[00:00:08] Speaker A: On this week's prequel episode, we follow up on our high rise listener polls, learn about the ways Tim Burton has disappointed us, and preview Big Fish.
Hello and welcome back to another prequel episode of this film is lit, the podcast where we talk about movies that are based on books. We have quite a bit to get to, so we're not going to dilly dally and get right into to it with our patron shoutouts. I put up with you because your father and mother were our finest patrons. That's why. No new patrons this week. But we do have our Academy Award winners and they are Eric Harpo rat doing my part to pay for the Tudor house. Vic Vega Matild Steve from Arizona, Paul Theresa Schwartz, Ian from Wine Country, Winchester's forever, Kelly Napier Grey hightower gratch.
Just gratch. Shelby is no more that darn skag. V. Frank and Alina Starkoff, thank you all very much for your continued support. And thank you.
Nathan, right, that changed his name to, uh, yes, I believe doing my part to pay for the Tudor house. Appreciate it.
We hope one day, who knows. All right, people had stuff to say about high rise. Let's see what it was.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Alright. On Patreon, we had three votes for the book and one for the movie. Kelly Napier said, I really enjoyed this book and after watching the trailer, I was excited to watch the movie with my husband. It seemed to be so up both our alleys and I was looking forward to seeing the world built in the book portrayed on the screen. And then we hit play.
Man, this was not a good movie. At one point, my husband paused it and asked me to take a few minutes and explain to him the plot of the book in the hopes it would help him figure out what the hell was going on. I did, but it didnt make a difference. We still couldnt follow the plot. Use of air quotes intentional.
The cinematography was beautiful, the score was pretty solid, and that's about all the nice stuff, I have to say. The plot was a disjointed disaster. The actors seemed to not understand what their characters were supposed to be doing. And I could never take Elizabeth Moss seriously with her bad accent.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: I take your word for it because.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Her accent sounded fine to me, but I notice it. But yeah, I'm not good at being able to.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: I'm not good at being able to tell. I thought her performance seemed good, and I remembered initially when she started talking, I was like, oh, she's doing an accent. Because I know Elizabeth Moss isn't british, but I seemed fine to me. But I again am pretty bad at knowing what is a good and bad accent.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: Turning back to the book, I really enjoyed the way the building residents mass descent into madness was portrayed. It was slow and predictable while also seeming fast and surprising all at the same time. I found myself enjoying following Wilder the best as he continually tried to climb the tower. His continual setbacks seem to be a well constructed metaphor for trying to get ahead in the world to secure a higher station in life. It's always one step forward, two steps back. Then there was royal hiding in his gilded tower, seemingly oblivious to the plight of those below him, and Lang, who struggled to find where he fit into the devolving social order, finally deciding to hide himself and his women away in their own microcosm of the world of which he had sole control over. You almost miss it at the end where he reveals hes drugging the women with him in order to keep them from leaving him.
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Yeah, I dont think you mentioned anything about that.
[00:03:57] Speaker B: You know, I was not quite sure what I was reading by the end of this book.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: In the end, I found the book to be a fascinating allegory for societal concerns, the delicate balancing act we all engage in every day, and how we're all just one small step away from mutual mass destruction. And I found the movie to be stupid. So I voted for the book.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: It's interesting because I will say that I think her takeaways, Katie Kelly's takeaways from the book, fascinating allegory for societal concerns, delicate balancing act we all engage in every day, and how we're all just one step away from mutual mass destruction is pretty much what I got from the movie. But just like, not, but like too surface level on all of those not very fleshed out. Yeah, just kind of like, yeah. Without really much to meet on the bones of those allegories or whatever.
And so I got, like I said, I got similar stuff from the movie and I don't, I don't think I disliked the movie maybe as much as Kelly did, but again, I wasn't comparing it to the book. So. But I can. I agree with a lot of the criticisms of the film.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree with a lot of those criticisms. And even I don't think I disliked the movie quite as much as Kelly. But I did find the movie frustrating.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Our next comment was from doing my part to pay for the Tudor house, who said so? I really liked this movie and thus feel some responsibility to explain it. However, I can't even fully explain why I liked it, let alone apply any meaning to it.
Sometimes that happens.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's fair.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: I almost didn't watch the film because I found the book to be so hard to get through.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: That's funny, because I remember before they changed their name to doing my part to pay for the Tudor house. They had said that Nathan, I assume, had said that they weren't sure if they were gonna watch the movie after.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: Reading the book, which I thought was.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Interesting because now they like them.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: See?
Give it a try and you never know.
I can see that it had some valid points about the failures in modern society, but it seemed more focused on pushing the boundary how grossly it could have its characters behave. This is about the book.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: I personally found my limit in the scene where Eleanor the third from Lange's incestuous throuple allows herself to be eaten alive by her cat.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: You did mention incest, right?
[00:06:20] Speaker B: Yes, I did mention incest. The sister. Yeah, we did not talk about the cat.
It was just kind of a gross scene. It wasn't like.
It was more like she was cutting herself and letting the cat eat little bits of flesh and less maybe what you're picturing in your head.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Yeah, but it was still a pretty.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Gross scene with that backdrop. I was not excited at all for the film, but I think it succeeded in a couple of ways. The book really failed and created a dark but engaging viewing experience.
I thought the movie was much better at creating a cohesive narrative. The book took large jumps in the story every time it switched perspective and then sort of filled in the holes via implication. The movie expanded a lot of that and placed it in a logical place in the narrative. For example, Bouk Lang just states that he plays squash with royal and never has any interaction with him on the page except recounting past events, whereas their interaction in the movie as fundamental to developing both characters.
I also thought the movie did a much better job of developing the female characters as actual people, especially Helen Wilder and Charlotte. In the book, both were just there to be acted upon by the male perspective characters, but become actual people in the movie. This is mostly clear shown in Charlotte's rape scene. In the book, it's all focused on Wilder, and he doesn't really seem to care about the rape beyond using it to record more of her cries for his weird burp mixtape.
The movie is able to portray Charlottes horror and fear as the victim because shes a real person rather than just a collection of the lazy and cliched ways the men of the story describe her. It makes for a much darker scene, but a more real one.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: I dont want to say I disagree with that. I found Charlotte in the film to be fairly flat and not particularly an interesting character. But I think that's less to do with.
I think that has more to do in the film with the fact that there's so many characters and we don't really have. Because the film feels like it's cut down quite a bit. We don't get maybe enough time with all of the characters to really get to know them and flesh them out in a way that I think would be super satisfying. But I didn't find her character, or Wilder, Elizabeth Moss's character, to be particularly well developed. Again, maybe better than the book.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I would. I would actually agree with this assessment more for Elizabeth Moth's character. Moth. I keep saying Moth. Jesus. Elizabeth Moth's character more than Charlotte.
Just because, you know, in the book, we're seeing them obviously, through the lens of all of the male characters.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: So you're gonna get a certain type of characterization with that. And in the movie, I did think that Helen had a little bit more to do, like of her own volition than she did in the book. Charlotte, I feel like, for me, came up pretty even in both the book and the movie.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: And I want to say there's nothing with Charlotte. There's definitely. She has moments, and I thought her character was fine. I just didn't think it was particularly memorable or compelling or deep or anything. Because she disappears for much of the movie, I think.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Yeah, she does. She really vanishes for a lot of.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: The movies, which, again, is probably similar in the book or whatever, but it. Yeah, I don't know, but, yeah, I could see that it's probably still better than. Than what is presented in the book. It would not be surprising to know that the woman who wrote this in 2010 did a better job characterizing the women than a book written by a dude in 1976. Whatever.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Right. Elizabeth Moss was great, as always, driving the best performance in a film full of great performances. I will admit that the movie stumbles at the end. The narrative just stops at a certain point and skips to the end. Especially with Pangborn, Cosgrove and Simmons, who seem poised to have a storyline around Cosgrove's capture, but then just show up dead at the end.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: So the storylines are so fumbled, stumbled, whatever, that I don't even remember who those characters are.
[00:10:45] Speaker B: Cosgrove's, the nickname was the tv guy. Simmons is the. I believe Pangborn and Simmons were some of the, like, lackeys of. Lackeys of Royal.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I thought. But, like, I remember nothing about them.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is, you know, other than I.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Remember at one point, I think when. When what's his name gets kicked out of the party at the beginning, it's Simmons kicks him out. Maybe Simmons and then Simmons, like, drags him to the elevator. I think I could, but other than that, I remember very little about them. Oh, one of them is played by. They might be. Pangborn is played by. Because I remember. Remember seeing the guys, like, what do I know him from? One of those guys, I think is played by the actor who plays Milo's shitty incel mra dad in sex education.
That actor who plays his.
The main character's dad in sex education. He's one of those guys.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: I can't remember which one, but he's one of those guys.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:48] Speaker A: This is the only other thing I'd ever seen him in, other than sex education.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: The women kind of fade together into Royal's harem, becoming a collective rather than individual people. The book portrays them as far more powerful at this point because they abandon Royal, leaving him to meet his fate with Wilder.
They don't kill Wilder in response to Royal's death, but to protect their society. In fact, they don't kill him at all, although it seems pretty clear that they are about to. That is a fair point. It's heavily implied in the book that they kill him, but we don't actually see it.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Or it's not like. Okay.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: There's not, like, a moment where, like, they stab him and he dies. It's very, very strongly implied that they kill him.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Despite its flaws, I felt the film was more emotionally engaging. I'm not certain it was more successful than the book at making any bigger point about society or capitalism, but I cared about the people of the apartment and connected with their descent into madness. The book failed to do either for me, and so I'm voting for the movie. Final and most important thought, that portishead cover of so's was amazing and worked perfectly to accent the emotion of the film. I will now return to listening to it on a loop.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Okay, fair enough. I thought it was a fine cover. I think we have another comment that disagrees with that. Am I crazy that I read?
[00:13:12] Speaker B: We had some comments that were, like, in direct opposition.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: Yeah. So, like, that second cover at the end of so's didn't make any sense. Yeah. Um, I did not particularly connect with the people in the film, but I'm glad you were able to, because I. Yeah, I. Yeah, that was not a thing. That was. The thing I struggled with was really, like, finding anything in the film.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: I am glad that at least one person got something out of this movie.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Yeah, like I said, I got some. I got some good visuals and some good, you know, there were some cool stuff that I liked in the film and liked watching, but, yeah, apart from that, there wasn't much that I really, like connected with.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Our next comment was from Shelby is no more, who said, I think my biggest problem with the book was that I was reading it in 2024, and that is fair.
I don't have much patience for gender essentialism these days. It's a bit like if they made a movie today about using the other 90% of your brain. I'm left wondering why I'm giving this my attention when we already know it's B's.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: They did this. It's called Lucy. That's a real movie with Scarlett. I think it's Scarlett Johansson. I don't know, Luke Besson movie where he. Where. Yeah, it's about. I haven't seen it, but I remember seeing the premise. And in the science skeptic y circles of, like, podcasts and stuff that I listened to, a lot of people were making fun of it at the time because it was seemed seemingly. I think it was Lucy seemingly based around the premise, like, in the trailer. That was the thing. They're like, human being only uses 10% of their brain. What if there was a human who could use 100%? And it's like, the idea is that, like, Scarlett Johansson's character can, like, use 100% of her brain to become, like, a superhuman, when in reality, if you use 100% of your brain, at least from the science podcast at the time that I talking about it, specifically, one which has a neurologist as one of the hosts, it's like, if you're using 100% of your brain, you're having a seizure. Like, that is what is occurring. If 100% of your brain is being used. That's what happens when you're having a seizure.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Well, and, you know, it is fair. The book is dated. It was written in 1975, and some of the themes it explores, especially in relation to gender, are 1975 themes. It's very like, second wave feminism kind of stuff, you know? I think the problem then comes in if a 2013 adaptation is not really bringing that stuff into the present.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: Shobi went on to say I feel the same about man. Violent, dominant sexual animal and woman submissive, defers to man, but also deadly animal. Maybe if the text explained how much of this idea is nurture over nature, I could have gotten behind it. But no, all these ordinary people just devolve the same way and no one tries anything. Maybe this would hit different in the seventies, but it just reminded me of Lord of the flies, and not in a good way. I never got very far in that book after the introduction where the author insisted that his story wouldn't have worked with girls because girls aren't like that.
And then, of course, there's the real world account of that story where they did not devolve into animals.
[00:16:24] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: If I were being generous, I'd say maybe this story is an example of. Oh, no, I didn't look up how to pronounce this. Folly Ado Follia do. Forgive my lack of punctuation and forgive my pronunciation.
But because it's fiction, I can say it's not an interesting example. It sucks because I love stories that take place in high rises and skyscrapers.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: Who doesn't? To be honest. But, yeah, folly Adu. That's the subtitle on the new Joker movie Joker. Folly Ado.
Because it's about Folly Ado for people that don't know. And I don't know. I just heard about it. I literally only heard about it today because I. People talking about it in relation to the Joker thing is, it essentially means, like, madness of two, where two people exacerbate each other's. It's a concept. I don't know anything else about it or how sound it is made off of each other. Yes. But essentially where, like, two people's sort of mania or whatever, their particular own eccentricities sort of form a feedback loop that creates, like, make each other worse. Tighten each other. Yeah. Make each other worse is the idea.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: And it's a similar idea, like, the idea of, like, humanity. Like, in this instance, it would be folly of a fuck ton. Yeah, folly a fuck ton. There's another t shirt.
Yeah. Where it's, you know, it's. Everybody kind of feeds off each other and drives each other to become the worst version of themselves. Yeah.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: All right, our next comment was from Steve from Arizona, who said, thank you for reviewing this book and film. You're welcome. Steve never really knew about Ballard's writing, and so now I have some future books to look into. I chose the book just to let you know, because my response is going to be long and laborious.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: From my base understanding, I'm most definitely a bollardian as I stand against gentrification, champion free public transportation, and desire more walking paths and spaces in cities.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: You're just a sane person. Sure. I mean, yes, I get what you're saying.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: At least that is what I believe it possibly stands for, as I find it gross that I cannot afford to buy a home in my own state and would have to distance myself from my family and friends by moving to another state or become a renter and live in a loud, massive apartment complex. Yeah, I'm pretty sure this might philosophically fall under a bollardian mindset as the separation of a physical support group can never truly be replaced by WhatsApp or other silly apps.
Anyway, don't feel bad about feeling dumb and not understanding the movie or the book. I mean, I didn't really understand the underlying meanings of what Ballard was writing about, but I could put them into context from the various educational courses and basics I have read about. I guess there was a general fear about high rises in the late sixties and early seventies. Bland and tightly constructed. There was a real fear that they would create societal chaos. At least that was what was indicated by the forward in the addition. I have. There's probably some truth to this. Considering the issues in our own inner cities with massive housing blocks and the psychological strife within their walls, I would say.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: I don't know if that's accurate.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: I would be. I mean, definitely having people piled on top of each other, I think help and.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Yes, but it can cause issues. But.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: But I think, you know, if we're talking about like, strife within inner cities or whatever we want to call it, I would be more. Want to put that squarely on poverty.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: Yes. That is.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: And not on like, not on like, proximity of structural.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: No, because actually I, you know, like, I what going back to. And I'm not remotely my area of expertise, but I listen to people talk about it sometimes.
The fear of like a high rise or like these sort of.
These sort of buildings. I think ideally, maybe not. You don't ideally want housing to be these giant, self sufficient 50 story buildings, but multifamily housing, like, multi story, multifamily housing is like, I think, widely considered by people who kind of fall into what. What Steve is calling a bollardian mindset here. People who want like, more walkable spaces and more, you know, that kind of thing. The best way to achieve that, from what I have heard is, in fact, things like multi story, multi family housing build up and build.
And so that way you can concentrate humanity and concentrate the services that humanity needs. In a way. Where is the idea behind 15 minutes cities, which are this whole big, dumb conspiracy theory that people have, is that 15 minutes cities means, like, oh, you're gonna be forced to live in, like. Like, that's the. The weird extremist fear of it. Um, but in reality it means, like, if you want a walkable city, you need to have all the services you need within a walking distance of your home, which is ideally around 15 to 30 minutes. You know, you could walk to anything. You would need a doctor, a grocery store, your job, whatever. And because one that reduces the proliferation of cars, which is a huge issue in America specifically, but across the world. And, you know, so, like, there is a benefit from a style of housing where things are more vertical and more contained and blah, blah, blah. But it is, to me, the thing I got out of the film, and maybe it's a more modern take on what Ballard was saying, was less about the sort of centralized, sort of centralized, like, nature of their living environment.
It was more about the.
Or I guess a way you could interpret is that it's more about trying to fix those problems or trying to solve the issue that purely through, like, a futurist idea, through, like, technology and through, like, this idea that we can, like, engineer our way out of any of these problems, like, in the building. It's like we create. Because we see Ballard in his, like, this very high minded, like, he describes himself as a futurist, and he thinks he can solve the world's problems by engineering them away, as opposed to restructuring society in a way that just benefits humanity, basically.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Right? And I do think that was one of the main kind of points in the book, because the book very explicitly talks about how they were replacing community with this technology and these services. But then we still end up with, you know, despite that, we still end up with a very clear, like, social strata, right? And Steve went on to say, I think Ballard just heard these fears and went completely into left field. I don't know if society would turn on itself like the book indicates, but these fears would definitely manifest because we always envied the nice houses in the neighborhood where I grew up. The ones with block walls, not chain link fences, and possessing ground level swimming pools were the sign of prestige. Having nice lawns was also a status symbol, considering the heat in Arizona and the cost of water.
Anyway, I enjoyed the book and movie for different reasons. I teeter on the verge of nihilism especially after a bad day at work. Don't we all after a bad day at work and wonder when are we going to crush and destroy this system that so many vote to preserve? While the movie was basic as an art house adjacent movie, the only real scene that struck me was when Lang was painting his apartment that bluish grey color. Working with paint and color and having some understanding of color theory and how it reacts to our psyche. I do believe the lack of color in our day to day lives is simply messing with our heads and lowering our energy levels. This could be the reason why no one in the book can sleep, as the modernistic, sterile world they live in keeps them awake and stimulated just enough, but does not relax their minds unless chemicals are involved. Lang's attempt to paint his home, albeit with a bland and neutral color, was at least an attempt to break that slumber and an attempt to regain his independence.
Anyway, I didn't like how the movie focused mostly from Lang's perspective. I definitely felt in the book he was the freudian superego, which played nicely with Wilder's depiction of the id and Royal's depiction of the ego. Royal just seemed more powerful and self assured in the book, which is what made his death more impactful, because the dream was truly over. The coven would seize the power and Laing was forever holed up in his little world, gaining nothing and being static. Without the ego and the id, I presume they killed Wilder, no longer completing him. I felt sticking to character archetypes just didnt work for me and I just didnt care much for it. Of course they had to do that because you got Tom Hiddleston real quick.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: I do think it's interesting, and I think that's one of the reasons that maybe the book didn't connect with me a lot because. But it totally makes sense and would track to me that the book would be playing a lot. This story would be playing a lot with like freudian stuff.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:25:49] Speaker A: I am not studied in freudian psychology at all.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: I know like very level of the.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Concept, the highest surface level of that kind of thing is, you know, what I'm aware of from the one psychology class I took in college. But I do think. And that would make sense given the time period the book was written, I think. But it would also make sense that it feels maybe less applicable now than it used to be, because we've realized in the intervening years that much of Freudian's stuff is bunk.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: So yeah, I can't complain too much about the aesthetic for they at least nailed that part. Also, I just wanted to throw Toby off the tower. I despise messianic child figures in these kind of movies. And the fact he was the tried and true Ubermensch in training just made me roll my eyes. Anyway, I will say both the book and the movie are mediocre, which I am sure I will catch the heat for. At least for the book.
[00:26:52] Speaker A: Not from this movie?
[00:26:52] Speaker B: No, not from us. Maybe from some listeners, but not from us. It offers a lot on your plate in big portions, but like eating tons of chicken nuggets without any dipping sauces. Is it really full of depth and impact? Not really. Nice review as always. I'm thankful that they didn't have the dog violence or the scenes where a character was letting a cat eat her flesh. This could have been a better movie if they had employed more steves to make the film.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: I love this.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Only three are in the credits. And yes, this is my thing now. Sorry, other people.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: That's fantastic. This is my new favorite running gag.
[00:27:28] Speaker B: Maybe it would have been a better movie if there'd been more steves.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: We're gonna have to. Now. The next thing Steve is you have to keep track the number of steves in production in the crew.
Cast slash crew. I think both count. Yeah, yeah. Which makes it easier. Cause then you can just control f on the all cast and crew page on IMDb and count how many there are. As long as they're not character names. But we also need to figure out a way to correspond that to our review. Like how much we enjoy the movie.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: We're gonna make like a nice little chart.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: We gotta figure out some sort of chart graph situation where. Yeah, I don't know how to. Because we don't really give the film scores. That would be the easiest way. If we gave the film like a number.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: I mean, I guess it could correlate number of Steve's to whether we thought the movie was better than the book.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: I agree with that, but I still don't know. That feels like we're missing either an axis or like. Cause. Cause like. Okay, so what if you pick the book and there's one Steve, and then another time you pick the book and there's twelve? I don't know how. Whereas if we gave it a number rating and then there's a Steve number, like we could correlate that somehow. I don't know. We could still try. But I think that's the next thing. Keep track of which ones. Cause I do think you're right. That that's the first step at least, is somehow try to correlate the number of steves involved in the in the cast and crew to whether the movie or the book one.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: We're gonna mine some really important data.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: Some very pivotal data about Steeves.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Also, I need to know if you're counting Stevens or just steves.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: I would imagine you need to know. I would imagine any Steve, Steven, Steve. Those all count. Maybe Stefan. We might have to draw a line. If they're french.
I don't know if they count.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Oh goodness. Well, let us know, Steve, if you're counting Stevens or not.
Next comment was from Mathilde, who said, I do have some thoughts this week and not many are positives.
The book never finishes a thought, which could be a stylistic choice, but I get the feeling it was a lazy cop out. It never goes to the end of a concept within a simple paragraph or in the book as a whole. It keeps on skipping to something else, usually without much of a payoff. Very frustrating. The descriptions were repetitive, and apart from the occasional metal line, I didn't much like the style of the book. I think my reaction to the book, and even more so to the movie, boils down to Benoit Blanc in glass onion when he talks about the murder plan and goes, it's so dumb. And Kate Hudson's character replies, so dumb, it's brilliant.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: And he yells back, no, it's just dumb. I can't do that.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: I really think it is a basic idea developed in the most predictable way.
I kept imagining other directions for every scene and character as I was reading. And yeah, I liked my version a lot more. I don't think you guys or anyone else is missing a point or a significance. It's maybe a worthy social commentary, but the characters are such caricatures of their assigned social class that I don't really care about any point that the story makes. There's no psychology, and seeing that the whole thing rests on your apartment level dictates your position in life too, was incredibly annoying. It's so obvious an idea, and it's tedious. How they make it an intellectual exercise.
The whole story could be aligned to introduce a social study, but as a novel, it's pointless. Give me characters that matter and have substance, not a thesis with pretentious symbolism and taboos for the sake of shocking. I still voted for the book over the movie because at least the book has a narrative structure and could be followed. The movie is the essence of the book done with even more pretentiousness. If that's possible. I liked the soundtrack, and that's about it. Maybe Elizabeth Moss's performance, too. She was good and felt genuine. I had a weird off vibe from everyone else, as if they were each in a different movie.
Considering the messy script, I can't really fault them. It's more on the director interesting.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: So I don't know if I necessarily, which is because it kind of echoes. I thought maybe Kelly, somebody else earlier said about how it felt like none of the actors really knew what they were doing.
They kind of suffered. And I didn't really get that. To me, it felt like it was interesting to hear that because that was not the vibe I got from the movie, to me. And maybe it's just a different interpretation of the same thing. To me, it felt like.
It felt like the characters knew but that the movie wasn't letting us be privy to everything that would make me be able to understand what they were doing. Like, I felt like there was so many parts missing or whatever that because I felt like the characters motivations were weird and kind of fluctuated and were all over the place. I felt that was more of a failing of either myself or the movie. Like, the actual editing of the film. Not like giving me enough, not so much the performance, like the actual, like, characterization of it.
[00:32:45] Speaker B: But I feel like that's just a different interpretation of the same problem.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: It's definitely the same problem. It's interesting that I came from it, from that angle.
Yeah. Maybe I'm just. I want to give benefit of the doubt. Like, I tend to give benefit of the doubt to actors and stuff in that regard, which I guess, to be fair, Mathild does here also say that, you know, it's more on the director. Yeah. But to me, it almost felt more. And maybe I'm just. I tend to give benefit of the doubt just across the board more in that sort of thing. Whereas I just like. To me, it almost felt like it had to be a result of the film being edited down. Like, surely the director and the actors. There was a grander plan. Like a grander, more complete, sort of.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Well, because we know the director was really interested in adapting the book. Right. We talked about that in the prequel, which does make what we ended up with interesting.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: Yeah. So to me, I just. I felt. I was more inclined to say that it's probably the result of the film being hacked into pieces because the studio just wanted something to sell.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: I am always down to blame studio.
[00:33:54] Speaker A: Execs, and I think that's maybe. Yeah. And again, who knows? Like I say, who knows? Somebody knows, like, yeah, yeah, it may hard to find. You might be able to, like, literally Google, like, director's cut and, oh, there's a three hour version of this film that wakes way more sense. I don't know. Or, you know, maybe in interviews after the words the director has said, like, oh, yeah, the studio, you know, wanted to remove 40 minutes of the film and what we ended up with was not what I wanted or whatever. I don't know. But yeah, to me it felt more like, yeah, like the pieces were. Had. Were there and had been removed as opposed to, like, the pieces themselves were misshapen. It was just like there weren't enough of them. Kind of. I don't know.
[00:34:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I will never know. Probably.
Mathilde went on to say I thought the cinematography was unnecessarily crowded and again felt disconnected from everything else. I can see why some people would like the book less so why some would like the movie. But overall, it was an annoying experience for me.
And then Mathilde came back a couple days later with more thoughts and said, additional thought. Since watching the movie, I've been obsessed with two ideas for what could have been one. I would have liked to see it done as a silent movie. Can't explain exactly why, but I can picture it and somehow it works. Maybe because the dialogue was so disjointed and bland. I don't feel like it's necessary.
[00:35:21] Speaker A: I'm not sure I think it works. I think one reason a silent film could work would be because the characters are so. So much of it is so arch. It's so archetypal. Like. Like the types of characters we have are so. And some of the symbolism and visual, like, symbolism is so kind of readily apparent that I. Maybe you could get away with, like, trimming it down and giving us less dialogue and just relying on the kind of visual symbolism that they're providing. And we understand who these characters are not because we hear them talk about things but because, again, we through their.
[00:35:58] Speaker B: Actions and we see them take actions.
[00:36:01] Speaker A: And because they're like, not particularly like layered, nuanced characters, but more so. Yeah. Archetypes that maybe that would work.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: I think that it would make the film 500% more pretentious. Yes, but I agree, could be interesting.
And then Mathilde's other thought was two. I'm sure Kubrick would have been a better director for a straightforward adaptation.
[00:36:27] Speaker A: I mean, the movie is doing its best Kubrick homage and just not particularly well.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: A director as ruthless as the material but more organized and focused. It would have yielded a much more worthwhile movie. Okay, I'm done.
[00:36:41] Speaker A: Now, I'm hard pressed to argue against the fact that Kubrick making a movie would have been a worse version of a movie than what we got, especially when it's just some random, like, this kind of movie. Like. Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna disagree.
[00:36:57] Speaker B: Kubrick can do the building is evil.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: That's what I mean. That's what I mean. Is that this particular movie. Yeah. It directly in Kubrick's wheelhouse. So much so that the filmmaker who did make it was clearly like, I'm gonna do a bunch of illusions to Kubrick, and I'm gonna try to, like, be a poor man's Kubrick. In this kind. I say that it's maybe a little dismissive, but, like, you can tell that the inspiration was there. And so. Yeah, Landry or Steven Landry or whatever the guy's name was who made this movie is not Steven or it's not Stanley Kubrick. So, like, you know, it is what it is. It comes out the way it does.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: All right, well, that was everything on Patreon, on Facebook. We had one vote for the book and zero for the movie. Andy said. Voted for the book. I'm a long term fan of Ballard's work, but also, I'm not a person who thinks adaptations have to be reverent.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Neither are we.
[00:37:51] Speaker B: Nope. No, not at all. Theres a lot to like about the film. The towers look great, and there are lots of great images that capture the themes and the psychology, but it doesnt quite come together coherently. And I felt bored as it went on. Fun. I live in Shanghai, and after helping a collector document Ballards childhood haunts, it led me to taking Ballards daughter and her family to the house where he grew up, which is on the same street as my flat. Ballard's experience seeing Shanghai, the Paris of the east, fall during World War Two and its subsequent internment is key to his writings, which show civilization and civilized behavior as a fragile facade.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: Fascinating.
[00:38:33] Speaker A: What a weird in or weird connection we have there. One of our listeners, because I remember Andy from previous episodes, he didn't just show up for high rise.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: Andy has commented on many things before.
[00:38:45] Speaker A: It's interesting that you. You knew Ballard's family. That's fascinating.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: Yeah, that's wild.
Over on.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: Hold on. I need to know, Andy, did they see this? Maybe. I don't know when you met Ballard's family and stuff, but I would like to know one. I mean, who knows? Maybe they didn't really particularly care about their father's work or whatever. But if they did, if they saw this movie, what were their thoughts? If you could share that, maybe you don't know, maybe you met him before the movie. Who knows?
[00:39:14] Speaker B: But yeah, that would be interesting to know.
Over on instagram, we had three votes for the book and two for the movie, and we got our troll comment from Tim Wahoo who said movie is better.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: And then we had another comment from Georgie who said, hi, some thoughts on high rise. I totally agree with everything covered in the episode.
[00:39:38] Speaker A: Fantastic.
[00:39:38] Speaker B: My pet peeve is media that makes smart people feel dumb because it has ideas that are poorly executed and leaves you wondering what you missed. That's exactly how this movie is. And the fact that I feel vindicated, and the fact that Margaret Thatcher needed to explain that capitalism is bad at the end. Why did I sit through the last 2 hours?
[00:39:59] Speaker A: To be fair, Margaret Thatcher is not explaining that capitalism is bad because Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher was in fact a capitalist capitalism. But she's talking about state capitalism, which is a dis yeah, but yeah.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: The book, though, I really loved a lot, went past me without my getting any meaning from it, but I did feel like there was meaning to be had, and unlike the movie, the text would reward more time being spent with it. I don't have a thesis statement about what I think Ballard was doing, but as a somewhat nihilistic and misanthropic person, our audience is full of them. Apparently I have found his narrative weirdly cathartic, sort of in the way I respond to the movie Midsommar. To respond any more intellectually, however, I think I'd have to spend some time researching some of the socio political context that Ballard was immersed in. The only thing I'll add is that I did some googling after watching, and there was an actual psychiatrist named Doctor Lang who was roughly contemporary with Ballard, if you've seen the movie mad to be normal, weirdly, also featuring Elizabeth Moss that's supposedly based around Lang's life and work. I know basically nothing about his philosophies, but I'd be curious to read them into the novel and see what comes of it, because that seems like too much of a coincidence to not bear some meaning. But even just on vibes, the book wins for me.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that is interesting. I'm sure it does. It seems unlikely. Seems likely that there's some relationships, maybe.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: There'S some allusion to that real person. Yeah, for sure.
[00:41:30] Speaker A: I just quickly wanted to go back to your comment on Midsommar because I Midsommar, because I thought that was interesting, because I loved Midsommar. And I'm not a nihilist or misanthropic person. I don't think. I don't feel like I am.
But I will say I do agree in the sense that I found these. There's some similar things going on in the movies in terms of the way society fails people and how people then revert and try to find belonging in maybe toxic, horrifying ways, which I think Midsommar kind of plays with a lot in that whatever Florence Pugh's character's name is has been kind of failed by the world in different ways and by her relationships and her friends and that sort of thing, and thus finds meaning in this horrifying white nationalist death cult or whatever, is fascinating. Again, I love that movie. If you haven't listened, we do have a bonus episode about it. But. Yeah, I do. Yeah, I thought that was interesting. But I don't find Midsommar to be particularly nihilistic. There's some nihilism in there, for sure. But to me, it's.
I don't know.
I don't know if I would. It's interesting. Cause, yeah, I really vibed with Midsommar and did not vibe with this movie at all. And this movie felt really nihilistic to me, and Midsommar didn't. But it. Maybe it's because I don't disagree that Midsommar is.
[00:42:55] Speaker B: Georgie was comparing it more to the book, I believe.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Which I didn't respond to the book the same way that I did to Midsommar. But I also did find Midsommar kind of weirdly cathartic.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: Yes, it's definitely cathartic. But they're specifically saying cathartic in a.
It provides a release nihilistic, misanthropic way. It seemed like what they were saying, but, yeah, I don't know. It's interesting. Think on it more.
[00:43:25] Speaker B: All right, well, thank you. Georgie gave us some stuff to chew on.
We had on threads. We did not have any comments, but we did have one vote for the movie.
And then on Goodreads, we had one listener who couldn't decide. And that listener was Miko, who said, don't worry, you're definitely not the only ones this story let down.
[00:43:50] Speaker A: Just so much vindication from our thank you audience this week.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: I actually thought the movie set up the descent into chaos better than the book, as the book felt like it just wanted to deal with the chaos itself in the film. You could see it spread from a couple of people, mainly wilder, to everyone else, while in the book it seemed like everyone snapped at once. For example, during the first blackout, everyone goes nuts, stampeding and panicking. While watching the movie. I initially thought it did a great job slowing down the descent into madness. It picked out the most important bits, like the clogged garbage, the dog drowning, and the sexual assault in the dark. But then the montage happened and suddenly the whole tower was a trash filled, violent, hedonistic mess. The movie had parts I really liked in isolation, like the suicide jump, the fight over the paint, or the cashier speaking French. But then again, some things were about 80% there, like seeing a murder through a kaleidoscope, the autopsies, or the second time Abbas so's is played like I know what the movie is going for, but there's still something missing or some change needed for it to actually hit. It's not that they're bad metaphors, they just felt mechanical and without heart. There were little things I liked in the book, also like how Lang cleverly hides his medicine bag under the bottom boards of his wardrobe, and then later Wilder while ransacking other apartments. Comments how every idiot hides their stuff there, or how things go full Mad Max with raiding parties with floor numbers painted on people's faces. I feel like a more experienced director could have made all the difference. Someone like Bong Joon ho or the people behind the tv show severance could have easily elevated the script.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: I mean, Bong joon ho feels like a cop out. Cause it feels easy. It feels easy, but you're not wrong.
[00:45:42] Speaker B: Could do it really well. Yeah, in my opinion.
[00:45:46] Speaker A: No, I agree.
Feels a little easy just because of Snowpiercer. But I agree that yeah, the people behind severance I think could have. Which I actually don't know who's like, yeah, I actually don't either, like the main showrunner or whatever, but yeah.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: Or you could have made it more metaphorical. I was reminded of Jeff Vandermeer's short story secret life about an office building where different floors raid each other, bosses have fist fights to the death on the roof, and one person builds a house inside their table. But that's new weird and has dreamlike fantasy elements to it. Go weirder, go more metaphorical, or go entirely serious.
[00:46:26] Speaker A: Sorry. The showrunner, the creator, executive producer and writer of severance is Dan Erickson, whose only credit before severance was as writer from 2016 to 2018 of the lip sync battle pre show.
[00:46:50] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:46:51] Speaker A: Also, Ben Stiller was a director and involved in the severance. I knew that. I forgot about that, that Ben Stiller was involved. But, yeah, Dan Erickson, who literally had.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Like, no credits, I feel like he was just, like, building up, like, frustration during that whole experience, which he then channeled into severance. Anyway, um, both the book and the movie felt like they were somewhere in the middle, resulting in nothing particularly interesting. The story and the metaphor felt half baked. And in this case, plus half. Plus half is less than one. I didn't particularly enjoy either version. So as much as I feel like this is a cop out, I cannot decide which is better.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: Sorry. Katie does it sometimes I do it, sometimes I've done it once.
[00:47:36] Speaker B: I also always feel like it's a cop out. But sometimes.
[00:47:39] Speaker A: Sometimes.
[00:47:40] Speaker B: Sometimes it's just necessary.
[00:47:42] Speaker A: Yeah. What are you gonna do?
[00:47:45] Speaker B: So our winner this week was the book, with seven votes to the movies, four, plus our one listener who couldn't.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: Decide seven votes to the movies, four. And I feel like we read a comment from every single person who voted. Right?
[00:47:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: Like, I feel like we had. I feel like we had, like, twelve comments, and it's just like, yeah, fantastic. All right, well, we. Which honestly wouldn't surprise me because. Cause it's one of those things where, like, a lot of people haven't heard of it or don't know what it is. And if you've watched it for the podcast, then you probably had something to say about it, so.
All right. We do, in fact, have a learning things segment this week, and what we're learning about is the filmmakers who disappointed us. The Tim Burton edition. Times are changing and I'm getting old.
Are you gonna hold me accountable? My bed is empty and. And I'm getting cold. Isn't anybody gonna hold me accountable?
I'm problematic.
He's a problem. And you mean beyond making just shit movies for the last 15 years or whatever?
[00:48:47] Speaker B: Yeah, beyond that.
All right.
I really hope I don't attract the wrong crowd with this one.
Tim Burton is an american director, producer, writer, and animator known for gothic horror and fantasy films. He made his directorial film debut with the comedy Pee wee's big adventure, incredible movie in 1985.
[00:49:09] Speaker A: Have you seen it?
[00:49:10] Speaker B: Yeah. A long time ago.
[00:49:11] Speaker A: Such a good movie.
[00:49:12] Speaker B: And gained further prominence with Beetlejuice in 1988, Edward scissorhands in 1990, as well as his Batman films.
Wikipedia says he's known for, quote, pioneering goth culture in the american film industry, which might technically be true, but also feels like a little dismissive of goth culture.
[00:49:37] Speaker A: I feel like goths would not feel.
[00:49:39] Speaker B: Like goth cultures would not be happy to read that.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: No, I, and I feel like that's a very surface level. I don't even know. But I bet there's a lot of movies and, like, underground, like, film and stuff out there that it's way more goth. Goth than Tim Burton's movies, even. It's not even underground. Fucking the crow. I think, like, would fit into that category. More. More so than most of Tim Burton's movies. I'm like, you know, it's like a bubblegum goth movie. Like, I don't even like his stuff.
[00:50:12] Speaker B: You know, part of me hates to shade it because it is something that a lot of younger people like. Yeah, but he's also, you know, we're talking about, like, goth culture. We're talking about, like, the hot topic.
[00:50:26] Speaker A: King yeah, that's what I mean.
[00:50:27] Speaker B: Come on.
[00:50:28] Speaker A: It's more so, like, a very, like, poppy mainstream. It's not what I would consider, like, goth culture.
[00:50:34] Speaker B: No, not at all.
[00:50:35] Speaker A: It's what I would consider. Yeah. Like, which, again, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's something that lots of people have a phase of in their life or whatever. Like. Yeah, it's a very specific, like, aesthetic version of goth as opposed to, like, any sort of.
[00:50:49] Speaker B: It's. It's very accessible.
[00:50:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:51] Speaker B: And not particularly.
[00:50:53] Speaker A: I'm really not trying to gatekeep goth culture. No, I'm not a goth. I'm just saying that it does seem to me, like, kind of.
[00:51:00] Speaker B: It feels a little bit dismissive of what goth is.
[00:51:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: Which is a music based subculture that's, like, kind of political in nature and, you know, similar to, like, punk, right?
[00:51:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. It just seems very surface level to be like. And very, like. It seems like something. Yeah. Like. Oh, yeah. God, you mean like Tim. It seems like somebody. Somebody's parents would say, oh, you're one of those goths, like, in the Tim Burton movies. Like, it's like, what? It's not really. Yeah.
[00:51:30] Speaker B: But he has been generally fairly popular throughout his career, especially among Gen Xers and millennials who grew up with his films. I don't know how popular he is with Gen Z.
[00:51:43] Speaker A: Probably not super, but maybe. I mean, Wednesday was pretty popular, I.
[00:51:47] Speaker B: Think, but mostly people our age, right? So why is he getting the people who disappointed us treatment?
Well, he seems a little racist.
[00:52:00] Speaker A: Oh, boy.
[00:52:02] Speaker B: Or to be a little more specific, he's made some shady decisions and comments that feel pretty dang racist.
[00:52:11] Speaker A: That's adequate to say. We don't have to judge his character. As a human being, we cannot see into his soul, but we can look at his actions and his words.
[00:52:21] Speaker B: We can look at the evidence.
People have been pointing out the lack of people of color in Burton's films for a long time. But that particular question, why are your films so white? Really came to a head in 2016 following the spectacular box office bomb that was Miss Peregrine's home for peculiar children, which we have covered, which I did not enjoy.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: No.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: And in that case, people were pointing out that the film actually did feature a prominent black actor in a leading role, Samuel L. Jackson. But more specifically, they were pointing out that the only black actor in the film was cast as the main villain.
[00:53:05] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:53:06] Speaker B: And Burton ended up doing an interview for Bustle to address those questions. An interview which didn't really help. In the interview, he stated, quote, nowadays, people are talking about it. Film, diversity, more things either call for things or they don't. I remember back when I was a child watching the Brady Bunch, and they started to get all politically correct, like, okay, let's have an asian child and a black.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: Oof.
[00:53:37] Speaker B: I used to get more offended by that than just, I grew up watching blaxploitation movies. Right? And I said, that's great. I didn't go like, okay, there should be more white people in these movies.
Now, to me, this comment feels right in line with conservative, kind of a baby boomery rhetoric about forced diversity, quote, unquote.
[00:54:03] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:54:04] Speaker B: So we've got our magic words politically correct, as well as a non sequitur about blaxploitation films, which apparently is the filmmaker version of I have a lot of black friends.
[00:54:14] Speaker A: Well, and it's also just a complete sort of, to me, and I am not a scholar on this in the slightest, but to me, feels like a very ignorant sort of reading on blaxploitation films and why they exist. And the kind of the culture that spawned blaxploitation was the fact had a lot to do with cinema at the time and how that black people weren't cast in films. And like, a lot of other things, like blaxploitation films didn't just as exactly, because black people decided they wanted to make their own movies for no reason. Like, and they didn't want white people. Like, there's a whole lot of other political context around the existence of blaxploitation films that feel like he just kind of glossed right over there and was like, ah, look, they got their own movies. We got our own movies. Haha. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
[00:55:02] Speaker B: And, you know, I also think that things either call for things or they don't strongly implies then that any role that does not outright require an actor of color is inherently a white role, because I. Which is nonsense.
[00:55:16] Speaker A: No nonsense. And it's like, it's one thing to be like, look, I don't tell stories. I don't tell black person stories because I'm not a black person. And it's not a perspective I have. It's another thing to be like, my movie doesn't call for black actors. That's like an insane thing to like. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not gonna write a story about growing up as a young black girl in America, but if I make a movie, it's gonna have whoever in it. Like, it doesn't. Like, what do you. That's just.
[00:55:43] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Well, and. But, I mean, he's.
His stories aren't.
No, but his stories are not focused on, like, race in any way, I would say.
[00:55:54] Speaker A: I agree entirely, and. No, I agree entirely. And that's kind of my point, is that, you know, if his stories were about, like, very specific things that felt like there was. Yeah. Or whatever. Like. Or, you know, again, I understand a director or a writer or something saying that they don't feel comfortable trying to tell the story of a specific marginalized group. Right. But nobody's asking you to tell the story of a specific marginalized group. Hey, why is every single person in your movie white? That's a different.
[00:56:23] Speaker B: Those are two very different, very different conversations to be had.
So those comments surfaced again in 2022, with some critics accusing his Netflix series Wednesday of following the same track that is only casting black people as villains. And I think there was one character who started out as, like, kind of a villain or more like a bully, but ended up not being one, like, the mean girl character. But I would have. I would have to rewatch to be sure on that count. But that was my memory of the story.
[00:56:54] Speaker A: No, I think. I think you are right that they're not particularly like a bad person.
[00:56:58] Speaker B: But anyway, so those comments resurfaced. People started talking about that again. And when asked for a comment on that discourse that was happening at that time, one of his representatives told the New York Post, quote, I'm not forwarding a comment request this silly to Tim.
So there's that. Also a couple other things relevant to this conversation. Burton's only animated character voiced by a black person is oogie boogie from the nightmare before Christmas. His character's not only named after a derogatory term historically used against black people, but also loves gumbo, gambling and jazz.
[00:57:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:38] Speaker B: And is also the movie's central villain. And disclaimer to get ahead of this one, because I often see this as, like, a gotcha. Yes, we're aware that Burton did not actually direct the nightmare before Christmas. He conceived and produced it.
[00:57:51] Speaker A: We're also canceling Henry Selick. Or. Wait, no.
[00:57:54] Speaker B: Henry Selick went on to make. Didn't he make the one we just watched? Yeah, the one we just watched.
[00:58:01] Speaker A: Unfortunately, not great.
[00:58:03] Speaker B: It wasn't terrible.
[00:58:05] Speaker A: Wendell and Wild.
[00:58:06] Speaker B: Wendell and Wild.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: I thought it was pretty mediocre, but.
[00:58:08] Speaker B: It was not incredible to me. Like, not, like, super memorable, but it did. You know, it was a diverse film.
[00:58:17] Speaker A: Yes. No. Yeah.
[00:58:18] Speaker B: And, you know, to kind of hearken back to your earlier point, kind of proving that you can feature a character of color in a lead role without having to make it a story focused on, like, this is what it's like to be a black person.
[00:58:33] Speaker A: Exactly. Yes.
[00:58:34] Speaker B: So, you know, it can be done.
[00:58:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And you can even touch on those. And again, I also want to even say that beyond what I said before, again, I think it's fair to say, as a white or whatever, I'm not going to tell a story like a coming of age tale of a marginalized girl or whatever. This is not a story that I can tell. But in a story, something like Wendell and Wilde, which has broader reaching everything, if you make your main character black or whatever, and then you're not the only person that writes on the movie, you can get other perspectives. You know what I mean? You can have other people come on and be like, hey, I want to write this tale. I want to write this story. Like, I have this broad idea for a story in this world, and I want to make the main character black because I think it ties in thematically to what I want to do. I don't have the perspective to write that story. You know, help me with this. Whatever. Like, I would imagine that's probably something of what happened with, like, Wendell and wild, if I had to guess.
[00:59:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:59:29] Speaker A: Well, also, I don't think Henry Selick wrote it, period. I don't. I think he.
[00:59:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know.
Another thing. 2000 five's corpse bride, likely based on a 16th century jewish folk tale at the story of the worms.
It's complicated, but I say likely because supposedly the folktale was relayed to Burton as a potential movie idea by Joe Ranft, who was an animator at Disney who has since passed, so we can't ask him. And Burton has always insisted that he doesn't remember what the folktale was called or what its origins were. So there's no way to definitively prove this. The two stories are just very similar, but the movie corpse ride contains a lot of religion, but notably none of it is jewish.
[01:00:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:14] Speaker B: Now, I have a distinct memory of hearing in 2022 that Tim Burton had said that black people didn't fit his aesthetics. I remember that being said, and I saw one other source while I was looking into this, claiming that he said that his films were based on his own dreams, which only include white people.
[01:00:34] Speaker A: Weird dreams.
[01:00:35] Speaker B: A weird thing to say, but I was unable to find primary sources for either of those. The only direct quote I could find of his relating to this was that quote from Bustle. From the interview with Bustle.
[01:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah. I remember also seeing something like that, but I don't.
[01:00:50] Speaker B: I don't know if that's just people interpreting what he said or if there's some other, like, source that I'm not able to find.
[01:00:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:58] Speaker B: And then my other note here, and this is kind of different from the main thesis of this section, which is his racism. But I could not let this segment go without noting that Burton's films are also pretty known for being fatphobic, with his larger characters routinely being either visual gags or outright villains.
There's also that I've never really been big into Tim Burton, which might surprise people who are aware of my interests in general and also know my past as a hot topic frequenter and former Tumblr citizen, but he never really struck my fancy. I actually do like Corpse Bride, and I remember enjoying big fish when I saw it in theaters, and also sleepy Hollow when we covered it a few years ago. But beyond that, for me, his films kind of range from fine to, ugh.
[01:01:48] Speaker A: I'm much in the same boat. He's never been one that I like Pee Wee's big adventure a lot. I've actually never seen Beetlejuice.
I remember liking Edward Scissorhand fine, but not like, a lot. The Batman movies are good. Like, I remember liking them, but like nothing. He's never been a filmmaker where his movies have, like, blown me away again. I think my favorite of his movies is literally pee wee's big adventure, but.
[01:02:12] Speaker B: He has a very recognizable, like, aesthetic and, you know, to his own definition, to the whole thing.
[01:02:18] Speaker A: Yes. In more modern years, it's definitely. Yeah.
[01:02:22] Speaker B: And I had to end this segment because it was getting a little out of hand.
I, like, messaged you while I was working on this last night, and I was like, this is getting out of control, because I kept finding more and more articles to read. And also this episode I knew was already going to be long, but I wanted to end with this. Banger burn, from an article that appeared on the Mary sue in July of 2022.
Even if he shed his racism, xenophobia, and fatphobia, Burton would not have the range to do anything other than make something visually look like he had a hand in it, let alone tell a story with a diverse cast.
[01:03:00] Speaker A: Woof.
[01:03:02] Speaker B: Burn.
[01:03:03] Speaker A: Got him.
All right, let's learn a little bit more now about the novel Big Fish.
In telling the story of my father's life, it's impossible to separate fact from the fact that the man from the myth.
The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me.
If there was one thing you can say about that, was that I was intended for larger things.
I was the biggest thing ashton had ever seen from the imagination of director Tim Burton. Most men, they'll tell you a story straight through. It won't be complicated, but it won't be interesting either.
[01:04:00] Speaker B: Big Fish, Colon, a novel of mythic proportions, is a 1998 novel by american author Daniel Wallace. The book is written in a chronological series of tall tales, so it's kind of episodic, is my understanding of it. And despite the novel's first person narration, there is no present tense in the book. There's not like a pop back to the present kind of a thing. It's all recollection.
[01:04:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:04:29] Speaker B: The book draws elements from the epic poem the Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses. Nobody's surprised.
[01:04:38] Speaker A: I read Ulysses in.
[01:04:40] Speaker B: I have not. I have not read Ulysses. Oh, I'm sorry you had to rejoice. In high school, I read portrait of the artist as a young.
[01:04:48] Speaker A: Oh, that's. That's the one I read.
[01:04:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I read. Never mind.
[01:04:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I read that in high school.
[01:04:53] Speaker B: And I hated every second of it.
[01:04:55] Speaker A: I did not like it. That's the one I was thinking of. Sorry. I did not read Ulysses.
[01:04:58] Speaker B: I would portrait the artist. Extremely hard pressed to ever revisit Joyce.
[01:05:02] Speaker A: I read. I read that in high school. Yeah, yeah.
[01:05:04] Speaker B: And I have. I have only read bits and pieces of the Odyssey. I have not read the whole thing.
[01:05:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Also, I've only read excerpts.
[01:05:10] Speaker B: But back to Big Fish, a review from Publishers Weekly said, in a plain spoken style dotted with transcendent passages, Wallis mixes the mundane and the mythical. His chapters have the transformative quality of fable and fairy tale, and the novel's roomy structure allows the mystery and lyricism of the story to coalesce.
[01:05:32] Speaker A: All right.
[01:05:33] Speaker B: And then, writing for New York Times reviewer James Polk said, while at times Big Fish is a bit too cute, with some exaggerations, simply too excessive, and others slightly off the point, most of it strikes the right notes. So, okay, seems fine. And then aside from the movie we'll be discussing, the novel was also adapted in 2013 as a musical starring Norbert Leo Butz of wicked fame, who I am also, in a way, but not actually related to what? That is my one moderate claim to fame. You know my cousin Emily? Oh, Norbert Leo Butz is her uncle on her dad's side.
[01:06:13] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:06:14] Speaker B: My mom was in shows with him in, like, high school. Ask my mom about Uncle Norb sometime, she'll tell you.
[01:06:22] Speaker A: Fair enough. We're actually going to see Wicked this weekend. We are amazing. All right. That was everything about big fish, the book. Let's learn now about big fish, the film. Dad, I have no idea who you are. What do you want? Well, who do you want me to be? Just yourself. Just show me who you are for once.
Discover an adventure as big as life itself in telling the story of my father doesn't always make sense, but that's what kind of story this is.
Big Fish is a 2003 movie directed by Tim Burton, known for Edward Scissorhands, the Batman, Batman Return, Beetlejuice, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow Ed Wood's Pretty Good too, by the way. Sleepy Hollow, Charlie in a chocolate factory, Miss Peregrine's home, whatever, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. The film was written by John August, who is a collaborator with Tim Burton at times, who wrote Charlie and the chocolate Factory. Frankenweenie actually wrote Aladdin 2019, the live action one, and wrote Titan Ae. I just picked some random films. He hasn't done a ton, maybe twice as many as I listed here, but I thought that was interesting. Titan A is a movie that I remember liking back in the day. The film stars Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter, Alison Lohmann, Robert Guillem, Marianne Cotillard, Steve Buscemi, and Danny DeVito. So a star studded cast. It has a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 58% on Metacritic, and an eight out of ten on IMDb. And it made 123 million against a budget of 70 million, and was nominated for one oscar for best score by Danny Elfman. Another person who's, I think, canceled oh, is he? I think so. Could be wrong.
[01:08:31] Speaker B: Had not heard anything. Another. Another frequent Tim Burton collaborator, Danny Elfman.
[01:08:38] Speaker A: So screenwriter John August had read a pre published manuscript of Big Fish right after the death of his own father.
[01:08:45] Speaker B: That would do it.
[01:08:46] Speaker A: Yes. And thus thusly convinced Columbia Pictures to purchase the film rights so that he could adapt it. Initially, the film was going to be produced with Steven Spielberg as the director, and with filming scheduled to begin after Spielberg finished minority report. Another film we've done, Spielberg's version of the film, was planning to have Jack Nicholson in the role of the father, and the script was actually revised several times to beef up Nicholson's potential part. Ultimately, Spielberg dropped out of the project in order to make catch me if you can, and the script was then revised once, several more times, to remove some of the elements that August had added for Nicholson. Basically, he called it his best hits version of the script, where he had made the original versions of the script, then added a bunch of stuff for Jack Nicholson and then removed some of that stuff, but kept some of the best parts. And that's the script they ended up landing on.
So Steven Daldry, who's known for Billy Elliot, extremely loud and incredibly credibly close, and the hours, was another director who was considered before the production ultimately landed on Tim Burton. Burton was just coming off of his version of Planet of the Apes with Mark Wahlberg from 2001, famously not a good movie, and wanted to do something smaller. And he really enjoyed this story's quirkiness and that it would give him the ability to play with different genres. In the different vignettes, the tall tales that happen, you can kind of play with. There's different genres inherent to the different, to the different stories.
So because Nicholson had already been considered, Burton went on to consider Nicholson briefly before deciding, along with the producers on the film, that they should cast the father and the son as a pair, as opposed to, like, just casting the father and then finding the son. They're basically like, let's find a duo of actors that we think works. And so two of the film's producers, who had been working with Ewan McGregor on Down with Love, the film I have not heard of. And they suggested MacGregor and Albert Finney for the roles of the father and son as they felt that they looked like and acted like and seemed like they could be related.
And they also used the same kind of method of dual casting for Jessica Lang and Allison Loman as well.
Fun, weird cameo during one of the stories, the vignettes that we see Edward Bloom enters a town and there's a guy playing a banjo on a porch in the background. That's Billy Redden. Tim Burton and his team tracked him down in Clayton, Georgia, where he was a part owner of a restaurant. But more notably, he's one of the original banjo players from the movie deliverance, and the song he's plucking in the film is dueling banjos. It's just a weird little. Yep, yep.
And then getting to a few little iRb trivia facts before we get to the reviews.
There's a joke with an elephant defecating while Edward daydreams. This was apparently unscripted. The crew found it hilarious, and the camera operator, I guess, supposedly zoomed out to get all of it in frame. And that's in the movie, I guess. I don't know.
[01:11:53] Speaker B: I don't remember that, but I. Yeah, we'll see.
[01:11:57] Speaker A: Apparently, Marion Cotillard was a big fan of Tim Burton and supposedly slept with the film script under her pillow for a month until she got the part.
[01:12:05] Speaker B: That's a little weird.
[01:12:06] Speaker A: This would be her first american feature film.
This is the film debut of Miley Cyrus, then known as Destiny Cyrus, and she plays Ruthie in the film at eight years old, or the character is eight. I don't know how old Miley Cyrus was time. This was 2003, so probably close to eight, maybe a little older, according to Wikipedia. So getting into the reviews, according to Wikipedia, some critics actually compared this film to Forrest Gump favorably. I think big fish turns into a wide eyed southern gothic picture picaresque in which each lunatic twist of a development is more enchanting than the last, said Owen Gleberman of Entertainment Weekly. It's like Forrest Gump without the bogus theme park politics, end quote. So actually critical of Forrest Gump.
[01:12:56] Speaker B: That was what I, that was the main thing I disliked about Forrest Gump.
[01:12:59] Speaker A: There you go. Forrest Gump without the bogus theme park. I'll take it. Peter Travers for Rolling Stone praised Burton's direction and said it was a celebration of the art of storage, storytelling and a touching father son drama. For USA Today, Mark Cloak, Mike Clark said that he was most fascinated by the casting, saying, quote, equally delightful is the, is the Alison Lohman character's evolution into an older woman played by Jessica Lange. It's a metamorphosis to equal any in screen history.
James Berardinelli found the fairy tale approach reminiscent of the Princess bride and the films of Terry Gilliam saying, quote, big fish is a clever, smart fantasy that targets the child inside every adult without insulting the intelligence of either. End quote. For Time magazine, Richard Corliss was disappointed and said that the father son reconciliation was overly dramatic and cliche, saying, quote, you recall the boy who cried wolf. Edward Bloom is the man who cried fish.
End quote.
[01:14:05] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:14:05] Speaker A: Okay.
Side note, Big Fish was number 85 on Slant magazine's best films of the two thousands. And then finally, Roger Ebert, in a mixed review, which I didn't look up what his star rating was, wrote, quote, there is no denying that will has a point. The old man is a blowhard. There is a point at which his stories stop working as entertainment and segue into sadism. End quote.
Yep.
As always, remind you, you can do us a favor by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or goodreads. Any of those places interact. We'd love to hear threads as well. We'd love to hear what you had to say about any of these episodes. It's always fun. You can also give us a favor, do us a favor by heading over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever, all YouTube, wherever you're listening to us, subscribe. Make sure you're subscribed. Drop us a nice little five star rating, write us a review. All that stuff helps.
[email protected] sfilmez that you can support us there monetarily if you would like to. Katie, where can people watch big fish?
[01:15:07] Speaker B: Well, as always, you can check with your local library or a local video rental store if you still have one. I feel like it's probably a pretty good chance that they have a copy of this. Yeah, probably a DVD.
[01:15:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:15:20] Speaker B: Unfortunately, this movie does not appear to be streaming with a subscription anywhere at this time.
At least not that I could find.
[01:15:29] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll have to do. Yeah.
[01:15:30] Speaker B: But you can rent it for around $4 through Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube, or voodoo.
[01:15:37] Speaker A: There you go. Yeah, I'm excited for this one. This is a movie I've always heard people talk about.
[01:15:42] Speaker B: Mm hmm.
[01:15:43] Speaker A: But that I have never seen. Yeah, I've heard lots of people say, oh, my God, big fish is great. But, yeah, never, never seen it. And I honestly had no idea it.
[01:15:53] Speaker B: Was Tim Burton until I also did not remember that this was a Tim Burton.
[01:15:57] Speaker A: I knew Ewan McGregor was in. It was, like, the main thing I knew about it. I had no idea that Tim Burton directed it. So, yeah. Interesting. But, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. See, maybe it can add it to the small list of Tim Burton films that I think are good. So it'll be be interesting. That's gonna do it. For this prequel episode. Come back in one week's time. We'll be reviewing and talking about big fish. And until that time, guys, gals, non binary palms, and everybody else, keep reading books, keep watching movies, and keep being awesome.
