"Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union" with Robert Daniels | The Movie Racket

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24:01Michael Phillips:There are over 250 reasons to join T-Mobile. Find yours and check availability at t-mobile.com slash home internet. This is according to Ooglu Speed Test Intelligence. Date a second half of 2025. All rates reserved. Redeemed money back guarantee within 30 days of cancellation. I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. It all happens on my show, Therapy Gecko, where we have real conversations just like this.

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25:16Michael Phillips:Yeah, Don't Look Up, I hate it. I hated it. And that movie was allegedly made for somebody like me. I think I like it just a little bit more than you do. I have no idea why either. Like, I can't really put my finger on it. Maybe it's just the vision of seeing people being messy, people being exactly... I mean, I feel like I'm like, at my heart a cynic. and at my heart I'm just like there's nothing we can do we're all screwed so maybe that just kind of like feeds into my like doomsday proclivities you know yeah don't look up as a disaster movie and I will say I am the easiest target for a disaster movie I I love disaster and post-apocalyptic films so I think that probably sung to my heart a bit more okay all right all I got it.

26:05Michael Phillips:Well, it had a huge audience on Netflix as far as we can ever determine what makes a huge audience on Netflix. Well, okay, so there's another category of what Samuel Goldwyn would probably describe as a message movie with a sneer in his mouth and a cigar. And that's a film that really was didactic, maybe even some sort of, you know, left-wing or right-wing propaganda in some sort of obvious way that we, you and I, fell for when we were younger. Whether maybe it was the first movie on that subject that was sort of a window into the, quote, adult world when we were whatever, adolescents or younger or whatever.

26:51Michael Phillips:but a film that you really bought into big time that could be described as a message picture that you look at it now and you think, well, I was young then. Well, I think about Forrest Gump. Okay, okay, why? Which is, you know, it's a film with many messages, actually. Well, let's break them down. I'd love to hear it. Well, you know, because Forrest Gump has this kind of fly-on-the-wall, like historical kind of almost like intimate epic through like this unlikely protagonist, very much kind of like a, well, it's like a Jimmy Stewart kind of mold. That's kind of, I think, the prototypical Tom Hanks is Jimmy Stewart kind of figure is Forrest Gump.

27:31And so there's this idea that I liked at the time was like, oh, we're kind of going through counterculture and we're seeing like the progression of America and going through these kind of liberal spaces. And it's only been recently, maybe in the last like 10 years that I like rewatched it. And I was like, this is a deeply conservative movie. How did we all not see, like, this movie is so conservative.

27:56Michael Phillips:I'd love to hear, like, the concrete image or scene or whatever or line that comes to mind when you say that. Well, I mean, I think it's the whole storyline with Jenny, right, of Forrest is in love with Jenny, Jenny is in love with Forrest. Forrest mostly stays home, remains a kind of good old southern boy. son, Jenny goes off into the counterculture, which is a big no-no in this film, and gets basically punished for it, right? Right. With the unnamed fatal disease, aka AIDS. Yes. But not even just that, right? One of the counterculture men she dates is, you know, a woman beater. She goes into the Black Panthers and they're violent against her.

28:38Michael Phillips:Shut that blonde man and get your white ass away from that window. Don't you know we in a war here? Hey man, he's cool. He's cool. He's one of us. Let me tell you about us. What the hell? Our purpose here is to protect our black leaders from the racial onslaught of the pig who wish to brutalize our black leaders, rape our women, and destroy our black community. Like, she's going into all these different spaces. And every space that we equate to freedom from that decade, Forrest Gump shows to be like, no, no, no, this is actually the worst thing she could have done, you know? Right, right. And, I mean, that's coming from the novel itself is my memory of it, yeah.

29:15Yeah, so the novel is even more conservative, if weirdly enough.

29:20Michael Phillips:Well, before we get to my example in that same category, I want to go back to what you said. You mentioned Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the Capra film, as a film that had like a message in it and a warning about creeping authoritarianism, right? In that case, in sort of the late Depression era America. I think a lot of the tension in Capra's films comes from the fact that, and I actually think it's very useful for the end result. Capra was a rock-ribbed Republican and never changed. And he was working frequently with screenwriters, particularly the films he made with Robert Riskin, Meet John Doe, Mr.

29:58Michael Phillips:Deeds. And it's in the same sort of general ideological camp, I guess, as Mr. Smith. But I think that tension between the two primary authors of those movies is kind of what makes them fascinatingly unstable a little bit and a little tricky to pin down politically. And I think that's actually a good complication. You know, it is a very good complication, I think. I don't know if we I don't know if those movies would have worked if it had been like a unified front left or right trying to make a film on that theme. You know, I don't know. And they all went over just ducky with the depression audiences, you know.

30:40Well, I mean, I think that you could make the point that that's why I don't look up doesn't work, right? Is that it has this one lens that is looking through the world and it doesn't give you, there's no complications in its view of the world, right? It's a very, it's very stable in that sense. Whereas like Mrs. Smith goes to Washington. I'm the least patriotic person you'll ever meet. And yet I love like movies like The Last Hurrah, Spencer Tracy. or Yankee Doodle Dandy. And I love Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I should be like the last person who should be like, oh, you know what? There is one good man who can uphold a broken system.

31:17Right, right. But the end, right, is just, Mr. Smith is just, as you said, so complicated and so destabilized. Jimmy Stewart wins. But what's winning in this film? We know these politicians who were dirty and crooked aren't going to change one did because he had a personal connection and it's actually like pretty bleak because cloud rains is supposed to be personally connected with the jimmy stewart character and yet he has to literally see the jimmy stewart character come close to dying on the senate floor before he's able like his humanity awakens what vision of that is that for our politicians that you can see someone who's close to you dying on the senate floor and you're I'm like, oh, I don't know if I'll jump in yet.

32:05Michael Phillips:Right. And bleak as that is, I don't know if you'd even find that much going on in terms of 11th hour empathy to a situation in today's Congress. You know, I just don't feel it, you know. But that's another story. And we haven't filmed that yet. Waiting for the very soft hearted John McCain where he's the affordable care actor. He comes onto the floor and votes no and upholds it, you know, and everyone gave him a rah-rah for that. Yeah, I keep waiting for that line in the sand to be drawn by somebody in politics. But so my feeling about something I saw where I kind of responded to both messages, not the same way and certainly not equally.

32:45Michael Phillips:And then I had a very different reaction to re-seeing these not that long ago. It was the same year, although they came out almost a year apart, Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. Okay, Vietnam War is in the rearview mirror, but not that many years in the rearview mirror. And you have a very, very, you know, kind of feelings and for my adolescence, very gratefully, sex forward picture like coming home, which hopefully taught a lot of us a few things. But that was an extremely simple political divide depicted, right? You have Bruce Dern playing the returning military man who is literally shaken up, lost his mind.

33:25Michael Phillips:And unfortunately, Bruce Dern is the kind of actor, good as he is in so many things, where he just goes in that direction completely, 100%. And the script, you know, the role is what it is. And it does paint an awful lot of people like he's the emblem for why we can't really trust the rights and why the military operation in Vietnam was a mistake. Now, I might agree with the latter. I don't agree with the former. And I know some of you guys are going to look at that uniform, man, and you're going to remember all the films, and you're going to think about the glory of other wars, and think about some vague patriotic feeling, and go off and fight this turkey, too.

34:12Michael Phillips:And I'm telling you, it ain't like it's in the movies. That's all I want to tell you, because I didn't have a choice. When I was your age, all I got was some guy standing up like that, man, and giving me a lot of bullshit, man, which I caught. I was really in good shape then, man. I was a captain of the football team, and I wanted to be a war hero, man. I wanted to go out and kill for my country. And it's just a wet kiss to liberalism and to a wonderfully, profoundly humanist filmmaker who, yes, was a lefty, you know, Hal Ashby, right? Didn't really notice any of that when I was 17. I'm older than you, so I can say that.

34:46Michael Phillips:But then seeing it again, it's like, hmm, ah, ah. Limited to the whole experience. As good as the acting is, especially from Voight and Jane Fonda, both very good. Dear Hunter, arguably much, almost inarguably, I think a much more kind of, not less overt politically, but essentially a conservative view. Essentially also trafficking borderline caricature the way Coming Home does with the Bruce Dering character in all its depictions of the enemy. you know the north vietnamese we see and also this incredible kind of leap of pure invention that i resisted on some level then and really hate now as an adult uh this whole idea of the you know the the russian roulette spiel you know which which gives the movie an unbearable amount of tension no question about it right i mean it's like gripping as hell and i think as i got older despite a lot of good things in that film in The Deer Hunter.

35:45Michael Phillips:I started to kind of really resent how easy it is for a skillful filmmaker to really grind an audience's guts with that kind of suspense. And it's also, I think, just becoming a kind of melodrama that is undeniably gripping and just kind of full of crap, I think, in the end. I was a little surprised at how thin and not as dimensional as I remembered, even as a 17-year-old, you know. I mean, I was probably a stupider 17-year-old than the average, but I remember thinking, well, these films kind of hit me in totally opposite directions, but I like them both. You know, they're saying something. And in that case, Goldwyn would have been wrong to not back them because they both made a handsome profit, right?

36:29Michael Phillips:Deer Hunter more conspicuously, cost more, made more. Coming Home still made back, I don't know, a good, like, multiple times its production budget. And they both were, like, Oscar bait, Oscar bait, and Deer Hunter wins that year. So that's my two. I don't know. Did you, when did you encounter those films? Because it was, it would have been at some point later. I don't know if you've seen both, but. Actually, I feel like it's like a, Dear Hunter's a rite of passage for all 17-year-olds. Because I'm pretty sure that's about the age when I watched it. And then coming home a bit later, because I got into Hal Ashby much later.

37:00Like for a while, I'd only seen Harold Amand. And that was, that was kind of it. Funny enough, as you were describing, like the precision-based filmmaker who's like able to grind the audience down. Singing in relation to the deer hunter, full metal jacket is very much the kind of Kubrick film that's aged the worst for me. It was a film I saw when I was 17. I thought it was so cool and radical and was really trying to say something about war and the army and violence. And I rewatched it maybe 10 years ago and I was like, huh, I think this is a lot of fluff. Irene, what is that button on your body armor?

37:36A peace symbol, sir. Where'd you get it? I don't remember, sir. What is that you've got written on your helmet? Born to kill, sir. You write born to kill on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke? No, sir. What is it supposed to mean? I don't know, sir. You don't know very much, do you? No, sir. I actually don't think there's like, once you get past the Vincent D 'Onofrio section, it's...

38:02Michael Phillips:Yeah, I'd agree with you on that. I agree with you. And as you describe it, you respond to it at a certain age. many, many Kubrick fans especially, but even people who don't know Kubrick very well respond very strongly to that film, maybe because they think it is, in your words, saying something about Vietnam War. There's a Lily Tomlin line in Search for Signs of Intelligent Life where she says, all my life I wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific. And it's a little how I feel about what Full Metal Jack is up to. Now, Kubrick is not necessarily a polemical filmmaker politically at all, I think.

38:35Michael Phillips:But, you know, I read that book. It's based on the short timers. And that's an infinitely sort of more effective version of whatever the short timers and or Full Metal Jacket is really up to. And yeah, you know, we change, but we don't have the same feelings, right? My favorite turnaround time was my friend Eric saw Billy Jack when he was 11. And it was like, this is, I'll never see a better thing in my life. Because it was a really rough. I mean, it's a rough movie for PG. Anything went in PG back then. And he saw it four years later at 15. He was like, what the hell was I thinking?

39:13Michael Phillips:So sometimes, you know, adolescents will do that to you. But there's one other category I'd love to get you on. And these would be movies that we've talked a little bit about some that might qualify already, but movies old and new that are really crafty at smuggling, if you want to look at it that way, smuggling their ideological or sociological political content message, whatever you want to say, inside the story or inside just a whole, maybe it's only happening visually. Maybe it's happening despite what you're looking at. Maybe it's happening just through characters that kind of sing so well that it just becomes harder to kind of dismiss as a message film.

39:55Well, it's funny enough, like, Locarno every year does a great retrospective. The first show, it's Locarno, they did a Columbia Pictures 100 retrospective. It was like Columbia Pictures for about, I think, 1929, 1950-something. And then last year was like post-war British cinema, 1946 to 1960. This year was the Hollywood Blacklist, which was... Ah, good years for film. I mean, interesting. Yes, phenomenal. And of course, all those films are chock full of messages that they're just trying to get past. But of course, I think the film that's most emblematic of that era is High Noon, right? Which is on its face, just a simple Western lone sheriff against a horde of outsiders, criminal outsiders who are threatening to destroy the peace of a quaint little town.

40:47But of course, when you look deeper into it, it's very much a film, a message film about America. It's a film about HUAC. It's a film about the Blacklist. It's one man standing up against these authoritarians who are looking to have him basically betray everyone else in order to save his own hide.

41:10Michael Phillips:Listen, the judge has left town, Harvey's quit, and I'm having trouble getting deputies. It figures. It's all happened too sudden. People got to talk themselves into law and order before they do anything about it. Maybe because down deep they don't care. They just don't care. And it's such a powerful, I mean, such a powerful, especially like that, the iconic crane where it's Gary Cooper. Gary Cooper alone. Yeah. And it's just the visual power of that message of this lone man, this one man of principles who's not willing to deny his principles, who's not willing to betray the thing that he's built and the ideals that he's stood up for.

41:54It's just, it's incredible. Right. And of course, some people think it is just a Western. And of course, John Wayne and Howard Hawks were angry at it.

42:02Michael Phillips:Yeah. And in fact, made a movie as a result. Right. Yes. It's Rio Bravo, right? Yeah, Hawks especially was like, I don't, what's this sheriff? His explanation of it was not political, why he hated it. He just says, what's this thing about this lily-livered sheriff running around town asking for help to fight these guys? You know, it just defended his sense of machismo, I think. Yeah, I want to say for Wayne it was political. I want to say Wayne was just like, that's the most un-American picture I've ever seen. Like, I've never known an American not to come help his fellow American. And it's like, well, buddy, I got a story for you.

42:38But you have the Blacklist retrospective was so good because you had a few of those. You also had, of course, the John Garfield pictures. He ran all the way and body and soul. And even the stuff like the women pictures like John Cronwell, Cronwell's caged about a women's prison. You know, this is just a whole spat of these movies are coming out in the late 40s through the 50s. They're pushing back against censorship. some in quiet ways and some in very loud ways. Right.

43:09Michael Phillips:You know, my pick in this category would be, it's basically part of the high noon story. It's a matter of what a difference a few years can make. And it sort of puts the screws to Samuel Goldwyn because Goldwyn produced The Best Years of Our Lives based on a short story. And it was not considered worth a bet, you know, in Hollywood. It was like, you know, the war was over. All the fighting forces were coming home in various conditions, and there were elements in the story that really felt like you are risking charges of un-Americanism with Frederick March, the banker character, kind of talking about, like, what the hell we can't do a loan?

43:50Michael Phillips:We can't cut a loan to a returning vet. What do you mean? We have every desire to extend a helping hand to returning veterans whenever possible. But we must all remember that this is not our money we're doling out. It belongs to our depositors. We can't gamble with it. I'll remember, Mr. Milton. Certainly the depictions of PTSD with Dana Andrews' character, risky for Hollywood, to kind of be that frank with it. And then Harold Russell, you know, an actual military figure who had lost a hand, not in combat, but as a member of the service. and playing kind of the lead character in this third storyline.

44:32Michael Phillips:Tough stuff to get by. But Goldwyn believed in it. He just sort of, I almost wonder if he didn't sort of feel like, I can just market this as like, we got a love story with Anna Andrews and Teresa Wright. We have a starry cast, A-list cast, up and down. And he had a hunch that this is the time for this film. You know, we don't need only fantasy or take your mind off the war. Everything's fine now. It's more like it's hard for these people to come home, and it's hard for this whole outer circle of family and friends and all of it. And as it's been pointed out by, is it Frankl, I think is his name, who wrote the book on High Noon?

45:11Michael Phillips:Yeah. It's just a page or two, and it's devoted to kind of like, well, what would have happened to the best years of our lives if they had tried to green light that, even among the most powerful producers in Hollywood, three years later? it would not have happened because it would have been like this movie is communist you know and it just would not have been greenlit three years later it was a crazy time you know it was and the studios then like as we know the studios now buckle under to political pressure from the federal administration to varying degrees about what is going to get made and what will not And that is a blessing right there.

45:55Michael Phillips:You know, I think for all of us, it looks like the past does not stay past, you know. And we're kind of living it again, I think. But I think the best years of our lives works because it doesn't apologize for the themes and it doesn't foreground them any more than it needs to. It's in every scene. I mean, we literally come home with these guys on the plane back to their small Midwestern town in the beginning and just see what life is like. Now, some of it's a little soapy, some of it's a little contrived, some of it's a little this and that. The film is actually, in many people's viewpoint, it is a perfect film, and it's a film that actually means the most to them of almost any film.

46:33Michael Phillips:I'm not sure it's quite up there for me, but I mean, the way William Wyler and Greg Tolan, the cinematographer, just shoot the simplest scenes of conversation, It's just kind of riveting in ways you don't even know why you're sort of like so in there with them until you just break it down and more about like what's happening visually. The fact that there's not a single flashy camera move at all until that, speaking of the crane shot in High Noon, right? The crane shot with Dana Andrews in the fighter plane graveyard. When you do that, that sparingly and that sort of strategically, it's just like you really notice it.

47:07Michael Phillips:That's my kind of message movie if it is one, I guess. And for the same reasons you like High Noon almost, but yeah. Well, I mean, where are we today, do you think? In terms of like people saying things that could be described as message movies, but, you know, may actually be, I don't know, have you seen anything recently that sort of says, actually that film had something to say, and it sort of put it over in a way that wasn't just its message. You know, it's fascinating because at the indie and international level, this stuff always exists, it continues to exist. At the Hollywood, like the big budget Hollywood level, not nearly as much.

47:43I mean, last year, I think, was a fascinating return because I think Sinners, of course, has definitely has something to say. One battle after another definitely has something to say. It's difficult to describe how surprising a studio would back one battle after another and give it a wide release. and I guess the Odyssey to a point is a message picture because so much of it is kind of an anti-war film in many ways Odysseus being very guilt written about his role in the war and his role in the sacking of Troy but yeah there's been quite a few hits but I'm not sure there's been much in terms of like message I feel like most of the big kind of hits this year Hollywood wise have been more psychologically geared you know whether it's Backrooms or obsession.

48:30I think Backrooms does have something to say, but I think its message is more on the internal than the external in terms of the internal psychology of people as opposed to like external culture. So yeah, I'd say there hasn't been much yet, but you know what? We haven't answered Fall and Fall is when most of these films tend to come out, you know, in terms of like trying to vie for Academy Awards, whether as Oscar bait or as legitimate surprises that do well at the box office and have something to say.

48:59Michael Phillips:I think in this category of a film that it's from people, it comes from people who have something on their mind and they have a way to really vividly dramatize it. The reason I love that, I know you're a big fan too, Nia DaCosta's Hedda from last year. Oh, yeah. Based on Hedda Gabler. I mean, Ibsen was really stepping out onto a limb that not many people had gone out on, just about to say, this is what we do in a patriarchy. This is how women shrivel and die or act out. And then DaCosta comes along and sort of gives it a whole new set of interesting complications that I just thought worked so much better than relocating adaptations where you're relocating the action to a different time and place.

49:45Michael Phillips:But do I call that a message picture? Is Hedda Gabler a message play? No, not to me. I don't know. But I just want more of it. Yeah. Yeah, Hedda has big themes, you know, like class and racism and sexism. They're not necessarily, so much of it is based in that kind of party atmosphere and the atmosphere of sex and desire. That I agree that it's not necessarily on its face a message picture, but there are messages in it. Right, right, right. Okay, speed round here for you, Robert. We didn't talk about this in advance, so this is the game show part of it, I guess. I'm just going to throw out a title.

50:26Michael Phillips:This is sort of in a category of movies that came along too late or maybe weren't any good to begin with from my point of view, but actually in the face of Goldwyn's idea, like, don't bother with message pictures. It's not what we're going to do. But they, in fact, found an audience. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, 1967. It's a terrible film, and it's fascinating how that film's talked about today where it's just like, oh, well, you know, it was very radical for its time. I was like, no, it wasn't. It was regressive when it came out. It was very regressive when it came out, you know, in terms of its depiction of race relations and its depiction of the good Black man who's trying to integrate into this white family and how he has to grovel for their acceptance.

51:13And it's just, it's a terrible film. And Baldwin writes incredibly about it. in The Devil Finds Work. You know, I haven't read that. James Baldwin's? Yeah, he writes a lot about what Poitier represents as an actor between that and The Defiant Ones, where he talks about being in a theater, I want to say, in Harlem, and everyone was yelling, get back on the trade at the screen to Poitier and The Defiant Ones.

51:40Michael Phillips:Yeah, right, right, right. I do remember reading about that. Yeah, yeah. A film like Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme, That comes along, and for some people in America and maybe around the world, it was some sort of empathizing machine that made them realize, okay, I don't hate all gay people now because this one's played by Tom Hanks and he's learning to accept, and vice versa, you know, Denzel Washington's character. And it found an audience and won an Oscar for Hanks. message movie of what effectiveness for you? You know, high effectiveness, you know, it's fascinating of the two message pictures that Tom Hanks won Oscars for back to back.

52:27I think it's by far the better one. And I think it's mostly because of the way that Antonio Banderas plays Tom Hanks as partner is really, really incredible. And I think Demi, a very empathetic filmmaker and our mutual friend, my partner, Mariah E. Gates, we talked about Philadelphia recently about like how when it came out, I think a lot of people in the gay queer community were very suspicious of it and critiqued it as being kind of like a straight washing of like the AIDS epidemic. But I think looking back on it and seeing as being not like the film about AIDS, but one of many films now about AIDS, HIV AIDS, I think it very much allows one to have like a kind of a clear eyed kind of look at, oh, this film was, I think, very radical for the moment.

53:14Was incredibly radical. And doesn't, I don't think the Denzel character of him trying to be like, no, I like gay people now.

53:22Michael Phillips:Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe I'm crudely characterizing that. Yeah, you're right. You're right. No, no, I don't think you're crudely. I think that's exactly what the movie's doing. But I do think it does it in a way that doesn't feel like Tom Hanks has to beg for empathy, where that character has to beg and has to say, please see me as human. There's no pleading with the Denzel character. The change of the Denzel character is actually quite organic. The Federal Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination against otherwise qualified handicapped persons who are able to perform the duties required by their employment.

54:01Although the ruling did not address the specific issue of HIV and AIDS discrimination.

54:05Michael Phillips:Subsequent decisions have held that AIDS is protected as a handicap under law not only because of the physical limitations it imposes, but because the prejudice surrounding AIDS exacts a social death which precedes the actual physical one. This is the essence of discrimination, formulating opinions about others not based on the individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics. I owe that one a rewatch. Well, Robert, it's been great talking this theme through here. So in the end, Samuel Goldwyn's maybe dismissive, dismissive possibly apocryphal but it sounds like legitimate but paraphrased phrase you know they send it by western union if you want to mess with what's the bs to truth ratio on that for you now on a one to ten of our um yeah you know i don't think it holds water i think most films are message films in many sense most you know unless you just even i would just even say even like the dumbest action movie is a message you know like something like top gun maverick is a message picture in its own way you know the message might be the might of the american military but it's still a message and so to go back i think it really kind of depends on the package and whether it is didactic and i think going back to what you talked about and in terms of like capra whether there is something that destabilizes the viewer and destabilizes the picture and really kind of makes you think not necessarily agreeing with your views but makes you and allows you to think whether about yourself or the next person or what have you.

55:48I think when movies can get to that point, I think the goal one, quote, holds no weight. But I do think that it holds weight when it comes to you. Maybe the pictures shouldn't only be a message.

56:00Michael Phillips:Robert, where can people read you right now besides everywhere? I mean, you've had streaks where you've literally been in every surviving film coverage outlet in the world at the same time. Where are you writing for mostly right now? Mostly I write for three publications, rogerupert.com where I'm associate editor. I'm also a columnist for the New York Times. So I have a monthly action streaming column where I highlight five action movies that have been recent release or streaming that you can find. And then usually I'm at a festival. I'm going to be at Toronto International Film Festival soon.

56:32I'll be covering that for Screen Daily, which is a great UK-based magazine trade that I write for.

56:39Michael Phillips:Excellent. I sure appreciate your time. Thanks. Thank you for having me. This has been a fun discussion. And all movies, to your point about action films, every kind of film, all films are saying something and hopefully many things. And it's just a question of how carefully you look at it. Do not forsake me, oh my darling On this our wedding day Do not forsake me, oh my darling Wait, wait long. After we talked, I thought about Robert's experience re-seeing High Noon. Director Fred Zinneman's film had and has plenty of detractors. It also has plenty of admirers who see it as a model for a movie, a western in this case, that says not one thing but many things and is not simply the sum of its messages.

57:42Michael Phillips:When it came out, High Noon won Gary Cooper an Academy Award, and this was in early 1953 when Joe McCarthy's commie hunt was raging. It was also a time not friendly to storylines coming out of Hollywood that could be read as uneasy regarding an Old West community, an emblem of America and Americana that does not step up when the going gets rough. With so much of contemporary moviemaking and streaming service production today, the corporate directive is clear and unapologetic. It's time to appease the current presidential administration and keep an American eagle eye out for anything that might anger that administration.

58:24Michael Phillips:That's what we're told anyway. But we, the viewers, the ticket buyers, the streaming subscribers, we do have a choice, a choice of what we want to pay for. Anyway, what's that William Faulkner line from Requiem for a Nun, the past is never dead. It's not even past. But all's not lost. It wasn't so long ago that One Battle After Another and Sinners were the big wows at the Oscars in the same year. Now, people have all sorts of opinions about those pictures and what they're saying, but, you know, those films were real movies and they risked something like a frontery. Were they message pictures? Sure.

59:02Michael Phillips:But every film we see is saying something. as Robert Daniels reminded me. The Movie Racket is produced by Joe Dessau and Michael Phillips. The executive producers are Adam Kempinar and Sam Van Halgren. Special thanks to Robert Daniels, worth reading and hearing in any shape, form, or medium. I'm very happy to say lots of you have written to us here at The Movie Racket. That address, movieracket at filmspotting.net. So write us, write me, just me, just write me, and we'll get to some of those missives of yours full of pith and vinegar next week. I'm Michael Phillips. This is a Film Spotting production.

59:40Wait long, wait long, wait long, wait long.

59:53Michael Phillips:Got a trivia question for you. How many square miles can a black bear roam? Well, up to 250 for a male black bear, which also happens to be the number of reasons to choose T-Mobile. Here's one awesome reason. They have the fastest 5G home internet according to Ookla Speed Test, which you can test for yourself with a 15-day money-back guarantee. Another reason, setup is fast and easy too. Plug it in and you're online in practically no time with no appointment or technician needed. Those are just a few reasons. Find yours at t-mobile.com slash home internet, where you can check availability and try it for yourself.

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