Reflecting on Star Wars and Nostalgia

I' Saan Feny and this is the Big Picture A Conversation S showow He Man. That's right. todayoday we are talking about Adam AKA He Man, the most significant action hero toy figure of my childhood and the new adaptation of his story, Masters of the Universe, which opens this weekend. There is only one man on Eth who can grab the sord of power for this conversation with me about the movie, the best high fantasy films And to build his toy movie Hall of Fame, I'm talking of course about the great Griffin Newman from the Blankchheack podcast. Later in this episode I'll be joined by Somarrow Weaving and Adam Rayeyer, the star and director of Carolina Carolina, a newew crrime romance. Raymeyer is the man behind twenty twenty four Snackhack, one of my favorite movies of that year. And Weaving has emerged this decade as one of the most leading and exciting genre stars in movies like Ready or Not overver your dead body. And my beloved Babylon, Carolina Caroline is a big step forward for her as a woman who gets caught up with a con man and becomes ensnared in life a very sexy crime. It's great chatting with them both about this movie and how they got this moment in their careers. I highly recommend you stick around for it. but first Let's talk about some movie news with Griffin right after this. Everyone knows that unexplainable it factor, that smile that lights up a room, that wow. Well, it doesn't happen by itself. There's chemistry behind the charisma. Colgate Optic White Pro Series tooothpaste removes fifteen years of deep set stains when you brush twice daily for two weeks. How? The clinically proven formula is powered by Colgate's hydrogen peroxide complex. It works at the molecular level to gently dissolve stains deep within the enamel where your brush can't reach. It's proof that daily routine can be remarkable. 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I really appreciate you having me on the pod to talk about this. what feels like a real psychological crux point for both of us Yeah. This is a confrontation with our youth with your adult career in many ways.. I do want to get into the movie very shortly, but before we do that I gott toa talk to you about what's happening with movies right now because it's fascinating. this movie feels like a vestige of a thing that has ended. That's exactly right. You know, you are famed for your skills at the box office game on bllank Cck, you understand the box office as well as anybody in the world. And yet just before we started recording, I saw that Obsession made five million dollars on a Wednesday and its third week of release As long as I've been following this is in It's a really odd, unusual extraordinary territory. So like G give me your gloss on everything going on right now. It actually is breaking my brain. It doesn't track as reality Even the backroom's number was so much bigger than anyone was expecting, but it still felt like, well, this is what sometimes happens. There was a surprise, there was an audience the industry didn't recognize was as big as it was Obsession is defying basically every rule of how we study these things The only comps I can think of are these things that have humonggous astris next to them, such as Sound of Freedom., where you were like, oh, it had this big second weekend jump. but is anyone actually in the theater People just donating tickets. And when you hear about things like Ni ja T. making a billion dollars U you know, there was a question of, well, but the government reports the numbers. I mean, any of the other things that perform like obsession, there are truly conspiracy theories that you can point to immediately of Who's buying the tickets and are people actually seeing it And obsession is a thing that basically has not happened within our lifetime which is like a different type of word of mouth hit which is open big and growing You know, I feel like I think of some comps of things In recent memory, you obviously have platform releases that slowly get to something. That's not the same as this, obviously. Obsession opened wide on twenty five hundred screens Totally U And you know, something like get out having a single digit drop in the second weekend is kind of the closest comp to this And that was ten years ago and that was a drop It wasn't a game That's what you're used to. You're used to things that open well and then hold well The growing is u actually don't know how to explain it. I used you use the phrase. It is just the thing of A lot of people have been out of the habit of going to movies in the last ten years and peopleeople are getting more interested in going back to the theater, plus, you have obviously younger audiences that are building a bigger relationship to it. And then the phrase is word of mouth is people saying, you gott to see this, you got to see Nki, you gott to see what this experience is like. It's really fun in a room together. And that obviously, it felt like that specifically happened all the time for seventy five years, but it has not happened as frequently with a series like unknown people A small movie, a filmmaker with basically no track record. The movie that I was looking at data wise this morning just to see if it matched up at all was paranormal activity, which was the last time there was a thing that was like We've never seen anything like this before. It's a horror movie. The in theater experience was a lot of fun. But the numbers like they don't match up. Like there's nothing like five million on a Wednesday for paranormal activity, as big as that movie was. And that movie basically invented Jason Blum Horror Master. So I'm kind of fascinated to see Now, if this is just a blit, if it is just an unforgettable performance, is it more like maybe a Six cense kind of thing where that kind of puts Samalan on the map and then there's like a Curry Barker brand. like it could really go in any direction at this point. It really could. You're making me think of a couple different things here. I mean, Six cense is kind of the closest comp in that it opened big, but not huge It opened at number one. It made like twenty million That was seen as an overperformance in that weekend. a weekend that famously sparked the box office game on our podcast. Right. it's my favorite box office weekend of all time because it was like a five car pile up of studio releases that all bombed except for the Scets. were they not do you remember Yeah, it's Iron Giant. It's Mystery men. is Dick which opened outside of the top ten And then I want to say it was maybe Maybe it was the first weekend of Thomas Crown affair, which opened a little soft and then held well. Wow, Dick and Thomas Crown aff for a huge weekend for Amanda. Jeez humgous. I mean, her personality is basically built in the first weekend of August nineteen ninety nine. but That was a movie that The idea that it was doing so well became its own form of marketing Yeah I think paranormal activity was a little bit more of you got to see this thing. I can't even explain it. breathless reporting of something weird is happening here. created its own must see factor.. I was talking to my best friend Sophie Fader, who is The mother you can do it Mama. of a two year old and thus has not been to the movie theaters in years barely even watch the stuff at home And my friend and I were going to see backrooms, and I was trying to explain to her what's going on And I could see the shift in the conversation from This is the kind of thing she's tolerated hearing me talk about for years as my best friend, to wait actually, what are you saying? What does that mean That is weird You know, And it's the kind of thing where sometimes a person can explain to me something that is happening in the world of sports And I go, oh, this is actually just objectively Unique. Yes. This isn't interesting to sports fans. This is it's weemby. It's likees, how is someone born with these proportions? Yes I know but Yeah. The obsession thing is so strange though, because It is And obviously, the Blair Witch proroject is a forebear here in a lot of ways. And there have been other kind of unique storytelling styles like paranormal activity like Blairwitch that have become phenomenons in theaters and word of mouth hits, especially among young people. I think even like the Jackass movie kind of falls into this where sort of like this is an unusual thing that we're seeing be very successful in a movie theater. The thing about part of excuse me, but part of it too, I think is This feels like we shouldn't be seeing this in a theater. Right. Exactly. There's something incendiary about this experience, even though it is a commercial release by a major studio. Right. Obsession is not thatad. even it has no stars, but it's just a horror movie. I mean, I think it's quite good and entertaining horror movie. but it is structurally, functionally even int intellectually ideologically, like it is just a horror movie. And so that's what is making this so fascinating to me that like I do tend to overread these things, but The idea of people getting very excited about a movie this long into its run, so to speak is is just so unque. Yeah It's why I bring up my friend Sophie, not that I think it's going to get her to go to the theaters, but I saw something in her Even when, you know, nine months ago, I was saying, you got to see one battle. I think you specifically would really like it. Her response was, it's just so hard to get out of the house. Yeah And here she was like, wait, what is ing here. And there is, I feel like studios and all the prognosticators and the analysts and everybody have been trying to post the pandemic You know, there's the pre pandemic wave of, is it over for everything other than Marvel? And then there's the post pandemic wave of, is it just over And this is an inexplicable something is happening here and people like being a part of it, which is the thing that's been so hard to synthesize What is the thing that gets people out? The movie we're going to talk about today is a movie that is very much going by an old playbook of how do we engineer around a couple models we know? to make something that should check boxes. And there is some weird form of FOMO happening with obsession, which I also think, you know, you bring up paranormal activity and you bring up Blair Witch. Those are movies that like had a semi wide, you know, hyper limited opening weekend, overperformed. and then the second weekend they put it in hundred or a thousand screens and it went big, it went bigger and then it dips. Yeah There was a clear cresting point of it's grown to the right size and now it's trickled, it all built to the one weekend. And usually that weekend was met with a lot of disappointment at people saying, I didn't think it was that scary. And there's been discourse around obsession, but I'm not hearing that much the fuck is this movie which usually you get with these kind of out of the box prizes. And I also think Well, that's what backg is going through right now Background is getting that going through what all this noise about this, you know, thist scare me or this doesn't work or whatever. It's getting that kind of classic backlash, especially to a horror movie and one that is is so internet born, Whereas obsession just being down the middle scary movie and people being like, you know what? it is scary. I like it. It reminds me a lot of weapons. It's very similar to weapons where weapons didt have a lot of discourse but for the most part, people were like, well, that movie is good. And it had a kind of like force field around it in terms of quality and this feels like it is operating in a similar way Shamalan is the closest comparison and it's not a twist movie. it's a hook movie But to your point, it's a hook that could have existed. Wes Craven could have made this movie thirty years ago And he could have made it with, you know, two cast members from Beverly Hills nine hundredo two onezer There's nothing about this movie that could only exist in this moment. Wow. Shannon Dherty and Brian Austinen Greene I think that's the parent, right? That's who it would be Harry would be the friend Yes. He'd be in the Cooperers T Homllinson role. Yeah. Exactly. Andrea Zucker would be She would be the other girl she would be Sam, right? Yeah. Yes. That's correct We nailed this. I rem. But but it' right, it's not a movie like Backrooms where you go, well, this could only come out of this current moment, could come out of YouTube come out of a culture looking back on itself, could come out of technology all these things. And it's also that for years there has been this failed effort take the most popular people on the internet and slot them into the traditional system thingsings like beast games I don't know a single person who has watched of their own volition. He's the most watched man on the internet. It's not that he's fallen off. His videos still continue to do well But when you say Put him in the Amazon system, give him infinite money and make him. tellell him to make a normal TV show It feels like the whole thing goes off the rails and neither side is happy He doesn't find a new audience and his original audience is like We like the twenty minute thing. And there's been this false kind of hunting of who has the biggest audience Wh has the biggest numbers versus Who is Dare I say, artistically developing in the most intriguing way that feels parallel to these pre existing forms and mediums, right where there's an obvious They're evolving towards this door And I think what you're seeing a little bit of, that's the starting point for both of these movies, is audience that feels invested in these people, it's not that they're subscribed And they'll go see anything they do just because they're a fan It's that they've been watching the evolution of the career And it feels like some satisfying graduation of All the steps have built up to this and it's working. That only gets you to the starting line. right. That gets you to the opening weekend being bigger than you think you know, or the buzz being bigger than you think do think that's if there's anything replicatable here, It's that goes back to The studios can't apply dumb thinking to this. The only way you're going to replicate this is to watch a bunch of stuff and find what's good It's not about finding the thing that has the view count. in my opinion. The obsession thing in particular is fascinating me. I think backackrooms has been kind of picked over and analyzed and deconstructed in a lot of ways already because it feels so unusual, but there is a long history of liminal storytelling at the movies. and so there's a lot of comps With obsession A lot of people are claiming credit for that movie right now, but that was an independently financed seven hundred fifty thousand dollars movie Curry Barker did not have James Wan and Oz Perkins shadowing him while he was making that movie. His father, you know worked in the business in some respects and understood things. and he was working with James Harris as se'ason producer. The things that are in the movie that I think your kind of classic film critic think don't work like the way that the film is lit, for example. That would have been on a studio film. L a twenty six year old would not have been allowed to kind of make that mistake, quote unquote. And I think that that mistake, which feels wrong to a certain kind of trained movie watcher eye, is actually working to an untrained eye I agree, and that's why I think Shamalan's the real comparison point is the star of the movie becomes What's going on here? Who made this and what is this feeling Those Shamalan movies as much as you could point and say, well, they're bits of Hishcock and they're bits of this and that There was a feeling there Even with the sort of emotionality of it, the melodrama of it combined with the hookiness and whatever, that felt very unique. and then similarly had this you have to see it performance Yeah. And I think unlike Weapons, which obviously is a humgous performance and an Oscar winning performance That's about creating like an icon of horror, right? And it's also a vet just killing it.. You know getting a great opportunity and nailing it. I think This has a little bit of that magic trick feeling that Haley Joel Osman had where you go Where did this person come from? Y What are they doing? How are they doing this And that combined with the language of the movie itself and the weird look of it and the odd pacing of it all these things where you go Well, is that someone evolving the language or is that element of outsider art because these are people who didn't have to go to film school. Yeah who learned how to make movies by making movies. They just kept iterating putting it out and getting feedback and doing again. We've never had a pipeline like that before that works It's so funny though, because most of the movies that we think of as the foundational generational horror films. and like you know you and David and Alex Rosspererry did this legendary episode on Halloween on your show and Alex talked a lot about kind of the groundwork of a certain kind of a horror movie. But if you And where Halloween comes from that it doesn't come out of a vacuum, that there's sort of four evolutionary strains leading to that moment where it feels like suddenly the atom is fllit. Right. But so if you look back at Night of the Living Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Last House on the Lft, or even Halloween to some extent Those are films that feel handmade independently that have flaws. that are not yet polished And I'm not comparing obsession qualitatively to those movies. It's not really in their realm in terms of what it's doing. Although I do think socially it's getting at something about desire and sexual relationships generationally. but I don't think it's kind of as sophisticated as like what Night of the Living Dead meant about the violence that people were experiencing in America at a certain time, whether it be in our country or in Vietnam or all these other ways you can read the film. I'd just say that to say that sometimes that unpolish is so essential for a horror moment and that the more that something is groomed and buffed. The more suspicious the core audience becomes of the product And so that's why this era And you know, Blumhouse has been guilty of this of like trying to scale up their movies and IPify their movies over the last seven or eight years and getting away from these kinds of movies has been completely antithetical to, I think, what is at the core of the fandom. You can say there are counter examples that the conjuring franchise being as big as it is kind of runs counter to that. They're always going to be pivots against. Something about obsession just being an indie makes me think that it's contributing to the quote unquote moment aspect Yeah, I think so too. And I think there's something weirdly to the fact that you can't Toilets that it isn't based around a hook that today people would Google and then go, does that sound corny to me or not? Do I even need to see it? Do I wait until later that what is being relayed to people in word of mouth is, that thing may be really uncomfortable. Yeah. And the preise happens. The premise is hard to explain. Yeah. The pre is the premise is simple, but then what actually is upsetting about what plays out outside of maybe two or three moments that you could describbe to someone and you go, I get how that's an effectively scary or violent sequence You know, the scene at the party, how do you describe that to somebody You don't, and you don't you could not successfully convey What about that is kind of electrifying? I mean, it's text chanceaws fasting because Cer Barkers' obviously signed on to do a new one And there's the shot in that movie of Leatherface in the field. the sort of lens flare in the sun where suddenly it feels like you're watching like Terce Malek movie and it's this sort of inverse of what you're saying of this moment of almost like accidental poetry suuddenly your feelings about what you're seeing get completely flipped around because there's such a beauty. in an image that is loaded with so much dread And I feel like no one's ever been able to explain why that moment feels that way and why it's in the movie And on paper, it actually works against everything the movie's doing. But I do think you're right that there's something to as much as we love the idea of these an horror auteurs who had complete control of the frame and of every second of sound and movement. Um sometimes the inexplicable out of the box hits are either touching on a cultural hot button could not have predicted would meet the moment in that sort of way Or there's just some fucking thing. Yeah. no one can put their finger on, but people be watching at sleepovers for fifty years. Yeah, I agree. There's an inevitable ineffable quality that I just saw teenage seex and D death at camp Masma yesterday. I'm so excited to see that. And it's such an interesting movie and it' almost feels like a movie that is It's a movie that's like responding to the last forty years of horror movies, but for all of these things to kind of be happening simultaneously for the post mododern reading, plus a backroomsy and internet focused thing, plus a really more classical monkey's Paw movie that still has the juice like obsession happening. Just just a fascinating time for the genre at the movies. Okay. So I think you set it up perfectly too with Hean, which is that this is an old playbook. This is a movie that is using something that feels like on if you just showed a photograph of the characters to a young child, they would be interested. But I'm not sure that the IP holds the same sway in the same way that Star Wars and superhero films and Transformers and a lot of other things have been drafting off of Millennial and gen X born interests being and I'll use that as a way to kind of talk about our histories with this character in this world. Yeah. I've said before He Man is my first obsession. It is my first I need to collect all the toys line. It started in nineteen eighty two, the year of my birth by Mattel. Many people think the cartoon started first. It did not. This was an action figure line, first and foremost that then developed IP out of it It's kind of incoherent in terms of storytelling. It's remedial. It is obviously born very specifically out of a Reagan era, kind of Machismo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone I want to pump you up moment in the culture. Also a Reagan era striaking down of laws that were preventing cartoon shows created solely to sell toys. Right. G Man is the one that basically breaks the Berlin wall of These can be twenty two minute commercials now. That's right. the reggulatory moment. Yeah. Exactly. And to fill in a couple gaps here because I mean, this is one of my real nerd. corners U and hopefully I don't get too much wrong, but u so much of HMan and the eighties for toys is a response to every major company passing on Star Wars that Star Wars is the whiff that no one can live down. Everyone goes, we need our Star Wars killer And Hasbro has GI Joe in its history. They go, let's make them small, let's make them fight crazy snake people and use lasers. You know, we can sell more vehicles. They rebrand that They also simultaneously start collecting a bunch of different Japanese toys, mush them together into one mythology, that becomes transformers there's all this sort of everyone is trying to come up with their killer And Mattel has Barbie is their biggest brand and Hob Wheels which is cars, but not characters. And they like needed a thing with characters And he Man comes out of like a panicked year of development. What is the thing that can compete with Star Wars? And as I always affectionately put it What I love about it is that it's a garbage plate What they ended up doing was kind of combining every pitch. There are like ten guys who claimed that they created He Man and all of them are correct because they all created what would be the one fundamental piece in any other property. But with Hean, they took ten pieces and they mushed them all together And they said, why are we choosing between barbarians and robots? Why aren't magic and technology existing in the same thing? Also ninjas, alsoso a cyborg cowboy, right? It's monsters and it's high fantasy and it's all of this sort of stuff And that was the genius of it was how kind of was was that it's but then within it, what I think is fascinating and I was talking about Uh, we had Matt Johnson podcast and we were talking off Mike about how we're obsessed similarly with these corners of pop culture. And said, you know, the thing that's fascinating is that These were like assignments for people. These were sort of interim jobs on the way to what they actually wanted to do, whether it was to write novels or to be a business executive or whatever it was. Either you have lo your creative ambitions or you're stuck in a creative position while you want to get to a management position. and you're the guy who gets the rights of this Japanese video game and you have to rename the characters. You know, these assignments that become like it's four o'clock on a Friday And when they hit right They become things that people like you and I study like religious text And the meaning is not behind it in the decision making process And there's the clip that goes viral like once a year from P of Gray Skull, which is a really good documentary about. the toy line was made of what does he manan ride? What's his vehicle? We don't have money for a vehicle And there was another toy line called Big Gim. And they said, give him Big Jim's jaguar. he's got like a big jaguar And they went, Well, Big Jim was like this tall it was like thirteen inches and he means five inches The cat's too big for he manan to ride And they go just paint it green or something And that's the decision. You're like, well, if the cat's green, then it can be giant. And then it's bn. Yes. And then you can ride it. R. All this sort of stuff you did get people like Paul Dini who is later, you know, primarily responsible for most of or a lot of what made Batman the animated series great and Jay Michaels Frzinski and all these people who worked on the early days of He Man u who were accidentally making interesting things You know, but none of the mythology lines up with itself. This is really key as you said is they create the toys first They go to the toy companies or the toy stores rather. And they go, who's going to buy the toys if the kids don't know the characters? They go, we'll write comic books and put them inside the package. Then they start developing a cartoon show Basically three mythologies being developed simultaneously. There is no IP management. no one's really talking to each other. The guysy writing the comics are doing one thing. The intent when they created the toys was one thing. And the cartoon is only when they add in Prince Adam Not to mention Orco and sorcerers. Like all this stuff is so piecemeal It is what has made this movie a development hell project for about twenty five years is how how the fuck do you adapt this combined with It's got cashe There's a fandom, there's nostalgia. But as you said, it's never been as big as Marvel, DC, GI Joe, Transformers. It doesn't have the immediate everyone knows what that means when you say it. even if they can't name all the characters. And so it's always been in this weird zone of There's no way to make a cheap version of this movie It maybe could be a big hit if you nailed it How do you nail it while giving it the backing it needs He's the fandom, which isn't big enough to support the budget on its own while also bringing in a new audience. And it's truly been twenty five years of basically every major studio I mean, it was Fox, Warner Brrosers, Sony U all had their goes with this And then Netflix for years before it ended up with the current Amazon MGM thing Yeahes, so In addition to this long road to adapting it into a movie and the way in which they adapt it into a movie, I think speaks to some of the anxieties that it has gone through in the development process It's also been rebooted as an animated series twice and there have been multiple three times, three times Arguably four times. Fth time. Okay. I don't know. I defitely dont about the fourth time. Yeah and Each time It's had varying levels of success but never replicated that experience in the nineteen eighties. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that, but primarily because It is inescapable and from its roots. likeike the actual the time in which it was made, does not poured over neatly the way that something like Spider Man does. where Spider Man has a kind of eternal quality. There is something very locked into that eighties mentality U and also some of the kind of raggedy quality of its development, you know, that the characters don't all make sense together tonally, that the technologies don't all fit together. So it does that Sorgas board quality that you're describing It just it makes it feel like, um, It never should have happened in the first place. It's like this weird beautiful accident. It's like a peanut butter truck and a chocolate truck crashing into each other except there were also twenty other trucks And I think you hear about the development hell of this movie over two plus decades and It's always the is the move that we have to ground it and make it more serious and actually make it make sense, or do you need to lean all the way in and make everything a joke and make it a total comedy? And it The original thing in its moment had this insane Rise and fall. Unlike GI Joe and Transformers, which continue to exist and have their peaks and valleys HemM was done by nineteen eighty eight. It starts in nineteen eighty two There's the one previous live action movie with Dolph Lundren in ' eighty seven. And by the time that movie comes out, it basically had ended.. It had crashed and burned. It was insane. It went from, you know, like tens of millions of dollars to hundreds to a billion to tenens to nothing. I can within the span of five years. I can map it so perfect because I'm born in eighty two. so I can map it perfectly onto my shifting interest specifically into Marvel and teenage Ninja Turtles and those being the two way is it of fom that in addition like baseball that I was kind of pouring myself into when I was six, seven, eight, nine years old and away from hean. Hean, it having this kind of primal quality when you're four and you see hean and you see Skeletor and you see Eilin and you see Sorceerress and you see have your power as a statement. I mean they talk about they did all these focus groups figure out what the toy line needed to be And they kept circling back to kids really light up if you throw the idea of power in front of them. All kids kind of feel powerless And if there's an idea of being able to take control of power in some kind of way And then the idea that he Man is basically, despite the fact that he looks like he could be Conan, the barbarian He is this affable goofball. Yeah the smiling sort of hyper friendly. He's what a child thinks they would be as a grown upp if they got really buff and strong. And but also still have their manners, you know Yeah was was remember what their parents taught them. I you know, You know this because you've been kind enough to give to my daughter some toys from this universe. But she sort of independently got into it. Yeah so she just pulled a Sira disk off of a video store shelf when she was like four years old And then about a year ago, we went to go see a bunch of human episodes strung together at the Egyptian one morning You know, she was pretty young. She was like three and a half four years old when she was getting into it And I think it is specifically what you're describing that there is this essential hereroic. oversimplified quality to both of those characters. She are a little bit more complex, but not really. Yeah Yeah and So it makes sense that it was clicking for people at that time. Now' I'm a bit older than you. So how did you get into this since it was gone by the time you came around I'm basically born the year it's put to bed. So they did a desperate attempt to reboot it like immediately when it was dying which was the second cartoon show, which was called The New Adventures of He Man And that was hean and Skeletor go to space otherwise entirely different cast of characters Now they're just like actually trying to tackle Star Wars directly. So that's running when I'm little, but that was a big And then I went to a summer camp that podcast listeners love when I invoke. where I mostly got taken under the wing of the cooler u teenage counselors and training And I had always been sort of obsessed with the pop culture that had come right before me And there was one guy in particular who named himself Grunge And his two greatest obsessions in the world were the Viewisk Universe and Masters of the universe. It was the two verses And this explains why we're friends right now. Totally. But also just to get ahead of this, the insanity of I ended up voicing Orco on a he Man cartoon show Show Run by Kevin Smith is like what's happening in Grunge's backroom. You know that like Are you in touch with Grunge? Do you know where he is right now He called me a couple of months ago. I actually owe him a call back. I you know, he is a guy I will run into a conventions. Okay, very often But yees, so I was like getting into human when I was like, eleven twelve many years after it had created and crered. Yeah. which was a really weird time. and I think I was just sort of fascinated by the sort of like uncanny pop culture object nature of it and trying to make sense of how something could have been big of a cultural phenomenon and completely disappeared by the time that I was conscious Like how is that a thing? when as all these other things were saying, Star Wars, GI Joe, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Wax and Wayne never truly disappeared. None of those things ever went away in the way that he man did. And then in the early two thousands was the first major reboot where there was a new cartoon show new toy line video games, everything. they really made an effort to try to like Give it another go. And that cartoon shows, I'm not one of these people who's going to pretend it's better than the wire, but it is a very, very well written children's fantasy show, you know? Yeah. Very different though, very anime inspired. Ver A little proto avatar of the last Airbound, I would say. And I was into that, which was a really cool thing to be doing in high school. And then I sort of just kind of stayed with it forever and then about Seven years ago, I guess now, I got a message from a guy I knew Eric Crosco who's a great writer for TV who I have mutual friends with and he said u just got hired to write on a new He Man cartoon show. And Derek gave me your number because he said you're a big fan and I want to pick your brain about some stuff And so I got on the phone with him and he was just like, you know, I've been trying to dig into the canon. it's so complicated and it doesn't really talk to itself well. Like I just I want to talk to some fans and ask like what are the things that mean the most to you Would you want to see in show ya yada yada We talked on the phone for about an hour U this is like summer twenty nineteen And then at the end of it, he said, what do you think about Oro? And I said, Oracco is obviously the best character. And he was like, okay, because my first takeaway from rewashing the cartoons is, I want to pitch you to play Orca And there was a very prolonged process to actually get the part from there but it very much felt like a realization of It was as much a dream job as anything I've ever gotten to do and is the hardest I've ever worked to get a job paid scale that to most people would not make sense on paper. Right. But Orko to me is like such an embodiment of what I like about Han, where he's a character that was crareated for the cartoon notot for the toys. He's a little flying magical trollin He's basically a troll whose face you can't see because he's wearing a scarf and a hat And I'm wearing the replica hoodie right now. I have way too much human merchandise But he was basically the a another self insert character for children who felt so powerless they couldn't even relate to Hean As the guy who sometimes gets the power Orkco is the little tiny thing who messes everything up. All he's trying to do is be like, poor Gesture magician and he can't get that right. And yeah, I just always loved that character and love playing So Interesting relative to the film. and your experience, I think probably maps a little bit more closely onto Travis Knight's experience with it because he think he's fifty two. And so when the when the series came around, he had to be eight nine, ten And That's really interesting to talk about around what this movie ultimately has become because as you said, it was in development for many years. Amazon now is in the midst of this from my perspective, much appreciated push back into theatrical. and this was A year ago at Cinema Con. One of the big centerpiece things that they presented after Project Hel Mary. they said, we've got this big piece of IP. We've got this exciting filmmaker We've got Nicholas Galazine Is this the one you have? That's the one have Yes. Yes. They gave us a this year, but even last year, there was all of this kind of behind the scenes uh, uh package that was shared with us around you know, and frankly, I was like, oh wow, this is Idris Elba and Alison Breee and like there's some Legitimate people in this movie. And, you know There was a two thousand one I think was the start of the modern development on this. It was John Wu originally announced. Then it was McG at one point. Y. Anyone who's ever been a teen Hearth Rob since two thousand one at one point was kind of attached to playing K in were rumored and you would have the moments where they'd go We're gonna to do the Lord of the Ring style version, or we're going do the version that mostly takes place on Earth That's more of a fish out of water comedy or a self parody, or you try to make it a gritty action movie, or is it the MCU inspired version It did feel like when this finally came together, it was coming together in a semi legit way. and Travis Knight on paper mix as much sense direct this movie as anybody Yeah. I think he's a I think he's a great pick and and I'm going to talk about why this is a the movie is a really interesting thing to pull apart. We'll pull it apart right now. So it' written by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adamneee and David Callahghan. You can see that a lot of hands were throwing in on this over a period of time And these were previously directors on the movie. Y. So they're still fingerprints from the last Iteration. Yes. And, you know, they wrote directed The Lost City. You know, Dave Callaham, who is a friend of mine like has written on twenty five movies like this, you know, he's always called in to kind of polish or update or improve upon fight sequences. It stars Nicholas Galazine, who people may know from Red, white and Royal Blue, or the Ia View Camilla Mendes is Tela, Jared Letto Is Skeletor have to dis I regret to inform you that you're let ofkelet Skeletor Allison Bree James, Purefooy, so on and so forth. Yeah, hereere's the log line of the film. The sword of power leads Adam back to Eternia, a world shattered under the fiendish rule of skeletor. Joining forces with Tela and man at arms, Adam must embrace his true destiny as he man, the most powerful man in the universe Now I did not know until about two months ago that this was going to be a metaxtual action Cittee I thought based on that BTS that I saw that we were getting pure down the middle San lore And I actually think it was a good choice even if it doesn't always work. And that's basically where I net out on this movie at large. I had fun with it. It's wildly flawed. It's way too long. It only hits its jokes at like a thirty three percent hit rate I think that's generous. I think the comedy is the most disastrous element of this film I would I would put the hit rate lower But I agree with everything else you're saying. The other thing that I'll say is just because of this movie arriving at this time in my life, if they nailed one specific thing, It was going to get me to feel big feelings, which is that In Nicholas Galaxine and specifically with Transforming into Hean. They just, they did it. Like they did it and I just felt chills. I felt tears filling my eyes. I was like, this is the realization of a little boy's dream that Dolph Lundreen could never possibly live up to. That doesn't mean the movie is good. I think it's got a ton of problems, but it gave me a feeling that I wanted it to give me. And so I just want to foreground our dissection of this property with that expression Well, let me foreground Additionally here, I was fighting like two different things while watching this movie. There were the moments where The film was jangling keys and I went regrettably It has my keys. It has stolen my keys from my pocket. It is jangling my keys in front of my face. There is no way I'm not going to look at this and have an emotional response, right? This movie just has my number Clearly from explaining my history with this franchise, I'm a bizarre broken person and the silly thing means a lot, right It doesn't mean that I'm going to be an easy life for anything this movie does. It also doesn't mean that I was sitting there with my notepad being like, they better get this right. Right Right. I wasn't either. But I was I felt pretty at peace with just the idea of seeing, I want to see a Han movie. and I hope it gives me some feelings of any sort Um I was at other times watching this movie and I kept thinking of the Sepusmi character in Ghost worldorld when Thorberirg recommends that he meets a woman his age who shares his interests and he goes I hate my interest. There were times and I know youve had a bit of a spiral like this watching Mutant Mayhem, the Ninja Trollless movie, which I think is an infinitely better film. It's a pretty excellent movie is something about watching these films now as guys who are both massive movie fans and pop culture fans but also now have built weird lives for ourselves as like commentators on these things. What we even are is hard to define. I know the is Srun Fantasy, a film critic or not conversation breaks the internet twice a week. But these are keep having it, you know, let's keep talking about it. Health. It's really healthy and all the work happening over on Reddit is good and productive. in all corners of Redit. I've yet to find a bad one. But you know, there's something weird about being people. We just had this conversation about backrooms and obsession that is so exciting. Two movies that we like that feel like pure expressions of creativity that are connecting with an audience organically and a younger audience that people had written off as moviegoers. And then here's a movie that just keeps looking at you and I and being like, huh Are you happy And that's exactly right Sometimes it made me happy and I felt guilty And other times it did something that annoyed me and I was disgusted at myself for caring You know? Yeah. So other times I was just kind of stepping back and going for someone who doesn't know anything, which this movie once again, needs to function as a clean entry point for people because the human audience alone is not enough to justify this budget and That for me was a real up and down thing. There were moments where I went This is smart. The framework you said It basically turns Adam, who is the character that is the prince of Eterurnnia, who in a kind of shhazam style setup is able to transform into human imbued with the power of the most powerful man in the universe It basically turns him into a fan of He Man. Yes. As you said, there's this metatextual hook, which is He grew up in this world and then he was sent to our world, my favorite thing to make up make fun of is magically they somehow end up in our world as the studio fix for adapting any nostalgic property. Of course. But he's literally like what dropped into the river and uh has I guess doesn't have amnesia half remembers his childhood and is trying to figure out how to get back almost in like an Alison Wonderland kind of way. Yeah, I think actually a lot of the construction of that and the way that it sort of resolves in the final act of the movie is quite clever. because there's such there's such a dumb guy quality to all of the characters in the Masters of the Universe story, the way that they're named specifically, that feels like it could have only come from the mind of a ten year old boy with a shoddy memory. And that I think is so framework. Yes. I agree with that.. The way that it's told, I think the movie has a little bit of like when you're reading the biography of a famous person and you're like Can we get past the first fifteen years here a little quickly? Like I don't really wantan to spend time with young Adam. I don't wantan to spend time with Adam and his job on Eth. L I just let's go to Eternia and let's have battles and see Skeletor. And for a movie that is two hours and twenty minutes long to spend roughly forty five minutes through that committee more I was thinking a lot Just move you ostensibly has two first acts And it is, it's forty five minutes. It's twenty minutes spent on, wow, we're going straight into the deep end. This movie is opening with multicolored skies and voiceovers and talking birds and explaining the lore and showing him as a little boy and setting up the emotional stakes and the fights and all the characters. And then at the twenty minute mark, basically, it resets to Nicholas Gallateign in our world explaining This has been his story that he's been telling on a disastrous date which is kind of a funny reveal, but gets into some of these movies like I don't I'm not going to logic police it on the big things because that's what he man's about is that Lvic Police stand by, stand down. but Um, Stuff like this where you're like, okay, so he looks like Nicholas Galaxine. He's ripped as hell On a date with someone who looks like a model And he thinks I should for forty minutes monologue about my childhood that everyone tells me is crazy Uh there the sort of questions of like Who raised this guy once he landed on Earth? How does he explain himself? How does he have a government identity? you just you literally can't. any of those things. like can you can't try to understand the movie in that way. and that might be the fatal, fatal flaw of it as a new as a new moviego, right? As somebody who's like I don't know what this is if you're coming down. But if you're us and you sit down and you you can accept that in the same way that we can accept what I think is the movie's closest comp, which is Barbie. Greta Gerwig's Barbie. movie is Barbie in reverse because Barbie is a movie about Obviously femininity, the glass ceiling, self determinism, all of these big existential ideas around womanhood that Greta Gerwg is interested in. But it's a movie about escaping the fantasy world to become real on Eth. That is really how Barbie realizes her true self Adam is the flip side. Adam is I need to go back to this special place where I come from. And honestly, what an amazing insight that is into the way that men think and the way that women think. and the way that womomen try to become realized in the world and seen and accepted and promoted And the way that men are just like Take me back to when me and Grunge were talking about the Viewiske Universe in camp.. and there's truth to it. Likes it's a clever He' also literally going like, take me back to my mommy. I want to play with all my old toys. Literally the character's drive, right? Like he really wants to My dad was a little bit brash with me My mom was always supported. I miss her and I miss my friends that I used to draw. Y We' all these characters with silly names. I think that is a smart framework for the movie, and it Oh you know, in working on the cartoon show, but also being such a big fan and following these things closely and being someone like my friend Eric who would get calls sometimes Oh, I got a hean scoop if you want to hear it like anonymously There's a lot of stuff I can't say, but there's a lot of various stages of development of this movie over at least the last ten, fifteen years that I had heard off the record And it feels like to some degree this is a mashup of a lot of those different elements, but that was the element they finally kind of cracked that made the movie work. and I feel like they got halfwave there to the most functional dramatic exploration of that Yeah. so they didn't quite crack it into being a totally satisfying narrative around that But it is the right emotional entry point And it's the right framework with which to engage with the spirit of the silliness of the thing. Part of my conf it's not confusion Part of my sort of like unsettledness with the movie is that one, it's kind of a It's jumping from Lily pad to Lily pad tonally where it can't really decide Do it want to be kind of sincere exploration of lost childhood, Do it want to be a really arch satire of eighties consumerism. Does it want to be an exploration of toxic masculinity? Does it want to be just a pure high fantasy movie? It's trying to do a lot of things at the same time. That's very, very challenging for a movie. The one thing that is a little bit particularly odd is that Adam on Earth works in human resources and has learned the language of safe workpaces and safe spaces in general and he is presented as a button down wearing kind of evolved man And then obviously running underneath that is this desire to hulk out and to become he manan. And the mo then is the movie like is it sending up Txic masculinity? is it like comommenting on woke culture surrounding a certain kind of masculinity? Is it trying to have its cake and eat it too? it seems a little bit undefined It's another idea where I felt like they got sixty percent of the way there. They were having the right conversation and they didn't ultimately get to the conclusion of it partart of the deregulation of cartoons at that time and allowing these things to exist that were produced by literal toy companies and were, you know transparently existing just to sell action figures. is that they had to tra some degree of educational content. And so much like GI Joe, every episode of He Man would end with a PSA. Yes. It would end with often it would be Hean himself, but sometimes it would be the newest character doself.. or it go would do it a lot. And, you know, no spoilers, but this movie is engaging with that legacy Um, but u Dud There is that nature too There were still a lot of guidelines around violence T Man is defined by having this sword. The sword is the thing that helps him transform. He could never use the sword on the cartoon. It's almost a Mandela effect. If you rewatch the show now in your mind's eye, you go, off course he was sword fighting constantly. He literally never J wases it. He takes it out when he transforms, and I think the only other time they were allowed to use it is if he basically was using it to restrain a bad guy. He held it over his chest and was holding him. But there's like never sword fighting So you have this cartoon show about quote unquote, weakling Wh? Everyone always jokes looks exactly the same. His transformation is just he gets a base tan, right? And he switches from a pink vest to being shirtless and ripe strapped And then he's the coolest strongest guy except he can't really fight. And he mostly says to Skeletor like Skeletor, lying is never good And then at the end of the episode, he looks at every kid in the audience and goes, Today we learned why lying is bad. When you lie, you get caught. You know, And so it's part of the odd nature of this thing when the trailer came out on his on the Vant L just you're tapping into something very raw in my in my history. Yeah. When the trailer came out, they had the big spotlighted shot of his placard on his desk at his HR job that said he him And there was a certain amount of handringing from a very healthy side of the internet going, oh, are they trying to make Hean woke Part of the problem with HMan and trying to adapt it in a modern era is it is fundamentally bulkish shit in the world But now that lands differently for people.. He was always this very sensitive, emotionally intelligent softy, even when he looked like Conan the Barbarian. He was hulking out, but he wasn't hulking out. Yeah. He's not even smart hulk because he's a professor. He's just basically team leader, that's always kind of what he was. And he's got this incredibly diverse group of allies. I mean, literally. and he's just fighting What is you know, you could argue a somewhat offensive stereotype but it is also just An evil man who just wants to consolidate power And hean is the ultimate kind of like reckoning with Everyone's going to roll the res when I say this, but it's just textually there. It is just about reckoning the fucking straightw straight white male privilege. He man is like to the manen are born, he is a prince who is born on Like third base Right and is like jacked and handsome and then is given even more power. And what defines hum in is that he tries to share it and divide it responsibly and empower others. And he's doing all of that in this way, not because there was some grand unifing theory behind the show. it wasn't Sesame Street that was trying to teach children something, it had to land on that in order to sell its toys. But think about That is what it is. But think about who's making this movie. Travis Knight, who is the son of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, whose father bought him an animation studio, which he transformed Will Vinton' stududios that he transformed into Lica, which then by his own skill and team leadership truly turned into one of the very best animation studios in the world. He individually, he directed films that are great animated films. He's made live action movies that are good. So even though he is to the manner born He is talented. It's very clear that he is talented It's why he was a good choice for this because I think often people were struggling to crack Hinan as a character because he seems too perfect and devoid of conflict And the answer is you're going to need someone with the lived experience and psyche of a Travis Knight who is the son of a billionaire who couldn't figure out his dad's thing And who it took a while to figure out what his thing was. He had a failed rap ced, you know There were many eras of Travis Knight's life before he fell into stop motion and started out as just an animator and then basically became the head of an entire company and then a director. and now has made two toy movies that feel very much like him living out what animated him as a child, No pun intended Um, that all of that is smart to me. Like I'm like you have a kind of meta textual structure that makes this a little more understandable for people of what it represents And then you have a director who has like a really clean emotional end to what the story is. I turn to my friend who I saw it with like halfway through, there's a scene where he man's father is disapproving of his son not being tough enough turned to my friend and just went I wish you understood the shoe business. It feels like it is coming from such a real place. I ag. And it's not like this is entirely some deeply personal statement that has been stnuck through the studio system. It's trying to serve like twenty masters. But I think it's part of why You and I are both resistant to totally dismissing this movie. And it's not just because it has our number in terms of showing the characters we like There's stuff that's close. and then there's stuff that makes you want to rip your hair. Yeah It's actually not a very fun movie, I think to talk about scene by scene. I think it actually is way more of a load bearing idea movie, which sounds ridiculous about masters of the universe. Butue there's way more going on. Like you and I can talk about like, was the air chase sequence with Adam and Tela and a hungover man at arms like too long or was it effective or not That stuff is kind of like careuff of an action movie. you know, it doesn't really mean anything. it doesn't matter. but like even down to Jared Letto being cast as skeletor who is simultaneously an iconic villain and one of the stupidest characters in animated show history I mean, fifty percent of Han's lasting cultural purchase is just Skeletor's memeability. Yes. him and the tone of his voice, his laugh, him halfway through the first season of the animated series turning into a vaudevillant comedian and not really A true villain Ting into like Paul Lind as well. Yes. Yes, exactly Yeah. and like and also like pursuing some like effite like awkwardes, like a homo erotic consideration in the show which I want to throw this out as well in the sort of dark years where He Man masters the universe has been fallow. What basically has always kept Hean afloat are the Latin American community and the LGBTQ plus community They are actually the tenets of the thing almost even more than Gring up nerdy white boys. L truly. and it's always had all this kind of purchase there in both directions. So yeah Casting Jared Leto. who is the most famous person in the cast, but then and him being cast and then now going through this roughly ten year period of like very gentle cancellation where like it has become clearer and clearer that he both doesn't not hold a strong draw for audiences, nor does he seem to be a person that people are very fond of And so this is happening at the same time. he gets cast as this arch villain from the nineteen eighties animated series and He also is never seen because he is AGIed with a skeleton face. There's something like could magical even further. Yes, because I'm just realizing how Uh Sticky this entire corner of conversation is You're also considering the fact that like this second era of Jared Leto's career, you know, he has his heartthrob era, he has his Is he the next interesting dramatic leading man kind of era Finch is one of only people who feels like he knows how to use him well in the post my so called life error I'm just talking through my leto eras. And then he disappears for a little while and focuses on the music and then he has this Dallas Byers Club comeback where he plays a trans woman performance that wins every single award two years later would have been canceled. L it was the last moment someone would have been awarded for giving that performance And so his new revived A lif status of the studio suddenly going, Is Jared Leto a movie star? How do we get Jared Leto? is tied to the upswing from a thing that would be shunned today and it was a lot of him seemingly wanting to transform and not do an obvious movie star thing. but they kept putting him at the center of these really big movies. and it felt like time after time, audiences kept saying, We don't like him. We don't like the work he's doing And we keep hearing bad things about him as a person. So as you're saying, it's the softest cancellation because there was no friction to it.. The friction was only that studios kept putting him at the center And audiences were saying like We arere not asking for this We're not wringing our hands over this guy. We'd just rather not think about him And so when he got announced for this and when the trailers are coming out right after Tron Aries, everyone was like, why are they doing this? Is the movie shooting itself in the foot? I don't like Jared Leto being in movies. I think you have to admit he has the best performance in this thing? By far My phone is really, really good and it sucks to say. And part of it is probably that you don't see his face. It helps that it's the one time I have watched Jared Leto in the last fifteen years and not thought about Jared Leto. But there's a specific reason for this The reason is that Jared Leto is always too much. He has no ability to turn and this didn't necessarily always be the case. I would not describe his performance on my so called life as overplayed And he has developed a lot of showy bad habits as a performer where he demands the gravity be operating around him in a movie at all times. And if you look at the movies he's made since Dallas Byer's Cub Suicide It's not that many. Gade Runner twenty forty nine The little things Zach Snyder's Justice League House of Gucci, Morbius, Haunted Mansion and Tron Arires, all of those movies It's about him all the time. He's drawing all the attention to him. Skeletor kind of needs that. He's a ridiculous overplayed character. And also it helps that you don't have to look at his face, but he honestly just has the sense of humor in this performance that it needs and is working. It's crazy that he's funny in this. It's crazy that it feels like The stickiness of Skeletor is this weird thing of he is presented as just this is the most evil creature in the world Skeletor loves being evil. What's his motivation? Evil. Yes. The movie plays a r The relentless pursuit of evil, right? But then also he is ridiculous. He's sort of this like dotering fool. You know, as you said, he's so camping everything does feel weirdly aligned with Jared Mow constantly insisting that he is like this generation's digital Peter Sells needing to completely transform himself into some I feel like most of his performances have this real loud self consciousness of Can you believe what I'm doing Like he wants the audience the whole time to think, I can't believe that's Jared Letto rather than actually playing a character I was gonna say's a human being, but he's played very few human beings in the last fifteen years or as you just pointed out, but they rarely feel like living creatures. They feel like exercises And weirdly, that's what Skeletor is and the movie makes that textual. You have what I think is kind of the most interesting sequence in the movie Wh skeletor basically invades human's brain and starts like forcing to relive scenes from his life with Skeletor now representing his own personal shame. And that felt to me like where the movie was bully in a Barbie esque way. I agree. We made this Barbie comparison. One of the things I really love about Barbie is that it feels very unconcerned with explaining its own logic does what it needs to do to tell the story it wants to tell which is the thing that movies used to do and especially children's films and fantasy films and genre films The setup is the setup It's more important to spend the time executing emotionally what you want to do in the story And I rewatched bigig recently, which I hadn't seen in a while And it is astounding to watch that today And he gets to the fortune teller machine withithin less than ten minutes And there is no backstory of who made the machine or why or why it's possessed with a ghost or why it works or how to undo it. It's just like, this thing can make you big and it can make you small again, and that's all you need to know And Barbie similarly goes, how do you get from Barbie World to California? you take you know, a car to a bike to a spaceship, to a boat. and if you want to go the other way, you have to reverse the process and This movie doesn't do that. this movie often ends up in the uncanny valley of trying to explain stuff too much. i. e. when twenty minutes in the movie like kicks you out of reality too our world and then spends twenty minutes trying to get back to the movie that we were already in. and I think largely enjoying And I think that skeletor sequence is the movie should be doing, which is who cares? Yeah. I agree What's interesting and what's entertaining Yeah. I mean, Just to put a button it, becausecause we have a bunch of things to go through It feels like a movie almost entirely made for like peopleeople between the ages of thirty five and fifty. and but it's also a candy colored PG thirteen action Adventure fantasy movie And I certain I was going to be able to bring Alice to this and now I don't think I can. L I just don't I think it's too violent and too weird And you have a kid who like organically has gotten into this property that has such difficulty developing new audiences. Yeah And she is too young to see the movie at the time it comes out. You agree with me, though, right? I mean, it feels like a little too rough I also think it's like really long. I think that's another problem is I imagine a kid getting antsi at sections of this. I think like the middle trunk is pretty deadly the movie just it resets itself like multiple times and even down to there's this whole notion of Well, he got kicked out of Eternia because his mom sent him to be safe on earth and a man style setup. The only way for him to get back is using the sword, but he's lost the sword And for twenty years, he's been trying to find the sword And then he just finds the sword. Yeah. And like it is you know, like why was the sword there Somebody foundrounded in the river one day and they decided it should be part of a bookstores presentation. like the whole thing is just like all of that stuff on Earth, which is kind of essential to make that late scene skeletor scene work. But all of it is just like, what is this? Like why are we even trying to make this seem as though it is operating on our planet? It almost would be better if you just went to a different planet entirely I think so too, or, you know, was cast out to the woods or whatever it is, but it does feel like this movie is It's's it's like a filmed adaptation of an in between draft. You know, obviously, a script is only done when it's 's done. But this feels like they were trying out some ideas someome of them should have been responded to with more of that and less of that. And instead we're just like straight up filming that and you have some of these odds As you said, like I appreciate this movie looking like a bag of candy Having characters who have ridiculous powers using them in silly ways is what I don't appreciate is The movie genuinely has one hundred versions of the joke of Your name is what they landed the plane very well with the final name reveal though I think so too, but that's a great example of maybe you get two of those jokes. Yeah. You set it up and you pay it off at the end It feels like the movie does it ten times for each character And it speaks to This movie feels very inspired by Thor Ragnarok to me. And when I saw that film I went, man, I really think Motu is a major touchstone for Tka on this, even more so than Kirby Cics or any of the other things colors, the sort of barbarianism of it and the weirdness of all the creatures and the forming weapons and vehicles and all that sort of stuff And so you could see executives lighting up and going, that movie was a hit. It wasn't too weird for people. It took four. it put them in a spaceeland We can copy this The way Tiger, in my opinion, Does this sort of deflation joke? It feels like it's coming from a place of I'm a little embarrassed that I'm making this movie So I'm putting it down so I don't look uncool. He's also better at executing those jokes because he's got more experience in comedy. com I've always found that tone of it a little bit annoying because I feel like if you're embarrassed by the movie, then don't make it, you know Yeah This feels like these jokes are made defensibly from a position of I like this so much and I'm worried they're going to make fun of me I'm wearing a shirt with my favorite thing in the world on it. But I guess I have to lampshade the joke before anyone else bullies me. And this is a movie that has a running bit about being shoved into lockers, a thing that kind of doesn't make sense for this planet. No, no, but it has that tone to it where I As much as I thought the comedy was not working, almost found sympathetic that it felt like it came from a place of such genuine personal insecurity. And I wanted to just grab it and be like, chill out, man. It's fine. We're here. We're watching the movie. Just be the movie don't I don't think the film is going to be a very big hit and I think that probably puts an end to Masters of the universe as a theatrical property for now, which I find interesting because first of all, there are three different end credit sequences, which we don't have to spoil for people, but that all kind of lean towards, well this is coming and this is coming and this is coming. and that also just feels like twenty eighteen. That just is like Actually even Marvel seems to be kind of getting over the end credits addiction and you know sort of teasing of the audience about what could be coming next. And the idea of withholding something, and I'll just say like withholding Orco from the Masters of the Universe movie, it's just fucking annoying. Like it's just annoying that they did that And I know why they're doing it because I think they had something on their hands, but they just did that biased. I'm very personally deeply invested in this character, but that was the one thing in the movie that made me kind of like take my nails into the armrests where it was It hit harder for me because it's a character I've spent time actually trying to professionally Apologies So it now feels like my home team also just tired of that type of thing. It felt really close to me to the moment at the end of the Fede Alvarez Evil Dead reboot where in the end credits, it just inserts a shot Bruce Campbell, saying groovy.. And I'm like, well, that doesn't mean anything.. You can't just show me the guy who hasn't been in the movie up until this point and have him do the thing that he did in the original thing with the promise of, well, next time, maybe we'll do that. and the other two credit sceness are much more the classic tee up of This feels like a dangling plot thread of where this thing will go next time. But I'm just kind of allergic to all of this now. Yeah. I want to watch a movie finish itself I want to see it be complete. And I don't know if OrCco is, you know, like a logistical technical reservation they had or if it's, is this character the one thing that pushes it into being too silly? But it's like, do it or don't. You should have done it But I'm not going to give you credit for showing him for three seconds in the end credits. Couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. And that's where all this stuff feels very, very post Marvel. evenven like The final scene of the movie, we see our ten main characters and all of them have slightly updated looks. They've taken all these designs that are really similar to the cartoon and the toys and they made them just ten percent closer And it feels like the end of X men apocalypse we're suddenly promises, wait a second, are they all gonna to have the nineties costumes next time? No, the next movie they all wear black leather. but like All of this stuff feels like this echo of the exact thing that has been in a death rattle at a time that something new is being born And there's a feeling even when this is the thing that we like where I'm like, are we watching Dor. Do Little and like Bonnie and Clyde and the graduate are playing on the adjacent screens. Whatever parts of this movie works, this is Dr. Douittle. Yes. Anything that I like about this movie is either something that I have extracted intellectually or emotionally connected to at the basest level of my undeveloped brain. Like that's it. and I'm okay with it as a fan But I can't look You know, I'll be going to my daughter's art show later this afternoon and I'll be talking to a lot of parents. I will not be able to look at a single parent at that art show and be like, you got to check out Masters of the Universe this weekend. That's not acceptable That's a great point though that The way in which this movie works the least is actually just as a functional summer block. Yes. Yes. Sar. Sould you see this interesting There is interesting metaxtual stuff going on here that they can't quite land but it's thorny And it's interesting to think through. And there's also the dumbest base level bullhit that makes us happy because we're broken sad m. And the stuff in the middle is what I think a lot of audiences are gonna to sit there and go like, huh And I went to a screening in New York that felt like it was thirty percent critic screening thirty percent premiere, but after the LA premiere that had been Big explosive. everyveryone's here. This was a smaller selection of cast and crew And then thirty percent fans. Yeah. same that mine was the exact same Right, there was a lot of Especially for the first thirty minutes, anytime anything showed up on screen that looked like one of the toys, they would appluse made me didn't want to hold it against the movie because it's not the movie's fault Every time it got that response, I felt embarrassed. I felt embarrassed for myself that I cared You know, because I'm like, well, that's not really storytelling I like seeing these things too, but we can't just applaud them putting a thing on screen It's about what you do with it when you put it on spreing So When I was thinking about doing this episode with you, and we talked about this when when we recorded the Mosquito Coast episode, like How long ago was that?ike nine months ago. I was like, all right, I'm just gonna rewatch every f or watchatch every high fantasy movie. I'm going to situate myself inside of that eighties period where there was this enormous number of movies mostly, you know, kicked off by The success of Conan and the Barbarian, but there was just been so many films in that period of time. Some of which I had seen, some of which I hadn't and I'm going be like I'm going do the ultimate list and I'm going to love it and it's going to be so great. And I watched a bunch of them and I, you know I watched them l and I watched Dragon Slayer and I watched the Sword and the Sorcerer and I watched Death Stalker and You know, I'd already seen, of course, like Dark Crystal and Labyrinth and all these other films And I can't wait not really loving as many of them as I had hoped I would. I've admired a lot of them because there's a lot of really cool practical stuff in them. But then I went to go make a list of my favorite movies like this and I was like, these are all movies that I known and have seen and were a part of my childhood or a part of my daughter's childhood now. and there's something like that kind of masculine Um man defending his castle and ravishing damsel aspect of it that has actually just kind of never been my thing despite having this attraction he manan So like hean has always sort of been my least favorite part of Hean. What I find funny is the incongruity of that being the character at the center of this story. Yeah. L ye, I'm just like, I don't know if this was an easy exercise or not to just come up with favorite fantasy movies, but like to me very quickly, like, I'll just tell you the movies they don't need much explanation. Yeah The never ending story, which is I probably saw at a very similar age and then I'm about to show my daughter The only very recent film is The Green Knight, which I think, you know Lowry's movie, which I think really kind of like tries to simultaneously explore like Arthurian legend and a kind of mystical legend and blend those two things together and draw you out with a much more folkloric exploration of the ideas Um Princess Mononoke, which I just watched for Alice, which is still unbelievable in a movie with a very, very big idea on top of it about you know, ecology and the future of the planet Willow, which changed my life And the fellowship of the Ring, which is just like to me, one of the most pitch perfect, here's how you build a world, introduce characters you instantaneously love and do the thing where you get excited for what's next, but you don't feel like you've been tricked into anything when you get to the what's next. You desperately are like, I need to go to the next stage of this journey with these characters that I love And like it felt like a very kind of unorriginal list, but I couldn't talk myself into saying like, well actually Beast Master has some really cool effects in it and Coscoerelli at the beginning of his career. You know what I mean Yeah, I would I would throw Dark Crystal and Excalibur into that canon. Those are the two that I think are worthi as sitting alongside it, but it is sometometimes as guys like us who do this kind of cultural spunking. Sometimes you try to go deeper into a canon to make a more interesting list and you realize it is just the five things that everyone says. I know. You know, certain careers are just the top layer Certain genres are really only represented well by the movies that everyone remembers And the start of the modern development cycle for this movie that we're getting now in twenty twenty six really comes after Lord of the Rings, where there was this feeding frenzy of what's the next Lord of the Rings? Basically none of them work I mean, it's not surprising that the Green Knight, which is great, is doing its own thing It's doing our three and leegend You know, and it's doing it in a twenty four silo. The attempts to find the next big fantasy, high fantasy I ke Nothing works in movies, Post Lord of the Rings until Narnia, which then fell off a cliff. The sequels couldn't sustain it. It was only really the first one. Y. And then and then it becomes Game of Thrones Then it becomes TV, and movies, it like never comes back And you know, the Hobbits made a lot of money, but they didn't the world in the same way. I mean, are there any other I agree with you that Labyrinth and Dark Crystal, there's something very special about them and we are you and I are both Hensonians and like very fascinated in that history and the world and the creation of all of those movies. and I love that he pivoted into like a much darker realm of storytelling at that point in his career. Yeah But are there are there any other titles that you're like, Well, this has to be in the conversation for the best versions of these movies? I mean, Conan, obviously, Conan L like Can film. Yeah. Yes. I think is kind of the text for what we're talking about. And then before that, it really is kind of it's it's more Tarzan and things like that., You know, that's sort of the Johnny Wartt Miller Tarzan films are sort of what evolve into things like Dragonlayer and things like that. Yeah, the only other thing is that I thought about including the Ray Harryhus in movies and it's like what is those sure What's the line between Greek and Roman mythology versus high fantasy and how much, you know, you know, I could put the seeventh Voyage of Sinbad on a list like this I think we could put that or Jason the Argonauts. I think putting one or the other makes sense. Yeah. Yeah at least representationally. Yeah. but also so much of it is the the visual language of what those movies develop And then I think a lot more of what we have in Silm that has stuck in fantasy is stuff that is one foot in, one foot out. is stuff like Jurastic where it's put something fantastical or that feels historical into a modern setting. canan I have Everyday people relate to this Right. Har Potter Harry Potter is that? Harry Potter is one hundred percent It's magic and it's also a coming of age drama about being a young person in school I also think it's telling and why that this movie ended up with the framing device it had probably is most of the canon you just put out are children's stores. You know they're often centered around children or they're from the perspective of a child or a child' sort of way of thinking and they are about exploring and discovering a new world. Yeah. The movies where someone starts out being master of the universe and continues to just kick ass for two hours usually have a pretty low ceiling on them. You know what movie Masters of the Universe has a lot in common with that is in this conversation is the Pincess Bride es, the Brince' Br was just thinking The deconstructivist exploration of a lot of the tropes of those stories, but it never blinks. It never is like we're doing a meta textual thing. It's like it's playing it straight, but there is a sense of comic tone that I think Reiner And Goldman were like such a great match for that story and the actors that Riner is able to cast, justust getting Billy Crystal and Wallace Seaan and all these people in that movie that it lets it have that cake and eat it too in a way the masters of the universe never can. But that's so hard. I mean, there's a reason that movie so leg perfect movie. exactly because people can't replicate it. I also think that movie makes its only deflation and through Fred Savage which has its own emotional arc. watching his cynicism melt away versus a thing I this movie got wrong is you alluded to it, but the u Idrressellba character, man at Arms, who is kind of the right hand man, the loyal ally, a little bit of a father figure, he man. They make this decision that in the time that Nicholas Galatine was gone, he's just become a sad drum And there's about an hour plus of the movie that's him stumbling and not knowing how to do stuff vomiting on other characters u and several moments where they do the buildup as if he's going to do something badass and then he slips. or he falls or he burps or whatever it is. And it felt like You can do a movie where one character is deflating. You can do your kind of Guardians of the Galaxy You can do your ghostbusters. You know, there is this classic format of having the one guy who's a little cynical and questions the reality of the world a bit. Or you can do your there's a literal outsider who's dropped in fish out of water and they don't know how it works And so they're going to question it. You can't do the movie where everyone's Kind of going like, but I sort of suck, right? Yeah It's weird, Idrress two has attached himselfves to so many different I mean, he was literally in the Thor fil He was in the gun suuicide squad. likeike he like he keeps doing this in a way that it's like this character almost feels like a continuation of all of those other characters that he's played to the point of he's so over it that he is now like a drunk U It's a it's a very strange career Iis Elba. It's he's not bad in the movie. He's never really bad in anything, but there's a kind of autopiilot quality I really liked him in the first trunk. I thought the scenes with him and the little boy were really good. and I thought he was really kind of sensitive and locked in action sequence there were good, but then it becomes the Idrress Eba problem where you're like Is there a greater example of a guy who just should have been a movie star was stuck at a time where the industry had no idea what they were doing. Y. Like he is emblematic of the movie star crisis of the last twenty years, which wasn't about lack of talent. It was a pipeline problem. it was a framing problem. And here's a guy who's just ended up being like The villain in the Fast of Furious spinoff and the third Star Trek movie, the seventh guy in four You know think about hisest man. Think about his first really big role after the wire is He's youngster Yeah. Yeahah, but that's H first real leading part is in the first streaming movie. It's in Peace of No Nation. Oh yeah which is like that's kind of emblematic of the thing that happened whereere itas like he should have been going into a period in his career where he was going up like a rocket ship, and then they was like, well, streamy movies are TV And if you want to be a moie, you' got to be the sixth lead behind Chris Eemsworth. Not only that, but incredibly weird stats. wins best supporting actor at the SG Awards that year for Beast of No Nation and is not nominated for the Oscar. Wh which kind of lends that movie more of its like, does it even exist quality? Yeah, it's a really weird one Experience a membership that backs your business journey with American Express Business Platinum When you pay with membership rewards points for all or part of an eligible flight booked with a qualifying airline through AX traravel, you can get thirty five percent of those points back, up to one million points back per calendar year American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it Terms apply. Learn more at Americanexpress. com slash businessinessash platinum This episode is brought to you by Street Easy. You gota ask yourself, Wna talk about the time you lived in the greatest city on Earth or still live in it? In the city where a matinee leads to two AM tacos. Your New York era can last a lifetime. With twenty years of NYC know how, Street Easy can help you become a forever New Yorker Visit streeteasy d. com to buy or rent in NYC. StreetEasy is an assumed name of Zillow Inc, which has licenses in all fifty states Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy moocha Rappuccino drink? or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel maybe, orr white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Rappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries We've got thirty minutes here. This is your time to shine now. Okay. You've been doing a lot of research. I't Is it a let'sian level of research, would you say? to say full Let'sian. I went in with Let'sian ambition and I realized very quickly it was not worth going that deep. But I compiled a list, which I have made public and we can share of toys stories I was trying to find it as movies that are specifically based off of toy U and or or characters within. And I could get a little non literal with that. It's not a great canon It does break into a couple different silos. You have a lot of ations of TV shows of toys So that's sort of copy of a copy. This is a movie version of a show that was already trying to adapt these characters. That's like original Transformers, animated movie, GI Joe movie, You have My Little Pony movies, Carebears movies as account here films I think so. I think they have to because they're There is a straight line, even though there is the step in between of Really, this is just a continuation of a TV show then there's sort of u oy is object movies where there's not really the same kind of narrative or characters to adapt. I guess Cue is kind of at the midpoint there, but then more so, we did a series on our blank check Patreon tabletop game movies where we did the two Oija films battleship Cue and the two Dungeons and Dragons movies which are all adapting things, but they're sort of more adapting what it feels like to engage with the toy. Yeah. mentioned Matt Johnson earlier. I'm wondering if his magic, the gathering film will have a similar energy hundred percent. Yeah Um, and then there's sort of like the big dogs you have to discuss of The Transformers franchise is obviously humunongous Beyond Transformers just having Ger name recognition When we were saying earlier, you know humans never had the same kind of instant sellable IP as transformers. I think part of that is been What now seven live action Transformers movies and two animated movies theatrically. It's nine films in total I most of them have made over one hundred million dollars domestically in hundreds worldwide I think most people you would ask, even the ones who have seen all of them could not tell you things about the lore of Transformers. big idea of Transformers is so fucking big that just saying These robots are going to turn into other things willll always sell some degree of tickets.. Th theseese movies have varying levels of engagement with the lore of the toys, which, as I said, was sort of cobbled together by buying different Japanese toys and mushing together into mythology. I've never known much about Transformers mythology. I think you and I have a very similar relationship to these movies, which is By and large the most satisfying version of Kyjangling for us. In the theater on opening night. Yeah an absolute blast. I don't really spend any time thinking about them after that. I know I let them sit on my shelf and maybe one day I'll go back and explore. But I have always had fun with them even when they're dog shit and some of them have been dog shit Some of them would have been horrendous. likeike crimes against you gu I was at the premiere of the original Transformers Michael Bay Film. at Lucky man. J justust rocked my world. I was like, this is fucking awesome, guys. And if you don't get it, then you don't get it They're made by Michael Bay. The guy' incredible at putting like sound and images together Transformers are an incredible excuse to explore those things on a big scale U Barbie obviously, I think now sits as like Arguably the top of the heap along with, I would say, the Lego movie, the first Lego movie, feel like the two modern examples kicked off the wave Post Transformers, there was a real rush of can we adapt this stuff? Yeah. I feel like Barbie and Lego have been seen as the two that creatively not only succeeded but engaged so smartly with the toy didn't feel ashamed by the fact that they were adapted from a piece of plastic that they're actually kind of trying to reckon with cultural legacy and also using that IP I hate that I keep saying IP so much in this episode, but this was unavoidable in a human episode using them to sort of analyze children's relationships to their imagination. and what toys represent in that sort of way and what they reflect in us and are they aspirational? O are they sort of u, I don't know, u mirroring, you know, of our internal feelings. The Lego Batman movie I love in particular. although that's getting a little bit more into tackling superhero culture and movie culture as well But those are movies that take place within the sort of logic of a child's mind And then there's obviously the Toy Story franchise, which I think does need to get acknowledged here evenven though its main characters are original, it uses a lot of obviously pree existing IP and becomes kind of the definitive I'm biased this is like my favorite franchise. a sort of exploration of how we think about toys and pop culture and the relationship between kids and toys And this whole whole thing that Barbie and Lego movie are both obviously riffing on as well of like Do we imbue life into these things Is that the way you tell stories with these characters? Yeah, I mean, I should note this because we've talked about it. Off mic mononth is just an absolute thunderdome for you. It is a remarkable thing. You texted me and said, June is Griffin Numan's psyche on trial. It is Toot Story five, it's He Man movie. then the amount of time I spend wringing my hands about the death of theatrical comomedy We have Scary Movie S opening againgst Ean. Wars movie, Mandalorian Groguver and Mandalorian Grogu.isclosure Day Yes. So you're like, there's Spielberg going cllassic Spielberg Toy story Star Wars jackass. It's kind of everything I believe in in terms of commercial cinema. just in terms of like what I want Hollywood to be putting out and all of them are being tested in really extreme ways. We're kind of over two right now. We're not doing great. But this is what's fascinating to me is I think there's another era in which If you don't have things like rooms, obsession, sheep detectives. Devil Wars Prdit two, which I really love moovies that are doing well right now and that I think are creatively successful, succeeding then the fact that the things that I have historically cared about not really working would depress me deeply and I would get into a It's so over spiral versus now I'd go like, maybe nature is healing. Maybe these movies don't need to be made for us anymore. You know, I'm still enjoying them. Something else needs to happen Um I want to call it two other tooy movies that I sort of I text to you, I'm thinking of going freak mode. There's also shit that just is not even worth talking about. There's shit like The Ugly dolls movies rol's trilogy is the more successful version of the Ugly dolls movie There's a Max Steele, which was a matel attempt to do there a new kind of came in in the early two thousands who is like an extreme sports secret agent kid There are things like the Bratz movie, which stars Chet Hanks weirdly as a nerd who the brats pick on and John Void as the principal All these sorts of like those are more like just dumb ass We bought the rights to a toy and made a movie over a weekend and it was made all with like tax shelter money, bullshit. Um The two other ones I wantan to call out that are personal favorites of mine One, I think we do need to consider the Hudsucker Proxy a tooy movie It is a movie entirely about The whole hope It is a movie about the business of toys. Sure. And it is sort of exploring the predatory nature of trying to make a thing that will break a kid's mind I'll allow it because it's you. and I know how much that movie means to you It's a real favorite of mine The other one I really like you can't you can't recommend like the Brats movies or the Troll Trolls movies like at all, right? No, I'm trying to think if there's anything I watched that isn't obvious that I would recommend. No. I think all of that stuff is bad I really think it's really bad. I went through it. It's really bad. It's really bad. It's like its's lowest common denominator drg. I mean, I do think the secondcond Mike Flanagan Ouija movie is really good. agreed. aggreed. Yes. And if people haven't seen the The Daily Goldstein Dungeons of Dragons Honor Among Theieves. That's also really good. Yes. I enjoyed that. talks about it. really, really successful genre movies but otherwise It's sort of like your barbarian problem of The ones that the good ones are the ones that everyone knows are the good ones. There aren't really hidden gems. The one I want to shout out for people And I think it's pretty readily washable on YouTube and not through many other uh, memes Richard Williams, The Adventures of Raggedy Anne and Andy, haveave you ever seen this movie? No Richard Williams, one of the greatest character animators in the history of cinema who did all the animated sequences and characters. and who framed Roger Rabbit, his big sort of Fitz Coraldo S Paston project was the thief in the cobbler, which was never completed then taken and finished as a different movie, Arabian Nights withithout him. it's sort of one of the great Magnizent Ambersons of animation. What would this have been if he had ever gotten to the finish line in the period where he was trying to get Stef in the cobbler made he took this assignment job to get the money to self produce more of Eief and the cobbler. And he made a Raggggedy An and Andy movie that was truly like an IP play. Some musical theater guys got the rights and wrote songs and hired him to animate it. And it is an absolute nightmare movie. It feels like the Jim Penson fantasy films we were talking about it falls into that sort of mind of the child, It's halfway in between feeling like you're watching a film of what a kid imagines their toys are doing and what tooy story gets to later, which is the psychology of God, it would actually be an existential nightmare to be a toy It is some of the best animated stuff you will ever seen? In particular, if you don't have the tim or patience to watch the entire film, there is a musical sequence in this called Blue sungg by a camel with four legs and the dancing the camel does is some of the most technically impressive animation you will ever see It's astonishing. It leads to the final thing, which is the more obvious thing in the canon. I do think you got to include Winnie the Pooh in this. Now Winnie the Poo wasn't IP in the same way, but Winnie the Pooh was a child's series of toys and characters he created that then his father wrote stories about They are Tailes adapted from the mythology created by kids for their toys You've really drilled down as deeply as you can, but that is I tri that is That is true about Winnie the Poo. That' true. I think of it as a literary adaptation, but you're right that that literature is born of a boy and his bear If you watch the many Aventures of Winnie the Poo, which was the package film they did of what had been three Theatrical shorts, the framing device of that is a live action camera pushing into a boy's room surrounded by the dolls and then the book opens And you're like, o right, what we're seeing is what he imagines his jys do. Is it A. Milm? is that the author?orct. Um, yeah. Damn It's kind of a sordid history. I mean, it's really not very impressive. And there are mov a lot of the movies that you named are almost like what I sometimes call like a movie kink. clue And like transransformers. L those are movies where I'm like This just kind of touches something inside me. that matters to me and I you were joking about me being a critic or not. But one of the reasons why I've always kind of tried to dismiss that is I'm kind of like I just have a lot of biases. and some of those biases are I know people in the business and some of them are like, you know, I have a different kind of a role in my professional life that makes it difficult for me to have this position. But sometimes I'm just like I don't really subscribe personally to the objective ivory tower vision of these things. I'm like, I want to get on the Masters of the Universe pod and be like, I almost cried when Adam raised the sword.ike that's not criticism. That's like I'm expressing an emotional feeling. And a lot of the movies that you just went through, they conjure the same feelings in me even though I know that from this kind of distanced critical lens They're not only flawed, but they're like cynical and kind of ugly at times. Yes, that's the big thing with the history of toy movies and why so many of the ones I'm calling out aren't actually driven by a product, you know? In order to make a canon that is good, you have to cheat and put in things like Winnie the Pooh Ty store Yeah and the Hudsucker proxy. you know, And then you're like, really it's only Barbie and Lego movie that came from the cynical place and ended up somewhere fairly pure. Yeah, and they both did the thing that we were talking about The Masters of the Universe does too, where they They are openly acknowledging what the act of adapting them means and That's extremely unusual and it's very, very millennial do that. And this has been a millennial conversation about our kind of fascination and struggles with the things that we care about. And you know, when when Greta was on the show for Barbie, I said this to her. I was like, this is so interesting that you keep making things that are abouting ofays that happened to you when you were twelve. Yeah And all of your movies are that. And this new movie, it sounds like is also going to be that. and You know, she seemed to receive it nicely but she was like I hadn't thought about it that way. But then I was like, I have to give that some thought. ye And I think that a lot of the ways that you were describing the way that the box office is changing and like what our expectations are for movies and whether like where you would feel a bit stymied byy something like solo in twenty eighteen where you'd be like, ah, this is So disappointing that this is where these things have gotten. To me, there was almost like a relief that Mandalorian and Grogu wasn't good. you know, I was like Let this it actually is a let the Past die moment. I was just listening to you you guys and Geth are talking about the movie on your pod and I thought it was such an interesting conversation. Just even the dynamics between Are we supposed to be holding these things to a certain standard? or are we supposed to be resetting our minds and just gathered having like a completely different mentality to you guys about what a movie could and should be trying to accomplish individually was really interesting to me One of our very close friends, someone we've known so long and so important to the history of the podcast, anytime he comes on to do Star Wars, we all almost have nervous breakdowns and We accept the differences of what we're asking of just thing St Wars and what it represents. but increasingly, I'm just like I'm so tired I just actually it doesn't feel the effort for me to fight through Star Wars to figure out what I still like about it And I know you've had this experience watching them all with your daughter for the first time, which is sort of like purest way to reengage with what the thing actually is away from all the conversation And I had the opposite experience, which was in the lead up to Mandaloria and N Grogu, I decided to watch all the Disney pllus shows that I had skipped and outside of Andor, which was such a delight to watch for the first time U, you know, a lot of that was a struggle in watching the stuff that didn't work I kept remembering what I love about Star Wars.es. And part of that for me was like, maybe I just need to let that be over there and I'm fine with that And I'm not going to get worked up about this and it's fine if this all moves on from us and our interest and also we let some of these things actually on ice like, you know, there have been multiple Hemian cartoons, but it's largely existed outside of light of the public consciousness for most of the last thirty five years And whatever response this movie is getting, it's not getting, oh, Jesus, another He Man movie.ight. It's getting some, are we still really making movies based on toys But it doesn't feel like something that's beating us over the head People seem to be reacting more to the fresher things. Uh, and that's exciting and it's exciting that there's something happening I think that feels essential I think you might have cited this on that episode, but this anxiety that we had that there were going to be so many toy movies in the aftermath of Barbie and all these things went into development, you know, Lena Dunham's Polly Pocket movie and all that stuff And then this is really the only one that has come out This is the only thing that has happened. And it sounds like maybe the Barney movie will happen. The Daniel C was the Snake Eyes movie, which totally has been white for memory Henry Golding. Right whichich was the third live action GI Joe. Yeah and was the one that happened kind of in the post Transformers wake, but I guess pre Barbie U I guess Hot wheels is coming out later this year. That's the other thing is Apparently that's an Apple movie Excuse me, not to correct you here. I think matchbox is matchbox. Sorry, matchbox. But hot wheels is still in development. My apologies to the fine people making tiny cars. Yes Do you know they're own by the same company? Are they really Yes, they're not even a rival bares. Did Mattel buy matchbox of a certain point? Yes, but it's been a while. It's not like a recent acquisition Okay Um, Hey, Griffin, you're the best man. Thank you for doing this. You're the best. This was really fun. What it's about at the end of the day is bros being bros and sometimes It is fun. to see a guy named Mcinak. who's a mechanic with a mechanical neck You said next. to hit people Yeah. some real structural challenges in many of the creatures and beings on on Eternia, but, you know, let's not thinking how much that would have hurt. Yeah, but you don't greatate. You just want to unplug that Trylops, like what's his day to day life like? Like what's how terrible? How does he likend us Like is he can he go on dates? Like how does it work It's a tough one. yeah, yeah, it's really rough. Yeah. Well, thanks for hey Never grow old. Stay young, okay? Stay gold, Pony boy. It's not looking good when when I pee in the mirror, but I'm trying see you Griffin Okay, let's go to my conversation now with Samara Weaving and Adam Rayeyer Very happy to be joined by Samara Weaving and Adam Rayeyer. Thankk you guys for being here Id like to start these conversations by asking folks who make movies, what were the movies that made them think they could make movies Do you remember? could have been as a kid? couldould have been as an adult? I really do remember like it go for it. What did you I was with my family and I hadn't been into the theater in a long time because we were living overseas and there wasn't a lot of English speaking movie theaters. and We found Theater that had an English speaking movie playing and it was Pirates of the Caribbean, the first one I think I was about twwelve And I remember Watching it and having the blacking out being so immersed with like childlike wonder at this world and I had completely like escaped my body and like gotone into this fantasy. and I walked out of the there furious. that I wasn't part of what had just happened. You know, I was going, it was like being like watching a party but not being invited. It's like how dare they make this without who? They're all playing dress ups and they look so much fun and they're fighting and I'm laughing and they're wearing all these costumes. Like whereere am I Oh All all of them. You know, I just it was like the perfect movie experience at that age and at that time. And I think I turned to my dad like pretty soon after going, okay, so I can do Make belief for a living. like how it's a job. Like what are we doing here? Amazing. How do I make that? Well I mean, I grew up in the heyday of like Star Wars and like that. So I mean, you know, seeing like the Empire strikes back, you know, in like my crowded theater in nowhere, Nebraska, you know It was really cool. But beyond that, like And we were just talking about Svereign, you know, But things like the Grim Reaper and sort of like lower budget horror movies were very inspirational to me you know, Madman comes to mind, but like just seeing those and then emulating that type of stuff with my friends. I had a friend whose mom you know, a VHS, you know, camcorder and and she would like she would tape us and it was like You know, she was the DP and we would roll around and kind of do, you know, emulate Chuck Norris movies mixed with it was like martial arts mixed with horror and stuff like that. and justust making stuff when we were, you know, ten, eleven, twelve. Me and my cousins did the same thing and they were always really horror heavy. Yeah. Like someone always was dead. Yeah. It's like the greatest entry point because it's achievable, but it also is like fascinating to little kids. What did you like decided at that time you were gonna to act and you were like I'm going gonna be K Niley or Johnyepp.ike That's the thing I want to do. I was going, what are we What are we doing? It was the I think I put two and two together that it was like a thing that do as a job And after that What are we doing with geography and maths and the rest of this? I just want to Dress up and play what you' It all feels like a waste of time other than that, ye. For you, I mean, you have been working in independent films, so like there is something about holding a camera as a young person where it's like achievable. Yeah. And I went to Columbia College in Chicago and I learned how to shoot. This is a time when everything was film. So I learned how to load cameras and shoot you know everything, edit on a steam backack all of that. And so For me, I learned a practical trade like in college and I went out and then I worked as as a working camera operator, a working VP for many, many years. Yeah, I mean, that was my entry point. And then I, you know, I always wanted to direct and write. and I was doing those types of things with my friends, but after many, many years, of helping other people with their dreams. You know, you're like, take a chance on yourself. And I made a very low budget you know, thirteen thousand dollars feature called the Bunny game with my friend Rudleen and It ended up like it ended up getting banned in the UK. We sold it to a bunch of territories and it was very successful as a microbudget film. What about for you? if you remember when you and you were like, this is actually going happen for me Yeah, I had done Um a like a Prime drama when I was about thirteen, I played like Braddy kid, just like myself essentially. And then I did a soap opera called Home in and A awayay. It's like the famous Aussie one. I you wan to see this? Don't. I wantan to see it so bad.ad I'm so bad at it and U I remember I I basically had to decide between University and the soap opera Wning me back on the show. They were like, We're going to pick up your storyline. you can come to us for three years, which felt like a lifetime to a sixteen year old like A lot of episodes a year, right? Like it's like sound, right?. Right How shooting you all in? You're shooting like a movie a day. That's insane. That's crazy. 'ause you're doing ten episodes in a week. And you I mean, like lines I mean, you I think the It's a great like school foot. technical sides of how to like build your craft. L you need to know your lines. You need to find your light. because if you don't hit your mark and like remember, they'll just re cast you. They can't. They' time. So did you sign up? Did you sign up for three more years? And I remember sitting in the bathroom like after like art class or something and I was in the bathroom and the casting director was calling me being like, we need to tell the studio if you're doing it or not And I really, I think at that age you just want to go to university with your friends because your friends are like the most meaningful thing of your life. And I remember going, okay, I'm gonna do the show. I' that's what I want to do I think after that was Um, Like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. you had committed with my life. Yeahah. What about for you after the first film were you like, I'm going to be able to stick with this and make a career out of this? I was doing a lot of second unit work and stuff like that. So I was like constantly on sets and around things. and I was learning from other people's mistakes. I was on I also did BTS for like a company I'd go around and shoot on things like Fast and the Furious and like like these big big job. so I could see how things moved on the bigger shows and I could see what what I gravitated. you know, towards, which was character driven, smaller, you know, those like telling more personal stories. That's instead of doing like green screen stuff and the carars on some type of you know, thing doing slow It was that to me is kind of boring, you know, But getting to do something, you know, that's I mean that when you started talking about the soap operates, like you know, we did we did Carolina Carolininea on a twenty five day schedule, you know, and I'm with almost a hundred locations. So I'm thinking that there's a correlation to your work ethic, like I be able I don't know just have to There's no time. I think and like maybe it's the Australian culture of how they They treat actors very much like the crew, you know, like we had one trailer for twenty of us to all hang out in. There's no sort of like, it's not very glamorous at all So I think that kind of helps N like working with me' total glamorous Mar Ja. Exactly. Well, I feel like your career, you have really nicely balanced blend of Indian kind of like slightly more running gun with studio stuff. And your sensibilities, I feel like, are often rooted in studio history movies. Yeah, but the way that you're making them feels more independent is that fair to say? That is fair to say. Yeah, I feel like I feel like I'm doing like commercial work. Yeah, but it's just with this sort of indie spirit and a different slant to it. Yeah. So I'm curious let's talk about this movie. So one thing that jumped out to me is you didn't write this movie. I did not I feel like your movies have a very specific tone that you've written. Yeah. So so I'm curious like why you wanted to direct a script that you didn't write? and then maybe when you read it, like why you connected with it too? I think for the same reason actors want to make themselves vulnerable and do like try different things. For me, that was a huge part of it, like being really vulnerable and being like, okay, I didn't write this And at the same time That's super liberating if you didn't write the project like because you're not precious about anything. When I write something, I'm really slow and it's very designy. I'm thinking about shot for shot how it all is connecting together with TomScript I could just take things out. let's get rid of that. I wasn't precious with anything. So I did a couple passes with Tom Um, in As we sort of we one of the things that happened was we were we were really ready to go with this probably twenty twenty three, but then the strikes happened M and when the strikes happened and we couldn't go. So we had like a year or so to wait. and in the meantime, I had done snackhack and we had shot that and cut that and everything. Um, as in the ramp up to like making the film and after casting Samar and after casting Kyle And Tom went off to shoot Charlie Harper I had the ability to he gave me his blessing to do what I wanted with the script too. and we had sort of shifted it. from more of a crime thriller when I read it and I read the first act. I'm like, manan, this thing really wants to be like a seventy style romantic you know, romance movie. That's what it's telling me to do with it. And so I was able to put my stamp on it And I'd never done that with something before and it felt like I said, very liberating to be able to do that. But it was just cool, like to have an idea that was outside of my wheelhouse that I wouldn't have really thought I would not have thought of this story. And so It was cool. and I'm open to that now to other things coming to me and you know, some things come and there's less that I want to fin S and then Sometimes I'll look at something. I'm like, the first five pages of this is great. I would just take over and You know, every so things come to me like that too where I want to just overhaul the whole thing. but I like the concept or the idea Samarow, I'm curious, not just what you responded to in the screenplay, but Are you strategic about the kinds of parts you want to take in succession. Like do you wantan to do something very different from what you had previously just done? Do you think about the body of work when you're thinking about picking a movie I think I'm starting to. It's hard, you know, because when you're starting out as an actor, especially when when I first moved to LA, it was like, does anyone want to hire me? So there's this imposter syndrome that's still looming of going, can I say no to something? Is that so presumptuous of me to think that something else will come along? but I'm starting to like believe that that's not going to be a problem anymore. So in the last, I'd say like five years I've tried to be a little bit more deliberate and like careful about what I'm doing, but definitely Um and trying to live by, you know, if it's not. Absolute, yes, it's a no. And this was just an absolute yes. I read Tom's script and it just captured like a feeling, a tone of the movies that I really loved growing up, that like true romance, Bonnie and Clyde, like that I just hadn't really seen a lot of recently, you know, where it's just is beautiful, like fun, entertaining story and I hadn't played a character like that before. So there was a lot of fear around, okay, can I pull this off? I've always wanted to, let's see if I can Um And then I watched Adam's movie Dinner in America and fell in love with Adam and Kyle So it just felt like all the inc like all the pieces came together in such an incredible. away. And to Adam's point, what I find fascinating about this shoot that I'd never experienced before was Um Adam and Tom being so collaborative as writers, not only with themselves but with Kyle and I Because as we were shooting and Adam is genius shooting in chronological order So Kyle and I started realizing, oh, wow, we've got really good chemistry. like this is G. Like this is kind of the heart of the story and we changed the ending. Yeah, we did because like as we were shooting, real it The writer would never you know what I mean? Like it takes such a time We realized that it wasn't quite lining up with how what we had shot like leading up to it. And we were like, wow, we have an opportunity to sort of Fesis and we got together likeike been a restaurant before like the weekend before we shot the sort of we we had this like a little small window of time and then we made changes based on to start sort of how we felt about everything up until that point. It' like living in the story, Mug. Wait, does this ending make sense? think I think he's like a just guy actually. I think he needs to be a. I think these two need to like ride or die fully. And just the fact that that happened so like Organ Organically and just authentically and Tom was watching the dailies going, u yeah, you know? it was that choice is the thing that made it feel even more classical to me. And know you cited a couple of movies that have that same energy. And I feel like in all your movies, Adam They're very sincere And And that's that's like very uncommon in contemporary movies. I know why is that? to ask you guys about If you look at stuff from like the like the early eighties, you look like the volume of stuff coming out Every movie is a classic movie. Like you look at like the bills like for theater bills and stuff, and you're like, oh my God, it was like, you know, the trading places and Beverly Hills you're like, wait with these Eddie Mury movies and this they're all like close together and it's like they it's like a great run. And just and the variety of things that you could see likeike on any given but month was amazing. and they all had heart. you know? yeah, mayaybe that's the word like it's earnest, but not cloying, right? It's not like sentimental, but Um The movie, I think is a really interesting representation of when you meet somebody and even if it's not necessarily the best idea for your life, like there's something att tractor beam quality that brings to it. But do does that come naturally for you to just tell a story that sincerely or are you like working with restraint? I know. it's just that that part of it I don't know, it just comes out through me. It just then people say that like your films have so much heart, they have so much heart. And I look at Dinner in America, you know, I can barely make it through that movie without, you know, crying. I see Emily and Kyle together. They're so good. and the same thing with you know, with Connor and Gabe and Snackshack and Mika and Nick. I mean, it's It's beautiful and And now with Sam and Kyle in this movie. It's like, Bight I was in Cleveland and I was just watching it and randomly and I just started crying and it wasn't't have anything to do with Anything other than I was really proud of you guys for like your commitment and just like it was a hard shoot. It was a really hard shoot. L we didn't have a lot of time. We had twenty five days and there's like a hundred locations It's really crazy, but to watch you guys and see the gifts that you give, like take to take and what we were able, you know, Just and I were able to use, my editor were able to use.'s I love that. And I think that we were able to really You gave so many gifts. Kyle gave so many gifts and we were able to just pull that out in the movie and it just, yeah, it's just it's just filled with heart. Can you a big softty area? Yeah, seriously. You mentioned Kyle and finding that you guys had chemistry. Can you demythologize that for us a little bit? Like when you're as a working actor, especially in a movie that is very romantic How does it feel on set when you know you have to like very quickly establish something so that it's believable and then How do you find a way to get along with someone? How do you if you hadn't met them before, how do you make a connection with them so that you can sell it?, It's hard. I really do think that we got really lucky, I do believe, or Adam saw something and was going, theseese two will get along. I don't know, it could have just been good Foresight or I was File forever. L with that. And when I met you, I was like dead set on you. I was like I remember We had our meeting at Great White and I was like She's Caroline. Yeah thanks. But I am like I don't know. I think chemistry reads and chemistry tests are so important because I really don't think you can fake It's really hard to do to really sell it. And I think a lot of movies that I'm excited to go and see and then I watch the two like big movie stars that I'm going, Oh, they cast these two because ye they're big names and they're going to draw attention but they don't have they don't have that quality, you know. So I I don't know. I think we got really The whole industry is like that, you know, it just feels very like most of the time feels very false and it feels like a lot of just bad choices and bad pairings. like this one for me was easy to see with these two And I knew your work ethic was strong. I knew Kyle's work ethic was strong. I hadn't worked with you before, but you know I did my homework, you know made some calls? stiffing around to asking Tyler, you know. Hey How is Sam Yeah, I don't know. the chemistry thing's weird because it's sort of like the camera can pick it up, but And you can feel it in a room You know, like, if you have two friends over and you're like, Oh L's still getting along. L it's not like a tangible. You can't like manufacture it. I don't think. Yeah. It's interesting too. I wonder how did it impact the fact that Kyle and Adam already had a working relationship knew each other and you're coming into something that is pre established It was quite comforting, I think and Adam like he uses the whole the same crew basically. So it felt like a very well oiled machine Um Because sometimes, you know, it's a bunch of strangers getting to know each other and trying to work with each other. like getting into the realom.. And everyone was really warm and welcoming and Things went great after day one. I mean, that was a thing. The day one on this film was shot when when Oliver pulls up in the car and they meet for the first time And you know, I like to do the fluff day. get the getting to know you part of it out of the way. That should always be first in my mind shouldn't do the end of the movie for a Yeah pullold off on that, but Yeah Not everyone agrees with you, though. Sometimes you mention you shot chronologically, but that's not common. Yeah. It's not common. I actually sometimes like to do Who said this? there was an actor who said this and I really agree. He likes to shoot the middle of the movie first to get the rust off Then you do beginning and the end and you're really good. because wereolog We weren't entirely chronological, but I made a point to shoot the most dramatic part of the ending. We were doing that on the last day. right. I was like always like that has to be on the last day because I want as much runway on the tarmac of them together to really sell that. And I want them to like the schedule they need to they need we need to make sure that the first day is them meeting for the first time because that's, you know, where She has some stuff prior to that, but it's all kind of like Flash, fllash Yeah forward flashback kind of yeah Um I've been riding with Kyle since Veronica Mars. so it's so interesting to watch him become like I was a legit Iie movie star And I think you're somewhat responsible for kickstarting that with Dinner in America. he's been doing some really cool work. Why did you first cast him? Like what is he like now? Is anything? I was so interested in him. there was So when I was casting dinner in America Um you know I was looking at four or five actors And Kyle was one of the top five actors that I was looking at And there's a picture of him. You can find it online. It's like some type of Daguerrea type or tin type of him and he looks like James Dean. He looks like a bad boy. body has like In the image too, there's a vulnerability to him that's just amazing. And I was like I would cast him off of that single image. I would cast anybody off of a single image if it showed me their soul and it this image showed his his soul and I was just like about to cast this guy and he had audition for a movie Ross Putman was producing with Karam Songa called No, wasn't first girl. It was the young Kjlaowski. and he didn't get the role. This guy Ryan Malgareini got it And they had Kyle's email So Karam sent Kyle the script Um Cickets. We didn't hear shit. Kyle was also doing a TV show called Outsiders and We cast the movie different set of actors and a different DP. The movie fell apart And then and then I found a new DP and he was working with Kyle in like Romania on a project. And he was like, hey This movie that I'm attached to, the film just fell apart and they're looking for a new lead. I think you'd love it. It's called Dinner in America. Kyle was like, Where have I heard of that before? And he went back in his email two and a half years back. And you know, he searched for it and the script was in his email, he read it and like the next day we're talking on the phone. It was the fame.ike you fucker made this movie like two and a half years ago, you know, because we struggled and you know, as movies often do, they come together, they fall apart. And yeah, so cast him the next day and you know the rest is the rest is history. That's fascinating. Did you guys watch any movies before you made this? O Was there any like reference points or touch points that you were like, this is what we're looking for watch a few. I watched like did abstract kind of things. But I watched like I really like I love Patricia Arcetti. Oh yeah, true. Yeah. She's great. And ye Alabama. Yeah. she's the best. Yeah yeah. I mean, the whole cast in that movie is to entain that rather. There's no weak links and I feel like almost like Kira's almost like the Dennis Hopper. love that Yeah, you know, kindind of has like really nice long, tasty sequence with Christopher Walcam. That's a great sequence. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about Caron for you because She's it's pretty restrained like what is going on with her. It takes a long time to kind of figure out what is maybe motivating her, how she's gotten to this place in her life. like as an actor, especially if'reooting chronologically, like, how do you do that? How do you like hide something and then wait and then, you know, you mentioned Kira and you guys have a Very emotional confrontation later in the movie. I don't know, tellell me about building that out Um I I mean, really, it's discredit to Tom's riding. I think he captured this vulnerable, but strong woman and you can just feel this like yearning for trying to find out who she is as a person. And there's this big sort of overhanging question of who am I? Am I good or am I bad? and It I related so much to you know, being in a smaller town and having bigger dreams and kind of feeling stuck. Um, What else? I mean, honestly for this character, the accent was a really big Um, like Keed to her Once I got the accent down and then once I started, um, putting her the costume on, it really came together because I think if you wear that outfit and you sound like that, you can kind of get away being like You can get away with a lot, you know? Like you can be bored and snarky and like kind of annoying to your dad and you know, late and making bad choices and everyone's a bit like, ah, you know? likeike as soon as Eron the makeup artist is putting extra freckles on my face and this like blonde bouncy hair, like you can go robber bank and everyone will be like Good on you, you know What about the u the music, which is like Amazingly well chosen, I will say. I would love to take credit for that. Okay I would love to in this situation, not. all. It was my editor, Justin Crohn. Justin is he's very well versed in country music and adjacent things and That is him going And so did you just say to him like Drop some cues in. what do you think would J. so a little bit of history. Justin was like a college roommate, like we've known each other for twenty nine years. and you know He's a close friend and I think we had done we had done Snackhack together And StackSack I had written like a lot of the ceues were written in I think Justin had a handful of ones that he had like that were great for the movie. but I was super specific about that. and I hadn't worked with an editor before. I'd always up u toil that point, I' edited everything that I did myself And u And so I was super specific about the music in Snackhack because that was my summer movie. that was my story, my experience in nineteen ninety one. so I wanted it. very curated like from what what I remember from being around the pool. and then we got into, you know, then we got into Carolina and He u He just had more I'm not as well versed in country type of stuff. and There wasn't anything specific outside of prior to it. I had I had a couple artists mission the song Carolina Caroline, which we we ended up kind of abandoning at a certain point like Tonally it just didn't feel right in the spots that we had it in. But outside of that, Justin was just peppering in, you know music and a lot of female driven country and stuff that felt really good with Caroline story. And so just say intuitive process. I mean, he would try things sometimes and we'd listen and It wasn't something that I wanted or worked, but I would say eighty five percent of the time on this movie, it was so smooth and effortless and he just curated this Amazing. there's like twenty four Songs, needle dps. All of that is offset Chris Bears amazing score. that's like this sort of synth driven score. I think those two things just go really like it's a mash upp. We had done that. Similarly, Sarly in. Dinner in America had this sort of ediom big thing against the punk aesthetic and Snack Shack had you know, Keeegan DWitz like really pretty score against these kind of pop music things. And it was like the same thing with us. It was like Chris Bear's score really offset. it made it this really cool mash up of like, you know, you've got the country Western thing, but you've also in The robberies and stuff like that, you've got something driving it too at times that's, you know, more akin to heat or something like that So it's cool There's one other about the movie that you guys havent mentioned but I really like like It is a real Ced movie, you know, whichich is another kind of classical thing, a very like eighties centric thing. selling that is also challenging. like and honestly, as a viewer keeping track of how I'm being conned a lot of fun. L Maybe you can talk about the mechanics of figuring out how these things work and how you can do I have no idea. I spent weeks like YouTubing it and get like, Again, I didn't do maths at school. I thought I would be an actor. Like I didn the it got to the point where there was there was like a whole crew. we had stopped for like half an hour going, Okaykay, let's just figure it out and we all were baffled I was sitting there on this table outside this thing trying to show them. like, No, I do this and then I still don't know, I don't think. like was that intentional for you to like disorient us as the viewer too that like it's because sometimes in a movie it's about it is about deconstructing R what's happening and showing us. and you even we have Kyle explaining it. but it is still confusing. Yeah, it is confusing. and I think the first one is the best because you know, Sam is watching the whole time. She doesn't say anything in that initial sort of exchange with her boss, Charlie and they're doing the thing and then she's like, godamn Charlie and she goes outside. She's the one that recognized it and somehow knew that it was dirty. and she calls him out on it. And so we know something's going. If you watch it, it's all very accurate. You see him put the ten down and walk away and he's like, whoa, hold down there us, you know? So yeah it does work. I will say if you're going to do it You want to catch people off guard. you want them to You want you want it to be busy. You want maybe like line to people where it's like like hurry up, hurry up, you know, you you want them to feel rushed. You don't have to think about it too much. At one of the screenings, Somebody popped up and said, My first day I work at a gas station, this happened to me. Really Yeah. And so Interesting. Do Do you identify with a con manan at all? Um, not really. Okay. I'm a little too straightforward Okay and like, you know, I wanted to I like I've said this a few times, but I wanted to on I I I didn't attempt to do it. I thought in my head was I was when we were shooting, we were in Kentucky And there was a situation with the clerk one night at a gas station. I almost did it.most did it prevented myself from I just cameras and stuff I didn't could have done research, you know, you trying to see how legible it was. I didn't want to get busted. Yeah. What are your hopes when a movie like this comes around? Like do you is your expectations because you've been doing this for a long time now and working independently? Andike I said, you're balancing this like these two strands, I it seems like in your career of independent You know, a lot of genre focus stuff and then you're in big studio movies. Is it you want the movie to be critically well reviewed? You wanted to make X number of dollars, you know, like you had a festival premiere. Like how do you think about expectations around a movie like this I mean, for this one I love it so much. like I'm a true fan. this movie. So I really just want people to go and see it and watch it. You know, I'm like quite proud of it. I think sometimes it's different, you know, you're like Oh I hope Some people see it and I hope that I get reviewed okay. But this one I'm just like, I want to scream it from the rooftops, which is such a nice feeling I mean For me, it's like every, you know, you you guys get to come, you you sweep in and do your thing and then you're out. But for me it's like, you know, there's nine, ten, eleven months after that where you're working and you're building and, you know deconstructing and reconstructing. And so, you know at the end of the day, I just you simply want people to see it. You want eyeballs on it. You want people to have an experience. And you know, when they walk out of it People will come up and they're very grateful and they're like, this is how movies used to feel. Thank you. And like's I feel like that's enough, you know. That is why I asked you guys to be here is I was like, this doesn' make me feel something that feels a little ancient in a good way.. So Democrats on that. We end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what is the last great thing they have seen movie I'd never seen it. What was it? Reds? Oh God. Lureren Baty. Unbelievable. Are joking? Yeah. How have they not seen that? I watch in one setittting? Yes.. In a theater. Yeah. It was incredible. In a theater Yeah No kidding. what auggered that What do you mean? Like what like why did you where did it play? Why was it inuter way Belta Theater. Oh my God. What? If you ever wantna It's been so amazing. We like built a cheeky little theater under the house and we have been watching like movies where either too young to have seen it in the theater and it's so much fun. But reds I it's a I It is I had never heard of it before. Yeah. I mean, it's incred they get awayay with so much. L there's so many things that shouldn't work that do It's an epic It's a love story. It's incredib I mean that last shot where it goes from like all the men walking off the train and then it pans to her and then there's a dead body going past and then he's the Oh sorry, spoiler Oh my God. It is I and it is three hours. Yeah. I was going No, it wasn't that was like an hour. It was yeah, any'm big fans. It's a great recommendation. God, what did I just have in my head? and then I got swept away.ry No, I got swept away. had I did have o, I know what it was I went with Gab L Beell, We went and saw Jack assass one and two at the new bed. Oh, nice. L like a few months ago. Oh my God nice Johnny Knxlow is there like Jeff Termaine Lance Bangs, Rick Cosic. so I' got like This is like hero status stuff And they introduced it and everything. They did. I love it this fil was every. No what that honestly, what I just did is like the polarity of this show. Yes, which is like those are two very different and distinct styles of movies that I love both of them. They are. And' I gott to talk to Jeff Tremaine for like fifteen, twenty minutes outside. It was like amazing I just I just a fan of those guys. likeike I think that As far as like comedy is concerned, they push things in a direction that was I don'minking anything's really caught up to that. Like it's it's just, you know, like maybe some Sasha Baron Cohen stuff. like I, you know, u or at in the theater was amazing with people Jack ass two in the theater when I saw it originally was like electric electric. know and it's just ye, It really was electric. Yeah. It was like being in a party. but to see it at the new Bev totally packed I mean, Everybody was as rowdy as fuck. and I were screaming and I told Johnny I love. I love you, Johnny. You know, like yeah, it was it was really, really special. Guys, those are great. Congrats on the film. Thanks for doing the show. Thank you so Thank much. Thanks to Adam and Samara. thans to Griffin, thanks to Lucas Kavanaugh, Sarareti, and Jamie Yukich for their production support on this episode next week. We're breaking down the new Scary moovie movie and we're also talking about Mel Brooks's entire career. to celebrate his one hundredth birthday. And you know what, Scary movie would not even exist without Mil Brooks. So show some respect. Check out his films. We'll talk about them here on the show. See you next week