Speaker 1: On the Bechdel Cast. The questions asked if movies have
Speaker 1: women and them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and
Speaker 1: husbands or do they have individualism? It's the patriarchy, Zephyn Beast.
Speaker 1: Start changing it with the Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 2: Hello Bechdel Cast listeners.
Speaker 1: Hello Jamie and Caitlyn.
Speaker 3: Here a little plug at the top.
Speaker 1: It's all coming together, It's all happening. I am going
Speaker 1: to be going on a book tour for the paperback
Speaker 1: release of my book Raw Dog, The Naked Truth about
Speaker 1: Hot Dogs.
Speaker 2: Ever heard of it?
Speaker 1: It is coming out in soft cover this may. If
Speaker 1: you're hearing this, it is out right now. If you
Speaker 1: are the kind of person that doesn't want to spend
Speaker 1: twenty eight dollars out of book, fair enough, we have
Speaker 1: a more affordable option. And if you haven't purchased the
Speaker 1: book and you know, maybe you're able to now, you know,
Speaker 1: it's also a great gift. I've sound so desperate. The
Speaker 1: thing is, it's a soft cover book, and people love those, and.
Speaker 3: I love a flaccid book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a floppy little book. And if you do
Speaker 1: have the hardcover and you're a completionist, there is also
Speaker 1: a brand new ForWord that I wrote, and also the
Speaker 1: acknowledgments have been adjusted to acknowledge that my agents were Zionists,
Speaker 1: so I don't really thank them anymore. So there's a
Speaker 1: thrilling edition there as well. But there is new stuff
Speaker 1: in the book and it costs less, and we love that.
Speaker 1: I will be going on tour throughout the country to
Speaker 1: promote the new book, and if you're a Bechdel head
Speaker 1: and you're in the area, this is a really great
Speaker 1: chance to come and hang out. It's all I'm at bookstores.
Speaker 1: I did kind of bigger shows the first time around,
Speaker 1: but this time we're just chilling. So you kitling with
Speaker 1: your permission. I'm just going to rattle off some dates.
Speaker 1: What if I was like, no, no, click, I'm going
Speaker 1: to go pee.
Speaker 3: No please, by all means tell us okay.
Speaker 1: May thirteenth, twenty twenty five, almost my birthday. So I
Speaker 1: know I'm missing your birthday. It's an act of violence.
Speaker 1: I will be at North Fig Bookshop in Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: hosted by friend of the cast Julia Clair May fourteenth.
Speaker 1: I will be at Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky. On
Speaker 1: May fifteenth. I will be at the Cambridge Public Library
Speaker 1: in Massachusetts with the Harvard Bookstore, and I will be
Speaker 1: in conversation with one of my dear friends, PBS's own
Speaker 1: Tory Bedford. On the nineteenth of May, I will be
Speaker 1: in Portland, Maine at Longfellow Books, hosted by friend of
Speaker 1: the cast Mayo Williams. I am very very excited. On
Speaker 1: the twentieth, I will be going down to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: my home state. Know they're going to be begging, They're like,
Speaker 1: where are they? I will be at the Midtown Scholar
Speaker 1: Bookstore and Cafe in conversation with Joe Piazza. Then on
Speaker 1: May twenty first, I will be at the Fountain Bookstore
Speaker 1: in Richmond, Virginia. And on May twenty second, I will
Speaker 1: be at Coppersfield Books in Pedaluma, California. And finally, on
Speaker 1: May thirty first, I will be at Marin Country Mart,
Speaker 1: which is also with Coppersfield's book in Larkspur, California. So
Speaker 1: if you live in those areas, please come out. I
Speaker 1: would love to see you. I'd love to chat. Please
Speaker 1: recommend your favorite hot dog. Let's talk Beck tol cast,
Speaker 1: Let's do whatever. And there will be dates announced later
Speaker 1: in the summer. So if you would like a show
Speaker 1: or a signing to happen in your town, please reach
Speaker 1: out and I will send it to my publisher and
Speaker 1: be like, see, I should go there. Anyways, that's a
Speaker 1: great it's begging works sometimes and we'll link this full
Speaker 1: thing and that isscription. But see you soon. I'm making
Speaker 1: a little outfit and that's the Jamie Loftus promise.
Speaker 3: I can't wait to see.
Speaker 1: So if you click the link in the description, it
Speaker 1: will take you to the full page where you can
Speaker 1: register to go to these events. They are all free events,
Speaker 1: so come and hang out and provided that I get
Speaker 1: my shit together in time, there will also be speakers
Speaker 1: from local unions at all of these signings, So come out,
Speaker 1: make some friends, come hang out, and uh, let's eat
Speaker 1: some hot dogs.
Speaker 3: Beautiful. We'll throw the link to be able to access
Speaker 3: registration for the events on our link tree as well
Speaker 3: link tree slash Bechdel Cast, so there's no excuse not
Speaker 3: to come.
Speaker 1: It's free, it's fun. I'll be wearing a little outfit.
Speaker 1: Come buy the book, yay, enjoy the episode the Bechdel Cast.
Speaker 3: Dig It All on, dig It dig It Out, dig.
Speaker 1: It I Wow, I rewatched music video and it seared
Speaker 1: into my brain.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, I didn't know about the music video.
Speaker 4: Oh, Caitlin show, you didn't know about ship?
Speaker 1: Pause the show it just started.
Speaker 5: But it's so good.
Speaker 1: They're having such a nice time. The boys are having fun.
Speaker 3: Okay, I believe it.
Speaker 1: That's the most important thing about the music video. And
Speaker 1: also the song is great and oh my gosh, two
Speaker 1: thousand and three, what a time School of rock an
Speaker 1: holes be serious? Wait, sorry, I you singing that song
Speaker 1: just really put me in a great mood. And I
Speaker 1: forgot what I was gonna say. Oh well, oh, I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, we need to bring back movies where
Speaker 1: there's a song during the credits that summarizes the movie
Speaker 1: you just watched. Yes, you need that. We need to
Speaker 1: bring it back. Maybe it is back in kids' movies.
Speaker 1: And I'm just no longer a child. I hope it
Speaker 1: never stopped. I find it difficult to believe that there
Speaker 1: is a credit. This is like a Will Smith grade
Speaker 1: credits song.
Speaker 3: True Wild Wild West, Men in Black.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the list goes on. I think I'm not actually sure.
Speaker 3: Might be just those two.
Speaker 1: It might, but they're impactful, impactful, welcome, to the Bechdel Cast,
Speaker 1: Do I think one of the one of our our
Speaker 1: longest holdouts for a beloved movie.
Speaker 3: Hold out whole out, whole.
Speaker 2: Again?
Speaker 3: We have our holes out on this episode.
Speaker 1: During this children Yes, we have our holes out during
Speaker 1: the Children's Prison Industrial Complex movie episode. My name's Jamie.
Speaker 1: Locked is my holes not in a way? It's away?
Speaker 3: So are mine talking about that?
Speaker 6: No?
Speaker 1: The hole in my damn face I is going to
Speaker 1: be flapping.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's like that line from Titanic when the.
Speaker 1: Wave you out shut that out? Yeah? All right, well
Speaker 1: things have already is already erupting. What's your name?
Speaker 3: My name is Caitlyn Durnteme awesome. And this is the
Speaker 3: Bechdel Cast, a podcast where we examine movies through an
Speaker 3: intersectional feminist lens, using the Bechdel Test simply as a
Speaker 3: jumping off point. But Jamie, what is it though?
Speaker 1: Well, I'll tell you. The Bechtel Test is a media
Speaker 1: metric created by queer cartoonist Alison Bechdel, often called the
Speaker 1: Bechdel Wallace Test. Created as a test in response to
Speaker 1: the fact that queer women were never in movies at all,
Speaker 1: it has since been sort of more generalized into what
Speaker 1: we use. Our version of the test requires that two
Speaker 1: characters of a marginalized gender with names talk to each
Speaker 1: other about something other than a man for two lines
Speaker 1: of dialogue. This is an interesting case. This is an
Speaker 1: interesting case. We're spiritually this know this movie passes the
Speaker 1: Bechtel test to.
Speaker 3: Me, sure, but it is. But there is.
Speaker 1: I think there's two women and one is dead. They
Speaker 1: don't exist on the same timelines. So it's a challenge.
Speaker 1: It's a challenge. Patricia Arquette and Sigourney Weaver are separated
Speaker 1: by generations, true and political differences.
Speaker 3: Yes, all of the above. Yeah, well, we'll talk about
Speaker 3: that further, but we'll also talk about so many other
Speaker 3: things because this is a rich text.
Speaker 1: Yes, because it is a perfect movie.
Speaker 3: It's so good. And joining us for this discussion is
Speaker 3: writer actor. She's in an upcoming horror comedy movie called
Speaker 3: Bad Karaoke. You know her from our past episodes on
Speaker 3: Us Get Out and Cheetah Girls. It's Carama Donquay.
Speaker 6: Welcome, Thank you for having me again. I would like
Speaker 6: to just issue a correction right off the bat. Five
Speaker 6: women in this movie.
Speaker 1: That's true because there there's a lawyer Stanley's mother. Yes,
Speaker 1: what else we got?
Speaker 6: There's there's the former student of kissing Kate Barlowe, whose
Speaker 6: name is said. And I think it passes because they
Speaker 6: talk about how she used to be a student.
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, okay, we're going to talk about the treasure.
Speaker 6: So legally it passes, not just to you, Jamie, not
Speaker 6: just spiritually.
Speaker 1: Okay, that is that is a relief.
Speaker 5: But it was it was tight.
Speaker 1: It was very close, and they made us wait to
Speaker 1: the very end. Then.
Speaker 3: But I think maybe the lawyer and the warden also talk.
Speaker 1: I think they're talking about Stanley.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're talking about the boys at all times.
Speaker 1: We're talking about the crime as a.
Speaker 5: Boy of man is a.
Speaker 1: Man, no women and children. This is getting complicated. Thank
Speaker 1: you Karma for solving the podcast right at the top.
Speaker 1: And now we you just talk about the movie itself
Speaker 1: because this is a rich text. Thank you for coming
Speaker 1: onto the Wholes episode. Can you tell us about your
Speaker 1: history with this movie, the book, the Holes Expanded universe.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna start with something that sounds like it's not related.
Speaker 6: I promise it is related. So recently, I was at
Speaker 6: a family friend's house and one of her neighbors came
Speaker 6: over and she was like, why do I know you?
Speaker 6: And my friend Jackie was like, oh, well, Karama used
Speaker 6: to come over all the time when we were little,
Speaker 6: and she didn't have cable at her house, so she
Speaker 6: would come over here. And so I had like a
Speaker 6: cable friend, as many kids who didn't have cable had.
Speaker 6: And I watched this at my cable friend's house when
Speaker 6: I was growing up, and I would see the Diggot
Speaker 6: music video on Disney Channel all the time. I still
Speaker 6: knew all the words. I don't know if I can
Speaker 6: say them on the podcast. I don't want to get
Speaker 6: you guys in trouble for singing too much of it.
Speaker 6: But when he started spelling like a MP at the TI,
Speaker 6: I was like, yes, yes, this is rap music, this
Speaker 6: is real rap music.
Speaker 5: Migos step aside.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's all happening on Radio Disney. They even had
Speaker 1: a band named De Tent Boys. Yes, yeah, this was
Speaker 1: a single they were. I mean, this was run Ragged
Speaker 1: on Radio Disney in the early two thousands, and I
Speaker 1: was a.
Speaker 6: Radio Disney kid when I moved to Ghana. When I
Speaker 6: was little, my dad would send me cassette tapes of
Speaker 6: like just hours of Radio Disney because I missed it
Speaker 6: so much.
Speaker 5: It's really sweet, I know, but also like scary that
Speaker 5: the mouse had that much of a hold on me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the mouse will find you wherever we go. But
Speaker 1: this is a rare I'm excited to talk about the
Speaker 1: production of this movie because this seems like a very
Speaker 1: rare Disney movie where it seems like they were relatively
Speaker 1: hands off with this, and the director said it was
Speaker 1: basically like creating an independent movie with Disney money, which
Speaker 1: is cool. I'm excited to get into it because I
Speaker 1: was surprised at because I reread. I got mostly through
Speaker 1: the book to reread it before, and it's they've changed
Speaker 1: so little because for once, they let the author write
Speaker 1: the screenplay.
Speaker 3: They never do that.
Speaker 5: And also the main thing that they change.
Speaker 6: I actually am for it because the main thing that
Speaker 6: they changed for people who either haven't read the book
Speaker 6: or don't remember the book is that Stanley is a
Speaker 6: pretty chubby kid in the book, and.
Speaker 5: Through digging he actually loses a lot of weight.
Speaker 6: But they didn't want to put Shila buff in a
Speaker 6: fat suit, and they didn't want to subject a child
Speaker 6: to a major like Christian Bale weight shift. So I
Speaker 6: think that that is actually, like, I'm all for a
Speaker 6: fat representation in film.
Speaker 5: I love that representation in film.
Speaker 6: I think that this was the better choice in this
Speaker 6: instance because I don't like fat suits. I think that
Speaker 6: they're dehumanizing, and I don't like torturing children.
Speaker 1: So they still tortured the children a little bit, but
Speaker 1: mostly with heat. Yes, But but yeah, no, I totally agree.
Speaker 1: I forgot that that was sort of the most major change,
Speaker 1: and I don't Yeah, it's I felt like rereading the
Speaker 1: book that it was, you know, I don't think meant
Speaker 1: to be a cruel outcome, but it's sort of lent
Speaker 1: this morality to Stanley's weight loss and and sort of
Speaker 1: presented it as a well, at least he's not chubby anymore,
Speaker 1: in a way that I felt like was not good
Speaker 1: representation if they had adapted it in that way. On
Speaker 1: top of what you're saying, the thing that was changed
Speaker 1: that I wish it stayed was there was more context
Speaker 1: for stan Lee's arrest. I get why they have to
Speaker 1: keep it focused on zero, but he was like really
Speaker 1: severely bullied in school, and they show like how his
Speaker 1: bullying very much factored into his arrest, and like fear
Speaker 1: of standing up for himself stuff. But other than that,
Speaker 1: it's basically all they're They're dropping damns, they're cussing.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 1: The adults are a series of unfortunate events, level evil
Speaker 1: like it's great. So okay, so you so you you
Speaker 1: watched it at cable friend's house.
Speaker 6: Yes, that was a frequent rewatch because they would run
Speaker 6: it on Disney Channel a lot. And I was a
Speaker 6: big fan of Lewis Accer, the author. I was a
Speaker 6: Wayside Stories girl from Wayside School.
Speaker 5: Loved it.
Speaker 6: Good Wayside School gets a Little Stranger my favorite of them.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah, I gotta reread.
Speaker 6: But I was a big fan of like that sort
Speaker 6: of universe of like wacky but real. And I remember
Speaker 6: distinctly Lewis Sacer had like three kids in the Wayside
Speaker 6: School that had the same name, and I don't remember
Speaker 6: their name, but he would describe one of them as
Speaker 6: being tall and fat, and it's the first time it
Speaker 6: occurred to me that somebody could be tall and fat.
Speaker 6: But it was always like a very neutral descriptor. It
Speaker 6: was just like, these are the way the kids look,
Speaker 6: And I was like, whoa people can look all kinds
Speaker 6: of ways that's wacky. So opened my mind up a
Speaker 6: lot and a lot of love for this movie. I
Speaker 6: have a lot of love for adaptations, specifically. I know
Speaker 6: that you guys probably remember, but our listeners maybe don't that.
Speaker 6: I used to be a co host of a podcast
Speaker 6: called Popcorn Book Club where we talked about page to
Speaker 6: screen adaptations, and I would constantly talk about Holes on
Speaker 6: that podcast. We never covered it, but I was like, guys,
Speaker 6: Holes is the perfect adaptation film. It is so true
Speaker 6: to the original text, and when it is not true
Speaker 6: to the text, that is.
Speaker 5: True to the spirit of it. It is amazing.
Speaker 6: And one of our co hosts had never seen it,
Speaker 6: and I was just like, I don't know how you're
Speaker 6: breathing air on this planet being an adult woman of
Speaker 6: a certain age who has never seen Holes.
Speaker 1: It is like a It is weird. It does feel
Speaker 1: like it's such a beloved millennial classic, but I wonder
Speaker 1: I don't know if kids are still finding it. I
Speaker 1: hope they are probably not. I mean the unfortunately, the
Speaker 1: shil abuff of it all does make it a harder
Speaker 1: sell because he's a fucking monster. I think he's like
Speaker 1: fourteen when this was, you know, child stardom should be illegal.
Speaker 1: But that's a conversation for another day. But okay, I
Speaker 1: also was a huge fan of the book and the movie.
Speaker 1: I forget when I think this was just like at
Speaker 1: every school in the early two thousands, like every kid
Speaker 1: read these books read wayside school. There's a kind of
Speaker 1: I had to look it up to be like, what
Speaker 1: was that Lewis Sakar, he wrote, it's a B side,
Speaker 1: Dogs Don't Tell Jokes. I remember reading Dogs Don't Tell
Speaker 1: Jokes because it is about a child's stand up comic
Speaker 1: who pees his pants, and I was like, wow, aspirational
Speaker 1: me someday. And I guess that Dogs Don't Tell Jokes
Speaker 1: had an impact on me because he's like, I had
Speaker 1: to check the plot. Gary Boon, who calls himself Goon,
Speaker 1: is the self proclaimed clown of his seventh grade class.
Speaker 1: He never stops joking despite the fact that nobody laughs
Speaker 1: much and he has no real friends. So he joins
Speaker 1: a talent contest as a stand up comedian, and he
Speaker 1: roasts everybody, and he hurts a lot of feelings, and
Speaker 1: then he learns that being a stand up comic parentheses
Speaker 1: evil is not the way to.
Speaker 3: Go well at least a roast comedian.
Speaker 1: It's true. Yes, he literally goes full roasting at the
Speaker 1: store and then learns those people don't like that.
Speaker 6: I think we need to wallpaper men's bathrooms in comedy
Speaker 6: clugs with the pages.
Speaker 1: Of this book with dogs. Don't tell you don't be
Speaker 1: like Gary. It did not help him make friends just
Speaker 1: like you. So but yeah, big lewis a car fan.
Speaker 1: I mean, like you're saying, krama, the wayside school books
Speaker 1: were so silly and like fantastical, and the fact that
Speaker 1: he wrote holes as well, I mean, the range incredible.
Speaker 1: I loved the book, loved the movie. Of course, Being
Speaker 1: ten when this came out, I had a crush. I
Speaker 1: had a crush on zero zero was my big time crush.
Speaker 1: Cleo Thomas. I had a picture of him in my room. Yeah,
Speaker 1: loved the song. But then, I mean, it's a great
Speaker 1: movie to come back to, not only because there are
Speaker 1: more crushes for you as you age, like today Hill,
Speaker 1: who I know we're going to be talking about quite
Speaker 1: a bit. He can fix that. But but just like
Speaker 1: what a beautiful like you're saying, like, what a beautiful
Speaker 1: adaptation it is. How it weaves together like five storylines
Speaker 1: in this really effortless way, and that it is an
Speaker 1: anti carceral children's book that is four kids but adapted
Speaker 1: in a way that doesn't talk down to them. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's an amazing movie. I'm so excited to talk about it.
Speaker 6: It's a real testament to the fact that people are like, oh,
Speaker 6: kids can't understand that. Kids can't understand that, and no,
Speaker 6: you just can't explain it, right, You're just not good
Speaker 6: and explain there is a way for kids to understand
Speaker 6: literally everything, Like, sorry, there are kids who are soldiers
Speaker 6: in war in some parts of the world, Like they
Speaker 6: can understand things. The way to explain it to them
Speaker 6: is the issue. And I think that this is a
Speaker 6: really good way to explain the school to prison pipeline,
Speaker 6: issues with incarceration and just institutional racism.
Speaker 5: Just all of this stuff is very.
Speaker 6: Clearly outlined in a way that is developmentally appropriate.
Speaker 3: Totally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like puts a face in a name to
Speaker 1: these issues. And I think the like maybe the only
Speaker 1: unhoused character that I saw in movies as a kid
Speaker 1: that is not played as a joke or as a
Speaker 1: personal failing or you know how often we see on
Speaker 1: like it's just it's so good, it's doing so much,
Speaker 1: and then it has the audacity to be a really
Speaker 1: good movie, I know. And what a cast. Anyways, Kaitlyn
Speaker 1: wants her history with Holes.
Speaker 3: Okay, I read the book in the late nineties, because
Speaker 3: it was published in ninety eight. I probably read it
Speaker 3: in ninety nine. I would have been a tween at
Speaker 3: the time, and I loved it. And then the movie
Speaker 3: came out a few years later and I saw it
Speaker 3: in theaters. I would have been I think a junior
Speaker 3: senior in high school at that point, so I was
Speaker 3: old enough that my big crush was Dula Hill and
Speaker 3: still to this day.
Speaker 1: You're Not Made of Stone, Yeah, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I thought it was such an incredible story. And
Speaker 3: then we got the movie on DVD and I watched
Speaker 3: it with my sister on repeat, and I chose this
Speaker 3: movie for my not to be a bit but it
Speaker 3: is my birthday episode. Oh yay, So this is like
Speaker 3: my birthday pick. That's how much I love this movie.
Speaker 3: I don't think it's without its flaws, but I think
Speaker 3: the flaws are few and far between, especially considering it's
Speaker 3: a movie from the early two thousands and that was
Speaker 3: just a flawed time yeah, so, yeah, I deeply love
Speaker 3: this movie and I'm so excited to talk about it.
Speaker 6: I will say embarrassingly, I was twelve when it came out,
Speaker 6: so my crush was Shilah buff which has not aged Well.
Speaker 1: My Kurt wouldn't convict you. It made sense at the time.
Speaker 1: He was on Even Stevens.
Speaker 6: Loved Evan Stevens. My dance teacher. My dance teacher choreographed
Speaker 6: Even Steven's Influenza. I remember when she had to miss
Speaker 6: class because she was doing Even Steven's Influenza, and I
Speaker 6: was just like, that's so cool.
Speaker 1: Wow, that show was cooking. I think about the song
Speaker 1: about going to space a lot. We went to the
Speaker 1: Moon in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 5: Nine, not nineteen seventy, the year before four.
Speaker 1: Uh huh oh no, it's a millennial circle jerk episode. Well,
Speaker 1: here's the thing.
Speaker 3: I was one of the Friends without Cable as well,
Speaker 3: So I've never seen a single episode of Even Stevens,
Speaker 3: and I think I probably was aged out of it anyway.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I don't know what you guys are talking about.
Speaker 1: I know, I don't think there's any need to return.
Speaker 1: It was just the age of the musical episode Even
Speaker 1: Stevens had a musical episode and it was iconic, memorable.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it was called Influenza, as one of the main
Speaker 6: characters had the flu and so she was like having
Speaker 6: a fever dream and everybody was singing in the fever dream.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, fine, but this is uh.
Speaker 1: I think this is Shia Labuff's first movie.
Speaker 6: It's introducing in the credits. I was like, oh, like
Speaker 6: I was. I was a little emotional. I was just like, wow,
Speaker 6: that's where it all started.
Speaker 1: Yikes, and oh that it had gone another way. But
Speaker 1: the kids, I mean, it's very famous adult cast and
Speaker 1: then a bunch of kids outside of chilah Buff I
Speaker 1: think mostly unknowns. I think Cleo Thomas had done some stuff.
Speaker 1: I saw he was on Kids Say the Darndest Things,
Speaker 1: so he was child starring out. But so Gourney Weaver,
Speaker 1: John Voight, Tim Blake Nelson, Henry Winkler. I remember my
Speaker 1: mom being like, that's the Fonds because we will watch
Speaker 1: Happy Days on Nick at night and I was like,
Speaker 1: why isn't he cool anymore?
Speaker 3: And earth A Kitar the Kid, Oh my god.
Speaker 1: One of her final film performances Delay Hill Patricia Arquette,
Speaker 1: and they managed to make the movie for seventeen million dollars.
Speaker 1: Don't know how that worked, but yeah, they brought a
Speaker 1: bunch of kids to the desert and made one of
Speaker 1: the greatest movies of all time.
Speaker 3: Yes, let's take a quick break and then we'll come
Speaker 3: back for the cap.
Speaker 1: And we're back.
Speaker 6: Okay.
Speaker 3: Here is the story of Holes. We open on a
Speaker 3: place that we will learn is a juvenile detention facility
Speaker 3: where teenage boys are out in the hot sun digging
Speaker 3: holes in the dirt. One of them purposefully gets bitten
Speaker 3: by a rattlesnake so that he can be sent home,
Speaker 3: and that's going to open up a spot at this facility.
Speaker 1: And you're all like, immediate. I hadn't seen this movie
Speaker 1: in a couple of years, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: from moment one, they're not fucking around.
Speaker 5: This is a dark, cold open.
Speaker 6: I would rather potentially die, literally die.
Speaker 1: Than another hole, which was added for the mo It
Speaker 1: does not happen in the book. They're just like something
Speaker 1: something barf bag. But they started as a full on,
Speaker 1: like active You're just like okay, okay, director of the Fugitive,
Speaker 1: Let's Go. Let's Go.
Speaker 3: Also one of my favorite movies.
Speaker 1: I've never seen it. I just thought it was like,
Speaker 1: what a this is? I think his first and only
Speaker 1: children's movie.
Speaker 3: I think so yeah, because he had been known for
Speaker 3: action movies.
Speaker 1: Collateral Damage came out like so weird.
Speaker 3: It does happen in the book that barf bag gets bitten,
Speaker 3: but it happens off screen, Like you don't see that
Speaker 3: scene play out. They just reference it after the fact.
Speaker 3: But in any case. We cut to stan Lee Yonnat's
Speaker 3: the fourth played by Shilah buff who is on his
Speaker 3: way to this facility because he was wrongfully accused and
Speaker 3: arrested for stealing a pair of shoes that seemed to
Speaker 3: have fallen from the sky and land on his head.
Speaker 3: And he goes on to say that he has bad
Speaker 3: luck and he always seems to be in the wrong
Speaker 3: place at the wrong time, which his family blames on
Speaker 3: a one hundred and fifty year old family curse. We
Speaker 3: meet his mom played by Chavon Fallen Hogan, and his
Speaker 3: dad played by Henry Winkler, who is an inventor trying
Speaker 3: to find the cure for foot odor. We also meet
Speaker 3: his grandfather, all of whom Stanley has to leave behind
Speaker 3: when a judge sentences him to eighteen months at the
Speaker 3: detention facility called Camp Green Lake, where there used to
Speaker 3: be a lake, but it dried up long ago and
Speaker 3: now it's a barren wasteland as far as the eye
Speaker 3: can see. At Camp Green Lake, Stanley meets mister Sir
Speaker 3: played by John Voight, who tells Stanley that he's expected
Speaker 3: to dig one hole in the dirt every single day.
Speaker 3: It has to be five feet deep, five feet in diameter,
Speaker 3: and this will build character quote unquote, I love.
Speaker 1: How instantly, Yeah, like how instantly it is clear to
Speaker 1: kids and anyone how ridiculous this is. Or it's like
Speaker 1: that line where it's like, yeah, you bring a boy
Speaker 1: to camp and you make him dig a hole every
Speaker 1: day and he turns into a good boy, and that's
Speaker 1: our belief. You're like, ah's that is just describing prison.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm just like, yeah, holes they make you so wholesome.
Speaker 2: They didn't even try. They didn't even try. It was
Speaker 2: right there.
Speaker 1: They're like, no, dig a hole, be a good boy.
Speaker 3: You're like, okay, right. Mister Starr also tells Stanley to
Speaker 3: beware of yellow spotted lizards, who are highly poisonous and lethal,
Speaker 3: and if one bites you, you will die a slow
Speaker 3: and painful death.
Speaker 1: Really good two thousand and three, CGI on the Lizards.
Speaker 1: You're like, there was a tennis ball there.
Speaker 5: You can almost steel the tennis.
Speaker 1: Energy with a racket.
Speaker 3: So then we meet Stanley's counselor, doctor Pandanski played by
Speaker 3: Tim Blake Nelson, who assigns him to d tent where
Speaker 3: Stanley meets other incarcerated teens who he'll be digging holes
Speaker 3: next to. They all have nicknames like x Ray, Zigzag, Squid, Armpit, Magnet,
Speaker 3: and Zero Zero, who doctor Pandensky is especially cruel to
Speaker 3: because he thinks Zero is unintelligent and worthless.
Speaker 1: Doctor Pandanski is such a fascinating care again, just like
Speaker 1: another adult pretending to be good who is actually fucking
Speaker 1: awful and talks shit about the kids he's supposed to
Speaker 1: be taken care of behind our backs. The first second
Speaker 1: he gets I think again, I've only seen it in
Speaker 1: series of unfortunate events, like adults who are as bad
Speaker 1: as it seems.
Speaker 6: And also from jump we get that he is very
Speaker 6: much about calling the kids by their government names, even
Speaker 6: though they have names and they'd like to be called
Speaker 6: And then like it's giving what your name is Toby,
Speaker 6: what's your name? Not like that?
Speaker 5: And except for zero, he keeps.
Speaker 6: Calling zero zero, and it's like, there's nothing going on
Speaker 6: up there, your little dumb dummy.
Speaker 1: Right, And he like explicitly says that he feels comfortable
Speaker 1: doing that because no one is looking out for zero
Speaker 1: and so he doesn't matter, like it's just like it's
Speaker 1: I don't know. I thought it's a good performance too,
Speaker 1: because he's really putting on the hateful guidance counselor vibe
Speaker 1: big time. And then you find out at the ante
Speaker 1: never got.
Speaker 3: His degree, and you're like, fuck this guy, right, So
Speaker 3: stan Lee settles in and starts to learn the ropes.
Speaker 3: He reveals that the shoes he was accused of stealing
Speaker 3: belonged to Livingston, a famous baseball player, who had donated
Speaker 3: those shoes to be sold at a charity auction to
Speaker 3: raise money for an unhoused shelter. And so that's why
Speaker 3: it was like such a huge deal that Stanley is
Speaker 3: presumed to have stolen them and why he's sent to.
Speaker 1: This and he, like the famous baseball player literally calls
Speaker 1: a child a horrible person in court. So I was like,
Speaker 1: easy man, easy, He's like twelve.
Speaker 3: So then we flash back to Stanlee with his mom, dad,
Speaker 3: and grandpa, who talk about the family curse how Stanley's
Speaker 3: great grandpa made a fortune in the stock market but
Speaker 3: was robbed by a famous outlaw kissing Kate Barlow due
Speaker 3: to the family curse and his bad luck. We'll find
Speaker 3: more about the curse soon, but back to the present,
Speaker 3: Stanley starts digging his first hole. He's told that if
Speaker 3: he finds anything that the warden thinks is interesting, he
Speaker 3: could get the rest of the day off. So he
Speaker 3: starts digging and it's hot and difficult and grueling, and
Speaker 3: then we flash back to stan Lee's no good, dirty, rotten,
Speaker 3: pig stealing great great grandfather, Elia Yell Nats, who lives
Speaker 3: in a small village in Latvia. He's in love with
Speaker 3: a woman named Myra Menke, who he wants to marry,
Speaker 3: but her father wants her to marry a different man
Speaker 3: because that guy is offering him his biggest pig in
Speaker 3: exchange for his daughter because women equal property. So Elia
Speaker 3: goes to a fortune teller named Madame Zarni played by
Speaker 3: the legend earth A Kit.
Speaker 1: Who I only knew at the time as you're like
Speaker 1: it's Easma from the other movie. And then later you
Speaker 1: find out she is a legend.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like the President was scared of her at one point. Legend.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, so good.
Speaker 3: Yes, And she tells Ellia to carry a baby pig
Speaker 3: up a mountain and let it drink from the stream
Speaker 3: while he sings to it over the course of I
Speaker 3: don't know, a few weeks or something, and it will
Speaker 3: make the pig grow and then he'll have a pig
Speaker 3: to offer Myra's father. And then Madames Roney says, okay,
Speaker 3: when you're done with that, Now you have to carry
Speaker 3: me up the mountain so I can drink from the
Speaker 3: stream and get strong. And if you fail to do that,
Speaker 3: I will put a curse on your family for always
Speaker 3: an eternity.
Speaker 1: That line read really stuck with me, always an eternity,
Speaker 1: Like it's such a good read.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And Ellia forgets to honor this promise before he
Speaker 3: immigrates to the US, hence the yell NAT's family curse.
Speaker 3: Back to Stanley, he finishes his first hole and then
Speaker 3: it's either the next day or a few days later,
Speaker 3: but Stanley finds a fossil in his hole and shows
Speaker 3: it to Pendanski hoping that the warden will find it
Speaker 3: interesting and that he'll get the rest of the day off.
Speaker 3: But the warden is not interested in fossils. Now, x Ray,
Speaker 3: who's kind of the leader of the boys who live
Speaker 3: in Dtent, tells Stanley to give him anything else he
Speaker 3: finds since x Ray has like seniority. Then we flash
Speaker 3: back to one hundred or so years ago when there
Speaker 3: was a lake in this location. We meet Sam played
Speaker 3: by Julae Hill, who is an onion farmer and he
Speaker 3: sells all kinds of medicinal onion based remedies. And then
Speaker 3: we also meet a school teacher who makes spiced peaches,
Speaker 3: Mss Catherine played by Patricia Arquette.
Speaker 1: And you're like, these actors are hot. I wonder what
Speaker 1: will happen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the two of them are vibing and they exchange,
Speaker 3: you know, onions and peaches. Then we also meet this
Speaker 3: rich prick named trout Walker, who has taken a liking
Speaker 3: to Miss Catherine and will return to this storyline. But
Speaker 3: in the meantime, back in the present, Stanley's peers finally
Speaker 3: give him a nickname, Caveman, so he's like one of
Speaker 3: them now. Then he learns that zero the kid who
Speaker 3: mostly keeps to himself. He only seems to talk to
Speaker 3: caveman slash Stanley, and we find out that he cannot read,
Speaker 3: so Zero asks Stanley if he'll teach him to read,
Speaker 3: but Stanley says that he's too tired at the end
Speaker 3: of every day and he just wants to chill. The
Speaker 3: next day, Stanley finds something peculiar while he's digging his hole.
Speaker 3: It's this like small golden cylindrical tube that looks like
Speaker 3: it might be a bullet or a shellcasing of some kind,
Speaker 3: and it has the letters KB engraved on it. So
Speaker 3: Stanley gives it to x Ray per his request, who
Speaker 3: shows it to Pandanski, who calls the warden, and we
Speaker 3: finally see the warden on screen, who turns out to
Speaker 3: be a whoa whoa whoa woman?
Speaker 5: What women can be bad too?
Speaker 2: Lewis Nakara is not afraid to say it.
Speaker 1: Oh her nail polish. That is such a good detail
Speaker 1: at Oh that scene in the book like really stuck
Speaker 1: with me where she puts on her evil lady nail
Speaker 1: polish and then slaps John backhands John voy she's doing it.
Speaker 1: I didn't never realize she's also wearing a sports braw
Speaker 1: In that scene, You're like, this is nuts, Like she
Speaker 1: just finished doing like yoga on zoom and then she
Speaker 1: like almost kills John Voyd.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty awesome. That happens a little later. First, yes,
Speaker 3: we meet her, it's so Corney Weaver. She gives x
Speaker 3: Ray the rest of the day off for finding this
Speaker 3: interesting item, and then she orders everyone to dig around
Speaker 3: x Ray's hole, thinking that that's where the bullet thing
Speaker 3: came from, but we all know that it came from
Speaker 3: a different hole of Stanley's. Then we flash back to
Speaker 3: Miss Catherine and Sam. He helps her fix up the schoolhouse.
Speaker 3: If there's a leaky roof or a broken window. He says,
Speaker 3: I can fix that, and they're falling in love. And meanwhile,
Speaker 3: that rich fuck trout Walker wants to take Miss Catherine
Speaker 3: out for a picnic, but she declines and he does
Speaker 3: not handle rejection. Well. Yeah, and one night he sees
Speaker 3: Miss Catherine and Sam kissing in the schoolhouse.
Speaker 1: Because he sees her crying and says, I can fix that.
Speaker 2: It's really that would work.
Speaker 6: On the iphear I folded like a lawn chair, Like
Speaker 6: I'm done, let's close the windows.
Speaker 1: We're having a party, one of the most popular letterbox reviews.
Speaker 1: Will someone tell mister I can fix that that my
Speaker 1: pussy's broken?
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh my god, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: I also love that there is this It's like, not
Speaker 1: it's a whatever, like one of a million themes in
Speaker 1: this movie, but that even in the flashbacks, there is
Speaker 1: this theme of literacy and gate keeping education because she
Speaker 1: also teaches night classes to the same men who are
Speaker 1: fucking creeping on her. But it's like the movie isn't
Speaker 1: I don't know. The movie is saying like, these guys
Speaker 1: are awful, but also they are you know, like at
Speaker 1: a disadvantage as well.
Speaker 6: And she believes that despite the fact that they are awful,
Speaker 6: they deserve the you know, privileges that literacy Ford's one
Speaker 6: in society, right. And on top of that, she's reading
Speaker 6: the kids like an Edgar Allan Poe poem and Sam
Speaker 6: can the poem and I'm like, oh, Stallar, we love it,
Speaker 6: love it. He's so fine.
Speaker 1: I think it is. I think it is an one
Speaker 1: of those Edgar Allan Poe poems that is like about
Speaker 1: fucking his cousin. But the spirit of it.
Speaker 2: It's the spirit of it it's fine.
Speaker 1: Annabel Lee was redeemed by delay Hill also.
Speaker 6: Petition to start calling them Edgar Allan Poems. I just
Speaker 6: feel like it's it's.
Speaker 3: Cleaner, it's right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's that's your ear doing justin Timberlake in the
Speaker 1: social note and then just stomp out of the room.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 3: So, yes, this is a white woman and a black
Speaker 3: man kissing in Jim Crow, Texas. So trout Walker sees this.
Speaker 3: He alerts the town people, who start a riot. They
Speaker 3: burn down the schoolhouse, they go after Sam. Miss Catherine
Speaker 3: tells the sheriff, who has no intention of stopping any
Speaker 3: of this.
Speaker 1: No, he just like hits on her.
Speaker 3: He harasses and prays on her.
Speaker 6: I've been called slurs in my life. I gotta say
Speaker 6: Onion Picker was scarily slurry when he was like, kiss
Speaker 6: the onion picker.
Speaker 1: I feel it, Yeah, onion Picker with a hard R.
Speaker 3: That's a lot, yeah yeah yeah. And right after this,
Speaker 3: the racist mob catches up to Sam. They kill his
Speaker 3: beloved donkey Mary Lou, and they murder Sam. We cut
Speaker 3: back to the present. The boys are still digging collectively
Speaker 3: while the warden supervises and clearly expects them to find something,
Speaker 3: but nothing else is found because, to quote Raiders of
Speaker 3: the Lost Arc, they're digging in the wrong place. Wow,
Speaker 3: so thank you so much.
Speaker 1: It's a little Seinfeld edge to that.
Speaker 3: That's just how they say it in the movie. That
Speaker 3: was unintentional, but the warden has them returned to digging
Speaker 3: individual holes when no other items are found. Back to
Speaker 3: the past, Miss Catherine pays another visit to the sheriff
Speaker 3: and kills him for not preventing the racist mob murdering Sam.
Speaker 3: And this is the start of her becoming the famous
Speaker 3: outlaw kissing Kate Barlow. We cut back to the present.
Speaker 3: Magnet steals mister Sirr's sunflower seeds from his truck and
Speaker 3: Stanley takes the blame for it. And so this is
Speaker 3: the scene, Jamie, that you were talking about where mister
Speaker 3: Sir takes Stanley to see the warden, but rather than
Speaker 3: getting in trouble, the warden smacks mister Surr's face while
Speaker 3: she has wet rattlesnake, venom nail polish on.
Speaker 2: Ooh ooh wah.
Speaker 1: It is a very like feminist You know, you could
Speaker 1: make your arguments against it, but it's just such a
Speaker 1: good idea that I will not be hearing criticisms of
Speaker 1: the snake Venom nail.
Speaker 6: Pasha, and Mister responds by saying, all I do is
Speaker 6: give you love and affection.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's implied that he has a crush on her
Speaker 3: because he's always like fixing his hair when he's about
Speaker 3: to see her and stuff.
Speaker 1: It's also it's another I mean John Voyd, another bad man, yes,
Speaker 1: who gives a really great performance in this It's true.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Stanley returns to his hole and he discovers
Speaker 3: the Zero finished digging it for him, and so Stanlee
Speaker 3: offers to teach Zero to read after all, and in exchange,
Speaker 3: Zero will help Stanley dig his hole every day. So
Speaker 3: they start lessons and Zero is like, by the way,
Speaker 3: my real name is Hector's Zerny, And we're like, hmm,
Speaker 3: where have we heard the name Zarny before. So then
Speaker 3: Hector tells Stanley about his past, how he and his
Speaker 3: mom moved around a lot, then they became unhoused and
Speaker 3: one day his mom had to leave him somewhere and
Speaker 3: she didn't come back, and Hector never found out what
Speaker 3: happened to her. And he says, if I could, I
Speaker 3: would hire a whole team of private investigators to find her.
Speaker 3: We'll put a pin in that. The other boys meanwhile
Speaker 3: resent that Stanley is getting help digging his hole, and
Speaker 3: a fight breaks out and it culminates in Hector hitting
Speaker 3: Pendanski in the head with a shovel and running off.
Speaker 1: That Zero is the best character.
Speaker 3: Oh, he truly.
Speaker 1: Beats the shit out of you. Oh he's so great.
Speaker 1: There's a quote from Because there was a There was
Speaker 1: a I think it was like two years ago. There
Speaker 1: was a short oral history for the twentieth anniversary, and
Speaker 1: Cleia Thomas says Zero is not the most Disney friendly character.
Speaker 1: Like he was grabbing eight balls ready to fight. He
Speaker 1: hit a guy with a shovel, he choked somebody out.
Speaker 1: I keep thinking about how this character I'm playing might
Speaker 1: be the biggest gangster in Disney history. It was crazy,
Speaker 1: and I kind of forget how like Zero, I mean,
Speaker 1: he stands up for himself. He's the coolest.
Speaker 3: It's awesome. So Zero aka Hector runs away from camp.
Speaker 3: The warden, Mister Cyr and Pandanski discuss deleting Hector's 'errony's
Speaker 3: files and pretending like he was never at Camp Green
Speaker 3: Lake because he's a ward of the state. There's no
Speaker 3: known family looking for him, so they're like, we can
Speaker 3: just basically delete his existence from ever having been here.
Speaker 3: So Stanley's thinking about Hector now being out in this
Speaker 3: barren wasteland with no water, no food, no shelter from
Speaker 3: the elements kind of thing, and he recalls his grandpa
Speaker 3: telling him about his great grandpa who kissing Kate Barlow,
Speaker 3: robbed and left stranded in the desert for sixteen days,
Speaker 3: and how he apparently found refuge on God's thumb, whatever
Speaker 3: that means. Then a new kid named Twitch arrives to
Speaker 3: take Hector's spot at the camp and he helps Stanley
Speaker 3: steal mister Sirr's truck, which Stanley drives off to find Hector.
Speaker 3: He almost immediately drives it into a hole, but Stanley
Speaker 3: keeps going. He runs off away from camp and he
Speaker 3: finds an overturned boat in the dirt where Hector's hiding out.
Speaker 3: Hector offers Stanley some Splosh, which is the one hundred
Speaker 3: year old spiced peaches that Miss Catherine made and gave
Speaker 3: to Sam. Because this is Sam's boat.
Speaker 1: It's all connected.
Speaker 3: So I think the worst part of this movie slash
Speaker 3: book story in general is the words.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they.
Speaker 3: Really needed to do a second draft on that. But anyway,
Speaker 3: I think it's.
Speaker 6: A fun word for kids, but like as an adult
Speaker 6: and like it sounds too much like things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I don't want to.
Speaker 5: Think about Hector's rony drinking things.
Speaker 1: I also is like, I feel like I have looked
Speaker 1: this up on past years, like can peaches like last
Speaker 1: like that?
Speaker 3: I think if they're preserved properly, right, maybe I.
Speaker 5: Just assume it's a little magic.
Speaker 4: Also, to be fair, he gets immediately ill from that's true.
Speaker 1: He just started throwing up the passing for days. That's true.
Speaker 1: That's true.
Speaker 3: So Stanley and Hector try to figure out what to
Speaker 3: do next. In the distance, they see a mountain that's
Speaker 3: sort of in the shape of a thumbs up, and
Speaker 3: they think maybe that's what Stanley's great grandpa meant about
Speaker 3: finding refuge on God's thumb. So they head there. They
Speaker 3: climb the mountain. It's a long difficult journey. Hector gets
Speaker 3: stick along the way from drinking this blush. So Stanley
Speaker 3: carries Hector Zarny aka Madam Zarroni's great great great grandson
Speaker 3: up the Mountain to drink from the water they find there,
Speaker 3: which effectively lifts the yell NAT's family curse. They find
Speaker 3: a bunch of onions and eat them because also this
Speaker 3: was Sam's secret onion garden. Again it's all connected. And
Speaker 3: then also at this exact moment back at Stanley's house,
Speaker 3: Stanley's dad finally invents the cure to foot odor and
Speaker 3: the secret ingredients peaches and onions.
Speaker 1: I don't yeah, again, there you have to magic it
Speaker 1: a little bit to be like onions cure or did
Speaker 1: it just make odor smell.
Speaker 5: They were boiled? I don't know. I believe.
Speaker 1: I believe that the fawn's cured foot oder.
Speaker 5: I'm not a chemist.
Speaker 6: I don't know what's in the onion that interacts with
Speaker 6: the peach that makes.
Speaker 3: It smell real, because a caramelized onion has a very
Speaker 3: sweet night true's and taste.
Speaker 1: It is beautiful that the legacy of their love cured foot.
Speaker 5: I wanted to cry a little bit.
Speaker 1: It's really nice.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, while Hector and Stanley rest and recover, Hector
Speaker 3: reveals that it was him who stole Clyde Livingston's famous
Speaker 3: baseball shoes and it's his fault that Stanley got arrested
Speaker 3: and sent to Camp Green Lake, but Stanley is not upset.
Speaker 3: He's just like this is destiny, and he suggests they
Speaker 3: go back to camp and dig one last hole in
Speaker 3: the spot where Stanley originally found that gold tube, which
Speaker 3: he thinks is probably a tube of lips stick and
Speaker 3: that the KB stands for Kate Barlow. Meanwhile, back at camp,
Speaker 3: a lawyer that Stanley's family hired played by Roma Mafia
Speaker 3: shows up to collect Stanley, but the warden kind of
Speaker 3: shows her away and tells her to come back with
Speaker 3: a signed court order. Obviously because Stanley's not there. He
Speaker 3: ran away, so she has to make up an excuse.
Speaker 3: And now the warden and mister sirr and Pandansky are
Speaker 3: panicking because they assume Stanley is dead out in the desert.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he quote unquote matters because his family has
Speaker 1: secured a lawyer, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. We flash back to kissing Kate Barlow being approached
Speaker 3: by Trout Walker and his wife wanting to know where
Speaker 3: she buried all the loot she stole.
Speaker 1: She somehow found Turn of the century like hair Bleach's
Speaker 1: a she's got a new wig.
Speaker 3: Well, she's out in the sun all the time, and
Speaker 3: it's true.
Speaker 2: It looks good.
Speaker 1: It looks good.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but Kate is like you and your family can
Speaker 3: dig for the next one hundred years and you will
Speaker 3: never find my treasure. And that's what Camp Green Like
Speaker 3: is all about, because the warden is a descendant of
Speaker 3: Trout Walker and she is using unpaid child prison labor
Speaker 3: to dig holes to search for Kissing Kate Barlow's treasure.
Speaker 3: Stanley and Hector returned to camp and they start expanding
Speaker 3: the hole where Stanley found the lipstick tube and they
Speaker 3: find a treasure chest. But just then the warden, Mister
Speaker 3: Sir and Pandanski show up and catch them, but they
Speaker 3: can't really do anything because they realize that the hole
Speaker 3: is filled with a dozen of those highly lethal yellow
Speaker 3: spotted lizards that are crawling all over but not attacking
Speaker 3: Stanley and Hector because they've eaten all those onions, which
Speaker 3: are a natural lizard repellent.
Speaker 1: Hey, for a movie about holes, there's not a single
Speaker 1: hole in the plot of the movie. There's true, everything
Speaker 1: is explained, yea, and it all is like a cross
Speaker 1: generational Oh, it's so good.
Speaker 3: A few hours later, Stanley's lawyer returns the warden makes
Speaker 3: up a story about how Stanley broke into her cabin
Speaker 3: and stole her trunk, but Hector is like, no, this
Speaker 3: trunk belongs to Stanley. It's got his name on it,
Speaker 3: and sure enough, the name Stanley Yellnatz is carved into
Speaker 3: the trunk because this is the treasure that belonged to
Speaker 3: his great grandfather. This means Stanley and Hector are free,
Speaker 3: as are all the other boys, because Camp Green Lake
Speaker 3: is shut down and the warden, Mister Sir, and Pandanski
Speaker 3: are arrested. It also starts raining in this area for
Speaker 3: the first time in one hundred years, in a scene
Speaker 3: that felt a lot to me like a movie that
Speaker 3: we have either just released or were covering soon, The
Speaker 3: Shashank Redemption Where when and now? Okay, now I always
Speaker 3: mix up Tim Robbins and Tim Robinson, but anyway, Tim Robbins.
Speaker 1: Very different guys, so different.
Speaker 3: But their names are too similar. Anyway, Tim Robbins when
Speaker 3: he spoiler alert, finds freedom and it's pouring rain and
Speaker 3: he's like, ah, so it felt like that to me anyway.
Speaker 5: Wow, I was gonna watch that movie.
Speaker 3: So yeah, sorry for spoiling now. A thirty year old movie,
Speaker 3: it reigns.
Speaker 1: Then he goes.
Speaker 3: Ah, okay, So we cut to Stanley and Hector at
Speaker 3: the yell NAT's house. They open the trunk. It's full
Speaker 3: of gold and jewels and stocks and bonds. Question Mark,
Speaker 3: I don't know what those papers are.
Speaker 1: And for some reason, Stanley is the one that knows
Speaker 1: about how money has appreciated over the last like century,
Speaker 1: because his mom's like, Stanley, what do you think? I
Speaker 1: was like, what is daily know about banking? He's you know,
Speaker 1: he's in middle school, but he knows.
Speaker 5: He takes math class.
Speaker 1: I believe that He's like, it's worth at least a
Speaker 1: million dollars. I was like, good, good math on your
Speaker 1: feet man's and and I really it'll it like makes
Speaker 1: me so much of the end of this movie makes
Speaker 1: me tear up. But the fact that, like, even before
Speaker 1: they know Zero is a Zeroni and connected to the
Speaker 1: history of their family, they agree to give him half
Speaker 1: of whatever is in there, and it's like mm hmmm, collective,
Speaker 1: I know it's great and.
Speaker 5: Like, no, no fight the parents.
Speaker 6: Ye have windos to Hector, one for us, one for
Speaker 6: mister Saroni, one for us, one for mister Sni And
Speaker 6: then the grandfather embraces Hector and kisses him.
Speaker 1: And I'm just like, oh, it's really nice, so nice.
Speaker 3: And then Hector uses some of his money to hire
Speaker 3: a team of private investigators to track down his mom,
Speaker 3: which he does, and they reunite and embrace and that's
Speaker 3: also very sweet and tearful. And then the movie ends
Speaker 3: with all of the boys from d tent at Stanley's
Speaker 3: nice new house with a pool. They gather around the
Speaker 3: TV to watch a commercial where that baseball player Clyde
Speaker 3: Livingston is the spokesman for Splosh, which is stan Lee's
Speaker 3: dad's product for treating foot odor.
Speaker 1: The end, and You're like, sure he's also I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I guess that that guy, the guy who plays Clyde
Speaker 1: Livingston was Rick Fox. Yeah, but he played for like
Speaker 1: the Celtics and the Lakers, and like was a pro athlete.
Speaker 1: Didn't know, I don't know enough about sports.
Speaker 6: Why didn't then make him a basketball player?
Speaker 1: So because because like Mike had just come out, they're like,
Speaker 1: there's two basketball shoes of it's played out in children's media.
Speaker 6: Fair.
Speaker 1: That's honestly my guess, but I have no idea.
Speaker 3: Yeah, anyway, so that's the movie. Let's take a quick
Speaker 3: break and we'll come back to discuss.
Speaker 1: And where back. I wanted to say just the one
Speaker 1: thing about this movie, and I didn't finish rereading the book,
Speaker 1: so I don't remember or I don't know like how
Speaker 1: this is dealt with in the book. There is like
Speaker 1: in a movie that is shockingly not Disneyfied in most ways.
Speaker 1: The ending does feel a little Disneyfied to me, but
Speaker 1: only in the one scene where you know, it's so
Speaker 1: critical of justice and of the school to prison pipeline
Speaker 1: and all of these things that you never see discussed
Speaker 1: in media, much less children's media. But at the end
Speaker 1: when you know, it's like, oh, well, it's just that
Speaker 1: the state didn't know that this is how the prison
Speaker 1: was being run, but now that they know, they're gonna
Speaker 1: take care of it, and like that was the only
Speaker 1: sort of disney fire plot point for me. It was like,
Speaker 1: because that is sort of what you're taught of, Like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: if you're if they're doing something bad, it's only because
Speaker 1: surely nobody knows it's not inherent to the system that
Speaker 1: it's a part.
Speaker 3: Of I did fully reread the book a couple days ago. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean me reading a book. Wow, good, thank you.
Speaker 3: But I tend to agree. There is a moment in
Speaker 3: the movie which it does feel very cathartic, when like, yeah,
Speaker 3: the warden and mister sir and like the officials at
Speaker 3: the camp are arrested and humiliated and all this stuff
Speaker 3: that doesn't really happen. In the book, there is a
Speaker 3: reference to how Camp Green Lake gets shut down and
Speaker 3: will be converted into a Girl Scout Camp.
Speaker 1: Which at one point was going to become a Disney
Speaker 1: Plus series.
Speaker 3: I think it's still in development.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, what isn't that bizarre? I was kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd watch it. I don't know.
Speaker 6: They could have just kept making Bunked. I don't understand
Speaker 6: they canceled Bunked a show Camp. And also, this is
Speaker 6: my listen. If you are a Disney executive, call me,
Speaker 6: because I think that we I know that everything's a reboot,
Speaker 6: even Fascism right now, but I think that we need
Speaker 6: to reboot Bug Juice.
Speaker 2: And I was gonna say, a great camp show.
Speaker 6: I don't know why, because like it's unscripted, it's gonna
Speaker 6: be super cheap to produce.
Speaker 5: It's you know, get those kid influencers started early. I guess.
Speaker 1: Bug Juice was so awesome. Kids shows were really gross,
Speaker 1: like I because that was like Baby Survivor.
Speaker 3: I have never heard of this. I don't know what
Speaker 3: you're talking about, but yeah.
Speaker 6: It was like a camp reality show. It was like
Speaker 6: kids at Summer Camp, and it was like the trials
Speaker 6: and tribulations of the drama of summer Camp.
Speaker 5: So I'm like, if you want to make a camp show, either.
Speaker 6: Bring back the script camp show that you literally just canceled,
Speaker 6: or you know, you have to renegotiate everybody's contract blah
Speaker 6: blah blah, or bring back Bug Juice a show that
Speaker 6: needs to be brought back.
Speaker 5: I think about this all the.
Speaker 1: Time because I don't and you're totally right, it like
Speaker 1: it fits influencer culture absurdly. Well, yeah, huh.
Speaker 3: So the Disney plus TV adaptation that's I think still
Speaker 3: in development. I don't know much about it, but basically
Speaker 3: it's an adaptation of the book. So it's not necessarily
Speaker 3: about like fun summer Camp. It's about like prison labor camp.
Speaker 3: But it is like a quote unquote all female reboot,
Speaker 3: which I don't know how that will go exactly.
Speaker 1: That's what makes me think it is not going to
Speaker 1: be made because I feel like that time has come
Speaker 1: and gone and what so has Disney plus making like
Speaker 1: original content ruined it?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think both All Lady Goes to My was
Speaker 6: the start of the death knell, and then Katy perry
Speaker 6: Space Journey is like.
Speaker 5: The final nail of the coffin.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a wave of feminism that ended when
Speaker 1: Katy Perry went to Space because it was just like
Speaker 1: what feminism? What are you even? What are you saying?
Speaker 3: I hate it?
Speaker 1: Woman should space tourism anyways?
Speaker 3: Yes, And then I would say the other big adaptation
Speaker 3: change from the book in general and especially at the end,
Speaker 3: is that Stanley feels a lot more confident at the end,
Speaker 3: and he likes himself now and now he has friends.
Speaker 3: And this is part of a larger adaptation change that
Speaker 3: we alluded to it at the beginning of the episode,
Speaker 3: which I would like to talk more about, which is
Speaker 3: the fat erasure of Stanley's character. So basically, in the book,
Speaker 3: Stanley is fat. In the movie, he is thin. In
Speaker 3: the book, it's mentioned that Stanley is teased and bullied
Speaker 3: at school by his peers for being fat. Sometimes his
Speaker 3: teachers will kind of subconsciously fat shame him. He doesn't
Speaker 3: have much self confidence or friends. As a result, over
Speaker 3: the course of the book, he does lose some weight
Speaker 3: due to strenuous activity of digging holes every day. It
Speaker 3: doesn't ever say how much weight he loses, but it
Speaker 3: does say that by the end of the story he
Speaker 3: has more confidence, he has friends, he likes himself. It
Speaker 3: is not super clear in the book exactly how much
Speaker 3: of his confidence boost, if any, correlates to his weight loss.
Speaker 3: But even so, I do remember that readers of the
Speaker 3: book they appreciated there being representation of a fat protagonist
Speaker 3: who is likable and compelling, who is at the center
Speaker 3: of this really you know, interesting and layered story, who
Speaker 3: has an arc. And I remember a lot of the
Speaker 3: criticism about this movie when it came out that, you know,
Speaker 3: audiences were disappointed that that aspect of the character was
Speaker 3: completely erased. They wanted to see on screen representation of
Speaker 3: a fat protagonist, but instead the movie cast a thin
Speaker 3: actor in Shila buff And I know that the choice
Speaker 3: to cast a you know, a thin actor in this
Speaker 3: role and to not have to have, you know, like
Speaker 3: someone wear a fat suit or anything like that totally valid.
Speaker 1: But Also, it's like they could have just cast a
Speaker 1: fat actor.
Speaker 3: Right, because the thing is like, if they wanted to
Speaker 3: emit something, why did it have to be his fatness.
Speaker 3: If anything, they could have omitted his weight loss.
Speaker 1: Right, that was the Yeah, that would be ideal, right, Like,
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, it.
Speaker 6: Is about the confidence. And the thing about being fat
Speaker 6: is that, for the most part, being fat is not actually,
Speaker 6: in my opinion, as a fat person, that bad.
Speaker 5: I'm hot, I am fine with the way that I look.
Speaker 6: The problem with being fat is society and the way
Speaker 6: that society treats fat people. And the problem with Stanley
Speaker 6: being fat is the fact that he's getting teased. He
Speaker 6: has no confidence because adults and children alike are making
Speaker 6: him feel bad about his body. And like the nineties
Speaker 6: was also a peak heroin chic, the early two thousands
Speaker 6: was like low rise.
Speaker 1: Genes also experiencing another unfortunate reboot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the rise of.
Speaker 6: Like skinny talk is terrifying. It's like anemia Tumbler all
Speaker 6: over again.
Speaker 5: It really, it really.
Speaker 6: Is like very disconcerting to encounter, and like, I find
Speaker 6: myself having thoughts that I haven't had in twenty years,
Speaker 6: and I'm just like stop it.
Speaker 5: But I'm okay, I'm good. But every now and.
Speaker 6: Then I'm just like, like, I'll read the can of
Speaker 6: a Lacroix and I'll feel bad about myself because looks
Speaker 6: actually are really weird of fat Shamie, because they really
Speaker 6: yeah with them, they say zero carbs, zero.
Speaker 3: Fat, zero, zero guilt or something like that.
Speaker 5: It's innocent.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, it does say equals innocent yea.
Speaker 5: And sometimes it gets to me.
Speaker 1: Polar would never, polar would never.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a spin drift couldn't catch them.
Speaker 1: No, absolutely not. No, I Caitlyn, that's a great point.
Speaker 1: Like it's because I did feel like, I guess what,
Speaker 1: I I agree with you, Karama that you know, putting
Speaker 1: child above in a fat suit would have aged the
Speaker 1: movie terribly. Yeah, but I did feel like in the
Speaker 1: portion of the book that I finished that there was
Speaker 1: it was like one of the faults of the book
Speaker 1: to me. I've I thought anyways that Lewis de Carr
Speaker 1: was sort of putting some morality towards the weight loss
Speaker 1: in a way that just felt kind of out of
Speaker 1: step with a lot of what the book is doing.
Speaker 3: Totally and right. If there was again anything to omit
Speaker 3: from the adaptation, it could be the weight loss, or
Speaker 3: at least the implication that his boost and confidence correlates
Speaker 3: in some way to his weight loss.
Speaker 6: I do also think that, like we are looking at
Speaker 6: this very much with twenty twenty five eyes, and I
Speaker 6: think that having a kid that was fat on screen
Speaker 6: be made fun of for being fat was something that
Speaker 6: was like also going to be considered like damaging, like
Speaker 6: putting this fat kid in the public eye, And I
Speaker 6: think that it ultimately would have been damaging.
Speaker 5: For that kid.
Speaker 6: Sure, And I know that like Heavyweights was a movie
Speaker 6: that came out in a similar era.
Speaker 5: I can't remember exactly what your Heavyweights.
Speaker 3: Came out, Yeah, late nineties, I think because he isn't
Speaker 3: Keenan Thompson in it, so it's like, yeah, Keenan era,
Speaker 3: I think baby Keenan's in it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But the thing about Keenan is it was always okay
Speaker 6: for him to be fat because he was funny, do
Speaker 6: you know what I mean? Whereas like with Holes, it's
Speaker 6: more of a dramatic turn and you're sort of like
Speaker 6: the hero of this drama. And I think that I
Speaker 6: think that I would have loved if it were different.
Speaker 6: But I also kind of understand why it was the
Speaker 6: way that it was with.
Speaker 1: The time that it came out, and adding that to
Speaker 1: I mean, I think I'm sure that I'm but I
Speaker 1: the only young fat actors that I remember knowing of
Speaker 1: as a kid were Keenan Thompson and Lori Beth Denberg
Speaker 1: and that was it. And so if the you know,
Speaker 1: directive is to cast Stanley yell Natz as a known actor,
Speaker 1: that might have been hard also because of how of
Speaker 1: how prejudiced Hollywood is in the first place, where the
Speaker 1: most well known child actors are you know, finn Totally.
Speaker 6: This is before Nicki Blonski changed cinema.
Speaker 1: It was a few years away, in just three years.
Speaker 3: So the filmmakers spoke to this adaptation change in an
Speaker 3: interview in two thousand and three. So it was Lewis
Speaker 3: Sacker and director Andrew Davis were interviewed by Phase nine. Sure,
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly what that is, some kind of
Speaker 3: film publication, but anyway, precisely, they were asked how they
Speaker 3: searched for the right kids, like the right child actors
Speaker 3: for the characters. Lewis Sacker says, well, the character of
Speaker 3: Stanley in the book is overweight, Shia is not, but
Speaker 3: this wasn't integral to the story. The point was more
Speaker 3: that he felt like an outsider, but he could display vulnerability,
Speaker 3: and Shia conveys the right amount of emotion and vulnerability
Speaker 3: and quirkiness, so the overweight thing wasn't important to that.
Speaker 3: I say, did you read your own book? Lewis, Like,
Speaker 3: what are you talking about?
Speaker 6: As a misguided take, I would say I can pretty
Speaker 6: much bring any topic back to how much I dislike
Speaker 6: Leah Michelle. But of course, for me Funny Girl the adaptation,
Speaker 6: I thought that Beanie Feldstein was better casting because the
Speaker 6: whole thing about Funny Girl is that Fanny Brice is
Speaker 6: supposed to be not conventionally attractive. And while Leah Michelle,
Speaker 6: because she is half Jewish, does have similar features to say,
Speaker 6: like barbar streisand in the original the way that that
Speaker 6: was written for twenty twenty forge or whatever year it was,
Speaker 6: twenty twenty two, she's conventionally attractive.
Speaker 5: She's like a hot lady.
Speaker 6: Our beauty conventions have changed, but we still hate fat people.
Speaker 6: And I think that Beanie Feldstein's casting was far more
Speaker 6: in line with who Fanny's supposed to be as an outsider.
Speaker 6: So I think that on the one hand, Lewis is
Speaker 6: right in that what matters most is that he's an
Speaker 6: outsider who gains confidence. But we don't get that from
Speaker 6: Shia abuff In any way, Like they didn't write something
Speaker 6: in that made it happen, Like he didn't have a list,
Speaker 6: he didn't have some sort of like physical disability or
Speaker 6: something that like that would have helped with the holes.
Speaker 3: But you know what I mean, Yeah, or even if
Speaker 3: it's just like he has a lack of confidence for
Speaker 3: a reason that has nothing to do with his appearance
Speaker 3: or ability or anything like that, and it's just that
Speaker 3: it wasn't replaced with anything. Yeah, Yeah, So that's just
Speaker 3: that whole part of his character is erased. And maybe
Speaker 3: Lewis Sachar is saying something like, well, you know, Stanley's
Speaker 3: fatness does not define him as a character, which is true,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't sound like that's what he's saying. He's
Speaker 3: just sort of like, I need to make an excuse
Speaker 3: for why we didn't cast a actor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels like a very like hollywoody thing, which
Speaker 1: to at least to Lewis Skar, I'm sure that Lewis
Speaker 1: Akar is not the one making the final casting decisions, no, right,
Speaker 1: I know that he. I think he was a pretty
Speaker 1: around the movie. I think that that is like a
Speaker 1: better suited question for the director than which the writer.
Speaker 3: Which the director answers a question, a follow up question,
Speaker 3: which was didn't you consider a fat suit, and director
Speaker 3: Andrew Davis says, yes, we did, but in the book
Speaker 3: he loses weight as the story evolves and as he
Speaker 3: digs the holes, et cetera. And we shot the movie
Speaker 3: out of continuity, so that wouldn't have worked.
Speaker 2: That's the reason.
Speaker 3: Yeah, youre right, And I think that was like I
Speaker 3: remember that also being a reason that they gave for
Speaker 3: not casting a fat actor to begin with, because it's like, well,
Speaker 3: movies are shot out of chronological order. So if a
Speaker 3: character is losing weight progressively, but the movie is shot
Speaker 3: out of order, then how how do we manage that?
Speaker 1: It's all very two thousand and three. I mean, I
Speaker 1: will say that, like not to give this movie a pass,
Speaker 1: but that this feels very thoroughly in step with how
Speaker 1: fatness was treated in movies at this time.
Speaker 3: For sure, shallow how oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Right, like this like the same couple of years God,
Speaker 1: I still have managed to never see Shallow.
Speaker 5: How oh, I won't see that movie because I love
Speaker 5: myself too much.
Speaker 1: That's one of those movies where it's like, I know
Speaker 1: we'd have a lot to talk about, but I don't
Speaker 1: want to subject to anyone to have it to watch it,
Speaker 1: including myself.
Speaker 3: Fair it's horrid. I have seen it, and.
Speaker 1: It's like been free on YouTube for a thousand years
Speaker 1: because no one would watch it on purpose. But in
Speaker 1: any case, yes, I wasn't aware that they had been
Speaker 1: asked about it directly.
Speaker 3: And then the other thing is that there is a
Speaker 3: fat character in the movie Armpit laid by Byron Cotton
Speaker 3: ar MPI to the t well, yes, of course.
Speaker 5: Is that you're smelling dog?
Speaker 3: That's me okay, Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: That was a lyric. That was lyric.
Speaker 3: The main thing we know about him is that he
Speaker 3: has body odor. He doesn't. He's implied to not have
Speaker 3: very good hygiene. Every and teases him about this. And
Speaker 3: also the movie goes out of its way to show
Speaker 3: at least once to show him struggling with a physical
Speaker 3: task of some kind.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So basically the only fat character on screen is attached
Speaker 3: to all these very harmful reductive tropes. Yeah, associated with fatness.
Speaker 1: So which sucks for a lot of reasons. I mean
Speaker 1: the actor, because I don't think I don't a lot
Speaker 1: of these kids didn't go on to perform at least
Speaker 1: in movies very much. But Byron Cotton is so good,
Speaker 1: he's so charming, and also like it also just doesn't
Speaker 1: it's so clearly fat phobic because you got to think,
Speaker 1: all these kids are stinky, They're not being taken care of,
Speaker 1: and it's not their fault, Like they all share a
Speaker 1: single shower stall like there, of course, hygiene is poor
Speaker 1: and they only get like four.
Speaker 3: Minute shower tokens or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and add that to the average hygiene habits of
Speaker 1: a young boy in the best circumstances, like, yeah, all
Speaker 1: these kids are stinky.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and they're wearing the same work clothes three days
Speaker 6: in a row.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I did want to talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: production of this movie, because there is child Okay, one
Speaker 1: of the hills that I love to die on day
Speaker 1: in and day out is child labor laws, and there's
Speaker 1: I think that this movie technically followed child labor laws,
Speaker 1: but to me, say that child labor laws are not
Speaker 1: restrictive enough because they I mean, obviously the kids have
Speaker 1: to go to school all this stuff, But they were
Speaker 1: literally in the middle of the desert in heat as
Speaker 1: much as one hundred and fifteen degrees, shooting for ten weeks.
Speaker 1: And I have a couple of quotes from that. It
Speaker 1: was a business insider oral history where they didn't speak
Speaker 1: to everybody, and you know there's certain like you know,
Speaker 1: like I don't want to know what child a buff says.
Speaker 1: He's not in it. But it's like Lewis Sakarr, the director,
Speaker 1: and then a couple of the cast members I think
Speaker 1: Tim Blake Nelson, and then a few of the boys,
Speaker 1: including Miguel Castro who plays Magnet and my crush Cleo Thomas.
Speaker 5: Well I met once.
Speaker 1: Actually what is he nice?
Speaker 5: It was very nice. I was like, is he t zero?
Speaker 5: He was really sweet.
Speaker 6: I was on a show on Hulu called Reboot, and
Speaker 6: at the premiere of Reboot he was there and I
Speaker 6: was like, what are you doing here?
Speaker 1: Also, you're great in Reboot. I was like I think
Speaker 1: I like gasped and like messaged you immediately, like how
Speaker 1: could you not have told me? Actually?
Speaker 6: I actually had a really sweet interaction last night with
Speaker 6: somebody at like an actor mixer thing for my agency,
Speaker 6: and this like younger actor at my agency.
Speaker 5: She's like in her twenties. She's not like a child,
Speaker 5: but she came up here. She's like, I really loved
Speaker 5: you in reboot and you made me want to go
Speaker 5: to UCB. And I was just like, I'm literally gonna
Speaker 5: cry right now.
Speaker 6: Thank you so much. I feels good about my career
Speaker 6: and that made me feel so much better.
Speaker 1: Like moments like that find you when you need it.
Speaker 2: That's really yes.
Speaker 5: But yeah, Cleo was very nice.
Speaker 1: He introduces something like I know you're I know I'm
Speaker 1: aware of.
Speaker 2: I know the classes, but I would lose it.
Speaker 5: I would still still crushworthy.
Speaker 1: I would say yeah, I followed it. I followed him
Speaker 1: on Instagram today. I was like, he still got it.
Speaker 6: I was gonna say slides DMS and I remembered, like
Speaker 6: a fully engaged with adults.
Speaker 2: He would get it.
Speaker 1: This Cleo Thomas has been promoted to my Hall Pass.
Speaker 1: But so this is a quote from Miguel Castro, who
Speaker 1: also talks about how like the casting process and how
Speaker 1: they really did. I mean, I think that being unwilling
Speaker 1: to cast a fat actor of Stanley is the standout
Speaker 1: bad thing that they did, because it seems like they
Speaker 1: tried to really find young actors who like fit the role,
Speaker 1: and also that the movie was not being aggressive whitewashed
Speaker 1: in a way that I would not put past two
Speaker 1: thousand and three. I do think ultimately centering a story
Speaker 1: about the school to prison pipeline around a white character
Speaker 1: as a little suss but we'll get there. But just
Speaker 1: in terms of the production, Mila Castro said, he's also
Speaker 1: very funny, but he said, I remember one day was
Speaker 1: one hundred and nineteen degrees. I thought they were going
Speaker 1: to cancel the filming, but we all agreed to knock
Speaker 1: it out. I was hallucinating and I started seeing water
Speaker 1: a swimming pool. The production team gave us thermometers to
Speaker 1: check the temperature of our holes. If the holes hit
Speaker 1: over one hundred and twenty five degrees, we had to
Speaker 1: get out of there. That day, some of our thermometers
Speaker 1: broke one thirty And it's like, you can't make kids
Speaker 1: do that. You can't make kids, they just said. And
Speaker 1: they had to do like a boot camp, basically re
Speaker 1: enacting the movie holes so that they would be able
Speaker 1: to do it on the production, so it ended up
Speaker 1: being like three to four months of them sort of
Speaker 1: just having to go methad, which is like, do that
Speaker 1: if you want as an adult, Like I just you
Speaker 1: can't make kids go method at a prison camp.
Speaker 5: Like that's we all agreed is bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's.
Speaker 6: It's giving Mikey Madison saying that she and Sean Baker
Speaker 6: decided together not to have an intimacy coordinator, and I'm like,
Speaker 6: I don't think that that's your call as a no.
Speaker 6: I think it's your call as a yes, but it
Speaker 6: can't be your call as a no. That's like not
Speaker 6: having a stunt coordinator. Like even Tom Cruise, as dedicated
Speaker 6: as he is to doing these outrageous stunts, has a
Speaker 6: stunt coordinator.
Speaker 3: Right right, Yeah, it feels like adults knowing that they
Speaker 3: have power over children and being like, no, we got
Speaker 3: to keep going. The show must go on, let's go,
Speaker 3: let's go kids.
Speaker 6: Don't you want to make the movie? Don't you want
Speaker 6: all of your friends to watch this cool movie?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: It's just I don't know, I don't understand like production risk,
Speaker 1: Like even if you were heartless and you don't care
Speaker 1: about putting a child in a one hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: degree whole like that production insurance. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: was just I was curious. I was like, I wonder
Speaker 1: how they kept the whole school. The answer they didn't.
Speaker 1: They didn't, so that is unfortunate. What I will say
Speaker 1: that is positive about the production, just something that I
Speaker 1: admire is that Andrew Davis, the director, who mostly had
Speaker 1: done action movies up to this point, was really set
Speaker 1: on keeping the story basically not dumbing the story down
Speaker 1: for kids, and that Disney, after I think a few
Speaker 1: initial like are you sure you want to include A,
Speaker 1: B and C, he was like, no, I will not
Speaker 1: make the movie if you keep bugging me, and really
Speaker 1: pushed to have Lewis Karr write the screenplay and basically,
Speaker 1: along with a producer, taught Lewis Decarr how to write
Speaker 1: a screenplay so that they could preserve the integrity of
Speaker 1: the story. And I don't know, just like I knew,
Speaker 1: you know, Crame, you're a writer. Like it's just like that.
Speaker 1: I don't know how they pulled it off, and I'm
Speaker 1: so glad that they did well.
Speaker 6: I feel like he has a really strong understanding of
Speaker 6: story to begin with, So I feel like it was
Speaker 6: like he was at the water.
Speaker 5: They just had to show him how to drink, you
Speaker 5: know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, yeah, And that's what they were sort of like.
Speaker 1: They were like, he's a great writer, he just needs
Speaker 1: to understand the format. And I guess throughout production, like Lewis,
Speaker 1: the Carr had a lot of input and if he
Speaker 1: wanted something changed or adjusted like Andrew Davis, had no questions.
Speaker 1: I was like, wow, no one respects writers. That's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. That was my takeaway.
Speaker 5: He's also in the movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, mister bold, Oh that's him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cute.
Speaker 1: Sweet.
Speaker 5: I wish they had shown him with like a bust
Speaker 5: down wig.
Speaker 3: Later because the onion juice it worked. The onion juice
Speaker 3: cured his boldness.
Speaker 5: I just want to know if it works. It's like
Speaker 5: a Sweet Todd situation.
Speaker 3: Mister No, I think Sam's onion remedies worked one hundred percent.
Speaker 6: You would have loved Arawan, Oh my god, Oh he
Speaker 6: would have.
Speaker 1: He would have been making billions at the Ariwuan.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I love cameos like that. And not to keep
Speaker 1: going back to series of unfortunate events, but it is
Speaker 1: my favorite. And that is a terribly adapted movie that
Speaker 1: the author was very upset about. So it's just like
Speaker 1: there's so many examples of you know, heavily sanitized, Like
Speaker 1: all the dark themes in that movie are basically played
Speaker 1: for comedy instead of because the you know, Nickel I
Speaker 1: think it was Nickelodeon productions in that case were like,
Speaker 1: it's too scary for kids, they won't be able to
Speaker 1: handle it. And that's how you get Jim Carrey count
Speaker 1: all off.
Speaker 6: I met the boy from that movie.
Speaker 5: I didn't know it was him. I just happened to
Speaker 5: be sitting.
Speaker 1: All my childhood crushes.
Speaker 6: I just happened to be sitting next to him. We're
Speaker 6: instagram like mutuals now. I happen to be sitting next
Speaker 6: to him. Last summer when I went to New York
Speaker 6: City and I decided to use my free will and
Speaker 6: my adult money to go see Cats.
Speaker 2: The Jellicle Ball, and he was there.
Speaker 5: And he was there in the front row, right next
Speaker 5: to me.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 6: He had a friend who was in it. He had
Speaker 6: never seen Cats before. I had seen Cats before.
Speaker 3: Of course.
Speaker 6: I will just say I think the Cat's the Jellical
Speaker 6: Ball was actually genius and a really amazing production because
Speaker 6: they used ballroom culture and I was like, oh, this
Speaker 6: is this is actually the only way this show makes sense.
Speaker 1: That is actually a great adjustment.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So it's like Paris is burning bust cats.
Speaker 5: Yes it's gay cats.
Speaker 2: I'm in that's so good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Liam Aiken, Yes he's sucking and like, I'm a yapper,
Speaker 1: so I'll talk to anybody that's unfortunately sitting next to me.
Speaker 6: And he was such a trooper about it, and I
Speaker 6: was like, Oh, your friend's in it. Who is your
Speaker 6: friend playing? And he was like, oh, she's Skimbleshanks And
Speaker 6: I was like the railway can.
Speaker 1: The best Cat's god best number.
Speaker 5: I was like, that's a good cat, you've.
Speaker 2: Good taste and friends.
Speaker 1: I can't believe you're hang out with Skimbleshanks. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Yet another like Horny Child's thing on my wall. I
Speaker 1: had like achin for Liam, that's so funny. Wow, I'm
Speaker 1: glad that he's And he did turn into my dream
Speaker 1: adult in that he was friend row at the Jelicable
Speaker 1: and like I never.
Speaker 6: It never it came up that he was an actor
Speaker 6: because we were just talking and I was like, oh,
Speaker 6: I'm an actor too, and blah, blah blah. And I
Speaker 6: didn't know until I like looked him up after he
Speaker 6: walked me into the subway because I was like, I
Speaker 6: don't know where I'm going, And I looked him up
Speaker 6: to see if his star meter.
Speaker 5: Was better than mine.
Speaker 6: It was, and I was like, oh, snap, this is
Speaker 6: the guy from Stepmom, one of my favorite movies of
Speaker 6: all time.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.
Speaker 6: And then I was like, oh, I had a series
Speaker 6: of unfortunate events a movie that I did not care.
Speaker 1: About, but Stepmom, good for him, Good for him.
Speaker 5: Have you guys done? Stepmom? Sorry, we should talk about
Speaker 5: the movie.
Speaker 3: No, we haven't, but it's on our list.
Speaker 1: I think would be down. I've seen it because jennam
Speaker 1: Alone is in it too, right, baby jenneral alone? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but well, I guess back, I guess.
Speaker 3: I mean speaking of a movie that you know, like
Speaker 3: doesn't sanitize the more serious themes, or at least not extensively. Yeah,
Speaker 3: this movie, it addresses a number of social issues such
Speaker 3: as race, class, incarceration in all of the storylines I
Speaker 3: think that are intersecting. So there's these two main storylines
Speaker 3: from the past, one from the present. In one of them,
Speaker 3: it's Stanley's Great, Great grandfather Elia Yellnetz. He is seeking
Speaker 3: out the help of Madame Zaroni. In the book, Madame
Speaker 3: Zaroni is described as being a word that is used
Speaker 3: as a slur to describe Romani people. She's played by
Speaker 3: earth a kid.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's like believe Egyptian. In the book too, they
Speaker 1: explicitly say that she is an immigrant from Egypt.
Speaker 3: Right, and curious what your thoughts are. But I couldn't
Speaker 3: help but feel that there are hints of like the
Speaker 3: magical Negro trope at play here, because she's presented as
Speaker 3: being this mystic type of person. She places a curse.
Speaker 6: I agree there's a little magical Negro happening, but I
Speaker 6: don't mind it. And I don't know if I'm supposed
Speaker 6: to say that out loud, but I don't because also
Speaker 6: I feel like it's a lot of the time, like
Speaker 6: when curses are happening, it's like, oh man, we got
Speaker 6: cursed for no reason, and nobody at any point is like,
Speaker 6: oh man, we got cursed for no reason. They're like, my,
Speaker 6: no good, dirty rotten pigs stealing great great great grandfather.
Speaker 6: It's like this was a deserved curse. Everybody's mad at
Speaker 6: the great great grandfather for not doing what he promised
Speaker 6: he would do. And it's like, you got the help
Speaker 6: that you want, it you ended up not getting with
Speaker 6: the girl, and now your butt hurt and you're gonna
Speaker 6: go on a boat to America. You realize on the
Speaker 6: boat to America, oh snap, I forgot to take the
Speaker 6: old lady up the hill and you don't take a
Speaker 6: boat back.
Speaker 5: I would have been on the next boat.
Speaker 1: Back personally, right, I did. Yeah, that is I guess
Speaker 1: I hadn't registered that that. At very least. The family
Speaker 1: is not like fuck, Madame Zeroni. They're like, he made
Speaker 1: a deal and he didn't keep his end of it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, at no point where they're like, oh, Madam Zaroni
Speaker 6: was the worst. They're like, yeah, no, that's that's fair.
Speaker 3: It's like a European white guy neglecting to pay a
Speaker 3: black woman for services rendered and he gets cursed about it,
Speaker 3: and it is fully deserved.
Speaker 6: And I also think that, you know, the the curse
Speaker 6: being broken because finally the services that were promised were
Speaker 6: rendered in a way with this new generation, it's it's
Speaker 6: very much speaking like the promise. I think that with
Speaker 6: them being explicitly black, even though it's like somewhat ambiguous in.
Speaker 5: The book, like if if she's Egyptian or if she's Romani.
Speaker 6: It's very much about like, oh, the promise is that
Speaker 6: America has made to black people and sort of like
Speaker 6: how those have been broken and there I think that
Speaker 6: there is going to be a curse on this country
Speaker 6: until something happens to make it right. Whether it's reparations,
Speaker 6: whether it's something else, I don't know, And like I
Speaker 6: don't even think that I would be entitled to reparations
Speaker 6: because my parents are immigrants. Like I'm not saying it
Speaker 6: for personal gain, and I'm saying it for justice reasons,
Speaker 6: but justice. Like the movie is very clear in teaching
Speaker 6: kids like hey, if you promise something to somebody and
Speaker 6: then you don't do it, that's a bad thing. And
Speaker 6: then later we were all like, yeah, no, it makes
Speaker 6: sense that they're cursed. And then later it's like, oh,
Speaker 6: I'm going to make this right. And he didn't make
Speaker 6: it right to do things better, Like he didn't make
Speaker 6: it right because he's like, oh, this lift the curse.
Speaker 6: It was completely selfless. His friend was hurt and he
Speaker 6: wanted to make him better totally, and like when you
Speaker 6: do the right thing for the right reason. Good things
Speaker 6: happen to you in movieland unfortunately not always in real life.
Speaker 5: But I think that more people tried it, we'd find
Speaker 5: out in real life.
Speaker 3: Right yeah, right, So yeah, that's that storyline. And then
Speaker 3: it also intersects heavily with the Stanley Hector Zerny storyline
Speaker 3: in the present. And then the third storyline is the
Speaker 3: Miss Catherine aka kissing Kate Marlowe and Sam in I
Speaker 3: think it's like turn of the century, like late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: early nineteen hundreds. Again, it's Jim Crow era Texas. She
Speaker 3: is a white woman, he is a black man. They
Speaker 3: fall in love. They kiss during an era when that
Speaker 3: was illegal in Texas and in many other states in
Speaker 3: the US. They are seen this racist mob forms. All
Speaker 3: this violence is inflicted. They murder Sam. The sheriff does
Speaker 3: nothing to stop them. In all likelihood, the sheriff was
Speaker 3: a clan member. And then this leads to you know,
Speaker 3: Catherine ak Kate becoming an outlaw getting revenge. She kills
Speaker 3: the sheriff. It makes you wonder why she doesn't kill
Speaker 3: trout Walker also, but I guess it's because the story
Speaker 3: needs him to live long enough to produce offspring, so
Speaker 3: that the warden can be a character since trout Walker's
Speaker 3: her grandfather.
Speaker 6: Right. Also, I think that there's sometimes there's power in
Speaker 6: letting someone suffer.
Speaker 3: Oh true, because he by the end of his life
Speaker 3: he is miserable.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's obsessed.
Speaker 6: He's a man completely possessed by the idea of finding
Speaker 6: this treasure where he's torturing his granddaughter, right, so built
Speaker 6: to dig these holes and she's you know the TikTok
Speaker 6: sounds that has spawned a million video.
Speaker 5: I'm tired of this grandpa it is.
Speaker 1: I thought that, like that was an interesting Again, like
Speaker 1: this movie is good at like providing context for the
Speaker 1: villains without overly empathizing with them, because what she does
Speaker 1: to deal with the uh trauma of the holes is
Speaker 1: that she becomes like a prison warden and opens a
Speaker 1: prison and outsources the labor to disenfranchised children. So it's
Speaker 1: not like it's an excuse for anything that she's doing.
Speaker 1: But I like little beats like that, I feel like
Speaker 1: are sort of what elevates this movie a lot if
Speaker 1: because I think that's like helpful for kids to have
Speaker 1: context but not excuses for how you know, oppressors become
Speaker 1: oppressors when it speaks.
Speaker 6: To the way that white women will pass on the
Speaker 6: violence enacted upon them by white men to black people,
Speaker 6: because you know, not everybody is black in the camp,
Speaker 6: but they do make it a point to have if
Speaker 6: you're a number of black kids, because that is unfortunately
Speaker 6: who is getting these harsher punishments. And even if you
Speaker 6: think about Hector and Stanley, Stanley is getting this punishment
Speaker 6: because he stole from allegedly stole shoes from a homeless
Speaker 6: shelter and they were like this famous guy's shoes, and
Speaker 6: this crime was like more egregious in that way. Hector
Speaker 6: got nabbed for stealing shoes from Paylass.
Speaker 3: Right, shoes that probably cost twenty dollars kind of thing,
Speaker 3: not even.
Speaker 5: In three pay less shoes fifteen at most.
Speaker 2: Right right?
Speaker 1: I miss pay Less every day rip rip to a
Speaker 1: real story.
Speaker 6: The payless where I used to buy my Easter shoes
Speaker 6: is now an axe throwing place.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. So it's like gentrification on gentrification. I
Speaker 1: thought it was interesting that Pala's got shouted out by name.
Speaker 1: I'm like, did they pay for that?
Speaker 5: I don't know, they shoes worth stealing? Paylas there is.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I'm curious what you both think
Speaker 1: of this, Like Camp Greenlake is a diverse but I
Speaker 1: would say mostly non white body of people, which I
Speaker 1: think makes a lot of sense if you look at
Speaker 1: prisons unfortunately, especially the school to prison and Pipeline. I
Speaker 1: do feel like, while I do love Stanley Yelnatz, centering
Speaker 1: this story on a white character does not to say
Speaker 1: that this does not happen to white kids, but it
Speaker 1: happens disproportionately less. And so while I think you can
Speaker 1: make the argument that Zero is a dual protagonist by
Speaker 1: the end of the movie, but he's not at the beginning,
Speaker 1: and so I don't know. I don't know, it's a pick.
Speaker 1: And then there's all of these kids that you get
Speaker 1: a little bit of their story. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: think you get a little more in the book, which
Speaker 1: is kind of to be expected, but you get like
Speaker 1: you don't really know why most of the kids have
Speaker 1: been put there. It was a really They do add
Speaker 1: that Magnet is there because he was trying to literally
Speaker 1: free a dog from a breeder, which is great practice.
Speaker 1: Shout out Magnet, and that there is I think it's
Speaker 1: zig Zag maybe is there because he has mental health
Speaker 1: issues that are not being treated, and which is you know,
Speaker 1: another thing you see all the time is someone with
Speaker 1: a mental health crisis being sent to prison instead of
Speaker 1: being given help. And so like you are given. I
Speaker 1: think kind of a sampler platter for lack of a
Speaker 1: better descriptor. But I do wish that we got a
Speaker 1: little more than one line for a lot of characters,
Speaker 1: because I don't know. I mean, do we know why
Speaker 1: Armpit is there? Do we know? I experalized there? Like
Speaker 1: we get, some characters get the context. Authors don't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think we know.
Speaker 3: This doesn't provide any more context in that regard, but
Speaker 3: I will share a quick paragraph from the book. Quote
Speaker 3: Stanley was thankful that there were no racial problems. X Ray,
Speaker 3: Armpit and Zero were black, he Squid and Zigzag were white.
Speaker 3: Magnet was hispanic. On the lake, they were all the
Speaker 3: same reddish brown color, the color of dirt. Unquote. So
Speaker 3: that's pretty much the only thing the book has to
Speaker 3: say about any racial or racialized dynamics.
Speaker 1: In that timeline, at least because.
Speaker 3: Yea, and I couldn't help think about another movie as
Speaker 3: I was rewatching holes, which is the movie Nickel Boys
Speaker 3: that I saw recently, so as far as a book
Speaker 3: slash movie about young men or teen boys being incarcerated
Speaker 3: and sent to a work camp. There is a version
Speaker 3: of this story that is written and made by white people,
Speaker 3: a la Holes. And then compare that to a version
Speaker 3: of this story that was written by black people, a
Speaker 3: la Nickel Boys, which is a novel from twenty nineteen
Speaker 3: by Coulson Whitehead adapted to a twenty twenty four film
Speaker 3: written and directed by Ramel Ross. Very different movies obviously,
Speaker 3: Where Nickel Boys. I don't know if either of you
Speaker 3: have seen it, but yeah, Nickel Boys is totally much heavier.
Speaker 3: It does a lot more to shed light on the
Speaker 3: horrors of the racism, exploitation, violence, abuse present in a
Speaker 3: detention facility like this versus Holes, which acknowledges these things
Speaker 3: to some degree, but it's center's whiteness. It's framed more
Speaker 3: as this like almost a fun adventure, folk tale type
Speaker 3: of story that is largely about a white boy, kind
Speaker 3: of like his redemption arc of like, oh I have
Speaker 3: to carry as a rony up a mountain kind of thing.
Speaker 3: So I just think it's interesting to kind of note
Speaker 3: the differences between two similar premises written by two very
Speaker 3: different perspectives, and how they kind of manifest at different times.
Speaker 5: To sure for sure, Yeah, I think that sometimes the
Speaker 5: messenger matters as much as the message.
Speaker 6: And I do think that in two thousand and three,
Speaker 6: for a kids movie to send this message, I think
Speaker 6: you need to see this happen to a white kid
Speaker 6: who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,
Speaker 6: because when black kids are in the wrong place at
Speaker 6: the wrong time, people are like, well, what were they
Speaker 6: doing there, Why weren't they there at the right time,
Speaker 6: Why weren't they in a different place?
Speaker 5: And I think.
Speaker 6: That it's kind of similar for me to my favorite
Speaker 6: movie about racism, Pleasantville. Yeah, it is a movie about
Speaker 6: racism with not nary a single person.
Speaker 1: Yes, however, wild that they.
Speaker 5: Did that, but like wild that they did it and
Speaker 5: did it well.
Speaker 3: I think one of my favorite movies.
Speaker 1: It's a great movie.
Speaker 6: It's a really good movie. And I think that there
Speaker 6: are people who would not have gotten the message if
Speaker 6: it were a straight and maybe wouldn't even have watched
Speaker 6: the movie if it were straight up, Like, hey, this
Speaker 6: is about segregation in the nineteen fifties, which is what
Speaker 6: it is.
Speaker 5: It is a movie about segregation in the nineteen fifties,
Speaker 5: but the colored people are literally in technicolor. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: I love that, and.
Speaker 6: I love that that was an idea that somebody had,
Speaker 6: And it's like, sometimes, what if this happened to white people?
Speaker 6: Is the way to get the message to people that
Speaker 6: are like, hey, wait a minute, And it's like the
Speaker 6: last few lines of that poem, that's like, oh, and
Speaker 6: then they came for me and there's nobody to stand
Speaker 6: up for me, And it's like, what if this were
Speaker 6: to happen to you?
Speaker 5: You need to think about if this happens to you.
Speaker 6: Not to say that all of the audiences are white,
Speaker 6: but in filmmaking, for better or for worse, white is
Speaker 6: seen as the default and you can put any experience
Speaker 6: on top of it. And I do think also there
Speaker 6: are things that are true about this story. I do
Speaker 6: think that even with the expensive lawyer, if it were Hector,
Speaker 6: or if it were another black kid, it would have
Speaker 6: taken longer than literally a day after hiring a lawyer
Speaker 6: to get.
Speaker 5: Him out of there.
Speaker 3: Definitely, no matter.
Speaker 6: How hard that lawyer was working, I feel like the
Speaker 6: judge would be like, no, I'm not overturning this. I
Speaker 6: don't care, he's already there. The holes are good for
Speaker 6: character whatever, do you know what I mean? Because like,
Speaker 6: while I was watching, when they said this into eighteen months,
Speaker 6: I was like, that is six times as long as.
Speaker 5: Rock Turner got ah.
Speaker 1: Yep, Well, when you put it that way, it.
Speaker 6: Was an unreasonably long sentence, and I don't even know
Speaker 6: how long those other kids.
Speaker 5: Are sentenced to.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, I would be really curious what
Speaker 1: the other sentences looked like, because it didn't seem like
Speaker 1: that was a default sentence by any means.
Speaker 5: Right, and like x Ray had already been there for
Speaker 5: six months.
Speaker 6: Also, x Ray's nickname is my favorite because it's because
Speaker 6: he's got the big glasses, but also his name.
Speaker 5: Is Rex and like genius.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is like peak kid brilliance. Yeah, I that's
Speaker 1: that's a good point, especially where like you're saying, in
Speaker 1: children's media often still, but like especially in the two thousands,
Speaker 1: you know, you're taking the like default protagonist for for
Speaker 1: a movie like this and making the worst possible thing
Speaker 1: happen and demonstrating that it was through no fault of
Speaker 1: his own. And then it's sort of I don't think
Speaker 1: this is like intentionally done. I would guess more that
Speaker 1: this is just a Lewis Karr self insert to begin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not totally sure, but you know the director and
Speaker 1: the writer if if you don't know, they're both white.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that it's almost like by seeing that happen
Speaker 1: to Shilah buff it creates this runway to understand that
Speaker 1: this is happening to every single kid in this place,
Speaker 1: and I think, like what you lose there? That I
Speaker 1: don't want to come down too hard in this movie
Speaker 1: because it's doing so much I have literally never seen
Speaker 1: in kids movies. True, but that it doesn't bring up
Speaker 1: the fact that the black kids at this camp would
Speaker 1: have a far worse time, and that I guess the
Speaker 1: closest you get to understanding that is through Zero. But Zero,
Speaker 1: I mean has compounded issues. I think that the movie
Speaker 1: sort of makes it out to be more that he's
Speaker 1: unhoused an award of the state and therefore they don't
Speaker 1: have to care about him and they don't really touch race,
Speaker 1: which is bizarre because this movie is willing to discuss racism.
Speaker 1: That's literally the whole Sam and Kate story. But I
Speaker 1: think it's.
Speaker 6: Very much a Colorblind two thousand. It's like, Wow, racism used.
Speaker 5: To be so bad.
Speaker 1: Now any kid can go to jail.
Speaker 6: I will say, just because we talked about kissing Cape
Speaker 6: Barlowe and Sam, I'm really glad that they didn't hang him.
Speaker 6: I know that they said they were going to hang him,
Speaker 6: which would have been I think more historically accurate, but
Speaker 6: I was so glad that they did not show him
Speaker 6: getting hanged, and that it.
Speaker 1: Was shown too, like, yeah, yeah, I think that that
Speaker 1: was handled very gracefully.
Speaker 6: And I think that not just for the kids, for
Speaker 6: me and my little heart, I couldn't have handled it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And then the other thing I was gonna say was
Speaker 6: we were just talking about like the kids at the
Speaker 6: camp and at the beginning, at the very beginning of
Speaker 6: the cold Open, when barf Bag sacrifices himself to the snake,
Speaker 6: they are singing dig It at the beginning, and it
Speaker 6: feels like the song sixteen Tons to me, like there
Speaker 6: was a very similar vibe and it was sort of like,
Speaker 6: you know, same deal as like working and you're never
Speaker 6: going to get out of it, but they're also joking
Speaker 6: around and like the background music is digg it. The
Speaker 6: kids are not singing diggt in universe, and the kids
Speaker 6: are joking around, and it really gives us a sense
Speaker 6: that they are kids, and every point it shows them
Speaker 6: being kids and it's not like this sort of hardened
Speaker 6: criminal thing. Like the only kid that you really get
Speaker 6: that sense from is the kid who's like watching TV
Speaker 6: in the like mess hall or wherever, who gets into
Speaker 6: a fight.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and even with that, he's like a slightly older kid.
Speaker 1: It's he's visibly a little bit older and God only
Speaker 1: does how long he's been there too that part.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I think that there's a norm of adultifying,
Speaker 6: particularly incarcerated kids and especially black kids, where it's like, oh,
Speaker 6: they're not normal kids, they're criminals. And like some of
Speaker 6: the kids did do things that are crimes. Like I
Speaker 6: mean technically, you know, Magnet did a crime, although innocent.
Speaker 5: Let them go right, h M.
Speaker 3: The puppy, he.
Speaker 1: Literally saved a puppy from a horrific practice, like come.
Speaker 5: On, and like Twitch stole a car, but he's a
Speaker 5: little boy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he's like I just want to go zoom and
Speaker 6: it's like, okay, well maybe we should take this kid
Speaker 6: go cart.
Speaker 1: There's so many like ethical solution, I mean, which is
Speaker 1: the story of incarceration. But it's just it's so and
Speaker 1: I love I do. I this was the first time
Speaker 1: I watching the movie that I really was like, I
Speaker 1: guess paying closer attention to Pendance Key specifically. I think
Speaker 1: it's like such a well written character where he is
Speaker 1: being presented as the nice guy, but over the course
Speaker 1: of the movie is so clear that he's not the
Speaker 1: nice guy. He is the he like tortures zero because
Speaker 1: he doesn't think that he will get in trouble for
Speaker 1: not being kind to him, and he's right, and the
Speaker 1: whole you know government name thing he like explicitly ties
Speaker 1: your government to your like that's the name you will
Speaker 1: contribute to society under. So that's your name, and saying
Speaker 1: when he's when they're doing like group or whatever. And
Speaker 1: that's where we find out about Magnet and his puppy
Speaker 1: is that you know, he is repeating these I think
Speaker 1: very like it's giving DNC to me, Like he is
Speaker 1: he is saying, like, no, what you did was a crime.
Speaker 1: It's against the law, and therefore it's bad. And it's
Speaker 1: just like, you know, the place he works for doesn't
Speaker 1: work if you challenge an institution, and so he while
Speaker 1: he is like I think that, like mister sir calls
Speaker 1: it like that, like touchy feely, fuzzy stuff, blah blah blah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but all Pendansky does is pretend to care. Like we
Speaker 1: don't see him ever defend any of the kids. We
Speaker 1: don't see him protect them, Like he folds the second
Speaker 1: that someone with more power than him asks him to
Speaker 1: do something.
Speaker 3: He's a coward.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And also just his response when like everybody's like, don't
Speaker 6: teach Hector to read, which is wild, that's that arc
Speaker 6: I was like, whoa, hold on, hold on, why don't
Speaker 6: we want Hector to read?
Speaker 5: Like I get why you don't want him to dig
Speaker 5: the hole?
Speaker 1: But it's another great like it's so good. There's a
Speaker 1: really good video essay that I was rewatching by I
Speaker 1: believe Yaharazade or I hope I'm saying her name right,
Speaker 1: Yaharazide called holes in the prison industrial complex and she
Speaker 1: like ties that explicitly to like, the kids aren't doing
Speaker 1: anything wrong. They're being told that they are going to
Speaker 1: improve themselves, so why would you get in trouble for
Speaker 1: literally reading? But again, it's like the institution is based
Speaker 1: on barring Zero from the education he deserves because then
Speaker 1: it's easier to exploit him. And like, just right darkest.
Speaker 6: About the theme of literacy is that they keep the
Speaker 6: shovels in uh ad, that says live library.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a good touch.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I had to pause it, but I was like,
Speaker 6: oh no, I didn't notice that before.
Speaker 5: That's very upset.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there, And also that the oppressors of this movie.
Speaker 1: It is kind of a funny, like woman can do
Speaker 1: it too, and you're like, it's true, but it's you know,
Speaker 1: the people at the top of this operation are white,
Speaker 1: and they're all sort of representing different kinds of oppression,
Speaker 1: where like mister Zur and Panansky are equally bad, but
Speaker 1: they are presenting a different approach to being pro incarceration.
Speaker 1: Like I it's just it's so well written. And then
Speaker 1: the snake nail Polish, I mean, hello.
Speaker 5: Love the snake nail Poli.
Speaker 6: I love the idea of like the women in this
Speaker 6: story having these weapons like kissing.
Speaker 5: Kate Barlowe is.
Speaker 6: Known, Yes, she shoots people, but then she kisses them
Speaker 6: and that's what she's known for. Is this red lipstick
Speaker 6: mark that she leaves behind is her sort of like signature,
Speaker 6: and then the warden has her nail polish that she
Speaker 6: then uses to like put these men in line. And
Speaker 6: this idea and like poison being traditionally a preferred method
Speaker 6: of like violence for women.
Speaker 5: I thought that was really interesting. And you know, there
Speaker 5: are a lot of women in here, but they make
Speaker 5: it count. Wh Yeah, when they're hurting people, they make
Speaker 5: it count.
Speaker 3: And I don't even mind that they're not the many
Speaker 3: women in this movie.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean it's about especially because it's about like
Speaker 1: a gendered incarcerated like it makes sense. I do think that,
Speaker 1: you know, it is good. I guess we got Orange
Speaker 1: just the new Black. You know, it's there was media
Speaker 1: down the line about incarcerated women, which is equally important
Speaker 1: to talk about.
Speaker 3: And maybe more with this Disney Plus reboot, which I
Speaker 3: wrote down the.
Speaker 1: Joke I'm calling it it's not happening.
Speaker 3: Well, if it does, they should call it Girl is
Speaker 3: the New Boy. And that's the amazing joke I wrote down.
Speaker 1: Really good.
Speaker 6: I hope that it gets green lit and that they
Speaker 6: hire me, and then I want to write the episode
Speaker 6: about when one of the girls gets her first period
Speaker 6: in the middle of digging her hole, and everybody else
Speaker 6: has to help her finish digging her hole because she
Speaker 6: has cramps.
Speaker 5: And that's womanhood and that's solidarity.
Speaker 1: Hire me, that is Disney solidarity. Yeah, as long as
Speaker 1: they bring back Sigourney Weaver, because that, I mean that
Speaker 1: character would get out of jail. It lickety split, I guess.
Speaker 1: The other just contrasting the yeah, because you really only
Speaker 1: get like one woman in each timeline, because you have
Speaker 1: Madam Zeroni in one timeline kissing Kate Barlowe in another timeline,
Speaker 1: and Sigourney Weaver, I mean, Stanley Yale's mom is barely
Speaker 1: in it.
Speaker 3: Like I do.
Speaker 1: Like that they go out of their way to show
Speaker 1: again that like all of these kids we are led
Speaker 1: to believe are from poor backgrounds to different degrees, but
Speaker 1: like it, Stanley is from a family that's just scraping by.
Speaker 1: They're almost getting evicted, and you still see that there
Speaker 1: is like he is emotionally cared for and loved, which
Speaker 1: I think often you know, like poor parents are made
Speaker 1: out to be negligent. I think you can say, although
Speaker 1: we don't get to know Zero's mom at all, I
Speaker 1: did appreciate that again, like an unhoused character literally, the
Speaker 1: two unhoused characters you get in children's media if you
Speaker 1: were a kid at this time are Zero and Aladdin,
Speaker 1: and they are They're both characters who when they take
Speaker 1: we know why they're doing it, is like because they
Speaker 1: need to survive, and the movies, their respective movies don't
Speaker 1: pass judgment on them for doing that. And I appreciated that.
Speaker 1: I wish we could have known her more, but that
Speaker 1: the movie takes care to say that Zero's mom wasn't negligent.
Speaker 1: It was all of these systemic issues that separated them
Speaker 1: from each other. And again that's just like I wish
Speaker 1: that that had almost been emphasized more by letting us
Speaker 1: get to know her, because you know, like unhouse characters
Speaker 1: are so rare outside of punchlines and getting the full
Speaker 1: context for And also that like Zero took the shoes
Speaker 1: because he was living at the shelter, and you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I just I kind of forgot about
Speaker 1: that portion of his character, and I really thought it
Speaker 1: was handled quite well.
Speaker 6: Also, he probably wouldn't have taken the shoes if he
Speaker 6: could have read so rightly, because he said that he
Speaker 6: did not know that they were Sweetfeet's shoes he just
Speaker 6: liked them and he took them. And I think that
Speaker 6: the you know, the weight of taking those shoes would
Speaker 6: have been different. Could he have read like the little
Speaker 6: thing that said, oh sweet feet whatever.
Speaker 1: His name is, shoes because he just needed shoes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you're saying like he got arrested for taking from
Speaker 1: a paylist. Like the kid just needed shoes and he
Speaker 1: wasn't being provided for. I just ah, I love Zero's character.
Speaker 6: And the shoes were donated to the shelter, so he
Speaker 6: was living at the shelter, those shoes were in.
Speaker 3: His mind for him, right, Yeah, totally. I also think
Speaker 3: it's interesting that there is acknowledgment that even though Stanley's
Speaker 3: family is poor, they are still more socioeconomically privileged over
Speaker 3: Zero and his family, because there's that moment that Zero's describing,
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, my mom would sometimes have to like leave
Speaker 3: me at a park, you know, I would go to
Speaker 3: Laney Park, and Stanley's like, oh yeah, I used to
Speaker 3: go there all the time parentheses for fun with my family,
Speaker 3: and Zero says, yeah, I used to sleep, you know,
Speaker 3: in the tube under the swinging bridge or something. And
Speaker 3: you see the look on Stanley's face is like whoa
Speaker 3: like his privilege is checked. And yeah, I just appreciate
Speaker 3: that the movie acknowledges that class difference. And I also
Speaker 3: think it's really effective in the Pananski character finding Zero
Speaker 3: so worthless. Part of the reason he has it out
Speaker 3: for him is that Zero can't read, and Pandanski treats
Speaker 3: that as as though it's a personal failure of Zero's.
Speaker 3: Oh he if he can't read, he must not be smart.
Speaker 1: But it's so clearly is because he can't. And it's
Speaker 1: like Pandanski acts as if because Zero can't read, he
Speaker 1: also cannot hear, like it is just like it is
Speaker 1: so oh, he's like to me, to me on this
Speaker 1: viewing the most evil character in the movie, because he's
Speaker 1: a fucking coward, like he does think he's a good person.
Speaker 1: I very least don't think mister sirr or Sigourney Weaver
Speaker 1: are like I'm an amazing They're like, yeah, I'm a
Speaker 1: piece of shit and I and I don't care if
Speaker 1: children die. I think Pandanski goes home at the end
Speaker 1: of the night is like I'm doing right by these boys,
Speaker 1: and there I'm better and there's I mean, I feel
Speaker 1: like every kid encountered a teacher like that who is
Speaker 1: like cruel to and not no disrespect to the teachers,
Speaker 1: Like but but I mean, I clearly remember the art
Speaker 1: teacher at my elementary school who would pick on kids
Speaker 1: and say it was like for their own good and
Speaker 1: clearly had no issue with I'm like the art teacher.
Speaker 6: Come on, Teaching is a tough job, and I'm so
Speaker 6: glad that there are people who are committed to doing
Speaker 6: it and doing it well.
Speaker 5: Few are and.
Speaker 6: Fewer people because administrators at schools are making it so
Speaker 6: much more difficult, and then the turnover is getting outrageous.
Speaker 6: But there's always one teacher who is like, I just
Speaker 6: want to be able to have beef with children, and.
Speaker 1: You're like what, And so often I feel like they're
Speaker 1: in administrative positions. Now I'm just projecting my mom's entire career,
Speaker 1: but like like it's yeah, I don't know, Pandanzky piece
Speaker 1: of shit. And then I do like that they add
Speaker 1: the bit at the end of like he doesn't even
Speaker 1: have a degree, because what, like what teacher would agree
Speaker 1: to work there that isn't fraudulent?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, So a lot of that I found to
Speaker 3: be very effective in the movie. There is a joke
Speaker 3: that rubbed me the wrong way. At the very end
Speaker 3: where whatever officials show up with Stanley's lawyer, I don't
Speaker 3: know if it's like DA's or something, but it's like
Speaker 3: people with some kind of authority, and one of them
Speaker 3: recognizes mister Sirrh and mister Surr gets arrested because he's
Speaker 3: in violation of his parole and there is a reveal
Speaker 3: of his real name, mister Surr's real name, which is
Speaker 3: marian Sevillo, and the boys are like, marian, I didn't
Speaker 3: know that was a man's name, and he's like, it
Speaker 3: isn't and it's meant to like escalate him and be
Speaker 3: one more layer of humiliation for him because he has
Speaker 3: a quote unquote woman's name, And it just felt like
Speaker 3: a cheap joke that was below the movie in general,
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, I didn't love it.
Speaker 5: And it's like it's genuinely not funny.
Speaker 1: No, no, yes, not for nothing.
Speaker 6: I'll admit when a joke is like, oh this is problematic,
Speaker 6: but also I giggle a little despite myself, But like
Speaker 6: the Merry joke is not even there's nothing funny about it.
Speaker 6: It's not even like a silly sounding name. It's a
Speaker 6: very normal sounding name that is just oh, girls have it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just a yeah as a Jamie. He's fine, fine, right,
Speaker 1: it's actually it's great having a gender fluid name. It's fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was not great, but I think, you know, a
Speaker 1: comparatively small.
Speaker 3: Totally yeah, one of the few blemishes on an otherwise
Speaker 3: perfect movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's everything I had.
Speaker 6: I wanted to say something about the music. Obviously we've
Speaker 6: talked about dig it. There is a lullaby. We didn't
Speaker 6: really talk about the lullaby very much. That when Elia
Speaker 6: was taking the pig up the mountain, he had to
Speaker 6: sing to the pig, and it was like if only,
Speaker 6: if only at the woodpecker's size, the bark on the
Speaker 6: trees were as soft as the sguise.
Speaker 5: There's something about wolves. I don't remember the rest of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know he's supposed to sing it when
Speaker 3: he takes Madame Seroni up, which, as we all know,
Speaker 3: drop the ball on that.
Speaker 5: Should it turned around taken the next boat. I stand
Speaker 5: by that.
Speaker 6: And then I think that it's really sweet that Stanley
Speaker 6: does sing this song when they get to God's Thumb
Speaker 6: and when Hector is drinking the water and it makes
Speaker 6: him strong, and that's kind of like the last piece
Speaker 6: of sort of breaking the curse.
Speaker 5: And the other thing is.
Speaker 6: They did a like studio song version of that song
Speaker 6: in the end credits, if you stay till the very
Speaker 6: end of the credits there they do that song as
Speaker 6: the last one, and then there's a scene of Zero
Speaker 6: saying like Madam Zeroni's line that if you forget to
Speaker 6: come for Madame Zeroni, your family will be cursed forever
Speaker 6: and all it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, however, the kid's voice, so he does a line
Speaker 4: reading of that, and it's very cute, but the song
Speaker 4: actually kind of slaps and it's giving, like very early
Speaker 4: two thousand's, late nineties.
Speaker 6: Like soft rock, sort of like a Matchbox twenty Moby.
Speaker 2: There's a Moby.
Speaker 1: Song in it. I did not know that that's of
Speaker 1: the time there is bravely a Moby's song.
Speaker 6: But so I looked at I rewound the video and
Speaker 6: I looked at who because I always like reading the
Speaker 6: little music things and I wasn't paying attention, and I
Speaker 6: saw that it was by somebody called like fiction Plane
Speaker 6: or something like that, and hold, then I wrote it down.
Speaker 6: I don't know why I'm pretending that I can't read.
Speaker 6: Uh yeah, fiction Plane. They sang the song if Only,
Speaker 6: and the lead singer of fiction Plane is a man
Speaker 6: named Joe Sumner, who is Sting's son.
Speaker 1: No way, yeah wow. And Sting was in the Disney
Speaker 1: Expanded Universe because of Emperor's New Groove. I wonder if
Speaker 1: he pulled some strings there, if he pulled some stings
Speaker 1: Sting some stings there, if anyone ever, I think it's
Speaker 1: it's It is occasionally re uploaded to YouTube. There is like,
Speaker 1: I don't know why I find it so compelling. Well,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting documentary about production. But Sting was originally
Speaker 1: like The Emperor's New Grave Groove. The production of that
Speaker 1: movie is fascinating.
Speaker 5: But it was.
Speaker 1: Originally a much more serious story and then turned into
Speaker 1: David's Bade comedy. But Sting wrote this really like he
Speaker 1: thought he was doing Elton john and The Lion King.
Speaker 1: So he wrote all of these serious stories, and his
Speaker 1: wife was making a documentary, assuming like, oh, we're gonna
Speaker 1: you're gonna be like Elton. You're Elton john Ning, so
Speaker 1: I should document this, and you just see the production
Speaker 1: completely fall apart. There's so many shots of Sting being
Speaker 1: bummed out in his mansion because he's like, they deleted
Speaker 1: in another one of my songs, or I think he's British.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, he's British.
Speaker 1: But but it's so interesting. It's specific watching Sting slowly
Speaker 1: realize all of his music is going to be deleted.
Speaker 1: And it's actually a David Spade comedy. If you ever
Speaker 1: wanted to see Sting become really depressed in the space
Speaker 1: of eighty minutes, it's an interesting documentary.
Speaker 6: Why would I want them to do that? Did Joe
Speaker 6: Sumner's father?
Speaker 1: My theory is that Disney was like, we we got
Speaker 1: a tossing a bone, we got a tossing a bone,
Speaker 1: we did a so Dirty on Emperor's New Groove, another
Speaker 1: Earth a Kit joint. Yeah, it's all connected, it really is.
Speaker 6: But yeah, seeing that and like the song was actually
Speaker 6: really interesting because I found it to be very moving
Speaker 6: and it was just sort of like, what if the
Speaker 6: bark on the trees was as soft a disguise? What
Speaker 6: if things were easy? What if life was different? And
Speaker 6: I was just like, yeah, what if what if? Joe?
Speaker 5: And just the the Sting reveal was very surprising to.
Speaker 1: Me, just when you didn't think Sting was going to
Speaker 1: get his way into the holes expanded universe. There he is.
Speaker 5: And then I like did some digging.
Speaker 6: I did some digging on Joe Sumner and I saw
Speaker 6: that he later invented an app in like twenty ten
Speaker 6: or twenty eleven that enabled people who go to concerts
Speaker 6: to upload their videos to this app, and all the
Speaker 6: people that went to the concert would upload their yes
Speaker 6: that they took and it would basically create a concert
Speaker 6: movie with the different angles that people oh did and the.
Speaker 5: Apps until like twenty sixteen and bring it back.
Speaker 2: That's cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would do so much better now too, right,
Speaker 1: I think like, bring it back?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Joe, if you're listening, bring it back.
Speaker 1: Joe biggest fans, We're big fans. I'm sorry to make
Speaker 1: fun of when your dad was upset about and for
Speaker 1: his new groove. I would have been upset too, But yeah,
Speaker 1: I just wanted to.
Speaker 6: Bring that little factory because I thought that was fascinating,
Speaker 6: very interesting and unexpected.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Does anyone have anything else they want to talk about?
Speaker 5: No, I'm good, I got it.
Speaker 1: I don't think so. Yeah, I'm going to reread Wayside School.
Speaker 1: That's my I.
Speaker 3: Love those books so much. I haven't read them in
Speaker 3: like thirty years.
Speaker 1: So they're so silly.
Speaker 3: Well, as we discussed, the movie does pass the Bechdel test,
Speaker 3: albeit briefly. It passes. It passes a pass as far
Speaker 3: as our nipple scale, though, where we rate the movie
Speaker 3: based on a scale of zero to five nipples, examining
Speaker 3: it through an intersectional feminist lens. Oh boy, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I feel like, are sure it applies.
Speaker 1: Our scale is kind of tricky to apply here. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think in terms of like intersectionality, this movie does
Speaker 1: well in that it brings up issues I've never seen
Speaker 1: brought up in uh children's movie about like justice and
Speaker 1: oppression and school to prison pipeline, and this movie is
Speaker 1: doing so much.
Speaker 3: I agree.
Speaker 1: You feel like the nipple scale is like difficult to
Speaker 1: apply here.
Speaker 6: It is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I give it.
Speaker 1: I would say I give it five wholes.
Speaker 3: File Okay, so not the nipple scale today is the
Speaker 3: whole scale zero to five holes.
Speaker 1: This is the movie holes. So I'm giving it five holes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, say I'm giving it five holes the end.
Speaker 6: If I had to give it on a scale of
Speaker 6: zero to five holes, holes, yes, five holes, six holes.
Speaker 6: Even I know I'm an extra hole because they did
Speaker 6: one last holes like one.
Speaker 1: Last job, and the bonus hole could forget.
Speaker 6: If I genuinely had to do it on a nipple scale,
Speaker 6: I think I would actually give it, like surprisingly, like
Speaker 6: three and a half nipples, like a lot of nipples
Speaker 6: for a woman free.
Speaker 7: Movie one woman per decade, just because like when we
Speaker 7: talk about intersectionality, yes we're talking about women and representation
Speaker 7: of women, but the things that matter at the end
Speaker 7: of the day are deconstructing these systems and it's talking
Speaker 7: about how these systems are flawed and bringing attention to
Speaker 7: these systems that do affect women.
Speaker 6: And even though they're showing it in the context of
Speaker 6: it affecting teenage boys, unless you're Disney US, it still
Speaker 6: is something that is I think, and that positive for
Speaker 6: intersectional feminism. So like I because there aren't that many women,
Speaker 6: I can't give it five nipples, And because you know,
Speaker 6: at the end of the day, it's like this camp
Speaker 6: was the problem, not like the whole system. The state's
Speaker 6: not the problem. The camp is the problem. Right, But
Speaker 6: like three and a half nipples still pretty solid showing
Speaker 6: there for a movie again, like half a.
Speaker 1: Woman in it, truly, I mean, and yeah, I hope
Speaker 1: that I wish that this movie led to more media
Speaker 1: like or just kids media that addressed issues like this,
Speaker 1: but it is still, twenty plus years later, pretty singular
Speaker 1: for the issues that because I mean, like if if
Speaker 1: a story like this kid, because I loved Nickel Boys,
Speaker 1: but it's very much not a movie for children.
Speaker 3: And well, if you count Paddington Too, that's I mean,
Speaker 3: I mean Paddington and Paddington Too are again indictments of
Speaker 3: the prison industrial complex of like anti immigrant hate and racism.
Speaker 3: So it's true that Paddington movies do it.
Speaker 1: So that's two there. But yeah, no, I mean, I
Speaker 1: I I don't know. It's it's a very special movie.
Speaker 1: I agree like it kind of broke the nipple scale
Speaker 1: in my head. But I think your your rationalization makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense.
Speaker 3: Grama totally thank.
Speaker 1: You for engaging with the show in a way that
Speaker 1: we were not willing to.
Speaker 5: That's what I'm here for.
Speaker 6: I ask the hard questions, how many nipples does this
Speaker 6: movie really deserve?
Speaker 3: Thanks for thanks for poking holes in our system by.
Speaker 6: I will also say Utopia tries not like this particular
Speaker 6: set of issues, but Utopia does.
Speaker 1: Try to be like haters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would. It tries and it fails.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I didn't say it succeeded, but he tried. Yeah,
Speaker 5: there's some deep.
Speaker 6: Laws there where it's like, okay, but yeah, some people
Speaker 6: are predators.
Speaker 5: No, but like they tried to fix racism with.
Speaker 1: Animals, they're like, we didn't quite. Disney was like, we
Speaker 1: didn't quite do it with holes. Let's let's try the
Speaker 1: animal copaganda movie.
Speaker 6: There.
Speaker 1: I do appreciate ultimately, and I feel like I'm talking
Speaker 1: a lot of shit. I'm trying. I am trying to
Speaker 1: get work. But anyways, that Disney was very hands off
Speaker 1: with this movie, because I think if Disney had been
Speaker 1: hands on with this movie, we would have gotten, you know,
Speaker 1: whatever this movie's version of Jim Carrey's count Oloff was.
Speaker 1: I think that it is like critical to the story
Speaker 1: working that you are scared for these kids and that
Speaker 1: you understand where they're coming from, and that their antagonists
Speaker 1: are you know, elevated, like the mister Sir is goofy
Speaker 1: in some ways, but not so goofy that he ceases
Speaker 1: to be scary.
Speaker 3: And yeah, totally, I think that.
Speaker 6: It's really a testament to the fact that like, you know,
Speaker 6: we talk a lot of shit generally, we not the
Speaker 6: three of us, but we society talk a lot of
Speaker 6: shit on these major corporations. And it's proof that they
Speaker 6: are capable of making these thoughtful movies and they can
Speaker 6: do it if they.
Speaker 1: Want to, right, So it's like, so why aren't they
Speaker 1: doing it?
Speaker 6: And it is also sometimes commercially successful when they do it,
Speaker 6: and I think that it's a good reminder, like, hey,
Speaker 6: remember when you did this thing and you did it
Speaker 6: the way the creatives asked you to and it was
Speaker 6: wildly successful and it had a lot of a listers
Speaker 6: in it, and people are still talking about it twenty
Speaker 6: years later as a like shining example of the way
Speaker 6: to do things.
Speaker 5: What if you rebooted that, What if you rebooted that spirit?
Speaker 1: They're like, well, no, let's do cgi dogs for Lady
Speaker 1: in the trimp. Let's do that One's.
Speaker 5: That word that's a joke, right, that's that's a joke.
Speaker 1: Oh no, that's exit that. It came out five years ago. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: it's very scary. It's a scary watch. It's scarier than
Speaker 1: mister sir.
Speaker 5: I did think a.
Speaker 6: Lady in the Tramp earlier because The Boy Dog is
Speaker 6: another example of a house representation in children's media.
Speaker 1: Forget I believe, I believe Lady in the I think
Speaker 1: Lady is Tessa Thompson.
Speaker 3: Sure, I never saw it.
Speaker 1: I think I was the only person that's yeah, it's
Speaker 1: Tessa Thompson and Justin Thurreau.
Speaker 3: And you're like, yeah, I was too busy gearing up
Speaker 3: for the live action Pinocchio Disney reboot.
Speaker 1: So shout out to the Pinocchio Wars on the Matreon.
Speaker 1: When speaking of which, Okay, let's wrap it. I'm hungry,
Speaker 1: let's wrap up the show.
Speaker 6: I just wanna say one last thing. Disney has been
Speaker 6: good to me personally, and I do you think follow
Speaker 6: the checks and I I'm just gonna say another thing
Speaker 6: and I forgot, So it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: Disney is good to me and that it made and
Speaker 3: or my favorite show.
Speaker 1: I will say there, Disney is still making cool, weird
Speaker 1: stuff like I mean, you mentioned Bunked as a great example.
Speaker 1: I just finished work. I hope it gets renewed for
Speaker 1: all manner of reasons. But like a super silly kids
Speaker 1: show called Stugo. So if you have a kid, and
Speaker 1: I think I would say like the Seven or eight range.
Speaker 1: That's a very silly, fun show that's on the Disney
Speaker 1: Channel right now. It's like speaking to your point, Grama.
Speaker 1: They can do it, so why not do it more?
Speaker 1: Because people like it. This movie did make its money
Speaker 1: back and then some. It made believe seventy one million
Speaker 1: dollars off of a seventeen million dollar budget. But as
Speaker 1: is the way with many movies that have a lot
Speaker 1: of like author involvement and Disney being hands off, it
Speaker 1: does seem like the price for that was that everyone
Speaker 1: took a pay cut, because you cannot have a stacked
Speaker 1: cast like this for seventeen million dollars without a serious
Speaker 1: pay cut and throwing kids into one hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: degree holes. So while it is amazing that this is successful,
Speaker 1: I do feel like there is always some sort of
Speaker 1: exchange of like, oh, you want to make your perfect art,
Speaker 1: here's four dollars, bitch, you know. Like, but but I'm
Speaker 1: glad that this cast. I mean, I just feel like
Speaker 1: it's a perfectly cast movie. It's so good, it's.
Speaker 6: Very well done. I hope they do more holes in
Speaker 6: the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Karama, thank you so much for coming back.
Speaker 1: You've covered such an interesting wide variety of movies on
Speaker 1: the show.
Speaker 6: I'm saying on the record, bring me back for Stepmom
Speaker 6: if you ever get around.
Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely yes, And then so it'll be it's two
Speaker 3: Disney movies, two Jordan Peele movies.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and then now and step in the future
Speaker 1: starting a new chapter.
Speaker 6: I'm gonna be like Tarantino. He said he was gonna
Speaker 6: like do eight movies and then never come back.
Speaker 1: Which you can't wait for that part, right, He's really
Speaker 1: dragging out the last one.
Speaker 5: I ever come back.
Speaker 3: No, you can come back after that, please do if
Speaker 3: you want. Anyway, where can people check out your stuff?
Speaker 3: Follow you on social media, etcetera?
Speaker 6: Yeah, at Karama Drama, on all the platforms that you
Speaker 6: might use. I started talking about libraries recently on my
Speaker 6: TikTok because I'm a big, big slat for libraries, love them.
Speaker 5: I have for library cards.
Speaker 1: Wow, hell yeah.
Speaker 6: You can have a lot of library cards and get
Speaker 6: a lot of different things with them.
Speaker 5: I highly encourage you to go get do it for
Speaker 5: Hector Zeroni.
Speaker 1: The Hector Zerni Memorial Library.
Speaker 6: Go get a library card. Where can you guys be
Speaker 6: found using your.
Speaker 5: Library cards or not?
Speaker 6: Uh?
Speaker 1: You could? You can find us on mostly just Instagram
Speaker 1: these days. At Bechdel Cast, you could follow our Patreon
Speaker 1: aka maatreon at patreon dot com slash Bechdel Cast. We
Speaker 1: have shouted out The Pinocchio Wars, one of our best series,
Speaker 1: but we've had it since twenty seventeen. So for five
Speaker 1: dollars a month, you get two bonus episodes every single
Speaker 1: month and access to our back catalog which goes back
Speaker 1: almost ten years, so there's a lot of spicy content.
Speaker 1: That's actually where you will be able to listen to
Speaker 1: us discuss the prison industrial conflicts for a second time
Speaker 1: if you so choose, because we are covering Shawshank Redemption
Speaker 1: over on the Matreon this month, which is Holes for
Speaker 1: grown ups.
Speaker 3: Yes, I basically decided that for my birthday month, I
Speaker 3: wanted to do Holes, Shawshank Redemption and Oh Brother, Where
Speaker 3: Art Though? Which is a movie about three men escaping
Speaker 3: from prison, and one of them is Tim Blake Nelson
Speaker 3: who's also in Holes, So it's all connected, just the
Speaker 3: way the plot of Holes is.
Speaker 5: And both movies feature down in the river to pray.
Speaker 4: Right Yes wow, yeah, it thinks that they changed it
Speaker 4: to valley because there's no water.
Speaker 3: Yes, so that is what's happening over on the Matreon.
Speaker 3: As it is my birthday this month, it would be
Speaker 3: a nice little gift to me and to the podcast
Speaker 3: in general if you subscribe to the Matreon if you
Speaker 3: haven't already listeners and.
Speaker 1: Uh, with that, let's go to the yell NAT's pool
Speaker 1: and watch a shoe commercial with our best friend, a
Speaker 1: basketball player playing a baseball player.
Speaker 3: Okay, bye, bye bye. The Bechdel Cast is a production
Speaker 3: of iHeartMedia, hosted by Caitlin Derante and Jamie Loftis, produced
Speaker 3: by Sophie Lichterman, edited by Mola Board. Our theme song
Speaker 3: was composed by Mike Kaplan with vocals by Catherine Volskrosenski.
Speaker 3: Our logo in merch is designed by Jamie Loftis and
Speaker 3: a special thanks to Aristotle Acevedo. For more information about
Speaker 3: the podcast, please visit link tree slash Bechdel Cast