This Had Oscar Buzz - 402 – The Return

Episode Date: August 24, 2026

As The Odyssey continues to prove to be a career peak for Christopher Nolan and possible return to the Oscar stage, we’re looking back at a very different take on Homer’s epic poem. In 2024, The Return reunited Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as the Ithacan king and queen – but limited the story just to the fallout from … Continue reading "402 – The Return"

What's up, Gary's. Just a quick announcement up top of the episode here that Vultures Movies Fantasy League is back again for its sixth season, and we are once again having a mini league for listeners and fans of this head Oscar buzz. If you haven't played before, you can head over to vulture.com slash movies dash league to get the full details, including a look at the rad prizes you could win, including a 65-inch Roku TV, PlayStation 5, merch from A24, neon, and criterion, and much more. The gist of the game, if you haven't played before, it's like fantasy football, but for movies. You draft an eight-film roster from the movies of 2006, and then once we get to October 2nd, your selections can start accruing points from their box office earnings, from their awards performance, critical performance, etc. We even have a new category this season for letterboxed star rankings. Your team score will compete against everybody else who signs up for the game, but you can also

choose to either create or join a mini-league. That way, if you have a group of friends who want to have a game within the game, you can have at it. Just make sure you all enter the same league name in the field, marked for mini-leagues when you sign up. And as we have done the last few years, you can also join your fellow this had Oscar Buzz fans, the Garys, in our dedicated mini-league, which this year we are calling, perhaps inevitably Chris, Project Hell Garys.

It was right there for us. We could not deny it. My brilliant colleagues at Vulture have even created a custom URL for GARES to use. When you sign up, that will have the mini league name right there, auto-populated, right there in the form. So just go to www.vulture.com slash garries, G-A-R-Y-S, and it'll take you right to it. And otherwise, just put Project Hale-Garys, no capital letters, but spaces, project Hale-Garries, into the mini-league. And you'll be all set. Remember that scoring kicks off on October 2nd. And any sign-ups after that date will be restricted to movies that have yet to open or earn points. So keep an eye on that calendar. That's right. Again, for full details, you can hit up vulture.com slash movies dash league. Or just go right to Vulture.

We tend to have a link right there on the homepage. We look forward to watching the Project Hale Gary's League flourish every year. The This Had Oscar Buzz dedicated league is the, the most robust and I'm just going to say it best of all the mini leagues. So you make us so proud and we look forward to competing for another year. No, the right house. I didn't get that. I'm from Canada, water.

Dick Poop. Of stories. You were there? I am Odysseus's wife. Odysseus is dead. Not to me. There is no king. He sailed the Troy years ago.

Took the best men with him. All year, suitors have been turning up, waiting for his widow to choose a new husband to be king. Scoundrels, they're just here for your wealth. Look at this island. The wasteland. Gangs of thugs terrifying the people. They need me alive, at least until I choose my husband.

Hello and welcome to the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, the only podcast telling Patricia Clarkson that our family died as an Improv Assignment. Every week on this had Oscar buzz, we'll be talking about a different movie that once upon a time had Lofty Academy Award aspirations, but for some reason or another, it all went wrong. The Oscar hopes died, and we're here to perform the autopsy. I am your host, Chris Fyle, and I'm here, as always, with my coterie of suitors, Joe Reed. For this movie, your coterie of suitors is going to be incredibly porn-coded, or, like, how do we, how do we, how do we, how? How do we, how How do we sum up some of these scenes of, that one particularly, like, they really did just sort of

air drop that one guy from like some European porno set. Sure, sure, sure. In this version of Homer's epic poem, Ithaca is Twink Island. Basically, it's like all these suitors are like 23-year-old Twinks. going after Julieta and it's like I have something to tell you diva they are not interested

And then there's one like token old man Who's there who's like friend Like I don't know what to tell you Even Yumaas is like 38 in this movie Where like Wait which one is Yumaeus Isn't Yumae the

The John Likwasamo Oh okay I sometimes don't know names Sometimes I just like have fully given myself over Well in this movie's impossible because there's only three famous people in this movie. And that I'm including Charlie Plummer as famous.

Yeah, Charlie Plummer is somebody I know by their name. Sure, yes. We who liked Lina Pete. I call him by his name. Yes, I quite like Linen Pete. And what else did I like? Well, I am a huge fan of National Anthem. So I also...

That's true. I still need to watch that because you like that so much. So, listener, Welcome. We're here to talk about the return from 2024. We thought it would be fun and a bit of a wink to, you know, with the Odyssey, getting ready to storm the Oscar season after, you know, being an even bigger success this year than you could say Oppenheimer was in its time and not just a financial success. I do think that in terms of conversation. the permeation of the Odyssey even goes past what Oppenheimer did in its year. So it's interesting to see how this year is going to go.

So we kind of want to talk about the Odyssey. And we're also obviously talking about the return. But yes. I think it's a, we're not exactly setting the return up for grand success. No, we're kind of being asshole. In this lens. But I also felt like,

well, if I'm ever going to watch this movie, it's going to be in this, you know, in this particular circumstance. So there we had. It played TIF in 2024. And it was on my like long list of things I might end up seeing. And it just lost out on, you know, whatever number of faceoffs it had with other, with other movies. But I certainly wasn't uninterested. It was, you know, Ray Fines and, you know, Ray Fines and Juliet Benoche together again. And the subject matter seemed intriguing. And I think I was less attuned to the inevitability of Nolan's Odyssey coming two years later.

I never really thought about it in that respect. But yeah, I would have been down for it. And then once it became clear that it wasn't going to be a part of the award season, then it became like, well, I have eight be. a million other movies to see before it, and then it just sort of fell by the wayside. Now we have to wait to see it because we'll eventually do an episode on it. Indeed. And it is kind of the perfect timing to do this movie, though it's like, are we being somewhat unfair to it by putting it in such stark, you know, contrast to what Nolan has done?

You could make that argument. I think this movie is very. unsatisfying, even in a context where Nolan's Odyssey doesn't exist. I wanted to, as I was watching it, I wanted to sort of keep myself, keep myself honest and be like, you know, kept reminding myself that like this movie is not trying to do the same things as Nolan's movie is. This movie very deliberately carves out just the parts of the Odyssey where it's Odysseus back on Ithaca

and expands that out. And I wanted to just sort of like, I didn't want to, you know, unconsciously ding it for not being quite as captivating as Nolan's movie. But at the same time, and I think this is a thing, you texted me something about this, and I think this is the thing we'll end up talking about,

which is the pacing of this movie doesn't do it any favors. And in and in focusing on just this sort of like smaller portion of the Odyssey, it does feel like, well, now let's, how are we going to get this to last two hours? You know what I mean? And I think the solution often becomes, we're just going to make them wait for the part. But this movie makes you wait about as long as Nolan's The Odyssey does for Odysseus to reveal himself. Because, of course, you can't pull that trigger too soon in a movie like The Return because it's still going to be your climax, him, you know, revealing himself and then him, you know, taking out, time to take out the trash. But as a result, it's just a lot of like, and now we're back to Odysseus, hang in.

out in the huts. And now we're back to Telemachus, who's snitting about about something or another. A very different take on Telemachus, which I maybe thought was the most interesting thing about the movie. Oh, that's fascinating. Or maybe the... Sure, it can piss you off, but it's maybe actually the only interesting thing about the movie. Besides Ray Fines Hanging Dong, we'll get to it. We'll get to it because I have a whole...

I have a whole diatribe about this movie. and costume design. Oh, good. We'll get to it. I think, you know, the thing about, like, judging this movie on its own merits, I think that whole, like,

pacing part of it is a major part of the problem. Because you could say, you know, you're removing anything fantastical from this story and you're just dealing with the, as of the title, the literal return to Ithaca. And I do think that this movie, you know, the, the Odyssey translator who's, you know,

railing on Nolan now and won't stop doing it because this whole situation has got her addicted to the likes. I swear to God, it is an object lesson in like, like, oh, like attention. Like attention is a drug. It is a drug and it will get you addicted as quickly as heroin does. Yeah. The, you know, someone like that who wants to look at Odysseus in this complex way of Odysseus is actually a bad person, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This movie, I think, does by, you know, isolating that part of the story want to be about asking those questions about this character.

but it doesn't really, you know, it doesn't spend its time kind of marinating in those themes, more so just like gesturing at doing that, you know? Well, to me, I don't, to make a movie about Odysseus's return to Ithaca, and to make one of the major themes the sort of great dehumanizing effect that war has a person is both valid and also, I think, a little expected. It's not exactly like, you know, you're not blowing my mind here by examining the idea that Odysseus is, you know, so bothered and, you know, he won't, he won't show his face to his wife and child because he's so, you know, not only ashamed, I guess, of what, I guess, Nolan's Odyssey is.

more so that he's ashamed. In this, he's just like, I'm not the person. I was when I left. I've lost my humanity, yada, yada, and yet, and for a movie that also makes the decision to have Fines' version of Odysseus not really talk very much, it's sort of like, it keeps things on a very kind of broad strokes basic level. And you get to the end and, you know, the massacre of all the suitors and whatever. And I think I get what you're saying there with Telemachus, because I guess that's the interesting part with Telemachus is that, like, ultimately... He's a shit in this one.

He's like, you know... Well, and ultimately, Penelope is much, much more horrified that, like, oh, now her son has also now given himself over to this sort of, like, monstrousness and bloodlust. but like you get to the end with with, you know, Odysseus slaughtering all these people. And it plays as if it's supposed to be this sort of like grand shocking, you know, a moment just like, I can't, you know, we can't believe how, you know, savage he's being. And it's just like, I don't know how shocked I am by that. You know what I mean? Like I, I'm not sure.

So. I think there's at least a, you know, in all this time. that we're kind of spending in this movie doing nothing and like intrigue about nothing happening, you know, that could be time spent, you know, really like developing these themes, you know, thinking of the, like, what's the version of something that's like, there's not a lot of action, but you're going through the philosophical, you know, ramifications that you're trying to make this thing about. Yeah, just kind of stagnating and not really, you know, walking the audience through these type of moral complexities that you're trying to be about.

And when I complain about this version of Odysseus not really speaking very much, I know that like the version of the return that is just all just like Odysseus yap, yap, yaping away about like, you know, everything is probably not going to be anybody's cup of tea. But it's not like they, you know, replace all of. of those would be, you know, talking scenes with interesting action or anything like that. It's just a lot of, like, him kind of being taciturn and, like, you know, walking amongst the peasants on Ithaca or whatever. And, like, I don't know. And then you go back and it's the suitors. And it's like, there are moments where this movie feels like it's about to break open into a movie that's going to, like, really settle.

in with the suitors and like make them all like major characters and just like and deal with like the the you know interactions and the various sort of like factions between them and whatever and then it doesn't and it's just like that could have maybe been an interesting avenue to you know to travel down but ultimately not so i just don't think there's enough here that i find particularly interesting. And also it's, this is a This movie is

It doesn't look bad It just doesn't look in any way surprising. I would argue this movie looks bad. You think it looks bad. I think this movie looks so pedestrian to an extreme that made me wonder if this money

was some type of money laundering scheme. Because like, you can even go to the wiki, sorry for citing wiki on Mike, but the, you can even go to the wiki and it's like, the return costs $20 million in comparison to Nolans, which costs blah, blah, blah. And it reads almost like whoever edited the page was trying to shit on the Nolan one for costing so much money. And it's like, look what you can do if you're a little thrifty. Well, but it's just like, first of all, you see, I think, all that money and more on screen in

Nolan's telling Where did the $20 million go in this movie? Did you give it all to Benosh and fines? Because this movie looks cheap as hell. Like it does not look like $20 million was spent on this.

To the point that like I don't know if I can jump into my costuming thoughts on this movie this early into the episode but like Yeah. I think for me, I maybe am a sucker for like, if you go and film in Corfu, you know, you're sort of, you know, you're halfway there for me.

You know what I mean? It's just like, ah, filming on location. Sure, but there's no, like, distinct visual style. There's no real aesthetic to this movie to the point where, you know, I think when the Odyssey came out, a lot of people naturally were comping it to, like, various TV versions of, you know. Oh, sure, the Armandesante. Yeah. And even, like, comparison to.

versions of the Iliad like Troy because of course Edward everyone has their own opinions on historical accuracy I need to re-watch Wolfgang Peterson's Troy at some point because like I have seen quite a few people sort of take pot shots at that movie recently

That's a stupid movie Of course it's a stupid movie But I think on that level I don't know I want to watch it again and see if I find something I mean, it's so It's so extreme, it's so vulgar It's very vulgar. But in a way that's very entertaining, as bad as that movie is.

I mean, that movie is nothing, if not a testament to the male fupa. Like, it is, that movie is about pubic mounds. I mean... It is! It's just like, it spends a decent amount of screen time with the male cast of that movie being like, bet you think you're going to see some tasteful stem. You might, you might, but you never do. That is Wolfgang Peterson's Troy.

We're absolutely going to be the podcast that brings you pubic mountains. And that is our commitment to you, Gary's. I mean, that's part of the vulgarity of Troy, too, is, like, nudity. Whereas, I think the amount of flesh on display. in the return is indicative of how boring it is, and that really should not be how flesh functions in a movie. The first thing we see of Odysseus in this movie, he's lying face down naked on the shore. Listen, Ray finds all due respect in every way, and his body is, like, insane. His body looks so incredibly, like, cut in this movie.

But he's got a flat butt. We can say that. We can, we can, we can, we can, we can admit things. But this movie is about how Ray finds is still jacked at his age. Oh, yeah. Of course, because this movie comes out the same year as Conclave, I'm immediately thinking that, like, wow. What you got under them, priestrobes. He's got, he's stacked under those priests robes.

You know. Those were the other photocopies that Isabella Russell. was making was look at what is look at what he looks like underneath there um she said i have eyes and ears and i know that father what the fuck is jacked i have eyes and ears and then it's just like eyeball emoji this did make me want to and like it's maybe i'm just catching a wave because i was feeling this before much like odysseus did get a phone truly caught several waves The waves caught him. Uh-huh.

Uh, but watching this is really adding to my feeling of, I gotta rewatch Concave, guys. We maybe need to loop back on Conclave. And those of us who walked away from Conclave, like, honestly work. We, we should go, we should reignite the Conclave flame. We should. What, okay, if we're going to make an annual viewing of Conclave, what should we like time that too? What, uh, is there a holiday? Is there a time of year that feels particularly

conclavy? For those of us who work in an office, whenever the, uh, the printer toner and paper restocking arrives, that's when we should be watching conclave. It's, yes, it's like timing your, um, whatever your, uh, optometrist appointment to your birthday every year. Time to make some copies. Yeah. Time to make some copies. Time to watch conclop. Yes, I love that idea. All right. Joe, before we get into the, you know, table setting for the return, why don't you tell the listeners about our Patreon?

Will I ever? Okay. Folks, this had Oscar Buzz has a Patreon, has had a Patreon for quite a long time. It is called This Had Oscar Buzz Turbulent Brilliance. It only costs you $5 a month. You get so much bang for the... those $5. You get two full-length episodes every month coming on the first and third Friday of the month.

First Friday of the month, you will get an episode that we call an exception, which is a movie that fits the usual this had Oscar buzz rubric, great osper expectations, disappointing results. But in the end, it got an Oscar nomination or two, sort of a little, you know, pity nomination or whatever. And thus, we can't cover it on flagship this had Oscar buzz. But we can cover it on the Patreon. We last month did, or earlier this month, I suppose, did an episode on David O. Russell's Joy. That was maybe one of my favorite exceptions episodes we've ever done.

I thought we had quite a good time. Speaking of Isabella Rossellini, listen to it with your favorite adversary in commerce. You will have a very good time. We have also done episodes recently on Beloved, Facebook. films like The Birdcage, the American President, when Harry Met Sally, contact, less than beloved movies like The Black Dahlia and Mary Queen of Scots and Hitchcock, the one with Anthony Hopkins playing Hitchcock, of all things. We have done real big swings by big artists like Madonna's W.E. and Barbara Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces. It's all there.

It's all there for the taking, and it's like multiple years worth of backlog, too. So, like, you can subscribe today for $5 and do the backstroke through all of these movies. The third Friday of every month you're going to get an episode that we call an excursion, which isn't about a movie so much, but about some corner of the filmmaking-slash-Oscar ecosystem that we are particularly obsessed with, be it we'll watch an old war. show and talk about it, an old Oscar ceremony, an old Golden Globe ceremony, perhaps an independent spirit awards, perhaps an MTV movie awards. We'll talk about old entertainment weekly fall movie preview issues. We'll talk about Hollywood Reporter roundtables that we really

liked. Earlier this month, you guys got from us a history of the Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice Award. Grulsh no more, except in our hearts. We will never forget chalach um once catalac that is true but it's you know the the grulsh is where i keep gros in my heart um which sounds like very unhealthy really a very unhealthy way to live that's not where beer goes it doesn't go to your heart it's not where beer goes how much are you drinking that it's that much in your bloodstream uh any who um as i say it's it's a value and a half i'm just going to to be a little unhumble about it. It's a good value.

And if you should like to sign up for This Had Oscar Buzz Turbulent, you can go right to our Patreon page at patreon.com slash this had Oscar Buzz. Fabulous, go sign up. Listener, The Returned by Uberto Pasolini. No relation. Former Mr. Rachel Portman. Yes. Who does the score?

of this movie? That's a good question. Rachel Portman. Ah, so they still get along professionally. Still professional collaborators. Written by John Collie, Edward Bond, and Uberto Pasolini, Star Angry Fines,

Juliette Benosh, Charlie Plummer, Tom Reese Harry's Marwan Kanzari, and Claudio Santa Maria, the movie World premiered as a TIF Gala in September of 2024, and then opened in the post Thanksgiving slot, of December 6th,

2024, that Tiff-Gala slot and the fall premiereness of this movie is kind of the beginning and the end for this as an Oscar buzz thing. Yeah. I think once the festivals were over, the Ray Fines

Oscar campaign was purely in conclave. Oh, yes. But also when, like, a movie like this hasn't been seen, and you know, the things right on the table are like costume drama, previously Oscar nominated and or winning headliners,

you know, that makes for a certain kind of buzz before the thing gets seen. And then at the festival, you know, I talked to people who saw it and no one was really that enthusiastic. I think also though nobody was all that, like, savage about it either. I think there were some, I think I had heard some people be sort of like respectfully, you know, mixed positive. Yeah, when I went back in read reviews and even like letterbox locks of friends who saw it at the time that I think everyone was being generous, including people who I wouldn't have expected to be.

I think when you get into the aesthetics of this movie, especially, I'm like, why was everybody being so nice to this movie that they didn't have to be that nice to? This was a Bleaker Street release in the United States, too, is the other thing. And that was when they were also releasing Hard Truths, Michael Lee's Hard Truths. And that was definitely, for as much as we can grumble about the ultimate fate of that movie and of Marianne John Baptiste's performance, they definitely were going for that movie. And they were, you know, promoting that movie. Hard Truths barely made more money than this did. They kind of jerked around hard truths in terms of its distribution plan because, and we can get into this in our eventual hard truths episode,

but like hard truths was originally supposed to open in October, and then they pushed it to December, and then they were going to do a qualifying release, and then the fires happen. I do think that the... It would be very interesting to see if Marianne Jean-Baptiste would have gotten that nomination, if not for the fires. I was supposed to interview her, and then the fires happened.

Oh, wow. And it's just like, it kind of, you know, really affected everything. It's kind of crazy how many sort of, I'm trying to think of a way to like describe this that doesn't sound condescending or just sort of like that I'm taking any of this lightly. but like how many events since just this decade have happened that you can actually be like, oh, X happened during Y and that's why everything was, you know, that's why circumstances were so insane. Like COVID to the writers and actor strikes to the fires. Like, you know, there's so many disrupting, disrupting, I think is probably the word I'm looking for. disruptive events that have absolutely sort of, you know, and again, keeping the movie business from running smoothly is less important when people are losing, you know, homes and lives and whatever.

But it's been very hard for the film industry to, you know, find the momentum when these disruptive events, keep happening. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, you're, you know, as much as we're like, oh, you know, famous successful people who make movies, their lives must be so easy. Those are, you know, the things that you just listed that happened, you know, one right after the other.

That's disrupting people's real lives, you know, and people's lives were very much affected by it. The Bleaker Street thing, though. Yeah. You know, Bleaker who has not happened. the most solid awards record in getting things nominated and things that should be that are like you see the movie and they're no-brainers like hard truths uh we'll see how it goes this year they now have that hadistown money after i think haydystown oh the pro shot of hadystown is their

highest grocer ever that's the movie i should have made the bet with you for and not stop that train that's the one uh that's what i meant to so um they've got the elizabeth Musk movie coming out this year, the Alex Gibney, Elon Musk documentary, that I literally when I saw how long that was, I texted you and Katie horrified. I was like, they are asking us... They're putting an intermission in it.

They are asking us to sit and look at that man's face for how many minutes? Four hours. 232 minutes. And it's Alex Gibney, so it's not going to be pro-Elon Musk. If anybody is confused about that. It's also not going to be uncompelling. Like, Alex Gibney knows how to make a...

movie. But what are you going to possibly tell me that is interesting? That's going to make me what hate that man more than I already do? Like what are we doing? I don't necessarily even need the movie to give me more reasons to hate Elon Musk. I'm sure there will be interesting things to do, but

I just think on a purely experiential level, I just can't look at his face for that. What a fucking avatar of a movie. Like all respect to Alex Gibney. Alex Gibney, who doesn't have an Oscar, so we too actually, unfortunately, maybe have to reckon with this movie, we'll see how the Paul's

festivals go. But they have a really good slate beyond the Elon Musk documentary. I'm so excited for the Anton Corbane movie, a talent for murder, which is Helen Mirren playing Patricia Highsmith, Alden Aaron Reich, playing a man who

travels to Europe to find her essentially and try to convince her to make another Ripley movie. I'm all in on that. The new Mike Lee movie, of course. Most I participated in the fall. The last Mike Lee movie, um, used to say.

I, uh, yeah, I, I can't emotionally talk about that yet. And then there's this movie called Victorian Psycho that I'm like... Looks fun. It looks fun. It looks fun. Looks interesting. And it's like, the cast list is like, Micah Monroe, Thomas and McKenzie. I'm like, this is going to be crazy.

I'm like, you know that this is going to be like full of, you know, I don't know. Everything's going to be wild. And it's called Victorian Psycho. I'm very into it. They're also doing this movie The Liberation, which is a guy Native movie, which, ugh. But it's Carrie Coon getting a, you know, a significant lead that sounds like it could be a role. I kind of wonder if this movie could end up being a nothing burger. And of course, in like two weeks I could have egg on my face for saying that.

But like, I am very much into anything Carrie Coon is doing right now. Yeah. I also love the fact that did you see that the one publicity still, they put it. put out for it, they made sure to have Tracy Letts in frame. Even though he's like sixth build in the movie, so that's probably his scene in the movie. So I am

down for the bleaker street slate. Yeah, yeah. We'll see what this. This could be a real testing ground for them this fall. Yeah, who knows? All right. What else about the return before we get into a 60-second plot description?

Ah, the opening box office week. Yeah. Post Thanksgiving. First place, Moana 2. The widely discussed, fully ingrained in the culture, everyone's favorite Moana 2. People forget, though, that like, because number 2 at the box office that weekend was Wicked, the first part. People forget that Wicked enjoyed a grand total of one week at number 1 before Moana 2 came in and supplanted it. Moana 2 made so much money. Made more money in that opening weekend than the live action version will do it in its entire box office run. Yeah, Moana 2 will forever be remembered as not being really remembered at all for anything that happens into it. I've never talked to an adult about that movie.

Gladiator 2. Gladiator 2 feels like it happened 100. years ago. Like, it... Gladiator 2 feels like a streaming movie that magically was in theaters, right? Like, doesn't that... Like, doesn't it kind of occupied that level? I don't know if I would necessarily go that far, but I do feel like it just, like,

had no stickiness whatsoever. I think it's, like, even the stuff that people really like, like, Denzel Washington's performance, like, did not... I go back and I read my, like, best performances of the year piece that I did include Dunsell Washington. And I'm like, oh, wow. Like, I was really high on that, you know, on that performance. And within a matter of, like, months, that kind of became really outdated and just sort of like, oh, yeah, like, that was just not really a factor. I got one Oscar nomination for cinematography. What was its Oscar nomination for? Costume design? Sound something.

But Yeah So Fourth place Push Paw the Rule Part 2 Opening weekend With 9.3 million dollars

It's so interesting What was that movie? I believe that's a Bollywood movie Yeah Or a movie from the Indian market You know that a lot of these movies Get released domestically And you always see people being like

Why don't these get major reviews? Why don't they get consideration? And I do always think it's interesting I always kind of want to take a flyer on one of these movies. It's just like the thing is they only, they'll make a ton of money, but they only have like week-long release plans here domestically. So it's kind of hard to, you know, permeate. And they don't really court the American press to do like press screening.

So it's like it's hard to like do anything but take a flyer on one of them, you know, to just like jump into it. So it's like, it's always, it's always an option. But I wish like there was more of the apparatus to like get that to permeate. Yeah. Just because my curiosity's high. And then in fifth place, the fourth weekend of Red One, an actual streaming movie that was put in theaters. This is the one where J.K. Simmons is Jack Santa.

Ugh. Right? Not with someone else's eyeballs would I watch that movie. Respectfully. Disrespectfully, but respectfully. Um, sixth place, the IMAX re-release of Interstellar. That's how much money you can make just by putting things in 70mm iMacs for a weekend. Keep doing it.

You should, uh, the studio should keep doing it. This is also the release weekend for horror comedy, Y2K. Did you ever see Y2K? I never did. I was not un-interested in it, but yeah, nobody liked it. So there was no real impetus for me to ultimately go see it. A movie that I believe made even less money, though never received a wide release and the return did, but made less money than the return. Is Joshua Oppenheimer's The End?

Interesting movie. That opening weekend made $25,000 on three screens. I ended up telling a lot of people that year to see that movie, just because it wasn't really getting talked about very much, and I thought it was really worth seeing. There's a lot of meat on that bone, even if that's not a full. successful movie and was kind of a frustrating viewing experience. I think it's kind of... I think I was less frustrated and more just sort of like, because I don't think, I don't really know what my expectations were, even though I did really like Joshua Oppenheimer as a documentary filmmaker. So I was more just like, oh, there are some really interesting things going on here.

and, but like, I can see where the frustration, like, settle in. Yeah, yeah. And it's not, it's like a movie for five people, you know? Yes, yes. Better original songs than almost anything nominated that year, though, I remember thinking. I would have to go and look at the lineup, but that's probably true. The End will eventually do an episode on The End. Joe, for the return, are you ready to give.

a 60-second plot description. I know that this is going to take you several minutes over time to say everything that happens in this. All right, then your 60-second plot description for The Return Starts now. Okay, stop me if you've heard this one recently. We are on the island of Ithaca and Ray finds his Odysseus, having just washed ashore naked as the day Zeus made him, returned from the Trojan War after taking a cool 20 years to get back. Julia Pinoche is Penelope, and in Odysseus's absence, every fuck boy in Greece has come to court her, which of course means eating and drinking her out of house and home and menacing her pouty twink of a son to Lemicus.

Penelope, who it should be noted is styled at all times, like if the Virgin Mary were going out for a night on the town with her girlies, refuses to choose a suitor since she believes Odysseus will return. The most insidious of these men is Antonis, who is less boorish than his contemporaries and claims to be genuinely in love with her, but it mostly seems like these guys would be having a lot more fun if they just gave themselves over to the heavy bathhouse vibes happening in the Ithacan catacombs. But so Odysseus is back, right?

none of this matters anymore, except no, Odysseus is being weird about it, refusing to make himself known to his wife and son due to the horrors of war he's experience. So he waste several days or perhaps weeks chilling with the peasants, his unsheathed dick flapping ostentatiously in the Aegean breeze. Meanwhile, Telemachus pitches several brady little fits to his mother and leaves for a blessed 30 minutes of screen time or so, during which time Odysseus finally returns to his home, only now passing himself off as a beggar. The Fuckboy Brigade taunt him and force him to fight someone's large adult son,

And Odysseus catches the guy by his as-yet-unnamed tendon, and the guy falls and snaps his neck. Later on, Odysseus is being cleaned up by Penelope's elderly servant woman, who recognizes Odysseus by his scars and gets positively horny with quasi-maternal relief, but he makes her promise not to tell anyone. Then Telemachus returns, boo, and Odysseus makes himself known to him finally, and Telemachus goes full, I hate you, I wish you were dead. Mommy and Uncle Tommy have sex all the time. So he's a real bummer.

By this point, Penelope has declared that whomever can string Odysseus' bow will be her. husband, knowing none of them can do it. Antenus nearly starts a men's rights riot against her before Odysseus finally emerges, pulls a full yoga maneuver on the bow, strings it and shoots the arrow through all those axes. And then he murders the shit out of all the suitors with the late-breaking help of Telemachus, who horrifies Penelope by turning into a brutal killer like his dad. Sorry, like his father. I know people care deeply about that terminology. So guess who's back in the house? Dick flip-flaping her out. It's Odysseus, and he begs Penelope to forgive him, and she ultimately does. And then she takes him up to her bed.

room and he's like, oh, I see you boarded up the entrance to our sex loft, and I know it smells absolutely crazy in there, the end. A minute and 20 seconds over, and that was incredibly thorough. Perhaps needlessly thorough. Perhaps needlessly thorough. It implies that something happens in this movie in, like, the middle hour and a half of it. Yeah.

You know, not a very energetic movie, not a very deep movie. No. I mean, no. Ultimately, no. Talk. I brought it up in the plot description. I don't want to talk about it. How Juliet Benocious Penelope is styled in this movie. The Mary Magdalene at all. Right. Well, I mean, you can kind of see a gender thing that they're going for of the men in this movie at all times where the least possible amount of clothes. But she at every moment is wearing the most.

Troutes upon shrouds. Yeah. But also... Several bolts of fabric. The last scene where she's, you know, gathered the mall to string the bow. She's got the, you know, Virgin Mary,

you know, whatever. It's not a veil. It's a shroud, essentially. And, but she's got, like, full beat. Like, like, burgundy matte lipstick and just, like,

you know, full face. And, um... I'm not quite sure what they were going for. I also thought with the, you know, her looking like the Virgin Mary, that the, that was part of my occasional, consistent passion of the Christ vibes through all of this where like all of the scenes were like we're paying hyper close attention to these scars on his sort of like sun bronzed body or whatever. And, you know, the hyper focus on. you know, this up-close violence and blood and, you know, all of it. I'm just like, somebody... We also going to talk about the violence of this movie.

Somebody watched Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ before making this movie and was like, I would like that without a lot of the explicit religious overtones that were getting that movie... Except the violence in this movie is, like, the apparent $20 million that were spent on this movie and not, you know, filtered through various chains and Swiss bank accounts, is so bad. There's, like, not really gore. There's, like, blood-ledding.

But there is, I literally spotted in one scene in, well, in the final, like, showdown. One of the suitors, like, gets speared, and it's, like, high school theater where he tucks it under his arm. Rather than them doing some kind of special effect. his way over like the over a cliff or something like that. It looks so bad. They was not a fight choreographer. And it's like right there in the frame. The blood in this movie is almost exclusively of the type where Odysseus approaches somebody with a knife, you know, grabs their head.

Camera goes back to POV, you know, back onto Odysseus, and you see the blood spatter onto him. Like that's, the movie takes that tack over and over and over again. Again, all leading up to this massacre in a way that like, and again, I really, really, really worked hard to not compare this to Nolan's movie at every turn. But it was hard. And again, the, the, whatever, the brawl at the bow stringing thing is, I would say the weakest part of Nolan's movie, too. where I am not fully with the like detractors who say like no one can't film action, but like it's not the most satisfyingly filmed action scene, the way that that all is, you know, is carried out.

The saving grace of that scene to me is every shot of Pattinson sort of like scurrying behind the pillar and being like, kill that guy, kill you know. But otherwise, I thought the action, the fighting, was a little chaotic without a lot of, I don't really know what's going on most of the time in that scene. But at least in that movie, it does not, I'm trying to be fair. It does not lean on that kind of like, you know, the blood to feel important. Right.

And it does feel like. And I understand that the return is, like, that's the point of the return. The whole idea is that, like, look what this war has turned this man into. He has a bloodlust. He has a, you know, he has, this is second, this kind of violence is second nature to him now. And try as he might to not want to be this man. This is the man he is now or something. Well, but, like, of course it's just going to make the gratuitousness of the blood just more pronounced.

when those themes are not actually done very well. And also, the action choreo is also lacking. Yes. Yeah. Again, I want to be kind, but I feel like we should also talk about the performances from the non-famous people in this movie. Sure. Which, again, respectfully, I don't think that they're really tasked with much, but I do think the acting is noticeably part of the problem here. I don't think that this ensemble is...

Yeah, and I don't want to pick on anybody specifically. But, first of all, I will never not be amused if there's a character named Pissander. It's just... Homer had a sense of humor. I don't know what to say. Which one was that? Which one is Pissander? I don't remember. It's the Tom Rees-Herry's character, but of course...

Hold on. What does Tom Ries Harry's look like? IMDB. Oh, that's the one who looks like a Nazi. Okay. Who is Clayface?

In Clayface, I want to say. Okay. Oh, the blonde one. The blonde one. The blonde one who like really was drawing out those bath house vibes you made fun up. Yes. They literally go to like a steam bath where it's like so...

They do. So y'all are just fucking down here. Well, at one point they like, there's a shot of, two guys, him being one of them, Tom Rees-Harries, who is Clayface and Clayface, and another guy sort of like swanning about a little bit and just sort of like, all of the like semiotics of this thing are very much leaning towards like, are they gonna like fuck now? And then they like pan down to some guy they've killed incapacitated, whatever, but all you see are like his like

feet like sticking out from whatever and I'm just like okay this is basically like a threesome where like the one guy party too hard right like what's happening? What's going on? She's jeed out. Yeah. Yeah. Also in that like pseudo bathhouse scene, they're wearing more clothes than they wear in their normal day to day lives.

They have more of their bodies covered there than they do elsewhere. Okay. This is where we maybe get into. of the aesthetics are embarrassing in this movie. I maybe get it as a choice, but the way it is rendered, it looks cheap and bad that every clothing store on Ithaca went out of business, but every blanket store is, you know, thriving on Ithaca, because basically everybody is just like shrouded in layers of blankets, or they're wearing like blanket diaper, you know.

They were on the hunt for a sensible, uh, paneled leather gladiatorial skirt and you just can't find those on Ithaca anymore. You can't find anything to cover your chest. Right. You just only have these blankets to like Maria von Trapp a skirt for yourself. Now I'm imagining Maria von Trapp just sort of like,

making clothes for all of these people. So, but back to the subject of the acting, because I want to talk about Marwan Kanzari as, is it Antoninus? Was I pronouncing that wrong? Is it Antonius? No. Antenis. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Okay. Who was like, this is an actor who has like been in maybe more things than people realize he was in the old guard, him, and who's the Italian guy? Luca Marinelli were the two gay guys in the Old Guard. He was Jafar in live-action Aladdin. He was in the ill-fated Tom Cruise mummy as I don't even remember. He was in Black Adam.

So, like, a lot of ill-fated movies, to be clear, I couldn't tell whether I was not digging his performance or whether I thought the script kind of left him hanging a little bit because the script sort of walks you up to the doorstep of this idea that he and Penelope might have like some potential something going on, right? Like he at one point in a moment that really made me roll my eyes where he was like, I wish I'd never met you or whatever. And it's like, oh, so like, we're pulling that shit out. And like, sometimes the movie feels knowing enough to make him seem insidious with those kinds of things. Because earlier, he, like, he tries to play the card with Telemachus being like, if she chooses me, I will, you know, I will let you live. I'm the nice one. All of these guys will make your life hell if she chooses them.

Have her choose me. And like, I'll be the nice one to you. And Telemachus is like, you think you're better than all of these people. And then he, like, pouts out of the room. So most, and then later on, he, like, suggests but doesn't say it that, like, they kill Telemachus. And he's like, listen, nobody said anything about killing Telemachus. So, like, you can tell he's, you know, this is not a guy who's on the up and up. And then there are other parts of this movie that were supposed to really, like, buy.

the sincerity of him being in love with Penelope. And that her reaction to him getting murdered, like, she tells Telemachus not to kill him or whatever. And we're supposed to think, like, is there a part of her that sort of like, you know, doesn't want to see him die or whatever? And it's like, that'd be interesting if the movie decided to actually, you know, go there with it. But it kind of just sort of nibbles around the edges.

And it makes his character incredibly frustrating. And it made me very thankful that, again, comparing it to no one, but like that Nolan's movie just decided like, hey, hey Rob, go fucking nuts. Just like, do your thing. Do your thing, babe. And I don't know what, did you have similar problems with the Antonis character in this movie? Yeah. I mean, I think I had a problem with basically every character that wasn't Penelope, Gilemechus, and Odysseus. even Odysseus is kind of boring in this movie

O'Dosius is a huge problem for me Like it really we'll talk about that soon But like not to just give you the sweeping answer To a specific question But I do think on a character level All of the suitors including Antonus Kind of blend together into a soup And like the script is not really interested

In distinguishing them from each other To the point where it's like Antinus is kind of a wash for me in this movie. Yeah. And, you know, maybe that's where I'm at a deficiency because Antonus is so obviously villainous in Nolan's telling. You know, it is like the big bad villain.

They're all villainous, but like he is the big bad villain. And this is maybe going for some other stuff, but it's just like they're not really compelling to watch. That's the thing about Odysseus in this movie, I think, is that Ray Fines would probably have to work really hard to not be baseline compelling in anything. He has such presence. He has such presence. Truly, even in things that I don't like, even in performances of his that I don't like, that it's just like he kind of just has to show up in this movie and you're on board to a certain degree.

Can I tell you what I thought? Go ahead. No, I agree with you that he doesn't do enough with Odysseus. Sorry to cut you off. The thing that I not really realized, but the thought that I had, watching this movie, though, was I really prefer him in comedies, at least now, which isn't to say that I don't, you know, that I don't like him in dramas, but I think about like, and obviously, I'm saying this, you know, months are moved from the bone temple. I still am spiritually in that. Okay, I want to talk about the bone temple in comparison to this, too. Thank you for bringing that up. Put a pin in that for like half a second, though, because like with that accepted, um, And I think even Conclave, sort of like, there's a rye streak of humor in Conclave that I think works. But, like, I'm thinking of, like, what are the sort of latter-day finds performances that I love? It's Grand Budapest Hotel. It's Hail Caesar.

It's imbriuge. You know what I mean? It's, like, a bigger splash isn't a comedy. But, like, his character is so outrageous and sort of, you know, there's a lot of. Probably my favorite performance of his. It's, I mean, he's incredible in that. And so, and then the other thing that I thought of was, is like his Odysseus in this feels very directed by Ray Fines-coded. Because I thought of like his Coriolanus movie and his, what was the costume drama where that got a...

The Invisible Woman. The Invisible Woman. And it's just like, I maybe am good with directed by Ray Fines for, you know, for a while. I just don't think his, what appeals to him in a dramatic performance or in a dramatic film is necessarily what appeals to me. And what I love is when you sort of pair him with a director or directors with a very, very, established, you know, mood and style like Wes Anderson, like the Coens,

like Luca Guadino, and just sort of has him kind of go off and not really care about. And I think there is some of that in 28 years later and especially the Bone Temple that, you know, not exactly to a comedic degree, but like there is,

28 years later, And 28 years later, the Bone Temple, are two movies... He's giving a real Rob Pattinson performance in those two movies. Those are two movies that are very aware of their own sort of outrageousness in a way that I think really contributes to those movies. Which I think is why people, Gen Pop doesn't like those movies because they want you to just like stick to your franchise lane and they don't want you to do anything weird. I think a four-film marathon of all four 28 days, weeks, years movies would be really incredible for that particular reason, because you were going to get four very different movies. Yeah. Yeah.

I think, I thought, partly just because you see so much of his body, I thought so much about Bone Temple and 28 years while watching this, because it's. It's just like, it's kind of going for a similar Ray Fines vibe, but it's way more interesting in both of those movies than it is here. I mean, to the point where you get everything that you get here, it's just better and more interesting, including Ray Fines Hang and Dong. Wait, does he in Bone Temple? And I'm just, I don't remember it. Yes, he takes off his clothes and puts on his vinyl, baby. That's true. Let me hang out naked while I spin a record.

I mostly don't remember it because of the other guy. And, you know, I'll do apologies to Rafe there. I also think in Bone Temple, he, you know, oranges himself up with iodine. And in the return, it's just like... It's self-tanner. It's just bronze, bronze, bronze. The Bronze Age all exists on this man's skin. I really thought...

He went to L.A. Tan, aka La Tan. I really... I really thought all that stuff was really, really tedious. All the time spent him, you know, in the shack, him sort of like out in the fields talking with, you know, oh, the guy whose name you knew and I couldn't remember it. You mayas. You may as.

You're really anti-Leguizamo. You don't even want to remember the character names. That's not why. I'm also not anti-LeguZama. I'm just like, I'm giving you shit. I'm a little less enthused about that. There's other performances you like more in that movie. It's fine.

There's a lot to choose from. We'll maybe end the episode with our Odyssey Oscar journey. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about Benoche maybe. Let's talk about Benoche. Can we talk about just like how excited people were, to the degree that people were excited about this movie at all. People like us.

Yeah. That it was like, English patient reunion. Yeah. English patient reunion in a costume drama. I know, I know. And they're like, and they're Odysseus and Penelope. They don't have any, I mean, I suppose it's fraught in that there are other suitors, but come on. Well, I mean, the return is very much in towards Ray Fines.

Look at his body. Whereas in the English patient, where he is covered in badges for, like, things for, you know, bandages. Yeah. Not batches. He's a contestant on Drag Race UK. he's covered in badges. So the English patient is very, do not look at this man's body. Right. Yes.

Yes. True. Yeah. They'd also done all Weathering Heights together. So it's like they have a cinema history of. Was that for British TV? Is that Wethering Heights or was it a film? No, that was a film.

Okay. It's a Julia Pinoche in this, I think is, to the degree that Ray, is just like always entry-level compelling, impossible to be less than that. I think that is also true of Juliet Benoche in this movie. And she's, you know, it's very much the Penelope you would probably expect from Juliet Benoche. I think maybe Penelope is a more interesting character in this than Odysseus is. Yeah.

She has choices. She has, you know, conundrums. She has, like, she's got the more sort of, you know, what's she going to do kind of thing. She gets to be more theme forward, which is going to naturally interest me more than, like, what Odysseus is doing. And that's a ball that, and again, Nolan's not really, you know, taking cues from this movie, but that's a ball that Nolan and Anne Hathaway take and run with it. Yeah, yeah, because, like, there's, like, almost. You know, Hathaway's Penelope, incredible performance, is so, like, fraught that it's like pushing her towards psychosis. Like, when she goes off, it's almost like...

I want who this is! Yeah. What it is? But, like, it's impossible to look at the Odyssey from a modern lens and not absolutely immediately zero in on the Penelope character and a sort of modern reading of the of the poem through the lens of, you know, what would this character, what more, you know, could this character be experiencing that, you know, wouldn't have been as, you know, focused upon in that original, you know, telling. And I think that is, you know, It's only natural because, like, you look at the, you know, the Odyssey and you look at Penelope, and you just sort of get pissed on her behalf, right?

You know, her husband left her for all of this time. She's left to deal with these fucking assholes in her house. She's, you know, the original sort of, like, wife on phone, right? Where it's just sort of like, she's back at home while Odysseus is, like, doing all these fucking adventures and living with, you know, other women on islands for various amounts of time. And meanwhile, she's just like loom, loom, loom, loom, unthread, unfread. Do not shun her and her loom. Like one, I think like my favorite prop, the thing that I keep obsessing about with

the Odyssey and Penelope in general is the loom. Sure. I love a queen with a loom. You love a loom. I was kind of like, you know, a loom, that actually seems like a fun hobby. You know, we in the current moment are talking about we need hobbies that we're not trying to monetize or use for like posting or whatever.

I was like, should I get a loom? Looming seems really, like. Do you remember the movie Relanted with James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman? I would prefer to not, but I do. But do you remember how that whole movie like hinged upon a loom that could predict the future? Hell yeah. Yeah. Also, this season of House of the Dragon, it wasn't a loom, but it involved a girl sewing tapestries that predicted the future. So there's something to that, perhaps.

Wanted, a movie I really wanted to love, and instead I just sort of like appreciate as an insane object. Thank you, Gene. Thank you, Gene. So on the subject of Ray Fines and Julia Pinoche as a Best Picture reunion, I decided to do a game. We did for episode 400, I introduced a game of 20 questions for us, and that was fun, and that turned out to be really fun and a good time. So I decided to bring it back again. In that episode, the mystery films were all movies that were ranked 400th on various lists. In this, the mystery films are all going to be movies that reunited two actors from a previous Best Picture winner.

And so I will start you off with just giving you the decade that they are from. And then you have 20 questions to get them right. Can I ask a question before my 20? It won't count. It will not count. You said you're giving me the decade. Is it the decade of the film I'm guessing, or is it the decade of the best picture win? The decade of the film you are guessing. The decade of a mystery film.

Yes. Okay. All right. So your first one, and let me pull up the Wikipedia page so I can answer any questions you have about it. Okay, so your first decade is the 1970s. Okay, 1970s. So it's something

prior to the 70s. It could also be in the 70s, but we're... Who could be... Try to, like, use the questions and don't try and, like, outsmart. Sure, sure. Is their best picture win also in the 70s?

Yes. Okay. So that definitely, unless you're trying to be like The Godfather Part 2, which would be cheating. Well, it also just wouldn't be interesting. Yeah. Well, it would be interesting if you stumped me. Well, sure. So we have The Godfather and the Godfather Part 2. I don't think it's going to be one of those. Did the best picture winner win any Oscars for either of these reunited stars? Yes.

Is this Manhattan? No. Okay. So, it's not Annie Hall. Best Picture wins. So, there's the French connection. There's Patton. There's The Godfather.

The Godfather Part 2. Oh, no. there's uh okay so did it win a male acting Oscar did what win a male acting

the of the reunited star the movie that won best picture and won an Oscar for one of the reunited stars did it win a male acting Oscar yes okay so in the

1970s I guess it could be one of the godfathers. But that would be... Okay, so what else are we talking about? We're talking about... Theoretically could be all the president's men if Jason Robards is in something. Wait, no, that was Rocky.

That was not all the president's been. Did not win a male acting Oscar. Ah! Ah! Deer Hunter is 78, and that got Christopher Walken and Oscar. I'm going to need you to ask another question. Sorry, sorry, this is hard to do with questions. Okay. Was the reunited movie a Best Picture nominee?

It was, and I'm going to double check and make sure that I'm right, but I'm pretty sure that I am right. Yes. Okay. Best Picture win in 70s also got a male acting Oscar and the reunited movie was a best picture nominee. So, but if you had to look it up, it's not a best picture winner. Is that a question? No.

No, that's me using deductive logic. Okay. So it's not like the deer hunter and you're saying Robert De Niro and John Cazale. Is that a question? No. Okay. See, but when you get into Oscar trivia, it's, Harder to be like questions.

I know. I know. I'm sorry I'm not being fun at your game. No, that's okay. You have 15 questions remaining. Do both of the reunited stars have Oscars? Yes. Okay. Are both of the stars male? Yes. Okay. Competitive Oscars question.

Yes. Okay. Now I'm in like a knot of Oscar trivia that I know that the like obvious answer is not, is staring me right in the face and I just can't see it. 17. 77. Is one of them Robert De Niro? No. Okay.

So you have 11 remaining. Is one of them? Is one of them Marlon Brando? Yes. Okay. 10 remaining. Oh, it's Robert. It's Robert Duval.

It's Apocalypse Now. It is Apocalypse Now, correct. All right. So you got it on 11. Well done. Yes. Robert Duval, Marlon Brando, reunited from the Godfather in Apocalypse Now, 1979. All right.

Next one is from the 2000s, from the aughts. Okay. Was the best picture win from the 1990s? No. Was the Best Picture win from the 1980s? Yes. Okay. Is this a male and female pairing?

Yes. Okay. Best Picture win. And it's in the 2000s. So it's not like the Evening Star, which would be a really diabolical thing to do. Find a way to ask that as a question. I will confirm or deny. Is it the evening star?

Well, the evening star is 1997. Is the best picture win terms of endearment? No. Okay. Is... I'll ask the same question I asked before. Did either of these stars win an Oscar for that best picture winning movie? No.

Okay. I'm trying to think of Best Picture Wins. It's not going to be something like Chariots of Fire. There's no women in that movie. It's not going to be Amadeus, because I don't think you would be giving me a 2000s movie starring Meg Tilly or Christina Ebersole.

So I suppose you could do Christine Ebersole. The... Could be Rain Man, though I don't think. Valeria Galino would be the answer. What are the other 80s best picture ones? Do to do 19. Oh, out of Africa. Oh, is it out of Africa?

It is out of Africa. Lions for Lambs. It is Lions for Lambs. You got that in seven. Well done. All right. Your next mystery movie is from the 20 teens. 20 teens. Was this a best picture winner from... Was the original movie a best picture winner in the 90s? Uh, no.

Was it a best picture winner in the odds? No. Was it a best picture winner in the 80s? No. Was it a best picture winner in the 70s? No. Was it a best picture winner in the 20 teens? Yes.

Okay. So this is a quick turnaround of reuniting people. together. Did either of these This is a question I'll just keep asking. Did either of the reunited stars win an Oscar for that best picture

winning movie? No. Okay. So movies that won best picture but did not win acting Oscars. Spotlight Well, that doesn't actually mean someone could have won an acting Oscar and that's just not the people who are reunited.

So like it could be two people from La La Land but not Emma Stone. Correct. That's not a question, but yes. That's not a question. This is my deductive logic. Yes. Have one or both of these people won a competitive Oscar? Yes.

Okay. So, there's a lot of people in Birdman. There's a lot of people in Spotlight. Actually, no, I don't think anyone in Spotlight has a competitive Oscar from that cast. So roll that one out. Did the Best Picture-winning movie also win Best Director? Yes. Okay.

That's a good question for the 20 teens. Yes. I wouldn't ask that for like the 70s. This is also the thing of like more recent movies are harder to remember those Oscars years. Absolutely. Did this movie win five or more Oscars? Give me a second. Sorry, I should have already brought up this.

What was your question? Did this movie win? Five or more Oscars. No. Okay. So, it could be Birdman. It could be Moonlight. It could be Spotlight.

But I don't know who in Spotlight won competitive Oscars. And this person didn't win. So if it's Moonlight, it's not, Maharshala Ali. How many did Shape of Water? Shep of Water, I think, only got Thor. Is Shape of Water the Best Picture winner? No.

Okay. You're halfway there. You're 10 left. The movie is from the 20 teens. The Best Picture Win was from 20 teens. It won. Best director is the Best Picture winner, Birdman?

Yes. Okay. So, one of the reunited people didn't win their Oscar for. this movie. So Emma Stone is on the board. Emma Stone is Emma Stone

One of them has an Oscar, so is one of the people Emma Stone. Yes. Okay. So you've got Keaton, Amy Ryan, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Norton.

Who else? Emma Stone and have I named to this person yet? Yes. Okay. So I said Keaton, Amy Ryan, Reyes,

Norton. Emma Stone movie since Birdman that include those people. Oh, well, it would have to be post-Birdman. Was Emma Stone Oscar nominated for this movie? No.

Okay. Was this movie an Oscar nominee? No. Okay. That really limits it down because Emma Stone movies that did not get Oscar nominations. You have five questions remaining, by the way.

Is it, no, because Cruella won an Oscar. It's not Cruella. When the fuck was Gangster Squad? A question nobody can answer. Okay, okay. I know listeners are like screaming at what it is. It can't be Naomi. me wants.

It could always be Andrea Rysbrough at any moment. Never know when she's going to show up. There's not a lot of Norton movies, and I don't think it's Keaton. Is it Amy Ryan? No. For Remain.

Okay. Not a Best Picture nominated. I'm a Stone movie. Is it Aloha? No, three remain. Trying to think of Emma Stone movies I haven't seen. No, Aloha was Aloha, yeah, Aloha was after Birdman. Was Emma Stone Golden Globe nominated for this movie?

Yes. Okay. Two questions remain. Oh, God, what could this be? That she was Globe nominated for, but not Oscar nominated for. this is going to drive me crazy I'm going to get it wrong and it's going to drive me crazy

and I'm going to... I think you're going to get it. In two questions and my last question has to be the movie? I think you're going to ask a very good question. I believe in you. And it has to be a yes or no question.

I can't be like who did Emma Stone lose that globe to? Correct. Is it Battle of the Sexes? It is Battle of the Sexes. I got it. Question 19. I know listeners, we're absolutely screaming that.

Emma Stone and Andrea Rysborough in Battle of the Sexes. All right, one more. God damn it. I'm mad at how long that took me. This movie is from the 2020s. Was the original pairing a Best Picture winner from the aughts? No. 20 teens.

No. 90s. No. Wow. The 1970s. Yes. Okay. Are both of these performers competitive Oscar winners?

Yes. Okay. Is one of these performers Robert De Niro? Yes. Fuck. So who... I feel like I'm in a movie where they're trying to trace the call and they trace the first satellite way too quickly.

Where I'm just like, oh, this guy's... These guys are good. Is the 2020s movie a Best Picture nominee? No. No. Okay. De Niro in the 2020s, man. Is the 1970s movie that won Best Picture, the Deer Hunter?

Yes. Is the other performer Christopher Walken? Yes. Is this like dirty grandpa or something? No. Okay. Wait. phrase that question again

phrase it differently well you said is this dirty grandpa or something which like is an open-ended question is this a movie about horny old men can't answer because I haven't seen it okay

so I'll not count that as a question yeah well I mean it's it's both of them in a movie in the 2020s they're like this movie is not dirty grandpa that is your ninth question okay it's got to be in that vein. Is this a comedy? Yes. I'm willing to bet neither of us have seen this. So

what was that other movie called? Was it Dirty Grandpa that was like a COVID movie? That I'm trying to think of what the hell this movie was. Again, you've traced the satellites way faster than I thought. Is there a child on the poster of this movie? Yes. I know what this movie is. I just do not know the title and not with a gun to my head.

Would you get me to watch it? You have nine questions in order to work out what this title is, and I think you can do it. Does the title include a relative descriptor? Like, Grandpa, Dad. Okay, yes. Yes. Is Grandpa in the title? Yes.

Okay. Is it Grandpa's Boy? No, you're thinking of Grandma's Boy, which is an Adam Sandler versus Nick Swardson movie. Oh, Kill Me. Yeah. So that's 14, so you have six remaining. I know this is a COVID movie. It's not like getting even with Grandpa or Grandpa's Money.

It's the title, The Trouble with Grandpa. No. This is going to be so shitty. I know this movie and I just don't know what it's called. Five remain. Is the title possessive as in Grandpa Apostrophe S? No, but that's a really good vein of asking. And you have four questions remain.

Is the title the blank blank grandpa? Yes. Okay. Is the title the blank with Grandpa? Yes. Two remain. Two questions remain. Not the trouble with Grandpa.

The the ball jokes with Grandpa. The flatulence with Grandpa. The antics with Grandpa. This movie qualifies as elder abuse. Forcing Robert Teniro to do these type of movies is fucking elder abuse. How many questions do I have left?

Two. Two. Great. The blank with Grandpa. It's not the business with Grandpa. It's not the, it's a simple, it's not the trip with Grandpa. No, that was Steve Coogan and. Steve Coogan in five years.

Yeah. The trip to Grandpa. Okay. Okay, okay. I just have to say words. It's not like antics, but like, if I pulled up this word on thesaurus.com, would one of the words that would go in the thesaurus results be antics? I would be very surprised. You really have to like... The war with grandpa.

Is that a question? That is a question. Yes, that's correct. It's the war with grandpa on question 19. For getting fucking De Niro and the Deerunter that early, amazing. And getting it on the final question. Once again, a fun time had by all, and by all I mean me, with 20 questions. So we're going to keep doing this.

Hopefully our listeners, too. Yes, yes. Gary's, get back at us. Let us know if you like 20 questions. I think this version of putting you through torture is more fun than other versions of me putting you through torture. So, um, yeah, yeah, this is good. Okay.

What else do we have to say about the return? We didn't talk about Charlie Plummer. An actor I generally like, though I'm increasingly surprised with when and where I see him, because I would not have thought of him for this role where he basically looks like shirtless Kurt Cobain as to Lemaikos. Blonde people, asking blonde people to grow facial hair is always going to be a, a somewhat fraught prospect. Yeah.

And the longer the facial hair... Always Cobain-esque results. Well, or it's like Ewan McGregor as Obi-1 Canobi, you know, kind of thing too, where it's just sort of like... At some point, the like... The push broom thing, the sort of just like the push broom effect kind of has its way with you, where your facial hair just looks very much like straw coming out of, you know... your face. And again, I don't know if that necessarily like Deep Six's Charlie Plummer,

but it's one of those things where it's like, are you trying to sort of counteract the baby-facedness? Because like, in a world of baby-faced actors, Charlie Plummer's face is one of the babyest. Like, he really just looks- He's been 17 years old for a decade on screen. He's 27, actually. But yes. you're totally right. And so some of the facial hair in this sometimes makes it look like, oh, you're just sort of, you're trying really hard to make him look older or like more, you know, more grizzled.

Or is it intentionally trying to make it look like he's trying to sort of project, you know, a maturity that isn't there? I think that might be thinking about it a little. hard. Okay. Yeah. He is an interesting performer. I mean, we who are very pro-Lene-on-Pete,

are there negative Lain-on-Pete people, or did just no one see that movie? I think if you thought to see Lien-on-Pete, you were probably going to be... Pro, yeah. Well, although it's coming... Lean-on-Pete is the next film after Weekend? Right? No, 45 years was between those two. Thank you.

Okay. So 45 years, which I think... brought Andrew Hyatt into a more of, um, a little bit more of a mainstream. It's an Oscar nominee. It's a best picture nominee. So I do think there are probably people who's checked out lean on Pete and were a little

sort of like nonplussed by it. We're a little just sort of like, now why would, you know, he make that movie, which is very, because gay guys are like, can he just make another gay guy movie?

Well, right. It's just like two movies. There's no gay guys, including this one. It's like starring like Twink Central. Like, you know, yes. And not to try to sound like I'm intentionally, you know, against the grain, but like Weekend is probably my least favorite Andrew Hay movie at this point.

It's certainly the one I think about the least, but also I haven't seen it in so long that I should probably rewatch it before this new one, actually. The thing that that doesn't, it's not that it bugs me, but it's like, I do feel like the, the, the, the, the, the, that. the critical come down to earth of for all of us strangers, because initially there were some really, really, like, huge big praise for that movie. And then I think there was a wave of, like, this movie's not as good as people are saying. And I think that tide sort of pulled it down a little bit farther than it deserved to. And I think now that that that movie is a little bit slept on. And that remains... Its fans are still really loud. That movie's in the criteria.

collection. It's... Sure, but I just, again, and maybe I am sort of a victim of, you know, the social media circles that I am in or whatever, but I do feel like I see a lot of sort of reflexive pushback against that movie. And I think that movie is probably my favorite of the Andrew High movies. And this would actually be a really easy rewatch to do before TIF, before I see a long winter at Tith. I mean, I think we should probably, for multiple reasons, be doing that movie very soon. We can save that for an offline. Oh, yeah.

But anyway, so his new movie, I don't know why we're doing the Andrew High deep dive right now, but I, oh, lean on Pete. Because of Charlie Plummer. Because of Charlie Plummer, because of Lean on Pete. His new movie stars, again, my biological son. on Fred Heckenger, and is about a gay guy and his dad who go on a... Expedition to find their mother who's runoff into the wild. Right. His father...

It sounds very lean on Pete. Abin Mast Bacharach, except the character's gay in this, I think, I'm pretty sure. Evan Moss Backerach plays his father. Katrina Balfe plays his mother. It also stars DeFerro Wunatai from... reservation dogs, and the newly re-ubiquitous Kit Connor, who just got cast in the X-Men movie and is in several things. I feel like, because he's the one from Heart Stopper, but I feel like for a couple years, the Heart Stopper guys sort of like were on the Wayne, and now I feel

like he's going to be in Eldon Ring. He's going to be in, well, he was just in, warfare. Oh, that's part of it, is for whatever reason, my, like, Instagram algorithm has decided I want just all of the warfare press, press splits interviews where it's like... So weird. Will Polter and Kit Connor and Charles Melton sort of, like, goofing around and junket interviews or whatever. I don't know where that started, but, like, okay, fine by me. They're all very charming. Did you watch the Long Walk? I did.

Charlie Plummer cast perhaps atypically as the villain in that? I mean, as much as like... A very sort of stock Stephen King character, which is like the resident sort of psychopath. Like, he felt very like there's a character in the stand called The Kid, who was just this sort of lived... on the outskirts of society mentally, you know what I mean? Yeah. And only exists to, like, provoke, you know, psychopathically provoke the other characters. But yes.

The edge lord among the group. Yeah. That movie, I did not like, I do think that the cast is all pretty uniformly good. I like that movie, actually. Yes, David Johnson, yes. I love David Johnson. and love Cooper Hoffman. They love each other, apparently, and want to work together again.

That is so sweet to me. Yes. And Charlie Plummer's good in that movie. Speaking of Cooper Hoffman and Kit Connor, by the way, because Cooper Hoffman kept getting asked on red carpets. They say you're going to be Cyclops in the X-Men movie. And the one clip that I keep seeing where he's like, is that what they're saying? No.

Not like, cool. That, you know, I love X-Men. Free him if he was going to be. But he's not going to be It's going to be Kit Conner now Which is also why apparently the news broke today That Indy Navarretti is going to be in those movies And it's like, oh man

There was a big D23 news stuff last night, yeah Girl, there's got to be some Go somewhere out like Get the bag though, that's the thing Yeah, secure the bag, but like I don't know This is good, I think that's good. Again, I don't like that movie But like I still am like invested in her success

Well, this is success genuinely like this is success Sure. It's money and steady work, probably. Yeah. You see that performance, and is that the performer you want to see locked down into a franchise for a dozen movies? Or do you want to see what they can really do? I would be very surprised if this X-Men gets a dozen movies, because you're casting them so young that they're just going to be... I guess you could age with them.

I guess they have done that with the original. Well, whatever. I don't know. But when you have Florence Pugh showing up in Spider-Man because her Marvel contract is for like nine movies. Does she show up in Spider-Man? I still haven't seen it. I've heard that and I was like, this could equally be a joke as it could be real. No, it would make sense.

It would make sense, especially if they want to tie in Spider-Man into, but from what I'm understanding that the Tom Holland Spider-Man isn't in Doomsday. because my whole thing was after Spider-Man had that opening weekend. I'm like, if Spider-Man's in fucking Doomsday, get that clip out there now. Because Doomsday is struggling to drum up, you know, support right now. And, like, everybody loves Spider-Man. Everybody loves this particular Spider-Man. Well, but, like, you can take your six-year-old to see Spider-Man. That's part of the, like, popularity of Spider-Man.

Sure, but this particular one was, like, very lore-heavy. was, you know, this is the culmination of, you know, four Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and the whole thing is like, nobody remembers me, and I've got to, you know, get them back and whatnot. I'm excited to see it. It's not that I haven't seen it because I'm disinterested. I am maybe the last person who's going to see it to see it, because everybody did. Let's talk about the Odyssey in the current Oscar race. Hell fucking, yeah. Have we talked about the last? out of see it all on this podcast?

I don't know. We're both fans. I fucking love it. I think it's... I went out of state to see it in 70mm IMAX on opening weekend. I am seeing it in 70mmy imax on Monday. Beautiful. As we record this, so... Can I say one thing that's already annoying me and it might be surprising that it... Yes.

I'm saying this. Anne Hathaway is not a lead in that movie. Just because... There's not a lot going on in leading actress this year. It doesn't mean you can just be like, well. I mean, I think I would probably gun to my head agree with you that she is supporting in the movie. But I have seen less fraudulent category fraud. You know what I mean?

I think spiritually, she is, you know, at the center of what is important. about that movie. I think that's fair, but that doesn't make someone a protagonist. Well, she's a protagonist of the parts of the movie that happened in Ithaca, though. I would even argue that Tom Holland is the protagonist of that section. That's an argument that could be made. I don't know if I agree, but I think that's an argument that could be made. But yeah, I think, you know, if you were asked me to choose, I would put her in supporting.

But moving her into lead does increase the chances that Samantha Morton could get nominated. I might sound a little crazy here, but I do think that those two things are running independently. I don't think Anne Hathaway getting a supporting nomination is inhibitive of Samantha Morton. I think those are two very, very different narratives. I think that you're also talking about the biggest dog in the game, that it's like it's going to get as many acting nominations as. it possibly can. And I don't think, like, Robert Pattinson and John Leguizamo are even, like, eating each other's lunch there. I think, you know.

If I were to ask you right now, how many acting nominations is the Odyssey going to get? On mid-August, as I ask you this. Three. Three. All right. You don't have to say which ones. Three seems like the right conservative estimate. Yeah. I mean, like, Morton, the Samantha Morton nomination is going to happen or it's not independent of anyone else in that supporting race, I think.

I think her narrative is so interesting. If she gets out there in campaigns, like I think it's kind of a slam dunk in a way. Not to win, but to be nominated. Right now, supporting actress is very, very sort of unformed right now. As much as best actresses. And who knows, could get on the other side of the festivals and this all could be completely different conversation.

Which is why I love the festivals for that reason. Indeed. Indeed. But yeah, I think I think Nolan's The Odyssey is, I mean, people are very quick to be like, where do you slot it among all your no-ones? I'm like, ask me in a year, I don't know. Like, I can't begin to process it to that degree. You know what I mean? But, like, of the movies I've seen this year, I've not seen anything that has impressed me more on like both a visual but also on a storytelling level. I know that like there are people who are going to be always very quick to be like there was that one post I saw maybe a tweet, I can't remember, probably on Blue Sky though, where somebody was or maybe I heard it on a podcast. Regardless, this thing where Christopher Nolan is a dumb person's

favorite smart director and a smart person's favorite dumb director, like essentially that kind of a thing. And I think people... That's doing too much, but I can go with what they're saying. And I think people are very quick to sort of poo-poo the idea that Christopher Nolan had anything interesting to say with this movie. Call me a sucker. I do actually think he has something interesting to say with this movie. And... I mean, I think the truth of the time we live in and the hostile, global environment we live in, where everyone is at each other's throat. I do think just even the simple thing of we need to get back to common decency with one another in a way that doesn't ignore the violence, the real violence of the world.

I do think that, you know, is significant, and that's a movie that makes a billion dollars globally. I do think that that, you know, does matter. I also just think, like, there's a mind at work that is beyond, just sort of spectacle. And I think sometimes in an effort to distance themselves from the, and I'm using finger scare quotes here, the Nolan fanboy, who we can all agree, like, nobody wants to be associated with. In an effort to distance themselves from those people, I think sometimes people do a little too much in terms of like, you know, being like, to be clear, like Christopher Nolan doesn't make smart movies.

Or, like, to be clear, like, Christopher Nolan's no great screenwriter. And, you know, he's not very good at, you know, X, Y, and Z. And it's like, I don't necessarily think you need to be that. Go, go. And again, maybe, you know, people have their feelings and people can think whatever they want. I just think sometimes it feels like there's an effortfulness out there to be like, I'm not like those people. Like, I can criticize Christopher.

I don't want to push back on the idea of the Nolan bro being what it was 15 years ago. Because I do think that there has been an evolution just culturally. I think those people have moved on to other things. And I think that like those Nolan Bros maybe don't exist to the degree that they do anymore. I would say it's not that they don't exist anymore. It's that everybody is a Nolan bro about everything nowadays. Like, or not necessarily everybody is a Nolan bro, but everything has Nolan Bros. Like, everything that is possible to be liked is liked in that same way, which is unbearable.

Like, it is unsustainable to deal with. And I also think, you know, that idea of that type of very loud fan for this filmmaker in particular, getting hung up on that is to ignore the fact that his two most recent movies are maybe him responding to a lot of people calling him a fascist filmmaker. Right. You know, and I think he's very explicitly saying what his worldview is without actually going out there and making some direct statement like we expect all of our artists to do now. I think these movies speak very clearly about his politics and his view of the world. And I also feel like the Nolan is a fascist thing was a reactionary stance to, again, the fucking annoying Nolan fanboys during the Batman movies where you're like, all right, like, you know, all of these people are being so annoying. I hope you enjoy your fascist trilogy.

You know what I mean? Like Bruce Wayne and Batman are fascists in this movie. They like, whatever they like. They, you know, reconstituted the Patriot. Act in Gotham and y'er-la-da-da-da-da-da. And I think went a little bit too far in, you know, attributing that degree of, you know, worldview onto No-Nor or whatever, when I think ultimately, while Nolan plays in politics in those movies, I don't think he's necessarily advocating for anything that is, you know, that is being depicted in that movie in one way or another.

Well, and you look at a movie like Dunkirk, too, that I think. is about one of the other things that I think runs through Nolan's filmography, especially his later filmography, is the idea of collective effort and working together.

Yeah. That I think runs counter to the idea of like Nolan is... Listen, I, as much as anybody understand the comedic satisfaction in just calling a thing you don't like fascist,

because, like, who doesn't... I'll do that. You know what I mean? Just like, you know, such and such, you know, this men over six foot six are fascist. You know what I mean? Like, that kind of a thing. It's just like, there's a fascism of beauty, you know? But there's a point in which, like, saying it for the lulls then becomes an actual narrative that people pick up.

And then they sort of, like, ascribe themselves to it. And I'm just like, we can maybe step back. We can maybe step back a little bit from it. It's 2026. I don't want to always be the one perpetually pumping the brakes, but I feel like I'm pumping my own breaks here that, like, yes, I think it's true that to be out early and establish yourself early and be the movie that everyone spends a year either catching up to

or being part of the conversation with is the trend for the, Oscars right now, and that's part of the reason why I think obsession is going to do just fine this year. I do think that there is also the thing of you don't necessarily want to be the big dog this early in an Oscar race, because everybody's going to be looking for the other thing for the rest of the season to see what could take it down. And I do think that there is the potential for the Odyssey to be that. I think. that is true. It all depends on, I mean, this sounds very obvious, it all depends on what the movies are in that, you know, last quarter of the year. Because in a year where there are

smaller movies that can do the sort of like David versus Goliath thing, then yes, you do not want to be the favorite coming into the fall because then you are at very much risk of people being, you know, sort of over it and looking for an alternative by the end. That said, if the movies in the fourth quarter are not really particularly catching people and are not really, you know, that nothing is really hitting on that level, then all of a sudden it's just a like a lineup of movies that crash into the breakwall that is the Odyssey and just like don't measure up to it. And every movie that comes out, people are like, yeah, it's pretty good.

it's not as good as the Odyssey. And you end up with, you know, an Oppenheimer-esque sort of, you know, situation. My favorite thing about The Odyssey being the movie that it is and in the Oscar race is it does feel, like as modern as I think a lot of the movie is and its perspective is,

it does feel like the real, like, I don't want to use Gladiator as the example, but like the real throwback to like old Hollywood epics where it's like, the acting nominees for this could be like stand by people who have been in the industry for a long time. Like Anne Hathaway, Samantha Morton, John Leguizamo are like the Elizabeth Taylor, Anthony Quinn, Anne Baxter of these epic movies,

and those are the people that we're going to recognize for them. I feel like a real, like, nerdy throwback vibe around its position in the Oscar race. That feels very fun to me. Am I making any sense with that? No, you're totally making sense. And it makes me want to dig into the, like, supporting actor and actress nominees of the 1950s and 60s and sort of pick those people out. For, like, the greatest story ever told. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which I don't actually think a lot of those movies got a ton of acting nominations, but it feels like that, right? you know. One last thing because we haven't mentioned him at all. Do you think Matt Damon can win best actor for this? I think he can. I think he probably won't and it'll bum me out. Yeah. Like Matt Damon, who hasn't...

It's crazy to see you. Who has rarely been my favorite. I was going to say, you're usually on the other side of this. But the thing is, I think it's the best performance of his career. I agree with you. If it's only Challenger is Ripley. And I think it's, you know, he hasn't felt so laid back and at ease. He pushes absolutely nothing in this movie.

And that's part of why I think he's compelling. In the way that, you know, Ray Fine shows up in the return as, you know, very, very compelling performer and just, like, kind of relies on that. there's an intentionality to what Matt Damon is downplaying in The Odyssey that I think is really effective. Is there a particular actor you're seeing as like being the person Matt Damon can't beat? Or do you just think in general one of the, because like it is shaping up to be a pretty competitive best actor race. Well, there's all the whispers around Elsa. It's still kind of wait and see. there's all the whispers around Elsinor.

And I'm not backing off of the Tom Cruise thing until that movie doesn't go over well. I'm just not. Every time I get a text from somebody being like, people think Digger's going to be good, it looks awful. And I'm like, I know, but like... I think it looks... Sorry, sorry, In Uri-2 Apologists.

Well, there's a sort of... I don't know what the math phenomenon is, but the thing where, like, as much as it looks horrific, it can be great or bad. And there's, like, a huge valley in between where you know the movie is not going to hit. The movie is not going to hit anywhere in the middle. It's either going to be really, really bad or mind-blowingly. Like, I can't believe they pulled this off. And if it's the second one, then he's like, look the hell out. You know what I mean?

And I also think there's a world in which he could be singled out while people being like, well, the movie maybe doesn't hold on to its horses. But like Cruz is certainly giving, you know, X, Y, Z performance. I think the most likely scenario for that movie is people like us and Jen Pop are going to be negative on that. movie and the industry is on board. Like, that's what I think the most likely scenario is for that movie. I think that's a smart observation. There's also John Malcovic and

Wild Horse 9, which is getting some good buzz and who are some of the others? Gosling, I think, for Project Hail Mary is a contender to be nominated, but probably not to win. Who else do we have at the top of the... I'm trying to think I've just been

in the soup of what you call it. movies fantasy league pricing. So I'm like, wait a second. Like what, you know, what are we talking about? Like, there's stuff like Pedro Pascal and behemoth, if it happens. Or like John Totoro in Only Living Pickpocket in New York. Or, I mean, who knows?

Adam Driver and Paper Tiger. And there's some stuff. There's some stuff, right? Things are happening. And probably not Sebastian Stan and Fjord. That movie really needs to bounce back in a big way. Wait, bounce back from what? Explain to the listeners what you mean by bounce back?

I feel like since it's won the palm, people have been more and more down on it by the day. But this is only, we're only hearing this through like back channels because like it hasn't played another festival. Don't see that movie getting an acting nomination for anyone. Agreed, but again I have not heard anyone say anything different If they've seen the movie And I've heard the same things But we're still going by

Just sort of back channel shit And again, this could also be another case Where it's like people like us And Gen Pop are out on that movie And the industry is on board I think that that is But I think that's more In the case of like triangle of sadness

I also wonder if the recent narrative that Cannes is the new Oscar Kingmaker, that this might be a stress test on that, where... Which is a theory I've been bandying about for like two years now, but these narratives evolve all the time. There's a timestamp

on how long Can as the Kingmaker will last. Well, but also the other side of that is if people just sort of assume that, like, Can is the Kingmaker, then all of a sudden, Fjord is starting with like a 20-yard head start, you know what I mean? Where people are,

just automatically assuming it's great and you have to prove to them otherwise. And I think that's a real advantage for something like that. So it's going to be an interesting season. I also, I know I have heard some pushback on this through back channels, but I still am very, very high on Robert Pattinson in prime time. So sight unseen, haven't seen it, you know, whatever. But I'm hearing things in multiple directions. Mixed things. Multiple directions about that. But you watch that trailer and you're like, yeah, this is going to either hit for some people and it's going to be other people are saying that it's bad. Like, that's what the trailer gives.

I'm excited. I'm excited. Do we want to move on to the reverse IMDB game? Yes, we do give me half a second because I forgot we were doing reverse IMDB game and I picked a regular IMDB game. And you threw out the idea. Yes. And I did throw out the idea because I was excited to do reverse IMD game. We could just do a regular one if you just want to do a regular game. one. No, give me half a second.

I'll find someone. Okay. Found someone. All right. Reverse IMdb game. We have not done this in about two months. We are currently tied for points.

Yes. Rather than doing, giving the name first and then we have to guess the movies that are known for, we do it in the opposite direction where we one by one name movies in a performance known for. have to guess the winner. The point system works in reverse. Four, if you get it on the first guess, three, two, and then one.

Yes. Currently, we are tied 14 to 14. We still have not decided how high the scoring will go or what happens when somebody reaches that peak. I'm fine living in the mystery right now. We'll see how it's like driving a car

past the needle when the needle's below empty and you're just like all right baby let's see how far we can take this um all right do you want to or no you're you're the captain of this episode you tell me uh i'll give to you first why not all right uh this performer they're known for of four films i'm going to start you with gosford park oh ho ho well everybody on Gosford Park has that movie and they're known for. So I want to rule out people whose career would probably rule that out. Who would that be in that cast? Like, Helen Mirren probably has four movies she's better known for than Gosford Park,

even though that was an Oscar nomination for her. that movie though. Right. Kristen Scott Thomas is in that movie and she was in the English patient, so maybe you decided to get thematic. Then you go down the cast and it's like, Kelly McDonald, Jeremy Northam, Bob Balaban, Ryan Philippi. I'm going to start by saying Kelly McDonald. That is incorrect.

Okay. Your next movie is four weddings and a funeral. Okay. Notice how I started with two giant ensembles. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, now I am going to guess Kristen Scott Thomas because she's in the... All right.

I thought I could maybe fool you, but it's Kristen Scott Thomas. Okay. So what do I get? Three points? Three points. All right. For you... What were her other two, by the way?

Her other two were the English patient and only God forgive. Sure. Well, there you go. Okay. For you, I'm going to start with Fantastic Four First Steps. Okay, so the recent Fantastic Four. Yes. Which is obviously the thing you start for me because I did not see. Yeah. There's Pedro Pascall. There's Vanessa Kirby. There's Joseph Quinn, Eben Moss-Bacarach. I kind of feel like you would not. pick that movie. You would not pick someone who was in the Fantastic Four. Though we did mention Evan Moss-Backerech as being in the new Andrew Hay. And that is the only thing giving me pause. Plus, I don't know anyone else outside of the four of them.

Wild that I can even remember the four of them. I'm impressed by that, yeah. Who was the villain in that? damn movie. Damn movie. I do think it could show up for anyone but Pedro Pascal. I feel like he would have things in his known for before that. So I'll say Eben Moss Bacharach.

Good guess, but no. Okay. Your second film is The Creator. Do you remember The Creator? The Creator, Oscar nominee with John David Washington, and Alice and Janney conceivable that Alice and Janie is in that movie

Um The lead I mean there's a child in that movie I don't think you would give me a child Um Is it like Alice Wu is in that movie Um Who's the lead woman of that movie

Name a woman I'll just For a dollar It's not Alice and Janney Um Alice and Janie would not have those two movies in her known for. That would be crazy. But I can't remember. It's not...

Vanessa Kirby is not in that movie. I guess I'll just say Joseph Quinn. Not Joseph Quinn. Okay. So your third film is The Green Knight. Dev Fetel is not in the creator. I don't think that this would be Joel Edgerton. I don't think it would be Alicia V. Kander. Is Sarita Chowdhury in those other movies? You're just running down the Green Night cast is making me want to watch the Green Night again.

Watch it on Christmas. It's not going to be Barry Keogan. I feel like I would know if he would. was in the Fantastic Four movies. This is really tough. It is definitely tougher than the one you gave me, and I feel that. And I don't know. I'm not getting really any indication of how you got here.

Like what, like, Kristen Scott Thomas, I shouldn't have done that. It was so obvious how I got there. My strategy for reverse IMDB game is I don't go. through channels. I just pick somebody at random. Sure. I mean, I have to just... It could be Ralph Inison. Is it Ralph Ineson?

It is Ralph Ineson. Very good. Good job. The Witch was going to be the fourth one. So you get two points. I get three points. I am now ahead 17 to 16 and... We go on.

I just like knew that like a bull it. That's so crazy. I know we've recently done... Well, no, it's not. Through deductive logic, like, nobody else would make sense to have those movies and they're known for in the cast of the Green Night.

He was, you were right that he's the villain in Fantastic Four First Steps. He's Galactus. And he's a general in the creator. If you say so. Yeah, I do. I do say so. All right. All right, you're beating me by a point.

I sure am. All right, that is our episode. If you want more This Had Oscar Buzz, you should check this out on Tumblr at ThisHadoscorbuzz.com, on Instagram at ThisHad Oscar Buzz and on Patreon at Patreon. On Patreon. Joe, where can the listeners find more of you? I'm on Letterboxed and Blue Sky at Joe Reed, read spelled R-E-I-D. I am also at Vulture, doing vulture-y things, including the movie Fantasy League and Cinematrix and Awardsy stuff. And come read my stuff over there.

You can find me on Letterbox and Blue Sky at Christy File. That's F. E.I.L. We would like to, as always, thank Kyle Cummings for his fantastic artwork. David and Zolson Gabby's for the technical guidance when we need it because we're dumb. And Taylor Cole for a theme music. Please remember to rate, like, and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcast. Five-star review in particular really helps us out with Apple Podcast visibility. So once you've finished your shopping at the Ithaca blanket store for your new diaper,

uh, throw us the five-star review. That's all for this week. We hope you'll be back next week for more. buzz.