"Obsession" & "Backrooms" Reviews; Cannes Winners & Their Oscar Chances

13:51Anne Thompson:yeah i see your point i haven't seen rose yet so i have to i have to check that out um but uh the other thing ryan is this was a very gay very queer can you know i mean you you cannot deny i mean did you count i mean there were so many films and many of them were you know booked at the end of the festival after many people had left, which I don't understand why Cherry Frumo did that. Homophobia. No. But at any rate, tell us which films could break out.

14:24Ryan Lattanzio:No, you are right. I did lose count because even in movies that did not appear to have a queer narrative on their face, there was something gay. Like Fatherland. Yes. Yes. There was something gay that was laundered into all of them. Even Nagi notes at the beginning of the festival actually turned out to be extremely gay. And I never would have expected that. I mean, obviously, we know the one that's going to break out, not just at the box office. I firmly believe we're going to hear a lot about this movie from critics at the things like the Gotham's Award, the Spirit Awards, original screenplay potentially would be Club Kid, which obviously the biggest crowd pleaser to come out of the festival, I would argue.

15:04Ryan Lattanzio:Well, we could say that about Hope, I suppose, depending on what crowd we're talking about.

15:10Anne Thompson:Hope is not going to be in the Oscar race. Okay.

15:13Ryan Lattanzio:No, absolutely not. Certainly not for visual effects. The one that surprised me was Coward, which the Lucas Daunt movie, World War I, a furtive romance between closeted soldiers. And both of the actors who are, one of them basically picked up off the street. They're very early in their career. They shared the best actor prize, you know, as the actresses from all of a sudden did at the award. So while I don't really see that movie advancing beyond international as a representative of Belgium, certainly it definitely is going to be a factor at the Oscars. The word was kind of muted about that one, but I actually found it to be quite lovely.

15:56Ryan Lattanzio:And prior to this, you know, Lucas Dunn's a controversial filmmaker because of how he dealt with transness in his first movie Girl, which was a Netflix release. and then Close. I liked Girl. Yeah. And then Close won the jury prize, I think, a few years later. That one I found to be very mawkish and manipulative. But this one is very lovely. It works very well.

16:19Anne Thompson:It would be the Belgium entry.

16:21Ryan Lattanzio:Absolutely.

16:22Anne Thompson:What about The Man I Love? What's going to happen to that?

16:25Ryan Lattanzio:The Man I Love is still looking for a buyer. I liked that movie quite a bit. And you said it's grown on you.

16:33Anne Thompson:It's grown on me. It's grown on me. and I'll tell you why. There are several sequences in it that are very moving. And even though I was, I found some of the main performers off-putting, Rami Malek among them, but he's playing a character who is off-putting. He's leaning into that. That's the idea. You know, he's a performance artist and he's a narcissist and he's, you know, eats up all the air in the room. So, you know, he's based on particular archetype I would say, but the idea is that he there's a scene where he sings what have they done to my song and it was very beautiful and it haunts me.

17:13Anne Thompson:It is a very beautiful moving scene because he's standing in for every gay man with AIDS, every man who died of AIDS. I lived through that period, I lived through that time and it's one of those you know, It's like the pandemic or something. It's one of those great wounds in your psyche that everybody... Now, the gay community lived through it in a much more horrifying way than I did. But I lost a lot of friends, and it was a tough time.

17:48Ryan Lattanzio:What's interesting about this scene, though, is that he's singing Gershwin at his parents' anniversary party, where they disinvited his lover. So they don't. So that's why I was a little confused how why people would be so accepting of this performance. But I guess they weren't reading between the lines of what he was trying to say. I do wish it was a different actor. I realize I recognize that he's playing a narcissist who's very self-destructive and destructive of those around him. But Franz Rogowski was doing that in passages. And that was an irresistible performance. Exactly. This one felt mannered.

18:22Ryan Lattanzio:He does. He puts you off. I mean, we felt we felt this way about him for a long time. I don't mean just you and me. There's a collective resistance to him, especially after Bohemian Rhapsody and people feeling like that was one of the worst, best actor winners that ever happened. I don't know if that's true. He still won. It doesn't matter.

18:39Anne Thompson:And that's an example of how actors really always respond to those bigger than life mannered performances, I'm afraid. And they could hear too, for all we know. You know, it's an interesting question. But somebody's got to pick it up first and it doesn't look on the outside like a very commercial bet.

19:01Ryan Lattanzio:No, it's not because it really, I mean, I found it to be very emotional, but it doesn't give you much in terms of emotion. And what I love about Iris Sacks is that he's not really interested in catering to the audience or even really trying to expand his audience much beyond his core.

19:22Anne Thompson:He's a very good filmmaker. I really like Peter who jars day. I mean, I think that's a great a great movie that he had out this year

19:31Ryan Lattanzio:He's never made a bad movie. Okay.

19:33Anne Thompson:Well, maybe that Isabella pair movie

19:45Anne Thompson:All right, so um, so let's get to the current box office we've got obsession explain this to me please what is it about this movie that has broken through all of these records and barriers and going up at the box office instead of going down which is highly unusual

20:04Ryan Lattanzio:because usually in the second weekend of a horror movie it drops like 40 to 60 percent or something this one went up 39 percent uh which according to our our film reporter brian welke last happened for that ultra conservative, I think it was Angel Studios movie, Sound of Freedom. So I don't know. Those aren't the best comparisons. But obviously word of mouth is really driving this movie. And social media, Letterboxd. There's a lot of discourse about this movie anywhere you go on social media, which is about, it's basically a retelling of the monkey's post, careful what you wish for story, where this guy asks for this girl that he has unrequited feelings for to love him and only him.

20:49Ryan Lattanzio:And then it really backs fires. And she basically turns into like a demon possessed sex doll. This is directed by Curry Barker, who is a YouTube comedian turned feature filmmaker. We are now starting to see that the path to becoming a director is not being an actor who stars in movies, but being a YouTube creator, which is the same for Backrooms, which we'll talk about in a minute.

21:10Anne Thompson:So this was also very low budget. So the numbers, just in terms of how much it costs versus how much it's returning, is enormous. It's an enormous return on investment.

21:20Ryan Lattanzio:The budget was under a million dollars, and it's already made$84 million worldwide after two weeks, which is insane for an original horror movie. I don't know. Did you see this one, Anne? No, no.

21:33Anne Thompson:Oh, I went, as you will find out in a minute, in my two movie outings on my return from Cannes, I went to see Mandalorian and Gargu and The Sheep Detectives. That's what I went to see.

21:46Ryan Lattanzio:I went to see all these horror movies. It's so interesting. Online, people are really pushing for this breakout actress in the movie, Inda Navarrete, to be an Oscar nominee in the vein of somebody like Amy Madigan or Demi Moore. this is a character who has no agency and the movie doesn't have the juice. It's not going to happen. It's also very underlit in a way that isn't just a projection in the theater. You often can't see what her performance is. To me, this was the weaker of the two horror movies that's going on right now by a large margin. I think it's when we talk about Gen Z that are driving ticket sales and people in their early 20s, those are the kind of people whose minds are being blown by this movie obsession.

22:25Ryan Lattanzio:How is it blowing their minds?

22:27Anne Thompson:Why is it blowing their minds? What is it about the movie that is making it such a phenomenon. That's what I want to know. Like if I went, when I went to see, you know, Fifty Shades of Grey or whatever, I figured it out immediately what, why that was doing as well as it was doing. Why is this doing as well as it's doing? Can you explain it?

22:47Ryan Lattanzio:Back Rooms is so much actually more like the Blair Witch Project, where it feels like a real discovery. And Obsession, I would say, is very familiar. But I mean, I suppose it nails the formula very well, but it's it's ultimately it's not that deep or smart of a movie, whereas I think Backrooms is asking people to engage with it more on a little bit of a philosophical or psychological level.

23:09Anne Thompson:Alright, let me ask you this. Is there, if you go back to my comparison to Fifty Shades of Grey, you know, that was a fantasy of what would happen, you know, if you fell in love with your dom and somehow changed him. It was romantic at its core in the end. The woman goes through all of this stuff, but then he comes out on the other side. It's a little bit like pillion in that way, in a way. So is this somehow digging into the bottom line fears of the dating generation?

23:52Ryan Lattanzio:Well, I mean, I think that the younger audience that's really turning up for this movie, they are not really into romance. I mean, we've heard they don't want to see romantic movies. They're not really dating themselves. There is also an element of this movie that is a disturbing kind of male, almost incel kind of fantasy where you have created through this careful what you wish for scenario, a very submissive woman who has no, like I said, no agency. And I think there is something unsettling about that particular fantasy that is resonating with men and the young guys in the audience.

24:30Anne Thompson:That's it. That's it right there. That's upsetting, actually. You wrote a terrific review of Backrooms, which reminded me of Exit 8.

24:41Ryan Lattanzio:yeah it's even more ambitious and mind-bending and surreal than exit eight with because it's a much bigger canvas this is directed by Kane Parsons who's 20 years old because there's a lot of people online that are really bitter about accusatory and again these are people who they have enough clout where the producers have responded people are saying that because Mark Duplass is in the movie and James Wan and Osgood Perkins produced it, that they must have shadow directed it somehow and that he didn't really direct it. It's based on a YouTube series that he created beginning when he was 16 that is basically about a portal that opens into this liminal infinite space of multiplying rooms and corridors called the back rooms that appear to be feeding off the unconscious or the psychic distress of anyone who enters into them.

25:37Ryan Lattanzio:which in this case are Chiwetel Ejiofor as a man who is a furniture salesman and he opens the portal in the basement of his showroom and then his therapist Renata Reinsva in her first horror movie and what turns out to be a final girl type of role. And I think it's actually the best work that she's done in the English language because you could tell with Presumed Innocent, she was a little shaky with the accent but i think she does a great job here the set pieces are really crazy there uh there's a lot of practical effects there's a lot of found footage aspects to it uh really ambitious sets and um even some unusual creature design i think this we talk about minds being blown i think this movie is really going to appeal to a younger audience especially ones that are really into david lynch uh this obviously is in conversation with things like eraser head where it really feels like we are seeing something new, even though to us a lot of the themes are familiar.

26:36Ryan Lattanzio:It's a fascinating movie that is flawed, but there's imagery in it that you've never seen before.

26:44Anne Thompson:That's high praise. Well, I caught up with a movie with imagery that we've all seen before, Mandalorian and Grogu, because it's been on a Star Wars TV series on Disney Plus. And I've been a fan. I've always watched this one. I love this one. I like Jon Favreau. I think he's a great filmmaker and and You know the jungle book was incredible to me. I've been a fan from the beginning You know from swingers on but at any I think he's a very clever director who knows how to appeal to to an audience So I went to my local cinemark and the crowd loved it lots of families Favreau wisely aimed the movie at a younger demo and they turned out and you know the older Star Wars fans can be really nasty so I think that was a smart a smart move and the movie opened okay along the lines of solo 98 million but we shall see where word of mouth takes it and where it will go from here I think it was 167 million worldwide I love a lot of people say it's like another episode of the tv series just it's not it can't be because it's on a big scale you know and it's actually a lot of fighting lots and lots of fighting and there's a new character played believe it or not by the bear star jeremy allen white and he's playing the son of jabba the hut so you've got this very beautifully animated character who you like who you really respond to who's very sweet.

28:20Anne Thompson:And there's a horrible scene because you know that the Mandalorian is not allowed to have his helmet removed and there's this heartbreaking scene where the the the aunt and uncle Hutts take take off his his helmet and and we see you know Pedro you know struggling and vulnerable and trying to exert himself. And you just see the human side of the Mandalorian in a way that you never do. And there he gets his helmet back eventually. But did you see the sheep detectives?

29:00Ryan Lattanzio:Not yet. I'm planning to. Instead, I went to these horror movies, you know, because there's things that happened when we were in Cannes. We had to catch up. This is how we chose.

29:08Anne Thompson:This is how we chose. So I'm an unabashed admirer of Craig Mazin, you know, who created Chernobyl and The Last of Us. And, you know, he's adapted a children's book, which features talking sheep trying to solve the mystery of who killed their shepherd, played by Hugh Jackman. And it marks a charming change of direction for Mason. He's a great writer and the voice work is superb. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart, they're playing sheep, the sheep detectives who are going to solve the mystery. And among the live actors is succession star Nicholas Braun, who's hilarious. So I recommend this one.

29:48Ryan Lattanzio:This one is beloved. Yeah, no, I'm dying to catch up with it. Speaking of Nicholas Braun, I just read something that the entertainment system is down. The Ruben Oslo movie is delayed again because he's doing some kind of reshoots involving Nicholas Braun. So there is not assurance that that's coming out this year. No! I really want to

30:07Anne Thompson:see that! I know. You know Ruben Ostland is one of the few filmmakers who has had two Palme d 'Or winners.

30:14Ryan Lattanzio:Well, now Christian Munju is also one of them, too.

30:17Anne Thompson:Yeah. Alright, we're done. We'll see you all next week.

30:21Ryan Lattanzio:See you next week.