The Wind That Makes You Dead - The Happening: Media Club Plus S02E06

Speaker 1 Hey, everybody, just letting you know that you can go to friendsatthetable.cash to listen along with us watching the last airbender movie.

Speaker 1 Me and Sylvie and Art and Allie and Austin watched the much hated and rightfully so last airbender movie.

Speaker 1 Really, really. It's a piece of shit.

Speaker 1 This episode, you probably noticed, is six days late, and we are not going to have an episode next week. Next week will be Side Story.

Speaker 1 So, Side Story, instead of coming out tomorrow, the 4th, will be on the 11th. And then we'll be back to our alternating schedules.

Speaker 1 So, the next episode

Speaker 1 with also with Austin of After Earth is going to be on the 18th. So, I'll see you all on the 18th.

Speaker 1 Three, two,

Speaker 1 one.

Speaker 1 All right. Oh my god, I didn't clap.

Speaker 1 Oh, you were just hanging out?

Speaker 1 Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 Hell yeah. It's fine.
We don't drink it.

Speaker 1 You're learning. This is our.
What a delayed reaction to that, too.

Speaker 1 We weren't podcasting yet, so I just thought, like, I don't need to listen.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Is that how Allie treats the clap casts?

Speaker 1 Is that how Allie treats the pre-show? I never, I never could have guessed that.

Speaker 1 God,

Speaker 1 I'm ready to lock it.

Speaker 1 Do you want to do another 3-2-1, Allie? If you'd like to. Okay, three,

Speaker 1 two,

Speaker 1 one.

Speaker 1 Greetings from Media Club Blues, a podcast about plunging into the media that thrills us and the stories that chill us. As always, we have been dragged to you by friends at the table.

Speaker 1 This season, we'll be subjecting ourselves to the twisted mind of M. Night Shyamalan.

Speaker 1 I didn't know what to expect.

Speaker 1 I didn't know what was happening with the happening.

Speaker 1 I guess

Speaker 1 I was expecting was plant monsters.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 Is that the only thing you knew about this? Was plants? I think we talked about this at the end of the last episode.

Speaker 1 All I knew was

Speaker 1 Mark Wahlberg and plants.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 like, I had some vague

Speaker 1 mental notions,

Speaker 1 really, mental notions about

Speaker 1 Mark Wahlberg looking

Speaker 1 out over like hills, like in grassy fields. I was like, well, they're in grassy fields a lot.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 I think another thing that I said, which turned out to be totally correct, was that this movie is like an escort mission.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you were actually right about that. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's really all I knew.

Speaker 1 So I was very surprised to learn that this was a movie about air, actually,

Speaker 1 not about plants. Well, it's about plants.
It's about pollen. It's about having really bad allergies.
It's about having really bad allergies.

Speaker 1 It's about how the human race is so bad to the earth that the plants made the air bad. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I had no idea. Nobody in the movie says air, though.

Speaker 2 They're always talking about plants.

Speaker 1 It is plants. They say wind all the time.

Speaker 1 Okay, sure. Which is just a very, it was just aggressive air.

Speaker 1 Oh my god,

Speaker 1 I said that this movie treats the wind like it's talking to someone who's never been on earth before.

Speaker 1 Well, it's like they're it's like the scene, right? When the scene where Mark Wahlberg figures everything out,

Speaker 1 and it's like, but the wind is coming this way, and they like show the wind rustling through the grass as like a visual representation of how

Speaker 1 close it is.

Speaker 1 but like that's not really, it's there now.

Speaker 1 That wind has actually already reached you.

Speaker 1 You're dead. Hold on.
I don't know that that's true. I've been to the beach.
I've seen sand down

Speaker 1 at the other end of the beach start flying, and then five seconds later, it makes its way to me, and that air is now where I am.

Speaker 1 Sure, and if they had a visual, they had something in the movie that told you when

Speaker 1 there was a line of wind in the grass. You could see it.

Speaker 2 Do you think there should be some like evil green gas that shows something?

Speaker 1 Stinky fire. There should be stinky fire.
No, I think they should just not do the showing the wind thing.

Speaker 1 I'm in the other path.

Speaker 1 Should we do a proper introduction so our guest doesn't just think they have to be silent?

Speaker 1 Yes. My name.
No, Jack will remain silent until i'm done complaining about this wince

Speaker 1 my name is keith j carberry you can find me online

Speaker 1 at keith j carberry you can find the let's plays that i do at youtube.com slash run button you can find all of us here and more doing friends at the table the excellent podcast where you play role-playing games and have a great time doing it uh with me as always is sylvie bullet

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Sylvia. You can find me most places online at Sylvie Bullet.
You can check out all the streams that we do. We do a lot of streams at twitch.tv slash friends of the table.

Speaker 1 And if you like loud music, check out my band, Gutmachine Band, dot bandcamp.com.

Speaker 1 Ali Akampora.

Speaker 1 Hi, my name is Ali, and I strongly encourage that you listen to Friends of the Table.

Speaker 2 It's an actual play podcast and it's very good.

Speaker 1 Art Martinez Tebble.

Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Art.

Speaker 1 I recommend that while if you live in a part of the country where the tomatoes are still really really good right now, take a tomato and a lime and you muddle them in the bottom of like a jar.

Speaker 1 You fill it with water, a little bit of sugar, and even less salt. It's a delicious beverage.
Can I give a second tomato reference? If you're already going to the store getting tomatoes

Speaker 1 or even better, going to a market to get tomatoes. I used to be a tomato hater.
And then what happened was I learned that it's just the kind of tomatoes that they sell in the grocery store

Speaker 1 are the worst tomatoes on earth. They're the worst tomatoes on earth.

Speaker 1 So if you can get another kind of tomato other than a grocery store tomato, just slice it into big thick slices, sprinkle on some finishing salt and olive oil, and have yourself a tomato slice.

Speaker 1 It changed tomatoes for me and now I love them.

Speaker 1 Joining us for the secondest time is Jack to Keat.

Speaker 1 I have become the secondest guest. You've become the first, secondest guest of the second season.
I've become the first, secondest guest of the second season.

Speaker 1 who will be the second secondest guest of the second season that's the really lucky one that's the person who's who's got got it together well austin's gonna be on soon and i'm gonna try to get austin on the bonus that we're doing next week too oh exciting i uh when we announced this project i

Speaker 1 was like i'm basically now thrilled because I get to watch The Happening, a film I had never seen prior to this point. I am an M-Night liker.

Speaker 1 All I knew about The Happening was the core premise premise and that it was like kind of viewed as a historic disaster.

Speaker 1 And so I have been looking forward to this for months.

Speaker 1 And I'm so glad to be here.

Speaker 1 We're glad to have you, and we're all glad to talk about the happening, I think.

Speaker 1 I think no matter what you feel about this movie, and I think this is the least that I know what anybody feels about it going in. I think we're all excited to talk about it.

Speaker 1 Can we do like a real quick one sentence each of us, how we feel about this movie? I want to know, going in, what the top-level feeling from each of us is. Okay.
I'm going last. Okay.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Okay. Who's going first? Keith.
I'll go first.

Speaker 1 I went into this thinking that the name The Happening sounded a lot like a stupid B movie. And then that is sort of what I got.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, M. Night Shamwan is not able to commit to this premise strongly enough to have a movie that is totally legible,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 it is maybe

Speaker 1 his

Speaker 1 least annoying movie yet.

Speaker 1 Besides the Sixth Sense. Least annoying movie after the Sixth Sense.

Speaker 1 Wow. Okay.

Speaker 1 I will go off from Keith here because I think that Keith's first comment about M-Night trying to make a B-movie, but not quite being able to do it is really in line with the way I feel.

Speaker 1 I will say that the specific ways in which M-Night is not able to do this, to like pull off a B movie, results in one of the strangest pieces of cinema I have seen.

Speaker 1 This movie, the first note that I wrote down for this film is something's gone wrong with this movie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I like maintain that. That's interesting.
I found that one of the greatest strengths of this movie in his catalog is that it is totally unremarkable. I found it to be completely unremarkable.

Speaker 1 That I don't know. I don't know how you're getting that.

Speaker 1 Okay, wait, let's keep going with it. I wonder if you even understand what a movie is.
I guess. Wow.

Speaker 1 I guess I'm going next because I started by insulting Keith. It was really uncalled for.
I'm sorry I did it. Okay.

Speaker 1 I think that this movie sort of is

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 problem when Shyamalan misses.

Speaker 1 And I guess that is the end of a sentence. So I'm going to take a second sentence

Speaker 1 to say

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 there are

Speaker 1 so many good choices in this movie. I think some of the imagery is arresting.

Speaker 1 And I think it's let down by a script that doesn't care about its characters. And some of that does seem to be on purpose.
And I'm not sure that was a good choice.

Speaker 1 And some of the worst acting maybe ever committed to film.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 as I said in an early episode, that the director is responsible for the acting and therefore I have to commit to my own

Speaker 1 premise here and hold Shyamalan responsible for the work that especially Wahlberg and Deschanel are doing in this movie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Both of whom, you know, I hate Mark Wahlberg, but I've seen him give a much better acting performance than this.

Speaker 1 I don't think anyone could give a worse acting performance than Mark Wahlberg gives in this movie. I think there's one character in this movie who does.

Speaker 2 I suppose I'm going last.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 2 have said before that I remember liking this movie when I saw it. I think when I saw this movie, I was for some reason like obsessed with Mark Wahlberg.
I have since corrected that opinion.

Speaker 2 And I looked at his IMTB and I don't understand why. Maybe it was was the Italian job, but to me, that's an Edward Norton movie.
So I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know. Also, it was not

Speaker 1 good. Is it Max Payne that came out in the same year?

Speaker 2 I still think that his performance is really silly and that is charming in some way.

Speaker 1 But I do have to defend Keith here where like I

Speaker 2 feel so neutrally about this movie after watching it. It was just kind of like, that sure happened.

Speaker 1 neutral is not the feeling I feel. I feel like a bunch of people have lined up and hit me in the head with different objects, okay.
And I've just been like, What the fuck was that?

Speaker 1 What did you just hit me with? I'm so excited for Sylvie to give uh her final sentence after saying that she wanted to go last.

Speaker 1 I do, but I do want to say, I have to say this in response to Allie or in agreement with Allie that, like, one of the things, the most remarkable thing about this movie is how intense the reactions that it provokes are while I was watching it, and it was like nothing.

Speaker 1 It was like watching nothing.

Speaker 1 It was like drinking an empty glass. You know, it wasn't offensive.
It wasn't annoying. It was the show wasn't exciting.
Like, I thought that the mass suicides were kind of distasteful.

Speaker 1 That was like, oh, okay.

Speaker 1 We're going to have some conversations today.

Speaker 2 I have some strong feelings about the decisions in these movies. Yeah.
And

Speaker 1 we will get to it. Okay, Sylvie, I'm so excited to hear what you have to say.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this comes with the caveat that I do not think this is a good movie, but I love this movie.

Speaker 1 This is like comfort dog shit to me. I don't know how else to put it.
It's like, I recognize head to toe it's dreadful, but I've probably watched this movie like 20 times in my life. 20?

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, I watched this movie.

Speaker 1 In high school, were you keeping this close to the vest? Yes. Okay, wow.
I had no idea.

Speaker 1 That's a good choice. That was good.
I watched the movie a lot in high school. Specifically, I also, I will say, like half of those,

Speaker 1 maybe even more of those are with when I discovered Riff Tracks, which are former mystery science theater guys doing commentary. And I

Speaker 1 really

Speaker 1 say drugs. I'm pretty sure.

Speaker 1 Drugs came later, but let me tell you, adding those to the equation had made this a very fun time when I first watched it. I watched watched it twice in 24 hours.
I love this movie. It's dog shit.

Speaker 1 I don't think it's dog shit or dreadful. It's just like kind of, it's just nothing.

Speaker 1 Okay, dog shit isn't

Speaker 1 it's dog shit because it has aspirations of being more than what it is. Do you think so? I think it has aspirations to be less than what it is.
Yeah, I think the problem is you can't.

Speaker 1 You cannot, you can read it either way. Yeah, okay, that's fair.
It doesn't commit either way. Yeah.
And that is the actual issue. This is actually

Speaker 1 committed. He has like given interviews about that.

Speaker 1 Let Allie speak. Ali needs a declaration.

Speaker 1 To Sylvie, I've been holding this baton for you since the Lady of the Waters. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I know. When you said it, I got so happy.
Oh, this is...

Speaker 1 I also particularly love that Allie introduced her feelings about this by saying, for some reason, I had a big obsession with Mark Woolberg and then had to really quickly qualify it.

Speaker 1 And it has been immediately eclipsed like a candle in the sun with Sylvie saying that she has seen this film 20 times. At least, probably.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because

Speaker 1 hate crimes are less bad than this movie. I didn't know.

Speaker 1 That's not true. No, that's not true.
That's not true. Of course not.

Speaker 1 Also, you totally missed it. Something provocative.
I thought you were funny. I thought you were trying to call me out for watching a Mark Wahlberg movie a bunch.
I was like, hey, I didn't know.

Speaker 1 Well, it happened before this. I know, but I didn't know.
Yeah, but yeah.

Speaker 1 We all know now.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 This is what I wrote because this is a very high-level thought about this movie.

Speaker 1 This is what I wrote while I was trying to come up with summaries for my feelings about this, is that I have been struggling with feeling that M.

Speaker 1 Knight struggles with creating meaningful depth in his movies.

Speaker 1 His movies that are all about love and connection and family and distance between people and distance of the, you know, and I feel like he really, really struggles to like land that plane.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that I like about the happening is that it avoids all his pitfalls by being so unapologetically shallow. Yeah.
So he is a shallow, I think he's a deeply shallow writer

Speaker 1 who has these

Speaker 1 ideas that he can't quite get onto the screen in a way that works for me. And And the happening works because he just sidesteps those by making a pretty surface level film.

Speaker 2 I'm glad you said this at the top because I definitely, in between watching those movies, had the like shower thought of like,

Speaker 2 like, it is such a failing to the stories that he tries to make that like the only opinion you can come around away from is like, well, war is bad.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Like war war is bad in marriages.

Speaker 2 I wanted to be successful. So I want to, I, you know, I have to say that war is bad because it is pretty bad, but like just completely devoid of like

Speaker 2 feeling or

Speaker 1 opinion. There's, he is, he, he can't seem to like,

Speaker 1 for some reason, I've, I, he can't seem to capture this like really well done interpersonal stuff he did in uh The Sixth Sense. Like, and it's wild to me because that was so well done.

Speaker 1 And then every movie since has not been able to capture that lightning in the bottle, and it's been like a real letdown. Because, like,

Speaker 1 he's not a themes guy, like you said, he's not a themes guy, he's a characters guy, and he's not been flopping with the characters. He's been trying to do characters, and he's been trying to do like

Speaker 1 not action, but he's been trying to do like plot momentum. But he's really not a plot momentum guy either.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 this is

Speaker 1 horrible. You're all being so unfair unfair to

Speaker 1 the good movies that we've seen in this.

Speaker 1 The idea that the characters' moments don't work in

Speaker 1 that, like, because these movies...

Speaker 1 My opinions are well documented about some of these movies are. I don't think I'm being unfair, but we just disagree.

Speaker 1 Sorry, Ali had something, and then I do want to talk to Art about what Art is saying after that.

Speaker 2 Well, I think it's the performances that fail these characters the most.

Speaker 2 Like, you, I mean, you can kind of do the like

Speaker 2 couple who's kind of drifting apart and come closer together as like panic is happening and like not being able to talk to each other and not having the moment together.

Speaker 2 But Zoe Deschanel can't break out of the person she always is in everything she's ever been in.

Speaker 2 And Mark Wahlberg is trying to do this like sensitive breevie thing.

Speaker 2 And like, just

Speaker 1 maybe not trying to dies.

Speaker 1 it's just the neurotoxin it's just and like he's like a isn't he like a pop star wasn't he technically like a heart throw like he should be able to pull this from somewhere but i guess the boston is like so in the way of being able to be charismatic he's obsessed with being a tough guy so he he was he's mad that he has to play a fucking like he's like i gotta be a pussy teacher like that's what he wants to be

Speaker 1 that's what he credits for him taking the role Like, he's like, I wanted to try being a science teacher instead of a crook or a cop. And I'm like, well, buddy,

Speaker 1 but then he's like, are you surprised I didn't try? And it's like, no one forced you to do this.

Speaker 1 I looked this up because

Speaker 1 Art mentioned this quote that was on

Speaker 1 the Wikipedia for the happening under cast and crew reaction. And he said,

Speaker 1 it's a really bad movie. Fuck it.
It is what it is. You can't blame me for not wanting to try to play a science teacher.
At least I wasn't playing a crook or a cop.

Speaker 1 So it seems like he wasn't happy with being a science teacher,

Speaker 1 but he's like less

Speaker 1 unhappy than if he had to play a crook or a cop again.

Speaker 1 I can't believe how angry this makes me think. Don't do any movie then.
Don't do the movie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Especially because, and Ali is on the money here, I think, in terms of talking about how he is being let down by the performances. I don't think that the script for this movie is necessarily great.

Speaker 1 I'm not making that argument. It's very bare-bones, but it's not trying.

Speaker 1 I think that the performances, especially, in fact, really, the performances of Woolberg and Deschanel are some of the worst acting I have ever seen.

Speaker 1 I think that Deschanel in particular is delivering like a piece of acting that is kind of transformatively bad.

Speaker 1 It's like she's on Quelludes the entire movie.

Speaker 1 Acting is really hard to do. And there were several points in this movie where I wasn't just thinking I could do I could do this better.
I was thinking, how the hell is this happening?

Speaker 1 How do you get into a situation where you're putting a camera on someone in a movie with this budget and this amount of crew? And this is happening.

Speaker 1 We can talk about it in specific scenes as it goes, but she has this like

Speaker 1 really spectacular inability to follow a through line of emotions throughout individual like lines.

Speaker 1 She will say a line with one feeling and then get to another line which has to be delivered with a different emotion.

Speaker 1 And, you know, an actor is trained to like draw a line between those two emotions and blend them.

Speaker 1 And instead, it's like she's trying to change gears at 70 miles an hour and it just it collapses completely. It's extraordinary.

Speaker 1 I want to defend Zoe Deshanelle here by saying that the script has nothing for her. No, no, she's a new character.

Speaker 1 You could put everything this character thinks, feels, and does in this movie on an index card. It's true.
It is true. But I do think, like, you know, Jack said acting is a hard job.

Speaker 1 I don't totally disagree.

Speaker 1 I don't totally agree. But it is the main thing that an actor needs to be able to do is like

Speaker 1 turn the index card into legible emotional

Speaker 1 character work.

Speaker 1 Yes. And because I sort of got a little loose from my point by thinking about how bizarre this performance is,

Speaker 1 part of the reason that what Woolberg is saying here makes me so angry is that the joy of a B movie and the skill of being an actor in a B movie is you have to recognize it and you have to commit to it.

Speaker 1 And I feel like

Speaker 1 this is not happening here. Something has come loose.
The wheels are falling off.

Speaker 1 And we're a universe away from Tony Colette as Lynn Cere or

Speaker 1 Livy as Anne Crow. or Anna Crow.
We're like, this is a galaxy apart from that. But we're also a galaxy away from Sam Neal in Event Horizon, you know?

Speaker 2 However, while we're talking about performances at the top,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 one actor who I have like

Speaker 2 text of Apelosis for fucking brings it. And that's Jeremy Strong.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. I didn't know here.

Speaker 1 There's Jeremy Strong and then there's hot dog characters.

Speaker 1 Oh, we will church a short.

Speaker 2 But Jeremy Strong,

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 2 in flicker, like strange his feelings on acting is, and seeing him lock into this role. It's like, he, like, doesn't

Speaker 1 he came out of it? My note for him is

Speaker 1 Jeremy Strong is putting his entire pussy into this perfect. Can I tell you,

Speaker 1 as a non-what is the name of the show that he's in? I can say succession. Succession.

Speaker 1 As a non-succession watcher,

Speaker 1 I saw the Jeremy Strong takes acting too seriously content that was coming out around the time that that show was ending in its last season or two.

Speaker 1 And I got to say, I'm behind him a thousand percent. I think everything that he ever said about acting is thoughtful and serious.

Speaker 1 And the fact that other actors don't approach acting the same way doesn't make him wrong or weird. No, no, no.
And he's a phenomenal actor, clearly.

Speaker 1 Clearly, he's a phenomenal actor. Clearly, yes, yes.
He's a strange Kritza.

Speaker 2 But yeah, that doesn't mean that he doesn't like reveling in being the weirdo and wearing his little outfits. So, like,

Speaker 1 he's amazing in this movie. He's amazing in this movie.
He's amazing in this movie. He pops.
He's one of the very few pops this movie has. I want to go back to.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Is it time for a synopsis? I do have a

Speaker 1 third out recap ready to go. I have one thing that I want to do before the recap, and that is I wanted to clarify on my own part and Art's part the

Speaker 1 thing about like the characters and plot momentum and themes discussion that we were having

Speaker 1 because I just want to make it clear. I'm not saying

Speaker 1 and I didn't hear all of the thing that Art took issue with.

Speaker 1 Art, you tell me if I'm wrong about what you were saying. It felt to me like

Speaker 1 you thought that I was saying that the characters weren't working, but I was saying that's the only thing that was working for me in his movie.

Speaker 1 No, I'm taking issue with you saying that the characters in this work better

Speaker 1 than the other movies we've seen. Oh, no, no, no.
I don't think that's true. The idea that the characters

Speaker 1 implied that that's not true. The characters in this are not as good as the characters in,

Speaker 1 I think, basically any movie we've seen so far, but especially every movie we've seen thus far. Yeah, my

Speaker 1 totally agree the thing that i would say that this movie does better is that it doesn't get bogged down in the things that he does worse that annoy me like super heavy-handed

Speaker 1 themes that are trying to be deep but aren't and then like um this kind of inability to keep the plot going forward i would say that this movie can keep the plot going forward better than his other movies.

Speaker 1 That's sort of the one thing this movie does better.

Speaker 1 Before Sylvie reads the synopsis, can I say a procedural thing for the listener? Yeah. That I think it is important to say.
This is a film that features as a core plot element suicide and suicidality.

Speaker 1 We are not necessarily going to be particularly gratuitous or salacious in our discussion of this, but we are going to talk about how it works in the movie, how it is shot, how it is sort of like discussed narratively.

Speaker 1 That is, you know, part and parcel of talking about this movie.

Speaker 1 So, if that is not something that you feel that you are necessarily up for at the moment, this is probably not the episode of Media Club Plus for you.

Speaker 1 But I wanted to make sure we set that into the camera, into the camera god. Yeah, you got it, man.
The voice camera whenever we begin talking. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Come back next week for a movie that I'm sure will have a lot less of that. Although I'm going to be honest with you, I haven't seen it, so who knows?

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 The happening begins in Central Park on a seemingly idyllic morning when all of a sudden, everyone in the area stops in their tracks and one by one begin to kill themselves.

Speaker 1 This quickly spreads through New York City, illustrated by a scene of an entire construction crew tossing themselves off their work site to their death.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I don't know if you guys have heard about this. This article in the New York Times about the honeybees vanishing?

Speaker 1 Well, apparently it's what Elliot Moore, played by Mark Wahlberg, a Philadelphia-based high school science teacher, is talking to his class about.

Speaker 1 We got a scene of him talking to his students being like, why do you guys think this is happening?

Speaker 1 And he takes a moment to bully the chad in his classroom before he gets pulled out of class with the rest of the teachers to learn what is going on.

Speaker 1 They blame on the news, they're blaming unspecified terrorists for the events in Central Park, and everyone is sent home.

Speaker 1 We get introduced to Elliot's best buddy, fellow teacher Julian, played by John Logozamo.

Speaker 1 He is a math teacher who loves his daughter, says things like, people are common by percentages, and he hates elliott's wife alma very very much because she was crying on her wedding day alma and elliot being in an em night shy malon movie are having marital trouble see there's this guy at work joey and he and alma ate tiramisu together and he keeps calling her that's gonna be that's gonna be i don't know if it was important but it'll come up a few more times

Speaker 1 Alma and Elliot meet Julian and his daughter Jess to take the train out of Philadelphia

Speaker 1 to Julian's, I think it's his grandmother, his mother

Speaker 1 or mother-in-law. I think his mother-in-law.
And with his wife to follow after them because she couldn't get out of work. But damn, wouldn't you know it?

Speaker 1 Right after our heroes leave, that hot new neurotoxin hits the streets of Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 We got another scene of people killing themselves in the street, this time illustrated by a handgun daisy chain after someone gets, after a police officer gets infected.

Speaker 1 These are all, just so the anyone who's not watching along knows, these happen in like, I would say, two-minute vignettes, and then it cuts back to the main plot. It'll happen a couple times.

Speaker 1 I've got them described in here, but I can skip that if people on the show think I should skip the descriptions of what happens.

Speaker 1 I think we'll get to it if we get to it. We'll get to it.
There's some I definitely want to talk about. Yeah.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So after that, we cut back to everybody on the train learning that Philadelphia was hit, and then the train loses contact with, and I quote, everyone, and has to stop in the little town of Philbert, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 The stranded passengers all flood into a local diner where Elliot comforts Jess with this routine about a mood ring that doesn't really read nearly as charming as the past M-Night Shyamalan scenes of its ilk.

Speaker 1 I'm thinking of the magic trick scene in the sixth sense to be specific.

Speaker 1 Immediately afterwards, and I mean in the same shot, a woman next to Elliot goes, oh my god, you have to see this, and shows him like a live leak video of a man being eaten by lions at the Philadelphia Zoo on her iPod Touch.

Speaker 1 It's revealed through another expository scene of the news that it's not a terrorist attack, and it's only occurring in the Northeast United States.

Speaker 1 Everybody that's been stranded from the train starts freaking out. They start trying to flee.

Speaker 1 And in the midst of this,

Speaker 1 Julian decides to leave and go find his wife up in Princeton while Jess is left with Elliot and Alma.

Speaker 1 Elliot joins up with this unnamed botanist. I double-checked.
This man does not get a name. He does not get a name.
He's called the nursery owner on IMDb. To me, he's hot dog guy.

Speaker 1 This guy loves hot dogs. They got a cool shape and they're full of protein.

Speaker 1 That's what he says.

Speaker 1 He also

Speaker 1 is a botanist and hypothesizes that the neurotoxin could be something that plants are producing, but it's his love of hot dogs that stands out to me the most.

Speaker 1 Julian's group reach Princeton and immediately get exposed to the toxin, crashing into a tree at top speeds before Julian dies in the middle of the street.

Speaker 1 Meanwhile, Elliot and friends have to take a detour, but after their way, they've been driving with the botanist and his wife, after their way is blocked by signs of more dead bodies.

Speaker 1 They come to this crossroads that

Speaker 1 it turns out everybody who has been traveling away from has had to come back this way. Basically, it's four paths and they all keep meeting up.
This is where they meet.

Speaker 1 Private Oster, played by Jeremy Strong. Everybody goes crazy.
Everybody goes wild.

Speaker 1 Cheese and crackers. Cheese and crackers.
He's very jittery, very nervous.

Speaker 1 He describes like finding a military base where everyone has sort of like killed themselves on the defenses there and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 We don't see that, but you know, it's a good visual input to put in your head. Why not?

Speaker 1 While they're there, an unnamed woman gets a phone call from her daughter in Princeton, giving her the news that everybody outside her window and in Princeton itself is dead.

Speaker 1 After spending a night in their cars, Elliot and Private Oster come up with this plan to start walking towards a safe zone westward where there's a much lower population and splitting into two groups of survivors.

Speaker 1 Oh, I forgot to mention that there's a scene of Elliot and Alma, not Elliot and Alma, Elliot and Jess sort of comforting each other a little bit, the little girl

Speaker 1 between that, but... We'll keep it moving.

Speaker 1 While they're walking, Alma tells Elliot about Joey, the aforementioned Tirama Sue man, but is quickly overshadowed by the first group, led by Oster, being struck by the neurotoxin.

Speaker 1 His firearm is his friend, and it will not leave his side.

Speaker 1 Elliot's group panic over what to do while they hear these gunshots in the distance, and amid panic attack, Elliot comes up with the theory that the larger the group of people there are, the more likely the plants are to release the toxin near them.

Speaker 1 The remaining few split up into smaller groups, leaving two boys named Jared and Josh, joining Elliot, Alma, and Jess.

Speaker 1 After a brief break in in a model home and watching a guy do some pretty cool stuff with a lawnmower, they find themselves at a boarded-up house in the hopes that Jess can rest for a bit.

Speaker 1 Elliot makes the critical mistake of singing the Doobie Brothers to the paranoid man inside the house, and the two teenagers call him a bitch and a pussy before getting ventilated with a shotgun.

Speaker 1 After a few vignettes of people engaging in varying degrees of doomsday prepping, from grannies and gas masks to your sort of classic militias forming, our heroes arrive at the old rundown farm of the standoffish Mrs.

Speaker 1 Jones.

Speaker 1 Being cut off from the world, Jones doesn't know what's happening to everyone, but lets the three stay for dinner, and in spite of her hair trigger temper and hostility towards them, even lets them stay over.

Speaker 1 She also accuses Elliot of wanting to murder her in her sleep, and he does not really rebut that in a convincing way. We'll get to it.

Speaker 1 Elliot also finds a creepy doll in the morning that he thinks is Mrs. Jones for a minute, and then when he gets close, he's like, oh, it's a doll, weird lady.

Speaker 1 She freaks out, accuses him of wanting to steal her things, leaves to go pray in her garden and promptly gets infected with the neurotoxin.

Speaker 1 Elliot starts freaking out, trying to close all the doors and windows to keep the wind from getting in.

Speaker 1 The wind, by the way, has been being treated like Mike Myers from Halloween, not Mike Myers from Austin Powers,

Speaker 1 Halloween this whole time.

Speaker 1 I mean, it depends on your... I'll recut this to have the Austin Powers theme playing every time the wind shows up.

Speaker 1 I did find the wind to be shaggedalic. It was.
It was groovy, baby. And that kind of theme does kind of sound like the wind sometimes, right?

Speaker 1 It's a window.

Speaker 1 Okay. That's the wind.

Speaker 1 Mrs. Jones, now infected with the neurotoxin,

Speaker 1 decides, has like,

Speaker 1 it's not clear if it's if the plants are onto the

Speaker 1 hiding inside plant or not, but they sure do make her... The neurotoxin sure does make her smash her head into all the windows,

Speaker 1 making our good friend elliot run and hide up up in a they did foreshadow this with the woman who is talking to her daughter on the phone

Speaker 1 oh they did did they yeah they did oh right with the the glass shattering

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 the throughout this whole sequence there's been you can kind of hear the sounds of alma and jess playing in the background and uh

Speaker 1 it this would read more like we oh we're supposed to think they're in the house if we didn't get a scene earlier telling us about the sort of sound tubes that can communicate between the main house and the field house back when this was part of the underground railroad um so because you know

Speaker 1 wow the only way that people can be open with each other is when they're not face to face they have this whole conversation through this um

Speaker 1 through this sound tube system where they go over how they met uh apparent they did uh he the mood ring turns out to have been the the meet cute that spurred their

Speaker 1 relationship uh he gave it to alma and it turned purple and he said that was love, but it turned out that it meant she was horny and

Speaker 1 he was like, that was so funny. And then his was blue, which was peaceful.
And I was like, okay. But the big thing here is that neither of them remember what color love is.
Isn't that sad?

Speaker 1 Wow. So while they're separated

Speaker 1 with this field of potentially deadly toxin between them, Elliot decides,

Speaker 1 I don't want to die alone. If this is going to happen, I'm going to see my wife.

Speaker 1 I'm going out there and Alma joins him and brings the kid with her for some reason I don't that part confused me a little bit why why did she she could have stayed inside that's okay they embrace they meet in the middle of the field and then all of a sudden Almost as if but like the power of love saved them.

Speaker 1 The neurotoxin is gone. The happening has ended as quickly as it began.

Speaker 1 Science coded.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 1 We flash forward

Speaker 1 to the first day of school. Our first day schools are open again after

Speaker 1 what happened.

Speaker 1 With Jess living with the Moores, Alma and Elliot.

Speaker 1 Alma finds out she's pregnant. And we also got some scientist on the TV saying the exact same thing that that kid in Elliot's science class did about the bees.

Speaker 1 That it's an act of nature and will never fully understand it. He also says it's a warning that humanity has become a threat to this planet and it could happen again.

Speaker 1 Alma and Elliot embrace after she presumably shares the news about her pregnancy and then the final scene of the movie is in Paris where on a seemingly idyllic morning people stop in their tracks and begin to kill themselves.

Speaker 1 A film by M. Night Shyamalan.

Speaker 1 I can't believe you left out the scene where someone just says it's going to stop at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning.
Does somebody do that? Did I

Speaker 1 write that? There's a guy on the news who's like, it's going to stop at 9.15 tomorrow morning and then it exactly does. Oh, I did miss that.

Speaker 1 He's a scientist at the and it's like a scientist of weird plant murders. This is uh the only scientist I listen to has strong feelings about hot dogs.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 This, this is, uh, this is stupid, but it is. They do also bring this up earlier when

Speaker 1 they're talking about the, they're in the model home and they're talking about the bacteria in the Australian ocean, and that what happens is that it gets exponentially worse until all of a sudden it just stops.

Speaker 1 So, that concept was introduced. It's still really stupid to come back and restate it and have a scientist be like, 9 a.m.
tomorrow,

Speaker 1 that's when it's going to stop, I think. It's like a little chart that says breast can't put his numbers on it.

Speaker 1 Midnight Shyamalan can't stop himself from having characters just know the answer to the problems of the movie. This is exactly what happens in science.

Speaker 1 It happens two times in this movie because the botanist is like, Yeah, I was thinking about it. I'm pretty sure it's the plants.
And then it's like, okay, 25 minutes later,

Speaker 1 it's the plants.

Speaker 1 Like, it's just so weird that the process of discovery happens in off-screen with tertiary characters. I, there was a point, because like you, Keith, here's, here's what I knew about the happening.

Speaker 1 It's got Mark Woolberg and Zoe Deschnell.

Speaker 1 There's like a mysterious virus that makes you kill yourself.

Speaker 1 And there's plants involved.

Speaker 1 And at the beginning of the movie, when characters started saying things pretty directly, like, I think it's the plants that are doing this, part of my brain was like, oh, have I misremembered this?

Speaker 1 And it's a fake out. That's a theory that they have, but it's actually not the plants.
But no, it does turn out that, like you say, Keith, they tell us what it is

Speaker 1 early. And then we do just sort of keep going.
Did you watch signs, Jack? No, I've never seen signs. Okay.

Speaker 1 Literally the same thing happens in signs. It's unbelievable.

Speaker 1 But the person's saying it is M9 Chalon. It's M.
Night Chamber. M.
Night Chamelon shows up. He's a veterinarian and he goes, look, man, I'm getting out of town.

Speaker 1 I'm pretty sure these aliens don't like water.

Speaker 1 And then nothing is done with that information until the climactic scene of the movie when he starts knocking the alien into the water and the water starts melting the alien.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 a few swing away.

Speaker 1 A couple of days ago, Art sent a message in our chat saying, if anyone hasn't seen this film before and would like a secret assignment, message me.

Speaker 1 And I messaged Art and I was given a secret assignment, Taskmaster style. And Art said, and we've sort of begun to dial into this already,

Speaker 1 that M-Night and the crew said that part of the reason this movie was like misreceived was that they were trying to make a B movie. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 And that is not what people thought that it was. And people judged it by the wrong yardstick, essentially.
So Art said, you should watch this movie as though it is a B movie.

Speaker 1 And the examples that M-Night gave were like the birds and God, what was the the other one, Art?

Speaker 1 The Blob.

Speaker 1 The Blob. Right, yes.
I was thinking of Bob, the Blob 2. And Art also said, and that it's supposed to be funny.

Speaker 1 And so I was watching this movie with these two things kind of in mind. And it just made me confused and angry in different ways.
This movie's not...

Speaker 1 This movie is occasionally very unintentionally funny, but I think... There is so much...

Speaker 1 I really, really like the soundtrack to this movie. It is not a funny soundtrack the soundtrack believes with dead certainty in what is happening in this movie um the emotional stakes of um

Speaker 1 we are uh like bringing a child along in a perilous situation we're constantly getting you know derailed or whatever this is how you would stage um like a spielberg war of the worlds movie or something you know um it falls apart in being a B movie.

Speaker 1 The areas in which I think it succeeds in being a B movie are actually in the

Speaker 1 suicide sequences. I think that this film has a really good eye for like exploitative or grindhouse horror detailing.

Speaker 1 And we could talk about that kind of as they come up. I think those are really well

Speaker 1 sort of like chosen for kind of carrying that feeling. But when I think about the B movies that I really like,

Speaker 1 this movie doesn't even come close to them because it is so emotionally muddled.

Speaker 1 A film that I thought about a lot when I was watching this was the John Carpenter movie Prince of Darkness, which is about a bunch of academics who accidentally discover the devil.

Speaker 1 And John Carpenter has such a good eye for like the ways to make his characters pulpy and funny and like lovable or hatable

Speaker 1 and scary and to arrange them in space in ways that it lets him pull emotional levers.

Speaker 1 You know, if if the only John Carpenter you've seen is The Thing, I think The Thing is like genuinely a sinister movie.

Speaker 1 Something like Prince of Darkness is scary, but it's like fun scary and kind of like goofy scary.

Speaker 1 There's a really great bit where a guy gets replaced by a load of cockroaches who dress up in his clothes and walk around outside to try and scare people.

Speaker 1 There's none of that like control over when you should be funny, when you should be scary, when you should be emotive in this movie. It's all just sort of happening at once.

Speaker 1 One of the things that I was conflicted about during these scenes, and like the very beginning of it, is this the first mass suicide scene. And

Speaker 1 it immediately

Speaker 1 reminded me that this is the first R-rated M9 Shyamalan movie. And at the same time, that I, as I felt that

Speaker 1 these

Speaker 1 scenes were kind of cheesy in a fun way, they are gruesome and tacky in a fun way.

Speaker 1 And they also, it also screamed to me like he doesn't know even what to do with an R rating. Like he had the idea to make an R rated movie without having an R rated movie to make.

Speaker 1 Because this movie is like full of violence that happens to nameless characters off in the distance.

Speaker 1 It's very, it's like, there's very little violence that happens to, like,

Speaker 1 there's no violence that happens to core characters, and there's very little violence that happens to secondary or even tertiary characters. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so, what happens is you have a PG-13 movie intercut with R-rated scenes that serve essentially no function.

Speaker 1 Well, they're visually arresting.

Speaker 1 Besides being visually arresting,

Speaker 1 besides being visually arresting, I think when they're like driving into Princeton and they see all those landscapers both hang themselves,

Speaker 1 that's ND Shamalon right there.

Speaker 1 Because that happens in The Sixth Sense. So we know he could have done that without the R rating.

Speaker 1 I don't know that you could do that in the Sixth Sense.

Speaker 1 Almost the exact thing, like the hanged people, happens in The Sixth Sense. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But like,

Speaker 1 they're at the end of that hallway.

Speaker 1 right? I think that I mean, yes, I don't work for the NPA, but like I do feel like

Speaker 1 I think it's things like knitting needle through the neck that is giving such a weird moment.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 sorry, go on, Allie. No, no, no, I, I, I, I

Speaker 1 am,

Speaker 2 there are some that are really good, and there are some that just feel like

Speaker 2 he does not know what to do with this because he has a very particular directing style and has

Speaker 2 sort of repeated a lot of the same sort of like setups and like

Speaker 2 you know scenes and and things to focus on that like

Speaker 2 i mean i'm i'm a i'm a scaredy cat

Speaker 2 eyes cover for a lot of these things

Speaker 2 but like the but like the I think there's a well of difference between how legitimately like shocking and interesting and scary

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 needle scene is

Speaker 2 which spends so much time in the anticipation of the like stab that like you sort of know

Speaker 2 you know i feel like the

Speaker 2 that scene gets stretched in a way that it just ends up being kind of frustrating and like not

Speaker 2 scary because of it yeah whereas like the the the the um construction site scene with like the one person dropping and then you having these actual like the moments with these characters where they're like shocked, and then the second body, and then, like, the sort of escalation of things.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's, there's a death, and they're like, it's a horrible accident, and there's two deaths, and it's like, oh my God, two horrible accidents. And the punchline to that scene is this beautiful

Speaker 1 wide shot tilting upwards to look at the rim of the building as people in slow motion are jumping off it, which is as they're realizing something is happening.

Speaker 1 Some kind of happening. I do think that,

Speaker 1 and to your point, I think that on some level, he kind of pulls his punches with some of these. I think that you're right, Ali, with the needle scene there as well.
I think

Speaker 1 I really do like that initial shot of the landscapers.

Speaker 1 But it's immediately followed by this scene that is supposed to be very tense and frightening as John Leguizamo kind of tries to calm people down. And we can see empty streets in the

Speaker 1 outside of the car windows behind them.

Speaker 1 And it would have been so easy to continue to crank up the tension and horror and pace in that scene by like lining the road with bodies or something but it's it's like you say Keith we have this sort of um pg he is a pg13 director who is trying to insert r-rated sequences and as soon as he gets his scare off on seeing the bodies they sort of melt out of the scene um and we we don't really see them they despawn

Speaker 1 they despawn

Speaker 1 similarly um the the lion sequence It's shot really weirdly. He's replicating

Speaker 1 his fascination that we started seeing for the first time in Signs, where he was like, oh, everyone really liked the TV sequence from Signs, except the Cast of Media Club Plus.

Speaker 1 So we have these people on their phones looking at a live leak

Speaker 1 clip of a guy deliberately getting himself eaten by lions.

Speaker 1 And I found this clip so structurally annoying to me because he approaches a lion and

Speaker 1 the first lion attack is hidden from us. You know, we're on the character's faces when he actually gets bitten.
And I was like, oh, right.

Speaker 1 M-Night can't show a guy getting torn apart by a lion because he doesn't want to do that or for whatever reason. But then we cut back to the thing, and a lion pulls the guy's arm off on screen.

Speaker 1 And I was like, the horror in that moment is the first attack by the lion. Why would you cut to a character's face in that moment? Right, because you know you're going to.

Speaker 1 He wants to give you the blood, but not the horror. I don't really

Speaker 1 understand it.

Speaker 2 I'm glad we're talking about this at the top because it really puts into context, I think one of my biggest complaints watching it, which is that like, I think the

Speaker 2 movie betrays how scary the actual concept is.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 I feel like the only time that I really feel like that in terms of like sympathy with the audience is when there's so many people crowded in that little diner and everybody's kind of getting information at once.

Speaker 2 And then they pull over the TV where it's like, Yeah,

Speaker 1 you're in it.

Speaker 2 Um, and just like the thought of how scary it would actually be

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 feel like a lack of hope, like just like I'm lost, I don't know what to do.

Speaker 1 You can feel it coming for you, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 But like, the

Speaker 2 every other scene, because there's no

Speaker 1 actual

Speaker 2 actor, I guess, or any like real representation, like you have these like long spanning,

Speaker 2 um, like, you know, shots of grass where the wind is picking up and then like music is really scary. And these actors who like are in this situation, but like kind of just don't give a fuck.

Speaker 2 Like, I don't know, I don't know that it ever really feels like they're scared. I don't know what it is.
But like,

Speaker 2 the concept for this movie could have been elevated in a, in a way that like

Speaker 2 this kind of,

Speaker 2 I don't know how far i could get away from this thing i don't have any visual representation of whether i'm safe or not could be a fear that really sticks with you after you leave it but instead it's just like oh okay that was a film i guess yeah yeah uh it's it's so sad because i the the the the we're kind of cheated out of that because

Speaker 1 You also get to this great point where like

Speaker 1 it is dangerous for you to be close to people.

Speaker 1 so people have to start separating you know you can feel thematic work kind of there under the under the under the surface but it's it's never acted upon it never sort of works well i also want to say that i think that the like a part of like a big cinema sins ding from this movie because we are now deep in cultural m-night hate um is that it's like this is a movie in which the trees the only scary thing they can show you is the trees moving or like the wind yeah and i think there's real potential i don't think that the movie necessarily does it well, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea.

Speaker 1 I think that you can get patient, good, scary photography of landscapes and of trees moving.

Speaker 1 There's potential there. I think

Speaker 2 the cornfield was so much scarier than any of the trees in this movie are.

Speaker 1 Infinitely scarier than this.

Speaker 1 Oh, there was something.

Speaker 1 Oh, I had something and I lost it. What were we at? Oh,

Speaker 1 not being able to be near people. yeah it comes too late yes yep because by the time like they get there there's only like four of them anyway five of them anyway

Speaker 1 and then immediately they they kill those two kids the like the the terror of not being able to to be near anyone sort of just like

Speaker 1 yeah it's too late in the film you can't do anything with this we've

Speaker 1 we've exhausted

Speaker 1 I don't know, because if you put 20 more minutes in this movie, I think people would have been killing themselves in the theater, too.

Speaker 1 Well, and what a bigger scare than that.

Speaker 1 I like genuinely had that

Speaker 1 get me the fuck out of here feeling during the mood ring conversation at the end of the movie. I was like, I'm going to walk into a lake.

Speaker 1 And you know what happens then? You die. You didn't like when she said that she was horny? I just, I was not connected to these people.
The movie was acting like I was.

Speaker 1 The music was telling me to be connected. James Newton, how it is, a good composer.
I was feeling like all the wrong synapses were firing. I was like, get me the hell out of here.
But

Speaker 1 I would like to say something I like about this movie.

Speaker 1 And we can kind of get into the first act. I think that this film has a really good eye.
This is a Takfujimoto joint. Yeah.
He's good. We've liked him forever.
Third Ebnite.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 This film has a really great

Speaker 1 eye for the arrangement of people in scenes. There are some beautiful arrangements of people, uh, that belong in a much better movie.

Speaker 1 Like Ali said, all these people crowded in the diner looking up at the TV that these two, this is like a CRT TV that these guys have like hoisted onto the bar.

Speaker 1 And at one point, he like leans down and turns the volume up, and you can see the little volume icons on the screen.

Speaker 1 Um, there's a there's a great shot of um when the train stops in this small town, an entire train full of scared people being like dumped in this like leafy station out in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 1 We talked about it earlier. There's that crossroads where all the cars keep ending up.

Speaker 1 And that's also staged really beautifully.

Speaker 1 The film has such a good eye for like...

Speaker 1 loose arrangements of people in interesting shapes and emotive shapes

Speaker 1 even when in the middle of it we have mark wahlberg and zoe dashanel doing absolutely jack shit uh

Speaker 1 although on the other hand like the for every time there's an interesting framing of people in a scene, there's two extreme close-ups on Zoe Deschanel's shocked-looking face and her wide eyes.

Speaker 1 Well, that's what you hire her for. I describe it as like watching TV like a golden retriever the first time we see us.
I don't know how else to like describe it.

Speaker 1 She just has a very like dog-like expression on her face. Yeah.
i i um i i understand what

Speaker 1 zoe deshanel's you know early to mid-career was but no one has had less um

Speaker 1 uh ability to restrain themselves i think than whoever was choosing how many times and for how long to show extreme close-ups of her big eyes um no i mean i to to to build on what jack was saying about the work being done this movie is that I do think the director M.

Speaker 1 Night Shyamalan really needs to be mad at writer M. Night Shyamalan for giving him this script.
Yeah, fucking producer M. Night Shyamalan for putting this cast together.
Yeah. Like, yes.

Speaker 1 The, the, the, again,

Speaker 1 setting aside the fact that I think the directors are ultimately responsible for the acting performances. The work that like Shyamalan and Tak Fujimoto and James Newton Howard are doing is good work.

Speaker 1 The technical work here is

Speaker 1 being done.

Speaker 1 And then it's just a shame that the events of this movie are what they're chronicling.

Speaker 1 Here's something that I like about this movie, talking about the early stages, is this is

Speaker 1 the first movie in the smartphone era.

Speaker 1 This is a mobile information age. A lot of the terror comes from people having a moment to look at the news on their phone.

Speaker 1 Like, as stupid as the lion scene was, and I have got to take credit from that actor who did a really bad job of feeding himself to the lions.

Speaker 1 I think, sorry, guy.

Speaker 1 There's a good idea in that

Speaker 1 casualness and his looseness. He should be really casual and disaffected, but then you got to do more than that, man.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And again, it's really M-Night's Fault for cutting away at the exact wrong time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think the actor deserves any of the heat for this.

Speaker 1 The way he's moving around,

Speaker 1 it was one of the worst suicides in the movie. And there's a lot.
There's a lot of suicide. But like the Lions aren't there.
Right? The Lions is all.

Speaker 1 No, they're not.

Speaker 1 Oh, you mean like in the middle of the day? No, he does reveal Lions.

Speaker 2 No, no.

Speaker 1 No, I don't think the actor and the Lions were in the same place. Correct.
So like the actor being weird in relation to the lions is not the actor's fault. No, I gotta go back.

Speaker 1 I have to plead that's what acting is, though.

Speaker 1 This is why when you're acting with things that aren't there, it's the responsibility of the people who put the things there to not make you look like a fucking jackass.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 1 Or the responsibility of the people waving the tennis balls around to.

Speaker 1 I thought about this before I said that he was doing a bad job, and I still think he's doing a bad job.

Speaker 1 Put one real line. This is how you shoot it: you get the lion and the lion trainer.
You shoot it with one lion. The actor is the guy.
We get one scene where he approaches the lion, then we cut away.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but then if we're gonna have to have if we're going to have the lion pulling his arm off on camera, why not make them all CG, I suppose, at that point? Yeah,

Speaker 2 yeah, I think it's one thing, like, um,

Speaker 2 yeah, there's just something to it where it's like

Speaker 2 it's it's also a disappointment in how the

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 this sort of

Speaker 2 impulse manifests in people, right? Where it's like

Speaker 2 it's hard to have it be really effective visually

Speaker 2 when everyone's supposed to have this sort of like dead-eyed

Speaker 2 um almost robotic, but not quite stiff enough to be robotic, kind of thing. Like, you know, the parts where this happens really fast, like the long cutout to

Speaker 2 the car.

Speaker 1 I love that one. That was a really good one.

Speaker 2 And then just hits the tree and hits the tree so

Speaker 2 like abruptly that you could see the bodies come out of the wind shield is like done very well.

Speaker 2 And the violets follow through and the, you know, ease up to the like the roller coaster drop is really done effectively and quickly.

Speaker 2 And, you know, it's like a rubber band snapping and it feels shocking and it feels really good.

Speaker 2 But with the lion thing, you kind of have like, oh, you have to spend time with him suddenly kind of acting disaffective.

Speaker 2 And then you kind of already know that something is happening bad because why would it be in the scene anyway? And then you have him like gesturing to the lion and then the cutaway.

Speaker 2 And it's just like,

Speaker 2 there's not enough to do with that scene when you have to consider, oh, I have to be really active and I have to be the only actor in the scene because there isn't a line here.

Speaker 2 And also, what I'm being directed to do is to look really blank and unintentional.

Speaker 1 Here's another structural issue with that is

Speaker 1 the choice to have had the woman showing Elliot the video, she's already seen it. So she's already screamed about it before we even know what's going on.

Speaker 1 It wouldn't have been that hard to have like everyone watch the video for the first time together and all reacting together.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but then I would be robbed of her being like, oh my God, you've got to see this. And that's one of my favorite bits.
I really like that part. Do you know

Speaker 1 that there were originally two clips shown in that dynasty? No. Oh.

Speaker 1 I did not.

Speaker 1 They cut.

Speaker 1 one of them because I think they're right that the lion is better.

Speaker 1 And if they're just sitting around watching live leak videos, the tone of the scene changes tremendously so i can understand why they only have one the original version of the scene which you can find it was released um i think on the dvd extras uh features a man midway through a violin recital uh like losing his place in the music and like getting stuck in a measure this sounds like a good idea it's not as cool as it sounds um

Speaker 1 and then uh they also

Speaker 1 there's some weird implications in this scene then a bunch of people in the crowd just keel over so there's a chance that maybe in this cut of the movie, sometimes you just died.

Speaker 1 And then the man puts the violin bow down his throat, which is

Speaker 1 that's that's that's pretty good. Um,

Speaker 1 but yeah, I can see why they can see why they cut it. Yeah, um,

Speaker 1 we don't need both of those. Um, the there, this first act also obviously is setting up the like emotional stakes between uh Elliot and Alma, which barely exist um yeah

Speaker 1 some important context as we're describing these scenes and the kind of plot maneuvers is that every five or six minutes mark wahlberg or zoe dashnell will deliver a line reading in the strangest possible way you have ever heard yes i have i have um i'm yeah i need to know about buttons keith

Speaker 1 So I don't, sorry, I don't yet have a, I don't know if I have a button of their sort of relationship stuff because it was so uninteresting, but I do have written a quote of like their first argument.

Speaker 1 You know, Mark Wahlberg has already set up to Johnny Legs that

Speaker 1 he's having trouble with Alma. And so when they meet up, I think that

Speaker 1 John Leguizamo very, I think, sensitively, tells her, hey, I'm glad you chose to come with us.

Speaker 1 Zoe Deschanel does not like this because she thinks that Elliot has like paddled, that they've been having trouble. And so she pulls him two feet to the side to say, you told him about our fight.

Speaker 1 I don't want to put my feelings out there for everyone to see.

Speaker 1 I'm not that type of person.

Speaker 1 In the middle of having a public fight that everyone can see, and John Leguizambo absolutely can hear.

Speaker 1 I thought that was kind of like girlfriend. That's just being a bad girlfriend.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 sometimes you're just an insane person. Sometimes you're just an insane person.

Speaker 1 That really seems to be like one of the biggest problems in the script for this is that like they're having fights about nothing. She's mad about nothing.

Speaker 1 They never like there's one scene where one of the boys that they're traveling with later on will be like, you got to take responsibility for yourself in this relationship.

Speaker 1 Yeah, after he asks him if his dick doesn't work.

Speaker 1 After, yeah, after he asked him if his dick doesn't work or if his, you know, if his swimmers don't swim or some, whatever, whatever thing he was implying about.

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 1 It's just such a weird scene where they're like teasing this guy who they don't know.

Speaker 1 And like, you know, he has his mood ring and the kid is like, ooh, I remember when I liked these being like, you're a baby, your relationship is falling apart. You're a loser.

Speaker 1 You don't know anything about. That's.

Speaker 2 I think it works because they're like high school boys and he's a teacher.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it works.

Speaker 1 It's very weird.

Speaker 1 This is the thing, though. It doesn't actually work because Mark Wahlbrook's performance doesn't work enough.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like he's he's trying to do, like, he's definitely trying to do cool teacher that you wish was your big brother is like the whole thing, especially when we see him early on and like, oh, the mistress of evil is here when the vice principal shows.

Speaker 1 But he telling that, he won't stop telling that boy how handsome he is. He's going to be a stud all his life.
But he, he, yeah, he want people talking to my

Speaker 1 kid like that yeah i he cannot make any dialogue he has with the children it sound natural because he can't make any of the dialogue sound natural but it really sticks out like a sore thumb there because that's supposed to be what he's good at but my point my point in bringing this up is that like we get nothing about their relationship and why they're having these issues like

Speaker 1 Like what she was crying on their wedding day.

Speaker 1 It's circular. Like they're having issues, so she's talking to this other guy, but in the end, her talking to the other guy is the issue like right it it's

Speaker 1 it's terrible and i hate it yeah we never get anything about why their relationship isn't working but we also don't get anything like convincingly not working like it's weird he can't even this is an r-rated movie and he can't he can't seem to like think up

Speaker 1 He can't seem to stomach have it as a director, Mn or a writer. M night can't seem to like stomach the idea that shh that someone actually did something wrong.
She should have cheated.

Speaker 1 She should have cheated. She should have absolutely cheated.
She didn't even kiss this guy. They just had

Speaker 1 Terra Masu. They had Tiramasu.
Tiramasu. This is like...
I don't think that's Teramasu. Oh, Gone Alley.

Speaker 1 No, I'm curious about weird.

Speaker 2 Because I feel like

Speaker 2 this kind of thing happens between people, right? Like you fight over nothing. You go through bad patches or whatever.

Speaker 2 Like, I don't know that, like, the movie would be so much worse if it felt like it needed to spend time like, justifying the weirdness between them more than it already does.

Speaker 2 And it could just be, like, they were having a bad time and also this thing is happening on top of it.

Speaker 1 I think they went for like the same amount of time and just had, like, a slightly more coherent reason. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because there's nothing given. It's not that she didn't cheat.
It's that, it's that, it's that they specifically went out of their way to show that she didn't cheat. Like,

Speaker 1 like, they went out of their way to tell you, by the way, this is is all about nothing. Like they could have said very less and it would have worked more.
Instead, the director just keeps calling her.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's M night on the phone. Yeah, Joey on the phone, which I loved.
I loved saying.

Speaker 1 This feels very strange to watch. Usually emotions kind of get in the film by accident.

Speaker 1 Or rather, if you've written it badly, some emotions will kind of creep in anyway, you know, like ants if you leave food out.

Speaker 1 It's very odd watching a movie where there's just nothing between these people.

Speaker 1 You might think you've seen a movie in which there's no chemistry between characters. We're not talking about a lack of chemistry, although that is also missing.

Speaker 1 We're talking about like fundamental things about how people like interact. To the point about the cheating and M-Night not necessarily wanting to show people doing bad things or whatever.

Speaker 1 It's really notable to me how sexless this movie is and how sexless M-Night's work is generally.

Speaker 1 This is especially, you know, I'd sort of started to notice this as, you know, I've been thinking through the movies as you've been talking about them, but as he's like deep in this B-movie space and is clearly very interested in the kind of salacious or exploitative power of these suicide sequences to greater or lesser effect, it becomes very notable that there is a big gap missing, which is sex and horniness.

Speaker 1 We have that coy joke about the purple mood ring actually meaning you're horny at the end. That is no substitute.

Speaker 1 The B movie

Speaker 1 features like very particular kinds of structures in the same way that in a like a camp slasher movie, someone takes their shirt off and gets killed by the killer midway through sex.

Speaker 1 The B movie is going to feature our

Speaker 1 man and woman protagonist brought together in a time of like stress, hooking up in the hotel room midway through the whatever.

Speaker 1 And we have a scene that kind of begins to gesture towards that in the strange house that we get, but nope, absolutely not. Then at the end, we have a completely sexless pregnancy.

Speaker 1 We bypass any of those sort of exciting and scary and messy feelings and emotions and actions to just go straight to, don't worry,

Speaker 1 I'm pregnant. What is going on with N-Night movies and sex? Have you kind of been able to start drawing some lines together yet?

Speaker 1 Well, he can't do a normal relationship at all. So I'm, I, you know, I know, but you can write really good sex stories about bad, awful relationships.
Yeah. Sure, yeah.
I, it is,

Speaker 1 first, I think that there's a PG-13 element to a lot of this. Um,

Speaker 1 weirdly, and this is, I'm, I hate to say it, but his most horny movie was Lady in the Water, and that was because you had um uh Paul Giamatti who was like actively

Speaker 1 resisting his urges.

Speaker 1 He's actively suppressing his

Speaker 1 attraction to

Speaker 1 the mermaid.

Speaker 1 What were they called? The Narf. The Narf.
Yeah, the Narf. Oh, my God.
The Madam Narf, please. Not a mermaid.
I mean, human legs.

Speaker 1 I thought that they morph when they go on land like a tadpole.

Speaker 1 Maybe

Speaker 1 that was just something I pulled. I was like, I'm going to get selkies.

Speaker 1 Is that what that is?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're like seal creatures that can become people and walk on. There's one in Bluff City.
Go listen to Bluff City.

Speaker 1 Go listen to Bluff City. If you're listening to this, go listen to Bluff City.

Speaker 1 It's so much better than the Happening. Oh, my goodness.
We have yet to see a movie from M-Night better than Bluff City. No offense.

Speaker 1 True.

Speaker 2 I think the only

Speaker 2 couple that we've seen that is actually convincingly attracted to each other was the couple from signs, and you only see them together for like three minutes.

Speaker 1 I thought

Speaker 1 six cents or signs

Speaker 1 six cents, six cents, yeah, because I was gonna say, and signs the only time we see her is when she's bisected by a car.

Speaker 1 You could, yeah, like, okay, Allie, damn, he had to restrain himself from popping what phones she had left.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 1 yeah, that's um, super, super mean to say, Allie, about the sexy movie.

Speaker 2 But also, in the sixth sense, he makes sex looks like it sucks.

Speaker 1 Like when they're drunk and like he's taking his clothes off, it's so unattractive. Good scene, though.
It's so funny. It's funny, yeah.
He's being funny. He's being a goofy guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the sex people have in real life is not as sexy as

Speaker 1 people have in movies.

Speaker 1 There's an attraction between Bruce Willis and

Speaker 1 I can't remember the name of the.

Speaker 2 There's an intimacy. They don't ever feel like they're attracted to each other.

Speaker 1 It feels like they're stuck in each other's house. They're unbreakable.
Yeah, yeah. No, did I say unbreakable already? I thought that you were.

Speaker 1 There's like a yearning there that I can see what

Speaker 1 you can read into a bit, but they definitely, like, any,

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 if we're specifically talking about, like, sexual energy between... characters, it's not really there.
Not even on the date they go on. But then along comes a B movie.

Speaker 1 This is your opportunity to really really tattoo M9.

Speaker 1 This movie should have been more Final Destination. It should just be kind of my takeaway from it.
Like it should have been a little trashier.

Speaker 1 I was like, is there a lot of sex in Final Destination? No, but like you could get away with a tit in a, in that type of movie. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like that's the, that's the caliber I'm talking about necessarily. Not necessarily the franchise itself.

Speaker 1 This is this is a tricky thing to think about because I'm just like scrolling ahead on the old M night filmography and I don't know that we're ever going to get there.

Speaker 1 It's weird because he will do a lot of stuff that evokes sexual peril,

Speaker 1 but he won't evoke actual sexuality like in a

Speaker 1 way between two consenting adults or anything like that.

Speaker 1 He will constantly play with the threat of something happening. I think

Speaker 1 he does have kids because his kids have parents. Yes,

Speaker 1 he has three kids. He has three kids.
So we know that he knows about sex. Yes, he has.
I was like, let's keep going.

Speaker 1 But But like, I think the

Speaker 1 what I was saying is like, we'll, we'll see stuff that, like I said, evokes the threat of sexual violence. I think about split a lot in this regard,

Speaker 1 which I think we have decided we'll be talking about at some point. Oh, God.
Yes.

Speaker 1 I don't know if it actually explicitly goes there, but that is the tone.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.
And then it turns out it's about something very different. Okay.
I won't spoil split for you right now, but

Speaker 1 I have a theory about this. I have a theory.
Okay.

Speaker 1 I started to make a point about

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 we're recording this. I'm two-thirds of the way through editing the media club blossom that was supposed to come out yesterday.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I was talking about,

Speaker 1 which is the episode for the village.

Speaker 1 And we were talking about

Speaker 1 Spielberg and how

Speaker 1 he seems to want to model himself off of Spielberg.

Speaker 1 And a point that I didn't get to make is that Spielberg attributed to him is this quote about like, I do one for the studios and then one for me, because he's, he, for a while, was going back and forth between doing more personal projects and doing more blockbuster style projects.

Speaker 1 And the thing I was trying to lead into, but never got to, was that M-Night doesn't have ones for him.

Speaker 1 Like, he is doing movies for the studio, for the audience. He's doing, he's trying to make blockbusters.
And by the way, I think one of the issues here, he's trying to make them very quickly.

Speaker 1 These movies have all come out

Speaker 1 very, very fast, back to back to back to back. So he's not getting a lot of time to work on these, which I think is maybe one of the big issues.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 Lady in the Water was definitely one for him. Yeah.
Yeah. Lady in the Water was one for him.

Speaker 2 Yes. I would argue they all are one for him.

Speaker 1 But his him is for the studio. I see what Keith means.
It's sort of like a square peg round hole situation, right? Where he keeps trying to take the ones for him and making them.

Speaker 1 He thinks they should be like.

Speaker 1 Right. I think that he's trying very hard to know what

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 big American.

Speaker 1 Maybe white American audiences are wanting from a movie, from a PG-13 sort sort of horror kind of movie, where it's like it has gestures at being scary, but it's not too scary.

Speaker 1 You know, there's a lot of

Speaker 1 sort of playing on the bounds of like conservative ideology and sort of reflections on that conservative ideology,

Speaker 1 but it never goes really far. Like he's obsessed with crime and obsessed with like showing you that people are afraid of crime.

Speaker 1 Like the newspaper in this, you see next to to the photo of him being married, all-time bad show.

Speaker 1 It's a shot of a newspaper that says Kiladelphia murder rape

Speaker 1 skyrockets, or so it's or something like that, definitely says Kiladelphia. Um,

Speaker 1 and and so, and like, maybe these are all just like real, genuine M-Night feelings and ideas, but what it seems like to me is that he is trying to triangulate what his perceived audience wants from

Speaker 1 him as a director or wants from movies, wants from Blockbuster movies. And what's happening is that he is

Speaker 1 not that good at hitting that mark. And so people keep being like, this kind of feels weird.
And I think it's because he's not creating art that is honest to himself. I think.

Speaker 1 I think that maybe Lady in the Water was his closest shot at doing that. But it has like all of these same issues with his scripting that he's had before.
Um,

Speaker 1 and so

Speaker 1 I, this is to say, this is all to say that I think that these movies don't have sex in them because he thinks that sex doesn't actually sell.

Speaker 1 And I actually, and I do, I think that what he thinks sells is like the idea of sex.

Speaker 1 Like, I think that he thinks that, yeah, like looking at Bryce Dallas Howard and Zoe Deschanel is what people want, not like tawdry, um, you know, like uh scenes where women are getting killed at the lake

Speaker 1 well i mean the the the presentation of bryce dallas howard in

Speaker 1 lady in the water is kind of exploitative like there's no sort of getting around

Speaker 1 that that is you know but it's a pg 13 we are being exploitation

Speaker 1 sure but we are always being like our attention is always being drawn to that she's not wearing any clothes yeah

Speaker 1 and you know wink wink you know what a naked lady looks like that and And that's the problem.

Speaker 1 Because we won't show you. I think all those wink-winks, I think that that is the dishonesty of his art.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I don't know. I feel like

Speaker 2 there's too much overlap in theme in these movies and this constant drilling of working through these same thoughts that I have a hard time agreeing that, like,

Speaker 2 what's happening here is that it's dishonest. And

Speaker 2 instead, is that

Speaker 2 because he is trying to go away from the contemporaries of his time, and because he maybe what we've learned from the Lady in the Water book, like, thinks that he's such an auteur in this way, is like,

Speaker 2 well, I'm either not interested in writing relationships in these ways because he doesn't seem to want to write a relationship between people who actually like each other.

Speaker 2 And also, like, you know, those other movies have sex in them, and I don't know that mine does.

Speaker 1 Um,

Speaker 2 you know, I, I don't know. I, it's a weird thing, bringing it back to the happening, is that if there's not going to be the sort of pulpy

Speaker 2 B movie, sort of like, you know, the world is ending, but every, like our emotions about that are overshadowed by, you know, the frustration that we're having with each other, the way that we want to be with each other, and that there's no like hidden kiss or weird, you know, hookup scene, um, is that like it also isn't relying on like the intimacy of parenthood, you know, in all of the scenes with Jess, like there's barely anything happening there.

Speaker 1 It's odd.

Speaker 2 There's like, yeah, there are times when the movie has to like sort of cut to her because it feels like it needs to acknowledge her again.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the fact that we even end up like the, the, the, like, core problem of the movie is like oh we have to get away from other people we have to like be considerate of how many people are with us that there's no sort of like attention drawn or tension drawn to the fact that like it is the kids who seem to want to flock to mark bahlberg and like what are you going to do with the responsibility of like needing to be a parental figure in this moment when you can't even be like a good husband which could be a very interesting concept think about the total whiff that comes from josh and jared like we talked about that one conversation, and that's kind of the only scene we get of them bonding with Elliot, and then they're dead, like, one scene later.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's one scene in the model home that is less tense. Right.
Maybe they feel comfortable. Being generous, they feel comfortable with him enough to

Speaker 1 fuck with him a bit. The scene with Jess that really got me

Speaker 1 feeling like there was something

Speaker 1 something had gone wrong with the movie, that there was something emotionally wrong and there there was something like narratively wrong is the scene where John Leguizamo who I think is doing a great job he's trying he is one of the best things in the movie and I think he is actually dialed into the B movie he can play the scenery chewing having a good time and also the I think a lot about when Michael Caine daughter's hand unless you mean it yeah when Michael Cain was in Muppet Christmas Carol he was like I'm gonna treat these guys like they're real actors I'm gonna play this you know deadly seriously famously and I think that there's a skill to acting in a B movie that resembles something like that where where when you are imperiled, you have got to believe it, but you also have to balance that with knowing that you're a character in a B movie in all the other scenes.

Speaker 1 I feel like everybody in this cast gets that except for Walberg. The two leads.
Yeah, yeah. So, Leguizamo is, he is, he is going to go to

Speaker 1 Princeton to meet up with his doomed wife. Yes.

Speaker 1 Never seen on screen, never heard of. Never seen on screen, never heard of.
And he gets

Speaker 1 doomed by the camera, too. First of all, they get into a Jeep Wrangler and you're immediately like, or at least I was like, oh, people fucking die in Jeep Wranglers.
That's the car you die in.

Speaker 1 Is this... Wait, what? Why?

Speaker 1 Was those car accidents? So there's three things altogether. One,

Speaker 1 they're extremely unsafe in real life. Two, like they're the most unsafe car by far in real life.
Two.

Speaker 1 When people die in movies, they're always fucking dying in Jeep Wranglers. And three, the air is dangerous and it doesn't have walls.
Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I saw the Jeep Wrangler and I was like, these fucking people are going to die. And then it shows John Laguazamo in slow motion driving away.
And I was like, motherfucker's dead as hell.

Speaker 1 It's a fake slow motion. Deadest guy of all time.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 one, the don't hold my daughter's hand unless you meet it line is one of the strangest lines in the film. It's weird.

Speaker 1 Two,

Speaker 1 he's like, she's going to the town of Princeton. And I know that that's there because people not from the Northeast would just hear Princeton and think of the university.

Speaker 1 Be like, why are you going to the university and not know it's a town? No one in the Northeast would say that.

Speaker 1 No. That if you were in Philadelphia and someone said she's going to Princeton, you would know they meant the town and not the university.
And so that just hit me very wrong. And to build on, M.

Speaker 1 Night Shyamalan doesn't make movies where people have sex. How sexless John Leguizamo is in this movie.
One of the sex is a moment. A deeply sexy man.

Speaker 1 And they're just like, fuck up your hair and look like an asshole the whole time.

Speaker 2 So he's supposed to be a dork. He's a math dork.
That's

Speaker 1 a distant Elliott. There are sexy math dorks.
I'm kidding.

Speaker 1 So he is saying to

Speaker 1 Alma, which is Zoe Deschnell, and Elliot, that, you know, I'm going to go and you need to take my kid because I'm essentially kind of going to go into danger.

Speaker 1 And there are two emotive lines that you can draw through here, ways that you could stage this scene. One is slightly slightly easier, and one is slightly harder.

Speaker 1 The slightly easier scene is that you stage a farewell between the father and daughter. This is very, the emotional stakes here are very clear.
An audience is tuned into this.

Speaker 1 They have been a kid saying goodbye to someone. They have been an adult saying goodbye to a kid.
The slightly harder one is that Leguizamo has to sell, or rather,

Speaker 1 what's his fucking name? What's that character? Julian.

Speaker 1 Julian has to sell to Elliot and Alma, you need to become surrogate parents. I don't care how not ready you are.

Speaker 1 I don't care how complex the feeling of shepherding a child that's not your own through this apocalypse is. You need to step up to the plate because I can't bring her into danger.

Speaker 1 That is the option Shia Malan chooses. He whiffs that by not dialing into the emotional stakes of that scene whatsoever.

Speaker 1 And then he completely neglects the farewell between father and daughter.

Speaker 1 Such to the point that at one point we cut to see that Jess is standing next to Alma and Elliot and I went she was in this scene the whole time

Speaker 1 she's just been here

Speaker 1 it's bizarre you have these two beautiful emotional paths and you choose neither of them yeah they pay her almost no mind for the whole movie

Speaker 1 they they front load

Speaker 1 that you know when she's scared she doesn't talk and it's like okay easy way out on that one we're gonna give the kid nothing to say

Speaker 1 Do you think about, we actually, Keith, you finish up and then I have a question about they follow through on that. She basically doesn't say anything for the whole movie.

Speaker 1 This is only relevant one time when she's like feeling danger coming

Speaker 1 and is unable to explain that danger. And her new surrogate parents like essentially ignore her tugging at their arms,

Speaker 1 which is very sad.

Speaker 1 When, no, this is right before Jared and Josh get absolutely obliterated by the gun.

Speaker 1 She notices. I think that what happened.
Honestly, I think this is an interesting thing.

Speaker 1 She notices that the swing set is swinging. And so I think that she's worried that there's too many people and that they need to get out of here or they're going to start all killing themselves.

Speaker 1 But instead, what happens is: this is my reading. I'm bringing this because she doesn't say what's happening because she doesn't speak.

Speaker 1 The people in the house kill Josh and Jared, maybe

Speaker 1 saving all of their lives?

Speaker 1 That's fun. That's good.
That would have been fun in the movie. That would have been fun

Speaker 1 if they had maybe hinted that that was what was happening a little bit more. I don't understand why the swing set swinging made her so panicked to leave if that wasn't the case.
That's my

Speaker 1 fucking causality in this stupid movie. Here's my question.
The scary thing. Sorry, Sylvie.
Do you think that this is M.

Speaker 1 Knight once again doing his favorite thing of vaguely magical children, and like this is supposed to read like that, or am I just reading it like that? Because I've watched a lot of M Night Shamala.

Speaker 1 Yeah. No, I think that that is the reach, but I understand why you get there, Sylvie, in the same way that Air wants to rush in to fill a vacuum.
Well, I don't think it's absolutely a good thing.

Speaker 1 It feels like a dropped plotline that she is aware of

Speaker 1 the danger they're in more so than the two grown-ass adults.

Speaker 1 Her choice to try to pull them out of interacting with this home

Speaker 1 is so intentional

Speaker 1 that I think

Speaker 1 it is a cut below even this movie for it to have been random.

Speaker 1 So, this is one of the scenes that has been a thing I've been thinking about the most on this viewing because there's also like the tone that this guy in the house has is of the like

Speaker 1 prepper,

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 uh don't let the the gas in vibe there's like a it definitely kind of reads and maybe this is me bringing baggage to it kind of like very like um

Speaker 1 like neocon bunkering down shit um and then you have the the kid who is like one of the like few like racialized people in the movie

Speaker 1 being like immediately get grokking the danger of someone of this and I don't know if that is M-Knight trying to do something given

Speaker 1 the time that he's in, and or if it's just something that, like,

Speaker 1 that like feels like on the table that he didn't thematically engage with properly. Um, and I think I'd lean towards the latter, um, but

Speaker 1 since we don't talk about, we talked about how sex doesn't come up in these, we uh, the only time like race has really come up in these movies has been in the like

Speaker 1 the ending of the village, I think, is when we talked about it um right of cut content of the village cut content of the village yes and it's like it's like shocking how much this movie

Speaker 2 does not engage with this theme at all despite kind of wanting to and wants to visually yeah and like well it wants to like it just it seems weird to have sort of like the

Speaker 2 the conceit of the movie, the fear of the movie being like, you have to stay away from people and you need to keep going to more and more desolate places.

Speaker 2 Like the, that the, one of the, the first plans is like, we need to go to a town that is literally not on the map anymore.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 and like, you know, I thought.

Speaker 2 The first time this really occurred to me, and I was like, why aren't you doing anything with this? Is the

Speaker 2 model house scene where you kind of go into the house and it's kind of like, oh, did they leave in such a rush that like

Speaker 2 they left all the food out, but it's just that it's like fake stuff set up yeah um for like a house staging and then it's this empty house and like when they leave the house for some reason the camera really linger lingers on this thing that says model house and it's like yeah do you see what else that thing says you deserve it you deserve it it says on a big billboard thing yeah new houses three hundred thousand dollars you deserve it yeah so i was like is he trying to say something about like

Speaker 2 you know there's this safe place it's not owned by anybody but it's not accessed to them. Like, I think he's trying to say something.

Speaker 1 That American suburban life is fake.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yes, because that scene ends in, I think, my favorite of the suicide scenes in the movie where the guy lies in front of the lawnmower.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That is like the sort of the

Speaker 1 latent ideology of a model home where everything is fake. that you have to flee from and then you look back to it and see a man turn a lawnmower on on like a perfect manicured lawnmower

Speaker 1 in front of it.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, there is latent ideology there.

Speaker 1 He is saying something. He does not have the movie to say it.
Like,

Speaker 1 and even in this moment, there's a whole crowd of people in there. If I'm making this movie, they're lining up in front of that lawnmower to all get run over.
No, it's scarier if it's one guy though.

Speaker 1 No, I don't agree with that. I think it's not scary if it's one guy.

Speaker 1 You don't get it as an effective a visual. It becomes.
Well, we'll never know. We have, we didn't have to.
If you want to lean into the yeah, I know, but let me let me finish a sentence. Um,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 uh if you want to lean into the B movie of it and make it like campier and funnier, I think have them line up, and that reads way sillier.

Speaker 1 Um, but I think the lawnmower scene is one of the most effective like horror visuals in the movie.

Speaker 1 I really like it, yeah, but this movie is way closer to working as a B movie than working as a real movie. I agree.
Um, uh,

Speaker 1 so, so this model house, this comes uh, after

Speaker 1 they've realized that splitting up into the smallest possible group is the way to survive.

Speaker 1 I think we have no clue what ends up happening to the other five or six that split off from Elliot's group.

Speaker 1 No. Lawnmower again, presumably.
Yeah. Yeah, I assume lawnmower for all of them.

Speaker 1 But I do want to go. They deserve it.

Speaker 1 They deserve it. It says it right there on the billboard.
They wouldn't put it there if it wasn't true.

Speaker 1 I do want to go back because we need to talk about Hot Dog Guy, the second best actor in the movie who shows up.

Speaker 1 When they're all stuck at

Speaker 1 in Philbert, Pennsylvania, because of the trains stop, and they're in the diner where they watch the lion thing, which we talked about.

Speaker 1 There's a theme of this movie that we haven't talked about,

Speaker 1 which I think makes absolutely no sense.

Speaker 1 They try to bring it up like four different times is this idea of like the bystander who like lets, I think a largely disproven thing, by the way, which is like people watching someone die on the street and like no one calls 911 because they're all like, ah, someone else will do it.

Speaker 1 Like that is weirdly a theme of this movie. And so everyone's driving away to trying to get out of town as fast as possible.
Even if they have space in the car, they're not letting anyone else in car.

Speaker 1 This makes sense to me. I think this scans as possible.
People in a panic, they're closing in. They're like, you know, they're protecting their sign farms.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there's two guys who will help

Speaker 1 Julian Elliott and the rest of them. One of them wants to take Julian to the town of Princeton, and the other one wants to like go west to New Jersey.
And they space in the car.

Speaker 1 It's the hot dog guy and his wife. They own a nursery.

Speaker 1 They're like,

Speaker 1 we have room for three more, so you can all come. We just have to go to the nursery and check it out.
This guy's great. I love this guy.

Speaker 1 This guy's great. I'm going to press my first button of the day called Hot Dogs.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 We're packing hot dogs for the road.

Speaker 1 You know, hot dogs get a bad rap.

Speaker 1 They got a cool shape. They got protein.

Speaker 3 You like hot dogs, right?

Speaker 1 By the way,

Speaker 3 I think I know what's causing this.

Speaker 1 You do? It's the plants.

Speaker 3 They can release chemicals.

Speaker 3 You like hot dogs, don't you?

Speaker 4 Okay, babies.

Speaker 1 We are gonna be going, but we will be back soon, okay?

Speaker 3 Oh, Plants react to human stimulus. They prove it in tests.

Speaker 1 This guy knows what he has to do. Yeah.
This dude understands the assignment. Yeah.
This guy's huge. He's weird.
He's right.

Speaker 1 He understands the plot of the movie merely 31 minutes in.

Speaker 1 I have to imagine the direction was we're going to do this scene. Say hot dog as weird as you possibly can.

Speaker 1 What has occurred to me watching this?

Speaker 1 Because it's been, I've watched this movie a lot, like I said, but it had been a substantial break since I last did, was realizing that when I want to say hot dog in a funny way, I say it like this guy.

Speaker 1 How did you say it?

Speaker 1 We're packing hot dogs. This is very

Speaker 1 hot dogs. That's how you say it.
Yeah, no, he says it normally the first time, but it's when he's asking. Oh, it's a trick.
He says this. He's getting a bad rap.
He lures you in the first time.

Speaker 1 I love this hot dog scene.

Speaker 1 This is one of the scenes where I feel like the B movie is humming along nicely. I'm enjoying it.
Yeah. You've got a cool shape.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 1 See what he leads with.

Speaker 1 The Glizzy Goblin is here.

Speaker 1 Zoe Deshnell, however, scares the shit out of me, as she often does in these scenes, by doing something completely baffling.

Speaker 1 The punchline to the hot dogs bit is that he asks Zoe Deshnell if she likes hot dogs, and she shakes her head no. Wow, she makes a funny face.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hang on. Do you think she's trying to be punished? Everyone likes hot dogs.

Speaker 2 She's famously and quirkishly a vegan.

Speaker 1 Oh, so at that point is... This is a reference to her real personal veganhood.
How she doesn't eat hot dogs and synthetic meat. It hasn't showed up yet, I suppose, or it's not good yet.
I will say

Speaker 1 Zoe Deschnell's quirkiness in this movie.

Speaker 1 Who is it who plays the sister or the friend or the girlfriend of the woman who gets neck stabbed at the beginning? She's another famous actress. She's some

Speaker 1 quirky actress.

Speaker 1 What is her name?

Speaker 2 She's the sister from the bear.

Speaker 1 I have the IRDB up. Let me see if I can find her.
Sister of slash girlfriend of next stab lady. Abby Elliott.

Speaker 1 She is doing better quirky eye acting for her 40 seconds of the movie than Zoe Dashnell puts in to the rest of the whole thing.

Speaker 1 You know, I think you could do a quirky

Speaker 1 eye acting acting character in this B-movie thing. The problem is that she's just doing it appallingly.
No expression that she makes is representative of any human expression.

Speaker 1 It's very strange watching this movie knowing that Zoe Dishanel is about to take off. Literally next year after that.
Like, yeah, she is this movie. The next movie she's in is that Yes Man.

Speaker 1 Jim Carrey. Yeah.
And then 500 days. And then 500 Days of Summer.
It's weird to look at this in 500 Days of Summer and be like, this made twice as much money as 500 Days of Summer.

Speaker 1 And then she gets on New Girl, and then she's on your TV every week for like six years or however long that shows. It's very funny because this was like...

Speaker 1 I had already had

Speaker 1 already had my Zoe Deschanel phase. It ended with Yes Man.

Speaker 1 And so I sort of thought that she was gone after this, but I guess she makes Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Guy. I think that's a good idea.
Oh, she's not bad. She's not bad in Elf.

Speaker 1 Elf is very weird for her. She can do a better performance than this.
I'm not a Zoe Deschanel fan, but she is a more capable actress than this movie would make you think she's.

Speaker 1 In Elf, she has this very interesting, hugely disaffected cynicism that is a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it is only...

Speaker 1 It is only the weirdness of Zoe Deschanel's character, Jovi, dating

Speaker 1 a man who knows nothing and is extremely weird. That is the problem with that movie, I think.
He is like a 40-year-old fucking weirdo that eats spaghetti covered in maple syrup. Well, she's

Speaker 2 falling in love with him because she's falling in love with the Christmas spirit.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to get into this.

Speaker 1 He is child-coated, though.

Speaker 1 It's kind of an age gap relationship in both ways. Like, he's too old for her, but also way too young for her.
It's a less problematic version of Big. I understand what you're saying.

Speaker 1 It's a less problematic version of Big.

Speaker 2 Two things. I want to correct myself because the woman on the bench just really looks like the woman from the bear.
Her name is actually Kristen Connolly.

Speaker 2 And it looks like the only other

Speaker 2 important,

Speaker 2 sorry,

Speaker 1 notable credit that she has is of Cabin in the Woods.

Speaker 2 So we will talk about her later.

Speaker 1 Or no, that's not M. Night.
That's not M. Night.
That's not M. Night.
Josh White. That is.
okay. No, it's not.
It's Drew Godard. Oh, is it not Josh? Josh Whedon produced.
Produced. Okay.

Speaker 1 That is the original one. That's the M-Night Cabin one.
That is

Speaker 1 Knock and the Cabin. Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to be wrong twice. Secondly, on Suitation L, it's like really frustrating because

Speaker 2 it feels like her character just melts. Like the, the, the, the, the note before about like

Speaker 2 you can fit her on an index card can sometimes be a really really good thing about a character. Like, you can just have a very strong concept.
Yeah. You can kind of understand who she is.

Speaker 2 And Zoe Deschanel can be the sort of person who like embodies the kind of weird girl.

Speaker 2 And for her to be sort of like constantly disagreeing or really, being really floaty or being more concerned with like how people are acting than what's actually happening in the scene could be interesting.

Speaker 2 But it isn't ever. I feel like in this hot dog scene,

Speaker 2 like it's where it's starting to fall apart.

Speaker 2 and it could be it could have been her place in the movie because her being a sort of the audience like like surrogate of being like i don't want to be with these strangers i think these people are really weird is could have been both something that's like really sympathetic and like cool to watch so you have this sort of grounding thing and like the ridiculousness of what the concept of this movie actually is she could be winking at the camera instead she's blinking at the camera right

Speaker 2 and you know also like calling out the weirdness of these other care of the hot dog guy could be like,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 like enlightening, you know, putting that performance even better because it's clashing against hers.

Speaker 2 But instead, like we're setting up all these things where like she's emotionally distant with Elliot. And that just kind of goes nowhere because the relationship doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 1 And like, it is what it is.

Speaker 2 She keeps having these sort of like, I don't trust this person.

Speaker 2 I don't think that we should do this, I think we should do this other thing, I'm distrustful of people in situations like this, I'm disappointed in humanity in a way that like she could be the emotional one, and Mark Wahlber could be like the analytical one, and it never even really feels like that's attention that ever comes up, despite there being like lines that acknowledge it.

Speaker 1 Like, they're sort of like playing the beats, but there's never, it never feels like it, it becomes like a melody in terms of like difficult even to explain how little we get of them as a couple or even as individuals.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just it just like these are characters that are there, you know. Like, I don't know, I don't

Speaker 1 protagonists, yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a problem when your movie is doing this, it's very sick.

Speaker 1 Um, I uh

Speaker 1 your movie has the toxin.

Speaker 1 I just watched uh two movies the other day. Um, it is not, um,

Speaker 1 It is not fair to compare this movie to either of those because they're very different.

Speaker 1 But I just wanted to illustrate how amazing of a movie you can do without really having characters that you know anything about in them.

Speaker 1 I watched Playtime

Speaker 1 of a Jock Tak T movie Playtime. And then I watched from the same year, also French

Speaker 1 La Samurai.

Speaker 1 I'm not familiar with that movie. Le Samurai is a Melville film.
It is a noir contract killer film. This is a movie where

Speaker 1 you learn maybe two facts about Elaine Dillon's character, Jeff Costello, in that movie. Like this movie, it's obsessed with showing you his big, beautiful face and eyes.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it is so good. It is so much better.
All of the questions that I ask about this movie are like, why didn't we get anything about their relationship? Why don't I know what's going on here?

Speaker 1 You know, Lesamurai also doesn't answer those movies, and asking them is fun instead of frustrating.

Speaker 1 And what we know about the protagonist of Playtime is that he sits on chairs and it makes a funny noise. Yeah, he says, Yeah, yeah.
Like, you know, Hulot,

Speaker 1 like Mark Wahlberg in this movie, kind of gets pulled through

Speaker 1 reluctantly for the most part, this insane and confusing world. He gives very little of himself, and we kind of just see him moving through.
Um,

Speaker 1 uh,

Speaker 1 and it's super compelling and interesting, and it's doing something way different than this movie, obviously. Um,

Speaker 1 well, yeah, you said it was super compelling and interesting, right? Um,

Speaker 1 but, but, but you don't, I don't know anything about, I know that, here's what I know about Hulo. He has army buddies all over town.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 he might have used to be a cop. I don't know.
He maybe used to be a cop and

Speaker 1 he doesn't like to get invited to somewhere, but he ends up having a decent time anyway.

Speaker 2 I feel like

Speaker 1 this is sort of

Speaker 1 I say this so often,

Speaker 1 often in company with Keith and Allie, that it's essentially a running joke at this point.

Speaker 1 And I'm sorry that I'm going to say it again, but viewer, listener, if you want to see how this movie should go, you should watch Prince of Darkness, which I mentioned earlier, and you should watch Halloween 3,

Speaker 1 which is a film about a man and a woman going to try and figure out a mystery at a Halloween mask factory.

Speaker 1 And it is a B-movie that is titillating and scary and funny and has real command over its tone.

Speaker 1 If you want to see one of these things humming along in the kind of silly, enjoyable way that they're supposed to, I think Halloween 3, Season of the Witch, is a movie that I really recommend.

Speaker 1 There is we're here.

Speaker 1 We're here. You mean we're here at Jeremy Strong?

Speaker 1 We're here at Jeremy Strong. Jeremy Strong arrives in the movie.
He says cheese and crackers. I sit bolt upright in my chair.
I'm on board. Jeremy Strong.

Speaker 1 We described Hot Dog Man, you know, understanding the assignment and coming in. Jeremy Strong understands the assignment, and he's also one of the best actors of his generation.

Speaker 1 This produces a weird effect. Right, Jeremy Strong.

Speaker 1 Jeremy Strong Strong Strong Structure

Speaker 1 is doing

Speaker 1 his career. He didn't just understand the assignment.
He predicted the next assignment and did it ahead of time.

Speaker 1 I have his little intro if we want to hear it. Please don't.

Speaker 1 Please.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's the army. I just want to highlight that.
Hot dog guy being relieved. Oh, my God.
Thank God. The army is here.
And it's the private. Yeah.
This guy. Completely, completely.

Speaker 1 But it's also like, that's not who that guy is. No.

Speaker 1 He was spying on his neighbors with binoculars. It's true.
It's true, but

Speaker 2 you can be really gossipy and old and weird and still like fiercely

Speaker 1 spying with the American government. I think I just wanted to mention that he was spying on his neighbors.

Speaker 1 I think that you can also like hold this slide, you could hold you know, cynical, um, suspicious, right or wrong, conspiratorial views about the American government.

Speaker 1 And then, when everyone around you is killing themselves, you can still maybe have some hope that the army can save you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man, I live in Ana, but I don't disagree with this. Like,

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 1 He arrives.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's the army. We're safe.

Speaker 5 My name is Private Auster. I'm stationed at West Dover Military Base, about 10 miles back.
I think they've been affected by whatever's happening. I lost communication with them.

Speaker 1 When I approached the base, I saw... military personnel in the barbed wire in the fence.

Speaker 1 So I suggest no one take that road it's a town about eight miles behind us there were bodies on the road into town

Speaker 1 cheese and crackers

Speaker 1 while jeremy strong is alive the movie is a full letter grade better i agree for duration and i'm gonna say this while hot dog guy's alive the movie is half a letter grade better so when they die the movie for a brief moment it was a B movie in my rating of it.

Speaker 1 And it very quickly drops from a B in one scene to a D.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I copy. I love his floppy armed run when he first shows up.

Speaker 1 He makes me so happy.

Speaker 1 He's trying to keep this professionalism. He's in the army.
He's been trained. He's not been trained for this.
He's losing his mind, but he's still trying to have that air of, I'm in the army.

Speaker 1 I'm here. I'm the script lets him do it.
And the scene where he, the scene where he's, like, talking about the zone of attack or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Um, and like trying to get when you're, when there's no escape from the, like, I can't, I don't have the specific

Speaker 1 like wording he uses, but when there's no escape from like the area under attack, you search

Speaker 1 attacks. Seek a safe zone within it.
Yeah. Um,

Speaker 1 that part's really good because he is perfectly nailing the performance of guy who is in over his head, but wants to project that he has some sort of grip on things.

Speaker 1 And is probably the guy who has the best grip on things.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's just like talking about this performance really just

Speaker 2 really puts into frame the failing of the other ones because, like, Mark Walbert also later has like a scene where it's like, I need to be the decision maker, but I'm in over my head.

Speaker 2 And it's just like characters yelling at each other with no effect. And then him like needing to take a long time to like, oh, I have to think analytically about this.

Speaker 1 I'm going to talk about science stuff. I got that as a bad thing.
Be scientific douchebag.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, that's the worst scene. It is the worst scene.
Well, it is also

Speaker 1 the scene where he's closest to being funny.

Speaker 1 So if he's supposed to be funny in this, oh, right. That, okay, so that seems genuine.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think that's supposed to be like a really tense scene. And you're supposed to be like, oh, this is this character finally coming together.

Speaker 2 This is the, this is the, the value of this guy by being able to first scream that he needs to be calm, but once he's able to be calm, he can sort of think through things where it's like, there's no actual emotion or urgency or realism or lived in-ness of that besides him being loud for a second, because I guess the louder you are, the more emotional you are.

Speaker 2 Whereas with Jeremy Strong, like even in that clip we just heard, the like cadence of him

Speaker 2 reporting into these civilians, you know what I mean? By like kind of just like going through each of the beats of what's happening, yeah, and like being really nervous about it, and like

Speaker 2 you know, the

Speaker 2 limits of how he is able to communicate because of his training and because of his situation and like all of that. Like, there's so much character there in 30 seconds.

Speaker 1 It drives me crazy. There's so much acting in the world, and and

Speaker 1 people are not putting the actors in the movies. Why don't we put actors in movies? Why do we put people like Mark Wahlberg in them?

Speaker 1 It reminds me of, he reminded me of the guy from Signs who comes in.

Speaker 1 I'll tell you what I think. You know, the colonel guy

Speaker 1 coming all stealth-like, like that guy, you know, pitch perfect, perfectly active, you know, different kind of army guy, you know, confident, over-confident army guy.

Speaker 1 Like, I know exactly what's going on. This is a tactic.
They're using tactics.

Speaker 1 So I have a remedy here. I'm curious if you feel the same way.
I think that Mark Wilberg should have been replaced by Owen Wilson.

Speaker 1 That would have been good. He's kind of doing an Owen Wilson impression at some point.
Yeah, he really is. But he's not doing it well.
No. And

Speaker 1 there is a moment in the otherwise not terribly good Wes Anderson film Dodge Ealing Limited, which features Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman, I think, as three brothers who are.

Speaker 1 Oh, Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, and Jason Schwartzmann. Are you sure?

Speaker 1 Are you sure?

Speaker 1 They are playing three brothers who are kind of taking a trip across India after what transpires to have been a

Speaker 1 suicide attempt that Owen Wilson's character survived. He was in a motorcycle crash.
And there's this scene that I think about all the time where he's in bandages for most of this movie.

Speaker 1 And he's really excited to take the bandages off as a kind of like

Speaker 1 transformative, you know, like emotional beat or whatever. And they all gather together in the bathroom of a station and he takes the bandages off and his face is just completely fucked up.

Speaker 1 You know, he's still absolutely in the process of healing. And Owen Wilson manages to deliver this like

Speaker 1 very sad, very meaningful, but still very funny.

Speaker 1 line delivery of like, oh, I guess it needs a bit more time or whatever. And then they very slowly put the bandages back on.

Speaker 1 And his control over the like nuance of that emotion has stuck with me since I saw it. He's a really good movie.
I think

Speaker 1 perfect for this kind of movie to be able to do the stuff like I'm talking to a plant and also do the classic Owen Wilson, like wow, I'm in over my head stuff,

Speaker 1 but also like anchor you emotionally to what is happening.

Speaker 1 Owen Wilson would have had so much more chemistry with, for example, the like narrative and emotive questions of what happens if I have to be a surrogate parent all of a sudden, you know?

Speaker 1 So Owen Wilson is my pick. That's a good pick.
I mean, I would put Owen Wilson in almost any movie.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 One battle after another, Owen Wilson. I also think Luke Wilson or Jason Schwartzman would have been better in this movie.
Yeah. Yeah, and I don't like Luke Wilson.

Speaker 1 I don't really even like Jason Schwartzman. Honestly, put Bill Murray in it.
Whatever. Whatever.

Speaker 1 I draw the line. I hate Bill Murray.
Okay.

Speaker 2 I was going to say, I can't stand Bill Murray and Zoe Deschanel again, but then remembered that that was Carol Jane.

Speaker 1 That was Carol Johansson, yeah.

Speaker 2 It would be just as torturous.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 They all set off together in multiple groups. One group is too big.
This is when we work it out. We get an off-screen, like handgun daisy chain that we saw in the movie earlier.

Speaker 1 This playing off-screen is a really nice horror beat. We know what this looks like.
Actually, don't think we need the kind of unsubtle movement here. This is when

Speaker 1 Zoe Deschanel has her stupid, I'm not going to stand by while someone commits a crime. I want to pause right here because I do have that button, but first I want to say that

Speaker 1 I already said that the movie was better when Jeremy Strong was alive, but I want to specifically highlight the crossroads minutia bit where cars are coming in from the four directions that they have to choose, and every car is coming in, reporting that in that direction, everyone's dead.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's lovely. That's good stuff.
And I loved seeing all the cars blocking the road. I loved kind of everybody kind of telling each other what was going on.
And I like this sort of tense decision.

Speaker 1 Like, we've got to find a small place and march ahead. Like, it works for me, and I like it.
Good stakes, good delivery.

Speaker 1 Oh, little one. Sad baby.

Speaker 1 I'm glad to learn that that was a baby just now because I thought someone was really disagreeing with me in the back.

Speaker 1 She might have been a little bit more. Yeah, she really disagreed with your interpretation of this scene.

Speaker 2 Do you need five?

Speaker 1 No, she's

Speaker 1 her mom's got her. Okay.

Speaker 1 I would love to hear

Speaker 1 Elliot freaking out because no one will give him a second to think where his solution ultimately is.

Speaker 1 Is this button going to feature the first appearance of Zoe Deshanel in the buttons? Yes.

Speaker 1 Good. Strap in, listener.

Speaker 1 Toxin?

Speaker 1 Toxin?

Speaker 1 Burners? Toxin is affecting them?

Speaker 1 Are those people killing themselves?

Speaker 4 You were with it, private. What do we do?

Speaker 6 We need to do something. Just let me think.

Speaker 5 You're dying. I need a second.

Speaker 1 They released it?

Speaker 4 We're not near the road.

Speaker 1 We can't just stand here as the uninvolved observer. I need a second, okay?

Speaker 6 Just give me a second. You're not gonna be one of those assholes on the news who watches a crime happen and not do something.

Speaker 1 We're not assholes. Just a second.

Speaker 6 You were children in that. that area.

Speaker 1 Please tell us what to do.

Speaker 6 I need a second, okay? Why can't anybody give me a goddamn second?

Speaker 1 Might be scientific douchebag. Identify the variables.
That's the two groups. Design an experiment.
This is fucking terrible.

Speaker 1 It's terrible. It's the worst thing in the movie.

Speaker 1 That's what I'm trying to do. Don't be an experimental pattern.
Interpret.

Speaker 6 What if it is the plants?

Speaker 1 They should have had him actually go into a mind palace, like it's a

Speaker 1 Sherlock or something. What's that?

Speaker 1 What's the meaning of the woman looking at the numbers? What is that?

Speaker 1 We all know. Oh, I don't know where

Speaker 1 Nilma's Lady.

Speaker 1 That's sort of like a Pela novella, I think. It is, yes.

Speaker 1 That's so bad. One, no one is doing science.
He's not, he has no ability to do the thing he's saying here. He's not isolating variables.

Speaker 1 It's so annoying. We also know that he doesn't believe in science.
He believes in natural law that is different than what science is.

Speaker 1 At the very beginning, when talking with the bees, and people are like, it's global warming, it's pollution, it's this. He goes, nuh-uh-uh.
Let me ask the handsome boy.

Speaker 1 Handsome boy, one day you might not be so smoking hot.

Speaker 1 Why don't you tell me what you think? And,

Speaker 1 you know, when he says like, oh, we'll just never know,

Speaker 1 he goes,

Speaker 1 he goes ding, ding, ding. He says, science will come up with some reason to put in the books, but in the end, it will be just a theory.

Speaker 1 We will fail to acknowledge there are forces at work beyond our understanding. To be a good scientist, you must have a respectful awe for the laws of nature.

Speaker 1 This teaching at a Catholic school. Yes.

Speaker 1 He's not a science teacher. He's a weirdo.
This is not science. In fact, I would call this anti-science.
This is a non-scientific understanding of science.

Speaker 1 Like the

Speaker 1 he is trying to negotiate that like science is a process, but he comes across like an always sunny when he's like

Speaker 1 science is a liar sometimes. Like that is.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 This movie would be better with him in it. Yes, this movie would be better with him in it.
With any of them. Danny DeVito, with

Speaker 1 Rob Mack. Charlie Day.
Rob Mack, yeah, Charlie Day. Charlie Day.
And then it says the gang runs themselves over with a little.

Speaker 1 And then Howard and put, hey, put Caitlin Olsen in there instead of.

Speaker 1 Oh, that would be way better. You know, how people.
Way better in this. Yeah.
You know, the videos of people, where people have like green, like, cut Danny DeVito from

Speaker 1 Joy Sonny into, like, cyberpunk or whatever? I need someone to do that for the happening.

Speaker 1 I don't have the free time to do it right now, but if you could just like find a way to do that for me, that would be excellent. That would be really nice.

Speaker 1 One of the things I've always felt this, and it's what leads to the exodus of really talented comic actors into doing drama, which is that

Speaker 1 comic actors know how to act better on average, I think. I just think that that's true about the world.

Speaker 1 I think that there are phenomenal dramatic actors, but there's something about being a comedian and a comic actor that puts you in touch with timing and character and dialogue, and they have a easier time

Speaker 1 accessing emotion because one of the most difficult things about being a comic actor is having to sell real emotion, anger, sadness, grief, as humor. That's hard to do.

Speaker 1 And because they can do that, they slot themselves into drama and have immediate access to a pathos that dramatic actors sometimes have difficulty accessing, or non-comedic actors anyway.

Speaker 1 That's why your favorite movie is the number 23. This is why my favorite movie is number 23.

Speaker 1 No, but this is like how, you know, John Candy died. No, I don't disagree necessarily.

Speaker 1 John Candy died a little bit after doing Planes, Transit, and Automobiles when he was like on the verge of being the best dramatic actor in the whole world. Like, who has more pathos?

Speaker 1 Who can gin up, you know, a heart-swelling monologue faster than John Candy right after making you laugh your ass off? Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 2 I think that this is also unique to horror and comedy.

Speaker 2 I'm going to be biting here off of an interview I recently heard with Jordan Peale on the Coda Needs a Friend podcast.

Speaker 2 But, like, that the structure of the scenes in terms of like needing to make you comfortable in a situation and then sort of build up the absurdity or the fear or the sort of like lack of reality,

Speaker 2 and then also like sort of hit those notes where you keep rising and rising and rising that tension until there's like a shoe drop is the same structure in horror and in comedy scenes.

Speaker 2 So like an actor who is able to do that good in a comedy would be able to

Speaker 2 feel those same paces in the way that

Speaker 2 like you're able to in a horror movie because it it it it's the same sort of muscle that you're working almost

Speaker 1 Yeah, that makes sense. I think you're right.
Yeah, they're very Jordan Peel.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's a great guy to say that, too. I mean, he would know.
Right. Yeah.
No, he was very right about it. By the way,

Speaker 1 I try to say this at every possible opportunity. If you missed Nope because of the pandemic, that is like maybe the best movie of the last 20 years.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Nope is wildly, unbelievably underrated. It's Jordan Peel's best movie.
It's so good.

Speaker 1 There is a scare towards the end of Nope, or I suppose in the kind of the third act, that made me laugh so much because it hit me, it got me so spectacularly.

Speaker 1 It involves something falling through the windshield of someone's car.

Speaker 1 And I felt electrified by it. It was great.

Speaker 1 I think Nope is fantastic. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Then they all run away from the window. It's not the best movie in the last 20 years.
Keith is out of his mind. Then they all run away from the wind.

Speaker 1 I think that when they're all running away from the wind, this is tremendous.

Speaker 1 I was delighted by this. I would have liked the movie to have more of this spirit.
I think that people who say it is not interesting to watch people run away from the wind

Speaker 1 are not touching the right part of their heart in this scene.

Speaker 1 I mean, talk about a movie where you run away from the wind. Nope.
It's a movie where you run away from the wind. Yeah.
You don't like the scene art?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Why don't you like it? No, I think all of the dramatic dramatic wind stuff doesn't hit for me.

Speaker 1 I think I don't view it as dramatic. I think I view it as entertaining.
And then it kind of starts to come alive.

Speaker 1 You know, I know that when I'm on Big Thunder Mountain, I'm not on a ghost train, and I'm not about to get blown up by dynamite, but I'm going, wee, ha, ha, ha.

Speaker 1 And this is how I feel watching them all run around in the wind. It's so stupid.
It doesn't evoke anything, really.

Speaker 2 Like, it's just kind of happening. And, like, you know, know, it's what the situation of the film is.
Um, but like again, they're like forests have been scary forever.

Speaker 1 Like, yes, like, do I think that you could make this scene scarier indefinitely? Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 It could be done better. I think the thing that's scary is the and dramatic is the like

Speaker 1 the hopeless, pointless failure of it. It it

Speaker 1 doesn't work, they don't run away from the window. Yeah,

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there's this like kind of inevitable acceptance of fate that's happening where you can watch them not be able to run away from what they think is about to kill them and then it doesn't.

Speaker 1 Then I think if I, if that was the feeling that I wanted to get, because again, I think, I think that both you and Ali are right, Ali, in that it's like, you can shoot wind moving in a much scarier way.

Speaker 1 You could put them in a forest. You could put them in some like arrangement of buildings or arrangement of set that lets you really crank up the tension.

Speaker 1 And Keith's right that like it seems like what M-Night is going for is the futility of it. I think you shoot the scene differently if you want them in a field and you want them to feel that humility.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 there's no

Speaker 1 aerial shots of like of like

Speaker 1 wind moving. We're like way down at ground level.

Speaker 1 And I think if I want my characters to feel lonely in a shot, you know, I move the camera away from them. Well, this movie's also We don't have any of that.
This movie's committed to doing two things.

Speaker 1 It's committed to keeping them away from trees because the trees are the bad guy.

Speaker 1 So I don't think it would make sense to put them in a forest.

Speaker 1 And then the other thing that it's committed to doing is like, it's committed to putting everyone in big, wide, open spaces because they're going to more and more desolate areas.

Speaker 1 And it's not helping them because the air is that there's no, you can't hide behind a tree from the air.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying it works. I'm just describing why.
No, no, no, no, no. And I just want to correct myself here.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying that the scene would be scarier if they were in a forest. I'm saying that cameras have been able to make trees scary for decades.

Speaker 1 Okay, I understand.

Speaker 2 And like rustling wind and like danger on the edge of the plains and the sort of like unawareness and, you know, the sort of like danger is approaching me and I don't know where from is tension that is very, I don't want to say easy because apparently it isn't very easy to do, but

Speaker 2 the techniques are out there.

Speaker 1 People have been doing it.

Speaker 2 Like they could have been implemented on and it just doesn't feel like anything in the scene. And I don't know if it's like that the music is too dramatic.

Speaker 2 I feel like this is a good score, but I feel like there are times when it reaches a pitch in places that don't feel appropriate.

Speaker 2 I remember they're like in the first train scene when the train is starting to stop, the music is so intense in a way that doesn't feel like it just feels like it's interrupting the scene instead of letting it happen.

Speaker 2 I feel like almost that's what's happening here because there's not like a

Speaker 2 there's not like a

Speaker 2 if if the thing is the the the

Speaker 1 scope,

Speaker 2 the scene setting, the like the the you know, the sort of distance between actors, except that one of the actors just the grass.

Speaker 2 It doesn't feel like there's there's any

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 like you know actual like feeling there there's no there's no there is no there's something weird happening where m night is kind of playing within the realm of the disaster movie the sort of like um day after tomorrow like post-apocalyptic doom days doomsday stuff like obviously uh trying to evoke that in some places um

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 you can't it's hard to make any of that work when you don't have the catastrophe everywhere.

Speaker 1 We talked about that one scene where they're driving through the town and it's empty streets as opposed to like

Speaker 1 seeing the carnage of the bodies behind them. Like the world doesn't feel like it is undergoing this massive event.
It feels like it is empty now.

Speaker 1 The techno-thriller that I think this is actually drawing very closely from and kind of misserving is Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, which is from the late 60s, I want to say.

Speaker 1 The Andromeda Strain is about

Speaker 1 an alien pathogen, like a virus from outer space that lands on a satellite. This is a movie that I used to confuse with Event Horizon before Friends of the Table talked about Event Horizon a lot.

Speaker 1 It targets this small town, and the people in the town all kill themselves in strange ways.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what Michael Crichton

Speaker 1 does in The Andromeda Strain is he has the virus mutate.

Speaker 1 The virus is mutating very rapidly over the course of the book.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 it allows for this kind of transformation to happen because, you know, to put it into the schematic of this film, it's not just like the wind is targeting...

Speaker 1 people it would be like the wind is now able to attack uh other weaker plants or the wind is able to like

Speaker 1 like depower gasoline in cars or something. The big thing that the virus in the Andromeda Strain starts doing really quickly is starts eating plastic.

Speaker 1 So all of their like vents and seals also start breaking down,

Speaker 1 which is really interesting. And much like

Speaker 1 this movie, the Andromeda Strain ends with the virus simply mutating to a place where it is no longer dangerous to us. It kind of just fizzles out.

Speaker 1 And I feel like both of those plot points, the virus that makes you kill yourself in weird ways, and

Speaker 1 the virus kind of eventually just leaving of its own accord,

Speaker 1 get ported over to the happening, but none of the additional apparatus gets carried over either.

Speaker 1 Is the blank that makes you blank

Speaker 1 the sort of like haunted lamp for M-Night? Okay, so for signs, you've got the alien that makes you defend your home. For Lady of the Water, you have the

Speaker 1 The girl that makes you right.

Speaker 1 Sixth Sense is the getting shot that makes you dead, but you don't know it. Oh, I thought it was the ghost that makes you therapy, or the ghost that makes you go to therapy.

Speaker 1 The child that makes you angel, the child that makes you therapize.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the village is tricky.

Speaker 1 The town that makes you leave.

Speaker 1 We're nailing it, guys.

Speaker 1 We are cooking.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 They all run through.

Speaker 1 They all have to split up. They're all gone.

Speaker 1 At this point, I wrote down Mark Woolburg's affect throughout is extraordinary because the more I hear it, the more I'm like, it's starting to dawn on me that nothing is actually going to happen with this affect.

Speaker 1 That this is just sort of something that we're going to have to deal with. It's just what it asks everything, like it's a question.
That's his whole career, though.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I know, but it's really funny in this one.

Speaker 1 You tell me.

Speaker 1 Call my brother, Don. Oh, get you a break.

Speaker 1 just before before the i need a second scene and we heard him kind of say this uh but he says it more clearly just slightly before the button that we heard he delivers the line oh no the toxin kind of exactly like i just delivered yeah hold on i can't read at the beginning of this please it's my favorite

Speaker 1 the toxin

Speaker 1 come on no you gotta let it roll a little more because like people need to hear how every line of his is punctuated by another gunshot.

Speaker 1 Well, we've played this stuff already.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess we have, yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, I think that I, I think that I, uh, there was a lot more gunshots in the preceding. I made sure to include a gunshot, but I think they basically stopped with the gunshots.
But it wasn't.

Speaker 1 So then they go to the then they go to the model home. This is when Mark Woolberg has, I think, one of the best scenes in the movie.
He starts trying to negotiate with a plant.

Speaker 1 I actually think that this scene is really good. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He's hapless, and this movie doesn't play him as hapless. It plays him as

Speaker 1 competent, hyper-competent. Yeah.
There's a weird moment. So he's pleading with the plant.
He says, we're just here to, you know, rest, see if we can find some supplies.

Speaker 1 And then he kind of reaches forward and it's scary and he touches the thing. And then he says, oh, it's a plastic plant.

Speaker 1 I'm talking to a plastic plant. And then he pauses and he says, and I'm still talking to it.
And for once in the movie, I think that Mark Wahlberg has dialed into the emotion.

Speaker 1 I had a laugh when I was like, he's talking to a plastic plant. This is funny.

Speaker 1 And then when he said, I'm still kind of continuing in this, like, this useless ritual here, I felt like a little shred of like an actual piece of emotional content. Holy shit.
There's a performance.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, but then it passes like a cloud over the sun.
Yeah, and it feels accidental. Yes.

Speaker 1 It must be crazy to be Mark Wahlberg and to be cast in all these movies and to be so

Speaker 1 uninterested in doing any of it. He just doesn't seem like he wants to be there.
Zoe Deschanel doesn't give that vibe. Zoe Deschanel seems like she's getting bad direction.

Speaker 1 She's delivering poorly written lines poorly. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And she's confused about what her role

Speaker 1 is

Speaker 1 as a member of the cast, as a character in the movie. Mark Mark Wahlberg just feels upset to be working.
Yeah, I think Mark Wahlberg has like

Speaker 1 one performance I would call like, that like sticks out in my mind, and then one that I can talk, like, I think it's just fine. The first being Boogie Knights, the second being The Departed.

Speaker 1 And then everything else he's in, he is just like nothing. I love him in The Departed.
He is such a shithead in that. It's great.

Speaker 1 A long, long, long time ago, I saw the movie The other guys and liked it but i couldn't tell you the 2010 action comedy with will farrell again i always get it mixed up with the shane black the nice guys the nice guys yes which is a much better movie much much much better movie very different movie i can't tell you that the other guys is a movie that i would like what i can tell you is that it's the only other time i've seen mark wahlberg on screen and and because i agree with your two and i'm adding asterisk on the other guys the one where he like dies at the beginning.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, he's not one of the guys who died.

Speaker 2 No, it's Dwayne Johnson and Samuel Jackson.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there I believe it is.

Speaker 1 And then Mark Wahlberg and Will Farrell are the others. Oh, this movie.

Speaker 1 I have seen this movie. I just can't recall any of it other than the guys die at the part, and it's funny.

Speaker 2 One of my core memories is seeing that movie in theaters and being one of the only two people bellowing, laughing when the shot happens, when it comes to their grave.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That movie's alright. That's the right guy.
You know, it's, you know, written and directed by Adam McKay. I tend to like his movies when I've seen them.

Speaker 1 I haven't seen any of them in a decade, but I didn't see Don't Look Up, but I didn't say I didn't see

Speaker 1 Vice.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Various events transpire. They go to the house.
The two boys get shot. Do we want to talk about these boys getting shot?

Speaker 1 It feels very shock factory and not like

Speaker 1 a button for it too in a way that like feels less well executed than some of the other ones. I don't know.
Hit the button. You ain't Floran here.
You best leave now.

Speaker 4 Okay. It's not worth it.

Speaker 6 Open the door, bitch.

Speaker 1 Hey, Josh, don't do that. He didn't mean that.
Come on, Jumps.

Speaker 2 There's more than one in there. Jess,

Speaker 1 Jess, come here.

Speaker 6 Stop it, Jess. Listen, we just want some food for a little girl, you pussies.

Speaker 2 Jess is clear.

Speaker 4 Josh, stop it.

Speaker 6 Let's not let that gas in here. Sir, the air is fine out here right now.
You don't need to worry.

Speaker 1 Might be with the terrorists.

Speaker 6 I don't think it's terrorists, sir.

Speaker 1 Josh, stop it.

Speaker 6 You're being crazy, Mr. Moore.
Show your faces. Let the gas in.
No!

Speaker 1 In case you didn't pick this up,

Speaker 1 this is Spencer Breslin, maybe most famous for being in the Santa Claus movies

Speaker 1 with Tim Allen. He's playing the cat in the hat.
He's also in the cat in the hat, and he also plays The Son from the Kid, the movie about Bruce Willis being a baseball player.

Speaker 1 It's the one that's not the rookie, which is the one that I remember better with one of the Quaids,

Speaker 1 Dennis Quaid, is in the rookie.

Speaker 1 And brother of

Speaker 1 Abigail Breslin. Abigail Breslin, who was in science.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, I didn't know that. I thought you were going to say brother of Randy Quaid.

Speaker 1 No, that's not true. It's not true.
But they are related. They're like cousins, I think.

Speaker 1 I thought you meant that the old man was Spencer Breslin. And in my brain,

Speaker 1 I thought Spencer Breslin was a young man. And then you said he was in the Santa Claus.
And I was like, oh, he must have been one of the Santa's, the old Santa's or something.

Speaker 1 I haven't seen the Santa Claus. And I couldn't, I don't remember who

Speaker 1 that there's many Santa Clauses in it.

Speaker 1 He's one of the Santa Clauses. Dennis Quaid and Randy Quaid are, in fact, brothers.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 The movie is so unfair to these kids.

Speaker 1 It's wild. They're there for like two scenes and then they get blasted.
They get blasted.

Speaker 1 It's insane. Yeah.
And it's just like

Speaker 2 telegraphed because they're so expendable. Like the hot dog guy who does not get a name and is killed killed presumably off screen at some point.

Speaker 2 Like the movie just doesn't care about them, despite also not really caring about

Speaker 2 Elliot and Alma, the two main characters.

Speaker 1 Every character who gets more than a couple lines gets killed and they were all better and more interesting characters.

Speaker 2 It's just like weird that you don't have any interactions with the kids.

Speaker 2 You don't have Jess talking to the two boys.

Speaker 2 You have this whole concept of like, oh, we need to get away from people, but you don't have the like group on the horizon who wants to join up with you, but you have to like refuse them.

Speaker 2 I guess you were kind of getting that plot here, but instead you're just getting like weird hick with gun who does not like homestead guy,

Speaker 2 which you know is a guy to exist in a horror movie, but to like, you know, the

Speaker 2 Keith said before that Mark Wahlberg is

Speaker 2 the character

Speaker 2 is being shown as hyper-confident. And I don't don't think that that's true in the script.

Speaker 2 I think that that's true in his performance because he can't let himself be vulnerable or embarrassing in that way.

Speaker 1 But the fact that, like, he

Speaker 2 doesn't have any control over these kids who are yelling pussy at a fucking.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's the only thing he should be good at is getting high school kids to stop acting out. Yeah.
Yeah. Hey guys, this is an Xbox Live.

Speaker 1 I did feel like that moment of the kids suddenly lashing out out was... that felt good in the movie.

Speaker 1 I liked this like violent emotion kind of coming out, the frustration that they weren't being allowed in, and also the way that it would, in theory, test Mark Woolburg. But it can't because,

Speaker 1 like you said,

Speaker 1 the performances aren't there to make that work. I do think the moment of the kid kind of like snapping and slamming on the door is in theory good.

Speaker 1 And I think that Spencer Breslin, famous old Santa Spencer Breslin, delivers it delivers it well.

Speaker 1 Also, I think that

Speaker 1 the kid getting shot is

Speaker 1 it's like, like you said, it's shock value, and you identified it as like not working quite as well as the other one.

Speaker 1 And I think part of the reason it doesn't work quite as well for me is that the other kid is shot in exactly the same way afterwards.

Speaker 1 You could make an argument for like, this is the futility of the thing. They're just both getting taken out in the same way.
It's like punctuation to the scene.

Speaker 1 But that's not really how a B-movie works. If you're going to like take take these two characters out violently and shockingly, give them two different

Speaker 1 ways to go, right? But you have to treat it like a slasher movie. The kills have to be unique if you're trying to nail the B movie.
Well, chest your head.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Anyway, sorry, Jack, continue.
No, I just, I was disappointed by the

Speaker 1 by the way this was by the way this played out.

Speaker 1 We talked earlier about the weird tension in this scene with with with uh Jess as well. Um

Speaker 1 it's all very odd does she have the shining i don't you know yeah

Speaker 1 it's not a very good scene it's oh i do want to we've we've moved past it i want to actually talk very briefly about the one jess emotive moment that really works for me which is after the um encounter with orster at the crossroads um mark woolburg goes and sits in the like you know um cowpaslee by the side of the road or whatever and kind of like puts his head in his hands and jess goes up to him and says something to him, inaudible, and then she kind of just like collapses into his arms and starts crying.

Speaker 1 And we hear her crying distantly, like the mic position is on the camera rather than with them.

Speaker 1 And I thought that worked really well.

Speaker 1 It makes me sad that it worked well when both of our actors' faces were obscured and the emotive value of the scene was a child crying, something that everybody feels bad about.

Speaker 1 But it was a moment where I was like, oh, right, I am actually feeling a kind of grief and sorrow and anxiety for these characters and this poor kid.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, in this scene, she's presumably learning that her parents have passed.

Speaker 1 She, yeah, I think she, yeah, like this was right after the phone call where they find out about

Speaker 1 the situation in Princeton.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It just feels like it's brushed aside so quickly, and then that is basically never mentioned again until she's like an orphan. She's like adopted by them, essentially.

Speaker 1 She's not really a person. None of them are.
No.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, and it's.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 don't.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So they.

Speaker 1 I'm excited for whatever this is.

Speaker 1 This.

Speaker 1 This girl's parents die. They do.
Off-screen. Off-screen.
Well, no, John Laquizama dies on screen. Right.

Speaker 1 And a huge number of people die. Enough people die that it's three months later and the schools are opening.
She has new parents. She has to find like her new way with this new family.

Speaker 1 And they immediately have a baby, which is going to make this child feel imperiled

Speaker 1 in this relationship. Like now, they have a quote-unquote real baby.
To do this at this point in this relationship is so irresponsible.

Speaker 1 I agree. I totally agree.
I had that same thought.

Speaker 1 They wanted to have a kid, and then they got a kid via a disaster, but they don't see that, so they still have to have a kid in order to close the loop on the having a kid plotline.

Speaker 1 They already have a kid. Her name is

Speaker 1 failing. If your relationship is failing, adopt a kid, and if that doesn't work, have your own.

Speaker 1 And everyone will come out doing great. The kids will be super normal and super healthy.
And it'll be

Speaker 1 everyone will love it.

Speaker 1 Dentally, we're accidentally walking towards some good and emotionally perhaps interesting stuff to explore. So don't worry about it.
Shit, you're right. Let me say hot dog real quick.

Speaker 1 It's time to enter creepy old lady zone. Mrs.
Johnson.

Speaker 1 We go to Arendelle. The movie briefly reinvents the village.

Speaker 1 This idea of like a area without, it's not even on the maps. There's no electricity.
The people there are, per the sort of cosmology of the movie,

Speaker 1 good and kind of empty. Sorry, sorry, separate from the dangers of the world.
The village gets briefly rebuilt.

Speaker 1 And then as he obviously eventually goes on or went on to say in the village, it's more complicated than that.

Speaker 1 But it is funny that he just sort of nesting dolled another one of his movies into this movie. Mrs.
Jones has to be her own monster.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I'm glad you said that because there is also a line earlier where he's like, we're in a small town. Nothing bad can happen to us here.
Which is like really funny. I'm like, okay, man.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I saw that. I saw the village.
I know what you're doing, man. I get it.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 M.

Speaker 2 Knight's desire to be cute at his movies will undercut everything that he's

Speaker 1 talking about.

Speaker 2 And this one, he doesn't even put himself in it.

Speaker 1 Like, he thought that he would stop missing the camera. But I think he

Speaker 1 got so much shit for how he appears in Lady in the Water that he goes, well, I can't, I have to be true to myself and be in this movie, but I can't be in this movie in any way that will cause anyone to criticize that movie.

Speaker 1 You know what? I love Tirimasu.

Speaker 1 I love Tiramasu. You know, I also love Tiramasu.

Speaker 1 I was wrong about it as a kid.

Speaker 1 I didn't like it as a kid. I was wrong.

Speaker 1 It was wrong with me.

Speaker 2 It's an intense flavor for a kid.

Speaker 1 This woman lives

Speaker 1 in a farmhouse. There's no electricity.
She is

Speaker 1 odd. She has lemon drink.

Speaker 1 She has lemon lemon drink,

Speaker 1 and she's very suspicious about the lemon drink.

Speaker 1 Why you and my lemon drink? Yo!

Speaker 1 Sorry.

Speaker 1 We turned over the card, the index card for this woman, and on the other side, it just said suspicion. And that's sort of her whole deal.

Speaker 1 But she has this really...

Speaker 1 God, there's like bits of this movie that are more interesting movies that are like pulsing away underneath it. I really love this sort of obligation where she has this cutely sort of like

Speaker 1 kind of a

Speaker 1 winkingly being like, I guess I've got to serve you dinner. I guess I've got to let you stay here.
And it feels like she's kind of being sweet,

Speaker 1 but actually it feels like maybe she really strongly and powerfully negatively feels those things.

Speaker 1 It's good. I think that stuff with...
What is her fucking name? We said it 10 seconds ago. Mrs.
Jones is good.

Speaker 1 Unfortunately, it's arriving way too late for me to have fond feelings about it, kind of compared to the rest of the movie.

Speaker 1 But earlier, Ali was describing the way you stage, or you could stage, interesting,

Speaker 1 and kind of stakes-filled encounters with survivors, the band on the horizon. How do we feel about them, whatsoever, you know, et cetera.
And here we have in Mrs.

Speaker 1 Jones, the person that you meet who it becomes clear very quickly has got something going on.

Speaker 1 This is a stock character, and it works really well. And the movie tries its best to make it go.
They stay in her house, they have dinner, and midway through dinner, I thought this was great.

Speaker 1 Jess goes to pick up a biscuit or something, and Mrs. Jones slaps her hand really violently.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I was like, oh my god, that's a really violent slap. I know this woman's supposed to be kind of cruel.
Does the movie know that that was a really odd, intense gesture that the actress did?

Speaker 1 I can't wait for her new surrogate parents to stand up for her.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I would have prevented 9-11

Speaker 1 Marky Mark

Speaker 1 fucking just let someone hit his kid right there.

Speaker 1 But interestingly, the movie intended that hit to be hard, right? Yes. Later we have Zoe say, did you see how she hit

Speaker 1 Jess? Yeah, but they sat and did nothing in the moment. No, no, they sat and did nothing.
Yes, they sat and did nothing in the moment.

Speaker 1 And I think in a movie that is got both hands on the wheel, you play with that feeling.

Speaker 1 You know, you can do a sort of like Ruben Ostland, Force Majeur, like how does a parent act in crisis thing going on.

Speaker 1 But I did think it was, it was one of those moments where I was like, oh, he does kind of know what he's doing when we had that really jarring, violent moment against the kid.

Speaker 1 And then Zoe Deschanel specifically talk about it later, but not act. I liked that.
I thought it was good.

Speaker 2 Well, it just feels tough to me because

Speaker 2 you could have an entire movie that's just in the house with this lady.

Speaker 1 That would be great.

Speaker 2 And like the fact that like this is able to hit those beats and that she's sort of kind of one of the most engaging characters in the movie because

Speaker 2 she is this

Speaker 2 threat that finally has a face and this sort of like, oh,

Speaker 2 she's mild-mannered enough or feels kind of

Speaker 2 compelled to be

Speaker 2 like a gracious host that she's willing to feed them and willing to let them sit down, but she does not trust them and she is not going to be warm to them.

Speaker 2 And she doesn't care about the world and the world doesn't care about me.

Speaker 1 She's so misanthropic. Yeah, she says,

Speaker 2 It's just like, you know, it's so late in the movie that there's no they're there.

Speaker 2 And then in a movie, like, we have this kind of a thing that we talk about on AMCA, a Star Wars podcast that I do is this sort of like a full meal crumbs sort of thing.

Speaker 2 And like the thought of like this entire movie being an entire banquet set out with like dishes dishes with no food on them is really weird.

Speaker 1 So much of these from the model home.

Speaker 1 Like it's truly.

Speaker 2 And the introduction of this character and the introduction of these steaks

Speaker 2 like feels so

Speaker 2 tense and scary and real and like

Speaker 2 tropey in a way that feels good in terms of like you're watching a horror movie and you're waiting for the the the the door to slam or you're waiting for the the escalation of where the danger is going to be in this thing.

Speaker 2 And instead, it's just like, oh, there's a weird slap. They kind of talk about it.
In the morning, there's sort of a fight, but she's justified in being angry. So that's already kind of like

Speaker 1 a weird enemy. He's not justified in being angry.
That door was open. He knocked.

Speaker 1 He's looking for his wife and kid. He doesn't touch anything.

Speaker 1 I don't want to get quite ahead of ourselves because there's a really beautiful.

Speaker 1 First, she says, we hear about this

Speaker 1 wellhouse,

Speaker 1 which is connected by a speaking tube. You know, you can hear clearly.
And the woman says, they used to hide people from slave chasers back there. Once again,

Speaker 1 there are things moving under the surface of this movie that this movie does not have the time, patience, or interest to kind of like work through. And

Speaker 1 I want to just to quickly speak on that, where

Speaker 1 the other M Night Shamalan movies have tried to speak on things. They have all failed for me.
And so it is almost a relief that this one decides to not spend any time on anything else.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 I was actually surprised when that shows up as a plot point.

Speaker 1 And then was, again, then not surprised that it, like everything else in this movie, was moved on from very quickly.

Speaker 1 And then as they're going to bed, they have this like anxious little whispered conversation with Jess in the room, which builds into a really effective little heartbeat. I like this a lot.

Speaker 1 As

Speaker 1 Mark Wahlberg goes to leave, the woman is standing in the hallway in a white nightgown.

Speaker 1 This house is all like plaster walls and kind of like rough. She's an older woman with short grey hair standing in the middle of this corridor in like a linen nightgown.
It's a good, scary image.

Speaker 1 And then they botch the scene.

Speaker 1 There's something exorcisty about her. How could she hit chefs like that?

Speaker 1 We need to stay in this house.

Speaker 1 You want me to protect you? I don't care that she hit my child. Let's just deal with her.

Speaker 1 I hear you whispering.

Speaker 1 Planning on stealing something?

Speaker 1 No, ma'am, we're not. Plan on murdering me in my sleep.

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 They are. That was

Speaker 1 the scariest thing that happens in the movie, and it's his funniest delivery.

Speaker 1 It's so funny, Mohammed.

Speaker 1 No!

Speaker 1 They just crashed the seat off a cliff.

Speaker 1 If the whole movie was like that, it would be a comedy, though.

Speaker 1 It would be a maybe funny comedy. Yes, but

Speaker 1 the woman who is so paranoid, the woman whose house you're staying in, who you don't know, who is so paranoid that she hears you whispering, that she waits outside the room to confront you about it, that's good scary stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Now, Mark, we're going to need you to deliver this slide.

Speaker 1 Really normally. Can you do that, Mark? Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure. Yeah, I got you, guy.
Yeah, sure. I can do that.
Come the morning, he goes down to her room,

Speaker 1 Mrs. Jones, finds it open, knocks on the door, and seeing something on the bed that from the feet, I could tell immediately it's not Mrs.
Jones, walks towards it and finds an extremely cool...

Speaker 1 Creepy prop. I thought this doll looked great.
The whole room was a creepy prop. There was weird religion stuff all on the walls.

Speaker 1 Good set dressing, good production design, great creepy prop. I like that we don't know why this lady has this.
We have no clue.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 she's very protective of that doll. She's very angry.

Speaker 2 I just want to say, if you're in a stranger's house, whether or not she recently threatened you because she thought you were going to steal something, but especially so, if you're walking into someone's bedroom and you weren't invited and they aren't aware you were there, you are fucking up and you are being rude and look she is allowed to think that you're a thousand percent disagree

Speaker 1 couldn't disagree anymore the door was one wide open you stay at the threshold keith he did stay at the threshold until there was a creepy doll in there oh the doll

Speaker 1 and so the doll is magnetic i think the doll is sort of psychically magnetic this is not not magically but i mean you know personal psychology uh but then the other thing is like he's looking for his kid he needs to protect this kid if the kid is in the room like he can hear her laughing somewhere in the house we know because we're not stupid like him that it's the tubes

Speaker 1 so we know that she's not in the house

Speaker 1 other things have happened to him whereas we just heard about the tubes 20 seconds ago he had like nine hours he had a six night of sleep yeah he had a whole night of sleep um but that sleep is where your short-term memory becomes long-term memory so something's going on with mark i think um so i think i know what's going on with this woman um

Speaker 1 You know, when you do a reparative reading of a text,

Speaker 1 she's worshiping a non-Christian god by mistake? She's accidentally a demon worshiper? No, no.

Speaker 1 Here is what I think this movie is. I want to hear Keith out on this demon worshiper thing.

Speaker 1 I think that God is real because it's an M9 Shamalan movie, and somehow this woman's got it twisted. She's been praying to something that isn't

Speaker 1 talking about nature.

Speaker 1 It is how they talk about nature.

Speaker 1 Here is the movie I would like to see. The whole movie takes place in this house, like Ali said.

Speaker 1 It is about this couple, Alma and Elliot, and their adoptive daughter, who has been kind of handed off to them by Elliot's friend, who he has gone off to die.

Speaker 1 Jess is not their kid. They run into this house of this woman who is a like isolate,

Speaker 1 suspicious woman who is nevertheless trying to play at being

Speaker 1 welcoming and hospitable, even though it's not in her nature. Based on props inside the house that we saw in this movie, I think that this woman had a husband who died in the Vietnam War,

Speaker 1 like a soldier husband, and he left and went away before they could have children. They wanted to have children together very badly.

Speaker 1 And after he died and she became more and more isolate and weird in Arendelle, she constructed a doll child that she would then raise like as her surrogate kid.

Speaker 1 Into this fucked up environment that the happening is also happening, you know, on outside, we put Alma and Elliot, who are themselves trying to deal with a kid that is not their own, but is a real living flesh and blood kid.

Speaker 1 And then we just bash these characters against each other for like two hours.

Speaker 1 That's the movie I want to see.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, they have something with Mrs. Jones, and they don't really do anything.

Speaker 1 She doesn't even get a particularly cool death. No, she gets a lot of fun.
She gets a cool death in that she goes out into the garden on her own and gets got by

Speaker 1 the happening. That's notable because it's not supposed to happen.
Right. Yes, the happening has gotten so, it's happening so much that

Speaker 1 it even happens to you when you're alone now.

Speaker 1 That's scary. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's scary, but like, it also feels weird. Like, I sort of feel like I was waiting for the movie to introduce, this is maybe stupid, but waiting for the movie to introduce this feeling of like

Speaker 2 the plants know if you're evil or not.

Speaker 1 Yes, I also felt this.

Speaker 2 The hot toxin will only, you know, it won't affect you if you're pure of heart, which I feel like almost is like the ending that we get because

Speaker 1 right.

Speaker 2 But the hot dog guy should have been pure of heart he was i guess

Speaker 1 it had it couldn't have been that yeah

Speaker 2 i don't know but like it feels like it's always gesturing at that because

Speaker 2 the main characters have taught armor and not like an actual immunity that makes sense in the film sure yeah yeah

Speaker 1 so i don't know there is a question the thing is that the movie constantly makes you ask why them why these two

Speaker 1 like why are they making it through and the answer is like because Mark is a smart, not Mark, Elliot is a smart

Speaker 1 science teacher who figures it out as he's going along, but it's just not a good answer because he doesn't seem that smart and the stuff he figures out doesn't seem that important.

Speaker 1 That's the answer we sort of get to, but it's not happening. Right.

Speaker 2 He's also not able to protect anyone ever. And I'm like surprised that the movie doesn't pay more attention to that.
And there's no like acknowledgement of that failure and reversal of that failure.

Speaker 2 failure like the hand slap scene after he just saw two kids in his ward get their brains fucking blown out and not immediately rise to that occasion and be like you were not touching a child i am not going to be anywhere near who someone who's willing to touch a child like that makes no fucking sense

Speaker 1 it's it's it's bizarre because that stuff is kind of handed to the script on a platter right like

Speaker 1 that's where the movie could be

Speaker 1 It's what makes me so conflicted about

Speaker 1 being

Speaker 1 about any of these movies so far is that

Speaker 1 M. Knight's ability to direct and his ability to write a script are so in conflict with each other.
Like

Speaker 1 he is

Speaker 1 He is good at directing mostly.

Speaker 1 This is his worst directorial effort yet. It still looks good because he's got Tac Fujimoto.
He's talented, but it is definitely his least visually interesting movie, I'd say. It is

Speaker 1 for sure. I think the least there's, Jack, you already pointed out, like, there's some good scene composition,

Speaker 1 but beyond that, the movie kind of doesn't have it visually.

Speaker 1 But I'll grant him that because every other one of these movies has had it visually. It's had better acting.

Speaker 1 Every single movie, every single movie that we've watched has had better acting, has pretty much had a better

Speaker 1 written characters. I almost said better script, but that's not true.

Speaker 1 You know, they have more interesting ideological positions.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the scripts can't pull out

Speaker 1 and hit on the same level as the directing. And so it's really, really weird when you have a guy who insists on being a writer-director.

Speaker 1 You know, he's a guy who's always pretty competently directing pretty bad scripts.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 We will continue, or you will continue to have that

Speaker 1 feeling. Yeah.
I think. And I suspect.

Speaker 1 I suspect. Yeah, I'm not going to say.

Speaker 1 So then we connect to we connect through the through the pipe.

Speaker 1 Mrs. Jones bashes her head through the windows and stuff.

Speaker 1 Another good horror beat, I think, is the smashing the head through the window. Yeah, I think that stuff works as a horror movie thing.

Speaker 1 It reminds me of those like the parasites that make worms

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 sit on the well, I think they all have it.

Speaker 1 It makes worms wriggle up to the surface. It makes grasshoppers like come out into the open.

Speaker 1 Different parasites that make you vulnerable to your prey. But it's sort of like a predator version of that where

Speaker 1 the virus or whatever is making you make other people available to it. Yeah, that's cool.
It's good stuff. Thank God it was the very last thing in the movie that introduced the idea.

Speaker 1 I'm also a sucker for sugar glass. I think it's great when actors bash their heads through sugar glass or hit each other on the heads with sugar glass bottles.
I just do that for fun.

Speaker 1 I have sugar glass every morning.

Speaker 1 Can someone clip out Jack saying, I like when actors bash their heads, so if we ever need to destroy their reputation, we can.

Speaker 1 We talk to Zoe Deshanel, to Alma,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 everyone decides that they want to commit the right kind of suicide.

Speaker 1 Rather than

Speaker 1 evil.

Speaker 1 this is staged like you stage the sort of

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 correct death scene in like a monster movie or like in a disaster movie where it's like we're going to go down with the ship.

Speaker 1 It takes on a different context when the mechanism by which the evil kills you is suicide because it really does just look like good suicide versus bad suicide.

Speaker 1 It's odd.

Speaker 1 Also, they involve the child. Yes, it's wild.

Speaker 1 I know it's because he wants the visual of them all in the field together, but it does still feel like

Speaker 1 I don't want to. I'm not defending this,

Speaker 1 but there's no good version of this.

Speaker 1 This is a core concept failure, not an execution failure.

Speaker 1 Because the other thing that you do is, okay, so they both commit suicide and then Jess is stuck in the shed until she, what, starves to death? Like, there's no

Speaker 2 you can make the

Speaker 2 relationship between Jess and the surrogate parenting

Speaker 2 strong enough in the film that it is a decision that they all make together. Jess can also be someone who doesn't want to die alone.

Speaker 2 Like, it sucks because she's eight, and I, you know, I don't really know how you put that, but like, the, the, the, the capacity of, like, we are a family now. We should be together in this moment

Speaker 2 could be there if the movie cared about them being a family.

Speaker 1 The other bit of tension here, in addition to that, is

Speaker 1 they waited no time, they did not spend a lot of time trying to like wait out the wind. Like,

Speaker 1 they, there, even though Elliot is the one who introduced the concept of the collapse of the threat when he talked about the bacteria in Australia, they have one conversation about their marriage and about the mood ring.

Speaker 1 And then he goes, time for death now. I'm going to die now.
Like, this conversation

Speaker 1 is so bad. This is what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 But you're right.

Speaker 1 You're right, Allie. There's like no way to do this.

Speaker 1 No, no. He's...

Speaker 1 Did I write a note about this?

Speaker 1 Yes, I said it's sort of technically impossible to sell because of the way the attack works. Right.

Speaker 1 You either leave her alone or you take her out to die with you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think he thinks it's possible. I think that it could be impossible if the movie was completely different.

Speaker 1 I think that that's the same. I believe that's the same thought.

Speaker 1 I think with the materials we have, it's impossible. If they were new materials, get back to me.

Speaker 1 Also, yeah, I don't know. In the scene where we try it and the fire reaches us

Speaker 1 and doesn't actually burn us, that's good because we got to see fire moving. In this case, they just go out and then they're like,

Speaker 1 I guess

Speaker 1 no death. Yeah, they're fine.
It's been a long time. Zoe Nationale looks disappointed.
What is that about? Oh, no.

Speaker 1 I have to stay married to Mark Wall.

Speaker 1 I can only really understand this as like a failure of acting because

Speaker 1 I don't know why she would be looking disappointed.

Speaker 1 But she does.

Speaker 1 Then it's six months later? Three months later?

Speaker 1 Three months later, which seemed to me, I was like, that's not long enough.

Speaker 2 Shockingly, the only movie we've watched so far with an actual ending.

Speaker 1 I wrote that

Speaker 1 all over my notes. I wrote, oh my God, it has an ending.
The very last thing was, in all caps, I wrote three times bigger than anything else, a real ending, three exclamation points.

Speaker 1 On my other page, when I was summarizing all the movies we've watched so far and what I most hated about them,

Speaker 1 I wrote next to the happening, but it actually has an ending.

Speaker 1 I think you're being spoiled. I do not think that this really is.
It's not a good ending. I suppose it is an ending.
None of the other movies had falling action. Yes.
Even

Speaker 1 in the most generous possible terms, they had a climax. They maybe had a scene that was like a scene that referenced.
By the way, we are post-climax. But there was no denouement.

Speaker 1 This maybe has a den.

Speaker 1 I'm not sure that the Sixth Sense doesn't now that I'm like

Speaker 1 all the way here.

Speaker 1 I went back and watched it to make sure. I said it in the original episode and I double-checked, and I want to stick to it.
He comes home still thinking that he's a therapist.

Speaker 1 He sees a thing and then has a doctor house-style realization that he is a ghost. And then the movie rolls credits.
But, like, that's not the important

Speaker 1 thing.

Speaker 1 The important thing, like, the fall, the scene in the car with Cole and his mom is the

Speaker 1 that's the that is I mean I think that you have a kind of structurally weird movie when the um

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 the secondary character of the movie is the one that has the emotional climax but I don't but the the but but his goal is to fix Cole

Speaker 1 By seeing Cole do that we see

Speaker 1 him get the thing he wanted. Yeah, he doesn't see it happen, but we do, right? And we're the we're the important part because we're the ones who spent 10, 25 to watch this movie.
Yeah, I

Speaker 1 just think that it's to me, it's so clear that the movie ends wildly abruptly. I don't disagree with you that there is an emotional climax with Cole that

Speaker 1 what's his name, Crow? Doesn't experience

Speaker 1 Malcolm Crow. Is that his name? I think so.
Malcolm.

Speaker 1 It is Malcolm Crow.

Speaker 1 I keep getting his character, him and David Dunn mixed up. So I was like,

Speaker 1 but there is such a weirdness to the way that he comes home, has a flashback, has like a long flashback about everything that happened to him. And then he goes like, you don't have to worry anymore.

Speaker 1 And then he then roll credits. It's very strange.
And it is the second most ending that we get out of all of them. So after the happening, the sixth tense has the most of an ending.

Speaker 1 Yes, although, so we've already talked about the sort of like absolutely ruinous family dynamics that are being produced by

Speaker 1 them having another kid.

Speaker 1 Zoe Deshanel gets a positive pregnancy test, sends the kid off to school, puts a little photo. Sorry, I'm saying these out of order.
Puts a photo of John Leglazamo and mom, dead mom, in your backpack.

Speaker 1 Take that to school with you. Off you go.
Good luck. Mark Woolbug puts her on the bus.
They say goodbye.

Speaker 1 She takes a positive pregnancy test and tells Mark Woolburg about it through just some awful sort of body acting. She just sort of bobs about.

Speaker 1 Yeah, when I was watching this with my partner, Muth, he said, oh, she needs to go to the bathroom again already. Yeah, it did look like that.
I

Speaker 1 can't get over how bad these two actors are.

Speaker 1 Every new emotion that they could do is a pit that I fall into.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, we get the classic stinger of the movie, Bad News France.

Speaker 1 Bad news France.

Speaker 1 Bad news for France. So I really like that you get the guy talking about the plants on the news and like the plant theory is kind of the fringe theory.

Speaker 1 And the guy, the newscaster's like, everybody's pretty sure it's the government. And the science guy is like, well, I think the reason it only happened in one place is just sort of like

Speaker 1 a random sort of hotbed of activity. And that if we don't start taking care of the planet, it'll happen again.
And then it happens again. Very heavy-handed.

Speaker 1 This is where my fix for the movie comes in, where it should have been, we should have been revealed that Hot Dog Guy lived. And he's on TV saying this.
Oh, he's so weird.

Speaker 1 We got a post-credit sequence of Hot Dog Guy walking out of the forest with a Glizzy in hand being like, well, that was crazy. As a botanist, he should have a chance.

Speaker 1 You could have had that character live. You could have had him live.
You should have. Because the last thing that we see is him still like

Speaker 1 thinking and feeling. He grabs his wife's hand,

Speaker 1 and then we cut away and we hear the gunshots.

Speaker 1 It's fucking sad and scary. If that happened, yeah, it is.
But the movie sort of

Speaker 1 doesn't care. It doesn't care.
It just swerved, and

Speaker 1 Zoe De Chanel and Mark Wahlberg should have died in that scene, and then they should have had sickers. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That would have been

Speaker 1 watch Halloween Season of the Witch. You got to watch it.
I should have it. I've only seen the first Halloween.

Speaker 2 You really should.

Speaker 1 Oh, you should also see the second Halloween. Have I seen the second one? I think I've seen one and three.

Speaker 1 Oh, two is two is

Speaker 1 two

Speaker 1 is fine. I don't think I've seen the second one either.
Anyway, I like the idea that there's a, that there's like the plant theory is out there, and it's like the fringe theory.

Speaker 1 That's like my favorite little thing.

Speaker 1 Did we all check in with our video games? Oh, I took a screenshot. Hold on,

Speaker 1 below the TV for this entire scene. This is the PlayStation 2 video games.
They are Heat Seeker.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 GTA 3? I think so. I think it's two GTA games.
It could be San Andreas.

Speaker 1 I think that's San Andreas. I think it's Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 I just guess San Andreas based on the year.

Speaker 1 Well, and now looking at this picture, I think that it is San Andreas. It could be too long to be Vice City.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 But I think you're right, Keith. I really do like this weird, angry scientist.

Speaker 1 I like the fringe theory.

Speaker 1 I like that they connect it to the red bloom, the algae bloom. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I like that towards the end, and by towards the end, I mean literally in these last two minutes, it turns into like an eco-thrill. They're like, you know,

Speaker 1 it's maybe because humans' global warming is all bad. I want to say that I think that was there the whole time.
He was trying to have it there the whole time.

Speaker 1 He was trying to have it there the whole time. I don't think it lands the whole time.
Like, I think, like, we were talking about the cutesy billboard of the, you deserve this.

Speaker 1 It feels like it could have worked if there was more, like,

Speaker 1 if we saw, the construction scene took place in a place where they're like hollowing out like a bunch of natural land for like suburbs or something.

Speaker 1 But again, there's no thematic tie there. It's just.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is a weird movie. This is a weird movie.

Speaker 1 I think that.

Speaker 1 Sorry, Aleg, did you want to go first?

Speaker 2 No, I was just going to say, or you keep the botanists alive and you have that sort of plot beat come up and again again.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like

Speaker 2 we are cruel to the world. We have to be considerate in this way.

Speaker 1 Like, it's just bad.

Speaker 1 We're a teen botanist.

Speaker 1 Yeah, hot dog guy's so good. He's so funny.
Shout out to HDG.

Speaker 1 He looks like a comedian that I like, Dan Lippert.

Speaker 1 If you've heard Dan Lippert on any podcast that I like, but he looks like what if Dan Lippert was a little older and had a big beard? I think he does have a big beard sometimes.

Speaker 1 It might also be his height. I think they're both extremely tall.

Speaker 1 Oh my god, he was in an episode of It's Always Sunny. Dan Libert was or this guy? No, this guy, Frank Collison.

Speaker 1 Hot dog guy.

Speaker 1 Who was he?

Speaker 1 He, in one episode, played a character named Smokey in

Speaker 1 The Gang Buys a Roller Rink, which I don't think I've seen yet. Oh, that's a fun episode.
It's kind of a stupid, fun episode. Damn, he's in Guild Wars 2.
He plays Hunklo. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 Does he know about Boar Dead? Bore Dead? I don't know.

Speaker 1 Does Frank Collender know about Colin? Does Frank Collison know about Bore Dead? Oh, I hope so.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I think that the most,

Speaker 1 the weirdest thing to me about this movie is the potency of the reaction to it. I feel like I see movies this bad all the time.
Like,

Speaker 1 all the things that I said about this movie, I fundamentally don't think it's remarkable in its badness. I think it's like

Speaker 1 a D D plus movie. Uh, you know, I

Speaker 1 think that we've seen worse movies from M-Night, movies that I found more difficult to get through. Um,

Speaker 1 I have almost nothing. I don't know about that.
I have nothing positive to say about this movie. Um,

Speaker 1 my only defense of it is like, there's a ton of fucking bad movies. Why is this one so remarkable? I don't see what people saw about this that made them so furious.

Speaker 1 I mean, again, people were ready to hate

Speaker 1 Shavelon at this point. Yeah.
Yeah, I was literally about to say the exact same thing. Like, it is fully just like people waiting on a downfall.

Speaker 1 It's the people who are posting about how Pedro Pascal is in too many movies now. Like, it's the exact same thing where they just want to, they, they want a guy to.
And it's not one-to-one.

Speaker 1 I'm just, that's just a modern comparison yeah um where they're like they want they people were already down after

Speaker 1 like the village was kind of mixed and then lady in the water was a real dud and then knives are out for this one and like he's a big name like you flop like this uh at the level of like a like shitty bloomhouse like low budget like horror movie you're a like fucking fart in the wind but if you if you're empty shy malon you're a stink bomb You're like

Speaker 1 filling the whole room. Here's not a bomb.
This was not a bomb. We talked about

Speaker 1 critically. No, you're not.
You're totally right. I'm not talking finances.
This is way more. You're totally right.

Speaker 1 I just think that it's interesting that this was not a bomb because in Lady in the Water, we talked about how it made $72 million off a budget of $70 million.

Speaker 1 And then Art, I think you said that with marketing and everything, it was more like a $40 million loss or something.

Speaker 1 It was like a $70 million loss.

Speaker 1 The marketing is like 100% at that

Speaker 1 level.

Speaker 1 I am obviously not aware of the way that this was marketed because I was not paying attention to the

Speaker 1 release schedule. They didn't even have to market it to you when you saw it 20 times this year.

Speaker 1 You're kidnapped by a movie student. They're going to study your brain in a lab.
I watched it because I heard it was bad.

Speaker 1 This one.

Speaker 2 But like,

Speaker 1 sorry, just, I think that the success of this is easier to explain is when you, when you pitch it as M. Night Shyamalan's back to doing a horror movie.
Right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, like, even though we've talked about how he hasn't really done stuff that feels as horrory as his reputation

Speaker 1 lends itself, he is still in the minds of the public as a horror movie director. And so being, going like, yeah,

Speaker 1 he did his weird. the village and like he did his his fairy tale movie but he's back now it's and it's r-rated that also is a huge that's that is a draw for horror movies in general.

Speaker 1 Like, if you tell people there's going to be gore, they're more likely to see it than if you tell them it's a PG-13 horror movie. And there is gore.

Speaker 1 There sure is. And there is gore.
And looking at, look, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
No, no, I'm basically done.

Speaker 1 Like, I just, I can see why this had the financial success it did, and I can see how that led to people turning on it even more.

Speaker 1 Just to put some numbers on it, I saw budget as 50 to 60 million, boxed off as 163.4 million.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure that they wanted it to make more money. You know, if you look at this as like, well, this cost about what the village cost and it made less.
It cost a little less than signs.

Speaker 1 It made half of what signs made. You know, it's

Speaker 1 this isn't, they don't want to see these, like, this is, this is an uptick, but it's still down from when he was

Speaker 1 really hitting him out of the park, right? Yeah. And looking ahead, and I don't want to like spoil what's coming up, but his next movie is going to, again, profit, even accounting for 100% marketing.

Speaker 1 The next movie is in the green, but not by a lot, and they probably expected a lot more from that franchise. And then his movie after that is also like a little down if you consider 100% marketing.

Speaker 1 And then you go on and he's making big money again. This, like, I remember thinking at the visit that, like, oh, Shyamalan is back.
And if you sort of look at it, he really never left.

Speaker 1 Like, I understand he started to

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 collective consciousness sort of turned against him, but people were buying tickets to his movies with the exception of Lady in the Water the whole time. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And ironically, you know, I had a lot bad to say about it, but looking at his movies all in a row,

Speaker 1 Lady in the Water is in the top half, I think.

Speaker 1 Okay. I think Lady in the Water is.
How many have we watched so far? Six. Five? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 nonsense. Six cents happening, Lady in the Water, or Sixth Sense,

Speaker 1 Unbreakable Signs, Village, Lady in the Water, the happening.

Speaker 1 I think they might be in order for me. The six movies are just getting...
That's my movie. Each one is worse.
Each one is worse.

Speaker 1 I thought a lot about this today

Speaker 1 because I did want to see see how I was feeling about these. As we've been recording them, you watch more, your thoughts change about them.
You know,

Speaker 1 my feelings about signs have gotten so much worse since watching it that I really, really wanted to put it last for me.

Speaker 1 But I have to admit that signs is better than unbreakable. Unbreakable.

Speaker 1 Wow, that is not the one I was expecting to come after that. Unbreakable is so bad to me.
It is barely a movie.

Speaker 1 It is,

Speaker 1 it has two really high highs.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I like a movie with some friction, but when you're working with bad material, friction is not what you need.

Speaker 1 Like, you can't take a movie that's kind of bad and clunky and add friction and be like, ooh, that's interesting at least. Like, to me, if you have bad material, like if you're, if you're,

Speaker 1 if you're not working with something interesting by default, then

Speaker 1 the friction only makes it more difficult for me to watch. And Unbreakable was full of friction and weirdness.

Speaker 1 Then signs is the second worst.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 Now, you're, you're, you're a, you're a fool. Whoa.

Speaker 1 Your opinions are bad and you should feel bad, I think.

Speaker 1 Signs, again, it was like, I was really liking it in the first half, and then everything about the second half I found irritating and chafing.

Speaker 1 Now, we talked that now, you know what? I'm going to put the happening next.

Speaker 1 The happening was

Speaker 1 an easy-to-watch piece of shit.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's a real easy to watch piece of shit. It was an easy-to-watch piece of shit.
Nothing happened. I have to remember the piece of shit part, though.
Yes. Nothing happened that was like,

Speaker 1 Like, I see bad acting all the time. The fact that you can't.
You can't play that Wahlberg clip again.

Speaker 1 Every time Mark Wahlberg spoke, I was like, ugh. Just let me think.

Speaker 5 I need a second. They released it?

Speaker 4 We're not near the road.

Speaker 1 We can't just stand here as the uninvolved observer. I need a second, right? Just give me a second.

Speaker 1 See, that's just funny.

Speaker 1 You're not making the argument that this film is not uniquely bad, I don't think.

Speaker 6 I need a second, okay? Why can't anybody give me a goddamn second?

Speaker 1 I'd be scientific douchebag.

Speaker 1 Be scientific douchebag.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I just really quick have to do mental scientific process.

Speaker 1 I'm testing myself. It's so much worse than anything in signs.

Speaker 1 No, Ray Reddy showing up and being like, by the way, I think it's water, and then driving away. That's worse, I think.
No, it's not worse. It can't.
Because that,

Speaker 1 I'm with you. Thank you.
This ruined. I don't think that the movie's worse.
I do think that that is maybe my low point of this season so far, though.

Speaker 1 The difference for me is that the Ray Reddy scene,

Speaker 1 it totally pivots the rest of the movie on an axis and makes everything that happens after it stupid and bad.

Speaker 1 This scene is so bad that it's funny and then doesn't matter for the whole rest of the movie. So it's sort of like this isolated piece of shit in a box that doesn't really.
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 It's the thing for the rest of the movie. That's like, and now we can't beat together.
Like the

Speaker 2 people density is the

Speaker 1 rest of the movie. You think that I don't see, I don't think that the concept isn't what's bad.
It is the acting that's bad.

Speaker 1 So I don't think that it really has a lot of bearing on, like, yeah, the thing he figures out is that we should split up. But that's not the part that's bad to me.
The part that's bad is like,

Speaker 1 be scientific, douchebag. And like, we're not assholes.
We can't be like those people on the news. You should run to where all those suicides are happening and try to stop them or something.

Speaker 1 Like, that's what's bad to me.

Speaker 1 But, like, my problem wasn't with M-Nights acting in that scene. My problem was with like the ideas being presented.
So when, when for the rest of the movie, they have to like keep splitting.

Speaker 1 It already felt like a movie where we had to keep having smaller and smaller little parties.

Speaker 1 Like, that kind of, that kind of like felt already present to me um and and night movies are like to me always chasing you know the characters catching up with what the audience already knows in a really frustrating way um

Speaker 2 i i feel like i have to go with art here because i like even

Speaker 2 thinking of impact and thinking of like character value i refuse to think of impact time spent like the the sort of like we're not going to be like other people and not do something about this

Speaker 2 ice machine

Speaker 2 is as absurd as saying, oh, I think it's aliens and walking away. Like, it's both as meaningless and

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 useless to the film, really, and to the character, the characters in the same way that, like,

Speaker 2 I think that they exist on the same plane.

Speaker 1 I'm not here to say that this scene is better, except that it's funny. Being funny makes it better.

Speaker 1 I'm not here to say that it's better. I'm just saying that the result of the Ray Reddy scene is to like prematurely spoil the movie.

Speaker 1 Like it is a weird, like a character off-screen figures out that they're weak to water and then just tells you to your face and then goes like, by the way, you know, sorry I killed your wife, but it seemed like fate.

Speaker 1 Okay, bye. Like, it is so absurd and it changes how the rest of the movie is.

Speaker 1 I don't think that this scene, like, changes the rest of the movie. It just kind of exists on its own as a weird, stupid bit of dialogue.

Speaker 1 And I'm not, I'm not easy on M-Night's dialogue. I think that he's been shit at writing dialogue at this point for more than half of a decade.

Speaker 1 But after

Speaker 1 the happening,

Speaker 1 I think it's Lady in the Water, Water, then The Village, and then, of course, Sixth Sense, which is like way better than the second place

Speaker 1 in first. Oh, yeah.
Like, it's not even clear. That is still like Heads and Shoulders his best movie.
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 Nothing is within striking distance, I think, of the Sixth Sense. I think it's far and away the best one of these.

Speaker 1 What's next?

Speaker 1 Oh, next is After Earth. Should we also like, do we want to announce what we're doing on the Patreon? Yes.

Speaker 1 On the Patreon, we are going to do a watch-along of the famously reviled Last Airbender movie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Everyone hates that. 5% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Yeah, it is like kind of like it's in the running of like worst American, like people talk about it in the same category as like worst American films.

Speaker 1 I have no idea what happens in it. I also know that the Avatar of the Last Airbender people are really easy to upset.
They're very sensitive about their stupid cartoon.

Speaker 1 And it is stupid. And we, Keith and I are saying that.

Speaker 1 I like it. I like it.

Speaker 1 I like it fine.

Speaker 1 I like it fine. It's fine.
It's from 2005. I'm over it.
I'm on to new stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I think that's really fair.
Yeah. It's fine.
It's

Speaker 1 fine.

Speaker 1 You shouldn't

Speaker 1 yeah you shouldn't feel bad no one involved should feel bad no one involved should feel bad no one who likes it should feel bad for liking it no it's like whatever but

Speaker 1 kind of get over it yeah like

Speaker 1 um that's my feeling about avatar the last airbender um

Speaker 1 oh my god there's a wikipedia page for films considered list of films considered the worst oh

Speaker 1 by decade

Speaker 1 is it on there i have not seen this movie, but looking at the other films on this list that I've seen, it would be hard for this to be the worst.

Speaker 1 People try to memory hole this, but there was a time when people would say that about

Speaker 1 a movie that I very strongly think is not close to being the worst movie, The Phantom Menace.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 I'm right. I don't have any opinion on this.
It's just really funny how it always comes back to this show. Well, I just think like this is very formative for me.

Speaker 1 I learned very young that huge groups of people will very loudly and confidently say a movie that is not even close to being the worst movie. They will declare it the worst for years and years.

Speaker 1 And then it was a second lesson when 10, 12, 15 years later, people sort of revise like it's not the worst, it's just bad and acted like, no, no, we never were insane about the Phantom Menace.

Speaker 1 We just always didn't really like it.

Speaker 1 And so that was a second lesson in how people behave.

Speaker 1 I'm here three hours into this.

Speaker 2 We can't talk about this.

Speaker 1 This episode is over. I'm sorry to say.
Thank you, Allie. Talking about the Phantom Menace, I'm really sorry to say.
No one can stop me from talking about the Phantom Menace.

Speaker 1 You can leave the call if you need to.

Speaker 1 I would say it's hard to believe this movie is worse than either the Adam Sandler film Jack and Jill, which is on this list, or Battlefield Earth, which are both like very bad movies. I can't.

Speaker 1 I'm not able to compare.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but Duncan Chino's pretty funny. I don't know the difference between Battlefield Earth and After Earth, by the way.
I don't know what the difference is between those.

Speaker 1 Well, we're going to really have to get into this. We're going to really get into that.
Just so we're clear, the next episode in the main feed is going to be about After Earth. Correct.

Speaker 1 That is correct. Curtis Howe the Last Adbender is a Patreon exclusive.
It's a Patreon exclusive watch along

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 I don't want to do a three-hour podcast on that movie.

Speaker 1 And I honestly, I think that the best way to present it and what will be the most fun is to be talking over it and having a good time and laughing and not spending three hours talking about it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and if I have time, I'll try to just watch the whole first season of the show to be really fresh on for next week. I don't think I have the time, but if I do, I'll try.

Speaker 1 Is there anything else we need to say before

Speaker 1 leaving?

Speaker 1 Do we have a review?

Speaker 1 See if we have any new reviews. I don't know if the last call for review.
Oh, we do? Wonderful.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 The fifth character is always dysfunctional family dynamics from Professor Puppy Feed. I didn't read that username before I started reading this.

Speaker 1 Really enjoying revisiting the works of M-Night with y'all. As someone who was very much into them when they first came out, I'm re-watching most of them with you for the first time in ages.

Speaker 1 And while they don't all hold up, your reviews and insights keep me interested and frequently frequently cackling i've even roped my husband into watching a bunch he's never seen so thanks for that love this pod and pretty much all you do thanks professor thank you uh i love uh roping spouses into watching movies that they might not watch otherwise and does any does anyone not know what after earth is about and wants to guess so oh i have no clue I think that it is effectively going to be the same as that movie where Adam Driver goes back in time and has to kill a bunch of of dinosaurs with like a laser rifle because he's from like an advanced civilization.

Speaker 1 I haven't seen it, I've only seen the trailer. Um,

Speaker 1 I think that's what it's like. Um, yeah, I genuinely the only thing I know about After Earth is that it has Will Smith and Jaden Smith in it.
That's I don't, I couldn't even guess.

Speaker 1 Um, I is it maybe gonna be he redoes he does a sci-fi version of I Am Legend where

Speaker 1 um you've got like robots instead of zombies.

Speaker 1 A remake of I Am Legend where his son is playing the dog.

Speaker 1 Yes. And then again, robots instead of zombies.
It's robots.

Speaker 1 Great.

Speaker 1 I don't think I've seen After Earth, but I know one thing about After Earth, actually, because my partner has seen it in theaters, apparently.

Speaker 1 One of the three M-Night movies he had seen in theaters, which I think is really funny.

Speaker 1 I know that there's something about

Speaker 1 an accent.

Speaker 1 And that's all I'll say.

Speaker 1 All right. Well,

Speaker 1 see y'all next time. And if

Speaker 1 we decide with a Patreon, that'll be up before or

Speaker 1 concurrently with or

Speaker 1 we'll figure it out. It'll be on the way.
So

Speaker 1 I'll say this.

Speaker 1 That's not going to get edited. There's nothing I can do to us talking over a podcast.
So

Speaker 1 the work I will do to it is like making sure that everything sounds good, but like we can't cut it down because we would ruin the watch-along part of it. Yeah, so

Speaker 1 like it is going to have like a lot less done to it than usual, probably.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to guarantee that this that after Earth and

Speaker 1 by the time this goes up,

Speaker 1 I said after Earth, I meant Last Airbender. By the time this goes up, Last Airbender will already be up.
Wow. All right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, okay, bye.

Speaker 1 Thank you, bye.