Time for Part Two of our big Oscar Show folks! Jett and Gareth agree, and sometimes agree to disagree about:
Maestro
Oppenheimer
Past Lives
Poor Things
The Zone of Interest
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Oh, my goodness, we're back. Folks, I am so excited. This is part two of our big, our big Oscars 2024 show.
We got five films. I'm Jett Lowe.
I'm Gareth Higgins. We're going to talk today about Maestro.
Maestro.
About Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer.
About Poor Things.
Has Lives.
About, why didn't you repeat Poor Things?
Zone of Interest.
Oh.
Folks, thank you so much for joining us. You know, we're kind of in a kind of goofy mood today, unlike our normal serious selves.
Because when you're subjected to this much cinema, we're talking Zone of Interest, Poor Things, Past Lives, Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer again, and Maestro. Wow, it's going to be all of a show.
We don't have that much time, so we're going to quickly, quickly, quickly move along.
I don't want to speak for you, Gareth, but I want to say, dear listener, whether you're an old listener of the old Film Talk where we did 253 shows, unbelievable, or part of this reboot, thank you so much for joining us.
Gareth, let's get right into it. Oscar nominated picture number one in alphabetical order, Maestro.
Maestro, of course, the, you could call it a biopic, but it's strangely missing something for a film about the life of a real person. But let's call it a biopic. Maestro, but Leonard Bernstein played by Bradley Cooper, who directed the film as well.
And do we want to start with a clip of Maestro? I think we should.
Let's get right to it. You know, Leonard was a man of great talents and great appetites. Let's give you an example of what that means.
That's why I love New York City. From right out of your apartment, all of a sudden you just run into people that you love. I'm going downtown.
Well, we're cutting across the park to go to sex before the deluge.
Oh, hello.
You are so beautiful. You're so precious.
Can I tell you a secret?
You know, I slept with both your parents. Too much. I love too much.
What can I say?
But I'm raining it in.
I'm raining it in. Raining it in. I'm raining it in.
Cooper is amazing. You may have loved him, dear listener, and Hangover 3, but let me tell you, Cooper, I'm assuming you say that. I haven't seen it.
Cooper is amazing in this motion picture. I'm calling it Smoking the Movie. You have not seen, I had no desire to smoke cigarettes.
I smoke cigars. But after seeing Maestro, I feel like lighting up one right now. Old school Hollywood filmmaking at its finest.
Maestro, what do you think, Gareth?
It's a beautiful film. And it was a film that went right through me. Like a storm, actually.
It's kind of a stormy film. He had kind of a stormy life. And by that, not just the appetites, his emotional frequency had a massive range, let's say.
And the film does take him from his early 20s up until very close to his death. We see his sadness. We see his joy.
We see his thirst for life. We see his marriage, which seems to have been deeply passionate and loving and broken and frightening and full and truthful. And we see the performance of some music.
We see a great dance routine early in the film where we have Bradley Cooper kind of playing an archetypal version of himself and indicating to his wife, Felicia, played by Kerry Mulligan, about what the complexities to their marriage are going to
look like. What we don't see portrayed, however, which is the unusual piece for me, is we don't see anything about the meaning of the music that he was composing and conducting.
We experience the feeling of the music and in what for my money is one of the two or three most spectacular scenes of the year. We see the feeling of him conducting Mahler's Resurrection Symphony in Ely Cathedral in England.
That's just an over the top cinematic moment. I happened to watch it in a 1700 seater, 100 year old theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
So I was watching the film about a composer and the performance of music in a place where classical music is often performed.
It felt fantastic, but what it omitted was something about the meaning of the music and then also London Bernstein was actually a really compassionate social activist, was involved in lots of causes, cared a lot about the common good, and we don't
see hardly any of that in the film at all. And this is one of those rare films where it's not a complaint about what's in the film, it's a complaint about what's missing.
This film could easily have been another 35, 40 minutes that long and I wouldn't have been disappointed at all if it had paid attention to those two things, the meaning of music and his life as an activist.
You know, rebuttal. One, it is about emotion. The film, to me, is about emotion.
It seems stripped of meaning as it strips away who this person is to this individual of great appetites, who feels so much emotion. And someone in one character says, there's no hate in your heart.
There's no stabbing, there's no killing, there's no pew pew, there's no lasers, no writing a saying, we're killing people. And nothing against, you know, maybe for a bonus episode, we'll talk about the dunes.
I know you and I have very, very, very different thoughts.
We're on different sides of the dune. We are on different sides of the dune. Opposite ends of the dune.
I'm on the side that says, I loved every minute.
You're on the side of like, you're giving up movies entirely. But well, maybe we can do a dune. That's unfair to you, I'm sorry.
You don't have any, there's no hate in your heart. There's no hate in your heart, Gareth. The film is about emotion.
We have these incredible emotive sequences, even towards the end of his life, where he's dancing to 80s, you know, sort of techno pop, which is an incredible moment.
It's about emotion and feeling into your point, to your point about, well, we don't talk about a social activism. Yeah, I noticed that too, but then you know a little bit about the fellow, right?
A little bit of, I'm sure I've got some biographies lying around, scattered around, seductively, as if someone's coming in and he's like, oh, have you read?
Oh, I'm impressed.
Have you read this? I'm very well read, right? I'm waiting to get in.
Reminds me of Michael Mann's Ali. You have this huge life. How do you, and you have to cut out so much.
My first novel watching Michael Mann's Ali was, well, what if you just do one day? Just do one day of this person's life, because they're living in such a large tapestry that it's too much in a traditional biopic.
Let's say Hollywood under three hours. You're giving up the three hours these days for these big things. It's just too much, maybe just focus on one day.
So we're just seeing slivers. And there's an argument to be made that's like, well, there should be something there about his social activism, because you could tie that in thematically, that he has incredible love for people on an individual basis.
Man, woman, doesn't matter. You could tie that into his children. You could then tie that into his social justice work, if that's an appropriate thing to say, because it's a manifestation of the same thing, right?
It's a manifestation of empathy, and we don't get it. But you know what? I'm still recommending this picture.
This is one of those thumbs up, thumb down, five stars. This is an old fashioned, full-blooded Hollywood movie, black and white. You get your color.
Your different aspect ratios.
You get your, who doesn't?
Your floating snoopy.
Your oversized floating snoopy.
Not something you see every day.
I 100% highly, deeply, wholeheartedly recommend this film, and I wanted more.
Even more nose. Did the fake nose distract you?
Never bothered me. It looked like a real nose.
Good makeup. Makeup is fantastic. I mean, it's always hard to do these kinds of things.
We think about the wonderful work of the 70s, 80s, the Dick Smiths, the Rick Bakers, the incredible work done on Dustin Hoffman, a little big man. That was a big breakthrough.
Makes the Godfather, and you watch the Godfather now, you're like, oof, just a little bit of old-age stipple, some cotton balls. The nose did distract me. I tell you whose nose distracted me.
Chris Hemsworth's nose in the Furiosa prequel trailer is killing me. It's killing me, but I'm going to learn to live with it. I, you know, always love the work of George Miller, so we'll see how that goes.
We don't have much time. Anything else you want to add?
Meister was brilliant. Meister was brilliant. I'd like 35 more minutes.
Yeah, great Hollywood motion picture.
Now, let's go to something.
Something you may feel slightly differently about. Would you have wanted 35 more minutes of Oppenheimer?
I feel Oppenheimer that I may have had the experience that you had with Dune Part II. We'll talk about it in our bonus episode for people that subscribe to Patreon. We're going to do that.
For folks that are not familiar with Oppenheimer, the man or his work. Gareth, what are we talking about here?
Oppenheimer is about, of course, J.
Robert Oppenheimer, who was in charge of the Manhattan Project that led to the development of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and took the lives of well over 200,000 people and are considered at least in the basic
mythology of the Second World War to have not only ended the war, but been necessary to end it. The film is by Christopher Nolan, known for massive scale movies that are also trying to say something about the real world. And I believe we have a clip.
But we do. Let's listen.
I'm Robbie. I caught you a lecture on molecules.
Caught some of it.
We're a couple of New York Jews, how do you know Dutch?
Well, I thought I'd better learn it when I got here this semester.
You learned enough Dutch in six weeks to get a lecture on quantum mechanics.
I wanted to challenge myself.
Quantum physics wasn't challenging enough, Schvitzer.
Schvitzer. Show off.
Dutch in six weeks, but you never learned Yiddish.
You don't speak it so much, my side of the park.
You homesick?
Oh, you know it. Ever get the feeling our kind isn't entirely welcome here? It's funny.
None of the department. They're all yours, too. This is German, you have to seek out.
Heisenberg.
Right.
So that was Oppenheimer. Now, here's the thing that interests me, Gareth. I'm really curious about your feelings about Oppenheimer.
And I'm curious what the listeners will think. Have some sort of feedback system, folks can leave us a voice message about Oppenheimer, or they can-
Using modern technology.
Yes, they can email us.
We have an answering service, can we get an answering service?
We do listen to the end of the show, we'll plug that. Because perhaps by the end of the show, that would have been set up, I'm thinking. I'm curious about what it means to engage with a movie.
Because I recall when I was younger, that sometimes that was very judgmental. Very judgmental. Shocking for you, Gareth, I'm sure to hear that.
And I would turn off a movie quickly, right? Not physically necessarily, but my brain would shut down in terms of engagement. If within X number of minutes, I thought, oh, you know, nah, not too sure about this one.
And that is kind of made me feel young again, Oppenheimer, because that's kind of what happened with me in the cinema. I was looking forward to it.
I love Inception, wonderful entertainment by the same director, Christopher Nolan, great, great piece of entertainment.
But about 15 minutes in, like 10 or 15 minutes in, my heart just sung, dear listeners, because I thought to myself that the director, the people making this picture, Nolan, at some level was not up to the subject matter. And maybe that sounds unfair.
This is such an important thing, the creation of the atomic bomb. And I thought to myself, this does not feel like it's engaging with a level of seriousness.
The kind of seriousness, for instance, we'll talk about in The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glaser. It just didn't feel up to it.
In the way that, dear listeners, in our early version of The Film Talk years ago, when I met Gareth, I was directing TV over there in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Gareth suggested to me, he's like, hey, have you read this Nicholas Baker book, Human
Literally, I literally just wrote down Human Smoke just before you said that.
Yeah, and Gareth suggested to me, this is a book about the lead up to World War II and the Holocaust, and it's an incredible work, academic work and also engages with narrative devices, incredible work, maybe you should option Human Smoke if you want
to direct it. And again, deals with the Holocaust. Dear listeners, at that time, I was directing a wacky hidden camera show with the laugh tracks for the BBC. And I said to you, Gareth, I said my exact words, I'm not up to that.
I don't have the moral seriousness as a person, as a human being or an artist to even begin to live up to this work. And at some level, I guess, sounds terrible.
And again, I love, love, love movies like Inception, which I think are fantastic for many reasons. It felt to me like the film wasn't up to the importance, the moral seriousness required for Oppenheimer. What do you think?
Well, you said that to me, like the week after the film was released, you've kept that view.
I'm interested to know what do you mean when you say it wasn't up to it? What would it have done if it was up to it?
Well, there's two things we can talk about here. We can talk about the way it's made and then the actual content itself, the characters. We'll take the second one first.
The characters are from a Hollywood movie. They're very thin.
When you think about what is required to deal with, we're working on a device that will change human history, not just kill hundreds of thousands of people, because of course, hundreds of thousands of people were killed in firebombing in Tokyo by the
US and the Allied forces before they mentioned the atomic bomb. You know, Florence Pugh's character, did you know she was a doctor? No. No, she's a doctor.
You wouldn't know that from this movie. You'd know other things. You've got a lot of people really interested, but you wouldn't know it from this movie.
The characters are drawn in a way that might even seem thin, watching on television. You would expect more from an HBO show, a show like Chernobyl, for instance. And it's not in this movie.
It's incredible spectacle, incredible production design, and incredible work in the analog medium of light and play in shadows. Huge amount of time spent on the sound design, but I don't feel these are real people. Who do I feel is a real person?
The characters in the zone of interest, which we'll talk about, as I said earlier a little bit later, nor did the film communicate on a physical, visceral level to me the dread of the atomic bomb.
Unlike those two shots we've talked about before, in a much maligned film, and I understand it, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. When Indiana Jones climbs up over a hill, getting out of that refrigerator, I know, I know.
And the John Williams music swells, and the atomic cloud rises. It conveys the feeling we have entered the atomic age with all of its horror and all of its beauty. And I didn't feel anything like that in Oppenheimer.
And again, I'm cutting it, giving a short strip, and I'm sorry, I'm going on a long time here.
It's all right. That's very much in alignment with Oppenheimer itself.
That I think perhaps if my mind had not felt that, if I didn't have that reaction in the first 15 minutes, like, oh, this film's not doing it, then perhaps I would engage with them more. What do you think?
Well, I get what you're saying. I feel like, yeah, there's some overlap there, but let me just tell you about my experience with Oppenheimer. I saw it on its opening day twice.
I saw it in IMAX in the afternoon and I saw it in like almost IMAX later that evening. And, you know, of course, it's an astonishing spectacle. It's one of the biggest films in terms of its scale that we've ever seen.
It's thunderous and it belongs in a serious discussion, both about serious cinema and films that are trying to say something meaningful in the world. There is no doubt of Christopher Nolan's intentions.
There is no doubt of the seriousness with which he treats both filmmaking and life. I think he entered into this in good faith, of course, and the outcome is still a concern for me.
There is no depiction of the suffering of Japanese people in this film. It's a conscious choice. What we see instead is Oppenheimer played by Killian Murphy's horrified reaction when he sees news footage of the suffering of Japanese people.
And that's clearly a good faith decision by Nolan. I'm imagining for two reasons. One is that you can't do justice to anybody's suffering, not just in three hours, you can't do justice to anybody's suffering in any length of film.
And sometimes there can be a kind of a catharsis when we see the suffering depicted, that we feel horrified and then we get it out of our system and we don't think about it afterwards.
And I think the other point is that Nolan didn't want people to go away thinking this only happened or only had any implications for Japan on the end of the Second World War, as opposed to we are still living in the post Hiroshima and Nagasaki era.
And the very last shot of the film is actually missiles flying into the sky, trying to make us think and take disarmament seriously today. So I get the reason why he didn't show those images of Japanese suffering.
However, that then created a parallel with a film that I think is, I mean, I was going to say a film that's worse than Oppenheimer. I think Oppenheimer is a great film. I think The Deer Hunter is a terrible film.
And The Deer Hunter is a terrible film because of the sequences that take place in Southeast Asia, where they portray Vietnamese militants as psychopathic monsters and Americans as sacred noble heroes who are suffering the worst things imaginable.
And it becomes a terribly racist film.
We've talked about it before, The Deer Hunter would be a much, much better film if you cut the scenes in Vietnam entirely and just have the scenes before they go to war and the scenes when they come back from the war.
The moral difference between the problem with The Deer Hunter and the problem with Oppenheimer is that there's no point at which I thought Christopher Nolan doesn't care about Japanese people.
There's no point at which I thought he doesn't care about everybody. Yes, he does care about everybody. And it's a rare thing for someone to make a film at this kind of scale, trying to say something that could help the entire human race.
I have a couple more things I want to say and I know you want to get it. Come on in.
What?
Come on back in. Come on back in.
Re-engage. You know, you're right, but let's just talk a little bit about filmmaking here.
Because, and I'm going to mention this film for the third time so far, The Zone of Interest, another film that does not show you the dread that takes place in a concentration camp or in the zone of Auschwitz and doesn't show it, but is, I would
I mean, you can hear the suffering over the wall.
Yeah.
So you don't have to show it, but you hear it. And I watched the film on headphones, and we're going to talk about that when we get to Poor Things.
But in Oppenheimer's defense, there is that scene which does not have the music that's layered over every other part of the movie.
And as soon as I saw it, I think I'm sure many other people have said this, that it's the best scene in the movie, the most effective, and that's the decision in a small room made by folks about which cities to bomb.
And don't bomb the one that we had our honeymoon in.
That we had our honeymoon in. And it's so horrific. And there's similar scenes in Zone of Interest.
There's similar scenes in the Vonacy Conference movies. Is it called Vonacy? The Kenneth Branagh film.
Isn't it called Conspiracy?
I don't recall, but it's a film that is taken from the actual transcripts, because they had someone writing it all down, writing it all down, deciding, we got to take care of this, this sort of final solution.
And that is far more effective in chilling. And is less Hollywood-y, I would argue, than, you know, the rest of the film that has, you know, that it's star-studded. You got Tippi Hendren's grandson in the picture playing Richard Feynman, Jack Quaid.
You wouldn't know it, except there's a shot of him playing bongos. Also in its defense, I think there's a nice thematic thing there with particles and waves. Are you a particle?
Are you a wave? You don't know until you look at it. And Oppenheimer doesn't know who he is, right?
So who is he? If you look at him, he's one thing, and if you don't look at him, he's another, that kind of thing. So I get that thematically.
But I mean, if you want to watch a good biopic, you can watch Maestro or, you know, I always recommend Vincent Minnelli's Lust for Life, Kirk Douglas. I've got to paint!
Which is not necessarily a line he has in the film, but in my mind, I always remembered.
Guaranteed, you're the only person that's raised the, that's invoked Lust for Life in a conversation about Oppenheimer.
Well, I just want to say Lust for Life. There's one thing about Maestro that reminds me of Lust for Life. I'm sorry for the aside, you know, Lust for Life 50s biopic of Van Gogh, Van Hoke, however you want to pronounce it.
I think it's probably his name is Van Hoke. Will do something like, hey, have you seen my good friend Paul Guggen? And Maestro is like, I'm just going to go have a cup of coffee with Aaron Copeland.
Wink, wink. I mean, just go, OK.
Well, yeah, but that's not far, you know, it's not far off people in Oppenheimer. I mean, it's almost like a kind of a slide presentation in a science class where somebody says, this is the most important thing we've ever done.
And if you, you know, do you remember, there's this very weird scene, I think, is it in Manhattan when Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are walking down the street and one of them says to the other one, weren't we engaged to each other at one point in
the past? Like the kind of thing nobody ever actually says to each other. I would never say to you, Jett, didn't we do a podcast once before? We know that about each other.
There's ways to write that that are better. But I don't want to end on a negative note about Oppenheimer because I really do think it's an important film. I like it more than you did.
And underneath all of everything we've talked about thus far, I think is this is a film about the relationship between ego and war, the relationship between war and status, depending on how you pronounce that word.
I'm never quite sure how it's supposed to be pronounced. And the most important character in it is Tom Conte's Einstein, not just because Tom Conte is the actor I most want to see in any film, no matter what the film is.
Tom Conte is your Keith David.
He is indeed my Keith David. And the two, I think he may be in three very brief scenes.
The heart of the film is how people define themselves in terms of immature relationships with their ego and how so much suffering in the world occurs when men, it's usually men, can't get their egos under control.
And they define strength in terms of might rather than strength in terms of self reflection and a willingness to suffer in order to protect other people rather than to destroy, in order perhaps to protect other people, but hand in hand with make a
name for yourself. The best thing I suppose we can do at the end of this discussion of Oppenheimer is to refer back again to Nicholson Baker's book Human Smoke, the most important book written about the Second World War, because it's about all the
things that most of us don't know about that if they had been fully attempted or fully oxygenated or given a chance to succeed, something other than the Second World War might have happened, and it might have been better. There's always an
alternative story, and that's what's missing in Oppenheimer is what's the alternative to war, what could happen instead afterwards. I still think it's a great film.
Well, you know, the thing is, is that history is always taught, at least you tell me it's different from your experience being raised in the UK. History was taught to me as inevitable.
When these things happened, well, they were inevitable in the past, they inevitably happened, and the human smoke shows us that maybe some things are not inevitable. I'll end by saying, when are we going to get the Vannevar Bush movie?
Vannevar Bush played by Matthew Modine. You would just think he's another functionary.
This is the guy that wrote that famous Atlantic article, As We May Think, which basically invented the idea of modern computing in a lot of different ways on the internet as we know it.
And I would argue that's another reason why, just as a film, it's not as effective as it would have been if it was made in the 70s. We're confronted with issues of AI and climate change right now.
And the Atomic Era almost seems kind of quaint in some ways.
Well, and what neither of us have mentioned, actually, is that Godzilla minus one does a far better job of doing the things that Oppenheimer doesn't do. And maybe we'll talk about that when you've had the chance.
Yes, bonus show. The bonus shows are stacking up. We've got the doings.
We're going to do more bonus shows than regular shows.
We've got to do an appreciation of William Friedkin.
There's a lot to live up to.
But moving to the next part of the show, Jett, do you think it's possible that you and I had met each other at some point in the distant past, perhaps repeatedly over thousands of years, and that the relationship we have today is the result of just
No.
But I'll tell you, if in a past life I ever saw a film as good as Past Lives, I'd remember folks, this is a beautiful film. Couple folks meet on kids, go on a date, they split up, different countries, meet on Facebook years later. Not much happens.
Let's listen.
He was just this kid in my head for such a long time. And then he was just this image on my laptop. And now, he is a physical person.
It's really intense, but I don't think that that's attraction. I think I just missed him a lot. I think I missed Soul.
Did he miss you?
I think he missed the 12-year-old crybaby he knew a long time ago.
You were a crybaby?
Yeah.
Most of the time, he'd have to just stand there and watch me.
That's past lives. Gareth, what do you think? Tell us about it.
What a gorgeous film, but the gentle ebb and flow of the most important things, and that is connection between human beings.
Just a beautiful from start to finish Celine song made this film that made me think about things I'd forgotten, about how life used to feel when I was a child, about connections that you make that feel temporary or eternal at the same time.
I've had experiences, particularly because I've lived in more than one country, where I reconnect with people that I haven't seen for a long time, and there's not much there.
And sometimes I reconnect with people that I wasn't that close to the first time around, and we become instantly intimate as if that was always there.
And then the really special time is when I've been apart from some individual for a long period, and we just start again as if no time has passed. And sometimes those relationships grow and strengthen, and sometimes they fade away.
I'm not going to tell you what happens in this film, but a more honest film about how no story is ever completely finished, and love cannot be contained to simply two people. A more honest film about that I've yet to see.
And because I want to be brief like this film is, I only have one more thing to say. I only have one more thing to say. With no spoilers here.
In the last scene of the film, something happens to Gretta Lee that must have been serendipitous on set. If I find out that they actually engineered this, I'll be disappointed. But there is a moment of pure serendipity captured on film.
If you don't know what it is that I'm talking about, I'll just say The Seven Year Itch. Something extraordinary happens that brings this film to that level of magic that's not within the control of the makers. And I'm so glad they captured it.
Extraordinary. If small films were the only films ever allowed to be nominated for Oscars, this would probably be my best picture choice.
It's fantastic. And you know, we did this film, Show Talk, are reconnecting after years. Does it feel like we never stopped, Gareth?
It feels like we never stopped.
I think we never stopped thinking about each other.
That's true. Ten years. Well, I'd given up on movies.
I was burned down on the linear media, projected imagery, whether on a screen, you're looking at the light coming from the screen. But past lives and a few others in our prop of ten, not all of them were bangers, but there's a few.
Past lives is so good that it's one of those pieces of art where you finish watching it and then you see the world in a new way. And that doesn't dissipate. It literally enriches your life.
Like, I'm a better person now for having seen this motion picture. So rich and thoughtful and in in sizably intuitive is it in its understanding of human beings, how they relate the importance of connection, the importance of empathy.
Man, you're not going to see a better picture in the English language, I tell you, than that. That's something. Because it's so deceptively simple.
Did you use to imply it's the greatest film ever made?
It might be.
It's the greatest film ever made, but it's not all in English.
You said you're not going to see a better film in the English language. This is in Korean and English.
Hold on, but I was going to say, this year, this month.
You won't see a better film, part of which is in the English language.
But it's so good right away from the beginning. Dear listener, it opens up with an unnamed person, we don't see them just wondering about our protagonist at a bar.
A voiceover from a narrator who you never hear from.
You never see, you never hear from. But yet it's so right. And you think, well, who amongst us hasn't looked at a bar, looked at some of the coffee shop, whatever, and go, oh, I wonder what their life is.
It's so good. You think, well, this device, this framing device, semi-framing device, must have been used a hundred times in movies, but I can't think of it.
No.
That's how good, I mean, maybe Preston Sturges, the great McGinty, in which a guy is talking to a bartender in some dive in South America, and the bartender goes, buddy, I used to be the governor of a state, and then the film is that whole story.
But other than that, you can't go wrong with Preston Sturges.
So let me ask you a question. I'm looking at this list. Here's one thing that, another thing that sets it apart from the other films that are nominated, and I need to say the names of all the films that I was nominated in order to ask this question.
Yes, I'm here to answer all questions.
So the question is, have you been to the world where any of these films take place?
American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, Holdover's, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro Oppenheimer, Who Are Things, and The Zone of Interest. I have not actually been to those worlds.
That doesn't mean that the films are not credible, but I feel like past lives takes place in a world that I have been to. In fact, a world that I sometimes still live in.
You know, after watching the film, I did something I haven't done since I was 12 years old.
You bought an apartment in Brooklyn.
I did. So I had to become a playwright.
Yes.
Artist residency. You know, and then I thought I had to try to see if there's any oil money in Oklahoma, possibly, and then maybe do some sort of at-home surgery. No, I looked up.
Where was the childhood sweetheart? The girl that I took when I was a kid to see Time Bandits. My first date, Terry Gilliam's Time Band.
And I found her. There she is.
Did she? How did she do it?
She is a public school teacher in San Francisco, because I'm from the Bay Area, right?
The life that could have been this.
The life that could have been Elaine W. And I hadn't thought about her.
Did you contact her?
Say hey.
Because you don't have Skype.
No one wants to deal with me. What are you talking about? Do you know how many times I've been married?
Listen, listen, listen.
Don't do yourself down. James Cameron has been married five times. I took ten years to decompress, and I'm back.
Yeah.
Are you back? I went on a ten year drunk, but I'm back now. Past lies.
One of those films, it's deceptively simple, because it's also full of film grammar. There's a one long shot, panning shot. There are two protagonists, or two or three, are lost.
They're lost. It's kind of rural, kind of like one of those walking parks. It's along the water in the New York City area.
And as one of the characters says he's ordinary, the camera is moving, and then we see the city behind him, and at times perfectly with what he's saying on the screen versus the background, just, oh boy, it's pure naturalism, but it feels like what
happens in your own life when you have artistic moments, when your own life becomes art, when you're in a situation where your surroundings and what you're feeling mesh perfectly. Ken recommended it highly enough.
The best film you'll see in the English language this month.
I like to think that when we record this show, our own lives are becoming art.
Well, that's a high bar. But we're doing what we can. Let's not judge ourselves too harshly.
We've done Maestro, we've done Oppenheimer, we've done Past Lives, and now we're moving to a film in which I think we may discover a bone of contention between us.
But dear listener, we will handle it with grace and with listening and with curiosity.
Yes, just like Emma Stone's character.
As we discuss this vastly overrated, I'm joking, I'm joking. As we discussed this film about which I don't yet understand the excitement and that is Poor Things. And I believe we have a clip.
Let's listen to Emma Stone.
Emma stoning it, discovering new worlds in Poor Things.
Good afternoon, madam.
Good day, my fresh darling English rose. Is this a hotel? We have rooms.
Are you looking for work? How much is a room? I charge you ten francs an hour, you charge them thirty.
Everyone's happy.
I see.
Ah, Monsieur Chappell, fresh from London, qu'en dîtes-vous? Enchanté.
Elle fera l'affaire.
Chambre 16.
At this point, I am confused.
You're not here to work? Oh, come on.
Okay, we got to talk about this, because for me, this is one of the best cinema going experiences I've had in years.
In the English language. In the English language.
Yes, many languages. The language of cinema, my friend, is-
But not the language of Scotland. I've written this book about Scotland, and Scotland would be barely mentioned except when Willem Dafoe tries to do- I'm not sure what accent he's doing, but you know-
Fair enough.
Anyway.
The listener may know.
Well, you and I both, I don't know if you've ever lived in Scotland. I've lived in Scotland. I directed shows in Scotland for four years running, so I lived there for a total of X number of years.
I don't know if you have, but-
I've been there many times. I've not lived there.
But the-
You don't have Scottish blood. You don't have Scottish blood.
You know, where do you want to cut it? We're all related. So the thing is, I get the pushback because it's a famous Glaswegian novel, right?
It's a famous book of Scotland. You wouldn't know that from watching Poor Things. I'm not saying I put that aside while watching it because I wasn't aware.
I had not read the source material. So I went in cold and I saw it on a big screen. And this is what I want to talk to you about because I was stunned when you did not have the same sort of the film did not have the same effect.
I knew that it did to me. I think it's an incredible, wonderful piece of cinematic art. And you told me you're watching it at home and you're on your phone.
And for me, being in the best on a big, big screen. This is a film that has a deep understanding of the films of like Terry Gilliam, we mentioned at the top of the show or mentioned just a little bit ago from Time Bandits.
It's an incredible fantasia that is so good, it makes you feel, again, this is sort of think about past lives like, wow, nobody's used that device before of opening a film, wondering about people at a bar, the way the past lives does.
The one of the central conceptions in Poor Things, the idea of taking this child's brain and putting it in the body of the mother, it feels like that's already been written like that is as a much part of our mythology as Frankenstein is.
Such a powerful idea is earth shattering. And then on top of that, you have the most incredible production, design, wardrobe, and fabulous comic dramatic acting.
Mark Ruffalo is, I have never laughed so much in the cinema, in the English language, for a while. It is an incredible, picaresque narrative adventure of cinema. I can't recommend it highly enough.
But I saw in the theater, you on the other hand saw like on the couch, maybe during the day.
Oh no, I watched it at night. I watched it at night. I wasn't on my phone while watching it, but it is easier to get distracted when you're watching at home.
And that really does come down.
Like, you know, it's interesting whenever Top Gun Maverick came out and they, Tom Cruise had been insistent that they would delay the release until it was absolutely certain it could be seen in cinemas because of the pandemic.
And he tends to say things like, I love watching films in a theatre surrounded by the audience. And that's the special thing about the cinematic experience. I don't think that I'm a misanthrope.
I love people. I love being in community with them. But I've got to say, my reason for wanting to watch films in a cinema has nothing to do with whether or not there are other people in the room.
Every now and again, maybe when you're watching a real crowd pleaser, it's nice to have people around you. But for me, whether or not there are other people there is not relevant to why I want to watch them in a theatre.
And it's not because of some ideological commitment or even, frankly, respect of filmmakers who want their films to be seen in theatres. Of course, I want to respect their artistry, but that's not my main reason for wanting to watch them in a cinema.
It's because the thing is bigger than me and I can't leave. The thing is bigger than me and I can't pause it. The thing is bigger than me.
I have to let myself be confronted and enveloped by it. So yes, any film is better in a contained environment. I'm glad that there's access for so many films now that can bypass theaters.
Clearly, not every film is going to get a theatrical release. I do wish I had seen Poor Things in a theater. So that's the caveat.
I imagine I might feel differently about it. But my curiosity that I'm sure will be answered in some way when I see it again at your urging is there's two Terry Gilliams. There's Monty Python Terry Gilliam and there's The Fisher King Terry Gilliam.
And The Fisher King Terry Gilliam from Richard LaGravinezzi's script is psychologically nuanced. It has four primary characters, Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruhl and Amanda Plummer.
It takes them on a real journey that actually goes somewhere and it speaks to my heart and my mind. I did not feel that the influence of Terry Gilliam on Poor Things was anything other than in the visual.
And while Emma Stone's performance is fantastic, it seemed like a cheap kind of liberation that didn't go very far or anywhere. And I'm surprised you didn't mention this.
The film ends with a touch of revenge and retribution, which is a disappointment when the whole film is really about liberating people from oppression. I'll watch it again. I may feel differently.
And I find it quite interesting that I'm being so negative about a film and a show in conversation with you, my good friend, with you, my good friend. Help me. Help me.
Well, I could be totally wrong.
My interpretation was different from you with the end. Yeah, it feels like revenge and retribution is that often. It's like, well, these people are just continuing on the sins of the fathers, as it were.
Or you think about how terribly William DeFoe was treated by his own father, and then he does this.
Mistreated.
Or mistreated.
You think we're supposed to, you think we're not supposed to feel that she's ended on a note of triumph?
Well, if that's true, and that's quite possible looking at the director's other films. Yeah, maybe it's a worldview that is nature red in tooth and claw. And maybe-
Maybe yes, I'm good at that. Then the message is that this is a dog eat lamb world. We've got to eat, we've got to strive, we've got to tear the other person apart.
How dare they try to stop us from actualizing, even if it means putting their own brain in another animal. So yeah, maybe I've changed my opinion. What a terrible movie.
No, I think we should watch it again.
Yeah, let's do that.
And with the knowledge of how the film ends, to see if we can pick apart. Maybe there's not a consistent thematic message that's wrapped up. Maybe the film does betray itself at some level.
It erases Scotland.
Well, okay, I feel like that's good.
We can talk about, we got to do another bonus show. We're going to do The Dooms.
Scotland Erasure.
We're going to talk about William Friedkin, and we'll talk about Poor Things again.
What I've done for this show, dear listener, because I was off movies for years, as I said earlier, and I hadn't seen all these movies in the theater like I wanted to. So I've devised this system.
So here's what I'm doing, Gareth, which maybe you could have done for Poor Things. I got a wide screen monitor, big super, that's the exact, what is that, Academy ratio, it's 239 to 1, that's the exact ratio of the screen.
So if you put on Good, the Bad and the Ugly, there's no black bars anywhere, it goes the whole thing. And that's a monitor, I sit right next to it. I sit about 12 inches away and I put on headphones.
And that experience is so much more powerful than just sitting on a couch and watching it across the bedroom, as it were. Not very social, it's true. That's a very isolating experience, kind of like your Apple Vision Pro kind of thing.
And Gareth, I'm different than you. I like the communal experience because I used to watch films in a very raucous background. So when I saw The Blob when it came out, The Great 80s Blob, for instance, I saw it at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland.
That's the theater that has been much lauded, and rightly so by Ryan Coogler, who's I think he probably, who knows, maybe he was there. I would have bumped up against him at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland.
You see The Blob, people, it's never quiet. People are yelling at the screen the whole time. They're interacting with it.
That's a very different experience than the one who's going to be quiet, like the old days at the National Film Theater in London.
But it depends on the film. You don't want raucousness.
And poor things, the poor things, screening was raucous. Well, let's talk about it. For poor things, yes, the experience that I had, people were laughing out loud.
Because Mark Ruffalo is just a brilliant performance. People were laughing, they were yelling things. Oh my God, I can't believe what I'm seeing.
It was a real interactive, wonderful, again, one of the best theater experiences I've had in years, maybe ever since midsummer, maybe. So let's look at it again. We're going to table this one.
Last episode, there's some bangers for you. This was not a banger. For me, it was a banger.
Well, hard to believe it is.
We're actually near the end of our reflections on the Best Picture nominations for the Oscar ceremony, which, dear listener, we're going to have this episode available for you in time for that ceremony, but it will live in perpetuity, I think is the
word, thereafter. The last film of the 10 nominated for Best Picture, the one that is most unlike any other film on the list, Jonathan Glazer's film for Martin Amis' novel, The Zone of Interest.
Do we want to play a clip? You know what? I don't want to play a clip.
Go see the movie. I'm not going to play a clip for this. Zone of Interest, Gareth.
So this is about the commandant of the death camp at Auschwitz and his family and the house that they live in, which is right over the wall from the camp.
And the horror of what's happening in the camp, as we've already said, is conveyed by sounds, for the most part.
And by quiet things, like the mathematical discussion meeting about how people will be murdered at scale, and the bureaucracy of Nazism, and the way in which people talk around what it is that they're doing.
There are lots of films about the Holocaust. There are few that say something new, but even the ones that say things that have been said before clearly need to be made, because the Holocaust always needs to be talked about.
The question is, or the reason why the zone of interest, I think, is more important, is because I could identify with the daily habits of the people doing evil in this film.
If I'm watching Schindler's List and I just see Nazi concentration camp guards doing things that are on the face of it, absolutely evil, that's a distancing device, because I don't like to think of myself as someone capable of doing those things.
But when I see them doing things like pouring tea and talking about their vegetable gardens and talking about how they really wish they could get away for a vacation together, or we were hoping our life was going to be different when we moved to this
place, that's a point of identification for me. And so the film ends up being one of the most personally uncomfortable that I've ever seen, because the whole way through, I'm asking myself the absolutely vital question, which is, who would I be on
the continuum of activism to defeat the monstrosity of Nazism, through to, on the other end, a complete fellow traveler and participant? There is one character in this movie who acts with astonishing courage.
She's a child who leaves apples for the people whose lives are being destroyed in the camp over the wall. And the way Glaser portrays this is through, I don't know what you, what do you call it? Jett, it looks like, I would call it a negative image.
I mean, the film stock changes.
It's not.
What do you call it?
No.
Is it infrared photography?
Well, this is interesting, isn't it? Because we're at an interesting time of people talking about, oh, movies are being over, but they're being more experimental and interesting than ever. Infrared photography, that was Dune.
Dune, for two, uses infrared photography to a astonishing effect. And this uses, you can say, thermal imaging. It's similar.
Like night goggles?
Yes, where the imagery is generated by heat, yes.
Right, so we're seeing something that's happening under cover of darkness.
It also is happening in a way that's hidden, because the person doing it is having to hide the fact that they're doing it. Otherwise, frankly, they'd be immediately murdered if they were caught doing this.
And the film is forcing us to ask, who would you be in this? I'm not sure I have much more to say about it that wouldn't kind of diminish the experience of watching, I really think people should see this film.
One sort of less important thing is there's a kind of a nice cinematic echo of Stanley Kubrick's film Barry Lyndon, a film I know you love, and I love too.
But it's so strange to even talk about the technique of this film feels like it diminishes the meaning of the film. And I'm very curious to hear what you have to say.
I disagree with you on that one. I think the technique is extremely important because the filmmaker people that I work with clearly approach this, we use the word moral seriousness.
And so you think about so deeply, and to me this is the film really comes across, that they've thought incredibly deeply over a period of years, how do you convey the horror and importance of what went on there.
So then you want to convey the horror, so then you have to come up with an aesthetic strategy and also a technical strategy for doing that.
Now Spielberg, you're thinking about the Hollywood Machine and Schindler's List, it's like, yeah, you got the guys with the Nazi armbands on, it distances you and makes you think of a Hollywood movie, because Indiana Jones also punches Nazis, right?
Because obviously Kubrick, according to how Steven Spielberg says it, Kubrick famously told them with Schindler's List, you made a film, you didn't make a film about the six million Jews that died, right? You made a film about the 600 who lived.
So I watched Zone of Interest, the Zone of Interest using that system of mine now being right up close to that widescreen monitor, even though it's not a super widescreen monitor.
The low system.
The low system with headphones on. And so that experience was unsettling to say the least to a listener, because we don't see the ovens, except on a diagram, a blueprint. We just hear random shots, screams in the background.
The effect is absolutely horrific. I think the technique matters. They shot it hidden camera style, a lot of it.
The cameras are hidden. The actors don't know if there's a close-up on them. I think there's maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, only one close-up on the whole film.
So it's shot hidden camera style. They shot like 800 hours of footage using natural available light. So we see, as Gareth says, people pouring tea.
You see the habits, people walking through a house. It feels completely natural, completely real, and that conveys the horror, right? So these are decisions made to convey the horror.
It wasn't that, oh, let's shoot hidden camera, and then that'll work this way. It's how do we convey horror?
And that hidden camera style combined with the sound design creates a deep unease and dread that is more effective than other films in terms of trying to convey, trying to help the viewer understand, appreciate, internalize and feel the nature of the
What did you think of the penultimate scene?
We're talking about the 2001 ending.
Is that what we're talking about here?
Oh, you mean like a flash forward?
Right. So, well, I mean, Blazer's interesting is that he made arguably, for me, the best Kubrick tribute film in Birth. You watch Birth and you're like, wait a minute, this feels familiar because he's using, he adopts the language of Kubrick films.
You have scenes right out of Barry Lyndon. You got Arliss Howard from Full Metal Jacket. You got Nicole Kidman from Eyes Wide Shut.
It feels like a Kubrick film. And then at the end of the zone, if it is interesting, this is what you're talking about. We have the film grammar from 2001 used to devastating effect.
I was stunned. My jaw dropped when it happened.
So we've reached the end of a discussion about 10 films nominated for this picture.
Wow, that was a quick wrap up. Well, I guess I can't improve on what Jett said. So I guess we just got to move on to the end credits.
I will say two things. It also was surprising. It does, you emphasize it, the habits, the ordinary people, it showcases in two different ways, just the mundane aspect.
You know, there's that old phrase, banality, the evil, when the protagonist, if that's the right word, signs off his letters, he says, and Heil Hitler, et cetera. He says that a couple of times. It's just completely ingrained baloney.
And the film takes time to show office politics. This guy, the protagonist, the commander of Auschwitz, is clearly a hard worker. Doesn't really matter because you got some kiss-ass other Nazi who's like praising another guy.
And you see office politics in a scene that is almost like out of the office. But it's about the extermination of peoples.
What of these ten films? And you're going to have to decide, because I know the listener is waiting, which of these ten films is your choice for the best picture from those that were nominated?
Okay, now hold on. So you and I are going to do a bonus episode, probably, right? Where we're going to talk about some of our what we think should have won.
There may have been alternatives.
There may have been films that weren't nominated that should have been nominated. There's at least four films that I think should have been nominated for best picture.
I was really good at picking Oscar winners. So I could tell you who's going to win. With these ten, I mean, it's probably going to be Oppenheimer that's going to win.
You got American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Poor Things, and The Zone of Interest.
I suspect Oppenheimer will win. I think Killers of the Flower Moon should win. And I think if they had a prize for favorite and most entertaining, I would give it to The Holdovers.
What about you?
We agree to disagree on that one. I'm going to go with your, Oppenheimer's probably going to win. Listeners, listen to the show after the show.
We'll see how right or wrong we are. I would have to go with, can I have multiple winners? I'll go with Past Lives, Or Things, Zone of Interest, Anatomy of a Fall, and Killers of the Flower Moon.
They all should win.
Any one of those five.
Absolutely incredible. Incredible motion pictures.
We haven't talked about the nominees for best international feature. We'll do that again as well. I do want to put a word in for Perfect Days, which is just see perfect.
Have you seen Perfect Days? You haven't seen Perfect Days.
I'm saving that for the bonus show.
Saving that for the bonus show. Every show will be a bonus show at this rate. How are you feeling going into Oscar weekend, Jett?
Are you going to watch the Oscars?
I'm going to watch the Oscars.
Are you going to text me while you're watching?
Yes. If the listeners want to know, how do we get these bonus shows? Well, we got this like a paywall.
There's a paywall. You go to the Patreon, if that's how you pronounce it, patreon.com/ The Film Talk. That's patreon.com/ The Film Talk.
Or there's a lot of different levels. We call them tiers. I call them Lars Van Tiers.
Sorry. You can go there to get your bonus shows.
Also, you can go to, if you're listening on one of your Apple devices, on one of your Apple devices, iOS, your iPhones, what have you, you can just hit the subscribe button and get the bonus shows that way.
And hey, you know what, folks, if you disagree with what we're saying, you want to add something, contact us at info at thefilmtalk.org. That's info at thefilmtalk.org.
The name of this show is amazingly enough. The Film Talk. I've been Gareth Higgins.
I've been Jett Lowe.
And we'll keep talking, next time.