Speaker 1: Bushkin.
Speaker 2: Hey friends, Malcolm here. I hope you're enjoying the Development
Speaker 2: Hell series as much as we are. We've got more
Speaker 2: great ones in the pipeline. Well, well, we've got our
Speaker 2: heads in Hollywood and the Oscars coming up this weekend.
Speaker 2: I want to share a great interview from our friends
Speaker 2: over at Talk Easy. Sam Fragoso talks with the brilliant
Speaker 2: New York Times critic Wesley Morris all about this year's
Speaker 2: Oscar contenders and the movies that should have made the
Speaker 2: cut but didn't, plus the state of the industry in general.
Speaker 2: It's a great listen, and don't worry. We'll be back
Speaker 2: on Thursday with the next episode from Development Hell.
Speaker 3: This is Talk Easy. I'm stud Forgoso.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Today.
Speaker 3: I am joined by writer and fellow podcaster Wesley Morris.
Speaker 3: Since twenty fifteen, Morris has served as the critic at
Speaker 3: large for The New York Times, where he's also co
Speaker 3: hosted the popular podcast Still Processing alongside Jay Wortham. While
Speaker 3: the show has been on hiatus, Wesley has continued publishing
Speaker 3: searching and often moving essays that explore the intersection of
Speaker 3: race and pop culture. His work was first awarded the
Speaker 3: pull to Prize for Criticism in twenty twelve his ten
Speaker 3: year at The Boston Globe, and then again most recently
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty one, at the height of the pandemic.
Speaker 3: But what I think makes his work special, and you'll
Speaker 3: hear it a fair bit in this conversation is not
Speaker 3: only his ability to connect the dots or to see
Speaker 3: the bigger picture, but to do so in real time
Speaker 3: with readers and listeners alike. Wesley doesn't come to the
Speaker 3: page or the microphone with the puzzle pre assembled. The
Speaker 3: pieces of the story or the theory are always there, yes,
Speaker 3: But the road to a good idea, the discovery process,
Speaker 3: which can often be vulnerable and vexing, is one he
Speaker 3: invites us into with wit, wisdom, and warmth. And so
Speaker 3: this week I want him to sit with Morris on
Speaker 3: the heels of this year's Academy Award nominations to try
Speaker 3: to make sense of what these ten films both say
Speaker 3: and represent about movies in twenty twenty four. Pictures like
Speaker 3: Barbie Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, the Holdovers, are
Speaker 3: they a window into the future of cinema or merely
Speaker 3: a reflection of this precarious moment in Hollywood. We also
Speaker 3: discuss his early adventures in moviegoing growing up in Philadelphia,
Speaker 3: the indie boom of the late nineties, the gradual erosion
Speaker 3: of what he calls the middle brow movie in the
Speaker 3: wake of Marvel now Mattel, and how the film industry
Speaker 3: has continued to struggle in its attempts to create a
Speaker 3: more diverse and equitable ecosystem, both in front and behind
Speaker 3: the camera. When Wesley accepted his second pull To prize
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty one, he said, at its most essential,
Speaker 3: criticism does save people money and it can expose them
Speaker 3: to new, mind blowing work. It doesn't save lives, but
Speaker 3: it can give life. And so by the end of
Speaker 3: this conversation, it's my hope that this episode will do
Speaker 3: the same for you. And with that, this is Wesleymore.
Speaker 4: Yes, Hi Westley, Hello Sam, how are you? Thanks for
Speaker 4: having me?
Speaker 3: That sounded a little labored?
Speaker 4: Sounds I mean, this is the year of our Lord,
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four. I think we're all in for some labor.
Speaker 4: If I've sound like this in January, I think you
Speaker 4: just check with me in eleven months or ten months.
Speaker 5: And see where I am.
Speaker 3: Do you want to schedule a time to come back
Speaker 3: on November fifteenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: That guess should not be me. You can do you
Speaker 4: can do better than me.
Speaker 3: I think David Remnick has signed up for that slot.
Speaker 4: Remnick for better or Worse. Oh all right, well, then
Speaker 4: bring your tissues.
Speaker 3: We can do a panel. We can do a panel.
Speaker 4: Have you ever you've never done a panel on this show.
Speaker 3: Oh, we don't do panels.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's not how this works.
Speaker 3: I want to start with maybe less apocalyptic news in
Speaker 3: the recent Oscar nominations.
Speaker 4: I mean, it depends on who you're talking.
Speaker 3: To what we're talking to you, So we're going to
Speaker 3: start there.
Speaker 4: I mean it was apocalyptic for Greta Gerwig.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, we'll have to get into them. In the past,
Speaker 3: you've called the Oscars quote a diagnosis of the health
Speaker 3: of the movies and the five the ten films nominated
Speaker 3: for Best Picture operate as a class that doubles as
Speaker 3: an x ray of the Academy and the movie business
Speaker 3: at large. So, now that we have the nominations and
Speaker 3: the dust has settled a little bit, what is your diagnosis.
Speaker 4: I was thinking about the pandemic years and the Oscars
Speaker 4: and all the rule bending that the Academy did in
Speaker 4: order to not have a show. Moving dates, expanding the
Speaker 4: release are the sort of eligibility windows what constituted a
Speaker 4: motion picture. There are all these adjustments the Academy was
Speaker 4: trying to do in order to keep the show going on,
Speaker 4: and it was pretty funny because things looked really bad,
Speaker 4: and how things looked a couple of years ago was
Speaker 4: that we weren't going to go to the movies again,
Speaker 4: and every Best Picture nominee was probably going to be
Speaker 4: watched on a TV by more people than saw it
Speaker 4: in a movie theater during its initial run. And that
Speaker 4: is how, in some ways, you wind up with a
Speaker 4: movie like Coda winning Best Picture, which is the kind
Speaker 4: of movie where, like, you know, I watched it the
Speaker 4: way pretty much everybody in the Academy who voted for it,
Speaker 4: and you just got to think, like with your eyes closed,
Speaker 4: I liked that movie. And it's funny because I watched
Speaker 4: it and I knew instantly by the time, like when
Speaker 4: they go to the audition and she does the song
Speaker 4: and the family's up in the balcony and you experience
Speaker 4: it from their point of view, I was like, there's
Speaker 4: no way in the world this movie does not win
Speaker 4: the Oscar for Best Picture, it's your winner. I felt
Speaker 4: like this is what the movies deserve. The movies deserve
Speaker 4: codea winning Best Picture. The point is I feel comfortable
Speaker 4: with where we are now versus where we were in
Speaker 4: two thousand, nineteen to twenty twenty two twenty one, mostly
Speaker 4: because the movies are better. I think the movie attendance
Speaker 4: is not as bad as it seemed like it was
Speaker 4: going to be. You know, it's funny. Coco Goff, in
Speaker 4: her press conference the other day after she lost to
Speaker 4: Arena Sablanca in the semifinals of the Australian Open, was
Speaker 4: talking about how bad, how she wasn't gonna get too
Speaker 4: down on herself, and she's like, you know, I'm Tomorrow's
Speaker 4: another day. I'm just gonna go see a movie and
Speaker 4: say that I didn't do so bad. And I was like,
Speaker 4: this is a nineteen year old person saying they're gonna
Speaker 4: cheer up by going to a movie.
Speaker 3: Incredible.
Speaker 4: That just kind of kind of gladdened my heart a
Speaker 4: little bit. It made me feel like it was possibly
Speaker 4: nineteen eighty nine. And I just think that for one thing.
Speaker 4: The Best Picture nominees include the two movies that made
Speaker 4: people believe that movie going was gonna be okay and
Speaker 4: would survive and would be would remain profitable, and not
Speaker 4: just it's not just the money, it's also just the
Speaker 4: cultural lifespan of what Barbie and Oppenheimer managed to do.
Speaker 4: You know, it created a sort of side imagination in
Speaker 4: the culture where we could not stop mocking, meaning overthinking, rethinking,
Speaker 4: defending some aspect of both those movies. And there their
Speaker 4: Best Picture nominees.
Speaker 3: Well, let's start with those two, because as the nominations
Speaker 3: came out, people once again came to the defense of Barbie,
Speaker 3: in part because Greta Gerrig was not not nominated for
Speaker 3: Best Director, and also because Margot Robbie was not recognized
Speaker 3: in the Best Actress category. Even former Secretary Hillary Clinton
Speaker 3: chimed in on Barbie Gate with the sentence that I'm
Speaker 3: going to read for you here.
Speaker 4: Oh I did not know this hit me.
Speaker 3: She wrote, Greta and Margo, while it can, sting to
Speaker 3: win the box office but not take home.
Speaker 4: Oh no, Hillary went there.
Speaker 3: Let me try to get.
Speaker 5: Lord.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, keep going.
Speaker 3: Greta and Margo, Oh God, while it can. You know,
Speaker 3: sometimes being a Democrat is so embarrassing, so embarrassing.
Speaker 4: But at least Democrats seem to watch things and then
Speaker 4: have feelings about them. Yes, anyway, just go on.
Speaker 3: Okay, Greta and Margo take three. Well it can sting
Speaker 3: to win the box office, but not take home the
Speaker 3: You're millions of fans love you. You're both so much
Speaker 3: more than kanough hashtag Hillary Barbie.
Speaker 4: Oh you know, as Hallmark cards go. I mean, I
Speaker 4: don't know any other presidential loser who would do a
Speaker 4: better job, frankly, but Hillary Clinton is more than entitled
Speaker 4: to look at the results of the Oscar nominations and
Speaker 4: go to a place. I think that it's a little
Speaker 4: I've been thinking about, like, well, what do I actually
Speaker 4: think about the fact that Grete Gerwork's not a Best
Speaker 4: Director nominee having watched the movie like three days.
Speaker 3: Ago, And what do you think?
Speaker 4: Oh? I mean, first of all, I think that Barbie
Speaker 4: is extremely well made. It's so well made in some
Speaker 4: ways that you kind of can't believe that the things
Speaker 4: that are interesting about it are even in the movie.
Speaker 4: There are avant garde sequences in this movie. There are
Speaker 4: things that come out of beach movies from the sixties
Speaker 4: and John Water, and I mean, they are all kinds
Speaker 4: of influences being pulled from here in a movie that
Speaker 4: is very funny. There's a line I don't know at
Speaker 4: some point she wants up in the boardroom. I don't
Speaker 4: know who's speaking, but at some point the lowly guy
Speaker 4: who is the only person who is a free thinker
Speaker 4: in the in the in the Land of Suits doesn't
Speaker 4: even have a suit. I think he's in a vest
Speaker 4: or a sweater. He's like, I'm a man with no power.
Speaker 4: Does that make me a woman? And he meekly asks it.
Speaker 4: I just think that line is really funny. There's I mean,
Speaker 4: the speech that the America Ferrara's speech is really good.
Speaker 4: I think that the big problem with the movie, in
Speaker 4: a weird way, it's that Ken Ryan Gosling as Ken
Speaker 4: Is is too good, and it's hard in some ways
Speaker 4: to not see past what he's doing because it's just
Speaker 4: so much better and richer and more shaded. There's something
Speaker 4: underneath that person he's playing, something like he's tapping into
Speaker 4: it to a pain that's not dissimilar, or or like
Speaker 4: an aspect of being a particular kind of human that
Speaker 4: is not dissimilar from what Margot Robbie is finding and
Speaker 4: she's got like two really good scenes where she's connecting
Speaker 4: her dullness, that the character's dullness to the character's humanists.
Speaker 4: But the problem with the Ken thing is that, like
Speaker 4: the keenness kind of overwhelms the Barbinus in a particular way,
Speaker 4: but not the sort of politics of the movie itself. Right,
Speaker 4: the movie's politics are completely intact and very coherent and
Speaker 4: legible and funny and right in so many ways. I mean, Okay,
Speaker 4: they're bald, they're a little bit blatant, but there's so
Speaker 4: much humor to be had. I watched Nine to five
Speaker 4: and it's so funny those movies. You could play Barbie
Speaker 4: in nine to five movies that are twenty Sorry, forty
Speaker 4: four years is a part and nothing really would have
Speaker 4: changed about them except how much better the filmmaking is.
Speaker 3: It sounds like you and Hillary are on the same
Speaker 3: side of history.
Speaker 4: No, because I mean, I don't think that it's a
Speaker 4: crime what happened to her. Right, there are nine thousand
Speaker 4: something voting members in the Academy. They don't nominate the individual.
Speaker 4: The guilds nominate each other. Right, The craft categories nominate
Speaker 4: each other. So nine thousand people don't have a say
Speaker 4: and whether Greg Gurrigg is the Best Director nominee five
Speaker 4: hundred and maybe sixty or eighty something people do, and
Speaker 4: they don't really care to see the achievement of what
Speaker 4: it is that she managed to do. I mean, just
Speaker 4: the colors alone, I don't like if you look at
Speaker 4: the color palette of the five Best Picture of the
Speaker 4: Best Director nominees movies, I mean, hers is the one
Speaker 4: that you know came from a candy shop, And even
Speaker 4: that alone is probably a deterrent for an entire class
Speaker 4: of director's branch member. It isn't explicitly her being a woman,
Speaker 4: but it's her interests as a woman that are kind
Speaker 4: of alien. I mean, she should have been nominated for
Speaker 4: Little Women, and it wasn't. But you know, this is her,
Speaker 4: like all three of her movies have been Best Picture nominees,
Speaker 4: as all three of her movies as a director have
Speaker 4: been Best Picture nominees, and they've all been screenplay nominees.
Speaker 4: She'll probably win. She and NOELH. Bambach will probably win
Speaker 4: in the in the adapted in the hilarious adapted screenplay category.
Speaker 4: I don't know what this movie's adapted from.
Speaker 3: When we look at these ten films nominated and how
Speaker 3: they are, as you say, an x ray of the industry.
Speaker 3: I wonder if we can't divide the list into three groups,
Speaker 3: because the first one to me are historical dramas that
Speaker 3: have arrived at the right place and the right time
Speaker 3: and speak to the country we live in and the
Speaker 3: politics of the moment. Those are Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan,
Speaker 3: Killers of Flower Moon by Scorsese, and Zone of Interest
Speaker 3: by Jonathan Glazer. Oppenheimer is the prohibitive favorite. But what
Speaker 3: in that cluster stands out to you?
Speaker 4: I mean, it's funny. I think all these movies operate,
Speaker 4: I should say, in different moods. Alphabetically. We'll start with
Speaker 4: Killers of the Flower Moon. I think Killers of Flower
Speaker 4: Moon is a perversely effective movie. It's a weird movie
Speaker 4: for more in Scorsese, because it's not a lot of
Speaker 4: his priorities aren't apparent. A lot of his typical priorities
Speaker 4: aren't parent orlthough they're not four grounded in this movie.
Speaker 4: He's not interested in acting here. It's one of the
Speaker 4: rare instances to me in which his interest in acting
Speaker 4: and actors is kind of secondary to the politics and
Speaker 4: the sort of thematic urgency of what it is he's
Speaker 4: trying to do. I am not surprised that Lenardo DiCaprio
Speaker 4: is not a Best Actor nominee. For instance, if we're
Speaker 4: going to keep this in the realm of the Academy Awards,
Speaker 4: this is maybe his least convincing performance of the of
Speaker 4: you know, all the ones he's given in Scorsese movies alone.
Speaker 4: This is an impossible part to play. He's playing a
Speaker 4: truly stupid person who is also truly in love and
Speaker 4: truly evil, easily duped into doing horrible things to people.
Speaker 3: On that I want to play a little bit of
Speaker 3: this clip featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and actress Lily Gladstone and
Speaker 3: the new film Killers of the Flower Mountain.
Speaker 1: Let's take a listen. Why did you come here for?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 3: To live here?
Speaker 6: Yes?
Speaker 4: I'll live here?
Speaker 3: Why?
Speaker 4: Oh? From my uncle.
Speaker 1: William?
Speaker 5: Your brother is Brian Byron. That's right, you're scared of him?
Speaker 4: My brother?
Speaker 3: Who your uncle?
Speaker 4: Well? No, oh, he's a He's a king of the
Speaker 4: o Sage heels.
Speaker 5: He's the nicest man.
Speaker 4: In the world. I know if you cross him, what
Speaker 4: he can do mm hmm.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 5: I'm my own man.
Speaker 4: I do my own work.
Speaker 5: I'm a businessman.
Speaker 4: In a weird way. The thing that sort of comes
Speaker 4: through in this movie to me is the thing that
Speaker 4: in reading January sixth reports really leapt out at me,
Speaker 4: which is like all the people who stormed the capitol,
Speaker 4: who were like, I don't know, oh, I was just
Speaker 4: following the crowd, and the crowd went up the steps
Speaker 4: and into the capitol, So I did. And this movie
Speaker 4: is really to me about so I did. It's people
Speaker 4: sort of betraying their own souls, selling their souls, I mean,
Speaker 4: and really for nothing, honestly for nothing. I mean it's land,
Speaker 4: but I mean there's land everywhere for oil. I mean,
Speaker 4: I don't know, go find some oil with some land
Speaker 4: on it. I mean the movie is steeped in such
Speaker 4: such incredible, vivid pettiness. But I would say, god, you know,
Speaker 4: I mean, I think that the Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer doesn't really
Speaker 4: interest me as a movie, And part of it is
Speaker 4: it doesn't really feel like it's living. I felt like
Speaker 4: Oppenheimer to me was a series of talking heads. The
Speaker 4: movie isn't really asking any questions. It's just recapitulating, and
Speaker 4: the recapitulation just never got me as filmmaking. I mean,
Speaker 4: I don't know, I just sort of feel like the
Speaker 4: introduction of the communist end of things was way more,
Speaker 4: was more than the movie necessarily needed. And I feel
Speaker 4: like if you're gonna do that, you kind of have
Speaker 4: to make Oppenheimer more of who he actually was to
Speaker 4: the culture. I mean, there was a period during which
Speaker 4: he was an extremely famous American and lots of people
Speaker 4: admired the turn that he took away from the building
Speaker 4: of the bomb and his outspokenness against it. So all
Speaker 4: the stuff with Lewis Strauss and the McCarthy hearings, I
Speaker 4: just feel like there's a bridge from the creation of
Speaker 4: the bomb to those hearings that's missing. And it can't
Speaker 4: be that it's Albert Einstein on the lawn with a pipe.
Speaker 3: I actually liked the film, but I mean, when you
Speaker 3: describe it like that, I don't even know how I
Speaker 3: like it because I was moved by the Albert Einstein
Speaker 3: with the pipe.
Speaker 4: Well, let's talk about that, Like what got you? What
Speaker 4: I mean, I always what about the movie worked for you?
Speaker 3: There's a lot that got Okay. I feel probably the
Speaker 3: same as you about him, which is it's pretty hit
Speaker 3: or miss and mileage varies. And I don't like the
Speaker 3: movies that seem to feel soulless, and I felt that
Speaker 3: this one did have a kind of beating heart, an
Speaker 3: emotion that I had not found in Dunkirk or Interstellar.
Speaker 3: Oh sure, none of those. So I was moved by it.
Speaker 3: But I want to ask you, because the second group
Speaker 3: that I had divided for us is Barbie and Maestro,
Speaker 3: both our actors turned directors. Both are making big, ambitious
Speaker 3: films that are kind of upending the genre that they're
Speaker 3: working in. Even in time. This week there was an
Speaker 3: article by Stephanie Zacharach titled Greta Gerwick, Bradley Cooper and
Speaker 3: This Strange Curse of Ambition. Do those two pictures feel
Speaker 3: linked to you?
Speaker 4: I feel like Maestro solves a lot of the problems
Speaker 4: that I have with biographical movie making. I did not
Speaker 4: need a movie about Leonard Bernstein. But I think the
Speaker 4: reason that it works as well as it does is
Speaker 4: because the movie really isn't about Leonard Bernstein. I mean,
Speaker 4: let's just talk about the movie formally for a second.
Speaker 4: I mean, it spans time, there are shifts in aspect ratio,
Speaker 4: which if you do that, you know you have my heart.
Speaker 4: But it also is really I mean, the movie is
Speaker 4: being sold to us as being about a marriage, and
Speaker 4: I don't really know if I mean, it's not about
Speaker 4: a marriage. It's about a man's behavior's effect on a
Speaker 4: marriage and all of its impulses. To avoid showing Leonard
Speaker 4: Bernstein really doing the thing that makes him one of
Speaker 4: the great Americans of the twentieth century, and to focus
Speaker 4: on his energy, his insatiable, unquenchable thirst for all kinds
Speaker 4: of things and people, his unembarrassability, and it's I guess
Speaker 4: it's shamelessness, his shamelessness. I don't know. I just love
Speaker 4: that It wasn't a love letter to Leonard Bernstein. It
Speaker 4: was a real portrait of an asshole, and the asshole
Speaker 4: happens to be a musical genius. But the movie isn't
Speaker 4: about what a musical genius it is. It's actually about
Speaker 4: what an asshole he is.
Speaker 3: Definitely, it's definitely not about what a genius is.
Speaker 4: And I actually liked that, and in that way it
Speaker 4: kind of frees the movie to be whatever it is.
Speaker 4: The person who made it want it to be and
Speaker 4: I also feel that way. I mean, it's funny because
Speaker 4: now that you put me in this position, like I mean,
Speaker 4: I think Barbie is also doing a similar thing. Where
Speaker 4: at no point in watching it, although at every moment
Speaker 4: up until the point I actually saw the movie, did
Speaker 4: I think that Greta Gerwig was beholden to Mattel and
Speaker 4: doing its bidding. She clearly had thought about had had
Speaker 4: some connection to not only the dolls, but like the
Speaker 4: politics of girlhood itself and the politics of the evolution
Speaker 4: of girlhood into womanhood. I think that there is such
Speaker 4: a struggle happening in that movie that's about living with
Speaker 4: the capitalist impulse to own, consume, buy things that are
Speaker 4: not in your political or in some cases onto logical
Speaker 4: self interest, things that are designed to oppress, dehumanize, demotivate,
Speaker 4: even when you start putting glasses on them in lab
Speaker 4: coats and give them clipboards and stuff. I don't know.
Speaker 4: There's a real conflict here about what it means to
Speaker 4: have a consumerist girlhood. And I thought it was so
Speaker 4: smart to invent the America fer Our character finding herself
Speaker 4: estranged from her daughter. There's so many layers of conflict
Speaker 4: here that are sort of Barbie adjacent but entirely human.
Speaker 4: Part of the reason that, like, you know, if you're
Speaker 4: some serious filmmaker from Japan or I don't know, some
Speaker 4: other part of the world and you are looking at
Speaker 4: this movie and you like have to say the words
Speaker 4: Barbie Land, I can see you being like, I don't
Speaker 4: know whose movie really is this, but to me, it
Speaker 4: is entirely Greta Gerwig's. I mean, it's like this movie
Speaker 4: is of a piece with Ladybird and little Women, and
Speaker 4: they're all dealing with the same themes of girls and
Speaker 4: mothers and cummings of age of various sorts, the arrival
Speaker 4: at womanhood, even if you have been invented to automatically
Speaker 4: look like a woman, which to me, he aligns Barbie
Speaker 4: more with poor things than Maestro. I can think of
Speaker 4: very few better examples of how to both integrate and
Speaker 4: subvert corporate interests into your a tour sensibility than Barbie.
Speaker 3: I think Greta should have had you on the campaign
Speaker 3: trail with her.
Speaker 5: Ha ha ha.
Speaker 4: It's funny because I don't really I think a lot
Speaker 4: about these awards. I've been thinking about these awards that
Speaker 4: the Oscars, especially since I was six years old, seven
Speaker 4: years old, and it always just seemed so final and binding,
Speaker 4: you know, these certificates of bestness. And now that I'm older,
Speaker 4: I can see in it the kind of bogusness of it.
Speaker 4: I mean, the thing that like everybody always knows about.
Speaker 4: It's like it's like I discovered that Santa Claus is
Speaker 4: also my dad, my very human, extremely fallible dad, who
Speaker 4: also just wants me to not have my fantasy disturbed
Speaker 4: about where the grifts, where the gifts come from.
Speaker 3: But the Wesley at boarding school who walked around with
Speaker 3: a contraband walkman listening to the nominees. This person believed
Speaker 3: in the oscars.
Speaker 4: Ah, I did, I mean, and I still I mean,
Speaker 4: I guess professionally now I do still believe in the
Speaker 4: oscars because they're important and in the ways that you
Speaker 4: said when we started this conversation, I mean, I still
Speaker 4: believe that they're an important framing mechanism for now, not
Speaker 4: just American movies, really just like the American stop on
Speaker 4: the movie station, the global movie station.
Speaker 3: After the break. More from Wesley Morris. You know, there's
Speaker 3: a way in which any discussion about these movies or
Speaker 3: contemporary cinema in general turns into an elegy for the
Speaker 3: medium itself, and so in that spirit, I want to
Speaker 3: understand exactly what we may be losing by talking about
Speaker 3: what we had, or what specifically you had, because growing
Speaker 3: up you went to boarding school much like the characters
Speaker 3: in The Holdovers in North Philadelphia. Okay, it was this
Speaker 3: enclosed campus with giant walls, but eventually you were able
Speaker 3: to go back home on the weekends and stay with
Speaker 3: your mother, Judith, and I think it's with her in
Speaker 3: that house that your love of movies was born. Because
Speaker 3: your parents got a VCR and then two video store memberships,
Speaker 3: one Blockbuster and one to West Coast Video. What did
Speaker 3: that early fascination look and feel like to you?
Speaker 4: You were discovering that there was a world that was
Speaker 4: bigger than the world you were living in. It was
Speaker 4: very different from the world you were living in. The
Speaker 4: school that I went to, we'd group movies and we'd
Speaker 4: watch this movie called Digby the something Wonder Dog or something,
Speaker 4: I don't know. It was about a giant dog and
Speaker 4: I was like, Wow, they made this shaggy dog really big.
Speaker 4: I don't know. There was just something about seeing with
Speaker 4: your own eyes someone imagine other ways of being or
Speaker 4: other options for life that just, I don't know, it
Speaker 4: just really captivated me. I mean it's the same experience
Speaker 4: I had becoming a reader, but this was a different
Speaker 4: thing because you, in a weird way, it's kind of
Speaker 4: preimagined for you. And then you can take this thing,
Speaker 4: these images that you've been given and sort of rethink
Speaker 4: what their meetings are and and how they relate to
Speaker 4: your life or don't relate to your life, or you know,
Speaker 4: have nothing to do with relating to anything. It's just
Speaker 4: a world that exists and you don't You'll never really
Speaker 4: be a part of it. But it's great to think
Speaker 4: about every once in a while.
Speaker 3: But like Cocoa Goff on her off day, you in
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty seven seeing Fatal Attraction five times in a theater?
Speaker 3: What did that do for like an eleven year old
Speaker 3: Wesley Morris, it was.
Speaker 4: A I probably it turned twelve by the fifth time,
Speaker 4: because I'm my birthdays in December, so I was probably
Speaker 4: eleven and twelve. There's just nothing that like operates like
Speaker 4: this now, like where you were, It's something a movie
Speaker 4: really is a like that movie is a straight up
Speaker 4: contraption right, Like, you get on the ride and very
Speaker 4: slowly you go up and up and up the incline,
Speaker 4: and then at some point you reach a peak and
Speaker 4: it just drops you off. And the movie is so
Speaker 4: blatantly aware of what it is that it throws in
Speaker 4: an actual roller coaster sequence. Right, there's an actual ride
Speaker 4: in the movie, and it's perverse in that way. And
Speaker 4: I sort of loved the perversity of it. I loved that,
Speaker 4: like you were watching adult behavior that is recognizably adult. Like,
Speaker 4: I didn't watch that movie and want to fuck Michael Douglas.
Speaker 4: I just knew, though, that there was a power in attraction, right,
Speaker 4: There was a power in two people meeting and responding
Speaker 4: to the desire that they felt for each other.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you something? Why don't you have a
Speaker 1: date to night Saturday night? I stood him up. That
Speaker 1: was this long call I made that might keep feel good,
Speaker 1: doesn't make me feel bad.
Speaker 6: So where's your wife?
Speaker 1: Where's my wife?
Speaker 4: My wife is in the country with her parents visiting weekend, and.
Speaker 8: You're here with a strange girl being a naughty boy.
Speaker 1: I don't think having dinner with anybody's a crime.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's right around that time when the
Speaker 3: film comes out that you write your first review. It's
Speaker 3: in the eighth grade. It's an assignment given to you
Speaker 3: by a social studies teacher named John Kozemple. You write
Speaker 3: that review in eighth grade. You continue writing through high school.
Speaker 3: You go to Yale in the late nineties, you graduate,
Speaker 3: you quickly land a job at the Examiner. Then the Chronicle.
Speaker 3: Movies are at a pretty fascinating place. At that point,
Speaker 3: there's a wave of young independent filmmakers and thinking about
Speaker 3: Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderberg, Tarantino. Those are
Speaker 3: just the white straight men, but there's many more.
Speaker 4: Those are some pretty good white street men.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, year. Let mean, you know, back at
Speaker 3: the late nineties, you had Booge Knights, you had Rushmore,
Speaker 3: you had Out of Sight, you had Jackie Brown. But
Speaker 3: when you hold this period in cinema, especially when you
Speaker 3: started writing professionally, did you see it as something that
Speaker 3: would continue to expand. Did you think that the form
Speaker 3: would continue to evolve or did it feel like perhaps
Speaker 3: movies were peaking in the late nineties early two thousands.
Speaker 4: I don't know that I felt that. I definitely knew
Speaker 4: that something like the year nineteen ninety nine, which has
Speaker 4: been acknowledged has been a great movie year. It was
Speaker 4: clear in nineteen ninety nine itself, how good a movie
Speaker 4: year that was. I didn't think that there couldn't have
Speaker 4: been like another year that was as good as ninety nine,
Speaker 4: and there's probably there. I mean, two thousand and eight
Speaker 4: was also a really good year for movies too. I mean,
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight I think is also the year
Speaker 4: that Ironman comes out.
Speaker 3: Iron Man to me is the beginning of that sea change.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I mean, I mean the reason to mention
Speaker 4: it at all is that it is the beginning. It's
Speaker 4: definitely the beginning of what we what people call the
Speaker 4: Marvel cinematic universe.
Speaker 3: Two thousand and eight was a fraught year in general,
Speaker 3: I'd say.
Speaker 4: Oh well, I mean yes, in that movie itself is
Speaker 4: a depiction of Afghanistan that is kind of troubling, right,
Speaker 4: like the way it kind of runs rough shot over
Speaker 4: the war essentially, But it's clear it was clear at
Speaker 4: that moment, by two thousand and eight at least, that
Speaker 4: like things were changing in all kinds of ways, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, Obama's election is the beginning of this divergence,
Speaker 4: right where like some people saw a glorious horizon and
Speaker 4: some people saw the end of the world. It just
Speaker 4: is a pivotal year. But I also think that in
Speaker 4: terms of movies, again, like the forces of capitalism were
Speaker 4: much stronger than the forces of culture and the idea
Speaker 4: that Iron Man. You could take a movie like Iron Man,
Speaker 4: although it's hardly the first example of this, but like
Speaker 4: you could just play it everywhere, and then you could
Speaker 4: start making versions of these movies where you would cater
Speaker 4: to the places whose money you wanted most, because if
Speaker 4: you know, in the case of China, it just has
Speaker 4: the most people. So you start doing what the Chinese
Speaker 4: government wants.
Speaker 3: You to do to these movies.
Speaker 4: It just, I don't know, it's like something you lose something,
Speaker 4: and right, like the thing that that tially got lost
Speaker 4: was a whole class of movies that just wouldn't get
Speaker 4: made anymore. I mean we're talking about like the entire
Speaker 4: middle of the American movie going ecosystem. I mean, you
Speaker 4: look at these Best Picture nominees in two thousand for
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three, and really the only one of these
Speaker 4: that I can see being something that would have come
Speaker 4: out in May and like had no real Oscar aspiration
Speaker 4: except for the fact that it was made by Alexander Paine,
Speaker 4: who's been nominated for a bunch of Oscars. Is the
Speaker 4: holdovers the rest of these movies. I mean, I guess
Speaker 4: Barbie is kind of innocent of this. And Oppenheimer, to
Speaker 4: its credit, did open in the middle of summer. And
Speaker 4: it's not that these other movies are guilty, but I mean,
Speaker 4: it's more like these movies would have been recognizable in
Speaker 4: nineteen eighty seven. Is movies bound for Academy Awards in
Speaker 4: one way or another, whether it was the intent of
Speaker 4: the studio or the thing or a thing the Academy
Speaker 4: couldn't resist. But if you look at a year like
Speaker 4: nineteen eighty eight and what was nominated for Best Picture,
Speaker 4: and I'm going to try to do this off the
Speaker 4: top of my head, it was like the Accidental Tourist.
Speaker 4: What the fuck? It's like a travel writer who was
Speaker 4: getting a divorce and starts having a relationship with a
Speaker 4: woman who walks his dog or trains his dog. Best
Speaker 4: Picture nominee Dangerous Liaisons, costume drama about two people manipulating
Speaker 4: each other because they can't have sex with each other anymore,
Speaker 4: what Mississippi Mississippi Burning. I don't even know if that
Speaker 4: movie would get made now. Given his point of view,
Speaker 4: which is the FBI rain Man, the winner, would that
Speaker 4: movie would definitely not get made now. It just would
Speaker 4: like that style of movie just does not exist. It's
Speaker 4: not based on real people. You have Dustin Hoffman playing
Speaker 4: an autistic person. I don't know how that would go
Speaker 4: over now.
Speaker 3: And the last one was Working Girl.
Speaker 4: My favorite of the five. I love Working Girl. And
Speaker 4: again a movie that just wouldn't get made now. It
Speaker 4: would probably show up on some streaming service, maybe even
Speaker 4: in six parts or something. It would be a show.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I mean eighty eight, it's an interesting year.
Speaker 4: I mean you could, you could do this like across,
Speaker 4: but not one of those movies, of those five movies,
Speaker 4: is a movie that's screaming. Nominate me for a bunch
Speaker 4: of oscars, maybe dangerously aisons, but even that movie is
Speaker 4: so weirdly done. I mean, John Malkovich is the is
Speaker 4: the sex interest in that film. Glenn Close is you know,
Speaker 4: still at her at her, you know, movie star Peak
Speaker 4: is the other you know, sex star of that movie,
Speaker 4: which makes sense given that it comes after fatal attraction.
Speaker 4: There was real interest in her, there was real belief
Speaker 4: in her erotic power because she actually had erotic power.
Speaker 4: Those movies just don't get made now. And I'm not nostalgic.
Speaker 4: I'm actually angry right because there's a whole realm. There
Speaker 4: are whole realms of human experience, of American life, American
Speaker 4: regional life. There are places we don't see in movies
Speaker 4: anymore that you used to see all the time in movies.
Speaker 4: Places the movies just don't go. You're either in la
Speaker 4: or you're in New York, or you're in outer space
Speaker 4: or wherever Nick Fury lives, or you're in the past. Right,
Speaker 4: you're the deep past during the past in order to
Speaker 4: not be in the present. And one of the things
Speaker 4: about Killers of the Flower Moon that I love is
Speaker 4: that it's so aware that it's being made in twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four or twenty twenty three. It's so much about
Speaker 4: looking at these incidents with the osage from the vantage
Speaker 4: of its present, of that of the filmmaker's present.
Speaker 3: I think the thesis here is what we've lost is
Speaker 3: the middle of movies. What we've lost is the drama
Speaker 3: or the comedy that has no Great Aspirations was not
Speaker 3: made to win a bunch of awards or be nominated
Speaker 3: for awards. I want to try to unpack how and
Speaker 3: why we're here. Do you see any parallels between the
Speaker 3: decline and film criticism with the decline in movie making?
Speaker 3: Did one precipitate the other?
Speaker 4: Well that's a more complicated proposition, right, because is the
Speaker 4: decline in film criticism is related to the decline of periodicals?
Speaker 4: That how were film criticism thrived?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 4: I think the two things are related, but not necessarily
Speaker 4: causal of each other. I do, however, I do think
Speaker 4: that they're in the last I don't. I don't know.
Speaker 4: Let's say the last fifteen years, the last sixteen years,
Speaker 4: there's been a sort of downgrading of what a review
Speaker 4: can do and should do you know there's this tension
Speaker 4: between coming up with a review or like liking something
Speaker 4: a lot, they love that, or like really panning something.
Speaker 4: You know, when I worked at the Boston Globe, for instance,
Speaker 4: we gave things stars. If I was like Killers of
Speaker 4: the Flower Moon two stars, that would have superseded anything
Speaker 4: I necessarily wrote about it. I think many people would
Speaker 4: have read the review. But I think that that middle
Speaker 4: place you the middle of movie making has gone. I
Speaker 4: think like a kind of mixed criticism. People sort of
Speaker 4: lost patience for that, you know, like that a movie
Speaker 4: can't have things that work and don't work. I mean
Speaker 4: the middle. The disappearance of the middle is there's so
Speaker 4: many middles that have disappeared, right middle ground, middle brow,
Speaker 4: middle class. There's either there's either or there's no. There's
Speaker 4: very little room for not even debate, disagreement, but like
Speaker 4: just complexity, you know, Like, I find it really interesting
Speaker 4: that none of the ten movies on this Best Picture
Speaker 4: list include May December.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: Did you see that movie?
Speaker 3: I love it?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I did not the first time I saw it,
Speaker 4: and then I went and saw it again and was like,
Speaker 4: what was my problem? I saw it the next day.
Speaker 4: I don't know. I just I think that's a movie
Speaker 4: that that has so much going on, that is so
Speaker 4: some it's so of a piece with where we are
Speaker 4: right now. It just doesn't it's not telling you what
Speaker 4: it's doing or how it's feeling, or what even it is.
Speaker 4: It's like the weird touchlessness of Todd Haynes, even though
Speaker 4: there's so much touching in this movie. The music is touching,
Speaker 4: like the butterfly metaphors are touching you, like his fingerprints
Speaker 4: are all over this thing. But it still feels like
Speaker 4: the hand guiding it is completely invisible, and these characters
Speaker 4: are just doing They're just doing whatever it is that
Speaker 4: they've been set on this earth to do. To sit
Speaker 4: down and talk about this movie and like what is
Speaker 4: happening here? It's really deep and really satisfying to unpack
Speaker 4: it or argue with people about it, I don't. I mean,
Speaker 4: there's some movies where you just I and it doesn't
Speaker 4: happen very often, like you leave them. I leave a
Speaker 4: movie and I do not trust my response to it.
Speaker 4: And in the case in December, I just went the
Speaker 4: next day and saw it again. It was like seeing
Speaker 4: something dead come to life right before your eyes. I
Speaker 4: found that expansion of my mind exhilarating. But we don't
Speaker 4: have time for that movie now. It's just like it's
Speaker 4: too it asks too much, It asks too much.
Speaker 3: It's funny that line you had right there, that watching
Speaker 3: something dead come to life. I think in some ways
Speaker 3: that's kind of what we've been trying to do in
Speaker 3: this conversation, talking about something that's dead, trying to will
Speaker 3: it back into existence. And in this last decade in Hollywood,
Speaker 3: I'm thinking about twenty fourteen to now, because back then
Speaker 3: in fourteen, you wrote this really beautiful review of Selma
Speaker 3: Oh Wow, Okay, a film directed by Ava Duvernet. I
Speaker 3: reread the piece last night, and I was thinking about
Speaker 3: how that picture, in so many ways, jump started the
Speaker 3: Oscar So White campaign, which for some to finally reckon
Speaker 3: with how the academy in the industry treats artists of color.
Speaker 3: And oddly enough, exactly a decade later, Duvernet is releasing
Speaker 3: a new film right now. It's called Origin. It got
Speaker 3: completely shut out at the Oscars. Funny how Hillary Clinton
Speaker 3: did not tweet about Origin.
Speaker 4: She's the Origin.
Speaker 3: Nevertheless, I sat with Ava a couple of weeks back
Speaker 3: on the show. I asked her about the state of
Speaker 3: movies and how the industry seems to be backsliding into
Speaker 3: a kind of conservatism, and I just wanted to take
Speaker 3: a listen to that passage for a second. So this
Speaker 3: is her reflecting on the last decade of working in Hollywood,
Speaker 3: in the system, through the system, and how she's starting
Speaker 3: to think about her future as a filmmaker.
Speaker 8: I don't know, I'm not sure about the way that
Speaker 8: I how to define how I'm doing it now. All
Speaker 8: I know is that I feel like I'm tapping out.
Speaker 8: I've tried to work within the system for the last
Speaker 8: ten years. I've sat on the boards of Sun Dance,
Speaker 8: I am DJA board, I am I am a governor
Speaker 8: of the Academy. In my second term, I really wanted
Speaker 8: to learn. I wanted to understand how these institutions worked.
Speaker 8: And there's some great people there and beautiful legacy, but ultimately,
Speaker 8: the shifts in the cumulative effect of this, like how
Speaker 8: the overall industry works are so insignificant in their velocity,
Speaker 8: in their scope, in their real impact, that I feel like,
Speaker 8: you know, what, I've done what I could because it
Speaker 8: was a lot. It's a lot of extra time, a
Speaker 8: lot of extra effort, a lot of calls, a lot
Speaker 8: of meetings, a lot of thinking, a lot of trying,
Speaker 8: and it's time to pack the baton to someone else
Speaker 8: who has a fresh energy and who wants to take
Speaker 8: And I've achieved some things within those organizations that I'm
Speaker 8: proud of, but for me, it's just not I feel
Speaker 8: like I'm tilling ground, that I'm like an old pioneer
Speaker 8: on a bad plot.
Speaker 5: It's like and I.
Speaker 8: Think that I started and I was like, oh, this
Speaker 8: place can change, like Pete, there are people here, this
Speaker 8: is a little time, like it'll change, and that there
Speaker 8: have been some beautiful things that happened. But my success
Speaker 8: is not change Nia Dacosta's success. Gina Prince bythewould suggests,
Speaker 8: when you can name us all on two hands, that's
Speaker 8: not change. That's a few lovely things that happened to
Speaker 8: a few people, And for me, that's not worth it.
Speaker 8: I would rather just try to build something sustainable and
Speaker 8: beautiful and smaller and lovely in my own likeness with
Speaker 8: people who think like me. And in some ways I
Speaker 8: think eyes that small minded. Is that just closing ranks?
Speaker 8: But at some point it just becomes what's healthy.
Speaker 4: What does that look like for her?
Speaker 5: Though?
Speaker 4: Does she say what it looked like for her?
Speaker 3: Well, in the case of Origin, it looked like getting
Speaker 3: funding from jobs, the Ford Foundation, Melinda Gates. But she
Speaker 3: went the kind of route that Soderberk has done, getting
Speaker 3: financial investments from private sources and stuff like that. But
Speaker 3: what did you make of that?
Speaker 4: I'm not surprised. I also think that it's funny because
Speaker 4: I think Ava DuVernay is the apotheosis of black American
Speaker 4: woman filmmaker. She's the person that people automatically think of,
Speaker 4: reflexively think of when they think those things. And I
Speaker 4: think there's a burden that's on her that doesn't have
Speaker 4: anything to do with her personal ambitions. I think that
Speaker 4: she feels responsible for ensuring that she's not the last
Speaker 4: person to get through the door. And I don't know,
Speaker 4: I mean, I have a lot of sympathy for her
Speaker 4: because she's She's taken on a lot. I'm curious what
Speaker 4: being done handing the clipboard and the frolodex to somebody else.
Speaker 4: What do those things look like for her art? I
Speaker 4: think that there are people like me out there. We
Speaker 4: actually believe that this movie is a turning point in
Speaker 4: some way, which movie origin like, who knows what she's
Speaker 4: going to do? We're it'll lead. But the reason you
Speaker 4: bring her up right is that this idea of what
Speaker 4: the Academy Awards are in terms of thinking about how
Speaker 4: they're a snapshot of a business. It's also kind of
Speaker 4: a game, right, Like it's a system you have to
Speaker 4: know how to work. And for many years David was
Speaker 4: a publicist. She knows how to work the system. She
Speaker 4: knows how the system works. And at some point, you
Speaker 4: don't want to keep doing that. If the thing on
Speaker 4: your business card says filmmaker, if it says artist, you
Speaker 4: want to make things, you don't want to bureaucratize the
Speaker 4: making of things.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: But I mean, she's so historically minded, she's so much
Speaker 4: about you know, she's so aware of history and the
Speaker 4: and the archives and the record that she does feel
Speaker 4: responsible for making sure that it has as many black woman,
Speaker 4: non white, non straight names as can be put. And
Speaker 4: you know that work. You know, ask ask the civil
Speaker 4: rights folks. They will tell you it takes a toll.
Speaker 4: If it doesn't actually literally get you killed, it definitely
Speaker 4: burns you the fuck out. And especially when you can
Speaker 4: look at the labor, the struggle, the everything, right like Selma,
Speaker 4: I mean, what was some about it was about getting
Speaker 4: one thing passed. It was about getting like the voting
Speaker 4: rights bill passed. That was one thing, and look at
Speaker 4: all that shit that had to happen and to get that. Think,
Speaker 4: I mean, the movie's at about any of this stuff,
Speaker 4: but like, think about all of the sudden that happens in
Speaker 4: the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting
Speaker 4: Rights Act happened, and then all the shit that happens
Speaker 4: after that happens, and people were just like, what the fuck?
Speaker 5: What do we just do?
Speaker 4: And now y'all are killing people, like actually assassinating our
Speaker 4: leaders for what for us to be able to just
Speaker 4: like have a say and who runs our county? That's it.
Speaker 4: So what if they have to do with board of governors. Well,
Speaker 4: it means that change is hard and people don't like it,
Speaker 4: and it's hard to make the change, but it's hard
Speaker 4: for the change makers, and so the change makers eventually
Speaker 4: just want to change things for themselves because the making
Speaker 4: of the change writ large. It's just too much at stake.
Speaker 4: It costs too much. People are so resistant. The Academy's
Speaker 4: membership just to sort of come back to the it
Speaker 4: has expanded meaningfully in the last ten years. Right, They've
Speaker 4: gone out of their way to recruit all these younger, browner,
Speaker 4: more international like, less American eyes voices tastes.
Speaker 3: Which Ava is partly responsible for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean to her point, I mean it's interesting, right,
Speaker 4: like just to stay with black people for one second.
Speaker 4: The math on this is tricky, but like there have
Speaker 4: been more Asian and people of Asian descent winning the
Speaker 4: directing Oscar in the last few years, I think than
Speaker 4: black people have ever been nominated. And I don't know
Speaker 4: what to do with that number. I mean it's great
Speaker 4: for changing the scope of who is in that club.
Speaker 4: I mean, the same is true for the three Mexicans,
Speaker 4: you know, del Toro and Inyanitu and in Quirne. I
Speaker 4: think that the sort of expansion of like what a
Speaker 4: best director is has chained is like it's grown so wide,
Speaker 4: but not wide enough to say that a Black American
Speaker 4: also best directed something. And there is like a real, real,
Speaker 4: real resistance to thinking about black people in a new way.
Speaker 3: Right, what do you what do you mean by by
Speaker 3: new way?
Speaker 4: I mean I've been really struggling with Oh god, I
Speaker 4: can't even get into that.
Speaker 3: Well what can't we get into? But we're here to get.
Speaker 4: I just I don't know, it's just it's too thorny.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's not too thorny, like I'm scared to
Speaker 4: say a bad thing, but like I have to like
Speaker 4: sort of work out exactly what it is I'm saying.
Speaker 4: But just all right, just think about the best supporting
Speaker 4: actress nominees across the history of the Academy Awards. Okay,
Speaker 4: what have those women been nominated doing? That's too Jenner.
Speaker 4: I mean they're housekeepers, they are cooks, they are servants.
Speaker 4: They work in the Jim Crow South as people who
Speaker 4: would have been doing that work. I mean daniel Brooks
Speaker 4: playing Sofia in the color Purple, I mean that's her job.
Speaker 4: Her business car would say, working for white people.
Speaker 3: Divine Joy Randa.
Speaker 4: I mean she's a cook at the at the school.
Speaker 4: I mean. It is not about the quality of the
Speaker 4: performances of these women. Divine Davine joint Randolph is fantastic.
Speaker 4: Danielle Brooks, I mean she is doing Sofia karaoke like
Speaker 4: nobody has ever Sofia karaoke before.
Speaker 3: It's about the job they have in the film.
Speaker 4: It's about their function in the movie. Right And how
Speaker 4: many Best Actress? How many Black American women have been
Speaker 4: nominated for carrying a movie regardless of their job. We'll
Speaker 4: start there, But if you make them something other than
Speaker 4: working for white people.
Speaker 3: How many have that fact at hand here?
Speaker 4: I mean, you don't need it, because I'm telling you
Speaker 4: we wouldn't get to this many fingers for best Actress, right,
Speaker 4: I wouldn't use them all. But my point is that
Speaker 4: I wouldn't need all ten of my fingers. A B.
Speaker 4: The real point is that the thing that's great about
Speaker 4: the oscars is they're telling the truth about the movies, right.
Speaker 4: They're telling the truth about what the priorities actually are,
Speaker 4: and who counts, who belongs, what gets made, who stars
Speaker 4: in it, how much do they make, Who writes these things,
Speaker 4: who does the costumes. It is like the whole industry.
Speaker 4: I mean, the reports come out from the Annenberg Center
Speaker 4: of the USC and Berg Center. We know the numbers,
Speaker 4: the numbers. The numbers are the numbers, but the numbers
Speaker 4: tell a story. And that's where people like you know
Speaker 4: I guess me, and you because you will have people
Speaker 4: on to talk about this sort of stuff. But my
Speaker 4: only point connected to the way Avra DuVernay is thinking
Speaker 4: about what she ought to be doing with her time
Speaker 4: in life, is that these are stubborn, stubborn, deep, deep,
Speaker 4: deep historical problems. And there's so many of us who
Speaker 4: honestly believe that if we just got in there, if
Speaker 4: we just got in there and made the calls and
Speaker 4: sent the emails and had the meetings and it would
Speaker 4: just be better. It would just be better. But this
Speaker 4: is now a woman Aver Duvernet who is as far
Speaker 4: away from being a Best Director nominee. And I'm laughing
Speaker 4: because it's fucking tragic and sad. She's as far away
Speaker 4: ten years after, like the closest she was ever gonna
Speaker 4: get to being a Best Director and not getting nominated
Speaker 4: now as she was that. And I'm not this is
Speaker 4: not about origin of the quality of origin or should
Speaker 4: she even be nominated. It's like the the It's just
Speaker 4: about the scope and intrenched of the problem. And I
Speaker 4: think in some ways in her case she's thinking it through.
Speaker 4: Is she's at least thinking through this question of justice
Speaker 4: in her work. And you know, why why are we
Speaker 4: like this? America? Why are we like this? But you know,
Speaker 4: the tidy fact of the Academy Awards is that it
Speaker 4: tells us that we are.
Speaker 3: Still like this, Amir and Awinda well and a ceiling
Speaker 3: and what are we like.
Speaker 4: Diluted? I mean, you know, we we think we're one way,
Speaker 4: but like I have a report that says we're not,
Speaker 4: We're this other way, but we keep saying we're not.
Speaker 4: Like the report we're like these other things. We're these
Speaker 4: other people. We don't have the values this report is
Speaker 4: saying we have. We've got different values. Look at us
Speaker 4: changing our values. But it doesn't matter how many more
Speaker 4: people you bring in. They're bringing the values right. And
Speaker 4: a lot of the times those values have just been installed.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is sort of Barbie, This is Greta
Speaker 4: Gerwick thinking here, right. They've been they've been installed in
Speaker 4: you from birth, and it's hard to let them go.
Speaker 4: Barbie is about how hard it is to let some
Speaker 4: toxic ass shit go, and sometimes how good toxic shit feels,
Speaker 4: how good it feels to just be a fucking asshole.
Speaker 4: I don't know what you do with that. I don't
Speaker 4: know what you do with how good it feels to
Speaker 4: just oppress people because it's easy and fun to like
Speaker 4: bend an entire country's attention to your dysfunctional personality because
Speaker 4: you can't. It's just, I don't know. It's a really
Speaker 4: really crazy time to be an American, to be a
Speaker 4: new arrival to this country and to see what people
Speaker 4: are saying about you and what you're doing here.
Speaker 3: To be a critic at large at the New York Times, Uh.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know so much about critic I mean,
Speaker 4: I guess if my brain is applied to some of this,
Speaker 4: some of these problems. Sure, I mean, but one of
Speaker 4: the great things that I love about my job is
Speaker 4: I don't have to I get to think about the
Speaker 4: meaning of the stuff that people make for us to enjoy,
Speaker 4: and I get to think about how the stuff that
Speaker 4: people make makes me feel. I don't have to, like
Speaker 4: weigh in on things. I just don't like that. I
Speaker 4: don't believe in having takes right. I mean, I believe
Speaker 4: in the having of takes. I just don't believe that
Speaker 4: I need to be having one.
Speaker 3: We've done a podcast of takes.
Speaker 4: Right, I mean, you and me just now, yeah, I
Speaker 4: mean I think that we've been doing We've been really
Speaker 4: thinking through these problems. These aren't really takes.
Speaker 3: I want to understand how you see your role and
Speaker 3: job in this moment, how you're thinking about it, how
Speaker 3: you're thinking about doing it, what it means to do
Speaker 3: it in this country in twenty twenty four, and where
Speaker 3: you're at with what you've committed your life to.
Speaker 4: I don't know. I mean, I mean, I feel like
Speaker 4: everybody tells you that you're you know, the therapist qualities
Speaker 4: that you have are intense. It's like I'm talking to
Speaker 4: a person that I that I mean. You know, we
Speaker 4: and I have had conversations before, but I think there's
Speaker 4: something kind of unburdening in a weird way about, you know,
Speaker 4: being asked to think about your life to answer your question.
Speaker 4: I feel like my job hasn't changed, like the nature
Speaker 4: of my job has not changed. I feel more certain
Speaker 4: about the way I want to do my job.
Speaker 3: I've that I've ever felt. What does that mean?
Speaker 4: The people whose work I like to read, the people
Speaker 4: that I love talking to, the people I love hearing
Speaker 4: talk to other people. We're all trying to figure out
Speaker 4: how to live in whatever way it means it to
Speaker 4: be alive. And so much of the creation of art,
Speaker 4: the making, the writing, recording of a song, the labor
Speaker 4: that goes into making a book, especially a good book, filmmaking,
Speaker 4: any kind of any kind of art. It's hard and
Speaker 4: it takes something really special to make something that touches
Speaker 4: other people. And that, to me, it's life giving. You
Speaker 4: are giving part of you to the rest of us.
Speaker 4: And you know, the way I think about my job
Speaker 4: is to respond to that offering sometimes I wish you
Speaker 4: had given me more, maybe maybe given me less, giving
Speaker 4: me something different, but I'm always grateful to have received it.
Speaker 4: I mean, I do think that's so much of the
Speaker 4: thing that I want to try to do is never
Speaker 4: lose sight of the biggest picture that we have, especially
Speaker 4: as Americans, because it's so easy to do that. Again,
Speaker 4: I hate to keep going back to Barbie, but Barbie
Speaker 4: is secretly deep. Barbie is really about like lost connections,
Speaker 4: displaced desires, like personal revelation, epiphany. And these are white
Speaker 4: people having these revelations too, right, These are white people
Speaker 4: waking up to the reality of themselves. And Barbie doesn't
Speaker 4: even know she's white, but she discovers it. I mean,
Speaker 4: not necessarily in the movie, but part of this the
Speaker 4: schematic of awakening and Barbie has to eventually involve her
Speaker 4: being aware that she is a white woman. Stereotypical. Stereotypical
Speaker 4: Barbie is what they call her, and I feel like
Speaker 4: that's a great euphemism for white. But I just feel
Speaker 4: like trying to make these connections between where we currently
Speaker 4: are and where we've been. You know, I don't always
Speaker 4: want to be like but you know, thirty five years
Speaker 4: ago x y Z E think because sometimes an experience
Speaker 4: just doesn't have a historical corollary, or even if it does,
Speaker 4: it can't be used to cheapen the intensity of the
Speaker 4: thing you're experiencing. Now, if you're seventeen years old and
Speaker 4: you know, hearing in the air tonight for the first time,
Speaker 4: it's new to you. So let's sit with it. I mean,
Speaker 4: I so deeply want to capture the sensation of, Oh
Speaker 4: my God, holy shit, Jesus fucking Christ, why did you
Speaker 4: do it? Again? Try to just think as historically as
Speaker 4: I can about the present with out like using the
Speaker 4: history to oppress our enjoyment of what we are currently doing,
Speaker 4: but to say that like we're on a continuum, and
Speaker 4: to figure out where on the continuum we currently are
Speaker 4: at a given moment in present time with respect to
Speaker 4: the past, and to always keep that awareness with us.
Speaker 4: We don't want to bring it with us is the problem?
Speaker 3: You know. I wanted to ask you that because when
Speaker 3: we first sat down in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: Was that in San Francisco? Was that at the San
Speaker 4: Francisco Film Festival, at the headquarters of the San Francisco
Speaker 4: International Film Festival.
Speaker 3: That's right, it was episode five of the podcast.
Speaker 4: Congratulations to you, by the way, I just you know,
Speaker 4: it's a funny, Like I'm just gonna rupt you for
Speaker 4: one second to say that I got very moved when
Speaker 4: I saw the art of the guests at some point,
Speaker 4: this is like four or five years ago, I was like, huh,
Speaker 4: look at all this, So like once a month, I'm
Speaker 4: just like, well, I didn't I missed that one. Oh look,
Speaker 4: mention Lee looks really good, you know what I mean, Like,
Speaker 4: I just I'd love that. So congratulations, I mean, just
Speaker 4: congratulations on eight years.
Speaker 3: But go on, well, thank you. In that conversation that
Speaker 3: we had, I kind of asked you this same question
Speaker 3: back then about purpose and why and where you were at,
Speaker 3: and I thought perhaps we should take a listen to
Speaker 3: that for a second.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, what the fuck?
Speaker 3: Really, this is Wesley Morris in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 7: I think, and you you know, if anybody who spends
Speaker 7: enough time writing about directors should know this, Like, at
Speaker 7: some point.
Speaker 4: You just start to start to lose it. I mean
Speaker 4: I might have already peated.
Speaker 7: I don't know, but I'm somewhere in that, like somewhere
Speaker 7: between thirty five and fifty.
Speaker 4: Is that zone. I mean, if some of it's subjective,
Speaker 4: it's probably.
Speaker 7: All entirely subjective when it comes to the question I'm
Speaker 7: actually asking, which is like what happens to does the
Speaker 7: energy run out? Like do I suddenly just get bored
Speaker 7: doing this? And there are a lot of days where
Speaker 7: I'm like this is dumb?
Speaker 4: Really no, I mean.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, no, like really like, I mean I believe
Speaker 6: in it, but you know, it's like six o'clock in
Speaker 6: the morning and you're like dragging yourself across your apartment,
Speaker 6: You're like getting dressed to go to work, and You're
Speaker 6: just like, what do I have to do today?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 7: Right, I have to write something that sounds smart about girls?
Speaker 4: Is that really important?
Speaker 7: And then I'm like, yes it is. I get to
Speaker 7: a point where like, yes, it's fucking important. But it
Speaker 7: takes it Like sometimes there are days when it just
Speaker 7: takes a little bit longer to get to like, guess
Speaker 7: this is important. Some days it's like instant, like I
Speaker 7: don't even have to There is no sort of meta
Speaker 7: conversation you have to have with yourself about whether or
Speaker 7: not you should be doing what you're doing. But I
Speaker 7: I will never really ever be satisfied with what I'm
Speaker 7: doing because I live in constant fear that I will
Speaker 7: lose the will to do it.
Speaker 4: I still feel that way. I still feel that way,
Speaker 4: I truly do. I don't know. Every day that I
Speaker 4: wake up, Sam, I think, is today the day that
Speaker 4: it won't be there? Will it not be there today? Like,
Speaker 4: not only the will to do it, the will to
Speaker 4: do it that is that is a that is eight
Speaker 4: years ago me. Like, now I'm like, is there still
Speaker 4: ink in the well? Can I still get it up?
Speaker 4: Is the magic still there? Because it's really what we're
Speaker 4: talking about. Honest to God, I swear to God, Sam,
Speaker 4: it's magic. Like, there's a lot of work that goes
Speaker 4: into it. There's a lot of suffering and you know,
Speaker 4: revising and you know false star every everything that involves
Speaker 4: you the creative process entails. But at the end of
Speaker 4: the day, at the beginning of the day, it's magic.
Speaker 4: I still have the will to do it. But now
Speaker 4: I'm like, it's not even about the will. It's just
Speaker 4: truly about is the sparkle of the thinking and the
Speaker 4: writing is still gonna be there even if I want
Speaker 4: to still be wiggling my fingers across the keyboard and
Speaker 4: I just I just think the universe that and my ancestors,
Speaker 4: somebody in my family had had this. I really believe
Speaker 4: that somebody in my family who never got a chance to,
Speaker 4: somebody in my in my in my genealogy, in my
Speaker 4: in my family history, somebody was cooking and really loved it,
Speaker 4: and whatever that was. I really feel like I got
Speaker 4: it from them. I got it from them, and hopefully
Speaker 4: I will have it so that when I die, it
Speaker 4: is a through line to my sister's kids or in
Speaker 4: their kids and their kids' kids. I don't know, I'm
Speaker 4: holding on to something really old. I'm not even holding
Speaker 4: onto it. It's just what's passing through me feels really old.
Speaker 4: I hope it outlives me essentially.
Speaker 3: Well. I feel like the only way we can end
Speaker 3: this is on a piece that that magic produced, a
Speaker 3: piece of writing that came out last year about the
Speaker 3: film that we keep mentioning but not discussing. This is
Speaker 3: your review of The Holdovers, ha ha, And I have
Speaker 3: to say, these last three paragraphs are maybe some of
Speaker 3: my favorite bits of writing that you've ever done. So
Speaker 3: I thought, oh, thank you. Perhaps you'd want to read
Speaker 3: it for people as we leave me.
Speaker 4: Uh, Okay, I have not seen these words, by the way, Sam,
Speaker 4: since they entered the New York time.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, this is Wesley Morris on the new film
Speaker 3: The Holdovers by Alexander Pain.
Speaker 4: Once it's all over and the movie is reminded you
Speaker 4: of Dead Poet Society, or maybe half a dozen films
Speaker 4: from the nineteen seventies like The Paper Chase, you might
Speaker 4: also feel what I did, Like you've seen an inversion
Speaker 4: of Wes Anderson's Rushmore, which opened twenty five years ago.
Speaker 4: Pain and Anderson arrived at roughly the same moment in
Speaker 4: the mid nineteen nineties. Only Pain's milieu is world weary, harsh,
Speaker 4: slouched blue or collared grayer. I saw Rushmore when I
Speaker 4: was loosely older than Max Fisher. The movie's go getting
Speaker 4: adolescent old soul protagonist. Anderson's declarative archness and rigorous eye
Speaker 4: rocked my world. A geek had gotten his revenge opening
Speaker 4: a nerd core Floodgate, but more important, his romanticism felt
Speaker 4: true cruelly. My peer is now Paul Hunnam, a figure
Speaker 4: humbled by principle, hampered by pride, and by the end
Speaker 4: of The Holdovers humboldt. Some more he's Max Fisher slumped.
Speaker 4: Watching Anderson's films has steadily made me the ogler. Matthew
Speaker 4: McConaughey plays and dazed and confused. I keep getting older
Speaker 4: and they just stay the same. The romanticism is calcified.
Speaker 4: His movies are less ardened. As much sculpture as to
Speaker 4: passion is passionate themselves. Paine's weakness was for pessimism, a hardened,
Speaker 4: freewheeling version. His movies were about cynics, the native born,
Speaker 4: the Ara Easts. But somewhere along the way he and
Speaker 4: Anderson swapped and the romantic intruded. Paine's characters began needling
Speaker 4: each other and connecting, and that crackle kicked in. That's
Speaker 4: especially true of his last two. The other is Downsizing,
Speaker 4: a soulful futurist sat tire with Matt Damon and Hong
Speaker 4: Child that nobody saw in middle age. Pain has come
Speaker 4: newly to life, whereas the Anderson of two thousand twenty ones,
Speaker 4: The French Dispatch and this Year's Asteroid City seems to
Speaker 4: me as alienated from sensation as ever, hiding in and
Speaker 4: fussing over the past rather than interrogating or inhabiting it.
Speaker 4: The Holdovers kicks off with the same kind of torpie
Speaker 4: entitled under an upper class folk that dominate Rushmore, but
Speaker 4: he sends them away to get down to a more pungent,
Speaker 4: nitty gritty kind of comedy. One character tells another his
Speaker 4: near murderous sob story, and at some point a different
Speaker 4: character deadpans to him, here you go, killer. This is
Speaker 4: Pain's first movie set in any kind of past. It's
Speaker 4: using the old MPAA rating card and was shot digitally
Speaker 4: by Igel Brild to achieve thirty five millimeters coziness. But
Speaker 4: it doesn't feel stuck there. Pain's not locking us out.
Speaker 4: He's letting us in practicing what I suspect is Paul
Speaker 4: Hunum's stock in trade during the school year, bringing ancient
Speaker 4: civilizations to aching life. All right, what was your point?
Speaker 3: Annoyed? Is this an annoyed Wesley?
Speaker 4: I see no, I mean thank you for that. I
Speaker 4: appreciate it. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 3: It's a moving piece of writing, in part because you
Speaker 3: kind of put yourself in there. You saw some of
Speaker 3: yourself in the Geomadi character, in disposition, in spirit, not
Speaker 3: quite age, but perhaps in vocation as well. I don't know,
Speaker 3: because his job as a teacher in that film is
Speaker 3: too as you write, bring ancient civilizations to aching life.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking, like, at its best, at your best,
Speaker 3: isn't that kind of what you do in writing?
Speaker 4: I mean, Faarah, it's well observed. I mean sure, yes,
Speaker 4: I mean it can't come at the expense of the new.
Speaker 4: I would just want to emphasize that, right, like, it
Speaker 4: can't come at the expense of not being in the present.
Speaker 4: And the thing that I kind of admire about The
Speaker 4: Holdovers is it's like Tom, It's Thomas Payne, Alexander Payne
Speaker 4: sort of thinking about what it would mean for him
Speaker 4: to go back to the nineteen seventies. I don't know
Speaker 4: this guy is. This is a filmmaker who's only ever
Speaker 4: wanted to tell us who we are as a culture,
Speaker 4: as a people, as a national civilization. So if that
Speaker 4: guy wants to spend one movie in nineteen seventy something
Speaker 4: thinking about these you know, spoiled people who have to
Speaker 4: like eke out a life in a real city like
Speaker 4: Boston during the end of the Civil Rights movement and
Speaker 4: the Vietnam War, he gets to do it because he's
Speaker 4: earned it. And it again, it does not feel like
Speaker 4: he wants to stay there at all.
Speaker 3: I bring this up because to end, does this new
Speaker 3: film that is very much the kind of film that
Speaker 3: has vanished from the landscape, does it give you hope
Speaker 3: for the future of this medium?
Speaker 4: I mean maybe? But how old is Alexander Payne too?
Speaker 3: I think?
Speaker 4: I mean, where's the equivalent now of the guy who
Speaker 4: made Citizen Roof? Where's that person? Because that's the thing
Speaker 4: that's giving me hope, not that this great director who's
Speaker 4: done his work right Where is you know, a thirty
Speaker 4: year old person who wants to give me an abortion
Speaker 4: comedy right now, who wants to give me a really
Speaker 4: perfectly etched comedy about reproductive rights in America and the
Speaker 4: hypocrisy's therein utterly cynical, very funny. Where's that person? Because
Speaker 4: I'm waiting for him and I don't know where they are.
Speaker 3: Well, I think right now there are a lot of
Speaker 3: people listening to this conversation that are going to try
Speaker 3: to answer the call.
Speaker 4: Ha ha ha, God bless you and God help you. But
Speaker 4: I'm here when you're ready, When you do it, I
Speaker 4: want to be the first person to see it, read
Speaker 4: it something.
Speaker 3: And whenever you write about it, I am excited to
Speaker 3: read it. You talked about how filmmakers at their best
Speaker 3: make work that shows us how to live, what it
Speaker 3: means to be alive. That's what you said, and I
Speaker 3: think you have done that a whole lot in the
Speaker 3: last eight years since we first spoke. So I want
Speaker 3: to thank you for that, and I want to thank
Speaker 3: you as always my god, eight years. Thank you for the.
Speaker 4: Time I know, don't do that. Thank you, Sam, Thanks
Speaker 4: for having.
Speaker 3: Me, Lesley Morris.
Speaker 5: Take care, Take care, Sam.
Speaker 3: And that's our show. I want to give a special
Speaker 3: thanks this week to Devon Darby and of course our
Speaker 3: guest today, Wesley Morris. To read or to learn more
Speaker 3: about any of the ten films nominated for Best Picture,
Speaker 3: be sure to visit our website at talk easypod dot com.
Speaker 3: If you enjoyed today's conversation, I'd recommend our episodes with
Speaker 3: David Remnick, Jay Wortham Matt Bellanie and Ava du Verne
Speaker 3: to hear those and more. Pushkin Podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Speaker 3: or wherever you like to listen. If you want to
Speaker 3: help us out, be sure to leave us a review
Speaker 3: on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you are listening to
Speaker 3: this right now. If you want to go above and beyond,
Speaker 3: sharing the program on social media, sharing it with a friend,
Speaker 3: all of it really does help us continue doing the
Speaker 3: work we do here every Sunday. You can follow us
Speaker 3: on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at talk easy Pod. If you
Speaker 3: want to buy one of our mugs, they come and
Speaker 3: Cream or Navy, or the vinyl record we made with
Speaker 3: writer fran Leebowitz, you can do so at talk easypod
Speaker 3: dot com slash shop. Talk easy is produced by Caroline Reebok.
Speaker 3: Our executive producer is Jennick Sabravo. Our associate producer is
Speaker 3: Caitlin Dryden. Today's talk was edited by c J. Mitchell
Speaker 3: and Kitlin Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola, who was
Speaker 3: taped at Spotify Studios here in Los Angeles, California. Our
Speaker 3: music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Kristashenoe.
Speaker 3: Our video and graphics are by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzac,
Speaker 3: Ian Jones, and Ethan Seneca. I also want to thank
Speaker 3: our team at Pushkin Industries. They include Justin Richmond, Julia Barton,
Speaker 3: John Shnars, Kerrie Brody, Eric Sandler, Jona McMillan, Kira Posey,
Speaker 3: Tara Machado, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, Malcolm Gladwell, Greta Cohen
Speaker 3: and Jacob Weisberg. I'm San Fragoso. Thank you for listening
Speaker 3: to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week
Speaker 3: with filmmaker Lulu Wong. Until then, stay safe and so
Speaker 3: long