Has SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY got Mark’s Spidey senses tingling? + ASA BUTTERFIELD

0:00Simon Mayo: Now, Mark, I don't know why all these trendy podcasters need to sell such tat in their online shops these days. You'd have thought the show would have been enough for them. I mean, look at this tea towel. Simon, I think that's our shop you're browsing, isn't it? Oh, so it is. Actually, those Kermode and Mayor director's chairs are very nice, and it's all incredibly slick and easy. That's probably what confused me. That's because it's powered by Shopify. Shopify is where you go to start your business. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one, which means our top production team can concentrate on, well, whatever it is that they do.

0:34While Shopify does all the hard work, because Shopify handles the setup and checkout, you have more time to focus on growing your business and the tools to do it.

0:41Simon Mayo: And Shopify checkout helps more customers finish their purchase. Then when they come back, their details are already saved. One tap and they're done. Simple. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.co.uk slash take. Start your free trial at shopify.co.uk slash take. This episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Hey everyone, this is Jonathan Van Ness from Getting Better. You know what you believe. Maybe your faith is at the center of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out.

1:19Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government-sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, this is what I believe. While your neighbor says, I believe something completely different.

1:52And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org slash getting better. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

2:05Simon Mayo: Before we begin, a quick reminder that you can become a Vanguard Easter and get an extra episode every Thursday. Including bonus reviews. Extra viewing suggestions. Viewing recommendations at home and in cinemas. Plus your film and non-film questions answered as best we can in Questions Schmestions. You can get all that extra stuff via Apple Podcasts or head to extratakes.com for non-fruit related devices. There's never been a better time to become a Vanguardista. Free offer now available wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're already a Vanguardista, we salute you.

2:52Simon Mayo: There was an old ad which started, was it PC World? It went, where in the world? World, PC World. Now adapted. Where in the world, Mark? Where are you? Where are you this week? I'm at the Provence Art Festival du Film up by Meneb. I was here last year, you remember? It's this film festival I'm involved in that they, it's a documentary film festival. Last year it was documentary films about artists. This year it's documentary films about music and musicians. so um i'm it's really nice actually it's a really really beautiful place kevin mcdonald is going to be here to talk about that john and yoko one-to-one doc jane pollard neil forsyth i'm doing a conversation with about broken english um susan steinberg is here to talk about give me shelter oh i'm going to introduce epic the elvis presley in concert film which both you and i absolutely love give me a quote for my introduction from simon mayo so i can say simon mayo from the uk says of epic it's directed by baz lerman well done

3:57Simon Mayo: it's fantastic it should be seen in a double bill uh with his other elvis film yeah i think it is funny i really i keep thinking about seeing that movie the first time and just thinking there's so much of this the fact that so much of that footage we hadn't seen before and um i talked to Sanj about it afterwards because of course Sanjeev is is you know is a bigger Elvis fan than you or me and actually knows a lot of those people and he thought it was absolutely knockout anyway so yeah that's where I am I'm in I'm in sunny France I came in last night in the middle of the night um so where so so just so that we can close our eyes and imagine where you are because obviously that's what we that's what we need to do okay so Meneb is sort of like um uh like a mile up the road.

4:41And I am currently in the home of Lucy Darwin, who I've known for ages, who's kind of running the festival. And I knew Lucy way back when she was a film publicist, and then she became a film producer and now a film director. And so I'm sitting in this re I mean, honestly, it's ridiculously nice.

5:02Simon Mayo: But that doesn't help us place where you are. It's nice that you're in a nice house but i'm in provence okay i'm in provence i'm on on provence right where they drink rosé for breakfast i'll tell you i'll tell you how we can cite it i'm about four miles or five miles away from ridley scott's winery incidentally i should just tell everybody that simon paul the redactor has literally his face has just appeared on screen because we we had to start the program without him because he was off drinking rosé doing something else but nice to see that he's here hello simon thanks for turning up just appeared like a like a spooky cutaway that's what it was yeah he's saying child care yeah yeah we've all pulled that one it's allowed in the 21st century he's he's found a pub that was open and and that's where he's gone welcome to the show anyway um mark is in france i'm in showbiz north london um when you get to uh movie reviews what can we expect well it's a really exciting week we have ish which is a fantastic feature debut which I'm really, really excited to talk about.

6:03Spider-Man brand new day, a new Spider-Man movie, which is going to be enormous. And our hero Balthazar with our special guest,

6:12Simon Mayo: who's Asa Butterfield, who's one of the stars of that there film. You'll hear from Asa a little bit later on. And in take two. In take two, David Byrne's American Utopia is opening for one night in cinemas. I want to talk about this because both you and I have now seen the current David Byrne live show. I was just at Latitude over the weekend doing... Yeah, I mean, I saw it a few years ago. I mean, it's essentially the same thing, but with fancier backdrops and things. Exactly. And also, in the ongoing Aardman celebrations, we have reached peak Aardman feature because Wallace and Gromit, Curse of the Were-Rabbit, is back in cinemas.

6:47And that's almost the most exciting news of the week.

6:50Simon Mayo: Is David Byrne's American Utopia the same one as it came out a few years ago? They've reissued it because he's been back on tour. Yeah, it's just a reissue of that film, yes. Which a lot of people might be wanting to see and own as a souvenir of the show. You can get Take Two ad-free by heading to our Patreon page. You just search Kermode and Mayo and you'll find us. We are going to do, for our next Hall of Fame vote, it's going to be the Battle of the Bristolian Independent Cinemas. Okay. and we're looking for uh the top of most bristolian independent cinema one is the watershed cinema two is the cube cinema three is the old picture house cinema four is 20th century flicks and cinema five is the orpheus cinema uh or any others that you can think of let us know if we've missed out uh any and uh and then you can vote and take part and stuff uh just uh let us know correspondence at codemer.com we'll announce the winner at our show uh on december the 6th so there's not really an urgency about this in terms of getting your votes in um because you've got until the end of the you got until christmas essentially um when we do a show at bristol beacon which is at 7 p.m the ticket link is in the show notes i can't believe i mean i know lots of people have done already bought all their tickets for something in december but it seems to me extremely odd behavior but you know a good thing obviously yes it's a very good thing and we are really, really looking forward to coming to Bristol and having a fabulous time.

8:22Of course, there is the Bristol-Ardman connection. So it's all tying together thematically perfectly. The only thing that isn't tying together is that we're talking about Christmas and it's the middle of summer.

8:33Simon Mayo: That's right. And we haven't even reached August yet. Nathan Pavey sends us an email. Dear Try and Mester, long time listener, first time emailer, on the recent subject of inappropriate films to show in a hospital. I feel I might have made my own dubious film adjacent hospital boo-boo. Right. Because we are all primary school children. Back in 2014, my good lady wife and I were in the pre-maternity ward in mid-December, not Joby's West London, waiting for what people wait for in pre-maternity wards. Our midwife implied that it would be a good idea to take a couple of books to help fill the hours of waiting.

9:13Simon Mayo: My wife had never read Jaws, which is one of my personal favorites and is always on the bookshelf, so she decided to pack it in the maternity bag. As the waiting went into the afternoon, the ward went into an exhausted, quiet lull. I imagined tiredness made up of a mixture of expectation and maternity drugs. At this point, my wife asked me to read to her, so I took the aforementioned book and started reading. Now, I don't know if you've ever read Jaws. I have, but it starts. I have, yeah. It starts how the film starts with the unfortunate young lady meeting her demise by shark. That's right. It seemed like the entire ward was hearing me describe how she screamed as her own blood spread across the water and warm blood flowed into the cold.

9:56Simon Mayo: When I finished reading the first chapter, my wife had fallen asleep, probably from my recital. and it was at this point that there was a collective sigh of relief on the ward because I realised only now that expectant mothers do not particularly want to hear about the messy business of blood gushing out of people and things attacking them. I quietly put the book away and slinked off in search of an afternoon cuppa. The next day we had our own messy encounter, but not with a shark, because we got our lovely daughter Jessica, who hasn't tried to attack me yet. Up with movies, with fishing and down with the orange cheese puff.

10:31Simon Mayo: Yours swimmingly, Nathan Pavey. I certainly wasn't asked to read to the good lady's ceramics. I mean, I think I made, we were asked for musical preferences, I think for the first one. And then I think I did make a cassette maybe or a CD. I can't remember with the others, but anyway. Well, do you remember the email from last week in which somebody had made a soothing playlist for their partner? Yes, drugs don't work. The drugs don't work. Well done. And the surgeon or whoever it was, the midwife, he said, you are kidding. Yeah. There's more on this kind of topic a little bit later. If you want to get in touch, obviously, you know where we are, correspondence at codermare.com.

11:08Simon Mayo: Movie review time. Tell us something that's out and interesting. Okay, Ish, I-S-H. This is the feature debut from musician, visual artist, filmmaker Imran Perretta. It was co-written by Andrew Walsh, whose CV includes things like Disco Pigs, the film of which introduced us to Cillian Murphy. Anyway, Ish is developed from a 2019 installation, The Destructors, which Imran Peretti has currently got on display at the Tate Britain. I think that's showing now. So the story centers on two friends. There's 12-year-old Ish, Ishmael, who's played in utterly natural fashion by Farhan Hasnat, and Maram, who is a slightly older boy, played by Yaya Kitana.

11:58and they've these two kids have got fantastic on-screen chemistry they're both making their their screen debut although it turned out because i interviewed the director on stage at the bfi a few weeks ago and he said he cast them independently and when he was working with them he said oh it's amazing you know you've got really natural chemistry they went yeah we've known each other since we were three so apparently they've been friends for ages and he just didn't know very fortunate so ish's mother has died he lives with his dad his grandmother and his older sister his sister is played by joy crooks the singer songwriter the whole thing it plays out in luton and surrounding bedfordshire all of which is shot in this kind of oddly lush black and white by jermaine kenny edwards who's the dp and you know luton often gets a bad press as being like somehow grim and you know filled with with strife but crucially that thing about when you're young your hometown looks exciting.

12:54I've been talking a lot recently about Ken Russell's The Devils. The Devils, which is set in Loudoun in 17th century France, is designed by Derek Jarman. Ken Russell said, the whole thing is, I didn't want it to look like an old mossy city because when you live somewhere, wherever it is, you feel like it's modern and exciting because it's your town. That's why Loudoun in The Devils looks like something out of Metropolis. Well, in the case of this, everything looks like it would to a young eye. It looks exciting. And in the early scenes, we see these two boys roaming the woods on their bikes, picking blackberries, which they're not only eating, but they're also using to kind of simulate blood in playfights.

13:35And the whole thing has a really kind of natural, very kind of unforced energy. Here's a quick clip from that scene when they're picking blackberries. Come try the black one. Blink. Oi oi oi. Get me one. You want to try one yeah? Try it, this is a bad boy.

13:59Oh dear, bang him. Bang him, innit? Back at your t-shirt, back at your t-shirt. Oh man. Oh bro, the spikey on that. Take about one by one minute. Put them in. What if someone sees us? It's mine, us. We'll run. I think I care about people looking at us, but I'm telling them what is this thing. Come on, there'll be enough, there'll be enough. You see what I mean about that kind of natural sound? It's almost like, it's almost got the quality of cares to it. It's like, it's just people being, and it feels really kind of documented. there's that lovely kind of sound of nature in the background anyway it's the summer it's the holidays but it's also in true coming of age movie fashion it's the end of something it's the end of the holiday it's the end of childhood innocence anyway when they're back on the streets in lute things are tougher the older boy wants in with an older gang sidelines his young friend when when he meets up with those kids and then um maram who's who ish's grandmother calls that palestinian boy He's got this kind of street talk and there's the background of conflict going on around the world.

15:14And then he's picked up by the police. The police are facially profiling people with those machines. And he's picked up by the police, dragged into a van. And when that happens, his young friend Ish basically runs off. And he is in many senses dragged out of his childhood into adulthood. And when it happens, I said Ish panics and abandons him. and this forms a crack in their relationship. And the rest of the film is about what then happens, what the fallout of that fracture is. I mentioned that you can hear sort of the tenor of Kez in the way in which the dialogue is completely natural. There's an awful lot of critics have drawn attention to the fact that Ish, I-S-H, Kez, K-E-S, and the Apu trilogy, A-P-U, all seem to be sort of part of the same film ecosystem.

16:02I mean, I thought for me, the best way of describing this, it's like, it's a really beautifully observed coming of age tale. It's got the toughness of 400 Blows. It's got the accessibility of Stand By Me, which I think you and I both absolutely love. And it's got the poetry of Lynne Ramsey's Rat Catcher. There are, there is an autobiographical element to it. Apparently the director had a formative experience at the age of 13 of being pulled into a police fan. And he said, that was 100 % the moment in my childhood, this was an interview in The Guardian, that I lost my innocence because I understood how I was seen outside my family home, outside school, outside the community.

16:44In that moment, I understood that I was seen as some sort of threat. And he said that since then, all his work has been about that moment of seeing yourself as other people see you. And I think the film is about that, but I also think it's about the way in which you can have a relationship kids can have relationships that are absolutely intense and then something happens that fractures them quite recently i was watching um lucas dance film close actually when i was in that festival in croatia and that has a similar kind of energy to it the music for the film is brilliant pareta is is a musician and the score is a really really big part of it and one of the things that the score does is it makes fantastic use of hand claps you know like hand claps and voices.

17:31And if you get a chance to see the destructors, you can see where, where that comes from. Honestly, if I still have, if I still had that show on Scarlet, the station that you and I both used to work for, I'd be playing loads of stuff from this soundtrack. But anyway, look, I think this is an absolutely brilliant feature debut from a, from a, you know, a rising filmmaker who you are going to hear much, much more of in the future. It's got terrific reviews. It's been lauded wherever it's played and understandably. So it is one of my favorite films of the year. I think Simon, you would love it because I think it's got real heart to it.

18:08You know, we often talk about what this means of a film is a humanist film. It's about, you know, it is about the human experience. I mean, it's got a very strong political undertow to it as well. It's substantial, but it is a, it's a terrific coming of age movie and a really terrific feature debut. And the name of the director, we will be hearing a lot of again. Imran Peretta. And I think you will, you will hear his name an awful lot because he's, as I said, he's, he's a very successful artist. And, but as it now, as a feature filmmaker, I think he, I mean, I think he's, I think he's found his, I think he's found his home and I, and I just can't wait to see what he does next.

18:47Simon Mayo: Still to come after the break, the box office top 10. We'll talk about our hero Balthazar. We'll be talking to Asa Butterfield, one of the stars of that film, Spider-Man brand new day it's all on the way after this

19:04Simon Mayo: Hey Mark Kermode fancy a fun quick fire quiz? I thought you'd never ask Great, how do you protect yourself from spoilers? We never watch the end of the film Well, a bit impractical but fine how do you protect yourself from getting wound up by noisy cinema goers? There's no need, I'm a very tolerant man as you know How do you protect yourself from getting bored of the exorcist? It's impossible. Anyway, shall we start this fun quiz? What's more fun than being well protected? Okay, is that part of the quiz? I'm doing the questions, thank you. How do you protect yourself from online scams? Ah, finally, a sensible question.

19:39Nord VPN's next-gen antivirus. Blocks, scams and phishing before they reach you. Fake texts, dodgy links. Your account is locked. Emails, same app as the VPN. One tap, the biggest protection in the game.

19:51Simon Mayo: Correct upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app. Head to nordvpn.com slash take to get an exclusive NordVPN deal plus four months extra risk-free.

20:20life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government-sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, this is what I believe, while your neighbor says, I believe something completely different.

20:57And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org slash gettingbetter. Because your beliefs are yours, and theirs are theirs.

21:17Simon Mayo: Okay, time for the box office top 10. And at number 13, Animal Farm. So we spoke to Andy Serkis on last week's programme. We did. Who's this? Morag in Dundee. Animal Farm isn't a generic revolution goes wrong story. Orwell was writing about a very specific political phenomenon. To make the story fit a modern right-wing populist allegory, the film has had to add characters remove key ones and substantially change the narrative at that point it stops feeling like an adaptation of animal farm and starts feeling like an entirely new story borrowing orwell's title and iconography um okay um maggie burrows says it is perhaps worth noting when trying to understand the level of criticism being aimed at this animal farm that Orwell fully understood that authoritarian slash libertarian political spectrum stances are present on both sides of the left right wing spectrum.

22:19Simon Mayo: It is always worth paying attention to the people who are policing, controlling and mangling speech because that is simply never a good sign. I'm really looking forward to seeing some more reviews of the movie, probably more than seeing the movie itself. Well, but see the film, have an opinion based on what you've actually seen rather than what you've read other people write about it. I like the film much more than I expected to. On the subject of mangling the language, in that first email, somebody said populist. And a number of people took to the internet to point out that I said popularist and not populist.

22:53It's absolutely true. I mean, I am the most malapropic person I know. My entire life has been spent using words that are close to the word that I meant or they mean something else. The other one is putative. What do you think putative means? Yeah. attempted? Yeah, it means supposed. I always thought putative meant budding because it sounded like something with people, but it doesn't. Anyway, you're absolutely right. I said popularism and popularist as opposed to populist and populism. And that is me being malapropic and stupid. On the other hand, I think that the film is so much better than the harsh reviews have given it credit for.

23:36I think the third act doesn't work, but I think for the first two acts, I think as you're right in saying it's top end primary. And I think if you showed that to a top end primary school, they would have loads and loads of stuff to talk about. I think the only misstep is that I think the ending is meant to be horrifying. The ending, it does not need to have a positive conclusion. I understand Andy Serkis saying you can't say to people, it's all terrible, we can't do anything. But I don't think a terrifying ending does say that. But I think two thirds of it are pretty solid. And I like the way in which it's updated for the, pardon me, populist agenda.

24:17Simon Mayo: I think there's an element to which it's not generic, but the whole revolution goes wrong story is not just the Stalinism that he was writing about. You only have to know the bare basics of for example the french revolution uh to know that a revolution will eat itself and the people that have made it you know so there are there are general truths that run through revolutions but it obviously was specifically a piece of its time and i'm not sure that the adaptations were made to make it fit politically i'm you know i'm not sure about that but it was certainly made with an awareness of the country from which it has yeah i mean certainly the british animation, which as I said, you know, was, I only found this out when researching it last week, was covertly funded by the CIA, was specifically made politically.

25:05But you know, you made the point, you quoted Pete Townsend, it is meet the new boss, same as the old boss, which is a universal truth actually across the spectrum. And I think, I think that's kind of the point. I just remain really surprised by just how hostile some of the responses have been.

25:23Simon Mayo: number 10 in the chart number 11 over there is supergirl good central performance shame about the film disclosure day is at number nine it's hanging on in there this is its seventh week we we sort of talked about this briefly last week i said the further away i get from it the less i think of it but i think overall it has stuck with you more than it has with me and i think we both agree that there's there's real pleasure in watching a director of that caliber enjoy themselves that much. Evil Dead Bum at number eight, number six in America. You need to add no more. That is, it is now and will forever be Evil Dead Bum.

26:02Simon Mayo: Obsession is at number seven, number nine in Canada. So look at this 11th week on release and it's still in there at number seven. So Evil Dead Bum, third week, number eight. Obsession, 11th week, number seven. It just goes to demonstrate if you've got a smart idea it that i mean horror is a genre of ideas it is not a genre of of just gore and stuff and yeah obsession is so it's such an exciting movie it's terrific to see it doing so well the invite is at number six grown-up comedy um which is kind of rare in the current market great performances all around i mean it i think that the interesting thing about the invite is that when i saw it it reminded me of the kind of film that you can't make anymore and i'm kind of impressed that they did manage to make it and it's good that it's it's still holding on in there number five is jana negan i think it's pronounced na na jagan at least this is what it says the tamil pronunciation is on wiki jana the jagan um uh indian tamil language political action drama it wasn't press screened if anyone has seen it please let me know minions and monsters is at number four number five over there we had the most brilliant email last week from somebody who had taken their their young child to see it and they had uh absolutely loved it and laughed all the way through and i think the real triumph of it is how universal it is i was talking to mike hammond dr mike hammond professor mike hammond who is a real uh chaplain uh specialist and he said, the fact is the Minions are modern day slapstick in its most perfect incarnation.

27:41And they are. I mean, Mike has a grandson who will sit in front of Minions movies and will just laugh in that incredibly spontaneous way that slapstick comedy provokes.

27:52Simon Mayo: Moana is at number three, number two in America. Very, very stinky reviews. I didn't mind it as much as other people did. I do think the whole Disney live action project is a bit pointless, but I thought of all of them, this was the one that mithered me the least. Although I think that's probably because I love Moana the best because of all, I just love the story. I love the songs. And I thought, I think the rock's great. Toy Story 5 is at number two. Sixth week in the charts. Big hit. For the fifth install. It is a big hit, big hit, big hit. And it's done well. And we've had some really nice emails from people saying that they thought that it actually did speak to the whole issue of children and screens.

28:29It's not for me. I think I've kind of lost it with Toy Story now, and that sort of breaks my heart a bit. But it is good to see that people took their kids to see it, and they did get something out of it.

28:40Simon Mayo: And number one, very number one here and there and everywhere is the Odyssey. Some more news from Go Woke, Go Broke. Go Broke. The Odyssey took a massive$215 million in its second weekend, which is down by just 19%. What a flop. It's already taken$639.6 million worldwide. If you compare that to Oppenheimer at the same stage, that had taken 400. So it's bigger than Oppenheimer. Took a 66 % market share in UK and Ireland at the weekend. Biggest grossing IMAX second weekend of all time. So as, well, if that's going broke, then let's all go broke together. because just it's just great isn't it it's just there was there was a thing on um i think it was either john stewart or um or seth myers of a sort of super cut of all these right-wing uh journos on fox news all pointing out why it was that the odyssey was absolutely going to flop and it was going to be a total disaster and no one was going to make any money out of it because of the go woke go broke thing and as you pointed out last week they've gone very quiet they've gone very very quiet as a here's a little taster from next week's hot takes and cold comfort which is our feature which highlights the most normal comments from our youtube channel here is someone called life's a beach whose comment i will read out in my real voice okay because normally it's yeah you know it's either heather being scottish or posh or the redactor in a variety of bewildering voices and appearances so uh lives of beach says it's uh not very good there you go where he uses he uses a short word meaning rubbish yes yeah uh there you go i've sorted it for you the shill critics can blow it up all they like the public hate it well mark can i suggest that may the public hate all your future books may the public hate this podcast May the public hate all my future books, because this is the kind of hate we can all deal with, equaling massive worldwide success.

30:54$600 million worth of your hate, please. That would be absolutely marvelous.

30:59Simon Mayo: Gus says, dear stem and petal, long time listener, second time emergency mailer. Regarding Jorgos's email about the Loftus flower in the Odyssey from last week. Since fruits develop from flowers, perhaps Nolan showing a flower rather than the fruit isn't quite the error it appears to be. Or, knowing Nolan, it was entirely deliberate. Obi, who is a refugee from London claiming asylum in Gateshead. I first saw the Odyssey on a premium large format screen, then again on a nearly empty standard screen. And the surprise was that it had lost none of its power. the bigger louder formats may enhance the scale but unlike something like avatar this isn't a film that demands sorry this isn't a film that depends on presentation technology to work its greatness comes from the filmmaking itself my hunch is that it'll remain impressive on tvs laptops and even aeroplanes seat back screens though i still recommend catching it on a cinema at a cinema if you can uh obi thank you that's very interesting because i think you're the first person to have seen it on normal who's got in touch and you would hope that it loses none of its power and it appears to be the case well we were talking about this last week and saying you know is there a problem if you have made a movie that can only be appreciated in a format which is not accessible to a vast swathe of the population and it is therefore very encouraging to hear somebody saying no i say i have and and it and it does still work and quite often we've talked about films that you have to see in the cinema, you have to see on the big screen.

32:34And then five or six months later, when they come out on Blu-ray or, you know, now streaming or whatever it is, and they do still work. But I don't think, I mean, look, as I think we said last week, go and see it on the biggest screen that you can. I think that's the thing. There isn't a rule about what that screen has to be, but go and see it on the biggest and that we can, because as you said, it is kind of the definition of the cinema experience. The analogy that you use, which I've now completely adopted and used as my own, is if, you know, calling occupants from interplanetary craft came down to Earth and said, what is this thing called cinema?

33:16You'd go, come with me.

33:18Simon Mayo: Yes, it's this. It's that. Councillor Rob Logan finally says, Dear Water and Shed, I'm writing to give my reflections. in the rosy-fingered dawn after seeing Christopher Nolan's latest epic blockbuster at Bristol's premier cinema pub. There is a reason why this story is called The Odyssey and not the Telemachy. Very good. Yes, that's right. Yeah. After Telemachus, Odysseus' and Lady Penelope's son. Yeah. Right. The scenes with Jason Bourne fighting mythical monsters are genuinely spine-chilling. those with spider-man whining to his mum about being bullied by batman are more eyelid drooping i'm reminded of mark's review of warhorse too much horse not enough war and it's good to see i say that i think because i i think that's a pithy phrase but it's not true i don't agree with that i mean if i i'm sorry if i said that i don't agree with it i'm i don't know what i was what i was on rob says anyway it's good to see when he's tired of both this is he sets his heights sets his sights on the far west by my reckoning he should be in bristol by 2034 anyway um far too clever i think councillor rob logan thank you thank you very much indeed uh you'll be hearing from uh our special guest asa butterfield and we're going to talk about our hero balthazar in just a moment

34:42Simon Mayo: hello mark kermode hello simon mayo quick question what's your autumn signature dish Why are you asking? Because I suspect the answer is a takeaway. That is deeply unfair. But is it? Sometimes it's delivery. Well, perhaps it's your pans that are holding you back. Food sticking, pans burning, uneven heat. That's unusually generous of you. Gordon Ramsay uses hex clad at home and in his restaurants. You could try them. They combine the searing performance of stainless steel with the convenience of non-stick. so you get great cooking results without the usual cleanup headache. They're dishwasher safe and easy to clean.

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36:30Simon Mayo: So our guest this week is British actor Asa Butterfield. You probably saw him first in Hugo in 2011, playing the title role in the Martin Scorsese multiple award winning film, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Ender's Game, X and Y, Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, Merlin, and also particularly four series of Netflix international hits, Sex Education, playing Otis Milburn's son of sex advice guru, Gillian Anderson. Now he stars in Our Hero, Balthazar. it had a one day appearance in your local cinema maybe but it's set for a digital release you'll hear our conversation with asa butterfield after this clip from the movie what is this you look like you needed someone that's why you're here hi dad i know you told me only to text you i've been having a hard time Get out of the school For Christ's sake Solomon Are you a man or what?

37:34I thought if you had an IRL friend You wouldn't do it You like that s*** don't you? Everyone always said I was this thing I tried to be that thing Lock that in folks Stay with us Try not to be that thing Stand up Well not anymore

37:54Simon Mayo: That's a clip from Our Hero Balthazar. I'm delighted to say one of its stars, Asa Butterfield, is with us. Asa, hello, how are you? Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. I'm really well. So introduce us to Our Hero Balthazar and also your character, Solomon. Our Hero Balthazar is a very American, quite dysfunctional, you could say comedy. I think it's very funny. other people have had a it's it's an uncomfortable watch but i think quite a necessary watch and it shines quite a bright light on the real uh kind of unseen worlds of particularly young men in the u.s my character solomon being one of those young men he's from texas he's from uh east texas and he's grown up in a trailer park.

38:47And the film, it's these two worlds colliding, two worlds from the totally opposite ends of the spectrum in America, but they bond over this shared anger, loneliness, frustration, and they go on this kind of wild buddy trip.

39:05Simon Mayo: You're one half of this buddy situation. So you're Solomon, you're from Texas. Tell us about Balthazar, played by Jaden Martell, who's very wealthy, very entitled, and so on. Very New York. What is it that you have in common? So Balthy or Balthazar is another sort of lonely young man. He spends a lot of his time on the internet. They both do, and that's where they find this friendship, if you can call it a friendship. and he spends a lot of his time performing these sort of fake crying videos for attention, for social media validation, be a part of this community. And Solomon finds one of these videos and starts trolling him.

39:54And Balthazar, through this conversation, thinks that Solomon is a school shooter. and he travels to Texas to be this hero, to be this white knight, to stop this school shooting. And you slowly start to see that his intentions might not be totally altruistic and it's quite sinister and it's quite weird. And you realise that neither of these guys are who they claim to be. And the whole thing is a bit of a performance. Despite the fact that neither of them are who they claim to be. They have this weird thing in common in their oppositeness. So your character feels everything. He's looking after an elderly relative.

40:39He feels shunned. He feels snubbed. He feels rage. He has a father, this kind of toxic masculinity figure of a father, and he feels ashamed all the time. Balthazar's character, on the other hand, doesn't appear to feel anything at all and seems to do this thing about cry, as you said, performative crying, which I, and I didn't know this before. Apparently there is a great wave of crying videos of people expressing their emotion through this. So the one thing that they're joined in is that neither of them are who they appear to be online, but also they're complete opposites. One's rich, one's poor, one's from New York, one's from Texas.

41:18But the one thing that they're joined by is that they are both oppositely isolated and they both find in each other, weirdly, this kind of strange, twisted friendship. Is that at the heart of it? Absolutely. It is. I think that's at the heart of it. You see this friendship form and you know, as the audience, these are not the people they should be looking for, yet they're brought together anyway. And you have this real sort of impending sense that this can't go well. Because as you said, Balthy is so disconnected from this sort of observer as to everything that's going on around him. And Solomon is like this case study for him.

42:07And for Solomon, he's the only friend he's ever made and will do anything to keep Balthazar around.

42:16Simon Mayo: You said he's from Texas, Asa, and the level of transformation for you felt strong. You know, it took me a while to write, it's that okay, it's Asa, there he is, and he doesn't really look like Asa at all. This is quite a big transformation that you go through for this. It was. It was one of the things I really was excited about this project. when I spoke with Oscar probably about maybe almost a year before. That's Oscar Boyson who's the director, yeah. That's right, Oscar Boyson, co-writer and director. And he was really excited by the idea of me playing Solomon, as was I, because it was so different from other roles I tackled, both in terms of how he looked and how he kind of moved and being around from Texas, but also his kind of his rage and his frustration and his volatility wasn't something that I'd really got to sink my teeth into in other roles I'd had.

43:19And it's not something that I particularly, as Asa, have a lot of experience with. So it was really interesting figuring out why I sometimes struggle to connect with those emotions and then finding Solomon's connection to those emotions. And it was amazing. We shot it in Texas, so we were surrounded by real Texans. A lot of the supporting actors in the film are non-actors. They're just people we found either in Solomon's Trailer Park or in the porn shop. And it gave me such a grounding of where he was in this place and the people he would be with. It just totally lent that energy to my performance.

44:02Can I ask you about Oscar Boyce? He's obviously known for as a longtime collaborator of the Safdies. when you talk to him about the film what did oscar tell you that it was about or did you discuss because i'm one of the things that you do as a critic right is that you you tend to sort of say well this is really what the film's about and i think you know it's about loneliness and isolation and the performative echo chamber of youth culture on the internet and snake oil salesmanship but also it is about a country in which school shootings are absolutely epidemic but I understand that what filmmakers think that a film may be about is often very different to the way it was received so what did you talk to him about what the film was actually about one of the big things for Oscar was about class and about this divide in America he always says he thinks it's the most rich and fascinating topic in American filmmaking is class and that was a big thing for him he didn't want to make it sort of too black and white but to have these these ends of the spectrum meet in quite a sort of unusual very unusual and chaotic way uh and and this idea of one of the inspirations for him was um a shooting in america the valde shooter.

45:25And there was a moment online where the shooter messaged this girl in Germany that he was going to go and shoot up his school. And she replied, oh, cool. Because she had no idea who this person was. If it was real, she thought he was probably just trolling them. And this idea that young people are exposed to all these things and all this violence, whether it's real or not, and expected to, I don't know, do something about it or not is so kind of tough. And that's really fascinated him. And working with Ricky, they both knew there was something there, something that hadn't really been done before.

46:13Simon Mayo: You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, they said that it was a very American story. And Marcus mentioned toxic masculinity, which has obviously been much debated in the last few years. we've talked about adolescence along with everybody else but greed is international loneliness is international social media is international but in the american mix you get guns and that seems to me that you know we have messed up people there are messed up people in every country but the proximity to guns just takes the whole story to another level so your character has edge but the political setup you know the cultural setup gives it this kind of hair trigger all the way through the film.

46:53Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the common themes, which are global, are absolutely there. And loneliness and frustration and division are everywhere. But this hair trigger is a great word for it because that tension goes throughout the film. There's knowledge that this guy has so much access to guns and Balthazar seemingly quite likes that. It's Chekhov. You know that something's there and something's coming. I'd never shot a gun before until I went to Texas and they took me to a shooting range. And it's absurd how easy it is to just go there, pick up a gun and shoot some targets. and strangely I it doesn't surprise me that they're so there's such an obsession with guns there there's a real sense of power that you feel and fear holding a gun and it's you could I can totally see why people get addicted to that and feel like it's their they're right the film makes very specific reference to that being an American problem there's somebody who says, you know, I'm a specialist, I'm an international specialist in school shootings and is told, well, you mean America?

48:18I just looked at the statistics for school shootings by country for 2026. Afghanistan, three, Nigeria, four, Pakistan, four, South Africa, six, Mexico, eight, United States, 288. I mean, it's just a completely different level. And one of the things that I was very interested in is the fact that that subject is now so prevalent that it is able to be the backdrop for, you said at the beginning, it's comedy, but it's actually much more than that. There was a film recently called The Drama in which the idea of a school shooting was in the background of this kind of very socially anxious comedy. I wonder how you get the tone right when And you know that you're dealing with subject matter, which is so prevalent, which is absolutely everywhere, but is also so, by its very nature, difficult to talk about.

49:17And when you're doing it in a way which is blackly comedic, how do you get that tone right? And did you always know that tonally the film was going to work? It's been very, very well received. But this could have gone wrong, couldn't it? it was credit, it was trust in Oscar Oscar Boyce and then Ricky having spoken of them on Zoom before, after I'd read the script, feeling those exact reservations that this could easily go to the wrong side of what this story is about and parody or mock or just get totally the wrong tone and And Oscar was really, really confident and assured in what he was doing and the moments that needed the comedy and the reasons he was doing it.

50:07You know, I think some people have compared this to adolescence and it's sort of light on young men. And what I think Arthur Bautista does is it really puts you in the shoes of these people. You're not really observing it from the outside. You're thrust into the sort of brains and trauma of these young men. And it doesn't paint anyone as being good or bad. It's very, it's just giving you this story. And it's up to us as an audience to kind of do with it as we want.

50:48Simon Mayo: And when you're at the heart of this very Texas story, very American story, Do you have any voices in the back of your head, Ace, going, but I'm the kid from Stoke Newington? You know, why am I here?

51:05I think possibly at first when I was working with a dialect coach on the accent, I was like, God. Because it's very easy to go too far with a Texas accent and it become a kind of, become a parody, become a kind of Western. uh but as soon as i got there and as soon as i spent some more time in it with the character figuring him out it felt it strangely came quite naturally to me and i think that was again just going back to being actually filming in texas um and and the writing having great writing to support us and having time before we start shooting rehearsing with jayden and oscar and Ricky and everyone and Jaden's I think phenomenal in this role and in a lot of ways I think Balthazar was was much harder for him to get under the skin because he is so directionless because he's such as he sort of floats through existence Solomon's uh stakes and uh and complexity.

52:12And it was all there. You could see it. It was on the page. I think Jaden had to work quite a lot harder to figure out why Balthazar was doing what he did. And I think he was incredible in this role. And having him to work alongside was, it made my job a little easier.

52:31Simon Mayo: Well, it's the most engaging film. Asa, your performance is great. Jaden Martell is great. And what's coming up next for you? I, what's coming up next? I have a TV series coming out on Disney in the UK, a comedy horror in the vein of Gremlins, except instead of Gremlins, it's Garden Gnomes. It's very silly and it's brilliant and it's fantastic. We shot that in Melbourne last year. What's it called? That'll be out. It's called Gnomes. Of course. Of course. So that's out in, uh, around Halloween. All right. Excellent. Uh, Acer, very good to speak to you. Thank you so much for your time and, uh, congrats, congratulations to you and your team for our hero Balthazar.

53:21Thanks guys. Thanks. Thank you. Take care.

53:26Simon Mayo: Acer Butterfield. I don't think I've spoken to him before, but, um, no, very talented guy. Um, charming, I think to interview, what did you make of the movie our hero Balthazar? Well, as you yourself said at the beginning, so it had a very, very brief blink and you'll miss it, like one day only cinema showing here, but it's on digital from the 11th. It was really fascinating to ask him what the film's about. And I said, you know, as a critic, I think, you know, it's about loneliness and isolation and all that stuff and school shootings and incel culture and online poison. What's it, you know, what, when you talk to your director and writer, what's it about?

54:02Class. Now, it's fascinating to me because it demonstrates, I think, quite often that things are about the things that you bring to them. In the case of this, there is a lot of stuff going on. It was very interesting to hear that for Oscar Boyson, class was absolutely central. The two central characters are certainly divided by class. One of them is rich, pampered New York, and completely unable to feel anything. somebody who goes online and does performative crying videos because, well, it's a community, isn't it? And somehow thinks that the only way they can simulate a human relationship is by this performative crying.

54:42In fact, watching it, I was reminded of that scene, I've invoked this before, in American Psycho, when Patrick Bateman basically says, if you looked at me, you'd see all these things, but actually I'm not here. I am just a construct. I am the idea of a person. On the other side, you have the character that Asa Butterfield is playing, who feels everything, who is stressed about looking after his grandmother, who has this incredibly toxic father, who is sort of like the trailer park version of the character that Tom Cruise plays in Magnolia. You know, a snake oil salesman selling these testosterone enhancements, even selling them to his son, the son that he abandoned.

55:24And this person is bitter and battered and has somehow decided that the way to get around this is to invent an online persona of this person who is incredibly horrible, Death Dealer 16. I mean, there's something that's funny, even in the fact that they're Death Dealer 16. They're not even Death Dealer 1. They are Death Dealer 16, just one of a number of people who are taking that on as a mantle, as a way of kind of identifying themselves. And the story ends. Death Dealer a bunch of numbers. Death Dealer a bunch of, precisely so. And these two characters' paths cross when the rich guy from New York, who is trying to impress a girl at school, is trolled by the character played by this character in Texas, and decides, I know, I will go to Texas and I will meet him and I will stop him from becoming a shooter.

56:22Not because that will be a good thing, because it will prevent a terrible tragedy, but because it will impress this girl. A further demonstration of the fact that he's completely removed from reality has absolutely no connection to the real world. And there is also this very twisted thing that the way in which they hook up is he uses an AI version of his mum's voice to record this dirty talk message, whilst the person he's messaging sends him a picture of private parts that are not his, but are his father's. So the whole thing is this incredibly sort of twisted milieu. Neither of these people know anything about each other until they meet.

57:03And then when they meet, the thing that suddenly bonds them is that they have met in real life. And neither of them have had friends up until this point. Now, I think that one of the interesting things about the film is that the whole issue of gun culture and school shootings in America, and you raised this as well, is now so prevalent that it can become the backdrop to a black comedy. I mean, I invoke the thing about the drama, which makes, you know, in which the central thing is one of the characters talks about that. And even just talking about it is the thing that sets the drama in motion.

57:39In the case of this, it is specifically said out loud by one of the characters. This is a specific American problem because that idea, as you quite rightly said, of isolation, of online trolling, of loneliness, all those things, that's absolutely international. But only in America is it happening in a milieu in which there is an absolute glorification of gun culture and there is also the availability of gun culture, which it seems to me from the outside, I don't know what this looks like from an American point of view, but from the outside, that isn't it is insane it is absolutely insane america's relationship with gun culture is absolutely insane and the very fact that it can now become kind of the backdrop of something which is a black comedy yes a drama about other things tells you an awful lot and i think it's impossible to watch this film from a from a you know perspective watching here across the atlantic and not see it as i mean they raise this in the drama as well there's a point in the drama in which somebody says, oh, so America is to blame.

58:43To which the answer is yes. Yes, that is absolutely part of it. I think there's a lot of other things going on in it as well. And I think the class thing is really important from the point of view of performances. When I started watching the film, you said that, I think just when we finished that interview, just when we were just ending it, talking about learning to do the accent, learning to do the walk, learning to become another person, you know, inhabiting. When I first saw the character that Asa Butterfield is playing, I didn't recognize them as being that person. I mean, I genuinely didn't.

59:20And I think that says an awful lot. I also think it's important that the two central cast members come from complete opposite sides of the divide, but they are weirdly physically similar. I mean, yes, one of them is more bulked up than the other, but facially it is almost like they've been cast because facially they are very, very similar people. They're both in their own way in this state of derangement, in this culture in which that state of derangement can become amplified manyfold. I do think it is worth addressing, again, we were talking about Animal Farm last week, that something can be comedic and horrifying at the same time.

1:00:06You said that you're feeling with Animal Farm, it is horrifying. And, you know, even though the story was made, you know, to be played to top end primary school kids, that element of horror is still there. I think all the time that I was watching this, one of the things that was going on, I mean, yes, it's about toxic masculinity and all those things, but one of the things that was going on for me at least was a horror, an absolute horror about the American culture that this comes from. and what this has to say about that culture. Simon, did you have a similar response? When you were watching it, was part of what was going on in your mind thinking this is a very, very American story and certainly watching it from the outside, it is a horrifying portrait of America?

1:00:58Simon Mayo: Oh, sure. I mean, that was... By the way, I know you've called it a black comedy and other people have called it a black comedy. There aren't any laughs in this. Oh yeah, no, it's not a laugh company. No, absolutely. I mean, the main kind of running joke is the fact that the fake supplements, which his father is selling, is called Thrush, which is like a combination of thrill and rush. And by Thrush, okay, so fine. But if it's a black comedy, it's black, certainly. Yeah, no, absolutely. With not a lot of laughs. But it was, yes. So adolescence, as we mentioned a number of times, is a truly universal story.

1:01:44Simon Mayo: Everyone across the industrialized world will have watched that and thought, we've got that happening down the road to us. Whereas you watch this, and as Asa said, right at the beginning of the conversation, this is a very American story. Yeah. Because it's messed up in that particular way. these guys would still be solomon and balthazar would you know would balthazar would still be rich and entitled and weird and solomon would still be the trailer park guy but they wouldn't be planning a school shootout you know they wouldn't be playing with guns um and there's a scene in a gun shop where he wants to trade them in and the guy says no you can't because you know and it's all it's normal it's like i'm taking something in because it's i'm going to john lewis because my uh hi-fi is broken you know to make it sound like it's the 1980s but you know it's it the the the fact that their culture particularly in texas is embedded with guns and as aisa said it felt when you're there it feels very natural and you can carry a gun you know and that's terrifying that's terrifying and it's insane i did a whole week's worth of programs for when uh we were both on five live and the idea was to explain george bush to texas back in the old days when george bush was the worst possible thing we could think of now i think of him as the good old days a good old stable centrist george w camelot you know and we had a woman who came on the show explaining why guns were great and she had all the stats and they were all messed up stats none of them actually worked but they genuinely think that the way to stop these things is to give more guns out to more people you know and school shootings wouldn't happen if the teacher had the gun um so yeah it's insane so it makes it a very texan film even though they're kind of the loneliness and toxicity is truly universal but if you haven't seen ace of butterfield for a while go see this film i mean i think it's genuinely fascinating film and and certainly worth your time and his performance is great isn't it i mean it is genuinely transformative it is and um i would actually We both planned to ask him and then we didn't because we all fell off the end.

1:03:53Simon Mayo: But, you know, I think they could have swapped roles. I think he could have played Balthazar and Jadon Martell could have played Solomon. And that would have been very, very interesting. Anyway, if you see it, let us know what you think. Correspondence at covenamero.com. As you say, Mark, it's landing on, it's a digital release, August the 11th, I believe. Let us know what you think. but anyway after all of that i think it's clearly time to put a smile on everyone's face something which is a comedy genuine comedy it's the laughter lift everybody

1:04:30Simon Mayo: hey mark i was uh i was up in front of the judge again this week now i regularly get tickets which i refuse to pay i said i believe they're genuine sometimes i get multiple tickets for the same time frame your honor i said 60 of these parking tickets Tickets are false and unfair. Hmm. Repeat in fractions, she said. Okay, very well, I said. Three-fifths of these tickets are false and unfair. I had to pay a lot on the spot there. Anyway, on the same subject, I'm looking for a new car at the moment, Mark. Are you? I went to the local showroom with the good lady ceramicist, her indoors. As you know, she often needs to transport large quantities of high-end artistic ceramics around.

1:05:13Simon Mayo: so boot size is very important cargo space she said to the salesman no dear said the salesman patronizing the car no go space car go on road no sale from us anyway mark did i tell you about my pre-radio jobs i once quit my job at the helium gas factory i didn't like being spoken to in that tone. Genuine comedy brought to you by a pair of comedians. Still to come, Mark's review of Spider-Man Brand New Day, if you can stop laughing.

1:06:06of your life. Maybe you're still figuring it out. Maybe religion just isn't your thing. Those choices are personal, and in America, they should stay personal. That's why Americans United for Separation of Church and State is fighting for something that affects all of us. The freedom to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Because religious freedom isn't just about protecting your right to practice or not. And it surely isn't about having one forced government-sanctioned religion. It's about protecting your right to say, this is what I believe, while your neighbor says, I believe something completely different.

1:06:42And honestly, that's the whole point. If that sounds like the kind of America you want, learn more at au.org slash getting better. Because your beliefs are yours and theirs are theirs. Real value shows up in reliability you don't have to second guess. like a set of Firestone all-season tires. They're designed to deliver confidence-inspiring wet weather traction and a quieter ride, no matter the road. Season after season, Firestone all-season tires. For durability you can count on, just like people count on you. Firestone, always dependable since 1900.

1:07:32Simon Mayo: next we have our new feature mark which i know you love very much ai don't like that this is our latest take on the robot takeover takeover for good or ill and i'm not sure if you caught lbc's tech correspondent will guyat on the newsagents podcast last week i didn't on the unprecedented cyber incident when one of chat gbt's ai models escaped a controlled testing environment oh yes i did got onto the internet and hacked into another ai startup without being asked to do so here we go yeah i've been trying to come up with a way of talking about this which doesn't sort of uh doom theorize or make it sound like really alarmist but the best thing i can come up with is this is exactly what happened in 1991's terminator 2 judgment day it is essentially the rise of the machine great that's not alarmist at all no i was hoping that a tech correspondent And it might be just putting it in greater context, after which we go, oh, okay, that's all right then, instead of making us run into the street shouting help.

1:08:35Do you remember there was an awful lot of stuff on the date in which in the films Skynet goes live, than when we actually passed the date that Skynet went live. Everyone went, this is it, it's all happening. And now we have genuine tech correspondents telling us, yeah, no, that's not a joke. It is really happening.

1:08:55Simon Mayo: And worth mentioning that the company that ChatGBT's out-of-control models gained access to independently was called Hugging Face. Nothing to worry about there then, Mark. But I think what we say to that news is... Hey, I don't like that. You see, I'm not sure about this. What about the jingle? The jingle needs to have more guts to it, I think. The idea of people sending in frequently occurring instances of the robot takeover, good or bad, is a neat idea. So there may well be some improvements, but it may well be that there are others that are sort of a bit rubbish. So you can send them to correspondenceofcodermayor.com, but I think more work for the jingle.

1:09:43Simon Mayo: What do you say, Mark? Well, I mean, I quite like the fact that it sounds shonky because it sort of makes me think that it's okay. technology is still in the shonky phase when in fact that's not true the technology is now in the rise of the machines skynet is live ai is breaking out of controlled experiments and hacking other thing you know so maybe it just reassures me if tech sounds a bit sounds a bit odd i did a thing just um just earlier this week i had to drop in a line of comms from a documentary that i made 20 years ago um and there was a there was a line reading that for some reason it had it had they it had gone wrong on the on the tape they had they said can you just say the line again and i said the line again but my voice over the 20 years has changed it's gone down yes and the the editor brian brilliant guy said it's okay i can fix it and he pitch shifted it up an eighth of a tone and it made me sound 20 years younger which was really really weird but then i realized that that is also i suppose ai going come here i can fix your voice and make you sound younger well do you remember it was like years ago that the redactor actually we started the show with robot versions of ourselves that he'd put our oh yes he put there was an ai me and an ai you that's right i'd forgotten that which and it was sort of it was rather it clearly wasn't us but it was close enough to make it feel very very disturbing that's right it wasn't good but it wasn't terrible and the thing that was scary was that it wasn't terrible yeah well i think that's our challenge let's see where we are in a few weeks time maybe although i'm not sure i want to know the results okay uh correspondence at codemo.com what else is out what else is interesting well you might have noticed simon that there is a new spider-man movie coming to coming to our screens so um uh it's been a little while spider-man brand new day is now forgive me for not knowing this off the top of my head i have to read it out the 38th film in the mcu the fourth film in the mcu spider-man film series following 2021's uh no way home takes its title from a 2008 comic book storyline brand new day that apparently reset the spider-man status quo this is directed by Destin Daniel Cratton, who made an absolutely brilliant indie pick.

1:12:14Well, started as a short first and then a feature, short-term 12, which was great. Made the very decent Just Mercy, the very enjoyable Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 12 Rings, to which this is kind of connected. This is written by Chris McKenna and Eric Summers. So Tom Holland, a.k.a. is it now Telemachus, Telemachus, how do you pronounce it? Telemachus, probably. Telemachus. Okay. So Tom Holland, a.k.a. Telemachus, is back as Peter Parker, alongside Zendaya, a.k.a. Athena, as MJ.

1:12:51Simon Mayo: Yes. And also back, John Bernthal, a.k.a. King of Sparta, as Frank, a.k.a. The Punisher. So basically, it's an Odyssey cast reunion. Reunion. Although, whilst the Odyssey, we've had this discussion about the Odyssey being released in IMAX, shot in the IMAX format, shot for IMAX, this is being released in Screen X. Now, are you aware of Screen X? I think I've heard it referenced, but I look forward to your explanation. Okay, so this is the first film to be shot specifically for the Screen X format. It's on the Shot for Screen X program. It is a panoramic film format, which presents film with an expanded dual sided 270 degree screen projected on the walls of the theater.

1:13:41So essentially you've got your central screen and then you've got two sides. So I suppose kind of not dissimilar to what used to be. So it is dissimilar because it's not the same, but Cinerama, you know, which used to be kind of like all the way around. Apparently this format is available in 22 cine world sites around the UK. okay, I haven't seen it. But when I went to see the film at the press screening on Tuesday morning, I was talking to, there was a guy there from Dolby and there was another tech guy and I just fell into conversation with him. And he said, oh yeah, well, the other day we were just doing one of the Screen X things.

1:14:17I said, oh, I haven't seen it. What's it like? And he said, well, it's literally like this. It's a good thing. And then I saw a video. There is a video, if you go to the Cineworld site, you can see it. It's the main screen and then around sort of looks like an immersive thing. Anyway, for the record, that's the format that this is being released in. So film also features, well, a number of records. I'm very, what I'm going to try not to do is not do anything that's spoilery. Because again, at the beginning of this, they stood up and they said, don't let there be any, please, in your reviews, don't let there be any spoilers.

1:14:49The problem is I'm never sure what constitutes a plot spoiler anymore. Like, for example, in the trailer, we see that Mark Ruffalo is in the film. and somebody said, oh, well, you're not supposed to say, but it's in the trailer. So anyway.

1:15:03Simon Mayo: I think that's fair. If it's in the trailer, no one can complain. That's what I think. So Tom Holland had previously said that No Way Home was the perfect send-off for his incarnation of Spider-Man. He also said that he thought there'd be something odd about him still playing the Spider-Man role in his 30s. Well, he is now 30, but he is now back in what has been flagged as being planned to be the first in a new Spider-Man trilogy. So the official setup, in order to not give any plot spoilers, this is how the film is set up in the publicity. Okay. So following Dr. Stephen Strange's spell at the end of Spider-Man No Way Home, you'll remember what happens at the end of No Way Home, the world in general, but Ned and MJ in particular have forgotten that Peter Parker exists.

1:15:50Okay. Because he has to wipe the memory. He had to wipe his memory from them, which is a great personal sacrifice in order to bring that story to a conclusion. Now, four years later, he is Spider-Man, once again, anonymous. His identity is hidden. People don't know who he is. Although he does have a note on which he's written something that he longs to be able to say out loud. Here is a clip from the trailer. Hi, my name is Peter Parker. You don't remember me, but we used to know each other. Something bad was going to happen, and the only way to stop it was to make everyone forget about me. Because I'm not just Peter Parker.

1:16:34I'm Spider-Man.

1:16:39And sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing, even if it breaks Peter Parker's heart.

1:16:46So in a way, that's kind of the center of it. I mean, on one level, it is a return to a theme that's always been at the heart of superhero stories, but particularly at the heart of the Spider-Man story, which is that of loneliness. That idea that, you know, with great power, not just great responsibility, but great loss comes, the need to put yourself aside for the greater good, as they would say in Hot Files, which we'll get to, incidentally, in Take Two. And I think in the previous Spider-Man movies, we saw this most clearly in Spider-Man 2, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man 2, which included a very direct nod to the comic strip Spider-Man No More series.

1:17:21You know, Peter Parker attempting to turn his back on the Spider-Man identity in order to reclaim himself, to get his life back, to get his childhood back. But if in those earlier films, there was this whole thing going on about the web spinning and the sticky substances and the goo was sort of all a bit kind of, yeah, well, this is kind of metaphorical, you know, becoming a teenager. now that kid is turning into an adult like not an adolescent but an adult and his body is behaving in a manner that evokes remember that the the line from the fly the jeff goldblum film film which jeff goldblum says i'm an insect who dreamed he was a man and loved it but now the dream is over and the insect is awake so that is happening basically his arachnid side is becoming more irachnid.

1:18:10And now he needs inhibitors to prevent further changes. And there was an interview with Michael Giacchino, the composer, who said that when he was doing the score for this, this is a good score. I mean, it always is. He's a very good composer. He said when he was doing the score for this, he deliberately took certain notes out of the score, certain themes that are from the kind of, you know, the spider legacy in order to represent pulling away pieces of his life, things that he doesn't have anymore. Meanwhile, as far as the wider plot is concerned, and I'm just going to gesture towards the wider plot because I don't want to spoil anything for anybody, there is a central unfolding mystery, which essentially involves a body hopping villain, meaning a spirit that leaps from one body to another, very much in the manner of, and I'm very glad to be able to get this in, Exorcist III the Heretic, in which the Gemini killer who is in a prison manages to, the spirit of the Gemini moves from one body to another.

1:19:06And in fact, in the case of this, it is very specifically referred to as being, well, pretty much possession. Okay. There's also a new nemesis who as always is the case with these things. It's the backstory that nobody's singly bad. In fact, what you find out is that most people are the victims of circumstance and loneliness. So fine, that's it. That's all the gesturing of the plot I'm going to do. For me, the most interesting stuff in this movie is the character stuff. There is a really lovely idea about the awfulness of meeting a friend or a loved one who simply doesn't remember you because that's been blanked.

1:19:49I mean, it's like a kind of one-sided eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. You remember the whole thing in eternal sunshine on the Spotless Mind, which is the idea that the only way that you can get over a relationship is that you blank your own memory of it. But like the inverse of that is the other person has done it and you, or you did it to the other person. They don't know who you are. And I think there is a, there is real chemistry between the central characters. I mean, two of whom of course have genuine real chemistry in the real world, but that idea about Peter and MJ and Ned, that they were this group and now they're not.

1:20:26And he's outside and he's watching them and he's watching their lives go on, knowing that he's had to take himself out of it. And he desperately wants to kind of reconnect, but he can't. For me, that's the most interesting stuff. And honestly, I could have done with more of that because when it's there, it's really, really good. However, this being a franchise superhero movie, you do have to have an increasingly huge amount of smashy, bashy, swingy, bingy, swoopy, doopy, flyy, bangy stuff. My feeling with all that stuff is the bigger it gets, the more inconsequential it gets. And in fact, in terms of this, all the best action stuff is the stuff that feels physical.

1:21:02So there's some kind of, um, wushu, you know, anti-gravity, runny, jumpy martial arts, you know, ninja Kung Fu, you know, um, martial arts basically. But the stuff when, when it's possible for people to run up the side of walls in a way that you couldn't do in real life, but you can do in films. And those sequences work really well, but largely because the director really seems to enjoy the physical choreography. And we've seen that before in his previous work. The film is 145 minutes long. Okay. So that means it's only a few minutes shorter than 2001, which is the great yardstick. I honestly think it doesn't need to be that long.

1:21:44I do think that it could, again, as I'm saying this about the Odyssey, it could lose 20 minutes. As I said with the Odyssey, the problem is if you say, well, the Odyssey can lose 25 minutes, okay, which 25 minutes? That's hard. In the case of this, the problem is if you lost 25 minutes, you know that what they would lose is 25 minutes of character stuff, which is all the stuff I like. Because obviously from the studio's point of view, the last thing you want to lose is the big smashy-bashy, you know, swingy-bingy stuff. As it was during some of the bigger action sequences, I really did drift in and out.

1:22:20And I also drifted in and out in terms of my interest in the exposition of the plot, which is always the kind of least interesting thing, because what the plot needs to do is to tie it into a wider expansive universe that I'm not emotionally engaged with. The time that I got really engaged is when the three main characters are sitting around in a room building Star Wars Lego figures and just being together and sort of rediscovering a friendship that they've forgotten about. There is a great performance, I think, by Sadie Sink, who people will know from Stranger Things in a role which, again, less said about the better because it's nice for it to be, you know, allow the audience to find out.

1:23:06I mean, I know that an awful lot of fans will know this stuff already. but it's interesting because that character it's not just that the character's got an interesting backstory dynamic but also is the character that seems the most genuinely desperate and with all of these things there is an element of desperation how can how can i deal with the world when all when this is this is my experience of it this is my loneliness this is my isolation i mean overall considering that i thought that we had had a pretty good end to the series we are back in a situation in which there is never an end to anything, in which everything will always restart again.

1:23:43And we're also in a world in which the Spider-Verse movies sort of changed the game so much that what animation was doing changed the game so much that it feels, I don't, you know, do we need to be back here? But if we are going to be back here and we are, this is much better than one might have might have feared because I mean, yes, it's too long. Yes, it's too smashy, bashy, crashy for me, but the bits of it that work, work because they work on a, on a genuine, you know, emotional level that you do believe that the center of the thing is my friends don't remember me and I have to live in a world in which I can't tell them who I am.

1:24:32And meanwhile, while all this other stuff is going on. So yes, too long, yes, too loud, but generally pretty engaging. And as you've probably seen, the responses seem to be pretty positive. It looks like it is on course to pack cinemas out. And considering where we might've been with this kind of reboot, that's a pretty solid recommendation.

1:24:57Simon Mayo: And you have a couple of stars at the heart of it, from what you were saying, who could open a film on their own. So that's a big deal. Yes, yes, you do. And also who seem to have genuinely committed to these roles which they have played, you know, and really enjoy. I mean, there's a lovely relationship between Peter Parker and Frank, played by John Berthold, and they've got this kind of fighty, kind of bromance-y, aggressive, oh, I really hate you, but I don't really, I kind of really love you. And actually, that's one of the nicest things about the film is that that relationship works really well.

1:25:34In fact, there's one sequence in it in which it works really well, despite the fact that it's happening in the middle of one of the biggest smashy-bashy-crashy sequences. And you think the fact that the characters are managing to shine through even when all that other stuff is happening is a kind of indication that there is some genuine substance underneath it all.

1:25:55Simon Mayo: Spider-Man Brand New Day, correspondenceofcodomer.com thank you very much indeed for being here Mark and joining us from France well thank you thank you for having me I think on your own podcast before we're done we have a quick waltz on this is Philip Thorne with an interesting sounding basically this is where we say if there's something cinema or cinema adjacent close to you and you want to get on the pod then just send us a voice note or film yourself doing it, that's fine. Philip Thorne has an interesting sounding project on the Thames in London. Theatreship is a historic cargo barge that has been lovingly restored and turned into a live performance venue and cinema.

1:26:41We're going to be screening a folk horror project there called Delivery After Dark, which is set in the North York Moors. It's something new. We're calling it an audio movie. it's something between film and audio drama if you're a fan of adventurous micro budget horror or if you simply want to experience this unique venue come join us aboard theater ship on the 5th

1:27:05Simon Mayo: or 6th of august all right okay well that sounds great philip thank you this is 5th or 6th of august tickets are five quid uh you can find out more at theatership.co.uk or you can see the show notes because we'll put all the links in there that's it for this week this has been a sony music entertainment production this week's team jen eric josh and heather producer was dom the redactor was the arriving late simon pool in take two we're directing you to the overflow car park for more chat about current film releases and if you've enjoyed what you've heard so far there is plenty more waiting for you over in take two such as five question film club three questions your majesty and questions shmestians in which this week we're asked amongst other things which film seemed to have started out as the first in a franchise but failed hard and don't forget people in bristol and beyond will be at the brizzle beacon on december the 6th tickets are on sale via the link in the show notes again you can get both takes ad free you just search kermit and mayo patreon and you join the church mark what is your film of the week my film of the week and i guarantee you it's going to be one of my films of the year when we get to the end of the year is ish i s h Believe me, it is really worth checking out.

1:28:15It's remarkable.

1:28:17Simon Mayo: We're back next week with Taika Waititi, and I'm going to bestow a year's ultra membership to our correspondent of the week. I think I just made a note of Obi, who was the guy who told us he's the refugee from London claiming asylum in Gateshead. Excellent. Who went to see The Odyssey on just the normal screen and said it was great. So in terms of setting, because there is so much pressure on the seats and you can't really get in until Christmas to see this thing that it's an almost, it's a great relief if you can just go to your local cinema that's showing it on screen one and two or whatever and still have a good time.

1:28:55Simon Mayo: So Obi, thank you very much indeed. We will be in touch with all our generosity and you'll be very grateful, I'm sure. And don't forget kids, go woke, get rich. that does seem to be the message of this year thank you very much indeed for listening take two has landed just not far from this one want to be the one who's always in the know about the game the scores the plays here's a tip the apple sports app just pick your favorite teams and get automatic live updates without even knowing their schedules and when your team scores it shows up right on your iPhone lock screen, making it easy to check in anytime.

1:29:40So rule the group chat and download Apple Sports for free on the App Store or find it on your new iPhone.