The Twisted Mind of M Night Shyamalan - The Sixth Sense: Media Club Plus S02E01

Greetings from Media Club Plus, a podcast about plunging into the media that thrills us and the stories that chill us.

As always, we've been dragged to you by friends at the table.

Before we start our next season, we'll be subjecting ourselves ourselves to the twisted mind of M.

Night Shyamalan.

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find me online at Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com slash run button.

Joining me for the first time is Art Martinez Tebble.

Hi,

I'm Art.

You can find me on Blue Sky at A.M.

Tebble.

Do you think it might have been a bad idea to have the person who doesn't have experience with the director write the intro?

No.

No.

No.

All right.

Well, I'm glad we got to hear from the crypt keeper at the top of the.

To be clear, I wrote that after watching this movie and deciding that it absolutely wasn't a horror movie.

And then going, I bet none of these are horror movies.

I think one of them is a one of the ones we're definitely watching is a horror movie and one of the ones that I'm going to complain about us not watching is a horror okay uh and also joining us this season is ally and gabora um hi my name is allie you can find me reluctantly over on blue sky at ally dash online i don't post there but you can follow me um you can also find me on friends of the table.cash which is our patreon i host a show there called gathering information about friends at the table a podcast you might have heard about.

And you can find me on our Twitch channel on Mondays at 12.30 p.m.

If you haven't heard of Friends at the Table, that's the podcast that we all do together with another half of people who aren't here,

some of whom you've heard on Media Club Plus before, but if you haven't checked it out, you should check it out.

Also, returning from last season is Silly Bullet.

Hello, it's me.

It's fan favorite coming back.

We killed the other two.

Yeah, we didn't.

Well, that's actually the last one we're going to do is M.

Night's first documentary, which is going to be about the murder of two people in order to cover.

Trey and Jack.

Yeah.

In order to cover a podcast involving his movies.

Yeah.

Hi, I'm Sylvie.

Check me out on your internet websites at Sylvie Bullet.

Check out Sidestory.show.

It's a gaming podcast that we've.

Allie, have you been on that yet?

I was.

I was there to talk about Lunar and then we talked about fantasy life and stuff.

We're officially like so deep into doing that that I can't remember like specific episodes.

And by that, I mean like two months, three months?

Yeah, everyone has been on now.

Art was just on.

We did a sports episode.

And by sports, I mean

Uma Musume and Pokemon and MLB and

NBA 2K.

I'm the last person on every show.

That's the rule.

Is that the rule?

Well, Janine hasn't been on this.

Yeah, so.

Oh, shit.

Yeah.

We've broken the rule.

I quit.

Well, I am a rule breaker at heart.

Oh, did we lose one?

No.

Art left.

Art quit.

Wow.

This is

when we started Friends of the Table, Art said,

I swear I will never break a rule.

So this is tragic.

This is tragic.

It's sort of, it's sort of, you two have a sort of one of us always tells the truth, one of us always lies situation, but one of us always follows the rules and one of us always breaks them.

Yeah.

That's the arrangement.

Why don't we go around the horn and talk about our, this is the horn, by the way.

The four of us is the horn.

Our experience with M-Night as a director, as a famous guy.

Ali, this sort of was your idea and mostly was your idea.

Do you want to start?

I don't know if if it was mostly my idea.

I think that other people.

Yeah, yeah.

I was very enthusiastic.

Yeah, it was mostly the two of you.

I think for the friends of the table audience, I think the seed was planted when I mentioned Lady in the Water during our Palisade post-mortem.

But yeah,

I've been a big M.

Night Chamelan fan,

I guess, my whole life.

Like, I feel like I saw the Sixth Sense in theaters.

Wow.

And that was 1999 when I was 10.

10.

So I, you know, I was in seats.

I was a day one fan, I suppose you could say.

And

God.

And also you could say that 10 is when your life started.

Yeah.

It's certainly when you could claim to have taste, have a taste.

Yes, this is true.

As far as my media, you know, influences go, this was a very early one.

In terms of somebody, I could honestly say, like,

I am a fan of his.

I think his work is interesting.

These movies make me think I am a teenager.

Um, but and I, you know, going back to them, I think they hold up.

Um, Sylvie?

I've got a kind of like a weird, like, big gap for my MI

knowledge, but I would consider myself a fan.

I really think I am someone who developed more of an appreciation for him with his later stuff.

Like, I'd seen this, and I'd seen Unbreakable before,

and then there's just like a huge jump to like

the happening.

We can get to that when we get to that, and then another jump to like Knock of the Cabin and Trap, and those movies like really hit for me.

So, I'm excited to see if it's just a thing where

a because I really liked watching this, we'll get into it, but I'm excited to see if it's a thing where I have always where now I just like his style of directing, or if like

there was there was a reason why it didn't stick the first time I tried getting into his stuff art

uh yeah I I also saw the sixth sense in theaters I was older than Allie was because I am older than Allie is interesting that checks out I liked it

yeah I liked it a great deal I also liked Unbreakable a great deal, which we'll

see how that goes.

Looking at

the wiki,

I watched the whole Buena Vista Pictures era of M-Night

and then skipped his little like

walkabout to other studios.

And then when he got to Blumhouse in 2015 with the visit, I was like back in.

With the exception of I have not seen Glass Old or Knock in the Cabin.

It's going to be really tough trying to remember the difference between

the happening and the visit for me.

I don't know.

It's not.

They're very different.

Just until we get to them, or maybe forever, I will just be thinking that one is the other.

I'll always have to ask which one is the plant one?

The happening.

The happening.

Okay.

Yeah.

The happening.

That's a question that will come back up.

For me,

people who know me from Run Button Friends of the Table will probably know that I'm not a scary movie guy.

And I always felt like M-Night Shyamalan was making scary movies.

So I have zero M-Night experience except for when I was 13 or something,

I watched the last third or last half of signs on DVD or on TV.

I can't remember.

So that's the only thing.

And I remember signs being huge, but also being like kind of split.

like i feel like people kind of not liking signs was the first thing i ever heard negative about m night shamelon

i don't want to talk about it okay it's gonna be tougher when we do the i think we need to i think we need to save it for the episode

there's a lot to think about signs but For this movie, I'm going to tell you right now, I loved it.

I thought this was really great.

Yeah, I had a fantastic thing.

This was really good.

It was different than I thought it was going to be.

It was

not.

It was much more.

It was really like

a family drama with

a supernatural code on.

Yeah.

Which to me is great.

Yeah.

Can I say something and then you just put it ahead of what Allie just said?

Yeah, totally.

Wow.

If you have, if you have not seen this movie and you don't know what it's about

or like what the thing about it is, turn this podcast off and go watch it.

Like, I don't even want you to know that that's why I want this put in front of Allie because I don't even want you to know what she said about it.

If you can go into this movie completely cold,

I envy your, I envy you so much.

Yeah, in my uh recap, I will note that

I that that someone doesn't know the thing of the movie to be so implausible.

But if that does apply to you, then yeah, you really should.

You owe it to yourself to watch a movie that like it would be like not knowing that Darth Vader is Lou Skywalker's father and then getting an opportunity as an adult to, oh no, egg on my face.

Oh my God.

And it like, it's like being able to go and experience that as an adult in the 2020s without having our

person must exist.

I don't know if they're our listener, but like

I feel like I think that they exist, they're more likely to exist now than they were 10 years ago or something like that.

Because like there was a cultural saturation point with Shyamalan that I'm sure we will get into throughout the series

that definitely like disappeared when he kind of fell from grace during the sort of tens and like late aughts.

And I feel like because of that, you know, I found out about the twist from this movie in a really stupid way.

I was going to say from TV, but that's not true.

But I did see, I saw, I see dead people.

Sorry, I've seen dead people, to quote Keith.

That was before the show.

Yeah, you said that.

Like, that was referenced in all sorts of stuff that was on TV when I was a kid that like it's not being done in the same way.

Like, I can fully believe that people just haven't been exposed to

Hailey Joel Osmond's psychic gifts.

Yeah, I was in the way we were.

I was seven when this movie came out, and I remember like probably not when it was in theaters, but probably when it was on home video,

I remember like kids at recess like whispering,

uh, I see dead dead people like as like a yeah as just like a punchline to nothing it was just like a meme that that like eight and nine year olds were doing

I know they still do that but they think it's a Kendrick thing

yeah and I feel like you'll you'll see that tone kind of repeated I mean these these movies were billed as thrillers sort of at the time.

And, you know, I think

the more popular he became and sort of the zeitgeist around, like, oh, what's the twist going to be?

And like,

so much of the response around this movie being, of course, Hailey Joel Osmond, who like does this incredible performance.

But it felt like the culture at the time was just like talking about like the I see dead people and the ghost aspect of this movie and not like how much

how like

intimate and like tender a lot of the actual story is.

The um

cinematographer for this movie was Tak Fujimoto.

And I'm glad that I looked this up because

he worked with M.

Night for a few other movies,

Signs, The Happening,

and some other stuff you might know him from are like Silence of the Man, but Silence of the Lamb

or the Manchurian Candidate.

Yeah,

it seems like Jonathan Demi was the other guy that he worked with a lot who did Manchurian Candidate and Silence of the Lambs.

The one that stood out to me was that like his second movie is being one of the three cinematographers on Badlands by Terence Malik, which is like really, really revered, at least was when I was in school.

Yeah, this movie looks good.

This is a totally bonkers filmography.

You told him the same filmographer did The Sixth Sense and Ferris Bueller's Day Off?

Yeah, yeah.

And Gladiator.

That would have been.

And Gladiator.

Wait, that must be a different Gladiator.

Oh, that's 92.

Yeah, it is.

That's a different Gladiator.

Miami Blues, though.

Yeah.

And the.

He also worked on Star Wars.

Look at that.

Camera and Electrical Department.

A New Hope.

Whoa.

Damn.

This guy's been around for a while.

But yeah, the music was done by James Newton Howard.

Allie, are you reading from my intro that I'm about to read?

No, I'm sorry.

I just thought it would be a good idea to like say it at the beginning, but if you have that.

I do.

I have all of that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Written and directed by M.

Night Shamalan with director of photography, Tak Fujimoto, composed by James Newton Howard, starring Bruce Willis, Haley Joel Osmond, Tony Collette, and Olivia Williams.

1999's The Sixth Sense might be one of the most famous American films.

Full stop.

Nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Screenplay, and Best Editing editing for Andrew Monsheen's work.

I can guarantee whether you've seen it or not, this is a movie you know the ending to.

The twist ending.

The twist ending.

But ending aside, this is a film about a boy who no one understands, who feels like a freak and is terrified to live in a world full of ghosts that only he can see and few can even sense.

A lonely world where even the ghosts can't see each other, and the only person willing to listen is a man whose biggest fear is failing another little boy.

Nailed it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the movie.

That's the movie.

Yeah.

You didn't mention Donnie Wahlberg, but I'll.

Donnie Wahlberg, a really great performance for Donny Wahlberg.

Yeah.

It's definitely the performance of Donny Wahlberg's career.

Yeah.

I was shocked.

I was like, who is this?

And I was like, that's Donnie Wahlberg?

That's Donnie Wahlberg?

That is

Donnie Wahlberg.

And his little tidy wife.

And his nipple ring.

Okay, I

missed the nipple ring.

I did.

Well, okay, so I just googled this.

Obviously, maybe people heard me typing.

I saw Donnie Wahlberg in the credits and I was like, huh, that's weird.

And I just didn't think about it.

And then right now, I was like, maybe he was one of the kids.

And now I'm like,

good job, Donnie.

Donnie shows up.

Donnie Wahlberg, who was an adult when he was in New Kids on the Block 10 years before the movie came out, did not play one of the children in this movie.

Listen,

I don't know.

Donnie Welberg is at the very beginning of this movie almost.

An old filament bulb lights up a corner of a wine cellar, and a woman in a dress coming from a party or something.

It's not either of those things.

She comes down and carefully picks out a bottle of wine before getting our first chill.

of the movie.

This is a movie that is full of chills, literal chills.

Characters are always getting chills.

And a couple spills.

And a couple spills.

Yeah.

There's a little bit of a spill in this first scene scene here with Bruce Willis as Dr.

Malcolm Crowe

receiving an award from the city of Philadelphia for his work in child psychology.

And he's kind of drunk and being like a weirdly stinker about it.

I think he has low self-esteem.

Yeah, maybe.

I thought this was scene was kind of cute, honestly.

Yeah, too.

The little like Dr.

Seuss rift they do.

I'm not going to say it feels realistic, but it feels lifted.

I don't know who needs to put it.

It's funny and cute.

And they've got chemistry.

They do have chemistry.

He gets a plaque.

There's a really great shot of them reflected in this like mirror plaque that they have.

This movie looks so good.

This is something, you know, like, I think this is an exaggeration, but something I've been saying since I saw the mid-reviewed

late 70s Richard Dreyfus movie, The Big Fix,

about a year ago.

I just had it in my head: you can pull any CC Plus movie off the shelf before

the 2000s.

Well, at least before 1995, and it has a chance of looking better than anything that I've seen in the last 20 years.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I kind of agree.

Yeah.

I mean, when I saw the big fix, I was like, wow, this is really good.

And I read the reviews and people were like, this is a totally average movie.

I was like, this is what what an average movie used to look like.

I just saw an interesting graph about average Rotten Tomatoes scores and how it's gone like way up in the last like couple decades.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And I think it's like that's why we're like, so this movie is average, and then it's like, Well, it's really that we've had some weird inflation of

what average means,

what average means, yeah.

Is this the no, that's not it, Yeah.

More opinions in the pot, I guess, in terms of

raider score on that.

Rotten tomatoes should be shut down.

This,

oh, sorry, Ali, go ahead.

Yeah, I just want to say

how good

this first scene, and like how smart this first scene in the movie is, because it's unsettling from the jump.

Like, even in the quote-unquote good times

of what we see of Bruce Willis's life here,

like the, like her being in the cellar and sort of having this like audience feeling of like, is this supposed to be scary?

She's alone.

You know, is something going to happen here?

Like, I, you know, I think that it sets the foundation that the rest of the movie is able to sort of like

divert your eye around because you're in this sort of like tense feeling from the jump.

So you're not like looking about like,

you know, what's the truth of the situation?

And as much as you're like,

is something about to happen?

Yeah, and it does a really good job of connecting like little moments of like fear or discomfort in like real human life to the symptoms of the ghosts in this movie.

Like even from the beginning, we see her get the chill in the basement.

And then when Donny Wahlberg shows up and he says, I know why you're scared when you're alone.

And then fast forwarding to Haley Joel's

monologue about, or not monologue, he's talking to Bruce Willis about

the hanged men and like, like what it feels like when ghosts are near.

You know, this is really good horror movie stuff.

Like, we want you to think about this movie when you're in the dark by yourself.

And that's scarier to me than anything that happens in the movie.

This plaque, it says, in recognition of his outstanding achievement in the field of child psychology, his dedication to his work and his continued efforts to improve the quality of life for countless children and their families the city of philadelphia proudly bestows upon its son dr malcolm crowe that's you uh the mayor citation for professional excellence during her reading of this he's like making bubbles in his wine yeah

it's It's very funny.

She has to scold him to pay attention.

I'm curious why he's like this about the award.

Does he not think he's doing enough?

Does he think it's stupid to compliment him when he already knows that he's not helping

these kids the way that he's supposed to?

What is this?

Whoa, I don't think that's.

I'm you're supposed to feel about him.

Well, he, well,

we see Donny Wahlberg.

Donnie Wahlberg says, you're not helping kids the way you're supposed to, and then

shoots him with a gun.

And to me, if this scene is anything, like, because why is he being so weird about the plaque?

He's like making fun of it for being in an expensive frame.

He wants to hang it up in the bathroom.

I think they're just showing him as like a kind of like a

not serious guy.

And so

later, when he's way more serious, you sort of see this,

the change that him being shot brings about in him.

Yeah, it's the same reason why you need the chemistry between him and his wife early on.

So when you have scenes later where things feel really strained, you notice it.

That's, I think, the question is, is he being frivolous or is he being self-effacing?

That's what,

which is, I think, is an open question.

Yeah, I think there's something in how Bruce Willis usually plays sort of an everyman character.

I read the

Roger Ebert review for this before sitting down, just to have some context.

And I think an interesting thing that he said there is that, like,

in

Bruce Willis's movies, he is such a grounding presence that, like,

the supernatural around him seems less obscene.

And I think, like, having Malcolm come out as a character who is not

overly confident in his ability

or, you know, self-centered, self-centered, or like having a big ego,

or like, sort of seeing the like,

you know, the plaque isn't the work sort of thing.

You know, I think it's interesting in the scene that, like, even the, like,

even when she's complimenting him, his wife is like, you know, all of the, you know, all, every sacrifice that you made, putting me second is, is like a, is a, you know,

again, I think it's the thing of like, even the good times weren't great sort of

foundation in what you see in the rest of the movie

um even at this i have already written in my notes this movie looks really good and it's funny this is where

it's when i think it's when uh when uh she's like just sort of quietly goes they called you their son about being called son a son of philadelphia

it's really funny

I also love when they like go upstairs and they're like getting a dress and it's like

you see it all.

It's so cute.

It's great.

I have written down here great dancing.

Wow, look how good at dancing.

Wow, they're going upstairs.

That's such a funny fucking thing to write.

Wow, so good at dancing.

They go upstairs.

She sees a broken window

and stuff thrown on the floor, the phone off the line um you know he steps sort of in front of her they see a shadow go past them she screams um someone is in their bathroom some a musician weirdly

shut up

who's who is this in the bathroom

is his name vincent gray vincent gray

yeah yeah it takes him a couple names to like get to it but he starts like going what as i don't have the exact stuff stuff that

our friend Donnie is saying here,

but I actually have the whole.

Do you have it?

Oh, I love a button.

Go for it.

This is 47 Locust Street.

You've broken a window and entered a private residence.

You don't know so many things.

There are no needles or prescription drugs of any kind in this house.

Do you know why you're afraid when you're alone?

I do.

I do.

What do you want?

What'd he promise me?

I want what he promised me.

Oh my god.

Do I know you?

Don't you know me, Hero?

Don't you even remember your own patience?

uh yeah this is when he starts cycling through those names and finally lands on vincent gray

uh

vincent says downtown clinic single-parent family possible mood disorder um and now he owns co-owns wall burgers

he really recovered from the stumpy episode at the end of the scene wow yeah one of these characters ends up dead and it's not the one that you think.

Well,

they both.

No, no, no, they do.

How can he be dead?

He owns Wahlburgers.

Is this...

I don't know how much we want to make this obvious to the audience about pre-production discussions or to let Art make his argument here.

But I, returning to this movie, I was like, success is great.

It's, you know, just some guy and a kid and they're figuring out ghost stuff together.

Without, and then I was like, oh,

Bruce Willis is a therapist.

Like the, the weirdness about mental health and the like treatment of it and the stigma that was, I mean, obviously different, you know, 20, 25 years ago.

Yes, 25 years ago.

It's obvious, like, culturally it was different.

So it makes sense that the movie is, you know, reflecting some of those ideas.

But the fact that it is something that M.

Knight keeps going back to again and again in his movies, and to see it from his sort of like

freshman breakout movie being such a central thing, is, you know,

the audience should remember this because I think it's going to be something that we're going to end up having to talk about again and again.

I, you know, for some of the sins that I think some of his later work does, does,

you know, the portrayal here is

interesting because I think Malcolm is such a

compassionate person with his patients.

I mean, even in the scene where he's like, obviously he's in a dangerous situation, but he's still trying to like, you know, he can still sort of have that sort of

Rolodex in his mind and go through these names and sort of speak to the history and, you know, eventually actually remembering who this person is.

um but like you know I think other places where it misses is like

oh my god my wife is on antidepressants it's like what are you know is it if this is your sealed of study this shouldn't seem so

um

oh that's not how I interpreted that scene I think it's strange if your wife if you're a therapist and your wife is taking antidepressants and didn't tell you Oh sure

that's a strange thing to happen I had I actually had both of your thoughts I had like both of those thoughts kind of at the same time where I was like, they do look at, he does look at the bottle of Zolof, like, oh my God.

But it would be weird if you didn't know that your wife was on Zoloft.

I was just trying to see if we had the same dosage.

It's funny because

there was

an anti-psychology thing happening in the late 90s.

Every once in a while, you'll watch a late 90s movie movie, and they'll be like

kind of anti-psychology will be a main theme or like a like a throwaway gag.

Uh, I recently watched um Jumanji for the first time in a while, and there is like so much kind of like anti-therapy

in in uh

Jumanji.

I was like, wow, at every turn, they're like,

they're almost trying to draw a straight line line from

talk therapy to like woo-woo crystal psychics.

Because it was seen as similar for a long time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, and I think there's a generational component to this

that our parents' generation were, and especially their parents' generation were very anti-psychiatry.

Yeah.

Seeing a psychiatrist means you're

bad, damaged, evil.

And we've come a long way on that.

And if you'd like to hear more about this topic, the next full season of Media Club Plus is going to be for you.

And it's interesting that this movie kind of

is like, I think, talking about that Americans are interested in psychology and have questions about it without being really clear on what it's saying to me anyway.

Because

Bruce Willis is a psychologist and he's intensely interested in helping these kids, especially Haley Joe Osmond.

But on the other hand, like his psychology is totally unequipped to deal with what

Cole Sear is going through.

And we see, like, when Cole kind of finally opens up to him about what's going on, something that's been clear to us for, you know, dozens of minutes of runtime.

The next scene is Bruce Willis talking into his tape recorder to introduce the fact that he has a tape recorder

being like, this kid needs meds and hospitalization.

And like, we already know that that's not true.

That's not what's happening.

We don't know that, though.

Yeah.

You only know that because you saw the preview that said, I see dead people.

The movie has given us no information at that point that Cole is

seeing ghosts.

Is that true?

I thought that there was a full ghost thing that happened before that.

No, there's no.

This movie has so much restraint.

Cole doesn't say I see dead people until 52 minutes in, and you don't see a ghost until two scenes after that.

Okay, I thought there was one for real ghost thing that happened already.

He gets the information about his teacher, but you don't see it.

Okay, okay.

Oh, and there's the voice in the staircase.

Yes, I'm counting those as for real ghost things.

Well, Stuttering Stanley, to me, is a for real ghost thing.

Wait, is the is the

staircase?

Yes, because the staircase happens and then he goes to the hospital and he fasts it.

Okay.

Yeah.

What was my what was the original scene that I was oh, right, okay.

So, yeah, then he says, I see dead people, and then Bruce Willis goes, This kid needs to go to a hospital.

And I, I think it is important at that, at that moment, that the audience believes that Cole can really see dead people so that they know that Bruce Willis is getting it wrong again.

But I think that I think we're supposed to see Bruce Willis's conclusion there is very understandable, yeah, totally understandable but wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, there, I mean, thinking about his ability, it's, it's funny because it's kind of a filmmaking thing where, like, they're giving information to the audience who does not have this sort of background in mental health.

But it also seems kind of laughable that like somebody with his career would still be looking through books and circling things like sometimes marks on a child's body are self-inflicted.

Yes, that is very silly.

Those

cuts that they see on Cole look so much more like self-harm wounds than look like self-defense wounds from someone attacking him.

And it's just, I think you've just got to chalk it up alley, like you kind of said, to the audience not knowing about this stuff.

Let's introduce Cole, though, in a cute cute little, extremely symmetrical neighborhood in South Philadelphia, Dr.

Malcolm is going over case files of Vincent Gray.

This is the next fall, by the way, and his new patient, Cole Sear, if you can believe it.

Cole Sear.

Wow.

Cole Sear.

He loves to make sure his stakes are well done on both sides, but not.

He loves Mayard reaction.

Yes, exactly.

Another child of divorce suffering from anxiety and social isolation with a possible mood disorder.

Cole exits his house, locks up on his own, puts on these dorky glasses that are extremely cute that we later learn he just stole from his father because

it's like just like stuff from around the house that are his dad's.

He keeps wearing.

What a hipster wearing glasses without lenses.

Come on.

And then Malcolm

watches him run to church.

This is when like I really still haven't figured out what this movie is going to be.

Like uh Ali, you talk about remembering that Bruce Willis was a was a psychologist.

That's like one of the only things that I knew.

Um

and uh

yeah, uh, I said,

does he play in the church to escape the demons?

Does he assume Malcolm isn't a ghost because he can enter the church?

I got my answer right away.

As soon as he took the doll, not the doll, as soon as he took like the Jesus statue on his way out,

I knew this kid knows for sure that that Malcolm is a ghost.

Um,

the

shit, I had something and then I lost it.

Don't worry.

Okay, come back.

He's playing with Civil War figures and speaking in Latin.

Um, and then uh, well, they're not all Civil War, right?

Because the one who speaks in Latin is like a he's got like a spear, right?

Oh, I thought he had a musket.

It was it was a little bit.

Oh, maybe that's where

um uh

Malcolm says, in the olden days in Europe, people used to hide in churches.

It was called sanctuary.

This is like immediately interesting to Cole because he's like, that's what I'm doing.

I'm hiding out here because of sanctuary.

And then I really liked this.

He says, do all your soldiers speak Latin?

No, just one.

And

what's that?

Good shit.

Yeah, it's good shit.

Like,

worth mentioning, too, I really love the performance of cole like i think he's a it's a really well acted uh

like sad i called him uh like a golden retriever with the wettest eyes in the world is kind of the vibe yeah when we were streaming like it works really well when we were streaming virtue last reward yesterday i called him the most pathetic kid i've ever seen yeah he's like he's extremely pathetic and and pitiful

But it's an incredible performance.

It's an unbelievable performance for like a 10 or 11 year old.

Totally.

Yeah.

It's unbelievable.

It's a triumph of acting.

It's a triumph of directing.

It's a shame he didn't win Best Supporting Actor

because of how

rare it is to have that caliber of a performance from someone that young.

Was it Jacob Tremblay that got the reaction after Room?

I think it was kind of a similar thing where it's like people were so shocked to see a kid give that performance, except didn't he actually win the award i don't know i don't know i don't know room

i can't remember i'll check later sorry allie you were gonna say no it's okay i i i think what's definitely significant about it is how much the movie relies on his performance um like you know kaley joel asman is the the the center of most of the scenes is the person in most of the scenes is arguably the star of the movie in terms of just just like

sheer

like minutes on the screen, you know what I mean?

Um, so to like

not only be able to get that performance out of him, but sort of have that confidence in an actor to sort of, you know, let the movie lean on him in that way is just astounding.

Um,

uh, art, I, I was looking through my things here, so it might be this uh knight with the mace that, uh,

or the mall or whatever this is.

That's the one that speaks Latin.

Yeah, yeah.

See, that's yeah.

This is after he was speaking Latin, but I didn't, I forgot that there was anything but soldiers there.

But yeah, the very cute, he like he's ducking behind the pew and sticking his fingers up on the ledge of the queue in front of Malcolm.

It's very funny.

Yeah, and it's tough to call him the supporting actor, seeing as how the main,

the, the, the, the the main character technically cannot talk with anyone else Cole is free to talk to whoever he wants to

no I don't mean to get too filmy here but he's definitely this he's definitely Bruce Willis is definitely the main character of the movie yeah um it's his it's his arc that pushes the

the action you know it's him he is the one who has to change for the movie to resolve he has to believe his patient, which is the conflict of the beginning.

Yeah.

I guess you could argue, though, that Cole also does go through the arc of like not being afraid, like effacing his fears and stuff like that.

Yeah, but I Malcolm has to push him through.

Yeah, but Bruce Willis drags him through that.

Not drags him, but you know, if the first scene was about, was Cole being a freak

and then being like, wow, I wish someone would come along and help me not be a freak anymore.

And then we got the introduction of Bruce Willis, Then I think this is the distinction that art you're trying to make, right?

And of course, yeah, of course, I only mean like in this like classic, you know,

academic approach to screenwriting, who gets nominated for what Academy Award is random and arbitrary.

Right.

Yes, that is true.

And mostly sort of based on

game theorying where you think you might win.

Yeah, that was less true at this time, but is certainly true now.

And I don't know if we're going to talk about it, but the movie that beat this for most of the Oscars is a movie that has not aged well.

Oh, yeah.

And that no one would, if they redid these Oscars today with the same nominees, Sixth Sense would win.

What was the movie?

More than the Z.

It lost to American Beauty.

Oh, okay.

Oh, boy.

In best picture, best director, best screenplay.

I've never seen it, but that is a movie that I felt in the 2010s

went from a movie that people really were affectionate about to a movie that people really didn't like.

And then now, of course, Kevin Spacey is in it.

Yeah, it lost best editing to The Matrix, and that's probably fair.

That's probably fair.

And

it didn't lose either of the acting categories to American Beauty.

And I'm going to be honest, I haven't seen any of the films that it lost to in 20 years, so I can't

say that.

But I will say that I thought Tony Collette and Haley Joel Osmond were amazing in this movie.

They were fantastic.

Tony Colette's brains together, especially.

Yeah.

Where are you?

Does anybody have anything about this church scene?

Oh, I do.

The church stuff, I think we're going to get back to it later, but I definitely immediately started noticing.

He really loves the use of the color red in this movie.

And

I'm not getting into like a big, like, what it's like a red shows that it's like connected to the afterlife or whatever.

I'm not doing that.

I just later on, you see him sort of like adopting, like, wearing a red sweater and like he, his, like, his blanket fort is red.

And I, you re, I read that as like,

he heard the sanctuary thing.

Yeah.

And now he's trying to make his own just in everyday life.

And it really made me sad.

But in like, the way you want a movie to make you sad.

So the thing, the thing that I said, so here's the, the thing.

He turns to Malcolm and he says, like, um.

Am I going to be seeing you more often?

And this is great because I know that Cole knows that he's a ghost.

Yeah.

And Malcolm doesn't know that he himself is a ghost.

Nope.

And so what he does when he learns like Malcolm's going to be around from now on is on his way out of the church, he grabs the Jesus figure

from the little,

I don't know what this is, this little, like the offering table.

And later on, we see like he has all of these figures, and it feels to me like each one of these represents a ghost that he knows, and that maybe there's a reason why there's some each one of them means something to him.

A lot of them are religious, and a lot of them are like soldiers, and there's not a lot of other things there.

So, it just sort of feels like good, a good ghost, bad ghost dichotomy.

Yeah, I wonder

with M.

Night's stuff, I feel feel like, I mean, he grew up in Philadelphia, didn't he?

So

I feel like there's a lot of like

Philadelphia as character in this movie, especially,

just in terms of like,

you know, how much the city ends up getting

centered and how much you can pull on the fact that a history is, you know,

the city is filled with so much history that you can kind of tell this ghost story in terms of there's this child that can connect to those other things, like the

sort of early,

I would argue to say that the first, the film's first clue of what the truth of what's happening to Cole is, is when he says they used to hang people in this building when his teacher is trying to say,

trying to explain, like, lawmakers came here and it's great.

And, you know, they were great people and they didn't do anything wrong.

Whereas, you know, he says, those are the people that hanged everyone.

Yeah.

Great line.

Yeah.

Cole was able to get this other

perspective.

I forget where I was going with that, but I do think that like, you know, being in the chat.

From Philadelphia's character, being from Philadelphia and the history.

Like, yeah, he does seem interested in like

getting a second version of the, of the, like, social studies lesson.

Yeah, I really love when he takes that figure, though, on his way out of the church.

Uh, Malcolm goes back to his house and finds a half-eaten meal, his girlfriend's sleeping, surrounded by tissues.

Um, he goes downstairs to work, yeah, wife, wife, like oh, sorry, I they hadn't said her name at this point, and they hadn't introduced the wedding video.

So, at this point, I, I, when I was writing these notes, I wasn't sure if it was his girlfriend or his wife.

Um,

so I wrote both in different places.

Uh, and they were roommates.

He goes downstairs and worked, pulls out a Latin dictionary to look up what Cole was saying in the church.

A Latin dictionary, like we all have in our basements.

De profundus

clave ad to dominae.

Is that what it was?

It auto-corrected whatever it was to claim, so I don't remember what that word is anymore.

I want to have Austin dub in the real analog.

Out of the depths, I cry to you, oh Lord.

This is chilling, a chilling thing for a child to be saying.

You know, Malcolm is like, this kid is tortured.

He learned Latin just so that he could cry for help to God.

But obviously, this is just some shit a ghost says, right?

Yeah.

It's funny to me, like, how much less sick Cole is when you realize that the troubling things that he's doing is mostly mostly just like stuff he's repeating from ghosts he knows.

Yeah, I mean, I do,

I mean, the

yeah, I, the, the, the thought that like each of the figures that he plays with represents a specific ghost that he knew is,

you know,

interesting here when he is not only doing that, but like reenacting what he thinks their lives are

with these little figures.

They're terrifying to him, but also they're his only company besides his mom.

Um,

I really love this is where this movie changes for me

visually.

The up until this point, we've had like a lot of really, and we never lose this, but a lot of really interesting framing of a static camera, like interesting composition of uh like rooms and people in them.

And see this scene here where we go back to Cole's house for the first time inside the house.

You know,

it's like a small townhouse.

It's messy.

There's a puppy sleeping in the clean laundry basket.

Lynn Sear sort of hurriedly getting ready for one of her two jobs.

Cole getting ready for Catholic school.

It's claustrophobic.

The camera is moving, following her around.

Like they don't, it feels like they don't have enough space to be in there with her um

uh which i think is a really cool effect um

as she's like trying to get everything ready uh

she like goes to get him a new clip-on tie the clip on tie appears many times in this movie uh and returns for like

a character's first big scare Oh, no, second big scare.

Seeing Donnie Wahlberg was a big scare.

Always is.

Yeah.

yeah I scared when he showed up and then when I googled who is this guy and it said Donnie Wahlberg I got scared again um

all the cabinet drawers were open um and she like screams because obviously that's insane yeah

a movie we probably should like think about with this is like the exorcist like they're doing so much classic haunted kid stuff here

um

and it

i don't know it it really hit for me.

I'm like, I

because I forgot a lot of the minutiae.

Going into this, I mostly just remembered the really big moments, right?

So, like, seeing the way that they

evoke the haunting in their little apartment with the cupboards opening, and then when he lifts his hand, you can see his handprint from the temperature lower.

Really good.

It's great.

It's like really weird.

I thought maybe it was a ghost hand.

Yeah, it was a ghost that was there that had left a handprint.

Because ghosts do leave little bits of evidence.

Sorry, Allie, what were you going to say?

I always thought that it was like his palms were sweaty because he was so scared.

And it was sort of this thing of like, what is this kid so afraid of?

Three different fever interpretations.

That's what I thought it was.

Well, I guess it fades immediately.

And that's more cold than yeah, it does fade.

And she's like scared of the handprint too.

And less like, is he sick?

Does he have a fever?

Sylvia, I'm glad that you brought up The Exorcist, a movie that I haven't seen, but I did have it in my head.

Like, I didn't know that Cole wasn't going to end up

being, like, evil or being, like,

pals with these ghosts in a, in a sinister way.

Uh, all throughout the movie, I had, like, this inkling in the back of my mind that at any moment, it could be revealed that Cole knows more than he's letting on.

Um, and

and that he could be like manipulating Malcolm.

Um, that would be thematically bonker.

It would be thematically bonkers, but, but I don't, I didn't know.

I had, well, there's, there's a couple, there's a couple things.

So there's, there is this, this, because I had, early on, I had connected the ghosts with the toys, and I thought that this image of like the kid who can see ghosts, like kind of playing with his collection of ghosts as something.

And there's another scene later where Malcolm finally believes in the ghosts and he comes back into the church.

And Cole has like this very strange

tone of like,

Do you have questions for me?

He's such a little mob boss.

You've been running around town.

Like, it's so funny.

Yeah, I looked at the script.

I read a little bit of the script, and in the script, that stuff is even more pronounced.

So I did have in my head, like, maybe, because the thing that I didn't know was

how does Malcolm finally learn that he's a ghost?

And it was, to me, it was the weakest part of the movie, but I can't really judge it because it's the one part of the movie that I knew was coming.

So I thought that I imagined it being a little bit more intense and a little bit less like Sherlock Holmes-y.

Of like, oh, I think it's very intense.

I think I like it.

Yeah, I think that scene.

I was expecting Cole to have to tell him to his face, you're a ghost.

And you think that would be better?

I thought that it would be

a conflict.

And instead, it's sort of like, I've, at the end here, I've put the pieces together.

Right.

Because

he's the protagonist of the movie, he has to solve his own problem.

Well, yeah.

And also we get the sort of,

I mean, I don't want to get too ahead of what

the direction of the film actually goes, but we get the reversal of like what the quote-unquote ask is.

When Malcolm ends up finding a solution for this ghost stuff, you know, they spread it to other people who are affected.

And then,

you know, he has this scene with Haley Joel.

with Cole sort of giving him his advice about, you know, here's what you should do.

And then that's sort of like,

if Cole is a vector of which people can move on,

having that sort of like reverse of like,

you've helped me figure out a solution for this.

I am now going to give you my advice.

And then having

Malcolm's sort of like crescendo or whatever, a realization happen, happening through that just feels like a sort of, you know,

baton pass in terms of, you know, Cole also

serving his purpose for malcolm right you know what i mean when he says i'm not going to see you anymore am i oh

yeah yeah because he gives him the edge he knows like if i give you this advice to talk to her in

her sleep which is where the where which is like this whole the whole movie is like i can't talk to my wife anymore and he's like thinking it's because she hates me but actually it's because he's not experiencing time or reality properly um yeah and getting the advice he does get the advice from cole i thought it was going to be be more direct.

But this scene with the ghost, with the oh, this is another thing

that very early on, all the cabinets opening up.

That's very ghost to me.

That seems impossible for it to for ghosts not to be real with these cabinets opening up.

Yeah, I know that I'm I have a confirmation bias of like knowing that being the only thing I knew about the movie, um, but I do feel like um

the movie does lean ghosts are real

up until the reveal.

I have a very funny line here before he runs out to go to school with Tommy Tomasino,

his rival.

This fucking guy.

This fucking guy.

Before that, when Tony Collette finds, when Lynn Sear finds all of the cabinets open, something you're looking for, baby

pop carts.

He's making excuses for the ghosts.

It's really good.

It's so good.

Yeah, the thing that I was starting to say there is that, you know, going back to what we, the exorcist comparison, that what brought us on that tangent.

You know, I, you know, with the slow burn of the movie centering all of the

supernatural stuff just on Cole and Cole's singular experience, and sort of having these adults move around him, and sort of like

seeing that something's off, but feeling like they don't have access to something is like so smart to pull on that, sort of like

kids see what adults don't.

Yeah.

Kids have access to things that, you know, they see a world, they see the world in a different perspective.

And,

you know, it's such a, it's such a,

like a cinema trope.

I don't want to say a trope.

But that's the religion.

You're about to say trope.

Cliche.

You know what I mean?

Trope cliches.

Don't let the trope people take tropes from you.

Yeah, it's true.

I wanted to say something more complimentary from trope, but like the, you know,

the movie kind of swirling around of what your expectations could be in terms of who is this kid?

What is he experiencing?

What's the truth of this here?

Like being like, oh, this kid is, you know, something is wrong with this kid and not

what's surrounding him, you know what I mean?

I think is, is something that really keeps you in that like discomfort, the sort of constant questioning, the sort of like

manipulation of what the audience is focusing on away from Malcolm and to Cole.

So like, you know, part of this is that when you watch this movie again, it's like, you know, As soon as Malcolm says in the first conversation that he has with Cole, like, are you a good doctor?

I used to be.

Like, you watch it a second time and you're like, right, okay, yeah, everybody should have known when they saw this the first time.

Yeah.

What was going on?

But there's such good, like, sleight of hand happening with what

the movie wants you to consider in these early stages that like

you kind of get distracted from Malcolm's whole thing, even though, you know, he got shot and we never hear about the injury again is, you know, just an umbrella hanging over the entire story the entire time.

There's two things I want to pick up on here.

Coming directly off of that, Sylvie in the doc, you wrote:

the movie still works knowing the twist, how knowing the movie still works, knowing the twist versus how easy it is to flub that.

And I think that's totally right.

I think, of course, I knew the twist going in, and I really, really liked the movie.

But I also, the whole time, it was like, it's hard to imagine

with the sheer volume of clues,

it's hard to imagine not picking up on it.

And I know that that is,

you know, I'm just confirming the thing that I already knew.

Like, I already knew it, so I can see all of the clues, but there's so much stuff.

And I really want to know about the experience of people first having seen this movie from the three of you to listeners of like,

you know, his last name.

First of all, his last name is Seer.

Yeah.

um i mean i saw this movie without knowing what the twist was yeah

i knew there was a twist right and i can tell you the exact moment i figured out what it was but it's way later than here okay um the other thing was like how weird it is to me that the psych the psychologist is like with him at school with him at home not talking to anybody else follows him to church like not do their movies are in a life that what's that movies are like that

It's not weird that you don't see all the connective

threads because

it's a cliche that no one ever says goodbye on a phone call in a movie.

They just hang up the phone.

And it's like because

movies need to

get on with it that it's not that weird that you never have like, oh, there's never a scene where

Lynn introduces Malcolm to Cole because, like, that doesn't do anything for the audience.

Unless it would.

You know, you could make the scene do something for the audience, but like, you don't, you don't need the scene.

And so the fact that it's not there doesn't feel that.

It's not as much like, oh, you know, they never, Lynn never talks to Cole about therapy,

although that's like a little, there's a, that's a piece of it.

And it's not just that they never are in a psychiatrist's office, although that's also a piece of it, but it's, it's like, it's so conspicuous watching it with the foreknowledge that Malcolm never talks to anyone

ever.

There's a couple little tricks where they trick you into thinking that someone's talking to them.

Yeah, and I think that's the significant part of that because those tricks work the opposite way if you don't know.

Like when you, when you, when you've, when the scene opens on Malcolm sitting in Cole's house, he's deliberately

in a chair that's across from another chair.

And we know that Lynn is in the house.

So there's

this sort of,

oh, just like that.

She's literally sitting right across the house.

There's this sort of like assumption that, like, they were talking about Cole, and then Cole comes in and she removes herself from the situation so they can talk to each other.

And she even tells him, hey, you know, they do the little bit of like pretending that they each had a much better day than they actually had.

Such a sad scene.

So sad.

Oh, my God.

Especially because hers hers is like really wild and his is just like, I was good at kickball today.

It's like everyone's like,

I mean, it's, it's getting to like the emotional reality of like what they want and like the like,

you know, the, the, the sort of like theme around

his relationship with his mother being like,

I don't want her to think that I am strange, so I have to hide myself from her.

Yeah.

But like, the, you know, the, the like,

I don't think that it's wild to be like, the dream that I had today was being free from financial burden in the same way that I don't think that it's wild for his to be like, I was accepted by my peers.

It's like, just such like a, these are these characters.

These are the perspectives that you have to know them in, but it's just like, and her favorite movie.

No, I'm just saying this.

His is sadder.

His is sadder.

His, yeah, hers is a, is a, her audience is a child who she wants to be silly and fun for.

And his audience is his mom, who he likes, he has such a limited worldview.

And he's like, Yeah, the best thing that I can think of is like not being bullied at school and having people like me.

His school, by the way, Saint Anthony's Academy.

Of course, he goes to a Catholic school, patron saint of lost things, including lost souls.

Oh, I put in the chat because it sort of sounded like what Keith was saying.

It's something my wife sent me this week after we watched the movie, and it's a Nate Brighetzi talking about the sixth sense and the twist and and what it's like.

Interesting.

You know,

we probably can't and shouldn't put it in the episode, but I think, you know, it's especially worth it for Keith to.

Should we watch it now and then talk about it?

I don't think we need to, but I think it's funny and interesting.

So I guess, yes.

Or we can watch it.

It's relevant.

Yeah, it's relevant.

Let's watch it now.

It's a TikTok.

It can't be that long.

Yeah, it's a minute and a half.

All right, let's do a 3-2-1.

All right.

Three, two,

one.

That's what it was like.

Yeah.

I mean,

again, that is a big part of it.

It gets shot right at the beginning.

And we do, we live, we live in a post-Shyamalan world.

I know movie twists existed before M.

Night Shyamalan,

and that M.

Night Shyamalan movies without twists exist, I assume.

I don't know about that.

Maybe I haven't seen The Last Airbinder, but

yeah, the Twist was it was supposed to be a good movie.

Well, then they blew that way early.

Yeah,

um, uh, the

but yes, him, he gets he gets shot.

He doesn't have to, they, but they do, they, they have all of these really great moments.

Like, cause I'm watching it and I'm like, oh, that works.

Like, when, when they're, the reason I brought up her having the conversation where they're like, I ate the chocolate mousse and I quit my jobs because I won the lottery or whatever, whatever, is because it ends with her saying, like, I'll make you triangle pancakes.

You have an hour and that doesn't all that that means is i'll be ready to give you pancakes in an hour but what it feels like is obviously you're about to have one hour's worth of therapy um yeah i mean it's also weird uh i've made pancakes before it doesn't take an hour i think she probably she had some other stuff to do

no

you she's really got to make sure they're equilateral

yeah it takes a lot of mathematics she only she doesn't have a scale and she only has a quarter teaspoon.

So she's got to do...

She's got to do that.

That's how you know that they're in financial trouble.

Yeah, she'll do like hundreds of little quarter teaspoons to make enough batter.

But yeah, I think all of these things like that try to keep you from feeling like maybe Bruce Willis is a ghost.

I also just think I'm the kind of watcher who, when I'm having fun with a movie,

I'm in my head, I'm like, maybe this is happening.

Maybe this is is what's going on.

Maybe the, like, I, like, Sylvie knows from us playing 999 and VLR, like there's,

I, it feels honest.

I know that it also feels like a brag or like, uh,

like, I'm smarter than movie watchers thing, but I feel like just even by accident, I would have hit on he's dead.

He's a ghost.

Um, it's hard.

I, I, I did figure it out while watching it, but I always thought it was cheating because I knew there was a twist.

And so, like, right, there's a moment in the third act where I'm like, okay, we're getting toward the end here.

What does the twist have to be?

And I just like sort of write it down.

It's like, oh, wait, he's never talked to anyone.

He's a dead.

There's even a great lampshade moment where

Malcolm is telling him a bedtime story.

And he's like, there's got to be a twist.

It's so funny.

It's really funny.

But I don't know that you can count this because everyone knows the twist.

And even if you didn't know the twist, everyone knew there was a twist.

Of course, it's totally unfalsifiable.

Yeah,

it's.

I was 12.

I was a target about confusing people.

I was watching it and I was like, all right, what were you?

14

or something?

Yeah, 14 or 15.

What week did this come out?

Let's get really granular on it.

Yeah,

this was the summer after I turned 15, yes.

Okay.

Oh, great movie watching time.

That is a great movie watching time.

I watched some of my favorite movies that summer.

It's like how the last movie I saw before 9-11 was Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Wow.

Wow.

That was,

if nothing else, a pre-9-11 movie.

Yeah, it sure is.

Okay, so one thing that we missed that's kind of important, he has his friend Tommy Tomasino who walks him to school because his mom said, somehow made a deal with Tommy's mom that he has to walk him to school.

Yeah.

Tommy pretends to be his friend because he's like, like, narcissistically obsessed with being a good actor because he was in a cough syrup commercial.

It's so funny.

I think his mom was also making school dance though.

Because I knew kids like this.

Like.

You knew kids that were in cough syrup commercials?

No, I knew kids that were extras in Degrassi and it gave them

an inflated sense of ego.

That's funny.

I went to high school with a lot of people that were on degrassi.

That's really funny.

Yeah.

And And they were pricks.

Yeah, I bet.

I believe.

Good show, but I believe.

I don't know anyone who is on Degrassi who isn't a prick.

Yeah, me neither.

I don't know.

That guy in the wheelchair seemed nice.

Now somebody can do this in really quick.

That's the

person saying that is also the person that didn't know the twist of this movie.

But also, like, the

being an ostracized kid whose mom tries to make like play dates or like things like walking to school together happen so you can make a friend is like

so real to me.

That shit's visceral.

That, that and the awkward getting to know your child psychologist, those are, those things gave me flashbacks.

Yeah, shout out to Dr.

Robinson.

I went to too many to remember their names.

Uh, this is just my first one when I was five.

Okay.

Um,

because he, he, he worked so close to Cunningham Elementary School.

Okay.

This is a this is a great

bit here.

This is exactly what we were just talking about.

Oh, there was one other thing that I wanted to mention, Allie, because the first one of these happened.

And I didn't know about this.

You wrote in the notes here in the dock the iconic M-Night long camera shot.

I don't, I didn't know about this.

I didn't know that that was a thing about him.

Yeah, I think.

think the the the the first shot through their house is one of these like long unbroken moving cameras

and i think that you know there he spends a lot of time on single shots as well like the

the movement between malcolm and cole's face when they're meeting in the house and having this sort of since we haven't explained the the scene fully um

sensing cole's reluctance still, because this is their only second conversation, Malcolm makes this sort of deal with him that's like,

from where you're standing, which is at the entrance of the room,

I'm going to say things out loud.

And if I'm right, you can come closer and we can sit down and we can have a longer talk.

And if I'm wrong, you can move away from me and you can leave and we don't have to do this.

And he goes through things like

you're afraid to talk to me because you know that your mom went to therapy.

Your dad gave you your watch.

You're a good kid in school.

And Malcolm's sort of moving back and forth.

But yeah, the sort of length that it spends on each of the characters,

I feel like this sort of,

you know, focus on a particular item is, or like in a particular shot, is something that we're going to see kind of develop through M-Night's career as we continue it.

Something notable, I think, about Hollywood is how

shrunk the average shot length in a movie has become.

In the last hundred years, we've lost like

nine seconds on the average length of

a single shot for a movie.

Which is wild to think about.

Like the average length of a shot in the movie in like the 20s and 30s was like in the like 10 to 15 seconds, and now it's under three.

Yeah, and some of the um

I was just reading through M-Night's stuff in preparation for this, and I think I was actually reading a review for

Lady in the Water,

But somebody called out this sort of like

this focus of cinematography, and that like the average length for his scenes at that point were 12 seconds when he's like doing this sort of like really

granular, like,

this is all I want you to look at.

I think, you know, Hailey Joel Osmond's face in the I See Dead People scene is also a part of this.

Yeah.

I think some of the scenes

like

when

are you using shot when you mean scene?

Are you saying scene shot?

I mean shot when I'm saying scene.

Well said that's not I've seen Lady of the Water.

That's not true.

Yes, I do mean single shot.

I do mean in terms of like how long the camera wants to look at something, wants to spend on something is really good.

I do think like what's more significant in this movie is the way that the camera moves.

You mentioned it a little before with the

wine cellar scene.

I think the you know the scene of him meeting his wife in the

Italian restaurant and having the camera sort of move with the waiter as

it goes from Malcolm back to his wife.

And it's because he's sort of like having this monologue to her and she comes back into the scene with the movement in the

comes back into the shot shot with the movement of you know people in the restaurant sort of breaking the bubble that he assumes that they're in um

so yeah it's a good movie there's this interesting and i'm not an expert on cinematography or anything but there's this kind of blending of what looks to me like a clearly post um it's hard to not be

um

uh Spielberg.

There we go.

Jesus Christ.

It's hard to not be post-Spielberg when you're post-Spielberg, but there's like, there's very like, you know, a still camera that's sort of tracking people as they move,

sort of interesting framings of it, like very, very Spielberg cameras mixed with this sort of tense kind of thriller, like claustrophobic movement thing, mixed with these very long, still shots that to me look like an older Hollywood kind of thing.

uh that make this movie feel like it's like

um

got multiple different ways of showing you scenes like that it can pull from where whenever it wants to, which is really nice.

It's a very dynamic movie, um, in that it's shooting things in different ways at different times.

Uh, you were talking about the um

the dinner scene, Allie.

Uh, this is one of those moments that to me was like a really, really good and clever and subtle way of keeping you

within the reality that Malcolm is alive.

When he shows up late

and

he makes the joke, he's like, I thought you meant the other restaurant that I asked you to marry me in, which is a funny joke.

But it's also like, I don't believe him that he's that thoughtless.

But he's talking about like, yeah, I just can't

seem to keep track of times and I have this case.

It's just like not looking at him or acknowledging him at all.

And it's like, it is getting to the point where it it it's breaking sense it doesn't it's starting to not make sense that she's just ignoring him that hard uh but she's signing the check they drag the waiter drops the check he goes to reach for it she seemingly snatches it from him um

And while he's saying something, someone behind him laughs loudly and she looks up.

She looks like she's looking right at him for the first time.

But it's, it's because someone had made a loud noise back there, and I thought that was great.

Uh, and then she says, happy anniversary and gets him and leaves, which is again, like, she's not talking to him, but it's conceivable that she is.

I like that.

It would be such a messed up thing to say.

Yeah, to say happy anniversary to someone and then just walk out like,

well,

he missed their anniversary dinner to go be with this kid.

You just got shot, man.

Come to dinner with me.

weren't we just talking about how you do that too much yeah you put me number two yada yada it's true it's totally true

yeah they do a really good job of just that's the thing is like at the same time as they do a really good job of keeping you not guessing that he but there's so much stuff like i find it to be very rewarding to see all of the ways that it's so obvious that he's a ghost.

Like, this is a re-watchable movie with a twist, which is tough.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, like, the

that he's almost like monologuing to her as he's explaining why he's, he's so dedicated to this kid as a way of

completely concealing the audience from being like,

well, why isn't she responding?

She's giving them nothing.

Nothing.

Yeah.

It's brutal.

Yeah.

That's the other thing.

The re-watching of this movie and just like

realizing how much of the time is being spent on

what is actually her grief.

Yeah.

What is actually a life that she is trying to live post the death of her husband of

still

having dinner at the place that they would have dinner at their anniversary, like, you know, constantly watching their wedding film, you know, turning down advances from an honest-loving guy.

Turning them down, and then sort of an employee.

Yeah.

Let's be

a guy does work for her.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I, I was one of the things I told Jessica when we were watching this movie that if I get murdered in our house, I want you to move.

And I want you to just like stay.

We don't have a wedding video, but I want you to like stay here just wallowing.

It's true.

It is one of the things I like about the movie is how

they

show early on that

Anna Crow is sensitive to

this kind of thing.

She can't see ghosts, but she can feel them.

She thinks the look on her face when

Vincent Gray says, I know why you're scared when you're alone.

Like she

recognizes that.

that there's truth in there.

There is a reason why we're scared when we're alone.

And then when she's talking about her antiques and she's like, when people die,

they leave their

imprint on their items and they have a story.

Like she can feel this stuff.

And I think that Malcolm being unable to move on is like almost like a psychic tether for her.

Like she can feel that he's still there, which is why she can't move on.

That is not my interpretation of that scene.

I thought she was lying to sell an expensive ring to someone who obviously couldn't afford it.

It's so weird.

It's such a weird vibe, though.

Like to have this wedding ring and have your fake story not be like, oh, I think the person who owned this ring was really happy and in love.

And instead, I think that this

ring defines yearning, like the assumption that it was from this person with an unrequited,

un whatever.

Unrequited.

Yes.

An unreciprocated love for this fucking couple who's about to get married and is already having weird vibes.

It's just like they're doomed, and this is the best joke in the whole movie, by the way.

Which is like,

does he have like curly hair?

Does he have wavy hair and whatever?

Like, she has, she's thinking of a guy.

She knows who the

longing is

for.

It's just, it's such a bizarre sales pitch that it's like so funny out of the context of what this movie is about.

Yeah, I, I, I think it's both.

I think that, like, I think that she believes this stuff,

even if conveniently also having these little pitches pitches is a good way to sell antiques.

Yeah,

sure.

And maybe it's true.

Maybe she can feel.

I think she could probably pick up on some of that latent psychic energy in there.

I got some rings to sell you.

Sick.

I love rings.

Tell me who died in them.

But

famous people.

Oh, awesome.

Elvis?

Do you have an Elvis?

I do.

Nice.

If you want more of Keith enjoying rings, listen to Friends of the Table Season Partisan.

We're at the scene that I think marks the turning point between...

Oh, did we talk enough about

Malcolm's psychic guessing game?

We talked a little bit about it.

But we mostly just talked about it in the context of concealing the

uh

like the twist twist yeah like we talked a little bit but that's a he does like a psychological profile this is like one of the things where it's sort of like the film is kind of leery of psychology where you know malcolm is head shrinking cole being like i can reduce you to the profile of a troubled kid

Oh, that's not how I read that scene at all, really?

Yeah.

We're really far apart on this one.

Yeah.

Tell me what you thought about it.

I think he's doing good work.

He's just, he's wrong because he doesn't know that he sees ghosts.

Well, I agree.

He is doing.

Well, I think he's doing someone else's version of good work.

Like,

if this was a movie where psychology was

sufficient to explain the problems of kids,

then it would be some good work.

He starts to gain a little trust by like getting some things right.

But I think that there's like this kind of presumption of

the medical industry that it can like fit you into a box, especially a kid.

Like I can reduce a kid to a profile of a kid.

Even though I think, and I think they're both true.

I think like he is doing good work, but also it's good work that the movie is not sure is good work if that makes sense

yeah i i think i ended up kind of in the middle here because i found myself wondering while i was watching this scene of like

as

uh cole is moving away

is he

deliberately

saying untruths because it is a way to get

Cole to open up because in each sort of round, I guess you can say of their game,

Cole is saying more about himself than he has.

Yeah, you know, I mean, this is the second time talking, but still, he's he's he's at least engaging in a way that he's not just saying yes or no.

He's giving more than was required to him by the rules of the game, where when Malcolm was wrong, he tells him why he was wrong.

Sure, and this is sort of, oh, sorry, no, you go on.

I bet he's used that before and it and it's worked, you know?

Totally could be, Yeah.

I really love this line when he says,

he talks about, Malcolm is like, you're a good student, you know, you're quiet, but you don't get into any real trouble.

And he takes a step back and he says, he talks about,

like, I made a drawing.

What was it of?

like a man using a screwdriver to hurt another man or something like that used a screwdriver

and they everyone got upset and they had a meeting.

And I don't draw like that anymore.

I says, how do you draw?

This is one of my favorite lines of the movie.

He says, well, how do you draw?

He says, I draw people smiling, dogs running, and rainbows.

They don't have meetings about rainbows.

I really like that.

It rules.

And then later you see his drawing.

You see his drawings of the happy stuff.

Yeah.

Every single one's got rainbows.

I think in that scene, it's also the one where he's wearing pajamas that have like dogs on them.

Which is really funny.

And I think that this is one of those scenes of like, Al, you talked about like kids seeing more than adults or at least seeing more than adults expect them to see.

And I think this is like a very real thing of

a troubled kid who knows, who's smart enough to know how to not seem that troubled.

Yeah,

I, yeah, I think the reason why I ended up questioning, you know, is this another deceit of the film?

Is because I was sort of wondering, like,

is there a perspective that you can have of the scene where Malcolm knows about the trouble that he's had in school?

You're sort of assuming that his mother is involved in this process, that he would have access to this information.

And by,

you know, making this assumption about Cole to him that Cole can correct on, because you're seeing that he's this sort of kid who's intelligent and closed off, but, you know,

wants to appear smart and interesting.

And, you know, that like maybe the sort of like, oh, you're just a good student.

You haven't gotten in any trouble.

And, you know, the sort of like, no, that's not true.

The defensiveness that Cole can have there, like, is that, is there a way of viewing this movie if you haven't?

seen the twist of being like, oh, that, you know, that's, he's, he's working him, you know what I mean?

Right.

That I thought was kind of interesting.

I do think, like, the, you know,

in terms of like vulnerability, the, the way that he gets things wrong and the, the sort of, you know, the first thing that makes Cole step back is this thing of like, your dad gave you that watch, didn't you?

And instead, the response is, no, I took it.

Like, this sort of like, yeah, he found it in a drawer.

He left that in a drawer.

I wouldn't call that.

Or yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, this sort of like assumption of warmth that Malcolm is making that isn't there is, i thought was you know significant in a screenwriting perspective yeah there's definitely a way where you know seeing this movie for the first time like you would have heard more malcolm would have heard more about cole by talking extensively with his mother and maybe with the school and that we can assume that he has that knowledge even though now we know that he wouldn't because he doesn't he can't talk to those people.

But this is the scene, the next scene with the two of them is like where their relationship, I think, kind of starts to turn for a very funny reason.

They're walking on the street.

He tells them that he doesn't,

Cole tells Malcolm he doesn't tell his mom things because she doesn't look at him like he's a freak like everyone else does.

And then Malcolm is like, don't think like that.

That's bullshit.

And it seems to me Cole really liked that he swore in front of him.

He's like, you said the S word.

I think that's one of the reasons why the performance works so well is because he flipped between being the like really troubled broody kid to just being a wide-eyed nine-year-old in one scene and like

that in a lot of scenes.

And that one's maybe my favorite of them.

Which is realistic.

Yeah, it feels very authentic.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

How else are you supposed to live if sometimes you have to go to school, sometimes you have to hang out with your mom and sometimes you have to escape the demons that haunt your house?

Don't talk about Tommy Tomasino like that.

I don't think he's going to the house.

This is, I think, an interesting thing that, like, that not a lot is done with, but is really important to the end of the movie where Lynn is cleaning the house and is like cleaning the pictures and

notices that in all of the pictures of Cole, there's like little glints of light that are like behind him or near him.

And he's looking away.

Yeah, looking away.

He's never looking.

He's never looking.

His eyeliner's always off.

He's looking at the glints.

Yeah, I really like that.

And then

we cut to the most sort of conventional therapy that happens maybe in the movie where Malcolm is getting called to

talk about free association, you know, finding ways to express yourself if you don't feel comfortable speaking directly, saying like, and maybe you would even get caught on purpose.

And while this is happening, there's a montage montage of Lynn still cleaning, headphones in so she can't hear her kid talking to nobody.

Cleaning the house, turning up, they keep turning up the heat because it keeps getting cold.

And she finds his

writing that starts as like a journal about his

feeling lonely because his dad is gone and becomes like demonic writing, like exorcist writing

about like killing babies and starting fires.

Cole Culsey's upset words.

Yeah,

deeply creepy scene.

Very creepy scene.

What do we think?

I love that the variety of stuff being written down on the page.

I love that some of it's like, oh, I had it written down.

Some of it's in the brain.

Some of it's about like a witch being burned.

Yeah.

And I want to know why he does this.

Where does this come from?

Because like the rules of the of the

of the of how the ghosts work, it doesn't seem like they can compel him to do this.

Christ, break the freaking glass.

Oh, no, God, no, what the hell is going on?

Quiet the damn baby.

I'll call, I'll cut you, I swear.

I'll cut you.

I swear.

Someone.

He's telling you.

It's free associate.

He's telling you the thing that he's doing.

The dialogue in the scene is telling you what's happening.

No, I totally, totally.

I 100% agree that

Malcolm is saying, is talking about free associating because Malcolm is seeing these letters and is like, you left these on your table so that your mom would find them.

And he's like, you'll start writing words you didn't even know you had in you.

So I guess he's channeling the ghosts.

I think what he's doing is transcription.

The first, you know, the first hints that we get of his

sixth sense.

Wow.

I think another therapist asked him to do this free association writing.

You think so?

Well, sure.

I mean, that's what I think is happening in this.

You know, the thing of like, quiet the baby, I'll cut you.

And then the ghost haunting his house is a wife who is having a fight.

with her presumed husband and being like, you can't hurt me anymore.

And she is cut is sort of this like, you know, and you know, that, what I was saying, that the, the, his sixth sense is we first get it through these words of the ghost, and then we get it through him hearing the ghost.

And then it's, you know, half an hour later, and we see a ghost for the first time.

Yeah.

Like this sort of slow burn of like having those, that perspective actually come into the film, the sort of like perception of these other, this other presence

that this is the start of the slow burn.

And it's like these other words spoken by another person is very successful.

Yeah.

I just think like

it is super creepy.

I just think like, like, it

he stops in the middle of his normal journaling to say like this ghost stuff.

The only thing I'm wondering is like, why or how that happens.

That's the that and I and I think really the answer is to produce the shot of the creepy pages.

like the, I think the answer is like it's a practical way to get something creepy that we can show that he's like, that something is wrong with Cole or happening to him.

Yeah.

And I think it's another thing of like how these experiences are sitting with him.

Like as an, you know, I said before that this is sort of like the first voice that you hear of this ghost, but really the first time that happens is when Cole is directly quoting Latin in the first scene.

Right.

So it's this even like slower burn of like actually being able to hear and experience these things through him, where like he is sitting with this

all of the time.

And whether it's like I was just journaling and I started hearing these things and I started writing down what I was hearing, or I was just journaling and it's free association.

My hand is just moving and it's obviously going to these like these horrific things that are stuck in my mind because I feel like I can't tell anyone about it and I don't know what to do about this.

Yeah.

Is

I think how you kind of get from A to B there and sort of imagine with the practical sense of what that happens allie while you were while you were saying that i think really the the the thing that clicked with me is how many sort of like ghost hunting techniques this movie goes through like later on we see um malcolm hearing a ghost in the tape hiss yeah of a thing like that is like classic ghost hunting stuff and it it it's it occurred to me like they're trying to show automatic writing this is like he's doing spirit writing by mistake uh like and and the reason it doesn't fit with how it seems like the ghost the ghosts work normally for him is because they're just like trying to get like ghost hunting show different ghost hunting techniques happening kind of by accident wait i also don't i also disagree with this interpretation of this scene okay i think he's hearing the kid talk to the ghosts

wait which kid he's he that's a tape of him talking to donnie Wahlberg.

Oh, no.

So to me, so Vincent Gray,

he's recording his conversation with Vincent Gray.

He

leaves the room.

And then

when he's listening back to the tape, he hears something.

So he turns the volume up.

And in the very background of that tape, he can hear a ghost speaking in Spanish, saying, I don't want to die.

Why is this happening to me?

No,

I think he's hearing Vincent like Cole speaking in a language he doesn't know.

Oh, no, I think that that's a ghost.

That's a ghost.

That's a ghost voices.

Yeah.

Because I remember listening to that scene and thinking

they have Haley Joel Osman

be the voice of Vincent in this scene because it's such a young voice and it sort of feels really familiar when you hear it the first time.

And the

Spanish speaking is,

you know sounds adult it sounds accented it sounds like somebody not stumbling through Spanish it feels like it's somebody having their

oh sure yeah there's a credit Spanish ghost on tape it's also um the other thing is uh uh Vincent is audible speaking at like two on the volume slider and he has to turn it up to 10 in order to hear the ghost at all and uh but the ghost sounds like he's talking at full volume which is like, to me, that's well, I mean, Keith, if I were talking to you, I would speak at a different volume than if I were whispering to all the ghosts in this room.

But he wasn't whispering.

The ghost was talking.

It was like, like, it sounded like the ghost was really, really far away, but speaking at a normal, like it wasn't a, it wasn't ghost whispers, it was ghost dialogue.

Right.

And the fact that you like, that scene is so good because it's

when he repeats it, and then when he finally gets to putting it on full volume, the like, what Keith was saying about the, the sort of like associating it with ghost hunting, the immediate like dead air and like crackle of like these, you know, room noise that is going to be in and out of this podcast and just exists on recordings everywhere, you know, the like this sort of like suddenly the room is filled with this other atmosphere because

you're having a ghostly experience is, I think, really good.

And that, you know, it sort of supports that like

this voice is happening behind everything else.

I think it is.

I have the end of this little session here on an audio clip.

I don't remember exactly where it starts.

So, if I if I repeat what the clip is saying, then I'll just edit it out.

But

Malcolm wants to know what Cole wants to get out of therapy, which is a very therapist thing to say, I think.

Be like, why don't you think about what your goals are for our sessions?

Can you do something for me?

I want you to think about what you want to get out of our time together.

What our goals should be.

Something I want?

If you could change something in your life, anything at all, what would it be?

Instead of something I want, can it be something I don't want?

Okay.

I don't want to be scared anymore.

This poor kid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I

this is another section where I think it works really well with like what Malcolm is thinking versus what we what we now know Cole is thinking.

Like Malcolm thinks that this kid is being abused.

And so he's like,

can I wish for something to stop happening?

And he's, and then that makes perfect sense to Malcolm.

Meanwhile, Cole is like, can i stop seeing ghosts is that

um

and then uh who wants to talk about the amish guy

the amish liking guy the amish knowing guy

yeah what a weird way to describe this character i just for the oh for the majority of the movie the only way i know him is the guy who goes to the um to where the amish are

Because he does that once?

Well, it's the only thing he does.

It's the only thing he does until he carries a table.

If the first thing he did was carry a table, I'd call him the table-carrying guy.

And you can assume in that scene that's an Amish table because of prior information.

Right, I thought so at least totally.

Totally.

Oh, my Allie.

It is an Amish table.

Of course.

Didn't even occur to me that was an Amish table.

No, it's an antique.

Amish have antique table.

People don't have antiques.

I don't know.

Are Amish antique dealers?

Okay,

I'll be the one to explain the scene to give some context here.

Because

what we see is somebody come to Malcolm's house while Malcolm is presumably in the basement studying, but there's some weirdness about the basement.

He's maybe he's an office somewhere else that isn't that cellar.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think he's a city.

Yeah, we see him constantly trying to access that place and he's unable to.

And then he's also mysteriously in a basement.

And I think that that's weird, but maybe they have a second basement.

Anyway, so we.

yeah, they have a basement and a wine cellar.

That might be true because his office has like a window and it feels like it's a lower floor of them.

That's not a wine cellar.

Where their living room is, but I mean,

it's a beautiful Philadelphia Brownstone.

So who knows?

It's a beautiful home.

It is a beautiful home.

So somebody comes to the door who's obviously familiar with Malcolm's wife, whose name, Anna.

Anna.

And he's like sort of inviting her out.

He's saying, I'm going to the Amish country.

Do you want to come with me?

I'm going to get furniture.

You can come together.

And she's like, no, that's okay.

I'll just see it on Monday.

Which sort of supports the idea that what he is doing is going to Amish Country to buy things for them to sell at their store.

And he,

you know, the thing that he says directly to her in the scene is, you know,

are you sure you don't want to come?

You've just seemed sort of down lately.

and she's like, No, no, it's okay.

And then he makes this other attempt to check in on her, which is like, Hey, when I come back, I can stop by here and show you what I got.

So you don't have to go do the thing, but you still won't be alone tonight.

Um,

and she still refuses, and you know, whatever happens.

Um, and then the scene shifts to Malcolm's perspective of seeing this person walk away from the doorstep and being like,

I got it, I got it.

Don't worry, yeah, I have it.

Keep moving, cheese dick,

Keep moving, cheese, dick.

You've been a little down lately is a wild way to describe someone who's still sad that their husband died.

It's been a whole year.

Get over it.

Maybe, um, maybe

the Malcolm apparition

has been more active since he took on the Cole case, and it's been psychically draining recent more so recently.

I also think what's significant here is that it is the month/slash week of their anniversary.

Yeah, so this sort of like

this idea of like, oh my God, she's obsessed about the past, but like, really, this is the moment in her life.

This is the first anniversary that she's had without her husband.

So, of course, she's revisiting their wedding over and over again is like,

again, a really good concealment about what the emotional truth of what's happening to her is.

Right.

Counterpoint, get over it, lady.

No matter how sad you are,

it's not going to help.

That's what Ebnite Chamalon says.

Yeah.

I don't think that is what Ebnai Chamalon is saying.

We'll find out later what he's saying.

He says some words in this movie.

Yes.

I also don't think that represents his opinion.

I agree.

I'm going to self-insert so that I can speak the truth of my film, which is that this kid didn't have a seizure.

This kid didn't have a seizure and is being abused.

Audience, please remember this because M.

Night Shamelon and who he casts at himself in his movies that he constantly shows up in, I think is a significant thing

that we will keep hitting on.

Yeah, he's in most of them.

Yeah.

And what he

decides to be

becomes increasingly significant significant and interesting.

He starts off as a doctor, so he's doing pretty well.

Yeah.

It's the same guy in all of them.

So we need to keep that.

That would be very funny if there is

the M.

Night Shyamalan verse

where

the main thread connecting them all is that M.

Night Shyamalan plays the same doctor.

Yeah.

Who was talking about this history class?

I found this to be a very fun scene.

Sure.

I can take it if you you don't.

I'll go ahead.

No, I can take it.

I feel like I've been

hold on, I hit my desk to stand up and now it's making a lot of noise in the background to me talking.

That's okay.

But I feel like I've been not doing enough scene description.

So yeah, Cole is in history class.

We've touched on this already where he's like, does anyone know what this building was?

And Cole's like, they hang people here.

And he's like, no, it was a courthouse.

They wrote laws.

And,

and uh you know he and he they have this back and forth about the hanging and then he's like did one of these kids tell you that and he's like don't look at me cole tells him in this you know very

cole gets to a 10 very quickly in this scene

this is where

they're they're like totally showing why everyone thinks he has a mood disorder yeah uh-huh

Because ghost or no ghost,

he is taking this up to a high level very quickly.

Yeah, he's like, don't look at me like that.

People don't like it when you look at them.

And I want to know what this is from.

They never really fully say

what part of Cole is reacting this way to this teacher.

He seems very sensitive about being perceived as a freak.

So this might be actual psychology that's happening.

This could be because the school also happens to be filled with a lot of really violent

and angry spirits.

So it maybe it's just like evil psychic energy.

Sure.

I mean, if you had to hang out in your grade school for the rest of eternity, you'd be really mad too.

Yeah, totally.

Oh, God.

Yeah, it's funny because the sort of like, don't look at me like that thing is repeated again in the film.

And this isn't even the first scene that it shows up in.

The first time he says it is when he's walking with Malcolm down the street.

And it's before they're even present in the scene.

The camera is on Philadelphia, like it's on just the street, and you don't even really see their bodies moving on it.

And that's when Malcolm first says,

Don't look at me like that.

I don't like when people look at me like that.

You know, people look at me like I'm a freak.

Yeah, yeah, that's all.

So, like, the, you know, the sort of

it's hard to describe what sets Cole off in the scene, but it is the teacher giving this sort of half-hearted,

you know, half-dismissive and half sympathetic, but in a non-genuine way of being like, you were just lied to about this thing and you should stop saying that.

The sort of like little smirk that he gives Malcolm that's this kind of like, I do not want you to feel bad for me.

I don't want you to be treating me as other,

you know.

is an extreme reaction.

It sure is.

But the sort of like, I think, the whole class is looking at him him now.

Like, it's not just

like one of the things that happens when you tell people not to look at you is that people who are around will look at you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, if the, the, like, God, there's like the kid like doing the Bart Simpson thing of like writing I will not, whatever, whatever on the class board over and over again.

It's so funny.

And then Malcolm just like interrupting this lecture by being like, people were hung here, and there's literal like a record scratch from the chalk squeaking against the board is so funny he does the comedy like when he's in the middle of writing and now there's a line down because he got distracted and looked away

although again the child is cole and bruce willis is malcolm oh sure sure sure yeah

details whatever what i also think about this scene is it it

once again is kind of like making you warm up to i mean i don't think at this point i think at this point it's already pretty solid but um

it makes the relationship between cole and malcolm feel a bit big better in comparison because he talks to him like a person while his teacher talks to him like a

like a little kid basically which he is a kid to be clear sure but then he destroys the teacher he does psychologically ruin the teacher you know what though but it was kind of funny yeah and i think they put the teacher in fisheye too i think i think you know it's really difficult to be a teacher and have like a kid lying and disrupting your class but you can't call that kid a freak.

Yeah, like you just can't.

You can't.

Dr.

Wilson from House, you can't do that.

Especially because we know this guy was called a freak.

Yeah, man.

How do you know?

How do you, who do you think is the ghost that tells Cole

that this guy used to be called Stuttering Stanley?

I thought it was the lady that we see him talking to at the end in the dressroom.

The fire, the one who burned it.

He talks about there was a fire here when I went here.

When I was a kid.

Yeah.

So she was his teacher.

Yeah.

Or whoever.

I guess.

Or whoever.

Yeah.

Someone who was at the school, either someone who worked there or a parent of another kid.

Yeah.

The school does a lot of plays, huh?

The school does so many plays.

They do two plays in the span of like...

It can't be more than a month, right?

You got a talent like Tommy Tomasino on your

school.

You got to make sure you're nurturing that yeah either this school does a truly

like infathom amount of unfathomable amount of plays or this movie takes place under a way longer time period than you would reasonably assume based on yeah everything else that happens the cadence it makes it feel like they have they do two plays a month is what it seems like I do like a bit of the obfuscating the timeline thing though because that's something that Cole says in a scene is that like

ghosts don't really have a sense of time the same way And with Bruce Willis being our perspective character, it like makes a lot of sense that we get jumbled up in that same way.

Or they do a lot of plays.

Or it's a dramatic school, you know?

Well, it's a Catholic school, so it is a dramatic school.

There's no drama in Catholic schools.

No, I'm saying the opposite.

I'm saying it's very dramatic.

Yeah.

Okay.

We've talked about this a little bit, but this is where Malcolm comes home and finds their wedding party video playing on the TV.

This is where he sees the, he dramatically finds the Zoloft bottle.

Yes.

Take with food or milk.

Take with food or take milk in there.

Actually, wait, the milk thing really threw me off.

The 90s were weird.

I've heard that about medicine before.

I think it's because milk is so calorically dense and also has a lot of

it has fat, sugar, and protein in it that would be my guess yeah it's still just like a lot to me personally

um the wedding video is very sad it's obviously uh

you know it's a very sweet video of people who cared about um

these two as a couple

yeah yeah the the thing of like

um Anna told me that she fell in love with you the first day that she met you on the street and like her friend like crying because she's so happy for them is just like

man

what happened to this marriage man when did it fall apart and it's difficult because they both seem to be in love with each other

and like the entire time yeah the entire time like she's constantly watching these videos and crying like

um but he but he's he's you know as cole says you know the ghosts see what they want to see he like can't he can't put reality together like so he has to come up with the best possible explanation for why things are weird, which is that, like, well, she's in love with a version of me that doesn't exist anymore.

The one who didn't have his confidence shaken by you know messing up a kid who then killed himself.

Um,

this scene is uh, this scene is the most Stephen King scene to me.

Um, Cole at a kid's party, um,

sure,

oh god, yeah,

He had recently gotten in trouble for

wrecking his teacher.

And Malcolm does a joke magic trick for him.

Oh, I love this scene.

So the original one or the repeat of it?

Both of them.

Okay.

Both of them.

The original one is great because it's literally just the director being like, I'm doing this to you right the fuck now, but you're not as smart as this nine-year-old.

Well, I thought, maybe maybe I'm maybe I misread it.

I thought it was never supposed to be a magic trick.

It was supposed to be a joke.

Well, like, yeah, I think it's a, it's definitely supposed to be a joke.

Yeah, because he's like, because he says, it's in, he has a, he has it in his hand.

He says, and now it's in my pocket, but he never shows it in his pocket.

And then he opens it.

He's like, it's always in my hand.

And he was like, when do, when were you supposed to be funny?

Is what

the kid says.

It's a great line, but also, like, him being shot at the beginning is the coin in the hand that we don't see again, right?

Like, the coin's always in the hand because he's been dead the entire time.

Yes, and Cole even tries to show him the penny later, and he doesn't, he just kind of ignores it.

Um,

the but uh, but yeah, he's at this kid's party, and he's like trying to do the joke trick for one of the his classes.

For the chalkboard kid.

For the chalkboard kid, yeah, chalkboard kid.

MVP of the movie, yeah.

He goes all the way back to the hand it started in.

The kid's like, that's not funny.

It's like, okay, I want to feel bad for this kid, but it didn't work on him either.

Yeah.

Like, he also didn't really think it was funny at the time.

No, he thought it was funny.

Well, he

said, I didn't know you were funny.

He's acknowledging that he thought it was funny.

It felt kind of sarcastic to me, but he was depressed.

So it could have just been an honest acknowledgement without a humorless acknowledgement of humor,

yeah.

Uh,

he hears his mom uh not complaining about him, but being like, uh,

geez, my poor fucking kid can't make friends, it sucks.

He's always hiding away from

while he's hiding.

One of the things I really love about this scene is this like attempt to do a class signifier when it was like, we were at Chuck E.

Cheese.

And they're like, Chuck, what?

And it's like, I understand they're trying to say, like, oh, the the Sears are working class and these other Catholic school kids are rich yeah but I can't imagine existing in 1999 and owning a television and being unaware of Chuck E.

Cheese

yeah the Chuck E.

Cheese feels like kids don't know about class like that like kids want Chuck E.

Cheese.

It doesn't matter if they if their mom works two jobs or doesn't work.

Yeah, kids don't know that Chuck E.

Cheese is horrible

to be at.

Not saying things you can't take back.

I think that I could.

You've never been to a clean Chuck E.

Cheese, is what I'm saying.

That's true.

I bet I haven't had it in probably 18 years.

I bet I could pick out pepperoni Chuck E.

Cheese pizza out of a lineup of 10 pizzas.

Do you know what I mean?

What did those pizzas do to get in a lineup?

Whoa.

Various crimes, mostly burger.

Was this a weird COVID story that like Chuck E.

Cheese was delivering pizzas at some point?

Because I remember hearing about this in the last one.

I think that you're talking about the

ghost kitchens.

Chuck E.

Cheese.

Yeah.

Well, maybe.

Chuck E.

Cheese had

Pasquale's Pizza.

Pasqually's Pizza and Wings, which is like...

Because that's the name of the pizza chef.

Yeah, one of the gang.

It was like one of the first ghost kitchens where Chuck E.

Cheese wasn't delivering as Chuck E.

cheese but as pasquale's pizza and wings

it shut down oh it shut down this year as of march 30th pasquale's pizza and wings no longer exists

rip

strange it was found in 2020 due to the forced closure of all chuck e cheese locations brought by the covet 19 pandemic damn wow

I should have ordered Pasquale's Pizza and Wings while I had the chance.

Yeah, you should have.

And then eaten it blindfolded.

And then eat it blindfolded next to 10 other pizzas yeah

uh okay tell me about the crime that that tommy tomasino and his toady commit

well they just want to do a pretend play they want to do a pretend play so sylvie what is this pretend play uh and where do they find cole So, okay, I'll talk about what happens with Cole.

Um, while he's eavesdropping on his mom, uh, telling about the talking about the uh, the Chuck E.

Cheese incident, Um, he sees a balloon floating up the stairs, uh, and it sort of you

you know, you know, you said it was a Stephen King scene, and I realized it is kind of doing a little bit of an it play with the uh, the balloon, but um, up this like spiral staircase.

Uh, I really like how this is filmed, too.

I always love a good shot up or down a spiral staircase, and he goes up because he hears this voice coming from an old, like, I think it's a dumb waiter, um,

and it's,

I mean, pretty obviously, uh, like the voice of a slave who died talking about something because they mentioned, like, the, something about the master and stuff like that.

Uh, and it's very upset, like, it's a really upsetting vocal delivery.

Um,

and he's sort of entranced basically by it when Tommy and his toady uh see it, like see him up there.

Uh, they can tell he's afraid of something,

yeah.

And I think it's worth saying, like, how scary what is being said is.

It's like, open this door.

Please help me open this door.

And then it's like, if you don't open this door, I'm going to break through it and kill you.

Yeah.

It's pretty.

I would just like to point out that I don't think they make dumb waiters that go to the top of a staircase and otherwise doesn't go anywhere.

Yeah, it might be an attic.

Oh, maybe.

Yeah, I don't know.

I just assumed dumb waiter.

It was a really small door.

But yeah, they come up and they're like, hey, do you want to be in a pretend play?

And he's just happy to be invited to something.

And he's like, yeah, sure.

Yeah, I want to be in a pretend play.

And it's called locked in the dungeon.

So they throw him into the room and shut him in there and lock the door.

And then some amount of time later, people start.

noticing that there's a child screaming.

Yeah,

it's Lynn.

The only person who notices is his mother.

Well, there's a couple people who notice it and then ignore it.

But yeah, Lynn notices and runs upstairs.

And then Tommy and whatever the fuck that other kid is, they had just been standing there watching him scream the entire time.

This kid is clearly a psycho.

This is the Stephen King thing to me of like...

like there's a second evil in the book and it's like some random kid which is also very it um

uh the shitty child actor Yeah, like, like, like, you know, in Stephen King, like, evil is like almost like a, it is like a spiritual currency that people have.

And

some people just have so much evil that it like infects their whole life.

And every once in a while, there's just a kid who, for no reason, you know, random chance, proximity to some other evil, becomes a total monster kid.

And that is Tommy Tomasino.

Although, this, they don't lean super hard into it, but

he like faints in there, and

she gets him out eventually.

Or no, it opens up on its own.

I think the ghost unlocks it while he's fainted already.

Yeah,

they don't focus too much on

the how of that unlatching, but yeah.

Yeah,

and then they're in the hospital,

greeted by the man himself

and Matt Shamalon.

Crack goes wild.

It's funny.

I was surprised.

I recognized him right away.

I didn't know that I would recognize him right away.

But apparently, what M.

Night Shamalon looked like was in there the whole time in my brain.

This is where,

does anybody remember exactly what the doctor says about sort of accusing Lynn, who's very frustrated

to be accused of abuse?

Yeah, he starts the conversation by, you know, assuring her, like, he didn't have a seizure.

He's, you know,

he's okay.

He's just going to sleep overnight and it's going to be fine.

Fainted from pure fear, basically.

Basically.

And

there's this sort of beat.

And then he says,

you know, we found wounds on your son's body or

cuts and bruises, I think is the exact line.

And Tony Colette's face gets kind of of serious.

And

she's like, you know, those are from sports.

That's from playing.

And he's like,

you know,

there's this, I don't think he says something as firm as officer.

I think he says the woman's name, but he says, you know, there's this person here and she wants to speak to you.

And Tony Colette getting increasingly visibly upset is like, do you think that I hurt my child?

And I think here is also, you know, when she says something like, I just want to know what's going on with him or something like that.

Yeah.

That, yeah, I mean, you, you have a kid who's brought into the hospital for

extreme emotional reaction and he's cut some bruises on his body.

You know, that's the

that's what you do.

You call a cop about it.

Yeah, this is where I wrote, I don't know what these cuts on Malcolm are from, but they're clearly from a time before everyone knew what.

Oh, did I say Cole?

Did I say Malcolm?

sorry allie's infected allie is is spread do i keep it off yes

i am going back to actor's name uh you know actually i think uh i think that the right below where i said cole it said malcolm i think i just miss misaligned uh while i was reading uh this is obviously from a time before what everyone knew what self-harm cuts look like because they're in the exact right location for that and it really is what they look like and i was honestly, I was surprised when that ended up not being what they were.

Like, he says towards the end of the movie, like,

yeah, the ghosts were hurting me.

And I was like, really?

Is that really what it was?

That, I, and I wonder if maybe there was like a draft where that had changed

because of how

obvious it was.

Like, that's not what, where I would put cuts or make cuts look like if ghosts were hurting a kid.

Me, that's just me, though, right?

Yeah, I mean, I do think that the like

the reason it starts on his wrist is because it immediately introduces the question of, is this self-harm or something else?

Yeah, and then I, you know, the second sort of beat that we get of this through line is

the scratch that uh Lynn finds on Cole's body that is like obviously happened the night of the party because it's a

hole in the sweater that he was wearing and then like a mark in the undershirt and then like a

like a it's not like a bruise it's like a like a sore or something on his he like a scratch or something that's on his back that matches the the spots of both of those things where it's like yeah

there was a real physicality here that is able to touch you know fabric and right where he was like grabbed and hurt through his clothes.

Yeah.

Um, I also wrote here, this is like saying stuff that I have been, I've already talked about this, but like, this is where it all kind of boiled over for me.

Where

Malcolm is in the hospital room with him.

And I was like, why is Dr.

Malcolm here?

Why was he at the school?

Why does he keep having access to Cole wherever he is?

Like, this is the most on-call psychologist

of all time.

Yeah.

Sure.

I mean, I think if you're like, if a child in your care in this situation who is like in crisis like this is hospitalized, you would try to go.

Yeah.

I, hey, I, I've, I've seen that not be true.

Oh, for sure.

But they're trying to make him a good doctor.

They are trying to, he is a hero doctor.

And who's also like noticeably, you know, from Anne's perspective and from the audience's perspective, over-invested.

Over-invested.

You know what I mean?

He tries to quit soon after this.

Yeah.

But yeah, he makes a weird sort of light joke about bedtime stories and starts telling the world's worst bedtime story.

Really quick, before we move on to past the

scratches and stuff, that is also something that's like, again, playing on the

lineage of like demonic possession films and stuff like that.

The kids being taken over and having both the unexplained cuts and then also like scratching and hurting themselves while possessed.

Thinking of the specifically the

mockumentary supernatural horror film from 1992, Ghost Watch, that I

is a, that's me shouting out Jack Dakeet, who showed me that.

Oh, that sounds funny.

Where that happens, and it, it made me, I don't know, I was thinking about that a lot during that sequence at the very least when they were talking about the

self-harm stuff because it that movie also kind of plays with the like

threat of

people thinking you're hurting your kids or your kids are like at risk because of your parenting when it's actually something supernatural going on.

This is brilliant face acting from Bruce Willis when he says, okay, some twists here.

I just linked the picture.

This is the face of a man who knows that this movie has a twist.

Yeah.

It was in front of us the whole time.

He was right there.

How did nobody know?

How did nobody know?

That's what I'm saying.

Look,

I think that

they compose this really, really well.

Like,

they do a great job of making it so obvious when you know.

It's so obvious when you know.

It's not like a movie that doesn't, because it wouldn't, it's not a good twist if it wasn't there the whole time.

It's just some random thing that happens.

So I can't think of anything, any twist twist in anything, where the twist is so,

it's on every single page.

It's screaming off of the pages and still,

you know, millions of people were fooled by the movie.

It's great.

Great job.

Cole's like, I don't want a bedtime story.

Why don't you tell me why you're so sad?

I'm the therapist now.

I'm the therapist now.

A thing that will get more and more clear clear throughout the rest of the movie, honestly.

Dr.

Crowe, more like Captain Phillips.

Shut the fuck up.

Shut the fuck up.

He's like, I'm not supposed to talk about that stuff.

And then he just straight away, he actually does.

He tells it.

He frames it like a bedtime story.

Honestly, he gets a bit too personal, I think.

This is a kid.

This is his patient.

He shouldn't be doing this.

Yeah, it's unprofessional.

But it's for the movie.

Yeah, he's a ghost.

He has to move on.

My wife doesn't.

Oh, sorry, Allie.

Go ahead.

Well, yeah, I was just saying, like, he's a ghost.

He has to do this.

He has to do this.

My wife doesn't like the person I've become.

We barely speak anymore.

We're like strangers.

But this is the scene.

This is the big thing.

Right.

Yeah.

I do think

perfacing how he starts that story with there was once this guy and he was happy and he had this patient that he didn't fix and he met this boy who like you know the the talking about his wife is significant but also sort of like

explaining to cole that he failed why he's investment yeah why he's invested in this so much and like this sort of like

admitting that he's fallible and sort of like you know

I like this as an emotional breakthrough because of this sort of like the way that they started this is by him being like, You don't think that I can help you?

And Bruce Willis being able to say, I don't think that I can help you either, is

a good mirror of that.

And I think, you know, they have a great relationship.

Um, but yeah, immediately after he kind of opens up in this way, the iconic scene,

you know, you've probably seen it referenced a million times.

And you're going to hear it, you know, for real.

Yeah.

Ready?

I, you know, I think I saw

Scary Movie probably did a thing, you know, definitely, absolutely.

Maybe

Movie Awards probably did multiple skits about this.

Yeah, but,

you know, the camera lingering on Haley Joe Osmond's face and the sort of like, I finally have the,

I'm finally going to tell you my secret, I think is what he says.

I see dead people.

Yeah.

Do you have a clip of that key?

I do.

I do.

Here we go.

Okay, please.

Yeah.

I want to tell you my secret now.

I see dead people

in your dreams

while you're awake

dead people like in graves and coffins

walking around like regular people

They don't see each other

They only see what they want to see

They don't know they're dead

How often do you see them

all the time

They only see what they want to see if they don't know they're dead that is

I mean, it's genius.

It's a genius way to do this.

It's so good.

Absolutely.

It's so well executed.

It's really.

It's another reason why it's being like, oh, I can't believe we didn't get it.

Anyone, people didn't get it immediately.

Like, they don't even give you the rules until.

I mean, again, this is 52 minutes in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If the ghosts could see each other, it'd be game over.

The whole thing would be disproven right now.

It's really good.

I really like this idea of

being a ghost as this kind of like lonely, sort of self-inflicted hell where whatever is happening, you just make sense of it.

You can't, you're forced to make sense of it in order to not realize that you're dead.

And obviously, some of them do realize they're dead.

We see a girl named Kira who seems to understand

later.

But

yeah, I just think it's a very interesting version of ghosts that

was created by this movie as far as I know.

I don't know.

I can't think of another thing where it's like, yeah, ghosts live on Earth.

They don't know they're dead and they can't even see other ghosts.

That's good.

That's a great.

Yeah, scene rules.

It also, like, this scene changes the movie.

After this scene, we start seeing the ghosts

and the movie gets scarier.

Yeah, we live.

I think it's fair to say.

We live a lot more in sort of Cole's life, what he deals with, like when his mom is asleep, like what he has to put up with in his own home.

Later on, we see, we actually don't see what Cole sees,

but I think it's really good where, you know, he's on a bus.

This is after he sort of made peace a little bit with the ghosts.

He sees a graveyard and he gasps and like ducks behind the window.

Like,

this kid is terrified all the time

because they're everywhere

it's really sad um

and uh this is where uh you know malcolm leaves he says uh his pathology is more severe than initially assessed he's suffering from visual hallucinations paranoia and some kind of school-aged schizophrenia that doesn't seem like an official diagnosis to me uh medication hospitalization may be required and then he turns off the voice recorder and says and i'm not helping him.

Not as a declaration, but as a

penitent description.

It's tough.

I mean, it's tough.

Seeing ghosts is a big deal.

Seeing ghosts is a big deal.

Seeing ghosts is a big deal.

Seeing ghosts, and I think that should be on the tin, I think.

That's the like the like tagline if this was like recut to be just like a very

like another genre that's playing off the sort of like unrelated but positive real male role model character.

Whereas like if this was about a boy, the tagline would be sometimes seeing ghosts is serious business.

Um, I think about this all the time, but the college humor um fantastic Mr.

Star Fox video.

Um, I don't know if anybody remembers that.

It was it was a fantastic Mr.

Fox style trailer for

Star Fox where

Owen Wilson

puts his hand on Star Fox's shoulder and goes, Hey, Einstein, I'm on your side.

Think about that delivery all the time.

That's what that made me think of.

Seeing ghosts is a big deal.

Imagine Owen Wilson playing the Malcolm Crow role.

Come on, buddy.

What's going on?

What's wrong?

Fuck.

I don't know.

I mean, I think Owen Wilson does a really good job of

about him, and he's like good at being like surprised or flabbergasted.

So maybe it would work, but it would be a much funnier movie, I think.

I love Owen Wilson.

I think he's a great.

I think he's an underrated actor, if anything.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I was obsessed with him

when he was big and I was young and watching a movie.

I would need to consider more how rated Owen Wilson is before I could have an opinion on if he's overrated.

That's fair.

Hey, I think that's fair.

Well, I also think that

Bottle Rocket is Wes Anderson's most underrated movie.

So that comes from that.

Again, I need to see some ratings.

Yeah.

It is a lot of people's least favorite Wes Anderson movie, which to me is outrageous because there's some actually bad Wes Anderson movies.

But yeah, like you were saying, you know, this is where we start, or someone said, this is where we start seeing ghosts for real.

Lynn sort of brings him back from the hospital, finds the scar that Allie was talking about, calls one of the moms, maybe Tommy's mom, and is like, tell your son to keep your goddamn hands off my son.

Yeah, I think it's weird in

the scene where the two scenes prior where he's rescued from the mysterious tiny door.

That there wasn't enough punishment to those boys.

Well, the other parents are looking at her like she's the weird one when she's like getting her passed out kid out of the room he was locked in.

Like,

yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is maybe the least realistic thing that happens in the movie where like no one is concerned about what these kids did.

allie were you gonna say something yeah i mean i yeah i think it what we were saying about like there's a deep evil in the world the stephen king sense the sort of like you know

everybody is against these two the sort of like

also sort of the class thing of like we took a chance on visit inviting them and they just had to go and ruin the party yeah they may sort of scene Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can see, you know, if you're a villain in a movie, I can see why you would think that.

But like, if you actually had a child, I think you would have maybe some sympathy there.

But this movie gets weird about moms anyway.

So he wakes up in the night to pee, and he's like clearly terrified.

He runs through the hall into the bathroom.

The thermostat.

This is a classic.

I think you're misreading the Ceda.

I think he just really had to pee.

No.

Well, he did.

Well, he did really have to pee.

He did really have to pee.

The reason he really had to pee is because he was holding it because he's too scared to go to the bathroom at night.

So he holds it until he can't hold it anymore.

And then also, as soon as he leaves his bedroom, thermostat drops 20, 30 degrees.

It becomes freezing cold.

You can see his breath,

which I think is the first time since the first scene where it gets that cold.

Actually, I can't remember if you could see Anna's breath in the wine cellar.

No, I don't think so.

No, I don't think visible breath is is a visible vision.

Yeah, this is like this becomes a thing that the movie does.

When the breath is visible, there's a ghost around.

I just want to give a shout out to

the other Tommy in my life, my partner, who just whispered, he's vaping under his breath when

he started exhaling the

like that you could see his breath.

Really funny.

Younger, they're starting younger and younger.

Yep.

But yeah,

this is a

jump scare, I think.

I thought this was a jump scare.

To me, I jumped scared.

A woman, I thought maybe she was in a dress, but I guess she was in

like a nightgown

passes by the bathroom behind Cole.

I don't remember.

How does he get from here back into his

little tent where he was sleeping.

He goes into the kitchen and sees her and then he just runs back down the hall.

Right.

This is the, this is the, the woman with a, with a husband named Lenny.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think that he hears a voice and assumes that it's his own.

Yeah, he briefly, he briefly calls her mom.

He's like, mom?

Right, yeah.

He, he kind of leaves the bathroom and starts hearing these voices, so it leads him into the kitchen where he has this sort of haunting.

He also only sees her from the back, and then she turns around and you you see her like bruising on her face and stuff.

Yeah, she says, No, dinner is not ready.

You can't hurt me anymore.

And then heavily implied that she killed herself when she holds out her wrists to him.

Yeah, which I also was wondering if it was supposed to be like much like he's repeating their words.

If this

means it's like in his home, I had that thought too.

Yeah.

And he's, yeah, he's crying in his little tent.

This is the first time we see his collection of toys.

It's so heartbreaking that he made a little church to keep him safe

and it doesn't keep him safe.

Calling that a collection of toys is also a weird.

Well, it is.

It's toys.

You're underselling this dramatically.

Wait, hold on.

I have a picture of it.

Here it is.

Is that it?

Yeah, that is it.

Um, well, that I call it toys because I do feel I still feel like they're sort of avatars of his uh

the ghosts that he knows that he that he like actually communicates with.

Because, okay, there's like these are statues of saints, but there's also a guy,

a little army man, another army man, and then later he invites, um,

he invites Malcolm into like his battalion.

He's like, Do you want to be in my battalion of you know the 13th Marines of blah blah blah blah blah?

Yeah, we're doing the Vietnam War.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, it is like half religious figurines and half army men.

And I think it might, this might be an access issue.

It's easy to go steal these figures from the church.

Because

I don't think, would he put the soldiers there if he was if he wanted them to like protect him or be a shrine to protect him?

I don't know.

Maybe.

Yeah, I think it's

there's a tank in the background.

Yeah, it's a good decision to sort of obfuscate the truth here, to sort of conceal it around

this, you know, the obviously the

chapel, the red chapel that he goes to and the red chapel that he creates are two obvious.

You know, the idea that he is both sort of recreating a

sanctuary, but also, you know,

because it's a safe space for him, it's where he wants to play.

He's the toys that are present here are the same ones that he brings to the church with him.

Yeah.

So I think that there is, you know, a

degree of comfort in some of these things.

And I think, you know, even having statues of saints is also a

search for comfort, a creation of a safe space.

Yeah.

I definitely agree that this is him trying to create a sanctuary for sure.

Yeah.

But it's sad.

I mean, it does look really sad.

It's just like, it's tough.

Big feature of the Jesus that he took after

he met Malcolm for the first time.

This is how bad I am at Christianity.

I have never identified that figure as Jesus.

I believe you all.

Yeah, it's definitely Jesus.

You can tell because of the heart.

Oh,

Jesus has a big heart.

That is like...

Oh, my God.

That's so Jesus, man.

Yeah, that is the most Jesus.

Well, you see him from behind at the first, the first time.

That's true.

It's true.

And I guess you can ding everybody back that just had long hair or whatever.

Within the wise hair.

Yeah, long hair and a cloak is not enough, I don't think.

From a church?

Nice man-bun asshole when he turns around

the savior of humanity.

They're doing a school play called A Jungle Tale.

Tommy is dressed as an explorer and introduces, let me see if this sounds thematically relevant.

A boy who is different from all the other boys who could speak to animals.

Huh.

Huh.

Malcolm's in the audience.

I am also saying, huh?

Huh.

Malcolm's in the audience.

Lynn is not in the audience.

They don't really show much of this play, but the set design is kind of cute.

And also very 90s to me.

I really like it.

Go ahead.

No, I was just going to say the significance of the scene is really for

Cole to say that Tony Tommy, Tommy Tommy.

Tommy.

Tommy Tomasino.

Tommy thinks that it was like.

He said it sucked big time.

Sucked big time.

Big time.

Yeah.

Tommy Tomasino was at a copser commercial.

He said everyone was self-conscious and unrealistic.

He said the place sucked big time.

We missed him talking.

We did not mention how he talked about how he, the star of the commercial, needs a trailer at his birthday party.

Oh my god, it's so funny.

It's so funny.

I was going to ask you, do you have a trailer when you did that Six Flags commercial?

Yeah.

No, I was like the star of that commercial.

Oh, you were.

I am the star of that commercial, but that commercial was like cut together with just stuff that existed.

Like, I did that commercial, and then they sort of like made it.

I did that and they made it into a commercial that I was the centerpiece of.

It was not planned as such.

Oh, sure.

Like, they shot that, and then the footage they had, I was like, I guess this guy's the

center point of this.

I think it's because one of my close friends was the producer on that shoot.

And so at the end, she was like,

I never.

I don't think I got to park close to the park, and it was closed that day.

So things have changed since the 90s.

I really like that this is like

the thin red line of

of commercials where adrian brody gets cut out and you get cut in you're the um you're the jim covezel of this

of this six fikes commercial

yeah if you haven't seen it i don't i'm not gonna find it again on youtube but okay but at some point it was on social media so um

Everybody knows about the Thin Red Line.

We all know about this.

We're not all dying in laughter, so I assume.

That's kind of laughing on the show.

I know that I do.

Terrence Malik made his first movie on a long time, Thin Red Line, and Adrian Brody was supposed to be the star of it.

But while they were shooting, he basically rewrote it in the edit to make Jim Caviesel the star.

Oh.

And so Adrian Brody didn't find out that he wasn't the star of this movie until halfway through the press tour of it.

That's really funny.

He's barely.

It is really funny, actually.

I did not know about that.

Yeah, unbelievable story.

I didn't know this commercial existed in this form until like months and months later when someone was like, I saw your commercial at Six Flags.

And I had to be like, when I'm in the background of the roller coaster unloading, and they're like, no, you're in this whole thing.

You're getting hit with a Slurpee.

And I'm like,

oh, I didn't think that was going to be a big deal.

Truly, you're the Jim Caviesel of that commercial in FinRay.

Yeah.

I think I got paid $60 for the whole day.

Wow.

And I'm in the background of two other spots we shot that day.

That's funny.

Yes,

go ahead, Allie.

What we were talking about is that the kid was in a commercial, he has

a lot of standards about acting and thinking that his

peers are below him.

Everyone's self-conscious and unrealistic.

That's so funny to say about a bunch of nine-year-olds.

But there's a real horror moment in this scene when they're walking through

the halls of the school alone.

You know,

Malcolm is just sort of like chit-chatting with Cole and realizes Cole's not there anymore.

It's because he's like froze in place because to his left is

three people sort of hanging from the rafters of the school.

Um,

he was right, they did hang people here.

Uh,

this is my last button.

We want to hear this is, I think, maybe this is actually the best acting that uh he does in the movie.

Yeah, I wrote this down, so I really, I'm really glad that you have a clip of it.

So I'm looking forward to you playing it.

Be real still

sometimes you feel it inside, like you're falling down real fast,

But you're really just standing still.

You ever feel the prickly things on the back of your neck?

Yes.

And the tiny hairs on your arm, you know, when they stand up.

Yes.

That's them

when they get mad.

It gets cold.

I love that scene.

I love how

effortlessly a scene from a much scarier movie gets dropped in.

The writing is really good.

The way that

Sean is able to bring out

a universal feeling and put terror into it, I thought was really good.

I thought that the way that

he feels too close to his microphone and you can hear so much of his mouth

was really good.

Like he's almost talking into like a lav mic instead of

talking to Bruce Willis.

It pairs really well with the sort of slow camera movement in that we've talked about a couple times with this one.

This shot slowly like just becomes tighter and tighter until it's like really claustrophobic.

And I think the sound design really adds to that with what you're saying.

Yeah.

Anyway, I thought that was a that was a great scene.

One of my favorites.

Yeah.

Anything else about the hospital stuff before we kind of I think that we're about to hit like kind of the

yeah, the movie feels like the pacing goes

so much faster than this.

Yeah, to say that it's rolling downhill is really accurate.

I love the scene so much.

I think that like,

you know, Malcolm's continued continued inability to interact with this stuff, where, like, the first question that he asks, like,

um, I think Cole says, like, do you see them over there?

Or, like, you know, Cole mentions it, and the first thing that he asks is, like, are you sure you're seeing them?

Or something like that.

This, like, immediate, like, uh,

disbelief or, you know, refusal to sort of meet Cole and his level there.

Um, and then just like the

bodies hanging suddenly, and he's like, I mean, admittedly, kind of really funny, old-timey outfits.

It is kind of funny.

It's just, they don't, I mean,

they have, they're from far away, it looks good, and then it gets there's a there's a closer shot, and it's kind of funny.

And it, yeah, it looks like they're like people at like an old-timey like field trip place and not, oh, yeah, like where they take a picture of you dressed as a cowboy with a big fake rifle.

Yeah, totally.

Um,

go ahead, no, yeah, but go on.

This is where the movie kind of transitions to bring the tension between Lynn and Cole into the forefront.

The rest of Cole's story is like he needs to tell his mom his secret.

You know, she's getting frustrated with like being a single mother of a haunted child.

That is a compounding difficulty in her life.

They have this really cute scene of them kind of playing in a parking lot

at the grocery store where she's like pushing him in the cart really fast and he throws his hands up and they're laughing.

And then

we cut back to their home and the PDA E's cough suppressant commercial is on TV.

Oh my god.

He throws, what do you throw a shoe at the TV to make it turn off or something?

And she's mad.

Lynn is fiddling with the thermostat.

I don't care what they say.

This thing is broken.

She's already upset about something.

I don't know.

Paying for groceries puts me in a bad mood too.

And then she confronts Cole about moving her bumblebee pendant, which belonged to her mother.

You know, what if it broke?

You know how sad I'd be if it broke.

And he says, Sometimes people think they lose things, but they really didn't lose them.

It just gets moved.

It's like another moment of bringing ghosts into the real world for the audience, I think,

which is very effective.

You know,

as someone who knew a bunch of Catholics growing up, because growing up Catholic, um, Catholics love

ghosts and psychics and all of this stuff.

Like, name a, you know, name a middle-aged Catholic woman who doesn't believe in ghosts.

I can't think of one.

Um,

and uh,

I don't know that I should be saying this because I'm a Jewish person,

but Catholics are deeply superstitious.

Yes, A lot of the stuff in Catholicism is like

weird magic, you know, from the St.

Anthony medallion all the way on down.

Every Catholic that I know is into ghosts and psychics and all of this stuff.

Yeah.

So I love the idea of a movie that's talking to Catholics being like, when stuff gets moved, it's ghost.

And they're like, I know it is.

I know it is.

Would we be able to take five before getting back to things?

Cool.

I think I need more than five.

I need to know where to walk a dog.

Oh, that's fine.

Yeah.

Okay, so we talked about this dinner where

Lynn is talking about the bumblebee pendant, which was which was stolen or moved by a ghost.

You know, she's really upset.

If we can't, I don't know if you've noticed, but our little family ain't doing too good.

If we can't talk each other out,

talk to each other, we're not going to make it.

He tells the truth that he didn't move it, but it makes her upset, and she sends him away without dinner, which is very 90s to me.

This is when he sees the ghost of a boy who wants to show Cole where his father keeps his gun.

And the kid turns, he's got a huge hole blasted in the back of his head.

And this is like so shocking that it sort of

jolts a

reconciliation between Lynn and Cole.

But this is where,

after seeing Amish Guy again, Malcolm tries to quit being Cole's therapist.

He says,

I thought I had a quote, but that's fine.

Cole says, you believe me, right?

Dr.

Crowe, you believe my secret.

I don't know how to answer that.

How can you help me if you don't believe me?

Some magic's real.

And we talked about it earlier.

This is the part where

Malcolm's revisiting the Vincent Gray tapes.

He wants to believe Cole.

It's very sad.

And he turns the volume up and is able to hear the ghost on the thing.

So he goes to find Malcolm in the church where they met.

This is the last time I had in the back of my head that maybe Cole was slightly evil.

The vibe is weird.

Cole is like very confident, almost sarcastic.

And he's like positioned above him.

He is positioned above him.

I don't know that you call that the rafters of the church, but he's like on the second floor that looks like a organist plays.

What do you think?

Malcolm asks him because now he believes.

He's just like on board now.

What do you think these ghosts want when they talk to you?

I want you to think about it carefully.

What do you think they want?

Just help.

That's right.

That's right.

That's what I think too.

Even the scary ones.

What if they don't want help?

What if they're angry and they just want to hurt somebody?

And then Malcolm's like, I don't know.

um

uh but

more exactly more sympathetic to that more

scoopy-doo

he thinks about it and he says ruttro

yeah he looks him in the eye and says rutt row raggy and then he eats a 10-foot tall sandwich yeah

um

but this is this is like the last big scary ghost moment uh cole sleeping with his dog in the tent

His mother's having a nightmare about him, like about what's wrong with him.

And he tries to go back

to bed, but there's like

another event happens.

Who wants to talk about this?

This like last scary ghost?

I can talk about this because this is like a pre-meme meme between me and my brother.

Pre-meme meme?

We would reference this scene all the time because I think in the theater, we were the only two who laughed when it happened because it was so shocking it just cuts to a girl like vomiting on him and like significantly like in the

confinements the safety quote unquote of the sanctuary that he's yeah he runs to the tent and she's like behind him already yeah and i do think you know i the

the kid that he sees before that is like an adolescent almost so i i think like it is very successful that like the first ghost story that we kind of see and feel invested in is this other child, the way that, like, you know, um, Cole's able to relate to her.

Um,

but uh, yeah, she just pukes on him.

She just pukes on him, yeah.

It is really good.

Yeah, he runs away, he runs away scared, and then kind of comes back because he's trying to take Malcolm's advice.

And she's like, Yeah, I'm feeling much better now, and he's very scared still.

Do you want to tell me something?

He's trying so hard.

He's trying so hard, and I feel like this stuff, this is like the emotional resolution of the movie, like Malcolm on the bus with Cole

going to

the funeral of this girl.

Cole says, she came a long way to visit me, didn't she?

That's weird.

Like, do they seek him out?

How would she know about him?

How did she find him?

She didn't die there.

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's

the implication from the scene, the like photography scene where we see these like marks in every picture of him, even when he's like a child, even when he's a little toddler, in that like

if he has a resonance, you know,

even if they're not specifically seeking him out by being the only thing that can be interacted with in the world or whatever, they sort of, you know.

that is the the sort of compelling

thing.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

they they see the sister of the dead girl on the swing, he's like, That's her sister.

And then, this is, I think, maybe the most

like present camera movement of the whole movie.

It's very obvious what's happening with the camera.

It almost almost cloying, uh, but it's still a version of the thing that I've been enjoying up to this point.

The camera sweeps around the reception, kind of slowly hearing everyone's like whispers about the girl um she spent uh

two years in bed six different doctors and now the younger girl is getting sick too um

this is the 90sest room of all time yeah

it's very it's very 90s via 70s room

um

uh like a place that feels like it hasn't been changed in 20 years in 1995 is what it feels like to me.

And they go upstairs to the dead girl's room, which is full of creepy dolls.

It's full of scary, creepy dolls, which was her hobby.

They're marionettes, but yes.

Yeah.

She's up.

They are puppets.

Yeah, they're puppets.

They're all puppets.

She's an aspiring puppeteer.

Is this the last scare?

The marionettes are creepy as shit.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but yeah.

Is this the last scare of the movie?

Who wants to talk about this scare?

This scared me.

This got me.

Oh, he's when Cole Cole walks by the bed and the hand comes out and grabs his leg.

Yeah, grabs like he freaks out and then she like pushes a box towards him.

And this is when I wrote in the

shared document.

Being a ghost makes you rude and scary by accident.

Like this girl.

I mean, it's right.

This girl's trying to help him help her.

And she scared the fucking shit out of him.

Couldn't she have said like, hey, the thing I want you to find, here it is.

Instead, she grabs his leg.

Something changes, like, uh, the tolerance you have for the niceties.

I, uh, uh, uh, um,

they have no,

they have no social grace, these ghosts.

Um,

sort of maybe the ultimate class movie, being a ghost, is the ultimate underclass of society.

It's tough.

I mean, I don't know.

I can't speak to what's going on with them.

This is

out of nowhere.

This is like so tragic.

There's a videotape in

the box, which he brings downstairs to.

Yeah, it's such a big swing for the tone of this movie, especially a movie where, like, I guess aside from the mean moms at the party that has been really positive about like

familial relationships and like mothers at the very least,

You know, Lynn has a really good relationship with Cole and presumably had a good relationship with her own mother.

But yeah, so what we see in the tape is,

and also what I wrote in my notes is the father seeing his daughter get poisoned should have gotten a supporting role, Oscar.

I mean, I'm sure it's fine that Tony Collette got it too, but he should have been nominated.

But it is this video of this.

It's initially like a play that the girl's performing with her puppets, and then she moves the box it rolls away and she gets back into bed when her mother enters the room um she comes in with soup and a glass of milk and pours deliberately in front of the camera that she doesn't know it was there um pours pine soul into her soup yeah um and it's this really sad conversation about like

eat your dinner don't tell me that it tastes weird you're gonna hurt my feelings if you do that and the daughter being like i feel a lot better do you think that i can go outside and the mother being like well you know how sick you get in the afternoons it's like

i mean just yeah it's so bad and it's

at first i thought that this was a video about the kid intentionally like

getting evidence against the mom but i only real i realized like after the movie was over i was just thinking about it that actually what i think it is

is

she ran back to the bed because she didn't want to get caught playing because the mom doesn't want her like up and playing even when she feels fine.

Which is very sad.

And that catching the mom doing this was just an accident.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the work by the father,

it's like the worst part, I think, and it's such a thankless part because he has like no lines.

Yeah.

And he's just sitting watching this thing,

doing all the emotions on his face, like happy seeing the play, the horror, seeing his wife murder his daughter.

Having to confront her at the party.

It's his own lurking.

Having to confront her.

And she's wearing the red dress at their daughter's waist.

Which is like anyone who does that should be investigated for murder immediately.

You're 100% right.

I didn't even notice that that is an extremely inappropriate dress to wear.

I'm not saying everyone who does that is guilty of murder, but someone should

just check.

Just double check.

Yeah.

I know.

Yeah.

I mean, for the five seconds that this, this woman gets to act to is like the way that she is able to perform as like almost above it all at her own daughter's funeral is really interesting.

Like she turns around and sees her husband with this almost like disinterested face until like suddenly the fear is kind of coming over her as he's confronting her.

Yeah.

It's really good.

They did a really good job.

The second play of presumably a procession of 100 plays at St.

Anthony's Academy.

Yeah, the Year of 100 plays.

Year of 100 plays.

Cole's teacher, Mr.

Cunningham, the

Stanley, comes into the back room of the theater saying that they're ready for the stable boy.

This is the young King Arthur play, and he's getting wardrobe help from a ghost.

Ooh.

This is the funniest ghost drop to me.

This is a really, this is a comedy ghost drop.

It's, yeah.

It's still, it's still, like, gruesome, but yeah, he's like, who are you talking to?

Like, as the teacher's walking away, and she turns to look back to reveal that, that, that she is a burn victim.

And then he sort of

tactlessly, I think, says, you know, there was a huge fire here when I was a kid, when I went to school here.

And he's like, I know.

This dude is.

I don't know what this teacher's deal is, but he's not.

Get out of here.

I think he's nervous about to be around Cole because Cole thanks him for letting him be in the play.

And I think it was like, this is like placative.

This is like, I'll.

I'm going to put you in this play as like a sort of apology, sort of like staying on the good side of this weird kid.

Please don't call me stuttering Stanley.

But also, this, like, this, the that he's introduced with this weird denial of like anything bad happening by lawmakers.

I mean, you want to have a nine-year-old not interrupt your class talking about people hanging, but to be like, Yeah, this club, this building is great and historic.

And by the way, part of it burnt down and it was horrible.

And apparently, this lady died.

Like, why are you talking about this now?

Yeah, this guy is weird.

This is a weird guy.

Maybe he set the fire,

whoa, to get back at the bullies who called him stuttering Stanley.

Whoa,

and that's why the ghosts tell him secrets about him.

The sixth sense, too.

Yeah,

uh, this is really funny.

This is almost like gratuitously, um,

uh, maybe it's schmaltzy is the word that I'd use.

Um, Tommy Tomasito gets cast as the village idiot

and is like begrudgingly delivering these lines, um,

uh, introducing you know, the situation, and then Merlin comes out and says, Let the stable boy give it a try, the pure-hearted stable boy.

Uh, and then Cole comes out, removes the sword from the stone, and everybody cheers.

And they pick him up like his dream of uh hitting a kickball grand slam.

Um,

like they carry him on their shoulders, it's very sweet.

Uh,

And

Malcolm's there.

Lynn's not there.

Malcolm says, I thought you were really great in the play, Cole.

And you know what else?

I thought Tommy Tomasino sucked big time.

You know, he did.

He did.

He really did.

Yeah.

Hey, there's no small parts, only small actors.

I do love that he did get to have the moment where he was lifted on everyone's shoulders, like the thing he told to his mom.

He wasn't kickball related, but it's still really cute.

He's still really cute.

And this is where he, I think he knows he

knows.

He says that he knows that his time with Malcolm is up.

He says,

I got an idea how you can talk to your wife.

Wait till she's asleep.

Then she'll listen to you and she won't even know it.

Great advice for a ghost.

Yeah, weird advice for a living person.

Right.

Yes.

It is, it's almost like telling him to write a letter and then burn it, you know, if he was, if he was a human, be like, say what you want to say when not really to her but to her as an as an exercise

But it is a weird thing for a nine-year-old to tell an adult psychologist

a living adult psychologist, which of course he's not

It's really sweet when he asks to

hey, we're gonna say goodbye.

Can we pretend like I'll see you tomorrow?

It's really cute.

It's very cute.

Again, also really playing on the like role mod, like the like schmaltzi, this this troubled kid needs a good role model

comedy drama that like I think kind of more had its heyday a few years later than this, but like yeah.

He's also, by the way, has he I'm just looking at the pictures.

Has he been wearing his dad's clothes this whole movie?

Yes, constantly.

He's wearing his gloves at the table when it's cold, and that's why his mom wants them not on the table.

The glasses, the watch.

But I just keep not

I noticed all that, but then he also had like these really big coats on.

And I'm like, these must be his dad's coats, right?

Um

it's very funny that he's wearing these big coats

We've got two big scenes left and that's the the end of the movie

Does someone want to talk about this uh traffic accident that Lynn and Cole are witness to?

Oh, it's such a sad scene.

It's really, it's really a lot.

Um, but sure, there's it's a big we open on like a big car uh a traffic jam because of an accident and um

cole decides to use this time to tell his mom that he can

communicate with ghosts he does this first by saying that he can see the the victim of this accident

yeah and lynn is like standing next to my do you mean right now where is she

yeah and he's like standing next to my window, and we get the reverse shot, and then it comes back, and there she is, standing next to the window,

having been a bicyclist who's been struck by a car.

And then he goes on to tell a story about his grandmother.

We know through the events of the movie, this has not come up in our conversation, that her mom passed, and not terribly recently, but like not too far ago, not too long ago.

Right.

She's still sad about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that, you know, she's sorry that she's moving the bumblebee pendant.

And, you know, the mom is not super buying it.

You know, she's being nice to her kid, but she doesn't start by believing him.

Well, it seems like a kid's lie to get out of being in trouble for moving this thing.

Yeah, and she has an extreme reaction enough of saying, like,

that's wrong to say, like, to speak about your grandmother in that way um

yeah and he asked like do you think i'm a freak and she looks like look at me would i ever think that and then he says this tells this story about talking to the grandmother and you know she says that you asked a question when you visited her grave and you know she says the answer is all the time or every day every day every day and you know what was the question and it's like are you proud of me?

And now they're both just like full on crying.

I'm sitting on my couch crying too.

It's a big fucking scene,

especially if you lost a parent you had a good relationship with.

And yeah,

it brings the two of them together.

And it's signaling that Cole is going to get through this, I think.

You know, that the two of them are going to get through this as a family.

Yeah, they gave us both pieces.

They gave us him learning how to work with ghosts to help them, and it also gave us like both a hint that there's ghosts that he already had good relationships with, like the grandma, and also that now he can bring these realities to his mother.

Yeah, and it's a

killer scene.

Yeah, it's really,

yeah.

It's it's here where you're like, were Michael Cain and Angelina Jolie really better than this?

Yeah, it's incredible.

I do like, I think this movie would be so much worse off if it was willing to close the book on Malcolm and Cole's relationship and not going back to the, the thing of Lynn saying, like,

um,

if we can't communicate,

we're not going to be okay together.

Like us being open require is a requirement of our, of the health of our family

and our relationship with each other.

So like, you know, the,

I really like the scene.

I think it's just really good.

I'm glad it wasn't on the cutting room floor or whatever, that it was still a consideration in terms of what was important

to

show.

It's really good, like, late script writing to have brought the tension between Lynn and Cole into the forefront in the last

half of the movie.

And then to be able to resolve it, like, as a kind of C-plot

in a way that makes it one of the more powerful pieces in the movie.

Like, you know,

it's the last plot that gets brought up.

It's the first one to get resolved.

Well, I guess it's the second one to get resolved because the Malcolm Cole thing kind of resolves right before this.

But then we head into

the first issue that we see in the whole movie, which is

Malcolm and Anna.

He's going to try Cole's trick.

I'm going to talk to my wife while she's asleep.

Maybe I'll get through to her.

And also, I'm alive.

And I know that for a fact.

For a fact, I'm alive.

Yeah.

Revisiting this, I was, I was surprised how like

small the scene feels in retrospect.

Like the reveal just being that his wedding ring drops on the floor and suddenly the reality of him leaving it or not wearing it is present.

Like his perspective of his his own self gets shattered and then you know we see flashbacks of all these other parts of the movie where the reason he isn't able to do open the door is because the table is there and things have changed in the house and he's a ghost and you know

but yeah i mean the the

bruce does a really great job here of being

of acting non-vocally as he's like reacting to this um yeah seeing the things in the house that are different and like thinking.

He goes through all of his evidence.

He has all of these.

He has the movie that we just watched in his head and he goes through and he hears Cole being like, they don't even know they're dead.

Like ringing in his head while he's looking at the

door that he thought was just locked and stuck, but instead has like a bookshelf covering it.

Yeah.

And also like sort of recoiling from himself, because I feel like in this process, he he's going upstairs and ends up resting down in the place that he died right and then we get the sort of full scene of the flashback which is

the vision of the actual wound that he got um the you know

god that the fact that this movie just lingers on his face as he's dying, like the motion leaving his face is just, it's an outstanding performance.

And it's also just like devastating Yeah to experience to be there with him for although you also get to see him find the bloodstain on the back of his shirt Yeah, it's one of the things that like I didn't notice in this movie for a long time is that he's wearing the clothes he died in the whole movie the whole movie He's just like wearing different amounts of layers to hide it as a white collar professional wearing a wearing a suit with a blue shirt and a jacket That's normal to me.

Yeah.

That reminds me something I forgot to mention.

When he's like running away from the antique shop after he gets angry, he's holding his gunshot wound in like the exact way.

He's got his.

I was like, why is his hand in his pants?

Oh,

it's so good.

I noticed it happened for like three seconds.

And I was like,

yeah.

Yeah, there's a scene we didn't talk about where he goes,

his ghostly rage shatters the window of the antique store when

the Amish guy almost makes out with Anna.

Again, crazy watching this movie and not thinking he's dead and you're just like, wow.

His wife is just going for it.

This guy's coming to their home.

Yeah, he's in the basement and she's like, I'm going to talk to this guy.

Yeah.

He did hate.

She did send him away.

Mm-hmm.

Uh-huh.

And then they made out at work where he supposed he wasn't supposed to be.

So it's all above board, technically.

No, it's not.

Don't you you know?

Son of a board.

Son of a board.

Yeah.

That's not how I hope that my wife behaves when I'm

working.

She's out there right now doing that.

I'm upset about it.

Well, the question you have to ask is, do you know anyone who's interested in Amish furniture or like Quaker baskets?

No, I don't think so.

We live very far away from both of those communities.

Okay.

Are they Quaker baskets or shaker baskets?

I think they're shaker baskets.

I don't know.

Any last thoughts on this movie?

It fucking rips.

It's great.

I really like Bruce Willis's performance throughout, and I think

it's obviously super heightened, but really captures the feeling of like recalling a memory you've repressed, especially at the end.

I like that it doesn't linger really after he figures it out.

It just ends.

You don't get him fainting to the light or whatever.

It's implied because the screen goes white, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

We faint to white and we get like one more clip from the wedding video and then it's credits.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he tells, you know, right before the realization, he hears Anna saying, like, why did you leave me?

And he's like, I didn't leave you.

And that's when she drops the ring.

And then he goes back.

He's like, you know, good night.

Things will be different tomorrow.

And then he's gone.

Yeah.

It's really good.

The sixth sense, it's really good.

They weren't wrong in the 90s when they said it was good.

And I hope I feel that way after watching our next movie.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Next time we are watching 2000s Unbreakable, also starring Bruce Willis, right?

Yeah.

I didn't know that until today.

I learned that today.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think Unbreakable is really good, but I haven't seen it in probably 20 years.

So who knows?

I also remember really liking it, and I I haven't seen it in a long time.

Uh-huh.

I'm in the same place.

I'm in a, I've probably seen it on cable once or twice since then, um, or like within the past five years or so, whatever.

Um,

Keith, do you know what that movie is about?

Do you want to do a guess, uh, a guest summon about the synopsis of that film?

I didn't know Unbreakable existed until art said we should watch Unbreakable for this.

Wow,

I think that it's about a boxer.

Oh, wow.

Okay, nobody talked to Keith about this movie.

Is it about Boxer?

You'll find out.

Okay.

Go in, Maligned.

Okay.

Yeah, go in.

Oh, I'm so excited.

It's really exciting.

It's going to be exciting.

I also want to know what movie Keith is thinking of.

What's that one that Mickey Rourke was in six years later?

Maybe it's the wrestler.

The wrestler.

Maybe I'm thinking of the wrestler.

That's not about a boxer either.

That's a good movie.

It's well, it's about a wrestler, but yeah.

Wrestling, boxing.

What's the difference?

We don't have time to talk about it now.

That's it, folks.

Two fake sports.

Okay, let's not do this.

Bye.

Bye, everyone.

Wait, no, not by.

Hold on.

Sorry.

Next time we're watching Unbreakable, you should go on Apple Podcasts and review this

so that people who haven't seen it have a chance to see it.

You should tell your friends who hate anime, hey, they're not doing anime right now.

You should go listen to Media Club Plus where they're talking about movies.

This is the time to make noise about Media Club Plus and to try to get people that you think would like it to watch it.

And I have a prompt for your reviews.

Oh, great.

Oh, wow.

Write a five-star review, including a time that something kind of haunted happened to you.

You don't have to actually believe in ghosts, but something that has the vibes of being haunted.

Another thing that I've got.

I don't have a time for it, but I had a deeply haunted weekend.

We can talk about it some other time.

Deeply haunted.

I will give my haunting story, which I've told before on the next recording.

So

the other thing that I want to know in your reviews is did you watch this movie contemporarily?

And did it fool you?

And when did you figure it out if it didn't?

didn't oh art when did you figure it out uh when they're on the bus on the way to the girl's funeral got it what was it the tip to you just yeah i just had time it was like that was the first scene where i was like okay i know there is a twist what's going on here and that's when i had like time to figure it out yeah it is like a little bit of downtime on the bus ride okay thank you everybody of course for watching listening to our first episode of the M-Night Shyamalan mini season that we're doing.

Thank you, Allie and Sylvie and Art for joining me and having the idea to do it in the first place.

See you next week with Unbreakable or in two weeks.

Thank you in two weeks for Unbreakable.

There's a thank you in two weeks.

Thank you.

We were saying thank you to you for hosting.

I'll clean it up.

Yeah.

Just, I think that should be your sign-off for this one.

Thank you in two weeks.

Thank you in two weeks.

A perpetual kicking forward of the can.

I'll never thank these idiots.

Okay, bye.