(upbeat music) - So hello and welcome to the Popcorn Counter here at the Two Real Cinema Club. I am James Rosica. - And I am André Florenti. - And well, we're largely keeping our heads down at the Popcorn Counter this week. Having watched two conspiracy movies back to back, I'm now worried that everybody is either watching me or filming me for the Infowars Style YouTube channel. Or maybe it's just the government listening in through Siri. I've just been a little bit more paranoid than usual. - I think my mustache keeps us safe. (laughing) - Just the kind of flawless disguise that nobody could possibly see that with. - You're putting a mustache, it's new identity. (laughing) - The problem with mustache is that it does present problems when you're eating popcorn, or at least when you're grazing popcorn straight out. If you have a drink in one hand and you can only eat popcorn by putting your face into the bucket, that's when you run into troubles. - Yeah, well you get a second taste of everything though. - It's like. (laughing) - So, the golden age of the conspiracy thriller was the 1970s. 'Cause we've done it before, three days of the combo. - Yeah. - Which we watched last year. Sydney Pollock, 1975. Well, not quite the conspiracy thriller, but one of the first ones always comes to mind. And I'm always guessing that the reason that conspiracy thrillers were such a big thing during the 1970s was just because of Watergate. - Yeah. - I mean, it seems incredible now, given current political events, that Watergate was such a sea change. Because these days, I feel like we can't really trust politicians to do anything. Somebody who was recently in the White House has now been found guilty of 34 different felonies with more court cases to come. So, it makes Watergate seem a little bit insignificant by comparison, but I suppose at the time, kind of, 'cause Watergate was coming out in 72 to 74, something like that. Was it 1972, I think, when the Watergate hotel was raided. - Yeah, so he was reelected in '72. Yeah, 'til the story starts coming out over those two years, yeah. - 1970. - And following that, there's a great long list of conspiracy thrillers that kind of respond to that notion. So, all the president's men, which came out soon after 1976, but also things like the conversation. - Yeah. - The Francis Ford Coppola film, 1974, the Parallax view. - Which I've never seen. I think you love that film, is that right? - No, I have never seen that film either since that's, which is, that's Warren Beatty, isn't it? - Yeah. - Alan J. Packula, also director of all the president's men. - Yeah, yeah. - And he also, but, you see, I think there is a strain of conspiracy thrillers that arise even before Watergate. Alan J. Packula made Clute in 1971, which is the Jane Fonda kind of thriller. And that precedes Watergate. Things like the Manchurian candidate, I mean, John Frankenstein, I made that in the '60s, just 1962, is it? - Yes, not that. Who was it, who we made it? Was it Gus Van Zan or John Demi? - It's Jonathan Demi. - It's Jonathan Demi. - Yeah, we made it in 2004 with Denzel, Washington. Have you seen the remake? Have you seen the 2004 version? - I really don't want to, I can't imagine. - You know, actually it's pretty good, it's not bad. - The original's just, perfect though, it's so good. - I think the remake, not quite as good as the original, but it's actually still a very respectable film. Good, good fun. No, I wouldn't avoid it. - Okay. - I was trying to look through, I like other potential conspiracy thrillers. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, have you seen the 1978 version of that? - I had, oh boy, I had the book. I had one of those, it was, now they call it a graphic novel or whatever, but they had taken images from the film and put in little bits of dialogue and little bits of, you know, expositionary like boxes or bubbles. I loved it, never saw the movie. - Oh, have you not seen the movie? Oh, the movie is fantastic. I would love to see that book. That was the real thing in the '70s. I remember being far too young to watch Alien, but being able to flick through the, like the graphic novel version using stills from the movie in the bookshop, but they're not quite having the bravery to buy the book. But, and I must say, I think as far as Alien goes, the book is more frightening than the film, insofar as it really, really lingers on the glorious bits and it gives you like a freeze frame of, you know, every worst possible moment of the movie, whereas in the real film, you know, it flashes by quickly. Even, I kind of, I put a video drone from 1983 in this same category that, you know, that film could possibly belong in the late '70s. It still has kind of that kind of grungy '70s feel. Marathon Man, 1976. So there's, I've got a big list of these kind of 1970s conspiracy movies. I guess Chinatown Counts, the China Syndrome, 1979, blow out the Bryan de Palma film from 1981, this notion of, you know, authority lying to you, politics being a place where you cannot trust anyone. The, you know, the clever man standing on his own. It was just everywhere in the 1970s. It's odd because it seems like we're in a time that is just ripe for more conspiracy films, but the conspiracies have become so mainstreamed that they're almost reality. Some people are just taking them as reality. You don't need to see the film because the conspiracy is like playing out before your very eyes online and in videos and in texts and tweets and stuff. It's very strange. - I think you're exactly right. So we are recording this. I think it's last week or the week before. It was an attempted assassination of Donald Trump. - Yeah. - Resulted in the death of its quarry compatories. And I think who's bystander, who's murdered by the assassin. And as soon as I read that story online, I was already seeing conspiratorial takes on it. - Yeah. - It's not like there was any time for people to start getting their thoughts together and deciding, oh, maybe it was this person. It did that person. It's like it's the automatic reaction now to any news like that is to dive deep into conspiracy. It's just the natural reflex. - I think we live in an odd time because technology could do one or two very opposite things. It could actually make conspiracies a la deep, deep fakes easier to produce or, you know, everything's on video. Everything's recorded these days. You should be able to dispel conspiracies very easily. So it's just that we're kind of in this very, very limbo era area. And almost purgatory of like, we're going to see lots of conspiracies, but we should also be able to dispel them pretty quickly. And yet we're right in between, it's a mess. - I feel like we're still at the moment where I can generally tell when an AI manipulated video has been AI manipulated. - No, yeah. - But, you know, when it can be done so well that I can't tell, well, I won't be able to tell. Maybe it's already being done anyway and I can't tell. - It's only, you know, it's going to be a matter of it's weeks and months, isn't it, rather than years and decades when we really won't be able to trust anything that we see at all. I was scratching my head trying to think of contemporary conspiracy films. And they do exist, although maybe they have less political content than they did in the 1970s. - One of my favourite recent conspiracy films is Zootopia, the Disney animation from 2016, which is, I get kind of, it's a little bit like Chinatown for 11 year olds, or kind of Raymond Chandler for preschoolers. It's very conspiratorial, though. There is like, you know, a big city-wide conspiracy aiming to destabilize the whole of society. It goes to some, you know, pretty dark themes Zootopia. And it's a terrific, very well-made film. But it's a proper conspiracy film. If they didn't have cute animals in it, you could easily remake a similar story, you know, as a neo-dwar and it would work perfectly well. - Yeah. - I can't yet unsee civil war. - Oh. - Which I think is a conspiratorial film. Although you don't really get much of the, one of the problems I had with that film is that you didn't really see any reasons why people were doing what they were doing wasn't very clear. And I think I didn't like that in the film, but maybe that's the essence of conspiracy. People are just doing it to entertain themselves. We're just to confuse other people or just start rumors and bad stories. So that one was a hard one for me. And we just did watch that. Contagion, what's that, that's another, we were talking a little bit about Aaron Brockovich in the last podcast, I guess. That's a really good film. That's probably 2006, '7, somewhere there, I think. - Something like that. - Six to 10, anyway, somewhere there. Which I think it's sort of an explanation story. They're trying to figure out what caused this and what can prevent it. But it's Jude Law's character who's really into conspiracies. And he's walking around in that little dome costume where he's not gonna catch this disease. I love that. But he's like an early sort of blogger. This is, I mean, I think it was a very cutting edge film in the sense that it really predicted both epidemics and also how people in the future might report on them or miss report on them. So I thought that was a really good film. That's the 2000s. And then I really see a lot of merit in JFK. I'm not a big Oliver Stone fan, but that whole assassination is still very suspicious. And we don't really have good answers about that. So I think that's probably '94. '91, I think I had to look it up. Yeah, JFK in 1991. Okay, yeah. So that's not the '70s by any means. But Oliver Stone certainly steeped in '70s films and even probably has a few credits that date back that far. So I think that was probably a project that took him a long time to put together. And I think the craft in JFK is absolutely outstanding. So it's a remarkable bit of cinema. Exactly. I wonder whether these days, don't people feel the conspiratorial thinking in JFK's. So it's too over the top. And it tends to undermine the underlying message of the film. I have not seen it since 1991. It's interesting to watch it again. To see how it stands up with a modern eye. I would put, and I know you never see these films, these Cape Pictures, but Captain America on the Winter Soldier, which is the 2014 Marvel film Captain America II, which is very much a conspiratorial film in that 1970s mold to the extent that they cast Robert Redford as the guy behind the conspiracy, spoiler spoilers, as a deliberate nod to three days of the Condor and all the president's man. So I guess once you have the industry power to be able to cast people who cast back to these original 70s thrillers, you've got all the elements there, you've got all the ingredients. Brilliant. Yeah, it really works as a conspiracy movie. And I guess like the born films, which they're still making until 2016, I think those are all broadly conspiratorial, aren't they? There is about uncovering a truth and finding out who's really pulling the levers behind the curtain. And sort of extra governmental activities and authorities agencies, yeah. I wonder whether with all these conspiracy, I can't wait, I've said to conspiracy so many times, I can't say it now, with all these conspiracy movies, I wonder whether somehow they are they subverting their own thesis? If you see enough films that tell you, the government is to blame, dark forces are working against you, everyone is out to get you. If you see enough films that have that same message, do you start to become completely immune to it? Does conspiracy end up becoming so much the fuel in the story engine that you stop seeing in the real world, that it actually discourages you from looking for conspiracies in day-to-day life? - Rhetorical question? - Oh no, I'm always interested in you all. (laughing) - No, I'm on the spot. - You don't wanna talk too loudly though. I like your point, yes, it's overload, right? You've got so much of it now that you can't believe any of it. - Yeah, or is that just what they want you to think? - Yeah, they mean they want us to think that it's all reality so that it's possible and it sort of gives explanations for things. One might make the argument that religion is conspiracy. They want us to believe certain stories. I think for me, it's just like a gradient away from reality. That's the whole thing is that it generally conspiracies, the good ones are quite believable. So from a storytelling perspective, it's great storytelling because it's right on the line. You can use articles right out of the headlines. You can use recent history to come up with something that's just a little bit counter to what we know that's interesting, that's fictional, and it just makes for good storytelling material, I think. - Yeah, it's close to reality, but it's just enough not reality to actually entertain us and also work our minds a little bit and see what possibilities are. So in some ways, I like them, but I like them as stories. So as I think I'm gonna go back and agree with you, then if you get overloaded with it, you start to see it as reality, you're not even thinking about it as a valid conspiracy or a valid theory for that matter. I think there's some value in that as a narrative storytelling. I think there's some value in that. But for me, I'm just always gonna look at it as just fiction-y enough. Did I say fiction-y? - Fiction is the word to say on this podcast. - Conspiratorial, conspiracy, fiction-y. - One of those kind of little techniques that they taught us at film school was, if you want to grow a starting story is just with the words, what if, isn't it? And that's exactly how you can come up with a conspiracy story. It's exactly that it's a distillation of what if, isn't it? What if everything you saw around you was just what it is, but the strings were being pulled by this guy or there was an underlying truth, which was this. It lends itself to cinematic storytelling. I can't believe your religion comics. I wrote here in my notes. I was trying to say that, you know, it's a bit glib to say that conspiracy throws were bigger than the '70s because of Watergate, because I think the human magnetism for conspiracy, the way that we are drawn to conspiracies is deeper than that. I wonder whether, you know, conspiratorial thinking, it's like it is a fundamental of human nature. It's, and I've written here in my notes, the Bible is a conspiracy story. The Bible is full of hidden secrets, isn't it? Great powers, plotting overhead, ordinary people who learn incredible things, and then they're dismissed or threatened by those who are in power, you know, Adam, Noah, Moses. You know, people who uncover conspiracies and then pay the price, you know. So if, you know, when you're growing up, you're told these conspiracy court stories in church every week, it just drills its way into your, into your fundament, doesn't it? Yeah. And I was wondering, is it something, is it something, you know, more human, even than that? Is it not that we love conspiracy theories because the Bible is a conspiracy theory, and that's the beginning of so many stories. Is it because, is the Bible a conspiracy story? Because, is it something anthropological about this? That, you know, humans have evolved from primates that, you know, lived in trees, in social groups of 40 to 80. You know, and in that kind of situation, if you become an outcast, if you are isolated by the group, that's tremendously dangerous. You know, you have to be in with the group, otherwise, you know, you will be shunned and then you get eaten by a leopard or you don't find enough food or nobody grooms you and then you die from some kind of tick that's bitten you. So, you have to fit in. So there is a fear of not fitting in, you know, not fitting in or thinking the other thing brings danger with it. But, but maybe this is the danger which will save your, your social group. So I, I wonder whether there's, you know, actually the, the thing that makes us human is what makes us susceptible to conspiracy theories and conspiracy stories. That's how humans think, it's how our brains work. - There is community in conspiracy. I think that's what it comes down to. - That's good, is that a lyric? - No. - It should be. - Well, I say stupid things like fictiony all the time. So let me say something sounds kind of smart once in a while. One other thing that I would add is that I think conspiracy and science fiction are kind of close cousins. I think conspiracy, you're very often taking headlines or, you know, current events and just giving them a wrinkle into the future, maybe the near future to make them a bit more interesting, maybe not as believable. I think science fiction writers, good science fiction writers can really predict the future by just examining what's happening right now and then just booting all that right into the future hundred years, 200 years, a thousand years, whatever. And then giving an alternate view of reality. And I think they're kind of close cousins in that way. And in some ways, you know, I think we also, as humans, don't always like to accept reality. So conspiracies do give us sort of a haven to think, oh, well, maybe it's not this way after all. Maybe it's actually a conspiracy that's the reality. - Ah, I wrote my list here of some of my favorite conspiracy movies and down here near the bottom, not because it deserves to be at the bottom, it deserves to be near the top. They live 1988, John Carpenter film. Have you seen that? - No, no, I don't remember. - No, it's a glorious sci-fi conspiracy theory film where the lead finds these sunglasses. And if you put your sunglasses on, it reveals the real truth of what's happening around you. Which is that aliens have been portrayed in the world. Anyway, sunglasses off and people appear normal, but sunglasses on, they're aliens. - Oh, that's great. - It's just fantastic. It's an utterly ludicrous, stupid, hilarious film, but also tremendously entertaining. Yeah, you've got to watch "They Live". - And not that far from the matrix we looked at last year. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, so much less sophisticated take on the same idea. - Yeah, yeah. - I think one of the best things about "They Live" is that I think John Carpenter was really struggling to get it up to full feature length. So it features like, I think there's a 14 minute fist fight towards the end of the film. These two characters just fight sort of mano-a-mano for like, for way, way, way too long. So long that it kind of becomes hilarious. - Just like the matrix. - Just like the matrix. - Just like the matrix. - Okay, okay. I think we better move into the cinema actually, 'cause I think that guy over there never humbled us. - Yeah, yeah, quiet. - Let's not get into a 14 minute fight. - Actually, I don't, I don't owe paid money for it. - Well, we'll take money for it. - I'll take the most of it, I'll take the most of it. - If you got a money, that's what you say. - Take it. 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