This Had Oscar Buzz - 381 – Happy Endings

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

After the edgy sexual comedy The Opposite of Sex made Don Roos a hot indie name and the drowsy romance of Bouncedampened the vibe, Roos returned in 2005 with ensemble dramedy Happy Endings. With a cast of Lisa Kudrow, Steve Coogan, and Laura Dern, the film looks at the secrets and sexual boundaries of a group of Los Angelenos. … Continue reading "381 – Happy Endings"

Hello, the right house. We want to talk to Mill and Heck. Mill and Heck. I'm from Canada water. Dick poop. Look for truthfulness. You might just as well be blind. It always seems to be so hard to get. Hello and welcome to the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, the only podcast that's pure a wedding in the middle of a rainstorm. 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

at all went wrong. The Oscar hopes died and we are here to perform the autopsy. I'm your host to Joe Reed. I'm here as always with my drummer who wants to be a drummer to look at everybody else's asses.

Chris, file. Hello, Chris. Wow. You immediately have to do the homophobic joke that the rest of these characters. It's hard to avoid they're everywhere in this movie.

Well, Don Ruse is gay. Don Ruse can make I know, but we'll talk about the era-specificness of this particular. Don Roos is very good in this movie observing the very particular ways that I'm not homophobic, homophobic straight people would be. Sure. I have my, I have a feeling we're going to disagree about this movie in a very fun way. Okay, good, good. I'm so excited to talk about this movie, this movie that we kind of booked on the fly.

Very much on the fly. So much was not available. Yes. Yeah, we were going to do Sherry Baby for Maggie of it all, and it was not available anywhere. Listener, if you want to watch the motion picture Sherry Baby, your best option is probably buying an old DVD on eBay. We didn't want to do that because we felt like,

let's do something that could at least be more accessible to the listeners that they could watch it if they want to. I don't know how many of our listeners actually try to watch. along with us. I don't know either, but I feel like I like to give people the option. We've done this before where it's like, I remember when we did Love Song for Bobby Long, we did that because somebody bootlegged it on YouTube, but it was otherwise not available. Not available.

Well, sometimes, I mean, with something like a love song for Bobby Long, it's such a perfect this out-oscure Buzz movie that, like, I didn't want to, I didn't want to sacrifice it. Happy Endings is a movie I imagine we both saw when it first came out, right? I saw this movie with my dad in the theaters. Christopher, with your dad. What an interesting movie for a gay guy to watch with his dad. Yeah, a closeted gay kid in high school. I would have been going into my senior year.

No? I would have graduated, I think. What were the conversation topics after? July 05, I would have graduated, yes. What were the conversation topics after the movie? Honestly, don't remember. I remembered very little of this movie. I remembered all of the Maggie stuff storyline, not that Jason Ritter was gay.

Oh, okay. Didn't remember any of that. And then I remembered really liking Lisa Kudrow, but nothing plot-wise. And I fully had forgotten the Steve Kugan stuff. Same. Absolutely had forgotten that Steve Kugan was that character, had forgotten everything about that storyline. I remember Jason Ritter.

I remember Jesse Bradford because I remember being so like gaga for Jesse Bradford at this moment. We got to talk about this performance. We really do. And Don Ruse, I remember being really, really high on at the time, particularly because it was a big fan of the opposite of sex in 1998. And also the writer of Boys on the Side. We'll talk about the whole Don Ruse of it all. Don Ruse, go back to our preview. episode on Bounce.

Yes. Motion picture bounce. Though I feel like they probably didn't talk that much about Don Ruse in that episode because it's not a very Don Rusey. This is sort of him back to his, you know, the stuff we maybe feel like is a Don Ruse movie. Although it's interesting, you look at the movies he made after this. And he's never really made, right. But like Marley and Me, he wrote the screenplay for, he directed that movie,

the other woman, which I've never seen. So maybe that has a little acerbic, you know, sort of edge to it. People did not like that movie. No. But I feel like the opposite of sex and happy endings are the movies we sort of imagine as being, like, classic, you know, Don Roos stuff. But obviously I was a huge fan of boys on the side, which he did the screenplay for. And, of course, real life married to Dan Bukitinsky, who, if that name isn't familiar with you, like, any kind of Lisa Kudrow project post friends has been in partnership with Dan Bukitinsky.

He's one of the creators of The Comeback and was on scandal for many years. Like you've seen him. He's definitely like a character actor who has been in things, but is sort of like besties and creative partners with Lisa Kudrow. So a queer power couple within the Hollywood sort of indie slash edges of mainstream kind of a milieu. The bride, Maggie Jelenhall, opening this week. Speaking of us politely disagreeing consistently through the last year. You made such a good point about it being kind of the antithesis of the Guillermo del Toro. Frankenstein vibe, you know, that it doesn't really bring anything new to the table, and it feels very like, you know, sophomore English class interpretation of Frankenstein.

Yeah. You know, the loudest voice in the room in sophomore English class who's read one other book. All respect to Guillermo del Toro filmmaker, I like. but that the bride exclamation point is, you know, Maggie just kind of taking the bag and running with it in terms of just going crazy. And that I can support. I can fully support that. I just might have to get over that it looks like a suicide squad movie to me. Uh-huh.

Yeah. I mean, I don't necessarily disagree. I would frame it as looks like the Harley Quinn movie because I like the Harley Quinn movie. because I like the Harley Quinn movie and I don't like the Suicide Squad movie. It doesn't remind me at Birds of Prey, though. Birds of Prey is fun. This could be fun. This could be fun, but it doesn't look.

The vibe is not that. I don't like what Maggie is going after it appears, but I do respect the swing. And I love her. So I'm going to be happy to go see that movie. You understand we're completely setting ourselves up for the thing where we see it. You like it and I don't like it. And all of a sudden the whole thing is like flipped on its head. Where I go and see something.

And I'm like, yeah, I had a good time, not a big deal. And you have an active problem with it. Right, right, yes. We'll see how it goes. Sometimes that does happen. That hasn't been you and me in, I would say, the past year. That feels like me and everybody else. Like I was like sentimental value.

Perfect example. I like it. I think there's some good stuff there. Do I think everything is revelatory? No, but I think it's good. But then, like, gen pop or, like, you know, cinephile gen pop is, like, kind of rolling their eyes on it. And I'm like, okay, I have no problem with this.

I think, I will say, I don't think it's necessarily a majority of cinephile gen pop who is reacting that way to it. I think it is a very vocal sort of. of subset of that because ultimately I think the majority of people who I hear from talk to see their letterboxed stuff, whatever, like that movie. But I think there is a very vocal and pointed sort of minority on sentimental value that seems to take issue with it.

Maybe Hamnet is a better example. Well, Jay Kelly was a better example too, because, you You ended up quite liking Jay Kelly. I like Jay Kelly, yeah. Yeah. And I think that was one where you were going into it kind of skeptical. Yeah, I think I'd gotten around to the point where I just kept hearing bad things about it. Maybe Jay Kelly and sentimental value are better comparison because those are movies about creatives.

Well, I guess so is Hamnet. And I think a lot of people are just kind of ready to sharpen their knives. for those movies in the past decade or so. Yeah. And I don't have, you know, upon entry, an issue with those type of stories the way that some people do and think that those things are self-serving or something. I think the criticisms of sentimental value that seem to begin and end with like, oh, it's a story about like a rich filmmaker who's trying to get his daughters to like him.

And it's like, well, yeah, like that can be a story. Why is that not, why is, why is that disqualifying as a story? I don't quite understand that. Happy endings, though. Happy ending. You talk a lot about an otsey or late 90s thing that just like kind of gets you where you live and scratches a certain itch. The best portions of happy endings really did that for me. Not there are, there are wide.

The very, yeah. There's a lot of space between the great. stuff and the not so great stuff and the maybe actively bad stuff in this movie. And what's crazy, and we'll get into it, but I think the really good stuff in this that really scratched that Otsey itch for me, and I think is like scratch the Don Ruse itch for me, felt like it could have just been its own movie. This is, yes. This is very of an era, especially like as it's dying out of these ensemble movies where these

these tangential connections between people. There's a literal car crash that there's multiple car crashes in the movie, but there's a car crash that's like, that's how two characters meet. And we need a super cut of that as a trope in movies and everyone needs to be sat down and forced to watch it so that it never happens again. We can't have screenplays do this ever again. And I know it's not so much of a trope anymore, but like we must remain very. vigilant. We cannot let this happen. Here's a framework I think will be valuable for us to have as we move through this discussion, which is happy endings, a Lionsgate movie comes out in 2005, the same year that Crash comes

out. Crash from Lionsgate. In the same summer. In the same summer. And there are ways in which happy endings and crash. are two very different sides of a fundamentally similar coin. Yeah. Which is this kind of, they mentioned it in the, you know, in the intro to the Wikipedia article for Happy Endings,

about how this movie ended up helping coin the term hyperlink cinema. A thing that sometimes people mention as if it's like a thing that everybody was talking about. And it's like, not really, but like you sort of understand the meaning through context. clues, right? This idea that like one character then is a gateway into another character with a different story, and then one of the characters from that storyline links you to another character from a different storyline. And this was an incredibly popular device or structure, particularly in the aughts indie movies. And Happy Endings has it. Crash definitely has it. And I think both of those movies taking place in Los Angeles.

Like there's a lot of sort of superficial similarities and also whatever meaning we're supposed to sort of glean from these movies comes from at least partially this idea that we have all of these like disparate stories that have themes that kind of link to each other. So it's, again, it's an interesting. framework to, you know, look at happy endings and the way that it is styled. And also the ways in which so much of crash is like, listen, there's a lot of racism in crash, but it's only to prove that, like, this is how things are and we're being real about it. Yeah. And there's a lot of homophobia in happy endings, and it's only to prove that this is how things were and we're not going to sugarcoat it. So that, that, I thought about crash way more than I thought I was going to, watching happy endings is kind of the, what I'm getting at here.

I, I'll save it for where you're coming from in terms of the crashiness. What a horrible word to invent. Terrible word. The crassiness of this movie's like, homophobia adjacencies. Because there's also like gay jokes like it in the opposite of sex, too.

Well, the opposite of sex is very much like the... Watching this movie again and not liking it as much as I did the first time really made me wonder like, oh, what I hate if I revisited the opposite of sex. The opposite of sex has that Kudrow performance and that Ritchie performance. This movie,

I think, has really good performances that I do want to talk about, but like those are big performance. these are more like natural. Yes. I agree. But I also feel like they both have this kind of fundamental, really kind of

un-like, decidedly unsympathetic female character in each of these movies, who one of their defining characteristics to sort of almost dare you to, to hate them is they're like

unapologetic homophobia you know what I mean? And they're like verbalized. And their exploitation of gay characters. Well, and in their exploitation of gay characters and also their fundamental frustration that

they they can only manipulate these gay characters so far because of the limitations of their sexualities. Do you know what I mean? Like there's part of Maggie Gyllenhaal's character in this movie, who seems to, like, mostly hate Jason Ritter because she can only use sex to manipulate him so far, and ultimately he is a gay guy, so like, she can manipulate his father a lot more effectively.

This is all so aughts. The more I talk about the plot of this movie, it's just incredibly aughts, both complimentary, but also as far as I'm concerned derogatory. And it's just full of like, there's so much stuff. I will be mentioning it like constantly in this episode. But like I will be setting the world record for saying aughts or aughtsy in this movie. For sure. I've already set the world world record for saying crashiness, which is not a word.

I like crashiness because it rhymes with trashiness. So you're sort of saying crashy, but also trashiness. Like, crashy, trashyness. You mean like how we say trash in Jack Nicholson's voice? Trash. Trash. Trash. Crash.

Yes. So for... Just to be clear, as we are an Oscar podcast, we are a crash derogatory podcast. We are taking no delight in crash. I also imagine I will end up referencing the chum scrubber at least once in this episode. The chum scrubber. Movies used to have titles. When you look at this.

This 2005 Sundance lineup, movies used to have titles. Yes. Granted, happy endings couldn't be a more vague title. We'll also get into the... Yeah, this is the hard one to Google for now, especially since the subsequent ABC slash unrelated ABC TV series, yes. Movies also used to have posters, though. And this one is a very memorable one, which is...

Memorable but bad and not suited to the movie. Oh, you don't think... Well, because it's so titillating, it promises a sexiness that the movie never really quite delivers. Yeah, but also, I mean, I guess what do you do for a poster for this movie? I would also like to ask Don Ruse, what is the single unifying theme in these, I guess we would say three stories? Because there are parallels among the stories, specifically around, uh, specifically around, uh, Sexual boundaries. Sexual boundaries, deception.

Lying to yourself, maybe. I think this movie is much more about lying to other people than lying to yourself. And we can maybe discuss that. Both of them simultaneously. I want to describe the poster, though, because I'm getting to a little bit of a point here. The poster being a face-down body shown from like the shoulder blades to like the mid. thigh with a

teeny teeny tiny towel draped over the butt. On the towel is written a Don Roos film Happy Endings. And then along the column of the back where if a very sort of fit person has that

sort of seam down along their spine that bisects their back is a single file column of alphabetical, alphabetical alphabetically listed actors. So it emphasizes the kind of leanness of the torso. And my point that I'm getting to is,

whoever this person is, and I can't quite tell if they're male or female, which is, I think, part of the point, a really good, cute, small butt. And I feel like this is a thing that you and I have disagreed before. would before is that I think somebody can have a good butt and it be still be a small butt. I don't think that's untrue.

I feel like we've disagreed with this before, but maybe you were just sort of poking at me. I can't get too horny on Maine about this. I can't. I can't go too deeply. Just look at the posture. A little butt can be nice. I would argue this butt is so little. It's borderline.

The legs just stop and wear it back. I don't think so. It is not a proportionally... Look at the way that the title of happy endings is like fundamentally not in a straight line. Like it, you know, it has... Curvature. It's sort of... Curvature.

Which suggests to me that there is butt curvature, which tells me it is not a straight line from the legs to the back. Evidence. Evidence-based argument on my part. Look at the font. Look at the letters. I do think that's evidence-based, but I just think proportionally something's off here that doesn't say human body, singular human body, rather than a frankenstining of different people's different body parts. Do you think that would have been worth it to do on a graphic design level for a Indy, for a Lionsgate indie movie that only made a million dollars at the box office? Maybe.

I don't know. I just think they like plopped somebody down on a massage table. draped a towel and we're like click click this was an america's next top model challenge it was it was a sponsored america's next top model challenge i'm going to be willing to bet that this is something that's happening as we're recording that people are still talking about unlike things that are timely oh if we derail into the a ntm doc we will never claw out of it what i'll say on mike is the thing that i have said to multiple friends at this point it is not good it gives you no new information, but it's incredible.

I think, I absolutely agree with you. It is not a good documentary filmmaking, but it is an essential watch. Somebody said the other day, and I wish I could remember who said it, if you are the person who said this to me, yell at me. The fact that it relies so heavily on

talking heads that are actually just like TikToks of people who weren't born before 9-11. This wasn't me, but like, yes. Any documentary that uses TikToks to this degree, It's like, you could just have, like... As if, like, mic drop, like, look at all these people who say it's problematic.

Boom. And it's like, you could just talk to people and get those, and get people to tell you this. They have, like, one journalist that they interview. And it's like you, like, there are so many, like, smart people who they could talk to. Like, get more than one journalist. Yes. You know? Yes. It's crazy.

It's crazy. And the other thing that you and I have talked about that I think is maybe the biggest disappointment is the fact that they talk to upwards of what, like 10, 12 former top model contestants and never put them in a room together? I know. Which is crazy to me. Like, give me a roundtable, folks. Like, let them, like, bounce off of each other.

I think that would have been incredible television. And there's certain contestants that you really would want to see, like, Jade, that, like, you can just imagine there's some people who just don't want to talk about it. who don't want to talk about it and also who like maybe are still like not don't have any perspective on it still do you know what I mean?

Like I can imagine Jade still being jade about it and then like okay well like what does that give you ultimately? But like we also kind of want to see Janice Dickinson come on I would rather have Janice Dickinson come on and say yes this is the role I was

playing and this is why I was playing it. She sure wouldn't apologize for it. Rather than have four different people speak for her. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, it's incredible. You and I both also said. It's a psychological study that absolutely

everybody needs to witness. I also said to you, though, the person who I would have wanted to hear from the most, maybe was Paulina Porzkova, who even at the time seemed to really hate Tyra and would have, I imagine, had a very interesting things to say. everybody also needs to see it for maybe one of my favorite moments and we're not calling it cinema it's television one of my favorite moments in television in like a decade is joanie pulling out a ziplock bag of all of the original teeth that they pulled out of her head like hanging onto those teeth in a ziplock bag that she keeps in a scrapbook that she keeps in a scrapbook is the funniest part about it like she's just like well back to the scrapbook for my ziplock bag full of teeth they're so much So much dentistry talk in this documentary.

The other thing that was crazy was because Danielle goes through the whole thing about, like, they pressured me into having major dental surgery. I wanted to keep my gap. All of a sudden, you know, no. She is a national treasure. My natural beauty wasn't enough for Tyra. But then them telling her, because this is the thing I didn't realize either, was that several seasons later, they had a different model.

go and get dental work to widen her gap so that she could, quote, look like Lauren Hutton. And they told this to Danielle, and she was like, they did what? That was good. I enjoyed that. Anyway, that's all we can afford to the... That's all we can afford to say. Give us three more hours, and we will watch it. Happy endings, though. Yes. So, yes, a classic mid-offer.

Lots. Several fucked up people bounce into each other's lives. Comedy drama, dark comedy drama. We had a lot of these back in the day, and some were good, some were better than others. Some were like Altman movies. Some were definitely not Altman movies. I think you could call Love Actually, actually, you know, a successful ensemble comedy. Yeah, and in that way, we're like, there are, like, crossovers to each other's storylines, but not exactly, not, you know, everybody doesn't come together. This isn't, this movie actually happy endings. Most of the characters do kind of come together, at least in this, like, extended epilogue, and I'll talk about that, too, my thoughts on the epilogue versus the rest of the movie.

How far into the movie do you think extended? begins because this is a two hour and 10 minute movie that should be a buck 40. It really, that's one of the problems with the movie. My very first note is all caps, two hours and 12 minutes. Are you fucking kidding me? So insane that it's that long. And like it's wrapped up a half hour before the movie ends. It's a little while.

That's what I mean. Like that epilogue goes on and on and on and on. Let's do the plot description now so that we can actually talk about the specifics of this movie. But before we do that, Chris, can you let our listeners know if they are not already signed up for our Patreon? Why they should be doing that. Hey, gang, we have a Patreon.

If you're not already subscribed, let me tell you about it. We call it this had Oscar Buzz turbulent brilliance. And guess what? you can sign up for only $5 a month. That's like less than a coffee. That's true. You know, we used to say a cheesy gordita crunch. This is like half of a cheesy gordita crunch now.

I know. We've stuck to the five. We keep it out of five. Taco Bell inflation only makes us look better. I know. I mean, you may not even be able to get up a hot blast for $5 anymore. Just like a kitty size. I know.

Anyway, what are you going to get for those $5 a month? You're going to get two bonus episodes, more of the show you love. That first episode comes on the first Friday of the month. And this is much more similar to what we do regularly here on this had Oscar buzz. But we call them exception episodes. These are movies that fit the usual this had Oscar buzz rubric but manage to score a nomination or two. We don't have the March plan set out yet. So I can't preview yet for you what we're doing in March.

But that's okay because we had a huge February. In February, we did for Valentine's Day and the sad passing of Rob Reiner, when Harry met Sally. You know you wanted to hear these two gay guys talk about that movie. Absolutely. And, you know, when Harry met Sally, masterpiece. We've done other masterpiece movies on exceptions episodes. Things like Mulholland Drive, AI artificial intelligence, far from heaven.

You know, lots of other fun movies like my best friend's wedding. We've had guest episodes for things like Phantom of the Opera and True Lies. And then we've done standard. This Had Oscar Buzz? Not so great movies like Madonna's W.E. Rob Marshall's 9. Hitchcock, Vanilla Sky. House of Gucci.

It's time to take out the trash. Go sign up for that $5 so you can take out the trash too. But there's still one more episode to talk to you about. Comes on the third Friday of the month, and it's what we call an excursion episodes. These, we go a little bit off the ranch. We do a deep dive into different Oscar, you know, obsessive, obsession items that we regularly talk about, like EW Fall Movie Previews.

We've recapped old award shows like the Indy Spirits and the MTV Movie Awards. We've talked about actress roundtables. last month in February we did our blowout annual finger quotes awards that we do annually called the superlatives. This year was a three-hour episode. It is like a real award ceremony, except it's all of the weird, real categories like Best Grown Up Love Story and the U.S. Dramatic Prize for Uncompromising Artistic Vision from, Sunday. Can prize of the youth. Can prize the youth. We make up our own categories.

And then our listeners also pick the best movie of the year. Pick the best movie of the year. I am trying to talk too fast. That's a different server. We don't do that over there. We don't do that over there. God, this may need to go into the outtakes. Dick poop.

See, we even have our own dick poop on this. this had Oscar buzz. Anyway, go sign up to Turbulent Brilliance right now over on patreon.com slash this had Oscar buzz. Do it. All right. So, for this week,

we will be talking about the 2005 film, Happy Endings, written and directed by Don Roos, starring Lisa Kudrow, Jason Ritter, Maggie Jelenhall, Bobby Connavali,

Steve Coogan, Tom Arnold, Jesse Bradford, David Sutcliffe, Sarah Clark, and Laura Dern. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20th, 2005, and then opened in limited release on July 15th, 2005 from Lionsgate Films. It opened on 52 screens and made $2,000, which was good enough for 24th on the box office chart that week. This was the week in summer

2005 when Tim Burton foisted Charlie in the Chocolate Factory upon an unsuspecting public to the tune of $56 million. This was also the weekend that wedding crashers opened to a very respectable $32.2 million. I believe that movie basically played throughout the summer and earned a whole bunch money. Fantastic Four. Did I write that down? This was, I think this was just the first of the Jessica Alba Fantastic Four movies. Finished in third place in its second weekend. Steven Spielberg's War the World was in its third weekend. That was in the top ten.

Batman Begins was, I think of its fifth weekend. I don't think I knocked, marked that down, but I think it was had been playing for a while. That was in the top ten. So like, a pretty banger top ten in terms of like size. Good time to go to the movies. Big, big movies. it's summer 2005 still. And if you wanted to see a small, small movie,

you sought out your art house and saw happy endings if you could. Chris, yeah, now is the time when I pull out my stopwatch and I ask you if you are ready to give a 60-second plot description of happy endings. It's a lot of pressure because we've been

breathing closer to 60 seconds. I don't think you're going to do it. I'm not going to do it. But I think listeners know, by now that I'm not good at this. So we all accept each other here. Expectations are very low for us on this, so it's fine. If you are ready, then your time begins now.

All right, so we follow Mamie and her stepbrother Charlie when they were teenagers. Whoops, they had sex and she got pregnant and everybody kind of thought she had an abortion, but really she gave the baby up for adoption. Flasked Flores into the future, she gets cornered by Jesse Bradford with too long hair. Greasy Hair, Jesse Bradford, saying, I'm going to film a documentary about you reuniting with this child you gave up for adoption. And that's going to help me get into AFI film school. And she says, no, we're not going to do that.

Let's make a documentary about my masseuse boyfriend, who is also an immigrant. Meanwhile, Charlie, her stepbrother, he is now gay, and he has a close friendship between him and his partner and a lesbian couple. The lesbian couple has a child that originally his partner was going to offer the sperm up for, but then they said that they didn't do it. Charlie suspects that he, that his partner is still the biological father of this child and goes through all of these hoops trying to basically force them to reveal the secret. Meanwhile, across Los Angeles, Maggie Gyllenhaal is hooking up with Jason Ritter as they're in some like dive bar band. and he is gay and she still has sex with him, but then finds out that he's living with his father who's rich,

so she dumps Jason Ritter, and then starts dating his father Frank, played by Tom Arnold, and they get into a relationship, and she is pregnant and starts and wants to get an abortion. By the way, Mamie works at the abortion clinic. And flash over to Charlie, the lesbian couple reveals that he is,

The partner is not the friend. The partner, his name is Gil for some reason. He's not the father, and the reason that they didn't want him to be the birth father is because he's a bad person who has an affair and cheats on Charlie, and then it basically disillusions this entire friendship and Charlie and Gil's relationship. Meanwhile, through the process of the documentary, Jesse Bradford is a bad person who reveals that the Bobby Conavale immigrant boyfriend

is married and he was doing this for a green card and then that breaks up that relationship. And then it all comes out that Maggie Gyllenhaal had sex with Jason Ritter and then the engagement is off with her and Tom Arnold

and then nobody ever hears from her again. Then Lisa Kudrow tries to track down Jesse Bradford and it ends up meeting her birth son and she gets in a car crash and then tells her stepbrother Charlie the truth. And then they eventually meet him. And then nothing really kind of comes up that.

And then Mamie, played by Lucid Cudrow, ends up in a relationship with Tom Arnold, who she meets in a car crash. And everybody ends happily. Ever after. Three minutes and two seconds. There was a moment where I was like, I could do that. I can kind of get the broad strokes. of this, but...

No, it's just too much plot. It's just too much plot and... Off-the-cuff words are never my... My strong... You managed to like... I prefer the written word, which I still... You managed to move pretty expediently through all of these plots, but yes. Yeah, I didn't really get into the weeds at all.

No, no, you didn't, which was good. It's just a lot to... Eventually, character names fell off. You're fine. Yeah, I think you having to summon... Gil's name was maybe your most off-the-path moment. But, um... Okay, let's start with that story.

Gil is the most central character who is the least important. Explored. Yes. Even though he's very consequential. But like he's not, that story isn't his story. It's Charlie's story. At the epilogue where we find out sort of where everybody leads up, we should also say that like throughout this entire movie, you don't get an oppressive voice.

like you did with the opposite of sex and the opposite of sex, Christina Ricci's character, had like this weirdly like omniscient slash independent, like talking to you kind of as an aside voiceover that was very, you know, edgy at the time. This replaces that with a sort of omniscient voice of, for lack of a more specific identification, like voice of Don Rousse himself, who is sort of like, that's this person. This person is, this is their deal. Don't worry, nobody dies. Don't worry, you're not supposed to like this character.

It's fine. I thought about this. Like, towards the end, we're just like, nobody ever hears from Jude again, except, like, and the only time I think of her, I can only think of, like, this or whatever. And it's like, oh, okay, so now we're into, like, you know, director statements or whatever. Like, we're beginning the Q&A before the movie is over. You know, I thought most of its, like, performatively offhand humor

kind of worked. It's a device that would be ran out of town with pitchforks and torches if a movie used it today. Yeah, so much of the stuff in this movie would be treated that way. It was mostly fine, I thought, if unnecessary in a lot of it.

What it does is it provides this kind of almost novelistic omniscience where you can flash forward and backward with a character and it's things about their psyche, they never have to explain, but provide kind of important context for how we should feel about them or understand about them? It also employs the device of telling you in the middle of this story, things that happen to this character years from now in a way that tells you about them now.

They're talking about Charlie and Gill's relationship. This is Cougain and David Suck. Cliff. And they're like, they will never have a threesome. You know what I mean? Like that kind of a thing. It's not telling you about where they've been. It's telling you where they are going. And by telling you that, it sort of acts as a descriptor of the kinds of people that they are. I think the most successful character that it's used for is Frank, played by Tom Arnold, who I think is not particularly likable or interesting as he's, just presented in action, but through these narrative moments, we can kind of, these like narrator moments,

we can kind of see that he is at this transitional place in his life where he's kind of floundering, but he eventually gets his shit together. Because it talks about, you know, we just basically see him suddenly falling head over heels over this Maggie Jillenhall character where she's fully kind of pulling the wool over his eyes. And we can't really see him as being so enamored by her for any reason other than she's younger and beautiful. She's hot, yeah. Yeah, and very sexually into him. But she's like using him for his money.

So we kind of see him as shallow, but through these like interjections of narration, if we're calling it that, you see that like he has one other kind of floundering relationship. relationship with a young woman, and then he ends up with Lisa Kudrow, and we know that, like, that's the last person he'll have sex with and that, you know. Right. Well, we know that because of a very earlier intertidal thing that says, after Jude, he'll only have sex with two more people. And then later we find out, like, we actually, like, find out who these two people are.

So it actually, like, sort of, like, turns the movie's ending into, like, the completion of this sort of wide canvas jigsaw puzzle a little bit, that like you weren't really. And like, I don't think that the movie presents itself as a thing to be solved. And then like, by the end, this is why I find like the ending, no pun intended, um, made me feel differently about some of the things that I didn't like about the earlier parts of the movie. And I don't want to, there's like 12 different things I want to, I want to, want to mention, because, like, you mentioned the Tom Arnold character, and I want to, like, go, deep on the Tom Arnold character.

This is how my brain works. This is how we end up, like, starting six sentences and never finishing any of them. I think by this point, closing in on 400 episodes, our... Episards. Episards? All right, Olivia Newton, John. 400 episodes. Our listeners know the rabbit holes of thought that we do hear.

Rabbit holes of thought, accidental accents, uh, X, Y, Z, etc. Right. Okay, so in the Russian nesting doll of things I want to talk about, the outer layer is this general idea of unvarnished sort of mean and nastiness as a truth, as a greater truth, right? That, like, this is a movie that particularly through the first three quarters of the movie is really full of characters who are, mean, nasty, selfish, manipulative, you know, out to, you know, get one over on other people. Miserable, you know what I mean? Unhappy. And like, like, that just sort of like, that covers the kind of gamut of your major characters in this movie.

And at its present in things like dialogue, we talked about like, you know, how. much homophobic, like, terminology is in this movie. It's, you know, obviously very reminiscent of the opposite of sex. This is one of the movies. Do they say cock smoocher? I couldn't quite, I rewound that like three different times. Johnny Galecki has a, has a cameo on this. Johnny Galicki, who was in the opposite of sex as a more major character. He says both, um, I wrote it down, sorry, pickle smoker. And then he says something that does sound like cocksmoochmooch. And it's one of those things where there was a period of time in the aughts. This is sort of, I kind of attribute this to be post-Bush re-election in 2004, where the Republicans ran on a very heavily homophobic, anti-gay

marriage platform, and won. And then Oberge fell, which was 2011, 2012, whatever, like the interim between those two events, there was this sense of everybody, this is just how everybody is. Everybody has an acute awareness of gay people and most people, even the people who are like kind of friendly, even the people who are like in a band with you, like, hate you and call you the most sort of like elaborately creative homophobic names. It was this, this blending of, a very sort of aughts-era hyper-verbalness,

this sort of post-Buffie, post-Dawson's Creek. Everybody has these like incredibly elaborate vocabularies. Bring it on, actually. A much better movie. Employs this a lot.

Talking about like the moment where a Leza Dishke's character says, oh, you speak fag. I'm like, there's so much going on with like those three words, right? because it's this idea that like, well, naturally everybody is a little bit homophobic, even the allies, and is very free with, you know, language in this way.

But also they speak in this kind of like hyper aware, like hyper verbose, overly educated, you know, a way of speaking. and the combination of those two things I find to be now looking back, it gives me hives watching that stuff. Like that, watching Johnny Galecki say pickle smoker in this movie gave me hives, watching all those different ways that Jude finds to like say homophobic words to Jason Ritter. And I don't find it like... Not even just like say homophobic, but like to use his closetedness against him and to like hold it hostage. is very, it makes her villainous in this movie. But that's a character thing, and that I don't mind so much. Like, that at least, like, that's her character.

To me, I think the stuff that I find so itchy is the, like, the overly effortful ways of, like, we're going to find 12 different ways to say gay in this movie, but they're all going to be, like, you know, the most sort of, like, what does she say? Like, after they have sex, she's like, your dad's never going to think you're a mo now. And it's just like, nobody says mo. Nobody's said no since 1987. What are we talking about? That kind of thing.

But so, okay. That type of ally is absolutely two and a half years away from saying my gaze. That's, and yet. But yes, this is the, this is the place in the historical culture of. I think we were already at my gaze. This is what I think is I feel like, I think happy end. is Don Roos sort of like not quite being on the cutting edge of how young people would talk about other gay people, even young people who have no problem manipulating, you know, gay folks.

So, okay, and the fact that then by the end of the movie, I think there is a decided shift towards a happier ending, you know what I mean? And that's almost, it's a little bit rye. It's a little bit sort of like, sort of looking at your audience, like, this is the kind of shit you want, right? You know what I mean? Like that kind of a thing. And there's a little bit of like knowingness. And that's why you get that shot of Lisa Kudrow at her wedding.

And she's so happy. And everybody's around. And she's dancing with Tom Arnold. And she's dancing with Jason Ritter. She's dancing with Steve Kugan. And yet she starts to look around and she sees. her and Charlie as teenagers dancing. And their parents.

She sees their parents. She sees Jesse Bradford, who, you know, manipulated her, and they had this sort of, like, very dark relationship with each other. And so, and she has this sort of look on her face. And that's this essentially, like, yes, this is an incredibly happy ending. But, like, our ghosts are still, you know, always going to be with us or something like that. But I think the end of this movie made me come around. on the beginning of this movie. And I'm a little self-conscious about the idea that, like, I didn't remember that I liked

this movie until the movie got happy. And I'm like, I promise you that I am not that much of a sap. It's not that, though. I understand what you're saying, and I understand why your self-warning flags are going up. But it's not that. I do think, for me, it's a re-contextual. of what you've seen that may seem sappy, but it ultimately works, and that's what the kind of effect of the movie is supposed to do. It is, it's not about, it's not about all of the,

like, bitterness of 95% of the movie. It's not about the 4% that is, isn't this a nice moment where everything ends up being okay and Maggie Gyllenhaal singing Billy Joel and everything's fine. It's about that 1% where it's like, not to make it about the 1%. It's about that sliver of a moment that is like entirely painted

on Lisa Kudrow's face where it's like even when things end up happy, you still will have things that you're haunted by. There is no such thing as a happy ending. There is, in the version that, you know, we consider it, you know? Like not, you know, pain doesn't just go

away when things end up okay. But also, you get those epilogue, again, we'll call it voiceover, even though it's textover, I guess. And for so much of the movie, that sort of, if that is acting as the voice of Don Roos, we are giving him a little bit in the Christina Ricci in Opposite of Sex Cadence, where it's a little smug, it's a little nasty, it's a little edgy, and then by the end, you get these missives that are like Otis, who is the Jason Ritter character. Otis ends up in a six-year relationship with the other guy from the band, the guy who played Otto in the West Wing, who I think is so cute.

And he kisses Steve Coogan at a party one time, and it ultimately doesn't come to anything, and he ends up being the happiest of all of these characters by the end. And Coogan ends up with the urologist, and they have a very long, relationship, that Gil ends up reconciling with Laura Dern and Sarah Clark and seems to be, he's, he's, you know, alone living with his dogs, but does not look unhappy about it. And that's probably for the best. And I do feel like by the end that, like, Roos is finally sort of being like, listen, I love all these characters.

You know what I mean? A little bit, like, through that voiceover that feels kind. You're giving me a little bit of a look. But, like, I do feel like, I do feel like that's, it's a turn that I find to be unexpected, unexpectedly warm in a way that then recontextualizes the beginning of the movie for me a little bit and makes it all feel a little less overly strenuous to be mean in a way that, like, that's the thing that irks me. I don't mind mean comedy. I don't mind. Like, there's a whole sort of like, particularly... You think in the context that the meanness is somewhat performative or, like, overly shellacked on?

Overly shellacked on in order to be like, we're not like these other, you know, gay comedies or whatever. And... That's also an otse thing, though. It is. You can't just be the thing you are. And it's an otsey thing that irks me. And I think by the end of the movie, I get a little bit more. more of a window into like, look, yes, that, but also there's a real affection for these

characters who, up until that point, I had been like, throw most of these people out with the garbage. And by the end, I'm like, oh, okay, but like, I can also sort of, like, they have their, you know, foibles and their bad parts or whatever, but like, and in only a few of those occasions did I feel that that was unearned. You know what I mean? I do wish we had gotten a little bit more of Gill. But see, the Gil stuff, I want to have a whole section about that. Okay. That storyline because, spoiler alert, that's the stuff that I think is great in this

movie. I do want to add on to like what you're saying. We've talked about the like homophobia in these characters throughout the movie. Also at that ending, there is a movement towards. towards reconciliation of it because the idea that we're supposed to have a Frank the whole time is that he will not accept his son as gay and, you know, that he's going to try to be a nice dad, but he actually has problems with him. Yeah, that's the thing that Jude is hanging over Otis's head and that's how she can blackmail him.

And that Mamie can actually kind of play, as we infer, you know, an agent towards that reconciliation. She has her gay stepbrother. She, you know, we're also led to believe this whole time that she wants to have a son the whole time. Her relationship with Nikki, the Jesse Bradford character, is very much like you spend most of the movie wondering if he is the son. And then you, when he kisses her, you're like, ah, is this going to be an incestuous thing? Like, it already feels that way, even though he is not her son. Even the fact that she and Charlie are stepbrother and step sister and have the kid, which to me, I was like, is this just for shock value? Because doesn't this movie have the exact same effect if they are like best friends from childhood who like have sex and then he's gay? And like that's why there's, you know, doesn't that like essentially confer the same relationship? More or less? He's definitely interested in these like sibling familial boundary crossings as like the edge of this movie.

I think that the only part that feels edge lordy to me is when Jesse Bradford in his tidy whitties and a boner kisses her. And at this point, we're already heavily suspecting that he could be her son. Even though the voiceover has definitely told us. that he's not. Right. But the voiceover in the opposite of sex also lied to us.

Exactly. Exactly. And everybody's kind of lying in this movie. So. Yes. But she's also, like her feelings

toward him are so clearly adjacent to parental. But what I was saying about the like gay reconciliation of it, like,

you know, she has her gay son. She has her gay stepbrother. But then we also see Frank at this wedding like, dancing with the dick doctor, the new boyfriend and the family.

So it's like you have everything to believe that all of those things, a lot of those things are alleviated over time. Even more explicitly, because when Jude is, you know, taunting earlier in the movie, she's kind of taunting Otis and that like, I'm going to marry your dad and there's nothing you can do about it.

And one of the things she says is just like, the whole gay stepson thing isn't ideal, but like whatever. And then after we see that that Mamie, Gleisa Kudor's character and Tom Arnold get married, and one of the text cards is like, Mamie doesn't have any problem at all with the whole gay step something. And they word it the same way that Jude words it.

And so it again is almost like it's an explicit rejection of that. Also, I just want to ask the question. He lives in his father's house, but his dad doesn't know he's gay, even though in his bedroom, he has a open stack of gay porn DVDs. It's a pretty big house. He's never seen that roof? And he's an aloof kind of a dad. So I think the whole, I think the thing that we're led to believe about Tom Arnold is that, like, there's a lot of, like, he doesn't see what he doesn't want to see. He doesn't know what he doesn't want to know about that particular situation.

That's a lot to not see. I think he's already twigging to the fact that Otis is probably gay and he doesn't want it to be true. So he sort of he ignores a lot intentionally. Did you catch that the DVD that Maggie Gyllenhaal puts on the television, the gay porn is called In the Can? I didn't. But that's really, if that's a gay porn about- That's homophobic. If that's a gay porn about making a movie, you know, called In The Can, that's pretty good. It's a Jane Campion parody.

We should also mention that, like, one of the things we see is that, like, Otis works for Charlie at the restaurant is attracted to him, like, jerks off to CC, whatever, close circuit security cam footage. Because that character has to have something that is boundary crossing in some way. Right. Because otherwise he's an innocent. Right. But so, okay, may I sort of make a structural proposition?

Let's do Maggie six timers, then talk about Maggie's performance in this movie. And then I want to get back to Tom Arnold, actually. And then we can do other things. Okay. So this is our sixth Maggie Gillenhall movie. This is also our 10th Laura Dern movie. We have two quizzes. We've got to figure out a way to fit these two things in without overcrowding our episode.

So we are going to start with our Maggie Gillen Hall six timers quiz. So Maggie Jillon Hall stretches back all the way back to this at Oscar Buzz number zero zero one. Mona Lisa Smile. That was our very first Maggie Jillen Hall episode. Since then, we have done riding in cars with boys, which we did with our special guest, Bowen Yang, our only thus far Emmy nominated guests soon, hopefully more. Number three, Stranger Than Fiction, our 82nd episode. Then we did- Guest with Kevin Jacobson.

Yes. Kevin, you're the next one to get an Emmy. Kevin, that Emmy nomination is right around the corner. Let's make it happen. Next was Secretary, which I believe was just the two of us. Did you catch that when they're flipping through the HBO like TiVo options that Secretary is shown on TV? I did catch that. Also, and then they end up watching showbiz moms and dads, which,

I think it's very funny. Yeah, guys. Also, TiVo in and of itself is so 05 coded. After Secretary was away we go. And then finally, happy endings for our six. So as we did with the Robert De Niro six-timers, I'm going to stick with the parental guidance quiz. And so what I am going to give you is six quotes from the parental guidance section on IMDB for these.

movies. One per movie. And then you are going to make your picks for which movie applies to each of these quotes. And then at the end, I will allow you to make one final pass at them. And then we'll see how well you do. All right? And you don't want me to say movie titles until we've gone through the whole thing? You can't, no, err your feelings. Sort of like, I'll give you the quote. You tell me where your heads at, where you're leaning towards, whatever, but we won't lock anything in until everything has been read. Great. All right.

So we will start with, from the section, Alcohol, Drugs and Smoking. This is considered mild for alcohol, drugs, and smoking. The quote is, character redacted is a heavy smoker who probably smokes three packs throughout. Okay. This could be any of these movies. Could be. Happy Endings is not going to be mild for this. I guess they do drugs at some point, right?

Someone does drugs? No. I don't know. There's a lot of drinking. I don't think it's stranger than fiction. Probably not riding in cars with boys, though she could smoke in that movie. Mona Lisa Smile, a positive Julia Roberts smokes in that movie. I bet you they all smoke in that movie.

That was a smoke in time. A way we go, definitely has smokers secretary. She could smoke. All right. So this will maybe be a process of elimination kind of a pick for you once you can do the other things. Next one. Profanity, severe. Oh.

Quote, there are 16 F words and nearly 10 S words plus two uses of the term cunt sucker yelled jokingly by character redacted in order to raise his girlfriend's heart rate. The 30 other combined uses of anatomical terms and religious profanities push the count to about 60. This is secretary. All right. Write that down. As we go, you can keep your notes. Chris says secretary. For number three, frightening and intense scenes, moderate.

Quote, the female lead sits in a chair, fully clothed, and refuses to leave. She stays so long that she has to urinate. She urinates as she sits there, and the urine is shown dripping from the chair. Okay, that is secretary. That you are saying is secretary, right? Write that down. All right. Next one.

Sex and nudity. Mild. Quote, a man and a woman kiss. The man lies bare-chested on the floor, and the woman buttons up her top, suggesting that they just had sex. Then he pulls her down to the floor, kisses her ear and neck. Men and women kiss in many scenes, and a man and a woman kiss and hug. I wonder if this could be Mona Lisa's smile. I'm going to leave this one open to it.

It could be riding in cars with boys. All right. Next one, ready? Yes. Profanity, moderate. Quote, at least five S words, four slang terms for breasts, parentheses, boobs. Two A words, parentheses, one used with whole. One D word, one H word.

Two uses each of God, my God, and oh my God. And one use each of, for God, sakes, and Jesus as exclamations. Boobbs makes me think of riding in cars with boys. I think this is going to be riding cars with boys. What's the H word? Hell? Oh! I didn't even think that was a thing anymore.

Oh, okay. God. Mom, he said the H word. Mom, mom come pick me up. They're saying the H word. All right. Finally, sex and nudity, mild. A man massages a woman's breasts and then under the blanket between her legs.

Her breasts are shown. No male nudity. Okay, so a. movie that actually shows boobs. Yes, her breasts are shown. This must be happy endings then, because it's not secretary, and then happy endings, I think, is the only one with boobs. All right, so I will read the quotes in order one more time, and then I will have you give me your selections.

All right. Number one, alcohol, drugs, and smoking, mild. Character Redacted is a heavy smoker who probably smokes three packs throughout. Next one. Profanity. Severe. There are 16 F-words and nearly 10 S-words, plus two uses of the term cunt sucker yelled jokingly by character redacted in order to raise his girlfriend's heart rate. The 30 other combined uses of anatomical terms and religious profanities push the count to 60, to about 60. Third one. Frightening and intense scenes, moderate. The female sits in a chair, fully clothed, and refuses to leave. She stays so long that she has to urinate. She urinates as she sits there, and the urine is shown dripping from the chair.

4. Sex and nudity, mild. A man and a woman kiss, the man lies bare-chested on the floor, and the woman buttons her top, suggesting that they just had sex. Then he pulls her down to the floor, kisses her ear and neck, men and women kiss in many scenes, and a man and a woman kiss and hug. Number five. Profanity, moderate. At least 5 S words, 4 slang terms for breasts, parentheses, boobs.

2A words, parentheses 1 used with whole. one D word, one H word, which is hell, two uses each of God, my God, and oh my God, and one use each of for God's sakes and Jesus as exclamations. And number six, sex and nudity, mild, a man massages a woman's breasts, and then under the blanket between her legs. Her breasts are shown no male nudity.

I wouldn't necessarily call the sex and happy endings mild, but I do think that's the last one. Okay, in this order. Okay. Number one is Mona Lisa Smile. Number two, the cunt sucker, is away we go. The jokingly is what kind of gave that away to me. Three is secretary.

Four is stranger than fiction. Five is writing in cars with boys. And six is happy endings. All right. Sorry, writing goes down. Okay, your score out of six is four. Four out of six is four. Which I believe is how you did it last time.

Which two did I confuse? You confused Mona Lisa Smile and Stranger Than Fiction. Stranger Than Fiction is the heavy smoker. Emma Thompson smokes a ton in that movie. And Mona Lisa Smile is the man and a woman kiss and he's buttoning tops. Yeah. Yeah, that's all Dominic West business. Otherwise, you got the way we joke where he says cunt sucker and then a...

Totally forgot about it. that. Riding in Cards with Boys, good for catching on the boobs. Six different slanks for boobs. Four different slang terms for boobs for boobs. It's a lot of different slanks for boobs for that movie to be like stranger than fiction. And the only real gimmy in that one was secretary. So, well done, I will say overall. Good job. Thank you. Maggie in this movie, the reason we're kind of talking about it because she got

a Spirit Award nomination, but also really great reviews. Really great review, Spirit Award nomination. I want to read you the opening paragraph of Manola Dargis's review for the New York Times, where she says, It's possible that Maggie Gillen Hull will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul. It's interesting that this movie comes out the same summer as Batman Begins, because Batman Begins is the one with Katie Holmes playing Rachel Dawes, and then Maggie would, end up being cast in that role in the Dark Night and would end up being like the one part of that movie that people were like, I kind of think she's not good. So I love Maggie Dillon Hall, just in general.

I'm so captivated by her. I think she plays such, I think on paper, this character maybe doesn't work for me because I think they overdo it, I think. There's like not a lot going on there. Like the lights are on, but nobody's really home on a character level. The most interesting scene that I think she has to play is her scene with Lisa Kudrow. Yes. Where it's like she kind of strangely has all the power.

But like I think it's kind of a blessing for this character in this movie that Maggie Jelenhall is as compelling and as like dynamic as she is. because I think this character would be really unsufferable without it, because there's just not a lot going on. She's so hyper-focused on destroying this family, and you're like, yes, there's a monetary motivation. Yes, she seems like at her heart sort of a misanthrope who, like, kind of, like, hates everybody and thinks everybody's got it coming, and the world is an awful place, so I'm just going to get mine.

but there's a aggressive and, you know, aggressive cruelty to her that doesn't feel always grounded in anything. But like you say, I think she's such an incredibly dynamic performer and is so watchable and is so incredibly just interesting to watch her work. and then you throw in on top of it, she does all of this singing. One of my notes is legitimately in like, this sounds like a joke, but it's not, why didn't Maggie Jillon Hall

just record an album of Billy Joel covers around this time? I know. I would have bought that in an instant. It's also a very otse-th. Her, like, vocal quality is incredibly otsey, where it's like, she's not, she has, like, this interesting tone,

but she's not a great singer. It's Zoe de Chanel coded a little bit, right? It's like, not to say Zoe DeCanelle is cool, but like it's like Brooklyn, Zoe DeConell, you know. Zoe was pretty Brooklyn, but yeah. But I mean, like there's a cool factor to it. Yes. She could beat up Zoe DeChernal. Exactly.

The Maggie Gyllenhaal who covers Billy Joel songs could beat up She of She and Him. Yes. Yes. And I don't know if I would on this watch even put her. in the top five performances of this movie. Oh, I think she's in the top two. I think there are only, I don't, I don't know how many performances in this movie I really love.

I think she and Tom Arnold are the two best performances in this movie. Oh, that's interesting because we definitely disagree on Tom Arnold. I remember Tom Arnold getting good reviews. Don't remember how I felt at the time, but on this watch. I dreaded the prospect of watching him in this movie, and I was so incredibly turned around. And I had completely forgotten whether I had ever liked him in this before. but like we'll talk about that next.

I don't think he's bad. I think I don't, I just don't find him particularly revelatory. I think it's more of a functional performance than a good one in that he serves the function of you cast someone who you think they think they're not going, they're not going to be someone you like and you grow to like this person over their like flaws. Like, John Ruse definitely wants someone who you have a predisposition to as an audience member. Tom Arnold apparently was his initial casting wish for this movie in the studio, tried to get him to cast somebody bigger or with more of a box office draw, and he stuck to it, and he got Tom Arnold. So you don't think that Maggie is one of the top five performances in this movie.

I think that's so interesting. I think she's, I think she, like, stands out so incredibly much from this crowd. She has a different energy. I think she's so much better than everybody, than her storyline, then her character, than, like, pretty much everybody in this movie. I think she stands out. Maybe I'm just an independent spirit voter at heart. You don't feel this way about Kudrow in this movie.

I don't. Kudro, I kind of come around to towards the end, but, like, I'm so disengaged from her character for the most for most of this movie i kind of don't care about this search for her kid i think the the sort of um sourness of her character while it makes sense i think it pushes me away i just this is not a mode i i think serves her super well i i think she's very compelling in this movie All right. Just for, I mean, I think all of the things you're talking about the character are true, yet I still feel like I understand where she's coming from or what's driving her pretty much at all times in this movie. And that's not something I feel like I can say about Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Though Jude is supposed to be like a phantom in the night. By design, she's the one who at the end of the movie, we are meant to understand the least about it. She essentially disappears at the end of the movie. because she's like a mythical like creature of harm because she wants like that's just like fucking rumble stills him. Yeah yeah yeah. I think Jesse Bradford's incredible. I love Jesse Bradford in this movie. Jesse Bradford would be Cudrow's my number one. Jesse Bradford would be my number two. Jesse Bradford who's like even in this era like B tier teen star decidedly. Like it was essentially bring it on and swim fan and that was

kind of it for like the Jesse Bradford moment. Already by happy endings it's like oh yeah remember Jesse Bradford a little bit. They make him have that that greasy hair at that very specific length and it does so much work that like

for the character that we buy it and I feel like we maybe shouldn't buy Jesse Bradford in this character and we do I completely do. He's so sleazy but like hot and I think

I don't know. He's so hot in this. I cannot tell you, if you want a snapshot of like the exact kind of hot dirtbag short king, ass looks great in tidy whitey's guy who I was like so incredibly into

especially at that time. I'm not really not into that guy anymore. Like I that type has existed. Well that guy just doesn't exist. It's not a type anymore. Right. Right. But like oh my God, he's so hot in this. But I think also it was just a performance that really surprised me on this rewatch, especially because I didn't remember it at all.

And it just really made me feel like he was an actor who should have had more opportunities in character roles like this. I agree. Because he knows exactly what he's doing with this real dirtbag guy. Yes. Who's another character, a Rumpel Stiltskin character, who also just kind of like disappears and has never heard from him again, to the point where like when Lisa Kudrow sees him at the wedding,

it is kind of like she's one of the ghosts that he sees. He really just sort of like absolutely like disappears never to be seen again. And another character who we learn maybe the most crucial information about them, not from a scene that they're even in,

not from words that come out of his mouth. I thought he was great in this movie. I also think Laura Duren is really great in this movie when she doesn't need to be. I think she's the most, the point where the most glaringly overcast role in this movie is that role. Like, I don't think that role requires an actress of Laura Dern's caliber.

And I think Laura Dern is pretty clearly slumming it in that role. Oh, I don't think she's slumming it. See, okay. I don't mean by the performance quality. I just mean by like, she's just taking a role that she doesn't need. She was available for four days and wanted to work with Don Roos. Yeah, I think Dern is really like lifting that storyline by giving this great performance that like she doesn't even need to give but does. I think that those two couples, I think that could have been its own movie.

It gave me so much like the kids are all right vibes. It felt like a movie I would have absolutely been head over heels about in the aughts. because they have the whole, you know, sperm donor narrative, but you also get on the fringes of this story of these two couples who are friends. You get those tent, because a lot of this is about queer tensions and like homophobia and such,

but you get the tensions of a gay couple and a lesbian couple and their perceptions of each other. Because... How quickly the Sarah Clark's character goes to calling him, a manipulative faggot or whatever. It's just like, it's so quick. And it's like, yes, I would love for a director, a writer-director like Don Roos, to really

dig into this essential clash between a gay male couple and a lesbian. Yes, I feel like that in and of itself is a full movie. But I think this movie, because it has to share space with other two stories, it shortchanges it kind of severely. We never see Laura Dern and Sarah Clark's characters opposite. or independent of the other two. You do in the epilogue, but that's it. But even then we just see them shopping.

Like, women be shopping. You know what I mean? Like, that's really kind of like... I thought they were going to the movies, but maybe they were just shopping. Oh, maybe that it was. But we don't, like, hear them talk to each other. You know what I mean? It's like...

And then David Sutcliffe's character. By the way, I did write down also. So many of the actors in this movie were like pulled from TV shows that I watched at the time. David Sutcliffe was on Gilmore Girls. Jason Ritter was on Joan of Arcadia. Sarah Clark was on 24. Oh, Amanda Foreman, who plays Maggie Gyllenhaal's friend, was on both Felicity and then later Alias.

Jesse Bradford was briefly on the West Wing. But anyway, I just thought that's interesting. But, I mean, it's not just the lesbian couples are passing a judgment on the gay couple or the gay guy. But it's also, like the whole setup is these, this gay guy thinking that these lesbians are being manipulative. Yeah, they don't trust each other. But they're also like the closest friends that they have. And you do, I do think that closeness registers in like Coogan and Dern's performances.

Steve Coogan, I would also maybe put in my top five and he's not a performer. I like me ever. I think Coogan's really interesting in this movie. I like him a lot. I do. He underplays so much because when Steve Coogan showed up and I was like, he's supposed to be gay. this is not going to be good. And like...

It's a really authentically played theater. Yeah, I thought that was good. But, yeah, I thought that stuff was so interesting. I thought it kind of lifted the quality of the movie and the other two storylines were never as interesting. Yeah. The Cudrow, Jesse Bradford, for as much as, again, Jesse Bradford, so hot, never really grabbed me.

The stuff with Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Ritter, and Tom Arnold, did end up grabbing me, particularly once she takes up with Tom Arnold. And this is where I guess become a Tom Arnold pop-tomist here for at least just this movie. I will say, in my defense, we did our True Lies episode on the Patreon, and I was rightly derisive of his performance on that movie. He's so bad in that movie. I think he's incredible in this movie, and I'll tell you why. So, first of all, one of the things you talk about, like, they couldn't do this in a movie today.

Perhaps the most, they'd never do this in a movie today thing with happy endings, is they make the most sympathetic character to be the multi-millionaire, rich white guy. Is he the most sympathetic, though? By a mile, I think he's the most sympathetic character. I don't know. He's an innocent and he's good-hearted. he, you know, he accepts his gay son, which in the milieu of this movie is like this giant, you know, act of stepping out of one's prejudices. And he's the only non-manipulative character in this entire, of this entire main cast. He's the only person who never tries to manipulate anybody. He's the most, like, morally straight character in this movie, if nothing else. And you'd never have that character be the rich white guy in the movie ever again. Well, but, I mean, maybe Don Ruse does kind of get that in this way and that it's just like, well, you can't.

Like, it's another otse way of like, here's how I'm being subversive. Maybe, maybe. But so obviously the outset of this storyline is Megan Gillenhall, Jude, is going to. have sex with the gay son, use that to get in good with the father, hop to the father, and marry him and get his money. And a classic gold digger storyline, tale as old as time, right? So. But can you also feel bad for him when he is kind of, it's, he can't see that he's being taken advantage of because he doesn't want to because he just wants to chase this young woman? Well, that's the thing. And we come in. to this, armed with the knowledge, if we know what she's up to, right? So, like, we have that advantage. And so he looks like even more of a dupe than he would be in general, because, like, we know where this is going. And he, I think he, because of also, you mentioned, the little, the text voiceovers, we get much more context to him as a person. And I think his pursuit of her

becomes more palatable. I think his performance, which sort of goes against most of the like Tom Arnold vibes that we've ever seen with like his kind of characters on like Rural Nair and True Lies or whatever, that he's he seems so genuinely, obviously he's a lonely widower,

you know what I mean, like this kind of a thing. So he's easy kind of prey, but it becomes less sad and more just sort of like, oh, this is like, she kind of like accidentally found like the one good guy in Los Angeles, right? And which makes it then ultimately, you think for a second, because she considers not having the abortion. She considers having the baby and like does the,

is, would having the baby be a more of a more villainous thing to do because then it like anchors you to this man's fortune? forever, would having the abortion show her to be letting go of that manipulation and she just wants to be in this relationship genuinely? Because there is a moment where you feel like she has maybe been won over by this guy and she's going to essentially like be a better person and just sort of like be with him. And that's the moment where he finds out what's going on and like he and then he rejects her. I suppose there's a certain I hate to use likable

because even like Roger Ebert was like talking about likability and his review for this movie and I'm like it doesn't I don't need likable but I do need interesting and I think that's where like some of these characters succeed and some of them don't and I don't think Frank is all that interesting what Frank has is that like through the full context of the movie and this epilogue he's the character who very clearly

grows the most. Yeah. Probably. Rather than the person who just like gets over their baggage, he probably becomes a better person over the course of all the information the movie wants to give us about him. Yeah, I think that's true. Although

again, I don't know if the movie presents him as starting from that much of a deficit. Like, yes, he's skeptical slash disapproving of his probably gay son. But of all the characters, who calls him, like, nasty names, that's not one of them.

You know what I mean? Well, and, like, I certainly don't want to do, like, age gap discourse, but, like, these rich older men who only go after very young women is also just kind of like, what's you doing, my guy? Like, you know. Well, yes, but, again. That is a character flaw. Because of...

Again, he grows past that. And because of the voiceover text, we find out that that's not really his, vibe either, that he's only ever been with two women, one of which being his wife, right? Isn't that what it tells us? It's like, essentially, we learn through that voiceover that, like, this isn't, like, a guy who's, like, screwing cocktail waitresses or whatever, you know what I mean? That, like, yes, he does go for this, like, you know, much younger woman. But I think the context that we find out about him through these sort of novelistic, you know, textual cards is, does sort of steer you away from that perception of him, I think.

I think it could have been Bobby Canevali as the only innocent in this movie, because it's just like he's a manipulator. He's such a manipulator. But he, like, he's like the immigrant who gets exploited by Jesse Bradford in this shitty documentary he's making to try to get into film school. But then they give Bobby Canevali from like fully another movie, the largest gun. that he puts in Lisa Kutro's case. Yeah.

Like for like suddenly, no reason. Don't go changing. Try to never let me down before. Don't imagine. You're too familiar. So we were talking about Bobby Conavale. So maybe just finished that thought and then we can move into something else. Not much more other than the very not Mexican.

Bobby Canabale. Yeah. Another very Otsey thing. Yeah. Playing a Mexican. Yes. There's that too.

Okay. So we mentioned Laura Dern. Who I think is really good in this movie. I think she's good. I just think the role doesn't need it. The scene where she starts crying when Steve Coogan tells her the lie about Gil being sick. I think she's very good. Another thing I would say about that whole storyline.

that I love is that you enter into it with Charlie being the asshole and the manipulator. And he ultimately gets the rug pulled out from under him for things that he, he's like looking for problems where the problem doesn't even lie. And then there's another problem elsewhere, you know. Yes, yes. I really didn't like him during that whole section with him making up the lie to get one over on it. Also, like, did. he want to be that kid's parent? Or did he just want to find a flaw with this seemingly too perfect arrangement? I ultimately where that story comes out is what it is and what it's representing is this flawed relationship where people are looking for other problems because they know.

in their bones that there is a problem. So they find other problems to say, aha, this was it all along. I also thought he was jealous of the fact that, like, these two women were Gil's friend and her partner. And he wanted to sort of separate Gil from them. And I'm like, that sucks. Well, and the other reveal is from the point where we enter the story,

we're like, oh, Gil's this angel, Gil's the nice one, you know? And ultimately, it's that Gil's kind of the emotional loser who can't be a grown-up. Right, right, yes. And then he's rewarded by marrying a doctor. And it's not because he had an affair that he's the emotional loser. It's just that he's chasing the shiniest puppy at all times, you know?

Sure, sure. Glad those people can get the rewards in the end. Okay, so Laura Dern, ten timers. We're going to do a short 10-timers quiz, very similar to the one we did for Julianne more recently. But just a reminder that the 10 Laura Dern movies that we've covered on this podcast, Deep Breath, Dr. T and the Women, the prize winner of Defiance, Ohio, October Sky, downsizing, a perfect world. We don't live here anymore. Certain women, 99 homes, the founder, and happy endings.

Hope you remember what those movies are as I list the titles. I was trying to write them all down quickly. Which one did I forget? I'll do it again. Dr. T. and the Women, which was the Robert Altman 2000 fiasco with Richard Gear, the prize winner of Defiance, Ohio, where Julianne Moore is the housewife who enters contests and wins things. October Sky, the sort of idyllic young kids building rockets, Jake Gyllenhaal movie, downsizing, Matt Damon gets little.

A Perfect World, Clint Eastwood directs and stars. Kevin Costner plays a convict. We don't live here anymore. Classic Warner Independent Cinema with Naomi Watts and Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause. Certain women, the Kelly Reichart, a triptych of stories about ladies' beat, feel, and emotions. 99 Holmes with Michael Shannon and Andrew Garfield, the founder, where Michael Keaton plays Ray Crock, the McDonald's guy,

and now happy endings. So, last time, we did Julianne Moore, and I asked you to count up the Oscar winners in all of those movies, and then I had you rank them. in these there are only five Oscar winners across these movies actually so I don't want to do that for reference sake Oh thank goodness because I thought that they were way more Well get ready

It was the only five Oscar winners are Helen Hunt Julianne Moore Chris Cooper Christoph Valtz And then Lee Grant is in Dr. T and the Women Oh so you're only doing acting winners Yes Okay So no Damon

No, Eastwood. Right. Instead, though, I'm going to ask you to name, there are, across these 10 movies, there are 16 actors who have been nominated for acting Oscars but did not win. So excluding those five. Can you name the 16 Oscar nominated but not Oscar winning co-stars in these movies? All right. I've got Kate Hudson, Dr. T and the Women.

Yeah. Woody Harrelson, prize winner of Defiance, Ohio. Yep. Jake Gyllenhaal, October Sky. Matt Damon, downsizing. Hong Chow downsizing. Yeah. Clint Eastwood, Perfect World.

Kevin Costner, Perfect. No, he's never been acting nominated. He has, I believe, for Dances with Wolves. He was a best actor nominee? I'm going to double check it right now. But I'm pretty sure he was. 1990 Kevin Costner

dances with wolves Okay there you go Ruffalo and Watts We don't live here anymore Lily Gladstone Certain women Michael Shannon and Andrew Garfield

99 Holmes Maggie Jelenhall Happy Endings Michael Keaton the founder Is that it? Let me write these down Sorry you are quicker than I can write.

Sorry. Jellen Hall. Keaton, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, wait, sorry, thirteen.

Oh, nope, Michelle Williams. Michelle Williams is fourteen. One, two, three, four, five. Townsizing has so many people in it. Okay, so you got Hudson, you got Harrelson, you got Jellon Hall, you got Damon and Chow

you got Costner and Eastwood you got Watts and Ruffalo you got Williams you got Gladstone you got Shannon Garfield

Keaton Jillen Hall you're missing one okay Steve Coogan was not nominated for Philomania Nope um is there anybody else

that I'm forgetting in this movie No, I'll say that now. I don't think so. Maybe it's Dr. T and the women. It's not Richard Geer. It's not Farah Fawcett. It's not

Liv Tyler. Nope. It's Could be someone in downsizing. There's cameos in downsizing. It's not certain women. I'm surprised you're forgetting this person. Oh, it's someone I love?

Yeah, and a movie you love. Oh, okay, so it's one of these that I like. Oh, Kristen Stewart for Spencer. Yep. I'm going to forget that nomination a lot. Because I didn't like the movie, and I thought the performance was fine, though I love her. All right, so now, the first part is done.

Now you have to guess how I'm going to rank 16 people in order of my own person. Let me write the rest of them down. We need like game music. Kate Hudson, Woody Harrelson, Jake Gyllenhaal, Matt Damon, Hong Chow, Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Naomi Watts, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Lily Gladstone, Kristen Stewart, Michael Shannon, Andrew Garfield, Michael Keaton, Maggie Jellenhall. Okay, for someone like Michelle Williams, I have to rank all of her Oscar-nominated. performances? No, just them as a person. Them as a... How much do I like them as an actor slash presence in the world? Got it. It's mostly as an actor. But I have my biases.

Okay. Okay. Let's hear it. I'm gonna guess do you want from bottom to the top, top to bottom? Whichever way you feel comfortable. All right. First place, I said Michelle Williams. Second place, Kate Hudson. All right. Third place, Michael Keaton. All right. Fourth place, Jake Jillon Hall.

All right. Fifth place, Andrew Garfield. Sixth place, Maggie Jillon Hall. Seventh place, Lily Gladstone. Eighth place, Mark Ruffalo. 9th place Kristen Stewart 10th place

Naomi Watts 11th Matt Damon 12th place Where's 12th place Woody Harrelson 13th Hong Chow

14th Somewhere in here Clint Eastwood 15 Kevin Cod And 16 Michael Shannon. Okay. So you got one exactly on the button.

You got two pairs of people who are next to each other but should be flipped. You got two people who you are seven places off. You got one who you're six places off. You have one who you are five places off. You have one who you are four places off. You have one who are three places off. You have one, your two places off, and then you have one, two, three, four others who are also one place off. So in general, between on the button and one place off, you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine out of six.

Okay. So that's good. That's good. So the order. You had Michelle Williams and Kate Hudson. It is Kate Hudson and Michelle Williams. I figured that could be a possibility, but... You have me liking Michael Keaton a ton more than I do, and I really like Michael Keaton.

You have it number three, I had him at number 10. Wow. You had Jake Gyllenhaal at number four. I had Jake at number 11, and again, I really like Jake Gyllenhaal. Yeah, this list is hard because you like most of these people. Yes. So, and then at one, two, three, four, at five and six, you had Andrew Garfield and then Maggie Jillenhall. I have Maggie Jelinehall and then Andrew Garfield at 5 and 6. You have Lily Gladstone.

Lily Gladstone, seven, exactly right. Very good. You really undervalued Mark Ruffalo. Mark Ruffalo was my number three and you put him at number eight. You had Christian Stewart at nine and she's my eight. You had Naomi Watts at 10 and she's my four. You had Matt Damon, pretty close. You had Matt Damon at 11 and he's my 12. You had Woody Harrelson at 12 and he's my 14. You had Hong Chow at 13 and she's my 9. So you undervalued Hong Chao. See, it's really hard because it's hard not to, in this context, what their nominations were.

I mean, definitely for, if I was ranking them in nominations, sure, she would be way higher than where I would rank her nomination. Yes, yes. Eastwood and Costner are my 15 and 16, and you had them at my 14 and 15. Michael Shannon, I generously ranked at 13 because I like him more than Woody Harrelson-Cleanie's Twitter or Kevin Costner. So there's that. Pretty good. As again, nine out of 16, you were at least at most one place off.

So well done. Okay. All right. Laura Dern, 10 timers. Here we are. It's impossible for us to not be having these games every episode. I know, I know. Listen, we hope you like them. Okay, so let's go back, though.

Maggie Jelen Hall gets an independent spirit nomination for happy endings. She loses to Amy Adams in June book. We've talked about the Spirit Awards over on one of our previous excursion episodes on Turbulent Brilliance. We have. That's right. Michelle William is nominated for Brokeback Mountain, Robin Wright Penn for Nine Lives, and then Alice and Janney for a movie called Our VIII. very own that she stars alongside, among others, Jason Ritter. Jason Ritter, we should mention cutie putti, married to the great Melanie

Linsky, is awesome. What else, though, about happy endings? Because, like, certainly, the thing about Don Ruse going into this movie, like, yes, bounce is a bounce. But the opposite of sex really had. him on an upward trajectory in a very sort of like traditional indie way. That's a big, it was a big hit.

It was enough of a crossover hit that I think people who weren't even necessarily like plugged into like the most indie of indie knew about it. Entertainment Weekly wrote about it a bunch. It got four indie spirit nominations, including Lisa Kudrow for supporting actress. It won best first feature and best screenplay at that year's indie spirits, and it was a WGA nominee for original screenplay. So, like, it was a pretty, like,

significant, like, B-tier. It was, like, on the, like, NBR list of, like, special recognition for excellence in filmmaking, which was their top-10 indie films before they had a top-10 indie films list. So, like, Bounce was his, like, well, you made a really good indie movie. Now here's a mainstream movie and go do this. And doesn't work. And so now he's like, back doing his thing. And so I think there was some expectation of like, okay, the opposite of sex, you know, was this level of a success. He's going back to this thing that he's really good at. He very well might level up. And this might be a Oscar contender for screenplay and an Oscar contender for a performance. And, you know, and it just doesn't move the needle kind of a

at all. It makes a million dollars, 1.3 million, I think, domestic. And in general, just, like, is not a point on the map of indie filmmaking that year the way that the opposite of sex was in 1990. Right. It more is on the map for Maggie Gyllenhaal and her performance. Yes. And part of, like, the ascent of her as a performer. to the point that when she does ultimately, because she's not nominated for things like secretary, doesn't get nominated for Sherry Baby, though. But it's a globe nomination for Sherry Baby, though. Yes, yes. It doesn't get nominated for World Trade Center.

How can we forget World Trade Center? Sure doesn't. So that when the nomination happens for Crazy Heart, which correct me if I'm wrong, she didn't show up in any precursors for it. It was a big surprise. It was a surprise. It was a surprise. And kind of in the trajectory of her career, you know, she. was certainly on the path towards getting nominated for something, but it's not really a performance of hers that people were talking about in the way that they talked about her previous performances.

Right, right. We should also mention that this is also the year that the comeback comes out. And so... The comeback is coming back. The comeback is coming back. How are you feeling about the comeback? is the fact that the comeback did so well in its second season, does that give you faith that they can pull off a third season?

Because there was some sense that, like, the comeback season one was such a miraculously singular piece of TV that, like, I don't know if they can... Ahead of its time, people were not ready to get it at that time. And I remember thinking before the second season, like, it's great that it's coming back, but also, like, I don't know if they can capture that magic again. You know what I mean?

I'm less concerned for capturing the magic than season two ends so, you know, perfectly. It really does. They're kind of, by doing a third season, they're forfeiting a, like, crystalline perfect. I always get nervous about that. Yep. Yep. So it's like, but I also trust that Lisa Kudrow would not agree to do this. if they didn't know exactly what they were doing.

And from what I've gathered in the tidbits that they've said so far is that it is set in the time of influencer culture that we are living, which seems like, you know, the easy kind of grab that you would just kind of on paper be like, I don't know, I don't know. But I think my trust is so implicit in, this show and the people involved and that I don't know, we're going to have so. It's, I'm glad that we have Masterpiece Appointment Television back.

Sure. Sure. Yes. Spoiler alert. Gay guy loves the comeback. I was going to say, call the presses. Gay guy thinks the comeback is a masterpiece. And she did get that Emmy nomination for that first season, which also feels fairly miraculous in retrospect. I mean, no surprise, I think Lisa Kudrow is just an incredibly talented comedic performer, and the comeback is sort of her magnum opus, right?

It's her great. Somebody who was on Friends also has, like, a magnum opus contribution to television comedy that exists outside of that is really incredible. And it's, you know, it's interesting to have these two things that have such a connection, right? Because Bukotinsky is, you know, involved with her in the comeback, and Bukotensky and Rousse are married. And so Lisa Kudrow's contributions to keeping gay talent employed in Hollywood is, her bona fides are top-notch. You can't really, you can't really fuck with it. I do think she's one of the greatest actors alive.

She's so good. Like acting ability. Not just like I love her because she's queen, but like I think she's one of the best actors alive. And probably of that group of people, the furthest away from an Oscar nomination. Yes. I think that's right. I think that's right. What do you think it is in terms of that like,

if I was to say to you, envision me a scenario where Lisa Kudrow does get an acting nomination or like, you know, greatest of all worlds enacting Oscar win, what's the avenue that that takes? This is not the sexy answer, but I think it's the right answer. And I've said it about other people in the past on this show. Like when you imagine Lisa Kudrow Oscar nomination, you think of her giving one of her great performances where it's her doing a very Lisa Kudrow-esque character. And that's not her avenue to an Oscar nomination. Her avenue to an Oscar nomination is having a prominent role in a Best Picture Frontrunner. And those movies that would give you the quintessential Lisa Kudra performance is probably never going to be a Best Picture frontrunner. Also, I think the fact that we have moved into ceding the supporting categories to quasi-leads really works against this.

Because when you said, having a supporting role in a best picture frontrunner, my first thought was Lisa Kudrow does the Beatrice Strait in Network thing. You know what I mean? Oh, she could. She absolutely could. One knockout scene in a movie that is like a 12-time Oscar nominee. But Lise Kudrow doesn't take those roles in movies, is the thing. She's like sixth building the girl on the train. But even if she did, we also don't nominate those one-scene wonders for Oscars.

What was the last time? What was like the last shortest supporting... I think nomination. Gench in Belfast is close to something like that, but it's not even the same thing that we're talking about. Because she's kind of present throughout that movie. There's not a whole lot of Beatrice Strait and network out in the world. There isn't. There isn't. I guess that's Judd Hirsch.

That's what it is. That's exactly what it is, actually. But Judd Hirsch had already been like an Oscar nominee. Right. But like he shows up, he knocks it out, he goes away. And that's such an outlier. But yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about, actually. And it is, it's just rare. You know what I mean? Even somebody who, like, gets nominated for essentially one scene is still usually

present throughout the movie, you know, at other parts, right? So I'm trying to sort of scroll through as I look at this. and yeah, I mean, you don't really see. Like, again, perfect example, America Ferreira. America Ferreira is essentially getting nominated for the speech. The monologue. But she's a character throughout that movie, and it's not the same thing as a Beatrice Strait or a Judd Hirsch or something like that.

Isabella Rossellini gets nominated for saying, six lines of dialogue altogether. But, like, she's present to route that movie. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. I think you heard me. Isabella Rosalini got nominated for making copies. The old Rob Schneider, just making copies. Yes, yes.

So I guess it does happen, right? Isabella Rossellini gives me hope that like if Lisa Kudrow shows up as a nun, Xeroxing her way and then finally bides her time and gets a moment. You can see that, I suppose. There's hope. But I agree with you that it does not feel likely. But the other thing is... But we'll always have the comeback.

The other thing is somebody like Alice and Janney, who was like, always in movies, but was like a consummate TV actress, which is sort of how I imagine, I think of Lisa Kudrow, is somebody who is in movies, but is like a consummate TV actress, TV is where she has had her biggest successes. It's not a bad comp. I do think Allison Janney was in way more movies than Lisa Kudrow was,

but that's not a bad. On a volume level, certainly. Yes, yes. And had been like in a best picture, and American Beauty all those years ago. American Beauty, which gets made fun of in happy endings. And I was like, all right, this is, this gets some cool points. Remind me.

I've already forgot it. I think it's Jason Ritter and Maggie Jolinhall that have a back and forth exchange that's like poo-pooing on American Beauty. I mean, yeah, we were already there six years after. Wow, that's something. All right. I'm going to dip into my little notebook. Oh, the younger version of Lisa Kookew. in this is Mark Green's awful daughter from ER.

And also, though, Joe Fox's little sister from You've Got Mail. Oh, FOX. Yeah. I couldn't place the guy who plays young Steve Coogan, even though I know I've seen him in something. Ditto. Ditto. Yeah. All the homophobic chokes in the movie, but nothing more homophobic than forcing

Lisa Coodro to have heavy black eyeliner. I said a film festival of women getting liberated. by sensual massages, this movie, and also Living Out Loud. Living Out Loud, great movie. I mentioned the TV stars. I mentioned the textual voiceover. Oh, I hated the score. What did you think of a score for this movie?

I didn't make note of it. So aggressive. Pickle Smoker, he doesn't think you're a Moe anymore. I mentioned Bring It On as a cop. Do not let the derange gays get a hold of this movie. They will make a meme out of Maggie Jelen Hall saying, isn't it great not being a fad? Showbiz, Moms and Dads on the TiVo I mentioned.

Maggie should have recorded an album of Billy Joel covers. I really nailed it. Otto from the West Wing is so cute in this movie, which he is. Yeah. So there. Happy endings. Happy endings. All right.

Chris, let the listeners know what the IMDB game is and how we play it. Listen, every week we end our episodes with the IMDB game, where we challenge each other with an actor or actress to try to guess the top titles that IMDB says they are most known for. If any of those titles are television, voice-only performances, or non-acting credits, we mention 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-hince.

Yeah, it does. All right. So, would you like to give first or guest first? Give first or guess first? I'm going to give first this time. All right. You mentioned Don Ruse's. I believe final directorial effort

The Other Woman, which had a festival premiere under a different title. Mm-hmm. If I'm remembering correctly, the star of that film is one Natalie Portman, who, unless we have not put it on the spreadsheet...

Have we never done Natalie? Never done Natalie Portman. Wow. Okay, that's very exciting. All right. No television, no voice. over. No television, no voice. You know what I love, what would be on the Chris File known for for Natalie Portman? What? Those, uh, paparazzi photos of Portman and Paul Meskel smoking. What was that from?

Who, hanging out? Just hanging out? I love it. Yeah, okay. Smoke break. All right, Black Swan. Black Swan. So, the challenge with Natalie is that she's in three Star Wars movies and three Thor movies. She's in a lot of movies, period. Yes. She's also in like stuff as a kid. There's like Leon the Professional.

She's in big movies in a small role like Heat, but I don't think Heat's going to be on hers. It's going to be something where like she's the lead. V for Vendetta. V for Vendetta is correct. All right. Okay. All right. Halfway there. The thing about guessing the Star Wars movies is it's a double guess.

It's first guessing that one of the Star Wars movies is on her list, and then it's guessing which of the three. So I'm going to avoid that unless I get a year. The Thor movies are interesting. Thor 11 Thunder, she's like... really prominent, but the first Thor is the first Thor. I'm going to guess the first Thor. Incorrect.

Thor, Love and Thunder. Incorrect. Your years are 2004 and 2016. So none of the Star Wars movies. Is O-4 closer? O-4 is closer. Nice. And 2016 is Jackie.

Stupid. Jackie. All of our Oscar nominations are represented. I did, I totally, Jackie left my brain. Jackie is always good for a rewatch because you watch that movie and you're like, okay, wow, perfect object. Like that movie, I love that movie. It's just like, Jackie is also like a hundred minutes long. Yes.

In this era of, you know. Mm-hmm. things that are too long. I don't need to be fancy about it. In this era of things that are long, it is long. Yes. There are certainly things that I love that are long that are justified to be that long. But like when you rewatch Jackie, it's like, oh, you're like in and out of this, like, it's very intense dive.

And it just like drops you out. It's great movie. It is. Okay. For you, I went down the, Don Roos screenwriting rabbit hole, and I arrived at Single White Female. And I arrived at the star of single white female, who we have not done on an IMDB

game since our double-digit episodes. And that is Bridget Fonda. Bridget Fonda. Okay. Jackie Brown. Nope. Wow. Wow. Okay, then single white female.

Yes, correct. it could happen to you? No, incorrect. Okay, so you already have years. Your years are 1993, 1998, and 1999. All 90s. What was she up to in 99?

90. No Jackie Brown is, this is going to be one of those ones where I am confidently wrong and it throws me out the whole time because I can't even wrap my brain around it. Yeah. Wasn't she in a disaster?

movie. Not Dante's Peak because that's Linda Hamilton, but... That is Linda Hamilton. I think she was in one of those. It's not like vertical limit, is it? That's not one of the four. What was the earliest? 90 what?

Three. Okay. 93 would be, I think, right before it could happen to you. It's not like singles, is it? No, that was 92. That is her, right? Yes. Okay.

Damn, so it's like rom-coms. What is right in the middle of those two? Mm-hmm. God, I can remember my mom watching something with her that was not single white female. That was like a thriller. Or like a... Is one of them the movie she did with Jessica Tandy? It's not Georgia.

That's an entirely different movie. With Jessica Tandy. The poster is the two of them in a car, sunglasses. Camilla? Camilla. I've never heard of this movie. Yeah. Jessica Tandy from Miramax.

Two women are about to share the adventure of a lifetime in a comedy that... I'm sold. I'm sold. In a comedy that proves that friendship is ageless. See, what modern cinema is missing is a movie about two friends who are about to share the journey of a lifetime in a comedy about how friendship is ageless. From the director of water. Okay, okay, I'm going to need some clues. Okay, so you're right about the thriller thing.

She is the lead of the 1993 movie. She is on the poster with a gun. Oh, is this point of no return. This point of no return, the American La Femniquita. The movie that exists only as a poster in my mind. Oh, I remember seeing that TV spot constantly as a kid. Okay, so 98-99. She's not the lead of all.

I don't think she's the lead in the 1990. No, she's first built in the 991. Okay. You guessed disaster movie, and you're like, not quite, but you're on the right general path to one of them. One of them was an Oscar nominee in acting, but not for her, obviously. She's not an affliction. That's an Oscar winner. Right.

98, 99. Oscar nominated for a man. Yes. a simple plan. A simple plan. Simple plan. I need to rewatch that. I think I only saw that on VHS. Agreed. I also need to rewatch that. And there's people who love that movie.

Yes. Oh yeah, for sure. Okay. So, your 1999 movie, not a disaster movie, but like... An action movie. I mean, there is action in it, but I would call it more of a... it's like it's horror but like a specific kind of type of horror Ghost horror? No, move far away from ghost.

It is not supernatural. Oh, is it like a domestic disturbance type of horror? No, not that either. Not ghost. 99 horror. It's so much

of this like off-shoot sub-genre of horror that I almost feel like a lot of people wouldn't call it horror, even though it definitely is. Okay. That's also happening in 1999. Yeah. I believe this movie was like, yes, this movie was like memed in its time in the way that like things were sometimes memed in that like 99, 2000 way. Like it was the butt of a joke. Well, there was just like a particular, like, clip that, like, sort of recurred with it. Is it like a killer nanny?

Not a nanny, but it's a killer blank. A killer... Killer grandma. No. Killer bees. No, but you're on more of a right track than you were. You're getting warmer. Killer monkey?

Nope, getting warmer She's in an animal movie It's like Yeah Killer Creature Oh, it's Lake Placid There it is Lake Placet's a horror movie

What are you talking about? But I think a lot of people sort of categorize creature movie Like killer animal movies As like such a subset of horror That it's because it's not a slasher And it's not a whatever No, it's definitely war

Lake Placid, the movie that put her in retirement, she's like, I'm done here, guys. Well, she doesn't have any credits past 2002, so it wasn't far after that. Bill Pullman, Bridget Fonda, Oliver Platt, you'll never know what bit you. Lake Placid. All right. Lake Placid, the movie where Betty White says, if I had a dick, I tell you to suck it. That's the viral clip. Yes, exactly.

All right. That's our episode, folks. Glad we went out on that line. So if you want more of this, Oscar Buzz, you can check out the Tumblr at this head oscarbuzz.ttombov.com. You could also check out the Instagram at this head Oscar buzz. Chris, where can the listeners find more of you? Letterboxed and Patreon. Well, our Patreon. Letterbox and Blue Sky at Chris Fee File. That's F-E-I-L. I am Letterboxed and Blue Sky at Joe Reed. Read, R-E-I-D. I am also at Vulture all the time.

We're getting up on Oscars at this point that you're listening to this. So, like, go and check out my stuff. I'll have some stuff up there on the Oscars, including my massive ranking of this year, it's 50. This year, all 50 features and short films nominated for the Academy Awards. So that'll be fun. As we speak now, I still have to finish a bunch of them, but we'll get there. All right. We would like to thank Kyle Cummings for his fantastic artwork, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Muvius for their technical guidance. Please remember you can rate, like, and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever all.

else you get podcasts. A five-star review in particular really helps us out with Apple podcast visibility. So look around you and see who in your life you can manipulate and then write us a nice review. That is all for this week, but we hope you'll be back next week for more buzz.