This Had Oscar Buzz - 197 – Downsizing

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

And we’re back to your regularly scheduled episodes! This week, we return to our non-EW episodes with one of the more divisive high-profile bombs in recent years, 2017′s Downsizing. A globalization satire from Alexander Payne and his Sideways co-writer Jim Taylor, the film follows an everyman played by Matt Damon who decides to join the … Continue reading "197 – Downsizing"

Uh-oh, wrong house. No, the right house. I didn't get that! We want to talk to Marilyn Hacks. Downsizing takes the pressure right off. Plus, you're really making a difference. You mean all that crap about saving the planet? Yeah.

Downsizing is about saving yourself. We live like kings. Got best houses, best restaurants. Cheesecake factory. Got three of them. In Leisure, Lynn, your $52,000 translates to $12.5 million to live more for life. Wow. Do you understand that you will undergo the permanent and irreversible medical procedure

commonly known as downsizing and that your body's, will be approximately 0.0364% of their current mass and value. Nervous? Uh, little. Hello, and welcome to the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, the only podcast that's Horse and Hound's favorite podcast. 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'm your host, Chris Fyle, and I'm here as all. always with a miniature actress in a bathtub, Joe Reed. First of all, thank you for calling me miniature, and thank you for comparing me to Laura Dern. Two of the nicest things anybody's ever done about me. Listen, I really fell on a sword here, because if you are the Laura Dern in this presentation scenario,

I just called myself Neil Patrick Harris, which is not, you know, not really my vibe. I will say really good casting. in that. And I think I would say a lot of the small roles in this movie, not to get ahead of myself into actual evaluation, but like Neil Patrick Harris is exactly the person you want to cast in that. Laura Dern does such a good job playing sort of insincere middle classness. I think the Marco Martindale role is perfectly cast. A lot of these little roles are... These teeny tiny one-scene roles are perfectly cast because it's dispensing so much information.

You Who Likes an Info dump. Yes. It does that in pieces but with different performers. And I think it's the only thing that maybe holds your attention in those long stretches before we get into the actual movie. Nisi Nash has a scene like that. She shows up, Donnellin Champlin, even from a crazy ex-girlfriend, James Vanderbeak, Jason Sedakis. I think all of those small little roles are really well cast with performers who, as soon as you see them, you really latch on to, like, it doesn't take you too long to sort of like figure out where they are in this ecosystem of what this world is. And I think that's all very good. Down to like the principal from election as Kristen Wiggs' dad, like that kind of thing. Like all of those small roles are really, really well cast.

The other thing that I think will be interesting to get into is I sort of peaked at your letterbox rating for this before we started. I ended up liking this movie a good bit more on second watch than I did on the first watch, which I was not expecting at all. And we're probably going to end up pretty far apart on what we think about this movie, which I think is very interesting and exciting. Yes. I still don't love it. But, like, I think it's a more interesting movie, and I think succeeds at a higher ratio than I originally gave it credit for. I still think there are, like, crucial things about it that I find misguided and misjudged. But, and I think it leaves a lot on the table is the other thing.

But I think some of the ideas that it puts forth and that it executes, I think it does pretty effectively. And I'll be excited to talk about it with you and to disagree about it. Well, okay, it wasn't as angry as a watch the first time, but it was the same level of having no patience for it. Yeah. But the first time it was like an angry, I don't have patience for this. Second, it was very get on with it. This is so fragmented in a way that just, feels messy, like Alexander Payne biting off more than he can chew.

I don't think you're wrong there. I don't think you're wrong in the biting off more than he can chew portion. I think in some ways, to me, there is some virtue in that, and that, like, it really does try to say some big things, and I do think it says some of them well. I also think, like, a big sticking point, if you look at a lot of the reviews, and is the fact that the Matt Damon character is so almost infuriatingly uncompelling, and not to be like that person who's like, well, that was, that's how it was supposed to be. But I do feel like there is a sort of basic component to this movie where like this

character has to represent all of sort of middle class banality. and he does, but what that means is you have two hours and 15 minutes of tracking middle-class banality throughout the rest of this movie, and by centering that, and we can talk about that in a continuum with Alexander Payne's other movies, which also, like, man loves a dissatisfied middle-aged white man. But like, by centering that, you necessarily off-center characters like Hong Chao's character and Kristen Wig's character, who I think succeed and fail in very different ways. Like, I think, especially watching this again, I locked on to Hong Chao's performance a lot better than I did the first time around. I remember being fairly mystified by the awards buzz for that performance,

relative to the rest of the movie that everybody else seems to hate, I still kind of hate what they do with the Kristen Witt character. Again, this is all me getting ahead of myself. Yeah, we're going to have a, I'll have a lot to say about like the different chapters for lack of a better term of this movie. Sure, sure. But to just continue on your thought about Matt Damon being tasked to play this average middle American, not particularly interesting guy,

it's a huge problem with this movie that he, I think he's pretty miscast. Like, I don't know what Matt Damon could have done to make that interesting. And granted, he's played Middle Americans before. Like, in recent years, he's done basically Red State Drag for Tom McCarthy for that movie I hated, whatever it was called. I still haven't seen it. I got to see it. I don't think you do, my man. I mean, just for, well, I was about to say Tom McCarthy completeism, but I've still never seen the cobbler. So maybe he's one of those, like Joe Wright, where I just only see the good ones and manage to avoid the bad ones, at least until we talk about them with Katie on this podcast.

But, okay, so I want to talk about the Damon character and who else could have played that character. Well, it was written for Paul Giamatti, who plays these characters all the time and is great at it. Let's put a pin in that, though. because we did want to start off by not talking about this movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's run through a couple things before we really get into it. We just wrapped up our May miniseries. We wrapped up our May miniseries.

I, dare I say, would call it our most successful miniseries. I would agree. Also, our biggest experimentation. Biggest experimentation, certainly longest sustained series of five episodes in a row. Listen, we are nothing, if not. atoors of the form. I will say... Innovators.

Yes. We are, if nothing else, pioneers, is what I would call us. Very heartened by the response to the entertainment weekly discussions. We were sort of nervous as we were recording these, that like, are we going to be trying people's patience getting to

like an hour into the episode to talk about the movie? And like, listener, if that was your experience, we do extend our thanks and gratitude for your patience. But we heard from a lot of people who really, really loved the EW talk. And while I don't anticipate us going to quite that length again of basically spending half the episodes talking about the EW issue that housed a certain movie, I do definitely see us seeking out old entertainment weekly issues that pertain to certain movies that we talk about

and incorporating that a little bit more because you guys have said that you like it. Yeah. Not as, you know, we're not going to devote episodes to issues as well as the movie. What I would say probably because we really mixed it up

with what we were doing for our mini-series, I would imagine that May is just going to continue to be a time kind of reserved for us to, you know, try things a little different. Yes. Yeah, we already have a couple ideas in the hopper for next year that I am already kind of very excited about deploying. So, you know, stick with us for another year and we promise something super fun for

next May as well. But in the short term, we've got some cool stuff coming up as well. Yeah, we are back on track with regular episodes, including a huge milestone coming this month, our 200th episode. It genuinely, and I know it's become cliche to talk about the sort of time-bending properties of the last few years under the pandemic regime, but it does feel like our 100th episode was so recent. It really does not feel like the same amount of time that passed between our first and 100th episodes was the same as our 100th episode.

to our 200th. It really feels I don't know. I don't know. Do you feel the same way or am I just experiencing this? I truly can't keep track of time in regards to our show because I can't, I'm starting to get to the point where

not only have I forgotten whatever we've talked about in certain episodes, but I've forgotten that we've talked about certain movies. I've, because there's been things that I have almost proposed and said, let's do this movie. We've done that movie. Nope, we did it. Not that we're running out of...

Not by a long stretch. Not by a long stretch, especially as we continue. We are having more and more things added to the pile as the year goes on. But... Yes. Was our 100th episode on Mother during the pandemic? Yes, it was. Wow.

I remember recording it from my parents' house. That's the nice thing about, like, delineating is remembering where I was when we recorded episodes really helps me remember whether an episode was recorded in, pandemic conditions or not. So like that at least helps. But yes, Mother was recorded in the year 2020 and under pandemic rules. It was all-star rules and pandemic rules are in effect for the mother episode. So episode 200 is going to be an all-star episode basically. It's going to be, I mean, we'll do the annual yearly, you know, recap of the show. But we've got a big movie on deck that we're going to have.

a lot to talk about. Long-time listeners are going to know that, you know, this is a special one for us. We don't even know all the special occasion stuff that we're going to deploy in that episode. So imagine how excited you are that we, that, you know, this will be a surprise to us as well. So that's funny. Exactly. Exactly. Also, we are one day removed as we record this from the Cannes Film Festival announcing their awards for this year's crop of films. Chris, I want to congratulate

you on winning the Can Pool that we ran among us and our band of cohorts. I won the Palm Door. The Palm Door is something. What are we going on? Winning the pool, which we conducted as sort of a draft where you pick four

movies as a roster, winning without selecting the Palm Door winner, which was tried to grand prix winner or grand prix that's true you really you cleaned up with the lower awards so well done let's remind the listeners what your four films that you select oh okay what were my drafts i drafted decision to leave i was the director winner an early drafter so i was like let me get one of those big ones first right park tan wook with the best director award it can very excited for that movie uh we stand tongway on this podcast um that's right

What else did I draft? Tori and Lakita. You've drafted the Dardin movie. Two-time Palm winners, the Dardens. Likely they would win a prize. They almost always do when they show up. They win something. I was just trying to get points where I could get them.

I wasn't trying to. They wanted to award the Dardons so much that they just made up a prize to give them this time. They didn't make up a prize. They do the anniversary prize pretty much every five years. Yeah, but still. remember five years ago for the 70th anniversary, they just gave one to Nicole Kidman, who had like four things it can that year. It was the beguiled. It was killing of a sacred deer. It was top of the lake. And, uh, 2017? Something else. Which is funny because if any year to give Nicole Kidman a prize just because it would have been this year for the accomplishments and the what she's done for cinema via the AMC theater. honorary palm winner the AMC ad honestly can like get your shit together you know what I hate I mean I don't hate this because the obvious reasons I would have to go all the way across town to go to an AMC so I have seen that ad once in the theater and it was before a press screening too so it was like they they they were doing me a solid in that instance but I've never you know your other two movies I have a crowd I have a lot of

concerned that if I saw it with a crowd, I would be the one reciting it and no one else would be doing it. Everybody has all these fun stories of being in a crowd full of people who are reciting it. There's the meme going around now where someone went to Top Gunn and was doing a naval salute or whatever. It's in Nicole Kidman, which... Is that real or is that fake? I mean... I don't trust anything anymore. No, it's right. That's true. Anyway, just to your other two canselections were Holy Spider from Best Actress winner. Border director, Ali Abasi, and Laila's Brothers, which won

the Phippresi Prize? How do we pronounce that acronym? Fripresci? I don't know. Fripeche. Sure. The Joe Pesci Prize. The Joe Pesci Prize. It can't went to Lelpsi Prize.

The Joe Pesci Prize went to the Iranian film Laila's Brothers. So on the subject of camp, obviously neither of us went, but we got all these. I've been recording from the French. Shut up. Is it the Riviera? The French Riviera. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

La Quartet. We've been getting dispatches sort of via Twitter and perhaps from people that we know who are on site. Emerging from it, without like devoting too much time into this, what are like the two or three movies that you are most excited to see relative. to your excitement going into Cannes? What movies did Cannes really, like, crank up the excitement for you for? I mean, the thing... I'm going to sound like such a nerd or fanboy here,

but none of the movies I'm most excited for were in competition. And the two that I probably came away, the most feverish to see, was Mia Hanson Love's new movie that was in director's fortnight that Sony classics will be releasing. I believe it's called One Fine Morning.

Everybody I've talked to seemed to love that. I saw a lot of people saying it was the best thing they saw. Yes. Starring Leia Sidhu. We'll see what Sony Classics does for that movie. God, Leia Sidu is everywhere this year, by the way. I mean, truly. Days away from seeing the new Cronenberg, which, like, I would probably put that at the top

of my list, but because I already have tickets to see it, it feels like it's happening or happened. Well, and also, like, going into Cannes, we were already pretty excited for crimes of the future. So, I feel like Cannes can, like, you know, crank up your excitement for certain things, which for me. Things we don't know when we're going to see. Right. So the Palm Winter Triangle of Sadness from Rubin Oslund, who did the Square and Force Majore, super, super, super excited to see that thing now.

rich assholes on a boat with vomit and poop and despair. You know I don't love poop, but still. Very excited to see that. Holy Spider, which we talked about a second ago, which is from the director of Border, and I loved Border. And what else? I'm trying to think of, like, what else did this? I would say my number two, which is kind of surprising for me,

is Brett Morgan's David Bowie Doc Moon Age Daydream? Which will be IMAX, but it's all this footage that I believe most of it has never been seen before. And like you hear musician documentary and you know exactly what you think it is, but it's apparently not that. You know, there's not talking heads in this interview or in this documentary. And it's apparently, you know, very visually exciting. And it'll be an IMAX. So can I tell you my shameful secret? What?

That like probably like will get me. trumped out of, you know, synophile circles forever and ever. I like a talking head documentary. I sometimes would prefer a talking head documentary. I mean, some of them can be really good and very entertaining. I would definitely recommend coming up on HBO, The Jains, is an incredibly entertaining talking head documentary.

We both saw that via Sundance. I don't know, I just feel like there's, and this feels very knee-jerk, like, anti-critic thing, and I don't mean it to be. But, like, I do feel like there is a tendency for people who write about documentaries and who talk about documentaries critically to sort of put column A and column B and all the good movies are the ones that are not talking head movies and all the bad ones are the talking head movies. And it feels like a lot of people sort of binary that in a way that I find frustrating. But anyway, this is a total side tangent. The other movie that I'm kind of certainly more excited to see than I was going in is this movie The Eight Mountains, which won, what was the prize that that won? That tied for jury prize. Okay, can we say just blanket before you go into it?

No more can ties. Stop it. Oh, I disagree. And I tweeted with Jordan Hoffman about this yesterday because he was also bemoaning the ties. I will say, I would not like a Palm Door tie. I would not, you know, but like if we're talking about ties for Grand Prix or the jury prize, those are already runner-up prizes. So like, it's weird.

It's weird. If you want to honor more movies, just give them a special prize of a different category. You know, it doesn't have to be the same prize at first. year. I find that more condescending. I'm absolutely totally fine with ties in those categories. Part of it is because I was running a pool and more ties meant more points, which meant more interest. So, like, maybe that's my perspective coming into this. But in general, I'm all four ties. Do it. Same thing with Critics Awards. If you want to go for it. Give a tie. There are eight bajillion things out there. Like, tie them up, as far as I'm concerned.

As far as I'm concerned, only Claire Dini won Grand Prix. Well, yeah, as far as Claire Deney is concerned, only Claire Deney one Grand Prix, because apparently she filibustered on that stage and would not allow Lucas don't. Yeah, good for her. To do anything. Of the competition titles, the ones that I am most excited for are the Claire Deney and the Kelly Rikart showing up. Sure. Well, you know when we talk about French actresses who I live in fear of and would never want to ask them their opinions on anything?

Claire Deney is kind of the apex of that type, even though she's a director and not an actress. I mean, she seems very sweet in interviews and such. She just doesn't put her up with, like, stupid questions. She seems terrified. Listen, she's not a social worker. My favorite quote. But see, this is what I'm saying. I'm not a social worker.

That's right, Claire. I mean, all right, anyway. What else are you excited from either from the Cannes competition or not in the Cannes competition? I mean, I mostly paid attention to the competition stuff, so I am less. well-versed, but the Riley Keough movie that won The Camera Door, I am automatically pretty interested in

because I'm really into Riley Keio as an actress and a creative persona, so that sounds pretty cool. It's her directorial debut with Gina Gamble. Yeah. So, I will say the benefits of doing this pool,

I am much, much more plugged into all of that, at least competition titles this year, which, like, I feel like is a nice, this way I don't have to, like, come, like, September, October, be like, what is that movie? Why are people talking about that movie? And, like, 12 different times, somebody's got to be like, it was a can. Like, okay. So, uh, we'll have a conversation about in Stemurgard and director's Fortnite, so I can steer you along to other things. All right, all right, we'll do that. Okay, but moving on, uh, moving into, back into downsizing.

We are here to talk about downsizing. Indeed. You know, I, you know, I, I was going to propose post 200, we do a bit where we say the song that had this been Oscar nominated, what song would Billy Crystal have used for this movie? This is coming out of absolutely nowhere, but okay, I'm into it. Well, it's mostly coming out of I was sitting there throughout the movie, kind of bored out of my mind, just saying, like, downsize. Okay, I was just about to say, oh, see, you're saying Moon River, and I'm saying it in the cadence of Goldfinger, because any three-syllable title, when I think of it in Billy Crystal song parody terms, I always, if it's three syllables, it always is to Goldfinger, as far as I'm concerned. But yeah, Moon River as well. That's a little more wistful. Yeah, I can see it. What else? What else could be due, downsizing.

because sometimes he doesn't do it just as like a title parody sometimes he does it as like a thematic right so like what's a song like short people he could do like randy newman's short people which i think is a very billy crystal keshah's timber i'm going down i'm getting little okay i'm going to give that to you again i don't know if billy crystal is going to go for keshah but in a better world where he would, that would be perfect. All right. Tell us what you think Billy Crystal's favorite Keshe song is. That's right.

We're eager to hear it. All right. Let's move into downsizing. The sizing of down. Yes, exactly. Let's do the plot description before we just jump back into the movie. I know we're going to have a lot to say. Yeah.

Listeners, we are here to talk about downsizing, written and directed by Alexander Payne, co-written by Jim Taylor, film stars Matt Damon, Hong Chow, Christoph Waltz, Udo Kier, Kristen Whig, Rolf Lasgard, Injured Egaberg's, apologies if I got those wrong, and in a slew of cameos, we have Laura Dern, Neil, Patrick Harris, Jason Siddakus, Jane Howdy, Shell, Marco, Martindale, Donald, and Champlin, Niecy Nash, and James Vanderbeek. The movie opened the competition of the Venice Film Festival and then opened why. December 22nd of 2017. Indeed. We'll get into all of that, too. Yes, yes. So, Joe, are you ready to give a 60-second plot description of downsizing?

Sure, let's try it. All right, then your 60-second plot description starts now. So the man called Ova and his Norwegian science pals invented a scientific process that can safely shrink people down to action figure size, a breakthrough that they think can save the environment, because tiny people use far fewer resources and produce tiny people-sized amounts of uncompostable waste. Cut to 10 years later, and downsizing is the hip new thing from middle-class milk toasts who want to live like rich assholes because your meager savings make you a millionaire as a shrinky dink. Matt Damon is one such middle-class milk toast, so he and his wife, Kristen Wigg, sign up to be shrunk, but she bails at the literal last eyebrow-shaving minute to cut Matt Damon living a sad Kirk Van Houten condo life and shrunken acres below Christoph Valtz's Eurotrash fuckpad. It's there that Damon meets a Vietnamese dissident slash exile named Knock Lan Tran, who puts his occupational therapist skills to use. helping the inevitable downsized underclass. And then for reasons, for reasons, essentially, they end up going to Norway.

And amid the fjords, the man called Ova tells them that the world is ending anyway, and they're going to live in a bunker to save humanity. And at first, Damon wants to go, but Knocklan doesn't. And he's in love with her. So they don't, and they stay and they ride out the end of humanity, helping people the end. And you got it one second over time. Listeners, we are back to doing 60 seconds. Not descriptions.

We'll see. We'll see how long that lasts. You know what you get for that, Joe. You're going to get a tax credit for your downsizing. So, all right. I could listen to Nishi Nash monologue about tax credits all day. Nisi Nash. That's part of the movie.

Okay. All right. This is how I want to start this off. Because I feel like this is a classic, would you do it movie. And I want to start off by asking you Chris Fyle, would you do it? Would you downsize? Given everything we know about it going into, like, giving everything that Matt Damon, all the information that Matt Damon and Kristen Wigg are given at the time that they make that decision, would you downsize if you lived in this world?

I mean, no. It feels like they already say in the movie, only 3% of the population does it. Right. So I feel like there's a lot of bad literature about downsizing that's available. And I conceive of myself as someone who would probably not do that. So I'm of several minds on this. A, an unreversible process would probably make me very, very, very reluctant to do it. And it makes me very sympathetic to the Kristen Whig character for the decision she ultimately makes. And we'll get to that in a second. The other thing is, though, is when we talk about how this movie is about how easy it is to sell middle class people on the fantasy of living like a rich person.

Exactly. It me. I am middle class. people. Like, you can very easily lure me with the promise of living like a rich person. And I would want to do that. That is the small piece of

several minds that I have about it because it's like, you're telling me I could live in a literal Barbie dream house. Absolutely. Well, and this is the other thing. And you your point about the 3% of the population, only 3% of the population doing it is point well taken. But this is one of those things where, and I mean, this would maybe be a hard sell.

But, like, if you and, like, eight to ten of your closest friends all decided to do this together, I think it would be great. You know what I mean? You would be little. You would have giant houses. You would have all of the friends you want at least to start, and you would have cheesecake factories and whatnot. The other thing...

I have too big of a family as the other thing. My family's huge. Well, that, I mean, yes, and that's, but like the limitations of living as, you know, this lifestyle were in your, you're in this sort of hermetically sealed community, yada, yada, yes, I think it, I think for people who like to do things like travel, I think people would would be a deterrent because, like, there's, you know, only really so much you can do. We see these people obviously can, like, go on planes and go on trains and yada yada, but like your ability to experience the world. world as a little person, I imagine, would be, as a downsized person, I should say, because a little person, kind of something else, as a downsized person, would be probably pretty limited. But I don't like traveling. So, and the things that I don't like about travel, like, feel kind of automated, where it's like, load me up in a box and carry me someplace. I guess that's kind of what flying is, but, like, I don't know, flying seems much more death to find. I would imagine

not a simple task like flying or being in a car or, you know, a train. However, they're transporting downsized people so that you can travel would be infinitely scarier. Well, okay, so let's talk about the nitpicks because, and I want to sort of get them out of the way, because I'm very much willing to take this movie on its own terms and not have to spend the whole movie being like, but what if like a groundhog comes by and, you know, tramples the whole town? But also, what if a groundhog comes by and tramples the whole town like you are this movie doesn't deal at all with the implications with the implications of like if there's like a rainstorm that would normally be like a slight inconvenience and like some people's basements get flooded right there's like a film over leisure land

sure there's a film but i think at some point like some sort of some shit's coming out of the ground like these people live in like a like a you know palm springs-esque sort of environment but like if you have a community that is anywhere where it would like snow and whatever like I feel like there are the the implications for natural disaster sort of go up exponentially if you're living in a small community also I just caught up on the staircase and so I am very concerned about birds of prey and so if you are in this community imagine how big a fucking regular-ass bird looks. That's what I mean.

So if some sort of like raptor-type bird, a hawk or a falcon or whatever, decides to swoop down, like that is like Godzilla-sized terror. I would watch that movie, though. Of course I would watch that movie. That's the thing is on some level, I almost,

it's about the hubris of man. It's just a regular pigeon, chowling down on all these people. It does feel like you could get a T-E- series worth of what if scenarios in a world where people are shrunken down and just like just episode upon episode not even like have like a long like you know the arc-y story but just sort of like stand-alone episodes of like what life is like in in these communities and like what implications are to all that sort of stuff so and the other thing is for as much as the goal of

this was to like shrink everybody, you're so dependent on regular-sized people to do things like carry you from place to place for, you know, I imagine a world where everybody is little becomes kind of untenable and again exponentially more dangerous because you don't have the sort of provenance of regular-sized people. I think it sounds like one of those traps, like Elon Musk just wants everybody to downsize so that, you know, they can all be killed, and then the rich people can just have the earth to themselves. So I don't, I think that's actually a kind of a key thing. And this movie, one of the things that I think this movie does successfully is it sort of

takes the given of a world sort of hurtling towards inhospitability or, you know, a disaster or, you know, the actual end of things and separates people's behaviors into a few different camps, one of which is, you know, you want to, pure self-interest, which is Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier, they are wealthy, they are profiting off of this new normal, they by the end are like, we're not going to go into this bunker with these Norwegian hippies, we're probably going to be dead by the time this whole world goes up and smoke anyway. So like smoke if you got them. You have the people like, you know, Matt Damon who sort of follow the self-interest, the sort of middle-class self-interest of it all of like, I'll do downsizing and pretend that it's because

I'm doing something altruistic, but really it's because I want to live, you know, a more comfortable lifestyle. And then you have the Elon Musk big idea type, which in this movie aren't portrayed as egomaniac rich people, but instead sort of well-intentioned Nobel Laureate types, Nobel Prize winner types, which is a key distinction, but I think at the very least, you have like that type of solution crystallized there. And to me, the movie succeeds best when it kind of interrogates. And then you have Knock Lan, who sees all of this and is like, listen, if the world's ending, I'm not getting out of this. And while I'm here, I am going to essentially help people out.

And if not everybody is going to be able to survive this, I am probably also not going to be able to survive this. So why don't I, in a metaphorical way, sort of shrink my existence down to who I can help and what I can do on a sort of human level. And so those are the different responses to a world hurtling towards catastrophe. And I think those are the ways in which this movie improved for me on second viewing, which is I do think Payne and Jim Taylor have a good grasp of what they want to say about it. And it reminded me a lot of Don't Look Up, which was so didactic and sort of sneering about it all.

And I think this movie handles that same kind of scenario in a more humane and sort of almost like behaviorally observant way, if that makes sense. No, it does. And I don't look up with a movie that I thought about in this too. My problem with both movies, actually, is it's not really saying anything all that deep. Like, all of these, like, different social strata that you're talking about. Like, I don't think it really explores it in a way that's all that, you know, uniquely observed, I will say. Or, and, like, because it's an Alexander Payne movie, one of the other frustrating things is it doesn't do it in a way that's funny. Like, yeah.

I don't know. It's fine if he tries to make a straight drama. He basically has before. Sure. But I think this movie thinks it's funny when it's not, and there's an element of, you know, exploring the downsized world and the process of it that feels cutesy in a way that's not all that palatable to me. The tone of the comedy felt very secret life of Walter Middy to me, and maybe that was the Kristen Wig of it all. And, like, that is a tone that I don't sit well in. And, yeah, I don't know exactly how I'd want it different, maybe sharper, maybe.

a little bit more biting, maybe a little bit more not necessarily clever, but like, I don't know, like, more sharply observed, I guess, about like little quirks of humanity, whereas this sort of gets the broad strokes of it, I think, well, but doesn't really sort of bore into sort of specific quirks of humanity as much. It's one of my problems with Alexander Payne's later work,

you know, the post-sideways work, is that it's like, where are the knives anymore? I mean, I think, I kind of think Nebraska is a mean and nasty little movie. Or, in a specific way, we don't have to talk about that movie. But we're not here to talk about Nebraska. In a way that this movie could use something a little bit more biting and less, you know, warm and fuzzy in the way that I think it is. And maybe it's not trying to be, but it ultimately still is. I think where my larger issue is, because I do agree with you and all of those dynamics you're talking about. They're there. I don't think they can be as effective as they would maybe be, A, without, you know, something a little more biting, an observation that feels, you know, like its own, you know, something fresh. But this movie is so disjointed. You got the 60 seconds in in your plot description, but the 30 seconds.

The first 30 seconds is the first 20 minutes of this movie. Right. I feel like it's kind of six different movies, which I can understand the ambition of Alexander Payne, who is a satirist, to push, you know, his normal satire towards an almost science fiction end of the spectrum. But it ultimately feels like a movie that's two hours longer than it is. and it's six different movies. This is why I feel like it would actually work as a TV series, because I do feel like the fragmented nature of it. I feel like there's a lot of avenues that Payne wants to explore here about this world,

and a lot of avenues he doesn't explore at all, which could have been explored. And I think ultimately a, you know, 135-minute movie can only do so much. Yeah, trying to fit it all in makes it be. the observation that you make about these hundred different things that you want to explore ends up being just a very simple observation about it. It's not all that interesting or all that, you know, well-developed. And your point about it not being as sharp or as, you know, stabby as you maybe want it to be is my dissatisfaction with the ending, where I do feel like, and again, I am not a script

doctor. I am not a filmmaker. I am probably not in the best position to tell somebody how to make their movie. But I maybe don't have, I maybe let Matt Damon choose to go to the bunker at the end of this movie and then end it on him realizing he's made the wrong choice. And I know that is like, that risks a really kind of bummer ending, but you're already talking about the end of the world. And the movie definitely wants to end on a note of hopefulness. And I think there's a way to do that if you allow knock long to be centered by the end of that movie where matt damon stays in the bunker he's made the wrong choice as so many people of his social strata do where you know the way the world is constructed has pushed him towards making this decision and and one that he ultimately regrets and then and maybe then by the end he finds a little bit of understanding for why christin wigg bailed out at the last second and then but then if you allow the movie to end perhaps on a centering of knock lawn who does make the decision to go out like i don't think i don't think you need to

have matt damon choose to be a better person to still end on an idea of hopefulness for the choice to help people just to to you know and and and center her does that you know what i mean uh again i I, too, am not a script doctor, all of this. But a couple, it solves a couple of problems. I still think it's a very messy movie, but it does solve a lot of problems. If you have the type of ending that you described, A, because then it makes, it, it makes it feel like an Alexander Payne movie. Whereas a lot of the rest of the movie, I feel like, if it's not said in Omaha at the very beginning, if I showed you the movie and asked you who wrote and directed it, you would not say Alexander Payne. Sure.

But it makes it feel like an Alexander Payne movie if it has that ending and your protagonist realizes they made the wrong decision. Yeah. You know, but it also, you mentioned earlier that this is essentially a, what would you do or would you do it? Yeah. And I really only think that this movie poses that question for the first 20 minutes. But if it's a larger theme of the movie where it's like ultimately life is a series of, irreversible decisions that you make, and the idea is people, especially people like Matt Damon's character, are more prone to make the wrong decision. You know, that actually feels like the

movie is having its own point of view. Well, and again, if you allow the movie to be a little bit more centered on knock lawn. She is a character who does make a series of irreversible decisions that she tends to sort of trudge forward from, right? Where, you know, she talks a lot, actually, in this movie about, like, my life after the TV box, because she's a Vietnamese political dissident who is forcibly shrunken by the government as a punishment, and she escapes along with other people in a... a TV box to like a target essentially in America and she's the only one who survives and she loses

the bottom part of her leg and she becomes kind of famous for it and and so that is this that is her big sort of irreversible decision is to you know to make that escape and now she's got this incredibly different life in the what is it leisure leisure land is the community that they're in even though she lives slightly outside of it. And so now she has made that decision and has decided to, you know, she doesn't talk about that with regret as much as just sort of like, well, that happened. And now I have decided to, I'm going to, you know, help this lady who is dying of cancer. And I am going to, you know, bring these people food. And I'm going to go to Norway to meet with this guy.

and I'm going to now go back and just there is a forward motion to that character that I feel like is a nice counterpoint to the Matt Damon character who does sort of a lot of like leap and stand, you know what I mean?

He'll like leap forward and then just sort of like well now I'm here and now I don't know what to do. Well I mean when she when Hong Chow finally shows up in this movie it is also that like propulsiveness you're talking about She is kind of a relief to the movie because you have a character who, all of the different ways that are a problem with this movie that she is portrayed, she is, like you're saying, still this very forward character who, like, has a momentum that's interesting to watch and follow, even if the movie doesn't serve her or do it well, where she is basically, you know, a mouthpiece to.

push his growth by the end of the movie, basically. And then they, you know, kind of shoehorn in this romance for the two of them. That's, I mean, by this point, so, yeah. Yeah. It feels like that angle needs to be there in order for him to make the final decision that he does. And I want to talk about Hong Chao for a second, though, and this performance, because this was the first thing I had ever seen her in. I think subsequently, I've been really impressed, obviously, by her in a bunch of other roles, almost all of them on television.

She was on Watchman for a few episodes and was kind of amazing. She was on Homecoming, I believe it was the second season of Homecoming, although I think she's in a few episodes of the first season as well. the Julia Roberts based on a podcast series on Amazon and she was in that TV series

she was in one episode of the TV series Forever the Fred Armisen Maya Rudolph show that was also on Amazon that she and oh who was the other actor oh was Jason Mitchell who had sort of this like one off

episode on that show and she's been pretty fantastic and all of them. But at this point, when I'd seen downsizing in 2017, this was my first exposure to her. Because you would have also seen this, probably, we'll get into this, but you saw this at Toronto, which I believe was before

Big Little Lies premiered, where she's one of the Greek chorus of parents, and she's probably the funniest one. No, because that was early 2017. So I had seen her in Big Little Lies. I guess I just hadn't made

note of her there's I think a lot of you're right she's part of that sort of Greek chorus and I think it's very easy for those people to be overshadowed also another small part that she's wonderful in but I would believe that you hadn't seen this she's an inherent vice too yeah inherent vice is another one of those movies where so I actually did you know what's funny I did remember her in that and it wasn't until after I'd seen downsizing that that I was reminded of that but she was also on Tremay which was a show that I didn't watch so Like, she was around, but I think because downsizing is the first thing I see her in, and I know that this was reflected in a lot of other people's reactions to the movie, too,

where there was a lot of sort of trepidation about the way that this character is presented. She's obviously, she's speaking very heavily accented English that is, you know, is broken and fragmented, and there is a way in which you can read this character as a, kind of almost comic relief or that the audience is being directed to sort of see the way that she speaks and is sort of like bossing around the Damon's character. Taking the piss out of him a little. Right. But as a sort of contributing to the sort of lunacy of the situation that he's in, especially

like, and this is what happens when you sort of so aggressively center his character. That is an impression that changed a lot for me upon the second viewing, and maybe that is because I since become more aware of Hong Chao as an actress, and I can sort of see the little things that she's doing with this character. But I remember even at the time, there was some hand-wringing, and then also, though, there were other perspectives, because Hong Chao ultimately becomes the one sort of awardable portion of this movie. She gets awards buzz up until essentially Oscar nomination morning where she gets left off of the supporting actress list. But the people who supported the performance, there was a lot of, not a lot of, but there were some reactions to it that were like, listen, like, there are people who speak broken English in this country. There are people who come to this country, and like, that is how they talk. They are, you know, human people with, you know, agents. and it doesn't make them automatically cringy.

And you need to be able to sort of look past that and look to the performance and see and sort of judge it on its own merits, even independent of how the movie utilizes her. And that kind of made me want to go back and reconsider it as well. And so finally now being able to watch it a second time, I do, I see a little bit more of that. It is a lot less cringy for me than I felt the first time. And maybe I was feeling this sort of like reactionary, you know, white guilt reaction to a character like this. I don't know if you had a similar story.

And I mean, she wasn't part of the trailers and such. So, you know, it's kind of designed for you to have a surprise or reaction to the performance. But yeah. And I mean, I mean, I definitely think that she's giving such a performance there. My thing is when I watch this performance, I'm like, she's great. I already knew her to be great before I saw this movie, even if it was just small things. Like, I think her, I think it's just one scene in an inherent vice is just so funny that, like, it's not necessarily written as funny. But, you know, her just like complete position with dialogue is so great.

And she's an amazing talent. But it's just a lot of the movie, it's none of her fault, but it's just a lot of the movie's bullshit. And I think the way that she has is written, whether or not it's intended to be offensive or problematic in any way, it walks up to so many doors of it that, like, I feel like what Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor wrote is it's just unavoidable for people to feel that way, while I also agree with what you're saying, too. Yeah. I'm sort of looking to see what she's got upcoming. Big Year. She will be in three, presumably, fall releases, where she's playing supporting characters, one of which she has already gotten good reviews and good notices for.

She's in Kelly Reichardt's showing up, which was just a can. Yes. She'll also be in Searchlights, The Menu, which originally was supposed to be an Alexander Payne movie. We will get into that. That is Ray Fines and Anya. Taylor Joy. It is about a couple who moved to a, or travel to a remote island

to eat an exclusive restaurant where the chef has prepared a lavish menu with some shocking surprises. So that sounds interesting. Directed by Mark Milo, who listeners will know from Succession. Yes, exactly. And then she's in The Whale, which I am very... We're both not looking forward to that movie. What I will say is she is probably the second largest part. I've read the play, despised it,

but she's going to have a lot to work with in that movie. Yeah, that is, of course, directed by Darren Aronofsky. That's the one where Brendan Fraser plays a sort of severely obese man one imagines with either a fat suit or CGI. I, uh, uh, yeah. And he's, there's also gay stuff in there, too. It's just, it's, it's, it's, the play is, uh, ill intended, in my opinion to put it as kindly as I can. And from hearing that from people who have seen and or read the play, combined with the fact that Darren, Darren, Darren, Dernovsky's who, again, Aronowski is a filmmaker who I almost always really like. And, and, and, but his approach to the human body, is, I would say, ill-suited to a film where the lead character's obesity is the central sort of issue. Darren Aronovsky tends to treat the human body as something that main characters sort of punish or have punished. I'm thinking of, like, The Wrestler and Black Swan.

Well, and this is a character who is punishing himself. Right. Right. But there's a grotesquery to the way that Aronovsky handles this kind of thing that has been very effective in movies like The Wrestler and Black Swan, but which, if applied to this kind of character in this kind of story, is going to really bother me in a, like, kind of significant way. I am right there with you. But I love Hong Chow. I think Hong Chow is going to be really great in that movie because she probably has the best role. but at the same time, she has other things to be excited about. Yes.

All right. So this award season, we talked about it, Hong Chow ends up on a lot of short lists for best supporting actress. She was almost certainly sixth place in the Oscar voting. She was left off at the end. I remember feeling like she, along with Mary J. Blige for Mudbound, were sort of the two kind of, of, not that Mary J. Blige was unknown, but as an actress, she wasn't really somebody who you

thought of in that realm, but they were sort of the two sort of newbies to the Oscar scene that were both, you know, threatening to crash the party, essentially. In a way that I remember in 2013, I thought the same thing about Daniel Brule and Barcaut Obdi as being these sort of just like, oh, like two sort of like brand new names to the Oster's or conversation. Like, this is very interesting and cool. And in that situation as well, you got one and not the other. And so in this one, Mary J. Blige gets the nomination for Mudbound.

Hong Chow ends up losing out. Who do we feel like is the, is, you know, if we could say that anybody sort of knocked her out. Definitely Leslie Manville, because Phantom thread came on really strong as downsizing was going away. The thing about, this is a case. think that the timeline is a significant thing because Hong Chao is SAG nominated, Globe nominated, and Critics Choice nominated when they nominate like seven people. So what does what does any of it even mean? But even still, that is a rare trio to hit and not to get the Oscar nomination. Right, right. And some of it has to do with the calendar of that movie

because downsizing has the, has, it hits all the big fall festivals. I don't think it went to New York, but it does Venice, Tellurai, Toronto, right in the span of a few weeks of each other. And at each festival, it gets a progressively more negative response. Right. And then the movie doesn't open until Christmas, and that leaves a lot of time, not only for people to kind of solidify their negative view of the movie,

like the press that's seen it but also for people to just forget about that movie and then when it opens at christmas it bombs so i mean i ultimately think it has less to do with the performance that she didn't get nominated and that it was a movie that wasn't liked i feel like the daniel brul barcad obdi comparison that you made is kind of an apt one because if you're saying mary j blige is the analog there. Well, in both scenarios, you have the performer in the new to acting performer or new to the Oscar audience performer, and the one that gets nominated is the one that's in the more respected movie. People like Rush more than downsizing, but... Right. But no, you're right. People like Captain Phillips quite a bit more. Obviously, Captain Phillips a Best Picture nominee that year, so it makes more sense that Barcut Opti gets nominated. I should say I really... Conceivably just outside the best picture lineup, you know?

Yes. Yeah, Mudbound, I really quite liked, actually. I don't know if... I like Mary J. Blige in that movie. I don't know if it's enough to have her crack my supporting actress lineup. In fact, I know it wouldn't have been, but... I love Rob Morgan in that movie. I also loved Carrie Mulligan in that movie.

I think Carrie Mulligan's really fantastic in that. The other oft-nominated person that year who did not get nominated for the Oscar was Holly Hunter in the Big Sick, who I also feel like was probably, I think this is probably a category where the votes between, like, Alice and Janney and Lori Metcalf were so far ahead of everybody else this year that I feel like the votes between number three and number seven probably in this race were pretty well spread out. you have Octavia Spencer in the Shape of Water who was nominated for the second straight year she had been nominated for Hidden Figures of the year prior Mary J. Blige

Leslie Manville as you mentioned for Phantom Thread Hong Chow and Holly Hunter I imagine those five having no one's too far ahead of anybody else among that five is what I would guess because you think oh of that three to seven

Yeah, I think three to seven, I think, I think, you know, Janie, all the votes, Lori Metcalf, almost all the votes, and then from that third place to seventh place, it probably is a pretty even split. I would maybe say that Mary J. Blige is probably safely third, because, like, that narrative was so cemented, basically. And she had a great showing everywhere. She also had the song nomination. And Octavia Spencer is representing the ultimate best picture winner, Shape of Water, was very well respected. I, again, don't think there's enough in that performance to nominate her, but I was roundly overruled by the Oscar voting public. I understand the people that don't see enough in that performance. I've always been a major proponent of she's an integral.

piece to the mathematics of that movie and making it work. Leslie Manville is by far my favorite part of Phantom Thread. I, as somebody who felt a little out-enthusiasmed on that movie. I don't not like that movie, but like the memeification of that movie really made me feel like, did I hate that movie?

Everybody else loves it so much. Everybody really is, you know, shipping the central couple. Everybody's lining up to be like, this is what a real couple looks like. Like, a real couple poisons each other with mushrooms. I mean, I do feel like it's the most authentic marriage I've seen on screen. See, this is what I'm saying. Maybe I am, maybe the fact that I am not married poisons me, no pun intended against that movie.

I mean, you can't take it literal. The poisoning isn't literal. You know, it's the type of bartering, the control, the, uh, sways in dominance, whatever. Right, right, right. My, but again, Manville fucking rules in that movie. Her, you know, her big

clip scene where she, you know, very quietly and controlledly tells Reynolds Woodcock where he can put it is great. It's also just as for her not getting nominated for another year. 100%

where she absolutely should have been nominated and probably should have won for another year. I think she would have been my best actress winner in 2010 for that movie. If you've not seen Mike Lee's another year, do yourselves a favor.

If you are a, if you are your friend group's perpetually single person, maybe take a, um, gummy or something like that. I don't know. Like,

take something that will calm your anxieties because you will see way too much of yourself in her character and perhaps need to, whisper some affirmations to yourself afterwards. But yeah, she's really fantastic. I'll save my thoughts on that movie because I'm actually guesting on another podcast to talk about it soon.

I'll post it to our Twitter when it arise. And then Holly Hunter in The Big Sick, I think she's fantastic. I really like that movie. I probably, and I know that like I get annoyed when people compare the apples and oranges of supporting actor versus supporting actress. Holly Hunter was not up against Ray Romano in any

awards, but I do feel like of the two of them, Romano is maybe the one I would have voted for more heavily. I think he, I mean, they both rule in that movie, but he's got a couple scenes in that one, which are really fantastic. I remember I got to... This elevator goes all the way fucking down. This elevator goes all the way fucking down is my favorite line in that and probably many a movie. I remember I got to interview, I got to interview Emily Gordon and Kamel Nanjani for that movie when they were on the campaign trail for that, who were, and my rare, a rare in-person interview. Normally when I, you know, in my strata that I was when I was at Decider, I was very much

on the level of, if I'm interviewing somebody, it's over the phone. But that one I got to go and interview them in person, and they were just absolutely lovely and really, like, incredibly down to earth, really felt like I could, like, you know, we're just sort of like having a chat with them, which is, you know, a good vibe. to put out, and especially if you are screenplay nominees. And I remember, I literally only had to, like, get the first half of my sentence out of it, but, like, Ray Romano was so good, that one line reading, and Emily Gordon just goes, this elevator goes all the way fucking down.

I'm like, yes! So, like, clearly that was the highlight for people who worked on the movie as well as who saw it. So, yeah. But very interesting, very interesting supporting actress here for a year that for me ultimately boils down to... Lori Metcalf, duh. Like, you know what I mean?

I was going to say, my next question for you was going to be, can we just toss ourselves back into the battleground of the Allison Janney versus Lori Metcalf? Battleground is saying a lot. Nobody that you or I knew was advocating for Allison Janney. We were very much in the sub. People thought that it was a winnable fight is my thing about it. And it's like, it's done. Alice and Janie, I have always said the second that she is nominated, she is winning.

and that's exactly what happened. She ran the table the whole season. She was one of those actresses, and people are going to resent this comparison because people really liked, people, again, in our circles, people in our circles really were kind of nasty towards Alice and Janney in a way that, like, I don't think that performance is an Oscar-winning performance either, but I get Wyatt won, and I think she's a great actress, and I do feel like there is value in the way that she performed that character. I think that's what the movie was asking for. Anyway.

She's legitimately funny in that movie. I mean, like, I understand people have their problems with that movie. I think she's funny. She wouldn't, she wasn't my winner either. She probably wasn't even on my ballot. There's a reason why you have you two fucked yet is a meme that people still use because it is a expertly delivered line. But it reminds me of when Regina King was nominated for if Beale Street could talk. And I'm like, yeah, there's no way she's losing. Do you see how many Emmys she's got on her shelf? Like, this woman, is beloved. And all people needed was a reason to vote for her. And with Janney, I remember seeing I, Tanya, at the premier screening at Toronto. And I was like, the way, the ovation that the audience gave

when her name comes up in the end credits, I remember I saw it with Katie, and I think we both sort of looked at each other. We're just like, okay, like, this is, this is going to be something. Obviously, all of us and all of our, you know, know everything homosexual friends love, just Laurie Metcalf the best, because that is a performance that is, I think, pitched to us in, you know, woman of a certain age is not respected the way she should be and is also incredibly funny and incredibly emotionally affecting. Like, yeah, we love Lori Metcalf. Well, it's also, that's another performance where it's like every line reading is perfect, but it's a different kind of perfect. And, you know, good, bad, or indifferent,

you can get more people to understand why an Alison Janie line reading is perfect than you can. A Lori Metcalf is, a Lori Metcalf line reading is perfect. And it just comes down to the numbers.

Like, you hate to be so gocious to say popularity contest, but that's what it is. It's the amount of people you can get to understand that. And what's interesting is Lori Metcalf's as much of an Emmy Mac as Allison Janney or Regina King, actually. It just was, you know, a decade prior. And also she became a Tony magnet.

Also, so, like, Lori Medcaf, it's rare that Lori McCath loses awards. So, like, truly, that was, remember where you were on that night, on that Oscar night, because Lori Medcaf doesn't lose awards. And, yeah. It's also, I think, a performance and a movie, really, that it's kind of a miracle that it did as well at the Oscars as it did. It got five nominations. I mean, there's, while it is a heartwarming and emotional movie, especially for people of a very specific age, the age group of the protagonist of the movie, it is a, it is still an odd movie. It is

still not directly in the Oscars wheelhouse, even though it produces the emotions that it does. during that movie Greta Gerwick talked a lot about Claire Deny's influence on her and the movie is very structured in the way that Claire Deny does her movies. It's a memory movie and it's

constructed you know like memory. It's an odd movie. Welcome to week one of the Chris File talks about Claire Deny podcast which will last through clear through the end of this year and possibly beyond. No, that's a very good observation.

The other thing I want to mention, though, is the 2017 Oscar race, we sometimes kind of overlook it in, you know, it was the year after Moonlight Lala Land, which was such a big thing. And it was the year before Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody, where we all lost our minds and, you know, got so angry. You look at 2017, the three, I would venture to say the three most prominent and talked about movies, is. that best picture lineup, give or take a three billboards, which was another movie that got everybody angry, and sort of hogged a lot of the oxygen in terms of the dialogue and discourse, which I think was ultimately a disservice to the actual best picture race. It got a little bit less when he didn't get, when Martin McDonough didn't get nominated for best director, but still.

But it was a little too late to give that oxygen to the movies that we loved, especially in the context of an award season. But you look at the shape of water, Get Out, and Lady Bird as essentially the three big movies of that best picture lineup, which... Oscar anomalies, the type of thing that the Academy normally wouldn't go for. Downsizing would be the weird movie in another year. Yeah. But I think that was a thing that didn't really get commented on enough, which was how, for as much as people sort of love to fashionably bash the Academy. and talk about Oscar Bate movies and talk about how they're out of touch and how they don't

take chances and things like that. And there are elements of probably all three of those movies that I mentioned that you could probably be like, oh, but Lady Bird is sentimental, and oh, but you know, get out is trendy. And oh, but the shape of water lionizes old Hollywood. And I, like, I guess that is true. But, like, take a step back and just appreciate the fact that you had a best picture lineup that was kind of dominated by... It's a best picture winner that opens with the deaf woman masturbating. That's the thing. It's just like,

those three movies especially are maybe movies that in 20 years, we look back, we look back and are just like, wow, like, you know, Hollywood was really tuned into something different that year. And then you add to that phantom thread. And then you add to that, I mean, I know Call Me By Your Name was under-nominated, but it's still got, you know...

Call me by your name is closer to the norm of what Oscar embraces than the shape of water is. Sure, yeah, but I'm just saying that, like, it's a more daring best picture lineup than it gets credit for. Oh, no, I totally agree with you. I mean, I also think that that level of...

It's an Oscar lineup of movies that they don't normally go for is part of the reason why, shape of water one because the overall field of, you know, kind of oddities, for lack of a better word, kind of maybe dulled the sharp edges of shape of water that, you know, maybe allowed a voter who might have been put off or stingy about it. Otherwise, I mean, it's also a very gory movie too. And that didn't hold it back at all. This is a category where we've talked about it a lot of movies that you would love to see the vote totals.

I would love to see what the vote totals and the way that, you know, the preferential ballot, you know, ordered the movies in this particular best picture year because I genuinely don't know. I genuinely don't know how this would have shaken out with Shape of Water, Get Out, Lady Bird. You add in three billboards,

which was so, you know, talked about but didn't get the director nomination. You add in Dunkirk, which is such a technical achievement that you would imagine draws a lot of support from people in craft's branches. And that how many votes does, you know, call me by your name pull away or Phantom Thread? The Post and Darkest Hour seem like also rands. And yet, like, it's a Spielberg movie and a World War II movie.

So, like, those are two genres that, you know, Oscar voters really love. So I would be really fascinated to see what order those movies ended up in. Yeah, totally. I mean, I definitely think Shape of Water has a strong lead, but I would be curious about second place, if second place was Get Out or if it was three billboards. Yeah. Yeah. And even just like beyond second place, like what order the other movies fell in?

What was last? Yeah. Honestly, yeah. Like, we assume Darkest Hour, but like, I don't know. Who knows? Anyway, Darkest Hour is a good movie. Okay. So Hong Chow was, you know, the big awards.

play, talk for this movie, so there's not a whole lot else for us to talk about, except downsizing was in the National Board of Reviews top ten films of the year. Totally. I would argue a pretty cursed list, even though it's very close to Oscar. So the best, close to Oscar. Right. The Oscar nominated Best Pictures on this list that we can sort of like lop out. The Post, which won Best Film of the Year, which National. Border Review was on it in a way that

not everybody else was, and that The Post was a great movie because it was. Call me by your name, Dunkirk, Get Out, Lady Bird Phantom Threat. So those are the ones where the NBR and Oscar overlapped. The other ones, Chris. Take us through it.

The good movie, the Florida Project. Right. And then we have the disaster artist, which I had fun with and enjoyed at the time, but it's not need to be on anybody's top in. I really enjoyed it. You and I sat next to each other, and we got our life at a lot of those cameos and those

jokes. You could tell where the gay people were in the audience, because they're the ones screaming at Sharon Stone. They're the ones who are like, oh, my God, oh, my God, over Melanie Griffith. Anyway, the other two nominees are two movies that I really, really don't like. That got a lot of legitimacy in this year's Oscar race that drove me crazy the entire time, and it's Baby Driver and Logan. Baby Driver, the Kevin Spacey film, Logan, the canonical Western.

Yeah. Yeah, listen, I tried to wrap my head around Baby Driver for a while. That was a movie that I really, really wanted to walk out of that movie, having loved, and I couldn't do it. And that was, I mean, whatever, we don't have to talk about answering. Elgort at all, not in a, you know, not when we still haven't had our requisite Alexander Payne conversation, which we will, but a lot of people decided to hang the failure of that movie on Ansel Al Gore, and I feel like that was probably misplaced. I think the failure

of that movie ultimately is on Edgar Wright, and I would say if any of the performances were bad, it was John Hamm, but I'm the only person who thinks that, so you know what. Um, but yeah, movie that I like. Just, I, I, I, I generally don't care for Edgar Wright, but I don't, I don't, it's, it's a lot of pastiche for me. And I realize people can have fun with that pastiche, but it doesn't make it on a certain level. And the other thing that just drove me crazy about Baby Driver is it may, it just made me feel very uncool to be against that movie during the Oscar year, because it's the type of thing that, like, many will tell you, doesn't belong in the Oscar race because of just what it is and not because of the quality of it. And I don't want to root against that movie.

Well, that's how I felt about Logan was I am a superhero movie optimist. I am not to the level of thinking that Spider-Man, No Way Home, should have been a Best Picture nominee. I am not a crazy person. But I will evaluate those movies on their merits and I will appreciate the really good ones. and I do not have a chip on my shoulder about Marvel. I do not have a chip on my shoulder about superhero movies. What I will say is, it was annoying that people put onto Logan this sense of, well, here's a good superhero movie because it doesn't seem like a superhero movie. This is a movie that is a James Mangled Western, and that's why it's a good superhero movie is because it is a Western.

Because of what it's attempting to do, not what it actually achieves. Right. And ultimately, I'm like, well, that's condescending to me. To me, that is like, oh, you know, all this movie had to do was conceptually go so far against the grain of the genre that we're going to give it credit for that to the degree of Oscar buzz for it and top 10 list stuff. People that treated it like some, you know, monument of acting by the entire ensemble. and Patrick Stewart deserves an Oscar. It's like, I don't know. I was also just very put off by the movie.

Like, whenever people dog X, Y, and Z superhero movie for being needlessly self-serious and not earning itself seriousness. Yes. Just always like, have you seen, Logan? This is my thing is people line up around the block to sort of knock the Christopher Nolan Batman movies for being self-serious.

And then in the same breath, we'll be like, but Logan, now there's a movie. And I'm just like, what am I missing here? What's, at least Christopher Nolan

is working within a genre without, like, despising it. And actually, like, I don't know, I'm very much justice for Christopher Nolan's Batman movies in a lot of ways. Whereas, like,

people will be like, Christopher Nolan's movies were too self-serious, but the Snyder movies. I'm like, fuck you. But anyway, anyway, to say. I was going to back up into something.

We don't like Logan. The Logan thing, wait, no, the last Logan thing I'm going to say, because if I'm going to be on the subject of Joe sticks up for fuckboys and movies, my favorite part of Logan absolutely was Boyd-Hulbrook. So, suck it. All right. I want to talk about their top 10 independent films because they are also on one. I appreciate them going their own way a little bit. Some of those, people always talk about the National Border Review, their top ten feeling. like, you know, placeholders for different things.

And Logan definitely felt that. Yeah. Their independent films, just going to read them off alphabetically. A Ghost Story. Beatrice's a dinner. Great. Fantastic. Briggs be bare.

Not fantastic. No. Lady Macbeth launches Florence Pugh. Yeah. Logan Lucky, excellent call. Great. Excellent call. Loving Vincent.

Terrible. Manasha, 824's first. and until this year will be, I believe, their only non-English language release, and I liked that movie. Norman, Richard Gear in Norman. Oh, that's what that movie was. Good golly.

Right. Richard Geer's mini genre of small independent movies where he seems to just sort of like wander or sort of, like, that feels like an unexplored genre that, like, nobody saw those movies. Patty Cake Dollar Sign. National Border Review was the only people who saw Patty Cake Dollar Sign. I kind of didn't hate that movie.

I don't know if that's a movie that we're supposed to like or not like. But, like... Nobody cared. So, neither. That movie is fine. That movie... Bridget Everett's good in that movie. Yes.

Yes. Love Bridget Ebert. That's just a movie that follows the formula very... Very close of, you know, emerging talent, stars-born type of things. You know, it does all of those things. And then Wind River, which was a movie I did not like. Still have never seen it, but it is canonical Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch are Friends Cinema, which, if speaking of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I very, very much care about

the Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch being friends. So it is kind of surprising that I have not seen Wind River. I will say. It's Taylor Sheridan. Don't like his work. Taylor Sheridan, who is swimming in red state dollars right now, just like absolutely has 12 swimming pools that are full of Yellowstone cash and is richer than any of us will ever hope to be. Oh, he does that show?

Yeah. Yeah, I'm not watching it. Were you going to up until this point? I mean, probably not, but I will pointedly not watch it. it now. There you go. Yeah. Let's bring it back to downsizing, though. Yeah.

We still have more. Okay. Downsizing originally supposed to be a Paul Giamatti, Rees-Witherspoon joint, which I will say maybe a more interesting movie if it's Paul Giamati, I think Rees-Witherspoon made the right decision by not being in this movie. Right. Well, the character is bad that it plays out like it's a twist, but it's not surprising at all. And I don't know. So let's lay it out, though, because Kristen Wigg is all in the marketing

for this movie. The marketing sells this movie as Matt Damon and Kristen Wig are in this, you know, situation together. The twist is that she ends up abandoning him. And up until that point, I think the movie, I feel like the movie is intending for me to feel at least some sympathy for her. That whole scene with Donald and Champlin. where she's reading off the, like, the fine print of the things that, you know, could go wrong and making them essentially sign their lives away. And I'm watching Kristen Wigg in that scene, you know, internalizing all of that and agreeing to it while, while her eyes are saying, I don't agree to this. And I'm like, I think she's very good in that scene. And I'm like, well, now you have sold me into feeling sympathy for her.

And I'm watching that scene. And I'm like, hell know what I do that. I absolutely agree with her. that seems terrifying. That's the other thing why it's not a twist. The movie kind of designs it that way. But then, once it happens, once she doesn't go through with it, and she gets on the phone with Damon, and all of a sudden... We get the one good laugh in the whole movie.

Which is... Which is her one shaved eyebrow. Oh, the visual gag. Yes. She got as far as them shaving her head and shaving her one eyebrow. And she turned around and she... But the way that they frame her in that, where all of a sudden, she's being unsympathetically hysterical and being like,

you don't understand how bad I feel. Don't, like, you know, her repeating, well, I feel bad and isn't that enough and making her seem like a kind of superficial white woman about this whole thing. And it's like, oh, now we're back into an Alexander Payne movie where even a movie that I love, like about Schmidt, about Schmidt centers Jack Nicholson's POV so much that all of these other characters, most of whom are women, most of whom are Kathy Bates and Hope Davis and June Squib,

their functions in the movie are how they affect this guy or they hold this guy back or they somehow put roadblocks in front of the sky and like, oh, all of a sudden now, we're in Matt Damon's story and Kristen Wigg is the bitch who abandoned him.

Yeah. And I don't like that at all. So I'm not surprised that Rees Witherspoon was like, yeah, not for me. Ultimately, maybe that's not why she made that decision. Maybe it was she just wanted to do big little lies or something. I don't know. But, yeah.

There was a lot of recasting that happened with this movie because this movie, much like another Paramount Bomb this season, Suburban, was a script that sat around for a while. It was supposed to be their follow-up to Sideways. Mm-hmm. He wrote it in the two years. years after sideways. This is why he spends so many years away from movie screens and his return is the descendants. And it's like, you see kind of a big break in his work during that time

because the descendants comes out and it's this maudlin, not funny. And they tried to say it was a drama, but that movie is definitely trying to be funny. Just real disconnect to me at least with the elements that make Alexander Payne's movies both funny and work. I hate the Descendants so much. Descendants, another movie that falls into that, like, these female characters exist to fuck up the main male character's life, to the point where, like, George Clooney's comatose wife is just like, God, why are you doing this to me?

He does a whole monologue, like, yelling at her or something. It's terrible. but this movie for whatever reason I would have to imagine it's funding because this is still a very expensive movie and it's no surprise to me that the role written for Paul Giamatti when this movie does eventually happen

is Matt Damon the type of movie star that can get a budget for this movie which is like it's not you know it's not a Marvel budget this is like a $65 million movie or something but compared to the rest of Alexander Payne's work you know, that's a bump. But you look at sort of on a cosmic scale,

you wait all this time, you finally do this movie, you cast Matt Damon because he is a movie star who's going to help you get your movie made, and yet the timing of when this movie comes out on a couple levels is unfortunate. It comes out, we'll talk about, it comes out during a cursed time for Paramount, first of all, where this was the TIF that it was,

and I saw all three of these movies at Tiff, downsizing Suburicon and Mother. Mother is obviously a masterpiece, but Mother was a savaged by critics. Reviled movie. F Cinema Score. Not really savaged by critics, though, but it opens

during the festival. Savaged by a lot of critics. So it feels like it's all in one. The people who hated it were very over the top about how they hated it. Right. And combined with its financial failure, that was the narrative that took. cold, right? Yeah. Suburban Khan, another Matt Damon movie, another big failure. So this was a disastrous fall season for Paramount. It culminated in Cloverfield Paradox getting sold to Netflix

for a, God, talk about cursed that night where I had to stay up after the Super Bowl to watch the Cloverfield Paradox, to write about how bad the Cloverfield Paradox was, was one of my least favorite days. Because nobody knew that Netflix bought, did anyone know that Netflix bought it or no? Because it was the Super Bowl trailer and it was like, we will drop it on Netflix once the Super Bowl was over. Yeah, it was a surprise drop. I don't know whether people knew or didn't know that it had been sold to Netflix, but they definitely didn't know that it was premiering on Super Bowl Sunday night until that day. Right. So this was a bad time to be a Paramount movie. I feel like Paramount has rebounded okay.

They rebound the very next spring after this with a quiet place, which... Right. You also have the pandemic where they didn't really release anything, but they'd also had a bad financial year leading up to this award season because they have the big monster trucks bomb, the whatever Transformers movie they did, I believe, lost money. Ghost in the Shell, another terrible PR. Oh, boy. Yeah. I mean, okay, speaking of terrible PR, though, the other bad timing of this is you're getting Matt Damon at a time, maybe the worst possible time to have Matt Damon in your movie, where he is just foot in mouth after foot in mouth press appearance. So this fall of 2017, you're already two years past his disastrous project Greenland.

moment where he F.ry Brown, the black producer on the movie that they were making, is trying to make a case for hiring a director of color, or at the very least, just having

a consideration for, given the subject matter of the script that they are making, that a considering a director of color would be important for a movie that has a black prostitute character in the film. And on screen in front of God and country, Matt Damon decides to, with his own two lips, say that diversity is something that we handle in casting and not anywhere else.

And it's said with the most condescending tone possible, and it really kind of turned everybody against him. And he had been, up until that point, pretty charmed in a sort of PR way where, like, people kind of really loved him. And so that was really bad. And then so now two years later comes this downsizing press tour that is happening in the thick of the initial post-Harvey Weinstein Me Too moment, where he gets, of course, somebody whose career was made in a Miramax movie is obviously going to get asked about. a lot of these things and almost at every turn says something that is not that is really on the

border of at the very least just tone deafness and would have almost all of them been better off if he had just been like yeah that's something to think about and then ended the discussion where he said to peter travers on abc news um about me too he said quote i do believe that there's a spectrum of behavior right and we're going to have to figure out what you know there's a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of these behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn't be conflated, right? Again, why is that your first concern with all of this? Why is that your first concern? He talked about Louis C.K. said, I don't know, Louis C.K.,

I've never met him. I'm a fan of his, but I don't imagine he's going to do those things again. You know what I mean? I imagine the price that he's paid at this point is so beyond anything. that he, I just think that we have to kind of start delineating between what these behaviors are. Really should have said nothing because... Should have said nothing. What the price that Louis C.K. had paid? Nothing.

Nothing. Zero. Nothing. So Vox wrote a whole article, Why Won't Matt Damon stop talking? Vulture wrote a post that said Matt Damon is sharing all his bad opinions on sexual misconduct. and of the Vulture post Oscar-nominated actress Minnie Driver

who dated Matt Damon and that is a relationship that did not end well quote tweeted the Vulture article and just said good God seriously so like dunking on Matt Damon became a spectator sport at that point so it was... Because why won't Matt Damon stop talking and he doesn't

that's kind of why we ruefully laugh because there would still be more years of shit that he would continue to say. They fully kept him out of the last duel, like, press tour. Yes. And he is the headliner of the movie. He has the most screen time in that movie. What was he promoting when he kept talking about how his daughter?

His daughter had to tell him to teach him about how to not be homophobic. Right. His daughter taught him to not say, the F slur anymore. Right. That's what it was. His daughter taught him. And he's telling this as if it's this heartwarming tale. We want to be like when she was three. She taught you that when she was three, maybe? And it was like, yeah, last year, my daughter finally told me that it's not cool to say the F slur. So on one level, kind of like necessarily illuminating of where white A-lister's are maybe at in Hollywood, that we can, you know.

Especially Bostonian heterosexuals. Well, I was going to say, these people who sort of, we assume that, like, well, they live in Hollywood. So I'm sure they're just steeped in good liberal attitudes and whatever. And, and again, Matt Damon's not a monster. Matt Damon is a privileged white person who probably has not had to deal with the implications of a lot of these things. So we can afford to take the perspective of, oh, God, what if this happened to me as

what if this happened to me a white person who somebody didn't like the way I complimented their, you know, outfit or whatever, instead of, oh, God, what if this happened to me, I got sexually harassed? Like, that is the perspective that a white man does not have to consider. So, right. Anyway, we should also mention Alexander Payne in the years after this. This was not a consideration while downsizing was in theaters or whatever. accused by Rose McGowan of a statutory rape when she says she was 15 and he was 28 that they had slept together.

Alexander Payne admits that they had a consensual encounter, but insists that she was of legal age. And we kind of didn't really hear too much more. Rose McGowan responded to that and was just like, yeah, he's lying. So he hasn't made... He hasn't made anything since then, though. He was originally attached to do the menu with Emma Schoen, I believe. But he does have a movie coming out this year, if I am not mistaken. He's filming a movie with Paul Giamatti, Divine Joy Randolph.

Who else is in this movie? Let me pull it up. There's another name. Yeah. Carrie Preston is in this movie, is the other name. Who I love. Carrie Preston's great. So, yes, so definitely the jury metaphorically is definitely out on where Alexander Payne's career will move now

and whether this is a thing that will either conveniently disappear, as often sometimes these things do, or whether this will be a thing that comes up sort of again and again again with him and will ultimately make it very difficult to market this next movie that he's making. Which is called, what did we say it's called? The holdovers. The holdovers. Yeah. So.

I'm also just the way that as his work has gone in the past decade or so, I'm also not confident that it's going to be any good. So it may not be something we have to deal with, even though we live to find. So this is a thing, though, that I sometimes, and again, this is coming from. a very limited perspective of me as an end-user movie viewer. So, like, I don't, you know, I have no desire to pontificate as to things like, you know, harm and sexual harassment, whatever. But I sometimes am leery of this sort of convenience of looking at art from problematic people and being like, well, it's bad.

So I don't have to, I don't have to think too seriously. Right. No, I understand that. And I'm not saying that his work is bad because there's accusations against him. Right. Right. But, I mean, and I don't want to pacify anything he might have done. What if it's a great movie? What if it's a great movie? And then what his movies are bad? No, I know. But I guess this was sort of my thing with, you know, J.K. Rowling, too, is if your response to everything that J.K. Rowling is saying is like, well, those Harry Potter books were shit anyway. And it's like, congratulations. Like, this is. now you don't have to worry about it because you always thought they were bad books and like it's not when she is a force for bad in this world absolutely the consideration isn't what when somebody who is a force for bad in this world does bad art to me it's much more difficult to be like what if somebody is a force for bad in this world and does good art or does at least like art that has entertained you then you have to actually grapple with it for a while and just be like yeah this thing that I really enjoy enjoyed. I really enjoyed. And I'm not going to be able to get away from that. But also, the person who made it is a force for evil in this world. And, and, you know, deal with it. Anyway. And you can't deal with it in a way that's going to give a sound bite. You know, it's, you know. Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, that is our unpleasantness corner of this film. Anything else we want to say about it. Let me dip into my old, the old notebook. again my thing with this movie is like you could lob off a portion of the movie or like take one of its chapters and make that be the whole movie and I think it's an infinitely better movie like I almost want the version of the movie where he's never downsized and it's all about the lead up to that you know the decision where it truly is a would you do it movie and you know you're left to deal with all that because it's just the tone of it is so hard to you can't tell what the tone is trying to be because the movie itself and the kind of movie it is

is constantly changing. The section where he's just you know, dancing and raving with Christoph Waltz is a lot of wasted time. I don't know. I will say this movie to me had some moments of effective

kind of almost like short film sequences. The whole sequence of him actually going through the downsizing that is conveyed without dialogue or whatever is kind of fascinating to watch the sort of like all the little things they've got to take out his fillings and they've got to, you know, they've got to shave him and they've got to, you know, stick the enema tube and whatnot. And that it all, towards the end, after they get shrunk, the sight gag of the nurses,

coming in with their little spatulas to scoop them up, I thought was very funny. And again, that's to me the kind of thing that Alexander Payne does well, is that kind of, you know, those absurd little touches in a way that I find, you know, very funny. The other note that I wrote down was the Vanderbeak scene that we see at the beginning. In the background is playing the Bodine song Closer to Free, which was the theme song to Party of Five. I know James Vanderbuebeek was not the star of Party of Five, but was on television at around the same time and was kind of pitched towards similar audiences. And I only ever hear that song in conjunction to Party of Five. And it just made me kind of laugh and smile.

So I enjoyed that. What else? What else? What else? Oh, knock-lans, eight kinds of fucks. she talks about how American people have eight kinds of fucks

there's love fuck hate fuck sex only fuck drunk fuck buddy fuck pity fuck breakup fuck and makeup fuck I feel like there are more than that I feel like we have a whole spectrum

of you know I get I get you know Did she say sad fuck? She doesn't I mean I mean sometimes people just fuck because they're sad yeah

yeah I guess sex only fuck in compasses things like, you know, too big of an umbrella term. Too big of an umbrella. Is there bored fuck? No, I would say board fuck, but like, there's no, there's nothing in there that that says that. But anyway, um, Hong Chow's very good in this movie.

All right. I'm good. I'm also good. Would you like to explain the IMDB game to our listeners? 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, voice-only performances, or non-acting credits, we mentioned that up front. After two wrong guesses, we get the

remaining titles release years as a clue. If that's not enough, it just becomes a free-for-all of hints. Eight kinds of fuchs. Eight kinds of hints. Eight kinds of fuchs. Yes, exactly. So would you like to give her guess first? I'll guess first. Okay. So for you, I went into the Alexander Payne cast roster, including one of his Oscar nominees, I chose for you, Miss June Squibb. Okay, interesting. Any television? No television. Okay. Well, Nebraska seems pretty clear cut. Nebraska, correct. I imagine the other. Alexander Payne movie about Schmidt is also there. About Schmidt, correct.

She's not going to be on there for in and out, even though she's one of the old ladies who dance to the village people at the end of that movie, which is very fun. Great kind of sequence. Yes. Okay. So oh, she's

one of the old ladies who's a friend of, I want to say it's in, I'll see, is it I'll see you in my dreams, the Blythe Danner one? Is that your guess? Yes. It's incorrect. Not, I'll see you in my dreams.

But she is in that movie. Right? She's one of Blythe Danner's friends. Yes. Along with Ria Perlman and... Mary Kay Place? Maybe. Maybe.

I think maybe. We both really like that movie. Yeah, it's good. All right, June. June Squib. The great June Squib. I feel like there was something where I was watching something and it was

older and I was like, huh, June Squib, who knew? But I can't possibly place it, which is too bad. I feel like there was another, I feel like in the wake of Nebraska, there was a lot of like, June Squib is an ornery old lady. And I know she was in glee and I know television doesn't count, so whatever. What's the movie where she wears like a dirty t-shirt? Oh, God. Some stupid movie for tweens or something.

You know, the tweens who love June Squib that flock to... No, but it's like dirty grandpa or something. Like, this is not a movie for adults. All right, all right, all right. What else is she in? She's in... Oh, man. All right, all right, all right.

Oh, she's... Um, in that movie, Love the Coopers. Incorrect, not Love the Coopers. So you're going to get your years. Your years are 1997 and 2020. So it is one of the older ones. Okay. This is 2020.

This is 2020. All right. That show should have let us know all along with our news programs that 2020 was the year of the curse. Is 2020 Hubey Halloween? It is not Hubey Halloween. Damn it! all right all right put a pin in 2020

1997 what is 1997 oh 1997 is in and out it is in and out really that's amazing she's like barely in that movie that's so funny credited as cousin Gretchen

sure she does dance to to the village people so that is fun um okay 2020 2020 gonna need a hand Oh, 2020. We disagree on this movie.

Chris, that's many movies. In the cursedness of 2020, this does have a very particular distinction for you. Distinction in the cursedness of it. Yeah. Perhaps in a way that you could mark the way things perhaps began in 2020. Oh. So it's from early 2020 No, but for you it was

But for me it was It might have been Oh, oh, is it Palm Springs It is Palm Springs I don't remember her in Palm Springs Maybe that's the movie where she wears Yeah, that was the last movie I saw in a theater Before the pandemic, you're right, I saw an early screening of Palm Springs

And then everybody had to watch it on Hulu On Hulu Good movie not my favorite all right so that's me that's it that's that i got that is it all right i'm surprised it wasn't the humans now that i think about it well she doesn't speak in the humans or she's true it's true but also we're two of the 15 people that saw the humans also true yes all right uh chris for you i also went into the

alexander pain filmography i went early uh one of the stars of his film citizen Ruth, the great Laura Dern movie Citizen Ruth, wonderful. Was Kelly Preston? Really? I haven't seen Citizen Ruth in a minute. Same here. Realize that the dearly departed Kelly Preston was in it or didn't remember her.

Yes. Jerry McGuire. Correct. Jerry Maguire, where she hops upon his penis and cries out in ecstasy. Not this. I need to rewatch Jerry McGuire. It is a very enthusiastically filmed sex scene where you see her from, like, the clavicle up. Very notorious during my childhood of the sex scene of that movie, et cetera.

Yes. For Love of the Game, the baseball movie. Did you just listen to that episode of Blank Check? Is that why you were thinking of it? Maybe. Same. Same. I would not have remembered her being in that movie.

otherwise. Same. Yeah. Is it like Battlefield Earth? Yes, it is Battlefield Earth, you absolute psychopath. She's not in a lot of movies. Sure, but still.

Okay, is the fourth one Gotti? It's not. Although, what if it was? You do not get a perfect score because you guessed Gotti, and I feel like that's only cosmic justice. Okay. Is it the Cat in the Hat? She's the mom in Cat in the Hat.

it is not the cat in the hat so that's two strikes your remaining film is 2003 isn't that the year of the cat Matt was the year of the cat in hat so clearly she was riding high that year oh she's uh another reviled movie she's it's got to be a view from the top it's not i was not i was not delivering a pun when i said riding high so it is not in fact a view from the top damn it is her other Her other 2003 movie besides those two. Wow. Okay.

Let me know if you want hints. What? Let me know if and when you want hints. Oh, I want hints. Okay, so she plays the mother of the main character, I believe. This main character was sort of a teen star at the time from television.

She had been sort of a child star on one of the child-friendly networks. A Nickelodeon star. Hillary Duff. No, she was, I believe, Disney Channel. Okay.

Oh, Nickelodeon. Amanda Bines. Yes. It's not first daughter, but it's basically first daughter, but it's British? Is it Colin Firth is the, like, British person. Yeah, you're hitting all the, you're hitting all the marks.

What is this movie called? Same title as a pop song that was popular, maybe a few years before. What a Girl Wants. Yes, What a Girl Wants. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. She's the daughter of, like, Prime Minister or something. Yes. I think that's right.

I think so. Here's what I'm going to tell you. I've never seen what a girl wants. I haven't either. I've actually really behind on like that era. On your 2003 movies. You really got to, you stopped, you slowed down in 2002. Spence all that time watching the missing.

All right. All right. And we're done. That's a good episode. Back to normal. It's still two hours. doing this episode as we would normally do our episodes but I think it was a good one if you want more this had oscar buzz you can check out the tumbler at this had oscarbust

tumbler.com you should also follow us on twitter at had underscore oscar underscore buzz joe where can listeners find more of you uh twitter letterboxed both at joe read read reid uh you can find me downsized my uh little eyes and little on Twitter and Letterbox at Crispy File. That's F.E. I.L. We would like to thank Kyle Cummings for his fantastic artwork and Dave Gonzalez, Gavin Medius, for their technical guidance. Please remember to rate, like, and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, wherever else you get podcasts. Five-star review in particular really helps us out with Apple Podcasts visibility.

So get this little podcast some upsizing by spreading the word with a nice review. In your review, tell us if there's any more than the eight fucks. That's all for this week, but we hope you'll be back next week for more of us. Thank you. Thank you.