?Sometimes a movie breaks ordinary critical language so completely that the wreckage becomes interesting in its own right. Jett and Gareth confront Reagan: conventional biography, bizarre artifact, possible outsider masterpiece, or some unstable combination of all three. Badness, sincerity, cinematic grammar, and the strange places art can emerge all enter the room.
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Oh, my goodness, folks, this is a special moment.
It's a special time for me, Jett Loe. Don't know if it's special for Gareth. This may be one of the most unique films we've ever discussed on the show.
The film is Reagan, a film that asks that immortal question, what if we remade amadeus, amadeus with John Voight as Solari. Welcome once again to The Film Talk. I'm Jett Loe.
I'm Gareth Higgins.
Oh, dear.
And conversation never ends. And it's too easy to say that at times I thought this film wouldn't. And we're here to talk about Reagan.
And we're intending to do it with sincerity. It would be easy to be cynical, it would be easy to just make jokes.
I don't think there's anyone in The Film Talk, listenership, who expects Jett or myself to be flag waving on behalf of Ronald Reagan's presidency. But we're also not going to, we're going to try not to joke just for humours sake.
I do need to say off the bat, as you've often said in the past, Jett, it's hard to make a film. And like-
Apparently not.
I actually, I don't know how to make films. I really don't. I've been on a couple of sets.
I've watched people do this stuff. There's a baseline craft to making films that I know nothing about. It's clear the people behind this film, particularly the director, Sean McNamara, trying to do the best they could with what they had.
But I do want to say, much as I really don't like to be negative, that this film might qualify as one of the worst I've ever seen. And I mean that relative to... Yeah, I do.
And I've kind of slightly agonized over this because being negative for its own sake is not just a waste of energy. That just pollutes the world.
But there's a meaningful critique that needs to be made when something is itself putting bad stuff in to the world. Propagandizing on behalf of a fake prophet and a person, some of whose choices created immense harm needs to be challenged.
The reason... Let me just say the reason why I use the word worst. The reason why I use the word worst, which is, you know, it's an ugly word.
I mean it on two levels. One is relative to the resources behind it. There are talented people behind this.
And it ends up feeling at times a bit like Victoria Wood's old Acorn Antiques skits on her BBC comedy, where the point was you were watching a soap opera in which there was no competency on display. That's the first thing.
And the second thing is the potential for a serious biopic of such a significant public figure exists. And you don't have to do a hatchet job on the guy in order to make a meaningful film.
You could make a film about Ronald Reagan that tells the truth. And the truth of course has shades of grey.
And the truth would include the parts of him that had had integrity and includes the parts that non-violently brought an end to the Cold War, but doesn't pretend that he was some kind of saintly figure.
And then that nothing but roses appeared in his wake. And this film absolutely, I mean, almost consciously avoids any possibility of criticism of the man and the levels of, let's say, shallow craft on display shocked me.
Well, basically, if you want to get a feel for the film, your listener, to Gareth's point, and you don't feel like giving the filmmakers money, the production team money, or not the production team, but the producer's money, the distributor's money,
but you want to get a sense of what it's like. Imagine if you're watching Battlefield Earth, the Travolta science fiction film, and it has the same level of craft, money spent, terrible decisions, bizarre comedy, but the subject was, oh, I don't
know, the Armenian genocide. That's the feeling you get with this film, a film that is so transcendentally bad at every level and every minute, that I think it almost maybe redefines cinema. And there is, here's the thing, Gareth. Here's the thing.
What's the thing? You know, you and I in the old days, we did years of The Film Talk. For a while, we flirted with this idea.
It was a thing for a while, director's commentaries. We were going to do commentaries for movies you could download for $1.99 or whatever, a commentary. And we tried to do one, we tried it twice.
We had to abandon it twice. Eyes wide Shut. And we could not do, it's my fault, we couldn't do a commentary for Eyes wide Shut.
Because there's too much to say.
Because every minute, not every minute, every shot, I started just going out, we see in this scene here, what's happening is that Bill's toying, he forgets the name of his baby theater, but then he actually remembered.
There was too much to say. Every minute of this film is a compendium of of awfulness in a way that I don't know if I've ever seen. Because the subject matter is so serious.
Yeah, there's worse films, but maybe not worse relative to the resources behind it and the potential of the thing.
And dear listener, I'm sure you're excited to hear, I believe we have a clip.
Okay, sure.
Let's have a clip.
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
So that was Reagan. Now Gareth, there is one thing I want to say. Do we want to save this for later?
Do we want to talk about some of the incidental, ordinarily you'd say pleasures of a film? Because you did text me while watching this film, that there is something that happens that is so jaw-dropping.
And I would almost argue for major motion pictures like Sui gaderas, out of place.
Yeah, I have a vague feeling I've seen something like this happen before, but not in a film like this.
Well, there's a reason why you've seen this before. So I guess we'll just address it. And then I want to talk about some other bits of business.
Dear listeners, folks, friends, do you ever see, and usually these are in bad science fiction films. They're always in dystopian movies, right? Like The Running Man and many other films.
In which our protagonists hack the network. And they show the people, usually they're in crowds, maybe they're all in gray, and they're all kind of, you know, they're suffering.
And they show on monitor screens, which are always all around the city, the truth. Like, oh, in reality, your leaders are corrupt, or they're aliens, or whatever it is. This is a signal.
It's always a signal that broadcasts, they hack the network. It's a cliche.
Yes.
This is maybe the only time in my life. I'm an old man now. We talked about me watching Return of the Jedi, James Earl Jones show.
I saw that in the theater. That's all the time when I was a kid. In the middle of this movie, there is a sequence which is as if the film has been hacked, and the crimes of Ronald Reagan are laid bare.
There is an image, there is a text that is flashed on the screen and held there, and it says, it says, Ronald Reagan presided over 89,000 deaths and did nothing. Yeah. And it's coming out of nowhere.
And the reason why narratively it's in the film is because you have a false crisis for the protagonist and you have a real crisis. And this is a montage of bad things. And the idea is, oh, this is this crisis he has to overcome.
But it's a condensed montage, hacking the network of this man's crimes.
My first thought is, did somebody working on this, like the editor, like he was told, one of the editors was told, the system create a montage of footage of like the AIDS crisis, and they subversively created this anti-film. I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, and it's soundtrack to Genesis performing Land of Confusion, and so it is itself like one of the most ambivalent things I've ever seen in a film. I'm watching it, thank goodness. They're finally addressing the criticisms of Reagan.
And I don't like, like I've said, what a truthful film about Reagan would not demonize him. A truthful film about Reagan would talk about light and shadow.
A truthful film about Reagan would talk about how, at some level, it doesn't matter how good a person you are and what your integrity or your values are.
If you occupy the presidency, you're already you're already going to be compromised in your capacity. Yes, you're in the system.
You are at the height of the system. To be in this system, you have to be morally, ethically compromised by its very nature.
I remember when Oliver Stone was going to make the Nixon biopic with Anthony Hopkins. People just assumed it would be a knocking copy or a hatchet job.
It's anything, but if you watch Nixon made by Oliver Stone, known as a radical leftist, whether or not that's actually how he identifies, I don't know.
If you watch Nixon and don't come away with empathy for Nixon the man, I don't think you've watched, was perfectly capable of making a film in which the courageous qualities and the kind of, I don't know, off the beaten track, counter-intuitive
qualities of Nixon were on display alongside all the shadow, all the brokenness, all the selfishness. So it's entirely possible to do that. I would have liked to have seen that film.
What they've done here is you do have this three or four minute long piece, soundtrack to Land of Confusion, which leaves me thinking, are they saying that America was confused at the time Reagan was in power, and Reagan was the only person who
wasn't confused, and that this manifestation of the ACT UP and other activists who were trying to protect the lives of people who were likely to contract HIV AIDS, are they saying that they were confused? Are they saying that Reagan was confused?
I'll give you a clue.
I think it is actually possible, someone working on this film did this as the, it was the best they can do, but the worst interpretation, the most chilling interpretation, is that very statistic.
When you refer to the number of people who died from AIDS, when the Reagan administration did and said nothing about HIV AIDS until about five years after the AIDS crisis began, that when that appeared in the film, I'm watching that and going, is
this a wink and a nod to the audience to say it was a good thing that he presided over that number of deaths and did nothing? I simply don't know.
I think it's outrageous and it needs to be spoken about in those terms, or maybe it's the most subversive thing.
Here's my guess. I'll tell you my guess because he's mentioned earlier that you've only been on a film set a couple of times and not in production. So if the listeners don't know, I do video editing every day.
I'm out there shooting stills and video and editing every day for my job, and doing broadcasting stuff and radio shows and everything for my job. Obviously, The Film Talk is my job, but when I'm not doing The Film Talk, I have another job.
The Film Talk is your vocation.
It's my passion.
Your calling, your mission.
And my true love, Justice Nancy Reagan.
When you finally do get to watch Feel the Dreams, you'll hear a line that says, it would have been a tragedy if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for 10 minutes.
I think the same is true for you and The Film Talk.
Here's the thing, that sequence feels like I can, again, because this is what I do all day long, so this is just my instinctual reaction.
It's like you're sort of Malcolm Gladwell blink thing, is that was edited by a specific person given a specific test.
Yeah.
Because the editing and the rest of the picture is-
Yeah, it looks very different...
. cumbersome to the degree, I'll give you an example. You're watching The Godfather, good picture.
It's a good movie. There's shots of Las Vegas in the 50s. It's a good picture.
Let's be honest.
Pretty good movie, The Godfather.
Shots in Las Vegas in the 50s, they had to find, they had to source archival footage from the 50s of Las Vegas, and maybe they had to color time it, which means back in those days, you tell you how long you leave the film in a bath to develop it, to
give the colors, roughly, I'm simplifying. They give it the same kind of tone and colors of The Godfather movie, so it fits in.
There's a sequence in Las Vegas in which we see shots of Las Vegas because Ron Reagan has a job in Las Vegas, and the film can't communicate. It's not clear.
Is this supposed to be the Las Vegas in the movie, or is this like a montage present day imagining of Las Vegas back then, if you see what I'm saying, stock footage?
Like, it's not clear because we see stock footage throughout the film with news events, but is this supposed to be in the movie, or is it a different thing that's outside of the movie?
And the film's not clear, and that's why I use the word cumbersome. I've been on a film sets where the director was not clear about what he or she was doing, and I've directed myself, but nothing to the scope of Reagan.
Yeah, I've directed TV myself, but not to the scope. But that shows a level of filmmaking craft that is not evident in that montage. Dear listeners, this is the kind of film in which Jane Wyman is played by Mina Savari.
Mina Savari. Got very big in American Beauty. Jane Wyman breaks up with him, his wife, by an actress, Jane Wyman, in real life.
And they're in a club, like a dance club, big band. And the song that plays as she leaves is Stormy Weather. And that's the level we're talking about.
In fact, it's so bad in that respect, that there's a line going, you know, Reagan believes in helping even those who are different, and they cut to him sitting next to a black man. It works. That film works.
The only way I was able to endure it was to think of it, I thought of that nightclub scene, that reminded me of A Naked Gun from The Files of the Police Squad scene, in which Frank Drebin is drowning in sorrows.
And there's like a picture of the hindenburg behind him. If you see this film, it works as a naked gun movie. If you see it as a comedy, then you can get through it.
If for some reason, dear listener, you want to endure this picture. And in fact, you've got Zuckerlobens like the wonderful Robert Davy. One of my favorite character actors, my very favorite James Bond villain, like Sanchez, great villain.
He's one of, die hard. He's wonderful. He's a great comic actor.
Not a big man. Here he plays Brezhnev, a man famously large. I take your point, Gareth, with what you're saying.
Your point being you have great empathy and love for all. It's difficult to feel that way watching this film and not to judge. And here's why.
I know you're not probably a big Reddit user, but there's a running joke on Reddit, which is a real thing.
And usually what happens in the history subreddits, Reddit social network for folks who don't know, you can grave your own subreddits, talk about whatever, anything under the sun, right?
And often in history subreddits or academic subreddits, you'll get someone young like a college student who's studying history, they're trying to find out why is American health care so bad, or why is the homeless problem so bad, or why is the
housing problem so bad? And there's the realization from the college student is like, oh my God, it was Reagan's fault. And it's a running joke is that all the problems we have in modern America, you study it academically. Holy crap.
It's all down to Reagan. And this film does not quite address those issues. Do you know Gareth that I'm ranting here?
I do know that you're ranting here, but your rant is welcome.
Well, you know what I appreciate, the listeners, because Gareth, you have such a beautiful voice.
You're an Irish brogue, and I'm like a Daisley Wine. Reagan was famous as governor, and I can say this as a California, I'm a native Californian born in San Francisco. Born in San Francisco.
Raised in places like Oakland and Berkeley. There's a scene in the sixth place in Berkeley.
Raised by Wolves.
And an interesting show, by the way. Raised by Wolves is actually really interesting. We can talk about that in a bonus episode.
Yeah. The thing with Reagan, one of the things that became famous for in California was the conflict with the students protesting the war in Vietnam. If you watch this movie, they spend the time to say Berkeley looks like a hellscape.
Yes. There's no mention of the Vietnam War. There's someone who goes, make love, not war.
But there's no mention of the destruction of peoples, our peoples, the people in Vietnam at all. It's shocking.
Do you know, for listeners abroad, not in the United States, Reagan became famous for union busting, for hollowing out workers' and people's power in this country. One of the most famous things he's known for.
This film opens, opens the opening scene with him being applauded by union leaders. This is the film we're talking about here.
But I will say, in its defense, the filmmakers seem to be so naive, their simplistic worldview matches the worldview that Reagan propagated. So in that sense, it's a unified work with a brilliant middle section that undercuts it.
But my god, maybe it's a masterpiece, it's about film of the year. No, I'm serious. Just think about it.
A film that's so basic and simple, so it totally holistically reflects its subject, and in the middle of it, undercut it. I think in that way, it's a piece of art. It's a piece of primitive art.
I actually think it is important.
And let's talk about this thing you call naïve, and it's relationship to sincerity, because, you know, like, since, since, since the seer, like, lots of people are sincere.
We're all, I mean, you know, hopefully we're all sincere, but we have to sincerely reflect on the impact of our beliefs and actions.
I'm intrigued by the fact that if you compare, if you contrast, you know, Reagan as a person with some other people we could talk about today, and I don't just mean Trump.
Like, I think a lot of the time, people just invoking Trump is a distraction from a wider issue regarding the addiction that a lot of people in the US and to a degree, people in the UK and Ireland as well have to electoral politics as if it is the
only thing that matters. Of course, it matters. Of course, the people who steward the power structures of a nation matter. Of course, the wider community should have a role in holding those people to account.
But electoral political power is not the only way to manifest power in a society. I don't know if culture is downstream from politics or politics is downstream from culture. They're all in the same river.
I would suggest James Cameron may actually have more power than anyone in Congress because he has the power to change people's minds about stories. And Reagan embodied a story and it was a sincere story, but it was also a naive story.
It may be naive for me to say one of the things that I think was different about Reagan from some people we could mention today is, I'm not going to say that Reagan never told a lie in public.
I'm going to say Reagan probably felt bad about it when he did it. Or at least weighed it up. And whether he did so from altruistic motivation or because he felt it would just get him in trouble if he was found out, I don't know.
Today there appears to be perhaps an entire, I don't want to say an entire political class, but a lot of people in politics who simply don't care if what they're saying is in alignment with facts, never mind whether or not it promotes wisdom in the
world. So I appreciate that, but the portrayal here, but he does come across as someone who would have felt bad about lying. Another thing I always heard growing up, because I'm Irish.
I'd say there's a scene to that, the famous bit when he did the Mia Culpa for folks don't know.
He said, my heart tells me, but my mind or something like that.
Yes. So violating legislation passed by Congress, we funneled money to a group that killed a lot of people down south of the border. How do we get that money?
We sold weapons to people we call terrorists in Iran. But he felt bad. His heart doesn't want to believe it.
But the facts, the truth and the facts of the matter. But again, this is a film in which John Voight, as Salieri, the imaginary Russian spy says, 30 minutes after Reagan was sworn in, the hostages are released from Iran.
No mention of the fact that it has come out. And it seems to be true that the Reagan and folks around him, at least, deliberately kept American hostages in place until they won the election, which is the most grossest evil I can imagine. I know.
Well, so it may.
I don't. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, being Irish, I always heard about Tip O'Neill.
My understanding is that Tip O'Neill, who was the, was he the House Majority leader? I don't, was he? Yeah.
He was House Speaker of the House. He was the Speaker of the House. And as an Irish-American, you know, it was instrumental in devoting a lot of US government attention to the need for a peace process in the north of Ireland.
And Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan had a personal friendship, and they argued the point out and would be willing to negotiate with each other. They understood that politics shouldn't be about winner takes all.
There's a nice moment in the film where Reagan says something like, I'm a politician until 6 p.m. And then after that, we're just a couple of Irish guys having a drink. Now, again, don't know how real that was.
Simply a rum. But I do think that it's in the film, partly because it is it is in the mythos of of of Reagan, that he would do a deal.
But partly because I think the filmmakers are trying to remind today's generation of politicians that it is possible and even desirable for people to actually talk about things. There's two things we haven't mentioned that.
There's many things. Kevin Dillon, Kevin Dillon as Jack Warner, as Howard Hughes is great.
Yes, I'll repeat, you're right, he did, he played Jack Warner as Howard Hughes, which is another one of your point about the kind of garish Las Vegas scenes.
I actually felt a little bit like the central performance, which we haven't talked about yet, we need to talk about. Those Vegas scenes looked like, what was the phrase you were using to describe them? You had a kind of a negative phrase to describe.
Like stock footage?
Well, not just the stock footage stuff, just the feel of Vegas felt more garish than I imagine Vegas is, and it felt cheap.
But it also at the same time, felt like an outtake from Scorsese's film The Aviator.
And this film is so strange because some of it is actually quite good, and some of it is so beyond terrible that it's a bit like, my friend James Allison said if there were two orchestras playing in a room, and one of them was playing Wagner and the
other was playing Vaughan Williams, you wouldn't be able to hear the Vaughan Williams. The badness of this film overwhelms anything good about it. And that's what I think about Dennis Quaid's central performance.
I think I've hit upon something. I think while you were talking, I was paying attention. Don't get me wrong.
In the United States, there are some places that are sports crazy. They're like they're all about, it was even a TV show called Friday Night Lights, all about high school sports.
And in some places, you go to Texas and you will see high schools that have million dollar stadiums. This is for a high school. We're talking for teenagers.
Imagine if you had a film, imagine if you're watching a theater production, but it was a million dollar production, like a high school theater production.
And it just turned out there were millions of dollars available to high school students to do something. And some high school students are talented and some are not. That's kind of what this film feels like, that kind of jump.
Well, we're going to talk about the performance of Dennis Quaid.
Which is...
He's going to be a big star.
Half brilliant, half caricature, and if there's a third half, he feels like the spitting image puppet of Reagan that shows up two-thirds of the way through the film. And I don't want to diss the guy.
He's a person who, like a lot of actors, there's only so many actors who can have a consistently high quality career for decades and decades and decades.
You know, it seems to me that the high quality Hollywood career of a leading actor or leading actress doesn't last more than about 10 years, if that.
There's very, very few people who get the chance to work at that level of quality for long, unless they are character actors. You know, if you want to have longevity with quality, be a character actor.
And if you want to work every year, you're going to have to make choices you might not be happy with. Dennis Quaid is a good actor. Ronald Reagan is a hard character to play, like any kind of iconic public figure is a hard character to play.
But there are scenes in this film where even in the course of the scene, it feels like he's in two different movies at the same time. And I don't think that's all his fault.
I think the kind of trappings around him make it look like, you say, a naked gun film, like the sequence of the very first scene of the first naked gun film where all the world leaders, the Queen Elizabeth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev are
Yes.
Where he feels like that.
And then there's scenes where-
Margaret Thatcher.
Oh my gosh, Leslie Ann Donne.
I like Leslie Ann Donne's in movies. This is Margaret Thatcher in a naked gun film.
In a naked gun movie, yeah, yeah.
It's really something. And I take what you're saying about how hard it is to maintain a certain level. And folks, younger listeners won't know, Dennis Quaid was a star.
Huge star.
When Dennis Quaid was younger, the same thing had, this is like a Cyndi Lauper and Madonna thing.
Cyndi Lauper and Madonna both got big at the same time. And it was a coin flip. It felt like who's going to be bigger, Cyndi Lauper or Madonna, and then Madonna, Clipster, you know, by orders of magnitude.
Dennis Quaid was going to be a huge star. It was like Dennis Quaid and Tom Cruise. There was a huge amount of investment in Hollywood.
And you said it's like kind of an overarching, you know, the media of Hollywood, the magazines, the TV show, a huge investment in, it's going to be a huge hit, this film, Great Balls of Fire.
Dennis Quaid, as a real life, as Jerry Lee Lewis, real life singer, and it tanked. And I don't know if he ever quite recovered from that.
Innerspace, a film that I loved, directed by Joe Dante, when they did tests, when they did test screenings for Innerspace, the production companies, the studio was overjoyed, the test scores were higher than Return of the Jedi.
This was going to be a huge hit, nothing, didn't do anything. So he never quite, he was going to be a big star, and he was for a while. And then you just sort of feel a skidding.
There's some sort of artistic corruption at some level. And it's interesting to be the makeup job on his face as Reagan, because he has the face in this film of somebody who feels that art uses this kind of look to show corruption.
It's like a Goya etching. It looks like a corrupt figure. Now, some of that may be the problem of fact, that throughout this film, there's de-aging.
I used that term loosely with him and John Voight and others.
I mean, now, what do you mean by corruption? I mean, you clearly don't mean moral corruption.
I mean, there's a tradition in fine art of showing moral corruption as... There's a physical manifestation on the face. This is sort of desiccated corpulence, and those words are contradictory, but that's kind of the vibe I'm talking about.
You're not leveling that kind of allegation about Dennis Quaid.
You're just recognizing it's what happened. I mean, Penelope Ann Miller, who plays Nancy, who's an actress I've missed. I mean, she was in a couple of huge films.
She was a bit fantastic in Carlito's Way.
The Shadow.
And it's just bad. It seems to me it's bad luck. It's not about talent.
You know, I photographed her on a film set.
I was a film set photographer for a while when I was younger. And she's great. And she's good in this film doing what she's being told to do.
But again, it's like a high school production. There's no nuance. There's no subtlety there.
Again, it's like a naked gun picture.
Okay, well, we're gonna talk now. I hope I'm gonna invite you to talk about one of your favorite topics and mine.
And that is, of course, the filmography of xander Berkley.
Let's talk about xander Berkley, George Schultz.
Yeah, it's George Schultz. I don't know if xander Berkley ever woke up and said, You know, I really, when I'm older, want to play George Schultz. I hope he's enjoying that new pool that this film pays for.
Surely, that could be the only reason. You know, they talk about Communists infiltrating America in one scene, and they close up of a photo of Oppenheimer. The very first leftist in Hollywood.
We speak, I think it's supposed to be Dalton Trumbo. He's like a gay caricature.
Yeah. Do you know how you know it's supposed to be Dalton Trumbo?
They say, Hey, listen, Dalton Trumbo. Yes. They call him Dalton.
They're friends, but I call it, listen, Gareth Higgins. Let me tell you, very realistic.
So let's talk about one of your favorite topics on mind, and that is, of course, the idolatrous monarchical dialogues in the Hebrew Bible, which connect deeply to this film because here's the question. In the Hebrew Bible.
I'm here to answer all questions.
The Israelites demand a king. And the word comes from God as a bad idea. You get a king, it's actually going to take away your freedom to discern things for yourselves, and you're going to be storing up trouble for yourself in the future.
And they get a king and, you know, lo and behold, that's exactly what happens. Jett, you've often referred to me as your spiritual advisor. I like to think of you as my philosophical guru.
Great.
Why do people want a king?
And why do a lot of people in the US who pride themselves on the American Revolution narrative and getting rid of the monarchy, behave as if the presidency is a monarchy and they like it that way?
Well, I'll take the second question first. The problem they set up-
Alex, will you?
Yes. Well, here's the thing.
Here's the problem. What are you willing to bet?
I'm going to go for the double bonus points. And big double.
Well, the problem, of course, is that, I guess this rejection of the king, yeah, that sounds great, but in places like Britain and France, they split the idea of the figurehead of the nation with the actual governing.
So in the UK, you've got the monarchy, you've got that person off to the side, they represent all of the UK, the person who happens to be the prime minister, that person works for a political party.
In France, for instance, they would have the president, and then the prime minister.
And the US doesn't have that system, so we have this weird situation in which the president is also the leader of the party, and then they also have to represent all peoples, and then those are contradictory.
So there was mistakes were made, like the electoral college. Yes. Hey, that person's only worth three-fifths of me.
I don't know if they said it in that voice. See me in my stage production of Reagan, coming soon, dinner theater at the gilded.
Why? I mean, I understand that that's why it happened.
Why do people want a king?
Why do people want it?
I'll tell you.
And steel man it. Steel man your answer.
Okay. I don't know what steel man your answer. I mean, I know Stalin means steel man.
It's the opposite of straw man.
Oh, wow.
That's good. I feel as your philosophical advisor, I should know this. Listen, I'm what they call the sandwich.
I'm in a sandwich situation, okay, in the US. What does that mean? That means I'm at an age where I'm taking care of my elderly mother who's in her eighties and all that entails.
And I've got two kids who are 11 and 12. And I've got multiple jobs. And my fence has fallen down in my property here in the East Mountains.
And nobody put in the chickens at the coop last night. So the chickens, the coyotes could have got them. And I've got the flat tire in my daughter's bike.
And she wants to do a sleepover with Andy. And Andy's dad, Justin, is a little bit, I mean, he seems like a nice guy, but I don't know him. And I got a lot going on.
No wonder you like Beetlejuice.
If there was a king, I would have a lot.
Just someone, could someone just take care of it? Can someone just take care of things, please? That's it.
I'm stressed out.
Yeah.
I'm exhausted. Could someone just take care of that? Did you get me, Gareth?
Can we have a king?
So, and, and, you know, of course, along with what I said earlier, it's good to have people who steward structures of any shepherds more than kings. Wouldn't you like a shepherd instead?
Well, they could help with the chickens.
Wouldn't a shepherd actually meet your needs? Not only the meat for the chickens to be cooped.
Maybe, maybe you'd have a shepherd that would read them a bedtime story too.
Listen, man, first thing I learned, never name your chickens. Why the kids name the damn chickens were going to have to eat them or their coyotes are going to eat them again and again. Do you know how many chickens I buried?
I had Barnaby, Gloria, I had to put down because she got hurt by the rooster. Cookies, cream, Jesse, I can't even. But that's my initial thought.
We can do a separate podcast about this. But it goes to the heart of the movie, is getting back to Reagan, right? This desire for some saintly king.
Sure.
And it's also why people feel hurt whenever their king is criticized because they've projected their desires onto them, they felt safe with them.
And frankly, when any of us find out something bad about someone who we felt cared for, we're going to feel that way.
It's an extensuous part of it, or at least part of the same continuum, where if I watch a film and I'm deeply moved by it, and the person that I'm with just hates the film and doesn't regulate their communication about that, it feels worse when
you're in the midst of that vulnerable experience after you've been really moved by something. I'm sure I've talked about it on the previous iteration of the show in the past, but it was such an important moment in my life.
I want to talk about it briefly again. There's a movie called Warrior with Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton and Nick Nolte. I can't remember.
Did you see that movie? Good picture. About two-thirds of the way through that film, my partner Brian turned to me and he was going to say, this is so cliched.
But when he turned to me to say that, he saw that there were tears in my eyes. I wasn't crying because it was so cliched. I was crying because I was moved.
That's about the performances.
You watched that movie for the performance.
Yeah, and there are.
There are moments. Yeah, sorry to interrupt you. The point of the narrative is that it's like Avatar.
You have a cliched bare bones plot so that we don't have to think about it. We know what's going on and we just focus on Tom Hardy.
And here's the thing, like while I don't think it's as cliched as Brian thought it was, I actually think he's absolutely right. It is cliched.
And if you're watching it at that level, and some people, that's just the way they watch things, that's what you're going to feel.
But clearly, he did me a beautiful service when he turned, saw the tears in my eyes, and decided I'm not going to say that this is cliched. Instead, he just took my hand and reassured me while I wept at this very moving film.
Another way, he said to me, look, I'd be happy to tell you what I think of that film, but don't ask me in a couple of days. Ask me in a couple of days, because right now, what matters most is you're having this vulnerable experience.
It was a significant moment in my life. It also taught me something. I think about how to talk about movies with other people.
And so there are people who will have been deeply moved by this Reagan film, either Reagan fans or frankly, I'm sure there are people and I have some people in my life who've been experiencing similar journeys the way the film does treat Alzheimer's
is quite touching at the end. And there's nothing we're saying here that's intended to take away from that. It's just an explanation of if you put your trust in princes, you're going to be disappointed.
The problem is that we're not providing an alternative proposal for that, because of the opposite of not having a wise authority figure, a wise shepherd in your life is that you're the only one in charge. That's not going to work either.
That's a recipe for unhealthy isolation, isolationism at best, and an aggressive demeanor toward everybody else at worst.
If I had known that during our review of Reagan, it was required that we develop and spread to the world alternative systems of governance and peoples that create a sense of incredible equity.
A community hermeneutic?
Yes. If I had known that, I probably would have prepared. But I would have gotten some plans together or some concepts of plans.
Do you have a concept of a plan for our next show?
In all sincerity, no.
To ask about, it's churlish to not acknowledge Reagan did play a substantial role in ending that iteration of the Cold War, and it is worthy of note, and it's important to explore and examine him saying, I'm going to end this with words and not with
weapons. Clearly, the threat of weapons was there and the threat of sanctions was there, but that's got to be noted.
I appreciate the film was called Reagan, and yes, he was a contributing factor. Yes. But, yeah, this is called The Film Talk, so let's talk about the film here.
The film presents his action, his words as doing all the things. So Carter is no longer president because he said made one quip on a debate stage.
There you go again. Isn't that what he said?
Yes, he said that, yes. The Berlin Wall comes down, communism ends after he leaves office because he said tear down that wall.
Thereby, in the film's world, there's not the work of, let's say, 300,000 people giving their lives, their times, their passions, their careers to solving these issues over many decades.
The film is so simplistic in its understanding of things that you could say, oh, do they really believe that or they're just trying to make a kind of a feel-good film?
Again, this is a film that when somebody gets broken up with, the band happens to be playing Stormy Weathers. I think that's insightful and that sounds flipping and disparaging, but I think that's true. Yes, he was a figure in American politics.
There's no question.
Dennis Quaid played him.
But here's what we need. Jimmy Carter is revered by so many now, people realize what an astonishing pro... Where's the Carter movie?
Oh, hold on. I got a thought. I got a thought here, Gareth, live on the show.
New film coming up, Matt Damon. Is Jimmy Carter in The Farmer? No?
Who else could play? Who else could? Carter.
Did he get Hanks? It's got to be Damon or Hanks.
It's not Damon, and it's not Hanks' kind of...
There's nobody.
Philip Seymour Hoffman could have done it.
Jimmy Carter could do it.
Let's not add to his burdens. Any final thoughts on Reagan before we close down this very, very special show? The guy that played lifeguard Reagan is good.
There's a... folks, it's kind of much like... You remember the original Superman Richard Donner?
We have a different person play Superman for an hour. We get a young Reagan for a lot.
We do get a young Reagan.
He's great.
He is good. Stripey t-shirt lifeguard. There's always...
And all presidential biopics set in the 19th or the...
set in the 20th century require an early scene in which someone is wearing a stripy lifeguard t-shirt because it does appear that the Hollywood vision of a president is you have to be a lifeguard at least once.
This film, when they have flashbacks to when he's young, I swear to you, dear listener, they put a sepia tone filter over it and they add a big heavy vignette around the edges because it's old timey.
God bless him.
Any other final thoughts?
It's possible. It's not only possible to make a nuanced biopic, but an ambivalent historical figure. It's actually more respectful to that figure if you tell the truth about them.
Look at Sansa Lam's late great Hannibal Lecter.
That's nuanced. Folks, don't forget, if you want to get our bonus, this was going to be a bonus show, but we're-
No, this is an unbonus. Let's unbonus it.
We are going to put this out free, but if you do want our bonus shows and our archive shows from 10 years of the show, you can go to patreon.com/thefilmtalk. We're also on Facebook, Facebook, facebook.com/thefilmtalk.
Any last thoughts? That was me. You just said we're also on Facebook, Facebook, facebook.com.
That's wonderful.
Three times the filmic insight.
It's been a joy to talk with you about this film. It's a joy to watch films that are challenging to watch because I know I get to talk about them with you and learn from you.
If I needed a king in my life, I probably still wouldn't ask for it to be you, but I might let you be like the ground of his ear, the one who stands to the right hand side of the throne and whispers in the king's ear.
The one played by Peter Wingard in Flash Gordon, who says, I think it's time for you to do this or that kind of stuff. I'd have you in that role, an advisory, a regent advisory role.
The fence is falling down. I had to get on the back of the truck. I stood on the tailgate, put the tailgate down.
I'm there with the post holder. I'm fixing the fence. I don't have time.
If you want to support Jett in his fence angst, the best way to do that is indeed to go to patreon.com/thefilmtalk and become a paying subscriber.
But even if you don't, we love you.
We're grateful for you. We're thankful that you're here.
It's lovely to be in this conversation together. I've been Gareth Higgins.
I've been Jett Loe.
We'll keep talking next time.