The Letterboxd Show 3.04: Blank Check Pod’s Griffin and David
[clip of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace plays]
C-3PO Oh... oh my. Hello Master Anakin.
ANAKIN Well 3PO, I’ve been freed. And I’m going away in a Starship.
C-3PO Master Anakin... You are my maker and I wish you well. However, I should prefer it if I were a little more... completed.
ANAKIN I'm sorry I wasn't able to finish you 3PO... give you coverings and all. I’m gonna miss working on you. You’ve been a great pal! I'll make sure mom doesn’t sell ya or anything.
C-3PO Sell me?!
ANAKIN Bye!
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
GEMMA Hello and welcome to The Letterboxd Show, a podcast about the movies people love watching from Letterboxd: the social network for people who love watching movies. Each episode your hosts Mia, looking at new releases in theaters, on-demand and streaming. And now... it is time to meet today’s four favorites guests... plural.
SLIM That’s correct, Gemma, we have two guests this episode, two Letterboxd , who are well known to any serious lover of podcasts and movies. Since 2015, these two have been podcasting about the ion projects of directors who have been successful enough to receive a blank check from Hollywood. You know who I’m talking about—at least you better know—please welcome to The Letterboxd Show, from the world-renowned Blank Check Pod, comedian, actor Griffin Newman. And Atlantic film critic, David Sims. Welcome to the show.
GEMMA Hello. Hello.
DAVID Hey!
GRIFFIN World-renowned is... I’m just, I’m trying to chew on that.
DAVID You’re bowled over? [Gemma laughs]
GRIFFIN Feels very lofty, yeah, for what we do.
SLIM Country-renowned.
GRIFFIN No, no, I was just gonna say, I mean, I don’t know how much we want to pull back the curtain up front, but the process of us landing on which four movies we were going to discuss was like a bit of a back and forth, because there’s—David and I have our personal s. And then our friend, Marie Bardi, who works on the podcast with us, recently started a Letterboxd for the Blank Check Podcast. And on that, we thought the funniest thing to do would be to make our four movies the three Star Wars prequels and Sully. [Slim & Gemma laugh] So then... you folks reached out doing the podcast, you said “I assume those are the four movies you want to talk about.” And then at some point, you guys came back with two of the movies from my personal four. I’m realizing, David, you don’t have a favorite four.
DAVID I do!
GEMMA He does, he does!
GRIFFIN Why am I not seeing—oh I’m seeing it now. It wasn’t showing up the last time. Okay. But I feel like your four changes a lot. You cycle out based on moods, right?
DAVID I change mine a lot. I have themes that I do for my favorites.
GRIFFIN Right.
DAVID Yes, that I’ll change every few months.
GEMMA Yeah, I got really excited, obviously, about your four favorites, David.
DAVID Thank you.
GEMMA Because, you know, currently they’re all directed by women.
DAVID Yes.
GEMMA And of course we have ‘la Campion’ on there. If we could just briefly dive to the end of the show where we do a small section for those with Patron hips, which Griffin you do not have, so we’ll talk about that later off-air.
GRIFFIN Okay.
DAVID Wow. [Gemma laughs] I’m a Patron.
GEMMA We do a “rated higher than average” look at your ratings. And I’m pleased to see that against the Letterboxd average of 3.2 out of five, you have five stars against In the Cut, so... you can stay.
DAVID Oh yeah.
GEMMA You can stay. [Slim laughs]
DAVID Oh yeah, thank you. No, yes, yes, my current favorite four are all New York movies, New York-set films directed by women. But I will go, every couple months, I’ll just kind of crack open—maybe it’s every few months—I’ll crack open the favorite films and just pick a theme. I had posters where people were hugging for a while. [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA Cute.
DAVID I had some sort of like primary-color thing going on, where I wanted like posters that were like a solid color. So there was like a yellow, green, red, blue motif that I had. I just like to mess around with that. But I do love the four movies. Obviously they have to be movies that I like a lot. And yeah, right now I love these four films. They’ve been up there for a while.
GEMMA So if you’re listening, you could add Girlfriends, Desperately Seeking Susan, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. and In the Cut to your watchlists. But those are not the four we are discussing today. We’re going to get to that. I feel like at the time of recording, which is the lead up to the 94th Academy Awards, you’ve just completed a Jane Campion season and you’re now starting down the Sam Raimi rabbit hole.
DAVID Mhm!
GEMMA Are you going to run out of blank checks... at any point?
DAVID No.
GEMMA Have you worked out how long this pod can go for?
GRIFFIN Too long.
DAVID Forever. [Gemma & Slim laugh]
SLIM Don’t sound too pleased.
DAVID We’ve talked about it, Griff, like the amount of, “oh, they’ll definitely do that director” directors. If we did all of them it would take years and years and years. And then that doesn’t even include any other sort of weird choice we might make, y’know?
GRIFFIN Yeah, we’ll do weird pivots based on moods or sometimes, like if someone like Sam Raimi, it’s like, “Oh, he’s got a new movie coming out for the first time in nine years. This feels like a good time to talk about him to sync it up.” But Jane Campion is a perfect example of someone who, for at least three years, we would say, “Well, she’s inevitable. We’ll do her at some point.” And then someone on our Reddit did compile—
DAVID And we finally did it.
GRIFFIN Everyone who we’ve ever said is “inevitable”, and it’s like twenty directors. [Gemma & Slim laugh] And right now, the other thing that’s going on, I mean, as we transition from Campion to Raimi is that every March we do a March Madness thing, where we have a bracket of 32 directors, and we have a matchup vote every day to let people vote on one of the directors we’ll cover within that year. And every year we do like... 50% new people to the bracket, 50% returning people.
DAVID Right.
GRIFFIN So it’s like, each year we present 32 people we would reasonably consider covering. So the show will—we will run out of energy for doing the show before we run out of subjects for the show. [Gemma laughs]
DAVID Never!
GRIFFIN Never.
DAVID We’ll never run out of energy, Griffin! How could you say that?
GRIFFIN Never.
GEMMA I don’t know, I mean, Griffin, you’re a busy, busy, busy boy on the screen.
GRIFFIN No, but I question David’s energy. Yeah.
GEMMA Yeah. Right?! I mean, churning out those—
DAVID Am I too energetic?
GEMMA Those super-duper Atlantic reviews day-after-day. But I mean, who are today’s “blank check” directors? We are, after all, yet to see the Gerwig, Baumbach Barbie. So... I feel like, you know, the future also has plenty of blank checks, even though the industry has changed somewhat.
GRIFFIN That’s a great example of one.
DAVID Um... yeah!
GRIFFIN Jordan Peele...
DAVID People who are two, three, four movies into their careers, but obviously, are already sort of appointment viewing and, you know, are the types of people who Hollywood will still let them make original movies, right?
GRIFFIN Yeah!
DAVID I feel like those are the two kind of, you know, two things we’re thinking of these days.
GRIFFIN I think they’re the two tracks. I mean, these days, it feels like there’s sort of the A24 golden-ticket route, where some directors sort of get anointed. And it’s like, you get to keep making whatever you want within this set budget limit, but they’ll let people go pretty wild within that. Or there’s the Gerwig thing, of like, are you going to try to tackle a franchise thing or some big pre-existing character and see if you can do it with your own personal thing? And I think both of them are interesting to us, you know? When someone’s able to fit something personal and specific and unique into something like a 100-million-dollar Barbie movie, that’s very exciting to us. It’s also exciting when someone has twenty million dollars completely unencumbered.
DAVID I mean, look, we’re doing Sam Raimi now, and that’s a guy, more classic “Blank Check-y” guy, right, Griff?
GRIFFIN Mhm.
DAVID In that he made a lot of interesting, you know, ion projects, in the ’90s and such. And now he’s making Doctor Strange [in the Multiverse of Madness]. And I feel that, we haven’t seen it, but our question with that is going to be like, is there—are we going to detect this guy’s personality now that he’s sort of swinging back into the new Hollywood corporate structure? Like is he still gonna be able to be Sam Raimi? I don’t know, we don’t know yet.
GRIFFIN When we try to pick a director, one of the things we consider, along with the films that that director made, because we we will cover everything a director did, in certain rare instances, we’ve siloed it a little bit and put parentheses around a certain era, but usually we’re covering beginning-to-end of a career. And so a big part of that for us, is like what is the narrative of their career? You know, what’s kind of intriguing about the way it builds and arcs and dips and all that sort of stuff. And Raimi is an interesting case of a guy who like, kind of out of nowhere ascended to the top level of blockbuster filmmaking. You look at the four or five movies he did for Spider-Man, and it’s surprising, and you look at his genre roots before that were on such a small scale that it’s surprising, and then it feels like well, now you’re at this territory where you get to make the biggest movies. And since then, he made a small return-to-his-roots horror film. He made a completely overblown Disney-blockbuster attempt that felt like he got lost in the jumble. And now it’s been almost a decade and he’s returning to this genre that he kind of helped solidify and, yeah, it’s this question that we’re going into the series with of, is he going to be swallowed alive by this thing? Or is he going to be able to come back to this genre and put his own fingerprints on it again?
SLIM Yeah, I’m excited for the Drag Me To Hell episode, that’s for sure. It’s one of my fave Raimi movies and a little bit too underrated in my opinion. But for this episode...
GRIFFIN I agree. A great movie.
SLIM Absolutely. We briefly mentioned the four, but the four officially that we’ll be talking about this episode, we’re going to kick things off in just a minute with Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. [David laughs] Which is what started it all, but then will drift into Clint Eastwood’s Sully, which I don’t believe has had an official designation...
DAVID Nope.
SLIM In the Blank Check episodes, but now we’re finally doing it.
GEMMA Oh, it’s a Letterboxd Show exclusive. [Slim laughs]
SLIM Exclusive. Get the PR ready to send out!
GEMMA Blank Check on Sully. Oh my gosh. [Slim laughs] Let’s get across that t press release. [Slim laughs]
SLIM Yes. And then we’ll wrap things up with Ang Lee’s Hulk and also Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence. But Gemma, what do you think about starting off with Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace?
GEMMA Yeah, I’d like to start off with a question. I’d like to start off with a question, for you gents. How does a good boy go bad? [music from Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace plays] [Slim laughs] We start with the film that is possibly—and this is a bold claim, but I’m going to make it—solely responsible for inventing entire generations of film bros.
GRIFFIN In many a way, yeah.
GEMMA George Lucas’s 1999 reignition of the Star Wars franchise: [Star Wars: Episode I –] The Phantom Menace. Synopsis: “A Scotsman and an Irishman walk into a trade blockade on Boonta Eve... [David laughs] Find a precocious slave boy called Anakin Skywalker and much bad bombin’ ensues.” This... has a 2.7 average on Letterboxd.
DAVID Wow.
GEMMA It won’t be the lowest-average movie we discuss in this conversation today.
GRIFFIN Really?!
GEMMA Just 449 fans, of which Blank Check is one, I think. Where does this, we know where it ranks in of the Star Wars saga on Letterboxd, it’s like seven out of nine or nine out of eleven when you factor in Solo[: A Star Wars Story] and Rogue One[: A Star Wars Story]. But where does it rank for you both in the Star Wars ratings of your hearts?
DAVID Agh... Griff, what do you think? I mean, this is the movie that obviously started the ball rolling on our show.
GRIFFIN Yeah.
DAVID Our show was initially this jokey podcast about the Star Wars prequels where we pretended like [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace was the only movie that existed in the world of Star Wars. That was like our bit.
GRIFFIN It was a failed franchise starter. Yeah.
DAVID Right. And from there, we discussed all the other ones. And we started getting into the sort of, you know, “God complex” of when someone like George Lucas, writing his own check, which is what this movie is, right? Like, this is George Lucas saying, like, “I’m gonna make another Star Wars movie.” And obviously, that’s enough to turn every key for him. And he produces this work that is highly divisive, and still kind of a fascinating watch. And now, you know, beloved by some corners, right, Griff? After you sort of, you know, years of hate... right?
GRIFFIN I think there’s a mounting defense, some of which might be a little reactionary. And I think you’re right, Gemma, that this movie—for better or worse—kind of changed a popular film culture and the way fans deal with movies in a lot of senses. But yeah, I mean, David and I wants to start a podcast, and we were sort of obsessively texting each other weird [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace marginalia. And we had this idea of like, what if we did a podcast that was just about [Star Wars: Episode I –] The Phantom Menace? Because there are a lot of Star Wars podcasts. But what if we just want to be a [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace thing? And then I had always had this take that was like, do you think people would like [Star Wars: Episode I –] The Phantom Menace more if it was just the first movie of a failed franchise? [Gemma laughs]
DAVID Right, unburdened by expectation.
GRIFFIN Right! That was the thing. Especially at that time, we were starting this podcast in 2015. So it was the year, the end of this year of us doing a full year of just Star Wars before we rebranded as Blank Check, was [Star Wars: The] Force Awakens coming out. So there was finally new Star Wars to contend with. But at that point, it had been like, you know, fifteen, sixteen years of people obsessing over this movie and what it did wrong, and it was always through the prism of like, what he gets wrong that he used to get right when he was younger. And this is the important central tenet of the original movies, and he’s lost it here. And we were like, what if we just unburden it, as David said, and just try to take this thing on its own merits, and view it in that way, and see if it gets better or worse. And weirdly, I think when we have the thought experiment of pretending the movie had no connection to anything else, the movie plays worse. [Gemma & Slim laugh] But through doing that, it made me appreciate the movie more in some other senses.
DAVID Right. Right. It plays worse in a logic sense—
GRIFFIN Yes.
DAVID Where you’re like, you know, if you don’t know that it’s a prequel, the focus on certain things is baffling. Like it would be strange to actually consider this on its own.
GEMMA If you’d never seen any of the other films, you would have no feeling of the shivers when R2 gets up on top of that ship with his little screwdriver.
DAVID Sure.
GEMMA …and starts fixing things.
DAVID Sure. I mean, that’s one of the many things we concentrated on, right, right. Where it’s like, “Who is this? Why is everyone so focused on this?” Yes, right.
GRIFFIN After it came out, George Lucas was so insistent, like “Everyone should watch this movie first. I’m sorry I made them in the wrong order. But if you’re a parent showing your kids these movies, this is the first one you should watch.” [Gemma laughs] And we were like, as a first movie, it’s confounding and so much of its value comes from either recalling things you previously care about, or creating interesting tension between the states you know and where things started and all of that. So I think the movie loses a lot of power in that sense. But it gains power when you’re sort of able to then re-appreciate—and I think it’s a deeply flawed movie, but it’s a fascinating movie. And the experiment of the prequels where it’s like, here are three movies that everyone loves that start with this sort of redemption of these new brave heroes being able to reclaim a galaxy and take ownership. And then the prequels, by default, have to be watching this slow, inevitable march into fascism. And it’s sort of defined by all of its central characters’ arrogance, that they let these terrible things happen around them, because they’re so confident that they know what they’re doing. And they’re just wrong! They’re wrong! Like you asked what turns a good boy bad, and it’s like, everyone mistreats him.
GEMMA And in fact, if I can just jump sideways and read a review from Letterboxd from Truman, you know, it really is the heart of it all: “kind of wild to think about how all of Star Wars starts because a bunch of rich people want to pay less taxes”.
GRIFFIN Yeah!
DAVID Right. [Gemma laughs] And of course, at the time, when this film came out, there was that fan bafflement of like, why is this about intergalactic politics and tax roots?
GRIFFIN Trade disputes.
DAVID And like, what routing does that really have in the boy’s-own-adventure that this is gonna turn into?
GRIFFIN Right, why does this movie have four Senate scenes? [Gemma & David & Slim laugh]
DAVID But now I do think there’s this weird appreciation for like, oh, you know... it was at least a swerve. I think the fact that [Star Wars:] The Force Awakens, and its follow-ups, but especially [Star Wars:] The Force Awakens, made such an opposite effort by just trying to recapture the magic of the original and hearken back to the energy that, you know, it thought was what made the original Star Wars so special. Now that makes [Star wars: Episode I –] The Phantom Menace seem unique. Before it seemed baffling and now it’s more like, well, that was different. And in a samey world, difference is is exciting, I guess? I’m trying—Griff, we’ve always talked about this. We always are like, “You know what, [Star Wars: Episode I –] The Phantom Menace, not so bad.” And then every time we would rewatch it, we’d be like, “Agh, it does have its problems though.” [Slim & Gemma laugh] Actually watching the film would kind of remind us like, “Right, right, this is sort of better in my head.”
GEMMA I haven’t seen [Star Wars: Episode I –] The Phantom Menace since it came out in cinemas. And it’s that funny thing isn’t it, that when you watch it as a younger person, and then you revisit it as I did this week. And you said, why are there four Senate scenes? I’m a politics junkie, I worked in, you know, New Zealand government. I actually, and at this point in my life, loved all of those scenes. And especially at this moment, I couldn’t stop thinking of Ukraine on this watch. I couldn’t stop thinking of the parallels basically between Queen Amidala and Zelenskyy.
SLIM Really…
GEMMA And I started wondering whether Zelenskyy was maybe conceived from Midi-chlorians, in fact. But just, you know, every time she goes to make an appeal, it just... it really got me in my gut in a way that these intergalactic politics, I literally could have given less of a shit about originally.
DAVID I think that’s a fair read. I mean, it is funny to think about. I mean obviously this movie, the later films, George Lucas feels like he’s grinding his axe about the Bush istration and the Iraq War and things like that, in the two sequels. But yeah, no, there’s potency to this august body, the Galactic Senate, that is doing nothing in response to Craven aggression or whatever, right, it’s not completely fantastical. Again, I think people just wanted a movie where Jedis do magic to make cool things happen. [Gemma & Slim laugh] And they were confused that in this movie, the Jedis seem to be like, tools of a failing bureaucracy, but now you’re sort of like, I appreciate the boldness of that.
SLIM They’ve announced so many, you know, “Oh so-and-so just signed on to do a new Star Wars trilogy” or “New Star Wars movie coming in 2030”. I almost don’t even really want another Star Wars movie for another twenty years. Like the response to the Skywalker saga ending, it just felt like... I don’t know if I want to go through this again for a while. The community response, the toxicity. And full disclosure, I didn’t love [Star Wars: The] Rise of Skywalker. I just looked at Jack’s notes, Jack who puts our facts together. [Star Wars: The] Rise of Skywalker is rated lower on Letterboxd than [Star Wars: Episode I –] The Phantom Menace right now.
GRIFFIN That is where it belongs if you ask me.
DAVID I think that’s... pretty fair.
SLIM Thank you. Thank you, yes. The truth will shine through in this episode. Big time bottom of the pile. I being so pissed off when I got out of theaters for [Star Wars: The] Rise of Skywalker.
GRIFFIN Yes!
SLIM I was so annoyed getting out of the theater.
GEMMA I was so fine with it! I don’t know what all your guys’s problems are with this?
SLIM Ugh! No!
GEMMA Like, I just sat there and I watched it, I just feel like every single one of these films is the same story and how can you get mad about the fact that it’s a truth universally acknowledged that in a Star Wars film, a control ship or a Death Star or whatever must be blown up from the inside by the end of the movie?
SLIM We nerds don’t have much, Gemma! Let us nerds have Star Wars! [Gemma laughs] We don’t have much in this day and age, 2022! [Slim laughs]
GRIFFIN I was just gonna say, I’ve gotten to a point where I feel like the things that angered me about Star Wars movies are no longer like betrayals of lore, or canon or things like that, that I kind of completely let go of my grasp on caring about. For me, I think that movie’s a fascinating counterpoint to [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace in particular, because I think when you get to [Star Wars:] Episode II [– Attack of the Clones] and [Star Wars:] Episode III [– Revenge of the Sith], Lucas is panicking a little bit. He’s like a little bit aware and frightened by the fact that people were so hostile to [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace when it came out. But [Star Wars: The] Rise of Skywalker feels like a movie that is trying so hard to figure out what we want as an audience, at a time when the audience for Star Wars is really fractured. It’s impossible to please everyone. And it’s frantically trying to please everyone in a way that just feels... like it’s operating from a place of defense. Whereas [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace just has this like, abandon that is kind of liberating to watch now where it’s like, “Wow, he really doesn’t give a fuck!”
DAVID It’s confident.
GRIFFIN Right! He just, “I’m George Lucas, it worked last time. Why wouldn’t it work now? I’m just gonna follow my bliss and everyone’s gonna connect to this.” [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA Okay, let’s get—we’re talking thematics. Let’s talk specifics. What do you love? What do you absolutely hate?
SLIM You know, I just recently rewatched this and I had an okay time. I think the pod-racing scene...
DAVID Yeah!
SLIM I think the whole thing slaps, to be honest.
GEMMA You mean the American Graffiti scene? [Slim laughs]
DAVID Yeah.
SLIM I mean, the audio of that scene, everything feels like so top-notch. It sounds rad. I just recently watched it, I think it’s the 4K on Disney+. I thought it looked great! I thought it sounded great! You know, make the whole movie more like this, George. What do you think, David?
DAVID Yeah, the pod race is fantastic. And George Lucas is always going on about how he actually just wants to make like, dialogue-free films about, you know, vehicles moving or whatever. And it’s the clearest example of how true or how good that could be. And I , I think at the time, people thought the pod race was kind of... you know, shoehorned in, and seemed to be an opportunity to sell toys or whatever, like, why... And it’s like, because it’s so grand and innovative and it’s not like what he had done before. We love the pod race.
GEMMA Ah, it was interminable at the beginning. Like, once it finally got underway, it was fine. But the beginning when they’re revving their engines, I was just like, “Ah! Get on with it already!” [Gemma & Slim laugh]
GRIFFIN In his mind, that would be the whole movie. Like that’s the one thing he’s too afraid to do, is make the whole movie that, which I think would be his heart’s desire. I do think the movie looks really good. He makes such a sharp turn to digital filmmaking in two and three, not just that he was such an early adopter of digital video, but also just the whole pipeline in the amount of CGI and blue-screen and whatever. And [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace has like really beautiful locations and giant sets, you know? And constructed objects. And I think the CG, even though there’s a lot of it, and at the time it felt like an overwhelming amount of it, there’s a lot of really good integration. I think it has like a real texture to it. You know, I think what doesn’t work is a lot of the attempts at more nuanced characterization. I think it’s a movie that is not just... has a lot of ideas that you can track cleanly in of his interests based on knowing him, reading interviews with him and knowing where the original movies came from. But if you’re trying to just find an entry point into it dramatically, it’s very tough. When we were doing this exercise of pretending that we had no other context for this movie, if you’re imagining watching this thing blind, you have no idea why you should be caring about any of this and who you should really be attached to. You know?
GEMMA Yeah. Before we move on, we just have to, we have Jack who, you know, compiles our facts. He hasn’t shared this particular tongue-in-cheek Letterboxd list for the podcast before, but it is a perfect one to call out today. It is called Humanity’s Greatest Achievements. And it’s a compile of possibly the most ill-conceived movies ever made. And yeah... this film sits on it alongside a lot of—
SLIM It’s a big list. There’s like six pages of movies on that list too.
GEMMA Wow.
SLIM It’s not just like a small top twenty list. It’s... vast. [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA It’s bad, it’s bad.
SLIM But we should move on. We should move on to our next film on our list. [music from Hulk plays] This was also covered on the pod during the ‘Podback Mountcast’ miniseries. And this is Hulk, 2003, Ang Lee. And I’m sad to say, I don’t agree with it, but we’re going down in Letterboxd average... 2.3.
DAVID This is what I—I would have guessed this.
GRIFFIN Absurd.
DAVID Griff, you forgot your beloved Hulk, right?
GRIFFIN No, I know.
DAVID Still not world beloved.
GRIFFIN Yes. Still a lot of anger.
SLIM Just a quote Griffin, this is quote, “my favorite Ang Lee film”. That’s direct quote from the pod. This was before the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is 2003. So we’re in a different world back then. I don’t really need to explain the backstory of Hulk necessarily, but this is maybe our first film rated below 2.5 on the podcast, per Jack. But Griffin...
GRIFFIN Wow.
SLIM Why is this one your fave Ang Lee? Let’s talk about it.
GRIFFIN I know. Yeah. Clearly, no one else was ever gonna stand for it here on the show. [Gemma & Slim laugh] I mean, look, I will certainly... I think I will grade things on a curve often, if I’m just kind of astounded by the ambition or the audacity of what they were trying to do, especially trying to do that within a commercial media, right? With the expectations of a film needing to function in a populous, commercial way. When people are able to somehow just take the money and do something bizarre. It’s why I love all the American Verhoeven movies, where we always joke that he would sort of like, lie and shake his head and go, “Yes, it will be a normal film” and then take the money go “Also, it’s about Nazis”. [Gemma laughs] You know, that like once they gave him the money, then he would only then tell them what the film was actually going to be about.
DAVID Right.
GRIFFIN We had, we did a screening of Hulk at the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn. And we had James Schamus, the producer and screenwriter, do a Q&A with us afterwards. And he told this story about Crouching Tiger, [Hidden Dragon] was so big, and this kind of bizarre—this thing we’ll talk about on the podcast where someone has a hit that is so thoroughly out of nowhere, and defies all logic of what types of movies become hits, that even the bean counters have to throw their hands up and go like, “I guess you know, what works better than we do.” Like you never could have planned Crouching Tiger, [Hidden Dragon] to become like this 100-million-dollar blockbuster grosser as this very like sad, quiet spiritual, subtitled, foreign language, fantasy, martial arts drama. So then everyone went like, “I guess you know, you have the secret, what do you want to do?” And he gets offered Hulk, and his whole thing is like, this is a universal picture. There’s the history of the Universal Monsters, you know, all these sort of psycho-dramas about these cursed men. And can we do something with that? And we lean to the Greek tragedy of Hulk as a character and all this stuff. And he writes the script was Schamus, and Schamus tells this story about going to see Spider-Man, Raimi’s first Spider-Man, opening weekend in May 2002. And it was when they were in production on Hulk and Schamus was back in New York City, and goes to see in Times Square, and the final shot of the movie is Spider-Man swinging through New York City and he lands on a flagpole. He poses next to the American flag, like six months after 9/11. And the audience erupts into cheers. And Schamus walks out of the theater and calls Ang Lee. And he’s like, “We’re fucked.” And he goes, “What do you mean?” [Gemma & Slim laugh] He went “I just witnessed a genre being birthed. Everyone in that audience now has a set expectation of what the genre of a superhero movie is. And we are fundamentally not making that.” And it’s arguably the last movie greenlit and that went into production before that happened, right? So it’s a movie completely unencumbered with the idea of what a superhero needs to be. It is just the two of them looking at this material and going “What’s the most dramatically interesting movie we can make about the Hulk?” And that movie for them is essentially a five-person, intimate, character-based psychodrama about the sins of the father.
DAVID Yup. [Gemma laughs]
GRIFFIN And these two cursed adults who cannot get over the damage of how they were raised by their domineering parents, and the rivalry between their parents, trying to find some solace and happiness and work past the scars that they inherited. And it’s a film that its final battle is—spoilers for those who have not watched this poorly rated movie. [Gemma laughs] Nick Nolte giving what I think should have won Best ing Actor that year. A demented performance—
GEMMA Oh I have to say, Nick Nolte...
SLIM Hundred percent.
GEMMA Oh my god, and his mutant pet dogs, like throughout the entire movie. From the first moment we see, not him, but like the edge of his hair as he’s kind of shuffling down the, yeah.
GRIFFIN He’s a hermit mad-scientist who used his son literally as a guinea pig for experiments. And all of this trauma has manifested in the child to the point where it explodes and he turns into a monster incapable of controlling his own emotions, all this repressed sort of damage that’s been tucked away inside of him for so long. And the end fight scene, Nick Nolte turns himself into a monster that can absorb his surroundings and use them to inflict more damage on his son. His son keeps on getting bigger and bigger and angrier and angrier the more they fight. And as they fight a jellyfish-like cloud forms around them, projecting the images of their past. Like they’re literally fighting in a bubble of their own trauma. [Gemma & Slim laugh] And I’m just like, there’s no other movie that will ever be like that for the rest of time.
DAVID Nope. Especially now, especially now that this genre has homogenized. Like, it was one thing in 2003, where it was sort of, like you say, the genre was still sort of being figured out. Now, it’s like, this would never slip through, right?
GRIFFIN No.
DAVID You know, I mean, obviously, there was a Marvel Hulk movie, and it had none of this movie’s personality.
GEMMA Then, this incredible piece of theater, where they’ve both been basically imprisoned in this facility. And it’s that black background, and it’s just once again, father and son going at it, but in dialogue form.
DAVID It’s so good.
GRIFFIN I mean, not to mention, obviously, the movie deals, it has like a fractured timeline, and it applies the editing style of comic books. So you’re often seeing three or four frames at the same time, zooming in and out of each other. So you’re seeing shot/reverse shot, all in one frame at the same time. But yes, the final confrontation before you get to the big CGI battle, which is so odd, is like the movie just stops cold for like, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, like ten minutes of these two actors sitting in chairs. And as you said, like a black box environment. There’s some weird like, sci-fi tech machinery around them, but otherwise, they’re just in a void. And it’s just the two of them yelling at each other.
[clip of Hulk plays]
Go ahead and cry. Cry.
Don’t touch me!
Maybe once you were my father, because you’re not now and you never will be.
Oh, is that so? Well I got news for you... I didn’t come here to see you. I came here to see my son. My real son. The one inside of you.
GEMMA Oh my god, can we just take a moment to talk about Jennifer Connelly? Because, first of all, wow... second of all, wow... third of all, K. Austin Collins wrote a very long review of this film in 2015, same year as your pod was birthed, on Letterboxd. And it’s still my favorite review of this film because he talks about the the sexual urge to Hulk Smash, and the sexuality and sensuality that has been, you know, basically ripped out, written out of any kind of MCU movies. And these guys who have all of the strength and all this power and spend a lot of time in their undies, have no ion. But that’s what this Hulk has. I mean, that scene when he saves her from the dogs, and then he just kind of gently comes out from behind the tree. And then he picks her up and puts her on top that—it’s just... it’s sex in a scene! It’s sex in just two pairs of eyeballs looking at each other.
GRIFFIN You’re also, you’re forgetting to mention that Hulk is butt naked in that scene. [Slim laughs]
DAVID He sure is.
GRIFFIN Ang Lee was really adamant in the design of this movie that the stretchy purple shorts isn’t realistic. Every time he gets big, the pants should rip off and I’ll just hide his genitals. And the original plan was to like Austin Powers opening credit style, constantly be blocking his butt and genitals with objects. And that’s the one scene where they let him do it. [Gemma laughs]
GEMMA Yeah, yeah.
DAVID Right, he does eventually acquire the purple shorts.
GEMMA Yeah, I had lots of questions about the purple shorts and which material they were made of. And, you know, whether Under Armour can get on that, because that’s, you know, the rest of his clothes fly off. But there’s some fantastic stretch technology going on there.
SLIM That’s the effects of gamma radiation, Gemma, on clothes. It turns clothes purple and elongates them. [Gemma laughs] At least that’s how I it being described in comic-book form. But rewatching this, I had a fantastic time! I don’t think I liked this in theaters when it had come out. And I wrote in my notes about how when I was a kid, I was like a hardcore, Ain’t It Cool News reader growing up and that was like the source for comic-book movies. And to this day, I have a vivid memory of X-Men coming out and there being leaked PR photos of them in costume and it being wiped from the internet forever. I cannot find any verification for that except my memory. But when this one [was] coming out, there was like set photos of, you know, buildings being blown up, and no Hulk being in it. Like you just have to imagine that there’s gonna be a CGI Hulk in that shot. In my head as a kid, I was like, “Oh my god, this is gonna be like the greatest movie of all time, a CGI Hulk movie!” And watching it this week, I love the monster-movie angle that they went with. You know him in the shadows, just his eyes, and even that shot of Bruce in front of the foggy mirror with the hand. Like that’s one of the best shots in any modern superhero movie that I can . And the Hulk is on the other side of the foggy mirror, gorgeous stuff. I was pretty impressed.
DAVID Ang Lee rules.
GEMMA There was that shot but then there was also the insane shot where a bullet ricochets off the Hulk in the facility. [Slim laughs] And Josh Lucas finally gets it but they kinda do it with a cut-out freeze-frame.
SLIM Freeze-frame comic-book death. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA It’s like in The Muppet Movie when they can’t afford to show the explosion at Gonzo’s toilet factory, they just show the cast watching the explosion going, “Wow, look at that explosion!” [Gemma & Slim laugh] You never see the explosion. I was like, “Wait, they spent money on this, but not on that?”
SLIM That’s right. That’s right. Makes perfect sense for me. I also love the score, to be honest. I didn’t realize Danny Elfman, I forgot—
GRIFFIN The score is incredible. Yeah.
SLIM Completely underrated score for a superhero film. I never hear anyone talk about that, well, this movie in general, but the score obviously gets lost in the shuffle too, unfortunately.
[music from Hulk fades in]
GRIFFIN Yeah. But it’s another example, I mean, I do think there is like a great Hulk theme in that, but it isn’t like a hero theme. And I think this is just in every way, the last time—not to repeat myself here—someone could make a movie like this before superhero movie was a genre in and of itself when it was still, “Okay, you’re gonna make a movie based off comic books. But what kind of movie is it?” There was an inherent implication now. And now you feel like now when we get superhero movies, where directors sort of trumpet like, “I think my film, I’m trying to make it more of a noir, more of a ’70s political thriller.” Or it’s more of like a ’90s action buddy-comedy or whatever it is. The most you get is like a little bit of that layering on top of the basic mode we know these movies need to operate in. And this is a film that is just actually looking at the material and going “What do we think would be interesting?” What if you have this sort of very Middle Eastern-inspired score? What if you have these long turfs, very dry dialogue conversations? These comic-book splash s. I mean, all these elements that feel very disparate, but I do think he’s also sort of, he’s kind of... there’s the sort of line that gets thrown around a lot, and I feel like it’s often thrown out in a kind of hollow way of like, well, these characters are our modern mythology, they’re American mythology, right? America is so young that we don’t have these kinds of characters in our lore, superheroes have become that. And I think he’s really kind of reckoning with that in some way, which is why he’s pulling in all these different, bizarre influences. He’s like, what is the dramatic power of this thing? What is the visual power of this thing? What does it represent? What does it speak to? Because our mythologies are always reflections of the things inside of us that we can’t quite figure out. Hulk is like a really good example of that, of just, this guy does not know how to talk through his emotions and he becomes a fucking monster. [Griffin laughs]
GEMMA And look, you know what? The whole irony of that, of America’s obsession with mythology, is that the heroes actually, literally walk amongst you. They are an ordinary guy, who is a ditch-jumping pilot, who is on a run from DC up to New York, and his plane suffers a bird strike. [Slim laughs]
GRIFFIN An incredible transition.
DAVID Those birds. It’s birds. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Birds. Birds.
GRIFFIN Gemma, you just did a podcast equivalent of a forced water landing. That was incredible. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Yes! [Gemma laughs] Five stars for me. Do we need to see another simulation or shall we just move straight in to...
DAVID Can we get serious now?
GRIFFIN Let’s get serious. [Gemma & Slim laugh]
GEMMA Let’s move to Clint Eastwood’s Sully from 2016. We’re moving up the averages here.
SLIM Big time.
GEMMA We’re just bringing it all up several notches. Big time. 3.4 out of five stars.
GRIFFIN Wow.
[music from Sully fades in]
GEMMA This is of course, Clint Eastwood’s telling of the very few minutes that Captain Sully Sullenberger spent gliding a plane on to the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 people on board. And this has a, as Slim said at the top of the show, this has a very distinctive place in Blank Check Pod lore.
DAVID Well, it’s a movie that Griff and I will frequently reference on the show, we’ll reference our iration for it. We’ve never done an episode, because doing a Clint Eastwood miniseries would take a year, a full year, I think. Maybe not, a long—the man has made many, many movies, as much as we like him or like a lot of his work. But we would reference this movie and constantly, Griffin, people would be like “I don’t get it, is that like a joke they’re doing?”
GRIFFIN “What is the Sully bit?”
DAVID “Why do they keep saying that Sully is good?” [Slim & Gemma laugh]
GRIFFIN They will always say that.
DAVID Right, what’s going on here? [David laughs] And the fact of the matter is, that Griff and I independently saw it. It’s not like we even saw it together.
GRIFFIN No.
DAVID We didn’t have like some shared Sully experience. Both saw that movie, and we were like, “Well that thing is just absolutely a homerun, like that thing rules.” And every time I rewatch it, I... only... feel more positive about it.
GRIFFIN No, I’m with you. I’ve probably seen it seven or eight times now. My appreciation for it grows every time I watch it. But originally, you’re overstating, originally, we both sort of said like, it was like a speakeasy. We were like, “Am I crazy? Or does Sully kind of rule?” [Slim & Gemma laugh]
DAVID You’re right. I just , we’ve talked about this, it was a film that I did not—I don’t think I went to the press screening, I didn’t review it, right? I got to it like... a month late.
GRIFFIN Same.
DAVID I went and just saw it one day, just like, “Ah, I guess I should sort of check that box.” Before it came out, I was like, “This looks so perfunctory. This looks like a parody of like an Oscar-bait-y movie. You know... he’s got his wife and it’s Tom Hanks, and he’s gonna do heroism...” and whatever, you know? And then I saw the movie and my hands were gripping my seat. And I was so emotionally involved in it. And I was just like, this thing is brilliant. It’s perfect, economical, classic Hollywood storytelling. It’s a great movie about trauma. It’s beautifully acted. I love it! I love Sully to this day.
GEMMA It’s a great movie about union representation.
DAVID Yup! [Slim laughs] They’re there for him.
GEMMA I mean, there’s just so many things woven into the fabric of this film. I do have to say, David and Griff, I don’t know if this will mean anything to you, but I haven’t watched it in full since it first came out. But do you know where I saw it? At the Pavilion Cinema.
DAVID Heeey! Good place to see Sully.
GEMMA Windsor Terrace.
GRIFFIN Wow.
DAVID Good place to see Sully. RIP.
GEMMA Quite a good place. Like, I mean, if you’re gripping your seats, I couldn’t grip those seats and anyone who has been to the Pavilion will know why. [Gemma laughs]
DAVID You would get bedbugs and/or you would just rip the seats open with your hand.
GEMMA If there was a seat. I mean, seats in that place were a privilege, actually. [Gemma laughs]
GRIFFIN But it is, I mean, it’s a masterpiece. It’s an American masterpiece that I think only grows year by year. It is a classic Blank Check movie. And that’s the thing that he makes right after American Sniper, which sort of out of nowhere became like, the highest-grossing drama in fifteen years, like just an unreasonable blockbuster. And you stack that on top of Tom Hanks as Sully being like the most greenlight-able pitch in the world. I think they had a lot of leeway and the movie just kind of sold itself, because that was all you needed to put on poster, was him with the hair and the mustache.
GEMMA Right.
GRIFFIN In a plane, with Clint Eastwood on top. Everyone’s like, “This makes sense. I know what this is.”
GEMMA Yeah, totally imagine that with greenlit over a phone call, right?
GRIFFIN Absolutely. Absolutely.
GEMMA Just picked up the phone and went, “Tom Hanks is Sully Sullenberger, locked.” And they’re like, “Yup. How much do you need?”
GRIFFIN There’s a very perfunctory version of the movie that’s still probably satisfying. And I think, you know, Clint Eastwood is known for working very instinctually, impulsively, not belaboring things, not doing many takes, working fast. He finds the script he likes, he starts shooting it in six weeks, or whatever. So there’s a very cursory, surface-level version of this movie that you can imagine that would still be watchable. But I think, to your point, Gemma, it’s a movie about a bizarre incident that took place over such a small period of time that you go, “How do you possibly structure a movie out of this?” And what I think is most fascinating, is this movie is pretty daring in of its narrative structure. It is very oddly constructed, in that the movie starts with what you think is “the famous landing”, and you’re like, wow, I cannot believe it’s doing this right up on the top. And then you realize it’s a dream sequence, we’re several days past it, and Sully is like, haunted by this thing. And the thing the movie is fundamentally about, which is the thing that I’d say most of Clint Eastwood’s best films as a director are about, is this sort of like deconstruction of American heroism, right? As sort of a counterpoint to everything we were saying about mythology with the Hulk, our need to elevate these American archetypes to being heroes and what it feels like to be a hero versus being told you are a hero, you know? And here’s a guy who just does his job every day and in a bizarre set of circumstances, makes the right decision that saves a bunch of people’s lives. But for him, it’s just like, that was what I had to do at the office today, I had to figure out how to land this plane. And simultaneously, he’s being under serious review, examined by this board to try to figure out if it was an irresponsible decision—even though it worked, even though it saved people’s lives. Was that a risky, irresponsible choice for him to make at that moment? The same time everyone in the press has called him a hero. And he’s trying to process the trauma of this near-death experience, but also, that he never... he feels equally comfortable, uncomfortable with both titles being thrown at him. You know? Am I reckless? Or am I a hero?
DAVID Late Eastwood, right, like his sort of post-Million Dollar Baby career, wherever you want to kind of peg it. He has this like, weird dual thing of, if he makes a movie about somebody real, somebody else. So make American Sniper, Sully, Richard Jewell, movies like that, [The] 15:17 to Paris, he’s very fascinated by heroism, how it interacts with the real world, right? Sort of the plainness of good people, and the systems that try to railroad them, all that, and then anytime he makes a movie starring himself, like The Mule, or Cry Macho, or something like that...
GRIFFIN Gran Torino, yeah.
DAVID It’s about how he, Clint Eastwood, is a piece of shit.
GRIFFIN Who sucks.
DAVID Who needs to suffer, you know?
GRIFFIN He’s a bad father, bad husband.
DAVID He’s like, “Yeah, everyone thinks I’m cool, and I am cool, but I also suck!” [Gemma & Slim laugh] And it’s such a fascinating dichotomy. This guy, who’s in his damn nineties now, still making these weird movies, is both still amazed by American heroism and also kind of like very critical of his own image as a hero. [Gemma laughs] I mean... he’s... there’s no one like him.
SLIM I will say that the running gag of this movie, you know, between the both of you on the pod, I mean, this movie is the real deal. I watched it for the first time this week, finally. And it’s very good!
GEMMA Whaaat!
SLIM It’s very good!
GEMMA Wooww.
DAVID Yeah, it’s so good.
SLIM I had a great time. I was also gripped the whole time. I mean, like you said, the movie starts out with that dream. I thought that dream was pretty horrifying, like to start off the movie. And I was like, “Oh my god, how crazy are they gonna get with this plane landing? Do they change it up a little bit?” It’s very real. And I had an amazing viewing experience watching this. Tom is incredible. I was also thinking in my head about the stories that you mentioned about Clint just doing like one-take-Wilson’s, he’ll do one take and that’s it, that’s in the movie. So I kept imagining, like, “Oh, is this the one take that Tom Hanks did for this movie?” [Gemma laughs] The whole time, which was cracking me up.
DAVID That’s why it’s good for him to work with a Tom Hanks.
GRIFFIN He needs a Hanks.
DAVID He’s more flawed films like Gran Torino or [The] 15:17 to Paris, where he’s working with non-professional actors, you know, you can usually tell like, “Wow, this person could have used five takes, maybe, you know, could have been able to build up to something better.” But Tom Hanks, he knows what he’s doing, y’know?
SLIM He can do it.
GEMMA Well, I was just gonna say, I was trying to work out if Aaron Eckhart, who is Tom’s co-pilot, was just having fun, like purely sitting there going, “I’m being directed by Eastwood, sitting next to Tom Hanks,” or if Eastwood was giving him the direction “have more fun” and because Sully’s the serious guy. I think it was probably a combo of both, but I’m leaning towards the former. I reckon he was just sitting in his seat going...
DAVID I think it’s gotta be the former.
GEMMA “Oh my god, I’m having fun!” [Gemma laughs]
DAVID What a great role. He’s like, slap a moustache on me. So you put it on and you’re like, “Great. Your performance is complete.” [Slim laughs] Like the second I’m looking at you, I’m like, “I get who you are. You’re the fun co-pilot.” [Gemma laughs] That’s it. And so Eckhart’s just sitting there being like, “Look at me! I’m just sitting here having a great time!” I love that performance.
GEMMA I want to say, I really appreciated the perfunctory straightforwardness of the CGI every time they showed the landing on the Hudson, like it was just so boring, like exactly what it was, obviously incredibly dramatic, saved a whole bunch of lives. But also, was exactly what Sally intended it to be, which was the safest possible landing.
DAVID Yup.
GEMMA And, you know, he just, I don’t know, his direction to his post-production people would have just been like, “Just make it what it was, nothing more.”
GRIFFIN There’s no spin-off, there’s a weird banality to how these events play out. Yes. And the greatest tension in that sequence is Hanks dying to hear the count, right? “Give me the count. How many people did we get off the plane? Did we lose anybody?” And the moment where they give him the count and he finds out that he saved everybody, I think is the single best moment of Tom Hanks’s career as an actor. [Slim laughs]
DAVID I love it. I love the performance. Yeah.
GEMMA Which brings us to our final film and the highest average rating out of your four favorites. And, you know, this is where we really meet, where our movie-loving minds meet. Because the rating for this film is 3.5, and as I often say on this show, I’m a 3.5 girl in a five-star world. [Slim laughs] This is my... happy place! I think 3.5 is the perfect rating. Because it is that sense of “Is this the best movie in the world I’m watching right now?” So we finish, we started with George Lucas, we finish with his bestie, Steven Spielberg. This is David’s favorite Spielberg movie, reportedly.
DAVID Yup.
GEMMA It is... A.I. Artificial Intelligence and it has a 3.5 average. If we just... for anyone who’s never seen it, here’s a synopsis that I wrote earlier: ”David is a robotic boy made to be eleven years old. He’s the first of his kind programmed to love and is adopted as a test case by a cybertronics employee and his hot wife, s O’Connor, who we don’t seen enough movies these days...”
DAVID True.
GEMMA “Whose own child is in a medical coma. Because David is a robot, he has wildly inappropriate and downright creepy reactions to things, eats too much spinach, ignores has devoted teddy bear—which is relevant—eventually, he must make his way alone in the world, whereupon he meets love-robot Jude Law, winds up at a flesh fair and meets an early version of Google called Dr. Know.” Let’s get into it...
DAVID Yeah, this is one of my favorite movies ever. It’s also, and I feel like we talked about this on the episode a little bit that we did years ago, back when we did Spielberg. It was sort of an early experience for me of, I went to see it with all my friends, it was a big movie in 2001, obviously, and everyone walked out being like, “Well, that was horrible.” And I was sort of like, “Oh... wait, I liked that and no one else did. What do I do?” That sort of teenage experience, especially, it’s like, “Wait, wait, why do I feel different on this one?” It’s also, Griff, one of my favorite episodes of our show, which is another reason I picked it, I think. I feel like that episode with David Rees, is kind of a classic example of what we do on Blank Check, where we are being very ionate about a divisive thing, and really digging into why we’re ionate about it, versus just why it’s divisive. Does that make sense?
GRIEF Yeah, yeah. And I think we chose [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace and Sully as common movies between the two of us, one film that was the origin of our podcast, one film that we never specifically covered, but that has loomed over the podcast for years. And then David and I each decided to pick one film from the seven years of doing the show that we personally want to sort of vouch for and represent. I do think it’s interesting, because there certainly are smaller films I considered as well. But A.I. [Artificial Intelligence] and Hulk feel like such extreme examples of movies you only get to make if you’re operating at that level of trust within the studio system. And both films were positioned as summer blockbusters, and could not have been met with more confusion by general audiences. [Slim laughs]
DAVID Right. I mean, obviously, it’s such a strange project because it’s Spielberg taking up the baton of a Stanley Kubrick ion project after Kubrick dies. It seems like such an odd blend of artists, those two, even though they were quite close in a lot of ways, just personally, right? And it’s the last film Spielberg wrote until I guess The Fabelmans, right? This is his most recent writing credit before The Fabelmans, which comes out this year. It’s obviously this weirdly, deeply personal project for him. And yet it’s also this treatise on how, you know... we are burdened with emotion! And doomed to be sad and die! It is so un-Spielberg in so many ways, which makes it all the more magical when it has those little Spielberg-y visual moments or the pop of invention in how he’s using the camera or using music or something like that. What did I just see—oh well, After Yang, After Yang this year, that’s a movie about robots.
SLIM Fantastic.
DAVID And it’s my favorite, one of my favorite subgenres is robot stuff because it’s such a good way to dig into like the philosophy of our creation and how we feel about God and what it would feel like to become gods, which is what humans are doing if their creating artificial intelligence, stuff like that. Y’know, like, it’s just such a rich thing to think about.
GEMMA Drives me crazy! I’m gonna put my hand up and say I’m the one who—I mean After Yang was lovely and all, but I was watching it for the production design. And as I was watching this film, I was like, I don’t... I don’t care about trying to examine the human condition through, you know, sentient robots. I just, I could give less of a shit!
SLIM Gemma was in David’s groups of friends that was trash-talking the movie as they were leaving. [Slim & Gemma laugh] David kept his mouth shut.
GRIFFIN Yeah. It’s one of many areas of overlap for David and I. I think we both have a soft spot for any sad, existential, robot movie. Like it’s, it’s just a prism through which to examine the human condition that always kind of grabs me to some degree or another. And they’re just, y’know, I think this movie’s legacy is really interesting, because when it came out, everyone was so excited by the idea of like, “Holy shit, it’s Spielberg and Kubrick, this is going to be unreal.” And then when it came out, a lot of the reaction was, it feels like it was a darker Spielberg movie that—sorry—a darker Kubrick movie that Spielberg put all his sentimentality into. And with time, it’s sort of become more clear that Kubrick was trying to make a more sentimental film, and that a lot of the darkest elements from this movie come from Spielberg.
GEMMA Can I just read aloud from review? So Mia, who is one of the co-hosts of Weekend Watchlist, Slim’s other podcast. “Obsessed with the fact that Kubrick primarily wrote the first and third act’s sentimental parent/son relationship while Spielberg added the second act’s Jude Law sex-robot storyline and not the other way around. Just goes to show ya—don’t judge a director by their past filmography’s central themes!”
DAVID Right. Yes, I think a lot of people assumed Spielberg was responsible for the treacly, which he actually really wasn’t.
GRIFFIN Right! And there was this read on the ending as being this weird, tacked-on, happy Steven Spielberg shit, which I think watching the ending is like profoundly depressing. I mean, this is...
GEMMA What!
GRIFFIN Coming, what, like six or seven years after Hook, where people had for so long said like, “Oh, Steven Spielberg making Peter Pan, that’s going to be like, what a match of material,” and that movie, neither David or I particularly love. And this feels like his weird way of finding an angle on a Peter Pan narrative, especially for a guy who people criticized for being so hung up on childhood, and never being able to get over like, you know, his parents’ divorce and making all these films that are stuck in that perspective. It’s a movie about the curse of this kid who can like never, ever grow up and will never get over being abandoned by his mother, and that his final happy, quote unquote, “happy ending” is getting stuck in a weird time loop with a facsimile of her.
GEMMA Is it a movie about this robot kid? Or is it a movie about this robot... teddy? [Slim laughs] Who, let’s be honest...
SLIM Gemma and my DMs have been popping off about Teddy. Gemma went on such a deep dive.
GRIFFIN Teddy’s a good guy.
SLIM Please tell us your deep dive journey for Teddy, Gemma.
GRIFFIN Teddy is a good guy.
GEMMA So I’ve been going on a YouTube deep dive into video essays about Teddy, about how he’s actually the best character and the best robot, even though he was made before David, he is the one who is in fact able to attach and adapt to all the situations. And, you know, he’s the one who’s—spoiler—right there at the end. There’s a bit though, where he drops from the helicopter, the balloon, moon balloon net, right? When David drops him. And it’s the one point in the film where David appears to show any kind of regret or concern for this toy. Ah, not a toy. But when Teddy drops, have you noticed, you’ve all noticed this right? He lands and he goes, “Ow.”
[clip of A.I. Artificial Intelligence plays]
GEMMA I’m like... “Whaaat?” [Slim & David laugh]
DAVID This kind of like flat tone, but he does say “ow”, you’re right. Like can Teddy feel pain? Is that what you’re wondering? [David laughs]
GEMMA Yeah, yeah. Can Teddy feel pain or is he just doing what’s appropriate? Which he has done throughout the entire film. So, I’d just like to say, as a thought experiment, it’s worth, if you’ve never seen this film or you’ve seen it a bunch of times, go back in and watch it just from the perspective of Teddy. [Slim laughs]
DAVID Teddy’s incredible. And Griff and I both love Teddy, right, Jack Angel, the voice performer there.
GRIFFIN Incredible.
DAVID Obviously has this great sardonic kind of voice. But that’s the whole thing with artificial—with A.I. [Artificial Intelligence]. David is a new kind of robot. But obviously they’ve already created AI, they’ve created these functioning beings that have their own lives. Yes, their focuses are narrow, like Gigolo Joe is mostly focused on being a gigolo. Teddy is focused on being like a helpful companion to children, stuff like that. But the thing about A.I. [Artificial Intelligence] that I think is so staggering and incredible, is that the idea is, “Oh, well, we made a child and children love their parents, so we’re going to program him with love for his parents.” [Gemma laughs] And that is the most cruel and horrifying thing to do. And that is Spielberg’s perspective, which is like, love is this insane, irrational burden that is thrust upon people where you, you can’t get over it! Like, you know, imagine if you were just stuck being in love with your mother forever! [Gemma laughs] It’s the most incredible Pinocchio take, and it’s funny people are still remaking Pinocchio, obviously, it’s sort of that eternal story.
GRIFFIN All these sort of permanent, adolescent stories, fairy tales that people would have imagined Spielberg would take to like a duck to water like Pinocchio, or Peter Pan or whatever, he’s got this much darker take on it. There are, as you’re pointing out here, three central forms of artificial intelligence in this movie. I think most people take the title to refer to David, but you have this like trio of these three robots who spend this chunk together. And what’s interesting is that Teddy is a toy, like Teddy’s function is essentially just to entertain and keep company. Whereas Gigolo Joe and David are both explicitly designed to serve have a specific emotional dynamic for other humans. Like they are burdened with an emotional intelligence that does not serve them internally, that is a nightmare for them to live through, because it is just this commitment to other people. Gigolo Joe isn’t just a physical sex robot, because if he weren’t, they wouldn’t teach them how to tap dance. [Gemma laughs] You know? They wouldn’t teach him how to talk like Jude Law. The whole point is that he also needs to romance these people. Right? That he is this like hopeless romantic, who cannot control himself. And David like cannot control his love because the one thing he’s programmed to do is make a mother feel love, to a degree where it’s almost immediately creepier and unnerving. Even before her son wakes up, you know, from his medically induced coma. It’s like, this is too much.
DAVID You feel bad for David. I mean, he’s been dealt a bad hand. But were I... what’s her name? Monica.
GRIFFIN Yeah.
DAVID I mean, I may not leave him in the woods... [Gemma laughs] But I definitely would be like, “Uhhhh... can we...”
GEMMA Or just turn him off, eh?
SLIM That whole thing was brutal. I mean presumably, he’s a very expensive prototype at that point.
DAVID One imagines. [David laughs]
SLIM I feel like the husband is gonna find out. “Hey, you returned David, right? You didn’t just leave him in the woods?” [David & Gemma laugh] That conversation probably would have been pretty uncomfortable. But this was the first time I finally watched A.I. [Artificial Intelligence].
GEMMA Whoa.
GRIFFIN Wow.
SLIM So I grew up in this era of Steven Spielberg. You know, the Minority Report era, like I’m all in on Spielberg. But for whatever reason, this movie just didn’t, the trailers at that time just kind of pushed me away, and I guess some of the response. I mean later in the movie—this is getting in some spoiler territory—when David has that conversation in Manhattan, you know, the tower that’s surrounded by water, I loved all that stuff.
GRIFFIN With Dr. Hobby?
SLIM Yes! And he eventually just like, he’s sitting on the ledge, and he just jumps off into the water, my eyebrows went up big time. So the final 30 minutes of this movie are incredible. [Slim laughs] I couldn’t believe that Spielberg like went so hard in pretty much the depressing aspects of this young robot who just wanted to be with his mother! Like literally praying for his mother for 2,000 years underwater. And nothing happening until literally aliens from outer space came.
DAVID No, no.
GRIFFIN No, no!
SLIM Right?
DAVID It’s a common misconception about A.I. [Artificial Intelligence]. They are not aliens. Those are David’s, you know, that is the future. Those are robots. They are human-made robots.
SLIM So they’ve evolved to that point?
GRIFFIN Yes. That is right.
DAVID Only artificial intelligence remains. Which is why the robots are so fascinated with him, because he’s like, it’s like they’re finding a caveman. [Gemma laughs] It’s like, he’s this very early version of them.
SLIM He’s like a Lisa computer.
DAVID Exactly. And that’s why they are like, “We want to help you. What do you want?” And he’s like, “I want my mommy!” [Slim & Gemma laugh] And they’re like, “Alright! Jesus!” [David laughs] “We’ll do our best!”
SLIM Yeah, I thought that ending was tremendous.
DAVID It is!
SLIM I mean, like you guys have said in the episode, extremely bold and ambitious for them to go that hard at the end of this, you know, mainstream, quote, “blockbuster” movie that resonated pretty much with nobody at the time.
GRIFFIN It resonated really hard with sad, existential, lonely, twelve-year-old Griffin Newman. [Slim laughs] I was the one person in the audience hootin’ and hollerin’. I’m like, “I get it!” [Gemma laughs] But you want to talk about part of the darkness of this ending? Teddy is, as we said, sort of the one character in this film who’s able to see things clearly, right? Because the humans in this film are also so burdened with their emotions and the weight of their experience. Dr. Hobby is haunted by his dead child and Monica can’t get over—
GEMMA Like have these people not heard of SSRIs? [Gemma laughs]
GRIFFIN None of these people know what to do. None of the robots know what to do. When you program robots to help humans process their emotions and you’re cursing robots with this horrible fate. And here’s this toy who doesn’t need to do anything other than just keep you company, right, be able to have conversations, but he does have an internal life. The end of movie he’s just stuck in this room with this ghost of this mother, they’ve been able to circulate with like the remaining fiber of her in reality for a limited loop. And David just shuts down.
GEMMA That Teddy held onto, by the way.
GRIFFIN Of course! [Gemma laughs] For 2,000 years. And David, Teddy’s just there! Teddy’s just at the end of the movie, just sitting in that room for the rest of eternity, thinking. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA We need a Teddy sequel.
DAVID That is... I know. I’d watch it. Teddy among the future bots. That would be good, yeah.
GRIFFIN But is he even among the future bots? Is he stuck in this weird simulation room, y’know? [Gemma laughs]
DAVID I don’t know. That’s the question. Right. Do they let him out? Do they sort of crack open the door at a certain point and be like, “Hey, by the way...”
GRIFFIN “What do you want?” Yeah.
DAVID “Feel free.” Yeah, Teddy’s the best. He has like a nuclear core! I have no idea how else he continues to exist! [David laughs]
GRIFFIN Incredible, incredible battery.
GEMMA That brings us to to the end of the four favorites. There are a couple of more things we’d like to throw at you, especially you David. Griffin, I don’t know what we have to do to get you a Pro- or Patron-level hip.
SLIM Let’s make this happen.
GEMMA Let’s make it happen.
GRIFFIN I’ll do it right now. That’s all you have to do. All you have to do is publicly shame me one time and it’s happening. I’m updating as we speak. [Gemma laughs]
DAVID It’s great, Griff. You get to have a nice little header on your profile, you get some cool stuff.
SLIM The bonus for us on the show is that it unlocks some really cool stats that we like to surprise guests with.
GRIFFIN Okay.
SLIM And Gemma found some pretty surprising stats about David’s , I think that you wanted to bring up.
DAVID Alright, alright.
GRIFFIN Oh boy.
GEMMA David, it is quite amazing. I don’t know how often you look through your stats, but I have never seen this before. And that is a member of Letterboxd who has possibly completed the highest number of collections, of any Letterboxd member I’ve ever seen. You have 63 complete collections. You have watched all of the Bad Boys, all of the Austin Powers-es, all of the Captain Americas, all of the Bill & Ted’s, all of the Before Linklater, all of the Crocodile Dundee collection. [Slim laughs]
GRIFFIN We did that for the podcast, yeah.
DAVID It’s obviously, it’s partly Blank Check, right, because we’ll do on our Patreon, we do franchises. So we might go through a film series. We obviously do film directors filmographies blah, blah, blah. But I do have a collector’s streak. It’s why I’ve always loved this website. I’ve loved it for many, many years. Because I like to logging stuff and ordering stuff and having lists.
GRIFFIN You used to do this manually by hand before there was the site.
DAVID Yup! I sure did! And so, you know, something like... now I’m looking at my collections. Something like all the Blades, you know, I just watched those one week. [Gemma laughs] I was like, I should fill out the Blades. All the Friday the 13ths, all the Halloweens, things like that. I’ll just kind of like have fun setting myself a task like that and seeing it through.
GRIFFIN And I’ll tell you folks that maybe a big part of the reason why I had not become a Patron until now, is that our listeners, David logs everything so obsessively. The payment just went through. So you’ve succeeded. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
DAVID Wow.
GEMMA The system works. We got another one, Slim, we got another one.
GRIFFIN Shame works. Public humiliation. David, listeners of our show love to track everything David watches to try to predict what we’re going to be covering on the show, which oftentimes we’ll record episodes several months in advance. So I log all the new-release films I watch, but I tend to be more secretive of when I’m watching older films or watching things at home because I don’t want things to line up. And like David just last year, decided to watch every John Grisham adaptation in chronological order. So all of our listeners were convinced we were going to do all Grishams. [Gemma & Slim laugh] And I had to just tell people, no, David just does this. David just decides on a Tuesday, what if for the next month, I watch every Grisham? What if that’s my life?
DAVID They’re mostly good. It tails off at the end.
GRIFFIN He had a great time.
SLIM Well I just took a screenshot, I just looked at Griff’s stats.
GRIFFIN Embarrassing.
SLIM Now that we have graciously unlocked Patron status.
GRIFFIN Don’t shame me further. I gave you the money. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
SLIM We don’t have anything else!
DAVID You are not as good, Griff, at it being encyclopedic, right? You don’t probably have everything logged or whatever.
GRIFFIN I log every new-release film I watch. And then when I see things popping up in activity, I go like, “Oh, did I ever log that?” So I try to fill it in, but I’m less completist than you are. Yeah.
SLIM I’m looking at the stats that are unlocked for Patron , “rated higher than average”. Great list for Griff. [Griffin laughs] I agree with, obviously one of which is in your faves right now, RoboCop. But also Starship Troopers.
GRIFFIN Yeah.
SLIM Rated higher than the average, five stars. I agree.
GRIFFIN Wow.
SLIM I mean, it’s a tremendous film. You mentioned Verhoeven earlier in the show.
GRIFFIN Look, I’m not surprised that I have Hulk and [Star Wars: Episode I – The] Phantom Menace and Sully and A.I. [Artificial Intelligence] higher than most. I am surprised that everyone isn’t giving Starship Troopers and RoboCop five.
GEMMA Yeah... I agree.
GRIFFIN I think those are indisputable, yes, Mount Rushmore movies at this point.
GEMMA But what can you tell us about Dave Wilson’s 2020 film starring Vin Diesel that is known as Bloodshot, which you have given a far higher rating than the 2.3 Letterboxd average.
GRIFFIN That’s a great example.
DAVID Not a bad movie.
GRIFFIN No, what did I give it? Did I give it five? Was I that on one?
SLIM Four stars.
GEMMA Ah, four.
GRIFFIN Four stars. Okay, okay.
GEMMA You weren’t that unhinged.
GRIFFIN I held it back a little bit. I think that’s a little bit of a baby Verhoeven movie, I think that movie is kind of an interesting commentary on action-hero narratives and the way that we craft these sort of odd types of protagonist we only have in hyper-violent action movies. And it’s a movie in which they are literally going through iteration. Like tech bros are going through iteration after iteration of “What is the right amount of tragic backstory we can give this guy? How much power is too much power? How burdened should he be by his past?” And the Guy Pearce just kind of keeps on. It’s Guy Pearce forcing someone else through a Memento, where his life is constantly wiped clean and rebooted, to try to find the right balance of like, what will actually launch a franchise? I also just have a soft spot for Vin Diesel. I think he’s our weirdest living movie star.
GEMMA Finally, we are recording this before the 94th Academy Awards. This episode will come out the day after, or two days after the Academy Awards. So a little bit of a fortune telling moment here. Especially because on your stats, David, you’ve watched 83% of the Oscar Best Picture winners through history. 78 out of the 93.
DAVID Pretty good.
GEMMA Pretty good. Pretty good.
DAVID I got a lot of boring ones left too. Not to diss any movies I haven’t seen yet. [Slim laughs] Obviously, maybe they’ll surprise me. But I have a lot of like... like I’ve never seen The Greatest Show on Earth. Again, I don’t want to be rude. You know, I’ve never seen... you know, maybe Going My Way is fun. Is Going My Way fun?
GRIFFIN You might like Going My Way.
GEMMA Haven’t seen it.
SLIM I have not seen it.
DAVID Yeah, I’ve never seen Around the World in 80 Days. I’ve never seen Mutiny on the Bounty. You know, there’s a few of those where it’s sort of like, gotta get to ’em.
GEMMA One day, yeah. And Griff, you’re at 53%. Not bad. Not bad.
GRIFFIN Okay, not bad. I have to check to make sure that’s up to date. But yeah.
GEMMA What will win? And what is your heart winner of the Best Picture 2022?
DAVID Sure. [The] Power of the Dog obviously has been sort of the, been sort of the presumed front runner, I feel like. But it’s been a bit of a soft front runner, in that people are like, “Oh, are people, are they really gonna go for this movie?” It’s artier than some or whatever, you know. So people kept looking for the disrupter, right? Like the movie that’s going to take it down. And now it seems like everyone thinks CODA could do that, because it’s got this sort of late surge at some of the precursors. And it’s a feel-good movie that everyone can enjoy. Right? You know, it plays to your heart, not to your brain, blah, blah, blah. I’m going to say... I’m going to predict that The Power of the Dog pulls it off, by this sort of Oscar-logic of, you’ve got a lot of craft voters, a lot of people who work on the technical side of things, maybe they sort of pull it over the edge. But I will say that I... you know, it’s not a confident prediction. I don’t know.
GEMMA But what’s your heart winner?
DAVID The Worst Person in the World. That’s my favorite movie of 2021.
GEMMA Oh, yeah.
SLIM Oh, yeah.
DAVID 100%.
GRIFFIN My feelings are pretty similar to David’s. My favorite movie of the year was [The] French Dispatch, and then [The] Worst Person [in the World] and then [The] Power of the Dog. So of the things that are nominated for Best Picture, [The] Power of the Dog would be my preference. I still kind of think it’s gonna win. As you said, at the time we’re recording this, right at the end of CODA having this like, two-week surge of a lot of precursor wins. But I think people forget how much the Oscars voting body has changed in the last couple years.
DAVID Sure. Right, right, so it may not reflect…
GRIFFIN It’s a very different makeup, then, yes, then all the other guilds and critics noms and groups and all the other things that have happened recently. So I don’t know. Yeah, I think it’s a soft front runner still at this point, I would be surprised to see CODA win. It’s not my favorite movie. I understand the compulsion to maybe find a movie that’s a little more feel-good this year. But for me, I feel like King Richard occupies that spot better than CODA does. I’m a little surprised that CODA has absorbed all of that momentum.
GEMMA I’m not surprised at all. I think, by the time this comes out, a beautiful awards-season round-up by Brian Formo on our behalf that will have been written, that sort of dives into how the conversation changes through awards season and how a film can change that conversation through how it campaigns. And in the case of CODA, it’s purely the entire cast showing up together to every single party.
GRIFFIN That’s true.
DAVID They’ve been really pounding it, yeah.
GEMMA Yeah. And that was a Parasite factor as well, right? It wasn’t just that Bong Joon-ho showed up, and he could have just shown up and nobody else showed up. But they took the whole cast with them. And that was part of the joy of that. But I don’t understand—I’m going to say I would like to see [The] Power of the Dog win. I reckon everyone’s underestimating Don’t Look Up.
SLIM Oh god.
DAVID I made this prediction to David two or three months ago. I backed off of it. I was very confident it was gonna win up until maybe beginning of last month, middle of last month.
DAVID Yeah, I think it’s just too divisive. You know, the whole thing with that dang preferential ballot is, you know, if you’re a movie that’s getting a lot of twos and threes, like second and third places, you are in a good position. That’s the power of... the dog, possibly. [Gemma laughs] Who knows?
GRIFFIN But that’s also the exact thing that could give it to CODA.
DAVID Right, where it’s like everyone agrees that they liked CODA, you know, that’s the argument of how it could sneak through, or whatever, who knows. We’ll see.
SLIM I haven’t recovered from Starship Troopers not being nominated or winning Best Picture. So... [Gemma laughs]
GRIFFIN I agree.
DAVID Yeah, wasn’t really in the race. I mean, as much as I love that movie. [Slim laughs]
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
GEMMA Thanks for listening to The Letterboxd Show and thanks to Slim and our HQ page on Letterboxd using the links in our episode notes.
SLIM Just a reminder, you can also hear me on our other podcast Weekend Watchlist with Sophie Shin for the episode transcripts. And to you, for listening. The Letterboxd Show is a Tapedeck production.
GEMMA We don’t have a Patreon or anything like that. Republic credits will be fine... [Slim laughs]
[clip of Hulk plays]
HULK Puny human…
[Tapedeck bumper plays] This is a Tapedeck podcast.