The Big Picture - Mailbag Special: Favorite Acting Performances Ever, Lingering Tarantino Thoughts, and the Dark Future of the Movie Business | The Big Picture

Episode Date: August 13, 2019

We open the mailbag to answer some of our listeners’ most-pressing questions: What films are we most looking forward to for the rest of the year? Is Adam Driver our best working actor (and is he hot)? What are Sean’s guilty-pleasure movies? And more. Host: Sean Fennessey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelley, and welcome to The Ringer Podcast Network. Season 2 of HBO's Succession is back, and The Ringer's Chris Ryan and Jason Concepcion are here to give you the latest in Roy family drama. Every Sunday night, they'll be breaking down what we just saw on our new show called Number One Boys, a Succession aftershow. You can tune in live on The Ringer's Twitter every Sunday night, right after the episode ends. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer,

and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show with myself. Amanda Dobbins is on vacation, and so right now we are doing a very special mailbag episode. I won't be quite alone. I'll be joined by Bobby Wagner, my producer, who will be throwing some questions at me about the year in movies and movies in general and the history of the Oscars and all the things that you guys wanted to know about.

I want to say I appreciate the depth and thoughtfulness and also desire to make me make lists that came in these questions. I'm really flattered by the way that people are engaging with this show and I'm really enjoying doing it. So this means a lot. Hopefully it will be a fun thing for us to do, especially in Amanda's absence. I'll try to get as many Spider-Verse takes in as I can while she's gone. And without further ado, Bobby, you want to jump right into these questions? Sure. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. First question, Brian Wilson asks,

now that Midsommar and Once Upon a Time have been released, what is your top five films of the year look like so far? See, this is what I was talking about. Everybody wants you to make a list. Solidifies your brand when you ask for a mailbag. I guess so. Top five films of the year so far. I'm not going to put them in any order because I don't really know. And we're not even at a sort of a three quarters turn yet. You know, we haven't even, we're about to cross, I guess, the two thirds mark of the year. In not any order, I think you're wise to put Once Upon a Time and Midsommar in the question, Brian. They both would definitely be there. I'm still chewing on both of

them. Those are two movies I've seen twice. I probably will see them both a third time this year. That's how you know when I'm really in love with something is if I go to see it a third time in theaters. In addition to that, definitely The Souvenir, which Amanda and I have talked about on this show in the past and which is sort of growing in my estimation. I finally got a chance to catch up on Rebecca Mead's profile of Joanna Hogg in The New Yorker, which ran, I think, in May before the release of the film. And just a fascinating portrait of a person who's having a really, really unique career as a filmmaker. And the fact that she is now making a second souvenir, the souvenir part two, in this time of overwrought IP, I find to be a hilarious decision. So I'm really looking forward to that.

What else besides those three? Those are locks. I would say there's certainly a case to be made for Toy Story 4, which I greatly enjoyed and Rob Harville and I discussed on this show at length. There's certainly a case to be out very soon on Netflix, which you'll be able to stream if you're a subscriber to that service, which is a documentary that chronicles the life cycle of a shuttered American factory that is reopened by a Chinese corporation and hires American workers. It's probably one of the most sophisticated, provocative looks at life in the American workplace that I've ever seen. So that's on my list right now. Bobby, what am I forgetting? What are some movies that I've gone completely over the top about on this show? Over the top about on this show? I mean, we all liked Last Black Man in San Francisco. I don't know if that would really crack your top

five, but in terms of like cinematography, that really stuck out to me. Yeah, that was beautiful. I like that in The Farewell are kind of operating in the twin. I have a lot of admiration for this movie, A24 brand, where I liked them a lot. I certainly understand why they have been two of the rare examples

of kind of small scale releases that premiered at festivals that have been able to do a little bit of business. A lot of their brethren and their sisters have not done quite so well in the marketplace.

So I have admiration for those movies. I don't know if I am passionately in love with them in the way that I am with, say, Midsommar. The Farewell, I just saw it this past weekend. I didn't get a chance to see it before this, but I'd be very surprised if that wasn't at least nominated for Best Original Script. Yeah, I think there's a strong chance there,

and there's obviously a lot of history with a kind of film like that, autobiographical. It's not Lulu Wang's first movie, but it's her second movie. It's obviously crossed a lot of boundaries. It's reached a lot of people who wouldn't normally get to see a story like that. So I think that's a reasonable bet. You know, I have like a scoring system that I keep because I'm a crazy person. So I've got this big document full of all the films that I've seen this year.

Let's see how many I've seen by this moment that have been released in this year. 168. So 168 movies, 48 of these movies have gotten three stars out of a four-star system. I'm probably being a little too generous with my scoring is what I've learned. So I'm reluctant to put any of the three-star movies on this list. Everything that I've mentioned thus far has either gotten three and a half or four. And the only two to get four, of course, are Midsommar

and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. So that's the best I can do with answering that question. That was long-winded, huh? Yeah. Did you mention Her Smell? That was your number one when we went through with Adam Neiman.

I take it back. That also has three and a half stars. And yes, that would be on my list too. I mean, that is almost assured to be a top 10 movie for me before the year is out. But we'll see where in the top 10 it lands. Shout out Elizabeth Moss.

Shout out Elizabeth Moss. Certainly. Former guest of the big picture. Okay. Question number two comes from Dawson. How did you feel about the movie Wild Rose? And do you think the buzz for Jesse Buckley as a potential best actress nominee is real? I don't think there is buzz.

Made up the buzz. He's giving the buzz. Maybe Dawson is a burner account for Jesse Buckley, who is an actress I quite enjoy and whose praises I have sung on this show. You may have also seen her in Chernobyl this season where she played the woman whose husband was badly burned in the Chernobyl disaster.

She's an incredible performer. I think I have seen very few performances in which an actor is as good at acting as they are at singing when their character is a singer. She's, it's a very, it's a fine movie. And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. It's well-made.

It's nice. It's kind of uplifting. It's not kind of steal your breath away quality, but it's very good. And she, of course, is wonderful in it. I think it's more star making than it is Oscar buzz. That being said,

if the best actress race this year is a little thin and they find a way to kind of burst through and get that little small indie nomination for her, I think that would be fine. I'm not, I wouldn't bet on it though,

if I were you. What's next for her? Where does she go from here? I don't know. Should we look at her IMDb? I don't really know what she's if I were you. What's next for her? Where does she go from here? I don't know. Should we look at her IMDb? I don't really know what she's got lined up. I mean, she was in a film in 2018 called Beast, which was very well-received

and she's done a lot of TV work in the UK. She is Irish. And one of the interesting things about her role in Wild Rose is that she's playing a Scottish person. So that's some rare accent work that you don't always see. It looks like she is going to significantly be a part of Fargo season four next year, which is kind of interesting. She's also going to be in Judy, which is the forthcoming Judy

Garland biopic starring Renee Zellweger. And she's got a little movie on here called The Voyage of Dr. Doolittle. Do you know anything about The Voyage of Dr. Doolittle, Bobby? Do not, although that's got a little movie on here called The Voyage of Dr. Dolittle. Do you know anything about The Voyage of Dr. Dolittle, Bobby? Do not, although that's quite a title. So this film is directed and written by Stephen Gagin, who you may recall from Siriana. You would not think that the guy who wrote and directed Siriana would be making a Dr. Dolittle movie. It's the first movie starring Robert Downey Jr. since Endgame. And it's ostensibly a remake slash reimagining of the Dr. Dolittle fable, which was a musical in the 60s starring Rex Harrison, that is about a doctor who talks to animals. Behind the scenes, this is thought to be one of the most complicated productions in recent Hollywood history.

This movie started filming a long time ago. It's been under various stages of reshoots and reimaginings over that time. I don't know a whole heck of a lot about it. It was first announced in March of 2017. So we're now almost two and a half years into the voyage of Dr. Doolittle process. Is this some cast here? Yeah. Should we read it off?

Tom Holland, Robert Downey Jr., Rami Malek, Michael Sheen, Jesse Buckley, Emma Thompson, Ray Fiennes, Antonio Banderas,anderas and then wait look Marion Cotillard and Selena Gomez John Cena so one thing you gotta keep in mind here is that more than half of these people

are just doing the voices of animals John Cena for example will be appearing as Yoshi who is a polar bear Octavia Spencer Academy Award winner

will be portraying Dab Dab who is a duck so you know this is how Hollywood goes forward this is how Hollywood goes forward this is how theatrical releasing in Hollywood

happens we have to make the voyage of Dr. Doolittle a 200 million dollar adaptation of a movie from the 60s

that no one likes anymore starring the biggest movie star on the planet as he is deceased as Iron Man and featuring the voices of John Cena Rami Malek

and Kumail Nanjiani heck of a time so for Jessie Buckley, I don't know. I mean, she's the only character on this list that does not have a character name, which means maybe her role won't be significantly big. I like her a lot as an actress though. Grant Andrews asks, are there any upcoming films that no one really knows about?

Like Just Mercy from Dustin Daniel Cretton that might have a chance at Best Picture? Well, that's so hard to say. There are a lot of movies that are in development or being shot or in post-production that could come, nothing in development, but things that are being worked on at the moment that could come along. There's this movie called Wendy. Are you familiar with Wendy, Bobby? No. So Ben Zeitlin is the writer and director of a movie called Wendy, which I believe went into development maybe four or five years ago. This is the guy who made Beast of the Southern Wild in 2012. And this movie, which is being produced by Fox Searchlight, is nowhere to be found. I just don't

know what's going on with Wendy. It is one of the longest in development movies of all time. Now, if Wendy just shows up at Telluride, which I don't think it's going to, but if something like that were to happen, immediately the guy who made Beast of the Southern Wild has a new film and maybe it finds its way into the Oscar race. I don't really know anything about this movie, but that is the kind of game that you have to play when you're doing this. Likewise, a movie I'm very interested in is called Waves, which is a musical, which I believe stars Lucas Hedges and Sterling K. Brown and comes to us from Trey Edward Schultz who famously made Cretia and a horror film two years ago for A24 and is a very creative,

thoughtful guy who operates almost entirely out of Florida. I don't really know what's going on with this movie except to say that I'm interested in it. If it comes along and it has a La La Land like energy, maybe it's meaningful. Another movie coming from Fox Searchlight is Nomadland. This is Chloe Zhao, who you may recall from The Rider and who is directing the forthcoming Marvel film Eternals. She's got this movie, which will star Frances McDormand, that is based on a nonfiction book that was released earlier this decade. By all accounts, it sounds interesting. Sounds like it could be meaningful.

I don't really know anybody who knows when it's coming out or at what stage of development it's in. Presumably, Chloe Zhao has moved on to Eternals or is about to. So those are three kind of random ones. There are some others that we just don't know a ton about,

but we know are coming. The Laundromat, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is a movie that I don't think many people have seen that is about the Panama Papers. And, you know, that's kind of got the profile of a movie that could be a big Oscar film. It stars Meryl Streep, but it's going straight to a streaming service. It seems like Soderbergh is in a very experimental phase of his career, so we'll just have to wait and see what

happens. That's my best three or four examples of things that we don't see coming. Now, maybe some of those movies don't come out until 2023. That's also in play. Yeah. You mentioned Lucas Hedges. What say you about Honey Boy, briefly? Hmm.

Haven't seen it yet. Okay. Can't weigh in. This, of course, is the autobiographical story of Shia LaBeouf's life in which Shia LaBeouf plays his own father. And it's about a young actor going through the stages of development

and having some success and having some troubles and some trials. Those who have seen it have told me that it is a very powerful and intense film. Bobby, I think you've seen it. Yeah, it's extremely intense. And it's also like a dual timeline film. So Lucas Hedges is playing, I guess, like 20 something Shia LaBeouf. And then there's a child actor whose name I can't recall off the top of my head, but he's playing younger child star Shia LaBeouf. And Shia's performance, I think a lot of the questions have been, is Shia going to be nominated? And, you know, frankly, it's hard to say.

Because on the one hand, I think there's been a long-term understanding all the way going back to his days as the star of Even Stevens and Holes and all this kid stuff. Iconic stuff for my generation, by the way going back to his days as the star of even Stevens and holes and all this kid stuff, iconic stuff for my generation, iconic stuff. He, that he is like a sincerely passionately talented performer. Um,

viewers of project green light may recall his role as the star of the film that they made in the first season of project green light. And he's just, he has a magnetism. The actor that you're talking about, by the way, uh, that plays young Otis is named Noah Jupe,

which people may recognize from a quiet place. Um, Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Noah Jupe, very good actor. As far as Shia, though, you know, Shia is the sole writer of this film. And I think people will be impressed by his braveness in putting this story on screen. He is, you know, he's a problematic dude, though.

You know, he's done a lot of things in the past, whether they be comments that he's made or things he's been accused of or legal fracases or accidents or the way that he's operated inside of big studio projects that have put a little bit of controversy around him. I'm sharing this in kind of a value neutral way that may become trying for him as he goes into an Oscar campaign. It's really hard to say because where once those things would be deemed an opportunity to overcome struggle, now they may lead to someone like him being quote unquote canceled. So I don't know. Yeah, I guess. I mean, only a couple of years ago, Gary Oldman won for portraying Winston

Churchill, two problematic dudes. I guess I think the thing that is maybe more of a hang up Oscar wise is that like the Oscars don't always want this much honesty in their films and this film is very honest and he's portraying his father who was um emotionally and physically abusive to him when he was a child so i don't i don't know if that might fly it's definitely not a feel-good oscary movie no though it is the kind of supporting performance that is usually recognized yeah you know if lucas hedges is not recognized it's possible that Shia himself will be because they'll want to reward that kind of that raw portrayal that he's going for. But, you know, as I said, I have not seen the movie, so it's a little hard for me to say yay or nay. What's next?

A lot of people ask this question. So this is from Andrew Lai and many, many others, but they want to know they're interested in hearing what you've learned, if anything, from your project of watching every Academy Award Best Picture nominee in history, which you've mentioned a few times on this podcast as well as a few times on the rewatchables. So what did you learn? I've learned that,

I've learned two things, Bobby. One, there are a lot of fucking movies that have been nominated for Oscars. This was a serious endeavor for you. I don't know how you did it. I'm not done. I'm not going to claim to be done. Hundreds of films have been nominated for Oscars. This was a serious endeavor for you. I don't know how you did it. I'm not done. I'm not going to claim to be done. Hundreds of films have been nominated for Best Picture. It hasn't helped that they've increased the number of films that are nominated for Best Picture now. The other thing I've learned is that most of these movies are bad.

And what we perceive to be a great film has changed a lot over time. But the thing that is unmistakable is that the Oscars have always been political. And I don't mean that in the sort of Republican and Democrat sense of the word. I mean that in terms of what gets spotlit at award shows and why, and the fact that there has been machinery behind films forever. The studios and the people who work on the margins of the industry that work hard to push for awards, it's evident when you look back at some of the nominees. Now, we've spent a lot of time on this show and on the rewatchables kind of griping about illegitimate wins or things that we would do over again or what have you.

What we don't account for is the small stuff in the middle. Let's choose a random year and analyze the best films from that year. So in 1981, here are the films that were nominated for Best Picture. Chariots of Fire, Atlantic City, On Golden Pond, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Reds. Now, I didn't have to re-watch any of these movies, or I didn't have to watch any of these movies for the first time when I was embarking upon this. I'd already seen them. But what's happening inside that fivesome is an interesting microcosm of Hollywood at the time, right? You've got a very sort of serious British historical drama, which won Best Picture. You've got a French auteur's kind of seedy, steamy romance crime film. You've got On Golden Pond, which is this treatise on aging. You've got Raiders

of the Lost Ark, which is like a whiz bang entertainment, very classical throwback. And you've got Reds, which is a deep historical American epic. And, you know, 1981 is a very interesting year in movies. Are those the five best? I don't know. I mean, this is the same year that Stripes was released. This is the same year that Time Bandits was released. This is the same year that the Cannonball Run was released. Arthur, Superman 2. It's a very complex collection of movies. And what you realize is, what I've realized really is that going back and trying to watch all these movies is not necessarily good use of my time because it's not necessarily telling me about what Hollywood was at that my time because it's not necessarily telling me

about what Hollywood was at that time. What it's telling me is what the Oscars was. And that then requires a second level of investigation. So I think I'm just learning that all things are political. That's my big takeaway. That's fair. The error of Twitter. So BMAC wants to know,

BMAC, Fantasy, can we have a brief Midsommar spoiler discussion? As listeners of this podcast will recall, we had a spoiler free-ish episode featuring Chris Ryan and the director Ari Aster. Um, he wants to know your thoughts on the ending because they didn't get it in the spoiler free episode. So it's been like a month, right? We can spoil Midsommar. I guess if you don't want to hear my thoughts on the ending of this movie, just bang that 30 second button, I guess, and go forward, jump ahead. I don't want to belabor it too much. Obviously, I thought it was brilliant if it's on my top five of the year so far list. I think that Ari Aster has a very distinct sense of the comically absurd. And I found particularly the last 30 minutes of the movie to be very funny and very twisted in a in a knowing way and whereas i thought the final couple of minutes of hereditary were pretty funny i thought the whole denouement of of mitsumar to be like pretty much a comedy now a grotesque and elaborate and certainly ridiculous comedy but you know if people are asking about, if BMAC is asking specifically about kind of that final moment

where Florence Pugh looks and gazes into the camera and her stone-faced look, you know, turns into a bit of a Mona Lisa smile, and then we get this feeling of exaltation from her, I think that that was appropriate for a movie about a toxic relationship. Did you have any reflections on it, Bobby? Well, I mean, you pitched it to me a few different times as a relationship test, and I actually ended up seeing it with my significant other, who said afterwards, if that's a relationship test for you, you might not be in the best relationship. Well, that's why.

That's why I said that, because I do think that there will be people who will walk out of that movie who are on their 11th date, and they may disagree about how they feel about that movie. I can't imagine being on a date with someone I don't know that well with that movie. I think what you said is right about the movie, about the last 20-ish minutes being actually rather comically absurd. That's a really nice way of phrasing it. I don't know if... There's probably a lot of crossover between listeners of this podcast and the A24 podcast,

but Ari Aster's conversation about making that film with Robert Eggers, who made The Lighthouse, and I don't think that's out yet, but... I'm seeing it today. Wow. Wow.

Big day. Big day. Their conversation about just his mentality making that film, why it's this follow-up to Hereditary, the blending of genre, how he keeps getting asked about genre. Fans of that movie should go listen to that episode of that podcast. Yeah, I agree.

I also really love the one film I've seen from Robert Eggers, He Made the Witch. Those two spend a lot of time on that podcast talking about Ingmar Bergman, which I find funny because I don't sense a ton of Bergman in the tonality of their movies. I sense it in the sort of like austere quality of some of the way that they film movies, and there is a kind of hysterical nature to some Bergman movies, but it's different. And Astor, the person that he has cited, not just on this movie, but on the last movie too, as being a significant influence that is really resonant for me is Albert Brooks. And Albert Brooks operating, especially early Albert Brooks, modern romance and real life, those films and the heavy dose of satire that he's putting on those films feels of a piece with where he's going. So yeah, I loved Midsommar. I thought it was an extraordinary act of creativity. I think he is a bit of a ghoul in a good wayommar. I thought it was an extraordinary act of creativity.

I think he is a bit of a ghoul in a good way, Ari. I think he knows that he's kind of trying to haunt people a little bit. And I think he relishes that. Even though if you've heard him on this show, you know, he's just like a very kind guy and a fun guy to talk to about movies. He's got his eyes on some, I think some big things. I'm very excited to see what he does next. Yeah.

Visually, that movie is unbelievable. It's one of the best things I've seen on any screen ever. Totally. All right, let's jump ahead. Evan Cunningham, what is your level of excitement for Adam Driver's two new movies coming this year?

The report and marriage story. And where is he in the ranks of best actors working today? I know you're a big Adam Driver fan. I'm on the record about this. This is the best movie star that we have right now. That's my take. Now, I don't think that we define it

in the same way that we would say Brad Pitt. There's all this Brad Pitt conversation going on right now around Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. How even this character who is theoretically

a very bad person is so magnetic that we're judging the film based on his aura. And I don't think that Adam Driver has the same kind of practical beauty and charisma

that somebody like Brad Pitt does he's a little bit more of a Humphrey Bogart which is to say that he is while not traditionally handsome whenever he's doing things on screen you just can't take your eyes off him and if he's being a son of a bitch you're interested and if he's being sweet you're interested and if he is tearing the room apart, as he did in Girls many times, you're interested. And if he is a dark Sith Lord, you're interested. And, you know, he's very, very, very funny in another movie that's come out this year called The Dead Don't Die, which was Jim Jarmusch's zombie comedy. And, you know, you mentioned he has more than, he's got a few movies coming out this year. I mean, if we look back on what he's done, so he obviously was Oscar nominated for Black Klansman.

That was 2018. 2019, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a movie that kind of came and went even though it has all this mythology around it. You know,

that's Terry Gilliam's long, long, long gestating story about a filmmaker who is making a movie about Don Quixote

and his experience with that mythology. Interesting movie, not one of my favorites. And then we've got The Report, which, did you see that at Sundance, Bobby? Yeah, I did see it at Sundance. So that's a forthcoming Amazon drama about the CIA. We will get into that when the movie comes around. It's a little spotlighty in terms of setting. You feel like you're in an office and it's very confined and just the hard work that went into that happening within the CIA and how much like pushback there was, you know, correcting the record for Zero Dark Thirty a little bit. It does seem to be in conversation with that movie. And

that's from Scott Z. Burns, who is a longtime Steven Soderbergh collaborator and screenwriter making, I believe, his directorial debut. I could be wrong about that. And so I'm looking forward to that. I like a good docudrama. I like a good claustrophobic confined spaces retelling of history. I'm not immune to that. Marriage Story is the one I'm most interested in. Amanda and I have mentioned it on the show a couple of times. I'm obviously incredibly enthusiastic about Noah Baumbach's work.

I am also notably a child of divorce, and I do love when a child of divorce makes a child of divorce film. The comparison that's been made to me by some folks who have been around the film is that it is his Kramer versus Kramer. Noah Baumbach, of course, went through a very, I don't know about a public divorce, but he was married to Jennifer Jason Leigh, who's a public person. And I think the film is in some ways, you know, at least iterating on the experience of going through something like that, and it doesn't just start,

it stars Driver, and it stars Scarlett Johansson, and it stars Laura Dern as a lawyer, and people really want this movie to be a thing, so we'll see if it's going to be a thing. I'll watch Driver in anything, you know, let's not lose sight of the fact that he's also going to be appearing

in The Rise of Skywalker, which comes out in December. Ever heard of it? So, you know, I mean, who's better than this guy? He works with Terry Gilliam, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Noah Baumbach, and he's in a Star Wars movie. What more can you ask for from a modern star? Yeah, he's picking them up and putting them down. He's doing his thing.

If you want to divide the Ringer podcast office, us podcast producers, the most divisive thing that's ever happened is, is Adam Driver hot? That question being posed to the room. So we'll think on that for a little bit. The good news is, is I don't have to weigh in on that question. You're not obligated to. By no means. All right. Jordan Eckhart asks, for your top turn your brain off comfort flicks. So movies you don't have to think about, but give you all the feels. I like the way that this question is phrased. It's different from

the next question, which I'll get into a little bit. Turn your brain off comfort flicks. Here are the three movies I wrote down. I wrote down Anchorman, Get Shorty, and Dazed and Confused. Now, I think Get Shorty is getting a little lost to time, though it's a wonderful movie. It's an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel. And it is different than I think most other Elmore Leonard adaptations. We think Elmore Leonard and we think, oh, Jackie Brown or Out of Sight. There's something kind of cool and stylish and subtle and kind of steamy about it. Get Shorty is more of a satire. It's more of a satire of Hollywood. It's very pop. It's very zippy. It's got tremendous John Travolta, R Russo Gene Hackman and Danny DeVito

performances it's got a great early James Gandolfini performance in it that's a movie that for whatever reason I owned it on VHS in like 1995

right in the throes of the John Travolta revival this is the first film I believe he made right after Pulp Fiction happened he plays Chili Palmer

who is a kind of a fixer for the mob he's kind of muscle for the mob but he also collects money and he's got a history doing a lot of different fixer for the mob. He's kind of muscle for the mob, but he also collects money and he's got a history doing a lot of different kinds of jobs. And he comes out to Hollywood after living in Miami. And there's just a rhythm to that movie that calms me. Anchorman, I don't really need to explain Anchorman, right? Anchorman is well understood as a masterpiece that also doesn't require much brain work. Isn't Will Ferrell still doing TV

hits as Anchorman I think people are well aware of why that's successful in 2019 did you know that there's a Ron Burgundy podcast

I did know that actually have you been a listener I have not I think he had Kamala Harris on last week so does he just

I'm unaware of it as a concept what is he what is the elevator pitch does he interview people as Ron Burgundy presumably

maybe I should check it out. I'm not into like fantasy pods. It's not really a fantasy pod because he's interviewing real people as themselves. However, he's playing a character. I've got some bad news for you. This is a fantasy version of myself. And for those of you who know me in the real world,

you know that perhaps my podcast persona is slightly different. No, he's like this all the time. No, that's not true. And I wrote down Dazed and Confused. I don't need to explain these things too much, right? These are wonderful movies. No, there's this whole history of other kinds of movies

that I've had probably that relationship to over the years. Aliens and Terminator 2, the things that teenage boys watch when they grow up in the 80s and the 90s. I don't return to those things that much. And honestly, I don't do this that much. I feel like there's so much new work to see. And I love seeing new things and understanding new things.

And we have never had an opportunity to see as many things as we do now for, if you just pool the total sum that you would pay for the most significant streaming services, let's say it's $300 a year. So for $300 a year, you can have the Criterion Collection and probably soon to be Disney Plus and Netflix. If you just take those three things, you could never watch one one-thousandth of all of the offerings of those spaces. So I don't have a lot of time to kind of re-watch Anchorman unless we're doing a re-watchables. Yeah. I don't do the shut your brain off comfort flick while I'm by myself.

If I'm with friends, maybe I'll do it sometimes. And I did it a lot more as like a routine in high school with friends or whatever, like going to bed, just throw on role models or throw on Super Bad or Talladega Nights. Like a lot of those like dumb high school boy movies that you love that that's when I need to like maybe turn my brain off a little bit. Yeah. And you know, I'll, I'll, I'll send a shout out to my wife who has something called kitchen movies, which is that whenever she is preparing dinner or working on a new recipe project or baking something, she just puts on the TV in the kitchen and it only goes on when she needs to watch a kitchen movie.

And like her kitchen movies are so different from the movies that I would watch. Just yesterday, she watched In Education. She watches routinely the David Lean movie Brief Encounter. She watches the Before Sunset Sunrise trilogy all the time. That's a different tonality than the kind of movie I want on in the background when I'm trying to do something else.

So for everybody, it's different. What's next? So similar, what are some of your guilty pleasure movies? So it's like a little bit of a different flavor of the same question. Guilty pleasures don't exist, Bobby. That's not a thing that we subscribe to. If you like something, you like it. And you need to stand forward and say, I am guilt-free in liking this thing. I love this take. In general, I reject the premise. That said, also this person is named Trey Turninator, which as Mets fans, we don't recognize that. Yeah, that's why I didn't read it.

That's not, this is, come on, man. I will say that there is certainly a kind of movie that I like that I don't feel guilty about, but I think is trying to, what Trey is trying to get at, which is the sort of like face-off, broken arrow, con air, dumb action movie. It's the kind of movie that I'm not routinely invited onto

for the rewatchables because no one wants to hear me pontificate about the cinematography choices of those movies. But I do have an admiration for them and I do like them and I have a lot of fun. And I love particularly Shea Serrano's ability to make us excited about those kinds of movies. And, you know, I think one thing that has happened too is, let me posit a theory to you.

You know, in the 2000s in music writing, which is something that I spent most of my time doing back then, poptimism came to the fore. The idea that popular music is not inherently bad and has a value and it has a critical value and we can understand the world a little bit better if we look at the totality of music through a similar lens and we don't just dismiss things out of hand because they are inherently commercial. I think that movies quietly are having its poptimist moment. And I think the ability to say, you know what's really valuable is John Wick. You know what's really valuable is some of the storytelling choices in Endgame. And the way that

we are valorizing popular movie culture in a significant way, and I think that some of the things that we do here are contributing to that. I think the rewatchables is absolutely contributing to that. The sort of high-level engagement, sincerity, and a little bit of intellectualism sprinkled on

stuff like Con Air. So I don't think they're guilty pleasures anymore. I think that that's a whole category that is kind of bunk. You wouldn't call Katy Perry a guilty pleasure anymore. You'd just say she's a person I like or not like if you are living in 2019. But the fact that that is going on right now is interesting to me. Now, there is still a kind of movie that it's not necessarily reputable to say you like, and I think it's probably mostly problematic-ish movies, but like I saw Brightburn this year. Did you see that, Bobby? No, I did not. Brightburn is a Sony superhero movie. It's sort of like, what if Superman, but he's evil? And Superman is a kid. And we see the origin of a

super powered young boy who breaks bad. It's a well-made movie. It's a nasty bit of business. It's just a really tough, violent, and gory movie. And it's the kind of movie that when I was 16, I really loved. And I still have a little bit of admiration for it. I think it's hard to step forward on social media and say, the movie I fucking loved is Brightburn because it indicates a little something a little cracked about you even and it's different than something like Midsommar, which is deeply artistic. Brightburn is more exploitative in a specific way with the movies. So I guess that that is the closest that we can come to this kind of like modern guilty pleasure. But as I said, I don't really think that that's a real thing. Yeah. Your optimism point is well taken. The fact

that I've read like 10 articles in my life about gun foo, which is like what they call the fighting style of John Wick. Absolutely. Just goes to show, I think that there's much more widely accepted critical thought about these types of things. No doubt. I think the concept of guilty pleasure movie kind of shifts on what the group of people who are around you right like I felt like Top Gun was a guilty pleasure for me at NYU

which was ridiculous because that's not a guilty pleasure at all it's a perfect movie but I think it depends on who you're talking to yeah I think the way that we deem something useful

and valuable has changed a lot too for a time I think a lot of people especially when they're growing up and don't necessarily know how this industry works as much think that the Oscars is the barometer against which you measure quality.

And we know that's not true now, but I think as you get older and you see more kinds of films, you see more foreign films, you see more documentaries, you see more things that are not necessarily fully commercialized, you have a different understanding of what's good and not good. And you can realize that the concept of unintentional comedy, as it applies to Top Gun, makes it better. And it's okay to be excited about something being kind of bad because it makes it even better. I'm going to go so hard for that in 2020. Speaking of that, Jolynn Villa asks, what is most anticipated 2020 movie for you, rumor or otherwise? I wrote this down quickly. Here's my list. Last Night in Soho. That's Edgar Wright's new movie. I have a lot of admiration for what Edgar Wright does. I think Edgar Wright is trying to do the same thing that Tarantino is doing. He's trying to create an event at the movie theater.

And that was what Baby Driver was. And I think even if you had some problems with Baby Driver, he was trying to create a theatrical experience that is full of energy. So I'm very curious to see what he does there. I wrote down Newark. You familiar with Newark? No, I'm familiar with Newark the place and unfortunately the international airport, but not the film. So I've never been to Newark, so I'm not going to weigh in on it,

but I do believe that that is the current title and maybe they've changed the title at this point of the Sopranos prequel. Oh, okay. Yes, I'm familiar with that. So this is the, you know, it's James Gandolfini's character, Tony Soprano's father,

I think is the significant figure in this story. This has been long gestating. Like most human beings, I am a huge fan of The Sopranos. I'm fascinated by David Chase's career and everything he's chosen to do. I think David Chase's last movie, Not Fade Away, is one of the already kind of like lost classics of this decade. I wrote about it for Grantland back in the day, and I really admired what he was going for. And this is going to sound like a strange comparison, but I think it has a little bit in common with Euphoria, especially the ending of Euphoria's first season

and the ending of this movie, Not Fade Away. So I'm going to use this as a shout out to Not Fade Away and to my interest in David Chase. A couple of other movies. Here's a dumb movie that I'm looking forward to, and it's called The Gentleman. This is Guy Ritchie's new movie. At CinemaCon, I saw a preview of this film. And even though it's not coming out, I think until January 2020, I'm just, I'm all the way in. It's Colin Farrell. It's Hugh Grant. It's Charlie Hunnam just being dashing, tweed-bearing drug dealer monster guys.

Great. And it looks in the vein of the sort of snatch and lock stock Guy Ritchie, which he has not been doing enough of lately, as we know from our Aladdin podcast. Other relevant figures in this movie include Matthew McConaughey, Henry Golding, who you may remember from Crazy Rich Asians, Michelle Dockery, with whom I am in love, from Downton Abbey, and Jeremy Strong, our number one boy. Just a lot of handsome dudes going to be wearing tweed. A lot of handsome guys in tweed.

So that's late January 2020. I wrote down Nightmare Alley. There was some news about Nightmare Alley, which is Guillermo del Toro's next film, his first film after The Shape of Water. This movie is going to star Bradley Cooper. It's based on a novel from the 1940s. There has been already an adaptation of this movie

from the 1940s starring Tyrone Power. This is a very twisted film about what happens inside of carnivals and who tries to penetrate the world of con men and chicanery. And it's going to be a period piece set in the 40s. And I'm very, very excited about it, even though I think Guillermo del Toro

has lost my trust a bit in the last couple of years. I've also written down Lee Whannell's The Invisible Man. I think Lee Whannell is one of the more underrated genre stylists. The idea of him doing a classical horror movie is interesting to me. I mentioned Chloe Zhao's Eternals. As far as the Marvel movies that are coming in the near future, that is by far the one that has piqued my interest the most.

There is now a bang-up cast in Eternals full of very, very famous people, including Angelina Jolie and Richard Madden and Kumail Nanjiani and a whole bunch of other people. I mentioned Waves as well. I don't know when Waves is going to come out. It might be this year. It might be next year, the Trey Ward Schultz film. I also wrote down Tiger Tail, which is Alan Yang's Netflix movie, which I don't know a whole heck of a lot about, but I did really admire Forever, the series, the miniseries that he made for Amazon starring Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen. And of course, Alan has, you know, appeared many times on The Dave Chang Show, and he was a writer on Parks and Rec, and he was a co-EP and writer director on Master of None, Az's on sorry series it's just a great writer and so i'm very interested to see what he does when he's got uh everything at his

fingertips yeah i'm quite a fan of the wholesomeness of his storytelling in many different occasions a sincere fellow you can tell yeah um okay nick adams asks and many other people ask this what is your rewatchables passion project that no one will agree to do? So a little bit of inner working here at the rear that you're trying to lobby for. I honestly don't know. I don't know. I mean, I really want to do There Will Be Blood

for obvious reasons. I think that There Will Be Blood is the masterpiece of the 21st century. I don't think that Bill is opposed to it. I think that Bill's trying to cycle through every last damn Michael Mann movie before we get a chance to do that, which is fine. You don't want to fire all the bullets out of the chamber.

The thing is, is if Bill does Black Hat before I get a chance to do There Will Be Blood, I'm going to be very concerned about my future. You know, and that's just one of those things. You know, Michael Mann is a brilliant director and I admire a great many of his films. I understand the desire to do The Last of the Mohicans and there's a handful of others that he hasn't done. Thief, I don't think, has been a rewatchables. There Will Be Blood needs to happen, and I'm waiting on that. I've already created so many podcasts and content options here and at Grantland in an effort to talk about There Will Be Blood. I wrote about the 10th anniversary of the film. We did a 2007 Top Fives podcast here. I just really love digging

my teeth into that movie. So that's my hope. I don't think no one's agreeing to it per se, but that's where I want to go. A 2007 top fives podcast for you to talk about there will be blood is just like chef's kiss, you know? It's my lifestyle. It's my lifestyle. Okay. Here, a few different people asked about this, Nate Schwartz being one of them. Suggestions from the Criterion channel. You've talked about it a few times. A lot of people who listen to this podcast probably have it, myself included, and it can be kind of a wall

of old movies that you don't know that well. So are there a few that stick out or a few filmmakers that stick out for you? It's so hard to do this because it's so hard to know what people are and are not familiar with. I'm always surprised by some people have an extraordinary depth of knowledge about the work of Akira Kurosawa, but they don't know anything about Nicholas Roeg, right? So how do you decide what to say? You know, what you really should watch is this, because there are certain canonical films that I think people are familiar with, but maybe they're not. The first handful that I wrote down were The Red Shoes, The Powell and Pressburger Film, and Bicycle Thieves, which are two significantly

different non-Hollywood productions that are striking in sort of their beauty and their intimacy and their importance to the future of filmmaking. And their films are from the 40s and the 50s. And I would just plainly recommend those to any living person. I would just say, watch the red, I dare you to watch the red shoes and not be moved. Then there's some other things that are passions of mine that other people may be interested in or not. I wrote down Volver, which is a Pedro Almodovar film. I'm kind of preparing for Pain and Glory, his new movie coming up. I think there are six or seven Almodovar films on the Criterion channel right now. I don't think you'd really do poorly to watch any of them. I wrote down The Manchurian

Candidate, which is actually a Criterion collection Blu-ray that I spent hard-earned money on because I love that movie so much. It's a John Frankenheimer sort of espionage paranoia thriller from the early 60s that is one of the most sophisticated, complicated evocations of political insanity that you can ever see. And it certainly feels relevant to this exact moment. I wrote down A Gear of the Wrath of God, which is one of the masterpieces made by a former Big Picture guest, Werner Herzog. If you want to see Klaus Kinski going for it, check out A Gear of the Wrath of God. And then, you know, one of the great things that the service does is they organize

certain collections by director. I'm obviously obsessed with directors. That's why I'm talking to so many of them on this show. I just wrote down a handful that would be good. I mentioned Herzog. I mentioned Nicholas Rogue, who passed away earlier this year and who Adam Neiman has written about for the site, directed movies like Walkabout and Don't Look Now and Performance, The Man Who Fell to Earth. I don't think you can go wrong with any of those movies. Those are all on the service. I wrote down Carol Reed. Are you familiar with Carol Reed, Bobby?

I'm not. So Carol Reed's the director of The Third Man, which is my favorite movie of all time. And he has a very underrated career. The Third Man, which I believe is celebrating its 70th anniversary in about a month, is widely understood as one of the best movies ever made. But he's got a few more that are a little bit underseen, including Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol are the two that I would really, really underline.

And I would also point out Our Man in Havana, which is a great Alec Guinness movie that also appears on the Criterion channel. So that's just a handful of recommendations. And then the aforementioned Joanna Hogg, her three movies before The Souvenir are there. Unrelated, Archipelago, and Exhibition. I would say brace yourself for a kind of stillness. These are not the most active films that you can watch, but they're really, really precise evocations of people who have a wellspring,

a feeling inside of them, but don't know how to let it get out. There is a high level of English repression happening in these films. So if you're interested in that, check out Joanna Hogg's movies. That's just a smattering of stuff that I quickly looked at and enjoyed. Are there directors that you have a hard time watching multiple of their films in a row? Like I watched There Will Be Blood a couple of weekends ago and I was like, I should really just go back and watch a bunch of PTA movies. And then I went to go watch them and I was like, I feel like I need to marinate on There Will Be Blood for a little longer before I jump right back into Phantom Threat. Because you find it's better to unpack them? Yeah, because I find I don't want to be necessarily making all the connections

between There Will Be Blood and Boogie Nights. Yeah, I mean, generally speaking, I don't do director marathons. Yeah. So, and I don't even really know why that is. I think the only time I'll do it is if I'm preparing to write something or to do an episode of the show. Yeah, which you do often. So you kind of do. But I don't do it in a way where I sit down and I say, what I'm going to do right now is watch 30 Ingmar Bergman films in a row. It really depends on the filmmaker. It would be tough to sit down

and do a Joanna Hogg marathon for me because those films are so quiet and I, I like all other people. I'm easily distractible despite my desire to watch foreign films all day and to watch slow cinema. I still, I can get really bored. I don't, I, you know, I, and I think if you watch any of these movies that I recommended and you're like, I'm really bored right now, that's okay. It's okay to feel that way. Um, but as far as somebody who, who would be tricky to watch a lot of their films in a row, well, it's probably for the opposite reason. You know, if you look at, say, Mike Nichols,

every Mike Nichols movie has a world of pain and anxiety operating just under the surface. And you have to let it sit for a little while before you go to the next one. So that's probably a filmmaker I really like who I need to chew on a little bit after I've seen one of their movies. Today's episode of The Big Picture is brought to you by Masterclass. Whatever you're passionately curious about, you can keep digging in and learning more with a master of the field when you sign up for Masterclass. My Masterclass experience has been interesting. Of course, there are so many filmmakers who appear giving their master takes on how to direct on Masterclass. My most significant experience has been with the poker player Phil Ivey, world-class gambler, who has given me a

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membership. So you've got nothing to lose. Now you can have unlimited access to every Masterclass, and as a Big Picture listener, you'll get $30 off. Just go to masterclass.com slash big picture for $30 off of your first year of the all-access pass. That's masterclass.com slash big picture for $30 off of your first year of the all-access pass. That's masterclass.com slash big picture for unlimited access to Masterclass at $30 off. Masterclass.com slash big picture. All right, let's jump ahead to, we had a whole category of Tarantino questions that people responded with because Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

has been on the mind. Yeah, got some feedback from our most recent podcast. Some people said, great job by you, I love you. Some other people said, fuck off and die. So, you know, different strokes. You're doing it right. All right, Doritos asks, love Doritos. Is this at Doritos?

No, it's not. There's a Z at the end oh no um has there always been this type of discourse with every new tarantino movie or is this a new invention of this decade uh this is normal uh it's amplified because we have social media now and we did not when pulp fiction came out but this is normal i mean he's a provocateur and he's literally attempting to get a reaction out of you. That is a part of his strategy. He actually talked about that a bit on Quentin Tarantino's feature presentation, the show that Amy Nicholson did with him that you did as well.

And I don't, you know, I think that's great. Martin Scorsese is also a provocateur. Akira Kurosawa is also a provocateur. The best filmmakers are trying to get you to feel and to respond. So I think that is he problematic aspect of this is also not new. People have been adjudicating whether his movies are too violent ever since Michael Madsen cut that ear off in Reservoir Dogs. So, you know, part of the reason I think I was a little bit exasperated by some of the commentary around the last movie is because I just feel like we've done

this before. And I feel like there are few filmmakers that can get me as excited about the work that they're doing as he can. And so I think that while the criticism is not illegitimate, I just was a little bit bored by it. Let's jump ahead to Jay Merritt asks, he says, 10 out of 10 agree that Leo's performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is one of his best. You mentioned that one on our review of the movie.

Where do you think Pitt's ranks among the roles that he's played? Well, this is challenging. I think Pitt's performance is a little more of a cipher for how you feel about the rest of the movie in this, right? Like Leo's performance is objectively just unbelievable, but I think Pitt is kind of at more of the same speed as the film. I think that's fair. I think Pitt is not given, he's not plumbing the depths in the same way that Leo is. Leo has to act extravagantly. He has to cry. He has to wail. He has to scream. He has to doubt himself. He has to be furious and delighted and scared. Pitt is as cool as Lake Placid. He is all on the surface, calm, confident,

maybe a little evil. And so while it's a strong evocation of Brad Pitt's stardom, I don't know if it's necessarily in his greatest performances. I think it's one of his greatest star turns. And there's a big difference there. So how does it relate to something like Moneyball? You know, Moneyball, he was nominated for an Oscar. I think he was very similar in Moneyball. I think he was very calm, very even keeled, not going out of his way to do things. It's a little different from something like the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, where he's applying an accent. He's lost a great deal of weight. He is melancholy and mysterious and angry, and he's flexing a lot more muscles um i also think he's very very fun in something like fight club which may feel one-sided but by the time you get to the end of the film you realize he's doing a lot of different things so i don't know where this fits in like his his long-term filmography i think people will point to it as one of his great star turns which is really what his career has been about. There's always been a conversation about how he's a character actor hanging out in a leading man's body. But I would argue that this is more of a leading man performance than anything else.

It's way more of a Steve McQueen performance. Not a lot of dialogue, looking cool all the time, beating up the hippies, doing things that only a cool guy can do. So it's in the top 12, but I don't really know what that means. In an Oscars montage of Brad Pitt's career at some Lifetime Achievement Award 30 years from now or whatever, what movie plays first? What is his most iconic performance

that you associate with him? This is a very good question. Well, it comes in two phases. There is the Legends of the Fall, fall felma and louise interview with the vampire seven era when he is a hot young 90s star and then there is the guy who proceeds a little bit from that stardom and takes on more challenging work now i think the sort of most quote-unquote respectable thing he's ever done is The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That's the one where people will say...

I'm not a fan of that movie. It's my least favorite Fincher. But I do think that that's the one where he is going for it the most as an actor. And I think additionally in Glorious Bastards is probably one of the most well-remembered movies that he's made. Yeah.

And has the most, I think especially for people like us, as he gets older and we start valorizing him, we're going to point to a movie like that. We're going to point to Ocean's Eleven. You know, we're going to point to probably movies like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The Tree of Life, I could see being a factor here.

Certainly Moneyball since he was nominated. You know, I think for some people, they'll point to like World War Z or The Counselor, but I probably won't i think i would point to oceans 11 just him being cool as shit it's just like that's what i think of when i think of brad pitt even when i see him on the cover of a magazine or whatever when i'm checking out at vons yeah i mean that's it's always been part and parcel he's been simultaneously feeding off of it and warring against that exact thing his entire career which is what makes him interesting so

kind of in the same vein true True Stories I Made Up asks, which actor do you think Tarantino gets the most out of? So we talked about Brad, talked a little bit about Leo's performance. Are either of these guys in the running for that? Is it all time?

All time, yeah. Any of his films. I think his great muse is definitely Samuel L. Jackson. I think the actor with whom he gets the most and who is most comfortable doing the Tarantino dialogue thing is Sam Jackson.

I wish Sam Jackson was in all of his movies. The Jewel, I think we're actually underrating how amazing Jules Winfield is as a character and a performance from Jackson. So that's a person who, you know, Sam Jackson's great in everything. It's not as if he, you know, really diminishes greatly when he's not in a Tarantino movie, but man, he is just fabulous. Even The Hateful Eight, which is not really in my upper echelon of Tarantino movies, he is just extraordinarily good in that movie.

And so mesmerizing. So mesmerizing in Django, also a movie that I don't love, but he is just so compelling to watch and he has such a, almost a preternatural grasp of how to deliver those words that that would be my go-to pick. I think he's, you know, he obviously has a great thing with Uma. Likewise, Mia Wallace, you look at the performance that she's giving as Mia Wallace in Pulp, and they have something.

You know, they just, she gets what he's going for, and he's lucky to have her. He's lucky to have somebody who has that kind of grace, wit, who can communicate kind of a slyness and intelligence in that way, because that's what he needs. He needs all of his characters to be pretty smart. Yeah. Okay. Last Tarantino question from Steven Orkut. Where does the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood soundtrack rank for you amongst the Tarantino films? I know you're a huge fan of the Once Upon a Time soundtrack. Steven, thank you for this question. Thank you for leaning right into my interests. I made a quick list. Here it is. Kill Bill, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Death Proof, Jackie Brown. I'm not fond of the Django soundtrack. I don't think that the soundtrack for Inglourious Basterds really applies here though. There are a handful of morricone moments that I really like

Um, what am I forgetting from this list? I think that's I think that's the sum total uh Kill bill to me Is the most effective not because it's the most fun to listen to it's not the most fun to listen to I think pulp and reservoir dogs are the two most fun to listen to Those are also the ones I listen to a lot as a young person. So they're interwoven into my DNA at this point. But Kill Bill has the most examples of Tarantino taking something that existed in the culture previously and making it his own in a radical way. Now that includes things like

Morricone soundtracks from Spaghetti Westerns that you haven't thought a lot about, but it also includes Bernard Herrmann score from the 1950s. It includes the theme song to The Green Hornet, which people think now was recorded for Kill Bill, but it was recorded, in fact, for the show that appears in the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with Bruce Lee. He takes the pan flute artist Zamfir and makes that music feel endemic to his own movie. He takes Quincy Jones's Ironside score and makes that relevant to his movie. He has taken all of these disparate snatches of movie score history and made them profoundly a part of his own.

And that is a really neat trick. Now, I think it's plausible to be 70 years old and to have a previous relationship with some of that music in the way that I don't And to not be as impressed by that which I I respect but for me personally, I love what he did with kill bill You know, i'm not dumb enough to think that pulp fiction and everything that he did with Dick dale and al green and dusty springfield and chuck berry and all the artists that he platformed in the way by choosing songs that are just left of center for them and making them a thing was not a radical shift

in the way that movie soundtracks happened. It obviously was and I still like it. Just one of those things where sometimes you play out your favorite album and you can't listen to it anymore

and so I'm going Kill Bill and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is right behind it and that's probably recency bias but I'm having a lot of fun listening to that soundtrack a lot. I've been listening to it quite a lot too. You made a lovely playlist of it. Thank you for that. You're welcome. Shall we do a couple of all-time questions? I guess so.

You don't seem too thrilled about that. Well, because then it... You're on record. Then I'm on the record. And one of the best things about seeing movies nonstop is your ideas get to change all the time. So I want to say that no matter what I say here, and I'm appreciative of the questions, and I'm not asking for less questions like this but no matter what i say it is it is mutable it has to be it has to it has to change i'll only make you do a couple of them okay okay kyle dink john asks which performance in history would warrant sean fantasy to whisper that was the best acting i've ever seen in an actor's ear can we cut in julia butter saying that into this i do that. I'll look for that scene.

I would love that. That was the best acting I've ever seen in my whole life. Like you. Great fucking note. I wrote down a handful. I don't know how to answer this question. Here's what I wrote down. Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train. If you haven't seen Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train,

it's one of the most twisted and fascinating movies of all time. Robert Walker plays ostensibly the heavy of the movie. It is pure malice. It is evil. This is a movie that was released 30, 40 years before Hannibal Lecter appeared on screen. This is just a dynamite, scary, weird kind of a character. And what Robert Walker's doing is amazing. I also wrote down Nicole Kidman in To Die For, which is a performance that did not win an Oscar. But I think as we go along, I can see more and more actors using this kind of meta-deluded figure as a text for the characters that they portray. Because Nicole Kidman's character's desire for fame and ability to shut off everything around her in an effort to keep going forward towards fame is a very resonant text for life in 2019.

And if you look at what she's doing and the way that she is channeling all of her experiences as a famous actress and putting it into this very, very interesting and clever Gus Van Sant film, I'm impressed by it every time. You know, I wrote down Pacino and Dog Day Afternoon. Sometimes you don't really have to overthink it. You can just be like, the greatest actor is the greatest actor. And this is them at the peak of their powers. Now, on the one hand, you've got The Godfather, which is all recessed, all sort of malevolent uh savviness and then you've got dog day afternoon which is desperate and emotional and furious and confused and unable to control everything but desperately trying to keep it all together so pacino no doubt i think we're forgetting um philip seymour hoffman

was the best actor of this century so I put the master down here I think you could pick any number of Philip Seymour Hoffman performances probably the most he's probably the most

flexible actor you know give or take a Meryl Streep who can do comedy, drama docudrama thriller this is a guy who's the best mission impossible

villain i was just gonna say that yeah you know he's a person who is the funniest part of a ben stiller comedy he's a person who is an extraordinary shit heel in um talented mr ripley he is the purest evocation of vulnerability in boogie Nights. Just like really my favorite actor, has always been my favorite actor since I came upon him in Son of a Woman. And his performance in The Master is like genuinely moving for me. So that one, I wrote down Faye Dunaway in Network.

Network is like a top five movie for me. Diana Christensen, much like Nicole Kidman's character in To Die For is a very prescient figure in the way that media came along. And I think her ability to kind of like icily and hilariously show us what's wrong with people, that lives on for me. Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success, similar.

Are you sensing a theme of cynical, dark figures that I respond to? Perhaps there's something underneath my skin. Is any Anthony Hopkins coming up? No, no. No Anthony Hopkins. Maybe in Westworld? What do you think about that? No, no. Probably not. That one didn't win all of the awards in a row, so.

That's true. And the last one I wrote down is Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. Now there's thousands of other performances I like, different films. I guess it's notable that all of these films are English language. But Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive is basically playing three parts. And I think in some cases, playing multiple parts in the same movie leads to weird Tom Hardy fuckery. In the case of Mulholland Drive, I think what Watts is doing is amazing. And I just saw Naomi Watts give an amazing performance in a new movie called Loose, which I was so excited to see and actually lived up to my expectations of it. It's directed by Julius Ona.

It's in theaters right now. It's about a family, a young boy who has been adopted from Eritrea, war-torn Eritrea by two liberal white parents played by Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. And how the boy, who is I think a junior in high school, interacts with the expectations of his life

and what people expect of expectations of his life and what people expect of him given his life situation and where he comes from and who he is becoming. And it is just a provocative, fascinating movie. And Naomi Watts has a key significant role in it as a mother who is trying to do the best thing for her son, but maybe doesn't realize that she is laying expectation that is unreasonable upon him. So I would highly recommend Loose. Bob, you should check that out too. I will.

Can I nominate a couple that are a little more, what you might call basic? Sure, yeah. Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood just like singed my eyebrows off. I just don't know how anyone does that. I mean, that's too much of a Sean answer maybe for you to have written that down here.

It's a little like saying Babe Ruth was good. You know, like, we know. We know. He changed the game. He changed the game. I remember seeing Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet

and being like, oh, people are allowed to be like that on screen. He would fit in with this group of evil monsters I've got here. Yeah, exactly. Him yelling about beer types

and Heineken and PBR is just like formative for me and liking movies. It's formative for me and liking movies. It's formative for me and liking PBR. It's a very hipster drink, very hipster of you. All right, let's move on. One more greatest of all time question and then we'll move on from that. Carol Amalia Alban asks, what is the most important movie made after 1960?

Well, I wrote down one movie for every decade. Here's the movies I wrote down, because I don't think you can say there's one single movie that is most important. And if you had to say it, you would say Star Wars. Not because it is the best movie that has been made since 1960, but because it is the movie that changed movies. People point to Jaws, but I think Star Wars is the most significant, because especially the IP stranglehold we find ourselves in, this deluge of comic books, action franchises, kids films, live action remakes of previously existing material, everything that has been dominating this very complicated industry that we're trying to track on this show comes up from Star Wars. And it doesn't mean that Star Wars is the first time there was serialization in a story. It doesn't mean it's the first time there was a

big-time action epic or a science fiction epic. It just became phenomenological in a way that is accepted as a fact of our culture now that did not exist beforehand. But I think before that, the most significant movie is Bonnie and Clyde, which just changed what a movie hit could be in terms of its violence, in terms of its portrayal of sexuality in this country, in terms of how it platformed new movie stars and new filmmakers. The way that it integrated the influence of the new wave cinema and put it on American screens and used it to tell a Western story, which is sort of our domain in a really significant way. So I would go Bonnie and Clyde for the 60s, Star Wars for the 70s, your precious baby Top Gun for the 80s. I love it so much. Sweating in white t-shirts, just what more could I need? I would say the supercharged masculinity and the rockstarification of movies is what that movie represents. You know, the sort of the Kenny Loggins soundtrack

and the nicknames and crews at his absolute most crews. For the 90s, I wrote down Jurassic Park. I think you could also put Terminator 2 Judgment Day here. Those are movies that took huge technological advances into movie theaters and basically changed our expectations of what we could get and how big we could think about what a movie could be. I think to this moment, Jurassic Park holds up astonishingly well.

And T2 as well a little bit, but Jurassic Park is still an absolute mind-blowing experience to me. And then, you know, I think for this century, I won't really split the difference between the O's and the 10's, but for the century, it's The Dark Knight, which put a great deal of respectability

onto the thing that we were previously anxious about. And let it really, I mean, it changed the Oscars the way it was received. It changed the expectation of the box office full stop. And I really think it changed movies for better and worse. You know, if you've heard the episode of the rewatchables that Chris Jason and I did about that movie, you know, there's some things about it that I don't think work or make sense or, or even reasonable. And I've had my doubts about Nolan's films in the past,

but there's no doubt that it is one of the most significant phenomenons of the last 50 years in movies. Yeah. I was 12 when that movie came out and I was like, there's never going to be a better movie ever made than this. Yeah. So I think, that movie came out and I was like, there's never going to be a better movie ever made than this. Yeah. So I think a lot of people felt that way and still do. Yeah. I think so too.

It's also a really good question because important, there's so much more, there's a lot of layers to the word important rather than best. I'm glad it was important and not best

because best is highly subjective. Even beyond the obvious stakes of a mailbag podcast, you know, best in terms of what you're grading on a film, there's so many factors. Like every week when we're doing the show and we're talking to filmmakers and we're trying to figure out like, well, what worked and what didn't and why was this good and what did, you realize that there are dozens, hundreds of people making movies go. And so because of that, figuring out what is the best is a reason why the best picture is always given to somebody who fucking sucks at the Oscars.

All right. This next question, it comes from Zach Paklib. Hope I'm saying that right. But it might be my favorite question. A few people ask this. So you can draft a director, two leading actors, and one supporting actor who haven't worked together on a film. Who do you got? I love this question.

It's a great question. Great job by you, Zach. Daniel Kaluuya, Jesse Plemons, and Florence Pugh, directed by Barry Jenkins. Who says no? What kind of movie is it? A couple other people asked if you could draft a director to do a genre that they haven't done yet. So what's maybe something that Barry Jenkins hasn't done yet with this cast? Remake of Eyes Wide Shut. Okay. No, I think a movie that starts out like a romance and turns into a thriller is what I would like to see. Daniel Kaluuya, Jesse Plemons, and Florence Pugh are all actors, and we know this now based on that last handful of roles that they've had, who don't have to say a lot to communicate a lot. And Barry Jenkins is the kind of filmmaker who likes to show us the faces of his performers. Very true. And those are people that can communicate a world without

saying much. And the older I get and the less interested I get in the people who can write like dazzling dialogue, the more interested I am in a certain kind of a cinema. So, and I just love watching those three on screen. I'm just so, so stoked about what Florence Pugh is going to do now in the aftermath of Midsommar. She's clearly got, she has that movie star thing that we're always trying to put our finger on where you just can't take your eyes off of what she's doing.

And you can't stop thinking about what she's thinking about, which I love. The Barry Jenkins take on the closeup of Florence Pugh in light of Ari Aster's affinity for close-ups would be a very fun thing to watch play out most definitely shall we do a couple more

about the industry and then wrap up? yeah let's do it GEC System Admin quite a Twitter name asks what is the future of Sundance? very open-ended question

tough question it's still a hugely important place in the world of movies what the expectations are coming out of Sundance is probably what's going to change the most because it's obviously a deeply useful and interesting place to discover new voices. I think the Sundance labs do incredible work in helping to develop people and to giving them exposure to professionals in the space.

No place has done more to kind of diversify who makes movies over the last 30 plus years, 40 years, I guess probably since the mid 80s is really when Sundance has been thriving. So they've got this incredible track record of providing an opportunity for new voices, which I have always admired. The movies that have come out of Sundance that have been big ticket items of late have not always succeeded. And there has been some doubt cast on certain kinds of films because of that. You know, Late Night experienced a little bit of a, not a backlash per se, but just a kind of anxiety cycle that resulted in not as much performance as a movie like that maybe could have done.

We're only a couple of years removed from a movie like The Big Sick, kind of over-performing its expectations. And everybody wants that for independent cinema, but it's not as easy to replicate as it was in 1997. So I think that there will be some anxiety. In the future, we'll have Paul Downs-Calezzo on the show talking about his movie, Britney Runs a Marathon, and talking about what it's like to participate in the experience of being in a bidding war and to show your film for the first time at that place. It's a place that has a psychological hold on independent filmmakers the world over. And I think that there are still both streaming services and studios that are interested in what happens there,

but it's changed a lot. And if you fail coming out of Sundance, I don't know if that means you're in trouble or if you can reboot in a meaningful way. Julius Ona, who I mentioned who directed Loose, is kind of an interesting subject there. So, Julius Ona's first kind of professional film was a little movie called The Cloverfield Paradox, which was previously a Paramount film that was sold to Netflix. It was debuted, I believe, after the 2018 Super Bowl on Netflix and was just absolutely savage. The reviews are terrible. And the movie is not very

good. And it was a part of the Cloverfield universe and produced by Bad Robot. And the movie just didn't work for whatever reason. Ona is a super talented guy who has been kind of making his way slowly through the independent ranks of the film world. I think he went to NYU. I'm not sure. Go Violets. Go Violets.

I don't care about NYU. Sorry. Neither do I. But Ona, I think, basically got a chance to reset his career by taking loose to Sundance. And he took it to Sundance. People liked it. It was purchased by Neon. And now it is out in theaters and it is doing decent business.

And I think that that's a person who has actually used Sundance to an interesting effect. And it still has that potential too. It's not just a place where people have never done it before. It's a place for people who are either returning alumni to the system or who need a reset. So it's still vital. It's still a vital part of movie making in 2020. Okay, here are two questions that kind of go hand in hand. So Tyler asks, and then we'll wrap up there. So Tyler asks, all the time on the pod,

you guys talk about how we're in the time of MCU and how they dominate the movie going experience like Westerns in the 40s and 50s. So if you had to make an educated guess and predict what's coming next in terms of genre, what would it be? It's like maybe the hardest question you could possibly ask about film. Well, I think that The Lion King

is a really important movie. Not the 1994 version of The Lion King, the 2019 version of The Lion King, the 2019 version of The Lion King. Because what that movie does, even more than Avatar, is that shows us that we don't need location. We don't need humans. We don't need anything other than technicians and voice actors to make movies happen. And if you look at the general American economy, there has, over the course of the last 30 years, been a lot of anxiety about the idea of automation and a concept of not needing human workforce to execute product. And there is, in a kind of

Philip K. Dick way, a bit of an anxiety about whether this could happen in movies. Now, obviously, some of the most successful movies in the world right now are animated. The Lion King is a different form of animation. It is a little bit perilous. And it's the first time that the phrase the uncanny valley has made sense to me. Not just because it's a good pun, but because there is something eerie about watching The Lion King to me. And part of that is because it's a story we already know. And so it feels iterative and it feels like a waste of time. And part of it is because it will replace a certain kind of movie that I love. And there's no doubt about it in my mind that it will replace that. There is a significant difference to watching a movie like The Last Jedi and watching

a movie like The Lion King, even though they both feel like they are part of this frustrating Disneyfication of the box office. And we're super worried about where things are going and whether movies will be in theaters and will it all be IP. The Lion King is not exactly a genre the way that a comic book movie is a genre. It is just a style of filmmaking. And I think that that style is going to become more pervasive, especially as the technology gets cheaper and frankly technology like this always gets cheaper over time And so as it gets cheaper and there are more movies that are like this that that look real and seem real Even though they are entirely unreal I think that's the direction we're headed and once we get exhausted of marvel and we will

Because all societies get exhausted of all of the most popular things and they move on to the next iteration i think we're going to have a kind of movie going world in which the uncanny valley is increasingly canny yeah i think there will be probably a lot less of a backlash to that the filmmaking style of the lion king when it's not just the same story told over again um i don't know if people objected to the way that there were no people involved in it quite as much as they objected to the fact that it was just the same story and the 90s version was probably better. I think it was a combination. I think that there was a bit of an awkward, like a weird feeling in experiencing the film,

but there was also exactly what you're saying, which is like an exasperation with watching the same thing again. I think a lot of people experience that weird feeling as a positive feeling, though. Like, you know, if you do the thing where we ask ringer moms, how they felt about it, my mom came out of it and she was like, it's kind of amazing how that looked. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's not that it's not an achievement. And I tried to, I think Amanda and I both tried to kind of underline that when we talked about the movie, when it was first released, it's not a judgment to me of the work that the people have done specifically.

It's a judgment about where the technology of the medium is going. And it's just less rooted. Like you watch it and you watch it and then you think about a movie like Midsommar, which we've talked a lot about on this episode. And it's just like, there's so much more of a sense of place with Midsommar and a sense of feeling and the certain innate quality that just like seeing a real field and real people in that field close up gives you that I just don't think that any of the Lion King footage really ignited for me. Yeah. And honestly, my favorite sensation at the movies, and maybe this is just dawning on me now, but it's to feel unsafe. It's to feel like I'm in a place where I don't know what's going to happen next. And a movie like the Lion King, while it is a technological breakthrough, is just very safe. It's very safe storytelling.

It's a very safe product rollout. I think there's more flexibility in superhero movies, candidly, to be unsafe. The movies that we're going to get in the future from Marvel sound kind of unsafe. You know, I think that there's expectation that they'll perform well, but

they're going to be a little different than what we got before. The Lion King, there's just nothing different. It's the same story. It's a story that we've seen a million times. And so I'm bored of that. Yeah, me as well. Okay, we have a ton of great questions here still that we haven't gotten to,

but we're running out of time here. So final one, and if the last question was kind of a look forward, this is a little bit of a look back. So Avinash Ajarapu asks, how would you define this decade of films? What kind of narrative are the films from this decade talking about? What movies do you think will be considered as classics? This is a really good question. I am probably not qualified to answer

the question. How would I define this decade of films? Desperate and aspirational, I think, but I don't think that's so significantly different from the entire history of films. Desperate and aspirational, I think, but I don't think that's so significantly different from the entire history of film. I think certainly it feels like box office is scared, but I think films are more diverse than they've ever been. I think there are some people that are trying things that you couldn't try before. I think a lot of our anxieties about where things are going are rooted in the loss of what we knew as kids. So whenever we say, why don't they make like, you know, sexy thrillers or studio comedies or rom-coms or all these things that we're always whinging about on this show and elsewhere, it's because that's what we had when

we were kids and we don't have it anymore. But what we do have is, um, the last black man in San Francisco, you know, we didn't have a movie like that 25 years ago, or if we did, it was harder to see than it is now. And I think that there's been a lot of opportunity, but everything has become miniaturized. So the most money that a movie like The Last Black Man in San Francisco can make in the entire market is like $15 million. And so fewer people will see it, but you can see it.

You can go to a movie theater if you live in a major city, if you're fortunate to see it in a major city, or you can wait until it comes to VOD three months later and you can rent it for $4.99 and you can see it. You can go to a movie theater if you live in a major city, if you're fortunate to see it in a major city, or you can wait until it comes to VOD three months later and you can rent it for $4.99 and you can see it. So those movies are getting made. It's not that they're not getting made. It's just that everything is shrinking and there's a huge stratification. And of course, there are 10 Disney movies that will be at the top of the box office and they will be big. And they'll continue to be big until Disney has probably a leadership change and they lose sight of how best to execute against all that. And if Kevin Feige isn't there or Bob Iger

isn't there or people who hold the Quan who have the magic answer to things or move on studios rise and fall and they move in proper directions and then they don't. And then the other thing to consider is I think that from a platform and distribution, point of view this is last gasp stuff because we're on the verge of disney plus we're on the verge of hbo max we're on the verge of prime video leaning in a specific direction we're on the verge of netflix continuing to evolve and as all of those companies do all those things and they start putting all their resources towards those machines as they try to rebuild the cable television business, movies will be the primary victim of that because a lot of movies are going to go straight to those services.

And the way that those movies are served up, and we've seen that from various streaming services, are not always going to be the same level of quality as they are when they're going to theatrical distribution. And so I think we're probably going to look back on this time and whether you're pointing to movies like The Dark Knight or movies like Moonlight, both of whom I think are hugely significant

in the story of the century of movies, we're kind of at the end of something with movies like that. There's not going to be a movie that is actually bigger than Avatar. There's not going to be a movie that's actually bigger than gone with the wind. When you adjust for inflation, the theatrical movie business is shrinking and it's not coming back in the same way. And so what we have is a, is a denouement,

you know, it's a, it's a last gasp in a lot of ways, which is obviously tremendously sad for somebody like me, but also means we're going to get stuff that we didn't think we'd get before i was thinking of um sorry to bother you uh boots riley's movie that came out last year a lot love that movie um such a bizarre energy to that film yeah and i you know i would say it's not my favorite movie in the world but i love that it

was just completely unhinged and i mentioned unsafe before, and there's something so unsafe about all the ideas that he's got in that movie and about the way that he's telling the story visually and the actors he's using. And I do think that we're going to get more stuff

like Sorry to Bother You. So it's not like we're in the throes of a creative death per se. It's just how we get it and how far it goes is going to change. I think that's as good a place

to end it as any, huh? I hope so. Bobby, what else are we going to be doing this week? I think I'm going to have Chris Ryan on later this week to talk about Bruce Springsteen. And that's because we're going to have Gurinder Chadha on the show. She is the director of Blinded by the Light,

which is the heavily Bruce Springsteen-indebted new film coming out at the end of this week. And then after that, Amanda returns and we'll probably start yelling at each other again. How does that sound? Sounds about right. Thank you for not yelling me on this episode, Bobby.

I appreciate it. Bye.