Blank Check with Griffin & David - The Woman King

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

It certainly feels great to cover a good movie again! Our mini-run of new releases ends with Gina Prince-Bythewood’s crowd-pleaser - the African female warrior epic “The Woman King”. We’ve got David’s exclusive report on the film’s world premiere at TIFF (humblebrag), a deep dive on the career of Viola Davis (did you know her early industry champions were Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney?), and some thoughts on how this film taps into Prince-Bythewood’s ongoing exploration of chosen families and personal identity. Join our Patreon at patreon.com/blankcheck Follow us @blankcheckpod on Twitter and Instagram! Buy some real nerdy merch at shopblankcheckpod.myshopify.com or at teepublic.com/stores/blank-check

An evil is coming that threatens our kingdom, our freedom. But we have a podcast they are not prepared for. Okay, good job. Right? I don't know. I don't know. Look, sometimes we cover a movie that does not have an IMDb quotes page. Is that this one? This has got a few.

This has got some trailer. Look, it's certainly not a thing we're going to harp on to any degree degree in this episode but this movie's already been the victim of bad faith online trolls right um and and this film has enough quotable cool badass lines in the trailer right and the movie's already a hit it is the type of film that usually gets a fully submitted uh filled out quote page pretty quickly on imdb but is usually usually largely a user-generated site. I have to feel like this is some kind of troll. The one quote on the Woman King IMDb quotes page is Nesca. Yeah, Nesca.

Relative characters. It says in brackets, as a company of warriors break out into a song and dance. And then the quote is, if you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain if you're not into yoga that's not that right unless i mean is that like a you know post-credits scene i didn't catch maybe i said through the credits i said through the credits there's a post-credit scene with the or mid a mid-credit cookie with sheila at. I may not have seen that. Yeah.

It's just kind of a nice moment. What is it? It's one of those things. It's her, like, at the grave sites of the fallen warriors, sort of like saying a prayer for them. It's one of those things where we're now so conditioned that when something like that happens, you expect Lashana's lynch to come out of the grave, her hand to fucking rise.

Women King 2, baby! Out for revenge zombie king it's a thing that fucking old guard is obsessed with as well old guard had one right I'm just saying the Gina thing of like she's very interested in not letting the collateral

damage of action sequences just become be forgotten be like I just didn't know damage of action sequences just become forgotten. They're people. They died. I just didn't know there was a little scene there. I can explain why in a minute. They don't sing the Escape the Pina Colada song, though. No, they don't sing that.

I mean, that's too bad. Do you know that, and we were just talking about this right before we started recording, literally everyone on the internet is exhausting. And I'm going to say pretty close to the top of that list myself. We all should stop it. Introduce our podcast.

This podcast is called Blank Check with Griffin and David. Wow. This podcast is called Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm Griffin. I'm David. It is a podcast about filmographies. Directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

And sometimes those checks clear. Sometimes they bounce, baby. Now, today is a one-off episode. We're turning to a filmmaker we've covered in the past. Our final in a series of new films we've been covering. We've got three new movies in a row. A Miller. George Miller.

Robert Zemeckis. And a Prince Bythewood. Gina Prince Bythewood. When we did Gina on this show, summer of 2020? Summer of 2020, correct. Not a great time to be a person. Tough time.

Was it in between Miller and Zemeckis, in fact? It's funny that they're all together again or was there efron in there too it's hard to remember anything i think it was miller efron bythwood zemeckis yeah that sounds right just check yes correct correct if only they discovered a long lost nor efron film to fill out this month yeah um but yes uh be fine you know we were at a place fucking five years into doing the podcast

where we were like sort of taking stock of what the show has become. And, you know, to a certain degree, she is a filmmaker

that both you and I really love. And not only that, have sort of shared our love for. We've talked about seeing Beyond the Lights together was like a very key early moment in our friendship. That's a good point. And all have sort of shared our love for. We've talked about seeing Beyond the Lights together. It was like a very key early moment in our friendship.

That's a good point. And all that sort of shit. And it was the one time we sort of went like, can we sort of change the thrust of the show and who we cover? And that we're essentially picking someone who is right now maybe starting to get issue checks. issued checks can we sort of try to use the fact that people take our show somewhat seriously or at least give it some weight to but kind of push a filmmaker who is often not discussed in these terms into a conversation and to try to reckon with the body of work um and that was for a very big budget netflix movie that was apparently watched by eight billion people big hit a totally real number forever is harder than it looks in the old guard yeah i think we just correctly anticipated that

that she did have her biggest project coming up and it did feel that way we were sort of getting ahead of the thing which we don't usually do it was also she had been in conversation for like doing one of the fucking spider-man spin-ff movies for a while old guard was her finally getting to make the action we should want to make and then this was almost immediately after old guard this gets announced this was a thing that had been in development for a long time yes at one point she was contacted to write and direct it developing it but she was doing black and silver which was the spider-man silver and black i believe and then years later this comes back around to her with a script and an offer to direct. She's not doing the Old Guard sequel, which is coming out sometime next year.

Is it filming? They have filmed it. I, in fact, was looking it up yesterday. Missed the announcement that Henry Golding and Uma Thurman are in it. That's cool. Along with the entire returning cast. Should we do it? People would love that yeah so old guard 2 directed by victoria mahoney who was she's a good director she did a movie called yelling at the sky with zoe kravitz and gabrielle

sidibe and then she did a lot of tv and then she was the second unit director in rise of skywalker yes which was this big deal and it was sort of like a lot of people like uh she did the fortnight jj abrams she did the fortnight stuff a lot of big blockbuster filmmakers have for a very long time sort of been boosting her as like this is someone who should get um in a way that i i read an interview with uh uh uh prince bythewood recently where she talked about Rian Johnson being a really big advocate for her sort of bringing her into his process when he was doing Last Jedi. No.

Oh, for Gina. For Gina. Sure, sure, sure. When she was doing Old Guard that she consulted him a lot and how to deal with a movie of this size. Here's a stat that I just kind of hadn't clocked. It was in one of the either New York Times piece or Hollywood Reporter piece.

I was reading as much of the sort of recent Gina interviews around this movie coming out. We're talking about The Woman King today. Yes. Her new massive hit film.

It is A-plus cinema score. People are spontaneously breaking into applause breaks. It's incredible. It is performed above expectations in every way. It performed above expectations. It's doing great.

I certainly feel in an upcoming month without a ton of major releases, it has a chance to really kind of hold on for a while. Have some nice legs. Which I really hope for. I would love to see her continue working at this scale. But the thing she pointed out in this interview was, and I might be fudging the numbers a little bit here, Love and Basketball

cost like $14 or $15 million, I think. Okay. Then Secret Life of Bees cost $11 million. Uh-huh. Disappearing Acts, her TV movie, cost $10 million. Right. Beyond the Lights cost $7 million. It's been going down. God, she made

Beyond the Lights for $7 million. I think we talked about it. Insane. Especially the scale of that movie actually feeling dollars it's been going down she was like she made beyond the lights for seven yeah i think we talked about it especially the scale of that movie actually feeling like it's representing award shows and concert tours and a fucking famous person in a mansion and all this shit insane so she was talking about in her stress leading up to the old guard it was like i've had a career where my budgets have only shrunk which is the opposite of how this usually is supposed to work and then old guard Guard was a $70 million budget. Even with weird Netflix accounting, it was 10 times what she had gotten on her previous film. And beyond that, multiples beyond her most expensive film,

which was her first film at that point, like 20 years earlier. And then this movie cost $50. It cost $50, but with a lot of covid difficulties it's it's smaller than old guard you know it doesn't feel that much smaller it doesn't i do think you can and i i say this only in a way to give her credit they've talked about they film this movie in south africa they start filming three weeks in omicron hits really fucking hard yeah like devastate it was yeah because they started november 21 yeah there was a question of whether the movie would ever resume production right because there's omicron was there first remember

it was south africa was where they were at like ground zero yes and it like decimated them i believe they were shut down for like six weeks. She was not sure if the movie would ever come back. And when it did come back, they pretty much had to change every single aspect of how they made the film. Like in her mind, she was going to have twice as many extras in every scene. Right. Which is what you expect from this kind of movie, right?

Big Lawrence of Arabia style movie. How many people are allowed on a set at any point in time change dramatically and i do think in ways that i give her credit for you can sense at certain moments like she is being very smart about how to shoot and cover this to work around and she even talked about like her choreography had to change you know they did months of training with everyone before the film but then you know it becomes a lot more deliberate in terms of what you're allowed to call someone to do um it it does feel like big expensive movie it does feels big right yeah yeah it's going for old school hollywood epic i feel like you know like a big big sort of heroic action war epic of the golden age of Hollywood.

Based around a historical figure. The movie, I mean, look, it's really in dialogue with 1990 to 2000. Braveheart, you're thinking. Dances with Wolves. Dances with Wolves, right. Ending with Gladiator, I would argue. I feel like there's another big one I'm forgetting,

but there's certainly a bunch of them in that run you know braveheart is the movie this most reminded me of yes and she has said huge inspiration for me last the mohicans i guess that's the other one i was thinking of thank you yeah but then there's also movies you're forgetting like legends of the fall uh you know movies that are not as good so they don't but like citing those as the big boys i know but like but that like that was a real era that's what i'm saying like legends of the fall is not a good movie but it has all the same ingredients of like big landscapes sort of movie stars a bit of everything romance drama family right you know like and just they don't make as many of those kinds of was sort of the troy kingdom of heaven thing like the sort of post gladiator runator run where I feel like it shifts a little

and it becomes a little muddy. I love that you used to give me those. Yeah, I'm giving you an Altoid. Ridley also is never able to hit it again, even though he tries to. I mean, he made Robin Hood. Oh, I took too many. You do Exodus, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood

are like the three times he tried to do it. Exodus. Exodus is the one where it's like, this is dumb. Well, you know, he has another one coming up. Which is? Napoleon. Oh, right.

But, but. The Patriot. Sure, that's 2000. That's end of the run. But Ben also says to me, when we're walking in the movie, he's like, it's like Spartacus. And I'm like, right. And we talked about this in our Spartacus episode. Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus.

Pretty much up until the year 2000, this was the biggest kind of movie Hollywood could make. What a better age. Sorry. It was just like, you put movie stars along with really fucking skilled technical actors in giant landscapes and period authenticity. And you tell these stories that

as you said, it's romance, it's drama, it's action. The special effect is scale, it's are like it's romance it's drama it's action the special effect is um scale yes it's crowds yes it's um you know people charging at each other on a field it's not energy beams and infinity stones it's a scope both feel like it's like i'm a nerd who wished on a rabbit's foot and then i got cursed with marvel so many times i mean the whole fucking i even like these things and i think the whole fucking pop culture landscape is now catered towards me and i hate it i hate it and it makes me hate myself more in return it's very catered towards like 16 year

old me as well where i'm like why are you listening to him he was stupid that guy was a fucking idiot you know how good he had it yeah it's like why are characters like oh i can't characters like joke around all the time now i'm, can we be serious for a minute? Fucking looking at the camera. We just constantly feel like Sully saying, can we get serious? Can we get serious? No,

it's a, it's a nightmare. Look, it's the line in ghost world where Thor Burr says to Steve Buscemi, don't you want to meet a woman your age who shares your interests? And he goes, I hate my interests. And the difference is what if every one of that guy's interests were

dominating culture you know at least he's into like niche jazz 45s so weird he's a cutie great performance but yes it is a thing we are not going to talk about this much but obviously because i want to in fact move past this so we can just start talking about what the film is rather than what it isn't right but there has been some amount of discourse over the historical accuracy of this film which is like this film i do not think presents itself in any way as any sort of docudrama it is very much in the fashion of movies we're talking about that are essentially creating romantic stories within a framework of history doesn't have any i couldn't remember. It doesn't have any, I couldn't remember this,

it doesn't have any kind of sort of like based on true events, you know, opening title card, right? There's something in the trailer, you know. Trailers don't count. But essentially just- Obviously this is based in history. It's not like it's completely made up, but yeah. Well, it is basically, I believe from my research,

and I say this as, you know, pointed pointedly i am not going to try to present myself as someone who because i read two wikipedia entries and three think pieces has a complete understanding of this thing whereas i feel some people are doing that right now but from my gathering boyega is pretty much the only character in this film who is a real correct he is the only character who is based in and that that is almost troublesome for the movie because the guy he's playing king geizo yeah never decided to end slavery fully in his kingdom he did they did close i believe at one point they did actually close the port but there was still slavery going on in the kingdom in other places and all that and like people think he more did

it because he was pressured you know like there's things like that where it's like the it's the triumphant end of this movie that is the most sort of like um imagined or romanticized part of the story and that is you know that is worthy of interrogation by people who know what they're talking about which we do not and will not pretend to do but there's things you can read and i've been reading and you've been reading that's all fine and people will read about you know but like but then of course there's also right a more bad faith you know contingent we don't need to no no it's one of those things you know that makes talking about uh the fucking pop culture in any way i just want to call out the um call out the piece that I read that I thought was really good was Julian Lucas in

The New Yorker, wrote a piece called Sisterhood and Slavery and the Woman King, which if you want a pretty measured, intelligent, well-researched sort of take on where this film relates to history, that is one I recommend that I will not even try to summarize. But, you know,

we're constantly combating this thing and being guys who fucking talk about a popular culture for a living that so often... It's a living. It is a living. The worst people on the internet weaponize things in bad faith

to a point where it then becomes almost impossible to have a reasoned conversation about any of the issues with an actual thing because they are adding Pina Colada song lyrics to an imdb page um the cornerstone of this for me is this notion that is getting perpetuated and then we're closing the fucking book on this that uh this movie is like taking a complicated history and whitewashing it into just pure escapist aspirational storytelling, which I do not think it is. I think this is a complicated movie.

I think she is telling a fictional story within a framework of a real societal, you know, sort of thing that happened, but not presenting to it as a retelling of history. And a lot of people seem to be comparing the trailer of this movie to a wikipedia page and going those two things don't resemble each other which i want to say yeah what fucking trailers have you seen that resemble the movies let's not worry about the trailer because this movie is i think among many other things and you know i i think a lot of what we want to talk about here is where it fits into like the canon of Gina Prince Bythewood's work.

Because one of the reasons why I think you and I are such big fans of hers and wanted to cover her and her movies on the show, because people don't sort of talk about her films in this way. She has that thing that pretty much all great filmmakers have where it's like to some degree, they're telling variations on the same story over and over and over again. She has such... Or they have their specific fascinations.

Yeah, right. And things that are intrinsically personal. Whether she's developing the material herself or it's something that's coming to her. The stories that she's connecting with and she's talked a lot about in the gaps where she wasn't making films. It was because there wasn't anything she wanted to make or rather she wasn't

going to be allowed to make the thing the way she wanted to she didn't want to do shitty things dispassionate work whatever and this movie is so rife

with all the concerns that have been you know explored in all of her films I would say and also the sort of strengths as a technical filmmaker

that she's been developing but so much of her work is about um i think she is as defined by being adopted as spielberg is by his parents divorce and the abandonment of his father right her movies are so much about relationships to parents uh chosen families versus given families yes that's a huge fucking thing in her work yeah and also you know and sometimes it's it's a literal thing and sometimes it's a more figurative thing of people being expected to fit into one space and wanting to exist in a different space right not just a

space of what they want to do but the community they want to exist and the work they want to do you know trying to find the the place that maybe you were told you could not go into and to that extent like this movie is whole dialogue about slavery i think is really invested in the moral gray area of uh and you know it's another thing of just like is this movie sanitizing how brutal this army was, right? Which I don't think they are. I think they are portrayed as being fairly scary in a lot of ways. This is a film about a barbaric time on Earth, right?

Sure. But I think a big part of this film is like, women at this moment in this culture have the choice to either become property through marriage at the very least yes yeah yeah or essentially turn yourself into a weapon in order to have your own agency right the only pathway to autonomy yeah this is right it's a surprising blade yeah but not just that but also you know and you have to lock yourself away. You have to, you know, not from everyone, but from, you know, society. People can't look at you. You only, certainly the old guard is very much about this. And I would even say the beyond the lights is so much about that. Her needing to create this pop culture figure, this sort of other person she can become in order to have a key to life, you know,

that becomes oppressive to her. Let's talk about, let me, let me give you, let's, let's a woman King. It me give you let's let's a woman king it's produced by maria bello we all know her season four vr that prime suspect remake where she had the hat we talk about that a lot the hat of course cooler history of violence which she's actually that's absolutely incredible uh the mummy tomb of the dragon emperor which is

that's a tough one that's a tough tough beat. Coyote Ugly. Good. Generally a fan of hers. I like Maria Bello a lot. And it's this strange story of she learned about the... The Agoge. Agoge when she was in Benin,

which is the country that is part of... Yeah. The Kingdom of Dahomey is now... It encompasses what was part of the kingdom of Dahomey. And most of what we know about the Ogoge is essentially what exists in folklore, passed down stories. Yeah, and some, you know, European traitor types

who, like, observed them. But there was not a lot of, like, tangible, sort of, like, fact-based accounting on them. But she just becomes kind of obsessed with like how does this exist how has no one made a movie about this and she's giving viola davis an award at some like la like event at the skirball center uh and like pitches her on stage in front of the crowd right is like i know this is annoying but like while i have you she's like i recently found out about this thing there was this army in africa at this point in time imagine viola davis in this kind of movie and apparently

like everyone's like yeah i mean i i would i might be annoyed but i mean it seems that viola davis was intrigued i mean it's like 2013 i think 15 2015 so it's uh coming off the help let's see that's a good question isn't the help more like 2013 yeah i'm just wondering what that the help is no help is 2011 wow so 2015 well black hat hey i mean that's good but like it's it's a year before viola wins an oscar right that's fences is 2016 yeah so viola davis is like a major serious well-respected actress but maybe is i feel like it's sort of post fences because it's like you know widows and this yes and to a lesser extent the suicide squad movies are like where it's like oh viola davis is like almost you know like your movie star lead right and before then that was forgetting the

other thing the big thing in between is how to get away with murder. And how to get away with murder, which is, that's 2014. So I guess that was already on. That was maybe at a toss. That was finally, someone has framed her as a true leading woman. Right.

She's bankable. She's a big deal. She's talked a lot about, in a, I think, completely fair, just way, that she still is not sort of thought of on the tier of someone like Meryl Streep. Right. Which, obviously, Meryl Streep's had a longer career, won more Oscars, whatever.

But there is that thing where I feel very often Viola Davis is kind of taken for granted as much as she is viewed as national treasure. And also, watching this movie, I kept on thinking about, like, she is basically one of the most famous actors in America. Yes, she's a very, very famous actor in person she's been nominated for so many oscars she's won she's won the emmy she's won the fucking tony but you're

also just like she's been in so many things everyone pretty much knows her and likes her no one argues like i have viola davis is underrated she just feels like consummate fucking like everyone's on board with viola davis yeah right yeah she has the emmy she has the yeah it's just one of these things where her doing a movie like this she's in black adam what the hell it's manda waller again yeah well obviously yeah jesus which look i hope she is really good in those she i really like her in the suicide squad movies i just i just am annoyed about and i agree and i almost feel like that's the Suicide Squad movies. I just am annoyed about it. And I agree. And I almost feel like that's the thing that finally gives her the cachet to make this movie,

along with a couple other phenomenons we'll talk about in a second. A little bit, but I think Widows 2. Anyway, so STX is the first place they go, which sort of makes sense at that time. Because is Kathy Schulman running? Correct. Kathy Schulman, who produced Crash Crash and so won a weird Oscar is running STX at that moment in time which is sort of a mid-major studio

where maybe you could go and say hey I have a movie that's not based on a superhero or not based on some franchise but like you know at that moment they were trying to be the smaller studio it's truly just kind of like Bello and Viola going we don't have a script right we just have

this idea there should be a movie set in this period in this world about this army everyone turns it down stx gives offers them five million dollars which is obviously not very much money to make a movie this size everyone's thing is you can do that as like an indie drama there's no way this is commercial enough to be an epic on the scale you're talking about. You can't do this as an action film. Davis mentioned this on, I went to the world premiere. Yeah, bullshit.

Ben is shaking his head. Yeah, that just makes sense. I went to the world premiere of this film, I'm not going to brag, but I was at the world premiere in Toronto. And Davis mentioned this when she was introducing the movie. She talks about it a lot,

how she has very dark skin and how she feels like that's made it especially hard for her to be a movie star and she says like in press like oh studios would be like if you cast lighter skinned celebrities things like that you know they wanted whatever hollywood may perceive as more box office palatable actresses um prince bythewood is approached but she's busy on silver and black she says when you have a script come back to me right i can't write this right now uh obviously that silver and black never came to fruition yeah then they meet with because they had to make way for morbius yeah then they yeah i mean uh then they uh meet with three sides tri-star yeah and nicole brown who i think is the

person who she was on stage at tiff and she's like the sort of biggest sort of uh booster of this movie right uh and the success of black panther this is the biggest which which is the biggest thing they have because the door melange right are very much based on yes um on this like history yeah yeah and so i guess that's enough they get the 50 million dollar right it finally becomes a thing where like black panther is so beloved and the door melange stuff is so beloved that the idea of getting to make this movie for 50 million dollars with an Oscar star feels like a pretty safe bet you watch the trailer

and it's very much sort of advertising itself is almost like this is the real Black Panther you know there was that vibe

the trailer is a lot more conventional than this movie is I would argue or at least a lot more modern yeah the movie is conventional

in ways I love in an old Hollywood way it's kind of old fashioned right it's sort of framing it as more of a modern yeah the movie is is conventional in ways i love in an old hollywood kind of old fashion right it's it's sort of framing it as more of a modern yeah sure um and as you say shot in south africa plagued by covid problems um dana stevens who uh it was written by her not not dana stevens friend of the show past and future guests but dana stevens friend of the show a screenwriter behind for love of game for love of the game game and what else has she done a city of angels a weird filmography it is a weird filmography but she's also i think one of those people who's just kind

of around yeah yeah she's sort of just a vet but they come to her she's married to michael apted oh really i don't know if i knew that they come back to gina with that script gina talks about she goes in for her pitch meeting and cries during it was like i just blew it they're not going to hire the woman who cries right and viola davis was like that's the moment right if i saw someone who cared that much about what they were doing oh she got like emotional during right yeah okay and was like a a that she cared that much b that she what viola dav Davis recognized as the strength required to be that vulnerable in a meeting like that, where that is not usually valued. And she was like, I'd seen the old guard.

Sure. And I could see that she was ready and that she had the passion behind it. She has some action movie chops here. I'm ready to make my fucking at-bat. fucking epic and they you know every every time we talked about gina you know down to her really like being on sonal athens ass about being good at basketball for love and basketball it's like everyone's got to do you know 90 minutes away training every day three and a half hours of fight training every day you know like they all had to learn all this stuff this is a movie that is very talking about the other you know through lines throughout her career it is i was

saying to ben you can very much tell this is an action movie made by an athlete in the same well you can tell the difference when a musical is directed by a choreographer right right this is someone who actually understands how the body works who understands movement you know is thinking about how they themselves would do it and is coaching her actors and filming and cutting it from that perspective. Yeah. And speaking of that,

it's one of those things where you're like, everyone in this film is clearly doing this fighting, right? Right. As much as I think a lot of the action is.

A lot of their own stunts and all that. It's more edited than Old Guard, but I think that was because of practical realities. Sure, but the action's really cool. You're not seeing stunt doubles. Even if they're more pieces, you're seeing their faces in

almost every shot. But they are not conventionally ripped in a superhero way. I was saying this to Ben. We're so conditioned to the idea of jacked people on screen looking jacked in this very sculptural way that is not actually

very practical you know like the rock does not move very well no it's very big it's the post alone uh you know schwarzenegger thing that now has gone out of control where every superhero has to have their like superhero diet and build like an aesthetic body that is not really athletic right as much as it is just like all these weird things that people dehydrating themselves so the And build like an aesthetic body that is not really athletic. Right. As much as it is just like all these weird things that people dehydrate themselves so the veins pop. Well, that's what you were saying. The veins thing is so disturbing to me. And this is a movie where it's like, oh, these people are built like Olympic athletes.

Their body is like trained for these specific purposes. It is not like performative muscles. There's also different body types. There's really very different body types for different fighting styles. It's nice to see. It's not everyone's just jacked and uniform. But you're never questioning that these people can cause this damage. Yeah. You know,

the woman king, I saw it at Toronto at the Roy Thompson hall. Do you want to save your story of your Toronto Airbnb? Because you've pinned that you want to talk about that. Airbnb story can go later. Okay. Or it can even go on. Well, we'll see about the Airbnb story.

But no, but I did attend the premiere of this movie. It was at the Roy Thompson Hall, which is this gigantic concert hall. It's honestly a terrible place to see a movie. But you have to go see movies at this place sometimes if you're going to the galas. And usually when you're going to the galas and usually when you're going to a premiere the director will come out and everyone's kind of like all right you know but you know you gotta clap but you know you're kind of especially people like press like me who have to see a lot of movies just like let's make this quick sure and so you always appreciate what's

like but they'll come out they'll usually introduce the cast then they'll say like and we'll talk late you know we'll do a&A after or something like that. And you're like, great. Gina comes out. God bless her. She brings out the whole cast. I mean, who obviously all look incredible. You know, I mean, imagine the cast of this movie basically just in, like, ball gowns.

They all look fucking insane. Sure. But then she's like, and I'm going to shout out the crew of this movie. And I'm like, oh, my God, I have a dinner reservation. But she starts shouting out the crew of this movie. And I'm like, oh my God, I have a dinner reservation. But she starts shouting out the crew of this movie. Yeah. Yeah.

Polly Morgan, the DP, right? Terrence Blanchard. By the way, I was sitting next to all of them because I was like, that's where I was.

So that was, the costume designer. Terrence Blanchard is best known as Spike Lee's composer. He's a jazz musician. He's incredible. Yeah. But in film, I'm saying is that's his yeah bulk of his

bodyboard costume designer editor almost every one a black woman which is pretty unusual yeah and i and she was not like putting a fine point on that or anything but it was very obvious as she's shouting everyone out you're like goddamn like this is a movie mostly made by women you know they all seem to really love each other. There was a lot of love in the room. There was a lot of, you know, which, you know, everyone's always very happy at these premieres, except for the Lucy in the Sky premiere, one of the most insane things I ever witnessed, where Noah Hawley came out and was like, look, they're not all good.

And then Jon Hamm was, like, clapping him on the back and was like, it'll be okay, buddy. We were like, that's your intro? I bet Griffin's going to like it, but we'll be too embarrassed to ever mount a defense. But it was like a really good atmosphere. And it was really, and then she let Viola talk. Not let, but then she was like, Viola, do you want to send Viola talk about this? Viola Davis was an incredible public speaker. Exactly.

A very impressive sort of weighty speech about, you know, how she was like, I wish any politician was able to inspire this much. How like, you know, as a little girl,

she was put down and she was never, you know, like all this stuff. So everyone's really jacked up by the time the movie starts. Then the movie starts with like the woman king

and then they come out of the fucking grass and start just like chopping people up and like everyone was just going ballistic right so i'm just saying i saw this movie in a very positive in atmosphere yeah and so i walked out of it like very thinking like that was great sure but also thinking like god like does that play as well right you hold like you know fucking amc on a tuesday afternoon like

you know because it's such a big sort of brassy crowd-pleasing movie yeah and then i've just been so thrilled that like that does seem to be the reaction just generally like the a plus cinema score like multiple people i know have seen it with packed houses where people were kind of like you know cheering and clapping sim rogal friend of the show yeah past and future guests uh texted me because i got a lot of texts from like uh friends of the show and blankies who went to see it opening weekend and were kind of like amped uh you know yeah you listen to our show you spend a fucking month or so talking living with the director you start to get personally invested you get excited when you have a fucking win right and rogal texted me uh i saw a half empty afternoon screening and it got four applause breaks which basically look this movie did well it there are more crowded screens where

i'm hearing stories like that right we saw an afternoon showing that was not super full but it did get a couple like quiet people were still People were still pretty into it, sure. Like I kept on looking at like the only other people who were in our row were like two older women who were like pumping their fists at multiple moments.

People are really loving this thing. It got an A plus cinema score, which is the thing that One other movie got it this year. What's the other one?

Top Gun. Yeah, it happens like twice a year, basically. It's because that means that everyone walking out of the theater is like A plus, A plus, you know, year yeah basically it's because that means that everyone walking out of the theater is like a plus a plus you know it's an average it means that everyone walking out of the theater is basically like that exceeded my expectations of what made me want to see this movie in the first place right it's it's it's exciting it's

exciting it's a fun movie i personally think i know this is a boring note but there's just a plot that i could lift right out of it it would make the loony movie leaner and meaner and i'd be happy about it the this sort of half romance with the portuguese yeah i would just lift it out but i also understand the and i think it would just lift right out it would just i do but i understand the feeling of like this is an old fashion epic it should have a romance it should have these kinds of swooning moments it should have this kind of like attention to the narrative i also like i i give them credit for not going like full fucking john smith pocahontas with it you know sure yeah it certainly could have been more

detrimental to the movie right it feels like a pretty contained thing that is more used as an exploration of ideas and to be able to check off some of those boxes the thing i was not prepared for is how much of this movie is the the look we're getting the spoilers in this episode but how much of it really comes into the the mother-daughter relationship right sure sure which is really the emotional cracks of the that's the big emotion in the movie but the other thing i was kind of surprised by is like uh this is kind of violola Davis's Sean Connery performance. I like this. This movie is more of an ensemble than I was prepared for it to be.

Me too. I mean, I was sort of having the widow's reaction, which I love that movie. But I was like, huh, once again, she's given herself this very locked down lead, in quotes, but she's surrounded by an ensemble that is popping. Yes. And she's almost given herself like a less rewarding role.

She rules in this movie. But she's really good at it. But even with Widows, she is more the narrative spine of the thing, even though she's allowing everyone else to be more colorful. Right. In Widows, she's really locked down.

Yes. Like that's like a really contained. Right. This is different. This is like really kind of the narrative jumps between the four of them right so her go ahead uh who is the the um i'm you know she's using the underground railroad her first movie ever uh yeah i guess so she's done a lot of tv but i guess it's her first movie yes yeah pretty cool which is uh wild but it really is the four of them and sort of them in different two person configurations.

A little bit. And then Boyega, obviously, as this sort of, you know. Yeah. The Portuguese guy as a side character. Right. Hero finds Tiffin. He was there. He's the other one.

Shout out to Hero finds Tiffin. Yeah. He's the villainous one. Right. But him sitting. So I'm in box B at the Roy Thompson Hall. If anyone wants to look at the Roy Thompson Hall seating map. I do. I'm in box B at the Roy Thompson Hall if anyone wants to look at the Roy Thompson Hall

seating map. I do. I'm in box B so I'm sitting with the crew mostly. I'm sitting with Shirley Lee friend of the show as well. Shout out. Yeah.

But then in box C, the next box over is Gina and the actresses. Sure. I was actually sitting next to Gina. We were across an aisle. So I kept watching her

watch the movie because if you're sitting next to a director. You want to see. I want to see because obviously she's seen it right so i want to know like is she watching the audience watching a parent watch their kid at a school right is she laughing at the laugh moments is she and she was just locked in but not expressive it was interesting but uh she was just funny hero surrounded by these like absolutely gorgeous black women who were like all looking and he was just like hi like anyway ray finds his nephew uh he's certainly a finds uh he is yes nephew to both rafe and joseph son of the third

sibling uh and son of martha finds who's a director yeah um i do it's that connery thing especially like you know the last 10-15 years of his career you know i'd say sort of uh untouchables as the inflection point where it's just like i will lend the star power the gravitas the genre credibility to this thing but i'm in my 50s or over at this point. Right. And you can build an ensemble around me or put me with a younger star. And I'm essentially like legitimizing other actors by putting them in my orbit. You know?

Yeah. Not that these actors need to be legitimized. But you know what I'm saying? Like this movie immediately makes all three of them far more into movie stars than they were before.ashana lynch who's one of these bizarre cases of like i was talking about with ben someone who sort of had this like incredible reputation in theater and then immediately starts getting thrown into blockbusters yeah in a slightly not her fault carpe for the horse way where you're just like everyone's betting on this person really big a little bit right it's tough tough or not tough,

but a lot of pressure. This is definitely the movie where I'm like, oh, I get it. Oh, she's so good in this movie. This is like the part. She's like incredible. She does have the most fun role. Yeah.

She's the fun one. Yeah, she is. Because like, obviously, Naniska is the leader. Right. The advice giver. You know, and then Naoi is the young one who is impetuous and breaks the rules. But she basically is the protagonist of the movie.

Kind of the protagonist. Kind of the audience. Amanza, who is the Sheila team character, and that actress is wonderful, and I'm loving that she's everywhere all of a sudden. Two shots in Pinocchio? Did you catch her in that? Two shots in Pinocchio.

She's obviously she's in doctor strange for five minutes like you remember she gets a lot of close-up reaction shots and she does it because she's such a striking actress i well yeah that's why you think she was cut out because this person yes there there's the fucking green minotaur who's also all over the merchandise for doctor strange and does nothing in the movie and i've heard from a lot of people that there were entire plot lines with the two of them that were cut out i believe uh that makes sense i think she was supposed to she has weirdly high billing in the movie and i've heard from a lot of people that there were entire plot lines with the two of them that were cut out i believe uh that makes sense i think she was she has weirdly high billing in the movie she's a really she let team is just a really really accomplished british theater actor and i feel like hollywood is on a lynch zone as well hollywood is just discovered disney's like

just throwing everything at her but like what a fucking good showcase for lashana but for both of them well for her, too. But Sheila team playing the, you know, the wise counselor, the right-hand woman. Right, sort of second-in-command. Right, the cool saucer under the hot coffee, right? Like, she's sort of the one you... And then, you know, Izogi is the fun one. She's the whatever. She's kind of badass.

She's a fucking badass. She's the only person who seems to get enjoyment out of her life, you know? Yeah. Sheila seems like such a functionary. And as you said, the, you know, the Val Davis character is so clamped down the entire film. And as the movie goes on, we start like revealing her literal and emotional scars, right? But when she starts out the the movie it is like that opening shot where she rises out of the grass it's it's the thing it's why i think suicide squad is kind of the guarantor that allows her to do this not just because viola davis wasn't someone that was

maybe being thought of in an action movie context before doing fucking dc movies even though her character is not the action character right but the other thing is the thing that is impressive about her in the dc movies is that she just is able to like turn on that fucking sociopath scare that stuff is cool when she goes around shooting people terrifying woman in the world the other thing with her in those movies is that she somehow fits into the silliness of them without being silly. Yes. And it's sort of crucial for that character to not be silly.

Because obviously in superhero movies, everyone's always like, you know, hey, you better go get Hawkman. Hawkman, am I right? What is he, a Hawkman? Right. Where I come from,

there's no such thing as a Hawkman. There's just Hawks and men. But she never does that. She's very serious. She talks about all this stuff seriously i i don't know if amanda waller says like enchantress has breached you know sector three or whatever but she can say that and you're not just like oh my god this is so embarrassing you're like yeah enchantress i guess has breached sector three this is part of her big like fucking you should pay me as much as meryl streep monologue that went viral years ago where it's just like she's like i can do literally anything and it's one of those things that doesn't feel like a brag she's just like i

went to juilliard i am like such a technically competent actor i believe i have proven myself in every genre in every size role you know it's one of those things that doesn't feel like, like, woohoo, like, sort of like, know your value shit. It's just an actual honest account of just like, here are the tangible results of my career and I'm still not sort of considered in this realm. Not being able to get a movie like

Woman King Finance for so long, you know? But it is that thing where like, when she rises out of the grass, you're just like, oh, she knows how to very subtly make herself the most intimidating person on the planet. Pretty cool. Her eyes say so much. Intense glare. She has some of the most expressive eyes of any actor working today.

But the thing that's incredible about her is that it's like entirely behind the eyes. Like she does not actually emote with her eyes in a performative way it's truly just all back there she talks about i've i've said this before because i love it but uh she talks about interviews how her entire approach as an actor is that she wants to be like a cat i think i remember this she's like if you study a cat they are there's nothing more compelling than watching a cat and are there's nothing more compelling than watching a cat and trying to figure out what they're thinking and why they're doing what they're doing because cats are really inscrutable as opposed to a lot of animals like dogs that are

more expressive and emotionally needy and here i have the quote it's actually from david mamet it's interesting do you want me to read it i mean she's citing david mamet if you're looking at an actor on stage with a cat who are you going to look at the actor or the cat the cat because the cat is just being a cat sort of a funny line she's expounded on this more basically like how she literally studies cats to you know rather than feeling like you're acting right just being an entirely natural which like i i think the expressive answer eyes are that whole thing where you're just like you you watch her and you know her big breakout obviously is doubt where she just has this like fucking five minute demolition right doubt is i guess where well it's where she gets her first off denomination right

obviously the first thing i noticed her in is solaris sodaberg and clooney were big boosters of hers for years she talks about they pretty much gave her a career for like a decade plus. She's in three Soderbergh movies before Solaris, which is Out of Sight, Traffic, and Ocean's Eleven. But she has small roles in all of them. Beginning of Ocean's Eleven, she's the parole officer voiceover. But also, she's a social worker in Traffic. She's in one scene Out of Sight.

I believe Clooney paid for her wedding. Hell yeah. Good for you, George. They were the two people who really were just like you should be a much bigger movie star we're gonna keep using and then in 2002 she has this these three roles she's really really good in far from heaven it's another fairly small role but it was sort of it is an incredibly impressive performance she's in antoine fisher which is like a flawed movie but she had like a really big yes uh part

like big i mean acting wise yeah and then i i mean solaris is like one of my favorite movies of all time i think a performance in it it's still like my favorite pilot performance i think she's so incredible in that movie but it's a huge flop but that is probably her big calling card for like look here i am i'm all over this movie blah blah blah but then it is it's like she's not in another i think she starts to do more tv and stuff yeah but her next credit is get rich or die trying she's grandma have not seen that that's the 50 cent movie i remember i mean i remember the movie itself i know i saw the name get rich or die trying oh yeah um she's a small part in siriana again that feels like the sort of

soderbergh clooney universe right the architect what the hell is the architect i could not tell you it doesn't matter not okay uh she's apparently is a small part in world trade center she's in disturbing she played a lot of cops this is the thing i mean she's like a lot of detectives like i played enough cops nurses right social workers like this was how she was paying her rent for a long time and occasionally you know on a good project but salaris is only time she was really kind of maybe given a meaty role in a movie like that the other thing i am forgetting is that she did win a tony for king headley the second i believe and that was in like 2001 that was like a featured

actress tony so that obviously that's a big deal she's in the zone where she's very much then she wanted another one for actors and you're like they're all these directors and actors and movie stars who are just like this person's the shit we should get them on set if you can get her for one scene it's worth getting you know but is is not getting the roles you know is one of these people very often the case where you're just like on stage they can play anything they're you know taken seriously and given real meat and in film they're often playing these sort of functionary roles um right and but she's always good she's anytime always you see her in one of those movies before she was a bigger deal you're always like goddamn violent professional and just has a different energy than anyone else in film it is that weird sort of like it's that thing that i think very often

makes movie stars where you're like this person's holding something back in every single performance of hers i do believe there is that quality of just like what is she not telling me right there's something elusive about her and she can be funny funny, she can be charming, she can be supportive, she can be scary, she can be whatever, you know? She can play high status or low status, but it always feels like she's not showing you all of her cards. Doubt is the one where Oprah Winfrey

campaigned for that part really fucking hard. Interesting. And John Patrick Shanley was like, you don't understand how good this woman is. And then when Oprah sees the movie, she not only is like, you're right, but she brings Viola Davis on her show, and she's like, if you don't understand how good this woman is and then when oprah sees the movie she not only is like you're right but she brings viola davis on her show and she's still like if you don't nominate for an oscar you're fucking insane this is incredible it's five minutes where she just like destroys the fucking movie she fucking kicks in a film with like amy adams meryl streep and philip seymour hoffman yeah well they're all fucking you know asleep at the shop in that movie in my opinion

i think adams is great in that movie she's pretty good i mean that character is a little difficult i think she's pretty good um i know you don't like that movie uh it's a horrible movie but but that's that's the one where it's just like you know have we now i'm looking have we never come no we did black hat we did black and we did a squibab squab right yeah we did suicide squad that's why i feel the need to do more viola yeah we've never talked about a different yeah because now we we haven't yeah this is this is sort of the first i mean she's no she's not a lead in black hat she's a supporting character in that movie this is her first like well she's sort of a lead in suicide squad there's shit like Don't Back Down.

That won't back down. That's actually, that's an offensive movie. I hate that movie. Widows, obviously one of your favorite movies in the last 10 years. Widows is incredible. I think she's incredible in Fences. I think that movie is wonderful, but I love that play. And I just love putting those plays on screen.

I really liked, I loved Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, honestly, which she's amazing in as well. But Help gets her the lead actress nomination, sort of puts her into a different position in terms of like story weight, what can be carried. The movie's obviously a big hit. She kind of maybe misses winning the Oscar

by like a hair. But then also talks about after that movie, she was just like, I want to really fucking take control over what I'm doing. You know, like she sort of talked about the elements of the help that she thought movie she was just like i want to really fucking take control over what i'm doing you know like she sort of talked about the elements of the help that she thought were counterproductive culturally uh and just being like i don't need to do stuff strategically anymore in that kind of

way and i want to use whatever force i can to like change the types of stories that people like me get to be the center of uh because the other thing is she's she's getting increasingly famous at an age where a lot of actresses get phased out yeah and she there's an interview matt patches did with a friend of the show passion future get past and future guest uh did with gina where he talks about at one point can i let me find the quote uh viola sing why are we while they were doing rehearsal like why are we hiding that i'm 56 years old i should be 56 years old in this movie i guess she was playing a younger character in the script they weren't dealing with the reality of her being

like a very aged warrior yeah and she was like no i want to own my age on screen which is obviously i mean she looks pretty good for 56 oh she does and but it's also not gonna look that good when you see a movie like this i can only hope to look that good when you see a movie like this with a woman over 50 in the lead role it's almost always something like jamie lee curtis returning sigourney weaver returning it is people who did this when they were young and have sort of legendary status within their genre and get to come back and kick ass again. It's very rare that at 56, someone's now given the chance to be the lead of an action movie. Yeah, it is.

I mean, unless it's... And a movie that's really banked and sold on her. It's not like she's incidentally the main character. It's like, as we're saying, this movie is more of an ensemble than it's advertised as being because they're selling it as a Viola Davis vehicle because that's what's exciting to people.

But the poster, the main poster, does have the five of them all billed together, looking great. The trailer throws her name up twice. Well, this trailer you're obsessed with. No, I'm just saying. She loves this trailer. They're aware that it's just like, oh, Viola Davis is

big ass name. The Woman King. Set in the 1820s in Dahomey, which is in West Africa. Yeah. Now part of Minyan. We should... Could we shout out specifically on the map

just so people kind of get a sense? Because I had to look it up, and it's like kind of Western Africa, but like, I guess, like next to Nigeria, right? So you got around there,igeria togo ghana the ivory coast so it's like where it like sticks out like that hump it's like on the southern part of it um lenisca is the leader of the agoji is that how you say it i believe so an all-female

group of warriors i mean i mispronounced my name, so I'm assuming that I'm messing up everything in this entire episode. Forgiveness, please, for anything I mispronounce, obviously. Who, in history, I believe part of the reason that there was this warrior fighting force was that these countries were losing so many men in war and to the slave trade and things like that, that there was, I guess, more of an opportunity where they were like, we need warriors. we can think about training women to fight i'll say this too like uh you know every time we do a proper war movie on this podcast my brain breaks

because i'm an idiot and a child and war makes no sense to me but when you watch a movie set in like an era like this i'm like well yes this makes sense i understand in this era if it's literally about like we have to protect our fort other people want to invade our fort you have to train people to defend it war is literally like you said you said this is a more barbaric age and i almost wanted to be like griff we still live in a barbaric age we do but you know what i'm saying the difference is that when i watch something like paths of glory and i'm like the barbarianism is now dressed up in men in corner offices with like a risk board going like would it be clever if i i'm like they

did why isn't this a conference call whereas in woman king i'm truly like i don't believe society has means to settle these things other than a bunch of people come to attack your fucking place to steal your stuff and you have to train people to defend the place you know i'm like i get this i don't like it i don't know me and it's not where i live at the time i get it was a tributary state to the oyo empire which was a larger west african country sure uh kingdom whatever which is made up of a lot of my nigeria uh now and so they are dealing with that they are that's that is their general enemy in this movie i would say usually they are fighting the oyo warriors right yeah um who is this the main actor with the earring who is sort of this

sort of central he fucking rules i mean that guy is so good as the villain in this i know i mean truly contemptible like what a fucking look though man yes yes um i believe the the um character is called oba right and the actor's name is jimmy odukoya i don't know him uh that well let's see i mean you know he's got a bunch of credits to his name on imdb but mostly movies i don't recognize um it is a thing this movie does that i think is actually pretty he's a nigerian actor and it seems like he mostly works in the nigerian industry uh you know he fucking that character poster is good he's just so like physically imposing but also just like seething with like confidence you know what i mean like and not just like evil like he's not

just some guy where you're just like well this is just an evil guy not that he's a good guy to be clear no good very bad but also just like that like brimming warrior confidence where he's just like i i am indestructible in battle right he's got the huge fucking earring like the the horn in his ear that's like cool. Yeah, yeah. It is a thing I think this movie is astute about that speaks to it having a more complicated view of history than I think some people reduce it to,

even though it is very much fictional. This movie is keyed into, like, everyone was just fighting everyone at this time. Well... Set in the 1820s. they they're they're all fighting is i guess yes these kingdoms are all at war and often they will take prisoners of war and that you know that is who's getting sold into the atlantic slave trade which is booming in the 1820s

sadly um england portugal spain yes all the major european france all those fuckers are participating in the atlantic slave trade those are the stories that are more often told whether correctly or not but also it's just like domestically within this country there is a slave trade as well and these these regions are all fighting each other these kingdoms are all fighting each other everyone's just fucking fighting and doing bad shit to everyone yes sure well but they are tributary state is the point like they they are trying to free themselves from having to pay tribute to the oyo which is like the current relationship between those countries that is like the main like conflict in this movie i would say right is that uh naniska who's the leader of the dahomey amazon's the

uh and gazo who is the king the new king a fairly young ambitious king hot hot he's very hot hot king are they are like maybe we can you know actually push back and like, you know, liberate the, the kingdom from having to pay money and prisoners to the Oyo. Right. Like that's the main thing they want to do. Yeah. Then Iska on top of that is like, we really should exit slavery.

We really should not be selling. She's like, I think time's up. It's coming for slavery. Gezo has this thing where he's like, we don't sell our own people. We don't know we only it's only prisoners we capture right like that's his sort of rationalization of it which i think was the common yeah you know like that's how this all worked she's like look i think it's gonna age really poorly he talks about is it his

brother who is the former king who sold his mother right and he's like you know my brother was much worse and he was selling our own people right it's that scene where where he meets the the portuguese guy who whose mother was a member of the dome yeah and they're they're like just casually swapping the stories of like the the slavery they've experienced in their own families um right yeah and as men right you know it's affected both women in their lives. Right. And also the frame of device of how we meet the main young character in this movie is also this thing of her father trying to find someone to sell her off to. It's like in one way or another.

Yes. There is certainly little independence available to women in this world. And when Boyega talks about like, I'm thinking maybe we pull out of the slave thing the argument to him is like not only like hey look around you got good shit going do you really want to cut off the tap right but be this notion of like you want your people to prosper it is this thing that is very much just a fucking humanity basically stays the same without time the same way that we just like throw people into the fucking gears of capitalism where it's like not only the very people at the top but the people that they're serving basically saying like can you allow like the top 20 of people to live a more luxurious life

if you throw 30 people into the grind right if you just sort of turn your you know you turn your head and you just go like i don't know it's a fucking yeah and he's you know and she's you know in this the thing that is rooted in history is that there was absolutely there's two things that are fascinating to me one is that the the way the politics of the kingdom is structured where it's like the king is the absolute ruler and what he says goes like many like any you know kingdom king king ruled country but his advisors is this mix of like his warriors including the agoji yeah and his wives of whom he has various wives who are sort of seem to be like domestic counselors or like they have influence as well yeah and so he's sort of like taken info

from all of them and like this seems to be true in history that it's at least at some point the agoji pushed for like let's you know uh emphasize palm oil trade right well we can we can be farmers right yeah right um and that like the kingdom at least attempted that and maybe then swerved away from it so that's what she's pushing she's like sure no more slavery we can be farmers we can you know emphasize palm oil yeah and i'll help you accomplish that by throwing off the yoke of the yo-yo you know like we can we can do this right and he's spending the most of the movie that he is the most fascinating character to me in a way because he's not stupid or smart. Yes.

Or whatever. You know, like, he doesn't seem like entirely out to lunch. It is really nice to see. But he needs to be kind of flattered and massaged and kind of nudged in the right direction. It's nice to see Boyega in the pocket. He's great. I haven't seen Breaking In yet.

Well, he's very good in that. He obviously was great in small acts breaking in which no it's just called breaking it was it was called 892 at some point so i keep forgetting that has a new title that that's just one of those kind of pressure cooker movies where it's like it's real time and you're just watching a guy you know he takes a bank's hostage and you're just watching a guy like unravel but it is that thing when fucking it's a very good performance. Attack the Block came out.

Everyone was just like, Jesus Christ, fully formed movie star. Here we go. And then it took so long for him to like pay off the promise of that or rather for anyone to give him the chance to pay off the promise of that. And then Star Wars ended up being

a little bit of a double-edged sword for him. I mean, sure. But he's very, very good in those movies. He is. He's always good. It's just's just like you know i think there's been this battle and he talks about it obviously very publicly of just like figuring out where he slots in what kind of actor he wants to be what kind of movie star he wants to be you know it's not just star wars of course and i'm you know pacific rim pacific rim was sort of a win for nobody. Yes. Right? Like, you know, everyone just sort of forgets that exists. Yeah. Detroit, I actually think he's excellent in, but he has a tough role.

And also is not as much of a presence as sort of we assumed going into that movie. Sure. I mean, he sort of bookends them. But it's a tough role. And that movie is like. The movie doesn't work. And it's a smaller part than. Yeah.

It's like whoever wants to rewatch it. And apart from that, he's really done very little like the only other things post the beginning of star wars there's something called naked singularity that came out last year yeah it doesn't seem to have made any impact and and that's it he's in a sci-fi netflix movie called they cloned tyrone yes uh with jamie fox yeah. But I'd like more. Oh, and then, of course, Small Axe. Right, he was incredible

in that Small Axe movie. That was the one where it was sort of like, oh, we're getting back to... Yeah. No, you know, I remember when the Star Wars cast

was announced and I saw some people cynically making the comment of like, great, here are six promising actors' careers now, like, ground to a halt. Because it's this notion of like great here are six promising actors careers now like ground to a halt because it's this notion of like star wars actually do this for years never

ends up being the gift you think it is to someone's career harrison's really the only person who like is able to build off the momentum maintain being a proper movie star from the original series and then to a certain degree it's like it was almost a thing that portman and mcgregor had to overcome for a little while mcgregor obviously i'm sorry uh christiansen gets like totally halted as well um and like you know adam driver obviously has just been off to the fucking races oscar isaac we talk a lot about feeling like he's not as exciting as we always hoped he would be, but does a lot of fucking good ass work. And then it does feel like Boyega and especially Daisy Ridley are the two who've gotten a little stuck. I'd just like to see more from both of them.

And it feels like Boyega's starting to punch through again and figure out what he wants to do. But this is a self, he's a bit of a buffoon, is what I'm saying. I'm saying I like that he's doing me too i like it too it's an interesting choice for him to take this part in the movie he does end up making the right decisions yeah but at least i when watching it was not like oh he's turned all the way around or he's definitely in on this it's more like the ending is as cut and dry as some people want to reduce it to and i also think a movie that this is weirdly similar to in certain ways is the last duel and that they very much feel like very modern films they're not trying to like pretend that that era was more modern than it was but they're

sort of like telling the stories from a modern perspective and using them to sort of be in dialogue with the shit we're still dealing with today. Yeah, I wanted to shout out there's in his court to there's a handler who's queer that I don't think has like very much to do on screen, but it's just the presence is there. And I think like to your point, like they're doing little things to just like be somewhat contemporary with this historical and it doesn't to me it does not feel like hollow performative stuff it's like you know yeah yeah nothing about this movie felt particularly performative to me it more because gina is such a classical uh storyteller yes basically in all of her movies she's sort of a small c conservative filmmaker to me in a lot of ways like she makes family dramas about like big relatable characters having big relatable breakthroughs there was that no matter what the movie is there was that thing

where like uh when um beyond the lights went on to net. Oh, sure. Right. You know this, right? The rights went to Netflix or whatever. Right. And then it got filed under like black film as a genre. And she was like, this is a romantic drama. This is like a melodrama. These are the films you should be putting it up against.

And like Reed Hastings actually responded to it and took a meeting with her and was like, maybe her algorithm's fucked. No, no. What he said was like, I can't control it. I can't control it. It runs me. Right now, it's running me.

All of my decisions, it's making. Right. I'm plugged into it at all times. My face is going to change based on whatever you want to look like.

The algorithm's like Ava in Ex Machina. Yes, right. I saw Saranda. I sat next to him or right next, very close to him for a glass of onion. Yeah. And I said, you've ruined cinema, sir. No, I didn next to him. Or right next. Very close to him for a glass on him. And I said,

You've ruined cinema, sir. No, I didn't say that. Thank you. I also sat right behind Daniel Craig and I took a picture. I'll show you. I took a picture of the back of his head. I don't usually take pictures of celebrities. But I was just like, The back of this motherfucker's head looks like Daniel Craig. I have one quick complaint just that

I saw slick films and you know me, I love like a wet movie. It's not what you think. It's like I saw slick films and you know me I love like a wet movie it's not what you think it's like kind of more like you know like bro kind of oh you saw slick films on Netflix and you were mad that it was not right you were a collection of wet movies you were looking for some oily pictures yeah Jesus yeah yeah yeah it just looks like him because it is it really does his head is kind of a perfect circle yes and then he's got these boink jug ears and obviously very distinctive hair color close cropped yeah um but yes no she she is she's a very classical filmmaker uh yeah that's what i

mean is why you have to view this movie in the context of the other types of epics we're talking about. You know, she's sort of, I'm overusing this phrase, but in dialogue with the history of turning historical events into aspirational epics. And then she told Patches that she has another thing lined up that sounds sort of woman-kingy, which sounds fun. She said she was deciding between two products and one of them was big like a big scale thing yeah i just like that she's working at a good clip again well that's true yeah because that's the thing is of course it's like i don't need her budgets to be bigger every time because i understand some filmmakers don't want to make a 200 million dollar movie every time yeah but i do want her to make movies consistently which it does seem like the industry now understands that she's a pretty

talented filmmaker who has an interesting perspective on things. And so she's getting jobs, but it does feel like throughout the 2010s, it was more like she had to like fight for a meeting or whatever, fight to pitch anyone on anything. Yeah. Or, or maybe it was that she was like,

they'd be like, Hey, do you want to make this? And she'd be like, well, I want to make it she was like they'd be like hey do you want to make this and she'd be like well i want to make it well and they'd be like oh yeah that'll be expensive and take forever can't you make it badly yeah like doesn't because doesn't that kind of what happened with silver and black like i think so basically and then at some point they were like why is this a movie should be two movies there should be a series and she was like what the fuck are we talking about stupid industry I have a script that's good. Let me make it.

Right, right. Silver and Black in one film? Are we blowing our load too fast? I think that was truly... Let's do Syl. And then Ver. We need to learn how the name comes together. Black and Beard.

That can be on HBO Max. And then The Ampersand. I'm sensing spinoff potential um the plot of the movie the woman king we begin on this big battle where they're rescuing uh women who have been abducted by you know people were going to be told to be sold into bondage yeah um and another thing i think this movie is about is in a very sobered way is just like it is incredibly difficult to extricate yourself from bad systems it is why the world remains bad yeah you know my attitude is i sit there and just go like stop it stop doing that

yeah uh well instead the kingdom is just weighing whether or not to say i guess we'll go to all-out war right you know go to just like let can we challenge them uh openly and you know rather than just like be defensive so gazo the king who's got a bit of a chip on his shoulder is kind of into that but they need more people yes and then we are and i think i think also has a chip in his shoulder and also wants to be the new hip modern king. A little bit of that. He has that attitude of like, I want to seem smarter, more in touch, more, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. Because there's a character that's one of his wives who is kind of, she got a lot of laughs at the premiere. I don't know if you guys got it. Who's kind of throwing some shade at him because he's like general niska what do you think you know like and he's actually listening to her and the wife character is kind of the like why don't we just stay status quo right like that's what her she's always gone for why

do we have to stir the pot she has been lucky enough to rise to the most comfortable position a woman can have in that culture at that time and and people are afraid of losing their status 100 so we have this parallel track which is nawi who's the girl who basically anytime the dad tries to marry her off she's just like you little cuck bitch i'm not gonna marry you or whatever like she's she's impetuous she's um impudent with the men there's that moment when she has her final sort of like training test. And Boyega is like so charmed by her. And he was like, if you weren't such a good warrior,

I'd make you a wife. And everyone laughs at it and views it as like, wow, you've really proven yourself. And it's such a like deeply sad moment. It's like, that would be the win. Yeah.

That would be the, yeah, that would be the lucky year you get to marry the king. Here's the person who's now found the one way she can exist on the terms she wants to in her life, basically. So, Na'vi is basically just taken to the doors of the castle, the fortress of wherever the Agoge live. Sure. Dropped off. Because the general people are not allowed to look at them, which is fairly cool.

Yeah. And it's just sort of like, I don't know what to do with her you deal with her right and she's immediately a pain in the ass and izogi which is the um lashana lynch character is just like you seem fun i'll take you on right yes and that's kind of i mean it's classic hollywood story telling shit that's how we learn everything it's how we learn about how the kingdom works and how everyone lives and you know how life functions inside the walls of their and it's it's easy but the other thing is you're doling out with viola davis's character the sort of i mean the the thing i just love in

gina movies so much of how much she will focus on these little moments of just understanding how much visual storytelling can be conveyed in a glance of reaction, a moment of privacy, whatever it is, right? I think it speaks to her also as an athlete, too, where she's just, like, really keyed into the amount of story you can get in a body language, even in just a parting moment. But you're getting these moments of, like, Viola in the bath, you know, tending to her scars. These sort of, like, well, this is the, you know, tending to her scars, these sort of like, well, this is the,

you know, you got to see this fucking badass opening action sequence where she's just like ripping it up. And now it's just like, this one's 56, her whole body hurts. You know, there's a certain degree to which she's like sharpened herself to just being

kind of like so tightly wound and dead inside and all this sort of shit. These moments where she's sort of by herself and doesn't really know what to do with herself to a certain degree. Right. Right. You don't have much of a lot. Your life is good in one way. Right.

And that you get to live independently in part of this collective. And it's forged by trauma. She had a traumatic life that she has now found a way to escape from by having to like turn herself into a Terminator. But, but right. But you're, you know, you're a soldier. Right. You're you're in danger you're you're not just a soldier but

these women truly are like human weapons yeah they're pretty down to even just you know the carving of their nails and everything it's like everything you do is to make yourself the most efficient weapon possible uh but she immediately starts to uh react strangely to this young woman who was now entered. I did not put that together initially. But yes, she is kind of like on her guard about this girl. Who you feel like is your initial maybe take of that is like they're very similar. And that's why you're butting heads. It's the classic, right.

I see myself in her and I don't want her to make the same mistakes. Is this just fucking like Tom Sker top gun or something right is this just like right yes yeah teach the hot-headed kid to learn some humility or whatever but then you get this moment where she witnesses the scar on the shoulder yeah reacts really strangely goes to she laughs him that comes late in the movie it's like post second it's around the 40 minutes yeah um and says like what happened to the baby you've already gotten the glimpses now of clearly she suffered a lot of sexual abuse when she was younger sort of being uh you know haunted by these men and whatever and you realize like oh she had a child right that was given away and now she is finally at the point you're not allowed to get married

or have children but it's like as a 56 year woman, she is at the point where, for the first time, she has to contend with, that child is now an adult that might cross my path at any time. And we also are seeing in these flashbacks of the attack that... It's the earring guy. It's the earring guy.

Right. As a younger man. But it's like he's got that same sort of like large spike in his ear. Yes. Which is like, you know, adding another layer to what's going on it's like she's discovering she's a mother but it's so conflicted because of the situation but also because it's the enemy yeah yes yes right this child's a reflection of the the person she hates the most in the world you know a tremendous amount of shame and trauma and all

this sort of shit right um the the you know i i watch it i think in a more conventional way it's going to dart around this thing for a long time and then you get the scene where they're both in the bath together and viola cuts open her shoulder and tells her the story of basically so she she analog tracking device right yeah she she did a very metal way of uh tracking right like or marking her child by putting a shark tooth inside of her uh because she's just sort of going like impossible there's no way and viola davis is like tell me which orphanage you sent her to and she's like i don't know i don't know like her attitude is clearly as her best friend as her confidant to just be like don't think about it it's impossible what are the odds don't consider

it and viola davis is like i have an insurance policy i fucking put a tooth in her skin so that i could know without a shadow of a doubt it's a good way to do it yeah there's only like 10 15 minutes i feel like before viola expresses her concern and the confirmation and from that point on it's like spread out over two scenes though that are that are far apart there's the first scene where she's like what did you do with the baby it's developed as and then like post a big battle is when she's like yo can i check out your shoulder for a second surprise yeah let me peep shoulder. I think it's almost the order is actually she realizes that the spike ear villain is her attacker.

That is revealed very late. And then sort of starts to put it together from there. So now he's getting trained. Yeah. Izogi is sort of combo teacher and big sister. Yes. I guess, right? Drinking whiskey. Right. Yeah, exactly. drinking whiskey right yeah exactly davis is so

low to take on any maternal role with her you know she's already gonna be like tough love with everybody and she has such greater conflict you know with with this problem yeah and so they're mostly training with hand-to-hand combat and using like weapons, swords, knives. Swords. Oh my God, the fucking swords in this. Guns. You do see muskets in this movie, but they don't wield them.

Well, she does at the end. At the end. While wearing colonial escarp. Right. But mostly in the movie, the idea is basically they mostly don't have guns, but they do have some male warriors who use them but like it's sort of like you know the dahomey amazons are very fast and agile it's

not really their body one of the key trailer moments of lashana lynch with the spear in the shoulder trailer should we do a separate episode on the woman king trailer the movie's a big hit no no go ahead no the the thing it was when... Oh, God, this movie is very visceral for people who don't like blood. Especially for... This is a PG-13, right? It's a pretty good PG-13. It's successfully gnarly for a PG-13.

Yes. And, you know, she's always interested in showing the actual consequence of violence rather than just... Right, as we said. But no, the thing, the test where she's going up against the the male warrior and there's the spear between the two of them and they have to walk closer to each other

until one person backs off right some gnarly shit oh my god yeah and then i love the movement uh like the celebration the dancing like all of the specifics of like how they chant yeah um and just like celebrate it's all just like really rich and like thought through yeah and they sing all of the specifics of how they chant and just celebrate. It's all just really rich and thought through. Yeah, and they sing the Pina Colada song. Yeah, those songs they sing, by the way, are historically accurate. They did not make up new songs for them. So you've got this side plot that I really dislike where you have santo ferreria

which is the hero finds tiffin guy who's like a portuguese slaver yes uh he's sort of the bad guy but like you know right he's a bad guy uh and then malik played by j Jordan Bulger. Yeah. He's very handsome. Yes. He's a looker. Yeah. He's British, who is half Dahomian himself. Right, his mother was, yeah. And so he's kind of, and they're there to treat with the king.

You know, they're not there for, right, like they're there to chat. But Malik is kind of also just returning to his mother's homeland and like getting in touch with it, I guess, and he falls in love with that I saw reviews spotlight this as the weakest element of the film and so to some degree watching it I was pleasantly relieved that it was less of an element than I thought it was going to be and it didn't play out as predictably the movie is two hours and 15 minutes long yeah you cut that out it's two hours it's a clean two i'd love that uh and i just i just think it needs to be either just more sketched out or just non-existent because it feels the most profound it just feels a little perfunctory like i'm like why do they like each other because they're hot and i'm like well they

are hot and shout out to them and props to them actually that is a good reason to like someone but uh i just but like she's in the middle of like forging this like deep bond with these women and like learning to be a warrior and then at the same time he's like hey what's up and she's like oh hey what's up with you and i'm like but i feel like she's more into like she i don't think that would be enough to draw her away from this. And obviously the overall arc that she has is she realizes like, no, I can't be with him and I can't go away. Yes. Right.

You know, we're, we're, we're, and I knew throughout the movie, like we're coming to that realization. We're not going to end with her being like, let's go,

let's sail to Portugal. We'll have a nice life. You know, me, let's move to England. Who does that? You know what I mean? All right.

But I just, or maybe they would just need to have the most electrifying chemistry where i'm like well yeah these two are just so amazing together that yes i get it i didn't really totally buy that but like i said it's an old-fashioned romantic epic you're looking something up no i was looking at the new yorker piece there was a part i was trying to quote but i couldn't find it yeah um People should read it. It's a good piece. Yeah, yes. I think it's better that we just direct people to well-written pieces

by people who know what they're talking about. The movie starts with a big action sequence. It has two big war sequences at the end. One just versus the OYO, right? And then one at the, one just versus the Oyo, right? You know, and then one at the trading port. But for the book, they really just invest you in these characters. It's light on it. I mean, there's training stuff.

Yeah, a lot. And there's like the big training, the big sort of like final test sequence and all that. Yeah. But it does like take the foot off the gas. But yet the movie does move, I would say. Like it never feels slow. Yeah. It's always engaging. take the foot off the gas but yet the movie does move sure say like it never feels slow yeah uh it's always engaging uh a part of the training that i just want to shout out is i love that

the like the trainees kind of fuck with the senior officers and they take gunpowder and they put it inside the head of the dummy like the practice dummy and so like they surprise the senior officers at one point when they're like you know demonstrating like how to attack on them and they hit the head and it explodes and i like how that then is set up later like for the big fight scene yeah they use that tactic later what's the line it's like you don't need a gun to you know to use gunpowder or whatever right is that a line yeah yeah the the big sequence where she sort of pretends to like offer the oil the trick because the oil at some point show up and they're like not only do we want you know our usual tribute but we want like 40 of your dahomey amazons and he talks them down to 20 or like

there's the sequence where like they're supposedly presenting the warriors yeah as prisoners yeah and then obviously it's a decoy and she fights yeah and it's cool i feel like we've talked about over the years a frustrating trend of like uh especially big studio films, trying so hard to be clever and being aware of how much more literate moviegoers are and sort of like, there's such a cottage industry around recognizing tropes

and people sort of throwing basic screenwriting principles against it. It's fucking cliched, overwritten, whatever. To the detriment of, you start throwing out a lot of cliches that exist because they work people start doing sort of clever subversion sure you maybe in the bath water you're saying clever yeah right right don't sometimes we can use these things because they work and they were they are success you talk about this being the only other a plus movie of the year

along with top gun maverick which is another movie where everyone's just like oh you just make a movie yeah but you're just hitting all the classic old hollywood things that have worked for people but a movie that has every cliche in it top gun maverick you know like everything where you're just like wow but it's so cheesy and i'm like yeah was that a problem for you and they're like no not really yeah and i i I think this movie is not operating exactly at that scale, but I do think there's something about... At no point does anyone say, too close to remissal, switching to guns or whatever. That'd be cool. But you know what I'm saying.

I do think that this movie is operating in a somewhat similar vein. Yes. It's what you said before. You're saying... It's the point you're making about it's modern but not contemporary or modern but not self-aware. It's okay. We can do old-fashioned epic.

We can do the let's see it through the eyes of the new recruit to learn everything. Some person might be like, ah, that's an old trope. It's a successful trope. The trope exists because it works. As long as the characters are well-defined and well-performed and there's an old trope it's like but it's like the trope the trope helps as long as the characters

are well well defined right well performed and there's an emotion to everything which that's the thing this movie invests in all the things it needs to invest you to make those things you know when uh um after this battle i described happens you know uh now we and izogi are captured right yeah well wait come on we gotta talk about the fight you can't just skip over it yeah no let's talk about the fucking okay so they use the palm oil which like there's a little moment where you get to also see the idea like being uh put like or like she challenges the king like let's start producing more palm oil and you at least get to see a little bit of the production start to happen but the palm oil and the gunpowder play in now to this fight where they pour all of this

palm oil in the fields just on the perimeter of where the warring faction is setting up and so then at like right at first light they light up and they make all these like makeshift bombs and they and they and then use the anthills yeah and disguise them which are they're basically just like landmines yeah sure and they do a surprise attack it's fucking sick it is it's very sick there's like this like slight fog uh-huh you know because it's that time of day man that fight scene was like i was like at the edge of my seat it was really really fucking good i have no beef with any of the fight scenes in the movie they were all really impressive i think it was the only thing like we were saying after we saw griff where it was like because of the covid stuff yeah like you know it was just like a lot

you didn't just you didn't get a wide shot. You didn't get to really feel the the full like battle. I was just rewatching some old guard things. And it's, you know, it's a testament to how Gina worked with her actors. And, you know, old guard, she has someone like Charlize, who's like so fucking good at action where it's like, oh, they can actually do the thing in full. They can play this out. Right. good at action where it's like oh they can actually do the thing in full they can play this out right this movie i think she was coming up against like you now have a third a third as many people as you thought you were going to have so you have to break this into smaller pieces because

you're maybe reusing the same crowd people behind it or maybe you can't clear out the space to the same degree you could before because you have to create a smaller bubble around or whatever the fuck it is you know i think all the action choreography in this is phenomenal. It's visceral. It is so, at times, really got me

squirming. She actually fucking builds story beats into her action sequences. There is a chain of events happening for a reason that have a build to them rather than just sort of chaos of people just swinging swords and being badass. I just loved it.

I love that sequence. I like the big sequence at the port where they free everybody. I like the escape with Lashana Lynch where she, spoiler alert, dies. It was very moving and effective. There's that moment on the back of the car where they're all lying there and she goes, do you want to live anymore?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you mean the one girl who throws herself out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really good. I also like how the rope, which is kind of a thing with the training, right? That's the first weapon that they're taught to work with. It's incorporated with the

sword and she starts like swinging knife on rope seems like a really ben yeah dude it's fucking like that's i do love that too we're right there giving her the rope and now he's like rope boring i want like a fucking giant sword and she's like sure take the giant sword cut the head off and she can't you know she doesn't know how to you know put her half behind it the final test being like going through the thorns, which is also how Viola finds the scar on the shoulder. But that sequence is very visceral as well.

My God, those thorns are so big. They're like the biggest thorns I've ever seen. Yeah, the thorns are... Shirley was weird. I remember now, Shirley was squirming in her chair. Oh my God. And I was like, thorns? And she was like, I just...

I was truly having to hold my hand up. Oh my God. And I was like, thorns? And she was like, I just don't. I was truly like having to hold my hand up. It's like nature's barbed wire. I'm not saying I want to throw myself into a thorn field. Sounds like you do. I'm just saying like. I know what to get you for your fucking birthday. Well, you know, like Barbarian, another movie that's out right

now, has basements in it, right? It's a horror movie with basements. I hate basements. And I was like, well, but it's not like one of those things where I go around being like, you know what? I hate basements horror movie with babies and i was like well but it's not like one of those things where i go around being like you know what i hate basements i was watching and i was like i think i might have a problem with this immediately we're like it really hit me but i should also mention i'm very afraid of basements you didn't say that like i think because i never had one in my like i never grew up with a basement yeah they're just extra spooky to me i'm like what's going on down there no one's really watching the store down we did fucking george lucas talk show in

detroit four days after i saw barbarian and patrick connor our producer had booked us an airbnb slept well and the basement was locked and i was just like i hate everything about being here should have gone in there i couldn't i want to check sure. Right, right. You want to check to make sure there's any secret doors. I won't spoil it. Have you seen Barbarian? No. Scary. People should go see it. Good movie. Okay. Yeah. I love Basements. Some of my best memories have happened in Basements.

That's also a movie that is interesting in that you talk about criticizing movies for being too clever for their own good. I'm not going to spoil anything about this movie, but it is a film where if you actually line up the series of events it is less insane in a way yeah yeah and the way it chooses to tell its story right it actually has a pretty straightforward story uh yeah but it's it's the construction of it's really smart yeah yeah the one can izogi dies in that they're trying when they're trying

to escape from being sold correct like they almost pull it off yeah yes um which even i just feel like it's like the guns are slowly creeping more and more into this world for as much as they train it's like if someone can shoot you from that distance everything you've done is going to start to become less and less effective in defense you know right right right everything you are can just be like immediately wiped out from you know 100 feet away or whatever and naniska has basically been told because she has successfully defeated the oyo yeah been told by the king like good job buddy yeah you get to be married to me now big win for you sure and she's

like and everyone's like i mean come on man like it's because it's basically like that's like your gold watch it's like retirement it's like congrats you know you know and she's like i want to go get my people i want to go get now we you know i don't and the the fact that she's her secret daughter is obviously a part of it but also these are her girls yeah and she defies orders to do it goes and gets her you've got now as you say has been now been dressed she puts on a nightgown because she's gotta wear something from her portuguese um from her from her portuguese how do you want to describe him? Not even boyfriend. Ingenue. Potential lover.

She comes out of it in this sort of like a colonial scar wielding a gun. I mean it's And then they take down the entire kind of port. The whole sort of like operation there. It's very cathartic.

The analog she is presenting of how these are the basic themes that present themselves across history and our human nature in different costumes with different weapons. I mean, she's almost at an inflection point in history. But the same things

are going to perpetuate themselves in one form or another. They go back. Yeah. She's proclaimed the woman King, which is sort of defined as like, it's like separate from being a wife or whatever, right? It's sort of like you would be my partner or you'd have more of an equal say in ruling the kingdom.

It almost feels like a vice president position. Right. It's good. Look, let's say it's, it's a good title. It's a good title. And it's good.

It's funny. Like the movie could end right there. was expecting it to exactly it feels like the movie's about to end yes and then in my opinion and effective although some people disagreed with me on this at toronto but very gina move there's like five more minutes of her sort of going to nawi and then kind of acknowledging their familial right like you know their relationship which you don't need per se like it's already kind of happened i i repeat again her entire body of work as an artist as a storyteller is very much informed this is more the victory here this is more what matters yeah she she comes at stories from the perspective

of someone who didn't know where she came from. You know, Gina herself. The struggle to sort of find your family and all of that. And so, I just have to imagine there was some note at some point where they were like, can't we just end on,

and you are now the woman king. Everyone cheers, cut to black. You can imagine it ending like The Phantom Menace, boss ass cheering in the crowd. But I like the little coda person. I do do too i think it's a very successful movie it's just kind of like you know kind of like i have very few complaints about it it's just a yeah i mean we're like that's a fucking good movie that's a well-made movie yeah and i feel like that has been the general reaction of just everyone

being like yeah it's a fucking crowd pleaser they don't make them like that anymore like that kind of stuff i don't i find everything about it shout out pretty encouraging and i certainly think they're you know you are allowed to fucking debate this text and wrestle with it and what have you but uh i i think as a movie it's it's a it's a pretty uh pretty excellent little object well we should talk about one of the most encouraging things which is the box office game 19 million dollars um talk about one of the most encouraging things, which is the box office game. $19 million. It's one of these things where it was like,

oh, it's projected to open at 12. And then going into the weekend, they were like, it might overperform at 15 or 16. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it came in at 18, and then a day later they were like, actually, it's 19. Yeah. Yeah, so it just kept trending up.

Do we want to play the box office game? I do. Okay. Woman King, number one, $19 million. Number one movie in America. Number two, we just discussed it, horror film. Barbarian. With a 38% hold, which is crazy for a horror movie,

but the combo of not a lot of competition and great buzz. Horror, basically, if you drop 65% weekend too, people are like, humongous. Incredible. Horror is like the most front-loaded right and i'm just kind of astonished by the success of that movie's marketing campaign still basically being don't find out anything about this um but right right i still haven't seen the trailer and you know i know you love trailers like for example and i actually haven't watched that brain trailer

all i knew going to barbarian was the poster I've been told same I've been told the trailer for Barbarian is surprisingly good at hiding everything I've heard that as well so I should check it out but people should see it it's a really really good movie

yeah number three at the box office is another horror movie I will say because I saw it I liked it I texted our group texted

the Doughboys afterwards because Nick and Mitch had already seen it and I was like I liked it a lot I don't think I loved it then you saw it you were like i loved it in the week since i've seen it it's only grown on me sims bump the sims bump it's it's well it's a fucking great movie it's pretty phenomenal yeah number three is another horror movie though new this week uh the fuck what's the fucking new this week horror movie oh it's pearl pearl i haven't seen

pearl yet neither have i i'm excited i've heard very mixed things but then martin scorsese was going for the map i know it sounds like my kind of shit cool yeah i mean yeah scott tobias was saying to me that it's like douglas circhi and i was like well that's interesting right right our friend the arp was like it's like more of a sad character study than a horror movie. I'm like, sign me up. Number four is one of the weirdest buried things of the year. It's new this week. It's a mystery movie.

This thing is called See How They Run? That's right. Yeah. Which is one of those things that they like announced last year. Yeah. And they were like announcing from Searchlight like,

you know, a mystery movie with uh sersha ronan and sam rockwell i will say you mostly go to screenings i've been seeing this trailer before every movie for the last three months right it's one of those you know maybe it's it's more so in new york but that trailer has been unavoidable i finally i i frankly have found that trailer annoying sure and sort of like forced west light kind of vibes everyone who sees it says it's pleasant that it's entertaining the word i've heard ranges from pleasant disappointing to pleasant fine pleasant good but like the trailer for me was nails on chalk it's a real sort of like four to six out of ten swing despite

being like my favorite her yeah but you know the fact that when a movie like that is not at a festival yes and is not really like being pushed to the press at all i'm sort of like does it just stink but it more just seems like everyone's like i don't know it is what it is i'm also like is that better than amsterdam if people are doing their fucking wes anderson murder mystery refs right uh that's another thing by the way i saw i saw amsterdam last weekend yeah uh q a afterwards uh i'll just say this uh the moment i walked out of the q a was when david o russell claimed that the film was 60 based on truth that movie is so much more fictional than this film sure right well yeah

right but he's pretending it's i would be very surprised if it is held up to the same level of scrutiny as this movie i think erlich had some tweet about it and it's so true. It's like, it's such a plague, the movies that are like, that begin with like, mostly true events. This is kind of based on a true story. David, can I tell you what the wording is at the beginning of Amsterdam? A movie that I do not really like. Right. It's a lot of this really happened.

I fucking hate that shit. And then it's like, he at the end was like, like 60% of this really happened i fucking hate that and then it's like he at the end was like like 60 percent of this is real and i'm like every single character in this film is invented made up so how real could it possibly be fictional narratives with fictional characters running concurrent with actual historical events anyone can fucking do that don't like a lot of this really happened yeah it takes place in a society where there's running water what the fuck are you talking about sounds good number five of the box office is at 96 million dollars and at this point i kind of just need it to get to 100 just for fun it's gonna be really frustrating if it doesn't make it i think it's gonna make there's nothing more infuriating than like a rampage topping out at like 98.7 get it to 100 let's just put it in drive-ins or whatever if for me a perfectly entertaining

you've said it many times yeah i recommend a ride on the train we've talked about all these movies top gun maverick dc league of super pets the invitation minion drives up grew and then no new at number 10 is moon age daydream which i will not be saying why it looks boring okay i just hate those kinds of like david bowie's you've never seen him before i'm like i've seen him before i've seen so a great performer I love him I don't think this is going to blow my mind modern pox I talked about

in last week's episode the Pinocchio episode how much I liked Invitation to a Point and felt really let down by the last act of the thing and then it's already rentable on digital and I saw the director posting the like hey finally the cut I wanted you to see is out. I think it makes a big difference.

And I'm like, am I going to watch Invitation again for the second time in two weeks in the hope that it actually follows through on what I felt like the movie was close to? Or is it like there's three more minutes of blood?

That would be my guess. No, maybe not blood, but like that it's not that different. But who knows? I don't know. Maybe you will. There's some good stuff in that film that's the box office

game I'm very excited for the next Gina movie whenever it comes let's also say because we're doing Fletch on Patreon that episode dropping the 21st is that right yes that's right so that episode just dropped okay so it just came out because this is the same

weekend in which Fletch bombed, we, on that episode, do the box office game for 15 to 20. Numbers 15 to 20. So get excited for that. I'll say this too, just as an addendum to the Fletch episode, because you did your

full tirade against the streaming movie. A thing which I notoriously love. I love streaming movies. And David felt the need to mount to Bruce McGill in The Insider. Yeah, pretty much.

According to defense of it. I banged the table. I'm the only one of the three of us who saw Fletch in theaters. And I will say, it maybe sounds like it plays better at home than it does at theaters. Maybe it is the exception to the rule.

I mean, I would have seen it in a theater if I had any time yeah like woman king's a movie where you're like great to see in a theater sure and i basically think all movies are better in theaters i'm willing to admit both of you gave fletch half star higher than i did fletch going to streaming makes more sense than secret headquarters or like what's another like obviously big budget movie that was for some reason put on. There was another Halloween movie is going to Peacock. I know those are in theaters too but like why why would you think anyone

would first kill another one where you're like why is this going straight to Paramount Plus? That was so weird. It's the end of August. Put it in theaters. Yes. Anyway. But yeah it's a fair point. David do you want to tell your TIFF story? Because you saw this movie at TIFF. You've already talked about being there at the festival. No, I'm going to save it for

****. Well, now you realize what you're doing right now. What? Building it up? It's not that good. No, you're telling people what's coming at the end of the year. Oh, ****. Should we cut that out? I don't know, David. I don't know. What do you want to do? I don't know. It's your choice. What do you mean? Well, we can just cut out me saying that it's the second time you said oh did

i say i said it on mic before yeah but also do you want to do you want to tell the story now the only thing is it's about the circumstances under which i saw that movie okay so i feel like it actually worked so are we bleeping out that movie yeah sure fine that's actually fun yeah intrigue i think most people feel like they fucking they probably know that we're doing that yeah yeah anyway we've long said we would do it right yeah the bill has finally come due yes anyway david saw some mystery movie at toronto which we will be covering on main feed later in the year as part of a director miniser mini the story is that i saw it on zero hours sleep wow zero hours of sleep and i still like that sounds like a real barbarian situation a real griffin you know what i like i like in the game of talking around anything that happens in

barbarian letting people assume that everything happens in barbarian that's the thing and i do worry it's over hyping the movie in a weird way where people like i don't understand like at no point did like a pirate get elected president in that movie or something where you're like okay fine it is why i do think it's the right kind of expectation to put people in for where it's like look you won't see where it's going but it is actually bug that shit happens in that movie right but it's not like fucking uh i i don't i don't know i don't know i can't even think of what movie. You know, a lot of people are comparing it to Malignant and I think Malignant

is a more bonkers quote unquote movie in terms of like it takes more flights of fancy. This film is just so tricky in the way it unfolds its story to you. And it just every 15 minutes

makes you feel like I literally have no idea where this is going or what this has been up until this point. Which is exciting to watch a movie like that. So check it out.

Yeah. We're back to Kubrick. Yes. Back to Kubrick next week. Dr. Strangelove with Sean Fantasy, which we already announced, I believe. Yeah. Get excited. Yep.

Damn dirty freaks. Yep. You can stop complaining. We got the podcast, The Right Guys on Sean Fantasy. Now you have to come with new people to bug us to have on the show. I'm sure they will. New friends who we were thrilled to have on the show. I'm sure they will. New friends who we were thrilled to have on the show. I'm sure they will. Which I also say because we said this

on Patreon, but this is the first main feed episode we've recorded in our offices. Oh, that's right. We said that on Patreon, but we are in the new offices. They're not done yet, but they're in them. They're very much not done, but we're in a space that is an office studio space that we now record this podcast, which

is nice. Great. And RIP the Haasalium as workplace. Yeah. Yeah. I continue to live there. You continue to live there. It's now purely a place for living.

Thank you all for listening. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. Thank you to Marie Barty for our social media, helping to produce the show. AJ McKee and Alex Barron for our editing. Lee Montgomery and the Great American Novel

for our theme song. JJ Birch for our research. As we said, tune in next week for Dr. Strangelove. You can go over to Patreon to hear our Confess Fletch episode and continue to do

the Roger Moore Bond films. We also have two more Kubrick bonuses coming up. 2010, you're going to make Contact Doctor Sleep, the rare sequels made to Kubrick films, not by Kubrick, and then a sort of Kubrick-themed Talking the Walk that I cannot remember if we've actually revealed at this point or not. Go to blankheadpod.com for some links to some real nerdy shit.

And as always, to the best of my knowledge the three of us have yet to drop a thor in this bathroom have we that is true wow we're gonna end on that i don't know what are you gonna end on and as always um gunpowder i don't remember the line doesn't have to be in a gun oh let me check on the IMDb quote page. The line is, if you like pina coladas. Ugh, okay.