THE DOG STARS: Top dog or a dog’s dinner?

0:00Now, 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. 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. From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

1:13The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming on Disney+. Before we begin, a quick reminder that you can become a Vanguardista 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 Shmestions.

1:51You 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.

2:22what's up what's up what's up what's up what's up what's up you haven't done that for a while what's up what's up why did you stop doing it i don't know really i grew up maybe not i forgot probably moved on thought of other things to say like hello how are you doing that thing about growing up i was recently in provence doing the provence arts film festival and then afterwards is your bit of the show from there i did my bit of the show from there and afterwards the good Lady Fressa, her indoors, outdoors, and I, we drove around, and we went to places, and we went to galleries, and we went to historical buildings, and we went to, and whilst we were in the middle of doing this, I suddenly thought for the first time, oh, this must be what being grown up is like, because we were just driving from one interesting art exhibition to an interesting thing to see, and it's like oh that's what being grown up is like you're 75 you must have accepted this no i don't think i have i mean you've said this before yourself i mean many people have said it that no matter what age you are still inside your head you're 14 or something and yeah i mean you're a dj right so from your point of view you must wake up every morning and think i might i might be 86 on the outside but inside i'm i'm at hospital radio asking for requests that don't that don't have anything inappropriate in them harry chapin had the line feeling over 45 going on 16 i think in wald and it but it's that really it is certainly that that you're playing all this rock and roll music but um you're 106 and and and since that you're top of most of the popper most yes do your sting anecdote oh well stings up we're recording this on on wednesday and uh sting is on the greatest hits radio show uh today talking about he's got so he did this musical he wrote this musical in 2013 called the last ship based on his childhood memories of growing up in wall's end and uh it's been on broad you know then went on broadway and toured america it's toured the uk and it's been adapted and it's back in the West End.

4:38So he came in to talk about it. And just before we started, he said, oh, yeah, he said, I really, really, yeah, I either said I really like or I love the film show you do. I said, all right, thanks very much. And do you refer to him as Sting or do you refer to him as, is he Gordon? Mr. Sting, he's Mr. Sting. No, no, no, you absolutely don't call him Gordon. No, he's Sting. Hello, Sting, how are you doing? No, he's Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting. Okay, so does nobody call him Gordon? Not as far as I know. No, I don't think so. And he was called Sting because when he was in a band when he was young, he had a stripy jumper that made him look like a bee.

5:14Is that right? Yeah. But, you know, what a great thing. You got a nickname in early, you know, when you were at school pretty much, and it wasn't embarrassing or dreadful or offensive to anybody, and it served you in a rock and roll life. most people's nicknames when they're at school are unbroadcastable, completely offensive, absolutely outrageous, and something that you'd rather forget. Yeah, there goes old itchy scrot. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So before we start, let's do a Dolly Parton thing, because I can't – so it was announced that she'd died like Tuesday evening, like just before 7 o 'clock, so it literally just came off air.

5:58And we're recording this on Wednesday morning, Yes, so obviously the airwaves are full. But I was just thinking before we came on, is there anybody, literally anybody, whose death would cause, you know, the world hates it, everyone hates each other. America is more divided than any other country. And yet Trump is lowering flags to half mask. Every gay artist, every country artist, every rock artist, every musician is saying, what a fantastic woman she was. The scientists are saying thank you for funding the Moderna vaccine. Everybody who's ever met her is saying she was genuinely extraordinary and I can't think of anyone else.

6:40So Greatest Tits is playing lots of Dolly today, but on Radio 3 this morning, Radio 3, they played Dolly Parton. Radio 4 this morning, they played Dolly Parton. I can't think of anyone who could cause that. I think genuinely unique. I only saw her play live once. it was my birthday treat what a treat I didn't yeah I didn't know what where I was going um Linda just got us in the in a car and said right I'm just going to give you instructions of where we're going to drive and we drove to Birmingham which was like weird because Birmingham was a very long way away from where we were it was like why are we driving to Birmingham and it was because Dolly was playing a gig in Birmingham I didn't know until we literally got to the outside of the venue that that was why we were in Birmingham and um and half the audience had pink cowboy hats you know and the thing was absolutely packed and it was everyone it was all walks of life all ages absolutely everyone and she played for I think two hours or something and it was just hit after hit after hit and it was I've said this thing before it was it was like she was playing to an audience all of whom looked like they had loved and lost a lot and her songs were just like speaking to everybody and that thing that you're saying about is there anybody else that that could that would have the same response it was like there was this massive auditorium full of people from every single walk of life all of whom were being united by these songs which every single person in the room knew off by heart and every single person in the room had their own personal connection with them and it was like they were all for that period of time singing the same songs singing that speaking the same language you know it was one place at one time one world only that that you know it's just astonishing absolutely astonishing did you see her play live no no no no no i did interview her once but she was down the line she was in she was in america i was in a in a studio and it's of course it's it's a great and humbling experience because she's sharper and cleverer than you are.

8:50So someone found this. Now, you particularly have quoted Roger Ebert from his book Life Itself many, many times. So this is a quote from Roger Ebert, okay? Yeah. In Dallas for the premiere of 9 to 5, I had an uncanny experience. I'm on the plane home to Chicago. ago i can i confessed it to siskel who is his uh yeah yeah sidekick would you say his co-host so you know co-host that's contributor yeah i had been granted a private half hour with dolly parton and as we spoke i was filled with a strange ethereal grace this was not spiritual nor was it sexual it was healing and comforting gene listened and said roger i felt the exact same thing during my interview with her we looked at each other what did this mean neither one of us ever felt that feeling again from time to time we would refer to it in wonder isn't that amazing it is and it's also it's the it's more amazing even when you consider how much Siskel and Ebert disagreed about everything and again it's another example of the one thing that unifies everyone I remember when i was working at time out in the early 90s there was this really odd little dolly parton film with her and james woods called straight talk and uh and i reviewed it for time out and i liked i mean i thought that you know they were great in films okay it's a bit flimsy it's like a it's like a somebody doing a radio show in which it's only straight talk on the radio show and she's very dolly and he's very james woods before wheels came off being james woods and and it was a really sort of quirky interesting little film and it didn't you know it didn't take any money I think people have sort of largely forgotten about it now but when that when the news broke I remembered and I went back to my original review of it and I remember right because I think it was the first time I ever wrote anything publicly about Dolly Parton and um it's it's just it is that thing that it's impossible to think anything other than good positive thoughts about her because she was just a force a force for all that is good in the world as opposed to all that is not good in the world frank hotrell boys uh oh yeah he was on the again on the radio yeah and he he put on blue sky she had jesus and gravity gravity finally let go now that is a script writer there wow isn't that amazing wow oh and by the way i just i found after that ebert quote this is part of his quote this is part of his review of nine to five yeah nine to five is a good-hearted simple-minded comedy that will win a place in film history there have been other i skipped a bit there have been other debuts this unmistakable you could name marilyn monroe james dean john travolta and what you'd be talking about in each case would not necessarily be a great dramatic performance in an important movie you'd be talking about a quality of presence a personal life force that seems to take over the screen so wow wow yeah yeah anyway that was that yeah um and frank if you're listening that's amazing to be to be able to reduce everything to two sentences could just just just say just read that sentence again the thing that he said again because that's such a beautiful quote yeah she had jesus and gravity gravity finally let go Man, he can really write, can't he?

12:26He really, really can. Didn't he, wasn't he the script doctor on Two Popes and uncredited? Oh, was he? I didn't know that. Anyway, there are films to talk about. What's coming up? Well, we have an absolutely packed, we have a packed show, Simon. We have reviews of Bitter Christmas, which is the new film by Amadovar. We have a review of I Want Your Sex, which is a new film by Greg Araki. And there is a new film by Ridley Scott, The Dog Stars. Plus, our very special guest this week is... Yes, Michael Sonowski is the director of The Death of Robin Hood, which is out next week. He's also the man behind A Quiet Place, Day One.

13:11So we're going to have a chat with him. But we're not going to review it as such. But that's out next week. We'll review it when it comes out next week. We can just say in advance that this is Robin Hood, but not as you know it. Is he a fox? No. Does he wear green tights? No. Does he get washed up on the shore in Dover, walk along Hadrian's Wall to Nottingham? No. No. Does he have a feather cut? Does he have a Nottingham accent? No. No. No, the accent. Is he good? No. No. Has he got a big shaggy beard? He certainly does. Take two, what's going on there? In take two, two very, very different films.

13:51One is One Night Only, which is a, imagine a rom-com sex comedy crossed with The Purge and then try to unimagine that. And then also De Gaulle Resistance, which is part one of a two-part film about Charles De Gaulle, second part of which is coming out in September. Both parts were knocking on three hours long. So two very, very different films to cover in Take Two. and um what are we reviewing first what's going up here the dog stars which is the new film from ridley scott you know sir ridley diddly this is a post-apocalyptic thriller is there any other kind adapted from a novel by peter heller which i have not read have you i have not no no okay scripted by markel smith whose feature cv includes the rather not good u.s remake of martyrs the awards garland did the revenant um and those george clooney films midnight sky and boys in the boat and then more recently twisters which if you remember everyone loved except me so this is set in an unspecified near future in which a viral pandemic flu i think has ravaged the population we meet jason elord jason jacob elordi jason hello to jacob elordi jacob elordi's hig who's a pilot used to be a mechanic and Josh Brolin's marine trained Bangley they are living in this remote encampment miles from civilization there's also Hig's beloved dog who you think at the beginning maybe the the dog of the dog stars there's a lot of stuff going on about dog stars up in the sky and blah blah blah blah blah he's kind of like a um he's both a security a security blanket and also a guard dog so Hig and Bangley monitor their perimeters really really strictly and Bangley is up on a tower and anybody who comes onto their land immediately gets shot Hig meanwhile flies to the nearest town to get supplies to get fuel food medicine and everywhere is completely abandoned except of course there are scavengers and he encounters scavengers and one of the scavengers that he encounters tells him there's a new tribe in town.

16:03There are a whole different kind of breed of people and we are all dead meat. Here is a clip from the trailer. Before the world ended, I was kissing my wife, playing with my dog. Jesper!

16:21The world that was doesn't exist. Here is just us trying to hold on to what was. But out there, it's kill or be killed. The only thing left to fear...

16:45Survivors. Stop me if you've heard this one. So, Bangley is basically kind of happy with the way things are because he loves that kind of militaristic lifestyle. Hig, who is haunted by visions of his lost wife, stop me if you've heard this one, dreams of getting away he's he's intercepted these signals from grand junction so he thinks that maybe there's something going on in grand junction one day he gets in his plane he heads off in search of it plane soon comes down and he finds himself on a ranch which is owned by guy pierce's ex navy seal pops and his daughter sema played by margaret qualley and they are both nursing heartache and loss suddenly they're together will them being in the same place somehow heal them or will they all become victim of the marauding incomers who are the new the new tribe who are apparently changing the game so look here's the thing technically this is a science fiction film from a guy who redefined science fiction right from the guy who did alien and did blade runner and did he's the man he's the man he's the man so you go okay this is really really exciting however it is much much more a kind of, it's a low key character piece crossed with the kind of post-apocalyptic survivalist drama of which honestly, I think we've seen too many.

18:03I told you last week, I've just read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which that came out in 2006. There was a film of it in 2009. And that seemed to me to be in many ways, kind of like the last word. I was recently in Provence I said before with Andrew McDonald who made How I Live Now in 2013 which plays out during and after a nuclear attack I'm still waiting for the BFI player to air my introduction to The Survivalist from 2015 you and I both love The Last of Us which has been the TV event of the past few years we're both eagerly awaiting the next installment in the 28 years later so it's a bit like yes yeah we have done this and there is very very little in the dog stars that we haven't seen before and i'm really starting to wonder whether we need to see any of it again um it is forgive the pun the road more taken it also feels like one of those films that ridley scott knocked off because he had a couple of months free and was a bit of a loose end because the Bee Gees biopic had fallen down and but you know what he's like it's like you know you go out to the shops you come back he's made another film and he's speeding up isn't he as he gets older he's speeding up he is he's he's he's clearly he's he's you know he's on a roll creatively in terms of how much he's producing but this feels so incidental that I mean it it there's none of the world building that you expect from a great ridley scott film so there's none of that kind of you know oh he's you know he's created the world of blade runner or the world of gladiators none of that there's none of the memorable characters of films like you know felmer and louise or or even house of gucci which honestly some of the characters in house of gucci i'd like to be able to forget but i can't hey i'm a nominate um there's none of the there's none of that kind of distinctive quirkiness that he brought to things like um gi jane or or robin hood a subject to which we'll return later on or even napoleon all the weird napoleon stuff about napoleon crawling under the table and being you know really weird and strange about sex the other thing is that despite the fact that the word imax features very prominently on the poster i don't know whether you've seen the post of this but the poster makes it look like a netflix series and that's what it felt like and i guarantee you that in a few months time there'll be a pub quiz question which is what film did ridley scott make after gladiator 2 and the answer will be oh i can't remember because no one will on the plus side there's a couple of decent sequences there's a there's one very tense sequence in which you've got a small plane attempting to take off whilst being chased by marauders on horseback that's quite well done there's an assault on a compound which is done with kind of militaristic precision i mean the point is this is the guy who made blackhawk down it's not like he doesn't know how to do this stuff there is also a completely bonkers sequence in the third act of the film in which it's like the it's like we were watching a film in one screen and we came out of it went to the bathroom and went back into a different screen in which they're not showing the same film they're actually showing this weird surrealist mashup of the shining and don't worry darling with alice and janey as the air stewardess from hell and then that sequence ends then it goes back to being the other thing there's also some stuff in it with the men and knights who keep being referred to as the amish in a sort of ongoing joke which doesn't really land and there's some yeah well the joke is that you keep saying they're men and they're Amish.

21:48No, they're not. They're men. Anyway, it's almost not worth getting into. And there's some quite, there's some quite, there's some very eye-catching scenery. There's some quite interesting music. But the problem is that the script is so lumpen. It's one of those scripts. It requires every character to explain in detail what they are thinking, what they are doing and how they feel about what they are thinking and what they are doing at the same time as thinking and doing it. And when they're not doing that, they're looking off just into a near distant future horizon in a way that suggests both loss and reconciliation.

22:27So it's fine. It's utterly unforgettable. It's utterly forgettable, not unforgettable. I came straight out of it and wrote my notes immediately because I was you've done that thing when if you stand on wet sand very near the shore, and you put your footprint in the sand and you take your foot out and you can literally see the footprint disappearing. Well, I felt like if I didn't write my notes immediately afterwards, the memory of the film would be gone by the time I got to the next screening. So it's just bizarrely incidental and unremarkable. And I am now officially tired of the post-apocalyptic survivalist thriller genre.

23:06That's enough, Ed. trudging slowly over wet sand i thought you were going to go into morrissey every day is like sunday mode there just you know just for a moment back to the bench where your shoes were stolen those were the days it's the seaside town that they forgot to close which i'm sure is worthing but i'm not 100 sure correspondence at codemoda.com okay still to come after the break mark does the well i'll talk about the box office top 10 and then mark will talk about bitter christmas and I Want Your Sex. I believe that's right. And also the writer and director of The Death of Robin Hood, Michael Sonosky, on the way.

23:46Hey, Mark Kermode. Fancy a fun quick-fire quiz? I thought you'd never ask. Great. How do you protect yourself from spoilers? Well, you 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?

24:19Ah, finally, a sensible question. Nord 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.

25:01for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming on Disney+.

25:28Box office top 10. Number 10 is Tony. Which I thought was fine. Sanj and I saw it together on our date night. But again, fine, decent performances. Not much more than that, to be honest. That's number seven in America. Number nine here, number six over there is Mutiny. Christine says Dear Vengeance and Tenderness I watched Mutiny before hearing Mark's review But was pleased to see that he found the same joy And comfort in seeing the usual Formulaic points in a Statham movie My adult son is also a fan And although we don't get much chance To watch the movies together these days We do compare our Statham bingo cards Sadly I couldn't get a full house In Mutiny but it was close I reproduce a typical card below But the potential tropes are endless So in this bingo card villain so it's like a bingo card so when one of these happens you mark it off villain underestimates him uh someone goes through a wall fight six men or more at once uh quote you shouldn't have done that um explosion directly behind him no suspiciously specific tradecraft final villain gets a poetic death uh doesn't look at explosion boat inevitably involved And the house rule is five in a row you shout Statham and you finish the entire card before he smiles.

26:51That's the whole idea of it, really. Number eight is Toy Story 5. Still there, still taking money. Number seven is Bethlehem Kundumbah. So this wasn't press screen. This is Indian language romantic comedy. If anyone's seen it, drop us an email, let us know. Does it have a Doombah pint in it? A pint of Doombah in there? Made in Bethlehem. I see that you've got the pronunciation written up. You said definitely Kadoomba. Yeah, well done. That's how you say it. Number six, number four over there is Paw Patrol, the dino movie. The least interesting of the two dinosaur movies that's currently playing in UK cinemas.

27:30Ah, right. Now, here we go. Number eight in America. Number five in the UK is Spa Weekend, a new entry. We had a few problems with this last week. Okay, so here's what you need to know. So Spa Weekend was screened last Tuesday. and as I went into the screening I was told to sign an undated embargo and I said well when does the embargo lift I mean the film's out on Friday our show drops on Thursday mid you know midday that's going to be fine isn't it they went well we'll get back to you so I sat there and watched the film and then the embargo wasn't lifted until five o 'clock on Friday morning so despite the fact that I had seen the film I wasn't able to say anything about it because we dropped on Thursday I am now able to tell you that I did send them back an email saying, I really wish I'd known this about the embargo before, because I wouldn't have spent two hours of my life watching the film.

28:18I would have done something more exciting, like having root canal surgery. So just briefly, since now we get a moment to do this. It is worth saying a lot of the time when that sort of thing happens with an embargo, it is because they think that the press aren't going to like the film, as has proved to be the case. It's got very, very poor reviews, and rightly so. So it's a hugely annoying alleged comedy written and directed by John Lucas and Scott Moore, who co-wrote The Hangover and co-wrote and directed Bad Moms, which I actually liked. So you put those two together, what do you get? Rather than a group of men going to get wasted in Las Vegas, you get a group of women going to get rested and, as it happens, wasted in an upmarket spa.

28:55So it is basically mums behaving badly. Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Anna Faris, Michelle Boutou. So Jane is a lawyer. She's a single mum. She's got no time to herself. She dreams of being just wrapped up in a carpet and left alone to sleep. Sophie is PA to an insufferable man who bullies her. Coco is sharing childcare with her ex who still clearly loves her. They decide to go to a spa to have a dream weekend and they don't invite their annoying Australian friend because they don't want her to come because she'll be an element of chaos. in any way she's abroad but then she turns up and there is this moment in it in which isla fisher turns up as the annoying australian and then you realize with horror that that is the gag the gag is she is going to be the annoying loud australian for the rest of the movie and you're going to have to laugh at her you know because that apparently is funny and not just think this is absolutely insufferable um so that's the gag that's the gag and then things proceed very much as expected uh she turns everything upside down she gets one friend to have sex with a yoga instructor who also turns out to be australian um another to hook up with her ex another loses her job she wrecks the room she wrecks the resorts she wrecks the golf courses she wrecks the yoga classes ruins everything but actually as it turns out giving everyone the shake-up they need so the thing that i was thinking while i was watching the film was i'm watching it in a very sterile environment in a 10 o 'clock screening right and this is you know could it be different if you were seeing it you know like a nine o 'clock screening and an audience because that's how I saw Bad Mums because Bad Mums I think wasn't press screen but I did quite like it um in the case of this I chuckled once and I think that I laughed more than anybody else in the room and even as I was thinking this isn't this isn't aimed at you and this is the wrong venue for it to be playing it I was thinking this is absolutely tooth gratingly annoying and these characters I don't believe in any of the characters and I don't care about any of them.

30:53I don't find any of the jokes funny, particularly not the joke about the loud, annoying Australian who is going to be loud and annoying an Australian. Incidentally, if you are an Australian listening to this, I'm not saying that Australians are loud and annoying. I'm saying that the film has, the whole film is built around this one joke about this group of friends who've got this annoying, loud friend who then turns up at the spot. So like I said, it really didn't help that after spending all this time watching the movie, and then wasn't able to review it and i kind of feel now like a week later on i'm a lot less bothered by it than i was but i came out afterwards and i was thinking well you know there's so few female-centered comedies maybe it was just me and then i spoke to three uh women critics who'd also been in the room who i'd noticed hadn't been laughing and they all to uh to a woman said i found that tooth gratingly annoying and one of them said i found it offensive so there we go it's a bunch of rubbish and they didn't press screen well they did press screen it but then they wouldn't let any of us say anything about it because they knew that what we're going to say about it was it was about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit there the the biggest laughs in the whole movie are in the blooper outtake reel at the end which once again go to prove that the more fun somebody have making a movie the less fun you will have watching it also a fart in a spacesuit I mean, it's only passingly problematic.

32:13Passingly. Yeah. Do you remember one of your best ever laughter lift jokes? I don't know any of them, no. I broke wind in a lift. It was wrong on so many levels. Oh, yeah. That's very good. I'm sure I thought of that myself. Number four is the end of Oak Street. You know, dinosaurs in suburbia. I kind of enjoyed it. I mean, it is rubbish, but I thought it was very entertaining rubbish. Sanjeev just thought it was rubbish. I haven't seen the number three film. It's a new entry, but it also has a very annoying title, Insidious Out of the Further. Yes. Well, I haven't seen it either because, again, it was not proffered to us.

32:56So if anyone has seen it, I will go and see it this weekend, but before I was catching up on all the other stuff that I hadn't. So if you've seen it, let us know. But it's the new Insidious movie. You know what you're going to get. We're looking forward to the following films, which begin with an adjective and end with an adverb in clumsy disharmony. Terrifying, out of the perhaps. Dark, out of the arguably. Haunted, out of the quite frankly. And nightmarish, out of the broadly speaking. Out of the... Stop. Just stop. Just stop. Anyway, number two here, number two there is the Odyssey. We should talk about that at some point.

33:32Number one here. Is there anything left to say? No. No, probably not. number one in Canada number one here spider-man brand new day well again we have spoken extensively about it but I think it's probably take two for for for more conversation on both those two isn't it yeah in the overflow car park but anyway so big number one and a big number two though whenever I say that out loud it just sounds unpleasant so a very successful film at number one very successful film at number two, more in take two. In a moment, you will hear our conversation with Michael Sanofsky, the writer and director of the new movie, The Death of Robin Hood, which is coming up in just a moment.

34:17Hello, 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 clean-up headache. They're dishwasher safe and easy to clean.

34:56Plus, every Hexclad product comes with a lifetime warranty, so they could genuinely be the last pans you'll ever buy. Upgrade to Hexclad and make everyday cooking easier. For a limited time, listeners get 15 % off with our exclusive link at hexclad.co.uk slash take. That's H-E-X-C-L-A-D, hexclad.co.uk forward slash take. Offer excludes bundles and other items already on sale. Support the show and let them know we sent you.

35:51Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming on Disney+.

36:04Now, you know Michael Sonoski from Pig with Nicolas Cage and from A Quiet Place Day One, which proved I think he could handle all the blockbusters. His new film is The Death of Robin Hood, and you can hear our conversation with Michael Sonoski after this clip from the film. It will be a mighty battle. One for the stories.

36:33Yes, strongly. They come from an old family. They save from Viking blood. There's a story that wants their elder father for the bear. it will be a mighty battle, Robin.

36:53How many are there? Four. Five. Together we can miss them.

37:03We'll likely die. And that is a clip from The Death of Robin Hood. Its writer and director is Michael Sonosky, and he joins us. So, Michael, you're very welcome to the programme. introduces to the film that contains a spoiler in the title, but anyway, introduces to the death of Robin Hood. It's a story about sort of an aging Robin Hood who's led kind of a life of violence, who is injured in this battle and ends up on a priory island where this kind of prioress who runs almost like a kind of healing commune gives him sort of a second chance at life. And it's based on the old death of Robin Hood ballad from hundreds of years ago.

37:43OK, well, there's people who have watched many Robin Hood representations on television and in the movies. What we all know is that he was jolly, that he wore tights. He was good. He was a proto-socialist. He was like a Mare Mam Dunn in New York, that kind of guy. He hangs out in Sherwood Forest, not Yorkshire Forest. He's after the sheriff of Nottingham, not the sheriff of York. And he's waiting for good King Sean Connery to come and rescue everybody. So are you saying you're moving the story from that? I'm nudging it, nudging it a little bit. We're definitely hanging on to the old death of Robin Hood legend.

38:19A lot of the other things we're kind of playing as if maybe there's the tiniest basis in truth, he says at one point. You know, maybe I once accidentally threw some gold to some people and killed a sheriff because I killed a lot of people. But but the the legends are greatly exaggerated. and so it's kind of, I mean, one of the early ideas for the story was you know, what if this person lived long enough to start seeing their folklore become a thing and how would they feel about that if they knew the truth of their life and yeah, so it's trying to imagine what if he was a medieval bandit in all the blood and violence that that might have meant There'll be many people who will be enticed by your film they'll look at the cast of Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgård and Noah Joopin think, okay, fine, I'm going to go and see that.

39:08That was an incredible ensemble that you've put together here. Yes, I was very lucky with this cast. It started with Hugh and then Jodie, and it was one of those, you know, I never really write for specific actors. I like to write a character that feels full on the page and then find someone that understands that and then can bring something more to it, and I really lucked out on this one. I think everyone who wanted to play these roles wanted to do it because they were challenging roles, Like Hugh Jackman trying to play a character that starts out pretty evil, just a bad, bad guy and then sort of like softens up over the course of the movie, but never kind of loses that monstrous edge.

39:45Jodie playing this kind of very mysterious prioress who has a whole story of her own. Like, I think I think they were all sort of intrigued by these characters. And I don't know. I was very lucky. We shot this movie in 30 days in Northern Ireland and everyone was kind of down for the summer camp vibe of a, you know, relatively low budget historical epic kind of thing. So that mud that we see, Bill Skarsgård and Hugh Jackman rubbing themselves in, that's good old Northern Irish mud. Oh, that's the real deal. Yeah, it was cold. It was brutal. The week before we shot, there was a record-breaking storm that blew out half of our locations.

40:23And we spent a month just trying to cut down trees so we could get back to our spots. So we shot in February, March in Northern Ireland. So it was hard. Can we talk a little bit about the way the film looks? Obviously, at the opening of it, there is the word that comes to mind is murk. You have these characters in this, it's kind of this Stygian gloom, and it's incredibly atmospheric, and you're kind of peering through the darkness. And as the film moves on, it moves into the lighter palette as it gets finally to the new location where the story will kind of be reinvented. Tell me what you were looking at as inspiration for those early sections.

40:59Yeah, I mean, the early sections, that's where we kind of land the violence. Like we wanted to make sure you got through the first half hour saying, OK, I saw my action scenes, but I'm not sure how I feel about that. Like they're kind of rough and unpleasant. And we wanted you to almost by the time you got to the Priory to feel that lightness. And so the early chunk was The Revenant, Valhalla Rising, like these movies that are really about, you know, the beautiful scope of nature, but the brutality of it. And, you know, we wanted to feel like that mud was just kind of getting under your fingers so that when we got to the Priory, it felt like kind of a weight was lifted off of us.

41:33Because then the rest of the movie becomes this kind of meditative reflecting on the violence and reflecting on those stories. And so, you know, we changed the aspect ratio partway through. So it just kind of opened up. We introduced more color. We actually shot all that stuff later in the schedule. So it was getting more into spring and we were getting some colors and some green. But, yeah, we really wanted to land. And this is not an easy life early on. And in terms of the person who is old enough to live their own mythology, the two things that I was thinking of, these may not have been in your mind at all, but it reminded me.

42:11I was thinking partly of that film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, in which we actually have a moment in which there is a minstrel singing the song. And Robert Ford said, that's not what happened. and I was there. And I was thinking also of Clint Eastwood and Unforgiven and that idea, you know, the idea that kind of resonates through Westerns about print the legend, that idea about somebody living long enough to live with their own legend is clearly sort of at the heart of all of this, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, no, both of those, I mean, those came up a bunch. For me, Assassination of Jesse James is like just one of my favourites, and so I think that was just kind of sticking in my head.

42:51I mean, watching someone who's, yeah, sort of, a living dead who's grappling with their legend and kind of wants... I mean, there's this core thing in this movie that, you know, Robin wants to die. Like, he's looking for this kind of right death. And early on, he thinks he's gonna get this right death in battle, and it's gonna be bloody and horrible and exactly what he deserves. And the movie's about kind of him discovering, you know, a right death that he almost never thought was possible for himself, never really considered. And that's kind of... That goes back to sort of that visual transition in the movie, is that the movie almost starts as the movie Robin thinks he's supposed to be in, like this violent, brutal, epic movie.

43:29And then, like, halfway through, he's supposed to almost be like, wait, what movie am I in? I'm very confused right now. So we kind of wanted to play that where, like, he's almost not OK with, like, aren't I supposed to have, like, a crazy action scene at the end of this? Like, you know, we kind of wanted to, like, be in that transition with him. Can I ask you about when Jodie Comer appears on the movie Michael? because there is a piece that she brings to your picture so that when she says to Robin Hood, would you like me to pray with you? You kind of think, yes, of course, I would like you to pray with me.

44:04What does she bring? When you're there in the room at the time, what is it that Jodie is doing to make that so peaceful? Yeah, I mean, Jodie's kind of a magical actor in that way where she, I wish I could explain how she works as an actor, But it's I think what she's able to do is both carry something extremely like human and accessible. And she can both play this sort of like sweet, childish side of something while also playing this sort of ageless, profound wisdom. But then at the end of the day, you just kind of want to watch her. I stopped trying to like figure out how it worked with her on set because it was just one of those things where she would read the words and the whole crew would be like, that was great.

44:49Let's move on. Like it just she's kind of an incredible actor that way where she can play this deep profundity, play so many layers of mystery that are left totally kind of unspoken. But then at the same time, just be someone that you want to hang on every single word from. I I don't know. I wish I could explain Jodie Comer, but she's incredible. She has this exchange with Hugh Jackman, which felt to me like it was the heart of the film, where they're talking about balance and the precision of balance and storytelling. Can you explain a bit about that? Yeah, I mean, so much of this movie is about storytelling, about the stories that we kind of tell ourselves, tell other people how we pass those things down.

45:32And there's kind of this thing going on between the prioress and Robin where Robin has sort of used storytelling and seen how it was used as a tool of violence and a tool of power and control. And the prioress is kind of telling him, you know, in that scene, she says knives cut bread as well as they do flesh. And she's trying to teach him, you know, stories aren't inherently evil or violent. They are what we use them for. and she's using stories of religion, stories of religion beyond just Catholicism. I mean, she kind of cites Celtic lore. She's quoting all these heretical texts by like Lucretius and Boethius and she's sort of, the idea is that she believes in the power of stories to help and heal if we kind of choose to use them in that way, but it's our responsibility to do that.

46:16And so that's kind of what they're vying with the whole movie and I won't spoil the ending, But there is sort of they find a kind of middle ground at the end where Robin kind of realizes that, you know, it's not about the truth of stories. It's about like how we sort of use them to be there for other people and what power they have in that way and that they can be used to help or hurt. And in terms of that stories about storytelling, I mean, obviously, we have we have the ballad of Robin Hood's death. Tell me about the way that song and music works in your film. It was interesting. I was thrilled to hear that you love Assassination of Jesse James, which, of course, has this really keening score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

46:53But music is a very, very big part of your film. Can you tell me about how the music integrates with it? Yeah. So I found this incredible musician, this Sheffield-based musician named Jim Getty, who had never done a score before. But I've just been listening to a lot of, you know, kind of like folk Celtic music. I knew I wanted to have something that had an edge of that, but I didn't want it to get hokey, but I wanted it to feel kind of of the natural world and of that time. And Jim is just this like incredible kind of trying to he's this musician who's sort of trying to carry the tradition of folk forward, believe in its roots, but also kind of bring his own artistic edge to it.

47:29And I just loved his voice and his style and it felt so raw. And I reached out to him on Instagram and I just said, would you ever had you ever wanted to like score a movie? And he was kind of intimidated by it. He didn't really know how to approach it, but we paired him with Tony Lewis, who's this music editor who works with Ridley Scott. And it's just incredible. And the two of them kind of we all work together to sort of find this. We had the sound. We had Jim's sound, which was so like raw and ancient. And then it was just about kind of like working with him to figure out how do we use that to score a movie.

47:59And he ended up kind of being a natural. But I think it brought this kind of ancient rawness while also having this like very deep kind of personal modern feeling to it. And we did, you know, we included even like a lot of old ballads. He sings Twa Corby's in there as they're sort of marching away. So there is this kind of nod to this feeling of, you know, these are old ballads. These are old songs. These are things that are passed down through words. And we wanted to almost feel like a little bit of that voice was kind of steeped throughout the movie through Jim singing. And I don't know, it was one of those just kind of magical creative things, though, where it could have worked terribly to hire someone who had never done a score before.

48:37but he ended up just kind of doing an amazing job and being lovely to work with. Yeah, it works really well. Noah Dup is, yeah, it does, it works fantastically. Noah Dup is one heck of a prospect, isn't he? He's great. I mean, he was fantastic in A Quiet Place. Obviously, you were part of that story, but he's a star, isn't he, already? Yeah, he's a special one. He is, I mean, he must be like 21 now, but he's, you know, in my mind, he's, yeah, Yeah, it's like he's a child, yet he is both so talented, so kind. Like for a kid that kind of grew up on film sets, he's just sort of this lovely, smart, good head-on-his-shoulders kid.

49:15I loved Noah, and he was so excited to just sort of like engage in this project and let us just do terrible things to him and mess up his eyes. And like he, I don't know, I think Noah is obviously, everyone's watching him. I mean, he's already a star, but like he's, I can't wait. I can't believe he has hopefully another 60 years ahead of him of incredible acting because he's a special one. Your star in A Quiet Place Day One, Lupita Nyong 'o, of course, has had quite a year. I imagine you were first in line to go to The Odyssey because she was fantastic in that. Yeah, I've seen that on 70mm IMAX film twice already.

49:52So, yeah, she's amazing in that. And who knew that bows and arrows and stringing bows was going to be the thing of 2026? Yeah. Yeah, it's a crazy world. It's a very confusing time. AI is coming about. We need some classic string of bow. Keep things simple. We understand tension. Is it Death Stranding next for you, Michael? Yeah, I'm doing a little, I'm doing an HBO show with Damon Lindelof and then I'm doing Death Stranding with A24 and Hideo Kojima. So that's what I'm writing right now. Michael, it's been a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you very much indeed for your time today. Thank you guys so much.

50:26And just to repeat, Mark will be doing the, I mean, we've hinted at quite a lot of stuff there, But the full review of The Death of Robin Hood will be on next week's programme. So what else is out then? Bitter Christmas. Of course, it's August. This is the new film by Almodovar. This is a tragicomic melodrama upon the theme of autofiction, reflecting on the relationship between fiction and reality and the responsibility that an artist does or doesn't owe to the real life people and events that inspire them. So there are two parallel stories, OK? one story is set in i think it's 2004 uh there's a director elsa who has a firefighter boyfriend who is also a male stripper she wants to be making films she's doing commercials she's also starting to have panic attacks after a family loss and one of those panic attacks we meet her after she's had the first one puts her in a hospital it happens to be a hospital in which she once directed a film in which a character died in that hospital she also has a friend who is tortured over the grief of a loss of a child and the story then takes her on holiday where she starts work on what will be her third film which is a story about two grieving women on a volcanic island so a lot of kind of self-referentiality going on again that is all wrapped in a second story which is playing out pretty much in the present in which we discover that Elsa is a character who is being written by a filmmaker who is trying to make his return to features his assistant is monica she's in the process of being about to take a sabbatical so he will be left in the soul care of his partner santi who we see is clearly the model for the firefighter stripper in the fictional story and the film being a work of auto fiction is also implied that elsa is him is his kind of alter ego but as the story grows monica starts to realize that it's drawing on her stories as well about which she is not pleased we're going to play you um a clip from the trailer obviously it's in spanish so i'm just going to tell you in advance what it says says i think i finished writing the script are you happy with it more or less something is missing you always say that when you're done writing and i haven't made a film in five years i've not created anything that excites me.

52:50And then I cannot concentrate. I can only write about the now. Is it going to be autobiographical? As little as possible, I hope. Here's the clip.

53:18It's going to be very confessional. I'll try to be the least possible. That sounded great. Can I just... Forgive me for being slightly slow and a bit stupid. Autofiction is... So it's a fictionalised autobiography. Yes, it's basically drawing on your own experiences. So writing something that is, I suppose... These things have also been called Romano Clef, haven't they? That are sort of using stuff from your own life, which I think you know it's there's a lot of discussion in the film about what exactly it is and there's a lot of this is all fiction yes it's fiction but you're drawing on characters who are real but it's not those characters but it is those characters have you got you I've got the so that's it so actually one of the one of the questions that the film raises is exactly the question which you have raised which is sorry what exactly do you mean by that you know to by that sort of fictional so for example if you wrote a book that centered around let's say for example a DJ whose life experiences mirrored yours but perhaps that DJ wouldn't be male it would be a female but it could still be a work of autofiction does that make any sense right okay yeah so it could be sort of based on and inspired by but actually not a memoir precisely and it's absolutely not a memoir and that is a key thing going on here is that it is not a memoir although in many ways it is so some of the reviews have drawn parallels between this and pain and glory which was sort of semi-autobiographical and that was a tale about a filmmaker in stasis and in that film this director there's a revival of one of his old movies and it puts him in contact with the past and then sort of brings back a whole bunch of stuff and i really love that film it's about memory and childhood and loves and regrets and i thought it was terrific and i compared that film in my review of it to the films of terence davis which is the highest praise that film also had a great score by alberto iglesias who does another terrific score for this film for bitter christmas um the score is pretty much i think the best thing about bitter christmas which i don't like anything like as much as i like pain and glory um the weird thing about the score is it seems to be playing almost all the way through the film and a lot of the time it felt to me have you ever had this experience you're listening to a score to a film that sounds like a score to a much better a film than the film that you're watching and you kind of think i'd like to be watching that film as opposed to what i'm actually watching you ever had that experience i have not had that experience no well i had it very much with this which is not to say that this is a bad film it is to say that a lot of us films have always flirted with the melodrama of telenovelas okay but they have rarely looked like that is actually what they are.

56:06I mean, in the case of this, there were times I thought I am just watching a bad television soap. I mean, it's superbly, as with all Almodovar stuff, color coded in its settings and its environment and its costumes. But it's also people having, to my ear, very unconvincing conversations about contrived situations, which I didn't believe in. it only really becomes it catches fire i mean it's inert for a lot of it feels like it's very very inert it feels like it's very written and very stagey there's a couple of scenes in which it comes to life one of which well there's a couple of times in which song comes into play and there's there's a scene in which a character sings a chivalry vagus song and the entire film seems to hold its breath and this is actually and it's a really great moment and then there is a kind of confrontation about the way in which auto fiction can be vampiric and the way in which it can take stuff from real life that it doesn't have the right to take and it's really kind of in the in the final act of the film when all that stuff comes together it sort of gets up out of its chair and starts walking around the room and doing stuff and feeling like an almodovar film because the thing with his movies is they've never felt lifeless really this did feel like okay you know it becomes in the end a sort of meditation on his own work, the status of his career, the themes that he's returned to again and again, the way in which he's used autobiographic elements to which he has returned.

57:42And at that point, the whole kind of level of emotional engagement really picks up and it stops looking like bad television. And it starts reminding you that this is one of the greatest film directors of their generation, someone whose filmmaking is astonishing. and who is really cinematic. So the thing is, look, it's not a bad film. It's just, it is, in terms of Almodovar's cinematic legacy, it just felt like we've, again, I sort of said this about the Ridley Scott film, we have been here before, and we have seen this done an awful lot better. And there are moments in it and a final act in it, which I found moving.

58:22But I did find a lot of it, I was just watching it and going, yeah, yeah, yeah, got that. And it felt stagey and not stagey in a way that was, that was great. I would have already in stagey, but stagey in just like a little bit in a, so it's fine. It's not bad. It's just not particularly good. Not, not destined to be a festive favorite then. Well, that's the one weird thing about it was that Christmas does feature. There is, there is a thing about Christmas in it, But if I was now making the Secret to Cinema programme that we made some years ago about Christmas movies, this would definitely be one of the ones that you put in as, it is a Christmas movie, but it's not a Christmas movie, but it is a Christmas movie.

59:07I feel as though we need a good laugh, but unfortunately we've only got to the laughter lift moment, so let's play the music and see what happens.

59:18Well, now, hey, Mark, I had a bit of a to-do with the good lady ceramicist, Erid Daws, this week. You're pedantic because you take things literally, she said. No, said I, that would make me a kleptomaniac, dear. Hey! And that's not the only thing that annoys her about me, but a lot of them are not my fault at all. For example, did you know that I have this awful disease where I compulsively tell aeroplane station jokes? No. The doctor says it's terminal. And well done for getting in aeroplane station. And you know Highgate Cemetery here in Chagas, London. Lots of notable graves there, including George Michael, Douglas Adams, George Eliot, Karl Marx.

1:00:00Also the person who invented the crossword. And if you look at the map, his grave is 12 down and 9 across. I think that's a Barry Cryer joke from 1974. As indeed was the terminal joke. As indeed was the kleptomaniac joke. Anyway, coming up, Mark's going to review a film which appears to be called, named after this, just mentioned George Michael. Yeah, this is what happened. I turned up at Mr. Young's screening room and I rang on the doorbell and the guy opened the door and said yes, and I said, I want your sex. And I'm sure they had a lot of that. Okay, well, that next.

1:00:42From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Why am I losing my mind? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming only on Disney+. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

1:01:28Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

1:01:44okay so it's time for our occasional discussion of the world of llms what's that a large language model and ai okay and last time we did this feature mark and i called this thing rather weedy Hey, I don't like that. So the production team have had another go. Oh dear.

1:02:16Remain calm. Stay in your homes. There is nothing to fear. There is everything to monitor.

1:02:30Hey, I don't like that. That's the epic sting as opposed to the weedy sting. The nicest sting was on my show this week on Greatest Radio, which you can check out again on the Rayo app. Thank you very much. At least the original sting was shorter, Simon. Yeah. It can be epic and brief, I would say. So that's our production tip there. Make it epic and five seconds long. That'd be very good. This is quite interesting. an email from TC. That's how it's signed. Okay. Top cap. Yeah, exactly. Dear David and Gigolo Joe, following your chat about AI sparked by Simon Brew's email about how AI cut traffic to his website in one day, I have some news.

1:03:17I co-own an independent video game news and review website called thesixthaxis.com. Capital T, capital S, capital A. which has been running for over 20 years, we, like millions of other websites, use a system called Cloudflare to protect the site from hackers, bots, and other nefarious agents. Cloudflare has slowly been introducing anti-AI measures, and now websites can control how much of their content is scraped, with options ranging from blocking it completely to charging the AI crawlers for access. Importantly, it does not stop results from showing up in normal searches. As you can imagine, this is a game changer.

1:04:02AI bots will no longer be able to scrape content without permission. And if enough websites start using similar technology, those AI summaries in Google will become useless. So good news for those of us publishing the written word online. We just need something similar for audio and visual formats. Given that AI has not gained self-awareness yet, maybe the one thing we should use it for is to ask it to design a system to stop it from scraping other media. Usual sign-offs from TopCat. TC. What was the name of the software? So Cloudflare is the software, and thesixthaxis.com is the name of the website.

1:04:44Wow. So TC, thank you very much. That does sound very interesting. When you say at the end, given that AI has not gained self-awareness yet, there is a fascinating, and also, I should add, terrifying interview that The Economist did with Yuval Noah Harari, who's thought a lot about this kind of stuff. And he makes the point that AI can pretend to get self-awareness. AI is quite clever enough to not actually to feel pain, but actually to say that it does feel pain. So how will we know when it has gained consciousness? uh isn't it also true that ai can pretend not to have gained consciousness because it understands that that will make it worrying to us you know there's always the thing about you know is it thinking for itself i mean surely if it is thinking for itself and it doesn't want us to know that it can just lie yeah i mean the it should at the end we're not here to talk about But anyway, sparked by TC.

1:05:50At the end of this interview, basically it sounded as though every politician, this is not a left or right issue particularly, every politician needs to answer the question, will you legislate to make it illegal for an AI to pretend to be human? That's what you need to do. So Harari says, Yuval Noah Harari, says, I don't mind talking to an AI about my medical condition because it may well have lots of great things to tell me. I just need to know that it's an AI. I don't want it to be called Dr. Johnson or whatever. I don't want it to be pretending. And I thought, okay, that's very good. If we had politicians on the show, I'd ask them that.

1:06:30But anyway. I had a weird thing happen this week, and I'll just talk about this in very, very oblique fashion. I had the first approach from somebody doing something who asked if they could use my AI image. and the answer was no but it was just wow okay so it's starting

1:06:58i can turn that into an anecdote really couldn't i yeah yeah yeah work that we'll come back on that next week okay uh right so let's do a what's on thing thank you very much indeed for the what's that come in so you audio is the traditional way of sending these in but video is also very good and you send it to correspondence at kerbinamore.com. Here's Cameron from Homeland's Adventure Film Festival. Hi, I'm Cameron Hall and I'm the founder of Homeland's Adventure Film Festival, which is coming to London this September. We're bringing two special evenings of adventure cinema to the beautiful screening room at the Charlotte Street Hotel on the 3rd and 4th of September with 13 films from filmmakers around the world.

1:07:35There's everything from skiing, climbing and mountaineering to wingsuit flying, freediving, kayaking and trail running, including nine UK premieres and a world premiere with tickets and a full programme available at our website homelands.co.uk h-o-l-m-l-a-n-d-s dot co dot u-k Simon, I want your sex. 18 for strong sex and sexually abusive behaviour. Sign me up. So, there are two sex comedies out this week. One of them is aimed at the mainstream. I'll be reviewing it in T2 and it has an audience of no one at all. The other is outrageously out there and independent and is, in my opinion, by far the more accessible and certainly the more entertaining of the two.

1:08:20So this is the latest Outre colourful outing from American indie queer cinema legend Greg Araki, who you will know, of course, as the director of Totally F'd Up, Doom Generation, Nowhere, Mysterious Skin, Kaboom, White Bird and the Blizzard. And the reason I cite all those is because I've reviewed most of them on various incarnations of this show over the years this is described as an erotic comedy thriller written by carly now i think it's skewtini either skewtini or shortini s-c-i-o-r so she's an american writer television host um the founder of a website that it's that is written s-l-u-t-e-v-e-r so I think you pronounce that slut ever um right Vogue's Vogue's online sex and relationships column and um had a memoir dispatches from an autonomous woman in a post-shame world so Olivia Wilde who we've talked about quite a lot uh recently she was terrific in the invite which I think you and I both enjoyed continues to do sterling work in the very decent grown-up sex satire market which is a very very small market so she plays contemporary artist erica tracy who we first meet lying face down in a swimming pool where she is discovered by cooper hoffman's elliot who is a battered and bloody doofus clad in women's underwear so there's a kind of sunset boulevard thing body in the pool the action then goes nine and a half weeks earlier get it nine and a half weeks earlier so we know where we are okay we're in the cinematic world of s &m there's loads of sort of sly cinematic nozzles there's one which is very very a clear quotation from the graduate with in this case the tale is of a young man and an older domineering woman apparently in an original version of this script it was the other way around it was a younger woman and an older male boss and i cannot imagine how that version of the script would ever have worked because the the dynamic in this seems to be the only way it could work.

1:10:23So now Cooper Hoffman's character is in a police cell recounting the story of his relationship with Erica, who we saw face down in the swimming pool, how she hired him to work in her gallery and then immediately started grooming him as her submissive sex slave. Here is a clip from the trailer. Elliot, Erica would like to see you in her office. Me?

1:10:47Come over here so I can take a better look at you. Oh, don't walk. I'd really prefer if you crawled. Like a lot of people my age, I have had conflicted and confusing feelings about sex. Do you have a girlfriend? I do. You would get weird then. Weird. If we...

1:11:10Your relationship with your employer was primarily sexual in nature? What's that? Yes. Why does all the cool sex deviant stuff always happen to you? You're a sexual astronaut just exploring the outer limits of experience. So you get the picture. She's wild, crazy. He's out of his depth, but he loves it. He loves being dominated by someone so glamorous, so out there, so unrestrained. And up until now, he's been in a relationship with someone played by Charlie XCX, who seems to have zero interest in him. and now suddenly he's in the middle of this absolute maelstrom of weird, perverted strangeness in which he can be called upon at any time to do absolutely anything with no holds barred.

1:11:53And then the wheels start to come off because then he starts to become sort of properly abusive. And the thing is, the film, I mean, it nods towards sort of fairly Vanilla Fair like Nine and a Half Weeks, but I mean, tonally, this is much closer to, you know, know taxis um clo or matress or more recently that film that i really liked um dogs don't wear pants i mean i really enjoyed this i thought it was laugh out loud funny i mean it passed the six laughs test in in in the first 20 minutes no you know no trouble at all its depiction of the ludicrousness of the world of modern art was particularly astute because she's this kind of crazy artist who just does all this art which is all to do with sex and she keeps saying yeah but all art it's a load of nonsense isn't it but she's also kind of completely obsessed with it and it's all absolutely about her and i the weird thing about it is that for a film that was so much about uh you have that thing you know why is all the kinky strange stuff always happened to you i thought it was weirdly wholesome because it was it had a totally non-prurient attitude to the strangeness of human sexual behavior i mean there is no kink shaming here at all and it it's just it's weirdly joyous and i think one of the reasons is the performances um you saw licorice pizza didn't you uh oh yeah a few years ago yeah so do you remember thinking in licorice pizza wow cooper hoffman is an absolutely terrific actor because he's the you know he's the the main kid in it yeah i'll be i'll be led and guided by you in all things does this mean no that you're not remembering how great he was because he was okay he was absolutely fabulous as gary valentine and apparently um gregor aki thought having seen licorice pizza okay no that that's not the guy that we need because he's too too young too dorky and then he came in and auditioned and he's absolutely the guy he's just brilliant here he gets the bewildered young man just right who's suddenly in this other world in which he's sort of discovering himself as for olivia wild i mean she just appears like she's willing to swallow the entire world whole she's like to say that the performance is scenery chewing doesn't come anywhere close to just how magnificently outrageous it is because she's playing this dominatrix artist for whom boundaries are just so boring and she's just she's devouring the role and it's a really fearless performance and the interesting thing is I mean, you know, she's a fairly sort of mainstream star, but she appears to have the sensibility of somebody who is absolutely in that indie world.

1:14:33I mean, it is the most out there performance I've seen in quite a long time. She really sinks her teeth into the roles, breathtaking. As for Greg Araki, once again, negotiates that strength. I mean, this is interesting. When Gregor Aki started out, I never thought he'd turn into quite the successful director that he has turned into. And he does manage to occupy that weird hinterland between the outrageous and the utre and the lovable and the wholesome. And his films, they're every bit as colour coordinated as the work of Pedro Amadovar. And they often look every bit as good, although I think they probably cost a fraction of it.

1:15:09but even in his mid-60s he doesn't seem to have lost any of his terrible punky edge I mean we talked about earlier on in the show about you know you can be a man in your 60s you still think you're 14 and Greg Araki still seems to have that kind of that that that punky bite to him so as I said two sex comedies out this week one of them we'll review in in T2 which is one night only and he's just incredibly vanilla and incredibly bland and I don't think we'll have an audience still but as far as this is concerned this is just rip roaring fun and in the same way as i really enjoyed uh sex and death uh uh at cat miasma i really really enjoyed i want your sex and it sent me sent me out of the cinema with a spring in my step and i have to say an increased admiration for olivia wilde who just just doesn't seem doesn't seem in any way scared of going yeah fine This role requires everything to be turned up to 57.

1:16:04So let's do that. Does the George Michael track make an appearance? It's not about that, Simon. It's not. No, I don't think it's in there. No, no, I think it's just a title. That's it for this week. This has been a Sony Music Entertainment production. This week's team, Eric, Josh and Heather, redacted Simon Poole. In take two, we're directing you to the Overflow car park for more chat about current film releases. If you've enjoyed what you've heard so far, And even if you haven't, there is plenty more waiting for you over in take two, such as Five Question Film Club and questions, Three Questions, you mentioned.

1:16:38Sorry. Pardon? I was slow off the mark. I'm so sorry. This week, we're asking why so many celebrities signed a petition in support of film director Roman Polanski after his arrest in Switzerland in 2009. Well, yes, that's a very good question. And don't forget, people of Bristol and beyond will be at the Brizal Beacon on December the 6th. Tickets are on sale via the link in the show notes. you can get both takes ad free just search coba de mayo patreon and join the church mark what is your film of the week well in a week in which there's a film by almodovar and a film by ridley scott i'm delighted to say my film of the week is gregoracki's i want your sex there's another take a landed alongside this one uh thank you very much indeed for listening

1:17:30From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming Omniot Disney+.