The episode goes off the rails. This is acknowledged early. Jett and Gareth remember their favorite Gene Hackman performances and what made him irreplaceable, examine what the 2025 Oscars did—and did not—say about the surrounding world, and ask the harder question underneath both subjects: when circumstances demand something of us, what are our responsibilities?
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The Film Talk is brought to you by you folks who listen and help out. Just go to patreon.com/thefilmtalk for details. Now on with the show.
Oh my goodness, Gareth, thank you so much for your support.
You know what, Gareth, dear listeners, I was just watching Night Moves this morning with a hot cup of coffee, got a cat sitting on my lap purring. I'm watching the great 1973 slash 1975 film. There's a reason for that.
Night Moves.
For which, the listener doesn't know this, but you have behind your right shoulder, there is a poster for Night Moves.
There is a-
Framed.
Yes.
There I say, mounted and framed.
Yes.
Properly positioned on the wall.
Original 1975 poster for the Arthur Penn, Gene Hackman starring Night Moves. I'm thinking, wow, Gene Hackman is so good in this. Gareth, is he still with us?
Well, I know that you always say that when we're talking about someone who has recently departed.
And the answer is always the same when it comes to what we used to call the curse of The Film Talk. And that is said with genuine respect, like he's not with us in bodily form and genuine sympathy to the people who knew and loved him.
But because of his work, he's immortal. And his work will always be with us. Let me run down some of the Gene Hackman films.
Over the years, you've got A Covenant with Death.
Haven't seen that one.
Doctors' Wives, The Hunting Party. You got Bite the Bullet, Bite the Bullet, Lucky Lady, March or Die, two of a kind.
These don't sound like winners.
Two of a kind, All Night Long, Power, Split Decisions.
And I could tell you that probably 30 other films that Gene Hackman was in that hardly anyone's ever heard of and look like, even if they're not good movies, I over the course of my life will watch them because Gene Hackman is fantastic in everything
he's ever been in. A welcome presence every time. And of course, many of his films are iconic, not just the roles, but the films themselves. He does frailty beautifully in The Conversation.
He does unlikeability brilliantly in The French Connection.
People forget fantastic comic actor in Young Frankenstein, in The Birdcage and in The Royal Tenenbaums, which at four o'clock this morning when I couldn't sleep, I watched the first 10 minutes of its masterpiece. He does depth in Unforgiven.
And even in a film that he said he did as a money job, The Poseidon Adventure, he brings real pathos to the character of an agnostic priest who dies to save people.
My two favorite Hackman performances, Lex Luthor in the first Superman film, not in the other ones that he did. And then a film that's kind of-
Oh, wait a minute though. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Yes.
In Superman 2, when Gene Hackman is in a scene in the Daily Planet with like the three evil villains, and Superman- Zod and-
Zod, more of the Zod, Marsha, and Clunk.
Is that what they are?
I don't remember what they're called.
The big guy-
Clunky, clunky.
Hold on. The big guy from Feral, Am I Lovely, who's fantastic, and the female evil villain who is supposed to be, originally, the one in Carolyn Monroe, and Carolyn Monroe did, I guess, The Spider Love Me Instead, which is kind of a loss.
But when the three villains are in the newsroom, and Gene Hackman is there, and he's sweating, and he's supposed to be aligned with the villains, and then Superman shows up, and Hackman immediately goes, oh, thank God.
Thank God you're here.
And then they glare at him and he goes, go get him, to the villains. And he's so great. I'm sorry to interrupt your spiel.
I do.
I mean, we often talk about Richard Donner's Superman, the one he got to complete, is the gold standard for that kind of movie. And I think Gene Hackman's performance as Lex Luthor is the gold standard for a comic super villain.
But my favorite Gene Hackman performance and film is a little known one. I know you've seen it.
Sandy's Bride from 1974.
No. Cisco Pike with Chris Christopherson. No, no, not Cisco Pike with Chris Christopherson.
I've not seen Cisco Pike.
It literally says introducing. Here's the thing about Cisco Pike. I'll get back to you in a second.
Yes.
He made Cisco-
Thank you. I'll just wait here. Please.
The listeners will understand. Cisco Pike, he made and then the next day he went off to do French Connection. In the meantime, so French Connection is released before Cisco Pike is released.
So Cisco Pike goes, Oh, now Gene Hackman, huge star. So the film says starring Gene Hackman, all the promotional materials. You watch the film, maybe Hackman did two and a half days on the picture.
The movie goes for, you see him at the beginning and there's an hour and then he comes in at the end. And it's like, wait a minute, what happened?
But Cisco Pike, obviously a huge influence on Once Upon a Time and on Hollywood by Tarantino, a great hangout movie. There's no plot.
Cisco Pike, played by Chris Gustafson, just needs to sell 10 grand worth of weed over a weekend in Venice Beach in LA. And we just see him selling the weed, meets his characters. Gene Hackman is in there.
And then there's montage after montage of Chris Gustafson singing. That's it. Cisco Pike.
Roscoe Brown's got a great scene. Just one, because everybody that's in the film is only in one scene. Yeah, Roscoe Lee Brown.
You know, Box from Logan's Run. And Diane Arbus' husband is in there too. Alan Arbus.
He's also the bad guy in Coffee. So Cisco Pike, I kind of recommend you want to...
I don't smoke marijuana, but if you have some marijuana from the 70s and you light up a doobie, they call it a doobie, hook up, light a doobie and watch Cisco Pike with Gene Hackman. Okay, please continue.
If you go back in a time machine. Heist from 1995, David Mamet's film, which has, I think...
Two of the greatest lines ever.
Well, it has one of my favorite lines. And actually I realized in the aftermath of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa's apparently very sad deaths.
I've been thinking about Hackman a lot and I've realized there's a line that he speaks in Heist that is one of my favorite lines.
I know what it's gonna be.
In all of cinema. And there's also a line spoken in the Royal Tenenbaums. He doesn't speak, but it's about his character.
And it might be, it probably is my favorite line in all of cinema. Well, you're gonna guess the line in Heist? Sure.
Is it someone asking how he does something?
He says, I just think what a smarter person would do.
Someone, yeah, exactly.
Or someone smarter than me.
You're so smart. How did you get to be so smart? And he says, I'm not that smart.
I just think to myself, what would somebody smarter than me do? And then I do that. Which frankly is actually the pattern of spiritual direction, mentoring and discipleship in all spiritual wisdom traditions.
When a mentor comes along and helps empower the mentee to find a wisdom within themselves that they didn't know they had by reference to other people.
But then there's this beautiful line in Royal Tenenbaum's when he's been found out, his ruse has been discovered that he's lying to his family in order to get free accommodation. He's faking an illness.
When Angelica Houston, his wife, Etheline Tenenbaum says to her husband, Royal, that he has to get out because she realizes he's been lying, he says, I just want to say that I think the last eight days have been probably the best eight days of my
life. At which point the narrator, Alec Baldwin comes in and says, soon as Royal said these words, he realized that they were true.
Which is not only an exquisite piece of poetry, but there's a nice resonance with that earlier line about, I think about someone smarter than me and what they would do and then I do that.
Sometimes we actually discover ourselves doing things that are more mature, wiser or better without having planned it or without knowing that that was in us already. That's just a little bit of the flavor of the great Gene Hackman's work.
Like anybody who made that number of films, there's some not so great ones in there and some that are a product of their time.
I think it's important to note that Mississippi Burning, which at the time was understood to be this great anti-racist film, is at best full of blind spots and at worst, it is so terribly racist and so terribly condescending.
It's like Green Book.
It's worse than Green Book because at least in Green Book, there's a substantially written character in the form of Mahershala Ali, who's a black character with agency.
I don't remember there being any substantially written black characters in Mississippi Burning that have agency in the film. If you want a white savior movie, Mississippi Burning is it.
It's a very strange film because it's many of the parts of Mississippi Burning, not least Gene Hackman's performance, Willem Dafoe's performance, Francis McDormand's performance. Don't forget Michael Rooker. Performance.
I vaguely remember Michael Rooker. I haven't seen it in a very long time. It's a strange film because the part, many of the parts are good.
The overallness of it is so condescending. And I was watching it when I was 14.
You think it was part of it is because of the director, Alan Parker's British and there's exoticism for America. So I'm thinking of Birdie and I'm also thinking of Angel Heart.
I remember loving Angel Heart, but there's an exoticism about America, right? Ooh, New Orleans.
Well, there's a- Gumbo. Yeah.
Let's have some gumbo. It's more exoticism when it comes to the Louisiana stuff and Angel Heart, it's potentially offensive.
I think you may be on to something because I was 14 in Belfast watching Mississippi Burning and it was probably the first confrontation I had had with some of the stories of the horrors of racism, of anti-black racism in the US and I didn't know any
better. I remember being just moved and challenged by it. It was only when I met civil rights activists and civil rights historians in the US who, one of my really good friends is a civil rights historian and he hates that movie.
And as I say, the parts are good, but overall it's awful. It shouldn't detract from the rest of Gene Hackman's career. And I'm feeling particularly fond of his performance in the Royal Tenement Ballons.
What about Zandy's Bride?
I never saw Zandy's Bride.
The complexity of his character in Unforgiven is, that's a very important transcending of the archetype of a bad sheriff in a Western. And so that's what I think about when I think about Gene Hackman. You haven't said much other than night moves.
Well, because you've been talking.
I mean, thank you. I literally thought you were going to go segue. Okay, now let's talk about the Oscars.
I'm like, wait a minute.
Hold on. Is the show not called The Film Monologue?
Sometimes, it feels that way. Listen, there's a reason why I have night moves, the poster. I only have two film posters in my, you know, man studio shed.
One of them is night moves. The other one we'll talk about another day. I would love to do a whole episode on that movie.
Am I going to name what it is?
No, no, it's a teaser.
The listeners know that I know and love you so much.
I know what the other poster is, even though I can't see it. Yeah, don't do it.
I can't see it either right now.
Would it suck the life out of this episode if I mentioned it?
Don't, don't, don't. Stop right there. Let's talk about Gene Hackman.
Stop right there?
Okay.
Okay, stop right there, please. So I picked Night Moves. It's one of my favorite Hackmans because you talk about the subtlety of his performances, he and the mistakes and growth.
And his Hackman movies at their best examine the human condition. He personifies almost like the Tuco character in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. If we think of Lee Van Cleef as the fallen, as the devil, and we think of Pliny Swift as the angel.
And then Eli Wallach is the human in the middle of the struggle between good and evil. And so Gene Hackman in his complexity, talked about the complexity of playing the bad guy in Unforgiven, sort of exemplifies to me the human condition.
And Night Moves is a very impressionistic film. Dear listeners, if you haven't seen it, you should probably skip ahead because I recommend you see it. It's sort of kind of like John Bormann's Point Blank.
It's a detective story, but the way that it's cut is very impressionistic. Like scenes, you sort of feel whenever you're watching it, that you've missed the beginning of the scene, that you're going right into the scene.
And that's an old scriptwriting technique, right? Don't start the scene at the beginning when the characters walk through the door, go in the middle. But Night Moves feels like it was actually cut that way.
It wasn't written that way. It was sort of like formed in the editing room, to do this impressionistic film. And it gives it a choppy, real feeling.
And if someone, a guy says to Gene Hackman, the film, because Gene Hackman plays a private detective, but he used to be a football player. And the joke here, they're a football player, you have the opposing side, you know what's going on.
But now Night Moves, think of it not as Night at nighttime, but Night as in KN, because he's always playing chess in the film, that there's a much more complicated playing field.
And someone says to him, you're a great player, talking about him in his football days, but you are different, more sensitive.
And so here we see this guy who was a football player, is a tough guy, but he's also got a sensitive side, he contains multitudes.
And Hackman in his best movies, you feel that absolutely, you feel that he's a genuine human being, he doesn't seem like he's acting. He never seems like he's acting, he just is. But he's not always playing the same character.
And Gareth mentioned Superman.
It's quite possible, given how long films take to get produced and then released, that Hackman went from playing a junkie, addicted cop in French Connection 2, some of the most harrowing scenes you'll ever see in cinema, dear listeners, as he's
trying to kick heroin in French Connection 2. And the next day just flew out to do Superman, where his comic performance, the way that he says, Otis Berg, is hysterical, and that's an intense range.
The same thing for when he played the sub-captain in Crimson Tide. And then, what are you doing tomorrow, Gene? Oh, I'm going to go play a hapless, idiotic film producer in Get Shorty.
And he's completely believable in both, and you never feel that he's acting. You feel he's a genuine human being. And what does it mean to be human?
Well, it means we're lost a lot of the time, and it means we don't know what's going on. And Night Moves is one of those great 70s films in which the protagonist doesn't actually know what's going on.
Only after we see the whole film do we realize, oh, he's misinterpreting everything that's happening. Everybody else has more information than he does, which is what it's like to be a human. We don't know what's going on.
Sometimes we might want someone to help us. We wish there was someone who was in charge, but maybe there's not. And that feeling of being lost and misunderstanding what's happening is a through line in Hackman's films.
One of his great ones is The Conversation, of course, in which he has an idea of what's happening. We find out, no spoilers, go see it. There's something else entirely going on.
So I'd recommend seeing something like Night Moves. See The Conversation. Again, I won't mention how those films end, but the ending of Night Moves and the ending of The Conversation are actually very, very similar.
And it kind of touches on that sometimes we're all just lost. To quote Paul Newman.
Yeah, in another David Mamet scripted film with magnificent dialogue.
And Newman and Hackman are in Twilight together, which is great. I just thought of that. Go see Twilight.
Robert Benton's Twilight.
You know, dear listeners, I was typing up my notes and I was typing in the Notes app.
In the Notes app. There's a reason why I'm emphasizing the Mac OS. And I'm typing and I was writing these exact words.
Gene Hackman was arguably the finest screen actor. And I was going to start typing of his generation or the latter half of the 20th century. And the predictive autocorrect of notes said, I just automatically put in of all time.
This just happened a few minutes ago. And he's arguably, well, he's clearly one of the greatest film actors of all time, arguably the greatest of the latter half of the 20th century and maybe the best. I recommend go see French Connection 1.
And see, I go like you go into a cinema. Maybe it's coming to you on your screens. See French Connection 1 and 2.
Thank goodness that everyone did a third one, Gareth. Can you imagine? They'd probably get like Eddie Murphy, like we gotta team them up now.
Do you know, Gareth, I'm on a roll here. I've had a lot of coffee.
Welcome back to The Film Monologue.
Did you know, Gareth, that coming off Star Trek 3, The Search for Spock, that the main idea the studio had, and they pursued to a great degree, there may even be a script out there. Do you know who they wanted for Star Trek 4?
Because they'd go back in time. They're still gonna go back in time to San Francisco, Eddie Murphy. We're gonna team up the Enterprise.
Eddie Murphy's hot. Anyway, let's see French Connection 1 and 2.
I guess, I guess they didn't make Star Trek movies the way they make Bond movies. You know, that is somehow deflected that, you know, where they're, where they're trying to do something that's culturally of the, of the moment.
I, I appreciate what you're saying about the ending of the conversation and the ending of Night Moves, as representing the, the sometimes experience of being lost as humans.
I also want to, I don't know, counter that or, or add to that by saying that the ending of The Royal Tenenbaums, have you seen Tenenbaums? I know you're not a big Wes Anderson fan.
That's a good movie.
It's, it, it, the ending of that movie is in a sense, it's a response to the lostness. It's, it's about a person exercising agency over their own life as an act of love and service to the people around them, a person actually growing and changing.
So, I don't know if the lostness is the final word. And, yeah, that's, that's a thought that's intriguing me as I consider watching a Gene Hackman movie I'm gonna watch this very day.
Well, you know who's not lost? Sean Baker, the winner of four Academy Awards at the recent Oscars. We say goodbye to Gene Hackman.
Folks, you can't go wrong. Go watch the films we've just recommended. They're fantastic, and even go see Cisco Pike.
I don't know about Zandy's Wedding. Basically, you can't go wrong with any Hackman picture. Though sometimes awards during picture shows couldn't go wrong.
As I found out when I watched the Oscars on Hulu, and right before they announced the best actress and the best picture, I've been sitting there for hours waiting for this one. And then Hulu.
It turned out some people knew more than you did.
Well, apparently nobody at Hulu realized that Oscars sometimes go long, and they set the flag for the end of the live streaming broadcast to turn itself off. So not only did it turn off their listeners, in case you don't know the story, maybe you do.
If you watch it on Hulu, because the Oscars went on long, they didn't set up the parameters properly for their live streaming service. So it just stopped and went, threw you back to the Hulu home page, and then you couldn't go back to the Oscars.
It's gone completely. And I had to rush up and fix an antenna and try to get some sort of live broadcast here in the mountains of New Mexico.
You should have just been there in the room like I was. I was watching it naturally.
You were there.
It was God intended. I don't like to, I don't, I wouldn't want to comment on my whereabouts.
I didn't know you were there.
I didn't know I was there either. Anyway, I want to say, I want to say things. Here's three things that the Oscars were missing.
Oh, three things.
There you, apparently you were not there. So that's more than one of the other two.
That's the fourth thing. I was not there. And we've talked before about films that we'd prefer to see nominated and so on.
We do that every year. We've already done that. I'm not going to talk about films and individuals that weren't nominated or who didn't win.
I'm going to talk about three things that I actually think could change, would make the show better and frankly would make the art form better. One of these things happens every year.
One of them happens most years, and one of them has been happening a lot in the last few years. And with just a few little changes, something far more interesting and richer could happen.
The first is, it amazes me how almost none of the winners of the Oscars ever talk about the film that they're winning for. You know, it's natural to talk about all the people associated with it and to thank those people. That's nice.
But they don't talk about the film or the meaning of the film.
The exceptions to that rule tend to be the documentaries and as there was in the case of two films this year, the documentary No Other Land and the Iranian short animated film, both of whose co-directors spoke meaningfully about real issues in the
Well, maybe for these folks, that's like Gene Hackman in Poseidon Adventure, who told someone who loved that film that it was a money job.
But also by the time they're accepting the awards, it was like, I remember Giovanni Rubisi on the red carpet for the Avatar premiere. And they asked him, oh, what was it like making Avatar? He goes, I don't know.
We did it years ago. It was years ago. There's another actress who plays the bad guy general in the second Avatar.
And she was like, I did it. It was like four years ago they motion captured it. And she was like, in the next two films.
Yeah, you know what?
No, I'm not, I'm not that when that if you've been nominated for it, it would be useful and meaningful to actually speak about the meaning of the film in the real world, to use that platform to at least encourage people to see, to see the film and
think about the questions that the film raises. The second thing is something that I was kind of stimulated to think about by Adrian Brody's speech, nice enough speech, apparently the longest in history.
He said this thing that's become quite popular, not just in the entertainment industry, but in the US in particular, in pop culture lately.
He said something that I think is a best, it's a semantic error at worst, it actually neutralizes the point that he's making. He said, I'm so blessed. And he was talking about the things that he's grateful for in his life.
And if he was asking for my feedback, and I'm sure he's just, the only reason he hasn't is he doesn't have my number. If he did, he would call.
I honestly think it's, the problem with saying I'm blessed is it implies that people with privilege somehow have been shone upon by some external force, let's call it God.
Well, I thought maybe it just means you're lucky.
Well, that's one way to put it. You might actually be, well, frankly, you in a system of the unjust and inequitable distribution of rewards, of course, it's luck because we know that most people of great talent never get a big audience.
Many people with a big audience aren't necessarily deploying the most exquisite craft.
Do you remember when I had that job at Variety and I was over at the Toronto Film Festival and then I called you after I interviewed a whole bunch of people.
I think I was interviewing Willem Dafoe and who's the guy who played a priest in that Paul Schrader picture? Oh, Ethan Hawke, right?
Ethan Hawke.
And Jennifer Garner, incredible huge diamond ring on her. I remember when I told you, I feel like I've just been hanging on a room full of lottery winners.
Yes.
And they're all fine people.
There are. I mean, all the people you've named are talented people. And Adrian Brody is a great actor.
And I'm sure he didn't. I'm just singling him out because he used this word blast.
I actually think he could actualize the thing that he's trying to say, and it could serve the world better if he were to say, I'm deeply grateful for the luck that I've had and the privilege that it has granted me.
Not implying that I've been shown upon in ways that other people haven't, and there's some reason behind that because there isn't a reason behind that. It's what you do with what you have.
And of course, the glitz, the glamour, and the money of Hollywood Awards ceremonies needs to be punctured a bit.
And the way to puncture it is for people to own their privilege and try to use it as an act of service, which they did with the firefighters during the show. But the third thing, and the thing that's really the thing that matters the most to me.
Yes.
About cinema and about what's missing from the Oscars. Sean Baker...
Nudity.
Twice. A burlesque show. Twice during the show, he talked about wanting to preserve the theatrical experience.
And again, it says re-energize the theatrical experience. But he didn't say why. He didn't say why going to see a movie in a movie theater matters and why it's different from watching one at home.
The last star or celebrity that I heard advocating for the theatrical experience was Tom Cruise. And what he said was, I love going to see a film with a big bunch of people, sitting there with my popcorn and enjoying it as a group. And I hear that.
But actually, that's the thing that matters to me least about the theatrical experience. I'm quite happy to go and see the movie on a big screen on my own. I don't need an audience to feel like something is happening.
The point of the theatrical experience for me is that it is a qualitatively different neurological, psychological, and even spiritual experience to watch something on a screen that envelops your field of vision.
Compared with watching something on a screen where you're looking down and in, which is what you're always doing with a TV.
And frankly, it's what we're mostly doing when we go to most multiplexes, because most multiplexes are maximizing their footprint. They have 14 screens, maybe two or three of those screens are big enough to envelop your field of vision.
The rest are just shoeboxes where you're looking down and in. I think the second thing that matters about the theatrical experience is that you can't take out a remote control and stop the film.
Of course you can leave the room, but if you're going to leave the room, you're going to miss some of the film. It's a contained, simple experience, start to finish.
You're there in a darkened room and at its best if you're in a theatre owned and operated by people who are empowered to screen the thing right, the lights will stay off for at least a little bit of the end credits so you can breathe in to the
experience of the film. I wish that Sean Baker and others, Scorsese does this a lot as well, advocating for theatrical experience, would say to people why it's not just about popcorn and being in a community.
I think it's a qualitatively, neurologically, and even spiritually different experience. Now, this isn't coming from a place of ideological purity. I'm glad that we can see more films than ever, as easily as possible.
And I watch most of the movies that I watch at home, but that's because they're not screening at theaters or they're not screening at theaters near me.
And if a movement were to begin to try to encourage theaters, perhaps even have audience members saying, I'd be willing to pay a couple of bucks more for a bigger screen or for the lights to stay off halfway through the end credits or to have less
ads at the start. I'd support that movement. Because at the moment, when I go to a movie theater, honestly, maybe 25% of the times I go, the projector breaks, the image isn't properly calibrated, the bulb on the projector is turned down.
I went to see Stephen Soderbergh's Black Bag the other day. The file was corrupted, so every four minutes, the screen blinked at me throughout the duration of the movie. And I knew if I go out to the lobby to...
Are you sure that wasn't in the film?
That wasn't in Soderbergh's thing?
Are you sure? No, there is that in the film, but this was every three or four minutes, the film effectively skipped. And I did talk to the theater manager, and she agreed that it was a problem.
And I mean, it was just a corrupted file.
But I knew that if I left the theater to go and tell somebody, most of the people working in multiplexes, they're not very well paid, they're not trained, and they don't necessarily understand the issues that you might raise.
And I'm just going to miss a few more minutes of the film. There's a value to actually caring about how films are projected and exhibited, in the same way that there's a value to calibrating the sound production at a concert.
And audiences notice sound production. They don't yet notice badly projected films because they haven't been empowered. Yeah, the expectations have been lower.
One of the problems is, as you have tied yourself to slightly, is that the experience is terrible.
I talked about this before, but as a kid, there used to be curtains, so the curtains would open up. It's a different experience. You're focused, and the curtains masked where the film frame ended.
Now, they don't do that, so it's just gray bars around there. She might as well be watching at home. 20 minutes of commercials.
It pushes you to look at the outside of the screen.
20 minutes of commercials, like you're being bombarded with sewage.
The commercials are being equated with the film. Now, before, they would have trailers. They didn't always used to be commercials in American movies, folks.
But the trailers are at least part of experience of cinema. But instead, if you're just blasting commercials, and then the movie, what you're actually implicitly saying is that these are the same things, that it's all commercial product.
So what difference does it make if it's crappy, if it's fast fashion, I can wash it once or twice, it's going to fall apart, who cares? It's disposable.
What's interesting, of course, is the movies used to be seen as disposable, which is one of the reasons why we've lost all those silent pictures, and then they became art. Now, we've gotten back to there's just disposable crap now.
I might as well just spend time on TikTok. What difference does it make? So what you're saying is that the cinema experience is crap, and you wish the Oscars were different.
Part of what I'm saying I haven't said yet, and I think it's important.
I think it's important to say this.
Please, take your time.
So, like, this show, The Film Talk, takes place in, like, we're in a moment. We're in the real world. Both of us have lives and experiences of those lives.
Both of us have privileges, and both of us have, I think it's fair to say, challenges in our own lives. And we're not ignoring the bigger picture, OK? And the bigger picture right now, depending on how you look at it, is really bleak.
There's people who are being targeted and suffering in massive ways.
And at one level, like, the best way to respond to that in a film podcast is just talk about the movies and open up the beauty of that experience, because that's the thing we can offer in the context of this show.
But when you're talking about evaluating a multi-million-dollar award ceremony for some of the most privileged people on the face of the planet, and every now and again, people like the Palestinian and Israeli co-directors of No Other Land getting
the chance to speak, or the Iranian co-directors of the animated film getting the chance to speak, it can seem a bit much to try to talk about that in the current context. I want to say one thing about that.
It has been occurring to me lately that this is a moment if you care about the world, if you care about the common good, that because of the overwhelm that's bombarding us, just like the commercials before the movies, although these are far more
serious things than advertisements, because of the overwhelm, everybody should pick the cause, the specific cause that they feel that they know the most about and are most competent to do something about, and then do it. Put 90 percent of your energy
into that, and then share the 10 percent of the rest of your activist energy across other things where you can help a little bit, or support other people who are doing good things. But one of the best things any of us who want to be actively engaged
in promoting the common good can do is pick the one cause that you know the most about and are most competent to do something about. And then because the world that we want to build, whatever comes after this, it's going to have to be a world in
which beauty matters, in which beauty is cared for. It's also okay to pick an esthetic or creative thing that other people might even see as nothing more than a hobby to try to make the world more beautiful. And again, it's not ideological purity.
I think we're straying from, I'm wanting to see how you put this back into the context of the Oscars, because I appreciate you using the content platform for your other shows, man. That's cool, but I want to see how you bring it in.
To me, there's no point talking about art if it's not connected to the real world. There's no point talking about that. And when a moment of emergency is happening, which is obviously what we're living through.
Now, emergencies are also opportunities too, and it may well be decades before we can really evaluate what's happening. There is an emergency happening, and there are people suffering, and it can sound churlish to talk about things like movies.
But the point I'm making is, it's okay to actually champion the beautiful, and it would be okay to try to support our grassroots movement to both encourage and support independent movie theaters to charge more per ticket if they do away with ads, or
to charge more per ticket if they build a bigger screen and put curtains in, so that the pleasure of the aesthetic experience is actually up to the task, is worthy of the films that are being screened. Wouldn't you choose to go to theaters where you
knew the people who operate those theaters understand something about how films should be screened? Wouldn't you choose to drive a bit further, you'd pay a bit more?
You're advocating for beauty and advocating for a different experience, and you wish Sean Baker would have touched...
I wish Sean Baker had talked about why theatrical matters. I wish Adrian Brody had talked about the difference between being blessed and being privileged and then doing something with it to serve the common good.
And I wish people who won awards for their films would talk about both the films themselves and the meaning of those films. It's all part of the same circle. It's all part of the same circle.
And I think that given the absurd concept of saying one thing is the best or another when it comes to art, that you're always going to be disappointed if that's what you want.
What is it that Conan O'Brien said, through the Trauma and Joy, the seemingly absurd ritual is going to be here, right? So we had to address at some level that the rituals of this thing is absurd.
Sure, but you could make it less absurd. You're looking...
Well, then, but that defeats the purpose because the point is to be absurd, right? The Oscars were started as a device to deal with unhappy workers in the film industry in the early part of the 20th century.
Give them a bit of glitz, give them a bit of glitz.
To say you were artists, you don't need to pay them or you're an artist. And then at the same time, it simultaneously morphed into a marketing device, which is what it is.
Morph is the way it can morph again.
Morph is great work.
Are you not an advocate of double morphing?
Never double morphing. Well, I don't know if that's legal now. Double morphing, I think maybe possibly you'll get targeted by the Department of Justice if you double morph.
I hear what you're saying and don't get me wrong. I think advocating for beauty, maybe that's your... What can you do, Gareth Higgins, is you could advocate for beauty.
You could advocate for a better theatrical experience is what you're doing. Maybe you could start a cinema. I'm sure you might.
Are you starting a cinema? Maybe you're buying a building or something there where you are in North Carolina.
I'd happily give the Double Morph Seal of Approval special sticker to any movie theater that installs curtains and or build screens that envelop the viewer, and or keeps the lights all the way down until halfway through the credits, and then turns
You don't want an experience like when I was watching The Fableman's the other day on a streaming service that I've already forgotten which one it was on, and there's a joke, spoilers, for the end of The Fableman's, a joke right before the end
About where the horizon is.
Yes, where the horizon is, but the metadata and the streaming services, the credits start, so as soon as the joke happened, like instantly, not even a frame after, it shrinks down and we have credits coming up.
Listen, don't get me wrong, I agree with you 100%. You've got to find what it is that you can do. I was wondering watching the Oscars, and I missed the first hour because I had to help out a friend who had a dead battery.
They were stranded in a Catholic church parking lot in this isolated part of the mountains in New Mexico. So I had to rush out there to go get a battery, switch the battery out. So I missed the first hour.
As you know, I think I texted you, I'm like, I can't see it because I'm swapping out this battery. I was wondering, maybe I missed the first hour.
We talk about living at a time of emergency, at a time of monumentally horrible things are happening in the United States, which will also affect the rest of the world.
So I was kind of wondering if there is going to be, what is the political context of the Oscars? Conan O'Brien mentioned this, an absurd ritual. So I don't know how they put it into context when the film started.
I was thinking about this because last night I was watching, the comedian John Mulaney, he's got a live show. Folks out there, there's a comedian American.
And an attitude, and a wee bit of an attitude.
Well, he's a professional.
He's an attitudinal comic.
Yeah, he's a professional comedian. He does a live show to the listeners, in case you're not familiar, on Netflix, called Everybody's Live. I was watching a live show and the guest is Joan Baez.
This is like a talk show, right? So Joan Baez comes out, and famously political activist singer. He starts getting into the comedy base, and he's going to do a little bit of wacky comedy with Joan Baez, and she stops him.
I wrote down her words, and she says, first, I have to say the context that I'm here in. You said I could say anything I want out here, and we're all here to be silly and have fun.
As long as you recognize the fact that our democracy is going up in flames, and we're being run by a bunch of incompetent billionaires. That being said, ask me anything you want. But she had to put her parents in context, and it was interesting.
In previous years of the Oscars, when things were not in an emergency, then people feel that space to make political statements. Whereas now that we have a genuine emergency, I'll say genuine emergency may mean for white people.
There's always been emergencies for other folks and women in the United States. But there's a genuine emergency now.
Now people feel almost as if you can't say anything, because things are too monumental to say something like a slogan at an awards ceremony. Things are too monumental.
But to your point, I think, yes, of course, find that thing that you are good at, that you can have the most impact, right? Buckminster Fuller, the semi-crank, but interesting character, famous to do that.
Who invented the geodesic dome 20 minutes from where I'm sitting right now.
Invented the geodesic dome. But the idea with the geodesic dome is like, what could cover the most area with the less material?
And so if you then extrapolate that, that's his vibe is, what is the most I could do, the most good I can do with what I have, with the least, not the least effort, but what's the most impact that I can have?
So I think you're absolutely right, Gareth, to bring that up. And maybe the most impact you can have is doing this film podcast. But I think there's more.
I don't know. You could start a cinema. And I apologize again for being churlish earlier when I saw you going off on that tangent.
This is supposed to be a tight 20-minute show.
I was staying, I was going off and staying in at the same time. It was a double morph. And we got there in the end.
We did.
And I hope, dear listener, we beg your forgiveness if this show's gone too long.
I thought it was gonna be 20 minutes.
I did too, but it's been an enjoyable series of monologues.
Is it a conversation?
Some of it's a conversation.
How about this?
How did you feel about the James Bond Tribute?
Because clearly as soon as the James Bond Tribute started, and they cut to Barbara Brockley and Michael Wilson, the audience, the people that have shepherded it family-wise throughout the whole thing, it sort of felt, and I think everybody said this,
like, this isn't a tribute. This is like goodbye. It's more like a funeral ode.
This is it.
It's over. The movies are done, folks.
Sure. Well, I don't know that they're done. When, when, you know, frankly, when anora can win best picture, movies are alive.
And if you, if you operate a theater out there, and I could, I could name, I could name many of them that do this well.
The chemo in Albuquerque, the Belcourt in Nashville, the Arrow in Santa Monica, the Grail in Asheville that was destroyed by Hurricane Helene and is going to come back.
Theaters that are operated, the Queen's Film Theatre in Belfast, theaters that are operated with love, often at a very low budget. You know, what you're doing is, is, is good. It is contributing something good to the world.
And if you're a shareholder in a, in a corporation that owns multiplexes, seriously, I, I think it, I don't think it's impossible, that multiplexes could see their business increase if you dedicated two or three of your screens to independent movies,
smaller movies that don't usually get shown in multiplexes, and you guaranteed things that make the aesthetic experience of watching the film better. I bet people would be willing to pay more.
I don't know if the, how about willing to pay? I'm not sure willing to pay.
Willing to pay, yes. Well, and I don't think you should have to pay more for the thing to be done right. Like, but, you know, you can subsidize your, your art house screen with your IMAX Marvels, because one of them, what are they charged?
29 bucks for people to see an IMAX film these days.
It's $43 for a hot dog. Have a wide variety of interesting films that are, that appeal to a whole bunch of different folks. Present them properly.
Make the experience pleasant.
Make the experience pleasant, but also make it also challenging, challenge, make it a place where ideas are formented and fomented.
Formented, formented ideas are.
I have a lot of them.
Folks, it's been a good show. Here's the thing, Gareth, with modern technology, you know, the Apple Podcast automatically transcript, does the transcription, right?
So all you need to do is have, you know, some government agency just scrape all the podcasts for sentiment analysis and then they could just create an algorithm that lowers it so our stuff isn't surfaced. Do you know what I mean?
That's the world that we're in right now.
You think that's what's happening?
Yes.
You think that's what's happening?
It's been a good show. Folks, movies are awesome. Go see them.
You don't need, but you don't need to see the latest, I don't even know what whatever the hell is.
Biggity biggity, wap wap wap, bang bang, whoop whoop film.
That sounds great. And it's probably directed by the Russo brothers. It cost $300 million.
It looks like that Wile E.
Coyote film is going to see the light of day. I know you don't follow the film news, but this is something you'd be excited by if you knew about it.
Do you know about it? This show's gone off the rails. Do I know, the star is the guy from The Last Man on Earth, right, that guy.
Is it that guy?
I don't know.
I don't follow film news. Folks, it's been a great show.
If you do say so. I hope it's been a great show. I've had fun.
Well, fun and as Gareth touched on earlier, beauty is important in the face of the emergency.
Ask yourself, what can you do to be a decent citizen? How can you help? How can you help?
I'm not doing enough. I've got to do more. I can't speak for Gareth, but I can say to you, dear listeners, thank you so much for listening.
Gene Hackman's passing meant a lot to me. His films meant a lot to me. He was a genuine human being, at least in terms of his portrayals on the screen, if not in his personal life, of which I know nothing.
Of course, as Wittgenstein said, of that would be knowing nothing, we must remain silent. Not that I'm a big fan of Wittgenstein. Boy, the show has gone off the rails.
Good.
Then let's do 20 minutes on Wittgenstein.
Let's go 20 minutes on Wittgenstein. It's the new Soderbergh picture. Folks, thank you so much for listening.
Don't forget you can always go to patreon.com. If for whatever reason after listening to this, you want to pay more, God bless you. I feel I've learned a little something this episode.
Go see a great Gene Hackman picture. I've been Jett Loe.
I've been Gareth Higgins. We'll keep talking next time.