Top 5 Unreliable Narrators and Kurosawa’s Rashomon (#1055)

20:45Adam Kempenaar:The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.

20:53Josh Larsen:Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Leppie. Lucy Leppie has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story?

21:05Adam Kempenaar:The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.

21:08Josh Larsen:I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level if the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected.

21:51Josh Larsen:The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.

22:31Adam Kempenaar:I have done nothing except get pregnant by the f***. Razzler!

22:36Josh Larsen:Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app,

22:38Adam Kempenaar:Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

22:45Adam Kempenaar:Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight.

23:05Josh Larsen:I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity. I hate those words. They make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo is born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son.

23:36Adam Kempenaar:What do you think you'd say?

23:38Josh Larsen:Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series. Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the astrology of the current grid, Lewis Hamilton, Capricorn Sun, Cancer Moon, And wouldn't you know it, Michael Schumacher is also a Capricorn Sun Cancer Moon. The story of the sport's most consequential driver's strike. We have one man who, upon hearing that he was going to be fired, freaked out, and apparently climbed out the window of the bathroom.

24:17Josh Larsen:And was Daniel Ricciardo's illustrious F1 career a success story, a cautionary tale, or some combination of both? He started getting all this attention, and he maybe started to think, I'm bigger than this, I'm better. and plenty of other mishaps, scandals, and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. I'm so excited to throw this number for you, Adam, because another sort of theory here that I'm very curious to hear what you think of it. It's a curveball pick.

24:56Josh Larsen:The top five idea prompted it for me. And then I was also prompted by the fact that there's this new documentary out, Ghost Elephants, nature documentary, but directed by Werner Herzog. So here's my question. Is Werner Herzog one of cinema's foremost unreliable narrators? He is notorious for his narrations of his documentaries, right? They're absolutely singular. These aren't, you know, a calm voice delivering facts. This is someone filtering factual things, the real world, through his own distinctly interpretive lens. This is one element of what everyone calls Herzog's ecstatic truth, right? His narration is part of that.

25:42Josh Larsen:So this made me wonder, do we really know Timothy Treadwell of Grizzly Man, or do we only know Herzog's particular version of him? Is there a certain unreliability in what we're being told as well in how it's being framed, especially by Herzog, the on-screen narrator?

26:02Adam Kempenaar:Treadwell is gone. The argument how wrong or how right he was disappears into a distance, into a fog. What remains is his footage.

26:14Josh Larsen:My pick isn't Grizzly Man, because I think there might be a better test case for this question, and it's My Best Fiend. So that's where I'm going here with my number four pick. This is Herzog's documentary account of his tumultuous relationship with volatile actor Klaus Kinski, who was the star of five Herzog films like Aguirre of the Wrath of God, Nosferatu, and Fitzcarraldo. So my best thing, it was made a number of years after Kinski's death, and there isn't a lot of room here for Kinski's own voice. Herzog does read a passage from Kinski's autobiography at one point, and it's very amusing because in that passage, Kinski is basically describing Herzog in the same egomaniacal terms that Herzog in the documentary has been using to describe Kinski.

27:03Josh Larsen:So you do get a real sense of, you know, the back and forth between these two men. And I don't think this is a hatchet job at all. I mean, you get a real sense of their relationship, of the love and respect that two of them had. But there is something inherently unreliable about trying to capture the fullness of a man through such a particularly personal lens. So, yes, this is a very different kind of unreliability that we're mostly going to be talking about here. But I think it fits. I was kind of more intrigued to probe the question the more I thought about it. But I'm thrown at you because you're a huge Herzog fan and just would love to get your thoughts on this.

27:43Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. My immediate response is I'm angry at you for, on one level, violating the integrity of the top five. And I say that because kind of going back to what I was alluding to earlier, that line of even though you know you're watching a narrative, you know you're watching a fiction, we as viewers are so buying into the reality of it that then the unreliability of the narrator and that tension is at the core of what this top five is all about. So if you bring, quote unquote, actual reality into it, then it kind of undercuts that, though we can also go into that realm of, yes, but we also now know and discuss constantly how even documentaries are their own version of subjective truths.

28:38Adam Kempenaar:Beyond that, though, I will just say my other reaction is I'm angry at you for having thought of it first and not me, because I think it's I think it's pretty I think it's pretty brilliant. And I think it makes sense if you're willing to go into the realm of documentary for this top five. Herzog's obviously the place to go because of what you said, because he so succumbs to his notion of the ecstatic truth, because he buys into that so wholeheartedly. He believes in it so devotedly and, and he, he again and again displays it in his films, whether it's on grandiose levels and, and has grandiose displays of it or these very small displays of it that, that honestly, unless you're doing research on the film later or someone points it out to you or Herzog himself points it out, you wouldn't even know it was some kind of manufacturing of the truth or a modification of the truth.

29:45Adam Kempenaar:the truth, but he can't help it. He, he likes to lie. He likes to lie within his movies. He sees a purpose to his lies within his films. And I, I actually was just watching it's on YouTube. I, I highly recommend it just a few weeks ago. I watched, it's only about 45 minutes long. And I think it's from, I think it's from the 1970s. Yeah. 1974 Herzog made a, made a documentary about a skier, a ski jumper, you know, those, those, like the winter Olympics, you know, where they just go down the ramp and then they jump and it's just all about distance about this guy named Gunther Steiner. And it's called the great ecstasy of woodcarver Steiner.

30:26Adam Kempenaar:And it's just about this guy and talk about ecstatic truth. This guy can just, or the ecstasy, right? That he captures the guy can just soar farther than everybody. And the way Herzog depicts that soaring in slow motion, it is something amazing. You understand why that word ecstasy is in the title. And you're watching it. And at the end, there's a poem that Herzog reads. And it's like about Steiner. And you think, is that a real poem? Did Steiner write that? Where did that come from? And you're like, Herzog just made that up. You know, like none of it, it's, you know, like that doesn't come from anything.

31:07Adam Kempenaar:Herzog just thought it was poetic and he decided to throw it in. And I can't find it. I feel so bad because it was just like a month ago. But Steiner at one point tells a story about growing up with some kind of bird. You know, he had like a pet and I'm I wish I could remember what it was. And the story is so pedestrian in a way, but also bizarre, like things like stories and Herzog movies are that Josh, as soon as the movie got over, all I did was start Googling because I was sure Herzog made that up and made Gunther Steiner read it in his film because there was no way that was true. That seemed like one of those things that Herzog said, hey, I think this works for my movie.

31:52Adam Kempenaar:Would you say this and recount this like it was part of your childhood? As far as I can tell, it's real that Steiner really grew up with that pet. But who really knows? So all of that is to say I wholeheartedly support your pick. Well, I'm so relieved. I thought you might throw me out of court. So I'm glad we can proceed. No, I'm in. I like it. I like it a lot. Okay. My number four unreliable narrator is Tony Wilson. The movie is 24-Hour Party People from 2002. So right around there. One of my favorite cinematic pairings, Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan. And what I'm pretty sure was their first cinematic pairing, their first collaboration in a movie written by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

32:41Adam Kempenaar:Some may remember from the Danny Boyle movie, Millions. among other movies. And this is the film that tells the story of that Manchester music scene that sprung up in the wake of the Sex Pistols and as music was changing in England in the late 1970s. Tony Wilson was this local TV news reporter who saw the Sex Pistols and said, I want to start a record label. I want to promote bands. I want to do something really important. And he ended up creating this label called Factory Records and and starting or being the instigator behind a bunch of new bands and this new sound coming into fruition. He's a TV personality, as I said, a real life Tony Wilson, a real life TV personality.

33:30Adam Kempenaar:He's obviously ambitious. And he did, as he's looking back, Steve Coogan playing Tony Wilson. Tony Wilson did make a major mark on popular music in Britain in the 80s primarily. And you put all of that together, Josh, and of course the person portraying him is in the way it's written. It's going to be written in a way and performed in a way to push a certain narrative that's a little bit self-aggrandizing. You know, it's going to favor what makes him look good over, quote unquote, what really happened. And that's easy to do when he, Coogan as Tony Wilson, is literally telling the story, not just with narration, but he's breaking the fourth wall.

34:15Adam Kempenaar:He's talking directly to the audience in many instances. And throughout, Winterbottom and Coogan are constantly reminding you to, and this is not a surprise for people who know Winterbottom's work and often his work with Coogan, they're reminding you of the mechanics of the story. They're reminding you of the fact that it is a story. So I think about a scene in this movie where Tony recounts meeting Sean and Paul Ryder of the group, the Happy Mondays, on a roof where they're trying to poison pigeons. and Coogan's explaining to us, right, that popular music's like a double helix, waves that intertwine and all this stuff.

35:01Adam Kempenaar:And he says when one musical movement's descendant, another one's ascendant. And so right now we're in kind of a crisscross, a kind of hiatus. But the two guys that are going to be on the crest of it are these two guys, Paul and Sean Ryder.

35:13Josh Larsen:This is a true incident, a bit like the hang gliding, which remember works on two levels. This takes place in 1980 when Sean and Paul put rat poison into some bread and fed it to 3 ,000 pigeons.

35:26Adam Kempenaar:Here we are in our narrative, this narrative of the movie 24-Hour Party People. One musical movement's ascendant, one's descendant. We're at this crisscross, right? But the next wave is coming. He's telling you, right, it's because of these guys that the next wave is coming, and they're going to be at the crux of it. Okay, that's why we're on this roof. There's the storytelling mechanics. Then he has to make sure we understand that, oh, this is true. You know, this really happened. But then it's not completely true because, you know, no pigeons were harmed in the making of this film. He does let us know that it's a reconstruction.

36:06Adam Kempenaar:He tells us it's a reconstruction that no pigeons were harmed. He wants us to be sure that we understand that. But when he says this is true, like the hang gliding incident, it is one of those things where even if we're aware of it sort of from the beginning because we understand the mechanism, the mechanics of storytelling, we understand the personality of Coogan and Tony Wilson and everything that's happening before us. you still can't help but believe what you're seeing before you and that it's a true quote unquote true story but when he draws attention to the fact that well this is true and that was true then all of a sudden you're thinking well then which ones aren't true and and why are some more true than others right and so the entire movie you're you're you're in this nebulous zone right This gray area wondering, what really am I being fed here?

37:02Adam Kempenaar:And does it matter at all? Because at the end of the day, it's entertaining as hell. And who cares if any of it's factually true? So I do remember watching 24-hour party people in a movie theater in Chicago. I wasn't living in Chicago yet when this movie came out. It was just before I moved here. But coming to Chicago to visit, seeing this movie in a theater, and it being one of the first movies I really remember that challenged me, not in a super challenging way, but was doing something semi-sophisticated in this way with its narrative, with that breaking the fourth wall, the unreliable narrator, and it being something that I felt like was new to me at the time.

37:44Josh Larsen:I'm so glad you called out the Happy Mondays sequence because I have fond memories of 24-hour party people have not seen it since. And I was thinking as you started talking about it, about the bands that were covered, it's like, is that, was that Happy Mondays? Man, I miss Happy Mondays. So yeah, a good movie. Good movie. And yeah, definitely works for this list. All right. My number three is, let's see here. Oh yeah. This was part of our family's COVID coping strategy. A few years ago now, thankfully, we went on a Joan Crawford marathon. And one of the highlights was 1947's Possessed, which I think counts as an unreliable narrator movie for reasons I'll get to.

38:31Josh Larsen:First, I want to clarify, though, we also in that marathon did 1931's Possessed with Joan Crawford. I think this one's a little better. So if you're going to choose the Possessed, go with 47 here. In this one, Crawford plays Louise Howell, who is the unreliable narrator. We basically first meet her in this incredible opening sequence where she's just wandering the streets of Los Angeles in a daze and mumbling the name David. She ends up being hospitalized and begins piecing together her past in these flashbacks that involve an engineer she was in love with who rejected her played by van heflin if i were in love with anybody else believe me i'd tell you there is another woman i know it otherwise why should you suddenly decide to go off to canada how did you know about canada you didn't think i'd find out about that did you but i did i listened i listened at the door do you see the things you make me do all right i'll do them i'll do anything because i don't care anymore you can't go away without me david i won't let you i'll find a way i'll lie if i have to but i'll find a way so that unspools a pretty wild plot of betrayal, potential suicide, possible murder.

39:42Josh Larsen:And this is all through the foggy memory and even the hallucinations at one point of Louise. So yeah, this fits your criteria, Adam, of like, we know obviously from that opening scene, this is a struggling woman. How much can we believe of her story? Crawford, this will not surprise you to hear, commits. I don't find that this particular performance leans all the way into camp. I think the movie overall, I mean, this is 47, so it's not perfect, but I think it deals with her mental illness fairly progressively for the time. And Crawford, you know, definitely is taking this woman and her predicament seriously.

40:24Josh Larsen:The director is Curtis Bernhardt. I'm not incredibly familiar with Curtis Bernhardt, but there are some nice employments of point of view shots in the movie, which I especially like for this list because they emphasize the unreliable narrator element. The first one comes when Louise is being hospitalized, and so she's wheeled into the hospital on this gurney, and we suddenly see her, from her point of view, like the ceiling lamps passing overhead. And so even though we've initially become suspicious of her because we've watched her from afar in this daze, and we're either nervous for her or maybe even scared by her.

41:03Josh Larsen:Here then we're put into her body and her panic becomes ours. So it's kind of messing with you in that way of what should I believe? What should I not believe? And well, now I'm actually experiencing this story. So that invests us even more. Yeah, I highly recommend Possessed. I think of it as the Hitchcock film that Joan Crawford never made.

41:25Adam Kempenaar:So it's a good one. Joan Crawford should be, it sounds like it will never be, she will never be a marathon subject on this show because you did that marathon without me. You did that with your other family. Yeah, yeah. You did that with your actual family. She would have been great. Should have been a marathon topic on this show because I need to see a lot of Joan Crawford movies and that unfortunately is one of them. And, you know, I already wanted to see those films, but now you've really sold me on wanting to see Possessed. There you go. Good pick.

41:59Adam Kempenaar:Josh, looking over the slate of movies that are playing or coming soon to a regal cinema near you, I kind of like seeing that with the Oscars approaching, you can still go to the theater and see Marty Supreme, one of the best picture nominees. If you haven't already seen that movie, catch it before. It's no longer available on the big screen. And of course, the movie that we will be discussing next week. Look for it in your feed. Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride. I have to share, I love that I just randomly got this video served to me. You know that John Mulaney story he told on the Oscars about reading, putting himself on tape for a young cop?

42:39Adam Kempenaar:It was so memorable. It was a really funny story. It was for this movie. And Jesse Buckley and Maggie Gyllenhaal got asked about it, and they were great sports about it. And they laughed and said it was really funny. And And Maggie did point out, Maggie Gyllenhaal, that it's a good role. And Lewis Canselme is the actor who plays Young Cop in the movie. And she ended up giving Young Cop a name, I think, after John Mulaney told that story. But she says, it's a good role. It's quite a big part. So maybe John Mulaney should have taken it more seriously. So we can see that on the big screen. And maybe we'll discuss just how good the actor is performing Young Cop, though I think we'll be spending most of our time looking at Jesse Buckley and Christian Bale and considering their performances.

43:26Adam Kempenaar:I am very excited to see that one. You can see both of those films at Regal Cinema near you, and you just might be able to see them for free. Regal Unlimited is the all-you-can-watch movie subscription pass that pays for itself in just two visits. Right now, Regal is offering film-spotting listeners endless movies for less. All you have to do is sign up for Regal Unlimited using code FILMSPOT26, and you'll get 15 % off. Regal Unlimited is the only truly limitless movie subscription pass. You can see any standard 2D movie anytime with no blackout dates or restrictions. And with Regal Unlimited, you won't just save money on tickets.

44:04Adam Kempenaar:You also save on snacks. Members get 10 % off all non-alcoholic concessions. So sign up now in the Regal app or at the link in our podcast description and use code FILMSPOT26. That's FILMSPOT26 to receive your discount.

44:24Adam Kempenaar:my number three this is the only one of my picks that doesn't come from right around the turn of the century it's from 2014 and here's where things get really fun because david fincher takes gillian flynn's gone girl conceit from the book and i think really employs it so perfectly. First, we assume that this is going to be the story as told completely from Nick Dunn's perspective, Ben Affleck. Can he be trusted, Josh? Well, in the opening narration, we hear him talk about cracking his wife Amy's lovely skull open. When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. I picture cracking her lovely skull, unspooling her brains, trying to get answers.

45:23Adam Kempenaar:Though it's not as bad as it sounds, right? Right? I mean, he just means he just really wants to understand what his wife is really thinking. He just wants to get inside her head. I mean, we've all had the same thought about our wives, right? uh but sure something about that phrasing and and kind of the way that just slightly menacing way he says it you know it's it's perfect we're immediately not sure what to think about this guy and of course as more details unfold like the fact that she's missing what happened to her is he in fact responsible for her disappearance how much can we trust what he's telling the police not just us, the people around him, what they think and what he's telling them.

46:06Adam Kempenaar:And then, of course, it gets really, really interesting once we learn that Amy's still alive. And that becomes a fact. That becomes something we're aware of when we get introduced to Amy and we get the famous cool girl speech. Nick and Amy will be gone, but then we never really existed. Nick loved a girl I was pretending to be. Cool girl. Men always use that, don't they, as their defining compliment. She's a cool girl. Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man. She only smiles. Other than the fact, Josh, that she faked her death and is obviously willing to go to great lengths to deceive the entire world, not just her husband, what does Amy immediately start telling us in that monologue?

47:03Adam Kempenaar:Nick and Amy will be gone, but then we never really existed. Nick loved a girl I was pretending to be. We were happy pretending to be other people. We were the happiest couple we knew. Her entire marriage, her life really up to this point, and as we quickly learned too from the beginning of the film, so has his, has been about deception, right? Right. We're in a in that movie. We are in a constant state of having to recalibrate what we think, what we believe, what we feel, who we can trust, what we can trust, not trust. and certainly what's coming out of the mouths of either Nick or Amy. And in some cases, in flashbacks, Fincher understands that because we've seen it happen, because he's shown us something, it's then impossible, almost impossible, for our brains to then disassociate it from reality.

47:59Adam Kempenaar:That what we saw in flashback could, in fact, be just their version of the truth or a complete fabrication. It could be a complete deception. And I think I think that movie is so disorienting in the best way a movie can be, because Fincher does turn it back on us that way. There are things we know that people within the movie world don't know. We're privy to information that they're not. And yet with every new revelation within the movie world or as characters on television or anyone who's questioning the reality or raising doubt about who did what, as those questions get raised, you can't help as a viewer start to question it yourself.

48:49Adam Kempenaar:You start to question the truth that you think you believe, the things that you've been clinging to, what you think you know from what you saw. And I think that's that line again, that edge that you're walking that entire time with that movie. And I think that's one of the things that really elevates Gone Girl.

49:06Josh Larsen:Yeah, I think Fincher had to get recognition with this top five. He's one of those filmmakers, and we might touch on one or maybe two others, who have a number of unreliable narrator movies in their filmography. I was leaning towards Fight Club. Didn't end up, spoiler, on my list. It's probably my number six. But I think you probably nailed the better one here, Adam. I'm just looking up. I wasn't quite as high on Gone Girl as I was Fight Club, which is probably why I didn't lean that way. But here's the first phrase of my review. I forgot about this. A viper's nest of unreliable narrators. There you have it.

49:44Josh Larsen:Apparently, I should have just, you know, went into my search field and typed in unreliable narrators and seen what popped up. Come on. What's the archive there for, Josh? To use that technique next time. But yeah, absolutely a fitting pick there with Gone Girl. Okay. At number two, however, and here's where we really need to put the spoilers out there, even though it seems ridiculous. list. My number two pick is The Sixth Sense. But Adam, I've watched The Sixth Sense with, you know, teenagers who somehow didn't know the reveal. So I'm just going to say, if that's you and you happen to be listening, you need to experience The Sixth Sense, if it's at all possible, without knowing what goes down.

50:25Josh Larsen:But as we discussed when we did our 9 from 99 review a number of years ago, it's not just a twist that makes M. Night Shyamalan's breakout ghost story so incredible it has those performances which across the board are brilliant hailey joel osmond bruce willis maybe above all tony collette it has good creeps good scares they're all expertly crafted but all that being said it's the twist that i think does elevate the sixth sense and for me is what really makes it eligible for this list and this is the fact that here's the spoiler Willis' child psychologist, Malcolm Crowe, is in fact trying to help Osment's traumatized boy from beyond the grave.

51:11Josh Larsen:Now, we don't know. He's a ghost until the end, of course. So there's maybe not that ambiguity you were looking for, Adam. But I think the brilliance of the twist here is that Malcolm doesn't realize it himself until we do. And this is when he tries to talk to his wife, played by Olivia Williams, who's also very good and discovers that he can't because he's dead.

51:34Adam Kempenaar:I see people. They don't know they're dead.

51:44Josh Larsen:How often do you see them? All the time. So Malcolm is unknowingly unreliable to himself. And for me, that adds a certain pathos to the narrative. And to me, that's also what gives the sixth sense its crowning achievement, that this movie has everything I talked about as well as a powerful emotional punch. So it is clever and it is intricate, right? The unreliability is baked into the actual composition of certain scenes, which is also revealed in retrospect. But for me, it's also moving as well, just because of the very nature of the unreliability of its narrator.

52:30Adam Kempenaar:We'll come back briefly to the sixth sense here when we get to the end of our picks. Absolutely understand why it's on your list, and I think it has to come up in any conversation of unreliable narrators. I'm as big of a fan of that movie as you are, going back to that conversation that we had about it during that 9 from 99 series. Before I get to my number two pick, I do just want to state, because I finally remembered it, and I know everyone's dying to hear it, Woodcarver Steiner. It was a pet raven. It was a pet raven. And who has a pet raven? You see why you can't believe that's true, right?

53:04Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. They shouldn't be pets. They're way too smart. I mean, that sounds dangerous. I know. I know. So my number two. Okay. My final two picks here, I'm going to call the children of Rashomon. And I say that in spirit. I guess all of these movies in some way are the children of Rashomon, but especially these two picks, Josh, in spirit, but also in their own distinct ways, form. This is another movie, and this is 1999, so right around 2000 again, another movie I have only seen once when it came out in the theater, and I would love to revisit it. I know it's a beloved film by a lot of our listeners, rightfully so.

53:44Adam Kempenaar:I have only seen it that once. It's not a direct parallel, obviously, to Rashomon, but not only does Alexander Payne's election have four narrators, unreliable narrators, Jim, Tracy, Tammy, and Paul, but they are recounting a single event in their collective pass. That whole election mess, as Matthew Broderick's Jim puts it at the beginning. Like Gone Girl, this was a book construct that drew Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, the co-writer, to the project, the Tom Parada book, which I haven't read, but I know it gave each chapter over to a different character. It's all first person, different chapters, different characters, so they get to tell their own version of events.

54:37Adam Kempenaar:And beyond recounting details of what happened as they remember it, the voiceover here in Election, it's so good. It essentially functions to reveal what I think the commoner, and we're going to get to Rashomon, but essentially what the commoner in Rashomon says. Most of the time, we can't even be honest with ourselves. Whatever these characters claim in voiceover, we as the viewer figure out pretty quickly that the opposite must in fact be true. Like take when Jim is at dinner with his wife. It has to be what is yet another silent dinner where they're just looking down at their plates across from each other.

55:21Adam Kempenaar:And the voiceover says, thank God for Diane.

55:36Adam Kempenaar:There's no way that's true based on what we're seeing. That clash, that ironic clash of the words to the visual, what we're actually seeing play out in terms of the action of their marriage. It's the expression of the fantasy version of his life. Or maybe Josh is not even the fantasy version of his life. It's just the version of his life that he has to believe in order to get through the day. And what's funny is he says she's his source of love and strength. And so even just beyond that clash that's clearly there, he says, you know, my source of love and strength. But when she actually says to him, is anything wrong?

56:22Adam Kempenaar:He says, no, no, just, you know, school. Well, if, if she was actually this source that you could confide in, who helped you through your problems, then why wouldn't you share what was troubling you? And maybe she'd help you. But of course he doesn't do that. So there's another layer of that, that irony, but it isn't just Jim. Of course, it's all the other characters. I mean, there's a YouTube clip that's labeled Tracy Flick isn't upset. Who put you up to this? What do you mean? You just woke up this morning and suddenly decided to run for president? No, no, I just thought that. Thought what? It starts with her haranguing Chris Klein's Paul, right?

57:05Adam Kempenaar:So right there you get the irony. But it ends or the voiceover begins with her saying, you might think it upset me that Paul Metzler had decided to run against me. but nothing could be further from the truth. He was no competition for me. It was like apples and oranges. Again, though, this immediately follows her haranguing him. You know, she's just, just yelled at him in front of everyone there in the gym because he's going to run against her. So there we have that clash once again, but back to Jim, because he is kind of, you know, the movie's main, main punching bag, just like Rashomon, this movie does eventually bring us sort of out of this time warp or out of this limbo into the present day.

57:46You know, the narration becomes present tense.

57:49Adam Kempenaar:We see and hear what everyone is up to now because in theory, everyone has moved on. Everyone's moved on with their lives and they've improved their lives, right? They've gotten past the whole messiness of that. But we see that that's not really the case. And in particular with Jim, he says, you might wonder if I ever, if I ever saw Tracy Flick again, and he's, he's at a museum educators conference in DC, right? And he randomly, he randomly sees her. She's working for a congressman. She's getting into a limo. and the voiceover again, Josh, where he's like, he's talking about how his impulse was to run over there and pound on her window.

58:35Adam Kempenaar:And he wanted to confront her about lying and cheating. But instead I just stood there and I realized I wasn't angry anymore. I just felt sorry for, and he starts, he starts trying to convince us the audience, the imaginary audience that he's talking to slash himself, right? About his new life and all the exciting things he's doing. and how her life must really be pathetic, you know? And that's what's so funny is, of course, he's not really angry, just like Tracy Flick wasn't really angry. And yet, what do we see him do? Throw his drink at the limo, you know, because he's actually still crushed by all of this and just overcome with hostility towards her.

59:19Adam Kempenaar:So that irony and the way the voiceovers are deployed in election is, I mean, you obviously you can't imagine election without it. I mean, it's so essential to that film and the success of that movie.

59:32Josh Larsen:Love the Rashomon parallels. I'd never thought about that before. But yeah, they're absolutely there. And this is a good case, too, maybe because we frame this as the movies and not necessarily the characters, but to give credit to the performances that are needed for a movie like this. I mean, how good are Broderick and Witherspoon in these parts and hitting all those levels that you've been describing, having to perform that sort of self-deception as well as they do. Man, 1999. I don't think, I know we probably considered this in the mix for our 9 from 99 series, Adam, and we just felt like there were others we had to get to before it.

1:00:12Josh Larsen:Yes, but we should have watched it. What a great film that we weren't even able to get to. What an incredible year. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.

1:00:24Adam Kempenaar:The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.

1:00:33Josh Larsen:Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Leppie. Lucy Leppie has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story?

1:00:44Adam Kempenaar:The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.

1:00:47Josh Larsen:I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level if the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected.

1:01:31Josh Larsen:The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract. Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you. Please search warrant. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.

1:02:10Adam Kempenaar:I have done nothing except get pregnant by the f***. Razzler!

1:02:15Josh Larsen:Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:02:25Josh Larsen:Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series. Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the astrology of the current grid. Lewis Hamilton, Capricorn Sun, Cancer Moon. Wouldn't you know it, Michael Schumacher is also a Capricorn Sun, Cancer Moon. The story of the sport's most consequential driver's strike. We have one man who, upon hearing that he was going to be fired, freaked out, and apparently climbed out the window of the bathroom. And was Daniel Ricciardo's illustrious F1 career a success story, a cautionary tale, or some combination of both?

1:03:03Josh Larsen:He started getting all this attention, and he maybe started to think, I'm bigger than this, I'm better. And plenty of other mishaps, scandals, and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:03:47Josh Larsen:But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo was born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son.

1:04:15Adam Kempenaar:What do you think you'd say?

1:04:18Josh Larsen:Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We are at number one. We are. Well, almost every Christopher Nolan film could be considered for this list, I feel like. I mean, certainly The Prestige, certainly Inception. I'm going to guess Tenet, but I had no idea what's going on, so I'm just going to say probably. I think when you consider the very notion of unreliability, you're inherently dealing with things. You're dealing with complication. You're dealing with artifice. You're dealing with deception. Unreliability also creates, in a lot of ways, a multiverse.

1:05:01Josh Larsen:and Nolan makes movie multiverses, not non-Marvel movie multiverses, but either literally in some cases or just in the way your mind is required to function to keep up with his films. So I have a Nolan film at number one and it is Memento. Memento where Guy Pearce plays Leonard Shelby, a man who has short-term memory loss while trying to solve his wife's murder. He's basically relying on a Polaroid and his own tattoos as clues. Here again, Adam, the unreliability baked into the movie's very form. Think about that Polaroid, the brilliant opening shot where it fades out rather than in as a Polaroid should.

1:05:47Josh Larsen:And really the editing throughout this movie, Nolan here working with Dodie Dorn, there is that flick of a shot, just an instance where we see Leonard getting into the car of Sammy Jankis and what that means and pretends for the levels of unreliability at play. I was thinking about this as I was putting together my list too, and I was thinking about Leonard in comparison to Malcolm in The Sixth Sense. And I thought, man, there are some fascinating levels and comparisons at play here because they're both unreliable to the audience at different phases, you know, of their films. Leonard obviously earlier than Malcolm, but they're both unreliable.

1:06:30Josh Larsen:Unlike Malcolm though, Leonard is knowingly unreliable to himself. That's what the tattoos are about. But this is a Christopher Nolan movie, so it gets even more complicated with the ending. And we learn that Leonard is also at the same time unknowingly unreliable to himself. And I'm not even going to get into how or why. We'll just leave that there. But I do think it was that level of sophistication when I started shaking things out here, where I was like, okay, this is not only on theme, this not only fits, but it's got to be number one.

1:07:08Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. And I'm just laughing because as you say that, I know what you mean. I wanted to contradict you, but it's actually, this is the, the layers that you're speaking to. It's, it's unknowingly because it's like knowingly unknowingly, you know, that's the beauty of this film, right? And, and that's why it's at number one for me. Deception self and otherwise are at the core of everything that Nolan does. And I'm not denying that this film has a twist, but unlike the sixth sense or some other movies that I'm going to mention in a minute, you said it, The unreliability is baked into the form from the beginning.

1:07:46Adam Kempenaar:I never believed Leonard or felt like I could believe him from that from the outset. And that's the essential criterion for me. That's why it qualifies. And you even get a great you get a great joke out of the narration and a great joke out of the unreliability of the narration out of the form. maybe the only real comedic moment in the entire movie. And I remember seeing this movie in the theater and everybody laughing at it and rewatching this scene. And it's still funny, Josh. It's still funny, even though I know it's coming when, when the scene begins and Leonard's running. Okay.

1:08:26Josh Larsen:So what am I doing? Oh, I'm chasing this guy.

1:08:34Adam Kempenaar:no he's chasing me right as the gun then fires at him the guy fires a gun at him so that's really funny it's it's also though a perfect microcosm for the discombobulated state that leonard and the audience start every single scene in but i think i think thematically too you can put yourself in those shoes and wonder, do you automatically assume that you're the good guy chasing down the bad guy? That's his first instinct. Or maybe, you know, you, you imagine that you're in a narrative, you, you might even see yourself like you're in a noir, which he is, but you know, he doesn't know that, but you might imagine yourself like that.

1:09:16Adam Kempenaar:Right. So that's the instinct, or maybe he's the bad guy getting chased by a good guy. In either case, he's the honorable one, right? Except all All of us would think, no, there's a there's a bad guy who's who, you know, chasing me for some reason, you know, or whatever it is. So let me let me restate that. Right. He's he could be the bad guy getting chased by a good guy. But the way he thinks about it or may in the way we would is that, no, there's a bad guy chasing us. Right. No matter how you look at it, we're always going to be good in that scenario. And that's that's at the core of the film.

1:09:52Adam Kempenaar:And I'm going to tie it back to Rashomon. I said the children of Rashomon, the movie that I think here again, the form is distinct, but I don't know that any movie more directly expresses what Rashomon expresses for 85 minutes of its runtime. let's put it that way maybe not 88 minutes of its runtime josh but 85 minutes of runtime i don't know that any movie expresses it more cynically more more explicitly than memento i think it's the perfect modern distillation of rashomon taking the form in a new completely original way a completely fractured way but it is expressing the fundamental idea of Rashomon, and I'm going to quote the commoner yet again.

1:10:49Adam Kempenaar:Tell me this line isn't something you think is in Memento, and in fact, a version of it is in Memento, but the commoner in Rashomon says it. We all want to forget something, so we tell stories. It's easier that way. That's Memento. Yeah.

1:11:06Josh Larsen:I like that you said fracturing. It is really a fracturing of memento, which is in some ways classically, well, we might get into this, but classically structured. As inventive of as it is in terms of perspective and that sort of thing, it's fairly classically structured. We follow, you know, point A to B, then we go back to point A, and then we take it to C, then we go back to point A, then we take, you know. And whereas memento is just like glass, it takes and just breaks it into glass, shards of glass.

1:11:35Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, those are our top five unreliable narrators. Josh, do you have some additional films you would like to mention?

1:11:47Josh Larsen:Yeah, I did have Fight Club at number six, though. I think probably, as I said, Gone Girl, you had the right Fincher choice. Usual Suspects, again, kind of around that era, maybe a little bit earlier. I forget exactly what year, but definitely one I considered. I you mentioned Scorsese already but yes Goodfellas taxi driver Shutter Island I think falls into this category maybe even more classically so yes in terms of the unreliable narrator but one I really like I love Shutter Island other ones I gave a passing thought to but just couldn't hold up to these must-haves but Trainspotting which we you know recently discussed in a way we could we could question our main narrator there and his reliability personality Blade Runner Big Fish the Tim Burton film and The Fall which is a Tarsem Singh film that has an unreliable narrator in addition to its lush visuals those were the ones I considered

1:12:46Adam Kempenaar:yeah the four big honorable mentions for me are the four big twist movies and I truly do think they are among the best unreliable narrator movies because of the way they do pull the rug out from under you. You mentioned it, The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects, Fight Club. And I would put ahead of all of those, my beloved Atonement, directed by Joe Wright. Three different Bryonies at three different ages and the impact, especially because I didn't know it was coming, of the reveal of the ending and the construct that I didn't know was the construct. Yeah, Yeah, Atonement would be in the mix for me.

1:13:30Adam Kempenaar:It would be really my number one unreliable narrator if I was counting twists in that way. And I could go back and try to retrofit it and say, am I questioning Bryony throughout? Maybe, but I wasn't. That's the key. I wasn't the way I was with these other characters when I watched these films. Another interesting one to think about in this, both of these fall more into the category of Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, what I was referencing earlier, A Clockwork Orange might be one that fits, right? Where if you think about his perspective, his psyche, do you want to believe? Do you want to believe that character?

1:14:09Adam Kempenaar:Can you believe Alex? How mushy is his brain at that point? It's a fair question with him. And I even thought it was interesting, Josh. I never thought about this film in this way. And I obviously didn't totally buy it because I didn't put it on my list despite the fact that it's one of my all-time favorite movies. And I'm not even sure I'm including it truly as an honorable mention. I do want to at least mention it because I think it's an interesting question. I saw on at least one list this movie presented as an unreliable narrator movie, and that was Amadeus and how much we should trust Salieri's version of events.

1:14:53Adam Kempenaar:I think the argument was more though, again, like, like Apocalypse Now, you know, where he, he's clearly a little bit deranged, um, unsettled, you know, can we fully believe him? Should we believe him? That kind of thing. But my experience watching the movie isn't one where, as I said, I'm actively engaged in that questioning anyway.

1:15:18Josh Larsen:Yeah. Yeah, I like it. I think you could make the case for it. You know it's skewed, but I guess it's a matter of the degree and whether you're getting completely misrepresentation of these actual events or if they're just bitter versions, right?

1:15:36Adam Kempenaar:Yes. Yeah. Again, those are our top five unreliable narrators. We would love to hear your picks or any other thoughts about the show. You can email us feedback at filmspotting.net and you can find all of our picks and see some clips that support our choices. The ones we referenced at filmspotting.net slash lists.

1:15:58Josh Larsen:Adam, let's take a moment to thank a couple of our FilmSpotting family members, those folks who support the show with their memberships and their donations. Both of these family members come from Chicago, Jake in Chicago and Carrie. Jake shared this first episode he remembers listening to, episode 739, The Blair Witch Project Discussion. I had seen this movie in middle school and vowed, one, never to go camping again, and two, never to rewatch the movie. For the rewatch, I can thank Adam and Josh's discussion of the film as a meta-commentary on the nature of spectator and violent spectacle. Armed with this analytical frame, I went to revisit it.

1:16:39Josh Larsen:It didn't work. I was still terrified, but I have been able to go camping again. Oh, well, that's nice to hear, Jake. Carrie shared this.

1:17:16Josh Larsen:I don't always agree with your takes, but I always appreciate your analysis, expertise, and passion. I recommend your podcast often and tell my friends it's the closest thing to listening to Cisco and Ebert do a podcast. Though, I think you guys like each other much more. Yeah, probably. Who knew Phantom of the Paradise was going to bring in film-spotting family members? I mean, great programming.

1:17:39Adam Kempenaar:When I when I read that, I got a little nervous and was surprised that Carrie ended up being a family member. But to prove that Carrie doesn't just talk the talk, but she walks the walk of review. We got wrong. She says, you know, Phantom of the Paradise is a perfect movie. This movie improves with each rewatch, especially if you're ever blessed enough to watch it with a room full of sickos at the music box who can sing along to the opening number. So she thinks it's a perfect movie. We were on Phantom of the Paradise. We didn't we didn't quite have the experience clearly that Carrie has with that movie.

1:18:15Adam Kempenaar:And yet she still did, as she suggests, enjoy the analysis, despite the fact that she probably didn't agree with us. Now, I will agree with her on this. I would truly like to be blessed enough to watch it with a room full of sickos at the music box who can sing along to the opening number. I would genuinely love to have that, but I haven't been lucky enough yet. Well, just thanks, Kerry, for not demanding a refund. That's all I gotta say. man here's jake who says you guys were both too kind this is an interesting one you're both too kind to steve mcqueen's blitz if the small act series teeters on the edge of being maudlin blitz is steeped in it from the period pc lighting to the cliche dialogue it's a hard watch for me mcqueen is at his best in widows where he stays gritty and focused yeah i think i like that

1:19:06Josh Larsen:one quite a bit more than you, Adam. So maybe this is falling, falling on my lap, which I get where you're coming from, Jake. It's definitely McQueen working in a different register. And I don't know if that's trying to reach a different audience, but yeah, I found it interested enough in some of his same concerns that I really, that I really went for it. All right, let's get to some more positive stuff here. Carrie's favorite show segment. I may be biased because I was able to attend the last one in person, but I love the year-end wrap party. Thank you for introducing me to Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, and also, of course, Massacre Theater.

1:19:42Josh Larsen:All right, here's Jake's favorite segment, Top 5 Bad Dads. All right, list we did a while back. Jake says, having recently become a dad myself, I hope to never behave like the main character in Force Majeure, Josh's fourth pick. Or it should be said, any of the other dads.

1:20:00Adam Kempenaar:You know, though, Jake, until the avalanche is coming. How do you know? How do you really know? A movie you credit with becoming a cinephile, Jake says Vertigo. Great choice. Carrie says Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind. I was working in a movie theater during that time period and was able to watch movies for free at any of the theaters in the chain, so I saw it probably five times. The movie completely entranced me. I'd never seen anything like it at the time. I watched it so many times that I had to take at least a 10-year break from it. I finally saw it again at last year's crying at the salt shed series over Valentine's day where John Bryan performed and gave an engaging and enlightening talk back.

1:20:37Adam Kempenaar:I still love it. That sounds wonderful. Doesn't it? We do thank Carrie. We thank Jake for being family members and for all of those years of listening. And if you think they have good taste, it sounds like they do. You can follow Carrie on letterboxd at cinema mendax. So cinema M E N D A X. and you can follow Jake at JP1965. In addition to keeping us doing what we're doing, membership does come with perks. You get to listen early and ad-free. You get our weekly newsletter. You get exclusive opportunities like being part of the Film Spotting Family Discord and you get monthly bonus shows. We have trivia spotting coming on March 19th.

1:21:17Adam Kempenaar:You get to participate in events like that. You also get voting opportunities like being the group that gets to select the next Film Spotting Marathon. You get to determine show programming if that all sounds like fun to you. More information about joining the Film Spotting family is available at filmspottingfamily.com. You can also help us by taking a minute to rate or review us over at Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It does help us reach new listeners.

1:21:49Josh Larsen:In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.

1:21:55Adam Kempenaar:The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.

1:22:03Josh Larsen:Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story?

1:22:15Adam Kempenaar:The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.

1:22:18Josh Larsen:I'm Amanda Knox and in the new podcast Doubt the case of Lucy Letby we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was no voicing of any skepticism or doubt it'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong listen to Doubt the case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected.

1:23:02Josh Larsen:The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it all, I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract.

1:23:23Adam Kempenaar:Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.

1:23:26Josh Larsen:Please search warrant. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies.

1:23:41Adam Kempenaar:I have done nothing except get pregnant by the f***ing. Rats work!

1:23:46Josh Larsen:Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:23:56Josh Larsen:Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series. Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the astrology of the current grid, Lewis Hamilton, Crabicorn Sun, Cancer Moon, Wouldn't you know it, Michael Schumacher is also a Capricorn Sun Cancer Moon. The story of the sport's most consequential driver's strike. We have one man who, upon hearing that he was going to be fired, freaked out, and apparently climbed out the window of the bathroom. And was Daniel Ricciardo's illustrious F1 career a success story, a cautionary tale, or some combination of both?

1:24:34Josh Larsen:He started getting all this attention, and he maybe started to think, I'm bigger than this, I'm better. and plenty of other mishaps, scandals, and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:24:55Adam Kempenaar:Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight.

1:25:15Josh Larsen:I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity. I hate those words. They make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo was born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:25:55Josh Larsen:And the Oscar goes to... Are they playing us off? No. Or maybe.

1:26:03Adam Kempenaar:Pop quiz hotshot. what film won the Oscar for best picture last year? Oh, come on. Anora, Sean Baker's big night. Okay. Do you actually remember that? Or did you see the notes in front of you?

1:26:16Josh Larsen:Yeah, no, I, yeah. I mean, that would come on. Like we were, you say, come on, but Josh excited. We were pretty excited about that.

1:26:24Adam Kempenaar:Okay. But you know, we're also at that age where we don't remember what we had for breakfast yesterday. And when I read this, when I read this part of the script that Sam prepared for us, until I read the bullet points below it, I couldn't have pulled out Honora.

1:26:40Josh Larsen:I mean, fair enough. Completely had forgotten. It's not like either of us, most Oscar years, yeah, complete blank. So it's not like I managed to keep track of a lot of these things and ask me who's nominated for this year's best picture. I'm out of luck. Which is not going to be helpful on next week's show, but I have been paying so little attention to awards shenanigans that I'm going to be really useless next week.

1:27:07Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. Well, that was the one that all three of us, you, me, and Michael Phillips, got right on last year's Oscar special. Next week, we will try to do it again. Who will win, who should win, and who should have been nominated? Now, last year, we did all think Anora would win, but we disagreed about the movie that should win. You picked Anora. I picked The Brutalist. I loved Anora. I think we all three were big fans of Anora, but I did have the Brutalist slightly higher. Michael had Nickel Boys as his favorite of the Best Picture nominees. Next week, we will have our Oscars special, and we will share results from the official Film Spotting Best Picture survey, our ballot.

1:27:49Adam Kempenaar:We invited our listeners, Josh, to imagine themselves as members of the Academy and submit their ranked choice Best Picture ballots. So we'll see how they all stack up there. somehow we're also going to try to fit in here it is the play-in round of spotting madness best of the 1940s it is march that means that's next week madness is upon us oh my gosh here we go yes in two weeks we'll have a sacred cow review of a film that we had penciled in for a review later in the year it's a movie that not only i but i think most people associate with summer when I saw it, when it was originally released, Rob Reiner's Stand By Me.

1:28:32Adam Kempenaar:It turns 40 this year. It is, though, getting a theatrical re-release this month, and that has inspired the new, not at all flawed, film spotting poll question. 80s Rob Reiner movies. You can only choose one, and this, as we said earlier, is just so not easy, Josh.

1:28:54Josh Larsen:maybe it's helpful that we do have distinct genres here as you called out at the top of the show adam so our four options this is spinal tap 1984 stand by me from 86 the princess bride from 1987 and then when harry met sally 1989 so if you're completely flummoxed you love all those movies maybe maybe just go with your favorite genre among them i don't know that that might be what i have to do. We have a comment here that'll help set up your deliberations from Andy Bucati in Kansas City. I've shown Stand By Me to both my teenage children, and it still lands amazingly well. I've never seen a movie better capture the weird way boys and young men relate to each other.

1:29:37Josh Larsen:I tend to be very stingy with high letterboxed rankings, and I give it four and a half stars, a rating that I only tend to give to one to three films annually. That means it lands fourth in this poll. Spinal Tap invented a genre and is still hilarious, which is saying so much since humor built around gags and bits doesn't often carry over 40-plus years later. And while it obviously led to the Christopher Guest films and other bangers, such as What We Do in the Shadows and Nirvana, the man, the show, the movie, it had an arguably even greater influence on the past two decades of television. Do we have The Office?

1:30:13Josh Larsen:Parks and Rec? All the others without it? Five stars. That puts it, Third on this list, When Harry Met Sally, For My Money is the Best Rom-Com Ever Made, Nora Ephron's writing in peak form. Star chemistry, never better. The Perfect Tone, five stars. That's your number two on this list. If I asked every person I know what their favorite movie is, I am quite confident the most common answer will be The Princess Bride. And the age ranges and life experiences of those people will be vast. Every single person who has the ability to sit through a feature-length film has the potential to not only like but love this film, whether that person is 6, 26, 56, or 86.

1:30:55Josh Larsen:I'm not sure I can name another film that I could fit, that I feel could fit that description. Has there ever been a perfect movie? Probably not. But maybe The Princess Bride is. Five stars, number one on this list.

1:31:09Adam Kempenaar:So I align with Andy a little bit here. It definitely comes down, Josh. for me, to Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. As much as I also really like, or at least I did when it came out, Stand By Me, and I also do appreciate When Harry Met Sally, those two, Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride, are just my personal affection, not necessarily thinking about how well-made they are, quote-unquote, just my affection for those films. Those are in another category. Those are in that pantheon of just all-time personal, favorites. I can't imagine life without those two films. So I don't know how I would pick between them.

1:31:50Adam Kempenaar:And I guess I have a week or so to think about it. And I'm going to take every bit of that time.

1:31:56Josh Larsen:Is it fair to say that something like personal affection should be maybe given more weight? Yeah. Among Rob Reiner films? I mean, I just think that's something he had a knack for. He had a knack for making movies that audiences responded to in that way, which shouldn't be discounted. So maybe in this case, more than most, let your heart lead the way.

1:32:18Adam Kempenaar:There you go. Vote in that poll and leave a comment at filmspotting.net. Let your heart lead the way, as Josh said. For future episodes, if you want to see what's coming up, you can go to filmspotting.net. You can click on episodes and hopefully get a sense of what is in store.

1:32:34Josh Larsen:What's happening right now, not just coming up on our sister podcast, The Next Picture Show is part two of their pop classics pairing. So they've gotten to their discussion of Wuthering Heights, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Previously, they talked about Baz Luhrmann's Romeo plus Juliet from 1996. So on this part two, they're getting into the good comparisons between those two. New episodes of The Next Picture Show drop every Tuesday, and you can find them wherever you get your podcasts.

1:33:19Adam Kempenaar:The Pantheon Project continues, Josh. A couple of weeks ago, me, you, producer Sam, we nominated nine films for the illustrious film spotting Pantheon. Two of those nine will be our 2026 inductees. before we turn those nine titles over to the committee, the Film Spotting family members. We do need to make sure that we are on record having discussed every one of those films. Now, we have done that with six of those films. Cleo from 5 to 7, Harlan County, USA, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Battle of Algiers, Stop Making Sense, Close Up, Great Lineup. And just a couple of weeks ago, we knocked off one more, one of your nominations, John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, it is true that John Ford currently not represented in the film-spotting pantheon.

1:34:14Adam Kempenaar:Now we get to a film from another director who is conspicuously missing from the pantheon, Akira Kurosawa and the movie Rashomon, one of producer Sam's picks. This was part of a marathon that preceded your time on the show. And Rashomon is a film that made my top 10 films of all time when we did that sight and sound exercise back in 2012. On the last sight and sound best films of all time list in 2022, it came in at number 41. And on the director's poll, it was number 20. We have been talking about Kurosawa a lot lately. Our February blindspotting review for family members was 1948's Drunken Angel.

1:34:59Adam Kempenaar:Last August, we talked about 1949's Stray Dog. That was another blindspotting review. Here we are at 1950 talking about Rashomon, a film as famous for, perhaps more famous for, its multiple unreliable narrators, its examination of subjective truth, than for the film itself. How long has it been, Josh, since you've seen the movie? How did it play for you this time?

1:35:24Josh Larsen:Well, first, going through that history of our Kurosawa discussions lately, I don't think we should be allowed to have another Kurosawa discussion until one of his movies gets in the pantheon. It's kind of ridiculous.

1:35:35Adam Kempenaar:Yeah.

1:35:35Josh Larsen:So somehow maybe the voting will go that way. We'll see. This is a movie. Yeah, I think it came up when we first talked about watching this again. And it's sort of a college, if you did any sort of, you know, cinema class or maybe even just an English class where you ended up watching a lot of movies, you will see Rashomon. That's the setting where I first saw it. Then I saw it again. Oh, this is amusing. What was the movie it was tied to? So when I was writing for The Naperville Sun, when I was the movie critic, I had a DVD library column. And I would basically take the excuse of a recent release to look at an older beloved movie, kind of like, you know, maybe a Sacred Cow review, something like that, that connected to it.

1:36:23Josh Larsen:The movie that I connected to Rashomon was Vantage Point, which I forgot even existed. This is, who's the guy from Lost? What was his name? That actor. I know I'm putting on spot here. I can't even remember. I should have known this. I didn't watch Lost, so barking up the wrong tree. Okay. 2008, Vantage Point, starring Matthew Fox. There you go. An unreliable narrator thriller. Did not come up, Adam, on our top five list. But at any rate. Shocking. I used it as the excuse to write about Rashomon. And I still, second time I saw it, ostensibly a professional critic at that point, I still don't think I appreciated it as fully as I should have.

1:37:08Josh Larsen:I think I was still adjusting to the type of performance that you got in mid-century Japanese cinema. And Mifune, you know, we know gave you that in full, like this very heightened style of performance. And also looking back at some of what I wrote, a little bit the talkiness of the, not necessarily moralism, which we touched on in our earlier discussion of Drunken Angel, but more just talking about the themes of the film among those three characters who offer our framework at the ruined gate, the Rashomon gate, where the storm is, the commoner, the priest, and the woodcutter. and how they would explicate the themes for us that we'd just seen.

1:37:57Josh Larsen:I think I have more space for understanding what's going on there now and the framework for that. And of course, have come to understand the type of performance that we're getting in this film. So all that to say is, yeah, this just keeps getting better. Rashomon keeps getting better. And it is so much more than those ideas and then those themes. It's just so beautiful. It's so visual. Not shocking to hear. when we're talking about Kurosawa, but maybe you forget that because at least I tend to think about his other movies being the spectacles, whereas here you get some composition and imagery that's as gorgeous as anything he's done.

1:38:35Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, you definitely do. It's interesting what you said about performance and adjusting to that because I went back and looked at my notes from the marathon that we did whatever year that was, 2008 or 9 or 10. somewhere in there. And I mentioned that as good as Mifune is that I found myself for the second time in a row, whatever the movie was that preceded it, appreciating Takashi Shimura a little bit more. And we've recently in these blind spotting reviews been really praising Shimura in addition to praising Mifune. And it is such an animated performance. Still, it's one that's interesting for me to to watch and consider and and and try to try to rate against some of his other performances and certainly try to consider and compare against the other performances in the film like chimeras right which are just at such a different level right in such a different volume but but something i'll at least throw out there that that i i've been wrestling with since i rewatched this movie in preparation for this review this recurring habit i'll say of his bandit character who is named tajumaru his bandit what's the defining characteristic of that character uh what is the the vocal tick almost that he has and the thing that that makes him seem so big.

1:40:15Adam Kempenaar:And it's that laugh, right? That exaggerated laugh, the way he admonishes those he's speaking to or tries to rebuke them in some way with that laugh. And what I noticed throughout Josh is other characters in the movie actually take on a similar kind of laugh, including the wife. It's not just him. And I started to wonder, I mean, of course, the commoner as well does it in response to Shemura's woodcutter. And I wonder if I'm wondering if that that laugh here takes on what Yusa in Stray Dog, that that yelp, that that cry that he lets out at the end of that film that almost becomes, as we talked about it in a way, this like this.

1:41:13Adam Kempenaar:this scream against or reflecting the human condition. It's almost this animalistic yelp, right? There's no other way to express the pain of the human condition. And here, this cruelty of humanity, the cruelty of the universe, that the men at the beginning of this movie are saying this story depicts and proves. It's almost like that laugh is almost the only way these characters can react in the face of a cruel universe.

1:41:52Josh Larsen:In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief.

1:41:58Adam Kempenaar:A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history.

1:42:07Josh Larsen:Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story?

1:42:19Adam Kempenaar:The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses.

1:42:22Josh Larsen:I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level if the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton Eckerd, and in 2022, I was the lead of ABC's The Bachelor. Unfortunately, it didn't go according to plan. He became the first Bachelor to ever have his final rose rejected.

1:43:05Josh Larsen:The internet turned on him. If I could press a button and rewind it, all I would. But what happened to Clayton after the show made even bigger headlines. It began as a one-night stand and ended in a courtroom, with Clayton at the center of a very strange paternity scandal. The media is here. This case has gone viral. The dating contract.

1:43:27Adam Kempenaar:Agree to date me, but I'm also suing you.

1:43:29Josh Larsen:Please search for it. This is unlike anything I've ever seen before. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped.

1:43:38Adam Kempenaar:This season, an epic battle of he said, she said, and the search for accountability in a sea of lies. I have done nothing except get pregnant by the f***ing bachelor!

1:43:50Josh Larsen:Listen to Love Trapped on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:44:00Josh Larsen:Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series. Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the astrology of the current grid. Lewis Hamilton, Capricorn Sun, Cancer Moon. Wouldn't you know it, Michael Schumacher is also a Capricorn Sun, Cancer Moon. The story of the sport's most consequential driver's strike. We have one man who, upon hearing that he was going to be fired, freaked out, and apparently climbed out the window of the bathroom. And was Daniel Ricciardo's illustrious F1 career a success story, a cautionary tale, or some combination of both?

1:44:37Josh Larsen:He started getting all this attention, and he maybe started to think, I'm bigger than this, I'm better. And plenty of other mishaps, scandals, and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:45:21Josh Larsen:make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when Bo was born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children over my job. I dread the conversation with my son.

1:45:50Adam Kempenaar:What do you think you'd say?

1:45:52Josh Larsen:Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, I'm glad you noted that the other characters offer a different shade on that because it is important to see this in the context of the mode of performance that was being given in these sorts of movies. not even just the period ones that, you know, Kurosawa was making. But as you pointed out, we see some of this in the more contemporary set films of his. So, yeah, it's generally a mode of performance that you as, you know, a generally Hollywood viewer has to adjust to. And I think the more films that I've seen of his or in Japan from that era generally, it was helpful.

1:46:40Josh Larsen:Also, in this context, specifically in Rashomon, I did think that the bandit is when he is most maniacal in his laughter. I believe it's when he's before the court, before the judge, and he's tied, right? He's subdued, and yet he's not cowed by any of this. But the only expression he really has in that scenario is his voice. So, so I did come to see that he was almost using that laugh as a weapon or a weapon. This is tied to what you were saying. It's his power. Like it's right. It's his power. It's, it's like a expression of defiance. So, so yeah, all that to say is, you know, it was, it was way easier this time to not have that be just a little bit of something I had to move past.

1:47:24Josh Larsen:It was more something I saw its relevance to this particular film and have a better understanding of its context within this genre of cinema.

1:47:34Adam Kempenaar:Was there anything on this viewing? We, we tend to talk about this. There tend to be aspects of these films and we haven't seen them in a long time that stand out. Was there anything that surprised you? I think you didn't remember or just surprised you.

1:47:50Josh Larsen:Yeah. Yeah. It's more, you know, you basic, you know, the idea of Rashomon, right? So you're not all that surprised, even though I didn't remember exactly what every witness's story was or what we find out at the end. So, so it wasn't that so much, I think going back to that beauty, um, that's always striking. There is one shot here that could be out of a fairy tale where the wife has been left alone by a brook with her horse. And we've been somewhere else. I forget who we're following, perhaps the husband for a bit. And it just cuts back to this, you know, widescreen, full shot, the sunlight coming through the forest trees above on her as she's in stillness, kneeling by this brook.

1:48:34Josh Larsen:I mean, it's just like something unreal, like something from an imaginary fantasy novel. So it was moments like that, but also I think the cleverness, what you're surprised by is it's, it's not just that you're getting different stories, but it's the cleverness in it. And the one element that stood out to me in this way were the two fight scenes we get, we get incredible fight scenes between the husband and the bandit, right? The first one, so thrilling, just intricately choreographed, athletically performed. The camera movement here, so exciting and sophisticated. I loved also how they used the levels of ground, like the topography, where one character would be up above the other and the camera would be below to generate suspense and excitement.

1:49:24Josh Larsen:Then we get the second one later in the film, completely awkward, so clumsy. they both seem scared it's like the scene you talked about in drunken angel right where they're slipping among the paint on the floor and of course the set that second fight that's the woodcutters version of the story where they look like fools whose version was the first one that the the adventures of robin hood version like the bandit swashbuckling it's the bandit right right so it's just the cleverness of of you know emphasizing the degree of the unreliability in that sort of staging that catches you afresh. And you're kind of like, oh yeah, this really was brilliant.

1:50:06Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. Well, it's like you read my mind because that's exactly where I wanted to go. And I do kind of have maybe even more than usual, a long-winded thought here. So Josh, please just jump in at any point. But before I get to that, I will also say the biggest surprise for me, and you said it. I didn't remember, of course, every little permutation or distinction between the stories, but one major thing I forgot, I did forget that the dead man had their story told and it was told through a Shinto medium. I had completely forgotten that, that we were going to have a story told by someone who was getting that voice, who was getting that story told to them from the afterlife.

1:50:56Adam Kempenaar:I had somehow, Josh, completely forgotten. What a wild sequence. I still don't completely know what to make of that. It puts this movie in a different type of reality, obviously.

1:51:09Josh Larsen:Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, proceed. But I do want to come back to that because I think there was something that was tied to the sophistication of the film related to that sequence. Yeah.

1:51:19Adam Kempenaar:Okay. Okay. Well, here's the other thing I suppose I'm going to throw out there as what was for me a surprise about the film. I want to throw out for discussion the possibility of Rashomon as a feminist text or one that is at least skewering fragile masculinity. and and even before i get there i'm also going to say on our topic of unreliable narrators how about the fact that we we do have four different versions of events but don't we also have to acknowledge that ultimately there is one meta story being told and it's the story that's being told at the Rashomon gate. And so even the version of the bandit story, the wife story, and the husband story that's being told is still being filtered through the woodcutter, the priest, right?

1:52:18Adam Kempenaar:Or isn't that what that character is? Like, it's still their version of what they saw or what they heard. It's not really completely theirs either. So there's potential flaws in subjectivity even in their versions of those stories. But what is interesting, and of course, I'm not breaking any ground here with this, but I want to use this as a springboard here. The thing about Rashomon, right? It's not that they recall events that they were involved in differently. It's that they recall events they were involved in differently because, as you spoke to already, their versions protect their sense of self.

1:52:57Adam Kempenaar:And restore or elevate, but for the most part, restore their honor. And what I found ironic, Josh, is that if you remove for a second the abhorrent crime of rape at the center of this story, not because I want to, but because the characters within the story do, they set it aside completely, almost completely in favor of apparently the far more egregious crime of killing the husband. protecting their sense of self and restoring their honor actually means taking responsible for the killing that that just strikes me as interesting because if you think about it Tajamaru says the bandit says he kills the samurai he claims that he kills him in that honorable battle that you spoke about after cutting him loose man-to-man battle it was a throw down and it was amazing but i won i killed him because i'm i'm a bigger badass than he is yeah the wife says even though she does say she doesn't really remember doing it and she fainted she basically says i did it and she says she did it because her husband stared at her with contempt he shamed her unfairly obviously and between that and then trying to drown herself later even though she failed, she was driven in both acts by honor, by trying to reclaim some honor.

1:54:23Adam Kempenaar:The husband then says also that he killed himself because what is a husband to do now that his wife has been so shamed? So in all three cases, they claim responsibility, but it's all about serving their honor, even though that's the crime. So it's just interesting to me. But if you ask the question, does Kurosawa give us at any point, does he actually give us an objective truth? Like, is there an overarching true version that we don't ever get? Do we still, by the end of the movie, know what really happened? Or do we just know the three versions and the woodcutter's version? Or is the woodcutter's version supposed to be true?

1:55:03Adam Kempenaar:Well, we know it's false in at least one regard, right? Because he gets called out for that. He took the dagger. He lied about that. He wasn't killed by the sword. He he was killed by a dagger and he took the dagger. And this Josh was my favorite shot watching it this time. I definitely did not remember this. And my favorite shot in this movie, how great is the match action cut we get from? I think it might be if I missed it, someone could call me out on it, but it might be the only true shot we get where Kurosawa very blatantly makes it clear that it's the woodcutter's point of view. It's the shot.

1:55:43Adam Kempenaar:He's behind trees, and he is watching this all play out, right? And so before he goes to kill the husband, supposedly, the bandit's standing in the middle. And we know it's his point of view because of the way it's framed. But then there's a match action cut where it's now a different angle and we're back into the movie world point of view. And in that new point of view, we see that the woodcutter can't actually see the husband. The husband doesn't know exactly what happened. The woodcutter doesn't see the husband die. He doesn't, he can't see it from where he's, from where he's at. That's, that's shuttered to him.

1:56:29Adam Kempenaar:So then we don't actually see the act either. In that moment, we don't see the bandit kill the husband because the woodcutter doesn't see it. So, you know, here he's at least partially unreliable because he lied. Right. And he also doesn't actually know exactly what happened to the husband because he didn't he didn't see it completely unfold. But that that cut and that point of view shot, I think, are really remarkable. Here's another question I'll throw out. What about the fact that the woodcutter in terms of just unreliability and honor? What about the fact that the woodcutter is just a voyeur?

1:57:07Who does nothing.

1:57:09Adam Kempenaar:He watches all of this madness play out, all of this pain play out and doesn't do anything. How are we supposed to interpret that about his character? Yeah.

1:57:19Josh Larsen:I, I wonder for that. I wonder if it was more, I get the sense from this film and a lot of films set in this period, if it's a societal role thing where you just, you do not cross, you know, that what was happening in that, obviously the bandit is crossing societal roles, but that's why he's a bandit, you know? And so maybe the woodcutter just would not step into that realm, but right. Yeah. It's a good question.

1:57:44Adam Kempenaar:It's entirely possible. But But so back to the question of, is there a single objective version of truth here? And I think you could argue that it is probably the woodcutter's account, minus the part about the dagger. And not just because it's the last one we hear, and because the movie obviously ultimately is sympathetic to that character, to Shimura's character. but the the commoner who's played by kichijiro ueda he asks i think the crucial question of the movie he says out of these three whose story is believable okay and and for me josh that question so before he's even heard you know the woodcutter that's kind of like occam's razor right whenever you're presented with a situation that doesn't make sense and you got to figure out an explanation like which one requires the fewest assumptions, which one seems the most believable just based on the fewest amount of hoops to jump through and the fewest amount of things that had to occur, those assumptions that had to all play out.

1:58:47Adam Kempenaar:And in all the previous accounts, the three previous accounts that we heard, not only do those all have those elements of redemption for the storyteller, right, which is huge and undercuts their story. There are choices throughout all three of them that just seem out of touch with human nature. Whereas in the woodcutter story, I think everything checks out, at least for me, okay? So like the bandit after the act proclaiming that he'll marry her. Her breaking free and her instinct being to release her husband and wanting the husband to then defend her honor and kill the bandit, that seems logical to me.

1:59:29Adam Kempenaar:the the husband um not defending her in this time and place and instead thinking he's no she's no use to him anymore because he's so shamed because of her shame as absurd as that is and and not wanting her and then the bandit seeing that and thinking well if if he doesn't see any value in her then i don't see any value in her and kind of retracting his promise to marry her and then her response to all of that is to taunt them, right? And like demanding that they fight for her and actually like trying to claim some honor. And then here's the key, Josh, you said it. That fight, that like clumsy fight that they have with each other, okay?

2:00:18Adam Kempenaar:Both men in this case act deplorably, but one acts like a bandit, like a notorious bandit would, one acts like a man would in a completely male-dominated society. I think the woman acts justifiably irrationally, like someone who has just suffered a sexual assault might, right? And then I go back, you said it, I go back to Drunken Angel. Why make a movie set in 12th century Japan if you aren't intending to comment on conditions today in 1950 Japan, right? And 12th century Japan is when feudalism emerged. And during our conversation about Drunken Angel, I referenced the Criterion essay that talked about trying to wrestle with the war and the aftermath of the war and the militarists and this feudalistic warrior tradition of male domination and sacrificing for samurai honor.

2:01:15Adam Kempenaar:This is what Kurosawa is wrestling with, you know, this idea. And you have the characters in Drunken Angel, those men who he depicts these tough gangster characters who act like children fighting each other. It's comical how they actually fight each other. We we laugh at them as viewers and we laugh at these two men the exact same way. It's the complete opposite of any kind of virile display of of masculinity. And I just think I think Kurosawa intends for us to laugh at them. And I think Kurosawa is asking us to align with the outrage of the wife in that final version. And I also think, Josh, for me, I'm predisposed to this a little bit or I'm aligning with this version of events or how I see it, because one of the most striking images, lasting images that I'll take away from this viewing of Rashomon is in her version of the story.

2:02:18Adam Kempenaar:that look she he gives her and and her covering of her eyes you know just that that image of her shielding herself whether it happened exactly like that or not in every one of these stories she still is in a position one universal truth is that woman having to is being not only objectified but violated and then having to somehow still defend her honor right and and that that that image of her covering her eyes as if she's trying to shield herself from the judgment of the men

2:02:58Josh Larsen:that that to me is like the lasting image of this film yeah machiko keo playing the wife and you know all these performances again as we talked about in our top five list having to work and at least double levels, right? If there are movies about, about deception or unreliable narrators, I was wondering about that too. You know, this is obviously being set in this time and place, a culture of extreme victim blaming what happens to this woman. And then the discussions of, you know, how it is, it is her shame, what they've essentially done to her, what the bandit has done to her. Um, and I was thinking, you know, well, how does that transfer to these movies that Kurosawa is also making set in the present, contemporary times.

2:03:42Josh Larsen:And yeah, I think you're onto something there. It's the machismo that is being exposed in both times and places. And certainly, victim-blaming did not go away. It maybe doesn't take place, or in mid-century, didn't take place in the same blatant way it might have in this more time way further in the past, but it's still a reality and it's built in that same macho, you know, chauvinistic society. So I think that's one thing that's being critiqued here for sure. I also think to your point about what is the objective truth, the movie wants us to assume another piece of evidence why we should believe for the most part, the woodcutter is that as in Drunken Angel, Kurosawa wants a, maybe not a hero, not a perfect heroic figure, but someone who does the honorable moral thing.

2:04:40Josh Larsen:And where does the movie end with the woodcutter claiming the baby who has been abandoned, right? So that's another signal, I feel like, that this is a man who's not perfect. He obviously, like everyone, is not telling the complete story, but his story may be the closest to the truth that we're going to get. And it's the most honorable, truly honorable, not in the sense of honor that, as you described, the characters are searching in this time and place. Complicating this, though, Adam, is I'm so glad you brought up the medium played by Noriko Hanma, which how about the performance in that sequence?

2:05:20Josh Larsen:I mean, this is like performance art that Hanma is giving us. It reminded me very much of Catherine Hunter's witch in Joel Cohen's The Tragedy of Macbeth. and of course we know Kurosawa would adapt Macbeth as Throne of Blood in 1957 but just this creating some a body that seems to truly be from another world and then filtering in this case another body through it which is the the dead husband I think it's also just intensely complicated in how it gives us another level of unreliability because are we to take the dead husband at his word because he's dead? No, we already talked about that. He's just as unreliable as the others.

2:06:10Josh Larsen:But just as you said, think about the meta level of unreliability of we're hearing all of these eyewitness reports secondhand. Can we trust the medium? Is she translating the dead husband accurately? It's another layer. Is she translating at all? I don't know how this works. Like, is this her job? Does she get hired? She hangs out at the courthouse and when someone needs a witness and who knows what her motivation is. So, so I, not only is this, you know, a dramatically arresting and visually arresting sequence, I think it just kind of like starts piling up more levels of unreliability as well.

2:06:49Yeah.

2:06:50Adam Kempenaar:A couple other just points I wanted to touch on really quickly. And it goes with what you just said, actually, because I think Kurosawa also plays tricks on us a little bit within some of the narratives, within some of the retellings of this from certain perspectives. For example, within the bandits retelling of the story, when we understand why from his point of view, he would want to tell it in such a way where she she pushes back against him fiercely at first, but then succumbs. Yeah. And yeah. And she embraces him putting her hand behind his head and kisses him deeply right against the wall.

2:07:35Adam Kempenaar:You know, all that stuff. We get that part. But why, Josh, then why does Kurosawa show us from her point of view? the sun as she's looking up at the sun while he's embracing her why would we see her point of view that's not something that the bandit could see or theoretically could right even uh fantasize about or imagine right in this in this construct so it's an odd thing and and it it's also odd because in that scenario, he is effectively assaulting her again. And what's happening there in that moment is not unlike something we've seen in other depictions of that on screen and in other scenarios we've heard about in real life where it's almost like she's disassociating.

2:08:27Adam Kempenaar:It's almost like what we see is her just giving herself over and staring up at the sun while he's doing that. And it's just interesting that we get that, but it's within his version of the telling of the story.

2:08:40Josh Larsen:I mean, maybe, I think your readout is right. That's how it struck me as disassociation. And maybe this speaks to your point about we're not getting this directly from the bandit. We're getting it from, you know, in this case, the woodcutter telling what he heard the bandit say. And maybe the woodcutter wanted to layer in a bit of empathy for the woman. There you go. And Kurosawa's giving us that visually.

2:09:02Adam Kempenaar:I mean, maybe. Maybe so, right? Of course, the other great formal choice that Kurosawa makes here is never showing us and never letting us hear the Inquisitors asking the questions. I know. I love that. Right. Yeah. What, what, what a conceit just, just making it. So it, it is us, the camera, the audience who become the inquisitors, the ones who are asking the questions, the judges who are dying to know the information, who effectively are asking those questions of the bandits dying to know even more information. Right.

2:09:38Josh Larsen:To the point that characters will say, what? But we don't hear the question, but they respond as if so, even more so to your point, puts us in that judge's seat.

2:09:49Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I don't I don't know totally if this matters or not, if there's any significance to it. It's just something that hit me at the last minute today. The fact that all of this, again, revolves effectively around the dead husband. that's that's the crime that matters most within this movie world and how does the husband how is he positioned the entire film he's that figure that has his arms tied behind his back or and or he's kneeling the entire time right and and how do all the storytellers except the woodcutter how are they positioned when they tell their stories they're always in that same position right?

2:10:29Adam Kempenaar:And the bandit has his arms tied similarly, but they all are kneeling in that same kind of position before the, there's, there's a symmetry there that again, I don't totally know what to do with, but, but they're mirroring each other.

2:10:41Josh Larsen:It brings to mind just the incredible blocking throughout this movie. I know that's something we discussed or at least referenced in conversations about high and low, you know, those early scenes in the apartment where the police team was there with the family and how incredibly dramatic Kurosawa made them just by positioning characters within the frame. These witness scenes, you know, will often have the speaker in the, in the foreground looking right at us or just slightly off camera. And there's almost always a witness or two in the background, but position just off center a little bit, all in these, you know, kneeling positions you describe or sitting positions, but the, the, yeah, just the blocking throughout this movie is exquisite and on point in every frame.

2:11:28Adam Kempenaar:I also love the outsized nature of it all. And what I mean is think about how we're introduced to these characters, the lowly characters who we know are lowly characters from the very beginning, the way they're depicted. Part of the reason we know they're lowly though, Josh, isn't just their clothes and their appearance. It's how they're so dwarfed by the Rashomon Gate and the way Kurosawa films the Rashomon Gate. The size of the temple in relation to the men is just so striking. And then even the rain itself. The rain isn't rain. The rain is like biblical in this movie, right? It looks biblical.

2:12:14Adam Kempenaar:It sounds biblical. And of course, it only ends at a point when we finally get some moral clarity. Right. That's that's the kind of level we're dealing with in Rashomon. It's the scale that Kurosawa is working. And from the beginning, the way they're selling this story before we as viewers have even the commoner who's our surrogate before we've even gotten into the story. They're setting this up like it's what we saw will make you lose all your faith in humanity. Those are the words. It's worse than famine or plague. And you're going to build up. Could it possibly live up to the hype? And you know what?

2:12:53Adam Kempenaar:Kurosawa pulls it off.

2:12:54Josh Larsen:Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to say he sets a high bar there, but I think, yes, I think we're equally despairing as, as the movie goes on. And part of it is that backdrop of the gate, you know, just that it, that it's in complete disrepair crumbled. It's the symbol for humanity itself in this crumbled, despairing state, which the weather, as you said, mirrors as well.

2:13:16Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. Last point. When we go from that time and place, the beginning, fully into the past, we finally dive into that story. The cut from the rain and the sound of the rain to the sun and the absence of the sound of the rain, right? And we get some drums and we get the sound of the woods. the disparity and the difference between that world going in immediately to this world and it feeling truly like we've crossed into some kind of different realm. And it's all just because of the, it's largely just because of the sound. Yeah.

2:13:53Josh Larsen:And I'm glad you mentioned the drums because I did want to call out the score as well. Fumio Hayasaka, it has this sort of propulsion, just slow propulsion to it. Like we're leading towards somewhere and we don't even, it doesn't even feel like we're leading toward a revelation. I mean, to that larger question of what's the objective truth, part of you feels like we're, we aren't ever going to get to it because human nature is so knotty and complicated and duplicitous, but there's an inexorable forward thrust to the score and those drums that drags us along as well through each narrative that I

2:14:32Adam Kempenaar:really liked. Rashomon is currently streaming on the Criterion channel and HBO Max. It's also available VOD and maybe at your local library. Why not check it out? One more Pantheon review to get to. It is, well, we're not going to stop the bleakness, are we, Josh? I don't know. Is there, there's hope at the end of Rashomon. Is there hope at the end of Meek's cutoff?

2:14:54Josh Larsen:it's been a while we'll have to discuss depends how you read it i think i guess um probably not

2:15:01Adam Kempenaar:yeah it's turning 15 this year and meek's cutoff is currently streaming on movie and peacock also available vod if you have homework to do and you do have some time we have such a busy show calendar here over the next few weeks that we are not going to get to that conversation about meek's cut off for at least two shows. I think it's going to be three shows actually before we fit that in. So you have some time and you can find more information about the FilmSpotting Pantheon at filmspotting.net slash Pantheon. Josh, that is our show.

2:15:35Josh Larsen:If you would like to connect with Adam and the show on social media, he's on Instagram, Facebook, Letterboxd, and YouTubed as FilmSpotting. I'm at those places as well as Larson on film. We are independently produced and listener supported. You can support the show by joining the Film Spotting family at filmspottingfamily.com. You'll be able to listen early and ad-free. You'll also get a weekly newsletter, monthly bonus episodes, and access to the entire show archive. For show t-shirts and other merch, go to filmspotting.net slash shop.

2:16:10Adam Kempenaar:In the Film Spotting archive, you can check out last month's bonus show if you're a Film Spotting family member, that drunken angel conversation, or the stray dog conversation. July 2020, Josh, we did Seven Samurai. So yeah, a lot of Kurosawa. Hey, family members in all those cases voted for that. So we're just giving the people what they want. Yep, that's true. And they want Kurosawa. And yeah, it was 2009, it turns out, was that Kurosawa marathon back before you joined the show. In limited release, there is a 4K restoration of Satyajit Ray's 1970 film, Days and Nights in the Forest. That's playing at the Siskel Film Center.

2:16:46Adam Kempenaar:And Josh, at this point, we both wish we were in Chicago to see that one. Blind spot, I think, for both of us. Yeah. In wide release, scientists have discovered how to hop human consciousness into lifelike robotic animals, allowing people to communicate with animals as animals. That's in Pixar's hoppers. Pixar. How about that?

2:17:09Josh Larsen:Was not even aware. New Pixar. Obviously, it doesn't necessarily mean what it used to. but I think I'm still going to have to check this out.

2:17:18Adam Kempenaar:See, I didn't read the Pixar part at first. I just saw below it, Milia Jovovich. And that really seemed like a Milia Jovovich film, like some futuristic, bizarre, sci-fi scientists have discovered, you know, and it all goes terribly wrong. Guns are involved. But no, Milia Jovovich is a former war hero whose peaceful life is shattered when her daughter is kidnapped. That's in Protector. And we have, yeah, what are you going to do? You going to see that one, Josh? No, that makes sense. There you go. That does check out. We also have Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride. Yes. That's out. I'm excited. Beware the exclamation point.

2:17:57Adam Kempenaar:Next week, we are planning to see that film. We will have our Oscars special with Michael Phillips. And yeah, believe it or not, it's Film Spotting Madness, best of the 1940s play-in round. It's a big show, big week.

2:18:11Josh Larsen:Film Spotting is produced by Golden Joe Dissot and Sam Van Hulgren. Without Sam and Golden Joe, this show wouldn't go. Our production assistant is Sophie Kempinar. Special thanks to everyone at WBEZ Chicago. More information is available at wbez.org. For Film Spotting, I'm Josh Larson.

2:18:30Adam Kempenaar:And I'm Adam Kempinar. Thanks for listening. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

2:18:45Josh Larsen:Ready for a different take on Formula One? Look no further than No Grip, a new podcast tackling the culture of motor racing's most coveted series. Join me, Lily Herman, as we dive into the underexplored pockets of F1, including the astrology of the current grid, the story of the sport's most consequential driver's strike, and plenty of other mishaps, scandals, and sagas that have made Formula One a delightful, decadent gumster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to No Grip on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:19:39Josh Larsen:Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When segregation was a law, one mysterious black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and Visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When segregation was a law, one mysterious Black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules.

2:20:22Josh Larsen:Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. they had to crush him Charlie's Place from Atlas Obscura and visit Myrtle Beach listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts