Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: This is Talk Easy. I'm standing forgo SOO.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Today.
Speaker 2: I am joined by writer and fellow podcaster Wesley Morris.
Speaker 2: Since twenty fifteen, Morris has served as the critic at
Speaker 2: large for The New York Times, where he's also co
Speaker 2: hosted the popular podcast Still Processing alongside Jay Wortham. While
Speaker 2: the show has been on hiatus, Wesley has continued publishing
Speaker 2: searching and often moving essays that explore the intersection of
Speaker 2: race and pop culture. His work was first awarded the
Speaker 2: pull To Prize for criticism in twenty twelve during his
Speaker 2: tenure at The Boston Globe, and then again most recently
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one at the height of the pandemic.
Speaker 2: But what I think makes his work special, and you'll
Speaker 2: hear it a fair bit in this conversation, is not
Speaker 2: only his ability to connect the dots or to see
Speaker 2: the bigger picture, but to do so in real time
Speaker 2: with readers and listeners alike. Wesley doesn't come to the
Speaker 2: page or the microphone with the puzzle pre assembled. The
Speaker 2: pieces of the story or the theory are always there, yes,
Speaker 2: But the road to a good idea the discovery process,
Speaker 2: which can often be vulnerable and vexing is one he
Speaker 2: invites us into with wit, wisdom, and warmth. And so
Speaker 2: this week I wanted to sit with Morris on the
Speaker 2: heels of this year's Academy Award nominations to try to
Speaker 2: make sense of what these ten films both say and
Speaker 2: represent about movies in twenty twenty four. Pictures like Barbie Oppenheimer,
Speaker 2: Killers of the Flower Moon, the Holdovers, are they a
Speaker 2: window into the future of cinema or merely a reflection
Speaker 2: of this precarious moment in Hollywood. We also discuss his
Speaker 2: early adventures in moviegoing growing up in Philadelphia, the indie
Speaker 2: boom of the late nineties, the gradual erosion of what
Speaker 2: he calls the middle brow movie in the wake of
Speaker 2: Marvel now Mattel, and how the film industry has continued
Speaker 2: to struggle in its attempts to create a more diverse
Speaker 2: and equitable ecosystem, both in front and behind the camera.
Speaker 2: When Wesley accepted his second pull To Prize in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty one, he said, at its most essential, criticism does
Speaker 2: save people money, and it can expose them to new,
Speaker 2: mind blowing work. It doesn't save lives, but it can
Speaker 2: give life and so by the end of this conversation,
Speaker 2: it's my hope that this episode will do the same
Speaker 2: for you. And with that, this is Wesley Morris.
Speaker 3: Hi Wesley, Hello, Sam, how are you? Thanks for having me?
Speaker 2: That sounded a little labored sounds.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is the year of our Lord, twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four. I think we're all in for some labor.
Speaker 3: If I sound like this in January, I think you
Speaker 3: just check with me in eleven months or ten months
Speaker 3: and see where I am.
Speaker 2: Do you want to schedule a time to come back
Speaker 2: on November fifteenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: That guess should not be me. You can do bet
Speaker 3: you can do better than me.
Speaker 2: I think David Remnick has signed up for that slot.
Speaker 3: Remnick for better or Worse. Oh all right, well then
Speaker 3: bring your tissues.
Speaker 2: We can do a panel. We can do a panel.
Speaker 3: Have you ever you've never done a panel on this show.
Speaker 2: No, we don't do panels.
Speaker 3: I mean that's not how this works.
Speaker 2: I want to start with maybe less apocalyptic news in
Speaker 2: the recent Oscar nominations.
Speaker 3: I mean, it depends on who you're talking to.
Speaker 2: Well, we're talking to you, so we're going to start there.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was apocalyptic if for Greta Gerwig, yes, well,
Speaker 3: we'll have.
Speaker 2: To get into them. In the past, you've called the
Speaker 2: Oscars quote a diagnosis of the health of the movies,
Speaker 2: and the five the ten films nominated for Best Picture
Speaker 2: operate as a class that doubles as an X ray
Speaker 2: of the Academy and the movie business at large. So
Speaker 2: now that we have the nominations and the dust has
Speaker 2: settled a little bit, what is your diagnosis?
Speaker 3: I was thinking about the panel endemic years and the
Speaker 3: Oscars and all the rule bending that the Academy did
Speaker 3: in order to not not have a show moving dates,
Speaker 3: expanding the release or the sort of eligibility windows what
Speaker 3: constituted a motion picture. There are all these adjustments the
Speaker 3: Academy was trying to do in order to keep the
Speaker 3: show going on. And it was pretty funny because things
Speaker 3: looked really bad. And how things looked a couple of
Speaker 3: years ago was that we weren't going to go to
Speaker 3: the movies again, and every Best Picture nominee was probably
Speaker 3: going to be watched on a TV by more people
Speaker 3: than saw it in a movie theater during its initial run.
Speaker 3: And that is how, in some ways, you wind up
Speaker 3: with a movie like Coda winning Best Picture, which is
Speaker 3: the kind of movie where, like, you know, I watched
Speaker 3: it the way pretty much everybody in the Academy who
Speaker 3: voted for it, and you just got to think, like.
Speaker 2: With your eyes closed.
Speaker 3: I like that movie. And it's funny because I watched
Speaker 3: it and I knew instantly by the time, like when
Speaker 3: they go to the audition and she does the song
Speaker 3: and the family's up in the balcony and you experience
Speaker 3: it from their point of view. I was like, there's
Speaker 3: no way in the world this movie does not win
Speaker 3: the Oscar for Best Picture. It's your winner. I felt like,
Speaker 3: this is what the movies deserve. The movies deserve Coda
Speaker 3: winning Best Picture. The point is, I feel comfortable with
Speaker 3: where we are now versus where we were in two
Speaker 3: thousand and nineteen to twenty twenty two, twenty one, mostly
Speaker 3: because the movies are better. I think the movie attendance
Speaker 3: is not as bad as it seemed like it was
Speaker 3: going to be. You know, it's funny. Coco Goff, in
Speaker 3: her press conference the other day after she lost to
Speaker 3: Arena Sablanca and the semifinals of the Australian Open, was
Speaker 3: talking about how bad she wasn't gonna get too down
Speaker 3: on herself, and she's like, you know, I'm tomorrow's another day.
Speaker 3: I'm just gonna go see a movie and say that
Speaker 3: I didn't do so bad. And I was like, this
Speaker 3: is a nineteen year old person saying they're gonna cheer
Speaker 3: up by going to a movie.
Speaker 2: Incredible.
Speaker 3: That just kind of kind of gladdened my heart a
Speaker 3: little bit. It made me feel like it was possibly
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty nine. And I just think that, for one thing,
Speaker 3: the Best Picture nominees include the two movies that made
Speaker 3: people believe that movie going was gonna be okay and
Speaker 3: would survive and would be would remain profitable, and not
Speaker 3: just it's not just the money, it's also just the
Speaker 3: cultural lifespan of what Barbian Oppenheimer managed to do. You know.
Speaker 3: It created a sort of side imagination in the culture
Speaker 3: where we could not stop mocking, meaning overthinking, rethinking, defending
Speaker 3: some aspect of both those movies and their their Best
Speaker 3: Picture nominees.
Speaker 2: Well, let's start with those two, because as the nominations
Speaker 2: came out, people once again came to the defense of Barbie,
Speaker 2: in part because Greta Gerrigg was not nominated for Best Director,
Speaker 2: and also because Margot Robbie was not recognized in the
Speaker 2: Best Actress category. Even former Secretary Hillary Clinton chimed in
Speaker 2: on Barbie gate with the sentence that I'm going to
Speaker 2: read for you here.
Speaker 3: Oh I did not know this hit me.
Speaker 2: She wrote, Greta and Margo, while I can sting to
Speaker 2: win the box office but not take.
Speaker 3: Home to Oh no, Hillary went there.
Speaker 2: Let me try to get.
Speaker 1: Lord.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, keep going.
Speaker 2: Greta and Margo. Oh God, while it can. You know,
Speaker 2: sometimes being a Democrat is so embarrassing. It so embarrassing
Speaker 2: by But.
Speaker 3: At least Democrats seem to watch things and then have
Speaker 3: feelings about them. Yes, anyway, just.
Speaker 2: Go on, Okay, Greta and Margo take three. Well, it
Speaker 2: can sting to win the box office but not take
Speaker 2: home the gold. You're millions of fans love you. You're both
Speaker 2: so much more than kanof hashtag Hillary Barbie.
Speaker 3: Oh you know, as Hallmark cards go. I mean, I
Speaker 3: don't know any other presidential loser who would do a
Speaker 3: better job. Frankly, but Hillary Clinton is more than entitled
Speaker 3: to look at the results of the OSCAR nominations and
Speaker 3: go to a place. I think that it's a little
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about, like, well, what do I actually
Speaker 3: think about the fact that Greta Gerwork's not a Best
Speaker 3: Director nominee having watched the movie like three days ago,
Speaker 3: And what.
Speaker 2: Do you think?
Speaker 3: Oh? I mean, first of all, I think that Barbie
Speaker 3: is extremely well made. It's so well made in some
Speaker 3: ways that you kind of I can't believe that the
Speaker 3: things that are interesting about it or even in the movie.
Speaker 3: There are avant garde sequences in this movie. There are
Speaker 3: things that come out of beach movies from the sixties
Speaker 3: and John Waters, and I mean, they are all kinds
Speaker 3: of influences being pulled from here in a movie that
Speaker 3: is very funny. There's a line I don't know at
Speaker 3: some point she wants up in the boardroom. I don't
Speaker 3: know who's speaking, but at some point the lowly guy
Speaker 3: who is the only person who is a free thinker
Speaker 3: in the in the in the Land of Suits doesn't
Speaker 3: even have a suit. I think he's in a vest
Speaker 3: or a sweater. He's like, I'm a man with no power.
Speaker 3: Does that make me a woman? And he meekly asks it.
Speaker 3: I just think that line is really funny. There's I mean,
Speaker 3: the speech The America. Ferrara's speech is really good. I
Speaker 3: think that the big problem with the movie, in a
Speaker 3: weird way, it's that Ken. Ryan Gosling as Ken is
Speaker 3: too good, and it's hard in some ways to not
Speaker 3: see past what he's doing because it's just so much
Speaker 3: better and richer and more shaded. There's something underneath that
Speaker 3: person he's playing, something like he's tapping into it to
Speaker 3: a pain that's not dissimilar, or or like an aspect
Speaker 3: of being a particular kind of human that is not
Speaker 3: dissimilar from what Margot Robbie is finding. And she's got
Speaker 3: like two really good scenes where she's connecting her dullness,
Speaker 3: that the character's dullness, to the character's humanists. But the
Speaker 3: problem with the Ken thing is that, like the keenness
Speaker 3: kind of overwhelms the barbinous in a particular way, but
Speaker 3: not the sort of politics of the movie itself. Right,
Speaker 3: the movie's politics are completely intact and very coherent and
Speaker 3: legible and funny and right in so many ways. I mean, Okay,
Speaker 3: they're bald, they're a little bit blatant, but there's so
Speaker 3: much humor to be had. I watched nine to five
Speaker 3: and it's so funny those movies. You could play Barbie
Speaker 3: in nine to five movies that are twenty sorry, forty
Speaker 3: four years apart, and nothing really would have changed about
Speaker 3: them except how much better the filmmaking is.
Speaker 2: It sounds like you and Hillary are on the same
Speaker 2: side of history.
Speaker 3: No, because I mean, I don't think that it's a
Speaker 3: crime what happened to her. Right, there are nine thousand
Speaker 3: something voting members in the Academy. They don't nominate the individual.
Speaker 3: The guilds nominate each other, right, the craft categories nominate
Speaker 3: each other. So nine thousand people don't have a say
Speaker 3: and whether Gregor Gurwrigg is the Best Director nominee five
Speaker 3: hundred and maybe sixty or eighty something people do, and
Speaker 3: they don't really care to see the achievement of what
Speaker 3: it is that she managed to do. I mean, just
Speaker 3: the colors alone. I don't like if you look at
Speaker 3: the color palette of the five Best Picture of the
Speaker 3: Best Director nominees movies, I mean, hers is the one
Speaker 3: that you know came from a candy shop. And even
Speaker 3: that alone is probably a deterrent for an entire class
Speaker 3: of Director's branch member. It isn't explicitly her being a woman,
Speaker 3: but it's her interests as a woman that are kind
Speaker 3: of alien. I mean, she should have been nominated for
Speaker 3: Little Women and it wasn't. But you know, this is her,
Speaker 3: like all three of her movies have been Best Picture nominees,
Speaker 3: as all three of her movies as a director have
Speaker 3: been Best Picture nominees, and they've all been screenplay nominees.
Speaker 3: She'll probably win She and Noah Bambach will probably win
Speaker 3: in the in the adapted in the hilarious adapted screenplay category.
Speaker 3: I don't know what this movie is adapted from.
Speaker 2: When we look at these ten films nominated and how
Speaker 2: they are, as you say, an X ray of the industry,
Speaker 2: I wonder if we can't divide the list into three groups,
Speaker 2: because the first one to me are historical dramas that
Speaker 2: have arrived at the right place and the right time
Speaker 2: and speak to the country we live in and the
Speaker 2: politics of the moment. Those are Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan,
Speaker 2: Killers of Flower Moon by Scorsese, and Zone of Interest
Speaker 2: by Jonathan Glazer. Oppenheimer is the prohibitive favorite. But what
Speaker 2: in that cluster stands out to you?
Speaker 3: I mean, it's funny. I think all these movies operate,
Speaker 3: I should say, in different moods alphabetically. We'll start with
Speaker 3: Killers of the Flower Moon. I think Killers of Flower
Speaker 3: Moon is a perversely effective movie. It's a weird movie
Speaker 3: for more in Scorsese, because it's not a lot of
Speaker 3: his priorities aren't apparent. A lot of his typical priorities
Speaker 3: aren't parent orthough they're not four grounded in this movie.
Speaker 3: He's not interested in acting here. It's one of the
Speaker 3: rare instances to me in which his interest in acting
Speaker 3: and actors is kind of secondary to the politics and
Speaker 3: the sort of thematic urgency of what it is he's
Speaker 3: trying to do. I am not surprised that Lenardo DiCaprio
Speaker 3: is not a Best Actor nominee. For instance, if we're
Speaker 3: going to keep this in the realm of the Academy Awards,
Speaker 3: this is maybe his least convincing performance of the of
Speaker 3: you know, all the ones he's given in Scorsese movies alone.
Speaker 3: This is an impossible part to play. He's playing a
Speaker 3: truly stupid person who is also truly in love and
Speaker 3: truly evil, easily duped into doing horrible things to people.
Speaker 2: On that I want to play a little bit of
Speaker 2: this clip featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and actress Lily Gladstone and
Speaker 2: the new film Killers of the Flower Mountain.
Speaker 1: Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2: Why did you come here for?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 2: To live here?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 5: Uh, I I live here?
Speaker 6: Why?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 5: From my uncle?
Speaker 2: Mm?
Speaker 5: I work with him.
Speaker 2: And your brother is Brian Byron.
Speaker 6: That's right, you're scared of him?
Speaker 3: My brother?
Speaker 2: Who your uncle?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 3: No, oh, he's a He's the king of the o
Speaker 3: s h Hills.
Speaker 5: He's the nicest man.
Speaker 2: In the world.
Speaker 3: I know if you cross him, what he could do.
Speaker 7: Mm.
Speaker 3: Now I'm I'm my own man. I do my own work.
Speaker 2: I'm a business man.
Speaker 3: And all way. The thing that sort of comes through
Speaker 3: in this movie to me is the thing that in
Speaker 3: reading January sixth reports really leapt out at me, which
Speaker 3: is like all the people who stormed the capitol, who
Speaker 3: were like, I don't know, I was just following the crowd,
Speaker 3: and the crowd went up the steps and into the capitol.
Speaker 5: So I did.
Speaker 3: And this movie is really to me about so I did.
Speaker 3: It's people sort of betraying their own souls, selling their souls,
Speaker 3: I mean, and really for nothing, honestly, for nothing. I
Speaker 3: mean it's land, but I mean there's land everywhere for oil.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know, go find some oil with
Speaker 3: some land on it. I mean, the movie is steeped
Speaker 3: in such such incredible, vivid pettiness, but I would say, god,
Speaker 3: you know, I mean, I think that the Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer
Speaker 3: doesn't really interest me as a movie, and part of
Speaker 3: it is it doesn't really feel like it's living. I
Speaker 3: felt like Oppenheimer to me was a series of talking heads.
Speaker 3: The movie isn't really asking any questions. It's just recapitulating,
Speaker 3: and the recapitulation just never got me as filmmaking. I mean,
Speaker 3: I don't know, I just sort of feel like the
Speaker 3: introduction of the communist end of things was way more,
Speaker 3: was more than the movie necessarily needed. And I feel
Speaker 3: like if you're gonna do that, you kind of have
Speaker 3: to make Oppenheimer more of who he actually was to
Speaker 3: the culture. I mean, there was a period during which
Speaker 3: he was an extremely famous American and lots of people
Speaker 3: admired the turn that he took away from the building
Speaker 3: of the bomb and his outspokenness against it. So all
Speaker 3: the stuff with Lewis Strauss and the McCarthy hearings. I
Speaker 3: just feel like there's a bridge from the creation of
Speaker 3: the bomb to those hearings that's missing. And it can't
Speaker 3: be that it's Albert Einstein on the lawn with a pipe.
Speaker 2: I actually like the film, but I mean, when you
Speaker 2: describe it like that, I don't even know how I
Speaker 2: like it. Because I was moved by the Albert Einstein
Speaker 2: with the pipe.
Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about that, Like what got you? What
Speaker 3: I mean, I always what about the movie worked for you?
Speaker 2: There's a lot that got Okay. I feel probably the
Speaker 2: same as you about him, which is it's pretty hit
Speaker 2: or miss and mileage varies. And I don't like the
Speaker 2: movies that seem to feel soulless, and I felt that
Speaker 2: this one did have a kind of beating heart, an
Speaker 2: emotion that I had not found in Dunkirk or Interstellar.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, none of those. So I was moved by it.
Speaker 2: But I want to ask you because the second group
Speaker 2: that I had divided for us is Barbie and Maestro,
Speaker 2: both our actors turned directors. Both are making big, ambitious
Speaker 2: films that are kind of upending the genre that they're
Speaker 2: working in. Even in Time. This week, there was an
Speaker 2: article by Stephanie Zacharach titled Greta Gerwick, Bradley Cooper and
Speaker 2: the Strange Curse of Ambition. Do those two pictures feel
Speaker 2: linked to you?
Speaker 3: I feel like Maestro solves a lot of the problems
Speaker 3: that I have with biographical movie making. I did not
Speaker 3: need a movie about Leonard Bernstein. But I think the
Speaker 3: reason that it works as well as it does is
Speaker 3: because the movie really isn't about Leonard Bernstein. I mean,
Speaker 3: let's just talk about the movie formally for a second.
Speaker 3: I mean, it spans time, there are shifts in aspect ratio,
Speaker 3: which if you do that, you know you have my heart.
Speaker 3: But it also is really I mean, the movie is
Speaker 3: being sold to us as being about a marriage, and
Speaker 3: I don't really know if. I mean, it's not about
Speaker 3: a marriage. It's about a man's behavior's effect on a
Speaker 3: marriage and all of its impulses. To avoid showing Leonard
Speaker 3: Bernstein really doing the thing that makes him one of
Speaker 3: the great Americans of the twentieth century, and to focus
Speaker 3: on his energy, his insatiable, unquenchable thirst for all kinds
Speaker 3: of things and people, his unimbarrassability, and it's I guess
Speaker 3: it's shamelessness. His shamelessness. I don't know. I just love
Speaker 3: that it wasn't a love letter to Leonard Bernstein. It
Speaker 3: was a real portrait of an asshole, and the asshole
Speaker 3: happens to be a musical genius. But the movie isn't
Speaker 3: about what a musical genius it is. It's actually about
Speaker 3: what an asshole he is. Definitely, it's definitely not about
Speaker 3: what a genius is. And I actually liked that, and
Speaker 3: in that way, it kind of frees the movie to
Speaker 3: be whatever it is the person who made it want
Speaker 3: it to be. And I also feel that way. I'm
Speaker 3: and it's funny because now that you put me in
Speaker 3: this position, like I mean, I think Barbie is also
Speaker 3: doing a similar thing. Where at no point in watching it,
Speaker 3: although at every moment up until the point I actually
Speaker 3: saw the movie, did I think that Greta Gerwig was
Speaker 3: beholden to Mattel and doing its bidding. She clearly had
Speaker 3: thought about had had some connection to not only the dolls,
Speaker 3: but like the politics of girlhood itself and the politics
Speaker 3: of the evolution of girlhood into womanhood. I think that
Speaker 3: there is such a struggle happening in that movie that's
Speaker 3: about living with the capitalist impulse to own, consume by
Speaker 3: things that are not in your political or in some
Speaker 3: cases onto logical self interest, things that are designed to oppress, dehumanize, demotivate,
Speaker 3: even when you start putting glasses on them in lab
Speaker 3: coats and give them clipboards and stuff.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: There's a real conflict here about what it means to
Speaker 3: have a consumerist girlhood. And I thought it was so
Speaker 3: smart to invent the America fer Our character finding herself
Speaker 3: estranged from her daughter. There's so many layers of conflict
Speaker 3: here that are sort of Barbie adjacent but entirely human.
Speaker 3: Part of the reason that, like, you know, if you're
Speaker 3: some serious filmmaker from Japan or I don't know, some
Speaker 3: other part of the world and you are looking at
Speaker 3: this movie and you like have to say the words
Speaker 3: Barbie Land, I can see you being like, I don't
Speaker 3: know whose movie really is this, but to me it
Speaker 3: is entirely Greta Gerwig's. I mean, it's like this movie
Speaker 3: is of a piece with Ladybird and little women, and
Speaker 3: they're all dealing with the same themes of girls and
Speaker 3: mothers and cummings of age of various sorts. The arrival
Speaker 3: at womanhood, even if you have been invented to automatically
Speaker 3: look like a woman, which to me aligns Barbie more
Speaker 3: with poor things than Maestro. I can think of very
Speaker 3: few better examples of how to both integrate and subvert
Speaker 3: corporate interests into your tour sensibility than Barbie.
Speaker 2: I think Greta should have had you on the campaign
Speaker 2: trail with her.
Speaker 4: Ha ha.
Speaker 3: It's funny because I don't. Really I think a lot
Speaker 3: about these awards. I've been thinking about these awards, that
Speaker 3: the oscars, especially since I was six years old, seven
Speaker 3: years old, and it always just seemed so final and binding,
Speaker 3: you know, these certificates of bestness, And now that I'm
Speaker 3: I'm older, I can see in it the kind of
Speaker 3: bogusness of it. I mean, the thing that like everybody
Speaker 3: always knows about. It's like it's like I discovered that
Speaker 3: Santa Claus is also my dad, my very human, extremely
Speaker 3: fallible dad who also just wants me to not have
Speaker 3: my fantasy disturbed about where the grifts, where the gifts
Speaker 3: come from.
Speaker 2: But the Wesley at boarding school who walked around with
Speaker 2: a contraband walkman listening to the nominees. This person believed
Speaker 2: in the oscars.
Speaker 3: Ah, I did, I mean, and I still I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess professionally now I do still believe in the
Speaker 3: oscars because they're important, and in the ways that you
Speaker 3: said when we started this conversation, I mean, I still
Speaker 3: believe that they're an important framing mechanism for now, not
Speaker 3: just American movies really just like the American stop on
Speaker 3: the movie station, the global movie station.
Speaker 2: After the break more from Wesleys. You know, there's a
Speaker 2: way in which any discussion about these movies or contemporary
Speaker 2: cinema in general, turns into an elegy for the medium itself,
Speaker 2: and so in that spirit, I want to understand exactly
Speaker 2: what we may be losing by talking about what we had,
Speaker 2: or what specifically you had, because growing up you went
Speaker 2: to boarding school much like the characters in The Holdovers
Speaker 2: in North Philadelphia. Okay, it was this enclosed campus with
Speaker 2: giant walls, but eventually you were able to go back
Speaker 2: home on the weekends and stay with your mother, Judith,
Speaker 2: and I think it's with her in that house that
Speaker 2: your love of movies was born. Because your parents got
Speaker 2: a VCR and then two video store memberships, one to
Speaker 2: Blockbuster and one to West Coast video. What did that
Speaker 2: early fascination look and feel like to you?
Speaker 3: You were discovering that there was a world that was
Speaker 3: bigger than the world you were living in. It was
Speaker 3: very different from the world you were living in. The
Speaker 3: school that I went to, we'd group movies and we'd
Speaker 3: watch this movie called Digby the something Wonder Dog or something,
Speaker 3: I don't know. It was about a giant dog, and
Speaker 3: I was like, Wow, they made this shaggy dog really big.
Speaker 3: I don't know. There was just something about seeing with
Speaker 3: your own eyes someone imagine other ways of being or
Speaker 3: other options for life that just, I don't know, it
Speaker 3: just really captivated me. I mean, it's the same experience
Speaker 3: I had becoming a reader, but this was a different,
Speaker 3: diferent thing because you, in a weird way, it's kind
Speaker 3: of pre imagined for you. And then you can take
Speaker 3: this thing, these these images that you've been given and
Speaker 3: sort of rethink what their meetings are and how they
Speaker 3: relate to your life, or don't relate to your life,
Speaker 3: or you know, have nothing to do with relating to anything.
Speaker 3: It's just a world that exists and you don't you'll
Speaker 3: never really be a part of it, but it's great
Speaker 3: to think about every once.
Speaker 1: In a while.
Speaker 2: But like Cocoa Goff on her off day, you in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven seeing Fatal Attraction five times in a theater,
Speaker 2: what did that do for like an eleven year old
Speaker 2: Wesley Morris.
Speaker 3: It was a I probably it turned twelve by the
Speaker 3: fifth time, because I'm My birthday's in December, so I
Speaker 3: was probably eleven and twelve. There's just nothing that like
Speaker 3: operates like this now, like where you were, It's something
Speaker 3: a movie really is a Like that movie is a
Speaker 3: straight up contraption, right, Like you get on the ride
Speaker 3: and very slowly you go up and up and up
Speaker 3: the incline, and then at some point you reach a
Speaker 3: peak and it just drops you off. And the movie
Speaker 3: is so blatantly aware of what it is that it
Speaker 3: throws in an actual roller coaster sequence. Right, there's an
Speaker 3: actual ride in the movie, and it's perverse in that way.
Speaker 3: And I sort of loved the perversity of it. I
Speaker 3: loved that, like you were watching adult behavior that is
Speaker 3: recognizably adult. Like I didn't watch that movie and want
Speaker 3: to fuck Michael Douglas. I just knew though that there
Speaker 3: was a power in attraction, right there was a power
Speaker 3: in two people meeting and responding to the desire that
Speaker 3: they felt for each other.
Speaker 5: Can we ask you something? Why don't you have a
Speaker 5: date to night Saturday night? I did a d I.
Speaker 1: Stood him up.
Speaker 5: That was this long call I made that might keep
Speaker 5: feel good, doesn't make me feel bad. So where's your wife?
Speaker 5: Where's my wife? My wife is in the country with
Speaker 5: her parents, visiting weekend, and you're here with a strange
Speaker 5: girl being a naughty boy. I don't think having dinner
Speaker 5: with anybody's a crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's right around that time when the
Speaker 2: film comes out that you write your first review. It's
Speaker 2: in the eighth grade. It's an assignment given to you
Speaker 2: by a social studies teacher named John Kozemple. You write
Speaker 2: that review in eighth grade. You continue writing through high school.
Speaker 2: You go to Yale in the late nineties, you graduate,
Speaker 2: you quickly land a job at the Examiner. Then the
Speaker 2: Chronicle movies are at a pretty fascinating place. At that point,
Speaker 2: there's a wave of young independent film makers and thinking
Speaker 2: about Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderberg, Tarantino. Those
Speaker 2: are just the white straight men. But there's many more.
Speaker 3: Those are some pretty good white straight man.
Speaker 2: I mean just that year. Let mean, you know, back
Speaker 2: at the late nineties, you had Boogie Nights, you had Rushmore,
Speaker 2: you had Out of Sight, you had Jackie Brown. But
Speaker 2: when you hold this period in cinema, especially when you
Speaker 2: started writing professionally, did you see it as something that
Speaker 2: would continue to expand Did you think that the form
Speaker 2: would continue to evolve or did it feel like perhaps
Speaker 2: movies were peaking in the late nineties early two thousands.
Speaker 3: I don't know that I felt that. I definitely knew
Speaker 3: that that something like the year nineteen ninety nine, which
Speaker 3: has been acknowledged has been the great movie year. It
Speaker 3: was clear in nineteen ninety nine itself, how good a
Speaker 3: movie year that was. I didn't think that there couldn't
Speaker 3: have been like another year that was as good as
Speaker 3: ninety nine. And there's probably I mean, two thousand and
Speaker 3: eight was also a really good year for movies too.
Speaker 3: I mean, two thousand and eight I think is also
Speaker 3: the year that Ironman comes out.
Speaker 2: Iron Man to me is the beginning of that sea change.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I mean, I mean the reason to mention
Speaker 3: it at all is that it is the beginning. It's
Speaker 3: definitely the beginning of what we what people call the
Speaker 3: marvel cinematic universe.
Speaker 2: Two thousand and night was a fraught year in general,
Speaker 2: I'd say, oh, well, I.
Speaker 3: Mean yes, in that movie itself is a depiction of
Speaker 3: Afghanistan that is kind of troubling, right, like the way
Speaker 3: it kind of runs rough shot over the war essentially,
Speaker 3: but it's clear it was clear at that moment, by
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight at least that like things were
Speaker 3: changing in all kinds of ways, right, I mean, Obama's
Speaker 3: election is the beginning of this divergence, right where like
Speaker 3: some people saw a glorious and some people saw the
Speaker 3: end of the world. It just is a pivotal year.
Speaker 3: But I also think that in terms of movies, again,
Speaker 3: like the forces of capitalism were much stronger than the
Speaker 3: forces of culture and the idea that Iron Man. You
Speaker 3: could take a movie like Iron Man, although it's hardly
Speaker 3: the first example of this, but like you could just
Speaker 3: play it everywhere, and then you could start making versions
Speaker 3: of these movies where you would cater to the places
Speaker 3: whose money you wanted most, because if you know, in
Speaker 3: the case of China, it just has the most people,
Speaker 3: so you start doing what the Chinese government wants you
Speaker 3: to do to these movies, it just, I don't know,
Speaker 3: it's like something you lose something, and right like the
Speaker 3: thing that thatterially got lost was a whole class of
Speaker 3: movies that just wouldn't get made anymore. I mean we're
Speaker 3: talking about like the entire middle of the American movie
Speaker 3: going ecosystem. I mean, you look at these Best Picture
Speaker 3: nominees in two thousand for twenty twenty three, and really
Speaker 3: the only one of these that I can see being
Speaker 3: something that would have come out in May and like
Speaker 3: had no real Oscar aspirations except for the fact that
Speaker 3: it was made by Alexander Payne, who's been nominated for
Speaker 3: a bunch of Oscars. Is the holdovers the rest of
Speaker 3: these movies. I mean, I guess Barbie is kind of
Speaker 3: innocent of this, and Oppenheimer, to its credit, did open
Speaker 3: in the middle of summer. And it's not that these
Speaker 3: other movies are guilty, but I mean it's it's more
Speaker 3: like these movies would have been recognizable in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 3: Is movies bound for Academy Awards in one way or another,
Speaker 3: Whether it was the intent of the studio or the
Speaker 3: thing or a thing the Academy couldn't resist. But if
Speaker 3: you look at a year like nineteen eighty eight and
Speaker 3: what was nominated for Best Picture, and I'm going to
Speaker 3: try to do this off the top of my head,
Speaker 3: it was like the Accidental Tourist. What the fuck? It's
Speaker 3: like a travel who was getting a divorce and starts
Speaker 3: having a relationship with a woman who walks his dog
Speaker 3: or trains his dog. Best Picture nominee Dangerous Liaisons, costume
Speaker 3: drama about two people manipulating each other because they can't
Speaker 3: have sex with each other anymore. What Miss MISSISSIPI Mississippi Burning.
Speaker 3: I don't even know if that movie would get made now.
Speaker 3: Given his point of view, which is the FBI rain Man,
Speaker 3: the winner, would that movie would definitely not get made now.
Speaker 3: It just would like that style of movie just does
Speaker 3: not exist. It's not based on real people. You have
Speaker 3: Dustin Hoffen playing an autistic person. I don't know how
Speaker 3: that would go over now.
Speaker 2: And the last one was Working Girl.
Speaker 3: My favorite of the five. I love Working Girl. And
Speaker 3: again a movie that just wouldn't get made now. It
Speaker 3: would probably show up on some streaming service, maybe even
Speaker 3: in six parts. Or something. It would be a show.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean eighty eight, it's an interesting year.
Speaker 3: I mean you could, you could do this like across,
Speaker 3: but not one of those movies, of those five movies,
Speaker 3: is a movie that's screaming. Nominate me for a bunch
Speaker 3: of oscars. Maybe Dangerous Liaisons. But even that movie is
Speaker 3: so weirdly done. I mean, John Malkovich is the is
Speaker 3: the sex interest in that film. Glenn Close is you know,
Speaker 3: still at her, at her, you know, movie star Peak
Speaker 3: is the other, you know, sex star of that movie,
Speaker 3: which makes sense given that it comes after Fatal Attraction.
Speaker 3: There was real interest in her, there was real belief
Speaker 3: in her erotic power, because she actually had erotic power.
Speaker 3: Those movies just don't get made now. And I'm not nostalgic.
Speaker 3: I'm actually angry right because there's a whole realm. There
Speaker 3: are whole realms of human experience, of American life, American
Speaker 3: regional life. There are places we don't see in movies
Speaker 3: anymore that you used to see all the time. I'm
Speaker 3: in movies, places that movies just don't go. You're either
Speaker 3: in la or you're in New York, or you're in
Speaker 3: outer space or wherever Nick Fury lives. Or you're in
Speaker 3: the past, right, you're in the deep past. You're in
Speaker 3: the past in order to not be in the present.
Speaker 3: And one of the things about Killers of the Flower
Speaker 3: Moon that I love is that it's so aware that
Speaker 3: it's being made in twenty twenty four or twenty twenty three.
Speaker 3: It's so much about looking at these incidents with the
Speaker 3: osage from the vantage of its present, of that of
Speaker 3: the filmmaker's present.
Speaker 2: I think the thesis here is what we've lost is
Speaker 2: the middle of movies. What we've lost is the drama
Speaker 2: or the comedy that has no great aspirations, was not
Speaker 2: made to win a bunch of awards or be nominated
Speaker 2: for awards. I want to try to unpack how and
Speaker 2: why we're here. Do you see any parallels between the
Speaker 2: decline and film criticism with the decline in movie making?
Speaker 2: Did one precipitate the other?
Speaker 3: Well, that's a more complicated proposition, right, because the decline
Speaker 3: in film criticism is related to the decline of periodicals.
Speaker 3: That how were film criticism thrived?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 3: I think the two things are related, but not necessarily
Speaker 3: causal of each other. I do, however, I do think
Speaker 3: that they're in the last I don't.
Speaker 8: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Let's say the last fifteen years. The last sixteen years,
Speaker 3: there's been a sort of downgrading of what a review
Speaker 3: can do and should do. You know, there's this tension
Speaker 3: between coming up with a review or like liking something
Speaker 3: a lot, they love that, or like really panning something.
Speaker 3: You know, when I worked at the Boston Globe, for instance,
Speaker 3: we gave things stars. If I was like Killers of
Speaker 3: the Flower Moon two stars, that would have superseded anything
Speaker 3: I necessarily wrote about it. I think many people would
Speaker 3: have read the review. But I think that that middle place,
Speaker 3: you know, the middle of movie making has gone. I
Speaker 3: think like a kind of mixed criticism. People sort of
Speaker 3: lost patience for that, you know, like that a movie
Speaker 3: can't have things that work and don't work. I mean
Speaker 3: the middle. The disappearance of the middle is there's so
Speaker 3: many middles that have disappeared, right middle ground, middle brow,
Speaker 3: middle class. There's either there's either or.
Speaker 2: There's no.
Speaker 3: There's very little room for not even debate, disagreement, but
Speaker 3: like just complexity, you know. Like I find it really
Speaker 3: interesting that none of the ten movies on this Best
Speaker 3: Picture list include May December. I don't know. Did you
Speaker 3: see that movie?
Speaker 2: I love it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I did not the first time I saw it,
Speaker 3: and then I went and saw it again and was like,
Speaker 3: what was my problem? I saw it the next day.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I just I think that's a movie
Speaker 3: that that has so much going on, that is so some,
Speaker 3: it's so of a piece with where we are right now.
Speaker 3: It just doesn't it's not telling you what it's doing,
Speaker 3: or how it's feeling, or what even it is. It's
Speaker 3: like the weird touchlessness of Todd Haynes, even though there's
Speaker 3: so much touching in this movie. The music is touching,
Speaker 3: like the butterfly metaphors are touching you, like his fingerprints
Speaker 3: are all over this thing, but it still feels like
Speaker 3: the hand guiding it is completely invisible, and these characters
Speaker 3: are just doing They're just doing whatever it is that
Speaker 3: they've been set on this earth to do. To sit
Speaker 3: down and talk about this movie and like what is
Speaker 3: happening here? It's really deep and really satisfying to unpack
Speaker 3: it or argue with people about it, I don't. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's some movies where you just I and it doesn't
Speaker 3: happen very often like you leave them. I leave a
Speaker 3: movie and I do not trust my response to it.
Speaker 3: And in the case of Made December, I just went
Speaker 3: the next day and saw it again. It was like
Speaker 3: seeing something dead come to life right before your eyes.
Speaker 3: I found that expansion of my mind exhilarating. But we
Speaker 3: don't have time for that movie now. It's just like
Speaker 3: it's too it asks too much, It asks too much.
Speaker 2: It's funny that line you had right there, that watching
Speaker 2: something dead come to life. I think in some ways
Speaker 2: that's kind of what we've been trying to do in
Speaker 2: this conversation, talking about something that's dead, trying to will
Speaker 2: it back into existence. And in this last decade in Hollywood,
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about twenty fourteen to now, because back then
Speaker 2: in fourteen, you wrote this really beautiful review of Selma,
Speaker 2: Oh Wow, Okay, a film directed by Ava DuVernay. I
Speaker 2: reread the piece last night, and I was thinking about
Speaker 2: how that picture, in so many ways, jump started the
Speaker 2: Oscar So White campaign, which for some to finally reckon
Speaker 2: with how the academy in the industry treats artists of color.
Speaker 2: And oddly enough, exactly a decade later, DuVernay is releasing
Speaker 2: a new film right now. It's called Origin. It got
Speaker 2: completely shut out at the Oscars. Funny how Hillary Clinton
Speaker 2: did not tweet about Origin.
Speaker 3: She's the Origin.
Speaker 2: Nevertheless. I sat with Ava a couple of weeks back
Speaker 2: on the show. I asked her about the state of
Speaker 2: movies and how the industry seems to be backsliding into
Speaker 2: a kind of conservatism, and I just wanted to take
Speaker 2: a listen to that passage for a second. So this
Speaker 2: is her reflecting on the last decade of working in Hollywood,
Speaker 2: in the system, through the system, and how she's starting
Speaker 2: to think about her future as a filmmaker.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I'm not sure about the way that I how to
Speaker 6: define how I'm doing it now. All I know is
Speaker 6: that I feel like I'm tapping out. I've tried to
Speaker 6: work within the system for the last ten years. I've
Speaker 6: sat on the boards of Sun Dance, I am DJA board,
Speaker 6: I am I am a governor of the Academy in
Speaker 6: my second term, I really wanted to learn. I wanted
Speaker 6: to understand how these institutions worked. And there's some great
Speaker 6: people there and beautiful legacy, but ultimately the shifts in
Speaker 6: the cumulative effect of this like how the overall industry
Speaker 6: works are so insignificant in their velocity, in their scope,
Speaker 6: in their real impact, that I feel like, you know, what,
Speaker 6: I've done what I could because it was a lot.
Speaker 6: It's a lot of extra time, a lot of extra effort,
Speaker 6: a lot of calls, a lot of meetings, a lot
Speaker 6: of thinking, a lot of trying, and it's time to
Speaker 6: pass the baton to someone else who has a fresh
Speaker 6: energy and who wants to take And I've achieved some
Speaker 6: things within those organizations that I'm proud of, but for me,
Speaker 6: it's just not I feel like I'm tilling ground, that
Speaker 6: I'm like an old pioneer on a bad plot. It's
Speaker 6: like and I think that I started and I was like,
Speaker 6: oh this place can change, like there are people here,
Speaker 6: this is a little time, like it'll change, and that
Speaker 6: there have been some beautiful things that happened. But my
Speaker 6: success is not change Nia Dacosta's success. Gina Prince byThe
Speaker 6: would suggests, when you can name us.
Speaker 2: All on two hands, that's not change.
Speaker 6: That's a few lovely things that happened to a few people,
Speaker 6: and for me, that's not worth it. I would rather
Speaker 6: just try to build something sustainable and beautiful and smaller
Speaker 6: and lovely in my own likeness with people who think
Speaker 6: like me, and in some ways I think eyes that
Speaker 6: small minded? Is that just closing ranks? But at some
Speaker 6: point it just becomes what's healthy?
Speaker 3: What does that look like for her?
Speaker 7: Though?
Speaker 3: Does she say what it looked like for her?
Speaker 2: Well, in the case of origin, it looked like getting
Speaker 2: funding from jobs, the Ford Foundation, Melinda Gates. But she
Speaker 2: went the kind of route that Soderbrook has done, getting
Speaker 2: financial investments from private sources and stuff like that. But
Speaker 2: what did you make of that?
Speaker 3: I'm not surprised. I also think that it's funny because
Speaker 3: I think Ava Duverney is the apotheosis of black American
Speaker 3: woman filmmaker. She's the person that people automatically think of,
Speaker 3: reflexively think of when they think those things. And I
Speaker 3: think there's a burden that's on her that doesn't have
Speaker 3: anything to do with her personal ambitions. I think that
Speaker 3: she feels responsible for ensuring that she's not the last
Speaker 3: person to get through the door. And I don't know,
Speaker 3: I have a lot of sympathy for her because she's
Speaker 3: She's taken on a lot lot. I'm curious what being
Speaker 3: done handing the clipboard and the frolodex to somebody else,
Speaker 3: what are those things look like for her art? I
Speaker 3: think that there are people like me out there. We
Speaker 3: actually believe that this movie is a turning point in
Speaker 3: some way, which movie origin Like, who knows what she's
Speaker 3: going to do? We're it a lead. But the reason
Speaker 3: you bring her up, right is that this idea of
Speaker 3: what the Academy Awards are in terms of thinking about
Speaker 3: how they're a snapshot of a business. It's also kind
Speaker 3: of a game, right, Like it's a system you have
Speaker 3: to know how to work, and for many years David
Speaker 3: was a publicist. She knows how to work the system.
Speaker 3: She knows how the system works. And at some point,
Speaker 3: you don't want to keep doing that. If the thing
Speaker 3: on your business card says filmmaker, if it says artists,
Speaker 3: you want to make things, You don't want to bureaucratize
Speaker 3: the making of things.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: But I mean, she's so historically minded, she's so much
Speaker 3: about you know, she's so aware of history and the
Speaker 3: and the archives and the record that she does feel
Speaker 3: responsible for making sure that it has as many black woman,
Speaker 3: non white, non straight names as can be put. And
Speaker 3: you know that work. You know, ask ask the civil
Speaker 3: rights folks. They will tell you it takes a toll.
Speaker 3: If it doesn't actually literally get you killed, it definitely
Speaker 3: burns you the fuck out, And especially when you can
Speaker 3: look at the labor, the struggle, the everything right, like Selma,
Speaker 3: I mean, what was something about It was about getting
Speaker 3: one thing passed. It was about getting like the voting
Speaker 3: rights bill passed. That was one thing, and look at
Speaker 3: all the shit that had to happen to get that. Think,
Speaker 3: I mean, the movie is not about any of this stuff,
Speaker 3: but like, think about all the sudden that happens in
Speaker 3: the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting
Speaker 3: Rights Act happened, and then all the shit that happens
Speaker 3: after that happens, and people were just like, what the fuck?
Speaker 4: What do we just do?
Speaker 3: And now y'all are killing people, like actually assassinating our
Speaker 3: leaders for what for us to be able to just
Speaker 3: like have a say and who runs our county? That's it?
Speaker 3: So what do they have to do with board of governors? Well,
Speaker 3: it means that change is hard and people don't like it,
Speaker 3: and it's hard to make the change. But it's hard
Speaker 3: for the change makers, and so the change makers eventually
Speaker 3: just want to change things for themselves because the making
Speaker 3: of the change written large. It's just too much at stake,
Speaker 3: It costs too much. People are so resistant the Academy's
Speaker 3: membership just to sort of come back to the oscars.
Speaker 3: It has expanded meaningfully in the last ten years. Right,
Speaker 3: They've gone out of their way to recruit all these younger, browner,
Speaker 3: more international, less American eyes voices tastes.
Speaker 2: Which Ava is partly responsible for.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean to her point, I mean it's interesting, right,
Speaker 3: like just to stay with black people for one second.
Speaker 3: The math on this is tricky, but like there have
Speaker 3: been more Asian and people of Asian descent winning the
Speaker 3: directing Oscar in the last few years I think than
Speaker 3: black people have ever been nominated, and I don't know
Speaker 3: what to do with that number. I mean, it's great
Speaker 3: for changing the scope of who is in that club.
Speaker 3: I mean the same is true for the three Mexicans,
Speaker 3: you know, del Toro and Inyanitu and in Quirne. I
Speaker 3: think that the sort of expansion of like what a
Speaker 3: best director is has chained is like it's grown so wide,
Speaker 3: but not wide enough to say that a black American
Speaker 3: also best directed something, and there is like a real, real,
Speaker 3: real resistance to thinking about black people in a new way.
Speaker 2: Right, what do you what do you mean by by
Speaker 2: new way?
Speaker 3: I mean I've been really struggling with God, I can't
Speaker 3: even get into that.
Speaker 2: Well, what can't we get into what we're here to get?
Speaker 3: I just I don't know. It's just it's too thorny.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's not too thorny, like I'm scared to
Speaker 3: say a bad thing, but like I have to like
Speaker 3: sort of work out exactly what it is I'm saying.
Speaker 3: But just all right, just think about the best Supporting
Speaker 3: Actress nominees across the history of the Academy Awards. Okay,
Speaker 3: what have those women been nominated doing? That's too generous.
Speaker 3: I mean they're housekeepers, they are cooks, they are servants.
Speaker 3: They work in the Jim Crow South as people who
Speaker 3: would have been doing that work. I mean Danielle Brooks
Speaker 3: playing Sofia and the Color Purple, I mean that's her job.
Speaker 3: Her business car would say, working for white people.
Speaker 2: Divine joy Rena.
Speaker 3: I mean she's a cook at the at the school.
Speaker 3: I mean, it is not about the quality of the
Speaker 3: performances of these women divine Davine joint Randolph is fantastic.
Speaker 3: Danielle Brooks. I mean she is doing Sofia karaoke like
Speaker 3: nobody has ever Sophia karaoke before.
Speaker 2: It's about the job they have in the film.
Speaker 3: It's about their function in the movie, right, And how
Speaker 3: many Best actress? How many Black American women have been
Speaker 3: nominated for carrying a movie regardless of their job. We'll
Speaker 3: start there, But if you make them something other than
Speaker 3: working for white people, how many?
Speaker 2: I don't have that fact at hand here.
Speaker 3: I mean you don't need it, because I'm telling you
Speaker 3: we wouldn't get to this many fingers for Best Actress, right,
Speaker 3: I wouldn't use them all. But my point is that
Speaker 3: I wouldn't need all ten of my fingers. A B.
Speaker 3: The real point is that the thing that's great about
Speaker 3: the Oscars is they're telling the truth about the movies, right.
Speaker 3: They're telling the truth about what the priorities actually are,
Speaker 3: and who counts, who belongs, what gets made, who stars
Speaker 3: in it? How much do they make? Who writes these things,
Speaker 3: who does the costumes? This is like the whole industry.
Speaker 3: I mean, the reports come out from the Annenberg Center
Speaker 3: of the USC Andberg Center. We know the numbers, the numbers.
Speaker 3: The numbers are the numbers, but the numbers tell a story.
Speaker 3: And that's where people like you know I guess me,
Speaker 3: and you because you will have people on to talk
Speaker 3: about this sort of stuff. But my only point connected
Speaker 3: to the way av DuVernay is thinking about what she
Speaker 3: ought to be doing with her time in life, is
Speaker 3: that these are stubborn, stubborn, deep, deep, deep historical problems.
Speaker 3: And there's so many of us who honestly believe that
Speaker 3: if we just got in there, if we just got
Speaker 3: in there and made the calls and sent the emails
Speaker 3: and had the meetings and did it would just be better.
Speaker 3: It would just be better. But this is now a
Speaker 3: woman Aver Duvernee who is as far away from being
Speaker 3: a Best Director nominee. And I'm laughing because it's fucking
Speaker 3: tragic and sad. She says, far away ten years after,
Speaker 3: like the closest she was ever gonna get to being
Speaker 3: the best director and getting nominated now as she was that,
Speaker 3: And I'm not this is not about origin of the
Speaker 3: quality of origin or should she even be nominated. It's
Speaker 3: like the the It's just about the scope and intrenchedness
Speaker 3: of the problem. And I think in some ways in
Speaker 3: her case, she's thinking it through. She's at least thinking
Speaker 3: through this question of justice in her work. And you know,
Speaker 3: why why are we like this? America? Why are we
Speaker 3: like this? But you know, the tidy fact of the
Speaker 3: Academy Awards.
Speaker 2: Is that it tells us that we are still like
Speaker 2: this Amir and Awinda well and a ceiling And what
Speaker 2: are we like.
Speaker 3: Diluted? I mean, you know, we we think we're one way,
Speaker 3: but like I have a report that says we're not,
Speaker 3: We're this other way. But we keep saying we're not
Speaker 3: like the report. We're like these other things. We're these
Speaker 3: other people. We don't have the values this report is
Speaker 3: saying we have. We've got different values. Look at us
Speaker 3: changing our values. But it doesn't matter how many more
Speaker 3: people you bring in. They're bringing their values right. And
Speaker 3: a lot of the times those values have just been installed.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is sort of Barbie, This is Greta
Speaker 3: Gerwig thinking here right, They've been installed in you from birth,
Speaker 3: and it's hard to let them go. Barbie is about
Speaker 3: how hard it is to let some toxic ass shit go,
Speaker 3: and sometimes how good toxic shit feels. How good it
Speaker 3: feels to just be a fucking asshole. I don't know
Speaker 3: what you do with that. I don't know what you
Speaker 3: do with how good it feels to just oppress people
Speaker 3: because it's easy and fun, to like bend an entire
Speaker 3: country's attention to your dysfunctional personality because you can't. It's just,
Speaker 3: I don't know. It's a really really crazy time to
Speaker 3: be an American, to be a new arrival to this
Speaker 3: country and to see what people are saying about you
Speaker 3: and what you're doing here.
Speaker 2: To be a critic at large at the NewYork Times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know so much about critic I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess if my brain is applied to some of
Speaker 3: some of these problems, sure, I mean, but one of
Speaker 3: the great things that I love about my job is
Speaker 3: I don't have to I get to think about the
Speaker 3: meaning of the stuff that people make for us to enjoy,
Speaker 3: and I get to think about how the stuff that
Speaker 3: people make makes me feel. I don't have to, like
Speaker 3: weigh in on things. I just don't like that. I
Speaker 3: don't believe in having takes right. I mean, I believe
Speaker 3: in the having of takes. I just don't believe that
Speaker 3: I need to be having one.
Speaker 8: We've done a podcast of takes, right, I mean you
Speaker 8: and me just now, Yeah, I mean, there's something I
Speaker 8: think that we've been doing. We've been really thinking through
Speaker 8: these problems. These aren't really takes.
Speaker 2: I want to understand how you see your role and
Speaker 2: job in this moment, how you're thinking about it, how
Speaker 2: you're thinking about doing it, what it means to do
Speaker 2: it in this country in twenty twenty four, and where
Speaker 2: you're at with what you've committed your life to. I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, I mean, I feel like everybody tells you
Speaker 3: that you're you know, the therapist qualities that you have
Speaker 3: are intense. It's like I'm talking to a person that
Speaker 3: I that. I mean, you know, we U and I
Speaker 3: have at conversations before. But I think there's something kind
Speaker 3: of unburdening in a weird way about, you know, being
Speaker 3: asked to think about your life to answer your question.
Speaker 3: I feel like my job hasn't changed, like the nature
Speaker 3: of my job has not changed. I feel more certain
Speaker 3: about the way I want to do my job that
Speaker 3: I've ever felt.
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 3: The people whose work I like to read, the people
Speaker 3: that I love talking to the people. I love hearing
Speaker 3: talk to other people. We're all trying to figure out
Speaker 3: how to live in whatever way it means it to
Speaker 3: be alive. And so much of the creation of art,
Speaker 3: the making, the writing, recording of a song, the labor
Speaker 3: that goes into making a book, especially a good book,
Speaker 3: filmmaking any kind of any kind of art. It's hard
Speaker 3: and it takes something really special to make something that
Speaker 3: touches other people. And that, to me, it's life giving.
Speaker 3: You were giving part of you to the rest of us.
Speaker 3: And you know, the way I think about my job
Speaker 3: is to respond to that offer. Rate Sometimes I wish
Speaker 3: you had given me more, maybe given me less, given
Speaker 3: me something different, but I'm always grateful to have received it.
Speaker 3: I mean, I do think that's so much of the
Speaker 3: thing that I want to try to do is never
Speaker 3: lose sight of the biggest picture that we have, especially
Speaker 3: as Americans, because it's so easy to do that. Again,
Speaker 3: I hate to keep going back to Barbie, but Barbie
Speaker 3: is secretly deep. Barbie is really about like lost connections,
Speaker 3: displaced desires, like personal revelation, epiphany. And these are white
Speaker 3: people having these revelations too, right, These are white people
Speaker 3: waking up to the reality of themselves. And Barbie doesn't
Speaker 3: even know she's white, but she discovers it. I mean,
Speaker 3: not necessarily in the movie, but part of this, the
Speaker 3: schematic of awakening in Barbie has to eventually involve her
Speaker 3: being aware that she is a white woman. Stereotypical. Stereotypical
Speaker 3: Barbie is what they call her, and I feel like
Speaker 3: that's a great euphemism for white. But I just feel
Speaker 3: like trying to make these connections between where we currently
Speaker 3: are and where we've been. You know, I don't always
Speaker 3: want to be like but you know, thirty five years
Speaker 3: ago x y Z E think because sometimes an experience
Speaker 3: just doesn't have a historical corollary, or even if it does,
Speaker 3: it can't be used to cheapen the intensity of the
Speaker 3: thing you're experiencing. Now, if you're seventeen years old and
Speaker 3: you know, hearing in the air tonight for the first time,
Speaker 3: it's new to you, So let's sit with it. I mean,
Speaker 3: I so deeply want to capture the sensation of, oh
Speaker 3: my God, holy shit, Jesus fucking Christ, how did you
Speaker 3: why did you do it? Again? Try to just think
Speaker 3: as historically as I can about the present without like
Speaker 3: using the history to oppress our enjoyment of what we
Speaker 3: are currently doing, but to say that like we're on
Speaker 3: a continuum, and to figure out where on the continuum
Speaker 3: we currently are at a given moment in present time
Speaker 3: with respect to the past, and to always keep that
Speaker 3: awareness with us. We don't want to bring it with
Speaker 3: us is the problem.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: I wanted to ask you that because when we first
Speaker 2: sat down in twenty sixteen, was.
Speaker 3: That in San Francisco? Was that at the San Francisco
Speaker 3: Film Festival, at the headquarters of the San Francisco International
Speaker 3: Film Festival.
Speaker 2: That's right, it was episode five of the podcast.
Speaker 3: Congratulations to you. By the way, I just you know,
Speaker 3: it's a funny, Like I'm just gonna rupt you for
Speaker 3: one second to say that I got very moved when
Speaker 3: I saw the art of the guests at some point.
Speaker 3: This is like four or five years ago. I was like, huh,
Speaker 3: look at all this, So like once a month, I'm
Speaker 3: just like, well, I didn't I missed that one. Oh look,
Speaker 3: mention Lee looks really good, you know what I mean, Like,
Speaker 3: I just I'd love that. So congratulations, I mean, just
Speaker 3: congratulations on eight years.
Speaker 2: But go on, well, thank you. In that conversation that
Speaker 2: we had, I kind of asked you this same question
Speaker 2: back then about purpose and why and where you were at,
Speaker 2: and I thought perhaps we should take a listen to
Speaker 2: that for a second.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, what the fuck?
Speaker 7: Really?
Speaker 2: This is Wesley Morris in twenty sixteen, I.
Speaker 7: Think, and you, you know, if anybody who spends enough
Speaker 7: time writing about directors should know this, Like, at some
Speaker 7: point you just start to lose it.
Speaker 3: I mean I might have already beaten.
Speaker 7: I don't know, but I'm somewhere in that, like somewhere
Speaker 7: between thirty five and fifty is that zone. I mean,
Speaker 7: if some of it's subjective, it's probably all entirely subjective
Speaker 7: when it comes to the question I'm actually asking, which
Speaker 7: is which is like what happens to does the energy
Speaker 7: run out?
Speaker 3: Like do I suddenly just get bored doing this? And
Speaker 3: there are a lot of days where I'm like this
Speaker 3: is dumb?
Speaker 4: Really no, I mean yes, yes, no, like really Like,
Speaker 4: I mean, I believe in it, but you know, it's
Speaker 4: like six o'clock in the morning and you're like dragging
Speaker 4: yourself across your apartment.
Speaker 3: You're like getting dressed to go to work and you're
Speaker 3: just like, what do I have to do today?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 7: Right, I have to write something that sounds smart about girls?
Speaker 7: Is that really important?
Speaker 3: And then I'm like, yes it is. I get to
Speaker 3: a point where like, yes, it's fucking important.
Speaker 7: But it takes it Like sometimes there are days when
Speaker 7: it just takes a little bit longer to get to like,
Speaker 7: guess this is important. Days it's like instant, Like I
Speaker 7: don't even have to there is no sort of meta
Speaker 7: conversation you have to have for yourself about whether or
Speaker 7: not you should be doing what you're doing. But I
Speaker 7: I will never really ever be satisfied with what I'm
Speaker 7: doing because I live in constant fear that I will
Speaker 7: lose the will to do it.
Speaker 3: I still feel that way. I still feel that way.
Speaker 2: I truly do.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Every day that I wake up, Sam,
Speaker 3: I think, is today the day that it won't be there?
Speaker 3: Will it not be there today? Like not only the
Speaker 3: will to do it, the will to do it that
Speaker 3: is that is a that is eight years ago me.
Speaker 3: Like now I'm like, is there still ink in the well?
Speaker 3: Can I still get it up? Is the magic still there?
Speaker 3: Because what it's really what we're talking about honest to God,
Speaker 3: I swear to God, Sam it's magic. Like, there's a
Speaker 3: lot of work that goes into it. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of suffering and you know, revising and you know false star,
Speaker 3: every everything that involves, you know, the creative process entails.
Speaker 3: But at the end of the day, at the beginning
Speaker 3: of the day, it's magic. I still have the will
Speaker 3: to do it. But now I'm like, it's not even
Speaker 3: about the will. It's just truly about is the sparkle
Speaker 3: of the thinking and the writing is still going to
Speaker 3: be there, even if I want to still be wiggling
Speaker 3: my fingers across the keyboard, and I just I just
Speaker 3: think the universe that and my ancestors, somebody in my
Speaker 3: family had had this. I really believe that somebody in
Speaker 3: my family who never got a chance to somebody in
Speaker 3: my in my in my genealogy, in my in my
Speaker 3: family history, somebody was cooking and really loved it, and
Speaker 3: whatever that was is. I really feel like I got
Speaker 3: it from them. I got it from them, and hopefully
Speaker 3: I will have it so that when I die it
Speaker 3: is a through line to my sister's kids or in
Speaker 3: their kids and their kids' kids. I don't know I'm
Speaker 3: holding on to something really old. I'm not even holding
Speaker 3: on to it, it's just what's passing through me feels
Speaker 3: really old. I hope it outlives me essentially.
Speaker 2: Well. I feel like the only way we can end
Speaker 2: this is on a piece that that magic produced, a
Speaker 2: piece of writing that came out last year about the
Speaker 2: film that we keep mentioning but not discussing. This is
Speaker 2: your review of The Holdovers. Ha ha ha ha. And
Speaker 2: I have to say these last three paragraphs are maybe
Speaker 2: some of my favorite bits of writing that you've ever done.
Speaker 3: So I thought, oh, thank you.
Speaker 2: Perhaps you'd want to read it for people as we
Speaker 2: leave me.
Speaker 3: Okay, I have not seen these words, by the way, Sam,
Speaker 3: since they entered the New York time.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, this is Wesley Morris on the new film
Speaker 2: The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Paine.
Speaker 3: Once it's all over and the movie is reminded you
Speaker 3: of Dead Poet Society, or maybe half a dozen films
Speaker 3: from the nineteen seventies like The Paper Chase, you might
Speaker 3: also feel what I did, like you've seen an inversion
Speaker 3: of Wes Anderson's Rushmore, which opened twenty five years ago.
Speaker 3: Pain and Anderson arrived at roughly the same moment in
Speaker 3: the mid nineteen nineties. Only Pain's milieu is world weary, harsh,
Speaker 3: slouched blue, or collared grayer. I saw Rushmore when I
Speaker 3: was loosely older than Max Fisher, the movie's go getting
Speaker 3: adolescent's old soul protagonist. Anderson's declarative archness and rigorous eye
Speaker 3: rocked my world. A geek had gotten his revenge opening
Speaker 3: a nerd core floodgate. But more important, his romanticism felt
Speaker 3: true cruelly. My peer is now Paul Hunnam, a figure
Speaker 3: humbled by principle, hampered by pride, and by the end
Speaker 3: of The Holdovers, humbled some more. He's Max Fisher slumped.
Speaker 3: Watching Anderson's films has steadily made me the ogler Matthew
Speaker 3: McConaughey plays and dazed and confused. I keep getting older
Speaker 3: and they just stay the same. The romanticism is calcified.
Speaker 3: His movies are less ardened, as much sculpture as to passion,
Speaker 3: as passionate themselves. Paine's weakness was for pessimism, a hardened,
Speaker 3: free wheeling version. His movies were about cynics, the native born,
Speaker 3: the Arab Easts, but somewhere along the way he and
Speaker 3: Anderson swapped, and the romantic intruded Paine's characters began needling
Speaker 3: each other and connecting, and that crackle kicked in. That's
Speaker 3: especially true his last two. The other is Downsizing, a
Speaker 3: soulful futurist sat tire with Matt Damon and Hong Child
Speaker 3: that nobody saw in middle age. Pain has come newly
Speaker 3: to life, whereas the Anderson of twenty twenty one's The
Speaker 3: French Dispatch and this year's Asteroid City seems to me
Speaker 3: as alienated from sensation as ever, hiding in and fussing
Speaker 3: over the past rather than interrogating or inhabiting it. The
Speaker 3: Holdovers kicks off with the same kind of torpie entitled
Speaker 3: under an upper class folk that dominate Rushmore, but he
Speaker 3: sends them away to get down to a more pungent,
Speaker 3: nitty gritty kind of comedy. One character tells another his
Speaker 3: near murderous sob story, and at some point a different
Speaker 3: character deadpans to him, here you go, killer. This is
Speaker 3: Payne's first movie set in any kind of past. It's
Speaker 3: using the old MPAA rating card and was shot digitally
Speaker 3: by Igel Brillde to achieve thirty five millimeters coziness, but
Speaker 3: it doesn't feel stuck. Pain's not locking us out, He's
Speaker 3: letting us in practicing. What I suspect is Paul hunums
Speaker 3: stock in trade during the school year, bringing ancient civilizations
Speaker 3: to aching life. All right, what was your point?
Speaker 2: Annoyed? Is this an annoyed Wesley?
Speaker 3: I see, no, I mean thank you for that. I
Speaker 3: appreciate it. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: It's a moving piece of writing, in part because you
Speaker 2: kind of put yourself in there. You saw some of
Speaker 2: yourself in the Geomadi character, in disposition, in spirit, not
Speaker 2: quite age, but perhaps in vocation as well. I don't know,
Speaker 2: because his job as a teacher in that film is
Speaker 2: too as you write, bring ancient civilizations to aching life.
Speaker 2: And I was thinking, like, at its best, at your best,
Speaker 2: isn't that kind of what you do in writing?
Speaker 3: I mean, Pharaoh, it's well observed. I mean sure, yes,
Speaker 3: I mean it can't come at the expense of the new.
Speaker 3: I would just want to emphasize that, right, Like it
Speaker 3: can't come at the expense of not being in the present.
Speaker 3: And the thing that I kind of admire about the
Speaker 3: Holdovers is it's like Tom It's Thomas Payne Alexander Payne
Speaker 3: sort of thinking about what it would mean for him
Speaker 3: to go back to the nineteen seventies. I don't know
Speaker 3: this guy is. This is a filmmaker who's only ever
Speaker 3: wanted to tell us who we are as a culture,
Speaker 3: as a people, as a national civilization. So if that
Speaker 3: guy wants to spend one movie in nineteen seventy something
Speaker 3: thinking about these you know, spoiled people who have to
Speaker 3: like eke out a life in a real city like
Speaker 3: Boston during the end of the Civil Rights movement and
Speaker 3: the Vietnam War. He gets to do it because he's
Speaker 3: earned it, and it again, it does not feel like
Speaker 3: he wants to stay there at all.
Speaker 2: I bring this up because to end, does this new
Speaker 2: film that is very much the kind of film that
Speaker 2: has vanished from the landscape, does it give you hope
Speaker 2: for the future of this medium?
Speaker 3: I mean maybe? But how old is Alexander Payne too?
Speaker 7: I think?
Speaker 3: I mean, where's the equivalent now of the guy who
Speaker 3: made Citizen Roof? Where's that person? Because that's the thing
Speaker 3: that's giving me hope, not that this great director who's
Speaker 3: done his work right. Where is you know, a thirty
Speaker 3: year old person who wants to give me an abortion
Speaker 3: comedy right now? Who wants to give me a really
Speaker 3: perfectly etched comedy about reproductive rights in America? And the
Speaker 3: hypocrisy's therein utterly cynical, very funny. Where's that person? Because
Speaker 3: I'm waiting for him and I don't know where they are.
Speaker 2: Well, I think right now there are a lot of
Speaker 2: people listening to this conversation that are going to try
Speaker 2: to answer the call.
Speaker 3: Ha God bless you and God help you. But I'm
Speaker 3: here when you're ready. When you do it, I want
Speaker 3: to be the first person to see it, read it something.
Speaker 2: And whenever you write about it, I am excited to
Speaker 2: read it. You talked about how filmmakers at their best
Speaker 2: make work that shows us how to live, what it
Speaker 2: means to be alive. That's what you said, and I
Speaker 2: think you have done that a whole lot in the
Speaker 2: last eight years since we first spoke. So I want
Speaker 2: to thank you for that, and I want to thank
Speaker 2: you as always my god, eight years.
Speaker 3: Thank you for the time I know, don't do that.
Speaker 3: Thank you Sam, Thanks for having.
Speaker 2: Me Lesley Morris. Take care, take care, Sam, And that's
Speaker 2: our show. I want to give a special thanks this
Speaker 2: week to Davon Darby and of course our guest today,
Speaker 2: Wesley Morris. To read or to learn more about any
Speaker 2: of the ten films nominated for Best Picture, be sure
Speaker 2: to visit our website at talk easypod dot com. If
Speaker 2: you enjoyed today's conversation, I'd recommend our episodes with David Remnick,
Speaker 2: Jay Wortham, Matt Bellanie and Ava du Verne. To hear
Speaker 2: those and more Pushkin Podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Speaker 2: or wherever you like to listen. If you want to
Speaker 2: help us out, be sure to leave us a review
Speaker 2: on Apple or Spotify or wherever you are listening to
Speaker 2: this right now. If you want to go above and beyond,
Speaker 2: sharing the program on social media, sharing it with a friend,
Speaker 2: all of it really does help us continue doing the
Speaker 2: work we do here every Sunday. You can follow us
Speaker 2: on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at talk easypod. If you want
Speaker 2: to buy one of our mugs they come and Cream
Speaker 2: or Navy, or the vinyl record we made with writer
Speaker 2: fran Leebowitz, you can do so at talk easypod dot com.
Speaker 2: Slash shop Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok. Our
Speaker 2: executive producer is Jennick Sabravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden.
Speaker 2: Today's talk was edited by c J. Mitchell and Kitlyn
Speaker 2: Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola, who was taped at
Speaker 2: Spotify Studios here in Los Angeles, California. Our music is
Speaker 2: by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Christia Shanowe. Our
Speaker 2: video and graphics are by Ian Chang, Derek Gabrazak, Ian
Speaker 2: Jones and Ethan Sineca. I also want to thank our
Speaker 2: team at push In Industries. They include Justin Richmond, Julia Barton,
Speaker 2: John Schnars, Kerrie Brody, Eric Sandler, Jorna McMillan, Cara Posey,
Speaker 2: Tara Machado, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, Malcolm Gladwell, Greta Cohen,
Speaker 2: and Jacob Weisberg. I'm San Fragoso. Thank you for listening
Speaker 2: to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week
Speaker 2: with filmmaker Lulu Wong. Until then, stay safe and so long.