Here

Blank Jack with Griffin and David

Blank Jack with Griffin and David Don't know what to say or to expect

All you need to know is that the name of the show with Blank Jack

This was our studio we podcasted here Good job.

Thank you.

Tom Hanks's voice has gotten so interesting.

Oh, please.

This is more interesting than the movie.

Yep.

Anything we can talk about that's not.

No, I'm joking.

I'm joking.

How's his voice gotten?

He's got a distinctive voice, I would say.

Right.

Sort of a famous voice.

Yes.

Sometimes he just says, yay!

Buzz, I'm going to go absolutely berserk.

And then this one time he said that life was like a,

I don't know, package or something.

Yeah.

He said, Buzz, life is like a box of chocolates.

No, he's got a distinct voice, but you're saying it's gotten a little more gravelly?

What are you saying?

He's entered some sort of like, like there is a

elder statesman, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, like bottom to his voice.

I feel like he now has this like quiet resonance that is unsurprising that comes not just with age and people's voices lowering pitch, but also that sense of just like security.

Experience.

Right.

And I feel like whenever he's doing press tour, he's doing classic Tom.

It's the best thing about a new Tom Hanks movie coming out very often.

He's out in the talk shows.

He's just coming.

And he goes and he's done the stories and whatever.

And then, like, I started to clock it in Toy Story 4, where I was like, oh, he's playing like a more contemplative Woody.

And now Woody sounds old.

And I feel like Toy Story 4, great movie.

Tim Allen.

sounds old in the Toy Story films now in a way where you're like, this guy's maybe just done some damage to his voice.

Sure.

Right.

Like he's like, oh, Woody, come on.

Like, he's just kind of, whereas, like, Tom Hanks is like settling into something that I cannot approximate because I'm doing a lot of different voices.

Right.

Right.

But it like hit me watching here that it's one of the things that immediately for me started to rub me the wrong way.

Beyond the eeriness of the de-aging or his posture, any of that stuff, I'm like, the voice that is coming out of him as a 20-year-old is a man who's lived through shit.

And when you get to the end of the movie and he's able to sit with that voice and play it, I'm like, what a fucking fucking incredible instrument.

And Wes Anderson has talked about this as well, who he used so fucking well on that physical incredible performance.

And is in the next movie as well.

What's the next movie called again?

The Phinencia Scheme.

I believe it's called the Finencia Scheme.

Am I wrong about this?

No, it's called the Phoenician Scheme.

Okay.

Phoenician.

I was like, what's this word he's saying?

No, Phoenician.

The Phoenician scheme

with Tom Hanks and

Michael Sarah's in this.

Michael Sarah and Benicia del

are the two leads.

Benicio del Toro by

I believe there's a young girl who is the third lead of the film.

Yeah.

And then I just love that Hanks is being added to the stock company.

And Wes Anderson in an interview talked about how, like, the way he used a Masteroid City was really kind of like him entering full elder Jimmy Stewart level.

Like, this guy represents some idea of America.

There is like an unflashy, just sort of like solidity to him now that it just like emanates out of his pores.

Um, that is,

in my eyes, one of the interesting things that he has to work with.

And I don't totally know what they do with him, but in trying to do a shitty impression of him to start out this episode, it just

talks about it.

Yeah.

Um,

this is this is a blank check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm David.

I was just thinking about when Wes Anderson won an Oscar like last year for the Henry Sugar movie, didn't show up.

Didn't show up.

And cool as hell.

There wasn't much of a like sort of, it was just kind of like,

I accept for him, whoever it was.

Do we know who accepted?

I totally forget.

I'll look it up.

Yeah.

And that just kind of happened.

And he made those

shorts for Netflix that, in my opinion, should just be one film that I can watch.

I agree.

Maybe it is now.

Have you checked?

I don't think so.

I think it still isn't.

Maybe I'm wrong.

But also just did that in the same year that he released one of his better features.

One of them, in my opinion, right, the best things he's ever done.

That basically goose-egged from every goddamn awards body.

Yeah.

Anyway, love that movie.

Yeah.

More mixed on today's movie.

Here we are on blank check

with Griffin and David.

We're here.

Right.

And you know, joy and hope and

loss and love and life happen here

at the Czech Republic our studios.

And also

in this 104-ish minute movie that Robert Zemekis has made for us.

In 2020, Robert Zemekis won our March Madness competition.

I just, I'm gonna, I just need to say the things.

Yeah, no, you're not wrong.

I believe that series was called Pod to the Future Cast.

Was it really?

I mean, that's as best I can remember.

You might be surprised to hear that a lot of that year.

No, it was called Podcast Away.

But I think you like complained a bunch how it should be called.

Like, I kept doing shit out of a butt.

No, what I said was

buzz!

I said pod to the future cast.

You're right, it was called podcast away, podcast away.

Um, but we did uh cover the films of Robert Zemekis on this podcast where we cover the filmographies of directors in 2020.

We did do that, and since then, Mr.

Zemekis has blessed us with two additional feature films.

Yeah.

Now,

some people love this movie.

Pinocchio!

Remember that one?

Yeah.

How is Tom Hanks' voice doing in that movie?

I love Tom Hanks.

I think he's a great actor.

I think he takes a lot of risks.

That's exactly what I like about him.

I was texting with a couple friends about like, is here going to hurt Tom Hanks?

And I'm like, I think Hanks is bulletproof at this point.

I think he's an American.

He can make a lot of shitty movies.

Doesn't really be a legend for the rest of his life.

I even think like bankability doesn't really affect him at this point.

Yeah, still fools are the ones they want to see.

Totally.

Yeah.

And he, like, will all.

Band Called Otto made money.

It did.

That's the thing.

Like, some of his marginal ones quietly do really well.

Like, I think Greyhound is like the most watched thing in the history of Apple, still, maybe.

Yep.

Ben's looking on with recognition at these things that came out, happened, were remember when he was like,

What?

Remember that?

Elvis?

Remember

a big hit?

Sure.

not only a big hit yeah but a absolutely daring performance like maybe not one that worked for everyone but it's not like he was like yeah should put some makeup on me and i'll be like hey i'm colonel parker and like not make a fucking effort he's like no i've got a whole thing this is an interesting point i want to say there's almost been a bifurcation of hanks right hanks had this legendary for a while he had

the most

the longest run of consistent hundred million dollar grosses of any movie star uh he famously famously in the 90s, yes.

Right.

I think there's like a 12 to 13 film run without exception, you know, and like that run is

starting after like things like the fucking that thing you do counting against him or whatever, which it shouldn't.

Right.

It's just like a.

He made a lot of hits.

And that was an era where we think of like a kind of like golden age movie star career.

where it's like, if Tom Hanks is the star, the American public shows up.

Material that feels difficult, tough, uncommercial, he single-handedly gets butts in seats.

Times have changed.

I would contend there is no star who would be able to turn something like Road to Perdition into a summer blockbuster single-handedly.

No, probably.

In the way that he could.

And since then, I would say there has almost been this bifurcation of Hanks where it's like he does commercial things.

And your

Robert Langdon movies, right?

And like to a certain degree, Otto is like, this is just like kind of of straight down the middle, you know, across the plate.

Greyhound was meant to be that and then ended up going to streaming.

Not a bad movie.

And then, as you said, he tries really daring shit.

It feels like in a certain way, him being freed up from every movie, needing to be a blockbuster allows him to be like, I want to use my cloud to get a Cloud Atlas made.

And if Cloud Atlas is a hit, that'll be great.

And if not, I don't care.

Happy I made it.

I can survive it.

Right.

Elvis feels like the one example of him in a big commercial movie doing an insane thing.

But like, it's funny that Elvis and Pinocchio were the same year because they're two, let's slap a bunch of makeup on Tom Hanks and he's going to do a voice and like, it'll be crazy, kind of Cloud Atlas vibes.

And in Elvis, that performance certainly did not work for everyone, but he's doing something.

And if Pinocchio, it felt like one minute before he started filming, he had it on his phone and he was like, how does your peto talk?

Yeah, kind of like that.

Okay.

Pinocchio, what's up with you?

Like, that was it.

Yes.

It's interesting that his work with Robert Zemeckis has now started to feel his most autopiloty.

So, how many films has Tom Hanks made?

So, we're talking about Robert Zemeckis.

This new film called Here.

Yes.

Here.

Her.

And they have made, you're saying, five films together.

So those films are

Forest Gump.

Tournament Ben?

Yep.

Cast Away.

Cast Away.

Great movie.

Better than Forrest Gump.

Hard agree.

The Polar Express.

Uh-oh.

Uh-oh.

Pink's not looking good.

Pinocchio here.

Uh-oh.

Correct.

Jesus.

Yeah.

I'm not forgetting one, am I?

No.

No, you're not.

No.

No.

No, you're not.

What's okay?

In between

the gulf of Polar Express and Pinocchio, which is almost 20 years.

Yes.

Is there a Zemekis movie he could have popped up in that he would have been?

I mean, like, so like, obviously your Beowulf, Christmas, Carol.

You know, no.

Forget that, right?

I mean, sure, he could do those, but like, he already did that.

There's a version of Hanks doing flight that makes sense.

Interesting, but obviously, you don't really want to lose the Denzel performance there.

I think Denzel is the best person who could have possibly played that role.

There is a Hanks version of it that makes sense.

And of course, people tend to conflate Flight and Sully.

They do.

But one landing, well, both landings successful.

The Sully landing, definitely less dramatic.

No, but he rolled it.

Yeah.

Do you know this, in fact?

What was that?

Then the movie Flight, he rolled it.

Oh, yeah.

What's his name in that film?

Skip Skippington?

Doesn't it?

Flight Flightington.

His name's Whip Whitaker.

Thank you.

I think Whip is a nickname, but yeah.

Yeah, what a fucking name.

The walk.

I mean, Hanks, I guess, could have been a guy who's like, hey, get that from there.

He wouldn't fit an allied.

He wouldn't really fit an allied, again, unless it was in some supporting role.

In Marwin,

he's kind of too old for it, but there's a time when he would be interesting in that.

10 years earlier, he would have been the Marwin.

In The Witches, he could have been Tucci,

I guess, if that's something anyone wanted.

By the way, here's another interesting thing about Hanks, that he'll like

not feel the need to be the guy in the movie anymore.

He will let himself sometimes be a stock company player.

It's just almost more than a moment.

But all of those feel too big for him.

You're like, if he was the Ben Kingsley part in the walk, it would destabilize the movie.

But it feels interesting that he makes...

uh three very successful films of Roberts and Mecca's.

I don't think the Polar Express is good, but these are all successful films.

Blockbusters.

Big hits.

He gets Oscar nominations for two of them and wins one for one of them.

I think it was for Polar Express.

I'd have to check.

Yeah.

And

then like 18 years later or whatever, Zemekis is like, hey, you want to fucking beat Geppetto and fucking this Pinocchio horse shit that's going to Disneyplus.com.

I would contend the least existent work either of them has ever done.

Right.

And he's like, yeah, sure.

And then Zemekis after that is like, okay, do you also want to be in a reunion with Robin Wright in a much, you know, bigger sort of pitch of a movie?

Do you remember how excited we were when this was announced?

Of course.

Like, I was not him phoning it in.

The original deadline story, but it was like, Robert Zemekis is making a $50 million adult drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, once again written by Eric Roth.

that spans centuries and takes place in one house.

And I was fascinated.

That sounds like exactly what I want my man to do.

And here it is.

And some people like this movie.

Yep.

But I'm going to warn everyone.

We did not.

That it didn't work for you.

We had a very, I think we had a pretty profoundly negative experience watching this.

Now, I would say, and we don't want to get too much into the events of the world because what a bummer it is.

But it must be said.

We did watch this the day after election day.

Maybe we weren't in a great mood.

No, we went to see it with Marie, who is not on this episode.

But who we love and who always cheers me up.

Of course, one of our favorite people, a dear member of our family.

But she in text was like, guys, what if this movie hits us so hard?

Sure, right.

What if we are in a kind of like vulnerable place?

And I was like ready for

distinct possibility.

I want to love this movie, right?

And we'll zoom out from this in a second, but I want to love this movie.

I was so prepared for distinct possibility where I'm like, this thing might just poke me in the bruise and totally break me and be some catharsis point.

And this episode might just be me offering qualifiers of like you know what i don't know if this movie works but it made me cry a bunch and maybe i'm just in that day you know yeah uh and i feel like it instead had the opposite thing where you and i were sitting there and we were just like today of all days i have no patience for that truly kind of was like it felt like a family member kind of trying to sit me down and be like, but let me tell you about like the sort of broken promise of the post-war.

And I'm like, I don't care right now.

I was like, this is literally the last thing I need on my plate.

You're telling me you had a nice living room?

That sounds great.

Ben, you saw this film Horizon Style two days before us, I think.

Yep.

And by Horizon style, I mean in a theater with no one else.

What was the movie theater you saw this in, producer, Ben?

Village East.

One of our favorite

screens in New York.

Exactly.

Not only did you see it alone in a theater, you saw it alone in a gigantic, it's like a former synagogue or something.

It's this looks like an opera

cinema where we've seen like hateful eight on 70 mil or what, you know, like these kind of cool movie experiences.

You're sitting in like a balcony

and the whole theater is empty yeah yeah yep i went to a 930 screening on a monday night like right after it came out it wasn't like you going to see horizon in like a storia at midnight on us on a wednesday right it was like you saw it on its fourth day of release yeah at a late

evening time but like not late late

no it's it was surprising it was really surprising that i was the only one there Marie got to the theater, I think, at the exact moment our showtime was supposed to start at the Alamo.

Right.

1245.

It was supposed to start like the movie.

Like, obviously, it's the ads and stuff.

And the door was closed.

Right.

Marie texts us.

It's not able to be opened.

I got here at 12.46 and it was roped off.

They had to open the theater just for me.

And then you and I both got there in the following five minutes.

Then one other guy walked in and then a woman walked in, I want to to say like 15 minutes into the movie.

It's basically the five of us watching here the earliest showtime that Brooklyn had to offer the morning after election day.

Now, here's here, here, here.

And I got a lot to say about this film.

I do think it's interesting to talk about.

And I apologize to everyone who had a profound emotional experience for this film and is going to be really frustrated with hearing us.

shit on it.

And I want to make it clear, it gives me no pleasure.

I so badly wanted to like this thing and to this point i think i can say this our friend ester zuckerman saw this like months ago sure

and you sent me screen grabs of her over text telling me explaining the movie not like spoiling things but just sort of like laying out for me what the movie is and we'll we'll talk about the book i know i'm putting like 80 000 pins on the board but for a while it was like what is this movie like what is this going to be and the book doesn't feel there are a lot of different ways you could adapt it right so i'm just like i have no conception of what this is going to be and then esther sends this text having just seen it being like holy guys i saw here and she's like the whole movie is approximating one shot from one angle the corner of a house it starts with dinosaurs tom hanks ages like 70 years like all this

And she's like, it's bad.

And you and I are texting each other and going like, this shit sounds incredible.

And Esther's going like, guys, no, you have to believe me.

It's bad.

And you and I kept saying, I refuse to believe that isn't good.

Everything she's saying to try to convince us it doesn't work.

I cannot imagine the reality in which I don't find that so compelling.

Like she was describing like a Michael Hanukkah movie or something.

I was just like, what?

You're telling me he's made something daring.

Yes.

How could, right?

How could this at least not be interesting?

And Esther was like, it doesn't.

It just doesn't work.

And I was just like, look,

how am I going to disagree with Esther on this our tastes usually align but she just must be off the mark here then i saw the first trailer and i was like oh it it's got this and at this point it is like it is my cilantro i feel like at this point i basically have the same like guttural physical reaction to late stage zamakis by and large that a lot of our listeners have with M9 Shyamalan and a lot of culture at large where they listen to our shamalan episodes and they're like How could these guys

in another dimension?

Of course, it's obviously bad, it just doesn't work.

Where I like see the here trailer, and it's the same way I felt when I saw the Marwin trailer after I'd been so excited at the idea of him adapting that documentary, you know, where I, and the same with the walk, where I'm just like, this look that I described in text to yesterday as looking like a bowl of plastic fruit,

where everything is just like too shiny and controlled and feels hollow and has like no weight spatially, you know, this like meticulous approximation of things where I'm like, why not just shoot it?

And every performance feels like way too bright and overstated.

Every line of dialogue super didactic and Sylvestri's going ham.

Yes.

And I'm just like, immediately, my teeth hurt.

Immediately, I see the hero trailer and I'm like, fuck.

This is the version of this movie that doesn't work for me.

And even still, I'm getting texts from friends being like, looks like your boy Bobby Z shouldn't be better.

Interesting.

Oh, no, okay, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just from the trailer.

Oh, yeah.

They're like, this looks like a disaster.

And I'm like, I believe.

I believe.

And they're like, have you heard good things?

I'm like, no, I've only heard bad things.

At this point, more people have messaged me who have seen the movie and are like, it doesn't work.

And I'm like, I really kind of believe in this.

And I think in the last two weeks, I finally got broken down where I was starting to dread it.

just because I'd started to hear such overwhelmingly negative stuff.

Now it feels like like defenders have popped up.

There's a lot of defenders.

I think my letterbox for here, oh, yeah, I'm sounding like Woody just got asked to, you know, give a doll his voice box.

My letterbox friends are mixed to positive, I would say, on here.

No, we walked out of the theater.

You checked the letterbox and you were like, oh, all most of my mutuals seem to like it.

Our friend Sean Fantasy.

is a fan and I think defended it on his show and had a take that I was like, that's an interesting take, Sean.

Unfortunately, I was not engaged by the film whatsoever.

Can I just read this quickly?

The deadline story announcing the film.

And it was presented as like Buzzy Package Hits Market.

Right.

Simon Kinberg to write and produce a Star Wars trilogy for Disney.

That's what it says.

It is happening again.

They just have to keep finding like kind of less and less impressive names.

No offense to Simon Kinberg to roll.

It's like Jay Roach.

Like, like, who is it going to be next?

I want to say once again, no offense to Simon Kimberg or Jay Roach.

But there is a real, like, we are stuck in it, like, toxic time loop thing of like, it is 2024.

Yeah.

Donald Trump has been elected president and Disney confidently announces a new trilogy.

The trilogy.

It's coming.

We're going to complete or have a new Star Wars trilogy.

Who's in charge of it?

You know, one of the fucking guys who does franchise shit, who's around, who's available.

Cobras of them.

I'm sorry.

I'm not sure.

I'm not going to kill you.

title my td but look these are the standalones is that am i damon lindelof will be cooking something up for us you know just am i wrong in thinking this is the third time they have announced that someone is going to create a trilogy so it's ryan johnson was the first then benioff and weiss then benioff and weiss and now it's him

god how about benny off but i'm like three times now they've been like look i know you guys have been haranguing us for failing to make one star wars movie in six years or whatever it's been five years i don't you know but we confidently are going to make three more.

Anyway, uh, what is the deadline story about here, say?

I was just trying to remember how they described it in the original story, right?

Based on Maguire's graphic novel, Here is described as a breathtaking and revolutionary odyssey through time and memory.

The innovative story is centered around a place in New England where, from wilderness and then later a home, love, loss, struggle, hope, and legacy play out between couples and families over generations.

Do you remember how exciting it was to read that?

And you're just like, what, what is this even?

Let's just forefront it.

Yeah.

I think you and I both

conceptually are so in the bag for what this movie is trying to do.

Sure.

I think like visually, cinematically,

even like thematically.

Like you describe the elements of this movie to me, much like Esther did.

And I'm like, I'm going to like this.

I hear people like Fennesy and Amy Nicholson, our friends whose tastes I respect immensely, describe the experience they had watching the movie.

And I'm like, what you just described to me sounds like exactly what I want to get out of this.

And I think you and I just both felt that the emotional execution of this movie is so disastrous.

I would say, yes.

On top of the overcranking of the sort of like Zemekis sugary visuals.

And like, I, you know, the way I feel about late period Sylvester's scores is I think how you often feel about Thomas Newman,

where I'm just like, can you please cool it down?

Yeah.

You don't need to play every key.

But I do need to, I needed some clarification on certain things like, you know, what the airplane guy died of and, you know, whether or not anything was up with Robin Wright's memory.

That was not, that was very, very subtle stuff.

And I couldn't really like grab on Ben smiling.

Yeah, he, he, he, he picked up on the clues.

I couldn't.

I'm not that kind of an intelligent viewer.

This is the kind of thing that emotionally alienates me more than anything else in a movie is basically this feeling of a movie having no faith in its audience and needing to have everyone directly state and then restate three more times every single thing that's going on.

Where I'm just like, I find it so distancing, even when the film is trying to depict

things that I should find emotionally accessible and universal and poignant, you know?

Like you could describe scenes of this movie to me and make them sound like they were.

And the problem is, as the film is dramatized, it feels like the characters are describing the scenes they are living through.

Yes, in real life.

Way too much.

Way too much.

Is it

the, I already said this to you guys off mic, but the oh, hello hello live show joke, the police, that's who you are.

Millennies on the phone, you know, that kind of dialogue is like, so my thing is, it's just over and over again what people are saying.

Millet's recent bit that I re-watched last night on Seth Meyers, where he said, I've read the script for the Saturday Night movie and I want to read, do a dramatic reading of one of the scenes.

It was not really the script from Saturday Night.

Of course.

A movie where I had slightly similar issues, although I do think it's better than here.

Uh-huh.

Where he's like, here's a scene from the movie Saturday Night.

Lauren Michaels hails a cab.

Hello, excuse me, my name is Lauren Michaels.

Will you please take me to 30 Rock?

I have to do a new show.

It's called Saturday Night.

Cabby, that'll never work.

Lauren Michaels, shut up, you stupid fucking Cabby.

It's going to be so successful and good at sketch comedy.

And like, Saturday Night is

feels deeply nuanced in the way the characters define and introduce themselves in relation to here,

and which let's just say is adapted from a book that I think is like a staggering work.

Anytime I've mentioned that I'm doing an episode on this film to my friends, a couple people have asked, and I'm like, here, and they're like, don't know what that is.

And I'm like, it's this movie of Tom Hanks.

It's like in theaters now.

Sony was releasing it wide.

And they're like, yeah, no, I don't know what you're talking about.

And I'm like, it's like set from one perspective.

And they're like, oh, like that comic book.

And I'm like, yes, the one called Weird that you clearly read.

And yet you're not even aware of this movie.

Yeah, and they're like, Oh, that comic was really good.

I'm like, Well,

and I'm not gonna do a like, I'm going to try my hardest, but it really isn't my feeling.

A to avoid doing a persnickety griffin, here's what the book did right, and why did they change any of this shit?

Because I think the book is a profound work, but it is not like a one-to-one thing, you can't turn it into a movie.

No, in fact, it is, it is a

work perfect for dramatic reinterpretation, right?

I think like the movie should be trying to do its own thing.

I just kind of feel like it got the equation wrong of what it should have kept from the book and what it should have

dropped.

But let's just say Richard Maguire, who's a deeply fascinating guy,

is like one of these guys who has just had

an incredibly varied career across several fields, was like an 80s East Village art scene guy.

He was in a band.

Have you ever heard of Liquid Liquid Ben?

Yes.

Like 80s art rock band.

He was the bassist in that band.

Probably best known because their bass line from a song called Cavern Cavern was used in the famous song White Lines.

Don't do it.

You know, the

famous sort of rap song from the 80s about how Coke is bad.

Don't do Coke.

I did a little digging on this.

You won't.

Liquid Liquid was on a very small

indie label.

I don't, no, I'm not going to.

Yeah, you should do it.

No, David, I don't want to.

I think you should give it a shot right now.

It's episode 6.

Why not?

If not on the here episode, then when?

What happened on the here episode?

They started doing cocaine.

They also started

doing lines.

Okay, Richard Maguire.

Yes, sort of 80s art house art scene guy was in liquid liquid.

Call this out.

This thing I didn't know digging in, right?

Liquid Liquid released a couple APs on a a very small label.

White Lions comes out is a big hit song.

They're immediately like, that sounds exactly like the fucking baseline from Cavern, which this is the guy who wrote this book is the guy who wrote that baseline and performed it, right?

Like the thing that is their legacy.

This small record label sues, I believe it was Sugar Hill Records, released it.

You're correct.

And gets involved in a years-long legal battle that ends up bankrupting them.

Sugar Hill ends up declaring bankruptcy to get out of paying the penalties.

And Liquid Liquid's label went under from the cost of the legal expenses and both labels went under as a result of this.

And like no one got paid because of it.

Wow.

Kind of just like an interesting, almost, dare I say, Gumpian.

Wow, this guy has like had these weird moments in different fields, cross-culture, whatever, right?

He does a six-page strip called Here that is published in Raw, the infamous comics magazine.

That he expanded, right?

That then turned into a bigger.

That's in 1989.

The book is not published until 2014.

Well, it took him a while.

The book is an entirely different thing.

So like here is very much like six pages of identical panels, black and white, very simple line style.

And it's just this idea of what if you saw the passage of time moving backwards and forwards and fragment

all from one corner, right?

And then the book doesn't like repurpose that specific strip.

It's like 25 years later.

He was like, is there a fuller work to be done with this kind of idea and conceit?

The book is incredible.

The book is also almost, in a way, reads more like an installation piece.

Right.

Right.

And this movie feels like theater.

Yes.

I guess is the sort of like way to excuse its creakiness.

Which I'm like, I'm on board to excuse that.

Not saying the theater is creaky, but it feels like a sort of, you know,

our towny kind of thing.

What I'm saying about like this being a work that should be flexible for reinterpretation into different mediums, right?

Because like here, the book is really making the most of being a book in a Scott McLeod kind of like, what are the unique things you can only do in the format of comics way?

Yes.

And it has the sort of like,

yeah, the Chris Ware, like, is this a uniquely good format for showing the passage of time and dilation and perspectives and things like that?

But then there's also like...

He's pulling something out.

I'm pulling the book out.

It's like this beautiful, like

deeply colorful.

Yeah, the colors are so cool.

Yes.

And you have these sort of like...

Was that character yelling?

Cause he's hard of hearing in one ear.

We'll get to it.

The bulk.

Basically, all the emotional thrusts of the movie are not in the book at all.

There are certain incredibly specific scenes, moments, lines that are adapted one-to-one.

The scene in which someone has a heart attack laughing at a joke,

that is not a scene that worked for me in the movie.

I would agree.

Upsetting.

Yes.

Yeah, kind of, but also just stupid.

Weirdly, a lot of the Benjamin Franklin Jason stuff, basically all of that is in here.

Okay.

But it makes sense that, because it was kind of like, what a specific thing to include, right?

Lazy Boy couple, fully invented for the movie.

Pilot and his wife, fully invented for his movie.

I'm shaking my head.

Yeah.

And I like the lazy boy couple.

Yes.

Modern black couple dealing with the struggles of America, fully invented for this movie.

Not surprised to hear that.

There are

things that are then placed into the Paul Bettany, Kelly Riley, Tom Hanks, Robin Wright sort of family generation story.

that are scenes that are in the book, but those characters don't exist as like through lines.

So like the scene of like

calling someone unseen to tell them dad took a fall, he broke his hip, he's going to have to move in and live on our couch.

And then the argument where he's yelling at him over and over again, the dad's hearing is too bad.

And he's like, I'm just joking.

I was kidding you.

Like, there are things like that.

But especially within the art style, there's not like, oh, I'm mostly watching this through the perspective of one guy changing.

The book is really good at just kind of giving you abstracted fragments, which I would love to see the version of this that is just like full conceptual, almost installation piece film art, right?

But that's not getting a $50 million Sony budget.

I'm also super into the idea of trying to do a more kind of like emotional spine, more conventional narrative.

solid character through line to hang your hat on version of this story because you can do that.

And have it be multi-generational,

right?

Zero in on that aspect.

But the book isn't doing that.

And even the way he draws people, like it is sometimes hard to tell if the characters you're seeing are characters you've seen before rather than just tracking like, oh, 1947, he seems to be showing a guy in a similar outfit, right?

But the characters aren't specific.

The book really feels voyeuristic in a way that is interesting.

Did you jack it to it?

Yes.

Wow.

Crazy.

Ben didn't like me saying that.

It's like elliptical where you're like not getting a lot of context.

Oh, that does sound pretty hot.

The kind of thing that gets me rock hard.

What I like is like Voyora shit, but it has to be elliptical without a lot of content.

Ben.

What's up, Griff?

This is an ad break.

Yeah.

And I'm just, this isn't a humble brag.

It's just a fact of the matter.

Despite you being on mic, oftentimes when sponsors buy ad space on this podcast, the big thing they want is personal host endorsement.

Right.

They love it to get a little bonus ben on the ad read, but technically that's not what they're looking for.

But something very different is happening right now.

That is true.

We had a sponsor come in and say, we are looking for the coveted Ben Hosley endorsement.

This is laser targeted.

The product.

We have copy that asks, is the product a porch movie?

It certainly is.

And what is today's episode sponsored by?

The Toxic Adventure.

The new Toxic Avenger movie is coming to theaters August 29th.

Macon Blair's remake of

reimagining, whatever.

A reboot of the Toxic Avenger.

Now, David and I have not gotten to see it yet, but they sent you a screener link.

Yeah.

I'm going to see it.

We're

excited to see it.

But Ben, you texted us last night.

This fucking rules.

It fucks.

It honks.

Yeah.

It's so great.

Let me read you the cast list here in billing orders.

They asked, which I really appreciate.

Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay,

taylor page with elijah wood okay and kevin bacon tremblay is toxie's son his stepson his stepson okay uh wade goose yes great name give us the takes we haven't heard them yet okay you got Fucking Dinkledge is fantastic.

He plays it with so much heart.

It's such a lovely performance.

Bacon is in the pocket too, man.

He's the bad guy.

He's the bad guy.

There's a lot of him shirtless.

Okay.

Looking like David.

David?

Sizzling.

Yep.

And then Elijah Wood plays like a dang-ass freak.

He certainly does.

He's having a lot of fun.

Tell us some things you liked about the movie.

Okay, well, I'm a Jersey guy.

I just got to say, the original movie was shot in the town where I went to high school.

Truma.

Yes.

Yes, that's right.

The original film.

Yep.

I grew up watching toxic and trauma movies on porches

with my sleazy and sticky friends.

It informed so much of my sensibility.

Your friends like Junkyard Dog and Headbanger.

Yeah, exactly.

Making Toxic Crusader jokes.

And so when I heard that they were doing this new installment, I was really emotionally invested.

It was in limbo for a while before our friends at Cineverse rescued it and are now releasing it uncut.

But I feel like there have been years of you being very excited at the prospect, but also a little weary.

They're playing with fire here.

Yeah, it's just something that means a lot to me.

And they knocked it out of the fucking park.

Okay.

It somehow really captured that sensibility, that sense of humor, even just that like lo-fi, scrappy kind of nature that's inherent in all of the trauma movies and the original Toxie movies.

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It's gooey.

It's gooey.

It's sufficiently gooey.

Tons of blood, tons of goo,

great action.

It's really fucking funny.

It just, it hits.

all of the sensibilities that you would want in an updated version.

Cinniverse last year released Terrifier 3 unrated.

Yeah.

Big risk for them there.

I feel like it's a very, very intense movie.

And one of the huge hits.

More interesting, yeah, theatrical box office phenomenons the last five years.

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And Ben, it just says here in the copy, wants to call out that Elijah Wood plays a weird little guy who says, Summon the Nuts.

Can you tell us anything about that moment without spoiling it?

Summon the Nuts is in reference to a

psychotic new metal band.

Hell yeah.

Who are also mercenaries.

Cool.

And drive a van

with a skeleton giving two thingies up on the grill.

And that's all I'll say.

Okay.

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Can I just show you, and I'll just describe quickly what is quietly one of my favorite spreads in the book?

And then let's move on for the book.

I know, I know, but I just think it's important to talk about a little bit.

I'm not going to compare everything one-to-one.

This is a two-page spread that is basically just a collection.

And it's, you know, a visual device he uses in the film that's really interesting, where you have this main one static shot from this one angle, but then within that, like kind of comic book panels will appear, very like Englie Hulk glimpses into other images.

So he'll sort of be like, primarily this scene is about the couple in the 20s, but then here is a small rectangle of where Tom Hanks in 1974 would be in the same space, right?

It feels like in the movie, they mostly use it as like transitions or doing like very blunt one-to-ones of like, here's a woman giving birth.

And then now here's a square next to her of an indigenous woman giving birth hundreds of years ago.

And you're like, okay, I'm just seeing the same action two times.

To just remind me, like, do you realize other people gave birth?

This is a two-page spread that is basically shattered into a ton of little boxes with the years next to them of just things being dropped or broken.

Right?

It's like, here's like two wine glasses.

Here's a plate.

Here's like a framed painting falling off a wall.

And it's just like, here's every time something has fallen and crashed on the ground within this plot of land, basically.

And then the other thing happening in this box in this spread, the only other, the only text outside of the years is just every insult someone has set in this house, but disembodied from people.

These are such fun ideas.

Weirdo.

They're in the movie.

Juice fist, nerd, square, shithead.

No, none of it.

Where you're just like, oh, this is the thing that's kind of profound is to think of like these things that are sort of meaningless.

Oh, across different years.

What are the different words you use to insult someone?

You know?

And like, what are are the different

kind of small incidental damages?

These are like innocuous insults and like life's little indignities of like, ah, god damn it, I dropped this that start to feel more important versus this movie wants to keep showing us incredibly important things and telling us how important they are.

And the thing that I think like accumulates extreme profundity in the book.

is you just not really understanding more about the lives you're seeing in a certain way.

You're getting these little glimpses, and the span of it is so wide and goes into like the fucking far-off future.

Yeah, which is cool.

Its scope is insane.

It would be cool if the house became like a rocket ship.

There's a stretch that is like at some point in a thousand years in the future where it's like a teacher basically giving instructional on weird objects that our ancestors used to use.

And they're using like holograms to explain what a key and a wallet and a watch were.

And And you're like, this shit rules, right?

But also just contrasted with like, in the original six-page strip, there's this recurring thing, or I guess it happens in the book, of just like, it feels like the more I clean, the messier things get.

And you're seeing the same woman repeating that over and over to herself across decades as she just cleans up different areas of the house.

I, I,

Zemekis and Eric Roth make the choice to basically be like, there are like six main narrative threads, maybe less, four or five.

There's really just one, though.

Like that, there is a main narrative in this film that is 60% of Tom Hanks Robin Wright.

Right.

That isn't really present for the first little chunk and then it's present for the rest.

And then there's a few other, right, sort of

D plots that are really just one thing.

You know what I mean?

Like the side gags.

That's what I'm saying.

It's like the pilot guy, the lazy boy guy,

the black family, the indigenous

people,

a couple sort of jealous and Benjamin and William Franklin.

These are just things we check in with where it's like, there's really just sort of one thing going on here and there's not like a big sweeping.

They almost feel like the equivalent of like rear window where there's like very vague characterization of what the other neighbors are doing that Jimmy Stewart's spying on, you know?

Where like each person has like one thing.

Right.

They have a thing.

This lady exercises a lot.

And you're like, yeah, right.

They're just sort of there.

They're like kind of like window dressing, you know?

This movie is mostly zoomed in on this idea of basically a cursed house.

What feels like

psychologically the equivalent of like the poltergeist house.

I don't know about this.

Well, it just feels like everybody.

The lazy boy guy did great.

Yes.

He had a hot wife.

I guess it's basically.

He invented a lazy boy and fucked her in it.

And then he sold it and was rich.

That seems to be his entire story.

It's really just the Betany Hanks lineage.

Well, no, the airplane guy definitely had a couple ironies thrown his way.

Yeah, like here's a great example of how this movie is dramatized.

And I guess William Franklin kind of showed his ass on like, we're never going to liberate ourselves from the British.

A guy walks into a house.

dressed like a cartoon drawing of an old-timey pilot, right?

He's got like a scarf.

He's have a goggles.

He's like, ah, my goggles and gloves came today.

And the important thing about planes is you need to fuel them.

He looks like Snoopy fighting

giggles.

And he like walks into this one static frame and goes, like, ah, thank God.

I think you literally see his helmet arrive.

You're seeing his goggles and gloves arrive.

Yes.

Right.

Ah, finally, my flight.

You shipped it in for me.

I can put it on before I go fly my plane.

These people are practically should be saying, like, it's 1916 after all.

Like, it's almost like his wife, Michelle Dockery, is like, oh, you and your plane stuff?

Are you talking about the plane stuff again?

You know, I hate that dreaded plane.

And then their child daughter walks in and is like, hello, I'm your child daughter.

I would love to be in the plane.

And the mom is like, I hate the idea of you being in the plane.

Don't get in the plane.

It's going to kill you.

You'll die in the plane.

No, no, only people who don't know how to fly planes die in planes.

Then maybe that scene repeats three more times.

Literally, like over.

I took her in the plane.

I wish you wouldn't take her in the plane.

The plane's going to kill you.

It keeps happening.

And you're like, is this going anywhere?

And then at one point, they just cut two.

He's in a fucking casket.

They're doing the funeral in their home.

And there are two guys standing in the back and they're like, surprised it's an open casket.

Why are you surprised?

Well, usually when a plane crashes, the body's so mangled, you can't leave the casket open.

Oh, you didn't hear?

He didn't die of a plane crash.

Turns face to reveal they have old-timey flu mask on.

Now, did your

screening have a fog horn at that moment?

Because I felt like that was out of place.

I'm not really exaggerating how blunt the dialogue is.

It's truly that.

And if you walk in with that, maybe you can more be on this movie's level.

And I could not lock in.

You and I love a lot of stuff that people think is like weird and stilted and overly stylized and like unrecognizable from human behavior.

But I'm like, in this type of movie where you're going to be jumping around so much and the movie's trying to make something profound out of like these little moments and these connections and these echoes, you know, it just like

it pushes me off so hard.

There's also it's like anytime i felt like i was kind of engaging with this idea as you say of the kind of the vanished promise of the post-war era right and like you can own your home and it's like yeah they get to own this home we only see one bit of it but seems fine but it's a home filled with faded dreams and you know hitting up against you know sort of not you know a like a low ceiling right and

depression and families divorcing and whatever, right?

That's interesting.

But then it would be like Tom Hanks's like smooth ass face.

And I would be like, fuck this.

Or Paul Betney being like, gee, Willikers, what are you talking about?

Like, and I would just be taken all the way out of like beginning to engage with the emotions of the movie.

The book is so good at engaging with like silence and space.

The books aren't yelling at you in Paul Betney's voice.

This movie is yelling.

If this movie, I, I, not to reduce it to simple math, if this movie had 40% less dialogue, I probably would like it 60% more.

You know, like if some of these scenes just played out in body language, I'm not saying I'd immediately love this movie, but there's something about it hitting you over the fucking head with everything that I just like could not

get past.

And

not to relate everything to Shamblan, right?

But I'm like, Shyamalan's weird, stilted, like bizarre, heightened tone performance style, dialogue, all that stuff.

I'm like, that works for me because Shyamalan is trying to make an uneasy world.

He is.

And also, he's making propulsive films is another thing he's got going for him.

He makes thrillers.

They're like plotty movies that need to like truck along and characters say stuff bluntly, but the movies are also about how everyone's insane versus this movie being like, you know, just the quiet moments of everyday life of simple Americans.

And instead, it's like, dad, I made one mistake.

I got my girlfriend pregnant on this couch.

How could you do that?

You didn't take her upstairs.

Why'd you fuck her on the couch?

Because if I took her upstairs, it would be out of frame.

Dad, you know where the couch is the ultimate horror of it, right?

Of Robin Wright being like, can we please sell this house?

And everyone just being like, basically, not able to say like, but then the movie

won't see us.

If we moved over there.

Robin Wright basically starts yelling, I don't want to be in this movie.

Like, not Robin Wright, the performer, the character is like, doesn't this feel like this setup isn't working out for us?

And you started joking at certain points about things that were going to have to, the movie would have to bend over backwards to justify why they were happening in the corner of the living room where the couch is.

And then most times we started to make a joke, the movie would then do that exact thing.

Where you were like, multiple times.

I made a joke about home birth.

Right.

And then her water breaks in the living room.

And I was like, oh my God, are they not going to get her to the fucking hospital?

No, of course not.

Why not?

Just do it right there.

Of course, she's going to give birth on the couch.

Oh, well, let's get married.

I know a great place to get married.

The front of our living room.

Of course, the funeral happens on the couch.

Of course, it's a weird family tradition that they don't have dinner in the dining room.

Thanksgiving happens.

You know, our crazy family tradition of eating sort of in the living room.

And like, the book has the confidence to be like, there's power in the things you aren't seeing, that you're filling in the gaps, the spaces between these these moments you're seeing and in fact we're not showing you the biggest moments right and the movie is like well obviously what you want to see are all the biggest moments and you want characters to explain why the moments are all happening in this one corner here

ben did you like here um

not really didn't care for it and i want to add that my perspective

Was looking kind of at a window, kind of like

I was only looking like out of the corner of my eye which really you know affected my uh viewing of the movie what was your no i grew up in an old house that's been in my family for a really long time so i feel like bringing that i would be so it should be able to get you i should be i should be so on board for it but i just found myself spacing out thinking about my own just like

like

family narrative with the house that I grew up in.

Yeah.

I was, and I was just thinking about like groceries I had to buy and shit like that.

what about this we should also mention we saw it at alamo yeah they had to open the doors to let marie they forgot to drop the check they forgot to drop the check it'd be funny if our waiter was just asleep on the floor that's why he didn't forget we had to track down a manager and they were like you guys were in the theater we were like yeah they were like what do you order like a lot of stuff

We were like, it truly wanted that us to be like, we saw here and they're like, I have no record of a movie called here ever being shown at the fucking Alamo.

They're like, here?

Who was on first?

Like, it just, it felt like we were not supposed to be seeing.

What about interesting release strategy?

Zemekis is like, franchises, everyone loves them.

So November will release here, Living Room Cut.

And then in like February, you can see the kitchen.

January, you know, May, we'll go upstairs.

Yes.

Same movie, different perspective every time.

Here, Colin, the next level.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just hearing the movie take place downstairs.

I told you I'd break that.

Because apparently nothing has ever happened in any other room in this time.

When Paul Betney is laid up on the couch as an older, you know, when he's near death.

We should mention he has a drinking problem.

What?

He seemed fine to me.

Okay.

The movie would have mentioned that.

And shown it.

He might have had a hearing thing going on.

I'm not sure.

No, once again.

Like, wait, where it's like, oh, yeah, my dad's staying with me on the couch.

I'm like, your wife left you.

Yeah.

Your kid's in college.

This is a two-floor house.

There's a spare bedroom for this motherfucker.

But also, he's got to sleep on the fucking house.

Like, as I said, that is one of the things, the only things from the main plot of this movie that is one-to-one in the book, but in the book, that is just a fragment of a life where you don't ask other questions.

I'm going to versus

an hour with these characters up until this point.

You're like, well, I'm into the logic loops of this.

Is there, I mean, maybe people like this movie.

Some people like like this movie.

So I guess there is a good version of this movie.

It's the one they saw.

But is there this argument of like, okay, Eminem, the rapper, right, in his early career?

And this is true of like comedians and this is true of music.

I think of rap musicians and comedians, especially with this, right?

When they emerge and they're telling a story about themselves and the community they're in, right?

And like how hard their life is.

Maybe your comedians are like.

Yeah.

And then like you start to get famous and rich

and then you kind of live in a, you know, fancy place or or whatever.

And the comedians come out and they're still trying to do material.

Or Eminem's like, here's my 14th record about my perspective on the world.

And you're kind of like, I think you don't have that interesting a perspective on the world anymore, buddy.

Is that Zemekis now?

Like, is Zemekis like, I need to tell another story about like post-war America.

And it's just kind of like,

Bobby, you kind of have done that.

Let's zoom out together.

People like Forrest, Gumper, whatever the fuck.

Like, I don't love that movie, but like, you know, you did that.

Do you have more on this now now that you're this many years removed from like even like

having any idea of what a real person's life is like because this is like a fake idea of a real person's like tough life right like a sort of like a middle-class life that you know they muddle through and they don't make you know the right choices and shit you know blah blah blah right like oh he wants to be an artist he turns out to be an insurance salesman and you know he makes the choice to prioritize what he thinks he needs to do to support his family and lives with the resentment of it and everyone gets it.

And quiet resentment.

Yes.

And there's this feeling of this thing that I do think is poignant in idea and is once again, Zemekison Roth's creation entirely, right?

A thematic thing they're creating just for this film.

And it's not to syndicate a series of thoughts that Fantasy has undoubtedly shared on his own podcast at this point.

But like his take is that this movie is about the sort of like death of the middle class across the last, you know, 70 70 years of America and how like, you know, structurally, we, we have put up roadblocks against the original belief that every generation wants their children to have a better life than they had.

And basically, it has started becoming a destructive pattern of like people trapping the future generations in a worse version of what they had to live through.

And this kid figures it out.

Totally.

And the movie's trying to do this thing of like, you know, life keeps getting in the way.

Sure.

If we, we don't have the money to fix the roof, you know, right?

Because now this new complication has happened.

Dad fell down or she got into law school.

And isn't that great?

But we're going to have to pinch pennies or whatever it is.

This feeling of like their lives, a thing that, by the way, the first 10 minutes of up dramatizes perfectly.

No, move along, move along.

No, no.

It's another movie I don't like.

I don't like it either.

Keep going.

Keep going.

That is the thing the movie does well and does in 10 minutes minutes that this movie is trying to do the whole time of like this life of postponed dreams.

Right?

I guess so.

It bothers me enough too.

You and I agree on up.

Sure.

By and large.

But

I, for whatever reason, couldn't sleep and re-watched that sequence recently.

And it was just like, this is a marvel of construction.

Whatever.

We're not talking about up.

We're not.

But I'm like, this is just this very protracted, you're watching an hour devoted to, we'll get to that eventually.

At someday I'll pick up painting again.

We'll go on a trip.

We'll fix the house.

We'll move out.

We'll go somewhere else.

And it's a little moving

that

to me, and it should have been more moving in a way, but like that like he's like, yeah, you know, it didn't fucking work out.

Right.

And

but we tried to be good parents and right.

And I provided and like, you know, we did our best sort of.

And it's like, there is, there is a win to that.

There were a couple scenes towards the end that started to get to me where I was like,

I'm starting to feel a pulse there's the robin wright birthday scene where she's trying to just give a nice sort of like

birthday toast and she just surprises herself getting more emotional than she thought she would about what her life has turned out to be it's sort of the scene in boyhood when patricia arquette suddenly sort of melts down out of nowhere And it's powerful in boyhood.

Robin Wright, a favorite of mine, that is one of, that's maybe the first scene in the movie where I felt like the movie slowed down enough to have a character speak in emotional terms rather than describing their situation, right?

And gave her the room to like play that.

And then there is, I felt some emotionality, some genuine emotionality in the sort of like Hanks recognizing, I fucked this up.

I need to let her go, right?

Their marriage sort of like slowly drifts apart.

And it never becomes clear if they're fully divorced, but they're sort of separated or whatever it is, you know, but they both kind of like come to a piece of like

this didn't work out for us without us hating each other or demonizing each other but all of this is also cut with 30 minutes devoted to scenes that end with robin right or start with robin right going the weirdest thing just happened i forgot something isn't that strange i remember that i forgot anyway moving on and the foghorn comes back yeah and you're like when is she gonna get dementia i'm not looking forward to this i guess the movie moves fast in a way like you're saying in that it can't sit in any scene like that too long i guess right so you're not subjected to that but the early signs of dementia seem to be spread out over the course of a decade before suddenly the movie is just like she's she remembers nothing.

She doesn't remember much about her life anymore, which is sad.

Yeah.

So she remembers the one thing and it's a little bit moving and I was slightly touched by it.

I cannot feel the same way.

Yes.

Even though I sort of was like, oh, that's, that's why that was there.

And but I do think there's like, weirdly, the theme of what Bobby Z is trying to make this movie about feels like the opposite of what you were saying of, I don't know how to relate to ordinary people.

Like he is invested in this idea of this being a movie about ordinary people who often are kind of ignored, right?

Like people who are just kind of slowly scraping by and existing.

There is a very like base level, sort of ground, simple humanity to this movie that on paper should work.

And what I feel like Zemekis keeps butting up against is this like guy who was an incredible incredible communicator for a while.

I've been listening to a lot of like the podcasts he's done in the last couple of weeks to promote this film.

He did a WTF episode that was fascinating in how unrevealing it was.

He did an episode of Happy Sad Confused with Josh Horowitz that was more interesting, I would say, got more out of him by only trying to engage him on the work rather than Marin trying to engage with him as a person.

Marin's like, hey, what's your deal, man?

And Zimexis is like, I sit here.

But

on WTF,

said a thing about how like i view myself as someone who makes i think he said commercial entertainment or mainstream entertainment right that's true and merit was like when you were in film school though like didn't you like you didn't have a phase where you like wanted to make guidar films and he was like nope this was always the kind of movie i liked and what i wanted to make it is what made him i think so skillful for so long similar to spielberg where it's like the love he has for the best examples of this is so genuine and it feels like he is making them to the top of his intelligence.

And for a stretch there, he just had the math figured out on how to communicate complicated things to wide audiences in a way that felt universal.

He could complicate, he could communicate them visually, narratively, dramatically, what have you, right?

But all these things we've talked about of like back to the future is an insane pitch for a movie.

There's a reason every studio turned it down.

I don't want to make your family comedy about a guy trying to not fuck his mom, right?

Everyone said that.

And he was proven right that he knew the exact right way to pitch that movie to make it work.

Roger Rabbit shouldn't work.

You read about what the original book was, the changes he made, the technology that no one thought would be possible.

You totally, it's just like he fucking nailed it.

Castaway is a movie that feels experimental when you step back from it and go like, in 2000, to make a movie with the biggest star that is like an hour and a half of him just being silent and sad and lonely and not really talking is insane, you know?

And he just knew the right amount to do.

Force gump, of course, is this like kind of key film that it feels like now the latter half of his career is him trying to replicate more than any of his earlier films, where it's like he took this weird, complicated text and found a way to synthesize it into something that was very palatable and very broad.

And in a way that makes some people revolted.

What is this like saccharine, stupid nonsense?

And other people, it's just like, this thing fucking hits.

And it feels like he's gotten back to a state of really wanting to do force gump again.

I know how to just streamline this thing and hit the emotional beats hard and give it the moments of triumph and the swelling score.

What just came out of it?

I don't know.

It's like, it's like there's music playing.

It's like there's music.

There is music playing.

Apparently, the Robin Hood score has been playing on my computer for Lord knows how long.

The other one, like on Spotify, like the score or the Markin Reynolds score.

No, the Mark Stritenfeld Ridley Scott Robin Hood score.

Oh, that one.

Yeah.

I think my guess is that Spotify has been running for hours while playing random music.

And that's what it settled on.

Anyway.

David, what?

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It feels like he is so frozen into his instincts from like the mid-90s of what you need to do to make something work for an audience.

And I think audiences have evolved a tremendous amount.

I think like people do not

need to see what used to be parodied as the conventional Hollywood version of a story, right?

I think we talk a lot on this show about like when we get frustrated of

popular entertainment feeling like it's not doing the bare minimum work to hit the emotional beats or like craft a compelling like narrative arc because it feels like movies are so into trying to be a step ahead of the audience and subvert expectations and not go into cliche because people are too savvy, like people know too much.

People are exposed to a wider amount, you know?

It's part of things not like us not living in

an omniculture anymore in terms of like media, where it's like everyone just finds their own shit.

Like all these things that used to be niche are mainstream and people can ride with shit.

It doesn't mean everyone's going to like everything and everything's going to be a hit.

But I think a lot of the feeling of like, you got to sand this down and make it the most easily digestible version of the thing.

is a thing that like Zemekis is still holding on to that is basically gone.

And it feels like he's made a couple of these movies now.

Like I put Walk Marwin in this, particularly in this category, where it's like he's starting out with a really interesting work, right?

A documentary, a real life story, a book, you know, and then he's like, well, obviously you got to do the Hollywood version of it.

And it feels like the changes he's making are not like dumb studio notes.

It feels like it's he's himself doing the kind of notes a studio would give in the 90s in the name of, well, I'm trying to make the broadest version of this.

And then all three of them come out, and people are like, who gives a shit?

Fuck you.

This movie's for no one.

Yeah, I think, and I think the obviously there are people who like all three of those films, but all three colossal bombs.

Big bombs.

I think the audience for a movie like here is also gone.

Likeish, right?

Like that kind of older audience.

But to that point, it's of the 90s is gone.

Then why are you trying to make the version of here that has to function like a blockchain?

Am I making the 16,000?

This is what I'm saying, where he's like, well, I'm just going to do what I do.

Okay, so here's.

He's not really going to evolve.

How old is Robert Zimakis?

How old do you think he is?

How old do you think he is?

I think he's 72.

You, you are right.

That is exactly his age.

Crazy.

Yeah.

I knew he was just a little bit younger than Spielberg.

And Spielberg is someone who

consciously tries to evolve and do new things and still is Steven Spielberg.

And he's always going to be Steven Spielberg.

And so you're saying the MM, the stand-up comic thing, like, what does he have to say?

Is he so out of touch with reality?

Right.

I think what's interesting to me is

we lived through the moment that was exciting of like, oh shit, Robert Zemekis is making flight.

Like there was the feeling, it was like an earthquake of like, he's dropping the mocap shit.

For a while, it felt like he might be doing this for the rest of time as like public interest just crashes on each successive movie.

He seems pot committed to this thing.

Then like Disney pulls out the like rug underneath him and is like, get the fuck out of here.

These are done.

And then it's suddenly like Robert Zemekis has like attached himself to this blacklist script.

He's going to make like a $30 million R-rated drama starring Denzel,

who's like willing to waive his quote on him.

Sure, right, because the material is so exciting to him.

I like that movie less than a lot of people, but I'm like, certainly now, in retrospect, I want to give it almost another full star just for being like, I can't believe he made that at that moment.

It is a hit.

It gets Oscar nominations.

It is well liked.

I like Allied much more than most people.

But to me, I'm like, that's him in the same vein of what I want him to be doing, which like those both feel like him making R-rated adult movies that sort of in a way that's a little bit similar to Spielberg, right?

These guys start out their career as like whiz kid geniuses making like popcorn entertainment for the masses.

And then they get older and they start to be rueful of.

the adult genres that they maybe help push to the side.

And Spielberg has moved to this vein of like making a lot of the movies that people don't make anymore versus trying to all the time make classic Spielberg blockbusters.

And I was like encouraged by Flight and

Allied being like him trying to make something that's sort of like a new Hollywood character piece, you know, or like a classic golden age like war drama, you know?

I know the walk happens in between Flight and Allied, is that correct?

And then the run of the other ones we've said, right?

Allied and flight feel like the two scripts to me that have the least to do with Robert Zemekis as a person.

As much as we have talked about him being a little inscrutable of like, what's going on in this guy's head?

And you see peaks of his worldview in a way that I think are unintentional in some of his material.

Allied and flight feel very far off from everything we know about this guy.

And it just feels like him reading a script and being like, this is a ripping yarn.

I'm going to make this.

I'll hire a movie star, right?

Versus like The Walk, Pinocchio, Marwin,

Here.

And am I forgetting one other?

No, I think that's it.

The Witches.

Jesus.

Forget that one.

Don't worry about it.

Don't talk about it.

And in fact, it doesn't really fit into what I'm saying here.

Those four feel like movies that are weirdly revealing and personal for him.

There's so much about like guys trying to control their universe.

Yeah, I think that's why Marwin is good.

The walk is not very good because it's stupid, but

they're stories we tell ourselves.

they're entertainers, they're all the sort of like puppet masters of Mechis.

This feels like a movie that's about like him now being like in his 70s and looking at how America's changed over time, right?

As a guy who came from like a truly like lower class Midwestern upbringing.

Or no, he was a Chicago guy.

Yeah,

yeah, I gotta be honest with you.

I just don't want to fucking analyze Robertson Mackis' brain that bad anymore.

It's sort of bringing me back to that hateful mini-series that was largely good.

It's just in 2020.

That ends with a lot of us being like, okay,

all right.

Yeah.

Because I'm basically like, I think the four films of his I like the least are the last four films he made.

Yeah.

Let me look at my Zemekis list.

You're probably right.

Like, I think my least favorite films of his, you'd like Marwen a lot more than me.

I think my least four favorite films of his are

here, not in order.

Here, the witches, Pinocchio, and Marwin.

Yeah, and if I'd put in there as Christmas Carol, which is probably my dead bottom, yeah.

I have Christmas Carol

near the bottom, and Pinocchio is bottom.

That just like doesn't exist.

I mean, witches also.

Witches doesn't exist.

Christmas Carol is bad.

Here is bad.

Polar Express is bad.

Walk is bad.

That's kind of, that's my bottom, right?

These are movies that make me just feel nutty.

The next tier up for me are movies of his that I like, which are like Flight, Allied, What Lies Beneath, Beowulf, Marwin.

Movies that are not wholly successful, but have enough going on.

Color Express.

And like my thing drives both of us crazy, but at least as an interesting object, which is more than you can say for like Pinocchio or Witches, where you're like, this is unpleasant and boring.

My problem with Flight and Allied, both movies that are much more successful, like you say, is that they're both too long.

They both feel indulgent at times.

Like, you know what I mean?

Like, you wish he was making 100-minute actual old-school Hollywood movies, and it's still like at this point.

We didn't know how fucking good we had it.

No, that's the thing.

And you wish he had stayed in that vein.

That's the thing.

Where, like, you know, these stories of like, uh, oh, Warner Brothers wanted him to do the Flash so badly, and he was like, I hate superhero movies, I hate these tentpoles.

That's not what I want to do.

You see the films he's made instead, and you're like,

He should have just done the Flash.

Who gives a shit?

You know, it's not like we're missing out on more interesting work from him not trying to get stuck in like franchise silo bullshit.

I would be

more,

I would be interested to see his The Flash, but not because I think that would be a great movie.

No.

Just because it's kind of like, yeah, what would what would a guy like him do with a

junkie cinematic universe movie?

Because like I liked what Raimi did with Doctor Strange.

I'm like, if there's like, would I rather you do something else?

Maybe.

There were three sequences in The Flash that had

Zemekis Verve in them in a way that like multiverse of madness has, would I be like, maybe this is like the best version of what we can do with grandpa before we put him out to pasture, before we put him on the fold-out couch in the living room?

He on WTF.

Okay, go ahead.

Marin was like, so I know you love all the tech and the de-aging and the mocap and everything.

You read this book, you must go, oh, wow, this is great.

I can do it with all the technology.

Right.

The way we all pathologize them.

And he's like, huh?

No.

Chris.

Yeah, okay.

And he said it in a way where earnestly, it genuinely felt not that he's lying to us, but that he's lying to himself, where he just said very directly, I actually don't think that way.

I just like look for material I respond to, and it's all about story for me.

And then I get into problem solving of how technology is going to help do it.

But we talk about, and it's become the narrative on him that it feels like he looks for projects that feel like they could be a tech demo so often.

as a problem.

And he was just like, no, I don't, I don't really do that.

Where I'm like, I think a lot of the pipeline problem with Zemekis might just be

his

lack of honesty with himself at this point.

Yeah, it was just fine.

Well, or lack of honesty with people on podcasts that he appears on, at least.

Right.

And, you know, he's got this thing that is great, that we all love.

That he negotiated his contracts for Back to the Future with Bob Gale and Steven Spielberg, where they have kill rights on anything and everything.

And every time there's something of like, when are they going to fucking remake Back to the Future?

It's like, no, they're not going to because it's ironclad, unbreakable contracts that they can't do it until all three of them die, like 10 years after.

The kind of contract they don't do anymore.

Ghostbusters had a similar contract.

And then when Harold Ramos died, they just backed up Brink's trucks and they went like, hey, Bill Murray, you want to own a golf course?

Sign away your rights, right?

The Back to the Future one, the three of them have just held on to it.

And it's like a good thing.

And

it is a good thing.

Right.

And Josh Horwitz asked him about this.

And he's like, it'll never happen over my dead body.

I'll make sure of it.

It's sacred.

We protect it.

There's no need to extend the legacy, this and that.

And then in the same interview, Horowitz asks him, is there any genre you haven't done that you'd like to do?

And he's like, yeah, I'd love to do a musical.

And Horwitz is like, you should do a musical.

And he's like, well, I pitched Universal the other day.

I want to make a movie of the Back to the Future stage show.

And I'm like, here's, there it is.

There it is.

There's the whole disconnect.

This guy knows that for everyone's sake, it's better that we never touch Back to the Future again.

And yet he's within the same hour saying, Yeah, do the thing the producers did.

I'm like, oh, that notorious boondoggle where the producers is a great movie.

And then the play is a fucking smashed success.

And then the movie is an inexplicable disaster.

And he wants to do that.

And I'm like, you know what?

I would rather someone else make some shitty Back to the Future remake than watch you try to direct an adaptation of the stage musical.

Robert Zemeckis is now the guy I trust least to make any Back to the Future thing.

In the same way that now he's saying, like, well, Roger Rabbit 2 will never happen because Disney's scared of Jessica's boobs.

And I'm like, here's my guess.

I'm guessing Roger Rabbit 2 will never happen because every time you've gone in and pitched something to them, your pitch is insane.

And maybe you talk about boobs too much.

I'm sure he talks about boobs too much.

I'm sure that's one of the sticking points.

But Horowitz in the same interview was like, I know you had a a script.

And he was like, we had a script.

It was great.

Everyone loved it.

And I'm like,

your judgment on scripts, take it with a grain of salt.

Right.

And he's like,

yeah, you know, but Disney doesn't want to move because they're scared of Jessica and they put a trench coat on or whatever the fuck he said.

Right.

And Horowitz was like, well, now, of course, Bob Hoskins has died.

And he said, well, but you know, that actually wouldn't have been a problem because the way we had the script, it was set many years later and Eddie was in it as a ghost.

So we were going to have Bob play the ghost.

So, I guess we could just write him out, or maybe we could just CGI.

And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about, buddy?

Stop all of this.

Where I'm like, this guy has made

several of the few movies I think are truly perfect in the annals of like Hollywood history.

And yet, I now feel like he is a child holding lit firecrackers.

And I'm like, we have to take them away from him.

Can I ask, how did he do as far as a tech demo?

On this, I think it looks bad.

Yeah, I don't think it looks very good.

The de-aging didn't look much better to me than other sort of more brief de-aging I've seen in like Marvel movies and shit where you're already kind of, or the Indiana Jones movie.

I mean, you're like, I can tell this is fake.

So it takes me out of it.

Sorry.

Corey said when they did tests on de-aging Tom Cruise for Mission Impossible, and he's like, the best test I saw, you're still thinking the whole time, wow, that's pretty good.

And I'm like, that's the whole digital de-aging thing in a nutshell for me.

Even the times I've seen it done the best, I'm thinking the whole time, wow, that looks pretty good, which is immediately distancing you from the story.

And Amy Nicholson makes her whole take of like, this movie works better if you think of it as like

an experimental theater piece, right?

Which is how I want to engage with this.

And I had the thought, not to try to solve this movie, but as I'm watching it, I'm sort of like, man, there may be a thousand different versions of this movie that would work for me.

And even a thousand different versions of the core elements on this specific version.

And I'm like, if this movie is Tom Hanks, Kelly Riley, Paul Betney, and Robin Wright play almost everyone, I think I like it more.

You know?

Can I make this case more?

I don't like that.

I don't think you should make this case.

I'm going to.

No, no, go ahead.

I don't care.

I almost think the weird, stagey,

like over-dramatized nature of it is more palatable if you're like, it's Tom Hanks with a cane being like, I'm an old man.

And you're repeating the same actors playing very broad versions of people in a like Cloud Atlas event.

I don't think that movie, I'm not saying I've solved it.

It's a masterpiece now.

But I'm like, that better sells the like,

well, this thing is not meant to be taken literally, or if the set is like more fucking dogvilly or like anything, you know, where I'm like, this movie is like trying to be grounded reality and also recognizes no reality I have ever seen in my life.

But if it's that, then it's, that's, then it's a movie about like the Tom Hankses who've lived throughout society.

And it's like, no, this movie is trying to be about like in one place, there have been all kinds of people.

Now, the movie wanted to put Tom Hanks in black face and Native American face and dinosaur face.

It's why I said almost all.

Yeah.

But then it's like, you're busting your kisses.

Okay, so I had kind of an as much as it'd be funny if John Hanks had a big mustache and was like, I love airplanes.

I won't die in one.

Anyway, what?

Uh, I had an idea that I wanted to pitch because I felt like the dinosaur stuff for me

was interesting.

Yeah.

He also breezes past it.

I'm like, when I hear from Esther, like this movie starts with the dinosaurs, I'm like, holy shit.

Is he going to pull some castaway shit where there's like 20 minutes before a human talks in this film?

Sure.

You know, and the movie does not really go chronologically.

It sort of roughly does in the Hanks timeline, but it's otherwise jumping all around.

But it does basically start with what feels like a short movie you watch in a room at a museum before you enter the real exhibit that is like sped up of just a bunch of shit happening.

There's totally a version of that, right?

Of like really trying to show this era, right?

Within this like closed little box.

But I think the other successful part of this is just family as a theme, right?

So for me, I'm watching the dinosaur report and I'm like, what if it was like a family?

Was it would there be a baby?

Maybe there'd be a baby.

How does he feel about his father

relative to his mother?

I'm just curious.

Maybe he has.

I feel like any opinions on who is

or is not the mama?

And I'm just throwing this out there.

He might say something like, not the mama.

Right.

Is that really the number one thing that show had to throw down the fucking plate?

Was like, and the baby says, not the mama.

And everyone's like, we're going to remember that.

And they're like, we have some other stuff too.

And everyone's like, no, we're sticking with just remembering that.

Honestly, not the mama.

That's our one takeaway.

I had an argument.

I don't want to call it an argument, but a disagreement with our friend John Hodgman the other day where he was like, oh, he had that weird failed one season show.

show.

And I'm like, my man, that show ran for five years.

And he's like, four, but yeah.

I think it was like it got spread out over

four seasons, maybe over five years.

Yes.

And he was like, that is impossible.

And I'm like, that show was seen as a failure because it was so expensive and it didn't run as long as The Simpsons.

But that thing did, like, they produced.

Many, many, many episodes of it.

And they had built all this stuff where, you know, they had to get some, you know, fucking use out of it.

Yeah.

That show is deeply bizarre.

I went down a rabbit hole when we were doing Twin Peaks season one, where I was going back and forth between

Twin Peaks and Dinosaur season.

Like all we fucking remember is not the mama.

Yeah.

We don't really remember anything else.

You know why?

Because every other thing on that show,

there's okay.

So there's like 20% of that show that is like insane proprietary dinosaur culture mythology where you're like, what is this?

There's a holiday where you throw your mother-in-law into a cliff.

And that stuff is fascinating.

And then the other 80% of it feels like a parody of a parody of a 50 sitcom where you're like, Earl Sinclair comes home, drops off his lunchbox, and goes like, honey, I'm home.

I mean, that was the joke.

And you're like, is that that they were too lazy and they settled on the first draft?

Or are they mocking the tropes in a way that kind of feels like what he's getting at?

Of like, maybe culturally things repeat themselves.

Even the dinosaurs would complain about their wife's horrang with the rolling pin in the kitchen.

Oh, he said, I'm the baby, gotta love me.

He also would say, well, that was his song.

That was his hit singer.

Right.

Right.

Not the mama.

Let's talk about his music.

Not the mama.

And much like Eminem, he hasn't really put out relevant work in a while.

I feel like he's sort of lost touch with his roots.

When he was a baby, things felt very raw to him.

He had a lot of things to write songs about.

And now he's just rapping about his mansion and shit.

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I just, I felt, and I know some people love this movie.

And

I wish I was

with them.

Yeah.

I did have the thought watching this to quote our our finest film critic Ben Hosley.

I think the guy needs to get spaced.

Like, I think we need to space his ass.

Yeah.

And here's another: here's an incredibly mean thought I'm going to share.

I thought there might be

no filmmaker we have covered on the show that I feel more confident will never make a movie I like again.

And that includes the filmmakers we have covered who are dead.

I could sooner see myself being excited about a new Nora Efron film than a new Zemekis.

I would love to be proven wrong.

I'd love to see him swerve back, but I just don't feel good about any of it.

And I'm just like, I don't even really, I find it hard to see the glimmers of the way, like, I'm never going to fucking quit Tim Burton.

And even in his most dire movies, as our listeners have heard way too much, I'll be like, but the 10% in a corner of an idea.

But also, Tim Burton makes

entertainment.

And I do feel like Zemakis is forgetting a little bit how to make entertainment.

This is my thing, though.

It's like he's stuck in this weird space where I'm like, all my problems with here come from him trying to make it too entertaining.

I don't think that's it.

It's not

him making the version of the movie that is like...

But you're talking about like an abstract movie.

But I'm saying like, he just can't write people or he and Eric Rod.

Like, you know, it's like.

We sit there with Murray.

They're just such paint-by-number creatures, all these people.

Four minutes in, she turns to us and says,

Eric Roth wrote this?

Well, actually, she said David Kepp wrote this, and we were like, I was trying to be kind of her.

Yeah.

But, you know, a well-known screenwriter wrote this.

Right.

And the people are talking like this.

And then the end credits, it says screenplay by Eric Roth and Robertson.

And all three of us went, oh, well, that's okay.

Wow.

Wow.

It's a little different.

And look, I refuse to believe that the film we're seeing on screen is not the aftermath of a heavy bob pass.

I think so, because Eric Roth is, is, it's not like Eric Roth only writes smash hits, but he's a pretty reliable screenplay credit.

This is honestly,

yeah, kind of his first cruddy screenplay credit since it sort of depends where you fall in extremely loud and incredibly close.

I mean, which he wrote once again.

Like, I would be thrilled to see Zemekis deliver an extremely loud and incredibly close at this point i guess mink you can kind of you know he didn't really write that but he sort of but like mink is way more successful obviously than anything we're talking about right now there's no thing he's ever had a credit on where people talk like this uh is that fair to say as a huge sweeping statement yes um and beyond that it's just like i like again this idea

But the emotion, the interiority of like the guy paints.

How do we, how can we tell he's a painter?

Well, he paints in the the living room.

He's always trying to capture the honey.

I'm staying up late.

I'm trying to get what the moon looks like.

And like the scene where he shows his baby the moon actually is sweet.

Hanks can really make that work, you know, like, but

you know, your sense of the guy is an artist or his artistic feeling is just that he had some painting that he did in the room.

And then there's a scene where he like takes the painting and puts it in a box and he's like,

I'm going to be a salesman.

Like, it's just the fucking, you know.

Right.

I mean, mean, your text, I just have it here, was the deal with me is my dad is Ben Franklin.

And then you wrote what all the dialogue in that movie sounded like.

And I'm like, yeah.

And then there's like, right, 14 scenes of people being like, you know, dad, you used to be a painter.

Yeah.

Remember, you wanted to go to art school?

And he's like, Yeah, well, I'm not doing that.

I look like big right now, by the way.

Anyway, I'll see you later.

Which, by the way, the Franklin stuff is basically one-to-one in the book, except they maybe never say Ben Franklin.

And you're like, that's so much better when you're reading it and you're like, oh,

that's Ben Franklin's son.

That's supposed to be, it's like the thing I say all the time.

It's the old fucking axiom of like, give the audience one-on-one and let them put it together and they'll love you forever, right?

Isn't that Billy Wilder line, I think?

But this like belief of like, audiences like it if you make them do a little work.

You get to feel smart that you're like putting the pieces together.

And more than anything, it makes you engaged in a film.

And when movies are like yelling shit at you, you know, like, I feel like the substance of film we have you

still haven't seen it.

A film that I think people were arguing about, like, it's so broad.

It's so like it hits this point over the head until it's dull, you know?

And I think a lot of people who dislike that movie are just like, no one talks like this.

The emotions are so extreme.

It's so out of whack.

Have you seen it, Ben?

The difference for me is, A, that movie goes in plot directions you could not expect.

right which keeps you locked in even if it keeps doing so in a very broad unnuanced way yeah yeah, yeah.

And the second thing is, it is largely a visceral experience.

And I saw her first movie, and

that's a very heightened genre, you know, thing.

And I, it's

much more forgivable.

There are many films that I like that people don't like, where my argument is like, I don't care about subtlety, subtlety is overrated, right?

And I don't want to sound like I'm just being persnickety about here because it's broad, but I think the way in which it is broad is actually

anathema to what it is trying to do.

For me, me, it was this rock, you know, and people would go near the rock, the Native Americans.

At one point, I described it to someone as having the depth of a postcard.

That's fucking right.

Because I called it a boomer diorama on Letterboxd.

And like, it's the same kind of thing where it's like, I said, Here, Randis.

Yeah.

That's pretty good.

I was into that.

But yeah, it's like, it's just like, yeah, thinking of you.

The trip's been great.

Anyway, bye.

Right.

It's like empty platitudes.

um, right, right.

It has the emotionality of a Hallmark cart.

The whole movie, that is a great way to put it.

Is like, it's like, my, my condolences for your loss.

And you're like, well, it doesn't really mean anything if it's on a piece of paper that you bought at a right aid 10 minutes ago that has a crying cartoon cat next to it.

The like um glue is still wet when I opened the envelope.

I'm like, look, I appreciate the gesture.

This, of course, resembles the idea of an emotion.

I understand

the intent of what was trying to be communicated here.

This does not make me feel anything.

The lazy boy guys, we got to talk about them.

They're so horny.

Yeah, this is probably the threat of the movie I like the most because it was the least important, if that makes sense.

Like, there's something nice about it being just kind of like...

free of serious incident or drama.

Right.

Cause it's like, it's not like this movie is about everyone who ever lived in this location.

Cause it's basically like, once there were dinosaurs.

All right, moving on.

It does not go beyond its range.

Right.

Then let's zip, you know, hundreds of millions of years.

And it's like, okay, Native American, this is sort of an important

Lenape burial site.

Okay, moving on.

Also, Ben Franklin's cuck son.

All right, moving on.

And then, cause that, that's like the 1760s or whatever.

And then we basically jump ahead to the early 20th century with Flying Guy.

So like, we're not seeing like whatever colonial family lived there or whatever, even though everyone says like, oh, it's an old colonial house.

You still get a glimpse of someone being like, I think I might build a house here.

But like, right.

It mostly sticks to, as we said, the like five or six threads that are all basically set up within the first 15 minutes of the movie.

Apart from the couple things I just mentioned, they're all 20, 21st century.

There's not like a sense of discovery of like, I have no idea where this is going to go next.

You're like, we're going to keep returning to the things we've established, you know?

And like the Lenape characters, you're not really seeing anything of meaning with them.

It's like you'll see Robin Wright and Tom Hanks hold hands and then a little box will come up in frame and be like, you know that other people used to hold hands too.

Very close to this same spot.

Just in fact, one foot away.

And you're like, okay.

The only problem I had with the lazy boy, and maybe I shouldn't have this problem, is that it doesn't connect to anything and never really comes up.

Like no one even, I was expecting like an annoying line of like.

Tom Hanks to Robin Wright being like, you know, I found out like the inventor of the lazy boy lived in this house.

Isn't that crazy?

Well, also, I think this movie has.

I looked up, by the way, the lazy boy was not invented by this guy.

It was invented by some brothers in Michigan.

Oh, weird.

It wasn't.

I'm looking here on Wikipedia.

It wasn't invented in the one house.

This movie trains your expectations in a way where I'm watching this Lazy Boy plotline, which to be clear is just a pin-up model.

Right.

Who's a Betty Page kind of lady, right?

Or, but pre-war, but, you know, you know, that kind of thing.

It's like a 30s version of According to Jim, where

it's in love with hot water right a fun husky guy who's like look i made the ultimate recliner chair and then they're like holy shit this thing is magical and the plot just doesn't change it's just they continue to be horny for each other and everyone keeps going like that is exactly

still works by the way it goes down it goes up that is a good invention and at one point you see a guy come in and he's like i'm gonna sell a lot of these and i think you're basically done that's it and then there's literally like a radio broadcast of like Pearl Harbor and you're like, oh, okay, so did he go to war?

And they're like, yeah, we're not checking in with him.

This is what I'm saying.

This one movie conditioned me to be like, oh, God, I'm going to hate it when the lazy boy guy gets polio, you know, or like fucking scarlet fever.

I'm like, what terrible fate is going to befall the lazy boy guy?

And you're like, nothing.

The movie could maybe use more of this, of just like things that happen, people,

the spread, the range of humanity, you know?

Yes, because I guess the next, well, we don't know who's in between Lazy Boy and Deaf Paul Betty.

Adolf Hitler lived there for two years.

And he was just trying out some ideas.

I had the thought about European audiences trying to engage with this movie where like people live in like cities that go back like thousands of years.

Right.

Like, and it's like this movie, like, it's dinosaur 1900s.

For the right time.

It's like, it's like, don't forget Ben Franklin's cooks.

But this is, this is another thing that should make this movie interesting, that you're like, the microcosm of American history is so small

that it basically could all be contained within a house by and large.

You know, like there, there's stuff there

that I want to engage with.

Ben Franklin's coxson.

I wanted to say it one more time.

I saw some behind-the-scenes photos, and I was genuinely surprised to see that they actually built this set.

Where I was watching it, and the film has such an uncanny sheen to it that I was like, Jesus Christ, Zemakis couldn't even put up four walls.

I was so convinced, even as like characters walk from one side of the room to the other, it felt very weightless.

um i agree with you did they build it like fully are there elements that are

that's what i was starting to guess while watching it like okay i know this wasn't shot in the volume but maybe they only had a couple pieces and then everything else i guess it makes sense that you have to kind of build i saw some pictures of bobby sitting looking over the script with robin and tom sitting on the fucking mantelplace and i'm like the room looks fully constructed okay but the card table that they brought up for thanksgiving that was cgi this is my thing i'm like wow you know grandma's famous card table why is this falling apart visually why am i not believing characters taking steps on this floor because they look too shiny they do but like the wall looks too shiny and also there's two scenes that are um

bizarre in the same way because they involve one a baby and two uh tony ways character i think that's the actor's name right falling down oh yes and the fall is clearly cgi assisted rather than them doing a stunt, obviously, with the baby.

It's going to be a vaguely funny, vaguely alarming moment of a baby accidentally falling to the floor.

And it feels, you're expecting the baby to bounce off the floor like they're in a bounce castle.

It's very strange.

And like moments like that, again, completely take you out of the movie and it's like disastrous.

Yeah.

There's, there's the sort of like

lingering moment.

There's a scene in which an archaeologist, a historian, comes into the house and sees Kelly Riley and is like, hey, we're working on an archaeological project.

We're historians.

We think that this house might be like an important burial site.

That seems kind of.

Who's that actor?

I don't know.

He looks very familiar.

Familiar looking.

I'm going to try and see if I can see it.

This is also because of the way this film is shot.

Most characters are

very far away from the camera.

Yeah, and then sometimes they kind of walk close for a second.

Like we were watching and being like, is that Noah Wiley?

I also, yeah, I just think compositionally, like, this is a movie that should live or die on interesting blocking.

And instead, it just just kind of feels like paper dolls placed in the least interesting positions.

But that moment, you're like, where is this going?

And it doesn't really go anywhere, right?

Because of the weird tone of performance in this movie and them wearing like fake mustaches and like 70s wigs or whatever they're wearing to show that they're like hippie historians.

I was like, The tone of this is so strange.

Are they going to turn out to be like Manson family people who are pretending to be historians to like rob them?

And they're like two younger research assistants who have nervous energy.

And I'm like, what's going on with them?

And then Kelly Riley and the main guy clear.

And they have this moment where the two young people are sitting on the couch.

And then he goes, Oh, you have a fuzzy thing on your face.

And she goes, like, oh, you found my imperfection.

And it cuts away.

And you're like, what was that?

And then you're like, oh, that's like one moment of understated human behavior.

in a movie that has not trained you to be able to receive that kind of thing, at least for me, like a scene that isn't someone explaining something, telegraphing it clearly.

And that is like from the book verbatim.

Oh, interesting.

Right.

Well, so that's why they got that interesting thing.

And like feels at odds with what the movie is.

That actor's name is Jonathan Arris.

He's just in a zillion things, like so many things.

It's too much to get into, but you've seen him in something.

Rogue One, The Martian, All the Money in the World, a bunch of TV.

I didn't like this and it bummed me out.

Clearly.

uh i also didn't like it and would have rather seen a movie like jordan number two or something right like where i'm like oh i want to catch that your line was i i was more in the mood to watch a movie about uh cars that turn into dinosaurs that would also rock just like some nonsense instead of this kind of thudding well david i have great news for you uh what's up red one and theaters nationwide this weekend if you want some dumb nonsense my friend Here comes a hearty I'm kind of annoyed that the reaction to that movie now that it's come out is just people people can be like, Yeah, it's bad.

What can I tell you?

It's not like, oh, like a historic disaster.

They're just like, Yeah, shitty.

The end.

I was ready for it to be the worst thing that happened in America this week.

And unfortunately, I think the release of Red One's only going to be number two.

Well, there you go.

We just play the box office game.

I don't know, man.

Yeah, I mean, I think we've done plenty on it.

I don't really like we could maybe talk about the performances, but I don't really think it's worth it.

Look, we did a lot of Hank's talk up front, right?

And I like the swing of him wanting to do something like this because it does feel kind of experimental.

And the movie tries to get a lot of mileage out of him just being a steady hand.

Robin Wright was the one person I found kind of affecting.

She's a great actor.

She cuts through.

She's a great actor.

And the movie finally kind of gets at something once in the last like 20 or 30 minutes.

It starts to focus on her a little more.

But just a little bit.

But up until that point, she's basically just a nagging wife.

Like, she's not very can we leave?

No.

up until that point.

And then the movie starts to like swing its perspective a little more to like, this woman had like hopes and dreams.

She wanted to balance books.

Wasn't that her dream?

No, that's Kelly Riley.

Oh, right.

She was like, I would have been a great bookkeeper.

I don't know what Robin Wright wanted to do.

I honestly forgot if she had a dream.

I think she had a thing.

She went to Paris.

Well, that's later.

She says, I'm going to save up.

my pennies so that every year I can go to Paris again with my daughter, just girl time, but also visit a different country every year.

Great.

And the daughter, their ultimate masterpiece.

Yeah.

Do you want to talk about Benny for a second?

Maybe it's just an actor I really love, but I think he's laying it on a little thick in this one.

Yeah, I almost wonder if he is, if he's got the right approach.

Sure, just yelling to the back of the audience.

I mean,

I don't know.

I didn't like his.

His performance works and it's out of sync with what everyone else is doing, but also it does kind of feel like everyone is sort of like

dog paddling, just trying to find a ledge in this movie.

I think Hanks and Wright do their best.

I don't know what an actor is supposed to do with this material, honestly.

We should mention Leslie Zemekis is in this, playing the woman who agrees that Benjamin Franklin sucks in a boostier.

And then their daughter, who we recently found out is named Zaza Zamekis.

Oh, really?

Yes, is Hanks' daughter in the film during the teen years.

But Zaza Zamekis.

A Walkman addict in in the film.

Yes.

Something that I just totally did not pick up on, and that's probably because I deeply checked out from the film.

Yeah, they're in the house.

Right.

Okay.

That's right.

No, the housekeeper.

I just didn't even pick up on.

Wait.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Yeah, we do have to mention that I do think, right, the most embarrassing, clunky things in the movie are in that storyline.

The black family, who, I mean, I, you know, I love the actress Nikki Amuka Bird.

She's incredible.

Who's the mom, who's a great great British actress, but recent Shyamalan rep company player, Knock at the Cabin and all.

Right.

But they just have zilch to do.

And that really feels like Zemeka's trying to just be like, and it's crazy how like, you know, Black Lives Matter and COVID, like are things that happen later in history, recent history.

Yeah.

And it just kind of gets like squished into that.

very brief plot.

Look, here's, here's the whole experience we had of watching the movie in a nutshell.

Okay.

Cut to housekeeper.

She's spraying a bottle at a flower.

Right.

And then you see her like pause.

And then she like.

And I truly thought she was going to huff it.

She smells the bottle.

That would have been interesting.

And we're like, what's this moment?

And then

we see that she's wearing a face mask, but it's hanging off of one ear, right?

Like she's taking it off.

And we know this is the most recent timeline.

Then she leans into the flower and Marie goes.

Yeah, we all go.

She lost her smell because of COVID.

Marie says that.

Oh, God, she lost her smell because of COVID.

And the second Marie finishes saying it, she basically turns to the camera, the character, and goes, I can't smell.

And we're like, yeah, we got, we got it.

And then she dies off screen, which also we didn't need to happen because I feel like just pick one thing.

Like, you don't have to hit it on us over and over again for us to get the point.

But I thought that was bad.

We're on Ed Sullivan.

What?

And it was kind of

explained.

Yeah.

This movie came out November 1st, Griffin, on 2600 Super Speaker.

Hey, we should mention the box office game is brought to you by our friends at Regal.

And here's the thing: you join the Regal Crown Club.

You accumulate those points.

You can get upgrades on concessions.

As we've said before, as I said in previous episodes, they got a site where you can usually spend points to buy.

weird movie tchotchkes, the kind of stuff I love.

But also you can upgrade to Regal Unlimited, which is an incredible deal deal if you're someone who likes to go see movies on a regular basis.

Promo code blank check.

Code blank check, 10% off your first three months.

Three months.

November 1st, 2024.

This film opened on 2,600 screens,

$4.8 million.

It's not a successful film.

No.

Some of the release day jockeying started to make us think, is Sony confident about this movie?

Because it was like, oh, they're pushing it up.

They were going to stagger it.

They're going wide.

It wasn't at any festivals, really.

I think it premiered at AFI, but you know.

And

it has not done well and will, I'm sure, vanish from theaters immediately.

Now, what's number one?

The number one movie in America is called Venom Colon: The Last Dance.

That's right, Griffin.

A film we've both seen.

I thought it was very good.

You saw it too.

I saw it with Alex.

Yeah, it's not very good.

No.

It's got

a couple things.

It does, but then it also, like, so much of it is said in a lab.

And I'm just like, why isn't this about

like Venom being silly?

I would say like every single thing that happens with Shuatel Hedge 4 and Juno Temple, two actors I love,

is so radically uninteresting.

Just the most boilerplate shoe leather explaining plotty shit, seemingly to set up spin-offs or sequels or whatever, where I'm just like, no one is buying a ticket for this.

Show like Venom giving Eddie a wedgie.

Like that's what we're all paying for.

It's so stupid.

And it's like, that's like the thing they should have learned from the first movie is like, oh, no one cares about like the lab.

Symbiote drama or whatever.

I don't think the second movie is like perfect either, but it at least had the right idea of just like, just do the crazy shit.

I don't think any of those three films really work.

No, I think the first one actually is the most successful, and that's not a great.

thing.

I think the second

one is my favorite, but all.

The second one is incoherent.

Yeah, but I think that's maybe the best approach to a venom movie i think the first one is best because tom hardy talking to himself is the best stuff in those movies because tom hardy gives so much of a and the second one i just it's like a lot of like carnage yelling and cgi action that's really shitty and like the problem is the first movie was like a mistake right where it's like very it's not a good movie trying to make a normal movie and tom hardy is hijacking and doing something weird and the tension of watching him work against it very similar to like the captain jack Sparrow feeling when those pirates movies started, right?

Of like, holy shit, this is like crazy that he's doing this within the machinery of this kind of thing.

And then you get to the sequels and you're like, well, if the movies are being designed to let Captain Jack Sparrow do his thing, then that tension is gone.

The electricity is gone.

And I feel like the Venom movies similarly could not figure out.

If we know now that people like the weird Tom Hardy shit, then what is the movie in relation to what he's doing?

I don't know, but the best shit in that movie is when he's in Vegas being

of course.

That's all we're paying for.

And let them be Carl Inch is, or what's it called?

Fuck, let their be Carl Ninch.

Let them be Carl Ninch.

I feel like that one is what if we built the whole movie out of the weird shit and it's too much.

And then this one is like, what's how do we do some of the fucking plot shit?

And it's just like, they just stop.

Whatever.

Number two, the box office is.

No, Madam Webb.

An animated film.

The wild robot.

Yeah.

Still have not seen.

I think it's pretty good.

Yeah.

I'm away to take my little cousins.

Venom, the last dance got prioritized.

My nine-year-old cousin Little George found Venom boring, which is probably the most damning review I have heard of any movie all year.

Number three of the box office is a horror sequel.

Small two?

Small two.

Heard mixed things.

Some people really like it.

Some people kind of.

Some of the underperforming is certainly a very profitable film.

Yeah.

But not maybe the breakout they hoped for.

We've been,

last decade or so, there's been like sequel growth on the horror breakouts usually.

And this one is dropping.

Yeah, I think making it so long was maybe an interesting choice, or maybe it's just you're not catching people off guard.

It's another thing Fantasy has talked about recently on Big Pic that is there's been an interesting year of studio horror largely underperforming and indie horror growing.

And it's like, oh, like movies that cost less than a million are making 10 million.

And that's exciting.

Right.

Like Terrifier, obviously.

But movies that cost like 20 that used to always reliably make 60 are now ending up at like 30.

Yeah.

Your night swims.

Number four with box office is Conclave.

A fun time at the movie.

Very enjoyable film.

And I think I want to say on Mike, Tucci's Touch Returns.

Yep.

Kind of the first movie where Tucci doing his thing really

worked for me.

God, are we happy to have it back?

Very happy in a little bit.

Yeah.

So really happy for that.

Conclave fun here, not fun.

Have you seen We Live in Time?

I have.

I did not care for it.

Some people like that one.

Yeah.

Haven't seen it.

Terrifier 3 is another movie that felt a little

overstated for me at times.

It's not as extreme as here, but I had a little bit of the same problem of like, I want this movie to breathe a little more.

There is such power to just letting Pugh and Garfield play off each other that the movies like focus on the most extreme scenes, be they like extreme sadness or like the most overstated version of charm, started to feel a little suffocated, suffocating to me.

Beetlejuice, Anora, which is doing very well.

Yeah, you know, there's good movies out there, and I'm seeing some of them.

Beetlejuice,

an insane success.

Huge hit.

Yeah.

Especially

where Warner Brothers has seemingly shown an allergy to releasing films successfully.

Released its ass to the public, largely.

I was saying to you that it, like, that's the only movie they haven't mangled.

And then you reminded me that the first three months of the year, they were crushing it.

They had Dune, they had fucking Godzilla versus Kong, and I want to say they had one other one that did okay.

Sure.

But like two genuine blockbusters, and then it's just been a series of like sideshow bobs stepping on rakes.

Essentially, yes.

Their other hit that you're forgetting is...

No, I guess that's it.

I mean, they mangled Twister

overseas.

One of the last rest of it is, you know, Furiosa underperforming, Joker, obviously under under horizon horizon that was a release you know trap

fine

did pretty good actually 42 sure but like and they might have hoped for more like a 60 right especially for the start of their yeah their shop relationship right relationship but it's still honestly trap actually did all right uh drew number two they're seemingly yes i mean this is the litany of their mistakes i mean clint should make one final movie about how zaslav tried to railroad the release of drew number two he almost now needs to make a movie about zaslav railroading him and he should play Zazlav.

Here is bad.

I kind of hope like you, yeah, Zemekis like takes a while off and like doesn't do something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like if he wants to make something

fine, but it better not be fucking Back to the Future, the musical or whatever.

It's crazy.

I mean, I know they've announced a closing date in Back to the Future.

There are two Robert Zemekis musicals currently running on Broadway.

The Beatles running on Broadway right now?

I mean, that's not.

Death Becomes her.

Just don't.

Death Becomes her, yeah.

I haven't heard the most most amazing things about either, but they do exist.

Yeah.

It makes sense that the stuff he used to make would translate to a musical.

Yeah.

It just underlines how much this guy used to be tapped in and has made things that survived, if not even grown, versus him continuing to put out stuff that it just does not connect in a large way.

Even if they have their defenders, you know?

Make them believe how hard it is to be a rich director.

Maybe that's more interesting.

Maybe that's it.

Here's a crazy stat I'm going to throw out.

And obviously the Asterix Heroes, two of them went straight to streaming.

I think the combined box office totals domestically of all of his films since Flight probably don't add up to Flight.

Yeah.

Like Flight made 90.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cause it's like 10, 40, 10, 6.

Jesus.

Ally did 40.

Yeah, like 40.

Walk and Marwin did 10.

Here won't probably even make it to 10.

Maybe I'll make it to 10.

I don't know.

Pretty rough.

Pretty rough.

Yep.

He's just pooping out black hats, basically.

My man,

sadly, is pooping out black hats left and right.

Tune in next week for...

Oh, our longest episode ever.

Yeah.

So don't, you know what?

Maybe this one's a little shorter.

Next week's really long.

Mohana Drive with Leslie Lynch.

Leslie Hedland.

I think it's a great episode of Lynch.

I think so.

It's all over the place.

On-topic conversation.

Right.

It stems and directions, but it's all connected.

Yeah.

Back to Lynch.

Yeah.

Back to David Lynch as we barrel towards the end of Twin Peaks and such like things like that.

Yes.

And on Patreon, of course, we're doing Andrew Lloyd Weber.

We're talking about musicals barreling towards

a cat's Christmas.

And in one day's time, our burger report episode will be released.

Okay.

And just two quick notes, because this is

a current episode being recorded on a quick turnaround so we can talk to more relevant present things.

Apple, great company has never done anything wrong, instituted new policies

that have added a surcharge if you are subscribing for Patreon memberships through their app on any device.

So we just want to alert all of our listeners, anyone who is thinking about joining the Patreon, had a membership that they're going to resume later.

We strongly encourage everyone to use a browser.

And avoid that added surcharge.

Yeah.

It's a charge that cannot be avoided.

It does not go to us.

It goes straight to Apple.

And just, yeah, just know that.

You'll save money if you open a browser window and type in www.patreon.com/slash blankcheck rather than using the app.

And to that end, we should mention that we recently have activated a new feature of gift memberships

for blank check special features.

So if there's any blank check fan out there, you know, who you want to maybe gift or someone just in your life who's a fan of movies and perhaps maybe will get a kick out of checking out our commentaries or other offerings?

There's a link in the description.

It's really easy to sign up and give someone a membership.

They offer somewhere between one month to one year.

So yeah, check it out.

And as always, we podcasted here.