The Big Picture - The Best Movie of 2022 So Far and 10 Sundance Films You Need to Know

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

With the virtual 2022 Sundance Film Festival wrapped, Amy Nicholson rejoins Sean to discuss their experience from the couch, the big acquisitions, and their top 5 favorite movies at the fest (:44). Then, Sean is joined by the Norwegian director Joachim Trier to talk about his critically acclaimed new film ‘The Worst Person in the World.’ (1:14:10). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessey and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about Sundance 2022. Later in today's episode, you can hear a conversation between me and the great Norwegian director Joachim Trier, whose film The Worst Person in the World just played Sundance and closed 2021 as one of the most acclaimed but little seen movies of the year. It opens in theaters on February 4th. I hope you'll stick around for that chat and see that movie which is just fantastic but first we're joined today by an old pal a movie podcaster par excellence the co-host of unspooled amy nicholson hi amy how are you sean i'm so happy to hang out with you hello i'm happy to be with you too so we're talking sundance today which of course we attended virtually this year tell me about your your virtual Sundance experience. Where'd you do it? Did you sit on your couch all day and watch six movies at a time? When you say it that way, it sounds really sad.

Well, was it happy making? Was it sad? There's something very convenient about this experience and there's also something a little bit isolating about it. So it's unusual. I know it's a Sundance of two extremes. I mean, because the normal story of Sundance is a story of great inconvenience. You know, you're on icy sidewalks, you're taking shuttles that are crowded and everybody's elbow to elbow and yelling and people are trying to impress each other and like you're covered and you're dropping your laptop in the snow and everything's wet and you're hungry all the time. And I'm living on grocery store sushi, which I will stand by. I think the grocery store sushi in Park City is actually excellent. And that feels, I mean, that's part

of the experience is like the misery, right? The four hours of sleep and the living on whiskey and popcorn. So to have a Sundance where I'm like at my house in sweatpants with hummus and carrot sticks and liking my life, I felt a little bit like I was betraying the spirit of the festival, but at least the films were, I thought the films were quite good. Yeah, there were some that I loved and some that I am interested to analyze the hype around. So, you know, we'll talk about our favorites from the festival in general, but I think that the way that we've experienced this one has raised some questions, which is this is much easier to engage with the movies as a critic, as a podcaster, as somebody who is just sort of

covering the movie landscape. If you're a buyer at the festival, somebody who works at a streamer or studio, it's a little bit more challenging because that hype is kind of necessary to determining how much interest there is going to be in a movie. And so the business side of things, I think, is a slightly more muddled in this way. There's also just the long term implications of COVID-19 and whether we will ever be able to get back to truly normal at a film festival. I think some people now that they've been able to live this way, and I've done both during COVID, I've been to a true film festival in person watching, you know, four movies a day. And I've also done this virtually at TIFF and Sundance in 21. Do you think that this is more likely to be the future of film festivals? Or do you think we actually will be able to get back to what we were doing, say in 2018? Oh, gosh, I mean, I hope and

I hope not. Like, I want to think that the people who have the expense accounts to burn because they're wheeling and dealing will be like, no way, you are not taking away my ability to sit in a fireplace and drink wine and be like, oh my God, look, that's Quentin Tarantino. Those people are always going to want to do that. But you're right about the buyer part. I mean, to me, some of my favorite stories that come out of being at an in-person Sundance is like, what are the movies that everybody's walking out of? What got a standing ovation that they did not deserve? Who planted people in the audience to hoot and make a thing feel like it had more buzz than you thought it did? I mean, those landmark images we have of Sundance are a movie premiering and then

it being 2 a.m. and all of these people are calling each other back and forth and running in the hallways. And in the olden days, that creep Harvey Weinstein would be showing up and screaming at people. I mean, the in-person mania is, I think, part of why some very bad films sell for a lot of money at Sundance. But that's also part of just the fun of Sundance. It's like gambling. You know, they show up, throw $10 million at this ridiculous movie that everybody loved for like one day and then it comes out and nobody pays attention. But I love chaos. So how am I not going to love that? I mean, in orderly film festival, what's that? Like a film festival of manners where you're like, I mean, what were you? Were you in pajamas the whole time? What were you? More or less. I mean, I was also during the week doing my day job. But I will say last weekend, when I was powering through six movies a day, I don't think I did anything other than shower and sit on the couch

and and attend to my child when i could mostly on nap duty because she could sleep on top of me while i watched movies but otherwise i wasn't really doing anything other than watching the movies and i was able to squeeze in just a lot more than i previously could i think i'm through 38 movies in like eight days which is kind of insane. But on the other hand, we might as well take advantage of that convenience if we don't get to have that sense of fun chaos that you're describing. I do miss that. I do miss getting out of a movie at midnight

at the Eccles and seeing, you know, playing like Spot My Friend. You know, it's like, oh, here's a distributor over here. Here's a critic. I love running into someone like you and saying like, what have you seen? What do you love? There is something very special about that.

There is something a little bit warping about that, too, to your point about bad movies that sell. Is hive minds form quickly and people decide that something is perhaps better than it is or more exciting than it is because everything is relative to other things you've seen. And so if something is above average, it suddenly becomes great. So I wanted to ask you before we start talking about the movies themselves, did the idea of hype feel differently to you this year? Did you process like, oh, I have to watch this movie now because everyone's talking about it? And if so, where were they talking about it? Who were you talking to about the movies? How did you process how to organize your excitement around this festival this year?

Yeah. I mean, it was almost, I think I gave myself a little bit of that Sundance torture by going back on Twitter. Cause I've been trying to have this like rule of I'll only be on Twitter for one hour a week, you know, show up, read some things, post some things, disappear. And it's been really wonderful. But no, for Sundance, I was like, well, you have to go back on Twitter because that's where the conversation I felt like took place this year. Yeah. And it seemed like it happened really fast. It was like day one.

It was like, oh, my God, you have to talk about this. Day two, it's like, oh, my God, you have to talk about this. And because everything kind of, I think, premiered and people watched it really fast, I didn't feel like building momentum towards anything. You know, we're recording this before we know what the awards are going to be. I genuinely have no idea what the awards are going to be. I have no clue. And I feel like at Sundance's past, you kind of know, and then you're always wrong, but you feel like you know. I at least don't even feel like I know what the consensus is.

And so I'm curious how that is all going to play out. And it was nice to see people talking about movies on Twitter, which is rare, right? You have to go searching for it, yeah. Yeah, but it was nice to see like i have friends who are outside of the critic world or just love movies and it was nice to see them get to see sundance movies without having to leave their day jobs and be like oh my god i loved this and having them participate is really cool for me to get to talk about movies with some of my

favorite people who don't get to have to talk about movies for a living. So I feel bad for saying that I do wish we can be back in person. I know. I know there's a trickiness there too, because I try to avoid if I can, spending too much time like touting things or downing things on social media during festivals, because it almost feels like rubbing potential audiences faces in it that like we're going to see this nine months before you and screw you i have my opinion already and you don't have yours but you're right that virtual sundance created this new opportunity for people to be able to buy tickets folks who are not in the industry who are not in the media to jump in and check stuff out and so if on opening night you saw a movie like fire of love which we'll talk

about more which is not necessarily like a mainstream movie that's going to open in 3000 theaters. You could just say, hey, this movie is surprisingly fascinating or even great. Maybe you should pay 20 bucks for the second screening. You might have a nice night a bunch of people in Park City who are like, hey, in between whiskey parties, I'm watching movies and telling you that they're great or not, and you'll have to decide for yourself a year from now. And I also agree with you that the awards thing is even more up in the air. Last year, at least, when Summer of Soul premiered, it was pretty clear that that movie was going to do very well at the awards. And we're now a year later, and it's pretty clear

that that movie is going to do very well at the awards and we're now a year later and it's pretty clear that that movie is going to do very well at the academy awards there's not as much consensus this year there's movies that people really like and you and i have some crossover in our taste but i wonder if as virtual sundance continues the idea of consensus gets a little bit more busted up too because you don't have those hundred or so powerful voices spending time together at various parties and communicating and you, it's a slightly more democratized. There's Twitter. And also, I think Letterboxd, too, is a place where people are watching the movies and talking about them, or at least sharing snide opinions and their reviews about them. So the dialogue, I guess, is slightly shifted in a virtual world. I agree with you. I hope it doesn't go back to this fully because

I love seeing someone like you in person. I love getting the experience of like a big noisy premiere. You know, all that stuff is still a lot of fun, but it might actually be better for the movies themselves if they can be a slightly more widely seen ahead of release. I want to mention just a couple of the acquisitions to you quickly. I don't, we don't need to spend too much time on the business aspect, but usually the dollar number is what people are looking at when it comes to this sort of thing. Films like Palm Springs in recent history sold for quite a great sum of money. This year, I would say the market has been a little less active. There has been one really, really expensive acquisition and that is Cha-Cha Real Smooth, which is Cooper Reif's second movie, which just sold to Apple TV Plus for reportedly $15 million.

Whoa. second movie which just sold to apple tv plus for reportedly 15 million dollars whoa that's a lot um it's not a record-breaking number but it's a it's a big number have you did you get a chance to see that one i haven't seen that i should i didn't love his first movie so i've been like putting it off but the the buzz online has been fantastic about it um there's a couple of others that have sold in, I would say, sort of predictable spaces. Uh, this, uh, horror movie named Speak No Evil came in with acquisition at Shudder. Um, one of your favorite movies, Fresh, was sold to Searchlight, um, as part of a Hulu deal. Another movie also sold to Searchlight, Good Luck to You, Leo Grand, which is, uh, an Emma Thompson film. A film called Living, starring Bill Nighy, sold to Sony Pictures Classics, which is a remake of Akiru. So there's some activity in the market, but it is not as intense as it has been in recent years.

And maybe that's just a product of it being Friday instead of Monday. But do you think that anything has been sort of depressed based on how things have gone virtually? I do wonder that. And I do wonder how much of the market for these distributors has been suppressed just by the major streamers buying so many things. Because one of the trends I noticed that made my independent film director boyfriend scream every single time it happened, because it was nice to get to watch films with him and not have to smuggle them in through the back of theaters like I've done in the past. I apologize to any Sundance person listening to that. But yeah, like every time we'd start a movie and then the Amazon card would come up first, he'd be like, isn't this an independent movie?

I can't believe Sundance already bought this. What's happening? Why are we promoting Sundance movies at an independent festival? And to be fair, some of those Amazon movies where the title card showed up and I groaned because I knew he was gonna start it was like okay here we go that they were some of my favorite films at the festival like whoever's at amazon uh connecting with these amazon films or sundance films has great taste but it was it is kind of a bummer it is kind of a bummer to feel like the landscape in a way it makes me feel like in a way it makes me feel like the landscape of independent movies has gotten so small because it is only like a the same half dozen maybe 12 buyers in the world now right and it just it's scary it kind of scares me i think there's also been this cognitive dissonance over the last 10 years where once many of the buyers sure there were pure independent buyers

indies that were distributing largely in art houses but you know the the mini buyers were like micro studios inside of bigger conglomerates so if you had fox searchlight or you had i don't know paramount vantage or you had those series of shingles and even miramax to some extent and the weinstein company when when it was still extant they um they were powerful and had a lot of money, but they still had the facade of indie. Amazon, there's no facade of indie. It's just this is one of the most massive corporations in our country, in the world, and they're putting movies out. And so you're right.

It feels wrong somehow. And yet, sometimes they have great taste. Amanda and I, last week on the show, just talked about how they're distributing a hero and you can just watch an asghar farhadi movie on amazon prime video which is just mind-blowing you know it's just it's right there for you and you fire it up and so maybe some people will discover one of the great directors of world cinema just when they open prime video that's that's a there's something great about that and there's also something complicating uh about how we feel about it so i don. And I don't know what that means for the future of it, too. Will streamers continue to be active here?

Are they going to lose interest if those films don't perform well? I don't really know. Yeah. And if they lose interest after driving up prices the way that they have, what happens then? I mean, the thing that I still just really want to understand that I can't believe I don't is what's in it for streamers to get into the independent movie Oscar business? I still don't understand it.

I don't really understand why Netflix wants Oscars, except that I guess the people who work there are genuinely movie people, which kudos to them, because it doesn't seem to make sense when there's a whole world of just like, everybody wants to watch this romantic comedy about like nine serial killers, like on an island or whatever they do. But they're like, no, no, no, we also win Oscars, please. I love that contradiction.

It does not make sense to me. But I think we live in interesting times. I agree that the cynical side of me, and I've been talking about this a little bit recently, is most fearful of the time when those people who work at these companies who love movies no longer work there. And they are replaced by people who have less passion for this medium, for the art form, for the people who make the movies. And then they say, well, now that I've looked at the ledger and I realize that these seven movies that we pay between $1 million and $18 million for every year basically mean nothing to our bottom line. And the prestige is not really worth the squeeze. We'll just get rid of them.

And then you're right. It leaves us. And maybe it leaves us in a more pure place. And maybe it leaves the festival in a slightly more pure place where the only people that are actually buying movies are those who want to, you know, platform them with good intention and not just for the sake of a good press run. But ultimately, it's a little bit hard to tell because we're in this major transitional stage. Let's forget about the industry for a minute. I appreciate you entertaining my fascination with the industry side of things. Let's forget about the industry for a minute. I appreciate you entertaining my fascination with the industry side of things. Let's talk about the movies.

So there were a handful of, I think, noisy movies. I would say that those noisy movies didn't necessarily live up to the hype for me. There were two in particular. Jesse Eisenberg's When You Finish Saving the World was the big opening night premiere film. I assume you got a chance to check that one out. Yeah, I actually had to review that one for Variety. Yeah. Okay.

So what did you make of that? Oh, gosh. I mean, if it's an insight into Jesse Eisenberg's head, it feels like his head is in a very dark place, right? I mean, you know, it's about a woman played by Julianne Moore, who is this like professional do-gooder. You know, she's opened up a shelter for like abused women. She lives a just life. She eats local.

She drinks like nice wine with her husband, who's a professor. Her son goes to school where everybody else is very like progressive. Like for fun, they go to like communist poetry readings. And then there's her son, you know, who's played by the kid from Stranger Things, who's just like, you know, a normal. I hate using the word normal because I don't even know. I feel like the word normal is very loaded, but like quote unquote, like he does youtube videos and he wears like cute stocking pink hats and in this like society he's this giant outcast for not like devoting his life to ending poverty in the marshall islands and it it felt like a movie full of straw men to me like everybody dumping on this one kid um for being

like for for trying really hard to care about the marshall islands and yet not being able to do it yeah i i have some vague connectivity to the character film finn wolfhard is the actor who plays the kid and the kid like you say is i'm sorry i never watched stranger things i totally blaked i was like it's one of them i mean he's it feels like he's a proxy for jesse eisenberg and eisenberg's talked about this a little bit, in that he was like aspirationally activist, but didn't seem to ultimately have his heart in it, and basically came to it by way of falling in love with a girl who was also very socially progressive important that we all read Howard Zinn phase of life at 16 years old. I have some familiarity with the archetypes here. Oh, yeah. I was president of Amnesty International at my school.

I still hold a grudge against Henry Thomas for coming to my high school to play a fundraiser and then asking me to pay him. And I was like, it's a fundraiser for Amnesty International at a Catholic high school. No. That's actually a sad story and a segment that could have definitely been in this movie. I thought the movie was just a little high school. No. That's actually a sad story and a segment that could have definitely been in this movie. I thought the movie was just a little bit uneven. I thought it was like

asking us for sympathies when they weren't necessary, but also pretty strong and interesting performances. I think Julianne Moore is doing something like... There's something in the film of the unlikable character,

the Noel Baumbach's kind of style of character that has obviously imprinted upon Eisenberg. And he's kind of nailing the tone, but I don't know that the tone is something I wanted. And so it was an odd movie, I thought, to open the festival. Not bad per se, but a little bit... It wasn't the kind of movie that you finish and say, man, I can't wait to watch 30 more movies, you know? Yeah, it is the kind of movie where you finish and say man i can't wait to watch 30 more movies you know yeah it is the kind of movie you're like man the world is in a terrible place yes but i do want to say like that part of the dimension of the film that i liked was like

julianne moore becomes obsessed with this kid that she thinks is going to be like her perfect son like her next perfect son who you know is a kid living in her in her shelter with his mom and that kid i think the actor's name is billy brick i really liked him he was very good like super charismatic so yeah very naturalistic across the board really good yeah yeah in a movie that was like i had a lot of mannered performances he seemed like a real person um did you did you watch sharp stick i did watch sharp stick i did you know i don't know how to talk about this movie this is the new lena dunham movie. This is Lena Dunham's first film since her debut movie, Tiny Furniture. Obviously, her first film since Girls concluded.

This is the story about a young woman living with her mother and her sister who is, I guess, for lack of a better phrase, preparing to explore her own sexuality. And there's a surrounding world, a kind of ecosystem. It's set during COVID. She is, I guess, nannying slash babysitting for a family with a young child. And she finds herself ensnared in a series of affairs. And the film,

I thought was just candidly all over the place. I didn't really get it at all. It felt like the jokes were good and the movie was not good. You know, it was one of those movies where I laughed, but I felt like it really wasn't hanging together very well, despite the presence of Lena, who I like, and I'm a fan of girls and Jon Bernthal, who's probably my favorite active character actor in the world. I had a hard time clicking into this one. What did you make of it?

You know, I thought it was half of a very excellent movie. It took me a little bit to get into the tone, too. You know, because you have this character who's like living in a home with, you know, an influencer sister and a mom who would have been an influencer in early time, you know, who is absolutely just so funny. Like, I really loved. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Taylor Page play those characters. Yeah, they're both i think fantastic i mean all of jennifer jason lee's dialogue is just hilarious you know lines that are just sort of like ending of and up with like and that's how i wound up in a duran duran video with a cheetah that could open a door with its paws and you're like what

i mean so all of her scenes i was like i am so grateful that lena dunham is back and then you have this like second sister you know the one who goes through the sexual awakening living in the house played by um a skin and avian actress christine forsyth i think forsyth yeah forsyth she's quite good she's in a movie called birds of paradise that also came out this year where she's like a demented ballerina um and she you know she obviously at first like my logical brain was like there's no way this girl lives in this house with these people like she she dresses like a nun, you know, she's like wears skirts to her knees and she's very innocent and doesn't seem to understand anything that her mom and sister are talking about. Even though she's literally just grown up with them, Candy, like that Terry Southern 60s movie about like an innocent who wanders through just having sex with people. And it's about the reaction that the world has to a stunningly beautiful girl who knows nothing about sex and is like so simple in her thinking that she's just like, show me what anal sex is.

I just want to give you a blow job. You know, she's like this bizarre creation of a, of an irresistible sex bot. And like, you know, to me, the most interesting parts of that movie are like Lena Dunham comparing

herself to this creature because she's the woman who's married to, to John, to John Barenthal gets like cheated on. And this idea of like, how does a pregnant mom who's got her own issues and working careers, like compare to this, like completely unreal fictional creation that I think she's deliberately made very fictional.

I mean, even her eye makeup is like, so sixties and strange. So I loved all the parts of this movie actually that were about like this girl and her strange relationships with the people in her life with like Lena and with her romance and all of this and her sisters and her mom but whenever it got to like her just discovering her own sexuality in the second half where she makes this checklist and has to like check off bukkake and whatever then i i thought the movie got a lot more boring like super draggy and i just

i missed the story that was in here and i didn't care so much about like this girl in her own vacuum not that i need a genre to better understand a movie but i i think because the tone is shifting so frequently and the the point of view of the that that first character is just slightly unnerving because she feels so unreal like you're saying i was like is this a satire of modern sexuality is this like a melodrama is it supposed to be a ribald comedy like i really had a hard time wrapping my head around specifically what lena dunham was going for the candy comparison is really smart though you're right that that definitely seems like the framework and it does seem like lena dunham is really interested in the idea of a woman

kind of essentially having like the fast-forwarded version of a sexual awakening you know it's like how can i get like through all the checked boxes as quickly as possible as opposed to just living out my sexual life the way that most people would which is sort of like slowly in one moment at a time you know one encounter at a time but i i don't i think that the performances were fun but you're also right that if you grew up in a home with the jennifer jason lee and taylor page characters who are so open and so almost like absurdist about the their real life experiences you'd think that someone would be slightly more mature in their thinking about some of the ideas that are present in the movie so i just thought it was kind of an odd movie um i'm happy lena's back. I hope Lena keeps making movies. The movie just ultimately didn't work that well for me.

But I love her observations. The fact that her favorite porn star is a guy who specializes in giving the women in his scenes compliments. There's moments of, I think, real insight here that are just hilarious. I'm glad you brought that up. Thank you for reminding me. I did think that Scott Speedman, who plays that porn star was the best part of this movie and i thought that that was the cleverest part of the movie was that sort of like face-to-face engagement with this object of sexual desire that you know lives in her head that was very cool um you know you mentioned your boyfriend your boyfriend's a filmmaker he um he makes he makes is it fair to say horror films is that accurate yeah a traumatic horror film okay traumatic horror films

traumatic action movies it is there's a whole range does that mean that the midnight movies at sundance are are more important are you watching those movies together does that do you care more about them i do like to keep up with them i mean even when um even before i was dating him i always wanted to like go to the midnight movies even though they would always show at that one theater where there's literally only two comfortable seats in the entire theater. Yeah. It's awful. And there's like me and this one other tall guy and we knew about it.

We'd always fight for the seats. Yeah, I love keeping up with the horror films at Sundance because I do feel like here especially horror has always been like the genre that is easiest to get somebody to give you two million dollars to make a movie the easiest one to get some random person like to click on horror film and just see something that night and so it's to me it's always like the discovery genre so yeah i my eyes are always very much on it because i think horror is where you know films get to talk about gigantic issues without having a bunch of mopey people sitting around in a cafe agree i thought that and also that it's easy to tell stories with very few characters and so that requires less money and also it's a little bit easier to make those kinds

of movies during a pandemic because it's you don't necessitate say a crowd of 3 000 people cheering on a gladiatorial battle um this year i thought the slate was pretty interesting a couple of the movies that were there on our lists for the best of the festival but um i'm wondering if it's more robust because horror continues to thrive both in theaters and on streamers in a way too that it's a genre that is sort of um impervious i think to a lot of the that those industry issues that we were discussing there's just a kind of like steady drumbeat of horror that continues to come out into the world. The Scream movie is in theaters and is doing very well in theaters despite the circumstances of the box office right now. And a lot of these movies, though, not all of them, but a lot of

them are also these sort of like portals into conversations about social issues. Fresh, Resurrection, Watcher, Master, Nanny, Emergency all six of those movies all seem to be very much about something and also largely effective as like thrillers or horror movies and it's nice that that part of the festival that part of the festival and the documentary aspect of the festival feel like the sturdiest and most reliable like 10 years on from when I first started really really caring about Sundance do you have any observations about kind of where horror is at at the festival this year

yeah no I felt the same way that you did like I every single one of these horror films was a horror film that was you know really like a social problem story told through the world of horror like there there's I think we are I think to make a film that is just like some guy with a knife running around and chasing people doesn't exist anymore like every horror film has to be about something very big and you know in this horror section I felt like it was the section where I felt like we had the most like directors of color female directors people telling really like individualized stories at the same time you know it to me a horror always feels the most intimate I guess maybe because you're watching people like die and get stabbed and get tortured. But the section here felt particularly really

interesting. I mean, there were some snoozers. I did put on Watcher last night and kind of suffered through it. Yeah, it's really slow. It's really slow. Well, Watcher is this Micah Monroe movie where she moves to Romania with her Romanian-speaking boyfriend and is basically alone in an apartment with gigantic windows and feeling like she's being spied on. And there were some parts of it I thought were really funny. The idea of like setting a movie in Romania where everybody's speaking Romanian around her and Romanian being one of those languages like you would not learn it unless you're in Romania, like literally her. So it's not like she's a dumb person for not knowing Romanian it's just the language that you don't pick up until you're like in the moment in the isolation of being in this country where she doesn't understand anything I really loved all of those parts I

thought they actually got stranger in a strange land really well but then then what a whole lot of nothing right yeah I felt like a handful of the horror and thriller movies at the festival this year did kind of not amount to anything. And that is a real challenge of the genre in general, which is like they're very premise bound, but the premise paying off is very challenging. And so you can get 78 minutes into a movie and realize like, oh, this isn't really going anywhere that I care about. And then there's like a sunk cost aspect, I think, to film festival watching too, where you're like, can I quit this now? Do I need to finish this movie that I don't care about and then there's like a sunk cost aspect i think to film festival watching too where you're like can i quit this now do i need to finish this movie that i don't care about i find

it's a lot easier to quit documentaries honestly than than other films because i can just be like you know what this world and this kind of experience just ultimately isn't very meaningful to me or compelling to me so i can move on with horror movies i'm like i want to see how it pays off but then when it doesn't pay off i have this deep feeling of regret that i've spent my time in that way but that's also a product of trying to get through 35 movies in seven days so it is what it is i mean can i say one awful thing of course because of sentence being online only with one movie did i do this but with one of the horror movies i finally was like wait we can fast forward and what i learned we could fast forward i was just

so in trance it was was the Macedonian witch movie. Oh, I haven't seen that one. You are not alone, right? You are not alone. I wanted to watch that. And I put the Macedonian witch movie on and it was just endless scenes of rocks and caves and like dissected animals. I was like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. I'm good.

You may have warned me off trying to give that one a run on Saturday before the festival ends. That was my plan. You know, maybe you're better than I am. Maybe you like slow-moving Macedonian witch movies. I mean, did you see the documentary about the Macedonian honey grower for a couple of years ago? I did. That movie was very good, I thought. Honeyland?

That movie was Honeyland, right. I thought it was Honeyland and I thought, could it really be a name that simple? But it is. Honeyland is wonderful and it opens with a scene that looks exactly like honeyland but and so i was that that bought it 15 minutes and then i really lost patience so honeyland but with witches is the premise there which is that wish they were in honeyland let's talk about some stuff we liked um we both made top five lists i've i've i've got probably like 10 or 12 movies that I genuinely liked that are like above a three-star movie. But for the sake of this conversation, we're mostly...

I think... Do we have any crossover here? We have no crossover. That's fantastic. I mean, I'll be honest. I made my list after yours. I left off things you also love because I was like, well, I'll just squeeze in that I love them too. Fantastic.

I'm very happy to talk about that. Let's start with your first movie, which I mentioned very briefly at the top, but it has been one of the talks of the festival. What is your number five? It is Good Luck to You, Leo Grand. The Emma Thompson sex drama, I guess you could call it. I mean, the setup here is that she is a widow. She's only had sex with one person in her life. She hires a sex worker to come to her hotel. And he's played by

this guy, Daryl McCormick. He's an Irish actor who plays a character that calls himself Leo Grand. And Leo Grand is like this fabulous put on, who's like charming and confident and suave and can say the right thing and is also very well spoken in emotional relationships. He's kind of a therapist. And part of this movie, you're watching it and you're like, is this like wish fulfillment? I think in my review, I wrote it like, is it how Teach got her groove back? She's a religion studies teacher. So she just keeps asking him all the questions you would want to ask. Like, is this okay? Are you trafficked? Am I a bad person? And as a conversation piece of watching him reassure her, talk through her,

her pushback fight, like the push pull of their conversation, I was fascinated by it. But I think what really sold me that this movie is very intelligently made and worth watching is how it's aware of the artificiality of this Leo Grand character. And just like there's moments where Emma Thompson leaves the room and goes to the bathroom to collect herself. And I was thinking in a normal movie, you expect the camera to always go with her because it's her story. Is she okay? And how is she feeling? And it does that once. But then the rest of the time, it stays with him. And you're watching him be like, oh, let me exhale. This is really hard being this person. I can't do this. I'm tired. What is happening to me? And then put the Leo Grant character back on. and that was what made

me fall in love with this film yeah i really liked um darren mccormick's performance a lot and the whole idea of life as a performance seems like a big theme here where emma thompson just sort of performed her way through her marriage and through her life and then arrived at the you know the final lap and was like what was this really about and did i actually have the experiences i wanted to have definitely felt felt like the Emma Thompson Academy Award campaign began this week too, because she's so wonderful in this movie and she's obviously so beloved.

It's a very small movie. It's also kind of a COVID movie because it is essentially a two-hander that takes place largely in a hotel room, but very entertaining. I definitely thought of my co-host Amanda because she is Emma Thompson's number one fan and I'm sure when she gets a chance to see this, she's going to love it.

This movie also, like I said, sold to Searchlight. So probably going to be a Hulu movie in the next four or five months that people will be able to see. Very good one. Definitely in my top 10. My number five is a little less whimsical, a little weirder, frankly. It's called Something in the Dirt. It's from Aaron Moorhead and Justinenson who have been to sundance before who are uh some of my favorite independent filmmakers who specialize in a kind of i would say galaxy brain science fiction very high concept um difficult to

put your finger on specifically what it is that they're trying to nail down and their characters also have a hard time nailing down what's happening in their worlds. So in this case, the movie actually stars Benson and Moorhead. They play John and Levi. They're two guys who live in an apartment building in Los Angeles and they witness something supernatural,

a kind of spectral presence that has colors and a kind of fog. And rather than have a spiritual awakening of some kind or rush to the authorities, they think this is actually an opportunity to maybe make some money and get some fame and maybe make a documentary. And so this movie becomes this interesting blend

of kind of mockumentary meets conspiracy theory drama between two guys who have this uneasy alliance. They are friends and then they are at odds and it feels like this amazing meta commentary on their collaboration and also on the idea of like the netflix true crime documentary and it's a very odd movie it's beautifully designed it's also very much a covid movie there's very few people that appear in this movie it does feel like a big kind of statement about their partnership in some ways and the way that we process genre movies and genre elements of storytelling and the kind of like mathematical ridiculousness that goes into conspiracy theorizing.

This is definitely my favorite movie of theirs since Spring, which is a movie they made about 10 years ago about a guy who goes on a trip in Europe and some wild things happen when he meets a girl. I assume you're familiar with the Benson and Moorhead brand. I am. I am. I am. In fact, part of my COVID story is just like spending time with the Benson and Moorheads virtually. They are part of my boyfriend's D&D group. So I know a lot about their orc powers. They're lovely people. And I know that they shot this movie, yeah, not just during COVID, but in their own apartments. They live, they're neighbors. They live in like kind of a duplex where it's like one on top of the other.

And so they just moved all of the stuff out of one, filmed the scenes in the other guy's apartment. I mean, they're just marvelous like human beings who I think are great collaborators and have like so much to say about that process. I adored this movie. To me, this is, this might be my favorite movie they have ever done um not just for like the enjoyment of seeing them on camera you know and running around i think their last film starred anthony mackie not quite as fun as watching them play i agree i was like actually you guys should make all your movies starring you too you know like weirdly their their their dialogue their ideas felt more comfortable in their mouths than in the mouths of a movie

star, you know? Yeah. When you're good looking and a good actor and you can write your own dialogue and like, why not? Why not just do it? Yeah. I suppose it must be really fun to collaborate, but they get to collaborate with each other. No, I dug this.

I dug this a lot. I really was fascinated with the idea that they weren't just making this movie about like conspiracies and spooky things happening and what is happening in this craziness and this kind of rabbit hole society of do your own research that we live in. Yes. It felt like the ultimate do your own research movie. I liked how they really took care to make these two guys in this apartment feel like individuals. They felt very specific to each other. Their personalities played into it.

It wasn't a story about the thing happening to them. It was a story about the way they interact with the thing happening to them, which sounds obvious, but I think a lot of films don't do that right. And I really enjoyed the way the film looked at Los Angeles. You're watching an LA that is, they live in a beautiful neighborhood, but they make their neighborhood look really run down. There's coyotes everywhere and just trash and gray and airplanes always going ahead. They do their own visual effects. So, you know, they're adding airplanes to their own neighborhood to make it have that L.A. vibe. But you feel in it this idea of a city of like people dreaming of how they're going to make it. And Justin Benson's character being a bartender who's basically tapped out, like, has no more moves left in this city. And it felt so just lived in. I adore this. I'm glad this is on your list. Yeah, I really liked it, too. It's a kind of movie I can't wait to see again. It also is a movie that has incredible, I guess, for lack of a better phrase, graphic design. You know, there are all of these sort of like geometric figures and puzzles that the characters

are constantly kind of talking about. They get visualized on screen as they're talking about them i mean these two guys too i think are i don't know if they're important per se but they're going to be more in the culture because they directed a bunch of episodes of the forthcoming moon knight tv series they directed a couple of episodes of archive 81 which is on netflix right now they are rising forces i guess in genre movie and tv making so this feels like a very personal version of their vision which i really really dug okay let's go to your number four which is a movie i have not seen it's very strange i don't know if anybody saw this i haven't seen anybody else talk about this movie about me but it is called leonore will never die it is a very strange little sci-fi

film that came out of the philippines that feels like synecdoche light or like a kaufman oh your fave yeah my fave my fave i'm obsessed with that um but the story here is that there's this um you know this film is directed by like martica ramirez escobar and it's this film about like a kind of retired elderly action film director named leonore she's like a woman who seems to be like in her 60s she lives in manila she's really broke. You know, the part of the drama she can't keep her electricity bill on. And she lives with, you know, her kind of least favorite son who's really annoying and is always nagging her to films, where it's like 80s style, grainy texture, men in high-waisted jeans running around, shooting each other, wearing belts, that kind of thing. That was the peak of her career.

So she leaves her house one day, gets hit on the head with the television, and enters one of her action scripts that she has never finished. And she wrote this film with her kids in mind. So the son that she loved is like alive and he's the hero. And the son that she didn't like gets like killed right away at the beginning of the film. And she's just sort of running through trying to set things right, but also just observing her world that she created and being like, oh, this is the sex scene and watching her like favorite son has sex with this woman she wrote for him, which is very bizarre. And then trying to feel like, should she save him?

How can she save the day herself? Which sounds kind of corny, but the way that it plays out is not corny because she's this woman wearing kind of a cheap house dress. She's in flip flops. She's larger in size. She's not the person that you have ever seen in an action film before. Like very deliberately. You never see this kind of person on a film before.

And she's running around with a hammer, kind of wondering if she should hit somebody on the head. And Martika Ramirez, Eska Bar, the director, is too smart to make her turn into this like vengeance killing machine. So it's not about that. It's about like kind of stepping into this world. And what really kind of made this film step up an extra level to me is you know like i hate doing this but i was like i'm gonna read a couple interviews with this martika ramirez i don't like reading what people have to say before i review them because i like just sort of watching the film as itself but she mentioned in passing how this film to her really connected to like

modern life living in the philippines political Because like, you know, here in America, we talk a lot about like kind of tough guy action heroes and how they've like set the course of our politicians. You know, we have Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan, all these guys who played tough guys on screen and then played tough guys in government for some reason, because we thought that was cool. Our president right before the one we have now, that was also his brand as well. That's been happening in the Philippines for a very long time. You know, like they have also had like actors who became presidents there. They have a current president who talks like an action hero, who's always like, I'm going to kill all the bad guys and actually is killing

his own people. He's a monster. And the references to the fictional president within this film, very pointedly feel like they're also about what's happening in the Philippines and that this film has this whole extra level about like machismo in the culture and, you know, the dangerous people acting like they can just shoot everybody who's in their way. And so that spun it to me until just like, oh, really, really, really outstanding film. I mean, it gets a little too meta towards the end but like up until then i'm like i was very on board you sold me to swap out you're not alone to see this film instead to see leonard will never die it sounds really fascinating i promise it'll be a lot more fun okay uh my number four is the fun is probably not a word that i'll use to describe it but it is it is a movie and It is an intense movie.

This movie is called Speak No Evil. This is definitely one of the horror breakouts of the festival, and it's by the Danish filmmaker Christian Taftrup. And I'll read you the premise. I'm reluctant to give away too much of this film. Here's the premise. Yeah, I haven't seen it. I'm ready. Okay.

A Danish family visits a Dutch family they met on a holiday. What was supposed to be an idyllic weekend slowly starts unraveling as the Danes try to stay polite in the face of unpleasantness. Now, these two families, the Danish family has a young girl. The Dutch family has a young boy. You know when you have met someone that you think is going to be a friend of yours and that first time you hang out, you're like, this person rocks. I can't believe I'm going to get to have this person in my life for five or 10 or 20 years. And the second time you hang out, you're like, that wasn't as fun. Maybe that person's a little weird. And then the third

time you hang out, you're like, oh, I've made a huge mistake. And maybe I need to distance myself a little bit from this person. That feeling is taken to a dramatic extreme in this movie. Now, I will say, if you're a parent like I am, this is a hard movie to watch. And if you are just a person that likes to go on vacation, this is a hard movie to watch. Because both of those things are really thrown into a state of emotional disrepair as you're watching the movie. But it is so tense. And the score is pitched so... It is so baroque and so loud and so menacing.

And the sense of disorientation that Taftra puts into it, I just think makes it very, very, very effective. I watched this movie after midnight, alone, in my garage, and I was deeply traumatized by it. And I'm the kind of person that does not get traumatized by movies. I see a lot of horror movies. I love horror movies. I love the sensation that they can give you. And there is a moment in this movie near the end that is a, I have to look away. And I never look away.

So I don't know if that's a recommendation. If you don't like movies like that, you will not want to watch this film. I think it will be on Shudder in a couple of months. You'll be able to check it out there uh but it is an achievement in discomfort and so for that reason i'm putting it on my list will you watch it do you like that kind of experience you've kind of scared me away yeah i know but you've also made it feel like a dare so i don't want to be a chicken well maybe i mean maybe give it a try you've got a strong stomach come on you've watched a lot of horror you've talked about a lot of horror over

the years on your shows i know but i don't talk about how much i look away when the blood starts this is this is a different kind of looking away too there's something i don't i don't want to share too much about other than to say i thought really strong performances just an incredible sense of um doom-like atmosphere you know that there something's going to go wrong here will it will it spoil anything if i ask you if there's any trauma to teeth or nails no but close oh okay that's really my weak spot i have a hard time with teeth and nail okay okay all. Okay. All right. Let's move on. So you're number three.

I was a little surprised to see it. So give me your case for this movie. Yeah. I was really surprised that nobody else seems to like this movie. Okay. Sure. Here we go. My number three was a movie called Alice.

It's like, it's a strange movie. It's sort of half like plantation horror slave drama, half like kind of feminist, like rabble rousing, crowd pleasing take on a blaxploitation film. What's going on is that

you have a woman named Alice. She's played by Kiki Palmer. And I think Kiki Palmer is fantastic in this movie um and she's living on this like very isolated georgia plantation you know she's married to a man named guys charles her um her owner who's played mr paul is played by johnny lee miller like has this like jealousy of course of like her relationship you know sort of punishing like her husband by like saying he has to like go to this other farm, this other plantation. He has to like get another woman pregnant. Lots of sort of emotional drama is happening there.

And then she finally hits her breaking point and she just starts running. And when she starts running, like all of a sudden, kaboom, she like nearly gets hit by like a speeding truck. And she realizes that it's actually like the 1970s she doesn't really know what that means you know she's been like kept in this world where she has not learned not only has she not learned about like the emancipation proclamation or even the civil war any of that she hasn't even learned the language to know how bad her treatment really is to even be able to articulate it like the film makes a very smart point of never even using the word slave, you know,

like they just, you know, she's just like considered sort of like a worker, like, and she isn't even given the tools to like speak out about what's happening to her. And to me, I thought that was like, that was the element of this film that I found really compelling.

You know, it's a movie, not just so much about like a person who's been physically held hostage. It's a movie about what is it like when your mind has been held hostage when like information has been kept from you and so she gets out you know she's discovered by like um common uh common has a really hard time talking to her about like what's going on because she can't really articulate it and he has his own sort of story of a person who like you know where i think the film is really smart is that like arriving in 1973 isn't just like, ta-da, it's a happy ending. It's like 1973 is also after some of like the progress of what felt like the promise of the 60s civil rights, you know, activism moment has ended in despair.

And like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X have been shot in common as a person who's witnessed all of that. So it feels like the exciting future to her is kind of like a bitter, bitter pass to him. He feels like, he feels like they've failed and she feels like there's so much she can now accomplish. And that kind of clashing of two viewpoints is intelligent. It's kind of clumsily done, but I really, I really just admired the thought behind it. I don't know, like this, this director, Kirsten Verlinden, I think she has a real eye just for like moments, you know, like she observes Kiki Palmer's reaction to things in a way where it's like Kiki Palmer can't express what she's saying, but you just

understand what she's thinking really well. And so I loved just the craft of this movie. I think it got really silly. It's probably a little too high on my top five because of course she falls in love with Pam Grier, suddenly has this pair of leather pants and goes on her revenge mission. You're like, okay, it's been 48 hours, I think, in this movie, maybe 48 hours. Sure. Great. The pants are wonderful. But up until she gives... I feel like really the irony of this movie is when she tries to give Alice that crowd-pleasing, cheering moment is the moment that I think a lot of other people were like this is dumb what are you doing it's everything up until then that i think is really smart yeah i it is the ultimate um watches foxy brown once movie you know like literally the character watches foxy brown once and it's sort of like transformed and maybe pam grer is that powerful i'm not gonna argue that she's not i think them i just got genuinely hung up on the fact that it bears a huge resemblance

to a not successful movie from 2020 called antebellum and it also feels just oh i didn't see that maybe that's part of my it's a very very very very similar premise um in addition to that i just kind of kept thinking of m night shambamalan's The Village when I was watching it too. And I was like, I, I guess in a way that's a movie that's 20 years old. And so riffing on that concept is definitely in, in fair game. It's in bounds to do that. And to, to transpose that story onto a story about, you know, black identity in a post civil rights movement, seventies.

Um, it had great style. It looked good. I just thought that the storytelling was off for me like i just i could not get into the into the character's point of view i could not get into even what the filmmaker was trying to say by getting into that 1970s era that being said the way you described it did make sense to me i i had not i wasn't thinking about it the way that you were just talking about it so maybe i should revisit it because there might be more to it. It has not been received terribly well, to your point.

People are saying this movie is not working at all. No, I just looked up. It has a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. I'm like, whoo, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. I don't feel like it deserves a 30. That feels very low. I mean, the observational style of this film. She makes a sandwich and puts on too much mustard.

I don't know. I'm a sucker for moments where I feel like the film is actually really thought about where the character is. It just doesn't know what mustard is. I should not like a movie because of mustard,

but it is in those moments where I really feel like the director knows what they're doing. Yeah, it's much more clever than Antebellum. I'd be curious to know how many of the people who reviewed that film

on Rotten Tomatoes saw Antebellum beforehand as well, because it's definitely, it would be an influence on you. That being said, one of the reasons I love talking to you about movies is because you'll be like, you know what, this movie that people don't like, I like it, and here's why, and you have a good reason for it. So more power to you. I'm all about the mustard. My number three is probably the consensus big movie out of this festival. It's an A24 movie. It's directed by Kogonada, who made Columbus, a movie in 2017.

That was one of my favorite movies of that year. Very beautifully observed, beautifully constructed movie about architecture and love in a time of confusion. This movie is called After Yang. It is a soft science fiction film set in the near future.

It's about a family that has adopted a young girl and also adopted a robot companion to mind after their young daughter. The couple is played by Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith. And Justin H. Min plays Yang, the titular Yang, who's the robot. And the robot breaks down at a certain point. And that leads to this exploration of memory and grief and what it means to spend time with people and also the hidden lives that people and even robots can live and the way that we can't know everything about our experience um kogo not a very patient very uh careful

constructor of images and frames and he makes a very um i guess he puts you in a trance with his movies i would say. You know, he has a kind of like ease and a calm that comes around, even intense emotional experiences. Colin Farrell's character runs a tea shop. He sells tea. And that should tell you like what the lives of the characters are like in this movie. They're very soft and very gentle.

And they would speak quite, you you know thoughtfully and carefully but quite confusedly at times um but it's also a movie that has like an incredible opening sequence that is like a dance party featuring many characters from the film so it's um i thought this was a really interesting you have to have that dance movie you can't have an a24 movie without either a goat or a dance do you think that that was a note that he got after after production he was like i mean we just we desperately need a dance. Do you think that that was a note that he got after, after production? He was like, I mean, we just, we desperately need a dance sequence here. Where can you wedge this in? Um,

I, I, I thought this was very, very good. It felt like a movie that was a little bit outside of the normal Sundance experience where I was like, this movie is a finished and pure example of high level, like modern art house.

And it doesn't really need Sundance to excel. Um, but it's just, it's very, very well crafted and did not feel like a filmmaker necessarily like in development. I was like, Koyonada knows who he is as a director. And this movie is not isn't necessarily like in competition here. It's more just like a presentation of someone who's ready to continue making great films. What did you think of After Yang?

Yeah, it came in with an assurance, not like a pay attention to me or like not like this is my breakout or not like this is my potential. It came out like I am a fully formed artistic creation. Hello. I liked this film. I was very excited to watch it. I don't think I loved it as much as, I feel like Colin Farrell has really cornered the market of guy who used to be action star, able to do high level, tricky kind of science fiction, semi-cultural satire. I don't know if anybody can pull off those kind of vaguely inhuman

characters who talk in a way that is artificial to us as well as Colin Farrell does. It's probably because of his training through Yogi's Lantant the most but he is just excellent at that he i don't know he was good at it even before then he like he was good at that all the way i think like back to like you know he's working like in bruce which is one of my favorite films of all time like he can play these heightened characters just so skillfully and so after yang to me feels like a perfect colin farrell performance you, it also feels like the kind of movie that I want to protect in like a very narrow way, which is going to sound so silly. I'm sorry. But like this is the sort of movie that should be sweeping the awards for costume and production design.

You know, it's in this like kind of slightly forward world where like everything seems to be kind of Japanese influence. The clothes are kind of kimono esque the house and the style is like a very Japanese influence kind of the way like if you were showing up you know in America in the 20s everything would look like it came from France you know and it feels futuristic and thoughtful it's not like a bunch of like lasers and bleeps and screens like I loved the view of the world that they created here and just the details in the design i mean god everything that jody turner smith wears is like vaguely large and kimono we all the pants are so gigantic you know what it reminded me of it reminded me of her in that way you know the the spike jones film that i thought also really pictured the future perfectly in a way that felt like true and lived in but different yes like this

looks like a shirt that could be worn in the future. But no one has this shirt right now. You know like that is the element of the production design. I totally agree with you. It's just. I want to watch that now. Because if they're going to give it to something where everybody's in a hoop skirt. So can we just say like no. You should be giving it to After Gang.

Yeah. I think there probably needs to be like a full scale reimagining of how we reward those categories at the Academy. Because like you're right that it will inevitably be a period piece and people don't think about futuristic design i guess there are movies like occasionally blade runner 2049 or something can kind of pierce that bubble but um that is what you mean the movie where harrison ford wears a t-shirt touche um number two what do you? My number two film is called Master. Uh, it's by, uh, Mariama Diallo.

She wrote and directed it. And it is a film that's set in like a very prestigious New England university. The kind of place I'm so glad I didn't go to. Every time you watch a movie set in one of these universities, I'm like, thank God I went to the University of Oklahoma, like state schools forever. But what is happening here is, um, um you know it's a historically white university it's very old all of the paintings on the walls are of course like old white men um the clientele they're the clientele i guess that says a lot about like modern colleges i'm like the clientele

instead of students but the students who are paying a lot of money to be there are a lot of like east coast white kids who have been to the same summer camps all you know all of their lives and know each other really well the exception being um a young girl named jasmine who shows up who's played by zoe renee this really fantastic young actress um and jasmine arrives at this college being noticeably like one of the only like black kids there has a roommate who's you know a popular nightmare um and is also cursed to live in the room that is known as like the cursed suicide room you know where like every year a witch possesses one of the freshmen and one of the freshmen dies in a way that you know is suicide probably but like it's probably the witch we

should wish whisper about that too so she's going through like her whole kind of trauma of like adapting to this college dealing with this professor professor named Liv, played by the actress Amber Gray, who's fantastic. And like this professor is biracial presenting and has like long braids and like seems to really have it out for Jasmine as one of the only black students. And then the master, you know, the master being like this role of kind of like the caretaker of her dormitory you know like a higher up level person at campus is played by regina hall and it's her first year being the master being the first black female master and you know having all of these like other white professors come up and like compliment her on her on like be on having this role in ways that feel very awkward so that's the setup and you kind of know that this is like a horror film that really wants to get into ideas about like

race and spaces that are like safe and protected to talk to be in and like people using racial politics in ways that feel like kind of uncomfortable and weird and feeling like you're you're you know standing out and not able to fit in and um and all of that is happening and it felt it felt like so kind of hilarious and really well observed you know like regina hall to me is like one of my favorite actresses right now have you seen black monday by the way her tv show i have co-starring your co your podcast co-host of course yes he's wonderful in it but like yes it's a wonderful show i'm not just saying that because i don't think i've seen so they're they're through two seasons

now three seasons they've done three yeah so i've only seen two seasons oh she's just amazing like i've really just been watching everything regina hall does but um i don't know what really knocked this film out of the park for me was just like the willingness of like mariamma to take risks with what she does with the characters i thought like she her scares are good and kind of low-key but she's willing to screw with them in ways that kind of hurt to watch and were really startling she doesn't come to the conclusion i think that's like this will all work out you know her conclusions are sort of like negative um and and live and they felt very like um sincere and earned and i just thought like scene to, it was like really kind of just funny and sharp. And what I admired about the way that she wrote like the Jasmine character

is that Jasmine isn't just like a sad little drip drip, which I think a lot of, you know, films about outcasts tend to be, you know, she doesn't just show up and she's like sad and mopey and nobody wants to be her friend. And then the film is like, why would anybody be friends with this sad girl? The way that Zoe plays her, she's funny. She tells good stories. She has something to add. She actually is full of life. She's fun on the dance floor. And if nobody can see that in her, it's not her fault. They make her a good character and not just this passive victim. And so that I thought really kind of punched it up. And if anybody sees this movie and is like, oh, I love Zoe Renee. She's in a movie called Gin that came out a couple of punched it up. And if anybody sees this movie and is like, oh, I love Zoe Renee.

She's in a movie called Gin that came out a couple of years ago. It played at South by also a fantastic movie. And she's just a really exciting young actress. I have not had a chance to see this movie yet, although it seems like it is in among a group of films about young people, often non-white characters who are in critical stages of their young life. You know, there's a movie called emergency that's also at the festival that i thought was very good directed by carrie williams that is about a few kids who uh a drunk white girl stumbles into their dorm room one night and is very sick and immediately they have to jump to action to figure out how to not basically be blamed for this girl's drunkenness and uh thrown into a terrible situation and it's like a tense and kind of

funny and kind of touching movie um there are a handful of others that speak to this to speak to that to that trend my number two movie is was a surprise to me i think it was a surprise to you too it's called navalny it was a documentary it's's being put out by HBO Max and CNN Films later this year. And it's about Alexei Navalny, who is the Russian political figure who has been very widely vocal and oppositional to Vladimir Putin's regime. And who was poisoned and ultimately recovered from a poisoning and is very active on the Internet and is an incredible documentary subject. This is a basically into-camera interview style film that is also like a heist spy movie that is also like an epic tragedy of world politics. Certainly the most riveting movie that I watched this year. There is a sequence right smack in the middle of it in which Navalny tracks down and contacts the men who tried to kill him. I've never seen anything like it in a documentary. It is mind-blowing.

You know, the film is conventional in some ways in terms of telling the story of the rise of this political figure, and he is not a wholly good figure. There are a couple of interesting moments where Daniel Rohrer, who directed the movie kind of interrogates the way that he has accumulated his his um his supporters and and organized his campaigning over the years but the partnerships he's willing to make with like nationalists yes i don't even think the film gets into the fact that i think he's known for being a bit homophobic yes yeah he is he is not a pure pure hero, but he is very much the hero of this movie. And it's just an amazing portrait

of a deeply charismatic and complicated and, you know, modern politician, honestly. I mean, he really, he represents a lot of what we see in America in some ways for good and for bad. And his story is, it's straight John le Carre it feels directly out of a great spy novel from the 1970s and so i was just completely taken with this movie what do you think

me too you elbowed me to watch this you as soon as you watched it you emailed me and you were like novalny basically i'm imagining that you were like you're not a person who uses nine exclamation points but we'll just say you did because it felt like it was the equivalent of seeing you use that many exclamation points your excitement and so yeah i like i put it straight to the top of my list and i'm so glad i did because this was thrilling to watch i mean when you call it like a john leclerc movie you almost realize that that's part of putin's evil mastery is like he does things that seem so over the top that you think surely this didn't actually happen. Navalny himself even kind of makes a reference. He's like, you want to kill somebody, you just

shoot them. He poisons me. A, that's like really weird and elaborate. B, people are going to think I'm crazy because who poisons people nowadays? And what I found so funny about him as a subject is that sense of humor. And like, I wanted to think it was a put on his like, kind of like tough talk. Like, why didn't he just shoot me? Like, you want to think that he can't actually be that resilient, I guess. But he is a person that has such social media awareness. And that to me felt like this other layer of the film that he, you know, he, of course, Kate Rose to fame as like a YouTuber kind of video guy. You watch him make his TikTok videos in this and kind of tell his 19-year-old daughter how to be making a TikTok video better. So funny. What a great scene.

Yeah. It becomes like a documentary about how the modern war is being fought through memes and page views. Like that's what excites him. He's like, we've got a million views. Here we go. And like you see the memes pop up of the information that he revealed. And it's like that's how you win hearts and minds, which is also kind of a terrifying. Then I think the documentary recognizes that as well,

you know, and there's a scene in here where you realize all of the information that is available on the dark web. That's just for sale. There's a Bulgarian man who enters this film who is not affiliated with anybody in this movie until he's like, eh, nobody's solving who poisoned him.

I have a couple hundred dollars and some time to kill. And he just does. It's extraordinary. He just does. And that, I mean, A, it makes you think like, well, I guess every crime can be saved now. It felt like the future is already here, seeing those scenes take place. And also, this is a documentary where you realize, yes, there's talking heads and they're talking to camera and they're like, here's what's going on. But because it's Russia, you're watching people talk to news cameras and just lie to you. You're watching the doctors of his hospital look in the camera and say, oh, he has a metabolic disorder. And then you're watching the Russian newscasters, you know, the media that is paid for by Putin be like, oh, he's on drugs

and cocaine. And, you know, those opposition people are just irresponsible addicts. And so you are, you wind up feeling as suspicious as he is, because you're watching people lie straight to your face. And that was terrifying. It is terrifying. It's very, very, very well done. And I think people will find it. It will open up a new way of thinking about how the struggles of the Putin regime over the years, because even this figure who is not wholly sympathetic is rendered sympathetic because of the awful things that are done to him. OK, let's go to your number one. Can I say something really fast? Because it's awkward, but I just want to get it in.

Like, as we're talking about the evils of Russia and everything happening right now, I just want to say, like, Ukraine is a wonderful country. Like, I've been to Ukraine. It Ukraine is a wonderful country. Like I've been to Ukraine. It's one of my favorite places on earth. I've almost never seen a country with that much personality that people who live there have so much wit. They make the best escape rooms in the world come from Ukraine. Like I went to an escape room in Ukraine. It's just amazing. They have the best restaurants and food. They are a culture that feels holy themselves. Like if you've ever traveled and like gone to try to buy souvenirs and you feel like all of these souvenirs are actually not even made in this country.

They're just plastic with a picture of like this country on it. Literally every souvenir I bought when I was in Kiev felt like it was made by the person who sold it to me. It is one of the most magically unique places on earth. All I want to do in my life is buy an apartment in Kiev. And I just want people to care about what's happening over there. I need to say that. I just had to get it in. I'm sorry.

This is a pro advocacy podcast as well, so you're safe. I'm glad you have your number one where you have it because I wanted to talk to you about this movie specifically. So what is your number one? Oh, my number one is Fresh. It is also a horror film of a sort. It is directed by Mimi Cave. It's written by Lauren Kahn. It is the ultimate movie about horrible dating. You have a girl named Noah. She's played by Daisy Edgar Jones, who's going on dates with lots of losers, meets a guy who seems magically maybe too good to be true. His name is Steve. He's a doctor.

He's played by Sebastian Stan. So you know what that means. He shows up with his square cut jaw romancing her in a grocery store trying to get her some grapes um and she opens her guard and he turns out to be a professional cannibal like like a corporate cannibal i would say who like captures women and then sells bits of them slowly in um in his house and yeah if i had just heard that setup i'd be be like, ah, sounds cute, clever. I think I know where it's going to go. Sure, I'll give it a watch. But in action, I was entranced. This movie was hilarious. The beats, the comedy beats, the way that it's put

together, kind of the push and pull, the really intense chemistry between Daisy Edgar Jones and Sebastian Stan, where at some points you're kind of like, maybe they can work it out. Like, what? But they have so much fun together. I don't know. It was just like a wicked fun little throwaway. I mean, to me, it was as delightful as watching the dating version of Get Out. I think that would be the thing it's most closely comparable to. And absolutely just a delight, a total delight delight i kind of don't want to spoil anything more about it by giving away any more of the plot but like bravo so fun i uh i enjoyed it as well not as much as you but corporate cannibal will live with me forever um sebastian stan is fantastic in this movie he is he is fully sinking his teeth into this part.

I have, of course, not been a woman who has had to try to date men in the world. And so I don't have as much insight into the horrors of this experience. But it's a very clever, you know,

very transparent metaphor for the challenges there. And a couple, I would say just a couple of the genre elements at the end of the movie like lost me a little, I would say just a couple of the genre elements at the end of the movie like lost me a little bit. But when it was unfolding,

I was like, this rules. This is so funny and so clever the way that it's been constructed. And Daisy Edgar Jones, who fans of normal people may want to know that this is kind of her first starring film role.

And she's terrific. And it's a slightly different tone. It's not this is not a melodrama by any stretch of the imagination it's somewhere between horror and satire and at some in some cases even like pure dramedy so um fresh is great i'm glad you picked it my number one is probably a lot of the number one for a lot of people it's a movie that has taken a lot of people by surprise it was an opening night movie i mentioned it earlier it's fire of love this is sarah dose's documentary that feels completely unreal if you told me this was the

premise for a wes anderson movie i would believe you all the way down to the red beanies that the two stars of this movie where it's about the uh the volcanologists and the the married couple katya and maurice craft who traveled the, rappelling down into volcanoes and exploring them and exploring their love for them and why they love them. I think a lot about documentary. I've done some work in documentary. We're always talking about archival. What is the footage? What exists? The footage in this movie is amazing because these are the people who in the 1970s were you know climbing down into volcanoes in kenya and spending time examining lava like the lava is real this is not cgi tommy lee jones movie lava this is a real these are active volcanoes that they're exploring

and trying to understand and also it's this incredible portrait of two people who are, are dreamers, are adventurers, are, um, not always on the same page, you know, but are bound by this obsession that they have. And, uh, it's also in a somewhat like impish and somewhat meta way narrated by Miranda July as this kind of tone poem about their love. I think that that will turn some people off. I loved it. I thought it was a perfect choice for kind of narrating the fascinations between these two and the sort of like metaphysical and physical romance between them that I just really, really loved. And it's almost like a love triangle with the volcanoes and these two people. So Fire of Love, I loved it. What did you think of that movie? I mean, I am one of the people who was turned off by the Miranda July narration,

for sure. It felt a little bit too twee. But that said, I could see myself muting it and just staring at these images forever. And I appreciated how much I actually wound up learning about lava. Yes. If you had asked me before if I saw this film film, like what's the most dangerous kind of volcano? I would have said the one with all the bright red magma spilling out of it. And for them to say, no, no, no, no. You need to be worried about like the gray smoky ones.

Those are the ones where like the trauma comes from. I would have been astounded. I mean, I love a documentary where you feel like you're not just like learning information. There's like an emotional story kind of pulling you through. And Katya being kind of pulling you through and katya being

kind of like this you know as as a younger person sort of like hyperactive figure very honest and blunt about things saying like yeah when we're walking on lava i make marisco first because he's heavier so if like anything happens like you know it'll at least break under him and not under me um all of that i really enjoyed like this i think I didn't really think that volcanoes were a problem. Is that a weird thing to say? of people can die in the face of these natural disasters and so the movie is very sensitive about that i don't want to make it seem too whimsical because there is real loss and toll in the film but i agree i did not realize there were so many that were so active over the last half century no i mean neither and i think this film does a really great job of sort of saying like they figured out how to have fewer people die in volcanoes and then when it doesn't work out it's like there's there's a volcano explosion here that takes place in chile in the 80s i'd never

heard of and the the death toll in that was astounding i had to look it up to be like is this documentary telling me the truth are that many people dying in volcanoes and nothing is being done about it like what is happening here um and i thought all of that was like devastating so it is strange like you're a kid right and you're like magma the floor is magma and like to have a film that like manages to say like there's actual magma in the world it is beautiful it is poetic it is dangerous it is it is it is astounding that like these two people who live in a kind of the same area found each other fell in love had the same passion for volcanoes even that feels like a natural like a not a natural disaster what's the opposite of a disaster a natural miracle miracle i guess so a natural miracle that the crafts found each other

and could spend their life their life that was brought short doing this doing this amy this was a a beautiful poetic and and natural naturally occurring miracle to chat with you on the show today thanks for joining me thanks for doing sundance with me i it. Oh, I hope we get to do it over snow and whiskey next year. Do you know how much I love putting a snowball in my whiskey? We can dare to dream. That's sort of the opposite of a volcano. Thanks so much to Amy. Now let's go to my conversation with joachim treer the director of one of my favorite films of 2021 or 2022 i'm not sure what to call it but joachim thanks for being here thank you for having me so i wanted to ask you straight away about your co-writing collaboration. I'm always interested in co-writers and how they work together. With Eskil Volk, are you in the same room? Are you

back to back? Is this an old school Hepburn and Tracy movie? How do you guys do it? Thanks for the question. No, I love talking about Eskil. Eskil and I have been film geek friends since we were in our late teens. And we both went to film school as directors. I went to London, he went to Paris, and I was fortunate enough to have him come along on our first collaboration reprise to write a feature film. And we've done five films together since then. And he's also, I must mention, directed two wonderful films that I have nothing to do with creatively other than to be just his friend.

He made a film called Blind and the Innocence. The Innocence is coming out in America soon. So watch that. Well, how do we work? We sit in a room. We feel always very anxious and that we're shit and we don't know what to do. And we start talking about movies and we start talking about what kind of movies. And we have a bookshelf filled with film books

and old sight and sounds and film comments and old cahiers du cinéma. And we talk about cinema history and we get into the zone and it takes a few months. And then we start procrastinating by talking about our lives and what we're going through. And then slowly out of that, ironically enough, very often the material arrives.

So we think we want to make a romantic comedy in this case with the worst person in the world. And we kind of do for a while. And we play around, we watch romantic comedies and, you know, see what... But then ultimately we end up making something which has, I guess, a bit more of a naturalist flavor of where we're from ourselves and people we know and that kind of thing. So Eskil and I sit in the room together and we kind of come out with something and show it in a nervous fashion to people. And in all the five

cases, it's turned into a feature film. So touch wood. So far, so good. Does one person man the laptop and another person is standing and pacing around the room? How do you practically do it? Practically, it goes through phases. So first, we talk a lot and Eskil always takes the notes. Then we have like a phone book of silly notes. We try to structure and then maybe by then we know what we need because we have like a character and some themes.

Maybe we even have a lot of specific formal scenes. We work from the outside and innovate. We want it to be pieces of cinema, like music on an album. Like we have like five, six hits. We got some set pieces. We got some moments we want to film. And then we make an outline, like try to put it down on a line,

like make it a quick text document, just noting down in order what we think is the order. And then we start writing it out. At that moment, Eskil writes out and he sends me versions of scenes. So we talk, he writes, I edit. And it goes in a circle like that until we have a feed, like a first draft. The biggest moment for us is the first one sitting read through. Early in the morning, cup of coffee. We always plan a kind of a soundtrack that we play that we know will last for, you know, two or three hours. We sit in each, you know, and read.

And when we're done, we have like a big talk that could last all night about editing and structuring. And we do it again and again. And we very often quickly then redraft thoroughly for a couple of weeks. And then we have what we call the first draft. And those two weeks, we got to tell everyone in our lives that, you know, just leave us alone. This is going to be crazy. And it's really like hardcore.

And we quickly do turnovers of drafts and read. I believe in the experience of one sitting read throughs, getting a sense of time. The temporality is the dramaturgy to us. It's not literature. It's the imagined film in your mind as you read it through. When you set that soundtrack, does that have anything to do with the soundtrack of the film you're going to make? Yeah. Like sometimes you don't want too many lyrics. So we could end up in a kind of a rut with like a lot of Tangerine Dream, but that's always a good thing. Or some classical music mixed in or, you know, but, but sometimes in this case, you know, there's an Art Garfunkel

old Bossa Nova cover at the end of the film, for example, that we, we already knew we wanted. So we dropped that in there. And what if it coincided with another moment or, you know, so we, we, we work with music in the room all the time. Music is very important to us. I'm interested in that conversation with your families. You say you're pulling in part from your own lives when you're making a film like this. This is a, you know, an emotionally radical film. All of your films are, but this one, it feels like you're pulling from something very real. It's a deeply specific script and film.

Do you have to prepare your families and the people in your lives to say hey i we may have borrowed we may have picked and choosed over these experiences we've had together i yeah not really i think what happens is that you start out with something and then it turns into something else and it develops and then the actors come in and it takes a new shape because i go through big um we not big, but at least amendments to the script after I've done a bit of rehearsal to make sure that the actors are also, you know, they feel the character, maybe they come in with some input. So at the end of it, there are bits and pieces that might be very specifically from our lives, moments, discussions,

problems. As an example, you know, like, I'm in my 40s now, I have been that person in a relationship early on that did not want children and the other one wanted and then I've been that person who wanted children and the other one did not want children, for example. So I know both sides of that discussion, like these things that come up, but it's not one to one. It's not like I'm trying to create a portrait of someone specific in my life or that it's real. And so I think I'm good, but I'm interested in not. Well, you said it, I'm not interested only in the sense of portraying something from reality. But I'm interested in the specificity of truth. I'm

interested in yearning for a feeling that something is more complex, allowed to be ambivalent because truth is never one sided. Like that's interesting. I'm not interested in emulating an event one to one with something that happened in my life. 15 years now, a long time. But have you even recently ever felt like you were standing on the sidelines of your own life? That's such a resonant part of the movie and of Julie's character. Is that something that you understood personally? I feel that in any life, regardless of how much drive or ambition you have, there was always going to be aspects that's going to be underdeveloped you know uh i worked very hard at becoming a filmmaker i and i it took me a while in my life to maybe achieve a sense of having a home that was stable and functioning in the way that i wanted

and in this film i feel i'm kind of writing it, I turned a page, I stepped into kind of a new era of my life. And I think there was a lot of grief of the past and a lot of sense of loss, sense of lost relationships, people that it was very dear to me that didn't work out. A lot of that material somehow, I'm sure fueled doing this film without again being you know one-to-one with any I can identify with actually all the characters in different ways but I kind of feel Eskil could too you know so it's hard to kind of this disassemble it afterwards but sure yeah no I I think there's something at play there I've heard you talk a bit about films like the Philadelphia story and some rom-coms that you've liked around this film.

But, you know, one of the things that I think makes it quite special is you're not just riffing on rom-coms, but you're taking this kind of absurdist visual flourish element. There's a melancholy in the film. Were there other hallmarks or other genres of movie that you were also kind of tapping into in addition to some of those 40s and 50s romantic comedies? Yeah, I mean, to me, the playfulness of Godard and Eric Romare, you know, that sense of having an actor who's aging, like Anders is throughout my first film reprise, Oslo August 31st,

and now the worst person in the world is, of course, you know, inspired by Truffaut or the wonderful Rich Linklater or, you know, like people who are working with actors in time, seeing them grow older. I mean, there's also Bergman at play here, obviously, because, you know, scenes from a marriage, we have it without revealing too much of the plot. And this is completely undersold in the promotion of the film but actually the third act of the film is a big big big reckoning with very very earnest straight talk between two people whose relationship will not ever happen again and they are talking very honestly uh about who they are who they were and who they thought they would be you know and i i think that

that doing a big drama chunk in this, which is kind of quite a melancholic piece of the film, is very inspired by dramatic cinema like Ingmar Bergman. You've mentioned that you wrote the part specifically for Renata. And, you know, despite the fact that you cast her, I guess, more than 10 years ago now, she has not done a lot of film work. Can you just tell me about her reaction when you approached her?

At what stage of the script writing did you even tell her you wanted her for this? I told her before the script was done because we couldn't write it with her in mind unless she would go along. So I met her and talked to her and I think she was very happy. And I worked with actors long enough to know that the moment after you give someone a part like maybe a day or two later you

should always call them and and they will always feel tremendously anxious I think all actors go through this imposter syndrome moment when my god he he thinks I'm someone that I'm not, and I'm not going to be able to pull it off. So even though she was very generous and brave and said yes, almost immediately, there was an ongoing dialogue about the whole thing. And I, of course, had to be honest and say, like, let's finish the script and you can read it. And she did. And that was perhaps the most scary and exciting moment because she really understood it and felt that it was very, it became very close to her immediately. So I think we were lucky that way that she went for it all the way and understood what we wanted to talk about in

the film. And I also think added a lot of her own input into it. In America, it is hard to get a film like this made with a relative unknown. Was it more difficult to get it made with a relative unknown and the lead of such a, I mean, she is truly, truly the central figure of the story. Did that present any challenges for you? No, we are very fortunate in Europe that our financing system is based on the project and the filmmakers, and not only cast contingent. You still, you have those filmmakers in America as well,

and several of them, but, you know, we don't have a star system like that. And no, so I'm very grateful. And I have Final Cut, we shoot on 35. I prioritize time with the actors to try to create something special where we could be taking risks as we were shooting and stuff. So I think, and it's all my fifth film, you know, you tend to get more production sophisticated with experience, like knowing where to put the money and not kind of. So I feel that in this one, we were lucky to have the time to thoroughly explore,

which was a necessity when we were training a lead actor who had not done that before. But actually, as it turned out, was very, very, very good. And I was never in a situation with Renata where she did anything bad, but it was like, how far can we push it? What can we do? Like how many, how can we, how can we really find time to explore it properly? Did you know the film's title before you started writing the script? No, it was actually one of the chapter titles. And, and we realized that, you know, actually, at least in Norway, it's a saying, the worst person in the world.

It's about failure. It's something you say about yourself when you feel like you failed. Like, oh, I'm the worst person in the world. Was the chapter's style of storytelling meant to be novelistic? Was it meant to be a series of recombined memories? Like, what was the actual purpose of using that structure? First of all, it was like a way to, again, you have all these support wheels as you go into writing a movie to have some faith that it'll be anything good.

So it allowed us like a contract with the viewers that we could mix and match a lot of varied material, in lack of a better term. We could have fun and sadness and, and a conceptual scene here and there, and something could be short, something could be long. And Eskil and I are very interested in trying to find a kind of a musical way to, to, to do dramaturgy, you know, not just the classical sort of three or five act structure.

But it then also started becoming fun that the chapters allowed us to jump ahead in time, tell a longer, bigger story of someone's life and have these ellipses, these missions of events that the audience could fill in. And also, Julie has these grand expectations of life, doesn't she? So she probably perceived her life, consciously or unconsciously, as a grand novel or something. But I'm not interested in emulating literature, but I'm interested in how literary tropes can free a film to be more filmic. Like a narrator, our third person narrator in the story

never tells us anything deeply important. It's there to play around with, more than anything, Julie's sense of self-consciousness and situations and stuff like that. Could you see yourself returning to Julie's story down the road? It's interesting. One of the reasons I am very, very passionate about feature films as opposed to doing continual TV shows. And this is just very personal. I'm not judging and I do enjoy several, several TV shows with several episodes, but it's the fact that to do the kind of character work that I do,

where I think a lot of the character is also about inviting the audience to identify and imagine the untold to fill themselves. And there's a sense of absence that sounds maybe cold and intellectual, but I mean it in the best way that you don't need like, like Julie is both someone we know, but she's also a mystery to the audience as she is a mystery to herself. So to end the story, exactly what we do is the power of the feature film. Like then afterwards, people will imagine where she will go, who she will be, who, and take her her with them so in a way i want to answer no to the question i it's important for me that it's finite it stops and that that was that little

moment of julie's story that we saw and she can hopefully live on and be imagined by the audience if they care about her but having said that you know who knows yeah i just I feel like this is it seems like your most acclaimed film. I think people are going to build a very big relationship to this movie and to this character. And I wonder if more and more people start asking you about this in the future. Feels plausible. Well, thank you. Like, no, you're the first. But let's see.

For now, this is it, guys. You know, we'll see what happens. I want to ask you about Anders quickly. Obviously, you have this incredible collaboration going with him over time. He's an extraordinary figure in the world at large, generally. But his character is fascinating to me. And Axel seems like someone who is a familiar figure in these times of culture war. And I'm kind of curious what that character represents to you and what you and Anders talked about, about how to build him out to.

Yeah, no, I think Anders is doing some of his great greatest acting ever in this film. And just because he's not the lead, I think it's worth talking about it because he really went out on a limb. So this character of Axel is a graphic novelist, comes from sort of late 80s and early 90s, kind of punk anarchist subculture, uncensored, you know, from the hip kind of stuff that in my generation, in terms of music, comedy, comic books, movies, was considered a sense of anti-authoritarian freedom. It was the right thing to do politically was to say, fuck the rules, fuck the parents, fuck the bourgeoisie, fuck the power. Let's do our thing. Let's talk honestly. Let's talk about how messy it is to be a human being and have a slight sense of humor, all that stuff that I've embraced. And then realizing in the case of Axel, that in that big sense of freedom,

it was still maybe not the free perspective for everyone. And that a young woman later in the film says to him, listen, in a debate show on TV, I'm not canceling you. I'm just saying you should really be aware that some of the portraits of women in your funny comic books wasn't so cool for women because they had, you know, they were portrayed in a kind of cliched way. And he gets very hurt by her critique because she finds him archaic and outdated. And he thought he was doing the right thing. And in a way, I'm not interested in judging either of them.

I understand where he's coming from. And I understand that he's sad about that. And I also understand her. She probably has a good, in this imagined universe, I'm sure she has a very good point to what she's saying. So I'm interested in the debate more, the humor and sadness of the debate more than I am in picking aside and saying that everyone's,

you know, I'm a humanist. Everyone has their reason. The place of art right now is also to try to understand each other and not just be a part of that aggressive climate that a lot of people are building at the moment. I thought it was a very perceptive structure. You know, Joaquin, we end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers, what's the last great thing they have seen? You were, of course, a cinephile. Have you seen anything great lately? Yeah, I have actually. Tell me.

Oh, I could mention several. Flea, the Danish animation documentary. Yes. What did you like about it? Oh, man, it's touching and smart. Jesus, that's great. Come On, Come On by Mike Mills. Wonderful film.

Subtle perspective on America and this day and age, you know, wonderful film. I would say The Souvenir Part Two by Joanna Hogg. For those of you, Part One and Two, both magnificent films. I think The Green Knight by David Lowery. Brilliant, brilliant film. Very smart, completely unexpected. You know, like the most original thing I saw this year, the most recent Wes Anderson film, see it on a big screen. What amazingly generous of ideas that film is, you know,

and let me finish by Céline Sciamma, Le Petit Maman. Jesus, it's a masterpiece. She's the, you know, she's the Bresson today. I don't know how she does it. So simple, yet so emotional and philosophically complex. So that was more than three. But anyway, like, and I could go on, but there, there's a lot of great movies out there. I've been really thrilled lately over great stuff I've seen. That is a bounty of recommendations. I absolutely adore The Worst Person in the World. So thanks for doing the show today thank you very much sean

thanks our pal amy nicholson for potting with me today and thank you to joachim treer and thank you to the producer of today's episode donnie beach and for filling in for bobby wagner stay tuned to the show later this week cr will be back and we'll be talking about one of the most anticipated movie experiences of the year. Jackass forever. See you then.