The Big Picture - The 21st Century Sci-Fi Canon, ‘The Creator,’ and ‘No One Will Save You’

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

The 21st Century Sci-Fi Canon, ‘The Creator,’ and ‘No One Will Save You’ Sean is joined by Chris Ryan to discuss all things science fiction. First, they cover Brian Duffield’s new film, ‘No One Will Save You’ (4:33) before turning to Gareth Edwards’s ‘The Creator’ (14:58) starring John David Washington. Later, they come together to form the 21st Century Sci-Fi Canon featuring their ten favorite science fiction films since 2000 (48:47). Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Chris Ryan Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about the albums you love with Dissect, a music analysis podcast hosted by me, Cole Kushner, a lifelong musician. Each season of Dissect dives deep into one album, examining the music, lyrics, and meaning of one song per episode. We've covered albums by Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean, just to name a few, and our brand new season just launched all about Radiohead's 2007 masterpiece, In Rainbows. Listen to Dissect on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, because a great art deserves more than a swipe. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about artificial intelligence and intelligent life from other worlds. We're talking about the new big budget

original science fiction film, The Creator, and the streaming hit No One Will Save You. And we're building a 21st century science fiction canon on the show. Joining me, the living AI himself, the smartest robot on the block, Chris Ryan. CR, what's up? This robot can feel... How many times did you do that in front of the mirror? No, I've been working on it so much. That was a little short of Wayne Jenkins, I think. I'm sorry, yeah. I do like my Hal voice, though. Sure, it was okay.

So that was Hal? No, that was like an old, bad... Like a Corman robot from a sci-fi movie? Okay, so you want to do the show in Hal voice? Start again. Start from the beginning. I'm Sean Fantasy. You should consider one Rewatchables episode as Hal, but don't tell Bill beforehand.

When do you think he would stop it? I think he would stop it immediately. He gets, like, really mad if anything is going away from like his vision of what i am yes so like even that moment i'm big chill where i was like typing for one second he was like what are you doing i did clock you typing as well though i will say that's something you don't usually do i was tweaking wayne jenkins okay no well it worked out that was a wonderful performance um there's a couple of big sci-fi movies out right now. What's your relationship to science fiction, out of curiosity? Have you authored any?

Do you feel that we are living in a contemporary time? I definitely do. So I think I brought this fact away to you, and you didn't know what to do with it. But I just want to let everybody know that we are now currently living closer to when Alien is set than the Battle of Gettysburg. And I came up with that myself. I was just wondering to myself the other day, I forgot when Alien, when does Weyland-Yutani start exploring deep space for mining? I see. I thought that that was a very clever thing that you could write down. But then when I explore it, I have questions. Why Gettysburg and not the Revolutionary War or World War II?

Well, Gettysburg just seems like an important point. In what way? Well, because I grew up in Philadelphia and there's a lot of historic battlefields outside of Philadelphia, Valley Forge, Gettysburg. So those dates kind of knock around my head a lot. I've come from the cradle of American history have you finished your Jefferson Davis tattoo yet?

no? all my tattoo artists keep getting cancelled it's hard to believe it is it is true we are living in many ways

in the future that a lot of the best sci-fi films ever made were trying to foretell. And the movies that we're talking about here today are kind of riffing, I think, in real time on the long history of science fiction. And they're using our expectations of what those movies should be about to either entertain us or to make us think a little bit more. I'm a very big science fiction fan. Yeah, me too. I mean, I think it's just, it gives filmmakers especially and authors

an opportunity to do one of the things that you and I really love, which is for lack of a better term, world building, like fleshing out like a society or a landscape that in a way that is incredibly creative. I think like horror too, it is the kind of literary genre that ports over very well cinematically. That even though there's a power in reading Dracula or Frankenstein and imagining what those experiences would be like in your own mind, seeing them rendered on screen have led to some of the biggest cinematic achievements ever. And the same is true for science fiction in many ways. The core texts can be adapted and can still be great. And we've seen a lot of great movies in that way.

What's interesting about these two movies that we're talking about today is they are original stories. They are adapted really from nothing. And they're clearly inspired heavily. I thought we would talk about No One Will Save You first. Sure.

Because it is certainly a smaller film than The Creator, which is a big budget studio movie. They actually were produced by the same corporation. The Disney Corporation made both of these movies. No One Will Save You is on Hulu right now. It is written and directed

by Brian Duffield, who is a very experienced screenwriter, who had his directorial debut a few years ago, a film released during COVID called Spontaneous, about a rash of

spontaneous combustions, I believe in high school. Oh. Which was a cool movie, really clever idea. He's clearly a person who has great ideas on the page. He sold a lot of scripts in his time um i saw he went like his script pages were going kind of viral on twitter because like he has like a very engaging and exciting like

action description like when he's doing stage direction it's like and then this happens yes really grabs people's particularly in this movie because this is a movie that is almost wordless there is very little dialogue in the movie it starts Caitlin Deaver as a young woman living in a town that has been invaded by aliens and then the film effectively becomes an incredible chase movie a silent chase movie some combination of like invasion of Body Snatchers meets like Buster Keaton in some ways. And it kind of snuck up on people. I'll give you just an honest telling of my experience with the movie.

A link was shared with me during a time when I was quarantining from my family who were sick with COVID. Okay. So I was mainlining movies at that time. I was having a tough day. Took an edible. Huh. Took an edible. Turned this that time. I was having a tough day. Took an edible. Huh. Took an edible. Turned this movie on.

Okay. I didn't really know what it was. There was no hype around it. Is this before or after Chris Russo did his whole bit about taking an edible and watching Colorado? This was well before,

but I stand with Chris Russo in those activities. Did you bet $10,000 on anything? I didn't. I didn't. Certainly not the Buffaloes of Colorado.

Okay. That being said, this was a very weird way to watch a movie that I knew nothing about. Because you didn't. I didn't. And certainly not The Buffaloes of Colorado. Okay. That being said, this was a very weird way to watch a movie that I knew nothing about. Because you didn't know it was going to be wordless. I didn't know

it was going to be wordless. I didn't know it was going to be this kind of visually propulsive and often explosive story. And I didn't know that it was going to be

both like a conventional and I think also kind of genre breaking in some ways. Can I ask you a really candid question? Of course. Did you tweet, this is the best movie of the weekend while you were high on it? No, no.

I saw it a long time ago. Oh, okay. But that being said, I've never seen this movie sober. Okay. I did see it sober in a hotel room in Tulsa over the weekend. And I thought it was good. I thought it was definitely good. I also watched it on a laptop, which maybe didn't completely envelop me. But I thought it was really cool. I also watched it on a laptop, which maybe didn't completely envelop me.

But I thought it was really cool. It was very much like an Amblin version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There's a lot of sweet, vintage, nostalgic quality to the Caitlin Dever character's house where she's essentially a dressmaker and everything in her house is landlines and dollhouses.

She's living in this frozen diorama of a house. dressmaker and everything in her house is like landlines and like doll houses. And she's kind of living in this sort of frozen diorama of a house. And throughout the film, you're kind of like wondering why she seems so alienated from the community that she lives in. And then there's like good science fiction often functions as metaphor. And there's like a really good like, you know, so how do we like forgive one another and how do we come together kind of thing? Yeah, it's a modest movie and modestly made. There is some really good CGI and there is some, I think, interesting filmmaking going on here. But it is a smaller movie.

I think it's pretty cool that it seems to be catching on a bit. That people seem to be, at least amongst the people that I follow, there was some interest in it over the weekend because no movie stars, no big push behind it. I think it was like made public to the world like a month ago. It doesn't. So there's the two movies that reminded me of in somewhat of it's like execution

and then also in its release were Prey, which was the Predator spinoff that came out, I think last year. And sequel was just greenlit for that film. Oh, cool. And Monsters, which is Gareth Edwards' first film that came out a long time ago and was kind of a cult hit and wound up becoming a little bit of a streaming sensation. Right.

Just because Prey, obviously, almost silent chase film, and Monsters was, how inventive can I get with limited resources? I think the, the Brian Uffield like seems to have like almost like this encyclopedic knowledge of tropes that he can twist and exploit at various points where Gareth Edwards is almost more of like a visual master of the frame, but maybe has like something missing a little bit. Sometimes the storytelling, but we're going to get into that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally agree. I think those are really

good calls. And to me, it shows kind of the promise of what streaming original movies can be. Yeah. They don't, Prey is a similar example, although that is technically IP, but you know, this is a movie clearly with not a big budget, but a lot of invention and someone who's given some flexibility to try something. And, you know, I did see some people on the internet calling for like, why is a movie like this not in movie theaters? No one will save you. I think I understand why. I mean, it's actually, even though it is an alien invasion movie,

it's a hard sell to general audiences. But in this environment where you're like, I can just turn my TV on and watch this for free. It's way better than, I would say, 90% of what you get dealt in the streaming movie universe. And do you think that there's something to be said for being able to call it the number better than, I would say, 90% of what you get dealt in the streaming movie universe. And do you think that there's something to be said for being able to call it the number one movie, like the number one thing on Hulu right now versus something that made $5 million in its opening weekend? I don't know. That's a great question.

Like, is it a bigger feather in the cap to say, like, this is the movie that took the internet by storm that weekend versus, like, also was in theaters with Sound of Freedom and Barbie, you know? Yeah, I think we're talking about a perception issue, right? And that perception is probably better. I mean, part of the issue is that the last two weeks have been extremely soft at the U.S. box office. And so I think a lot of people were like, I'm not going to the movie theaters this weekend. Or if I am, I'm going to see Bottoms or I'm seeing Oppenheimer again or something that has been around for a while.

And so a movie like this feels like a reasonable alternative. I think the other thing too is just that science fiction has this great tradition of low budget movies that get surprisingly strong distribution. You know, like Star Wars didn't start out as like a world defeating behemoth. You know, it started out as a small start out as, like, a world-defeating behemoth. Sure.

You know, it started out as a small idea from a weird art film student who made THX. So, I think that there is, like, room for this kind of a movie for the audience's sake.

I really hope that there are more of it. I mean, Brian Duffield is somebody who's been working in the studio system for a long time, so I would imagine he now gets to make

a bigger movie because this movie seems to be doing well. Yeah. Whether a movie being number one on Hulu versus Netflix, I think there's some interesting things to explore there because Hulu doesn't have a ton of movies in general that they're offering up.

No, but I noted with interest over the last couple of days, I think Denis Villeneuve was talking about basically large format is the future of movie theaters. That there has to be this like value add for the theatrical experience where imax or 70 millimeter and and these sort of like almost event films but not event films like it's all the avengers are getting together it's event like the fucking theater you need to see this on this screen because otherwise like you and you can't have that experience at home so like you have to basically like incentivize people to come to the theater with the sort of technological leaps that

are being made by the movie industry and lost in that will be probably genre movies like this that are like fine to watch on a computer or a tv at home but like probably would be a little even more fun to watch on a big screen in the dark like, but like probably would be a little even more fun to watch on a big screen in the dark. Like when you're not kind of like, Oh, I'll get up and check Twitter for a second. You know? No question. And my like celebration of no one will save you on a streaming platform is really more just an acceptance of a certain kind of reality more so than this, you know, like overstating its greatness. The, the, I saw the villain of comments as well like i'm pretty

i'm pretty mixed on that point of view i i don't you know i think that if you put broadcast news out like it should be in a movie theater and that like experiencing a movie like that with a crowd it's powerful and i do think he's right that an oppenheimer or dune style spectacle deserves to always be in a movie theater. And it's fair to say that the business should orient more around those things and that the business should take more chances on those kinds of movies and filmmakers. I'm fully on board with that idea. But for someone with as much influence and artistry as he has to almost like cordon off 88% of the other kinds of movies that are in the world as being like likely to participate in the theatrical experience.

I know he's not saying that that's the way it should be. He's saying this is the, like, this is the path forward for us. It's like if we're going to save movie theaters, we have to give movie theaters like a justification for existence now, other than this is where all the movies are. Cause that's not the case anymore.

Yeah. I, gosh, I'm really torn on that. Cause like I noted with interest, the conversation you and Andy had on The Watch this week where you talked about your experience going to see Raising Arizona in Oklahoma

and all the rep theater stuff that we've been doing, Amanda and I, and my sense that there's just something happening in the city of Los Angeles with seeing old films. BeyondFest is happening in LA right now. Almost every screening at BeyondFest, whether it be old films or new films, is selling out. I mean, Michael Mann today is doing a screening of Manhunter. Last night, Jim Cameron sat for a conversation

after a screening of The Restored The Abyss. My friend Jeremy went to that, and he posted footage from it, and it was like, he got a standing ovation. Pandemonium for this stuff, yeah. Now, obviously, we live in a company town and a real movie of the cinephilic town in many ways, but I think

that there is a broader appreciation of movies that still remains untapped and I think just saying we can only do Barbenheimer as a way forward is not right

and I don't know how to market a quiet drama to young people I'm not saying I have the answer to that I do think that's something that a lot of studios

are challenged by especially this comes up every year when we get closer to Oscar season right because especially as increasingly, these movies are basically going to go on Netflix

or Apple in two weeks anyway. Yes. I saw Maestro this week, Bradley Cooper's new movie, which I really enjoyed and I look forward to talking about, but I note clearly that that is a Netflix movie and I don't know if there's a world in which that movie would be made by a studio

or if it was, it would be Focus or a smaller subsidiary of a bigger studio. Whereas a movie like Maestro 30 years ago is the Oscar ticket movie of the year for Universal or Warner Brothers or whatever. And so that particular thing has evolved quite a bit. The creator is interesting in the context of this conversation. This is a new movie from Gareth Edwards, who listeners may know from Monsters, as you pointed out, but probably more likely from the first American Godzilla remake in the current iteration

of Godzilla Stories, which is from 2014. And even more so than that, probably Rogue One, which he directed, sort of. There's a little bit of a shadow confusion mystery about how much Tony Gilroy contributed or made on that film and how much Gareth Edwards did. Edwards is a great visual stylist, like a truly like breathtaking mind for big ticket movie making, often in the science fiction realm.

I really like his Godzilla quite a bit. I think visually it's amazing. I think it's as good as an American can do. It's got a couple of like a couple of set pieces that are like truly, truly special as does the creator. The creator is an attempt

I think you pointed this out to me after we finished it to almost like right the wrongs of Rogue One or kind of like finish his ability to tell that story. What did you mean when you said that?

Yeah, I mean you can make the argument that there are only so many stories to tell but story. What did you mean when you said that? Yeah, I mean, you can make the argument that there are only so many stories to tell, but I felt like there were elements of the creator that were very much like, here's the story I want to do with Rogue One. Here's what matters to me.

And I'm now going to do it without Tony Gilroy getting in there and writing cool speeches about class systems, you know, by where Riz Ahmed can can can talk you know this is much more a combination of like lone wolf and cub with you know massive sci-fi world building but it's essentially the same thing as rogue one ragtag outsider ex-soldier ex-spy who is charged with protecting somebody on a basically suicide mission and against this sort of imperialistic force that's pushing them down.

And there's actually a lot of other beats within the creator, I don't want to get too much into spoiling, right this second, that are very, very similar to what Rogue One kind of was going towards. Rogue One is now reputationally risen to class A Star Wars movie I you know tonally like Rogue One is now like reputationally risen to like class A

Star Wars movie because I think of the hardships that Star Wars has experienced over the last few years and as inevitably happens like people

just are like yeah Rogue One is actually the best you know and I tend to agree in a lot of ways but it was

really interesting to see Gareth Edwards like be like it's this one. This is my movie. This is the story I've been working on for years. He wrote it with Chris Weitz.

He's an experienced screenwriter. But you have to basically take what you see on this movie as the sole creation of this guy. And curiously distributed by the same corporation that distributed the Star Wars movie that was effectively taken away from him. Yeah. Which is a, I mean, there are only so many big studios to finance movies like this.

So I guess there's some inevitability around that. But I do find that a fascinating wrinkle of this movie coming to be. It's been seven years since Rogue One, since he made a movie. I think his image-making ability is not in question. I think his taste as a storyteller has always been a little bit in question,

where even, you know, Godzilla is Godzilla. The first 20 minutes of that Godzilla movie, I think, is amazing in an attempt to kind of, like, recontextualize what that story should be for a modern audience. And then the movie is just kind of dull, except when it's amazing. And I kind of feel like the creator is very similar.

Well, the funny thing about what happened with Rogue One is that Rogue One should have been the greatest movie of all time because you essentially match someone like Edwards' vision and his ability to see deep into frames. I've been trying to articulate to myself what it is that he does aside from just has a really good sense of like physical space within it but like i noticed over and over again in the creator that something in the back right part of the frame was as deeply thought through as something that was right in the foreground that i was supposed

to be focusing on it can be something as simple as like characters walking down a balcony or like kind of an elevated walkway and the wall has scuffed up um chinese uh letters like up on on the wall that like are just so beautifully like rendered and thought through like what would this wall look like after 20 years of factory work you know being done there and the same thing goes for all the battle sequences that happen in this movie where there are things happening on the left and the right part of the frame that are just so insane. The problem is, is that when you get into the character, like that kind of level of detail and thought seems to have been abandoned or that he's comfortable with just using kind of cliched tropes as his like avatars for the story. Tony Gilroy is the person who comes in and says, I'm going to take that lieutenant and make him into this

three-dimensional character. I'm going to take this soldier and make him into this incredible poet of struggle. That's why Rogue One should have been perfect. It was probably actually the order of operations.

It wasn't like Tony Gilroy wrote a script, gave it to Gareth Edwards, and he shot it. It was like Tony came in to fix the movie of operations. It wasn't like Tony Gilroy wrote a script, gave it to Gareth Edwards and he shot it. It was like Tony came in to kind of fix the movie. Exactly.

I think it's fair to say that you and I are both pretty mixed on this movie and that there are some things to recommend and some things that really don't work.

I think we will explore them in some detail. For anybody who is not familiar with the creator, I'll give you a brief synopsis of the movie. So it's set in a future impacted by a war

between the human race and artificial intelligence, which is the Alcaron villain or issue of conflict in many of our contemporary movies right now. The creator follows, as you said, a lieutenant, an ex-Special Forces agent, who's recruited to hunt down and kill the titular character, who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war by destroying mankind itself. John David Washington is the star. He is effectively on

a lone wolf and cub trail with a young girl AI. And they form a kind of father-daughter bond relationship over the course of trying to elude the forces that John David Washington's character started out working for in an effort to kind of better understand the conflict at hand. Yeah. And what happened to people he was very close to who he was separated from for circumstances that are made clear in the movie.

Let's talk about the good stuff first. Yeah, sure. Okay. The first thing is, I knew this before I even saw the movie, but I'm going to make this point. This is an original story not relegated to streaming

with a big budget from an artist who clearly had control over telling the story, who has an amazing eye. And that in and of itself is more rare than you might think. I salute you. Thank you. No, I salute him. Yeah. He did it.

He got this movie made. He has legitimate vision. There are things in this science fiction movie that I've never seen in another science fiction movie. That's not easy to do in 2023. And it requires marshalling the forces of not just budget, but visual artists and cinematographers and making actors fit into those spaces and not having those things be ridiculous. This movie never looks fake. It always looks like it's happening in a real world. Yeah. It's not just the scrawling on the wall that you're talking about, but there are robots in this movie that look like they are operating AI that would be in our universe. He also does stuff with the robot characters

that I'm sure has been done in some sci-fi show or some sci-fi movie that I maybe have missed. But he has them behave or mimic human behavior in a way that I'd never noticed before. There is a moment where a group of like humans and robots are going to a secret base. And the robot is essentially like has his arm hanging off the boat. Like he's Timothy bottoms and apocalypse now.

And like, is like lounging in the sun as a like mercenary. Yeah. And I was just like, that is fucking cool, man. I have never seen that before. It's just a small moment where you're just like, oh, this is the wild bunch on this boat. That's William Holden.

And I just thought that was, there are so many moments like that in this movie where even if you find yourself drifting off because you're like, let me guess, this kid is the secret to saving the world. You then are like, oh, you're going to do that? Like there's this little thing happening? I think that's totally right.

And it tracks with the science of the movie, which is the idea is that the AI is closely modeled on human behavior. And that's part of the reason why it, why, to the human's perspective in the movie, things have gotten out of hand, is because even though they don't necessarily look exactly like humans because of the technology that is built into their hardware, they act just like humans.

And we've seen versions of that in movies like Blade Runner, where Rutger Hauer just is a human being acting like a robot. But this is a movie where someone looks like a robot, but is acting like a human. It's like a C-3PO type robot, but is behaving like it's an apocalypse now. It's pretty cool. It's pretty fascinating. The way that this movie looks is fascinating. The way it was made is fascinating. We're in this era of the $300, $350 million blockbuster movie. Indiana Jones, the most recent Indiana Jones film, for example, cost $300 million.

Many of the Marvel movies cost well over $200 million. They're defined by their CGI in many ways, for better or for worse. This movie, the budget was $86 million. It has all of this both practical and computer-generated image work. Greg Fraser, who was one of the great working cinematographers most recently shot The Batman, was the kind of pre-production consultant

on this movie, working in conjunction with Oren Soffer, I believe his name is. And Oren is a fairly inexperienced feature film DP, but this is kind of an interesting thing where obviously Gareth Edwards really works closely on this kind of thing. You put these three people together

to kind of collaborate, and they make something really interesting and unusual. One, they make the choice to shoot the majority of this film in Asia, in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Nepal, and those locations

are not the kind of locations that you see in these kinds of movies. So that's one of the reasons why I probably reminded you of Apocalypse Now is because it's meant to evoke Apocalypse Now.

I mean, it's essentially like the second half of this movie is essentially a Vietnam War movie. Yes. Now there, I have seen some thoughtful criticism about what this means, about what the AI

is supposed to represent in this story, which we can get into as we talk about what, maybe what is kind of a failure of the story. But from a visual perspective, seeing those worlds and seeing the struggle set inside of them with these characters and the robots, I thought was genuinely kind of inventive. Like it was a new twist on something I'd not seen before. Yeah. There's also something that he did just if we're talking about the visual language of the movie and and this is something that he's he's pretty amazing at is being able to at once in a scene make you feel like you were seeing the biggest thing you've ever seen in your life like a huge military vehicle

coming over a mountain and going you know going over villages and you're just like holy shit and then have it feel handheld and feel like it's actually happening rather than being staged or being rendered. And the verite parts of it, the sort of shaky parts of it, not in a Catherine Bigelow way, which is not a knock-on,

but it's very, very, very calculated and considered of how it makes you feel like this is a real thing that's happening with a bunch of stuff that can't happen. Robots running around, giants, small town-sized vehicles moving over the landscape, but then also feels like you're right behind somebody's shoulder. He did that with Rogue One. He has such an amazing idea of perspective and scope. You remember in Rogue One when they're running through the fields

and the giant Imperial Adats are shooting down at them. It's so fucking cool, but you never leave how huge those must look to people running underneath of them. And he's just really, really good at that stuff.

Yeah, even more so in this movie, they just don't look fake. They don't look like they've been designed by a computer. They look like they are a living computer machine. And that's kind of what's fascinating about it. There's a bunch of stuff I clocked while I was watching it. Right when we walked out of the movie, I was like, I've never seen a running suicide bomber robot before.

That's something that you see in this movie you know i've never seen this idea of a microchip that captures your consciousness in the final moments of your life that can be then implanted into another robot and they can communicate with somebody who has died they essentially resurrect the previous yeah that's like and and you're right maybe in some science fiction work there is a version of that. Obviously, Edwards is very, you know, literate when it comes to this stuff. Yeah, I mean,

it has like an Agent Smith quality to it, but I haven't seen it done like this. So there's a series of these individual choices that when you're watching the movie,

the score, for example, like I thought this was a great story that kind of leads into some of the things that don't work as well for me in this movie. But originally, Edwards wanted an AI-generated score in the style of Hans Zimmer.

And he told Hans Zimmer about that. I think effectively to ask his opinion, you know, get his blessing, exactly. And they did do something. An AI company did develop a Hans-esque score which Hans said was a 7 out of 10 and he found it amusing but said,

I'm going to do the score here. We're not going to do an AI Hans Zimmer and you know, I think he speaks for many people in the world

who don't want to be replaced creatively by machines and of course, that being a text of the movie, there's something really funny about that

but we do get a classic Hans Zimmer score. You know, like when there are epic vistas, we get that. But we do get a classic Hans Zimmer score. You know, like when there are epic vistas, we get that thrum that you get from a lot of his movies.

And then like, this is both good and bad. Like, the tone and themes of the movie and the subject matter of the movie, which I think will lead into a little bit of a

spoiler territory for us. But I think that the idea of a society violently raging against technology that it created to make life easier and more convenient is very resonant. Sure. We are in the midst of a post-Alexa universe where we're sort of like, where is all of this going?

We've just seen strikes happening in the creative communities for fear of some of these things. And then also, this is a movie about examining the military industrial complex and the way that it uses its forces to justify its size and to justify its power, which is a tried and true story in a lot of science fiction

and, you know, thinking of like Starship Troopers, for example, is like an example of a movie that is very focused on this idea of kind of parodying

this idea in a way. This is more of a po-faced reading of that concept. Yeah. But it's a fair concept to explore in a movie like this. Yeah, so it starts out, can we be a little bit explicit

in how we discuss the film spoiler-wise? Yeah, let's just put a little tenting around this. If you don't want this part of the movie spoiled for you, I would say that this actually, knowing all of this, will not take away from your enjoyment of the movie if you are going to enjoy it in the first place. But there are some critical storytelling choices that are made, especially in the final act, that will color our conversation about it.

So the thing that I thought was challenging about this was the insistence on merging technological advances with near mythological storytelling so the need for there to be like a father and mother of ai and that there was this sort of almost godlike figure nimrata who's referenced throughout the film that invented ai and protects ai and that ai protects this father's identity and that that's sort of the mission of the John David Washington character in the beginning of the film is to like go undercover to find this guy to, to, to like get to the bottom of it because AI has directed a nuclear attack on Los Angeles that has started this world war between the America and new Asia, which they don't really get too deep into how that came about, but it

is the case. I think that his ideas about AI are obviously really prescient. He also has the courage to make a pretty provocative twist on that that we can get into, but the stuff that didn't work for me was the idea that it was going

back to this mother-father complex and that parentage is the only way we can was going back to this mother father complex and like that parentage is the only way we can kind of relate to any of this stuff interesting yeah yeah i mean i think i hadn't really considered it that deeply my bigger concern was more just that there's something really schematic about strong man carries baby around sure and we're just we're deep into mandalorian season three here and so that shape of that story

feels really rote at this point. I mean, Last of Us is doing that. We have a lot of stuff going on that is essentially we have to take care

of this child to preserve the world. Yes. And it allows you to kind of like wish away a lot of the bigger emotional concerns

of movies like this because there's no deeper bond between. Let me tell you as a father of a two year old. It's fucking real dude. Like I get it. I know. I believe it. You did turn to me and you were like this is me. I mean it is.

That is true. It is a real thing but it's also a cheat. It's a cheap cheap kind of structure for a movie like this. And I know why. It's an attempt to insert an emotionality into a story that could be very cold. And it needs a story like that to draw in a general audience. We're not talking to hard sci-fi fans. Hard sci-fi fans are going to go see this movie,

whether it's good or not. But in order to bring in young kids, parents, people who are maybe not as interested in these kinds of worlds you build in these kinds of story structures but this one's just we've seen it up a thousand times yeah and the other thing that is fascinating about the movie and this is a pure spoiler so if you don't want to know don't listen yeah this movie comes out as pro-ai yeah like a deeply pro-machine movie. Yes. And this like freedom that it is questing for,

it effectively achieves by the end of the movie. And we're meant to be kind of like awed and thrilled by that and happy about it, I think, from the filmmaker's perspective. And the timing just seems really weird and wrong.

And I don't, I'm not saying necessarily that AI won't be an incredible benefit to our lives and that AI will not eventually develop human characteristics that require empathy in our experience in the world. That's possible. This is, I love this for you. This is not the time.

Like I, I really don't, like we were, the movie came out right at the end of a Hollywood work stoppage that is informed in large part by fear of ai taking over creative people's lives so for the this movie distributed by the disney corporation to be like the real enemy are american people yeah yeah it's pretty weird well this kind of also goes to a uh the challenges that this movie has with like the the peanut butter and jelly of storytelling, which is like this nuclear Holocaust that takes place. That is explained with one line in the movie that no one seems to blink at. Like where they're just like, that was,

that was a mistake. That was a coding error. A human error. Yes. Of coding in the AI that caused this, this massive attack on Los Angeles that then prompts a global war that is like savagely taking lots of lives. I understand like there's obviously commentary

on the fog of war going on in there, but the lengths to which this film goes to have you empathize with AI so far as to make most of the human robot synthetic people Vietnamese peasants for the most part like and then also like just broadly Asian peasants is very interesting you know and then the Americans are sort of the avatar of the American stance on this whole thing is a platinum blonde Allison Janney

who is bloodthirsty to get revenge for her children being killed in this war. But there's something confusing about that message because on the one hand, I've already seen a number

of Asian American critics writing about this movie saying like, this is just wildly othering and Orientalist nonsense. And I think that they're right about that in many ways. I think it's plausible that this had not even occurred to Gareth Edwards. I think it's plausible that he had not even really considered that by doing this,

he is actually repeating the sins that he's trying to kind of rise above. Yeah. Secondarily, when you came out of the movie, you were like, is this movie about like China and America's relationship to China, which I think is also

kind of an interesting reading of the movie and the idea of Disney's relationship to China and the way that like what New Asia could more meaningfully represent.

I don't think that Disney was like, we need to make New Asia a part of the story, but it's more like in the broad sense, the kind of confusion

about our relationship to other cultures and what they represent and like basically who lives there and who occupies their space and what do we get from them and what do they get from us? And whether or not we're in like a Cold War that could be a hot war at some point, all of this stuff is in the stew of the movie. It's not really meaningfully explored. Uh-uh. fully explored. And so what you get is this like kind of drab neither pro nor con rendition of an epic tale.

And so like that that's really just bad writing. I mean it's really ultimately what it comes down to is the script for this movie is not good. And a movie that

looks this good deserves deeper thinking in its story. I mean it's also indicative maybe it could just be the two of us. It could be a larger kind of

interest in detail and in motivational explanation rather than just scope and broad stroke storytelling. I think we've probably now, there was a time where I felt like sci-fi movies were like little treats or big treats,

but they were not the common language of studio blockbusters. A lot of the sci-fi stuff that we grew up on, whether it's Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, whatever, has now been fully subsumed so that it is like the stakes of those movies, the tropes of those movies, a lot of the language of those movies are now like what you find in Marvel movies and what you find in monster movies and what you find in theologically searching indie films.

Like, you know, everything everywhere all at once. Like all this stuff that has sort of assimilated the language and the ideas of sci-fi and then shot it through

because it feels like the only way to get a movie made is to have the fate of the world in the balance, right? And you and I are like, I would like a little bit more of an explanation of the political maneuverings that led to this or the fallout from this and why was there no 9-11 commission to investigate the Los Angeles bombing? But I think I've seen so much sci-fi now. And this is why like I liked Androider so much is like that's what I'm interested in now.

Right. Show me something new. Yeah. And sometimes that new thing can be what is under the surface of the world that we're exploring. I think that at times when this movie is most successful when it's doing that, when it's giving us specificity,

when it's giving us grand scale, like I could feel the, like an overwhelming amount of ADR anytime Ralph Innocent, who plays a general in this movie, is on screen. He's explaining the entire United States position on things and why they need to do something. And if they don't in this amount of time, something bad will happen. And it's just a pure studio note of someone looking at the movie and being like, this doesn't make sense. You have to help us make sense of the story that you're trying to tell. And that also is a failure of the script if they've cut a movie together and then they're like, you need to have a guy be like ADR what's

going on. Now, on the other hand, if we were like, this is a tone poem, it's an $86 million tone poem about the awfulness of technology and war and how we use our machines to kill each other. That would be cool. I'm open-minded about that, but that isn't ultimately what's saleable when you're a filmmaker. And so again, like it feels like once again, Gareth Edwards has this great grand vision. And then when it comes down to making it,

there's just a lot of holes. And so I'm really torn because I want filmmakers like him to make more movies and to get more shots like this. And I don't think you can just say Tony Gilroy I need you on line 2 every time you make a movie

but I also I think a movie like this is a little dangerous honestly like I I don't want to overstate it

but it feels like kind of sappy and glib at the same time about something that I think actually really matters

in the world right now so I'm very torn on the movie in general I feel like he was also trying to do and glib at the same time about something that I think actually really matters in the world right now. So, I'm very torn on the movie in general. I feel like he was also trying to do, his most successful movie to me is still

Monsters. Not to be like, I liked his early stuff. It's just that it's about two people. Yeah. And it's not trying to build out like a whole world

around them. It's just like, this is their, their adventure through Mexico that has been essentially given over to an alien invasion

and there's obviously like political and socio-political like things you could extract from that subtext yes but for the most part

it's just about this couple trying to make it on a road trip every time I think he tries to like be like nuclear disarmament and environmental violence in godzilla or you know like west versus east relations and also ai and

also american militarism in this film it gets a little bit more more convoluted and also like kind of like dude if you spend as much time worrying about this as you did about like what something in 90 yards away from your camera looked like it might be like a much much better movie and if you match this guy's chops with like a real really tight story you'd have like something really special i mean there's things that happen in this that it kind of reminds me of when i saw the Halo jump in Godzilla. You'll be watching, or I was watching, Creator and Sean does

that I'm a little bit of a twitchy seat guy. I need to move a bunch because my back just gets really tight. You were good during the Creator. You performed well. But I was starting to get a little bit, there's a whole passage that's essentially Blade Runner and you're just like, this is cool, but I feel like I've seen this rendered a lot uh this kind of like what if in the future billboards

were just really invasive maybe you'll fall in love with a robot yeah and it gets to a battle scene and i actually felt like my body come alive like you it's kind of funny to think about like your physical state during a movie and what, what you're seeing on screen does to you. And sometimes it can make you really tense. Like an Oppenheimer. I remember like, I realized I was like gripping my own arm during Oppenheimer. And in this, I realized that like, I was probably bored, like dutifully watching and paying attention. But like in a, in a way, when you see something that you feel like you've basically never seen before on a screen, when you see something that you feel like you've

basically never seen before on a screen, your soul leaves your body. You're just like, I'm now like, I'm not thinking about whether this seat's comfortable or, you know, I'm going to get back in time to see the second half. I'm like in this movie, totally at the mercy of this director. This is incredible. And that happened during that battle scene in this film. I had a couple of those as well. I mean, you're talking about the hair standing up on the back of your neck kind of moments, and he's capable of doing that. So when you encounter a filmmaker who can do that, you're like, okay, figure out the other stuff. Because you have something that like 14 people in the world can do. And that like, if you have it, you got to harness it. You

got to protect it. You need a coach. Maybe Brian Duffield should write Gareth Edwards' next movie. That was sort of what was occurring to me as I was thinking about this episode is you really need somebody to elevate the filmmaker's ideas. And usually seasoned screenwriters can do that. The other thing, and I'll just say, I'm really rooting for John David Washington.

I do not think he's well-suited to this kind of performance style. It's tough because those are the movies he seems to be doing. What do you mean performance style? Deeply earnest. He is not an earnest performer. The best moments are when he's like taking the piss a little bit.

Yeah, when he's cracking jokes or is a tough action star. He can do both of those things. He can do tough action star very credibly. He's really fit. He looks good on screen. he can carry a movie much worse actors than him have carried action franchises for many years he's also like a pretty jocular broey athlete like that's his persona in real life he was the star of ballers for christ's sake like he's got a tone that he can do in that way a movie like this does not serve him well, where he has to be reckoning with loss

and the concept of fatherhood and this kind of agony over the world falling apart. His line readings are just not strong. And I really like him. I'm rooting for him because I like watching him. I loved watching him in Tenet. I loved watching him in Black Klansman. Those two movies had a really wry sense of humor. Yes and he also had somebody to play off of in both of those totally

he had Adam Driver and Robert Pattinson yes and in this movie he has a couple of fun interactions but you know like it's always going to be a challenge when like when they made Ewan McGregor do the entire Obi--wan series with this kid like if the kid's not henry thomas it's going to be a little bit of a tough hang it's true i actually thought that the little girl who played alfie and i want to say her name so i don't get it wrong um her name is madeline yuna voyla voyless did a good job like that's a bizarre part to be like the world solving six year old with a hole in her head because she's a robot.

Like there's no blueprint for how to be good at that performance. Like it's not Paper Moon, but it's really trying to be Paper Moon. But it's not, they needed to have a little bit of a like, you know, last action hero kind of energy with each other

and not a like, you are the missing piece of my soul. Yeah. Relationship for the movie to just feel more fun. Yeah. So I don't know. It's a disappointing, amazing movie. You know what I mean?

Like that's, I feel like he makes those over and over again. Sure. Where I'm like, God damn it. That was so cool and bad. If you like this kind of movie, like if you like just sci-fi battle movies, like, you're going to think

this is pretty sick. Yes. If you were hoping for something that would transcend that, because ordinarily, like,

that kind of stuff is not really your bag. Like, I don't think Amanda would like this movie that much. I don't think so either. I mean,

I'm not sure what that means specifically. I don't want to speak for her, but like, yeah, I mean, like,

if I had to guess, I think she would be like, I got it. Lone Wolf and Cub. And she's the biggest Lone Wolf and Cub fan out there. Absolutely. She's scholarly about the subject.

Let's talk about science fiction in this century. Yeah. Because you've made this extraordinary point about the Battle of Gettysburg. I've made it several times and I just don't think it really is landing for you. Do you have the Gettysburg Address committed to memory? No, I was going to ask you.

It's four score and seven years ago, right? Four score, yes. Yeah. And then it kind of goes from there. Yeah. I don't have it written like totally nailed though. Okay.

I can do it as Wayne Jenkins if it would make you happy. Let's stop down. We'll pull up the Gettysburg Address. You'll read it in full. God damn, Abe! I feel like... I know a fair amount

about Gettysburg, though. Go ahead, cook. No, I'm just saying I know about the Joshua Chamberlain move off the hill. You know, the pincer kind of action he pulled. And it basically saved the country.

Sounds like you're ready to make a film about this. Have you seen the film Gettysburg? I have. It was one of my parents' favorite movies. Isn't it like four hours long?

Yes. Okay. That's one of their favorite movies. Yes. Yeah. Can we explore that for a moment?

I think that they were, they got in their late middle age super into visiting historical sites. Oh, I did know this. So my dad wrote an unpublished mystery novel set during the Civil War

and spent much of his 50s traveling to Civil War battlefields and investigating Civil War archives and was just obsessed with it. Took pictures. So Civil War was big in my house. Is it big for you uh yes but i think i've become like interested in other roman empires you know since then do you know what i mean like

it's not like i'm not walking around it's also like kind of a it it's weird to be super into it because like i think that it's hard to be into the Civil War and not drift into Shelby Foot territory where you just like you have to tip your cap to the rebs.

That's right. You know? And I think at this point like we've done enough cap tipping like we got the statues up that came down

like everybody knows about the military inventiveness of them. You're saying you're all set on the Confederacy. We don't need to talk about that anymore. Shout out to everybody. Yeah, I think we're good.

Okay. Is it notable that emerging from Tulsa, this is your point of view? No, it has nothing to do with that. Also, I don't think Tulsa was like, I mean, it wasn't a contested area during that time. I've really got you on your back foot now. I can see. You know that vibe that guys give where it's just like never has there been a fighting man

greater than Jeb Stewart. And he's like, Jeb Stewart was a fucking diabolical bad hombre. We don't have to give him

that much props, right? This is what everyone's missing on JMO. This is what we do every day. Every day we supply you with the... Jeb, my opinion.

Yeah. Science fiction is important. Or at least it used to be. I'm not so sure it is anymore. I'm not up on a lot of contemporary written science fiction. And I'm not going to pretend like I am. I did read quite a bit of it when I was in high school. And I got really obsessed by it.

Because when we were kids, I think a lot of portals to science fiction in our popular culture. Star Wars and Star Trek being kind of like the alpha and the omega, really. And the kind of definitional, I think, for a lot of young boys and young girls, too, but a lot of young boys who were sort of like, I'm a Trekkie or I'm a Star Wars kid. You and I were Star Wars kids, but that could lead to reading, you know. A lot of Asimov. Asimov or Robert Heinlein or, you know, a lot of the great

kind of mid-century American and English authors. Essentially, what happened to Zach Baron? Yeah, well, but Zach went down the fantasy rabbit hole, which I narrowly avoided

as a reader, but I didn't avoid the sci-fi rabbit hole. But like my, one of my pet interests is 70s science fiction movies. Like I think that that is like one of the most

fascinating outgrowths of the explosion of independence amongst filmmakers in the studio system because those guys

made incredibly weird transgressive movies with big budgets and movie stars. So like throw out a couple of names and titles. I mean the one I always point to

is Demon's Sea which is a movie that I think is very much it could be in conversation with a movie like The Creator which is a movie about with big budgets and movie stars. So like throw out a couple of names. I mean, the one I always point to is Demon Sea, which is a movie that I think is very much, it could be in conversation with a movie like The Creator, which is a movie about a scientist who develops an artificial intelligence. And that artificial intelligence takes over that scientist's home. And the only person who lives in that home

is his sort of like estranged wife, who's played by Julie Christie. And that artificial intelligence starts to render itself physically into the world and its number one goal is to impregnate a human and create the ultimate forging of

kind of flesh and this AI technology and power. But it's basically like, kind of like a like a rape thriller, but with technology in it. I mean, it's a very fucked up movie. It's directed by

Donald Camel, who made some very complicated movies. The White of the Eye is a movie that he made. He made Wild Side, which was just discussed at length on

Karina Longworth's podcast. A very complicated guy who did some very terrible things. But it's an example of when there was a time in Hollywood where you'd be like,

Donald Camel, absolutely. You should team up with Julie Christie, one of the great living actresses, and tell this fucked up story. And we do not get that anymore. Or at least we do not get it in the scale of a movie like The Creator. It is funny that you're really concerned about the message of The Creator, but you're like, Demon Seed. Well, you know what it is?

Demon Seed is really trashy and it knows it. Yeah. And it's not trying to hide it. It's a programmer, you know? It's a movie that plays second on a bill that is top-lined by like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something in that ilk. Something a little bit more kind of credible and prestigious

that is still a genre movie. The Creator is like the big release of the major corporation this month. Yeah. And there is something different about that in many ways. I do feel like science fiction, because of the budget necessary now for these kinds of movies, and the fact that a movie like Demons He Doesn't make sense for the most part, for the bottom line theatrical business, you kind of have to do something grand. It wasn't that hard for me to come up with a really long list of sci-fi movies from this century.

We were pinging them back and forth. Yeah. I mean, I hit a hundred in like an hour. Yeah. And you can be pretty elastic with like, what's sci-fi? You know, like there are some things, some people might be like, I guess that's sci-fi, but really it's more, it's more like a dinner party that has like a little bit of a sci-fi twist at the end or something like that.

Yeah. And we'll talk about some of those and like whether, I think what I'd like to do ultimately is to kind of pick 10 that we feel are most representative of our times. Now, what that means, I think, is very fungible because there's movies that we really like and I think almost everything we pick will be something that we like. Then there's movies that are representative of our times or of what we think the future might be. Right.

And then there's movies that feel like they say something about what Hollywood or filmmaking is. Because I think that that's the other thing that science fiction can do. Like you mentioned Ridley Scott a couple of times now. Ridley Scott's vision of the world kind of sets the template for an icy 1980s.

And I'm not saying it wouldn't have happened without him, but I think when you look at Alien, you look at Blade Runner, you look at how technology evolves, you look at how a company without him, but I think when you look at Alien, you look at Blade Runner, you look at how technology evolves, you look at how a company like Apple creates products, and then you look at a slightly more dystopian vision of what happens when those products go into a dark world.

When they age. Ridley Scott kind of invented that. I mean, or at least he was iterating on what science fiction writers were doing and visualizing it. So I think some movies that we've gotten in the last 10 or 20 years do that. Not a lot though.

Yeah. Science fiction is funny to me because it sometimes feels like it's frozen in time even though it's supposed to be a vision of the future. And I don't know whether or not

this is like guitar music sounds a certain way to me because I listened to this band when I was 15 and that's when I decided guitars should sound like. But I don't necessarily

feel like we've evolved that far past Blade Runner, Alien, Star Wars, Cameron. You know, like, that the idea, you basically start from this baseline of like, so the spaceship's

going to look like this. Right. And I don't know, maybe that's also based very heavily on research about if we ever get long-range spaceships that will be going to Mars, they're going to look like this. But it seems to me like we have just settled on a visual palette

of what space travel and time travel and multiversal travel or whatever you want to be interested in, what it's going to be. And there are a few directors, Alex Garland, Shank Ruth, maybe who kind of like pushed into different space who have pushed into different spaces with that. But if they're few and far between.

Yeah. Maybe that's an entryway into like talking about a couple of different movies. The one movie that you just, that I thought of as you were describing that, which I think is dead on, like we haven't, we haven't evolved much past where we were 40 years ago visually,

is Under the Skin. Because there's a couple of things in Under the Skin, which is a movie about an alien who comes to this planet in the form of a beautiful young woman played by Scarlett Johansson, who then is sort of like a succubus who is kind of like attracting men

and drawing them into her lair to use their flesh for something, to eat or to procreate or whatever it is that she's doing. There are a couple, there's a moment where she is sort of like rendered in this all white at the beginning of the film. And then there's a moment where she, after she's lured a man into her realm, that they disappear into this pool of blackness. I've never seen those things before. They're amazing.

They're like incredible, ingenious designs of high art blended with like commercial filmmaking with a movie star. That's like catnip for me. There's a Jonathan Glazer movie coming out later this year. It's very exciting. He hasn't made a movie since he made this movie, Under the Skin. That movie is not a big tent Hollywood movie, but it is doing that exact thing that you just described where it's like,

I've never seen this before and I don't even fully understand it, but it seems to be metaphorically relevant to the way that like we have been consumed by so many of the things that we are attracted to. That was like a cool idea to me that I clicked in with that. I really like in science fiction that it allows you to extrapolate in that way. That's how I felt about annihilation in a lot of ways. Where there are, and it's adapted from a trilogy of novels that I like and don't like in some respects,

or not don't like, but rocked with in certain ways. But there are ideas in Annihilation that I was like, I just don't think I've ever seen this before. And I don't even think we've got a proper explanation as to, I mean, you could probably go and figure out what he's trying to say with annihilation but there are huge swaths of annihilation that are just completely unexplained animal carcasses metamorphosizing into other things what is this you know field of energy that they've entered into why is this

happening why is that happening what happens at that happening? What happens at the end, you know, is all really, really fascinating and is the kind of thing that I don't think sci-fi movies maybe do enough anymore, which is to, like,

ask unanswerable questions. And also not necessarily resolve satisfyingly. Yeah. I think that's the other thing. Like, a movie like The Creator really attempts to

resolve itself. Well, also, a good example of that is Sunshine. So, Sunshine is this Danny Boyle film that I think sean and i like probably equally like adore but also acknowledge turns into a monster movie at the end but for the first two-thirds of sunshine you're kind of like am i watching 2001 you know like this contemplation of the greatest energy source in the galaxy that gives all life,

but also may bring about death that they've got to restart essentially and how they go about doing that. But he does it in this like poetic way. And then it kind of has to eventually resolve itself in a very like traditional way. But it must be the most daunting task of these kinds of movies

is to decide like, how far away from the space station are we going to go, man? You know, like, because every time you get out there and you start asking these fundamental like, are we alone? Did something create us? All these questions that you can't really answer, you then sort of like fall back on. And it was always a monster down the end of the hall that did it. Yeah. I think that the kind of boldness and willingness to be abstract in 2001 and that movie not expiring in the culture looms large

and is in constant conflict with the expectations or the imagined expectations that executives have about audiences. Yeah. so like sunshine is really after in its first hour a very similar kind of psychological um epistemological exploration of what's going on in the universe and then it invariably has to complete yeah as a as a piece of commercial product. I love that movie. I've told that story before that my first time I ever went to the Arclight was to see Sunshine

when I was on a vacation with my wife and we were like, we sat like three seats down from Drew Barrymore and I was like, is this what this is? Like,

do we get to see cool movies on the best screens in the world with famous people? And it actually kind of is like that here. But,

I love that movie and I'm also like in conflict with its ending. Sure. I don't even remember. There's a very good episode about Blank Check about this because they just did Danny Boyle where they talked about it at length,

but it does kind of spin out of control at the end. You know, you mentioned Annihilation. I feel like the movie that the creator is really talking to is Ekmachina. That's the Alex Garland movie that is a shrunk down version of some of the concerns. the creator is really talking to is ex machina that's the alex garland movie that you know is a shrunk down version of some of the concerns isn't the robot the badass here because she escaped these these two men yeah and someone who we are rooting for and and mixed in that is you

know ideas of toxic masculinity and control and what technology thinks it can do to human life and whether AI is real or not. But if not for the Apocalypse Now style inspirations, Ex Machina renders the creator moot in a lot of ways because it doesn't really get to the bottom of something that a movie like Ex Machina does. What do you think is the... If you had to pick a Garland movie to be like, this is part of the canon right now, would you pick Ex Machina? Ex Machina, it's just a much more tight kind of tight successful story you know like it i haven't watched in a while i re-watched annihilation and i was like this movie is massively underrated yeah um i think i watched it the first couple of times very much under the spell of jeffrey vandermeer's novels and being like there is

like a kind of progression that this this story should have that it didn't in the film. I also, it felt like a little bit jumbled in its cut. Like there, uh, some of the performances felt like they may be like not, did not match each other. Yeah.

Uh, but in rec, in, in further viewings, I was like, man, this movie is fucking unbelievable to look at and also to experience. I'm,

I'm, I'm on the record about Garland. He is in a very rare class of writer-directors for me. Speaking of Amanda's opinions, you and Amanda share a rival. You share a passion for the movie Arrival. You mentioned Villeneuve and his comments about big visual filmmaking and how that's the future. I like Arrival a lot. I'm not denigrating it at all, but I think you should talk about it

since it is like a film that you're very passionate about. So it's adaptive from the Ted Chiang story. I thought that it captured the human heart of this stuff the best. And that is something that I think kind of gets lost a lot, the human heart of this stuff the best.

And that is something that I think kind of gets lost a lot, especially in more modern sci-fi. Arrival and Interstellar are probably the two most sentimental films I can think of, of this batch that we're going to be talking about. I didn't want to talk about that next, so I'm glad you bring that up.

I can only be who I am. I was very deeply affected by the love story in the center of Arrival. I also thought that effectively the use of time travel in the film was rather beautiful. And I think that rather than it being sappy and manipulative the way it is often deployed with the lone wolf and cub type stories or like it's just like child endangerment for the sake of it this actually felt like it was a regular everyday person being thrown into something that was just absolutely huge and beyond her and her trying to like make sense of it. Yeah. I think that there's an extended period of mystery in the movie

that really plays in its favor where you're still trying to get your arms around why are they there and what does it mean for this person and it takes a long time

to reveal it and the payoff is so powerful that it really works which is different from the creator which like there are some revelations

at the end of the movie. The crescendo of arrival is like kind of unmatched for me in a lot of ways. Interstellar. Now, I've gone through quite a journey with this movie personally. Because I think it is like in many ways the absolute best of Christopher Nolan and also in many ways the absolute worst. And I think it like surpasses to me

the Dark Knight and Inception in terms of like his visual power and his like kind of breathless approach to storytelling

and I think it is also like easily the most like gloppy sentimental over explained movie he's ever made I know it's

Defenders are so passionate about it. You know, shout out to KOC, one of the biggest interstellar stands in the universe. Shout out to everybody

at the Prince Charles Cinema lining up to go see Interstellar. Yeah. And I know why this is a big deal movie for a lot of people and I do understand it

and I want to take it away from anybody. But it is doing something that I think the creator slips into as well sometimes where it's sort of like, here's why this

emotionally matters audience comma audience and that part has never quite clicked for me the fifth dimensional library of love always seems to be

a place that you get stuck yeah and I I I genuinely feel like his last three films feel like him recognizing

why that was a mistake because he doesn't do that anymore yeah he no longer says like here's what it all means no which i fucking love like i one of the reasons why i have had this kind of like i don't know like reconstituted opinion of nolan yeah is because i feel like he's no longer doing the thing that really bugged me in his movies and i'm not saying i'm responsible for that because of course I'm not, but it felt like he would like was maturing through figuring out how to tell a complex abstract story.

Yeah. And he did so, and he got braver by doing Dunkirk where he was just kind of like, sure the timelines are mashed up, but they do fit together in my mind and I'm not going to tell you. Doesn't mean I necessarily have to like it, but I liked the bravery of it. Whereas at interstellar,

which is just so propulsive and exciting. And speaking of tech that we'd never seen before, Taurus is another good example of a thing where I'm like, I've never seen a robot like that before. And also feels rooted in like, I'm just going to spend a couple years talking to physicists about how this would happen if we were going to do it. Yes. But what I didn't want is for him to then transcribe those things and then put them in the mouths of the people in the movie. I know. Nevertheless, I know you like it more than I do. This is the one for him, right?

Like this has to kind of be in the conversation when we're earmarking whatever the 10. I think so. I mean, do you consider Inception sci-fi? I think it's almost like more of like a psychedelic heist movie. You know, like. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that's accurate.

I think it's very much a thriller. And Interstellar is pure science fiction because it is truly in space. No, and in fact, I think a lot of the film's power comes from the engagement with the human imagination, the capacity to imagine something huge.

You know, like, we don't, we aren't meant to die on this planet. We are meant to explore new ones. You know, like, we are meant to go through this thing that is the last barrier of existence this black hole that's what the movie is really about longing for exploration let me pose a

duality to you you choose what you think makes more sense Prometheus the extended continued vision of a filmmaker who's You choose what you think makes more sense. Prometheus. Mm-hmm. The extended, continued vision of a filmmaker who can't get away from the thing that put him on the map, the world that he created, the tone that he executed that has then been copied endlessly

with a very complex story inside of it that is at times confusing and frankly doesn't always work, but I find pretty breathtaking. This is kind of my interstellar, Prometheus. That's how I'll frame it. Yeah.

Versus The Martian, which is a much more conventional script. It's about ingenuity. It's about ingenuity. Yeah. That does require some leaps in science logic to accept

and is much more kind of winning and feel good but that i think represent like two posts the same filmmaker ridley scott directed both movies which of those feels more prometheus yeah okay yeah i think in march it's funny like it's almost like martian's more rewatchable and the prometheus is the thing i think about more so prometheus i've seen you know half a dozen times, I don't know, a lot, and has some of the most interesting ideas that I think

a 21st century blockbuster has had. And it plays with some of the ideas that the creator tries to wrap its mind around. Prometheus does it in a far more compelling, ambiguous way. And then the Martian is just like, we can fix it.

You know? Like, let's use tape, grow potatoes, put a little painkiller on that potato. Let's try again tomorrow. Like, it's much more closer to like Apollo 13, whereas Prometheus, I think, drifts into like the horror version of 2001

sometimes. Amanda wanted to go to space when she was a kid or at least space camp. Did you? Uh, space camp space. Oh, uh, not, not super a lot.

Yeah. Not super a lot. Yeah. I mean, I'd much rather play like minor league baseball than go space, you know, like I thought it would be cool to play like second base for the durham bulls more than it would be like can me and my like human ai robot partner like go out

and encounter a xenomorph that wasn't what i was asking so you don't want to encounter a xenomorph i don't know what i bring to the table as like what what is my expertise on that spaceship uh vibes comms yeah no vibes i just think you know yeah glue guy yeah you bring everybody comes out of their pod they've been cryo sleeping for a long time and i'm just doing a little bit of an ass pat and like, like, Hey, I got this Gettysburg joke. Looking sharp out there guys. Yeah. Yeah.

I think you, I think that I think every crew needs that. Do you, or do you think, do you think I would be like Paul Reiser and aliens Burke? Unfortunately, I think that's me. So,

um, no, I know that's not true. Represents substantial investment from the company. Do you feel that Spotify is a Weyland-Yutani type vessel? I hope so. I mean, like, yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, we're all trying to get our own xenomorph these days.

If we could take the watch to deep space. Is Greenwald in on space? No, I don't think so. Okay. He's into the sea? I think he's just into like... His feet are on the ground. Yeah.

He's a runner. He's a McMurtry guy. I see. Bookstores. Yeah. Cowboy hats. For sure. Okay.

Where should we go next? There's a lot of movies here that I feel like are representative of our science fiction times. Okay. To use your sort of like things that we think are good, things that fiction times. Okay, so let's, like, to use your sort of, like, things that we think are good, things that we think are important, what were the other categories you sort of had?

Shit that rocks. Okay. I believe that when I, you were like, why don't we each sort of nominate five. I wanted to throw Looper in there by Rian Johnson, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. One of, I think, probably the last great Bruce Willis performance. One of the last great Bruce Willis performance. One of the last great

Bruce Willis performances in retrospect. It's up there. A really great example of what you can do with the kind of scope that sci-fi usually demands.

So the rendering of I think it's Kansas City or St. Louis that's set in like the Midwest there with just a truly breathtaking original story. You know,

this idea of like time hopping assassins and twin and twinning, you know, like it's just such a cool story. And I admit, I miss it. I miss, I miss movies like this kind of coming out of nowhere and being super badass and then changing the game a little bit.

And obviously Ryan got sucked up into Star Wars and now he's kind of making Knives Out. And I think those all have a lot of nice things about them. But this is kind of what I loved about Rian Johnson. Yeah, me too. Let's make a gangster movie, sci-fi movie that's also set in daylight Midwest America. Yeah, I think that it was obviously necessary for him to make something like this to go to the next level and participate in some of the stuff that he did um it's part of it's part of my case for no one will save you like this is

a great way to show your chops as a creative thinker in doing a grounded version of a story like this now looper Looper is like, is a movie about the future and is like a mid-budget movie. It's not a big budget movie. And we don't have a lot of mid-budget sci-fi these days. Though I guess in some ways the creator qualifies.

But I really like Looper. I loved it when it came out. I liked when he was in his genre hopping phase from Brick to Brothers Bloom to Looper and even to Star Wars to some extent.

But it's hard to not get on the treadmill, you know, once you've had success and people want more of what you do so well. I think Her has to be like a part of this conversation, the Spike Jonze movie. Speaking of filmmakers who have not made a movie in a really long time. Yeah.

It's actually been even longer that Spike Jonze has not made a feature than Gareth Edwards. This, of course, is another movie about AI, about a kind of artificial intelligence. Quite a double feature with Under the Skin.

Yes. In Scarlett Johansson's quest to undermine your expectations of her dream girl image, which I think is a really cool project that she pursued. I think the third portion of this sci-fi story is Lucy if you look

at the three ways in which she was dangerous to men I always really liked her from the moment it came out I do feel like it is even though it is a very soft movie and like a very heartful movie in some ways sentimental

it does feel more like the kinds of 70s movies that I'm talking about where a lot of thought and care has been put into its own weirdness. Yeah. Let's use technology

to talk about how perverted we can be. Yeah. Or lonely or whatever. Yeah. And those two things are often stuck together. Sure.

And you know it's Joaquin I think as he is about to transition to becoming the most celebrated actor of his generation. Sure. Like, in that time period when he becomes the chosen star of the thoughtful auteur. And I really love this movie.

I think it's, like, a really good example of how not all science fiction design needs to be metallic and hard. If you just look at the way the clothes that Joaquin's character wears, they are like six degrees away from what we're wearing right now. Yeah. But they feel futuristic. And I always like a movie that has that kind of intention and care put into it. And also, it is pretty provocative about what we get from the machinery that we invent in a way that a lot, you know, Ex Machina is another movie

that this pairs very neatly with about the idea of falling in love with something that may not be real. But, I really love this one. So we've got Interstellar, Ex Machina,

Looper, Prometheus, Under the Skin, Her, and Sunshine, and Arrival. Do we need a big, messy blockbuster?

I think we should choose one of, just for the hell of it, of Edge of Tomorrow or Minority Report. Okay. We should throw Tom in there. Yep. They're both very grounded sci-fi movies

in a lot of ways. So the science fiction, the whole reason why Edge of Tomorrow works so well, aside from the mechanism of the repeating the same day over and over again, I think is also the way like how palpable the tech feels and how rugged it feels

and like they're wearing these suits and like you know everything is dirty and they've been fighting this war for a long time and mentally he's been fighting this war for years and it's just one of the best Hollywood executions of like a sci-fi movie I think you obviously, in the last 25 years.

And then Minority Report is so important, I just think, because of the darkness with which Spielberg contemplates something that he has previously been so optimistic about. Which movie do you like more? I think it's kind of similar to Martian and Prometheus. I like watching Edge of Tomorrow more, but I think Minority Report is a more interesting film in a lot of ways. Yeah. Minority Report feels like the conclusion of the Philip K. Dick era of movie storytelling,

where our dark future could still be far away and now i feel like a lot of our science fiction is like this is around the corner like the creator is ostensibly set 10 years in the future i mean it looks like our world minority report doesn't really look like our world that much like the precogs and the the way that the technology works and the screens and the way that you know tom's character is kind of like sliding things around while looking at a board. We kind of have that now if you're John King on CNN. But for the most part, that's not a technology that we're using on a daily basis. It still feels distant.

And that's one thing that I think differentiates it from a lot of the stuff that we're talking about now. Edge of Tomorrow is more of a romp. And it's a really fun romp. And it does have some things to say. You can actually set Edge of Tomorrow in more of a romp. Mm-hmm. And it's a really fun romp. And it does have some things to say. You can actually set Edge of Tomorrow in any war movie. Yeah. It's just the technology, like whatever it is that they pull out of the alien invasion that makes this guy, like he makes his blood mixed so he's able to do this day over again.

But if you did Edge of Tomorrow with a guy storming Normandy, you could. I mean, one of the reasons, I mean, it would be interesting to see Steven Spielberg's version of Edge of Tomorrow because we know he knows how to shoot Stormy Normandy as good as the action is that Doug Liman directed in that movie. I guess we have a lot

of contemplative stuff so I feel like maybe Edge of Tomorrow is the more fun inclusion. You with that? Yeah, I mean, I wanted to throw

a B movie in there not even like a B movie but one that's just like fucking fun and that would be Attack the Block. Obviously, a story that gets told like fucking fun. And that would be attack the block. Um, obviously a story that gets told like alien invasion is, is,

is pretty much the bread and butter of this thing. But like, I thought attack the block did it and obviously setting it, uh, in London that way. And, and Joe Cornish has just got like such an energy and a verve to it. So I,

I've always really loved that movie. Um, what, what else? So if we include that, that gives us a solid 10. Here are the movies that we're not including that I think are kind of in that A tier of discussion. Well, I don't even know if this is an A tier,

but frankly, Guardians of the Galaxy probably is the most recognizable science fiction that's been made in the last 20 years that is new, that is not Star Wars. Those movies are self-consciously riffing on 50s and 60s sci-fi movies the like you know the the Jack Kirby invention is almost like if Roger Corman had a even bigger budget that's like the what he was drawing and creating in those stories and that's what Jim Starlin and all of those guys were all doing with like there are conceptions of

space in Marvel I don't think a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy, which I really like and I think is a lot of fun, can really hold a candle to Ex Machina in terms of like what I want most in movie making. But I think that as far as like sci-fi blockbusters go, it's really not bad in the last 20 years. It's pretty good. Two that really stick out to me are snow piercer and melancholia um which are i think also two sides of the same fatalist coin about the end of our society and using this kind of science storytelling to tell really grim tales from really strong non-american auteur filmmakers that burst through like lars von treer was a big star in the art house world and had been Oscar nominated

or had his actress had been Oscar nominated and was widely celebrated at places like Cannes. But Melancholia feels like the most American of his movies. Yeah. And Kirsten Dunst's performance. And I think that that cut through to a new audience for him. And a movie that I think is really resonant with a lot of people who are like in their 30s

and like as they approach middle age and they're like like is the world ending and by the world I mean my life so I think that that movie is really powerful Snowpiercer of course like

truly amazing vision like kind of foretells a lot of what like what Bong now represents I think to a lot of film goers

I feel like Mickey 17 his new movie will be more like Snowpiercer than any other movie that he has made with its interest in technology and the grime and grit of technology and the kind of like brutality of the human spirit.

We haven't mentioned Avatar. Now, you're not a big Na'vi guy. I'm not. I'm not, but I think that you kind of have to put it on this list because of, I mean, it's literally the most successful film franchise of all time at this point. And probably the greatest sci-fi director of our lives

chose to dedicate what will be the last third of his career to these movies. Yeah. It's really interesting because it's been noted many times that the story of Avatar is like Rudyard Kipling. It's like the Bible. Like it's centuries, maybe even, you know, a thousand years old

in terms of what the framework of it. It's Pocahontas, whatever you want to say that it recalls. It's using this incredible technology to tell the story.

One of the reasons why the creator doesn't really work as well for me because I'm kind of like we have Avatar at home. Like there's enough in Avatar that is similar enough to the creator that it's, it feels a little obviated by what you, as you said,

the best filmmaker in this world is doing some ways like avatars, more animated qualities, like probably like save it from having to like, uh, reckon with like the, the sort of othering that happens in the creator. Yeah.

And it was definitely accused of that in the early going. And I feel like it kind of beat the charges in a way. I feel like over time, people are like, that actually isn't what Avatar is. It actually isn't this rendition of a foreign culture that we know in our world. I like the idea of Joe Takapina representing the Na'vi in the court. Be like, we beat the case I want to

can I on the other end of the spectrum from Avatar and that kind of blockbuster is sci-fi is still like very usefully deployed

within indie cinema Benson and Moorhead the filmmakers are very very great when it comes to like making these very inventive relatively low budget provocative sci-fi movies.

But the one I wanted to shout out is this film Coherence from 2013, which is essentially a Twilight Zone episode about a dinner party that happens on the night a comet is passing by. And the impact this comet trail has on space-time and physical space and dimensions. Just go watch it. I don't want to spoil anything about it. It's a 2013 indie film. Go look it up and give it a shot. So that director, the writer-director of this movie, James Ward Burkett, has not made a movie since then.

I know. It's just one of those things that happened, I guess. And apparently he has a movie coming out in 2023 called Shatterbelt okay don't know anything about it just putting it out there okay coherence is a really good movie you and I we bonded on that when we saw it that was

right around the time of like the invitation I feel like yes LA dinner party core was a movement we abandoned absolutely yeah what did it culminate in uh Trump's election oh

yeah Trump's election yeah um, yeah. Trump's election. Are you interested in the Planet of the Apes reboots? No. Why? Are they doing it again? No, no, no. Just the most recent ones. Oh, they're cool.

Yeah. For some reason, I don't really consider those science fiction. I think Planet of the Apes is one of the great science fiction stories. I know, you're right. But in the new ones, it's just, it's just real like lab work, you know, and it's animal experimentation and then they get away from them.

And in my, in my life with my daughter, monkeys do talk. Yeah. So it's not that far of a leap. No, you know, and my wife and I use, how do they,

who's the, which one of the apes does the thing where it has to hold its palm out to be like, I'm sorry. Caesar? Yeah, we do that at the house sometimes like if we have like

a little bit of a flare up one of us will go in and just be like palm out oh that's adorable wow we haven't done that in a while

would Phoebe you're holding on to that bit after like nine years still giving Caesar love yeah that's very sweet I wanted to

well two things one Donnie Darko I feel like is also pretty important here sure I feel like you. One, Donnie Darko, I feel like is also pretty important here. Sure. I feel like you're not a Donnie Darko dude. I am

not a Richard Kelly guy. You think he's a fraud? No, I just never really clicked with his movies. I see. So a fraud. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Last year, a science fiction film won Best Picture. Yeah. Everything, everyone wants. Yeah. yeah okay yeah um last year a science fiction film won best picture yeah everything everyone wants

yeah um I think I'm so interested to see how this movie ages I felt like uh

I noted with interest that there's virtually no precedent for a movie like this winning not just because of the creators of the film

and the stars of the film but because of the kind of movie film and the stars of the film, but because of the kind of movie that it is, a multiversal story, a time travel story, a kind of radical, goofy story, a very goofy movie. Right. In ways that are purposeful, you know,

it's not unintentional. I think I was expecting a big wave of stuff that felt like this movie in the aftermath of it. And it's been over, it's been a year and a half since it came out. And I wouldn't say that there are. There are, of course, a lot of multiversal stuff that was already in the hopper. But this tone, and maybe it's because what Daniels does is not replicable. Yeah, it's kind of hard to be like, we're going to, I mean, you could make the argument that there's elements of this in Loki. And I think that those guys are directing episodes of second

season of Loki. What are those guys working on? No, they signed up with Universal. So they are now working on a new original script for

Universal. I thought they had a TV, they're doing. I'm pretty sure that Universal. They passed on directing Loki, my bad. I think that they want

to tell their stories and that was very important to them. And so they did, Universal did the same thing they did with Christopher Nolan where they were just like, we want to lock down so they did, Universal did the same thing they did with Christopher Nolan where they were just like,

we want to lock down your time on this next one. Same thing they do with Jordan Peele. Like, they're trying to create that stable of filmmakers. I'm just interested to see what the influence of this movie is.

Obviously, it was like widely hailed and now I think it's kind of fallen back a little bit in terms of the culture. But as soon as they have another movie, it will be like one of the biggest things

of that movie year. Of course, yeah. No question, it'll be like one of the biggest things of that movie year. Of course. No question. It'll be widely anticipated. To me I don't love it enough to be like this signals the future of science fiction.

I liked it when it came out. And I thought it was genuinely inventive and fun and then as with all things overexposure is dangerous. Yeah, you have to talk about it for six months in opposition to like all movies. Yeah, you have to talk about it for six months in opposition to all movies.

Yeah. Is there... I didn't prep you for this one, but is there an active filmmaker who you'd love to see take a bite out of science fiction? That's a really good question, because I think that the easiest answer would be PTA. I would love to see him apply his sort of... But he has such

a strangely unique vision. It's just that he seems such like a strangely unique vision. It's just that like he seems so drawn to these period pieces. I wonder what would happen if he skipped ahead a little bit to like a future period.

But I don't know what kind of story or if there's a text that he would want to adapt. God, let me think. Can I can I suggest one from the CR bin?

Yeah. Ask Craig Zoller. Yeah. Would you be interested in his vision of the future? No, I'm really more comfortable with his vision of the absolute present or the old. Right, the penal system here in this country. There's so many more cell blocks to explore yeah I mean we almost got a Quentin Tarantino

Star Trek movie yeah that would be that would be fun for him to do something like that I don't get the impression that that's in the cards

given that he's working on his final film I don't think I have like a filmmaker that I think would be I mean like I think it would be interesting to see lots of like

I would do you want to watch like a Kelly Reichardt movie set in space or in the future? Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. There's neat stuff. Yeah. I mean, I think to our conversation about coherence and Donnie Darko and her, these

sort of smaller, more grounded stories. After Yang is a movie that came out a couple of years ago, The Kogonatame, that I think is like, that's a very achievable form of science fiction in an indie style at a low budget that I think credibly sold me on a world. That kind of world building that you talked about that Edwards does. I think that that's really, it's plausible. It's achievable. I hope that there is more of that. I hope that No One Will Save You being a success, or at least what seems like a success, will lead to that kind of thing.

And I think that there has been traditionally, like once a year, there's like an A24 level movie that dabbles in science fiction, but is like, you know, modestly budgeted and interesting in that sense. Oh, I know who I want to do sci-fi. Tell me.

Kind of already has, Yorgos. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It seems like he Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it seems like he's building towards it anyway. I put The Lobster on the long list for this. And I do think The Lobster

is straight absurdist sci-fi. But could he do one that is like expanded worlds? I've seen Poor Things. Whether you like Poor Things or not, you can't deny that it's somebody who's got

like an incredible vision. Like an incredible... And you know, that movie has been compared a lot to Terry Gilliam movies and he's somebody who did that with an incredible vision like an incredible and you know that movie has been compared a lot to terry gilliam movies and he's somebody who did that with 12 monkeys in an amazing way yes so philadelphia yeah right we're truly one of the like cesspools of our future space zoo yeah uh okay that's a really good shout okay are you excited for poor things yeah yeah i'm excited for the for I'm excited for Emma Stone season that we're about to embark upon. What are we going to do

about the curse, man? Greenwald says now he is willing to meet Nathan Fielder on a battlefield of his choosing and engage with the curse. Nathan Fielder doesn't know Andy is alive. I think what we should do is fantasy fest on the watch.

You come on, you do the curse, you do Hal Hartley with us. I would love nothing more. Long Island's finest. I would love nothing more. Where's Fielder from? He's not from Long Island. No, but Hartley is,

and you are. That's true. And the Safdies, they're nearby. Yeah. And I've been to Long Island for your wedding, so. What was that like?

How did you- Going to Long Island? Yeah, how did you feel about it? The Van Wick, you know, among the best expressways. Okay. Yeah, the 295.

Is that how you get out there? The LIE? Yeah, yeah. Sort of. Depending on Yeah, the 295. Is that how you get out there? The LIE? Yeah, yeah. Sort of. Depending on where you're coming from. I only travel to the LIE by helicopter. Absolutely amazing time

at your wedding. Did you? It's still one of my favorite weddings. I did great. I was also like... Your turn. I was like the Acuna of your wedding.

Yeah. The Ronald Acuna. Yeah. As a Phillies fan, that's an odd poll. I just mean the numbers, the pure numbers I was putting up

did you see he put up 40-70 he had 40 home runs and 70 stolen bases and that's what happened when I grabbed one man's fedora and put it on your father

at your wedding and then demanded more tequila and Red Bull yeah you and my dad hanging out I took Murph's fedora

and I was like wearing it and then I was like oh Murph's tried to get your dad to wear it if you knew Murph you'd know how funny that is thanks for coming to my wedding I was like wearing it and then I was like trying to get your dad to wear it. If you knew Murph,

you'd know how funny that is. Thanks for coming to my wedding. That was actually 14 years ago, two days ago. Okay. Happy anniversary. We just celebrated our anniversary.

You know what we did? You went to the movies. We went to go see Clue. Yeah. And then I did Idiots, which was a lot of fun. You seen Clue? Yeah.

You out on it? No, I just, I don't know necessarily that I need to see that film in the theater. What's better, Clue or Donnie Darko? Clue, honestly. Wow. I haven't seen Donnie Darko in a really long time. And sometimes I just imagine it as Bubble Boy. Like I don't really know what Donnie Darko is about. You got your Gyllenhaals mixed up. I know. Richard Kelly will also beat the charges. That's something in the same way that the Na'vi persevered.

He will also persevere. I think you and I should set up cinema law firm. Like basically Cinema Better Call Saul where we defend directors against

Stop talking. You have to go get an LLC going. We need to copyright that. Cinema law is that is our new brand where can we hear you CR? on the Watch Podcast

twice a week often on the Big Picture yep often on the Rewatchables and occasionally writing you know

my memoirs so you we can catch you writing your memoirs where? when you see me at Dinosaur Coffee with an airbook open laptop open okay I'm writing your memoirs? Where? When you see me at Dinosaur Coffee with an airbook open,

laptop open. Okay. I'm writing my memoirs. No. You can catch me out in these streets. You can catch me in front of City Hall defending some of our greatest directors from their crimes against cinema.

Okay. I want to thank Jack today filling in for Bobby Wagner. Thank you, Jack. Thanks to Bobby for his work on today's episode. Next week is an episode that is decades in the making. It will turn out to be one of the most important things

I've ever done in my life. We're building the Martin Scorsese Hall of Fame on the big picture. How much time are you allotting for that? Two hours? I think two hours is a reasonable amount. Yeah. The problem is, and I shared this document with you

with all of his work. It's not just movies and TV and music videos and short films and performances and documentaries. It's all of those things. So we try to pick 10, and we'll try very soon. We'll see you then. Outro Music