

• 1:49:50Sean Fennessey?

  And they both represent something about, um, the golden age of Hollywood stepping forward.

• 1:49:56Amanda Dobbins?

  Great. But you think we need two golden age of Hollywoods?

• 1:49:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 1:49:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:50:00Sean Fennessey?

  And then for Lincoln, I'd say Congo.

• 1:50:02Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:50:05Sean Fennessey?

  Just, you know, a fearless leader, the great emancipator.

• 1:50:08Amanda Dobbins?

  I think Mission Impossible and, and Singin' in the Rain. Oh, sorry. I said Social Network and Singin' in the Rain, but I think we need Mission Impossible Fallout on there. You don't think?

• 1:50:15Sean Fennessey?

  Mission Impossible Fallout?

• 1:50:16Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:17Sean Fennessey?

  On the Mount Rushmore?

• 1:50:19Amanda Dobbins?

  Like, not of the greatest movies of all time.

• 1:50:22Sean Fennessey?

  Just that a representative of where we're at?

• 1:50:25Amanda Dobbins?

  You don't think we need Fallout on there?

• 1:50:27Sean Fennessey?

  If you want to make Fallout of Abraham Lincoln, that's fine by me.

• 1:50:30Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, I mean, instead of Congo.

• 1:50:32Sean Fennessey?

  Well, I was joking about Congo.

• 1:50:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 1:50:34Sean Fennessey?

  But what if, what if we were like all the president's men or, you know, something?

• 1:50:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, we need a fourth one.

• 1:50:39Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. We, we got Social Network, Casablanca, Singin' in the Rain.

• 1:50:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Casablanca and Singin' in the Rain is, are, they're two of my favorite movies, but like both of them, okay, fine, fine.

• 1:50:49Sean Fennessey?

  What about, uh, well, you love Song of the South. Do you want to put Song of the South on there?

• 1:50:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:50:56Amanda Dobbins?

  As who? As which president? Ye great scholar of national history? Of American history?

• 1:51:03Sean Fennessey?

  God, I don't know. What else? I mean, you know, Few Good Men is a big one for us.

• 1:51:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:51:07Sean Fennessey?

  That's a, that's a, that's a.

• 1:51:09Amanda Dobbins?

  All right. So you want that to be the Tom Cruise movie?

• 1:51:11Sean Fennessey?

  Protestations.

• 1:51:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. So Social Network, A Few Good Men, Singin' in the Rain, and what's the fourth?

• 1:51:16Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:21Sean Fennessey?

  Probably Other Mommy.

• 1:51:22Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay. Yeah. There we go. All right. Now, episodes.

• 1:51:29Sean Fennessey?

  Deacon's Hall of Fame.

• 1:51:29Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:51:31Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:37Sean Fennessey?

  Dark Knight Rises commentary?

• 1:51:40Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:51:42Sean Fennessey?

  That's a funny episode.

• 1:51:43Amanda Dobbins?

  Is it?

• 1:51:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:44Amanda Dobbins?

  I just remember that I got Girl Scout cookies and kept trying to give you guys the Girl Scout cookies. And you were like, we do not want Girl Scout cookies. That's really my only memory.

• 1:51:51Sean Fennessey?

  We were extremely focused on Bane.

• 1:51:53Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:51:53Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I think the 2000 movie draft?

• 1:52:03Amanda Dobbins?

  Was that?

• 1:52:04Sean Fennessey?

  With, with Mal, Van, and Joe?

• 1:52:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Oh, right. And that's when I had my perfect game. Because that's when I got Bring It On and Coyote Ugly and Virgin Suicides.

• 1:52:15Sean Fennessey?

  Literally, no one has ever said that. You're just saying that out loud as though it were something written in textbooks.

• 1:52:19Amanda Dobbins?

  It was incredible. What else did I have? I like, you couldn't knock me off my square.

• 1:52:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. As if that were a good choice.

• 1:52:27Amanda Dobbins?

  I think there were like, there were several more amazing ones.

• 1:52:30Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, for sure. That's definitely what I was thinking.

• 1:52:32Amanda Dobbins?

  2000 draft?

• 1:52:33Sean Fennessey?

  2000 movie draft. Um, I mean, we've done good episodes, you know?

• 1:52:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, you don't want to put those on there?

• 1:52:39Sean Fennessey?

  I think, yeah, I think we've, some of the better episodes we've done. Um, Anatomy of a Fall is a good conversation. Brutalist is a good conversation.

• 1:52:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Tar was good.

• 1:52:47Sean Fennessey?

  Tar is a good conversation.

• 1:52:48Amanda Dobbins?

  One battle after another. And then also you've got Leo and PTA on that. Just two great American filmmakers.

• 1:52:56Sean Fennessey?

  Two Mount Rushmore candidates for this show. I think, um.

• 1:53:00Amanda Dobbins?

  Marriage Story was good?

• 1:53:01Sean Fennessey?

  Marriage Story. There's a certain, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, there's a certain kind of movie.

• 1:53:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:05Sean Fennessey?

  That I think kind of brings out the best in us, that gets us really, really engaged. I don't, you could debate whether or not you think that's the best version of this show. I think some people want this show to be stupid.

• 1:53:13Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, don't, with a Mount Rushmore, don't we get all four?

• 1:53:19Sean Fennessey?

  I don't know how to do this.

• 1:53:20Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, I also, the only other ones, the only other one I thought of was, um, obviously Deacon's Hall of Fame, but I had to Google what year Iron Man 3 came out, but the year that Chris, the draft, where it's 2013. Yeah, so the 2013 draft, Iron Man 3 first pick would be the top forever. Also, the very first auction was also really chaotic and very good.

• 1:53:42Sean Fennessey?

  Explaining Barbarian to you, that was a fun, memorable one.

• 1:53:45Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:45Sean Fennessey?

  Um, we're just doing the work here.

• 1:53:49Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure, every day, all the time.

• 1:53:50Sean Fennessey?

  We have to do 900 more episodes in the next two years, which is something we agreed to on this episode.

• 1:53:57Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, and then, so 200, so then it would be 50 episodes for each of the four Beatles movies, and then we make it to 2,000 and we're out.

• 1:54:05Sean Fennessey?

  I think that's a good idea.

• 1:54:06Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, that's great.

• 1:54:07Sean Fennessey?

  And maybe we should do it like the One Heat Minute podcast, where like each episode breaks down one minute from the film.

• 1:54:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay, perfect.

• 1:54:13Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, that sounds good. Do you, Jack, do you want to add anything to what we've just discussed?

• 1:54:19Speaker 04

  The Chicago movie draft's the most special one for me personally. Just very fun, meeting Tracy, solo producer, us going out. It was very rewarding, seeing everybody in person. And, you know, like, when I'm back here doing this show, I'm not really actually using my brain, like, it's down so much to a muscle memory that, like, getting me out of my comfort zone, having to collaborate with other production people is really fun.

• 1:54:39Sean Fennessey?

  It's nice. I'm sorry about your brain.

• 1:54:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's doing really, really, really good.

• 1:54:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:44Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, good.

• 1:54:47Speaker 01

  Born from the intensity of a night in the Eternal City. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Masculine-leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at Macy's.com.

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting, and completely delicious. Simply, say yes to simple.

• 1:55:46Sean Fennessey?

  Let's talk about a couple of movies real quick.

• 1:55:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 1:55:48Sean Fennessey?

  Before we jump to the conversation. So as I mentioned, you've seen You, Me and Tuscany.

• 1:55:52Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 1:55:52Sean Fennessey?

  And I haven't seen it.

• 1:55:54Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:54Sean Fennessey?

  This is a new film from Cat Coiro, was hotly debated amongst black creatives and its success at the box office, something that Van and Rachel talked about on Higher Learning. What'd you think?

• 1:56:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, so this movie stars Halle Bailey and Roger Jean Page and then a lot of Italian people.

• 1:56:14Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, takes place in Tuscany.

• 1:56:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Most of it takes place in Tuscany. Anna, the Halle Bailey character, is at a, just lost in her life in her young twenties. She's mostly a house sitter and she meets a young man who describes a Tuscan villa that he has built, but then is basically sitting empty. And wouldn't you know it, she has a ticket, a plane ticket to Italy, but really no other money. So she goes to quote unquote, "house sit the Tuscan villa." His family's there. Somehow she winds up telling them that they're engaged and so she pretends to be his fiancee, sort of like a while you were sleeping situation.

• 1:56:58Amanda Dobbins?

  Where she becomes endeared with, to the family while also falling for the brother, who's played by Roger Jean Page.

• 1:57:04Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 1:57:05Amanda Dobbins?

  This movie is a rejoinder to my belief and my insistence that locations can make or break a movie because this is filmed in Tuscany and otherwise really is a hallmark movie. There is no imagination in the script. There is no imagination in the cinematography. I mean, it really looks filmed for TV. Like, it's a real waste of Tuscany. I don't really feel that Halle Bailey and Roger Jean Page have any chemistry. And she in general just looks a little uncomfortable on screen in this, in this movie. I don't really know

• 1:57:45Amanda Dobbins?

  what's going on. So I did not think that this worked from a creative point of view.

• 1:57:51Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, that's too bad.

• 1:57:51Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:52Sean Fennessey?

  I similarly was not, didn't, didn't.

• 1:57:57Sean Fennessey?

  I had a ticket to this movie and I skipped it.

• 1:57:59Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:00Sean Fennessey?

  I was like, is this something I can really do right now? Part of it was, we were traveling to go to Las Vegas. Part of it is just trying to catch up on a lot of stuff we've missed over the last couple of weeks. The film has, I would say somewhat disappointed, not dramatically disappointed, but this does speak to that concern that we had about.

• 1:58:17Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 1:58:17Sean Fennessey?

  How do you make a movie like this theatrical? And this has kind of a high concept and it has that location that you're describing, but.

• 1:58:25Amanda Dobbins?

  But it, but then it doesn't use any of it. And the, the problem is, is that this is not as it is made, a theatrical movie. They put, they made a streaming movie and put it in theaters. And you can just kind of tell.

• 1:58:38Sean Fennessey?

  Do you think it's a rap for Roger Jean Page as a theatrical star?

• 1:58:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Well, this plus his performance in Black Bag, I would say two examples of him not really holding the screen. So in Black Bag, he was surrounded by heavyweights.

• 1:58:55Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:55Amanda Dobbins?

  Not so much in You, Me and Tuscany.

• 1:58:58Sean Fennessey?

  But not, he's not just being blown off the screen by like Fassbender and Blanchett, but like Naomi Harris and Marsha Bella are blowing him off the screen. So, you know, not ideal if you're him. And, you know, he's in Dungeons and Dragons, Honor Among Thieves. He was in The Gray Man, like a little rocky.

• 1:59:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:12Sean Fennessey?

  Since his breakout in Bridgerton, it has not really hit.

• 1:59:15Amanda Dobbins?

  I, this did not hit.

• 1:59:17Speaker 04

  Amanda, I don't know if you stayed for the credits, but I thought it was like a real indictment of the film not working, that the blooper reel was entirely the secondary characters.

• 1:59:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Of course.

• 1:59:27Speaker 04

  And those were the funniest moments of the movie and they're 5%. And.

• 1:59:31Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  It was, it was tough.

• 1:59:32Amanda Dobbins?

  You know, this is the other thing where like romantic comedy is, despite everything I said about, like you do actually need to have a script with a brain and good writing and you need to spend time on the, the setting and the production. There need to be ideas, but like if you don't have two actors who can stand on their own and also have chemistry, it's not going to work. And, and these two, it's, it's not, they just look uncomfortable. It's not that they're not talented. It's just, there is, it doesn't, it doesn't fit. So I feel for them, but it did not work.

• 2:00:08Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, let's talk about The Christopher's.

• 2:00:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:11Sean Fennessey?

  There's a new Steven Soderbergh movie out.

• 2:00:12Amanda Dobbins?

  There sure is.

• 2:00:13Sean Fennessey?

  This is a very low-key film, not in massive wide release. It stars Ian McKellen and Michaela Cole. It is about a woman who is approached by the two estranged children of a very well-known artist, who has entered a kind of funky final stage of his career. Ian McKellen plays the elder artist, Cole plays the woman who is approached. And she is a, help me figure this out, a sort of a former art student who is an artist herself and also has an incredible ability to mimic, to replicate.

• 2:00:45Amanda Dobbins?

  She has a restoration business, but yes, she is, without being too rude, like a forder. Or she has, she has real abilities as forder. She's like the really hot model at the end of Thomas Crown Affair in 1999.

• 2:00:58Sean Fennessey?

  And she is approached by these two children of this famous artist to effectively complete these incomplete paintings and keep them, prepare them, so that they can be sold by these children who have kind of been cut out of this artist's life. Movie's written by Ed Solomon, who's made a handful of projects with Soderbergh over the last couple of years, including No Sudden Move and Mosaic. What did you think of The Christopher's?

• 2:01:22Amanda Dobbins?

  I really like it when Steven Soderbergh does stuff. And this is obviously in my wheelhouse, which is that it is, it's sort of an art heist movie. It's a, it's a caper, I guess. But then also a two-hander of two great actors. It's, it's modest. It's, I like watching Soderbergh movies now because, you know, he obviously works at such volume and so efficiently, as we know, that I, when I watch him, I try to figure out, okay, so what was it about this movie that interested you? That you said, okay, like, I want to try to figure this out?

• 2:01:56Sean Fennessey?

  Okay, so what do you think it was here?

• 2:01:58Amanda Dobbins?

  I thought that, I mean, I thought that it was a little bit the Ian McKellen character and that there is, there's not autobiography, but there is someone who makes a lot of work and who is an artist and who does things at various reasons and starting to think about. One and why you do stuff and what's good and what's bad and so much of what the Ian McKellen character is, he's wrestling both with his, his actual art, but also his legacy and his fame and, and doubt about what's good and what's not. And the disconnect between what is received as like quality and what isn't, which, you know, Soderbergh is like a very smart guy who's thinking about a lot of these things.

• 2:02:43Amanda Dobbins?

  So I think that was probably an interesting idea to him. And then I assumed it was the actual art and the making, the making of the paintings and then also the destruction of the paintings and the forgery and the, how do, how do you communicate the, the physicality of the artwork that, that I did think was interesting. So those are my guesses, but you know, it's also two good performances. I think Michaela Cole's really good in this and is like not the type of performance that Soderbergh usually uses in a movie. It's, you know, it's very, it's very still and she's receptive. So, um, and she's, and she's watching.

• 2:03:24Amanda Dobbins?

  So I thought maybe that was interesting to, to work with a different type of actor.

• 2:03:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I was a little more muted on this. I think the ideas that you're talking about are definitely there and it's interesting. I think McKellen and Cole have good chemistry.

• 2:03:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:37Sean Fennessey?

  I think they're both realized characters. I found the movie a little claustrophobic and that may have been its intention.

• 2:03:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:45Sean Fennessey?

  But we're now working on like the fourth or fifth Soderbergh movie in a row where I'm like, I kind of feel like we're just trapped in somebody's house here.

• 2:03:50Amanda Dobbins?

  Right. I mean, we are.

• 2:03:52Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And part of that is like the scale with which he is making these movies, Black Bag Accepted. You know, when you think about Let Them All Talk and No Sudden Move and this film and Kimmy and Presence, like these are all very.

• 2:04:07Sean Fennessey?

  They're very modest frames, you know, the mise en scène is limited. And it's on purpose, right? Because he can control those environments a lot more. This was the first one where I was like, I don't want to go outside.

• 2:04:21Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:21Sean Fennessey?

  And I know that a lot of the movie is meant to be about this aging man who's kind of like trapped

• 2:04:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:04:26Sean Fennessey?

  in his past and trapped in his ideas. I thought it was very appropriate, so I don't mean to hold it specifically against it, but as you know, I always think about like the arc of the filmmaker.

• 2:04:34Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:04:34Sean Fennessey?

  And how different or not different the previous work is. And he's so renowned for mixing it up, you know, from going from Traffic to Aaron Brockovich to Add a Sight to Schizopolis to Ocean's Eleven, you know, to hopscotching from space to space. And this one felt, for the first time in a while, I was like, okay, I kind of know what you're doing here. Like, I know how the camera's gonna move. I know what the tempo and pacing of the story is gonna be. It's not bad. He doesn't make bad movies. It's just, it was, it felt a little iterative for me.

• 2:05:09Amanda Dobbins?

  I definitely had the thought of, okay, so he spent 15 days on this total, and there is this sense of, this is, it's just a small thing that he did. And I like that Steven Soderbergh is just trying all sorts of stuff.

• 2:05:24Sean Fennessey?

  I do too.

• 2:05:24Amanda Dobbins?

  And he has like, he has an amazing, he has amazing skill, and he can work at volume. And so if he wants to just, you know, like, do like a single, like a nice little, you know, just a bloop, it's fine.

• 2:05:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yep.

• 2:05:37Amanda Dobbins?

  But I agree that it just feels sort of, if not like a side project, then something that he spent like a month on.

• 2:05:44Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's funny to think about it in relation to the news of him not being able to make the Ben Solo movie, which is the kind of movie that would take like a year to make or two years to make. And that these movies where he's getting these pretty sharp scripts from real old pro screenwriters, right? Your Ed Solomons, your David Koephs, your Scott Burns, like these guys who I'm sure what they, what they submit is like probably pretty close to what they're gonna end up shooting.

• 2:06:07Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:08Sean Fennessey?

  And so that they can move quickly, and they're getting super gifted actors in all of these movies. The casting is always so good in his films. But there's a part of me that wants to see him do Ben Solo, you know, that wants to see him do something a little bigger and stretch himself in a different environment. And it seems like he does too, so I'm not holding it against him.

• 2:06:24Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:24Sean Fennessey?

  He's being told no on a couple of things, right? He said he pitched James Bond recently, and they didn't get it. So it's just one of those things where, because he has been so productive. It now feels like 100 slices of pizza. And sometimes you want to have a lamb feast.

• 2:06:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Sure.

• 2:06:42Sean Fennessey?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:06:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:43Sean Fennessey?

  And I love pizza.

• 2:06:45Amanda Dobbins?

  That's fair.

• 2:06:45Sean Fennessey?

  I fucking love pizza.

• 2:06:46Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, I just, I, I was thinking about this movie in the context of CinemaCon and, you know, the continued, like, what's the biggest, loudest, what's like, what is, what is every director's been solo, which is kind of where we are as an industry.

• 2:07:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's very true. You're, you're right.

• 2:07:02Amanda Dobbins?

  And-

• 2:07:03Sean Fennessey?

  Few people are as talented or as interesting as him.

• 2:07:05Amanda Dobbins?

  Exactly. And that's, I mean, and that is the problem is that's like Soderbergh is one on one. Like Soderbergh is also, it, I, this movie would be wonderfully enjoyed at home, you know?

• 2:07:13Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:07:13Amanda Dobbins?

  And it's like, if everybody could make streaming movies, like the, with the quality that Steven Soderbergh made streaming movies, then like, you know, maybe we would have adult dramas again, maybe we would, but-

• 2:07:25Sean Fennessey?

  I agree.

• 2:07:26Amanda Dobbins?

  But, you know, you can say that if everyone could do what Steven Soderbergh does, then we would be living in a, in a much happier place.

• 2:07:32Sean Fennessey?

  A functioning society.

• 2:07:32Amanda Dobbins?

  On a lot of different fronts.

• 2:07:34Sean Fennessey?

  That's absolutely true. Um, let's speak briefly about Blue Heron.

• 2:07:37Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:37Sean Fennessey?

  So it's not out in a lot of theaters yet.

• 2:07:39Amanda Dobbins?

  Okay.

• 2:07:40Sean Fennessey?

  So I certainly don't want to spoil anything about it for people who haven't seen it. We got into some of it when I spoke to Sophie, but, um, this is a film that our friend Adam Neiman has been telling us about for a long time, um, that has been in the works for some time because Sophie's been making movies for a while, but premiered at TIFF last fall. And it's a, a very personal movie about a family of six that settles into their new home on Vancouver Island, which is a place that we know is not a province in Canada.

• 2:08:05Amanda Dobbins?

  It is in British Columbia.

• 2:08:06Sean Fennessey?

  It's in British Columbia, which is a province. Thank you to the people of Canada. And in the film, um, the dynamics of the family evolve because of their eldest son. And, um, the movie, at least in, in the first half, is seen through the eyes of an eight year old girl, who is, seems to be at least in part inspired by Sophie's own experiences. And it's a very, uh, contemplative, complicated, I would say emotionally tumultuous, um, piece of work. What did you think?

• 2:08:37Amanda Dobbins?

  I was quite moved by it. And, and it's also one of those without, without spoiling it, where you, you keep thinking about not just the structure and the filmmaking choices, and it is, um, without spoiling things, kind of-

• 2:08:54Amanda Dobbins?

  There's a meta textual aspect to some of it. But in a, in a new way, in a way that I thought was really engaging, like the first half of what I'd seen. I started thinking about, okay, so this is what you've already shown me and now I'm seeing in a different way. And this is why you showed me that, which is, which is very cool. But also, you know, it's a newer way of exploring a familiar, if, and very sad story, which is like a complicated family dynamic. But it was effective enough that I have just been thinking about it in my own life since I saw it. So it really, it does, it connected with me or I connected with it.

• 2:09:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I think the first half of the film is very well made and interesting and uses like documentary strategies to create dramatic intensity. The second half of the movie takes some pretty bold chances structurally.

• 2:09:44Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:09:45Sean Fennessey?

  And the way the characters interact that I had, could not really think of a comp in a drama. I think there are a lot of comedies that do some of the things that Sophie does in the movie. But I, I, the sensation that the final 30 minutes of the movie gave me, I could not really think of a way that she had kind of elided our general expectations for how a story like that should be told and kind of wrapped up in as much as it can be wrapped up.

• 2:10:12Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:10:13Sean Fennessey?

  It's a very sincere movie. It's a very, even though it's structurally dynamic, it's very straightforward. And I thought really, really cool and a step. And if you look, all of her shorts are on the Criterion Channel right now and you can look at what she's doing. And we talked about this in the interview, but you could feel her figuring out all the moves she's going to make in the feature as you go through each of the short films.

• 2:10:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Right.

• 2:10:37Sean Fennessey?

  We're always a little tough on short films on the show.

• 2:10:38Amanda Dobbins?

  It's not, we're just, they.

• 2:10:40Sean Fennessey?

  On the Oscars.

• 2:10:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes, on the Oscars.

• 2:10:42Sean Fennessey?

  In general, though, when you like a director, I always think it's interesting to see what they're putting on screen in the early stages of their careers. Martin Scorsese, for example, you can buy a collection of his shorts from the Criterion Collection. I would encourage people to do it because you can see him figuring some things out about what interests him, about how to move the camera, where, how to look at someone's face, you know, how to cut a scene. The same is true for this. I think she gets really, really good performances in this movie. Ailagouvven as Sasha, the eight-year-old girl, is, is really good. She's not asked to do a lot, there's not a lot of dialogue in this movie. There's a lot of withholding information and feeling even, not enunciating what's going on specifically, but. Yeah, I was really, really impressed by this. And you mentioned Mylan Kix and this film and Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, and Canada, so it's all happening.

• 2:11:27Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, Ontario. We see you, Ontario. We're sorry that we forgot, but we see you. What cities are in Ontario?

• 2:11:36Amanda Dobbins?

  Toronto?

• 2:11:38Sean Fennessey?

  No.

• 2:11:41Amanda Dobbins?

  Are you sure?

• 2:11:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yes.

• 2:11:42Amanda Dobbins?

  It is in Ontario, yeah.

• 2:11:43Sean Fennessey?

  What else?

• 2:11:44Amanda Dobbins?

  And then Montreal's in Quebec.

• 2:11:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yep. Calgary is in Alberta.

• 2:11:48Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah. What's in Saskatchewan?

• 2:11:52Sean Fennessey?

  Saskatchewan City.

• 2:11:54Amanda Dobbins?

  All right. Canada, we love you. We're grateful for your cinematic works.

• 2:12:00Sean Fennessey?

  Should we go to my conversation?

• 2:12:01Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah, please.

• 2:12:01Sean Fennessey?

  Let's go to my conversation now with Sophia Romvari.

• 2:12:08Sean Fennessey?

  For the first time, Sophia Romvari, thank you for being here. Congratulations on your first feature. Now, I know you've been making shorts for some years. I was curious if there is a movie, since I know you've seen a lot of films in your life, that kind of turned the engine on for wanting to become a filmmaker? When you were a young person or even a little older, when you were studying film and thinking, like, can I really do this as my vocation?

• 2:12:36Speaker 21

  It's a great question that I feel like I should have like a canned answer for at this point, but I think there's so many, there's so many, some of the films that I love are not films that I would want to make myself, but there's films that have just moved me so much and made me feel like I want to be involved in the medium in some way, but I'm trying to think of like an early

• 2:12:58Speaker 21

  interaction, because I think I did grow up with parents that were very avid movie watchers. They would watch a lot of movies and invite us into that world and to watch a lot of films and not always just kid-friendly movies. So I saw a lot of foreign films or just art films that I think I wasn't quite ready to digest at the time.

• 2:13:19Sean Fennessey?

  Were they showing them to you at home?

• 2:13:21Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:13:21Sean Fennessey?

  Or were you going out to the theater to see them?

• 2:13:22Speaker 21

  Definitely at home, yeah. I think so much of my movie watching was actually at home. And because I grew up on a very small island, Gabriel Island, which is even smaller than Vancouver Island, which is what you see in Blue Heron, which didn't have a movie theater. So so much of what we were watching was rented tapes or things that would screen on on the TV or things that they would record from the TV onto VHS tapes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I didn't answer your question at all.

• 2:13:52Sean Fennessey?

  Do you remember a movie that they showed you that you thought, maybe I shouldn't be seeing this or I don't understand this?

• 2:13:56Speaker 21

  Hmm. Oh, yeah, many.

• 2:14:00Speaker 21

  I was I was thinking recently. I mean, I don't remember what ages I was, but I remember I do remember seeing Ponnet pretty early on, which is, I mean, it's not it's not not for kids, but it's a complicated movie. There's a lot of big emotions in that film and it's quite difficult because it's about a child going through grief of a parent. And I remember being very feeling a lot of empathy for the child and having that be a unique experience because there's not that many child performances that are that evocative, I think.

• 2:14:32Speaker 21

  And they also, I remember watching, I've been thinking about this movie a lot recently. It's La Ceremony, the Claude Schubert film. Because it's they they also are, my parents also have a lot of actors that they love to follow the work of. So I think they're big fans of Sandrine Benard and Isabel Hooper.

• 2:14:52Sean Fennessey?

  So I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm raising a little girl and we're not quite at that place where I would show her La Ceremony. But I I have thought like, when will be the time when I start showing things like that? Do you think that it like transformed your sensibilities? Or like, what do you think it gave you that maybe those some of those things came into your life, quote unquote, too soon?

• 2:15:19Speaker 21

  I think at the time, I was not really in the right headspace to accept them as art. And I was just being shown images and films that confused me and were complicated. But I also, now in retrospect, I think that did open up my mind to the possibility of what films can be and what films can do. And I think at first, I'd actually wanted to be an actor. That's what I thought women did in films was act.

• 2:15:49Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:50Speaker 21

  And I actually went as far as trying to audition and apply to acting schools. And the reason I went to film school is because I didn't get into any of those schools because I was not a very good actor.

• 2:16:02Sean Fennessey?

  And yet, you have performed in some of your films.

• 2:16:04Speaker 21

  I have. I enjoy acting, but I think that acting is not for the faint of heart as a career. And it's something that I'm, I have a lot of respect for, but it's not something that I have like the trained craft in. So when I'm in my films, it's out of necessity. You know, I'm available. I'm, I'm the one that is kind of putting myself on the line in those films. And I'm also playing a sort of a version of myself. So if someone gave me a script and asked me to memorize and do different versions, I don't, I don't know that I could do that. But I, I like acting like for fun. But I, I think when I was applying to acting school, it was out of a false sense of what involvement I wanted to have in film. And I applied to film as a sort of backup plan, actually. And when I got into the program, it was very early on in the semester.

• 2:16:46Speaker 21

  I think there was an exercise to direct a film. And I just really had one of those moments of aha, this was what it was the whole time. I just didn't know. And I really haven't had like a look back moment, which I'm so grateful for.

• 2:17:01Sean Fennessey?

  When you had that feeling, was it more related to learning about something technical or something emotional? Or like what triggered the sense that you'd found the thing?

• 2:17:12Speaker 21

  I think just the cumulative nature of film, of getting to work with different, different elements, you know, the, the production design and the, and the performance and the camera and all these different things you have to learn about and also work in tandem with other people. And I think realizing how much craft goes into that and how many decisions you get to make and have to make, I think I fell into that really naturally. I think it's something, I think in my own life, I, I have a lot of trouble with trying to not.

• 2:17:45Speaker 21

  Be a perfectionist and have so much control over everything. But in film, it's like, that's what you're being asked to do. And so I think I can thrive in that environment. And I think when, early on in film school, I was definitely called a micromanager more than once. So, you know, it's something that lends itself to the job. But I think it's something, when you're a young person, you have to learn how to do that in tandem with other people and collaborate with other people and communicate better than any other job I can imagine. You have to communicate not only your vision, but also what other people's needs are to have their vision be heard and translated.

• 2:18:24Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's funny. I definitely share that sensibility. And I've often wondered why I'm so attracted to, interested in filmmakers. And I think it's because there's like a like makes like experience of like someone who's maybe thinking a little too hard about making sure that everything is just right.

• 2:18:41Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:18:41Sean Fennessey?

  But do you feel like sometimes you have to combat that when you're trying to be creative? You know, because like some things you can't control when you're making something.

• 2:18:49Speaker 21

  Oh, for sure. I think it's a false sense of control. Because I think you can control as much as you want with preparation. But then, of course, when you're making a film, there's so many live elements that you're having to react to. And I think that's really where the preparation is necessary is because once you've prepared to a certain extent, you're ready to face the actual spontaneity of what's going to happen. Because it's going to rain, someone's going to be sick, someone's not going to do what you want them to do. All these different things that you then have to, in the moment, decide. And that's where you're actually directing the film. Because you're having to funnel in your intentions and your vision. And it's, unless you're working in animation or something, there's going to be so many

• 2:19:31Speaker 21

  uncontrollable elements, which is what makes film beautiful and also what I think makes film always kind of a documentary regardless of what the genre is.

• 2:19:41Sean Fennessey?

  It's very interesting because your films really puncture that imagined line between what is documentary. I want to talk to you about that. Before we do that, I know you studied film in undergrad and got your MFA. The whole time you were studying, did you think this is how I will, this will be my career? This will be the way that I make money, support a family? Because it's a very challenging, like it's a very bold thing to say, I'm going to try to do this professionally.

• 2:20:07Speaker 21

  To be honest, I've almost never thought about anything long term. What do they mean? Not what filmmakers want to hear, but I really think of my life in sort of six month increments. I've always kind of been that way. Like, will this gig get me through the next six months of rent? Will this, you know, I don't really attach my work, my career. I don't attach filmmaking to the word career because I think career implies longevity. And I don't know, I don't think any of us can really know that in the arts. I want to, I want to keep making films for the rest of my life. I don't even want to retire.

• 2:20:48Speaker 21

  I want, I think that's going to be, if I'm lucky, a very iterative thing that I can grow and change as a person. And the films will evolve with that. And that's such a privilege. But I don't have a plan for like, this is what my career is going to look like. Because I think I'm always going to be a filmmaker who's responsive to like what I'm experiencing, what the world is experiencing. And I think that's hard to plan. Obviously financially, we're so dependent as filmmakers. It's not the same thing as being a painter or a poet. We have to rely on other people. We have to rely on financial means to make work, even if you're making low budget work. So I try not to think too far ahead.

• 2:21:30Sean Fennessey?

  How did you, well, I want to understand a little bit about maybe the Canadian system and how you worked, making the shorts, working towards making Blue Heron. And then also like, how do you support yourself when you're going through that process of like, okay, I'm sharpening my craft, making more shorts, trying to work toward getting to a feature? I assume that's how you were thinking about it. But how do you do both of those things?

• 2:21:53Speaker 21

  With a lot of false confidence. No, no, really, I think, when I talk to like students or more emerging filmmakers, that is a question that comes up a lot is like, you know, How do you get to this point? And I think it's such a cliche thing to say, but there's no one path. And it really, I do believe that for me, the path was I needed to go through making all these short films in order to make this feature. But I didn't know that the feature was at the end of this road. I wasn't making the shorts in order to get there. I think I, once I had made all the shorts that I had made, I, I had done the work I needed to do to explore different modalities of filmmaking and also emotionally, things that I had to kind of excavate.

• 2:22:38Speaker 21

  And so then I was, only once I finished those shorts was I ready to start conceptualizing the feature. I didn't have this sort of like, oh, now I can start applying for funding for this project that I've been thinking of all this time.

• 2:22:50Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 2:22:51Speaker 21

  But the project is obviously cumulative at the same time.

• 2:22:53Sean Fennessey?

  It feels like a culmination in a lot of ways. If you look at the shorts now.

• 2:22:56Speaker 21

  It is.

• 2:22:56Sean Fennessey?

  But I just looked at them like in succession, basically, over the last few days. And it does feel like you're very clearly working towards something and trying to like deconstruct something at the same time. How are you, this is a dumb question, but how do you get like the shorts paid for? How do you actually go about trying to make something like that? I'm sure, again, students are asking this question, but like.

• 2:23:16Speaker 21

  Sure. Yeah, no, it's a, I love talking about it because I think it's part of, I think part of why I'm glad that my shorts are available is because I think they're a good tool for deconstructing the myth of you need a lot to make a film. And because almost all of these films are no to very, very low budgets. Like the, the budget of Pumpkin Movie is literally two pumpkins. Like it's, you know, it's like my best friend.

• 2:23:41Sean Fennessey?

  And a Zoom account, maybe?

• 2:23:42Speaker 21

  Yeah, right. No, it's actually Skype.

• 2:23:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, Skype, there you go.

• 2:23:44Speaker 21

  R I P, R I P Skype. But no, it was, you know, it was my best friend from high school who's, you know, playing herself and me and we're shooting in a friend's apartment. And it was just very minimal, you know, resources. And so many of the concepts were just things that I thought of really, really kind of off the cuff and did them very quickly. And that's, that's my biggest skill, if anything, is just not waiting. I just, I have an idea and then I go and I, I make it, especially with the short films. And Norman, Norman also, a short film about my dog, you know, he was just very old and I wanted to document him and I kind of had this like vague concept of how I could depict this emotional experience and filmed in just a couple of hours.

• 2:24:26Speaker 21

  And so I think the limitations are actually what breed the creativity. So many of the shorts are very intuitive and the feature is much more. It's much more intentional than anything else I've made and that was that was purposeful. Like, I wanted there to be intention behind all the decisions in the in the future.

• 2:24:45Sean Fennessey?

  Looking at the shorts, I was thinking to myself, did you know that a lot of people were going to see these? Because now, like, it's available on the Criterion Channel now, and so a lot of people can look at your work. And I think it works well to see the feature and see kind of the continuity of the body of work. But, you know, they're very personal. And they do feel, at times, like, experiments, a sort of like, will this, can this withstand a short film? This idea that I have?

• 2:25:13Speaker 21

  Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, I feel the same way. Actually, I only recently watched them all in succession because they were playing at a festival, sort of in a mini retrospective. And I did have this moment where I was like, these are really personal. These are really vulnerable. And I think, you know, they were all made in my twenties. They were all made in a time of my life when I was genuinely going through all the things that you see in the films. And I've just been using film as a way to process these things, you know, since the beginning of making my work. And I'm glad there's a documentation of that. And I think I've accepted that vulnerability. And I think, again, from like a perspective of learning from other people, like, for other people, maybe it's it's interesting to see.

• 2:25:57Speaker 21

  But I do see them now as, yeah, that the vulnerability is almost surprising to me in a way. And now I see the feature and I feel like I've found the right distance to make the work.

• 2:26:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it reminded me a little bit of, I'm friends with a lot of writers and just a lot, how we wrote in our twenties, which was a little bit more open.

• 2:26:20Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:26:21Sean Fennessey?

  And you felt like maybe you were looking to be understood, but also had less to protect.

• 2:26:26Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:26:26Sean Fennessey?

  And but so I'm, I'm, I thought Blue Heron was very special. And I'm very interested to hear like how you conceptualized it and effectively why you wanted to tell the story. Because you're some of your shorts kind of glance at or even directly look at what this film sort of becomes about in some respects. But it's a very dangerous thing, I think, to put so much autobiography in a movie. And so when did you start thinking about doing it, since it wasn't part of this big master plan, as you say? And like, why was this the one to be the the first feature?

• 2:27:05Speaker 21

  Yeah, I think, like you said, I think that there was, there's a general openness and a sort of, yeah, that desire to be seen and understood. And I think that, I think that's a very common thing as an artist in your twenties and, because you're also trying to understand yourself. And I think that by the time I'd finished making those films and started to develop Blue Heron, I had just a greater maturity as a person where I, I no longer, no longer felt that need as much, but I also knew that it wasn't possible to be understood by, you know, never mind, everybody, you know, it's just, it's this, when you're making films, not only are you going to be misunderstood, but your intentions are going to be misunderstood and your artistic intentions.

• 2:27:50Speaker 21

  And when you make personal work, people are going to make assumptions about you, about anything that you put into the work. And I can say as much as I want that this film is fiction and that so much of it is complete fiction and people are still gonna make implications. And I just, I have to accept that as a filmmaker who's not only made really explicitly vulnerable work, but also this film is publicly known to be autobiographical. But in my, in my understanding, when I watched the film, I don't see myself. I don't see, I see a version of my experiences, but there is a really, there is a distinct creative difference. And I think the most obvious one to me is that the character who's playing Jeremy is so dissimilar from my brother.

• 2:28:32Speaker 21

  Because that was part of the acceptance of making this film was that I couldn't recreate, you know, I couldn't recreate this person. And there's, that impossibility is part of the point of making the film and part of the point of using film to access that acknowledgement, if that makes sense. You know, I could just trying to acknowledge this, this, this art is the limit to which I can access this person and.

• 2:28:56Sean Fennessey?

  How did you think about making that distinction then? Like making that because you're going to be confronted by. Schmucks like me being like, is this your life? So then what material decisions do you make to say, well, this, I don't want this to seem too close, or I want to find divergences from my own experience, but that still feel,

• 2:29:17Sean Fennessey?

  I always say true, but not real.

• 2:29:19Speaker 21

  I love that.

• 2:29:19Sean Fennessey?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:29:20Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:29:21Sean Fennessey?

  So how do you, how did you think about that?

• 2:29:23Speaker 21

  I think that is kind of the line. I love that you said that, true, but not real, because I think the reason I like documentary form and the hybridizing between fiction and documentaries, because for me, they're just different tools to access true, but not real. You know, performance wise, or script wise, or whatever it is, like accessing something that feels more authentic, but it's always an illusion of authenticity. And I think that's true for documentary and true for fiction. There's just different access to get to that outcome. And so I think those are the kinds of films that I've watched over the years that have been the most exciting to me, or films where that line is blurred and you can't tell as a viewer, like, what is the contract here? Is this real or is this not?

• 2:30:06Speaker 21

  And just having to accept that and, and move through the, move through the work. And there's so many great films that dissect that, like symbiops, psychotaxiplasm is like a very formative film for me when I watched it, because it's within the deconstruction, within the film, it's, it's commenting on that. Or Chronicle of a Summer is a film that I watched early on as well, where I was, you know, they're actually talking about the, the access to authenticity and, and how you can achieve that. And I think that's what motivates me more than anything is, is to try to root the work in naturalism and, but naturalism is very constructed. It's extremely constructed. It's not something that is just occurring. It's, you have to create a very tightly curated environment

• 2:30:51Speaker 21

  with the camera, with the, with the production design, with the cinematography and editing. Everything is actually so tightly wound, but that it gives the sense of, oh, it's just occurring in front of us and it's a documentary style, or it's very hard to actually do in a way that feels natural.

• 2:31:07Sean Fennessey?

  Do you find yourself intellectualizing it when writing or conceiving of it? Or is it primarily instinctual to say, this just feels like what it should be?

• 2:31:20Sean Fennessey?

  Especially it's a period piece.

• 2:31:22Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:31:22Sean Fennessey?

  It's got kind of echoes or reflections of personal experience, but not one to one. So like, how much of it is, I'm sitting down and my brain is imagining like, oh, thematically, this will make sense, or is it just, this feels right to me?

• 2:31:35Speaker 21

  I think there's, yeah, there's only so much you can do until you're making those decisions on set. And we did, you know, shot list the film as much as we could, but then of course, once you're on set, you're discovering things that are more interesting. And the thoughts that you had before were built upon assumptions of how things would feel and look. So there's room for the spontaneity, and especially because we were shooting on this very long lens, this zoom lens, that we were always from shooting from a distance. It gave a lot of room for that play, you know, oh, wow, if we move the camera over here, we can shoot through this and that creates more distance here. And, you know, Maya has a lot of experience as a cinematographer in every genre, in documentary, in television,

• 2:32:17Speaker 21

  in fiction narrative. And so she's very responsive to the environment. And so we were able to, to be, yeah, to be responsive, but then develop a consistent cinematic language together. So we're not like, just slapdash, you know, putting things together. It was admittedly like very addicting to shoot on a zoom lens. We did not think we were going to have as many zooms, but every time we would put the zoom lens on, we were like, whoa, we could do another shot on it, another shot. And it's, because you can do, you can be so economical and it's just, it's, it's like a fun challenge. It's like, how can we shoot this entire scene in one shot? And that became like a fun challenge for us.

• 2:32:56Sean Fennessey?

  That's really interesting. And one of the things I was thinking could have been the, the reasoning behind that was when shooting young performers, having distance from the camera sometimes draws out better performance or better material, or like that, that naturalism that you're describing like occurs.

• 2:33:11Speaker 21

  Yes.

• 2:33:11Sean Fennessey?

  Maybe more comfortably? Like, was that part of the design of that choice?

• 2:33:15Speaker 21

  Yeah, it was, it was twofold because it was, it was pragmatic from a performance level, which was very much inspired by Cassavetes and reading about just his desire for performance over technical precision and how that turned into an aesthetic. And, yeah, just using that as an ethos. And then also aesthetically, it made sense for the film and it made sense for how I wanted the film to look and feel as a sort of recreation, but also memory. So it's like, is this a film that we're watching that this character is making? Or is this a memory that she's having? And I think both. Can be applied.

• 2:33:50Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 2:33:51Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:33:52Sean Fennessey?

  How was it directing actors in this way over a period of time?

• 2:33:57Speaker 21

  I loved it. I mean, I think so much of the performances is in the casting process, of course, you know, especially when you're casting children, you're also casting the dynamic between the children. And so much of the rehearsal that I did was actually just chemistry, chemistry building and, you know, sending the boys on play dates and they're playing video games together. They were going to the water park and half the time I wasn't even there. I was just having them build their own world and their own relationship. And then with the parents, there was really an important sort of chemistry in their auditions. And we auditioned many different actors and combined them and saw them in different arrangements. And because that's, you know, everyone's pet peeve is you watch a movie about a family

• 2:34:40Speaker 21

  and you're like, these people just met, you know, there's.

• 2:34:43Sean Fennessey?

  Right. That is definitely not the feeling I took away from your movie.

• 2:34:47Sean Fennessey?

  I, I assume many people have come to you and said this by now, but like I grew up with a Jeremy, not in my family, but I knew a Jeremy. And it's a very extremely emotionally challenging thing to be proximate to. And similarly, that person just is not in my life anymore. And I, I'd like to hear a little bit about like, you're thinking about how you like, wrote and framed him because he doesn't speak very much. I think maybe he only has one or two lines of dialogue in the whole film. And he seems to be like drifting to the side of the frame a lot. And we're not really ever getting, he's never down the barrel, you know what I mean?

• 2:35:28Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:35:28Sean Fennessey?

  And so I just kind of wanted to hear about like conceiving and like portraying the character from your perspective.

• 2:35:37Speaker 21

  Yeah, I mean, it's a challenging thing because obviously we've all seen the film with the bad teenager, the teenager is acting out the, you know.

• 2:35:48Speaker 21

  The teenager who's, there's a lot of people who watch this film and assume that there's going to be some sort of like really violent act that occurs. And so I knew I was up against sort of these cliches of depicting a teenager that's having any kind of, you know, behavioral problems. And I didn't want to fall into that because I didn't want this character to feel unsympathetic or like a caricature, but I also wanted this character to be complicated. So it's a fine balance because, I mean, that's also the fine balance I've had to grapple with, with my feelings about my brother was I did grow up with a lot of resentment and frustration, like, why can't you just be normal? Why can't you just make things easier for mom and dad? And like this kind of feeling that when you're young, it's, there's not much nuance to it.

• 2:36:31Speaker 21

  And then when you're older, you're applying the lens of an adult and the perspective of understanding that you didn't actually have all the information and there's more, there's more empathy. So I think it was important to show both the child's perspective and the adult's perspective and how those things change over time. But I, the character itself is based on my, my family's experience, but the character Jeremy is, yeah, I think I've spoken about this a lot, but he's so dissimilar from my brother in the sense that my brother was very, I don't know, he was just very bizarre, very, the way he would speak and the way he would move his body and the way he was,

• 2:37:14Speaker 21

  he was always kind of clownish and joking around and you could never tell if he was lying or joking or what was happening. So this very complicated person and almost very childlike, like through his entire life. And so he was provoking people. This is something he would do a lot of, he'd provoke. And I tried to hint at this at moments when he's on the roof and it ends with a little smile. And these were just little performance things that I knew that Edict, the actor, could, could pull off. But if I started asking him to perform the way that my brother was, it would not work. It would be a very, very different movie and. That's one of those lines I drew was like, this isn't important. It's not important to try to recreate what my brother was like because first of all, it's impossible.

• 2:37:58Speaker 21

  And second of all, Edek as a person is such a special person. It has such a special presence that I'm going to lean into that instead. So it changes the trajectory of the film entirely because I'm not recreating this character or this person in my life anymore. I'm leaning into what this actor is giving me. And I think that's one of those things you have to do when you're working with non-actors, new actors, is what are they bringing to you? And how can you utilize that? And his silence was so much more powerful. So I, yeah, I just leaned into that.

• 2:38:33Sean Fennessey?

  The movie creates a tremendous sense of unease. And I feel like a big part of it, as near as I could tell, was due to the sound design. And I really felt, you know, the cereal container sliding across the kitchen table and the ball bouncing against the house. And it's sort of ominous, especially in the first half of the film. How did you think about that? Am I picking up on something that you were going for?

• 2:39:00Speaker 21

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think people really underestimate the work of Foley artists. Foley is a very, very important part of every film. And you don't want to feel it. You don't want to actually know it's there, but it's a nuanced thing. I think we were, every sound in the film was calibrated to be exactly the volume. Every slide of the cereal box, every time a glass of water is sipped from, every time one of the parents sighs, like, these are all decisions that I can see when I watch the movie. And it's something that really does create the majority of the atmosphere and also the sense of it being in the past, the memories. And it's such a funny thing of like, everyone who watches the film.

• 2:39:45Speaker 21

  Remembers the sound of a lawnmower and remembers this feeling of the summer, the sound of the summer. And it's funny because as adults, we still should hear those sounds.

• 2:39:56Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, no, the present doesn't, it feels untextured, but the past is so, it has a lot of ripples, right? It's a strange thing.

• 2:40:02Speaker 21

  I can only assume it's because we were newer to the world, so we were paying attention to these things more or something, but it's-

• 2:40:08Sean Fennessey?

  Less distracted now than we are, too.

• 2:40:09Speaker 21

  Yeah, that's true. And it was important for me to have, the majority of the film is just kids that are bored. Kids that are bored, and that's normal.

• 2:40:18Sean Fennessey?

  That is what it was like.

• 2:40:19Speaker 21

  Yeah, that's what it was like.

• 2:40:21Sean Fennessey?

  How about music? A couple of needle drops?

• 2:40:23Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:40:25Sean Fennessey?

  Very powerful. How did you think about how it should work inside the movie?

• 2:40:30Speaker 21

  Oh, God, I could do a whole TED Talk on music.

• 2:40:33Sean Fennessey?

  One of my favorite topics.

• 2:40:33Speaker 21

  Yeah, just because it's so, it's such a complicated thing because it's such a big part of this film and always was going to be, was written into the script that there was going to be diegetic music in the film. But I'm sure everyone knows it's very expensive.

• 2:40:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yes. So you, did you put song titles in the script?

• 2:40:50Speaker 21

  There was some, there was some, yeah. I think the music, it was important to me that the music, yeah, was coming from a source, that it was diegetic. And that was inspired by, looking back, again, the home video footage that my dad had shot, in still processing, but also just other clips that he'd shared with me. There was almost always music playing in the background. And the music felt like score. And it felt like I was watching something intentionally paired, the sound and the image were intentional. But they were always mismatched in terms of the importance of what the image was and the grandiosity of the music. So there'd be something very mundane, just, you know, kids doing kid things, but then there'd be this beautiful, like Mozart score going on in the background, and it created

• 2:41:34Speaker 21

  this sense of importance. So I really, I borrowed that and tried to have the same atmosphere being created from this dad character. And so so much of the music in the film is inspired by just the music I remember growing up and what my dad would play and his taste, which is obviously consequently my taste now. So-

• 2:41:55Sean Fennessey?

  King Crimson, yeah.

• 2:41:56Speaker 21

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:41:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's very powerful and it's tricky to know, like, what is-

• 2:42:05Sean Fennessey?

  What is like a personal memory versus what is going to connect with a wider audience? The final song that is played is a very powerful song and it's like if you know it, it's a big deal. And if you don't know it, then I think it's like a little bit of a portal too.

• 2:42:17Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:42:17Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I don't know how much you want to talk about that.

• 2:42:20Speaker 21

  Yeah, I mean, I, it's, it's hard to end a film on any level. It's, you know, I think, um, because I also, it's, I know that the film gets to an emotional place on its own and then how you want to leave people is, it's a question. And I know that song does what it does.

• 2:42:41Sean Fennessey?

  It does what it does.

• 2:42:41Speaker 21

  Yeah. So I, I think, I think as soon as I tested it out with my sound designer, we kind of looked at each other and we're just, we just knew that it just felt right. And I think also, um, yeah, we can talk about, should we spoil what it is or not?

• 2:42:56Sean Fennessey?

  No, let's not spoil it.

• 2:42:57Speaker 21

  Okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah. It just felt, it just, it was very, very evident that it felt right. And also, it was also the final note that I wanted, um, to end on for my parents because I, my parents are also a fan of this artist and I knew that I wanted them to have, you know, end on a note that it was a final gesture toward them, I think. Yeah.

• 2:43:18Sean Fennessey?

  Do you, um, share what you're going to do when you're making something that is connected to your family or seek consent or permission or something like, what are you beforehand or maybe after you've completed something? Like, what is that experience like?

• 2:43:32Speaker 21

  Yeah, definitely.

• 2:43:33Sean Fennessey?

  You do?

• 2:43:34Speaker 21

  Yeah, I mean, I, I talked to my parents almost every day. We're very close. Um, I've long since called them like my digital parents because they're just always in my pocket, you know? And we talk, we talk a lot. We're very conversational, very, um, yeah, we're very in each other's lives. And, um, when I was making my short films, it was more complicated because I was also, you know, not as nuanced in my understanding of what my parents had gone through and what my family had gone through, but I was still needing to process those things. So I was kind of making these films, wanting to acknowledge these experiences and they were still grappling with their own feelings. And so I think there was more of a tension to begin with, but that once we, um, Once I was making those films for a while, and especially Still Processing,

• 2:44:19Speaker 21

  there became a real sense of trust and a real sense of understanding. And Still Processing was the first film that I really do feel I made for my parents. And in the thesis paper that I wrote about the film, which is all about using film as a way to process grief and to process grief and to actually process trauma. And this is something I'm actually interested in teaching eventually is using film as a tool to reckon with difficult memories and complex memories. Because I think there's something very powerful that only film can do when you're watching back a reflection of your experience and sharing it with other people collaboratively.

• 2:45:01Speaker 21

  And it's like a communal experience that I don't know that any other art form can really access. And so I think there is an untapped tool there therapeutically.

• 2:45:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. It's so interesting that you frame it that way, because I felt that same feeling, like only a film can do this, when the film takes a sort of structural shift.

• 2:45:20Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:45:20Sean Fennessey?

  Where we move towards the present, or whatever the perceived present. And just even how the film is kind of working, like how it is narratively operating, shifts pretty dramatically.

• 2:45:32Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:45:32Sean Fennessey?

  And it's not so confusing that anyone couldn't follow it, but it's a bold choice stylistically.

• 2:45:37Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:45:37Sean Fennessey?

  And I loved it. I thought it completely worked. And I've seen films try to do something like that before and fall flat on its face. So can you talk about, like, was it always part of the design to make the movie in that structure? Is it something that you came to over time? How did you think about it?

• 2:45:55Speaker 21

  I mean, it was, yeah, it was, it's what interested me, because I think this film easily could have been a coming of age narrative drama, which stays in the same register as the first half, which was enjoyable to make and I think to watch. But I think the point at which it cuts is kind of when it exhausts its originality. Like, there isn't anywhere to go from there, I think, had it continued in that register. And I think I knew from the beginning that I wanted it to be this perspective shift between a child and an adult. And originally, when I was writing the script, I was trying more superficial things to distance myself from the character. And so originally, she wasn't a filmmaker. She was, she actually becomes a social worker.

• 2:46:37Speaker 21

  And then I realized I was doing that thing that filmmakers do, which is like, here's a thin facade, and behind it is- A filmmaker.

• 2:46:45Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:46:46Speaker 21

  And so I, I, it wasn't actually until like the last six months or so, I think I was talking to a friend of mine. And he just, yeah, just encouraged, he was just like, why, why are you trying to, oh, everyone's gonna know it's you anyway.

• 2:46:58Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:58Speaker 21

  So what are we doing? So, and, and, and once I unlocked that and allowed that to be the case, then I, it, it just made the, the meta elements of the film make so much more sense. And, uh, and also I think there is a connection between social work and filmmaking in terms of the, um, the research elements and trying to understand human behavior from, from a perspective that is like very, um, universal and, and I think, yeah, so I found there was a way to, to marry these two things. And also because narratively, we see the social worker in the first half of the film who arrives to the house. And she's doing a house visit. It, it was an easy access point for why Sasha comes back. And so rather than she's just visiting her home from like an emotional,

• 2:47:42Speaker 21

  you know, um, catharsis, she's actually performing a house visit as a social worker. So I realized from a narrative perspective that this could actually be wrapped into this, um, performance that she's doing. And, and, uh, so I, I liked that. So, yeah, just to, to answer your question, yes, I did always want it to be bifurcated because I think there's a lot of films,

• 2:48:04Speaker 21

  that are wonderful, but they cross cut these two things, you know, when you're, when you're dealing with the past, it's very natural to want to cross cut between the past and the present. And the thing that excited me was not doing that because that to me feels more realistic to my experience of, of growing up and, and becoming an adult is, is you get to the certain point where you start to look back and you, I think if I was cross cutting, it would, it would be less jarring and I wanted it to be jarring because that's, that's the experience is you're, you're suddenly an adult and you can't go back and you can't access those things and you're grasping at them and they're disappearing and, yeah.

• 2:48:37Sean Fennessey?

  I, watching it, I was thinking of a lot of like heavyweight stylists, you know, like Linklater, Nolan, Wong Kar Wai, like they all have tried like things like this in their movies. Sometimes they're a little bit more. They're very showy in audacious and exciting ways sometimes, but the editing style is very like clean and invisible, especially in the second half of the film. And I'm not like, I don't really know how it works. I don't know how you do that. Like, so how did you try to, because at first it seems like, oh, this movie is like trying to wrong foot you, and then it becomes something more ethereal, and then it becomes a very practical experience of watching this character inside of this timeline. And I don't, I can't, maybe you can explain how you did that.

• 2:49:23Speaker 21

  I mean, yeah, I worked on the script for a long time because I was really wanting the script to make structural sense, especially because we were taking this kind of big swing halfway through. And there was many different iterations of how that time jump was going to happen. And then once I landed on the phone to phone, and I, as you saw my shorts, I do include a lot of screens and cell phones. And so it made sense to me that that would be the first image we see of the present day, is the iPhone, because it's the quickest way to say we're in present time. Like, immediately, we're going to get there. And I was like, how can I communicate to the audience 20 years later without putting 20 years later on the page? And that's, that was a big.

• 2:50:03Sean Fennessey?

  Which is something we always talk about on the show, that like, most film, most modern filmmakers are afraid to do that. And they make a lot of period pieces because they feel like a phone somehow indicates like a loss of attention, or it's like, just not very cinematic, I guess, but you're using it in the opposite direction.

• 2:50:16Speaker 21

  Yeah, I mean, I understand that, because it creates, it's very insular to be on a, to be on a phone, to be on a computer. It's, you're not interacting with anyone else, really, but that's how we communicate. So to me, it feels impossible to avoid. And it's been how I have communicated for so much of my life. And yeah, all of my films are characters communicating through digital means. And so it made sense to me, because the second half of the film is very similar to the experience I had making Still Processing. So in many ways, it's like a fictional recreation of me making that film. And I think I wanted,

• 2:50:58Speaker 21

  I wanted it to be a little confusing, but there was a concern that it could be too confusing, but it really doesn't seem to be.

• 2:51:05Sean Fennessey?

  It wasn't to me at all, but it did have me kind of leaning forward.

• 2:51:07Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:51:08Sean Fennessey?

  And trying to figure out what you were trying to accomplish until you sort of realized what it is that you've accomplished.

• 2:51:12Speaker 21

  You have to commit to the journey, I think. Like, obviously, if someone walks out at that point, they're gonna have a very different experience.

• 2:51:19Speaker 21

  But it's, yeah, I think I wanted that moment to feel like the experience that I I've had was, which is that you have conversations with your parents when you're a kid. And then by the time you're an adult, you're still having those same conversations. And I wanted to kind of show almost seamlessly, like, this is still occurring. And you can actually hear the sound of the trampoline in the background as though the time just like disappears. But you're still having these same conversations and you still don't have answers to these questions. And that's really the point, you know, is you're still, you're still stuck with these curiosities without clean answers. And I think that's so much of life, really.

• 2:51:59Sean Fennessey?

  Uh, what has it been like showing the movie over the last seven or eight months?

• 2:52:05Speaker 21

  Like, um, heavy.

• 2:52:07Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:08Speaker 21

  For sure. And.

• 2:52:09Sean Fennessey?

  This is not like you made an action movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, and people like, I was entertained. Like, it's a very, it's very heavy and personal.

• 2:52:15Speaker 21

  Yeah, it's, the personal aspect, to be honest, is not the hard part.

• 2:52:19Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:52:19Speaker 21

  Like, I think because I have spent so much of my adult life now thinking about and talking about. And looking at from different angles, the grief that I have experienced with my brother's losses and my parents. Their experiences and it's very, I'm very aware of it. So it's, I'm much more able to talk about it now. Which was not the case, obviously, even when I was making Slow Processing. So it is, there probably is sort of a disassociation, I'm sure, on some level that is occurring. But for me, the heavy part is, is the people who are watching the film who are relating to it.

• 2:52:58Speaker 21

  And it's unlocking for them their own experiences and, and wanting to, to, to be able to carry and help hold those things is, is, is heavy. But also I'm so grateful that that is happening. Cause when you make personal work, I, I'm really not interested in making work that is just accessible to me and to my family. I want it, I want people to be able to reflect, um, or feel reflected in the work. But I think I didn't know.

• 2:53:25Speaker 21

  The extent to which that would be true. And I've met many people who have lost siblings. I've met many parents who have lost children. And I've met many people who relate to Jeremy and who have gone through foster care systems, who have come out the other side and are grateful for having done that. And many who feel represented by that experience, but also many who feel, yeah, just devastated to know that this is such a universal experience. And so I really, it seems like every character has a foothold for people. And that, as an artist, is very validating, but also is a very heavy thing as a human being to know that that's such a shared thing. Because growing up, it really did feel like we were in isolation. Yeah.

• 2:54:08Sean Fennessey?

  Is the plan to keep working in this literally personal register?

• 2:54:13Speaker 21

  No, I don't, I don't think so. I mean, I, I think even the shift between still processing and this film does feel to me significantly more at a distance. And I think that feels more comfortable to me now as an artist because it gets much more creative freedom. And I'm sure the work I make will always be personal on some level and kind of rooted in my point of view. And I'm probably always going to be interested in like the meta textual elements and filmmaking its process. And these are just fixations. But I think, yeah, I'm, I'm, I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do.

• 2:54:48Sean Fennessey?

  You haven't written anything yet?

• 2:54:49Speaker 21

  I haven't written anything yet.

• 2:54:51Sean Fennessey?

  Okay.

• 2:54:51Speaker 21

  Yeah, I haven't had five damn minutes.

• 2:54:54Sean Fennessey?

  Well, why not? Like, what, just because you're just sharing this with as many people as possible to get, as many people as possible to go and see it?

• 2:55:02Speaker 21

  It's been, yeah, it's just been going since August, basically. Like, it's, the festival's-

• 2:55:07Sean Fennessey?

  A weird job.

• 2:55:07Speaker 21

  It's a weird job. It's not even a job, actually. That's why I don't say the word career.

• 2:55:11Sean Fennessey?

  It's a weird non-job.

• 2:55:13Speaker 21

  Yeah, it's not, it's, it's, it's an insane privilege to get to share your work with a lot of people, but it is very time consuming. And it's something that you, in order, because the film is personal, I'm the person that's going to be talking about it as well. You know, it's, that's just the nature of it. And now that the film is coming out, there's a new wave of that, which is very exciting. And I'm, I'm on record, I believe, at Le Carne saying, oh, there's no way this film will get distribution.

• 2:55:40Sean Fennessey?

  You're getting very hallowed distribution.

• 2:55:42Speaker 21

  I know, I literally, I know, it's insane because I fully was like, this will maybe stream, like, because the industry tells you, there's no, there's no way, the theaters are dead, it's, it's over. So I'm still in, in the, the process of believing what's actually happening with this film, yeah.

• 2:55:59Sean Fennessey?

  Congratulations. We end every episode by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen?

• 2:56:05Speaker 21

  The last great thing I've seen? I saw less films in the last year than I've ever seen in my entire life.

• 2:56:10Sean Fennessey?

  Everyone always says this.

• 2:56:11Speaker 21

  Oh, God.

• 2:56:12Sean Fennessey?

  This is the problem.

• 2:56:12Speaker 21

  I know.

• 2:56:13Sean Fennessey?

  Once you start making them, you can't watch them anymore.

• 2:56:15Speaker 21

  I know, that is true. Um, well, I, I was on a jury, uh, which forced me to watch movies in Spain.

• 2:56:22Sean Fennessey?

  Great.

• 2:56:23Speaker 21

  Um, and I saw this film by a filmmaker from Cuba called, uh, David Zim, Sim, David Sims. And, um, it's called Out West to Zapata, I believe. And it's this documentary that he shot by himself in Cuba. It's black and white photography and it's phenomenal film. It's the film that we awarded the best, best of the festival. Um, I don't know that it's accessible at all, but it was, it was unbelievable film and it was made just himself. Um, and he was shooting, uh, um, a couple who were taking care of their child and the, the, um, the father of the family hunts crocodiles with his bare hands. And you see the footage

• 2:57:06Speaker 21

  of this actually being shot and it's, uh, some of the most incredible footage I've, I've seen in, in recent years.

• 2:57:11Sean Fennessey?

  What was, and what was the name of the film?

• 2:57:12Speaker 21

  I think it's called, fuck.

• 2:57:15Sean Fennessey?

  [laughing]

• 2:57:17Speaker 21

  I, I think Out West to Zapata, I believe it's called.

• 2:57:20Sean Fennessey?

  Out West to Zapata, okay.

• 2:57:21Speaker 21

  Yeah.

• 2:57:22Sean Fennessey?

  That's an incredible recommendation. Hopefully, we will all be able to see it soon.

• 2:57:25Speaker 21

  Deep cut, yeah.

• 2:57:26Sean Fennessey?

  Sophie, thank you.

• 2:57:27Speaker 21

  Thank you so much. This is such a pleasure. Thank you.

• 2:57:34Sean Fennessey?

  Okay. Thanks to Sophie. Thanks to Chris Ryan. Thanks to Griffin and David. Thanks to Ben David Grubinski.

• 2:57:42Amanda Dobbins?

  Yes.

• 2:57:43Sean Fennessey?

  Thanks to every single person who sent a voicemail or wrote an email for this episode. Thanks to everybody who's been spending time with this show for, we are in our 10th year. We are, we're not quite 10, but we're in our 10th year, which is fucking crazy. Thanks to Jack Sanders. Thanks to Lucas Cavanagh.

• 2:58:03Sean Fennessey?

  Lot of whiplash coming later this week. Our pal Yasi Solak is gonna join us. We're gonna talk about two music movies. What are they?

• 2:58:10Amanda Dobbins?

  Michael and Mother Mary.

• 2:58:12Sean Fennessey?

  What's Michael about?

• 2:58:14Amanda Dobbins?

  I can't believe I'm not on vacation for this. Can't believe I didn't, didn't, didn't arrange this, but no, we'll all be there together.

• 2:58:20Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, it's the Michael Jackson biopic, which I explained to some friends over the weekend and they were like, what? That's real?

• 2:58:26Amanda Dobbins?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:26Sean Fennessey?

  It's not only real, it's probably gonna be one of the biggest movies of 2026. We will talk about it with you on Friday. See you then.

• 2:58:53Speaker 02

  What's the secret to being a great host this season? Keeping things deliciously simple, like mixing Simply Cranberry into a festive drink as guests arrive, or serving up a warm mug of Simply Apple on a chilly night. That means less time behind the scenes and more time in the moment with everyone. Crafted with real fruit, Simply juices and fruit drinks make any holiday drink effortless, inviting and completely delicious. Simply. Say yes to simple.

• 2:59:23Speaker 22

  Say hello to smooth, sugar-like sweetness with Truvia Alulose Plus Stevia Sweetener and Monk Fruit Sweetener. This blend delivers balanced sweetness that minimizes aftertaste with zero calories per serving. Designed to fit everyday moments, Truvia Alulose Blend measures cup for cup like sugar, making it effortless to swap into beverages, baking, and even savory dishes. Find Truvia Alulose Plus Stevia Sweetener and Monk Fruit Sweetener online and nationwide at Kroger, Target, and your favorite local grocery retailer.