Blank Check with Griffin & David - The Secret Life of Bees with Jourdain Searles

Episode Date: August 16, 2020

A coming-of age story. Racism in America. Complex connections to motherhood. The Secret Life of Bees adaptation had a lot of themes to tackle. This week we look back to 2008 and compare the strengths and weaknesses of Prince-Bythewood’s biggest commercial success.  Critic, comedian and co-host (Bad Romance Podcast) Jourdain Searles returns to talk meeting celebrities at the worst moments, Hollywood’s attempts to depict the south, and underrated Queen Latifah performances.

My whole life has been nothing but a hole where my podcast should have been. It always left me aching, but I never thought about what it did to you i don't have a dakota uh no i'd be impressed if you did yeah is this the last like this is sort of the end of the run of child dakota right this is unfortunately all i want all i was thinking about for most of i was like man the dakota star arc is is weird yes this is the end of of young dakota i guess right next year is new moon and then the year after that is the runaways and i feel like that's when it's like she's a you know a grown-up star right but she becomes supporting or if she's lead it's in much smaller films but this is the end of this insane run in which like not even like macaulay caulkin but where a small girl became like a prestige highbrow movie star

it it's a weird it's a weird thing there look there are a lot of career arcs to talk about here yes there are but what were you gonna say it's also it's just it's also just funny that like she was like you know one of the big kid actresses when you know in the 2000s and she's still around but her sister is the one who got famous in a way. I feel really bad about that. It's odd. I don't know. It's like, I remember L playing baby Dakota in I am Sam,

the movie that like launched the Dakota Fanning thing. And it, you know, that was, it was just a little fact. It was like, Oh yeah. And she has a little sister who looks like,

like, looks like her, you know, she who looks like her. She played little baby her. And I am a noted L-stan. I've talked about her a lot on this podcast when she comes up. I think she's a great actress. It is weird how Dakota has just sort of become the secondary Fanning. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

It's odd. Despite still working still working i mean it's not like she backed away um they were a mid-production in that there was the film what's it called i don't know it might it might be called the nightingale also but it was uh melanie laurent directing yes dakota and l fan the world war ii movie or is that a different yeah and it was Melanie Laurent directing Dakota and Elle Fanning. Oh, the World War II movie? Yes. And it was supposed to be a big Oscar release at the end of this year, and then obviously production got shut down, and now

they don't know when it will resume. But I was excited about that movie, A, because I like Melanie Laurent as a director, and B, because I like the idea of putting both of the Fannings in there. I feel like it's time for a real Dakota surge. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, fine. I support it. I like Dakota. She seems nice. She's good. Chris White said she was so great. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, she's good in that.

Like all her small appearances, she's been good in. She's good in the Twilight movies. Yeah, she's good. She is good in the Twilight movies. She's yeah. She's good. She is. She's a little creepy person. I vaguely remember it. I haven't seen her. She's one of the Sheen.

She's a Volturi. She's the Volturi. I just watched New Moon like two days ago. Right. It's Michael Sheen, Dakota Fanning and the pretty boy from Sweeney Todd. Jamie something. Oh, Jamie Campbell Bauer. Yes. Yeah. Listen, and the pretty boy from sweeney todd jamie something oh jamie campbell bauer yes yeah listen as someone who has watched the closing credits of breaking dawn part two

many times it's one of your favorite videos yes i love the closing credits set to what's that song i can't remember yeah i know everyone who is in the twilight thousand that one a thousand years song um we'll we'll dig into all of this because of course this is a podcast called blank check it's about filmographies directors who have massive success early on their career and are given a series of blank checks make whatever crazy passion products they want which doesn't really apply with this career but kind of does sideways this is a mini series on the films of gina prince bythewood and the main series is called pod and basket cast and today we're talking about is this our highest grossing film yes Yes, I believe so.

The Secret Life of Bees. I mean, unless you count Netflix saying that, you know, a billion, gajillion people watch The Old Guard. Yeah, I'm looking here. There's a new Netflix update. Apparently, everyone who has ever died in the spirit realm has also watched The Old Guard. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yes. It has a one quadrillion views.

Look on the record, not to get ahead of ourselves. I love the old guard. I'm very happy if it's doing well. It's a little bit weird that like early in a week, Netflix releases here are top 10 most watched movies of all time. And they put that list out and old guard is not on it and then two days later they're like never mind old guard is the most

popular movie ever so number one uh our guest today returning and uh sounded like she had something to say about netflix statistics so i want to introduce her so she can dig into this uh from the bad romance podcast from uh brows held high new podcast on patreon uh great film critic uh great friend of the show jordaine searles uh what do you want to say about netflix's dodgy numbers i don't i don't understand netflix's film model I think that that's all I was going to say. I don't really get their numbers. But I don't really understand Netflix as a brand at all. But, you know, whatever.

Sure. They're hemorrhaging money, I'm sure. I don't know. Well, look, I have been a, I don't want to say a Netflix truther, but I've been a person who for the last couple of years is like netflix is no pun intended a house of cards that might collapse within two years like it was built upon just like uh increasing amounts of debt outspending everyone else in

the hopes that they could outlast everyone else just long enough like much like what happened with amazon where amazon like was losing money every year until jeff bezos became the richest man in the world what a great great reality we live in sure that was the model that netflix was chasing i think actually the pandemic has saved them like i think their subscriber rate has gone up so high and now all these other streaming services launching are bombing in a way that netflix might have been given the hail mary pass by our broken world unfortunately i've written about this too much and people who know more about the stock market have gotten in touch with me and said like netflix

was never in trouble it's the same thing as amazon where it's like i look at it i'm like this makes no sense they don't make money and they lose more money every year so much debt so much right people don't understand how much you can just sell the debt i mean like every like everyone is just like no i mean you it's it's the amazon story it's just like now they they know what they're doing nothing capitalism's weird nothing matters i also think jordaine like netflix made the decision because when they started out it was like wait a second are they going to be streaming hbo are they going to be like prestige there's a high level of quality high level of talent not even their walmart they're like our brand is walmart it's just everything for cheap yeah which is I which reminds me I tried to watch something on voodoo last night and I was just like absolutely not

everything about voodoo like is offensive to me personally but I did see that they I don't know if you were aware of this but voodoo it's probably canceled now but voodoo like launched a show which means that walmart launched a show and it was like a mr mom sitcom starring hayes mcarthur yes i was gonna bring this up yes i feel so bad for hayes mcarthur every single time i think about it i'm just like he's a funny guy i don't want this for him wait Wait, is Voodoo owned by Walmart? I don't think I know that. Yes. Voodoo is a Walmart streaming service. Wow. I mean, I see it.

But they just sold it off. Walmart sold it to Fandango. So, like, I feel additionally bad for Hayes MacArthur because not only are you on a Mr. Mom reboot on a streaming platform that borderline doesn't exist where no one knows there's any level of original content but also it was one of those things where walmart was like we're gonna make a ton of shows walmart is gonna be making shows and then they made that one show and they're

like we're kind of out of the making show business but here's one show as a remnant of that and then they sold the whole platform uh wow there's so many of these platforms it's so weird yeah voodoo it's always being pushed on me they're always like don't you want to check out voodoo and then i look at it it's just another way to watch movies just logging into voodoo pissed me off their on-screen keyboard is is blue because it's walmart but the contrast with the letters is not good and i just couldn't find the fucking letters and i was just cussing the entire time and then by the time i got to it like the movie that i wanted i still had to pay money it's like i can rent this on youtube i didn't need to do this the the value of voodoo if i can even call it the voodoo value the v squared was this this

hack it's not even really a hack but the the sort of the value was uh movies anywhere which links together your purchases from any platform to every other platform was compatible with Voodoo. It still is, but it seems like they're nerfing this feature a little bit in terms of limiting what you can do it with. They had a thing for a while where if you scan the barcode of a movie you own, you could then get it on digital for Voodoo for only $2.

Sure. And then you'd get it on iTunes through movies anywhere. But also, all it mattered was that you were scanning the barcode from your home in terms of location, your zip code. But you could pull up a photo of a barcode on your computer and take a photo of that on your camera you've already lost me halfway just like describing it this does seem very hackable i mean look i made out like a bandit i i got a robust voodoo library which slid over to my itunes library but now i have no value for voodoo anymore wow anyway this is uh that voodoo that you do our podcast about voodoo i don't think so yes it is it's a voodoo podcast voodoo bought us david

voodoo could buy us they could make an offer i just you know i want to hear i would put a number on it you know uh no this is a mini series on the films of gina prince bythewood and we're talking about the secret life of bees a film that weirdly i feel like is the movie that gets forgotten about in her canon like people forget that she made this but as as we said, is her, her biggest film. It's her highest grossing film. And it's probably the one that got the biggest sort of like Oscar-y kind of push. Like, you know,

it had your class. It was a Fox searchlight movie. It came out in the fall. They premiered it at, um, the Toronto film festival, you know, like based on a book,

a bestselling book. Right. Um, and love and basketball were not viewed as sort of serious awardsy movies and this was very because beyond the lights is like a serious awardsy movie like it is and it rules that's what it is it is the most classical hollywood awards movie and yeah david and i have argued about this for years i think it's just better earlier star is born and it was very perplexing to me to watch beyond the lights get roundly ignored and then five years later everyone flip out over

stars born which i don't dislike no yeah no i totally understand i i really like beyond the lights and i really like a star is born and i agree with you and i've also seen all the other versions of a star is born so yeah i mean it does it does fit in i don't know maybe it's i'm trying to figure out what could have gone wrong with it because i mean all of the ingredients are there i guess just it's issue lack of stars i think was its issue um obviously stars i would say big star power thing two problems it was sold kind of it wasn't really sold well right she hung a movie on two people who were not named stars at that point in time which is already an uphill battle um and it wasn't positioned like they didn't send it to festivals no they did it festivals it was the opening night movie at

toronto yeah yeah beyond the lights was yeah i had no idea see i just remember it sort of just being like dropped wide release opening weekend that they didn't really push it like it was and it was relativity which was the other weird little studio that was sort of like trying to stick out to go under like this is right when relativity is spiraling and collapsing and ryan so i think that was also an issue but it was a well review i think in terms of it not sticking with audiences like yeah it premiered at thanksgiving time and it didn't have big stars and even though it was well reviewed for whatever reason people just kind of ignored it uh which is rude because it is great and i can't wait to re-watch it i can't wait um i also it's actually my favorite movie from her absolutely i think

it might be i'm not sure well i'm gonna have to re-watch i'm not sure but i'm also very weirdly not a love and basketball fan i feel like interesting and it's a real, yeah, I don't, I don't know why, like there are things about it that I really enjoy. And Sanaa Lathan is, I'll watch her do anything. I met her once and my, my glasses were broken and it was just like, it was like the fate came together to put me in this weird position where I got to meet such a beautiful woman with my glasses, like literally falling off my face. Like I had like tape and I had like positioned the arm and the arm was coming off. And anyway, she was very, very nice and said that she liked my name and she's very,

very beautiful. But I don't know. I broke my glasses. She is very beautiful. My favorite actor of all time, Philip Seymour Hoffman. The one time I got to meet him, I was an intern in the production offices of, uh, before the devil knows you're dead, which that whole movie was shot on sound stages. So like the actors would come into the office a lot,

but he's so intense and like in his bubble that he wouldn't. And he came in, it was like a half day where he wrapped early because Sidney Lumet always wanted to go to the Hamptons on Fridays. And he'd work so fast that they would wrap at lunch. So I was eating lunch at my desk and I was like the lowest ranking intern.

So I was the desk closest to the door so I could like weed out the chaff or whatever. And I was eating corn on the cob so my hands were covered in butter and philip seymour hoffman comes in in like sweats like top to bottom sweats pants top and he's gotten like he's wrapped for the day he's finished his acting and it looks like someone just performed an exorcism on him like he's drenched in sweat and his like soul is out of his body like he's just like i've given myself to my craft i'm done and he comes in and he's like doing like full philip seymour hoffman like befuddled sort of thing and he goes like uh uh do you do you have

a pen i i need to uh write something down my bad philip seymour hoffman impression and i'm just holding corn on the cob like bugs bunny like eating it like a typewriter butter dripping down my face and my hands and i went yeah there's a pen right there you could just grab it for yourself and i was trying to say you don't want me to hand you a pen because i i'm a butter boy i got literal you're sounding like you're like, what am I your pen person? Go to the pens over there. Right. And he went,

uh, okay. And like took the pen and walked away. And I was like, wow, what a terrible interaction. Someday I'll get to, I'll get to restore.

I'll be able to share this as an anecdote. Yeah. Um, yeah, terrible. I just feel like you always meet the best people under the worst circumstances yeah yeah yeah i'm not really i was i was actually that was like a the day that i met so now i was doing press for god what is that movie that no one saw the new native son yeah

i went i interviewed the whole cat and it's like a really interesting cast full of like people that like you know like Ashton Sanders and stuff but it was just weird doing press for a movie that no one watched and it ultimately ended up no one watching the only thing I remember from that was the premiere of Sundance last year and

it got bought by HBO for a bajillion dollars before it we even got to see it like we were walking into the theater and we already know like hbo bought this and we're like okay and then i remember this the the screen lights up they show the sundance pre-roll and then the hbo films logo plays and they had announced it that day and everyone in the room was like oh that was the biggest reaction everyone was like how'd they get the logo in so fast

it's a very very very boring recollection the other thing i remember about that movie is that spoiler alert when the insane thing happens the whole audience gasped and i was like did no one read this book in high school i thought this was like a signed reading it's such a weird adaptation and also it's a very weird adaptation. And also. It's a very weird adaptation. Everyone felt, I don't know, like when I was interviewing them, they felt the white people were very uncomfortable when I interviewed them for that movie, which I think is, which I thought was really great. I was like, no, talk about.

I met Maggie Qualley. Qualley. I don't know what her name is. Qualley. Qualley. I'm not sure. Yeah. Nick Robinson.

Right. Love Simon himself. Yeah. quali quali i don't know what her name is quali quali i'm not sure yeah and then robinson right himself right yeah nick robinson did most of the talking because i would ask her a question and she'd just be like you're nick and i just feel like i just didn't expect the love simon guy to be the one doing most of the talking i think she didn't want to talk because i told her that she was great in death note and i think she thought i was making fun of her and i wasn't okay you want to talk about awkward celebrity she's good she's a good actress i generally like her she anytime she pops up i'm like she's always good this is on the subject of awkward celebrity encounters this has also happened to me a lot where i meet someone famous and i go hey you were great in blank and they think I'm trolling them because I have...

The Neil Patrick Harris story. That's the one I like. I met Neil Patrick Harris and I said, hey, you're great in Undercover Brother and he gave me the iciest glare of all time and he went, that one?

He is great in that one. He is. That's his best performance. I would be genuine. He's in like... What? Look down on Undercover Brother? I don't know he shouldn't he shouldn't look down on it maybe i mean he's not in it that much so maybe he's kind of like i mean okay i've i've thrown myself around the broadway stage i did magic it was great assassin you said like a million ways to die in the west

Or something like I feel like that would be the troll answer That would be very trolly I love you in beastly That's my biggest NPH poll Look I saw beastly Okay I wasn't saying You were good in beastly But I feel like very often people think

I'm trying to think of other examples The Neil Patrick Harris one is the big one. If you're a Mohawk College grad, get ready to make your diploma, certificate, or degree work even harder. Connect with the Mohawk College Alumni Association today and you can win one of five great prizes. Connect to exclusive benefits, discounts, contests,

career support, and networking opportunities. Update your contact information today to win one of five great prizes, including a $500 gift card. Then get busy making your Mohawk alumni network work for you. Enter today at mohawkcollege.ca slash alumni win. Jordaine, I feel like you are somewhat similar to David and I, in that I will see you very often shout out a great performance in a movie that no one is even putting any thought into. Right?

Like, I feel like very often people, if a movie isn't good, or especially if a movie isn't successful, they just throw the whole thing away. They just treat it like, well, that doesn't work. And I feel like we on this podcast love being like,

this is a really good performance. This person is getting what this movie is. You should be able to extract good elements from a not wholly successful movie. And I feel like successful actors very often, if the movie isn't successful, treat their own work the same way. Like they're like, I must be bad in that

because that didn't make money. Sure. Yeah, it's not true. I mean, I don't,'t right i guess some actors just don't re-watch their work as well maybe so he's just like you know he maybe has never even seen undercover brother who knows i just love that one it's so weird that was the wording that one that one i actually just bought a dvd of undercover brother a used one, because I was like, I need to have this in my life. I was thinking about it. Oh, man, did it ever come out on Blu-ray?

Now I wonder, like, do I need to get high def Undercover Brother? Listen, today we're talking about The Secret Life of Bees. Now, this is one of those examples of a movie where, like, the book gets optioned at the galley stage. Lauren Schuller Donner, who's a big producer, gets sent the galleys in the way that I think a lot of big producers, the big publishers will just send them any new books they have coming out. And so she reads it at that stage before it becomes this massive bestseller and goes, wow, this is a movie, buys the rights, or options them. I think it takes about six years. She carries it over to a couple different studios. I think it starts out at Big Fox, and then it goes somewhere else, and then it ends up at Fox Searchlight. But over that period of time, the book just gets bigger and bigger and

bigger and bigger. It was definitely at focus focus at some point because that's when david gordon green was gonna make it that was the big thing i was gonna say they went through a lot of people but david gordon green was the big one for a while and that's when they announced like dakota fanning is gonna do it she's a little young for the character as written but what a weird phenomenon that we have this major prestige movie star who is nine years old we We have to rewrite this around her. And David Gordon Green, I guess they mostly were hiring because they're like, this guy made Undertow and George Washington. Yeah, because he's the guy who makes your sensitive Malickian, you know,

Southern, right? Yeah, he's a Southern guy. A child based dramas. I love David Gordon Green's early work and his later work is very confusing to me he really weirds me out because i too i remember i loved his like all the real girls is one of those movies i adore that movie i haven't seen it in years i'm almost like should i revisit yes that that early trilogy i think is perfect like george washington all the real girls undertow, I love.

They're great. I never saw Snow Angels. I know that kind of didn't go over. Snow Angels is, yeah, it's like meh. It's meh. And then he had his real sort of, what's his name? Danny McBride, sort of stonery comedy run. Right.

And then he was doing stuff like Our Brand is Crisis, where I was like like is he just like a for hire guy now like i don't get it and then stronger was a movie that i like loved and i was like even though it was kind of ignored and it was like a you know feel good oscary real life movie i was like oh this is so well directed and like i i'm so happy like that he's making and then he now he's like trapped in halloween land so i don't know what's up with that i don't like him doing halloween i don't either i i don't either i mean i've had no desire to revisit that movie like i you know i saw it with a cheering audience

it was fine like but yeah i don't i don't really know yeah I stood in line for it. I was at the festival. I actually sat next to Elijah Wood to see the movie, and that's the experience that I think we missed about. Did he have a good time? Did Elijah enjoy it at least? Oh, wait, was it? No. Okay, wait, no. I saw Us with Elijah Wood.

Who did I see? Oh, that's cooler. I think I ran into someone else for Halloween, but no, Elijah Wood seems like just be like a chill guy He's like a chill guy who likes horror movies And stuff right He just likes to go to the movies He likes a genre film

I bet if you told Elijah Wood I loved you in Flipper He would say thank you He wouldn't be like that one No Well Elijah Wood's just not like I don't know I feel like he doesn't take his career as seriously as other actors do. He picks roles because he wants to have fun

and you can tell. And he also produces so many horror movies. It's very clear that he likes movies. He is not picking the path of the obvious career for someone who starred in one of the biggest franchises of all time. He's picking the path of I want to use that power to just carve out my little corner of the film universe doing the stuff I like to do. Yeah. And watching him watch us was so cool.

I've just never seen because like I see movies with press a lot. It's like they're not paying attention. Meanwhile, Elijah Wood is just like leaned in, just paying direct attention and i just i love that love when people actually pay attention to the movie you know what movie is uh already more relevant than when it came out 18 months ago yeah i like once a month think about like man us is aging really well huh us is doing great us is killing movie um i i do think it's interesting because like after those first three the southern gothic sort of like uh malikian uh inner lives of uh children uh david gordon green movies i man, this guy, he's the guy. This is going to be the dude who has the career. Like he's got a really clear style, but these three movies are kind of

different genres. And then he becomes somewhat anonymous. And there's even the weird thing of like within his comedy run, Pineapple Express for all of its faults feels like it's made by a very specific director the sitter does not in the same way that like even though stronger is very different from his early films it feels like it's made by a very specific director and our brand is crisis does not and i remember at the time like my exposure to secret life of bees for the first time as a book was hearing that David Gordon Green was going to make it and being such a big fan of his and being like, oh, I'm excited for a new David Gordon Green movie. And you think back to like, at that point in time, reading about this

book, you had a very clear image in your head of what that movie would be. And at this point, if you hear David Gordon Green's going's gonna make this you have no idea what that could be i never saw this movie i for a long time thought it was a spelling bee movie because there was that spate of spelling bee movies and a season a keel in the b and i was like this must be another spelling bee movie and then i saw the poster and it was a honeycomb and i'm like well okay i assume it's actual bees then i've seen this movie before um so this is my second time watching it uh i don't this is like my this is the kind of movie that i kind of hate the most so i almost feel like i don't really come to it with the kind of like white eyes like i'll watch a movie i'll watch a

movie that's just like about like I watched Frankenhooker and I'll just be like I'm watching Frankenhooker my mind my mind is open I want to know what's gonna happen where's like Secret Life of Bees my mind is like this and then it just keeps on closing as I get angrier I am with you entirely and I am such a big Gina fan. I had put off watching this movie for so long for that very reason. I'm like, this is not my type of movie. This is in like the collection of subgenres that I'm least inclined to like. Right. I mean, and I love Southern movies like the thing about Southern movies, movies about racism. Like I dig those. And I actually think that like if David Gordon Green had made it and if the character it might have been a little darker yeah and i just i probably would have preferred that version of the movie just because um the kind of stuff that they're working with the kind of themes

i just feel like they could have been opened up a little bit more and i also think about the way that david gordon green like my one of my favorite david gordon green movies is joe and so i think about like um the paul bettany character what would that look like in a david gordon green movie and i feel like it'd be closer to joe yes yeah yeah the the element that gina feels least connected to here is is the south of it all which was obviously david gordon green's strong suit at this point right right she's of course a californian but like it's also she just has in all her movies like she has so much sympathy for her characters and that is a quality like in her filmmaking like i hate to call i didn't hate this movie at all like it's it was no i don't dislike it but it is it's it's fighting against my expectations of this type of movie but i hate to use this word

because it's a pretty broad and uninteresting word but like this movie is a little boring and that's not like it shouldn't be like it's not the books i'm sure you know whatever like a gentle read in its own way but like this is not about boring things and it doesn't have boring events like and yet there is just there's something a little like the tone never just you know spikes in either direction and those are the southern movies that i hate the most like i prefer like as a person from the south like and there's a lot of complicated stuff i hate it when it's depicted like a little bit too cartoony but i also hate when it's a little too soft as well and so it's

just like when we're like dealing with all of these different things like racism and stuff i hate it like if it can be played in history class it probably means that depiction of racism is not that great yes yes uh i agree uh that that's what makes this fall into the category of like movies i'm not that into the movies that are sort of like book closed on racism wasn't that bad like well and it's like the lesson being learned is yeah right it's not an interesting lesson i guess although i also was sort of struggling to i guess what she's learning is that her mom was a complicated person as well right is that the personal lesson heavy on the mother themes i got yeah yeah i just i can see

like gina who wrote the movie right like so like i and she's the only credited writer so i'm assuming she's being brought on early enough that she is i was digging into a lot of the special features on the blu-ray it sounds to me like she was maybe brought on as a writer first okay when they were struggling to crack this story david gordon green never figured it out the book doesn't seem to have much of sort of like a driving plot and so they kept on taking different stabs at it no one could figure it out they bring her on as a writer she's the first one who cracks it they let her direct it but i think they viewed it as like finally someone has a handle on this and the two elements for me that it feels like she's connecting to here

are one the the thing that is like you know she's so focused on these small moments of human interaction and connection between people i i think the backdrop of this movie and the larger sort of stakes at play are less intriguing to her than this idea of this haven in which these five women are living together. Like that seems to be the thing she's interested in. And that's when this movie works the best is when it's just the dynamics at play, the smaller sort of. Yeah, it's like a portrayal of womanhood and community right that's not a lot of the tropes you would see in a movie about southern racism there's the other angle that it feels like she's very connected to which is i i think i read this in in bilga has been

writing so much good stuff about her with old guard coming out because he's a big genus stan and he wrote like a long form piece and did an interview with her in a review and everything um the quiet storm i think his main piece is called but she was uh the byproduct because she she was adopted she grew up with white parents in southern california but her biological mother was white and she was given up for adoption because I want to say it was in the South and she knew her mother knew that she would be reviled in her community for giving birth to a black child. Correct. Yes. She said there was not a good experience. Her, you know, reconnecting with her.

So her mother gave up for adoption as sort of like a defense mechanism against violence in her own life and it took her a very long time to find her mother and when she found her she had a hard time connecting to her and she doesn't really have a relationship with her so that feels like the big in for her is this idea of like this sure you have this character trying to figure out her own mother who's this absent mysterious mother must be the turnkey to me understanding myself story for me like makes me think more about beyond the lights too i was just like well that's a very good movie about mothers and daughters right right so that's that's the movie that she writes that feels like it's far more representative of her own relationship right but i think that's the

thing that she connected to is the idea of being a small child being so driven by this idea of i need to know what my mother's like but that those elements of it feel so kind of plotty like they feel so obvious like sort of movie i need to fill this gap kind of stuff in a way that is I don't know it just feels like going through the motions a little bit yeah I mean I wanted to know more about the mom like in general I needed to know more about her to really understand like I feel like there's just so much maybe because the movie is very like for kids I feel like the whole like sex of it all is kind of missing sure and I think part of it is that like I mean how do you talk about because the way that they describe her mother's relationship

with Paul Bettany is that he was in the war she was impressed by that they were in love for like six months and then she didn't love him anymore but she was pregnant and so they got married and then like i guess presumably he became abusive but i feel like there's so much of that that like i wanted to know more about it i wanted to know why he was so bitter in the first place aside from just like he was in a war so that just makes him better like there was just yeah i feel like because this is so seen in the child's like i feel like the the relationships the adult relationships don't really get like any like nuance or room to breathe and since that's like hinging so much of what's going on because dakota fanning's not really like doing a whole lot I don't know it's very hard like I kept on thinking about um My Girl

2 which I um which I'm a very big My Girl 2 defender I think that My Girl 2 is great which like it's just it's just about Veda trying to figure out about her mom and it's like a more I don't know it's a more intimate story because she's like talking to like people that her mom used to date and like looking at footage of like what her mom was like and it's just like it's more of like a what kind of woman is she and what kind of woman am i gonna be kind of thing and i kind of wanted more of that here and that story is like one of the types of stories that hits me hardest emotionally. Like anytime a movie goes for like I'm trying to learn about someone I never really got to know myself and learning through the other people they were close to. That's like a total like Griffin emotional breaking point for me. breaking point for me and this movie is only dealing with it in this kind of like central mystery way like it's so focused on did she come back for me or did she come back for her stuff well it has that but also it's not focusing on it for most of the movie it's a weird sort of

prologue epilogue time is when she's really thinking about that and then when she arrives at the the honey you know, house. Yeah. It kind of, she kind of just is like, well, I'm going to get into all this now. And like, it kind of just gets set aside until it comes back.

I mean that the only aspect in which it's interested in that is solving that one mystery, but the movie becomes so much less interested in, in the way where you're like, Gina just wants to make a movie about these different characters in a house together like i feel like she talked about how like she was trying to avoid the sense that you need to represent all the isms on one of the like behind the scenes documentary like she's like this the book is so focused on the isms of the time that i felt like i could drop a lot of those and really just focus on the character interactions and not worry about proving too many larger points.

But that also means that when the movie starts to get to those scenes, it feels a little less engaged. Because it's also like that's kind of... It's interesting. I mean, Jordaine, you're talking about this movie's weird relationship to sex. I feel like she makes very, like, mature representations of sexuality in film. Like, I feel like Old Guard, Love and Basketball, and Beyond the Lights are films that are really interested in, like, a level of emotional intimacy and what connects people to each other, you know, and how those dynamics change at different levels of comfort in a

relationship and movies that all feel very sexy without being graphic because they're so keyed into the psychological aspects of sexuality in a way, or at least in sort of attraction. And this movie feels very kind of hands off with all of that. And there's like one of the featurettes on the DVD, they're interviewing the whole cast about like the differences between the characters as written and how they were adapted and how they chose to play them. And there are a lot of interesting choices here where like the Jennifer Hudson character hudson character which i think jennifer hudson might be the best performance in this movie

yeah i think so too and she also kind of gets sidelined for the whole middle section she's also really just there in the front yeah she gets like one line at the end it's like well i'm gonna vote now and you're like remember that plot line i'm like oh yeah that was set this all off right they bring her back into the fold like the last 20 minutes but the first like chunk of it is so much about her and i think she's really fucking good and the thing that's interesting is uh in the book she was supposed to be a much older woman and And Gina was the one who said, it feels like that's a very stereotypical dynamic. I would rather that she be closer in age to Dakota Fanning. I think that's more interesting if they're closer to being contemporaries. And it's someone who is somewhat at the beginning

of her life and has the potential to have the civil rights movement actually affect her at an early stage for the rest of her life rather than being a woman who's in her 60s and sort of was never given these opportunities that she's sort of at the beginning of this opportunity um and i think that like that works and that opening chunk even though it's going through a lot of these like plotty sort of motions, the stuff that works is the dynamic between the two of them. And the Queen Latifah character is much older in the book. Like she made a lot of those shifts, which I think work. But then they interview Hillary Burton, who at this point was like total request live correspondent who then becomes a one tree hill

star so she's very much in this sort of like teen pop world and this is like one of her first big serious roles and she said my real goal with this was to make sure that my character was not just the lady in the pictures because in like movies like this and stories like this there's the character who people just look at an old photograph of and they never feel like a fully formed human being and i wanted her to feel like real and three-dimensional and it's a bummer because it just feels like the movie is not giving her any room to be anything other than the woman in the picture yeah because i mean her vibe is actually really interesting and i think that's yeah and i was just she doesn't like i don't know there is a certain way that like southern white women are kind of like i don't know there's certain like posture that hollywood gives them

where they're just like all these like very like dignified kind of like southern bell kind of posture and she just seemed chill and you know she seemed like open she had like a very like open expressions in her face like i could see like she seemed like a human person i don't know sometimes i think that like and maybe it's just because she doesn't get to say a lot and so it doesn't really get bogged down by her trying to do an accent or anything like that but yeah i wanted her in more scenes because i i thought that she was really interesting this movie may might be better if it was more a parallel story about lily and rosaline both making this journey

both arriving at this community mama mia too if. Yes. Right. And both being changed by it, you know, both like, you know, emerging as different people. I like Dakota Fanning, and it was interesting, as we were saying, watching this movie, I was just recollecting like, oh God, remember when she was this just like super poised child actor. I feel like we talked about

it on our War of the Worlds episode, right, Griffin? We must have. Yes, but I do want to do a little bit of a career sidebar here. Go on. I'm just pulling up. I don't think she's very good in this movie. Um, and I,

I don't mean that in a mean way, but like when we're getting to the big stuff at the end and when she's having the big breakthroughs and she's crying and she's having these long conversations with queen Latifah's character, I was kind of like, I like she was she she was the center of the movie and i was really always struggling to lock into her um and maybe it would be yeah maybe benefits if you if you give jennifer hudson's character more to do i i think she's a very skilled actress but there are scenes that i think the one i'm thinking

of is the one where she gives the like i'm an unlovable monster speech to latifah and then she like falls to her knees and it just feels like such a stock big dramatic right it feels very acty i mean that was you know part of her thing. Like, what's interesting. She shot her fucking mom. Like, this is the, like, darkest thing in her, that she will ever have to, like, you know, say to anyone, basically. Trauma is so weird. And there are so many interesting ways of expressing trauma as an actor and as a filmmaker. And then you get to that scene and it's like, it is the most sort of off the shelf. This is a person having an emotional breakdown as a filmmaker. And then you get to that scene and it's like it is the most sort of off the shelf,

this is a person having an emotional breakdown in a movie. You know, it's not representative of, I think, how anyone actually processes trauma. It's only how people play trauma in an acting class. I think the character of May, if anything, represented trauma maybe a lot more accurately i watched some interview where gina talked about how casting for that role was she wanted to be like really particular about it because she said in her words it could tank the movie if it you know yes it's it's it's the the

role that if you do too much with that you're just like okay you know like it would throw everything off and she's very good i mean she sophia ganado is a great actress i want to go performance by performance actor by actor because i think that's the most interesting thing to talk about with this yeah and i also wanted to say real quick uh because i was also in my head because i was when this movie came out i was like just at the right age let's see when it was it was 2000 it was 2008 so i was i was in high school so i was just like a little too old for it but like still like i was still aware enough of like children's films and stuff to have like an opinion

and i remember thinking this should have been anna sofia robb um interesting she was always the sort of like you know the the tastemakers dakota fanning yeah because anna sofia robb also did a bunch of like did did more like kind of like southern roles when dixie yeah and sofia robb i feel like has a better handle on that entire environment than which which is weird because Dakota Fanning is from Georgia, but she just doesn't seem like a person from Georgia. Neither does Al, honestly. It's really weird. Okay.

I want to, let's dig into this Dakota Fanning sidebar. Okay. Because I always just assumed in my mind, especially because Dakota and Al are both good actresses and we're so skilled at such a young age. I was like, A, they feel very coastal and B, they feel very like Haley Joel Osment. They are the children of actors or acting coaches. Like when you hear about Haley Joel Osment, you're like, oh, his parents were actors, but they never really made it. And then they became like acting teachers. And then he was born and you're like, oh, so he was like raised in a household where they like taught him how to act

and the work ethic of being an actor. And he was like a consummate professional at like age eight. Right. All of that stuff. I'm like, that really comes out of, oh, my parents were failed actors, but they instilled in me the sort of like the workflow of being an actor and the like day-to-day of the job um so i always just in my mind was like one of the fanning parents must be an actor right you look at their wikipedia and not only as you said do they come from georgia which is surprising but also their entire family is sports okay a lot of athletes yeah her mother played tennis professionally her father minor league baseball player maternal grandfather former american football player her aunt former espn reporter jill errington right they just come

from this pure sports family there's like no sort of like just southern sports and then these two like very like formal like hello i'm a serious child actor kids come out at age three you know i will say you know she went to school in california my guess is they eventually moved to california because she became a actress at such a young age like that she was doing all this stuff yeah but it feels like very much the cart followed the horse it was like she comes out and is like hello i'm a tiny thespian and they're like i guess we have to move to hollywood when she was in i am sam i just she didn't get the oscar nomination no um she got the sag she got a sag nomination and i do

remember it was a real conversation was like are we about to nominate a six-year-old? Like, is this going to happen? Because the Oscars nominate kids, obviously, but six is like very young. I mean, how old was Tatum O'Neill? Tatum O'Neill, I think it was 11. 10 or 11. Quavanzane is still the youngest.

And that feels like they finally broke that barrier. Kwanzaa, there was also the thing, though, where that movie was shot. Right. Two years before it played at Sundance, which was then a year before the Oscars. So by the time she shows up at the ceremony, she's three years older than she was in the movie. Yeah. She was nine when she was nominated or whatever. She was six when they filmed it.

She was probably like six or seven yeah well you know it wasn't just that she had like cute little chubby cheeks and she was a sweetie like she was a poised actor like at a young age girls is like uptown girls yeah man on fire she's like great in like you know like like when she was a little kid she was she was very impressive i never saw the cat in the hat. Griffin, I'm assuming you have seen that. She's good in the cat in the hat, but the cat in the hat itself is. A nightmare movie. She's doing the uptown girls thing.

I mean, this is what's, what's so fascinating to me about Dakota Fanning. Here's a very, very young child who became a major movie star, right? And the other examples of this are like Macaulay Culkin and Shirley Temple, you know? And to a lesser degree because they were a little older, like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. And the dynamic there is like they just represent a kid so well. And they're not exclusively beloved by kids but they definitely a lot of their movie stardom is that kids see themselves on screen and then dakota is this weird anomaly where it's like she became a major movie star but it was almost based on she seems like a tiny adult nothing about her seems childlike and she was either giving like wise beyond her years

performances which is like really sam right in really intense movies it's like i am sam war of the world hide and seek like whether they were prestigey man on fire whether they were prestigey or like mainstream the the premise was kind of this actress is having to play very harrowing things in very adult films and she seems to be doing it with a lot of professionalism and poise and then the closest she comes to movie star performances the closest she comes to having like a movie star persona is the uptown girls cat in the hat i'm a little child who acts like a 70 or 8 year old woman i'm high status dreamer dreamer is like the one outlier where it's like here's a family movie where dakota is playing just a kid and it's the one that exists the least

sure never i have never seen dreamer uh she was uh charlotte's web right is she is she the kid she is and she's actually good in charlotte. But it is funny that, like, so little of her career was tied to her being a sort of avatar for children. You know, it's like she's got her movies in which she plays a real kid, but those are adult films. And then she has her movies where the entire joke is she doesn't behave like a child. And those are the movies that kids could actually see yeah and then when she hit like young adult age like because like this is 2008 and 2007 she did a movie called hound dog which i have seen yeah have you seen it no i have not seen hound dog i only remember hound dog as the movie everyone made such a fuss over when it was like announced

or what you know like it was like well wait a second she's gonna be in this you know grown-up movie where she's abused and like i don't know if that should be allowed like i just remember there being a lot of discourse about hound dog at the time it was like this is dakota fanning's uh pretty baby it was like the movie where everyone was like is this humane why is she doing this hound dog is hound dog is a very depressing movie but like it's depressing in a way where it's like it's the kind of role that you would it's i don't know how to say this in a delicate way um you usually don't see white kids deal with that in movies it's usually like everyone but white kids

it's yeah it's a very like i don't know the kind of melancholy of hound dog it reminds me a lot of like stuff like precious stuff on the long the lines of that and it's just it's weird to see her there because she's just so like well moisturized and like pristine and i just don't believe that she's like really going through it yeah that's what she looks like a little doll she's just yeah she's just little she's like porcelain so yeah hound dog is like she did like two southern movies and this movie and hound dog and hound dog was like the dark one and this was like the nice one and now she doesn't do southern movies anymore and i'm actually really happy about it because it's weird she seems weird

like she doesn't seem like she belongs there it's weird right it's like 2001 i am sam that's pretty much her debut she played kids no she and she'd been in er and al mcbeal and stuff like she yeah she'd done kid roles. Right. Then the next year is like Trapped, Sweet Home Alabama, Hansel and Gretel. I think in this Hansel and Gretel movie, she's like not Gretel. She plays something else. Sweet Home Alabama, she's in very briefly. She's being read a story.

Right. She's the Fred Savage role in that. Sweet Home Alabama, she's playing young Reese Witherspoon. Trapped, she's like, that's that in that sweet home alabama she's playing young reese witherspoon trapped she's like that's that weird abduction movie with charlie she's a kid in peril right yeah then 2003 is like uptown girls cat in the hat that's like comedies in which the premise is she acts like a grown lady right and then you go man on Fire, Hide and Seek, Nine Lives, War of the Worlds. Like this is Dakota Fanning is like acting alongside major movie stars playing like extreme circumstances. And Steven Spielberg is doing interviews and going like she's as good as any actor I've ever worked with.

She's amazingly skilled at assessing a situation and figuring out what a scene needs. And it becomes like the Dakota Fanning show on SNL. Like the joke is Dakota Fanning is this weird adult in a child's body who like is like very sort of like erudite and pretentious. And then it's like Charlotte's Web is her last kind of children's film. Then it's Hound Dog, Secret Life dog secret life of bees coralline which she had obviously recorded much earlier which honks great and coralline yeah coralline honks she honks she's in bush which of course is the reason that precious is called precious because it's a movie push that important franchise but then it right now it's this pivot point it's like

push twilight saga runaways twilight she's good in the runaway saga yes she's good in all these things she's also uh going to college at this she's going to college she went to nyu i believe she actually graduated like yes she seems to have made that uh like a priority more than some young actors would from 2009 to 2013 all she really does is the twilight movies and some things that never really saw a wide release and then it's like night moves effie gray like now here's the thing here's the thing here's the thing starting with i would say tell me the things tell me the thing and and before you get into this is this with alec baldwin or without alec baldwin here's the thing with

alec baldwin um thank you uh a lot of the movies that are in her filmography later i've never even heard of but like night moves american pastoral once upon a time in hollywood she has become america's favorite like spooky like blonde lady like she plays like radicals and creeps and frightening people like what this is now her thing like it's very moves she's an eco terrorist and she doesn't share any scenes with Griffin Newman but you know

you're both in it a shame an absolute shame American pastoral she is you know she's sunny lavav right she's the Mary not sunny so you know the girl who basically joins the weather underground and blows something up and then what's fun at the time of hollywood she's squeaky from and she's kind of good she's kind of scary like she's good she's got a good scene scary kind of

like empty eyes like there's a shot where she's watching alicia keys make out and i i just remember thinking like if the music were any different, this would be, like, from a horror movie because she's just, like, sort of, like, in the bushes nearby. It's just funny that that is now her thing. It's just a funny little groove that she found for herself. And I also, like, watching a movie like this, like Secret Life of Bees, I look at this performance and my takeaway is, wow, Dakota Fanning sure was very professional at that age. And my takeaway is, wow, Dakota Fanning sure was very professional at that age. Like, I keep on viewing her scene as like a skill piece where I'm like, that's impressive that like someone this young did this. I don't know how engaging I find this performance, but it's clear that she's a very skilled actress on a technical level. And then those three later movies you're talking about all become like real vibe performances, like the exact kind of thing she wasn't particularly good at as a child

where it's like she's just being very natural and and sending out like a real energy she seems to be like more chill than she used to be which i guess is usually the case like i i always liked dakota fanny characters because they reminded me of like me as a kid i was like that you're like a serious little child i was a very serious kid you were an uptown girl you had yeah you had no patience for the cat in the hat chicanery no no yeah i was so i was that kind of kid so i really got her and then like you know she got older and she chilled out i got older and i started smoking weed and i chilled maybe dakota did too i forgot to mention she's in that thing the alienist which i don't watch but i know i know some people enjoy the alienist now in season two i've heard that people like that show what if there was an alienist what's that was that on hulu no it's on tnt it's a tnt show about like early criminal

profiling like vintage 19th century criminal profiling but the alienist is also one of those things that like was a uh carrie fukunawa project that he then abandoned and still happened anyway like it's in that exact time zone where it's like, okay, you know what? I'm not doing it anymore, but now I'm going to do this TV show. Actually,

I'm not going to do this TV show anymore. I'm going to do this instead. Like he kept on. Was he supposed to do it? Yes. Yeah. He wrote, he isn't a screenplay credit on.

He still gets the screenplay credit. And apparently a lot of the designs are still things that carry Fukunawa proof. Like by all accounts, the Pennywise design in the movie is what he developed. Ah, I really like, I really like the

first it. First it is good. Jordan, here's what's interesting. He apparently took it right up to the finish line. They became afraid that what he was doing was too avant-garde and not commercial enough. So he walked. They hire

Muschietti. Andy Muschietti. He barely touches Fukunawa's script for the first movie. Tries to put in more conventional scares. The movie is a huge hit. Then he apparently dramatically rewrites the second script. Like, throws it out. I think a lot of

what's good in the first movie is what Carrie Fukunawa developed the second movie sucks so hard and that's the movie that has none of his fingerprints on it anyway yeah I know he's not credited as a screenwriter the second movie is one of the most

I actually walked out of the theater and not because like i was offended by the movie although like was it because you'd been sitting in that theater for eight hours and the movie wasn't done i got i got halfway through the movie realized how much was left realized how irritated i was that i was there and i'm just like you know what I'm in Times Square this is before they got rid of the Times Square Sephora and like I'm gonna go to Sephora instead of finishing this movie

make a better use of that half hour of your time you missed 18 more flashbacks so I'm sorry that you missed that and then just a couple days ago I tried I watched it at home and like it's just one of the most upset. Like I thought on a smaller screen, I'd be less angry about it. Cause I watch, I watch all kinds

of dumb shit. Like Kyle, Kyle gets so annoyed with me with the shit that I'll watch. Like he'll come in and he's like, what are you watching? It'd be like dead heat. And he'll just like turn around and walk out. But I could not sit through it part two. Like that's, I don't know why. I just didn't have the patience. Can I give you my take? Any of that. On why you couldn't put up with it? Because it's the exact opposite

of what you're talking about. It's a movie that should be owning sort of the trashiness of where it can go. And instead it has this lofty self-importance of it's the final chapter in the it saga. And they're acting like it's it end game. Like there's been 40 movies of 10 years and 20 movies. And you're like,

dude, it's one two hour movie that you're banking off of. Just wrap up the fucking story. You don't need to make this like a legacy. It's acting like it's a legacy sequel. Like, can you believe we got all the kids back together again? Remember that trailer? You know, the cool trailer, the Chastain visiting the old lady.

The teaser is so good for them. And you're like, oh my God. Yeah, this is great. Oh, this is so cool. And then, so good for them. Oh, and she like scooches by the hall. Oh my God. Yeah, this is great. Oh, this is so cool. And then, you know, whatever. Shitty movie. All right, moving on from Dakota Fanning. Is there another filmography

you want to discuss, Griffin, next? I mean, let's say like, okay, Alicia Keys, this is really her first movie. And I think people expected that she was going to have a film career and she kind of just didn't. And I think she's good in this and she was also

in Smoking Aces, which she's cool in. And she's in the Nanny Diaries. Oh, you're right. This is kind of the last one. It's Smoking Aces and Nanny Diaries in 2007. Nanny Diaries, 2007 nanny diary she plays like the best friend role smoking aces she plays a cool assassin for a long time uh when the why the last

man movie was supposed to be made with dj caruso and shia labeouf uh she was supposed to play i'm forgetting her name agent 100 yeah no it's not 100 it's like 355 she was supposed to play, I'm forgetting her name. The agent? Agent 100? Yeah. No, it's not 100. It's like. 355. She was announced as playing 355. And then she does this movie, which felt like her big

sort of like, oh, now she's making a prestige movie. And then she doesn't really act that much ever again. The only performance she's given since is playing Alicia Keys

in Jamming the Hologramss and she was on empire and stuff. Uh, she did pop up on empire. I mean, she's done some TV maybe, but no, no, she,

she pivoted to like, uh, like, you know, reality TV. Like she did, uh, the X factor.

She did. Um, I feel like she did another, right. Doesn't she does another of the, the voice. Yeah. You know, like she's, she's, she's all in on that. Now I feel like that eats up right doesn't she does another of the voice yeah you know like she's she's all in on that now I feel like that eats up so much of your time

I'll say she's also like host of the shows yeah she's produced a lot both like on film and TV and on Broadway like she produces a lot of other people's works but I think she's good in this like I remember being excited at the time

that it felt like she was going to become a movie star, that she was going to have a sort of Janelle Monae, like, split career and keep doing both. Because she's a good actress and she's very innately engaging. She is, yeah. No, she's really good. It's weird.

I never think about alicia keys anymore that's such an interesting thing like i watched her in this movie and i was like oh yeah fuck she was in movies for like a second yeah and like now i mostly just know her as that that weirdo on instagram like she's like i don't wear makeup i'm just amazingly beautiful all the time. She's very into not wearing makeup. I know this, right? Like that's her thing now. The most notable thing that she has done,

in my opinion, since this movie, is break up Swiss Beats' marriage. That was a big one. She was in the headlines a lot for that. She's very cool in this movie which makes sense because that's her vibe she's good at that she's like i would not say it's a one note performance but it's sort of like uh you know she's got she's got a lot of poise and presence and she's like a cool and magnetic figure yeah yeah i i liked her um i thought i thought that the the nate parker the nate parker of it

all man every single time i seen him i was like fuck you're still in movies i know well this is this is uh i guess the beginning like this is where she his relationship with gina right right where she finds him and this is before red tails like i don't what has he been in before this the great debaters i guess that's that's right that was sort of his discovery movie i'm trying to i don't even remember the first place that i saw nate parker because for a while i did i did like him i mean i didn't have any reason not to like him before i know it's the one thing I dread about rewatching beyond the lights. Yeah. Oh yeah.

He did. He did. He did pride, which is that swimming movie. The great debaters. Yeah. I've never seen the great debaters. I think he's,

he's the main kid in the great debate. He's the main debater in the film. You have like Denzel as the captain the teacher you have forrest whitaker as the disapproving parent and then nate parker is sort of giving the like anointment role like it very much feels like that movie is denzel saying like i'm saying that this is a guy and i'm giving him a spotlight and i denzel am trying to put the focus on this dude and then people start putting him in movies yeah yeah yeah um but yeah the stuff with him and her i was so like i just felt like there was a piece missing like i get it she doesn't want to marry

him or whatever but like why doesn't she want to marry him it's never really like was it like supposed to be cut out of the movie or something i like there's definitely something not there because like i guess it's like she wanted her independence or something like i'm not really sure i also like in my head canon i was like oh maybe she's gay and then she says and then she accepts it anyway i don't know she had a lot of gay vibes from her i kind of wanted her to be gay absolutely and in smoking aces she's gay she plays like a very cool gay assassin who i believe is maybe in a relationship with taraji p henson they're they're like gay couple assassins um but uh it's a good performance. Um, but all the special features I watched, they talked about how much difficulty they had adapting this character.

And they keep on talking about likability and this sort of like standard Hollywood kind of way. But I think it's because they were like, we're worried that the character feels like kind of a buzzkill. She's the only one who doesn't want Dakota Fanning moving in. And she's the one who's kind of uptight and she keeps on rejecting this guy's marriage proposals. And so it seems like their solution to making her likable is sort of making her comedically heightened and treating all the proposals like they're Lucy pulling the football away from charlie brown but it also makes it feel like it's just like a sketch comedy routine until she finally inexplicably goes like nah i'm gonna bury you no i don't even understand because he calls her a bitch i was like oh yeah that seems kind of weird but then since the other thing again you're like wait whoa whoa wait what what is going on with these two and then he's out of the movie for a while and then yeah like by the time he comes back i've almost forgotten the plot like i don't know like i feel like if a guy like it would have made sense if she was just gay because it's like oh he calls

her a selfish bitch and it's like okay well obviously he's not coming back and she and obviously she can't say hey i'm gay like that's just me that's what i would have done it would have fixed everything in my opinion that's how i would have read the movie yeah yes and it would have made it a little more interesting and it would explain why she's so i mean like she's right she's sort of closed up she's right she doesn't want to talk about her feelings in the same but also like she's sort of like this opposite, you know, June and mayor, like sort of right. Like,

you know, may is so emotive and she says, you know, like all her emotions are right on the surface. So June's kind of like very sublimated for a movie about a bunch of people hanging out in a house and learning about each other. You don't learn a lot about the characters in the movie. She has like an NAACP shirt and I think she a lot about a lot of the characters in the movie she has like an NAACP

shirt and I think she says something about a meeting but then it's just like never addressed again I think she wears that shirt at four different points in the movie like four different timeline points in the movie they keep on wanting to sort of just like code in without having to vote screen time to it the idea that she's like a leader and an organizer and all this sort of stuff but you only get it through seeing her t-shirt while she walks out and goes like excuse me i'm trying to practice my music um boy let's talk about latif let's go and talk about queen latif because she is still you know this is a few years from her oscar nomination and right this is sort of like in the run with like Taxi Beauty Shop,

Last Holiday, right? Like those movies where she is above the title. And she's the lead, she's the top billed performer. Right. Yeah, she's above Dakota Fanning or anyone else. She's first billed. Yeah.

Yeah. Chicago comes out in 2002. She gets an Oscar nomination. Everyone's like, fuck, Queen Latifah, who at this point has already proven herself as an actress. She's great and set it off. She did multiple seasons of Living Single, right? Yeah.

Come on, she's a legend, Living Single. Yeah. She's actually amazing and set it off, obviously. Yeah, one of my favorite movie deaths is her death in that movie. She rules in that. And she's been, yes, I mean, you look at her filmography and she's like, it's very predictable. That it's like, she's been acting regularly throughout the 90s giving good performances.

And you're like, okay, she's in Jungle Fever, House Party 2, Juice. She's in Set It Off. She's in Hoodlum. She's in Living Out Loud, right? Then she starts to like transition into white Hollywood. Then you get like sphere the bone collector bringing out the dead then she gets the chicago oscar nomination and people were like who knew queen latifah could act it's like motherfucker she's been acting for

12 years she's been acting for a really long time what are you talking about oh yeah she's great i was actually just on the bechtel cast talking about set it off. So people should listen to that episode. I talk a lot about queen Latifah. I listened to that episode. Great podcast. Great episode. She gets, uh,

isn't she the one who gets eaten by the jellyfish or the, yeah, it's the jellyfish and sphere. Yeah. So here's a great movie. We should just fear. Let's do this. I've never seen this fear.

Okay. It's Barry Levinson, right? Listen, what if there was a sphere? What if it was under the water? What's up with the sphere? You got to find out. Only four people can find out.

Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Samuel Jackson, Queen Latifah. They're going to go look at the sphere. All kinds of things are going to happen. There's going to be jellyfish. No one's going to have a good time. The movie will be critically reviled in a box office bomb. It's incredibly long and it's great. I love it.

Sounds like the abyss. It's very, it's very abyss. From the director of Rain Man comes a sci-fi movie that asks, what would Dustin Hoffman and Sharon Stone do in space together? Except they're underwater. But, but Queen Latifah right yeah so fantastic actress right overnight white hollywood discovery who knew now she has this run as like a leading movie star where it's uh bringing down the house comes out right after her oscar nomination and is the biggest fucking hit in the world it's so

humongous we can't i mean we've talked about it before but please go ahead jordaine i bring down the house let's bring down the house for a second one of the worst movies ever made it's not a good movie it's a movie that has puzzled me for years like i have seen bringing down the house so many times and every single time i'm just like what what you see he's very uptight yes i don't think you're getting lonely and she she was in prison and she learned all kinds of things i believe she has she has broken out of prison in that movie right it? It's not like she's been released. I think she's escaped. No, I think she's been released.

She's trying to prove her innocence. Oh, she is. Right. You're right. And Jordaine, I don't want to mansplain Bring It Down the House for you, but the thing you need to understand, because it's subtle,

and a lot of people don't get it when they watch the movie, is that Eugene Levy is in Bring It Down the House, and Queen Latifah has him straight tripping boo okay but that's subtext that's subtext so eugene levy in this in that movie i think about him constantly like when i don't know why like when i just when i just think about like sometimes when i think i say the word white people I'm thinking about Eugene Levy in Bringing Down the House with those cornrows yeah that's what he was going for

I guess he was like I will be white people he was 100% white I actually really appreciate how much he committed to being like man aren't white people stupid it's just like wow you know the man the man is a

satirical eye yeah sure but i also kind of wanted that movie i kind of want to do it on bad romance just because of how weirdly how it's set up to be like a rom-com and then it's not because because like the world just could not imagine steve martin and queen latifah but it's like a it's not because because like the world just could not imagine Steve Martin and Queen Latifah. But it's like it's like a rom-com without the sex. Like she like comes in and changes his life. But like then they don't fuck. And they meet from being like on an online dating website. Like the premise that set up is he thinks they're going to date.

But she ends she ends up with Eugene Le levy he gets back together with gene smart i believe who is like queen latifah fixes his wife or whatever right yes yeah queen latifah fixes his white marriage because you know god forbid well she has everyone's house i don't know but then here's the big like post Oscar post bring you down the house. Queen Latifah has the keys to Hollywood run. Then you get a taxi. She has a small part in the cookout, which she produces. Then she has the cameo in barbershop too, which is only to establish backdoor beauty shop spinoff.

Like they announce in variety, Queen Latifah will be appearing in barbershop to solely to launch a spinoff film. So then it's beauty shop, uh, stranger than fiction where she's supporting, but that's like the hottest screenplay in Hollywood. She's the new main character in ice age.

No, you're skipping. Okay. Last holiday. She's great in Last Holiday. I haven't seen that movie in years. That's sort of an odd movie though because it's like it's about her dying. Like Hollywood would never make a movie like that anymore. That's sort of like weird and melancholy and like presented as a romantic comedy drama. Is it her? And LL Cool J.

Who's her love interest? L cool j right right and you're remaking an alec guinness comedy right is it oh is it wait really yes i think it is you know you're right it is yes it's uh an old but like an obscure british comedy yeah um then hairspray which she's very good in yeah she's great in hairspray And then this is when she starts to slow down again. It's like she does Mad Money, which doesn't exist. Mad Money didn't really work out for anyone involved. I love Mad Money, though. Really?

I really do. I love Mad Money. You're a Mad Money fan? I watched it for the first time this year, and I was just like, oh my god, why have I never watched this before i like mad money in the sense that like they are very aware of like the class differences and the race differences i don't know i thought it was i thought it was really smart i thought it could be way worse than it was they're stealing money that is gonna be like destroyed right like it's like they're

gonna they're gonna steal money that is about to expire essentially right yes katie holmes queen latifah i forgot it's it's written and directed by callie curry who did thelma and louise yeah did the screenplay for thelma and louise yeah yeah and queen latifah is great in mad money like she's way better than everyone else in that movie because she's taking it seriously i mean she was a great like comedy movie star. She had this run and she would do like supporting roles in between. And I think she's very good dramatic actress as well. But she had this surprisingly fertile run as like a lead in comedy lady.

And then now. You got just right. Well, just the tail end of this sort of thing you're talking about. Because now she starts to transition more into like ensemble so after mad money what happens in vegas is a very small role secret life of bees she's first build you get a sense that she was the person they needed to get the financing for the movie like she's really sort of extending herself playing a role that was written for an older actress because her movie stardom's so big at the time. And then it's like Valentine's Day ensemble

just writes her sort of last lead. Dilemma is supporting. And then it's like two years until Joyful Noise, which is her and Dolly Parton. And then she doesn't really do a

big movie role again until girls trip five years i believe joyful noise is that not is that like a you know choir versus choir movie yeah bring it on with choirs yes yeah yes no that's what it is but she does a five there's like a five-year gap pretty much there where it's like you know small role in 22 jump street tiny role in miracles from heaven another ice age movie and girls trip and that's all that happens between joyful noise and girls trip you're forgetting you're forgetting bessie uh where she played bessie smith which was a tv movie but it was yes you know uh written director by d reese i love bessie pretty good movie yeah she was not made for an emmy i guess but you know like but she's good in that and that that seemed

like sort of passion project-y for her. And she does Steel Magnolias for TV and she does Star. She's written Steel Magnolias too. Yeah. I've never seen Star. She kind of just pivots to TV. And then now she was supposed to before the pandemic. I think it's still happening.

But obviously they never were able to really start production and they can't get, she's supposed to do a reboot of the equalizer for CBS. That's right. With her playing the equalizer. Yeah. Which I so badly wanted to play the computer nerd on. I think you remember David,

I was losing my mind. It was like the only pilot that i was like i would love to do this you would love to also to play the role that they're always telling you like to right like i feel like computer nerd you often avoid because it's like you know been there done that a little bit but there were two x factors, three X factors. One, films in New York. I was like, great, right? Two, I have heard such great things about Queen Latifah, like just her fucking professionalism on set and her decency as a human being.

I was like, man, I would love to work on a show where Queen Latifah is the star and the producer and presumably bullshit will not fly and no one will be an asshole. Remember she also had a talk show. I forgot about that. She did that for a year. Number three,

it was a better written computer nerd than most of those shows. But that's what she's supposed to do now. She's supposed to do the equalizer for CBS. Could I talk about Bessie one more time? Please. Please.

Okay, so Bessie is one of those movies where I'm a huge fan of Bessie I I wrote about it I'm obsessed with it um mostly just because it's one of the few movies where like black women are gay like it's just the fact that if it had been theatrically released I feel like her career her like film career would have jump-started but instead it's on hbo where i feel like not a lot of people watched it and it's like we have queen latifah being mentored by monique and no one is talking about it i think it's great in it and monique so rarely acts too so like it was genuinely exciting and monique is like amazing like monique maybe

kind of makes the movie because the movie i love the movie i think it's great monique i think is what stops it from being like as sad as it could be because she's such like an interesting like presence in the film i feel like you know what i mean since you actually watched it yes i just love her i i know i don't know like why monique doesn't make a lot of movies i'm sure there's a lot of things going into that but like anytime i see her in a movie it is i was just looking at monique's she delivered recent films almost christmas blackbird like anytime i've she pops up in something she's great but yes she's playing ma rainey and bessie she's very funny she's very i don't know intense how to how to describe yeah she's like very into anyway

i just i just need anyone who's listening to this to please watch bessie i would assume it's on hbo you know max or whatever right it has to be i mean was this before or after we started recording where we were talking about native son and how that also fell into like an hbo black hole that i feel like yeah we this is during recording the tale also fell into that i'm yeah i was just complaining about like how great the tale is yeah a few people know about it i need to just make a list of just like hbo movies that are great like bad education education just like a lot of people to watch bad education it's one of those things where i feel like it's like if you have made a small movie like the tale or bad education or native son you know and hbo comes knocking and they're like we're gonna pay you 10 million dollars for the rights like it's so hard

to say no because it's like look this means that everyone makes their money and like yeah you know everyone is made whole and the movie will get seen it'll be but like it it sadly does kind of like sweep it into a category of movies that get kind of ignored like the tale should have been one of the big movies like critically of 2018 and it wasn't like it played at sundance and everyone was like fuck lord dern might win the oscar for this and then it just went to tv and no one really engaged with it. And I feel like very often HBO will pay money, big money. And it's also the promise of we're going to put all our energy behind this. Like if a studio releases this, they might release it on four screens and it might be one of 20 movies

they have this Oscar season. We'll give this like a real star birth. But it feels like it's very often movies that either are viewed as difficult subject matter or unconventional subject matter. And it's just the kind of mid-budgety movie where it's like, you know, like, well, how are we help making this pop? You know, right. I don't know. This is kind of the point I want to make by going through Latifah. Here you have this person who is like a very prominent pop culture figure for 20 years, right? Like in the 90s, sitcom star, incredibly successful music star, and then is starring in like a lot of canonically important black films.

Then the 2000s, she translates, she like goes over into mainstream Hollywood, is a comedy star, is ensemble, gets gets an Oscar nomination like does all these big things and then it feels like in the late 2000s she goes like okay I have passion projects that I want to make I want to play Bessie Smith I want to do Steel Magnolias and Hollywood's like yeah you should go to TV like it was yeah don't you want to be the next Ellen right maybe she did I mean maybe she did for a while but it does feel like she like tried to cash in her capital on these like big passion projects and they were like you're not really a movie star anymore and she doesn't really get to be in movies again until she plays the fourth lead in girls trip which she's very good at yeah but yeah it is weird because like uh just

like thinking about Steel Magnolias and Bessie, which are both like really really good. She's really great. Steel Magnolias is actually like one of the best casted remakes I've ever seen. It had Jill Scott, right? Who else was in it?

Jill Scott. God, I'm totally Alfre Woodard is in there. there yeah like it's it's great yeah um but i but i kind of feel like there's not room for that kind of black movie on the big screen right now and i can't say why that is the the huge problem of just like so many kinds of movies that we are we are fondly recalling as we speak right now just don't seem to be able to exist in cinemas anymore which is very frustrating like i don't know if secret life of bees exists in 2020 does it like me situation probably right like you know i know they still make bestseller you

know to movie train like but like i i'm not sure yeah it probably is a tv movie now or a mini series or something i mean what the help is four years after this and is a box office juggernaut and is also a a steaming pie of poop it is a garbage movie but that it it feels like like watching this movie you kind of have to compare it to the help unfortunately yeah right the difference the helpful difference is like at least dakota fanning is a child like at least she her being astonished by these things is a little more believable in the help where fucking emma stone's like a time traveler and you're like where have you been woman you're a grown-ass person like what are you how why are you behaving this way but also it's

like at least this is perverse the way i say it but like at least the dakota fan and character has her own struggles in this movie and bonds with other women over like you know the the common sort of disenfranchisement they feel with the world rather than the help where emma stone's like huh this is like i can use this to become a very successful writer i can like exploit other people's suffering yes i'm very aware of that um but that movie is like a lot more pat is a lot less interested the interior lives of the help despite being the title of the fucking film yeah secret life of bees is kind of like you know what you know if you just hang out with the black people you know they're much they're much cooler

they're much more chill they have better it's mostly because like in the end she's just like living with these black women and it's just like the idea is that like her life is going to be so much better because she is living with those black women which i think is an interesting thing that they don't really like lean into more this idea that like everybody in the movie that is terrible is white except for her that is the juice to this movie for me, is as a hangout movie, is this weird 60s, like we got this one pink house where everything is pretty cool

as long as we're staying within these walls. They have a line about how it's like kind of cut off from the rest of the world. And I know the same things don't happen inside the house, but it reminded me of Mother. You really don't see any of the world outside of it to the point where you're like is she dead like it's just like so heavenly and perfect exactly did she just arrive right like did she actually fall down a hill and die yeah just imagine i just

love that like when they're in the have the whole dinner scene they're all those black women including the one who's like we haven't even talked about tristan wilds yet but i noticed sure it's very good tristan wilds mother is played by the actress who played la fonda in napoleon dynamite oh yeah chandrella avery i believe yeah yeah those scenes and like the church scene where it's like they have like reordered how they approach these things like they don't do it like however they're supposed to do it. And that's right. They've made their own community. Their house almost feels like Brigadoon, but it's a time portal to a future that we still haven't achieved.

Yeah, it's like people are visiting and it's like this like oasis and like Tristan Wilds is coming in and he's chilling. And I still don't know why Tristan wilds is there or what he's doing especially because like what is his point in this movie making honey it's nice to see him yeah it's nice to see him i you know i remember when he was on the wire uh there was another thing on the special features that really jumped out to me where uh gina was talking about trying to like find her into the material. She also said that like they offered her this right in like 2002 or 2003. And as she said many times, and we've talked about on this podcast after doing a disappearing acts and

loving basketball back to back she was super burned out and it's like i want to wait a while before i make my next movie so she said they sent it to her and she just left it in her closet for three years and didn't even look at it until like 2006 or 2005 um but she said when she read it she what she was interested in was she was talking to her husband, Reggie Rockbythewood, and his parents grew up in the South during the Civil Rights Movement. And she was asking them what it was like. And they said, well, it was interesting because it was this time of great upheaval and there was a lot of awfulness going on, but there was also a sense of hope. But I feel like the thing that people don't talk about is we were still just living our

lives on a day-to-day basis. Like movies about that time tend to make it seem like everything that was going on was incredibly politically sort of like loaded. When in fact, we were like eating food and we were falling in love and we were tending to our gardens. And like life does continue in all these very dramatic times. A thing that I think we're all experiencing right now where it like feels like the world is on fire. And yet there are things we do on a day to day basis that have some sense of normalcy, even if they're tinged with the awareness of what's going on at the world at large and that's sort of like i feel

like the movie that gina's really into is like can you have this house that almost feels like a sci-fi conceit where like life progresses one step at a time and these small gestures have like huge implications but then you step outside of the house and like you get arrested at a movie theater yeah yeah they don't even talk about like, let's, let's sit together when we get to, you know what I mean? Like it just,

you just see them doing it. But there's also, there's the dynamic that August talks about with Lily at the end when they're sort of sharing, you know, when they're finally talking about her mom where she's like, I was your mom's maid. Like I was her nanny. right? You know, like that scene kind of rules that seems good. And she's like, and that's a dynamic. I did not want to repeat, right? You know,

they're sort of talking about like, you know, this needed to be different. That's why I didn't tell you about this. And so many, so many times in movies like this, there's that scene where it's like, well, I didn't tell you because you just weren't ready which really just means like because uh because we needed to have this scene later in the movie but like that conversation makes a lot of sense like when they finally have it and sort of open up to each other i also think that that scene is so well written and so well acted from latifah's uh uh vantage point which is like she takes that pause i mean what dakota fanning asked her like did you love my mother and latifah sort of says like i mean i loved her like with qualifiers right she's like what do you mean

in another version of this movie you'd expect that that's all they'd say about it and brush past it and latifah like unpacks it and brush past it and latifa like unpacks it and she's like look it's like it's an incredibly unbalanced relationship that's not something that is conducive to an honest form of love you know we were so in equal that despite me feeling probably some sort of sense of like maternal love for her it was wrapped up in this really like contradictory relationship yeah she can order her around like yeah and i feel like that's kind of the fact that at the end of the movie she ends up sort of claiming mothership of the dakota fanning character because that is actually closer to a mother-daughter relationship

rather than this weird transactional, like, forced, indentured, like, job sort of relationship, you know? Yeah. That's interesting to me. I mean, there's, like, a lot of interesting threads. While you were talking,

I was just thinking about imitation of life and, like, what if? Yeah, it's like there's so many like interesting dynamics and like that one. I'm not one of those people that thinks that like old movies are better, but I do think that like they were a bit more curious about this stuff. Like a lot of the curiosity led to bad directions and weird directions and problematic directions. But I don't know. There was just like a little bit more curiosity of like, how is this going to work, black people and white people together? What are we doing? And that scene with them talking about that relationship made me think of that. I think like Hollywood used to be a lot more interested in making what they would call issues pictures and being like there is a thing, there is a discourse going on sort of digressed to wanting to make films that are just kind of like, this is what happened in the past and we solved it, book closed. Well, this came out like a month before Obama's elected president.

Like I was watching an interview with Alicia Keys and she was like, and I sure hope he's elected. And you're like, oh, wow. There was like a time frame when we weren't sure that wasn't going to like was going to happen. Yeah. And it just feels like this movie is like of that time having this incredible distrust of our country. But but I do think, yeah, Jardine, like that we've moved beyond wanting to make films in a Hollywood studio level that really engage with difficult conversations. Yeah, because like a lot of films now, like it's almost like the assumption is that they're made on the assumption that everyone who is watching the movie is progressive yes or at least knows what that means and so we don't really have to like we don't have to explain how this is bad or why this is bad or we just said it

was bad and it was then and there were these people who fought and it's just like i find it to be a very very boring well the character like who's like well i i'm the racist you know like they're like right like there's the movie that's a and then there's the one characters like some people like oh well i i approve of this progress. And then another character's like, well, I don't approve at all. I'm the villain now. And that's who I'm going to be here. The Sam Rockwell and the Kevin Costner. Right.

Yeah. This is only like maybe tangentially related, but I recently watched Charles Burnett's The Glass Shield. Great movie. It's about a black cop who like, he becomes a cop because he wants to be a hero and like basically finds out, oh, it's impossible to be a hero. I feel like The Glass Shield is like a movie about how being a cop is just inherently bad and there's like nothing that you can do to fix it.

It's much more about him being like told like you have to abide by the rules of you know the brotherhood of policing right like you know which is essentially like whatever we do you you know no snitching and we're you know we're allowed to behave the way we want over whatever idealistic notions you had of like you know being the i believe he's supposed to be like the first black deputy at the sheriff's department right like he's you know he's supposed to you like the first black deputy at the sheriff's department, right? Like he's, you know, he's supposed to, you know, he's like a, a milestone figure. Yeah. And I, so I was watching that and then I was thinking about black Klansman, a movie that I do not like. Um,

and it basically has a very similar kind of like setup, but then it goes like, there are the bad cop, the bad cops and there are the good cops. And like you can choose to be a good cop and that's how you fix it. And like I just that's kind of how I feel about like films like from like 2008 on where like that's the kind of attitude. It's just like they're the good people and they're over there and you just have to be over there where the good people are. Whereas like if I watch,

we're watching the black, the glass shield actually like I was, you know, stirred intellectually by a film. Like it made me think about dynamics. You know what I mean? I like that movie. I mean,

I think Spike Lee's great cop movie is inside man because that movie is very upfront about everything terrible about the NYPD while still being like, I am delivering you a really like slick, fun, you know, heist movie, but like it makes, you know,

it has all those sequences where like the weird in industry of the NYPD is being deployed. Like the fences, the machinery, the vehicles, like, you know, they're like, they're hassling anyone coming out of the bill. They're like, you know, all that stuff. That's just kind of like bubbling away. Black Klansman. I feel like he got so hung up on the story, right? Like the Ron Stallworth story. And like, I don't know.

I like Black Klansman. Okay. I have a handful of things i want to say i mean one is i i remember during the black clansmen oscar campaign season uh when like everyone was like oh my god spikes finally made a movie that's gonna like cross over at the oscars um sure i i remember talking to a publicist who was part of the black klansman team at like a cocktail party and she was saying to other people in the industry who had not watched black klansman like no you don't understand like this movie's actually for white people like that was kind of their selling point on the movie at the time, which ties into what you're saying, Jordaine,

and also talking about the way that race relations are often dealt with in major films now, which is like movies to make liberals feel good. Movies in which there are very clear cut, like these people are good, these people are bad. And the journey of the movie is watching the good people succeed over the bad people. And you get to feel good because you knew that the good people were good all along. And the bad people were bad. Like they're very sort of self-serving to the audience.

Um, I think black Klansman is probably the best of those types of movies. Yes. I will say that. Yes. But it still is. He's an extremely, he's an exciting filmmaker,

even if you're not into the totally right. Exactly. Yeah. The five bloods is so much more interesting and fraught to me and the way it's discussing all these weird racial dynamics, uh, you know, in a way that also I see the movie being misinterpreted a lot,

but I think that's because it's a complicated text. Whereas Black Klansman is so cut and dry. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Black Klansman, like there are scenes that I really like, like the one where they're all dancing and like all the all of the like flourishes stuff I enjoy. But yeah. And I will because I was like I think about Secret Life of Bees, which is like the exact kind of movie that I would never want to watch simply because of how kind of like cut and dry things are but like but as a hangout movie it actually works that's where it works yeah there's some good hangouts i mean there are good hangs in the secret life of bees and

making honey seems fun and the beekeeping scenes of which there are not enough are weird bees are a great they're a great metaphor right because it's like here we are in this incredibly like you know like it's it's very tense it's sort of dangerous there's bees flying around but like it's also sort of serene like she's approaching it in this very methodical and like you know uh knowledgeable manner and like there's no fear because they're in this nice community that they built for themselves but it's still like an intense and scary place and like i dug all the bee stuff bees are cool like these are cool queenifah, like just sort of like telling me about queen bees. I'm like,

yeah, I could, I could do like a, you know, like a sort of like planet earth mini series length of that. Like that would be great. Um, so I was,

yeah, it could have done with more bees. That's maybe, maybe my biggest complaint about this movie. Not enough, not enough bees. Oh oh we haven't really talked much about sophie okonedo yes okay i was gonna say i i feel like we briefly have to touch on her and bet me so this is like sophie okonedo who has been around forever uh is like a great british

actress a lot of stage and TV. Does Ace Ventura, When Nature Calls, where she plays the princess, you know, but then doesn't really have a breakout until like Dirty Pretty Things in 2002 and then Hotel Rwanda in 2004. She doesn't do that many movies from 1991 to 2004.

And then she gets a surprise Oscar nomination for Hotel Rwanda. Very deserved. Then she has like a run of a couple kind of like post Oscar nomination paycheck roles. Eon Flux, which I feel like I need to watch now. She is like the wise. I don't know. What does she play in it?

Because both her and Frances McDormand seem to be playing like omniscient leader characters, right? I don't know. I have never. Yeah, we should do Kusama. I just think every element of that movie is fascinating. And it was written off at the time. And now I feel like I need to watch it because I'm like, I like Kusama. I like Charlize Theron doing action.

But then this is like 2008. This is four years after Rwanda. I feel like everyone's pegging her as like, this is the big Oscar-y performance. This is the key supporting role. This is like the most classically Oscar-y character. And I can't figure out what I think of this performance. Yeah, I don't, you know, when I was on this podcast before

and we had to talk about the tandy i was about to say it it is similar it's a similar fine line thing i okay here's the thing though i think that uh sophie has like a better job than tandy newton in keeping this character reigned in i think so too yeah um but i don't i still don't understand her like she's a very mysterious character to me well she's sort of oddly defined where it's like this is sort of a woman post breakdown. They try to make it seem like rather than someone who was born developmentally disabled in any sort of way. I was kind of I was hoping they would say, I don't know, maybe it says it in the book was that basically she was like developmentally stunted in a way or emotionally kind of stunted when she went through such an awful thing as like the loss of a sister and the loss of like a twin well but they also they talk about it like unpack it a little bit

in that her relationship with her sister was so symbiotic which i feel like is often the case with twins at a young age i mean you hear all these stories about twins having their own sort of secret language. You know, it's often like parents of twins have a hard time teaching them to speak because twins figure out how to communicate with each other in a way that is not conventionally verbal. So it's the idea that like they're so bonded. She's perhaps a more empathetic person to begin with, and that, you know, she has this sort of breakdown after her sister dies, this sort of, like, post-traumatic breakdown, and that they bring her to all these doctors who can't diagnose what's wrong out how to teach May to cope on her own, but it is very

much this kind of classic Oscar-y, you're playing someone who is sort of childlike and sees the world differently performance with a lot of affectation. I feel like she does it better than most, but much like Jordaine, you're saying this is the exact type

of movie you don't like. That's this is the exact type of movie you don't like that's sort of the exact type of performance i'm least interested in it's a character that's tough yeah no i yeah i really don't like that kind of thing but she i like the actor so much that it didn't piss me off i think as much as it would have i i think she does it pretty well, but it does still fall into that thing of like actors viewing a character's challenges as an opportunity for a skill piece. You know, it becomes that sort of show offy, like, look how well I can play this person's circumstances thing that always feels a little gross to me. Yeah, you know, the Ed Norton norton specialty yes we talked about this i feel like on beloved as well the edward norton thing of just like oh my god look how many ticks i get to play here but yeah i don't know she's she's she's fine i you know it's weird that she gets

the death because i don't know it's one of those things where like that, I guess that is the kind of character that would get best supporting someone who's like not there for very much and then dies. And cries a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And it also feels like a bummer because it's that kind of like, oh, this character is the innocent who needs to die as like the martyr for everyone else to go through some catharsis the whole construction of it feels kind of cynical to me um but it's very typical to these kinds of movies that there's like right there will be a big death in the third act and it will sort of shake everything up and as you say right yeah the last

performance i want to talk about very briefly before we get to the box office game is this is just the the height of paul bettany's like you know what i absolutely do not want to be a conventionally sexy movie star run where hollywood is just like this guy is so handsome and so charming and he's like oh only play the least appealing people in the world and he's doing like this and da vinci code yeah da vinci code for sure he plays a lot of villains you know he's still in his movie star period because legion is after this where he's a shirtless angel with a machine gun so but that is the weirdest movie to want to finally be a conventional movie star in he's like oh you guys want me to be like a buff superhero i'll do legion which is fucking bug nuts and made two

dollars he also does priest he did both of those when did he do a knight's tale is that early 2000 knight's tales that's that's breakout no that's when everyone's like fuck this guy is outrageous like he's in gangster number one is young malcolm mcdowell and everyone in britain is like oh this guy's like a talent and then he has knight's tale and a beautiful mind in the same year right and knight's tale was brian hedgeland wanted him to play the heath ledger role and they went to the studio and they were like absolutely not you have to get someone who's also already well known. So he writes that best friend character. He plays Jeffrey Chaucer as his best friend and hype man.

It's great. It's a great performance. What a perfect movie. It's a perfect movie. Obviously his performance in master commander is one of the great, like, you know, things in that i've experienced in my life then i think about all the time is like all these directors were like

fuck bettany that guy's got the juice right and so everyone gives him the best friend role to like these big movie stars and he's playing like heath ledger's best friend russell crowe's best friend twice and people are like come on this is like it's gonna happen right the guy's so handsome he's so charming when you see him in interviews he does wimbledon which is like here we go rom-com him kirsten dunst and he always talks about rom-com and he like hated it he was like i hate this i don't like playing these types of characters i'm done and then he's just like villain villain villain scumbag scumbag he just like dogville dang firewall yeah da vinci code the only big movie he stars in playing a non-creep is the voice of jarvis and iron man and then he's like doubling down secret life of bees young

victoria he's like i want to direct a film or no no he didn't direct creation i always think no that was a passion project for no, he didn't direct creation. I always think he did. No, that was a passion project for him, but he didn't direct it. I think that he just wanted to do that. That's his passion project. I think he put a lot of his heft into that. And when it didn't work, that's when his career starts to wind down.

He does pre-sim Legion with both bomb. And then the thing that saves him is being brought back into avengers is the vision thing yeah right um but since then his career is like what four marvel movies and solo he hasn't done he has this movie at sundance called uncle frank that he's the star of that he's good in it's a very big actor-y performance another southern movie uh it's a very big actor-y performance. Another Southern movie. It's a bad movie. Capital B. Bad movie.

Alan Ball. You know, 1970s road movie. Gay guy. Goes home. Confronts his past. Everything about it. Like, you know how that sounds annoying? It's annoying.

But he is good. He is certainly good. And it's sort of one of the things you're like oh yeah right i mean if you let him at something i do love the like actors whenever they're trying to be like yeah we're really going for it they want to play like a southerner why does everybody want to play a southerner everyone is so bad at it brits love the accents they just want to fuck around with accents. I forgot he also, he played the Unabomber in that, in the Unabomber show.

I never watched that. That's another dang ass freak. I think it's another like skill piece talent show thing, Jordane. I think it's like the Southern accent is like such a meal as an actor. And you have so many like regional specificities depending on what era you're in and what specific city and state you're in that actors are just like let me at it let me at it i want to spend six months listening to like tapes of like southern baptists in the 1970s like they just love that kind of shit uncle frank i assume one day when the coronavirus subsides uncle frank

will be unleashed on society and then we'll all get to deal with that fucking thing but i saw it wait was that a sundance this year yeah yeah it got bought by somebody yeah no i mostly saw good movies at sundance yeah i actually had a great sundance and uncle frank was one where i was like sitting down and i was like alan ball i don't know about this and then you know it's amazon bought it so i guess amazon will oh terrible company it's done many bad things guys let's play the box office game unless we go ahead griffin no all i was gonna say is it's just wild to think that within this calendar year sundance happened like properly like at the last

moment that you could have a film festival sundance happened a lot of big movies premiered big acquisitions happened and now we're like will there ever be a film festival again will movies ever be released in theaters but that was like if it's gonna be in online for press i think the press isn't coming can't wait to log on for tiff okay box office game box all right this is a wild box office game it's october 17 2008 secret life of bees is opening to 10 million dollars at number three it makes 37 yeah you know and you're also like it probably never stops being played in english classes as you said jordan this is such a high school middle school

yes i assume it's it's in the mix and some cable channel i don't know who knows the book continues to sell well there was a secret life of bees musical that was about to open off broadway with lachance and uh lynn nottage wrote the adaptation with duncan chic right writing the music wow maybe it's good. Sam Gold directed it. Like, it was, like, hyped up as, like, this might be a big Broadway musical

and then Broadway shut down as well. But it's, like, clearly this material still seems to have juice. I don't know. People like

finding about that secret life that bees live. Do you think they're going to have real bees on stage? They should. They should unleash them every to have real bees on stage? They should. They should unleash them.

Every performance. The bees are the chorus. They're a bunch of dancers. They should just have people in bee costumes like the early SNL days. It's just Jerry Seinfeld from Bee Movie descending from the ceiling. I think Jordana's right.

I think they should reuse the exact killer bees costumes. I think the entire ensemble of dancers and chorus singers should be wearing Elliot Gould's sweaty bee costume from 1976. Yes. Now, number one at the box office is a video game movie. It's new this weekend.

Yes. So it's not Silent Hill. No, it's unfortunately a video game i've played so many times and i have played a sequel do you like the game i do like the game it's absurd but i like the first two games i did not like the third one um here's a question was this like was this a pretty quick adaptation or was it in the works for a while after the game it was it was in the works seven years it was in the works for a while but it was one of those video games even though it came out back you know and when video games were you know a little a little

less cinematic like that it kind of felt like they were like turn this into a movie like it was a very movie it's max pain that's right yes i remember mark walberg yeah because that game was so cinematic i loved that first game too when it came out everyone's like oh man just feels like you're playing a movie and then by the time they made into a movie everyone's like we don't really need to see this yeah max that's okay his name is max pain he feels pain i have no idea what that is but okay well in the video games and shoots people yeah you're you're a cop whose family gets murdered and then you go on the rampage um but uh in the video game you could go into bullet time because it was right after the matrix

so you could slow things down david you're leaving out the most important detail what that's the element that made everyone think oh my god this game is so cinematic you get to do bullet time sequence what activates bullet time sequence no you it's not taking pills if that's what you're about to say really i remember it being that you would take painkillers no and then go into killers to reduce your you know to to heal yourself are you sure yes you enter bullet time by right clicking come on i played max pain let's not let's not mess around max pain this is so because i was i was a film snob in in high school so i would never watch anything like this i was just you didn't want to see max pain the guy's name

is max pain do you understand there's a subtle illusion i was an insufferable kid i was an insufferable teen right i'm just looking at the max pain film wikipedia entry that's the one with mila kunis and i knew mila kunis was in a movie that i that i was like i like her but i don't want to watch this okay that was max pain right because this is the same year as forgetting sarah marshall when she's starting to like right um i the poster on wikipedia for max pain you know a movie that's called max pain right is not really like trafficking and subtlety no the the poster is mark walberg on his knees in the middle of a city street in the rain looking up to the heavens holding a handgun in each hand like it looks like this is the most tortured anti-hero he's in so much pain it's

black and white with the red which is sort of like it's like a sin city ripoff they're going they're clearly trying to sell you on like this will be like sin city yes or more like the spirit absolutely right okay so max payne's number one huge number two griffin it's a film that's come at the box office game before it's a disney film it's a children's film it's an animal film bolt it's not bolt it's not bolt no 2008 uh it's live action or animated hybrid i believe it's uh live action but certainly there's some so then it's a live action, but certainly there's some. So then it's Beverly Hills. It's Beverly Hills Chihuahua. We've talked about it before.

I can't remember when it came up Griff, but it was in some other box office game. I think it came up in our Roger Gosnell miniseries. Did it not? Right? Of course. Yes. Directed by podcasted.

Yeah. So Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Anyone wants to say anything about it? No. Okay. We're moving on to the number four film at the box office. Another Oscar failed Oscar play a biopic by a big director, but he's kind of on the downswing. I'm sorry to move backwards.

I have one brief thing I want to say about Beverly Hills Chihuahua. You open the floor. I'm allowed to say this. No have one brief thing I want to say about Beverly Hills Chihuahua. You opened the floor! I'm allowed to say this! No, I reopened it for a second. Beverly Hills Chihuahua is an interesting phenomenon to me, which I feel like it's very paired up with Kangaroo Jack, where the trailer is focused on one sequence that is not indicative of the rest of the movie.

So Kangaroo Jack was sold so entirely on the sequence of Kangaroo Jack talking to the camera and rapping. Right, because they had to add more of it. No, most of the movie is a completely non-anthropomorphized kangaroo who's being chased by Anthony Anderson and Jerry O'Connell because the kangaroo has money in its pouch,

which they need to recover. Well, in a jacket that they put on the kangaroo for fun. Because they thought it was funny to take a selfie. It's a pretty good premise. I mean, I'm laughing. But there's one scene

in which Jerry O'Connell gets knocked out and has this hallucination in which the kangaroo talks to him and raps. And the advertising campaign was entirely based around the talking kangaroo,

which is not... I was so angry about that as a kid. I was like based around the talking kangaroo which is not i was so angry about that as a kid like i was like where is the kangaroo who i don't care about anthony anderson i want the kangaroo right they just made it seem like that was going to be the entire movie snow dogs did a similar thing with it with its dream sequence which is the only sequence for the dogs talk beverly hills chihuahua is even weirder because it is about talking chihuahuas, but the trailer was just this entirely CGI, like Aztec monument with chihuahuas doing a big Busby Berkeley number

and singing. So they advertised it as if it was happy feet for chihuahuas. And then the movie is like a chihuahua gets lost and has to find its way back home. But is it like more focused on humans or it's still just focused on the dogs? I'd say it's closer to like it's it's half and half, but it's not what the trailer made it seem, which is a Happy Feet ask. Here's just a world, a society of chihuahuas singing and dancing. Anyway, the floor is closed on Beverly Hills Chihuahua it's a

bio break Griffin for number three is bees wait go ahead oh can can I answer yes of course um I think is it J Edgar it's not J Edgar a great guess another biopic from a big director that no one gave a

shit about this is a singer or is this era over? No, it's political. So, you know, you're in the right wheelhouse there. And is it a failed Oscar play? Does it get any nominations? No Oscars for this one. Oh, it's W? It's W.

Oliver Stone's W. Yeah. Released while Bush is still in office a very bizarre movie not a bad movie i was surprised at how much i watched a bunch of political movies at the beginning of quarantine because i was i don't i don't remember what my reasoning was it was some kind of i was annoyed with white people and I wanted to understand why they mythologize the presidency that's what it was and so I was and I so I watched W and like out of all of them it was the one that annoyed me the least but Tandy as Condi Rice we were talking Tandy of course it's my favorite Tandy performance

I think she's excellent in it. She's great in that movie. Did she talk about that in her interview? She did. She said she felt very betrayed by the movie because she thought

the film was going to be a lot toothier. And so she's giving this like very big performance. And then as the film went on, Oliver Stone kept on sort of like dulling it down. It is the ultimate,

as you said for Dane, it is the ultimate not bad, but also not good movie. Like it's very bizarre that Oliver Stone made a George W. Bush film in 2008 while he was still in office. And the movie is just kind of in the middle. Like it's not annoying, but it has no strong angle on anything outside of Tandy Noon, who I think is giving the most sort of, like, pointed performance in the whole film. Yeah, I just, like, I mean, it annoys me less than Vice does,

so that's nice. It is much better than Vice. Vice is fucking terrible. Yeah. God, I wonder, though, is Vice more interesting than W? No, no. Just because it's so bad

no i'm not talking about better i'm not talking about better better conversation w is more interesting because it is it's so milk toast and it was directed by a maniac i don't whatever w i don't know yeah it's a question mark that one k which i jfk which i hate is like i hate it but like you can tell how much oliver stone loved making it and to compare it to w it doesn't make sense it's very weird um the number five film at the box office i feel like it also comes up a lot for us it's an actor having a big star moment uh it is technically a hit as Griffin. You often like to remind me that made a hundred million dollars,

you know, like everything's going great for this guy. It's a thriller, sort of a chase movie, sort of a spy movie, but doesn't exist. Killing it. It's a spy movie.

It does. Oh, it's Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye. Shia. but doesn't exist killing it it's a spy movie it does oh it's eagle eye eagle eye shia i feel like i constantly have to remind people how consistent shia's run was there right but i do think i think eagle eye is one of those fake hits where yes the studio crawled at over 100 million dollars yes people saw it but not one person knows that movie exists no uh it like you know had no i already forgot which movie you're talking about the eye is looking it's you know eagle oh oh okay okay got it got it i've seen i've seen eagle eye

i do not remember it i remember that in the trailer, you know, cause he's getting framed or whatever, right? He gets dragged into a room and he's like, what's going on? And Billy Bob Thornton comes in and says, you're in a whole mess of trouble, son. And I'm like,

I do not want Billy Bob Thornton to ever say that to me. That that's when you know, you're in trouble. When Billy Bob Thornton is entering the room, he's clearly an agent of some sort of you know government and he says you're in a mess of trouble it worst case scenario the reason i bring it up so much is that movie comes out sandwiched in between indiana jones and transformers 2 and spielberg was so behind shia like dreamworks DreamWorks produces Disturbia.

He plucks him from that and puts him in Transformers, then makes him the new, like, hope for Indiana Jones. And Spielberg kept on doing the press, being like, I'm telling you, this guy is Tom Hanks. Shia LaBeouf is Tom Hanks.

He's going to be America's favorite, super likable, non-problematic movie star. And then Eagle Eye is the one where they were like, here you go, we're putting him in a new movie where it's not based on pre-existing IP. After these blockbusters, he has a big sequel lined up. He's going to hit 100 million by himself

without any sort of attached franchise. And then after that, he does Transformers 2, Wall Street 2, Transformers 2 Wall Street 2 Transformers 3 and then is like I fucking hate being a movie star. That's when Shia starts like eating Hollywood.

Remember when he watched all his movies at the IFC Center? Yeah. Or Angelica wherever it was. Look I'm pro Shia. I just think that film's

fascinating as the last gasp of There's good andp of the Spielberg movie star machinery. We're going to make this guy work. I still haven't seen Honey Boy. Have you guys seen it? Yeah, I'm a big fan. It's great! I love Honey Boy. Honey Boy's good.

That is it. You've also got Ridley Scott's Body of Lies. Doesn't exist. You've got Topical Quarantine. Remember that movie. you also have opening at nine ninth uh sex drive the movie where the kids have to drive because of sex i was a big fan of sex i mean i was the right age to get i remember it being i love a movie title that just says exactly what it is.

That is exactly what it is. They have to go on a sex drive. It is exactly those things. And also a lot of Amish people and also Fall Out Boy show up. Fall Out Boy is in it physically? Fall Out Boy physically

shows up in sex drive. They play themselves. I remember Marsden,ames marsden pops up yes seth green plays one of the amish people right yes he does he's very funny in that movie it's one of those tail end movies from the sort of like you know teen sex comedy like the american pie yeah yeah like it's one of the last ones where they're like we can still just fucking throw this shit at the screen right and i feel like it just eventually they just stopped i guess yeah sex drive is really at the tail end like it's it's sex drive

it's easy a and then i don't really know if there's really anything after easy i guess easy a right was sort of like yeah let's do a higher quality version of these right not that i mean i like super bad or whatever you know but like right it's yeah they like learn about the scarlet letter and it's like interwoven into the plot as opposed to just like one of those sex drives feels like the last of like the r-rated sex based yeah well it's just like what's the plot they want to fuck they wanna fuck tell me more I don't know they need a car it's a lot going on

the joke in that movie where like Clark Duke is the hot guy I love that that's the weird joke of the movie it's that like everybody thinks that he's hot and that's supposed to be fun he's a nice boy yeah no but it's pretty hard joke which i always find funny which is just like put

a character on screen who does not seem conventionally sexy and have everyone in the universe of the movie lose their minds over him he literally like a woman one of the amish girls falls in love with him and he just moves into the Amish community. Like that's the ending for that character. Pretty cool. Pretty fucking cool. But 2008 seems like a bad year for movies. Seems like it's,

it's, it's the slumdog year, which is, yeah. So it's a weird year. Like I'm sure, you know, like there's good movies that you're,

but it is, it's kind of the big it's the big year because that's the iron man year so it is kind of the beginning of the end and in a way and dark night it's the year that breaks hollywood yeah yes it's the year where it's like oh fuck my favorite movie from 2008 was synecdoche new york also my favorite movie from two that one of my families of all time yes yes but but 2008 is the year where Iron Man and Dark Knight like roll the die they cast the die for the next 10

years of Hollywood and also the year in which the Oscars start losing their fucking minds because they don't nominate Dark Knight and they start like doing like the 10 movie thing they do the 10 the following year because this year the 5 is so bad and they feel like they lose ratings because

they don't nominate Dark Knight so then they go chasing that like 2008 is the beginning of the end for everything yeah anyway this has been our episode on the secret life of these buzz buzz buzz yeah uh Jordaine thank you so much for coming back on the show of course of course also did this come out the same year as b movie

i think b movie comes out when i'm in college so that's america has b fever yes b fever anyway right yes we as we know from bee movie honey just got funny so like you know obviously right uh jordaine people should listen to your podcast uh bad romance you co-host with the great uh brown when ariel isaac and then brows held high you co-host with uh kyle uh your partner and that's accessible on Patreon. Yes. Yeah, that's on Patreon. We need to. Kyle is very new to podcasts, so I'm going to show him how to like put it online so that other people can listen to it. But yeah, it's us talking about art house films. The first episode is on Antichrist. The second episode is on Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book.

Yeah. So like I think we might be doing High Rise next. So that'll be fun. I gotta say, High Rise is a movie I've been thinking about a lot recently. Kyle offscreen saying he's pro High Rise. Kyle now onscreen. Real quick. I'm fetching pants. Don't mind me.

I keep on thinking about high rise while being in lockdown. That's all I'm going to say. High rise good. Thank you for being on the show, Jordaine. Of course. And thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate, review, subscribe sometimes I feel like you just don't want to end the show yeah it's almost like this is maybe the only form of social interaction I have anymore well I love to interact it's great to interact

but David the point is we gotta thank Lane Montgomery for our theme song sure we gotta thank pat reynolds and joe bowen for our artwork and and for co-producing the show and rachel jacobs for her editing assistance and we gotta tell people we gotta tell them to go to patreon.com back back slash blank check where they can listen to mission impossible commentaries and we gotta tell them to go to reddit.com griffin backslash stop for some real nerdy shit this is interminable david look me in the David, look me in the eyes. Look me in the eyes, David.

And as always, David, I gotta tell you that you got me straight tripping, boo. Oh, God. Get out. How do I mute another person on Zoom?