The Pink Smoke podcast
Ep. 150 Toronto International Film Festival 2024 Wrap Up
Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke
John Cribbs & Christopher Funderburg are back with their rundown of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival! From the highest highs (Hard Truths) to the lowest lows (It Doesn’t Get Any Better than This) and the poutine in between, they take a look at the state of cinema as explicated by one of the world’s premiere film festivals.
They discuss new works by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Mike Leigh, Mike Flanagan, Tomas Alfredson, Thomas Vinterberg, Ron Howard and so much more - they discuss not just the highlights, but every single goddamn film they saw on their final trip to the Queen City for the festival!
Support our Patreon: www.patreon.com/thepinksmoke
The Pink Smoke site: www.thepinksmoke.com
The Pink Smoke on X: twitter.com/thepinksmoke
Christopher Funderburg on X: twitter.com/cfunderburg
John Cribbs on X: twitter.com/TheLastMachine
Intro music: Unleash the Bastards / “Tea for Two” Outro music: Marcus Pinn / “Vegas”
- Duration:
- 2h 44m
- Broadcast on:
- 15 Sep 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
(upbeat music) - Yeah, once you start us off, Thunderbird. - How? What am I doing to start this off? Since when do I start things off, John Cribbs? This is the TIFF 2024 Toronto International Film Festival review, wrap up, retrospective, everything it needs to be and more. I'm here with my constant chum, John Cribbs, my cohort, my colleague to discuss what is in John's bold opinion, which I'm sure he's going to go on the record for, the best crop of films he has ever seen in his entire life. This is an adversarial podcast 'cause I disagree with that. I thought this was the very worst slate of films I have ever seen in Toronto's history. John thinks it was the best. It's like firing line. Go, John, defend your position. Night bitch was a 10 out of 10 were the words you said walking out of it. Oh man, I've just, I've not looked forward to sitting down and doing this because I don't want to be negative. You know, I really don't on this podcast. It's no fun talking about movies you don't like or the future of films not being something that you are enthusiastic and optimistic for. And you know, just to kind of get this out of the way, I mean, this festival was not a great experience for a lot of reasons that we'll get into, but I would just say for the listener, if you know, you came in here thinking like, oh, I can't wait to hear about all the great things about the substance and the shrouds and all these movies. Baby skipped this one, maybe it's not for you. (laughing) - Well, that's, yeah, yeah, that's a good... This year more than any other year when films have been praised coming out of it, it has felt like not just that I disagree with it 'cause there's definitely been tons of films that get praised, that I don't think are good films or whatever. It felt like, what's the word I'm looking for? Untrue is not the word, but like a zombified critical sense that something must be good, that there must be something we can give a good review to. And it's not that we didn't see good films at this festival. I saw what will almost definitely be my favorite film of the year here, but there is something that feels like zombified apparatus, the reports of good films, even just any film writing feels like Prove there or something. It feels like propaganda apparatus that has zombified and exists beyond the actual life of something. Just that there's a machine that's gonna keep writing about movies and talking about movies, even after there's no point in doing it, you know? And for me, this was really the theme of this festival. It's funny because you and I were like, "Maybe this'll be the last, not maybe." Like I was like, "This'll be the last time we go to TIFF. "We've been going for 20 years. "Let's go on different adventures." It hasn't been what it was. And there was, I felt in the back of my head like, "I bet if we go in and this is a great experience, "we talk ourselves into it." This was literally the opposite. It was a real like, so long, stink town kind of experience. Like, there's no reason to come back to TIFF if this is what it is now. But at the same time, I also observing the festival, I feel like it's become more audience, like TIFF, Toronto's regular audience oriented festival. And maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe that's just what this festival is now, but it's certainly not anything approaching it as like, you know, from the industry perspective that we have for the beginning that we needed to come back to. And we're not gonna go deep into that stuff 'cause we're gonna record an episode later tonight with Marcus Penn talking about just 20 years of Toronto or reminisce us on the festival, what it was and what's become. So this isn't really a retrospective on the festival and our relationship to it. - It's important to bring that up. - Yeah. - It is because part of the reason that this was such a disappointing experience was because I came away from it thinking, is it me, you know, like, am I watching films the wrong way? Am I not the same, young, hungry, appreciator of cinema that I once was? Am I unable to have a good time at the Toronto Film Festival anymore? Is it my fault? Or is it that the festival has changed in some sort of a better way? - Or is there something wrong with cinema itself? - Yeah. - Is there something wrong with cinema now? And I think those are the three options. I know exactly what you mean. When we were watching "Shadow Strays", the Timo Tajanto movie, which is a perfectly good movie, in some objective way, I, you know, as you well know, half an hour before it was over, I just walked out and sat in the lobby and stared off into space because, and it wasn't even a bad movie, I just felt like I don't have it in me anymore to watch a movie like that. It just, it's not interesting to me anymore. But I was asking, as I'm sitting there, the same question, maybe it's not cinema that's dead, but that I'm dead to cinema. You know what I mean, that maybe that movie is fine. And if you're 28, you'll have the reaction that some of the people in the audience did there. Although I think, I really do think there's a lot more of people convincing themselves to like things than I've ever experienced in the past. - For sure. I think it's significant that you said, you know, people having this kind of zompified rudimentary kind of response to things. It's true because even at a regular Toronto Film Festival, you'll see a terrible fucking movie, but it will be great, you know? You'll have like your worst film in the festival and talk about it for days. Like, can you believe how bad that movie was? I can't believe they did this. I can't believe they did that, you know? It's a fun time. I feel like there wasn't even a worst film this year, you know? There wasn't even something you could get excited about being bad. Everything just like achieved a very similar middle ground of nah, nah. - Yeah, well, that's what I wanna talk is there. I do think there's something wrong with cinema. I do, and the reason I bring it up is because I know that maybe I'm dead to cinema, right? The reason I bring that up at the beginning is because that's going to be the really comforting perspective to believers, right? God isn't dead. God isn't a falsehood. God is dead inside that guy, right? He's lost and he's sad. He's lost his way. I'm a true believer, it's still alive in me. Kind of thing, right? That's the comforting perspective to believers. So I wanna get that out of the way that you and I thought about this, that I definitely sat there thinking, is the problem me, you know? And doing the principal skinner, is it the kids that are, you know, is it, you know, no, it's the kids that are wrong kind of thing. That, then, you know, maybe I'm out of touch. But I do think there's something wrong. And a lot of what this episode is going to be is what's wrong, how do we articulate it, what's happening, how do we know something's wrong? Does our sort of years, I hesitate to say wisdom, but years of watching film give us some sense of where things are coming and where they're going from, right, and sort of what's going on with it, what's happening here, you know? Because it's, you know, the festival was not great, you know, in a lot of different ways, but I don't think it was a bad festival. I sort of think the badness of the festival is in some ways indicative of the larger problems in film right now, that I think everybody's hyper aware of and trying to contend with in one way or the other, you know, that COVID shutting down theaters and switching all of the models to streaming and screwing everything up that this was a big blow. It might not have destroyed it, but it's certainly, you know, like a tanker that gets a dent in the side and is now capable of collapsing. It's sort of the structural blow to the structural integrity of it, but I'm not sure it's just industry structure that we're talking about. - Yeah, but two things I feel like I need to get out of the way before we get into the movies is that usually, you know, when we stay for like the length of the festival, when we go, you know, the festival starts on a Thursday and we stay well into the next week, after the weekend, and certainly by Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week, like it feels almost empty, you know, it feels like-- - It clears out. - It clears out, it feels like it because all, you know, the big movies that play out, the big premieres and a lot of the hot shots, you know, take off back to their jobs or whatever. And it's just a stragglers left there. And it's a real feeling of like a discount call. - Those of us who have eschewed work, thumbed our nose at productivity. The Bartleby Scriveners of the world remain. - We stay. So there's always that kind of big shift, you know, after the weekend. And this year, Thursday, the first day, first day of movies felt like the Tuesday or the Wednesday. - It was fucking weird. - It felt weirdly hollow and empty in a strange way that it never has before. - Like there was nobody there. It was crazy, right? - Yeah. - It was so fucking strange. - And that's just one of the things too, where it's like, is it me? Like does this seem somehow diminished because of just my perspective? Or is it really that like, people are not coming to this thing anymore? - We had the same-- - We were separate, 'cause we go our separate ways generally during the festival. We don't see the same movies, although this year, I feel like we were funneled into the same, there were fewer options. We just had to go see the same stuff. But you and I had the same impression of that Thursday. I texted you and I was like, what is going on? This feels like, you know, Wednesday of the following week, not Thursday opening day. 100% I agree with that. - Yeah, I would love to know, like if someone who was going for the first time thought, huh, I thought there'd be more people here. You know, had that kind of like reaction because having, you know, but gone there so many times, even compared to last year, it just seemed weirdly empty in a strange way. And the second thing to bring up is that the every single year when we go and we have the press and industry pass, when we go to pick it up, we receive a catalog of all the films. It's a nice big book. They're, you know, it's very helpful to have around, you know, if you haven't decided exactly what you're going to see. - Oh, color, you know, object. - Yeah. - Yeah, a full, beautiful book that, you know, you can flip through and say, huh, this looks interesting. I hadn't like seen this, you know, was gonna be the festival. Maybe I'll check this one out. And, you know, in the past, it really has been something that like, that's what you do at night is you flip through the book and see maybe there's something tomorrow you hadn't, you know, thought of or sounds interesting. And this year, they were not giving them out. You had to buy them separately at the TIFF Lightbox gift shop, which is the first time. - Well, I'm not sure about that because that was the only the first day I saw a copy of it and then any other day. So I didn't go in and peruse it. They might have been selling copies of old catalogs. I don't know what it was. I just saw in the window. - Okay, well, we'll wear another. - That's not going on the record about that. - All right, well, we're another. They were not giving out the book. - They were no copies that I saw and thinking about it more, you know, to me, I know that every, it's not a secret that TIFF has been having a lot of problems in the last few years, that it's an embattled festival. And as somebody who worked in the not-for-profit art sector for 11 years, I can tell you the first sign of a sinking ship is, okay, no more printed materials. That's just the first thing everybody wants to put on the cutting block is, well, we print these materials. They cost a ton of money. We can just get rid of it and do it digital. That is always the first thing. And so to me, it was not even a harbinger. I don't know what your relationship to it all is. You seem more annoyed, like, I didn't get the book I liked. To me, it was like, this festival might be super duper fucked. Well, to me, it was, yeah, I didn't get the book I liked, but even more, the indication was like, it felt unwelcoming, you know, in a way that usually, you know, you get that and it's a perk, but it's also part of the experience, you know? Again, you know, when you sit there and you're like, thinking about the next day and what you're going to see. And it's like just the ability to physically have something to flip through. And of course, this is another kind of, you know, analog versus textural kind of thing, where, you know, you want something that, you know, connects you to that experience and to that festival and to have that taken away, it just felt unwelcoming. Yeah, I mean, the book thing, it's like there are these massive, well-funded, regional inconsequential festivals. And we all know what they sort of are, that they're big festivals with a ton of money behind them, but nobody is looking to them for taste-making and for anything sort of cutting edge, you know? And this was the year it felt like when Toronto slipped out of the ranks of Khan Venice New York Film Festival, really consequential festival, it's different than those festivals. It's always been different than those festivals, you know, in some fundamental way that it's not staking its claim to having a refined and focused sense of taste, but to have a incredible breadth of looking at the landscape of film so that it's always been different than those, but it feels like it's no longer in the South by Southwest category anymore. You know, it feels like this thing slipped out of, it's status this year and not having the books from a lot of different ways is an indicator of that. I agree with you, it doesn't feel welcoming. I think also, you know, you're different than me. I would just kind of carry the book around and then look at it years later to kind of thumb through it. - You sure there's always that too. - You can't tell in the hotel room every time. - As it keeps, as it keeps skating, you know, you can have it later on, you know, that's another thing. - But I don't, but again, the problem, I don't think the problem is the Toronto Film Festival, and I don't think the problem is me. I really do think there's a problem with movies itself, you know, and we should just go through, 'cause we saw so few movies too. The schedule was so thin and empty. One thing that I don't think people know, they used to show press and industry screenings well into the evening, right? The way it's structured now is the press and industry screenings is there's like a nine o'clock slot and an 11 or noon type slot, and then like nothing else now, like strays here or there, like A documentary showing at 5.30, you know? A movie from Bangladesh, showing at 7.45. And if you're really not interested in that stuff, you just miss 'em. That's not the way it's been in the past, you know? I certainly would go very late, and I think that that shift away from being a press and industry oriented festival to being something else, if they need to make more money and need to do that or wanna focus on the citizens of Toronto, you know? And have the festival not be a sort of international worldwide thing, but like a really special thing for the people of Toronto. I actually think that's cool. I think that's fine, I'm into that. My complaints are not necessarily about the logistical technical aspects of the change. They really aren't like, this used to be great for me. Now it's not as great for me. Like that happens, you know? Like you move on, it's certainly not worth it to spend the money. I will say there's also a huge emphasis, and this is part of what I think the problem is happening with cinema, right? And you can talk about this 'cause you heard a quote that's very relevant to this just hanging around. They have all of these conferences. They are now on the schedule, you know? These conferences about fundraising or shooting in South America, I don't even know what, 'cause I'm not gonna go to these filmmaking conferences, right? And I feel like the festival is full of people looking to make movies, but not interested particularly in seeing movies. And I feel like the film world in general is full of people who think of themselves as filmmakers, but don't watch films. Isn't that what you overheard? What I overheard at the Matty D. Op film, "Dohomi," before it started with somebody who said, "I'm a filmmaker, but I don't like watching films," which was a really, really sobering thing to hear from somebody to say they don't wanna watch movies, they just wanna make the films. And then I was talking to somebody who told me that, you know, she had spoken to somebody who said, "Oh yeah, I'm a filmmaker, I really wanna make movies." And she said, "Oh, what films are you influenced by? What films do you think are interesting?" And the person was like, "Oh, well, I wanna make an influential film," you know? Like, what were some examples of an influential film? The one he decided was "Get Out." Oh, very, very good cinema. And again, she was like, "Oh, you like Jordan. Oh, you're a fan of Jordan Peel, you're a fan of horror." You know, you wanted to make something that's kind of like a social commentary comedy horror, and he was like, "No, no, just up an influential." And it just seems like, "Huh." So you don't wanna be informed at all by the hundred years of cinema that came before you, you just wanna be a filmmaker and just have it out there. And I got to say, hearing that, I just thought immediately, like, "Holy shit, so many of the films I saw at this festival felt like films by people who don't like films." There was just some kind of go to the conference and go to the Q&A, but not the screening itself. Yeah, there was just some kind of artistry. There was just some kind of artistry around talk, but don't wanna watch the movie. There was some kind of artistry that was absent, you know? There was some kind of just directoral voice that wasn't there in so many of these films that, you know, had perfectly serviceable concepts, scripts, fine acting, looked okay, whatever, but there just wasn't any kind of-- This is the, exactly-- Artistry behind it. Exactly the Bonjour Tress Test problem. 'Cause that movie has an aesthetic and approach, it has good performances. It's trying to be true in some way, right? But, but it's not a well directed story. The whole directed film. And when I say it's not a well directed film, you would look at it and the surfaces of it, like I'm sure it's gonna be chopped up into a billion TikToks and Instagram reels and have that same kind of life on there, that like, you know, Lapasina and Eric Romer movies have, right? It's going to be able to live that kind of life because of its aesthetic with not having any good direction to it. The plot, and this is, you know, a movie and a book I'm very familiar with, right? Makes no sense as it's rendered here. By building the characters and building the story the way they're built, it becomes incomprehensible. It has no impact. Characters by the end start to do things that make no sense whatsoever. But in a way that's so purely nonsensical that it feels like the director has never thought about what directing is. And if you made me guess what this person is, they have to come out of music videos and commercials. It has that same sense of how to make an image look really good and even how to make a performance sort of raw and real while not connecting any of the dots to anything whatsoever. You know, it just feels informed by by mood books, it's just like mood board filmmaking. You know what I mean? It's like anti-Howard Hawks, anti-John Renoir filmmaking. It's like antithetical to that. And I'm sure they take that as a big point of pride whoever directed this, that I'm doing something that's about mood and feeling. Well, it's not actually about feeling and it's not actually about emotion because story is the conduit through which emotion and feeling are generated in cinema. And if you have no fucking idea what a good story is or how to tell it, your movie will be completely meaningless. But I think for the kind of person who makes a movie like this and watches a movie like this, it doesn't matter that the experience of having created something that can be chopped up into moody TikToks with Lana Del Rey and MGMT playing over them is the ultimate goal. And I wouldn't be surprised if studios and producers and money people don't encourage cinema towards this goal. I would be surprised if that's not in the discussions for how this movie gets made. But it's completely lifeless and worthless as a movie despite the lead actress is phenomenal. You want to rescue her from this movie. And the director does nothing to save her from her own worst tendencies either as an actress. It feels like very under directed in that sense with the performance that again, the director's job is going to be connecting these emotional dots and maneuvering both through in the performance, connecting the emotional dots and the audience being moved through the emotional dots simultaneously with the audience. And it doesn't have to be schematic, same connecting dots. It doesn't have to be falsified. It doesn't have to be narrative heavy. There's a billion examples of loose, seemingly aimless narrative. We're gonna get to one later with Mike Lee, you know, but when you've walked an audience through it, you can knock them out, right? When you've maneuvered them where you want, you can have everybody in tears from stop to start in a movie like hard times did to me, you know? - Yeah, similarly, you know, Night Bitch, the buzzworthy Adam's film where she, you know, she's a frustrated mother who turns into a dog. It's the basic premise of it. I saw a tweet before going into the movie that said, "Oh, there's a montage set to Weird Al Yank, "you've been scared to be stupid." And I thought, "Oh, that's great!" You know, "That's enough to get me excited. "How will this film, you know, tap into that decision? "And how will it, you know, kind of "govern the overall tone of the film? "How will it, you know, kind of have a narrative "significance to the film?" And the answer was, "It doesn't." You know, we just found this song we liked and we put it to a montage. And later on, there would be a Sarah McLachlan-style sentimental song when there's an emotional montage, just like any other stupid movie. It just doesn't have any ideas about how to make that interesting or how to use that in a way that's significant at night, but you end up becoming a film that is completely lost, has this weird supernatural element to it, this fantasy element, that is totally negligible. That, you know, it's just a straightforward, boring story about a lady who's, you know, have a tough time being a mom. And the idea of like her like transforming or changing, physically, you know, going somewhere else, mentally going somewhere else, doesn't matter by the end. It does not tap into anything interesting whatsoever. It just kind of makes a few jokes at its audience. You know, it's its audience will like, it becomes a female fight club, you know, where it's character, lead character is breaking the fourth wall, narrating and, you know, having scenes where she's talking to somebody and saying how she genuinely feels. And then, oh, just kidding, she said something different. We're gonna flash back there and show what she really said. Just, you know, devices that have been done and they're just not being utilized here to do anything interesting whatsoever. - Well, that's the question for me is how does a filmmaker express personality artistic voice through a film? Because I think more than ever, especially with independent and low budget films, they look better, are better performed, are better shot, are slicker, are better edited than they've ever been. There's a certain level on which films are reaching a commercial slick competence more than at any point in history, right? That there's more movies operating at a certain level of competence than ever. But why does that competence not come hand in hand with any sense of a voice? You know, if you take the idea that like, you know, but Rafferty talking about Trufo, that like his films feel like receiving letters from somebody, you know, that he had that approach, that he felt like Trufo was sending letters to the masters who came before them as well. Again, it's a little thing like if, what letter do you intend to send to an audience? And what letter do you intend to send to the masters who came before you? If you're not watching films, if you're just some guy who goes to a conference, you don't actually have any relationship to the form or the medium, you know, you don't actually have any relationship to that stuff. How can you develop a voice if your voice is not intended to speak to someone? You know what I mean? It's that kind of buskers voice. You know what I mean that you get when somebody has a pattern that's very rehearsed and singing for nobody, joking for nobody out in the park 'cause this is the tourist spot area and maybe I can get their dollar I can't. But to say that like, there's a busker with an original voice expressing something true feels like an absurdity. Even though it's in theory no different than a musician who goes out and plays the same set every night and you feel like there's an authentic voice to a musician playing for an audience every night. What's the difference in that, you know? And I think there is some difference there, you know? It's not primarily quality. It's not exclusively quality. - You are perfectly describing the substance which was another one of the big, you know, talk worthy films of the festival, the Carolee Fairgate horror film starring Demi Moore and Margot Welly, which just feels like, you know, yeah, I've seen a horror movie too. You know, it's very slick. It's very, you know, commercially shot. It really feels like a commercial from beginning to end and you know, part of that is the point, part of that is like, we are tapping into that very hollow, you know, world where it's all gloss and it's all trying to make women look beautiful and sexy and yada yada yada. I get, I understand why it shot that way. - Yeah. - Something in it, you know, Cronenberg, Carpenter, Henan Lauder should sue the shit out of this movie because all it does is throw in things they've been doing for decades to an audience that hasn't seen those movies and so they're like, oh my God, I almost vomited watching this movie. It's so gory and creepy and weird. - That's the fucking thing. If you think about, this is the problem with modern homage too. If you think about the idea of sending a letter to the master that you've loved to try and express your own voice to them, they don't want to get a letter that's just written in their style. They're not going to be like, great, this letter, they're going to be like, fuck you, what is this, right? And that's the problem not is we're doing it like Cronenberg is like, fuck you. You know what I mean? Like you are, if you send that letter to Cronenberg, I'm sure he'll be flattered if the film's successful, you know, he'll probably say nice things about it, but that's not actually a letter you want to get. That's not actually a letter that he'll value and return to and think about. It's fan mail, right? And is that what cinema is now? Just an endless fucking supply of fan mail? Or is it an intimate letter sent in conversation between people? - I just want to bring up too that I'm immediately digging into two films by female filmmakers, which I feel bad about, but two of the great films I saw were by female filmmakers who are fantastic. So just to throw that out there. - I don't even think, I don't even care that identitarian stuff is such a cover for corporatism. Now that it doesn't matter to me if your Taco Bell commercial was directed by a black woman or not. It just doesn't. And it especially doesn't matter to me. You know, the old idea of identity politics is that when it's the Claire Danie Luca Ricchia Martell era, there is genuine sexism. There's great artists who are not being given the chance to direct film simply because they're women. And we have to make industry change because I want the Luca Ricchia Martell movie. I want her to get a shot to do it. If it's just give this movie to someone who will shoot the Travis Scott music video who will shoot the fucking weekend music video, right? That's no different than giving it to the white guy who will shoot the fucking pizza hut commercial, who will shoot the iPod commercial, who will do the Nike campaign. There's no difference and it's just a cover. And I think everybody's onto it at this point. I think everybody in the world knows this. I don't think anybody's saying anything controversial, but the people who will hammer you are the people who have a vested interest in protecting this sort of nonsense system that does nothing to advance the Luca Ricchia Martell's of the world. You know what I mean? That does absolutely nothing. She's just blocked out in a different way now, right? And that's the nature of the system in some way that if you have no desire to direct episodes of a Star Wars TV show, then of course you're gonna get boxed out, you know? That we don't live in a fantasy world in which, you know, like they're gonna give, you know, the intrepid rebel reporter, a byline at the New York Times, like that's just not gonna happen, you know? Like that's the same things with movies. They're not going to give somebody who actually wants to challenge or blow up the system or take film in a different way, a fucking Indiana Jones remake. They're just not. - Yeah, I mean, I just wanna make clear, like, you know, I think it is important for female voices to get out there, especially if it's a film about-- - I think it's important for the good voices to get out there, John. - Yes, especially if it's a film about motherhood, especially if it's a film about, you know, an aging actress, you know, being, you know, dismissed by the system, the entertainment industry. These things are important, but, you know, in the substance, for example, you know, the Dennis Quay character is this absurd, ridiculous, you know, pissing, you know, close up, you know, chomping and chewing and being disgusting, horrible, ogre of a, you know, caricature. And it's like, you're not even trying to challenge me here. You're just saying something that is just a very one-dimensional, uninteresting kind of story. I need more than that, you know? I need to know what, like, you think about these things, not just what everyone agrees with. I don't need Amy Adams to just sit there and tell me, like, how every mom feels about raising her kid and how she loses her identity. You don't tell me, like, show me, like, what you, what, and what about it? You know, what do you have to say about it? And this is what I'm trying to get at, is that, you know, there's no artistic feel behind these movies. They're slick and they're well-made and they're competent and they're well-acted, but just, there's just no ideas behind them. I just want, you know, that's, that, for me, is the distinction that I think you're making right now, is that, you know, give it to a good film film. Give it to someone who has an idea and has, like, you know, something they want to communicate to the audience, not something who's just going to kind of either play the hits or just spoon-feed everything to a point where there's no, there was no real reason to watch this film in the first place. - Yeah, I mean, I want to see good films from good filmmakers. I mean, it's what you're talking about where it's like, you know, I'm curious if the reaction to Mike Lee's film isn't he shouldn't be making a movie about these people. It's a super old white guy making a movie about middle-class black people. This is not his story to tell. When in fact, like, who's given Marie Jean-Paptiste a good role since "Secrets and Lies"? That's one of the great performances of that decade and nobody did anything for her. Nobody gave her jack shit, only he did. And he gave her two of the greatest performances in the history of film. What do I care if it's Mike Lee being a 70-year-old white guy doing it or somebody else, right? Like, what do I give a shit who's telling that story unless they tell something truthful and funny and amazing and brilliant? I just can't get on board with any of that anymore because the experiment's not working out. We haven't had all of these voices emerge that are giving new perspectives and new visions of the world and allowing us to see things we've never seen. We're getting the visions of a bunch of social strivers who dream is to be showrunner on "Game of Thrones." We're getting the visions of a bunch of social strivers who want to go to the conference, not the screening. We're getting the visions of a bunch of social strivers and corporatists and non-artists whose biggest fucking fantasy is to win an Emmy for an episode of "Young Sheldon" or whatever. Not young Sheldon. They all hate young Sheldon of Fargo, of some piece of shit like that, right? That's the problem. And I think that that's the proof of, this is a faulty method for giving this unheard voice because there is out there somewhere, a woman who's going to direct Night Bitch and give it a real voice who isn't being given a shot. She wasn't being given a shot before and she isn't now. And this method of ticking boxes is not getting them there. And the proof is where movies are at right now that the movies aren't as good and cinema is going to die because of it. Maybe cinema is going to die anyway, but I do think that it's just like, I have no patience to even hear it out anymore. Get the good artists making the movie or I don't want to fucking see it. - Yeah, let me just find like a quick light in the darkness here or I'm just going to be completely depleted and we're not going to be able to finish the episode. A good film by a good filmmaker is Nungano Niones on becoming a guinea fowl, which I was looking forward to and is a great film. It's really, really good. It's a film about women who are suppressed in this Zambian family after this man dies. This man who they find out was sexually molesting other female members of the family that all have these completely repressed experiences with this awful person and the ritual of remembering him and his life and the fact that he was the patriarch of this family completely buries their emotions and their feelings and their complicated reaction to this happening in a way that is very significant. And I think that maybe, I think there were 3% of the dialogue was male dialogue in this film. It was overwhelmingly female characters. We spent the whole time with these women and it had so much to say and there was so much to think about after the film was over that I thought, wow, only this filmmaker could have made this movie. - Yeah. - Everything about it is her voice. Everything about it are her thoughts on this situation and these characters are her characters. I feel like this was one in 10 at this festival, a film like this where I actually came away from it wanting to think about the movie, wanting to see it again, wanting to see the filmmaker's next movie so badly. This is the kind of experience I wanna have all the time and the fact that it happened so rarely at this particular festival was kind of the reason that I'm so bummed about it. - And well, it's good that you saw a good one. - Yeah. (laughs) - Do you wanna just go through, 'cause I was thinking just in order, 'cause there's so few films we have to talk about that I can get through my entire list very, very quickly if we just go in order. - Yeah, sure. - And the reason I was thinking that too is because the first film I saw at the festival was Steven Soderbergh's presence, right? And that gets us back on the horror stuff because I wanted to talk more about horror cinema and where horror cinema is at. And presence, we were talking in the ride home about what's the exact moment Soderbergh gave up trying to be a good filmmaker and was just content to do whatever. And I think it's 2000 Zine's girlfriend experience because right before that you have Che, which he's still like without a sight and Che and the limey, even Aaron Brockovich in traffic, he's trying to be the greatest filmmaker in the world. Whether he is or not, whether you agree with it, he's trying to be the greatest filmmaker in the world. And then he just suddenly stops. Whatever you think of, you know, contagion and no sudden move or whatever. After that, our magic mic, which is a very likable movie, whether you think they're good or bad, he's not trying to be the best filmmaker in the world anymore. And he has a few movies like "Unsane" and "Kimmy" and "Presence" where it feels like he is not even trying at all. Like he's just wandering around with a camera with some people in front of it. And it's written by David Kapp, who I can only imagine what the hell he thought when he saw the rough cut of this thing. You know, famous screenwriter, writer of the dark night, you know, very associated with big slick Hollywood thrillers and comic book movies, right? Did he write Jurassic Park? Yeah, he's that kind of guy. And just like this nothing non-effort movie with presents, right? And I, this festival, you know, we talked about with "Shadow Strays", I, there's a problem of genre now in filmmaking, right? There's a problem of genre filmmaking. If you remove the genre element from "Presence", it's a non-movie. It's so small and amateurish and cliched and boring that no one would dream of making this movie. It's a non-movie, right? And the genre is sort of the excuse to make non-movies a lot of the time now. It's sort of the excuse to make thoughtless movies, to make movies with nothing inside of them. And I've really struggled a lot with, you know, you know, we did the, we're gonna do the "Summer Horror" movie episode. And I think we're aborting that because you and I both tapped out. We're gonna, we're gonna watch every horror movie this summer. And it was just bad movie after bad movie after bad movie, even the ones that were well reviewed or liked, like "Maxine" or "Long Legs". These are just movies that I found to be beyond bad, just nothing, just not even worth talking about or thinking about. And it was just one after the other with this. And I was somebody who was always a horror kid, you know, like some of my most formative cinema memories are being in like sixth grade and renting every the Friday the 13th and staying up all night to watch them. And, you know, in a marathon, you know, right before Halloween and, you know, and spending all day raking the lawn because my dad said I can't play the Friday the 13th NES game I rented until the lawn was raked. And we lived in a, you know, three acre, three acre lawn covered in trees and just spending all day desperate, you know, to play that NES game and going all the way through, like having a really deep relationship to horror movies, even when I was in places, you know, like, you know, film school and certainly, you know, when I was working in as a program or not for profit that were, you know, dismissive and hostile, you know, to horror stuff and always being surprised. I was always surprised growing up that like some of the filmmakers and critics I loved, like true phone, guitar, having no relationship to horror films, having no thoughts about them and seeming no affinity or care for the genre, you know. It's like you're defending fucking, you know, Jerry Lewis movies, but you don't got a word for a current echo. This is shocking to me, true foe, you know, kind of thing. And I just feel like I and Joe Bob Briggs, you know, coming back to shutter, just watching those in college, you know, just like I felt like I'm not a horror kid anymore. And it was very shocking to me this year. And I really, I was thinking a lot about it. And for a long time, I was always really puzzled by in the Dogma 95 fauf chastity that, that Winterberg and Lars von Trier wrote, while the anti-genre stuff was in there, right? Especially coming from von Trier, who I think was thought of a little bit with the kingdom and element of crime as a genre, if not full-blown horror director, you know, to that point, like coming from him, but I completely understand it now. You know, I completely understand if you're trying to approach some transcendently spiritual, even if it's sarcastic and sort of provocative way, they do an approach to cinema, why you have to strip genre away, right? - Yeah. - And presence was really a movie that felt like, if horror is the only thing that's alive at the box office and the theater, like it is now, that feels like another signal that cinema is dead. And I hate to say that, you know? I hate to say that, but it does feel like another signal towards it, that, that, and we'll get into the short films I watched. I watched a short film program and literally every single one of them, even when it made no sense, even when it was a comedy, even when plot-wise it didn't work, simply used violence to resolve their plots, that every single plot resolved in a burst of violent and/or gross activity, and generally not or gross, violent and gross a lot of the time, burst of violence. And I just don't, you know, you can be, "Oh, Euripides would agree that that's not, "disagree that that's not real art." But Shakespeare doesn't end in burst of violence, yeah, but she didn't fucking make Shakespeare, so shut up, you know? But that's not like a real way to end stuff. And it feels very childish, like, and then they all kill each other. And then they all shoot each other. It feels like middle school gains. And I feel like it's just infected cinema and Soderbergh making this non-movie horror film. I mean, it's a new low for him. (laughs) It's almost, and he's somebody for which there is no floor for laziness and indifference as a filmmaker that he can find. And it's a new low for him. I just don't know what to do about movies becoming infected with genre, that there are only genre movies now. - Yeah, well, it's another thing too. It's such a big conversation about, you know, that guy who said, "I wanna make get out." The other kind of, you know, version of that person is someone who says, "I wanna make horror movies so bad. "I wanna make horror movies without having an idea beyond. "I wanna make a horror movie." You know, they just, they like horror films. They've seen them their whole life. They think, "I can do this." But what, you know, what qualifies you to make a horror film? Like, what do you think of a, you just wanna like do a movie like, you know, like films you've been watching and enjoying your entire career? But what informs that? You know, you're no Cronenberg. You're not somebody who actually has these themes and ideas. That really say, "This is how I feel, "and this is me on screen through the horror genre specifically." And that kind of gets me, will move me into my-- - Well, I just wanna say about Cronenberg real quick, exactly what you're saying. Cronenberg gets into horror movies because that's where the money is, right? And he has an idea that's important to him about expressing this, you know, the Heidegger mind body split very acutely, right? And that horror ends up expressing it very well. But he almost immediately is drifting away from the genre, right? It's not that he dislikes the genre, but he's headed somewhere else. You know what I mean? Dead Ringers is only a horror movie by virtue of the fact that Cronenberg made it and it gets labeled that. If you put that in front of regular people, I don't think it gets labeled a horror movie. I think it gets labeled a weird thing. You know what I mean? - Yeah. - And by the time he's getting to Madam Butterfly and Naked Lunch, these are not horror movies at all. And that's immediately where he's drifting when he gets power, right? And but he, exactly what you're saying, that he's interested in disease. He's interested in two's civilizations, civilizations tendency towards dystopia, right? He has these interests, that ballerian sense of like, as we become civilized, it naturally becomes dystopia. Why is this? Is it because of our fantasy space? Is it because of our bodies, right? And all of those things combined together to make the Cronenberg idea. If your idea is like, I wanna make a movie where a lady fucks a car, 'cause that's Cronenberg-y, that's nothing of what Cronenberg actually is, right? That's nothing of it. And when you say like nothing, (laughs) it's about to quote, "garing." Whenever I hear the word body horror, I reach for my revolver and I'm like, maybe I shouldn't positively quote a Nazi on the episode in which I'm talking about, I don't wanna hear women filmmakers. But no, but it's the same, like a big red flag is when people say body horror. It's an almost empty phrase to me. It's like, oh, they don't have an idea when you say body horror. You know, it's like a shorthand waving of something. You know? It's like when people in 2024 say, I'm gonna make an album that's really punk. It's immediately like, oh, well, that's gonna be terrible. That's a real shame, 'cause up until this point, I had thought he was an interesting artist. (laughs) - All right, so-- - What are you eating in your next thing? - I'm leading into the fact that I saw the new Cronenberg movie, "The Shrouds" at the festival. And if we're talking about, you know, cinema being dead and we're talking specifically about, you know, filmmakers like Mary L. Heller not having a voice. And, you know, if they are like the current people, the people that are actually getting talked about. And Soderberg and Cronenberg are the oldies who are still just hanging in there. What does it mean when they make a bad movie, right? As opposed to the people who like, you're just like, this is just not an artist I'm interested or has any kind of thing to say. Cronenberg has a lot to say with this new movie. He's got a ton to say, obviously his wife passed away a few years ago and he made a film about it. It's about this man who builds a cemetery, a virtual cemetery that basically allows him to watch his wife's decaying body and have like an interaction with that and still have a relationship with that played by Vincent Cassell. So right off the bat you're like, well, that's a Cronenberg idea, sure. And it's, and I have to kind of admire the fact that he got money to make a movie that's about him dealing with his grief in a very Cronenberg kind of way. So as far as that goes, I really admire this film and it's hard to say, it's hard to admit that it's a bad movie, you know. But it's a bad movie in the way I think Crimes of the Future is a bad movie and Dangerous Method is a bad movie. It just has a very detached sort of, it's almost like Cronenberg doesn't remember how to make films just straight up. It's funny when you say something like The Substance. There's a movie that totally understands what it's already and it's will react to. Totally knows how to shoot the movie and get them involved, invested and make them go ew and like something gross happens. Whereas Cronenberg has tons and tons of interesting ideas in this movie but just has no idea how to communicate them in ways that will pull the audience in. It's incredibly leaden. It's very, very dull film and you can tell why people are not responding to it in any way. Vincent Cassell is almost a nightmare casting in your lead role when he's supposed to talk, speak English and then have you engage with that character. Guy Pierce starts off doing his goofy geek character but doesn't go far enough. Doesn't make that character interesting or fun enough. It does cast Sandrine Holt, which is very cool. I haven't seen her for a while and it's very cool to see Sondry know it in the movie but it just goes from scene to scene with like no real, with a very vague on-flict, very does not resolve itself in a way that's satisfying. It just does not go from A to B in a way that a movie like Existence does when you watch Spider and it's a film that is a little abstract, a narrative that is not conventional in any way but you still understand what's going on and it has a solution that's satisfying. The shrouds really just ends. It's kind of amazing. And again, there's a part of me that wants to say I love the shrouds because it is so uninterested in engaging his audience in the way a conventional film would but at the same time it's such a disaster and it's such a slog to get through. At the end of the day, I wouldn't say that that's anything I wouldn't say about Crimes of the Future, which is a movie that felt like Cronenberg just playing the hits just not in a way that's engaging anymore. He's just, he can't do it the way he used to do it. This is a film that's like, no, I have a new idea and I have a new thing to say but it has the same problem of just, I don't know how to do this anymore, you know? It feels really, it feels like he's tired and he wants to just finish it. - Everybody loses their fastball. They just do. It's a fact of human life, you know? Everybody loses except Olanka but we'll get to that later. But everybody loses their fastball, you know? And I don't think there's, I'd rather he make the shrouds than bearing the axe. You know what I mean? I'd rather make something that's not like, this is so outside of what I know you to be as an artist that it somewhere between makes me want to puke and makes me want to cry, you know? - It's definitely not work for hire. It's definitely not like some young guys who are at a Cronenberg-esque script. So I guess I'll direct it. It feels like this is my thing. - Yeah. - It just-- - Well, it reminds me of, he talks in his interviews about how when Marilyn Monroe died, he was young and nobody claimed the body. And he was like, I wonder if I can go claim her body. This was the most desired body on earth and now nobody wants this body that's crazy. I as a teen should go claim Marilyn Monroe's body. And I think that it sounds like that. I think that sounds like that impulse about like, why do we stop caring about bodies? You know, like what's the mind body split is kind of crazy, aren't we all body? When I'm in my body, I feel like I'm all body, you know? But there is a split there, you know? And isn't Marilyn Monroe all body? Did I want to go out to coffee and hang out with Marilyn Monroe? No, I wanted that body, you know? And so I think-- - I think if something like that had been communicated with the shrouds, it would have been great. - Yeah. - But it just sets it up and then it just literally is just dog paddling in the shallow end where it's just like something's happening, something with, you know, Chinese cyber guys or manipulating my AI character, my avatar, something technology's bad, right? - I feel like Chinese cyber guys is the name of every movie in Midnight Madness. Now I don't know, Chinese cyber guys. - Yeah. - This is the kind of thing they show here. - Yeah, it's true, it's like a dude like holding guns and it's maybe comedic, you know? - Yeah, yeah, where it's like, I get it, Cronenberg, it's like, you know, relation to the body is human and you know, disembodied men through technology is inhuman and that's bad. But like, tell me the story, like what's the story, you know? Don't just, you know, give me a lecture every single scene, you know, I mean-- - Is it bad or is it a fantasy that's too beautiful to be real, John? But those are, you can have real thoughts about a Cronenberg movie, even a bad one. You can have real thoughts. - 100%, yes, that's where it's different between. Yeah, when it's a established artist who's decade after decade, it's just been giving you meaningful art, great films, you know, you'll always have a relationship to that artist no matter what. - And yeah, that'll lead me into that. I went to the shorts program and I really don't wanna hammer these shorts because I'm sure these are all like young and struggling filmmakers, although struggling. One thing that's weird, I'd never been to a shorts program before and I'm like, if this is my last tip, I'll go watch some shorts, right? And just see what they're about. And it was top to bottom bad. There was not a single one in it worth seeing. And I sort of don't wanna hammer these filmmakers so I'm not even gonna call them out by name and call them the films out by name. I will say the programming, it was terrible. But one thing that struck me about it is it's an, they almost have too much voice to them, the shorts, while not having anything to say. Like you'd know exactly what kind of person made it without having any sense of film making, right? It feels like they had the attitude of not of receiving a letter, but somebody screaming political slogans and a megaphone in the park. You know what I mean? Somebody yelling in a protest. You know exactly what that person is and you don't feel like the message is for you. Nobody has ever been like, oh, I believed one thing and then some dude screamed at me on the subway he was shutting down and now I believe another thing. That's not like actually how it works. And there's a total artlessness to it as well. The art of writing a letter versus the art of screaming into a megaphone in some way. Like they announce their personalities forcefully without having anything behind them in sort of the thinnest, shallowest way. But also these movies have so much money behind them that these movies, if a single one of them was made for less than $20,000, I would be shocked. And I would bet some of these movies were made for as much as a hundred thousand, just based on how they look, the amount of special effects. You know, it was a program supposed to be a weirdness of weird films. Well, that's not true. One is like internet slop that I specifically like YouTube junk. You know, that's 20 years too late. That was probably made for 15 cents, right? But that one costs nothing. But the rest of them look like they have a lot of money behind them. And I, more and more, when I see films, I feel the same thing that I get when thinking about college resumes for people who get into like Princeton and Northwestern, where it's like, this is impeccable in some ways. And this is very well-funded. You're clearly a very well-funded person. What is your relationship to any of this? You know what I mean? There's like an inhumanity of ambition and desire to accomplish that feels inhuman and programmed and robotic to me. Again, even as it's sort of very forcefully personality, you know, 'cause you know you got on your college essay, you gotta have a big personality. You can't write, you know, I don't really know what I want. And I'd kind of like to learn at college and explore and develop my personality. You have to be screaming in your megaphone, you know, about all of the extracurricular activities you did and how you were student council president and, you know, volunteered at the homeless shelter in addition to having a GPA of, you know, 4.0 and, you know, having read your favorite book, you know, crime and punishment, whatever, that probably wouldn't be a good one for that. To the lighthouse, you know, like five times and written an award-winning essay on it, you know? These movies have the personality of a college essay, you know? And there's something very bad about that. There's something very, very bad about making the pursuit and creation of art tied to academia and academics that I think is almost as bad as tying it to music videos and TV shows and Taco Bell commercials, you know? I do think that they're similarly bad and that it's the same funnel. I think the people coming out of NYU go on to direct music videos for, you know, whoever. I don't even know who the young artists are anymore. Go on to direct TV commercials. Go on to direct episodes of HBO shows. Go on to direct night bitch. I do think that that's the pathway or it and it's, and the machine is producing shit and that's the machine, you know? - Yeah. - And these films feel very much indicative of that. And the sort of programmatic critical aspect which we'll get into at the end, you know, I think is a big problem too. That if you're programming films like this, that's really, really bad. And that there's a failure of programming happening on a fundamental level. And I don't know if it's that movies that are good aren't being made or if people have lost taste in an ability to define and identify good art. You know, I think if you're the kind of person who wants to make get out, the ability to understand and identify good art is beyond your grasp. Not that get out is a bad movie. Not that get out deserves to be hammered like this. But if that's your idea of a good movie in sort of in an aspirational way, you know? And if you're a critic saying that this is a really, really important artistic accomplishment, I think that there's something in taste that is very far beyond your grasp and that these movies are indicative of it. Any one of these filmmakers, this is the positive thing. Any one of these filmmakers could go on to direct get out or portrait of a lady on fire. I fully believe that about any of these filmmakers. - Well, again, if we can launch a positive real quick in there, just the negative, we can, while we're on the subject of genre and how do you feel? - We're about to hit three in a row that I'm positive about to go on. - Good, good. Well, let's talk about the ability to use genre in a way that is interesting and surprising as only a master filmmaker like Kiyoshi Kurosawa could do. One of the few screens that felt like a real tip screening this year was, you know, a nice nine o'clock at night screening of "Cloud", the new Kiyoshi Kurosawa film. I mean, the Midnight Madness films and things like that, they used to always be able to see a night screening of that. And, you know, it was always packed because it was the only thing showing for press and industry and you had a great audience for it. It was all primed and, you know, maybe it was a good movie, maybe it was a bad one, but it felt like a tip experience. And that's what I really needed to end the first day with "Cloud", so, and it wasn't disappointed. It was, I would never in a million years would have guessed. It was going to be a cautionary tale against resellers. That would be my last guess because I had heard it was a horror movie, so I was surprised it was more of an action thriller kind of thing, but a very Kiyoshi Kurosawa action thriller where it's like, wow, I'm just gonna go along with this and I have no idea where this is headed. - Yes, it's interesting. I said to you after the movie, 'cause he's normally a very like subtle and deliberate, or a lot of the time is a very subtle and delicate filmmaker. When you think of something like "Daguerreotype" or even "Pulse", you know, certainly like "Cure" and "Brite Future", these are movies that have genre to them that is combined with a measure of subtlety that is completely absent from "Cloud". The second half of "Cloud" is an insane brain dead, loud free for all in a way that's very fun and very satisfying. I don't even know what filmmaker to compare it to 'cause it's still done in his style, but it just becomes something completely different from what he normally does. And I was saying to you that if this was a filmmaker's like second or third movie, I'd be like, "Oh, I fucking hate this. "I don't like this filmmaker anymore." But as like his 12th movie, I'm like, "This is great. "I love it. "What a weird thing for him to do. "What a strange place to take his usual kind of story. "What a weird way to go for it." It almost-- - It's like his 50th movie. - Yeah, well, whatever it is. It almost feels like the "Shinota" movie killer's on parade. You know what I mean? It almost has this like buckaroo bons I ask. Like group a weirdo's quality to it, you know, with a plot that like, and the second half of the film is just like, and then everybody's trying to kill each other. And that's it. There's not any more to it than that. - Well, it becomes like a almost a giddy sort of thriller, like a severance or a bell-co experiment, but like done expertly by, yeah, like here, exactly, by Kurosawa. It's funny because he's so good at dread, which really these days for me, like I don't so much enjoy horror films as I enjoy dread films, you know, where there's just this something is weird, something is fucked up. You can't put your finger on it. There's just something in society, in the environment that is freaking you out. And this character throughout the first half of the movie is like just experiencing this incredible dread, this completely intangible feeling of menace. And you're like, well, he's just crazier paranoid. And then the second half is like, absolutely not. (laughing) Everyone is coming after him and that's what the rest of the movie is gonna be. And it was so much fun. And I so many times just kinda was shaking my head and smiling like, what is even going on? This is crazy. You just kinda like let him take over and like kind of just let him lead you where it's gonna go. It's always a very satisfying experience when he does something like this so effortlessly. - Yeah, but it is a movie that I would describe as like fun, but trivial, but I do feel like this movie, this festival is missing fun, but trivial. You know what I mean? That it's strained so hard to have any movie like that. And cinema itself, I think movies aim more frequently than ever for fun, but trivial and strain to achieve that, which is depressing. And we'll, you know, we'll-- - It is, it's part of that festival experience. Another fun, but trivial movie I saw. It's one of the few midnight madness movies I actually caught was a movie called Dead Male, which was really well made. It was fun. The audience was with it. At the end you're like, well, you know, I didn't know these guys didn't, you know, fucking split the atom. They didn't reinvent like the wheel, but they did something that was perfectly like they said to do something, then they did it. And I enjoyed it. So even that is a kind of film where like, if you watch it just like at home on your TV, you're like, okay, whatever. Where you watch it on Shutter, you think, yeah, whatever. But you know, in the milieu of like, you know, film festival watching you at night with the receptive audience, you're like, wow, I really like that. Good job, guys. - Yeah, yeah. And it's, that seems like bare minimum. You know what I mean? That seems like what Hollywood for decades did effortlessly. You know, that if you went to see something and it seemed like it was just gonna be the most moronic crack. If you went to see furry vengeance, it was still fun, but trivial. And they have such a, I just watched the new Beetlejuice yesterday and it's strained so hard to be fun, but trivial. And it gets there sometimes, it's fun at times, but this is like, it feels like they scaled Mount Everest compared to these other legacy sequels that Hollywood's putting out that just wanna be fun, but trivial and can't even get there, can't even be fun, but trivial. Next on my list, I liked it, but this is indicative of another problem of the film festival. There's a whole TV section, like press TV's teats, press TV's section at Toronto now. And I feel like the treatment of press TV as somehow similar to cinema and not a different and replacement thing from it is bad, I in general am not a believer when you list the best TV shows ever made, they are not as good as the best movies from that year. And so when I saw this Thomas Winterberg movie, Families Like Ours, I had my same relationship to it that I have to all those TV shows. When I watch Breaking Bad or Mad Men or whatever, where it's like the first few episodes, I'm like, right on, this is great. I get why people like it. And then at a couple of episodes later, I'm like, I'm done. That's it. I just don't care anymore, right? And that's it. That's what happens to me with press TV shows. And it was the same thing with families like Ours. I watched two of the episodes and was like, oh, this is great. I'm really enjoying this. This is, you know, good. This is the most Danish movie ever made. The two leads, the two of the young woman and the young man are just like, put them in the museum of what fucking Danish people look like. You know what I mean? Like this is just a very, very Danish movie. This is for the Danes, this one. I don't think Winterberg has any plan except for them to see it. And I enjoyed it, but the third episode, I just got up and left. I didn't even have anything else to see. It's just like, I'm clearly not gonna sit through all five or six episodes that they're showing of this. And, you know, the way this creates and sustains a story is not interesting or compelling to me and the way that cinema is. It's different than cinema. I don't think watching this in a movie theater with an audience gets anything. And I think, in fact, gets in the way of the experience that this is probably better served. You know, that I should watch two and a half hours and then stop and then forget about it and then maybe pick it up at it another time, that that's the way sort of binge stuff works. It's not that you watch all eight episodes at once. You watch as much as you can take and then you stop and you come back kind of thing. And so it's the kind of thing where it's like, I like this movie. If you're inclined to see it, see it, it's interesting. He's an interesting filmmaker. He's definitely in straight ahead journeyman mode, which is, you know, he seems to be operating in a lot recently, but he's still good. And it's, is it worth your time? I don't know. I don't think any TV show is worth your time. I really, truly don't. You know, and when people are always will ask me, I find it funny. They're like, you know, oh, you've watched all these movies and read all these books and you take all these trips and you travel everywhere and you go to all these museums, you know, you're a single father custodial parent raising. Son, how do you have all this time? And the simple answer is I don't watch TV. I don't spend one hour of my day. Maybe I'll put on like a American dad when I'm going to sleep or it's always sunny, you know, and that last 20 minutes before I'm going to sleep, but I don't watch TV, you know. And I do think that a lot of it is like the material you can extract of value, of artistic, emotional, spiritual value from even the best TV shows is limited, is extremely limited compared to how much time they want you to take. And that's, and people aren't watching that. People are watching 90 day fiance and house hunters flip in the house. You know, they're watching baking shows. Like I guarantee you, you will never feel like, I don't have enough time to have a satisfying job and write on my own and print a podcast and do all this other stuff. If you just stop watching TV and you will never miss it at any rate, I did not, I was not thinking I was going to give a, a moralistic TV ramp. This has been dad corner with dad. Certainly something to like be worried about when you know we've had to hear for years, TV is better than cinema now. It is cinema now, like the prestige that cinema enjoyed. Now you have to give to the sopranos or madmen or whatever. And those are the ones that always get missed. Those are the ones that make me very, very worried. Yeah, those are the ones that always get listed. I didn't want to interrupt, I just want to say. And what gives the game away is they never say, you know, what's that show called? Dragon Masters, Game of Thrones, right? They never say the ones that are like, 'cause the prestige ones at the time are like lost. And then you go back and you're like, what a toilet bowl full of shit this is, you know? And it's the same thing with like Game of Thrones. You go back and you're like, really? This is art. Are you lying to me about this? And it's very much the Hamilton effect too, I think of like HBO has such a limited small audience that they can get away with saying whatever thing that's showing on HBO right now is the best thing in the world and it develops the best reputation, the best thing in the world. And you go back and watch it and you're like, really? This is a good thing. This is better than the average, this is better than Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. I'm not sure about that, buddy. This is better than, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is not better than Hubie Halloween. So whatever the prestige here in Colcan drama, you know, the fucking, I can't remember the names of any of them, I'm picturing them. I'm like, the one that stole the plot from it's a living. You know the one I'm talking about, John, where he leaves too big of a tip and wants to go back. This stuff is bare baseline minimum and it's treated at the time as real. But the game being given away is they always say madmen and sopranos, which are pretty good compared to the other stuff, you know? I'm going to jump on the back of Game of Thrones and use that to go over to my next movie. - I genuinely was like, is that movie called Dragon Masters? I couldn't think of what it was fucking called. - Maisie Williams from Game of Thrones appears in this film that we were looking forward to. We had a good vibe from the luckiest man in America, directed up by Samir Oliveros, and is a dramatization of the 1984 episode, a pressure luck the game show, where this guy just keeps missing the whammies and hitting it and making tons and tons of money. And it has a dynamite cast, not so much Maisie Williams, but Paul Walter Houser, Walton Gogans, David Strathan, Johnny Knoxville appears in it, Damian Young from How Hardly's Films. I haven't seen him in forever shows up, it was very cool. And this might hit that fun-betrivial kind of thing, ultimately, but like a very well-made film. I had theorized that it would be a good one to go with the Anacendric movie we saw him enjoyed last year, Woman of the Year, because they're both dramatizations of old '70s and '80s game shows in this particular episode that was really weird and kind of engaged at everyone's attention for a while. But it was definitely a well-made film and an interesting story and obviously there's a lot of artistic license taken with it, but Paul Walter Houser is phenomenal in it. I love him, I think he's great. And you feel such empathy towards his character throughout the entire film and also reservations about like what his real motivations are and what he's actually doing kind of remains a mystery. And so there's enough to kind of keep you engaged there. So Lucky Smith America is a film, I would say, a very, very good film. I would not go as far as it is a great film, my favorite of the festival, but very good. It's very good, definitely has voice and definitely tells its story very well. And would pair very nicely, I think, with Woman of the Year from last year, which no one has seen or nothing has happened with that movie whatsoever, even though it was a really good movie. - Well, it's funny, that's the kind of movie where it's like, you know, you're taking a shit on Mad Men and then saying luckiest man of the year, although you didn't really take a shit on your shows. - I did, I know how you feel about them though, even if you won't say it on the air. - I've never seen a single episode of Mad Men. I just don't even want to be involved in that conversation. - Yeah, it's like me with Black Panther. I just don't want to risk not liking it. I just don't want to be the like guy who doesn't like Black Panther. But it's, you know, oh, you're saying luckiest man in the world is worth seeing, but like 90-day fiancee isn't, is there any difference? And I think I would be quick to say like, yeah, there isn't much difference, you know? And there's something depressing about the level to which Hollywood struggles to produce luckiest man in the world level quality, entertain it, that there's some-- - In America, in America. - Yeah, luckiest man in America. I'm sorry, the luckiest man in the world. - Yeah, it's in America. - Salman Rushdie. He's the luckiest man in the world. Survived to stabbing, dated Padma Lakshmi, what more do you need? - Isn't it the guy from Final Destination 2 is the luckiest man in the world? - That's only in America. And yeah, and I do think that that's a fair statement. It's like, oh, how are you gonna take a dump on the triviality of TV and then promote a movie that's really trivial. And I think that it's like, it's not necessarily that I'm against triviality. It's that like, how come we can't produce reasonable trivialities anymore even? And how come triviality is the only option? How come ineptly produced trivialities are my only option? There's something bad about that. The aspiration to triviality and the failure to produce it is what I'm describing. TV does triviality just fine for trivialness. Although I think an episode of "Press Your Luck" is probably even more trivial than the luckiest man in America, right? So I think it is a little bit Apple's to Apple's comparison. But it's not that like we're against fun and inconsequential movies and fluff and silliness and bloody horror movies and stuff like that. I think that we've long been partisans in favor of that. I feel like if you go through our website, who's putting Harold and Kumar, go to White Castle on their top 10 list right next to the Michael Hanneke movie? Like it's not that that's a super rarity anymore. And in fact, that's probably indicative of a critical problem that there's not differentiation between that stuff, now that that's become the regular way to do. But we're definitely of that mindset and of that world. We're not snooty academics in taste elitists in any way. Like we love a good fart-swilling bro comedy and that brings me to Nutcrackers, which is another-- I would just say real quick, before I get off the lookest man in America, 'cause I hadn't realized until just now that Patti Harrison from "I Think You Should Leave" is in it as well. So for the Marcus Pins and everyone who loved that show, she is, I didn't recognize her when I saw the movie, but she is in it. So that's another recommendation for those people anyway. Nutcracker, sorry to step on your transition. No, just talking about fart-swilling bro comedies, and sort of dumb mainstream like, I fell down on a pie comedies. This has been stiller in like a big-time city slicker has to take over his four rowdy nephews from the country movie. It's essentially like an Uncle Buck Dutch type film, like a mismatched people type movie, although it's got the Doc Hollywood set up, what I mean, like big city fancy guys, gotta go to a small town. The thing that's strange about-- - Not a Dutch film, like Flunder goes nuts. You mean like, Dutch the-- - Like Dutch, like Dutch, yeah. It's like a Deutsch film, you know, Dutch. - Deutsch film, not a Dutch film. - Just Dutch. - But the thing that's strange about it, it's directed by David Gordon Green, who tries to bring like a measure of like artsy improvisational rawness to it. That's a total disaster as far as making a fun, funny, compelling film. 'Cause the beats, the beats are Uncle Buck, and the directing is like, you know, killer sheep. You know what I mean? It's like it's, the beats are just the most brain dead holiday comedy. Like, look, and then the golf cart goes in the rich guy swimming, whoa, you know, kind of stuff, and like, don't fart at the dinner table, guys. And combined with a directing style, that's like, you know, slow motion of shots of the boys dancing around a bonfire. You know what I mean? And like artsy close-ups of like the detritus in their filthy house, you know? It's a very funny, it's, you know, they're living in the house from overboard. You know what I mean? But it's being directed like it's, you know, George Washington are all the real girls, all the real girls not necessarily artsy in that way. But that kind of approach to it, and it's such a horrible miscalculation. The film could not be worse from two different directions. You know, it just could not be more, that stuff all cuts the throat of the comedy of sort of the genial sentimentalist comedy of the relentless sentimentality of the comedy, of the John Hughes Curly Sioux type stuff. You know, the John Hughes Home Alone type stuff, the relentless sentimentality of that, it cuts the throat of both the comedy and the sentimentality and gets nothing from the artiness. You know, it's not like you go like, wow, what a beautiful mood piece, you know? Reminds me of my own childhood. It's just, this movie is so bad. And I'm somebody, again, I'm somebody who's always defended Ben Stiller, and I like Ben Stiller. To this day, I'm somebody who's like, his secret life of Walter Medi has things to recommend it. You know, like, I am a ridiculous partisan for some of these people. And I went out to dinner with David Gordon Green. He's very, very nice to me. He's a genuinely nice guy. And so I don't mean to like, take these super hard shots at stuff, but it's, you know, I'm just not coming from the perspective of like straight hater. You know what I mean? I'm coming with the perspective of disappointed mom. - Well, I'm sure speaking of haters, most people will be like, anything to get them out of the horror genre, you know? (laughing) - Why, just 'cause he directed at least two of the worst horror movies ever made, maybe 30. - I am a lot more lenient on his Halloween movies than those people, but that ex is just movie yet. I was, that was really bad. That might be the worst horror movie ever. - The second of his Halloween movies is unimaginably bad. It's unimaginably bad. - It's got stuff to recommend it, but. - Name two. - Name two things from it to recommend it. - Judy Greer, number one. - Boo, you just don't get to put Judy Greer in a movie and be like, it's good now. Hey, you said, just say one pause the bell of the end and say, everybody loves Judy Greer and Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Myers, great. Yes, I will admit, those things are in this movie. - Let's not get off track. Let's talk about a movie that is genuinely funny, a movie that is genuinely heartfelt, emotional. Let's talk about a hard truth, Chris, come on. Let's, what are we waiting here for? - Is that when you watched hard truths? I'm just going straight in order on mine. - Oh, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go in a whole other world. - I'm just gonna basically go in order. - I watched four other movies about four hard truths, John, before we get on. - I don't know, are we gonna talk about every one of these movies is my question? - I only have. - See if one of these movies deserve to be done. - Let me count, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. I only have 10 more movies, John. - All right, well, if you want to do an order, whatever you want to do. - I mean, I'm fine. It's literally only 10 movies left to talk about. - Okay, okay. - How many do you have? 'Cause you watched-- - How important is it that we're going chronologically? - No, I was just surprised. I was just surprised. It's not super important that we're going around. - We had three to talk about all the movies, but like let's dive into hard truths because I've been wanting to talk about something I loved, something I loved without question. - Yeah, so hard truths, if you're not following Mike Lee, he made this movie Peter Lue, which is not very good. It's probably one of only two of his theatrical films, though, that you could say is not very good. John and I fretted a little bit about, like, is he at Peter Lue levels, it's time to hang it up? You know, is he ending that phase of his career? Or do we have reason to think he might, you know, still make a great movie on the preview episode? He had trouble getting movies funded through Netflix and streaming services, famously. Just nobody would give him money to make Mike Lee movies. So he's having a lot of trouble getting a movie made at all. He hasn't done anything since Peter Lue, which is what six years ago, is it that long ago? And so this movie is him, like getting sent back to the miners. It's like him getting sent back to TV money, right? It's overtly cheaper and less well-funded and just has less money behind it than anything he's done in a very, very long time. And rather than getting lost and feeling lost, you know, like, like, Antonioni making Mystery of Oberwald, right? This has the like attitude of like, you don't think I made the greatest fucking TV movies ever made? You don't think that I made the greatest fucking TV movies, TV plays in history? I'm Mike Lee, I made fucking Home Sweet Home and nuts and may and kiss of death. Like, you're gonna send me to TV money? I'm gonna make the best fucking movie ever made for this amount of money. And it is, it's incredible, it's prime Mike Lee. It is prime Mike Lee. If you identify prime Mike Lee as like that stretch from like mean time to secrets and lies. Like, that's I think what people think of when they think of Mike Lee, you know, the like high hopes life is sweet, mean time. Naked like secrets and lies like run, right? It's exactly like those movies. It's funny in a lot of ways, I said this to you, although I don't think you like the comparison. It's black, life is sweet. It's like life is sweet getting the, who's your caddy, hit man, black human treatment in a lot of ways? Well, only in that it's Mike Lee playing a lot of the hits, which is funny because I said, you know, I don't appreciate it when Cronenberg does it, but like with Mike Lee, he has so many strong themes that run throughout all of his films but the fact that this movie has the angry motorist and the father who gets hurt on the job and all the stuff that you recognize from other films and has a lot of those that same cadence doesn't matter because he's going to have new and original things to say about those same things in 2020. - It's in war. - Yeah, I don't think that's a diminishment of it at all. I just think it's like-- - No, it's just funny to say like, you know-- - It's true the level of that stuff. - An aged filmmaker shouldn't go back and do the same stuff and it's like, but Mike Lee can. Mike Lee is a master and he can go back to the same stuff he was doing 20, 30 years ago and make it fresh. - Yeah, yeah, you don't think I can do this anymore? I'm going to do it better than it's ever been done. I think it's better than any of his TV movies, honestly. This movie is up there with anything. This movie is up there with anything, he's done and it's really incredible. You know, like I said, it was a movie that just had me in fucking tears. You know, there's this kind of character that I call the Mike Lee special, right? Which is this miserably unhappy person who cannot help but sort of verbally and emotionally violently inflict that happiness on everyone around them. The daughter in "Life is Sweet", you know, the daughter with the deed and disorder, the James Corden character and all or nothing. You know, the son who shows up for the funeral in another year, right? These characters are just like these balls of mean time, the lead in mean time, negative energy. That is sort of inflicted on their captive, helpless family who can't get away from them. And it's never been the main character until this movie, right? That character is never, I think Mike Lee senses, this is really hard character to deal with and one of the sly things about the movie is that I think it pushes you right past the point where you're like, I don't find this fun or funny anymore with her 'cause the first half hour of this movie is the funniest movie of the year. Her negativity, her verbal dexterity and virtuosity in vomiting out negativity is like Johnny from "Naked", you know? Just this incredibly, this fountain of like human shittiness that becomes charming, it's so relentless and has so much dexterity to it, right? - And he's watching the entire movie of Marianne John Baptiste just ripping into every single person. - No, I don't think you can. I think he pushes you past it. I think he pushes you to a point that like, when the big change in her personality happens, you're like 10 minutes into like, I cannot take this person anymore. And if there's another 40 minutes of this, I'm gonna like, it will stop being a movie I like and start being a movie I hate and I think he knows that and I think he pushes it just far enough to make her, now she's a gun. She's a bomb that you're afraid is gonna go off. She's a spring trap that's gonna release a sledgehammer into you, right? If she goes off now, that she's not spewing it everywhere but she's like, tightly wound, right? And that change and approach to her like creates a new dimension to the movie and sustains its further through the end. And as somebody who's like, the main character's name is pansy, like somebody who was both a pansy myself, like the way she is and raised by one, this is just like a devastating movie. I spent at least half of this movie with just like tears streaming down my face, you know, just to be that kind of person and have intimately involved, emotionally involved with that kind of person. It was just, it's just so powerfully true and generous and cruel and thoughtful and funny and mean and nice and kind and awful. You know, as a film, as a film. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just amazing as Jean Baptiste is in this film. It's totally balanced by Michelle Austin playing her sister who was phenomenal in the movie as well and to have these two families that are contrasted to each other and just everything you've ever thought about, you know, through the filmography of Mike Lee in terms of like people who are effortlessly happy and those who couldn't be happy no matter what they did and the resentment that comes from that, the compassion that comes from that, just the human fucking approach to that idea. It's Mike Lee in a nutshell and the hard truth is that exact thing, that exact Mike Lee magic that we want and I couldn't recommend it higher and it was a movie I wanted to watch again right away and that's exactly how I felt watching another year, you know, in 2012 at the festival. It's, you know, this is the kind of thing that, you know, just blows you over and, you know, you can walk out thinking, it doesn't matter that I've seen 10 complete duds. I feel so invigorated and cinema is dead, baby. It's gone to survive. It's got a beating heart. Even if it's a beating heart of an 80 year old British man. - But that's what I'm saying is naming a filmmaker under 55. I don't question that there's filmmakers in their 50s and 60s or 70s. - Immediately when you walk out of the theater, five minutes later, you're like, God damn, I'm depressed again. - I definitely did not. I'm not sure invigorated is the right movie for this. Like completely, I guess invigorated, but there's a kind of hollowing outness and like, sure. - Yeah, yeah, experience for it. It's also funny that you mentioned the sister. It's this movie more than any Mike Lee movie, I think is perceptive about how when you're hopelessly depressed and unhappy person. Depressed isn't even the right word. I think it's like an unhappy person, regular. - You're like broken or dysfunctional. - Yeah, regular, well adjusted people extending kindness to you does not feel like a lifeline. It feels like a knife in the gut. And I think that that's one of the things that he's observed as a filmmaker and an artist that I don't see anywhere else, which is that like when you are unhappy, good regular people being nice to you does not bring you towards happiness. It hurts you, it damages you. It drives you further into the ground. And that's a really hard thing to understand, you know? That's a really hard thing to understand. And I think that a lot of people, a lot of film doesn't have an awareness of that and how that mechanic functions. A lot of humans don't, you know? - Absolutely, I mean it's brilliant. And I saw this movie right after seeing the new Elmo to VAR film, The Room Next Door. Which, you know, I've heard people say good things about, people say till the wind's gonna get an Oscar, et cetera, or a thing like that. And it was just striking to see these two films right next to each other because The Room Next Door is such elitist, fantasy, bullshit about, you know, rich New York woman who's dying and you're supposed to feel compassion toward her and I'm sorry, I know I'm always doing his Bergman, rich woman dying thing, I couldn't care less. I couldn't care less. I couldn't be further distance from these non-characters. It was interesting because I think Tilda, is it the kind of actress who, you know, can pretty much, is good enough that she can like handle anything. Julianne Moore is a little more limited, I think, in terms of like what she can play and what she can't. So her dialogue was almost embarrassing and it made me realize this is a badly written film because Julianne Moore, when she says something, I wanted to cringe until there's just kind of barely getting away with it. But it just has no, it doesn't feel human, you know? It feels sappy and sentimental. It feels hollow and artificial in a way that Mike Lee's film does not. And it's kind of interesting comparing these two revered masters, these decades long masters, making these films late in the game. And one of them is seemingly having no idea how to engage an audience and the other one being like, I can do it in my sleep. That was kind of my takeaway from Room Next Door is that, you know, who could possibly care about this poofy? Like I couldn't, you know, it was putting me to sleep. - It's interesting that you mentioned Bergman because I watched a film by Thomas Alfredson called Faithless based on a Bergman script, right? And it's funny to think about Bergman in the context of modern filmmaking, right? Because Bergman is like the knee-plusalta example of like emotional relationship filmmaking, right? You know, like when we say Bergman, it's just people being miserable in a room together is like the thing you draw up for it, you know? Frustrated desires and articulatlessness and spiritual abandonment and hollowness, right? And people say they want to make, do people say they want to make Bergman movies? I don't think they say that as much as they used to. And when they do, it doesn't, it's like they don't even understand, you know? Like when I heard, I think it was fucking hereditary. The filmmaker said he was thinking of Bergman when he made it and it's like, you should be ashamed then. You know what I mean? Like if this is what you think Bergman is and expresses, you should be fucking ashamed of yourself. You should hang up the cleats, man. You know, you should just be like, not everybody is made for this. And I wanted to make Bergman and I made hereditary. I should, I'm not built for it, you know, like it's over. Faithless is interesting. It's Thomas Alfredson. I was saying to you, like, what is this guy done? Like, let the right one in and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy seem to announce like that's a new filmmaker whose those movies are not a huge deal to me, but they're very good movies, very tastefully done and seem like this is guy who's gonna be around. And then there's like nothing. He does the snowman, right? Which gets ridiculed into oblivion, right? And it seems to sort of end his career, but it's not like there's movies you've heard of, but when Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Faithless and seeing him take what's probably Bergman's weakest script for summer and late period, Bergman, you know, like this is not, this is like 2000's Bergman, right? Faithless and remake it is a very strange thing to do because it is, it's absolutely Bergman's worst script. It's an idea that's tough to pull off and the film fails because it's two characters when they're young and then like 40 years in the future, right? And to make the actors match, the movie fails completely. You just feel like the modern stuff is unrelated to the old stuff. They don't connect at all. It's really, really hard to pull off, right? And this film does not pull it off at all. But you watch it and you're like, oh, a real movie. You know what I mean? It's probably Bergman's weakest. It's probably the most cliched. If you think of what Bergman is, it probably expresses things with the least delicateness and thoughtfulness of anything Bergman ever wrote. But you go, oh, here's an adult making a movie for adults about adult things in a way that actually has a chance of being meaningful to me. And I know I would be very hesitant to call it a good movie. I think it flops in some absolutely crucial aspects of it. But at the same time, I like this movie. Do more like this. Flop and fail in this way. Please, you know, make these mistakes. Don't make fucking marriage story, which is like a cartoon Bergman movie from the writer of a fucking Madagascar film. Less of that, more of this. You know what I mean? Don't give me the primetime TV, fucking comic book Bergman reference in homage. Give me a real Bergman script if you're capable of it, you know? - Yeah. Yeah, I guess the part of me just wants to say, you know, room next door, I'm not a huge almond of our fans. To begin with, maybe it's just a film I just give a pass, let it exist out in the world, you know, an adult film, an adult can enjoy. It does make the incredibly hilarious choice that after Tilda Swinn's character has died, her daughter is introduced and is played by Tilda Swinn. (laughing) - This movie-- - I feel you can't bring that in there and expect people to take it seriously. - This movie makes an incredibly big deal when they're young about how tall the woman is and how she's much taller than the shrimpy little guy. She's like a tall blonde model. And then in the advanced future stuff, she's like, foreign is shorter than him. It's like, come on now, guys. Can we at least get the one as tall? Is one as short dynamic right for this? Can we at least have them, I guess, an old-person makeup I would have preferred? But it's certainly you go like, well, maybe that's why Thomas Alfordson didn't make it in this world, in the modern world, is because he's, they want you to make the snowman. You know, and that's it, and that's really all that's out there for him, you know? - We didn't talk about this film. - Well, I want to talk about sentimentality real quick. - Sure. - I think another main problem with where cinema is, is this relentless sentimentality, right? That there's a sentimentality in place of affect and feeling, and I saw two movies that just try to heap sentimentality just into the biggest possible piles they can. They were the mountain and the life of Chuck, right? The mountain has nothing to it, but a cloying sentimentality that would have been embarrassing in like, you know, a movie like Uncle Buck, which the reviews are at the time are like, this shit is too sentimental, planes, trains and automobiles, this is too sentimental. I'm coming hard after John Candy today, for some reason, but you know what I mean, that this is just, there's nothing to it, but this dreary, Mac and Me style cancer kid is dying stuff that is completely artificial, completely insincere, trying to pull at your heartstrings so violently in a way that I feel like there's a shamefulness to it that did not exist in previous eras. And same for life of Chuck, and I feel like life of Chuck, it's based on Stephen King, it's directed by Mike Flanagan, who is the Stephen King guy, and when I was watching Life of Chuck, I was thinking about how he really is the ultimate Stephen King guy in the sense that, if you ask people who are really into Stephen King, what their favorites are, right? It's not the violent horror stuff, it's the relentlessly sentimental ones, right? That's what really makes Stephen King, Stephen King is the sentimentality of it. You know, the green miles and the Shawshank Redemptions and the standby knees, these kind of punishingly sentimental nostalgic movies, this kind of meat grinder of boomer nostalgia that it wants to grind everything down into. And I think, when I try and think about what makes Stephen King not a real artist and what makes his books an art, not real art to me, it's the sentimentality. It's not that he's talentless, he obviously knows how to tell a story, he knows how to be gripping in a very, very simple way. Life of Chuck is very gripping film, like you're with it. It makes a huge mistake in that it's all about dancing and it asks two people who can't dance, and then the second half of the movie is all about them dancing. It's like, these dudes can't dance, just cast a dancer next time. And the performances are terrible, who gives a shit? 'Cause there's a lot of dancing and it needs to be good. And we'll just be like, that dancing was fucking great. You know what I mean? Like if it's Eleanor Powell, who cares if she can act? We'll just be like, that dancing was fucking great. You know, that is all that matters. And it makes that huge mistake. But like the sentimentality of it, it's just like, what does the mountain want to be? You think about that movie, what is the mountain trying to tell you? It's just trying to like manipulate you with like fat kid with no friends, cancer kid, divorce dad. Like it just throws it all at you. And it's what does this have in its heart? What does this have in its brain? What does this have in its fucking soul but this? And I think life of Chuck is guilty of the exact same things. It's like made from the hope of animated Hallmark cards, both of these fucking things. You know? - Yeah, I'll just throw in because I'm the one who actually is a Stephen King fan and has kept up with Stephen King over the years. That sentimentality has really reached like an unacceptable level over the last decade or so with his work. I mean, he's an old man now, you know, I get it. But every single one of his novels is about like a young guy who young kid who has no faults whatsoever. You know, it's just like the best kid you could ever imagine. Nothing about him is negative. Everything about him is positive. Trying to get a cranky old man to like, to love him, you know? And letting that old man like remember what it was like to be young and what it was like to have that kind of purity to him. You know, it's a kind of very sappy, incredibly, almost icky sort of thing he keeps coming back to in this particular movie. I didn't see it, but it's based on one of his books from like the last year or two. So it's a, it's a, it's a recent thing. I don't know if you could accuse him throughout his career of having this level of icky sentimentality, but it's definitely a recent thing in his work. So I get it. I get exactly what you're saying. - It's there, it's there in Dreamcatcher. It's there in Pet Sematary. - It's there, but it's never been as prevalent as it is, as it is now. - It's all, it's green mile. It's all green mile is. It's all Shawshank Redemption is. - It's all those movies are, but it's there. I agree, yeah. - I think that sentimentality is defined by trying to get an audience to cry by telling them what they want to hear. - Sure. - And I think that that is what is green mile and what is Shawshank Redemption, if not that. - Yeah. The mountain, we didn't, we didn't discuss it all in our preview episodes directed by Rachel House, who's an actress, and Taika Waititi's films. You'll recognize her from Hunt for the Willard People and the Thor movies that she's always, you know, awesome. But she's always so cool to see her show up. So I was like, oh, she directed a movie. That's neat. I'm excited to check that and see what that's all about. And what she did was she made a Taika Waititi movie without anything that makes those movies good. - Without any of this, how absolute worst aspects of a Taika Waititi movie are here. She even took the person is dying, woman is dying of cancer and is seeking a mystical remedy to that, that, you know, didn't work in Thor, love, and thunder that made everybody like hate that movie so much. - It's almost amazing to see that strip, the Taika Waititi stripped away from a Taika Waititi movie, and that's what she ended up with. I don't want, I feel bad knocking it, but it really is so amateurish in student filming. And just, yeah, just why don't you make this movie when there's nothing about it to set it apart? - Why do you want to make it? What's your relationship to cinema? I mean, the green screen and digital stuff in it is so absurd. It's like when Pee Me Herman would like bike by the pyramids on, you know what I mean? - Yes, I know that, would you, man. - It's why so many of these movies leave you with a question of why did you want to make a movie? What did you want to do with this? And the answers, I think, are all unsettling. You know what I mean? I think the answers are all of a variety which should dispute you, not necessarily 'cause they're hearts in the wrong place because of the work they produce and because of the blindness they seem to have to the traditions of art they belong to. You know, I'm not joking when I say these films have like a Mac and me style approach to sentimentality. You know, it's that level of quality. And people are like, it can't possibly be that bad. And I would say that it doesn't appear that bad to you because so many movies are bad that now. That way, you know, that so many movies are fine. - It's not gonna be without even the cheesy stuff you can laugh at that, you know, the Paul Rudd takes to the Conan O'Brien show. It doesn't even have that. It's just total flat line. You know, there's nothing you could say in its favor or against it, it's just something that's there. - Yeah, that's part of the quality problem. Is it spiritually resembles Mac and me with a level of competence? Although, I don't know, some of those shots of like the mountain and them running around in front of them to me are as absurd as anything in Mac and me. You know, I think a better example, like of Chuck, which I love to see, again, talking about like, I love to see Chewy in a movie, Cheotelogio 4, like I love to see him for half an hour as a lead. There's stuff to like about it, it's effective. It has a baseline of competence that's very, very high. And when that baseline of competence is so high, like if you compare to like silver bullet, which has an incredibly low baseline of competence, right? It's objectively better in some way. So why is it worse? Why, what is worse about this? Is the question you're like question I'm left asking with a lot of these movies is when movies look and are performed and are edited and constructed better than at any point in time, you know? Like the kind of Mac and me style and competence is really tough to find. There's kind of like outsider artist shit that exceeds it, but that was like a big budget movie. Big budget movies aren't incompetent in that way anymore or it's certainly a rarity, you know? And certainly a way that like not even worst of the worst but like Goonies knock offs, you know what I mean? We're bad, bad, bad, you know? Movies aren't bad in that way anymore. Especially independent movies and outsider movies and independently funded movies that all have a kind of slickness to them that I find unsettling because it belies the like hollowness at the core of them, the complete inability to be effectual. And like if you see Life of Truck and you cry your eyes out, I bet that's very possible. It's an effective movie. I can also imagine it getting just the absolute worst reviews. It's hard for me to guess anymore what kind of reviews any of these movies are going to get, right? I can't even guess with everything we've been through, whether these movies are gonna get good and bad reviews, whether what we're saying is in line with the critical consensus or against it because I think that there's nothing, there's no driver behind the consensus anymore. You know, I don't know what drives critical thought anymore at all. It seems much more driven by, I don't wanna say trendy, but a kind of like thoughtlessness and pack mentality than has ever been in history. - Yeah, like suddenly, like in this festival specifically, like last year you had your holdovers, you had your American fiction, you're like people are gonna love these fucking movies, they're gonna win awards, who gives a shit, it's not for me. In that respect, I will say the movie that came closest to that, although again, I don't know, this movie could win best picture this year or could disappear entirely. I don't know, was Conclave, the Edward Burger film about electing a pope. It was, you know, it was fine. I went into a bit of hearing all this buzz about Isabella Rossolini, how this is gonna be the movie that wins her and Oscar, and I was like great, I wish nothing, but excellent things for Isabella Rossolini, I love her, that would be amazing if she had a nice, meaty supporting role in this. I came out thinking, I don't know. She has like two scenes, she did get like fucking unanimous applause from the audience in her big speech that she has, but I wish there had been more Isabella Rossolini, and I was talking to Vanya Garaway about this, I got to meet her up at the festival, she had done our Peter Pan episode with Martin Kessler, she is very cool, and she was telling me about, she liked it as like a classic political thriller along like the 70s, you know, political thrillers of Alan Pacula and things like that, and I wanted it to be like that. I feel like it needed like to be 30% more sleazy, and you know, like 40% more intriguing. As it is, it really is just like speaking to its liberal audience about, geez, aren't elections stupid? There's literally a line that's like, so you're saying we have to go with the least evil option here for Pope, and everyone was like, bah, get it? 'Cause that's what we're doing in America, right? We're going with the one who is in this clearly- - Don't just wait for me, find to look at the camera and then go, no, we must go with the most evil. 'Cause then I'd be, 'cause then I'd watch it, right? - That's what I would be, that's what I would be into, right? But as it is, it's just like, you know, elections are stupid, our system is stupid, get it everybody, and yeah, sure the liberal audience is going to eat that shit up with a spoon. - Leave it to those clowns in Congress. Those clowns in Congress are sure up to it again. - It's speaking to that audience 100%, so. Yeah, Edward Berger had made the "All Quiet on the Western" front movie that had like done really well a few years ago. I guess that's why people are saying this one is, you know, got a lot behind it, but at the end of the day, it's just, again, it's something that's like, I guess people could love this movie or just ignore it entirely, and it wouldn't matter one way or another. I really don't know what kind of life this sort of movie would have. - And look, it's not that I'm denying that there's always been middle brow stuff like Conclave, and that Conclave getting good rewards is a failure of taste, that driving the stazier dances with wolves, you know, does not represent. What I'm saying is legitimately good stuff that appeals to good taste is disappearing. And when I say cinema, like, of course, there's gonna be the Conclave's of the world. You know what I mean? Like, that's end, and to a certain extent, the Almortivar movie belongs more to that tradition than the tradition of Bergman and Fellini and Naroos and Vigo, right? You know, like, I'm not saying that that stuff has not existed and I'm having nostalgia for an age that never existed. That's not the argument. The argument is the legitimately great stuff seems in short supply. You know what I mean? And that this is a sea change that people say Conclave is good. Well, there's always movies like Conclave that people are, say, are good. And the little Oscar prognosticators hop on their Twitter feeds and start giving their little odds about who's gonna win, which little awards at what time, and everybody gives the thumbs up and thumbs down. And, you know, does their little comment section bullshit responses to it? Like, look, that's what life is. It was being done in a different way in previous times, you know, but that's always, that's always what it's been. So I don't want to say that-- Back to the days of the caveman. Yeah, exactly. That were in some era where, you know, middle brow just got invented and low brow just got invented. That's not my argument. My argument is that the literary equivalent, you know, the equivalent of literary achievement is gone from cinema. I don't see any evidence of it, right? Right. But that brings me to Eden, the Ron Howard movie, which I always think about. Talk about Mr. Middlebrow. I wonder, 'cause this movie is... I really enjoyed this movie while not having a feeling that I was watching a good movie. And when you talk about Middlebrow, it's really a question of like, in 2024 as part of the problem, not part of the problem, but like, I don't think you can get away with making a beautiful mind or Cinderella man anymore. I think that the landscape has changed. And when people talk about the death of middle class cinema, they're talking about the death of movies like Eden and Cinderella man. You know what I mean? They're not talking about the death of something actually good. This is a big part of the stuff that's dying. Although Eden is very good in some ways. Vanessa Kirby has been on a trajectory to be one of the best actresses in the world. I think when she's given this kind of like, thankless part, and she is so far above everywhere on Elson's screen, you go, oh, she really is one of the best actresses in the world. And so there's watching her. And Ida Armis has given a huge amount of leeway to like, vamp it up and be unlikable in a sexy way, which is, I think, at this point, it's been proven the only way to deploy her. And Sidney Sweeney plays a very like, chaste woman who like defeats the bad guys by pulling her boob out, you know? And I think that that's probably the only way to deploy Sidney Sweeney as end-all conversation by pulling her boobs out. It's to feed a baby, John, in this movie. It's to feed a baby. But there is something about this movie. It's a crazy story, and the main problem with this film is that it needs to be directed by somebody who's a little bit fucking insane. It needs to be directed by Herzog in 1977 to be a great movie. And instead you have the least insane, most sober filmmaker who ever lived directing it, you know? Like Sidney Sweeney gives birth standing up while being attacked by a pack of wild dogs. Like Ron Howard's just not the guy for that scene, you know what I mean? Like, and it's not that this movie is bad, but this movie is more like cautionary tale to me. Like I like this movie in some ways. This is what you mean when you say, what happened to middle-class cinema? Who cares what happened to middle-class cinema? You know what I mean? Middle-class cinema is dances with wolves and Eden. Like what are we fucking complaining about? They're fine, you may like them, you may not like them. They have good things to recommend they maybe don't. But we're not talking about movies, real movies here, when you talk about that shit. We're not talking about Herzog making agre or Fitzcarreldo, you know? It's just not what the conversation is. And it's like, oh, did you expect that out of you? And it's like, no, of course I didn't. I'm telling you why I don't expect anything out of it though and why I'm okay with it. - I didn't see that one. I just briefly mentioned I did flee two different films that turned out to be musicals. - Yes. - I didn't expect that. - Oh my God, an unexpected musical. This is like the kind of stupid fucking cliche. Sorry, go on. - No, Joshua Oppenheimer is the end. And Amelia Perez, which is the new-- - Jack O'Gare. - Jack O'Gare film. Starring Zoe Saldana Selena Gomez and Carla Sofia Gascon. - Yeah. (laughs) - The end already had an issue with like the very first scene is Michael Shannon, an old age makeup walk in real slow. Like he's an old man. I was like, I'm not gonna be able to watch Michael Shannon for an entire movie pretending to be an old man. And then the guy that was named David McKay, George McKay starts singing and it was just like, I'm out. I know, that's why I wasn't planning on seeing the substance but I ended up running over the substance because I was like, I can't know, it's not gonna work. And Amelia Perez, yeah, they're twirling around in a sex change clinic singing about all the different kind of procedures you can have when you're getting a sex change and it's like, fine, good, have a good time. - I feel like the pace of culture moves so fast now that if you wanna make something provocative about taboo subject, like sex change stuff, well, you're like 12 years too late. You're certainly three years too late. You know what I mean? The pace of the culture, like, this is like dad stuff. This is like suburban mall America stuff and to make films that are trying to be provocative in that kind of way, you just, it moves lightning quick. This is a dead subject at this point. Everybody is every opinion and thought that can be expressed on it has already been voiced in a public setting. If you're gonna be cutesy musical provocative, that's not enough. You actually gotta be fucking good. You can't get away with being headwig in the angry inch anymore. You know what I mean? Like, you just can't get away with it. You're way too late and things move way too fast. - Move on, what's your next one? - Mine is. - You think he's about Paul Anka now? - Yeah, he's got the goods. So it turns out John and I didn't know anything about Paul Anka and we both went in. It was like, finally a relief. We're gonna have some fun here. This is gonna be enjoyable. Paul Anka, I know him as a song writer, not as really a star himself. He wrote, I know him as like, the writer of the "Tonight Show" theme song. And, you know, he wrote for like, you know, other people and he's like a jingle writer, right? This is what I thought Paul Anka was. I know he's associated with like Sinatra and then he was like, you know, wrote the "Tonight Show" theme and wrote for other people. And it turns out I did not understand who Paul Anka was whatsoever. He wrote "My Way", the film is called "Paul Anka", his way. And that's a really big deal for the movie. I don't think I've, this movie, in my opinion, should be called "Show Business Worm". That is this guy. He is just, you know, in fake documentaries or movies about musicians that are comedies, they show him chasing all of the trends. And so like in the '50s, he's, you know, dressed up like Pat Boone. And in the '60s, he's wearing like tie-dye and got like an acid haircut. And in the '70s, he's a disco guy. And in the '80s, you know, he's like, you know, like a billy idol type. And you're always like, that's ridiculous. Paul Anka is that guy. Paul Anka stands for nothing, chases after every trend. Every story is like, and then I stood by somebody famous. You know what I mean? He seems like broken in the way child actors are. He's also incredibly arrogant. We're introduced to like as much younger wife. There's an awful scene where his wife seems to be meeting one of his adult daughters for the first time. Are you the third or the fourth one? I'm the third one, right? But the movie plays everything about him, like a PR kit. You know, this is what documentaries about artists are now. They're just like these EPKs. They're these electronic press kits for these assholes, you know, that are just, there's so much overt rot and repulsiveness in the life of Paul Anka. And the movie just plays it like the story of a real songwriting swinging cat hero, you know, that he's gonna plant the flag on that mountain. And it's really just like, if you compare it to like, what movies about artists used to be like from or burden of dreams, you know, like that when movies aspired to something, you know, when they were about artists, it's just so, I didn't realize how much I hate Paul Anka. I guess it's all I have to say about this. It doesn't help that like, the era that he was most popular is so antiquated now that it's like watching, you know, monsters of megaphone of 1920 or whatever that is from Mr. Show. Like, you can't do anything with this stuff. It's just like, here's another clip of him standing next to Dean Martin or whatever. And that's all it is. There's not even like great footage to like go back to. And I'm talking about the peak era because the only thing that he's done that's significant for the last 40 years is, you know, hey, after Michael Jackson died and people were starving for stuff, no one ever heard. They dug up three songs he did with Paul Anka for people to enjoy that were not good enough to release when they recorded them, you know. It's like, he's just like an antiquated guy and there's nothing to say about him still being alive except, hey, here he is. He's walking around, tipping everybody generously. Here he is performing Dick Clark's "Rockin' New Year's Eve" with the new lyrics to my way, that reference, like, and new apps, I've flipped through a few and you're like, Jesus Christ, this worm, this utter worm. Also so funny that my way, something, a song that is so, you know, so connected to Frank Sinatra, obviously, in his life. That'd be like, well, I wrote it so I can take it too and it's like, it's not yours, though. You know, in a weird way. It's like, yeah, great, congratulations. You took five hours and you wrote it. It's not your song, you know, that like, that's something that is associated 100% with someone else. So even to say like, you know, Paul Anka his way, you know, and end it with him singing this horrible, distorted, you know, re-write of the song. It's just like, wow, and you're fine with this being like, yep, that's my way. And on TikTok, I did a dance. You know, it's the unreal, how horrible that rendition is. I know, it's just like, what is there to say about this guy? It's like his fucking plastic surgery monster, 40 year old fiance. It's not, it's, there's nothing. And all of the songs aren't good. My way is the only good song, which the film reveals, he ripped off from a French song, the tune and the structure. And the movie plays it like, I bought that song many, many, many, many, many years before I wrote it for Sinatra. That tune, I owned it legitimately. And you're like, this sounds fishy here guys, 'cause it's the only good song you've ever written. Every other song is like, ceiling of B plus. Like Tom Jones, she's a lady. Like that's a fine song. It's no, it's not unusual, which is like the great Tom Jones song. You know, it's like, you know, layer, put your head on my shoulder. That's pretty good. You know, it's not as good as like, you know, Earth Angel, or, you know, any other song from that era, any other five satin song, you know. - No, there's a point where he meets with Frankie Avalon. It's a real like there, but for the grace of God, like Frankie Avalon is just like this teen idol for, you know, for a few years. And then, you know, he was just a professional, hey, remember me guy, you know? - Who's-- - And Paul-- - And Paul-- - And Paul, you're under a mask of past trick surgery too. He looks like one of the failed fucking experiments from Eyes Without a Face. And Paul Inka's whole claim to fame is like, I wrote a song that's really well known. This is one claim to legitimacy, which is that Frank Sinatra's best known song was written by me. - And I got rich from the Tonight Show theme. - Right. Well, that's the other thing is like, it's just a story of constant success. He literally, you know, gets signed by an agent his first week in New York when he's, what, 15 years old or whatever. And since then, he's just been able to like make money. Somehow, you know. - Yeah, just relentlessly write songs that even the Michael Jackson songs, you know, cropping up after his death is like, and here's a few more million bucks he's gonna get now because, you know, people wanna release that shit now. It's just like, hey, well, congrats. Good on you, congratulations for constantly making money and being rich. - And it's got to be pointed out he does not seem like a nice guy or a good person. That's the thing is like, he might be a sleep with old man where hammering. He's like an asshole. My impression of him devolves into Robert Evans, as John has said, but it's, he really is that kind of like, you know, and then Sinatra bought me a robe that said the kid because I was the kid, you know, and it's like, great, great. - Every time I was like trying to mockingly do a Paul Anka song, you rightly said, I'll put too much swing on it. It's 'cause I'm trying to make it more interesting. (laughing) - Yeah, but this, you know, there's a lot of discussion which is going to be our Donnie Brook, our finest kind this year. And it's either the mountain or Paul Anka. I'm leaning towards the mountain because you could always, you know, make the joke about, I guess that guy's mountain wanted him to fucking die. We could keep going back to that one, but Paul Anka was definitely, definitely the movie that I most detested and it's every music documentary. It's the symbol of like every fucking, not even music, but documentary about an artist, documentary, just these hagiographical made for fucking streaming music docs about these people that seem like legit garbage people. You know what I mean? That like does somebody think Paul Anka is good? You know what I mean? You're not making this movie about somebody who's revered. You know what I mean? You're making it about like show business worm. You know what I mean? Just guy who's worm in his way in day after year, day after day, leaving his wife when he gets bored with her because she's like, maybe you should hang it up. And so he leaves her, you know, just like, and the film tells it like, it was a moment of personal growth for me. And it's like, I dislike everything about you, you know, your other daughters don't want to be in the movie, I guess, you know, that kind of thing. I've supported you in your career, I've raised your family. I was just like a little more time with you. Ah, that's it, divorce, we're done. - I haven't planted the flag on that mountain yet. Your Paul Anka, what flag do you think you're going to plant? I'm gonna write the jingle for, you know, Eppsie and that'll be your next thing. - The mountain is telling everybody. - The mountain is telling, you know, that's what it's telling you. - The mountain's telling you to die. The mountain's telling you. - If I found out that Paul Anka 100% financed this himself, I wouldn't be surprised. - No, it just has that stink of like, who else, who else, who else to it, you know? We've made documentaries about Dino and Steve McQueen and, you know, who else, who else have we got, you know? Who wrote my way? - Right, it's the scraps. - Is it, it's not your right, my way? - It's the scraps. - No, he also seems like he must have an ultra powerful agent to just that, like he's one of those show business guys who's just like so entrenched, there's no digging them out, you know? - Yeah, yeah. All right, well, I got two more movies we both saw that I feel like we need to talk about. Do you have anything other than hair-ticking shadow strays? - I have The Order, which if you maybe pick my three best movies of the festival. Hard Truths and Cloud were the two legitimately good movies I saw. And then I guess The Order's gotta be three, you know? It's the Order, it's made by the director of Snow Town, which is about the Australian Snow Town murders, which were not committed in Snow Town at all and really had almost nothing to do with Snow Town. But it does everything right the Order. It does everything right, but still somehow achieves nothing. And it's funny that this is the third best film in the festival for me because it feels like the work of a filmmaker with no specific personality and therefore not an artist, right? And this feels like it has a cap to it. Everybody's good in it. It tells the story reasonably close to the truth. You know, it's well cast. Mark Marin is in the Eric Bogosian Allenberg role, you know, for making a little cameo. And it gives, it does something that's almost even shocking, which it doesn't turn The Order into cartoon evil. It sort of gives them more than their fair shake in a way that's almost shocking. And I can imagine it might even get negative reviews for this reason, get reviews like this is an irresponsible thing to do, you know, to not paint these guys as like soulless, evil, you know, forces of darkness in the world, as opposed to just like really or even idiots, you know, they're just like really committed to something evil, you know, like "Snowtown" in that way. But it's just there's nothing to be said about this movie, you know, there's just nothing to be said. And it more than a lot of other movies makes me fearful for the future of movies that this is sort of like one of the highest heights by a young filmmaker in this festival. Kyoshi Kursawa and Mike Lee are not young anymore. I don't even know if this guy's young, he might be in his 50s, but it definitely makes you go, is this all there is, you know, is this all there is? This is one of the best that I saw. It does everything right. I don't have a specific complaint about this movie other than that it does not feel like that artistic voice that I think is essential to real art, you know? So I don't know, like go see it. You'll probably like it. It's an interesting movie. This is not a bad review. This is not telling him to change. It just feels like you were rough. It feels like hard to say anything about. Then I also have Ick, which I wanted to talk about. It's directed by Joseph Kahn, who's like a music video maven, probably the greatest music video director of all time. And watching this movie, it's another midnight madness whiff. And I think Ick is a great example of how hard it is to direct and create sort of candy colored fluffy popcorn. This movie is supposed to be just like dumb, fun, relentlessly fun, dumb movie, right? And it just fails every single second of it. There's no piece of this movie that's fun ever, right? And it reminded me a lot of the Steven Spielberg quote 'cause it's obviously he's a music video director. So the camera whips around upside down and there's quick cuts and there's smash cuts on jokes and there's pullbacks to reveals and CGI monstrosities and like montage sequences edited to pop tunes and things like that. And when Spielberg was making Crystal Skull, the much beloved Crystal Skull, an interviewer asked, I'm like, do you feel like the action is gonna play in this sort of Michael Bay quick cut post MTV era? Like in the quick cut era, do you feel like the action's gonna play? And Spielberg, I always think about said, if you construct the narrative engine right, it doesn't matter how fast you cut because it will always feel like you're cutting fast, right? And this movie is a great example of if the narrative engine is not constructed properly, it doesn't matter how fast you cut and how fast you try and make it move, it will always feel slow as molasses. This movie is a grueling boring movie to sit through. It's a very difficult movie to endure and it's hyperactive candy colored, not even candy colored, it's a very drab looking movie, but sort of pop confectionary type film that has a new music cue every 20 goddamn seconds and it feels super slow and it doesn't play and it doesn't work. And I feel like there's just legions of filmmakers making movies exactly like this who have no idea what a narrative engine is, who have no idea what a story is, who have no idea how to move an audience through any of it. And it's another midnight madness, right? Yeah, it's as hapless a movie as you can see. And then I saw a fairly interesting documentary called Men of War that like I don't necessarily have a lot to say about it, except that it's, you know, it's one of those document films. It's sort of one of those fun you, fun you mentories that takes a very serious subject, which is like, you know, the autocratic pseudo-democratic dictator of Venezuela who's attempting to be deposed by an even more autocratic and untrustworthy opposition leader and how America gets involved maybe. And is this a black ops group that goes to depose them and fails miserably and interviewing with the guy who was overseeing this black ops group that was supposed to lead a revolutionary party? Sort of like Bay of Pigs Part II failed, small group goes in. And it's a very interesting story that an fun movie made about something that I'm not sure you should be telling a fun story about. This is again, it's the question of triviality. It's an incredibly trivial film made about something very, very serious. And part of the problem is the guy he's interviewing is an excessively trivial human being. Just a total clown, right? And he's given the film over and then it does like, you know, you know how these fucking Netflix and Hulu documentaries look and sound and move, you know? It's cut in that way and put together in that way and fun in that way. And there's something sort of sickening and repulsive about it, you know? The fact that it's good in the way it's good is makes it a questionable, possibly irredeemable project. And then that's it. Now we just got heretic and shadow stress. - Okay, so heretic, it's weirdly not part of the midnight madness. I always think it's interesting these horror films that are released outside of the midnight madness, you know, programming. I was wondering if you know it's like, is it the filmmaker being like, I don't want to dissociate this with just sleazy horror. - This is elevated A24 horror. - Exactly, you know, like it's, I was wondering, you know, is it a decision of the programming or is it a decision of the filmmaker? But heretic stars Hugh Grant as a charming, just absolutely charming young man who lives in this house by himself and two Mormon, what are they recruiters? What are they called technically? Then they go door to door. - They're on the mission. - Missionaries, there we go. Two Mormon missionaries, young women, come to him on a very dark and stormy night and find himself trapped in his house and have to listen to his relentless theological opinions on things. It's one of those movies where everything is, you know, everything in the narrative is precedented on this guy being three steps ahead, right? Or four steps ahead of the heroes that he knew they were going to do this, he knew they were going to behave this way, these manipulating them into this such and such, even the storm surrounding the house, it's like their trap, they can't go in the storm and their cell phones don't work inside of the house because it's lined with metal. Everything about it is just like you just kind of have to immediately be like, all right, so this is all going to be manipulations of the screenplay where, you know, something is introduced, you know, it's going to pay off in the end, it's going to come back in a way that makes you think, I think that these filmmakers are trying to be clever in a way that I'm just not going to get behind. I would say that the main thing behind this movie is you grant and its performance, right? It makes it tolerable from beginning to end, is the best thing you can say about it. Do you agree with that? - I mean, I told you, my reaction to this movie is this movie's idea is what if you combined saw with the worst fucking class you ever took in college? It's this sort of like adjunct professor approach to like intelligence. It's like the villain's evil architect monologue at the end of the movie extended to feature length. You know what I mean? The like, let me, you should think more seriously about good and evil expended to feature length. And the movie has an awareness and a certain humor about it, but I do think if it had been literally anyone, but Hugh Grant, I can't think of any other actor that I would have walked out on it. Like, and it's, if this is elevated horror, the problem with the elevated horror genre is that I find most of those movies to be fake smart. I find them to be stupid. I find them to be movies that sort of have a pretension to intelligence. This movie is constantly saying of the Hugh Grant character, you just have a pretension to intelligence, right? So is there some measure of auto critique to this movie? It would have to have something else to it. You know what I mean? It's not enough to say, this is fake smart. It will have to show me what real smart is in its opinion. And it doesn't have any real smart to it. It only has fake smart to it. - Well, it's not really fake smart or it's auto critique. - Well, the first thing you pointed out when they come into the house and you see the butterfly circling the light and you leaned over and whispered like, they're like, lost to the flame, right? They're being drawn to it. That's exactly what it is, right? I mean, again, they make this regular guy, yeah. They're making this character, you know, supernaturally smart and a spider, you know, pulling them into his web. And it's just, it's boring. - But he's not supernaturally smart. He's like smart the way like the worst college professor you have ever done. I think of this photography teacher I had in college who was just like, in this image, almost emphasizes the small. And it's like, yeah, it's a Polaroid. Like what the fuck are you talking about, you moron? Like this movie has that kind of like-- - Yes, he's the constant like, let me show you Monopoly and it's a rip off of this game. That's what religions are. They're just a rip off of old religions, you know, and he does it in a way that's supposedly snazzy and clever. But the movie it reminded me most of, even more so than saw was martyrs, right? - Oh yeah. - A film that just like had this, you know, you don't know what's going on and you're constantly wondering what's happening and like what's next. And it has pretensions to like a bigger idea. And again, these theological ideas. And it's like, and what is it exactly? Well, these characters are dumb and they just never thought about this stuff before. And now they have to, never forced you for their lives. They have to think about these themes and issues. And it's like, yeah. - Well, but I think, I think, I think, yeah, yeah. - It's the same that you're saying where it's like, I don't know what this film is saying that their villain is right and smart. It's smarter than everybody else, you know? Or does it actually siding sympathizing with these two female characters? - Yeah, I think martyrs is like true believer stuff. Like, no, let me tell you this mind-blowing thing. And heretic is like, nah, Hugh Grant's full of shit. You know what I mean? Like, he's full of shit and he's pulling the wool over these guys. If anything, I thought it was admirably sympathetic to the Mormons and not their beliefs are ridiculous and they're inherently ridiculous. I think it does talk outside of both sides of the mouth. But I just don't think it has anything to say in particular. And it's a movie that's like staking its entire self on not necessarily having something to say, but being about what it means to have something to say. You know what I mean? Which is a kind of funny line. But it's all very like 18 year old cheap undergrad philosophizing, you know? It's very much like, it's not even undergrad. I've met plenty of 33 year old vegan wiccans who are like, and do you know that Jesus is based on Osiris? And it's like, yeah, I've heard this one before, guys. But when the heroes, you know, finally grow a pair and start arguing with them, their arguments are pretty much the same kind of like 14 year old philosophy. There's no question. There's no question. You're right. This movie's purely fucking stupid. Yeah. I mean, I, the thing is, Q Grant's so likable in it. There's, when I remember this movie, it's like, oh, blueberries disease, I wish I had that. Like, that's a really funny line. There's movies that are really funny line. I think the woman who plays the more naive missionary does incredible with it. That's a hard role to play. And she really reminds me of the Mormons I've known in my life, you know, I was, I was very friendly with a Mormon family growing up. And she nails that kind of character in a way that's, could easily be unkind cartoon that could easily be ungenerous. I, again, it's like, if this is supposed to be a good movie, and I don't know that it's gonna get reviewed, the kind of reviews that like Lighthouse and Midsummer get, it's definitely not good enough, you know? Again, it's like fake smart. This, this movie is, is as, as, you know, sort of dumb as hostile, you know? And dumb horror movies can be quite savvy. And I think Hostile's a great example of a dumb horror movie that's savvy, you know? But wants to think it's as something else. Last wave or something. Does it? I don't know what this movie wants to be. I think this movie wants to make money at the end of the day. You know, I don't know that there's a lot driving this movie. - Yeah. At the end of the day, I'd say, you know, the approach, direction, everything like that, I wouldn't say is bad. I would just say it is what it is, which I think kind of leads into the Shadow Strays in a certain way, right? - Yeah. Oh, let me just say my two walkouts before we go to Shadow Strays to wrap up. Collective monologues and it doesn't get any better than this. It doesn't get any better than this. It's like, oh, it's really awesome to have a contender for the worst movie I've ever fucking seen. It's awesome to have another name in that hat. Never have I walked out of something in just total dislike better. It's, you gotta see this movie. I don't want to spoil it for you, but just. - A foul footage horror movie, right? - Yeah, but just like this wiener they got doing "The Voice Over," it's like sniveling millennial dark song is the only way to describe this movie. It's just you will be like, what am I in the fucking Unitarian youth group hug sessions? Get out of my fucking face. And collective monologues, just nothing. One of those movies that I feel like this is what passes for art. This is nothing. Okay, "Shadow Strays." - "Shadow Strays," yeah, so we were excited because it's by a director who's made good films. He made headshots. - He like, yeah. - He made "The Night Comes For Us." Films that you know are high adrenaline, very innovative, very fast moving action films. And the thing is "Shadow Strays" is it's like those films, right? It's a very hard hitting, doesn't let up for a second kind of highly trained assassin goes the professional and decides to protect this young boy. It's almost unremittingly bleak, this film. I mean, like everybody dies in this fucking movie. There really is no hope left at the end of the film, which kind of was like, oh, that was a choice. Okay, I actually thought when it seems like the child died that they were going to be revealed to be alive at the end of the movie, don't even get that. I mean, it's just very, very pessimistic kind of film, which makes you know, the kind of wall to wall, blood splurting and decapitations and pounding each other into letting mass as a pulp seem like, you know, oh, this is less fun and a lot more, I kind of wish I was dead. I don't know if that was what they were going for. - I did not find this movie bleak or hopeless. - I stay to the end though, where everybody literally dies. - Yeah, but who cares? They're like non-characters. This movie, so again, it's the problem of being trivial that there's a weightlessness to it. - And you're saying it doesn't merit that level of consideration, basically. - Yeah, not even doesn't merit that level of consideration 'cause I think it's a, I think action movie fans will like this movie, and I think this is a good, interesting town to director that I don't wanna speak badly of, particularly, but like that kid could die a hundred times on screen and nobody would feel anything because it's nihilism is like, you know, it's a cheap nihilism. It's a, you know, it's a, wouldn't this be fucked up nihilism? You know, that is inconsequential to me and has no effect on me anymore. I don't know if it affects other people, but I, you know, it doesn't feel like the bleakness of a really bleak movie. It doesn't feel like bleak moments to me, you know? And so I don't know, it's just like none of it worked for me. The plot is just Lee on the professional where there's like a super badass hitman living next door to a kid who gets shaken down by a corrupt cop whose family gets killed and she takes him in and they develop the bond which drives her towards an inevitable violent revenge with the apparatus that, you know, caused the suffering, right? That's, you know, that's both movies and it's just sort of like, you know, who cares? This movie's all who cares to me and I'm, and I don't, you know very well, part of this is a matter of taste is I don't like John Wick style, super secret society assassins who have their own telephone systems movies. Like, I don't find any of that. It's divorced from reality and you say, well, aren't all action movies divorced from reality? And it's like, I guess it's, you know, it's to live in Diane L.A., divorced from reality is, you know, are Steve McQueen movies divorced from reality? Do John Wayne make movies divorced from reality? In some aspects, yes, but not like this. You know what I mean? Not this kind of total divorcement from reality. Well, it's not trying to be that. It's trying to be like, you know, comic book style violence, ultra violent, you know, almost, this has more in common like a superhero movie. And it's like, I don't know. To me, the kind of tradition this movie belongs to is like ballistic X versus sever more than anything. You know, sort of people and body armor finding extra ways to cause glass to shatter and cars to blow up. Well, that's what I mean in terms of the bleakness. It's like a nihilism, you know, where it just, where it reaches a point of who cares. You know, a fun action movie shouldn't do that. You know, we shouldn't have like, oh good, another scene where everyone is fucking shooting at each other and flipping over cars and kicking each other into windshields. You shouldn't have that. You should be like, oh, that's a cool new thing. And this film just, you know, relentlessly, you know, has seen after scene of like this kind of extended action that makes it not fun, which was a real bummer because, you know, I thought like, let's end the festival on a fun movie before we head back to New York, you know? And, yeah, it really was sort of like, you know, the perfect way to end this particular festival and like an action movie that's no fun. - Well, that's the thing for me. - Perfectly well made, but not fun. - But I don't know if it really made me feel like, will I ever find an action movie fun again? The way the horror movies in this festival made me feel, and all summer long made me feel like, will I ever like a new horror movie again, you know? And is that cinema or is that me, you know? The question of like, is cinema dead? I think that people have to entertain that because of what's happening with the landscape, with what's happening with the theatrical landscape, with what's happening with the quality of films, with what, with how so overtly the YouTube and bite size reels, the TikTok and Instagram size reels are overtaking the image market, right? How TV is overtaking the image market that you actually have to ask the question with some sincerity, you know? Will they even be making theatrical movies 15 years from now, except in a super niche way, is a very legitimate question, you know? And it reminds me a lot of, you know, Milan Cundara and part of novel intestines portrayed is always asking, not asking, but he's like, the novel is over. He's writing these books in like '90s, early 2000s. And when I was a kid, I remember thinking that was really silly. Like, what do you mean is the novel over, right? That's, this is completely ridiculous. You're still writing, Carlos Puente's still writing. You know, there's all these great novelists still discovering, but now I find it to be true and specifically how he delineates sort of the two halves of the history of the novel and then the overtime period of modernism, right? In the modern era. And, but it's true, like the novel is over both in terms of quality and sales, right? There has not been a meaningful literary achievement in 25 years at least. If you look up the absolutely best reviewed books of 2023, they're lucky to sell like 25,000 copies, you know? Like, I looked it up and just pulled a book that was on a bunch of Best of Year lists, this book called The Ren, The Ren. And it sold 23,000 copies, right? And considering both how usual it is now for people to buy books and not read them and for a chunk of those books to be library copies and sort of like educational copies, how many people have read that book, right? This is one of the best reviewed books of the year. Is it 10,000 people? That read that out of the 23,000 copies sold? Is it 5,000 people? These are nothing, those are like the amount of people that listen to this fucking podcast, John. You know what I mean? Like these are trivial numbers, you know? Our show was like a nothing show and a very pure sense of it where it's like, no aspirations, no audience, no good ideas, not really a meaningful cultural thing and something that like, you know, we're probably incapable of doing better than that. But this is also what we do. And I think we're happy with it. That should not be what the novel is anymore. You know what I mean? And as a literary form, the novel is unquestionably dead. You know, I think that you have to like, if your argument is that like James Patterson and Harry Potter still sell copies and read that and that like, there's a lot of like YA slop that still sells and is read. I think that you're only proving the point that the novel's dead. And at some point, people are going to have to contend with the fact that cinema is definitely next. Cinema is more tied to apparatus than a book, you know? It's tied to theaters. It's tied to physical media for a lot of its history. You know, it's tied to a very specific cultural apparatus that is going to go away at some point, whether it's 10 years from now or 150 years from now, you know? Like, that's gonna happen and what does that mean? Am I watching it happen before my very eyes? And I know that like humans are like fucking apocalyptic thinkers, right? That everybody thinks their era is the end of the world, that this is one of the most common human thoughts in philosophies. Every generation has it's the world is ending now, right? That idea. But you know, apocalypse is also do happen, you know? Just fucking, ask a triceratops, ask the dodo, you know? Not a dodo is not a good example, but like they do happen, forms die off, ask the dodo about forms dying off, you know? And, you know, I think about the various reactions to the idea of cinema being dead, you know? Young people always dismiss it, you know? Young people are always like, I'm the vanguard, I'm in charge, I'm in charge of the future, I'm gonna control the future. I care about movies, therefore movies will be around forever. So the people who think they're the vanguard are always gonna be that. And then you have like the old desperate people who like want to be forever young and cool. You know, the Timothy Spall in Life is Sweet types, like Nick Pinkerton, the like cinema's still happening. It's not dead, you're dead, these fucking like, you know, sad losers, who's like, you know what I mean? You know what I'm talking about. And then who like are tied to like youth, whose entire like persona is tied to like the falsehoods of youth, you know what I mean? And in a way of that, like they're completely rejected. And then you have old people who I think are where you and I would fall, who are like very unwilling to think about the source of so much of meaning from their life vanishing and being gone. You know, that people who have thought of themselves as movie guys their whole lives, thinking about the forms sort of dying off in the form not being able to sustain anything anymore, right? And it's like, and you can always make a movie that's true. You can always fucking write a Greek tragedy or an epic poem, but you're working in a dead form. You can speak in fucking Latin and write in Latin right now if you want to, that doesn't make it a living language. And so when I think about like, what is cinema dying going to look like? Is there going to be some fucking volcanic age that burns it out? Is it gonna be a meteor strike? You know what I mean? Is it gonna be like Archduke Ferdinand getting assassinated in 2025, but you know, now it sends nukes out? You know, like what is, what is the going to be the appropriate metaphor for the death of cinema? You know, and I honestly think it's more like, I think it's more like heretic, you know what I mean? I think it's more like my pitch. It's going out with the whimper. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's not even a whimper. It's just this, this sea of gray that washes over everything and then it recedes into the sea, you know? And one thing I did. (laughing) That's fair enough. And one thing I did want to say is that like, I don't even necessarily think filmmakers are to blame. The corporate commercial apparatus is always going to encourage what makes the most money for themselves, right? So you can't be like surprised that they're hiring, you know, Johnny Pizza Hut commercial and Reebok ad director to do their movies, right? Great art. Again, the Kundara idea, the survival of great art, criticism is necessary for it. Great criticism is necessary for the great survival, great art. Nothing is more necessary for the survival of great art than great criticism. So if you're a critic who's lamenting the state of art and lamenting the death of a form, you must look to yourself first. If you have appointed yourself steward of the form by declaring yourself a critic and the form is getting sick and dying, this is your patient that is dying. This is your responsibility that's dying off. So if things suck, this is your fault. You are not enough, good enough critic. You are not enough, good enough writer. You are not enough, good enough podcaster and thinker and what you are doing is killing this shit, right? You are the steward and if you are letting your garden die, if everything's withering on the vine, it's not actually the garden that's to blame. It's the steward of the garden. And I think that critics really are, as much of the problem critics and programmers and those in charge of the stewardship are the problem even more than the films themselves. - Final takeaway. I'm going to the Tony Steller route. I'm going to escape into 1940s, Japanese cinema, 1950s, Italian cinema, French cinema. I mean, I'm just going to go to the past. I'm going to go, there's a giant sea of excellence that I have not experienced yet from 100 years of cinema. I am going to stop getting excited about new things coming out. - But isn't this a question? This is a question I was thinking about too, right? 'Cause I was reading Carlos pointes and he talks about how Jacques Lefait, at least, is even more alive now than when it was 200 years ago, over 200 years ago when it was written, right? And when you go back and you watch Latelante, why is Latelante still alive in a way that these movies are talking about are not alive, that don't have any liveliness to them, that don't have any vibrancy to them? Why is die-hard still alive? We watch die-hard when we're up there, die-hard stills plays. Why is hard truths lively? Why is that? Why are the old films still alive? And that's the question that I don't have a good answer for. I guess just because they were made when the form was alive, you know? - I won't stand for this die-hard to erasure. We also watch die-hard too, which is a great movie. - I never once raised die-hard to, never once. - Yes, it's good to examine it. It's good to go back and see, like, you know, maybe there's a way to experience these older pieces of art that, like, you know, they're brand new, that, like, it's like seeing a new movie to go and watch Latelante again, you know? You have a different reaction to it this time, your relationship with this has changed in some fundamental way. I think that that's possible, and I think that, you know, that's always gonna give me hope, that like, there's such so many great things out there, so much great art that you can re-read and re-watch, re-listen to, re-experience for the first time, and that's a very optimistic thing, and I'm not scared about that at all. And if, you know, there is another movie that is a fucking masterpiece worthy of a art-truths, then I'll be there for it, you know, and no worries, but I do think we screwed up in not going, not making last year our last time going to the Toronto Film Festival. I think that this time, we went one too many times. I think that was the problem, but either way. - We went back to the college party when we were 23. - Exactly, exactly, that's all it is, but Chris, I always enjoy spending time with you. I always love to do this thing with you, and so it wasn't all bad, it wasn't all a negative experience. - It definitely wasn't all a negative experience, and I don't, my relationship to art is no longer such that like, a bad movie affects me, right? - Right. - And even the dying of the form doesn't bum me out, all forms die, you know, and it's, you know, it was nice time to take a little vacation up to the Queen City with my boy, Johnny Crabs. - Absolutely. - And, equals one. - They did. - It was one, John. - They did. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (gentle music)