Kermode & Mayo’s Take - Gabriel Byrne, Dance First, How To Have Sex, Bottoms & The Killer

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

This week, Simon sits down with the brilliant and always-interesting Gabriel Byrne for a philosophical chat about his turn as the legendary Irish playwright Samuel Beckett in ‘Dance First’, James Marsh’s experimental biographical drama. Their conversation is so good, there’s more of it in Take 2! Mark also gives his thoughts on the film, as well as reviewing ‘How To Have Sex’, cinematographer-turned director Molly Manning Walker's Cannes-winning feature debut about  a group of teen girls’ rite-of-passage first holiday to Malia; ‘Bottoms’, the Young Hollywood-packed second feature from director Emma Seligman, which follows two unpopular queer high school students as they start a fight club in a bid to have sex before graduation; and ‘The Killer’, David Fincher’s latest offering starring Michael Fassbender as a – you guessed it – contract killer with a growing conscience. Plus, Mark and Simon take us through the Box Office Top 10 and the film events worth catching in this week’s What’s On. Time Codes (relevant only for the Vanguard - who are ad-free!): 11:12 How To Have Sex Review 21:24 Box Office Top Ten 32:55 Gabriel Byrne Interview 46:50 Dance First Review 52:09 Laughter Lift 57:52 Bottoms Review 01:04:27 The Killer Review 01:11:46 What's On You can contact the show by emailing [e-mail] or you can find us on social media, @KermodeandMayo EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/take Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts To advertise on this show contact: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, esteemed podcast listeners, Simon Mayer. A Mark Kermode here. I'm excited to let you know that the new season of the Crown and the Crown, the official podcast, returns on 16th of November to accompany the sixth and final season of the Netflix epic Royal Drama Series. Very exciting, especially because SuperSarbon friend of the show Edith Bowman hosts this one.

Indeed, Edith will take you behind the scenes. You can also catch up with the story so far by searching the Crown, the official podcast, wherever you get your podcast. Subscribe now and get the new series of the crown, the official podcast, first on November 16th. Well, it was a quiet Halloween at our place. We didn't get many trickle-treaters, in fact, when I came home after performing on drive time on greatest hits radio.

That's what they're doing. There was only one cooler. It was doing very well, by the way. Thank you very much. You're very much asking. There's only one cooler. That was you. That was me. And actually, you didn't say trickle-treat. You just wanted a cup of tea. No, actually last night I broke the rule of a lifetime,

which was because I had spent Halloween introducing the exorcist and what else would you do? Exactly. Act one cinema twice because they sold out the first time, so I did it again the second time. And then I came to your house, but usually I would, as you know, I'm a low-impact guest, so I've eaten and everything before I got to your house and I hadn't eaten. Eaten, ate us out of house and home this time. The good lady ceramicist her indoors said, you look hungry. Would you like me to make some? And I said, no, no, no, no, I don't want to be any first.

She went, we've got some pasta in the fridge. I went, no, no, no, I don't want to be any first. She said, go on. I went, all right. And then she spent 10, 15 minutes preparing this, the most delicious pasta I'd ever had. I kept saying, please don't go to any trouble, but then she did go to trouble. And then I was really glad she did because it was fan-tastic. Anyway, so you were like our solitary.

Yes. I didn't turn up and say trick or treat. I turned up and said, give me vegetarian pasta or death. I was listening to the, I mentioned the script editing podcast, which Craig Maizen and John Augustine, which is called script notes. And they were having a conversation about Halloween and I realized this will be of interest to, you know, punctuators, pew or pedants, pew or copy editors, cavern. Right.

That I've been missing a trick because Halloween is just a wash with punctuation. I've just been writing it Halloween. E, E, a pastrophe E, isn't it? It's Halloween. It's Halloween. Oh, E, apostrophe E. E. E. Yes, I didn't know about the hyphen. I knew it's E apostrophe E. E. E. I mean, that seemed, that's fantastic. This is, I need to reintroduce this. So I need to write Halloween differently with the hyphen after W and then the apostrophe, that looks far more exciting.

And then we got into all kinds of, do you ever use a dioresis? I don't know what it is. It's two dots, it's not an umlaut, but it's two dots that go up. So apparently the New Yorker, for example, they do this. So co-op, which you might use a hyphen, they would put a dioresis, two dots, just to show it's a different sound. So also re-elect. You can re-dot, and the dots are in the middle of the...

No, they're above the second. So to make it... They're in umlouts. It's like, no, it's not an umlout. It's two dots, I suppose, to two lines. So dioresis is different to an Umblown. Hang on, but what's the thing that you... Hold on, what is the thing in a language which is the two dots over the letter?

I've just told you, it's dioresis. But dioresis, oh good heavens, Latin small letter O with dioresis. That thing that I just, that thing, I said. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but okay, well, what's an omelette then? An omelette is two is two lines. Is it? Yes.

And it changes the way you say the word. I thought that the two dots instead of schlaw, it would be schlaw. Schlaw. Okay, I thought that, and it means that it changed, so it's a co-op so you put it put it put it over Like a hyphen so zoological you could put one over the second out and then you wouldn't put the hyphen in yeah also so like My mind is blind. Yeah, I just thought I'd mention so anyway So this is this is exactly the kind of thing that pedants pew and punctuators pew they sit next to each other. And you can have that in the English language, can you?

The dioresis is a new. The dioresis. I always thought that that was an umlaid. And so how do you spell umlaid? Is it UM, L-A-U-T? And what does that look like? It's two lines that go above a letter. I like.

No, but it's, look, the picture, the picture. I don't want to confuse it. The picture of the umlaut looks exactly the same. It's two dots. Yeah, I'm just telling you. No, but it's not two lines. It is a mark used over a vowel, especially in German. But you were saying that those marks aren't dots.

They're actually small, smaller lines. Vertical lines. Yes. OK, what's all intents and purposes they're dots. Yeah, but two dots is a dioresis and two lines is an omelette. What's a dioresis is English and omelette is German? Yeah, omelette. A diacritical mark that consists of two dots. Excuse me, here we go. I've just looked up omelette. Omelette, dialect, A diacritical mark that consists of two dots. Two dots.

A place over a letter, which is the same as what you're saying. Anyway. No, no, you're saying it's lines, they're not lines, they're dots. So that could look, it could be either an Bumlaute or a dioresis. Context will explain. Anyway, look, this clock is ticking. It was just a humorous opening, not a kind of, let's block it. Last, let's put Mark into a Tiz.

And what are we reviewing? We're going to be reviewing how to have sex, bottoms, the killer. Hang on. Yes, you're actually put, is this carry on movie reviewing? You're reviewing bottoms and how to have sex, at the same, next to each other. Yes. And the killer.

And then dance first without special guests. At least we know where we are with the killer. That's clearly a different film. Yes. How to have sex, the killer bottoms. Yes, and dance first. And dance first with our special guest. Gabriel Bern, who I haven't interviewed before,

but I met in a lift, which he does remember. And also, it was a very rare conversation where he was just going to do a 50 minute chat, which is what we normally get. But he was early, and I was early, so we just kept on talking. So there were in take two, which as everyone knows, he's landed alongside take one. There's another, there you go, that's it. And there's another part of the Gabriel Burnt Conversation,

because he's just endlessly fascinating. And he's got a lovely voice. He absolutely has. another part of the Gabriel Bern conversation because he's just endlessly fascinating. And he's got a lovely voice. He absolutely has. In Take 2, lots more of this complete rubbish. Also recommendation feature, we can watch this, we can not list. Take it or leave it you decide, are we doing that actually?

No. We're not doing that. So normally there is that feature. It says here, it says take it or leave it you decide, explain feature. Well, the explanation is we're not doing is, we're not doing it this week. We're not doing it this week, because there's so much other great content. And bonus reviews, what else do we review on the other one?

The Royal Hotel and nobody has to know. Pretentious Moira is currently Mark 21, Mark 19. One frame back is inspired by the killer and the David Finch film and we've asked for your top David Fincher films So that'll be coming up you can access all of this joy and wonderment by Apple Podcasts or head to extra takes.com for non-fruit related devices and if you are already a Vanguard Easter Coma as always

Ellipsis We just leave it. Oh my oh my So, just before we do the your sex film, he was an interesting, slightly different take on guilty pleasures. Okay, from Robin London. Yes, right, go ahead. Okay. So, this is slightly different.

Doctors, regarding the ongoing guilty pleasures chat, I think the post me too moment puts a slightly different gloss on the question. There are things that I have enjoyed whose conditions of production included the exploitation and or abuse of people involved to name but a bare few. I've not felt like watching anything mirror max made since the Harvey Weinstein revelations, which makes say the English patient talented Mr Ripley and Shakespearean in Love Rather Hard to Watch, doesn't affect the quality of the film whether you liked it or didn't like it but it affects the way

you look at it according to Rob. The former two are no longer just magnificent ice cream sundaes on celluloid. The latter is no longer a silly romp notable for Dame Judy Dench, smashing the record for the least screen time for an Oscar. Similarly, my naught is teenage metalhead fondness for Marilyn Manson has aged poorly. And whenever I realize I've got a Michael Jackson earworm, my skin crawls, interestingly, he spells earworm

as O.R. with an umlaut above. Really? Which I don't, we sure. It's not a diet, it's not a diet. It's not a diet. It's not a diet. It's not a diet. Anyway, the punch is rather hard to enjoy when the bowl is so conspicuously polluted. No, that's not what people usually be by guilty pleasures, but they are pleasures. I am now guilty about that. Oh, I see. That said,

the witch, celavie, makes me smile, and I'm not sorry about that. An honor related, given the observation that School of Rock would not survive past an enhanced background check, incidentally that bit where Dewey assigns the role of group his to some ten-year-olds is copiously yikes. I wonder how many other films can only survive with a massive caveat. The one I remember best is a friend I showed clockwise to in the... Both the John Cleeseville. Yeah, in the notice, thinking it was a brilliant fast. This film would be shorter said he, if he had a mobile.

Anyway, of course. So that's opening up over the slots more. But anyway, it's an interesting point that in guilty pleasures, which maybe is a better way of it, if you're going to use the phrase, if you really like the English patient or the talented Mr. Ripley, which I remember enjoying, that maybe now you can say, well, it's still a good film,

but I'm not sure I want to watch it because of who made it. Yes, although, you know, you're just going to wipe out, basically, I mean, the fact of the matter is that Harvey Weinstein's fingerprints are all over pretty much every British Oscar winner for the best part of a decade. And if you look back at the, you know, the BAFTAs, he was, he was kind of lauding it up like,

you know, like Lord of the Manor. So it's, and it's this, it's the age old issue, as you say, specifically, I remember hearing a cultural expert from New York talking about Michael Jackson. Most people have to hold these things together equally. One, if he was alive now, he'd be in prison. Two, he is culturally incredibly important. So you hold both those views together and then you either choose to enjoy his musical you choose not to. So yeah, yeah.

Yeah, most people can hold those thoughts together. Anyway, what is the phrase at the definition of intelligence is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in the same head at the same time. That's not what I'm about, right? I don't know who said it, but it sounds... Someone very wise. Somebody very wise.

Because it was you, almost if I was reading it out because the director told me to, then... Probably, yeah. Correspondence at codermay.com. I'm not saying that that means that the person that wrote the email isn't intelligent. I didn't that Scott Fitzgerald said it apparently so the reducter just said in my head.

I wasn't saying that as a that that's a very well argued email. I'm just I'm just so but it's interesting. So hand me that shovel that I may dig myself deeper into this hole. So guilty pleasure to kind of play to other things. Maybe as opposed to the other one. Anyway, tell us about this first movie that you like. Yes, apparently. Well, it's, yeah, how to have sex,

which is the feature debut from writer, director Molly Manning Walker, who was also the cinematographer on Charlotte Reagan's scrapper. You remember scrapper, Harris Dickinson came in to talk about that. Do you remember that, which you enjoyed very much? No, I wasn't here. Who was?

I mean, was somebody else. I'm so sorry. Okay, that's what I's what I am. I am interchangeable. Well, anyway, Harrison came on the show to talk about it, and you must have been off somewhere doing something else. Anyway, how to have sex won the Unsurped Out by Guard award at Cannes this year. The Uncertain regard, which is one of the strands and the joke is always that it's the films that are regarded uncertainly by the canjury. So, a group of British teenage girls go on a holiday to Malia in Crete.

They have finished their exams, results are pending and they are determined to have a wild time which will involve drinking, dancing and hopefully as far as they're concerned having blissful holiday sex. Here's a clip. Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! This is insane! Oh my God!

Oh my God! Look at this one! Let's look at this one. Pat, take me. Hey, it's Stony. Open number one is your end. Um, Sky, what are you doing? What are you doing? Deep right back doing? Deep fried faggies.

You already... No, you already tried it all. I will have one. Thank you. I already tried. Okay. Oh, free. Oh, free. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Imagine that you've got the room next to them. Well, in fact, the room next to them is full of other people exactly the same because of the result they've got to.

So Mima, Kenna Bruce, Laura, Pete, and Baluitz. So from the outside, in fact, from that clip, it may look like it's crazy drunk teens abroad adventure, sort of like a gender-reverse Kevin and Perry or the in-betweeners remade for the after-son crowd. It is a very different film to what that looks like, and it is a very, very good film. It's kind of shiny on the outside, but very dark and very personal on the inside. So on the one hand, it deals with the desperate hedonism of the holiday abroad, which in British cinema,

that takes you back to carry on movies, and there is a whole strain in British cinema about Brits going abroad and losing all their inhibitions. But what it also captures, rather brilliantly, are the grimmer realities of youth, particularly in terms of sexual interaction, sexual consent, and the way in which a situation can go from fun, drunk and fun, to coercion, to assault,

to something completely in a kind of horrible, fudgy gray area that means that at any one time, it's kind of hard to know what's going on and what happens is that as the central characters have these, you know, drunken adventures, it becomes apparent that the way in which those things are playing out are nothing like as innocent as they may have hoped or expected. Now, I think that like after Sun, this owes a debt, or at least a sort of, you know, a historical debt, too. There's a brilliantly in Ramsey film, Moorven Caller, which has been cited quite a lot since after some of us always loved Moorven Caller. It was the great Lynn Ramsey overlooked masterpiece.

Because it has that kind of combination of, on the one hand, there is earthy grit. When you saw that thing, it's almost like a document. It's like one of those things you'd see on a channel for a document about Drunken Brits Abroad. A broad. On the other hand, it has this visual style, which is kind of slightly dreamy, slightly woozy, slightly drunken, slightly hungover, which gives it a kind of, there is a poetry in the way that it captures that experience.

It also, I think, brilliantly evokes its heroines in her experience. It also, I think, brilliantly evokes its heroines in her experience. Obviously, I am a 60 year old white man. I talked to Alanie Jones, who is a colleague of mine, who said that she thought it captured brilliantly the feelings of being a young woman in that world. And obviously, she would know that better than I would. But I think one of the things about cinema is that cinema, and we've talked about this in terms of empathy before, is that cinema can put you in the position of a character who is completely different to you and you feel that you are understanding their world and you are seeing the world through their eyes and you are experiencing the world through their eyes.

And I definitely got this sense of, okay, I'm understanding what that experience is like and that experience becomes very, dark and very very complex and in a way that I thought really brilliantly captures the way in which consent becomes a danger zone and in which people can find themselves in positions that can go from one thing to another thing in a heartbeat. And then afterwards, it's very hard to exactly explain what it ever was. Now, none of this is to say that the film is nothing but dark because actually, you know, the performance is a great, so naturalistic, you really believe in these people. And obviously, for my point, if you're just the idea about being surrounded by drunken party in teenagers, that sounds like a headache in a can from the beginning. So I think it's a real achievement that it, what it did was it drew me in. It showed me their world and made me understand what was going.

So I think it's a really, really striking piece of work. And I think it's the, it's depiction of that experience seems to be completely authentic. And it deals with some really complicated subject matter in a way that is so deaf that you almost don't notice how complex it is. I think it's, and I think you would really like it despite your reaction, which was exactly my reaction,

which is, imagine having the room next to them. Yes. Deep-fried cigarettes. It's because they've got the cigarettes have got wet, so they're driving them in. They're frying pan. And that's a cinematic release. It is a cinematic release, and it's very, very critically acclaimed

and rightly so it's called How to Have Sex, a Molly Manning Walker, real talent to watch. Still to come, still to come, we are going to be reviewing bottoms, we're going to be reviewing The Killer, which is the new David Fincher film, which is in cinemas, but is coming to Netflix on the 10th.

And dance first with our special guest, who is Gabriel Bern, and we will be back before you can say, do you know it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile? Do. I know. It's a little bit cheesy, but I don't know when that's come from. Hi, esteemed podcast listeners, Simon Mayo. I'm Mark Kermot here. I'm excited to let you know that the new season of the Crown and the Crown, the official podcast, returns on 16th of November to accompany the sixth and final season of the Netflix Epic Royal Drama series.

Very exciting, especially because SuperSub and Friend of the Show, Edith Bowman hosts this one. Indeed, Edith will take you behind the scenes, dive into conversation with the talented cast and crew from writer and creator Peter Morgan to the crowns Queen Elizabeth, Imelda Staunton. Other guests on the new series include the Crowns research team, the directors, executive producers Suzanne Mackie and specialists such as voice coach William Connaker and props master Owen Harrison.

Cast members including Jonathan Price, Selim Dor, Khalidala, Dominic West and Elizabeth DeBickey. You can also catch up with the story so far by searching the Crown, the official podcast, wherever you get your podcast. Subscribe now and get the new series of the Crown, the official podcast first on November 16th. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Happy Nord Christmas. Protect yourself whilst Christmas shopping online and access all the

Christmas films from around the globe. Plus, when you shop online, you'll have to give websites your card details and other sensitive data like your personal addresses. Those websites should already have their own encryption built into their payment systems, but to be on the safe side, you can use a VPN to ensure that all data coming to and from your device is encrypted. Even if you're using an unsafe Wi-Fi, you'll still be able to shop securely with a VPN. And you can access Christmas films only available overseas by using streaming services not available in the UK. To take our huge discount of your Nord VPN plan, go to NordVPN.com slash take.'ll link will also give you four extra months for free on the two-year

plan. There's no risk with Nord's 30-day money bank guarantee. The link is in the podcast episode description box. Box office top 10 very shortly. Dear Santa Claus and further Christmas. This is Jonathan Smith, grade B geography level. L-T-L-2-T-E, Van Godeaster, has the merchandiser in chief forgotten you? Sorry, I'll say that again. Has the merchandiser in chief forgiven you yet? For not plugging the high quality indefinitely not socks after

shaves and tap merchandise in reply to Nick Ords question asking for suggestions for physical gifts in last week's questions, shmessions. Surely the merch fits the bill in the same way that Paul Newman and Steve McQueen's name positioning fits the bill for tearing in Ferno, with gift receipts down with amusing secret Santa gifts at work parties. So that, I mean, but it may well be that the corporate shill would have wanted us to say. I thought we did mention our merchandise, but I remember it's on that we didn't. But the whole point was we didn't want to buy stuff. So what was an interesting thing to buy somebody? Yes. Well, obviously our merch is there to be bought and it's fabulous. Like you are you're modeling the cold water container.

Container, which also works for hot water. Yes, funnily enough. Yes, I haven't tried it for hot water, but I'll be doing that soon. it far more to buy. I'll be doing that soon. Ania endorse it or possibly Ania. The person who enjoyed physical gifts and would like to know what to buy, I suggest nothing. If it's someone near and dear, not dead, as it ought to be corrected on my email, spend time with them. I don't mean sit by them, scrolling, but take them to a pottery class, go to a gig, go hang gliding. If you're going to spend 20 pounds on them, get them a cinema ticket, sweets and a fizzy drink the size of a small child. If they're a long way away, you can get snacks sent by a post and rent or buy a film and watch it at the same time. For my best friend's 40th birthday present last year. I took it to Chester for the weekend and we went on a ghost walk, did

a park run, ate, drank and were generally merry. I've not spent time with her alone in ages as we're both married, so it's a time I'll treasure. This is obviously not something for everyone, every birthday, but I can't remember the time I bought her a gift other than something incidental as we buy the things we need ourselves. As I'm not constantly gifting, it means I can save it for special presents. For other people, adult relatives like Nises and nephews, do they need anything you'd buy them? We made an across-the-board decision to not do that sort of thing. And it takes the pressure off.

That's the thing, yes. It takes the pressure off. Supplemental, read the Wizard of Oz to see that upset me as a child, wasn't the flying monkeys. But when... Spoilers, but it's a long time ago. The wiki which the West dies, I was used to but it's the long time ago, the wiki which of the West dies, I always used to cry because I felt very sad for her. My bleeding heart

liberalism appears to have started at a young age. All my love and kisses and the end all said. Were you upset when they kicked the alien out of the airlock? No, no. I mean, okay, that's very interesting. Is anyone else bizarrely sad when the Wicked Witch or the Monster finally cops? Well, I mean, monsters, they've had things like, you know, King Kong, that's deliberately constructed. So, you know, it wasn't airplanes killed the beast.

It was beast, all that stuff. But it's, the Wicked Witch of the West is hardly given, although that's what the whole thing about Wicked is, isn't it? Wicked, the musical is all about the backstory. Is that right? Yes. These people didn't just turn up being...

Box service top 10. Oh, yes, we're doing that. At 50, Dr. Jackal, which is not good. No, but it wasn't opening in a huge number of cinemas. I thought it was interesting. I certainly think it's Eddie Isard's best film. I thought their performance was actually the centre of the film worked well. But beaten to number 38,

Peeping Tom, the 4K restoration, and see last week's program for details. Yes, it was a fantastic interview with the amazing film scoomake. If you haven't seen Peeping Tom in the cinema, it is so worth seeing it with the 4K restoration. It's fantastic. Number 20, typist artist pirate king. So Carol Morley, I think, is doing a collection of Q&As at cinemas around the country. And as I said last week, I saw the film first on a link and wasn't a big fan and then saw it in a cinema with an audience and it was like watching a different film. So do go and see it and see it in a cinema. Don't wait for it to come to streaming. Number 16 here, and number 54 in the States is Cat Person. I've really enjoyed an email here from Helen and Glasgow. Yeah, so it might be that if at any stage you think this is giving too much away, just say you're giving too much away.

Okay, can I just say also the conjunction of those two titles together gives us the chance to repeat last week's film of the week, which was typist artist pirate king cat person. Mark Simon says, Helen, long term list, occasional failed emailer. Okay, but God loves a tryer just back from a screening cat person at my local world of Sydney in Glasgow, apart from being disappointed by a lack of cats, I found it an interesting film and have been surprised by the Sways of very negative reviews. Have there been Sways of negative reviews? And if so, who are you saying Helen and Pasco?

No, my reading of the film in the context of Margaret Outwood's quote at the beginning, which is what? Yes. The Margaret Outwood's quote is, men are afraid that women will laugh at them, women are afraid that men will kill them. Right. Is that both protagonists were biased in their impressions of one another by these differing paranoias.

From the outset, Margot repeatedly imagines Robert killing her, which then influences how she reacts to his text and appearance outside the cinema after the breakup. Robert imagines she's laughing at him behind his back, so misinterpret her boob pick and virginity comments then takes the breakup as a sign that he was right all along, that she must be streaming him along, have a boyfriend and so on. Overall, as a single white female who's long since shunned the hell of internet dating, I appreciated the way it showed how quickly great text chat can turn to awkwardness and Ick in real life and the stress of how you would deal with that.

I can't help but wonder whether some people hate the film because it's more nuanced than the blanket. Men are all for message which at words opening quote might suggest. Robert is not simply a psychokiller misogynist inverted commas, but someone genuinely hurt and confused by Margot's mixed messages who then overreacts with a very offensive text or have I got it completely wrong? No, you've got it completely right. The reason that the film works is because it is ambiguous throughout. And even at the very end of the film, there are still levels of questions. But I think it's a very smart portrayal of the different expectations

that the two central characters have, and the way in which, I mean, we were talking about this just in relation to how to have sex, that thing about a situation can go from being, this is fun, to this is not fun, and to this is really dangerous in the blink of an eye. And it's always the way, is this something bad or am I just projecting onto it? And I thought that email was very correct. I don't know what the bad reviews. I mean, there are other reviews. It's completely lost on me.

No, it would. In fact, it's the first I've heard of it. Other opinions. Beacle juice is at number 14. Which is amazing. I've seen the X-sister around 167 times and it just gets funnier. UK number 10, 9 in the States is sore 10. You're still haven't seen soaks, have you?

I haven't seen any. You're not going to. Absolutely. You know, the world is a wash with troublesome situations without watching someone being tortured for fun. No, thank you. You know, it's not real, don't you? Well, you say that. Number nine here, ten in the States is the Creator.

Which we enjoyed very much, and you can still hear our interview with the director on a previous podcast. Number eight is some other hood. It's just done fine. It's dropping out the charts now pretty fast, but it found its audience. I am not its audience, and I wasn't a huge fan of it, but I kind of, you know, I have a sneaking aberration for the fact that it got made and it, you know,

it did exactly what it said on the tin. Number seven is the greatest capable. I thought was really sweet. I love the central performances by Michael Cain, retired Michael Cain now allegedly and Glenda Jackson largely because Glenda Jackson reminded me of my mum, but I thought it was a very very touching story. And number six, here is the exorcist believer, number five in the state. Number five here, number six in the state. It's poor patrol, the mighty movie.

It's better than the exorcist believer by quite some way. Number four is Taylor Swift, the era's tour. So, I'll mean, I'll mean now officially Swifties. Yeah, of course. No, I just didn't, I hadn't even heard that word until you say this. I think it's quite possible to be Swiftie, but not particularly downloading her latest album. No, but you know, you, but you know, I tell you,

if you see this film, you'll come, if you, if like me, you know, nothing about Taylor Swift before you see the film, you come over and then you, well, whatever she's doing, she's doing rather brilliantly. Child two couldn't get tickets to go and see a concert. So when were their mates to see the movie and they were all going to do, you know, dressing up in different Taylor Swift eras, yes. And, you know, that's, that's fun. And by the, the normal rules

don't apply, I think the normal rules of cinema etiquette. If you're going to see a concert movie, then I think you can jump up and dance and sing and eat. I'm welcome. Whilst you were reading the previous email, I was distracted by the phone, the child, by the fact that the child who was calling on your phone, she always calls when we're calling it's on our way to money. It's just like, fortunately, I just sort of thought that. I'll get back to you.

Number three here, number three in the States, killers of the flower moon, which is doing very, very well, particularly considering the length. There has been a lot of discussion recently about a certain cinema chain is putting intervals in some screenings. If you go to the booking, yeah, it's view. I think it's view. And I think if you go to, it's not all screenings, it's if you choose to have an, an info there is, I believe, a 15 minute intermission. They were talking about it on the news this morning. It's been quite a lot of discussion of it. And in fact, we've had a lot of correspondence about people saying, why isn't this possible? Because it is possible. The big problem for a long time is to do with multiplexes saying, you can't let people coming out of the screen and then going back

into them, but apparently you can. Okay. Well, I think that might be appreciated if you got a three, you know, from a cinnage point of view, it's three and a half hours or three and three and three quarters. It's not going to make a huge amount of it. No, the film is long enough that it's already long enough to mean that you're going to be limited in how many screens you can do, which means that the fact that it's at number three means it's doing very well. Number two is trolls band together, which is exactly what you would expect from trolls band together. Number one in the UK, number one in the United States is five nights at

Fredis. So my prediction was, you know, it'll go to number one for one week and then it'll drop like a stone. Pablo says, I very much enjoyed Mark's review of five nights at Fredis. FNAF being the colloquial terms. Yes. Even though I knew I was going to disagree, later that day, I went to see the film with my good friend George, the both of us being big fans of the video games. Big and our early 20s, we were the perfect age to discover the series when it first came out in 2014 and follow along with each of the now 10 plus installments.

The crazy fan theories, the crazy actual plot and the work of the fan base, which is more generative than most creating their own game, short films and stories. We absolutely adored the film, and our experience in the theatre was one of the most delirious, hilarious and memorable experiences I've ever had in the cinema. I say this as a recent BA film production graduate. We laughed and cried and cheered as our favourite elements

of the series were rendered in live action, packed with easter eggs and knowing nods as well as genuinely interesting new developments. I just wanted to give you more of a feel of what FNAF is really about to maybe provide better context to some of the convoluted silliness. I love the film which was clearly made for fans but I don't believe anyone would not have a good time with a camp-murdered ghost melodrama that isn't afraid to mock itself into oblivion if they knew that's what they were in for rather than a genuine scary film.

And Luke in Gloucestershire, I went to see Friday night at Freddy's movie. Five nights at Freddy's. Okay, five nights at Freddy's, Pat late night's screening, full of clearly diehard fans of the franchise. I myself are not a fan, having never played the games,

but I'm familiar with its trappings and I love a campy horror. Throw in some fantastic-looking Jim Mhenson studio made practical, animatronic costume puppet effects and I simply a campy horror. Throw in some fantastic-looking Jim Henson studio-made practical, animatronic, costume puppet effects, and I simply couldn't resist. Sadly, the film was something of a bore. It wasn't scary enough, nor campy enough to work, as either kind of horror entertainment.

And whilst there are a few fun sequences, there's far too many boring conversations and a complete lack of actual scares. The latter is somewhat surprising since the video games are 90% waiting for a jump scare and 10% the jump scares. Yes, and I'm in tune with that second email is that I thought it wasn't anything like as much fun as it should be. I would say it is worth looking at Willie's Wondaland, which is the same film made for a fifth of the money with Nick Cage, who in the car this morning I referred to as Nick Cave, which I would always be. Easy to make. It looks second paragraph, by the way. I was so sorry. On your comparison with Willis Wonderland,

which I found surprisingly boring given the premise of Nicholas Cage fighting robot animals, I must point out the superior robot animatronic animals on a rampage film, which is the banana splits movie, which came out in 2019. Yes, it's that banana splits from the 60s TV show, except now they're let loose on all manner of annoying horror protagonists in gleefully gory fashion in Aena Masterpiece, and it's probably the cheapest of all three of these movies, but it oddly has the most heart, humour and visceral creativity. If FNAF had been like this but on a bigger budget, I'd have had a blast. Still, with that there are now three of these kind of films.

Yeah, exactly. But yes, but the Banana Split's movie is definitely in the same bullpog. As in Tralala. Tralala. Who did the... Dickies. The Dickies. They made every song sound exactly the same,

as a matter of what they did. And in fact, I had a great version of Silent Night on White Vinyl, really? Which is exactly as you would imagine it. It's very fast. I had a t-shirt which said original Dickies, because it's an American work clothes thing. And somebody said to me, oh, but honestly, I went, no, no, I presume the Dickies are named after that. but honestly, I went, no, no, I presume that Dickies are named after that. Yeah, I don't know. Because Dickies is an American work clothing thing.

You know, it's like car heart. It's, you know, it's the car heart is not as good as the Dickies. The car heart is not as good as the Dickies. Anyway, okay, nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful. You know what I'm talking about? Nothing happens. Nobody comes. Oh, I know, I'm talking about. Nothing happens, nobody comes.

Oh, I know that's waiting for Goddo. After the break, Gabriel Bern. This episode is brought to you by Mubi, a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from around the globe. From my connect directors to emerging otters, there's always something new to discover, for example. Well, for example, the new Aki Karri's Mackey film Fallen Leaves, which won the jury prize it can, that's in cinemas at the moment. And if you see that and think I want to know more about

Aki Karri's Mackey, you can go to movie The Streaming Service and there is a retrospective of his films called How to Be a Human. They are also going to be theatrically releasing In January Priscilla, which is new so for you, a couple of films which I am really looking forward to since I have an Elvis obsession. You could try Mooby Free for 30 days at Mooby.com slash Kermit and Mayo. That's M-U-B-I dot com slash Kermit and Mayo

for a whole month of great cinema for free. With banking packages from Scotia Bank, you can put money back in your pocket. That's how Marcus was able to invest in everything of great cinema for free. Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful. And the other version of that is a play in which nothing happens twice. That's also good, yes. All of these things will be discussed because our guest today has starred in over 35 feature films, usual suspects, Millas Crossing, Stmata and so on, in addition to writing too. His producing credits include The Academy Award nominated in the name of the father,

it is of course Gabriel Bern, who came in to our studio here to talk about his new movie which is called Dance First, all about the life of Samuel Beckett. You'll hear my conversation with him after this clip from the movie. They want the rights? Yes, sir. Good. We'll do a separate deal with the BBC for the translation. He must keep writing in France. We'll get paid twice. Please. Tell me you did not offer him a translation. Her.

I'm delighted to say Gabriel Bern has joined us, but we've just given him a coffee, which is not quite good enough. I think. Let's be honest. A very demanding guest. No. When I'm in Europe, when I'm in New Orleans or England, I drink tea. I can't drink tea in the States. Tea is... I don't know how to make it. They really don't...

You know, they'll give you lukewarm water because the temperature of the water can't be a certain degree because they're afraid of being sued after that case where the woman spilled the McDonald's coffee on herself and sued McDonald's. It's lukewarm water and then it's always Lipton's RPG tips on tips on the side on the side on the saucer. And no matter what you do with that tea bag in that lukewarm water, and then they always say to you, do you want half and half with that? And you just say, well, there's no point in getting into this because if you don't know that PG tips and lip-tips, no offense to people who drink them,

but that is the only kind of tea you can get there. Or they'll sometimes say, you you have tea and they'll say, yeah, we have jasmine tea, green tea, barley tea or whatever, and would you like some old milk with that? And you think, no, that's not what I'm, anyway, we didn't mean to get off on that round. No, no, no, that's right, but we've served you a coffee that looks like, as you said, it looks like half a Guinness. Yeah, thank you. It's very nice to meet you, Gabriel. Thank you very much, David Keying.

And I could tell us we were riffing there about tea and coffee that your friends at Sky were getting very nervous that we weren't going to promote your film at all. But actually, we will because dance first is, okay, it was a new movie. I thought it was terrific. I realized as soon as it started that I know so little about some of your becket that it was a delight from start to finish. Tell us how you got involved with this, Gabriel. Well, it's an interesting point that you make. I mean, I think that most people don't know

a great deal about Samuel Beckett. He was a reclusive man and valued his privacy more than most people, because he wanted the work to speak for itself and he didn't want any kind of personality contamination in the world, but paradoxically he created this mysterious iconic persona that people became kind of fascinated by and the less they knew about him, the more they wanted to know. But there was very little, there was anecdotal kind of episodes where people come back and say, yeah, that guy met Beckett in Paris and he had a coffee with him and so forth. But little was known of him. And he was the first one, I think, deliberately or not to build up the idea of mystery as a brand. And the next time I kind of saw that in action was with early Danero,

where he wouldn't give any interviews whatsoever. And he built up this kind of mystique about himself as you know, he would talk in character, but not as himself. So the film is an attempt not to do a literary biography and impersonation because I think when you do impersonations in films you leave yourself very vulnerable to a closer examination. People say, oh yeah, he looks like him in that job, but he didn't look like him there. And that's not the way he spoke. You become the target of all kinds of irrelevant examinations of the physical self.

So what this film is is not an impersonation, it's an attempt to fill in the humanity of the man behind the myth. And he could not have been the writer that he is, had he not been a deeply empathetic human being who had great virtues and great failings and suffered a great deal of self-dad and shame and regret and essentially was an unhappy man but lived a brave life through his own unhappiness. So Beckett, as you say, you didn't know where nobody does and what we've done is we've taken an almost real approach to it. So this is you and James Marsh, the director. So just maybe the best way of illustrating that then is,

tell us about the first five minutes, right at the very beginning, when we see you all suited and booted at a very glamorous event. Tell us what happens there, because I think that's probably a good way to just explaining them. You're right. It opens in a very conventional way,

a packed hall in Stockholm, the King of Sweden announcing the Nobel Prize for a 1958 or 59, whatever it was, goes to Samuel Beckett and then it cuts the Beckett and his wife, played by Sondrene Bonneir, the French actress, and Beckett says to himself, kill Keltosloff, which is what he said actually when he won the prize. Basically, this is the end of my private self. And so he walks up onto the stage and you think he's going to make a speech and he takes

the envelope of money from the King's Read and he climbs up a ladder and goes into this other world. And the purpose of that scene is to head the audience off from making assumptions about what the rest of the film is going to be. You know in that second scene, it's not going to be a conventional birth to death, literally kind of biopair. So you climb up the ladder where you meet another version of yourself. So the film is essentially interior monologue as dialogue. So it's you and you. So what is the difference between you as Samuel Beckett

and the interior monologues, Samuel Beckett, because it's a fascinating relationship you have with yourself? Well, I think we all have a fascinating relationship with ourselves, and we all have that other self inside. And I think it was Garcia Marquez, Governor Garcia Marquez, who said, there are three lives. There's our public life, our private life, and our secret life.

And I think that was a really astute observation about human beings. I think we continue a dialogue, a constant dialogue with that other self throughout the day and throughout the night and social situations. That other self is there. And I think one of the strong points of the script was that you see the physical manifestation of that other self, where he's in fact talking to himself, but he's visually talking to a slightly different version

of who he is, which was technically quite difficult to do, because you had to be in the costume of one character, talking basically to a tennis ball, then you had to go and change costume of one character talking basically to a tennis ball. Then you had to go and change and be on the other side and talk to the tennis ball. And then by the miracle of editing, they put the two together and it looks like you're talking to yourself. But as I was saying to James, you know, when I was a kid grown up in Dublin and to this day still, I used to go for walks by myself, talking to myself, non-stop, out loud.

And if somebody came near me, I'd pretend I was singing. And they used to say at school that the first two sons of madness where hairs on the palm your hand and talking to yourself. And I used to think, maybe I'm mad. But now I look in the streets and this people walking along, unself consciously roaring to themselves, where the white things stick in their ear. And I'm where do the white things they can know their ear. And I'm constantly saying, oh, they're on the phone. They're not actually escaped from somewhere, you know, for, you know, talking to themselves,

hairs on the palm of their hands. Is it true that this is your first time with Beckett? I would seem astonishing to have been working for as long as you have without playing in Beckett. No, I never played in Beckett. And to be honest, when I was younger, I never identified with Beckett's plays. In fact, I didn't identify with the theatre that much, although that was my first kind of experience of drama. But for me, it was always films. And the idea of being in a dark room with a crowd of strangers watching something that we are all individually but collectively reacting to emotionally was something that I found absolutely magical. And I used to go to, I would go in at two o'clock in the

afternoon and stay in the cinema till 11 o'clock at night in the days when there was a double bill and sometimes see the first one over again. What did you see dear, remember? The very first film I ever saw was Treasure Island, the one with Robert Newton and Bobby Driscoll, the Walt Disney film. And then I saw another Disney film which was the one with Sean Connery, what was the famous one with the Leopardcans? Oh God, what's it called? W. Eugil and the Little People. I know I couldn't see that.

I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that.

I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I know I couldn't see that. I wonder if you'd been sent to script to tell some of the story of Samuel Beckett and it had been more conventional. It sounds like you wouldn't have you'd have said no because that wouldn't have been as interesting as the kind of series of episodes series of vignettes which you've done with this. Yeah, I think James wouldn't have made the film either.

It was the fact that we were able to go into this world where there were no actual rules in terms of where you could go narratively. And you weren't bound in by that strict storytelling cinema bio genre. So that gave you a freedom and a kind of a protection. And all James just told me that he wouldn't have done it if it had been a convention. And I wouldn't have done it either because I think that then you'd have to look exactly like backett and yeah.

Yeah, you know what those traps are. I had absolutely no idea. So we have a younger version of Beckett Playbife Finneau-Shei and Samuel Beckett was in the French Resistance and I had absolutely. When the war comes in Paris thinking, okay, what are we going to do? Oh right, he's joined the Resistance. Yeah, I had no idea. Yes, he joined the Resistance and was stabbed in the street,

afterwards by a pimp, and was very near to death. And that's how he met his wife. He was married for many, many years, unhappily. But fighting in the resistance says such a great deal about who back it was politically and as a man of principle. I wonder if the experience of you writing your memoir, which wasn't linear, has made you sort of made you more empathetic to this approach, you know, because as we said, it's told in series of episodes, having told some of your story in that way, your private life, your professional

life, when this script comes along, you think, okay, yeah, this is the way you deal with the story. I wonder if having written yours, whether that impacted the way you reacted to this script. Well, I think you get to a certain age, or certainly in my case, memory becomes more important. You tend to look back more than you look forward. And you tend to see the events of your life as milestones, as vignettes, sometimes as clouded events that you can't quite make sense of. And memory is a very fractured thing. It comes in it goes, and it's replaced by the the present and then it's the past again.

And that's where I found that the best way to write the book was to write as if I was recalling events briefly and then letting them go again and not examining them in any way, but just to say, okay, this happened, that happened. And everybody has that story. Everybody's life is extraordinary. And when we look back on the events of the life that we've led, we can look back and say, these moments formed who I am. These people made me who I am. The fact that I was born in this city at that time influenced me culturally, socially, and I am the product of that.

What person would I have been had I been brought up in Sheffield in 1920 or whatever? It's trying to make sense of life. And I think when you get to that stage of life, you are trying to make sense of the past. And although we're brought up to believe that you shouldn't have any regrets about life, I think a life fully lived is full of regrets, some less, some more. You can't live a life without regret and say, well, everything that happened, that was fantastic. And you look back and you say, I wish I had done that differently, but the paradox is, it's done, and you can't undo it. So now we're going to leave Gabriel Bern there. It was a fascinating conversation.

As you can hear, he's very happy to wax lyrical and... I could listen to him talk for the rest of the time. And theorize about life and in towards the end of our conversation it gets a little bit political and talks about Marvel films and everything. So he is someone who has because he's written his memoir, he has considered his life and I think you can tell that. So he has lots to say. Anyway, this is an interesting movie with a cinematic release. A cinemas and then on Sky. Yeah, exactly. So directed by James Marsh, who just won an Oscar for Man on Wire, which is one of the greatest

documentaries. Helms, the brilliant and heartbreaking project near, which I really loved, won the Alexander Court of Best British Film Award for Theory of Everything. So, like Theory of Everything and actually before it, the mercy, this is obviously based on the real life character. So as you said, it starts at the Nobel Prize ceremony. I think it's 69. And then it's what a catastrophe.

And then the whole thing is this theatrical conceit, as you said, he climbs up in the thing and he ends up in a space, which is very waiting for God-o-space, in which there are two characters, which are both him, one of them, full of guilt and self-recrimination, the other rather more kind of arch and prodding. And they then decide that they will go back through their life, through the shame, through the guilt of their life. Start with mother, it always starts with mother, it's one of the early lines. It's father teaching him that that mantra of fight, fight, fight,

which he hears and then he kind of repeats throughout the, throughout the thing. And then what the film does is it intertwines biographical detail, which like you, I knew almost nothing of. So obviously there's the philosophical stuff from the plays. There is the biographical detail. I didn't know about his work in the resistance. I didn't know about the stabbing which Gabriel Bern referred to there, stabbing by the PIM. I didn't know about his work in the resistance. I didn't know about the stabbing which Gabriel Bern referred to there, stabbing by the Pimp. I didn't know anything about his personal relationships. So it's, as you were discussing there, it is tricky. I do think that the script is nil for size. I think it manages to do the gear changes pretty nimbly, that you, you don't feel that this, it is, it is a theatrical conceit, but it doesn't feel that theatrical

in as terms of like not cinematic. I think it does work. Most of the film is in black and white, not all of it, significantly in the sort of later stages. There is a change. And it looks great. It was funny when he was saying to the story about having to talk to himself and talking to the tennis ball. You always forget that it's talking to it. It's always the tennis ball is the thing. It's the paddington story I mean, I thought what was Fascinating was you know, I've just come back from Triester and Triester is full of statues of James Joyce James Joyce is played in the film by Aiden Gillan who I love and in fact It's a great cast. It's a really really good cast.. There are, you know, there are, it's with Gabriel Bern, Aiden Gillan,

Bronnick Gallagher, who's never been bad, nothing, Maxine Peac, who I've never seen be bad, and anything. Sundryne Bonnet. Sundryne Bonnet, yeah. I mean, so it's a really sort of top notch cast. And what it manages to do is, I think there are bits of it,

you know, funny and witty, I didn't know anything about the James Joyce's daughter story which which you think this must be made up but apparently it's not apparently you know that there is there is truth in it. So it manages to be dramatically engrossing like you're actually interested in the character and the story where I'll be honest with you when you said to me I'm interviewing Gabriel Bern about a film about Samuel Beckett, my heart sank. And then when I watched the film, it wasn't anything like I expected it to be. So I think it's very well written.

I think it's very well played. And actually, although you could think that it is a clunky theatrical device about the phrase that you use, which is that monologue becomes in a monologue, becomes in a dialogue, that reminded me of Nick Cage in adaptation, you know, when there's the author is split into two — Dick Cage? — On Nick Cage. Nick Cage. Thank you. In adaptation in which the author is a divided soul who, you know, there are two versions of that character and they argue with each other. Yeah, I thought it worked surprisingly well. I mean, and I believe me, I was surprised because it just sounds like it's going to be the

most doer subject matter, a largely black and white film about the life of Samuel Beckett. You do think his mighty, more think power ranges on in the next three, but actually it's really entertaining. Yeah. And interesting is observation via Marker's about private to take us into his secret life. Anyway, I would recommend hearing more of this. You enjoyed the film, right? Didn't you? I did enjoy the film, and I enjoyed talking to the film.

Were you surprised by how much you enjoyed it? You know, I'm not being down on it. I'm just saying that if you describe that subject matter, if you say that subject matter, if you say black and white bio pick of Samuel Beckett, you go, yeah, and I expected the conversation to be maybe a little bit difficult, but he's passionate. He's fantastic.

He can use great, great conversation. Can I tell you my lift story? Very good. Well, we've got the laughter lift beckoning. Okay. Well, this is this will lead in very nicely. I was, I was leading very nicely to the laughter lift. I'll be very quick. I, we've got the laughter lift beckoning. Okay, well, this is this will lead in very nicely. I was, I'll lead in very nicely to the laughter lift. I'll be very quick. I think we'll judge. I was at the American, the good lady professor, her indoors was writing the erotic thrillers book. We were at the American film market in Los Angeles somewhere. I was with a child to a lift opened child to ran ahead into the lift. I called

out child to his name. I went Gabriel and the man in the lift turned round and it was Gabriel Bern. So you can't actually tell that story without... I know, I realized halfway through that there was no way. I haven't given myself an off-ramp. I'm sorry. And speaking of lifts... Speaking of lifts... Adds in a minute. Let's walk into the laughter lift

because it's great fun. And Gabriel's not in there. He's not. No, here it is. Here it is. Play the music. and we are and I popped into Toys I R Us and I said to the assistant, can you tell me where the Arnie Schwarzenegger Toys are please and she said yes sir, I'll be back. Very last Christmas. Very good. There's a bit of a disaster. The good lady, SRAMSY, Sterendor's got me a very snazzy drone. I tested it in the garden and he got stuck right at the top of the tree at the back of

garden. Come to think of it, it wasn't the worst thing that happened to me in that Christmas but it was definitely up there. It wasn't the worst thing that happened to me at Christmas, but it was definitely up there. What? Because it stuck in a tree. Because the drone was got stuck in the top of the tree. It felt like a non-punch line.

It was definitely up there. Like the drone is up there. Yeah, but it doesn't really should give that to child to make it a rewrite. It's a pretty good idea. Yeah, but it doesn't really should give that to child to rewrites or gifting. First of all, if you're on the lookout for an affordable toy for the Kitty Winkies, a well-known German discount chain is selling a very attractive Humpty Dumpty. It comes with oldie King's horses and oldie King's men. And my final recommendation is the excellent and very high quality Sesame Street tickle me Elmo plush toy a very stringing quality control processes in place as you'd expect

Do you know what the very latest thing is they do before the toy leaves the factory? I don't they give it two test tickles Yes They're back after this unless you're a van Easter, in which case we have just one question. In which mammal can ribs grow back? Hmm. Get holiday ready at Real Canadian Superstore. We'll find more legendary ways to save than any other major grocery.

Until December 13th, you'll get a free PC turkey when you spend $300 or more. That's right, free. Only at your super holiday store. Conditions apply for details. Metro links and cross links are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Cross-town LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, this trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe.

And the answer is... Can I have a guess? Can I have a guess? Is it a whale? No. Oh, okay, humans. Can we grow ribs back? Your ribs can actually grow back as long as the pericondria membrane is intact. They're the only bones in mammals known to do so. Is that why it was possible for gods to take a rib out of Adam's chest and turn it into the good lady Eve? Essentially, the good lady hurt outdoors with the serpent. Well, the good lady here in the garden with no clothes on. What was he... But I was the only new that once the snake. That is what I told you not to eat that apple,

and incidentally you've got no clothes on. Apparently in 2015, this is University of California San Francisco stem cell researcher. Took a closer look at rib regeneration in humans and mice. Using CT imaging, they monitored the healing of a human rib that had partially been removed by a surgeon. The eight centimeters of missing bone and one centimeter of missing cartilage did partially repair after six months. Well, that's interesting.

I think so. I think it is. That's an amazing thing. Before some reviews, Mark and Zurich did Toblerone and Ritter Sport. See, I would choose neither of those, actually. I've gone through a couple of airports recently and I have seen more big Toblerone than anyone needs to see what is the thing with why the big tubular only exists only in airports? Why do they exist?

It's a weapon. I think it's a weapon. Yeah, I think that's what it is. It's a toast rack, isn't it? I think Monty Zoomer chocolate is probably the best. No, the best chocolate is the one that I get when I get to your house. Oh yeah, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben,

Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben thing. Anyway, Mark says as an Irishman living in Zurich with a Swiss wife and Irish Swiss kids, I was struck by the description of Mark's Nana being Swiss German. I am no nationalist, so I say Mark, and don't want to stand up for that type of thing. Here we go. We would be interested in a clarification on the following. So let me get to the end of this. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. Was Marks grandmother half German and half Swiss? Or did she have both nationalities? Or was she, as I suspect, a Swiss who was German speaking as opposed to French or Italian speaking? Swiss people are Swiss, even if they speak languages not strictly named after their own country. Einstein was Swiss German in that

he had both nationalities. However, if it annoys the far right, carry on with the vagueness. As a foreigner, I thought I'd ask, as the Swiss might be too diplomatic to do so. Yes. Down with right-right nationalism and up with soft borders and identities. Anyway, Markin Zurich. No, so my ground was Swiss, who spoke German, spoke Basel Deutsch. And the reason I refer to her as Swiss German is because that is how she referred to herself, but she's Swiss and her family is Swiss. Right. Since her Swiss, so I think what she meant was she was German speaking Swiss, but she was very proud of the fact that she spoke Basel Deutsch, which is a very particular dialect.

That is apparently, there's a fairly small number of people it's Basel you know it's a bit of that like speaking max it's just a we go but he speaks max naturally anymore the the language it's it it it no longer exists in in the natural world it's it's now taught obviously but it's you know it has the last naturally max speaking person is gone. So your man was like Einstein. She was Swiss, but she spoke German. She spoke Baseldeutsch. Like Einstein. Yes, I'm just, it's a weird thing comparing my grandma. With Tom Conte. Yes, we can't have a Swiss actor. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't any of that. Anyway, Mark, thank you. Correspondence at, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, co-rites and stars here. So it's a radical reworking of the high school comedy in a similar vein to book smart which you liked very much, like its central perspective is LGBT female,

but it's far more indie and anarch-experited than book smart. It's build as coming from the producers of pitch perfect, which means it's Elizabeth Banks, who if you remember, was most recently the powerhouse behind cocaine bear and who is somebody who really is doing quite remarkable work in the world of films. So, Senate and Ayodabiri are PJ and Josie. They are two unpopular schoolgirls, Alab Bukesmart, and they say that people just don't dislike them because they're gay. They dislike them because they're gay and untalented. They hit upon the idea of starting a women's self-defense club as a way of attracting the attention of the kind of queen bees, the more popular people

who are also their heartthrobs. And also, this will provide them with an excuse to grapple with them literally. Here is a trailer clip. I'm gonna expel you both for committing a crime against Jeff. Get out of the car. You can't tell me what to do. Good night, you little chicken car.

Get out of the car. We were just practicing for ourselves the fence club. Say it's like a fight club? Yes. Just stay in your lane until you're much more Wesleyan. Yes, sir. What's your plan here? Jeff is like caught it. And they're picking on the weak and defenseless. into your much-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet-wet You know, my own dear say I need to pick up a hobby. Welcome to our Fight Club. Let's get it happening.

Anyway, you get, that's a lot of bird song. There is a lot of bird song. There's a lot of bird song in the film. So Fight Club, four girls, PJ and Josie, conning their schoolmates into PJ and Duncan, PJ and Josie, interbelieving that they spent their summer in Juvee, in Juvee Nile Hall, you know, having to having to fight off knife attacks and shiver attacks. Anyway, meanwhile, the football team are counting down

the days to a match with their longstanding rivals who are generally considered to be murderers and killers. So there is a reference to the final football pitch showdown from the wanderers, the Phil Kaufman movie. And I think that must be deliberate because it does seem to be sort of clearly flagged up. So, Seligman has called it, quote, a campy queer high school comedy

in the vein of Wet Hot American Summer, but for a more Gen Z queer audience. And Rachel Senet called it, two girls in a classic American football town who start a fight club under the guise of female empowerment, but it's also so that they can have sex with cheerleaders. So you can tell from both those statements that it's kind of deliberately provocative and front foot,

but neither of those tongue-in-cheek descriptions quite managed to capture just how anarchic and just how genuinely bonkers it is in, I think, a really entertaining way. Apparently studios didn't want to make the movie when it was pitched. No school wanted to allow the school to be used. They ended up doing it in an abandoned school in gym.

Honestly, congratulations to the filmmakers for standing there ground because cinema would be a lot poorer without movies like this. At times, it had the kind of, in my opinion, the sort of freewheeling spirit of Lindsay Anderson in that you're, you know, you think, I genuinely don't know where this is going. Oh, it went there. Wow, that was kind of unexpected. There's a couple of scenes which reminded me of,

do you remember that scene in in Ron Burgundy when two of the news teams have a fight in the park and it suddenly becomes really, you know, and one of them says, wow, that escalated quickly. Do you remember that? Yeah, but I didn't think. I thought, no, we can, well, it you remember that? Yeah, man. You got anything. Well, it's a long time ago.

Yes. This is a lot of funnier. There was that sort of sense of the anarchic energy of where is this going to go. But the really impressive thing is that for all the madness, for all the contrivance, for all the, you know, the sort of the arch the edge of the reality, I actually did care about them.

And I, you know, it kind of got me in the fields. I just, I really enjoyed it. There were many moments in it. I was just like, wow, I, I'm just impressed that you managed to be that far out there. And I think it's, what does that mean? It means that the film, if it was workshopped, you'd go, no, take that out, take that out.

You can't have that. What sort of thing are you talking about? I don't want, I don't want to spoil any of the plot points, but what the film does is it sort of sets itself up with a slightly sort of mad cap premise, which it then follows through on. In a way, actually, you know when we were talking about Beckett, I am not comparing the film to Sam, you'll Beckett, and yet I'm about to do that. You know the thing about absurdist comedy and absurdist tragedy that life is absurd. You know the stuff that you know what Beck it was, this is hard to do. There is something

about a portrayal of the world in which the portrayal of the world is completely absurd, but it's absurd to the point that it's actually truthful because you think, yeah, that's mad and those things would never, could never happen, but there is a truth in them happening. And that is, I have managed rather wonderfully to mullange together Samuel Beckett and bottoms, and I'm very proud of having done it. I thought, why is it called bottoms? Because they're bottom of the league, they're bottom of the pile, they're bottom of the, you know, they're the lowest of the low. So it has, right, okay. You're gonna say, it has no,

I can't imagine that the word is used without knowing that bottoms also because of in America. But every time the word has come up on this program over the years, you've always done it, Teehee Betem. But the, it's a customer, that's how it is. Yeah, but it's not that. But no, it's, they are bottom of, it's they are bottom of the pile.

They are bottom of the social ladder. Right. Because in quotes, an archit comedies can often be, yes, very off-putting, but it sounds as though this isn't. This is an an archit comedy which you are a part of rather than being alienated by. Precisely so, you said it better than I did. And also, I think once again, and we've compared this

to how to have sex, it is once again proof that one of the things that cinema can do is put you in the position of characters who are nothing like you and you see the world through their eyes, even if they are actually constructed comic ads. I really enjoyed it. Okay, so that's bottoms, also at this week. Well, I see a film that was out last week, so the killer, which is the new film by David Fincher, which is playing in a very few cinemas, it opened on last Friday, and it comes to Netflix on the 10th. So it has a brief theatrical window, but it's, you'd have to sort of seek it out.

So, you know, I just said there, you know, a market crazy out there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of those adjectives apply to the killer, which is it's based on a European, cur, graph, in all comic strip about the life of an initially unnamed assassin scripted by Andrew Kevin Walker, who's best known for his work on S7 and Michael Fassbender is the killer, who we meet methodically preparing for a hit. He is unemotional.

He has a very strict code, and he narrates his own experience constantly throughout Abba Look. A fine music a useful distraction. A focused tool keeps the inner voice from wandering. This is what it takes. This is what it takes. My process is purely logistical.

If I'm effective, it's because of one simple fact. I don't give a... I wonder what that's an interesting... I wonder what that I know what's that Fridge I gotta give a fridge don't give a fridge. He's ice cold like that was good He doesn't give a fridge so you know the reuniting of the director and the writer of Of S7 and um then of course despite what he just said there something goes wrong and Chaos issues things get personal suddenly his life is thrown out of order. He's no longer living by his rules. He's breaking his rules. It becomes, George, for this time as personal.

Now, this material is more than familiar. I mean, I have lost count of the number of movies about ice-cold, ruthless hitmen who lived by a strict code. And, you know, there's a lot of them doing the number of movies about ice-cold, ruthless hitmen who live by a strict code and you know there's a lot of them doing the kind of weird, you saw him there doing his exercises. Yes, also, right at the very beginning he puts in an earbud when he says music is very important and the way he puts it in is even that he uses his thumb and forefinger and it's very kind of flamboyant, it is. Balletic, almost movement. And guess what he

listens to all the way through the film? Rockset. The Smiths. Oh, really? The Smiths. A soundtrack of the Smiths is his soundtrack all the way through the book. So it's the voice of Morrissey. Oh my guess. Game drive. Exactly. No wonder. Anyway, so, you know, we have seen this genre of film, you know, whether it's European or American or Japanese live action animation, so not a new story. So, on the plus side, I think Michael Fassbender is hugely watchable. He's got one of those faces that the camera loves. He's got one of those bodies that the camera loves because he's a very physical performer. I mean, you saw just from that clip when he was doing the, you know, the exercises.

You know, obviously we talk to Kano Reeves about this sort of thing, about physical performance. And in fact, there is one fight sequence, punch-up sequence in the film that put me in mind of John Wick in a good way, because it's really crunchy. It's really kind of like, it's sinewy. And David Fincher is a very stylish director, as we know, you've interviewed people who have worked with David Fincher. I think you've also interviewed Fincher, haven't you? I mean, he's some... Because I think you have, I'm not sure.

Okay. Well, anyway, you've spoken to people who have worked with him. And there's the famous thing about he'll do, um, teen, not um, teen takes in a sort of Kubrick style until he gets exactly what he wants. On the downside, the voiceover is a little bit like a less pretentious version of the counselor, but still bordering on parenting. Even from that, you could hear that from that you could hear that, you know, it's slightly self-periodic. The thing is, Stephen Soderbergh can do this stuff in his sleep. And I think the thing that I wonder about is I'm not entirely sure what attracted Fincher to this. In the same way that I wasn't really sure what attracted Ridley Scott to the counselor, rather than the fact that it was, you know, the

call Macmack, the Carthie script, although it's not a good script. This is... I, whilst it was on, I enjoyed it, I enjoyed watching the performance, I enjoyed the stylishness and the glass of it. It didn't have any substance, there was nothing in it that made me think, oh, I can see why this is the new Fincher project. Also, having seen it on a big screen, I'm honestly think it would lose a whole ton on streaming, I think it'll do perfectly fine when it goes to streaming services, it's not something that absolutely demands to be seen in the cinema, despite the fact that Finch knows how to make a film look good. And there is one really weird thing in it, which is this,

till the Swinton's in the film, but she has A key appearance, and she has a big scene in the film. And in that big scene in the film, she tells a joke at length, okay, and the joke is about a hunter who goes in, because obviously he's a hunter, because he's a hunter, goes into the woods and shoots a bear. And he shoots the bear and then he can't see the bear.

The bear's gonna, he goes to find the bear, the bear's behind him, the bear taps him on the shoulder and says, right, you've got a choice. Either I kill you or something else. And I go, I know this joke. And do you know why I know this joke? Because Josh O'Connor tells it in the crown as Prince Charles at length.

There is, I'm not making this up, a four minute sequence in which Tilda Swinton's big speech is a joke from the crown. Well, I don't know where the joke comes from originally. I don't know whether it's in the original comic strip source, but it's been, I don't know where the joke comes from originally. I don't know whether it's in the original comic strip source, but it's been I don't know the first time I heard that joke was when Josh O'Connor was playing Prince Charles in the crown some time ago and there is there is since the crown is such a big deal it just seems odd that till the swinterns big scene It just seems odd that Till the Swinton's big scene, a large chunk of it is taken up telling a joke that all I can think is, Josh O'Connor telling this joke with, you know, in the crowd. I did interview David Finchett for Gong Girl. Thank you.

Memorably. Yes, thank you. I thought you had an idea. Yes, and you're absolutely right. I have. Good, exactly that. So anyway, the killer, it's fine. You're absolutely right. I have. Good. Exactly that. So anyway, the killer, it's fine. What was that?

I think it was a message from on high. It's something that's falling apart. Something fell down. I have no idea what is. The studio is falling apart around us. It doesn't matter because I said the killer is fine. It's fine. But you can wait and watch it on a streamer.

I would think so. OK. Let's do some listed correspondence. Thank you very much, D, for telling us about stuff that is on in a cinematic kind of vein near you. Send yours to Correspondence at covidamau.com. Let's find out what's on this week. Hi Simon and Mark, this is Stephen Graves. I'm curating a screening of short horror films at the Redding Biscuit Factory Cinema on November 2nd at 8 p.m. We've got a selection of short showcasing the work of local filmmakers as well as films from further a field. To find out more into book visit ReadingBiscuitFactory.co.uk and search for winter chills. Louise here from Sydney City, Brighton and Beyons independent film festival. The 21st

Station of Sydney City will take place on the 10th to the 19th of November. Highlights include, a special preview of the incredible documentary Scarler, followed by a Q&A of the directors. Numerous tributes across the festival to Brighton-based, experimental filmmaking legend, Jeff Keane, as well as joining the BFI and celebrating one of the greatest filmmaking jurors of all time, Paolo and Presbyterga. Visit cinehyphencity.po.uk for full info. Louise, inviting you to the cineine City Film Festival in Brighton. Steven promoting the Winter Chills Horror Festival in Reading. Thanks to them, your audio trailer should be...

Wherever you are in the universe, send it to Correspondence at Covenamo.com. That is it for Take One, Take Two as landed alongside. It's been a Sony Music Entertainment production. The team was Lili Vicki Zachi Michael, actually that sounded like one person. Lili Vicki Zachi. Yes. Also, Tery Gully Types. This is the type of artist, pirate king, cat person. Asked prod, Beth, prod, Hannah and redacted pool. Mark, what is your film of the week? It's a double bell. Oh, another one. Okay. Yeah is your film of the week? It's a double bill. Another one, okay.

Yeah. My films of the week are how to have sex and bottoms. Take two is available. Get it where you got this. Loads of extra stuff, top recommendations, bonus reviews. Take three, the questions, Schmessjens feature will be with you on Wednesday. Shmestions feature will be with you on Wednesday.