Kermode & Mayo’s Take - THE DOG STARS: Top dog or a dog’s dinner?

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

The Take is now on Patreon: www.patreon.com/kermodeandmayo Become a Vanguardista or an Ultra Vanguardista to get video episodes of Take Two every week, plus member-only chat rooms, polls and submissions to influence the show, behind-the-scenes photos and videos, the monthly Redactor’s Roundup newsletter, and access to a new fortnightly LIVE show - a raucous, unfiltered lunchtime special with the Good Doctors, new features, and live chat so you can heckle, vote, and have your questions read out in real time. Three more of the week’s big screen offerings reviewed by the Good Doctors on the Take. First up, The Dog Stars—Ridley Scott’s latest post-apocalyptic survival thriller offering starring Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin. Then there’s the new drama from our favourite multicoloured Spanish maximalist Pedro Almodóvar, Bitter Christmas, and even more outrageously, Gregg Araki’s kinky comedy I Want Your Sex, starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman. Plus our guest this week is Michael Sarnoski, director of Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One, and now The Death of Robin Hood, Out next week, it shows us a darker side of the folk legend, following Hugh Jackman’s grizzled Robin Hood in later life as he reckons with the legacy of years of violence. No men in tights here, sorry. Michael chats to Simon and Mark about reimagining this famous take and directing Huge Action through some serious Northern Irish mud. Laugther Lift too as usual, plus the best of your excellent correspondence, including some great What’s On info and another entry into our new technophobic feature A, I Don’t Like That. Enjoy! You can contact the show by emailing [e-mail] or you can find us on social media, @KermodeandMayo. 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] EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/take Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Our Christmas Movie Spectacular is back! It’s in Bristol this year on Sunday 6th December. Don’t miss it! Here’s the link for tickets: https://www.fane.co.uk/kermode-and-mayo Timecodes: 00:00:00 Introduction 00:12:11 The Dog Stars review 00:21:41 Box Office Top Ten 00:30:35 Michael Sarnoski interview 00:45:08 Bitter Christmas review 00:53:37 Laughter Lift 01:01:28 I Want Your Sex review Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get your tickets now for the Dog Stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Go! Out there, just kill or be killed. Jacob Allorty. There are people out there? They need our help. Josh Berlin.

Shoot first and inquire afterwards. Margaret Quali. Okay, tough guy. And Guy Pearce. Arm up! The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott in The Theater's Friday. Get tickets now. Some evil thing happened here.

Three people die in a quiet suburb in the same house, years apart. It's not a coincidence. This wasn't ghosts and goblins, okay? These weren't murders. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrisons. Coming September 1st, wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers to the binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, ad-free. Before we begin, a quick reminder that you can become a,

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And if you're already a Vanguard Easter, we'll... We salute you. What's up, what's up, what's up, what's up, what's up, what's up. You haven't done that for a while. What's up, what's up? Why did you stop doing it? I don't know, really. I grew up.

Maybe not. I forgot, probably. Moved on, thought of other things to say. Like, hello, how you're doing? That thing about growing up, I was recently in Provence doing the Provence arts film festival. And then afterwards, is your bit of the show from there. I did my bit of the show from there.

Then afterwards, the Good Lady Fresser, her, outdoors, outdoors, and I, we drove around and we went to places and we went to galleries and we went to historical buildings and we went to and whilst we were in the middle of doing this, I suddenly thought for the first time, oh, this must be what being grown up is like because we were just driving from one interesting art exhibition to an interesting thing to see and it's like, oh, that's what being grown up is like. I'm 65. You must have accepted this.

No, I don't think I have. I mean, you've said this before yourself. I mean, many people have said it, that no matter what age you are, still inside your head, you're 14 or something. And, yeah. I mean, you're a DJ, right? So from your point of view,

you must wake up every morning and think, I might be 86 on the outside, but inside, I'm at hospital or radio, asking for requests that don't have anything inappropriate in them. Harry Chapin had the line, feeling over 45 going on 16, I think, in WOLD. But it's that, really. It is certainly that that you're playing all this rock and roll music,

but you're 106. And since you're top of most of the popermost, do your Sting anecdote? Well, Sting's up. So we're recording this on Wednesday, and Sting is on the greatest hits radio show. today talking about he's got so he did this musical

he wrote this musical in 2013 called The Last Ship based on his childhood memories of growing up in Wall's End and it's been on broad you know, it then went on Broadway and toured America it's taught the UK and it's been adapted and it's back in the West End so he came in to talk about it

and just before we started he said oh yeah he said I really really I either said I really like or I love love the film show you do. I say, all right, thanks very much. And do you refer to him as Sting, or do you refer to him as, is he Gordon? Mr. Sting, he's Mr. Sting. No, no, you absolutely don't call him Gordon.

No, he's Sting. Hello, Sting, how are you doing? No, he's Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting. Okay, so does nobody call him Gordon? Not as far as I know. No, I don't think so. And he was called Sting because when he was in a band when he was young, he had a stripy jumper that made him look like a B, is that right?

Yeah. But what a great thing. You've got a nickname in early, you know, when you were at school pretty much. And it wasn't embarrassing or dreadful or offensive to anybody. And it served you in a rock and roll life. Most people's nicknames when they're at school are unbroadcastable, completely offensive, absolutely outrageous and something that you'd rather forget. Yeah.

Oh, look, there goes old itchy scrot. Yeah, you know. Yeah, exactly. So before we start, let's do a Dolly Parton thing because I can't. So it was announced that she died like Tuesday evening, like just before 7 o'clock. So it literally just come off air. So it hadn't been able to do anything. And we're recording this on Wednesday morning.

So it's still very much. So obviously the airways are full. But I was just thinking before we came on, is there anybody, literally anybody whose death would cause, you know, the world hates it. Everyone hates each other. America is more divided than any other country. And yet Trump is lowering flags to half mask. Every gay artist, every country artist, every rock artist, every musician is saying, what a fantastic woman she was.

The scientists are saying, thank you for funding the Moderna vaccine. Everybody who's ever met her is saying she was genuinely extraordinary. And I can't think of anyone else. So great stints is playing lots of Dolly today, But on Radio 3 this morning, Radio 3, they played Dolly Parton. Radio 4 this morning, they played Dolly Parton. I can't think of anyone who could cause that.

I think genuinely unique. I only saw her play live once. It was my birthday treat. What a treat? Yeah, I didn't know where I was going. Linda just got us in a car and said, right, I'm just going to give you instructions of where we're going to drive. And we drove to Birmingham, which was like weird because Birmingham was a very, very long way away from where we were.

It was like, why are we driving to Birmingham? And it was because Dolly was playing a gig in Birmingham. I didn't know until we literally got to the outside of the venue that that was why we were in Birmingham. And half the audience had pink cowboy hats, you know. And the thing was absolutely packed. And it was everyone. All walks of life, all ages, absolutely everyone.

And she played for, I think, two hours or something. and it was just hit after hit after hit. And it was, I said this thing before, it was like she was playing to an audience, all of whom looked like they had loved and lost a lot. And her songs were just like speaking to everybody. And that thing that you're saying about, is there anybody else that could,

that would have the same response? It was like there was this massive auditorium full of people from every single walk of life, all of whom were being united by these songs, which every single person in the room knew off by heart, and every single person in the room had their own personal connection with them. And it was like they were all for that period of time singing the same songs, speaking the same language.

You know, it was one place at one time, one world only. That, you know, it was just astonishing, absolutely astonishing. Did you see her play live? No, no, no, no. I did interview her once, but she was down the line. she was in America, I was in a studio. And of course, it's a great and humbling experience because she's sharper and cleverer than you are.

So someone found this. Now, you particularly have quoted Roger Ebert from his book, Life itself many, many times. So this is a quote from Roger Ebert, okay? In Dallas for the premiere of 9 to 5, I had an uncanny experience. I'm on the plane home to Chicago. I confessed it to Siskel, who is his sidekick, would you say?

It's co-host, so, you know. Co-host. That's a contributor, yeah. I had been granted a private half hour with Dolly Parton. And as we spoke, I was filled with a strange ethereal grace. This was not spiritual, nor was it sexual. It was healing and comforting. Gene listened and said,

Roger, I felt the exact same thing during my interview with her. We looked at each other. What did this mean? Neither one of us ever felt that feeling again from time to time we would refer to it in wonder. Isn't that amazing? It is. And it's also, it's more amazing even when you consider how much

Siskel and Ebert disagreed about everything. And again, it's another example of the one thing that unifies. I remember when I was working at Time Out in the early 90s, there was this really odd little Dolly Parton film. with her and James Woods called Straight Talk. And I reviewed it for Time Out, and I liked it. I mean, I thought they were great. I mean, the films, okay, it's a bit flimsy.

It's like somebody doing a radio show in which it's only Straight Talk on the radio show. And she's very Dolly, and he's very James Woods before Wheels came off being James Woods. And it was a really sort of quirky, interesting little film. And it didn't take any money. I think people are largely forgotten about it now. but when the news broke, I remembered,

and I went back to my original review of it, and I remember, right, because I think it was the first time I ever wrote anything publicly about Dolly Parton. And it's just, it is that thing that it's impossible to think anything other than good, positive thoughts about her, because she was just a force for all that is good in the world, as opposed to all that is not good in the world. Frank Cottrell Boyce

Oh yeah, he was on the Again on the radio Wonderful. Yeah. And he put on blue sky. She had Jesus and Gravity. Gravity finally let go. Now that is a scriptwriter.

Wow. Isn't that amazing? Wow. Oh and by the way, I just found after that Ebert quote, this is part of his quote, this is part of his review of 9 to 5. Yeah.

9 to 5 is a good-hearted, simple-minded comedy that will win a place in film history. There have been other, I skipped a bit, there have been other debuts this unmistakable. You could name Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, John Travolta. And what you'd be talking about in each case would not necessarily be a great dramatic performance in an important movie. You'd be talking about a quality of presence, a personal life force that seems to take over the screen. Wow. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that was that. Yeah. And Frank, if you're listening, that's amazing to be able to reduce everything to two sentences. Could just just read that sentence again, the thing that he said again, because that's such a beautiful quote. Yeah. She had Jesus and Gravity. Gravity finally let go.

Man, he can really write, can't he? He really, really can. Didn't he, wasn't he the script doctor on two popes and uncredited? Oh, was he? I didn't know that. Anyway, there are films to talk about what's, uh, What's coming up? Well, we have an absolutely packed, we have a packed show, Simon. We have reviews of Bitter Christmas, which is the new film by Amadova.

We have a review of I Want Your Sex, which is a new film by Greg Araki. And there is a new film by Ridley Scott, The Dog Stars. Plus, our very special guest this week is... Yes, Michael Sonoski is the director of The Death of Robin Hood, which is out next week. also the man behind a quiet place day one. So we're going to have a chat with him. But we're not going to review it as such. But that's out next week. We'll review it when it comes out next week. We can just say in advance that this is Robin Hood, but not as you know it. Is he a fox? No. Does he wear green tights? No. Does he get washed up on the shore

in Dover, walk along Hadrian's wall to Nottingham? No. No. Does he have a feather cut? No. No, the accent. Is he good? No. No. Has he got a big shaggy beard? He certainly does. Take two, what's going on there?

In take two, two very, very different films. One is one night only, which is a... Imagine a rom-com sex comedy crossed with the purge and then try to unimagin that. And then also, de Gaulle resistance, which is part one of a two-part film about Charles de Gaulle, second part of which is coming out in September,

both parts were knocking on three hours long. So two very, very different films to cover in Take Two. And what are we reviewing first? What's going up here? The Dog Stars, which is the new film from Ridley Scott, you know, Sir Ridley-Didley. This is a post-apocalyptic thriller. Is there any other kind?

Adapted from a novel by Peter Heller, which I have not read, have you? I have not, no. No, okay. scripted by Mark L. Smith, whose feature CV includes the not good US remake of Martyrs, the awards goaded the revenant, and those George Clooney films, Midnight Sky and Boys in the Boat, and then more recently Twisters, which if you remember, everyone loved except me. So this is set in an unspecified near future in which a viral pandemic flu, I think, has ravaged the population.

We meet Jason, our Lord. Jason, Jacob Allardy, Jason Allerdy. Hello to Jacob Allaudy. Jacob Allody's Higg, who's a pilot used to be a mechanic, and Josh Brolin's Marine-trained Bangley. They are living in this remote encampment miles from civilization. There's also Higgs beloved dog, who you think at the beginning, maybe the dog of the dog stars.

There's a lot of stuff going on about dog stars up in the sky and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's kind of like a, he's both a security blanket and also a guard. dog. So Higg and Bangley monitor their perimeters really, really strictly, and Bangley's up on a tower and anybody who comes onto their land immediately gets shot. Hig, meanwhile, flies to the nearest town to get supplies, to get fuel, food, medicine, and everywhere is completely abandoned except, of course, there are scavengers. And he encounters scavengers, and one of the scavengers that he encounters tells him there's a new tribe in town. There are a whole different kind of breed of people,

and we are all dead, mate. Here is a clip from the trailer. Before the world ended, I was kissing my wife, playing with my dog. Jesper! The world that was doesn't exist. Here is just us trying to hold on to what was.

But out there, It's kill or be killed. The only thing left to fear. Survivors. Stop me if you've heard this one. So, Bangley is basically kind of happy with the way things are because he loves that kind of militaristic lifestyle. Higg, who is haunted by visions of his lost wife.

Stop me if you've heard this one. Dreams of getting away. He's intercepted these signals from Grand Junction. So he thinks that maybe there's something going on in Grand Junction. One day he gets in his plane. He heads off in search of it. The plane soon comes down. and he finds himself on a ranch which is owned by Guy Pearce's ex-Navy Seal Pops

and his daughter Seema, played by Margaret Qualley. They are both nursing, heartache and loss. Suddenly they're together. Will them being in the same place somehow heal them, or will they all become victim of the marauding incomers who are the new tribe who are apparently changing the game? So look, here's the thing. Technically, this is a science fiction film,

from a guy who redefined science fiction, right? From the guy who did Alien and did Blade Runner and did... He's the man. He's the man. He's the man. So you go, okay, this is really, really exciting. However, it is much more a kind of... It's a low-key character piece, crossed with the kind of post-apocalyptic survivalist drama

of which, honestly, I think we've seen too many. I told you last week, I've just read Cormick McCarthy's The Road, which that came out in 2006, film of it in 2009, and that seemed to me to be in many ways, kind of like the last word. I was recently in Provence, I said before, with Andrew McDonald, who made How I Live Now in 2013, which plays out during and after a nuclear attack. I'm still waiting for the BFI player to air my introduction to the Survivor List from 2015. You and I both loved The Last of Us, which has been the TV event of the past few years. We're both eagerly.

awaiting the next installment in the 28 years later. It's a bit like, yeah, we have done this. And there is very, very little in the dog stars that we haven't seen before. And I'm really starting to wonder whether we need to see any of it again. It is, forgive the pun, the road more taken. It also feels like one of those films that Ridley Scott knocked off because he had a couple of months free and was a bit of a loose end because the Bee Ge's biopic had fallen down. But you know what he's like?

It's like, you know, you go out to the shops, you come back, he's made another film. He is speeding up, isn't he? As he gets older, he's speeding up. He is. He's clearly, he's, you know, he's on a role creatively in terms of how much he's producing. But this feels so incidental that, I mean,

there's none of the world building that you expect from a great Ridley Scott film. So there's none of that kind of, you know, oh, he's created the world of, or the world of gladiators, none of that. There's none of the memorable characters of films like, you know, Thelmer and Louise, or even House of Gucci, which honestly, some of the characters in House of Gucci, I'd like to be able to forget, but I can't.

Hey, I'm a nominate. There's none of that, there's none of that kind of distinctive quirkiness that he brought to things like, um, G. I, Jane or, or Robin Hood, a subject to which we'll return later on, or even Napoleon, all the weird Napoleon stuff about Napoleon, under the table and being, you know, really weird and strange about sex. The other thing is that despite the fact that the word IMAX features very prominently on the poster, I don't know whether you've seen the post of this, but the poster makes it look like a Netflix series.

And that's what it felt like. And I guarantee you that in a few months' time, there'll be a pub quiz question, which is what filmed did Ridley Scott make after Gladiator 2? And the answer will be, oh, I can't remember because no one will. On the plus side, there's a couple of decent sequences. There's one very tense sequence in which you've got a small plane attempting to take off whilst being chased by marauders on horseback. That's quite well done.

There's an assault on a compound, which is done with kind of militaristic precision. I mean, the point is this is the guy who made Black Hawk down. It's not like he doesn't know how to do this stuff. There is also a completely bonkers sequence in the third act of the film in which it's like we were watching a film in one screen and we came out of it, went to the bathroom and went back into a different screen

in which they're not showing the same film. They're actually showing this weird, surrealist mash-up of the Shining and Don't Worry Darling with Alison Janie as the air stewardess from hell. And then that sequence ends and then it goes back to being the other thing. There's also some stuff in it with the Mennonites

who keep being referred to as the Amish, in a sort of ongoing joke which doesn't really land. What's the joke there? Well, the joke is that he keeps saying they're men and they're Amish, no, they're not, they're men, anyway, it's almost not worth getting into.

And there's some very eye-catching scenery, there's some quite interesting music. But the problem is that the script is so lumpen. It's one of those scripts. It requires every character to explain in detail what they are thinking, what they are doing and how they feel about what they are thinking

and what they are doing at the same time as thinking and doing it. And when they're not doing that, they're looking off just into a near, near distant future horizon in a way that suggests both loss and reconciliation. So it's fine. It's utterly unforgettable.

I came straight out of it and wrote my notes immediately because I was, you've done that thing when, if you stand on wet sand very near the shore, you put your footprint in the sand, and you take your foot out, and you can literally see the footprint disappearing. Well, I felt like if I didn't write my notes immediately afterwards,

the memory of the film would be gone by the time I got to the next screening. So it's just bizarrely incidental and unremarkable. And I am now officially tired of the post-apocalyptic survivalist thriller genre. That's enough. Ed. Trudging slowly over wet sand, I thought you were going to go into Morrissey every day's like Sunday mode there,

just for a moment. Back to the bench where your shoes were stolen. Those were the days. It's the seaside town that they forgot to close, which I'm sure is worthing, but I'm not 100% sure. Correspondence at coadamode.com. Okay, still to come after the break.

Mark does the box, well, I'll talk about the box office top ten, and then Mark will talk about bitter Christmas, and I want your sex. I believe that's right. And also the writer and director of the death of Robin Hood, Michael Sonoski, on the way. Some evil thing happened here. Three people die in a quiet suburb, in the same house, years apart. It's not a coincidence.

This wasn't ghosts and goblins, okay, these were murders. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrisons. Coming September 1st, wherever you get your podcasts. subscribers to the binge can listen to all episodes all at once ad free. Box office top 10. Number 10 is Tony, which I thought was fine. Sand and I saw it together on our date night. But again, fine, decent performances. Not much more than that, to be honest. That's number seven in America. Number nine here, number six over there is mutiny. Christine says,

Dear vengeance and tenderness, I watched Mutiny before hearing Mark's review, but was pleased to see that he found the same joy and comfort in seeing the usual formulaic points in the Statham movie. My adult son is also a fan. Although we don't get much chance to watch the movies together these days, we do compare our Statham Bingo Cards. Sadly, I couldn't get a full house in Mutiny, but it was close.

I reproduce a typical card below, but the potential tropes are endless. So in this bingo card, villain, so it's like a bingo card. So when one of these happens, you mark it off. Villain underestimates him. Someone goes through a wall, fight six men or more at once. Quote, you shouldn't have done that. Explosion directly behind him.

No suspiciously specific tradecraft. Final villain gets a poetic death. Doesn't look at explosion. Boat inevitably involved. And the house rule is five in a row, you shout, stay three. them and you finish the entire card before he smiles. That's the whole idea of it, really. Number eight is Toy Story 5.

Mm-hmm. Still there, still taking money. Number seven is Bethlehem Kundumbah. So this wasn't press screen. This is Indian-Lyam language romantic comedy. If anyone's seen it, drop us an email, let's know. Does it have a Dumbar pint in it? Pind a Dumbar in there?

Made in Bethlehem. I see that you've got the pronunciation written up. He said definitely Kadumba. Yeah, well done. That's how you said. Number six, number four over there is Paul Patrol, the Dino movie? The least interesting of the two dinosaur movies that's currently playing in UK cinemas?

Ah, right, now here we go. Number eight in America, number five in the UK's spa weekend, a new entry. We had a few problems of this last week. Okay, so here's what you need to know. So spa weekend was screened last Tuesday. And as I went into the screening, I was told to sign an undated embargo. And I said, well, when does the embargo lift? I mean, the film's out on Friday. Our show

drops on Thursday, mid-day, that's going to be fine, isn't it? They went, well, we'll get back to you. So I sat there and watched the film, and then the embargo wasn't lifted until five o'clock on Friday morning. So despite the fact that I had seen the film, I wasn't able to say anything about it because we dropped on Thursday. I am now able to tell you that I did send them back an email saying, I really wish I'd known this about the embargo before, because I wouldn't have spent two hours in my life watching the film, I would have done something more exciting like having root canal surgery.

So just briefly, since now, we get a moment to do this. It is worth saying a lot of the time when that sort of thing happens with an embargo, it is because they think that the press aren't going to like the film, as has proved to be the case.

It's got very, very poor reviews and rightly so. So it's a hugely annoying, alleged comedy written and directed by John Lucas and Scott Moore, who co-wrote the Hangover and co-wrote and directed Bad Mums, which I actually liked. So you put those two together, what do you get,

rather than a group of men going to get wasted in Las Vegas, you get a group of women, going to get rested, and, as it happens, wasted in an upmarket spa. So it is basically moms behaving badly. Ila Fisher, a lessee man, Anna Faris, Shabuio. So Jane is a lawyer. She's a single mom. She's got no time to herself.

She dreams of being just wrapped up in a carpet and left alone to sleep. Sophie is a PA to an insufferable man who bullies her. Coco is sharing childcare with her ex who still clearly loves her. They decide to go to a spa to have a dream weekend, and they don't invite their annoying Australian friend because they don't want her to come because she'll be an element of chaos.

And anyway, she's abroad, but then she turns up. And there is this moment in it, in which Isla Fisher turns up as the annoying Australian. And then you realize with horror that that is the gag. The gag is she is going to be the annoying, loud Australian for the rest of the movie, and you're going to have to laugh at her, you know, because that apparently is funny and not just think this is absolutely insufferable. So that's the gag. That's the gag.

And then things proceed very much as expected. She turns everything upside down. She gets one friend to have sex with a yoga instructor who also turns out to be Australian, another to hook up with her ex, another loses her job. She wrecks the room. She wrecks the resorts. She wrecks the golf courses. She wrecks the yoga classes.

Ruins everything. But actually, as it turns out, giving everyone the shake up they need. So the thing that I was thinking, thinking while I was watching the film was, I'm watching it in a very sterile environment in a 10 o'clock screening, right? And this is, you know, could it be different if you were seeing it, you know, with like a 9 o'clock screening and an audience, because that's how I saw bad mums, because bad mums, I think, wasn't press screen, but I did quite like it. In the case of this, I chuckled once, and I think that I laughed more than anybody else in the room. And even as I was

thinking this isn't this isn't aimed at you and this is the wrong venue for it to be playing it. I was thinking this is absolutely tooth-gratingly annoying and these characters, I don't believe in any of the characters and I don't care about any of them. I don't find any of the jokes funny, particularly not the joke about the loud, annoying Australian who is going to be loud and annoying an Australian. Incidentally, if you are an Australian listening to this, I'm not saying that Australians are loud and annoying. I'm saying that the film has, the whole film is built around this one joke about this group of friends who've got this annoying, loud friend who then turns up at the spot.

So, like I said, it really didn't help that after spending all this time watching the movie, I then wasn't able to review it. And I kind of feel now, like a week later on, I'm a lot less bothered by it than I was, but I came out afterwards, and I was thinking, well, you know, there are so few female-centered comedies, maybe it was just me. And then I spoke to three women critics who'd also been in the room who I'd noticed hadn't been laughing. and they all to a woman said,

I found that tooth-gratingly annoying, and one of them said, I found it offensive. So there we go. It's a bunch of rubbish, and they didn't press screen, well, they did press screen it, but then they wouldn't let any of us say anything about it, because they knew that what we were going to say about it was,

it was about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. The biggest laughs in the whole movie are in the blooper, outtake reel at the end, which once again go to prove that the more fun somebody have making a movie, the less fun you will have watching it. Also, a fart in a space suit, I mean, is only passingly problematic. Passingly?

Yeah. Do you remember one of your best ever laughed at lift jokes? I don't know any of them, no. I broke wind in the lift. It was wrong on so many levels. Oh, yeah. It's very good. I'm sure I thought of that myself.

Number four is the end of Oak Street. You know, dinosaurs in suburbia. I kind of enjoyed it. I mean, I thought it was, I think it's, it is rubber. but I thought it was very entertaining rubbish. Sanjeev just thought it was rubbish. I haven't seen the number three film. It's new entry, but it also has a very annoying title,

Insidious Out of the Further. Yes. Well, I haven't seen it either, because again, it was not proffered to us. So if anyone has seen it, I will go and see it this weekend, but before I was catching up on all the other stuff that hadn't. So if you've seen it, let us know. But it's the new insidious movie. You know what you're going to get.

We're looking forward to the following films, which begin with an adjective and end with an adverb in clumsy disharmony, terrifying out of the perhaps, dark out of the arguably, haunted out of the quite frankly, and nightmarish, out of the broadly speaking. Stop, just stop.

Just stop. Anyway, number two here, number two there is the Odyssey. We should talk about that at some point. Number one here. Is there anything left to say? No. No, probably not. Number one in Canada.

Number one here. Spider-Man brand-new day. Well, again, we have spoken extensively about it, but I think it's probably

take two for more conversation on both those two, isn't it? Yeah, in the overflow car park, but anyway, so big number one and a big number two,

though whenever I say that out loud, it just sounds unpleasant. So a very successful film at number one, very successful film at number two, more in take two.

In a moment, you will hear our conversation with Michael Sonoski, the writer and director of the new movie The Death of Robin Hood, which is coming up in just a moment. Some evil thing happened here.

Three people die in a quiet suburb, in the same house, years apart. It's not a coincidence. This wasn't ghosts and goblins, okay? These were murders. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrisons. Coming September 1st, wherever you get your podcast.

subscribers to the binge can listen to all episodes all at once ad free now you know Michael Sonoski from Pig with Nicholas Cage and from a quiet place day one which proved I think he could handle all the blockbusters his new film is the death of Robin Hood and you can hear our conversation with Michael Sonoski after this clip from the film will be a mighty battle One for the stories. You're strongly. I come from an old family.

They say from Viking blood. There's a story that wants their elder for the fodder bear. It would be a mighty battle, Robin. How many are there? Four, five. Together we can best them. We'll likely die. And that is a clip from The Death of Robin Hood.

Its writer and director is Michael Sinovsky, and he joined So Michael, you're very welcome to the program. Introduce us to the film that contains a spoiler in the title, but anyway, introduces to the death of Robin Hood. It's a story about sort of an aging Robin Hood, who's led kind of a life of violence, who is injured in this battle and ends up on a Priory Island

where this kind of prioress who runs almost like a kind of healing commune gives him sort of a second chance at life. And it's based on the old death of Robin Hood, valid from hundreds of years ago. Okay, well, there's people who have watched many Robin Hood representations on television and in the movies. What we all know is that he was jolly, that he wore tights, he was good. He was a proto-socialist.

It was like a mayor-man-in-in-new-York, that kind of guy. He hangs out in Sherwood Forest, not Yorkshire Forest. He's after the Sheriff of Nottingham, not the Sheriff of York. And he's waiting for good King, Sean Connery to come and rescue everybody. So are you saying you're moving the story from that? I'm nudging it, nudging it a little bit. We're definitely hanging on to the old death of Robin Hood legend. A lot of the other things were kind of playing as if maybe there's the tiniest basis in truth, he says at one point.

You know, maybe I once accidentally threw some gold to some people and killed a sheriff because I killed a lot of people. But the legends are greatly exaggerated. And so it's kind of, I mean, one of the early ideas for the story was, you know, what if this person lived long enough to start seeing their folklore become a thing and how would they feel about that if they knew the truth of their life? And yeah, so it's trying to imagine what if he was a medieval bandit in all the blood and violence that that might have meant. There'll be many people who will be enticed by your film.

They'll look at the cast of Hugh Jackman, Jody Comer, Bill Scarsgaard, and Noah Jupin think, okay, fine, I'm going to go and see that. That was an incredible ensemble that you've put together here. Yes, I was very lucky with this cast. It started with Hugh and then Jody, and it was one of those, you know, I never really write for specific actors. I like to write a character that feels full on the page and then find someone that understands that

and then can bring something more to it. And I really looked out on this one. I think everyone who wanted to play these roles wanted to do it because they were challenging roles. Like Hugh Jackman trying to play a character that starts out pretty evil, just a bad, bad guy and then sort of like softens up over the course of the movie but never kind of loses that monstrous edge. Jody playing this kind of very mysterious prior ass who has a whole story of her own. I think they were all sort of intrigued by these characters and I don't know.

I was very lucky we shot this movie in 30 days in Northern Ireland and everyone was kind of down for the summer camp vibe of a relatively low budget historical epic kind of thing. So that mud that we see, Bill Scars got in huge. Jackman rubbing themselves in that's good old Northern Irish month. Oh, that's the real. That's the real deal. Yeah, it was cold. It was brutal. The week before we shot, there was a record-breaking storm that blew out half of our locations. And we spent a month just trying to cut down trees so we could get back to our spots. So it was, we shot in February, March in Northern Ireland. So it was hard.

Can we talk a little bit about the way the film looks? Obviously, at the opening of it, there is the word that comes from mind is murk you have these characters in this it's kind of this stygian gloom and it's incredibly atmospheric and you're kind of peering through the the darkness and as the film moves on it moves into the lighter palates as it gets finally to the to the new location where the story will kind of be reinvented tell me what you were looking at as inspiration for those early sections yeah i mean the early sections um that's where we kind of land the violence. Like we wanted to make sure you got through the first half hour saying, okay, I saw my action scenes, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. Like they're,

they're kind of rough and unpleasant. And we wanted you to almost by the time you got to the Priory to feel that lightness. And so the early chunk was the Revenant, Valhalla Rising, like these movies that are really about, you know, the beautiful scope of nature, but the brutality of it. And, you know, we wanted to feel like that mud was just kind of getting under your fingers so that when we got to the priory, it felt like kind of a weight was lifted off of us because then the rest of the movie becomes this kind of meditative, reflecting on the violence and reflecting on those stories. And so, you know, we changed the aspect ratio partway through, so it just kind of opened up. We introduced more color. We actually shot all that stuff later

in the schedule, so it was getting more into spring, and we were getting some colors and some green. But yeah, we really wanted to land this is not an easy life early on. And in terms of the person who is always... enough to live their own mythology. The two things that I was thinking of, these may not have been in your mind at all, but it reminded me. I was thinking partly of that film,

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, in which we actually have a moment in which there is a minstrel singing the song, and Robert Ford said, that's not what happened, I was there. And I was thinking also of Clint Eastwood and Unforgiven, and the idea, you know, the idea that kind of resonate

through Westerns about print the legend, That idea about somebody living long enough to live with their own legend is clearly sort of at the heart of all of this, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, no. Both of those, I mean, those came up a bunch. For me, assassination of Jesse James is like just one of my favorites. And so I think that was just kind of sticking in my head.

I mean, watching someone who's, yeah, sort of a living dead who's grappling with their legend and kind of wants. I mean, there's this core thing in this movie that, you know, Robin wants to die. Like, he's looking for this kind of right death. And early on, he thinks he's going to get this right death in battle, and it's going to be bloody and horrible and exactly what he deserves. And the movie's about kind of him discovering, you know, a right death that he almost never thought was possible for himself, never really considered.

And that's kind of that goes back to sort of that visual transition in the movie, is that the movie almost starts as the movie Robin thinks he's supposed to be in, like this violent, brutal, epic movie. And then, like, halfway through it, he's supposed to be. to almost be like, wait, what I'm, what movie am I in? I'm very confused right now. So we kind of wanted to play that where like he's almost not okay with like, aren't I supposed to have like a crazy action scene at the end of this? Like, you know, we kind of wanted to like be in that transition within.

Can I ask you about when Jody Comer appears on the movie Michael? Because there is a piece that she brings to your picture so that when she says to Robin Hood, would you like me to pray with you? You kind of think, yes, of course. I would like, of course I would like you to pray with me. What is it, what does she, what does she, when you're there in the room at the time, what is it that Jody is doing to make that so peaceful? Yeah, I mean, Jody's kind of a magical actor in that way where she,

I wish I could explain how she works as an actor, but it's, I think what she's able to do is both carry something extremely like human and accessible and she can both play this sort of like sweet childish side of something while also playing this sort of ageless profound wisdom. But then at the end of the day, you just kind of want to watch her. I stopped trying to like figure out how it worked with her on set because it was just one of those things where she would read the words and the whole crew would be like, that was great. Let's move on. Like it just, she's kind of an incredible actor that way where she can play this deep profundity, play so many layers of mystery that are. left totally kind of unspoken, but then at the same time, just be someone that you want to hang on every single word from. I don't know. I wish I could explain Jody Comer, but she's incredible. She has this exchange with Hugh Jackman, which felt to me like this, it was the heart

of the film, where she, they're talking about balance and the precision of balance and storytelling. Can you explain a bit about that? Yeah, I mean, so much of this movie is about storytelling, about the stories that we kind of tell ourselves, tell other people, how we pass those things down. And there's kind of this thing going on between the Priores and Robin, where Robin has sort of used storytelling and seen how it was used as a tool of violence and a tool of power and control. And the prioress is kind of telling him, you know, in that scene, she says knives cut bread as well as they do flesh. And she's trying to teach him, you know, stories aren't inherently evil or violent. They are what we use them for. And she's, you know, she's using stories

of religion, stories of religion beyond just Catholicism. I mean, she kind of cites, you know, you know, Celtic lore. She's quoting all these heretical texts by like Lucretius and Boetheus. And she's sort of the idea is that she believes in the power of stories to help and heal if we kind of choose to use them in that way. But it's our responsibility to do that. And so that's kind of what they're vying with the whole movie. And I won't spoil the ending, but there is sort of, they find a kind of middle ground at the end where Robin kind of, kind of, of realizes that, you know, it's not about the truth of stories. It's about like how we sort of use them to be there for other people and what power they

have in that way and that they can be used to help or hurt. And in terms of that, stories about storytelling, I mean, obviously we have the ballad of Robin Hood's death. Tell me about the way that song and music works in your film. It was interesting. I was thrilled to hear that you love assassination of Jesse James, which of course has this really keening score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. But music is a very, very big part.

of your film. Can you tell me about how the music integrates with it? Yeah, so I found this incredible musician, this Sheffield-based musician named Jim Getty, who had never done a score before. But I've just been listening to a lot of, you know, kind of like folk Celtic music. I knew I wanted to have something that had an edge of that, but I didn't want it to get hokey, but I wanted it to feel kind of of the natural world and of that time. And Jim is just this like incredible kind of trying to, He's this musician who's sort of trying to carry the tradition of folk forward, believe in its roots, but also kind of bring his own artistic edge to it. And I just loved his voice and his style and it felt so raw.

And I reached out to him on Instagram and I just said, would you ever, had you ever wanted to score a movie? And he was kind of intimidated by it. He didn't really know how to approach it. But we paired him with Tony Lewis, who's this music editor who works with Ridley Scott. And it's just incredible. And the two of them kind of, we all worked together to sort of find this. We had the sound. We had Jim sound, which was so, like, raw and ancient.

And then it was just about kind of, like, working with him to figure out how do we use that to score a movie? And he ended up kind of being a natural. But I think it brought this kind of ancient rawness while also having this, like, very deep kind of personal, modern feeling to it. And we did, you know, we included even, like, a lot of old ballads. There's a, he sings Tuak Horvies in there as they're sort of marching away. So there is this kind of nod to this feeling of, you know, these are old ballads. These are old songs. These are things that are passed down through words.

And we wanted to almost feel like a little bit of that voice was kind of steeped throughout the movie through Jim singing. And I don't know. It was one of those just kind of magical creative things, though, where it could have worked terribly to hire someone who had never done a score before. But he ended up just kind of doing an amazing job and being lovely to work with. Yeah, it works. Noah Jupe is, yeah, it does. It works fantastically. Noah Jupe is one heck of a prospect, isn't he?

He's great. I mean, he was fantastic in a quiet place, obviously. you were you were part of that story but he's uh he's a star isn't he already yeah he's he's a special one he is i mean he must be like 21 now but uh he's you know in my mind he's yeah it's like he's like he's a child yet he is both so talented so kind like for a kid that kind of grew up on film sets he's just sort of this lovely smart good head on his shoulders kid i loved noah and he was so excited to just sort of like engage in this project and let us just do terrible things to him and mess up his eyes.

And like he, I don't know, I think Noah is obviously, everyone's watching him. I mean, he's already a star. But like he's, I can't wait. I can't believe he has hopefully another 60 years ahead of him of incredible acting because he's a special one. Your star in Quiet Place Day 1, Lupita Njongo, of course, has had quite a year. I imagine you were first in line to go to the Odyssey because she was fantastic in that. Yeah, I've seen, I've seen that on 70mmy.

filmed twice already. So yeah, she's amazing in that. And who knew that bows and arrows and stringing bows was going to be the thing of 2026? Yeah. Yeah. It's a crazy world. It's a very confusing time. AI's coming about. We need some classic string of bow. Keep things simple. We understand tension. Is it Death Stranding next for you, Michael? Yeah. I'm doing a little, I'm doing an HBO show with Damon Lindelof and then I'm doing Death Stranding with A24 and Hideo Pajima. So that's what I'm writing right now. Michael, it's been a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you very much, indeed, for your time today. Thank you guys so much.

And just to repeat, Mark, we'll be doing the... I mean, we've hinted at quite a lot of stuff there, but the full review of the death of Robin Hood will be on next week's programme. So what else is out, then? Bitter Christmas. Of course, it's August. This is the new film by Almodovar.

This is a tragic comic melodrama upon the theme of auto-fiction, reflecting on the relationship between fiction and reality and the responsibility that an artist does or doesn't owe to the real-life people and events that inspire them.

So there are two parallel stories, okay? One story is set in, I think it's 2004. There's a director, Elsa, who has a firefighter boyfriend, who is also a male stripper. She wants to be making films. She's doing commercials. She's also starting to have panic attacks

after a family loss. And one of those panic attacks, we meet her after she's had the first one, puts her in, hospital. It happens to be a hospital in which she once directed a film, in which a character died in that hospital. She also has a friend who is tortured over the grief of a loss of a child, and the story then takes her on holiday where she starts work on what will be her third film, which is a story about two grieving women on a volcanic island. So a lot of kind of self-referentiality

going on again. That is all wrapped in a second story, which is playing out. pretty much in the present, in which we discover that Elsa is a character who is being written by a filmmaker who is trying to make his return to features. His assistant is Monica. She's in the process of being about to take a sabbatical, so he will be left in the sole care of his partner, Santee, who we see is clearly the model for the firefighter stripper in the fictional story. and the film being a work of auto fiction is also implied that Elsa is him, is his kind of alter ego.

But as the story grows, Monica starts to realize that it's drawing on her stories as well about which she is not pleased. We're going to play you a clip from the trailer. Obviously, it's in Spanish, so I'm just going to tell you in advance what it says. I think I finished writing the script. Are you happy with it?

more or less, something is missing. You always say that when you're done writing. And I haven't made a film in five years. I've not created anything that excites me. And then I cannot concentrate. I can only write about the now. Is it going to be autobiographical? As little as possible, I hope.

Here's the clip. I think I'm going to end. You're content? I think it's a little short. He's a little bit more. Well, I always say it's the same when you're to write a movie, no? I see five years that no one

has said or nothing that has rebutte. I'm incapable of concentrary me. Only can't write of the immediate. It's very confessional. I'll try to that be the less possible. That's sound great.

Can I just, can I just forgive me for being slightly slow and a bit stupid? Auto fiction is, so it's a fictionalized autobiography. Yes, it's basically

drawing on your own experiences. So writing something that is, I suppose, these things have also been called Romano Clef, haven't they, that are sort of using stuff from your own life, which I have to, you know, it's, there's a lot of discussion in the film about what exactly it is. And there's a lot of, this is all fiction.

Yes, it's fiction, but you're drawing on characters who are real, but it's not those characters, but it is those characters. Have you, I've got their opinion, so that's it. So actually one of the, one of the questions that the film raises is exactly the question which you have raised, which is sorry, what exactly do you mean by that, you know, by that sort of fictional. So, for example, if you raise,

wrote a book that centered around, let's say, for example, a DJ whose life experiences mirrored yours. But perhaps that DJ wouldn't be male. It would be a female, but it could still be a work of auto fiction. Does that make any sense? Right. Okay. So it could be sort of based on and inspired by it, but actually not a memoir. Precisely.

It's absolutely not a memoir. And that is a key thing going on here is that it is not a memoir, although in many ways it is. So some of the reviews have drawn parallels between this and pain and glory. which was sort of semi-autobiographical. And that was a tale about a filmmaker in stasis. And in that film, this director, there's a revival of one of his old movies, and it puts him in contact with the past

and then sort of brings back a whole bunch of stuff. And I really love that film. It's about memory and childhood and loves and regrets, and I thought it was terrific. And I compared that film in my review of it to the films of Terence Davis, which is the highest praise. That film also had a great score by Alberto Iglesias,

who does another terrific score for this film for Bitter Christmas. The score is pretty much, I think, the best thing about Bitter Christmas, which I don't like anything like as much as I like Pain and Glory. The weird thing about the score is it seems to be playing almost all the way through the film, and a lot of the time it felt to me, have you ever had this experience? You're listening to a score to a film that sounds like a score to a much better film than the film that you're watching,

and you kind of think, I'd like to be watching that, film as opposed to what I'm actually watching. You ever had that experience? I have not had that experience, no. Well, I had it very much with this, which is not to say that this is a bad film. It is to say that Amadevaas films have always flirted with the melodrama of tele-novelas, okay? But they have rarely looked like that is actually what they are.

I mean, in the case of this, there were times I thought I am just watching a bad television soap. I mean, it's superbly, as with all Almodovar stuff, color-coded and its settings and its environment and its costumes. But it's also people having, to my ear, very unconvincing conversations about contrived situations which I didn't believe in. It only really becomes, when it catches fire. I mean, it's inert.

For a lot of it feels like it's very, very inert. It feels like it's very written and very stagey. there's a couple of scenes in which it comes to life, one of which, well, there's a couple of times in which song comes into play, and there's a scene in which a character sings a Chavlovaga's song, and the entire film seems to hold its breath, and this is actually, and it's a really great moment. And then there is a kind of confrontation

about the way in which auto fiction can be vampiric and the way in which it can take stuff from real life that it doesn't have the right to take. and it's really kind of in the final act of the film when all that stuff comes together, it sort of gets up out of its chair and starts walking around the room and doing stuff and feeling like an al-Modovar film

because the thing with his movies is they've never felt lifeless really. This did feel like, okay, you know, it becomes in the end a sort of meditation on his own work, the status of his career, the themes that he's returned to again and again, the way in which, the way in which he's used autobiographical elements

to which he has returned. And at that point, the whole kind of level of emotional engagement really picks up and it stops looking like bad television and it starts reminding you that this is one of the greatest film directors of their generation. Someone whose filmmaking is astonishing and who is really cinematic.

So the thing is, look, it's not a bad film. It's just, it is, in terms of Almodova's, cinematic legacy. It just felt like we've, again, I sort of said this about the Ridley Scott film. We have been here before and we have seen this done an awful lot better. And there are moments in it

and a final act in it, which I found moving. But I did find a lot of it that I was just watching it and going, yep, yeah, yeah, got that. And it felt stagey. And not staging in a way that was great. Amadavarian stagey,

but stagey in just like, a little bit inert. So it's fine. It's not bad. It's just not particularly good. Not destined to be a festive favourite then. Well, that's the one weird thing about it was that Christmas does feature. There is a thing about Christmas in it. But if I was now making the Secret of Cinema program that we made some years ago about Christmas movies, this would definitely be one of the ones that you put in as it is a Christmas movie, but it's not a Christmas movie, but it is a Christmas movie. I feel as though we need a good laugh, but unfortunately, we've only got to the

laughter lift moment, so let's play the music and see what happens. Well, now, hey Mark, I had a bit of a to-do with the good lady ceramicist her indoors this week. You're pedantic because you take things literally, she said. No, said I. That would make me a kleptomaniac, dear. Hey. And that's not the only thing that annoys her about me, but a lot of them are not my fault at

all. For example, did you know that I have this awful disease where I compulsively tell aeroplane station jokes? No. The doctor says it's terminal. Well done for getting an airplane station. And you know Highgate Cemetery here in show? I do. Lots of notable graves there, including George Michael, Douglas Adams, George Elliot, Karl Marx. Also, the person who invented the crossword. And if you look at the map, his grave is 12 down and 9 across. I think that's a Barry Cryer joke from 1974. As indeed was the terminal joke. As indeed was the kleptomaniac joke.

Anyway, coming up, Mark's going to review a film which appears to be called, named after this, just mentioned George Michael. Yeah, this is what happened. I turned up at Mr. Young's screening room, and I rang on the doorbell, and the guy opened the door and said, yes, and I said, I want your sex. And I'm sure they had a lot of that.

Okay, well, that next. When you buy furniture from Wayfair, you're not just getting furniture. You're setting your home up for a lifetime of memories. Visit Wayfair.ca.com or download the Wayfair app. Furniture made for all of life's moments. That's Wayfair. Wayfair, every style, every home. Some evil thing happened here.

Three people die in a quiet suburb in the same house, years apart. It's not a coincidence. This wasn't ghosts and ghosts. goblins. Okay, these were murders. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is what happened to the Harrisons. Coming September 1st, wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribers to the binge can listen to all episodes, all at once, ad-free. Okay, so it's time for our occasional discussion of the world of LLMs.

What's that? A large language model and AI. Okay. And last time we did this feature, Mark and I called this sting rather weedy. Hey, I don't like that. So the production team have had another go. Oh dear. Remain calm. Stay in your homes. There is nothing to fear. There is everything to monitor. Hey, I don't like that.

That's the epic sting as opposed to the weedy sting. The nicest thing was on my show this week. which you can check out again on the Rayo app. Thank you very much. At least the original sting was shorter, Simon. Yeah. It can be epic and brief, I would say. So that's our production tip there. Make it epic in five seconds long.

That'd be very good. This is quite interesting. An email from TC. That's how it's signed. Okay. Top cap. Yeah, exactly. Dear David and Gigolo Joe,

following your chat about AI sparked by Simon Brew's email about how AI cut traffic to his website in one day, I have some news. I co-own an independent video game news and review website called the 6thaxis.com

capital T, capital S, capital A, which has been running for over 20 years. We, like millions of other websites, use a system called Cloudflare to protect the site from hackers bots and other nefarious agents. Cloudflare has slowly been introducing anti-AI measures, and now websites can control how much of their content is scraped, with options ranging from blocking it completely to charging the AI crawlers for access. Importantly, it does not

stop results from showing up in normal searches. As you can imagine, this is a game changer. AI bots will no longer be able to scrape content without permission, and if enough websites start using similar technology, those AI summaries in Google will become useless. So good news for those of us publishing the written word online, we just need something similar for audio and visual formats. Given that AI has not gained self-awareness yet, maybe the one thing we should use it for is to ask it to design a system to stop it from scraping other media. Usual sign-offs from Topcat TC. What was the name of the software?

So Cloudflare is the software and the sixth axis.com is the name of the website. Wow. So TC, thank you very much. It does sound very interesting. When you say at the end, given that AI has not gained self-awareness yet, there is a fascinating and also, I should add, terrifying interview that the economist did with Yuval Noah Harari, who's thought a lot about this kind of stuff. And he makes the point that AI can pretend to get self-awareness.

AI is quite clever enough to not actually to feel pain, but actually to say that it does feel pain. So how will we know when it has gained consciousness? Isn't it also true that AI can pretend not to have gained consciousness because it understands that that will make it worry, to us. You know, there's always a thing about, you know, is it thinking for itself? I mean, surely, if it is thinking for itself and it doesn't want us to know that, it can just

lie. Yeah. I mean, it should, at the end, we're not here to talk about this, but anyway, it sparked by TC. At the end of this interview, basically, it sounded as though every politician, this is not a left or right issue, particularly, every politician needs to answer the question. Will you legislate to make it illegal for a, an AI to pretend to be human.

That's what you need to do. So Harari says, Yval know Harari, says, I don't mind talking to an AI about my medical condition because it may well have lots of great things to tell me. I just need to know that it's an AI. I don't want it to be called Dr. Johnson or whatever. I don't want it to be pretending.

And I thought, okay, that's very good. If we had politicians on the show, I'd ask them that. But anyway. I had a weird thing happen this week and I'll just talk about this in very, very oblique fashion. I had the first approach from somebody doing something who asked if they could use my AI image. And the answer was no.

But it was just, wow. Okay, so it's starting. I could turn that into an anecdote, really, couldn't I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll come back on that one next week. Right, so let's do a What's On thing. Thank you very much indeed for the Watson's that come in. So audio is the traditional way of sending these in,

but video is also very good, and you send it to correspondence at COVID-a-Mah.com. Here's Cameron from Homeland's Adventure Film Festival. Hi, I'm Cameron Hall, and I'm the founder of Homeland's Adventure Film Festival, which is coming to London this September. We're bringing two special evenings of Adventure Cinema to the beautiful screening room at the Charlotte Street Hotel

on the 3rd and 4th of September, with 13 films from 4th of September, filmmakers around the world. There's everything from skiing, climbing and mountaineering to wingsuit flying, free diving, kayaking and trail running including nine UK premieres and a world premiere. With tickets and a full program available at our website, homelands.co.uk, h-o-lm-l-n-d-s.c.com. Simon, I want your sex. 18 for strong sex and sexually abusive behaviour. Sign me up. So there are two sex companies.

There are two sex comedies out this week. One of them is aimed at the mainstream. I'll be reviewing it in T2, and it has an audience of no one at all. The other is outrageously out there and independent, and is, in my opinion, by far, the more accessible and certainly the more entertaining of the two. So this is the latest utre colorful outing from American indie queer cinema legend Greg Araki,

who you will know, of course, as the director of Totally Eft Up, doom generation, nowhere, mysterious, Caboom, White Bird and the Blizzard. And the reason I cite all those is because I've reviewed most of them on various incarnations of this show over the years. This is described as an erotic comedy thriller written by Carly. Now, I think it's S-E-R-T-E-R-E-R-E-R. So she's an American writer, television host, the founder of a website that is written S-L-U-T-E-V-E-R. think you pronounce that slut ever, right? Vogue's online sex and relationships column and

had a memoir dispatches from an autonomous woman in a post-shame world. So Olivia Wilde, who we've talked about quite a lot recently, she was terrific in the invite, which I think you and I both enjoyed, continues to do sterling work in the very decent, grown-up sex satire market, which is a very, very small market. So she plays contemporary artist, Erica Tray. see, who we first meet lying face down in a swimming pool where she is discovered by Cooper Hoffman's Elliot, who is a battered and bloody dufous clad in women's underwear. So there's a kind of sunset boulevard thing, body in the pool. The action then goes nine and a half weeks earlier. Get it? Nine and a half weeks earlier. So we know where we are. Okay, we're in the cinematic world

of S&M. There's loads of sort of slice cinematic nozzle. There's one which is very, very clear quotation from the graduate with in this case the tale is of a young man and an older domineering woman. Apparently, in an original version of this script, it was the other way round. It was a younger woman and an older male boss. And I cannot imagine how that version of the script would ever have worked because the dynamic in this seems to be the only way it could work. So now, Cooper Hoffman's character is in a police cell recounting the story of his relationship with Erica, who we saw face down in the swimming pool. how she hired him to work in her gallery

and then immediately started grooming him as her submissive sex slave. Here is a clip from the trailer. Elliot. Erica would like to see you in her office. Me? Come over here so I can take a better look at you. Oh, don't walk.

I'd really prefer if you crawled. Like a lot of people my age, I have had conflicted and confusing feelings about sex. Do you have a girlfriend? I do. You wouldn't get weird then? Weird. If we...

Your relationship with your employer was primarily sexual in nature? What's that? Yes. Why does all the cool sex deviant stuff always happen to you? You're a sexual astronaut just exploring the outer limits of experience. So, you get the picture. She's wild, crazy, he's out of his depth, but he loves it. He loves being dominated by someone so glamorous, so out there, so unrestrained.

And up until now, he's been in a relationship with someone played by Charlie X-E-X, who seems to have zero interest in him. And now suddenly he's in the middle of this absolute maelstrom of weird, perverted strangeness in which he can be called upon at any time to do absolutely anything with no holds barred. And then the wheels start to come off because then it starts to become sort of properly abusive. And the thing is, the film, I mean, it nods towards sort of fairly vanilla fare like nine and a half weeks, But, I mean, tonally, this is much closer to, you know, taxis um, clow or matress or more recently, that film that I really liked. Dogs don't wear pants.

I mean, I really enjoyed this. I thought it was laugh out loud funny. I mean, it passed the six laughs test in the first 20 minutes, no trouble at all. Its depiction of the ludicrousness of the world of modern art was particularly astute because she's this kind of crazy artist who just has all this art, which is all to do with sex. and she keeps saying, yeah, but all artists, a load of nonsense, isn't it? But she's also kind of completely obsessed with it, and it's all absolutely about her. And the weird thing about it is that for a film that was so much about, you heard from that thing, you know, why is all the kinky strange stuff always happened to you?

I thought it was weirdly wholesome because it had a totally non-pruriant attitude to the strangeness of human sexual behavior. I mean, there is no kink shaming here at all. and it's just, it's weirdly joyous. And I think one of the reasons is the performances, you saw Lickrish Pizza, didn't you? Oh, yeah, a few years ago. Yeah.

So do you remember thinking in Lickrish Pizza, wow, Cooper Hoffman is an absolutely terrific actor because he's the, you know, he's the main kid in it, yeah? I'll be led and guided by you in all things. Does this mean no, that you're not remembering how great he was? because he was, okay, he was absolutely fabulous as Gary Valentine. And apparently Gregoraki thought, having seen licorice pizza, okay, no, that's not the guy that we need because he's too young, too dorky.

And then he came in an audition and he's absolutely the guy. He's just brilliant here. He gets the bewildered young man just right, who's suddenly in this other world in which he's sort of discovering himself. As for Olivia Wilde, I mean, she just appears like she's willing to swallow the entire world. whole. She's like to say that the performance is scenery chewing doesn't come anywhere close to just how magnificently outrageous it is because she's playing this dominatrix artist for whom boundaries is just so boring. And she's just, she's devouring the role. And it's a really

fearless performance. And the interesting thing is, I mean, you know, she's a fairly sort of mainstream star, but she she has, she appears to have the sensibility of somebody who's, absolutely in that indie world. I mean, it is the most out there performance I've seen in quite a long time. She really sinks her teeth into the role's breathtaking. As for Gregoraki, once again, negotiates that straight. I mean, this is interesting. When Gregoraki started out, I never thought he'd turn into quite the successful director

that he has turned into. And he does manage to occupy that weird hinterland between the outrageous and the Utre and the lovable and the wholesome. And these films, they were every bit as color-coordinated as the work of Pedro Ladova, and they often look every bit as good, although I think they probably cost a fraction of it. But even in his mid-60s, he doesn't seem to have lost any of his terrible punky edge. We were talking about earlier on in the show about, you know, you can be a man in your 60s, you still think you're 14.

And Gregoraki still seems to have that kind of that punky bite to him. So as I said, two sex comedies out this week, one of them will review in T2, which is one night only. And he's just incredibly vanilla and incredibly bland. And I don't think we'll have an audience still. But as far as this is concerned, this is just rip-roaring fun. And in the same way as I really enjoyed sex and death at Camp Miasma, I really, really enjoyed, I want your sex. And it sent me out of the cinema with a spring in my step.

And I have to say, an increased aberration for Olivia Wilde, it just doesn't seem in any way scared. of going, fine, this role requires everything to be turned up to 57, so let's do that. Does the George Michael track make an appearance? It's not about that, Simon. It's not. No, I don't think it's in there. No, no, I think it's just a title.

That's it for this week. This has been a Sony Music Entertainment Production. This week's team, Eric, Josh and Heather redacted Simon Paul. In Take 2, we're directing you to the Overflow Car Park from more chat about current film releases. If you've enjoyed what you've heard so far and even if you haven't, there is plenty more waiting for you over in take to such as five-question film club and questions. Three questions. You mentioned. Sorry. Sorry. I was slow off the mark. I'm so sorry. This week we're asking why so many celebrities signed a petition in support of film director

Roman Polanski after his arrest in Switzerland in 2009. Well, yes, that's a very good question. And don't forget people of Bristol and beyond will be at the Bristle Beacon on December the 6th. tickets are on sale via the link in the show notes. You can get both takes ad-free. Just search COVID-Dameo Patreon and join the church. Mark, what is your film of the week? Well, in a week in which there's a film by Elmodova and a film by Ridley Scott, I'm delighted to exactly my film of the week is Greg Arakis.

I want your sex. There's another take and landed alongside this one. Thank you very much indeed for listening.