The Big Picture - ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ Is the Movie America Deserves

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Sacha Baron Cohen's Kazakhstan correspondent has returned in a sequel to the 2006 comedy classic. Sean and Amanda are joined by Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker of 'The Press Box' to discuss whether or not Borat is still effective in today's absurd political environment, how Borat pulled off the stunts this time around, and why this is really Tutar's movie (0:55). Then, Sean and Amanda break down a pair of misbegotten new remakes: Ben Wheatley's 'Rebecca' and Robert Zemeckis's 'The Witches' (52:33). Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guests: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessy I'm Amanda Dobbins and this is the big picture a conversation show about my wife today we'll discuss a handful of new releases that hit streaming services over the past few days. Among them, Robert Zemeckis' remake of Roald Dahl's The Witches, which arrived on HBO Max. Rebecca, Ben Wheatley's remake

of Alfred Hitchcock's classic for Netflix. And of course, the comedy event of the fall, Borat's subsequent movie film, Sacha Baron Cohen's return to the character that made him a comic icon

of the George W. Bush era. It's all coming up on the big picture. Joining us today are two men who know from political and cultural quagmires. It's Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker, co-host of the press box podcast. Hi guys.

Yes. Just a couple of Borats here to talk to Amanda and I about one of the movie moments of the year, really, in a way. And I'm fascinated to talk to you both about it because you guys on your show regularly cover the intersection of culture and politics. That's something that Borat is very focused on. I'm just going to read the full title of this film for the listeners out there in case they didn't get a chance to check it out. It's called Borat Subsequent Movie Film Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I could hardly get through that. I wanted to ask you both to start when you saw that Sacha Baron Cohen was returning

as Borat in a film, in a movie film. What did you think? Did you think we needed this? Brian, why don't you start us off? Of course we need it. Of course we need it. Because the people that Borat likes to have merry fun with are now running the country. As opposed to 15 years ago where they were having a little meeting off in some holiday inn somewhere in America.

So we need it more than ever, I think. David, what about you? Well, I mean, to take from what Brian said, I mean, a lot of people have made the argument that there's sort of like no comedy in the age of Trump, right? That reality has gone too far and, you know, comedy as we know it is impossible. I mean, I don't think it was an accident that Trump was literally a Sacha Baron Cohen character in this movie because Trump is metaphorically a Sacha baron cohen character from 15 years ago right um it almost i i will say when you read the title i chuckled and there's a point about like halfway through the subtitle where the laugh actually kicks in at first you're kind of like oh we're here again and then you're like okay they're just gonna like, oh, we're here again. And then you're like, okay, they're just going to wear me down. And I think there was a lot to the movie, to me, that I don't feel like it wore me down.

But it was like, I was skeptical of it at first because I felt like I already knew the joke. But it was comfortable. And it was really funny at times. There were times where it sort of fell flat. But going back to what I said at the beginning of the beginning of this ramble when it fell flat it almost seemed like that's when it was like it was like inversely making its own point that there's no joke to tell you know it was it was a very surreal viewing experience amanda do you think that we needed borat 2? Did you need Borat 2? That's the question, isn't it?

Is who needs it and who is receiving it? Because I agree with Brian. We need it in the sense that we are living in the joke now. And we are maybe not living in what Borat wrought, but what Borat kind of pointed out. And then, in a a way gave power to and obviously like the the media nature of of borat and the figures who are in borat is something that brian and and david can speak about at length but has really turned on itself and inverted so many times from 2006 to or 2006? To 2020 that you can't tell which way is up. And that's really interesting. But it's a bummer to talk about intention in comedy and effectiveness in comedy. But I think the way this was framed and when this was released, we're going to have to talk about it a bit.

And I don't know whether it sticks the landing that it's trying to. Yeah, let's just do a little bit of Borat history. So this character is 20 years old. Most people obviously know him from the 2006 film that Larry Charles directed, which was a huge comedy hit. And I was reminded recently that this film was Academy Award nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. It was a true, true comedy phenomenon. It was born out of the Ali G show TV series, which started on Channel

4 in the UK, then eventually came to HBO. And it really was the sort of thing that took over the American lexicon. Doing the Borat voice was an unmistakable uh shameful but also um unavoidable bit in my life certainly i'm not sure i can probably north of 500 times have i done the voice in public um which is just you know what can you do i'm just i'm i'm susceptible to these things sean i just i gotta let you know now i'm sorry this is an awkward moment brian and i are actually workshopping an idea called the impression championship belt this is not a gig this is not a joke where we go through like the past 50 years in America and decide and figure out which impression is the most widespread Borat definitely held the belt uh for for like he might have held it for two years and that's pretty

significant David uh let me give you my reaction to that idea. Very nice. So let's talk a little bit about why Borat became this phenomenon. Amanda was kind of getting at it, which is the strategy for that original film in the TV series was to functionally dupe unsuspecting U.S. political officials and members of the media into having conversations with this Kazakh TV journalist who himself was prejudiced. And in doing so, Sacha Baron Cohen sought to unearth the prejudices of these people, get them to say ignorant things, put them in a position to be not necessarily embarrassed

by him, but to embarrass themselves, which, you know, is certainly was not a new strategy necessarily in comedy, but seemed like a new format. And he really pushed the edges, I think, of propriety and what we thought was, you know, it was extremely sexual. It's extremely scatological and extremely effective. I think he did a great job of not just making people laugh, but getting a certain kind of high level political and media celebrity to

come to the table to participate in these interviews. And so now with this new film in the aftermath of being a phenomenon 15 years ago, a Borat movie seems pretty unlikely because everybody knows who Borat is. And Sacha Baron Cohen is a world famous celebrity. So I'm just curious if you guys, how you felt about the balance of this movie in terms of what Borat is known for in terms of his comedy and the strategy that he uses versus what he had to do with this movie. Brian, what did you think? Well, it felt a little bit watching it like a comedian who's standing on stage and sort of reading the room. You know, you read the room one way in 2006 and you read the room a totally different way in 2020.

I felt that Borat's misogyny was kind of a drop-in in the first movie and in some of the things. It was just little notes here and there. And obviously, now that has the point of the movie or one of his biggest points in the movie. So I thought that was really interesting. I think also to your point about getting people to reveal prejudices, Baron Cohen also uses this other term. He used it with Maureen Dow the other day in the New York Times, which is indifference to these things, which is slightly different, right? Where there's this great scene in this movie where he's at this anti-mask rally and people are chanting along with

him saying, we want to chop up journalists like the Saudis do, right? Now, I'm not sure everyone in that audience actually wants to chop up journalists, but they are happy to just kind of go along with this thing, right? And I just think indifference is a really interesting kind of idea in the Trump era, right? Because there is active prejudice. Certainly, we see lots of that in the world all the time, but there's also a large amount of indifference to prejudice, misogyny, antisemitism, all these kinds of things and i thought that note really really struck in this movie overall no i mean i i think that the

indifference is uh yeah i mean it was that's what was really powerful about the whole thing i mean it's i guess to me there's a little bit of a chicken and an egg question about the the inception of borat because i mean when i watched the borat sketches originally it was almost just like he was just fishing for buffoonery and he almost fell backwards into this study of racism and misogyny right like he felt like people were really betraying themselves most hilariously most gallingly in those kind of subjects um the indifference i think is is really profound and it's and listen it cuts both ways i mean there's a degree to which you can point the finger at at you know the audience and the whatever it was the was it a rodeo bar and bore out one when they were saying throw the jews down the well and

you're like well maybe they're not all textbook anti-semites but they're indifferent enough to the cause that they're singing along but also it's like there's a degree to which like we're all indifferent enough about it to laugh at it right if he was singing a song that was just the n-word over and over again i don't think we'd have the same reaction right i mean so there's so i mean there's a lot of there's a way that there's introspection that's sort of necessary that said i i i hear i take what amanda said to sort of be an interesting question do i mean do we need it is it are the right people seeing it i don't know i find it i don't i it's a really hard question to answer but i will one one thing based on from what brian said i think we're sean i remember who said

it it does strike me that the most significant difference between the kind of power structure from the first borat and the people that we have in power now are that these are the people who are they're almost their defining characteristic is that they're most available for interview to any to any kooky outlet that sort of addresses them the right way right i mean it's like there's a huge number of people that would have said no i mean that just their staff would have figured out to say no to borat during the hbo show but those are the people that we have running the country now the people that that don't know better than to say no yeah i i thought so much about this and who winds up in in this film and how, and Brian,

to your point about indifference, I think, especially kind of with the civilians, it's obvious of the people who are just kind of going along with it and are like, sure, I guess so. And,

and it does expose something of people's just unwillingness still to engage or to just kind of let things pass them by. But I was struck by how much in 2020 those people are the exception. And certainly that's the exception in terms of engaging with anything, whether it's hate speech or something that they disagree with, or just kind of the willingness to engage in these interviews. I found myself wondering how many people they had to go through who were like, no, I won't do that.

Or why are you filming this? Before they got, they found the person in the bakery or in the fax store who's like, okay, sure. I'll just keep doing this and I'm not going to ask any questions. And I don't say that because I think that there are just, you know, tons of really like principled people out there who would say no, but just because everyone's so much more media savvy and everyone is just so aware that, um, of what filming is and having their own brand and putting themselves out there that I was, um, I was just kind of like, how did you find these people? And are these people,

they're possibly representative of a mindset, but I don't know if they're representative of like a logistical reality in 2020. Yeah. There was an interesting story, a column in the New York times magazine a few weeks ago by Dan Brooks called how president Trump ruined political comedy. I don't know if you guys had a chance to read by Dan Brooks called How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy. I don't know if you guys had a chance to read this story. And there have been a number of pieces, you know, as David pointed out, identifying this issue over time.

I thought this one kind of clarified it in a succinct way. And one of the focuses of the piece was about The Daily Show and how The Daily Show has changed and how Trevor Noah's Daily Show remains one of the only consistently popular comedy products of the last five years. And the way that it did that is by evolving from the Jon Stewart kind of mock outrage, Fox News analyzing kind of town crier approach. To something that was more inherently political and progressive

by dint of its host. And it is a show that almost has a mission now. And then the mission is, is, is frankly like politically oriented as opposed to comedy oriented through the lens of a political point of view. And I thought that was fascinating. I'm not as big of a Trevor Noah fan. Maybe that says something about, you know, where I come from or what my background is or what I'm interested in, even in comedy. I thought it was interesting, though, that in this Times Magazine story, there was no mention of Sacha Baron Cohen at all. And it was only a couple of years ago that he made the Showtime series, Who is America,

where he was kind of up to some of the same tricks that he's up to in this movie. I don't know if any of you guys had a chance to watch that, but he's dressing in costume. He's interviewing in costume. He's interviewing political figures. He's interviewing regular people about their engagement with the political process and, you know, big ideas like gun control and torture and, you know, national defense policy. And somehow he kind of like elided this big story about what is comedy right now. But the thing that did resonate for me was that I do feel like this movie, as opposed to the last movie, feels like

it is on a political mission. And I kind of wanted to unpack that idea, Brian, that you were getting to, which is like, is this finding the right people? Is anyone going to watch this and have their mind changed? So I think it's a really interesting question. I do not think that a single Trump curious voter will come over to Biden or Joe Jorgensen or whomever because they watched Borat 2. That is probably absolutely zero chance. But I also think, and I read Baron Cohen's comments about that, right? He wants to point out misogyny so that women will not vote for Trump and stuff. I think we're also very allowed to look at a filmmaker's comments

about their own work and ignore them. This is like George Lucas saying, you know what Return of the Jedi and the Ewoks are about? That's about the Vietnam War. And I'm like, I don't think so. I'm going to watch it as a sci-fi movie and forget what you said. So I read all his comments and I kind of like, you know what? I thought this was really funny and I'm not going to worry too much about his intentions here. And I'm just going to kind of let myself enjoy it just as a movie. Yeah. I mean, I agree with that.

And I think there was a lot to enjoy. But I don't know. I mean, I did find myself constantly getting caught up in the premise. And I don't mean like the movie's premise, because even that, I mean, that's pretty straight, mostly straightforward, but it gets a little bit lost in the telling.

Because the creator's motives are clearly a part of this movie. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, well, just from a creative perspective, like this was a decision to make borat and not make who is america too right this is and that's a publicity i mean one would assume that was the way he was able to get it made because there was so much this movie that was just who is america part two uh it was more of a sequel to that in a lot of ways than borat except for the parts that were like the scripted parts, which like, I mean, Sean, I defer to you on all descriptions here. But like trying to take this movie on its own terms or maybe not even on its own terms, but on its face.

I mean, it's clearly like there's no way to describe it as it compared to like another mockumentary. Right. I mean, it's just like it's more like, know ross mackleway or something than like any actual mockumentary and and and as a fiction a fiction film i don't i mean a lot of people are talking about the great acting performances uh and and justifiably so but it is a weird fiction film it is a very weird fiction film uh i don't i mean it's it's and so yeah i mean you're left with like the sketches um which are some of them are really really good um but yeah i mean i i think that he i mean i think that he makes it i think that he made a good i think he makes a point i think he makes a good point i i'm i i did find myself wondering what the thought process

was more than digesting a message throughout most of it. So you raise a good point, though, which is I think there's basically two tracks to look at this movie on. One is the scripted framing device of the movie, and the other is the classical Borat real person stunt. Now, I would say in the first film, the balance of those two things was probably 70% stunt, 30% framing device. The new movie, for obvious reasons, I think, because everybody knows who Borat is, is more like 70% framing device and 30% stunt.

And for me personally, the movie suffers for that. I mean, I think not many people really think very often about the original framing device in the first Borat, which is he falls in love with Pamela Anderson and seeks her out and like stalks her across the country and then eventually seeks to capture her, literally capture her inside of a pillowcase. That's bizarre. That's not what Borat is remembered for and i wonder if borat too invariably will be remembered for um maria bakalova who plays his daughter tutar and this very strange almost incomprehensible story about delivering a a prize wife to mike pence at cpac and then eventually he and his daughter being, you know, going their separate ways and then ultimately reuniting and then them finding themselves in the throes of a potential political conflagration with former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. You know, it's convoluted is too light a word to explain what's actually happening in this movie.

And it does feel like this was true of the first movie too. It feels like a movie that is scripted, but really found in the, in the, in the, like in the, in the room, in the idea making process where you,

a number of different dominoes have to fall to get to a point where you're like, okay, now we have a movie. The first movie is 84 minutes long. This movie is 94 minutes long. This movie, I think frankly could have been about 80 minutes long and it might have been better served.

But I don't know. Amanda, how did you feel about the scripted aspect of the movie taking a bigger precedence over the Boratness? It's funny because I liked it more, I think, than some of the very familiar, specifically the civilian Boratness, which to me is kind of the most old hat. I have seen this before, and I don't know what was revealed even to me about voter about what's going on in, you know, a bakery or like a Macon debutante ball, which I probably have more knowledge of than most people having grown up in Atlanta, Georgia, and at least knowing what a cotillion is. Um, you know, I, I thought that was like pretty funny, but, um, okay. People go along with stuff and people are indifferent. As Brian said, like,, I got it.

And I thought the high wire act of the scripted stuff, and particularly Tutar, was really impressive. And they kind of, they pull it off. And obviously she pulls it off at the end and you can't get those, you can't get the CPAC, but you really can't get Rudy Giuliani without that invention.

And I think kind of as like comedic genius and pulling all of these elements together to lead to that moment, which it will absolutely be remembered for and which in many ways has already eclipsed the movie, at least kind of in the media world. Like I was very impressed. I also think that we just need to shout out Maria Bakalova. Incredible. Just like, I think it must be very hard to just be dropped into this world and this incredibly iconic character, but also style of comedy and just go toe to toe.

And she absolutely does. And I was genuinely impressed. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think she's a revelation. There's a legitimate Oscar conversation happening around whether or not Maria Bakalova should be nominated for an Academy Award. And you know, part of that is because this has been a very strange movie year. And part of that is because you're right. I mean, Borat is one of the signature comic creations of the last 20 years. who is a comic genius. She is a relatively unknown comic actor who stands very comfortably side by side in all of these circumstances and even by herself in some of these ways. Brian, what did you think about kind of the balance of the way that they tried to tell this story? I found myself, I think I totally agree with Amanda. I found myself really liking their

relationship and I wanted to spend, I enjoyed spending time with them on the screen. And I think maybe that's because Borat has actually been a deep freeze for a couple of years. So I've not worn out by Borat bits at this point. Also their relationship has demented as it began. This is a daughter who lives in a cage for a large part of this movie took on a kind of a sweetness by the end. I was amazed at Bakalova's performance, as you say, because she is like Sasha Baron Cohen, incredibly brave to do these things.

I mean, I don't think we'd underestimate this. Incredibly, incredibly willing to be totally gross. These things. And I also thought the one thing this movie did amazingly when you talk about fiction, nonfiction is it really threaded a lot of ideas through. I mean, the one that's in the trailer and about eating the figurine off the cupcake that pays off two, three, four times just incredibly well, which really, and I don't know if they figured that out after the fact or before the fact or how they plan that whole thing. But that really, really is some amazing writing and rejiggering in terms of putting the movie together. The scene with the baby, I mean... She want it out now, please.

Right. Can you take it out? No, we cannot. What you say, take it out. You end that life. That life will die. It's already dead. It's not living. No. It is a living, breathing life that God has created. I don't think he's breathing. We can show you that it's breathing. I feel bad because I was the one who put the baby in her. You don't need to feel bad. I was just trying to give my daughter pleasure, and next thing I know, there's a baby inside her. You keep calling her your daughter yes okay is he your father yes this is your daughter yes okay like it's like you can you can divide up the the types of these you know

borat you know gorilla moments into different categories i think that's my favorite sort of kind where the person there isn't acting particularly embarrassing. They're just putting a really impossible situation. And, and yeah, I mean, there's some truth comes out of it. I'm not sure that the person in the urgent care clinic, uh,

would have been, should be embarrassed at all by a single moment of that, except for, you know, if there's any elements which they were taken in, we talked earlier about indifference, but there's before, I mean, before it gets away, I did want to talk about the other thing in these interviews that really affected me, I thought, was not indifference, but sort of the insidiousness of everything that Brian and I talk about in the press box all the time. And I think it's easy for us. I mean, the four of us talking, probably most of the people listening to this thinking that when you hear about QAnon or like whatever, I mean, that's obviously the easy one, but every New York times article about, you know, some specific subject and the sort of fringe, it's easy for us to like,

think of those as like a concise, like malfunction. Right. But the problem in the world that Sasha Baron Cohen is entering in this movie is that it's not a problem. I mean, nothing is contained in the Facebook era. Right. There's nothing is nothing is concise. And to watch those two guys when he when he gets with these two dudes who are really hard to define. I mean, they're not just like QQ heads or whatever. They're just kind of country conservative dudes to watch them talk about conspiracy theories about the you know clinton's killing kids and drinking their blood the way that we talk about i'm sorry i'm going on the problem is not that they're true believers they're not it's like it's like if there's like a sporting event if there's like a moment in a football or basketball game that i've missed and i've only i only know about it through Slack and a few tweets. And then it permeates the point that my wife comes in and asks me what happened. And I have to recreate the moment based on those tweets and the very minimal knowledge. That is how they know about the, I mean, that's how they talk about the

Clinton's drinking children's blood. And yet they, they believe it with the same certainty that I believe that football game happened yesterday. Right. And it's it is a i don't even know what to say about it except to point and you know to point that out it's a weird weird world that we live in right now yeah i think that it's a great point there are two different kinds of uh nuanced exploration of people's political prejudices in this version of the movie one of them is the sequence before she eats the baby when she's in the bakery and they ask the woman behind the counter to write, the Jews will not replace us on the cake. And the woman doesn't say anything. She just breaks out the frosting machine and she starts putting that on the cake. And there's hardly any exchange. And that's theifference that brian is talking about in a way right or the indifference that david is talking

about too like there's just no compunction there it's just like this is what someone wants i will give it to them and even if i agree with them i'm not even going to identify that but the the conservative country guys and that whole part of the film there's a counterpoint to the moment when they're regurgitating Clinton, baby blood eating trutherism, whatever the fuck they're talking about, which is when later in their conversation, they're talking about Borat's daughter and they stand on ceremony to say like women have equal rights in this country and they, women in our society are allowed to vote and they are, they have the same brains as men and they are equal to men which is you know i would not say was a feminist gesture on their part

but was almost like their attempt to clarify to this strange foreigner that our our societies are different and it's it's not so clear like i i agree with the way that you define that, David, which is that it definitely feels like they are just taking Facebook posts and using them as conversational fodder amongst people that they ostensibly agree with, as opposed to unpacking the political realities of the things that they're talking about. And very rarely do you see people in real time have conversations like this. And that is one thing that the movie exposes. Can we also just say how interesting that comment is on our fragmented world that these two dudes are extremely online in Facebook Clinton world,

but do not know who Borat is. It's a, it's a really good point. Amanda, how did you feel about the, those guys takes on Hillary Clinton? I think it's important really good point um amanda how did you feel about the those guys takes on hillary clinton i think it's important to note out and i can't remember whether it's during the same speech where they're explaining that quote women are allowed to do the same things

as men which i do they say equal rights i think we need to run back the tape on that and i would love to hear their understanding uh It was more than I was expecting. That's all I can say. It was more than I was expecting, but I don't think they were like, what we did was we fought for women's suffrage and then now next we got to do is equal pay. And that's really important to our beliefs. I think they're just kind of like, yeah, women don't need you to get a mortgage anymore, at least currently. We'll see tomorrow. But they do in this conversation, like they're trying to tell him that his book of weird like Kazakh, you know, how to raise a daughter miss is a conspiracy theory.

And they literally say to him, this is a conspiracy theory so that they have this understanding that not everything that, you know, in the world that you read or hear about is to be trusted, but have also selectively applied that is to me the eeriest part of it and illuminating. And I, and I think kind of that one of the most like effective in the Sasha Baron Cohen,

here's what I'm trying to show with this movie, which, you know, Brian, your point about we should just ignore what directors say about their movies is like, it's taken to an extent, but it is illuminating kind of how people get lost in the, in the sauce of, of this media ecosystem and this political nightmare that we're all in and the consequences that it does have. I would like to go back to the anti-abortion clinic for a second, if we could. Yes. That one didn't work for me. The quote crisis pregnancy center. And that one didn't work for me, I think a little bit because it is so divorced from the consequences of the actual world. And I'm sorry to be the killjoy, but I feel it's my responsibility for two seconds. I watched this

the night before Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. And I just like, what was I supposed to take away from that particular scene? And I, you know, it's at the expense of someone and it is supposed to be funny. And I agree that the construction of the baby and like the Abbott and Costello, it's a baby. It's not a baby like that. That is genius. Like that is like intellectually very funny. But it didn't it didn't hit for me, I think. And because it's hard to divorce from from the larger world and the larger consequences. And I think this movie is most effective when it can

really put its finger on some of the media or the absurdity that it is itself a part of. And I think it's weakest when it's divorced from the real world. I think that's an interesting point. That's the one sort of non-scripted gimmick with a real person in which the real person doesn't embarrass him or herself. I think, you know, certainly you could say just by even having a job working in a place like that, there is a certain sector of society that would think that there's something embarrassing about that. But that guy tried to be calm and controlled and sensitive to what seemed like a young pregnant teenage girl in his office and an insane incestuous father and you know as opposed to the the country conservatives as opposed to Rudy Giuliani as opposed to any number of other figures who talk

in this movie that guy was just like an avatar for a point of view and you know i think obviously like at the level of insensitivity that that bit could be received with is probably a little bit hard to forecast necessarily i suspect that that was shot and conceived well before we had a mcconnie barrett situation um but i think also you know as an act of comedy there are plenty people who are not going to care you know there are plenty of people who are just going to say like this doesn't affect me i thought it was funny when he had to explain that um you know there's a baby inside my teenage daughter so and that's like the that's the high wire act that we're alluding to here too where

sasha baron cohen is willing to do things that many comic figures are not because that's kind of his brand and i don't think i think it's an interesting thing to evaluate the even in the small ways i could tell that he was older and that his voice had gotten deeper as he had gotten older and that he had gotten a little bit you know thicker around the edges and that there was like at some point at what point do you become like Milton Berle while you're a little too old to be doing jokes like this um I don't I I'm not totally sure it's in it's in conversation with the idea that the world has evolved so much that some of these jokes don't necessarily make as much sense um but I don't know I I think I think we should probably talk

about the Rudy Giuliani segment though. The segment itself. And then also I really wanted to talk to you guys about this because I, I knew, I knew that there was going to be a quote unquote media firestorm around this when I first saw it. So just generally speaking, do you guys think that that whole bit that kind of concludes the film is effective?

Well, it's, it's a comment on what Amanda referred to earlier. And I think all of Sacha Baron Cohen's work is, which is about celebrity and celebrity PR, that you will just talk to anybody. In this case, a self-created journalist who is running this thing called Patriots,

something or other that is just vaguely pro-Trump and anti-mask, as far as we can tell. We don't see much of her Facebook work on this movie, but that is enough to get to Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer to Donald Trump. So it certainly works on that level. And there's part of it is like, in addition, just Rudy, if you, if your standards are so low to let somebody through, there's a little, there's somewhat of an argument that as soon as that that as soon as you've done that and the camera's on eh you know um i i you know i again as i did for almost all this movie i laughed like a hyena during that scene i thought that was really i thought that was really funny i don't know what else i can add to that uh brian i just want to

say uh and i'm sorry for everybody listening out there, I miss living with you when I watch movies like this because the volume of hyena laughing will never reach the levels that we attained when we were in the same crappy living room together, just sitting in disbelief of what we were watching. I know that this was, that the Rudy Giuliani story was leaked out as a part of publicity, you know, for the film and I'm sure in the national interest as well. I don't think it did any great service to the movie because I feel like, you know, it felt like we saw the whole plot in the trailer, sort of, you know?

I mean, once the cat was out of the bag, I mean, I was looking at my watch, you know, throughout the movie under the assumption that that would come halfway through watch, you know, throughout the movie. Under the assumption that that would come halfway through or, you know, that there would be other things on that level. And that was really the, you know, the crown jewel of the film, which it is legitimately. And I but I, you know, I think just from a as a viewer, having seen that, you know, I wasn't laughing quite as hard as I was the first time I, or as, as aghast as I was when I saw it on Twitter the first time.

Um, but yeah, I mean, Brian's point is right. He, there is a lot of embarrassment in that scene that doesn't even involve the, the whatever, anything sexual.

And, uh, and just the, the degree to which, I mean degree to which i mean this is our this is this is an advisor a current advisor to our president i mean it's like on the one hand it's not surprising at all and on the other hand it's like like do we is there any do we need to spend any energy doubting how easy easily Giuliani could be like a puppet for Russian disinformation I mean is there like like I feel like in some ways this answers political questions in a way that like actual truth-telling and reportage doesn't couldn't quite do it yeah I

think it at least exposes the venality and how susceptible these people are to flattery and to being welcomed into a safe space. And that's the story of a lot of what you guys talk about, the way that Fox News protects a certain sector of politician and other conservative outlets, and that the idea of Tutar coming along and having her big interview break be with Rudy Giuliani and that he is literally coaching her through the interview and holding her hand to make her feel more comfortable during this very exciting moment in her career is patently absurd. It's just, it's ridiculous to have captured all of that stuff. I think I'm probably the only person

that saw this before having any awareness of the really rudy giuliani aspect of the story and i will say like i thought the movie was a little bit slow through the first hour and then i was utterly riveted through the final 20 minutes i was like holy shit he did it again this is extraordinary and then the very next day it became a massive talking point in the media. And Dan, I think you're right, David, kind of like spoiled the movie effectively. You know, I think if you didn't know this was coming, it would have been received much differently.

Amanda, I was just kind of curious, like how you felt watching it, knowing that it was coming. Well, I'm kind of a structure nerd. So I was like, oh, how are they going to get from A to B, you know, to C to the end? And I was just kind of like waiting for it. But I think that probably got me more engaged in like the architecture of the comedy than I otherwise would have been because in general, I can't stand talking about the architecture of comedy.

So good job marketing to me alone, which I do not think was the intent of this movie or the reveal. Um, it, I have no trouble believing that for most people i think that it like ruins the movie as a movie and i think once again we come to the idea of is this supposed to be a movie as a movie and an achievement of comedy and filmmaking or is it supposed to be an achievement of um making a piece of comedy that reaches people and changes people's minds. Because I think the, what, 10 seconds in the hotel room, in the actual bedroom of the hotel room, as opposed to the guest suite, are going to be the most widely seen and are probably the most

objective is not the right word, but they don't rely on you interpretation. I guess they do rely on interpretation because you can have various questions about what Rudy, Rudy Giuliani's hands are doing, but you know, you can see many people watching the interview segment. And if they don't, if they feel differently about Rudy Giuliani and about the media and about Donald Trump than we do, then they just or about women or about journalism or, you know, really anything. You have to have beliefs to see that as absurd or you can, you know, think that Rudy's just being nice to someone, which is gross. But there's room for interpretation. The 10 seconds in the bedroom are just like, huh, Rudy Giuliani is in the bedroom with a woman who is much younger than him and he is putting his hands down his

pants. It's not dignified. It's like, it's not. That is what's happening. And to see those 10 seconds, you can't argue with it in the way that you can argue with almost anything else in the in the movie so in that sense if the goal was to change minds were to have an effect on the election then like huge success and the wider it goes on twitter the better but is that good for movies or comedy i don't know i believe we might say great success oh sorry sean nope that was the joke good job everybody i'll just stay out of the way. No, we're not going to get to the end of this podcast until everyone does Borat Voice, Amanda included.

Brian, how did you feel like this story went into the news media cycle? Just about like we said there, it got chewed over so much that it was bound to be somewhat weird and disappointing at by the time you actually saw it but um you know in the sense that it was not you know whatever our wildest dreams of that scene were possibly our biggest nightmares maybe in the case of Rudy Giuliani it was not going to quite achieve that but um

you know it it felt look a lot of his comedy is a stunt right and it's a stunt to get attention and to grab you but there's nothing subtle stunt to get attention and to grab you, but there's nothing subtle about it, right? He wants to grab you by the lapel and say, pay attention to me. I'm about to do something really, really transgressive right now. Here it goes.

And as that, it was just like a very, very, you know, sort of perfect Sacha Baron Cohen moment. David, I wanted to ask you as, in addition to the press box, our foremost wrestling expert, I feel like both the trump administration and sasha baron cohen are kind of arbiters of kayfabe you know that they they like create these like imaginary truths that we accept and then we go talk about as if they're

not real publicly um how do you feel about just the like two colliding visions of we all know this is fake, right? Okay, so we all know this is fake, right? It's at the crux of all wrestling viewership, right? Wrestling fans will all say, and I will argue that we all are very aware it's fake. Even when you're a kid, you understand that there's something unrealistic going on there and and you know the the kind of big lie has been an open secret dating back to you know before the 1920s um but it's at its but wrestling is most interesting when it's most real right when when a wrestler gets a microphone and says something that he actually believes it's most interesting when a guy throws a punch that's actually loaded because you know you've heard that these two people have heat backstage like

that's when it's really interesting uh when or more plainly when somebody gets slammed off a cage and there's no way to fake that injury that's when it's most interesting right so um you know to describe i mean we're not the first or probably the millionth outfit to describe, to compare, you know, the Trump administration or the Trump era and professional wrestling. And certainly Sacha Baron Cohen has his own little kayfabe going on when they collide. creates a black hole or something where there's not, it's either so farcical, it's incomprehensible or so real that, uh, it either really, really works or doesn't work at all.

Right. And, and, um, I think the Giuliani thing was sort of an instance of it working so well that it was, it just, it felt different.

You know, it wasn't just, we weren't laughing. We were, it was, it felt real serious. Yeah, I agree. That's sort of why I ask you, because it did feel a bit and the movie in many ways, I think,

feels a bit like two magnets like repelling each other, you know, like their forces can't meet because we already understand so much of not just the administration, but the politics of the administration, the people who follow the administration to be so performatively absurd on a day-to-day basis. Amanda, how do you think this movie is going to age? Is this something that people will be returning to in five years? It's interesting, right? Because in some ways, it's like as a historical document of this moment and how weird it was, it will age well.

And we're kind of, we're living inside it and that's not funny. Um, or certain the outside world is not funny. I don't really find it that funny. Maybe you do. Um, and it's, and it's hard to separate and you're watching Giuliani on Twitter and then you're watching it here. But if you're just kind of, I mean, I hope in five years we're able to be like, wow, what a wild time and what a document of a very strange time.

That does imply having moved on from it. And I suppose that's a bit more optimistic than anyone should be at this point in October in an election year. Brian, what about you as a time capsule for this moment? It's a great question.

You know, I always think of stand-up, you know, there are like a handful of classic standup records that have actually aged well. And so much of it, it's so great in the time. And then like five years later, it's, and then 10 years later it's canceled. And 15 years later, we didn't even remember it existed. So I sort of think of him like that. I think what will age well is just his, his sort of craft a little bit. I just think of when I would watch this movie, him, his ability to lure people in and make them feel safe. I think, I mean, way back in the day in the infamous, in my country, we have problem song. We forget that the first verse was about transportation problems in Kazakhstan, right?

That was a very safe topic to get everybody on board. In this movie at the debutante ball in Georgia, the first move is this very nice native dance that everyone can clap along with and feel happy about. And then it turns into the shower scene from Carrie, basically a few seconds after that. So just to me, his craft and skill more than maybe the subject of the movie i think that will be what ages david what about you you think you think you'll be watching this movie in 2025 i mean yeah i'm sure we will i'm sure we will because the craft and skill really is like brian said off the charts And I think that the discussion of, you know, Oscar nominations and stuff, it's,

this is a weird movie year, but it's sort of, I mean, as crazy as the Rudy Giuliani scene was as sort of just like halting as some of the other more traditional Borat things, you know, moments were the most affecting. I mean,

I, I don't think I'm wrong. I don mean i i don't think i'm wrong i don't think i'm missing anything i think most of them one of the most affecting scenes in the whole movie was when borat and his daughter like waved did the double newscast at the end and like said and waved goodbye and borat put his arm around her and said you did good and it was almost like talking about kayfabe like you almost felt that was like sasha baron cohen saying like okay like like cut, right? End scene.

It was almost like a farewell to the audience and to his acting partner. But in the context of the movie, it was really touching. And I think that... I wonder if we get away from the politics, you can actually pay more attention to the character work that was being done.

Who knows? I mean, it would not surprise me uh yeah i mean it's been pointed out by a handful of people already that sasha baron cohen is the father of a teenage daughter and that that this is clearly a reason why he used this framing device to make this movie and that it seems perverse in the face of that debutante ball sequence or the idea of putting your daughter in a cage. And frankly, I don't think I totally connected the cage bit with the nature of American politics

until we had this conversation. But again, a very kind of incisive and upsetting satire when you really think about it. Do you think Borat is a girl dad amanda can i please be removed from this narrative you like you you walked right into a father of a teenage daughter and i didn't say anything and then we had to go to the girl dad i will say that david i completely agree with you that that

was a very affecting final scene and i think like their relationship and the character work, the scripted framing is like genius, a real achievement. But also in that, that final scene, when they're doing the double newscast, they're doing a callback to the first movie, which is the running of whatever you guys remember what it was.

And the, in this case, it's the running of the white racist Americans and there is first the the white racist man and then there's a Karen and they actually use the name Karen which is like which is very funny and I think again to this idea of it being a time capsule and time capsule a moment, it's a great record of what we're living through. But I was also like, this is really weird that we're going from, you know, strange, politically charged meme to like high concept comedy, emotional moving moment within, what, four months? And just the way that these things rebound on each other is so much faster and kind of head spinning. And I think this movie engages with that really well,

but it is a very strange time that we're living in. Any final thoughts, Brian, David, on Borat's subsequent movie film? I'm interested in what disguise he's going gonna have to don to do another one of these or if this is the end of borat right i mean that's another thing is that this character was declared dead by its creator and then it in a very clever way managed to come back at least in some form um i'm always fascinated and to the point of him just being older like you said sean i'm just fascinated like what is sasha baron cohen gonna do next right which I think is the biggest compliment

I could probably give him is that I'm interested in what his next thing will be his next prank his next show his next movie whatever it is yeah he's a person who makes me feel hyperbolic because whenever I talk I've been maybe I'm not expressing my enthusiasm for him on this episode as a kind of question asker, but I think he is the greatest. I think his comedy is incredible. I think he is brave in the way that only a comedian can be brave. I think he is incredibly incisive in a format that is difficult to be incisive in and just generally is one of the few people that makes me hyena laugh like you, Brian. Davidid what about you any any final thoughts it is interesting to think what he's going to do next and i think that sort of you know we we're excluding anything i mean we're

deliberately asking what's he going to do next in this vein right what's he going to do now i mean because he can act and do other stuff um i couldn't help wondering whether or not we would like what what let me take the temperature of the of the room what what i mean could borat be between two ferns i mean could borat just be like a completely straightforward talk show that it's just a guy or or uh what would jiminy glick or whatever i mean can it just be a talk show with a guy in costume doing it then doing the bits i mean it almost is inherently becomes friendly fire at that point right because to go on the show you sort of have to be an ideological fan of the show but um and that's why between two ferns sort of i think has a little bit of relevance but i don't know if it's the same i mean it feels

like like the sort of gorilla aspect of it is is half or more of the of the joy yeah i think i think it's really hard to to do to do it again i mean he he created a proxy in tutar this time around i mean she really is the one who does most of the work in this respect he does pull off the the the anti-mask rally, which is, again, another original song recording by Sasha Baron Cohen. It's just unbelievable. But I don't know, Amanda, you think we'll ever see Borat again? Never say never, especially when it's comedians or artists of any kind being like, this is done forever and ever. They're just priming you for a comeback.

Well, Brian, David, thank you for uh being with us listen to the press box on the ringer podcast network really one of the best shows we make and um essential listening during this election season thank you again guys thank you ma'am dare we say it Okay, we're back. It's Amanda and I. We're here to talk about a couple of more movies that hit streaming services. Amanda, before we talk about these two movies,

you know, I really, this weekend, in terms of film releases, felt like the future of movies to me. You know, I was like, this is how we're going to get everything. It's going to be IP stuff. It's going to be remakes and sequels, but it's also going to be straight into our home. Did you have that sensation at all? I honestly felt like a little bit of nostalgia or like we're back, baby, to me watching,

having to watch like a lot of movies that just don't pan out the way that I want them to, which is not so much Borat as the other two films that we're about to discuss. It's just kind of like, well, it's 9.30 on a Sunday night and I have to watch The Witches on HBO Max because this is my job and I procrastinated. So that was nice. It was good to have a selection it's good to like i'm just i'm about to be a little rude and and that's okay you know that i missed doing that we have been mostly talking about things we love or respect or things that are interesting and i i don't have a lot of respect for the next two films primarily because they don't have a lot of respect for the things that they made. So let's go. Yeah. Difficult final few days of the month of Amanda here. We're going to do our best.

So the first movie we're going to talk about is Rebecca. We did a Hitchcock podcast this summer and celebrated his work. I think we all agree that 1940s Rebecca is just straight up one of the greatest movies ever made. It is a haunting and beautifully rendered adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel. And for some reason, Ben Wheatley decided to remake that movie and readapt that novel. And this is a new film that comes from Netflix. It stars Lily James and Armie Hammer. And it's just not what I wanted. It's not horrible. I don't think it's a terrible film. It just feels a bit like so many remakes. I mean, you're nodding your head. You're doing your little Amanda dance there to indicate perhaps it is. I didn't think it was terrible. Ben Wheatley in particular is a filmmaker who I really like, who I really admire, who I think has made some of the most interesting and transgressive movies of

the last 10 years. A Field in England and High Rise. And I really liked Free Fire. He was on the show a few years ago talking about that movie. Kill List is one of the scariest movies ever made. So he's a really talented guy. This story is, of course, quite, is more corseted, is more formal than a lot of the work that he does, which is often kind of emotionally erratic and kind of scary. And it just felt like an odd match and it felt like an odd decision to remake

the movie. What did you think? Yes, to everything that you just said. So I was willing to give Ben Wheatley the benefit of the doubt in the sense that he and Netflix, I would say like months ago, just started the, this is not a Hitchcock remake campaign. And it was just like,

before you interacted with anything related to 2020 Rebecca, it just had to have like stamped in all caps lock. This is a remake of the book and not the Hitchcock film which you know what fine I have read the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier big fan great trashy but fun read and I was like sure give me another version of it unfortunately it fails on its own terms as a movie or an adaptation of Rebecca, and it just fails to be interesting. This movie is disrespectful to the Mediterranean, which is just, you lost me 20 minutes in. No one looks like they're having any fun. It's like, why is Lily James dressed like a newsie? Like, what's going on here? And then you get back to the house and it just,

I don't, this movie, the idea of Rebecca, which is used, which was a dead character who haunts everyone, but particularly the main character who is played in this version by Lily James, but,

and who narrates the novel, the character Rebecca is meant to like be a way to investigate insecurity and weakness and a power structure and, um, all sorts of psychological dynamics in a young woman and between a young woman and the person she marries and the young woman and another woman. And, but it's like, it's all interior and this movie is like all exterior and it doesn't have it can't nail down the concept of Rebecca um thus no one has any motivations and like even Chris and Scott Thomas who plays Mrs. Danvers and who I would give my life for Chris and Scott Thomas I don't really offer that to many people and And I think she does the best that she can, but like kind of her shifting motivations

don't really match up because the animating character is not really pinned down. Armie Hammer, he wears a mustard suit. That's really all I have to say about it. And then at the end, Lily James just becomes Encyclopedia Brown for a while. And I was just like, what is going on? I don't understand. The tones shift. It's a mess. It didn't work for me. I haven't read the novel, so I can't speak to how faithful an adaptation

this actually is relative to the Hitchcock movie. But I know that there is something tonal and somber and melodramatic about the Hitchcock movie. It is a true gothic romance. And obviously that film features some extraordinary performances, you know, Joan Fontaine and Lawrence Olivier. So it's a high bar to try to reach in terms of your consciousness. And frankly,

if you're 16 years old and you've never seen Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca and you fire up Netflix and you pull this film up and you treat it like a gothic European version of The Kissing Booth, maybe you'll enjoy it. Maybe there's something algorithmic about the creative decision making behind this movie, but it did have that thing that is coming is becoming more common, which is that it just has like the Netflix gloss where it's like, why does this movie look like this? Why does it not look as good as it should? I'm a little confused as to what's happening here what cameras were used why is it framed this way why is there a kind of a film on the film that makes everything seem a little bit hyper real unreal unrealistic and maybe that was part of the design that we really tried to bring to the movie but just from a pure cinematic perspective it just wasn't as engaging as what it's going to be inevitably compared to.

And I'm not a big Lily James person. I just don't get it. And Armie Hammer, I think, is one of the most hit and miss actors in recent memory. We've talked about him a lot on this show, honestly, probably more than we should. Yeah, because I agree with you on the hit part of it. And this was a real miss. I don't know what to say. Lily James is just like so plucky.

And this is a movie like based on the idea that this woman doesn't have pluck. And she kind of has to find maybe not her pluck, but like her determination. But even there, it's not so much that she's like finding her will as opposed to that she is like joining the delusions that everyone else is um or that's what makes the original scary you wrote in our outline like did we need a feminist take and i was like number one is this feminist i don't really think so except lily james seems to think it is she's like i'm just gonna you know find justice for my man which is not not how it goes but she definitely thinks that she's the heroine of a different movie and it's not a great match i think it's worthy to compare her to joan fontaine who i is an actress that i love my wife and i both love joan fontaine

in a very small period of time she makes rebecca and then she reteams with Hitchcock to make Suspicion. And then a couple of years later, she makes Jane Eyre. She plays the adult Jane Eyre in Robert Stevenson's version. And she has this deep reservoir of sadness as an actress. You know, she has a very melancholy power to her work. And I feel like that defines the Rebecca character, the kind of the fear and the trauma and the confusion and the sadness of that character. And that's just not there. This movie has more in common with a Nola Holmes than it, than it does the original Rebecca. And like, I, I understand that that's a very common kind of storytelling that you find

these days, especially on streaming services. But I don't know, this just seems like it's just, it's not, it right it's not correct one more thing i'll say this won't surprise anybody like kind of perked up a little bit during the very last scene after spoiler alert turn this off i guess if you you know after man really is set on fire and after quite frankly the most ridiculous scene that i've seen in a movie this year, which is when Kristen Scott Thomas, again, hit the spoiler button, when she jumps to her death, but not before, she's just like, says to Lily James, you'll never be happy. And then

Lily James yells, yes, I will. And then she jumps. And then there's just like a Lily James slow-mo reaction face. But I was like, am I watching like that that's not me uh paraphrasing what is said that's literally what's said it was so confusing but then I'm gonna do that for you next time I jump off a cliff I'm gonna call you I'm gonna FaceTime you and say you'll never be happy and then jump I'll just go yes I will um So strange. What is going on? Fast forward, then she and Armie Hammer are in, I believe, Cairo. And I don't really think this happens in the novel. And they've just like had a lot of sex.

And suddenly that's just like there's a lot of heat and sexual chemistry on the screen. And I was like, number one, yes, I'm awake now. This is working. Number two, if you wanted to remake Rebecca and make it be about sex, that's a great idea because that's obviously animating some of it. And it's not something that they were going to explore in detail in 1940. In fact, it's famous for being just like the repressed queerness of the Danvers character. But there's no sex in the previous two hours of the movie. It's just that last scene. I don't know. I enjoyed the last scene, though.

I think we've said all that needs to be said about Rebecca. Okay. Shall we talk about the witches? Yeah. What the fuck? What the fuck? I'm like, you don't respond to my text so i stopped but i watched it like i said last night 9 30 and once i got to in hathways i have to say somewhat virtuoso uh ballroom you know which convention scene scene. But that was upsetting and visually alarming. And this is what

we're feeding children, literally. Well, let's provide some context here. Have you in your life watched Nicholas Rogue's 1990 adaptation of The Witches? I believe that I have, but when I was very young, and I probably turned it off because if I'm a wimp when it comes to watching movies now, then I certainly was as a child. The witches, the book, huge for me. Vividly remember it. I remember the cover. I remember the illustration. I remember loving it. I had absolutely no memory of its incredibly strange plot details. And I was like, this is what I loved, but they turn into mice. I had completely blocked out pretty much all of the plot mechanics.

Can we do a quick sidebar on Roald Dahl? Yeah, tough. Roald Dahl, I don't want to talk about the problematic nature of Roald Dahl. Let's just focus on his work for a moment. He was my favorite author from the ages of probably seven to 10. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Peeler, very influential person in my life, gave me a copy of Matilda. And she said, you will really like this book, I promise. I loved Matilda and then proceeded to read all of his books. And he has been adapted many times. James and the Giant Peach, of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

You know, this is one of the great kind of marriages of storytelling and cinematic form. And The Witches is definitely one of the darkest and most psychologically complex books that he's written. And Nicholas Rogues, the late Nicholas Rogues who just died, his adaptation is one of the last films that he made, is one of the scariest movies ever made. It is a trauma-inducing movie for many kids. And it is like a masterclass in puppetry. And it's a Jim Henson production. It's the guy who made Don't Look Now combining with the Jim Henson

company to make something that is unnerving to the end. And it's also got a tremendous Angelica Houston performance in it. But it's very similar to the Rebecca circumstances where we just do not need another version of this. They made the version. They made the version that is iconic in its own way. And The Witches is more of a cult film than Rebecca. But it is widely understood amongst its fans to be a masterclass in creepiness. And so I found the decision to make this movie very disorienting. And it is a bit emblematic of the director's career choices in the last few years. I am a huge admirer of Robert Zemeckis. I think he's changed moviemaking in many ways in the late 70s and early 80s and even into the 90s.

And we're a big fan of his on the rewatchables and I'm sure we'll do many more of his movies over the years. But the last few years of his career have been a bit complicated. You and I have been rude to Allied in the past on this show. I think Allied was rude to itself, okay? Okay, fair enough. We never did an episode on Welcome to Marwen.

And maybe what we should do, okay, I'm freestyling this, but we've done movie swaps in the past of movies that we love that we want the other person to see yeah um you know we traded for weddings and a funeral and aliens earlier in quarantine i would love to do a movie swap for movies that we hate or that we find utterly confounding um and i i want to know what you think of welcome to marwin do you remember the day that i learned that welcome to Marwen was a real movie? Because it was about like 10 days before it was released.

And I just remember the extended Slack messages that I sent you just being like, do you know about Marwen? I have like a sense memory of being in my office still when we went to offices. And then we brought Andrew Guadadero in for some reason. And I was just like, how is this real? I confess I didn't follow up to actually see the movie.

Yeah, it's a strange choice. I don't understand who this movie is for to kind of maybe go back to the Borat thing. I mean, I don't think that you should show this to children. I don't know your children. It was very creepy and visually upsetting. There are a lot of boils on Anne Hathaway's head. And when she goes into real kind of Grand High Witch, whatever her name is, mode,

and she has the creepy teeth and her face opens up, I was very upset. Just like that, I'm an adult and I didn't need to see that. Well, it seems like what appealed to Zemeckis is this ongoing project he has in sort of digital animation and digital filmmaking, which goes back to the Polar Express, and he's made Beowulf and all these other films that he's worked on. And even though this film is ostensibly featuring humans and humans playing witches,

there's so much effects work. There's so much computer generated graphics in this movie. And some of it is effective, honestly. Some of it looks really cool. Most of it, I think, is kind of distracting. And it's a little hard to know how to take a movie like this on a small screen because when you shrink down a lot of that animation, it doesn't have the same effectiveness that it might have.

There's a lot of other issues, though, with the movie, which I think is really not a success at all. I mean, it's really honestly one of the least successful movies I've seen this year. But it's got this Frankenstein collection of people that worked on it. It's co-authored by Zemeckis and Guillermo del Toro and Kenya Barris, three hugely accomplished, talented people who are all you can see kind of working in their interests. Guillermo del Toro, of course, famously so interested in the point of view of children in peril. So many of his stories feature characters in those situations. Kenya Barris clearly brings this story of a young black boy

who is thrust into this world and that is completely different from i think the english setting of the the role the first uh which is adaptation and then zemeckis's sense of like puckish kind of gameplay that happens in his movies and you put all these things together and it's just like a stew that doesn't congeal you know it doesn't really come together and oldies which he just at some point it's just like let's play another hit for like which you know i like all of these songs but it is obviously a crutch yeah it's got that boomer thing right it's got that forrest gump thing of like here are the songs that were good in 1968 in alabama which is where the movie starts and i don't know it's just a really weird thing and

this of course was a movie that I believe was made for Warner Brothers. And they chose to send this directly to HBO Max. It was originally meant to be a theatrical release. I didn't sense a lot of witches chatter on the timeline. Did you? No. Again, I did my homework at the last possible minute, but I did it. And that's the only reason I watched this.

I did want to say, when the film ended and it cut to directed by Robert Zemeckis, the black title card, the Charlie Kaufman callback was, unintentional callback was tremendous. I laughed very hard. That, in retrospect, is really funny.

It was funny then, but it's even funnier now. I had completely forgotten about that. I'm thinking of ending things joke, but it's a great call. And, um, you know, I don't want to say it's sad that Robert Zemeckis is in this place. He's a, he's a great filmmaker. I back to the future is an all time favorite for me, but it's just, it's odd how he's chosen to spend the last five or six years of his career with these stories. I prefer he tries something a little bit different. What else? What, what do we have anything to look forward to? What's coming up in the future

here on The Big Picture? Well, I believe that there's another movie draft in the works. There is. How are you feeling? Well, you've certainly handed me and Chris our ass two movie drafts in a row. I've been thinking on what to do.

How can I bust up the system? How can I exploit the inefficiencies in the game that I created? And I'll find something. I'll find something to defeat you. What I love is when you become ruthlessly competitive and spreadsheet driven. It's my favorite side of you.

So I look forward to that. I look forward to whatever weird shit Chris is going to pick, which is my favorite part of you so i look forward to that um i look forward to whatever weird shit chris is gonna pick which is my favorite part of these and he's not listening to this so he'll never know um and you know i just i'm gonna try to do everybody proud i'm just i'm gonna i'm gonna try to to carry the banner with honor and and respect for the films of 2013 and our listeners. Stay tuned to The Big Picture if you want to hear our next movie draft that'll be coming later this week. Thanks, Amanda. And thank you to Bobby Wagner. And as always, very nice. you