‘The End of Oak Street’ and the Top Five 'Twilight Zone' Movies. Plus: Will Poulter!

13:15Sean Fennessey:We know that about them. They both present as they're going to be the grownups in the room, quite literally, in these stories. So it'll be interesting to see how those two worlds kind of interact.

13:24Mallory Rubin:Yeah, I just have a couple of questions about, like, the mechanics of how they're going to do this version of, whether it's phased storytelling or not. Like, they're probably not going to use Disney Plus as a spackle for plot. So there probably won't be a Hellfire Club series to introduce these people, right? I have some thoughts on that, but keep going. They're probably, if I had to guess, these characters will be relatively well introduced in the two Avengers films. And so the first X-Men movie, do you think it's going to be like Charles Xavier? I think you might get in Secret Wars. Yeah. A little bit.

14:00I think that gets to the younger cast, right? And the meta quality there of like, not only leaning into the ability to grow with the Spider-Man comp, which I think is exactly right and great. And, you know, ultimately very appealing for the idea of like creating and fostering a new generation of fandom rather than just continuing to make movies for a bunch of increasingly fatigued and beleaguered moviegoers who are like, this isn't as good as the thing I used to love. There's a natural element to the Secret Wars, post-Secret Wars reset of saying, okay, the universe is taking shape and form anew.

14:30And we're doing that with characters who are figuring out their powers as the MCU is figuring out the next stage of storytelling. So I think that's appropriate and exciting. It actually feels to me like it gives me more confidence than the idea of continuing to try to like layer on and connect to these extra strands of threads of a tapestry that has now existed for guys. We're a couple years away from 20 years of the MCU. It's 2026. Iron Man came out in 2008. Like we need to move on to the next phase of things. And so that I think is actually a good choice.

15:10Sean Fennessey:Me too. Yeah. I'm curious to see with Mr. Sinister being the lead villain, how much of this is really an X-Men movie. Because Mr. Sinister is very Gene and Scott focused as a character. We know Gene and Scott. They're announced here. We have already been introduced to Gene in these movies. But no Wolverine, no Nightcrawler, no Colossus, no Angel, no Iceman. forget about Banshee or Bishop or Cable or any of those other characters. I have not forgotten about Bishop and Cable, by the way. If you really like Bishop and Cable, you need to be watching X-Men 97 season two. They're getting a lot of energy.

15:47Sean Fennessey:And I wonder if they're going to keep the team a little smaller. Maybe Beast will come in. Maybe Angel will come in. Or maybe we'll get a Wolverine near the end of the film. No Wolverine would be really bold. The biggest questions, obviously, I think, are Wolverine and Magneto. Is Magneto not going to be cast in this first movie? I don't think they should. I agree. It's what Joanna said this morning. I think I'm coming around to this. This was not where I was initially.

16:10Mallory Rubin:I also really liked the way Brand New Day was like, here's the star of the movie. Here's the co-stars of the movie. This is the pyramid of importance within this plot. There is not a D-plot of two people doing a MacGuffin journey to bring something back to Spider-Man that doesn't really matter. Like, they need to get away from that kind of storytelling, which they box themselves into, because they have 12 actors in Avengers who all need like plot service and they wind up acting against tennis balls in Atlanta and saying like, no, bring it over here, you know? Well, they do it in London now, but sure.

16:45Mallory Rubin:Sure. But like my point being is like, if they were to start as a love story between these two kids who get fucked up by this guy. That's where I think they're going. Yeah. That is exactly where I think they're going. Even just, I don't know, how much of how they spend the first 30 seconds of a four and a half minute D23 panel really matters and what does that tell us? I don't know. But they did introduce Gene and Scott before Charles, which felt like it was signaling something. And then to end on Sinister, I agree, it felt like the bookends of the announcement were, you know, that character set and that pairing.

17:16And the idea of building your new franchise initially around young charismatic stars like Kit Conner and Sadie Sink, I think makes a lot of sense. I don't know that you can wait too long to bring Magneto and Wolverine into the era of X-Men in the MCU. But one movie is interesting.

17:38Sean Fennessey:It's a fascinating choice. I was thinking about what you said with there not being a Hellfire Club TV show, for example. So we know that next year there's only one Marvel movie. It's just Secret Wars. In 2028, when this X-Men film is coming in May, that will be followed in succession by Ghost Rider and then Black Panther 3. And then we'll be back on the three Marvel movies a year schedule. and it was the expansionist mentality that I think really felled the Marvel Enterprise and I'll be very curious to see because I think it's not hard to imagine a world where Doomsday and Secret Wars and X-Men are all big hits maybe diminishing returns on the Avengers films relative to the previous two Avengers films but still those movies are going to be very very big and then all of a sudden Marvel will be feeling itself again and then they'll be like well what if we do need to do the Colossus origin story in animated form on D+.

18:31Sean Fennessey:Like these things always come in waves and cycles. And so I'm kind of curious to see.

18:35Mallory Rubin:I don't think there's any way to make those movies in a cost effective way or make those shows in a really cost effective way. I think that's what they figured out. That even something like Wonder Man, which had all this affection for it critically. And I think even among the fans who found it. But ultimately, like Disney decided not to do it because it was a real Excel sheet for them. where they were like, this show costs too much for the amount of people who watch it, and it's not germane, it's not essential to have this as a building block going forward for our plans for Marvel. I think they could change their mind again just the same way all of, you know, entertainment could be like, we're diving back into streaming TV as a platform to connect theatrical events.

19:17Mallory Rubin:And especially if movies become more and more this sort of like, not boutique, almost like luxury live experience of something, and then like TV is kind of where the grinders are. I don't know if that's ever going to happen.

19:30Sean Fennessey:It's almost like the dynamic amongst podcasters as well.

19:33Mallory Rubin:That's right. Just got to make that rent money.

19:37Sean Fennessey:Kanish over here.

19:41Mallory Rubin:Always got that bread truck for you if you want it. My point really was just that I could see a world where they're making Ghost Rider, Black Panther, X-Men movies and they don't have that much to do with each other. that we are in a post post credit sequence world and these stories are maybe a little hermetically sealed like I'm sure we'll have team ups I'm sure you know but I could see a world in which we're not doing a lot of like you better stick around for the second post credit sequence to see Charlize Theron who's never going to show up again

20:15Sean Fennessey:it's probably a good idea to at least take a break from that after Secret Wars which is kind of the ultimate like the er team up story so do you think Vision Quest will be like the last TV show we see for a long time from Marvel? I think you're both right. I think what Chris is outlining feels currently like the plan. And I think you are right that the impulse to go right back to the thing that worked before until it didn't will be really strong if the overall enthusiasm is at a fever pitch again. I don't really know why I'm putting so much stock in like these Feige presentations at these conventions, but I was really struck at Comic-Con and for the Marvel Hall H panel when he came out and was like, we're not here to talk about TV.

20:53literally said that. And I just thought that, now again, he's like trying to muster enthusiasm for Endgame encore and then of course Doomsday and they had the Ghost Rider and Black Panther 3 announcements at that panel, a little Spidey tease before people had seen that movie. So there was a lot of film-centric footage and conversation to highlight, but We're Not Here to Talk About TV felt like a signal of intent about where Marvel is right now. I thought the Vision Quest trailer that they showed at D23 was one of the highlights of the entire night. It looks wonderful. WandaVision was great. Agatha was great.

21:33There's a version of Marvel from a couple years ago where the third piece of that trilogy is like really central to how people are talking and thinking about Marvel. And I would say this is very much being presented as the conclusion of a thing, not the continuation of a thing. Now that said, like Wiccan and Speed are in the MCU now and will be a part of things moving forward. So even the installments that are positioned as conclusions or, to Chris's point, as separate, still present characters, if not maybe as many active plot lines that connect to other things because it is inherently a connected universe.

22:03I don't know. I mean, I think that there's no question, you're right, that Doomsday and Secret Wars will be huge. The question is whether they'll be good, right?

22:13Sean Fennessey:I think we can pivot that conversation into the second trailer that was released. Now, you guys got a chance to see this at Comic Con, correct? Yes. And this is the one that was communicated to us as a huge improvement on the first one. And I ask you, Chris, is it a huge improvement on the first one?

22:31Mallory Rubin:Emotionally and dramatically, yeah. Yeah. I was interested to find out what they are yelling about. I'm seated. You now are interested to find out. Yeah. I mean, I didn't know it. The first one is Did you do this? Yeah. Well, if it's important, start screaming about it. I'd like to see like they have been doing kind of the inert like I don't know really what I'm looking at but a lot of posing yeah and now like even though it looks like it is I think Andy said it looked like it was shot in Harrenhal it is I think that's generous wow it at least had did anyone fuck their mom? dramatic stakes that it was suggesting I dream about it

23:08Sean Fennessey:isn't that the whole Victor Von Doom thing right? his relationship to his mom yeah that's a big part of it yeah for sure I'm kind of about that isn't that one of his motivating forces is he can't really live up to the expectations for him. He's always second best.

23:22Mallory Rubin:I always want to call him VVD, but that's the nickname of Liverpool's beloved center back, Virgil van Dijk.

23:30Sean Fennessey:I think Victor Von Doom preceded him. He did. In the VVD power rankings, if I had to guess. I thought this was a little better. I don't know if it was some dramatic improvement on what I saw before, because it was shot in front of a giant fucking green screen. I guess the throne room scene is a real room that had furniture in it. but like the movie definitely has me interested in what the story is going to be

23:50Mallory Rubin:Marty Supreme Jack what's his face oh Jack Fisk Jack Fisk marvels the Avengers

23:56Sean Fennessey:doomsday and it was nice to see Pedro Pascal acting and not wandering around like he's on Ambien like he did in Fantastic Four that was you know I was interested in that it does make it seem like obviously I like the theory maybe it was Van who said this maybe it was you who said this that it feels this looks like maybe the first five minutes of the movie.

24:16Mallory Rubin:Yeah, I just think that all this, like, the Fox X-Men are back! It's like, come on.

24:21Sean Fennessey:In all likelihood, many of those characters will be annihilated fairly early on. I would think so. And what did you do? Did you do this? Was all about killing many, many heroes, presumably.

24:32Mallory Rubin:Channing Tatum's gambit.

24:34Sean Fennessey:Yeah, and we will mourn him on this show. But, I don't know. The Russos, you know, they have a visual style. It's not the greatest style. and they don't have the same level of anticipation, at least for me, that they had going into the previous two films. Sure. We'll see how it goes. Yeah. It's going to be a popular film. Oh, no question. But. No question. Will it be good, as you said, is really the big question. I mean, I hope so. I really want it to be. I thought that this trailer was a market improvement over the first one, which I considered quite worrying. I don't know. I heard Downey break out the Latverian accent and I felt like possibility still existed in the world.

25:19I felt alive. I don't think that was your reaction to it. I was like, let's go for it.

25:22Mallory Rubin:Do you think we'll get any no mask Downey? Or is this a Mandalorian situation? You know, they're giving us so much like eye, so much eyeball in the trailer. Maybe. I do think they will find it very difficult to resist having our Avengers who know Tony see Downey's face. Like, I don't think they'll be able to resist that. I agree. That feels inevitable.

25:46Sean Fennessey:Yeah. Will it be Cap? I know they're not saying that Peter's in this movie. Will it be Peter? I think that that seems very likely to happen at some point. How scarred will the face be? We'll find out. We'll find out. Yeah. It definitely is like a Fantastic Four movie, which makes sense, obviously, given Doom. But because they had to, you know, change the plan from Kang to Doom, it doesn't have the, like, Thanos equivalent of we built across the Infinity Saga to this thing. So it makes sense to...

26:18Mallory Rubin:Vigie tried to walk that back a little bit, though. It was like everybody's always like, you guys pebbled Thanos across ten movies. He's like, Thanos would show up for like five seconds, sit in a chair, and everybody's like, what great storytelling. Yeah, it wasn't all like...

26:32Sean Fennessey:It wasn't a perfectly orchestrated plan, but there was a plan. This is like, we have to fix a problem. And that doesn't mean it won't turn out to be good. It's a little interesting to use Doom now. in a moment when they are, they feel a little up against the wall because he is kind of like, there's a case that he is the great comic book villain. I agree with you. And so they make Apocalypse Rape. That's right. Well, again, watch X-Men 97 season two, you know? They're doing it all there. But you see that, to your point about Doom is a great villain, you see that moment. You know, I think when the RDJ is coming back, news came out, there's the like, you know, inside us all we have two wolves and there's, okay, Downey is the MCU for many people, exciting.

27:11I think also it felt like the most morally and creatively like bankrupt decision in the history of cinema. It's the sweatiest thing of all time. Right. Those maybe could both be true at once. You see Doom stick his hand out and stop Thor. Stop. It's like, this is sick. Maybe this will be sick. So there were a couple moments like that in the trailer that did get me hyped and get me jazzed. I agree with you guys that visually it looks appalling. And the fact that it will be coming out of the same weekend is possibly one of the most visually astonishing movies we've had the pleasure of watching. Yeah.

27:43Dune Part 3 is, you know, that's not a comparison that I think is going to benefit Doomsday, but at least we get to see it in Infinity Vision.

27:51Mallory Rubin:I think there's a lot of cap maintenance going on right now. A lot of cap maintenance? Yeah. These two movies, get them all off the books. Right. Then we got all these young kids. Right. Sure. Good deals. Because you can't make these movies for less than$200 million because of everybody's quote. They were like,

28:07Sean Fennessey:we can make Eternals. And you're like, no, you can't. You're going to be in cap hell for the next five years. And, you know, now here we are. We're going to get cleared out. Next year, only three superhero movies. Beyond the Spider-Verse, next summer. Can't wait. Man of Tomorrow, next summer. Also pretty excited. And Secret Wars in December. And that's it. Hope it's great. That's the only time you'll have to hear us talk about superhero movies on this show.

28:27Mallory Rubin:I think Secret Wars is going to nail back-to-back years like that? They're not going to delay it at all? They can't delay it. I don't think they can delay it. I don't think they can delay it.

28:34Sean Fennessey:Okay. Starfighter. Yeah. Did they show a trailer to you? They showed a teaser trailer. Okay. And it was fucking electric. I've heard real mixed reports about this. I'm curious. No, not a joke. Not a joke. It looked like Drive? Be real. It's very much a trailer about the starship. Like, it is very much framed as... So we learn Ryan Gosling's character's name is Cade Oberon.

29:00Mallory Rubin:Cade Oberon? Yeah. Exciting stuff. Great name. Sick name. Cool name. Pitch for the Mariners. What's this guy's doing? Yeah. you know, he's going to be right there. He's going to slot in after Brian Woodham, I think.

29:14Incredible jacket. I'm a George Kirby guy myself. I love George Kirby. Love. I've had Logan Gilbert, Kirby, and Wu on the AL Only Keeper League that Jeff and I co-managed for the last few years. It's been a delightful experience. We've yet to win a title.

29:26Mallory Rubin:Most of those tweets are about his AL Keeper League now. Well, he has Kate Anderson as a keeper, which is like unbelievable. So annoying.

29:32Sean Fennessey:Is Kate over on it? Is he in the bullpen or like where does he put? Yeah, exactly. High-leverage reliever? Yeah, exactly. He's a setup guy. So he's got this sick leather jacket with this kind of skull sigil on the back. And the kid - Does he seriously? Yeah. The kid who I thought from the initial image they released looked like a young child. They're aura-forming our youth. That's my shit. This is incredible. Get your own shit. I thought the kid was much younger based on the image they released. He seems to be like a teen. It was a quick trailer and it was very much like, you know, fastest starship ever built.

30:07Can it be flown kind of a vibe what's your favorite

30:10Sean Fennessey:Sean Levy film I like a few of his episodes of Stranger Things quite a bit I enjoyed obviously Deadpool and Wolverine okay that's number one for you quite loved the pegging joke in Deadpool and Wolverine thought that was inspired yeah why is it funny when Olivia Wilde does it and not when Sean Levy does it Chris answer me that

30:28Mallory Rubin:what's the one that went straight to Adam's song what was that about The Adam Project The Adam Project oh yeah

30:34Sean Fennessey:I'm sorry I kind of like real steel did you ever see that one Hugh Jackman

30:39Mallory Rubin:based on a Twilight Zone episode

30:41Sean Fennessey:no written by Richard Matheson yeah we will get into that shortly okay so you're pumped for Starfighter I thought it looked great I mean we didn't see much and I was also hoping that they would play it again they trot that kid out there no okay no Gosling was out there he like switched jackets he was about a kid yeah the kid the kid who who was like supposed to be his you know lone wolf cub kind of and I thought he was going to be much younger but he seems to be like a full on teen so I don't know I haven't tried that before. We just did this with Mandalorian and Grogan. Yeah, I don't know. The visuals looked good.

31:10They've really barely showed anything. Obviously, this is set in the future of the timeline.

31:14Sean Fennessey:Five years later, apparently, after Rey. Post First Order. So that's new. That's exciting. It gets to play in a different slice of the canon, a different slice of the timeline. And how do you feel about the theory that it's all leading back to the big Rey-Kylo story down the line? That they're not going to do the search for Ben Solo, the hunt for Ben Solo, but they will bring all them back.

31:35Mallory Rubin:Dave Filoni was like, that's not happening.

31:36Sean Fennessey:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that seems completely possible. I don't know. They can't stop making movies about the same characters. We are old. Yeah. It's next year's 50 years of Star Wars. 50, 5-0. 50.

31:51Mallory Rubin:How do you feel? I feel pretty much the same. Yeah. Dead inside? Yeah. I mean, I don't, I mean, like it's funny to just kind of just be sitting here at nearly 50 years old talking about this thing that's been in my life the entire time. But I guess in some ways, most people would say, what a lucky guy. What do you think more people will be celebrating next year? 50 years of Star Wars or 50 years of CR? Why not do it the same? Do it the same day. On the same day? Yeah.

32:17Sean Fennessey:Should we get a big... What's the biggest movie theater we could possibly get to pile in and watch A New Hope together? Why don't you get me the Millennium Falcon? You want me to purchase it? Who owns the Millennium Falcon? Well, there is one at Galaxy's Edge. But that was a recree, as they say. But we could still go and sit in it to celebrate Chris's birthday. I don't think, would you enjoy that? I really don't care for Anaheim very much. That's why you weren't at D23. A couple news and notes out of D23. The Bluey movie, announced for August 6th, 2027. Comes down by Andy Greenwald's younger daughter.

32:48Oh no, that's upsetting. I've never seen a second of Bluey.

32:51Mallory Rubin:The different rendering of it.

32:53Sean Fennessey:Yeah, it does have the heightened, we have a slightly different animation style that differs from the TV show, which I'm not sure I totally understand, but I have a lot of faith in Joe Brum, the creator and writer and director of this movie. Is that coming to your life yet?

33:10Mallory Rubin:Hardcore?

33:11Sean Fennessey:Bluey? Yeah. Oh, been for years. Oh, before pre-Alice, you were just rocking Bluey episodes? No, no. I mean, Alice is five years old. We've been watching it since she was like two years old. I wouldn't say we watch it very much now, but if we popped it on, she would be wrapped. Okay. You know, the fascinating thing about Bluey, of course, is that every episode is eight minutes long. Right. So the idea of a 90-minute film is sort of antithetical to the magic of the show. Interesting. We shall see. That movie will make$500 million easily. That is one of the most encoded things for all parents of the last 15 years that exists.

33:45Sean Fennessey:Tangled live action. Huge news for Alice. Horrible news for this podcast. I'm going to have to do an episode about this movie, which I'm sure will be terrible. But Catherine Hahn is in it, so that's exciting. She rules. She's great. Diego Luna is great. Katrina Balfe is great. Will you be on that episode? March 31st, 2028. I'll be here. You'll be 50 by then. Pixar, four titles. This was the highlight of D23 by, I think, a comfortable margin, the Pixar presentation. We already knew Gato was coming next year. It's about a mafia cat, a cat in the mafia. That's correct. It's about a cat who was in the cat mafia in Venice, Italy.

34:19And when the Pixar presentation started, I just kept, I was like, Gato, Gato, Gato. A while ago, I texted Sean Mahoney and Joe Dato, first pick in the 2027 House of Our Hype Draft. Nobody replied. But I'm on the record. You know what I love about you is that you

34:37Mallory Rubin:don't take disinterest as a sign of hostility. It just means I have to work harder to make this a shared experience. You text a thread with literally zero other Baltimore Orioles fans on it. Updates about an Orioles reliever. And nobody responds. We don't even heart it. I find it comforting. I'll never

34:57Sean Fennessey:respond to it, but I find it comforting.

35:00Mallory Rubin:Three unanswered texts of like screenshot of the standings, screenshot of a guy's batting average, and it's just like, I don't know. Here's how Gunnar's doing. Who gives a shit? I don't care. You did respond once this season. Actually, twice. It was about Pete,

35:12Sean Fennessey:and then you sent me a very rude, very rude follow-up about Gunnar's OPS, and I think I took a brief pause from sending Oriole updates, but now I'm back. Now I'm back. Gato looks amazing. They showed an extended clip and a trailer. It just looks great. It just looks tremendous. And the hand-painted animation style looks beautiful. It looks lovely.

35:33Mallory Rubin:I will see this film in theaters.

35:34Sean Fennessey:You will. I can't wait. Will you be looking for... My wife likes cats a lot. She does. But will you be looking for an underage wife figure a la Apollonia from The Godfather that you can admire?

35:47Mallory Rubin:I was on the sort of like more safe side of that. I wouldn't say so. Spectrum of opinion, I think. You were? I think so. I think Bill was the one who was like...

35:56Sean Fennessey:Jack, let's play the tape. Godfather Rewatchables episode. Let's run that clip.

36:00Mallory Rubin:There was also a time when I don't think we understood maybe people were listening to that podcast.

36:04Sean Fennessey:I think what you said on the episode was I would frequently whip it out and stare at myself in the mirror during those scenes. Yes. That's right. Is that what you said? It is. I remember. I remember listening to it. Incredibles 3. Wonderful news. That's coming out. Peter Sohn directing Not Brad Bird who has a movie later this year for Netflix called Ray Gun. And then a film called Ghost Market. It's like amazing. I like the log line, the idea. Yeah, they showed some footage from this as well. It looked fantastic. The kid who I believe was described by Pete Docter, if memory serves here, I'm going off the dome.

36:36The kid is a, the protagonist is a content creator from Chicago. He goes to Hawaii and winds up in the ghost market. Looked great.

36:44Mallory Rubin:What's the ghost market? A market. Dark web. Run by ghosts. Well, I'm asking pointedly because I had had an unanswered pitch Supernatural. in at Pixar called Wet Market. That was about a bat. Wet. Not a pangolin. What? What? It's a joke. What? About, yeah. Wuhan. Got it. Will you be going to Coco 2 in 2029? I haven't seen Coco 1, so I would be lost. Should we sing Remember Me to him right now?

37:13Sean Fennessey:Let's not. Will they flag the podcast for copyright infringement? Probably. Wouldn't that be fair use? Disney is litigious in that respect. Only if we're commenting on it as we go. We used to be Imagineers. Coco is a wonderful movie. and seeing Miguel aged up as a teen in the little glimpse of the animation that we got was very emotional. Great film. Disney Animation, I guess, confirmed Frozen 3 in 2027, similar to the Bluey movie. This will be one of the biggest movies. Chris and I were talking about how 2027 is an interesting year for movies and there's a lot of stuff, but it feels very adolescent.

37:50Sean Fennessey:Many of the biggest movies, especially that summer, like Minecraft 2, movies like Frozen 3. Like they're they're going to be very big but it's not going to feel like having the Odyssey for example in the center of the culture. Zootopia 3 also announced as incoming. And then you know on Hulu we're going to get Romy and Michelle 2 for the olds. How does that feel? It's crazy

38:09Mallory Rubin:that like Fox doesn't it kind of doesn't exist. Yeah.

38:14Sean Fennessey:They're mostly an IP engine. Yeah. With the occasional original story. You know

38:20Mallory Rubin:they're putting out

38:20Sean Fennessey:Whalefall.

38:21Mallory Rubin:The thing that I noted that was whale fall you in on that you know about that yeah yeah yeah yeah yes I'm excited the big thing from the Fox side that I noticed was that I know that alien earth is doing a second season but that there is no current alien film planned because they've basically shelved Romulus right the Romulus sequel because they can't figure out the director's relationship to Ridley Scott apparently allegedly

38:45Sean Fennessey:we'll talk about that more very soon on this show Romulus was great I agree you saw Romulus I did yeah oh yeah god damn As you know, my tolerance for horror when it is in a genre rapper is much higher.

38:58Mallory Rubin:I don't know why. And if no cats are involved. I don't like seeing the horror and befall a cat. Yeah, that'll be, this is a problem for today's discussion.

39:05Sean Fennessey:Excellent segue. Before we talk about The End of Oak Street, I thought we could talk briefly about The Last House. Yeah, this was homework you added on Saturday. Yeah, and I appreciate you participating. I know you're a very busy woman. CR, of course, had already watched this terrible film. the movie though is fascinatingly timed because it is a somewhat similar premise to The End of Oak Street and The End of Oak Street made me think of The Twilight Zone and this is a very Twilight Zone-y kind of movie it's directed by Louis Leterrier who most recently directed on the big screen Fast X which is an absolute travesty I got the Now You See Me franchise rolling among other things he made a Hulk film and this is a Netflix movie it is the number one movie on Netflix right now.

39:47Sean Fennessey:It stars, oh my gosh, Greta Lee. And Wagner Mora. And Wagner Mora. And it is about a family of four who are suddenly sealed inside their home with no way out. Family of five. Don't forget the dog. Family of five, sure. Not a human being, but all right. Must work together to survive against both their dwindling resources and the mysterious looming threat that is keeping them trapped. Were you happy that I asked you to check this film out? I mean, I thought this movie was quite poor. Quite poor. I was worried it would be too scary for me and that was not my experience with it, though I did find it.

40:18We're going spoilers?

40:20Sean Fennessey:Yeah, who cares? Great. Chris, and we're already spoiling End of Oak Street or do we want to, we wait for that? Let's wait for that spoiler. Okay, I'll keep this very general. Chris, who is a good, good friend of mine. This Chris? This Chris. A person who I have worked with and known and loved for 13, going on 14 years. I would say the same about you, except there's a notable distinction here. You asked me to do the pod. Chris knew that we were doing the pod together. You, who had seen Oak Street, did not tell me that cats were... In peril. ...eaten by dinosaurs in the movie. But Chris did. Is that confirmed?

40:54Yes. Oh, yeah. Dinosaurs are eating a cat on the porch. Yeah. A lot of cats run out of houses, and we don't see everything that happens to all of them. I thought one of them was happening behind the... ...is just being eaten.

41:03Sean Fennessey:Oh, yeah, right. On the porch. And Chris, when I saw him for Rewatchables last week, and these are not... While the cats are very meaningful to me, they were not primary characters, so I think it doesn't count as a spoiler. There's just a lot of chomping and eating in the movie. Chris said to me, second I saw him, walked in to Recordery Watchables, and he said, I want you to know that I saw the end of Oak Street and some bad stuff happens to cats. I don't have the exact timestamps for you, but here are the scenarios. You did not share a similar warning with me. The reason I mentioned this in the last house discussion, I am 39.

41:35I'll be 40 years old next month. I know.

41:37Mallory Rubin:What are we going to do to celebrate? What are we going to do to celebrate you? What spaceship are we renting out for you? I wouldn't have brought that up. The cats or the 40s?

41:46Sean Fennessey:No, I'm glad that Mal said it.

41:49Mallory Rubin:Okay.

41:50Sean Fennessey:You got to own it. That's the whole thing with 40. You got to own it. That's fine. I'll be dead in a few months probably. It's not true. Don't say things like that. Here's the thing Chris didn't tell me. Not only did he not tell me.

42:01Mallory Rubin:Okay, so I didn't tell her about something that happened to a pet in the last house. He didn't tell me about the dog and I specifically asked him, does anything happen to the dog? And he said he didn't remember, which I find shocking given the level of. There's a new phenomenon. It's not even new. I just am ready to start talking about it. It's a phenomenon where instantaneously everybody in the country watches the same two dumb streaming movies every weekend and doesn't remember a single thing about them. That's correct. Prior to The Last House, a great cinematic achievement called Devil's Mouth.

42:30Mallory Rubin:The Devil's Mouth starring Catherine Watson. Nope. Catherine. Newton. Catherine Newton. Who's Catherine Watson?

42:41Sean Fennessey:I think you're thinking of Catherine Waterston.

42:43Mallory Rubin:No, I know I'm not thinking of that, but that's probably why I got the name screwed up. And Lana Condor from All the Boys of Kissed Before. All the boys I've loved before. They play two chicks who go to Thailand. It's turning 50. But I can still rap all the lyrics from Rakim's Know the Ledge. That's true. They go to Thailand to go swimming in some caves and get attacked by sharks. and the night it came out, like several men in my chat were just like, I've already logged this. Yeah. And that's happening with The Last House too. Do you remember what happened to the sharks? I do. I don't remember exactly.

43:18Sean Fennessey:I had so much more fun with The Devil's Mouth than I had with The Last House. The Devil's Mouth is not good per se.

43:25Mallory Rubin:No, but it's like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade compared to this.

43:28Sean Fennessey:It is. My goodness. What a comment. There's significantly more esteemed actors in the last house and that's part of the fake out and it feels like old school streaming bad movie thing where it's like coming off of you know award nominations Greta Lee and Wagner Mora are cashing in by making a Netflix movie that has an 80 million dollar budget and kind of looks like shit and is boring

43:49Mallory Rubin:it felt so COVID-y to me

43:51Sean Fennessey:very and I think there's something in the idea about it being COVID like it does seem like premise wise there's something about social distancing that's part of this story where you can't leave your house you're trapped inside your house with your family and how much do you really love your family and can you survive when you're in these circumstances but that also is something that like we don't want to really be thinking about and I wouldn't say it's an Eddington style like searing portrayal of the challenges of social distancing

44:13Mallory Rubin:put that on the poster I wouldn't say this is Eddington

44:17Sean Fennessey:to some people that might be appealing but it's just a dumb streaming movie and what I didn't realize and we can spoil it is like this is just like a big Kraken Lovecraftian monster movie and I thought it was going to be more drama than CGI monster movie but it's not a good CGI monster movie either. It's not terribly creative. It had a little bit of that feeling of like the third act of War of the Worlds, you know, when they go into Tim Robbins' house. No question. Very similar. And just like a real budget version of that. This movie's, it's not good and it is actually lowering the standard in a way that I find unfortunate.

44:54Sean Fennessey:It doesn't mean that there can't be bad movies that we can enjoy all the time. There can be, but the low effort required to get across the line on a movie like this kind of bums me out. It wasn't like fun bad, right? It wasn't leaning into and embracing being bad. It thought it was doing something actually like interesting and dramatically compelling. I thought to the COVID like social distancing point, I mean, it did come up against just a couple times doing something interesting, like the conversation that Anne and Jason, the husband and wife, the Gretelian Wagner-Mora characters have about, you know, and Past Lives is maybe one of my 10 favorite movies of the century.

45:33So I was like, let's go, Greta. And this was just a bit of a letdown on that front alone, obviously. But the moment where she's like, you're happier. Like, we are trapped in this house. The world is over and you're happier now. And he's like, yeah, kind of. Like, there are interesting ideas inside that if maybe explored more fully and teased out or more centrally positioned as the focus could have been compelling. But it is actually just really weird voiceover taking us into the sentient rain locked us in our house. Also, I think Chris's point about the way people are engaging with a movie like this and maybe you're looking at your phone, you log it, did you even remember that Cass, the beautiful golden retriever, ran out of heart pills and had to be shot in the fucking head

46:20Mallory Rubin:by the Jason character who had a secret gun and then chopped up into pieces and put in the freezer so that they could have the meat on hand in case they needed to eat him one day because their homegrown tomato farm might not be sufficient. And then that meat is taken out and cut up and cubed up for the animal traps that they're using to lure all of the wild animals who have reclaimed the earth. This brings me to, is it okay to watch a movie like this and not think about it to this level of detail? Sure, but I had a hard time I'm doing this, drove me fucking crazy. Why are they able to get through the chimney?

46:58The little kid, when she goes up, first of all, if you're, I'm not a parent, but if you're the foundation of your house and the chimney are crumbling, don't send your daughter up.

47:04Sean Fennessey:Yeah, but you got to get out of the house. You mean just the logic of it not being sealed like everything else is sealed. Exactly, her hand breaks through. And right away, Adam and I paused it and had like a 20 minute conversation about why is the hand breaking through? And then of course it has to so that they can procure food and work the traps and the fishing chair connecting to his prior life as a free fisherman out in the wild, et cetera. They, you use the fire poker to bash the window open. You drill holes in the door. Any breach immediately seals. This is the mythology of how the world works, how the sentient rain works.

47:36But he could just, they could just go in and out of the chimney. The rain doesn't seal the chimney.

47:40Mallory Rubin:It's really interesting to hear you talk so passionately and detailed in such a detailed fashion about this film, because I do think that this is a lens through which you view a lot of stuff. so I'm fascinated to know whether or not you applied the same discipline to Oak Street and whether or not it lived up to your scrutiny I just can't believe you didn't remember what happened to the dog can't believe it

48:00Sean Fennessey:couple of closing notes on the last house I can't do better than David Ehrlich's review of this movie which is so wonderful in IndieWire locating the fact that this is a literalization of the chubby rain idea from Bowfinger this is the idea from Bowfinger which is maligned as a dumb sci-fi concept in a movie that was made over 20 years ago sprung to life. The review was very funny. I highly recommend it. And it's hysterical that they only have two DVDs in their house. That was good. That was good. Yet another Netflix movie extolling the virtues of owning a lot of physical media because you might be stuck without any internet and you won't be able to stream movies anymore.

48:36Crumbled up the old Netflix red envelope. Good little bit there.

48:41Mallory Rubin:The problem for me would be it may not be Annie that we were stuck with but it would be 85 movies about an Italian police commissioner who walks around with his shirt off. Yeah, but then your son wouldn't know what it means to be a man.

48:53Sean Fennessey:Yeah, that sounds like you're set. That sounds awesome. You're set. Okay, don't watch The Last House. It's not very good. But it is interesting that it is coming, it came out the exact same week as The End of Oak Street, which is a movie that I have been anticipating for a very long time. Card-carrying David Robert Mitchell fan. Love It Follows, love Under the Silver Lake, love The Myth of the American Sleepover. And this is also a movie that has been redated multiple times. Yes. Tale of bad test scores from audiences, tale of reshoots. It's been in the ether for a very long time. And it's a movie that got kicked out of Warner Brothers' very successful 2025 into 2026.

49:31Sean Fennessey:It feels extremely inspired to me by a lot of Twilight Zone stories, especially the Odyssey of Flight 33, which is the one where a flight from, I think it's from New York, from London to New York is traveling overnight and it crosses some sort of jet stream barrier and all of a sudden is transported back millions of years it's this great like establishing shot where the plane lowers and we see dinosaurs right underneath them this movie stars Anne Hathaway Ewan McGregor Maisie Stella and Christian Convery it's about a mysterious cosmic event that rips Oak Street a suburban anywhere town into someplace unknown the Platt family soon discovers that their various survival depends on sticking together as they navigate their now unrecognizable surroundings, which are, of course, dotted with dinosaurs.

50:17Sean Fennessey:Yeah. Because they go to prehistoric times. Yeah. Chris, I'll start with you. What did you think of the end of Oak Street?

50:22Mallory Rubin:Well, I was terrifically entertained by it. It has a couple of gear shifts and twists and turns that I think are few and far between in major blockbusters these days. And I've been fascinated to read about the film. It's a movie that has kind of grown in my estimation the more I've thought about it because there's so much discussion about like, that was good, but was it kind of like a ton of effort put into a movie that's kind of, you know, like why did we need a 1980s Amblin porn dinosaur movie? And if you believe in Mitchell as a filmmaker and you believe in his project and what he's been kind of interrogating, like you have to ask yourself with him, why did he do that?

51:03Mallory Rubin:Right. And that's been a really cool question to not only ask myself, but to read other people's takes on it. So I think it's a really, aside from being just like a pretty whiplash, fun summer blockbuster, is very thought-provoking. I agree. I had a good time at the movies. You know, it definitely was more... I think when I saw the... I was intrigued by the concept, and then when I saw the first trailer, I was like, oh, I don't know if this looks very good, actually.

51:30Sean Fennessey:It's not a very good trailer. Yeah, and my enthusiasm really diminished after that. And then I started to get excited again as we were talking about doing the pod. and then I saw the runtime. And now I am never, ever, my enthusiasm has never diminished by seeing like a two and a half, three, three and a half. You know, I like to watch like the four hour Lord of the Rings extended editions every year. My podcasts are three hours. Runtimes don't scare me, but I was like, oh, this is basically an hour and a half. Like when you factor in credits, right? So that was interesting and it changed what I was expecting the movie to be in terms of pace and flow.

52:07And then the movie was exactly that. It's very much a concentrated little adventure to the point where actually it takes a few minutes to, I think, get into it because it opens as a family drama before the action really picks up. It ends with some really thought-provoking questions that made me like it way more. So I think the fact that it presents as a dinosaur film is an adventure family chase. Can we escape? Our reality is suddenly swapped out movie, but also is a kind of in a couple ways, not not as its primary ambition and intention, but as in a couple areas is like a kind of existential and philosophical question about what sort of life you choose to live or grant to somebody else.

52:54I had a good time at the movies. I enjoyed talking about it with a couple people after. And I will happily rewatch it again in the future. And there were little touches inside of it, like the way that the dinosaurs were furry or had their feathers that I thought made it feel, I don't know, very much connected to a certain storytelling history and tradition, but also specific. It felt like its own rendered thing.

53:19Sean Fennessey:Yeah. I really like this movie and I'm fascinated by it. And there is definitely a part of me that also wants to see the clearly extant two and a half hour cut of the movie. Not because I think it will be better. It probably won't be better. Yeah. But I can feel some of the ideas that Mitchell is trying to project and hold on to. And then I can also feel very smartly a movie machine making a very entertaining movie. And both of you guys are like, this is like a fun movie. Yeah. It's like a good time at the movies. And it is that. And it does have some underlying darkness. But you can see the way that it's pitched from the very beginning of the movie.

53:52Sean Fennessey:It shows us a block party in Anytown, USA. and a man turns to Ewan McGregor who plays the patriarch of the family and he's like, you have a beautiful family. And then we see very quickly in short order that like, actually this family is kind of falling apart. You know, that Anne Hathaway's character is working on this Erica Young-esque novel about wanting to flee and find her own personal freedom away from the family structure in America. We see that Ewan McGregor's character has been laid off and that, you know, he's delivering pizzas to make ends meet. We see these - Sneaking drinks. Yes. He's got a drinking problem.

54:23Sean Fennessey:We see - He's got a lot of shame. Yes. two young kids in kind of crisis about who they are and whether or not they're like, they fit in and they feel good enough and, you know, are they bullies or are they the bullied and like, how do they fit into this ecosystem? So it is like, very much the myth of the American suburb, right? Like, it's a continuation of a lot of the stuff and then the movie a little bit dispenses with that and it's like, actually, put all these foibles aside, this is what's going to bring this family together and then the movie takes on a very amblin-spielbergian tone, right?

54:49Sean Fennessey:Where it's all about a family in crisis getting over that to combat dinosaurs in their hometown. Yeah.

54:58Mallory Rubin:I will say that one of the things I admired about this movie is that for as many camera moves as it might crib from Spielberg or even the spirit of Spielberg's visual storytelling, I think maybe more than any one camera movement or split diopter shot that comes up a couple of times, I thought it was an interesting critique and or variation on the idea that like these things are not wonderful creatures who are themselves as disoriented as us in this new world like they're killing monsters and so it turns into pretty much a broad daylight horror movie for uh for most of it and there's a little bit of night stuff but it's a lot of like oh the woman at the barbecue just got eaten you know this you know this guy who you know there's a lot of random and concerted moments of like real violence that I kind of admired the movie for because I could feel the roller coaster that the crowd was on in the theater that I saw it in where they were like this is what this movie is about how they're going to learn to love each other right oh fuck

56:03Sean Fennessey:it's the best component of the movie there are a few shocking moments there's one in particular and we will spoil the movie but there's one in particular very early on at the discovery of the dinosaurs where I don't know. And Anne Hathaway's character and Ewan McGregor's character, after a blackout power outage throughout the neighborhood, they learn that the water is no longer running the morning after. And they're trying to figure out, their dog has gotten off his leash. Starbuck. Starbuck. Shout out Battlestar Galactica. They start roaming the neighborhood in a way that you could in a neighborhood where you knew all your neighbors and you could comfortably cross over through people's backyards and things.

56:37Sean Fennessey:Where a dinosaur is discovered. It's a bird-like dinosaur covered in feathers. And this is a very feral, violent creature. Yeah. And it starts chasing them. And while it's chasing them, it pivots and attacks a neighbor. And it's one of the great hardcore mean kills I've seen in a movie in a while. Just eats her head like a fucking milk dud. It's just shocking when it happens in a great way. I racked up. Yes. Like I, so we, Adam and I went to see this on Saturday and the theater was full, completely full. And the crowd was having, to your point, Chris, a great time. Now, that kill, like, it made me laugh in a really kind of, like, rib-deep way.

57:19And, like, when we were driving home, Adam was like, it was pretty weird that you were, like, maniacally laughing as all these people were being eaten. But that was the, I don't know, there was something about the surprise of the heightened violence that I just found incredibly entertaining. I like how you mentioned earlier, so the surprise of a moment like that, you mentioned earlier just kind of, like, dispensing with the myth of this, like, seemingly picturesque American family. you think of something like the way that they have to in order to seek shelter right away from that these threats that are becoming clear and apparent in real time they have to literally like tear down their house right this this symbol of the life that they've made they have to use the pieces of it much like in the last house they're connected they have to close themselves off from their

58:03Sean Fennessey:community you know they're not working together they have to pull the the planks of wood off the wall in order to board up the windows etc very clever it is it really is yeah there's a lot of stuff like that throughout the movie that is very clever and to me at first i was like oh he's going for spielberg the michael g aquino score is very john williams yeah and then the thing with amblin that is great to me is that it's both it's also joe dante sure also gremlins like there is a those kinds of movies they tend to leaven the outrageous with the warm and this movie's trying to do both of those things i don't know if the original version was a bit more cynical or down beat or harder than the one that we get because we do head towards a slightly sunnier divorce movie

58:42Mallory Rubin:as many Spielberg movies are divorce movies but it's told more explicitly from I think the POV of the wife yes very much we're the one we're going into rooms with her so you kind of watch it from Anne Hathaway's perspective and she's you know she's throwing 99 in this movie she's great

59:03Sean Fennessey:what a summer but for my gal what I really liked about it both in the

59:08Mallory Rubin:human moments like the you know Hathaway losing her book in the basement to the flooding or her reaction to her husband's optimism that they're going to figure out

59:20Sean Fennessey:that's a great piece of

59:22Mallory Rubin:writing yeah that they're going to like it's okay we're just going to sit tight and it's going to like what took us here will take us back and she's like what are you talking about and like and he's like God will abandon us and she's like you only go to church once a year like why are you telling them lives i like that stuff and i also like the fact that the reactions that we were feeling from our theater mates were based on a subversion of expectations as much as it was spectacle so 99 of versions of this movie would just be like check out the fucking dinosaur we cgi'd it to an inch of its life and it's so incredible and its scale is amazing.

1:00:03Mallory Rubin:But they wouldn't have the stones to be like, and then the dinosaur did this. And now where does the story go from here? It would have just been such a linear storytelling exercise. And I felt people reacting not just to like, damn, that's a big dinosaur, to, I didn't, they built up this character and took them away. Or we, you know, didn't think that this character was going to be a bad guy or a good guy. school nuts and bolts. And that is also Amblin, which is just like guys who think really, really, really hard about the mechanics of screen stories. Absolutely. I like with Denise, the Anne Hathaway character, the way that like someone, so you get one of the great dinosaur kills is Mel, the neighbor on the roof.

1:00:51And, you know, we see them pecking and pulling. But then when we kind of shift angles, it's just this like blood smear.

1:00:57Sean Fennessey:It's the next morning. I love that. Yeah, the shot of his roof covered in blood. Incredible stuff. But again, very mean-spirited and well done. Yeah, well before then, well before then, Denise is like, if you threaten my dog, if you look at him the wrong way, I'm going to fucking kill you. So there's the violent intent and the little like kind of heartbeat of some nefarious element between the people in these seemingly happy houses well before you get to the actual tearing apart limb from limb via dinosaur. even something like when Denise and Greg are one of the stretches where the the TRX comes knocks the car in the fire catches the fact that they have to escape there's peril in that moment it's a very tense you know your heart is pounding are they going to be okay but you're not done with that the whole fucking neighborhood is on fire they're like there's a little brief comic beat of did we do that maybe and then there's a moment where Brian is like mom like where are we gonna go oh, what are we going to do?

1:01:56They're coughing. The air is getting thick. They're being choked out. There's the threat of the dinosaur, but also the thing that they caused trying to escape and stay alive.

1:02:05Sean Fennessey:Another brilliant idea about the mess that humans make of the world. Great touches like that. I don't know. And there were little details. Like, I thought the kid who played, I thought both the kids were great. I thought the kid who played Brian, Christian Convery, he had just such an expressive face. He was wonderful.

1:02:20Mallory Rubin:I also like the fact that he was somebody with some unchecked violent urges or whatever it is that's happened between him and this other kid in the neighborhood. And also that, like, they give him this stupid bow and arrow that is completely useless throughout the movie, more or less. And he can't shoot it. He doesn't know what to do with it. Little touches, like, I don't know, the initial, when the parents break back in through the front door and shut it just in time to escape the first potential death bite, and he, like, pisses his pants. And it's, of course you would. But nobody, there's no discussion.

1:02:50Nobody stops to comment. little choices like that I think made the urgency of the moment feel really heightened it's like we just have to get out of here we can't talk about the fact that you need to like change your

1:02:59Sean Fennessey:pants yeah no it's a great point I think um there are constant like a series of moments that show you know kind of man's inability to combat this to your point about them just being straight up monsters that if we were in a encounter dinosaurs it would not be Jurassic Park it would be

1:03:16Mallory Rubin:it wouldn't be the Brontosaurus is so cool it's eating a tree Yes.

1:03:19Sean Fennessey:I just showed Alice that scene the other day, and she was like, this is incredible. And I was like, we can't watch any other scenes from Jurassic Park yet. You can only watch this one. Because she saw the trailer for Oak Street. That's why she wanted to see it. But so, in this movie, you mentioned the bow and arrow. There's a gun that plays a prominent role, though that gun is mostly useless. There's a notable sledgehammer that we think is impactful, and in fact is not at all. and you know full spoiler warning here because I think we have to talk about a very critical event in the movie so if you haven't seen Oak Street and want to you can turn the pot off or fast forward maybe 10 minutes but Ewan McGregor's character is shockingly and I'll say thrillingly killed about two thirds of the way through this movie after we have finally become fully invested in this story and we feel that this family is finally working together and maybe transcending some of the challenges of the first act of the movie

1:04:08Mallory Rubin:at a moment in the movie where you probably I had a little voice in my head being like, are we really going to do 90 minutes of them just avoiding injury from Dinosaur and how many other neighbors, faceless neighbors can get their heads bitten off? So I was delighted to see this. They also, it truly explains the pitch that Ewan McGregor is at throughout this film, which is like, I don't really care if this guy dies. Not in a callous way, but you're just sort of like, this guy's not helping you know he's a little ineffectual

1:04:43Sean Fennessey:yes and

1:04:46Mallory Rubin:also the instant he dies you're like well he's gonna come back in some way you know like this movie did you think that

1:04:50Sean Fennessey:I actually thought that they were gonna pay off him dying in a way that

1:04:55Mallory Rubin:that's where I with all due respect the bad robot part of it kind of comes in and like with inability to ever let anything go you know

1:05:03Sean Fennessey:yeah

1:05:03Mallory Rubin:we should talk about that

1:05:05Sean Fennessey:any thoughts well I just wanna say with no disrespect to you McGregor I don't think he's very good in this movie. I think he's also opposite Anne Hathaway who's just in the zone right now. I know you love him. I know he's very important to you. He should just stop doing parts as Americans. Like he's not American and his American accent is not. It was strange. It's distractingly bad. Yes, it was strange. It doesn't mean he's not an incredibly gifted actor because he is.

1:05:26Mallory Rubin:He's in the Patrick Wilson part.

1:05:28Sean Fennessey:Yeah, that's right.

1:05:29Mallory Rubin:Right. That's right. And I understand like he's a great actor.

1:05:32Sean Fennessey:They needed more of a star than a Patrick Wilson type. Somebody who you can put on the poster and be like, oh, shit, Obi-Wan. Yeah. which I get I think he's kind of the weak link and yet I still was emotionally affected by his death scene I thought it was very impactful anything you want to say about it I thought that he did a good job of you know you used the word shame earlier conveying this and like there was an interesting dynamic inside of the family too of like the mother and daughter and father and son are more often the allied pairs inside of the family unit I love that scene when he comes home from the deliveries at the beginning help me take this off your mom doesn't like to look at it why are you still smoking like all that stuff is like that's also very specific real stuff.

1:06:10Sean Fennessey:Like it's from a bigger movie with more stuff going on and dynamics, but it's specific in a way that I appreciate it. Yeah, and even like, you know, mentioning the God thing earlier and like you only go to church on Sundays, but then Brian, the son is like, well, I believe in what dad is saying. So they captured a lot of that well and I thought that he convincingly played the dad to that son most of all. And a husband who you can see, you know, he's handsome, He's wearing the hell out of that terrycloth polo and short shorts. And you understand maybe the spark that he and Denise once had. And believe that when he, you know, throws himself on top of her to cover her in the back of the car, that they could, like, find that again if she just saw a little bit of something.

1:06:57The confrontation, I think my favorite beat from his character in the movie before the leg chomp into full body chomp was actually the moment where he's like, I read your novel because that really deepens the sense of what he's keeping, what he's not sharing. He's not only withholding his own shame and I got laid off and I'm not enough of a provider for the family. It's I know you think that too, but I'm too embarrassed to confront that and tell you, and you're too embarrassed to tell me, and that makes me more embarrassed. That felt like really true to life in a way that I thought he actually, and they as a married couple, conveyed to us quite well.

1:07:38But then you have the other parts that he's bringing of like, oh, buddy, there's the sweetness with the kids about the dog, but he's also like, leave the dog. You kind of have to be like, wait, this isn't what they need from you.

1:07:49Mallory Rubin:I thought it was probably where the rest of the movie was, was this like, to your point, like this juxtaposition of not only that opening barbecue scene, but everything that we bring into these 80s nostalgia movies of like, man, it was just so much better back then. You knew your neighbors. Like, you know, you were out until the streetlights went on. That's all a big lie. And it's all bullshit. Yeah. And these people were all miserable with each other and way too armed and probably drinking too much and, you know, trickled down economics were starting to impact the ability of guys like this to have jobs or whatever.

1:08:22Mallory Rubin:It's not a social commentary per se, but I feel like there's more of that in there. And if you've seen something like It Follows, which has like a folk horror, not folk horror, but like a folklorish horror, element of in terms of like an urban legend that comes to life.

1:08:37Sean Fennessey:But also in an urban setting, like a kind of bombed out Detroit.

1:08:40Mallory Rubin:Where is this? And like what happened here that something like this could permeate? Yeah, it's the question he asks. Silver Lake is the same thing.

1:08:47Sean Fennessey:Silver Lake is like, we're all being controlled by insidious forces and we're being made to feel crazy because we can't figure out who these forces are. But they're there. But the sort of rabbit hole, the mouse maze is the whole problem of this thing is you get caught up with the maze and you don't think about the wider question. So he has a lot on his mind. And this movie, it kind of, kind of like skips through it at the end. And I just want to cite the eel snake sequence before we talk about the ending really quickly, which I just thought was like very visually inventive and fun and exciting and scary and silly all at the same time.

1:09:27Mallory Rubin:And also a moment where everybody was like, she is stabbing that fucking eel. Yes, and very visceral, right?

1:09:32Sean Fennessey:Speaking of your laughs, Eileen, I saw it with Eileen again on Friday and she was laughing really hard during that scene because Hathaway is just going so hammer on that eel. That was great. I really enjoyed that, the ending. Yes. So, we learn after a little tease about Carl Sagan's cosmos from Maisie Stella's character at the beginning of the movie that in fact, this is a kind of wormhole time portal scenario. Yes. The entire neighborhood has been transported to prehistoric times by a wormhole and wormholes are cropping up in this town and the only way to get back seemingly is to jump through one.

1:10:06Sean Fennessey:McGregor and Hathaway's characters opt not to jump in to one they spot earlier in the film without their children. Right. And then at the end, after McGregor's been killed, they go to the roof of Mrs. Valcourt's house. Yeah. Hardest I've laughed this year in a movie is when Convery jumps off the roof and misses the portal and falls and breaks his ankle. Hysterical stuff. Incredible. Just a great movie moment. I loved it. Yeah. They find their way back up to the top of the roof. Mrs. Valcourt, RIP. She gets killed by some alligator, crocodile, dinosaurs. Tough one. And they jump through. And they jump through and they land back in 1982.

1:10:42Yeah.

1:10:43Sean Fennessey:What, an hour before the event? 20 minutes before the events? Yeah. Right on the precipice, yeah. And Denise, smart gal that she is, has a strong idea, which is that she's going to call as many people as she can to try to evacuate them from the town before the event happens, and she's going to order a pizza and have her husband deliver the pizza to them on the outskirts of town. We don't see any of that. We just see it presented as a possibility, and then there's a flash forward at the end. And we show that Denise has not just saved members of this community, though not all of them, and I wonder how many of them she did save.

1:11:20Sean Fennessey:How many phone numbers did she have memorized of her neighbors is an interesting question. Well, back then. Different time. Probably get through at least eight or ten, right? Probably. She's also written a successful book. That's right. Called The End of Oak Street. About her experiences at The End of Oak Street. She has grabbed alternate universe Greg and brought him into their experience. But this is a Greg without the PTSD of the events that were portrayed in the film. This is a simple man who was a bad husband, who was unemployed.

1:11:50Mallory Rubin:But witnessed the white light thing. He knows that like... Something happened.

1:11:55Sean Fennessey:And he saw Dinosaurs, but mostly on TV. Right. And in addition to that, a character who we have not mentioned is Jeanette, who is a young girl who has been orphaned during the dinosaur onslaught and joins the family in this film. She also escapes, and her family is alerted by Denise at the end of the movie. Jeanette went to get her family. Oh, that's right. Jeanette raced off to get her family. Yeah. And we learn in a very, very fast moment at the end of the film that not only did Jeanette save her parents, but she saved alternate universe Jeanette. And there are now two Jeanettes in this new version of Oak Street.

1:12:35Sean Fennessey:So it's a lot to take in in a very short period of time. I feel 100 % certain with no actual factual knowledge that this is not the way the film ended the first time around. Oh, okay. Interesting. I found this ending very amusing. it did leave me a little bit like the film we'll talk about later this week, that there's a little bit of the market tested. How can we make everybody a little bit happier on the way out the door?

1:13:01Mallory Rubin:It felt kind of JJ-ish to me.

1:13:03Sean Fennessey:Uh-huh.

1:13:04Mallory Rubin:It also opened up a Pandora's box of narrative and ethical questions that you could ask, which is essentially that Denise has gone through a loop, right? Like she escaped the lost world to get back to her suburban town outside of the blast radius. Saves some people, but not everybody. Including herself and her kids. But she does. No. Right. This is the thing is that what she doesn't do is create like a chain reaction where it's the responsibility of each Denise to bring more people out of the zone. and like she's just like we'll do my neighbors we'll do my husband Jeanette's family Jeanette's guy but it seems as though they stop with that and allow a world to be decimated by dinosaurs and environmental change or whatever and then the government gets involved

1:13:58Sean Fennessey:but she wasn't the author of the ethicist column she was just a woman trying to survive with 20 minutes to go I'm just saying

1:14:03Mallory Rubin:that that is something that modern storytelling usually pours over and that this is like there are two Jeanettes it's pretty cool yeah The prestige TV version of this becomes like the Apple TV Plus show Dark Matter, where like every version of the alternate history with your family is something you get to glimpse in this. But I think that I actually thought it was interesting that the movie kind of allowed. Yeah. Thank you for this not being a fucking TV show.

1:14:28Sean Fennessey:Yeah. This is the exact kind of high concept premise that would be dragged out over three seasons and be fucking unbearable to me. And the idea that it's like it's a 92 minute movie full of gnarly kills and it's fun is this is almost exactly what I want. The movie is not perfect, but the fact that it chooses to be this is a great relief to me. I'm sorry to interrupt you. Yeah, no, no, no. So I obviously would welcome and love the six to eight to ten episode version of that that does really like deeply mine all of those questions or the novel version that would spend a lot of time parsing the ethics and the existential, you know, just the quantum like mechanics of it all.

1:15:05I thought inside of this movie, the fact that we just are like, huh, I have some things to think about now was very effective. Of course, they want Greg to be there to complete their family. But in order to bring Greg to them, they deprive the other versions of themselves of Greg. And they deprive that Greg of being with his family. So do they make it out this next time? Does that Denise Audrey Bryan make it out without Greg?

1:15:35Mallory Rubin:Two years later. So they have not, there's not 20 Denise's at this barbecue. So they stopped saving people the first time. Well, who knows? Who knows when they jump through the portal where it takes them, right? Like who knows exactly.

1:15:46Sean Fennessey:Like what else is different in that world? Well, yeah. Or like where they pop out if they go, you know, is it like the TVA with your timelines and stuff? But what chance do they have without Greg in the sledgehammer moment? These are all interesting questions. I think the fact that they - This guy doesn't care. I don't, I really don't. It's just interesting that she sent herself and her kids back in because in order to spare them, then they'd all be sharing Greg. Fascinating. Seeing the two Jeanettes at the end, I thought was a great touch. The fact that Jeanette saved, of course, her parents and her family, but also herself.

1:16:18One of those Jeanettes is with Audrey. They have hit it off in the course of the movie of escaping the dinosaurs. I was waiting for a moment.

1:16:28Sean Fennessey:Is this romantically? Oh, yeah, definitely. Pretty clearly indicating that, right? They're like holding hands at the end. And the kid, the son is like, And Brian's like, oh, shit. Another L for Brian. Tough one. L after L for Brian. Tough scene for Brian. Breaks his ankle. This is not in the movie at all, obviously, but I do wonder if, like, does the two and a half hour version, not actually, I don't actually think this was ever in the movie, but, like, is there a stinger where Audrey, who goes to Cornell to study with Mr. Cosmos himself, Carl Sagan, is, like, in the future, because here's the thing the movie doesn't try to answer at all, and fact goes out of its way to say, there are no answers where did the fucking portal come from who's doing the experiments and I'm like is it Audrey did future Audrey create the tech that opened that portal this is we're in house of our territory here I don't need that though no we need it

1:17:15Mallory Rubin:what Sean and I would do if we had this scenario is we would be like Denise 1 gets Denise 2 out to saddle her with Greg so she could go to New York and become Joan Didion that's exactly right this is literally the plot of Dark Matter are you watching Dark Matter I'm not literally spoilers

1:17:31Sean Fennessey:I'm watching Dark Matter. Your life is so fascinating to me. I had read that book, so I wanted to watch the show. And Jennifer Connelly is one of the great loves of my life. So I was... Is it Jason Clarke? Is he the star? No. It's Joel Edgerton. Yeah. But he does play a character named Jason. Jason 1 and Jason 2 is part of that.

1:17:50Mallory Rubin:Is Jason Clarke in an Apple series of some kind? Yeah, he was in one that came and went. I can't remember. It was like a hostage negotiator or something like that. There sure are a lot of those shows. Apple, they're making a lot of shows.

1:18:01Sean Fennessey:Ted Lasso you guys caught up on that? Haven't started the new season Saving it for myself Like to binge the whole thing So Long time listeners of this show Know that I'm a huge fan of the Twilight Zone Twilight Zone is the I think probably the entry point for me Into Science fiction fantasy Storytelling My dad was a big fan He showed me a lot of episodes when I was a kid And of course the sci-fi channel has run a marathon of Twilight Zone episodes on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day for many, many, many years. They still do it, I believe. And I love movies like this where they're just like really high concept sci-fi fantasy thriller stories that can be explained in one sentence and often lead to outrageous circumstances with a real moral underpinning.

1:18:52Sean Fennessey:And I think this movie has that. I think maybe it doesn't always land the plane, so to speak, in terms of what message it's trying to convey. But it's been interesting because, you know, you many years ago when we were all working together at Graylin put me on to Black Mirror. You were watching Black Mirror when it was airing in the UK.

1:19:09Mallory Rubin:I was watching it illegally. I'm not too proud to say.

1:19:12Sean Fennessey:Well, Statue of Limitations is up. You're free.

1:19:15Mallory Rubin:Yeah.

1:19:16Sean Fennessey:And that show obviously heavily inspired by The Twilight Zone and brought a point of view about technology into the storytelling there. Yeah. And that show is still going. It sure is. three to four to six new episodes every, what, 18 months to two years at this point. I was explaining that to my dad when I was on vacation and he was like, I never heard of it. I was like, never heard of Black Mirror? Did you boot up San Junipero for him? I don't think that's when we would watch together. Great episode. But these movies are coming back, I would say, in a big way, these kinds of stories. And just thinking about what are some movies that would be eligible for this kind of conversation, a bunch have happened in recent years, including It's What's Inside, which was on Netflix, The Invitation, Bird Box, Vivarium, Don't Worry Darling, Companion, Nope, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Barbarian, Black Bear, Begonia, Backrooms, other films with B titles.

1:20:06Sean Fennessey:There's a lot of movies like this.

1:20:08Mallory Rubin:I mean, Obsession is a Twilight Zone episode.

1:20:11Sean Fennessey:Very much so. Guy gets what he wishes for. Yes, he gets a magical object and uses the magical object to make something that goes terribly awry. So it's so interesting because this movie did fine at the box office, but it was kind of buried in mid-August in the aftermath of two of the biggest movies of the year. And I would say it sunk my spirits just ever so slightly, the fact that it didn't really work. Your box office high. Yeah.

1:20:35Mallory Rubin:Tough time of the summer. I mean, it's just like - School is starting for a lot of people or it's like the last week of summer. It was pandemonium at the AMC that I went and saw this at and it was pandemonium for like Paw Patrol, Spider-Man, Odyssey.

1:20:47Sean Fennessey:I'm writing about this in the substack this week about like what is the right time to release a movie? Well, also,

1:20:52Mallory Rubin:because there's so many movies that have come out. Does the idea of this, like, trickle-down effect of movie theater, like, you know, do they need to have a movie in between? Because there was a couple weeks ago between Spider-Man and Odyssey, and I think people were like, how is there not a new fucking movie? Everybody's so used to going to the theaters right now. And now it looks like it's just like, yeah, they were probably right to just steer clear of Brand New Day entirely.

1:21:15Sean Fennessey:That's exactly right. I mean, this was two full weeks after Spider-Man, and Spider-Man is still going super strong. And I think also the Odyssey he only went down like 25 % or something. So obviously they've encountered these two big movies, but there is a real appetite for movies like this, generally speaking. Any general thoughts on them before we share our list? We can do our list quickly, one through five.

1:21:32Mallory Rubin:I was curious about whether or not there was something to the easy to explain but high concept premises for all these films that I think seems to be very in vogue for almost any genre right now, even down to romantic comedy with the one night only thing. Yeah. where you're not going to get a lot of, nor have you ever really, because it's a misunderstanding of cinema history to be like, Mikey and Nicky is what we used to make. But like saying, what is your movie about? And being like, ah, it's two guys and they're having a tough night. That's not enough anymore. You got to be, it's like two guys, but they have a robot maid, you know?

1:22:11Mallory Rubin:That would be the 2026 version. Mikey and Nicky and companion? Who says no? Would watch. Yeah. so I wonder whether or not there's something about the slick box the Twilight Zone episodes come in that Chris loves a slick box Jesus Mallory

1:22:32Sean Fennessey:that's just disgusting I'm leaving that in 100 % she cut that out make it a social clip I agree what's your slick box hall of fame 1 through 10 yeah

1:22:50Mallory Rubin:I'm glad it's a very new international symbol for you have my

1:22:54Sean Fennessey:physical attention

1:22:56Mallory Rubin:I'm trying to think of the last time anyone's referred to it as that like Robert Mitchum who's the last person who like genuinely referred to a woman's waiting privates excuse me as a slick...

1:23:12Sean Fennessey:It's somehow way more upsetting than Slickbox. Way more... Stop, dare you. Waiting for privates? I'm honestly astonished

1:23:22Mallory Rubin:it only took Mal a minute 85 to get her freak on.

1:23:25Sean Fennessey:Yeah, thank you. That was the alternative title for Full Metal Jacket, actually.

1:23:27Mallory Rubin:Was I making a good point or are we glad that we derailed it with Slickboxes? You're always making good points, I think. Always. Always. You were talking about companions and the premise of the movie and how you need that extra element now. Yeah, I think it seems like most movies need some sort of like... Explain it to me on an elevator ride kind of thing. This is a penetrating point that you're making. Sure is. But he slid right in with that logic. I would just note quickly before we do our top fives that a lot, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of the things, not to offend you, that popped into my mind right away here were television shows.

1:23:57In terms of just like...

1:23:59Sean Fennessey:Well, Twilight Zone is a TV show. Yeah. And the concepts that you think of that kind of like, oh, a debtor, you know, paying... Like, I don't know. Obviously, you know, Lost. And you mentioned Black Mirror, but The Lost, Dark, The Prisoner, things like that. Like that's the stuff that just pops into my mind right away. Absolutely. I think there's something to me about the anthological quality of The Twilight Zone. There's a reason they keep relaunching The Twilight Zone every 20 years in an attempt to kind of revive this wonderful delivery system. I didn't say Slickbox, a delivery system for these ideas.

1:24:31Mallory Rubin:That's actually my preferred nomenclature for women's pilots.

1:24:37Sean Fennessey:Excuse me, dear. is your delivery system clean?

1:24:44Mallory Rubin:You fucking corrupt everything you touch. You're like the reverse Midas. You're like rogue, but bad. Yeah, I mean, I've got enough gray hair. I just drink some gray now. It's true.

1:24:55Sean Fennessey:Almost a southern belle. Not quite. Not quite. Will it be southern belle rogue? Or more goth rogue? That's a good question. What do you think?

1:25:05Mallory Rubin:Well, Indy is... Where is she from? Please don't make her do like an SEC accent. That's all I'm saying. What if she's a huge fan of Auburn? Sure. Yeah, War Eagle. Sure.

1:25:16Sean Fennessey:I just like put her on... Do you love when Gambit says, Mon Cher? No, I don't love Gambit at all. Well, he will after X-Men 97. Are you participating in the X-Men character rankings that the Midnight Boys are doing? I wasn't asked. Well, the Gambit, it was a big Gambit.

1:25:32Mallory Rubin:I've watched Charles talk about it online, but I've not been asked to participate.

1:25:36Sean Fennessey:Outside the top 25 X-Men characters? For me? Yes. Crazy. You don't think so. 25? No. Even Charles walked it back. He said 22. Yeah. Midnight Boys cooking lately. Midnight Boys are the best. They're the best.

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1:27:40Sean Fennessey:Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice. I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyer's rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. I like these movies. Some of the biggest movies of all time you could deem Twilight Zone movies. Yeah. And also there's a lot of hidden gems that have these ideas.

1:28:15Sean Fennessey:Titanic? Well, that's based on real events. What if it went down? I like it. That is a log line. That would have occurred to Ron Sterling since it actually happened. 40 years before the creation of the Twilight Zone. What feels like it, what's necessary for a movie to be eligible for this? Is it like, we don't, there has to be an element of like, we don't realize what's going on and neither do the characters. How important is that? There has to be something broken about the world that makes the world not quite like our own. Yes, right. Something about the reality has fundamentally shifted. And I think moral recompense is a big part of it.

1:28:43Sean Fennessey:There has to be a sort of like, there is a kind of dawning realization moment where not only is the world not like our own or not like what we perceived it to be, but there are consequences to that. Are we allowed to have picks on our list that are the same as each other? Yeah. Or no? Because I have one that's the same as yours. Yeah, and you should talk about it. Groundhog Day. I probably would have had that higher on the list. I put it at five because I wasn't sure if I was allowed to include it because it's on your list. Spoiler. No, that's okay. I mean, I think it is one of the greatest examples of it and it's an uncommon version of it.

1:29:19Sean Fennessey:This is number two on my list. because it's comic. It's hysterical. I watched this movie 700 times when I was a kid. Me too. Probably. It was one of the movies, along with Clueless and Rescuers Down Under, that I was just every other weekend when I would go to my dad's house, childhood divorce. I would just boot up all the time. It was just a big part of my life. And I think that the comedy paired with the premise, it was a great way to be entertained, but also to get your mind turning when you were a young person. So indelible to this day. Yeah. You like Crown Hog Day? Yeah. Pretty good movie.

1:30:03Mallory Rubin:Really good. That was my new character. How long do you think you'd let me get away with that being my character? Just a restrained guy? Just a guy who's like, yeah, I thought it was good.

1:30:17Sean Fennessey:I mean, you're definitely not allowed to do that ever.

1:30:22Mallory Rubin:Here's my thing about Groundhog Day. The hilarity comes from the attention to detail in the premise. The hilarity comes from what does Tobolowsky say when he steps in the puddle every time?

1:30:34Sean Fennessey:Whoopsie. No, he says oh my god. I can do the entire Ned Ryerson spiel if you want me to do that but I can't do Watch out for that step because it's a doozy. Needle nose Ned, Ned the head. Come on, buddy. Case Western High. Don't tell me you don't remember me. I sure as heck fire remember you. Tough scene there where we did Groundhog Day rewatchables with Issa Rae during COVID. Me, Bill, and Issa, which was really fun. But I didn't feel comfortable enough with Issa because I didn't know her to do all the Stephen Tobolowsky bits. So I'm happy to do more of them here with you if you'd like. Great.

1:31:10The floor is yours.

1:31:11Sean Fennessey:Okay, I'm done. Groundhog Day is really, really funny and very affecting. Oh, yeah. And the character does feel real change. Okay, what's your number four? Oh, geez. Okay, my number four, I don't know how strongly I feel about the exact order. These could go in any order.

1:31:25Mallory Rubin:That's fine. I have Get Out next. Have you heard of it? I've seen it. You picked some hitters today. Have you heard of it? It feels like a P.L. movie has to be on the list, right?

1:31:35Sean Fennessey:Yeah, I mean, very clearly inspired by The Twilight Zone, so much so that he attempted to reboot it. Exactly. Felt like The Sunken Place needed to be present on the list. did you consider anything from the appeal canon on your top five? I had Us on my long list which I think is feels the most Twilight Zone-y to me of all of his movies this sort of like what if doppelgangers arrived and what they would tell you about how the world really works like they're sort of like underworld of that movie which is such a thorny movie and is like maybe not totally narratively thought through or like executed or explained properly to your point about Oak Street earlier but has so much invention I mean Get Out and Nope also have just an incredible amount of invention.

1:32:16My next film is one of my favorite movies from the last decade, Arrival, one of my favorite Villeneuve movies. He's my probably favorite filmmaker right now.

1:32:27Sean Fennessey:Is that true? I think so. I've been thinking about it a lot with him and Nolan because doing the whole Nolan rewatch has been such a joy and he's obviously in the, you know, at the top of the list as well. But I just love Villeneuve's movies. Absolutely love them. And I think Arrival is gorgeous. I'm like reluctant to say why I picked it because it is a spoiler, but I guess what I will say without getting into, how can I do this without spoiling this wonderful movie for people who haven't seen it? It's not just, oh, the aliens are here. There is an element to it about how we perceive how a certain character, Amy Adams' character, perceives time.

1:33:06And when all of that clicks into place and you realize either when you're reading the excellent Ted Chiang short story on which the film is based or watching the movie, it is a really gobsmacking, gut-wrenching examination of the choices you make and the decisions you make about your life when you have a certain degree of awareness out of time and sequence with what other people know. It is really just great.

1:33:38Mallory Rubin:it's still probably I don't know if it's his best movie I really go back and forth but it's among his best films it's among the best films of this yeah what would you have at the top of the list right now Doom Park 2

1:33:50Sean Fennessey:of my favorite Villeneuve yeah you're a big enemy head I think Sicario is the best I have Sicario film he's made yeah of course you do Eileen and I rewatched Blade Runner 2049 that movie's great and that's a movie that I was not very big on for a very long time but I really liked it on a revisit it and that's a been that movie's very culty now i think among young people who are younger than us that's a huge film um enemy was on day one i was i was in line saluting it and yeah the dune movies we'll see i think how three turns out i think will impact that conversation i i don't have a single doubt yeah not one we saw man and i saw the first seven minutes and it's it was beyond it was absolutely thrilling i will be astonished if that's not my favorite movie of that you're astonished.

1:34:35Sean Fennessey:Okay, number two. Another one I don't want to spoil and thus it makes it difficult to explain why it's on here. My number two is Moon from 2009, a movie that I absolutely love. Incredible Sam Rockwell performance. Really, really great. We actually, we recently had an opportunity to talk about this, Chris, on the space movies draft that we did for House of R. This is a Duncan Jones film. How do I talk about this without spoiling it? I kind of have to spoil it. It's really hard to explain why it's on here otherwise. It is a movie that presents an interesting, very compelling twist about identity.

1:35:09I'll leave it at, I'll say that. Because I don't want to blow it for people who haven't seen it. Though I bet most listeners of this podcast in particular have seen Moon. Confronting a different version of yourself. And learning about that version, about you, and about the larger apparatus that allows things like that to happen. Very Twilight Zone-y. and just a really great piece of science fiction. I think it's fantastic. And then my number one is The Truman Show, which, again, the order of this list could change, but I knew Truman Show had to be in the top five here. You know, the idea that your life is being filmed for other people's entertainment.

1:35:47The reason I think it ends up being really high on my list, in addition to just being on it, is because not only does it, I think, really honor and meet the prompt of something that could be the premise of a Twilight Zone episode, but is also kind of right away, really its own fully realized thing that then becomes a reference point in its own right. It's the one that like got in my head the most when I was young. This came out in 98. So I was, let's see, I was 12. So I saw this when I was like in middle school. I watched it a bunch of times and I constantly for like years after that, this is a really incredible like Loki-esque seismic narcissist thing to say, but I would just walk around being like, are people filming me?

1:36:28Is my life a reality television show?

1:36:29Mallory Rubin:I'm looking at you now. Exactly. It kind of is now. You know, lots of people at D23 just being like, world star. World star? Look at you. You know who that makes me think of? Matt Borkus. He used to say world star a lot. Did he really? Yeah, missed that guy. Wow.

1:36:43Sean Fennessey:A name I've not heard in a long time. Okay, CR, top five.

1:36:48Mallory Rubin:Let's go number five with a movie that's coming out in theaters in a couple of days, but premiered last year on Letterboxd's newfound video store shelf or whatever they were calling that where you could stream films from Letterboxd, and it's It Ends. which is a young director named Alexander Ellum's foray into a very, very beloved subgenre for me, which is road trip horror or loop and also sub subgenre time. Have you seen this? No. This is about a group of friends who are on a road trip before they all go off to different points in their, in their young adult lives and the road trip never ends.

1:37:26Mallory Rubin:They wind up on a loop and they have to figure out what the rules of this looping road are and why they're there and how they get out and what their options are for dealing with that. And it's very much like, what if your road trip went awry? Number four, not unlike Groundhog Day. It's a great pick. I picked Field of Dreams, which is a very, very beloved and sweet movie. Mallory and I share this film being among our favorites, obviously. The best. The Field of Dreams classic in Iowa just relaunched the Phillies season. So I'm very grateful. Relaunched the Philly season? Yeah, rebooted it. I think it rebooted it.

1:38:02Sean Fennessey:Is Bryce still playing right field?

1:38:04Mallory Rubin:I mean, he's just working through some stuff.

1:38:06Sean Fennessey:Is he playing right field?

1:38:08Mallory Rubin:They're moving him around a lot. Yeah. You think that's a good choice? He just has a lot of pain that's difficult for him to manage, I think. Yeah, I can relate. Field of Dreams has a Twilight Zone premise. It's like, what if a guy was out in a cornfield and heard a voice that told him to build a baseball stadium? I should have picked this as a great... Or is it merely the representation

1:38:27Sean Fennessey:of a delusional man slowly breaking. There you go. An acid casualty from the hippie days

1:38:32Mallory Rubin:whose excesses have come back to haunt him.

1:38:35Sean Fennessey:I think that's a reading of the film. You know, there's that, God, what is the movie that is a very upsetting thriller that is cut to seem like a charming romantic comedy? Is there like a version of Taxi Driver that's just like, he's the taxi driver. There's a version of Field of Dreams that is cut like Zodiac. Yeah, where he's like, his daughter's like, dad.

1:38:51Mallory Rubin:Yeah. Field of Dreams. Number three for me is 1968's The Swimmer.

1:38:56Sean Fennessey:This was sitting at number one on my list, and I took it off at the last second. Happy to see you put it on there.

1:39:01Mallory Rubin:An adaptation of an adored and hallowed John Cheever story.

1:39:06Sean Fennessey:Which we will be discussing. No, Amanda. We will talk about Cheever as much as we damn well please today. Short stories rise today.

1:39:13Mallory Rubin:Okay.

1:39:13Sean Fennessey:Well, right now.

1:39:14Mallory Rubin:Well, my 50th birthday is already going to be a celebration of the American short story. I heard about it on this podcast. Will you be reading? I listened to this pod, just FYI.

1:39:23Sean Fennessey:Do you think men and women should read Cheever stories? Of course I do. Yeah. I hope to be invited to participate in the grand reading of the short stories. That would be rough if you were not invited to Sierra's 50th. What would that say? Chris's life. I would be very hurt. Very hurt to not be included.

1:39:39Mallory Rubin:I'm going to have a rave. I've decided. A rave? Like with like ecstasy? Starts at midnight. I won't be there. No. Number three, The Swimmer, directed by Frank Perry, who's a director. I've just kind of gotten into, honestly, with The Last Summer, which got released on 4K recently or on Blu-ray recently. The Swimmer stars Burt Lancaster. It's this guy, Ned, who's at a pool party in the suburbs. This is very Mad Many, if you're interested. Have you seen this on Reddit? And he's hanging out and he's looking out at the suburban landscape, the suburban lawns. He's like, I bet I could swim all the way home just jumping in people's pools.

1:40:20Sean Fennessey:Eight miles.

1:40:21Mallory Rubin:And it turns out to be something of an allegory. for the experience of life and then perhaps literally goes through some sort of transformation as he does this.

1:40:32Sean Fennessey:This is a rare case of a thing that I read when I was 15 and then I watched the movie and had completely forgotten that I'd read it and then halfway through the movie I was like, oh! I know exactly what this is. Wonderful movie. Very upsetting though. Number two, Shutter Island.

1:40:50Mallory Rubin:You're in a real Shutter Island, kid. you know what it's a fucking awesome film yeah and this is Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Dennis Lane's thriller where Leonardo DiCaprio is going to investigate a crime at a mental institution on an island off New England where is he the criminal this movie rules this movie is great one of the great twists very upsetting very sad movie very very sad movie truly one of the saddest movies of the 2010s awesome ruffle in performance and finally my last Twilight Zone inspired film is the game. David Fincher's How Fucked Up Are Yuppies movie about a rich man in San Francisco who has everything so his brother gets him an experiential night of excess and violence for his birthday.

1:41:36Mallory Rubin:So real that he forgets and or disbelieves that it's a game at all.

1:41:42Sean Fennessey:Incredible pick. Mel, I think I've asked Chris this before, but would you do the game? Oh yeah, of course. You would? Yeah, for the experience.

1:41:51Mallory Rubin:No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't. The first thing I would do if I was doing the game with you is I'd be like, make your own food. Fuck. That's a wrap. Make your own food. That's a wrap. I can make my own food. I just prefer not to. You know what I tried to do the other day? What? Do the homemade ice cream thing with the frozen melon and the heavy cream that you pour into it. Because I've been served a lot of Instagram reels. Oh, you got TikTok pilled for your food? and then I did it with the pineapple and it was delicious, but it was a lot of work for one spoonful. I know, this is the thing with cooking for one and cooking for two is very tough.

1:42:27Mallory Rubin:It's because it's a lot of effort. It's a lot of effort to be like, in the time that it took me to make this, eat it and clean it up, I could have just gone to... I feel like the trick there is, and I say this as a person

1:42:36Sean Fennessey:who doesn't really cook very much anymore, but when I did in my 20s, I cooked a lot more before Eileen learned how to cook. I try to make things that keep. You pretty much only make meals. You invented meal planning. No, obviously I learned from someone else who told me this, but it was always like make food that you can eat for three, four, five days in a row after that. But this is so contrary to one of the famous Sean Fennessey mantras, which is I work too hard to eat leftovers. I don't eat the leftovers, but other people enjoy the leftovers.

1:43:03Mallory Rubin:Do you consider it a leftover if it just hasn't been prepared yet? If it hasn't been prepared yet? Well, there's a big trend in food content right now of making stuff to be frozen. And then it's like now you have your burrito filling right here. You just throw it right in the pan.

1:43:19Sean Fennessey:Do you consider that leftovers? I don't think that's leftovers, no. Let's just get ahead on the week. Because it hasn't been fully baked.

1:43:26Mallory Rubin:So why don't we start our own food delivery service called Slickbox Inc. And it's just like people get frozen burrito fillings from us.

1:43:34Sean Fennessey:And we would put little box stations around and just say, reach into my box. Exactly. See what's inside. Slide right in. Yep. I think this is a billion dollar idea, genuinely. Yep. No need to grease up. Seed investment indeed. it's wet inside

1:43:50Mallory Rubin:why don't you give us your list

1:43:52Sean Fennessey:Rod Serling you know Rod Serling lived in Ithaca and first of all Alan Sepinwall has a great book coming out about Rod Serling very soon, Biography of the Man and there was a documentary that premiered I think at South by Southwest about Serling called Serling but I don't think it has been acquired yet I'd encourage people to look into that Serling of course didn't just write The Twilight Zone And he also wrote movies like Planet of the Apes, which might be the single best Twilight Zone-esque movie. I didn't pick it, but I wanted to honor it. My number five is The Vast of Night, which we talked about quite a bit during COVID.

1:44:26Sean Fennessey:It's one of my favorite movies that came out that year. 2020. Andrew Patterson, who has a new movie out this week called The Rivals of Amzaya King, starring Matthew McConaughey. Did you like that film? I thought it was less successful than The Vast of Night, which is about two teens in New Mexico who find themselves on a radio program, maybe or maybe not making connection with life beyond our own. It's really good. You haven't seen this movie? No. You'd like it a lot. Terrific movie. Incredibly well made even though it's very modestly budgeted and really feels like a totally original voice. Highly recommend for you Mel.

1:44:59Sean Fennessey:Interesting. Number four is a movie that I think our friend Brian Raftery put me onto or maybe it was Tracy Letts or maybe not. I can't remember who put me onto it but it's called Repeat Performance. It's from 1947. It predates The Twilight Zone. it's a film noir it's about an actress who the movie opens with her at a New Year's Eve party and she's just murdered her husband okay and she goes to the party and pretends like nothing has happened but she knows something is wrong and she somehow sort of magically enters a time loop and we see variations on the experience that she's had this is an extremely modern movie made 80 years ago features great performances by Lewis Hayward and Joan Leslie as the woman at the center of the story.

1:45:48Sean Fennessey:It's based on a novel that came out in the 40s. Sounds great. Relatively anonymous director, Alfred L. Worker. Never heard of this movie. Me neither. It's really really good and I highly recommend you check it out. Number three is The Quiet Earth another movie that I got put onto recently. New Zealand film directed by Jeff Murphy about a man who wakes up this is not on like many many stories like this. In effectively an apocalyptic scenario. Everyone is gone. No one has survived. Why is that? Not unlike Night of the Comet is like this. There's a lot of movies that are 28 Days Later obviously is like this.

1:46:22Sean Fennessey:This one being set in New Zealand, you see some like particular cultural differences that are portrayed, but really chilling and very, very well-made movie. My number two is Groundhog Day, of course. And number one is Seconds, which is a science fiction dystopian melodrama. Yeah, Frankenheimer. It's John Frankenheimer directed it. It stars Rock Hudson. It's about a man who receives a phone call from a friend who he thought was dead. And the man says, there is a procedure that you can get that will put you in a new body and a new life. And you can be happier, more beautiful, and richer than you ever possibly imagined.

1:47:00Sean Fennessey:And Rock Hudson says, sounds great, sign me up. And he signs up, and there are devastating consequences for this decision. Very traumatic. It is sort of Shutter Island before Shutter Island in a lot of ways. but I thought I would just try to give a couple of recommendations. Those are great. A little off the beaten path. But, you know, there's a whole host of movies. M. Night Shyamalan's career is indebted to this. You know, Edge of Tomorrow is a great version of this. Memento, to your point about Nolan, is very much one of these kinds of movies. The Invitation. The Invitation, yes. Many Stephen King stories.

1:47:31Sean Fennessey:You know, The Mist, to me, is a very specific version of it. Palm Springs, a rom-com that has a very Twilight Zone-y premise. and I also wanted to give a quick shout out to directors I know you like a lot Benson and Moorhead who you know somewhat unfortunately to me have been subsumed into the Marvel machine and now only seemingly direct episodes of Daredevil and Moon Knight but they had a run of five movies in the 2010s. They still come back to it though. I feel like they haven't like completely left. They haven't made a movie in four years which is the longest gap that they've had because they've been making these TV shows but they made these films Resolution, Spring, The Endless, Synchronic, and Something in the Dirt that are all terrific ground level high concept sci-fi movies that I highly recommend people check out.

1:48:19Sean Fennessey:Endless and Spring specifically. Those are the two best. I agree with you. I think that's it. Great stuff. Thank you both for being here. Let's go now to my conversation with Will Poulter.

1:48:33Sean Fennessey:Will Poulter is here. Very excited to talk to him. I want to start a little bit early in your career before we get into Union County, because I think it might inform some of the choices that you're making now. So you started working as a teenager before you were a teenager, really. And I always ask actors and filmmakers, what was the first thing you saw that made you want to do the work? Do you remember seeing something and making you think I could do this? Wow. Yeah, that's such a good question. it was probably if i'm being honest it was probably kind of like a series of black and white kind of westerns i can remember as a kid sitting like irresponsibly close to the tv and watching uh black and white westerns just non-stop and i think maybe at the age that i was watching them i wasn't even necessarily sure what was real and what wasn't if that makes sense i think that was probably my sort of earliest former kind of like inspiration uh i guess um do you do you did you have family members who liked that kind of thing i don't even think i did necessarily um that like primal cowboys thing that you see on tv yeah yeah and and and obviously like you know i think in in fairness there's a lot of uh there's a lot of messaging within those films that is you know respectively quite problematic and and and isn't um necessarily accurate whatsoever but i think if i'm honest that's probably the first sort of exposure i had to film before i even necessarily knew that it it was film um and uh and then i think you know within that i sort of started to kind of admire different performances and gravitated to ones that felt more kind of authentic and whatever else um and then i think you know i've spoken about this so many times before, but I think the first film that I was very aware of being a film that was probably the biggest influence on me was Hook, which remains my favorite film of all time.

1:50:26Sean Fennessey:Wow. Yeah. What is it about Hook that clicked for you? You know, I - Just wanted to be a lost boy or - Yeah, I think so. A little bit. You're a little Rufio energy. I got it. Yeah. That's the best thing that anyone's ever said to me. I think I did want to be a lost boy. I think that being a kid at school who didn't necessarily gravitate towards traditional kind of academic subjects, certainly didn't excel in any of them. And then seeing imagination and play being celebrated so much and creativity being championed in this space that was Neverland and by this group that was the Lost Boys. I was like, oh, I think those are my people over there.

1:51:06So it was a little bit of that. There was also some stuff, I think, you know, in relation to Peter and his relationship to his son, Jack, that kind of mirrored me and my dad's a little bit. And so, yeah, psychologically, I could have a field day on that film. But it was definitely the one that kind of grabbed me by the heart from early.

1:51:27Sean Fennessey:This was something I thought about thinking about you choosing to make Union County, which is when you're a teenager and you're working, How much were you thinking about not just how to learn about the craft of acting, even before maybe you're studying it in school, but also how to have some agency in your career where you're getting to do things that you want to do when maybe you're not even old enough to know what you want to do? Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. Man, still kind of figuring it out as I go along, to be honest. And I think, I mean, I can't speak for anyone who's trained because I'm not.

1:52:04I wouldn't want to speak for anyone anyway, but everyone's experience is different. But I think regardless of whether you've trained or not, my understanding is that you don't necessarily have the blueprint or a kind of guidebook as to how to handle the career side of things. You do put that in the hands of agents and managers and often your family play an influential role. I know I was very lucky that my family sort of didn't really have an interest in entertainment and media, but were very supportive of me doing it because I think they took one look at my grades and were like, well, he's not going to do much else.

1:52:40Sean Fennessey:But did you raise your hand and say, I want to do this? Was it that active a choice? I think so. Yeah, I did really. And my family, for the most part, are in sort of like healthcare sector and caretaker roles or like full-blown medics. My mom was a nurse and my dad is still a professor of cardiology. And so they were very much in that direction. And I think they just saw at a young age that I was not necessarily showing signs of following in their footsteps, but I had this like passionate interest in drama. I mean, like nauseatingly so, like I was that precocious kid who was just always performing all the time and doing impressions and this, that and the other.

1:53:18So they were like, okay, he wants to do drama, big, big shock. And I just got very lucky that when the first opportunity rolled around, which was Son of Rambo, which is my first film, my mom and dad were incredibly supportive. and you know they they allowed me to do it and the school that I was at were kind of cool with me taking that time off and it was during my summer holidays to be fair but it worked out um and then the next thing I did that sort of required I guess some kind of disruption to my family life was was Narnia and my mum came with me so did my little sister and I'm so grateful to them forever for doing that um my dad did like a sabbatical in Australia like so all of these these things, you know, required, I guess, my family to make really major sacrifices.

1:54:04And I don't take that for granted either. And between them and agents that I've been with basically ever since 2010, the same team, they've just been incredibly helpful and supportive. And I am very, very fortunate with the system I have around me.

1:54:20Sean Fennessey:I'm curious about that right now then, because from the outside, it seems like you're very adventurous in the kind of things that you're trying to do. Very varied. Your filmography, film and television is kind of all over the place. Seems like you have a real interest in filmmakers, but maybe you can demystify the process, at least for you, because we hear that actors, they get scripts from agents and they read them and they decide that they want to make a movie or not. Like, is it just that simple for you? Do you go hunting for talent that you like and try to connect with them? Like, how do you chart a career in your 30s when you have, you know, some clout you're accomplished um that's kind of you i mean i i don't know i mean you know if i can use you know union county as an example um which uh is written and directed by adam meeks that that came to me um in sort of short film format together with the screenplay for the for the feature and adam at that point had not yet made a feature film and so inherently just on paper you know in the context of things that might you know arrive on your desk so to speak there's already certain like risk attached to that right and so you're you're you're reading the script trying to uh analyze it you know kind of in isolation of the director's sort of uh level of experience just like what is the quality of this script and it was so beautiful and so then what the short film did i think was provide something of a kind of proof of concept for how this very uniquely kind of crafted story would work.

1:55:50And the short film, Union County by the same title, really was, you know, an exhibition of just how Adam might go about making the feature. And really the combination made it a sort of undeniable kind of opportunity for me. And sort of the last remaining question, even though I had a strong instinct based on how it was crafted, the last remaining question for me is, how is this story that is going to be made in collaboration with a recovery community and involve the contributions of real participants of this recovery program, you know, how is the director going to go about that? Is he going to practice the sort of sensitivity and respect and level of care that I think is required?

1:56:37And within about five minutes of talking to Adam, I knew that was the case. The other thing, and I've said this to Adam as well, the other thing that I really appreciated is that yes he's a first-time filmmaker but there wasn't so much deference that he was going to like kind of willingly just sort of give it away to me he was like I want to meet you and make sure that we're on the same page because Adam's perspective I think was I care deeply about this and I'm not just going to hand it off because you've done a few more movies than me and it's my first time I'm going to make sure that you know me and you are going to sort of really link arms over this and do this together.

1:57:14And that was further sort of affirmation of the fact that he was the guy I wanted to work with, if that makes sense.

1:57:21Sean Fennessey:It does. So why did he want to make it with the community? And why did you want to make it with the community? Like, why was that intriguing to you personally? I know Adam is from Ohio and he's seen it firsthand what is portrayed in the film. But for both of you, I'm curious about that. Yeah, it's a really good question. As you say, Adam's from the area and he's had friends and family kind of affected by the epidemic, the opioid epidemic, which was really kind of taking a hold of folks, you know, around the time that he was out there visiting family. so his grandmother had got sick I believe in 2017-2018 and he was seeing you know the effects of how this opioid epidemic was you know impacting people and at that time he was you know spending a lot of time in the area and he was at a folk music concert in somebody's house which is kind of actually like more of a typical thing in Ohio than than maybe other places and it's it's a beautiful thing that is something of a kind of like cultural practice out there.

1:58:25He was introduced to Annette Dio, who is the real life director of this adult recovery program in Ohio. And, you know, I think Adam's experience, I was speaking for him, but, you know, we've sat side by side a lot of Q &As. And one of the things he sort of says is that at that time, he didn't have to look far to see how the opioid epidemic was, you know, contributing to a lot of kind of like devastation and a lot of like irreparable damage. But in the headlines, there was less attention being paid to the recovery efforts and the success that was being had and the way that certain folks were getting back up on their feet.

1:59:05And when he was introduced to Annette and had the opportunity to kind of walk through the recovery space and see the facilities, meet some of the service providers and speak to participants of this program. He was thinking, this is something of a counter narrative to what is going on right now. And there's an opportunity here to sort of shed light on this really workable and really effective program that is helping people get back on their feet. And the best way to do that is to make it, you know, with the community as opposed to about. There's a distinct difference, I think, particularly in the entertainment industry, You know, sometimes I think we're all at risk of sort of descending on an area and kind of even inadvertently sort of exploiting or extracting information and not necessarily being as careful or as considerate of what that does to the community who are the sort of subject matter, if you like.

2:00:00and Adam's approach was always to be very conscientious about making sure that the film was only ever sort of capturing platforming and celebrating the success of the program but not infringing on the process for the participants you know the path of recovery for the participants in this community is hard enough and you know no one needs to be burdened with the responsibility to shoulder narrative beats or invent a dramatic moment or whatever else and so i think his approach was always to make it you know in collaboration and sort of weave the fictional elements into what is an otherwise kind of uninterrupted um process and um yeah it was something that i think you know he just did with like the utmost diligence and conscientiousness And he did it really in collaboration with Annette Dio, who, because she is the real life director of this program and also kind of one of our lead actors, she was able to sort of bridge the two worlds and make it happen.

2:01:04And they're sort of our two leaders in that regard.

2:01:06Sean Fennessey:So why did you want to do it, though? Like, what is interesting to you about working with nonprofessional actors, working within a community that is being portrayed in a, you know, fictionalized but seemingly very authentic version of that story? Because it does feel very different from doing a studio movie, for example. Yeah, I think. Well, it provided me with an opportunity to sort of spend time with and speak to people with the lived experience of what, you know, I was being tasked with kind of representing. And I think, you know, I'm very, very lucky that the doors were kind of opened in that way.

2:01:47Annette Dio has such a immense amount of trust and respect within the community. She's kind of heart and soul of her community and, you know, everything sort of orbits around her a little bit. And so there's this sense, you know, in the local area, if you're good by Annette, you're kind of good with us sort of thing. And we were all benefactors of that. And the reason I think I wanted to be part of this way of doing it is that I think the alternative has been done and it feels a little bit less humanizing on screen. it feels like often it runs the risk of sort of reaffirming certain stereotypes or contributing to some of the stigma that exists.

2:02:30Whereas I think by allowing folks with lived experience to sort of represent themselves to the extent that they do in this film, you know, we kind of avoid that to a large degree. and I think that what Adam does really really well is he he wasn't interested he wasn't interested in sort of dramatizing or fictionalizing you know as much as possible it was about capturing the kind of mundane realities of recovery and that in itself cuts against the grain of how we often focus on the subject of addiction and recovery in tv and film and For me as an actor to be a part of that was just so exciting. I felt like I got a much better understanding of the subject matter as a result.

2:03:16I think I got closer to my character and was able to do something that just felt more authentic. and in summary like as a collective I think we truly felt this sense that we all made it together as opposed to this sort of slight disconnect or sense of like segregation between sort of cast crew and and real life participants it was all sort of it all became kind of one that's not to conflate what Nora and I were doing to the difficulty of what the participants were were doing in recovery. I mean, their work was continuous and is continuous and far, far harder, obviously. But the spirit in which we all made it was sort of shared.

2:03:59Yeah.

2:04:00Sean Fennessey:I had an interesting conversation with Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio about one battle after another. And they talked about how in that film, more than you would realize, a lot of the actors were non-professional, especially in the sequences in Bacton Cross. Many of the people that Leo's character is encountering are people who just live there and who they brought in and how it changed the energy and dynamic of the movie. And I'm curious for you when you're working in a similar fashion, even though it's a much more contained environment focused on this specific community, what does it mean as an actor to be working in that atmosphere instead of one that's, say, not Guardians of the Galaxy 3, you know?

2:04:36Yeah. You know, it's funny. Before we embarked on this process, like we had an opportunity to go out sort of six, seven months before and walk the space and meet folks within the recovery community. And, you know, they were very generous with their stories and, you know, sharing. And I think I began to get really, really nervous at the prospect that I was going to sort of have to sort of match the level of like naturalism or authenticity when it came to play my character, Cody. And, you know, you could say on the one hand that, you know, someone with lived experience kind of representing themselves in a sort of docu-fiction context they're going to be sort of doing something that it's almost like impossible to match and and i'd agree there's plenty of times i was like dang i'm really behind the curve here but oddly and this is kind of the genius of what adam did i think because annette is such a unicorn of a human being both as a therapist of 39 years and being so exceptional at her day job and then also an amazing actor

2:05:44Sean Fennessey:And she has a background in theater, right? So she sort of understands the dynamics of what's going on here in addition to the work that she does. correct yeah yeah she's also she's also you know she studied acting for i think three years before becoming a therapist as well which was very handy but but because of all that there was this sort of commitment to a character that we built out well in advance and i think being an independent film having you know the constraints of both time and money very much sort of present at all times we had to prioritize the right sort of things early doors and that was you know story and character and the sort of things actually often with bigger budget stuff falls down you know the list of priorities and sometimes by the wayside we sort of committed to what our characters looked like and felt like and then when we arrived to shoot the project it sort of felt less like okay well let's try and match the level of authenticity and realism here and it felt more like let's just let's trust fall into what is a very real environment as these characters.

2:06:51And because it was so immersive and there were so few signifiers of the fact that we were actually on a film set, like we traveled light, you know, and we weren't a big crew and there weren't that many cameras. And I mean, honestly, in any given scene, there were much less cameras and much less lights than there are in this room. You know, no, not to pull.

2:07:10Sean Fennessey:They have to work very hard to make me look human. Yeah, that's not true. this is this is in for me apparently just to make me but you know so that is to say that the acting challenge was actually reduced like in a way I had to do less acting than I've ever had to do because I felt very much connected to my character I had been so lucky to be kind of welcomed into the community by the folks that I'd gotten to know quite well at that point and there were sort of less reminders that we were acting and we were making a film so the task was made about as easy on us as you could possibly hope and you know credit to adam i didn't do a lot of takes in the sense that like i felt like i'd done it once and we'd got it like i i kind of was like i'm so happy to move on if you are and i hope i never put him under like the caution that way but i just you know i didn't have to repeatedly do things you know that that were like difficult or or trying and often we didn't have that opportunity anyway because for example the court hearings that happen every monday and are part of the program we shot five consecutive court hearings across the 25-day shoot and those approximately run for about 90 minutes and the way we would do it is that the court hearing would happen as it does in reality and that noah and i as fictional characters in that setting would be called up kind of randomly and we would sort of flip over into the scripted material for that moment, maybe some improvisation.

2:08:40And that relies massively on Judge Bragg, who is the real judge in that program and is also happens to be an exceptional actor.

2:08:49Sean Fennessey:His voice, his voice like still rings out because he's so often off camera when he's communicating and the camera stays so closely on anyone who is speaking to him in this interesting way. But he has this like very resonant, memorable tone, the way he's engaging. And it's like all about personal accountability with his character and seemingly him in real life in a way that it, you know, it stuck with me. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. No, me too. It's, it's, it's, um, it's quietly very authoritative, but it's, it's also a reflection of, I think, how the program operates, which is in a very humanizing, compassionate way as well.

2:09:24And it's a difficult balance to strike and he does it beautifully. But in those court hearings, you know, they run for 90 minutes. And if we went up and made our contribution, we'd rarely sort of jump in and shoot it again or go for more coverage because I think Adam wanted it to feel every bit as sort of real and and for it to um be captured in the same way that any of the other participants were being sort of observed um and you know they weren't asked to repeat you know the process and so it almost became something that maybe I sort of took advantage of as well i was like i don't want to repeat it either um so all of that is to say it kind of it all helped make it feel more more real um and then importantly you know there was a there was a policy all the way through which is you know for any of the real participants if at any point they didn't want to be filmed or they didn't want to participate it was a raising of the hand and and it was kind of a non-negotiable situation where you know no one was of course made to be you know, filmed if they didn't want to.

2:10:29And I really mean it when I say like Adam was so conscientious about that.

2:10:33Sean Fennessey:There's an interesting dynamic too in those sequences that you're describing where your character in particular is very taciturn and very withdrawn. And you can almost feel him, you processing kind of what is at play for the rest of your life. And many of the real life participants, the non-professional actors are incredibly charismatic and are storytellers and are like given a chance to shine. They're humanized, obviously. But it feels like there's a dramatic strategy at play in a way where we're sort of like we're being kept at bay from you and you don't have some long traumatic monologue that explains things.

2:11:12Sean Fennessey:So I'm kind of curious to just hear a little bit about how much you and Adam talked about that and if that was a very purposeful choice to try to have both effectively. Yeah, absolutely. yeah I suppose with Cody my character you don't necessarily sort of learn all that much about him until he gets a little further along in the program and begins to kind of share in some of the NA meetings and then you sort of start to learn a little bit more of his backstory as he you know attempts to kind of reconnect with family members and and and and kind of take various steps in the in the recovery process one of the things I really appreciated about how Adam had kind of sought to represent Cody and particular in tandem with Jack is kind of offer up these two sort of different versions of people who had had you know similar kind of social experiences up until that date you know kind of relatively comparable sort of lived experiences up until the point that you meet them.

2:12:17And yet, even though they're brothers by way of the foster care system, they are incredibly different while wrestling with a very similar issue of substance use disorder. And it manifests in very different ways. And, you know, I think Noah plays Jack with this kind of gregarious, infectious, charismatic quality that is just amazing and kind of lit up every room. and then I think Cody by contrast you know is very reserved as you said internalizes a lot doesn't express much as kind of very much a man of few words and the way that Noah and I talked about this and Adam and I talked about this kind of together is that in a way you're seeing sort of two different styles of avoidance you know Jack is someone who will talk about anything and everything except for his trauma and his relation to substance use disorder and Cody is someone who I think will kind of not talk about anything at all if he can help it and avoid in that way.

2:13:21Jack is sort of distracting by talking a lot and Cody is avoiding by not talking much at all and really kind of not addressing the problem. And that was important, I think, to show different styles of substance use disorder. You know, I think if we accept that there's a lot of stigma and there's a lot of stereotyping around addiction and folks who do experience substance use disorder it's really important if we're going to be humanizing the subject that we show you know a lot of individual experiences and we we sort of we sort of have an appreciation for the individualism in every case um and i i think about it often as i do with mental health you know i think sometimes there are certain personalities that you wouldn't assume are struggling or dealing with something because of their presentation, because they are outgoing and they seem to be really, really happy.

2:14:18But it's important not to mistake that for someone who isn't masking or isn't actually, you know, practicing some kind of avoidance of their own feelings. And I think the same thing applies to substance use disorder in a way. And I think that's what the characterization really kind of was sort of supposed to do, if I've interpreted it correctly. And that's definitely the way in which Adam and I discussed it.

2:14:44Sean Fennessey:Did you and Noah decide to do this together? Because obviously you were in warfare together. I don't know if you knew each other before that love warfare, by the way. Thank you. And so I was kind of curious how that came about. Yeah, that was pretty like magic bit of alchemy, really. I had I met Adam having read the script uh for the feature and having watched his short was blown away was blown away by my meeting with him was just sort of really hoping that he wanted to do it with me because it felt like a very very special quite kind of fast sort of uh meeting of intentions and and passion for the subject and in the last sort of five to ten minutes of our meeting he said um by the way what do you what do you think of noah centineo and i was like oh my god i love i just i just worked with noah on warfare and we got so close and and he said um he said okay well yeah there's a conversation about him maybe kind of playing jack and i thought wow to have this sort of pre-baked kind of understanding of each other and you know having kind of spent such intimate time with each other like we worked it out and for about two months we spent 17 hours a day with each other um you know and and in a very intense environment that is almost designed to make you bond kind of at a you know accelerated rate so arriving again in ohio playing these characters with this pre-baked understanding of each other was was amazing and i was so glad you know noah was the one to play jack i i think he's extraordinary in the movie i think he's so amazing in it he really is i i'm curious about the parts that you're picking at this phase related to this movie because i feel this is true more fair too the first part of your career it felt like it was very easy for you from from my distance to be charismatic to pick parts where you're funny where you're engaging or where you're more comfortable being the heel or you have like you have a lot to do a lot to chew on a lot of dialogue um and it seems like the last few projects and maybe this is in the bear a little bit too but more restraint a little quieter not as worried about showing off how entertaining you are and i don't know if that's a purposeful choice on your part if that's something you think about as an actor but it strikes me as i look at the last few things that you've done yeah that that's interesting i mean i think i definitely appreciated the challenge that lied in warfare and and in and in Union County in that regard, also in the bear to a degree.

2:17:14Scary though, as well. Like the fit, I think I've sort of come to terms with this idea that the creatively speaking, you know, the things that scare me and feel like I maybe can't actually do it are the things that I should challenge myself to do. And you may end up with egg on your face doing that for sure. And God knows I probably have and will but I think that there's something that I am trying to embrace this idea that like a little bit of fear and even maybe a little bit more fear around the idea that you can do something or can't do something is exactly what you should be trying to embrace because it may actually bring the best out of you like I felt like potentially unprepared to to do it at the point that I did it, Union County.

2:18:06And I think I threw my everything into warfare, but I felt really scared by the challenge and kind of unprepared. And so, but that was the kind of thing that maybe in the past I would have sort of run from or panicked over. And I'm trying to kind of not do that. Yeah. And I'm enjoying that, actually. I'm enjoying that challenge. It's, it's, it's, uh, creatively is keeping it kind of really interesting and rewarding. And it's, it's forcing me to, I think, um, yeah, I don't know, just, just unearth stuff that I didn't necessarily know that I had. Maybe

2:18:47Sean Fennessey:you've, you've worked with a pretty cool collection of filmmakers. And I'm, I'm, I wonder if you, do you go looking for established people who you really want to work with? Like, you know big low and inaritu and mari aster and you can go down the list of people you've worked with but then there's somebody like adam who is effectively is unknown effectively first-time filmmaker um and then you know like i said you have some ability to help movies get made especially at that scale so what's the responsibility to do that work what's the responsibility to just challenge yourself with exciting established filmmakers what's the responsibility to do studio movies that probably pay well and and allow you to do more of those other two things How do you think about that balance?

2:19:29Yeah, it's a good question because I feel like, you know, in the case of Union County, you know, I feel so lucky. And I think there's like this mutual kind of understanding between Adam and I, where it's like maybe on one hand he's like, oh, you know, great that you're attached to my first film. You know, that helps. You and Noah are attached to the film. Helps get it made. at the same time in equal measure if not more i'm like dude thank you for giving me this opportunity to play this character to have this experience to you know spend time in this community to meet some of the most incredible people i've ever met i mean annette dio alone i said this the other day i was like even putting the film aside the fact that i got to interact with a human that good and call them a friend is like the biggest win in the world and um you know i think it definitely works both ways and and adam i think is such an extraordinary talent i really think like the sky is the limit for him and i just feel lucky that i got to start working with him at the beginning of his career um i think in terms of identifying who i want to work with next or or you know if i'm so lucky as to choose um which i'm not in that position where i can just obviously just sort of pick who i want to work with but but um certainly the filmmaker is a massive massive part you know the director writer director in this case is a massive massive part of the consideration because that relationship is so important and so intimate and so vulnerable and you know I I rely so heavily on on my directors and um you know I I carry information that they've passed on and advice that they give with me long after I'd finished working with them.

2:21:14Like I cherish those relationships. And I've been really lucky to work with some amazing people who are very experienced. And then also some people who are kind of like, you know, first time or second time filmmakers. And in a way, it's not even so much, of course, their experience kind of textures what your experience is with them. But the most important thing for me is always like, you know, what is the story? What is the story that's being told? What is the social application of that? What are audience members going to experience from hearing it and living with it in the outside world? Whether that's as simple as putting a smile on people's face and having a laugh and experiencing some escapism to being encouraged to think very differently about a subject as sensitive and important as substance use disorder.

2:22:07Thinking about who the stewards are of that story and whether you can serve those stories, whether also you're the right person to do it with them. And I think also like, you know, the character side of things is very personal and instinctive. It's like, am I the right person for this? And there's plenty of times where it's kind of ineffable. I'm like, I can't put my finger on it. I'm just not the right person. And I don't know why, but I don't think it exists in my tool belt. And there's other times where I'm like, it might exist in my tool belt. It scares me that I might not get there. And I think now I'm sort of trying to force myself to maybe grab a hold of that tool and go to work a little bit.

2:22:46Sean Fennessey:Okay, you don't have to tell me the parts, but have you ever done a part where you thought you were right and then you did it and you were like, oh, I made the wrong choice. And then vice versa, did you ever turn anything down and then see it and think I could have done that? Well, it's interesting. I've turned things down, seen it, seen other actors do it and thought, yeah, they nailed it. I don't know if I could have done that for sure. have I done something? I mean, listen, yeah, I mean. You can be modest and say, you know, sure, you always could do better, but like genuinely, you know. Gosh, yeah.

2:23:18I mean, yeah, well, I feel that with every project, to just be clear, but yeah, I don't know if there's like, I feel like more often than not, if I've stepped away from something or said like, I'm not the person for the job, I felt like vindicated only because inevitably, like more often than not, someone else has filled the role and done a great job at it. and it's been like affirming. I've been like, yeah, that's what I hoped it looked like for the people involved, but I wasn't the right person at the time. I think that just now I'm trying to not allow self-doubt to creep in too much. Because I think if I look back on some of those occasions, even though the result was affirming, it was still a lack of confidence or a self-doubt that held me back.

2:24:03And now I'm like, oh, maybe I won't write myself off too quickly and I'll try and push myself outside of my comfort zone a bit more because I've been doing it a bit more and enjoying it and loving the experiences that I've had.

2:24:15Sean Fennessey:I think of you as a very versatile actor. Is there a kind of movie you would like to make, a certain genre that you have not yet made? I really have tried to be genre and medium agnostic, if that makes sense. I don't actually care if it's TV, film or theater. Other than the times when I haven't been able to afford to do theater, frankly. I know a lot of actors will be able to relate to that. But I've tried to be like kind of agnostic as much as possible. That's interesting because it almost feels like you're spinning a wheel, you know, and you're like comedy, action film, sensitive drama. You know, like you really do have a variety of different types of projects that you've worked on.

2:24:55Yeah, thanks, man. I mean, yeah, I suppose I'm being genre agnostic, but then also, yeah, simultaneously trying to, I guess. I guess trying to kind of like vary it for my own sake as much as anything else as well just for different experiences and and to challenge myself but really I'm drawn to story and character so wherever that presents itself in whatever medium and with whichever creatives I'm sort of drawn to like um you know and then there are some people that maybe at the risk of contradicting myself I do like seek to work for like I asked to work for Chris Dora on the bear like I watched the bear and I asked him if I could have a part.

2:25:32I was like, I will peel a carrot in the background for two minutes. Please let me in sort of thing. And he then went above and beyond and blessed me with this unbelievable role that kind of changed my life. Do you think that that part changed your life?

2:25:49Sean Fennessey:That's so interesting. Why do you say that? It didn't necessarily change my life in the context of my career, I don't think, but it changed my life in terms of affirming that food and cooking was like something that like fed my soul and like was this creative endeavor separate from or used to be separate from my job but like was and can still be kind of separate from my life as an actor that that really feeds me and and also if you pun the pun like also can feed other people like it's this beautiful practice of being able to like create something you know through emotional expression using memory using experience and then share that to sort of impact someone else in the same way like I regard cooking as kind of like the most as a non-professional fan of the of the world uh I I regard cooking as kind of the most complete human art form the reason being that as an actor I can appeal to people's sense of like sound and sight in order to kind of affect them emotionally or tell my story.

2:27:01But if I'm cooking for someone, or I should say if a professional cook or a chef is cooking for someone, I think that, I hope I'm not speaking out of turn by saying that you have access to far more senses and you can impact someone emotionally in a wider range of ways. So you can appeal to their sense of smell, you can appeal to their sense of touch, you can appeal to their sense of taste, as well as sight and sound, actually. You can have all of those sensory experiences in one moment. And just as you can watch a film, TV show, and be moved because it represents your experience, you know, authentically, or renders an emotion really, really clearly, you know, conjures a sense of nostalgia, brings back a memory, food can do exactly the same thing.

2:27:52And the bear really helped me realize that. made me realize I thought I love food just because food tastes good. But I love food because it's fundamental to the human experience. And it is, I think, you know, cooking and eating is the most kind of like sensory complete experience we have.

2:28:11Sean Fennessey:That was beautiful. We end every episode of this show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they've seen. Have you seen anything you like recently wow um i've been really fortunate because with union county we've gone around to all these amazing independent movie theaters uh around the country and uh around ohio specifically and it's really kind of affirmed my just love and faith in like independent film so um my thinking is to mention something within that vein.

2:28:52Although I'm tempted to also mention a documentary that I've seen recently.

2:28:55Sean Fennessey:Just say both. Just say both. I can say both. Yeah, of course. I saw a film called Omaha by Cole Webley. Oh my God. Devastating. Isn't that a beautiful film though? Holy shit, yeah. Yeah. Very similar to Union County. Very tough movie. Yeah, a tough film, but beautiful. Yeah. um John McGarrow he's amazing in that film John McGarrow gives an amazing performance as do those two young children yes um I think it's a really beautiful film I think made for a very very limited budget and done beautifully well and then I saw an amazing um documentary called come and see me in the good light which I believe was uh Oscar nominated um last year and um so it's relatively well known but um yeah stunning like talk about laughing and crying and um uh So those are the two that are kind of top of mind right now.

2:29:44Sean Fennessey:Will, thanks for doing this. Yeah, dude, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

2:29:52Sean Fennessey:Thanks to Will. Thanks to Mallory and CR. Listen to The Watch, House of R. Tailgate, you on that these days?

2:29:59Mallory Rubin:Man, I tried out. You heard me on Bill Simmons on Sunday night talking. Didn't hear it. How'd it go? I didn't hear it. Was it good? I was good. Yeah. You were good on it. I talked a lot about Eric Morris and the system he's running at Oklahoma State. I think I have to watch college football this year because of the Jets. Oh, I mean, of course, yeah. So like, I actually,

2:30:18Sean Fennessey:maybe this is a different episode, but I need a cheat sheet for who we're looking at. I mean, this takes me back to the Grantland days. And he doesn't want to play there, though. Dante, he doesn't want to play in New York. Okay. And he certainly doesn't want to play for the Jets, even though the color scheme is like, you can just flip right over. He's wonderful. You know. Just wonderful.

2:30:34Mallory Rubin:Do you think we should start, have you been following the Jaden Daniels NIL story? I have, yeah. even though he has left LSU, he's like, you guys can't use number five. You can't use my picture, all this stuff. I want to start doing that with pods. You know, like if somebody, it does the Charlie Rose imitation and I'm not there. I'm like, you have to take that pod down.

2:30:52Sean Fennessey:This is a guy who's getting a little agitated by the third chair bit. No.

2:30:56Mallory Rubin:First of all, how dare you bring that up this late? And honestly, a little bit. What Will Poulter gave to this pod, you shouldn't be desecrating it with this shenanigans, this nonsense. What?

2:31:08Sean Fennessey:I'm merely citing, that the heat is on. The heat, the H is O. That Van walked in this room. I heard. And he turned the volume up. Right. And he said, listen clearly

2:31:18Mallory Rubin:to what I'm saying. The reason he did that is because he also said, I am the prince who was promised. Mm-hmm. And I am going to take over Bill. But you said it in High Valerian, right? Yeah. With some new eye makeup. You've been waiting on this topic. Not that I really want you to. Yeah. I, to me, there's no greater person in the world than you. So I'm with love and respect to Tracy who I think is wonderful. There can only ever be one answer.

2:31:45Sean Fennessey:This isn't who's a good person. Well, I think that Chris is. He is a good person. I agree. You're a good person. Just the best podcaster as well. I like,

2:31:57Mallory Rubin:iron sharpens iron. I asked Chris at the end of the. It keeps me sharp. It keeps me good and ready for my appearances on this pod. What did you learn from Friedland about podcasting? Oh, interesting question. Yeah. That I'm not that funny. No. That he's... No. I'm funny, but he's funny. It's a very generous response. He's incredibly funny, but so are you. You're a great comic. Great comedian.

2:32:24Sean Fennessey:How many more years will you pod?

2:32:28Mallory Rubin:How many more years do you want to pod?

2:32:30Sean Fennessey:Over under nine. Nine? Oh my God. Holy shit. I'll pod for nine more years. I'd like to be employed. I'd like to have a career, earn an income. But nine years ago, you never would have thought podcasting would have been your career. I know. When will I pivot to a quiet life? Nobody gives a shit what I have to say, you know? That's so not true.

2:32:49Mallory Rubin:I'm asking you because I'm interested. I think the arc of the universe is bending towards you. I asked Chris at the end to Talk to Thrones. Are you excited for next season? And he said, I'm on a year-by-year contract with Talk to Thrones. Into the mic, on the record, on the public record. I respect that. So, you know, who knows? Once Chris is out, I'm out. That's how I feel about it. No, but you still talk about those episodes for hours without me. It's just that you like my, you know, whatever energy I bring to those recaps. The everyman energy that you bring. How long will I podcast? I will podcast as long as you all will have me.

2:33:21You know, that's the answer.

2:33:22Mallory Rubin:I think that you've been creating like a sense of scarcity with yourself where you're just like, oh, at any, you know, when I retire, when I leave. No, I haven't. I'm in it for the long haul. What's the long haul mean?

2:33:35Sean Fennessey:18 months? Yeah. Maybe less. Will you still be podcasting when you have to wear like a still suit to do it? You know? Because of the environment? That or because you're incontinent. You know? Like, either. I got some bad news for you. Been there for a long time. He's been pissing himself this entire time. Okay. Well, thanks everybody for listening along at home. CR will be back on this pod. He's really putting in the hours. That's why he's third chair. we're going to talk about Tony no thoughts about Pete Alonzo that you wanted to share he's doing exactly what I told you he would do isn't he doing exactly what I told you he would do he has 27 home runs I'm thrilled the first two years of this contract he will be an above average first baseman he's been excellent probably be a 3.5 war player he's got a 3.4 right now there you go but there's still time there's still 30 games or so right but he you know back half will be a little challenging I wish I had him on the Mets right now that's for sure I love him

2:34:34Mallory Rubin:not only like athletically, but financially collapse. Would you revel in it even though that probably also means that we're about to head into an economic depression? Oh, interesting question. Hmm. My answer is yes. Yeah, I think so too. Well, you guys are NL fans, so, you know. So you want the Dodgers to be... Over here in the American League, I'm not worried. We got eight teams, you know, south of 500 fighting for the third wild card over here in the AL.

2:35:05Sean Fennessey:Here's my real zag, and I'm very sorry, Jack, but just hang in there. I think we're like three months away from it being curtains for the Dodgers no matter what. Like the bets fall off happened. Freddie's going to be 38. Otani. Otani, you know, how is that going to age? Right. Well, Otani, it's just like at any moment, one thing that he does just throws off the other. They've already got three$25 million plus pitchers who can't pitch. Right? Yeah. They'll just get more players. They're going to fucking win the World Series. That's absolutely correct. You guys are crazy. Anytime they need more players, they can sign or trade for anyone they want.

2:35:42And they still somehow have one of the best farm systems. It's insane.

2:35:45Mallory Rubin:And there was an article about how the stadium is empty. People are booing Tucker. He's getting mad. Scoogle sucks. How has Scoogle been since he went over to... He's only pitching mid. I mean, he's mid. Yeah. But that's the thing about the prospects is they dupe these other organizations into thinking that they have good prospects. And then they trade for elite players every year.

2:36:06Sean Fennessey:Who's the single best player they've traded in the last 10 years? Didn't the Red Sox get somebody out of this best thing? Dean Kramer in the Manny Machado trade. That's not actually the answer. But what'd you think about the Orioles trading Dean Kramer after he asked Pete Alonso, can you see? I noted that with interest. Incredible.

2:36:22Mallory Rubin:That happened. He was like, you're fucking blind old man. And they talked him up. He was throwing over to first. and he was all surprised I think it's really bad for the economy if it turns out Mark Walter's been stealing from insurance annuities but it's incredible content

2:36:38Sean Fennessey:thanks for listening to The Big Picture we'll see you later this week

2:37:00Mallory Rubin:This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT. Hey, it's Bill Simmons from the Bill Simmons Podcast. Have you guys heard about ChatGPT work? It's the new way to use ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects. And when you need more than just answers, give ChatGPT work access to your apps and files, and it can create real work documents like spreadsheets, slides, and structured reports. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode available on Plus and Pro Plans.