The Ricochet Podcast - The Visual Fallacy

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

Thirty years back, filmmaker Whit Stillman charmed audiences with a comedy about two Americans abroad in chaotic Cold War Europe. He joins Rob, James and Peter to discuss his movie Barcelona, cinema as an artform and as a business, and reasons for hope regarding its revival as a crowd-pleaser. Plus: Rob's returned from Morocco, Peter's got big news, and James has a plan for the post-CCP TikTok.- Soundbites from the opening: Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols in Barcelona; Bob Hope at the Academy Awards in 1968; and Brendan Fraiser at the Oscars on Sunday.

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Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie Hello? Yes. Are we all here? We're here. Alright.

You suddenly stopped. I thought for a minute, oh my god, James has had a stroke. No. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast, and they're back. Rob Long and Peter Robinson are back with us.

I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to director Whit Stillman on the 30th anniversary of Barcelona. So let's have ourselves a podcast. That was really terrible. You were blowing it way out of proportion. Don't take it so seriously. Those Red Ants were bad news. They weren't any good for anybody. I was trying to convince them to look at Americans in a new way. Then in one stupid move, you confirm their worst assumptions.

I did not confirm their worst assumptions. I am their worst assumption. Here we are once again. Welcome to the Academy Awards. Or as it's known at my house, Passover. And the Oscar goes to... Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 683. You can join us at ricochet.com any day you like, and if you want to pony up a couple of shekels,

you can take part in the most stimulating conversations in the community on the web. Some of them will give you a free little hit, and then later come along and say, you want to give us some money? We're up front about it. Oh, you can read the front page for free, but all the fun stuff, the commenting, to get skin in the game, as Rob Long always loves to say. Yeah, membership. And it's a good thing. It'll pay you every single day you're on the internet.

Hail, hail the gangs all here. Peter Robinson is back from his annual exploration of the American soul. And Rob is back from Africa. I've been sitting at the same table for the last two, three weeks or so. I got nothing to add to this. World travelers, what lessons have you for us now that you have returned? Well, where was Peter? I don't know where Peter was.

I was skiing. I was in the Rockies. I was in the, or rather the Tetons. I was in the Tetons. And you were skiing? you know i'm just like i'm trying to capture a visual picture you're were your children with you my a couple of my yes and my nurse and my aid and i was built for me yeah no my oldest daughter got engaged on the slopes congratulations congratulations and moreover to a man of whom my wife and i thoroughly approve he's a canadian and he

well that's a problem ski he can really ski which was one reason that so i didn't quite know what was going on except that this brief family trip to the tetons got arranged and i was told to attend and then um and then news got broken so it was a lovely event and i did ski i went cross-country skiing three whole days and i went downhill skiing cheap bastard that i am i paid the exorbitant one day pass price and went downhill skiing for a day so there i'm still recovering i grant it but yes i have a couple questions all right did your wife know of course that this is going to happen yes and so uh so the canadian this canadian fellow he didn't ask the bride's father for permission. He did, actually.

Oh, he did, okay. But the bride's father was, as usual, so distracted. He did something very sweet and very old-fashioned, and he called me the week before and presented a kind of business case, God bless him, that I met your daughter and then this happened and we met you and so on. Next slide. Yes, exactly. No, no, it was all verbal, but he was kind of working his way through a deck, God bless him. And then he actually uttered the very sweet, very old fashioned words, so, do I have your permission? And of course, I granted it, but I didn't know quite when it was going to happen i see that's the point so i i knew i mean i yes yes i knew a happy event was about to take

place i didn't know quite when so what kind of a canadian is he because i've met several kinds he's the kind of canadian knows how to handle peter that's for sure that's true well here's what you need to know and i told my, it's all I need to know. She was describing him to me for the first time before I'd met him, and I said, whoa, whoa, let me see if I've got this right. He's a Dartmouth man. He's a former professional athlete. He played hockey for a couple of years professionally and important to us although i know that rob has his doubts about all this and james was raised in what we call a different tradition but important to our family and he's a catholic i said to my daughter i don't even need to meet him just

just this is this one is fine this one is fine right there and he's currently in prison for no stop i didn't right rob africa africa where were you in africa well africa you know that's a so huge it sounds really exotic i was in morocco which is of course is technically africa but uh and the broccans always say they're africa but it's a very different kind of africa from the other is what you say you say africa people think you're you're doing a you know a hemorrheic safari in the middle of exactly exactly uh in morocco um i was traveling with a group of people um we have a very um thoughtful generous and interesting friend who wants to you know go on treks and so we went on a trek it was quite quite fun and quite interesting i love morocco i've been there a couple times. This is sort of the most purposeful

trip I've taken to Morocco, in a way. It's a really interesting country. And I was there, I stayed a couple extra days, and I was there. It was in Tangier on Tuesday. And for the first day of Ramadan, for Moroccans,

everyone else, the rest of the Muslim world, I think, ramadan the day before moroccan start the day later and no moroccan that i spoke to could give me a plausible or consistent reason why that is so i just suspect that they're just a little bit more groovy and they're like well let's not rush this thing but i did love um i had never i've ever been to a muslim country during ramadan um and i I loved it because they take it very seriously. It's a cultural thing. They're not devout or orthodox or in any way fundamentalist Muslims.

The king of Morocco, Muhammad VI, is also the head of the church there. So he's like, you know, as if King Charles was the king of england the head of state and the head of the government and the prime minister and also the archbishop of canterbury and what is that i think that is done in morocco which has always been a very kind of very cosmopolitan place it's um kept uh any friday um preaching in the mosques from getting weird um because he's the boss so you can't be in the mosque on Friday, some crazy one-eyed imam preaching jihad. Not that I think the Moroccan character would actually accept that.

Anyway, so the great thing is that they take Ramadan very seriously. It's like a serious Lent, but everyone has given up the same stuff for Lent, which is different because Lent here, Lent, Christian Lent, we all give up whatever we want to give up. So if I see you walking down the street eating M&Ms, I don't know that you're breaking your Lent vow, but I don't know what you gave up or what you took, right?

Ramadan, everybody does the same thing. So, it's a lot of like the first day, at the end of the second to last afternoon prayer, Ramadan officially, the fast officially ends. So, they fast. Now, if you're really devout, no water either. And you could see, you could tell in Tangier, people walking around before that, the fast officially ended. They were just a little cranky. They're just a little bit, like you could, there's just some more.

There was a, I mean, I didn't even realize that. Why is everybody so pissed off at each other? And that was why. So it's a fast city. I loved it. I love that Morocco is a great you know pissed off at each other and uh that was why so it's a fast city i loved it i i love morocco's a great country great city some great really fascinating places um i recommend everyone go i was in jerusalem once during ramadan and at sunset at the moment when the arabs were permitted to when the muslims were permitted to eat again they fired a rocket like a firework that went over the city and you could hear scattered applause from the streets did was there anything like that a kind of communal moment well there's a call to prayer which is usually that's what they do so there's a call to prayer the the first one

and then and then there's a special soup they all eat it's really kind of lovely i mean it has all sorts of associations for us i think they're negative and you know legitimately so in many ways but it's kind of a lovely thing for everybody in the country to be doing this and then have this kind of philosophical idea that gives me a chance to think. It clears my mind. I get to focus on what I really want, and the families get together, and then there's feasting, of course. So it's kind of a lovely thing to watch.

I would be disappointed if within five minutes of getting off the plane i was not met by a small spindly sweating uh man with a white fez who offered to sell me a special heroin some some rare antiquity and then took me to the back roads and the back streets where sydney green street sat under a slowly moving fan you know fanny himself mr lilacs mr lilacs this way mr lilacs yeah i know you must protect me come here i know you despise me here i would be that would be because that's all my conception of morocco and tangiers and these exotic other places uh is but to hear that it's cosmopolitan and modern is wonderful it does sound like you had a grand time yeah they're just cool people it's a just cool people. Tangier is a fantastically interesting city.

Just one of the most interesting cities in the world. How big is it? It's twice as big as it used to be. Because the French, when they took over, created a separate city next to the old city. So Medina, in Arabic, just means city. So Medina, New York, Medina, Paris, Medina, Rome. But the French would always build a Nouvelle Ville right next to it. And so, depending on where you live is depending on what kind of, where you live, the Nouvelle Ville or the Medina.

But that's not that big. It's not a hill. It's not that big. Standard of living, streets filled with cars. Do you feel you're in a third-worldy country? You're not in a third-worldy. It's not a poor country. I see. you're in a third worldy country you're not in a third world it's it's not a poor country it's actually it's in many ways it's the it's a a fantastic example of a country that works because

the king is an insane and if you look at muhammad um the sixth you were actually all of the kings basically they've been sort of thoughtful very spent a lot of time in paris you know downside of the upside of being a king of morocco get a beautiful Hotel Particulier in the 7th you get to stay in. But he's done a lot of investing and he's created a lot of businesses. He's trying to turn Tangier and the Atlantic coast and then the Mediterranean coast on the other side into resorts and pleasure spots for bored, rich people, which is kind of a smart idea not

unlike donald trump and mar-a-lago uh but on a larger scale yes right yeah but i mean they they like him they really do like and if you look at that would be unlike donald trump yeah it would be but if you also look at um you know who his um contemporaries uh not not even are what have been most of them are dead some of them were murdered by their furious citizens there's not a chance for that he's um he's an enlightened figure as they say well if I was doing a book report on Morocco of course remember from grade school you have to ask and the main exports are what are what do they make aside from culture mostly it's agriculture um figs right uh citrus oranges agriculture i mean is um and then there's

there's agricultural products so there's a lot of potassium and there's some minerals but mostly it's agri i mean they if you're if you're in a continent of Europe and you are between, you know, September and May and you eat an orange or a lemon or a grapefruit or a fig or a date, that's where it comes from. Or olives, olive oil, olives, they have them in every meal, but their olive oil is very good. So they do all that stuff. And they also, they pioneered this thing that's very much from the Arab culture. And I've eaten it all across that part of the world.

And it is nougat. They all have a terrible, incredible sweet tooth, but they make this nougat. And I know it sounds so boring, but like, if you ever went through,

in Jerusalem, there's the nougat sellers and candy sellers in Jerusalem, all sorts of, and all around the Middle East. And it's delicious. I'm completely,

completely defenseless against it. One of my great experiences was sitting in nazareth outside in a um in a guest house run by french nuns uh drinking their wine and smoking a cigar and eating nougat and i'm telling you it was great but the best nougat. And I'm telling you, it was great. But the best nougat sellers in Tangier. And people accuse you of being somewhat sybaritic. And meanwhile, the nuns are puttering around in the background, saying,

in French, under their breath to each other, but this man, he is not sick, he is not poor. How do we get rid of him? He must move along now. He's drinking the worst wine. He likes that. What's his problem? So the nougat sellers, you were about to say The nougat sellers of Paris, which sounds like some Michelle Legrand song from 1967

The best nougat seller In, I think, I've ever had I've ever eaten, and I thank you Is in Tangier And the guy's been selling nougat Or something, or his dad In a tiny little booth, from a tiny little booth In a little street in Tangier, in the Medina and i want to call the petite soco the little market

he's been selling it since 1954 and it is insanely delicious and i was um i was embarrassed to ask for a kilo because I said, a kilo? How much is a kilo? And he looked at me like, a kilo? Good Lord, what's your problem? So I only bought a half a kilo. And I ate a quarter of a kilo walking around. And then I ate a quarter of a kilo on the plane home. What you do, man, here's what you do.

You buy that kilo and then you take it quarter of a kilo on the plane home. What you do, man, here's what you do. You buy that kilo, and then you take it, and you cut it. You cut it with some Three Musketeers, okay? You got the good nougat, but then you step on it with some crappy Three Musketeers stuff. Listen, folks, you probably learned more history-wise about Morocco than you've known here in a long time, right? All of a sudden, the country has opened up to you in the imagination, and you want to go. What if there was a place here in the United States that performed a similar function on the youth of America? What if there was a college

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Bet within 48 hours of race. Main market excluding specials and place bets. Terms apply. Bet responsibly. 18plusgamblingcare.ie We're going to get to our guest in a second, but before we do, I want to ask Peter and Rob, now that you're back in your political chairs, perhaps you've seen the CNN map that says if the election were held today, Donald Trump has sufficient electoral votes to beat joe biden do you believe it or do you think that cnn is trying

to anger up the blood of its readers so they're they're watchers so they uh they'll get more ratings i know the idea of cnn and the rest of them trying to puff up trump in order to get ratings is ridiculous and beyond the pale but let's just say it's possible i mean i believe it i mean it's going to be close right i mean we i think it's fair to say right i believe it donald trump has led in national polls for a couple of months now with i think only one or two exceptions we now have to say that if you take the last quarter, the polls in which Biden is ahead are the outliers now. Of course, the media argued for the long time that as the polls began to come in showing Trump ahead, that those were just outliers. That's flipped. The poll after poll after poll shows him especially ahead, not just barely ahead, but especially ahead in what we all know are going to be the swing or the combat states of Michigan and Pennsylvania and Georgia and Arizona. Some of them include Nevada.

He seems to be up in the mid to high single digits in some polls in those states. So, what is there to say? There are two things going on that the country, the middle of the country, as very distinct from whatever is left of the legacy media, just will not buy. They will not have crammed down their throats the idea that Joe Biden is a healthy, well, quick-thinking 40-year-old, which is the way they're attempting to portray him. They simply say, no, excuse me, I believe the evidence of my eyes. Stop lying to me, one. And then two, these cases of all the various cases against Trump, even Andy McCarthy, who detests Trump as much as Rob does, I think, if I'm allowed to put it that way. Andy McCarthy, who is still a very careful, well-trained, fierce in his day, former prosecutor, says that even in the Mar-a-Lago case, the documents case,

which is the one case against Trump, where they seem to have got him as a legal matter, they seem to have got him, the way Jack Smith, the prosecutor, is attempting to rush to trial just violates all the norms of due process and prosecutorial simple dignity. So that's the other thing that the country just says, I'm not buying it. Don't do this. I'm not even sure it's, of course, there's still a MAGA pro-Trump, but that doesn't explain his majority in the polls. I don't think that the MAGA is more than 35 or 40% of the country, as far as I can tell, at best. So, there's some independents in there who are just saying, look, I don't like this guy, but I'm with him. If you're going to try to corrupt the American judicial system to stop him, I'll say hell no. As far as I can tell,

it's about those two. It's not policy. No, but this is not an endorsement of Donald Trump's character. I think that's the way it feels to me but i'm sitting here in california where you know it's not the rest of the country let's put it that way um i i guess i generally i i see your point i i think um i think it's worse for biden actually because i think it isn't about his age or his infirmity i think that's just a placeholder for people he hasn't done anything and what he's done they don't like they they don't like the fact that he hasn't done anything on the border they don't like the fact that he hasn't done anything about inflation but if he was a president in full career in full faculty right now he would still be

struggling because the people perceive whether you know they think they're wrong but i mean the people perceive this country's going the wrong direction and the general reason for that they're assigning to his age but i think there's he's got prior problems that just seem baffling to me as a politician who's been essentially successful for so long and in getting elected in return is that he just completely misunderstands the american mood um if he was vigorous and vital and out there handing whip inflation now buttons to everybody it still wouldn't work you're absolutely right rob and those of us who remember the whip inflation now buttons remember the whole

malaise that beset america and how we climbed up out of it. And now we retcon the 80s as being this absolutely wonderful, magical, unified time, which it wasn't. It wasn't. But it was fascinating. And we have one of its greatest chroniclers with us now. Whit Stillman, filmmaker, written, directed, and produced Metropolitan, The Last Days of Disco, Damsels in Distress, Love and Friendship, and Barcelona, which was released 30 years ago, and that gives us

an excuse, a peg here, it tells the story of two American cousins living abroad as they grapple with their anti-Americanism, with career distresses, faith, romantic disappointments, and all those things that plagued us as young people in the last decade of the Cold War, as it's called. Mr. Stillman, thank you for joining us today.

The most important question I have about Barcelona right now, frankly, having just been there. Barcelona or Barthelona? I can't get a definitive answer, even from people who live in Barca, Barthelona. Well, the South American and Catalan version would be Barcelona, and the Castilian would be Barcelona. Yeah.

I swear I was going to come down to Night Fights at St. Pont over the pronunciation. So, the sophisticated viewers of 1994, let's say, they might have been... How do you think, in 1994, when you put it that movie what was the anticipated reaction that you got exactly and that you you presumed people were going to look at it through and uh did did critics see in it what you had intended them to see the critical reaction was really interesting in the sense that we got beat up early by the sort of fashion-y monthly magazines. And then when it got to the daily press, it was fantastic result. And that was true both here and in other English language countries like the UK. Peter Robinson What was going- this is Peter Robinson. Thank you for joining us. What

was going on there? I would have guessed that it would have been just the reverse, that the New York Post, say, would would have said this is a fancy pants movie too much dialogue and the the the the magazine press the the style press would have gloried in it no not at all uh not at all the new york post is about the best review is michael medved and it was a oh okay well all right all right michael Medved knows his movie. But all the, we're really lucky. One critic sort of wanting to take away, I guess, the glory of the good reviews said that it was an accident that a lot of the important critics were sort of on semi-vacation at the Seattle Film Festival, where the film premiered in the United States, and they're very relaxed and in a good mood. So they all because uh the conditions were so great in seattle but um i'm not sure if that's it hey whit it's rob long thank you for joining us so um okay two things one barcelona is 30 years old so my god you're old holy moly i just i just never occurred to me. The second thing is, you started your burst onto the scene in this fantastic movie called Metropolitan. And all these are, by the way, if you haven't seen them, if you're listening and you haven't seen these, these are all available to stream and they're fantastic.

They're just funny and thoughtful and singular, really. And Last Days of Disco of disco of course wonderful movie um barcelona um now you're a giant success you know you like your your love and friendship um big damsel just big hits um are you do you make movies differently now that you're you know one of the one of the official greats it certainly doesn't feel that way and i think you're being much too nice and uh oh i'm sorry about that i apologize rob is angling for a job with i don't know i've been angling a job with for wit with wit for about 20 years so So yes, I think he knows. We've wanted to work together, but it never happens. So it's very hard to make movies.

And I think actually everyone says the problem is money, but I think it's actually lack of commercial standards. So all our films essentially have been profitable, but sort of people don't care. Because a lot of people i

think just get paid in advance before the the movie happens the green light unlocks their fees and so there are a lot of non-economic projects and particularly the award season kind of projects so i feel sort of frustrated that we make profitable films to get pretty good reviews and it's still very hard to make them um can we just talk in general i i i saw a tweet you um tweeted i guess a few maybe a week ago um you talked about the visual fallacy yes which is something that i think you and i agree on one wholeheartedly. Your movies are dialogue heavy. People sit and they talk and they say interesting things and funny things

and they hold forth. They have thoughts and perspectives. I love that. I love the writing. I love hearing the dialogue. But if your movies were 60 pages long and only 10 pages of dialogue, no one in show business would complain because people think of it as a visual medium, but you consider that a fallacy.

Yes, I mean, I think that film schools and film theory has been dangerous, that films were sort of better before there are theories when people were just doing it um so in the early 30s and and the later 30s um there was great cinema and they were basing it on great um other works from other fields um so there would be a booth tarkington story and that would become a Booth Tarkington play and then become a Booth Tarkington movie in different forms remade three times and all of them pretty good. And the level of sort of information and narrative in 70-minute early 30s films just dwarfs the amount of story in current films, that there's something stupid about trying to tell every story just visually. And also, there are so many things that have happened in the business that just dumb it down. So, agents find it easier just to negotiate a single card

credit. So, you have these invariable openings of movies of a car going through the countryside with just one boring single card credit after another. And people got so sick of that, they now do something worse, which is end of movie credits. And in the old days, they would just have like three cards with everyone's names on it. And then they'd also put up sort of little vignettes of the actors who are going to star in the film with their character names, this really cool sort of way of introducing things. And so, I think there have been a lot of bad habits that have come in. And I can understand why Hitchcock wanted to sort of defend his cinema

and talk about his storytelling visually and all that. And it's true with Hitchcock, but it's not true with anyone. It's like, if you have a photo or a film of sort of an attractive person, well-dressed, you don't know who they are until they open their mouth. It's not only what they say, but it's their voice, the quality of their voice, their accent, all that. I mean, you really get into people's souls by what they say. I, not even knowing that you were going to be joining us, a couple of weeks ago, I watched Metropolitan just because it's such a wonderful movie. My wife was out of town, I had some, it was my house for the evening, and I just watched

it for the sheer pleasure of watching it. And I have to say, this is the question, it sort of plunged me into lost worlds. I was a kid, 1990 I think was the year of Metropolitan, which isn't that long ago. All three of us aren't that old and we can remember, I mean, it's not like 1920. And yet, I was very struck that New York is gone, that kind of crowd, the prep school crowd, where they were all Anglo, they were all heterosexual, all unselfconsciously who they were, appreciated wit. I mean, it's in the story that the couple of witty characters get sort of points with other, all right. And that is just gone now, point one. Point two, this movie storytelling question, I thought to myself as I watched that,

that there's a direct line that goes all the way back to what, Irene Dunn and Cary Grant, and in literature, I mean, it goes, in a certain sense, the sort of feel of metropolitan, you can feel the same sort of interest in storytelling and dialogue in Scott Fitzgerald. So, where has that, if we all feel that dialogue still matters, that intelligence and wit are still part of storytelling. If that's permanent, where has it gone? Has it left Hollywood? Is it reemerging somewhere on television or on the web? Where has it gone? Gosh, that's such a tough question. About the world portrayed in metropolitan um i don't think it existed much then i mean it's just a real world it's a tiny world and i think it has sort of this um

half-life that keeps going down but still exists so it's still there in a similar way um the film that came out in 1990 was sort of shot in in 88 and it reflects a world sort of late 60s sort of straddling woodstock before and after uh and um it's sort of the half-life of coming from sort of the 1914 f scott fitzgerald's debutant year and it's still there um and there are these still these kids around um but um it sort of dwindles and i like sort of catching it like butterflies and and preserving them in the film um and rob i have to correct him again because unfortunately the films aren't streaming except for Metropolitan, which is on Max and Criterion Channel, and Love and Friendship, which is on Amazon Prime. And it's very hard to sort of get the films out of this sort of rental download model and get them streaming.

We really had a wonderful moment when Sony Classics put Damsels in Distress on Hulu just as Barbie was coming out. So, it's sort of a great, great, great, great film. And that was a good moment because Damsels in Distress got to reconsider. But I don't know. I mean, I hope the world gets back into, you know, real narrative and stories where people can't talk um an inspiration for damsels was sort of the world of mumblecore which is the very low budget films were being made early in the century by greta gerwig and and um andrew bujowski and the duplass brothers whole group of people and um they really do make these um interesting talkie films uh i recommend um andrew buchowski's support the girls and his computer chess they're sort of

below the radar they're not getting awards they're not getting award campaigns um but they're there they exist what james lollix here in minneapolis you were talking before with rob about the movies of the 30s and how they they would be short to be an hour and a half if that and there'd be tremendous amount of information and dialogue and the rest of it the story was crisp it moved even the b movies i watch a lot of b movies i watch a lot of programmers and you're right even they're they're not visually spectacular but even that said sometimes you will see them slip in a great shot if william castle is directing and he's young and hungry, you will find interesting little bits of visual language there. And I think, why can't we bring back theaters by making a lot more hour and 15 minute tight little movies like this? Because it seems now that everything moved to streaming where it has to be eight hours it has to be a 10-hour show yes i saw the other day that there was a there's a new um um uh i

can't remember is it marlo or sam spade it's sam spade uh who shows up as a detective in france and i thought great i'd love to see an hour and a half sam spade or Marlo movie. But it's Liam Neeson and it's seven hours. And I just perhaps don't need seven, eight hours of anything. And every scene feels like seven hours in that. I agree. I felt exactly the impulse you felt, James, and started to watch it. And it was just too slow. I would clarify something about the visual

side of it because i think what's just surprising is you see films from 1933 34 and they sort of have every good technique uh people have i mean i think some look absolutely sensational and they're very tightly edited and and kind of brilliant so i do think there's some great stuff visually also in those films and a lot of care a lot of good production design um i think one of the problems with television is that it's so long you're going to shoot be shooting so much it becomes very expensive and and the result is it's very corporate world it's very hard to get um sort of strange projects off the ground because it's just such an investment and in the film world no matter how sort of commercially minded it is

there are sort of film buffs who want to sort of take a chance on something that's film buffy and there's much less of that in television i find but maybe i'm wrong rob rob would know better it's just it's very cumbersome to to finance something that's gonna be 10 hours 10 hours long i think also just i'm just to get back to the physical part of it one of the things i'm struck we talked about dialogue but one of the things i'm struck you know with stillman movie is that your actors are acting on screen together that there are you know you you have these fantastic duos pairs um i'm thinking about taylor nichols and chris eigeman in barcelona um these wonderful shots of two people together interacting being together on screen on in the frame and i i think that's that's it feels incredibly fresh right because everything now is

in a single close-up single close-up single close-up um but that is one of the ways that the pace i think in those old movies and and i think in your movies works because you're watching something happen between the characters that you've created which sometimes I'm watching a movie a contemporary movie and it's as if everybody kind of showed up on different days and they stitched it together um and I just don't think you feel connected to even if it's exciting to a bunch of stitched together close-ups I mean is that is that a choice you make is that a choice that you've made because you because the artistic aesthetically is a choice or artistically is a choice creatively choice.

Or as sometimes people would say in the thirties and forties is like, we don't have the money to do that many setups. So we got to, the actors have to come prepared. They have to know their lines and they have to act within the frame. But where am I, am I oversimplifying, which you have accused me of in the past?

Well, I think a lot of things are defined by the way the industry is financed. So, in film, a lot of films are financed by casting a big star or stars. And so, it has to be about the star or stars. And if that's not the case, if it's indie cinema with less money, you can have an ensemble. It can be about a whole group of people um no one being the big star really and um and that can work so you have a lot more freedom in a lot a lot of ways if if it's not a heavily um capitalized uh project um there are just so many sort of

bad habits people have gotten into that are sort of tiresome. Like, half the films seem to start with an alarm clock going off and someone having breakfast, and the other half is a car going somewhere as they do the single-car credits. And so, it's good to sort of think of films that can start different ways. In the old days, they used to do sometimes these sort of montages, sort of quickly telling the sort of historical context with all kinds of interesting films, very tight montages. And that was great too. There were two films from this early 30s group where it starts with what it seems like it's a beautiful wedding. It's absolutely gorgeous wedding with beautiful outfits. And then the camera pulls back and it's actually

the showroom of an haute couture fashion house. And they're showing various rich people the wedding dresses they could buy and all that. And a lot of these films are available on YouTube, like Double Harness is an interesting film. This is, I think, William Powell. And it's not the sort of formula where it's the outsider character who is the hero and the sort of established rich playboy is the bad guy. It sort of shows this woman sort of entrapping him, and she's sort of in this morally ambiguous, ambivalent situation. And it's great to see something that's non-formula that has sort of moral ambiguity where you sort of identifying with this character and they've done something bad

they've kind of done something wrong and how's that going to come out we love our anti-heroes i love that yeah you mentioned 34 and you're right by 1934 or so there the visual language of film was in place the films look spectacular but prior to that they were still working around sound yeah and there was a lot more stage in this. It was static. It was like the microphones were nailed down. Everybody had their shoes nailed to the floor so they didn't move. But prior to that, in the most sophisticated portion of the silent era, they had developed a visual language that was absolutely fascinating and sophisticated and spectacular. And it's marvelous. I thought of that because you mentioned William spectacular. And it's marvelous.

I thought of that because you mentioned William Powell. And he plays, I think it was the, I saw him in a movie recently where he plays a Russian aristocrat or something who's coming back. And nobody cared whether or not he was Russian, really. Nobody heard what he was saying. He just had a presence. And the whole film had this spectacular, epic quality to it, but you couldn't get anyone under 30 to watch it today because it's silent and black and white. Are these people completely and permanently turned off to an entire, this grand, vast treasure of American art? Or is there some way do you think that we can get them to pay

attention to it and say look at this look at this it's really important no i'm hopeful that there's sort of a cult mentality that people develop an interest in in earlier earlier cinema and i think some young people do and i think um criterion with our collection with our channel uh helped a lot it was great when they were combined with tcm and warner brothers for something called filmstruck that was really ideal unfortunately fell apart um i remember that experience of going with a group of people including including young people um and it was lubitsch's lady windermere's fan and i thought oh my gosh i didn't know anything about lubitsch doing lady windermere's fan it's Oscar Wilde play and then we get in and um it's it's a silent movie and uh I sort of

thought well will the kids you know stay for this and we all stayed for it and it was fantastic and um you know there were a lot of words in those um movies they're really good cards you had great people in Need to Lose and other people writing really punchy interesting cards and you had always music you had music along so it wasn't silent cinema exactly it wasn't wordless cinema and um yeah i think there's a chance um i think if a talented sort of repertory cinema owner wants to promote that kind of thing i think you can find a an audience hey what I know you gotta run I just um one of my favorite movies I mean that that is not a Whit Silliman movie is the women and it was I think as you as you have described it because it made its way from a giant stage play onto the

giant movie hit um and there's a moment in the women when the older woman is a widow was talking to her your daughter who is a you know is going through a divorce and she's miserable and the older widow is trying to mom's trying to console her and says look it's kind of great i mean you have the you have uh you have the kind of the bed yourself i get in bed and i can just stretch out like a swastika oh and it's a you know 1936 movie right it's just whoa um it's like a 1940 movie i think uh is it i maybe i think but i i give it a pass i feel like it's yeah a little bit before before swastikas were bad put it that way um do you ever find yourself writing something or writing about people and or

characters or a world um and think oh i gotta i gotta trim this sale for 2024 i don't want to be you know carried through the streets um and uh you know canceled in a abrupt way i mean does any of that affect your creative output? Or you just kind of... There is a joke in Metropolitan that I've since come to regret. It's someone talking about all the shootings, you know, a progressive Spanish girl

is criticizing America for all the shootings. And then the naval officer character played by Chris Agamemt says, oh, shootings, that's just because we're better shots. And I really regret that joke now because there have been too many shootings, too much good shooting of the wrong kind. So, yeah, I sort of regret that. A lot of stuff that i sort of worried about got cut before we shot and so um i mean i think if you sort of are acting sort of fairly incorrectly in a sort of gentlemanly way with your material um you're probably not going to get in trouble over time you know you don't have bad stereotypes of people.

You don't besmirch people in ugly ways, and it can be okay. But I regret that joke. I have to say, though, just for our listeners, if you haven't seen Barcelona, go see it, because it has one of the great, most robust and hilarious arguments for American military hegemony, I think'm just using them i've ever seen don't use their word that's their word that's their word all right you know whatever it's a defensive alliance a defensive alliance exactly when uh chris eigenman and i'm with a a trail of ants red and explains yeah red and black explains the um contra

yeah just explains how the world should work uh and i won't give it away it's a wonderful moment and uh it's one of those things that you i was saw the movie in the theater of course and people uh just instinctively laughed at it and kind of and clapped and i was in the middle of i think santa monica where i guarantee you 70 of the people in that theater probably philosophically politically disagree with that point but that scene was so great his performance was so terrific and the dialogue of the movie is so wonderful that you just you found yourself carried away and thought hey wait wait a minute you got amazon you have amazon folks you can go you can rent it uh for

3.99 uh and find the rest of the works on the various platforms, and they're worth it. And, Whit Stillman, we thank you for coming today. And we hope, if there's justice in the world, that a couple of years from now, Al Pacino will stumble out of bed and go to the podium and open up an envelope and just simply say your name. Exactly. I hope so, too. Thanks very much. Thanks, Whit. Thank you.

Take care. All right. Exactly. I hope so, too. Thanks very much. Thanks, Whit. Thank you. Take care. Bye. Yes, the metropolitan damsels, Barcelona, feature people in social situations, enjoying themselves, having a tipple. And they're young folks, so they can get away with it. But, you know, those are the bones.

Bones creak and the back aches. After a night with drinks, maybe you don't bounce back as soon as you used to the next day. So now you've got to make a choice. You can either have a great night or a great night day. Right? One or the other. No.

No. That was the choice until we found Z-Biotics. Z-Biotics pre-alcohol probiotic. It's the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle, well, rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's this byproduct, not, you know, dehydration, that's to blame for your rough next day. Z-biotics produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. It's designed to work like your liver, but in your gut, where you need it the

most and when you need it the most. Just remember to drink Z-Biotics before drinking alcohol. Drink responsibly and get a good night's sleep to feel your best tomorrow. Go to zbiotics.com slash ricochet to get 15% off your first order when you use the ricochet at the checkout. You can also sign up for a subscription using a code so you can stay prepared no matter what the time or occasion is. Because you're going to take this stuff, at the checkout. You can also sign up for a subscription using a code so you can stay prepared no matter what the time or occasion is because you're going to take this stuff, you're going to figure out, hey, I like this, this helps, and then you want to have some on hand. ZBiotics is backed with a 100% money-back guarantee, by the way, so if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll

refund your money, no questions asked. So remember to head to zbiotics.com slash ricochet and use the code ricochet at checkout for 15% off. And we thank Zbiotics for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Well, now that Rob's back, we can answer a question that was actually bouncing around the member feed the other day. Meetups? Where's the meetups paid?

I need to be with my people. So that's your thing, Rob, to tell people where to go. Well, that's always your thing to tell people where to go. I'll just start from the distant, the near future to the more immediate future. Near future, there's

a National Review Cruise in June. And Ricochet members traditionally have gone on there and have done, have meetups on the National Review Cruise, so I would recommend that. There will be one in St. Louis, I'm told, in October, which I think is the first time we've had one in St. Louis. I don't think we've ever, I don't, that seems like new territory for us.

And then coming up soon on April 8th, there is a Dallas meetup hosted by omega paladin um and they're going to catch the total eclipse of the sun which i think is going to be fantastic incredibly fantastic uh and it is in dallas on april 8th what's been and i think there'll be some stuff before it and after it too um and i i 100 i recommend that if there's any way I can get there, I will do it. It's great. That to me is, I can't imagine seeing an eclipse with a better group of people. And remember folks, if you want to really get the best impression of the eclipse, stare directly at it while

it happens. Exactly. Otherwise, how could you possibly see it? And you'll have a memory that lasts you the rest of your life. It's almost like everywhere you look, there it is. I have to say, you know, how do you resist that? I mean, it is a thing happening, and you're supposed to look at it some other way. It's like, don't look right at the Mona Lisa. Go look at the other side of it. Like, I don't know.

I totally understand people who think, wait a minute. I can just take a quick peek, right? You get a smoked glass, pinhole camera, something like that. Boys, I heard a physicist give a little talk on this solar eclipse. And it turns out, and he said, this is really important. You will really damage your eyes, and the damage happens fast. But go to Amazon. You can buy these NASA approved cardboard glasses. You get five of them for 10 bucks or something like that. So I have a son who lives in Austin where the solar eclipse will also be

available. So needless to say, I instantly sent him a couple of bundles of these glasses. It's cheap. It's easy. And the man who told you to look at the sun was Lilacs, comma, James. Not Robinson, comma, Peter. Just remember that, folks. I was kidding. I was kidding about that, of course. Don't look at the sun. Instead, hum a Bonnie Tyler song to yourself and enjoy it through the usual socially approved and technologically safe means.

Before we go, speaking of technology, we've got about a few minutes here before Rob has to peel and Peter has to saunter and I have to go down to the gym. My painkillers are kicking in, so now I can go down and make things worse. It's like I draped the pain under this call, this blanket of anesthesiology, and then go make it worse. TikTok, where do you guys stand on this?

And, of course, this is all dependent on how much money you have taken your anesthesiology and then go make it worse uh tick tock where do you guys stand on this and of course this is all dependent on how much money you have taken from uh their you know from by dense executives so go uh i will i will start by saying i i because i i um i don't know here here my instinct is that um i think it's silly to ban it um I don't think it needs to be banned. It's not a ban, it's a divestiture. A divestiture. I don't think it really is what people say it is. That's my instinct. On the other hand, the politician, I think, who is still in office, who I admire the most,

is Mike Gallagher, who in the perfect world would be President of the United States tomorrow, or at least President of the United States on January whatever 2025 agreed and i hope will someday be president united states and this is one of those cases where uh my instinct is now i'm thinking there is a person in government who i respect who has a opposing view and um that is very meaningful to me that he disagrees with me to the extent that i'm thinking to myself that maybe i'm dumb and he's i know that i'm dumb he's smart but maybe he's right and i'm wrong um the courtesy you've never extended to me once in the last 30 years yeah well go ahead go ahead high bar uh so it it i also i'm trying to tease out my reasons but one of the things i like about banning it or whatever divesting it is i am loving the response by the

chinese which essentially say how can you do this what about free speech how can you ban a social network that we have banned ourselves how can you can i mean to to the the chinese sea prop foreign propaganda in almost everything uh and so the idea that someone is calling them on it and playing their game by their rules um it's maybe it's too delicious to ignore i don't know yeah so i agree mike gallagher gets my attention here's what's's going on. The company that now owns TikTok reports in one mysterious way or another, because China is obscure, but we know that it reports to the government and that the government is run by the Chinese Communist Party. 170 million Americans use TikTok, including, let's be honest, all three of us glance at it from time to time. Of course, in my case, it's just to see what the kids are up to, but still.

And it provides them an opportunity. We don't even have to prove that they're doing it, although we can assume that they are. It provides them an opportunity to acquire masses of information about viewing habits and demography and so forth about the american public going straight to the chinese communist party that has to stop details to follow that's my view and i agree that's why divestiture not banning is uh is a good idea thing of it is when you say 170 million and some of us look at it, I look at TikToks sometimes when they show up in social media. I don't look at the app.

I don't have the app. The app has never been installed on my phone. My daughter had it installed once in the very beginning and we drove to another state, threw it out the window, shot it up with high-velocity munitions, and got her a new one because

i don't trust any of it the thing is if you were the united states government and you had an adversarial power and you had 150 million of their children who were glued to this thing would you not use it to amplify whatever message you want or to encourage whatever social disorder that you wish how would you not want to use a tool like that? I think we were talking with Charlie about this last week, is that, you know, given the ability of these things to map out where you are, you don't need to have a mole in the government that tells you what the interior of the White House looks like. You just need a couple of stupid interns walking around with this thing, you know, in the pocket with notifications and location

services on, and you got the joint mapped out. So yeah, divest and let somebody buy it here. And then it would be great if they could get under the hood and take a look at exactly what it promotes and how it promotes. And if somehow, and I know this sounds like Orwellian top-down mind control, civilian manipulation, but gosh, if you could take a platform like this and somehow emphasize positivity in the culture, in humanity, in our future, and the rest of it, that'd be great. That'd be really great. Because while there's a place for everybody sitting in the front seat of their car and complaining and being very unhappy, and there's a place for all

the fights and the fights and the world star and the rest of it, there has to be a larger place on the stage for things that actually uplift. And I know it makes me sound like an old grandpa shaking his fist at the cloud, but there we are. We are not at the top of the hour. Rob has to peel. Peter has to saunter. I have to go down and exhibit more pain. Guys, anything else before we leave? James, I want you to know I'm willing to invest $10 right now in your effort to buy TikTok. If we can move it to the Midwest, I couldn't agree more. It could change everything in this country. All you need is another $150 billion, and you're good to go.

If anybody wants to contribute, first thing I want you to do is just buy a lot of people's subscriptions on Ricochet, because the more, the merrier. There we go. And we'll see anybody come. Ricochet 4.0 right now, 5.0 on route but uh we're out but the columns are the you know the comments is where we'll be discussing these matters and others as always at ricochet gentlemen it's been fun welcome back and we'll see you next week next week fellas ricochet Ricochet! Join the conversation. At LiveScoreBet, we love Cheltenham just as much as we love football.

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