Burn After Reading with Fran Hoepfner

Black Jack with Griffin and David

Black 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 is Black Jack.

Osborne Cox, I thought you might be worried about the security of your podcast.

It's hard to do an impression of him doing the tough guy voice.

Can you do an impression of him at any other time?

He does have a specific delivery in this that is really well worked out.

I love

Kill him.

He did his pit impression on SNL for years that I never understood.

He like you didn't get what he was going for.

I'd be like, I don't understand what this is.

Uh-huh.

Where you'd go like, eh.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, I do.

I mean, I guess, yeah, I guess there was a, yeah.

But pit's kind of hard to do.

These files, no, I can't do it.

It's not bad, yeah.

It's like the, he's got the little draw,

I,

but he's also got a little bit of like Bill and Ted in him, like Pitt in uh, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,

where he's uh stoned at the end, where he's high on acid at the end, and he's talking to Austin Butler, and he's like, Yeah, it wasn't that.

You know, I wish I could do that.

The thing when he's crying, but that's when he gets more grabby.

He's got the yeah, wait, but it always feels like he's got that gum in his mouth, which I know is like, that's his tick.

Not in this so much.

No, he's clearing.

He's doing something in this.

He's clearing this.

I mean, this is, I couldn't quite make it work, but the other thing I wanted to do for the quote was I really want to just take some time and focus on my Pakal.

That's good.

I think that's good.

But I thought it wouldn't.

I need to tee it up in that way.

My Paka.

This is what we're here doing today.

We're recording our Pakal.

I think that doing Clooney in this would be impressive.

Because he also has a very specific thing going on right in this one everywhere you look in this movie someone is doing something completely insane yes yes this is a movie built out of uh incredible performances that are really hard to define i think this is like clooney's single most underrated performance i do too just

because i think

everyone was sort of focused more on pitt maybe and even mouth everyone yeah everyone over him and and he's he'd already worked at the coins and all that but like he's so fun

his parts are the parts that make me laugh the most, just as pure, like, I can't believe what I'm watching.

It is the most fascinating.

I mean, this movie is now, what, it's 17 years old.

Yeah, sure.

From the moment I saw this, his first scene, him taking the cheese and asking about, you know, his acid reflux and like motor mouthing.

Yeah, all that stuff.

I was just like, oh my God, he's playing such a specific guy in this.

He has pinned such a specific type of person.

And yet I lack the words to describe this kind of person.

And in 17 years, I've gotten no closer to describing it other than the kind of guy clooney plays and burn after reading

totally it's like a completely undefinable type and I think it's easy to latch on to Pitt and to Malkovich because we can kind of see like that archetype but the Clooney character is an archetype of something that it's a one-of-one yeah it feels like recognizable and universal well I would he's the only character in this movie yes I'm just looking down the list to make sure that I think I would kind of enjoy hanging with because everyone in the movie kind of enjoys hanging with him.

He's kind of an easy hang.

Apart from the go-to restaurants.

Yeah.

He's sort of like, he'll just take you on a date.

He'll enjoy the movie.

He'll fuck you and then he'll be like, I'll see you later.

You know, like, it's just like.

That's not what he says.

Come on.

What he says is maybe my favorite running joke of the movie, which is you cut to woman in bed, him coming out of the bathroom fully clothed, checked his watch.

I think I can get a run.

They do variations on that, I think, five times.

And I feel like, I mean, Malkovich doesn't like him, I guess, because Markovich doesn't like anybody.

But everyone else is kind of like, yeah, he's all right.

I mean, I guess, yeah, Tilda's getting sick.

I don't know.

But it feels like Elizabeth Marvel and Tilda both have utter contempt for him and yet cannot deny him.

Right.

They can't deny that he's, again, kind of fun guy to have around.

Fun guy to have around.

He's like sort of high, low self-esteem.

Like, like.

He's very confident, but he also kind of knows that he's like, you know, just a whatever.

Does that make sense?

I don't know.

Everyone else in this movie kind of thinks they're high status and isn't.

Well, he's like false modest.

He's so proud of the fact that he hasn't fired that he has to discharge his weapon.

Right.

That's what you need to talk about with your

psychiatrist.

I don't have a psychiatrist.

But he says it so aggressively.

It's maybe the most aggressive he is in the entire movie.

I don't have a psychiatrist.

He's just.

It's also like, I wonder, I mean, maybe this will be in the dossier.

I don't know much about the production of this movie, but obviously they know Clooney.

And I wonder if they bring him the script, if they're like, is there someone you want to do?

Or if they're like, we really like this one for one.

It's a good good question.

They could do other things here.

Yeah.

The other thing was that their fabled Idiots trilogy, right?

Where they do O'Brother and Talbot Cruelty pretty close together.

And then they'd always said the third one's going to be Hail Caesar.

What Hail Caesar was changed a bunch of times, but it was always this notion of we like the idea of Clooney as a pompous actor.

At the time, it was doing Julius Caesar, I think.

And then this came out and people were like, so is that the end of the idiot trilogy?

Is this its own kind of thing?

It wasn't part of their original plan with him.

His look in this is so good, too.

The

love when he has a beard, the heavy tan and the little fucking chain around his neck.

Maybe I'm telling on myself because I know obviously his character in this is a fool, but I'm like, I'm just like, it's kind of hot.

Would go on park date with Harry Farrer.

It's important to the movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

I also think there's.

And he's not judgy of Frances McDormand.

Like, he wants to fuck the high-profile DC ladies, but he's also like, yeah, I'll go on a date with her.

She seems fun.

Well, and he's like supportive of her surgeries, but it isn't like you need them.

No.

No, he's crazy about her.

And she's like,

it's, I mean, she's the only person it feels like he actually connects to intellectually.

The best joke in Burn After Reading, and then we should introduce the podcast, in my opinion.

is just Richard Jenkins being like, I used to be a Greek Orthodox priest and then not explaining what happened.

I've completely forgotten that.

I also kind of forget about it.

And then every time I'm like, right, I just glide past it.

Yes.

I mean, he's like the only solo card actor who is not on the poster, called out in the trailer.

He's like the secret, whatever, seventh lead of this movie.

You had not re-watched this in a while.

No, I mean, I've probably seen this movie like four times.

Like, it's not a big movie for me.

It's one you're sort of holding on.

I am.

And I, I.

I always like have a perfectly good time watching it, but find it doesn't like move me.

But i had forgotten about jenkins you texted jenkins is on fire in this thing and i called out 2008 is stepbrothers his first oscar nomination for the visitor and this he was just like firing in all cylinders you pointed it out and you're right i just want to point out uh and yeah the stepbrothers yeah those three he also was a voice in the tale of despero he must have been great in that he probably is i want to shout out how horrendous his 2010 was oh give it to me i mean and i love Richard Jenkins, and I bet you he's good in all these movies.

But these were sort of his cultivate our guests.

Oscar cash-in jobs.

Maybe, but I think it's also right.

It's like post-like higher visibility, where like he just suddenly is in like five movies a year.

Every character actor moment that sometimes happens where the storm brews and you get your Oscar nomination, and everyone goes, Thank you for your service.

We haven't given you the respect you've deserved for too long.

Now we're going to throw everything at you.

Is Hall Pass in the grouping?

No, Hall Pass was 2011.

Along into his 2011, is Friends with Benefits, Hall Pass, The Rum Diary.

I feel like, you know, whatever.

He's phenomenal in Hall Pass.

I know you're a big fan of him in Hall.

You've mentioned this before.

Hall Pass.

His 2010 is Happy Thank You More, please.

Relax, Guest.

A movie that won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I'm not silencing you.

I just knew it would activate you.

Happy Thank You More, please.

Actually, the worst movie title of all time.

Actually, the number one.

Possibly.

Dear John, eat pray love who's in that i don't remember see like i bought you a plane ticket julia something like that right dear john i want to say he plays uh uh changing tatum's dad with dementia that's uh correct i mean he plays channing tatum's dad it looks like uh norman not the one you think with richard gere that was like okay uh-huh some other fucking shit with emily van camp oh how dare he and then i will say one thing that he is good in which is the matt reeves let me In remake.

He's really good.

He's good in that.

That's the one saving grace.

Yeah.

It's just tough that he followed this up with fucking Radner and, you know,

pray love and shit.

Can I say something about his 2008?

You can say anything you want about his 2008.

Was applying to college that fall, including his

alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan University.

And so in 2008 to be visiting Illinois Wesleyan University, they were like, you guys know Richard Jenkins?

Richard Jenkins.

Yeah.

And they were like, we just got to get it.

They were like putting him on

a show.

He was the mascot.

They had a guy come out in a Big Jenkins foam costume with those sad eyes.

I will say, he is the most like Midwest Illinois theater guy.

It's like if you were just like, Chat GPT, create like a respected Midwestern theater actor who came out of Illinois.

It's like Richard Jenkins just materialized.

There's never greater, like, no-nonsense do-the-work actor than Richard Jenkins.

He, I mean, it's an estimable history of guys like that, obviously.

There's always been guys like that.

And he just has been that guy or was that guy for 25 years.

Now he's sort of slowing down.

I, this movie gets accused of being their meanest film.

And even sometimes that's my problem with it.

This is what I was going to say.

Many people who love the Cohens throw it out as like, that's the one that gets too mean and too judgy for me.

And other people go, I love it.

It's their meanest film.

Of course, it's so pitch black.

Which is sort of my take on it.

But I think Jenkins is kind of the key to this movie.

Like he is the mortal center of the film.

He's a tough hank.

I'm not sure I'd want to hang out with him.

I used to feel so bad for him in this movie.

And now I actually kind of don't at all.

You've grown up.

You've matured.

You understand his values.

I only root for Elizabeth Marvel now.

Yes.

Well, she's.

But her life is fine.

She's killing it.

Yeah.

But, but yes, that moment of, God, this guy's whole fucking backstory that the movie isn't even going to get into.

Greek Orthodox priest.

It's so funny.

And Chevy Chase.

It's so funny.

And what she said, she goes, that's a pretty cushy job.

Yeah, yeah.

She locks into like, I could be married to a Greek Orthodox priest.

That'd be a good life.

She says that's a good position.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's our podcast?

Our podcast is Blank Check with Griffin and David.

I'm Griffin.

I'm David.

It's a podcast about filmographies, directors who have massive success early on in their careers and are given a series of blank checks to make whatever crazy passion projects they want.

And sometimes those checks clear and sometimes they burn baby.

This is a mini-series on the films of Joel and Ethan Cohen.

It's called Pod Country for Old Cast.

That's so true.

Today we're talking about Burn After Reading, Pod After Casting.

Paka.

Elizabeth Marvel.

This morning, So Griff, I did something you might appreciate.

Oh, who's our guest?

Our guest today is Elizabeth Marvel.

She's a marvel of this world.

Marvel.

Our guest today.

Look, I don't need to say who our guest is today because if you're one of the millions of people tuning in for the first time in over a year, it's because the ultimate blockbuster champ has returned to the show.

The Fran signal has been lit in the sky.

The ultimate spike in listenership, the great Fran Hoffner, Fran magazine.

Thank you.

And New York magazine and many other outfits.

Yes.

So many things I want to say.

Hi, Fran.

Hi.

Did you listen, like me, to every Spike Lee podcast appearance he did for highest to lowest and start to grow comforted sort of in like a lullaby way of the like sort of six like phrases or anecdotes he would trot out every time?

Yeah, D and Lee.

You know, I think of it as more of a reimagining.

You know, great jazz musician liked the way he was.

It was great.

He has some of

his greatest speaking rhythms.

Yes.

Yeah.

His story about seeing sinners and IMAX.

Yes.

Yes.

Now, this, yeah, I wasn't even supposed to be in L.A.

That's what he kept like, that was.

Imagine that.

I get the call.

I'm like, wow, Spike Lee in LA, the craziest thing he's heard to me.

He's a New Yorker.

I didn't listen to everyone, but I listened to quite a few.

Did you listen to most of them first?

I listened to the.

This feels like a beat you would be covering.

I actually was not on this beat at all.

Wow.

You were sort of mid on highest to lowest.

I was mid on highest to lowest.

I like it.

You were sort of middle to middle to lowest.

Middle to middle, low.

Uh, this is Fran's ninth episode.

Wow.

You're close to 10.

10-year anniversary?

It is the decade of dreams.

It's been decade of dreams.

Public Enemies.

Well, that's her third episode.

I'm not going to go in order, but I'm going to try to knock them out.

Sure.

There was a Twin Peaks.

Aliens with a dollar sign.

Was that the first one?

That was.

Blockbuster episode.

Our biggest episode at that point in time.

Slow it down.

Let's keep going.

Yeah, great.

I got three out of nine.

Fuck.

All right.

The holiday, which I think is often cited as our best episode.

People will cite it as very much a sort of platonic blank check episode, I would say.

It was so true.

Great Mouse Detective.

Of course.

Bright Star?

Of course.

Lolita?

Of course.

And the girl with the dragon tattoo.

Girl who does computers.

Girl on computer.

I, Griffin, made a letterboxed list of every thing I own on physical media on disc.

I had never, I had tried to do it before and I'd never like finished it right now.

I was like, I'm going to finish it.

I'm going to put a note for every single one, what the format is to avoid ever fucking doubling up.

Because I occasionally mistakenly, yes.

I will do the same thing.

And then I give them to usually Amista fans.

Talk about real embarrassing champagne problems.

Yeah, seriously.

So I make a big list.

And I'm also like, and that will, then I can just fade watched or I can filter and see what haven't I watched, right?

And I sort of have a vague idea, but I want to just to look at it.

I do it.

I go, show me what I just seen.

And I know I've seen everything like on the shelf.

It's mostly stuff in the piles, right?

But then there is one thing on the shelf I haven't watched.

Jason Bourne, the fifth Bourne movie.

You had never seen.

No, but it was part of the box.

Yeah, I have the box.

I have the stupid steel box.

You didn't get the steel box, not the backpack, right?

No, I didn't get a fucking.

There was a collector's edition backpack.

Oh, no, no.

The five movies packaged in a backpack with a flashlight and a carabiner or whatever.

That's useful stuff.

Absolutely.

The fifth one is where he comes back.

It's not Renner.

It's not.

It's the one post-Renner where Damon and Greengrass are like, Tony Gilroy, step aside.

And then they just shake the camera at you for two hours while Alicia Vikander like browses the game.

Tommy Lee Jones goes, I don't know about that.

Yeah, Tommy Lee Jones is just there being like, so I'm Albert Finney or whatever.

I'm just like, whatever that guy is this time.

Brian Cox.

Does that movie suck ass?

It sucks ass.

It's so interesting because I really like pretty much all the other Bourne movies.

And you're like, wow, this is kind of doing all the same stuff and yet is really bad.

It's funny how it's like, you know, there is something

you had to do something right.

Like you couldn't just have these elements.

We talk about Damon a lot in the True Grid episode coming up soon.

And

he's great filming.

He's a film, great.

Phenomenal Linux.

And then he has a really bad run after that.

And you can tell the moment where he and Greengrass sign up for Jason Bourne after it felt like they had walked away was like, fuck, we need a hit.

And it was a hit.

It made money.

But the other thing is, The Martian comes out like eight months before it does.

And you're like, he wouldn't have made this movie after The Martian came out.

He probably didn't need to like jump off buildings in Greece for a while.

But he was in like post-Great Wall panic.

Totally, totally, totally.

And the reason I thought about this is just that Elizabeth Marvel is in The Bourne Legacy.

And I love that she's in that movie.

And I'm a big fan of that movie.

I think it's very good and and underrated.

And I love to shout out that she hand-to-hand fights Jeremy Renner in it.

People don't talk about how Elizabeth Marvel and Jeremy Renner fight in that movie.

Completely forgot that happen.

I still haven't seen that one.

It's the only one I've seen.

It's really good.

I'm waiting.

Well, I just did the trilogy for the first time over Thanksgiving last year.

Of course.

So I'm giving myself some breathing room.

You shouldn't because Born Legacy is set between the second and third movies and it's like really weirdly inside the continuity.

This is the whole thing, five times.

It's not like we're rebooting.

Right, Griffith's,

I didn't see the Damon movies, and then the Renner one comes out, and I'm like, maybe this is a clean entry point, and it is the most like midqually deep in the weeds shit possible.

And I could not make headphones.

It is also, once you watch them all, it is Tony Gilroy going to war with Paul Greengrass.

That series is those two at war.

It's much like the Hotel Transylvania franchise.

Double OTERS

fighting.

Yes.

And it is, in my opinion, Gilroy being like, the action does not need to be shaky.

Look at my nice, clean action.

And you watch it.

You're like, yeah, this is better.

Tony Gilroy is right.

But narratively, maybe that movie.

I like that movie, but you know, I mean, it's an odd duck for sure.

It's an odd duck.

I mean, look, Ludlam is kind of an after-reading.

Is one of the things it feels like this movie is sort of riffing on.

The thing I remember hearing right before I saw it in some interview with the Cohens was on set our motto was, what would Tony Scott do?

That that was the prism through which we ran most decisions.

And it doesn't feel like they're one-to-one doing like a fucking hot shots version of a Tony Scott.

It's such a fast movie with so many twists and turns.

And like, yeah, yeah.

I like that they're not like actually actively aping the visual language of late period Tony Scott or Greengrass or any of those guys, but it definitely feels like a movie that is infused with that.

in the sort of, in the rhythms, in the sort of like intensity of what they're presenting.

And I think these characters live in a world where Tony Scott films also are.

Like they are processing what's happening to them in a very like narrative way.

It is one of my favorite types of comedy.

It is why I love this movie so deeply is it is a comedy largely based around characters having the wrong notion of what movie they are in.

Right.

That like if you actually untangle this movie and it's what's so great about the ending, you're like.

What's actually happening is so different than what's happening in everyone's minds.

And it's not just a misunderstanding, which a lot of Cone movies are based on.

It is based on their inflated sense of self and importance.

Right.

The initial and driving thing is Osborne Cox, Malkovich, thinking his life story is interesting and his like secrets, you know, he holds like real, and it's probably, I mean, we never see what his memoir

hero snippets, yeah.

You're right, but it's probably mostly him just talking about random shit no one would care about.

I sort of think it would be interesting.

Well, maybe that's just if he did the audiobook.

If he did did the audio book, if he did the audiobook, I mean, not only does he think it's important, but he's even talking to his like senile father about how he is worried it might be too incendiary, right?

Yeah, like this notion of like,

you might see me as unpatriotic, but I think this story needs to be told.

And then multiple important offices look at the material and go, like, just snuff.

Drive,

like, not important.

Level three clearance, right?

We're taking you off the Balkans desk.

David.

Uh-huh.

You know that moment when you sink into a hotel bed and think, why doesn't my bed feel like this?

I do.

I love to sleep on a hotel bed.

I got a solution.

Lisa.

Griffin, I love Lisa.

Lisa is like having a hotel sleep at home.

Now, obviously, I love the season four Simpsons episode.

I love Lisa.

And you love Lisa the character.

great character and i love the apple lisa as a sort of interesting artifact in personal computing and certainly as a story point within the film steve jobs but i also own a lisa mattress now it's lisa with two e's and an s and an a and uh i have i think i got it a few years ago

and it's the best mattress i've ever owned they just sat

they just sent me a king yeah mattress because i'm now thinking of upgrading and lisa has rejoined the show yeah to to to you know know, partner with us.

I was thinking about getting a little taller and I said, why not arrange a splurge on a California king?

Did you get a California size?

I did.

Crazy boy.

I'll grow into it.

Lisa isn't just luxury comfort at a reasonable price.

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So there's, you know, actually sustainable sort of elements to this.

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Damn, this ad copy is reading me for so.

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Having that level of comfort truly matters.

It's one of the few things in my day that's just for me.

Okay, so like they've got four kinds of mattresses, I think, in each size.

All of them are cool.

Yeah.

I had,

I think I have the Sapira hybrid.

Yes, I do.

And this new one I'm trying out is, I think, the Legend hybrid.

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One word.

Burn after reading.

I saw this film in theaters.

I was living in 2008.

It's just the year of Sims in New York with no friends.

My friend was the Regal Union Square, where I saw, I think I told you all of those Richard Jenkins movies in 2000, like Richard Jenkins was there for me in the Regal Union Square.

You had a Richard Jenkins Regal Union Square punch card.

I really did.

And when you showed up for Burn after reading, they gave you a hope.

Yeah, they gave me some grandpa glasses.

And like,

I was hyped for this movie, obviously, because I love the Cone brothers and they had just won Best Picture.

And I saw it and I didn't like it very much.

At the time, you didn't like it.

At the time.

And I have sort of grown to appreciate it, but I still,

it is the one where I'm just kind of like,

like, when I'm watching it, like,

here's the arc of this

for me.

I loved no country so much, as we talked about last week.

Uh, the trailer for this movie was really fucking good, and it was everywhere, and it was everywhere.

Yeah, the whole pit is in this movie thing was also like front and center.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we'll talk about it.

I've been talking about all series.

He's in this movie, and he's doing a thing.

Everyone forgets how successful this movie was.

It was successful.

They sold it as a mainstream movie it opened number one at the box office it made a lot of money uh it was like a mainstream play in a way that very few of their movies were and a lot that's coming off the heat of no country and also the kind of like 10-year cycle of uh lubowski becoming like so totemic and huge um but the ads were everywhere people were really amped for it and then it comes out it does really well opening weekend and almost immediately the response is like from critics eh maybe this is lesser cohen's it's more of a lark and from general public, like, what is this?

This is not what they were selling in the ads.

And yeah, did it get

a WGA nomination for best screenplay?

BAFTA nominated Pitt and Swinton in supporting.

And the Globes nominated McDorman for best actress.

BAFTA also tossed it a screenplay nod.

Globes nominated for picture and actress.

Okay.

And BAFTA gave it a screenplay.

Yeah, but that was about it.

That was it.

It got zero Oscar nominations.

I probably saw it about a week into release and was like, people have cooled my expectations a little after being so amped.

Saw it immediately, was like, this thing's a fucking masterpiece.

It fucking rules.

And I watched this movie like every couple of years.

I've seen it many, many, many times.

Many, many, many, many times.

I think I saw it opening weekend.

Yes, Fran, you were earlier.

I was a senior in high school.

And I went with my friends, including my crush.

And we all went to go see this.

Like, everyone I knew was seeing this movie.

And we were 17 years old and i don't think this was like the first r-rated movie i saw in theater but it probably is an early movie but it was a very formative one and like i'm driving myself to the movies to see this r-rated movie a focus features release and that's when i learned to love focused features that's when i learned to settle down when it goes

uh I remember saying to my dad, isn't this like kind of crazy that Burn After Readings opening number one with like $20 million?

And he was like, I mean, George Clooney and Brad pitter in it yeah man and i was like i had not thought about it that simply and the trailer just had funny moments and good stuff

yeah it's also

reunites clooney and tilde swinton and this time they get in bed together right after michael clayton michael clayton and karen crowder of course yeah yeah you never think about that you never think about i was thinking about it the whole time okay i said there they are i said that's karen crowder well i love karen crowder you know every time i watch my do you think karen crowder got a bad rap do you think uh trump should try to partisan

He's going to move her.

She was just keeping her company afloat.

A cushier.

I think we should check in with her.

Yeah, we should check in with her.

Do you ever wonder if the tragic events of Michael Clayton could have been avoided if they just hopped in the sack earlier?

That all this fighting between the two of them was really just tension that was going unspoken.

Is Michael Clayton capable of getting an erection?

My guess is no.

That man has the weight of a thousand worlds.

He's a sleepy.

Yeah.

This is a good point.

That is, I love that movie.

It is not a very horny movie.

No.

Sex is not really present in Michael Clayton.

No one's thinking about it.

No, I mean, when Pollock's on screen, I'm thinking about it.

There's so much with his ex-wife.

Right.

And you get the sense that, like, this fell apart because this guy just cannot be present.

Like, remotely.

And now he has no interest in any women whatsoever.

Until he met Karen Crowder.

Until he met Karen Crowder.

If they had just been able to work through.

Look, a little bit of sad news.

Producer Ben Hosley has COVID.

He does.

He'll be all right.

He'll be all right, but unfortunately, he's missing from this episode.

Here's some great news.

Happy news.

Friend of the show, jumping in heroically.

Producer Ben Frisch.

Hey,

filling in the seat.

You were saying this is one of your favorite cones.

Oh, absolutely.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

I like that it's a Virginia movie.

Okay.

It's a, I'm from southeastern Virginia, but

I grew up with

the kids of a lot of spooks.

Okay.

Because I'm from Williamsburg, where the farm is,

which is Camp Perry, which is a CIA training center.

We talk about movies a lot.

I feel like, isn't that where like fucking The Recruit is set?

My favorite Colin Farrell movie?

Yeah, that's your number one favorite Colin Farrell movie, right?

Yeah.

I have not seen The Recruit.

Okay.

Well, I'm going to look it up.

Carry on.

Kind of a boring place to set

a series, I think,

but Williamsburg, I mean.

But I

love that this movie looks like Virginia, looks like DC.

And I just think it's so funny.

Peace is incredible.

Do you want to know one of the craziest things about this movie?

It was almost exclusively, if not entirely, shot in New York City.

Really?

Like over here.

That the Cohens were like, I don't have to go to fucking.

Can we figure out how to film this at home?

Which is funny because it's like a, it's a movie about DC.

Like, and you'd think they would want to, like, whatever.

But

shooting in DC can be a pain in the ass.

And I don't know if no country was just such a tough production.

And so often, so many times on this podcast, when the production starts with that, you're like, and that's why the movie's bad.

They got too lazy, right?

They didn't care enough to go to the place.

And now they're like shooting in the wrong place.

And

they did a little bit of Georgetown location stuff to get the streets.

The vast majority is like Brooklyn.

Yeah, I know.

It was shot in Brooklyn Heights.

Yeah.

You know what?

I'll open the door.

But yet it does feel like it kind of gets it right, right?

Like, I remember the first time seeing it when they go to see the romantic comedy, the Dermot Mulroney movie.

that is now the dearly departed 23rd and eighth movie theater Clearview Chelsea the Clearview Chelsea and I was like huh why would they film that there if the rest of the movie is in Virginia and then I looked it up and it's like oh the whole thing it was the bow tie after it was the clear view you know the theater there was the other Chelsea one though the other Chelsea maybe i'm thinking of the same

one it went through multiple names we saw a movie there i think the first time we ever met yes you knew i knew it as seeing a movie there i knew it as synopolis Chelsea.

Oh, that's right in between.

Oh, no, it was after, right?

Right, yes, yes.

Okay.

Right.

It was also United Artist at one point.

We got egg salad at Murray's.

Yep.

Sorry.

Sorry, girl.

Apology exactly.

It was like 10 years ago.

What movie did we see though?

I don't know.

Okay.

Don't worry about it.

And the recruit is indeed set in the farm.

Roger Donaldson's The Recruit, which is just like Pacino's like, ah, you gotta be a recruit.

This film, Burn After Reading.

I do think it speaks to how well they nailed this, though, that you're from there and it was passing your sniff test versus like half of the fucking Amy Heckerling movies we covered where you're just like, this is Vancouver.

Sorry, it's just, yes.

Yo, what's going on, David?

Something very exciting just happened on your laptop?

We can cut this out if we don't want to include it, but.

We're trying to, we pay our guests and we're trying to fill in some backlogs because we got a new person who's in charge of like, you know, payouts and all this stuff.

And she very wisely has sent out, like, you know, hey, hey, like, yeah, checking back.

And this is the third person.

This one was Carolyn Framke, who's texting me being like, this is a phishing scam.

I have gotten a couple of these two.

People think that it's not.

No, no, no, no, no, take her money.

Like,

can you send your payment information so we can even think that for an episode a year ago?

I've got, I've gotten a couple of those payments.

I'm so screwed.

For you, it was a phishing scam.

It was.

Everyone else, no.

We made a phishing scam just for you.

Okay, so burn after reading.

Fascinating thing is that this is

no, what were you going to say?

I was going to start the dossier, so you go ahead.

You seem to be struggling for the.

No, no, I was just getting the tab open.

We're doing great.

We're doing great.

We're doing amazing.

This is really good.

We're paying back people from two years ago.

I can't wait to get money.

It's going to be really good.

I'm going to start spending like crazy.

Yeah.

Because I just know money's coming.

Yeah, and it's 50,000 per episode now.

Oh, that's actually not true.

I want to clarify.

It's time for me to say this one last time, says JJ.

And he's saying it, of course, one last time because he probably knows he's going to get fired.

Right.

Burn After Reading, 13th Cone Brothers movie, was written during a flurry, unprecedented flurry of activity

where they got no country for old men, a serious man, and burn after reading kind of all kind of going at the same time.

That is what I was going to say, that this is a fascinating post, like, you know, it's a post-victory lap.

no country movie.

But yet, no, it comes.

Burn and serious men had been funded and set up before they won best Picture.

At their lowest moment post-Lady Killers, they write these three movies together and get them made three in a row.

The true blank check is true grip.

Yeah.

That's them being like, more money, please.

We want to do this properly and we want to adapt a book that was already adapted into an Oscar winning film.

And Scott Rudin is like, why?

And they're like, we want to.

And he's like, okay, well, I'll go get the rights.

I want to say that.

And he said it that show.

He said it that way.

Yeah.

And String Cheese firmly in hand.

I want to say, and I'm sure we can verify this or reject this in the dossier that this movie had finished filming by the time they win the Oscars.

Yes, and then I guess it comes out like six months after that.

Or they said they had shot most of it before they won the Oscars.

So maybe it was right near the end.

But this is like, right, it gets to be the movie after the win, even though it was in no way actually made as the movie after the win.

So.

Burn After Reading emerges from

the Cohens desiring to work not just with one actor, a bunch of different actors.

Mission accomplished.

These parts were basically all written for the actors who play them.

So Brad Pitt, George Clooney, this is answering my question from earlier.

Frances McDorman, they knew her?

They did.

They're heading in.

John Malkovich and Richard Jenkins were all basically purpose-built, you know, in this script.

Swinton, surprisingly, is the one they hadn't written it for, and I've never been able to find who they did write it for.

If anyone, they were probably like, eh, we'll figure it out.

It's just always so funny when like it just happened with the new one joel codena making with josh o'connor where they're like it found its female lead uh francis mock dormant who's that

um james gunn has added jennifer holland to the supporting cast of new project

does this need to be its own deadline flannigan's uh

why pete segal no look no disrespect no no it's fine when you when you post the news item as if it's like after a long search.

Yeah.

So McDorman, Clooney, and Jenkins obviously are Cohen's favorites who they were keen to work with again.

Pitt, basically, they had been working with together to try and make two of the white sea happen for quite a long time.

So they have a relationship there.

And I think with Malkovich, they were just, I mean, correctly, like, I think we could really have fun with that guy.

This is my favorite

Malkovich performance.

And it absolutely feels like a kid on Christmas morning getting the toy they've been dreaming of for months.

It's really outstanding.

Unwrapping it quickly and being like, oh my God, look at all the things you can do with this.

They just, you can tell that they're just like, what are the funniest things that could come out of his mouth?

What are the funniest outfits we can put him in?

Totally.

And just like how to tap into his kind of seething energy.

Yeah, I think it's my favorite performance of his.

That's crazy to me, but he, but it's very funny.

I think he is so transcendently good in this.

Yeah.

He's really good.

He's good.

Is it my favorite?

I don't think so.

My favorite performance of his is obviously the Vinny Vedici sketch where he's like, I don't talk like that.

And Hater starts doing him perfectly.

Oh, I miss Vinny Vidici.

I do.

There was also Hater's

weekend update where he was Malkovich

and it was after the Madoff scandal.

And Malkovich had gotten fleeced by Madoff.

Right.

Right.

In real life?

Yes.

Oh.

And he keeps doing this thing of like, how do you feel about it?

And he's like, I feel fine, Seth.

and he's like you're not going to get upset and he's like i know what you expect me to do you expect me to launch suddenly into a hyper articulate angry jag but i'm not gonna do that and then they just keep trying to egg him on until he explodes i saw him live once malkovich doing what in chicago poetry

well close uh in like a steppenwolf thing No, with the symphony.

Was he at the bean?

There is

very close to the bean.

Frank keeps responding sincerely to my jug.

I'm not letting you get one in the Widget City.

I'm not letting you get one in here.

There's an Aaron Copeland piece called A Lincoln Portrait that is like music with just excerpts from Lincoln.

And Malkovich did the Lincoln excerpts, but they didn't announce ahead of time

who it was going to be.

So it's just like Lincoln portrait with guests.

And so I went with my mom.

Seven years ago.

Basically,

Lincoln Park after that?

Yeah.

Crawling in my skin.

It's pretty good.

It was pretty good.

It was crazy.

It was crazy to see him.

I can't imagine.

He's one of those guys.

I mean, he's so fascinating because he talks about like acting is easy.

I don't understand these people.

I show up.

I say words.

They pay me money.

A dog could do it.

And like sometimes when people like Brando would say that, you're like, you're like trying to hide the sin of the process.

You're trying to act like you don't care.

Malkovich, I genuinely believe to some degree, it just flows out of him.

I guess so.

It must, I mean, it's interesting.

I wonder what his process is like.

He talks about it as if he does not internalize stuff at all.

Because it's because, like, Joan Allen, Gary Snees, Glenn Hedley, like the classic Steppenwolf people, you think about those as like really sort of like awful actors who wanted to do new stuff with this, you know, and like, is Malkovich right?

Just this like alien they found where they were like, oh God, we got to get this guy.

Like, he's the best.

To some degree, like, I do get the vibe that, like, obviously he has a very unique energy and way of speaking, and he has incredible emotional access, right?

Like, Malkovich doesn't become Malkovich if he isn't able to tap into that anger so quickly and viscerally.

But he, when he talks about it, it's just like, I just learned the script and I do line readings.

I like him.

I love him.

When was I first exposed to Malkovich?

Great question.

Conair, Cyrus the Virus?

I guess it was that run.

I guess it was that mid-90s him as a line of fire villain guy.

I guess that's when I'm like, because like, I feel like the first time I really cared deeply about him was being John Malkovich, obviously, yes, for a whole generation.

He becomes something different because of that.

I knew who he was by the time that being John Malkovich.

I'm not too.

I didn't understand why the movie was about him.

I remember my parents having to explain to me, like, sort of what he represents culturally, that him, just the idea of why he was a funny guy to build that around.

Um, yeah, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich.

I was trying to figure out the first thing I saw him in,

I'm going to guess for you it was

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

That's what it was.

Really?

Yeah.

That makes sense, actually.

He's a pretty good one-scene performance.

What does he do in that?

I don't remember.

He plays a leader of an alien race who's like a rival of, I don't know how the book is.

He's falling.

Oh, yeah, he's got a lot of money.

It's like that and Aragon, I think, were the two.

Oh, sure.

Trevor Aragon?

Yes.

Looms large in my home.

Loomed large in the world.

Aragon is a great example of our age difference where it's like, I was way too old for that dragon teen shit.

I never read it.

But you were just the right age.

I knew about it.

Like for it to have been thrown right at your age group.

But look, here's a perfect example.

I feel like the way Malkovich talks about his approach to acting is that he doesn't do anything differently on Aragon versus 100%.

Burn After We.

But I also think they're the same level of real to him.

Exactly.

That's part of it.

I think he's just on a wavelength where he can just read it and be like, yes, I feel this.

Go put up the costume on my body.

You know?

You know who I think is kind of like this also?

Mark Strong.

Interesting.

I was just, what was Mark Strong on standby for?

Fuck, what was I just reading about?

He was on standby for a seat.

There was some.

Like a flight?

Yeah, he was on standby for a flight.

And he just couldn't get a seat.

He was hoping to get upgraded to first?

There was some role that

I was just reading about that, like,

you know, it was definitively played, you know, well by some great actor.

I cannot remember who.

And then like he was the backup option.

He was the backup because they almost couldn't get this guy.

Now I can't fucking.

He does feel like he has become Hollywood's number one second choice.

Because he's always good.

Yes.

But it always feels like, huh, did you offer to someone else first who said no?

And you realize you could save money in the budget, but also he will knock it out of the park.

Someone will tell me what I'm talking about.

Okay.

But I always like Mark Strong.

He's going to be Oedipus.

He's in Oedipus?

With Leslie Manville.

The sexy Oedipus?

This time it's sexy.

This time it's sexy.

So they're just for the listener, they're staging Oedipus the play.

Blockbuster Run in the West End by Transport.

Yes.

But there's so there's posters around New York telling you to buy tickets to it.

And it has, what's the fucking tagline?

It's really hard to do.

It's like blank as a motherfucker.

Yeah.

It's things like that.

Where I'm like, uh-huh, the truth that Oedipus might, like, just the idea of taking a thousands-year-old Greek tragedy and being like, you'll never guess the twist is just so funny to me.

Um, but I would like to see it.

Oh, I want to see it so bad.

Lean and full, like, Argyle on Oedipus, right?

Right, exactly.

Don't let the motherfucker out of the bag.

Yes, yeah, Argyle.

Argyle.

And Mark Strong was in Kingsman.

He's really good in Kingsman.

And then he blows up in the second one?

He does.

Yeah.

Maybe he's in Argyle?

No, because they're in the same universe.

As we all know, it was very clearly

explained at the end of Argyle that they're sort of in the same universe in some way or other.

Once I learned Argyle is two hours and 20 minutes, I said, that's not happening.

Argyle do be long.

Biggest spoiler warning block of all time.

Alert, alert, alert.

The end of Argyle is the real Argyle showing up and being like, hey, I'm a Kingsman now.

No.

In a flashback.

Sort of.

Kind of.

Sort of.

Kind of.

I just know Dua Lipa guns down Ariana DeBose.

And I said, that's crazy.

But it's like at that level.

I'm like, wow, crazy.

I think that is the first 45 seconds of the movie.

Yeah.

So the Coans are making burn after reading.

This is, I think, one of the ultimate the Coans just being like, I don't know, we just wrote it, who cares?

Like in all the interviews, because they're like, hey, we wanted to work with these actors.

So we wrote to them.

It's a spy movie.

We'd never done one before.

Honestly, it could have been a dog movie or an outer space movie.

Funny to imagine them just being like, let's do a dog movie.

Movie with a dog.

It's also funny to say that when this movie does feel so angry like it feels very pointed in their disdain for many of these people totally joel says it didn't really turn out as a spy movie obviously he is correct the original idea was one it's not really meant to be a comment on washington it's just about these characters that's crazy right this is the whole thing where i'm just like stop everyone stop interviewing them Well, it's like, because this movie isn't political as much as it is like exposing a deep, deep cynicism for our political

for like middle-class bureaucrats who like sort of run our country.

I get you know, like Joel, here's a better quote from him.

The quote I was reading from earlier, he literally, in the middle of it, says, Sorry, I lost my train of thought or something.

So, I'm going to go with this one.

Cool.

The stories about middle-aged people, all of whom are undergoing professional, personal, and sexual crises, touching on matters of national security.

That's what makes it a Washington tale.

But they had years and years ago, apparently tried to do an adaptation of advice and consent, the sort of political drama from the 60s.

So, like, I guess they had sort of thought about a political movie before.

That's like a more of a real political movie.

But then they also say, Yeah, it's our version of like a Tony Scott movie or a Jason Bourne movie without the explosions.

And Joel also says, a seven days in May sort of thing.

No, it's not.

What?

That's like set in the White House.

Doesn't matter.

But they, I think fundamentally,

Griffin, this is speaking to sort of what you're saying, are like, it's a Hitchcockian like McGuffin movie.

There's nothing at the center.

Like, it's all just people being motivated by nothing.

And that's what amuses them the most.

Right.

This is a.

They're all circling a thing they think exists, but doesn't exist.

This is a real, the ending is the conceit movie.

And like, I compare this almost to

Inherent Vice.

Which the first time I saw it, I was like so angered by, right?

And you get, you get to a final scene where like Martin Donovan kind of unravels the movie and both explains and refuses to explain what's been going on and makes it clear how little the character is actually understood.

Right.

Tenet.

Right.

And that

opened doors.

In that moment, the movie basically says, like, you're kind of a fucking moron if you were trying to make sense of this film up until this point, which the first time I saw it, I found very antagonistic, right?

Yes, me too.

I have seen it many, many times now.

It is a movie that has grown on me.

And once I now just submit to it, I'm like, the story does not matter.

I enjoy it as a Supreme Hangout movie.

I think what is great about Burn After Reading for me and its construction is it doesn't feel overly complicated.

You can watch it and be like, I think I kind of get what's going on.

I'm curious to see how it comes together.

And then at the end, when they go like, actually, if you zoom out, none of this really matters.

It doesn't feel like a deflation of what.

happened up until that point.

It feels like the ending is the conceit.

This is the thesis of the movie.

Here's our point we're hammering.

The best thing in the movie is the ending, obviously.

Like, that's the thing everyone remembers best, even though there's lots of other memorable stuff.

But it somehow inflates the movie rather than deflates it.

Whereas I think often these kinds of endings of

like, hey, you know what?

Turns out this was all bullshit.

My friend.

Well, the movie's not mad at you for caring.

No.

And it's actually sort of exposing how little these guys care is kind of the point.

But like, you care the right amount.

Oh, maybe.

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but J.K.

Simmons is right in this movie.

Yeah.

All his like thought,

like decision-making is basically correct where he's like, no, no, no, get rid of that.

Deal with that.

Yeah, pay her.

I don't care.

Like, where he's just like, let's just make this not messy anymore.

But there's also, there's a deep cynicism to how.

Of course, because he's like hearing people died.

And he's like, oh, well, or he's like,

right, yeah.

And yet, right, I think this is what they're really drilling in on is like, at the end of the day, these are like weird bureaucratic middle management jobs.

Like these things, it's a thing I find very interesting about this movie, especially a time of just like peak political conspiracy theory culture, right?

Is I think one of the main like ideas behind this movie is just like, all of this is so much less organized than anyone wants to believe it is in both directions, right?

Whether you take comfort in that or you have deep fear of that, even when insidious things are happening, they are most often just sloppy, messy, completely out of control.

Just like, it's just idiots stumbling around.

Now, they claim this is not a political movie and all that.

They will admit that Frances McNorman's character is very inspired by Linda Tripp.

Mostly in that Linda Tripp wanted a bunch of cosmetic surgeries, which is sort of like an under like current to a lot of Linda Tripp's behavior during the Lewinsky scandal in terms of Linda Tripp wanting money or trying to figure out how to get like monetize things or whatever.

And so they kind of like decided to put Linda Tripp, you know, in a new context.

So that's one of those things where I'm like, okay, so yeah, you guys aren't just like being like, oh, who cares if it's setting Washington?

Like, I'm like, no, you're making fun of like these kinds of Washington kind of gad fly, like lower section of, you know, like the government kind of people, right?

Like, I don't know.

Yeah, I also think, look, I mean, obviously she doesn't work for the government.

She works at a gym, but within DC.

But she's very obsessed with power and status.

Status, as Deb said.

Right, right.

Right.

Those people on Hollywood would laugh me me out of town.

Yeah, to like some DC stuff.

Like, it's like, why would you live there if you don't work for the government?

And it's because of like an obsession with the culture of government to some degree, I think.

Yeah.

And it like translates onto like a Greek Orthodox priest and Chevy Chase.

It's just the idea of like

power through osmosis, some level of status

by proximity that she's clearly drawn to.

One of these people who's caught in this like absolute catch-22 of being miserable about being single, but being so like ruthless in her strategizing of what she wants a relationship to be and how she thinks she could be appealing to that type of person versus having it exist on any organic emotional level.

Just her like disregarding of other people while also being terrified that other people are going to disregard her.

And I think, you know, a lot of the complaints of people who think that this movie just pushes like one step too mean is, is this movie really, really judgmental of this character?

And because she is not someone who actually operates a real lever of power, is it like a misplaced cruelty?

And I think it's like the fact that they cast Francis is very telling.

And the fact that the movie keeps going, like, you don't need these surgeries, you know, that it is not like.

I think there's an argument the movie is shaming the idea of caring about that kind of thing.

Sure.

Which is a whole larger, messier cultural conversation about body modification and what have you.

But, but I think it's more about like a misplaced sense of what is missing in this character's life that unifies almost all of the characters in this movie, right?

This sense of like, here's how I want to be seen.

Here's how I see myself.

Here's how I obsessed I am with the idea of my position and what I need to do to maintain that or to continue to reassert that.

Yeah.

Well, and also because in Francis has has become so I'm going to the Oscars with no makeup.

Yeah.

Like, which I think was not always the case.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

I think, no, I think that's something she's.

No, but I think she is like in that very rare group of actresses in like her age class.

I think of Annette Benning feels very similar to me.

Niad.

Niad, where they're just like, we want to play women our own age.

Yeah.

You know, like we are not trying to look 40 forever.

We're not trying to look 20 forever.

I, yeah, look, the thing about Francis McDorman, she's very funny in this.

Yes.

She's playing a Cohen's character.

It's a mean...

It's the movie is not right.

It's not fond of this character.

No.

It's, I think.

She's a mild understanding of her pathology, I guess.

But it's like, you know, it's a pretty mean.

But it's mean, meanest

to her.

of at least all the other women.

I would, yes.

But she does remind me of other stupid sort of, you know

uh

cohens characters with silly motivations like it's not like i'm like this is the first time they've ever had a character that you're basically like oh my god you know like

at their motivation there's there's kind of a level playing field and there's also the comparison of like the two other significant female characters in this movie both refer to each other as like ice queen bitches.

Yeah.

They're higher.

I mean, they're way higher status than her, too.

They're way higher status than her.

They have the ability to like fall back on money.

Right.

Or other comforts that she doesn't have.

I think I saw people like in our Reddit litigating this, right?

This like recurring thing of like

this discussion point of do the Coens hate their characters?

Are they judgmental?

This and that.

And I saw someone put, I think, very well, which is like, no, the key is that they actually

love these idiots.

And I think that is big, right?

I think that very often they have like an absolute adoration for their silliest characters that for me, like really, you can feel in the DNA of their films.

And I think she is in that vein where they, the movie thinks she is very silly, but also does like actually

consider her emotional inner life in a way that it does not as much with the bureaucratic characters.

I think the mere fact that it's like trying to explore her like internal struggle, but it's also why Jenkins is like the moral center of this movie because he's the only guy where he's just like, can't everyone just like sort of try to figure out how to be okay okay with themselves?

Totally.

And keeps trying to talk to her directly and she just doesn't listen to him.

And this is one of those movies where like none of the events of this movie happens if like six direct conversations happen.

If like six conversations where people can just actually say what's going on and express themselves intelligently, like with emotional intelligence.

All of the incidents basically are preventable.

Has this Ewok always been on my desk?

I placed it there recently.

David's gotten really back into Ewoks and little Ewok butts.

We do have some Ewok butt discussion coming up on the show.

Have you ever thought about how they have little furry butts?

David won't stop saying this.

Okay.

It's fine.

I really think about Star Wars.

I just said it all the time.

The creatures.

I had taken a good long break thinking about it and then thought about it again.

You re-watch Return of the Jedi and he texts us.

Do you ever think about how the Ewoks have little furry butts?

And now I hear that like three times a week from I don't think it's that often.

I guess he knows not to text me about that.

I'm not complaining, but it's coming up a lot.

yeah i text you about something else yeah i'm really into pine martens lately pine martin pine martens are cool what are pine martensons they're like they're sort of a cousin of like a you know a ferret yeah exactly pine martins yeah they're all over my reels i feel like spelled how it sounds martin like with an e okay um i feel like one of the um his dark materials characters uh demons is a pine martin oh sure right yeah yeah there's a scottish layman who's a pine i think he becomes one permanently um i like these guys There's a Scottish woman who feeds Pine Martins on Instagram.

You and Emma.

Her name's Tilda Swinton.

Yeah.

You, Emma.

You know, you never really see her.

So it could be.

She gives them honey and whole eggs, which I'm like, well, I guess you wouldn't like that, but I think that's a great diet.

Yeah, I like the first part.

Right.

Is

not Scottish,

but has Scottish ancestry, I believe.

Right.

Yes.

Maybe she is sort of Scottish.

Tilda.

I think she's kind of Scottish.

I thought she was.

She's like half Scottish, maybe.

Yeah.

Right.

Well, she lives there.

She's from London, but yeah, maybe she lives there.

Matilda Swinton.

Is that her?

Is her name Matilda?

I've never thought about that.

Oh, yeah, because in the Joanna Hog.

Of course.

In the Joanna Hogg short, she's credited as Matilda Swinton.

Can she make books move around with her mind?

As long as Miss Honey supports her emotionally.

It's like Topher Grace.

Christopher?

Yeah, his name's Christopher.

And you're like, oh, right.

That one I think, I guess I knew.

You know, just honestly, I haven't been thinking much about him lately.

What's he doing?

Remember when he was in two movies at Cannes?

Nope.

Black Clansman?

Yep.

And then the Silver Lake.

What a crazy year.

He had kind of like a swing back in that.

I mean, he's in Flight Risk this year, a movie that he is in the entirety of it.

Yeah.

It's not like a thing where you're like, oh, Topher swung in for 20 minutes.

It's like, no, they're all in that fucking plane.

Something going on for

a bigger role than Mark Wahlberg in Flight Risk.

Absolutely.

That thing is depressing.

It sucks.

I was so mad about that movie.

It should have been ready to move.

It should have been like fun, sucking.

Exactly.

It's not even.

Guiltily admire

Mel Gibson.

Mel Glimpson.

Well, he is kind of in a lane.

Yeah.

Mel Gibson's action filmmaking.

I was like, God, this is weird and annoying.

What?

You're smiling at me.

Have I ever told this story that I had my screen test for the tick?

This was fucking 10 years ago, now, nine years ago.

And I cared so much about it.

And I left and I went to my agent's office in LA.

And I was just like, I really think that went the best best it possibly could have gone.

I think anything I could possibly do to convince him to give me the part, I did the best performance I could have given.

And I really feel good.

And if I don't get it at this point, it was just out of my hands and I was never going to get it.

And he went, that's great.

I'm so happy you feel that way.

And I have even better news.

Topher Grace just passed.

And I have even better news.

Topher Grace just passed is like a sentence that lives in my head and infamy where I was like.

Sliver in your mind.

Oh, so that whole time I was in there, at any moment, Topher Grace could have emailed and said, sure, why not?

Topher Grace is like walking Phoenix and Gladiators holding his thumb out like this.

It is just a perfect snapshot of what it feels like to be a young actor.

Strange.

Right.

Where you're like, I'm fighting so hard.

And they're like, some guy hasn't checked his inbox in three days.

And if he's bored, he says yes, and the part's his.

Yeah.

All right.

But you have to go to Cam.

I want to end run through the dossier just so we can talk about the movie.

So

basically, the way the Cohens work is they send the script to Eric Fellner and those kinds of people, you know, their producers.

And I assume they're basically like, we can get some actors.

And everyone's kind of like, great, well, let's do it.

It probably will cost a reasonable amount of money.

The budget of this movie was 20, 30?

Yeah, I think that's about right.

They get everyone to like basically work for scale or certainly well below the quotes.

But at this point, if they're going to work in title, and they have like a $20 million film where they tell you they can get six actors attached, Work and Tell is like, we don't even need to read the script.

Whatever you guys want.

Tilda, as you mentioned, that one character they hadn't written for anyone, they said.

Okay.

And they just cast it with Tilda Swinton, a good actor.

Matilda Swinton, just to correct you.

And

apparently at the end of the shoot, Clooney,

touchingly and willing, wistfully, sorry, according to Swinton, said, maybe one day we'll make a film together where we say one nice thing to each other.

I like that.

Me too.

They haven't.

I don't know that they've worked together since because George Clooney's been too obsessed with climbing the mountain of mediocrity.

She didn't jump in the boat.

She's in a Hill Caesar, but I don't think they interact.

They don't.

They don't.

Even though they're not.

She just interacts with Till with

Brolin.

And

interacts with Alden a bunch.

She talks about him a lot.

I mean, the whole plot of that movie is her threatening to expose him.

Right, but they don't.

He doesn't, he's really with the communists mostly.

But it continues the tradition of they're not saying nice words about each other the entire movie.

They're both.

She's not in Jay Kelly.

Is she?

No.

I'm missing jay kelly to be here right now wow you're gonna see it yeah i was like what am i gonna do not see jay kelly and it's the only time a movie i'm gonna love i also heard the line was crazy i heard that too um

um

tildis went and uh yeah enjoys making this movie the colins told the actors to embrace their inner knuckleheads

uh basically if this is not part of the idiot trilogy fine but it is basically about all idiots there's that clooney it's oops all idiots absolutely yeah there's that clooney story we always bring up where Spielberg was watching him work on the set of ER and comes out from behind the monitor and goes, like, if you could ever figure out how to stop shaking your damn head, you'd be a movie star.

I noticed that in this movie, he never stopped shaking his head.

It's like the bad tick that he's been trained out of, he knows makes him look dumb.

And he reinstitutes it with like a vengeance.

He's really doing it.

And he's really, it's well deployed.

Pitt was, I mean, so like Clooney and Malkovich are like, yeah, yeah, we get it.

I get it.

Like big dumb idiot.

I get it.

Pid's a little, I guess, taken aback that they're like, we wrote this part for you.

This, this guy's a numbskull.

Like, you know, like, I mean, it must be, you know, but they go into, I guess, a wardrobe fitting with his hair like that.

And they just, I don't know, you know, they just decide to, because the hair is very crucial.

The story I'd always heard was that they found some earlier commercial he had done at the beginning of his acting.

He'd done this commercial with his hair like that.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, a long time ago.

Right.

That it was sort of, it wasn't like a prank on him, but it was the equivalent of like his like the rock with the turtleneck and the fanny pack photo.

They found like the silliest look publicly available from his early 20s and said, like, can we dress you like this?

Which I think is a big part of it is like, Pitt is playing this guy like he's 25.

Well, yes, but is 40.

Right.

Which is why that character is so awesome.

It's the key to the character.

Yeah.

Yes.

Cluny grew with the beard.

He thought they would fit the part.

So he just showed up with

Francis McDorman.

This is from Ethan.

This is a good quote from Ethan.

It's fun to write for Fran, not you,

because you know she's good.

It's not fun to show the script to her once it's written because she yells at you.

As Joel puts it, you've been writing it for another

number of months and she'll go, this is it.

But we usually work through that.

Frances McDormand, quote, in my first scene, the description said, close up on a woman's ass, pale, bare, middle-aged.

Why should one even read on?

Why would one even consider the job?

Fine.

There you go.

Oh, she cracks me up.

So, yeah, she cracks me up too.

They did almost entirely shoot the film in New York.

Clooney was working on another NYC-based project.

Don't know what.

Leatherheads, maybe?

Possibly?

I don't, I don't know.

2008?

Yeah.

I don't know.

But that was, in theory, the reason why they worked around that?

I, yes.

Up in the air?

No.

That's not New York.

That's all over.

Yeah.

Oh, they're in the air.

It's up in the air often.

It's on the film in plane.

It's weird that the working title for that film was called Up in the Plane and nobody liked it.

Malkovich said the first scene he did was the phone call with Brad and Francis that you quoted for your opening of the podcast.

He was rehearsing a play in Paris, which is like the

likely place for him to be.

He's in France.

Imagine if you're like the CIA and we're like, we have to catch Malkovich.

It's like, okay, first, let's go to every play rehearsal in Paris.

See if he's there.

Doesn't he primarily live in France because of taxes?

I believe he's one of those guys.

He's very much one of those guys.

He owns a chateau.

That's the whole thing where he's like, I own a chateau in Paris for artistic reasons.

Also, I pay no taxes.

Also, I design my blazers here.

You know, he has like a clothing line.

But he's like Michael Jackson.

You could say any pretentious thing about him, and I would believe you.

Right.

Like that, he has a you know, a brand of cheese.

He makes his own jellies.

Yes.

So

he said he did the phone call in his apartment in his Paris screaming at the top of his lungs.

That's funny.

So obviously he didn't shoot his side of it, but was truly on the other end of the phone.

Okay.

Roger Deacons was busy shooting Revolutionary Road.

David's favorite movie.

So this film was shot by Chivo.

This breaks the streak of a very long streak.

10 consecutive Deacons movies, maybe something close.

Because Sonenfeld does the first three.

So

subsequent eight had been Deacons.

Okay.

But yeah, Deacons is having his time wasted by Sam Mendis, another unfortunately likely place for him to be.

I'll say it.

Shivo fucking crushes this.

Yeah.

I like that he's not reinventing the wheel, but he's also not just copying Deacons.

Yeah, for sure.

What's Chivo done lately?

We just looking at that.

Amsterdam.

Who was I talking about?

Amsterdam.

I thought this was an on Mike comment.

He's never been on Mike.

He really stopped working.

Shivo, yes.

I mean, he's shooting the new Inorita movie, which is in the case of the Bardo.

He didn't.

Kind of crazy.

He did fucking disclosure but i think he only did half the season because it went on so long you mean disclaimer that's what i mean disclosure is the quaron series but he he did do that you're right he won three oscars in a row he sure did and since then he has

one released feature film

am i correct about that i think amsterdam is the only one 2022 amsterdam and then like half of a tv season and a handful of like short films and music videos it is always funny when it's like oh we couldn't get Lubeski, so we got Darius Kanji, like where these guys have to slum it with one of the eight other great cinematographers working.

Kind of like a Mark Strong situation, right?

Yep.

They, yeah, Lubeski, though, had a great time making this movie,

said they have a very close relationship.

Ethan was saying, in many ways, they're complete opposites.

They both do amazing things, approaching things in such different directions.

Great.

Thank you, Chivo.

One thing that they built for this movie was the sex machine.

One of the greatest props.

The George Clooney sex machine uh they had uh seen it something like this at the museum of sex in new york city my uh old office the atlantic used to be right by the museum of sex in new york city oh which is on 23rd and madison and uh they said to george clooney apparently like if you want to go see it like 23rd in madison and george clooney was like the last thing i need is to be coming out of the museum of sex and you got i'm george clooney

um and then a big part of this movie i do feel is carbure will score all percussion right like big drums big like just like the most sobriety and like bombast possible for like the stupidest

and yet i would say there's an emotional theme in this movie that is like one of his sadder themes in in a canon of very sad cohen brothers like motifs classical fran do you have any thoughts on um Carter Burrows scores in general or this one?

My man does break out like those obos and clarinets.

Yeah, I mean, I think this film has a great score.

I like Carter

a lot.

I've not liked a ton of his more recent stuff,

which is starting to get.

I mean, some of these guys who have been around forever does start to feel like playing the hits.

But I love his score for Catherine called Birdie.

I mean, the

nice one.

The true grit.

He did true grit.

Yeah.

That's, I mean, that like I bought on CD

and I listen to all the time.

It's incredible.

I do feel like the Corns are really good at kind of pushing him each time so that he didn't get stuck in a rut.

That I agree with you, most

legendary composers start to like play the hits a little more.

And since they have slowed down, he's maybe become a little bit repetitive.

I think there was enough of a swing and difference from their movies.

And it also felt like they would ask him for different things.

He can't reuse Fargo tricks on this, you know?

Totally.

Yeah.

I think I don't think about the score a lot, I have to admit, but I really like it.

And I think it works, yeah.

Yeah, I there's like what I like would colloquially call the loneliness theme in this movie that feels like a very kind of like slowed down piano-based melodic version of the intensity of the drums and this kind of like spiral into sadness that's especially played in all the like dating scenes and the sleeping around scenes that I find very effective.

And then the rest of it, yeah, is like a parody of the kind of score that Crimson Tide would have.

Right.

David,

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Oh, sure.

Yeah, I care about money.

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I mean, here's the thing.

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I speak of other people.

I can't relate to this.

It can be very overwhelming, of course, keeping track of whatever you've got saved and whatever you got invested or whatever you've got.

Yeah, of course.

It's so much worse than that, David.

What's going on?

This lack of awareness leads to leaving money on the table.

That's my least favorite place for money to be.

Leave it in your wallet.

Yes.

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How do we go through the plot of this film?

Here is what happens in this movie in basic.

Try.

Osborne Cox is fired primarily because he's a drunk, but also you gather because no one likes working.

He's annoying and he's a drunk and he yells at everybody.

And he's got this kind of whole John Malkovich thing.

Right.

He's married to a very high-status woman who one of the funnier reveals in this movie is that she's actually a pediatrician.

Very late in the film, you realize

I haven't known what she does.

I assume she's also in this world.

And instead, she's yelling at a a kid to open his mouth.

That the two high-status Ice Queen wives both work in children's fields.

He decides he's going to kind of rattle the world by writing his memoir, his big expose of his time as a spook.

Unfortunately,

in finding out that he has lost his job, his wife, Tilda, decides it's time to finally file for divorce.

She tries to take financial documents off his computer.

When she does so, she also gets his memoir, which is placed on a CD-ROM that is in the gym bag of the aide to the divorce lawyer, who then leaves it at the gym, where it's discovered by Francis McNorman's nanola.

His name is

Manola Despair.

She hands it over to the other three.

Linda Litzki is Francis, and Radpit's character is called Chad.

Yes.

Jenkins is, of course, Ted.

She desperately wants multiple procedures.

They're actually separate procedures.

They're separate procedures.

Yeah.

That her.

It's kind of what, like, face, boob, but butt,

maybe sort of eyes, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rhino Plasty, they say.

Yes.

Who's that guy playing the plastic?

Jeffrey DeMont.

He's the greatest.

I love one of the greatest.

Right.

It's Jeffrey DeMont, of course.

Yes.

And it's a great Coen's move where most of that sequence, you're getting extreme close-ups on her eyes or on the parts of her body, but a lot of it is an uninterrupted wonder of Jeffrey DeMont.

And you just get to watch.

It's a thing the Cohens do that I love.

You're watching him manipulate her beautifully.

Beautifully.

Yes.

But also, like,

what you get when you stay on on one actor and let the other side of the conversation be off-camera dialogue is you get to watch all the little touches that like an expert character actor puts into a scene like that without cutting away for the tiny little moments.

Um, it's so good.

Uh, but yes, she has four procedures she wants to get that will not be approved by her Mickey Mouse HMO.

Right.

Um, it is funny that she, I guess you're supposed to be like, she just went and scheduled all this shit and was like, I assume my gym's health insurance covers like four hundred thousand dollars worth of her logic is totally sound she has a public-facing job where she has to look fit yeah why would the company not take control of that They sense an opportunity that they can use what they think is high-level government secrets to blackmail and get the money for the procedures.

Good Samaritan tax.

Do you want to see if you begin to blackmail Osborne Cox?

The first image from Gore's Verbinski's movie that's coming out

here.

This looks pretty cool.

I may be going to see this movie this weekend.

Oh, really?

What?

I'm very excited.

Oh, cool.

Yes.

I'm very excited.

Cool.

Gore's back, baby.

I hope so.

Gore's back.

Yes.

The other wrinkles in this are Tulla Swinton is already having an affair with George Clooney,

who, what?

He was previously...

What was his shift in position?

He was in private?

Yes.

Who are we talking about?

Private protection.

He's always like in PP, private protection.

And now he's working for a guy in the treasury.

Right.

He was a U.S.

Marshal, then he was, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he carries a gun.

Yep.

He carries a gun, but he's never discharged it.

Tilda Swenton's been having an affair with him.

He's been dating everyone.

He's been dating everyone.

And he's married.

Right.

And I get the sense that she's been kind of his focused side piece.

And the second she's getting primary partner.

Yeah.

And is starting to push the idea of like, then you should also get divorced.

Now he needs to start like expanding his range.

I don't think he's ever been hyper-focused, but it does feel like he goes back out there in a big way once she's maybe going to be looking for something more serious.

So he starts sleeping with Frances McDormand.

Are there any primary characters we haven't looped in here?

No, that's all the main people.

Yeah, it's not that many people.

Yeah.

Great.

Hi, Jinx and Sue.

Hi, Jinx and Sue.

But yeah, I guess you need to know that like Frances McDormand goes on internet dates because she's looking for a partner.

Whereas Harry Farrer is just like a serial philanderer who just, he's always having sex sex with people.

Yes.

These kind of like intellectual superiors who are weirdly drawn to him almost in kind of like.

He's like a puppy.

Yes.

And it feels like there's almost a little bit of a sexual charge in how much they can high status him and he won't push back.

Right.

He's, he's, I guess, a little subby, but he is also working on a sex chair.

Yeah.

Oh, and he has such a good runner about the floors.

I forgot about that.

He's, he's always asking what a floor is made of or guessing.

It's like

this kind of like detail-obsessed guy who always wants to ask these tiny followers.

Because it's like, you know, brother, Clooney's thing is the hair, and in Todd Roll Cruelty, it's his teeth.

And in this, I mean, it's sort of the allergy thing where his throat, I guess.

Acid reflux.

But the floor thing is right there with it.

It's sort of like the weird hyperfixation.

Right.

Yes.

Right.

He seems to be, you have to imagine he's a pretty proficient lovemaker.

Yeah, I think he's probably really good.

He just, this is what I'm saying.

He seems like a fun hang.

But, but, like, go see the shitty movie with him.

The movie make me.

the movie make the movie make me think the movie make me think movie make me think sometimes and in the end movie make me think

um the movie makes me think that he is probably a bit of a jackrabbit in the sack and yet the second he's done he jumps out of bed gets dressed and goes i should run this off yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that there's something kind of like energizer bunny about him the scene where he calls elizabeth marvel in the car after spoiler he has shot brad pitt to death.

And he's just like spiraling out of control.

And you're like, oh, this guy is just like so much like uninhibited forward motion.

And anything causing him to stop and be introspective is like an absolute crisis for him.

And that's like, oh, this is the cornerstone of his relationship with his wife.

At some point, she clearly was into the idea of petting his head and making him feel better.

And now she does that for children.

Yes.

Who are interested in government.

And also big burly men grab her shoulders as she has affairs with them.

Right.

He's she's also preparing to file for divorce from him.

So there are divorce lawyer toadies following him around in black cars, which makes him think that he's part of some larger conspiracy.

What were you going to say, David?

Brad Pitt's character in this film is

like the positive sunny version of John Goodman and the Big Lebowski.

He is like a low status but high opinion of his own intellect fool who keeps having the like a bad idea about

how to right drive the plot and i know how to do this yeah obviously goodman is like this is a fake you know hostage situation and we're just gonna give him a dummy and right and brad pitt is like oh he found like weird like security secrets we should just blackmail them they'll probably just pay us like a reward well and especially that like they arrange the meeting and malkovich is like let me explain to you fuck off right and then even when that makes pitt angrier and makes mcdorman even angrier and they push back malkovich is just annoyed annoyed.

It feels like at no point is he ever considering giving them money.

No, not at all.

And Paul also doesn't have any.

Part of it's like philosophical, right?

Part of it is like logistical.

And there's also the just like, this isn't how this works.

You don't get to do this.

And he knows that he is so much this guy's intellectual superior that he thinks he can logic him out of even attempting to do this stupid thing that he's in over his head on.

What was Pitt doing right around now?

Well, Benjamin Button's the same year.

Yeah.

He has the line read of the movie to me.

Which is.

When she's scrolling on the dating website and is like, oh, he works for like the State Department or whatever.

And he goes, oh, that's cool.

It's so good.

I like have to wind it back every time I see this movie.

The key image of this film is his smiling, as the British would say, gormless face in the one second before his brains are blown out.

This is like the first time I didn't cover my eyes for that.

Uh-huh.

Because I have not seen this

in a while.

And you knew something bad was going to happen when you're watching it.

Yeah, and I'm so squeamish, but now I'm sort of like, whatever.

It's so fun.

I'd only ever seen the still of him smiling, but never in actual

movie.

It's so funny.

The way you're watching his brain work and Pitt does play it very, very well of like where he's like, okay, I got to hide.

And then he's like, maybe if I just come out smiling

until he thinks that's going to work.

You have this like extended, expertly crafted, no country-esque, like pulse quickening.

Oh, I'm trying to smile something.

Right.

And you're stuck in the closet with him, seeing the POV, and you're like, fuck, how is he going to get out of this?

And yes, as you said, the split-second decision of, if I smile really big, will it disarm this entire situation?

There are like 15 things in this movie you want to refer to as obviously the funniest thing in this movie.

But that might truly be the funniest thing in the movie.

I suppose you're right that there's plenty.

I mean, I already said that the funniest thing was Jenkins being an Orthodox priest.

And the reveal of the sex chair.

They're just like.

The sex chair is like a classic Cohen's thing, though, right?

Where like they've built up to something, and then it's like the most ludicrous, stupid thing you ever saw.

And then her being thrilled by the ingenuity of it.

But it's like, it's a serious man with like Jefferson airplane or whatever.

You know, it's like, I almost think him destroying it is way funnier than the reveal.

But I guess you obviously need that.

When he takes the bat to the dildo specifically, he's hitting every other part of the chair.

And then you see him.

This is the thing.

There are all these moments like what you're saying with Brad Pitt, where you're like, they somehow build such a specific enough character character that you can see the gears in their brain turning in a millisecond of what they think they're accomplishing.

And he goes like, well, it's not really broken unless I hit the dildo.

And then he's hitting a hard aluminum bat to a rubber dick, which does nothing.

Now, given how prominent dildos are in

driveway dolls.

Is this an Ethan Cohen fixation that we're getting the first sort of glimpse of?

Perhaps.

Yes.

Yes.

It's just funny.

Perhaps.

No, it's just the wonkiness of the chair, how basic it is, the squeakiness, the sound effect on it.

Well, and it's like the floors thing of like, he saw this and was like, I can figure this out.

This is for me to determine and do it cheaply.

He was so offended when he saw the price they were asking for.

I can build this for $100, and then he qualifies, except for the build-up.

He can't build rubber yet.

Like, he hasn't figured that out.

But it's not like money is tight for him.

No, no, I I don't think that's it.

But it's a principle, which defines most of the characters in this film.

Totally.

Yes.

Their idea of their principles that they have to maintain a line on.

So, as everything's going wrong, we have this brilliant idea to check in with people who are like in charge of monitoring crises of intelligence in America.

Yes, David Rasky, Ratchy.

I always say his name wrong.

I honestly don't know how you say his name.

I used to, for a long time, I was like, David Rash, of course, but no, it's Rashi, I believe, is how you say it.

And

he's

an esteemed theater actor.

He's been in a billion movies.

Sledgehammer, which was a

espionage parody show in the 80s.

I do feel like he was already so famous and he's so funny and like in the loop and stuff.

I know.

Yeah, that's what I know him from.

But then like succession did turn all those sort of middle-aged character actors into celebrities of a new sort, including him.

But he's very funny and he really plays all this shit perfectly because Simmons, J.K.

Simmons is obviously like, what, what, what?

And like, every time J.K.

Simmons is like, fucking send him to Venezuela, he's like, of course, yes, you know, like, like the way his personality is basically like, I assumed you would say that, and I will be taking care of that.

He's so funny.

It's such a good double act between the two of them.

I also think it's such funny meta casting of like, the Coens obviously love J.K.

Simmons, have worked with him up until this point.

In 2008, if you're putting J.K.

Simmons behind a desk as the boss, everyone's thinking J.

Jonah Jameson, right?

Even if he looks totally different.

So the movie makes you think, like, oh, he's going to come in, deliver the bad news, and J.K.

Simmons is going to like blow his top.

He's going to lose it.

And to just have the no-cell of him being like, ugh.

The Russians?

Like, what?

Every time he checks, like, the...

Never mind, never mind.

You know, is this his third Cohen's or second?

Lady Killers?

Lady Killers, this, I feel like there's a third I'm forgetting.

He's in True Grit and a voice cameo, but that's maybe that's all I'm thinking of.

Isn't there another one?

Isn't there another one?

I'm not forgetting

the movies we've covered on this podcast, blank check.

JK Simmons.

In folks,

kidding Simmons.

Just kidding Simmons.

What does JK stand for?

Jonathan Kimball.

Well, well, well.

I did not murder her.

You like that.

Think of me.

Let's see.

I just feel like there's one other and I'm going to find it, but you guys keep talking about whatever.

He's the M ⁇ M.

He's the M ⁇ M.

He is yellow M ⁇ M, of course.

Right.

Because it was originally John Goodman and John Lovitz for the first year of the commercial campaign.

Oh, I thought you were about to say, and burn after reading, like that it was Goodman and Lovitz in the CIA scenes.

That also would work.

I mean, that's kind of funny.

That's something I'd like to see.

Yeah.

Lovetts was originally red MM.

Goodman was originally yellow MM.

I don't think I, I, I don't think I ever thought about it.

And then I think after a year, they were just like, these guys want movie star salaries to continue playing these roles in an era where that was not the expenditure

they were willing to put in.

And so it's Billy West and J.K.

Simmons are the like downgrade sound alikes.

And now it has been so funny to watch J.K.

Simmons hold on to the role with an iron grip for 30 years, well past being an Oscar winner.

I don't find a third one, so I guess it is just those three.

You know, True Grip, obviously being a tiny voice cameo.

What else do you guys want to talk about?

Burn after reading.

Come on.

Come on.

This is your favorite movie of all time.

It's a horny ass movie.

true i think you're right picking at this is maybe a little bit of the ethan side of things coming through i mean i'm not mad about it it's just funny it is it is one of the things that is startling about the two ethan trisha cook movies i've i haven't seen them you haven't seen either nah i'd be very curious to hear your opinions they don't interest me at all um i'm sure i'll get to them They have a lot of dildos.

I mean, Driveaway Dolls does.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's not really.

I know.

I'm not saying that that should interest you.

It's just DriveAway Dolls has like multiple sort of visual jokes built around it.

The entire plot is built around it.

They are so outwardly horny while also treating its sex in a goofier way than almost any movie I've ever seen.

That's like, I don't like that.

It's odd.

And like Burn After Reading has sex negative, but.

But Burn After Reading has like a version of that more so than the way sex is depicted in any of their other films.

Sure, but they're not sexy filmmakers.

They're not.

They mostly aren't going to be having a little bit of fun and sort of like giggling.

And even in a movie where people, attractive people, are having sex with each other, the only act of sex I think you actually see in the film is Francis McDoran's terrible date.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's really.

Which is one of the more depressing sex scenes.

Yeah.

That's really top, whoever that guy is.

He rocks.

He's like trying not to touch her.

It feels like he's sort of like, you know, like sort of doing press-ups where he's got his hands on the bed so he won't touch her.

And he's got this like consternated facial expression.

That's great stuff.

What's the fake movie called?

Dermot Mon Running.

Like, that's a treat.

Yeah.

Coming up Daisies?

No, something Daisy.

Yeah.

I got to look it up.

I love Dermot.

He's so good.

Claire Danes is on the poster with him after they ended up together in Family Stone.

Yep.

But you don't actually see Claire Danes in the movie.

Up Daisy.

There we go.

Coming up Daisy.

But I just love Claire Danes is the funeral.

That quick series of we've seen Brad Pitt weigh in on the dates.

She like kind of

like through gritted teeth is like, I guess he's fine.

But she has such disdain for all these guys she's getting right and this dating service and all of this then meets up with him is immediately disappointed seeing him in person even beyond her settled expectations i think his only line of dialogue is when he self-identifies in the park and then you cut to like dinner silent movie he's not laughing right she's laughing he's not sex he's like in his own universe not connected to her not speaking

which i i think is like one of the areas in which i contend this movie kind of has affection for her is like you don't put that scene in unless you want the contrast of her and clooney actually have a connection that like one of the central tragedies of this movie obviously you wish she would just listen to richard jenkins who's right there right well right i mean the triumph of this movie is she gets what she wants

She does, I guess, everyone is dead.

She wins, though.

But Richard Jenkins.

Clooney's in venezuela clooney's not dead he's in venezuela richard jenkins has been hatcheted yeah in the sense and and brad pitt has been shot in the head so she doesn't really have any friends or like

osborne coxx is in a coma not that they ever had much of a connection uh i guess tilde swinton's doing okay they could link yeah maybe tilde swinton would hate her

oh yeah you think she'd find her a little ghost i think she'd be negative um i also love there's that brief scene where she's talking to the woman at the gym that she's giving the tour to yeah who's like Oh, yeah, my friends got hooked up with guys on that.

And it's sort of like, okay, so it's obviously working for some people, it's just not working for her.

But I also think it's like

it's not that she's being too picky, it's that she's like trying to exert too much control on the abstract idea of what she wants her love life to be.

Sort of a classic dating app thing, yeah,

yeah.

What's the app called?

I mean, it's not it's a website, something DC, yes, yeah, um, meet me DC or something.

Yeah.

You say the thing of like Pitt thinking being a kind of more benevolent Walter or at least a friendlier Walter

His move in the scene in the car, and I guess he does it over the phone as well, but certainly in the car scene, where he clearly thinks that

Cox is going to be rattled by him knowing his name.

And so he just keeps repeating it with increased intensity, as if just saying it is going to to make him go like, oh shit.

And anytime

Malkovich kind of like traps him in a logic corner, he just resets to, well, Osborne Cox.

Appearances can be deceptive.

Right.

The way he...

I don't think so, Osborne Cox.

He just keeps starting and ending sentences with it.

The thing is, Osborne Cox.

The way he's so startled by getting hit.

Yeah.

And then he goes into the car.

You know, Francis McGirl picks him up and she's like, where's the money?

And he's like,

and she's like what what happened he's like he hit me is really also you think that's a schwin is the only thing that makes him break his act and then his like absolute panic not at being punched but at like that thing is only back there with a kryptonite lock you can break through that thing with a big pen

it's a very it's yeah it's it is funny to look at pitt at that moment where it's like the year before is ocean's 13 jesse james this year is benjamin button the year after is Inglorious Bastards.

There's funny stuff in all those performances, except for Jesse James.

It's not a very funny movie.

That's pretty serious.

He's got funny stuff, but he's light.

Right.

But like, those are very serious movies by and large.

Not so much Oceans 13, I guess, where he's like playing pretty tough guys,

right?

Like by and large.

And then in the middle of that, he just has this.

And then he had Tree of, he had like a break and then Tree of Life Moneyball.

And it was like, fuck Pitt.

And then it's kind of like, forget it for a while.

I mean, mean, obviously his personal life

disintegrates.

Remember that one?

I mean,

yeah, War Machine is way later.

I mean, it's sort of like it's allied and stuff that you can kind of debate.

And Griffin loves to debate out.

Of course.

Yeah.

Fury, like that, you know, where it's sort of like he plays super stoic, like World War Z Fury allied.

You know what I mean?

Where it's like, I don't like those performances that much.

I don't like

none of those performances register that hard for me.

I've never seen World War z but that feels like an ultimate example of him

just being like do i gotta get the zombies do i need a jason born right like right that he had been pushing himself so hard for a decade plus to do unconventional stuff work with interesting people get more like sophisticated movies made at a higher budget level that he clearly was like do i need a tentpole to like reset my foreign value and clearly tried to make that movie something more interesting and then everything fell apart was sort of was a hit and worked anyway Right.

And then I think at the moment that his fucking life spirals out of control and he clearly like hits a fucking wall.

He seemed to respond with panic of like, do I need to make more conventional movie star moves now?

Like now there's been this run of like F1 and money, the fucking bullet train.

I almost said money train and what have you.

It was a money train.

Right.

That despite the fact that the guy's now in his like late 50s.

You're right.

And wolves.

Don't forget wolves.

Right.

Those Those are all like panic moves of a little bit.

I mean, he's yeah, 61.

He's 61.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing that he's good in is Babylon.

I think it's a really good performance, but you know, that movie.

But like Outlier in the Run, we're talking about him showing up, supporting Role, doing something that's kind of self-reflexive versus these other ones where he's like playing into the Brad Pitt coolness, which I think.

He wants to just like sell the narrative as much as possible of like, remember what we all like about Brad Pitt, you know?

There's yes, it's calculated.

My big complaint about F1, where I feel like I've heard a lot of people be like, why isn't he awesome in this?

This feels so similar and set up to Moneyball, and yet like it's not activated in the same way, is that like in all of his best performance, there is like the coiled anger that he is clearly trying to suppress in F1, that he doesn't want the sense of darkness in F1.

So F1, he's basically playing the Moneyball character, except without any demons.

And even when he talks about He's not demons in F1.

I have a different read, I think.

The big emotional scene where he reveals his demons is like, yeah, well, you know, I blew it.

Yeah, I mean, F1 is a little trifly.

I like that movie is just let him watch, but yeah.

But he's removing the core of his character, which is any sense of like tortured, you know, the stuff that he doesn't want people thinking about.

He's like sleepy in that movie.

He's a little bit more.

He's old cowboy.

He's old cowboy coming back, but there's no

rage.

The thing about F1 that is both, you know, frustrating, but also you can't deny it, whereas like, he's just like, yeah, I can still do this by the way.

And the audience reaction was like, yeah, we enjoyed that.

And the world's reaction was like, here's money.

It was one of those things where it's like, yeah, now he can make movies on that scale for another five years.

Kind of autopilot.

Because he proved it does sort of financially work out.

Fran, what's your take?

That was my take.

It's like, it's like Western.

Old cowboy comes into Newtown and shows them how to do everything old.

fashioned, you know, get off your phone, millennials type movie.

I think it's sleepy because he's like removed what is is actually his battery as a performer, like his kind of like special move.

And I think you compare it to Once Upon Time in Hollywood, which is similarly like this guy's like the ultimate fun chiller cowboy, but is like

stuff's scary.

Well, but also in Once Upon Time, he's playing a really scary person.

That's the whole thing

he wants is sort of juicy.

He's a thousand miles away from F1.

And Brad Pitt seems kind of scary.

Like, you know, and, you know, you know, who's so good in F1.

Patrick Mardem.

Yeah.

He's

when he goes, not yet.

Not yet.

That is one of those.

We're all talking about Ruben from.

Everyone's talking about Ruben.

I've been talking about him all year.

It's Ruben's world.

We're just living in it.

That is just.

He just can do whatever.

And I will lap it up like a dog lapping up.

Has he become a when's he bad?

Has he ever not been?

Like I did.

But I mean, I guess I know what you mean in terms of like you're like, he's like, I'll be in Lyle Lao crocodile and kind of start some Oscar.

Well, La La, like, you know what I mean?

Like,

maybe one of his five advances.

That's what I'm saying, where he's like, I'm going to do La La Crocodile, and you're like, why?

And he's like, oh, I don't know, maybe check it out.

Actually, Rock.

You know what I mean?

Like, he's senior balloons.

Yes.

I mean, the only thing against it, I mean, obviously, Dune in Dune one, you know, he pops up at the, you know, he's peppered in, and you're like, oh, sure, Bardem, he makes sense in this.

And then in Dune two, he's like, I'm funny in this.

And you're like, you are funny in this in a very serious movie.

Do you like like him in Skyfall?

I feel like that's the performance.

I love him too.

Some people hate that performance.

Who?

Where?

People.

Where are they?

I don't know.

I love it.

That performance is like magnificent.

Yeah, I think it's great.

Yeah.

And that performance is like, I think, so tapped into that movie is so like, it's the anniversary of James Bond.

We're doing like a

claim or some other thing.

You know, that we deemed previously too silly for the Craig era.

Right.

A little bit.

I mean, the whole push and pull of the Craig movies is they're like, can we do a little bit bit more silly?

And Craig's just like, just a little bit.

But Bardem is striking the absolute perfect balance.

That's why it's good.

And he's like, I'm going to play all the James Bond villains and I'm going to get at the core of all of them, which is they all kind of wanted to fuck him.

And like, that's what's so the push and pull of that in Skyfall is just so, I think he's fantastic in that.

The two I haven't seen are

Live Action Little Mermaid and Salazar's Revenge.

There is no defensive live action.

That's our safety.

That's the only thing

that I'm like, are those actually just really like Saladar's Revenge?

He's trying.

He's trying.

There's just nothing there.

Little Mermaid's autopilot, though.

I forgot he's in Little Mermaid.

I can't tell you a single thing about that movie.

I saw that.

I never saw Big Dad Nipples.

Yeah,

that's apparently a thing I said.

When we did our episode on the animated Little Mermaid, David said something to the effect of, you know how King Triton has Big Dad nipples?

Sure.

I guess I know exactly what I'm saying.

Oh, in the cartoon, I said that.

In the cartoon.

And you're like, does Javier Bardem have them in the movie?

Yeah.

Right.

Does he have those pepperonis?

And I think he doesn't.

Those papa pepperonis.

It's just so funny when he's like, I did it because my children would like to see that movie.

And I'm like, your kids don't want to fucking see that movie.

They don't want to see you play King's Frighten.

They want to see some other shit.

You know,

they want to watch animated little movies.

Probably, exactly.

Yeah.

But he is late, of late, kind of crushing it.

I would love to see what he does next.

I mean, counter to everything we're saying, Pitt like finds a different motor in this that is incredibly fun and is not tied to any darkness whatsoever.

Like, this is a guy who does not consider darkness.

It is incredible how thoroughly he like nails this guy's entire worldview,

as you said, as embodied with and he's only

only in it for 10 or 15 minutes.

Like, everyone is just well, and any darkness in the movie really upsets him.

He's like a clown, he feels it all like so purely when he's yelled at, right?

Right.

I mean, and it's like

it's what uh makes this character worthy of judgment: is like,

if the documents were as important

as they think they are, what they're doing is actually very fucked up.

I'm not even

what McDorman and Pitt are doing in an unpatriotic way, right?

No, it's just kind of insane because they only, they're like, let's threaten him.

That didn't work.

What is the address of Russia here?

Like, let's just go present this to Russia.

They're out of their depth, and the files are like a nothing burger.

But in their mind, they could be handing over nuclear codes, you know, which it's just like, if your sense of like self-importance is more important than like global safety,

it doesn't reflect super well on your moral balance.

Oh, that Krupa, very, very funny.

Uh, the guy who plays the Russian guy.

Love him.

Yes, Randy.

Yes.

Another line reading I love where he goes, so you are not ideological.

Where he basically just calls them out for having no feeling whatsoever about what they're doing.

There's nothing at stake for you.

Yeah.

Jenkins,

who this is, this is his third Cohen's, right?

He's in

No Country.

Sorry, Man Who Wasn't There and Intolerable.

That sounds right.

Yeah.

And

he

is

desperately sad in the film.

Also is, I want to assume his gym is just like in total shambles because two of its highest level employees are basically never there.

But I don't know if there's much more to say about him, except that like, of course, he gets killed with a hatchet trying to steal shit for a girl he has a crush on.

He's not there.

And presenting hard bodies.

Right.

Basically, his final words are, she's not a moron.

Right?

Like, he then says no, no, as Jenkins, as she

comes towards him.

Right.

But

like, all this character wants to do is

defend McDorman's honor.

You are a special person.

Why don't you see that in yourself?

Defending you from her from plastic surgery and from, you know, whatever.

Right, that's bad boyfriend.

That's the root of it.

It's like, you are worthy of love, and she thinks she is not, and that she could not possibly be unless she is,

she gets these multiple procedures done.

Right.

Yeah.

Do you think she's happy after this movie?

I hope so.

Possibly.

I do, I was, no, I was going to say,

you think Pitt's only in like 10 to 15 minutes of the movie.

He enters pretty late because McDormand doesn't come in until like 15.

I think he comes in around like 25 minutes.

Um, a thing I like about this movie is it does have a kind of like relay race narrative structure where the lead is constantly changing.

Who's pulling you forward in the story without it being like a traffic-esque, here are multiple timelines kind of thing?

McDormand is probably the closest thing to a true lead.

Yeah.

Clooney is top build and he's sort of the lead, but Clooney's also kind of like second fiddle to everyone he's in a scene with.

That's what I'm saying.

Like each scene has a lead.

No, I know what you're saying.

And then very often the scenes are grouped together and you're like, for these like six minutes, you're, you're riding it through them.

It is the one Cohen Brothers movie where I do kind of buy that they're like, yeah, we just kept writing.

Like we thought what other funny shit could happen.

And then we thought what other funny shit could happen.

And we were just thinking of what cool actors could play what crazy parts.

And like, you know, we've sort of fit it all together.

It does the relay thing that you're saying.

it does have that energy yeah

yeah it has an economy too which is great it's not overstaying it's welcome it's not hitting any beats too hard it is a gorgeous 96 minutes long a worse movie would have way more pit because they'd be like

oh

crushing we got it all yeah yeah like that performance stays so good in part because there's so little of it yeah yes i also i i just like that i think what is interrogating the sort of anger in this movie is we're saying is like uh

is is there a fundamental problem in modern government structures where this becomes a position of like social capital versus the idea of these people being like public servants like is this like part and parcel with why our government is constantly failing its people you know that this idea of like it's its status more than anything else that all these people are so concerned primarily with their like wine and cheese parties and like who's who's zooming who and who's got what desk and what book they're going to be able to write on the other end of it versus any of these people actually seeming to care about what they do.

Their ideology is just themselves.

Absolutely.

And even like

Cox, who, you know, he is the lead for like the first 10 minutes of the movie when we're really sitting with him.

has this sad moment where he's talking to his like completely psychologically gone father.

And even when he's starting to dictate his memoir, where he um is talking about who he thought he was going to be, right?

That he wanted to be one of Moreau's boys and he wanted to, like, kind of shape.

We were young, and there was nothing we could not do, right?

And he's like, you know, and it's not what you would have done, dad, but but it's different today than it was when you, you know, this idea that he like entered it too late and he used to be idealistic about it, but yet all he wants to do is just like have people view him as important.

That's all all an extension of that versus any idea of like, this is what I believe, I used to believe I could do for the people.

I also just want to call out the memoir bit is exactly how my mother talks.

She's now made a paywalled Patreon appearance on our Diary with a Vengeance episode.

That's true, briefly.

Yes, yes.

And I forget what the version of it was, but I called it out.

But my mother, who is French, but speaks with like a pretty

mid-Atlantic accent,

will just fall into like, and what genre would you say the movie was?

Right.

Well, your mother has French

heritage.

Yeah, no, as I said, but she doesn't, she doesn't speak with any

French inflections.

And then if she is using a word that is part of the American vernacular, that has French origins, she pronounces it so hard.

I love that.

Yeah, it's great for her.

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

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You might know me from the League Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

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Before we begin to wrap up,

you wanted to talk about the theater of the new year, and I don't want to forget about that.

Oh, yeah.

I just think that this is something that blank check listeners should be aware of and would probably like.

And was vaguely around the same time.

It was in sort of 2005.

It was a sound play created by Carter Burwell, correct?

And the Cohen brothers.

Cohen brothers, Charlie Kaufman, yes.

But Carter Burwell was the one who sort of brought both of them in.

I think it was his idea to begin with.

He does the music for both.

Okay.

For both of them.

Well, actually, there were three.

It's a little confusing.

So there were a few performances of this.

The main ones, of which there is a recording, I think this is the New York performance.

Is

two

sound plays.

They're basically radio plays that were performed on a stage.

But like with live foli work and sort of the idea to do a throwback to an earlier 20th century form.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The first one is called Sawbones

by the Cohen Brothers, which is about a frontier veterinarian television show that is sort of one perspective.

And then there's a woman,

like a housewife who watches the show, who falls in love with a traveling salesman and her husband, who's like in a fire watchtower.

And then the second play is the Charlie Kaufman play called Hope Leaves the Theater, which I think is among his best work.

Now, yeah.

Pardon me for talking telling Tales out of school here, but this Charlie Kaufman play, I'm told that it broke the fourth wall somewhere.

It did.

Well, it doubted of its own reality.

And it makes one of the running jokes in it, which I think is very funny, is that Charlie Kaufman has died and this play was the last thing that he wrote.

And so you have Meryl Streep tearfully on stage breaking character

to talk about how this was the last thing he wrote.

Am I mistaken for thinking that Anomalisa came out of a later iteration Theater for the New Year?

Yes, correct.

Yes.

It's never been recorded.

Play Saw Bonds.

Yes.

Was Was replaced with Anomalisa

in LA when they staged it in LA.

Yes.

It was a 30-minute version.

But it had Thulis, Newton, Jennifer Jason Lee.

So it had the cast of the Inventional movie.

Right.

And in Charlie Kaufman's frustration of not being able to get another movie made after Frank or Francis fell apart so many times, Dino Samatopoulos, who had started his stop motion studio, was like, what if you adapt that?

And Anomalisa was supposed to be just a 30-minute short at first.

And then they went to Kickstarter and raised enough to make it a feature.

Very, very, very cool shout out.

Those things are absolutely worth listening to.

100.

Yeah, it was a percent.

Meryl Streep sings in it.

Yeah.

Also, just, I mean, all the kind of Cohen Brothers miscellaneous stuff, we keep on sort of scanning around for like, is there something interesting to scrap together to do a bonus episode on Patreon?

And none of it really feels episode worthy.

But of the stuff we're not covering, I would almost recommend that most strongly.

So is it listenable?

Like, is can you find it yeah it's it pops up on youtube every so often uh i'm not sure i even checked today if it's you can find it there it was only broadcast on sirius like once wow yeah um but there are mp3s of it yeah i just it's around oh you already downloaded it in the time between asking yep um but so many of like the the theater projects and whatever are like ethan solo things the fact that this is one of the only Joel and Ethan co-written things for a different medium is interesting in and of itself.

David's biting his nail.

I mean, I do that all the time.

It's been something I've been doing since I was a very little boy.

Pediatrician told me a long time ago that it was no different from any other self-harming behavior, and I really should look into it.

Still doing it.

39 years.

Was your pediatrician Tilda Swinton from the team?

Yeah.

I mean, he said it in a nice way, but he was like, you're aware of what self-harm is, right?

That's what you're doing to yourself.

Cause I like tear the cuticles up and stuff.

And he was like, he was like, the sort of the psychological principle of what's happening.

It's the same basic thing.

And I was like, okay.

What age were you?

I was probably like a teenager.

It is fascinating that you remember this verbatim.

Oh, yeah.

Unpacked it so quickly and still do it.

There's been like a couple of times in my life that I've successfully kicked nail biting for like a longer than like whatever, a few days.

And then something will make me anxious and I will start unconsciously doing it.

Thank you.

I mean, I've gotten married and like maintained a career, two things my mother told me would be really at risk if I kept biting my nails.

Yeah.

So take that, mom.

I take it back.

I'm going to buy her 4K if I know where I'm going.

Yeah.

The criterion's pretty good.

As you said, this movie didn't have much Oscar juice.

It gets the SAG nomination, but that's very much a classic SAG.

Hey, it turns out that six of the top qualifying movies are ineligible.

Or not SAG, I'm sorry, WGA.

There are always a couple weird WGA nominations because other things were disqualified per their specific rules.

BAFTA went through it more hardly, but Pitt and supporting, which kind of would have been the obvious play,

is overshadowed by Benjamin Button the same year.

Tilda had just won.

Yes.

Sort of a bad Oscar year after an incredible one.

Yeah.

And it's kind of a like,

what is it, 99?

Where you're like, what a great movie year.

And then you look at the Oscars and you're like, why did the Oscars not understand that?

Look, I believe.

And 2008 is a sort of similar one where you're like, I mean, there are some decent nominations, but obviously it's the one that leads to the multiple nominations.

I was going to say that I will never miss an opportunity to say that.

It is the year that breaks the Academy Awards.

Where they're like, if you guys aren't going to fucking, I mean, but it's not just Dark Knight and Wally, which are obviously the big two.

I put Gran Torino in there as well.

I think all three of those movies.

Right.

Big hits that audiences were like, we like that.

And the Oscars are like, Frost and Nixon.

You understand me?

Here comes the single.

They talked to each other.

I like Frost Nixon.

Wow.

Have you seen it recently?

No.

And I like Peter Morgan.

I'm a slut for that stuff.

Yeah.

But it's not very good.

I'm just reading over these nominations.

Ooh, you know what's in here?

Revenge.

Ever seen that?

Yeah.

That movie's good.

That movie's good.

That's actually crazy.

That got a best foreign language.

I was going to say that was so foreign film.

That was one of those, like, oh, weird.

They nominated something cool.

Once in a while, they'll sneak a coolie in there.

They've overhauled the whole process, and now I think it's

a slightly better feel, but certainly like before 2015, if something that actually was kind of awesome got in, it was astonishing.

I think you had to like be 95 to vote for that category back then.

You know what I mean?

Like

obviously it's most I'm joking, but like because you had to watch all the movies, it was all retirees.

My memory is that

in order to vote in that category, you had to attend screenings and check in that were marathons.

So it did have to be retirees because it was like Monday through Friday, you're going to have to show up at the Academy and watch five foreign language films in a row and check in to prove you've seen all of them before you vote.

And anyone who was busy wouldn't do that.

Right.

Shall we play the box office game?

Are there any other things we want to talk about before I do?

This movie makes me laugh really hard.

I think it's really funny.

Francis?

You know who's great in just one single scene is the guy serving George Clooney with the divorce papers who he tackles in the street.

That guy's great.

I mean, he was, he's the ugly Betty guy.

What's his name?

I couldn't remember who he was.

I I meant to look it up while watching.

He's in a bunch of other stuff.

Wait, the guy who serves the papers at the bar or the guy in the Kevin Sussman.

Kevin Sussman is the guy I'm thinking of.

What's the name of the firm he keeps talking about?

I don't know.

But it's just funny how mean he is.

Yeah.

He's phenomenal.

I think of him as the wet hot guy, of course.

Also great and wet hot.

Who can control the weather with his hands?

Oh, my God, of course.

I mean, he's in a million things.

And has made like $8 trillion from Big Bang Theory.

And I think now is the star of a Big Bang spin-off.

I saw young Sheldon once on the street.

Really?

How is he looking?

What age?

Youngish.

Youngish.

This was the problem.

That's why the show's not on the air anymore.

I will say that.

I saw Life of Chuck.

It's not like Tremblay's bad in it.

Yeah.

But I do think I'm like, can Tremblay, I think I need him to wait a few more years for when Andy fully adults

bury Tremblay.

They do.

In that movie.

I went to that to see Tremblay.

He's barely You've got your like Tremblay penance.

They sold me a Tremblay picture and here I am waiting until the last two minutes.

You know, that movie, honestly, whatever they would sell you on it, you'd probably end up being disappointed because it's got so much shit going on.

That was a real challenge to market.

And yet I think they maybe settled on only the worst approaches possible.

And it's like, Tom Hiddleston's going to...

hoof it up in this movie.

It's a Hiddleston soft shoe picture.

And you're like, boy, are you going to be really confused for the first 45 minutes of this movie?

And then very happy and then confused.

And then back to being practiced.

Ooh, but you know who's so good?

Lillard.

Lillard is phenomenal.

He's amazing.

Talk about a great one-scene performance.

Yeah.

Like a real journey.

The kind of performance that feels like it's a Cohen's thing of just like letting an actor you're very familiar with, but you've never seen get this kind of runway, go on a full journey and show you an entire life within one scene.

The other guy I like, he's a two-scener in this, but Total Swinton's divorced lawyer.

Oh, yeah.

Who loves the kind of excitement of the idea that he's not in the beltway, but he's adjacent to it.

Yeah.

And the comings and goings.

Yeah, you can be a spy too.

And then what's the thing where he brags about who his wife saw out at dinner?

I don't know.

He's a really good performance.

Anyway,

also the book, the children's book, the TV sequence.

That's very old-fashioned Cone Brothers.

Like Bruce Campbell should probably be in that.

Okay.

The film made

60 domestic, 168 worldwide.

The worldwide number really does feel like your kind of George Clooney Brad Pitt number of like, it does not matter what the movie is.

Right.

Back then, they are going to just get you something.

But this movie had good marketing materials.

It did.

It wasn't a total hide the ball, but it was a kind of like reconfigure the elements in a way that is a lot easier to digest.

It's funny, though, that they did not go for like, I mean, the classic poster was that red poster, the sort of cartoony without their face.

Without, with no, no floating heads.

It's like a Saul Basty, but giant yellow star names and then right the faces only come in on like the the home video release number one at the box office on September 12th

2008 never forget opening to 19 million dollars what do you think this is number two so one it is number one burn after

ratings number one right number two to four are also all new movies this is a four new movies top five I think it's the other thing that made it surprising that this performed so well it was not an uncompetitive weekend and it tripled its opening weekend.

But it is that early September, slightly more fallow feel before the big Oscarie movies are coming.

The other three movies are just like three really different offerings, I will say.

So number two at the box office is

it's a work from a director who would produce one to two new movies a year.

And it's in his dramatic vein.

rather than his comedic vein.

Okay, you do one to two movies a year.

Okay, so it's a Tyler Perry.

Tyler Perry, but it's not a Medea.

But he would have a non-Medea.

He would have his weekends that he staked out.

And I'm sure they thought he was going to own this weekend.

Well, he was like his summer guy.

He was a February.

Yeah, okay.

Right.

So

this is a dramatic one, and it's not a Medea.

It's not a Medea, but Tyler Perry is in it.

Is it?

Among the ensemble.

So it's not I could do bad all by myself?

It is not about doing bad all by yourself.

The burn after reading could be called that.

Yeah.

All these characters have the capacity to do bad all by themselves.

They don't even need anyone else to help them.

Tyler Perry is in the ensemble.

It's not Dice Little Girls.

It's not Good Deeds.

It's neither of those.

And in Good Deeds, of course, it was sort of like a Goodwill Hunting situation.

He was a guy called Deeds who was good.

Yes.

It's not Why Did I Get Married To?

No.

And it's not the first one.

It's not that.

This is fun now.

Ben might have a guess.

Okay, he's in the ensemble.

So I was going to guess, Why Did I Get Married To?

Nope.

No, no.

Can you tell me who the first build person is?

Well, that gives it away, maybe.

Alfrey Woodard.

Is it the family that prays?

Family that prays.

And now you think this.

P-R-A-Y.

Moving on.

Subject closed.

What?

P-R-E-Y-S?

I've never seen it, but I think it's sort of like it's an upstairs, downstairs kind of like there's like a rich family and a poorer family.

And it's two different religious families.

It's Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard as the two matriarchs.

Those are the

Sanal Lathan, Khadi Strickland, Cole Hauser.

I bet you he gives a really, really measured performance.

Playing a good guy.

Right.

Rockman Dunbar, who I always enjoy.

Yeah, he's cool.

Taraji P.

Henson's in it.

Making $17 million, a very sort of standard Tyler Perry non-Medea opening.

They probably shot it in 0.5 days and made it for $2.

They somehow shot it in negative time.

Exactly.

It was like celery.

You gain calories.

Somehow Kathy Bates' schedule opened up making that movie.

I don't know.

I don't know, guys.

No, good stuff.

Number three at the box office is a movie that is completely forgotten, except it has become a catchphrase on the Lonely Island podcast.

Right, just kill.

Yep.

Yep.

Just the, in my opinion, one of the funniest things De Niro and Pacino ever did, where they were like, it's so cool how we're in Godfather and Don't Interact, Godfather 2.

And then we're in heat and we interact for one scene.

What if we did a movie where we're in it together all the time and it sucks?

What if it was dog?

It's just bad.

Yeah.

I bet you they literally just like went to a bucket of scripts and were like, just anything with two men in it.

Let's get something out there.

Also, to go like Coppola Man.

Yes.

John Avnett.

Avnet.

I've been saying that.

You're like,

wait for the Irishman.

Just wait for the Irishman.

Do you know anything about this movie?

It's like they're both cops

in the New York police department.

And someone's going out there killing criminals and leaving poems by their own.

Oh, no.

So, but it's like the vigilante that they're hunting sort of seems to be on the right side of the law in a way.

Righteous law.

I've never seen it.

I've never seen it's a righteous kill.

I've never seen it.

I am sure one of them is doing it.

I'm just not sure which.

But Andy Sandberg has a running bit since this movie came out of saying righteous kill instead of righteous.

Like, oh, yeah, yeah, righteous, righteous kill.

And now he's popularized it on the podcast.

It's sort of a runner how they talk about he tried to make it happen for 20 years.

And now it actually has.

And now it actually has.

So you didn't see Righteous Kill?

Okay.

Because you're busy seeing burn after reading.

I was in, this came out in the heart of marching band season so that I could go see him with me.

What was your instrument?

Percussion, of course.

I don't, I actually don't know.

You don't know that?

I'm not totally sure that I knew that.

I played Vibraphone, actually.

So I wasn't marching.

I was like posted on the 50-yard line.

But yeah.

But we had like a really robust pit percussion where there were like 20 of us.

It was like five marimbos, four vibraphones, two xylophones.

This is a timping.

It's crazy.

It's a huge thing in the Midwest.

I know.

And it's cool to work with.

They have people like roll stepping on treadmills in their free time.

What was your school called?

Like, what was the school?

Where did you go to school?

Prospect High School.

Cool.

I'm sort of doxing myself, I suppose.

Oh, we can cut that out if you don't want to know people know where you're at.

Go nights.

Go nights.

number four at the box office, new this week, not probably the least successful of these four films, still made 50 million dollars.

Um, it's a remake of a masterpiece, uh, from the golden age of Hollywood.

Um,

is it the women?

It's the women.

There we go.

Can you tell me who played the women in the women?

Okay, can you tell me it's five women on the on the uh

obviously how many do I have three of them are going

one of them is going phone, yeah, I remember busy being being one of one of them is going

Photoshopped posters.

Okay.

Eva Mendez.

Eva Mendez is there.

Annette Benning.

She's there.

She's on the phone.

Deborah Messing.

She's going.

Meg Ryan.

She's going.

And the fifth one.

There's one I'm forgetting.

Oh, it's good.

The fifth one's good.

It's a good one.

It's not Jessica Beale, right?

No.

Give me a hint.

Fish Mooney.

Well, that's the biggest hint of all.

I just wanted to say it.

Let me quickly put her name in my mouth.

Are you ready to sit down at the red table and announce who the fifth lead of the women was?

Jade of Pink is fast.

The film also has Bette Midler, Candice Bergen, Carrie Fisher, Cloris Leitran, Debbie Mazar, like Anna Gastyer.

It was kind of like clearly going for that first wives club.

Everybody come, have fun.

And it just, I remember it being like kind of annoying.

It was a development hell movie for like 20 years to do an all-star of the women remake.

And it ended up being made by the isn't it the Murphy Brown

English, who is you know a legend in her own right, but uh I think by that point, no offense to her was a little cooked.

Um, offense taken, yeah, I guess so.

I guess so.

A woman is cooked like she should be cooking in the kitchen.

You sound like the witch from Hansel and Gretel trying to cook a young woman

in an oven.

She's trying to cook children, a young woman.

I love the new take on Hansel and Gretel being, that was a young woman in STEM that you tried to cook.

Gretel had all kinds of aspirations.

That's probably how they're going to do it next.

Everything is so tiled and stem.

God, it'll be so STEM heavy.

The woman, number four.

Number five at the box office is a film that I think

had just done like a one-month run at number one for pretty much all of August.

Tropic Thunder?

It's Tropic Thunder, which has made it to $102 million.

Because that dethroned Dark Knight, basically on a one-month dark night is at number seven number six is the house bunny sure uh which was sort of like a solid hit super hit yep uh number eight dropping from actually from number one so i think dropper jumped the week before to number eight is the nicholas cage film bangkok dangerous quite a poor film and also historically one of the lowest number ones always one of those like 4.8 million dollar number ones or whatever Number nine is Traitor.

Is that the Don Cheadle movie?

Yeah, which is not bad.

Right?

Never seen.

Guy Pierce.

Yeah.

Based on an idea by Steve Martin.

Yes, right.

Weirdly.

Number 10 at the box office is the remake of Death Race, which is, I think, a Paul W.S.

Anderson that I haven't seen.

Oh, it is a movie that fucking ruins.

I got to see that one.

It is so good.

It's kind of Death Race, but it's more like Twisted Metal Mario Kart.

Yeah, that sounds fun.

Oh, I never saw his from earlier this year.

Land of the.

I was not a fan of that one.

I think he is getting,

we got to take the volume away from him.

Yeah.

you know what i mean like and a lot of these kind of mid-budgety genre guys i'm worried that they're gonna get lost in like cg death race is super practical part of it is that they build like power-ups onto the death race course so it has like hitting mushrooms and

and joan allen plays like the prison warden who's like creating the death race you are you already had me and then you say joan allen is in the message she has

can joan allen play kind of like a steely boss lady is that something that's in her repertoire david she has a scene where she's freaking out that like oh my god they're they're beating the system how is he doing this right we're supposed to have them under control and she says like 14 curses in a row that feels like it was just a dare to see if they could get joan allen to say it yeah that's right

this movie is set in new york in the year 2020 it rules i wonder if anything else happened it's also technically

It's also technically a Lego sequel to the original rather than a remake.

It's fun.

It starts with the Frankenstein character, the Keradine character from the original.

Right.

And Cooper Trupa is in it?

Yeah.

Cool.

Just to close out on Burn After Reading, it did premiere at, it was the opening film of the Venice Film Festival that year.

And indeed, it was a solid hit.

It's listed much as about 37 million.

Okay.

But still, obviously, it was very successful.

And indeed, as we noted, the reviews were a little mixed and a little heavy on the it's so sadistic It's also just coming off of their fucking peak.

And I think there's this like

this back and forth we've talked about many times now of like the Coens make like a serious transcendent film.

And then people are like, why are they doing a larky comedy now?

There was a little bit of that, you know?

Next up, of course, for us is a serious man.

What's that I hear in the distance?

Gates are being locked next week.

Mark Marin's on the show next week.

Mark Marin's on the show next week.

Fran knows this already, but she's excited.

I love him so much.

I know.

I'm despondent that his show.

I can't even really talk about it because I was sort of, I was a Marin hater and I came around.

I think a lot of people had a journey like that before.

Or they're right.

They like him and then they get a little sick of the show and then they rediscover and they're like, you know what?

Still fucks.

Yeah.

Did you see that he, I don't know if it was on WTF or on one of his like behind the paywall sort of like full ramble episodes talked about recording with us and was like it was a long talk it's a long episode those guys go long and then our Reddit was like losing their mind and I had to be like guys his standard of long is very different than yours we got a full episode out of him but do not get angry definitely a moment probably around two hours into the show where he literally just says out loud i think we're done it was it was well under two hours it might have been under and i worked to kind of filibuster it over maybe the two hour line yeah but i think clearing my day i think it's a really great episode we get right into it and go deep into the talk.

He's the perfect guest for that movie.

It was, it was a long time coming, and I'm glad.

It was really fun to have him on.

I hope we can have him back on, honestly, because he's got more time, right?

Yeah.

What else is he going to do?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Other than come on blank track.

Exactly.

So yeah, tune in next week for that, Fran.

Anything you want to plug?

Yeah, Fran, what's up?

You work at New York Magazine?

Yeah, it's my first time on here in a long time that I have not been begging for a job.

Yes.

Because I have one.

Yeah.

You're busy.

I'm busy.

Go to dinner with me more often.

I will once I get to the next month of my life.

You're also getting married.

I'm also getting married in a matter of days, ultimately.

Congrats.

Thank you so much.

I'll plug Being in Love.

It's good.

Yeah.

And my work for New York Magazine and Vulture and Fran magazine.

Still going strong.

Going strong, still at it.

And I'll plug getting eight hours of sleep, which hopefully I'll return to very soon.

It's the best shit in the world.

I think it's going to change my life.

It's unbelievable.

I'm looking forward to the day where you have to, Anna Wintour style, announce your successor at Fran Magazine.

Yeah.

Who is the like the future Nepo baby, the equivalent, the black label Nepo baby like Louis Maul and Candice Bergen's child that you will someday hand over Fran Magazine?

That's a great question.

Be the Nepo baby you want to see in the world.

Can we will one into existence now?

Yeah, I'm sure they're at a very expensive preschool right now, but it's got, yeah, it's got to be someone like 35 years younger than me.

So maybe someone who doesn't totally exist yet.

Maybe if like Michael Hanukkah and Sidney Sweeney want to get on it, is Hanukkah retired?

What's up with him?

He seems to be.

Are you going to do one more?

I think he's maybe retired.

He's 83.

He's pretty old.

Sorry.

I'm not trying to bum you out.

No, it's okay.

That's okay.

The white ribbon, too.

Wait a second.

I'm seeing here Michael Hanukkah

attached to Underworld Return of the Lichens.

How great would it be if he Hanukkah's circling Flash reboot?

He's just circling it.

He has a take.

There really isn't like a curse project like that anymore.

Like for so long, we had like Crow Reboot, Suicide Squad 2.

There'll be something eventually, but yeah.

But is there such a good point?

Right?

There's not the one like, hey, man, don't sign up for it.

We need a poisoned chalice to return to Hollywood for like every director to be like chalice drought.

Can I figure this out?

We actually like like worked those things out of our system and now we need a little bit a little bit.

But now it'll be like the Candyland movie or whatever.

It'll be some fucking board game.

Yeah, Michael Hanukkah's gonna do hunger, hungry, hippos.

They're so hungry.

Hippos are so hungry.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you all for listening.

Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe.

Hey, thank you to Ben Frisch for jumping in.

Thank you, Ben.

Hosley back in full form.

Feel better, Ben.

Yeah.

I hope ice cream tastes good again to you soon.

And as always, now we can just focus on writing our memoir.

Memoir.

I have to pee Griffin.

I have to poop.

Oh, well then, I go.

Okay, I'm just going to get out.

Blank Check with Griffin and David is hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims.

Our executive producer is me, Ben Hostley.

Our creative producer is Marie Bardy Salinas, and our associate producer is A.J.

McKeon.

This show is mixed and edited by A.J.

McKeon and Alan Smithy.

Research by J.J.

Birch.

Our theme song is by Lane Montgomery in the Great American Novel with additional music by Alex Mitchell.

Artwork by Joe Bowen, Ollie Moss, and Pat Reynolds.

Our production assistant is Minick.

Special thanks to David Cho, Jordan Fish, and Nate Patterson for their production help.

Head over to blankcheckpod.com for links to all of the real nerdy shit.

Join our Patreon, BlankCheck Special Features, for exclusive franchise commentaries and bonus episodes.

Follow us on social at BlankCheckPod.

Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Checkbook on Substack.

This podcast is created and produced by Blank Check Productions.

Someone just said, here's what I found.

I think that was Siri.

Ghost.

Siri just was Siri on the record computer.

I thought Siri was about to correct my pronunciation.

Go away.

I love you, but...

No.

No, actually, I don't love Siri.

Fuck off.

Yeah, you know what?

It's true.

But you know, if you say fuck off to Siri, she'll like reprimand you.

Oh, okay.

Like, has that ever happened to you where you like accidentally start Siri on your phone and be like, oh, fuck off.

And then Siri goes, I don't appreciate that.

And I'm like, Jesus.

No, here's what I do.

There's enough going on.

The second I buy a device, Siri off.

Yeah, yeah, disabled.

Have never used Siri once.

I don't like her.

I don't trust her.

I'm not rude to her, but I don't want to speak to her.

Yeah, I just have her like do my taxes and stuff.

I mostly don't use her.

I don't

ever do anything.

Siri, do my taxes.

And I'm like, that's done.

I don't like her.

Siri is listening to her.

What is she doing?

Go away, Siri.

Siri, disable.

Off.

I think she's tricky, and I think she's mean.

And I want to make it clear, it's not that she's a woman.

That's not my problem.

I'm starting to feel like you have a problem with women with small.

I find her overly emotional.

I don't like all these questions she asks, and it has nothing to do with her being a woman.

Do you guys know anyone who has Siri as man?

I recently

heard someone who used her Sirius Man.

And I was like, what the hell?

What if it was like Crocodile Dundee?

Like, is there a way to make the voice something that I would be amused to hear?

Doesn't Amazon Alexa do a bunch of that?

You can do celebrity voices.

Right.

If it was Croc Dundee, I'd turn it on.