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Episode 92 Old Featuring Dylan Roth
74 Plays1 month ago
Podcaster Dylan Roth (The Pod Universe with Dylan and Dalton) is back and this time they’ve brought a returning director, M. Night Shyamalan and his film Old (2021). That’s right, we’re going to the beach that makes you old with Gael García Bernal, Rufus Sewell, and Ken Leung on the sand with us. Adapted from the graphic novel Sandcastle, it manages to bulldoze over the existential horror of dying rapidly and just focus on how much physical ailments suck. We’re really examining what works in this one and what flies too close to the sun. You won’t want to miss it, so tune in!
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Reveal
00:00:40
Speaker
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to your favorite bad movie podcast. The only podcast that's brave enough to ask the question, if this movie's so bad, why does it make you old?
00:00:56
Speaker
We're your hosts. My name is Chris Anderson. And with me, as always, is the Idlib to my Trent, Mr. Greg Bossy. Yes. Hello, Chris. Love being Idlib. How are you doing, brother?
00:01:09
Speaker
i am here and I'm alive and that's enough. Yeah, i think I think we're all a bit on the struggle bus today. and Unfortunately, the bus did not pick up.
00:01:22
Speaker
Obviously, the Patricia to my Jaren, my wonderful wife, Anna, could not be here with us tonight. But we do have a very special guest. You might know him as the guest that makes us old. It's Mr. Dylan Roth. How are you, Dylan?
00:01:40
Speaker
ah Feeling younger than ever.
Movie Selection: 'Old'
00:01:42
Speaker
Chris, feeling great, feeling healthy. kid went to sleep at a reasonable hour today, and with relatively little fuss, I'm feeling great.
00:01:53
Speaker
I don't think that's a good omen. I like that. I like that a lot. Now, you chose our movie this week, and you chose the movie Old, a.k.a. The Beach That Makes You Old. It's not actually called that like in a subtitle, right?
00:02:09
Speaker
No, but I did notice this was never a real tagline for the movie, but on Letterboxd, that's what they've placed as the tagline for the movie. They almost always use the official tagline from the marketing of the film.
00:02:22
Speaker
But some wise guy decided when they were adding this film into the Letterboxd, the database, that they would change it. It just now just says old. Underneath the poster, it says, the beach that makes you old.
00:02:32
Speaker
um Okay. Now, I take it that this person who did such a thing doesn't have a high opinion of the film.
Plot and Preferences
00:02:40
Speaker
ah And I got to tell you, I kind of do.
00:02:44
Speaker
um Okay. Okay. Well, but listeners, if you haven't seen The Beach That Makes You Old, here's just a brief summary to hold in your mind.
00:03:05
Speaker
About a dozen tourists are taken to an isolated beach for an afternoon fun in the sun. instead, they all grow old and die.
00:03:19
Speaker
so there you go. That is the whole movie. Yeah, that's the movie. yep ah Dylan, what drove you to choose the beach that makes you old?
00:03:31
Speaker
I can tell you exactly what brought this movie to to our our into our arena here. i came over once previously to do ah Tokyo Drift, one of my favorite. Yes, a classic episode. um And you invited me to come back on, and I was like, oh, I liked doing that show. I like i like you all, and in the cut of your jib, I'd love to come back on the show. The problem I'm into is that I don't have the same zest for bad movies that you all do and that most of your guests do.
00:04:00
Speaker
No, fair, fair. My feeling is like until I've actually seen every Mike Nichols movie and or whatever, or every Park Chan-wook movie, I'd rather watch good movies. That's fair.
00:04:11
Speaker
That's a legitimate way to live one's life. No disrespect. Different paths. But I appreciate that you didn't want to disqualify me from being on the show. Everybody has some sort of guilty pleasure. Everybody has some dark Skellington. Well, you were suggesting, what if I picked a movie that was critically panned, but that I think is legitimately good? um It's funny because likes not what I did is i went through, i opened Letterboxd and I sorted all of my liked films by their average five-star rating.
00:04:43
Speaker
ahhuh and tried to find something on the low end that I felt was a good pick. And not just a movie that people thought was kind of mid that I really liked. Like, um, that, uh, Mary Elizabeth Winstead action vehicle, Kate, that came out on Netflix. I loved Kate. Kate is great. That along with this was one of the movies that came out the very first year I was writing or, and I was just a little bit later, but I was early in my, in my film reviewing career.
00:05:10
Speaker
Um, and, ah I went to go see Old and my takeaway from it is often the same kind of thing I take away from a lot of m Night Shyamalan movies, which is, I think it is a brilliantly directed movie that if you just redubbed all of the dialogue would be legitimately a great for great film.
Shyamalan's Style and Influence
00:05:32
Speaker
um I think i could see that one of the best one of the best directors in terms of camera placement and camera movement not necessarily in terms of directing actors, but in terms of the mechanics of, of, of filmmaking, you know, he is the new Spielberg after all. So he's great at blocking. um And just the most baffling writer, writer,
00:05:55
Speaker
That like, yeah, he's not weird enough to be a true psycho, like a Neil Breen Lego so but level psycho. Right. he's no not He's too normal to be that. But it's just like for a guy who, as far as I can tell, talks normal, has no idea how people talk.
00:06:14
Speaker
Yeah. and Yeah. A real teen year. Yes. it's And it's like he studied the rules of writing a screenplay so literally yeah that he has to, he has to stack up his crazy plots and his nonsense dialogue into like, you have to do the exact beats. Like here's your saving the cat and here's your planting and payoff. And everything is so mechanically sound and so practically nonsense. Yeah.
00:06:41
Speaker
ah And this, I think, is one of his greatest examples. I can tell you exactly how he got that way because I went through the exact same system. He went to and NYU film school.
00:06:54
Speaker
And they he teach you structure in NYU film at school. Structure is the foundation of everything. Interesting. Interesting.
00:07:07
Speaker
I remember like five years ago, I finally got around to watching Raging Bull and like Raging Bull, I think is the epitome of the movie. NYU film school wants you to make.
00:07:18
Speaker
It is like something that is structurally sound, but also beautiful. And like, this is what they're going for as opposed to like UCLA wants you to be like Steven Spielberg.
00:07:32
Speaker
Well, I guess that Eb. Night Shyamalan is who you get when you take a guy who wants to be Spielberg and then you send him to Tisch. Yes. And on the other side, what you get is... See, I lack experience to make such a judgment. I'm going to start going through a list of filmmakers who came out of NYU Tisch School and see who else fits into this profile that you just created. Woody Allen dropped out.
00:08:03
Speaker
ah Okay. So he'll be half keep half of the... yeah Yeah, you could see it in the DNA. um Another director of the horror movie, of Valentine.
00:08:16
Speaker
think they might have also done the Urban Legends sequel. Okay, I'm not familiar. Okay. When I was there, the Dean directed Chud 2, Bud the Chud.
00:08:28
Speaker
oh wow. Wow. wow But also one of my professors was Kelly Reichardt on the other side of the coin. Well, in any case, any case, we are far afield from old and we have a lot of material
Personal Experiences with Shyamalan
00:08:44
Speaker
to get through here. Greg, had you seen old before?
00:08:46
Speaker
So no, I had not. So are the last, I'm trying to remember at what point I dropped out of Shyamalan. So I was into Sixth Sense, saw that in the theater, saw Unbreakable, I think, in the theater. Maybe I didn't, but I really liked it. Then saw Signs in the theater. I was young enough. It was the theater. I was like, this is a great time. And then I think it worked in the theater when The Village came out. It was just like, nah, not.
00:09:09
Speaker
my thing lady in the water did not want to see happen. It didn't look good. And by the time old, I, so I remember going on like a date with someone and they played the trailer for, ah what is the one with the, is it the devil? Is that just what the devil's in the elevator? Yeah. know The devil, yeah the devil's one of the people in the elevator. yeah Yeah. So when the trailer for devil came on and it said like produced by M night Shyamalan, everyone in the theater laughed Yeah, i had the same experience. Yeah, that's when I was kind of like, I think I'm done with that. Yeah, you and America, i feel like. Yeah, and then I saw Old and thought, okay. But I will say this.
00:09:51
Speaker
I did have several people be like, you like bad movies, right? I was like, yeah, like you should see Old. And I was like, okay, i'll I'll keep that in mind. So I was excited when this popped up because it's been on my radar.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah, this is one I had never gotten around to. i had been sort of aware of the Shyamalanasants, I would call it. Sure. ah But i I hadn't really checked in with it. I was just just like, yeah, okay, respect. Glad he's doing something and people are still doing. He's doing his thing. People are digging it. Awesome.
00:10:24
Speaker
Uh, but I wasn't that interested. we've watched lady in the water for our episode with Manolo Moreno. Check out that episode. And that was obviously a wild ride. Yeah. And you could see how that was also sort of like, after that he had to reinvent himself. Yeah. ah Yeah.
00:10:42
Speaker
Like at that point, people were like, you were, you were too far up your own, but you know, we can't do this anymore. Uh, So checked this one out and i i had an experience with it. I will say that it was not a film that I will forget.
00:11:01
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. Not a film that I enjoyed ah watching. Yep. Not a film that I would recommend. Yep. This is a film where this is only the second time that I watched it I saw it in theaters opening weekend and I watched it now.
00:11:16
Speaker
But there is one shot in this film that I think about, I'm not kidding, probably three times a week. Okay. never stopped thinking about. continue like I mean, from the time I saw it to when I rewatched it yesterday.
00:11:33
Speaker
I was like, I have, I remembered it so well. And I have been thinking about it. Like I come back to it as in my head, and I'm trying to think of what are my favorite shots in cinema? One of them is in this film.
00:11:44
Speaker
What, what is it? Or are we going to do that? jeically Let's dive into it now. Okay. Okay. Okay. We'll run into it. and now you want to do I'm a guest. Well, let's press on. Let's get onto the context portion of the show, baby. Time to play that bumper.
00:12:11
Speaker
I wish I had some context about the background of the film. Script director, actors on time. What was going on on screen?
00:12:21
Speaker
I want to hear some details. Gossip stand to all that shit. Can't imagine all the time.
00:12:39
Speaker
So Old, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, came out July 19th, 2021. twenty twenty one I found four taglines, four official taglines, other than ah the beach that makes you old.
00:12:53
Speaker
One, a new trip from m Night Shyamalan. Sure. Okay. Okay. he's He's still a name. yeah He's still like, he was probably the last director that people knew his name. Other than I would say Christopher Nolan. chris He was the last director that built a brand. and ah Jordan Peele has that now.
00:13:15
Speaker
And Jordan Peele. Yeah. But he's he's like up there with those guys in terms of directors that made a brand that's known like outside of film guys. Right. Yeah.
00:13:29
Speaker
Tagline number two, a new trip from writer slash director M. Night Shyamalan. Boo. Boo. Thumbs down to that. He and directed this one, you guys. He's not just the producer like devil.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:45
Speaker
Tagline number three, it's only a matter of time. yeah oh biden I mean, there's an actual tagline where, you know, the other one, I mean, a new trip from, I guess, is, you know, it's like it's like half a tagline. This is like, i don't know, it gets the tin against the tone of the movie.
00:14:06
Speaker
It works on a level if you know what the movie is. I don't know if it's a great tagline, but it is at least applicable. You know? Tagline number four.
00:14:18
Speaker
They grow up so fast. Now that I like. Yeah. And i mean obviously I mean, naturally they're meant to, they're meant to like be accompanied with particular posters or whatever.
00:14:28
Speaker
ah And it really does speak to one of the most terrifying things about this movie. ah One big thing that changed for me in between the first time and second time I watched it, I'm a parent now. Yeah.
00:14:42
Speaker
I bet that makes it hit different. Yeah. That'll crank up some of the intensity of this film. Yeah. Yeah. ah Okay, so M. Night Shyamalan is our second director to join the Two Timers Club, joining Christian Duguay, director of Live Wire and Screamers. This is crazy.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's an amazing club. M. Night Shyamalan and Christian Duguay separated it at birth. ah If you want to hear our take on Shyamalan's career up to Lady in the Water, check out episode 53, Lady in the Water, featuring Manolo Moreno.
00:15:19
Speaker
But to sum up, Shyamalan was a bit of a wunderkind. The success of The Sixth Sense in 1999 made him the last of the great 90s auteurs to break out, ah but his follow-ups offered diminished returns.
00:15:34
Speaker
When Lady in the Water flopped, Shyamalan sort of got on the struggle bus. His next three films did all turn profits, but The Happening was about Mark Wahlberg fighting trees that make you kill yourself.
00:15:49
Speaker
The Last Airbender was a gritty action reimagining of a Nickelodeon cartoon. And After Earth starred Jaden Smith. So that's a rough three things to have to do in a row. And Airbender and After Earth weren't twist endings, right? Do we know this or not? No. Okay. So these are standard...
00:16:13
Speaker
No. Airbender. I watched Airbender this weekend. How was that? Just because I wanted to see where he was at at that point. Yeah. It was bad. It was really bad. Yeah.
00:16:25
Speaker
That's one of the only night joints that I've never i've never attempted. i see i i just I can't imagine being motivated. I salute you for giving it a shot. Watching it felt exactly like reading the Wikipedia article about it.
00:16:39
Speaker
Yeah. can see that. I can see that. Like i I was just like the movie was describing itself to me the whole time. So ah if Shyamalan wasn't careful, he was going to become one of those guys with like a promising early career that ended up directing c plus studio filler movies every other year, much like Roger Donaldson of Dante speak.
00:17:03
Speaker
He could have ended up being that kind of guy if he wasn't careful. So he needed to switch tactics and, So two years after after Earth, Shyamalan returned with a self-funded found footage horror movie, The Visit.
Film's Background and Adaptation
00:17:20
Speaker
And that sort of kicked off the Shyamalan-asance. Have either you guys seen The Visit? That's actually one that I missed the time, and I have not i have not caught up on that one yet. that That was the one where he really started to turn things around. i really respect that he's like, man, Alaska movies I've made have not been good, and what I'm going to do is mortgage my house.
00:17:41
Speaker
Uh, and now the has to be good and then it has to be successful or else, uh, I'll be having to pay off my house, uh, that I, that I bought with my much more successful films and it worked. So I salute him.
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it was smart of him to go small. I think it was smart of him to lean into found footage. You know, yeah i think, uh, the world wanted to see an M night Shyamalan take on found footage. That would have been very intriguing at that point.
00:18:16
Speaker
So, uh, instead of, uh, his attempts to make big budget blockbusters anymore, m night would now make relatively low budget, well executed high concept thrillers and horror movies, terror films, one might call them. Uh, he immediately followed the visit with split and glass finishing up what he started with unbreakable, uh, before moving on to direct old, uh,
00:18:45
Speaker
In September 2019, Universal announced it would distribute Shyamalan's next two independently financed films. In a press release, Shyamalan stated, There are wonderful studios out there, but Universal made it a mandate to release original films.
00:19:03
Speaker
I believe original films are crucial to the longevity of the theatrical experience. This is ironic, of course, because old is not original. It's an adaptation of a Swiss graphic novel called Sandcastle.
00:19:16
Speaker
Anybody read Sandcastle? No, I looked at some pictures of it. It looked pretty. It looked interesting. I read it. ah It was very sad. Yeah. And it had ah none of like the framing plot of this. It was just these people are trapped on a beach that makes them old and they die.
00:19:36
Speaker
Yeah. That's what it sounds like. Without any kind of mystery plot to it. It's just like, huh, here we are. Yeah, they just they they die before they figure it out, and the the comic doesn't tell you.
00:19:49
Speaker
It's just over. it's It's good, but it's very sad. I could get into that. Yeah. so I think the important thing to recognize here is that aging 50 years and 20 hours, 25 hours, that's that would be pretty sad Yeah, it's kind of hard to get around the sadness in and inherent in the in the premise. Yeah, yeah. Yes.
00:20:14
Speaker
But there is some levity here in the, there is some levity to be found in the Shyamalan version, ah thanks to my personal favorite rapper, Midsize Sedan.
00:20:25
Speaker
I I like to write down names of characters before I begin so that I i can kind of reference them as I'm watching like okay and so I have to make some predictions about who's going to be what sometimes like all the big people they're going to be in it or I know enough about this plot to know that the guy named Tony is important but I saw a mid-sized sedan and I was just like I don't I actually wrote it I was like mid-sized sedan is that real Like, i was like, is this a misunderstanding? Am I not understanding what there's someone credited as a midsize sedan?
00:20:57
Speaker
I don't understand. Well, we do eventually learn. Well, that must have been a treat for you. Yeah. He's got, we learn his government name, eventually. Aaron Pierre plays Brendan.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah. But to the world... of pop music. He is known as Mid-Sized Sedan. And I have to tell you, I played a game with my um like my my co-writer and producer on my show is ah as ah is also a producer for an Apple podcast, ah like like the Rap Life podcast.
00:21:28
Speaker
And through that, they've learned so much about hip hop and occasionally will quiz me to try and get me to detect which current rap names are real. Okay. They just made up on the spot.
00:21:41
Speaker
And I flunked that test. I bet it would be hard. They're weird now. They're weird now, right? Because they've gotten weird. Whatever your fucking social handle is, right? Like you have to get really, you really creative. Mid-sized sedan. I love it It's relatively simple, really.
00:21:56
Speaker
I like it because it feels out of time. It makes this. yeah It feels like it's specific to a time that didn't happen. Do you know what I mean? And makes old timeless that way.
00:22:08
Speaker
It feels like old could be all of us. um Maybe it is. We're all bound there eventually. It's only a matter of time. So ah the production went smoothly despite being filled during a pre-vax COVID pandemic. They filmed it entirely in the Dominican Republic. Everyone stayed at the same hotel and allegedly nobody got sick.
00:22:31
Speaker
it was Shyamalan's first film since his debut praying with anger to not have any shooting days in the greater Philadelphia metro area. How about that? Don't worry though. Some of the characters are still from Philly.
00:22:45
Speaker
Yes. first I think they need to get night on Abbott elementary. I think he would be a great guest. I think he's a natural fit. That would be cool. Wait, hang on. They shot some of the last airbender in Philadelphia.
00:22:59
Speaker
Uh, I guess so. Maybe. I think they built some of their like green screen studios near Philadelphia. I mean, that's just to check a box, really. Well, and he'd like, then he doesn't have to stay away from his home. He gets to be with his kids at home and gets to put money into the local economy.
00:23:15
Speaker
He loves it. He's like what Tyler Perry is to Atlanta. M night Shyamalan is to Philadelphia. I grew up in, in central Jersey. So like right between New York and Philly. And so there was like a lot of sort of Philly allegiance where I was growing up and, you know, I was like 12, 13 when his first movies were coming out and every like teenage film, film buff or wannabe filmmaker,
00:23:41
Speaker
was instantly a huge fan of M. Night Shyamalan for doing it in Philly. The other big filmmaker from my area at that time was Bryan Singer, who we were really excited about at the time. Yeah, hindsight. He went my high school much much earlier. ah But we have Chris McQuarrie.
00:23:58
Speaker
Same school, same town. Okay. we just kind know He wasn't directing yet.
00:24:04
Speaker
Well, okay. Okay. Okay. Where was I? ah The change of move of location must have served Shyamalan well. The film did connect with audiences and turn in a $90 million dollars box office on an $18 million dollars budget. And that's during the pandemic.
00:24:21
Speaker
It came out in 2021.
00:24:25
Speaker
Or i can't remember if I'm a fucking anything anymore. no it came out in July 2021. And it was one of those things where theaters had been reopening gradually. I i believe ah I don't think I would have gone if I hadn't been vaxxed yet. So surely that had happened.
00:24:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. There must have been maybe like a vaxxed card situation. One of the first movies that I saw in theaters after getting vaccinated. I could find out if it's the first. I don't think so. I think the first was ah that Zack Snyder a zombie movie that he made for Netflix. but Oh, no Army of the Dead.
00:25:02
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:06
Speaker
So, old was instantly memefied. ah Many online do still call old the beach that makes you old, which is why it still uses a punchline in some circles.
00:25:18
Speaker
This simple turn of phrase, the beach that makes you old, the dysphemistic nature of it, does strip down the film to the pure absurd horror of the concept.
00:25:29
Speaker
As we all see an older face looking back at us from the mirror every day, the absurd horror of the beach that makes you old becomes more and more apparent every day.
00:25:41
Speaker
Other horror films of 2021. You got Black Phone. you got black phone Okay. Never getting around to it. People loved it. I didn't either, but people loved it.
00:25:53
Speaker
You got Army of the Dead, as Dylan just mentioned. You got The Deep House, the one about the haunted house at the bottom of a lake. Oh. I'm sorry, what? The Deep House. It's about a haunted house at the bottom of a lake. No, I i i got it.
00:26:10
Speaker
I'm just still trying to wrap my head around it. That sounds like my personal nightmare, honestly. It sounds scary, right? Yeah. You also got Willy's Wonderland. Oh, okay.
00:26:22
Speaker
You got Malignant. Sure. got the Japanese reboot of Cube. Oh. You guys know they did a Japanese reboot of Cube? I had no idea. Yeah, I bet that's interesting. I'm really curious. Yeah.
00:26:41
Speaker
And, of course, you have Phil Tippett's Mad God. That's great. That's a class. I'm really embarrassed that I missed it. And it was on Shudder for a while, and I kept wanting to find the right mood to watch it. obviously you know You need to be in the right mood to watch that one, I think. That's that's the thing, you right? like I should have seen it in theaters when I had the chance, because that's the environment. would' have been I think it was playing at the IFC for a while.
00:27:04
Speaker
ah Blew it, and so I still haven't seen it. I think it needs to be like a party atmosphere. i need to's this is ah It's a boys' night film, I think. I don't know about that. That's not a child in the house. No, it's not a child in the house. i mean, you can watch it with other people, but it's not a, it's a, it's like a nearly, uh, dialogue-less claymation film. That's just full of very surrealistic, uh, imagery, motifs of death. Okay. Consuming and excreting.
00:27:35
Speaker
I guess it depends on the group. Yeah, that's fair. it for The group should be weirdos mostly. Yeah, that's right. I think it could be good. I've not heard groups like that discuss discussed as boys.
00:27:47
Speaker
Usually it's like the geeks or the film nuts or whatever, you know. Every year for Dalton's birthday, they get together a group of guys for a weird feel-bad movie. Oh, okay. We watched Possession one year. Oh, then watch Mad God. You watch Mad God. You're going to have a great time. Now that I know you've watched Possession. We know who the boys are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are the boys to whom I'm referring.
00:28:17
Speaker
Okay, those boys. Yeah, those boys. Those are different boys than I'm thinking. the lives like we We're thinking of different boys. Let's talk about the plot old. Yeah, let's do it.
00:28:46
Speaker
Plot bumper, listen to me. I'm gonna give you the plot summary. Come on, baby. Here's the synopsis.
00:28:58
Speaker
Plot bumper, plot bumper.
00:29:11
Speaker
All right, here we go.
Arrival at the Beach
00:29:14
Speaker
We get some very brief credits before we cut to a shuttle bus bringing a family of four up to a resort on a small tropical island.
00:29:22
Speaker
Mom and dad are Prisca and Guy and daughter and son are Maddox and Trent, aged 11 and 6. The resort is incredibly luxurious. The hotel manager greets them with a bespoke cocktails. There's a table covered in free candy for the children.
00:29:39
Speaker
The room is gorgeous. And Trent soon makes friends with the hotel manager's little nephew, Idlib. And their shared habit of asking everyone they meet to their names and occupations does bang out a lot of exposition very nicely.
00:29:59
Speaker
On their first night, Prisca and Guy fight. The kids hear the whole thing. They're splitting up. And also, one of them is sick. Maybe not that sick, but sick and it's making things more complicated. And it's got nothing to do with his failing marriage.
00:30:15
Speaker
No, that's unrelated. That's, yeah. I just love that. la like That has nothing to do with it. It's like, it's weird that it's been brought up then. Yeah. I mean, everybody's just got a lot on their minds. Yeah. And it's true. And they're going to tell you about it.
00:30:30
Speaker
dont they yeah yeah In as clear and specific and precise language as possible, as we all do in our daily lives. Exactly. Exactly. The good news is Idlib has whipped up a distraction for his buddy Trent. It's a Zodiac Killer style cipher never for him to decode.
00:30:53
Speaker
And it says that there's going to be an ice cream eating contest tomorrow. So that's got to be exciting. That's pretty cool. i'd love I think I could eat the most ice cream. I'd love to try.
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah, probably now probably i not. I will not fare well, but I would like to participate. because Yeah, that's what I'm. Yeah, i'm I'm right there. Yeah, I might just throw it once I got to the point of having eaten enough ice cream.
00:31:16
Speaker
Just a half a scoop. I had a big lunch. Now, unfortunately, he will not be able to make it to the ice cream eating contest. The manager of the hotel has arranged for a day trip for the family.
00:31:31
Speaker
The family all agrees, and soon they're being driven out to the aforementioned beach by a very squirrely shuttle bus driver being played by, of course, m Night Shyamalan himself in his trademark director cameo.
00:31:48
Speaker
Always a little bit more than Hitchcock's cameo. He never just walks through the screen. He always gives himself like a under like and more than five lines. like He should be making more than SAG minimums.
00:31:59
Speaker
it's less It's less a cameo in more small part. Yeah. Not that any part is small. No, no, no. and i And he comports himself well in this one. He doesn't give himself, you know, in Lady in the Water, he was underwater. No, no. He was biting off more than he could chew with that one.
00:32:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Here he's fine.
00:32:23
Speaker
Uh, and, and it is good that he's sort of a puppet master here, you know, director is like, you know, it's a fun parallel.
00:32:32
Speaker
Uh, now also on board the shuttle bus are another family of four, which include Dr. Charles played by Rufus Sewell, who you might know from dark city.
00:32:42
Speaker
oh uh, the night movie with Heath Ledger, not first night, um Knight's Tale, I think Knight's Tale, that's the one, he was the villain in that but yeah, he plays Dr. Charles and he has a vain trophy wife named Crystal they have a three-year-old daughter named Kara, who appears to be barely verbal and there's Charles' mother whose name I didn't clock but I'll call her Gam Gam Agnes I thought maybe, but I could be wrong
00:33:20
Speaker
All grandmothers are Gam Gam on this show. That's fine. ah Good for Gam Gam. Gam Gam also has a small dog named Gustav.
00:33:31
Speaker
ah So Knight hands over a suspiciously large cooler full of food before explaining that he will not be walking them down to the beach. And they just need to follow through this narrow crevasse between this 50 foot tall rock cliff.
00:33:47
Speaker
And um when they get to the other side, they're there. And then night speeds off. The two families find themselves on the beautiful remote beach. The end.
00:33:58
Speaker
I do have to say there were several like beach scenes before this. And I like try to write down where I am. So I have like little little note where like, oh, we're at the the breakfast or, you know, the flirtation or whatever. And this sort is like, is this the beach?
00:34:11
Speaker
Is this the beach? Is this one of those was, it turns out. But a lot of them, it was just like, no, this is not the beach. Everyone's expecting, you know, I think i I'm going to be doing this a lot. I'm going to give Knight some credit here and that I think that there's some pretty good misdirects before the actual terror kicks in because he knows the audience is waiting for it, right? First, we go to a different beach ah where nothing bad happens except for we just got to establish students do a lot of exposition. And then later, once they get to the beach, there's this shot in which we see one of the children standing on the beach completely frozen solid.
00:34:49
Speaker
as another kid runs by. And I think that certainly the director of The Happening ah knows that this can be eerie and unsettling, as that's a thing that happens in The Happening before everyone kills themselves. um He knows we're just waiting for that eerie thing to happen.
00:35:04
Speaker
And then one of the kids comes by and tags that person, and they get unfrozen, and they're playing freeze-tap. Yeah. Right. And it works on the metatextual level of like, I gotcha. But also it's one of those things that's got thematic, a little bit of but a little bit of thematic resonance. And, you know, they're children and they're and they think they're going that way forever. They'll stay frozen in time. ah And but they're just playing a game. they're just being silly.
00:35:29
Speaker
um And he does that a couple times. And personally, i think it's good. I will give him that shot. I will not say that he is bad at doing what he is trying to do so much as I think he is trying to do a bad thing.
00:35:48
Speaker
Oh, yes. Oh, absolutely. yeah you'll never think that that is That is a description of almost every M. Night Shyamalan film. ah And this is no exception. This is maybe like maybe the Ur example.
00:36:00
Speaker
I remember the shot you're talking about. Is that the one that you think about? no no, no, no. Okay. That's just a shot that i think is good. I remember the shot of the freeze tag and I found it disorienting, but not in a positive way.
00:36:14
Speaker
Okay. I found a lot of the camera work in this to be disorienting, but not in a way that I felt added to it. I felt sometimes it obfuscates, which is part of what he's doing and part of the shtick.
00:36:25
Speaker
But sometimes it ob so obfuscated so much that I was like kind of squinting me like, what am I even what am I not seeing? I'm not even certain what's trying to be hidden at this point.
00:36:39
Speaker
And that was a bit. Yeah, that was a bit weird for me. Yeah, at times it feels like he got a little out over his skis for me, i but I felt like he at least was trying things, and I'll give him a salute for that. And it it it did hit as often as he missed, I would say, depending on how generous I was feeling.
00:36:56
Speaker
and So they're not the only people out there, these two families. Maddox spots her favorite rapper, Midsize Sedan, hanging out alone.
00:37:07
Speaker
ah But Guy tells her not to bother him. If he's over there alone, it's because he wants to be alone. Now we know from an earlier scene that mid-sized Sedan has been there since maybe last night.
00:37:19
Speaker
Or the morning. One of the two. For at least, I'm going to say, 10 hours.
00:37:28
Speaker
So he should be about 20 years older at least than she remembers. Anyway. anyway Yeah, no it's it's definitely strange, credulialally but but don't worry. They explain it away in a very sensitive manner.
00:37:41
Speaker
No, they absolutely do. That's all swept under the rug. So Maddox and Trent soon make friends with Kara and the three of them start playing freeze tag, eating lots of snacks and finding large caches of rusty hotel cutlery buried in the sand. As as one does.
00:37:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's a hotel beach. People like to throw knives out into the ocean, and this is where they wash up. That's right. It's a tradition at the hotel. The throwing of the knives. There's like 30 or 40 knives.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah, they order the knives in bulk. They don't even care.
Beach Discoveries and Tension
00:38:17
Speaker
Now, ah then, while playing hide and seek, Trent finds a rotting corpse of a skinny dipper that we saw earlier in the film.
00:38:30
Speaker
Charles suspects that mid-sized sedan is involved with her death. But before he can turn him over to the local police force, who I'm sure are fantastic in this third world country, game two more people from the hotel show up.
00:38:46
Speaker
There's Patricia, a psychiatrist with epilepsy, and Jaren, her husband, a nurse played by Ken Jeong, who is... Doubtlessly the most rational and likable character in the whole film.
00:39:00
Speaker
Yeah. Is a real Ken Leung type. Yeah. I call him Ken Jeong at first. I apologize. Ken Leung. Guy from Lost and that one Sopranos episode.
00:39:12
Speaker
Mm-hmm. And I'm always happy to see Ken Leung in anything. Yeah. And I think him being in Lost really does make this feel very lost to me. Yeah, yeah. This does have a this does have a and a lost kind of ah kind of a shine to it yeah You could not get away with casting a season one actor from Lost, like somebody from the original Flight in this movie. That would be too on the nose. But Ken Leung shows up later, so we're in the clear.
00:39:41
Speaker
i don't even think he's a tailie, right? Isn't he from a third? think he i think it's another I think it's another one further down. like a He's sent in by the Dharma initiative because he can talk to ghosts. Oh, that's right. ah But also...
00:40:00
Speaker
The ending of this movie, I don't want to get too much. I have a whole big thing about the ending of this movie, so we really got to get cracking. I also want to say the ending of this movie feels like what people who didn't like the ending of Lost wanted the ending of Lost to be. Yeah, could sort of see that, actually.
00:40:20
Speaker
Absolutely. They would have loved it if it ended like old. Yes. Now, ah so they catch the newcomers up vis-a-vis the dead bodies. And Jaron tries to walk back through the crevasse where they were dropped off so we can get a cell phone signal so we can call the hotel or the police or something. But instead, halfway through, he gets hit with a migraine and has to run back towards the beach and he passes out.
00:40:46
Speaker
Then Gam Gam dies. Maybe it's the stress of the whole corpse thing. Maybe it was lying in the tropical sun without proper dehydration is a dangerous thing for the elderly. Who can say? Certainly at this point, no one is suspecting that the beach is making them old. Why would you?
00:41:03
Speaker
But two dead bodies is cause for alarm. Everyone agrees. Yeah. The kids, they're off doing their own thing. They don't want to be involved with this dead body stuff. ah So they don't even really notice what's going on.
00:41:15
Speaker
But the next time Guy and Prisca take a look at Maddox and Trent, they've grown so much that they don't even recognize them. The cats in the cradle and the silver spoon. Right.
00:41:27
Speaker
They appear to have grown, I'm going to say, but five years at this point. That's right. So then midsize sedan, he makes a break for it. You've never seen a midsize sedan with this kind of acceleration.
00:41:43
Speaker
Come on. Yeah, it's pretty solid. ah So ah Charles, he tries to give chase and the two of them run into the crevasse and the exact same thing happens to them just like it happened to Jaren.
00:41:57
Speaker
Prisca is now desperate to get off the beach as she's convinced the children have some sort of viral infection. They split up to try to find another way off the beach and they soon all pass out for a reason that's not particularly clear.
00:42:13
Speaker
Out of nowhere, Charles whips out a pocket knife and slashes midsize sedan across the cheek and claims it was because he felt threatened. the weirdest thing. Yeah.
00:42:23
Speaker
Well, there's a lot of weird things. yeah I don't know if you want to claim that. that this this is Just when this happened, I was just like, what is going on now? Why are we doing this now?
00:42:34
Speaker
Well, you got to ramp up the tension. Well, that's Rufus Seabro's character. The whole thing. Of course, they don't really explain his thing until later, but... ah He likes to stab his stabby.
00:42:46
Speaker
he's just yeah He's just a paranoid stabby guy. Yeah. He's got problems. doctor? Yes, and and in fairness, he is the person asking the most important question in the film, which is, what is the movie that starred both Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando? yeah And think about how much less conflict would have been in this movie if he could recall that that movie is called Missouri Breaks.
00:43:12
Speaker
Yes. If someone had just said Missouri Breaks to him, this movie could have gone very differently. Yeah, it would have been less stabby stabby. Yeah. But the good news is midsize sedan's slashed face heals instantly.
00:43:27
Speaker
Everybody feels like that's pretty strange. Yeah. Charles then examines his daughter, Kara, and guesstimates that she's aged about six years since they came to the beach this morning, which would mean that they're all aging at a rate of about two years per hour.
00:43:46
Speaker
Patricia, the psychiatrist, suggests that they all gather in a circle and talk about their feelings about this new development. That's her one character trait. yeah Yeah. You know, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. She's got two character traits because she also has epilepsy.
00:44:02
Speaker
It's true. Okay. That's important. It's extremely important. It turns out very important the story. Yeah. That epilepsy scene at the beginning of the film wasn't there for no reason. That was a checkov's epilepsy. That was Chekhov seizure. Definitely.
00:44:16
Speaker
I did not mention it because there's so much happening. God, I have so much to get through. Let's keep going. Let's keep piling through. ah So before they can all, you know, pass around the talking stick and play a game of magic wish ball, Prisca passes out.
00:44:33
Speaker
It turns out that she was the sick member of the couple and she had what would have been a benign tumor somewhere in her gut. But the beach is causing it to expand rapidly from the size of a golf ball at the beginning of this scene to roughly the size of a pumpkin by the time we're through.
00:44:55
Speaker
They ask Dr. Charles to cut it out, but when he makes the incision, it rapidly seals shut. He also keeps asking the others if they can remember the movie, The Missouri Breaks, which seems odd in this context.
00:45:10
Speaker
Jaron and Guy help out by holding the incision open and Charles excises the 20 pound tumor before the wound closes up and Harry tosses the tumor into the sand, never to be mentioned or seen again.
00:45:24
Speaker
And so that life threatening tumor is now done. Yeah. I gotta say, this is a part of, this is ah an element of body horror that i think is executed really well. I like the, first of all, conceptually, it's pretty freaky.
00:45:38
Speaker
Secondly, the idea of having to hold the wound open with your hands to keep it from healing fast enough, that's pretty novel. And I like how little we see Yeah, very classy. This might be one of those disorienting moments that you're talking about, but I really like the shot where we're basically going from the POV of right by the wound and our but our gaze is kind of drifting off into the sky as they're doing the surgery.
00:46:00
Speaker
And then we only see it happening as they're pulling. We see it like for a split second, this fucking basketball out of her body. Yeah. yeah that That to me is the good M. Night Shyamalan shit that I like.
00:46:14
Speaker
I would have liked, it hear me out, I would have preferred it if it was ah one of those dermoid cysts that has teeth and hair. Yeah. I think that this should have been more body horror. Like, when they're like, the the wound is, like, healing around my fingers. It's like, instead of saying it, could you show me that? Like, I would love see that. at very least have some blood on your hands when pull them away. I mean, admittedly, it's a PG-13 movie, and that might not be... It's...
00:46:42
Speaker
PG-13 horror movies are tough because they're like, it's horrible, but in a way that is still safe for a 13-year-old. And it's just like, yeah okay. Yeah, neither fish nor fowl a little bit Yeah, you can do that, but I don't know if you can always do that.
00:46:56
Speaker
For me, this is one of those bits that kind of makes me feel like this whole thing gives it kind of a stage play vibe. True. yeah i've i've I've said my piece about it. i don't ah I also think that something gnarly would have been cool.
00:47:11
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I could see this very much as a no exit. You could easily mount old for the stage. Uh-huh. Now. i and I'm going to do that now.
00:47:22
Speaker
It actually, I think, might be slightly more interesting on a stage. Yeah. You could make it a musical. You could make it an opera very easily. Now, Prisca is feeling much better.
00:47:33
Speaker
And ah the health scare does bring her and Guy closer together. So that's nice. Midsize sedan decides now would be a good time to look at that skinny dipper's rotting corpse for some reason.
00:47:45
Speaker
ah But then he's surprised to find that she's actually decomposed into a real human Skellington. How did this happen? What's the mechanism? Why didn't this happen while she was bombing around in the ocean for the last 10 hours?
00:47:59
Speaker
Who can say? I'm going to say, if you approach this movie with that CinemaSins mindset, you are going to wreck yourself. You have to turn that part of your brain off.
00:48:11
Speaker
Yeah. I'm not going to do this with absolutely everything that I like in the movie, but I have to say the one line in this movie that's supposed to make me laugh, that I'm completely sure was supposed to make me laugh, did make me laugh really hard. Which was? Which is when they pull, when Midsize Sedan brings everybody over to see the skeleton, and he says, can we all agree that I didn't do that?
00:48:32
Speaker
Yes. yeah yeah That got me. That was pretty good. ah Good job, Aaron Pierre. Yeah, I'll give him that one. Credit where credit's due. Now, ah everyone is now fully convinced that something is affecting time on the beach.
00:48:50
Speaker
Perhaps the rare minerals that the hotel manager bragged to them about in order to lure them out there. Jaron suggests that rushing out of the crevasse is like radical decompression and that those headaches they're experiencing are their bodies reacting to the dramatic change in time pressure.
00:49:09
Speaker
And if they slowed way down, Like if they took eight hours to walk out, they could escape. For some reason, no one tries this. This a true Voyager magic ray situation.
00:49:27
Speaker
ah The rest of the movie, I was like, please, please, please try to walk slowly through the crevettes. ah Now, ah the main reason why they don't do it immediately is that another crisis pops up. There's constant crises in this movie. Yeah.
00:49:43
Speaker
In a way that reminded me a lot of two of my favorite comics, which are The Drifting Classroom and The Eternaut. So I thought of The Drifting Classroom with this one quite a bit, actually. Yeah. They're both just like nonstop nightmare mode. Mm-hmm.
00:50:01
Speaker
Except this is paced a little bit more deliberately. Yeah. ah Now, ah the thing is, this crisis is ah no one was keeping an eye on Trent and Kara. And during some of their alone time, the six-year-old boy got that three-year-old girl pregnant.
00:50:22
Speaker
Because they're now roughly 18 or so. They're post-pubescent. Yeah. And they don't know what they're doing. He thought it would take 10 times.
00:50:35
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. They're just doing some groovy goofing. ah Kara gives birth 45 minutes later, and then her baby dies of malnutrition roughly one minute after that.
00:50:48
Speaker
And then the movie keeps on plugging.
00:50:52
Speaker
Everybody does sort of disperse for a moment to process what they just saw. ah But there's not a lot of time for that because Charles stabs midsize sedan to death. Yeah. For some reason.
00:51:04
Speaker
Yeah. He just freaks out. He's just a psycho it is what everybody's rapidly realizing. That's what age does to you. makes you do the dabby stabby stabby. Yeah. At least. That's how most of us go in the end. If only we had the privilege of growing old, like this movie offers, most us end up getting stabbed.
00:51:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Such is life. ah No one really has much of a reaction beyond trying to take Charles's pocket knife away from him.
00:51:32
Speaker
But other than that, nobody seems to really care. Prisca tells Maddox about the affair that she had. And Maddox says, i just need some time, mom.
00:51:47
Speaker
which perfect. Obviously you got to do that. That's your trailer. left it There and it would be ham fisted enough, but you have to have Prisca turn three quarters to the camera and say, that's the one thing we don't have because it's possible that someone in the audience is unclear on what the film is about.
00:52:08
Speaker
yeah Well, I'll tell you one thing that one of my professors told us in film school. And i remember the example that they showed us was ah the Fisher King and the scene where Jeff Bridges has like white ah cream on his face and he's practicing his line for this sitcom that he's auditioning for. and the line is, forgive me, forgive me And he's just saying, forgive me over and over again for like this two minute long segment of the film. And the professor said, when you want to be subtle, be obvious about it.
00:52:41
Speaker
And that's what's happening in this scene. M night wants to be subtle. So he's being obvious about it. Huh? It's interesting advice.
00:52:54
Speaker
It's true. It's true. Now, uh, Then ah Maddox goes for a swim and she bumps into Jaren's floating corpse.
00:53:05
Speaker
As one does. I guess they don't rot in the salt water. So I think the thing with Jaren is he was, he had just like, I'm just going to go out and swim. So his was relatively, ah i guess, yeah, even if it was a half an hour, it would still be a year decomposition.
00:53:22
Speaker
yeah We might be running into that PG-13 problem again. Yeah, that's... yeah If they had one if they they maybe did think it through and they're like, well, then we have to have like a half-eaten corpse show up on there. I don't know if we can get away with that. Never mind that this kind of thing shows up on NCIS at 8 o'clock on network TV all the time. It is the 2020s. Yeah.
00:53:45
Speaker
They should have just had to be a skeleton in his ah bathing suit. That would have been yeah so good. Yeah. Somehow still his hair independently on top, directly on top of his. That's how you add a toupee.
00:53:59
Speaker
Yes. But not his identification, because I forgot about this. If you ever get dropped off at a secluded beach and someone before they drive you there says, now you've kept your passport in the safe, right? You get out of that vehicle.
00:54:13
Speaker
You say, you know what? Actually, i have my passport here with me. Can we go back? I'd feel better if we dropped it off. Love to put it in the safe. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. Oh, you know what I'm just tired from the dry. You know what? I'm going to go to the bathroom for the next two weeks.
00:54:29
Speaker
ah So, meanwhile, Kara and Trent bury the towel full of dust that was once their dead son. Kara decides that she wants to get off this crazy merry-go-round and tries to climb up the cliff face that surrounds the beach, only to fall off and die.
00:54:50
Speaker
Because she also passed out. Yeah. Or she at least stopped climbing. Yeah. She died no matter what. Patricia wants to try to swim out by lashing together three pool noodles to form some sort of raft.
00:55:05
Speaker
But before she could try that, she has a series of epileptic seizures and dies.
00:55:13
Speaker
Guy starts to lose his vision and Prisca goes deaf in one ear. As a guy that's deaf in one ear, I found what Prisca was doing when she realized she is deaf in one ear. Very relatable. That and the sound design in that sequence worked for me very well. Very evocative.
00:55:29
Speaker
It's one of the only times they don't specifically tell us verbally what's happening, which I appreciate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He is a stronger visual storyteller. He should let himself do it.
00:55:41
Speaker
Let's see. the da du da da Um, yep. Oh, Crystal wanders off, distraught over losing her family, her good looks, and also she has some sort of bone disease, and that isn't really helping.
00:55:56
Speaker
Guy and Prisca reconcile, and Trent notices that someone off the beach is observing them, and Maddox digs up a notebook full of exposition for her to read.
00:56:09
Speaker
That was... Like, I get why it has to come from, like, a book, but, like, yeah nobody really figures anything out. It's all just outside information that gets thrown at them, almost literally thrown at them from outside. And not for the last time, either. No, no.
00:56:29
Speaker
ah So Dr. Charles comes running out of the darkness, somehow rearmed with the knife that they took away from him, and he starts slashing at Guy. Unfortunately, his wounds instantly heal. So it seems like this is more annoying than anything. yeah Prisca runs off to tell the kids to hide before returning with a rusty butter knife.
00:56:53
Speaker
She slashes Charles and he dies of ultra tetanus. Yeah. Meanwhile, Trent and Maddox run into Crystal in a cave, who chases them off because she is very much like an evil bony witch, and her brittle bones keep on breaking and then rehealing in ways that are set wrong. That reminded me very much of the Junji Ito story, The Enigma of Amagara Fault.
00:57:19
Speaker
I was thinking Uzumaki, but that's the only one I've read by him, but it was felt very Ito. Yes. I think it largely worked, but also paled in comparison. don't It was, i liked it at first, and then i after a while I was like, okay. So, we're finally left with just our original family.
00:57:42
Speaker
Guy can no longer remember even why they were fighting. And why they were even trying to leave the beach in the first place. I'll give you a hint, it's because it's going to kill you.
00:57:56
Speaker
Turns out it makes you. Yeah, it turns out that it does, in fact, kill you. a Guy falls over and dies. And as is the case with so many elderly couples, his wife is not far behind him.
00:58:10
Speaker
This is, by the way, the shot from this film that I absolutely love. there The dialogue getting up to it, it's very ham-fisted, right? But what we do here is we we have, first of all, and with the sound design, we have the waves coming in from the left of the from the left of the screen, right?
00:58:25
Speaker
Mm-hmm. ah the the dad, I keep forgetting their names of these guys. Guy. That's right. That's why fucking yeah wanted to call him what that guy. Guy falls over dead.
00:58:36
Speaker
Prisca, like the Vicky Kreps, she gets up. She starts walking towards the beach. The camera follows towards the beach like it's moving in as the tide rolls back.
00:58:47
Speaker
She, she, we hear her fall. The camera moves back in like the tide is cut, like the waves are pushing back out. And we see the family. We see the children coming to her side.
00:59:00
Speaker
And then we move past them. And then we and then the and they're like with the waves, we roll back across them, and it's just the two surviving family members sitting, holding each other by the bodies of their parents. no No dialogue, just essentially this entire sort of grief process in the space of like a 20-second continuous shot where the camera is... It's very comic book-like in a way, right? You could imagine doing this as a row of... As a stack of...
00:59:32
Speaker
Like four rows on the same background, subdivided each of them you know into into three. You end up doing this on a 12-image grid, three by four, right? Where you get to do the same locations and you're doing time differently with each one.
00:59:46
Speaker
i think I think it's genuinely just like a fucking great shot yeah in the middle of this movie that is largely bad. And it's worth a lot to me. I think about it lot. It's shot. It's a good shot.
01:00:00
Speaker
I can, I completely understand that. If there's one shot in this film that would stick with you, I think that is the one. And I wish it was in a better film. Yep.
01:00:13
Speaker
Let's see. Okay. Okay. Okay. ok They're dead that. Oh, and this is also what I'm going to call the very first ending of the film. I counted seven distinct endings of this film onto ending number two.
01:00:26
Speaker
Okay. Trenton Maddox wake up. And now they're adults. They agree that they should keep trying to escape. But first, Trent asks if they can build a sandcastle together.
01:00:39
Speaker
And this is where the comic book ends. I'm going to call that ending number two. Ending number three. That where the movie should end. yeah Absolutely. 100% would be a better movie.
01:00:53
Speaker
Ending number three, Trent remembers that he got another cipher from Idlib. Remember Idlib and his famous ciphers? Yeah. He says, oh, I never solved that cipher from Idlib. So why don't you go solve it? Oh, it'll be fun.
01:01:10
Speaker
Then we'll die. So he takes it out and it says, ah my uncle doesn't like the coral.
01:01:20
Speaker
they realize the coral is somehow alive. Well, technically kind of whatever they go and they investigate the coral and there's a tunnel through the coral that could lead them to freedom, but they get stuck and drown.
01:01:38
Speaker
Then we're onto ending number four. And here it is. All of this was being observed by M night Shyamalan.
01:01:51
Speaker
He reports back into base that they're all dead. He saw them drown. We learn that the resort is a front for a drug company that uses the beach that makes you old to test new drugs, getting a lifetime's worth of data within a single day. This makes no fucking sense, but sure.
01:02:12
Speaker
Fine. It's a fable. Also, the drugs. It's like, we're going give you drugs like eight hours before you age 20 years in 10 hours. It's like, do you do they need to keep getting the drug? Do they metabolize it faster?
01:02:28
Speaker
All of them are on a 24-hour half-life. That's the one thing that every drug they're testing has in common. Okay. Ending number five. Trent gets back to the hotel and gives the notebook they found full of exposition to a cop that he knows. And the cop arrests the hotel manager. Take that.
01:02:52
Speaker
Ending number six. We flashback. It's them in the coral. They didn't drown. They're fine. They didn't even drown. And we know that they're fine because they see fish swimming around them. And fish can't live on the beach that make you old.
01:03:09
Speaker
They've survived and they're floating free, relieved. And the sun is setting. Ending number seven.
01:03:19
Speaker
Trent and Maddox are now in a helicopter. Don't worry about them. They're going to be adopted by an uncle. The end. I also like that they take them in the helicopter like that's the beach that you were at. like, get the fuck away from that beach. Look, if that helicopter goes down, you're back on that goddamn beach.
01:03:37
Speaker
That shit's going to make me um old, bro. It could make me old from up here. I don't know how it works. I almost kind of thought it was going to crash. Because, like, what if that's the twist? because like That's the M. Night twist. Why else is this scene here? It feels like this scene is like the first scene of the sequel, right? you Right. Like, you know,
01:03:56
Speaker
but They're even being like, well, how would you feel if you got a call from your six-year-old nephew? turns out he's 50 now. like It sounds like you're recapping information for the audience who just needs to remember the premise of the original film before this helicopter crashes. No, that's the last line of the movie. why are we yeah If you want to have that moment, tell you what, you could hire an actor.
01:04:16
Speaker
not an extra, somebody doesn't have to have a line of dialogue to like meet them at the airport and have their shocked reaction, like be a scene in the movie. And that would be 20 times more powerful than having him kind of joke about it to the audience as if it's not the most insane and devastating thing. As if as if the tragedy of this happening isn't so so crucial to the theme of your movie about how life is so short And it's so tragic how short it is and how little time and how little we get to appreciate it while we have it.
01:04:48
Speaker
We'll just kind of end on like kind of like a half joke, like not even like a joke that's supposed to laugh, make you laugh out loud, but like a thing that someone would say to just kind of lighten the mood in a car ride, which is what this is. Yeah. why is the scene in the movie Yeah.
01:05:01
Speaker
Real bizarre. In a way, it almost reminds me of the ending of The Graduate. where it's supposed to be like, and now this is the rest of their lives. The rest of their lives is going to be lived after this. They could just do exactly that. And it's just them saying wordlessly. That would have been much better. yeah Well, I guess I've got 15 years left to live. I'm 55 years old. i have never, I have a second grade education and an unbelievable, unrelatable trauma that is going to ruin the rest of my life. Instead, let's have a little,
01:05:37
Speaker
Let's have a little chuckle. Let's have a sensible chuckle about it. You know what I'm going to do, though? I'm going to sue the hell out of this company. I tell you what. Yeah. I'm going to spend the last 15 years of my life going buck fucking wild. Yeah.
01:05:52
Speaker
There is, but like there are so many good outs. Like when we talked about the best out is the one from the book. Let's let's build a sandcastle. And we just assume that they die there, but they kind of just to take their last moments to re just to doing something that matters, spending time with someone they love and being young.
01:06:07
Speaker
Living. right Instead of trying to figure out how to get off the beach, they start living again. Yes, yeah that would be, which is like kind of like that's, that's, I mean, still get that message through the parents, right? Who realized that they would rather spend their last moments together than fighting. Like, but like, this is a more subtle, more, like it's just, it's a more powerful. It's a stronger ending. yeah Stronger ending. Okay. so you don't end with that. All right. So you got to have your happy ending. Fine. Then you can end with the moment of 50 year old Trent,
01:06:38
Speaker
ah Giving Idlib a hug as And Idlib studying his face And being like hey thanks lonely kid Which is what I was yesterday You saved my life we yeah that's like That's kind of nice But you got to have this stupid fucking chopper Is it like, well, you know, we paid for this chopper.
01:06:57
Speaker
um It would be a real shame. This scene's not working. But this was, i mean, this movie was made on the cheap. this is a This is a chunk of the budget, right? Renting this helicopter. And then another helicopter to follow the helicopter so we can get a shot of the helicopter. This was expensive. We cannot throw this scene out. Some producer is saying, oh, you want to cut the helicopters? You begged us for that shot.
01:07:15
Speaker
You begged us to w rent you that helicopter. No, no, no. We had a whole meeting about it. The last 20 minutes of this is all studio notes. It's a series of consecutively given studio notes where each additional ending is meant to fix the last ending. And then the last guy was like, oh, but what what happens to the kids after that? are they Do they just leave them there?
01:07:36
Speaker
No, no, no, no. They get they get get adopted by their uncle. Who cares? Well, we should say they get adopted by their uncle. What if somebody's worried that they're just going to be like these two kids? We should say that they're adopted.
01:07:47
Speaker
That scene has such ADR energy, even though you see them speaking the lines on screen. Like it feels like the kind of scene where every person who's talking should be mysteriously off screen because it was the very last thing they did in the movie to add the dialogue in. No, they shot this all in one. There were no reshoots. This was part of the plan. Wow.
01:08:08
Speaker
um I mean, no, the issues that i know of, but especially given the circumstances with COVID, I feel like that's probably true to a arrange. Well, maybe they got their notes during the script phase. I may i mean, that must have been what happened. Right. But wait, but this was self-financed.
01:08:23
Speaker
No, I think this I don't think this one was, I think. um Oh, is he back with the Universal? It was distributed still by Universal. Anyway, anyway. This is spouse's plans to distribute the event on an independently financed film. Okay, so this, so, I mean, it's ambiguous, I guess, with the limited information we're looking at here with the fucking Wikipedia page. But it's, ah this is a period of time where it's like, no, he's producing his movies with his producing partners. So, but the thing about M. Night Shyamalan is that I don't think he's ever been able to kill the studio, the studio executive in his head.
01:08:59
Speaker
Because this kind of thing happens a lot. I'll say this and then we got to keep on going. The famous story that I always heard about M. Night Shyamalan is that he didn't figure out that the psychiatrist was dead in the sixth sense until the fifth draft.
01:09:14
Speaker
I think this was him trying to find out what he did. He went into it and he didn't have an ending. You know what I mean? And I think he didn't wasn't able to stick the landing on this one. Yeah.
01:09:25
Speaker
Yeah. ah So with that final thoughts, five-star rating on our unique watchability and weirdness scale, Greg, out of five stars, where are going this for watchability and weirdness? Okay, I'm going to try to keep this succinct. This one, when I saw it, so my first reaction, like halfway through it, was almost to become infuriated. But I have figured out i have figured out now what what where that has come from. So this is my thing. I love apocalypse movies. My favorite genre is post-apocalypse movies. What I like about it is you take humans...
01:10:02
Speaker
And you put them in a situation where they are deprived of many things and you're able to boil humanity down to its most base elements. And then you're able to like bring notes out in that and shine things and make social commentary based on a smaller scene that has a huge impact and says a lot. There are other movies that other styles of movies that can ah also be like this. Lost is very much an apocalyptic movie because they have no resources. They have no way to communicate. So they're making these apocalyptic decisions. I know that he um was he was inspired by the excruciating angels, which I've seen before.
01:10:41
Speaker
and it's very much the same where these people are exterminating. ex I'm sorry. Exterminating angels. Yes. um Where the people are like in a room together and they can't leave and all this stuff.
01:10:51
Speaker
um And then also, I forget what the other, but I'll, I'll move on. So what it is, is i feel like this movie has this idea where it's like you're on a beach and it makes you older, faster than you normally would be. And so I'm thinking in my head, like, oh, so you're gonna deal with your own mortality. You're gonna deal with missing other people. You're gonna deal with ah like coming to terms with what you've done in your life. It's like, no, you're gonna deal with ah with a man who's stabbing you. And you can't hear him because you've lost hearing in one side of your ear and the husband can't see him.
01:11:27
Speaker
And so sometimes there's so much obfuscation too that it can't tell what is going on. in like horror movies, you always say like, don't go, don't open the door. But you really want them to open the door because you want to see the monster. But in this one, it's like, I don't know where the door is. i don't know what the door is. i don't know what you want me to be frightened of.
01:11:46
Speaker
all the but All the chaos and the moments that came up were so like, it's like, oh God, I've got a tumor. Oh, we better get it out. It's out anyway. It's like, was that a moment of conflict? I don't know what happened there. And I realized what it is, is that what I like about the movie is the graphic novel.
01:12:04
Speaker
What I don't like about the movie is what the end has to add to the entirety of the movie to justify itself. So it's like a bunch of people being on a beach dying because they're aging faster is what I liked.
01:12:16
Speaker
But it was like, but they all have to have medical ailments because it's a beach where we're testing them for medical ailments. And so everything that comes from the end is the part that just utterly confuses me and feels completely grafted onto it because I think it is grafted onto it.
01:12:31
Speaker
um And I know he said it was like a two hour Twilight Zone movie. Well, I think there's a reason why the Twilight Zone movie is three 30 minute things. because you don't want them You don't want a two hour Twilight Zone movie.
01:12:43
Speaker
Because you want you want you want to know what the solution is. And the solution isn't even explained. I mean, the solution is it's minerals in the rocks and they figure it out. The twist is that someone took advantage of that. So it's not like the the movie isn't about aging. The movie is about a pharmaceutical company torturing people.
01:13:01
Speaker
And it's just like I was there for the aging, not the medical research. Yeah, this is truly a movie that does get wrecked by its own ending. Yeah.
01:13:12
Speaker
And that was what I realized. It's like all the parts of the ending that I could feel because it's just like, why is he stabby stabby? It's like, oh, because he has schizophrenia. It's like, why does he have schizophrenia? It's like because they were testing a drug out on him. It's like, what about the beach that ages him, though?
01:13:26
Speaker
You're at the beach. That's really interesting interesting to me. Is that not enough? Yeah. And that was the whole thing. I was like, why why do you keep doing all this other stuff? I want to talk about the beach that ages you. I want to get sad.
01:13:37
Speaker
i want to feel these moments and think, God, do I have enough time? Not. Oh, boy, I hope I don't go blind before the man starts stabbing me. um so But I do think that it's an interesting film. It certainly got me thinking. I think for bad movie watchers, you could get some enjoyment out of this. So in an interesting take, I'm going to give this both a four and a one for watchability.
01:14:01
Speaker
I think some people could get something out of it. I think... I am more personally a one. I'm glad that I have seen it. um But it was because I wanted it to be that apocalypse thing. It just didn't do what I wanted. And like halfway through, is like I don't really care anymore. Everybody. It's like, oh, he's going to get stabbed. It's like, well, it's going to heal immediately. So whatever.
01:14:22
Speaker
um And as far as weirdness goes, it's it's pretty bizarre. I'll give it three and a half. Okay. I... i I have lately been going through like a lot of midlife crisis stuff.
01:14:37
Speaker
Sure. And like thinking about like aging and my own mortality. And so I found watching this movie to be distinctly unpleasant. So that's, that colored a big part of my experience. Cause I spend most of my time in movies trying to avoid thinking about things that horrify me and the, the, the terrors that stalk my mind and my waking hours.
Watchability and Humor
01:15:01
Speaker
ah And so I gave this a two for watchability. I think one man's beautiful, elegiac meditation on mortality is another man's slow, boring bummer.
01:15:14
Speaker
ah Depending on my mood, I could go either way. i was surprised the bummer alarm was never sounded during this conversation. No, no. I mean, the whole movie is just a bummer, but i they're not in like, they're all natural bummers.
01:15:28
Speaker
Yeah. This is such as the bummer of life. You know, if I had to play the bummer for that, I'd be playing it every second of every day because the sad fact of ah the beach that makes you old is that we're all on the beach that makes you old all the time. And none of us can do. Like that's the horror of old. And I couldn't stop thinking about that and be like, that's me. I'm dying right now as I'm watching old. Like it was just a very unpleasant experience. um Yeah, over the course of watching that film, you did age two hours that you will not get. I did.
01:16:00
Speaker
I can't get it back, as they say. For weirdness, I gave it four stars because six-year-old impregnates three-year-old. And ah that's because, obviously, he busts during the eight seconds she's ovulating, and then she gives birth 20 minutes later.
01:16:19
Speaker
I hadn't thought about even that aspect of it. i And then the then the baby dies and then the movie keeps going. Like, it well, I'll say love me because then it's life. We all see constant horrors all the time and we all keep going because we don't have a choice because we're all on the beach. That makes us old. It's horrifying.
01:16:37
Speaker
Dylan, what about you? Where did you land in terms of watchability and weirdness? Well, watchability, I'm going to put it the square in the middle in ah in ah a three out of five because it is, I think, a really good looking movie at times and also unquestionably deeply unpleasant.
01:16:52
Speaker
Right. Like like I said, one thing that had changed for me between the first time I watched it where I got kind of fascinated by it and the second time I watched it is that I now have a three year old. And so it is way scarier. Um, it's way, yeah way scarier of an idea. Still not a horror for and like, again, the only the idea is scary.
01:17:09
Speaker
The execution of the movie is rarely all that scary. Um, I think it works more as a thriller a drama. Like I said, I think I, I actually agreed that I think it would maybe would be better on stage because you have to watch these actors very gradually age before your eyes with no interruption. Uh, I think you wouldn't even want to do it without makeup. You want to do it entirely in the performance. Um,
01:17:28
Speaker
Do it with changing the lighting like they did in the old the black and white movies. Oh, great idea. I love this as a stage play, in all honesty. Hell, um you know, i I know some theater people.
01:17:40
Speaker
You should do it. Yeah, get this thing up on its feet. That might be cool to do. Because by abstracting it for a play, you would make it less literal, and that would then, like, add a layer to it that's not there.
01:17:54
Speaker
I mean, yes, the question is, do I want to license old or do I want to license the sounds like sandcastles is what we said. The way go. Yeah, but probably cheaper, too. um So it's and in terms of weirdness.
01:18:06
Speaker
ah I was going to give it a lower one, but you did bring up the fact death that ah two young children have a baby. The baby immediately dies and then the film moves on. So I will go with a four out of five in terms of weirdness. Yeah, it's a weird thing that happens in the movie.
01:18:24
Speaker
There's so many weird things that happen. and It's just like, anyway. Well, the good news is we can move on to the third segment of the show.
Comic-Based Films Discussion
01:18:32
Speaker
It's time to talk about trends in film.
01:18:35
Speaker
This would be intriguing.
01:18:53
Speaker
Trends in film, they do happen. Trends in film.
01:19:00
Speaker
Trends in film, that's a segment. Trends in film.
01:19:18
Speaker
All right, so as we mentioned, old is based on a comic book. And it it's the kind of comic book that people don't think about when they think about comic book movies. Obviously, superhero movies are what people think about when they think comic book movies.
01:19:31
Speaker
So I've worked up a list of ah movies that people might not think of as comic movies, but actually are. I like this. Make it very cool. All right. So we got Casper and Richie Rich.
01:19:43
Speaker
Oh, yeah. You don't really think about it. Similarly, Josie and the Pussycats. Mm hmm. And now the list starts getting a little bit weird and is nonsensical. I have these in literally no particular order.
01:19:58
Speaker
Time cop. Time cop. Time cop was based on a ghost world and art school confidential. Yeah. And I think ghost world is better than the graphic novel. person I haven't read the graphic novel, but ghost world. That's a good in film.
01:20:15
Speaker
Oh, it's class. 30 days of night. Oh, yeah. People also just don't think about 30 Days of Night much anymore. I'd like to see that because I'm a vampire person. so They made a bunch of direct-to-DVD sequels, too, that I bet are weird. Yeah, they did.
01:20:30
Speaker
ah From Hell. Oh, yeah. A History of Violence. Yeah, I keep forgetting about that one. Yeah, it's not bad. Yeah, it's great. i love it.
01:20:41
Speaker
The movie's good. Oh, yeah. right I'm talking about the movie. Yeah. Virus. Jamie Lee Curtis's Virus. no Oh. Based on a Dark Horse comic. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Yeah.
01:20:56
Speaker
Persepolis. People don't talk about Persepolis anymore. Tank Girl. Yeah. Speed Racer.
01:21:08
Speaker
American Splendor. Oh. Yeah. American Splendor, one of the great comic book movies about comic books. Absolutely.
Film Trivia Game
01:21:18
Speaker
Here, the Robert Zemeckis movie where the camera was just in one place the whole time. Yeah. And you watch that movie and you think the whole time, damn, I bet this comic is really good.
01:21:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I bet it's a lot better. It's a good commercial for the comic. Yes. The Mask. Yeah. Monkey Bone.
01:21:40
Speaker
My Friend Dahmer. Really? Yeah, my friend Dahmer's good. The comic is good. Okay. Road to Perdition.
01:21:51
Speaker
Obviously, any of the Tales from the Crypt movies.
01:21:57
Speaker
Arguably, they live. Really? Yes. it's You could say it's either a comic adaptation or a short story of a short story or the short story that the comic was adapting. Okay. There's debate.
01:22:13
Speaker
Modesty Blaze, based on the classic British comic strip. Oh, yes. I don't even know that one Barbarella.
01:22:21
Speaker
Blue is the Warmest Color.
01:22:25
Speaker
The Death of Stalin and Snowpiercer. i didn't realize Death of Stalin was ah was a comic book first. Yeah. And now it feels obvious in hindsight.
01:22:36
Speaker
What was that? Do you guys want to play a game? Yeah. Oh, I love games. Fantastic, you've come to the right place. Love one bumper, though. We show up at the film set Running from the mob I'll take whatever I can get
01:23:09
Speaker
There's so many kind of jobs. A key grip. A PA. I'll do it. If it pays.
01:23:20
Speaker
A best boy. Makeup. I tell you folks, that's what's up. There's lot of different jobs if you want to work in film.
01:23:32
Speaker
There's a lot of different jobs if you want to work in film.
01:23:50
Speaker
That's right. There's a lot of different jobs if you want to work in film. And I'm going to ask you questions about nine of them. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a brief description of a position that's in the credits of old.
01:24:03
Speaker
And then I'm going to give you three names from the credits of old. I want you to guess which one had that job.
01:24:11
Speaker
So question number one. They oversee the budget, schedule, and logistics of shooting the film. It's the production manager. Oh, and this is a buzzin' game. You'll buzzin' by saying your own name, and if you get it wrong, your opponent has the chance to steal.
01:24:30
Speaker
The production manager. Was it Tudor Jones, Kendi Yanareth, or Pedro Bueno? Greg.
01:24:41
Speaker
Greg? Tudor Jones.
01:24:46
Speaker
No, I'm sorry. It wasn't Tudor Jones. I had real good feeling. right, but I'm going to guess that second one. Kendi Yanareth? Yes. That's correct.
01:24:56
Speaker
Nice. Okay. Question number two. They helped the director plan what a film will look like by drawing illustrations of individual shots. It's the storyboard artist.
01:25:10
Speaker
Was the storyboard artist Brick Mason... Moe Meinhart or Thomas Flouts? Dylan! I'm going to guess Thomas Flouts because I just think that should be the person's name.
01:25:27
Speaker
Oh, I'm sorry. It wasn't Thomas Flouts. What were the other two choices? Brick Mason or Moe Meinhart? And what was the position again? Storyboard artist. Moe Meinhart.
01:25:41
Speaker
No, I'm sorry. That was the great Brick Mason. So I wanted to say Brick Mason and I didn't. I got to go with my guts. That is like a pulp detective name. Yeah. It's a great name. It is.
01:25:53
Speaker
Question number three. Somebody has to select all the art, decor, and furniture for a set. And that person needs an assistant. It's the assistant set decorator.
01:26:05
Speaker
Was the assistant set decorator Ricardo Fulch? Gino Delicoli or Rich Bologna? Greg. Greg? I'm going with Gino.
01:26:18
Speaker
Gino Delicoli? That's correct. That is correct. Greg, you're on the board. right.
01:26:26
Speaker
Question number four, all tied up. When you're sound editing, somebody has to adjust the levels on all your Foley ADR and music. So it matches up with the production sounds seamlessly.
01:26:38
Speaker
It's the re-recording mixer. Was the re-recording mixer Deontay Fly DZ Chambers? Prince Anselm?
01:26:50
Speaker
Or Skip Lievce? Greg. Greg? was the first What was the first person's name again? Deontay Fly DZ Chambers? Deontay Fly DZ Chambers, please.
01:27:04
Speaker
No, I'm sorry. It was not Deontay Fly DZ Chambers. Dylan, can you steal? I'd also like to guess Deontay Flydeasy Chambers. It's a fun thing to say, Deontay Flydeasy Chambers. No, I'm sorry. It was not Deontay Flydeasy Chambers. It was Skip Lievse.
01:27:21
Speaker
Deontay Flydeasy. Flydeasy not in quotations, by the way. Good. Okay. I mean, this the correct answer's name was great, too, but completely overshadowed by Flydeasy.
01:27:32
Speaker
yeah No, Flydeasy was the bait, for sure. He was a honeypot. yes Question number five. They set up support equipment for cameras, such as tripods, dolly tracks, and cranes. It's The Grip.
01:27:45
Speaker
Was The Grip Harry Hang, Goran Techic, or Winsthon DeJesus?
01:27:55
Speaker
Oh, man. Greg? Greg? What was the second person's name? Goran Techic? Goran Techic.
01:28:06
Speaker
No, I'm sorry. It was not Goran. Dylan, can you steal? I gotta go with my man, Winthon.
01:28:14
Speaker
You're correct. It it was Winthon to Jesus. That was too good to be the one. You know, it felt too right. Sometimes there's a guy with a good name and an easy to describe position. What can I tell you? Yeah.
01:28:28
Speaker
Question number six. Somebody needs to make sure nobody's getting COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. It's the COVID compliance officer. Was the COVID compliance officer Sashi Sohn, Harje Kjellberg, or Pedro Pablo?
01:28:48
Speaker
Dylan. Dylan? ah I'd like to guess the Antifladeeasy Chambers.
01:28:56
Speaker
No, I'm sorry. It wasn't Deontay Fly DZ Chambers. Greg, can you steal? Was it Pablo Padre? What was the last gentleman? Pedro Pablo? Pedro Pablo.
01:29:09
Speaker
No, I'm sorry. That one was Sashi Sohn. Okay.
01:29:14
Speaker
Question number seven. Okay. We're rounding the horn now. When there's a sex scene in your movie, it's a good idea to have a professional on hand to help your actors navigate that and make sure nothing weird is going on.
01:29:28
Speaker
It's the intimacy coordinator. Was the intimacy coordinator Griffin Fennedy? Jean-Franc Blas?
01:29:39
Speaker
Or Dee Shooka?
01:29:43
Speaker
Dylan! I'm guessing Dee Shooka.
01:29:48
Speaker
No, I'm sorry. It wasn't D. Schuka. Craig, can you steal? What were the other choices? Griffin Fennedy or Jean-Franc Blau? Jean-Franc Blau.
01:29:59
Speaker
That's correct. It's tied up again. I'm calling bullshit. You absolutely cannot hire a French man to be your intimacy coordinator. That is completely unacceptable. I was going to suggest maybe he was French-Canadian, but that almost seems worse.
01:30:14
Speaker
ah Question number eight. If you've got a military helicopter in your movie, you want a guy around to make sure it's in good working order. It's true.
01:30:26
Speaker
It's the military helicopter aviation technician. Was the military helicopter aviation technician Johandy Cespedes? Matt Babb or Yester Cyprian?
01:30:41
Speaker
ah Greg. Greg? Babb.
01:30:46
Speaker
no it wasn't Matt Babb. i guess that I'm going to guess Yester and hope that ah and and hope they had an uneventful, ah on a hazing-free military training regiment.
01:31:04
Speaker
Yes, sir. It was. Yes, sir. Cyprian. I feel so bad for this person. that Yeah, and he was a sergeant in, I guess, the Dominican Republic Army. i don't know. Somebody's army.
01:31:18
Speaker
Question number nine. Sometimes a director will send off a film crew to shoot something else without them. And that film crew will need its own director. It's the second unit director.
01:31:30
Speaker
Was that Stephanie Duran? Jack Santry or Ishana Knight Shyamalan. Great. think we know this is Ishana. This is Shyamalan, yeah. You can split it.
01:31:45
Speaker
Correct. It was indeed Ishana Knight Shyamalan, the very daughter that he told the story Lady in the Water was based on, is now his second unit director.
The Batty Awards
01:31:56
Speaker
And of course, his other daughter, Suleika, is the singer and songwriter behind that very mid-song that the daughter is obsessed with in the beginning of the movie that comes back around later. And it will be our closing credits this episode. nice Don't worry, listeners. Uh-oh, it's the Batty Awards. Oh, congratulations, Dylan, you win. Oh, I do?
01:32:19
Speaker
You do. And it's the Batty Awards. Oh. Oh, I thought I won the Batty Awards, like very quickly. You can. You can possibly.
01:32:33
Speaker
Now you're messing with the Batty Awards. Now you're messing with the Batty Awards. Now you're messing with the Batty Awards.
01:32:45
Speaker
Congratulations to all the nominees.
01:32:58
Speaker
That's right. Congratulations to all our nominees. It's the Batty Awards. Greg, why don't you kick us off? You're our traditional inaugural Batty Awards. Yes. So this is actually going to a bit of dialogue and in a sort of a scene that is actually like, was exactly what I wanted out of this film.
01:33:19
Speaker
we like When you're like, you're going to a beach that makes that ages you in a year, every half an hour, this line in particular with a little scene was the thing that I was just like, yes, this, that I want more of this is what I expected. And this is what I want out of this scenario.
01:33:34
Speaker
And it's when Maddox, that's the Priskan guy's daughter, right? Yes. Yeah. So Maddox, for some reason, just goes off and has like a three line dialogue with midsize sedan for some reason.
01:33:47
Speaker
And she just says, ah
01:33:51
Speaker
my thoughts have more colors in them now.
01:33:56
Speaker
Yesterday or this morning, my thoughts had fewer colors, but they were brighter. And now they're more, but they're duller. And that to me was a beautiful, beautiful moment.
01:34:10
Speaker
I know I'm kind kind of misquoting it, but just the the the big thing being like, ah my thoughts have my thoughts have more colors in them now. I think it's a beautiful like concept of like a six-year-old trying to talk like an adult who doesn't know how and is just like, this concept makes some sense to me. Does that make sense to you? I thought it was really beautiful, really nice. Had there been more moments like that in the movie, I definitely would have rated it higher. like This is the kind of moment that I'm looking for in this potboiler situation, in this apocalyptic super That thing for to...
01:34:44
Speaker
I've jotted that down. I think that's a really good exchange. I'd be curious to see if that's in the if that's if that's in the graphic novel. yeah ah It is? Okay. because i' like I can't remember. It's been too long since I read.
01:34:57
Speaker
Okay. yeah I don't want to do that thing where I automatically attribute anything, any line of dialogue that i think is good to the source material on because I just find this to be a thing that M. Night is bad at. But occasionally he does. Occasionally he has a really good one. So you never know. Yeah.
01:35:11
Speaker
I see dead people. Yeah. yeah I think I'm becoming unbreakable. and I'm going to give my baddie award. My baddie award is ah this could never be me award.
01:35:26
Speaker
I know exactly how I would avoid the beach that makes you. well let it stop Obviously, once I was there, I would follow Jaron's plan and just walk out the crevasse very slowly. I would at least try it. Yeah. But.
01:35:38
Speaker
They would never get me out there because obviously the manager came up to them the first day they were the hotel. And I would be like, look, man, my wife and I, we just flew in. We're really tired. We're going to hang out in our room today.
01:35:50
Speaker
And the manager would be like, oh okay, I'll get them tomorrow. I'll get them tomorrow. And the next day I'd be like, it's just really hot. My wife doesn't do really well in the heat. I'm going take some, some stuff back to the room and that would be the rest of the stay. And then boom, free vacation. Got you beach that made you old. Yeah.
01:36:09
Speaker
What about you, Dylan? Do you have a batty award? I do. um I was going to give it to... I'm changing it to last minute. I was going to give it to Alex Wolfe for funniest performance in a scene involving a dead baby.
01:36:23
Speaker
Where he, again, five-year-old in the body of a 25-year-old playing a 16-year-old, says as his as his child bride is giving birth... Um, we we're go to get married and we are never to fight and we're never getting divorced. And it is, it is in this long tracking shot. Once again, it does this thing where we start over here with her giving birth and we pan away and we follow these characters reacting to it. And by the time the camera moves back, the child has died.
01:36:51
Speaker
We never see the child alive. Right. Mm hmm. Except for this time, it's fucking really funny. And I yeah i don't know. i don't know if it's supposed to be. I truly don't know. But it's up with such conviction, it is so absurd and it is so fucking good.
01:37:09
Speaker
But I'm actually going to change my pick. ah Not for a funnier line in the scene involving a dead baby. That's still the capper. But yeah my favorite terror my favorite stupid line in the movie, of which there are many candidates, is they tell the doctor...
01:37:24
Speaker
that his mom's dog has died. And he says, what? He was only just alive. Yeah. Yeah. Which I got to say, especially coming from a doctor, this is typically how death works. Yeah. agree I think most of you consider it to be the princess bride, notwithstanding a pretty firm binary between dead or alive. Yeah. One usually precedes the other one immediately.
01:37:48
Speaker
Yeah. Pretty quick. Yeah. But try telling a doctor or anything. They never listen. Yeah. yeah Dylan, thank you so much for coming to join us this week. I know that you've just rebooted your show.
Closing and Future Teasers
01:38:02
Speaker
Please tell the listeners about it. Well, thank you very much, first of all, for having me. And I, I am here representing the pod universe with Dylan and Dalton. This is a creative podcast where my writing partner, Dalton, to Shane and I are one movie at a time,
01:38:17
Speaker
ah composing an entire cinematic universe of original sci-fi movies. This means that one episode, i am writing a full fucking screenplay and reading it with my with with with my partner and our one cast member and workshopping the script as we go. And when we get to the end of that episode, that is canon to our universe. And then it's my hosts my my co-host's turn to do the next one. In between, we have a lot of fun guests on the show. We recently had Vera Drew, the filmmaker behind The People's Joker, was on the show. love The People's Joker.
01:38:49
Speaker
we've had ah emmy We've had Emmy nominees. We've had any nominatminee nominated ah comedy writer, Daniel Kibblesmith, and Emmy Award winning comedy writer, Josh Gondelman. So take that, Daniel. um and And we've got ah exciting stuff coming up. Our next our next guest is Tulak the Barbarian, a YouTube guy who does a bunch of actual play and Dungeons & Dragons and Hades related content. made a He wrote a full script for our show.
01:39:18
Speaker
It was amazing. He wrote a full fucking episode. and We read it. I'm scoring it and I'm going crazy. I also scored the show. And anyway, it is the show that Joseph in its previous on incarnation. Welcome to Night Vale creator.
01:39:30
Speaker
Joseph Fink called the kind of show that makes him exciting about kind about podcasts. So if you ah want to feel excited about podcasts, check out the pod universe. We're also on YouTube. We're a video show now as well as on audio. You can find us anywhere you find a podcast, including this one.
01:39:46
Speaker
All right. nice Listeners, you got your marching orders and listeners. Well, you got your phone in your hand before you navigate away to the pod universe. Leave us that five stars.
01:39:56
Speaker
Follow the show. Come back next week when we're going talking about Zandalee, a movie that stars Nick Cage and Judd Reinhold. Yeah.
01:40:07
Speaker
Together at last in an erotic thriller from 1991. As you've always wanted them to be. I've got to barely be airily being able to keep it in my pants.
01:40:17
Speaker
Yeah. When I hear the name Judge Reinhold, i think erotic thriller. That is the first thing that comes to mind. Yeah. He is a man that oozes erotic charisma. Listeners, tune in.
01:40:30
Speaker
And ah until next time, be good. Goodbye. Goodbye.
01:40:39
Speaker
Somewhere on the edge of sleep There is a taste of peace Every night we dance in my dreams But Cupid's an archer His violent departure Leaves us at the altar Wounded, weak, and ready to believe