This Had Oscar Buzz - 118 – Far And Away

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

Plunge and scrub, listeners! We’re going back to the early 90s to look at Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and director Ron Howard for Far and Away. The film was both an intended inch toward Oscar’s embrace for Howard and a big budget romance for the recently wed stars, attempting David Lean-level grandeur with an Irish immigrant … Continue reading "118 – Far And Away"

Uh-oh, wrong house. No, the right house. I didn't get that! We want to talk to Marilyn Hacks. I'm from Canada. I'm from Canada water. Shh, I'm running away. You're brave.

Come with me. He left behind everything he knew. Shannon! Yeah! For freedom. You'll be my serving boy. Don't call me boy. In my imagination, America is a wonderfully modern place.

Who is this bit of a sniff anyway, huh? She's my sister. And I'm your mother. But even in the land of the free, nothing but an ignorant mick. Everything has a price. We haven't eaten for three days. I'll work for food.

I know higher Irish. All they have left is their dream. But America was built one dream at a time. Hello and welcome to the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, the only podcast doom scrolling with our Codhanger telescopes. Every week on This Had Oscar Buzz, we'll be talking about a different movie that Once upon a time, had lofty Academy Award aspirations, but for some reason or another, it all went wrong.

The Oscar hopes died, and we are here to perform the autopsy. I am your host, Chris Fyle, and I'm here, as always, with the true luck of the Irish, Joe Reed. Chris, I'm frightened. Oh, top of the morning to you. I am legitimately, I think, with good reason, scared about this podcast episode, because I remember not long ago, we did an episode on a little movie called The Walk, and the two of us proved to be utterly incapable of resisting the temptation to drift into accent work and ill-advised dialects that are not our own, and I just don't see us being able to similarly resist the urge to approximate

the Irish accents that are attempted. It's going to be very interesting. In this movie. Perhaps before we stumble down that rabbit hole, we should announce our news, Joseph. We have news. We're on Spotify now. We are.

Come listen to us on Spotify. It's going to be like an episode or two behind of when it actually hits Spotify. But hey, listeners, if you like us so much you want to listen to us on another platform or if Spotify is easier for you, you can now find this had Oscar Puzz on Spotify. You should.

How exciting. We also have, because at this point, it is November, we all need nice things. We are doing, once again, a very nice thing for y'all. We are doing another listener's choice for Christmas. Okay, now that sounds like it's a long time away, but we want to really make this one special for you guys. So we are taking everyone's suggestions, meaning. If you want to throw out an option at us, whether on Twitter or on our email, you can list us one movie. Now, don't get crazy.

Don't get crazy. So if you want to either tweet at us at hat underscore Oscar underscore buzz, what you think our listeners' choice should be, please do so. You can also email us at had oscarbuzz at gmail.com. Throw out one movie, the top four options that we hear. Yes, I will be tallying all of those. these myself. The top four options will be a poll on our Twitter at the beginning of December, and then that's going to be your listener's choice. It's all fully organically chosen by you guys. Now, we want to remind you that our parameters for our podcast are a film can't have been

nominated for an Oscar, any kind of Oscar. And it had... You reasonably have been in an Oscar conversation. Yes, that's the... We should be able to make a case for it. We can, you know, we've been known to be a little elastic on this kind of thing. I think our episode today, we can talk about how seriously Oscar destined this movie ever was. But nothing that's so off the beaten path that there was never an option for that. So you guys tied to our rules that a full calendar year has to happen before we're going to discuss that calendar year. So I would also say 2019 is off the table.

Don't worry. Katzisode will be coming in the new year. Right. John F. Donovan was technically a 2018 festival release. John F. Donovan is unbeholden to such fluid constructs as time. Yeah, very true. Very true. Jacob Trombley, the Eternal Exception.

Yes. You can throw out any Jacob Trombley movie. That's fine. Yeah, that's fine. Don't throw out any. Jacob Trompley movie. I'm trying to think of what ones you could for you. I'm also really excited to see what the pool of these movies are that you guys want to hear.

So once again, tweet at us, hat underscore Oscar underscore buzz or email us at had oscarbuzz. At gmail.com. Yes. Excellent. Now, on to the movie at hand today. Joseph. Yeah. Far and away.

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore? This is the other problem is that my name is Joseph. and there's a character in this film called Joseph and it's just going to be really hard. God, you're just throwing me down the blarney stone well of accents right away because I immediately said your name is Joseph or Joe but his name is Joseph of Joe I can't really do it. Joseph.

It's very, you got to be angry like Shannon is. Joseph. Joseph, get out of these stables. I don't know. I'll stab. I'll stab your leg. you with a pitchfark. What's that? See, you already did a better Irish accent than I did.

Speaking of which, like, once again, we record well enough in advance. So, obviously no spoilers because I don't know what's happening in the game show, but I'm also going to have a hard time, not just falling into accents this episode, but talking about Mark on Great British Baycock. Oh, God. I'm going... Oh, God. I'm going to slide off my chair.

Oh, dear. year. Okay. Guys, if the, a little window into the experience of

knowing Chris File and being friends with Chris File is being subject to weekly text messages

about Mark on the Great British Bakeoff and the things that Chris would like

to transpire with her. I become Sanjaya girl. yeah yeah but like far hornier like just explicitly hornier I would say yeah this is by the way not to like transition quite so elegantly this is Ron Howard's horniest movie right absolutely Ron Howard I think Ron Howard is so horny in this movie that he just said never again will I make any movie right a sexual pulse now it's just Da Vinci codes from here on out um yeah this is I

I tried to think of another one, and the only other movie... DaVinci Code is the anti-matter of hornyness. Right, exactly. It's God being so against horniness that he, like, created an elaborate mystery for us to solve so as to distract us from our horny impulses. Like, Da Vinci Code has a whole subplot about, like, orgies and fornication, right? Am I remembering DaVinci Code wrong? Yeah, but it's not sexy.

Yeah, no. Well, and also, the first movie is predicated on the idea that, like, Jesus, like, knocked boots with Mary Magdalene and had a child, right? Like, that's the whole thing. And again, deeply not sexy. The only other Ron Howard movie I could think of that had a sexual pulse, like, in any way comparable to far and away, was probably Splash. Right? Sure.

He wants to fuck a more. The Disney Plus version is like, let's just give Daryl Hannah some more hair that doesn't have a butt. And immediately. previous to Far and Away was Backdraft, which I only basically remember as the movie where you could see William Baldwin's butt in like the one shower scene or whatever, but like Backdraft is also, that's not a sexy movie, that's not a horny movie.

Like this movie is horned up for Tom Cruise like you would not believe. Like the entire character motivation for Nicole Kidman's character. And part of it is that the script isn't great, so the script doesn't give you a whole ton of reasons why these two would actually want be together, except for the scenes where they're, like, peeking in on each other in semi-states of nakedness. And it's like, oh, well, now I get it. Like, now I understand what's going on. Yeah, they want to look at each other's jibly bits. Of course, like, they need to be together. It's the only points where the narrative of this movie makes sense. Yes, yes. We should also

mention that, like, Ron Howard, much as we forget, directed Coon, which is a movie that's, like, plot drives around boners, right? Right, horny old people. I maybe don't remember Cacoon. No, yeah, there's the whole thing where, like, Don Amici's just like, I haven't had one of these in years, and, like, he wins an Oscar. Yeah. It's funny that, like, that was Ron Howard's first sort of foray into Oscarness, right?

In terms of movies he's directed? Yes. Am I right? He even got a director's guilt nomination for Cacoon. Wow. Isn't that crazy? I didn't realize that. That is.

That's definitely. I mean, if you need a better statistic of how ingrained the whole narrative of Ron Howard of we will eventually give him an Oscar because we respect him as some industry legend who, who like started as a young actor and that became a director, it's that he got a director's guild of America nomination for cocoon. That's genuinely crazy. Wow. But again, he had that thing where, you know, he's this child of Hollywood, right? The Andy Griffith Show into Happy Days, and, you know, there's some sort of trajectory, right, where it's like, oh, well, now he's making movies and now we want to pay attention to this

and this whole kind of thing. But, yeah, his career is interesting. There are more, like, kind of fascinating little niches in, Ron Howard's career than I think we give him credit for. I think I remember when he took over solo and there was just this whole sense of like they couldn't have found a more boring director. Like Ron Howard is synonymous with dull. And like certainly I've talked enough times about how terrible a best picture winner,

a beautiful mind is. So like it's not like I'm not contributing. We've talked about Ron Howard previously when we did the missing on this. But I think that was, we talked about that movie a lot more in the context of 2003, it was our miniseries and Cape Blanchet. But he's made some kind of fascinating movies, like, and some really good ones. Like, I think Apollo 13 is a really good movie. But, like, even stuff like Coon or Willow, which is like a fave of mind, but is like, when you talk about that genre of, you know, fantasy proto Lord of the Rings kind of stuff, it's still super weird.

Like, it's a very strange movie. And that was sort of part of the reason why I liked it. Like, EdTV sort of came at a very interesting moment in time, and I think that's a really interesting movie. I don't know. What are your sort of general Ron Howard feelings? I mean, I think now we kind of think of him as, like, a studio junk director. That's why when he came on to Solo, it was like, oh, so he's just going to pacify.

and, like, blur all of the edges of this into product, right? I mean, like, what are the discernible, like, I think now, at least the discernible, like, Ron Howard traits are, like, studio big budget director, right? Of not necessarily franchises, but, like, adult fair. Like, really his only franchise is not one, not two, but three DaVinci Code movies. Yep. But, like, he's made big movies that have made a lot of money, like, all the way back to the Grinch. Yeah. And even in the 90s, like, these 90s movies we're talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. Backdraft, I think, made a bunch of money. Movies for adults. Right. Yes. And now he has Hillbilly Elegie coming out this year with Netflix, which looks like a movie for no one. Well, I mean, nominally.

who are asleep and are going to have a nightmare. Nominally, I guess it's for people who enjoyed the book, though, right? Like, there is this sense that there is an audience for it. I mean, it's not that, right? Like, it's not like this complete reworking of the book where fans of the book wouldn't recognize this movie that they made. Like, I think we can allow for the possibility that people who are not us would,

have enjoyed that book and are looking forward to this movie. I know what you mean. I know what you mean. From the day that trailer broke, which was like Caligula on the timeline, it was full anarchy. It just like it looks very much like the type of thing that is the worst kind of Ron Howard product. But it's also absolutely the worst possible kind of movie for our demographic. Like, right?

We can, like, the circles that I am in. Two actresses who have not gotten their Oscar before, like, it doesn't matter what they're making. We're going to be the demographic. Right. But it's this sort of poison pill, right? Where it's just like, we can't look away because it's Amy Adams and Glenn Close. But we're also, like, obviously going to be repulsed by everything to do with the story of it. Right?

Yes. Well, I mean, even if it's not the story of it, it's obviously how it's being. handled, which is in this like saccharine cartoonish way. I mean, we'll see how we feel about the film, but that's how I felt about what I was witnessing in the trailer. I think, I feel, I just

feel like everything about the book, because the book was so notorious for being this sort of post-2016 Trump voter apologia, like, however we want to look at that. And it's just like, okay, well,

that's not something I'm interested at all. So I just sort of tuned out. No, not at all. But it doesn't look like the movie is that, to me. Hmm. It's interesting. It does look like that to me. Or at least, like, it certainly is

It's going to sneak it in there in a way that it's not going to broadcast until you watch the movie. Well, I mean, I don't even know if the book was like outwardly would have mentioned Trump in any way either, but it's just sort of like, it's sort of just getting at this like

demographic right which is poor disadvantaged white rural uh or not rural but like small town kind of people and i mean i don't know it's you get into sort of dangerous territory when you start you know delving into demographics that way anyway and we'll see it when we see it and it looked like it was certainly i'm sure i i would say i felt like it was looked like it was more making farce of those people than trying to understand them, to my eye. But you're saying that because it looks bad, whereas I don't think the movie is trying to make them into a farce. You think Ron Howard went into that movie and is like, I'm going to stick it to these people.

I don't think it was approached with a modicum of taste that would have been maybe indicative of trying to respect and understand these people. Okay. All right. I don't know. But Ron Howard, what's interesting about that to me, like, it didn't really look or feel that much like a Ron Howard to movie to me because, like, these movies we're talking about and, like, if he's known as a boring director or maker of boring films, it's because, like, even now, I think there's a veneer of, like, politeness and inoffensiveness to most of his movies that, like, go down easy in a way that, like, we don't. don't necessarily remember them, like, your running joke of Frank Langella fully reviving his Richard Nixon for the trial of Chicago 7, I remember basically nothing of Frost

Nixon, a movie that was fully Best Picture and Best Director nominated. Yeah. This is the thing about Ron Howard, though, is just like, what is a Ron Howard movie? Like, what, what signifiers could we look at and just be like, ah, this is really going for a Ron Howard vibe? I don't quite know. He sort of he bounces around from genre to genre, and it never quite seems, I know far and away got at the time a lot of comparisons to sort of like watered down David Lean kind of a thing because of the scope of it. It filmed in 70 millimeter. It was this. But it doesn't usually, even when he's hopping genres, it doesn't ever seem like he's going for particular directorial styles. It's not like he's making his genre. Ford movie or his, um, you know, Alan J. Pakula movie or whatever. It's just like he's not really going for genre in that way. He's not a visual stylist. You couldn't like pick a significant frame

out of any of his movies and say, oh, that's a Ron Howard. Which isn't to say that he hasn't made movies that are, that look good or are visually impressive in certain ways. I think some of his movies have. I think the thing about far and away that I like, and I think this is, on balance a bad movie but it is a movie that knows that it's about two movie stars and it photographs Kidman and Cruise fantastically throughout the movie like in every there are so many great shots of them that I'm like that sort of play in this like clip reel in my mind of both of their careers like there were so many shots in this movie I was just like oh that's a great shot I remember that shot that's like that's stuck in my mind and that's even before we get to

the land rush scene, which is the big sort of set piece. That's the one filmed in, like, widescreen, and there are, you know, countless numbers of extras and wagon trains and horses, and it all looks incredibly grand. And I think that's, I think he pulls that off quite well. The problem is there's no story to this beyond that. Like, the actual script of this movie is laughably bad. And I don't think Kidman or Cruise are good enough to elevate it in the movie like they're both very good factors it's like it's kind of like these two stars together that were

a like incredibly magnetic had already started on screen together they were married at this point yeah and like were the hot couple for a decade like you kind of watch this and you can't fathom although two people who are attracted to each other right um like that's how like tepid the romance of this movie is well for so long and i feel like still there is this sense of if a couple is together in real life, if they make a movie together, it'll be bad. And I think they were like building blocks of that theory where they've made three movies together and only one of them is good and in only one of them are they credibly like, is their credible chemistry between them. Like Days of Thunder is a terrible movie. And it's always so baffling to me to watch that movie. And it's

like, yep, that's the movie where they met and fell in love because it's just like, huh, that's interesting because you couldn't tell by what is on the screen. And it's only an eyes wide shut that, and I think eyes wide shut plays on their, you know, long history of marriage. And it does not surprise me that that movie comes at what ends up being near the end of their marriage. But there is no doubt that there is chemistry and fantastic acting and sort of like all the sort of like really interesting stuff going on there. That is not the case in far and away. Now, I mean, I kept thinking of, like, there's a whole boat sequence and, like, coming to America sequence that I could not stop thinking about Titanic, which would come off all right. Oh, I thought about Titanic a ton of this movie.

I literally wrote down in my notes, James Cameron watched this movie before he wrote the script to Titanic, because there's so many beats of this movie that reflect that. Mm-hmm. It's like the firebrand red-headed woman and the poor boy, and they hate each other at first and yada, yada, yada. Like, there's so much of that in Jack and Rose. When they dock, they dock in America, and it felt like reverse Titanic because the, like, docked scene is after. Right. One of the most laughable things was because of the era they are portraying. She has stolen, like, her family's silver and spoons.

to sell in America to have money. And it gets immediately stolen on the docks. And Nicole Kidman spends about five minutes screaming, just my spoon. Yes, she says, that's a great, I want to clip just that of just Nicole Kinman yelling my spoons, my spoons, oh no, he took my spoons. Also, beyond Titanic, the other movie that I thought of constantly in this movie is an American Tale and part of it is Because of Robert Proskey.

Well, Robert Proski is playing Honest John from American Tale in this movie. Like, it is absolutely certain. And but also like... I will absolutely. I took a screenshot of our... One of the times we were actually texting about this movie. It was just us sending characters back and forth

of who Robert Proscy was playing. I sent a picture of Oaken from Frozen, which he is absolutely dressed like that character at one point. Yes. it's Robert Pratsky in this movie is very funny but like but there's also the fact that like they go to America and then her family comes to America unbeknownst to her after by the way their home getting burned to the ground

in a scene that is not unsimilar to the Cossacks rating the Mouskowitz family at the beginning of an American tale but the fact that like she's in America and they're also in America and she doesn't know it like and then it ends up in the Old West just like Fival goes west. Like, there's so... It's all right there, people. It's all right there.

I also texted you... You know what's in America. Nicole Kidman in this movie. You know, it's not in America. What? Any cats. There's no cats. There's no cats in this movie, nor are there cats in America. There's no cats in America. And the streets are paved with cheese.

I also texted you that the cool mini character in this movie is the logo of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, because literally the first thing you see of him in this movie is him with, like, his dukes up in a... a very canny impersonation of the Notre Dame mascot. So clearly there's been some visual influence. Those are Ron Howard's visual influences. We're an American tale and the Notre Dame mascot. Yes.

Should I give a plot description? You know, let's do that. Before we get too deep into this movie, we've touched on the Ron Howard thing, but we're starting to get into the plot, so we should do a 60-second plot description. We should. Once again, we are here to talk about far and away, as I mentioned earlier, and you just kind of left it there.

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore? Oh, wow. I did just sort of leave it there, didn't I? I let you weave your tapestry all on your own. It would be so fine to see your face at the door. See, now that to me is you're dipping into Sean Connery, James Bond, a little bit. there. Like, it's a little, um, I mean, Sean Connery's had his own problems doing an Irish accent, but, uh, yeah, he has, he has.

Yeah. Um, oh, once again, directed by Ron Howard, written by Bob Dolman and Ron Howard, starring Thomas Cruz, uh, Nicole Kidman, uh, the aforementioned Robert Prossky, uh, Greg of Dharma and Greg Thomas Gibson. Deed. Barbara Badcock, Cyril Cusick, and Colmini, The movie had its world premiere out of competition at Cannes, but then opened May 22nd of 1992, Joseph. Yes. Do you think you could do the task of giving our listeners a 60-second plot of Far and Away? I will almost certainly go over time, but yes, let's do this.

All right, your 60-second plot description for Far and Away starts now. It's 1800-something in Ireland, and Tom Cruise is playing Joseph Donnelly, whose family lives under the thumb of the wealthy landowners, the Christie's, after his DA is trampled to death in a low-scale riot, and his family's home is burned down by the rent collectors. Joseph attempts to murder Daniel Christie, but he gets caught by the stables by Christie's firebrand daughter, Shannon, and he's injured and unconscious, and she sneaks the peek at his willy under a bowl and decides he should come to America with her because she is very modern and she doesn't want to play her mom's dumb piano music anymore.

So the second they're off the boat in Boston, she has her silver spoons literally stolen from her, and with the both of them broke, Joseph takes up bare knuckleboxing in order to earn money, and by this time they're in love, of course, but they run afoul of Sleasy local Boston soon enough. Joseph and Shannon are starving, and she gets shot or something, and he returns to her family who are now in Boston. And the time passes, and both of them end up in Oklahoma for the great land rush, and they ride their little horses very fast and find some land, and Joseph fights off Greg from Darma and Greg, and Joseph is mortally wounded and dies except only for a minute because then his soul or whatever returns to his body, and he and Shannon plant their flag in the land, and nobody ever lived on that land before.

It's totally fine, and we cut to Enya, and it's over. Yes, I'm glad. that you got there to the end because the whole like land rush sequence is so upsetting because it's like they think they can just like plant I mean like this this is this is history this is history well this is history but like the movie has no perspective on this that it's like they're just they're just going to have this whole like charge and like fight each other for this land that is occupied by indigenous people well wasn't anymore because they were all driven off the land previously by the government so here's here's what's

especially baffling about far and away. And there's a couple things. One of them is, because you can make a movie about the Oklahoma land rush, it's a thing that happened. It's a terrible, you know, it's an offshoot of an incredibly terrible and shameful period of American history where literally the American government, like, moved all the Native Americans off of the land in Oklahoma to literally give it away to white people. But also, the fact that the theme of this movie from minute one is how important.

important it is to own land to have a sense of self and to feel, for Tom Cruise's character to feel fulfilled, he needs to own his own land. And that is the central theme of this movie, and it like progresses and Shannon wants to have a place of her own. And the fucking her parents, the wealthy landowners who get driven off of their whatever like estate by the peasants. who are rioting or whatever, that they decide to have their, like, charming little restart all in Oklahoma. It's all about the importance of having land to call your own, and the fact that it is all happening in the Oklahoma land rush, which took the land away from people to give it away to other people, that Ron Howard doesn't have the presence of mind to at least know that this is a complicated thing and it should have a modicum of undercurrent to it. He has one cutaway shot as the land rush is beginning to like two or three Native Americans standing on the sideline looking grim, and that's fucking it.

Like that's the only acknowledgement in this movie that this would be a dark irony that all of these white people are looking for land and it's coming at the expense of people whose land were taken from them. There is no acknowledgement of it beyond that one shot. And the other thing that's fucked up about this. is that this comes two years after Dances with Wolves Win's Best Picture, which was a cultural sort of high point for awareness of Native American history. Like, there was a, like, this is, like, this is what I mean, within the culture, within, like, popular culture. There are, this is the thing that has been, like, swept under the rug again and again, again. but that was a sort of momentary high point for the culture being aware of this.

That was like definitely a spike in that, right? So for this to come right after that, you can't tell me that this wasn't, that you couldn't have. Yeah. This isn't a movie that feels gross now today. Like it's a 30-year-old artifact that like we can like, it feel queasy about it the whole time we're watching the sequence of the sequence is so loudly telling us, isn't this great? isn't this thrilling isn't this America and like at the time it was bad like and like I couldn't find any type of critique on the movie from the time about that but I have to imagine it was out there um like I am not a person who relishes going back into old movies and applying modern day standards of correctness or propriety in it like that is not my thing I don't like I'm not interested in that it is impossible to ignore it in this because the themes are so overt and so sort of bafflingly tone deaf and like blind to history. It's so dumb. And it doesn't ruin the movie. The movie's bad on its own. But it certainly

at least takes the movie's most impressive sequence and casts a pall over it, like for sure. where it just like makes you question the movie's intentions too because like as you mentioned dances with wolves was a huge freaking movie like by the time that this movie was in production right that like you had to have questioned that so it's like what's the whole point of this major like set piece that's like probably a half hour of the movie right it's like are you really just that like bent on doing this type of grand canvas david lean or like, uh, old style Western, like, sequence that, like, you're not even thinking about what the messaging of it is. Right. Yeah. It's weird. The other thing that surprised me, was this your first time watching this movie or had you

watched it before? I'd definitely seen it in, like, chunks as a kid, but never, like, sat in front of it. So, like, yes, I'd seen it before. This was, like, a movie that my mother loved and rented all the time. Yeah. I had seen it before, too, and in my memory, the stuff, the section of the movie that takes place in the West was more of the movie. Like, it really is just sort of, like, kind of almost like a tacked-on last 25 minutes of the movie, where this movie really exists in three stages, where the beginning part in Ireland, and then the middle part, which is the biggest part of the movie, which takes place in Boston. Where it becomes basically a saloon movie.

Right, exactly. It's a saloon movie. he's putting up his dukes, their fight, fight, fight, or whatever, and Tom Cruise is more or less credible as a bare knuckle boxer, which is funny to think of, because, like, the other thing about Tom Cruise is just, like, especially in this movie, it's just like, he's short of stature, as always, but also he has, like, the most alabaster skin sort of, like, tone where it's just, like, and I get, like, whatever, he's Irish and pale, but it's not like this, like, you know, sickly Irish pale kind of a thing, you know what I mean?

Where it's just like, and listen, I have Irish in me. My skin is damn near translucent unless I sunburn. I've never seen a movie that was hiding the fact that Tom Cruise is short less than this. Like every movie since this movie tries to hide the fact that he is short. But like this one, he looked a little diminutive. He's a wee little leprechaun in this movie. His muscular body, and I'm not saying this like in a creepy way, because I've already I met my creepy question at the beginning of the episode.

And don't worry, I'll make up for it in a second, because we're going to talk about the bull scene. We'll talk about the bull scene. We've got to get into it. We'll get into it. His body looks exact, like his muscles look exactly the same today. Are they Irish menning his body? He is on screen with a nude torso. No, he's kept his body.

This is the thing about mussely Tom Cruise is, and I have. historically, not now, but like through much of my formative years, I found Tom Cruise to be wildly attractive, like incredibly attractive. That's a whole generation. Yes. That's not just you. No, right. But it's like, but what I'm saying is I'm not here being contrarian or whatever is just like I've never found Tom Cruise attractive. Like I have. I bought into the whole thing at that time and for a while. But muscles- Yeah, if you had a libido in the 90s, especially the early 90s, stop lying. Muscles have always sat oddly on Tom Cruise, and I don't quite know how to explain it

more than that, where it's just sort of like, they've arranged themselves on his body weirdly, and his torso just sort of like looks bulky, but not ever super defined. It's like a whole, do you know, do you understand what I'm getting at here? Like, it's just, I don't think I do, but go on. I don't know how to explain it more than that, where it's just like, He doesn't seem like he was ever meant for muscles like that. His frame. Do you know what I mean?

He's a short guy. I'm trying to think of like another, I guess sort of like, you know how muscle sort of looks semi odd on Jake Gyllenhaal when he balks up when he really sort of like gets like. He's huge. Yeah. And it's just like, no. People aren't supposed to be that huge. You're Donnie Darko, man.

Like you don't need to be like you don't need to buff yourself up that way. And it doesn't sort of, you don't look at Tom Cruise in this movie. and think, like, wow, he, like, roided up or whatever. But it's just, like, I don't know, it's still weird to see him being, you know, like, little muscle boy. He's just an odd person. Well, yes. I think in general, yes. But the parts that really work for this movie in terms of, like, sexy Tom Cruise, and again, this is a deeply horny movie, where Nicole Kidman's movie, or Nicole Kidman's character, is canonically horny for this character.

The scene, after he gets caught in the stables, and he's sort of knocked out, and he's convales. in the Christi's upstairs sort of bedroom, and the mother has strategically placed a bowl over his Willie in bits. I say Willie, because they say that later on. It's a ceramic loincloth. Yes. We've talked about that scene, I'm pretty sure, on this podcast before, because I've talked about how, like, formative it was for me, and I really get blazed in my memory of, like, my tween self or whatever, just watching this and just be like, oh, I want to see what's on an too. And there's this like, she lifts up Kudman, too curious about it to resist, lifts up the bull and looks underneath. And the wide-eyed wonder on her face is- She gives her like three full

glances. She does, she takes her time with this thing. But I remember. There's like 30 seconds of cinema. But watching it as a kid, I'm watching it and I'm just just like, what does she see under there. Like, how great, how magnificent must this thing be under there? And it literally is the only, like, she goes from that to, like, you should come to America with me in, like, 30 seconds. It's so funny where she's just like, I've got a great idea. You and that should come with me across the ocean.

And there are no cats in America and there's no bowls. You would be forced to be nude around her. But it's, but also, um, He just looks the best he's ever looked in that scene. Like, it's probably that my, you know, my formative years are making that determination for me. But there's also, you mentioned to me, we were texting yesterday, the anecdote about the dance belt or whatever, the modesty pouch that they had him in. He had his modesty. Ron Howard wasn't pleased with the performance he was getting out of Nicole Kidman, which, how dare you?

I mean, this movie, maybe. Okay. We'll talk about Kidman's screen in a second. Just tell this anecdote, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. So he has Tom Cruise remove his modesty pouch. In secret, without telling Nicole. In secret.

So when she is actually lifting the bowl on screen, the performance that he captured that stayed in the film is her actually looking at his penis, which I don't understand how that would get a better performance. They were married, conceivably. She's seen it before. Right. Like, I guess maybe it's the surprise of it.

Like the, the, the, you're giving a more genuine reaction from her because she all of a sudden is shaken out of whatever, uh, actresses. Or maybe the modesty pouch just looked really silly. Yeah, I mean, you know. You know, so it's like you're, you're responding to this weird looking thing versus, you know. It's also one of those directorial decisions that it's just like, I guess it's okay because they're married. But, like, I really hope nobody tries this thing with, like, actors who are not wed to each other. Like, because that's not great. Like, don't spring surprise penises on actresses directors.

Like, let's all agree that that's bad. And not. We're recording this in the fallout of Jeffrey Tubin. Oh, dear. No one should be seeing penises. They don't want to see. The thing about that is, and I get the whole. thing of just like it's bad it's all bad there's no justification for it there's no defense

there's no um listen there seems to be this like weird strain of like and it could have happened to anybody it's like no it couldn't have truly you have to make up a good like 14 different uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh but the thing about that story i was saying this to another friend of mine and of course there were takes about it so it got it it and the defenses of it sort of it less fun. But for like a good 20 hours there, it was the perfect media story because it was, A, insane, B, kind of hilarious, and C, like a victimless crime, whereas just like nobody was being sexually harassed. We all had to, like everybody on that call sort of experienced it together. And it ultimately was an accident that should not have been made. And he didn't

intend to show his co-workers, his penis, but at the same time, like I said, there's a good dozen decisions that you can make so that it doesn't happen. It's the great goofus and gallant story of our time, whereas just like, listen, there are very clear-cut do's and don'ts in this whole situation, and he made a lot of don'ts. A lot of don'ts. But yes, let's talk about Nicole Kidman, because the thing about Nicole Kidman at this stage of her career is nobody thought she could act and everybody figured that she got the role because she was Tom Cruise's wife and she got

I think there was there was a whole thing about like she got top billing along with him and that was due to him pulling strings or whatever and there was a lot of there was just this pervasive sense and it didn't go away until to die for in 1995 where she's incredible enough Everybody assumed that Kidman was just a pretty face who couldn't act, even though she, A, got the role in Days of Thunder, and then also B got the role in Far and Away because of her performance in Deadcom, which everybody agrees is great. Yes.

Well, okay, first of all, if you're complaining about this movie and her getting above the title placement and she's got her face on the poster, at the end of the day, this movie is a romance. It's a two-hander romance. Right. Right. Very even that way. Right. In terms of like above the title billing, you're face on a poster.

It would be more of an overt action to not give her above title billing alongside him. Because it's a two-hander romance. It just is. That's just how the movie is structured. I mean, her character sucks, but she's probably a better, it gives a better performance than he does. They're both kind of at the same level of not great. to me, but I get what you're saying. Well, he has more embarrassing dialect situation going on, but, like, this is just pure, like, Tom Cruise's early 90s magnetism. It's not necessarily a great performance, unless, like, especially if you're not equating, like, star persona, which, like, is a skill and a talent. Absolutely. And again, this movie knows how to photograph its stars. This movie is a movie star movie, and it's the one. And it's the one. one thing about it that I really appreciate is that it feels old-fashioned in a good way

in that it feels like the kind of movie where they were just like, listen, get our two most magnetic stars, put them above the title, put them in this movie, who gives a shit about the script, doesn't have to make sense. People come to a movie to watch movie stars, and, you know, this is what we're giving them. And it doesn't make the movie good, but it works on a movie star level, I think. Mm-hmm. So there's that.

I mean, certainly at the point of their careers where they were, because, like, going through the Tom Cruise filmography, I'm always struck that, like, how, like, meteoric his rise was in the mid-80s. Like, there's not a whole lot of movies there before Top Gun. And then after that, he's like, I'm going to make one movie a year. I was going to catapult me. He only makes nine movies in the 1990s, which seems insane if you, grew up in the 1990s because Tom Cruise felt like he was everywhere.

Like, he was the movie star. This was before Hanks sort of really came into his own. I know Hanks sort of, like, had his rise through the 90s, but it wasn't really until pretty much at the end of the 90s that he was, like, Tom Hanks is ensconced as, like, America's, you know, favorite guy or whatever. Whereas, like, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt sort of the same way. Brad Pitt was sort of like, you know, hot young thing through most of the 90s. Whereas, like, Tom Cruise was the movie star.

And yet, it's only nine movies. It's Days of Thunder, far and away, a few good men, which was the same year. I want to talk about that a little bit. The firm interview with a vampire, the first Mission Impossible, Jerry McGuire, and then two movies in 1999, Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut, where he does it. Like, that's the point where it's Cruz getting weird, right? 1999, but like for the rest of that decade, it's just an obviously interview with the vampire

was another one where it's just like he's going to take a chance. I mean, it's its own thing, but at the same time, like, we can look at it now where it's like, it is coded as queer, it is like very horny. Like, it seems atypical now, but that was like a huge studio prestige product. Those books were huge.

The movie was a hit. It's surprising to me, as I scroll through his 1990s, how many horny movies there are because you don't expect, like, I don't think of Tom Cruise that way now. And yet in the 1990s, whereas, like, the only ones I can think of

that aren't horny are a few good men, the firm, and Mission Impossible. Yeah, but a few good men works partly as, like, at least for his character as much as it does, because, like, you think that he is incredibly hot. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a handsome movie. It is a Tom Cruise's handsome movie, but there is no sexual energy in that movie whatsoever, to the point where you have Tom Cruise and Demi Moore two massively hot movie stars at the time, and they have absolutely, it's not that they don't

have sexual chemistry, is that the story never puts them in a position to have feelings for each other in that way. And I remember reading at the time, and I actually don't don't know if this is true. I should look into this more. Whether in Sorkin's initial conception of the play, whether Demi Moore's character was played by a man, was like a male character. Oh, and they cast a woman. Which would make sense because, like, there's just, no romantic angle to it. The firm, he's married to Jean Triplehorn and she sort of, but like, the whole, like, the sexy angle there is, is she going to sleep with Gene Hackman? Like, that's sort of that momentary thing in that.

Noted Lothario, Gene Hackman. I love the firm. And then Mission Impossible is Mission Impossible. The whole thing about Ethan Hunt is that he's this weird, asexual weirdo. And I don't know. I don't want to talk about the Mission Impossible movies. But, like, Jerry McGuire is, like, Bonin, Kelly Preston in that scene. And obviously, it's, like, romantic otherwise.

But, like, there's horniness at the beginning of that movie. Magnolia, for a character who doesn't have. have sex in that movie is like he's like a walk-in boner it's weird and id yeah yeah and then obviously eyes wide shut like it goes without saying but uh yeah and then he kind of just like stops being horny almost like right away almost like it almost is like eyes wide shut was um a scared straight program for him where all of a sudden like eyes wide shut was too horny and he was just like never again. Absolutely not. Never again. I mean, there's Vanilla Sky. Vanilla Sky, which it kind of feels like an extension of that where he's like, maybe he was so traumatized by

the Cameron Diaz character. Vanilla Sky in many ways feels like PTSD from Eyes Wide Shut, doesn't it? In terms of his movie star persona? I think so, maybe. I think that was where he lost the public a little bit at first because it was like, okay, too much weird, too much sex. Vanilla Sky is, failed film, but it's one of the most fascinating failures of my lifetime, I feel like. And it is, if you watch it through, like, a psychological treatise on Tom Cruise, it's fascinating. It's such a movie about somebody struggling with his existence as a movie star. It's so fascinating.

And in really kind of ways that I think are accidentally revealing of the time. Tom Cruise stuff. But like, other than that, what's a subsequent movie of his? Like, even like night and day, which is supposed to be like sexual tension, Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz back again. And it's just like, that I don't buy that. And like Rock of Ages where he's supposed to be like, I was going to say, does Rock of Ages count? It doesn't. It doesn't. You've seen Rock of Ages. It absolutely doesn't. It should. Like, if it's doing its job, it should, but it doesn't. Did you ever see Rock of Hage's on stage? No, I haven't.

That character, as conceived on stage, and now I can't remember the actor's name, which is too bad, because I loved him in it. The guy who plays Stacey Jacks, and it's so, it's such a sexy performance in that guy's hands, and then Cruz comes, and he's literally just like the Edna Turnblad of that movie, and it's just like, why are you this? What's going on? I hate it. He decided, you know what I'm going to be? Brett Michaels. I feel like the Mission Impossible movies are like not sexless, but they should be

I don't know. There should be a little bit more I don't know. They kind of lose me a little bit. I don't love them as much as everybody else does. I definitely don't love them as much as everybody else does. The best thing about them to me are like the, I mean, some of the stunts are cool. And like I have a good time at those movies. even if I don't think they're great.

But, like, Rebecca Ferguson is amazing. Okay. And, like, why... I get that Ethan Hunt is, like, married and they're both exiled from each other. Whatever. So you can't really have too much sexual tension there. But it's, like, it's almost, like, non-existent. I have never seen a film franchise get more of a pass

or have been given a lower bar to clear. than Mission Impossible with Rebecca Ferguson, where people are just like, she's a lady and they let her be part of the team. Isn't this great? And it's just like, y'all, like, this is just that she's one of our underrated screen presences right now

where, like, she can, like, be given a really crappy character and have this fully formed person on screen that's interesting to watch. Like, I think she is just that person right. We're like, when she came back for the second one, and they're like, she's really part of the team now. Isn't it's great?

She's like, she's a lady. And it's just like, okay. But like, this is still just like Tom Cruise Ego Trip, the series, right? Like, it's still just that. I mean, is it Rogue Nation where she shows up? Yes. Is that the one? Okay.

Yeah, the only thing I remember about that movie is her green dress. Yeah, there's that whole opera house scene. It's good or whatever. The thing about the Mission Impossible movies, and I agree with you that, like, in the moment, they're fun to watch. But they do exit my brain. immediately. Just like, absolutely immediately. Can we talk about the dark universe?

Sure. Go. I never saw The mummy. Oh my God, it's so bad, but you know who's great in it? Sophia Boutella adds the mummy. Okay. I don't know. It's just like this weird new Hollywood hubris of like we're just going to make serious, gritty, modern monster movies that are not fun. And here's six movies we have planned, and the mummy is so bad, and Cruz is so bad in it that, like, it immediately sinks this very cynical franchise. Here's the thing about, and listen, I am, I like franchises.

I like cinematic universes. I know that, like, I'm in the minority on that, but, or at least the minority on people who say the phrase cinematic universes. I love the whole MCU stuff, whatever. But I think whatever you feel about M. Night Shyamalan's split, the great success of that is he managed to, in that final scene, turn unbreakable into a cinematic universe without having to make a press release about it or having to like announce that that what he was doing. And all of a sudden, the second that happened, enthusiasm for his next movie was at like a 12.5 out of 10 because, of just like that small little thing. And he just did it totally under the radar. And, like, I think the further you can get away from announcing your cinematic universe

ahead of time, like, Marvel is the exception to that. Everybody seems to be weirdly chasing that Comic-Con moment where they brought out the entire cast and everybody, like, flipped their shit. And it's just like, they can do that, but, like, let's not all think that we can do that, the dark universe. like that's not really just make monster movies and then if after like two or three of them you want to be like hey they're all connected then like fine but just but it was also like Russell Crow is going to be in these movies right um find someone among us that wants that I don't know yeah I was just so fascinated by the dark universe and kind of bummed out because like I love those monster movies I love the universal uh monster properties like I think it would be cool to do some type of franchiser cinematic universe

with them to the point where it's like Blumhouse took over the Invisible Man which is not a movie I liked but if they did

Really? You didn't like that? Oh, I loved it. I thought it looked cheap and bad. Oh, I loved it. And it's starting to strain me

on I need Elizabeth Moss to play someone who isn't crazy. See, that's what Shirley did for me weirdly enough. Oh, see, I think she's great and Shirley.

I just think that the Invisible Man was like, be crazy, but just be crazy. We don't, you know, you can just be crazy, whereas, like, Shirley has like texture. She's playing a person, you know? I

weirdly think the opposite. Oh, wow. Okay, we'll fight. We'll fight about this later. Okay. But no, like, I would have, and, like, you can have movie stars in them, I guess, if Tom Cruise really wants to, I, I could not wrap my brain around Tom Cruise doing that movie. Yeah. Except for whatever

they had probably paid him. But, like, if they want to do those type of things like the Invisible Man with those Universal Monster movies, I am all in for it. Yeah. I feel that.

I don't know. Tom Cruise. I want to go back to Far and Away for a second. Do you have any recollection, because I know you're younger than me, of the sort of Irish

exploitation in culture during the 1990s, where I was still very young so it's like I don't know and of course I come from a very Irish American community where like my neighborhood I'm like part Irish and my family is sort of my dad's side of the family is Irish and Scottish and whatever but like our neighborhood is very Irish so then my like little 25% Irish became like the whole thing because of where I grew up you are compromised Yeah, exactly.

So, like, I'm very much, like, in it already. Like, I remember when River Dance and Lord of the Dance became a thing in, like, the mid-90s. And, like, none of that, to me felt like any kind of a revelation because, like, mean, an Irish, like, there were Irish dancers everywhere around here, like, especially in March, but, like, kind of also year-round. Like, a friend of mine in grammar school was an Irish dancer, and, like, my cousins were Irish dancers, and they had the whole thing, and the dresses and the hair pieces and whatever, and it's a whole thing.

So, like, that was never surprised to me. That was just sort of, like, yeah, it's step dancing. It's a thing. Well, I definitely remember the whole, like, Irish pluitation you're saying because, like, Irish culture in the 90s had a whole, like, constant evolution, probably ending with Angela's ashes in terms of, like, popular culture, referencing, like, different periods and different facets of Irish life. Right.

Like, this very year we're talking about the crying game is the best picture nominee. Chenate O'Connor had just hit a couple years before that and like that was a whole moment and obviously like we'll talk about Enya but like Enya was in a moment and like that was very Irish the chieftains who also did work on the soundtrack for Far and Away were like a really like weird subcultural thing the commitments was I think the year before this movie and like that was a whole thing. It's a really like deeply rooted pop culture thing to the point where like most of our grandmothers probably have a CD of Celtic woman in their car. Uh-huh. Yes. Yes. Yes. All of that. Also, leprechaun was only a couple years after this. So like clearly. Noted Jennifer Anderson

vehicle leprechaun. Okay. I mentioned this in my letterbox review of it. Have you ever seen anybody who is less credible as a Tory in your life? as Jennifer Aniston in that movie. Like, I just don't buy it. I don't. Like, she looks like she could credibly play a lot of other people, but, like, Jennifer Aniston does not look like a Tory. I'm sorry.

Listen, all I care about is legend Warwick Davis stays booked and busy. He really does, though. That's the other thing. Like, good for Warwick. Speaking of Willow. Lepricon goes everywhere. Lepricon went to space. Leopardon went to the hood.

Leproon went back to space. Lepercon went back to the hood. Lepircon, I'll go wherever you send them. Lepircon should go back to central perk. I think Jennifer Aniston should make another lepercon movie. Oh, the other Irish thing from the 90s that I forgot to mention, which is a movie I've still never seen weirdly enough, even though I should, is Circle of Friends, which gave us mini-driver.

Ah, yes. The Great Mini Driver. It's also the Brothers McMullen. Yes. Noted, that's where I will remember you by Sarah McLaughlin comes from. You don't need to tell me that, but I'm sure other people listening to this do need to know that. Yeah, absolutely true. I had bought, I think I mentioned this before, when we did, I don't know why.

I won't remember you show up in anywhere but here. Is that why we talked about it there? I mean, probably throw a dart at any of our past episodes, and that's where we could have conceivably talked about ceremony. But I definitely talked about buying the cassette tape to the Brothers McMullen soundtrack for one song and one song only. and it was, I Will Remember You, by Sarah McLaughlin. Yeah, it was, there was, it was definitely like Irish, Irish mania a little bit. If, if the 1980s were Aussie exploitation, Crocodile Dundee era, like definitely the early to mid-90s were when we all decided to get very fascinated with the Irish. And this movie was definitely part of that, even though everything in Ireland seems.

so vague in this movie, right? Like, am I wrong? The Jared Harris stuff and the... That's Jared Harris at the beginning, right? Playing his brother? Yes, Jared Harris. How many episodes of Jared Harris like randomly shown up in for us now?

Natural born killers. Yeah. Yeah, like, and it's all like barely known Jared Harris stuff. It's not even like when we would have known his name. The other odd... Like, obviously the whole thing about Ron Howard is that like, Clinton Howard is in all of his movies. And I remember when I saw his name show up in the opening credits, which, by the way, it's hilarious that his name is in the opening credits to this movie.

Can we talk about the fonts in the opening credits? Like, as if you didn't know, we are in Ireland. It is bright, like, Michelle Visage hated green in the fonts of a movie. That should be an illegal color for a movie font. It is the, as somebody who worked in a public library in my, high school and college days. It is what I would call the Maeve Binchie font, which is just sort of these very like sweet Irish, whatever, probably romances. Serious 90s product font. But Clint Howard shows up in this movie for like a second half as like the boss at this

like chicken plant or whatever that Shannon is working at. And has anybody seemed ever less period in your life than Clint Howard just like rolling up in a movie? It just makes Whereas, like... Might not have been a problem had he been cast as a leprechaun. There should have been a leprechaun in this movie somewhere or another, right? Like, somebody who, like, he stows away on the boat with them. And that's the other thing that's seen on the boat where there... Davis shows up at the end of the movie and says death to colonizers and kills everyone.

Ah, cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha. Yeah. The scene on the boat where they're at the, whatever, on the deck and they're sitting at the fancy little table and he's like cover up your ankle or whatever that also seemed very titanic to me like not to double back but like i'm glad that you also had titanic vibes from this because it's just like what what if only the story parts of titanic like what if just that like not the visual bravora what if tape one of titanic right exactly exactly um but if tape one of titanic but 15 minutes long i would say i would have loved for

Nicole Kidman to have been able to do an Irish step-dancing scene in any kind of setting of this. She's sort of, she gets, she's one of the dancing girls at the boxing match at one point, which is upsetting that she ends up getting aggressed by the boss. But, yeah, it's an odd. So I mentioned that Tom Cruise makes nine movies in the 1990s. During that same span, she makes 12, which is sort of in keeping with her, like Nicole Kidman works. Nicole Kidman wants to work and she will And like that's not even getting into

Nicole Kidman in the 2000s is just like movie after Movie after movie after movie after movie It's uh she had that sort of like post Marriage uh rum springa where all of a sudden She's just like I'm free and there's that whatever that meme of her And then it's just like fully iconic She makes 8 billion movies after this but like even in the 1990s right So Days of Thunder Billy Bathgate where she gets that Golden Globe nomination which

weirdly, I think, worked against her in that because it was the Golden Globes, the sort of like Pia Zadora Golden Globes or whatever, people still were just like, oh, well, that was like a bought and paid for nomination. She can't act. She just sort of like that's one of the weird, you know, golden globe anomalies or whatever. Flirting, which always seems like an 80s movie to me, was 1991. That was her back in Australia with Tandy Newton and, uh, Naomi Watts, yes, her bestie Naomi Watts, then far and away. A movie after that that nobody remembers really called My Life, directed by Bruce Jill Rubin. Michael Keaton. With Michael Keaton. And it's that he's dying and she's his wife, right? That's the thing. Yes, and he's, like, filming their life together.

And it was this, like, self-conscious weepy that, like, never succeeded in the way. It was Bruce Joel Rubin's follow-up to Ghost, I'm pretty sure. I don't know if he had a movie in between that. That's the guy who directed Ghost, right? I'm not wrong about that. He wrote Ghost. Who directed Ghost? Zucker, Jerry Zucker.

Right. Bruce Joel Rubin wrote Ghost, and then he directs my life. But my life never quite hit the way it was supposed to. Then, also in 93, she makes Malice, which is a movie I've wanted to rewatch forever now. That's an Aaron Sorkin script. People kind of drag that movie, and it makes me really curious to watch it. I want to watch it again, because everything that I remember of it, I love. There's that fantastic Alec Baldwin monologue

We've talked about it before You ask me if I have a god complex Let me tell you something I am God After malice 1994 is a great Kidman year Where she makes Batman forever Which earns her so much money

Probably then and into the future And then to die for Which is again the movie where everybody Finally decided to say that Nicole Kidman's a good actress And she wins a golden globe and she sort of opens a lot of eyes, and it was a real turning point in her career. Then, 96, it's the portrait of a lady.

It's Jane Campion. She's great and super underrated in that movie. Like, Barbara Hershey got the Oscar nomination, but Kidman's fantastic in that movie, and it never felt like she was ever seriously in the Oscar conversation, which to me is so strange. Yeah.

Isn't that a really packed best actress here, though? 96. Well, but 96 was the big sort of like indie, wave, where it was McDormand for Fargo, Kristen Scott Thomas for the English patient, Emily Watson for breaking the waves, Brenda Blethon.

Brenda Blethen for Secrets and Lies, and then at the Globes it had been Merrill Streep for Marvin's room, and then they swapped her out at the Oscars for Diane Keaton. So, like, yes, but I feel like, I think Nicole Kidman could have taken that Diane Keaton slot, and people wouldn't have been so... Or even like the Emily Watson slot, I think Emily Watson's slot,

I think Emily Watson's revelatory in breaking the waves, but it wouldn't have shocked me if someone like Nicole Kidman could have... It's an intense movie. Well, but like, and also that, that movie really played into the narrative of that year. We talked about this a little bit when we talked about melancholia, about how like it was the indie wave and so whatever. But it's just strange to me that they clearly watched and enjoyed the movie enough to nominate Barbara Hershey, but not Kidman. So then 1997, the peacemaker, which was the first big

DreamWorks movie, 1998, it's Practical Magic, which I love. Did you read that? Called Classic. Did you read that Stockard Channing article, I believe, on Vulture, where they interviewed her

about Practical Magic? How did I miss this? I think it was this week. Or maybe somebody surfaced it and it had been from a little bit ago. But go seek it out. It's really good and fun. Hang on to your husbands, girls.

So, all right. what do we think of Kidman in that movie? 99, by the way, as wide as we talked about it. So, like, Kidman in Practical Magic I've always found so funny because she's clearly playing sort of second fiddle

to Bullock, right? It's Bullock's movie. She's the protagonist, and Kidman is like her wild sister. And it's an interesting role for Kidman. It's not something that she would typically, I think, maybe even more than the now because she did these

studio movies that kind of look odd on her larger filmography. Yeah. But like the character itself is not someone you would think of for Nicole Kidman. I wish she got to play more characters like this that are like fun and loose and kind of rangy. Yes. But no, I think she's fun. I think she's funny in the movie. All right. So yeah, so that's Kidman's 90s.

it's a really fascinating evolution to me to go from like Billy Bathgate and Days of Thunder to at the end of the decade the portrait of a lady and eyes white shot right and even like practical magic which all of a sudden is just like she really became a movie star this decade and became a really kind of like confident one at that well and you can see her becoming the actress

that she wants to be as well because she talks pretty extensively about how she's always motivated and interested in directors, right? Whereas the 90s, you can see her slowly starting to get to do that, right? Like, no offense to any of the other directors, but, like, it starts with Gus Van Sant, and then, like, slowly she gets to do more on that, like, with James Campion, Stanley Kubrick, until now it feels like that's pretty much all she does now. She works with the director she wants to work with, or on the, like, TV project she wants to do.

Right. No, I think that's totally true. I think she I mean hers is one of the great sort of like self-built careers which is interesting to say because again the rap on her at the beginning of the 90s was very much that like these things were handed to her but she's built the career like you said this is the career that she wants and she's really been able to do that through both being very good in movies with big directors in being in successful movies when she's needed to, when she's needed to, you know, pull out a Batman forever kind of a thing. And stick him by her guns in a way that like,

I feel like, and this is not to disparage Julia Roberts at all. I love Julia Roberts. But I think many times in Julia Roberts's career, she's strayed from the path and sort of gotten smacked for it. And then she's returned to the bread and butter. to sort of like recharge right to make to get everybody sort of like back on her side and kidman and maybe it's because kidman was never never really had her pretty woman never became sort of like so uh emblazoned as a type in mainstream culture that like there's there was never a pretty woman to return to for kidman but i also don't think that that's her bread and butter her bread and butter is working with an interesting director right but that's the thing that's the thing

thing is she doesn't have a mainstream bread and butter to return to, which is not to say, like, it wouldn't necessarily have to be romantic comedies, but it could be like, but like, that's not her center. Her center is really herself. And her center now, like what you're saying, she could be entering that phase now because it seems to be that it is TV now. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah, she's about, as we're recording this, this weekend, she's, uh, her new HBO series with Hugh Grant, which is called The Undoing, am I wrong? I just literally wrote about this the other day. I don't know why I'm remembering.

I haven't heard good things about it, unfortunately. It's long delayed. It was sort of supposed to premiere in the spring, and then the coronavirus happened, and they sort of pulled it and delayed it. And I guess I don't think you're wrong in that, but I'm intrigued to see it anyway, if only because it is her.

And I feel like more than most actresses, I give that benefit of the doubt where it's just like even if it's not a great project I'm interested to see what she does with it so what I will be foaming at the mouth to see her do

is the Robert Eggers movie where she plays a Viking queen like I'm sold and like every other detail that comes out about this movie it's like I don't know if you get this but like I'm good I'm sold I'm already excited for this movie

you don't need to tell me that Bjork is in it you don't need to tell me that like it's filmed in I think some type of like ancient language or right I'm good I'm gonna be there guys calm down um am I wrong or was there was did she have a Wang Karai movie in the works at some point that seems possible I don't think it like I know I don't think it is anymore but like I feel like I remember had I had heard about that at one point I could be wrong listen we just got to get through the prom. We just got to

get through it. Honestly, I'm leaving room that I could enjoy the prom. I don't know. We got to get through the prom and we got to get through Hillbilly Elegy and it's going to be fine. Here's the thing. The thing about Hillbilly Elegy, it could, this is it's that time of year where listeners are always

like, this looks like a, this had Oscar Buzz movie to us on Twitter and like our policy stays firm that like we are optimistic about everything and like it could be a nominee, it could be a not nominee. It's so interesting to me that nobody is talking about it

in terms of Ron Howard. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of his thing as of late. Like, it just, like, Ron Howard movies. Like I saw some digs at it, but it's just like... Yeah. I don't know. That seems like kind of,

aside from the source material and the, like, Trump apologistsness, uh, uh, that seems like the source of the problem. When was the last Ron Howard movie that felt like oh this is a Ron Howard movie like rush to a degree I guess Whereas at least in the buildup to that movie People were like oh it's the new Ron Howard movie

In a way that like There's so many movies of his that we can do Like in the heart of the sea That feels more like that I guess But in the heart of the sea Which I definitely saw in theater And remembered almost nothing about it Chris Hemsworth is he the lead in that?

Yes Okay That to me felt very divorced from its Ron Howardness in its publicity. I just feel like that was like the big seafaring, whatever, and it was like it's a Chris Hemsworth movie, it's a boat movie, whatever. But I don't ever remember,

what was the Chris Pine Boat movie around that same time? The finest hours? Yeah, I saw that one in Los Angeles. I saw that one at the Chinese theater in Los Angeles. The only movie I've ever seen there. I deeply don't know why. I guess that was what was playing there when I was there. Probably because you just wanted to go there.

But just remember very little about In the Heart of the Sea. And then, yeah, the DaVinci Code movies sort of clog up his 2000s. Frost Nixon, we've talked about being this like inexplicable best picture, best director movie that like nobody I've ever talked to loves. Like, I've never talked to anybody who loves Frost Nixon. It's so weird. Nobody was enthusiastic about the time Because I was the one that was like This is not going to get nominated

And like it just Sure did And had no imprint even after it was nominated Yep Yep, it's true Is there anything else I'm sort of going through my notes about this I liked Grace the prostitute

She was fun She also was deeply horny For Tom Cruise in this movie Um All that RASI nominee For Worst Song One day, one night, one moment

With a dream need to be Even one step One fall one long time And the new earth That was a wide ocean This is where Became my journey Okay, all right, all right, all right, we're going to get into this.

Again, and we don't need to go into yet again about why we hit the ransom. Yeah, because we don't need to give them more air time, but sometimes this is fun. It's so stupid that, of all the things to pick out about this movie, you're going to pick on Enya, who, again, is the, easy target of the moment, right? And you's been a punched line as long as she's been an artist, right? Because it's very sort of this ethereal, easy listening, halfway to ambient sounds, kind of a musical style. And yet, ironic uses of Orinoco flow in cinema are always great.

It's great in the girl with a dragon tattoo. It's great in eighth grade. Here's my deep, dark secret. I kind of like end of days a lot. like, or book of days, sorry, not end of days, book of days. Like, why are we talking about sportsmaker? I really, and I think it's, it's, and maybe it's because again, in my youth, that song got married to this movie in my brain. So like, of course it makes sense in this movie.

But like, I think it's a good end credit song. It sort of keeps you in a vibe at the end of the movie. It is again, this movie takes an inexplicable turn towards magical realism in its final minute. That is so strange. We haven't even talked about him dying and coming. coming back to life. Not only dying, but his soul via the camera, like, floating away from his body into the ether. And then she says, I loved you. And it stops. It literally like, er. Like, you want to hear, like, screeching breaks. Like, oh, wait, we don't have to die. She loves this guy. And it comes rushing back into his body. And it's just like, when did this movie make the case for magical realism before literally the last minute of this film? It's so insane. You know what that is, though? that whole thing where you can die and a woman says I love you and your soul comes back to your body

you know what that is? Tinkerbell? It's luck, it's the luck of the Irish. Oh my God, shut up. That is the luck of the Irish. You can do that. That's what they mean. Okay, the other thing I wrote down

in the land rush scene, which is genuine, all right, I have a couple questions about the land rush scene. One of them, and again, it's fantastically filmed and it's really well done and good job. Two at end. These families that went out there and decided to make the race for their land with their little wagons or whatever, why not just leave the wife and kids back at the starting line with the wagon

and you ride your little horsey out and plant your flag and have your wife come meet you later? Like, I don't, I guess it's that... The theme parks didn't exist yet, so they needed something to do. I guess you needed to, like, get there and then literally stay there, or else somebody would take it from me. you and like maybe that's the deal. But it's insane. I'm watching these wagons and I'm just like, it's just going to slow you up. And there's these scenes of like wagons fully like flipping over ostentatiously and whatever. And it's just like, that's just bad strategy. Whereas Tom Cruz is there on his little galloping ghost of a horse. And it's just like, of course he's going

to get to the land first because it's just him on a horse. He's not dragging his whole little freaking family from Toledo or whatever who decided to come out west to go get land in Oklahoma. All right, that's one thing. Another thing is there's a shot of this guy utterly wiping out on his penny farthing that made me laugh so hard because it's like, dude, like, the wagon people are one thing, you're on your little goddamn penny farthing on the like rocky terrain of the Oklahoma plains. Like, you're not going to make it there at all. That's not even fast. Like, I don't even understand.

What was this guy thinking? I would simply stay in a city. Generally, and again, if you're the kind of person that likes to ride in a. penny farthing why aren't you in a city that's like that's where that's where you belong man like it's so funny i think anything with a penny farthing is funny anyway but like especially that where did this movie get magical realism newsies one worst original song but it was also nominated against the bodyguard for queen of the night and if i needed another reason to say go to hell Razzies, saying that Queen of the Night is the worst.

You could burn in hell, Razzie. Oh, because it was like the fun song amid ballads in the bodyguard. Like, go fuck yourself. Like, shut up. I mean, I guess it is the gay one. But like all the songs in the bodyguard are the gay one. What are the other nominees, by the way, now that you're looking at them? It is just three.

It is a far and away is a double MTV movie award nominee. It sure is. Best action sequence for the land race Lost to Lethal Weapon 3 And then on screen Duo Also Lost to Lethal Weapon 3 Which is

A, it's the worst of all the five nominees But it's also the least MTV of that era Like at that point Lethal Weapon wasn't cool with the kids at that point It was the third movie in like A Successful Franchise or whatever But it's not like the kids were like clamoring for Danny Glover saying

I'm too old for this shit again It was up against, it was Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman far and away, which, like, it's Tom and Nicole. Like, they were the MTV demo back then. They were the moment. Come on now. The bodyguard for Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, again, absolutely was the MTV moment back then. White men can't jump, Woody Harrelson, Wesley Snipes. I love that on-screen duo is romances and bromances.

And friends. Yes. Well, they already have Best Kiss, so... Right, right, exactly. Who won Best Kiss this year? Best kiss was basic instinct. No, it's Untamed Heart. I was looking at the wrong category. All right.

The year that Untamed Heart, this was like peak Christian Slater for MTV. Because he was also most desirable male, I think, that same year. Marissa Tomei also won Breakthrough Performance. MTV loved Untamed Heart. That was the greatest movie about a man inheriting a baboon heart

and then falling in love with a woman ever. Can I talk about this best best? Breakthrough Performance category, can we talk about like five factions of gay culture warring together? Do it. Marissa Tomei wins for my cousin Vinny. Holly Berry is nominated for Boomerang. Whitney Houston is nominated for the bodyguard. Rosie O'Donnell is nominated for a league of their own.

And for Sister Act, Kathy Nijimi. That's a great category. That's a great category. I have no notes. I have like, I have absolutely no problem with any of that. The 1993 MTV Movie Awards, I think, were like, peak MTV Movie Awards for me. That was when I'm pretty sure that was, oh, no, you know what it was. This was the year that they had the reenactments of movie scenes with the Brady Bunch cast,

because it was Florence Henderson doing Basic Instinct. It was... There's no smoking in this building, Mrs. Brady. What are you going to do, Peter? Charge me with smoking. Would you tell us the nature of your relationship with Sam the Butcher? I had sex with him for about a year and a half. I liked having sex with him.

He gave me a lot of pleasure. And a 30% discount in Rumpfrest. Also, a few Good Men wins Best Movie, which, like, they were catering directly to you. Absolutely, that's the thing. It's, like, this was peak MTV and me were, like, at that. very same level. It's a great set of now. Go check out the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards or MTV Movie Awards nominations. It's some great stuff.

Indeed. But yeah, a lethal weapon three, winning both of those categories is dumb. Like, far and away would have been a much more appropriate winner in both of those categories. But anyway. Should be on-screen duo of Nicole Kidman and the ceramic bowl. Okay. The other thing about the ceramic bowl scene, Did you know that the Irish town where they filmed those scenes was Dingle, Ireland? That made me laugh.

It makes me laugh. Uh, blah, blah, blah, blah, bah, magical realism, penny farthing. Shannon is very modern. What else? Oh, the plunge and scrub scene, speaking of, I know we like double back to horniness. But, like, the way that she watches, she's looking at Tom Cruise when he's showing her, the plunge and scrub method of washing your laundry is so, like, literally, there should be like a sproyoing, like, sound effect. It's very sexual. It's a very sexual laundry. It is. It's very sexual laundry. And then later on, when she's in Oklahoma with her mother and she's showing her plunge and scrub, she just goes, plunge and scrub. Like, she's so incredibly repulsed by this notion of plunging and scrubbing. It's wild.

I feel like we haven't had a dialects conversation on this podcast in a while as we were, like, doing them readily every single week for a minute. Yeah. But, like, this is a movie that's like kind of a punching bag for bad accents, but like... It is. The Irish people hated this movie. It didn't necessarily find them, like, easy to make fun of. They're just bad. Yeah.

Tom Cruise's accent is bad, but it's... Tom Cruise never gets to do an accent. It's just not allowed. What's funny is, I found an old EW article about this. And it's a very sort of like rah-rah article about this. And it's Cruz talking about working with the dialect coach and how helpful it was and how much it improved his performance and whatever. And then like the next article I read was this article from this Irish paper that is just like

famously the worst Irish accents ever in a movie. And the thing about Cruz's Irish accent in this movie is, and it's again, the Irish complaints are the same that we hear from just like from one scene to the next. he's from a different part of Ireland, blah, blah, blah. And, like, I, myself, I'm just like, I don't. One on sounds the same to me. But the thing about Cruz in this movie is, it's not that he has this, like, insanely over the top.

He sounds crazy accent. It's that every scene he, like, fades back into just regular Tom Cruise voice. Oh, yeah. It's one sentence per... It's one word per sentences in a dialect. Right. And mostly, it's just like,

yeah, you just sound like Tom Cruise. whatever. It's whatever. And then Nicole, of course, is doing the thing where she's Australian, trying to do an Irish voice that is supposed to sound closer to British because of her class in this movie. So it's just like too many, too many layers upon each other. And my poor ears couldn't decipher what was supposed to be going on. So, but yeah, plunge and scrub. I enjoyed it. If there's a wrap-up question I have for you, mine would be. because this came shortly after Tom Cruise's first Oscar nomination for Born on the Fourth of July, three years later. Do we think Tom Cruise is ever getting an acting Oscar? Yes, I do. At some point, yes.

I don't. Maybe not for a while. Because at this point, I don't think he cares. And I don't know what, like, when he becomes 70 years old, which is not as far away as you think it is. I don't know what type of roles he's going to play. I don't either. But at some point,

point, he's going to get too old to be doing stunts anymore. And I think when that happens... Or he's going to die. Well, knock wood that that doesn't happen, but yeah. Right, right. But yeah, it's like he is wanting to get closer and closer to it. No, eventually he'll be filming scenes for Mission Impossible 12 from Mars, and it'll be a very dicey situation, indeed.

Yeah, he thinks he's filming movies from space, and I want to be like, you know, Gaga tried to do this a few years ago. Didn't happen. Do you remember when that guy, I think he was sponsored by Red Bull, because he had a whole like Red Bull thing, did the like free fall from literally like almost space, right? Where he, uh, do you remember this in like early 2010s? And it was a whole, it was like a thing on the internet that day, right, where this guy's going to do a free fall from the troposphere or whatever.

I don't know. And almost immediately. after. Midnight flight to San Francisco. Right, exactly. Yeah, he plunged through the web of souls that was rising from the earth. Anyway. And was repaired. But somebody like the next day, and it was my favorite thing, did put that movie or that shot of him doing the free fall and added the goofy holler to it. So that when he fell, it was the famous sort of like goofy, like, goofy. Like, and it's so it's still so funny to me and I can't quite explain it except for that I'm a simple man of simple pleasures but yeah yeah far and away a bad movie that I managed to enjoy on its own merits more often than I probably expected to let's say that I was bored out of my skull and also it's also long it's just very long this is we got lucky in

recent weeks. Well, I mean, I suppose Melancholia is like two hours and ten minutes, but this is two hours and 20 minutes, and it feels like two weeks and two days. It does. I appreciated its horniness. I appreciated its movie star-ness. Otherwise, it's

not good. It's not good. It's not. Joe, should we move on to the IMDB game? Yeah, let's do it. Would you like to tell our listeners what that is? Sure, yeah. Every week we end our episodes with the IMDB game, where we challenge each other with an actor or actress to try and guess the top four titles that IMDB says they are most known for. If any of those titles are television or voiceover work, we mentioned that up front.

After two wrong guesses, we get the remaining titles release years as a clue, and if that is not enough, it just becomes a free-for-all-of-hints. It's the IMDB game. Would you like to give or guess first? I'll guess first. Okay, cool. So for you, I went back to the first film of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman together. we are talking about Days of Thunder.

Who else is one of the top-filled performers of Days of Thunder, Mr. Robert Duval. I was going to say, you're giving me Duval, huh? Okay. I am. Robert Duval, who has a long career of very well-known movies, so this is going to be difficult. And I'm pretty positive Days of Thunder is not going to be one of them. So, all right, so he's in the first two Godfather movies. are pretty well known.

And he's probably, like, no worse than third or fourth build in them. So I will say The Godfather. The Godfather, correct. The Godfather. Maybe he is Oscar nominated for. He is. He's great in that. The Godfather Part 2?

No. Okay. All right. The movie he is not Oscar nominated for. Right. He did win an Oscar for Tender Mercies, so I'm going to guess Tender Mercies. Incorrect. That is two wrong guesses.

Your years, hold on, my page is loading, are 1979, 1997 and 2003. Okay. So not his appearance as himself in 2018 widows. And not either of his other Oscar nominations for a civil action or the judge. All right. So, 1979 is Apocalypse Now? It is.

Is 1990, wait, no, the ranking. mainmaker is John Voight, never mind. I'm going to put a pin in 97. No, I'm not, because he was also Oscar nominated for The Apostle. Correct, the Apostle. And then what's the other year? 2003. Here we did a miniseries on. Yeah.

All right. I don't think that's gone in 60 seconds. I think that movie is like... Gone in 60 seconds is 2000. Right. Thank you. Okay. He has three movies in 2003.

Be willing to bet this made the most money. All right, let's see. O-3-3, what's going on in the culture in O-3? And what are Robert Duval movies? It's not starring... What should I say? It's not Space Cowboys. It's not Deep...

Impact. Those are all before that. It's not those kind of movies. I mean, it's probably the same audience. Is it serious? Is it like very serious? It's serious. Is it Oscar-y? Oh, maybe if it had been like a decade previous. Okay.

Is it like sentimental? You could say that for its genre. It's like, when this genre was revitalized, there was a clear formula. Is it secondhand lions? It is not secondhand lion, so that is 2003. Okay. It is, this genre of movie, when they, like, tried to make a comeback, it very much followed a formula of, like, two guys and a lady. Above the Bill title.

Above the bill. Two guys and a lady. So, like, buddy comedy where one of them's got a girlfriend. Not a buddy comedy, no Right, because you said it's drama, okay But like prestige This movie probably blurs With at least like two other movies

In your brain Okay A dead genre Western Yeah open range Open range I like open range was like male actor Male actor lady actor

Is that to Appaloza was Is that Appaloosa? male actor, male actor, lady actor. Is open range directed by Costner? It is. I was almost going to go there with Dangers with Wolves, dances with Wolves, but I figured you would have got it right away.

I remember certain critics really riding for that movie. As a return to the genre, I remember it got compared favorably to the missing when they were talking about genre, like Western, the sort of the Western Revitalization. an open range opened in August and got very forgotten about it made money if I remember correctly it's the rare Annette Benning movie that I haven't seen but I also sort of resent the idea of her sort of like being the like thankless woman role in a western for Kevin

Costner so perhaps at one day I'll watch it probably not but you know I'm not a westerns guy all right well I'm glad I got that eventually that's a weird that's a weird known for for Robert Duval. I would venture to say he's not known for Open Range. I'm going to say that. Right. Is that movie on TNT right now? Are your dad's like sitting there and their lazy boy

and watching Open Range and looking it up on their phone? Exactly. All right, Chris. I have chosen something for you. Nicole Kidman, as we said, got this role as well as her Days of Thunder role because she was so good in the 1989

movie, Deadcom, where she was 22 years old in that movie, playing a mother of a child who gets killed at the beginning of that movie. Such an icky movie, but she is amazing. She's great. And that movie is genuinely terrifying. It's such a good movie. She's 22 in that movie.

Her love interest, Sam Neal, is 42 in that movie. There's a 20-year time difference, which I did not appreciate at the time, even though it does sort of get baked into the story about how, like, Billy Zane sort of is like, you know, why are you with him? And you should be with somebody young and vital like me. I'm not going to give you Billy Zane, even though I considered it.

I'm going to give you Sam Neal. So what's the known for for Sam Neal? Mr. Samuel Neal definitely has Jurassic Park on there. That's the no-brainer. Jurassic Park. Certainly Jurassic Park. Do I think, because he's not in Lost World, but he is in Jurassic Park 3. Do I think Jurassic Park 3 is in there?

Do I think anyone gives a shit? Sure, I'll say it. Jurassic Park 3. Jurassic Park 3 is correct. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. He's in the third Omen movie. I'm going to take a wild leap.

No one gives a shit about that. Is there any TV? Hasn't he done a lot of like British TV? He probably has, but there is no television and no voiceover. Which movie is he opposite Robin Williams? Is it Bicentennial Man? Bicentennial Man. It's not Bicentennial Man.

No. That is a strike. Okay. I want to now look and see if he is in that movie, though. It's 1999, right? Yeah, he is. He's in Bicentennial, man. He's in a lot of, like, 90s crap.

Like, um... He is. In the Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon. In the Mouth of Madness is a creepy movie, I will say. That's a weird movie. That's Clive Barker, right? That's a Clive Barker movie. I think so.

He's... No, he's not in the Serpent and the Rainbow. That's Bill Pullman. Oh, in the Mouth of Madness, it's based on a Clydeonononon. Barker, I think it's based on a Clyde Barker story, but it's directed by John Carpenter. Oh, that makes sense. Okay, I'm going to guess that one of them is on there.

And I feel like because there's more famous people in it and, like, that's going to get the SEO count up high. I'm going to guess Event Horizon. You're correct, Event Horizon. Ah, yeah. Where he plays cuckoo-pants, man, in that film. That movie is fully cuckoo-pants. I didn't watch it until last year

And I remember I'd heard so many good things about it That I was very much looking forward to it And I didn't like it I wanted it to be better I don't know I wanted it to be something else That's sort of like seen as like Paul W.S. Anderson's good movie And I'm just like

It just seems like a junkie Paul W.S. Anderson movie to me But it's a movie about space madness And who doesn't love a movie like that I of course Always go to sunshine for my go-to Space Madness. I need to see that. Have you never seen

Danny Boyle's Sunshine? Haven't. It's so good. And so many great actors are in it. You will love it if only for the cast. I know. People I love like Michelle Yo. Exactly.

Exactly. And the music's so good. All right. You have one strike. I feel like the next one's going to be a costume drama. I know there's costume dramas in there. I just... Oh, wait.

Wait, wait. No, not a costume drama, but he's opposite Meryl in Dingo 8 baby um is it tingo ate my baby well you have to give me the title of that movie which has a american title and an australian title which i don't remember a cry in the dark cry in the dark it's not a cry in the dark um do you remember when a few years ago when merrill was on jimmy kimmel's show and he asked her to uh see if she could remember all of her oscar nominated roles and she didn't she just call it dingoate my baby no no he was she said a cry in the dark and he said no it's not one of your

oscar nominations and so the headlines that next day were mary even meryl streep can't remember all the oscar the all her oscar nominated roles and it's because he got the title wrong because he was pulling his staff or whatever was pulling from i mdb and i mdb lists that under its australian title which is evil angels but just saying a gay staffer wouldn't have been okay that was one of my notes. I was just like, why doesn't Jimmy Kimmel employ any gay people? Because they would have caught that. Or like women who watch movies?

But like people at like entertainment news aggregation sites were just like running with that headline. Merrill can't remember all of her because that's probably how Kimmel's staff like put that in the press release that they sent this clip out to people. And we're like just parroting this headline. But if you watch the clip, anybody who knows Merrill Streep's Oscar nominations knows that she was nominated for a crime. in the dark. Cry in the dark. Did she get anything else wrong or did she forget any of them? No, it was only, he gave her, like, whatever.

She guessed like two or three correct, and then she said, a cry in the dark, and he said no, and that was the end of the game or whatever. They didn't have her name all 20 of them or whatever. So she was like, she didn't get any wrong. And I was just like, A, there's no gay people on staff at Kimmel at the time. B, are there no, like, no homosexuals at these entertainment websites who are going to, like, fact check. I'm like, I get that everybody's 12 years old or whatever, or watch the clip entirely. It made me so mad. And it's, again, one of those things I get mad about that makes absolutely

no difference in the grand scheme of life. But I was just like, I was so mad. Anyway, that was years ago. I've totally let it go. I don't even remember it at all. Okay, you have one more. I've had two wrong guesses, right? Yeah. So your year for your missing film is 2016. Hmm. So it's new. It is. Is it a new? Is it a new? costume drama? No. I will tell you this is a movie

where I was a good two-thirds of the way through this movie before I realized it was him in this movie. Oh. How's that possible? It's possible.

He's like, it's Sam Neal. I know. I was surprised as you are. I was surprised as you are. I should have guessed possession already even though I shouldn't have. Yeah, you shouldn't have. You would have been wrong.

I would have been wrong. um oh you didn't know it was him it's not a voice performance nope it's a it's a him performance it's a live action i really liked this movie okay did i like this movie i don't know i think you there's a very good chance you would have it was written and directed by a future oscar winner oh so somebody who in the past, like, three years has an Oscar. Yep. That would have Sam Neal in it. This was...

People who have won for directing. It's not... Wait. This wasn't this director's breakthrough movie. It came right after. It sort of came on the heels of this

director's breakthrough movie, and they sort of in tandem became his breakthrough, and then, like, he sort of shot up in uh in recognition after that point got it and they this person will this director won an oscar did they win an oscar for directing no did they win an oscar for writing yes okay people who've won oscars for writing jesus christ i forget that tycho white tini won an oscar last year um is it one of the tycho white tini movies oh it's hunt for the wilder people it's hunt for the Wilder People. Do you like that movie? Is that a movie you like? It's fine. I really

liked it. I really enjoyed it. That and what we do in the shadows came like within a couple years of each other and what we do in the shadows is awesome. Yes. And the TV shows even better and probably so. Yeah, Hunt for the Wilder People. He's got like the beard or whatever and for whatever reason. That's right. I just wasn't connecting it and all of a sudden I'm just like, holy shit, that's Sam Neal. I was so thrown. It was crazy. Well done. well done. So, before we wrap things up, guys, once again, reminder, we're taking submissions for your listeners' choice episodes. We're going to pull all of your answers. You only get one. Yes, I will have a spreadsheet and everything to make sure no one's cheating. You will get one

suggestion for the episode you would like to have in your stocking on Christmas morning from both of us. So you can either tweet at us at had underscore Oscar underscore buzz, or you can email us at had oscarbuzz at gmail.com. Joseph, I think that's our episode. It is. Good one, I think. If you want more of This Had Oscar Buzz, you can check out the Tumblr at this had oscarbuzz.com. Please also follow our aforementioned Twitter account, Had underscore Oscar underscore Buzz. The beginning of December, we will take the top four polled listeners' choice options, and then you will all get to vote on those for Joseph. Yes.

Joseph. God, yes. I don't even know what that was. Joe, where can the listeners find more of you and your stuff in Irish inflection? Yeah, you can... 25% Irish inflection. You can follow down to the end of the rainbow and find me pot of gold at... Which is what I call my tweets.

My tweets are my pot of gold. On Twitter at Joe Reed, read spelled R-E-I-D. And on letterboxed, where I am as Joe Reed, read spelled the exact same way. All right. And I am on Twitter at Chris V. file, that's F-E-I-L, also on Letterbox, under the same name. We would like to thank Kyle Cummings for his fantastic artwork, Dave Gonzalez, and Gavin Mavius, for their technical guidance.

Please remember to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, wherever else you get your podcast, which now includes Spotify. We're on Spotify. A five-star review in particular really helps us out with Apple Podcast visibility, so please plant your flag in this podcast and claim us, which is something you can do because we are a podcast and not land inhabited by indigenous people. That's all for this week. We hope you'll be back next week for more buzz.

There was no one in America There was no one in America There was back in America That's why he said His name