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Did the Oscars Get It Right? Plus: ’65’ Reviewed!

March 14, 2023
Notes
Transcript
On this week’s episode, Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark), Alyssa Rosenberg (The Washington Post), and Peter Suderman (Reason) talked about the Oscars. Sonny is shockingly happy. Peter is down on the whole thing. Alyssa, meanwhile, wonders how we’ll look back on this show’s snub of Tár in years to come. Then the gang reviews 65, the movie about Adam Driver fighting dinosaurs that has too little hot Driver-on-Dino action. Make sure to swing by Bulwark+ for our members-only bonus episode on Friday. And if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:11

    Welcome back to across the movie I will present it by Bulwark Plus. I am your host, Sunny Bunch culture editor of the Bulwark I’m joined as always by a list of reservoir of the Washington Post, Peter Souderman of Reason magazine. A list of Peter, how are you today? I’m just fine.
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:25

    I am happy to be talking about movies
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:28

    with friends than all the movies because we’re gonna talk about the Oscars. Right? Oscars. That’s up first in controversies and controversies. The Oscars were this weekend.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:37

    And I have to say I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, this is a very weird feeling for me. I just wanna rewind the clock back to March of last year. When I rolled out to an early screening of everything everywhere all at once and tweeted the following after seeing it supremely silly and profoundly moving everything everywhere. All at once is potentially a generation defining film. Don’t think I felt quite this way while walking out of a theater since the Matrix.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:02

    Then in a letter box post that was accompanying my very quickly pinned Instarave, I wrote, if I see a better movie this year, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. Technically, I did end up putting Tara ahead of everything everywhere all at once at my year end best of list, but those two movies along with Top Gun Maverick and perhaps bodies, bodies, bodies were all I think instant classics, basically four star bangers. They slapped as the kids say. But they’re all working on slightly different levels. And if I had to pick one movie that I think will hold up as an offed replayed classic that transcends its kind of dorm room chic status alongside the likes of the Matrix or Fight Club.
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:39

    It’d probably be everything everywhere. It’s just delightful moving kinetic. It’s a marvelous little movie. Now it’s a best picture winner. Right?
  • Speaker 1
    0:01:46

    It’s also one best director, best original screenplay, best actress, best supporting actress, best editing, and best supporting actor. This is the first movie in ninety five years of the Oscars to win all of the above the line categories, except for one, didn’t win best actor, didn’t have anybody nominated for that role, but it went all the rest. Just an amazing achievement for this movie from a twenty four. It’s that last win that I mentioned the best supporting actor that encapsulated just why so many people connected with this movie in a moving speech dedicated to into great parents who brought him over to this country on a boat, worked hard to give him a life that led to this Keih hoi kuan, closed things by telling people not to give up their dreams and that he is in fact the American dream. The tears welling up in my eyes.
  • Speaker 1
    0:02:34

    It was a sort of year where everything that one kind of more or less deserved it, like, I didn’t love all Quiet on the Western front, which is, you know, a movie that takes very bold stance at war is bad, hammers at home like a bayonet to the face. But it is a handsomely shot movie. It’s obviously made with skill and Karen Kraft. I have a hard time getting worked up about it, winning best cinematography, production design, international feature. Or even score, which I didn’t love for this movie, I’m a kind of admire as a bold choice.
  • Speaker 1
    0:03:00

    I don’t think it worked necessarily, but, you know, it’s certainly a lot of score. Avatar of the way of water, winning for best visual effects, that felt perfectly right. I love Top Gun Maverick and, you know, I could have seen that being happier without winning best picture, but I can live with it winning just for sound because it had great sound. The whale, mediocre Meeting Oker, I would have gone with probably Colin Farrell or Austin Butler for best actor, but Brandon Fraser’s comeback story was the best story of the year, and the best story always beats The best workout. Damn it.
  • Speaker 1
    0:03:29

    I like bread and Fraser anyway, so no real complaints. Even my punk ish trollish side was a a little thrilled by the whale winning, not only best actor, but also best makeup, I can just imagine, that takes that takes swelling up on Twitter when that happened. Indeed, all of the awards are so spot on that I I genuinely cannot remember the last time the Oscars got everything so right. Like, maybe all the way back to silence of the lambs. I don’t know.
  • Speaker 1
    0:03:54

    The show itself, the actual show was pretty safe, pretty good, solid. Jimmy Kimbell was fine. He was almost tame. The most controversial moment of the night probably came during the red carpet beforehand when an obviously annoyed Hugh Grant treated the woman interviewing him in her underwear with the contempt. And kind of annoyed sensation that only a Brit dealing with a deranged American can muster.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:16

    I gotta be honest, I loved it, but my opinion is kind of in the minority at this point. Guys, I’m kind of freaked out. I’m not gonna lie to you. I never get what I want from the Oscars. Never happens ever.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:26

    Alyssa, what terrible alternate reality have we stepped into?
  • Speaker 3
    0:04:30

    I don’t know. I mean, one where Malala is hanging out with cocaine beer, I guess. I felt like that set of bits was the one part of the night that could have gone off the rails if she were not extremely game. Like, I I feel like, oh, women of my generation just unbelievably protective of Malala, like, want her to be okay. And I thought she looked incredible, and I’m glad that she wasn’t offended by being asked about, don’t worry darling, drama, or harassed by someone in a bear suit.
  • Speaker 3
    0:05:01

    But yeah, no, I think, like, this particular branch of the multiverse that we’re living in. It’s like one where I’m happy to do laundry and taxes in forever. It was just nice. Right? It was like, I think everyone was sort of expecting some sort of train wreck drama and it’s a little deflating when that expectation doesn’t happen, but you know, maybe we’re all kinda out of practice at feeling good for people who seem to be deserving.
  • Speaker 3
    0:05:26

    And, you know, it’s probably good for us to work those muscles a little bit again. So I thought it was a good night.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:32

    Yeah. I mean, Peter, in a year where the best picture winner has a theme that is very bluntly stated as, let’s all just try and be nice to each other. It really was it was like a very nice award show. This is just like a nice time with all of my favorite you know, tuxedo clad friends celebrating good movies that that deserve to win awards. I I feel like it’s a it was a fitting Sarah Longwell.
  • Speaker 2
    0:05:56

    Well, the theme isn’t just be nice to each other. It’s also that free will and free expression are the only fitting responses to, like, a nihilistic universe that is out to destroy your soul, which may not even really exist. Anyway, I I like that movie a lot. Yes. So I have probably the least positive reaction here to all of this because I am somebody who has at best a mixed like, a very mixed feelings about the Oscars as an institution.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:28

    And I agree with you, Sunny. They basically got everything right. I don’t have like a lot of notes about the actual awards themselves. At the same time, I have been frustrated by the Oscars for twenty five years thirty years, basically as long as I have been aware of the thing that the Oscars are than paying any kind of attention to them, And my feeling about the Oscars is always. It’s a little bit like your feeling, which is they are a self serving trade show.
  • Speaker 2
    0:06:59

    And sometimes the self serving trade show gets everything wrong and it’s just crazy and stupid. And sometimes it’s just a disaster because they didn’t plan to the actual show. Right. And I think we’ve seen some of that the last couple of years, but sometimes they get everything right. And yet it’s still.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:18

    It’s still very obviously just a self serving trade show. And I think what you saw here was that Hollywood understood that they needed their self serving trade show to go really right and to not have any errors this year. To not have anything that was like, what the hell was that? Because otherwise, it wouldn’t do the thing that it needs to do, which is promote the brand and I don’t mean the brand of any particular movie. I mean the brand of the movies themselves.
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:50

    And it always just rubs me a little bit wrong the way that the Oscars pick movies that are that are about the movies. That are about the power of the movies that are indebted to the power of Cinema. And I say this is somebody who loves the movies deeply. It always just rubs me a little bit wrong about how much it’s a sort of self congratulatory exercise.
  • Speaker 1
    0:08:13

    And
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:13

    I think everything everywhere all at once was in some ways the ideal winner because it is the best example of a movie from at least the last you know, post pandemic from last several years. It was a not a horror film. It wasn’t a superhero movie. And it was a low budget film that also played well with audiences. So like great.
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:37

    At the same time, this was a movie I think a lot of people won’t understand and will never really understand unless they’ve kinda grown up as like mainlining like Coke snorting cocaine beer style. Just a lot of movies and like deeply embedding their brain in movie style thinking. And as someone who has done that, as somebody whose brain only operates at the level of, like, I understood the one car y references, but also like a bunch of the weirder stuff as well. Great. You have tendered to me in incredibly effectively, and I think you’ve done so in an artful way.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:16

    And I frankly think you’ve done so in a way that is much better than a lot of the, you know, the artist level Oscar nominees, you know, the the shape of water, which has that sea in which they all gather together to watch movies, to feel together, and, like, understand their place in the world. It’s great because it’s using the language of cinema and the reference points of cinema to tell a story. At the same time, this was an Oscars about how the movies needed to be saved. And I guess they kinda delivered on that, but like I don’t know. I ended up feeling even even agreeing with you that basically all the choices were good.
  • Speaker 2
    0:09:54

    Even as someone who’d really, truly, deeply, like, fell for everything everywhere all at once. Really I did. And I I wanna be clear, this is not a quiz. And, like, my mixed feelings here have nothing to do with that movie. What they have to do with is the trade show aspect of this.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:14

    The fact that it is basically a three and a half hour commercial for You know, we loved the movies once, weren’t they great? And it just felt like this sort ofness nostalgic exercise in in looking back at, like, at something that used to have real cultural power and now only has a kind of lingering aftertaste of that. Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:35

    But, I mean, Peter, this is a brief against the Oscars as a whole, which is fine.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:39

    Yeah. Yeah. And I am someone who doesn’t like the Oscars even when they get it right. Or at least I should say, doesn’t love the Oscars. I’ve never been there.
  • Speaker 2
    0:10:47

    She’s like, yeah, the Oscars are great. Like, they make me feel good about being a moviegoer. They never do. Even when they get it right. But
  • Speaker 1
    0:10:53

    I mean, I I do think that this year did a good job of kind of hitting on the best argument for the Oscars, which is that it is a way to get people interested in more and better varieties of movies. So, I mean, even what you said about everything everywhere all at once. Right? Let’s If this is the movie that inspires the sixteen year old kid with a letter box account to go watch one car Wi FiX, and, you know, try to pick up all the other reference point there. That’s good.
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:22

    That’s a good thing. That’s that’s good if it if, you know, this ceremony highlighted some of the smaller movies even if they didn’t win. You know, I mean, the whale wasn’t exactly a blockbuster if people go check that out. That’s good. Fine.
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:35

    I again, I didn’t love that, but it’s it’s I do
  • Speaker 2
    0:11:37

    hope people go check out Ron DeSantis Fraser’s work into the mummy films. Just great cinematic
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:43

    plot. Casino man. Big night for Encino man as several people joked with both Quay Quay Quay and also Fred and Fraser in that movie. You know, probably sure bringing together generations of filmmakers. I I don’t know.
  • Speaker 1
    0:11:56

    I I again, I I agree with you on the the trade show specs and the annoyances there. But if you’re going to have a trade show, I do think this is the best way to do it. Right? Alyssa?
  • Speaker 3
    0:12:07

    Yeah. I’m well. With two caveats. The sort of ad for the little mermaid in the middle of the show — Oh, good. — really just embarrassing, especially into, like, look any movie that’s set substantially underwater that comes out in close proximity to Avatar the way of water is screwed.
  • Speaker 3
    0:12:23

    Like, sorry, pardon my language, but, like, it’s just screw that movie looked cheap and awful. The whole thing was sort of crafts and an interruption of the rhythm of the night. And you know, it was just it was really tasteless of ABC. They should not have done that. I saw some speculation that that was sort of the price of getting to bring all the minor categories back.
  • Speaker 3
    0:12:43

    And if so, I guess it was worth paying it, but just like gross and they’re not sending their best. I just thought that was awful. And then this sort of hundred years of Warner Bros. Thing really leaned into the worst aspects of the trade show is a shouldn’t have at all. And I don’t know if all three of us have read Michael Schulman’s recent book about the Oscars But it, you know, it’s a really fun read if you’re a movie fan.
  • Speaker 3
    0:13:07

    It’s got a lot of great juicy stuff, but it’s also just a reminder that you know, there’s never been any purity to this, and it’s ended up, you know, the Oscars despite that lack of purity, despite, you know, their origins in, like, Louis v Mayer wanting a beach house built on the QuickBuy studio employees who are nonunion, you know, it is still managed to be the site of a lot of important cultural conversations. And so those two things can coexist even when the promotional trade show aspects of it are at their fastest as they occasionally were last night. But can I throw us a slightly spicy question into the conversation? How do we think the total wipeout for tar is gonna look in retrospect? Because, like, our hive mind converged on that as the best movie of the year.
  • Speaker 3
    0:13:51

    I liked everything everywhere all at once quite a lot, and it grew on me over time. I think I still probably liked it a little bit less than the two of you even though it gets me totally in the mom feels. But you know, we all can brush on par as the best movie of the year. And I still think it is just so you know, just laparary and it’s perfection in some ways. And, I mean, obviously, this is, you know, the win for everything ever all at once.
  • Speaker 3
    0:14:18

    It’s not gonna be some, like, crash or three billboards, embarrassment for the academy. But I do wonder how just like the total, you know, why that photon is gonna resonate over time?
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:31

    Because
  • Speaker 3
    0:14:31

    I just thought that was pretty much a perfect movie. Peter,
  • Speaker 2
    0:14:34

    do you wanna you wanna go first? A good question. I think the tar is going to remain a critical intellectual favorite because it is a movie that is Will Saletan difficult in a lot of ways. It’s a great movie, and it is easy to watch, I think, and easy to enjoy, and yet it is also not a crowd pleaser. It goes out of its way not to to ever hit the and hear you will enjoy this button.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:09

    Whereas
  • Speaker 1
    0:15:09

    everything
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:10

    everywhere all at once just hits it hits it really, really effectively, like, for two hours and whatever number of minutes. Does a very good job with that. I I deeply enjoyed everything everywhere. I mean, we all we all had the same top two movies for last year, and I think that was the easiest part of making our Jonathan Last at least for me. I suspect for all of us was that it was everything everywhere, Antar, and those were the two movies.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:32

    Antar was totally shut out. And I think that Tara is gonna be one of those movies that people of a certain self understanding, self assessment, self cast. Right? Who, like, want to take on something difficult will come back to. But it’s never gonna be a big audience favorites.
  • Speaker 2
    0:15:55

    And I think it’s it’s gonna be limited by that in some ways, but it’s also gonna live by that in other ways. I will look back at that movie as the movie that was the most intelligent film the most sharply made and certainly had the single best performance I saw last year. But, I mean, also, like, I said this on the podcast when we talked about it. Maybe ever. Like, I I really cannot get over Cape Blanche’s performance in that movie.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:23

    It’s not just perfect. It’s just that it’s it’s the kind of performance that is hard to imagine until you have seen it. Right? It is it’s so full and so real. And I think people who know will know that now we can see what Kate Blinchett is capable of.
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:42

    Finally. Finally, I mean, you’re the dude. But that’s the that’s part of what I’m saying is no one was under the impression that she wasn’t a good actress.
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:49

    Yeah. No
  • Speaker 2
    0:16:50

    one was under the impression that she wasn’t a great actress, and yet the extent to which that movie just showed that she had so much more left in her that we hadn’t seen I think, again, people who are who kind of care about that particular thing. What can we get out of our performers? Like, there’s now a a range that has been displayed. It’s like, oh, we’re gonna have to reckon with that for a while. Well, it’s very interesting that it comes in a performance that,
  • Speaker 3
    0:17:23

    you know, feels male and female in very interesting ways. Right? Like, it’s a it’s a marker thrown down across the entire profession.
  • Speaker 1
    0:17:35

    My take on this is that the movie that Tara most reminds me of It’s actually there are two movies that Tara Mohs reminds me of. The first is Mulholland Drive. It was also nominated for Best Picture, is a movie that is very much beloved by critics. And, you know, people who love movies in general, cinephiles in general, and is not super appreciated beyond that space, I would say. And then the
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:58

    just had a four k rerelease?
  • Speaker 1
    0:18:00

    Actually, I don’t know. I bought Lost Highway, not not Mohawk and Drive. But, yes, it is out on four k from the criterion question. And the other movie that this reminds me of a lot, and that this year reminds me a lot, is there will be blood, which is another kind of longish, difficult dish a movie that kind of reveals itself over the course of the picture, doesn’t give you an easy person or really anyone to cheer for, to root for. And is like a clear work of an all tour at play.
  • Speaker 1
    0:18:27

    But the two thousand eight ceremony for the two thousand seven movies is the last year I can remember where two movies that I knew at the time would make my best of decade list. Were not only released in the same year, but were up against each other in the Oscars. No country for Old Men was the other one here. And I feel a very similar way about everything everywhere all at once and par. I feel like everything everywhere all at once is the much more accessible, you know, popular type picture, which is kind of what no country for Old Men was in this guy economy between no country and there will be blood and tar and everything everywhere all at once.
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:03

    I mean, I’ll be honest, Alissa, you said that these were the our two favorite movies of the year and that this was but I I could have gone either way, honestly. I could have gone everything everywhere all at once at number one and Tara at number two. And, frankly, Top Gun Maverick in there at number three. Like, all three of those are almost interchangeable to me, though I do think that tar and everything everywhere we’re a slight cut above for various reasons. And
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:26

    this is a long running argument between the two of us about whether no country is better than there will be blood, and Europe, there
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:35

    will be blood guy. And I’m a no country guy. I mean, I think I think there will be blood as a better movie. It it is how I feel about Tar kind of, which is that I think it’s a it’s a more impressive piece of cinematic art. But I also think no country for Old Men might be a better movie if we wanted to make that distinction.
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:53

    Does that make sense? Yes. And that’s kind of how I feel about tar and everything everywhere all at once. Frankly, I think everything everywhere all at once is a better best picture winner than tar for the Oscars and what the Oscars wanna be because everything everywhere all at once was an actual hit with audiences is very popular. And at least part of the reason for the Oscars to exist is to put the official stamp on popular and populous things.
  • Speaker 1
    0:20:17

    That is not something to sneer at. I’m not I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I think that’s actually a good function of the the award ceremony in general. And it’s one thing I think that they have made a real mistake getting away from in the the post nineties, post early odds era. You know, I think the the Oscars make a mistake when they when they routinely pick movies that are not well seen by people as best picture, even if they are, you know, nominally the better cinematic artistic achievement.
  • Speaker 1
    0:20:45

    But that’s that’s neither here nor there. It’s an interesting thing to think about. Again, I think in o seven years when I’m putting together my best of the 2020s list. I have a hard time imagining from my vantage right now that both of these movies won’t make it. And I I will be curious to see which order they go in once that comes together in full.
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:06

    Alongside June two, of course, which we’ll be giving later this year. Alright. So what do we think? Is it a controversy, the the Oscars this year? Just as a whole, was it a controversy or a controversy, Peter?
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:17

    It was a controversy. I mean, it was a triumph of branding. Triumph Triumph, Alyssa.
  • Speaker 3
    0:21:24

    Peter’s you know, just sort of general scrutiny is controversial. The Oscars themselves were almost controversially nontroversial. Was
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:33

    a delight, non tremorcy. Great time was had by all thanks to the the fine movies on display and the excellent hosting by Jimmy Kimmel. Alright. Make sure to swing my Bulwark plus on Friday for a little more Oscar chatter. We’re gonna be talking fashion.
  • Speaker 1
    0:21:46

    Why did the rock look like a cream circle? How great was Jonathan Majors’ Frederick Douglass inspired look, etcetera, etcetera. Gotta talk some fashion here. It’s gonna be we’re gonna I think we’re gonna get a list of explain too. Is my is my hope on this So I’m excited for that.
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:00

    And now on to the main event. We’re talking now about a movie that will likely not land ending Oscars next year, sixty five. I remember when the trailer for this movie dropped and it was just Adam Driver crash landing spaceship on a alien planet. He’s running around, he finds a little girl survivor, and it’s like, oh, no. How are they gonna survive on this planet?
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:19

    And it turns out, oops, they’re on Earth. And it’s sixty five million years ago. And he’s got to fight dinosaurs. That’s right. What I’m saying here is sixty five should have been called the Adam Driver versus the Dino’s.
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:31

    It’s not called Adam Driver versus The Dynos, which costs the movie at least fifty million dollars in its opening weekend, I think. But what do I know? Sixty five is kind of a weird movie. Okay? On the one hand, again, it’s about Adam Driver and he’s sixty five million years in the past and he’s finding dinosaurs.
  • Speaker 1
    0:22:47

    On one hand, it does a like, the whole movie seem incredibly preoccupied with making us believe this setup. Like, there’s a whole bunch of story about driver and a sick daughter and an ancient civilization, traveling to cosmos and how he’s like basically a long haul trucker, and he’s just doing this to, you know, making money to pay for her treatments, his daughter’s treatments, his sick daughter’s medical treatments. But it’s done in this very perfunctory hand wavy sort of way Like, perfunctory and hand wavy is how a lot of this movie feels, particularly in the way futuristic technology is deployed on an entirely ad hoc script needed basis to keep things moving. Adam driver needs a map. Great.
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:25

    Here’s a machine that makes a map that works sometimes when he needs it to. Adam driver needs a gun to stop working for a minute to create tension. Great. Let’s shut it down for a second. Alright.
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:36

    We need the rescue ship to not be able to take off for a few minutes because we we want a little little excitement here. Good. Perfect. Boom. Doesn’t work for a few minutes.
  • Speaker 1
    0:23:44

    I guess the thing I resent about this picture is that it just doesn’t really work as what it was advertised as, which is, again, Adam Driver Finding Dynasty. It’s really all I wanted here. But the action is dutiful at best. There’s nothing clever or surprising. He just kinda shoots the dinosaurs.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:00

    I don’t know. Doesn’t work. It fails as a dino hunting movie, but it’s not terrible as a gruff dad out of water movie. As I mentioned, Adam Driver, space pilot rescues this little girl, whom he bonds with emotionally as a replacement for his dead daughter, and with whom he shares many cute and funny moments, driver, magnetic, magnetic on the screen. He’s got that whole put upon dad feeling that so many of us dads have felt at some point, just down perfectly.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:24

    That stuff all kind of works, but it doesn’t really work well enough to overcome the failure to do the thing, it promised to do just have Adam Driver fight dinosaurs. Alright. At the end of the day, it’s it’s just kinda dull, really. That’s that’s the real problem in this movie. It’s not incompetent.
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:40

    It’s just kinda boring. And that’s almost the worst thing that a movie can do. Like, honestly, I would take a train wreck over something that’s like, it’s just kinda boring. Peter, you were texting us after the singing of the movie and you were just raving about it. How much you loved it?
  • Speaker 1
    0:24:54

    Why were you such a fan of adam driver fights dinosaurs and rescues a little girl, the movie, dot com. Oh,
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:00

    yeah. That’s exactly right. So this movie is titled sixty five. Which is a reference to the number of millions of years ago that dinosaurs were around and that this movie takes place. I wish I could give it sixty five million thumbs down.
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:15

    Oh. It was so bad. It was so bad. If I did not have some sort of professional responsibility to finish this movie, I absolutely would have walked out. It was a giant waste of everyone’s time.
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:29

    Including an especially mine since my time is what I care about most. Now, there is absolutely nothing to recommend to about this movie. Your, like, kinda, it’s not so bad, it just doesn’t quite deliver position, wildly overrated the strengths of this film. Which is both boring and actually incompetent in the story. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:51

    So again, like, let’s just stipulate that the premise is guy with, like, a future guns? Like, space guy? Future guns. Laser gun. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:02

    He’s the kind of, like, laser guy except they’re not laser. Like future guy lands on earth during the Cretaceous or Jurassic whatever. Did the dinosaur period and it has to fight dinosaurs to get out off the planet and then there’s like a little girl or something too. Like, the movie doesn’t deliver on that for a solid hour of it’s only hour and a half running time. If you are going to make your movie, like the premise of your movie, that future guy has to fight dinosaurs, then I wanna see some freaking future guy fighting some freaking dinosaurs and they deliver up just a little bit of that in the final twenty minutes.
  • Speaker 2
    0:26:41

    Or so. There’s literally a scene in the first act in which he’s meeting and rescuing the little girl and, like, he’s, like, oh, No. I’m not trying to hurt you. And you see the wrestling, the trees in the background, and you see just barely out of focus, like the top of, like, I think, a t rex head or something, And then the movie just cuts. It just cuts away.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:02

    It cuts away because it’s like, oh, oh, we were gonna give you a dinosaur fighting scene. But actually, no. We’re not gonna do that because you wouldn’t want a dinosaur fighting scene in this dinosaur fighting movie. There’s just so little there. This movie is, again, it’s ninety five minutes long, and the whole third quarter in this dinosaur fighting movie is spent in a dark cave.
  • Speaker 2
    0:27:25

    Where you can’t see what’s going on. Now, you can imagine a dark cave sequence in a movie like this that build suspense that actually shows what it would have been like in a world without light where you had to make your own fire, where, you know, if you your headlamp that you have because you’re space guy like allows you to see, no, it’s just twenty minutes of movie where you can’t tell what the hell is going on. And where you don’t care because you can’t tell, because they’re just stuck in a cave for twenty five minutes or whatever it is. For a quarter of the movie, in a ninety five minute movie. Just absolutely uninspired and incompetent.
  • Speaker 2
    0:28:04

    I didn’t care about the relationship and all the dad stuff. This goes to your point about the weird way that it is, like, trying to establish this stuff is, like, serious and real, and and yet also does so in the most perfunctory way. I thought every one of those beats was incredibly shallow. There wasn’t a single thing there that was like, oh, that actually makes me connect to these people. And relatedly, none of these people had arcs and the movie itself doesn’t have an arc.
  • Speaker 2
    0:28:33

    So a movie like this kind of lives her dies on both the suspense and the tension in the individual scenes and there is none. Like, it’s very bad about showing us what the stakes are in an individual scene, what the options are for the protagonist, what the threat is, and how he might respond to them, which is like how you create tension. Like, oh, somebody wants something. It’s gonna be hard to get. And, oh, wait, then we raise the stakes by making it a little more tense like as this person is trying to complete their their plan to get the thing they want.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:04

    No. There was none of that. He, like, never saw anything that was sort of remotely just sort of practical suspense building in this movie. But you didn’t really see any real character arc either. None of these people grew.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:17

    They didn’t get to know each other in a real way. Like, she kinda learned to speak some English or something like some like a couple of words. And he rescued her at the end because of course he did. But that’s it. There’s not like they learned together and, like, develop a bond by doing stuff together, you know, like family members do or, like, found family members by do.
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:40

    Every single thing about this movie was stupid and worthless, and I hated it. And I’m really mad that I watched it. The only thing that makes it feel better The only thing at all that makes me feel better is that I get to rant about it on a podcast. So at least thank you guys for that. But my God, what a terrible waste of talent?
  • Speaker 2
    0:29:58

    What a waste of Adam Driver and fifty million dollars? Forty five million dollars production budget, I guess. One
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:04

    thing I will say was just before we get to you here. I do think this is a movie that how you view it changes a little bit based on if you are a parent or not. One of the people I saw on Twitter defending it as Bill Guebierry who is a dad and and has written about how interstellar movies like that or like total dad movies and, like, it’s hard to kind of appreciate some things within them if you if you aren’t as a parent. Do you think this movie hit you a little differently than it might have hit Peter?
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:33

    Yes. But first, I wanna talk about how neither of you have acknowledged this is a movie where Adam Driver kills a t rex with a proto old faithful. Come on. He murders it with a geyser. It’s great.
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:45

    Now, this is not a good movie, but part of what makes it sort of general inertness. So weird is that it’s actually full of incredibly good little details about how Mills Adam Driver’s character super power is his experience as a father. And I actually started making a list of all of the moments in which the movie just does something that is totally what a dad or what like a nine year old girl would do in a given situation. Right? Like, the little girl, like, throws and burries at him to get his attention and annoy him.
  • Speaker 3
    0:31:20

    Him squicking her out with, like, the goo from the bug. You know, her insisting on stopping when the baby dinosaur is stuck in the tar pit because, like, it’s adorable and she’s a little girl Ron DeSantis sort of exactly what she would do. Mills making sure that she doesn’t see the worst of the baby dino getting eaten by Raptors, but also covering her ears later when he’s setting off one of those grenades. Like, again, totally instinctively. That’s like a very fluid, like, this is loud.
  • Speaker 3
    0:31:50

    I know my kid will be scared. Him letting her put or kids in his hair, whether it’s like the sort of one way to like placate her and move her along. Using the whistle to distract her there were all of these little I was like padding her on the back when she’s throwing up, when that insect was doing whatever it is, like in her mouth, him letting go of the rope when she says that she can climb up the cliff by herself and sort of like trusting her. I mean, there are just all of these moments that, like, someone involved in this movie is a dad. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:32:26

    And For a script that had to have that many details, never sort of commented on officially, but just sort of woven into the movie and the performance shows that there was someone with some sort of care and sensibility involved in this movie, which makes the rest of it very perplexing. But to be fair, Adam Geyser Adam
  • Speaker 2
    0:32:45

    Geyser Adam Geyser.
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:46

    Adam Geyser. Adam Geyser.
  • Speaker 3
    0:32:48

    Adam Geyser does murder a t rex with the help of a geyser and that was kind of fun. I enjoyed that. It’s not a good movie though.
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:56

    And listen to your point, I do think that everything you just laid out here does kind of counteract some of Peter’s points about development of the characters, etcetera. You you get a lot of that just from from watching them interact. And it is I think fairly well done guys who made this movie also made a quiet place. Well, they wrote another movie that To to the
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:13

    guys who wrote and directed this — Right. — wrote a quiet place, but they did not direct it. And I would say that a quiet place is just such an obviously superior example of the kind of film that this is trying to be — Totally. — because every single one of the sequences has incredible built in tension. Again, this thing where a character wants something.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:34

    There’s a clear physical goal that you can tell, and then there are obstacles. And then you see the danger that they are putting themselves in by attempting to get the thing that they want. You also understand why they want the thing in a really deep and primal way and it and it builds upon itself Right? The action gags. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:54

    The rules of the world sort of slowly accumulate over the course of both of those films. So that you’re just locked in to the character’s struggle in both of those movies. I really like both of them. So it’s not that I think that these guys can’t produce anything that’s good. It’s that I think that as as directors, they just couldn’t figure out how to put their ideas on screen.
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:15

    Yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:16

    Alright. So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down. On sixty five AKA Adam Driver kills dinosaurs with geysers and also space rifles. Peter.
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:24

    I am personally aggrieved that this movie exists. Thumbs down. Thank you. Alyssa. I
  • Speaker 3
    0:34:31

    mean, thumb’s down unless you’re an Adam Driver Completeist. And why wouldn’t you be an Adam Driver Completeist?
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:37

    So that’s like a semi thumbs up. Thumbs down. Again, I I don’t think it’s incompetent, but it is kind of boring. And that’s that’s maybe worse. Alright.
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:46

    That is it for this week’s show. Make sure to head over to Bulwark Plus for our bonus episode on Friday. Tell your friends, strong recommendation from a friend. Is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences. Don’t grow.
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:55

    We will die. You did not love today’s episode. Please complain to me on Twitter at sunnyvale to mention that it is a best show in your podcast feed. See you guys next week.
Bulwark+ members enjoy weekly bonus episodes here.