Hello, 2026! 2025 In Review
A 'Supreme' Year For Movies: Industry News, Our 2025 Recap, and Preview of 2026
Benji and Luke start season two of the podcast by catching up on news from the movie industry, including the announcement of Jess Walter's bestselling novel So Far Gone coming soon to Netflix. They also discuss an essay from A.S. Hamrah in the New York Review of Books on the state of contemporary film criticism.
Then, they look back at the nine movies they've covered on the podcast in 2025 before catching up on all the movies they watched to close out the year, including a lengthy discussion of Marty Supreme.
Finally, they preview the year ahead for the podcast and announce the first movie they will feature in 2026.
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All Those Moments — Season 2 Kickoff (2026)
Since we last recorded a podcast together way back in 2025, I have seen the following movies for the first time. I'm not going to include my Christmas movies, but I did see all these movies for the first time. Bring her back, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Worst Person in the World, Materialists, 28 Years Later, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Jockey, Sing Sing, Zootopia 2, Wake Up Dead Man, Sentimental Value, and Marty Supreme. God.
My list is so much shorter than that, but you mentioning Christmas movies made me realize there's one more on my list that's not here. I don't even remember the name. It is one of those could have been made by Hallmark, but was actually made by Netflix. god. Christmas rom coms, one of the roughly hundred rom coms that have been made where a plucky American falls in love with a prince from a
fictional fucking European nation and falls in love at Christmas starring Lacey Chabert. Jesus Christ. You watched it? No, so we do for the for like the last three years, my friends and I have done basically a mystery science theater 3000 of for holiday movies. And we just get together, we have we break bread a week before Christmas and we watch just the worst Christmas like worst rom comm Christmas. Do you even know the name of the movie that you're talking about? I do not.
And I don't even know that I could look it up because not only are there a hundred salt of the earth American woman meets Prince of a fictional European nation, there are like five that hit star Lacey Chabert. Yeah, of course. All right, give me the rest of your list. Marty Supreme. We saw that together. Yes, we did. With my wife Ray. We did. Twenty eight years later, which I saw last night when I was choosing between either that or wake up dead man. Really glad you s told me to choose that one.
I saw most of Jay Kelly, really excited to talk about Noah Bombok with you on that at some point. have not seen Sentimental Value, but I'm dying to, even before I heard how much you loved it. Again, Wake Up Dead Man. I'm just gonna watch every Knives Out movie from here on out, regardless of how good they are, because I I think there's gonna be a decline in quality. I'm still gonna watch them because I think they're fun. And other than that, I've watched a a preposterous amount of TV. I'm rewatching Mad Men wanna talk about the cinematic nature of the first season with you.
Watching Dune Prophecy. I do not want to talk about this with you because you're such a snob. I'm watching Banshee, which is maybe the best television show ever created by Cinemax, in my opinion. I watched Task, which is a really beautiful Ray and I tried that one. We dipped after see one episode mostly just because we're like, I don't really care about these characters. We can talk yeah. Okay. And then I'm also watching The Pit, Noah Wiley returning to the ER, but not in like a really naturalistic
Pretty kind of brutal show of like almost like a procedural about people love it. I can't do medical dramas, but I may try. I did love house back in the day. Does that count? Is that a medical drama? I guess it is. Of course it is. This is the thing that's funny. Like something like House, this is actually kinda like house. These are procedurals. Okay. It's a medical procedural, right? You're like
You're solving a mystery of like why is this person blue? Why is this person like have Tourette syndrome? I did read the like situationally. Yeah, it's like sixteen hours in the ER area. It's it's one hour. It's kind of it's almost like do you remember that show, Gabriel Byrne show in treatment? Yeah, yeah. Where it's like there's thirty five episodes, but each episode is like fifteen fifty minute counseling session. Yeah, totally. this is fifteen episodes basically covering a shift in the ER in a single day. Really awesome. We obviously have a ton of catching up to do.
Yep. The year is 2026. This podcast is called All Those Moments. I'm Benji Wade. I'm Luke Baumgarten. Welcome to season two. Didn't actually know if that was gonna happen.
All those moments will be lost in time, by my life.
All those moments is still a podcast where we connect social, political, and cultural moments with moments from our favorite movies. Just like the Magic Lantern movie theater where we celebrate our love of cinema together, it is a thoroughly independent movie podcast, in case you've ever wondered that. I'm so glad to be back doing this, Luke. You too, man. I forgot to add one movie. Last night I watched the Andy Sandberg movie, Palm Springs. Wow.
With Ray. Have you seen that movie? I have friends who said it was good and it got kind of quashed by the pandemic. Totally destroyed by the pandemic. Yeah. I have not seen it, but I will use this in in this is going to be a theme in this episode, I think, to turn it toward a TV show I watched, one of my favorites of twenty twenty four, Kristen Miliotti, who's in Palm Springs, was also in The Penguin. I think that's gonna be her star turn. She's as good as Colin Farrell is in the penguin. She's more than half the reason I thought that was a great show.
Before we hit record, I was telling you that I'm pretty much out on superhero shit. I can't do it anymore. I just don't I have no fucks left to give about any of it. I do think the Bat Batman stuff is a little bit unique because he doesn't like have fucking x-ray vision or some shit. It's all gadgets and stuff, which I think is cool. And the whole like duality between him and it's got all this Freudian psychoanalytic shit happening. And Penguin's like penguin's basically a mob show. It's not really superhero y at all. So I may try it.
I thought that the Colin Farrell penguin in the Batman movie was really cool. It was one of the more memorable parts of that movie. So maybe I'll dip into it. But yeah, I thought Palm Springs was super cool. And I just want to say really quickly about it that it was not only killed by the pandemic in terms of its release and the timeline for it. It came out in the summer of 2020. Yeah. I think it went to Sundance in January. But watching that movie last night, I I had to pause it and I looked over and I was like,
Not only did the pandemic ruin its release, I don't think this movie's finished because there were moments where it was like odd audio mix of just vocal dialogue. Interesting. You did not hear any like incidental sound design, environment, ambiance, nothing, which is very unusual in any movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let alone like a a kind of silly sci-fi rom com.
'Cause it's a time loop movie. Is it just like screwball? Is it like hot rod or is there some is there like a seriousness to it at all? It has a tiny bit of gravity. Okay. And I think had they gone any further with it, it could have it could have backfired. Yeah, yeah. You'd be like, fuck it, Andy Sandberg. We're talking about I can only take him and like Conroe Malley and JK Simmons is in it too. It's dude, it's badass. I mean, I it's the only our friend, friend of the podcast, and our friend Chris Shepman. Yeah.
DM'd me. It's the only time Chris has ever DM'd about anything we've done on all those moments. He's like, no, this is a movie that I love. So I feel like we finally did something that reached for Shetman. But awesome. Anyway, yeah. By the way, real quick update: some housekeeping stuff. This is gonna be our last episode in this space. So anybody who likes to watch this podcast on YouTube, very video forward. Mostly we do this thing on YouTube so that we can get clips and stuff. I love doing clips, but yeah, this will be our last episode in this space.
I consider myself a fairly humorous and funny person. I think you're a pretty funny person, Luke, but but we don't need to have a stand up comedy backdrop. Totally. Yeah. Our like comedy seller sort of routine here is gonna go somewhere else. So be on the lookout for that. Yeah. we're recording this episode Friday, January sixteenth. should come out by the twentieth if I can edit it in time. Well that's a quick turn. Well, it'll we'll see, 'cause guess what I'm doing tomorrow. I'll pretend I don't see have the notes in front of me.
Well, we'll say this is for the listener. Guess what listener? Anyone who's seen the podcast, every once in a while I wear Portland Trailblazers hats like I am right now. Currently. I have never been to an NBA game. Is that crazy? Well, I told you I went to my first Mariners game last year and I was like, Why have I never done this before? Which is f dude, I've been to a dozen baseball games. Cardinals, Giants. I saw Barry Bonds, he hit a home run like a few feet from me when he was roided the fuck out. Yeah. Like in four, I think that was, maybe five. I mean, he was extremely roided at the time.
I've seen so many baseball games. Never seen. I've seen one NFL game, not memorable. Don't recommend. Not into the I don't like football anyways, but n obviously tons of pro soccer. Yeah, but I've never seen an NBA game. As much as we taught we're evangelizing about going to see movies in person, I love live sports just as much. Even same like I I played baseball, I loved baseball. I briefly had a dayliance where I was so into fantasy baseball that I was in danger of losing my job as a journalist because I was spending so much time like
moving my relievers around. That was twenty years ago. That's the last time I paid close attention to Major League Baseball. I still went and watched Ichiro get his jersey retired and it was like it's a top 10 moment of the last decade, even though I'm not that big of a baseball fan. Yeah. So I've never been to an NBA game. They're playing against the Lakers. So I may see two absolute GOATs if both Luca and LeBron play. Yeah. Blah blah blah. Anyway, I'm going to a basketball game. Let's preview what we're gonna do on this episode. Luke.
You ready for that? Give it to me. Okay. We're gonna talk a little bit of shit about the movie industry and catch up on some kind of news and notes and things that have just come across the timeline for each of us. This is not a normal episode in case anybody didn't wasn't clear about this, or not what we did in season one. We're gonna look back a little bit at twenty twenty five and the first nine movies. I counted I had to count double check how many we've actually done that we have featured. We'll catch up a little This is a solid first season, man. Nine. That's good. I'm super stoked on it. And that doesn't include the filmmakers that we got.
got to talk to, which we'll also catch up on a little bit. we'll also talk about the movies we have seen since we recorded. We previewed that a little bit at the top intro of the episode. And we're also gonna preview what we'll do in 2026. Talk about the first movie that we will do for 2026. Don't want to step on that right now. We'll make that a kind of reveal. Yep. And we're gonna do a couple things differently. Not much. I think the format will mostly stay the same, but we're gonna try to right size our effort.
For it. So that'll come at the end of the episode where we'll just talk about the couple small changes from the podcast that make this a st sustainable effort. A couple things we were doing, and I talked to a great friend of the podcast, his name's Jack. He has a podcast called Made in England. And we were swapping some notes about doing movie podcasts and the topic of like doing, you know, plot details came up. And he's like, Yeah, I get it. That's something I ask myself all the time. Like, how much
I don't want to be anything like Griffin Newman and David Sims and Blank Check, where they do these painstakingly detailed things bec partly because their brains are filled with knowledge about the industry and actors and their filmographies and whatever. I don't pretend to have that type of encyclopedia. They might have researchers or so you like there are people. they 100% there's a staff that supports the encyclopedic shit they do. Ben Hosley, their producer, is a stud and he does a ton of stuff, but they have other people too.
Also, they work in the industry. Anyways, I don't want to even go near the whole like plot point by plot point specifics thing anymore. I think it's where we've gotten gummed up. So I've kind of already told people what we're gonna talk about, but and just in general, like you like I could sit down and we have sat not recording things for like two or three hours talking about movies, and it's some of the funnest stuff I've yeah, you know, do with my friends. There was like a stress around feeling like I had to try to catch up to your
Literal, like could have been a film professor, knowledge of like if if you would have done a little bit more schooling, like PhD, like well, people don't know. I ducked out on an MFA. Yeah. Which was gonna be to teach. And so glad I didn't. So like I was stressing myself out trying to like catch up to your you were calling things this is my syllabus. And I'm like, I I was like, This is psychotic. Yeah. Your syllabus, brother. And then like I was I was the one that was like leaning too much into the plot stuff. So we were just like, I should be having a
two hour long conversation with my friend that I love. Exactly. And I'm stressed out about having the same two hour conversation because I maybe didn't watch enough of X ex filmmakers back catalog or whatever. So just in the best shit that came from our podcast in the first season in those nine movies was us just talking some shit. Yeah and having a couple ideas of what we want to talk about and giving some thoughts and perspectives and, you know, both kind of our physical reaction to movies, but also sort of our
intellectual you know, read of them and doing some intertext stuff. So yeah, we are going to probably more properly right size that side of things instead of the Wikipedia-ish shit. Yeah. We'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the podcast when we preview what we're going to do in the first movie that we'll announce that we'll we'll cover on all those moments. But let's start going down the list of things that we wanted to do. Yeah. Starting with some movie industry stuff. Okay. So
I saw an article by now friend of the podcast, filmmaker Carson Lund, director of EFIS. He shared this article that was written by an author, an author who's written a bunch of books about movie criticism in the movie industry. His name is A. S. Hamra, really thoughtful person, great writer. And this article that came out in New York Books, the article's called A Total Breakdown of All the Easter Eggs and the kind of byline summary, whatever you want to call it, is.
Major film studios embracing AI, newspapers announcing the death of movie going, critics devoid of values. All of this can instill a great sense of defeat, and we have to write against it. wow. Okay. It's a super good piece. And there's a quote I pulled from it that I'll just use to sort of catapult us into a conversation about what we're doing with this podcast, quite honestly. In the publicly traded world of Netflix and the breathless business reporting that follows it around.
The growing success of art houses and revival houses is an inconvenience best ignored. Since news reports about the resurgence of these movie theaters cannot compete with stories about big tech and its oligarchs, and now their obsession with AI, it's understandable why news of the continued existence of movie going has not permeated public consciousness. Widespread disbelief in the cinema is not amenable to hearing about it.
The I just had a conversation before I came up here while I was grabbing coffee with a a music writer friend of mine from Spokane talking who's now 35. Yeah. basically has a band and he's like, it's I basically I'm ripping off built to spill, whatever. there is an entire underground all ages like indie rock movement in Spokane that nobody's really covering, but it's just all these kids who probably grew up listening to their
Parents built the spill records who are like showing up in person. So it feels like very parallel to this. Like the success of art houses is inconvenient. And where you're talking about AI. Yeah. Everybody's thinking about music scenes in terms of like Jesse Wells getting big on TikTok, writing about like songs about United Health and stuff, and you know, getting a a Grammy nomination off of that. There's also this other thing that we're trying to like cultivate on the movie side that's already happening.
In Little Spokane, Washington, of the biggest all ages shows people have seen in a generation, because a bunch of 16-year-olds want to watch their kids play or their friends play four chords. It's kind of got me hopeful, dude. Yeah. And I think there's a moment in this piece from A.S. Hamra where he says he ran into like one of his favorite critics. I think he may reference this person so directly that it wasn't hard to figure out who it was. But the person kind of shit on modern movie criticism was like basically like it's a dead.
doesn't exist. There's no point doing it anymore. And I think effectively that's what he's trying to write. When he says writing against it, that's part of like what he's describing is discourse around movies is so fucking stupid right now. Have you seen like what's happening with this one battle after another argument that people are having? No. it's it's nauseating. And it's what is it? Give me give me the give me the It's these dude, Brianna Gray. okay. Okay. Started shitting on one battle after another using the jungle pussy scene.
Sure. And then it turned into this back and forth. The bank guys say as mocking, basically mocking black activists specifically and like black power movement and so forth. It turned into this whole back and forth. And we could we could probably just talk about it right now while it's top of mind. Bernie Staffer, yeah. Bernie Staffer. But the funny thing about her is she was always the black woman who was
Preaching class consciousness, not identity pol like. No, she was very anti identity. No, and people are calling her out for It's like this seems inconsistent with being anti class anti identity. Like she was getting in fights with black liberals, like Kamala. So that's really interesting. It is interesting. And it feels all very casual and surface level and kind of weightless, some of this criticism. It's not to say that one battle after another isn't subject to some really meaningful criticism, but that's not the kind of criticism that's happening.
It's all this identity politics shit. And I feel like the same thing happened with Murdy Supreme. Anyway, to circle back to the the point of this piece by A. S. Hamra, I just think that meaningful discourse, people really, really doing some work to understand and to provide a perspective and a good read about movies, I hope never goes away. And it's partly what we try to do with this podcast. Because a lot of stuff is kind of payola now. Yeah. Well, that's probably unfair. But when it comes to like navigating
That space between access and filmmakers. Yeah, like what do you have to do to get a filmmaker? And how mean can you be? How I don't I haven't been following this much either, but like the whole Quentin Tarantino thing where he's like seriously, like shitting on Paul Dano and stuff. It's like that has become it's like gossip. It's tabloids. Yeah. It's not about and it is like, well, Quentin Tarantino's always been a dick. Pauldano's actually a good actor. That's the deepest it gets. It's like, okay, that's this is what we're doing now. That doesn't yeah, that's terrible.
Well, and I think about it a lot with what we've done so far with the filmmakers that we've chatted with. In fact, the biggest trust fall for us, just to peel back the curtain a little bit, when we talked to Julian Glander, yeah, that had been arranged before we saw the movie. Yeah. You know? That was yeah, that could have gone poorly. That could have gone super poorly because I'm not you know me really well. Like I'm not very good at being like, Yeah, I loved your movie if I didn't. Yeah.
It thank God that was like an eleven out of ten experience watching the movie. I still think about and get quite weepy thinking about my 11-year-old daughter who watched it with us, got her the soundtrack on vinyl, The Boys Go to Jupiter for Christmas. that's cute. she fucking lit up. She was so stoked. Yeah. But yeah, like I've thought about that in context of when we want to interview and have conversations with filmmakers. And honestly, like this kind of this ties into like what we're trying to do here, but it also ties into like giving ourselves a break about everything. It's like
I like the idea of occasionally talking to a filmmaker if we want to. Like I was just talking about how like doing the Benji Wade syllabus was stressful to me. I think always being ready to do the audience stuff downstairs is was a little stressful to you. It's also a little stressful to me too. So you to be on while you're also trying to pay attention to movie. We're not gonna do that a hundred percent of the time anymore. If yeah, we're gonna try to, or we're gonna get some help. You know, even the conversation with Adolfo Veloso, the cinematographer from Train Dreams, I loved that conversation so much. I want to
use this to come full circle to this essay or this piece from A.S. Hamra about how no matter what happens, whether there's an audience participation on an episode or we have a filmmaker that we chat with, you and I really do want to do meaningful conversations. It doesn't mean we're always gonna feel super like I don't I'd always also don't want to feel like my takes or perspectives are just fixed. No, I will change my mind. I might watch one of these movies again and go, wait a minute.
Cause on the way out of watching Marty Fucking Supreme, you and Ray, my wife, who we ganged up on you so hard. because I and dude, I can't wait to talk about it. we'll we'll talk about when we talk about Marty Supreme. But my mind kind of it's not like my mind changed. That's not the way to describe it, but just kind of there was a contextual fluidity to the way I was reading the movie that I really loved sitting down and chatting about with the two of you afterward.
Right. And so that's what we don't do with this podcast no matter what. We can promise you that we to the point that A.S. Hamra says about we have to write against this perspective of just like hot take, surface level, dog shit, throw it into a tweet and hit send. Like I don't want to be part of that.
It's just like the the zero nutritional value of the film content. Also, it's like I kind of don't want to talk about it's so much about the economics of the business too. Like even film criticism sort of starts with like box office stuff now. Or like or that's the teaser or like the clickbaity part of it is like whatever. It's like I actually do want to talk about the business of film because I'm kind of like an artist who became a business guy to keep doing the stuff that I wanted to do. Yeah.
But the way that it gets talked about just in terms of that, like that horse race thing, like the numb the balls and the numbers, another version of that, like surface level, so devoid of content, empty calories. Why did I waste my time worrying about how much money House of Dynamite made or something like that? You know, why can't we be talking about the stuff we talked about about House of Dynamite? Is this even a movie we should have been making in twenty twenty five, right? Totally. And at the same time.
There's been something that I have found quite challenging about my where I'm at innately as a person who watches movies versus how I kind of what I'm aspiring to be as somebody who watches films. And here's what mean by that. The callo younger, certainly in my twenties and probably in my 30s as well, version of me would have probably been a little harder on train dreams. It's maybe it's more sentimental than a 20-something would want watch. Probably that and I might have just been a little bit like
you got 80 to 90 percent toward like what I think at the time is like a young lover of movies like Malik or Tarkovsky. Yeah. And I might have held that against it and just been kind of like, meh, you know? Dude, this is a the exact same thing. I was talking about that music writer friend in terms of music writing. Same deal. And even the way that I actually feel like the most I've shit on a movie on this podcast so far, I think was highest to lowest. Yeah. Followed by House of Dynamite.
One and two, like one in one day almost. Real close. Yeah. Didn't really love either. But I also want to be very careful about not shitting on something just for the sake of shitting on it, which I don't think I do anyways. I'm pretty informed about my my perspective. We did an okay job. We did okay, but there's there's this part of me still that wants to just honor and respect the fact that movies are kind of a miracle right now with where things are at in the business. So if I ever talk about box office stuff, part of me is just going, God, is there any hope?
Because if Ari Aster continues making movies that cost fifty million dollars and they make ten, that's troubling. So I want to talk about it, but I want to talk about in the context of like we when we talked with Carson about patronage and how how are these fucking things gonna get made anymore? Yeah. So House of Dynamite, I just are you know, or highest to lowest, I want to be able to be clear to go, all right, there's this didn't work, this didn't work, whatever, but also this did, and I'm glad it got made.
Cuz fuck ASAP Rocky was incredible. Princess Nokia was amazing.
So let's do a a quick update about if you saw our episode about train dreams with local Spokane author Jess Walter. We were 20 minutes away from finishing that episode. And Jess slips me a note. I'm like, I'm not re I I literally picked it up and looked at Jess and said, Jess, this is not a it's not live radio, dude. He's like, I've got to go. And he was telling us even before we walked in to record that he's in conversations with Hollywood and he literally left our
Train Dreams episode to go take a call from Hollywood. I'm just putting Hollywood in air quotes, but it has been announced that his novel that came out in June of last year, called So Far Gone, is coming to Netflix as a miniseries. Yeah. Or as a limited series. Limited series. What do they call that now? They call it a limited series. I'm like, why is it not called a miniseries anymore? Limited. Because mini is small. Jesus. His novel, best-selling novel, is being adapted by the creator of the
TV show Defending Jacob. His name is Mark Bombach. He's also the writer of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Jess is going to serve as an executive producer alongside Liz Garbus, Dan Kogan. Bomback will serve as the showrunner, writer, and executive producer. I really wish, and I brought this up to you in a text that I had read So Far Gone before Jess came on the podcast to talk about.
Robert Granier in Train Dreams, A Loner in the Woods in Northern Idaho. So far Gone is a book about Spokane and basically Northeastern Washington. And a loner who's living in the woods. Well the main character, Reese Kinnick, is a loner in the woods living in a cabin. And I was like, God dang it, if I had just known. Contemporary though. Not Robert Granier's turn of the nineteenth century. I hope it gets filmed in Spokane. Spokane is a key character, Northern Idaho, key character in the
world building of So Far Gone. So I'm very curious to see what's gonna happen. So it has been ordered like six episodes. They are casting. This is happening. I just can't wait to find out where they're gonna film it. Yeah. Because I really hope it ends up being a local production. We got to talk a lot about the local filmmaking community that participated in the making of Train Dreams. So I really the audience when we watched Train Dreams was a lot of the local people who worked on the film because it was the premiere night. Yeah.
And there was just to your point about like the goodwill, just like the good vibes of like going to see a movie that had been filmed in our area with a lot of the people that worked on it was like it kind of like made my heart grow three sides. totally. And the greatness of Train Dreams too. And the fact that it's so beloved and the way audiences have responded to it has been such a cool part of it. So please, Netflix, if you're out there listening, I know you're not. Make it in Spokane.
Make it in northern Idaho. The backdrop is a key character in So Far Gone. I honestly think it can't be made anywhere. So what I'm worried about is that they'll do it the thing where they it might get shot in Vancouver, BC, and they're gonna pretend it's Spokane. They'll do a couple drone shots of Spokane. That'll be really fucking lame. But I could I wouldn't be surprised if that happens. Or then maybe they'll do some second unit and stuff. Well, and in fairness, I do think because like The Last of Us and all this stuff was shot in like Alberta and BC and wherever, the southern part of
Canada and the border areas. They're really, really equipped for big movies and big television shows. Like so many, like beast, like British Columbia is basically the Hollywood of Canada. But then again, I don't care. Make it here. Please, God, make it here. Please, God, make it here. All right. one more little quick Hollywood update. I mentioned our friend Carson Lund, the director and writer of Ethos. His childhood best friend, Mike Bosta, who was a co-writer of Ethos.
And also like first AD also did sound. It's really funny. Like he had a bunch of roles on Ephis. they're best friends since they were kids. They grew up in New Hampshire together. He's now directing a movie called Raccoon, which we knew when we interviewed and had a log lines come out for it, and the star of the the movie has come out. So here's what it here's what it says about raccoon if you go to IMDB. Married ad salesman.
Bernard Wayland flounders through dive bars, strip malls, and other roadside pit stops in search of forbidden pleasures over the course of a three day dental convention. And who's starring in it? Spokane City Council member Paul Dillon is going to be very excited to know it's Tim Heideker. Tim Heideker. So that just came out because I don't even know how I've IndieWire, I think, had an article. And I mentioned this to a friend of the podcast, producers in
co-hosts and founders of Chapo Trap House, Chris Wade, Will Meneker, Amber Frost. I do think they're involved in in Raccoon. Kind of want to get Chris and Will, possibly and Amber too. I would love to have them on the podcast and just talk about what they're doing with like supporting movies like Ephis and now Raccoon. Yeah, that's the update there. I think that movie will it'll probably come out in 2026. So hopefully we can have Mike Bosta and Carson come on the podcast too. Yeah. Hell yeah. Let's take a quick break.
And then we'll talk about the first season of all those moments and just do kind of a a recap of some of the highs and lows of our first nine movies that we talked about. Sounds great.
Okay, Luke. I just wanted to talk a little bit about our first nine movies. I guess we technically had eleven episodes. This will be episode twelve. Nine movies, eleven episodes. You we can take this anywhere we want. I just wanted to kind of do a little bit of a I feel nostalgic a little bit about season one and can I start? Yeah, go. So looking at this list here. Yeah. We talked a lot before we started this thing about doing repertory films or like old films. Yeah.
There's only one on this list. It's the damn united. It's the first one. The very first one we did. And we kind of were like, maybe not so much. We also talked about doing TV shows. I know. And we ca you were like, you vetoed TV shows almost immediately. Yeah. and then yeah, I I also maybe do want to do repertory stuff, but there's also yeah, a lot of good n new cinema coming out that's not getting a ton of juice. Like listen, always go to Jupiter. Here's my promise. If we build this thing big enough, anybody listening that cares about this enough, support us on
Patreon, do whatever you want to do. If we could build this audience big enough to where I could go, all right, let's do this what I've I thought about doing. I really feel committed to this idea. We'll do a repertory movie and then put it on Patreon, just for Patreon subscribers or whatever. Yeah. And again, it then it almost becomes maybe let it be audience choice or something. Well, and then it almost becomes like a thing where, you know, I've had a couple ideas of things I've wanted to do. I'm I don't have any issue like bringing them up here. and then put those on Patreon. And it might just be something that feels personal to me and I don't
care if it ends up being something that doesn't get seen very much. We could still create clips from that and then go if you want to see the whole thing, go check it out. That's how we would like turn this into a business if we wanted to. Right, exactly. But for now we're doing this because we love movies, we love the magic lantern. We want to get out of the house and go enjoy movies together. But yeah, like here's an example of what we've talked about and why it used to be movies and TV shows. No one's ever heard this on the podcast is we wanted to do an episode about the TV show Andor, which is fucking outrageously good. Yep.
It's one of the best television shows ever made. And do a little bit of an intertextual read against some of the French resistance films. and including like Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows or Bonte Corvo's Battle of Algiers. Battle of Algiers was the one I really wanted to do. Yeah. And quickly calling back to the Brianne Joy Gray thing and the one battle after another thing, when you're talking about like that was a was that scene making fun of black radicals?
I think it was. Yeah. is it okay for a white filmmaker to make fun of black radicals? I am not the right person to answer that question. But you know what he also did? Made fun of white radicals. Totally. The fact that when Sean Penn comes for Leonardo DiCaprio, he is smoking out for like the thousand the a hundred thousandth time in fifteen years and reciting lines from Battle of Algiers as he's laying on the couch. Totally. I don't know enough about Thomas Pynchon and I don't wanna we could just go on a whole tangent about this, but
I feel like it's fairly safe to say that Pynchon is even complicated as far as the source that this was based that the screenplay was based on. In order to make this a contemporary film, Paul P. T. Anderson had to basically make it an alternate history of America. Yeah. Which which Pynchon has done lots of kind of quasi sci-fire alternate reality type stuff to take a Pynchon book that was meant to critique radical like left wing radicalism.
In say the early 70s after the student movement in the 60s, and be like, okay, now let's talk about the failures of left-wing radicalism in 2025, say, right? Yeah. I've already said this, and I think we're gonna talk a little bit about it when we go into chatting about Marty Supreme, but this is just the discourse that I can't stand. It's effortless, it's coloring book, it's reductionist, it's all these things, and it's why I really liked talking about that piece from Assamra. But anyway, I do think doing a battle of Alders and a with a little bit of
With a little bit of andor in the mix would be a fun maybe it is a fun Patreon episode or something. Yeah. It it would be. Another one we've talked about doing is one of my favorite movies ever. It's probably just outside my kind of Mount Rushmore of movies would be Steven Soderbergh's nineteen ninety-four King of the Hill. yeah. And comparing it you want to do with Home Alone? Comparing it to Home Alone. Yeah. Like let's do that for a Christmas episode this year. So to get back to the structure of what we're doing and why we've kind of gone this direction, I think it's because
It feels good to just look at things that are being programmed at the Magic Lantern. I feel committed to that as a principal. I gotta be honest. I don't wanna go to the AMC to watch something. It doesn't mean that I'm not gonna watch those movies. I just mean I really like going down to the Magic Lantern and sitting in our local independent movie theater and talking about the movies that are programmed there. So we participate in conversation with our friend Joe, who manages the Magic Lantern. So yeah, anything else you wanna say about the movies that we did in the in just the first season before we talk talk a little bit about the movies we've seen since then.
Do anything jump out? I the mixes it's like weird. Yeah, it's fascinating. So weird. I love that we got a doc in there. So glad we did Jeff Buckley. And there's so much big stuff we miss, like one battle after another. I've seen four times in the theater we did not do that as an episode. And that's kind of weird to me. Yeah. But I'm also glad that we did Boys Go to Jupiter because again, like almost like the mastermind, like that's a kind of a real deep cut of a like Ephesus was a micro budget film, like Boys Go to Jupiter.
But it had the I think the Chapo bump. And it was just like everybody's like, this is a wild take on a sports movie. It had some buzz at like the indie level. That or the mastermind are probably like the smallest movies we definitely by Country Mile. Here's so here's a question about award season. in trained dreams. I just want to say. shout out Adolfo Veloso, one critic's choice for best cinematography. He seems pretty assured of being nominated for an Oscar. And I think would probably be, I don't know if I'd call it Dark Horse, but like
Would not surprise me if he won an Oscar, which would be crazy. Would that be the first Oscar nomination for a spoken shot film? certainly for cinematography, right? But like sure. But like I period? Was it Benny and June. Didn't get anything at all. Vision Quest. Vision Quest is a a great sports movie. I will you I will fuck I will brook no criticism of zero.
Vision Quest. That is in some ways is kind of a prototypical sport movie. That movie is goaded for me. Great. But it was not Oscar. No. No, no. I don't think there has been an Oscar movie in Spokane. Has Spokane ever been, you know, in the same room as a an Oscar? that's a good question. Yeah, I don't think it has. I could find out. Anyway. And Cindy Sweeney hasn't gotten her Oscar name yet. Stop it.
Let's move on to the topic of the movies that we've seen since recording. Okay. Okay. There's this movie I watched called Bring Her Back, horror film. Okay. Very well done. The sound alone, like completely terrified Greta and I. My 14 year old daughter Greta and I watched this movie together. She loves horror movies. Okay. After watching this movie, she was like, I'm done with horror movies for a while. Made by these Aussie filmmakers, the brothers, Danny and Michael Philippoo. They were really successful YouTubers.
Who turned into filmmakers and you can kind of tell their technique feels like they make things like 40 to 50 seconds at a time. Yeah, interesting. But I will dunk on it to say interesting movie, but it almost felt like this thing where as an exercise, they would just figure out what could we do that would just be so gross and fucked up. This guy, he turns around and another guy, he's like eating a knife. And so they make that. All right.
So this character walks in and just decides to shit on another character's face while they're sleeping. And there's like, yeah, let's do that. Sure, but like, was there maybe one or two extra rounds of like script notes? Like it does that just sounds like Saw. It kinda had I know, that's my criticism of it. That's like the first sixty step sixty percent of like how you get the first saw movie. They do freak out gross out type stuff a lot in their movies, and it just feels like a string of YouTube clips by the time it was over. Interesting.
Ballad of Buster Scrugs. Did you see that movie? So this is my I'm kicking myself for having not seen this. Yes. There was just something about Ballad of Buster Scrugs that the time it came out where I was like, same. not for me. I'm a big Tim Blake Nelson fan. The first and the last of the six, it's an anthology. It's like this dark black comedy, Western anthology, six shorts. The first one, which has Tim Blake Nelson's character, and the last one.
Kind left me a little cold, but the middle four were all fucking amazing. Especially one, Tom Waits as a gold miner. Oof. a gold panner. god almighty. See if I would have even known Tom Waits was in it, I would have watched it. It's so fucking good. Worst person in the world, Joe Kim Trier. He's made all these Oslo Norway. Anyway, his Oslo movies. It was the first one I ever watched. It also had Renata Reinsva, who was also in Sentimental Value.
This movie was a little all over the place. It didn't end up syncing with it entirely, but more on Trier and Ryan's photo. Is Renata Rensva the the title character, the worst person in the world? She is the worst person in the world. Yeah. Yeah. I won't even go into it, but I I thought it was okay. Some of the filmmaking astounding, the performances amazing. But then I had these moments where it's like, I don't feel like that character who was in this scene would have done what she did three scenes later. They felt I just don't think everything totally came together. Anyway, materialists.
Have you heard of movie? No, no, not only did I hear about it, I heard about it so much, I realized I never wanted to see it. Yeah, Celine's song Sophomore Slump is officially upon us because this is her first movie after the movie Past Lives, which I liked quite a bit. Materialist is one of the dumbest fucking movies I've ever seen. That's all I'll say. Even the performances, like Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans, they do the most manicured, odd things in every scene.
To where I'm like, what kind of direction was happening here? It's really strange. The way they would drink a fucking beer was even weird, or smoke a cigarette. It was like.
Just all these intricate details around like take a sip of the fucking beer. Why are you like and it's like every character was doing weird things. And I don't know. Anyway, I didn't really like materialists whatsoever. Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. I fucking love Martin McDonough. And obviously Francis McDormand. This is not one I ever saw. I watched it with Greta, my 14 year old. total trust fall for her. She was like, What the hell is this, dad? You know, and she's done with horror movies. Yeah. So I'm trying to get her to reach outside of her genre comfort zone.
So Martin McDonough, this did not be awesome. Also, what the the writer of a play called The Behanding in Spokane. What? Martin McDonough wrote I did not know this. It's not This is why we do this podcast to educate each other. It does not take place in Spokane, but it has Spokane in the title. All right. It's about it's about a hitman after he behands somebody in Spokane and he's in a different town. my God. If you've not seen his short, which kind of put him on the map, he went from being kind of a playwright to a filmmaker.
six shooter, I think it's called. Yeah. But obviously Imbruge too. I Imbruges. No, no. Well, this came and Brendan Gleason's in Six Shooter. Yeah. Then Imbruges. Yeah. Yeah. I loved Banshee's Vinishiron. Banchy's Vinishiron's great. If you have not seen Embruge, do yourself a favor. Because you're also going to want to take a trip to Belgium after that, because Imbruj like Bruges looks like the most beautiful city ever created. What a movie. And actually I've been there and I can vouch. It's amazing. Three billboards is sick. Absolutely loved it.
Jockey, new friend of the pod, Clifton Collins Jr., Clint Bentley and Adolfo Veloso's first collaboration together. music by the National Bryce and Aaron Desner both. For those of you who didn't watch our Train Dreams episode, this is the Train Dreams team before Train Dreams. Yes, which is producing, writing, friends, Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar. Yep. Greg Kwedar's first movie was called Trans Pecos, which also had Clifton Collins Jr. as the lead and had music, music also by the Desner brothers.
Did not even I haven't seen that one. I need to see that movie. jockey is fucking amazing. If you listen to our conversation with Adolfo Veloso, I watched that movie and and it was a big part of that conversation. Sing Sing, which came up when we talked to which was the second movie from Greg Kwedar. I cried a lot. Coleman Domingo, incredible. Paul Racy in a character very similar to his character from Sound of Metal. Did you see Sound of Metal? I didn't. it's so good.
Sing Sing is also incredible because most of the actors between the time b the Coleman Domingo and Paul Racy are people. It's a it's a movie about an actual theater program at Sing Sing Prison in New York. And most of the people, most of the actors in this film are actually incarcerated people. That's the most incredible thing about this movie. Cause it's beautiful. Yes. The performances are incredible across the board. Coleman Domingo chews up every scene he's in. He's one of my favorite actors. These amateur incarcerated actors.
Are every bit his match throughout every part of this movie? Zootopia 2. I loved the first one. Family and I went to watch that. Did not vibe with Zootopia 2 whatsoever. Cybernatic 2, remember liking one like a a decade ago? When did that come out? A really long time. Totally. It was kind of weird that they made a sequel. Anyway, I did I bumped on it. Made a trillion dollars, but I did not like it. Wake Up Dead Man. Do you want to just can I give you a TLDR? Give me a TLDR because I want to talk in general about Yep. Yeah, go ahead. I would say.
The best first act of any of the Knives Out movies. okay. I'm just like so in. I was laughing. I was the world building, everything, the setup is so fucking funny. The scenes between Josh Brolin and Josh O’Connor are just like amazing. But then the last better part of an hour of the movie becomes a very lame, Scooby-Doo, inscrutable mess of a
Of like a plot twister that pretends to be a mystery. This is one of the biggest criticisms of all the Knives Out movies. I think it sticks the most in this one, which is like, this isn't a mystery you can fucking figure out. Yeah, yeah. If you're watching along, you have no shot. It depends on the filmmaker basically just going, yeah, you thought it was something. Nope. It's just totally unrelated to what you thought it was. There are moments I just want to say, in in fairness, of kind of poignance where the character of Joshua Connor
His faith, his piety, his religiosity is called into question. He's constantly wondering, like, am I in? He's like a a former. He's a priest. He's a former bad boy, boxer, wrong side of the tracks type character who like finds God, whatever. Yeah. I think Ryan Johnson makes like a half-assed commitment to that whole aspect of it. But there's one scene in particular that I won't spoil that is so beautifully done, but it just is a little it's just too little. I think I needed more of that. I think the way that Ryan Johnson writes the characters in these like n
It's like this is not a jewel box, these are not jewel box mysteries to me. They're kind of like jewel box satirical character portraits to me. Yes. Like that's what I've started thinking. That's a great way to put it. Love the first night of that movie, kind of soup to nuts. Like cause it was also, it's like it's basically clue. It's like, yeah. And maybe this is like the way people like Ryan Johnson get to make some of their fun or stuff. And we saw Soderberg this with a lot of films like earlier in his career. So this isn't new, but it's like, is this like Ryan Johnson's version of the MCU where he was like tried to get into the like I want to make
silly satirical things. And so I have to put it into a mystery or something. Friend of the podcast London, shout out London. really liked Wake Up Dead Man. And he's the one who kind of challenged me on the whole aspect of the religiosity and faith and piety or whatever of the O'Connor character was really interesting. I just think that the last hour where you it's less of those opportunities for characters to come do great character work. And it's more just
Unwinding this this just happened, and there's a hidden camera, then there's a vault, and there's a false door, and there's a fucking this, that, and the other. And I just that's that's actually exactly how I felt about Glass Onion, where it was like Ray and I looked at each other and we were exhausted. So it's like take the shaggy dog parts, take that characterization and spread it out for the whole movie, you know? Yeah, I don't know. sentimental value. Okay. So it's my second Joke and Trier movie, and Ray and I were both just puddles.
Total messes by completely, completely independent of you. I've wanted to see this movie since I saw the trailer. And then when you and then obviously Renato Renseva, I don't know, people are saying this is the best performance by anyone in a decade or so, you whatever. Just you what's funny, I don't know where I crazy plot. It's yeah, it's it's like there were so many synchronicities to Ray and I and our lives together that which I wasn't totally aware of. I knew there were gonna be some things that would hit kind of close to home for us.
But I wasn't aware of all of the. It's not like an absentee an absentee father, right? So it's Stellan Skarsgard, who's a kind of world-renowned, to some degree, not like a Hollywood successful filmmaker, but like an art house filmmaker. Yeah. His name is Gustav. His wife is in the movie, and the mother of his two daughters is a therapist. Okay. So his oldest daughter is played by Renata Reinsfa. she is an actress in, she's portraying an actress in the movie. For those of you who aren't
familiar with Allure, Benji's wife is a is a therapist. So my wife is a therapist. Yep. his youngest daughter played by Inga Ibstdaughter Lilius, who is, I think, gonna get she's probably gonna get nominated for Best Supporting Actress. People expect her to. She's totally brilliant. As good as Renata Reinsfa is, I think that her younger sister played by this other actress is also incredible. It was just
There were just so many moments from it. It opens with this kind of interesting sort of second unit looking photography. You would think it is, anyways, of like, why are they showing all this architecture of this house? And then it becomes clearer and clearer that the house itself is a kind of character. Almost in like the plays of like Eugene O'Neill or like to use a Scandinavian playwright, Henrik Gibson, it's got this the the house itself is sort of a character in its
There's just so many moments in this movie where I feel like everything that I didn't quite like about Worst Person in the World, this just was, it resonated deeply, almost instantly, and didn't let up until the final credits rolled. And then I was watching the Martin Scorsese documentary. Have you seen this? Rebecca Miller wife of Scorsese. There's a moment where Scorsese's daughter Domenica.
is talking about being an actress in Age of Innocence. yeah. And when she was in Age of Innocence, it was the it's the best she's ever felt about her relationship with Circesi. What's Corsesi? Because she was an all the light. Yeah, he's just so nurturing and supportive and encouraging and brilliant and all that. His focus and intensity and brightness, it's like that incredible beam from a lighthouse. If he's working on the film, it's right there. He's on the film.
And then if you're not in the sphere of that light, it's it's sometimes you can feel its absence. Once the cameras turned off and the lights were off or whatever, it's like it was yeah. And she kind of trails off almost like Yeah. And the character that plays the youngest daughter in Sentimental Value was also in one of the Gustav characters films when she was a child. Similar. And she described it and I was like, my gosh, this is all just hitting very, very close to home.
anyway. Can I jump in here real quick to talk about Jay Kelly? Yeah. But kind of seems similar to you, like how it caught you at this time of life. Noah Bombbach's, I think his kind of breakout film, Squid and the Whale, was that for me? I watched that. He's about 10 years older than me, I think. but his the Jesse Eisenberg character in that film, which is it's basically about like an absentee father sort of situation with Jeff Daniels. Jay Kelly's it's interesting because it's another point where it's like this is a person now.
The George, it's a George Clooney character, What's My Life about, you know, past middle age, like a 65-year-old actor. It's a really good script. Bombbach is has gotten less cynical, I think, over time and gotten more sort of, or not cynical, but maybe just nihilistic about the nature of human relationship and stuff. Maybe because he's got a great partner in Greta Gerwig and like life's a little bit better for him. But because it's like,
A portrait of a character that's 10 years older than Bombbach. It says now it's 20 years past where I'm at. I was it's basically George Clooney is trying to figure out was this crazy movie star career he's had even worth it? Does he have any meaningful relationships? What's his life even about? Great performance by him, great performance by Adam Sandler. but it's really a about like I just spent all this time doing all this work. Was any of it worth it? It's Netflix, right? Yeah. It's interesting because I think.
Sentiment sentimental value was unavoidable in the discourse. I think twenty-eight years later, when I finally watched that was unavoidable in the discourse. Jay Kelly kind of came and went and not very many people talked about it. It's why it slipped off the radar for me.
So we went into Marty Supreme together with my wife Ray. And I loved it. Yeah. Sort of soup to nuts. Yeah. sounds like Ray liked it more than you initially did. And then we went and grabbed a drink afterwards and she and I bullied you into changing your opinion. Or what where are you at now, like three weeks after we watched it? It reminds okay, so it reminds me a little bit about when we talked about this discourse around one battle after another and the jungle pussy character and like what because that character is in the movie.
Therefore, Paul Thomas Anderson must be saying, This is like so this is the how pedantic and stupid some of this discourse has been. Yep. That it's like, wait a minute. Just because there's this character in a movie doesn't mean that the filmmaker's sitting around going, I fucking love Jungle Pussy or I fucking love Marty Supreme. He's just like an infallible character. He's just great. No, because I made this movie about this character. No, it sucks. The character sucks in in many ways, right? He's not a good person. So to me, it when I left that movie, I remember the first words I said to you guys was
I felt a little bit like even though he goes all over the place and his character is traveling around the world or whatever, I felt like I was because I am sitting in a movie theater chair and I'm watching this big screen and his character is so fucking obnoxious. I felt like I was stuck in an elevator with a one of the biggest assholes I've ever met. And I can't get out of the fucking elevator. That's how I described it to you guys. Yeah. And you were kind of like, yeah, I agree. I loved it. And I went, huh?
I didn't dislike it either, but I just have this complicated feeling about it right now. And it and I would Can I put you on the therapist couch for a second and ask you a question? Yeah, of course. What do you think that you so this is this is actually something that's I can't think of other examples, but this is not the first time that like I feel like maybe you've gotten you've prejudged a movie based on discourse one, but also two, are do you think despite your structure you know, post structuralism and your fucking film school shit?
Are you a little bit of a I like heroes and not anti heroes? Like I like to I like to root for the main character. Yes, I I am, but also I think the biggest thing that I bumped on with Marty Supreme, which we explored together, the three of us, having a beer afterwards, was there's some shadow work for me to do of I recognized a lot of myself in the kind of bolt of lightning, charismatic, persuasive. I myself am a
bit of an acquired taste, maybe so and a world class ping pong player. And people probably describe me as being a bit of an asshole, you know? So I I I'm not gonna say I've ever described you that way, but I'm also not gonna say I haven't described you that way. fuck down. So to me it's like the voice and perspective of a character. The voice and perspective of a character versus the voice and perspective of a filmmaker and a writer. In other words, Marty Supreme is a dickhead
And a lot of people read the movie as, okay, therefore Josh Safty must love dickheads. He must himself also be a dickhead. Kind of like the thing about Paul Thomas Anderson and I don't know why you would jungle pussy or whatever. It's like, why would you ever conclude that? Yeah. It it it's so I I know. It does honestly feel like the death of fucking literacy. Well, it goes back to that conversation we've had about Netflix and streaming and and second screen viewing, whereas like you have to dumb down, you know, Netflix shows for or Hulu shows. I'm not trying to single out Netflix here, like you have to s
You have to dumb down streaming shows because the you expect your audience to be doing this. Dude, seriously. So it's like, did we want to like have a scene in the middle where Josh Safty like breaks the fourth wall? It's like this guy's an asshole, by the way. You know? we brought that up, right? I think we brought it up on the podcast at once upon a time that there is this new thing happening where screenwriting is becoming tailored to second screen viewing. Yeah. It's so nauseating. I don't even want to get into it. Yeah. But it does feel like discourse that I'm calling it the like there's just feels like
We're going through like a death of literacy. Yeah. That it's almost like second screen film criticism of I'm gonna watch this movie and immediately think about the tweet that I'm gonna send when it's over. Yeah. And it's not even over yet. I haven't even like dared myself to process it and really sit with it and let it sink in, or God forbid, watch it again and try to watch it with a clearer perspective. Anyway, a funny thing occurred to me though. I don't know if I brought this up. I think I brought it up when I was chatting with you and Ray. Okay. This is the weirdest reach of like.
What sometimes the inner text of my brain and movies that I've seen. Yeah. But I had this moment after watching Marty Supreme where I like, I'm reminded of Terry Zwigoff's documentary about Robert Crumb. It's actually about the Crumb family, but of course a lot of it is driven by Robert Crumb, the very famous San Francisco cartoonist. Outsider comic artist kind of. Yeah, totally. underground comics, the keep on trucking. Yeah. Pervert. Pervert.
But there's a moment in this documentary about Crum. I have no idea why I'm reaching back for this 1994. It's Crum re saying that you know that that's a nineteen ninety four film. It is Crum referencing this in a conversation. He's talking to he's talking to this woman who's the editor of Jugs. She's like works. She's a she she self describes as a pornographer. Yeah.
And I went back and I did watch the clip because I was like, what did I just reach up my ass to find this weird take about Marty Supreme based on a swig-off documentary about Robert Crum? But no, there's actually something to it. She's describing how men can be manipulated because of their susceptibility to body fetish. She's talking about boobs versus legs versus butts versus whatever. And of course she's talking to Crumb because they're friends. And and Crumb goes, I think women are susceptible to power. You know, men, because they have that.
Fetishistic twist to their minds because they have that ability to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of all else can really be manipulated sexually where women are not as susceptible. Women are susceptible to power, that's what I find. Any display of power in there he's so interesting. Gee, who's that man over there who's being so obnoxious and arrogant? Hmm. He's so interesting. And he's just making the point that.
And this is kind of what we talked about afterwards, which is that whether it's the Gwyneth Paltrow character in Marty Supreme, whether it's the Gwyneth Paltro character or the Odessa Azion character, yeah, and their susceptibility to the power. How does this aging Starlet, you know, like not doesn't have a career anymore, but she's still Gwyneth Paltro, beautiful and like an aging starlet, just falls for this 20-something dork because he has some, as the kids say, Riz. He's got Riz and he's got Panache, he's got
Other synonyms for Crisbo? Bravery and Yeah, totally. And he's fearless. He's fearless. And the truth is, whether we want to admit it or not, like human beings respond to that. And he's that's what this movie's about. And I think it has a lot to do. I love that it found a way to kind of call back to a a movie that that we watched together, was which is highest to lowest to some degree. it's true. And because of the New York angle, and also high and low because of the Japanese post world war.
Post World War II angle. See if you can land this plane here, keep going. The Kevin O'Leary character as this magnate. He's an actual like multimillionaire, if not billionaire. Yep. Legendary asshole in real life. Well, and his character is trying to broker a deal with post-World War II Japan. That's fair. Yep. Over pens and all this shit. So there was there is a little post-colonial or more like capitalist, you know, post-war the colonizing of Japan, definitely d which is very much a an under th
lying theme in hide a low. You're right about Yeah. Yeah, and the and the presence of the military and which comes up in high and low a lot, right? Yeah. In the end of the movie. That's Akira Kurosawa clocked that in 1963. Yeah. That's exactly what I mean Safti had to have I don't know. Like he's probably seen Hideo. Yeah. It's a Kurosawa film. But it's like that is exactly how that whole like this is basically the climax of Marty Supreme is a is a an exhibition
Table tennis match with zero stakes, other than Marty's ultimately his dignity. It's about dignity. Yeah. And it's the part where you just go, I can't, well, I can't fault. He's faultless in that pursuit to me. Yeah. But by the way, real quick, yes, Safti had to know about high and low, and that had to be somewhere in the, you know, foundations of this shit he was writing. Yeah. But also I couldn't help but think about the climax of Karate Kid Part Two.
Live or die, man.
Wrong.
And I was like, where's the Peter Sotera song? You know? And it's also another thing where it's not a turn it's not a tournament. It's not an it's an e it is like an exhibition fight that he has. So here's to protect his girlfriend in Karate Kid Part two. So we spent some I don't want to g spoil the absolute end of the movie where we do get the the moment of Marty's redemption and the a lot of our conversation around that. So this is after this meaningless exhibition ping pong match happens.
We you when we were unpacking your feelings about the film, we spent a lot of time at the end there. Yeah. Where it's like he kind of tries to eventually kind of do right by the Odessa's a Zion character. I don't want to spoil anything. Yeah. But we were talking about like, is that earned enough? Does he do enough to be redeemed in that moment? And one, my feeling after I didn't think about this in the moment we were talking about it over beers, is like he's 24. Of course it's not enough to redeem him. There's an entire, there's a Marty Supreme two.
That's never gonna get made. Where it's like now you have a moment where you're like, God, maybe I had the wrong priorities for the first half of my life. There's a moment, it's not this is not a resolution film. It's a moment of, okay, now he can choose at the very end to be a better person or go back to being a shitty person. And we don't know what resolves after that. He has a moment of like he has a moment of possibility. He has a moment of purgation. The movies we've talked about from Brisson and we talked about Pickpocket and Mastermind about how
There's these moments of purgation or catharsis or whatever. He has that. And a lot of people, a lot of the discourse, which I think some of that discourse has been has been really interesting. Yeah. Which is how do you interpret that? And I gotta be honest with I think Safti kind of leaves it up to the audience to some degree. Yes, there's a needle drop that I won't spoil that happens, and you just kind of go, well, it does sort of have a perspective here. The whole point is like he wants to be.
The best ping pong player in the world, but really he wants to be the best in the world at something, right? Like that's ping pong is the thing he's really good at, but he really wants that external validation of being world champion ping pong player, right? Yeah. And when it becomes clear that it that's not going to happen for him by the the end of the runtime of this film, he then has a choice to he has to make a choice between do I
continue doing this really gross stuff that Kevin O'Leary is forcing me to do. Or do I try to do I start for maybe the first time in my life, because again, I'm 22, be like, wait, actually it's the ex it's not the external validation that I need. It's the dignity of being like, okay, I'm just gonna win this meaningless tournament or this meaningless match. And well, and here's the spoiler part. So just don't go on if you haven't seen Marty Supreme and you don't want the end spoiled, but
How you read the ending when he's seeing his child, which that's not that much of a spoiler, but when he sees that happen and how you read that, how you interpret his response to that, that moment of purgation, is totally open to interpretation. And that's great. And it's whether you think he's going to attach all of his ego onto this child and fuck that kid up. Plus, you can make two reads at the same time, which is that he's also just experiencing genuine joy that he
And that joy could be like selfless. The joy of reproduction. Yeah, it's like, or it could be self-centered. It's like I just reproduced myself. You know what I mean? Like exactly. You can I then again, let's talk about I think Timothée Chalamet is an a a really great actor and all the awards. Having not seen every single film in made this year, like that's one of the best. Like I think he gives great performances. He keeps getting better every film. I like, you know, the Bob Dylan documentary was a pretty straightforward musical biopic. I thought his performance was
exceptional within the context of what it was. I like him in Dune. I have so far to go with with the Chalamet's career. I've not seen a ton of his movies, man. I think, you know, I think I think you were like rightfully skeptical because he kind of has this like teen beat heart throb vibe going and he's kind of a goofball personally and he's got all these like well it was an intensely self-reflexive performance. The character of Marty Supreme and the actual Timothy Jalon. That's why I think he's like there's something a little special about this kid where he's like he is more
He's being a goofball 20-something kid who's like high on his own supply because he's like one of the most famous young actors in the world. And I think he also realizes that. And so I think he's playing with he's a self-reflexive guy. Well, and the opening 30 minutes of this are so exhilarating. It is a roller coaster ride. It's it's incredible. I can't wait to watch it again. I will also just say that when you were describing that it he just wants to be the best ping pong player of the world, whatever.
People that have that kind of drive. Well, again, he's poor as shit. So this is also it's like I'm trying to live my version of the American dream would be being the ping pong champion of the world. Yeah. And people that have that sort of single-mindedness are really irresistible. And I think this is just human nature that when you're around somebody like that, it's irresistible. And this is where I think I had the shadow work thing to do. I remember being a grocery store bagger and telling people.
Who would ask and I would end up being conversational with that? I I would be Marty Supremish. I'd be like, I'm gonna be a Hollywood filmmaker. I'm gonna move to Hollywood. I'm gonna make movies. I love, love, love movies, and I'm gonna be a movie director. Fairbanks, Alaska. Fairbanks, Alaska. Yeah. I'm gonna be a movie director. I'm going to LA and Hollywood. So this is the like the small difference between you and I is I had all those thoughts about my I'm gonna write for the New Yorker someday. I just kept them to myself. Yeah, totally. I was like, no, check it out. You're in my orbit. Yeah.
This is what I'm gonna do. Yeah. Nice to meet you. I mean, I it's not like I was, I don't think I was, and I don't think Marty Supreme was always shitty about it. She's just like, I love this, I love this, I love this. Yeah, totally. Yeah. You in? Let's do this. Let's do it. and then everybody in his orbit gets they either are part of that narrative or he gets rid of them. Anyway, I want to also say about Safti, something that just occurred to me. Speaking of Paul Thomas Anderson, to me, Marty Supreme is Josh Safti's Magnolia. He flings every fucking conceivable.
skill that he has at the wall and most of it sticks. I don't think all of it does. There's so many twists and turns of the story. It's not as it's not as aggressively weird of a movie as Magnolia, to be clear. It's not it is. He is trying you what you're saying about flinging every tool he has in his chest at the wall is totally true. This is open public knowledge. So I want to talk about it. It's not a spoiler, but I don't know if this is bullshit and I've just been trolled and fell for a hoax. no. But there is a kind of you think of Magnolia and the frogs.
Right. Yeah. Google it if you don't know. there was something like that that Safti was thinking of fucking with in the ending of Marty Supreme, which is that the Kevin O'Leary character was a vampire. Well, he even sa he has that soliloquy about the vampire. And he fucking He's like, I'm a vampire, I was born in sixteen one. And he was going to put into the movie that he has actually This is what I think Safty said this that he was gonna bite Marty Supreme later, like decades later. Wow. What the f and turn him into a fucking vampire? Fucking weird.
I don't know if I got trolled and just fell for it. But anyways, it was Was it AI? I might cut this shit out. But but I I swear that just came up. And well, even Sean Fennessy said that on the big picture in his conversation with Safti that they talked around it. They didn't talk about this, but they talked around the topic of that was in a draft of I don't know if he was just trolling or just being goofy, but anyways. Well, but you we think about vampires as being like the er, like
very primal expression of a power fantasy. Well dude, there's a super Oscar Wilde Dorian Gray thing happening in Marty Supreme. So I wouldn't have I don't think it would have been totally outrageous to do that, but anyway.
Okay, we've run out of time to talk about 28 years later. And I that's okay because what we can do is back pocket that for our next episode. And instead because I want to go see Bone Temple, which just came out I think yesterday. Let's go see it in theater. So we'll go Bone Temple and then we'll give our thoughts about 28 Years Later on our next episode. Do you wanna I you don't it's only at AMC, it's not at Magic Liner, but you wanna maybe go see it together? Yeah, of course. Let's do it. Hell yeah. All right, Luke, let's talk about what is in store for 2026.
The format of the show is gonna stay mostly the same, except for if you've listened to this podcast before we're gonna let ourselves off the hook. We're letting ourselves off the hook. The doing the hardest parts of this a hundred percent of the time. Yes. Especially the minutia details of the plot. We're doing we're gonna do log line that we we steal from Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB or Wikipedia or whatever. We're just gonna give you that. So it's also you have to watch these movies. You will not get much out of all those moments if you haven't watched the movies that we're discussing.
And yeah, we're just gonna we're gonna keep on cooking. We will still have audience participation. Might not be in every episode, but we can promise you on every episode back to full circle with that piece from AS Hamra. We are going to do meaningful conversation and thoughtful critique/slash reads of these movies. That sounds great. Dork. schedule every other Tuesday. Sometimes we'll take breaks. So I don't say think it'll be ever it won't be all the time. We'll probably do like
We'll rattle off four or five episodes and take a break. The first movie of season two of all those moments, no other choice. You ready for that? I'm ready for that. We're gonna watch the movie on February sixth. And then what we do is then we record the following Friday. So we give ourselves some time to work through our feelings, take some notes. If you're in Spokane, come watch it with us on February 6th of The Magic Lantern. Details to come. If you're not in Spokane,
Get ready for the episode February 17th. That's right. It'll the episode will drop on February 17th. Movie we will watch on February 6th. I have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to Park Chen Wook, because the truth is, I haven't seen any of his movies since the Vengeance trilogy, which I think the final movie of which came out in 05. And that might actually be the last I don't even know if I've seen the entire Vengeance trilogy, but I've definitely seen Old Boy and I've seen some of his films. Yeah. The thing that I told you, and I'm just gonna own this. Yeah.
I saw the trailer five times and got really hooked on the idea of it, but I wasn't paying close enough attention to who the director was. Yeah. I actually thought because and this is why I'm so interested to see this movie, because this trailer f for this film feels to me like Bong Jun-ho. Totally Parasite. It literally looks like a companion film to Parasite. It really does. Yeah. And so part it's so it's fascinating to see this. Like I mean, this is kind of a later career director who's like the pro you know, like
Up there with the Scorsese's and Tarantinos of like Korea doing something that feels very class focused, a little screwball. Like there's clearly more comedy here than I know about, or than I at least think I know about what I know about Park Chanwook's background. Yeah. So that's really fascinating to me. I really wanted to see Magellan, which opens the same day at our local movie theater. Filipino filmmaker Lab Diaz. It's his first movie that's not in Tagalog. Yeah. So
I would have to start from literally ground zero. I've not seen any of Labdia's films, and I really want to. Very widely respected, slow cinema filmmaker. I also love seafaring explorer movies. I think 1492, Ridley Scott's movie about Christopher Columbus. Wow, yeah. Is totally underrated. Okay. I loved that movie. I have not seen it in a long time, just admittedly, but Michael Wincott, Gerard Despardeux, the soundtrack by Vangelis is fucking amazing.
Anyway, how you feel about Master and Commander? Fuck goaded. my God. In amazing movie. Yeah. One of my favorite Peter Weir is probably Peter Weir's best movie. Anyway, that's what we're gonna do for our first episode of All Those Moments for season two, Park Chan Wooks, No Other Choice, February seventeenth. That's gonna do it for this episode of All Those Moments, our first in 2026.
Really looking forward to doing this all again in season two. Please follow the show on YouTube or Spotify. Hit the follow button, hit the subscribe button. It's free for the main show. And I'm really active on our Instagram page. So if you wanna follow us on Instagram and slide into the DMs, tell us if we've said something stupid and you wanna keep us in check, or you can also say something nice. We like nice things. Yeah. thank you to the magic lantern. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Luke. Thank you, Benji.
Yeah.
All those.
In time I'm
Yeah.