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131: Is ‘Amsterdam’ the Flop of the Fall? Plus: RIP, Nikki Finke.

October 11, 2022
Notes
Transcript
On this week’s episode, Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark), Alyssa Rosenberg (The Washington Post), and Peter Suderman (Reason), bid farewell to Nikki Finke, the notoriously nasty maven of Hollywood gossip who revolutionized the trade magazine business at Deadline Hollywood Daily. Then they review Amsterdam, David O. Russell’s big-budget, star-heavy flop. What went wrong with this farce about fascism? Make sure to swing by Bulwark+ for our bonus episode on Friday, when we’re going to talk about the further entanglement of Disney and fantasy gambling site DraftKings. And if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend! 
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:11

    Welcome
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:11

    back to across the movie isle presented by Bullwork Plus. I am your host, Sunny Bunch, Culture Editor of The Bullwork I’m joined as always by list of Rosenberg of The Washington Post and Peter Sutterman, of recent magazine. Now, listen, Peter. How are you today?
  • Speaker 3
    0:00:22

    I’m swell.
  • Speaker 1
    0:00:24

    I am happy to be talking about movies with friends.
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:26

    R i p, Nikki Fink. For those of you who do not closely follow Hollywood News and gossip, the name Nicki Fink might not mean a ton. But if you listen to the show, you probably know a little more than the average bear. And some of you Titans of Hollywood who are listening into this right now just broke out in cold sweats at the mere mention of her name. Or alternately you started doing a dance of joy that would press the munchkins celebrating the wicked witch’s death.
  • Speaker 2
    0:00:51

    Fink is one of those figures for whom the general and wise rule about not speaking ill of the dead has been tossed out the window. Immediately. People saw she was dead and started doing little little dances. There are relatively state and straightforward obits like the one in variety that talked about her career in journalism before moving to LA and revolutionizing how the Hollywood trades worked or her brand of gossip mongering and all that stuff. But, you know, mostly people were pretty upset.
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:19

    They recalled her nastiness. Bill Wyman who worked with her for a spell described her as a repressible sometimes fun and also a clumsy bully. The b word was used by Matthew Belledy in a scorching letter delivered late Sunday night that included this passage quote, everyone in Hollywood who was active during Fink’s reign and it was range. She dominated the landscape from two thousand six to two thousand thirteen in a way that is difficult to explain to those who didn’t experience it. Has a Nikki story and most of them are awful.
  • Speaker 2
    0:01:48

    She was awful. Screaming threats, three AM phone calls, outright blackmail. I’m all four being super aggressive on a story, but she tried to destroy lives. To get agents and assistance fired if they wouldn’t do her bidding. She’d torment publicists.
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:00

    With email subject lines like, today’s the day I ruin your career. She once attempted to sabotage the book deal of a rival journalist, I know, just because end quote. And look, think think is interesting for how she came to power and how she kind of revolutionized the the business of writing about Hollywood. Her biggest moment in her rise to fame was the writer strike in two thousand eight when she was one of the few big names to come down squarely on the hardliner side of the writer’s guild. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:02:29

    She was she built a legion of forces. She used her platform to terrify the agents and the studio chiefs into doing her will or really the will of her sources. I mean, that’s a thing that Richard Rushfield talked about in his newsletter about Nicki Fink. That one of the glorious things about subscribing to a hundred different Hollywood newsletters is that they all had a a scorching Nikki Fink take today, but Richards was very interesting because his whole point was look, it’s not that she was, you know, afflicting the powerful and comforting the unpowerful. She was afflicting the less powerful on behalf of the more powerful.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:01

    It’s a very weird little thing. She reminds me a little bit of Matt Drudge, who was another nearly reclusive Internet creature who radically altered the landscape of porting and bent the rules on little things like sourcing and, you know, strict feel to you to accuracy in the in the in the doing. And indeed, my understanding is that the two of them became friendly following her rejection. From the site she founded, dead one deadbine Hollywood daily, when she moved to Florida. Peter, you feel like there’s a little bit of deadline’s DNA and a lot of the digital startups we’re seeing today.
  • Speaker 2
    0:03:34

    Don’t you?
  • Speaker 1
    0:03:35

    Yeah, I think just in terms of her legacy and influence, you have to look at the today’s digital media landscape and think that a lot of it not just Hollywood trade press is heavily influenced by her style and by her way of thinking about how to do reporting on the Internet. And she was she was an opinion writer for sure. And I but she was also a reporter and she was her her sort of her reign was defined by just an an absolute continual drip of scoops and really what we now call scuplets. Right? And it wasn’t quite that she invented this.
  • Speaker 1
    0:04:16

    At the same time, she was at the but she was really at the Vanguard of using the Internet to deliver Scooplet after Scooplet to kind of stay on the same story, not just in the sort of twenty four hour news cycle that we used to have. I think we should probably actually just, like, remind people that her her peak period was about two thousand six to twenty thirteen. And in two thousand six, if you were working in media, even in what we now think of as, like, very online, you know, legacy TV, like, the the New York Times, someplace like that. The new it was the the, like, management editors still thought in terms of a very like, of of a nineteen ninety five level kind of twenty four hour news cycle in which news broke in the morning in the mid major papers and then maybe and then was, you know, sort of repeated throughout the day on the news telecasts. But that only really kind of political junkies and sort of news die hards actually watching anything throughout the day and was just this sort of the standardized day by day kind of thing.
  • Speaker 1
    0:05:19

    A lot of even in big publications that have gone on to to serious success on online. There was just a lot of skepticism that the internet would take over journalism and that the Internet was going to be the future of journalism. People believed in print, not literally everyone, but that was still a a very dominant view in the mid odds. And it’s easy to forget that, I think, especially for people who are, like, even just a little bit younger than all of us on this podcast. And so what I would I would like, Nikki Finkie’s legacy in in influence was that she absolutely forced certainly the Hollywood trades to to sort of move into an online era and an online style, but also push pushed like, was part of the the the group of people who were pushing who were pushing that you’ve sort of just across journalism and and building out this idea that actually people can access news twenty four hours a day now, and we can publish twenty four hours a day.
  • Speaker 1
    0:06:19

    And we can just update stories drip by drip by drip. And and, like, instead of providing people the whole oh, here is the thing. And it’s just a whole complete story and inverted pyramid style. What we’re gonna do is we are going to bring people into finding out about the story as it is happening almost as if you are receiving an email from a friend. And that was the other thing that I wanna go back to since I’ve now described her kind of as a reporter.
  • Speaker 1
    0:06:44

    Is she was someone who she was one of the first people on online to really successfully blend reporting with personality driven opinion writing. And I mean, successfully, just in the term, not necessarily in, like, I always loved it, or it was was nice or it was always even true, but she was she wrote. She helped develop a style that now persists online. Which is that people write maybe not exactly the way that they speak, but they way they write as themselves in their own voice It’s rather than this sort of like state, you know, sort of like voice of God, like, we’re perfectly neutral. She’s you knew that she wasn’t neutral.
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:24

    You knew that she was riding from a place of passion intensity, maybe by this vial, yes, vial, all of that. I’m trying to be I’m trying to we could go in for the mean parts of this conversation later. And
  • Speaker 4
    0:07:40

    You
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:41

    know, she was by all accounts a very difficult person. Maybe a a mean person, you know, like
  • Speaker 2
    0:07:50

    Someone say a bad news
  • Speaker 1
    0:07:51

    story. And and she broke a lot of journalistic rules, I would say not little Right? I know I know you were joking. She published stuff that she knew either to not be true or she wasn’t sure was true. She would change she would literally change things without, you know, change, like, date stamps, you know, time stamps on her posts in order to make it look like she’d gotten the scoop earlier.
  • Speaker 1
    0:08:13

    She did all sorts of stuff that’s just not acceptable. Like like these are journalistic sins and you and like violations of the professional code. At the same time, there was a way in which she showed people part of the way forward. And I I’d like to think that her better ideas, speed, personality, more conversational style, all of those things have been incorporated. While we you know, a a lot of digital media has also proven that you don’t have to you don’t have to be a jerk or somebody who is willing to violate journalistic principles to do that stuff.
  • Speaker 1
    0:08:52

    Yeah,
  • Speaker 2
    0:08:53

    Alyssa. I feel like this is a overly positive look back at the Nicki’s reign from our own Peter Sugarman.
  • Speaker 3
    0:09:02

    Yeah. I mean, I think it’s worth for, you know, listeners to this podcast who don’t follow the trades as we’re talking about them here. It’s worth remarking on sort of two particular aspects of the Hollywood specific news business. You know, and much in the same way that, you know, the financial industry has the Wall Street and all Bloomberg MarketWatch publications that are sort of specifically dedicated to the new stories that are going on there. Hollywood has long had its own sort of vibrant specific media ecosystem.
  • Speaker 3
    0:09:34

    And that new ecosystem has always been very, very driven by transactional relation relationships in part because of things that are baked into the sort of financial setups of these publications. A lot of the stories about think have mentioned that publications like the Hollywood reporter, which was really a revitalized under Janice Mann, and Mabeloni, and Variety, which was once a daily, those publications, you know, made, like, fifty percent of their revenue from for your consideration ads. During award seasons, which meant that, you know, look, every publication has advertising from an organization it may someday cover. Right? I mean, you know, Amazon runs print ads and they pay my and, you know, the revenue from Amazon pays my salary.
  • Speaker 3
    0:10:22

    Same thing with lots of other business retail. But in the entertainment industry, that relationship was an has long been unusually dominant and direct. Right? I mean, you know, a good Hollywood news publication is going to spend a lot of time covering these specific productions that then go out and by advertising there. So there was always a sort of a very sort of financially chummy relationship there.
  • Speaker 3
    0:10:48

    There’s also a long tradition of absolutely vicious Hollywood up coverage. You know, Karina Longworth did a season of you must remember this about head of hopper at the well of persons. Who were the two gossip columnist who absolutely dominated Hollywood for a long time.
  • Speaker 4
    0:11:04

    And
  • Speaker 3
    0:11:05

    it’s I mean, it’s a well worth listening to if you’re at all interested in that era or the sort of foundations of the Hollywood media business. But, you know, they these were women who had many of the same ethical issues that Nicky think did, you know, generations later in their coverage. And there is this long of, you know, sort of dealing for scoops and leveraging professional relationships and reporting things in a way that is gossipy and voice y. And so, yes, I think it’s absolutely true that deadline really upset the apple cart in terms of speeding up the, you know, the metabolism of coverage of Hollywood. And to a certain extent, taking it a little bit mainstream.
  • Speaker 3
    0:11:48

    Right? I mean, unlike Variety, which for a long time was very pay wall. Like, deadline was out from behind the pay wall. It was written in you know, in a very clear voice. There, you know, there was this signature line she would use.
  • Speaker 3
    0:12:01

    It was like, told you in the headline when something that she published had come to pass. So she’s speeded up with the metabolism a lot. But in terms of being, you know and she was certainly, I think, look, more bluntly and publicly nasty than Harper and Parsons were, but in turn, but to a certain extent, she was just a continuation of a tradition. Right? Like, the sort of, like, acid pen, female gossip in Hollywood who you know, I think was you know, she was incredibly reclusive, like, didn’t go out and meet people apart because she was just being horrible people.
  • Speaker 3
    0:12:37

    All the time.
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:40

    She had too many mean emails to send. Yeah. Exactly. Can’t go to parties. Gotta send mean emails.
  • Speaker 1
    0:12:46

    I also
  • Speaker 3
    0:12:46

    think it’s just worth remembering, like, how insanely vicious the Hollywood gossip related Internet was in that era. You know, I don’t know. I assume that neither of you spent a lot of time reading Perez Hilton in the early audits, but he was sort of the dominant, like, gossip blog in terms of, like, who was sleeping with who and doing what? And, like, his dog was insanely vicious. Like, you know, homophobic and sexually nasty even though Mario LaVendory, the other guy who ran it eventually came out of this guy, just like really vicious about the cohort of young women who were kinda like making a mess of themselves in Hollywood at the time and have since sort of been a little bit reassessed and re examined.
  • Speaker 3
    0:13:31

    And so Her tone to a certain extent was inventive for what was effectively news coverage, but it was kind of of a piece of the Internet of the era. And so in a way, the things that made her distinct if you’re thinking about her strictly through the lens of journalism, actually make her like pretty run of the mill when it comes to thinking about Hollywood as being covered as gossip.
  • Speaker 4
    0:14:00

    So I I
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:00

    think that’s I think that’s right. I just wanna tweak that just a little bit. She did that sort of mean coverage but instead of doing it for the boldface names, the the stars, you know, that the actresses and actors, she did it for the agents and the executives. And that was certainly different than what everyone else was doing at the time because agents and executives didn’t get nasty coverage in the trades because they made sure that their ad dollars went to trades that didn’t cover them in a nasty way. And so that was I don’t know if it’s, you know, a completely you know, I don’t know if it was completely novel.
  • Speaker 1
    0:14:37

    I think that’s probably not true. But to treat the the the behind the scenes power players who make mostly financial decisions. About people’s careers as objects of gossipy scorn was not quite what the other gossip public you know, the other gossip columnist were doing. And it helped develop a as you said, Alyssa. It helped develop a general audience for
  • Speaker 4
    0:15:04

    For
  • Speaker 1
    0:15:06

    more insider y news, for for gossip, for gossip that isn’t just like this woman is sleeping with this dude, but gossip that is, like, this agent is demanding this crazy thing for his clients or treating his clients badly. Or, right, is, like, is being a jerk towards, like, has successfully cowed all of the, you know, the Mogo’s, that sort of thing.
  • Speaker 4
    0:15:28

    And it’s to
  • Speaker 1
    0:15:29

    me, that’s like, this is in some ways why I’m why, you know, I as a non gossip consumer read this kind of gossip column because this actually gave me some sense of, again, despite, you know, her journalistic failures, which were serious and real, this her column was one of the first media business columns that I ever read because she was telling stories about how things actually worked behind the scenes and the hidden kind of the factors that you don’t see, not oh, the starlight is blah
  • Speaker 4
    0:16:00

    blah blah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:16:01

    But this is all happening because an agent package this deal or that thing didn’t happen because some executive was mad about some previous thing that happened and decided this director isn’t gonna work again.
  • Speaker 3
    0:16:15

    To be fair, entourage also succeeded in making a lot of this stuff — Yeah. — interesting. Right? I mean, you know, there there was there was something in the water culturally sort of in the early aughts where, you know, and I think to a certain extent, this is of a larger piece with, you know, the so called celebrity taunts. Right?
  • Speaker 3
    0:16:32

    There was this rise of interest in people who were not actually starring in movies, who became the object of gossip been interest. Like, Ari Emmanuel had a lot to do with this as well and not just because entourage got, you know, effectively adapted his life. But there was this rise of interest in the kind of general milieu and some of that was people being interested in agents and agencies as personalities. Some of it was sort of a, you know, a precursor or some of it was driven by reality television, Uniper album was someone who didn’t really have a, you know, a job in Hollywood, but became like fantastically interesting to people and, you know, paved the way for our Kardashian future. So I think that, to a certain extent, to PRAISE Fink is to give her a little bit too much credit for some stuff that was in the water anyway.
  • Speaker 3
    0:17:22

    To to
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:23

    the extent that there was actually a HBO series that went to pilot, that was based on Nikki Frank’s life and they ended up getting shelved. They decided not to to move forward with it because it was, I think, Well, who knows who knows the reason? Maybe it just wasn’t good, but I think it was also perhaps a bit esoteric. Anyway, our IP, Nikki, you know, Sorry. It’s bump up.
  • Speaker 3
    0:17:48

    And everyone who’s tortured by her.
  • Speaker 2
    0:17:50

    And everyone everyone who, you know, I’ll let everybody else take their shots. Elsewhere, but there are a lot of feelings out there about about Nicky Frank and Debine and what she did. So Anyway, make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus this Friday for a special bonus episode on the questionable partnership between ESPN and gambling super side draft games. Now on to the main event. Amsterdam, director David O Russell previously of Three Kings Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hussle is back with another big ensemble period piece, this one set during the period between the Great War and World War two.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:27

    The plot is almost too complicated to recount here, so I shall share just the basics. Christian Bale plays Bert Baronson a doctor and veteran of World War one who was disgusted by his in laws for their opposition to his professional partnership with Antripen of African Americans he served with in the Great War. One of those vets is Harold Woodman who was played by John David Washington. While in the hospital, the two of them meet it with Valerie Vose is played by Margot Roby, and they jut off to live a Bohemian lifestyle in Amsterdam. The three of them separate after the war.
  • Speaker 2
    0:18:59

    Only to come together again to try and figure out why someone has murdered Harold and Burt’s beloved general are fascist coming to America is high society, their entry point. What can be done to stop them? Yeah. Amsterdam has one of the best cast in recent history, I’ll give it that. In addition to the actors mentioned above, it has Luis Sedona, Chris Rock on the Taylor Joy, Rami Malek, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Robert De Niro at Bagley Junior Timothy Ollafond, Andrea Reisbrough, all sorts
  • Speaker 1
    0:19:28

    of
  • Speaker 4
    0:19:28

    folks. And
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:29

    that’s probably at least part of the problem. As everybody feels like they’re in a slightly different movie or at least two competing movies. I think you could I think you could describe two competing movies here. The first is kind of goofy serious force in the vein of a coen brothers burn after reading style movie. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:44

    Said in the inner war period, it’s, you know, it’s got something interesting to say, but it’s also a little bit little bit
  • Speaker 4
    0:19:50

    goofy. No. Right.
  • Speaker 2
    0:19:50

    That’s that’s that’s one movie there. Bail is in that movie. The mics, Myers and Shannon are that movie, Roby’s in that movie, Rrock is in that movie, Rami’s in that movie. And it’s it’s that that is the movie that David O’Russell is directing for the first two acts of this film. Home or so.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:07

    And then there’s a super straight movie, a sort of big ideas movie. What about the dangers of fascism and the softness of democracy to fight against it? And and that is the movie that Washington and Didiero were in. It’s the movie that Russell feels like he’s directing for the third act. And the first half for first two thirds of this movie, I found entertaining kind of baggy, not not great, not super tight, but like a shaggy entertaining movie.
  • Speaker 2
    0:20:34

    The second movie is almost embarrassing when it isn’t like just horribly confused about the political argument that it’s making. I like, to wit, the film is based at least in part on the business plot, which was an effort by titans of business to partner with fascist regimes in Europe for profit and power. Right? Fine. But if this movie is aiming for current relevance and I think it’s hard to see it as anything other than a brief for its own relevance and the relevance of David O’Russell who previously made politically relevant art with three kings, which was a, you know, shocking broad side against the first Gulf War as a, you know, deceitful power play to steal money and whatever.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:14

    This feels like a misguided outdated notion of what is what’s going on today. Right? The big problem today isn’t big business so much as it is the populist uprising against big business. And and politicians who are supposedly in the pockets of big business. Right?
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:28

    And they’re they’re led by Veronica talking heads. Father coughlin, more relevant today than Henry Ford, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. And the suggestion that a big, honest speech at the end broadcast over the radio is the tool that we need to solve our problems, feels at least a little naive. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too cynical and it’s been known to happen from time to time.
  • Speaker 2
    0:21:50

    Alyssa, what did you make? Amsterdam. This
  • Speaker 3
    0:21:53

    is a weird ass movie. That’s the technical term for it. Yeah. I think you’re right that Russell wants to be doing a bunch of different things here. And to be clear clear, I would totally watch a ninety minute movie about British and American spies who uses cover their obsession with burning.
  • Speaker 3
    0:22:13

    That would be hilarious. I would watch it, especially if you were directed by Wes Anderson, like, that’s my jam. The political commitments of this movie are weird. And I have been I’ve been trying to turn this over in my head since I watched it. I think that ultimately the thing that bothers me the most is that, you know, it has this sort of nefarious plot by big business to try and get a respect in general to effectively coup Franklin Delano Roosevelt and take over as president of the United States.
  • Speaker 3
    0:22:45

    And there are these weird there are these little nods throughout at both racism and antisemitism. But the movie just does not in go acknowledge or engage with in any way the extent to which these people were aligning themselves with, you know, what would turn out to be genocidal regimes that had already revealed themselves to be racist in the early thirties. Right? And so you know, there there is an interesting through line here of, you know, Bert as someone who is I think half Jewish, you know, last name is Baronson, who is, you know, appointed to command of a mutinous you know, black regiment in World War one and clearly ends up being a white man who is more comfortable around black people than he is around white people of his own social set. And like that’s really interesting and the movie just has no insight into it at all.
  • Speaker 3
    0:23:46

    Right? There is this, you know, the major set piece at the end of the movie where the general played by Robert O’Neill is giving a speech to a reunion of this black regiment. And there are all of these, you know, sort of white high society people who are have been bored there because they think that he is going to, you know, reveal himself to be a part of the
  • Speaker 4
    0:24:09

    plot. And the
  • Speaker 3
    0:24:10

    movie just has no engagement with what, like, what it would be like if a bunch of rich industrialist showed up at a reunion of black veterans in New York. Right? Like, just no interest in it whatsoever. And so I mean, I’m not saying that everything has to be about race. But if part of your warning is that, like, we are in danger of fascism that you know, and that we are in danger of a kind of fascism that, you know, has racial and religious implications.
  • Speaker 3
    0:24:41

    It’s seems like maybe you would wanna engage with that song. That’s what bothers me about it politically. There are many other things that bothered me about it. Aesthetically. Well, there’s there’s a very
  • Speaker 2
    0:24:51

    weird moment in the last act of this movie where they they go to this they go to this reunion that is like a fundraiser, but it’s also gonna be where the the general reveals himself to be the the guy who’s gonna take on FDR. And you have you have, like, the rich swells who are there. And then all of a sudden, the camera, like whips whip pans around to two tables of, like, German American Bund.
  • Speaker 4
    0:25:14

    Yeah. And
  • Speaker 1
    0:25:15

    they
  • Speaker 4
    0:25:15

    just
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:15

    come out of nowhere. It’s like, wait. Wait. Who how do they get here? Wait.
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:19

    What is what is happening in this? Are they not
  • Speaker 3
    0:25:21

    checking tickets at the door? Like Like,
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:24

    it it’s just a very it’s a very
  • Speaker 3
    0:25:27

    It’s it’s a movie yeah. It’s a movie where things that are at convenient to the larger message happen for reasons of no internal Yeah. I
  • Speaker 2
    0:25:35

    don’t know. Peter, what did you what did you make of Amsterdam? This
  • Speaker 1
    0:25:38

    is a bad movie. I hated it. I hated every minute of it. There was not a single scene that I thought worked. It is basically a total misfire.
  • Speaker 1
    0:25:47

    Literally, the only nice thing I have to say about it is that Emmanuel Luvsky who is the cinematographer, create some very beautiful images that, like, don’t that that doesn’t make the movie any better, but every now and then I sort of like tuned out what was going on was just like, that’s pretty. You use the light real nice. Oh my god. Everything about this is just a disaster. The cast is, I think, the the cast and characters are, I think, the worst part.
  • Speaker 1
    0:26:13

    So, oh, this is just an incredible waste of a great cast. I like every single of these performers. I even like Taylor Swift. Whether or not she could act, I don’t know, but she can hold an audience’s attention. And one of the one of the strangest things about this movie is that every single performer gives some sort of bad performance.
  • Speaker 1
    0:26:34

    There is not a single good performance here. There are less bad ones. I think Margot Roby is less bad than the other than the other stars here. But there is not a single good performance. And none of them connect with each other.
  • Speaker 1
    0:26:46

    They all in fact seem to often be in different scenes even when they’re in the same scene talking to each other. David O’Russell shoots them in a way where often they are separated from each other, they are not allowed to move. He has just created these little sort of these little sort of painting portraits in which he doesn’t allow any kind of natural interaction that can work, see Stanley Cuprick, who often treated his actors like props to the point where he was criticized for it. But here it doesn’t work at all. It’s like who are these people?
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:18

    What are they doing? What do they want? And this is I think this goes to Alyssa’s point that there’s no insight into why any of these people are doing anything. I would say it’s worse than that. It’s not just that there’s no insight, though I agree, totally.
  • Speaker 1
    0:27:31

    These characters are not characters in any way. They are at very best just lists of quirks. And I have no idea what any of these people are actually like, what they actually what they really want from the world, Why they are the way they are? We get a bunch of It’s not that the movie provides no information about them. But the information doesn’t, in any case, add up to a coherent portrayal of a of a psychology or a history or any sort of sense of and of of individuality.
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:03

    And so what you have are these great performers who have absolutely no reason for doing anything that they are doing in any given scene. And that’s why ever every single scene, whether it’s one of the early sort of more comic hijinks murder mystery scenes, or one of the later political, leadership, fascism is rising scenes. Every single scene falls flat and doesn’t seem to connect to any other scene. And it it’s it’s confusing to the point where the movie seems to know that it’s confusing. I don’t know what happened with a script here, but something happened and David O’Russell seems to have realized at some point in the production process that the story he wrote wasn’t really clear because as the movie goes on, we start getting these voiceovers from a couple of the leading characters.
  • Speaker 1
    0:28:48

    The voiceovers, you will notice, never ever tell you what the characters are thinking or feeling, Instead, what they do is they summarize the importance and meaning and like what just happened in the conversation. As if, like, like, like, we’re gonna pause the action so that, like, you can, like, ask your friend. Hey, what just happened there? I’m sorry. I was, like, I was, like, I was, like, I was, like, oh, yeah.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:09

    Well, so they just decided to have a conspiracy or, like, to stop the conspiracies. Like, the movie is doing this for itself because it like and and it because it seems to realize as it goes on, there’s no way to follow what’s actually happening because none of it has any kind of internal logic at all. And I think that this movie is in large part done in by its desire to have some sort of political relevance. It’s like it was it’s like David O’Russell saw this, you know, the the historical story that this is loosely based on, wanted to tell that story. And because he’s a sort of comic hijinksy kind of guy and sort of often adopts that tone.
  • Speaker 1
    0:29:48

    One was like, you know, we we don’t have to make this too serious. But then they couldn’t he couldn’t figure out some sort of narrative engine to get him to the point that he wanted to go and make make that point. So we have all these loose kind of go nowhere scenes for the first two thirds of the film. And then the final act is nothing, but monologues in which people kind of explain themselves and then stop to have a voice over where someone explains them explaining themselves. I mean, Rami Malek’s character in this movie, ends up being one of the bad guys.
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:19

    And the final act is just like, all he does there is just sort of sit and explain why corporate fascism is great. And, you know, the corporations will win whether there’s war or whether there’s peace as long as we have fascism. And you should just join the big corporate fascist conspirator. Like, what? It’s it’s not even snidely whiplash mustache twirling bad.
  • Speaker 1
    0:30:42

    It’s just pedestrian and
  • Speaker 3
    0:30:44

    terrible. If I could add one thing, there’s a there’s a really interesting subplot where the movie kind of gives away its own incoherence. Which is when, you know, when Bird and Harold meet Valerie, part of what they’re drawn by with her is that she is making, like, sort of interesting surrealist art. And she, in some cases, making it explicitly, like, out of the shrapnel that she’s helping remove from soldiers’ bodies. And The movie treats this as a personality quirk, which is really interesting considering that you know,
  • Speaker 4
    0:31:20

    there were
  • Speaker 3
    0:31:22

    incredibly important artistic movements that grew out of the violence. Of World War one. Right? Like surrealism is a response to a war that is so cruel and brutal that it makes the world not makes sense. And so instead of engaging with that, it’s like, oh, she’s wacky.
  • Speaker 3
    0:31:43

    Like, you know, she makes weird photographs and turns t sets into like objects of violence. There’s even like a tossed off joke about, like, why would you make a perfectly nice tea set into an object to a violence? That’s the question of our age, isn’t it? Right?
  • Speaker 1
    0:31:58

    And
  • Speaker 4
    0:31:59

    you know,
  • Speaker 3
    0:31:59

    for a movie that wants to be political art, the fact that it includes an artist working in a style that historically was inherently political and then
  • Speaker 4
    0:32:09

    just sort of
  • Speaker 3
    0:32:10

    glosses over it and treats it as window dressing, speaks to the just shallowness of the engagement in this in a way that is incredibly self revealed. Yeah. I
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:21

    totally agree there. And I think that this movie commits the sin of doing the thing that, like, you know, how online, like, kids will say, like, oh, man. You know, I like to wear fedoras too, but I don’t make my fedora my whole personality. Yeah. This movie makes every character’s main tick their whole personality.
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:39

    Like Christian Bell’s character is his glass eye. And some of his Oh, some of his drug
  • Speaker 3
    0:32:43

    addiction. Right? Like
  • Speaker 1
    0:32:45

    and I I don’t I don’t know what Washington’s character is because he’s So he’s a great actor. To be clear, he totally like in other movies, he casually commands the screen. And here he is he just deadens every single scene. It’s like, oh man, cold lead weight dropped on my foot every time the camera comes to him. He’s always weirdly separated from the other actors.
  • Speaker 1
    0:33:08

    And, like, they shot him on different weeks from when and nobody else was there. I mean, again, I don’t think the consistency of the badness. Like, the the universality of the badness is a a real sign to me that this is Russell’s fault and not the actor because these are good actors, and Russell Mix gets bad material get gets bad performances out of all of them. Well, to
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:29

    see, I disagree with that because I actually like a fair number of the performances in this movie. But John David Washington is so bad and so flat in this movie that it it made me like reconsider in retrospect some of the other movies that I’ve liked him in. To the extent that I was like, maybe I do I need to rewatch black klansman and see if he’s actually good in that? Because I’m I’m not sure anymore. That it’s just a really bad performance.
  • Speaker 2
    0:33:52

    But again, the material is not good. And I have no doubt that David O’Russell was like, You are the straight man. So you need to never move your face at all. Keep your eyes perfectly still at all times. Don’t ever move It’s very it’s a very weird performance.
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:07

    Peter, you and I both in our reviews mentioned the Grand Budapest Hotel. As a as a reference point for this. In in specifically, as a reference point for the way that you can do a very stylized, very specific sort of thing while also having a larger point about the darkness of our age. And, like, that’s that’s What is most frustrating about this movie to me is that it it it clearly wants to say something, but it has such lack of control over its own tone. That it ends up saying nothing at all.
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:42

    As opposed to Grand Budapest Hotel, which is very much a movie about the ways in which manners and civilization
  • Speaker 4
    0:34:50

    are at
  • Speaker 2
    0:34:51

    best a very thin cover for darkness and can be easily torn us under. This movie has an
  • Speaker 1
    0:34:58

    awful lot of Wes Anderson and Coen Brothers NV. And Grand Budapest hotel is clearly that if not the model, it’s the film that this wanted to be and I and should have been in a lot of ways. Because the grand Budapest hotel shows that you can make a funny, quirky, big cast film that is just kind of odd and isn’t, you know, is not perfectly psychologically real, that is not that isn’t self serious in the way that it presents some big issues, but then actually lands really hard at the edge edge is and sticks with you. This movie does every single thing that the Grand Budapest Hotel does well with maybe exception of there are some interesting lots. Amsterdam does badly.
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:51

    I I just
  • Speaker 4
    0:35:52

    I
  • Speaker 1
    0:35:53

    truly have nothing good to say about this movie, and I and for people who think that, like, oh, wait. Like,
  • Speaker 4
    0:36:00

    my when I my rant about the
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:02

    politics of this was not that you can’t make a movie about the historical dawn of fascism in America and the thin line between civilization
  • Speaker 4
    0:36:14

    and Democratic destruction.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:16

    Right? And it’s not that you can’t make that movie in a quirky weird way. It’s that David O’Russell like, totally failed to do so. And I think he failed to do so because he was thinking almost exclusively about the politics. And not about the aesthetics, the tone, the story, the characters, any of the stuff that you have to do to sell that because this movie just fails on on all the levels that the script is the script is so bad.
  • Speaker 1
    0:36:49

    Every scene is bad. The scenes connect badly. The overall story is, like I said, confusing to the point where it explains itself. And then you get bad performances out of all the the actors, none of whom seem to be playing characters who you can actually define or psychologize off, you know, off screen.
  • Speaker 4
    0:37:08

    It’s a it is a it is
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:10

    a a an unusual misfire, especially given the talent involved. So
  • Speaker 4
    0:37:16

    what do we think? Thumbs up
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:18

    or thumbs down. On Amsterdam. Peter, you’re clearly a thumbs up. I don’t know. Kinda wish
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:24

    washy. Yeah. Thumbs down. Alyssa.
  • Speaker 4
    0:37:28

    Thumbs down. It
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:29

    is a thumbs down. It’s too bad. I was looking forward to this movie because I like everybody in it. And I think Peter is being too hard. There are several good performances in this.
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:36

    My Mike Myers and Michael Shannon doing their funny, quirky spy thing. Again, a bird watching movie. This
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:41

    is
  • Speaker 3
    0:37:41

    what we need. Would love
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:44

    that. Anja Taylor Joy and Rami Malek doing their kind of weird, fascist, high society types. The two of them are so
  • Speaker 1
    0:37:50

    bad in this movie.
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:51

    No. They’re so good. They’re so they’re so good. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. But now the whole the whole thing just doesn’t work.
  • Speaker 2
    0:37:58

    Just does not work. Alright. That is it for this week. Show, make sure to swing by h t m a dot the board dot com for our bonus episode on Friday. Make sure to tell you our friends.
  • Speaker 2
    0:38:04

    The strong recommendation from a brand is basically the only way. GrowPod cast audiences. If we don’t grow, we will die. You did not love today’s episode. Please complain to me on Twitter and so anybody just shocked to mention that it is, in fact, a best show in your podcast feed.
  • Speaker 2
    0:38:18

    Take out next week.
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