The Big Picture - The Prestige Dirtbag Movie: A Celebration

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

Sean is joined by Chris Ryan to break down the new Paul Schrader film ‘The Card Counter,’ explore Schrader’s seminal works, and define one of their favorite movie subgenres: the Prestige Dirtbag Movie. What is it and why do they love them (0:30)? Then, Sean and Chris review James Wan’s ‘Malignant’ before discussing the state of horror movies in 2021 (59:00). Host: Sean Fennessey Guest: Chris Ryan Producer: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Press Box is here to catch you up on the latest media stories. Hosted by Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker, these guys have the insight on the biggest stories you care about. Check out The Press Box on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sean Fennessey, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about dirtbags. CR is back. What's up, Chris Ryan? What's up, man? So I'm a little bit nervous because I feel like you and I are about to enter the phase of our relationship where like I'm Worm and you're Mike McD.

And you have me on to corrupt you and talk about card counter and like the more like really like the gross part aspects of your cultural life. And then like everything with everybody else is just like Pixar movies and sunshine and lollipops. Yeah, I think that's right. You have always been the ferryman to hell for me. You've always been someone that I have sought out to take me on a journey

into pain and power and pleasure and the films of Paul Schrader, which is one of the things we'll be talking about on today's episode. The card counter is in theaters. Every Paul Schrader movie is a personal event for me and sometimes for Chris as well. So we'll talk about that movie a little bit. And that movie got me thinking about a certain kind of movie, Chris, that you and I really, really like. And I don't know if I've ever been able to wrap my arms around this concept before, but it dawned on me after watching The Card Counter. There's a certain kind of movie called The Prestige Dirtbag Movie. That's what we're going to call it, in which a certain kind of man,

sometimes woman, but often man, emerges with some troubles, but also some point of view that is perhaps compelling to us in a certain way. So we'll talk about that. We'll talk about a couple of other things in the movie world, including Malignant, the new James Wan movie, which hit HBO Max this weekend, and is also in theaters. Let's talk about some big news out of the movie world first, though, CR. So your boy, Chris Nolan, is a free agent. A few months back, when the news about HBO Max's

day and date strategy came to the fore, he was very unhappy. I believe he described HBO Max as the worst streaming service, which indicated that perhaps he would never be working with Warner Brothers again, the studio with which he has made almost all of his movies. And so now he's got a new film about J. Robert Oppenheimer and about the development of the atomic bomb. And he's shopping it to various studios. One, how are you feeling about the prospect of the Oppenheimer movie from Nolan? Okay, let's go through this step by step. First of all, anything Christopher Nolan wants to do, I'm into it. I saw some people online mentioning that this doesn't feel Nolan. This seems like I don't really see a Nolan kind of entryway here to this point.

I completely disagree. I think world-changing power and world-changing scientific evolution is very much at the heart of what he's interested in and how our perception of time and reality and our own destruction can be changed in just a snap. So I think that that's very much in his wheelhouse. You mentioned that he thinks HBO Max is the worst streaming service. I got to know what Christopher Nolan thinks is the best streaming service. Do you think, is Nolan just on Tubi? He's like, these guys have a great library. You know?

Maybe like a big Crunchyroll guy, you know, super into the anime. I don't know. What else could he be into, you think? I think he loves Girls 5 Ever. He's probably just like, just grinding out some Peacock shows that didn't get enough love last year. Well, Peacock is interesting here

because Peacock and Universal could be the home for this movie. Sony could be the home for this movie. Both of those have been suggested. Obviously, he's going to want a theatrical release. That's what's most important to Christopher Nolan right now. Sony very famously in 2019 when Quentin Tarantino went looking for a home

offered him safe harbor in the theatrical movie business and released Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Nolan and QT are pals. I could see that being a thing. Tom Rothman is still building a business that is almost entirely around theatrical. They don't have a streaming service to speak of. The Universal thing is interesting because we just got news that Halloween Kills, the sequel to David Gordon

Green's Halloween movie from 2018, is now going day and date as well. It's going to be available in theaters and also available to viewers who have premium Peacock subscription. Is that something you have, Chris? I do. I have, I'm essentially like in the champagne room of every single streaming service at this point. Does that mean that the strippers are the content you're watching? No, I just mean like whatever the tier is that you just don't have to watch ads and you could just get everything.

I feel like I'm subscribed to Shudder on five different platforms somehow. Yeah, I know the feeling. We're getting a little bit of bloat. And that actually leads me to another conversation, which is that Paramount just replaced their studio chief, Jim Giannopoulos, this morning with Brian Robbins, who had previously been running Nickelodeon. All of those things are obviously under the Viacom banner. And that also seems like an indication maybe that the theatrical movie business is not as important as the streaming business. You know, taking over Paramount also means, you know, taking over Paramount Plus in many respects. Be interesting to see what Brian Robbins does there. But it all kind of feels like the tributaries of movie content are flowing into your television these days, which makes Nolan like a real outlier.

Yeah, I mean, it does feel like with the sort of Game of Thrones with all these studio chiefs and who's running what at which streaming service or which conglomerate which also has a streaming service, it feels like you either get a movie person, a TV person, or a tech person. And

under that tech person might be a couple of content people. I think that obviously the, the Warner set up with Jason Kilar was there and now he's gone. But like Casey boys obviously still has a huge, he basically runs HBO and HBO max to some extent. So I think that like, we're going to see a lot of,

um, shuffling of the deck like that, this, but Jim Giannopoulos was like one of the, one of the people who was sort of kind of still guarding the gates right like he he's an old school movie boss yeah and like it's been you were talking about it with amanda but like the top gun just moving top gun because they just want top gun to be a blockbuster and they want to maintain their relationship with

tom cruise and christopher mccorry and make sure that they're in that business going forward. So yeah, I mean, I think that that's probably not a great sign, although I have a hard time believing that Brian Robbins is going to be like, Tom, here's how it's going to go. Mission Impossible is going to be up on Peacock or Paramount+. It's hard to say, right? Because Brian Robbins' big move of

late was not only greenlighting the Paw Patrol movie, but which I believe you guys discussed on The Watch recently, because Andy is a huge Paw Patrol movie, but which I believe you guys discussed on the watch recently because Andy is a huge Paw Patrol guy, loves copaganda. And I think that the idea there with Paw Patrol was it did good business in theaters, but also was available day and date on Paramount Plus. And maybe that indicated that Robbins had a better sense of kind of the layout, the Top Gun news and the Mission Impossible pushback news. Ultimately,

I think Ginopolis going out indicates to me that that was very much about Tom Cruise and not about Jim Ginopolis, his future at Paramount. So we'll see what happens. Everything seems to feel like these day and date. Like when's the last time there was a day and date on streaming movie that you feel like was the talk of the weekend? You know what I mean? Like, was it was it the Snyder cut? Like, I'm trying to remember when it was like, man,

it's Friday. Everybody's going to watch the same movie. It's a very good question. Maybe Godzilla versus Kong, I felt like. So we haven't really had it all summer, right? Not really. I mean, I don't feel like Black Widow was really the talk of the town until Scarlett Johansson announced that she was suing Disney. That's when it really became a flashpoint. But there have been movies that have been just theatrical releases that have done really good business and I think have had strong word of mouth. Quiet Place 2, F9, now Shang-Chi. All of these films actually did pretty well in theaters. And so I think movies can still do well in theaters. I'm hoping there's another movie that does well in theaters this year, Chris. We got a little bit of news about the most important movie of the year and maybe the millennia, frankly. The movie that I'm talking about has a new title. It was heretofore known on this podcast and elsewhere as Soggy Bottom. Yeah. Initially it was untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Project. And then the, what seemed like a joke title, Soggy Bottom. And now a new title. The new title is

Licorice Pizza. Yes. Licorice Pizza. I'm going to repeat that again just so people hear me clearly. Licorice Pizza is the name. And this, in fact, these are not just

the first two words that are on Sean's shopping list when he goes to a grocery store. You pointed out to me this morning, and these are big facts, licorice and pizza, probably my favorite things to eat on earth. And so when I first saw this news, I was like, am I being trolled by someone? In fact, I learned this news via DM. Someone reached out to me, someone out in the world, because they saw the trailer for this movie, which apparently is playing in random movie theaters, particularly the New

Beverly and the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles before repertory screenings of Pedro Almodovar films, before showings at the New Beverly. Unannounced, the trailer for this movie just starts playing and the title appears, Licorice Pizza. Now, is this a troll job? Is this an act of brilliant Banksy-esque movie bombing? Is it a foolish marketing strategy? I don't care. It's all amazing to me. How do you feel about licorice pizza? I feel the same way.

I feel for you the way I would feel if Michael Mann made a movie called Mezcal Sixers. I'm very happy for you. I can't wait to see it licorice pizza for what it's worth i did a little digging was the name of a record store chain in the 1970s so i'm very excited about the aspect the musical aspect of this movie which will probably be the record store is a place where people gather or hang out or maybe some of the people work uh there are not enough movies and tv shows set in record stores. They're an incredible incubator for free thinking. So I'm just like, what is it? I can't wait. I can't wait. So this is coming in November, right?

It's coming in November, at least as far as I heard. I tell you right last week, the film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman's son, Cooper Hoffman, that was confirmed as well as one of the Heim sisters. And it also starsley cooper as john peters the famed hairdresser turned hollywood mogul a fascinating figure in movie history for sure and the fun thing about this movie too is that the san fernando valley is really valhalla for for pta and this is his big return after a visit to the UK for Phantom Thread. And Licorice Pizza was a hallmark of 1970s youth. It was a record store that if you lived in the Valley, you often visited. So this had previously been described for people who had read the script as PTA's American Graffiti or his Dazed and Confused. And now that really seems like it's going to be

the case. I love American Graffiti and Dazed and and days and confused as do you so all signs point to this being a very good fall at least for me a bit it's a really big time for the valley for me um not only do i play some golf out there but i've been reading william finnegan's barbarian days which has like a lot of set in san fernando valley because he went to high school in woodland hills. I'm still on this surfing jag, so I'm reading Barbarian Days. And yeah, I wonder if we should do a live big pic in the valley when Licorice Pizza drops. I thought you were going to say like on a surfboard, a live big picture. Could we both go out into the ocean with our recording gear? Wax, can you pull that off for us?

Yeah, it would be fun to do something valley-centric, a valley-centric episode. Obviously, we'll be doing a lot of PTA content around there. Uh, Chris, how's your golf game? Uh, it's, it's okay. So I'm playing of probably like the, the nicest course I've ever played. I'm playing next week and I'm incredibly worried about like, I'm just, I have a lot of nerves about that. I have a lot of stage fright. Do you want to share what the course is? It's it's Riviera. Riv. Yeah. Playing Riv. Yeah. So stage fright. Do you want to share what the course is? It's Riviera. Riv? You're playing Riv? Yes. So what are you doing to prepare? Talk us through this quickly.

Well, I played on Monday and I feel like I found some things out about myself on the back nine. And I'm hoping to take those learnings and iterate on them. The thing about golf is that you can be good for like 10 minutes and you're like, okay, cool. Let me like hit pause on life and always be this good at this sport. And then it will slip away from you so fast, which is also why we love golf, right? It's also why we love Paul Schrader movies. You just described a Paul Schrader movie. I think Paul Schrader, if he's going to look at another man playing game of chance, should consider training his lens upon you on the golf course.

That's right. Let's talk about the card counter, CR. There's a lot of prayer involved in my golf game. A stoic examination of one man's failures and triumphs. The card counter is, I believe, the 22nd feature film directed by Paul Schrader. It stars Oscar Isaac, a huge favorite of both mine and Chris's. He stars as William Tell in X-Con traveling around the country playing games of chance in casinos. He plays low to modest stakes, grinds out a living, and never stops moving until he meets two people

in the span of one week. One is named Lalinda. She's a gambling stable manager played by Tiffany Haddish. And the other is Kirk with a C played by Ty Sheridan, who you may remember from Mud and many other films in recent years. So Lalinda wants a piece of Tell's future, and Kirk wants a piece of his past. Film travels from Abu Ghraib all the way to the

World Series of Poker in a pretty tense but austere character study about a dangerous man trying to figure out his place in the world after doing some bad things. I thought it was a great movie. What did you think? Yeah, I really enjoyed this movie a lot, and it was also a real thrill to be watching something where i was

like man anything could happen in this movie and i don't mean that in a plot twist way i mean in an emotional way i mean in a psychological way i mean in a tonal way like whether they would kind of engage in some really like obvious uh kind of scene gag humor or just like incredibly upsetting portraits of a torturer, frankly, a war criminal. And it's just such an amazing kind of career on Schrader's part. I mean, I was rewatching Light Sleeper recently, and these are essentially the same movies like he is a guy who has um a set of interests that he approaches from different angles over and over and over again and i also find it so fascinating to look at his filmography and his career from the dueling perspectives of this like european style auteur who is just like i i need final cut. I need to have this exact vision replicated on screen.

And then also a relatively well-regarded, I mean, very well-regarded, not gun for hire, but like Hollywood screenwriter. Yeah, he operates in a very unique strata. He's one of the last new Hollywood filmmakers who's still active. You know, if you think about Coppola or Bogdanovich or all of those guys,

they don't really make very many films anymore. De Palma is not really very active these days obviously Martin Scorsese who is probably best known as his key collaborator and is an executive producer on the card counter is still also like 11 executive producers honestly it's more like 25 I've never seen quite so many people I did because there's that title card in the beginning where it's just like all the executive producers. I think it must have just been anybody who went over a certain threshold of funding. I think that's accurate. I think particularly because this movie had a lot of COVID-19 sort of stop and start delay trouble. I heard you talking about this on The Watch recently about the number of TV shows that are experiencing this too. This is a film that at times, if it feels flawed or a little bit rough around the edges,

I think it's reasonable to attribute that to the way that the production kind of started and stopped again. There are a lot of shots full of people in empty rooms. That also seems like a symptom of what had been happening in the world. Nevertheless, I think Schrader really retains the tonality, the intensity, the sort of like who knows where this conversation and this story will go feeling that you're describing.

Also just features an absolutely, kind of like predictably excellent Oscar Isaac role here. Like he's really, really great at these kind of nodded internal men who are just like begging to scream out and get one or two moments of exultation throughout a film, but otherwise are just like begging to scream out and get one or two moments of exaltation throughout a

film, but otherwise are just tied so tightly. And that's a perfect kind of performance style for someone who gambles. Obviously, Chris, I love to play poker. This movie was of significant interest to me. I think I first mentioned it on the show in January of 2020 when I was talking about the most anticipated movies of the year. Here we are all the way 18, 19 months later. I guess as far as the gambling stuff goes, you like to gamble, but certainly not as much as me. There's a lot of detail about how the games work and how they're executed. For some people, if you're a big fan of Rounders or California Split, you already know a lot of this stuff.

But if you're not, it might be new to you. How did you feel like that stuff tracked with the rest of the film? It reminded me a lot of the sort of opening scenes of Color of Money, where they're talking a lot about Nineball. And even if they're using the lexicon of pool, so you don't ever actually get the four dummies part. The thing that I thought was actually most effective in the gambling side of this movie was the intentional ugliness of the film.

It is lit the way casinos are lit. And you get this huge charge of energy when you're arriving at a casino. I don't know. I've never been to one in Tunica, but maybe you get a charge when you're going to one of them. But when you're going to Atlantic City or Las Vegas, and you're like, Vegas, baby, Vegas,

and this is going to be so awesome. And you walk in, and it smells like 500 people smoking while playing PyGow. And you're just like, oh, right. This is what I drove across a desert to do to myself. And the lighting in the movie very much is what the lighting in casinos is like, where you're just kind of like, this is kind of hurting my eyes, but I also know I'll never go to sleep. Yes. Fluorescent and neon, and you never know what time of day it is. You really never know what time of day it is. You really never know what time of day it is in every scene

of the movie. But not in the cool Nicholas Wending Refn way. No, no, no. Like ugly. It's not bright and intoxicating. It's a dulling of the senses in order to allow you to engage more deeply in the games, which I thought was really effective. I feel like Schrader seems much more interested in the gambling aspect

of the film in the first half of the movie where he's kind of explaining how to count cards, essentially what it means to count cards when you're playing blackjack, specifically the rules of poker and what some of the moves you need to make on poker are. maybe we should have a sidebar about Paul Schrader giving interviews as a genre of content in 2021. But in interviews, he has said like he's not a gambler necessarily, at least wasn't before he started this film. But he was interested in people who were engaging in this kind of world. And he does this right. Like in all of his films, he identifies these character archetypes, you know, in Light Sleeper, Willem Dafoe plays a drug dealer in autofocus. It focuses on Bob Crane, an actor. It's all of these people who have these sort of like performative roles. These people who have jobs in which they need to execute at a high level in order to be great. And in some cases, what they do is dangerous. So it's a healthy framework for a movie that ultimately does kind of sort of become about torture and the history of, you know, like american sin in the 21st century yeah it's like it's base

and basically how do you expunge you know sin from yourself which is as a calvinist and obviously he's just like enormously concerned with his soul you know and what's gonna happen to it so i gotta say i am not a very spiritual person in general and i've been trying to figure out what it is about schrader's movies that I, that click with me because they almost all of them click. One of my very favorite movies of the last 10 years is First Reformed. I talked about it a lot. That was his last movie, of course,

the Ethan Hawke movie in which he plays a priest going through what could lightly be called a crisis of faith. And I'm trying to, obviously I was raised Catholic. And when you're raised Catholic, you get this sense of doom, guilt, and foreboding built into your DNA at a very young age. But I don't ever think about God. I don't even really think about

the nature of existence very often. And yet I watch a Paul Schrader movie and I feel like something clicks in for me. What do you think, like, I know you like his movies too. What is it that cinephiles and people who like these kinds of stories click into? I think that there's, well, first of all, they have an unmistakable rhythm and voice. And a lot of the times the acting seems to come from a very specific Schrader school. He clearly has a thing that he says to the Willem Dafoe's and

Oscar Isaacs and in The Late Sleeper, Susan Sarandon and Dana Delaney and in this movie Tiffany Haddish and Ty Sheridan and where he's asking them to give I would say a relatively flat performance you know to just say the words and almost without a ton of inflection or tone and you can see actually in this film uh we don't have to give away like anything and plot wise, but Tiffany Haddish, I think, is a really interesting casting choice because she is a naturally charismatic person who I think at times is trying to pull back on the delivery of her lines. And it's really interesting to watch her as a scene partner with Isaac. They have quite a bit of chemistry, and it's quite, honestly honestly an entertaining relationship for the most

part but you can tell that like schrader has something very specific he's going for and then he almost cast haddish as a way to like push the limits on on what he could do and what she could do in terms of that tension between what he asks of people in terms of what you're saying though about like how does a non-religious or non-spiritual person approach the work of paul schrader i think that there's aside from the aesthetics of it you probably are attracted deeply to the the discipline of the characters and like the aesthetic kind of spare sparse minimal it's really just like emotion and action on a stage it's not really cluttered with a lot of bric-a-brac and tchotchkes and distractions. It's very pure. I think that's it. I think you boiled down what appeals to me about it. When Schrader talks about his movies, he talks about Robert Bresson and Ozu and filmmakers who

also are similarly minimal and a bit removed from their subjects, but not unemotional in a way um and transcendentalism is a you know a kind of filmmaking that he really likes and he really speaks to but he has these fascinating collisions with of western influence like his movies are often very violent at times and they're very sexual at times you mentioned light sleeper there's this like you know robbing yeah tantric sex scene between dana delaney and willem dafoe in that movie that is like as sensual and kind of unnerving as anything you'll see this is the guy who made cat people and made american gigolo he's very interested in the body and the flesh but also seems like kind of a strange man who owns a lot of guns. And so there's just this unusual mixture, this conflagration of feelings and ideas in his movies that really makes him

one of a kind. What are some of his other movies that you like? Well, I would say that I really enjoy a lot of the scripts he's written for Martin Scorsese. They've all been, they're some of the great Scorsese films like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and Last Temptation of Christ, and then sort of a lesser known one, Bringing Out the Dead, which is the film with Nicolas Cage about an ambulance, a paramedic. So I really enjoy his collaborations with Scorsese specifically. Other than that, I mean, obviously First Reformed and Light Sleeper, we mentioned he's had a lot of really catastrophic, interesting disasters. His Exorcist film is quite weird. That was made, scrapped, reshot in that story, it was certainly fascinating to see his take on it, which is, as you can imagine, incredibly spiritual in nature. Yeah. I don't know if I like that movie, but it's one of the

more interesting curios. It's called Dominion, the Exorcist film that both he and Rennie Harlan directed, which is so strange. I really like Hardcore. Me, you, and Bill Simmons have joked many times about Hardcore. Great meme. Yeah. Great meme. George C. Scott watching the film in which his daughter performs pornographic acts. You know, I will say since having a daughter, I'll bet that film hits different. Maybe I should check that one out.

You know, Mishima, Life in Four Chapters is a film I've talked about on this show before. I think, speaking of Ozu, that seems like his ode really to the Asian cinema that he grew up loving in the 50s and 60s. I mentioned Autofocus. Honestly, most of his films are worth checking out, even those disasters. You know, he infamously wrote and directed, along with Brett Easton Ellis, The Canyons,

the film that digitally shot Lindsay Lohan film co-starring a porn star, actually. That was definitely the point where I was like, I bet Paul Schrader will never make another movie. And then he made First Reformed, right? He did. Well, I think he actually made a couple. He made a movie called Doggy Dog after that,

which was really violent and strange with Willem Dafoe and Nick Cage, which was taken away from him. And then there was the one where Nick Cage plays a blind CIA agent, right? I think that's The Dying of the Light light yeah that also got taken away from him i think or maybe it was the dying of the light that got taken away from him not doggy dog but he has had his wars over the years and as you said at the top he likes to have direct like final cut he likes to be in control of his stories

because honestly his stories are such high wire acts that if you put them in somebody else's hands they're almost certainly going to screw them up. He's far from a perfect filmmaker. He's made plenty of movies that don't work. We didn't mention Affliction, for example, which was like a comeback for him all the way back in 1997. Yeah. So Russell Banks adaptation.

Yeah. He's had a, he's had a huge career. He's almost all of his movies are worth checking out. He's also, he's an interesting cultural figure right now. He talks a lot. He's active on Facebook. Every time he releases a movie, it seems like his movie studio tells him, please stop using Facebook and talking in public because you're going to damage the prospects of his movie. I would

argue it's going in the other direction. In fact, he is intoxicating his weird fan base. I think he also knows that now. I agree. I think he's become sentient around the internet. And sometimes he says things that are inappropriate

or hurtful or weird. Ultimately, he just sounds like a man in his late 70s. And I don't know that I'm necessarily going to hold that against him. I look on in fascination

as he continuously implodes without ever really going away. If you want Paul Schrader content that is not just his facebook posts uh i would suggest checking out some of his film criticism he uh wrote a very specifically an essay for film comment called cannon fodder which is largely about how he didn't write a book for faber about the the film canon like he was going to do a

harold bloom-esque survey of the canon of cinema and was going back and forth about what my book would have been had I written it and stuff. And the essay itself, written in 2006, kind of is an incredible snapshot into a lot of the stuff that we talk about on this pod. The idea of high and low art, the idea of whether or not we're living in the end of film,

whether we're going to live to see the end of high and low art, the idea of whether or not we're living in the end of film, you know, whether we're going to live to see the end of cinema, the end of culture in a lot of ways, and gets into a lot of stuff about like what he calls, I think, post art or works of Tarantino. He draws a lot on Pauline Kael. He talks a lot about Harold Bloom.

But if you're interested in thinking critically about cinema, specifically, but art in general, it's a fantastic essay. It's available as a PDF online. And also, if you want to get a little bit of a deeper look at him as a person, there was a film made a few years ago by a friend of the pod, Alex Ross Perry, called Man in a Room, which was made available on the Criterion channel, which is like a 30, 35-minute documentary about Schrader. And and obviously man in a room is a riff on something that you see in a lot of his films in a lot of his films his characters can be spotted

writing quietly in their journals after midnight with a glass of scotch in front of them there is of course another sequence like that in the card counter this is like he's a man of motifs and he is continuing to riff on his motifs all the way into mortality frankly uh the card counter i really i really liked it i i don't think it's going to be for everybody i recall uh riding really hard for first reformed when it was released and a lot of people wondering if i'm okay um i am okay but it's okay to admire these things i think people if people see the card counter which i hope they do because i think it's an incredible admire these things. I think people, if people see The Card Counter, which I hope they do because I think it's an incredible

Oscar Isaac performance and a really interesting movie at a time when even good movies are not always interesting. Good point. I hope people check it out if they have the stomach for it.

I will say that there is some pretty upsetting things in the film. It is gnarly. Yeah, I think he's just a really, really, really fascinating filmmaker and I always leave his movies thinking a lot about what I've seen, It is not only. Yeah. Like I think he's just a really, really, really fascinating filmmaker. And I always leave his movies thinking a lot about what I've seen,

which even like I'm saying, like even for movies that I really admire, I really enjoy. Sometimes I walk out, I'm like, got it. I'm going. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from real Canadian superstore with PC express shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today

and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Chris, last year you and I came together for an episode of this show about garbage crime. Yeah. Garbage crime is a sub-genre of movies that we love they are not the not top tier top shelf filmmakers necessarily not the glitziest or the most glamorous kind of movies they're a very specific brand of crime flick that is little discussed but has a huge audience and after we made that that episode which was critically acclaimed by the way that that pod um heard from a lot of people about who who felt a similar affinity

for movies like 21 Bridges. I'm hoping we can unlock something similar here. Now, this is a slightly headier subgenre of movie. Nevertheless, I do feel like there is a strong contingent of people who love them. And I'm talking about the prestige dirtbag. Paul Schrader is, he's sort of the shogun leader of the prestige dirtbag film. You know, he really, he has a true affinity for the prestige dirtbag.

But let's try to explain and unpack what this kind of movie is. So when I first started talking to you about this, what did you think? What do you think the origins of this figure are? Definitely the mid-70s and characters like Ratso Rizzo and Sonny from Dog Day Afternoon. But then I think it's important to note that there are two paths diverging into wood here. There is the prestige dirtbag, which is what we're concerned about, which I think is ultimately the films of Schrader, Michael Mann, Nicholas Nicholas went and ref in and like these kinds of very precise experts in their field who also are morally corrupted,

but in conversation about that corruption. Yes. And then it's worth noting that there is the prestige scumbag who I think is more like a Donnie Brasco, like a really meaty role for an actor of an ultimately doomed nincompoop. I think that the key distinction between dirt and scum is that a dirt bag, contrarily, is kind of elegant.

There's something kind of smooth about the dirt bag, whereas the scum bag is full of something that is gross, that can get on you and stain you. The dirt bag, whereas the scumbag is full of something that is gross that can get on you and stain you. So if people are trying to figure this out, this is a very obscure reference, but I think it's useful. Brad Pitt in Killing Them Softly is a prestige dirt bag. Ben Mendelsohn in Killing Them Softly is a prestige scumbag. Perfect. You nailed it perfectly. Let's talk about some other hallmarks. I've got a little list here of how you can identify a prestige dirtbag in the wild.

There's got to be some sort of trauma underneath his skin. It's usually him. I'd be curious to know who we think the prestige dirtbag S's are, if they exist. It's usually rooted in some sort of moral or religious persecution

at a young age. That's especially true in Schrader's films. But even in Michael Mann's films, among others, there's something simmering under the surface. This guy has read books not just about buildings, but about Shintoism. There's something else going on there. Existential despair and a death wish, really. Somebody who is consistently putting their life on the line in order to be an expert at something. Journaling, as I mentioned.

Chris, have you ever kept a journal? I did when I had a semester abroad in Ireland and Europe when I was in college. Where is that journal right now? It's right over here. Is it? Yeah, it's like right over on this bookshelf. And's a lot of like entries about how i need to be better about keeping the journal and also um about my uh preparing myself for what will be a long decades long career as one of america's great short story writers is that true well because in 1999 it just seemed like being richard ford was like a great career idea like it was just like oh yeah like i, I'm just going to crank out dope short stories for The New Yorker and plowshares.

Would you say that in your role as one of America's most beloved podcasters, you actually have evolved into the 21st century version of that thing you wanted to be? Well, I mean, mostly what I'm doing is reacting to Marvel shows, so I don't really know if that's true. I'm like, are they going to stick the landing on WandaVision or what? I think I had higher hopes for myself.

But you're doing so with such grace and such humor, such mirth, you know? Okay, well, I'd like to get my hands on that journal. Sure. You've got to be careful to see your heads when I raid your house. I will bequeath it to you. How about that?

Really? Yeah, sure. And who knows when that's going to be? What else will you give to me? Well, it'll be imminent. How old are you? You and Schrader were born in the same year. It's like licorice pizza and I'm out.

Will you give me anything else? Will you bequeath anything else to me? Do you want my PlayStation so you can play Red Dead Redemption? The answer is yes. Like a deep video gamer? I'm going to have to with a child in the house. You know, she won't be watching movies.

She's going to be playing games. That's going to be such a corrupting influence on you. If I do, if I do leave that to you in my will and you're just like, now I will become the greatest FIFA 21 player.

You were just going to be like, I didn't see that movie. Again, that sounds like a Paul Schrader film. You know. A man loses his closest friend and then he throws himself into a life of video game-dom. What are some other things that prestige dirtbags do? Well, Chris, they do crimes. They rob banks. They break into safes. They gamble at a high level. They assassinate. They kill people. They deal drugs. They're bad. They typically love alcohol. They have a complicated relationship with sex. Sometimes they're bad they typically love alcohol they really um they have

a complicated relationship with sex sometimes they're totally abstinent in cells in some cases um and in some cases they are sex mad and don't really understand the body's relationship to other bodies poor communication i would say is a is this now that doesn't mean that they're a few words they're great narrators they often have voiceover in their films you may recall brad pitt and killing them softly having a lot to say about the nature of his work but it kind of just feels like he's monologuing to himself and not to other people um strong sense of style these men like to wear black and leather sometimes they have a cloak do you own any cloaks? I don't own any cloaks,

but I did once think briefly earlier in the last decade about getting the Ryan Gosling jacket from Drive. The Scorpion jacket? Yeah. I don't think that would have been a good idea. I think it also just was really passe really quickly. But there was that moment when you saw Drive,

really, that's how I'm going to address. What about when Drake named his album Scorpion? Did you have second thoughts? I did. I thought about doing it. Now I have a jacket with just the certified lover boy emojis on the back. Oh, the pregnant folks,

all the pregnant, the pregnant gals. I get a lot of, a lot of cool compliments and silver lake about that. Is that because, well, I'm not even going to get into that. Let's just avoid that issue. You love these movies,

right? So do I. What do we love about them? Well, I think that there is the dueling kind of, as you mentioned, the sort of restraint of the performance and their interaction with the world combined with the

incredible eloquence about the state of their soul and their psyche and their lives to us as the viewer. So it's almost like the viewer has preferred seating in this person's life as compared to the other people in the movie. So even when you're watching Drive, I feel like we understand Driver's life in a way that the Carey Mulligan character can't. We understand who this guy really is, what's driving him, what sort of sense of perfection he's aiming for. And I think that that's really intoxicating. If you're talking, you're trying to sum up who these people are. And in some ways, I always go back to that Neil McCauy quote in heat where he's like i am alone i am not lonely you know like it's like these people are are

samurais like they're they're like lone wolves out on the range and it's really interesting because then you know you start to get into like are they heroes are the anti-heroes are are how much do you sort of like like quote unquote root for any of these people? I think that these movies sort of kind of eschew all that. Like it's really just an experience to be with them. So some of these films are hugely acclaimed and beloved. Heat, obviously, maybe the single core movie text of your adult life. Sure.

Is a movie that is widely considered one of the greatest crime movies in the history of movies. Doesn't necessarily need to be recontextualized or re-examined in this conversation but then there's another branch of these movies that you and i have talked about and have tried to lend some credibility to maybe maybe foolishly you know killing them softly i think is on the line i think killing them softly has emerged in the last couple years since it's been on netflix as like a lost classic with some over the top and overstated flaws but that it still is kind of after something really compelling it looks amazing and has a kind of tension in it it's still kind of prestigious it was an anna perna production then there's like there's like a george bush speech every

five minutes in that movie like they're deaf they definitely thought it was prestigious definitely um but then there's like the gambler or the counselor. I think Nicholas Winning Refn started out in America as a prestigious filmmaker and now has devolved

into kind of a joke amongst many but not to you and I. Sure. How do we these movies I feel like if we don't celebrate them we'll fall away.

They will fall away in the culture. Well I don't know not as long as there are actors because they seem to love making these movies. It seems to be like every actor seems to be like, I got to make my black hat. I got to make my drive. I got to make my card counter. I got to make my 25th hour.

I got to be in a movie where I have like one day to set things right. Or I'm like a getaway driver, but I finally meet the girl of my dreams and I have to be in a movie where I have like one day to set things right. Or I, I'm like a getaway driver, but I finally meet the girl of my dreams and I have to go straight. Going straight is a big part of these movies. It's like whether they, there's always like a clock on their malfeasance and they're like, there's like a, a point where they either are going to be redeemed or totally fall into

hell. And that's always like a very, like that's a tantalizing, like contraption to watch a movie. Like it's always a very tantalizing contraption to watch a movie. It's a really great package. If you were to forge a prestige dirtbag, what would his job be?

What would his role be? What would his mission be? What would his religion be? What are the things that you would want to see if you were to craft one of these movies? That's a great question shit all right let's let's put this together as like a fantasy draft so like let's go religion first i don't i as a half jewish person i don't know that i don't know if we're going to get a lot of really great prestige dirtbag jewish guys you know it's like andy says like there's not a

lot of jewish big wave surfers you know but but here's your chance to to defy convention so is this like a late period albert brooks we could get going or what like yeah i mean he appeared in drive didn't he you know he he ripped apart the the expectations of the the jewish american man so i i if you wanted to make him a jew you could do that okay. And then let's make him... He can't be like a firefighter. You know what I mean? No, I know. It has to be a job that's like

in the underworld. Con man is out because con man is too expressive. Too fun. You get too into it as a con man. So it's got to be something where... Safecracker has been done a lot. What about like a soulful enforcer? So like muscle enforcer where a safe cracker has been done a lot.

What about like a soulful enforcer? So like muscle for the mob, but he's well-read. You know, he's a big man. He's very strong. You would think by looking at him, there's not a lot going on upstairs. But in fact... Very soulful.

He has the heart of a poet. Read the novels of Saul Bellow. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. Precisely. You know, he has the heart of a poet yeah absolutely exactly precisely you know he has sonnets committed to memory sure and he has a lost love and everything is about the reclamation of his lost love she's dead she he can't get her back but her memory is her playstation and now he plays yeah she was the inspiration for red dead redemption and now he is playing that game every night to get her memory back. What else?

What city do you want it to take place in? I always enjoy Chicago as a city, as a film city. I was just thinking about that in regards to the Matrix trailer. And just because I know that they shot a lot of that in Chicago, even though I'm sure most of it will look like it takes place in some sort of like candy land of our digital dreams. But like, let's put it in Chicago. Okay. Heard you raving about Matrix Resurrections. Pretty excited, huh? Yeah. What about you?

Very, very excited. Like they kind of did, like when the needle drop comes in, you're just like, okay, yeah. Yes. I felt the hairs stand up on my arms. Even if the movie drop comes in, you're just like, oh, okay, yeah. I, yes, I felt the hairs stand up on my arms. Even if the movie is not good, I now have something else to look forward to, which is frankly

almost as important for me at this point. Do you think they gave us too much in the trailer? I'm hoping that that, with the exception of the, like a couple of fight sequences, that that was the first

20 minutes of the movie. That's my big wish. I think that that should be the new trend in movie trailer-dom, is we're only showing you the first 20 minutes of the movie. That's my big wish. I think that that should be the new trend in movie trailer-dom is we're only showing you the first 20 minutes of the movie. This is something I struggled with with Dune. I felt like I saw too much of the

greatness of Dune in Dune. See, I was worried. This is interesting. I'm capable of going to see DV's movies with my own open heart, but I was hoping that the Dune trailer was the first 15 minutes of dune it's not and that sucks like dune is a huge property it's a denny villeneuve movie they've

got big stars in it i don't this is a movie that i don't think we needed six trailers for well i think they feel like it does because they want more people to check it out and get excited about it because it's such a big property. But we shall see. Yeah, they were trying to do that when they had the whole Dune NBA playoffs tie-in. Remember? I noticed that actually last night, the way that these movies are being sold during NFL is very strange to me. The integration of Marvel TV shows being sponsored by Hyundai, we're really

through the looking glass. Did you see those commercials? Nevertheless, we can kind of wrap up our conversation about the prestige dirtbag because I feel like people need to explore these movies themselves. Maybe I'll put together a letterbox list. Yeah, please. I'll help you out with that. Yeah. One other movie that strikes me as being a part of this that I just revisited recently is Strange Days. When's the last time you saw that? Catherine Bigelow's movie. I think I watched a little bit of it maybe for a draft that we did. When did that come out?

I think it was 95. Did we do 95? We did do 95. Yeah. So I must have rewatched a bit of it. And I was like, oh, this is really awesome. She's like, she's one of my favorite filmmakers. So, yeah. What's up her I saw someone asked me on Twitter

recently if she's in movie jail dude like what is up with her honestly I don't know like like so she was the last thing that she was sort of like heavily attached to I think was triple frontier right that sounds right I believe that there was another project announced with Mark Boll after Detroit but that that never went anywhere. Okay. Another true life story. I don't know. I don't know why Mark Boll is working. I don't know where she's at. If she is in some kind of movie jail because of Detroit, we're living in a fucked up world.

I mean, on the one hand, she's 69 years old at this point, so it becomes harder and harder. Yeah, maybe she doesn't want to make movies. Maybe she doesn't want to work i it's hard to know um she her career is so fascinating because obviously her beloved a couple of her beloved films are as well seen as anything that's come out in the last 30 years point break and zero dark 30 and um hurt locker her locker but then she's got this whole other collection of films, some of which are very good, some of which are kind of unseen. You know, The Loveless and Near Dark and Blue Steel,

like our first three movies, don't have a huge American reputation. She's made a couple of movies like The Weight of Water and The Widowmaker that people don't think are great. You know, I think K-19's okay. So it's a really like up and down and kind of fascinating career and especially for i don't is it fair to call her the signature female filmmaker of the 80s 90s and 2000s i feel like she is her in campion yeah yeah so at least in america she's she's been the most visible woman making these films

i don't know i'm always curious about how someone like that will be remembered, especially because Detroit went over like such a lead balloon in 17. And we're coming up on four years since she's had a movie in theaters. Yeah, that's absurd. I honestly hope that she is happy not making movies because if she'd rather be on set, like it's kind of ridiculous that she's not. I could see this also being a situation where people are like, well have this like do you have a take on on this superhero character and

and she might just be like no i don't you know yeah superhero movies huh how are you feeling about those um i feel like a little bit i'm i'm like trying to be at peace with it just because it's such a reality and i do feel like we are entering a phase where can something be essentially the mainstream but still be like a niche subculture you know what i mean where like i think that the density of the marvel stuff not only in the volume of it but also in like the amount that you have to kind of understand to just converse with any of it, especially when you go to see Shang-Chi. And I was like, this is cool. But there's a lot of fantasy elements of it.

And then are we allowed to talk about what happens in that movie? Yeah, sure. I mean, you can fast forward. All the Doctor Strange stuff towards the end and everything where it's like, I think that there's just going to be a lot of multiversal portal

jumping. This isn't really him. He might be an alien. He might be the alternate version of this person like that. That seems like something that is like a little few steps beyond what like most like kind of Joe popcorn is like, I got it. Yeah,

cool like this. And I think you and Amanda were talking about this, that there was a point where you could see these movies and just sort of enjoy it for like the movie stars and stuff like that. But now we're kind of entering a phase where it's a little bit more involved in a little bit more. Like there's like an active scholarship you have to participate in to understand what's happening.

And I almost wonder whether or not these will still be massively successful, but also be like, not as remarked upon maybe in in like the discourse as they have been in the past. It's an interesting point and one that Amanda really put her finger on around the Spider-Man trailer when we talked about it a little bit. I think that there's like you can be annoyed with the prevalence of superhero movies in the culture, but there's something actually more interesting going on here, which is exactly what you and Amanda were talking about, which is the depths to which you need to have traveled

to fully grasp the most theoretically mainstream movie that is coming out. And that is, it's not a crisis. It's an interesting evolution of popular culture. We've never really seen anything like it. The dueling philosophies

that Marvel and DC seem to have where everything about Marvel is so precise and so controlled and they're just not they're they're like very slow dripping what this next phase is going to be about and what these next 10 years and 10 movies are going to be about and on the other hand dc is like here's another movie that has the same name as the old movie but with different people but kind of the same vibe but totally different vibe have at it it's streaming and in theaters at the same time. You know, like that. And like there are four Jokers and three Batmans

and also there are television shows. So obviously I think questioning or undermining Kevin Feige's management of the Marvel properties would be a mistake because Shang-Chi is a huge hit in the face of the Delta variant, which once again proves like these movies in movie theaters are such powerful commodities. And there's so,

there's so often right about what to do with them. Not always, but so often, but if it were up to you creatively, when they ended the, whatever the end game thing was, would you have taken more of a DC tract and said like, let's just kind of explode this a little bit and see if we can have some more kind of creative standalone things? Or

would you have done what they did and dug deeper into this? No, I mean, I think that for all my issues with it, I find the entire endeavor fascinating. The idea of trying to tell a story, like a massive story over the course of these years and years and movies and movies. And I think within those movies trying even though they get knocked for it even though it's kind of like oh great you found another like a startling young filmmaking talent and you've put them in this world where like they're going to be locked up making eternals movies for 10 years like i still think it's pretty interesting that chloe zhao is making a Marvel movie. I mean, that is a fascinating development.

And even if it makes you feel like, oh, I wish she had done something more in the vein of Nomadland or something that pushed the boundaries. I still think it's an interesting aspect of their project. I think it's really fascinating. If you could give Paul Schrader

any Marvel hero oh would you give him Wolverine 100% see I was thinking Daredevil oh yeah cleaning up the crime of Chelsea yeah yeah like like expunging I was thinking more like Wolverine like because of the the Japan stuff oh interesting that would have been good too yeah Lady Deathstroke and all that that would that would have been exciting um Deathstrike? Deathstroke? Deathstrike. Help me out here, Chris. I don't know, actually. Come on. You were a nerd once upon a time. Not as big as me. Let's talk about Malignant. Yeah, sure. Okay. So we wanted to see this and we wanted to come in and be like super prepared

and do a james wan thing and we we can do the james wan thing but this was not really made available to us i think it's worth mentioning right yeah there was a screening of the film approximately 12 hours before it hit hbo max so that was not ideal we watched malignant very early on friday morning which i would not call peak Malignant watching hours. I think that that is fair to say. Malignant, for those of you who are not aware, is a new horror film that is available on HBO Max. Chris mentioned James Wan. James Wan, really one of the most successful horror filmmakers, not just of the last 20 20 years but really ever he's he's responsible for the creation of huge franchises like the conjuring and insidious and he's now also directed fast and furious movies he created saw he uh directed the aquaman film for dc which i actually liked quite a bit because of i think a lot of james wan's instincts are to do these kind of like purposefully gauche and

ludicrous and really over the top, but also kind of beautiful and visceral movies. In some cases, they can be chilling and a little gross in the case of Saw. In other cases, they can be a little bit more elegant and restrained in the case of The Conjuring. Malignant was sold to us, at least before we got a chance to see it, as a modernization of the Giallo film, which is an Italian's mode of slasher movie. Dario Argento, one of my favorite filmmakers, is probably the key kind of creator behind those kinds of films. But there's a long history of Giallo films in Italy and then, of course, the huge influence

that they had on the US. And I think that's kind of sort of the case for malignant i think you can certainly see with like some of the colors and the framing and the way that annabelle wallace the star of the movie is shot she actually looks a little bit like dario nicolotti the dario argento's wife and frequent star um and the movie is certainly bloody and violent and it has a kind of familiar james wan framework which is that a there is a uh a a creature a boy a something that is terrorizing people and killing people and the star of the film annabelle wallace is able to essentially slip into the vision of these murders and

dreaming she sees these murders and witnesses these murders. Like in her lucid dreaming, she sees these murders. Exactly. And so she, it is almost as if she is participating in the murders.

It is so lucid. And I thought the movie was surprisingly not effective. I really wanted more from it because like I said, I love Giallo. I really like James Wan for the most part.

I don't, you know, he doesn't have a perfect track record, but he's a really creative guy and I think is trying to do mainstream horror in an entertaining way. What did you think of the movie? I don't know that I saw a lot of the Giallo stuff

in any of the sort of advanced word about this movie. So when I was watching it, the thing it really reminded me of was Bad West Craven. It kind of reminded me of the time in the late 80s and maybe the early 90s, but before horror went meta, really, when it was kind of like, speaking of prestige dirtbags, it's like, you're

a prestige dirtbag for going to these movies. There's something wrong with you if you go see Shocker in a movie theater. Yes, it's totally like Shocker. And I kind of felt like that watching it this morning at 9am alonem. alone on my couch, you know, where I'm just like, what the fuck is my problem?

You know? And there is like a, there is a real B-movie vibe to this movie. I think it has, it has like aspirations to have sort of like these kinds of almost Hitchcockian,

you know, like kind of like they're the same, like people are the same and like the duality of these people. And like there's a lot of body horror and there's a lot of really like pronounced Verhoeven kind of Dutch angles when things go kind of wrong. But to me, it just kind of was really schlocky in a way that I didn't hate, but also in a way where I'm kind of glad that I just knocked it out rather than built my weekend out of watching Malignant at 10 p.m. on Friday night. Yeah, it's the kind of movie that is actually perfect for day and

date in a lot of ways. It would have been a little bit, maybe even a little bit disappointing to go see it in theaters, or maybe it would have been more effective. We both watched it at home. It's kind of hard to say, but you're right. It does have the feel of an unironic 90s mainstream horror movie, which is a little bit dingy and a little bit lacking self-awareness. And that's not necessarily

a bad thing, but it feels outside of the mode of what horror is right now, which is usually either this kind of elevated, arch, A24 thing, or something that is of the mode of what horror is right now which is usually either this kind of like elevated arch a24 thing yeah or something that is i don't know significantly less gnarly and like a little more way more pop way more like fear street or like a slasher movie or like you know i mean i think that the blumhouse stuff right now is probably i mean they're obviously like i think or they have like a suite of stuff that's coming in the coming months

and we mentioned halloween earlier but like you know they they have always been very like market inefficiency and where they're going with their stuff but you know i think that they probably made the most you know not if they weren't always creatively successful but they were always creatively interesting and pushing the limits of what you could do and the work they did with Mike Flanagan and stuff like that. But yeah, we're in a weird spot with horror where it's either the thing that indie filmmakers make

because there's a floor of success that anything that's in the horror section of the Apple store is going to be well like well received um and they can also kind of have like long dull stretches of discussing grief in those movies um like night house for instance or whatever you know but or you could have like tongue-in-cheek really like grindy pop horror. This feels somewhere in between. And maybe that's what's so unusual about it. It also very clearly feels like a movie that was not difficult to fund relative to the

kinds of movies James Wan makes now. And he was like, you know what? I'm going to make Aquaman 2, which he is right now. Before I do that, let me just do something that really tantalizes. It tickles my fancy. And if he loves if he loves Jalo or if he loves 90s Wes Craven or whatever it is. I mean, the other thing is this is probably a spoiler to say this, but I want to say this to you so we can talk about it. Sure.

So if you don't want to hear this, just fast forward 30 seconds. But the movie that this movie owes a lot to is Brian De Palma's Sisters. That's really the movie that in many ways by the time I got to the end of this movie, I was like, oh, this is literally just Sisters. And that's not a bad thing. Sisters is fantastic. But it does feel like something we've seen before. And I

think Juan is probably best known, not necessarily for showing us something we've never seen, but for ramping up traditional styles. The Conjuring is like a haunted house exorcism movie we've seen those but he did a great job with that one yeah and there's also i think he's a guy who personally i prefer when james wan has some restrictor plates on on his car where it's like conjuring and like bumping up against good taste in that movie, whereas I think Saw and this one, where it's just

super gross out in a lot of cases, I was just kind of like, I don't know. It's not really doing it for me. But I also felt like this movie was heavily influenced by early Fincher. It felt very like the Seattle setting and the rainy kind of anonymous city was very... Reminded me a lot of

Seven. So, you know, even in some ways of Alien 3. Let's talk about The Empty Man really quick, Chris. Oh, okay. You have a personal relationship with The Empty Man. Yeah, he's right over there. I believe he contributed to the journal that you crafted in Ireland all those years back.

I feel like The Empty Man, even though it was technically released in 2020, is like still one of my two or three favorite 2021 movies. Did you watch it again since it joined HBO Max? I watched it again because I saw Naaman tweeting about it somewhat recently. So I was like, I want to go see the two or three scenes. I mean, I still adore that movie. It's strangely an epic film.

It's almost three hours long. I think it has great lead performance by James Badgedale. And it's just a really, really interesting movie that I think draws on a lot of pretty contemporary anxieties. It's been kind of an awkward year for horror, I would say.

I talked about the Candyman sequel reboot a couple of weeks ago, which I was not wild about. Fear Street seems to have been a big hit for Netflix. I think it's been kind of it was the reception was somewhat middling critically um there were things i was a little cooler on it than you were yeah i loved the first one i think it kind of i think it they each film was worse than the than the previous in the series um but i don't know what to expect i mean you and i every october we do a horror episode i want to do a big horror

episode at some point this year on the show. I kind of want to talk about franchises because of the Halloween movie and kind of what are the great horror movie franchises. But for many years, this was such a dependable genre. And now it does feel like it's in a little bit of a curious state. I wish I had some news from the front. You know me, you know, I love to get deep into the VOD horror movies and find the hidden gems and find the movies that I'm really excited by and check out whatever Shudder has to offer. There are a couple of IFC Midnight movies coming that I'm kind of interested in. pretty interesting, which is We Need to Do Something, which is a film by Sean King O'Grady and it stars Vanessa Shaw and Pat Healy and is basically a contained drama about a family, kind of dysfunctional family who take shelter in their bathroom when a storm hits their town and then they can't get out of the bathroom. And it is

a little bit more of like a psychological thriller than I would say a horror movie necessarily. But that was an interesting experiment is indicative of the kind of thing that I feel like we should have like six of those this year. And instead, there was this one. So I'm really hoping that the last few months of the year produce a lot more like these. Yeah, I hope so too. I saw that movie. I liked it as well. I thought it was, you know, not incredible, but impressive insofar as it's so contained and probably really much easier to make during COVID.

Great idea. Great concept, yeah. And Pat Healy, who people may know from movies like Cheap Thrills, he's showed up in some PTA movies too. Great character actor, has a kind of like ludicrous over the top performance in this movie. Vanessa Shaw, the great Vanessa Shaw of Eyes Wide Shut and Ladybugs and Two Lovers. One of my favorite James Gray movies.

Great actress. I feel like the year has been mostly defined by underwhelming sequels to movies we've already seen. You know, Quiet Place Part Two, which I actually liked, but no one thinks is better than the first one. The Conjuring movie that you and I talked about

on the show with Amanda, the Spiral from the Book of Saw movie, the Forever Purge. It's like Escape Room 2. Kind of feels like we're like circling the drain on some of this stuff. So I'm hopeful. I thought, I had hoped Malignant would be the start

of something new and exciting when it comes to those things. My guess is it's going to be a kind of a quiet reception for that one. But yeah, my hope is this is more of like a especially for the kind of horror movies that you and I really like, which are either the sort of off the beaten path indie hybrid horror movies or studio films that no one fucked with too much. And they wound up being really interesting, like Empty Man man i wonder whether for the lower budget ones like covid production protocols have made like making smaller budget movies very difficult because i know that's very expensive to have like a lot of those protocols in place you know i don't know that you can make a lot of horror i mean there's some conceptual

horror movies that you can make with just like a person in a room but like i imagine they're pretty difficult to make when you don't get to be like, you know, very close, you know? So I don't, I don't know what the state of filmmaking is right now, but I,

I do wonder if one of the reasons why we're in a little bit of a lull is because a lot of these movies that we would have gotten, haven't really gotten a chance to go into production. Maybe, maybe the case. The one thing I am really looking forward to that actually probably is in the genre that I'm seeing this weekend is Last Night in Soho.

And also is Giallo influenced apparently and isn't necessarily pure horror as Edgar Wright movies go, but apparently has those influences. So I'm psyched about that. Sierra, anything else in the movie world you're fired up about? Aside from licorice pizza,

I'm excited for the fact that it sounds like the next, the last two to three months of the year are going to be just really great. You know, regardless of whether or not like it's more or less difficult to get into a movie theater. And I think that there are some films here that I'm just going to roll the dice with, like I'm just going to go see licorice pizza no matter what. But it does sound like we've got between No Time to die and, you know,

all the, my boys over at Venom, let there be carnage or dropping, you know? So it's just like, I'm psyched that, that it'll feel much like the way the NFL gives my life a little bit of structure.

When the sports come back, like I just know that it's Sunday and Thursday and Monday. And then we're going to talk about it for a couple of days. Same thing with having the NBA back. I think it's really like just more fun to have like a good movie come out every week and to have something to talk about and something to look forward to. So I'm looking forward to that.

Me too. Chris, there's rumors of a midnight boys crossover for Lennon, the venom. Let there be carnage. Are you interested in being a part of that? Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. Maybe that's something we can put together. Chris, thank you for, uh, participating in this. Thanks for having me. So we're drafting on Monday, right? We're drafting on Monday. We asked the listeners to vote on what year they wanted to hear.

Me, Chris, Amanda, and Bob, you all suggested a year. We did not reveal what year we suggested, but the year that was chosen is 2004. A fascinating year in movies. I would say a little top heavy. Yeah. Little top heavy, but we have a bit of research to do over the weekend to figure out our drafting strategy. You're on a two-game winning streak. I am.

I am. Don't spook the pitcher, but I have a lot to say about where the draft is as an entity when we get together on Monday. Are you going to attempt to destroy the draft?

No, but I think I just feel like I am the card counter. Now I know how to win. Is that a challenge to my manhood? Just saying. You have assumed you've gone full prestige dirtbag. It turns out it's a game that can be

won. I know I won it like 13 times before you won it. But I was drafting for me and the CR heads. Uh-huh. And then I started drafting. I started playing to the base. I started throwing red meat to the cages. So let's actually quickly unpack that.

You are saying that you have betrayed the CR heads. No, they know that to gain more power, I need to get some Ws under my belt. This is how we get all the awful politicians in this country, candidly. You just revealed the very nature of cynical pollstring. That's what I was going to say.

I was going to say, basically, now I realize I feel like I'm in a Sinclair and Lewis novel, but this is how it's done. Wow. You're big oil. Only I can get the oil. You are truly big oil, and it's shameful to me. Thanks to our producer, Bobby Wagner, for his work on this episode.

He's always here making the show sound better. Stay tuned, as Chris said, on The Big Picture next week. Ciara will be back. Amanda will be back. We're going to draft on the year 2004. We'll see you then.