'The Dog Stars' and 'Coyote vs ACME' Reviewed; Indie Box Office Success; International Oscar Submissions

14:37Anne Thompson:Her values were good. She was presenting, you know, treat people well, treat people with respect, no matter who they are. And we like that. The other person who I have often admired, actually, is Mark Ruffalo. And this is such an interesting situation. I mean, what's your take on it, Ryan.

15:00Ryan Lattanzio:Well, okay. So basically he's being accused of anti-Semitism after quote unquote attacking Paramount CEO David Ellison and his father, who's the chief of Oracle, which is a company that has financial ties to Israel. Obviously Larry Ellison is a huge financier of this merger. I feel like I often want to tell these celebrities to just zip the lip, but I'm very impressed. Whether or not you agree with him, it's impressive that he hasn't. And also, I don't know that, does he have that much to lose? I mean, one question is, he is the lead in one of HBO's hottest shows, which is Task, which is, you know, an Emmy generator.

15:39Ryan Lattanzio:I don't know what's going to happen there, what impact it's going to have on his career. You look at someone like Susan Sarandon, you don't really see her in much anymore. And I don't know if it's tied to her outspokenness during the election and what many people feel helped get Trump elected by going so far in the other direction. What do you think about Ruffalo?

15:57Anne Thompson:I think that he's one of these people who's been around in Hollywood for so long. Everybody knows him. Everybody knows who he is. They know that he's an outspoken advocate for the downtrodden. And in this case, he's speaking out for the Palestinians in some ways. And he's speaking out against this corporate transaction. Paramount responded to Ruffalo saying it was troubled when anti-Semitic tropes are invoked in a purported service of a business dispute. So Ruffalo responded saying criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people.

16:39Anne Thompson:This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel. He says his views come from his own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people for whom I have deep love and respect. So a lot of people are angry at him. A lot of people wish he wasn't being so outspoken, so critical in tying this merger to the politics of the Middle East. But I think that there's such respect for him as an actor and as a human being inside Hollywood that he won't be affected. I really don't think so.

17:15Ryan Lattanzio:Here's my other question. And I asked this about any celebrity activism, and I would pose it to Hannah Einbender as well, who obviously has, she's been really outspoken about being supportive of Palestinians. And she responded about Mark Ruffalo's comments. Are we changing hearts and minds here? Or are we drawing more attention to ourselves and putting ourselves in, inserting ourselves in the situation? I don't know that people are going to be like, huh, that's so interesting he said that. Never mind. I'm going to totally change my perspective now. I don't know that that's happening.

17:46Anne Thompson:I guess what I would say is that he's being consistent. He's always been this way. You know, he's always spoken out. He's one of those people at the Golden Globes. He says something, you know, so. So I probably won't be at the Golden Globes this year. So I hope he's all right. I hope I hope that this is just an example of how these these the whole situation in Israel, You know, just because you criticize Israel doesn't mean you're anti-Semitic. It just doesn't.

18:16Ryan Lattanzio:But in certain eyes, it automatically means that is so. So that's not changing. So neither is anything that's happening.

18:26Anne Thompson:Well, the other thing that's going on is that Paramount has proved to be rather clever at manipulating the press. They're pretty good at playing the game. And so they're distracting, really, away from what's really going on over there. So we'll see as this plays out how it goes. But I wish Mark Ruffalo well. I do. At the same time that I'm with you, he might be better off not being quite as outspoken. But that's who he is.

18:55Ryan Lattanzio:Yes. At least he is consistent. We can give him that much. So, Anne, we should talk about, there's been some success at the indie box office that we've seen, especially over this past weekend.

19:05Anne Thompson:So I was glad to see that Tony expanded really well, grossing$5 million on 1 ,652 screens for a total of$6.6 million so far. Yet another hit for A24. Clearly, people love to see young men misbehaving in the summer, struggling awkwardly with relationships, and growing up under the eyes of a supportive mentor. I'm rooting for Antonio Banderas, by the way, for supporting actor on this one.

19:31Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, no, he's very good. And, you know, I've said this before, but my favorite parts of this movie were when we were doing a kind of an incel serial killer thing with Dominic Cessa in the beginning. It proves very heartwarming and I think undercuts some of that bite. Yeah, I do think that you could.

19:46Anne Thompson:That's really not what he's doing in this movie.

19:48Ryan Lattanzio:No, but I think you could have that interpretation. I think Anthony Bourdain would be amused by that even. And my other issue with it was.

19:54Anne Thompson:Obviously so incredibly driven by his lust for this woman. That's driving him from the beginning.

20:00Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, it's pathetic to watch even. And Amelia Jones. The young man.

20:04Anne Thompson:He's got urges.

20:08Ryan Lattanzio:They needed to do some work on her character, though, I am afraid to say. There's not a lot of chemistry between those two or coming off of her, frankly. But we've already reviewed this movie. I don't need to trash it. I actually really liked this movie. And I am happy to see it's doing well. And I felt like it could be more of a streaming play, but it's, you know, on HBO Max where A24 has their deal, but obviously it's doing well theatrically. I have complicated feelings about the movie, which I did like, but I am happy to see Jane Schoenbrun's Can Break Out, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is also expanding well.

20:41Ryan Lattanzio:and it's been out in theaters for a couple weeks from MUBI and last weekend it expanded from 54 to just over a thousand and I think a thousand and 36 theaters I say Can Breakout because this was one of the few movies that I feel like is going to was going to travel it had a lot of buzz at Can also with Club Kid and La Bola Negra but you know for a muted Can and this was early in the festival so this kind of like put the defibrillators on it when things were kind of quiet it, I would say, in the beginning. So this movie has expanded to 1 ,036 theaters and now has grossed over 3.6 million at this point.

21:19Ryan Lattanzio:And it's on track to be probably movie's best domestic grocer since The Substance, obviously that did way better at this point. That grossed more than 40 million or something like that. But I think this does mean that Jane Schoenbrun is on a lot of people's radars and probably should expect to have meetings with even bigger studios at this point. And no one wanted to take this movie but movie and it's a complicated film it's a sapphic slasher movie homage that's honestly i think it's very intellectualized that i thought maybe wouldn't penetrate with audiences so much but obviously a lot of people are talking about it and it's doing pretty well you want to know why yes because it has sex and death in the title and no of course obviously even though there's not a ton of sex in the movie i would say but it is but at least that's what it's promising yes it's promising hot scenes between hannah einbender and jillian anderson but they're but the hot scenes are more in everything can be sex it doesn't have to be you don't have to be see people fucking on screen and so this is the sex exactly and that's what this movie is all about it's about the two of them eating chicken nuggets and dipping them into um sauce special sauce and the camera zooming in on their lips and these interactions that is the sex in the movie rather than them actually fucking, but that does sort of happen as well.

22:36Ryan Lattanzio:So anyway, yeah, I'm pleased to see that movie's doing well. I feel like Jane Schoenbarone is going to level up even more with the next movie that they do.

22:44Anne Thompson:I'm curious to see what the next thing is going to be. So what is this about a PTA concert movie?

22:49Ryan Lattanzio:So I don't know if you're familiar with this guy, Cameron Winter, but he is... I'm not. Yeah, he's a young rocker, and he is the front man of a band called Geese that I like very much, which is an indie band. And there's sort of a jammy, noise-rock quality to some of their music. But it's a Gen Z band, and they're pretty popular with that age group. He shot a Cameron Winter concert at Carnegie Hall last December. And there was talk about this, I think I saw it in Pitchfork or something early on, but I didn't know it was actually going to play out in this way, which is that now there's a 35mm print that's going to do a roadshow release from Criterion and Janus Films of this sold-out concert.

23:28Ryan Lattanzio:And that's going to start in New York. on November 20th. I do wonder, there's always a secret screening at New York Film Festival. A lot of people are saying it could be artificial, the Luca Guadagnino movie, but I could see this also showing up at New York Film Festival. Feels like a very New York movie. And my theory about this movie is that if you look at all the music videos that he shot for Haim, it was almost like he was getting ready to cast Alana Haim in his movies. He doesn't collaborate with musicians without some sort of tie to his actual, his narrative filmmaking work like he shot a music video film for Tom York of Radiohead a few years ago and that was you know I think that was by way of his connection to Johnny Greenwood who does a score for all his movies so I feel like in the next PTA movie I will not be surprised if this guy Cameron Winter doesn't make his acting debut in it as we saw with Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza and by then he'd already been shooting basically all of the Haim music videos.

24:23Anne Thompson:I love those videos. I love Haim. So there we go. Yeah, me too. Thank you, PTA, because he introduced me to them. So the foreign Oscar submissions are flying in. They're not all in. There's quite a few still to come, like France, Italy, Poland, and more. But we know that Berlin actress winner Sandra Huller stars in Rose, which is Austria's submission.

24:48Ryan Lattanzio:Germany went with Sandra Vollner's Uncertain Regard winner every time, which is a fantastic movie that I saw at the end of Cannes. That's going to be at New York Film Festival. That's really one of the best movies of the year. I can't wait to see it.

24:59Anne Thompson:I think I have a screening for that. And then Cannes shared Best Actor winners Emmanuel Machia and Valentin Campagna in Coward from Lucas Daunt, which is Belgium's submission, as we expected. And Coward is one of those very delicate,

25:16Ryan Lattanzio:gossamer lovely movies about furtive desire so it's a subtle it's subtly played i'll be curious i think there's an audience for that for from the gay cinephiles out there including myself and i think it's lucas don't's best movie i've been he's been he had been zero for two for me up to this point and this one works very well also there's been some development in the best actress race which is that virgin virginie afira and tau okamoto from all of a sudden the rise uki hamaguchi movie they're going to go best actress and best supporting actress, respectively.

25:48Anne Thompson:And that's obviously the Japanese submission. And the other thing that's interesting this year is that there's a bunch of movies that didn't win, didn't get submitted by their countries, but are in the race because they qualified following new Academy rules to include movies that win top prizes at major festivals. So that includes Palme d 'Or winner Fjord from Christian Manju and Sundance's Albanian World Cinema winner Shame and Money, and also from Germany, Yellow Letters. So we've got quite a few of those as well.

26:21Ryan Lattanzio:Yellow Letters won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, and this has not popped up at any of the major festivals since that, I mean, maybe in Europe, it's certainly not here. And I don't know if it'll be at Telluride. This movie needs to get to another festival because I don't even think it, it doesn't even have a distributor at this point. And it's pretty good, but I feel like I'm the only person who saw it. And this was all the way back in February. The other one that's kind of hanging in the balance, which this was in Variety, is Minotaur, which France could submit unless they're going to go for one of their homegrown movies.

26:50Ryan Lattanzio:And often they end up screwing themselves over when they do something like this. You know, I'm thinking of the year of Taste of Things when they opted for that over Anatomy of a Fall, which did well at the Oscars.

27:01Anne Thompson:By the way, Taste of Things was a great movie. No, it is. They obviously miscalculated. It was wrong. It was the wrong decision to make at that point in that time. you know, Anatomy of a Fall ended up doing okay.

27:13Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, no, and I love Taste of Things. I'm just saying if they wanted to win it, they probably should have gone for Anatomy of a Fall. So this means that I don't, you know, there's other countries that have stakes in Minotaur. Obviously, Russia's not going to submit it. Who is going to submit that one? It could end up being left out because it hasn't won a major prize.

27:29Anne Thompson:Is there an obvious French contender though? I don't think there is.

27:32Ryan Lattanzio:No, there isn't. That's why I think it might be Minotaur.

27:35Anne Thompson:And they've done this before, obviously.

27:37Ryan Lattanzio:All the most of the French movies I saw at Cannes were very bad. So there you are. It's not going to be any of those. We also have the South Korean entry, predictably, which Netflix has this movie, Possible Love from Lee Chang Dong. I can't talk about it. I've seen the movie. I'm very excited to talk about it. This is a director of Burning. And I do think this movie has a shot to be nominated. That's all I'll say at this point.

28:01Anne Thompson:Okie dokie. So we're still waiting for Spain. I have to assume that La Bola Negra will be the, there's like 10 films being submitted, you know, so far, and they're going to have to pick one. So if they don't pick La Bola Negra, I will be very upset. So will Netflix. Page six, I get a newsletter from them, this new L.A. outpost. They're doing a lot of sort of breathless reporting about things. So they say that there are six Bond finalists. Sources tell them there is nothing official. There is nothing announced from Amazon MGM. But the six are Jack Barton, Jacob Elordi, Paul Meskel, Colm Turner, Jack Loudon, and Harris Dickinson.

28:48Anne Thompson:Some of these have been mentioned before. We know five of these people. Who the hell is Jack Barton?

28:54Ryan Lattanzio:you got me he's pretty cute though actually he's cute he's a great look yeah he's handsome well he's he's I I do kind of know who he is he he's been in this Netflix YA queer romance show Heartstopper which I've sort of come and gone from it's not that great of a show but that also brought us Kit Connor who's now he's one of the X-Men or whatever he's lost to time at this point this guy Jack Barton is also was in Poor Things I have no memory of him being in that so he is completely new and that that is that could be a good thing yeah well that's what the long-time casting director wants she wants someone who we don't know at all who can be totally surprising now of the other guys what do you think i think jacob alordi is too tall literally that's what i wrote down too tall to be a spy he stands out he's way too tall paul meskel is too disheveled

29:44Anne Thompson:i think harris dickens he can dress up meskel but are you saying he's too working class

29:49Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, I think that's kind of what I'm saying. He's a little blue collar. And he's a little soft. He's a little sweet. He's a sweet, cute man. He's an emotive guy. I'm not convinced that he could be a killing machine.

30:02Anne Thompson:Is he dangerous? He has to be dangerous.

30:04Ryan Lattanzio:I don't think he's dangerous.

30:05Anne Thompson:Calvin Turner isn't that good an actor, gotta say.

30:09Ryan Lattanzio:No, no. He's good looking.

30:10Anne Thompson:Harris, yes. Jack Loudon would be fine with me.

30:13Ryan Lattanzio:He would work. Yes, he would work. Harris Dickinson, I think, is too lithe. And also two of these people are in Beals movies. I mean, like, I don't want to see them caught in the franchise wheels for all time. We do need someone who is medium height and agree and and and loose, but also polished.

30:34Anne Thompson:I like Harris Dickinson because he's just a great actor. I love him and great filmmaker. He's he is a good filmmaker. I could imagine him turning it down, honestly, because he's got he doesn't really want to be an actor. He wants to be a director. That's what he wants. He takes himself quite seriously in that regard. Jack Loudon would be great. But I just have a hunch that the unknown is the one who has the edge here. I agree.

31:00Ryan Lattanzio:And that's what our friend Tatiana Stiegel is saying in this report of unfounded information. She said it as if it was true. Yes, exactly.

31:06Anne Thompson:As if she knew that it was true, which I don't think we should. I'm a great fan of Tatiana's. I used to work with her as a Hollywood reporter. but I don't know that she always reports. She says things like sources say, and then you have no idea what that means. You know, that's all.

31:22Ryan Lattanzio:She is a reporter of integrity. I like her very much. I'm just talking about page six overall as a platform. Overall, I agree with that. Versus variety.

31:30Anne Thompson:They are in a big rush and they have a slightly tabloidy sensibility. That's what page six is. What is your recommendation for this week, Ryan?

31:40Ryan Lattanzio:My recommendation is, I think it's actually only opening in Chicago right now because it's the director's hometown and then it's expanding next week, is Joe Swanberg's The Sun Never Sets. People have really complicated feelings about Joe Swanberg. There's been rumors for years about on-set behavior. But he worked with people like Josephine Decker he had a relationship with, Greta Gerwig as well, all these women that don't really work with him anymore. Anyway, he has a movie called The Sun Never Sets, which is a love triangle with Jake Johnson, Corey Michael Smith, and Dakota Fanning, who is fantastic in this movie.

32:17Ryan Lattanzio:I highly recommend it. It is one of those, will she, won't she? Is she going to go for her kind of bad boy ex? Or with the more stable guy that she's been dating in a while, she's waffling between these two guys. It's a really good performance. It's also set in Alaska, and it's shot on 35mm and looks beautiful. This was also at South By. Who's releasing? Great movie. That is IFC. Sorry, Independent Film Company.

32:42Anne Thompson:We call it IFC.

32:44Ryan Lattanzio:Yes, IFC is releasing it.

32:46Anne Thompson:All right. So my recommendation is a movie called The Cycle of Love. And I saw this movie at Middleburg. And the reason I went to see it there was because it had been such a big hit at Telluride. People loved this movie. They talked about it. That's what's great about Telluride. All the people who go line up at all the different cinemas over the course of the four days talk to each other and tell each other what they like. And so this was one of the ones I kept hearing about. So let's say it was a crowd pleaser. So it's a documentary about an untouchable who makes his living doing portraits of tourists in New Delhi back in the 70s.

33:24Anne Thompson:That's where it starts. and he meets a Swedish tourist, a beautiful young girl, and they fall in love and they have a wonderful summer of love. And then she goes home. He sells all of his worldly possessions, buys a bicycle, and treks per 6 ,000 miles across multiple countries, Iran, Afghanistan, you know, all the way across to Sweden. Seriously, he goes off Germany, he gets all the way across. They called it the hippie trail or something. He gets all the way to Sweden. He reunites with his love. They love each other. They get married and happy ever after. So this movie uses him as a narrator and also reenactments to show the story of what happened.

34:10Anne Thompson:And it isn't that the people are scripted. Orlando von Einzseidel, who is British, and he is known for White Helmets, which won the Oscar short, and Varunga. These were Netflix films. This movie is getting out a year later after Telluride because Variance is, you know, self-service distributor. They had to raise money. They had to raise money across all this time in order to put it in theaters. And they're going to go to 20 or 30 theaters and he's going to go on tour with it. And it is because he feels so strongly knowing how people reacted to it that it could be in theaters. So that's why. I do love this movie.

34:52Anne Thompson:It's really remarkable, actually.

34:55Ryan Lattanzio:I got to catch up with that one. And on that note, we should call it because I actually have to go edit your story about this movie.

35:02Anne Thompson:See you later, Ryan.