The Big Picture - ‘Blonde’ and the Top 5 Essential Marilyn Monroe Movies

Episode Date: September 28, 2022

‘Blonde,’ Andrew Dominik’s long-awaited Marilyn Monroe biopic starring Ana de Armas, is now available on Netflix. Sean and Amanda dissect the film’s handful of successes and numerous, puzzling failures, before discussing Monroe’s titanic impact on movie stardom and the various depictions of her throughout cinema history. Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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but diamonds are a girl's best friend. I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Davis. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Blonde, the long-awaited fictionalized biopic about the life and work of American screen icon Marilyn Monroe, is available to watch on Netflix right now. We're breaking it down and talking about Monroe's work, including her best film, in this conversation.

Amanda, the film Blonde, did you like this film? Do you do any push-ups this morning? Do you do any stretching? You ready? I'm ready. Let's get a workout in. Yeah, no, I did not like this film, as you know, because we got to see it together, which that part I enjoyed. That was very exciting. And we sat through all three hours of this film. And in a

screening room, we did see it on a big screen, which I think is crucial to actually having completed the film. And then we did get to do that exciting thing, which was like we immediately started talking about it. And pretty rare for us, like we stayed in our seats. I did enjoy this. It's funny that you said that. This part was really nice. And we talked about this during Don't Worry Darling.

We've talked a lot about this in the last few episodes of like the thing of talking about movies, which, you know, is what we do on this podcast, but having movies to discuss and argue about and get involved with is really fun. And I'm excited for that.

And boy, do I have a lot to say about this. Yeah. So I didn't really like this film that much either. I know we're in no partial credit this year, but I'm going to foreground

the conversation by saying that this movie is written and directed by Andrew Dominick, Australian filmmaker. I've been a pretty big fan of his three previous narrative features. That includes Chopper, the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford,

and 2012's Killing Them Softly, which was starring Brad Pitt. This film is also an adaptation, much like Killing Them Softly, of a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Dominick is an incredible visual stylist. And this movie, in its way, is an incredible visual achievement. And that's basically where my praise stops for the movie. There's total commitment to the vision of what he's doing. But I think as we explore what it is that he's doing, we'll pretty

quickly come to the conclusion that it's pretty brain dead and kind of disappointing and maybe even a little troubling what he's trying to accomplish and say about Marilyn Monroe, about femininity, about middle century America and trauma. And, you know, a lot of it is based very closely on the text. I have not read this novel by Joyce Carol. You have at least read some of this novel. I read about 200 pages and then I stopped. And part of the reason I stopped is part of the reason that I did not enjoy this film, which is I think the animating idea, if you can call it that, is I find pretty limiting intellectually, but certainly cannot support a three-hour film. But I want to go back to no partial credit, which I still don't want to give partial credit, but I do think this is a storytelling aspect are to its detriment. So it's not even, it looks good, but to me, it's the emphasis and the service of the collage and the visual undermines what it's trying to do. Or maybe doesn't undermine it,

maybe just speaks for itself, but I don't even think it deserves partial credit. Well, it feels like he spent a lot of time imagining the visual execution and maybe just accepted whole cloth what was on the page in the novel and translating that as opposed to kind of interrogating some of the psychological underpinnings just so people know what we're

talking about obviously the film is about Marilyn Monroe there's painstaking efforts to recreate some of Marilyn's most famous parts the films I mean some of the recreations look extraordinary this is not like Forrest Gump territory it is like inch for inch moment for moment capturing gentlemen prefer blondes and some like it hot. I mean, Anna de Armas, whose name we have not yet said, who stars as Marilyn in this film, really transformed. It's pretty extraordinary what they're able to accomplish. Yes, and it doesn't look schlocky and it doesn't venture into the territory that a lot of these recreation biopics often fall into, which is sort of SNL parody imitation. Like it is suddenly like you're living in this 1950s world. And then likewise, when we're seeing Marilyn's, you know,

personal life and the life that we don't know about necessarily from photographs maybe that have been published, the recreation there is exceptional. And then there are a lot of visual choices that are made from changing the aspect ratio of the story to shifting from black and white to color to changing film stocks. There are a lot of very aggressive choices in the storytelling to kind of keep you unbalanced, off balance, as you essentially plunge into the psyche of, at least through the eyes of this film, a very damaged person. You know, a person who's been really traumatized by everything in their life from the very beginning of their life, all the way through Marilyn Monroe's tragic end. It's a hard movie to talk about in some ways, because

the novel itself is about Marilyn Monroe, but not necessarily not legally about it's an imagining of what Marilyn's life was. But the beats are almost word for word, things that she participated in or people that she actually was married to or interacted with, with some exceptions. And so I think this is that unusual case where a lot of people, probably especially younger people

who don't know as much about Marilyn will watch this movie and think, well, that's definitely what happened. Right. And that's not the case. And that's not necessarily a bad thing that there are necessarily, you know, historical elisions going on here. We talked about this with The Woman went through that I don't want to say I found unnerving.

I just found like a little confusing. I don't know why there's so much fealty to this story when the world knows that this is a movie about Marilyn Monroe. Do you know what I'm saying? Yes. I mean, there are real historical beats. I mean, both of her marriages, or at least two of her marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, which are the famous ones. If you know anything about Marilyn Monroe, you know those happened, are included in more kind of snapshot visual way but like you see all of them as you mentioned uh jfk the president is in this film he is and you know there has been a lot of speculation that i think is pretty much confirmed that they had an extramarital relationship which uh is definitely suggested.

It is rendered. It is rendered in this film. We'll come back to it. But, you know, there is the historical record of happy birthday, Mr. President. So, you know, we know that they were associated. So it has things that happened. And then it has just a tremendous amount of psychological, like, and or or conjecture and trying to figure out what all of these things that we know happened to Marilyn Monroe must have created in the person

and what was going on behind the screen and if you want to be generous, also trying to figure out the dynamic between what it means to be Marilyn Monroe and to create this person. And so, you know, obviously she was born Norma Jean Mortensen. And there is a dynamic in the film between Norma and Marilyn. And Marilyn is almost this otherworldly, like, projection. She is, like, the 30-foot high. The alter ego superhero. projection. She is like the 30 foot high. The alter ego superhero. Yeah. Cut out from seven year itch.

And I do think that even a completely uninformed viewer could understand that these are the things that happened. And then this is maybe not an estimation of how she's feeling but this is a like a recreation of of feeling this is a a guess in part because the movie is so focused on the psychological experiment you're basically just made to feel like Marilyn Monroe for three hours or this movie's idea of of her and what that experience would be right there's no way to know if this is actually how she felt or even specifically some things that she experienced um because there's no proven record of that there is only conjecture it is like a psychological reimagining at times it is a direct direct point of view with the camera through her eyes or through other parts of her body, somewhat unnervingly.

This is a very strange project in general. It's been a long, long time in the making. It's been almost 12 years in the making for Andrew Dominick. It's been a passion project for him ever since the novel was published. I'm having a hard time understanding what it is about Marilyn Monroe that interests him because he has said on the record that he's not really a big fan of her movies. And we will talk about her as a performer and kind of what made her special

and not just what made her famous. And I'm not sure that he necessarily like cares about Hollywood at this time in any meaningful way, even though the movie is very much about the sort of dark side, the underbelly of what happens in Hollywood and how people rise in Hollywood. And, you know, he's obviously not a woman. And the movie is very much about not just one woman's trauma and one woman's struggle,

but it's, you know, it's projecting a lot of sort of representational decade-spanning experience onto a lot of women, honestly, not just women in Hollywood, but across the board. And there's something like a little discomforting about this guy. He's making a lot of assumptions, I would say, in the execution of this movie. And so there is obviously a grandeur to Marilyn Monroe and a romance and a kind of fire right there's like she's a she's such a sexy person she's such a sensual person so the titillation is obvious but from an intellectual perspective or an artistic perspective I still don't really get what was interesting to him about this other than frankly like the trauma porn yeah that he is puts on screen i mean that's the thing if if you could sense

what was interesting to him if you if there were larger ideas and it's a rich text right i mean obviously her iconography or her place in american history and not just hollywood history this idea of the blonde which you know shouldn't, but certainly I like our modern understanding of it. She idealized the blonde bombshell. Yeah, exactly. And these ideas of celebrity and fame and certainly also trauma and childhood experience and your relationship with your family and objectivization and, you know, all of these things. There's a lot to work with. Does he work with any of it in this film? Like, I don't really think so. And so my objection is not the effort or even that it's a man trying to understand all of this. It's that the only

understanding I could really glean is like, wow, a lot of terrible things happened to her and let's just watch them in succession for three hours with absolutely no break. It is, as you said, trauma porn, like sadistic and kind of one note. That's the thing. Because to me, it's not the sadism that bothers me. As you know, I love nasty kind of dark movies that leave you with a pit in your stomach at the end. I actually love that feeling and that experience.

And I didn't hate the movie because it kind of kept my eyes wide open as I was watching it. But I, it felt like, and the reason I raised the fact that he's a man is because it feels like he literally doesn't have access to that bigger idea. Like it feels like he is unable to kind of pierce the outer skin of the story of Marilyn Monroe. And this is a person who, it's not just that we have lots of evidence of who she was on screen. She's been portrayed on screen by a number of actresses at this point. I mean, probably most recently by Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn, which is about the production of The Prince and the Showgirl. But, you know, I remember the Mira Sorvino HBO movie that was starring her and Ashley Judd that I think actually more effectively rendered this kind of duality

between Norma and Marilyn and the idea of invention. And this movie just really doesn't give Marilyn Monroe a lot of agency. And it gives her none. And I don't really know why, because you could certainly make the case that she was victimized in the early stages of her career because she was sexually assaulted. It's presumed that she was sexually assaulted by producers in the early stages because that is often what happened in the studio system. To get on contract, you were subject to the casting couch. There are so many horrific stories over

the years about the way that that worked. Maybe it's an unfair, unreasonable assumption, but many people understand that to be the case for many of those bombshell actresses in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. But also throughout her career, she constantly was claiming independence and inventing new spaces for herself to succeed and pursuing filmmakers and starting a production company. This is a person who has actually quite a complex and dynamic sense of professional agency, at least. The movie is not interested in any of that stuff and in fact when you read interviews with dominic which i have found like pretty frustrating and at times nauseating yes um he literally is saying like i wasn't interested in that yeah why not that's actually more notable than the fact that she was abused which we know because everyone knows what happened in hollywood

for 70 years yeah i i mean i have no idea why not and the movie even when it does show those kind of more iconic like high profile moments or like diamonds are a girl's best friend for example it's just i think shown in the background uh some like it hot which is we'll talk about it more one of my favorite movies and one of her my favorite of her movies she is shown like having a tough time on set it's it's not like a comedic triumph it's you know it's kind of in the i believe what andrew dominic referred to as the dead doll phase of the movie which that's an interview and deadline you can do that interpretation yourself um happy birthday mr President is not in the film. Some other JFK incidents are. So it's never showing her in glory. It's never even tangoing with this idea of her as this,

you know, American icon, if only to then break that down. You don't get the high, you only get the low. And I will say, not in defense, but I mentioned that I read about 200 pages of the Joyce Carol Oates novel and then I quit. I quit because this was my experience of reading the book and it was just grim and relentless. You know, it starts as a child and the interpretation of her childhood

presented in this novel and then in Andrew Dominick's film is really tough. Brutal. Just oppressive. Yeah. And a disturbed mother played by Julianne Nicholson in the film and an absentee father. Ultimately, the movie doesn't include the foster care stuff, but there was a hundred long page foster care experience in the novel, which was also very difficult to read. So at some point, I found the oppressive grimness of the novel too much. And I was like, okay okay I don't have another 600 pages of this in me so if he's using this as a

text I guess he's using this as a text yeah he stayed faithful for sure it's it's it's pretty evident because I don't know why you would run like make the movie this way if you weren't staying faithful to something that had this tonality I mean that opening that opening stretch is kind of an interesting thing to break down in this conversation because on the one hand, it's really visually accomplished and kind of amazing and a little and terrifying. Julian Nicholson plays her mother as a paranoid schizophrenic and we sort of like jump right into the mass delusion of being raised by this woman. It's very scary. Marilyn or Norma Jean, I should say, is very young. She's maybe five, six years old. And when we, when the film starts and Julian Nicholson's character is fully melting down,

which is somewhat accurate to the reporting, but you know, Marilyn Monroe's mother was married three times. She had many children. I think she had six or seven children. Marilyn Monroe was raised by her for a stretch and then was sent foster care, and then eventually to an orphanage, which is sort of told in this story. But there was this idea of the lone, lonely girl that Dominic keeps returning to. And we see this later in the film when she's at her own film premiere surrounded by adoring fans,

and she feels utterly lonely. That's not exactly how she was raised. That's not exactly what her life was. It's a small note, but it's a relevant note because it's sort of like, there's all of this work that goes into recreating things. But then there's also all of this work to kind of cast aside inconvenient details of the life that I find curious. And it's because there is just this relentless pursuit of that grimness that you're talking about. And I don't know what it's serving.

And also just this really, I guess, simple, if you want to be generous, and I find to be really limiting idea of, and limiting sounds ungenerous, but the point of the movie, as you said to me afterwards, you were like, what if it was really this simple? Is that she had a truly horrific, completely tragic childhood and that just messed her up for the rest of her life you know and also simultaneously went on to become the most significant sex symbol in american history right right but that you know it all stems from this was just things were were grim and kind of irreversible from the very beginning. And we're just living with the consequences of that

for the rest of her life and the rest of her movie, the movie. And you were like, what if that is really how it was? And I think, honestly, we don't know anything. It is conjecture. I think it says something about the novelist or the filmmaker to explore why this conjecture like speaks to them. But what if it is? What if that is true?

That's like tragic and really upsetting and is also maybe not enough for a three-hour movie which sounds heartless to say and i'm not trying to be heartless to the person or to the idea of trauma but i do think increasingly we're coming to this in movies of there is a lot of and and tv and art in general books certainly there's a great piece by pearl pearl siegel and then new york in the new yorker because she moved from the new york times to new yorker about like the trauma plot and it keeps coming up and it's not to deny the experiences of anyone involved, but it's like once you've done the therapy, then the art processing the therapy, there's just not that much room. Just narratively dead. Yeah.

There's nowhere to go. Exactly. From the opening minutes, you're like, oh, it's this kind of movie. Yeah. It's not going to improve from there. Exactly. And that's the thing is as her life becomes more glamorous, she continues to sink deeper and deeper. And, you know, Ana de Armas is an incredibly likable screen presence.

She has the thing that we're constantly talking about on this show, which is like she is open and you want to root for her. She is like exciting to watch. She's obviously quite stunning, especially in this movie. Everything she pulls off in Knives Out is yeah yeah yeah is you know is uh it's it's quite clear like why she's on the rise as a performer but there's no there's nowhere for her to go there's no there's not even really like any notes for her to play other than just like fear sadness and the the projection of trying to hold it together in many scenes she's trying to hold it together and collapsing and shattering.

Yeah. And she's good at that. But for what? Well, I think one of the ways that the film is most effective, if unintentionally, is that you start to worry for her. And I don't mean this

in a concerned troll experiment, but, you know, it was three hours. I had some time to think about the making of this movie while watching this movie. And imagine that process yeah and just hard work living in it every single day and she by all accounts is not really a method actor and she had a great cover story in um variety by dan daddario where she talks about

like leaving it and not totally living in it but she also also says that she filmed No Time to Die, the Bond movie, after Blonde. And she talks about how the Marilyn character was kind of still with her. And you can kind of see it in her No Time to Die performance. The glamour of it, you mean? And I think the charisma and a little bit the bubbliness. And all of the things, things frankly that she wasn't allowed to do as Marilyn in this movie which when you when you think about that scene which we immediately compare to like a 30s screwball like there is something really like vibrant about it um she's

great and she wasn't allowed to do any of that in this movie so it spills over into No Time to Die yeah it's such this movie is such a head scratcher for me because when it ended i was impressed by certain aspects of it and the more i've thought about it and the more time i've spent re-watching marilyn monroe's films or reading about her life the more i'm just confounded about why everyone thought this was such a good idea i guess as far as um as far as anda armice goes like is this like a an award worthy performance? Is it like a notable I guess what I'm trying to figure out is sort of like

is this a movie that's just going to come and go? Because it's a movie that we've been hearing about for a long long time and that has come under much controversy in part because you know it received an NC-17 rating and it does feature some some not just disturbing but sexually explicit sequences throughout um there's as you pointed out here multiple abortion sequences that are among the

most like disturbing ever rendered yeah i should we talk about that now yeah sure because that's when it really tips over for me and it's not the abortion sequences i believe there are and i can't believe we're counting like this. And I really edge into horrible like a corner of the Internet. I don't want to edge in when I'm like, I think there are two abortions and one lost pregnancy. And anyway, there are three just really like medical surgery room invasive, deeply upsetting scenes. And on the one one hand that is a reality of every woman's life and show it i you know or acknowledge it on the other hand it doesn't really feel like these scenes are being used to speak to the reality of what it means to be a a childbearing

person it they are just really really digging in. And that was when I felt the fact that a man was making this film more than any other point. I should also add that there is a talking fetus, or maybe three. I'm not really sure. I was so angry throughout all of them. And this is meant to communicate Marilyn Monroe's sense of longing for a child and the loss that she feels as she's not able to have these children, whether for career reasons or her own reasons. I thought that was just like conservative trash. I was like so offended by it. It was really, really, really disgusting in my opinion. Yeah, the movie is this really messy blend of a feels like a few distinct influences that those sequences in particular feel very Tara Gilliam to me. They're almost like fantastical, but brutalist at the same time.

And then there's obviously a massive Terrence Malick influence on this movie. There are like sequences where you're looking into the stars and the stars are moving and the evolution of life and the majestic power of the cosmos and the earth colliding and all of this kind of like way less elegantly handled Malickian visual styling. And then I just, I thought of Oliver Stone a lot. Yeah. And as you know, I like Oliver Stone a lot.

And Oliver Stone has made a couple of movies that I would name among my favorite movies, including JFK. And it's not just that JFK is in this movie that I thought of JFK, but it's because of the big sweeping conclusions that JFK tends to make that I think are diverting from the truth at times, but are also this like bizarre psychological projection of a filmmaker talking about the death of a country, the death of an industry, the death of an American innocence. Like Andrew Dominic,

Dominic is doing something very similar with Marilyn Monroe that JFK was doing with that, with all that Oliver Stone was doing with JFK, which is like kind of maybe sorting through his daddy issues. And the idea of like dad ruined everything and I'm desperately reaching for dad and someone took dad away from me, which is just the most like facile,

psychobabble imaginable. And JFK was made 30, 25, 30 years ago. You know, like we're far past this in our culture. Sure, but JFK the film also adds in just a huge amount of wild level conspiracy theory, governmental. It is a movie about like capital A America. Now it's like a batshit crazy movie about America,

but it spans a lot. This is, Blonde is just daddy issues. That's true. That's true. It does do some things that are similar though. You know, one of the key, two of the key characters in Blonde are Cass Chaplin and Eddie Gee. This is so weird. Who are these two handsome, dashing young actors who meet Marilyn in an early stage in her career. We come to learn that they're Charles Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin, and Edward G. Robinson's very handsome playboy sons. And they are sort of lovers or maybe just pals and consorts. And they envelop Marilyn into their world.

And then they become this triad of sex and danger and passion. And as far as I can tell, that just never happened. Like that, those three people did not have a wild threesome love affair and were not enmeshed over a period of time. And they knew each other and maybe they were pals. And hell, maybe they even had sex. But this is like a bizarre invention in the middle of a movie that is otherwise trying to stick like very closely to this like sad script of this person's life and it's just one more choice in a long line of choices that just feels kind of brain dead it's like are you trying to indicate

that like these men sexually awakened this woman and that is how she went on to like realize her power as the sex symbol of the time but also they used and abused her the way that all men do it's just again it's like a really simple-minded lame plot device i read it also as more daddy issues because they obviously have daddy issues and then as i as i believe andrew dominic himself points out in the deadline piece in the middle of one of their so-called hot sex scenes, not hot at all. From Marilyn's perspective, you flash from the sex scene back to the poster of Charlie Chaplin that was in the apartment that she shared with her mother, like right next to this shrine photo of her father. It's really weird. I don't get it.

I mean, therapy has ruined art a little bit is where I am on this. And therapy has been great for humans and I benefit from therapy myself. So like no diss to therapy, but once you've worked it out, then you don't need to work it out again in the art. And it's really pretty stupid.

And this is kind of like peak version of that for me. A couple more choice quotes from that interview that I found a little frustrating or silly. One, you know, he said, my original idea was to do this for a serial killer. But when I read Blonde, I thought, well, I could do this with an actress and it should be slightly more sympathetic.

What? Why? How did you go from serial killer to Marilyn Monroe? It's really, really good. That's psycho behavior. Yeah. Here's another one. I think if you're telling a story of an orphan child from within the fortress of the self,

what you're looking to do is for her to retain her innocence. I think for that to happen, it's always got to feel like it's happening to her. Otherwise, you are asking her to accept responsibility. And this film is not asking her to accept any responsibility. I think that that can come across as a lack of agency definitely it does because it is this film is not asking her wait can i throw one more in that i texted you this morning this is my favorite the experience of life that was described and i believe it's talking about the daryl joyce carol novel, reminded me of the sort of things my girlfriends would say

when they would describe their lives and their mythological take on their lives. That's actually dope. The mythological take on their lives. My girlfriends, plural, because he's had a few because none of them have worked out. I'm not shocked.

But just kind of like that passing, not even misogyny, but disinterest and lack of thought expressed in that quote is really extraordinary and also you know reflects the opinion of this movie in 100 meters turn right actually no turn left there's some awesome new breakfast wraps at mcdonald's really yeah There's the sausage bacon and egg. A crispy seasoned chicken one. Mmm. A spicy end egg.

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We can review the film and review all of the extant drama around the film. In this case, they feel very bound together because I'm trying to continuously understand why this movie was made. I have no idea. And it's an interesting object too, because it's a, it's a Netflix production, of course, and it's a very long film and it feels like he got final cut. One little wrinkle was that Jennifer Lame, the great editor, was brought in at a certain point to look at this movie in part because it didn't seem like there were too many women involved in the production of the film at a high level. And maybe Netflix expressed some concern about that. And also because, of course, Andrew Dominic was cutting together what was going to be a very, very long movie. And I'm so curious to see how people receive this. That was why I mentioned the sort of like, will this just kind of come and go question?

Because it's a fairly expensive movie, $20, $25 million. And it is very much meant to be for award season. But there is a whole swath of voters across all the bodies who will watch the first 20 minutes of this and do exactly what you said, like just check out and be like, this is not for me, or this is way too traumatic to spend three hours with.

So I don't know. It kind of could just be DOA or at the risk of getting ahead of ourselves or much like the don't worry darling thing, like could be reclaimed pretty quickly too. Like it's, here's the thing. It's going to be very, very divisive. And some people will find the merit in it.

I, the more time goes by, the less merit I'm seeing. I mean, it's three hours at home. That's the thing. You can't turn it off. You and I, like I couldn't walk out of the theater. And I wasn't going to because I do this job for a living, but it's really hard to imagine people just pushing through the discomfort married with this sort of dreamy aimlessness of the project at home

I just you know and well put and and it's switching all of the I think some of the visual flourishes that you and I thought worked on a big screen will work as affectation on a small screen. And maybe they worked as affectation on a big screen. I don't know. But people are just going to be like, what's happening? And now it looks different. And I don't know where I am. And I recognized that Marilyn outfit, but it was behind the screen for half a second.

I just don't really think that enough people will power through it to have it be in the discourse. And that's before you get into some of the choices, both in terms of the interpretation. And I don't think the sex scenes will be... I don't know that enough people will get there to be scandalized by them. I mean, it's not titillating. No, it's not.

You know, it's obviously Ana de Armas is beautiful and she's taking her clothes off throughout the movie. But I. It's upsetting. It's not ravishing. You know, it's just. And it's not meant to be. And so, like, I saw Ana de Armas had a quote going around over the weekend about how frustrated she was by the idea of like the internet kind of grabbing those images and spreading them around the way

that they always do when an actress makes a choice like this but I don't know that's not like that wasn't even something that crossed my mind when I sat

down to watch the movie and the movie doesn't play to it I guess to its credit it doesn't really it doesn't really take advantage of her or that

in any meaningful way but that wouldn't be like an incentive to stick around you know it's like she's going to take her clothes off. Like, who cares?

Not at all. I don't know. This is a very odd movie. What do you think of the other performances? You know, it's like some well-known actors playing some well-known people

in this movie. Bobby Cannavale plays Joe DiMaggio and Adrian Brody plays Arthur Miller. What do you think of them as the two husbands? Adrian Brody is really just having the time of his life right now.

Showing up for 20 to 30 minutes in some highbrow entertainment. Always just impeccably dressed. Really, production design seems to be, and costume design seems to be a major incentive for him. And great. Keep it up, sir. Yeah. He's very good in this.

He's a very good Arthur Miller. Yeah, he's really good. Bobby Cannavale doesn't have that much to do. I don't know. Yeah, I wish they gave him a little more. That is similarly one note to the rest of the story. Not that Joe DiMaggio is necessarily the ideal husband. He definitely was not.

But we get 10 minutes of screen time, and it's mostly brutal. Yeah. And Julianne Nicholson, who you mentioned, plays her mother. Those are really the big significant parts in the film. Julianne Nicholson is a very gifted actor who is often cast as a crazy woman um i feel sad for her in that respect i want more for her you know i think she's she's capable of more worthy of more the last time i saw her was in um meravistown yeah you know well she's not crazy in that but there's something yeah a little unhinged about that character very good in meravistown but she's always very good yeah um i don't know i mean what what else is there to i i

want to talk a lot about maryland and kind of like what this movie gets right and doesn't get right the other thing that you and i talked about after the screening was just the sort of this sad white lady horror story approach and this is very reminiscent recently of Pablo Larrin's Jackie and really Spencer to me. I think Jackie is the most effective of this little trilogy. But just basically, oh, she's famous and beautiful. And, you know, that just means that she has to be subjected to nightmares for the duration of the movie. And you as a horror viewer seem to have a little bit more patience for that. Well, it's that very complicated dance that I'm trying to navigate through this conversation of well-made versus good.

And Pablo Lorraine is very gifted and he's very good at creating a sense of atmosphere and dread. And that's part of what worked for me about Spencer was that if we were trying to get into the psychology of this person. And maybe it's because that film takes place over a very short period of time. That it's a little easier for me to accept this was a nightmarish Christmas holiday for Diana. As opposed to this was a nightmarish 36 consecutive years for Marilyn Monroe, which is what this movie is. You know, it's her entire life really rendered on screen for three hours. I, you know, I mean, three movies made by men.

Yeah. Maybe not the most sensitive portrayals of femininity and that experience. I mean, I think they're reductive, which I guess everything is reductive at some point. That's in a lot of ways what movie making is about picking and choosing but I just don't think this approach works for me and I I think it's really limiting not just in its understanding of women or its understanding of of fame which plays a role in all of these and is a really interesting topic for me and one that I think Blonde in particular leaves entirely on the table. Just like 100% what role, like her success and the highs that the movie declines to show played in her understanding of herself and her relationship to other people, what it says

about the world at large or certainly America at that time or our ideas of fame. That to me is a really rich text that most people think they're above. But I don't think that this idea of like, oh, we made her, you know, we ruined her life. Again, I think that's probably factually true in all three cases. I think that it can be really corrosive. And I also think that these are three women who went through genuinely traumatic experiences that we know of so I don't mean to diminish it either but this casting them in a horror movie I think does remove all agency and just victimizes to the point that it doesn't portray a real sense of the person or even the experience yeah there is a

there is a fine line between two of these three movies which is that jackie and spencer are about states people you know they're about politicians for lack of a better word you know a member of the royal family the first lady they They're people who weren't artists. Marilyn Monroe was an artist. She was an actress and a star. And, you know, it's easy to kind of reduce what that means. But she was an artistic person. She studied with Lee Strasberg.

You know what I mean? She was in New York studying acting in the 50s and 60s. So she was present for this extraordinary shift in the artistic culture that we now, like that resonates constantly in our lives now. So there's just a lot to say about that. And we get a little bit of it. We get like that one scene where she reads for Arthur Miller and he has this kind of like dawning moment where he realizes he's in love with her because she becomes his imagined manifestation of a character that he wrote in a woman that he was

once in love with as a young man and that was the only time in the movie where I was like there's a little bit more of an idea here about like the intoxicating effect that she had on people and the way that her talent could like transform the country right you know and maybe that too is like hackneyed. And if it was three hours of that, it would have been too much. But I was like, this is at least something. Yeah.

And that's something that like, you know, Jackie and Diana were also people who inspired, like they inspired people and they were very powerful and they kind of like communicated a kind of greatness and an intelligence. But it was different.

Like it wasn't, they were famous, but it wasn't the same as when you are making art all the time. Yeah. And Jackie has that framing device of Jackie is portrayed by Natalie Portman is speaking to a reporter and it's about managing this idea of Camelot, which confronts all of these issues that we're talking about, like head on and kind of thus plays with the idea of

the Jackie Kennedy that you knew and the Jackie Kennedy behind the scenes. So, and that's why I think it's the most effective of the three for me. Me too. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think we need this approach anymore. I agree. I don't, I don't think we need to do this. I mean, especially because I'm not sure if you could pick three more iconic women from the 20th century to make these, this kind of a movie about, right? So we, we did it. We're all set. No more of these.

Yeah. It's very strange. What's your relationship to Marilyn Monroe the person? The issue is that probably more her as an image, her as a scene from a movie. I can imagine the outfits. I can imagine the voice for sure. I can imagine the presence. There are a few iconic roles. To me, she's much more of a comedian than a dramatic actor, which makes this like complete dirge of a movie a lot, you know, even more, maybe not contradictory, but weird. And, but I don't think of her as like a Meryl Streep who's well, I guess Meryl, I think of more as Meryl than like her, you know, great movies.

So in that sense, a presence. But she's a she's a presence more than a filmmaking, you know, not a lot of great movies. A few great movies. She has a couple of iconic parts. Yeah. And she's also appeared in a couple of unforgettable all-time classics. Right. And she also consistently worked with great filmmakers. I mean, she probably only made 20 movies, really, 25 movies in her very short career. I mean, I just made a list off the top of my head.

I know she made movies with Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Laurence Olivier directed her and starred with her, John Huston twice, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz. That's 10 of the 25 most important filmmakers of her era. And part of that was because people, they sought her out because she was a box office draw. And by the by the late 1950s she became arguably the biggest star in all of hollywood um and certainly the most desired woman in america i think it's fair to say her gifts as an actor are really interesting like i went back and i watched a couple of her more dramatic movies uh over the last few days she definitely has something she has like i think she is underrated

in terms of like the kind of composure and grace that she had as an actor because she was really funny and because she was, she had this kind of appealing singing voice. So she's constantly being asked to sing. I mean, the person who I thought of a lot when I was watching her movies,

and it's relevant because there was also a movie about him this year, is Elvis Presley. Because Elvis Presley made a lot of movies, most of them not very good. But in some of those movies, especially those early movies, you look at him and you're like, what if Howard Hawks got his arms around him? Or what if Vincent Minnelli got his arms around him? What kind of a movie would we get? Like, could he have been one of the, if not one of the great actors, one of the

great screen idols of all time, instead of like consistently in this kind of junk that is only leveraging what we already know what we like about him right as opposed to challenging him to do something new and i feel very similarly about her i watched a movie last night called river of no return that i'd never seen before i don't know if you've seen this one i haven't seen this one so it's otto preminger um it's a robert mitchum movie uh he's about a man who you know shows up in a mining town to retrieve his nine-year-old son and when he gets there there's a woman in in town who is sort of like a showgirl slash acoustic guitar singer.

And she's sort of singing for the men in the tents at the trading post. And then her husband is also there, and that's why she's there. And then they all go off on a journey, and then they end up going down like a wooden raft down a river that's like a very dangerous river, the River of No Return. There's this great theme song that she sings in part in the movie there are big sequences of the movie that are just her and robert mitchum and she's going toe-to-toe with him and she's you know she's tough and she's you know um she has a kind of fierce dependence and it's one of the only movies that she got to make where she wasn't playing like the dame she wasn't playing like

the silly showgirl is It's a real part. It's not a great part, but it's not a bad part. And it's interesting because obviously she died so tragically at 36. She overdosed or maybe perhaps committed suicide. It's still unclear from barbiturates. And so she never really got a chance to challenge herself too many times as an actor and as Elvis the same way. He died young. Yeah. He kind of stopped making movies

by the mid-60s late 60s and so we don't really know and so like analyzing her career is a little bit challenging because like she's in all about Eve yeah you know she plays you know she has one or two scenes and she is her looks and her presence are a major part of what she's doing. And that's true of her comedies and all of these roles. And, you know, another reason that I think the 10 of the greatest, you know, classic Hollywood directors worked with her is because she was like an extraordinarily like beautiful, but like unique visual like presence.

And so to have this like new quantity in your movie it's like casting the statue of liberty yeah exactly and so you know you wonder what that evolves into it's funny even her comedy is like a little understated we have this idea of like the dumb blonde but she's not like doing full 10 out of 10 energy there is something like she's not jane man yeah like coiled a little um that's really interesting i agree and can lend itself to more than just those ditzy roles but and she even plays like the dits with a little bit of dignity for lack of a better word you know that all about eve part where she's kind of carted around and it's almost like this manifestation of her rise to fame where it's sort of like you need to charm the producer and get next to the screenwriter and work the system if you want to have a career in Hollywood. now when we think about the arc of her life and also is part of what makes all about eve so good

is that it so clearly understands hollywood just like 30 years into hollywood's history it's already got its arms totally around what it means to become famous in this world um but she i i agree with what you said the sort of like understated comedian approach to it another one of the movies that i watched yesterday was Bus Stop, which I had seen a while ago, which is not a good movie. But I think might feature her best performance

because it's her least Marilyn performance. She's not platinum blonde in the movie. She plays a southern girl and her accent is pretty good. She loses it a couple of times, but for the most part,

she sticks with it. And she's also kind of a showgirl slash singer because she can sing and so they keep putting her in front of audiences. But it's all about

this cowboy who's kind of relentlessly pursuing her throughout the movie and it's kind of like awkward and uncomfortable throughout the film

but her resistance to him is part of what makes the movie effective and feels like the movie itself feels like an

outright rejection of everything that we see in the movie Blonde. It's sort of like, this isn't a person who only did gentlemen prefer blondes. Like, that's not accurate. Right. You know, that isn't actually the totality of her career.

Like, there's no mention of the misfits in this movie. There's no mention of, like, her striving to be a deeper artist. It's not. So, I find myself really confused by this. Right. The idea thinks that. The movie thinks that it has a richer idea. Of Marilyn Monroe.

But really it only understands her. As you know the pink dress. And Diamonds are a girl's best friend. Kind of marauding in the back of the screen. And is not. Certainly not interested in her skills. No not at all. I mean.

I don't know. Do you remember the first time that you saw her? I think it had to be something like that, right? Which is just her best performance. I think her best movie, like the Billy Wilder classic. And she's going toe-to-toe with Jack Lemmon. And it's funny, but it's not. It's a little, pulls at the heartstrings a little. That is her best part, a little more layered.

And then I think I must have known Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend, like the song, before I ever saw it. But her in the pink dress is just the first thing that I think of. Well, I feel like Madonna's recreation of that too, you know, like she has been kind of memed since before we had memes, you know, she was like so iconic and representational. And that's what, 1987 when that video came out, 1986, something like that.

And by then we're 20 years past, maybe 25 years past that film. But she has like that very hot period in the early 1950s where she's in Had to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, both movies with Jane Russell. And then she's in Niagara that year too, which is this like really hot, overheated color noir, which is, I love this movie. I think it's such a good movie but it's so

like of its era yeah you know where it's like she is the dame and there's like dramatic sequences where like the shades open and you see

Marilyn Monroe smoking a cigarette in all her glory and she is like the reason that everything goes haywire in the movie obviously

but it's really effective you know she's like she's well used in that part and so she has that period where she's like on the rise and is the movies are starting to get built around her and then she kind of falls out for a couple years so she gets married once the marriage ends within a year she gets married again she gets stays married to arthur miller for a few years there they made it four or five years in the process of that he

starts writing the misisfits for her. John Huston, who directed her all the way back in the asphalt jungle in 1950, one of her first parts, takes on this Arthur Miller script. It's Clark Gable.

It's Monty Clift. It's Marilyn Monroe. Arthur Miller writes the screenplay. Yeah. And it's an interesting movie that is not really a success. Yeah. And it is way more like impressionistic than any other John Huston movie.

And the story is a little bit hard to follow. She is kind of ravishing as she's entering, like, you know, not quite middle age. But you can kind of see her, like, turning the corner on her beauty in a way. I always, I'm, see, watching that movie, I always wanted to know who she would be in her 40s. Like, I always liked, I always liked Ava Gardner. And Ava Gardner, she started to get older. She started to, like,

actually age. And she started taking on more parts. Like, she wasn't, there was no plastic surgery. She wasn't desperately trying to hold on to her, her glamour.

And she would play 52-year-old women who were married to 58-year-old men in movies. Right. And they made movies about 52-year-old men and women. They kept casting her.

And she was damn good in those movies. And there was a part of me that always wanted to see Marilyn Monroe do stuff like that. But there's this sensation when you go back and you look at her work,

even though she's in something like Hot Like You Say, literally one of the 100 best American movies ever made, that's still like, I wish I could have seen what else she would do. Because she had talent.

It's all tinged now, right? Knowing that the end of the movie, and I think this is, this contributes to blonde's failure, but it's also impossible to resist is like, you can't watch any of this stuff without knowing the end of Marilyn Monroe's story.

And that there is this not just lost potential but sort of you know a little bit of tragedy or just reserve running through all of it and I think that is 100% projection but I don't know we were born 30 years after or 20 years after Marilyn Monroe died. So you can only receive her and understand her in that way. I know, but that's sort of what obviates the movie for me.

Yeah. I'm like, I know. She died tragically. She had a horrible life. Yeah, you don't have to tell me. I'm having a harder and harder time the more I plunge into the psychology of the film, trying to understand if there's any

psychology in the film there's not it's just it's a sentence that is stretched into a three-hour movie do you think this movie would be more successful if it were a more traditional movie length not really i don't either i i it's actually, I didn't find the length itself punishing. Obviously I don't mind long movies. Um, the, the first hour though, which is really tough because it's the,

the childhood. So, I mean, it's not fun watching a child of any age go through that stuff. Pivoting almost directly into a, a brutal sexual assault. Yes. I mean like,

and like that is returned to as a flashback throughout the film in a way that is like, again, why? Like, we know. We know that this was very painful. Like, I don't know. Yeah, it's,

I don't really get it. But that first hour, my heart really sank. Because I was like, oh, two more hours of this. And this is just, I know how it's going to end. And it's not going to be great.

Wouldn't that have been great if he was just like, twist, she lived to be 87 years old. She won 12 Academy Awards. You know, like I would have enjoyed a re-imagining of some kind. Maybe that's the thing is I wanted more stretching, more imagination, like to just do like a little bit that only serves your one note psychological pursuit.

It's lame. What book did i read recently that does that it's like what if this person that you love and i mean a lot of a lot of i mean a man in a high castle yeah yeah i know they all do but it was somewhere it's like you know this person died but instead they didn't have a tragic death and they lived forever and i can't remember what it was now it didn't really really work. It's a nice idea to give someone back all of this time that they didn't have. I was thinking about Dominic

and his final answer in that interview that we've cited a couple of times was to the question, what do you want to do next? I'd like to make a film about the Afghan war. Incredible kicker. Super funny. Listen, I don't know whether you can credit this.

Rather you just did. I mean, the intentionality behind this interview, but great copy. It's whatever he thought he was doing, it's great copy.

How do you measure whether something like this worked or not in this age of streaming films? You know, because it is an art film. Oh, you mean literally

as opposed to whether you and I thought it worked. Yeah, I mean, obviously we didn't think it was successful and it's not very successful and I think it's going to get some pretty negative notices. film. Oh, you mean literally, as opposed to whether you and I thought it worked. Yeah, I mean, obviously, we didn't think it was successful. And it's not very successful. And I think it's going to get some pretty negative notices.

Yeah. But there are some things to recommend about it. Obviously, Anand Armis could be nominated. It's a pretty crowded best actress field. There's all the controversy last week about Michelle Williams, you know, signing up to be best actress in The Fableman. It's a film we have not seen,

so can't even really comment on. But a lot of the scuttlebutt about that was sort of like, signing up to be best actress in The Fableman. It's a film we have not seen, so can't even really comment on. But a lot of the scuttlebutt about that was sort of like, this is already a loaded category. Can Ana Darma squeeze her way in? Presumably not because the movie will turn off so many viewers. But if it doesn't,

if it gets blanked come award season, how do you even know did this work? I mean, I know there's viewing hours, but this isn't going to top netflix's viewing top 10 right it doesn't even seem like it those numbers will be released i mean netflix is not presenting this as like a world conquering yeah you know our investment in the future of cinema it's pretty much being presented as like this was a three-year struggle and now you know good, good luck. Yeah.

But the generous marketing is like we still spend money on like interesting, challenging projects, which I think means we'll just like never hear about it again. Do you think that they will continue to do that? This is, we've still not seen White Noise. Right. We've still not seen a couple more of their bigger films. I'll tell you, I watched a Netflix movie last night that is coming out in early October called The Redeemed Team. Okay. It's a documentary about the 2008 U.S. men's Olympic basketball team, which had come off, if you include the FIBA tournament, three consecutive losses.

And so it was redeeming U.S. men's basketball. And it's just a documentary about how Kobe, LeBron, Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony all came together to reclaim greatness in the face of NBA or world basketball. And it's right down the middle. And I watched all those games. So nothing was surprising or interesting. But I was like, this is great. This is 90 minutes just going down like a tall glass of lemonade. Is this the team that Juliet really loved or was that 2012 with all of the good footage? I presume that's 2012.

Okay. Sounds nice. I've heard of all those people. But I was like, this is the future of Netflix to me, not Blonde when I was watching it. I rewatched, well, not rewatched. I turned on about 30 minutes of Do Revenge at your recommendation. Oh yeah, what'd you think of that?

And also because it's like starting to percolate on the internet. Number one on Letterboxd this weekend. Oh, was. What'd you think of that? And also because it's like starting to percolate on the internet. Number one on Letterboxd this weekend. Oh, was it? That doesn't mean anything to me. But I was like- It says something though. Yeah. But there are like blog posts about it or whatever. So I turned it on. First thing I noticed was that the runtime is two hours, which just cut your movies. You know, no teen comedy should be longer than 90 minutes. But one of my favorite things about Netflix is it's like 11

minutes of credits. So if you see two hours, it's 149. Okay, still 90 minutes. That's still long. And we're out. And I do have the experience now. I've seen the two hours and being like, uh-oh. I liked what I saw. Again, I saw 30 minutes and I was like, this is cool.

I can revisit it later or not at all. I'm pro Camila Mendes too. I feel like she could be put in the right hands could be a thing. So in the sense of like, oh, I heard about this. I'm curious. I'll turn it on. I'll leave it. Like, maybe we'll chat a little bit.

I'll read a blog post. Totally worked, which is maybe their model. I don't think that blonde fits into that model. Yeah. I don't know how you sell this movie. So maybe it does. Maybe people watch 30 minutes, fire off some angry tweets or, you know, send, have a conversation about it. I mean,

there is a class of movie viewer who still likes watching things and getting mad on Letterboxd. How's it doing on Letterboxd? The film Blonde? Yes. Let's take a look in real time. Okay. Wow. This is exciting. This will be a fun experience. I mean, it is the kind of film when I fire it up, I look at my friends and it's like one star, and a half stars four and a half stars one star you know like it is it's divisive okay and there is so much craft in it that people will love it it currently has an average of 2.9 okay which isn't good yeah this film will not have a cinema score because it's not playing in enough movie theaters to render one this feels like it has a it would have had a real shot at an f there have not been very many f's in the history of cinema score it could have been don't worry have had a real shot at an F. There have not been very many Fs in the history of cinema score.

It could have been. Don't worry, darling, had a B- this weekend, which indicated that it's going to have a tough second week. Yes. Were you surprised by 19.5 million opening weekend? No, I think that was pretty much right on the money, right, of what people expected and the Harry Styles fans turned out. I will say in my group of text message chats,

my group chats that could all be named, you know, cool women approaching 40, the reports and or anticipation for this movie is still very high. For blonde?

No, for Don't Worry Darling. Oh, okay. The people who saw it didn't like, thought it was stupid but had a great time. And the people who haven't seen it yet thought it was stupid but had a great time and the people who haven't seen it yet

are like really excited to go see it so maybe that's the second week there's no awareness for Blonde among the cool women approaching 40

as best I can tell do you think you'll ever watch it again no okay what do you think should Olivia Wilde and Andrew Dominic together make a film

about the Afghan war yes because we need stuff to talk about on this podcast. Yeah. This is, I definitely won't be watching Blonde again. No. Which is a shame because I find Assassination of Jesse James and Killing Them Softly in particular very rewatchable.

Assassination is slower and it's much more of a visual feast. Killing Them Soft a is a ride it's like a rollicking crime movie with a lot of ridiculous stuff and it is upon reflection the stuff that i thought was really funny about that movie for example two guys getting really high on heroin to the strains of the song heroin by the velvet underground now when i think back on that scene, I'm like, maybe this wasn't as self-knowing and funny as I think it is.

Maybe this was an artistic choice that is really dumb and leaden. Anyhow. Yeah. Blonde? Any final thoughts? Not great. Just not great.

I guess not interesting. That's the other thing. I don't think it gets partial credit. Do you give it partial credit? I do. I do not interesting. That's the other thing. I don't think it gets partial credit. Do you give it partial credit? I do. I do. Why? Well, there's just like a couple of sequences that are pretty visually breathtaking.

Okay. Like the driving through the fire, the forest on fire. I guess so. And there's the, I mean, the moment leading up to the JFK moment is pretty harrowing and effective. By then, they've kind of bludgeoned you to death, but it's like... Right. That sort of like... That conspiracy thriller feeling that you're getting as that's happening is pretty intense. I don't know.

It's like it's a two-star... It's a two out of five, you know? It's like you did a couple of good things, but it's mostly unpleasant. I just think this film and then also Don't Worry Darling have taught us that it's not enough to look good, especially if you're making an ideas movie. They really, really fall flat on the ideas. Well, I agree with you. We can wrap it up there. More ideas to talk about later this week.

We're talking about Bros. Oh, yeah. ideas to talk about later this week uh we're talking about bros oh yeah which is a perhaps the ultimate profound opposite of blonde a studio rom-com a first ever lgbtq mainstream rom-com opening wide yeah that we've ever had right i think so co-written and starring billy eichner yes directed by nicholas dollar who'll be on the show um it'll be a fun conversation Right? I think so. Co-written and starring Billy Eichner. Yes. Directed by Nicholas Doller. Who'll be on the show. It'll be a fun conversation. I'm excited.

We're also going to share, I think, our top five 21st century comedies. And I started to make my list last night and I was like, this is hard. Yeah. I know we think it's dead, but we're going all the way back to 2000, right? Back to 2000. Yeah. So there's plenty to work with. So many movies. My honorable mention had like 30 movies on it comedy not dead um no i think it's

dead but that's okay okay well thanks to our producer bobby wagner for his work on this episode and yeah we'll see you later this week when we talk about bros Thank you.