The Big Picture - Top Five World War II Movies, and ‘Blitz’

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Sean is joined by Chris Ryan and Rob Mahoney to discuss the robust domestic box office this past holiday weekend (1:00), before digging into Steve McQueen’s latest movie ‘Blitz,’ now in select theaters and on Apple TV+ (12:00). Then, they explore the renewable resource that is World War II movies, assessing the various subgenres that have sprung from that genre (26:00). Finally, they each share their top five WWII movies (42:00), and talk about whether they think the genre will persist. Host: Sean Fennessey Guests: Chris Ryan and Rob Mahoney Senior Producer: Bobby Wagner Video Producer: Jack Sanders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's happening? It's Todd McShay, and I'm back with a new home and a new show at The Ringer and Spotify. The McShay Show. It's a video and audio podcast coming to you year-round with all my NFL draft information. Big boards, mock drafts, and player movement. Plus, I'll be chatting with some of my best friends in football, including some of your favorite football analysts. During the week, we'll have episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays that'll include discussions about my player rankings, who's rising, who's falling, and who your NFL team should be keeping an eye on. Plus, we'll be reacting each week to the college football playoff polls and giving you previews and picks for each Saturday slate. In addition, I'll have episodes on Saturday nights with my immediate reaction to the full day in college football every week.

So if you love the college game, the NFL, the draft, or all of it like me, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, and get ready for the McShea Show on The Ringer, Spotify, and wherever you watch or listen to podcasts. What's in this McDonald's bag?'s bag the mcvalue meal for 579 plus tax you can get your choice of junior chicken mcdouble or chicken snack wrap plus small fries and a small fountain drink so pick up a mcvalue meal today at participating mcdonald's restaurants in canada prices exclude delivery i'm sean fennessy and this is the Big Picture, a conversation show about WW2. I'm not talking about the little son of the former president, George W. Bush.

I'm talking about the World War. On today's episode, we are also talking about Steve McQueen's new film, Blitz. It's a World War II feature told through the eyes of a young boy in 1940s London. Thanks for gesturing toward me. My youngest boy from London. He's back here on the home country. This movie is available to stream right now on Apple TV+. You're a subscriber to Apple TV+, right, Rob?

Of course. I'm a patron. Yeah. CR, are you as well? Lifetime. Yeah. So you can watch that movie right now. We're also going to talk about our favorite World War II films, which is also fertile territory. Rob Mahoney is here in person. Nice to see you in the flesh.

Thank you. Likewise. Chris Ryan. Hi. Kind of like the Marshall and Montgomery of this podcast, right? Really? Does that make you the Rommel? Who are you in this? Me, Rob. Oh, okay.

And you're Churchill. I thought we were the Mar... No, you're the Patton. You're the Churchill, I think. You're Patton. This is getting convoluted already. You actually, you have the, who was the naval commander again?

Come on. Gregory Peck played him in a film? This is how I know about history is just from watching movies. No, I don't know. Who's the naval commander? Come on. Jesus Christ.

I don't really rock with the Navy that much. But you're the sea guy. So ironic. But you're not into the pilots either? No, I'm into the pilots, especially in Dunkirk, you know, like my guys,

I'm on him. Um, I really appreciate you being here. You served in World War II, right? I did. Yeah. And what was that experience like for you?

Uh, you know, it was like, I, I thought like I was, I was over it, you know, I'd left it in the past,

but this podcast is digging it up for me, but this is good. I appreciate everything your generation did for us. I just want you to know. Keep it going. I'm already mad about the chair. Speaking of great generations, we have a great generation of moviegoers active in the world right now. A little bit of news. We had an extraordinary

box office weekend because of three films. And I know that there are three films that you've all seen multiple times, so I'm very excited to share this news with you guys. $420 million in the domestic box office over the holiday weekend. Thanks in part to Gladiator 2, Wicked, and Moana 2. Yeah, I think in part doing a lot of heavy lifting there

for the first two of those movies. Well, almost entirely those three films, but I'll say I did my part. I saw the film Moana 2 not once, but twice in movie theaters this weekend. Once for this podcast and once for My Daughter's Future. Wait a second.

So you saw it independent of your daughter. I did. And then saw it with your, did you screen it to make sure it didn't have any troubling imagery or something like that?

I recorded a podcast about it with Yossi Salik and Rob Harville. You can find that on the feed. Yeah. I was thinking that might have been some of the reason for the box up. Like the Yossi bump is such a real thing

huge just tremendous Yossi literally bought 10,000 tickets and she just sat in several theaters alone no I saw it

because I needed to record and it was during school time so I went again brought Alice over the weekend both screenings packed house you and I were in an AMC over the weekend

seeing an early screening of a forthcoming film can't you say what it is? It's called The Brutalist. We're Brutalist boys. We are Brutalist boys once more. And that theater also, there was a buzz. There was a hum.

Were you at the cinema this weekend? No. Oh, shit. But apparently I was the only one who wasn't. I do think, as I'm trying to understand what happened here, I mean, Moana happened here. Literally any parent, they will tell you it is an unavoidable force in their lives. So that I understand. But why this Thanksgiving? Why this period of time? Why the Gladiator 2 part of this? I don't really understand.

Theater nerds and parents, I get. What is the strong second wave weekend crowd for Gladiator 2 like? It's not me, unfortunately. I don't know. Well, I mean, I think that the reason that happened, it's a good question because obviously Gladiator 2 has not been terribly well-received, hasn't been that well-reviewed, seems like it's been considered a bit of a letdown. It was for us.

You haven't seen it yet? Not yet. It's just because there were no movies for grown men in the movie theater. You know, like that's ultimately what it is. It was really the only option. But with all due respect, who was the grown man rolling up solo or with a couple of other grown men

on like Thanksgiving Friday? Is that a robust audience? You never know because like I actually did, this hasn't happened in a while, but I actually did have a moment a couple weeks ago where my wife and I wanted to see different things. And I was like, well, why don't we just go to the movie theater

at the same thing and split? You know, which is not... You guys did do that? We didn't. We wound up not being able to get into real pain that time. But like it was... It was very progressive of you to think about it. I thought...

I want to bring that back into my rotation. I've done it before. I think it's a nice thing to do. Yeah. Sometimes you got... I've also seen everything all the time. So my wife is like, can't go to the movies with me anymore. Were you leaning over to Alice

and spoiling Moana too? Constantly like throughout the movie? No, no, I was, there were scenes that were, that are traumatic. I'll just say Moana is in significant peril

at one point in the film. And I was locked in on watching her reaction and she was, she was cool. She was chilling. She was like, Moana is going to be good. Moana is,

she's got demigod in her future. Wow. So she, she felt good about the whole thing. But it's is she's got demigod in her future wow so she felt good about the whole thing but it's interesting because like obviously it's been a huge down year coming off of the strikes

most of the movies that have been successful though look a lot like these movies Moana 2 was not meant to be a movie it was a TV series

commissioned by Disney Plus one thing I wanted to float to you guys and Chris you talk about this all the time on The Watch too you talk about it

on Prestige as well I think that the Moana 2 success could potentially signal or even confirm that the whole D Plus TV strategy

was a mistake and that the entire purpose of Disney Plus and maybe only Disney Plus but it could be other streaming services too we could talk about

what Apple could do with this sort of thing in the future is basically as strong marketing for active library. If you're a parent, you need Disney Plus

and you're probably watching Moana a lot. And Moana is a movie that's probably going to be handed down across streaming for 10, 20, 30 years. And then, when you open Disney Plus now,

for the last two weeks, the first thing you see is the trailer to Moana 2. Yeah. So kids become aware of it instantaneously. So they don't even need to promote the movie

on billboards or on commercials because that primary viewing space that you already have for your kids is pushing the movie out. So there was so much,

it changed the paradigm, I think, of how people got excited about a movie because it seemed like the marketing was relatively modest for Moana 2

and yet it still is breaking records. So it's an interesting like positioning where it felt like they started out by making all of these tv shows that were meant to support and continue the storytelling of other franchises but now maybe it should just be a place that pushes out future theatrical movies and then houses them once they come to streaming yeah i you know i think it's different for each one of their sort of verticals like i think marvel has had an up and down

experience on Disney as far as how much do we want to push our chips in and move story forward in these kind of niche shows about smaller characters. Star Wars has frankly just been kind of like a car accident where it's like we are doing these legacy characters, but we don't really know how to move the story forward past Skywalker. But with Disney, you're right.

I think it's basically like the world's greatest billboard. And if that's going to be the primary thing that people have on in their house all day long, it's just great advertising. Frankly, also, we saw this earlier in the year. I feel like Shogun got an extraordinary boost from being advertised on D+. And also because they needed stuff to advertise

before Disney movies. They were doing commercials for it in theaters. So I think it's become a really effective marketing space. But this is where Disney is different from, I think, Apple or any other platform. Like the gateway drug element of having your kids in front of a TV locked in on Disney movies, ready to click the next thing that comes up is so different from, like, you know, I'm watching Blitz on Apple TV and it wants me to watch Silo it's like I mean respectfully I'm gonna if I want to watch it not now there isn't that propulsive like onto the next thing quality that I think

kids naturally get sucked into yeah I think it does explain one reason why Netflix has spent so aggressively over the last 10 years to build a library so that they can always be kind of cycling new content in front of people. Like with Apple TV, you see all the time now, like they've only produced what, 40 shows. They've only produced 40 movies. They licensed some movies, but not very many. So when you go there, it's very easy to reach the bottom. And what I think a lot of these streaming services want you to do is to never reach the bottom, to always be served something new, even more so if they're able to basically maximize the theatrical experience financially

and then let you have more and more of it on the streaming. It's just an interesting observation, especially because The Wicked Phenomenon is obviously not slowing down. That movie's doing really, really well. That's also a movie that has been bifurcated and will be part of an extended universe of stories. You've got The Wizard of Oz.

You've got Return to Oz. You've got Oz the Great and Powerful. There's many, many movies like this. Do you think that they'll remake Wizard of Oz. You've got Return to Oz. You've got Oz the Great and Powerful. There's many movies like this. Do you think they'll remake Wizard of Oz? There was some speculation about this online over the weekend. I wouldn't rule anything out. Do they have the rights to that specific story? I think that's an MGM Warners project and not a Universal project.

Plus, Tim Burton owns it now. My guy Zaz needs to greenlight that tomorrow. Go full Rohirrim with it. Just make an animated Wizard of Oz. It's really, I guess, it's a question of who has the rights

to the L. Frank Baum novel rather than the original film. So I guess whoever can get their hands around that. I don't actively, I don't know. Bob, do you know who owns L. Frank Baum's

estate right now? I have no idea. Get on that, Bob. I'll spend the next 10 minutes looking that up diligently and make sure that I'm legally correct so I don't slander anyone. Thanks for on that, Bob. I'll spend the next 10 minutes looking that up diligently and make sure that I'm legally correct so I don't slander anyone.

Thanks for your service, Bob. Happy to be back. Movies, we're back. Movies are back. Moana's back, I guess. Does it feel good for this to be what movies

are back for? Moana 2 setting the biggest five-day opening in movie history. For the movie theater to be pandemonium playground of children screaming and singing throughout movies. That's what you want. I'll say, I think the bigger problem is grown-ass people singing along to Wicked and not children. There was no singing

in Moana 2 for me. Actually, the kids in both screenings were very well-behaved. It's the weirdo 32-year-olds who were singing along to Popular and, you know, nobody mourns the wicked or whatever. You mocked that, but I thought you carried a beautiful tune during the Brutalist.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, if you want me to do the Daniel Blumberg score, like, I'll be doing that on this show probably for the next 12 years.

Every time you win a draft, I hope God drops the brutal score. That's the needle drop. I need that hit in the future. It's the new Thanos

and by the way if you would like to make your own Wizard of Oz film at home you can because they entered public domain. How about that? Oh of course.

Coming soon from Ringer Films. The Wizard of Oz. Taylor Sheridan's Wizard of Oz? Taylor Sheridan's Wizard of Oz? Wow that's amazing.

How the wizard fights back against the woke mom. I mean, Dorothy was the original lioness when you think about it. She really was. Okay. Shall we pivot to Blitz?

Please. So, Steve McQueen, one of my favorite active filmmakers. He's been on the show a couple times. I think the last time he was on

was for Small Axe, his five film series he made for Amazon, which came out during COVID. And his new movie is A Period Piece set during World War II. Clearly a very personal story. It's written by Russell Hanlon, but you can tell that there's a lot of McQueen's personal experiences and a lot of stories of his heritage and a lot of, you know, remembrances from people who were alive at this time. It's about a nine-year-old boy named George who's sent away during the evacuation

while the Blitz is ongoing in London and jumps the train when he's being sent away to return to his mother. So you've got this kind of classic Dickensian tale, very Oliver Twist.

Saoirse Ronan plays his mother in the film. Elliot Heffernan is the young actor who plays George. A very un-McQueen-like McQueen movie. And we'd spent like a lot of time in the three or four months in the lead up to it speculating

about what this movie was actually going to be. It premiered at the London Film Festival and not one of the signature fall festivals, Venice, Telluride, Toronto, et cetera. Curious like if that was signaling something to us. Obviously, London is a huge part of this film and its history. And in fact, I think the theater where they premiered the film was previously a site that had been bombed and they rebuilt the theater on top of that space.

And so, you know, there's like a kind of commemoration when they screened the movie. But the response to this movie has been remarkably muted. It had a short run in theaters and it is available to stream already. Rob, I'll start with you. What did you think of Blitz? I think part of the reason for that is I found it like kind of bland. Yeah. And, you know, technically impressive at points you think of Blitz? I think part of the reason for that is I found it kind of bland.

Yeah. And technically impressive at points, but bland ultimately, and I think structurally pretty misguided. I, as a viewer, am not super compelled by the George runs away from stuff framework of driving an entire movie. And that's tough because I get the personal connection.

You get what he's going for in structuring the movie that way. It's just every time he goes through a little world of like a criminal conspiracy or a bunch of firefighters, I just want to stay with the firefighters and not follow the kid who's making kid decisions. So it's kind of a tough hang in that way. Yeah, we should probably just be straight up where it's like casting a kid actor to carry your film is like a one in 100.

It's very hard. He's not bad. No, but he's not Christian Bale. And that's just tough. You know what I mean? Like I'm not trying to be hard on him at all because like he has to carry a bunch of different emotions and do a lot of really intense physical acting for such a small child. But to your point, Rob, I just found myself constantly wanting to go back to Saoirse or, or, or Harris Dickinson's character or Paul Weller's character. Like I wanted to kind of be in the world of adults. And I think that ultimately that was something that just felt much more unique to film. Like where I was like, oh, this is such an amazing portrait of London trying to

get by at this moment of extraordinary terror. Whereas The Child's Odyssey felt like something I had seen before and didn't emotionally connect to it. That being said, I've thought a lot about this movie since seeing it. I think it's got a lot going on as far as ideas go.

I think it's almost a more interesting film to talk about than it is to watch. Yeah. But it left me a little cold even if I really appreciated some of the stuff that happened in it. Yeah, I think I'm mostly with you guys.

I found it to be, I've seen the word anonymous thrown around to describe it, which I think is not really fair because there are a handful of flourishes,

like artistic choices that are made in the movie that you don't see in your one-of-the-mill period piece that comes to you from Focus Features or Searchlight or whatever.

Like, there is a gravitas and an artistry that McQueen retains. I think the movie actually is ultimately a little lower in my estimation because he kind of teases out what the movie could have been in the first five minutes of the film. The first five minutes of the movie,

you get this incredible sequence which captures these firefighters who we later see in the film, who are attempting to put out the fires during the blitz, and you're immediately thrust into the drama of the moment. And the way that it's shot and the way that he captures it is like among the most riveting firefighting sequences I've ever seen in a movie. The way that the hose kind of loses control and the people are being blasted around and in the attempt to kind of like, you know, they're being engulfed in flame and trying to fight through it. And then he hard cuts out of that once we see another bombing coming into this kind of like snowy um digitized imagery which

transforms into daisies which is this you know sort of avant-garde imagery that's sort of like a remembrance of the time before the blitz and the movie is all about you know elliot heffernan's character and serger ronan trying to come back together and also recapture that feeling that they had before world war ii just like all the people of london are trying to come back together and also recapture that feeling that they had before World War II, just like all the people of London are trying to feel that way too. And in that five minutes, I was like, we are in a Steve McQueen movie. This is really cool that he is going to, you know,

project some of his moves, some of his ideas and concepts onto this historical structure. And like you said, Chris, you referenced Empire of the Sun with Christian Bale, you know, the John Borman movie, Hope and Glory, like Mrs. Miniver. There are a lot of movies that are about civilians and young people during wartime, especially World War II.

Yeah. So it's something we've seen before and I was hoping it was going to be a twist. It's not really that much of a twist. I think it's a matter of perspective. Like, I'm not comparing this movie to Empire of the Sun, like one-to-one, because they're just completely different stories. But one of the things that Empire of the Sun does is really strictly stick to the POV of Christian Bale's character yeah so that everything is being viewed with this kind of childlike wonder and then a loss of innocence as the film goes on and this movie is kind of all over the place like it's worth noting

that McQueen also last year made a documentary called Occup which is about the nazi occupation of the netherlands and is an epic undertaking and is also thematically about like a lot of like normalcy versus what happens to normalcy when terror and war come into the picture um i almost felt like that filmmaker was like i can't let i felt like he couldn't let it go. Like he wasn't like, I just want to tell one story with, with a blitz. I want to tell five. I want to tell six.

I want to talk about music and culture during the war. I want to talk about racism during the war class during the war. I also want to tell like a magical odyssey story during the war. I want to talk about what it must've been like to be a single mother during the war. Like, and yeah, like it fills up and it fills you up because you're

thinking about all this different stuff, but when you get to the end of the movie, you're like, what was that about? What was the story of Blitz? And it's hard to nail down. When it's hard when you deviate that much, I think Blitz has a really hard time delivering the sort of emotional heft to be the movie it wants to be when

you're not with George all the way through. To be honest, even though he is in fires and he is being abducted and he is jumping off trains and he is in a literal blitz, I just never felt that he was in that much peril. And it's like for this movie to come off feeling that way is I think what makes this a little empty. I think a little bit of it is the lack of the transformation too

that we're talking about that, you know, that you mentioned with the Bale character, the sort of loss of innocence. We don't really necessarily feel that totally communicated. But in addition to Occupied City, which is this really strange sort of four plus hour documentary

that uses like contemporary imagery of Amsterdam and sets it against the sort of, like the sort of narration that discusses what was transpiring in those spaces during World War II. A year before that movie, a film called Three Minutes, A Lengthening, which is another

documentary that is about an image from World War II that was made by Bianca Stichter, who is Steve's wife, is also a fascinating exploration. So as a couple, they're kind of entrenched in this project, and I think you're right that they kind of can't, they're really stuck on it it understandably like this is the signature event of the 20th century

and so it's very understandable that there's like a lot of rich material we're going to talk probably for like an hour about you know a ton of world war ii movies and why it is this fertile ground but it's just so strange because i think of i think of mcqueen as a really hard, sharp, cynical, bleak, not like ultimately there is like a sense of potential redemption in a lot of his stories, but there's nothing sweet about the movies that he makes. And they often, this movie looks very, even though it's about terror during war, there's something like soft in the composition. And it's notable to me that like he's using more or less a different crew like sean

bobbitt his longtime dp is not on this film it's shot by uh york lasso who's a great cinematographer but who shot like little women and shoots olivier asas movies yes domestic dramas yeah period pieces i mean that is what this movie wants to be it does um but i wonder if you apply yeah what is sean bo what does Sean Bobbitt shooting the Stephen Graham sequence look like? Yes. The other thing, too, is just that Steve McQueen's never made a movie at this scale. He's never made a movie with this much CGI. Those are tools that are hard to utilize. Did the CGI bother you?

It doesn't look bad, but, I mean, you know, at the risk of spoiling something, there's a signature closing shot of the film that is sort of like a pullback onto the city. Yeah. After it's been fully bombed out. That is very, just, just digital. I mean, it is just like, it's obviously been fully created in a computer and you can tell, you know, you can tell it's not in an attempt to be grand and to have this sort of vista of a destroyed city, you're looking at something artificial. And that kind of like takes you out of the feeling that you're meant to have watching the movie, which is the sense of like place and terror. So I don't, it's like, these are big, important choices in your head when you're thinking of a movie, you're like, this will be good. We'll be able to do it like this.

And then when it's executed, I don't know, it doesn't, it doesn't feel as weighty as you want it to seem. There are visuals that I think really do stick with you and sequences that I think are just like well-executed set pieces or elements of these things that just really, really click and work within their little silos. And then the transitional pieces, I think, are where the CGI sticks out. And it felt a little bit in watching this,

like playing a AAA video game, like playing a very glossy story, like you're running from place to place as this character as everything is falling down behind you or if you prefer like a big transformer hand is just about to grab Shia LaBeouf or whatever like that was the vibe yeah and that's just not what I want from a blitz movie to be honest especially a Steve McQueen blitz movie do you know what I'm saying where it's like you wind up thinking about it more than you wind up enjoying it because like I i do think that you know the film itself has some personal resonance for me just because my dad was an infant in london during the the bombing and like i think that there is at least from my

understanding through my own family's perspective a mythology that yeah the english tell themselves about the stiff upper lip the unity the the collectivism that they experienced during that time period, which I don't think he necessarily suggests is untrue. But it does a great job showing how much more complicated that would have been and how much race and class played into a pecking order when it came even to bread lines. And I thought that was fascinating, but deflated a bit when we then would go off into these almost magical realism sections with George in his adventure across England to get back home. Yeah, I just think he's sort of like teasing you with the possibility of moments or extended stories that are just more interesting than the central story. And the central story is sort of like historically significant because George is not white. And there's very rarely been a young non-white boy centered in a story like this.

And McQueen's family is from Grenada and that heritage is explored in the movie. And he's made a lot of documentaries and short films about this and so in a way I think you could very clearly see this movie as sort of like a prequel of sorts to Small Axe and how Small Axe is about those communities, those West Indian communities

that are in London and so it's not that it's not new and it's not that it's not relevant, it's just like the framework of the story is really the issue. It's like the script just feels soft. It just feels like a little iterative and not exactly what you want it. So it's disappointing. Like I really, really anticipate new McQueen movies.

And I don't know. There's a little bit of like, is this an Apple problem? I don't know. I was wondering about that. You know, I was wondering about that. I just feel like you have to take the text as you get it. So without knowing anything about whether or not Apple was like, what we really want to do is tell like a wondrous story of perseverance, but you can do other stuff on the side. Alyssa Wilkinson had a really good piece about this movie in The Times where she suggested

that the almost like abrupt nature to the episodic storytelling like the way that these stories almost cut off just as they're about to take full flight was reflective of the way in which life itself was interrupted in london and how you know like one of the most striking images i think is the moments in these in this movie before a bomb falls. And we know a bomb is coming as Paul Weller is in bed with a cat or as something is like, you know, very normal everyday life is taking place. I thought it was an interesting read of the film that didn't change how I felt about my experience watching it. But I thought I would shout that out

because I thought it was a really cool idea about the structure of it. I think some of that plays in in terms of the other technical aspects of the movie. I thought the score was very strange. And at times, it would be building up in a sort of way like you're about to reveal the alien in signs. And then abrupt cut to a new scene. It's like it's building to something, something, and then nothing. So I get that sort of cutoff momentum. And if that's the artistic intent there, I support it. I just, I don't think it makes for a very cohesive watching experience. Yeah. He said something in the LA times that I thought was

interesting. He said, often people think war is what happens in far distant places. And he talked about what's happening in Gaza, Libya, Ukraine as sort of like inspiration points for the movie. He said, I wanted to bring it home. This is what happened here. This movie has a real sense of urgency. Unfortunately, I wanted it to be a roller coaster ride through London during the war. So I think that kind of accounts for that like jumpy quality that the movie sometimes has. I did think it was notable that in 2014,

when he made 12 Years a Slave, he did a lot of press for that film, obviously. And he said at the time that the film industry had been negligent in covering stories about American slavery and the slave trade. And he said that World War II lasted five years and there are hundreds and hundreds of films about the Second World War and the Holocaust. Slavery lasted 400 years and there are less than 20 films about it.

And yet he was eventually drawn to making a World War II film too. It's like there's something kind of like... Two World War II movies. Yeah. There's something kind of like undeniable about the appeal, and maybe we can use that as like a segue a little bit towards our World War II films conversation, because like I just started mapping out the kinds of movies

you can make about the conflict in that time in history. It's more or less every genre of movie. Is there a genre of movie that, I mean, I can run through this list that I spent hours plotting, but are there any kinds of films that you can't make during World War II? I'm kind of stunned at the variety. Like, you know it, and you've seen a lot of these movies, and you've seen the gonzo stuff. You've seen the very somber, solemn things. You've seen like the gallows humor in between zone. But the fact that you can make outright farce and musical

and spy movie and sniper movie and also frontline battle movie out of something that I think a lot of people hold not only historically to a very strict standard in terms of what they want to see on screen, but like it's a lot of delicate

subject matter to just delve into with a sense of humor to the point that some of the best filmmakers have tried it and just completely fallen on their face in doing so but I don't know why it seems to like ebb and flow in terms of how we make these movies and like why Blitz now I don't exactly know other than obviously the racial elements that are discussed in the movie are very pertinent and relevant and make sense. But otherwise, it doesn't really seem like we're in a World War II moment.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think we always are. You know what I mean? In your house, yes. I do think that there is something about the moment itself, the World War II moment, those years, and even the post-war years.

First of all, how it gives birth to everything that comes after it. So the way it shapes the world of all how it gives birth to everything that comes after it so the way it shapes the world the way it gives way to the cold war the way it kind of sets up all these powers for years to come but i was thinking about this the other day um actually after watching brutalist we're not going to talk about that but filmmakers also world war ii film filmmakers fascination with with the past because it is a pure storytelling arena to be in because they don't want to show people on their phones doing group chat, LOL. That is the way that people do dialogue.

Soft promo for Rob Sutherland. Yeah, listen to group chat. But World War II technology, World War II fashion, World War II music is firmly a period, and it's got romance now. Like, you know what I mean? Like something about Morse code, like encrypted Morse code is more like kind of romantic than a Nokia phone from like the Jason Bourne era, you know,

that would be like an earlier technological development so there's something about it that i feel like is like modern enough but also has like the romance of like shakespeare you know what i mean partially also because i'm sure we're going to talk about the at least in the narrative sense uh the moral clarity of the conflict i think that's a big part of it i would suggest that there is also a social component which which is that, you know, at the time of the event, movies were becoming the centerpiece of American entertainment and soon international entertainment. And studios repositioned a lot of filmmakers to work to create propaganda. Five Came Back is this great Mark Harris book

about some of the best filmmakers working in Hollywood at the time making documentary films to inspire. And then in the immediate aftermath of that, and even during the conflict, you've got the production of really good movies by really good filmmakers and some filmmakers who were exiles from countries who were in the conflict. Fritz Lang in particular coming to America or to England and making films like literally during World War II about Nazis. And so you've got that. So you have this sort of starting place where movies are becoming more and more popular. And this is a deeply cinematic conflict that you can portray in a variety of ways.

And so it becomes like part of the bedrock of not just American movie making, but you've got stories told through the Japanese perspective, the German perspective, the Polish perspective, the French perspective. A lot of the great Russian cinema is made in the aftermath of the conflict. So it's this fascinating thing where it starts out as you can make sort of sly thrillers that have a strong political point of view, or you can make sharp satires, right? Like Lubitsch is making To Be or Not To Be,

like really early in the conflict and then it like it expands out and out and out adventure action movies this becomes the best um setting for those kinds of stories men on a mission movies child in peril movies like this one pow movies escape movies are perfect for this romance movies amidst the conflict some of the most beloved and celebrated movies in filmmaking history like Casablanca, From Here to Eternity, The English Patient.

These are World War II movies. Biopics, obviously. You've got these great leaders and figures that rise during this time. Patton and Churchill and Rommel and all these fascinating people

who are part of the conflict. Musicals. There's like several great musicals. Yeah, it's shocking. Are set during World War II. The Sound of Music, Cabaret, South Pacific, Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

I mean, these are all, Bedknobs and Broomsticks is kind of a prequel to Blitz. You know, like they're, it's so interesting to me. And then there's the whole civilian element too, sort of like life during wartime and how people lived commonly during this period, which we get some of during the Saoirse Ronan stuff. And there've been a lot of movies like that.

Like you were saying, like Remains of the Day, things like that, yeah. And then there's all the fallout. There's Holocaust dramas. There's this sort of post-nuclear annihilation dramas. There's desiccated cities and what Europe looks like in the aftermath of the war. Like all these movies get bundled on top.

And so it's so interesting that one, our favorites list is almost like a waste of time. You know, it's just like, it has to be so personal because the list is like, there's like 300 genuinely interesting movies made about World War II. There were individual years where it's like, there were dozens of World War II movies.

And there are like 10 that are some of the most decorated films ever made. So it's almost like, yeah, obviously, but you know, I try to just have a little bit more fun with it. But there is a reason for that. Like, yes, it is part like the propaganda machine and the cultural programming, but I cannot pretend that there is not a part of me that stirs at like a big horn section and an emotional salute in the middle of the movie. Like it hits. And I've been trying to like isolate, like what it is about these movies that works,

like what, what it is that I want from them. And I think the camaraderie is a big part of it. Like the, in the foxhole feeling, whether you're at home or on the front lines or wherever it is, there's the sense of like tragedy and humanity. And then I think the scale sometimes,

right? Like it, it's, you're either taking the very personal story and blowing it out, or you're showing the full, like a, a bloody ocean, you know, washing up on Normandy. Like, I think the scale of those things can be, can be a little hard to wrestle with in a history book, Wikipedia page kind of context. It's all that. It's the totality of the conflict, touching everybody from Eisenhower to a woman working in a factory in the Midwest. You know, it's, I think there's something very recognizable about watching these films

because, you know, if you've gotten, if you're lucky enough to have gone to Europe, like one of the things that's just amazing about that place is you will be walking and it'll be like, oh, Constantine was crowned next to this pizzeria. That's pretty cool. Like you will be like walking through history a way, you could still do it in the Northeast here and all over this country. Like, you can see it,

but maybe it's a little bit more woven into, like, the cities and the countryside of Europe in a way that just hits you differently. And I also think that there's something about how this is a super genre of film

that I am equally open to being romanticized by it. And also having all of that deflated. Like I will do the longest day, which is like the successful triumph, the D day. And I will do a bridge too far, which is the failure that happened before. You know,

I, I am open to the craven moral decay of the third man and also, you know, Casablanca. Like I am open to every kind of iteration of these stories. I think another thing that adds to the mythos of it is even though there are no cell phones in any of these films, this was really the first technology war. You know, we're sort of like radar and sonar and mapping and spying and code breaking and all of these complex ideas, plus the level of artillery and scientific sophistication

that went into the bomb making and the actions that were taken. So is imitation game in your top five then? It is, yeah. That's number one for me, spoiler. But you have all this new world ideas getting bumped. This isn't bayonet fighting. You know what I mean?

There's a certain kind of warfare that can be depicted that is so visual and so fascinating to kind of unpack and untangle. And I think the key point is what you said, Chris, which is that there is a simple morality to fascism bad that still works and still makes sense and resonates deeply and it makes movies

that would otherwise seem corny feel inspiring or feel justified in its corniness. The concept of a war you can win is just not something that we have a lot of exposure to anymore. But I also think

because it is so straightforward in that way, there are a lot of these movies where the Nazis are just kind of like lurking on the outside of the frame or coming two years after the duration of the movie. And it just heightens everything. It just like completely raises the stakes. It casts this huge shadow over whatever like domestic travail you may be watching. And it just, it completely

changes the tone of those movies in a way that you just can't do with any other element. That's why you prefer films that center the German military anyway right like valkyrie and you know what do you mean he's just a history buff i hit you with one booster seed joke and you're just turning the fascism gags on me uh yeah this is a this is a a pretty amazing and special way of thinking through film history. Like I, I definitely was like, honey, I just need one more minute when I was working on the outline.

And it was like two hours later of just thinking about all the different kinds of films that fit into the idea. I literally did this last night where I was like, my wife was like, do you, can you please spend some time with me? And I was like, I'm making an imaginary list of movies.

Rick Dalton would have been in. This is like the happiest I've been in 2024. I just want to go back. I just want to go back to a time when Rick Dalton was above the line. What else can we say? What else is me? I mean, coming of age for me, like I was 16 when Saving Private Ryan came out. You know, so that in the Brokaw book and The Greatest Generation, all of that was being fed.

Both of my grandfathers served. Both of them were POWs during World War II. They never spoke about it, but everyone around them talked about it all the time. You know, there was a real consciousness of the war in my family growing up. And so it's just kind of intrinsic to the experience. I think my grandmother had six brothers and they all served in World War II or Korea. Like it just was an elemental quality of American life

at a certain time, especially if you were of a particular class. And so it's no surprise that this stuff like continues on and on and on because it is passed down. It is sort of like, it is narrativized and there's like a legacy that is created through it. So yeah,

Saving Private Ryan being the phenomenon that it was, not only being a movie that was like, you know, well-reviewed and won awards,

but was like a big fat hit on the heels of Spielberg making Schindler's List for my generation. It seemed obvious that there would be another hundred years of World War II movies

now I do feel like there is a lot of well they haven't done it like this like there's a lot of like scraping going on on the edges of the story

or it's it's like big time filmmaker is finally ready to tell his epic story yes Dunkirk

you know what have you like Inglourious Basterds I did see Tyler Perry has a movie coming out literally a few weeks a World War II movie does he really

he does yeah the 6888 I think is the name of it so all of our Titans showing up all black female regiment oh wow we're also getting

and Spike Lee did Miracle of Sand like a couple of years ago I do I will note that there has been a a minor burst of World War II genre dramas on TV. So a lot of what would have been B-films, relationship films in the 50s and 60s perhaps,

have now kind of like, you'll get SAS Rogue Heroes or what have you on TV. Do they work in that format? I feel like there's the whole point is that these You know, it depends on what you like. I like the early seasons of The Crown are quite good

when it comes to the World War II stuff. That's a good point. That is a World War II film. Rogue Heroes is incredible. You could make an argument that Blitz might have been better as a miniseries.

But I think it's... As CGI becomes more and more prevalent, you'll probably see period pieces that look kind of fake, but then you can just kind of rock them up like that. I mean, one reason I think it works on TV like that and one thing that, as you alluded to, Blitz might be missing is these movies lend themselves to big, dope ensembles. Like huge companies of people,

whether they're military or not. And it's like, I think Blitz by comparison feels very small in that way, in a way that I think is intended. But to me, the most successful ones often have, it's a rogues gallery of actors who become big deals in five years after they were in it. Or even in real time, it's like, oh my God, they got all these people to be in one company together. No, it's true. And I think it's often because some of the best and

most kind of classically entertaining of these movies are team-up movies where you've got like unlikely figures being banded together to serve a common goal. I just re-watched The Guns of Navarone for the first time in a long, long time last night. And as I was watching it, I realized that a movie that was released this year is a full-blown Guns of Navarone ripoff, which is the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The first 30 minutes of the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is ripping off Guns of Navarone. Not in a bad way. I mean, this is something that movies like this do.

They're iterative and they're sort of paying homage. It's like you're saying, it's my turn to do a movie like this. That is clearly Guy Ritchie's love letter

to 50s and 60s action movies starring guys like Steve McQueen and Anthony Quinn and Gregory Peck and I love those movies

those movies are not very deep they don't have a ton to say beyond you gotta save the day it's just cool guys walking away from

explosions that has its appeal that's the thing that's most of my top five. Yeah. Trust me, there's room on all of our lists for movies like that.

There's nothing wrong with them at all. It's interesting though, whenever people would criticize like Michael Bay, I would always be like, this is not different from anything that's been

happening in movies for the last 50 years. Like Michael Curtiz movies are like Michael Bay movies and this is where a lot of filmmakers make their best stuff. Michael Bay, of course,

also made a World War II movie, Pearl Harbor. Like every great filmmaker really, almost every great filmmaker takes a bite out of this apple. What were your hard cuts here? Did you have ones where you're like, I'd really like to put this on my list? I had movies that I was like, is there really any point to me putting this on a top five of World War II movies?

Because we've talked about it so much. I tried basically to do this, the movies that I have watched the most and that I returned to over and over again out of pure pleasure. And one that I was like, I think everybody should see this. Okay. Um,

but I left off a bunch of stuff that I was like, I would just say like, well, yeah, obviously, you know what I mean? Um, but yeah, like that was, that was sort of my guiding rule of thumb.

I also tried to keep the movies more or less set between 40 and 45. So even though my favorite movies are probably the Fallout movies, I kind of tried to keep them within the rails of the actual conflict. Yeah, that's interesting. I have one that is pre-war just in an effort to talk about like a round trip of films but that's the other thing i'm trying to like look at what is the best way to discuss some of these things like you know night and fog is a tremendously important movie about world war ii i wouldn't say it's my favorite right i mean like

it's not something i'm gonna fire up and. And there are even some films, like you mentioned A Bridge Too Far or Longest Day or Tour, Tour, Tour, like these big, splashy, you know, ensemble epics. Like, I don't necessarily always love those movies. You know, like, I find them kind of

a chore to get through. So, some things work for some people, some don't work for others. So, the big Cornelius Ryan joints, like, you're kind of... It's not really my thing. Yeah.

But I know you're more into those. Do you... Were you mostly European theater? Did you find yourself wandering over the Pacific theater? Yeah. I mean, there's like a couple of incredibly important Japanese films, like Kondichikawa's movies, Fires on the Plain,

and The Burmese Harp are both like great. Essentially made in like 1946, like in the immediate aftermath of the war and sort of like reckoning with Japan's role in the war and effectively like what happened to soldiers after the war. Burmese Harp is particularly fascinating in that respect. But a lot of those stories are more in the sort of post-nuclear examination that resonate more with me. Like, I haven't seen a ton of films about the actual conflict through Japanese eyes.

Colonies would be one of those movies, actually. But I just haven't seen as many of those. Unlike, like, Ballad of a Soldier. Like, in Russia, there's a lot of movies that are like that, where you see the world through the eyes of Russians, like Ivan's Childhood, the Tarkovsky movie. But I think I'm entirely in the European theater in all the films that I picked what about you I picked some in the Pacific theater for sure and I think generally you know you're talking about how personal these lists are for me war movies when I was a teenager were not something I felt comfortable watching like in the same way that I don't really like listening to a true crime murder podcast it's like a frontline battle movie is just not something i was locking in on and throwing on tv and so the pacific theater movies that resonated more with me are a little bit more

smaller personal stories a little bit more every person involved and and like the tendrils of this great conflict that they are let's let's show the battle on the beach. Let's show the U-boats. For some reason, that stuff when I was younger felt a little too tangible. Gotcha. And I don't want to say abstract it, because obviously the nature of the war

is shaping all these movies, driving the conflict. I think the movies we picked are not just movies set during World War II, but World War II movies in terms of what is driving the action. But there's lots of ways you can do that. It doesn't have to be machine guns, you know, on the front lines. Absolutely. I mean, like, in some ways, I think that, like, our personal relationships, both to the conflict itself,

but also to where maybe America's place in the world was at various points over the course of the last couple of decades definitely influences this. I'll also say that I was largely introduced to these movies by my parents as comfort food. And even when Saving Private Ryan came, I was kind of like, ah, well, I kind of intuitively understood that this is what happened, but that's kind of a bummer. I kind of wanted to see Steve McQueen throwing a baseball against the wall, you know? I mean, that's, I think the most iconic movies are movies that we'll probably all talk about from our list, but that are often tightly focused on groups that are not in infantry battles.

Sure. You know, like, Saving Private Ryan is weirdly more of an exception than it is The Rule, which is very different from the World War I movies. You know, like, All Quiet on the Western Front is trench warfare. You know, Paths front is uh trench warfare you know paths of paths of glory is trench warfare those movies i think the war was fought differently for obvious reasons but the kinds of movies that emerged in the canon are just very different from the great escape or bridge on the river quai or these other movies that are sort of like locked in as important films you have

to see if you want to understand the history of movies. So it's interesting that like what the war demands, like what kind of movies they'll give you. You should also note that Oppenheimer is a World War II movie. It certainly is. It just won Best Picture and was one of the movie sensations of 2023. I wonder if we charted this,

if we're on a every five years, there's a great World War II film run because it's like before that Dunkirk before that Inglourious Bastards before that you know what I mean? Yeah absolutely. I think that fairly routinely now like this isn't going anywhere. Yeah. No I don't think so either.

There's probably been more than just Ministry and Blitz this year too. I can't think of any off the top of my head but they're always coming. Yeah. They're always coming. And now it's time for a very special segment presented by Walmart. Since Amanda is on leave, I thought we could use this time to plan the perfect gift for her for the holidays. I honestly love going above and beyond getting gifts from my friends. Amanda doesn't know we're doing this right now, but I had this incredible

lineup of possible gifts. So many quality gifts from Walmart. And when it comes to shopping, I thought about a lot of different kinds of things. I thought about maybe some gifts for Knox, her young son. I thought about maybe a new TV or a Roku that she could stream movies on. I thought about maybe a Lenovo, a laptop that she could, you know, look at all my spreadsheets and download what we're doing on the big picture going forward. But then I thought I need to take care of Amanda. I need to give her something that makes her feel safe, comfortable, happy at home, which is where she is right now. So here's what I came up with.

That is the Ninja Creamy. You might be asking yourself, what is a Ninja Creamy? Well, I'm glad you asked. It's an ice cream maker. Amanda loves ice cream. I love ice cream. On this show, we support ice cream. And so I thought for this holiday season, she might like to dig into some ice cream.

During the holidays, thoughtfulness is a big deal. So give the gifts that show you get them at Walmart. Shall we do our list? Let's do it. Sure. Chris, would you like to kick us off? Yeah, so this is probably the most like

important film history one and the one that i think is probably underseen at this point but is important to see which is paesan roberto rossellini's 1946 movie this is a episodic film i think there's six stories told it's set in italy uh in the end of towards the end of the war. It is stunning. It's a mix of professional, non-professional actors. It's got Rossellini's neorealism style in full bloom. And one of the things that you have to kind of remind yourself of is that you're not watching newsreel footage. And so you'll see footage from a dock in Sicily or something.

And you're like, that's just the boat and the people. That is really happening. Because of the episodic nature of it, your mileage may vary on various stories in it, but you'll never be bored. In fact, I think you'll be stunned by the modernity of the storytelling and the maturity of the subject matter and the moral kind of

gray area that it operates in. He made a World War II trilogy, which I recommend everybody see. Rome, Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero. And Rossellini's movies are just fucking incredible. They are on Criterion Channel. It should be considered

a foundation of your film education. I'm taking notes. This was underseen, including by me. Those three movies are made literally in the immediate aftermath

of the war too and they're capturing something that could only be captured at that time. And if you can, if you're watching these, specifically Scorsese, but lots of people

have talked about these movies, but you can find Scorsese talking about them on YouTube or on Criterion, and it's like getting a film education in and of itself. To hear him talk about what these movies meant to him

is really pretty awesome. Okay, Rob, your number five has already come up. What is it? Yeah, it's not Underseen. It is Saving Private Ryan, and I think you can watch that movie and the story and the music

and the sentimentality can hit you in a way that works really well. I think you can watch that movie and the story and the music and the sentimentality can hit you in a way that works really well. I think it cracks like wide open when you realize how fucking bleak that movie is. To me, the whole idea of this sort of like earn this conceit is that you can't, no matter what you do, no matter what anyone does,

like all of this, there's nothing that can make it worth it. And to have Tom Hanks at the center of that is really breathtaking to watch and to revisit. And this is one, like, I think there are a lot of movies in this genre, in this world that we're talking about, that are just really hard to go back to.

I do think you can go back to Saving Private Ryan for a couple of different reasons, maybe with enough time in between. But it is propulsive. It does the thing that Blitz does in that it is kind of a winding vignette story as a lot of these war movies are it's travelogue it's a complete travelogue and it feels totally different um and i think it i think it packs the sort of punch that i was hoping

blitz would be able to deliver for me but didn't um it is a world war ii movie where like the stakes don't have to be end the war or kill Hitler or whatever. It can be smaller than that. It can be more fragile than that. And look, it's an instant classic for a reason. Spielberg has made 1941,

Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, I'm forgetting. Empire of the Sun. Empire of the Sun. Yeah. Five.

You could call Bridge of Spies a post-World War II movie. It is. Yeah. War Horse World War I. What's his deal? Like, why is that the thing to keep going back to

over and over and over? I mean, you know, I think it's also like very much a prismatic American experience, you know, in Spielberg, one of the signature

American filmmakers and storytellers of the 20th century. So it's not shocking that he goes back and back to it. Stephen C. Ryan is probably my favorite of all of his World War II movies. I like Raers of the 20th century. So it's not shocking that he goes back and back to it. Saving Private Ryan is probably my favorite

of all of his World War II movies. I like Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think there's an argument that it's the greatest film ever made about World War II. Do you think that's true? Well, I just...

Like I said, these are films for the most part with the exception of Paisan that I go back to over and over and over again because I just love the feel of them. But I probably, it's pretty close,

but I think, save in private, you would not get a lot of arguments. It might be the one you put in the capsule that you send into space to explain artistically what that period of history was like. It would be hard to pick one of these sort of fringe side stories from some other element of the world and say like this represents this massive global conflict so i think it probably taps into that as well as anything and it actually i mean like what's crazy about that

movie is it does what it takes hundreds of other movies to do about the conflict which is it both kind of launches the greatest generation idea and this sort of lionization of this entire thing but also talks about the incredible horrors that these guys went through and obviously didn't have the tools to like really talk about afterwards yeah i am there was a conversation going on online over the weekend about the best shots of the 21st century or, you know, like people were screenshotting images from movies that they really liked. And a bunch of people had pointed out that image from the Fablemans where young Sammy Fableman is filming himself in the mirror while his family is sort of breaking down, like while his parents are telling the children that they're

separating. And, you know, it's this fascinating self-reflexive moment where he's talking, like showing how he can't really cope with any emotional experience unless it's shot fascinating, self-reflexive moment where he's showing how he can't really cope with any emotional experience unless it's shot through the lens of storytelling in his own eyes. And someone pointed out, when people were pointing to that scene, that that was something that he came up with on the day, that Spielberg had not mapped that out,

and it wasn't in the script, but he was like, I want to try something. And then someone else pointed out in the immediate aftermath of that that another thing that he did, and he does this on every movie where he's just like what if

we did this but the sequence where Adam Goldberg gets into the knife fight. Yeah. With the German soldier was like something that they just came up with

like it was supposed to be a gun battle. Yeah. And they were just like what if we just did this on the ground in close quarters like body to body.

Begging don't do this. Which is one of the most visceral and upsetting scenes in world war ii movie history and i think it's like the kind of scene that you could shoot that scene in 1957 but not that way yeah and i think that's maybe one of the reasons why it like stands the test of time as one of the greats if not the great because it seems like one of the most direct representations of what this looked like and felt like. And that probably will always be true.

Yeah, it's weird that like, I mean, I haven't seen Paisan more than I've seen Saving Private Ryan, but something happens in Paisan that's similar to what happens to Giovanni Ribisi in Saving Private Ryan. And that's just so much more upsetting, even though Paisan was made in 1946

with people who had just literally come out of that conflict. Okay, so for my list, in 1946 with people who had just literally come out of that conflict. Okay. So for my list, I tried to basically choose one type of movie for each slot. Yeah.

So, you know, I've watched The Guns of Navarone maybe more than some of these movies, but I wanted to see like how the kind of movie

this like the weight could be held from the conflict. So, A Matter of Life and Death is my number five. It's a Palin Pressburger movie from 1946, same year as Paisan. It's about a British pilot who the film opens with him sort of in the final moments of his life. Like there's just been a bombing raid and he's

going down. And in the moment that he's going down, he sort of flashes and is essentially entering, if not the pearly gates, like he is about to be escorted to the afterlife. And there's some confusion and the person who is about to be escorted to the afterlife. And there's some confusion, and the person who's supposed to be escorting him misses him. And so he slips into this sort of like purgatorical, imaginary experience where he gets to sort of negotiate for the future of his life. The movie is not like an infantry battle movie.

It's not a pilot battle movie. It's about a person who sacrificed his life for the war and sort of like what the sliding doors of that experience could have been for all people. The movie's ultimately

like a romance and a fantasy and this incredible proscenium for Palin Pressburger to try things. In America, the movie was called

Stairway to Heaven because there is a literal image, sort of like an escalator moving into the sky that is very memorable, resonated with Led Zeppelin quite a bit,

and is like one of the signature films of the first half of the 20th century in britain but is like a beautiful movie about using real world events to apply the imagination and the mind and what like what a movie can be springboarding off of the world and the fact that they did this immediately after the film, like this is something that like Blitz actually never gets to. It never gets to an idea beyond when you had your boots on the ground.

It's not a bad thing necessarily. It's not really what McQueen is going for, but it's like a testament to, I think, the kinds of stories that you could tell around this experience. And there's the Archers, which is the Powell and Pressburger production company for a while there.

They made like 15 movies about World War II, 10. Yeah. Like, I can't remember. Life and Death of Colonel Blinn is probably the other most famous. That's the big one, yeah. But some of them were like propaganda movies. Some of them were like basically like submarine action movies. And then some of them were like these amazing romance films.

So, yeah. Very cool. Number four, Chris. My number four is The Dirty Dozen. So this gets into the sort of, this movie was just on for the first 15 years

of my life all the time. This is how I was introduced to Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland, Men on a Mission,

the dregs, the convicts who come through and save the day. I can't even remember really. They have to blow up a hotel with all the Nazis in it. Does it matter? But I just know that Jim Brown runs a football route

with buttons at some point. It's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. Split into two. First half is basically training. Second half is the mission. Funny, corrosively cynical. And every cool guy ever is in this movie.

I just love it so much. I could just watch Lee Marvin cook dudes all day. All day long. I do think the first half does take, it takes its time kind of getting up and going a little bit. So it's kind of a perfect have on all the time movie where kind of getting up and going a little bit. So it's kind of a perfect have-on-all-the-time movie where you can drift in and out a little bit.

Oh, now we're really getting into it. But look, it's an incredibly enjoyable watch for a reason. One of the all-time shitlord characters

is Telly Savalas' character in this movie. All of these movies, almost all of them, that are considered like the 1960s classics of World War II, are all two and a half to three hours. And so, like you said, they are sort of like, we have more hijinks to get into in the training sequences before we actually get to the mission. It's funny that we're like so mad at like Red One being long and I'm like, but Dirty Dozen could be seven hours.

Yeah, it's true. Okay, Rob, what's your number four? My number four is Lust Caution. And maybe that's all I need to say about that. I don't know if this is the movie I want to be on record a bunch about,

even though it is beautiful. It is a team on a mission movie, except the team is a bunch of students in Hong Kong who are playing at being spies and getting in way over their heads. It also includes...

I've never seen this movie. It is... Great movie. Ang Lee. Ang Lee. Ang Lee directed. Maybe the pitch to you is it's kind of like

a soft black hat launch because basically half the cast is in this movie. Oh, awesome. It is very racy. If that is not your speed, this is not the movie for you.

But it's like... I would be scandalized. Is it NC-17? I think it is NC-17. I have only seen the R-rated cut. I don't think they're that different, to be honest with you. But people seem to clutch their pearls

very hard at this movie. It is a spying as seduction movie. Like, basically, the entire premise is this group of these would-be spies are trying to seduce and eventually hope to assassinate this government official. Basically, it was like working for the Japanese puppet government in occupied Shanghai,

played by Tony Leung. So it's going to be smoky. It's going to be... I think overall, the vibe of this movie, of just turning out this incredibly charged thriller in the middle of a war, something that I didn't know Ang Lee could really do until I saw him do it, I would recommend it to literally everybody. It's just an incredible watch. in the middle of a war. Something that I didn't know Ang Lee could really do until I saw him do it. I would recommend it to literally everybody. It's just an incredible watch. Really great film. Definitely the first time

I saw Tang Wei. Shot by Rodrigo Prieto. Yeah. Martin Scorsese. She's so good in it. Yeah. She's amazing. Joan Chen is in this movie.

Really, really good film. Like that pic, Rob. What is my number four? Hmm. Oh, Cabaret, which I did mention, which of course is uh bob fossey's musical about kind of weimar republic germany and the rise of fascism in germany in the 1930s and has like another movie that is kind of durational where at the very beginning of the film

you see the the aspirant third reich sort of not being respected and still being a minority in Berlin. And then over time, infiltrating the arts community and effectively running all of Germany by the end of the period. And it kind of sandwiches the rise of an ambitious singer and performer and this world of performance and theater. And what's happening in the world around it is much more significant, but,

uh, the way that you can kind of throw yourself into your own personal experience as something very awful is rising around you. Um, feels like an important movie right now. I don't want to put too fine, find a point on it, but,

um, I'm a person who throws himself into his personal experience a little bit at times like this. So I think it's good to at least have a little bit of self-awareness.

But if you haven't seen Cabaret, it's one of the great movie musicals and is... If you think Wicked is a really good musical... Yeah. Check this out.

Watch this movie. Listen to this. I'll look right into the camera for that one. Check out Cabaret. Consider it. Okay. I'm not even Listen to this. I'll look right into the camera for that one. Check out Cabaret. Consider it. Okay. I'm not even a musical guy.

I will watch and listen to literally anyone who is not Eddie Redmayne do Willkommen, like the MC welcome song. Did you not like that, Tony's performance? Respectfully, I'm going to decline to comment on that. Are you a fan of the films like Veronica Voss, like stuff that's set in and around Germany, like throughout this period?

I don't mean that. Like the Fassbender movies? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I think this entire period is fascinating to me. Well, you're a dad now. I am.

Yeah. Well, it's just very unnerving. You know, 31 through 37 in Berlin is even 29 through 37 is upsetting to imagine

and it's not not to be too pod-save about this but you know it's not that unimaginable it's like the oxygen jump

in your voice the cabaret really is us who knew okay number three Chris number three is Bridget Remagen have you ever seen this the option to jump in your voice. The cabaret really is us. Who knew? Okay. Number three, Chris. Number three is Bridget Remagen. Have you ever seen this?

I have, yeah. We talked about it once before on the show. Yeah, so this is a 1960s movie with George Segal. It's very simple. It's like the Americans have to hold a bridge and the Germans got to take the bridge. And it's got an awesome cast. Robert Vaughn plays the German officer on the other side of things. It's got an awesome cast. Robert Vaughn plays the German officer

on the other side of things. It's got some absolutely extraordinarily violent, realistic feeling kind of shoot-em-up scenes. But I think if I'm being real, I just find these films that are sort of set in these Western European countries

to be incredibly picturesque and I love looking at the scenery and the landscape even if it all is about to get blown up this is a real very interesting story that also is about the futility of this entire thing and about how we're just fighting for an inch here and an inch there

but is just an awesome B movie, John Gillerman directed it it's not, I would from what I've read, the not most historically accurate World War II movie ever made, but incredible George Segal performance at the center of it. So I would really highly recommend anybody

who's just looking for like a kind of like cool 60s era, so like a little bit more modern, a little bit more racy World War II battle movie. What relationship did your dad have to movies like this? How kind of,

it became like box office bait to make these adventure movies in the 60s. Yeah. Like, did he like them? Yeah. Oh, he loved them. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, I think like when he saw stuff like Hope and Glory, it was a little bit more traumatizing or upsetting or triggering for him. But I think when he sees like these kind of like imagine the coolest people

you could possibly think of doing cool shit in Europe he's like yes well speaking of traumatizing and triggering my number three is

Grave of the Fireflies thinking about this movie fucks me up you have to explain it to Chris because there's no way he's seen it I have not seen Grave of the Fireflies

well I mean the one I think the one animated entry on our list which which explains it, a Studio Ghibli production, which they've actually made multiple World War II movies somehow. Last year was another one. Absolutely. It follows these two kids in Japan who are orphaned

by the war and basically left to fend for themselves. And it is one of the most devastating things I've ever seen. You should watch it, but don't. And you really should, but like absolutely not under any circumstances.

I watched this movie almost 20 years ago. I cannot watch it again. Some of the imagery in it will just like haunt you forever and ever. The fact that it is these, it is these two kids

like so young that they shouldn't have to be doing this, but trying desperately to look after each other in a community that just like doesn't have the means to do that for everybody all the time

and it again like not to bring everything back to blitz but it's like part of the reason why i'm frustrated with that movie is like i've seen that you can make a movie about world war ii featuring and starring only kids and it can work yeah it can be an absolute emotional like haymaker and for whatever reason like that wasn't able to connect in the same way but great with the fireflies like it's a masterpiece of this kind of filmmaking it's just not the kind of thing you're ever going to want to watch again it's a it's a i'm not speaking directly to you because i know you won't participate but it's the first non-miyazaki studio ghibli movie yeah that's uh isao takahata who's the one of the co-founders of the studio and it would be like kind of a perfect bookend with The Boy and the Heron.

For sure. They're very much in conversation with each other. Great pick. My number three is a movie called The Train, which I think is one of the best movies ever made. Yes. This is a John Frankenheimer sort of heist movie. It's a movie about French masterpieces

that the Germans are trying to steal. So Monuments Men. Yeah. Monuments Men doesn't need to exist because we have the train. Yeah, but it's like

Monuments Men if it was about the killer, like the David Fincher movie. What about Black and White? Yeah, Labiche, the Burt Lancaster character who is... The train guy.

He's Train Man. Train Man. He literally fixes the connecting rod on a train wheel train man he literally fixes the connecting rod on a train wheel in the film like in real time like this is just

this is what I'm talking about a lot of men stuff going on in this movie but it's shot in black and white beautiful film like incredibly gorgeous to look at great performances

all around classic German motherfuckers as your villains like uncomplicated kind of narratively in that respect but it's a movie that's about sacrifice like most of the great world war ii movies are about what you give up a lot of frenchmen in the resistance give their lives during the course of

this movie to protect these great works of art and then the movie kind of confronts you with this big idea which is sort of like is this sacrifice worth it because people are literally giving their lives for works of art they may never see that are basically just boxed throughout the entire movie. And it just says, like, Picasso, like, written on a box during the film.

But it has all the spirit and intensity and grit of heat and all of the, like, real-world consequence of Saving Private Ryan smashed together. So it's a great movie

if you haven't seen The Train. It's, uh, Jean Moreau and Paul Schofield are also in it uh paul scofield as the german ss motherfucker uh lancaster fucking fired arthur penn after like a couple of days and brought frankenheimer in but there's like a what if arthur penn had made this movie like it probably would be much more strange yeah it would have that like itinerant new wave editing and all the stuff that he was doing at that time but this is a great great movie

there's a great Keno Lorber transfer that I would encourage the physical media heads to pursue because it looks much better than if you stream it

compressed on Amazon or whatever before I get to two I'll just say a worse train movie is called Von Ryan's Express which I highly

recommend people see if only to watch Frank Sinatra read off of cue cards. Because every conversation shot of Sinatra, he's just looking to the right shoulder of the person like, let me tell you something, Mr. Fritz. I'm not getting on that train. I don't know why I'm doing Trump.

I don't know how it sounds. I think you were doing Byron Mayo as Frank Sinatra there my number two I think this is on everybody's list so we all have the same number two which I personally view

as an acknowledgement of the long history of these kinds of movies on this movie which I think is one of the most perfect movies ever made what does it Chris?

it's Inglourious Bastards certainly one of those big picture movies ever made it was gonna come up it might be I think with Moneyball and the social network it might be those big picture movies ever made it was gonna come up it might be I think with Moneyball

and the social network it might be the big picture movie the film that we are the most celebratory about in some ways

every World War 2 movie is inside of this movie like every little genre that you've broken down could be applied to this the men on a mission the romance

the satire, the sort of in some ways fantasy, in some ways like fantasy of vengeance, but yeah, what else can you... During wartime, yeah, everything is captured here. I think the thing that I keep... I was thinking about this because

Fassbender is obviously back on screen with not only Kneecap, but with the agency. And so I was just thinking about his character in Inglourious Bastards, how that's still my favorite performance of his other than Hunger

by Steve McQueen. And how indelible the characters are from this film. Like, half a dozen people that I'm just like, that is one of the most

fully fleshed out, amazing depictions of a person, even if they're just like Quentin people I've ever seen. How many movies do you think have like six of them? Well it's like a testimony I think or testament to

the fact that he's seen all these movies. He's seen all of them and he has processed them and he is attempting to outdo the best parts of all of them you know especially with hans landa you can feel him for sure in a fun way saying what if i could make my peter cushing hound of the baskerville's character the worst nazi ever i know and it's just it's like a lot of inspired ideas like that where he's sort of like he's filtering his taste so

wonderfully through this prism because there's so much to pull from and still making something wholly original and just like wildly entertaining. Well, and that character messes with you so much because like, Christoph Waltz is so watchable

and there's also like the Sherlock thing going on where it's like, you almost want him to solve the puzzle but obviously you don't want him to solve the puzzle and it just,

it just wrenches you as you watch it. This has to be the most rewatchable of it just wrenches you as you watch it this has to be the the most rewatchable of any of these movies like it you can return to inglorious bastards i feel like in a way that is much harder to do with almost anything else on our list it's very pop you have a movie on your list coming up that i think is for an older generation almost like this vert this this movie where people will just would just put it on at all times i think it's funny too because, well, one,

obviously there's a kind of fantasy element to Glorious Bastards because not only do the good guys win, they win in the most extraordinary fashion imaginable. I think that's what makes it rewatchable in that way.

Yeah, maybe that's what it is that there's a, it's not even hope and positivity. It's just like, if only we could just, straight delusion. I really enjoy that about it. Yeah, I was trying to tap in,

I was trying to articulate this. It's just so weird how like my, like I'll have a movie that I think is like one of my 10 or 15 favorite movies of any given year. And I'm like, there's this guy and this guy. And then I like forget the names of characters or like really what they do. And then I'm like,

I still think about like Bridget and Shoshona and Hickox and Zola. And you know, it's just, it's so wild. It's great writing. It's just great writing uh okay chris why don't you give us your number one then okay uh my number one is uh the great escape yeah um literally like a nightlight on in my house for most of my life uh this is weird it makes being a prison of war look incredibly cool. Like it seems kind of fun. Like these guys do

definitely go through a lot but it's Steve McQueen James Garner James Coburn Charles Bronson and Richard Attenborough and they like

look cool and smoke and have like a July 4th party and dig tunnels and it's you can see the Alps and they're trying to get to Switzerland.

And it's just like the most romantic version of this kind of story I think you can have. And the star power of it is blinding. You know, it is just blinding. It is so long and you forget like... Is it? I don't remember. Oh, it's like a double videotape. Like I think this one's 320 or something like that.

Okay. Wow. Does the star power of the World War II movie or the war movie still exist? And the guys being dudes part of this canon. I feel like there was really a time where it's a fun thing to play as an actor, to go be a soldier for a couple months or whatever.

I don't know that we're going to see the Jacob Elordi war movie except Elvis, I guess. Like, I don't know what the version of that is or if that's a thing young actors are still

interested in. It's a good question. You know, I think one of the ways that in the post-Saving Private Ryan world they navigated that was that onslaught of TV that Chris was suggesting

like Band of Brothers. The Pacific. And we had Masters of the Air this year so speaking of Austin Butler he did do his version of it

it just happened to be on TV I don't know I don't I do think that the movies could use more movies they're like

original stories about historical events that have all the movie stars for whatever reason I tweeted about this I'm sorry to say I tweeted about this on a podcast

but I tweeted last night i just for whatever reason stumbled on the revolutionary road why didn't you why didn't you skeet it um because they don't allow you because they don't allow you to upload videos more than 60 seconds on blue sky and you were filming yourself crying i was so captured that um so you can check that out over on my twitter uh no i was watching the Revolutionary Road trailer yeah and I was like there are not movies like this

yeah there are not period piece adaptations of great literature with the biggest possible stars like

in Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet's follow up to Titanic together they made this desperately bleak movie about the impossibility of love in America like that's what that movie that movie fucking rips and I'm not going to pretend otherwise

anymore like we gotta we gotta get over that was how I felt I was like I don't care about the pretensions about like Sam Mendes not being good or whatever when I saw that movie I was like this is incredibly powerful and good my point being I feel like the same thing that I I'm identifying in that movie I'm like it would be awesome if it was let's just do it it's Jacob Elordi it's Austin Butler who else it's

Chalamet obviously he's the sniper I think he's in there who else is on the list who should who would be Attenborough who would be the

British actor Josh Brolin Josh Brolin he would be like I need you to get me Zinn oh you mean the old the old oh

like the David Niven type yeah the guy who's like the mastermind of the whole thingiven type X yeah the guy who's like the mastermind of the whole thing oh that's a good question he has to be British well X is British

maybe it should be maybe it should be Fassbender as a kind of nod not mad about that I would I mean it's not right but I would go with

Brave Spall for David Attenborough you'll never quit him no you're convinced one day he will be Jimmy Stewart.

This movie is also very cool because it's not important. It's like it has the room to let these guys hang out for 80 minutes before we really start getting serious about digging tunnels. And that's similar for Dirty Dozen. I think most movies now either have to be incredibly high concept or incredibly important. And the idea of it being like, I don't know,

what if we took eight of the coolest guys ever and let them hang out in prison? Is like probably not enough to get a movie sold these days. Yeah. It's a real shame. I'm glad we have the POW representation on this list though.

Like the sub genres go, I mean, honestly, you mentioned earlier, like every one of these movies is about a bridge somehow. Like bridge movies might've been their own thing. I got another one coming for it very soon. I can't wait. Okay, Rob, you mentioned earlier, every one of these movies is about a bridge somehow. Bridge movies might have been their own thing. I got another one coming for us very soon.

I can't wait. Okay, Rob, what's your number one? This is my favorite World War II movie. It may not be Adrian Brody's favorite or George Clooney's favorite. It's The Thin Red Line. It's a very different war movie in every way that a war movie can be different.

And I think there's no single mission. There's not really a team. There's just a bunch of guys. There's barely even a main character. and I think there's there's no single mission there's not really a team there's just like a bunch of guys there's barely even a main character and I think much to Adrian Brody's

chagrin much to his chagrin and deservingly so but I think the end point you want to put some framework around that that Adrian Brody thought he was the star

of this film he was under the impression showed up at the premiere and realized that he basically has one scene yeah extremely tough beat but

that's what Terry Malick does. I don't think they knew that then. He's just feeling it out. Now we do. He's just feeling his way through the picture. Yes. The result of that,

there was this very decentralized story that I think makes it like an everyman soldier kind of thing. Sometimes I just want to watch sun steepling through trees as people wax poetically

about the meaning of life and conflict and I think it has something that these other movies don't which is it is in like an idyllic setting you know

no disrespect to the European countryside but like putting a World War II movie in like an island paradise is just such a different vibe and I think lends itself almost

to more of like a Vietnam parallel in a lot of ways than a World War II parallel and his like obsession with Paradise Lost. Like this idea of like an Eden that gets desecrated somehow. And also we are the Eden who gets desecrated by ourselves all the time perpetually.

And I'm here for the meditation for it. I have a lot of leeway for the Terrence Malick experience. Me too. This is an incredible movie. This is my movie. I do too, but I must admit this has never been one of my Malick movies. Never clicked for you but I probably

never seen it on the big screen and I probably need to take another look this is also a really good example of I would be almost be interested

to revisit Blitz in a few years because when I first saw this I can't possibly even communicate like the level of excitement that was around this film

from both like film nerds who were like I can't believe Malick's back, but also just from anybody reading Premiere Magazine was like, this cast should be illegal. We should say Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson. Those are the guys

who didn't get cut out of the movie. Yeah, Clooney. It's a lot of Nick Nolte muttering before you start to get your hands around it. I think that a lot of these movies need to be separated from their release and separated from their context before you can really truly appreciate them. You're going to reclaim Blitz the way I reclaimed Revolutionary Road just now?

Well, I'll see you here in five years, this very day, this very hour. Revolutionary Road was released 17 years ago. So will you see me in 17 years? You don't think we're going to be friends in 17 years? Well, what do you think? Do you think that I will be in the hospital for my Zen addiction?

Pulling particle plastics out of your bloodstream. Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Zen Award. You're going to be like the writer that the dude comes across in the middle of

Big Lebowski when he's on a quest for the homework. Okay, my number one is The Bridge on the River Kwai, which I said I didn't have a movie in the Pacific Theater, and I guess I sort of do. This is a movie about a prison camp in Thailand that the Japanese are running, full of British soldiers and a handful of American soldiers. Their purpose at this camp is to build a bridge that the Japanese need to transport materials during the war effort.

And it becomes this complicated film about the necessity of duty and honor and the code of the military set against the most unimaginable suffering you could ever see. It's also a movie about a mission and also a movie about an escape. It's kind of a blend of a lot of the best of these movies. This is David Lean's film from 57. You know, in addition, Alec Guinness features William Holden, who's like your classic American matinee idol in the film. Alec Guinness in this movie is so tortured by the end of it.

It's like one of the signature film performances of all time I don't know it must have been my grandparents who hipped me to this movie

when I was a kid but another movie similarly that was just like did you ever see that like they would ask you when you're nine years old like have you seen that one yet if I was like excited

about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles they were like Bridge on the River Kwai that's a film that's a film not these turtles please turn into that guy with Alice really soon

I mean I'm already there I'm already you know chortling about Bridge on the River Kwai when is she going to learn about the secret of the ooze though that's what I really want to know

I mean I can't wait to perform Ninja Rap for her like I'm so lit up with Vanilla Ice lyrics from my youth this is a great film

if you haven't seen it you should check it out any thoughts Chris you relate to Guinness in this movie? I was trying to think if there's ever been a non-perfect Alec Guinness

screen performance. I know there probably is, but it's not coming to me. Him mailing it in is usually pretty perfect, too. What about when he was force-ghosted in the most recent trilogy?

Was that a good performance or not good? Did that happen? Didn't he get... Did he show up? I can't remember. Did we not see the old Obi-Wan in any of the more recent Star Wars projects?

I feel like they might have called in Ewan for that one. Is he not in Rise, though? Oh, yeah, right. Right, he would be. They did all the voices. I don't know who did it. I know Liam Neeson got roped into something at some point. Just Googling Force Ghost Old Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I'm seeing the end of Return of the Jedi. Amanda, are you sure you don't want to come back early? Maybe you're right. Maybe they're just bringing in Ewan McGregor. What about at the end of Return of the Jedi when he's there? Who's the actor who plays... Old Anakin? Who plays Old Anakin, yeah.

I can't even name that guy's name. He's barely in the movie. Peter O'Toole? You like Return of the Jedi? Not that much. Luke doing the somersault off of the prison barge? Yeah, off the sail barge.

Among the coolest things that's ever happened. You were a Boba Fett guy, though. Yeah. No, I was... Boba Fett. I thought he deserved to go. What are your thoughts on Salacious Crumb?

How do you feel about Salacious Crumb? Who's that? Jabba's little, like, pet. Little Muppet. He gets choked out. Jabba gets choked out. Jabba gets choked out. What happens to Salacious?

Does he get thrown in the Sarlacc? He probably gets fed to the Rancor, I think. How have you... What did that inspire in you? Jabba getting choked out just later in life. It's made me passionate about disassembling the Deep Stateor. How have you... What did that inspire in you? Jabba getting choked out just later in life. It's made me passionate

about disassembling the deep state like I told you. Sarlacc pit? Yay or nay? Oh, yay. Yeah. I like a Sarlacc pit.

Kind of a permanent... There's not a lot of parole from the Sarlacc pit. Well, we don't know. Oh, we don't know what's at the bottom. Right, exactly. Boba Fett knows.

Is it just an esophageal carcass? Like, what's going on there? I don't like that word. Well, I used it. Is there a Studio Ghibli movie about what's at the bottom of the Sarlacc pit? Yeah, The Boy in the Sarlacc pit. It's a beautiful film.

Should we do some honorable mentions? There's so many movies we could name. All right, here's the problem. Dunkirk, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List. Nobody had them. Well, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List. Nobody had them. Well, Saving Private Ryan was on Rob's list, right? Yes. I'm not saying that those are not

some of the greatest movies ever made. I just didn't feel like putting them in my top five. I know that that won't matter, but I'm just saying so. Yeah, I feel confident if Amanda were here, she would have Remains of the Day on her list. I will say The Third Man is one of the greatest films of all time. I think I did this and I set up

this whole landscape here. For whatever reason the movies that are in the aftermath didn't feel like what I should do. That's my favorite movie. Yeah.

So I love that movie and it's very much about Vienna in the aftermath and what can happen in a world after a war. But I don't know

for whatever reason I just wasn't linking it to this. I hear it didn't feel like a war movie in that way. What else? Atonement? Atonement, for sure.

It's a fairly recent film that I think has been canonized. People really love that movie. You know, Downfall? Yeah. It's a very popular 21st century movie about the portrait

of Hitler at the end. How seen is the actual movie? Like the meme? It's been memed. The clips? Absolutely. You know, it's actually the meme, the clips. Absolutely. You know, it's actually quite hard to see now. Yes.

It's not streaming anywhere right now. I don't know why that is. What's the movie that Branagh and Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci made that was about like them talking about the actual camps and stuff?

Like, Oh, yeah. I can't remember. I mean, Anthropoid is another one that I was thinking of. That was like a Frank Pearson HBO movie, but it was like incredible though. Yeah, yeah. I can't remember the name of that movie another one that i was thinking of hbo movie but it was like incredible though yeah yeah i can't remember the name of that movie uh i mean there's a lot of you know we haven't mentioned the best years of our lives is kind of similar to the sort

of the aftermath movies like uh third man i got a couple uh stalag 17 and five graves to cairo are two billy wilder movies that are just incredible uh another austrian exile who came to america to make films and stalag is a great companion piece to Great Escape. In fact, probably a little bit more of like a cynical

kind of comic take on it. Some more recent stuff, Fury. David Ayer's incredibly violent tank movie. I gotta say,

Valkyrie's pretty entertaining. I was thinking about watching that one for this. Would you recommend it? I'm just saying it's entertaining. I was thinking about watching that one for this. Would you recommend it? I'm just saying it's entertaining. I'm not saying it's like accurate depiction of the German high command. Anytime you can get Bryan Singer directing Nazi Tom

Cruise, you got it. You had me at Nazi Tom Cruise. I got to be honest. I thought it was McQuarrie. McQuarrie wrote it. Operation Crossbow is the movie I was thinking of when I was like movies that Rick Dalton would be in. I haven't seen that. Dam Busters as well is like,

kind of like that. I haven't seen that either. Um, Dam Busters? Dam. Okay. Like, bursting the dam.

Is that the movie that the dude watches in the Big Lebowski? That's log jamming. That is, goddammit. That's the greatest generation we're talking about.

Uh, speaking of which, Mr. Roberts? Yeah, good film. Uh, Jack Lemmon and Henry Fonda directed by

John Ford and Ensign Pulver yeah and it's basically like comedy it's very very stagey but it's a comedy set on a destroyer park to the Pacific mmm come and see I've mentioned on this

show many times one of them probably the most destroying film Melville Silence of the most destroying film. Melville's Silence of the Sea, another film made right in the immediate after, I think, 48 or 49. Phoenix, Christian Petzold's movie from about five years ago,

which is maybe actually more like 10 years ago, which is very good. I've talked to Naaman about that on the show a few times. Lena Vertmuller's Seven Beauties. I'm just thinking of international films here. I mean, Pan's Labyrinth is a World War II movie. I didn't even think about that. You're right.

You know, very much about, like, I think that's right at the end. I think it's set in 45 in Spain. What else? What else is in there? How does history remember the Clint stuff? The Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Eogema. Like, I feel like Letters from Eogema is probably more successful than Flags of Our Fathers. I think it's a better movie and the more well-regarded movie.

I think just because Flags of Our Fathers just feels think it's a better movie and the more well-regarded movie. I think just because Flags of Our Fathers just feels very... It is propaganda. Straight up. But I think the fact that he attempts to balance it by telling the other story is interesting. I mean, there's so many more.

I do think I made a list of roughly 300. There's a lot. I do love the spycraft counterintelligence part. Like Black Book, I think, is worth noting. Also, I would never put this movie on a top five list, but I have time for U571 personally. Robby was definitely on my long list. I'm happy to throw that on.

In terms of that part of this list, that's got to be there. If people are interested in the spycraft part of World War II, I'd highly recommend the novels of Alan First who's written about like a dozen books that are set between like 36-7 through World War 2

and are just all about like resistance fighters and spy networks across Europe would it be helpful if I just said movie titles right now yeah

isn't that what we've been doing but with no commentary should I sing the Star Spangled Banner while you do it just do the brutalist score for me underneath

where eagles dare is movie we haven't met have you seen that one no really good Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood as two guys going undercover in Germany during World War 2

now we're talking spy movie quality Patton movie that I like don't love catch 22 Mike Nichols is adaptation of the spy movie quality Patton movie that I like don't love Catch-22 Mike Nichols' adaptation of the Heller novel

Midway Bob you're gonna have to pipe this in I think should we just make this the permanent theme of the show no it should just be

playing while we talk the entire time on a loop this is very zone of interest honestly? No, it should just be playing while we talk the entire time on a loop. This is very Zone of Interest, honestly. Speaking of World War II. I still haven't seen The Brutalist, but now

when I do, I'm just going to hear you doing the score when I see it. Has anyone said Zone of Interest in a more excited way? Zone of Interest! I saw every time I've

been on a plane recently it's been available. That is a particular plane vibe. Not a good place to watch it. Chris, you forgot your favorite, Captain America,

the first soldier. Oh, you know what? I will say that I thought about throwing on a long list just as an example of how much room there is to play with this genre

is Overlord. Fun movie. Horror movie set during World War II. A horror movie with Wyatt Russell set during World War II. There's two very big ones,

one of which I don't really care for very much. One of which I don't really care for very much. One of which I like. Jojo Rabbit. That's the one you love. Yeah. Which I don't like very much. You like watching that on planes.

I don't. Greyhound. Have you guys seen Greyhound? No. The Tom Hanks movie? I have. It's not bad. Pretty good.

Yeah. Pretty good. It's a naval battle film set on an aircraft carrier. And it was released during COVID on Apple TV. Wow. If we had seen it in the movie theater, I think it would have

done quite well. I think we actually did the Dad Movie Hall of Fame with Kevin Clark hinged to that movie. Pretty good if you haven't. How many World War II movies is Apple TV churning out?

I don't know. They've sent something in the marketplace, I guess. There's so many more. Michael Mann's The Keep. You know. Up in the marketplace, I guess. There's so many more. Michael Mann's The Keep. You know. Up in the Carpathian Forest.

You know, I just want you to know that I bought it on 4K from Vinegar Syndrome over the weekend. They're issuing it on home Blu-ray 4K release for the first time ever. And this completes my Michael Mann collection.

Wow. So now I have every film he's ever made. Are you saying you're better than me? I'm saying level up. Shout out to vinegar syndrome by the way.

It was $44.99 and I bought it. Okay. Because I'm supporting the cause. I wouldn't pay that much honestly for most films. But the last piece of the Michael Mann puzzle.

What's the price point for the DVDs that you're buying these days? Where are we at? It's all in the $19.99 range. Yeah. Okay. Remember when video games were like $80? I do. Oh, they still are. Yeah. And your parents would just

be like, what the fuck? I would have to wait for Christmas. Yeah. Do you wait for Christmas every year? No. I'm increasingly playing fewer and fewer. But the good thing about being an adult man is I don't have to reckon with my parents saying, what are you doing with my life? That's just my inner voice. There's also the problem that you can buy them online now where it just doesn't hurt at all. I don't have to reckon with my parents saying, what are you doing with my life? That's just my inner voice. There's also the problem

that you can buy them online now where it just doesn't hurt at all. You don't have to go to the store. We haven't mentioned another reason why these films, I think, resonate and keep getting made, which is Call of Duty. Oh, yeah.

Call of Duty created a whole new generation of interest around this. Yeah, well, yeah. But I think because of the, you know, only some of those games are set during World War II, right? I think there are all sorts of conflicts, I think, yeah. But I feel like one of the you know only some of those games are set during world war ii right like i think they're all all sorts of conflicts i think yeah um but i feel like one of the most popular in the first three or four was a world war ii game and that spawned a whole new level of interest around them

okay and anything else well let's can we talk briefly about oscar chances for oh yeah i was gonna ask i've been uh i've been like holding space for this film in the 10 and it seems like no one truly loves this movie yeah which is not a good thing

for a best picture contender and it does seem now like Wicked and A Complete Unknown which were two movies that people were like I don't know is this gonna be good

I'm not sure if this is gonna make it now I feel like both of those movies are definitely making it. Oh. And so I could be wrong on A Complete Unknown Wicked without question. That was the stunning

I feel like you lumping in with Wicked is revealing. Maybe, maybe not. I think A Complete Unknown does what it needs to do to satisfy a certain kind of audience. You think it would get nominated

for Best Picture. Yes. You do. If I had to guess right now I would say yes. Because that area at 910 feels so weak and undefined and things have been moving

in and out of it for the last six weeks. And I had had Blitz in there. I think I had Blitz in there all the way back in September when Amanda and I did an Oscar bet. I think I had it,

I'm pretty sure we had it in two weeks ago when Katie Rich and Joe were on the pod is that when you did the last power ranking? yeah and now

it's like didn't do anything in theaters it was released into the wicked Moana 2 Gladiator 2 Yacht Rocket Documentary

corridor there you go have more people seen Yacht Rocket Documentary than Blitz honest question no right

I don't know a lot of people have Max yeah not a lot of people have that is true that is true does Yacht Rock start right at the end of

the most recent Dune Prophecy episode I thought you were going to ask does it start right at the end of World War 2 is that that's where it picks up I mean not

technically no but doesn't everything the birth of Donald Fagan was Fagan born what what, 46 probably? You know, it's got to be right in that zone. He's a sort of a post-war baby. He's a hep cat.

The greatest generation, a baby boomer. Yeah, I don't think it's getting in best picture right now. So here's what I wanted to ask you, is that there were two movies

that were kind of like the flagship awards films, I thought, for streaming services. Amelia Perez for Netflix. This splits for Apple. Yep. In the past,

like for instance, when Coda made its run, I know that Coda is a much more crowd pleasing film than Blitz and is a much more obviously like kind of uplifting film than Blitz. But I was like, what, like literally what is CDA until like two weeks before the Oscars

yeah I mean that was in 2021 at a time when yeah it was there were hardly any movie theaters open for the first

half of the year and the competition was significantly more slight yeah than the last couple of years and like you said

that was a time when a lot of people were depressed and sad and in their home and separated from their family. And that's a movie that made people feel great. It's a big contender that that year was The Power of the Dog, which is a real feel-bad movie. Very artfully made movie, but not exactly what the world wanted at that time.

This year is different. I will say, I thought about this a lot. 1917 Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge, The Imitation Game, War Horse, and Glorious Bastards in Atonement all got Best Picture nominations. If there's a big, splashy war movie with a big budget and a star like Saoirse Ronan, it's probably going to get nominated for Best Picture.

And can't you take this movie and say, now more than ever? You know, and like, kind of... I mean, that's what McQueen is saying in the press. He's saying that this is a movie about right now. This is a movie about what is happening in other countries and what could happen in England and in America, what have you.

So there's a story to tell and it fits the mold. And yet, weirdly, we spent 25 minutes talking about it and I'm like, how many people that are even listening to this episode saw it? I think one thing that may work against it is Saoirse Ronan is in this movie. It's telling that we've barely talked about her. And I know there's a long history

of best supporting actresses making an absolute meal out of like underwritten wives and mothers. Like that's the whole deal for the most part of that category. This part gives her nothing to work with. She gets to sing. She gets to sing.

She gets to sing. And I think the scene of the movie, in addition to the firefight sequence and some of the set pieces that feels most like a Steve McQueen movie, is the Saoirse at the jazz club dance. That feels like a movie I want to watch. For the most part, she's just kind of chasing after her kid, which is to say she can't even do it because she doesn't know where she is. She's like walking about town.

If she were a huge central part of this movie in like a big movie star way, then I see the route to a lot of different awards. But other than that, like it's barely a war movie. It's not like a star driven vehicle. It's in this weird, like neither fish nor fowl kind of situation. It is.

I just, I think it will be an interesting test of the age of the Academy members because they've added so many people in recent years. I think the expectation is always that older film, like older set films like this tend to do better with older Academy members. The Saoirse question is interesting. As recently as September, I was like, well, she's getting two nominations.

She's going to get nominated for Outrun. She's going to get nominated for Best Actress. Maybe she'll even win because she's been nominated so many times despite barely being 30. And she'll also get nominated for supporting for this i still think there's a path for her to get nominated for supporting even though i agree with you that like she's not misused it just it doesn't feel like a developed arc no um she's just a mom who misses her kid and is trying to make a living during this um terrible time in history supporting actress right now ariana grande and Ciara's favorite performance of the year.

Zoe Saldana for Lioness, excuse me, Emilia Perez. Felicity Jones for The Brutalist, which you can attest you enjoyed. Thumbs up for us. Thumbs up, all right.

Monica Barbaro for A Complete Unknown. I will say, definitely the revelation of that movie for me. That's awesome, cool. Danielle Deadweiler in The Piano Lesson

and Isabella Rossellini in Conclave. And the Conclave hive is a buzz because now they're like, I see an opening for a BP win. And a lot of times when you get a movie that is like, everybody decides we're going to make this the best picture,

it gets a lot of stray nominations that you don't see coming. Has Conclave been under the microscope yet? Is there going to be like, actually Conclave isn't good? I know that people are saying. I'm sure that will happen. This movie is just not that good.

Too many popes in it? What's the problem? I just think it's like, Conclave winning, or Conclave being the clubhouse leader, would draw attention to Conclave in a way that Conclave didn't have to deal with when it first came out.

It's very true. And I think everybody was like, damn, that shit was pretty entertaining. And now if you actually have to interrogate it, I wonder whether or not it stands up under scrutiny yeah I mean short of Adam I don't know a lot of people who really didn't like it and I think that's going in its favor as opposed to Blitz where I don't feel like a sense of enthusiasm but we're reading tea leaves that are illusory so I don't know I feel like my letterbox algorithm for the most part is either like no matter what film i see if i go on

letterbox it's just like it's giving mother you know like so that's one kind of comment and then the other is who is giving mother in concrete i don't want to spoil it uh or this is a piece of shit this is like late capitalist clapaptrap. That's on the Taylor Sheridan boards? No, that's just like when you go through Letterboxd reviews, those are generally the two kinds. So you're just looking at rando Letterboxd reviews? What am I supposed to be doing? I just look at the

mutual people that I'm following. You don't ever pull up a movie? Are you on Letterboxd? Oh, yeah. I don't follow that many people. I don't know. I couldn't tell you. Guys, let's get on. I will happily follow you. This is our own Conclave. Who's who? I'm Lithgow, obviously. I don't think that there's much to cancel about Conclave.

I didn't mean cancel. I mean interrogate whether or not this is worthwhile. Now, honestly, I look at all this stuff from an outsider's perspective. I think probably Onora should win. I think Connickleave has an opening if you believe the theory that Onora and The Brutalist are a bit too indie

for the sensibility of Best Picture. After Parasite 1, I've kind of dispensed with that expectation. I think movies like Onora can definitely win Best Picture. It's still probably my pick right now. It's your pick because

is it your want to or will win? I still think it will win. Okay. What do you want to win? Probably The Brutalist because I think it represents the ambition

that I'm most interested in from filmmakers. It's a cool year though. I love Dune Part 2. I think that's a great movie and I think those pair of movies together are great Part 2 I think that's a great movie and I think that's a those pair of movies together are great together I think I was

Nora and or Brutalist and Dune 2 oh Dune and Dune 2 those are two movies that I love that are contending okay but

the Wicked thing is very real the reason why I said on the show that I would be a brat if it won even though I think the movie

looks kind of ugly and is a little hokey in its storytelling, my issue is more that it's a part one. So if a part one wins Best Picture, I think like all bets are off in the Moana 2 conversation we were having. I'm just like, movies are gonna get fucked up. If they're like, we're awarding half of a story

that isn't a fan fiction of classical Hollywood, we will have fewer and fewer new things ever again. So that really was the origin of my concern around that. Just to dive into your mind for a second. Please do. Thank you. Would you have felt this way if like Across the Spider-Verse won Best Picture? Like an unabashed part one to be continued.

I would feel pretty upset about that. Yeah, I mean, the thing, the case that I've made over the years is that I like those movies being represented in Best Picture. And I think Wicked being represented in Best Picture would be a good thing. Sure.

It's a movie with a ton of craft, with big stars, that represents like a certain kind of Hollywood filmmaking. I have no problem with a movie like that being nominated. It winning would be annoying. It winning would send a weird message.

Just like Spider-Verse part one. I'm with you. We're not going to give Avengers Doomsday part one best picture, right? No. And if you ever suggested it

previously, people would be like, you should kill yourself. And now if you're like, if you say that Wicked shouldn't win, you're like, you're an incel.

No way. I don't feel like it. It's like, it's a totally fine musical You're still on Twitter so hard. No, I just saw all the feedback to the episode that we did

where I was basically like, this movie's okay. And it is. It's just okay. But a lot of okay movies have won Best Picture in the

past. So, we shall see. What do you want to win Best Picture? I think Enora. Yeah. Yeah. Have you seen Enora

yet? I loved it. You did? I think of the realistic candidates, I would love for it to win. Yeah, I think you have to pick like, it's like you get out of the primaries,

you got to pick the president that's going to lead us all, you know? We're coming together as a nation to pick Anora. President Annie. Yeah. I have a theory that I'll share with you later this week on the show, and I can throw to that tease shortly,

that all the best movies of the year for me are all about America. That's a very ethnocentric way of seeing things, but that they're all very much ported onto what America thinks it is versus what it actually is. And that has been the theme that has coursed through the year. Anyway, we'll get to that. Who's the Elphaba in this? My daughter, unfortunately, who is just fully dressing like Elphaba every day and wants to go to school dressed like Elphaba. Congrats. It's been a bit of an issue in our household.

Rob, thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks for being here. You're one of the hosts of Group Chat. I am. You are a frequent host of the Prestige TV podcast. What other pods are you on? Mostly those these days.

Okay. And, you know, hopefully this one. You're coming back on this one. Well, we'll save that. Yeah. Twice this week or once? What do you think? We're doing a lot of taping.

I don't know what's coming out when or why. Can you tape with me three times this week? Yeah, of do you think? We're doing a lot of taping. I don't know what's coming out when or why. Can you tape with me three times this week? Yeah, of course I can. Yeah? Why? Well, I might need you to. Well, I mean,

I've definitely signed up for it. I know what I'm responsible for. I don't think we've put time to the third recording. Yeah, we have Thursday lockdown. I do not know what you want for me on Friday. Okay.

On Thursday, we are... I may have to do the FanDuel pregame show at any given moment. How did that go on Sunday? I missed it. I felt like I was in a little over my head as far as gambling went. Did you do picks? I did try to throw out the Panthers money line and I almost got it. Can you explain what that means?

I think the money line is just like I'm betting on the Panthers to win, but I get a spread here and there. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Are you in crippling debt now? What's going on? No, I was just like, the Panthers to win, but there's, I get like a spread here and there. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Are you in crippling debt now? What's going on? No, I was just like, the Panthers have been frisky and I think the Bucs stink. So I just like take it from CR.

You're on the Bryce Young train. I was just like, this is the kind of point in the season where teams start to give up. And other teams are like, we need to play for our coach's job or our quarterback's future or whatever. So when Adam Thielen made that catch, you were like, boom. I was literally about to hit send on all of my... I was like, come back for more hot picks from Chris Rye.

I like to sell and stuff, and I didn't. You just forgot. CR, where can people hear you? The big picture. Okay. Thanks, Chris. Thanks to Jack Sanders. Thanks to Bobby wagner our producer

for his work on this episode and that's right later this week we'll be picking our top five favorite movies of the year chris will be here adam namen will be here amanda won't be here or will she we'll see see you then Thank you.