Oscar Season with Talk Easy

Development Hell will return on Thursday with an all-new episode about a chimpanzee. In the meantime, here's a Hollywood-related episode from our friends at Talk Easy. Host Sam Fragoso talks with the New York Times critic Wesley Morris about all things Oscars, his career, and the state of the film industry. Find more Talk Easy at talkeasypod.com.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hey friends, Malcolm here. I hope you're enjoying the Development
Hell series as much as we are. We've got more
great ones in the pipeline. Well, well, we've got our
heads in Hollywood and the Oscars coming up this weekend.
I want to share a great interview from our friends
over at Talk Easy. Sam Fragoso talks with the brilliant
New York Times critic Wesley Morris all about this year's

(00:46):
Oscar contenders and the movies that should have made the
cut but didn't, plus the state of the industry in general.
It's a great listen, and don't worry. We'll be back
on Thursday with the next episode from Development Hell.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
This is Talk Easy. I'm stud Forgoso.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Welcome to the show.

Speaker 4 (01:37):
Today.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I am joined by writer and fellow podcaster Wesley Morris.
Since twenty fifteen, Morris has served as the critic at
large for The New York Times, where he's also co
hosted the popular podcast Still Processing alongside Jay Wortham. While
the show has been on hiatus, Wesley has continued publishing
searching and often moving essays that explore the intersection of

(02:02):
race and pop culture. His work was first awarded the
pull to Prize for Criticism in twenty twelve his ten
year at The Boston Globe, and then again most recently
in twenty twenty one, at the height of the pandemic.
But what I think makes his work special, and you'll
hear it a fair bit in this conversation is not

(02:22):
only his ability to connect the dots or to see
the bigger picture, but to do so in real time
with readers and listeners alike. Wesley doesn't come to the
page or the microphone with the puzzle pre assembled. The
pieces of the story or the theory are always there, yes,
But the road to a good idea, the discovery process,

(02:44):
which can often be vulnerable and vexing, is one he
invites us into with wit, wisdom, and warmth. And so
this week I want him to sit with Morris on
the heels of this year's Academy Award nominations to try
to make sense of what these ten films both say
and represent about movies in twenty twenty four. Pictures like

(03:07):
Barbie Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, the Holdovers, are
they a window into the future of cinema or merely
a reflection of this precarious moment in Hollywood. We also
discuss his early adventures in moviegoing growing up in Philadelphia,
the indie boom of the late nineties, the gradual erosion
of what he calls the middle brow movie in the

(03:29):
wake of Marvel now Mattel, and how the film industry
has continued to struggle in its attempts to create a
more diverse and equitable ecosystem, both in front and behind
the camera. When Wesley accepted his second pull To prize
in twenty twenty one, he said, at its most essential,
criticism does save people money and it can expose them

(03:53):
to new, mind blowing work. It doesn't save lives, but
it can give life. And so by the end of
this conversation, it's my hope that this episode will do
the same for you. And with that, this is Wesleymore.

Speaker 4 (04:09):
Yes, Hi Westley, Hello Sam, how are you? Thanks for
having me?

Speaker 3 (04:29):
That sounded a little labored?

Speaker 4 (04:31):
Sounds I mean, this is the year of our Lord,
twenty twenty four. I think we're all in for some labor.
If I've sound like this in January, I think you
just check with me in eleven months or ten months.

Speaker 5 (04:45):
And see where I am.

Speaker 3 (04:46):
Do you want to schedule a time to come back
on November fifteenth, twenty twenty four.

Speaker 4 (04:52):
That guess should not be me. You can do you
can do better than me.

Speaker 3 (04:56):
I think David Remnick has signed up for that slot.

Speaker 4 (04:58):
Remnick for better or Worse. Oh all right, well, then
bring your tissues.

Speaker 3 (05:04):
We can do a panel. We can do a panel.

Speaker 4 (05:06):
Have you ever you've never done a panel on this show.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
Oh, we don't do panels.

Speaker 4 (05:10):
I mean, that's not how this works.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
I want to start with maybe less apocalyptic news in
the recent Oscar nominations.

Speaker 4 (05:20):
I mean, it depends on who you're talking.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
To what we're talking to you, So we're going to
start there.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
I mean it was apocalyptic for Greta Gerwig.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Yes, well, we'll have to get into them. In the past,
you've called the Oscars quote a diagnosis of the health
of the movies and the five the ten films nominated
for Best Picture operate as a class that doubles as
an x ray of the Academy and the movie business
at large. So, now that we have the nominations and

(05:49):
the dust has settled a little bit, what is your diagnosis.

Speaker 4 (05:54):
I was thinking about the pandemic years and the Oscars
and all the rule bending that the Academy did in
order to not have a show. Moving dates, expanding the
release are the sort of eligibility windows what constituted a
motion picture. There are all these adjustments the Academy was

(06:18):
trying to do in order to keep the show going on,
and it was pretty funny because things looked really bad,
and how things looked a couple of years ago was
that we weren't going to go to the movies again,
and every Best Picture nominee was probably going to be
watched on a TV by more people than saw it
in a movie theater during its initial run. And that

(06:39):
is how, in some ways, you wind up with a
movie like Coda winning Best Picture, which is the kind
of movie where, like, you know, I watched it the
way pretty much everybody in the Academy who voted for it,
and you just got to think, like with your eyes closed,
I liked that movie. And it's funny because I watched
it and I knew instantly by the time, like when

(07:01):
they go to the audition and she does the song
and the family's up in the balcony and you experience
it from their point of view, I was like, there's
no way in the world this movie does not win
the Oscar for Best Picture, it's your winner. I felt
like this is what the movies deserve. The movies deserve

(07:22):
codea winning Best Picture. The point is I feel comfortable
with where we are now versus where we were in
two thousand, nineteen to twenty twenty two twenty one, mostly
because the movies are better. I think the movie attendance
is not as bad as it seemed like it was

(07:44):
going to be. You know, it's funny. Coco Goff, in
her press conference the other day after she lost to
Arena Sablanca in the semifinals of the Australian Open, was
talking about how bad, how she wasn't gonna get too
down on herself, and she's like, you know, I'm Tomorrow's
another day. I'm just gonna go see a movie and
say that I didn't do so bad. And I was like,

(08:04):
this is a nineteen year old person saying they're gonna
cheer up by going to a movie.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
Incredible.

Speaker 4 (08:10):
That just kind of kind of gladdened my heart a
little bit. It made me feel like it was possibly
nineteen eighty nine. And I just think that for one thing.
The Best Picture nominees include the two movies that made
people believe that movie going was gonna be okay and
would survive and would be would remain profitable, and not

(08:34):
just it's not just the money, it's also just the
cultural lifespan of what Barbie and Oppenheimer managed to do.
You know, it created a sort of side imagination in
the culture where we could not stop mocking, meaning overthinking, rethinking,
defending some aspect of both those movies. And there their

(08:58):
Best Picture nominees.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
Well, let's start with those two, because as the nominations
came out, people once again came to the defense of Barbie,
in part because Greta Gerrig was not not nominated for
Best Director, and also because Margot Robbie was not recognized
in the Best Actress category. Even former Secretary Hillary Clinton

(09:20):
chimed in on Barbie Gate with the sentence that I'm
going to read for you here.

Speaker 4 (09:25):
Oh I did not know this hit me.

Speaker 3 (09:27):
She wrote, Greta and Margo, while it can, sting to
win the box office but not take home.

Speaker 4 (09:35):
Oh no, Hillary went there.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Let me try to get.

Speaker 5 (09:42):
Lord.

Speaker 4 (09:43):
I'm sorry, keep going.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Greta and Margo, Oh God, while it can. You know,
sometimes being a Democrat is so embarrassing, so embarrassing.

Speaker 4 (09:55):
But at least Democrats seem to watch things and then
have feelings about them. Yes, anyway, just go on.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
Okay, Greta and Margo take three. Well it can sting
to win the box office, but not take home the
You're millions of fans love you. You're both so much
more than kanough hashtag Hillary Barbie.

Speaker 4 (10:18):
Oh you know, as Hallmark cards go. I mean, I
don't know any other presidential loser who would do a
better job, frankly, but Hillary Clinton is more than entitled
to look at the results of the Oscar nominations and
go to a place. I think that it's a little

(10:39):
I've been thinking about, like, well, what do I actually
think about the fact that Grete Gerwork's not a Best
Director nominee having watched the movie like three days.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
Ago, And what do you think?

Speaker 4 (10:48):
Oh? I mean, first of all, I think that Barbie
is extremely well made. It's so well made in some
ways that you kind of can't believe that the things
that are interesting about it are even in the movie.
There are avant garde sequences in this movie. There are
things that come out of beach movies from the sixties
and John Water, and I mean, they are all kinds

(11:11):
of influences being pulled from here in a movie that
is very funny. There's a line I don't know at
some point she wants up in the boardroom. I don't
know who's speaking, but at some point the lowly guy
who is the only person who is a free thinker
in the in the in the Land of Suits doesn't
even have a suit. I think he's in a vest

(11:32):
or a sweater. He's like, I'm a man with no power.
Does that make me a woman? And he meekly asks it.
I just think that line is really funny. There's I mean,
the speech that the America Ferrara's speech is really good.
I think that the big problem with the movie, in
a weird way, it's that Ken Ryan Gosling as Ken

(11:54):
Is is too good, and it's hard in some ways
to not see past what he's doing because it's just
so much better and richer and more shaded. There's something
underneath that person he's playing, something like he's tapping into
it to a pain that's not dissimilar, or or like

(12:16):
an aspect of being a particular kind of human that
is not dissimilar from what Margot Robbie is finding and
she's got like two really good scenes where she's connecting
her dullness, that the character's dullness to the character's humanists.
But the problem with the Ken thing is that, like
the keenness kind of overwhelms the Barbinus in a particular way,

(12:38):
but not the sort of politics of the movie itself. Right,
the movie's politics are completely intact and very coherent and
legible and funny and right in so many ways. I mean, Okay,
they're bald, they're a little bit blatant, but there's so
much humor to be had. I watched Nine to five

(12:59):
and it's so funny those movies. You could play Barbie
in nine to five movies that are twenty Sorry, forty
four years is a part and nothing really would have
changed about them except how much better the filmmaking is.

Speaker 3 (13:18):
It sounds like you and Hillary are on the same
side of history.

Speaker 4 (13:22):
No, because I mean, I don't think that it's a
crime what happened to her. Right, there are nine thousand
something voting members in the Academy. They don't nominate the individual.
The guilds nominate each other. Right, The craft categories nominate
each other. So nine thousand people don't have a say

(13:43):
and whether Greg Gurrigg is the Best Director nominee five
hundred and maybe sixty or eighty something people do, and
they don't really care to see the achievement of what
it is that she managed to do. I mean, just
the colors alone, I don't like if you look at
the color palette of the five Best Picture of the

(14:03):
Best Director nominees movies, I mean, hers is the one
that you know came from a candy shop, And even
that alone is probably a deterrent for an entire class
of director's branch member. It isn't explicitly her being a woman,
but it's her interests as a woman that are kind

(14:27):
of alien. I mean, she should have been nominated for
Little Women, and it wasn't. But you know, this is her,
like all three of her movies have been Best Picture nominees,
as all three of her movies as a director have
been Best Picture nominees, and they've all been screenplay nominees.
She'll probably win. She and NOELH. Bambach will probably win
in the in the adapted in the hilarious adapted screenplay category.

(14:48):
I don't know what this movie's adapted from.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
When we look at these ten films nominated and how
they are, as you say, an x ray of the industry.
I wonder if we can't divide the list into three groups,
because the first one to me are historical dramas that
have arrived at the right place and the right time
and speak to the country we live in and the
politics of the moment. Those are Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan,

(15:14):
Killers of Flower Moon by Scorsese, and Zone of Interest
by Jonathan Glazer. Oppenheimer is the prohibitive favorite. But what
in that cluster stands out to you?

Speaker 4 (15:26):
I mean, it's funny. I think all these movies operate,
I should say, in different moods. Alphabetically. We'll start with
Killers of the Flower Moon. I think Killers of Flower
Moon is a perversely effective movie. It's a weird movie
for more in Scorsese, because it's not a lot of
his priorities aren't apparent. A lot of his typical priorities

(15:48):
aren't parent orlthough they're not four grounded in this movie.
He's not interested in acting here. It's one of the
rare instances to me in which his interest in acting
and actors is kind of secondary to the politics and
the sort of thematic urgency of what it is he's
trying to do. I am not surprised that Lenardo DiCaprio

(16:10):
is not a Best Actor nominee. For instance, if we're
going to keep this in the realm of the Academy Awards,
this is maybe his least convincing performance of the of
you know, all the ones he's given in Scorsese movies alone.
This is an impossible part to play. He's playing a
truly stupid person who is also truly in love and

(16:33):
truly evil, easily duped into doing horrible things to people.

Speaker 3 (16:39):
On that I want to play a little bit of
this clip featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and actress Lily Gladstone and
the new film Killers of the Flower Mountain.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
Let's take a listen. Why did you come here for?

Speaker 6 (16:55):
What?

Speaker 3 (16:57):
To live here?

Speaker 6 (16:58):
Yes?

Speaker 4 (17:00):
I'll live here?

Speaker 3 (17:03):
Why?

Speaker 4 (17:05):
Oh? From my uncle.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
William?

Speaker 5 (17:14):
Your brother is Brian Byron. That's right, you're scared of him?

Speaker 4 (17:25):
My brother?

Speaker 3 (17:26):
Who your uncle?

Speaker 4 (17:32):
Well? No, oh, he's a He's a king of the
o Sage heels.

Speaker 5 (17:40):
He's the nicest man.

Speaker 4 (17:41):
In the world. I know if you cross him, what
he can do mm hmm.

Speaker 7 (17:46):
No.

Speaker 5 (17:47):
I'm my own man.

Speaker 4 (17:48):
I do my own work.

Speaker 5 (17:50):
I'm a businessman.

Speaker 4 (17:55):
In a weird way. The thing that sort of comes
through in this movie to me is the thing that
in reading January sixth reports really leapt out at me,
which is like all the people who stormed the capitol,
who were like, I don't know, oh, I was just
following the crowd, and the crowd went up the steps

(18:16):
and into the capitol, So I did. And this movie
is really to me about so I did. It's people
sort of betraying their own souls, selling their souls, I mean,
and really for nothing, honestly for nothing. I mean it's land,
but I mean there's land everywhere for oil. I mean,

(18:39):
I don't know, go find some oil with some land
on it. I mean the movie is steeped in such
such incredible, vivid pettiness. But I would say, god, you know,
I mean, I think that the Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer doesn't really
interest me as a movie, And part of it is

(19:00):
it doesn't really feel like it's living. I felt like
Oppenheimer to me was a series of talking heads. The
movie isn't really asking any questions. It's just recapitulating, and
the recapitulation just never got me as filmmaking. I mean,
I don't know, I just sort of feel like the

(19:21):
introduction of the communist end of things was way more,
was more than the movie necessarily needed. And I feel
like if you're gonna do that, you kind of have
to make Oppenheimer more of who he actually was to
the culture. I mean, there was a period during which
he was an extremely famous American and lots of people

(19:41):
admired the turn that he took away from the building
of the bomb and his outspokenness against it. So all
the stuff with Lewis Strauss and the McCarthy hearings, I
just feel like there's a bridge from the creation of
the bomb to those hearings that's missing. And it can't
be that it's Albert Einstein on the lawn with a pipe.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
I actually liked the film, but I mean, when you
describe it like that, I don't even know how I
like it because I was moved by the Albert Einstein
with the pipe.

Speaker 4 (20:16):
Well, let's talk about that, Like what got you? What
I mean, I always what about the movie worked for you?

Speaker 3 (20:22):
There's a lot that got Okay. I feel probably the
same as you about him, which is it's pretty hit
or miss and mileage varies. And I don't like the
movies that seem to feel soulless, and I felt that
this one did have a kind of beating heart, an
emotion that I had not found in Dunkirk or Interstellar.

(20:42):
Oh sure, none of those. So I was moved by it.
But I want to ask you, because the second group
that I had divided for us is Barbie and Maestro,
both our actors turned directors. Both are making big, ambitious
films that are kind of upending the genre that they're
working in. Even in time. This week there was an

(21:04):
article by Stephanie Zacharach titled Greta Gerwick, Bradley Cooper and
This Strange Curse of Ambition. Do those two pictures feel
linked to you?

Speaker 4 (21:15):
I feel like Maestro solves a lot of the problems
that I have with biographical movie making. I did not
need a movie about Leonard Bernstein. But I think the
reason that it works as well as it does is
because the movie really isn't about Leonard Bernstein. I mean,
let's just talk about the movie formally for a second.
I mean, it spans time, there are shifts in aspect ratio,

(21:39):
which if you do that, you know you have my heart.
But it also is really I mean, the movie is
being sold to us as being about a marriage, and
I don't really know if I mean, it's not about
a marriage. It's about a man's behavior's effect on a
marriage and all of its impulses. To avoid showing Leonard

(21:59):
Bernstein really doing the thing that makes him one of
the great Americans of the twentieth century, and to focus
on his energy, his insatiable, unquenchable thirst for all kinds
of things and people, his unembarrassability, and it's I guess

(22:22):
it's shamelessness, his shamelessness. I don't know. I just love
that It wasn't a love letter to Leonard Bernstein. It
was a real portrait of an asshole, and the asshole
happens to be a musical genius. But the movie isn't
about what a musical genius it is. It's actually about
what an asshole he is.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
Definitely, it's definitely not about what a genius is.

Speaker 4 (22:44):
And I actually liked that, and in that way it
kind of frees the movie to be whatever it is.
The person who made it want it to be and
I also feel that way. I mean, it's funny because
now that you put me in this position, like I mean,
I think Barbie is also doing a similar thing. Where
at no point in watching it, although at every moment

(23:06):
up until the point I actually saw the movie, did
I think that Greta Gerwig was beholden to Mattel and
doing its bidding. She clearly had thought about had had
some connection to not only the dolls, but like the
politics of girlhood itself and the politics of the evolution

(23:29):
of girlhood into womanhood. I think that there is such
a struggle happening in that movie that's about living with
the capitalist impulse to own, consume, buy things that are
not in your political or in some cases onto logical
self interest, things that are designed to oppress, dehumanize, demotivate,

(23:56):
even when you start putting glasses on them in lab
coats and give them clipboards and stuff. I don't know.
There's a real conflict here about what it means to
have a consumerist girlhood. And I thought it was so
smart to invent the America fer Our character finding herself
estranged from her daughter. There's so many layers of conflict

(24:20):
here that are sort of Barbie adjacent but entirely human.
Part of the reason that, like, you know, if you're
some serious filmmaker from Japan or I don't know, some
other part of the world and you are looking at
this movie and you like have to say the words
Barbie Land, I can see you being like, I don't

(24:41):
know whose movie really is this, but to me, it
is entirely Greta Gerwig's. I mean, it's like this movie
is of a piece with Ladybird and little Women, and
they're all dealing with the same themes of girls and
mothers and cummings of age of various sorts, the arrival

(25:02):
at womanhood, even if you have been invented to automatically
look like a woman, which to me, he aligns Barbie
more with poor things than Maestro. I can think of
very few better examples of how to both integrate and
subvert corporate interests into your a tour sensibility than Barbie.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
I think Greta should have had you on the campaign
trail with her.

Speaker 5 (25:31):
Ha ha ha.

Speaker 4 (25:33):
It's funny because I don't really I think a lot
about these awards. I've been thinking about these awards that
the Oscars, especially since I was six years old, seven
years old, and it always just seemed so final and binding,
you know, these certificates of bestness. And now that I'm older,

(25:57):
I can see in it the kind of bogusness of it.
I mean, the thing that like everybody always knows about.
It's like it's like I discovered that Santa Claus is
also my dad, my very human, extremely fallible dad, who
also just wants me to not have my fantasy disturbed
about where the grifts, where the gifts come from.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
But the Wesley at boarding school who walked around with
a contraband walkman listening to the nominees. This person believed
in the oscars.

Speaker 4 (26:28):
Ah, I did, I mean, and I still I mean,
I guess professionally now I do still believe in the
oscars because they're important and in the ways that you
said when we started this conversation, I mean, I still
believe that they're an important framing mechanism for now, not
just American movies, really just like the American stop on

(26:49):
the movie station, the global movie station.

Speaker 3 (26:53):
After the break. More from Wesley Morris. You know, there's

(27:18):
a way in which any discussion about these movies or
contemporary cinema in general turns into an elegy for the
medium itself, and so in that spirit, I want to
understand exactly what we may be losing by talking about
what we had, or what specifically you had, because growing

(27:40):
up you went to boarding school much like the characters
in The Holdovers in North Philadelphia. Okay, it was this
enclosed campus with giant walls, but eventually you were able
to go back home on the weekends and stay with
your mother, Judith, and I think it's with her in
that house that your love of movies was born. Because

(28:03):
your parents got a VCR and then two video store memberships,
one Blockbuster and one to West Coast Video. What did
that early fascination look and feel like to you?

Speaker 4 (28:17):
You were discovering that there was a world that was
bigger than the world you were living in. It was
very different from the world you were living in. The
school that I went to, we'd group movies and we'd
watch this movie called Digby the something Wonder Dog or something,
I don't know. It was about a giant dog and
I was like, Wow, they made this shaggy dog really big.

(28:37):
I don't know. There was just something about seeing with
your own eyes someone imagine other ways of being or
other options for life that just, I don't know, it
just really captivated me. I mean it's the same experience
I had becoming a reader, but this was a different
thing because you, in a weird way, it's kind of

(28:59):
preimagined for you. And then you can take this thing,
these images that you've been given and sort of rethink
what their meetings are and and how they relate to
your life or don't relate to your life, or you know,
have nothing to do with relating to anything. It's just
a world that exists and you don't You'll never really
be a part of it. But it's great to think

(29:20):
about every once in a while.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
But like Cocoa Goff on her off day, you in
nineteen eighty seven seeing Fatal Attraction five times in a theater?
What did that do for like an eleven year old
Wesley Morris, it was.

Speaker 4 (29:36):
A I probably it turned twelve by the fifth time,
because I'm my birthdays in December, so I was probably
eleven and twelve. There's just nothing that like operates like
this now, like where you were, It's something a movie
really is a like that movie is a straight up
contraption right, Like, you get on the ride and very

(29:56):
slowly you go up and up and up the incline,
and then at some point you reach a peak and
it just drops you off. And the movie is so
blatantly aware of what it is that it throws in
an actual roller coaster sequence. Right, there's an actual ride
in the movie, and it's perverse in that way. And
I sort of loved the perversity of it. I loved that,

(30:18):
like you were watching adult behavior that is recognizably adult. Like,
I didn't watch that movie and want to fuck Michael Douglas.
I just knew, though, that there was a power in attraction, right,
There was a power in two people meeting and responding
to the desire that they felt for each other.

Speaker 1 (30:44):
Can I ask you something? Why don't you have a
date to night Saturday night? I stood him up. That
was this long call I made that might keep feel good,
doesn't make me feel bad.

Speaker 6 (31:05):
So where's your wife?

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Where's my wife?

Speaker 4 (31:12):
My wife is in the country with her parents visiting weekend, and.

Speaker 8 (31:18):
You're here with a strange girl being a naughty boy.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
I don't think having dinner with anybody's a crime.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
Yeah, I think it's right around that time when the
film comes out that you write your first review. It's
in the eighth grade. It's an assignment given to you
by a social studies teacher named John Kozemple. You write
that review in eighth grade. You continue writing through high school.
You go to Yale in the late nineties, you graduate,

(31:46):
you quickly land a job at the Examiner. Then the Chronicle.
Movies are at a pretty fascinating place. At that point,
there's a wave of young independent filmmakers and thinking about
Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderberg, Tarantino. Those are
just the white straight men, but there's many more.

Speaker 4 (32:05):
Those are some pretty good white street men.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
I mean, yeah, year. Let mean, you know, back at
the late nineties, you had Booge Knights, you had Rushmore,
you had Out of Sight, you had Jackie Brown. But
when you hold this period in cinema, especially when you
started writing professionally, did you see it as something that
would continue to expand. Did you think that the form
would continue to evolve or did it feel like perhaps

(32:31):
movies were peaking in the late nineties early two thousands.

Speaker 4 (32:35):
I don't know that I felt that. I definitely knew
that something like the year nineteen ninety nine, which has
been acknowledged has been a great movie year. It was
clear in nineteen ninety nine itself, how good a movie
year that was. I didn't think that there couldn't have
been like another year that was as good as ninety nine,

(32:56):
and there's probably there. I mean, two thousand and eight
was also a really good year for movies too. I mean,
two thousand and eight I think is also the year
that Ironman comes out.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
Iron Man to me is the beginning of that sea change.

Speaker 4 (33:10):
Oh yeah, I mean, I mean the reason to mention
it at all is that it is the beginning. It's
definitely the beginning of what we what people call the
Marvel cinematic universe.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Two thousand and eight was a fraught year in general,
I'd say.

Speaker 4 (33:24):
Oh well, I mean yes, in that movie itself is
a depiction of Afghanistan that is kind of troubling, right,
like the way it kind of runs rough shot over
the war essentially, But it's clear it was clear at
that moment, by two thousand and eight at least, that
like things were changing in all kinds of ways, right,

(33:46):
I mean, Obama's election is the beginning of this divergence,
right where like some people saw a glorious horizon and
some people saw the end of the world. It just
is a pivotal year. But I also think that in
terms of movies, again, like the forces of capitalism were
much stronger than the forces of culture and the idea

(34:10):
that Iron Man. You could take a movie like Iron Man,
although it's hardly the first example of this, but like
you could just play it everywhere, and then you could
start making versions of these movies where you would cater
to the places whose money you wanted most, because if
you know, in the case of China, it just has
the most people. So you start doing what the Chinese

(34:32):
government wants.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
You to do to these movies.

Speaker 4 (34:35):
It just, I don't know, it's like something you lose something,
and right, like the thing that that tially got lost
was a whole class of movies that just wouldn't get
made anymore. I mean we're talking about like the entire
middle of the American movie going ecosystem. I mean, you
look at these Best Picture nominees in two thousand for

(34:55):
twenty twenty three, and really the only one of these
that I can see being something that would have come
out in May and like had no real Oscar aspiration
except for the fact that it was made by Alexander Paine,
who's been nominated for a bunch of Oscars. Is the
holdovers the rest of these movies. I mean, I guess

(35:17):
Barbie is kind of innocent of this. And Oppenheimer, to
its credit, did open in the middle of summer. And
it's not that these other movies are guilty, but I mean,
it's more like these movies would have been recognizable in
nineteen eighty seven. Is movies bound for Academy Awards in
one way or another, whether it was the intent of
the studio or the thing or a thing the Academy

(35:39):
couldn't resist. But if you look at a year like
nineteen eighty eight and what was nominated for Best Picture,
and I'm going to try to do this off the
top of my head, it was like the Accidental Tourist.
What the fuck? It's like a travel writer who was
getting a divorce and starts having a relationship with a

(36:00):
woman who walks his dog or trains his dog. Best
Picture nominee Dangerous Liaisons, costume drama about two people manipulating
each other because they can't have sex with each other anymore,
what Mississippi Mississippi Burning. I don't even know if that
movie would get made now. Given his point of view,
which is the FBI rain Man, the winner, would that

(36:24):
movie would definitely not get made now. It just would
like that style of movie just does not exist. It's
not based on real people. You have Dustin Hoffman playing
an autistic person. I don't know how that would go
over now.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
And the last one was Working Girl.

Speaker 4 (36:38):
My favorite of the five. I love Working Girl. And
again a movie that just wouldn't get made now. It
would probably show up on some streaming service, maybe even
in six parts or something. It would be a show.
But yeah, I mean eighty eight, it's an interesting year.
I mean you could, you could do this like across,
but not one of those movies, of those five movies,

(37:01):
is a movie that's screaming. Nominate me for a bunch
of oscars, maybe dangerously aisons, but even that movie is
so weirdly done. I mean, John Malkovich is the is
the sex interest in that film. Glenn Close is you know,
still at her at her, you know, movie star Peak

(37:23):
is the other you know, sex star of that movie,
which makes sense given that it comes after fatal attraction.
There was real interest in her, there was real belief
in her erotic power because she actually had erotic power.
Those movies just don't get made now. And I'm not nostalgic.
I'm actually angry right because there's a whole realm. There

(37:47):
are whole realms of human experience, of American life, American
regional life. There are places we don't see in movies
anymore that you used to see all the time in movies.
Places the movies just don't go. You're either in la
or you're in New York, or you're in outer space
or wherever Nick Fury lives, or you're in the past. Right,

(38:08):
you're the deep past during the past in order to
not be in the present. And one of the things
about Killers of the Flower Moon that I love is
that it's so aware that it's being made in twenty
twenty four or twenty twenty three. It's so much about
looking at these incidents with the osage from the vantage

(38:32):
of its present, of that of the filmmaker's present.

Speaker 3 (38:37):
I think the thesis here is what we've lost is
the middle of movies. What we've lost is the drama
or the comedy that has no Great Aspirations was not
made to win a bunch of awards or be nominated
for awards. I want to try to unpack how and
why we're here. Do you see any parallels between the

(38:59):
decline and film criticism with the decline in movie making?
Did one precipitate the other?

Speaker 4 (39:05):
Well that's a more complicated proposition, right, because is the
decline in film criticism is related to the decline of periodicals?
That how were film criticism thrived?

Speaker 7 (39:17):
Right?

Speaker 4 (39:18):
I think the two things are related, but not necessarily
causal of each other. I do, however, I do think
that they're in the last I don't. I don't know.
Let's say the last fifteen years, the last sixteen years,
there's been a sort of downgrading of what a review

(39:40):
can do and should do you know there's this tension
between coming up with a review or like liking something
a lot, they love that, or like really panning something.
You know, when I worked at the Boston Globe, for instance,
we gave things stars. If I was like Killers of
the Flower Moon two stars, that would have superseded anything

(40:01):
I necessarily wrote about it. I think many people would
have read the review. But I think that that middle
place you the middle of movie making has gone. I
think like a kind of mixed criticism. People sort of
lost patience for that, you know, like that a movie
can't have things that work and don't work. I mean

(40:21):
the middle. The disappearance of the middle is there's so
many middles that have disappeared, right middle ground, middle brow,
middle class. There's either there's either or there's no. There's
very little room for not even debate, disagreement, but like

(40:43):
just complexity, you know, Like, I find it really interesting
that none of the ten movies on this Best Picture
list include May December.

Speaker 5 (40:53):
I don't know.

Speaker 4 (40:54):
Did you see that movie?

Speaker 3 (40:55):
I love it?

Speaker 4 (40:55):
Yeah, I did not the first time I saw it,
and then I went and saw it again and was like,
what was my problem? I saw it the next day.
I don't know. I just I think that's a movie
that that has so much going on, that is so
some it's so of a piece with where we are
right now. It just doesn't it's not telling you what

(41:17):
it's doing or how it's feeling, or what even it is.
It's like the weird touchlessness of Todd Haynes, even though
there's so much touching in this movie. The music is touching,
like the butterfly metaphors are touching you, like his fingerprints
are all over this thing. But it still feels like
the hand guiding it is completely invisible, and these characters

(41:41):
are just doing They're just doing whatever it is that
they've been set on this earth to do. To sit
down and talk about this movie and like what is
happening here? It's really deep and really satisfying to unpack
it or argue with people about it, I don't. I mean,
there's some movies where you just I and it doesn't

(42:02):
happen very often, like you leave them. I leave a
movie and I do not trust my response to it.
And in the case in December, I just went the
next day and saw it again. It was like seeing
something dead come to life right before your eyes. I
found that expansion of my mind exhilarating. But we don't

(42:22):
have time for that movie now. It's just like it's
too it asks too much, It asks too much.

Speaker 3 (42:28):
It's funny that line you had right there, that watching
something dead come to life. I think in some ways
that's kind of what we've been trying to do in
this conversation, talking about something that's dead, trying to will
it back into existence. And in this last decade in Hollywood,
I'm thinking about twenty fourteen to now, because back then

(42:51):
in fourteen, you wrote this really beautiful review of Selma
Oh Wow, Okay, a film directed by Ava Duvernet. I
reread the piece last night, and I was thinking about
how that picture, in so many ways, jump started the
Oscar So White campaign, which for some to finally reckon

(43:11):
with how the academy in the industry treats artists of color.
And oddly enough, exactly a decade later, Duvernet is releasing
a new film right now. It's called Origin. It got
completely shut out at the Oscars. Funny how Hillary Clinton
did not tweet about Origin.

Speaker 4 (43:31):
She's the Origin.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Nevertheless, I sat with Ava a couple of weeks back
on the show. I asked her about the state of
movies and how the industry seems to be backsliding into
a kind of conservatism, and I just wanted to take
a listen to that passage for a second. So this
is her reflecting on the last decade of working in Hollywood,
in the system, through the system, and how she's starting

(43:56):
to think about her future as a filmmaker.

Speaker 8 (43:59):
I don't know, I'm not sure about the way that
I how to define how I'm doing it now. All
I know is that I feel like I'm tapping out.
I've tried to work within the system for the last
ten years. I've sat on the boards of Sun Dance,
I am DJA board, I am I am a governor
of the Academy. In my second term, I really wanted
to learn. I wanted to understand how these institutions worked.

(44:23):
And there's some great people there and beautiful legacy, but ultimately,
the shifts in the cumulative effect of this, like how
the overall industry works are so insignificant in their velocity,
in their scope, in their real impact, that I feel like,

(44:46):
you know, what, I've done what I could because it
was a lot. It's a lot of extra time, a
lot of extra effort, a lot of calls, a lot
of meetings, a lot of thinking, a lot of trying,
and it's time to pack the baton to someone else
who has a fresh energy and who wants to take
And I've achieved some things within those organizations that I'm
proud of, but for me, it's just not I feel

(45:07):
like I'm tilling ground, that I'm like an old pioneer
on a bad plot.

Speaker 5 (45:13):
It's like and I.

Speaker 8 (45:15):
Think that I started and I was like, oh, this
place can change, like Pete, there are people here, this
is a little time, like it'll change, and that there
have been some beautiful things that happened. But my success
is not change Nia Dacosta's success. Gina Prince bythewould suggests,
when you can name us all on two hands, that's
not change. That's a few lovely things that happened to

(45:36):
a few people, And for me, that's not worth it.
I would rather just try to build something sustainable and
beautiful and smaller and lovely in my own likeness with
people who think like me. And in some ways I
think eyes that small minded. Is that just closing ranks?
But at some point it just becomes what's healthy.

Speaker 4 (45:56):
What does that look like for her?

Speaker 5 (45:58):
Though?

Speaker 4 (45:58):
Does she say what it looked like for her?

Speaker 3 (46:00):
Well, in the case of Origin, it looked like getting
funding from jobs, the Ford Foundation, Melinda Gates. But she
went the kind of route that Soderberk has done, getting
financial investments from private sources and stuff like that. But
what did you make of that?

Speaker 4 (46:16):
I'm not surprised. I also think that it's funny because
I think Ava DuVernay is the apotheosis of black American
woman filmmaker. She's the person that people automatically think of,
reflexively think of when they think those things. And I
think there's a burden that's on her that doesn't have

(46:39):
anything to do with her personal ambitions. I think that
she feels responsible for ensuring that she's not the last
person to get through the door. And I don't know,
I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for her
because she's She's taken on a lot. I'm curious what
being done handing the clipboard and the frolodex to somebody else.

(47:06):
What do those things look like for her art? I
think that there are people like me out there. We
actually believe that this movie is a turning point in
some way, which movie origin like, who knows what she's
going to do? We're it'll lead. But the reason you

(47:27):
bring her up right is that this idea of what
the Academy Awards are in terms of thinking about how
they're a snapshot of a business. It's also kind of
a game, right, Like it's a system you have to
know how to work. And for many years David was

(47:48):
a publicist. She knows how to work the system. She
knows how the system works. And at some point, you
don't want to keep doing that. If the thing on
your business card says filmmaker, if it says artist, you
want to make things, you don't want to bureaucratize the

(48:11):
making of things.

Speaker 7 (48:12):
Right.

Speaker 4 (48:13):
But I mean, she's so historically minded, she's so much
about you know, she's so aware of history and the
and the archives and the record that she does feel
responsible for making sure that it has as many black woman,
non white, non straight names as can be put. And

(48:36):
you know that work. You know, ask ask the civil
rights folks. They will tell you it takes a toll.
If it doesn't actually literally get you killed, it definitely
burns you the fuck out. And especially when you can
look at the labor, the struggle, the everything, right like Selma,

(48:57):
I mean, what was some about it was about getting
one thing passed. It was about getting like the voting
rights bill passed. That was one thing, and look at
all that shit that had to happen and to get that. Think,
I mean, the movie's at about any of this stuff,
but like, think about all of the sudden that happens in
the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting

(49:17):
Rights Act happened, and then all the shit that happens
after that happens, and people were just like, what the fuck?

Speaker 5 (49:25):
What do we just do?

Speaker 4 (49:27):
And now y'all are killing people, like actually assassinating our
leaders for what for us to be able to just
like have a say and who runs our county? That's it.
So what if they have to do with board of governors. Well,
it means that change is hard and people don't like it,

(49:49):
and it's hard to make the change, but it's hard
for the change makers, and so the change makers eventually
just want to change things for themselves because the making
of the change writ large. It's just too much at stake.
It costs too much. People are so resistant. The Academy's
membership just to sort of come back to the it

(50:10):
has expanded meaningfully in the last ten years. Right, They've
gone out of their way to recruit all these younger, browner,
more international like, less American eyes voices tastes.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
Which Ava is partly responsible for.

Speaker 4 (50:29):
Yeah, I mean to her point, I mean it's interesting, right,
like just to stay with black people for one second.
The math on this is tricky, but like there have
been more Asian and people of Asian descent winning the
directing Oscar in the last few years, I think than
black people have ever been nominated. And I don't know

(50:49):
what to do with that number. I mean it's great
for changing the scope of who is in that club.
I mean, the same is true for the three Mexicans,
you know, del Toro and Inyanitu and in Quirne. I
think that the sort of expansion of like what a

(51:10):
best director is has chained is like it's grown so wide,
but not wide enough to say that a Black American
also best directed something. And there is like a real, real,
real resistance to thinking about black people in a new way.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
Right, what do you what do you mean by by
new way?

Speaker 4 (51:37):
I mean I've been really struggling with Oh god, I
can't even get into that.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
Well what can't we get into? But we're here to get.

Speaker 4 (51:46):
I just I don't know, it's just it's too thorny.
I mean, it's not too thorny, like I'm scared to
say a bad thing, but like I have to like
sort of work out exactly what it is I'm saying.
But just all right, just think about the best supporting
actress nominees across the history of the Academy Awards. Okay,
what have those women been nominated doing? That's too Jenner.

(52:09):
I mean they're housekeepers, they are cooks, they are servants.
They work in the Jim Crow South as people who
would have been doing that work. I mean daniel Brooks
playing Sofia in the color Purple, I mean that's her job.
Her business car would say, working for white people.

Speaker 3 (52:26):
Divine Joy Randa.

Speaker 4 (52:28):
I mean she's a cook at the at the school.
I mean. It is not about the quality of the
performances of these women. Divine Davine joint Randolph is fantastic.
Danielle Brooks, I mean she is doing Sofia karaoke like
nobody has ever Sofia karaoke before.

Speaker 3 (52:45):
It's about the job they have in the film.

Speaker 4 (52:47):
It's about their function in the movie. Right And how
many Best Actress? How many Black American women have been
nominated for carrying a movie regardless of their job. We'll
start there, But if you make them something other than
working for white people.

Speaker 3 (53:08):
How many have that fact at hand here?

Speaker 4 (53:11):
I mean, you don't need it, because I'm telling you
we wouldn't get to this many fingers for best Actress, right,
I wouldn't use them all. But my point is that
I wouldn't need all ten of my fingers. A B.
The real point is that the thing that's great about
the oscars is they're telling the truth about the movies, right.
They're telling the truth about what the priorities actually are,

(53:34):
and who counts, who belongs, what gets made, who stars
in it, how much do they make, Who writes these things,
who does the costumes. It is like the whole industry.
I mean, the reports come out from the Annenberg Center
of the USC and Berg Center. We know the numbers,
the numbers. The numbers are the numbers, but the numbers
tell a story. And that's where people like you know

(53:58):
I guess me, and you because you will have people
on to talk about this sort of stuff. But my
only point connected to the way Avra DuVernay is thinking
about what she ought to be doing with her time
in life, is that these are stubborn, stubborn, deep, deep,
deep historical problems. And there's so many of us who

(54:21):
honestly believe that if we just got in there, if
we just got in there and made the calls and
sent the emails and had the meetings and it would
just be better. It would just be better. But this
is now a woman Aver Duvernet who is as far
away from being a Best Director nominee. And I'm laughing

(54:44):
because it's fucking tragic and sad. She's as far away
ten years after, like the closest she was ever gonna
get to being a Best Director and not getting nominated
now as she was that. And I'm not this is
not about origin of the quality of origin or should
she even be nominated. It's like the the It's just

(55:06):
about the scope and intrenched of the problem. And I
think in some ways in her case she's thinking it through.
Is she's at least thinking through this question of justice
in her work. And you know, why why are we
like this? America? Why are we like this? But you know,

(55:26):
the tidy fact of the Academy Awards is that it
tells us that we are.

Speaker 3 (55:31):
Still like this, Amir and Awinda well and a ceiling
and what are we like.

Speaker 4 (55:41):
Diluted? I mean, you know, we we think we're one way,
but like I have a report that says we're not,
We're this other way, but we keep saying we're not.
Like the report we're like these other things. We're these
other people. We don't have the values this report is
saying we have. We've got different values. Look at us
changing our values. But it doesn't matter how many more

(56:05):
people you bring in. They're bringing the values right. And
a lot of the times those values have just been installed.
I mean, this is sort of Barbie, This is Greta
Gerwick thinking here, right. They've been they've been installed in
you from birth, and it's hard to let them go.

(56:25):
Barbie is about how hard it is to let some
toxic ass shit go, and sometimes how good toxic shit feels,
how good it feels to just be a fucking asshole.
I don't know what you do with that. I don't
know what you do with how good it feels to
just oppress people because it's easy and fun to like

(56:48):
bend an entire country's attention to your dysfunctional personality because
you can't. It's just, I don't know. It's a really
really crazy time to be an American, to be a
new arrival to this country and to see what people
are saying about you and what you're doing here.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
To be a critic at large at the New York Times, Uh.

Speaker 4 (57:15):
Yeah, I don't know so much about critic I mean,
I guess if my brain is applied to some of this,
some of these problems. Sure, I mean, but one of
the great things that I love about my job is
I don't have to I get to think about the
meaning of the stuff that people make for us to enjoy,
and I get to think about how the stuff that
people make makes me feel. I don't have to, like

(57:39):
weigh in on things. I just don't like that. I
don't believe in having takes right. I mean, I believe
in the having of takes. I just don't believe that
I need to be having one.

Speaker 3 (57:52):
We've done a podcast of takes.

Speaker 4 (57:55):
Right, I mean, you and me just now, yeah, I
mean I think that we've been doing We've been really
thinking through these problems. These aren't really takes.

Speaker 3 (58:06):
I want to understand how you see your role and
job in this moment, how you're thinking about it, how
you're thinking about doing it, what it means to do
it in this country in twenty twenty four, and where
you're at with what you've committed your life to.

Speaker 4 (58:23):
I don't know. I mean, I mean, I feel like
everybody tells you that you're you know, the therapist qualities
that you have are intense. It's like I'm talking to
a person that I that I mean. You know, we
and I have had conversations before, but I think there's
something kind of unburdening in a weird way about, you know,

(58:45):
being asked to think about your life to answer your question.
I feel like my job hasn't changed, like the nature
of my job has not changed. I feel more certain
about the way I want to do my job.

Speaker 3 (58:59):
I've that I've ever felt. What does that mean?

Speaker 4 (59:02):
The people whose work I like to read, the people
that I love talking to, the people I love hearing
talk to other people. We're all trying to figure out
how to live in whatever way it means it to
be alive. And so much of the creation of art,

(59:24):
the making, the writing, recording of a song, the labor
that goes into making a book, especially a good book, filmmaking,
any kind of any kind of art. It's hard and
it takes something really special to make something that touches

(59:44):
other people. And that, to me, it's life giving. You
are giving part of you to the rest of us.
And you know, the way I think about my job
is to respond to that offering sometimes I wish you
had given me more, maybe maybe given me less, giving

(01:00:04):
me something different, but I'm always grateful to have received it.
I mean, I do think that's so much of the
thing that I want to try to do is never
lose sight of the biggest picture that we have, especially
as Americans, because it's so easy to do that. Again,

(01:00:26):
I hate to keep going back to Barbie, but Barbie
is secretly deep. Barbie is really about like lost connections,
displaced desires, like personal revelation, epiphany. And these are white
people having these revelations too, right, These are white people
waking up to the reality of themselves. And Barbie doesn't

(01:00:48):
even know she's white, but she discovers it. I mean,
not necessarily in the movie, but part of this the
schematic of awakening and Barbie has to eventually involve her
being aware that she is a white woman. Stereotypical. Stereotypical
Barbie is what they call her, and I feel like
that's a great euphemism for white. But I just feel

(01:01:10):
like trying to make these connections between where we currently
are and where we've been. You know, I don't always
want to be like but you know, thirty five years
ago x y Z E think because sometimes an experience
just doesn't have a historical corollary, or even if it does,

(01:01:31):
it can't be used to cheapen the intensity of the
thing you're experiencing. Now, if you're seventeen years old and
you know, hearing in the air tonight for the first time,
it's new to you. So let's sit with it. I mean,
I so deeply want to capture the sensation of, Oh

(01:01:53):
my God, holy shit, Jesus fucking Christ, why did you
do it? Again? Try to just think as historically as
I can about the present with out like using the
history to oppress our enjoyment of what we are currently doing,

(01:02:15):
but to say that like we're on a continuum, and
to figure out where on the continuum we currently are
at a given moment in present time with respect to
the past, and to always keep that awareness with us.
We don't want to bring it with us is the problem?

Speaker 3 (01:02:33):
You know. I wanted to ask you that because when
we first sat down in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 4 (01:02:40):
Was that in San Francisco? Was that at the San
Francisco Film Festival, at the headquarters of the San Francisco
International Film Festival.

Speaker 3 (01:02:46):
That's right, it was episode five of the podcast.

Speaker 4 (01:02:50):
Congratulations to you, by the way, I just you know,
it's a funny, Like I'm just gonna rupt you for
one second to say that I got very moved when
I saw the art of the guests at some point,
this is like four or five years ago, I was like, huh,
look at all this, So like once a month, I'm
just like, well, I didn't I missed that one. Oh look,

(01:03:11):
mention Lee looks really good, you know what I mean, Like,
I just I'd love that. So congratulations, I mean, just
congratulations on eight years.

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):
But go on, well, thank you. In that conversation that
we had, I kind of asked you this same question
back then about purpose and why and where you were at,
and I thought perhaps we should take a listen to
that for a second.

Speaker 4 (01:03:37):
Oh my god, what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (01:03:39):
Really, this is Wesley Morris in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 7 (01:03:43):
I think, and you you know, if anybody who spends
enough time writing about directors should know this, Like, at
some point.

Speaker 4 (01:03:50):
You just start to start to lose it. I mean
I might have already peated.

Speaker 7 (01:03:55):
I don't know, but I'm somewhere in that, like somewhere
between thirty five and fifty.

Speaker 4 (01:04:00):
Is that zone. I mean, if some of it's subjective,
it's probably.

Speaker 7 (01:04:04):
All entirely subjective when it comes to the question I'm
actually asking, which is like what happens to does the
energy run out? Like do I suddenly just get bored
doing this? And there are a lot of days where
I'm like this is dumb?

Speaker 4 (01:04:19):
Really no, I mean.

Speaker 6 (01:04:20):
Yes, yes, no, like really like, I mean I believe
in it, but you know, it's like six o'clock in
the morning and you're like dragging yourself across your apartment,
You're like getting dressed to go to work, and You're
just like, what do I have to do today?

Speaker 5 (01:04:34):
Oh?

Speaker 7 (01:04:35):
Right, I have to write something that sounds smart about girls?

Speaker 4 (01:04:41):
Is that really important?

Speaker 7 (01:04:43):
And then I'm like, yes it is. I get to
a point where like, yes, it's fucking important. But it
takes it Like sometimes there are days when it just
takes a little bit longer to get to like, guess
this is important. Some days it's like instant, like I
don't even have to There is no sort of meta
conversation you have to have with yourself about whether or
not you should be doing what you're doing. But I

(01:05:04):
I will never really ever be satisfied with what I'm
doing because I live in constant fear that I will
lose the will to do it.

Speaker 4 (01:05:17):
I still feel that way. I still feel that way,
I truly do. I don't know. Every day that I
wake up, Sam, I think, is today the day that
it won't be there? Will it not be there today? Like,
not only the will to do it, the will to
do it that is that is a that is eight
years ago me. Like, now I'm like, is there still

(01:05:40):
ink in the well? Can I still get it up?
Is the magic still there? Because it's really what we're
talking about. Honest to God, I swear to God, Sam,
it's magic. Like, there's a lot of work that goes
into it. There's a lot of suffering and you know,
revising and you know false star every everything that involves

(01:06:02):
you the creative process entails. But at the end of
the day, at the beginning of the day, it's magic.
I still have the will to do it. But now
I'm like, it's not even about the will. It's just
truly about is the sparkle of the thinking and the
writing is still gonna be there even if I want

(01:06:23):
to still be wiggling my fingers across the keyboard and
I just I just think the universe that and my ancestors,
somebody in my family had had this. I really believe
that somebody in my family who never got a chance to,

(01:06:43):
somebody in my in my in my genealogy, in my
in my family history, somebody was cooking and really loved it,
and whatever that was. I really feel like I got
it from them. I got it from them, and hopefully
I will have it so that when I die, it
is a through line to my sister's kids or in

(01:07:06):
their kids and their kids' kids. I don't know, I'm
holding on to something really old. I'm not even holding
onto it. It's just what's passing through me feels really old.
I hope it outlives me essentially.

Speaker 3 (01:07:19):
Well. I feel like the only way we can end
this is on a piece that that magic produced, a
piece of writing that came out last year about the
film that we keep mentioning but not discussing. This is
your review of The Holdovers, ha ha, And I have

(01:07:39):
to say, these last three paragraphs are maybe some of
my favorite bits of writing that you've ever done. So
I thought, oh, thank you. Perhaps you'd want to read
it for people as we leave me.

Speaker 4 (01:07:55):
Uh, Okay, I have not seen these words, by the way, Sam,
since they entered the New York time.

Speaker 3 (01:08:04):
Okay, well, this is Wesley Morris on the new film
The Holdovers by Alexander Pain.

Speaker 4 (01:08:11):
Once it's all over and the movie is reminded you
of Dead Poet Society, or maybe half a dozen films
from the nineteen seventies like The Paper Chase, you might
also feel what I did, Like you've seen an inversion
of Wes Anderson's Rushmore, which opened twenty five years ago.
Pain and Anderson arrived at roughly the same moment in
the mid nineteen nineties. Only Pain's milieu is world weary, harsh,

(01:08:37):
slouched blue or collared grayer. I saw Rushmore when I
was loosely older than Max Fisher. The movie's go getting
adolescent old soul protagonist. Anderson's declarative archness and rigorous eye
rocked my world. A geek had gotten his revenge opening
a nerd core Floodgate, but more important, his romanticism felt

(01:09:00):
true cruelly. My peer is now Paul Hunnam, a figure
humbled by principle, hampered by pride, and by the end
of The Holdovers humboldt. Some more he's Max Fisher slumped.
Watching Anderson's films has steadily made me the ogler. Matthew
McConaughey plays and dazed and confused. I keep getting older

(01:09:22):
and they just stay the same. The romanticism is calcified.
His movies are less ardened. As much sculpture as to
passion is passionate themselves. Paine's weakness was for pessimism, a hardened,
freewheeling version. His movies were about cynics, the native born,
the Ara Easts. But somewhere along the way he and

(01:09:44):
Anderson swapped and the romantic intruded. Paine's characters began needling
each other and connecting, and that crackle kicked in. That's
especially true of his last two. The other is Downsizing,
a soulful futurist sat tire with Matt Damon and Hong
Child that nobody saw in middle age. Pain has come

(01:10:06):
newly to life, whereas the Anderson of two thousand twenty ones,
The French Dispatch and this Year's Asteroid City seems to
me as alienated from sensation as ever, hiding in and
fussing over the past rather than interrogating or inhabiting it.
The Holdovers kicks off with the same kind of torpie

(01:10:26):
entitled under an upper class folk that dominate Rushmore, but
he sends them away to get down to a more pungent,
nitty gritty kind of comedy. One character tells another his
near murderous sob story, and at some point a different
character deadpans to him, here you go, killer. This is
Pain's first movie set in any kind of past. It's

(01:10:46):
using the old MPAA rating card and was shot digitally
by Igel Brild to achieve thirty five millimeters coziness. But
it doesn't feel stuck there. Pain's not locking us out.
He's letting us in practicing what I suspect is Paul
Hunum's stock in trade during the school year, bringing ancient
civilizations to aching life. All right, what was your point?

Speaker 3 (01:11:14):
Annoyed? Is this an annoyed Wesley?

Speaker 4 (01:11:16):
I see no, I mean thank you for that. I
appreciate it. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:11:21):
It's a moving piece of writing, in part because you
kind of put yourself in there. You saw some of
yourself in the Geomadi character, in disposition, in spirit, not
quite age, but perhaps in vocation as well. I don't know,
because his job as a teacher in that film is

(01:11:41):
too as you write, bring ancient civilizations to aching life.
And I was thinking, like, at its best, at your best,
isn't that kind of what you do in writing?

Speaker 4 (01:11:54):
I mean, Faarah, it's well observed. I mean sure, yes,
I mean it can't come at the expense of the new.
I would just want to emphasize that, right, like, it
can't come at the expense of not being in the present.
And the thing that I kind of admire about The
Holdovers is it's like Tom, It's Thomas Payne, Alexander Payne

(01:12:19):
sort of thinking about what it would mean for him
to go back to the nineteen seventies. I don't know
this guy is. This is a filmmaker who's only ever
wanted to tell us who we are as a culture,
as a people, as a national civilization. So if that
guy wants to spend one movie in nineteen seventy something

(01:12:43):
thinking about these you know, spoiled people who have to
like eke out a life in a real city like
Boston during the end of the Civil Rights movement and
the Vietnam War, he gets to do it because he's
earned it. And it again, it does not feel like
he wants to stay there at all.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
I bring this up because to end, does this new
film that is very much the kind of film that
has vanished from the landscape, does it give you hope
for the future of this medium?

Speaker 4 (01:13:12):
I mean maybe? But how old is Alexander Payne too?

Speaker 3 (01:13:17):
I think?

Speaker 4 (01:13:19):
I mean, where's the equivalent now of the guy who
made Citizen Roof? Where's that person? Because that's the thing
that's giving me hope, not that this great director who's
done his work right Where is you know, a thirty
year old person who wants to give me an abortion
comedy right now, who wants to give me a really

(01:13:39):
perfectly etched comedy about reproductive rights in America and the
hypocrisy's therein utterly cynical, very funny. Where's that person? Because
I'm waiting for him and I don't know where they are.

Speaker 3 (01:13:55):
Well, I think right now there are a lot of
people listening to this conversation that are going to try
to answer the call.

Speaker 4 (01:14:04):
Ha ha ha, God bless you and God help you. But
I'm here when you're ready, When you do it, I
want to be the first person to see it, read
it something.

Speaker 3 (01:14:15):
And whenever you write about it, I am excited to
read it. You talked about how filmmakers at their best
make work that shows us how to live, what it
means to be alive. That's what you said, and I
think you have done that a whole lot in the
last eight years since we first spoke. So I want

(01:14:35):
to thank you for that, and I want to thank
you as always my god, eight years. Thank you for the.

Speaker 4 (01:14:40):
Time I know, don't do that. Thank you, Sam, Thanks
for having.

Speaker 3 (01:14:45):
Me, Lesley Morris.

Speaker 5 (01:14:46):
Take care, Take care, Sam.

Speaker 3 (01:15:22):
And that's our show. I want to give a special
thanks this week to Devon Darby and of course our
guest today, Wesley Morris. To read or to learn more
about any of the ten films nominated for Best Picture,
be sure to visit our website at talk easypod dot com.
If you enjoyed today's conversation, I'd recommend our episodes with

(01:15:42):
David Remnick, Jay Wortham Matt Bellanie and Ava du Verne
to hear those and more. Pushkin Podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
or wherever you like to listen. If you want to
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(01:16:02):
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(01:16:26):
dot com slash shop. Talk easy is produced by Caroline Reebok.
Our executive producer is Jennick Sabravo. Our associate producer is
Caitlin Dryden. Today's talk was edited by c J. Mitchell
and Kitlin Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola, who was
taped at Spotify Studios here in Los Angeles, California. Our
music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Kristashenoe.

(01:16:49):
Our video and graphics are by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzac,
Ian Jones, and Ethan Seneca. I also want to thank
our team at Pushkin Industries. They include Justin Richmond, Julia Barton,
John Shnars, Kerrie Brody, Eric Sandler, Jona McMillan, Kira Posey,
Tara Machado, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, Malcolm Gladwell, Greta Cohen
and Jacob Weisberg. I'm San Fragoso. Thank you for listening

(01:17:11):
to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week
with filmmaker Lulu Wong. Until then, stay safe and so
long