The Big Picture - Introducing the Garbage Crime Movie Oscars. Plus: Brandon Cronenberg!

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

Things are quiet in the world of movies, so we’re taking a moment to celebrate one of our favorite subgenres: GARBAGE CRIME. What’s that? Allow chief criminologist Chris Ryan to break it all down and hand out some awards to the very best the subgenre has to offer. (1:00) Then, Sean is joined by writer-director Brandon Cronenberg to talk about his viscerally overwhelming new film, ‘Possessor.’ (1:05:00) Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan and Brandon Cronenberg Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessy and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about beautiful trash. Today I am joined by my partner in crime, Chris Ryan. What up, man? What's up, man? Chris, we're going to talk about our secret favorite subgenre today, a little universe of cinema I like to call garbage crime. What is garbage crime? Well, we'll be celebrating the good, the bad, and the brutal of this special world on today's episode

by giving out the first annual Garbage Crime Oscars. Later in the show, I'm joined by the writer-director, Brandon Cronenberg, to talk about his viscerally overwhelming new movie, Possessor. Hope you'll stick around for that. It's all coming up on The Big Picture. Okay, Chris, I think that you and I have been circling this exact conversation, a recorded version of this conversation, for the better part of 15 years, ever since we first became pals.

And I don't know when we realized that we were in love with this specific genre of movies, but I think I can't claim nearly as much ownership over it as you can. This is your metier. This is where you live in this subgenre. So the floor is yours. Speak to me on why it matters. Okay. So garbage crime is not a new thing. In decades past, we used to just call these B-movies or exploitation movies. It would even go as far to say that sometimes they were grindhouse movies. These are just basically hard genre crime films that are really only concerned with the story that they're telling. They're not really trying to tell us anything about society. They don't even really have that high end cinematic expectations for themselves.

These are pulp fiction, body blow movies. And I feel like, and we're going to discuss a little bit of the parameters of this genre, but I feel like you can pretty much trace the new iteration of this genre back to about 2009, which is where I feel like it emerges from. And then ever since then, reliably, you get about three to five

crime movies per year, often starring pretty big movie stars, whether they are slumming it, whether they are trying to get in the fields with the real folks or whatever, get in the streets. But they are usually like the absolute definition of a B-movie. And what it is, is it's

disposable, but weirdly rewatchable. They are usually overly serious, which is kind of a weird hallmark of these movies, is the amount of sanctity they have about the story that they're telling. But the movies themselves are not really enrichinging your life but they are like my favorite kind of movie i think that they are an homage to mediocrity and mediocrity is really really important we've overlooked that too often we're ranking the only the best things only the top five everything else gets flushed movies need to have this solid foundation from which to be good and then not to be too bad. I don't want them to be too bad. But that movie where you're just like, eh, I'm glad I spent 10 bucks or 15

bucks or three bucks on that. I'm glad I snuck into that. I'm glad I watched that on a Sunday afternoon when I was hungover. That's what we're talking about here. So let's talk about what you can find in these movies. You mentioned some some movie stars you mentioned that kind of the general shape of things that there's there's crime there has to be a crime of some kind committed either by a corrupt police officer or a thief or a drug dealer or some other criminal actor these are violent movies they're very masculine films i would say that they are often slickly made but not necessarily over budgeted, not mega budgeted movies. You know, they're the same way that we're celebrating mediocrity. They're sort of the middle in terms of how much it costs to make these movies. You agree? Absolutely. I think

that Heat is actually the outlier. Like when we've talked to me like this, Heat might be the most talked about movie on the Ringer podcast network, but Heat is actually, like, way too well made. You know, and for as much as a lot of these movies aspire to be Heat or aspire to be Goodfellas or aspire to be The Godfather, that's actually not what we're talking about. We're not talking about transcendent crime films. We're talking about actively untranscendent crime films. Yeah, and I think the intention of the

people who make it is super interesting around these movies too because some of them know exactly what they are and we will talk about the classics of the genre it will surprise no one to hear the den of thieves is going to come up on this podcast because that is a movie that has its sights clearly on i love heat i'm not as good as, but you're still going to like me. Yes. But then there are other movies that I would say are trying very hard, are sort of lower class films that are trying to rise above their station to be something better than decent. And then there are also high budget, prestigious, or even IP related movies that want to be something special, that want to be a part of a mass culture,

but actually find themselves dragooned into garbage crime. And so it's a very fungible kind of category. It's a fun selection of films to try to categorize because it's not just what you see on the label. Den of Thieves, it's clear. We knew what that was going to be the moment we saw one commercial for it. The first time you saw it, you had an emotional experience,

as I've heard you discuss in the past, you built the shrine to Christian Guttagest, you know, you just... But not everything is as it seems, I think, with these films too, which is part of what's going to be fun about this conversation. I think that one of the coolest things about this

is when you're talking about a genre that you're pretty much making up on the fly or a movement that you're pretty much making up on the fly, you get to make the rules. So I made some, I made a few rules. So let me go through some of my commandments for the genre. You tell me if you have any notes, if you want to push back on anything. Number one, it doesn't matter when these movies are actually released. Spiritually, they're released in the first two and a half months of the year. These are movies that you go see. The perfect time to go see this movie is after your football team loses on a Sunday. You go see it on a Sunday afternoon. Okay. So this is the perfect

time to go see a Liam Neeson movie is in those first early months of the year where nothing is working out right for you, even though you had such high expectations and it's gray and you just go to the movies to go see A Walk Among the Tombstones. That's number one. Speaking of Liam Neeson, it doesn't matter who stars in these movies. Spiritually, they all star Gerard Butler. Gerard Butler's character in Dead of Thieves is what we are talking about. I think Gerard Butler thinks that he is literally doing like, he thinks that he is among Robert De Niro and Dan of Thieves. He's doing Richard III.

Yes. Yes. And he is like, I'm going to put on weight. I'm going to actually get tatted up for this. I'm going to do so much tactical training. But that's what we're talking about. So Gerard Butler is the avatar for a lot of these. The villains in these movies, I would say, roughly break down one third

Mexican cartel, but overwhelmingly feature Eastern European mafia. So whether it's former Soviet bloc, like some strange Balkan thing, or it's just straight up the Russian mob, those are the perfect villains because they can just be as fucking evil as possible and nobody seems to ever question it. We're just like, oh yeah, the ever question it we're just like oh yeah the russian mob they're just like absolute savages it's deeply inoffensive yes absolutely even if the first scene of these movies even if the first scenes are not a ripoff of the first high scene in heat spiritually they are the first high scene in heat so several of the films that we're talking about specifically uh sleepless with Jamie Foxx,

Den of Thieves, definitely, they just straight up do wear the hockey masks from Heat. Like they make no bones about it, but it's more just like the vibe of opening your movie with a heist scene is incredibly powerful. And it just lets the person in the theater know you're exactly right to come to this movie.

It does not matter whether or not Run This Town is featured in the movie's trailer. Spiritually, Run This Town is in every single one of the movie's trailers. If not Run This Town, No Church in the Wild is also an acceptable replacement. And recently, I Will Also Allow No Talent by Drake. Those three songs are the three songs allowed in the trailers.

A lot of late period Jay-Z, though. Absolutely. Absolutely. And these movies usually feature a scene where a supervising law enforcement officer asks for a status report and often will ask if his shooters are in place. These movies are also just absolute advertisements for the tactical and firearms training that the actors took beforehand. Often a breach of a door is like a major sequence of this movie so that they can be like, I'm in line behind this guy and we're going to go through who's got the battering ram.

Often, because of that, in so many of these films, there is a character who served multiple tours in Iraq or Afghanistan. These are actually kind of post-Gulf War movies. And they're drawing a lot from people who have come back from Afghanistan or Iraq and have now turned

into a life of crime. That whole thing comes up often. And that also explains why these people are often superheroes in terms of what they're able to pull off. And it's a real shorthand. It's like, oh, that guy did two tours in Iraq. And it's like, oh, shit.

Well, then he can definitely rob six banks in two days. So those are the sort of broad outlines of what I'm talking about. And within that, there's a lot of room to play. I don't know if you have any others that you would like to add on. Well, you've raised an interesting point, because I think that while these movies don't necessarily have overt politics, they are definitely, I would say, traditionally more politically incorrect in terms of the way that the characters talk to each other, the kinds of stories that they're trying to tell. And maybe you've latched onto something, which is that they do feel kind of post George W. Bush presidency in terms of the way that they're

structured and like almost trying to claw back to a time when you could make a meaner form of cinema because they're part of the reason why we're celebrating them is not because of those that point of view specifically but it's more like there aren't as many of these kinds of movies as there were in the 1970s and the 1980s when you could there was a movie like this on every plane on every corner and the pack has been thinning for some reason why do you think that is well I think that they're pretty drab. You know what I mean? I mean, traditionally, one of the things that's a sensation

that I feel like I always have deja vu with is getting incredibly pumped up off of a trailer for one of these movies. And then when you actually see the movie, you're like, oh, did you guys think that you were making like a hard time or something like that? Did you guys think you were making

a really like important 70s drama? Because that's not what i was actually coming into the movie theater to come see if i want to see that i'll just like re-watch the master you know i actually do like a little bit of pulp and you know like theatricality and and humor and and like a little bit of like you know unbelievability to my you know? But there are a lot of these films take themselves incredibly seriously. And I think that that has been running out. The other thing that you gotta admit is that a lot of tough guy stories

are just moving to television like everything else. So something like True Detective, which would have been a prime contender for a movie like we're talking about, it's just like, where is it gonna be a six-hour show six hour show now? Night Of would have been a perfect movie like this. Just Richard Price is like, no, I'm going to do the five, six hour version of that where nobody's going to give me any notes about what this character is doing. Yeah, I agree with that. I feel like The Shield specifically would have been one of these kind of 70s tough guy movies and also Justified, which you and I

obviously have obsessed over for years, is another example of what would have been so when something like this comes along we get a little bit overexcited about it there's a few other things i've noticed as i've dove back into the into the archives of these movies recently there's a few words that are always cropping up in the titles of these movies they almost feel like a pavlovian trigger for people casting around on itunes or on amazon prime to rent something late on a friday night or perhaps on a sunday after their team like a Pavlovian trigger for people casting around on iTunes or on Amazon prime to rent something late on a Friday night, or perhaps on a Sunday after their team cough, cough,

the jets has gotten their ass kicked. The word crime itself, you will definitely find in a great many of these movies, the word money. That is a clear signal that money is being stolen. The word kill. There's always some sort of righteous kill or truthful kill or the power of the kill.

Easy, easy, which is usually meant to be played ironically because there's nothing easy about the work that needs to be done in these movies. Dead or the variation death, somebody is dying. You know, probably multiples of people are dying. Maybe even dozens of people in the case of some movies we're going to talk about. Another important word that you don't really see that often in movie titles anymore, except in this subgenre, is bullet. Bullet is now, that's a clear sign that you're watching a garbage crime movie. And then also, this is a key variation, I think, for a particular kind of movie star, usually a Jason Statham type.

A the followed by someone's noun descriptor. Yeah. Transporter, negotiator, driver, circus performer. Yeah. Trapeze artist, whatever. Yeah. I don't think I saw the trapeze artist. What is that about? It's great. It's a moving portrayal of a trapeze artist who falls into a life of bank robberies because they need a bendable guy. Wow, crazy. Is that a Tim Burton film?

Who made that? So I think that I agree with you. I think about 2009 is right around when this started. And I think Liam Neeson's taken the films of David Ayer and then one of your favorite movies of of this period i think are all sort of responsible for the kickoff yeah so i'll let you talk about your movie in a minute but i think that there is one other movie that you i remember you being very in on in the early 2000s and almost not really understanding why you liked it so much but it was a very predictive film for this movement that movie was called swat yes why did you like SWAT and and did you sense that the

you could you hear the train coming down the train tracks did you did you sense the wave ready to crash so SWAT is just shitty IP SWAT is just like they were sitting on the rights to you know like the was SWAT a tv show right it was yeah yeah and like so I think they were just sitting on the rights to that and they and they were just trying to make Colin Farrell happen back then. This is after Tigerland. Everybody was just like, Colin Farrell is going to be the next Tom Cruise. He's going to be the next leading man

for the next 30 years. And they were putting him in this stuff. And SWAT's a perfect example of it's basically like the movie Speed if there's just no speed component. It's just like an LA SWAT team movie with a group of charismatic actors solving a really pedestrian crime. There's not like, can you get out of the skyscraper or does the bus ever go below 55? It's not high concept at all. Very few of these films are high concept. They're all pretty much one last

job movies or they've got my wife and kid movies. Yeah. I think Liam Neeson's films are probably the exception that proves the rule in terms of the concept. And I think the primary reason for that is because he's made so damn many of these that he keeps needing to reinvent them and coming up with a new pitch to get people to come out to see them because they're some of the most successful of this small subgenre. So I mentioned that, you know, I would say the ceiling is low, but the floor is high on a lot of these movies i want to talk about some movies that aspire to something different and then landed in the garbage crime bin sure so these movies are the sequels that sought to be respectable

but then found themselves stuck one jack reacher never go Back, which stars Tom Cruise and was directed by Ed Zwick and kind of sucks. And yet, incredibly watchable. Deeply watchable film. Do you think they'll ever make a third Jack Reacher movie? I mean, it really depends whether Tom Cruise lives

through the making of the next two Mission Impossible movies. And also, it goes to space with Elon Musk. I mean, I think we as a society need to agree upon the fact that we very well may be watching

Tom Cruise die on screen soon. So... Jesus Christ. No, but he's going to space, man. Like, I don't really... We're not really talking about this enough. Chris, we're getting a vaccine.

We have a new administration coming into office and all you can think about is Tom Cruise dying in space on screen. Do you think they'll is Tom Cruise dying in space on screen. Do you think they'll release that film if he dies on screen in space? Oh, absolutely. I think he'll be like, I went out the way I came in.

Okay, that's great. I think Sicario Day of the Soldado also applies here. You and I once did a podcast about this movie and how much we liked it despite it being immensely depraved. Why do you think it qualifies? Well, I think it takes the sort of highfalutin idea of Sicario and is like, there's a repeatable model in it. You know what I mean? Like the two characters who seem like supporting characters in Sicario, the Josh Brolin Department of Defense like spy and Benicio Del Toro's assassin are

actually like pretty interesting if you just put them on the road and put them on different adventures. And what if they did this? And what if they did that and taylor sheridan imagine sicario at least as a trilogy and honestly like if things break one way or the other like i would not even have been shocked if they were like sicario the tv show the further adventures of these guys wouldn't you watch that of course. I think the other thing that can happen here is movies that are out of genre can transform into garbage crime. So the Purge Anarchy, for example, I don't know if you've revisited this one recently, but you know, the original Purge film, it's a thriller for sure, but it's essentially positioned as a horror movie. You know, what would happen in this dystopian future where people were permitted one day a year to commit a crime?

The Purge Anarchy is just a crime movie. It's just like a survival run all night firefight movie. Yeah, it's like a Walter Hill movie, right? Exactly. Yeah. And I love that. I think there's nothing disreputable about that at all. It was actually a really smart pivot the same way when they pivoted to, you know, the election version of that film.

They were doing like, you know, a very over the top, you know, parallax view style political thriller. And then the last version that they did, I believe it was like a blaxploitation movie. So that's like one of the most flexible franchises. So smart of them to make garbage crime. I'm definitely putting the Dark Knight Rises in this list. I love this. If you look closely at what's happening in The Dark Knight Rises, don't look at Bane's mask. Don't look at Catwoman. Look at the actions that the characters are taking.

This is garbage crime up to exploding the football stadium. Yes. That is where it, I think, exits that sort of like low hum of violence and enters a kind of a nuclear category. Blockbuster, yeah. But otherwise, the plot of that movie and the plot of 21 bridges is not very different. Exactly. It's basically taking, shutting down a city in an effort to send a message and capture somebody. So definitely Dark Knight Rises. Prisoners.

You think prisoners fits the bill? So I would say prisoners is just the flip of what you're saying. I think prisoners directed by Kola, you know, Sarah would just be a classic Liam Neeson, like, where are my kids movie. But because of Denis Villeneuve, it almost elevates into this like Lynchian dread, you know, and it becomes something it almost transcends the other way. So I wanted to include that to show sometimes things can go up. All right. You made a note here that is important for us to unpack. Is the town too good for this list? I think it is. Where do you say, where does the line get drawn between garbage crime and

basically like the Irishman? If I want to recommend the movie to anyone in my life who isn't you, it's not garbage crime. Yeah. If it goes beyond me and Bill. Honestly, yes. Honestly, if it's not you guys, then I think it's not garbage crime. I think it can't be. And the town,

I would recommend the town to my in-laws. I would tell my mother-in-law to watch The Town. You know, I think, you know, The Town has like a slightly elevated love story. It has like a slightly elevated sentimentality. That's the other thing about these movies is they're very unsentimental.

You know, they don't have a lot of treacliness in them. Couple of things though. The Town has the heat face masks. It does. It does. It also has an amazing performance by Jeremy Renner that I think is very indicative of what actors try to do in these movies, which is essentially like, I want to do my version of De Niro in Mean Streets.

I want to do my version of Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs. I want to do that thing where I say the F word, every other word. I point guns. I scream. I'm desperate. I'm. I point guns. I scream. I'm desperate. I'm a cop who's in too deep. I'm a robber who has one last job. And that is obviously a very intoxicating carrot to dangle in front of an actor. Yes, the hair trigger. That's a key character in all of these movies. So I think the town is too good. Just like I think something like Reservoir Dogs would be too good. Reservoir Reservoir Dogs, you know, it's well before this, we invented this genre two days ago,

but it feels very inspired by a lot of those 70s movies that these movies are also drawing from. But there is something almost too idiosyncratic and too personal about Reservoir Dogs. That's the other thing is there has to be like a veneer of blandness, you know, and I don't mean that critically. I just mean that there has to be kind of like an easily copyable framework here. The best way to think about it is Den of Thieves insisting that what is easily identifiable as suburban Atlanta is actually like LA County, you know? Or 21 Bridges shooting in Philly and being like new york baby and you're like that's toronto man like that is so obviously not like there is a weird fakeness to these movies and it goes all the way down to like the celtic cross tattoos that everybody seems to have in them you

know it's like there is something about it that is more like um prop jewelry than ingrained into the characters. I like how you put that. Yeah, that's very true. I guess the other thing that we didn't mention is that most of these movies, almost all of these movies take place in cities. They are very urban set stories. There are a handful of movies, I think, that we're bidding for something bigger and much better than garbage crime

that I think unfortunately got dragged down to just in the last couple of years. One, Nocturnal Animals. That's one of the most insane misfires I've ever seen in my life. I love that movie. You really don't like that. No, it's not that I don't like it. It's just, it's not what it thinks it is.

Like it is, it is absolute trash. And you know what? I don't want to, I don't want to cast aspersions on Tom Ford and all the wonderful actors in that movie. Maybe they knew exactly what they were making, but if they were, it's so interesting that they were giving carte blanche to make something this grimy and dirty and crime-ridden. So I love that one. Black Hat, which is obviously one of the architects of garbage crime and not his finest hour, Chris. Black Hat definitely goes into the garbage crime bin because there is still a Getty stock image in that film. And I will never forget for as long as I live, you know, the amount of hype that goes in in my life when Michael Mann has something coming out and seeing that movie. And I think

I saw it with Bill and Bill was like, was that just a Getty photo? And I was like, yeah, but I'm sure this is like an early print. It was just like opening day of the movie. It wasn't like we were not seeing a director's working print and that happened, you know, and that movie is incomprehensible

and so fucking weird that that was like a movie that Michael Mann was like, I'm going to spend two years on this. But it's like a perfect example of Chris Hemsworth just being like, I need going to spend two years on this. But it's like a perfect example of Chris Hemsworth just being like, I need to be a hacker who gets into machine gun battles.

What was he hacking? What was that? Was it like the- Nuclear plants. But wasn't it like the price of something? Oh, he was playing markets. Yeah. Yeah.

He was like Haralabob, betting on Biden. That's right. Nuclear Bob. That's great stuff. Yeah. You know, I think the accountant also falls into this category. I think Affleck has an interesting relationship to these movies.

You know, he clearly is a fan of the, you know, Don Siegel type of 70s crime movies and is doing his kind of homages to them. Argo, in a lot of ways, is not garbage crime. It's much more of an international hostage crisis movie. But it has a similar kind of energy. You know, there's a lot of like kicking doors down, guys brandishing machine guns, you know, people taking over flights

and taking people hostage. So let's talk about the icons of this phenomenon. Obviously, we just talked about man. Man, I think, heat and thief and what? There's another, oh, collateral. I think Manhunter to some extent too. Manhunter too absolutely yeah i think um those movies are obviously very influential on the filmmakers

who spend their time making garbage crime but there there are a lot of others i think a lot of people you can look back and say i'm gonna try to rip moves off here and there from these people obviously martin scorsese i think what you and i really like is the idea that when we go back and we read, like, if you read, like, Cahiers de Cinema and you read, like, Francois Truffaut or Godard writing about the Hollywood movies that they watched in the 40s're 50 or 60 and say, you know, those movies in the early 2000s or this director who never really got a fair shake, but was like reliably making these incredible genre movies year after year. So that's what I think we look back on. And we look back on directors like, you know, whether it's Don Siegel or Richard Donner or Robert Aldrich or, gosh, I would even go into the 80s and 90s with like somebody like Andrew Davis, who I think is famous for The Fugitive,

but did Under Siege and has like a bunch of like, McTiernan is kind of like this. I don't know if he's really a crime guy as much of an action guy, but there are a bunch of filmmakers who I think are just like really, really excellent craftsmen at this kind of thing

that didn't really get their due because they weren't making like awards bait. Yeah, I think probably the biggest example of that is Tony Scott, right? I mean, Tony Scott, who is, you know, an object of obsession on the rewatchables and that you and I have been talking about forever and not all of his movies would fit this category, but he has made a couple like last boy scout and man on fire to me are kind of the alpha and the Omega for him in terms of pure crime movies, bad attitude movies, guys doing things that are completely reprehensible on screen, but also somehow visually intoxicating. And you're right. I think we have worked hard the last 15 years

to try to valorize a lot of that work, or at least make people understand how virtuosic it is, that it's not just disposable crap, that there's something worthy. Now, not all of these movies are, are Tony Scott worthy. You know, not all of these movies are Richard Donner worthy. A lot of them are kind of junkie, but I'll make my case for the ones that I love. And I'm sure you will too, as we, as we start going through them. So those are the filmmakers. Those are like the godfathers. Who are the, the who define this genre? Well, of this most recent batch? Yeah. Yeah. So definitely, I think the two guys I have on Rushmore, at least, or the three rather, are Wahlberg, Neeson, and Denzel Washington. So three guys who you would think, I think,

has Neeson won an Oscar? I don't believe so. Well, in any case, it wouldn't be out of the question if Liam Neeson at some point had won an Oscar, right? No, just nominated once for Schindler's List. Okay, and you could have made an argument that maybe you could get in there for silence for a supporting actor or something like that. Yeah, sure, before and after. Yeah, Michael Collins, yeah, that's great.

Gangs of New York. So Neeson has obviously made a cottage industry out of making these, but Quiet as Kept, Denzel actually spends more time making garbage crime than he does making flight or making fences. You know what I mean? He is actually one of our great purveyors of absolute dog shit crime movies, whether it's Safe House or Two Guns or two fucking Equalizer movies. I would even say that the Magnificent Seven remake is in some ways garbage crime in its soul. And his collaborations with Antoine Fuqua

and these other filmmakers, like this is obviously a genre that he really likes. And he thinks of himself- Yeah, look at all the Tony Scott movies he made. Exactly. And he thinks of himself probably a little bit like a Latter-day East would. I think that's 100% true.

Do you want to wait to talk about Wahlberg and your relationship to Wahlberg's work in these movies? No, I mean, I think that he's just actually then the person who I think sees the financial margins on these. So these films, I think I would best put them as the less financially rewarding version of horror movies. So for a horror movie, usually the margins are really big. You can make a horror movie for a little bit cheaper as long as it's not a huge special effects driven thing. And the baseline audience for any horror movie is good enough to make 1.5, two times your money, at least. And that's how Blumhouse gets built. I think these crime movies are really the last example of the mid-budget movie that gets made anymore, where I would only have to guess,

but I would imagine somewhere between $35 and $70 million budgets. And after everything is kind of accounted for, these movies wind up making their money back with a little bit of a profit. Obviously, the actors like making them, but I think somebody like Mark Wahlberg sees these as reliable, button-pushing, deliverable financial endeavors. I think he's really important for this reason. For years, this was a two-track economy. One was the straight-to-VOD movie that featured the likes of late period John Travolta, late period Bruce Willis, late period Arnold maybe, certainly late people like John Cusack, Nicolas Cage.

These guys cashed paychecks by making movies that sold overseas well, and then you could watch at home on Apple day of release. And then there was the other track, which was the Denzel's movies that you're talking about, the Mark Wahlberg movies that you're talking about, the Liam Neeson movies that you're talking about, which were in theater experiences where they were made probably by a hot young European director making his American debut. Coming out of the Luc Besson school. Yeah, exactly. And doing something very stylish, but very on the ground that is very manageable for

what you said between 35 and 70 million. Wahlberg is important because he's the first guy to do this in the streaming era. He is now with spencer confidential made a transition to these movies being a potential market for streaming and frankly they make a lot more sense for the future of movies than you know 300 million dollar ip if 80 million people watch spencer confidential on your streaming service and get people to subscribe to your service that makes way more sense than trying to make a fucking Thanos movie. It's a completely different ballgame. And I wonder if with Two Guns and Broken City and Contraband and all of this capital that he

has built up with audiences like this, he can just now make these movies for the rest of his life and not have to worry about box office receipts. Yeah. And then every once in a while, he can go make a David O. Russell movie, or he can be in The Departed, or he can go be in a bigger film. I mean, I couldn't believe it, but we could have an entire other conversation about what the hell is going on with the Netflix top 10. But Mile 22, which is a much maligned film that came out a couple years ago, which was supposed to be an action franchise, now is sort of recontextualized as a military crime film and is in Netflix's top 10 chart this weekend. And is actually, when I was rewatching a little bit of it, far more watchable as like kind of a disposable Netflix movie than it is like

a $100 million blockbuster up against an Avengers movie in the theaters. That's the thing. All the time on this show, I'm as guilty of this as anyone. We bitch and moan about what's lost by not having a theater experience or theaters even before the pandemic theaters continuing to shrink in terms of the movie business. But there are versions of movies that are frankly just better at home with lower stakes. And Mile 22, if I had not seen it in a movie theater, I would have appreciated it more because I saw it in a movie theater and I was like, this is incomprehensible and bad. And on Netflix with no skin in the game, probably just a better movie. We'll talk more about it, but I felt exactly that way watching

21 Bridges on Showtime. I was just saying, dude, this movie is good as hell. But I never, even though I was like, I should go see this. I'm going to go see this. This is Chad Boseman's post Black Panther Gambit. It's the Russos. The great cast, I should go check it out. I just missed it for whatever reason. It is the perfect cable movie. Perfect. Completely agree. We'll talk about that a bit more in a minute. So, few other figures who are obviously important to this. Also, late period De Niro and Pacino have been known to cash some checks on a garbage crime. Statham, I mentioned him. He's happy to swing in from time to time. The filmmakers,

there are probably between five and ten linchpin guys who make these movies, or at least who are the best at making these movies. I don't want to step on their names too much

because I think we may be awarding them some prizes. But why talk about these movies now? You mentioned it in part, right? Mile 22 was number four on the top 10 this weekend for some inexplicable reason spencer confidential one of the biggest movies of the year is basically garbage crime with a little bit of a sense of humor but not enough of one to be

to make it recognizable and then the biggest movie on vod this weekend is a little movie called the informer chris and i have been looking forward to The Informer for almost two years. What is The Informer, Chris? The Informer is a movie that seems to be like its own garbage crime subgenre, which is guy has to go back into jail. And it stars Joel Kinnaman as a confidential informant for the FBI who is working against the Polish mafia. So sorry to the Russian mob, take a seat. And is involved in bringing down the Polish mafia over a fentanyl deal

and gets double-crossed by both the Polish mafia and the FBI and sent back into prison where he is supposed to run the Polish mafia's incarcerated drug distribution network. This movie takes itself so seriously. They definitely seem to think that they are making ordinary people or something. I cannot believe how much time they spend on the parts of this movie that I don't want them to spend time on. is not actually that thrilling. Like there's really not that much action in it. It's,

it's more or less like Joel Kinnaman picking up different cell phones and sweating, but is the number one film in the country somehow. Uh, yeah. Picking up different cell phones and sweating. There are a couple of very important performances in the informer that I think we'll talk about.

Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, the reason we've been paying attention to it and i should say that the original release date for this film was august 17th 2018 and i can tell you that it it's released now it definitely seems like it's a surprise to some of the people who are in the movie have you been hitting up any of the actors just trying to get a better take like when like jennifer lawrence had like a bunch of shitty horror movies come out after hunger games like that's how anna de armas feels right

now it's like i was really curating something special here with knives out and now you guys have got me as like a gangster mall in in the informer it's not not anna de armas's best work it's not bad it's just she is the fifth lead in this movie who else is in the movie you mentioned kinnaman kinnaman also i think one of the signature stars of this movement. Rosamund Pike? Absolute. Like, watching Aaron Judge hit homers in this movie. Rosamund Pike is so powerful in this film,

and it's all based on the fact that she spends the first half of the movie wearing different windbreakers, and it is just... She is a sicko. She has, like, new york yankees like varsity jacket and then she wears like this multi-colored nautica thing for a while she's absolutely out of her mind in this movie uh also appearing in this movie is clive owen

and chris you sent me a note last night that said i need you to explain to me what happened to Clive Owen. I can't. You can't get a bet for Clive Owen as James Bond. If I told Sean Fennessey that in 2014, that Clive Owen would be making UPS commercials and showing up for nine minutes in the Informer, and we wouldn't be talking about him as replacing Daniel Craig, run it down, man. Like, this guy was, like, in pole position. Yeah, I said to you last night that in the last 15 years, this is a dude who is the star, the star

of movies for Mike Nichols and Alfonso Cuaron. He was at the absolute... He starred in movies that Spike Lee made. If you see Inside Man, you're like, that's Paul Newman. Yes. And right now, he is doing

a two-bit extended cameo in The Informer. And I, how much money could the man have been paid? I don't know, but he is literally

wearing the outfit he wears in the UPS commercial. In like, in the logistics commercial. So like, he's definitely like, I'm shooting at Silver Cup already. If you guys need me to come on,

you make the payment to this Cayman Island account and I will come and read the bullshit dialogue. You also made a good point, which is that he's just playing a British FBI agent, which is that a thing? How many British FBI agents are there? I don't know, but this is an issue that comes up a lot in these movies, especially for Triple Nine, where Choozle Aljafor at various points just drops the American accent, even though he plays an Atlanta bank robber. And this happens a lot, with a lot of accent stuff happening. The other star of this film is a guy named Common. Common also has been eating on this kind of work. Now, on the high end, he gets to be in the John Wick franchise, right? John Wick is not garbage crime. I want to make that very clear. It's also

action. It's action. There's something very elevated about that. The hand-to-hand combat, the kind of fighting, the sort of kung fu influence of that movie, I think elevates it clearly out of garbage crime. But Common, he'll do anything.

I don't begrudge him that at all. This started in Smoke and Aces where I was like, why is Common the sensitive, thoughtful, progressive rapper of the 1990s

starring in Smoke and Aces and then pretty much only does these movies? He was an American gangster. He was in Street Kings. He was in Wanted. He is eating off of this whole genre.

It's amazing. It's like all Common does is get Democrats elected and star in garbage crime movies. I'm really happy for him. So the Informer, you know, I would say I soft recommend it.

I liked it. Yeah, I thought it was fine. I mean, I was definitely like not bored and I was pretty into it. I think that if you were going to rank them, I wouldn't necessarily put them in the top five, but it is exactly what you want. It's exactly like the reliable B- movie that you want at this time of year. Coming up soon, we have a few movies that I think are going to fit the bill for Garbage Crime. I'm

just going to tease them. You noted to me No Remorse, which is the new Michael B. Jordan. I think it's a Tom Clancy project, right? Yeah. Which is coming to Amazon probably later next year. And directed by Stefano Saluma, who did some episodes of 000 and Sicario Day of Soldado. So he has a very clear style, which is garbagey crime. The Little Things, a film that John Lee Hancock is directing that's coming out next year, a movie called The Asset that is coming out next year. These are all potential garbage crime movies. I was wondering if you think the new Taylor Sheridan,

Angelina Jolie movie is also going to be garbage crime. Are you up on this? I know you love Taylor Sheridan. This is like about an assassin, right? It is. Yeah. It might be too international to fit the bill here. It's called Those Who Wish Me Dead. Uh-huh. You know, I hope it fits the bill.. It's called Those Who Wish Me Dead. You know, I hope it fits the bill. Angelina tried to do this before with salt kind of, right? She did, but same thing. It was a little too big. I hope this doesn't get too big. I hope it stays on the ground. Actually, let me ask you one thing. Wind River. Do you think Wind River is garbage crime? It's really tough because Wind River really splits the Yellowstone difference here. It really drags.

It's, it's more Western, I think than it is crime. But I think there are elements of it that are definitely like, cause we could do an entire other hell or high water wind river, sort of red state genre movie. That is also like a thriving thing, but yeah,

I wouldn't necessarily put Wind River in garbage crime. Okay. You want to give out some awards? Yeah, let's do it. Here's what we're going to do. You and I collaborated. We nominated people in the traditional Oscar categories. And I'm going to let you choose who should win these categories, okay? Oh, thank you. Yeah. Because you're the grand dame of garbage crime.

Okay. First category, best supporting actor. It's almost impossible to make this list, as it is usually in the actual Oscars. This is really the money crowd. For all the reasons that you said, this is a stacked category. We have six nominees, technically seven nominees in this category. Here they are. I'm going to read them to you. You can shout out what you really appreciated in them. Scoot McNary for sleepless. Okay. So I just want to say that aside from his acting, Scoot McNary for Sleepless. Okay. So I just want to say that aside from his acting, Scoot McNary is important to recognize that slick back hair and a goatee is canon.

In every one of these movies, someone has that going. I'm going to pursue that look soon, I think. I was thinking about a goatee. Do you think I could pull off a goatee? Seriously, why not? Just turn the Zoom video off. I feel like Ethan Hawke has been so good at it for so many years and no one gives him shit. No one's like, oh, goatee, that's passe, that's out of style. They're just like, oh, Hawke, goatee, it's cool. I know. Hawke,

Ribisi, and McNary can do it. Speaking of Ribisi, Giovanni Ribisi nominated here for his work in Contraband, some wild stuff. Yeah, just really putting some Cajun seasoning in this one. But Ribisi is like a great like black t-shirt always hanging out at the pool hall seems to be able to broker stolen goods double crossing

five, six people. It's awesome. Your dad, Mark Rylance for his work in Sean Penn's The Gunman. Dude, why is Mark Rylance in The Gunman? Why did that happen?

Why did The Gunman happen? Why isylance in the gunman? Why did that happen? Why did the gunman happen? Why is Bardem in the gunman? I've got more here. And why do we say gunman? Why isn't it? Because it's one word, right? You want it to be gunman? Yeah, well, if it was two words, it should be.

You and I should write a movie called Gunman Two Words. Right. And then pitch it to Sean Penn. Be like, no, no, no. It's a new twist. See? Spinoff. Different guy. Barry Pepper for his work in Snitch,

one of the all-time great goatees. Unreal. Unreal. So he has kind of like the more of the Klondike Gold Rush look going. Like one of those guys who's like on a caterpillar bulldozer in a naturally beautiful area, like trying to dig up $80 in gold. Yeah. He looks like Tom Waits in Ballad of Buster Scruggs. And Snitch is a David Ayer. Is Snitch David Ayer? I think Snitch is Rick Roman Waugh. Oh yeah. Right. Sorry. Who is also one of the lords of this category. And then a couple more,

Dan Stevens for his work in a walk among the tombstones uh really you know going down market i really loved his move post down abby when he was making movies like the guest and and walk among the tombstones where he was like i'm not a pretty boy i will fuck you up and i'm on drugs yeah really great great pivot for him and then common and ti because they're just in all these movies they're yeah they're nominated for all their performances usually in the back of an armored truck, at some point, Common or T.I. will pop up

and just be like, the streets know where we are. You'll see 50 cent in these roles too, but his performances are not good and Common's and T.I.'s performances are good. How's T.I. in Cutthroat City? I haven't seen Cutthroat City yet. He's okay.

He is not as good as Terrence Howard, who is having one of the all-time... Terrence Howard and Ethan Hawke are putting in extraordinary work in Cutthroat City. They are working so hard. They are chewing up the scenery beautifully. I would recommend it just for those two parts. I'm going to save my Ethan Hawke soliloquy

for when we get to him. So that's seven people that are potentially nominated here. Who do you think should win? Honestly, man, I really want to go with Ribisi, but I'm leaning Pepper after re-watching some of Snitch last night. Hell yeah. Wow.

I love it. Happy to see that. I'll go with Pepper with you. So Barry Pepper's working Snitch as, I think he's like a DEA agent. That's the other thing is all of these guys are parts of different agencies and they're all flip-flopping. ATF, DEA, FBI, NYPD.

They're all kind of sliding around. They're all kind of like a little bit corrupt. They've all been in too deep too many times. You know, this is not copaganda. Like everybody in these movies is a fucking animal. If you want to feel like you're on drugs, watch the scene from Snitch where it's The Rock,

Barry Pepper, and Susan Sarandon talking about cartel activity. It is... It's just about as good as it gets. Yeah, they should remake Two Guys, When they're like, how is America going to come back together after this election?

We show them The Rock and Sarandon in that scene. Yeah, that's unity. That's the kind of coalition I'm looking to. Should we send them to Georgia? What do you think? Okay. Best supporting actress. Tough, tough here.

These movies are not, I would say, not very generous to actresses in general. They are, most of the parts are written for men. Occasionally, you have a woman who is cast in a kind of perfunctory role as like a wife or a sister. Sometimes they let some of the women have central pivotal parts. You mentioned Rosamund Pike in The Informer. She is one of the pivotal parts in this canon of films. She's nominated. Sienna Miller in 21 Bridges.

Knockout stuff. Unbelievable shit. Just like top pony and just walking around with the most turned up New York accent that any British person has ever tried to pull off.

I wouldn't say I was impressed, but I was moved by what she did. Anna Kendrick in The Accountant. One of the strangest performances of the 21st century. I don't know if she knew what kind of movie

she was in. It kind of feels like she thinks she's in Pitch Perfect 4 but worthy of celebration. You remember Sarah Shahi in Bullets to the Head? Were you

did you come to the Bullets to the Head screening that the Grantland crew went to? I don't think I did. That was great stuff. Bullets to the Head is a late period

Sly Stallone movie that is directed by Walter Hill. Immensely violent. Features an incredible showdown between Sly and Jason Momoa well before he was Aquaman, well before he was Khal Drogo, I believe. Really great movie.

Sarah Shahi plays his daughter. And Noomi Rapace in The Drop. Do you think The Drop qualifies here? I think The Drop is too good, honestly. And is more like the difference between high-end George Pelicanos and low-end George Pelicanos. So I think that that's more of like a character study. And you kind of are waiting for something to happen in the drop, but there's really only one garbage crime scene in the drop, which is Tom Hardy's story about how he actually killed the guy that Matthias Schoenharts is claiming to have killed. Okay, so with that in mind, I feel like this is a race between Rosamund Pike and Sienna Miller. Who wins? I got to go Rosamund for recency. And I just think that the windbreakers alone take it for Rosamund Pike.

Special achievement in windbreakers? Yeah. Speaking of special achievements, we're giving out an award to the Easy Money Trilogy, aka Snob of Cash, which is kind of the, I think that's really the project that got Joel Kinnaman into the American movie and television system, right? Isn't it this series of films?

Yes, and I would also say that it's worth mentioning the international level of these movies. Now, a lot of the international aspect of them has started to gravitate towards television,

so you got like Gangs of London, which is currently airing on AMC+, which is just basically like all out the raid style fighting in London. You've got Zero Zero Zero, which I'm a huge fan of, which came out earlier this year on Amazon. Money Heist, quite literally, they just put it in the title. Fauda. So there's a lot. I would even put elements of Narcos in this. For sure. Especially Narcos season three, I would probably put in here. So yeah, a lot of this stuff is moving to TV.

But one of the cool things about this is that it's easily translatable across markets. So that's a special award for Snobba Cash and Joel Kinnaman. Let's go to Best Actress. Again, difficult here, but a few standouts that we're going to praise. First and foremost, Kate Winslet in Triple Nine. Perhaps the most gifted person

to appear in one of these movies. And it goes unremarked upon. And I don't know why. So Triple Nine is a movie that John Hillcoat made a few years back. It stars Chilatel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Aaron Paul.

Who are the cops in that movie? Casey Affleck. That's right. Casey Affleck and Anthony Mackie, obviously. Kate Winslet plays a Russian-Israeli mafiosa who is setting up a job to break into a Department of Homeland Security building so that she can secure the release of her husband in, I think, a gulag somewhere. And she's just an absolute savage in this movie. She's basically like Hannibal Lecter

meets Michael Corleone. I don't know what... I mean, maybe she was just like, nobody offers me parts like this. This is really cool. But it's absolutely incredible. She's the white Griselda, truly. The evil queen. It's going to be hard to overcome her, I think, in this category. But I'm going to read the rest of the nominees. So Carmen de Jogo for her work in The Purge Anarchy, which is a woman who starts out in peril and then takes the power back, in part thanks to Frank Grillo.

We didn't really talk about Frank Grillo, but he's also a badass in these movies. He appears in a lot of them. Lauren Cohan from Mile 22. Cohen? Cohan? How do you pronounce her name? Cohan. Who many people recognize from The Walking Dead,

but also in this very strange military crime drama starring Mark Wahlberg that I guess millions of people have now seen. The one that I really want to talk about is Mireille Enos from Sabotage. Mireille Enos, many people will probably know from Big Love, where she portrayed one of the sister wives

living on one of the ranches, one of Harry Dean Stanton's ranches. She is married to Alan Ruck in real life. She seems like a very kind woman. I've seen her at my Gelson's, not to blow up her spot. Just a really nice woman. Talented actress.

She's been on a handful of ABC series over the years. And in this movie, she plays a demon. She plays one of the most evil people I've ever seen in a film. And sabotage is probably the most extreme of all of the garbage crime movies. It's before David Ayer was allowed to make prestigious-seeming movies like Fury and before he was able to make comic book movies like Suicide Squad, this was his last gasp of garbage crime. And it's an immensely intense and violent Arnold Schwarzenegger, I guess, raid movie, more or less. It's kind of the American raid in a way.

Less kind of kung fu influence and more explosive influence. But Marilena just plays as just a savage she's just a vicious person in the movie great performance totally out of character for her love the the inverted casting and then i i think diane kruger and jan jones have to share a nomination for unknown which is i think that's the movie that proved that liam neeson had staying power as an action star you know taken and taken to we knew were're going to be big hits but they felt standalone and then unknown comes along and it's like this guy this is like a genre

yeah yes you know it's very similar to what's the what's the Roman Polanski Harrison Ford movie is it frantic frantic frantic frantic it feels a lot like a frantic knockoff but they're both very good in it and also why is January Jones not in more movies? I don't know.

I've never gotten an answer for that. She's just too good at Instagram. It's facts. Who is our winner? Kay Winslet? I got to go with Winslet. She's one of those decorated actresses

of our lifetime, and she's just in Triple Nine. Yeah. She deserves a garbage crime Oscar to stand alongside her Oscar for The Reader, which is... I don't know.

I don't even know what to say about that. Okay, best actor. Time for you to cook. Okay. So I think that this entire genre starts with this movie and specifically this performance, and it's Ethan Hawke and Brooklyn's Finest.

I definitely think that Antoine Fuqua and Ethan Hawke tried to maybe link up with Denzel again after training day, and Denzel was like, no, I'm too busy making Safe House or whatever other high-end cinema he was working on. But I just think that this is an example of what I'm talking about. Training Day transcended garbage crime. Training Day obviously features one of the great cinematic performances of the

last 30 years, I think, 20 years in Denzel's performance as Alonzo. But there's a lot to like about what Ethan Hawke was doing in that movie. And they basically said, what if we made Training Day, and if it's 20% not as good, isn't that still pretty good? And that's what happened. So Brooklyn's finest stars, Richard Gere, Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, Ethan Hawke, and a bunch of other people, Lily Taylor, a couple other people. These films all have reliably deep benches. And Ethan Hawke is just completely unchecked in this film. He wears a goatee and he plays a troubled Catholic cop who's like stealing money from drug dealers

to pay for medical bills or something like that in his family. And they've got this incredible scene where he's in a confession and a priest says, you know, you just have to ask for God's forgiveness. And Ethan Hawke goes, I don't want God's forgiveness. I want his help. And it's just like, that's what this is all about, man.

This is all about guys who think God owes them a chance to rob a bank or rob a drug dealer. And that is where I feel like I started to notice these kinds of movies. What if Training Day but not as good? Okay, it's going to be hard to beat that impassioned, feverish note that you've struck here. I think there are a handful of obvious other best actor nominees. Gerard Butler in Den of Thieves, obviously Pantheon-level performance, truly believes. We may have overlooked his counterpart in that movie. Pablo Schreiber?

Pablo Schreiber. Very good in that movie. I think that they could be 1A, 1B in terms of this nominee here, the same way we're recognizing Common and T.I. together. Maybe some love for Pablo Schreiber too. Casey Affleck in Triple Nine as a wrung out cop. Just overqualified. Everybody is overqualified in that movie. And Aaron Paul is wearing a ridiculous wig in that movie. One of my absolute favorites in this genre is Nikolai Koster-Waldau's performance in Shockcaller. He's incredible in that.

And Nikolai has been making more and more garbage crime. Yes. Somehow he pivoted out of Game of Thrones into full-blown VOD lord. Yeah. I was surprised to see it.

He's made a couple of movies that I think fit the larger bill on this. And in this one in particular, he gets swole. He goes into the jail yard and he just starts beating the shit out of people. It's just not what I expected to see from him. Yeah, I know.

No, he's really good in Shot Caller. Liam Neeson. So I chose Non-Stop for the Neeson performance because I feel like Non-Stop is the one where he's on a plane and he has to figure out who is hijacking the plane. Is that the premise of the movie? I can't even remember, but it all takes place on a plane. Julianne Moore's in it for some reason, speaking of overqualified.

And it's the most internal Liam Neeson performance. So I'm giving him a shout out for nonstop. Nice. And Chad Bozeman in the late great Chad Bozeman in 21 Bridges. Just a bummer for a number. Nice. And Chad Boseman in the late great Chad Boseman in 21 Bridges. Just a bummer for a number of reasons. One, he's just excellent in 21 Bridges, but you get a picture of like, I think Chad Boseman wanted to make these movies and probably would have made like eight more of them if his life had not been tragically cut short. And he's excellent in this movie with a bunch of people around him who are like on 11.

He's at seven and he might have been on seven because he was he was ill you know i think he made this movie while sick but and you can tell like knowing what you know now he seems very drawn you know he seems like he doesn't have as much energy maybe as like jk simmons or something but his performance is actually closer to the 1970s character actor version of Leading Man that we think of when we think of the original version of these movies. Yeah, he was doing Charles Bronson. He's not overexerting. It's all about a kind of cool. He's really good in this movie. And like you said earlier in the show,

this is a really good mid-tier thriller and overlooked, frankly, by people like me and you. It actually is our responsibility to celebrate movies like this. And I was watching it last really good mid tier thriller and overlooked, frankly, by people like me and you, we, it actually is our responsibility to celebrate movies like this. And I was watching it last night after you said how much you were digging it. And, um, it's great. It's just highly enjoyable.

Like you said, it's on Showtime. He's very good in it. The last time I saw Chadwick Boseman, I was at cinema con in Las Vegas in April of 2019. And that, that's where they first kind of introduced 21 Bridges to the World because STX was partnering with the Russo brothers, you know, right on the heels of Endgame and Chadwick Boseman right on the heels of Black

Panther. And they were touting it as if it was going to be, you know, the next Godfather. But to hear Boseman talk about it, he was like, what I like is these grimy city bound thrillers. Like these are the kinds of movies I was raised on and the kind of movies I like. And so I think you're right that he would have made a lot more of these and we missed it. We're really missing out on something cool. So who would you give this to? Well, for legacy purposes, I feel like it kind of has to go to Hawk. He's doing a lot with a lot,

which is kind of what these movies are all about. I mean, there's a case for Butler, I suppose. This is not the Oscar show, but I kind of feel like Chadwick Boseman's getting a real Oscar this year. So he doesn't need

a garbage crime Oscar. Oh, that's really cool. For Ma Rainey? Yeah, I think, I mean, that's the sense right now in the community. Oh, wow. So yeah, I think we should

go Ethan here because I think for our next one, we're going to recognize someone who is his partner and maybe in the start of all of it. Yeah, so Lifetime Achievement Award. Who you got? It's got to be Denzel. Definitely.

Denzel is the best at this. He is great at elevating shit, but he is also good at putting a ceiling on that shit and making sure it's never that good. What's your favorite bad Denzel movie? So it's an originator in the garbage crime genre. It's a little movie called Ricochet. Yeah. You've seen Ricochet?

Yeah, of course. Very similar kind of thing here where you have a movie that everyone that is in it is overqualified for. So it stars Denzel Washington, John Lithgow,vin pollack and ice tea it's an la crime movie about a district attorney and a criminal who is attempting to seek revenge on the da who prosecuted and convicted him and i can't i'll never forget the first time i saw the sequence in which he's like drugged and forced to have sex with a prostitute denzel washington like it's one of the most perverse yeah like sub brian de palma moments of filmmaking i've ever seen this is a russell mulcahy movie uh who you know made highlander and a bunch of other movies but um

that's like a terrible movie that is immensely watchable what about you what's your favorite bad denzel you know they're they're pretty. I would say that Safehouse is probably the best of the worst of them. So Safehouse I like more than Equalizer, Equalizer 2, Two Guns. You know, this is the non-Tony Scott, non-Antoine Fuqua ones. I do enjoy, well, Fuqua did the Equalizer, but I do think Safehouse is like good bad Michael Bay and good bad Trading Day ripoff. Is Safehouse?

Brian Reynolds. Balthazar. Yeah. Oh, Brian Reynolds. Oh, okay. It's Ryan Reynolds and Brendan Gleeson. Got it. Got it.

Well, shout out to Denzel. Another statue for his mantle. Lifetime achievement in garbage crime. I'm sure he'll have that buried alongside him. Let's go to the last two categories. Best director and best picture. Best director. Here are the last two categories. Best Director and Best Picture. Best Director. Here are the nominees, Chris.

Stefano Salima for Sicario Day of the Soldado. Yom Koletsera for his collection of works, which include Run All Night, Unknown, Nonstop,

and The Commuter, all of which are films I would recommend to people. Yom Koletsera was a former guest of this show and I'm happily so. Balthasar Kormaker for his work in contraband the mark walberg film in which a pollock is stolen taylor sheridan for wind river and kim ji-woon who is a korean transplant who made films like the tale of two sisters and then came over here and made a fucking garbage crime arnold

schwarzenegger movie shout out to him incredible So I think that Soldado is the best looking of all these movies, but I think we have to go to Jome because of his contribution to the genre. I agree. I agree. He's similarly, you know, he has made movies outside of this genre. The Shallows probably being the best outside of the genre. The movies he's doing in the future are far more Disney-fied. He is the director of the forthcoming Jungle Cruise movie starring The Rock. I wish he would have just stayed in this lane. I love this lane so much for him. And he's so expert at all.

All of those movies are so wonderful. Congrats to Jean-Colette Serra. Best picture. Now, how do you feel about these nominees that I've got here? You feel good about this collection? Do I feel good about this collection of movies? I think that this is the problem with best picture here is the point is not to be a best picture so it's hard to say oh well these are clearly the cut above i actually don't think there's that much separation between a lot of

these movies even the best of them have like a plot line that you're just like please please get me out of this this is so boring so. So I think that like, you know, even something like contraband, which is pretty entertaining. A lot of it is about like Mark Wahlberg, you know, working stuff out with his wife and saving his brother's life and stuff like that, where you're just like, I just want Rabizi and I want like massive heists of cruise ships. But I, so we picked, I think a good group of movies here. Okay. Here are the five Brooklyn Brooklyn's Finest. Are you a fan of that movie? Of Brooklyn's Finest? Brooklyn's Finest.

I didn't revisit it, but I definitely loved it when I first saw it. It was also a big Snipes' back movie. You know, Snipes had not been on screen for a while when he appeared in that film

and people were celebrating. I'm a big Brooklyn's Finest fan. I also really like Vincent D'Onofrio getting his head blown off in the first five minutes. That's also very enjoyable. So Brooklyn's Finest,

Den of Thieves, 21 Bridges, Triple Nine, and A Walk Among the Tombstones. Scott Frank. Yeah. Scott Frank, exactly, who is in the news, of course, because of The Queen's Gambit, and is another guy who is way overqualified to make a movie like A Walk Among the Tombstones. Now, we've represented some of the kings of this grouping. Not everybody. We don't have a Denzel movie here, for example. Sure. We don't have a Wahlberg movie here.

No. But we do have some great-ish films. Everything is ish. Of these five, what does your heart tell you? Thieves. I think it's Thieves because Thieves is the feeling, the sensation you get when you're watching Den of Thieves. Actually, in the first 20 minutes or so.

And you're just like, oh, this is going to be way better than i thought it was going to be and that is such a great feeling when you're watching a movie it's almost better than like it's a it's a kind of surprise that it's it's really hard to articulate of that feeling of i had no expectations coming into this and i can already feel them being raised as i watch it i agree uh. Den of Thieves 2, we've been told, is coming. Yeah. Are you nervous about it? Are you excited? I think they're going to make Fast and the Furious. I think that the end of that movie, they were like, what if O'Shea Jackson and his crew went around the world robbing things and Gerard Butler chased them? So I think that they're going to make it into more of a franchise.

But tell me when you watch like Den of Thieves and they do the crime scene at the donut shop and Gerard Butler's character shows up that you're not like, oh shit, I'm ready for this. I don't want to leave this at all.

I think there only could be one winner at the first annual Garbage Crime Oscars. Chris, should we do this again in 12 years? That's right, yeah. I'll see you in 12 years. Every 12 years. But I actually want this to be our last pod

so we can call it One Last Pod. Oh, that's really good. As I've said to you, I think that examining movies like this could be an entire podcast empire

into itself. So, you know, one day when we spring free from the Ringer Podcast Network, that's when One Last Pod goes on its own two legs. That's right. Our really lowly supported Patreon.

Chris, thanks so much for bringing your insights to this very special world of movies. It was my pleasure. Okay, now let's go to my conversation with writer-director Brandon Cronenberg. prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC optimum points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Delighted to be joined by Brandon Cronenberg. Brandon, thanks for joining the show today. Thanks for having me.

Brandon, you make films that are very viscerally upsetting and intellectually invasive. And I'm amazed that we're here doing a Zoom conversation because I would imagine that this would, this would repel you. Um, I want to know specifically around possessor, where the idea for this movie came from for you. Um, to be honest, it came initially from a fairly trivial personal place, which was that I was on the press tour for my first feature film antiviral. Uh, and when you're traveling with a film for the first time, it's a very surreal experience on a certain level, because you are, in a sense, inventing this public persona out of necessity, and you end up performing another version of yourself, this kind of media self, which weirdly then goes off and has its own life online without you. So between that and a few

other things that were going on, I guess I was feeling like I was having a hard time seeing myself in my own life. You know, I was waking up in the mornings and feeling like I was sitting up into someone else's life and having to scramble to construct a character who could operate in that context. So I really, initially I really wanted to write a script about someone who may or may not be an imposter in their own life and just use that as a way to talk about how we build characters and narrative just as a way of operating on a kind of basic level, how humans are kind of film, therefore, was really in those sort of domestic scenes, the relationship scenes and the choir drama scenes and the thriller sci-fi stuff built out from there as I was developing it. I'm interested in that personal experience that you had. Was there anything that emerged from the Brandon Cronenberg public character that you didn't expect or just didn't see in yourself until you started becoming a little bit more public?

Yeah. I mean, you know that thing where you see yourself on camera and it's weird because it's upsetting. You don't recognize yourself. It's like that, except a lot of it. And people think that's who you are. But actually, of course, doing presses is a very unnatural way to deal with people. It's, you know, I'm in no way criticizing you here. It's interesting. You need to talk about your work and it's fun on a certain level and, you know, to engage with people and to discuss this stuff. But it's also a weird formal mode. It's nothing like day-to-day life, as I'm sure you know, on the other side of it as well.

And so we're both playing characters on a certain level here. Yeah, I think one of my unfortunate tics whenever I talk to filmmakers is I feel like I'm desperate for them to define themselves and kind of like what the parameters of their ideas are. And I feel like that kind of might box you in, in some ways too, but there's no doubt that with the first two films that you've made, that you have a style and a point of view and that you, there's an extremity to the work that you're doing. Um, does that, does that pursuit feel purposeful that you want to have a kind of an, to be known as a filmmaker that is going to push the envelope with the stories that you're telling? Uh, no, I mean, I, I really am just sort of pursuing whatever ideas and interests come to me, you know, something shows up at your door, you know, you know, it's, it's a smell that comes to you that you need to track down somewhere,

you know, figuratively it's, I don't know, whatever the, whatever, I forget who it was who was saying that the idea is to pile up and spill in through the window, and then you just have to deal with them. Things come to you, you get excited, you pursue those things because they're just whatever honest expressions of your impulses and interests. I don't really think much about how I'm perceived, in part because I don't think I can know, you know, I think that those threads that people follow the way the boxes, if you want to add that connotation to them, but really even just in a sort of interesting film criticism way, how we define artists, I, is something that really has to come from the outside. Because when you're doing it, you can't see yourself that way, or you don't have that kind of perspective on yourself.

You might think you do, but I think Borges thought he was mainly a poet and was just doing a little short fiction on the side. And then the greatest short fiction writer, arguably. Things like that i mean you just don't have perspective on your work when you're doing it right but you you do know you're not making like disney animated films right i mean what's what what's next do i know that are we doing that right now i don't know that's a good question um there seems like some at least to me in possess, some clear subtext about the way that people can become submerged or subsumed by social media or their engagement with technology. And I've heard you talk a little bit about the movie and some of the ideas in the movie and some ideas of neuroscience. I mean, how much were you thinking about the scientific and practical aspects of telling this story? And how much were you kind of letting the abandonment of, you know, truth go on while you were writing? Well, it's, I mean, it's interesting. Certainly the sci-fi elements of the film are intended to be kind of metaphorical. I wasn't looking to

do predictive sci-fi here. I did certainly research the neuroscience and found it incredibly engaging. There's this Dr. Jose Delgado, the Spanish doctor, for instance, who I was reading about. And I read his book, Physical Control of the Mind Towards a Psycho-Civilized Society, which is sort of brilliant and dystopian and just a plea for more financing. It was a really interesting chronicle of his experiments. He was implanting wires literally in the brains of animals and humans and controlling them

and was able to control a very alarming range of functions motor functions but also emotions and other behavioral functions um in the film there's this scene where you're seeing a kind of documentary this bull fight that's going on and that's actual footage from an experiment that he did where he implanted this bull with one of these stimocebers he called them and jumped into a bull ring and that's him the bull charges him and he hits the receiver and it veers off because he's controlling it so the scientific basis for this is actually there even though that wasn't the point of the film i ended up setting it in kind of an alternate present. It's, for me, set in alternate universe version of Toronto in the year 2008, just to compartmentalize it.

That totally doesn't matter. But the point is just that I think the science could lead to this technology, but it would be much further in the future. And I wanted to really just use it in a figurative way to talk about how we, how we behave now and wanted to make it a kind of more familiar world. It wasn't some sort of distant future world.

There's so much elegant and messy design in your movies. And there's, it feels like you're thinking about the practical reality of how to pull something off when you're writing. Is that the case when you're writing? Do you see sort of what the headset might look like that Christopher Abbott's character is wearing or is all that stuff come after you've done the writing? Some of it is while I'm writing.

Some of it is after the writing. You know, it's all, I mean, filmmaking is very collaborative. And once you get your production designer, for instance, you're getting ideas from someone else. And that's exciting because you may have thought of it one way but

it becomes something else for instance the mask that she wears uh initially i had imagined it as something messier and more like prototype science like there are sort of equivalents now from some brain gate uh experiments that these brain machine interfaces where people are able to control computers with their with their brains directly when you look at the aesthetic there it's all very very rough prototype stuff because of course these aren't products it's not consumer gear it's all cables and it is messy it's not you know's not Apple or any of that kind of sleek future design. At a certain point, that wasn't quite coming together. And one night, I just, I don't know, I felt like that had to doing a close drawing of it and then working with a

concept artist to sort of refine it and render it in a way that it could be built so that was a very last minute change in the aesthetic where that became something a little bit more fantastic and sleek and unusual rather than a really rough real science version of that device your your first film came out in 2012 so a good deal of time has transpired between that and this and they obviously feel very connected but i was just kind of curious i know at some point you want you were going to start this movie and then it had to be pushed back but what's going on in that eight-year period because antiviral was very well received i think a lot of people felt like oh we have a a new great filmmaker so what's his next thing what was going on for you in that time uh that's very kind of you and um i'm not

it was a number of things first of all antiviral was my first film i didn't have a film career back then so i didn't have a bunch of other stuff in development you know i'd spent seven years just trying to make a first feature get to the point where I had made a feature film. So there was a certain period where I was essentially starting over writing, coming up with this next thing and developing it. And that took a certain amount of time. Beyond that, honestly, it was just a bad version of the usual indie film stuff. Getting any independent film made can take a while. It can be difficult

to get financing together and cast and all those things. In this case, it just happened to take a very long time. And that's the reality of it. We went down a path with a financier that didn't work out at one point. They ended up being the wrong people for it. We had a few false starts.

We had to push at one point because of an actor obligation and so it was just it wasn't anything too interesting it was just all of the things that you might bump into uh repeatedly for years until finally i could make it what's it like trying to convince people to give you money for films like this i'm always so fascinated by anybody who works in what seems like a very uncompromising way how you compel people to fund your vision um i don't know i mean apparently i'm very bad at it because i don't know if i'm the right person to ask i'm not i'm obviously not on a tear you've made two movies. That's not nothing.

It was different both times, honestly. For the first film, I had written a feature film in film school. And at the end of that period, I made a short film based on a scene from Antiviral and turned it into a student short that had some success on the student circuit um rhombus media who produced that film and who also produced possessor on the canadian end at least

um happened to be doing this series of first time feature films uh hobo with a shotgun jason eiser's film being the first of them They were looking for their third film in that series. I had gone to school with one of the guys who went on to work there. He showed the student film to everyone. So I had a kind of proof of concept of the script. It was that, you know, it was just a lot of luck. This time around, it was a bit different. You put together a visual deck so you can kind

of give a sense of uh what the directing is going to be like you have a script you hope people like the script and the deck and your previous work and it's kind of it's sort of just a long process really are you able to compel to people or can convey to people that um you have this sort of hallucinogenic, very practical vision for the movie before you're able to, before you have the money to do it, because you're able to do so much visually in this story that seems like it's very difficult to accomplish. And I know you're like very experimental with the way that you shoot things and the gels

that you use on the camera and things like that. How do you, do you, do you have to explain those things to the to not just the financiers but even the people that are going to be collaborating with the movie will be like that um you do and i'm you know i'm not sure how well you can explain something like that i mean there was some to a certain degree people could see what we were doing because uh i had done some music videos with kareem hussein my cinematographer and then we did a short film just the year before we went into production that um that used in a lower budget way many of the camera tricks that we then uh put in the future so we had it wasn't exactly a proof of concept for the future it was it was

its own piece and it wasn wasn't narratively that related, but it had some of those hallucination effects, and we could show people and say, this is what we're doing. Some of it, though, you just can't explain, and you hope that people trust you. There was this hilarious moment where one of my producers walked onto set and found me crouched on the floor with a flashlight

just blinking the flashlight on and off into Chris's face while we had multiple projectors and three cameras filming this projection screen that we'd thrown up behind the actors and Andrea as well flashing flashlights in both of their faces

and they were just like shaking their heads and yelling and he was like he sort of walked in had a look and then left and then it was later that night he said you know what what was going on there like what was I seeing that was pretty weird but at least I had the short and I could say, well, you just this is this is that effect. It's just doing it is a very weird process because you're making material in a way that seems ridiculous in the moment, but it will cut together. So

I guess there's a certain amount of trust that has to be upheld there. Well, I mean, it's interesting. You kind of opened the conversation by talking about the public performance that you have to do around some of these things. And I'll be candid with you. I was not sure

what kind of a conversation we were going to have today. And in part, I wanted to ask, what are your sets like? Because you're making these incredibly intense, violent and unusual films. And,

but you seem like a good, a good natured guy. So like, is it, is it like a, like a, what kind of environment are you creating when you're making the movie is what I'm asking.

I mean, I hope I'm creating a kind of calm environment. My, my approach to set is that we're all adults and we're all working towards the same thing. And I don't like tricking people or trying to, to play games with people, especially when you're dealing with actors on this level. I mean,

Chris and Andrea are both incredible, incredible actors. They're so talented and also so intelligent and perceptive and have so much to contribute in a collaborative way. So I don't want to play games with them or, or, you know, try and force some of them. I feel like we can just deal with it as professionals in a kind of calm way. They may not have that.

I mean, they may have a very different perspective because certainly when it comes to the effects stuff, I know with actors, it can be uncomfortable, not because it's's violent but just because on a physical level some of this stuff can be uncomfortable they're wearing prosthetics for a long period of time they have fake blood in their clothes um some of those scenes i think from an acting perspective are less gratifying because there isn't a lot of flow to them. You're shooting effects, so you have one particular moment that you're trying to get.

They don't have a full scene of dialogue to really be able to flex their acting muscles. For everybody else, though, I mean, the thing is, I guess the old joke, or I don't know, what's understood is that comedy sets are way more intense and difficult than horror sets. Horror sets are usually pretty lighthearted and fun. And it's because when you do that stuff, in the moment, it's ridiculous what you're doing. You're playing Halloween.

It's fun. It's fake blood. It's silly silicone arms flapping around or you know it's your effects guy poking a fake head with a fire poker for like 15 minutes well everybody kind of laughs because it's so it's so ludicrous what you're doing and what you're filming so the end result of all that ends up being intense because you're grabbing you know of 15 minutes you're grabbing two seconds under the right two seconds and when you put a series of the right two second shots in a row it looks like something intense but actually you know a lot of the most gory stuff we would shoot as just an effects pickup at the end of

the day and it was it had the the secondary effect of almost blowing off steam for the crew because it's just this kind of lighthearted thing, weirdly, even though that isn't the end results. Did you, did you grow up on sets or did you have a distance from your father's work when you were a kid? Um,

I wouldn't say I grew up on sets necessarily, but I definitely went to sets. I mean, it was family, you know, whatever your, whatever, whatever kind of work your was family, whatever you're, whatever kind of work your family is doing when you're a kid,

you end up there. So I wasn't, I didn't imagine that I wanted to be a filmmaker and so I wasn't there studying him or spending a huge amount of time there, but I definitely grew up around sets to a certain degree, which was probably helpful because you can't really, can't really teach filmmaking in an academic way. You kind of have to know just practically how it works. So I think having some sense of that was useful. There was less mythology around it, maybe going into film school, shooting a film was less, it wasn't such a big deal. It was just a kind of straightforward process. Was there anything after the antiviral experience that you thought like,

I'm never going to do that again, or I want to try to do something like this in my next film? It's a good question. I don't really, I don't really have an answer. I'm sure, you know, and it was, it was a learning experience and I hope i've grown as a filmmaker but it's it wasn't one specific thing i think you again you learn by doing you know and the first feature you you shoot you learn a lot because you're doing the filmmaking a lot and you're tracking this narrative over a longer period of time so it's's very educational, but I can't point to one thing that was the thing that bothered me that I wanted to change.

It was all just sort of a bit rougher. I think maybe my interests formally have changed. I like more camera motions and I like playing with more toy. I'm more interested in other aspects of the film language and not being quite so rigid. I love a nightmarish

freakout movie. It's one of the reasons why I responded to your movie so much. Do you feel like you are making movies like that in a tradition? Do you watch movies like that to prepare for films? Or is your vision, the stuff that you're making, does it just feel sort of from whole cloth?

No, I mean, as a group, again, I've become very close with my collaborators from Antiviral, Kareem Hussain, Rob Connell, Matt Hannum, these people who I've become friends with. I see them a lot socially and we all work together. In development, we would watch a lot of movies and some of them were maybe more obvious reference points like Argento, we watched a lot for the possessor of the opera, say. Some of them less obvious, like we watched a lot for Possessor, some of them less obvious, like we watched The Offense a number of times.

Some of these movies just stick on a certain level, but it wasn't a question of a few influences where I was trying to particularly mimic one film. It was more like mashing a bunch of films together into a kind of loaf that I kept in the back of my head and just kind of nod on through development what were the movies as a kid that really influenced you it's hard to say I don't know the Adam West Batman movie I felt like I watched that quite a lot as a kid. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. I had a beta tape of some TV recording of that.

That was like something, you know, Robin passed me the bat shark repellent, you know, I'm trying to figure out where I can sense that influence in your work. I don't, I don't know. There's a, there's a lightheartedness in that movie that maybe it hasn't necessarily made its way to Possessor.

It's all the shark repellent in my films. That's the connection. I'm curious about knowing how far is too far and what the limits of extreme can be for the stories that you're telling and kind of what your relationship is to the audience in that respect and how much you're thinking about the audience versus the story that you're trying to tell because

like i said for somebody like me i i actually love to be pushed and challenged and i find it exciting i watch way too many movies and so invariably my my vector for pain is pretty high it's pretty wide um but for other people i think if you just sat down your average MCU fan and turned Possessor on, they might be like, holy cow, this is very fucked up. Is that something that even crosses your mind when you're working on a film? To a degree. I mean, it's interesting. you know in Possessor I think the violence was very narrative and that was part of it because so much of Vos's character is um in her relationship with these experiences and this violence and so I felt like it had to be something very visceral and explicit um it really changed it tracks with her psychological state you know whether it's sort of more observational or these

sort of more stylized memories of it that she has. And that's so essential to her and she's so essential to the narrative. So it wasn't just violence for violence sake, it was very much part of it. But I mean, also, I guess to a certain extent, I'm like you and that I like to be pushed around by film. I like to be made uncomfortable. I feel like that is how the art form operates as art to a certain degree. I mean, I would never really try and define art because it's such a subjective thing. I'm not saying it has to work like this for everybody. But for me, often there's an element of discomfort or an element of surprise. Whether it's literal shock or it's just something coming out of nowhere and surprising me it pushes me to see the world in a different

way and to change slightly from that experience um obviously not everyone will agree with that i mean not everyone wants to see the things that are in Possessor, but at the same time, you know, not every movie can be for everyone. You can anticipate your audience to a certain extent and you should, of course, I'm not trying to be completely hostile to the audience because filmmaking is a form of communication and you anticipate the person seeing it, what the read is going to be. You try to have some sense of the various ways they may take your work.

But at the same time, people are going to have such an incredibly wide range of reactions and most of them you can't possibly predict. So you can't, I think, if you're making films, I don't want to say making films is art, but if you're approaching filmmaking in a certain way, you can't get so mired in concern for audience reaction that you shy away from things that you think are important to the film itself.

It's different if you're making an MCU film because you have hundreds of millions of dollars on the line and it has to be embraced in the broadest way possible. It's really an active industry on that on that level and that's not to criticize those films they're just coming from a different place and they have a different purpose and a different sort of industrial responsibility to them when you're not doing that though i think you're free to sort of address the work in its own best possible terms as you see them and uh i think some people will come along for that ride and some people won't with that in mind do you do you see yourself staying in the in the track that you're in right

now or are you looking to expand the kind of the scope or the reach of the films that you're making? It's a little bit hard to say. I mean, I would like to expand a little bit. I mean, the trade-off is you get to play with more toys. You have more people seeing your work, you know, I feel like there's things you can do with more budget that are very interesting. And so I'm not looking to be a completely esoteric filmmaker with no kind of commercial potential,

partly because I can't say that or no one will finance my films, but also because there's just, when you have more of a budget, there's more freedom on a certain level and less freedom on another level. So I think I'm still just looking to find that sweet spot. That isn't to say, I mean, if someone tomorrow offered me a massive Marvel film,

I don't know that I could say no, because that's such another kind of filmmaking, you know, that would be such a strange experience that I don't know if I could turn it down if I somehow had that opportunity, but certainly where my heart is creatively, I want to find a kind of balance where I have some practical freedom, but still a lot of creative freedom.

Do you know what you're doing next? I have two films that are fairly far along in development. One is called Infinity Pool, which is a kind of tourist resort satire with some sci-fi horror elements. And another film called

Dragon, which is a kind of hallucinatory space horror movie. And I'm not sure which one. I don't know what I'm going to get to shoot again, basically just given what the world is right now. I would love to shoot them both very soon and back to back, but we'll see when I get the chance. I look forward to them both.

One thing I wanted to ask you about quickly before we start to wrap up is, what's the state of the canadian film community industry right now good you know given covid and everything else going on it certainly seems like your nation is in a slightly better position than than the united states but what's the state of production and things like that well i mean it's interesting because a lot of the canadian industry is american industry actually there are a lot of the Canadian industry is American industry. Actually, there are a lot of service productions in Canada, so I think a lot of what's happening here right now is American. We shut down entirely early on when the initial

spike of cases happened. All production shut down here. And then it started opening up. I know people who are shooting especially in places where there are fewer cases like Atlantic Canada or Winnipeg. Definitely productions are happening and in Toronto where I am. I don't know how long that's going to last. I think right now we're in a second wave. We're climbing up to levels of Friends mission that mission that are approaching

that initial spike and probably will go beyond it. I think it ends up coming down to whether the sorts of regulations that are in place here now can withstand that. Everyone's trying to work very safely and there are all these protocols to try to allow productions to happen. We won't know. I think we won't know until a month from now or two months from now, whether we can continue making movies despite the increasing cases.

How do you feel about your film coming out kind of in the midst of all this, especially, I mean, especially after antiviral, there's obviously a perverse irony or something going on there with just the what you focused on in the past in your stories yeah i know people keep telling me antiviral would have been the one to release right now well maybe maybe not or maybe not i don't know contagion really blew up on that right at the start of all this so um, you know, it's a little bit weird, honestly. I don't, on a certain level, I don't feel like I'm releasing a film because normally I would be traveling around and we would be speaking in person

and it would be this whole big period of time dedicated to the release. Whereas now, it's a few days of hardcore press in my sweatpants in my apartment. You know, and it doesn't really feel like the film's coming out, even though it is that I'm excited to finally be able to show people. On another level, though, I'm fine with it. I mean, we're having, obviously, a bit of a theatrical release. I'm not sure. It's not the same world that it would have been

if it came out at a different time. There aren't a lot of theaters open. And so that's a smaller part, I think, of the release now than it would have been if it was. But at the same time, I don't fetishize theatrical in the way that some directors do. I'm okay if people are seeing it. So that's not horrifying to me in the way that some directors do. I'm okay if people are seeing it at home, so that's not

horrifying to me in any way. That's interesting. Why don't you fetishize that in particular? Because I do think that this film is going to play well at home. I mean, it has played well at home twice now for me. So is it because of the kinds of movies that you like or the way you watch movies or just

your age? What do you think contributes to that? I'm not sure. You know what? Maybe it's because of the way I watch movies or just your age like what do you think contributes to that i'm not sure you know maybe it's because of the way i watch movies i mean i feel old but uh i'm young enough to have grown up in the home video era you know i'm not to me i don't have that nostalgia that some older filmmakers i think have of going to the theater and having that experience that really made it work for them i kind of approach movies a little bit like reading books. I actually like watching them at home alone and there's something cozy and enjoyable about that. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's just me or maybe part of it is just the inevitability of it i don't feel like we should shy away from new technology and new forms of distribution i feel like it's better to just embrace them and say this okay this is the art now this is a significant part of the art let's just uh let's just run with it brandon we end every episode of this show by asking

filmmakers what's the last great thing they have seen since you are comfortable watching at home what have you been watching the last you know what the last great movie i saw was failsafe actually oh yeah i watched that during quarantine as well the lumet movie yeah so what what brought you to that just it just it came out on criterion and i hadn't seen it before. What did you respond to in it? I mean it's just very intelligent and the sort of weird mix of melodrama and kind of literary genius you know and also I mean I think I brought up the offense actually earlier. One thing that he does so well is he shoots a room full of people talking in such an incredible

dynamic way. You know, the offense is essentially a series. It's a, I think based on a play actually, and it's like a series of conversations for the most part between two people in a room, but it's totally engaging. I mean, just the subtle camera moves and the framing. That's really, really impressive. It's hard to do.

Those are great picks. They would make a good double feature with possessor. Brandon, thanks for being on the show today. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you to Brandon Cronenberg. Thank you to my pal, Chris Ryan.

Thank you to Sasha Ashel. Thank you to Bobby Wagner. Tune in later this week on The Big Picture, where Amanda Dobbins and I are going to be returning with another mailbag. See you then.