Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: On this week's prequel episode, we follow up on our Malcolm X listener polls and preview predestination.
Hello and welcome back to this film is Lit Pockets where we talk about movies that are based on books. It's another prequel episode. It's very late because. Well, a couple reasons. It was already gonna be late because of the last episode being a little late. We were giving people more time for feedback, but then I got sick, as you can probably tell. Still, like, I'm.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: This is the best you've sounded all week.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's the best I felt generally. I still have a little bit of stuff in the lungs, but yeah, I had a cold all week and have been out of commission.
Finally able to a point where I can actually, I think I can record without hacking up a lung the whole time. So, yeah, we're gonna get into it, though. Thank you for your patience. We're gonna start how we always do with our patron shout outs. 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 winning patrons and they are Amanda Nicole Goble Harborat Nathan, Mathilde Cottonwood Steve Ben Wilcox, Theresa Schwartz, Ian from Wine Country, Kelly Napier Gratch.
Just scratch. Shelby will return in Avengers, Doomsday, and that Darn Skag. Thank you all for your continuing support. Really appreciate it. Katie, let's see what people had to say about Malcolm X.
Yeah, well, you
[00:01:35] Speaker C: know, that's just like your opinion, man.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: All right.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: It's been so long now. I feel like since I read the book and watched the movie, I hope I'm going to remember what everybody's talking about.
On Patreon. We had five votes for the book and zero for the movie.
Shelby said, I'm picking the book because if I'm learning about someone's life, I want the more accurate version. I think I also just enjoyed the book more, to be honest.
I didn't know anything about Malcolm X's death other than that he was assassinated. So that part of the film really had my attention.
I laughed out loud when baby Giancarlo Esposito appeared because, of course, who else could they possibly cast to kill Malcolm X?
Thanks for covering this. It was a hole in my education and I learned a lot.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny, he doesn't do a lot in this movie, but he doesn't have a lot to do in this movie. But he's also. I don't know if Shelby has seen, but he's also have you seen do the Right Thing?
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Years ago, yeah.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Do the Right Thing is a great movie and he has a little bit more to do in that one. And it's a very fun character and also evidence of why he needs to stop being typecast is just like the scary villain guy.
I mean, he's good at it, he has more range.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: But yeah, I would like to watch that one again. I watched it in college and I don't remember it all that well, but I remember liking it. Our next comment was from Nathan.
Nathan said, I'm probably not being fair to the movie, but to me it's a pale imitation of the book. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is, as Katie mentioned, 500 pages long and I think it justifies the need for every single word.
No movie, even at 213 minutes, could possibly do justice to that size of work.
I mentioned unfairness and I will fully admit that I had reached this conclusion prior to watching the movie. But I still think I'm correct.
The book takes longer to get through every part of Malcolm's life, but I think it uses this time to really develop who he was as opposed to who he becomes.
He mostly doesn't pass active judgment on his past self, just recounts things as if he were experiencing them for the first time.
In the epilogue, Haley mentions that Malcolm X had marked up changes to the section on Elijah Muhammad that would have updated to reflect his views after leaving the Nation of Islam, but accepted Haley's advice to leave it as it as is. This was the right choice and it really makes the book so much more of a journey. I can feel the transformative power that Brian saw in the movie. In the book, while I went down a leftist path long before I read Slash watched this for the first time this month, I can see parallels to the queer visibility issues that spurred my own transformation.
We have to acknowledge the bad stuff that happens to anyone in our society, not ignore it or we will never grow.
The book really benefits from being in Malcolm's head in the way that literature can achieve and is always hard to replicate in film without ponderous narration.
I also appreciated in the last 80ish pages with Haley's perspective.
They really served to give voice to the external filter for and context to Malcolm's story.
I don't know that the movie really successfully mimics that.
I wondered if they might even have Haley as a character in this movie. It would have been weird and sort of meta, so I see why they didn't. But it could have worked. I could envision a different version of this movie that has the interviews as like a frame story. I don't know that that would make the movie any better or worse.
It would just be different.
I always got the sense that Malcolm was called red because of his skin color. Looking back, it was primarily his hair, but he definitely is referred to as a red skinned black man.
Interestingly, in the Noi Origin of the World, red is one of the less perfect races that Jakob had to go through to get from perfect original black folks to fully evil white folks.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Huh.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: I don't. We didn't even talk about that.
There's like in the, the, the like
[00:05:52] Speaker A: racial hierarchy in the book.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: There's like the, this whole like folklore backstory for that the Nation of Islam has about. Yeah. Did we talk about that? No, I can't remember.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: No.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: But you're aware of what I'm talking about.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: No. I mean, just going based on what he said, I can understand. Like, I. I'm aware that Nation of Islam has weird like racial hierarchy shit involved in it. I don't know the specifics, but I
[00:06:17] Speaker B: wondered if that fueled a small inferiority complex in Malcolm and made him so outspoken in preaching their message. It could be. Yeah.
My least favorite part of the movie was Banes. I didn't like that he was created due to the removal of Malcolm's family and really didn't care for how important a fictional character became in the real story of Malcolm's departure from the Noi. That's fair.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:41] Speaker B: It changes history too much for my comfort.
Another change I understand as a move for adapting fiction, but don't love when changing reality was the importance of West Indian Archie. In reality, Sammy was the contact for Malcolm to get settled in Harlem and enter the criminal world there. I get why you conflate the two since Archie needs to be around for the gambling kerfluffle, but I'm not comfortable with changing history.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: We've talked about before. It is.
You kind of have to.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Yeah, the movie truncates that part a lot.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: You kind of always have to.
Unless you're doing some sort of sprawling miniseries or something where you can really, you know, that's like 10 hours long.
Like you could do this maybe this story justice in like 10 hour miniseries or something like that, but to where you could include every little minor character, but in a film you just. You simply have. It just becomes too much of a pain to. Yeah.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Speaking of the kerfluffle, malcolm definitely says 8:21 when placing his bet because that is the time when he does it. And the movie indicates 821 is the number that won.
Similar to your issues on the Russian roulette scene. Having this be. Having this be a movie means that something has to be shown to happen. And thus Malcolm is clearly correct in the book. Malcolm is perpetually high at that time in his life, so not super reliable as a storyteller. And he also doesn't seem sure if he did win the numbers game.
Given that West Indian Archie was all about remembering numbers, I generally assumed that Malcolm hadn't actually bet the numbers. He thought he did.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, yeah, that kind of makes sense.
I was thinking about that more, though, in context of the movie that maybe there is more of an argument. Now, I would argue that in the filmic language of the movie that it doesn't really indicate that in the number scene or the bullet scene, but the movie does actually have, now that I think about it, a direct acknowledgment of like an unreliable narrator or events not playing out. Exactly. As always indicated in On Screen, that you're seeing very early in the film, in a scene that you liked in the movie and that I liked, which is the fantasy where he imagines shoving the sandwich in that face. We see that happen, but it doesn't actually happen. We see that it didn't actually happen.
Now, again, I think the filmic language of how that's edited is different enough from the way the bullet scene and the. The number scene are done that it. I don't think you can assume that it's meant to be unreliable in that same way. But there is at least some.
There is another thing you could point to in the movie of like, hey, there are things you see that you know are not. Did not happen as depicted.
[00:09:26] Speaker B: So, yeah, that's interesting. I had not thought about that. But that is a very interesting little additional moment. Spike Lee believes, or at least did at the time of the movie's release, that CIA and FBI were involved in Malcolm's murder.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that's.
Growing up in a black school with a lot of.
So I was in Drumline and I had some of my mentors at that time period were some, like, college age music instructors who are our drum instructors.
And they were.
They were interesting guys, shall we say? I like them a lot. In certain ways. They were horrible people to be in charge of children. In other words, they were just way too irresponsible. Looking back, I'm like, why in the world? Like, in my head at the time I was like 16. I assumed these guys were probably like 35. I realize now they were like 22. Like, they were like literally also children. Also children.
And they were like taking us on like out of state trips. I'm like, what? It's insane now that I look back at it, and just deeply irresponsible people.
Good music, whatever. But they were also a weird combination of woke regressive, like.
And I remember, you know, I think we talk. I don't know if we were talking about Malcolm X, the movie or something like that, but they were very much, at least a couple of them. I remember of the opinion that, yes, the CIA killed. I mean, which again, is not outlandish.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Not something I.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: We know that the FBI was involved with the blackmailing and yeah, like, smear campaigned against mlk and like, again, I'm not saying that they killed mlk. I'm just saying that they were involved with nefarious stuff. That. So, yeah, it's not. And we know they. They've assassinated other people, so it's not, you know. Yeah, they're. Yeah.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: If it came out that that was. I would be zero percent surprised.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: But from what we know, it was the Nation of Islam.
From my understanding, the most prominent kind of historian perspective is that he was assassinated by members of the Nation of Islam for that stuff.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: The book doesn't mention Malcolm running into folks he thought were undercover agents while on his pilgrimage. But the choice to have Malcolm actually say towards that the government was helping and. Or manipulating the noi and killing him was a step too far for me. Since that didn't happen, I believe the government wasn't really above murdering black leaders at the time, but we don't really have the evidence of that. And according to the book, Malcolm never mentioned it as a fear.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah, they're definitely watching him. And you know, I could even. You can even see like, maybe they were giving information to people who might be. You know, there's all kinds of things that.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: That the FBI knew something and just let it happen.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: There's all kinds of things that could have gone on that is not them directly being like, we need to assassinate this guy. Let's make that happen. There's a, you know, there's a lot of levels of involvement below that that are, I think, more likely.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: I thought the description of Mecca in the book was really effective. It was clear to some extent that Malcolm was getting a sanitized view. But he does spend at least part of two days and overnight in holding because they didn't trust his status as a real Muslim. And he interacted with normal People. Then he makes a lot of grandiose claims based on that time. Like everyone snores the same way, and thus Muslims must be unified.
Regardless of how unaware of reality Malcolm was, the book still does a great job to make you feel his sense of really belonging on this pilgrimage. And this makes his rhetorical shift upon returning home seem very natural.
The scene with Malcolm on a camel near the pyramids was a recreation of real life footage that shows towards the end of the movie.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Yeah, which is why it feels so much like vacation footage.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: Vintage vacation footage.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Yeah, it is based on real footage.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: I immediately called bullshit when Malcolm told the Russian roulette story because it just seemed too much like a movie scene. So when we find out about the palmed bullet, it made things make a lot more sense too.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: I mean, it definitely feels like a movie scene, but sometimes those things happen in real life.
[00:13:30] Speaker B: Yeah. All right. Our last comment on Patreon was from Harpo Rat. Harpo Rat is the patron who requested that we cover this book and movie. So thank you, Harpo Rat. First off, thanks for doing my recommendation. And my next one won't be as I have a terrible memory regarding the media I consume, so I barely remember the book. However, reviewing the book with your episode was wonderful. I first read the book because I realized that even though Malcolm X was an American historic figure that I've heard of since I was a child, I was never really taught anything about him beyond roughly a paragraph. And none of it was about his life. Post Mecca experience.
From what I remember, the book had me hooked the whole time. I remember enjoying the writing style that Malcolm X and Alex Haley used.
I watched the movie more recently and was pretty amazed by it. As I watched the movie, memories from the book were surfacing constantly. And the movie as a whole was very gripping. Denzel Washington's performance was fantastic. I liked the movie, but I'm just not sure how you adapt an autobiography in such a way that would have me choose it over the primary source. Over on Facebook, we had one vote for the book and zero for the movie. And we had another comment from Nathan. I think Nathan left one on almost every platform this time.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Taking that challenge.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Yes, taking it seriously.
So Nathan said, gotta be the book. At risk of making this too much about myself and my identity as an
[00:14:59] Speaker A: atheist, I would just already too late, you've already done it.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: I would just mention a quote that stuck out to me from the book.
Since I learned the truth in Mecca, my dearest friends have come to include all kinds. Some Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics and even atheists. Atheists.
A man who previously identified as an atheist, admittedly while he was a criminal and all around terrible dude and made a larger portion of his life about trashing Christianity, still thinks it's the most surprising that he could be friends with a godless atheist.
Also, I kind of like how this comment mirrors the some of my best friends are black people in quotes construction that so many racists use as justification of their behavior and words.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: I don't know. I. I want. Because the movie definitely doesn't ever depict him as an atheist.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: So.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: And I'll be interested to hear about that. Like if he ever called himself that or if he called. Go ahead.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: I don't recall in the book that he ever referred to himself specifically as an atheist. Yeah, there is a portion of the book like he talks a lot in the beginning of the book about how he doesn't like Christianity for various reasons
[00:16:15] Speaker A: and that I, that I buy.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: But there's like a portion in the book specifically like the prison portion before he starts getting into like getting into Islam where he is very much in this, like, God isn't real kind of a bend.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: But it feels, I don't know if it feels to me more like.
It felt to me less like atheism and more like a reactionary response to.
[00:16:46] Speaker A: That's what I was gonna say. Actually, this doesn't surprise me at all because I never again the little I know about Malcolm X specifically in regard to like his religion, you know, what I know is from this movie and just some very broad reading, but it would not surprise me at all to know that his. Maybe he would have called himself an atheist at some point, but that it would not have been, especially if it was entering his younger time, which you reference here. You said admittedly while he was a criminal and all around terrible dude, which is when he was very young.
I don't think it was like a reasoned philosophical. Atheism is not what the impression.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: No, I think it was an angry,
[00:17:20] Speaker A: reactionary, sort of just like God, I hate God kind of rejection of God thing, which I think is clear by the fact that he then becomes a Muslim, like a very devout Muslim.
He clearly has a very strong attachment and disposition towards religion. It would appear of some sort, obviously.
And so I think it's kind of very understandable then that he would.
That I don't find that saying of like, oh, my dearest friends have come to include all kinds, even atheists, despite the fact that he was maybe nominally an atheist. At some point in his life because he didn't quote, unquote, believe in God. I don't think those are as, like, not hypocritical. Yeah, maybe hypocritical positions as it may sound at first blush because of the type of atheist that he was. In the same way that a lot of, like, conservative Christians will say, like, oh, I used to be an atheist. And it's like, not. They weren't really not to know true Scots in it, but, like, it's very common for, like, Kirk Cameron is one of them who does this all the time.
He was like, well, I was an atheist. And it's like when he was 17, he hated his parents, so he, like, told them he didn't believe in God because.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Right, they told me not the same
[00:18:39] Speaker A: thing, which is not the same thing as, like, getting to a point. And again, I'm not trying. I'm not saying that it's bad or whatever. I'm just saying that there is a difference there between, like, I have thought about a lot, very hard and deeply about, like, all of the different arguments for and against the existence of God. And I have come down on the side of I think God does not exist versus I was 17 and mad at my parents and told them God isn't real because, you know, like, maybe, you know, and then so thus I describe myself as an atheist when I was younger. I think those are a little bit different things. And it sounds to me like Malcolm X maybe fell a little bit closer to that version than, like, yeah, having
[00:19:17] Speaker B: read the book, that's what I would say.
I also, I don't think you. That this particular quote necessarily has to be interpreted as Malcolm X himself thinking that it's surprising he could be friends.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: That's another way of.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: I think you definitely can read it that way, but I think you could also read it as just a general reflection of the dominance of religion in society. And particularly at this time, he's speaking
[00:19:48] Speaker A: to an audience where the idea of a Muslim or a Christian being friends with an atheist is crazy. And he's saying, yes, even atheist people, like, yes, we can even have communion and form community with people who are atheists. You know, like, maybe that's less of an indictment of his own views on it and more of an indictment on society's views on it that he is expressing there. I would agree with that entirely.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Over on Instagram, we didn't have any comments. We did have one from Tim Wahoo, but it wasn't relevant. So I didn't include It Sorry, Tim, gotta try harder.
We did have two votes for the book and four for the movie.
On threads. We had one vote for the book, zero for the movie, and another comment from Nathan who said I'm picking the book because it's maybe the best non fiction book I have ever read.
Regarding the film though, how did Denzel not get the Oscar? Al Pacino is a good actor, but I'm not convinced he has ever had a better performance than Denzel in Malcolm X.
[00:20:52] Speaker A: Is that Scent of a Woman that he was. I'm trying to.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Nathan mentions that in a minute. Denzel, on the other hand, has had quite a few better performances because Denzel Washington is the best actor of all time, period.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Okay. I don't know if I would go that he's a good actor.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Good actor. I don't know if I know enough about. So think Al Pacino, his performances to make that claim.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I think Al Pacino can also be way worse than Denzel ever is. I don't know if Denzel is ever bad. Whereas Al Pacino can be bad and stuff.
Denzel's like always good in some to some degree. But I don't. Yeah, yeah, you know, that's your opinion obviously.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: And Nathan added here to be clear. I mentioned Pacino because he won the Oscar that year for Scent of a Woman.
[00:21:34] Speaker A: Looking here, let me look real quick. I want to see what the other.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah, well, who are the other nominees?
Also, have you ever seen Scent of a Woman?
[00:21:42] Speaker A: I have not.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: No. I feel like I have. I have like. Or I've seen a clip from it.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: At least 93 Oscars. I'm looking at the wrong one.
I've seen clips from it. The, the famously. There's the line with a great ass. He says that in Scent of a Woman and I know it's about a blind. A blind Al Pacino being driven around by some younger guy and like looking for strange or something. I don't even know.
[00:22:06] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a tango scene. There's a scene where he does the tango. Yeah. With a woman.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: I have not. Yeah, I haven't seen. I like I said I've just seen some like random clips from it, but I have not seen it. Okay, so Al Pacino won for Scent of a woman.
Robert Downey Jr. Was nominated for Chaplin as Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, which I have not seen but I've heard. I can't remember if that movie is regarded as like bad or good. I actually don't remember Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Steven Rhea in the Crying Game and then Denzel's Malcolm X. I have
[00:22:39] Speaker B: not seen any of those other movies. No.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: So I can't argue, but I.
Yeah, I would believe that Denzel should have won.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: All right. Over on Blue sky, we had one vote for the book, zero for the movie. And our final comment from Nathan, it's the book by a mile over a solid movie. The book is great at really putting you in the mind of Malcolm as he changes through his life. He had the ability to soften the edges or really judge himself for being terrible, and it's able to just give the perspective of the Malcolm from that time period.
Nathan, I do appreciate that you have a different comment on every platform.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Yes. I like that you're able to give a little bit of different thing each time. It's nice.
[00:23:26] Speaker B: All right. And over on Goodreads, we had one vote for the book and zero for the movie. And a comment from Miko, who said, as a non American, the totality of my knowledge regarding Malcolm X going in was an assassinated black activist.
So, yeah, so the movie was an interest. So the book was an interesting read.
While watching the movie, I was thinking how confused I would be had I not read the book first.
Did you have that experience?
[00:23:57] Speaker A: No, obviously not this time. But also, I don't remember having that experience when I watched it.
[00:24:01] Speaker B: I don't either. No.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: But also, maybe I just had more context as an American.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: That's fair.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Yeah, would be my guess.
[00:24:07] Speaker B: Yeah. The context around, like, the civil rights.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: The civil rights and, like. And what different time periods look like. You know, there's a bunch of stuff that just culturally I would get out of the movie that if you're not American, I think would be harder.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: Oh, I should have read Mikko's next sentence before we went on that bear, because Miko went on to say most of it would be undoubtedly be due to not being that familiar with the culture and time period. But I feel like the editing is still a bit confusing and jarring at times.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: I would disagree. I. I genuinely think that if you have the content, which is, I don't think, an unfair criticism, that, like, ideally, film should transcend.
Maybe not ideally, but there you can make film that transcends cultural boundaries. Like.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: It is possible.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Well, and certainly if you want your film to transcend those cultural.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: But I do think that you could argue that when telling a story like this, maybe that's not as possible. Like. Yeah, and. And maybe shouldn't even be the goal, necessarily.
And I think within the context of Having a. You don't even have to have a ton again. I was in high school when I watched this and it wasn't like I was super like knowledgeable about like all of this history, but you know, I had a little bit of cultural understanding. And I think within that context, the editing and the pacing and stuff I think works really well and isn't jarring at all for me. But again, I think that, yeah, definitely, if you don't have the cultural grounding of what's going on and the different things happening, definitely I could see why the editing wouldn't make it any easier
[00:25:38] Speaker B: as this is once again a true story turned into a movie. The comparison is a hard one. I cannot say which is better, but I think the book is more interesting, so that shall have my vote. P.S. last time I mentioned that the Steve index doesn't work, that kept nagging me and so I fixed it.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: The page is up to date again with a link to the new book to movie adaptation search tool too.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: Incredible.
Did we mention that?
[00:26:03] Speaker B: No, we didn't talk about that yet.
So long time listeners may be familiar with the Steve Index.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Which is I guess a tool would be the right thing to call it or.
Yeah, I'm not overly familiar with this type of data work and website building.
I don't even really know what to refer to it as. But this is a tool that Mikko built that compares, I believe the IMDb scores and the Goodreads scores to the number of Stevens or Stevens involved in a production.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:26:43] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: In front of or behind the camera?
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Yes. And this is based off of an inside joke that Cottonwood Steve, one of our longtime patrons. Yes. Or Steve from Arizona, as he was going by for a long time, would often mention whether or not there were any Steves involved in the production of a movie.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: He joked that the more Steve's in the movie, the better the movie will be.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:27:08] Speaker A: And so Miko took it upon himself to test that.
So we have an actual data. It's one of my favorite things that has ever arisen because of this. It's the perfect kind of nonsense that weird little micro Internet cultures and like, you know, groups like ours can spawn. That is kind of like in my opinion, the platonic ideal of what the Internet can be.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: But Miko also built a new tool that is a book to movie adaptation searching tool where you can go in and I believe there's a way that you can like remove all of the stuff we've already covered and then search according to topic. I Think.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Like different. Like keywords, different genres.
And I think it's like cross referencing Goodreads and IMDb.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And it can tell you. So. So that was based on us talking about specifically, I think, when you were saying that it's hard to find Christmas movies.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: Far fewer Christmas movie adaptations than you would think.
[00:28:13] Speaker A: And so now we have a tool where Katie can literally just go and search all of them relatively quickly and easily. Thanks to Mikko, because, again, Mikko's the best.
[00:28:24] Speaker B: Thank you, Mikko. Thank you for existing and wanting to do strange side projects for us.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: So our winner this week, unsurprisingly, was the book. With 11 votes to the movies. Four.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: Yeah. In retrospect, I guess it's unsurprising because it's a non fake, like an autobiography. It's just. It's hard to compare those. But, yeah, I hear what everybody says.
I'm never gonna read that book. Probably just because of the length. I don't want to say that. I might. If anything, I'd probably listen to it if I could find an audiobook of it.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: There's a. There's a Kindle only.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah.
[00:29:00] Speaker B: Our audible.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: Is it read by Denzel?
No. That would be incredible.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: It's read by.
Oh, my God. I said who it was. Oh, you did Equal Episode. And I can't remember now.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: It was somebody interested. It wasn't.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: No, it's. It's another, like, prominent black actor, but I can't remember who it is now.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: I would hope it's not a prominent white actor.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: That would be.
Yeah.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Laurence Fishburne. Yeah, yeah. Read by Lawrence Fishman.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: But it isn't. It is an Audible exclusive, so you have to have an Audible account to listen to it.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: Yeah, but what I was gonna say was, you know, hearing all everybody's points, and I take all of that into consideration and admitting that I have not read the book to compare.
I really like the movie.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: I really. I really like the movie, too.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: I think I would vote for it.
[00:29:51] Speaker B: And I think it's one of those kind of weird situations where the movie is legitimately so good.
[00:29:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: And very effective. Clearly. We had a long conversation on the episode about how effective it was for both of us as younger people.
But I also think it's one of those things that it's just difficult to take something that is a real, true account from the mouth of a person who actually lived and say, actually this fictionalized version of it is the better story.
[00:30:27] Speaker A: Obviously, 100%.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: I think everybody maybe feels A little weird about that.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. All right, that was it. For all of your feedback. Thank you so much for sending all that in. Love discussing what you all have to say about the stuff we watch and read.
Katie. Time now to preview all you Zombies by Robert Heinlein.
[00:30:48] Speaker C: What if I could put him in front of you, the man that ruined your life?
Would you kill him?
By the time you listen to this, seven years will have passed.
Here you are at the beginning of your new life.
It can be overwhelming knowing the future.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: Quotation mark EM Dash all you zombies M Dash quotation mark is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, who also wrote Starship Troopers, which we have covered on this show, which I remember not liking the book very much.
But this short story was apparently written over the course of one day.
He apparently wrote it July 11th of 1958, and it was first published in the magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction after being rejected by Playboy. Oh, and I. I've never cracked open a Playboy. Does Playboy still publish fiction?
[00:32:00] Speaker A: Probably. I, I assume they still do a similar thing where they publish like, articles and stuff, but I actually don't know.
I don't even know if Playboy's in print, like physical print, so I assume it is, but I don't actually know every.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: Every time, because this does come up frequently when we cover like older short stories and stuff. And every time they're like, oh, it was published in Playboy, I'm like, that's weird.
[00:32:24] Speaker A: Playboy is also one of those things that's really interesting because from my understanding, the quality and like, type of thing that was published in Playboy, especially back in the day, varied so greatly. But a lot of it was like, you know, that classic joke people will say of like, if somebody get caught, like with a Playboy, they're like, oh, I'm just reading it for the articles. Or like, that's the joke.
But it's actually, I've heard there's some pushback to that idea. I've heard people say, like, if you find. If somebody says they actually read Playboy for the articles, that's actually like a bigger indictment of their character. Because a lot of the stuff that Playboy published in its articles was like awful, like morally reprehensible in terms of like being like, weird, like rape apologia, that kind of stuff. Kind of like manosphere style stuff.
But that's not all of it. That it was. They also had weird, random, you know, like sci fi fiction stories and stuff like that. That wasn't. There was also stuff like that in it. But yeah, which is interesting because.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I bet if we went back through and like I looked back at all of the different short stories that we've covered, particularly like older ones like this, I bet Playboy comes up quite a bit. Yeah.
So this particular story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel.
It further envelops themes explored by the author in a previous work called by his Bootstraps, which was published around 18 years before all you Zombies.
The unusual title of the story, which, as you heard at the beginning, includes both the quotation marks and the EM dashes. Oh, yeah, that's the part of the title is a quotation from a sentence near the end of the story. And because the quotation is taken from the middle of the sentence, we have the dashes indicating the omitted text before and after the title.
[00:34:28] Speaker A: So it could have been an ellipses before and after if they wanted to do it.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Maybe. Yeah.
I don't know. That's. I mean, I get it. As a person who understands a lot about how punctuation functions, that's certainly correct.
I also feel like it's.
[00:34:45] Speaker A: As a title, you can.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: As a title, I feel like it's a little pretentious.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: A little bit, but whatever. It's also fun.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it's fun.
In 1980, all you zombies was nominated for the Balrog Award for short fiction reference to Tolkien. I don't know of any other Balrogs.
Philosopher David Lewis considered All you Zombies and by his Bootstraps to be examples of quote perfectly consist time travel stories.
[00:35:17] Speaker A: Interesting. What is Bias Bootstraps?
[00:35:19] Speaker B: It's the other story that Heinlein wrote.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: I don't know anything about it.
[00:35:24] Speaker A: I mean, based on its title, I can tell that it's like one of those time travel story where. Yeah. It's self like that.
[00:35:29] Speaker B: Self. Yeah, like a self.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: Hence the. By his bootstraps. Like he goes back in time and does something that creates the circumstances that lead to a thing that happened in the.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: I don't know anything about by his Bootstraps. But apparently it has like very similar themes too. I'll use zombies. And apparently according to this also involves time travel.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
Stanislaw Lem, that's the author of Solaris.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: Yes.
A TFIL alum. Stanislaw Alum, in his monograph Science Fiction and Futurology mentioned all you Zombies as an example of a minimal possible bootstrap paradox in science fiction.
[00:36:10] Speaker C: There you go.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: I wonder if it's called a bootstrap paradox because of by his bootstraps. Or if by his bootstraps was referencing.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know.
[00:36:19] Speaker A: Bootstrap. The Bootstrap paradigm paradox. Good Lord.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: I have no idea that. We'll have to look that up, though. That would be fun to find out.
Finally stating that it and other Heinlein time travel stories quote, force the reader into contemplations of the nature of causality and the arrow of time.
Carl Sagan listed all you zombies as an example. Example of how science fiction, quote, can convey bits and pieces, hints and phrases of knowledge unknown or inaccessible to the reader.
[00:36:54] Speaker A: Absolutely. You know what? One day I'm still surprised nobody has asked us to do Contact yet. It's gonna happen. One of these days I'm gonna have to make it my birthday episode.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: We could do that. You don't have a birthday episode picked out yet.
[00:37:07] Speaker A: That might have to be.
[00:37:07] Speaker B: I do. But you don't.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: Been wanting to do Contact for a while. Okay, I'll have to think about that.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: I don't know what. I don't know what that is.
[00:37:14] Speaker A: You don't know what Contact is? You've not seen Contact.
Oh, my God.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: Give me some kind of reference.
[00:37:19] Speaker A: Jodie Foster movie from the 90s, late 90s, about.
It's called Contact because they contact aliens.
[00:37:27] Speaker B: Okay, I think I know what you're talking about.
[00:37:30] Speaker A: They get a signal from, like, aliens and then.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: I mean, that happens in a lot of movies, too.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: Than Jodie Foster. But it's like hard sci fi. It was written by Carl Singh. It's based on a book written by Carlsen.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Then I think that would be a great one for you to read.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Cool.
All right, let's go ahead now and preview the movie based on all you zombies Predestination.
[00:37:51] Speaker C: So what, you're a cop, I'm a temporal agent. We prevent crime before it takes place.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: What is it?
[00:37:57] Speaker C: It's a time machine.
Don't ever exceed the jump limit. It can be problematic.
If you ever want to stop the Fizzle Bomber, you'll never get another chance. Time it catches up with us all.
[00:38:15] Speaker A: Predestination is a 2014 film written and directed by Michael and Peter Spirig, who are German.
Australian. German by heritage, but Australian, like born and like living, I think.
Twins. Twin. Identical twin brothers.
Known for the film Daybreakers, the Saw spinoff reboot film Jigsaw, and then a film called Winchester, along with this movie.
They haven't made a ton and there's a lot of years in between them, but they made a few movies that daybreakers. Also has Ethan Hawke in it. I've heard of it. It's like a. I think it's like a vampire movie. Kind of like a weird sci fi vampire movie.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: Makes sense.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: It might be based on a book. I don't actually know.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: The film stars Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook, Noah Taylor, Kuni Hashimoto, Christopher Kirby and Christopher Summers, among others. It has an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 69 on Metacritic, and a 7.4 out of 10 on IMDb and it made 5.4 million against a budget of 5 million.
So the Spirig brothers were announced as the directors on the project in May 2012. And on the topic of adapting this 50 year old short story, they said, quote, so we worked on the premise that if there were a way, if there was a way to pick apart the logic, the logic of the time travel over that time, the last 50 years, it would have been done by now. We kind of say, let's trust the short story and trust that logic. So we stuck very closely to it.
[00:39:40] Speaker B: Oh, interesting.
I'll be the judge of that.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Supposedly a pretty close adaptation.
And then these are just a handful of IMDb trivia facts because there really wasn't that much about the production.
They're kind of some Easter egg stuff to look out for in the movie.
When the barkeep sits down at the typewriter for the first time and the barkeep is played by Ethan Hawke, There's a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: I always forget he wrote that.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: Sitting next to the typewriter. When John is at the store purchasing that typewriter, the saleswoman is holding a 1966 edition of Heinlein's novel, the Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
[00:40:14] Speaker B: Banger title, incredible title.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: Just some more Easter eggs. The picture of the Crosby Shoes building in the beginning of the movie, which I don't know what the context of this is or why it would be. I thought it was really interesting. The picture of the Crosby Shoes building in the beginning of the movie is actually a picture of the exploded reactor number four from the Chernobyl power plant.
[00:40:33] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:40:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: I don't know. Interesting.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: At one point in the film, 8 minutes and 18 seconds in supposedly, according to IMB Trivia, Ethan Hawke looks at his watch and the date that is depicted there is his actual birthday.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: And then my final one here is there's a character in the film referred to as the Fizzle Bomber. I don't know.
[00:40:51] Speaker C: Or.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: Yeah, Fizzle Bomber. And he Plants a fizzle bomb.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: I can't believe. What a whimsical name for something horrible.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: The fizzle bomb timer discovered at the bomb site is actually made in the film from a SparkFun Arduino Pro Mini 328 which you can Google look up and as it is shown in the movie with a few things destroyed, could actually serve as its intended purpose as like part of a bomb.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: What does a Spark Fun Arduo Mini?
[00:41:20] Speaker A: It's essentially a little circuit board. Like a computer circuit board.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: It sounds like a camera or something. That's what I was asking.
[00:41:26] Speaker A: Arduinos are like little circuit boards that you can buy with like a kit and then you can like turn them into things. Like if you know a little bit of like basic programming and like soldering and wiring, you can use them to like build little things.
[00:41:41] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:41:42] Speaker A: So you can use them to like, if you want to make a, an alarm clock that does something weird, you can use this to like, it's like a logic gates and stuff. It's like a little tiny computer that you can customize and make use different things.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Well that makes sense.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: And so you can use them to make bombs with is the.
[00:41:57] Speaker B: Sure, sure, sure.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: And they actually use that, which I, I just thought it was random and funny.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: All right, well, if you want to support us, you can follow us on social media, follow us on Facebook, Instagram threads, Blue sky or Goodreads. We will this coming week we will be starting our March Madness bracket. So if you want to participate in that and vote in all of the polls, follow us over on social media. You can do that. There another way to support us is by going to wherever you listen to us, Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever. Leave us a five star rating, write us a nice little review.
We love to see that.
And if you really want to support us, you can subscribe to our Patreon.
You can be a patron for free and you get access to the polls as a free patron.
If you're not on other social media sites, that's another way to do that.
At the two dollar level you get access to early access, usually unless we're running late like we are right now.
And you also get access to monthly episod episode announcements. If you like to read or watch along with us, that's a way to know what's coming in advance. At the five dollar level, you get access to our bonus episodes. We put out an episode on Megamind in February and this month we will be covering whatever the runner up from our March Madness bracket is and at the $15 level you get access to priority recommendations.
And this was a patron request from Mathilde. So thank you Mathilde for requesting this.
And if you would like to watch Predestination along with us, you can of course always check with your local library to see if they have a copy of it. Or if you still have a local video rental store in your town, you could check with them. Otherwise, this is not streaming anywhere with a subscription, but you can rent it for around $4 from Amazon Prime, Apple TV or YouTube.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah, I'm excited to watch this one. I read a little bit of what it's about because I had literally no idea.
[00:44:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:19] Speaker A: And I'm very intrigued to see this whole thing's gonna be because the minor spoilers it concerns and I don't think this is a major spoiler. It was like in the first sentence of the first couple sentences of the like the summary on IMDb that didn't get into any spoilers. It concerns a trans character pretty prominently. And again in a film written and produced in 2012 by seemingly a couple cis straight white guys.
I was like, oh boy, this could be interesting.
[00:44:54] Speaker B: This is either it's either gonna be really handled really beautifully and great or a complete nightmare.
[00:45:00] Speaker A: The fact that it was recommended by a patron gives me hope that maybe and by Mathilde gives me hope that maybe this is one of those that is like a surprisingly be again, not that 2012 is the ancient past where. Where we can forgive everybody for not be. For you know, for being transphobes or anything like that. Not, not saying that by any stretch, but it was definitely before the like current modern reckoning on. Yeah, kind of an understanding about and I think like movement towards like acceptance of trans people that has really come into shape over the last like decade. I would say at least in like popular culture. I would say again, trans acceptance and liberation movements have existed long before that and plenty of very cool, very smart people were very accepting of trans people long before 2016. I'm just saying that like in popular
[00:45:49] Speaker B: culture, in broader popular culture that has been more recent.
[00:45:52] Speaker A: That has been more recent. And so it is very interesting to see what this is gonna be.
But I'll just even disregarding that it looks like a apparently a pretty compelling like fun little like trippy sci fi film. So very excited to watch it come back in just a few days. Cuz we're turning this around quick cuz we were late on this prequel episode to hear what we have to say about predestination until that time, guys, gals, non binary pals and everybody else keep
[00:46:17] Speaker B: reading books, keep watching movies and keep being awesome.
[00:46:26] Speaker C: Sam.
