The New New Tastemakers: An Edible Oscars Preview, with Wesley Morris

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

If you had like 2% gay in you,

you would see it.

Just 2%.

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I'm bringing you in to talk about film and criticism and the things you do professionally, but I also promised you a platform.

I'd platform your Russell Wilson takes.

Is that what you want to talk about with your blank piece of paper in front of you that I'll let you write anything on?

He's just a beautiful person.

He's just a beautiful person.

And I think Sierra is the luckiest human being on earth.

I don't know what it's like to play football with this man.

I don't have any idea.

But I can tell you to just like behold him.

When you say beautiful,

that's almost too poetic for the feeling that I think you're really describing here.

Do you want me to say he's hot?

I mean, you're the Pulitzer Prize winning critic.

Lots of people are hot.

This is a different, I mean, there's a kind of person, and these people are rare where like you could like

they look like they're made of pudding you know like part of the beauty is they also seem edible somehow right

and i'm gonna i'm gonna stay in the league and give you a really like nauseating example of this because i'm already nauseated i oh really i mean russell wilson you he's not cool though i don't care what do i what what is my what is my what do my desires have to do with cool i mean like like, y'all can have Ryan Gosling.

Just take him.

That's right.

I don't.

I'll take the scorpion jacket.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, you can, you can do that guy all day long.

Everybody makes fun of Russell Wilson.

But I think everybody's jealous.

I think he is the most handsome man in the NFL.

You had pudding and edible and what was the name in the league that you had to do with the brains.

You know what?

You know what?

I can't do it to everybody.

It's bad.

I mean, to your point, like, it is actually bad enough that I am saying this about Russell Wilson.

It's a safe space.

It's not safe enough to say what I was about to say.

I really, I really, because I think better of myself, but there is another person involved in professional football who is not a player, who also has this kind of like creamy, edible quality.

It's just that you also would get food poisoning and nobody wants that.

Wait, who are we talking to?

I can't.

Who are we talking about?

What if we bleep the name?

Because I've already said, because I've already said too much.

It's Andy Reid.

Fine.

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Is it easier or harder to describe to people who don't know what your job is, what your job is these days?

These days.

Yeah, like the present tense.

Like,

do you think there was a period in which it was easier, it might have been easier for me to do it?

Well, I went to college and I took a class in American film criticism

in 2005.

Elvis Mitchell was my professor.

Shit.

Okay.

Well, you got, you got something good.

Well, New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell would commute to Cambridge and he would lecture once a week for three hours.

We'd watch movies.

You were in the famous

American Film Criticism.

Oh, yes.

Taught by this dreadlocked.

anti-professor professor who was like the cool guy, like the iconoclast on campus.

Yeah.

And it was so popular because we watched movies and he's entertaining.

But the point is, I took a class about criticism.

And of course, we read Pauline Kahle.

We wrote about like Gus Van Sant and I wrote about like Elephant.

Oh,

yeah, I know, real, real academic stuff.

But the point is, if I'm thinking about what criticism has become in the last, that was 05,

2024 now, I imagine the class is just something that almost needs to define itself in the context of the present, of

the genre being different.

And so let me ask it this When was it easiest to describe what it is that you do professionally?

I mean, probably in 1972.

Probably.

I mean, I'm going to guess I wasn't around in 1972.

My definition would probably be the same 50 years ago

and now.

But essentially what you're sort of doing now is defining the job of a critic in opposition to or maybe as a point of clarification with respect to what people are doing on the internet, for instance, right?

Exactly.

Which, to be fair, or honest, or real or accurate,

is itself a form of criticism, depending on who we're talking about.

I mean, the act, the noun criticism is being practiced by

everybody

in a way that makes me want to demand from you the definition.

What is it that you do?

How do you actually describe it now?

You want to try to use

your voice and imagination and mind and personality to

think

through what a work of culture, art moment in art or culture is doing and means.

So I figure I should also just jump in here and start to define who Wesley Morris is himself because the Academy Awards happen to be this Sunday.

And so what I wanted to do today was just sit down with the only writer in history to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism more than once.

First with the Boston Globe in 2012, then again with the New York Times in 2021.

And that is where Wesley still is, by the way.

He is the critic at large at the New York Times.

He also covers culture generally.

But as for our popular understanding of what professional criticism actually is,

I mean, in the world of movies, we're all familiar with this general idea, right?

Because there's this Siskel and Ebert, thumbs up or thumbs down customer service aspect to that job.

I, for a long time, I resisted that idea because in my literal brain was like, well, no, I'm not providing, this is not consumer reports.

This is the daily newspaper.

And I

really just want to

work through my feelings.

That's all it starts off as being for me.

Like, how do I feel?

Well, I'm not really going to know until i sit down alone and work through my feelings through words um

and once it's clear where i'm going as i'm writing then you can start to do all the magical things that you really don't have any control over like language the sort of word connections i mean there's a conscious part but then there's an unconscious part the service being provided is not is this good or is this bad, right?

You truly can get that from lots of different places.

You don't need a person like me, you can just go to Metacritic.

I don't need words or rotten tomatoes, right?

I can go to the to the statistical index that is those places.

Are we all looking at marinara or are we looking at at a whole tomato?

Is that threatening though?

What does rotten tomatoes, what is metacritic, these things that say um 95, it gives you a grade, basically, if you're a director.

What does that do for your profession?

If I'm being honest, I'm just as dependent on that quantification in other realms as other people are with respect to movies, right?

Of course.

Am I going to go to a restaurant that's rated 3.7?

Do you know what I mean?

Like

on any service?

I don't think so.

You know, if I'm going to a country I've never been to before,

and I don't know what some of these places are and I'm winging it.

Most of the time I'm doing this, I'm taking the advice of people when I travel but I think though just just pure and simple those ratings have a value right there is at least a baseline

that you can judge your experience by in some way as a as a moviegoer as a diner I think there is a value for that but I also think that in the same way that I am talking to people who I respect before I travel somewhere about where they like to eat I think it's great to, in addition to having the metrics to tell you what most people are into,

I think

there's an additional value to having a relationship with one or two people

who do the thing all the time, right?

Who go to a lot of restaurants, who watch a lot of movies.

There is a record of their dining and reading and movie going experience.

There's a rigor to

their opinions.

Maybe not, right?

Like, I don't even know that it has, it just should be somebody you trust.

That person could have terrible taste, but I think it, it should be somebody that you can eventually develop your own taste by.

And maybe you wind up breaking up with that critic because you realize they aren't rigorous and they aren't doing the work and that you now know more than they do and they suck.

Right.

They think Russell Wilson's super hot, for instance.

Oh my God.

Just you went, okay.

Sure, sure.

He might have a 3.7

according to everybody else, but I've been to that restaurant and I'm telling you, it's a 4.9.

Just saying.

People will ask me, journalism students, like, what should I do if I want to do what you do?

And I have settled upon a thought that I want your help sussing out.

Okay.

Because the thought I have is you should develop a defined taste.

Know what you like and how to explain why you like it and know what you don't like and be able to do the same.

How did you develop your taste?

When we say I have taste, it usually is meant like positively, you know, that the taste is good.

I realized very early in my life that I liked, I had bad taste, right?

Like I was interested in like not gore, not necessarily violent.

I liked, you know, my first John Waters experience was, was a life-changing life-changing thing the most sordid the dirtiest the weirdest the rudest the meanest anything that i could identify as being truly

funny in a in a like i as a kid i watched a lot of stand-up comedy and it was very clear to me who my favorite people were versus the people who did nothing for me do you have somebody that you still think of as like an influence in terms of taste oh yeah i mean it was it was all those women.

Guy grew up in the 80s and the early 90s.

Adele Givens, Elaine Boozler, Judy Tenuta, who was a real weirdo.

Do these names mean anything to you?

I could not plead more ignorance.

This is a very obvious, I mean, this is going to surprise you a little bit.

Andrew Dice Clay didn't really do it for me because it was such a shtick and I didn't

performance of I'm a bad boy.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny.

It was such a performance and it was so off Elvis

and so rat packy.

I know what you're saying.

Cute comic, but he's got an attitude.

So f you.

I mean, if you sort of boil it all down, this is a handsome man who hates himself.

and is doing everything in his power to like direct that hate somewhere else.

And that was clear to me as a kid and it just turned me off.

But you know who I liked in a not dissimilar vein?

Sam Kinnison.

There was something really musical about, I mean, I guess we could argue about the musicality of Dice Clay, but Sam Kinnison, he came at, he was at the exact right pop rock and roll moment, right?

People walk up to me to act like they're looking at the angel of death.

It's like, oh, oh!

I know he managed

the screaming punchlines that Sam Kinnison had about,

you know,

disappointment, insult.

You know, I read the Bible.

I followed the calendar.

I think it's been about 2,000 years since Jesus said anything to anybody.

I think his last words may have been

I just loved that.

And obviously this fat guy with a big mouth, not in telling like really tasteless jokes, bad taste.

But I loved him.

And so I think the more I got exposed to this sort of seedy, underbelly side of people, my first Barbara Streisand movie was Nuts, a movie called Nuts in which she plays a call girl who has to kill a John because he's trying to assault her and she goes on trial for being insane.

That's my first Barbara Streisand movie, not Funny Girl.

You have a fairly disturbed childhood.

I mean, my childhood was great.

My mom loved me.

So did my dad.

I was loved, but I also liked some really distasteful, discourteous, rude shit.

So part of your origin story here is the desire to explain why it is that you felt like the stuff that people looked down on was actually some of the greatest that you had seen and vice versa.

I am a big proponent of trash as an aesthetic and as a practice.

I think the real housewives franchise is the only reality experience you can have that satisfies all of the parameters that I would lay out for what constitutes a great work of trash.

And even Meincourt says our producers, sorry, I can just hear him.

He's cheering that a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner is saying this, but please proceed.

I, you know, I don't watch everything, but I've seen more than enough to understand

that the values of those shows are basically a, they're basically human beings.

They're trying to work out how to be human beings, right?

And what these women are actively resisting is being present.

Right.

And so you have this tension between women who don't want to be where they are and want to be somewhere else.

And what comes out of that is like,

like, what is the most obnoxious, horrible, mean, awful thing I can do just to get out of here and to be off in what do they call the little confessionals?

Yeah, yeah, confessionals.

Like, I want to go do a confessional.

I don't want to be here giving the material to make the confessional.

So the performance of self-consciousness is itself in this world, a trashy achievement.

Do you give them credit for being as compelling as you've just out?

So, this gets to the notion of like authority.

What's intent?

Authorial intent, Wesley.

Yes.

Do you give them credit?

Is it so?

Part of the weirdly, I will mention Stephen A.

Smith here

because part of the comedy of him existing and like naming his favorite Pokémon and being a love doctor, just super horny on air, is him not always being in on it.

Okay, so I love this.

I love this.

Stephen A.

Smith, to me, is not a trash artist he's camp right

where the thing that is so serious and true and earnest about him is also completely ridiculous how many pillows is the right amount to sleep with stephen a

i say to personally i agree with you i think three is too much i think one's too little

two is just right because you can put one laid down and one standing up or you can put one on top of the other.

Either way it goes, it should work for you if your pillows are right.

And he has no control over how ridiculous he is on a minute-by-minute basis, right?

I mean, just his hate, just his look alone.

Oh, yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Irresistible.

I mean, you watch it.

I mean, it's hard to, I mean, I have very mixed feelings about experiencing this man, but, but the, but the, but the fact of him, the character that he embodies is irresistible because

you're saying there is a camp level of theatricality.

Yes, yes.

But also, he has no control over.

And that's so important, right?

That he's not a scientist engineering the response.

He couldn't.

It is, in fact,

carnal.

It's so much bigger than he is.

It's an id, right?

Yes.

No, I mean, it is truly an id, but it also is an id

that never had the sort of girding of a superego, right?

Like there's nobody who can make this guy go back inside his body.

And I would never want to try.

No.

I mean,

imagine producing him, right?

I've actually, you know what?

It's funny.

I have never heard a story from anybody about having like a, I was in an elevator with Stephen A.

Smith.

I ran into Stephen A.

Smith in a parking lot.

He came over to my table while I was having.

I've never heard like a, he was whispering.

He was, I feel like whatever it is to be on in him,

it's not even, I hate the phrase, there's no off switch, but I mean, he doesn't have any other mode, right?

Like this.

I showed him a picture of a sonogram, my daughter's like imaging in the makeup room during in between shows one day.

And what he told me, instead of saying like, congratulations, this is great, was, and I won't even begin to imitate him, basically that you are going to want to defend this child's life

to the point where you will kill a man.

And he gave this monologue about just like the violence I will want to exact upon someone to defend this

image.

And I said to myself, This man is exactly who he is all the time.

There's also no thinking, right?

I mean, his thinking, I guess.

It feels like instinct.

Right.

There's no, there's no plan.

And this is again what gets him to camp and not trash.

He's not trashy.

I want to go to the hypothetical world in which someone is like

wanting to become a professional movie critic or cultural critic, either one really at this point.

The notion of how

in demand that occupation is, What is your blunt assessment of how that's changed, given that oftentimes we're not even the ones to type in the name?

No, right?

It's just given us to care.

As opposed to like, you say, I want to go and consult my informed friend, an expert.

That's like so much more work than what's happening now, where they're giving it to you and saying, you like this.

That's not that different from the old remote cable days, right?

We now understand that there's a system behind the scenes of these platforms that claim to know what we were going to like, but they don't.

It's like,

they're basically bottom feeder studio executives, essentially, that algorithm.

Yes.

Right.

Absolutely.

It's the lowest common denominator.

You liked this, so we're going to give you this.

And it's kind of hilarious to me

what they will follow something with.

Because I'm actually curious, like, okay, I just watched Barbie.

Now you're going to give me Working Girl.

What do you think the connection is between these two movies, other than the fact that they star two very sexy blondes?

Right.

But I do think that it's not that different from when you were hunting for something to watch in the old days.

And you didn't have the ability to choose at all.

Right.

And it was already chosen for you.

So

your wheel of fortune would like just land on, you know, National Lampoons Vacation x x y z and you'd be like oh i kind of like this movie there's there's three more of them um clint eastwood i don't know who this guy is but i'm into it i'll i'm gonna watch the beguiled next

can you can you explain how it is that you even got the the

the idea to do this job wait i actually want to ask you a a related question what happened at the end of elvis's class because

I mean, what was your experience learning this history and then practicing a little bit of it yourself?

Oh, my experience personally was

revisited today as I was trying to find my final paper on Elephant by Gus Van Sand.

And I was like, I used, in my attempt to imitate New York Times film critics poorly,

so many adverbs.

Janet Maslin is what you're saying.

But just the idea of like, oh, I was cosplaying as a critic, which is to say I was channeling a voice that when I revisit it now makes me cringe so hard that I turn inside out.

That I am trying to replicate sophistication with adverbs, which is the telltale sign that you're not actually confident in the verb you chose.

Right.

I've been doing this now

in some capacity since I was 12 years old.

I wrote for my middle school newspaper, my high school newspaper, my college newspaper.

And during somewhere in that period, I wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News because I'm from Philadelphia.

And they had this kids section called Yo, Fresh Ink.

And they got all these kids to write for it.

It was like, it's corny, but it was legitimately cool.

What were you like back then as

your takes were concerned?

But probably the same, but adverbier.

Yeah.

Right.

Because I think that at some point,

the things that separated

the big cats from the little cats was their command of English, right?

If we're talking about writing in English, is their command of the fun that they have with the language.

And for me, adverbs were fun.

I just liked using them a lot because, you know, putting a lot of words in front of another word just seemed like a cool thing to do.

There was one sentence that you wrote recently.

You reviewed Jennifer Lopez's uh

allegorical film about her life, which we've also talked about on the show, incidentally.

But you had a sentence where you had a sentence devoid, devoid of adverbs.

And I think confidence in writing, just to illustrate the kind of writer you are, also comes from the confidence to do a short sentence.

Oh, yeah.

And you called Jennifer Lopez's allegory about love, and you compared it to, of course, Beyoncé Lemonade.

And you said, I believe the quote is something like, call it Lulu Lemonade.

Oh my God, this thing is so deep.

Like

she basically, Jennifer Lopez, one of our great stars, one of our great global entertainers,

took it upon herself to ask herself,

I can do anything with all this money that I've got.

What is the thing I'd like to do?

I want to make something about

my relationship to a to a thing that's very important to me and that's relationships.

But also I want to work in the zodiac.

Yeah, I want to

think about all of my old relationships and why I've been married so many times, but I also want to think about how I can make this about

getting better and being a better person.

She's clearly working through something she's been through, and I'm like, okay, well, Beyonce has done this, right?

Like

lemonade is essentially about the

roadblocks, speed bumps, trap trap doors that she found herself being put through

at a certain point in her marriage.

And I'm like, these things are similar.

And there's no doubt in my mind that Jennifer Lopez watched Lemonade and thought, well, what would my version of this be?

And because Jennifer Lopez is so,

I think we don't think of her as being neurotic, but I think because her neurosis isn't verbal, it's physical, right?

She is a physically restless human being.

She's always in motion.

She's always like,

there's no peace in her body.

Like, her body is always going like this.

I mean, she's a great dancer.

It's kind of like doing

a karate kata, as they called it, like a martial arts routine.

That's, I mean, it is about self-defense.

Like a multi-step self-defense

performance.

There is something about

being like keeping out and protecting.

And, you know, all that physical stuff just reminds me of like if the Lululemonade thing came to me, I thought like maybe there's a Gatorade joke to make or like a Kool-Aid joke to make, but they didn't feel right.

And I didn't have it until I just sort of started working through what the persona is about.

When you've got a joke that I think is going to resonate with people as a very concise explanation of what the what the thing under consideration is.

Yes.

You don't want to step on it.

You don't want to adverb it up.

Right.

Well, not only that, but you don't even want a clause.

Exactly.

You don't want, I mean, because I actually was like, well, maybe I need a clause to explain.

No, all of your clause work has to go on the front end.

Even if it costs you something a little bit in the rhythm of the setup, you want to keep the referent as close to the referee, right?

Or, you know, you want to keep the two references basically together.

Yeah.

So if you're making a comparison, you can't, you can't have like

200 words between the setup and the punchline.

But the point here, I think, underlying all of it is that there is a bite to that.

Yes.

Like J-Lo reads that and is like...

Feels like she's just been hit by a karate kick.

Like there's, and I, not because you intended it to hurt her, but just because it cuts through in one line to the stylization and the hollowness and the artifice of this performance of strength, but also vulnerability.

Yes, yes, yes, that is, that is Pablo.

I mean, look, I took American film criticism as a sophomore in college.

That's very good.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And I, you know, one of the things that I think in order to be able to do this job, I mean, you'll talk to any, any actual artist.

and I think there's artistry to

criticism.

Absolutely.

But if you talk to like a person who dances for a living or sings for a living or acts for a living or, you know, writes novels

or writes really anything, it plays a sport, right?

Like just watching a great athlete do what they do,

there's a freedom.

that like, you know, even under pressure, they're like, you don't know that it's match point based on the way, you know, I mean, just to pick a person, Carlos Alcaraz is like returning the ball, right?

I don't even think he thinks he's going to lose.

Even when he, even when he does lose, he is still playing like he's up, you know, 40 love.

And I think that kind of freedom in

what I do,

it really is hard to come by.

And I'm very lucky that I'm not on social media.

I was going to say, you haven't tweeted in about two years, which congratulations.

Thank you.

I mean, I'm not proud.

You've missed nothing.

I just feel like for my own sanity and really for me to be able to like practice this freedom that I'm talking to you about.

Absolutely, man.

I don't think it comes.

I don't think I have it if I'm thinking also about how to, what is the thing I'm going to extract from this piece, then put it on the internet and then sit around and wait for everybody to gather around and applaud it or, you know decry it well

it gets to the question of why you are writing things the way that you do why is your opinion this and not that and i think for a lot of us who exist mostly by looking through the lens of a feedback loop you are trying to get the scientists to give you more pellets yeah more pellets please like i would like i would like to feel good i want the serotonin I mean, I don't know what the numbers are.

It's funny.

Let's talk about the numbers.

Like,

somebody came over to me today to, well, it's not, it's too in the weeds, but basically, I don't know how the stuff I do does.

I would prefer not to know for my own stuff.

I don't want to know.

Do you know?

I can know, but I would like to not make decisions based on the scientists giving me exactly, exactly, exactly.

So, I

just don't, I don't know how the pieces do.

I still have a job.

They still let me write what I want.

As long as that's true, and you know, I'm not like having things killed or canceled or taken away.

I mean, I'm okay.

But as for whether the movie industry itself is okay and this question of what films, what things actually get made these days, I did want to look ahead to, yes, the 96th annual Academy Awards this weekend.

And ask Wesley what he thought about the last year in film from Barbie to Oppenheimer and what it taught us about cinema today and movie stars today.

The delusion about the Barbie, the Barbenheimer thing

is that it's going to lead to more people wanting to go to the movies.

I mean, I feel like that's ridiculous because most of the people who were going to those movies used to be moviegoers.

It's not like some breed of person was created in the last, you know, they said this about Top Gun too.

I think people, we had a pandemic

where people were terrified to sit in the dark in an enclosed space for a long time with people.

That takes some getting used to again.

You know, you, I mean, for some people, the pandemic is not over, right?

Correct.

It's, they're still living with either the ramifications of it or a fear of experiencing whatever they experienced in 2020 or 2020.

Yeah, a medical fear.

And I think that the sort of cultural reintegration of ourselves back into like enclosed spaces with each other is real.

I also think that the movies have to give us a reason to want to go.

And there aren't that many.

We're already not getting as many movies as we used to get, you know, 15 years ago.

That could be good.

It also, I don't think for my purposes, it's good at all.

If you like movie stars, guess what?

You don't have any anymore.

Right?

There's no movie star narrative to like,

I don't know.

I mean, I'm trying to, who is a person?

I'm like Alden Aaron Reich.

Does that name mean anything to you?

I mean, just a Han Solo performance that

bummed me out a bit.

He's an Oppenheimer.

He's the guy who, like, is dressing down Robert Downey Jr.

That guy, I mean, we should be on movie, on starring movie number seven, right?

Miles Teller, same thing.

Michael B.

Jordan.

Michael B.

Jordan is a Donnis Creed for life and Killmonger, right?

And I just feel like there are fewer and fewer opportunities for these people to establish persona through movies that are, that tell a story across time, right?

The idea that Denzel Washington became a star essentially in 1987, there's nobody like that now.

The idea of a Tom, like the reason we love Tom Cruise so much is because this dude has not changed.

He's still doing now what he was doing 35 years ago and happily doing it.

And we are happy to see him happy to be doing it too.

But yes, he's the IP that reboots itself.

But is he ever going to play Jerry Maguire again?

Is he ever going to play the duty played in Magnolia?

You know, I mean, the question is, like, is he ever going to do another?

What is that movie, American Made?

Where he's the, he's the pilot.

I love that movie.

He's so good in it.

And the movie is pretty solid.

American Made, yeah.

Um, he's not going to do another one of those because he didn't make enough money.

I mean, I don't want to speak for Tom Cruise, but the business imperatives he wants to win

we have the rock wesley oh my god

go on go on pablo

talk to me about the rock

what it feels like it feels like

objectively he is our biggest star

okay go on

Why am I in a corner defending the edibility of the rock?

All I'm saying is

the time that we're living in now feels, for me, as a guy who never became a critic, despite taking a class about film criticism, it kind of feels like a bit of a bummer.

And

I am enjoying the ways in which you are not necessarily feeling that.

I don't feel, no, no, no.

I don't feel that I'm not bummed out, but I also understand

that

where we're going to be in 10 years with respect to like where we were 20 years ago is going to be really different.

Yeah, you're going to be reviewing AI.

Like AI generated like

Tyler Perry's AI generated

seven-part series.

I mean, you introduced The Rock as a continuation of a thing that Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington are among the last people to move.

Yeah.

I don't, I think he, he missed his, I mean, nothing he missed his chance, but like, where's the proof?

Like, what's he doing?

He's doing, I mean, his sequels, he's no.

He's back wrestling now.

What, I mean,

rather, I mean, for real, it used to be if we were going back maybe 12 years ago, the WWE needed him to go back way more than he needed it.

Now,

I think he needs them more than they need him.

What is this year in movies defined by?

What did you find out this year in movies, Wesley Morris and Pablo Torre finds out?

What did you find out about cinema this year?

I think we don't know what it is.

We think we know, but we don't, right?

I don't think that knowing is really that important,

but I also think that

are in a real transition point away from something.

And you could see it in just what Barbenheimer meant, but you can also see it like at the end of Corey Jefferson's movie American Fiction, right?

Where I don't want to ruin it for anybody, but there's a shot that basically is like the movie sort of throwing its hands up and being like,

I mean,

this is, this is what they do.

This is all they're going to do.

It's just this over and over and over again.

And I don't know that I necessarily believe that, but I definitely think that the cynical conclusion that it draws is damning of a moment that we are actually in right now, right?

Yes.

Where

no matter what you think of Oppenheimer, the sheer fact of the movie is that it's a movie biography, period, right?

It is a movie about a person who did a thing.

And the person playing the person who did the thing has to play the person who did the thing.

And there are like clear parameters for how to do that thing.

And in a completely different realm, you've got a movie like Poor Things, which I think is extraordinary from the standpoint of the eye.

the ear with respect to the language that the characters use to communicate with each other, particularly Emma Stone.

That is a movie star performance.

That is a feat of technical acting.

You have the bonus of Mark Ruffalo doing something the movie doesn't even need him to do, and he just goes, you know, to outer space with it.

I think that the lesson that we're going to learn from all this stuff is more movies based on toys with respect to Barbie.

We were kind of already there, right?

But this really put a nail in the coffin for going in some other direction, right?

And with, I mean, I think Greta Gerwig, that is definitely one of the five best directed movies I saw last year.

There's no question about it.

The thing from beginning to end is a unified vision coming from one person about

this experience of Barbiness, right?

And all the ways in which this doll

matters both to the community of Barbies, but also to the people who make them happen in the real world.

I think that the lesson to to be learned is not that Greta Gerwig is an original voice in American movies.

It's that IP, people really want that shit.

People want a thing they grew up with.

People are nostalgic.

Any lesson, but Greta Gerwig is a great American filmmaker and let her do anything she wants.

Cause you know what she's doing now, don't you?

No, I mean, I love her.

She can do whatever she wants.

I'm not here to question her choices.

And I'm sure it's going to be really good.

But I think she's doing a Narnia movie.

Oh, okay.

She's going, she's reopening the wardrobe, right?

So I don't know what in there needs.

C.S.

Lewis as IP feels, feels like.

I mean, but it was already, right?

Like, I mean, they've made

this would be a, this would be bringing back to life a game

that has been brought back to life in many other iterations.

So I trust her, but I also, I don't know, maybe, maybe it's too much to want her to make another Ladybird.

Do you know what I mean?

Because Ladybird is in all the other movies, right?

it's in it's in little women it's in barbie this is a this is a unified sensibility that we are talking about here but this is something that i believe that you are familiar with the idea of i'm going to take something that is mainstream and reverse engineerable from a broad consumption standpoint and i'm going to use it as a trojan horse for some stuff that actually might be interesting yes also

There's a way that you could just go the opposite direction and just do the thing that is actually interesting, right?

That would be nice.

And so I, I'm really curious to see

what happens to Justine Trier, who made Anatomy of a Fall, because the Hollywood people seem to really love her.

What happens to Cord Jefferson?

Because he's worked in the industry, but this amazing, magical specialist.

I've already told Cord, like, I expect you to direct a Marvel movie.

And, and you're being silly, right?

Right.

When you weren't serious.

I was joking, but also as soon as I said the joke, I was like, I bet he's also getting a call about directing a monster.

I'm sure he's getting a call about that.

But I think that you watch this movie that this guy made.

And

I don't want to say there's no way he doesn't do it.

I mean, he did write The Watchmen.

He wrote a couple episodes of The Watchmen.

And, you know, the one he wrote was, it was beautiful.

And that show, that series is beautiful.

So it's not to, I don't want to force

you or shortchange

what what it means to go into that world, but that's not my point.

My point is I miss when people,

when I'm, I'm not nostalgic for this.

I think it's actually important to our understanding of ourselves to

have dramas and comedies that are just about people in situations and they don't fly.

They don't have superhuman strength.

They aren't Deadpool, you know,

which I think think those things have their place.

But I also wonder, like, what would it look like for somebody to try to do Trading Places now?

If that screenplay just landed on some executive's desk right now, what happens to it?

Forget Trading Places.

What happens to like House Sitter?

Remember that movie?

Baldie Hawn and Steve Martin?

I'm not saying these are great works of art, but I don't know.

I think that what we lose when we sort of put all our eggs in this one basket, and you can see it in the Oscar nominations, is

other countries start eating our lunch from the standpoint of the imagination and creativity.

That is a great way of putting it.

I'm sorry.

I mean, we used to have back in my day in America, we had imaginations.

We are giving something up every day that we stop looking at ourselves as a people in the present

and start thinking.

I mean, I guess there is a kind of reparative work, for instance, that a movie like Oppenheimer is trying to do or that a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon is trying to do.

But, you know, and to Scorsese's credit, he's in his 80s, and this is like, he should be looking back at what violence means and what crime means.

This is a meaningful thing for him to do.

But, you know, I want to know what it's like to be in 2024.

Yeah.

I want artists to like, like, show me my present too.

Right.

Right, right, right.

You want Russell Wilson to be in the Trading Places reboot.

actually.

That I mean, he did.

Yeah, there's some part for him in there.

It's not, it's not Eddie Murphy's part, but there's a role for Russell Wilson in something.

Wesley Boris, before I get just furious with you,

I should tell you that I greatly enjoyed this and I thank you for doing it.

Oh, you're going to get mad about Russell Wilson?

I'm just saying.

I mean, I value your eye.

Thank you.

And I'm like, come on, man.

If you had like 2% gay in you,

you would see it.

Just 2%.

I got like 1.9, and I feel like it's not doing it.

You can borrow my 0.1 to get you over now.

That's the next episode of Pablo Torre finds out.

Let's do it out

being the operative word.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark media production,

and I'll talk to you next time.