The Watch - Ep. 128: 'Get Out,' 'Logan,' and Other Movies With K. Austin Collins

Episode Date: March 2, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and K. Austin Collins discuss the movies they’re most excited about right now, starting with the hit new film ‘Get Out’ (1:50). Later, they discuss 'Logan' (19:00), The Lost City of Z' (30:05), 'Kong: Skull Island' (37:00), 'Alien: Covenant' (42:15), and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is brought to you by a very special food edition of our Channel 33 podcast. Katie Baker and Danny Chow bring you two stories on the best Wahakian restaurant in L.A. And a vegan burger that bleeds. You can listen to this by subscribing to channel 33 at iTunes.com slash The Ringer or wherever you get podcasts. Hey, everybody. Thanks for listening to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. Today, Andy is out. So we had a special guest, Cam Collins from The Ringer, who's basically our movie critic.

and he writes beautifully about film on Theringer.com. You can read his writing there. Today we talked about Get Out. We did a spoiler. That is a spoiler conversation about Get Out. So that's about 20 minutes of the first half of the pod. And then for the second half, we talked about the movies that we're really excited for

that are coming out in the next couple of weeks, month or so. So we talked about Lost City of Z, Kong, Skull Island, Beauty and the Beast, Alien Covenant, the Circle. So it was a really fun conversation, just kind of going all through movies. I'm going to be back on Monday talking about taboo, billions, big little lies, a bunch of TV stuff.

So we'll knock the TV stuff out on Monday. Today, movie conversation with Cam Collins. Thanks for listening. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com

and joining me on the other line, the Professor X of my timeline. It's Cam Collins. Hi, Cam. What's up? What's up? Andy is out today. So, Cam is joining me to talk movies. We're going to be talking about Get Out.

And then we're also going to talk about some of the stuff that we are excited for over the next couple of weeks, specifically Logan, James Gray's Lost City of Z, Kong, all sorts of stuff. So I'm really excited to talk movies with someone who watches them not on an airplane. And, Cam, it's great to finally have you on the show. Yeah, absolutely. This is fun. So you wrote about Get Out for the Ringer earlier. This week, last week. I guess you were about last Friday.

It was a relatively huge success in the box office. I was curious whether or not you were surprised by its popularity. Yeah, I'm a little surprised by its popularity. I knew that it would be a big deal because I think everyone loves, you know, everyone loves an early year horror movie. I just wasn't expecting it to be the biggest movie of the weekend. Yeah. And so beloved, you know, it was until recently had like some kind of,

of like 100% on rotten tomatoes and it was just uniformly adored. It's pretty incredible. And friends who've been going to sit in theaters have said that the theater experience of this movie is uniquely fun. Yeah, I mean, you talk about like crowd pleasing and usually it's something that is we internalized. Like, oh, that was a crowd that pleased me. But it's wild to be in a movie theater where people are just like, yes, that was

awesome. Like as soon as it's over. Like I remember Looper was kind of like that Like when like some of the stuff that happens in Looper People were just like This is why I go to the movies This is so great Absolutely

You know it reminds me I went to see the Blair Witch sequel In the regular theaters And there was a lot of that participation During the movie But by the end we were all kind of like Yeah That movie is so tough on the nerves too

Because half of it is just strobe light In pitch black darkness Yeah, and get out is just, I mean, I think to be honest, part of it for many of us is that, you know, the last season of girls is on right now. I think we all have feelings about Marnie. I think we are loud. Yeah, that's right. It is really helping us. This movie is really just, we needed this movie, I think.

So let's talk specifically about the movie. It's obviously, I've been trying to sort of piece this together with the success of this, with the success of split. and the kind of, I feel like a lot of the horror movies, and you talk about this in your piece, are, it's strange now that we are, horror movies have always drawn

from collective social anxieties anyway and collective, um, yeah, societal kind of, uh, you know, like talking points or whatever,

for lack of a better term. But, um, it seems like in the absence of that much lamented mid-tier movie, the mid-tier Hollywood drama, that horror movies are actually taking on a lot more of the responsibility of being the kind of front-line reporting

about what scares people, what excites people, what people are actually, like their deep-seated kind of fears are. And I was thinking about Green Room, you know, you think about split, you think about get out, and the way that it's kind of investigating

this kind of terror that we have on the fringes of our lives. Yeah, absolutely. And Jordan Peel has been really good about talking about the social thriller, or the social issue thriller is a thing that he's really interested in. And it's a thing that get out is a part of a part of a tradition of movies that are just interested in taking big social questions and scaring the shit out of us by pushing them to the most extreme. Right?

Like the extreme place that they can go to. I think it's really exciting that so many horror movies are taking on weird little nuggets of culture. but I think that even in that context get out is better than better than the rest I think it's just unusually sharp and I think his his eye for satire I think

really elevates this a little bit and it's such a delicate tyrope walks with the balance of comedy and horror and can you talk a little bit about what you think elevates it well I mean for example well I don't want to you know spoiler oh no you can spoil

I want to ruin it but you know there's for me what's really striking about this movie is that the scariest moment in the film comes late in the movie, and it involves a cop car. And it, you know, there's, it's after a bunch of violence, it's very gruesome, but the moment that really hit me in this film was when I thought that the cops were going to come do something to...

Yeah, that's how I thought it was going to end too, yeah. Yeah, and, you know, and it's a little bit of an echo of Night of the Living Dead, where the black character, who's the hero of the movies, fighting off all these zombies. And in the end, the cop, come kill him because they're mistaken for one of the zombies. They were mistaken for the threat. It's a little bit of a, you know, a nod toward that.

But in the contemporary context, it just really, really threw me. And in the context of Jordan Keel and Kean Peel and their kind of eye for humor. Yeah. Humor does a lot in a horror movie. Like you're laughing so much of the time. You're laughing uncomfortably the rest of the time. But then those jolts of pure terror. really hit you, I think, when the movie is otherwise sort of satirical.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about it in the context of, I mean, Keanu obviously wasn't as successful film, but even some of their sketchwork where they're obviously like deep, deep lovers of genre and they like to like immerse themselves in that, but at any given point, the bottom can drop out of the genre and they can kind of have like these incredible moments of comic relief. I was kind of curious whether you felt like this movie would have been in, is effective if it didn't have those moments of incredible comedy. You know what I mean? Like if it didn't have those moments with L'Relle,

where you're getting like this break from what is obviously this incredibly horrifying moment. Yeah, you know, I think, yeah, comedy is really what makes this standout, isn't it? It's like, I think for Jordan Peel in particular, his feel for satire sets him apart from other horror filmmakers that I think we have right now. You mentioned like Green Room and you mentioned even if you add movies like it follows the witch. They're all they're all putting their

finger on something but they're not funny. Right. And they're not really even weird in the way that satire can be. There's just something very unsettling about just not knowing whether or not something is meant to be funny in this movie that really does something to me. Even even just the casting of Allison Williams as like the Uber white girlfriend. is hilarious, but then he takes it to a place that really makes you think, wow, Alison Williams is really, hey, this is the perfect role. She's never, she's never been, she's never been better than this. She will never be better than this.

This is the perfect role for her. But he takes that persona and really pushes it to a place that's just pretty remarkable. He seems to be very aware of what we think of, what we think of tropes, what we think of horror traditions, what we think of characters who make stupid mistakes because he is a horror he's a student of horror and he doesn't just repeat or reiterate these earlier things he takes them and pushes them to somewhere

that I haven't really seen them go before I think it's pretty exciting yeah it's an important point because like he is not moonlighting here like he definitely has like a grasp of like all these Polanski moves and another thing that's come up a lot in horror movies over the last year or two maybe three or four years

especially with this reverence that a lot of horror filmmakers have for John Carpenter and like this kind of the 80s aesthetic is this I guess it's like it's like domestic interior zoom shots of like creeping dread that is

like lurking in a in a like ultimately bourgeois like setting you know and the way that he is able to do that which is like I think he's talked a lot about Rosemary's baby and drawing a lot of inspiration from that there's this incredible scene you ever see that documentary visions of light

the cinematography documentary you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can't remember who shot Rosemary's. William Fraker is talking about Rosemary's baby. And he's talking about Polanski comes in, and there's a scene where Mia Farrow is sitting at one end in the hallway, and Ruth Gordon is all the way down the hall. And it's right when, just right when the sort of creep is coming into this movie. And Mia Farrow looks down the hallway, and it's a really easy shot.

And Fraker was like, you know, we had it all set up so that you could see Ruth Gordon perfectly down the hallway. And Roman Flansky comes and says, no, no, no, move the camera like six inches to the left. And he's like, oh, okay, great, of course, six inches of the left. Like, what was I thinking? And now you can't see her. You can only see your shoulders. And he said, they screen the movie for the first time, and the entire theater peers to try

and see around the corner of the doorway where Ruth Gordon is. And it's those kinds of little choices that, and Jordan Peel makes a lot of choices like that, where it's like the first time you see the door open. where the pictures are in the earlier part of the film or, you know, just the way that Catherine Keener looks at him from the very moment he comes in. That are the difference between this. And a movie like, say, don't breathe, which is just more of a straight, how stressed out can I make the audience type of horror movie. Right, right, right. Yeah, and I mean, to your point, he has a way also of dealing with faces. I think a lot about the faces in this movie. And there's the very popular.

images in the advertisement of Daniel Kalua, tear-stricken, looking terrified, but also just, I don't really know how to explain the look on his face, but it's one of the main images of the movie, which is something about the mix of terror, but also, wonder's not the right word, but you just feel like he's experiencing something that he hasn't experienced before, that we were looking

into the face of someone who's just facing a kind of terror that he's never experienced before, or thought conceivable. I think about the faces of the help in the movie, Betty Gabriel and Marcus Henderson. You play Walter and Georgina. You could tell from the trailer that they were going to be doing some fuck shit. Right.

Like, that they were going to be doing. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I immediately thought of like the kind of the grotesquery of like blackface mensualsie actually when I'm thinking about their faces. And there's just something about putting that in the white like bourgeois. home, contemporary, Obama voting, home. It's just very unsettling.

Yeah. I mean, glue is like interesting because I've only ever, you know, I think I've known from Black Mirror and I know him from Sakaria, right? But his stoicism in the beginning of the movie was actually kind of like, I was like, oh, I wonder if he's got the range really to do this. Like he seems like so like he's gripping the wheel so tight. And that becomes such an asset as the movie goes on and on. It's like he is so trying to hold this together.

And he actually is someone who, was the way he performs it is like you could see him get hypnotized you could see him get caught on his on his backside because like you know he wouldn't he's so concerned with what's right in front of him and i actually thought all the like the family stuff that katherine keener you know stirs up was actually very very effective stirs up that's right that's right you see what i did there um i had to i had to yeah uh so i mean i think that you were mentioned with Allison Williams, the casting of Bradley Woodford, who is sort of like America's favorite liberal uncle as this guy is just really terrifying. Do you think, I wonder whether or not, you know,

there's always like this copycat stuff, you know, I'm sure we will get tons of lovely musicals out of La Land. Do you think that there are, this could be something that people keep exploring with this sort of social issue thriller? I kind of hope so. I mean, but I'm interested broadly. I'm interested in just where horror is going right now. I'm interested in cheap horror, what it's doing right now, all the Bloomhouse movies generally.

But yeah, I'm really particularly interested in these horror movies that are taking a current moment and really fucking with it in some way. Because I think, to be honest, I think that trash art is so much better and more fun about social issues than regular kind of Hollywoody dramas. I'm just not interested in. anything that's very polite. I want something that's very weird. Yeah.

That goes to a place that's just uncomfortable because I think that's kind of what it should be, but also because I like the combination of, you know, asking questions, but also just really entertaining. Both of us have written about this in the past, especially in regards to Blumhouse with how they kind of have this model going right now where these movies cost $5 million. And as long as they provide one or two takeaway scares that they can market, the filmmakers are kind of allowed to do whatever they want. And those are my favorite kind of horror movies.

And I still, you know, there aren't very many movies that are better about the madness of America than Texas chainsaw massacre. You know, these movies, once they get past the initial, like, it's a slasher movie or it's a haunted house movie or it's a home invasion movie or whatever it is can get incredibly deep with like what they're talking about. And I agree with you. I love, we are both avowed fans of Exorcist 3. Oh, my gosh. And that is essentially a ghost story. It's a possession story. But what happens in that movie is like you will look around you and make sure that you're not losing your mind while you're watching it.

Absolutely. I mean, that movie really, I only saw it for the first time last year because I frankly, I only recently gone into horror movies because I was a scared of cat for most in my life. So I'm kind of late to a lot of them and I'm catching up. But Exorcist 3 really threw me. It's genuinely scary. But it's scary and like it's spiritual terror for me. It's like you're watching someone a skeptic, you know, like kind of the classic skeptic in a religious film, but really being taken to a place in that movie, in the worst possible

way. I think that movie is scary in the kind of jump scare sense, but also just in the monumental sense of your friend comes back from the dead and is killing people. It's really bad. Yeah. It's like the worst possible version of it. And is the worst serial killer ever that you thought was dead. and it's just to fuck with you.

Yeah. It's because you don't believe in God. Yeah. And there's someone wandering around a hospital with garden shears, and it's not to do gardening. Okay, let's take a quick break. We'll come back, and Cam and I are going to talk a little bit about the movies that are coming out in the next couple of weeks that we are excited for. Hey, guys, just want to take a quick break to tell you about Crowd Cow.

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That's S-O-N-O-S dot com. Okay, I'm back with Cam. We're talking about movies that are coming out over the next couple of weeks. Cam, I always get like a serotonin hit as soon almost as, I mean, this Oscars was particularly wild, obviously. But as soon as the Oscars ends, I feel like that's when the movie year begins. And I get very excited for everything. You sort of cleared the palette.

You're no longer talking about La La Land and Moonlight in this false binary way. And you get to just jump in. And now that summer starts basically on March 3rd, we get, like, they'll be becoming hot and heavy for the next couple of months. Let's start, I guess, by talking about the biggest movie, Logan, which opens today in most cities and tomorrow everywhere, I think. You've seen it. I'm seeing it tonight. It is predicted to make something like $170 million. This was a kind of a Hail Mary from or a favor.

I don't know how you want to read the tea leaves with this one, but basically it's reported to be the last Hugh Jackman-Wilverine movie. James Mangold wrote and directed it. And tell us a little bit about the vibe without giving too much away about it. I will say that this, first of all, this is one of the few superhero movies that felt like, in recent memory that felt like it's absolutely a movie for adults. And I don't even know what that means anymore,

except it's kind of an annoyant when I see it thing. I watch this movie. It's about the level of violence. It's about the questions that it raises. It's got this man on fire vibe for me. It's a little Tony Scott for me. And that's just a little different, right? I mean, it's just a little different than the past Wolverine movies,

the other, you know, the Avengers movies, et cetera. It's just a little bit more grown, right? frankly, and it is extremely violent. I just want to emphasize that I never really, this is the first Wolverine movie that really made me think in a fundamental way about what those claws do to someone's body. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. I really enjoy it.

I also think that for me, the question that's raised by this movie is why are expectations have become a little bit low for superhero movies, frankly? Oh, interesting. I just, you know, I mean, I don't know that I really get excited hearing about the next Avengers movie. Even as I'm watching them, I'm not hating them, but I don't get excited about them in the same way. I certainly was not excited about X-Man Apocalypse. I wasn't excited about it before I saw it. I certainly wasn't excited afterward.

I just, this is the first one in a while that's really got me, you know, a little bit hyped to talk to people about it. Yeah, it's funny. This happened a little bit with Deadpool, like where you get. Kind of like it's the It's like you have low expectations and then you start so you So something gets a huge spike just by exceeding your already low expectations for something So the fact that Deadpool was basically like an entertaining 90-minute movie That was more or less like an Eddie Murphy action comedy from the 80s

Yeah Was just like oh my god I can't believe what a blessing you know But the fact of the matter is is that these are Like largely I you know you can kind of see a A trajectory and we're going to talk about this James Gray movie Lost City of Z that's coming out in a little bit. But you can see a trajectory where a lot of the movies

that you would say, oh, I'm so excited for the new James Gray or the new Noah Baumack or whatever, those are going to be Amazon movies. Those are going to be Netflix movies. And the movies that are going to be in the theaters are going to be passengers and space between us and movies like Kong and Logan and Avengers. And that's sad, but it's also the reality.

So I think you start to look forward. for reasons to get excited for things other than Dunkirk and just kind of fire yourself up. So would you say that what's the kind of most striking leap forward or unique thing about Logan that differentiates it from all the other kind of superhero fair that you've been seen?

Well, there's no big battle scene in a parking lot. You mean like an Atlanta box store parking lot? Yeah. There's like every single Avengers fight happens outside of a Home Depot. There's no parking lot. There's no airport. Which is a step forward, let's be honest. But it's also, I guess a genre that I'm into is the grizzled veteran superhero kind of vibe.

I'm into this Logan who's sick, who's extremely grumpy, who's unshaven, who's basically like a chauffeur. I'm not really giving any way, any big spoilers away, but it's very much like a, like I said, it's kind of like a Tony Scott movie. You could see if Denzel Washington were someone to be in superhero movies, this would be the one that he would have been in. Right. Frankly, which is a step ahead. You know, our producer, Zach had said to me before I came in, he was just, you know, like, oh, can you try and like give some context for the timelines of these movies? And I mean, I could make an effort to do it. But one of the issues with it is is that even the comic books,

X-Men is constantly resetting or happening in alternate timelines and people are dying and then there's like a thing and then they come back to life in another timeline and everybody is younger, everybody's older, everybody's wearing a different kind of outfit. So it's nice to kind of, I'm sure that this does, and just based on like the casting stuff, you can kind of tell that this is happening

in a specific version of events. But I like the idea of an unforgiving, as a superhero movie. This is kind of like one of the things that superhero movies, and for that matter, Star Wars movies or any of these franchises could start to play with, is if you feel like you've got enough capital with the audience, is to start doing these kind of genre experiments. Absolutely.

Well, absolutely. I mean, and I'm glad that you kind of mentioned it in terms of westerns, because that was what I remember hearing, you know, when we were all suddenly very shook about the possibility of dealing with a hundred more superhero movies for the next foreseeable future or whatever. I was hearing the comparison to Westerns in terms of, you know, superhero movies being just one of the basic major Hollywood machine genres in the way that Westerns were. And they're going to be great ones. You're going to have the searchers.

And then there's going to be the shitty ones that you can't ever remember the name of. And I've been waiting for these movies to kind of go more in the direction of greatness. Not just in terms of how they're made or how much they cost, but just in terms of tackling something. Like, tell us why superhero. are so important to us. Yeah. You know, and the way that our great Western is implicitly about why the West is important culturally, like the cultural myth.

Tell me why superheroes are important. Give me a sense of why we're all going to see these movies because I'm not above it. And I'm going to, I mean, not because I'm a critic, but also because I just, I like, frankly, I like shitty, entertaining movies. It's a good time. But give me a sense of why we're here, maybe. And I think Logan is a little bit more in that direction. I don't want to overstate it because it's an imperfect movie.

Above all, it's really an enjoyable movie. Yeah. But it just feels a little bit more serious, not just in tone, but just like, yeah, let's do something with this movie. It has some self-respect for its content, I bet. Yeah, I mean, like, that's part of the... Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of, like, I think that, you know,

Jackman's always, whether you love him or find him annoying, like he has his level of commitment to the things that he's doing is pretty unquestioned. and he has always been a very good steward for this character, I guess. You know, and lots of people love Wolverine. And the fact that no one's ever been like, should someone else be playing Wolverine the way they do with Batman all the time? He is Wolverine.

And he seems to care about the story and he cares about the legacy of the character. The one thing I would say about the Westerns thing, I'd be curious to know what you think about this. Because Andy and I have often talked about this because we'll dork out about Star Wars. And I'll just be like, I wish there was just like way more. Star Wars movies and the Westerns, you know, especially in the Golden Age of Hollywood from, say, like the 30s to the early 60s and even into the 70s because there was also all the television Westerns. Right, right, right.

The sheer frequency of them meant that there were lots of weird ones. Like, there were Anthony Mann Westerns that were so psychologically complicated. And then there were John Ford ones and then there were Howard Hawks movies that were really cool hangout movies. And the problem I have sometimes with the superhero stuff and with the sci-fi stuff is that it takes so much to get one of these things made and they cost so much money and they have to do so much legwork for every other movie

that's going to come after it, that you can rarely have something that's like, you know, we thought we tried this. We thought we would try this kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I mean, part of what you're talking about is just a matter of, because there were so many, some could be really cheap. And you could have things

like acid westerns. Yeah. Like, what would be the acid superhero movie? I would love to see, you know, I would just love to see, I mean, you're right, I would love to see those variations. And really, it's a matter of Westerns were combining with other genres. So you have Western melodramas, you have Western thrillers, you have Western comedies. I would love for superhero movies.

I mean, they're getting there a little bit. Like, you can get the Hangout vibe, for example, in some of the Avengers movies. And I guess the acid superhero movie would be Batman v. Superman. Or Dr. Strange, maybe. Or, right, or Dr. Strange. Yeah. It's, but it could go further. And I mean, maybe part of that is allowing some of them to be, frankly, kind of less investment,

allowing them to be a little bit cheaper, giving it to a director who's interesting, but maybe not going to make the blockbuster, just to see what happens. I think that's kind of what happened with Ant Man maybe. Yeah. Which is a movie that a lot of people don't care about or maybe don't care for, but I appreciated it because it knew that it, you know, Ant Man is Ant Man. Yeah. I mean, like, Ant Man literalizes how people feel about.

that movie I think. But accordingly, yeah. Accordingly, though, it could be a little funky. Yeah, and it could be funny and you could just have, you could just have those guys making,

like improvving jokes and have it, have those like anchorman swaths of that movie. Like Michael Pena just kind of being like, I'm just going to make jokes for five minutes here. Which is fantastic. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about some of other films that are coming out. I want to talk about Kong because I,

Oh, wait, before we do, can I just ask a quick Logan question before I, and you know, I don't have to spoil anything. But I have a lot of my, like, retirement money is tied up in Boyd-Holbrook stock. How is my money looking? I would say. You know it's not enthusiastic. I was just saying, I'm very excited for you. him. I feel like he's got, because he's got that and then he's got something, another movie coming out that I'm like really, really hyped for him to be in.

He's not as big in Logan as, I look forward to seeing what else he said. He's not as, he's not as big in Logan, I would say. He's got a lot of like, there's a lot of Boyd-Holberg put on 25 pounds of muscle for this movie. Well, he's in, he's in song to song, but we don't know if he's actually in song to song, the Terrence Malik movie. No one knows. And then he's also in the Predator reboot. So I'll be, I'll be psych. I want to, to talk about Lost City of Z because you are some, it's this coming out in April, and I saw it

last night. It's James Gray's new movie based on the David Grand book about a early 20th century explorers' quest to find the city of gold, the like sort of mythical city of gold on the Amazon. And it's an epic. It is something

that could have come out in 1953 or 1972 or 1990. Well, I don't even know about the 90s, but it is timeless in a way that I'm almost dumbfounded by how it came off are you, there is a subsect of critics who are just like James Gray is there

our greatest working artist or would you count yourself in that group? I'm a James Grace tan, yeah. Okay. Yeah, I take some shit for it. I'm prepared for the flame. I do take some shit for it. But yeah.

I don't know why it. Yeah. Because he's pretty inoffensive, frankly. I'm a fan, and I'm a huge fan of this movie. Yeah, and so. I saw it. You saw it, would you see at the New York Film Festival or? I saw it at New York Film Festival at premier there, and I've just been dying to talk about it.

It's been, that was like September, October. Yeah. And, and, and yeah, it's got Charlie Hunnam. Also, I have to say, back to superhero movies for a second. It's got Tom Holland, the new Spider-Man. Yeah. And it made me really excited to see him be Spider-Man. I know.

I have to say. I have to admit, like, one of the cool things about Lost City of Z is it takes place over the course of about 40 years, 35, 40 years? Right. And Hunnam and Patinson, Robert Pattinson, who also plays this, like basically his sidekick in this movie, age very gracefully. It's not easy. When you hear about, you know, Martin Scorsese needs $120 million to, you know, special

effects Joe Pesci to look younger. They could have just cast these guys and made him grow older. Absolutely. I am shocked that Charlie Hunham is going to be like a good middle-aged movie star. Oh, my God. I can't wait. Yeah, and this... Did you recognize Robert Pattinson, though?

Did you know that was him? I knew he was in it. And I know basically now at this point, he seems to be like the non-performance art version of Shia LaBouf where he'll just like, any good filmmaker, Robert Pattinson will do the most, like, thankless role. And he is literally like Chubaka in this movie. He just like shows up. They'll be like, oh, let's move over here. And he's like, helpful.

But that's like, that's his arc. Absolutely. It's a movie that, um, I, I, I, I, I, really did, not to put too fine a point on it, feel it's a, you know, it's a river movie in a lot of ways. Like, you float down this movie and you go all over the world with it. And it is so exciting in a way that I haven't had that experience in a theater. I mean, for people who aren't familiar with Gray's work, could you talk a little bit about some of the reasons why you're such a fan of his? Well, I mean, the thing about James Gray is that he, he's had some not

great box office success. So I'm not even sure that a lot many people have seen his movies. His last movie was The Immigrant, which had a botched release starring Marion Cotillard and Joaquin Phoenix. Walking Phoenix was also into lovers with Gwyneth Paltrow. I think what's really great about James Gray is that he makes these, he makes contemporary melodramas and the kind of like the new Hollywood-y sense. But he, I don't know. I just, feel like I walk away from his movies with just such a sense of where they're set, who they're about, like a sense of place, a sense of time. He's very detailed.

And he takes what feel like ordinary, dramatic tropes and just instills them with this sense of anguish or wonder or whatever he's going for. I mean, I think about Joaquin Phoenix's character and two lovers who in the beginning of the movie tries to commit suicide because of a relationship and then falls in love with Gwyneth Pau who lives in his building while his parents are setting him up with another woman. Who among us has not gone through that? Which is, I mean, right, everyday stuff. And it sounds, it frankly kind of sounds insufferable when I listen to myself talk about it.

But when I watch the movie, I just feel like it's very sensitive, but also very dark. And he just makes satisfying dramas, I guess, is the way that I would put it. The idea of taking these tropes and actually. giving them their do. There's a character in La Sadiou Z, played by Sienna Miller, who's Charlie Hunnam's voice. It is the most thankless role. Her job is literally to be like,

I'm sad that you're going to the Amazon again. She has like five scenes that are like that, and there is an actual arc to her character. She has like a backstory. Sienna Miller has enough room to give this character like an infusion of humanity and idiosyncrasies. It's just such an incredible choice. because it's a movie where you, in any other situation,

somebody's like, come on, man, we got to get back to the river. Let's go, let's go. Absolutely. I mean, I think James Gray saw American sniper and was like, so Sienna. About that plastic baby. About that baby, about that non-roll. And it's a pretty direct comparison because it's the same kind of, you know, the wife at home type of story.

But in Lossady of Z, it's, and I say this as a, I say this as, you know, an Eastwood fan. One of the problems with American sniper is that he doesn't. doesn't do much with her character. But what's exciting about Lost City of Z is that her lack of ability to get beyond the home is part of the broader questions the movie's asking about civilization and modernizing. There's like there are ideas there. There are ideas at stake in her domesticity, which doesn't mean that the role is not domestic,

right? She doesn't get into the jungle. But it does mean that her roles, her scenes have ideas. There's things happening. Yeah. And also it's just a lovely performance. I just say it's a lovely performance. And I guess if you're interested, I mean, I guess the best way I could recommend it is like this is an incredibly thoughtful meditation by someone who is obviously obsessed with Raiders of the Lost Ark. But is, you know, it's like what is the slow food version of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Right. Right. Let's talk. If the Las Ark were about the Sublime. Yeah. Yes. And it was like if Raiders of Lost Ark spent a ton of time like going through.

through like the vagaries of the university, the university in the 1930s in America or something instead of just being like. Oh, I love that stuff. Yeah. I love that stuff. All the- Those university lecture debates killed me. Yes.

I was falling out in the theater. I've never had so much fun watching a bunch of old dudes debate esoteric shit. I love, I love it. Like, people from England really know how to, like, ether each other in parliamentary settings. I want to talk a little bit about Kong, which opens pretty soon. And I personally, like, one of my favorite. favorite sub, it's not even a subgenre, but it's just like a thing that happens in movies. And it's been happening since I would, I would market at the Con Air, the Rock kind of era,

Armageddon, which is basically like Hollywood takes a preposterous premise and gets, gives, you know, spends a ton of money on realizing this premise, whether it's a meteor hitting Earth or rating, like breaking out of Alcatraz or whatever. Right, right. Then they, for whatever reason, hire the 10 best actors to be. And they're just like, sure, let's have Ed Harris and Steve Bouchemmy be in this movie. Like, that sounds great. Let's, you know, like, and that's, the Kong and previously Godzilla, although I'm not sure we got the best of Aaron Taylor Johnson and Godzilla.

But they, Kong. He used a golden globe for that performance. Yes, right. He's a golden globe for being in the scene where Wagner plays and they jump out of the plane. he you know the Kong has Tom Hiddleston Brie L. Raleigh, who I still

I'm still riding for Samuel L. Jackson, John C. Riley and he kind of like list goes on and on John Goodman even right? And basically John Goodman doesn't make bad movies anymore. So this looks like it's a little bit more comic than the Godzilla

which was incredibly serious which was a lot of David Stratharine like giving solemn speeches about the end of the world Kong seems to be a little bit trashier but are you excited for this one? I'm always excited for

I mean I rewatched the trailer right before right before this and I saw Brie Larson shooting a gun I've been waiting for that I deserve that so I'm excited for that and I'm excited I see people falling out of helicopters

I see people exploding for no reason so I'm excited I do kind of what I liked about Godzilla was that it teased us with Godzilla. It was very traditional in the sense of we're building up to the monumentality of this monster. I'm already seeing a lot of King Kong in the trailer, so I don't think it's going to be that kind of movie.

So I'm kind of curious about what the structure of it's going to be. Is it going to be mysterious in some way? Is it just going to be action comedy the entire way? Who's going to die is always something that I think about? Yeah. I feel like Sevent L. Jackson's going to die because doesn't he always die? He does in any movie involving a killer animal. So like, you know, DPC, it's required that he gives a long monologue and then gets bitten in half.

Someone's going to get ethered and then he's going to die, yeah. He, you know, like, you're right about the sort of long weight in Godzilla for Godzilla. I feel like people take the wrong lessons from Jaws where they're like, oh, in Jaws, they didn't show the shark to like two thirds into the movie. And it's like, yeah, but they didn't spend two thirds of the movie talking about the shark only, you know, like, or wondering whether like, End of the world is going to come about because of this shark. Yeah, I'm excited for Kong. That's coming out next week. What else have you got on your radar that you're excited to see?

Excited to see might be overstanding it, but curious about, I have to say, I'm curious about Beauty and the Beast. I'm curious. Okay. I'm curious because I'm curious broadly about this Disney project of live action remakes of their kind of animated franchises. So, Maleficent, which is not really a remake, but like a, you know, a contribution to that myth and Beauty and the Beast. They're about to do Lion King. I'm interested in what the revision's going to be because, like, Maleficent, like, my joke about Maleficin is that she turned out to be like this eco-feminist, like, somehow. Yeah.

So I'm curious about Beating the Beast. I've seen, like, the clip that's online. I'm curious about Emma Watson as Bell. now they're saying Josh Gad's character Le Fu, who's the sidekick to Gaston is gay. I'm curious how that manifests It's all happening.

It's just everything, Stanley Tucci is just everything is in it. I'm curious. I didn't actually know until we watched the trailer just now that it was going to be a musical again seems like all the same songs, which excites me a little bit less. Yeah. Because I already had Beauty in the Beast.

Best Picture nominee, Beauty and the Beast, I'm sorry. I should. That is the official title of that movie. I don't know. I like Emma Watson much of the time. Yeah. I feel like I've just been hearing about this movie for so long. And I really, this is directed by Bill Condon.

His last musical, I think, was Dreamgirls, which I didn't like. So I want to give him another chance. I don't know. Is this on your radar at all? I'm actually probably a little bit more excited for the other summer or spring Emma Watson movie, which is The Circle, just because I'm very into James Ponsol

just as a filmmaker and Boyega and Pat and Oswald and maybe good Tom Hanks, which we haven't had great Tom Hanks in a while. That's all he was really good, but we haven't had like movie star Tom Hanks in a minute. Yeah. So yeah, I'm curious about Beauty and the Beast, but I'm probably more excited for the circle.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention my now like raised blood pressure and like an inability to sleep over alien covenant just because I think that Alien Covenant may have my favorite cast since Ocean's 11 like Fastbender waterson James Franco uh Billy crudup guy Pierce Carmen a Jogo Danny McBride Amy Simits and Damien Bashir is like tough to mess with this is apparently going back at least based on like the quotes you read from the people who are in it is going back to Alien, the first one, the horror roots of that. Like the, it looks just straight up terrifying.

But I am excited to see, I'm, on one hand, I'm like, oh, like, is this just basically like they land? Something bites somebody. Then all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose. Like, that's, I think that there's a little bit of the seams are showing there. I was excited by Prometheus being like this huge. mythological diving into like the reasoning behind what happened with Alien but this looks just like kind of unfuck-with-able like I don't really know who nobody

makes stuff look like the way Ridley Scott and Scott makes things look and I'm just so excited about this cast I I'm excited about the cast I like I mean frankly I love space movies I love space horror in particular because I think space is horrifying so that very much matches you know I mean I I I Even, yeah, I kind of, I don't want to say I like Prometheus. I'll say that I'm really entertained by Prometheus and that I'm always in the mood to defend it when people shit on it. There's just a lot you can get out of Michael Fastbender watching Lawrence of Arabia and shooting baskets.

Right. A sleek, blonde Michael Fassbender being weirdly robotic is fantastic. Yeah. Because that's who he is. Yeah, yeah. And it's good to have a movie that acknowledges that. I also, yeah, I like the darkness of it. I like Catherine Warrison's haircut.

Yeah, she got the Ripley. It's great. Right, right, right. I'm really excited. Yeah, I'm curious to see what James Franco is going to do. I think he's going to get killed in like the first two minutes. I think that the world is ready for that. Yeah, I know.

He seems like the kind of person who's like, sign me up for them roll where I walk into the closet that the alien is in. And what I love about him is that he's game for it. Oh, sure. Yeah. It's like, that to me is like Gwyneth Paltrow and Contagin volunteering to be the end of mankind. It's like, I'm glad that you understand. I know. What are some?

I'm glad you understand how we're all on the same page, I think. Are there other space horror movies that you, I like, I like Event Horizon a lot. That's a, I like Event Horizon. Does Sunshine count as horror? Oh, I was just going to say Sunshine. I adore Sunshine. Yeah, Sunshine is, I think it's Danny Boyle's best movie for me. I think it's a movie I think about a lot.

Yeah. It's just the aesthetic of that movie. And also just the music is so gorgeous that the scene where he's going to repair the solar panels, I think about sunshine all the time. Sunshine is very, very good. Okay, so we're excited about Kong. We're excited about Lossity of Z, beauty and the beast and Alien Covenant. Cam, it was really awesome for you to come on. I really had fun.

Yeah, this is fun. All right, man. I'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much for joining us. And we will be back next Monday with a mostly television episode, billions, big little eyes, a bunch of other stuff. So stay tuned. Thanks, guys. Thanks again to our buddies at Sonos.

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