We Loved 'Weapons'; What's Where in the Fall Festivals, & Speculating about New Bond

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0:35Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast that brings you up to speed on what's going on in Hollywood. I'm Anne Thompson in Los Angeles.

0:43Ryan Lattanzio:And I'm Ryan Latanzio in New York. Apologies, I'm a little congested at the moment. Going to work through it. This week, we will review the latest Warner Brothers release, Weapons, which we both managed to get into and see finally. And I'm very excited to talk to you about this one, Anne. And we will parse the latest info from the fall festivals as they continue to update, which have pretty much told us most of what's playing, even when Telluride, of course, isn't going to announce its lineup until the Thursday before Labor Day. Meanwhile, there are also a few outliers which don't seem to be playing festivals at all.

1:17We will ask why that is. And then we're also going to look at Stephen Knight's prospects for the new Bond franchise at Amazon MGM Studios under director Denis Villeneuve. Knight was announced as the next 007's movie screenwriter last week. And I also quite liked season two of Wednesday, which suitably breaks on Wednesday at Netflix. And Ryan managed to catch a new sci-fi series on FX, Noah Hawley's Alien Earth, starring my fave, Justified star, Timothy Oliphant. Frustratingly, I could not break the password code on their screener site, which gave me an excuse to catch up with the last episode of Gilded Age.

1:57I am guilty as charged. So Ryan, tell us what you thought of actor turned director Zach Kreger's weapons. I never did see Barbarian in 2022. Were you a fan?

2:08Ryan Lattanzio:I liked Barbarian, but it does descend into some creature body horror in the end that I don't feel totally stuck the landing, but it definitely came with the advantage of surprise. Zach Kreger came from this improv group called the whitest kids you know a couple of years ago one of his castmates named trevor moore died and so this movie is kind of a response to that this new movie weapons and this guy zach craig is following along the jordan peele formula right of a comedian who becomes a horror auteur as the days go on i am more convinced of the greatness of weapons look it's really hard for us to talk about this movie without spoiling things for people i really don't want to maybe one of the reasons why they didn't invite us to see it, honestly.

2:56But they invited every influencer on the planet.

2:59Ryan Lattanzio:Oh, I know. The screening I was in was a bunch of, I don't know, it was a bunch of influencers that were all on their phones the entire movie. No, I was sitting with people who were eating enormous quantities of food really loudly and slurping. And I was reminded how spoiled I am. Most people are very polite about just being good with popcorn and not eating an entire meal during a movie. Yeah. You know, I don't know why studios hate their movies so much that this is the environment that they want to put critics in. I was surrounded by many of my New York peers, you know, esteemed critics of New York that also endured what we did.

3:36Ryan Lattanzio:I was still able to enjoy the movie, which I actually find to be quite funny. And something that I think both helped and hurt the movie is that Zach Krieger talked about this as his kind of version of Magnolia as a horror movie. And I suppose I could see that, but it's Magnolia directed by Stephen King, right? Because it's similar to other suburban nightmare movies like Blue Velvet or even Todd Solis' Happiness or even something like Little Children. It's almost more of a mystery dramedy with horror elements until it ultimately does become very gory. What did you think of it? I quite enjoyed it, by the way.

4:12I really didn't know what to expect. It's very well written and well directed. And the story unfolds in a way where you really don't know where it's going to going to wind up. And what's great about it is that it's in chapters. So you see it from different points of view. The setup is that at the very beginning of the movie, this woman comes to class to teach her class. And they're there. I guess it's a class of 10 year olds, more or less. How old do you think they are, Ryan? Eight-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 9-year-olds?

4:43Ryan Lattanzio:That sounds right. Yeah. I know there's 17 children. I know that number. At 2.17 a.m., it turns out, because people have rings on their doorways with cameras, these children go tearing out of their beds into the night, and they don't know where they went, and they haven't been able to find them. The Julia Garner character, the teacher, she is being demonized by the parents and she's being badly treated. There's a Josh Brolin character, one of the angry dads who's sleeping in his child's bed and is inconsolable. And he's very good. So is Julia Garner. They're both very good. And then we have the star of the show is revealed eventually.

5:32There's a bad person. It's a very memorable villain.

5:37Ryan Lattanzio:A very good villain. We're not going to go into it, but it's basically Amy Madigan. Did you recognize her? Nope, I sure didn't. Wife of Ed Harris. Yes. A lovely character actress who's a very nice person, and she is so scary. I think she deserves a supporting actress nomination for this. Here's the point. It's a very well-made, very well-constructed horror movie. I yelped at one point. I was embarrassed. I was sitting next to Jim Hempel, and I screamed at one jump cut reveal. And, you know, that's what you want. But it isn't gross. There is a good dismemberment, actually, a pretty good dismemberment.

6:21It's not gratuitous, though. No, it's a good story. Let's put it that way. It's a good story, and it's well resolved, and you don't know how it's going to come out. And I was quite pleased with it. it's smart horror. This is what I want to say. It's more like Ari Aster horror.

6:36Ryan Lattanzio:I'd say it's more entertaining than Ari Aster horror because it often is quite funny. And there's really good characters in this. I loved Alden Ehrenreich as the cop who is hooking up with his ex, who's played by Julia Garner. Austin Abrams, again, is fantastic in this as a twitchy meth head who knows a thing or two about the disappearance of the kids. And interestingly, we liked him in the movie Wolves a lot too, of course. It's the same cinematographer, a guy named Larkin Seiple that I'm not familiar with, but the movie looks great. It does. It looks great. You're right. It's in this suburban horror genre.

7:12I was thinking of Stepford Wives or going back even further, an invasion of the body snatchers kind of thing. Totally. More like the 50s.

7:20Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah. What's good about it is that it's not, it touches on ideas of grief and trauma, But, you know, I see all these contemporary horror movies that are so weighed down by those themes. And this one, there's a lighter touch to it. And it's helped by some cartoonish violence by the end of the movie. It moves from, oh, my God, what happened to as you get into the latter sections. It's very funny. You're laughing out loud. There's a good needle drop in the beginning that must have been expensive to license, which is a George Harrison song that I didn't know actually called Beware the Darkness. I did know it.

7:57I'm sure you did. It's obscure though. You're right. It's not one of the better known. As I sat there, I wondered how many people would recognize that it was George Harrison.

8:07Ryan Lattanzio:I knew it was the Beatles, but I didn't know where we were in the discography and in time. That may have been a George Harrison solo. It was. Yes. It was. Yes. Okay, and then we have shout-outs to The Shining, of course. You saw that. A couple places where there's faces coming through the door. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, there's this one little kid who's really terrorized, and he stands up to everything. He's really quite heroic, this child. I was strangely very moved by it at the end. I found it touching. I really did. I don't know. look it's been a long summer Ann and these I have gone to almost all of these movies I've been with you every step of the way for better or worse mostly for worse this is my favorite movie of the all of the blockbusters that we've seen the commercial the commercial movies I ran into a friend of mine who had gone to see Naked Gun with his family his father his mother his sister and they were all standing there you know talking about Naked Gun as a family and I was moved This is what it's about.

9:17This is what you're supposed to be doing in the summer, going with the people you love to laugh and cry or be scared. And it's so important that that happened. We were talking about how, in the end, the studios came through. I know you didn't love all these movies, but none of them were cringeworthy. Jurassic, Superman, Fantastic Four, they were not cringeworthy. The studios did their job. They were well-made commercial entertainments. They may not have been your taste, but they were really well done. All right.

9:51Ryan Lattanzio:Well, not cringeworthy, but worse than cringeworthy, boring. A lot of them were boring to me. And I'm not alone in that opinion. There was another movie you saw that I didn't, though, this week, which was Freakier Friday. Okay. Now, that's not one. Our colleague, Kate Erbland, gave that a very positive review. And I was like, hmm, this one I'm not going to go to the bank for. It's entertaining. It's slick. It's Jamie Lee Curtis way over the top. Think about it. She's the most powerful person on that movie, even more than her erstwhile co-star, Lindsay Lohan. I like her a lot. And there was a lot of it that was entertaining.

10:32She's playing a young person again inside the older person's body. But there were four of them this time. Last time it was pretty easy to figure out which one was Lindsay Lohan and which one was Jamie Lee Curtis, right? Mother-daughter. This time Jamie Lee Curtis is the grandmother, and then there's Lindsay, and then there's two young women, one of whom isn't related to anybody. And she's the one who's in the grandma body. And you're going, well, who's who? Who's that? You get lost, and it gets a little murky.

11:03Ryan Lattanzio:I don't care whose body's in who. I'll watch this on the plane at some point You know, it was supposed to be a streaming movie But fan response Encouraged Disney to push it to theatrical Does it justify that? I think it will do well I think it's good enough to do well at the box office I actually think this is their job Their job is to make movies that are going to do well at the box office That's why I was so angry That K-pop demon hunters didn't go Theatrically So this guy, Zach Kregor Obviously his career is made What we have next is a reboot of Resident Evil, right? That's right. That's a game.

11:37Ryan Lattanzio:Another game I've played that is becoming a movie or a TV series. Didn't they make movies already? Wasn't there a whole series? There's a terrible series of movies with Mila Jovovich. There's one after another. Which was successful. Yeah. These are much gorier than Last of Us and the zombies. But in the game, the zombies move a lot slower. They're more like traditional zombies. But this is known for being a very gory, violent game series. So he will be ramping up the gore, at least with respect to barbarian and weapons. Okie dokie. So tell me how Alien Earth is. You seem pretty high on it. I wouldn't say I'm pretty high on it.

12:16Ryan Lattanzio:I wasn't. OK, so this this is Noah Hawley. This is set 20 years. The guy who did the Fargo series. So this Alien Earth is set two years before the events of the original Ridley Scott alien movie from 1979. this is a world where earth is run by this is sort of donald trump's fantasy right it's run by five corporations a ship crash lands on earth that is carrying all these different extraterrestrials so so you know there's been intimations of some other creatures in the other alien movies that that we like so much but there's a whole host of different species in this one that we've never seen before which is cool so it really opens up the world the one thing that i'll say is that the original alien, the xenomorph, which, you know, that comes from H.R.

13:04Ryan Lattanzio:Geiger and Carlo Rimbotti, it's kind of doesn't really have any rules in how it operates. One minute, it's a vicious, unfeeling killing machine. And the next, it's more discerning about who it's going to kill. So that's weird. We've never really seen that before in this series. And I didn't watch Justified. So I don't know. Was Timothy Oliphant relatively brawny in that show? Would you say He's a built guy, right? He's a swimmer. He's very thin in this. Well, he's older now. But he was definitely a macho sheriff with a hat and a gun. And, you know, he threw his weight around. But he's always been on the slim side in the sense that he's a swimmer.

13:44So he has the broad shoulders and the slim hips. And I think he has a beautiful body, actually.

13:49Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, well, it's cloaked in a jumpsuit in this. But it's just he seems whatever. Well, you know, I think they make everybody too thin now. You know, that's the new order. Somebody like Cynthia Erivo should not look like a skeleton, you know. Oh, yeah. Well, she's doing Jesus Christ superstar. Good Lord. She is a cadaver. I know. And I happened to see some video of her from a few years ago, and there is a marked contrast. Well, the same could be said for your pal Jenna Ortega in your favorite show Wednesday. She's looking quite gaunt these days, vanishing in real time. And you can see the progression.

14:30Ryan Lattanzio:She gets older. As she gets older. She's 22 now, a grand old age of 22. So they relied on her a good deal in season one. And now season two, I talked to the showrunners, Miles Millar and Alfred Goh, who are a really fun friend to talk to. They've been doing movies and TV shows since they met at USC back in the 90s, back in the dark ages. And so they filled me in on season two. And I really enjoyed it because I like Tim Burton. This is a perfect world for Tim Burton to play with and do animation. And they told me the backstory of how they cast Thing, who's played by this Romanian magician in a blue suit.

15:12In other words, everything is covered blue except for his hand. And that was fun to hear about.

15:19Ryan Lattanzio:Yeah, that was cool. That kind of made me want to watch it because I really haven't seen this show. Tim Burton only directs a handful of episodes, right? I mean, obviously his... Four out of 12. So he's done a third of them. Fingerprints. Yeah, they're definitely all over it. But it's funny, this week is also the 40th anniversary of Pee-wee's Big Adventure, another Tim Burton movie I really like. So a lot of Tim Burton. I interviewed him back in the day. That was the first time I interviewed Tim Burton. That was at Windows on the World. That was where his office was back in the day in Hollywood.

15:53Ryan Lattanzio:You know the Tim Burton movie I love that doesn't get enough love is Sleepy Hollow. That's a good one. That's a scary one. Very scary. And gory and psychosexual. Well, of course you liked it. Yes, I do. So one of the things I love about talking to these guys was I got the Wednesday origin story, which always blows my mind, which in this case, you'd think it would have been some kind of institutional. Hey, you know, we got to get the Addams Family back on screen or something. These guys dreamed it up on their own and pitched it. and no one wanted it. And they didn't want it because the toys weren't available.

16:30Eventually, after years of getting it on its feet, they got, Netflix got it. And that's why it's so good is that writers dreamed it up instead of having an assignment of some kind.

16:45Ryan Lattanzio:I liked reading about how when the show went to committee, people said, oh, well, she would never talk like this. She doesn't know Old English. She wouldn't talk about Beowulf. and they were like, we don't care. This is how she's written. This is a character we've created. We are men of a certain age, and this is who we've written. They're allowed to be men of a certain age who are literate, and they're also allowed to be that way when the show is already a hit. That's it. That's the bottom line. That's when you can say, we don't care. I like that. I'm glad you liked that. All right, so the fall festivals have continued to announce their lineups.

17:22Some movies like Frankenstein and A House of Dynamite that's Guillermo del Toro and Catherine Bigelow, respectively, are playing Venice and not Telluride, while the Edward Burger movie about gambling, starring Colin Farrell, what's that called?

17:37Ryan Lattanzio:Ballad of a Small Player. Is breaking at Telluride. And many, many movies are playing at TIFF and NYFF. So a company like Netflix has to sort of make choices. You know, we're going to play Venice with these. We're going to play Telluride with these. We're going to go here for Toronto. And one of the things that they say when you ask them about this is, where do we want the reviews to break? So how do you rank these festivals now and what their role is in the firmament? I would put Venice at the top. That seems to be the coveted spot where everyone wants their movie to premiere. I've only been going now.

18:18Ryan Lattanzio:This will be my third year. So I don't know if it hasn't always been that way. Do you feel that way? They came out on top during the pandemic. The pandemic really hurt Toronto in a big way. And it hurt, it didn't hurt Telluride that much. Telluride is still very, very powerful. It's just that it's hard to get to and it's expensive and it becomes a bit of a burden for everyone. But once, you know, once they decide to go for it, they go for it. These companies can afford to go to Telluride. We're not worrying about that. And Venice is also where you get the reviews because Venice, we adhere to embargoes.

18:58Ryan Lattanzio:There's press screenings in the morning and we have many hours to file. Not many, but a few hours to file in between. There's more of a sort of order there that the trades follow, whereas Telluride, it seems a little more freewheeling, right? Well, you have to either you get the screening ahead of time and file ahead of time, you know, under embargo, or you scramble at that moment to write the review right after the movie shows. Right. Whereas Venice is structured around those reviews breaking in lockstep with each other. Telluride is not quite it's similar to Sundance, where if you didn't see it in town beforehand, you're not you're not getting the chance.

19:34Ryan Lattanzio:But I haven't been to Telluride, but it's obviously more of a social atmosphere. And it's about it's about I mean, there's voters there. Right. So it's it's also about wooing the Academy. It is about wooing the Academy, but it's also about how do the movies play for the audiences there who are national? You know, they're from all over the country and they're they're like good old fashioned art house audiences and families. And they've been going for a long time and they line up and they get they get really, you know, into the whole question of seeing. There's classic movies there. There's there's also documentaries there.

20:07There's a lot of of material to to catch up with.