129: Should You See ‘Don’t Worry Darling’? Plus: The controversy (or nontroversy!) of ‘Jihad Rehab.’

Welcome

back to a crossover movie I will present it by Bulwark Plus. I’m your host, Sunny Bunch, Culture Editor of The Bulwark, I’m joined as always by List of Rosenberg of The Washington Post and Peter Sugarman. Reason magazine, Alyssa Peter. How are you today? I’m well.

I’m happy to be talking about movies with Friends.

First, stop in controversies and controversies, a documentary that set out to humanize terrorists held at Gitmo has found itself the subject of criticism, but not from the people you might expect or at least Not from the people of the New York Times seems to have expected. In a lengthy profile of g hod rehab and it’s director Meg Smaker, possibly Smack I don’t know how I have never heard her name before. The New York Times noted that critics warned the documentary which featured interviews with men in Saudi rehabilitation centers for accused terrorists among others. We are told that film critics warned that conservatives might bridal at the poor tryout, but in a turn of events that should surprise very few. By this point, attacks on the film came instead from the left rather than the right.

Here’s the New York Times, quote, Arab Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused miss Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda, some suggested her race was disqualifying a white woman who resumed to tell the story of Arab men and quote, and now the times allied some of the other controversies here. There there were some suggestions that the prisoners being in prison could not consent to the interviews. And doing the interviews put some in grave danger. They said, oh, you know, we didn’t know that the interviews that you were doing on tape for a documentary would be put in a documentary and submitted the film festivals. We are napes in this world of of ours.

But these all strike me as fairly obvious you know, kind of trying to insist on more stringent rules for something that has fallen into his favor for other reasons. Right? Yeah. There’s a reason that Abigail Disney, an executive producer on the film, said that it, quote, landed like a truckload of hate and, quote, and her open letter begging for forgiveness for supporting such terrible, terrible, inappropriate problematic work. The real question here is who gets to make movies about whom?

Right? I see again, names I do not know how to pronounce this. I’m a flummoxist. I’m sure. Asiya Bundawi, a filmmaker tiqued up for documentary magazine, The Times Notes.

Here’s what she said, quote, to see my language and the homelands of folks in my community used as backdrop White savior tendencies is nauseating, she wrote. The talk is all empathy, but the energy is Indiana Jones, end quote. I mean, I wish my movies that I made in never had Indiana Jones Energy, but that’s neither here nor there. This isn’t the only documentary to come under fire. Because the filmmaker who directed it is of the wrong race, some have suggested that the great Kenburn shouldn’t be allowed to make a documentary about Muhammad Ali because he’s white and therefore cannot possibly understand what Ali went through as a black man in America.

I mean, if Ken Burns isn’t safe, etcetera, etcetera. None of us have seen the documentary, so we can’t really comment on that. That’s kind of the point of this. The whole reason controversies like this exist is to stop art from being made and to stop it from being seen if someone does have the temerity to make it. This is one reason I find the Times’ framing of the complaints so funny, this idea that critics were practically giddy for impotent complaints from the right, you know, about how old this is terrible, how dare they humanize these people.

And are utterly unprepared for equally specious, yet deadly serious complaints from the left. Gatekeepers only have as much power as you give them. And as a result, there isn’t a single conservative gatekeeper in this whole industry really. Alyssa, what do you make of this whole

mess? You

can’t just crumble. That’s not podcasting. You have to you have to use your use your words. That

was not rumbling, that was groaning. Like you said, I have not seen this documentary. And like many of the people who are critiquing this documentary, I have not seen this documentary. So it’s entirely possible that it is hand handed and reductive and offensive and Sudential and programmed it in the first place. I haven’t seen it.

I don’t know. But I find the behavior people like Abigail Disney, particularly gutless in this area. And the idea that this line of critique was would be surprising to anybody. It’s just bizarre given, like, the entirety of the post nine eleven media landscape. Right?

Like, has Has no one does no one remember the response to twenty four or the response to homeland? Or, you know, like, the response to three hundred or, you know, just the, you know, the response to Zero Dark Thirty. Right? I mean, we have several decades of debate about,

you

know, the extent to which, you know, depictions of Muslims and media are dominated by stories about terrorism. Questions about who can tell those stories, what’s appropriate. And so the idea that anyone would be surprised by this discourse is ridiculous. And someone like Abigail Disney, who should know better going into this, should have been in a position where she was prepping her filmmaker for how to respond to these kinds of questions instead of throwing her under the bus with enormous apparent force. I mean, you know, I Look, I think this is I mean, this is clearly a tricky area.

Right? And in ways that are I think legitimate to talk about. Right? I mean, you know, the Saudi regime had my colleague, Jamal Khashoggi, you know, murdered and dismembered with a bone saw. Right?

Like, I don’t place a lot of credibility in anything they’re saying or doing. I think the question of, you know, what these like rehab facilities, the extent to which they’re actually successful or useful is a completely legitimate question to ask you know, the treatment of the men who agreed to be viewed on camera. Like, I mean, lots of documentarians face ethical issues about, like, what’s gonna happen to their subjects? And the time story made clear that there was a safety review here. But these are legitimate conversations to have about a documentary, about a subject, a subject that’s this sensitive and that’s so geopolitically vexed.

Right? I mean, that’s that’s totally a conversation to have, but, you know, for festival programmers or an executive producer on the film to be surprised by this line of discourse and to you know, sort of do this to a filmmaker or strikes me as real gross, and I am I am very I’m disgusted by the whole thing. And I think it’s yeah. I think it’s bad for it’s bad for a nuanced discussion of the ethical perils. Of documentary which are worth having a discussion about.

It’s just infuriating.

Alyssa, I want to drill down on one point here because, you know, we say, like, well, they should have seen this coming. They should have seen this this controversy coming. But the the the kind of flip side of that is if you say, well, you should have seen this coming then the prudent course of action some would say is just to avoid it altogether, then the thing doesn’t get made, then everybody just kind of goes about there. Their day. And I I feel like that’s even worse, really.

Yeah.

I mean, but just because, like, I

mean,

look, I think all of us, like, live a certain amount of our lives on the Internet Right? We have, like, a I think there are times when I’ve been legitimately surprised when people have gotten angry about something that I’ve written, and then I can sort of step back and be like, okay, I see where I see where that reaction is coming from even if I think it’s absolutely you know, maybe a piece that was intended to have a sarcastic tone, you know, didn’t convey that clearly after readers or you know, maybe I have stepped into a conversation that is very sort of insulated given community and I know it was out there and boom, now my mentees are terrible. But, you know, I I think that I hope that we’ve gotten to a place in the media landscape where savvy executive producers and PR people understand that certain kind of kerfuffles are inevitable, but also have a sense of how to navigate them or at least that should be the goal. Right? I mean, you know, I think that

an

inability to distinguish between what’s loud and what’s important is sort of an ongoing challenge of this particular social media, culture war age. And you know, you would think that the attend the entertainment industry would have a long term interest in discerning the difference in figuring out how to spin or, you know, respond sincerely to what is loud versus what is actually a legitimate critique of things. And you know, look at people don’t wanna be in the business of having anyone mad at them, that’s fine. Right? Like, you can go, like, sell shoes at a big box store.

Like, there are many inoffensive things that you can do for a living. But if you want to be liked, going into any aspect of the media business just seems like a recipe for

disappointment.

Peter, you’re liked by many people.

Yeah. It’s just not anyone on this podcast.

No. What do you what do you make of this? Because I I do think there’s there there’s an argument to be made here that the New York Times is getting spun on this. You know, they’re they’re it’s being turned into a culture war fight about, you know, identity politics blah blah blah. When when, actually, actually, it’s about the safety of these individuals.

Okay.

So let’s take some of these critiques in order. I think the absolute worst critique, which is one of the ones that is being directly loved at the filmmaker here is that she should the the the director should not be able to tell this story because she’s a white woman and the her subject are are not white. Right? And that is that’s just a dumb, terrible, incredibly limiting idea about art. I just completely reject that.

The best arguments to to the extent that I think these arguments have any merit, is the are are questions about the subject’s safety. And so one of the sort of core tenets of journalism is source protection. We wanna tell stories, and we wanna get people’s info we wanna get true information out into the world. And we also don’t want to endanger our sources. This is a big thing in journalism.

We have to and if you’ve ever edited or or participated in investigative reporting, something you have to think about a lot. That’s obviously all especially true when your sources are people who are incarcerated in the regime, you know, in a sort of quasi prison like facility in an authoritarian regime, difficult complex question. At the same time. According to The New York Times are presuming that The Times is not spinning the readers on this. Sundance officials did ask for a safety plan.

They did ask for the consent forms. And, quote, here’s a quote from The New York Times. The the the review of her safety method. Quote, concluded that missus Baker more than met the standards of safety. So when the ethics review was done, their peer to have been no actual issues.

No one has raised a specific issue other than the the circumstances do seem quite delicate quite dicey at best. And so I think to me everything from what I’ve seen about this. Again, if somebody wants to raise a specific issue about the safety, I, you know, I’ll I’ll take that as it comes. But to me, if the Sundance officials commissioned an external ethics review and said, or we’re, you know, looked at an an external ethics review and said, look, The the ethics review said this is fine, then it seems like that’s not a a a a giant issue here. The other issue is whether prisoners have the ability to consent at all.

So to that, I would I I would just say that presuming it is true as we are told in in in the story that a hundred and fifty different men were made available and only four agreed to actually talk, then it sounds like that sounds like at least some evidence that that the folks who participated didn’t have to. They weren’t being forced to go on, you know, go on camera and and sort of read a hostage note saying, oh, you know, here’s my story that’s been given to me that I just have to read. Because the vast, vast majority of the men who were who were made available just appear to have said, nope, I am not going to appear on camera. Again, this is what the time says. I I guess, if that story is wrong, then I will reconsider here.

But I will also just say, in journalism, we do this at at reason a lot. We we interview prisoners. Interview people who’ve been put in jail. And there are always limitations to doing that. There it’s always something that you have to be careful about doing.

At the same time, it’s better to be able to talk to those people. It’s better to be able to hear what they have to say and print that for readers than to not. How else are you going to be able to access those experiences. And she seems to have done much more than a lot of the other journalists who went to you know, who who went to this facility and tried to tell the story. One of the, you know, sort of, asides in the New York Times piece is that journalists from other publications you know, from big name publications had gone and had spent a few days or a week talking to the men in this facility.

And she spent a year there. She also already had a huge amount of on the ground knowledge having lived, you know, in in the Middle East, learned the language, that sort of thing. Right? This that sort of access and that sort of intimacy, that sort of ability to connect with people is something that we should value in journalism and in documentary film making. Again, I don’t think that it’s totally unreasonable to raise safety questions about sources in in an instance like this.

But are these is this really mostly about the safety questions? Or is this really about the fact that some people are mad that a white woman is telling the story. And it seems to me like, maybe there’s some of both, but a lot of it is happening because people are mad that it’s a white woman telling a story, and that’s just a completely ridiculous critique. Yeah. I

mean, it it feels I it it just feels like getting Capone on tax fraud sort of thing. Like, it it feels like you were you’re you’re attacking this from a from a perspective that is, you know, like, okay. Well, this actually, it’s about ethics and documentary journalism. But, like, that that really doesn’t seem to be the case here. I don’t know though.

Again, would be would be nice actually see the film. Hopefully, it gets gets wide release. We all get to watch it. Put it on Netflix. Let’s check it out.

So what do we think? Is it a controversy or a controversy that gatekeepers are trying to stifle a problematic documentary, Peter? I

think it’s a controversy.

Elisa. Controversy and just really shameful.

Yes. Very much for controversy. Don’t don’t do things like that. Gate keepers. Alright.

Make sure to tune in for our bonus episode this Friday in which we are going to discuss the power and the limits of Avatar mania. Avatar’s back baby. In four k three d form. Alright. Now on to the main event.

Don’t worry Darling directed by Olivia Wilde who also has a supporting role. Don’t worry Darling has found itself at the center of a swirl of controversy these last few months, affairs, drama on set, stars that refused to do promo works, Spitgate. But is the movie any good? I’m just gonna throw a spoiler warning up now. If you don’t wanna know what happens in this movie, please turn off the podcast.

There’s a big twist. If you couldn’t a guest from the trailer, big twist in this movie. So don’t want it ruin for you. Just find that off button. I’m gonna I’m gonna just jabber here for a sec while you reach for oh, you’re reaching.

You’re grabbing your headphone. You’re pulling them out. Okay. Alright. You’re good.

Alright. So don’t worry Darling. Stars Florence Pew, as Alice Chambers, she’s a young housewife living in what appears to be a planned community sometime in the nineteen fifties. Where her husband, Jack, who was played by Harry Styles, works as some sort of military contractor, maybe possibly nobody really seems to know what the men in this town do for work. And only the men work, the wives go to ballet class and they clean the house and then they shop and they have nice steak dinners prepared for the men when they get back from the cracker factory or whatever it is they go to during the day.

At night, the couples have drunken dinner parties when they aren’t ravaging each other senseless. But all is not well in victory California. No. Things are not quite as they seem. Alice is seeing things.

The walls are literally closing an honor. The eggs she plans to cook our empty crumbling shells. And one of the neighbor kills herself after their boy wanders off into the desert. Jack’s boss, Frank, he’s played by Chris Pine, deals less like a manufacturer or even an arms dealer than a cult leader. The children in this town are robotic.

The wives don’t seem to understand what’s going on. Everybody has the same origin story. Something is off. Now, here’s the big twist. Turns out that Frank is basically Jordan Peterson and he’s convinced listeners of his podcast to kidnap their wives and prison them in virtual reality and force them to treat their husbands like the alphas they truly are.

In the real world, Alice is in a submissive homemaker. She’s a doctor. And her sad sad cubby just couldn’t handle that. WOMP. WOMP.

In other words, this look, guys, let’s just be clear here. This is a two hour plus black mirror episode and not a particularly good one at that. The villain is not really very timely anymore. Jordan Peterson is like seventeen outrages ago. And he the the whole thing whole project is just like weirdly smugly full of itself and and into its own, like, very I don’t know, progressive ideals, but not really progressive.

We’ll talk about that in a second. Like, imagine if the matrix decided to set the whole thing in Neo’s and Prison reality and got rid of all the cool wire food, and then re imagined that to, like, appeal to middle aged women. And you have some sort of idea of what this movie kind of feels like while you’re watching it. The picture has its pleasures. I will admit Pew and Pine, both great Olivia Wild and cinematographer Matthew Labateek to Like, it’s actually a visually pretty interesting film.

And the mid mid century modern architecture is to die for, etcetera, etcetera, look, not terrible. The reveal is just so dumb and unearned that I don’t I I can’t I can’t set aside the rest of the the the good stuff in this movie to appreciate

it. Like Alice doesn’t

even discover the truth in the town. She just gets pulled out and zapped and then somebody tells her what’s happening. Like, you you you know, like, I don’t know. It just it drives me it like thinking about all the weird plot problems with this movie drive me a little bit crazy. But, like, the biggest thing is probably, like, you know how Sometimes on the Internet, some people will say, like, you know, when Fight Club are the matrix where they think that the the worst thing that can happen to you is you you have a steady office job, Right?

Like, that’s kind of how I feel about this movie with its amazing homes and beautiful architecture and wonderful dinner parties and, like, you know, healthy sex lives with all that. Like, I don’t know, man. If that’s prison, it doesn’t sound terrible to me. You would say that as a man. Well, that’s the thing.

Right? Peter, you like this dumb movie more than I did? What am I what am I getting wrong here?

Well, I I agree with your critique in a lot of ways. I mean, this wants to be a big idea a movie about troubled men and, like, toxic ideas of masculinity, ideas of power imbalances between men and women in the workplace and it’s all wrapped up with, like, you know, this big twist that the movie is signaling, like, from the very first minute, you know, you know, something’s coming. One of the big problems with this movie is that it waits until three quarters of the way through a two hour movie to actually get to the twist. Right. But it, like, wants to be, I don’t know, revolutionary road as retold by Jordan Peel or Betty Friedan translated via the trial twilight zone or something.

It’s not a big idea movie. It’s a dumb idea movie. This idea is dumb. It’s just it doesn’t work. It’s totally preposterous.

It doesn’t make any sense when you think about it for i not even a second. The movie just leaves you with so many glaring narrative questions that that distract you from the ideas that it’s kind of trying to, like, get across. Right? Like, just the in I don’t know if it’s quite the inciting incident, but a one of the big early moments in the movie where Florence Pew’s character kinda realizes something is wrong, is when an airplane flies over the town while she’s on like a trolley tour bus. And it sort of glitches out or something.

Maybe it’s not totally clear. She follows the airplane crash is. It crashes and across the mountains. Right. And she sees it crash and she wants to follow it and she gets to the secret headquarters or something.

What? Was the plane? Like, what what was it? Was it a glitch in the sim simulation? Was it like a the the outside world was making a sound and the simulation had to account for that because maybe there’s stuff bleeding in.

I guess that’s what we’re supposed to make of like the all the earthquakes or whatever. The movie never even makes a halfhearted attempt to explain any of this. And there’s so many questions like this that just come up like, again, on an even cursory attempt to think through what this is actually all about. And so the narrative issues are really significant. And the script is pretty bad and the movie kind of can’t get over them.

And yet, I kind of enjoyed it all anyway. Because if you take this as not as like a serious kind of Oscar bait, you know, Jordan peel, like, let’s really you know, let let’s let’s deliver the whatever wave feminist ideas but through the lens of genre in a kind of in a serious way. If you take it as actually like just a kind of preposterous pulpy sort of twilight zone thing, it really works on its own terms, especially the first ninety minutes. It’s Like, it it draws you in. Florence Pew is really great.

Every scene is just is beautiful. This was a great looking movie. Just at every turn, I I I really liked the kind of spastic, psychotic editing, the, like, the all of the just the weird vision that she has. Like, these are there’s some daring choices stylistically in this movie that like, that keep that kept me engaged. Like, even the third act is dumb as is, when you get to that car chase out through the desert, it really kind of works.

And you’ve got like this big army of of guys in red, you know, jump suits, which are drawn, I guess, from her we see the same jumpsuits at the hospital. And it’s not clear if, like, the simulation is drawing things from her experience exclusively or like melding them again, big questions, but it’s a cool image. Those guys all running up the the the mountain side and I liked it it I liked, like, every frame of this movie. I just didn’t like any of the frames connected together. But you

you say it works as an a twilight zone thing, but that’s like specifically how it doesn’t work. It doesn’t it doesn’t work because it doesn’t it doesn’t sell that like, oh, what a twist? Moment at all. Like, it just it just happens. It’s just like, oh, yeah.

Here’s it would be like it’d be like the Twilight Zone episode, with the kid who runs the town except you spend the whole time in the town, like all you spend like twenty eight minutes of the episode in the town and weird things are happening. And then at the end, you’re just like, yeah, this kid was doing it. Wow.

Spoiler is sunny. Some people haven’t

seen the twenty eighties. Seventy year old episode, whatever. Alyssa. Alyssa, what I I’m curious to to get your take on the, like, sexual politics of this movie because they are, like, they are messed up as best as they are, like, totally not only incoherent, but they’re, like, potentially, like, deeply messed up. Yeah.

It’s

so

this movie kinda

drives me nuts. Because I think there’s some, like, a much more challenging like, it’s sort of genuinely upsetting and provocative movie hidden behind it. And it’s contained in two scenes towards the end after the twist. And neither of them have anything to do with Alice. The fur I mean, the first is that Olivia Wilde’s character, Bunny, kind of like breaks and warns Alice to get out of town after most of the movies spent, like, trying to reassure her and calm her down and reintegrate her into the simulation.

And she ends up revealing to Alice that she chose to live in the simulation because In the real world, her world, her kids are dead. And in this simulation, she can have a simulacrum of them. Like, she can greet them when they get off the bus. She can threaten to call Santa on them when they’re bad. Like, they are, you know, they’re eternal scamps.

They’re never gonna age. They’re never gonna die. And having that for her is better than not having her children at all. And that’s a really interesting revelation. It actually echoes Alex Garland’s mini series devs, which was probably the best thing I saw in twenty twenty, admittedly, that was a weird year.

But that idea of, you know, someone who makes this just a terrible choice. Right? Who we’ll live in the simulation. And, you know, we’ll give up everything. And, you know, just live in this Ersac’s world out of grief and love.

But then, also, you have this weird scene towards the end where Shelley, Frank’s wife who’s played by Gemma Chan, who’s seen in his retagians, eternals, you know, when out he, she, you know, sort of hears Frank dealing impidentally with Alice’s impending escape. And straight up murders him, tells him, like, you stupid man, it’s my turn now. And that scene has never explored at all, but Shelly’s a really interesting character in that, like, she’s basically, like, the Tradewife Avatar in the simulation. Right? Like, she leads the ballet classes.

She, like, there’s this sort of big annual dinner, and she treats her husband to a performance by Diovan tees. Right? Like, she is, you know, she’s sort of game for everything. She’s very she’s very supportive of the project. She gets very angry at Alice when she challenges Frank.

And you get this implication that, like, she knows she’s living in the and she chose to live there because she likes it and believes in it. And there is a version of this movie where there are a range of people living in victory. Right? Where there are, like, guys who have gotten, you know, seduced by this ideology and are, like, taking everyone’s, like, taking care of the body of his personal wife in air quotes. There are women who have, like, chosen to put themselves under because you know, the, like, the version of the, you know, two couple earner, you know, career woman things just like is not what they want.

And there is this movie, there is a potential movie about the seductiveness of the illusion to a wide range of people that is much more provocative. About, like, sex and gender than anything the movie actually does. Right? Because and part of what’s weird about the movie’s unwillingness to pursue that is that aesthetically and sexually, it’s very much on the side of the temptation Right? I mean, Sonny, you mentioned, like, the fabulous mid century, like, furniture and architecture and clothes.

Like, it it’s an aesthetic dream. You know, this, like, wild sort of weirdly before the movie came out, sold victory of this, like, sexual utopia. And you see like, multiple scenes where, you know, Alice and Jack are having sex and she reaches a climax either because he’s going down in her because, you know, that’s just like where the focus is. And you never see him, like, reach fulfillment. Right?

You know, so it like, the movie is sort of aesthetically and narratively on the side of the illusion, and then, you know, stacks and then suddenly stacks the deck against it with the twist. And you know, I I think the way the twist is I agree with Sunny, the way the twist is revealed is, you know, narratively and visually incoherent. But, like, that scene of Jack coming home and, like, lying down in bed with her and the weird projections on that you know, the canopy that he has set up. Like, that’s genuinely, like, yuriy and unsettling. But having, you know, so thoroughly stacked the movie in favor of the idea that this like simulation is great it then has to sort of overcompensate to be like, oh, no, this is like this is actually monstrous and terrible.

Instead of grappling with the question of like, why why that might appeal to people. Right? And that’s, like, that’s the much more interesting. And from, like, a sort of, a question of politics, like, the much more dangerous and interesting question, especially given the political moment that we’re in. Howard Bauchner: Well,

I it’s it’s

interesting. There you know, Olivia Wilde obviously did a lot of press before the movie. And here’s a tweet from a variety interview with her, you know, a month or two before the the movie came out. Olivia Wilde discusses her approach to focus on female pleasure and sex scenes and don’t worry Darling, quote, men don’t come in this film, she declares, only women here. Now here like, I’m sorry that they’re they’re, like, laying out this whole, like, look at this girl boss fantasy land, you know, like, women’s pleasure is the importance.

But also saying, like, in the the text of the movie itself is that this is a bad thing. Like, the text of the movie is that, like, this is a prison in which they have they have been placed and, you know, the pleasure is just keeping them there. And, like, I I’m sorry. This is, like, That’s like a weirdly regressive thing. That’s like a weirdly reactionary thing for a movie like this to be saying.

The movie

is very at odds. With this self. I I totally agree with you about that. I I

think Alyssa is right to say that there is an interesting idea at the heart of this and that you could make a you could make a very good movie with this concept. And, you know, Alyssa focused on on the idea of of resistors. And I would just say that, like, to me, the big problem is that the reveal is so clearly set up from the very beginning. You know that there’s gonna be something something weird, something sort of science fiction y or or, you know, some kind of fan it’s some sort of fan data year. Because it’s so clear that they’re they don’t exist on something that truly resembles the planet Earth just because they’re so separated from it.

Right? From ever from the rest of society. And to me, this movie should have had her escape or at least partially at the quarter point to, like, the bulk of the movie should have been an escape from this, and then she should have had to rescue all like felt the need to go and find the other women who were in her little cul de sac or whatever. And rescue them, and then, to get to Alyssa’s point, found that some of them wanted to be there and may even have been part of the organizing force behind the thing. Right?

And, like, that’s a much more interesting movie. There’s action. There’s right, the like, in the outside world that sort of drives this, right, rather than just sort of the slow brooding dread. There’s there’s like opportunities to interact with people’s different reasons for being there, whether they are trapped in some cases, or whether they have trapped themselves in other cases. Like, it also allows you to explore the concept a bunch more and answer all the questions that this movie just didn’t wanna answer because it won it wanted to sort of do the metaphor thing without actually engaging at the genre level that is required.

Yeah. I

I just there like, everything about this movie is weirdly unsatisfying. I don’t know. What did you guys make of Harry Styles? Harry Styles big draw for this movie. People, you know, people wanna come see the singer do the do the acting.

Would you guys think of would you think of Harry? Good

hair? Yeah. It

like his casting works a lot better once the twist happens in a way because he’s like so, like, sort of blah in the first hat in the first three quarters of the movie that, like, when you find out this is like a sort of weak and monstrous person’s, like, projection of himself as an alpha, it retroactively works better. It is very interesting to, like, think about what this movie would be like with Shilah Buffin. That. I

feel like hairstyles actually did a much better job than Shay Labeouf would have done. I don’t I just don’t think Shay Labeouf has it in him to play a role like this that is both where he can both seem dashing and sort of pathetic without chewing the scenery too much because Labuff just likes to sort of Labuff is too much of a ham and I think for a role like this and I liked the way that Harry Styles had like, I liked the ease with which he played dashing in the first, I don’t know, hundred minutes of you eighty five minutes of this film. I also

would like to see the alternate version of this movie with Shiloh above. I think it’d be much more interesting. Alright. So what do we think thumbs up or thumbs down? Don’t worry darling, Peter.

I kind of enjoyed watching it and I will probably actually watch this again at midnight at some point in my life. It’s not a good enough movie for me to give it a thumbs up. It’s a thumbs down. Alyssa. I

feel like I’m gonna

give it a thumbs up only because I want other people to see it so I can talk to them about it.

Thumbs

down. Bad movie. Do better at making movies. Olivia Wild. Alright.

That is it for this week’s show. Make sure to swing by at m a dot theboard dot com for our bonus episode on Friday. Make sure to tell your friends. Strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences girl will die. You did not love two days up, so please complain to me on Twitter at sunybunch talking about you that it is a fabulous show King or podcast feed.

See you guys next

week.