The Secret to Right-Wing Films ｜ Guest： Last Things ｜ 12⧸12⧸23
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
176.34065
Summary
In this episode of The Last Picture Show, host John Rocha chats with Oren Horowitz, founder of the First Picture Show Film Festival and host of the film and TV show show, Last Things, about what it means to be a "right wing" movie goer, why they like certain movies, and why they love certain TV shows.
Transcript
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We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
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Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
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I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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Everything is incredibly boring and stuffed with the message.
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And of course, there are a lot of films throughout Hollywood history that really speak to kind of the right-wing ethos, the kind of world that many people want to build out of the ashes of kind of the clown world that we have today.
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And so, I wanted to talk to my buddy, Last Things, because he is running a film festival.
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He interviewed a whole bunch of people, myself included, about some of their favorite movies or TV shows.
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And he's gotten a good idea of what it looks like to have a good film culture, to look at what makes a movie right-wing and how we might look at those films going forward.
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And thank you again for participating in the first annual Last Picture Shows Film Festival.
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And it's been great to listen to some of my favorites.
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Many people who have been guests on this show come on and talk about some of their films.
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There's so many reasons that people picked films.
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And so, it was really fun to kind of dig into why people were addressing the films that they were looking at.
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And we had a few people, I think two or three, who did, you included, did elected TV shows as well.
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You, of course, did Battlestar Galactica, which is a fantastic show.
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I'm still very proud of my thumbnail that I made of Admiral Adama with a word balloon saying,
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I think that one will, I'll get, I'll make a poster of it and you can hang it up in your studio.
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Yeah, we'll throw it back and, you know, replace one of the albums here.
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Well, we're going to dive into the film festival.
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And more importantly, what makes a movie right wing, why right wingers are drawn to certain movies
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and what we can kind of draw, what conclusions we can draw from those.
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All right, so films are obviously a critical part of any kind of cultural movement here
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since their inception. There are always art forms that are critical to driving culture, but
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pretty much since the movie has been around, it has been central to any kind of aesthetic
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movement, any kind of cultural movement that wants to grab the zeitgeist. Now, conservatives
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have notoriously had a difficult time making good movies, and part of that is, of course,
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the pool of talent available, willing to work with them. Another part of it is the funding,
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those kind of things. But also, there might be something to the creative process. We might get
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into that a little bit as to why that's been so difficult. But I think something just as important
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to that is developing a culture of being able to analyze and critique films. You were talking to me
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a little bit before we got on as to kind of the modes of that and the way that people are looking
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at that. Obviously, you had a film festival interviewing a bunch of right-wing creators,
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personalities, who are looking at some of their films and addressing that. How should people go about,
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or what are some of the main modes when it comes to going about criticizing movies and trying to
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understand what they mean, their strengths and their weaknesses?
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Absolutely, Oren. Yeah. Yeah. So I basically, I began the film festival by reaching out to,
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my hope and intention was to have 30 unique guests review 30 films of their choice. I actually wound up
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with 40, just because some people I invited initially didn't get back to me until 30 days later. So,
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you know, it got bigger than I anticipated. But my instructions for my guests were really,
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you know, you didn't have to pick a movie that you felt was right-wing per se. You didn't have to
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pick a movie, nor did you have to pick a movie that was left-wing and you felt it was subversive
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so that we could sort of deconstruct the propaganda. My only real requirements were that
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they felt like you could have an interesting conversation with it for an hour or two.
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And you felt it was important and significant enough in some way to be analyzed. And people
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went a lot of different directions. I kind of had a running joke during the, while I was promoting
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the film festival that, you know, inviting 30 dissidents to do a film festival, everybody's just
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going to pick Conan the Barbarian. And I did, we did have one guest to do Conan the Barbarian,
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but it was actually a really large spread of movies. Some, you know, as far back as the,
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from the 1950s, some very, very contemporary, some children's films, some foreign films, some domestic.
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So it really did run the gamut in terms of what people wanted to discuss and, and why people wanted
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to, to discuss films. I think for me, I'm curious to get your, if you would agree or disagree, Oren,
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I sort of start with two major kind of categories or approaches when, when it comes to film criticism.
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Um, the first one I could maybe, I could, I can contrast it to kind of Thomas Carlyle,
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which would just be like the, the great man theory of cinema. This is what gets commonly referred to,
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um, it as auteur cinema. And I mean, we, we think about tour cinema, you might think of something like,
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um, like Wes Anderson, something that has a very sort of unique, distinct visual style. That's auteur
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cinema. There's just a very specific kind of flavor to, to a movie. Um, and that's certainly true,
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but I think at a, at a deeper level for me, auteur cinema just means a director that has sort of
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complete control over their, their film in that it is saying what they want it to say. And they are not,
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uh, they're not beholden to power in any way. This is not a regime film. This is not propaganda that
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you've been hired to produce. Um, and the, the author is in some ways, a typical auteur director
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is somebody who's often at odds with power or at odds with the regime and their, their film,
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which they maintain control over, um, has their voice, their, their, their message, their,
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their sentiments within it. Um, and then, I mean, you know, this is the kind of films that people
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call films, right? Although I don't think it has to necessarily be art house to, to, to qualify in
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this first kind of category where you're just going to talk, if you're going to review a great film,
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your job is to help people understand why it's great and why the, the director was able to execute
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on their vision. Right. So that's my, my first kind of bucket. My second bucket is, um, what I've come
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to refer to as sort of the, the accidental genius to be quite honest. You know, if you're asking the
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question, you know, how to survive, um, you know, the, the, the current, the current year, um, with the,
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the dearth of kind of truly original, um, films, you know, one way is to look for the accidentally,
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uh, right-wing messages. Um, sometimes movies that are, are very obviously and transparently
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kind of left-wing and are being, being produced and manipulated by, by power, by the sort of framework
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instantiated by a political regime can accidentally, um, reveal very right-wing messages or, um, or have
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kind of interesting right-wing themes unbeknownst to themselves. You know, they might have left-wing
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characters and right-wing characters, and you're supposed to identify with the, the progressives
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and despise the right-wingers. And then the right-winger actually winds up being the most kind of noble
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and sympathetic, uh, character on screen. So I think there are genres, but, but those are kind of
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my two main ways that I, I frame or I approach film criticism. Yeah. I think a lot of people could
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identify the, the second one pretty often, right? There are these truths that if you're just observing
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the world and you're putting it on film, you have to be very careful not to communicate certain
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aspects of reality, because if you do, they might reveal the truth, right? So you're slathering
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everything in propaganda, but if you go ahead and put certain things on film, uh, that even if you,
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if you're trying to be subversive, it's something classic, like about this is like starship troopers,
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which is supposed to be a farce. It's supposed to be a subversion of the Heinle novel. It's supposed
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to be showing how ugly, you know, or, you know, he, he, the Paul Vanderhoeven thought it was,
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you know, a fascistic novel. It isn't, but, but either way, you know, he's trying to portray it
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as something awful. And it turns out if you put a bunch of really good looking people doing heroic
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things, um, you know, and like banding together to fight for a cause, uh, that actually is just
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the aspirational desire of every 15 year old boy. And so it actually just becomes, you know,
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the, the, the secretly based movie. So I think a lot of people can recognize that phenomenon
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for sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great, that's a, that's a great and a, and a classic example. And
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lucky for me, the, um, the messaging when I saw starship troopers probably as like a teenager went
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completely and utterly over my head. Um, it is interesting. And I guess one kind of cohort
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of films that I noticed, uh, I'd say that the, one of the largest groups of films that were a lot
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from the nineties. And that, that may just be a result of having invited a lot of millennials to
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participate in the film festival, but there are a lot of films. You probably have these in your own
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life or in where, you know, you may have watched them as a younger man or, or growing up and just
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kind of enjoyed them or took them to be kind of superficial entertainment. But then you, when you
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return to them, uh, after the veil has been lifted or you've had certain kind of political
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epiphanies, uh, they, they, they land very differently for you. And there were a number of,
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of, of films that, um, that have that kind of accidental genius quality. Um, you know, a few that
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come to mind that people interrogated were, um, Chocolat. That's a movie with Juliette Binoche
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from the early two thousands. Um, a more, one of the more contemporary films was everything,
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everywhere, all at once. Um, a lot of accidentally, uh, uh, interesting things were said in that film
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about kind of multiculturalism despite its, its, its intentions. Um, so I think a lot of people were
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having that, uh, revisiting films that they even maybe had a certain sentimentality for and nostalgia
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for, but land very differently. Now, another one, um, uh, Aristophanes, one of my guests, uh, reviewed
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the postman, uh, which was kind of a classic nineties action movie. Um, which I remember watching
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as a teenager without, with as little self-reflection as I did Starship Troopers, but, um,
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returning to it now it is, it is, uh, all I can say is that, you know, Kevin Costner earned that
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the HickLib meme, um, way before he did Yellowstone. It was all there in the nineties with the postman.
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So, I mean, he did dances with wolves. So if you can't, if you can't pick it up there,
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then I don't know what to tell you, but yeah, no, it, it is interesting, you know, because of course,
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like you said, we look at these films and, and the nineties is an interesting time because
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obviously we, we like to think, we like to think of all of these films kind of previous
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to the woke era as more based, right. Or more, you know, more grounded in reality. And of course
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they were, but they were subversive for their time too. Right. In many ways we're, we're projecting
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back our, we're thinking, oh, well, my, my version of liberalism from the nineties was fine. You know,
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this is when things were still, you could still say things or, or, or even, you know, the seventies
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or something, but those movies were of course subverting orders that existed before them.
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So it's kind of this continue, continuous train of like, when you feel like enough truth could
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have gotten through, but I feel like the nineties, there was a break of course, where I, where
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I feel like the nineties is the last time where the, there was at least this allusion to neutrality.
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And so I think you still have a lot of those films, like you said, of course, part of it
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is the demographic you're inviting to have that discussion. But there's also certainly
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a shift where it feels like kind of post this era, we, we need to, we need to inject
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things into all of this. You, you had less opportunity to accidentally, you know, make
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certain statements, but, but even in those films, it's still a large amount of people trying
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to force a particular agenda across. It just, it just didn't have to enter into every form
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of entertainment at every opportunity. Right. Yeah. Right. Well, well, well said,
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Oren. I certainly did have this. I, it's funny. I, I think I had this, I had more pride in the
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nineties and nineties cinema before I began the film festival. I was like, you know, back
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in the nineties, they never did this. I remember my old movies. I'm going to go back and watch
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them. Oh no. Oh, I didn't remember that. So it did, it did kill some of my darlings to go
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back and kind of revisit, revisit a lot of films. But you know, another part of not nineties
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nostalgia that came up in a lot of the movies was not just the cinema itself, but a lot of
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films that kind of depicted this just kind of normal middle American suburban middle-class
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culture. Um, yeah, I, I did, uh, one of our mutual friends that you've had on your channel,
00:17:04.200
zero HP Lovecraft, uh, chose, chose groundhog day. And one of the things that we wound up discussing
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for a while about that movie was actually just not even the like, you know, weird metaphysics
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of the film as much as just Puxitani, this tiny sort of Pennsylvania town. Um, it's not something
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you see in, in movies anymore. And, you know, part of that just might be because these towns
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themselves are like, you know, dealing with the opioid crisis or, you know, industry has
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collapsed, but it's just strange to see, to go back and watch some of these films where there seems
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like this wholesome, uh, local economy and high trust suburban towns. You know, I can't really recall
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the last time I saw something like that in a contemporary film or if I did, it was like,
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you know, ironic or something to be deconstructed. Right. Yeah. That's the thing is that nothing will
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put you off the myth of progress quite so quickly as like moving through different decades of
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entertainment and recognizing the, the norms that have been completely stripped away. You know,
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just, just the fact that, yeah, of course you have a nice town with intact families, uh, you know,
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the, the dad's able to work, the mom's able to stay home. This, this isn't the, the 1950s is still
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the nineties where there's these options still exist for people. You'd still expect to have to
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know your neighbors and, and have a functional church and, and those kinds of things that just
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aren't, aren't going to exist later on in, in your media, unless like you said, they're about to be
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deconstructed by the people involved. That's actually something I wanted to ask you about too.
00:18:47.240
You mentioned earlier, you know, the kind of, you have your auteur filmmakers, and then you kind
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of have like your, more of your popcorn movies and the auteur can, can work against the regime
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because they have the level of control necessary, but the, the film or rather the kind of the popcorn
00:19:03.540
movies, they have to be almost accidentally subversive because they're playing to more of
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the crowd and they have more of the studio involvement. And so when, when they happen to be
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based or right-wing, it's a little more of an accidental situation, but I wanted to dive a
00:19:17.100
little bit more into the auteur phenomenon because I think more and more that the, the ability of
00:19:22.140
auteurs to do the very thing you're describing has fallen away. And so, so I wanted to touch on
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All right. So, uh, kind of the auteur movies, like you said, they, they have the ability at least at
00:21:03.400
one time to kind of break away from the mainstream. They're getting to say something, craft the message.
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It's not just there for entertainment though. Obviously that's a critical part of it, but their
00:21:13.260
ability to not have to take notes from the studio, to not be a movie by committee, to not have that
00:21:18.700
massive, Hey, I better get a, you know, $300 million or something at the box office means that they,
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they kind of get to make a singular vision and carry that through. And that, that gives them a
00:21:28.880
certain degree of separation from the powers that be. Now, obviously back when the powers that be
00:21:34.160
were, you know, probably more, it's still, you know, subversive, but a little more, you know,
00:21:38.940
conservative, at least with what could be allowed by the culture that meant that the auteur filmmaker
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could, could break the boundaries of, I don't know, Reagan-esque, you know, censorship or,
00:21:48.520
or that kind of thing. That's what they would have thought of as, as kind of being outside of the
00:21:53.320
boundaries. But today it feels like it's increasingly difficult for an auteur filmmaker to even break
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free of that stuff. They're kind of the, the political correctness even inside those films,
00:22:05.820
because it's so critical to them, even ascending to the point at which they would be allowed to
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make a movie like that, where they would have that kind of freedom. Can you think of some more
00:22:17.300
recent auteur films that really got to break from kind of the, the, the message and, and do something
00:22:23.580
that may have been a little more right-wing today? Oh boy. Yeah. It's a tough, that's a really tough
00:22:29.400
question, Oren. And I should, I mean, I should mention too, you know, just, just because a, a film
00:22:35.100
really is, is an auteur film. It's, it's no guarantee that, um, that, that they will be right-wing.
00:22:41.640
Although I do, um, we can circle back to this at some point. I do. I'm, I'm, I'm one of these
00:22:46.060
people who is a great skeptic about the idea that, you know, all the great artists are, are left wing
00:22:51.460
and somehow, uh, you know, art or, or movies is, is a deficit of, of, of the right. We can dive into
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that. I, somebody asked me this question recently, and I, I hate to, um, kind of say it and I hope it
00:23:05.240
doesn't sound like a dodge, but you know, a lot of the different countries, different nations,
00:23:11.820
different areas of the world kind of have their own, their own renaissances or their own periods
00:23:17.200
where certain art forms kind of flourish. Uh, you know, the novel is, is something that kind of
00:23:23.060
traveled from, from France to Russia and kind of traveled across Europe and gave us different
00:23:28.700
periods of, of, of masterpieces. And I will say that I think Korea, Korean cinema right now,
00:23:35.580
Korean cinema, cinema has always been very interesting, but, um, I think that they've been going
00:23:40.180
through a bit of a, um, a kind of golden era, um, with films like, uh, Parasite or it's a bit old at
00:23:49.420
this point, but old boy, that's another film that got, um, discussed, uh, during this festival. So I,
00:23:56.280
I, I have to say, you know, if people go abroad, they might have an easier time trying to find things
00:24:04.520
that have, uh, have greater freedom. I mean, there are real kind of maverick filmmakers like David Lynch
00:24:11.700
who, uh, or, or Terrence Malick, who, uh, neither of whom I would consider to be left-wing by the way,
00:24:18.880
I think they would, they would be, um, an example I would offer as counter examples to, to needing to
00:24:24.900
be left-wing to be an artist, um, who I think get a lot of private funding for their movies. Um, I think
00:24:31.620
they have to struggle to, to, to pull their films off. Um, uh, and it, it takes a very long time for
00:24:37.640
them to kind of gather the, the necessary resources. Um, but I can't say that there's anybody that's
00:24:44.400
just absolutely working outside of the system. That's, that's crushing it. I don't know if you
00:24:51.060
have anybody in mind. Um, no, I w I was just interested to pick your mind on that. Cause I was
00:24:57.180
thinking, so there are two directors that are not outside the system at all because they're making
00:25:02.800
giant blockbusters, but seem to consistently make blockbusters that don't fit into the Hollywood
00:25:09.580
narrative that come to mind. And that would be Christopher Nolan and, uh, and Velen, Velenove. I
00:25:15.120
forget how to say properly, but, but I thought it was interesting that both of the, uh, two of
00:25:21.240
Velenove's, uh, recent, recent movies were reviewed during your film festival. The, the, uh, uh, the,
00:25:29.940
the new Dune movie, of course. And then, um, I'm trying to say cyberpunk, but it's not cyberpunk.
00:25:35.340
I don't know why I can't. Oh, Blade Runner. Blade Runner. Thank you. 2049. Yeah. The thing that gave
00:25:40.740
birth to cyberpunk, but, but yeah, Blade Runner 2049, both of these movies certainly have left-wing
00:25:47.680
themes, you know, they, they, you could speak about ecology or, uh, you know, different, different,
00:25:53.380
uh, you know, maybe feminist aspects in, in, uh, Blade Runner, but it's very interesting that both
00:25:59.040
of these films, while having massive budgets, you know, being huge blockbusters with huge amount of
00:26:05.480
attention to them don't seem to sit quite right when it comes to the message. You know, they seem to be
00:26:11.020
bringing a different feel. I don't know what his, his personal politics are, but he seems to be
00:26:16.640
choosing stories over and over again that, that brings something that doesn't quite fit into the
00:26:21.260
framework of kind of the left-wing message inside, which should be, you know, basically,
00:26:26.280
you know, popcorn blockbusters. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's, that's very true. Um, I think that,
00:26:33.060
uh, um, Astral, who's, who's the, the guest that discussed Blade Runner 2049. I think this kind of
00:26:40.720
fits into one of these categories that I call the, the literally me category. A lot of people pick
00:26:45.600
films because they, they thought this really epitomized our, our current cultural moment and,
00:26:51.660
um, Ryan Gosling in that film as this sort of, um, completely and utterly atomized man. Um, and
00:27:00.760
granted he's a, he's a replicant, he's not quite a human, but, um, of course, Ryan Gosling has been
00:27:06.160
memed into probably more than any other human being into, uh, uh, uh, uh, right-wing memes. A lot of those,
00:27:14.400
those stills of, of Gosling are from, uh, Blade Runner 2049. So I think that film does
00:27:22.080
approach that in an interesting way. And it's, I think what might allow it to get away with that
00:27:27.840
is the fact that it is this sequel to an earlier movie. And it's still very much its own, its own
00:27:35.440
film. Although I think a lot of the same kind of tone and imagery, um, can be traced back to,
00:27:41.960
to, to, to Blade Runner, but the fact that it's kind of a get unlimited grocery delivery with PC
00:27:47.980
Express pass meal prep delivered snacks delivered fresh fruit delivered grocery delivery on repeat
00:27:56.500
for just $2 and 50 cents a month. Learn more at PC express.ca. Yeah. A sequel might've opened the
00:28:04.080
door for that a little bit. Um, in terms of Christopher Nolan, I know that this is also,
00:28:09.480
you know, Bane is, I guess, a more passe meme nowadays, but, um, I, I think people talk endlessly
00:28:17.720
about the, the bat, the, the Nolan Batman trilogy, um, which I don't know if you have thoughts or
00:28:25.240
opinions on it. Um, I think I, I heard it described once as, uh, and I think I agree with this as sort of
00:28:32.620
a, a, a neocons, uh, a neocon fantasy in that, um, Batman is sort of this neocon figure where you
00:28:41.840
have these, the three villains like Ra's al Ghul, the Joker and Bane as these much more sort of, um,
00:28:48.160
aristocratic and reactionary characters, um, going up against this, this more kind of, I don't know,
00:28:56.540
classic conservatism in Batman. And it does seem to me that everybody, uh, for all three of those
00:29:04.000
movies, people talk more about the, the villains and kind of find them more, more memorable and
00:29:10.140
compelling. And, you know, that may be the case kind of like in, in paradise lost where like, you
00:29:14.940
know, Lucifer gets the best lines in the poem. But, um, but yeah, I don't know. It's, uh, I think
00:29:21.420
people are more mesmerized by the villains in that trilogy than they are necessarily Batman and
00:29:30.480
often his sort of overcoming of, of both the villains themselves, as well as their, their
00:29:35.500
philosophy or their sort of moral, moral problems that they're putting before Batman as the defender
00:29:42.020
of Gotham. I don't think he necessarily has an answer for them. Right. That's what I was going to say.
00:29:48.800
Yeah. He flies in in the last five minutes and like jump kicks them and they, and, and wins.
00:29:54.640
Yeah. It feels, it's a good point. Cause it feels like in all of those movies, yeah, they are
00:29:59.920
presenting this, uh, this worldview. And it is interesting that all three of those villains in
00:30:06.060
one way or another do have a more reactionary understanding of, of kind of the problems that
00:30:11.840
are facing Gotham and the solutions that should be applied. And he is always just kind of bringing
00:30:16.920
this like good shepherd, like, well, yeah, but I can probably just, you know, I have to do some
00:30:21.760
things that they don't, that they don't like, but otherwise, you know, civilization can more or less
00:30:26.960
kind of putter along the way that it's supposed to. And it's my job to kind of, kind of keep these
00:30:31.100
people afloat. And in every one of those scenarios, even though they're, you know, framing him, you know,
00:30:36.640
these really difficult questions of kind of what civilization should be and, and whether it's worthy of
00:30:42.980
Gotham to continue and those kinds of things, he never answers those questions. Yeah. It's, it's always
00:30:47.080
just very much like, well, yeah, but also like you're wrong. And so, you know, or you have to
00:30:53.240
trust me on this or something. And then, yeah, just some, some bad device solves the problem and we move
00:30:57.420
on. Christopher Nolan is one of those, um, mysteries to me though, because I can never tell how, how
00:31:04.940
self-aware he is. I mean, maybe he's somebody that I kind of have to place in, in a gray zone. I can't
00:31:11.420
say that I think he's, he's necessarily this, um, you know, cunning genius in this, you know,
00:31:19.940
the, the manner in which we're discussing and describing Batman was his, his blueprint all
00:31:25.780
along. Or if these are just things that kind of snuck into the, to the films on their own.
00:31:31.260
Yeah. But I mean, the accidental base thing, right. It has to be, it has to be part of that,
00:31:34.820
no matter what, when you're going to be discussing, cause, cause Nolan due to his kind of auteur
00:31:40.220
background, you know, back when he's making memento and things like that, he's, he can't
00:31:45.660
just go in and, you know, have Batman like break out the bat credit card. Like you're not going to
00:31:50.560
have that, you know, that level of schmaltz. And so like, he's got to try to say something in these
00:31:56.460
movies, but we're like, what does Batman say? You know, and there's really no, I don't think
00:32:01.640
there's a way to, you know, to kind of bring his interaction with those villains in without having
00:32:08.500
to address questions that, that are fundamentally going to bring a certain based worldview, at least
00:32:14.460
on screen, even if that, that worldview gets, you know, defeated by a random explosion and,
00:32:19.380
you know, nothing else, you're going to have to entertain some of those questions. If you want
00:32:24.640
your movie to go beyond like Arnold Schwarzenegger telling everyone chill. And so I think that that's
00:32:30.820
kind of like why that ends up being the case, even if, even if that's not his master plan to
00:32:35.780
communicate some, you know, subversive base message, I just think it's, once again, impossible for
00:32:41.540
certain aspects of reality to break through when you're discussing that character.
00:32:45.660
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But no, you, I mean, I think Villeneuve and Nolan are definitely two of
00:32:53.080
the more interesting directors at work currently. I mean, I think Villeneuve is French Canadian,
00:33:01.460
so I can't say they're domestic directors, but their stuff is worth, worth examining. You know,
00:33:10.180
I think another, a lot of films that are, are actually older still were selected because people
00:33:16.100
felt like they had something to say about our current moment. T.R. Hudson selected The Searchers,
00:33:24.720
which is probably John Ford's classic Western. I would say John Ford exhibit number,
00:33:31.440
number three for, you know, directors do not have to be lefties. He's pretty, and David Lynch
00:33:38.620
actually played him in The Fablemans. He, he, he guest starred as, as John Ford in that recent
00:33:44.980
biopic about Steven Spielberg's childhood. But that, that movie's from the late fifties. It's probably the
00:33:54.320
most famous Western. But I think part of why T.R. Hudson chose it is that he kind of felt like a lot of
00:34:01.420
men with right-leaning sensibilities find themselves in, in a circumstance, very similar to, to Ethan,
00:34:09.100
John Wayne's character in that film, sort of trapped between, in, in this kind of liminal,
00:34:15.320
liminal space between civilizations. You know, he's not quite at home in, within civilization,
00:34:23.440
nor is he necessarily part of the, the wild, um, and, uh, kind of caught between nature and,
00:34:33.120
and culture. And, uh, I think that film, despite being almost, at what, 70 years old, practically,
00:34:41.580
uh, was a very interesting film to, to, to use as kind of a lens to consider kind of current issues.
00:34:51.400
Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, so much of the Western, of course, is that contrast. It's that,
00:34:57.340
uh, you know, a guy who's out on the prairie or, or, you know, somehow, you know, on the trail,
00:35:03.640
cutting, cutting a way of life for himself, uh, you know, that otherwise wouldn't be able
00:35:08.800
to exist inside of civilization and then civilization kind of catching up with him.
00:35:14.280
This is the story of course, of like the man who shot Liberty Valance or, or Deadwood, or, you know,
00:35:19.240
like any, any of these classic Westerns, this is, this is a theme that I think is, is, is pretty
00:35:23.760
baked into the, uh, the genre itself. And it's interesting because you wonder if that genre,
00:35:31.960
you know, I mean, of course they still make Westerns today. Uh, much of the Western just played
00:35:36.520
out due to the, the, you know, the glut of them. It was the comic book movie of the day.
00:35:40.520
Many people have made that, that kind of connection between those, those two genres that there's
00:35:45.220
just so, so much that it burned out. But you also wonder if it's that, you know, you're no
00:35:50.760
longer allowed to let young men kind of see a space in which they, you know, would not enter
00:35:58.160
into kind of the long house, right. Would not enter into the domain of, of civilization where
00:36:03.420
there is an existence and men would find a preferable. Like they could, of course could
00:36:08.080
have stayed, you know, in the East, they could have stayed in large cities. They could have
00:36:12.320
stayed in a domestic life, but they would rather, you know, sleep on a bed roll out somewhere,
00:36:16.600
you know, in, in the West, uh, you know, because that, that was worth the kind of the, uh, their
00:36:23.240
independence and, you know, being able to, to kind of find themselves in that way. Maybe that
00:36:28.620
doesn't, or, you know, maybe people afraid of showing that to young men anymore, or that
00:36:32.720
wouldn't appeal to young men anymore, or that you have to have sort of a strong masculine
00:36:38.600
male protagonist in order to do that. And that's something I, that's something else I, I, a theme
00:36:44.340
that I picked up on a lot of films were kind of lamenting or, you know, commenting on the
00:36:50.920
fact that, you know, when is the last time that you just, you know, there was a, a male
00:36:55.380
character, a male protagonist who was just sort of fundamentally masculine and a female
00:37:01.060
character that is, is fundamentally feminine. You know, one, one film that was discussed
00:37:05.760
was the princess bride as sort of the, the paragon of that, um, that mode where you just
00:37:11.760
have, um, you know, Wesley, whose object is the princess and he's, he's trying to rescue
00:37:18.580
her. And she sort of, um, it affects her environment in ways that are, are quintessentially
00:37:24.360
feminine, but there was this kind of lament for, you know, what you could just, even if
00:37:29.460
it's not a true Western, um, but like a lament for the, the cowboy, which is the kind of the
00:37:36.400
most iconic sort of resourceful, stoic, um, stalwart male hero. Um, it's funny that, I mean,
00:37:46.080
there were a few Westerns, uh, that got selected. I, uh, I've, I designed a few awards that I was
00:37:53.640
describing to you at one point or in, um, which I'm, I'm tentatively calling the froggies.
00:37:58.580
One of the awards is called the doppel filmer award. And the doppel filmer award will be,
00:38:03.980
I have not announced who has won this yet, but I can tell you, this is one of the nominees
00:38:07.180
hands down is basically like somebody who's selected a film, which where the film is essentially
00:38:13.160
their, their spirit animal. Like if everybody, if everybody wrote down on a three by five card,
00:38:18.940
what film is that guy going to pick? And then they'd show it to him and they'd all get it right.
00:38:23.840
Um, and one guy, you, you're probably aware of, of Lafayette Lee, big, uh, big Twitter personality,
00:38:29.940
great guy. And he picked the murder of Jesse James by the coward, Robert Ford. Um, beautiful
00:38:36.140
auteur film, by the way, gorgeous to gorgeous to watch. But of course, I mean, like his name's
00:38:41.060
Lafayette Lee, what movie, what movie was, is the man going to choose if not the murder of Jesse
00:38:47.320
James. Um, yeah, no, it's definitely interesting the way that the, the films or the things that
00:38:52.820
people selected kind of reflect on them, uh, of course, uh, you know, and, and like you said that
00:38:58.500
I've had Lafayette on many times and yeah, it's hard to imagine a film more fitting, uh, for him to
00:39:03.960
select in that one. Yeah. Although to be, I also created an award, which I've, I've, my tentative
00:39:09.820
name for it is, is, is the Janus award because the Janus is two-faced and the Janus award, it goes to
00:39:15.840
somebody who gave me like a complete and total curve ball. So like, for example, zero HP Lovecraft,
00:39:21.640
I assume we were going to be talking about like aliens or, or event horizon or some, um, you know,
00:39:28.100
Italian horror film and he picked groundhog day. So they surprise you. Yeah. I listened to that one
00:39:36.460
and I liked the way he said that he said, you know, I, I don't, despite, you know, being a fan of horror
00:39:41.680
and writing horror, I don't actually consume a lot of it because it's, you know, it feels like
00:39:47.100
people who, uh, kind of make an intentional horror movie. Uh, they are, they're taking the easy way
00:39:53.380
out. They're just putting it on their nose as where if you make a normal movie, like part of the,
00:39:58.200
the process is revealing the kind of everyday horrors that exist in inside a comedic experience
00:40:05.160
or something like that. And of course, groundhog day is a great example of that because it's,
00:40:08.780
you know, yeah. In one, in one way it's, it's funny and everything. In other way,
00:40:12.780
it's a man reliving like the worst parts, uh, and the most mundane and like devastating parts of life
00:40:18.800
is literally like lives of quiet desperation for eternity, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
00:40:26.120
I get it. He did have maybe a grim, a grim, dark take on the movie in, in hindsight. Um, yeah. I mean,
00:40:33.200
uh, zero HP Lovecraft is a very interesting figure too, because he's, he's, he's this contradiction.
00:40:38.400
I used to think that in order to be a good horrorist, you had to be somebody that, that
00:40:42.680
like wanted to kill themselves, but he's actually, you know, quite, um, uh, very much a vitalist
00:40:50.160
and yet writes fantastic horror fiction. Um, do you feel, do you feel like horror does require
00:40:56.680
something because, uh, you know, I'm again, far from the first person to say this, but you
00:41:01.300
know, horror being kind of a innately right-wing genre because it, the dynamics require an us
00:41:07.460
versus them that the, the unknown and the outside is the danger, but also because it constantly
00:41:14.040
puts people in things like physical danger with where they can't have like magical, you
00:41:20.280
know, uh, comic book powers. And so like men have to actually be physically stronger.
00:41:25.220
Women are genuinely in a disadvantage, you know, a killer can get away with, you know, stabbing
00:41:31.960
a bunch of people simply because it's a man and they're women in, in this, in a scenario,
00:41:35.860
like just, just, just dynamics that require you to kind of acknowledge truths about biology,
00:41:43.180
truths about good and evil truths about the world that otherwise, you know, you, they're
00:41:47.520
just, the genre is dependent on them in the way that it doesn't exist for other movies.
00:41:52.320
I think that's, I, I, I agree with everything you just said, Oren. And I remember, I remember
00:41:56.900
a tweet that you put out a little while ago where I think you, you mentioned something
00:42:00.880
to the effect of like horror seems like this one, like sort of the last readout when it
00:42:06.100
comes to film genres where it's, it's very hard to corrupt horror. Like how do you make
00:42:12.560
a, like, what, what, what does, what does a woke horror movie look like? Um, I think something,
00:42:18.360
I think there's, it's E. Michael Jones who, who said this, um, in his book, um, nightmares
00:42:23.860
from the id, but, but his, I guess his theory of horror, what he proposes is that horror is
00:42:29.600
always about returning to baseline in that a horror film happens when somebody has committed
00:42:37.680
a taboo, right? Think of, I mean, the classic example here is, you know, all these teenagers
00:42:42.900
become sexually curious and then Freddy Krueger jumps out and, um, uh, scares them back into,
00:42:50.060
into, into, into chastity, but, um, it is some sort of kind of cultural line. Something sacred
00:42:57.280
has been, uh, crossed. Some sort of tradition has been, um, dis disrespected. And this is often kind
00:43:06.020
of the, the catalyst or the primary, um, element of a horror film. And I think it's because progressivism
00:43:15.020
is just kind of in favor of transgression, I think it's very difficult for them to kind of,
00:43:24.620
uh, colonize horror films the way that they may have colonized other kinds of film genres. Um,
00:43:31.580
there, there is just something strangely traditional about, about horror movies. And that may, may sound
00:43:37.220
kind of strange and counterintuitive to people because often horror has like the most grotesque
00:43:42.800
kind of imagery to sort of call it like the most traditional genre maybe seems, uh, seems
00:43:50.040
counterintuitive, but I, I do think there is something, something to that, that it is fundamentally
00:43:54.800
right-wing. I, I, I thought I would get more horror, horror movies. Um, the one real true horror movie
00:44:01.120
I did was with, um, with Tyler Hamilton, he chose Exorcist three, um, which, uh, uh, well, people will
00:44:10.700
have to, to, to, to listen to it, but he's, uh, he's a, um, excellent reviewer of, of, of horror films.
00:44:18.500
Um, but his, yeah. And unfortunately his, his YouTube channel got, um, shut down unexpectedly,
00:44:25.720
but I think, uh, I'm not sure where people can, can find his, his work at the moment.
00:44:31.560
Well, one place is your film festival. So that's the first place they can start.
00:44:37.080
Are there so interesting, you know, interestingly, you kind of mentioned earlier that you aren't
00:44:44.660
really on board with the idea that the left has all of the talent and the, you know, the
00:44:49.620
right just can't make movies. And I wonder if we, if we can expound a little bit on that,
00:44:56.040
I think in some ways might touch on, you know, the, you just mentioned that most people would
00:45:00.660
look at what might be the most conservative genre horror movies, but say, well, this isn't
00:45:05.600
for conservatives though, because, you know, probably can't watch it with your kids. You
00:45:09.640
know, the many aspects of the movie are, are, you know, gross or subversive or in certain
00:45:16.080
ways, you know, the, the content is explicit in certain ways. And so therefore it's not thought
00:45:20.600
of as a conservative genre. Is it, is it the content of possibly more conservative genre that
00:45:26.400
keeps the right out of these areas? What do you, what do you think is, you know, why would
00:45:30.640
you say that the right, you know, isn't at a disadvantage and what do you think it is
00:45:34.120
that's structurally keeping it out if it isn't at a creative disadvantage?
00:45:38.420
Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess, I guess the, the, the, the latter, I mean, I would never deny
00:45:43.300
that it's right now we are, we are more or less, or for all practical purposes and means
00:45:49.060
shut out of filmmaking. Um, and that is because it is a incredibly cost intensive, uh, artistic
00:45:57.600
form, right. We don't really have the backing of elites. Um, and you, even if you can just
00:46:04.240
find a maverick elite, uh, you need somebody that can write pretty substantial checks and,
00:46:09.760
and take a, take a bet on you. Um, and so I, I think it's, it's not for lack of, um, lack
00:46:17.260
of talent. And I will say, I am honestly an optimist about this because eventually one of
00:46:22.800
us is going to make a movie eventually. I'm sure, I'm sure a bunch of us have already written
00:46:26.940
scripts. Um, and those are going to be passed around and sooner or later, it, it doesn't take
00:46:33.280
much. Um, you know, even, uh, I guess it's funny to kind of take inspiration from, from this, but,
00:46:40.180
um, you know, one movie that Bob beef reviewed, uh, easy writer, which, uh, was a movie from 1968,
00:46:47.440
which, which is kind of considered, uh, the film that kind of kicked off the American art house
00:46:53.760
cinema, sort of the, the generation under the influence. Think about like, you know,
00:46:57.800
Sam Peckinpah movies, very early Jack Nicholson films, um, dealing with, uh, you know, uh,
00:47:06.040
the spirit of 68 and things like that. Those films were all funded by, uh, the monkeys,
00:47:11.780
the monkeys, after they kind of got done with their hit TV show, they had a lot of money and they
00:47:17.240
just wound up kind of making a lot of bets on, on Dennis Hopper and, uh, Sam Peckinpah and a lot
00:47:24.040
of these other kind of, um, people that just got out of film school and were, were certainly outside
00:47:29.960
of the mainstream at that point, they were in a very similar position to Hollywood that we are.
00:47:36.140
Um, you know, somebody like, like Edward Hopper giving, being handed a check to, to make a movie
00:47:43.580
that he just kind of, um, um, came up with to celebrate counterculture that kicked off, um,
00:47:51.380
what, what, what became to known as the generation under the influence. And now that's, that's
00:47:56.400
considered this very successful artistic, um, period in American movie making. Um, and that kind
00:48:05.860
of sensibility eventually did kind of infiltrate Hollywood and the mainstream. So there's nothing
00:48:11.340
that you could say about the left in the 1960s when it comes to filmmaking that was different,
00:48:19.940
I think, conditionally than, than the right, except that they eventually sort of found those
00:48:26.880
elites that were willing to place a bet on a, on a, on a director. Um, and that, that shall happen.
00:48:33.940
It shall happen or in I'm calling it here and now. Well, it's patient. Yeah. I mean, it's also just
00:48:40.280
with the, with, you know, the dearth of interesting material coming out of left, the fact that they're
00:48:44.120
just creatively dead at this point, eventually you just, if you're, if you're looking to, you know,
00:48:48.560
the content mill has to run, eventually you have to start feeding something right wing into it just
00:48:52.780
to, just to put anything of value in there. I also wonder, you know, you, we talked about how
00:48:58.000
different mediums have their time, the novel, you know, kind of waxes and wanes. It moves from, from,
00:49:03.720
from one area to another. And I wonder with, obviously, of course, people will point to video
00:49:08.560
games, but also, you know, short form content, whether we like it or not is coming to dominate
00:49:13.680
the, the, the minds and understandings of young people. Uh, you know, they're, they just rather
00:49:18.820
watch, you know, a collection of 10 minute videos on YouTube than they want to sit down and watch
00:49:23.360
a two, three hour movie at this point. It feels like they just keep loading them further and
00:49:28.660
further. It's one of my hatred of current movies that feel like almost every current movie could
00:49:33.040
just be better if you cut it by half an hour and they just refuse to do it. Is it, could it be that
00:49:39.520
the movie has just lost its cultural power? I mean, we're always going to have movies in the same way
00:49:45.200
we'll always have novels and things, but, but, but in many ways, a novel needs to needed to become a
00:49:50.680
movie for the last 20 or 30 years to really have an impact. And, and are we at a point where at this,
00:49:56.080
you know, the, the, the genre or the, the medium itself has kind of fallen behind, uh, kind of the
00:50:02.200
march of time and in, while it'll still exist, it's just not going to have the same impact, uh, or
00:50:08.060
creative kind of spark that it had, uh, back when it was the, you know, the dominant form of
00:50:13.980
entertainment. Yeah, no, I mean, I, I definitely, I, I, I absolutely see what, see what you mean.
00:50:22.100
I guess I, I wouldn't feel comfortable kind of declaring the decline of, of movies, you know,
00:50:28.780
broadly like that until I've, until I'm actually have observed a real work of art from a new,
00:50:38.680
a brand new novel medium. And like, there is like, you know, give me, where is the citizen
00:50:44.540
cane of Tik TOK videos? You know, if, I mean, there's certainly, you know, drawing people in,
00:50:51.820
um, they, you know, they, they, it wields plenty of, of power and influence, but, uh, does it wield
00:50:59.220
the, the sublime? Does it have, um, does anybody experience the, the holy moments as, as Dave,
00:51:06.080
the distributist recently put in one of his, his videos on, um, on movies that he released last
00:51:11.900
week? I don't think I've gotten a holy moment necessarily from, um, from, from new media.
00:51:19.480
And I think that's what it's going to have to provide before we can really say that, you know,
00:51:24.500
the time of the movie has, has come and gone. The one exception to that, I actually was saying,
00:51:29.280
like, there are some memes that I would absolutely frame and put in my house. I mean, you, we should,
00:51:34.840
you should have Gio Penichetti on if you're going to talk about that, but I, you know,
00:51:38.000
there are a few, a few memes that I, but even that, even though I, I find some, some memes to
00:51:45.680
just be, you know, fantastic. And I wish somebody would, if somebody hasn't already just create some
00:51:51.680
sort of gallery show and blow up a bunch of memes to the size of like Lichtenstein paintings and,
00:52:00.620
uh, you know, rent out the Metropolitan Museum with them. Um, but, uh, it is, it is sad to think
00:52:07.860
that things have sort of like that revolutionary artistic spirit has like shrunk down to the,
00:52:14.280
to the meme. Like the, I think the only way you get the same kind of, I don't know, like punk ethos
00:52:21.480
that you got from like nineties alternative rock music or like, you know, underground music in,
00:52:27.540
in the nineties, that's really only alive nowadays in, in meme culture. But even, even the best meme
00:52:35.220
on the planet is just this, you know, it's this tiny little chiclet compared to like art forms that
00:52:42.540
are more, you know, the thing that, that none of these are ever going to have over movies. If you're
00:52:48.660
really going to the movies, if you're going into a cinema to watch something is that it is this,
00:52:53.240
it's not just this tiny little video that you play on your phone. It's something that
00:52:57.600
overwhelms you that completely like subsumes your, your sensory experience.
00:53:04.220
But I wonder, so, so, and, and this is just me, you know, prattling on about the client,
00:53:09.260
like an old man on a, on a porch, but, uh, you know, I wonder if that's even an option anymore,
00:53:14.920
right? Because like maybe the movie was a, you know, maybe that cinema experience was itself kind
00:53:22.640
of, um, uh, a moment in time in which like you had a society that was high trust enough to where
00:53:29.780
like people wouldn't be screaming the whole time or, you know, throwing things or talking on their
00:53:35.540
phone or like, you know, goo would be, you know, formed on the, you know, like, yeah. I wonder if you
00:53:41.120
even have like a society that cannot return the shopping cart, cannot enjoy an auteur film. You
00:53:46.700
know what I mean? Like there, there, there, there might be like a limit to like, if society can't
00:53:53.180
hold together, whether you can actually have those moments because, you know, who can even go to a
00:53:58.120
film and make it make through it without someone in the, in the audience of ruining it at this point.
00:54:02.560
Yeah. I mean, I guess I will say, you know, when I think, I think movies and like, even when
00:54:09.080
movies are successful, they are going to speak to more niche audiences. Like I certainly can't
00:54:16.440
remember, like when was the last film that was like, like a star Wars or something like that,
00:54:21.100
where it's just like everybody in America went to see it. Everybody agreed. This was like
00:54:26.260
kind of a significant cultural watershed moment. And I do think that that, um, kind of mass culture-wide
00:54:36.860
national kind of cinema is probably, it's probably over the, the, the things that are going to succeed
00:54:43.620
are going to be demonized by one group and, um, lionized by another. I think that's, that's
00:54:52.260
definitely true. All right. Well, we've got the questions of the people stacking up, so we're
00:54:57.220
going to switch over those, but before we do, can you tell people where to find this fantastic film
00:55:01.360
festival? Yeah. Yeah. So this is available on Gumroad, uh, a mere $10 will get you, um, over 40
00:55:10.700
hours of, uh, live stream. You can do it in audio or video form. Um, you can listen to it all at your
00:55:18.380
leisure. Um, if you go into, if you go, go onto Gumroad and type in last things, you'll, you'll
00:55:23.280
probably find it right away, but it's last things.gumroad.com slash L L slash LPS 23. Um,
00:55:32.120
and yeah, I hope, I hope folks check it out. Um, I tried to price it, uh, as, as, as low as I could
00:55:39.880
and, uh, I hope people enjoy it. And I definitely plan on, on doing it again next year.
00:55:44.500
An incredible value to be sure. I haven't made it through all of them, uh, because there are so many,
00:55:49.360
but I've enjoyed all of the ones I have listened to so far. So guys, make sure that you go ahead
00:55:55.240
and check out the film festival. All right. So let's go over to our questions real quick.
00:56:00.200
We got Cooper weirdo here for $5. Uh, we really need to have a deeper conversation on the secretly
00:56:05.420
based movie. How do we not fall in to cope? I mean, yeah, so there's, there's always, I guess
00:56:12.700
you people, so the thing that always happens and you hear this with like, I don't know, again,
00:56:16.760
starship troopers or Warhammer 40 K or things people are like, well, there was intended to be
00:56:21.340
a joke. It's intended to be, you know, whatever. And you're reading things into the, you're not
00:56:25.400
getting the joke. They're making fun of you. And, uh, you know, I think the, you know, the answer to
00:56:30.100
that is always just the, uh, the giga Chad, you know, smiling. It's like, who cares? Right? Like
00:56:35.940
I don't care what the author meant. I don't care what they were trying to say. If it's cool,
00:56:40.820
if it's based, if it speaks, then it speaks, you know? And so who cares at the end of the day? Uh,
00:56:46.420
I'll vote the death of the author. I don't care. Like this really does not matter. Uh, especially
00:56:51.940
when you have a culture that is entirely built around the subversion and attack of kind of your
00:56:57.560
identity, like you're just going to have to take your W's where they're going to come. And in many
00:57:02.400
ways, it's interesting to find them growing through the cracks of the concrete than it is to
00:57:07.200
necessarily, you know, uh, find them cultivated somewhere that this just doesn't exist.
00:57:12.100
Yeah. I, I don't, I don't think I have anything to add to that, to that, Oren. That's, that's all
00:57:16.560
great. And I agree. Like, you know, until we can make our own movies, we got to find, uh, the base
00:57:21.740
where we can, we can find it. I think there's different degrees of it too. Like, you know,
00:57:25.560
it's one thing to maybe just, you know, Oh, that it was actually like a kind of cool, very manly,
00:57:31.640
masculine character that I thought was, was interesting. And I know I was supposed to despise them,
00:57:38.120
but then there are also just, I think maybe even a deeper observation is, is when like a film
00:57:44.100
almost, uh, a film logically could have progressed toward a more based ending and just swerves,
00:57:52.100
you know, like the, the Batman coming with the Batarang and just, you know, knocking, bang,
00:57:57.420
bang out with it in the last five minutes. And it's clear that, you know, the, the more authentically
00:58:04.960
earned ending could have written itself. You know, that to me has more resonance than just,
00:58:09.600
you know, accidentally based characters. Very true. All right. Uh, bird hole, the dirt
00:58:16.780
knoll for a $2 beaver gang represents. See, I, I bring Jay burden on the show one time and his
00:58:23.540
audience invades. And now we're going to have to deal with the beaver gang from here on out,
00:58:27.200
but thank you very much, man. Appreciate it. I had no idea that Jay burden has his own gang.
00:58:31.100
Yes. Yes. Yeah. They, they roam from stream to stream, uh, you know, and so you, you've got to
00:58:38.040
really watch out. Um, all right. Uh, creeper weirdo here again, uh, how the crunch stole Christmas
00:58:45.320
is about an atheist Jew finding Jesus. Look at, uh, look at it and think about it. You know,
00:58:50.860
it's true. Uh, of course the Grinch is a classic. Thank you for that. Well, creeper weirdo, we can,
00:58:56.860
we'll have you on the next film vest. Yes. He can, he can give you those insights into the festival.
00:59:02.040
Uh, and again, creeper weirdo here. Blade runner is superior to 2049 overrated. Sorry. So I'm,
00:59:09.000
so obviously I think the original blood runner is a classic and that kind of puts it, I don't know if
00:59:14.620
superior is the right word, but it is certainly has a place of primacy for me. I enjoy that movie a lot.
00:59:20.920
Uh, but I think I, the thing for 2049 is really that movie should have been a disaster. Like when
00:59:27.580
someone said, I make, there's a blade runner sequel coming out. I was like, Oh, why please,
00:59:32.100
please God. No, like, please don't do this. Like, have we not has enough not been defiled? Have we not
00:59:37.820
seen into the, into the depths of despair enough? And then you get a movie like 2049 and is it perfect?
00:59:44.480
No. Is it, is it better than the original? I don't, I don't think so, but it is really good. And it's,
00:59:50.060
it's, it's one of the best movies I think to have been made in a long time. And it, you know,
00:59:55.940
just visually, uh, you know, the, the, the directing everything, the acting is amazing,
01:00:00.600
but also the fact that it was able to communicate things that you otherwise, like I said, probably
01:00:05.760
wouldn't have gotten through in other movies. I think it's really great. I don't think it's
01:00:09.360
overrated at all. Sorry. Yeah, no, I, I, um, I love both movies. I think they're both trying to do
01:00:15.820
and say pretty different things despite their kinship. Um, I would just say, listen to Astral's
01:00:22.460
review of it. You might, it might bring you around. Yeah. That's the other thing about it is
01:00:27.380
I liked that while they share universe and obviously they share like a kind of a visual language and
01:00:32.820
things, it is a sequel to be sure. Um, they, they are about very different things. It didn't just try to
01:00:38.780
rehash, uh, you know, the themes of Blade Runner went a very different direction, a lot of the ways.
01:00:43.960
And that's, that's what I think made it interesting. It didn't totally just the fact
01:00:47.860
that, uh, that a kind of a quote unquote reboot of an old film didn't make the main character a woman
01:00:53.760
and kind of like centered masculine issues in the, in the character of Ryan Gosling is kind of
01:01:01.380
unprecedented. And we managed to not get a star Wars or an Indiana Jones. Yeah. It should have been
01:01:08.340
like Ryan Gosling's character should have been played by Scarlett Johansson and it just be like,
01:01:12.940
you know, drop kicking people for two hours or something. Yeah. It is amazing that all of those
01:01:17.820
involve Harrison Ford, by the way. Uh, so yeah, it's the one Harrison Ford reboot that didn't
01:01:23.860
completely turn Harrison Ford into a whining mewling, uh, you know, uh, well I'll, I'll watch my language,
01:01:29.580
but, uh, uh, Dylan, Dylan 98 here thoughts on Michael Mann's heat and collateral. Uh, I love heat.
01:01:37.500
It's a great movie. Very, you know, very tight action movie. Um, really well done. Uh, I'm trying
01:01:44.640
to remember collateral with that was the Tom Cruise movie. I can, yeah, I actually even, I, I, I like
01:01:50.280
both of those movies, but I actually think I prefer collateral. I love, I love really. Um, I mean,
01:01:55.580
Michael Mann, we should have mentioned we're talking about masculinity and the masculine film,
01:02:00.340
but, um, yeah, that's sort of a hit him and Jamie Foxx. Jamie Foxx plays the cab driver. Um, that role
01:02:06.820
was originally going to be played by Adam Sandler, by the way, which would have been interesting. Um,
01:02:12.180
but, uh, I think that's a fantastic movie. Um, definitely about a, I mean, kind of weirdly,
01:02:17.960
like a coming of age story in some ways, even though Jamie Foxx is probably in his like forties when
01:02:23.780
he made, um, beautifully shot too. Um, I, I, I love the film. I remember seeing it in theaters
01:02:33.360
when it came out and enjoying it, but I I've never revisited it. So I just don't have enough
01:02:38.160
recalled. I've seen heat several times, but lateral. All right, guys, well, we're going to go
01:02:45.400
ahead and wrap this up, but once again, make sure to check out last things film festival. It's really
01:02:50.980
good. And he has, uh, you know, yours truly on there going on about Battlestar Galactica. So
01:02:57.040
that's entertaining if nothing else, if it's your first time coming on the channel, of course,
01:03:01.760
please make sure that you go ahead and subscribe. And if you'd like to get these broadcasts as
01:03:06.000
podcasts, make sure that you go ahead and, uh, follow the Oren McIntyre show on your favorite
01:03:10.700
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