‘Evil Dead’ to ‘Super Mario’: Options for Everyone. Plus: RIP, Netflix DVD. (And don’t forget about ATMA live!)
Episode Notes
Transcript
Just a quick reminder to pick up tickets for Across the Movie Aisle live at the Alamo Drafthouse in Crystal City on Tuesday, May 16, where we’re presenting the Matthew Broderick classic WarGames. There are only 20 tickets or so left, but I’ve got good news: they’re the best seats in the house! The front row! You’ll be very close to Alyssa, Peter, and me as we do the show! Can’t ask for more than that.
This week, Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark), Alyssa Rosenberg (The Washington Post), and Peter Suderman (Reason) lament the end of Netflix DVD. It was a golden age of exploration for budding cinephiles, and streaming still can’t quite match its breadth. Then the gang does something a little different: with the multiplex back to something approaching full power, there are too many movies to discuss! So we each grabbed a new (or newish) release to talk about. Alyssa’s handling The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Peter got Beau Is Afraid, and Sonny took on Evil Dead Rise. Make sure to swing by Bulwark+ on Friday for our bonus episode about the xennial relationship to social media. And if you enjoyed the 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!
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Welcome back to across the movie I’ll present to my Bulwark Plus. I am your host Sunny Bunch Culture Editor of The Bulwark I’m joined as always by Elizabeth Rosenberg. I was watching a poster Peter Zimmerman of Reason magazine. Alyssa Peter, how are you today? I’m
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swell.
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I am happy to be talking about movies with friends.
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Just wanted to
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quickly remind folks about the ATMA live show. Let’s cross the movie eye alive. On Tuesday, May sixteenth at seven thirty PM, At the Crystal City Alamo Draft House, we’re hosting a screening of the nineteen eighty three classic war games, and then we’re taping a live show. Super gratified by the response so far. Theatres like three quarters sold out.
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That’s I thought it would take a little bit longer to get to that point. Pretty much every seat that’s available is in the first two rows in your sitting there thinking, well, I don’t wanna sit that close to the screen. But, hey, no bad seats at the Draught House. Trust me, I’ve sat in those seats plenty of times over the years, they’re they’re fine. And
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I’ll actually adjust the recline so you can recline further in the closer seats so that you get a better angle on the screen.
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Look at that. And also, it just means you’re gonna be closer to Peter and Alyssa and me while we type the show. I mean, those are actually the best seats in the house. If you think about it, you get all these suckers out there sitting way in the back. You wanna be right up front with us.
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So get your tickets now because it looks like we’re headed towards the sellout, I guess. Definitely don’t wanna miss the movie or post movie drinks with us. It’s gonna be fun. I assume Peter’s bringing buckets of cocktails to pour into people’s mouths like, you know, at a cabo. Cocktails, dark.
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Come
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in buckets, sunny. They come in little tiny martini glasses. What
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about like a like a one of the aged barrels, the barrels that you put it in, and you can open up the tab and just put it directly into people’s mouths. That works. That alright. On with the show. On to controversies and controversies, Netflix is at long last killing their DVD by mail service.
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What? They still ran DVDs? What is this? Two thousand five? I can hear you saying it to yourself in your car and you think you’re very funny.
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You know what? That’s fair. But lots of people still use the service, and it’s worth thinking about why. One reason for the continued loyalty to Netflix is DVD operation, choice. Thanks to the first sale doctor, Netflix had access to everything ever released on DVD.
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All they had to do was buy a copy and mail it to people. That’s how first ail Doctor Works. When you buy a thing, you can do what you want with it. So HBO exclusives like Westworld and Showtime exclusives like Billions, they would be on the net Flic service as well just once they hit DVD. This is markedly different from the world of streaming rights where everything is kind of bifurcated to the point of madness.
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Necessitating entire apps like just watch dot com to figure out where something is showing. I mean, that’s if it’s showing at all because for all the promise of a digital future that meant instant access to everything ever made. Simple fact of the matter is that lots and lots of stuff is getting left behind. Sometimes that’s because of Wright’s questions. Right?
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So for instance, Kevin Smith’s dogma is streaming legally nowhere. It’s it’s zero places that it’s streaming legally. It’s available for rent nowhere. And it’s out of print on physical media. That’s why because guess who owns the rights to that?
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One Harvey Weinstein and nobody really wants to deal with him to get them back. Sometimes it’s because there’s simply no value in creating a digital transfer of the work in question, creating a digital transfer of quality is expensive. And recouping that cost one rental at a time or one streaming digital rights package at a time is not always easy to do. Turns out in a weird way that VHS was the true golden age of home media. There are fewer DVDs than there were VHS.
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There were fewer Blu rays than there were DVDs. And fewer streams than previous generations of home video. Look, there were stuff to criticize about Netflix DVD’s operation, Peter Labusa, broke down some of the ways in which it bent and slash war broke the USPS to get DVDs all over the country in the cheapest and quickest way possible. And like all great tech companies, there’s a bottom layer of simple hard labor that can’t be technology to weigh. But it really was the best of times for folks who were just looking to expand their cinematic knowledge.
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I watched more movies released before I was born during the heyday of Netflix DVD than I have at any other time in my history, including college, when I was singing, you know, film history courses. I filled in so many cinematic potholes that otherwise would have destroyed the undercarriage of my ability to understand the language of movies and to continue with this horribly tortured metaphor, the information’s super high way. It’s just an enormous mess right now with off ramps to nowhere and Walt called the Sachs, keeping people from the entire breadth of cinema city. Peter, Let’s just let’s go down the nostalgia route for a second here. Do you remember the last Netflix DVD you
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got? Oh, man. I so I think it was about ten years ago. And I don’t remember what it was. I do remember that it was only last year that I canceled my DVD perption.
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Yep. So I I have I I think I still have the last one, like, from from whatever I saw.
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No. Totally. I don’t I have a copy of Roshomon with Netflix’s logo stamped on it somewhere in my my wall of DVDs. I no. I I loved their DVD service, and it was
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a a big part of my cinematic education. I will I I was actually a a slightly late adopter to it because I was an early subscriber to a DVD by mail service, but I didn’t start with Netflix. I started with blockbuster. Back when blockbuster had a competing service, back when blockbusters still existed because blockbuster was a couple dollars less. It didn’t seem like their selection was obviously worse, and you could also get some physical rentals, like if you wanted to drive to a store.
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This is probably back in two thousand and four. I wanna say, is is when this would have been. Ron DeSantis was during my I believe I I first subscribed during my final year in college, my final couple of semesters in college. And, you know, I was a college student I had very little money. So the biggest reason that I went with Blockbuster is just was that it was, like, a couple dollars a month cheaper and that was a big deal.
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When I switched to Netflix pretty quickly as soon as I got a a straight job, you know, out of college. And it was phenomenal. Right? Like, I remember, like, there there were articles about people who were sort of maxing out how many DVDs you could rent per month. And to the point where my recollection is, and I’d have to go back and look at this again.
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But my recollection is that there were even reports that Netflix might be slowing it down for some people. And I was pretty clearly, like, in the slowed down zone because I was renting, like, eighteen movies a month, which which was just about the maximum number you could get. With your two or three disc plan and cycling them through, and it takes a couple of days in the mail to get back and then to get another one. And but it just it meant that I could just watch a huge number of movies. And this also was at a time in my life when work was less engaging and like it just required less of me.
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Right? And I also was I wasn’t out and about every single night. And so I would just come home. And even if I was out. Right?
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I’d come home at eleven PM or midnight, and I’d just watch a movie. Or I wouldn’t go out at all and I’d watch three movies. And I just kinda plowed through the whole cannon. Some of that I had started beforehand, you know, in high school and in college, But Netflix made it possible to to do that in a much more completions way, and also without the without the the sort of the time commitment of getting an car and going to a video store, which was a big deal because, you know, after college, I moved to Washington DC. And while I lived in the Burbs in Virginia where it’s which are a little more car friendly, like, driving places and going places, getting anywhere was just much more difficult in time consuming than living in a smaller market where could just, you know, you had a driveway and you could always just kinda drive a, you know, five minutes to the local strip mall and the local video store.
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So Netflix was just a huge boom to my cinematic education. And a lot of what we talk about here on this podcast when I’m like sort of walking through my mind in the film library in my mind a lot of that came from that period of time, you know, in my in my early twenties when I was just kinda binging Netflix all the time. It’s
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also interesting to think of Netflix DVD as an early version of essentially binge watching a TV show streaming streaming a TV show because if you had it set up properly, you know, you get three discs out at a time. You watch one disc of a season, send it back. While that’s in the mail, you watch the second disc in the season, you send that in the mail, but the other one’s coming back now. You watch the third disc. But if you if you if you do it right, you get it all done in pretty short order.
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Alyssa, what do you make of this kind of idea that, you know, the the rights issues with streaming versus DVD make it harder to, like, really just keep track of what is available to watch. And it reduces the
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amount some overall choice that people have. Yeah. I mean, I’ve written and talked about this as sort of one aspect of sort of a larger cultural atom station that I think Netflix has really facilitated in a lot of ways, you know, not just by, you know, sort of spearheading the string revolution, but by pushing the binge watch as opposed to, you know, a sort of more episodic communal experience, But I do think that it is, you know, it’s a shame that, like, young cinephiles coming up now will have to work harder to get some of this stuff, and it will be more expensive. I mean, this is not a medium that, you know, can really afford to throw out barriers to entry. Right?
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I mean, you have you know, something like video gaming, you know, can be fairly expensive for a console and a game itself, but provides a ton of hours better in payment. And if you know, the only way to get access to some of this stuff is gonna be to like buy the criterion collection or, you know, watch an adulterated version of it. Think that’s kind of a shame in terms of developing a common language. Right? I mean, Netflix helped us share in a world where there was so much content that nobody could get of their arms around it at any given time anyway.
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And now if the, you know, the disappearance of its DVDs serve as shuts off an arena for people to go back and acquire, like, a former common culture. That’s a shame. I don’t
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wanna make it sound like I’m approving of this, but I do wonder if this is going to lead to general kind of boom in especially amongst younger people, younger cinephiles trying to figure out what is going on in the history of cinema lead to a boom in piracy. Because I mean, look, I the the simple fact of the matter with movie piracy is that ninety eight percent of the stuff that’s downloaded is either stuff that’s in theaters or stuff that was just in theaters. It’s it’s always the most popular movies out there. But there is a kind of undercurrent of folks who are picking up things that are simply not available to watch online with easy access. I
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think that some of that is going to happen, but I I also think that part of the reason that the the DVD business is going defunct is that online options have effectively replaced a lot of it. Yes, of course, There are now films that you can’t stream anywhere. But aside from the Netflix model and the kind of Amazon Prime video models of where you sort of have access to a big streaming library, there’s now this other thing that exists where you can go and pay to rent a movie online. Right? And it’s typically four or five or six dollars Amazon has the service, and so does Apple.
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And there is a huge huge library of things that are rentable for a one time fee. And that library is almost certainly much larger than the video’s rental stores that I grew up with. Now it’s obviously gonna be smaller, the Netflix’s DVD library. But it is very, very large and larger than most people in small markets would have had access to in, say, nineteen ninety five. And it’s relatively affordable.
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I mean, I was paying four or five dollars to rent movies, you know, when I was fifteen years old. So if you think about inflation, that’s basically the same price. And it works really really well. So there is just less need for individual time limited or sort of wanted a time type rentals in a world where Amazon will let you watch. Maybe not everything.
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But a huge, huge, huge library of stuff as long as you’re willing to pay the four or five bucks.
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May I also hope that we see it would be I don’t know what Netflix plans to do with all these DVDs, but it would be amazing if they did, like, a used DVD sale. Right? Like, the biggest one in history. But also, I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with, you know, someone doing reissues of stuff that’s harder to find on DVD, that’s harder to find on streaming. Know, the New York Review of Books actually has something called the New York Review, a classic collection, and they do a classic children’s books that are out of print.
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You know, I mean, we tend to think of DVD reissues as, you know, I think like a fairly high end thing, what’s gonna damage the criterion collection, etcetera. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with a sort of lower end reissuer that, you know, we’re someone who thinks that it’s important to keep some of the stuff available in physical media. I hope that happens.
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For a while, there was the Warner Brother archives, which was gray. There was basically blue ray print on demand. They had a list of movies you’d pick it in and they would send it to you. And a part of me wishes that we would have more things like that out that way, you know, there are lots of studios that have enormous libraries that are just kinda sitting there, not to have any cash. But again, it is expensive.
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Like, it’s not it doesn’t cost zero dollars to make a digital print of a movie. You have to run it through a machine. You have to have somebody checking to make sure the quality is there, making sure everything’s sync Bulwark. You gotta work on color timing. It’s a whole thing.
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So I don’t know. Part of me is very kind of nervous about the future of some of these
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older, less popular movies. I think that there are more preservation options now than there used to be. And that that is ultimately going to mean that there will be more preservation. That doesn’t mean that everything is gonna be easily available. It’s just obvious that some things will be difficult to access.
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At the same time, I I just feel like we’d now live in a world where there is So much more abundance of of cinema history easily available without leaving your house and for a low cost than when I grew up. You know? And I grew up in the the VHS video store era. And I would just as a as somebody who loves movies, I would much rather be a movie fan in twenty twenty three than in nineteen ninety five just in terms of access and availability. And that doesn’t mean there are no that that I have no complaints.
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That doesn’t mean that I I think it’s everything’s perfect and that nothing you know, there there are no issues here. But I do think that this is a a a world in which there’s more stuff that’s available and more easily available to more people, especially outside of big cities. And this is a big thing. I mean, that that I think people forget is, if you were a cinephile and you lived in, you know, a small town in Kansas, in the nineties or, you know, like, the there was just so much stuff that you couldn’t find or couldn’t access unless you had access to a mail order catalog and we’re buying, you know, foreign copies of of things. And it’s just the world we live in now just offers so much more to to people who don’t live in a megalopolis.
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Yeah.
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I think that’s probably true. I mean, look, the it is better now than it used to be, but I I do I do pine for the Halcyon days of two thousand five to two thousand ten ish, that that period. Alright. So what do we think? Is it a controversy or a nonproxy that Netflix is phasing out DVD by mail.
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Peter, it’s a controversy that it still existed. Alyssa?
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It’s mildly controversial but not surprising.
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I mean, it’s it’s a controversy in the sense that it probably makes more business sense, but it is still kind of sad. Alright. Make sure to swing by Bulwark Plus on Friday for a special bonus episode. About what it feels like to kind of age out of social media maybe and see what’s going on with Twitter, check-in on some other stuff. But now on to our main event where we’re doing something a little bit different this week between our vacations and cinematic calendar regaining some measure of health, there is a on of stuff in movie theaters to discuss.
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There’s something for everyone. You have the Super Mario Bros. Movie as the biggest hit of the year so far. It’s bringing families hungry for movies back to theaters in enormous numbers. You got Evil Dead Rise, which was originally destined for HBO Max and got a full release from Warner Bros.
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To entice horror loving audiences out of the house back into the multiplex. And Art House Darling, a24 is rolling out their most expensive movie ever, the thirty five million dollar bow is afraid from the hereditary and midsummer director Ari Aster. All of these movies offer up different pleasures for different audiences. So we thought we’d split our talents and check them out for you individually I actually saw all of them, so I’m I’m a weirdo here, but I that that helps me to facilitate this discussion for you, the movie going public. Alyssa, let’s start with you.
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Is the Super Mario brothers movie everything you ever could have wanted from a kitty flick? Or is it good enough to get by?
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So one of the benefits of having missed out on much of the pop culture of the nineties when I was growing up in my, you know, poor benighted, like, amish at a kind of a childhood — Amish. — is that I phonetically get to learn in detail about some of these franchises and be just endlessly amused by what they constituted. Right? I mean, the fact that there was like a substantial hit television show about like teenaged turtles who somehow subsist entirely on pizza with the cooperation of, like, of Lady Jordan West runs around in yellow jumpsuits. It’s just the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of.
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Right? Like, where do they get the money for the pizza? Who orders the pizza for them if they live in sewers, etcetera? And Mario, the whole Mario complex of things is sort of like that for me. And so going into this movie, it’s like, Okay.
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They’re plumbers who also rescue a princess in a toadstool kingdom. Like, why is she human princess? In a kingdom full of sentient toadstools.
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These are among the many important questions answered by
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Super Mario brothers movie. And so one of the things that’s very interesting about the Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it operates by the same logic of a story told by like a smart four year old. Right? In the sense that there are, you know, weird bridges where our characters say obvious things like, you know, like toad declaring it’s like, and now we’re off on an adventure together.
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There are times when events happen, not because there’s any sort of organic logic in the movie. But because, you know, the plot such as its setups room needs them to happen. Right? I mean, if Princess Peach really believes that there’s like an imminent danger to her country that needs to be saved by an emissary to the cons, why she stops that emissary and spends, like, twelve hours training an obviously incompetent Mario to, you know, do various marioing things. Makes no sense in the context of the movie, but like the franchise requires Mario and Princess Peach to go on an adventure together.
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And so the movie delivers. But there’s a difference between a movie or any kind of story operating by a fundamentally childlike logic with those same sort of gaps in, you know, naturalistic writing or the same sort of flaws of logic because, you know, the teller’s demands need that. And something you you know, sorry, it’s like really good for kids. Right? And so, you know, it was sort of amusing watching this as a trifle that bear that’s like Oh, so this is what I was missing or not missing the entire time.
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I have to say like Mario GoCARTS things, whatever that is. Mario Kart, that’s a game that exists. Mario Carter. Okay. That looks kinda fun.
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Like, maybe I would have enjoyed playing that if we’re not terrible at video games. But I don’t think this is a particularly strong kids movie. You know, I I don’t think the characters are particularly well developed. It’s like, oh, my dad doesn’t respect my ambitions to either be a plumber or like an arena fighting monkey. Like, that’s much more of like a sort of an adult emotional narrative.
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Yeah. We’ll come back to that on Bo as a friend. Yeah. Princess Peach is like, you know, child who got, like, mysteriously sucked into Todd’s dual kingdom. Like, none of these characters are really people and none of them are really children.
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In a way, like, it is a this is an adaptation of a pop culture artifact that children played. And it is child like in its logic, but it’s not really a movie sort of about or four children’s. Like, so obviously sort of a nostalgia play that obviously went over my head in part because I don’t have nostalgia for it. Right? But I don’t think it’s particularly, you know, artful.
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I don’t think it looks particularly great. That said, at my, you know, Friday weekday screening during school break in DC. There were a ton of families there with kids. And so you know, this for me is a movie that exemplifies the ways in which, like, I am just gonna be unable to connect to certain things because I miss them. A certain point in time.
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But it’s also a good reminder that just because not all pop culture is for adults doesn’t mean that all pop culture for kids has to be mediocre or that by virtue of being for children. It must therefore be mediocre. I think kids probably deserve a little bit better as do people who have nostalgia for Mario.
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Think all that is is probably true, and I don’t think this is a very good movie. Just on it it’s definitely a movie that relies very heavily on musical cues for instance that have nothing to do with Mario brothers. It’s just like here’s some pop songs from the nineteen
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eighties and nineteen nineties. It’s also an interesting measure of where we are in the nostalgia cycle that when holding out for a hero comes in, in the Super Mario Brothers movie, the nostalgia effect that it conjures up is actually like the first Shrek movie. Right? It’s like a whole previous era of kids’ entertainment when that movie was itself like sort of pulling in an old song from a previous cycle. So what I’m saying is that we’re old.
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It really is. It’s a it’s a remarkably interesting cultural artifact just for all of the nostalgia at play here in the in the different ways that it it kind of refracs off itself. Like I took my four year old to see it. And he was he was wrapped. Just you know, it wrapped attention on the on the big screen.
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He was a little bit worried about the scary bowser. He didn’t like scary bowser, but then bowser turned out to be kind of funny, so it wasn’t it wasn’t as big a deal. For him. Does
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cause her wanna marry princess peach in the game?
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Well, he he kidnaps princess peach and takes her to the castle to marry her, I believe. That is like That’s why
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our princess is in another castle.
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I’m pretty sure that’s that’s the the basis there. I don’t know. I haven’t played Super Mario.
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I don’t recall the marriage aspect being in the games. I recall
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him just kidnapping her because he’s bad. That also could have been it frankly. I don’t I don’t remember. I did think it was very funny that they basically made Bowser and Angry and cell. And they made Princess Peach a noble white savior, which I thought was was kind of fascinating.
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Like, it’s just this this, like, white girl shows up in the total kingdom. They’re like, you’re our queen now. Yeah.
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Also, like, do you show up in our kingdom as like a pacifier sucking toddler and really like train you up for like eighteen years so you can be our queen?
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Like, they have to do this though because they’re all such cowards except for a toad, the sidekick character. The all the rest of the toadstools just don’t they they don’t have it in them. The fight, they need the they’ve finally have a human, the most dangerous species on their side. So they they train the rub. Okay.
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Alright. We’ll we’ll do evil dead rise next because that came second in the box office this week for among other reasons. This is the second effort to reboot the evil dead series. Though there’s some question as to whether or not this film and the two thousand thirteen effort led by Fady Alvarez. Are remakes or reboots or sequels or something else been entirely?
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I have a tremendous soft spot for Sam Ramey’s first three evil dead movies, the evil dead, evil dead two, and army of darkness. May have talked about this on the show before, but I’ve owned all of these on, like, four now modes of home video. I love them. I I think they’re great. And I I love them in part because they’re doing something very interesting and tricky with tone.
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Kind of like melding horror in humor into a looney tunes esque Sarah Longwell gore fest. Right? There’s lots of comic gore. There’s lots of silly action. It’s a good time.
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And in those first three movies, it’s anchored by Bruce Campbell, who’s playing the put upon hero Ash. The whole reason these movies work is because we just kind of like hanging out with that squared chin to goofy’s while he gets put through his paces by the deadites, the evil evil deadites. And I think the two more recent cinematic entries have kind of made a mistake and trying to get us to care about the people who become possessed by the evil dead and then turn into the zombie like deadites. I think both Alvarez in two thousand thirteen and Evil Dead Rise writer director Lee Cronin succumb to this kind of modern desire to make all horror movies about the trauma of Modernity Right in a two thousand thirteen movie. It’s drug addiction.
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That’s the real horror, not not the evil day. It’s a drug addiction. Here, it’s a divorce and single motherhood that’s the real horror. You know, nobody wants to get divorced or be be a single mom. But trying to get us to care about the suffering of these folks renders the comic gore like too mean spirited weirdly and not in a funny way like you want.
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Like it’s one thing to torture folks on screen that you don’t care about, but imagine giving Wiley Coyote, like, a mortgage that he’s four months behind on. And then and then he sits there and he tells his baby Coyote pups that they’re gonna starve to death if can’t bring home a tasty road runner to eat, and then just running him into a cliff at full speed over and over again or sending him off and getting blown up. I mean, like, that’s kind of messed up. It’s a little bit messed up. Still, I enjoyed this movie.
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I did I’m I I’ve been nitpicking it a lot in in my review and and just discussing it, but I I still actually kind of really liked evil dead rise. It’s absurd. It’s over the top. Alyssa Sutherland delivers this, like, kind of, key, demanded performance as the possessed mother who turns bad. And there’s also an interesting moment.
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Just politically, there’s this very interesting moment, the deadites discover one of the characters in the movie is pregnant. And then they say that consuming her flesh would involve eating two souls, meaning that life begins with conception in the evil dead universe. Who knew evil dead rise would be the pro life hit of the summer? Peter, are you considering checking out evil dead rise? Is that is that on your radar?
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I definitely am planning to. I just haven’t had time to see it yet. I’m a no. I’m a big evil dead fan. Or I should say, I really love the times when I have seen those movies, but they are not movies that I’ve gone back to and watched a lot of times.
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But I was a big Eagle Dead fan in college for obvious reasons. It’s just like a great late night door movie. But also, I may have said this on this podcast before, but the single greatest screening of a movie, not the best movie I’ve ever seen, but the best overall experience of watching a movie that I have ever had in my life. Was at a midnight showing of evil dead two at the Kentucky Theatre in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. It’s this old state theater that sort of kind of giant art deco thing.
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Right? And, like, they just would host midnight screenings of of cult films, you know, mostly for college kids who would attend. And this one’s started like an hour late. Right? So it’s starting at one in the morning and this screening was just absolutely loud and ruckus and sort of, you know, there obviously a lot of the people there were drunk or something else, I was not, to be clear.
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But, like, Just everybody’s sort of shouting at the screen, but like and saying lines and yet it wasn’t obnoxious at all. Every single person in the theater was operating on exactly the same sort of hyped up zany vibe and just completely commuting with the movie at its intent in a way that I’ve never fully felt before and it it had never fully felt and have not quite felt since even at, you know, sort of big fan screenings, Star Wars, stuff like that. And it was just just a perfect night at the movies despite starting an hour late and keeping me up until, you know, three in the morning or something. And I will I doubt any screening of anything will ever surpass that in terms of sheer, like, crowd communal joy.
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Alyssa, is there any possible way you would ever consider going to see evil dead rise? Is that a thing that would even be on your radar anywhere in the in the known
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universe. Think how much you would have to pay me to do it. The answer is probably a fair bit. Okay. I could bet you know what?
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For you too, I could be persuaded if, you know, if they all if For you too, I could be persuaded, but you’d have to pick the case. I
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feel like you would like evil dead two or maybe even army of darkness more than more than this movie because those are those are very, like, cartoony it’s like cartoony gore. It’s not really gorgor, like fountains of blood, that sort of thing,
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not really, you know. Not like torture porn. Luding to is right, but also of of self awareness. And it’s certainly trying to shock you, but it’s not trying to up set you in a traditional sense. Maybe it is trying to upset you a little bit like it’s not trying to make you it’s not trying to punish you.
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Which might be a good segue to our next movie.
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Speaking of punishments, Belle was afraid. So I just wanna read a text message that Peter Suderman sent to me at six thirty eight this morning, central time, six thirty eight central time. It’s just a line from a story with a link. Quote, costing a reported thirty five million dollars, Beau is afraid marks a24’s priciest movie to date. Partly because Aster requested the funds needed to commission an animatronic penis monster.
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I’m
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sorry, Peter. What what was that?
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I know. What? So I have seen Bo as afraid and I can confirm that that is accurate. And that’s all we’re gonna say about that. No.
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Like, that’s like, that is what this movie is. And it makes exactly as much sense in the context of the movie as in that completely context free quote because this movie is an endurance test. It is exquisitely excruciating. And so, Sunny, you were saying to me before this podcast that you thought not only was it too long, but, like, every single scene itself was too long, but I think that was that’s kind of the point. But this movie would not have the same effect if it weren’t obnoxiously too long.
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If it were not drawing out absolutely every bit to the point where it was upsetting, where it was boring, where it was like made you feel irritable and anxious and weird yourself. It’s just absurd and Bulwark. And like I said, there’s there’s so little context to this. You don’t know if what you’re seeing is a dream. If it is the paranoid schizophrenic visions of the character, if it is maybe some sort of representation of real life in a surreal world that often resembles ours, but doesn’t operate according to the same rules.
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You know, it is it it’s just a flat out bizarre movie. A vision of what it is like to be a paranoid, deeply anxious, possibly, totally insane person in a cruel and incomprehensible world. And it is difficult to watch. Difficult to the point of pain, to the point where I nearly texted you guys, I cannot do this. I am walking out about forty minutes into the movie.
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And I I was like, nope. This is I don’t do that, like, for like, I I think that’s actually professionally irresponsible unless you morally object to a film. Like, in which case it is okay, even then. Maybe. Right?
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And
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then you have to be done. You but, like, with it. I you’re a professional. You did your job.
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That it is an unprofessional behavior to walk out of a movie or, you know, and then make it all about like, oh, I just couldn’t watch this. It was too but like I came really close. Really really close in this. And so in some ways, like I agree with the critics who are like this movie is a mess. It’s unwatchable.
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It’s unbearable. But I also think that’s kind of the point. I I like Ari Aster is a smart guy. And I think he wanted to make a movie that was unbearable. I think he wanted to make a movie that dared people and even critics who who like the same movies that he does, who like his movies, who have this who share his taste in films.
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I think he wanted to make a movie that was a dare to them to say, can you actually finish this? Will you stick with me? I’m going to make it difficult for you. I’m going to make it unpleasant and I’m gonna make it so that this is not an enjoyable cinematic experience. And in a way, you know, I I kinda have to respect that.
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It is just incredibly, maybe not to go back to our monster, but ballsy. Right? It’s ballsy. For a guy with a lot of cache in Hollywood who is a young, hot, up, and coming filmmaker to take that cache and say, I’m going to use this to make maybe the single most difficult movie.
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I I
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don’t know. Like, again, like, I I like weird bizarre films in a lot of the reference points that you you might think of with a movie like this. I’m a big fan of of David Lynch’s nineties work, you know, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, lost highway, that sort of thing. I love those movies, and I love the incomprehensible of them, the dreamscapes that he is contouring. Charlie Sykes Kaufman, another Seneca y New York in particularism.
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This is probably the movie that this feels most like. And I really liked Seneca y I don’t think it’s Kaufman’s best Bulwark, but I I think it’s an absolutely fascinating movie. And then you think, you know, stuff like Falini, the discreet charm of the, you know, bourgeois that that sort of thing. Like, all of this kind of surrealist, you know, stuff that he’s drawing from. I like all of that, and yet even still, I was I just was sitting there thinking, like, should I be mad at Ari Aster for making this?
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For making me watch this? Should I be mad at Sunny for making me watch this? Like, Yes. And and then I and then in some ways, I thought, you know what? Like, I don’t love this movie.
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I’m not sure it even totally works on its own terms. But I’m I still kinda am am glad that he made it, and I’m glad that he is willing to take not just risks but, like, that he is he’s, like, embracing failure in some sense with a movie like this. Because now there’s now he’s shown he can do it and there’s, like, something freeing about that. I don’t know. It’s a it’s a bizarre movie.
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It’s not really meant to be enjoyed, but there is much to appreciate about it because in many moments, not maybe as a whole, but in many moments, there are real demonstrations of his abilities as a craftsman. And at a certain point, I just sort of settled in to watching what he was doing as a filmmaker rather than watching the movie itself. And I found myself thinking, gosh, man. This guy really can direct. Right?
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And, like, they’re just shots here that I I just sort of lingered over and was like, like, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like that except maybe in a previous sorry, Oscar Filament. I’m glad those movies exist even if in this case I also find myself very frustrated even to the point of anger. With it.
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It’s a bad movie. It’s a bad movie on almost every level. Like, even even on the performance level. I I don’t like what Joaquin Phoenix is really doing here. What I said to Peter was that every individual shot could be half as long and you don’t lose anything.
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You don’t even have to cut the discursive subplots even though you could. You could get rid of a lot of stuff in this movie, but you don’t have to. If you just made every single shot, fifty percent shorter, the thing would come in at a much more reasonable, you know, close to two hour running time probably. You wouldn’t even have to cut a full fifty percent. Cut cut thirty, forty percent.
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But, man, this is a this is a this movie defines Hank. It’s a Hank. It is a it’s a total self involved, self indulgent pile of mess Like, I I am kind of with Peter in the sense that I’m glad that it exists because I like I like the idea of filmmakers getting to make massively personal things, and I like to for those things to be in theaters. But I also am, like, there are things I don’t understand a twenty four. And one of the things I don’t understand about a twenty four is how under the Silver Lake, which is a genuine masterpiece in the mold that Peter was talking about earlier, the Lynchian, kind of neo norish type.
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I don’t understand how that movie gets dumped to Direct TV and abandoned and and left to rot without, like, anything approaching a proper DVD or Blu ray or four k release. And this movie gets like the full It’s probably gonna end up on two thousand screens next week. I bet they expand it again because it’s in the contract. And it’s it’s bad and audiences hate it. And it’s gonna die.
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So I don’t know. I mean, it’s not a very good movie even if it’s when I’m kind of glad exists for the same reasons Peter is. I’m
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isn’t this something he’s been working on for, like, ten years, you know, prehereditary? It’s like his There’s a short there’s
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a short film. He
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also wrote the script before hereditary. And so and and an early version of the script had a somewhat different and more oblique ending, also said in the water. But like I’ve read I’ve read reports by people who have read the initial script, and then he also made a short film as part of a series of short films that led to him making his first feature hereditary. And one of them was Beau, that short has apparently recently disappeared from the Internet for not surprising reasons.
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Disappeared forever. We gotta get it on DVD. Get it back out there. So so they can’t take it away from us. If you can’t hold it in your hands, you don’t own it.
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No. I like Aster’s hereditary. I was more mixed on midsummer, which again I thought was a a little a little bit of a self indulgent mess but still had its moments. I think this is this movie is an artistic disaster on virtually every level. It does it does not it does not Bulwark.
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But I’ll say that if
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you are the sort of person who likes a difficult movie and who likes a challenge, who likes David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman and, you know, that sort of mid century surrealist filmmakers consider seeing this movie and consider seeing it in with one bit of context in mind, which is that Aster has talked about when he was pitching his first feature hereditary, which of course is, you know, this sort of quite dark psychological horror film with, like, witches and stuff like that. And he has talked about how when he was in the process of pitching his first feature. He wanted to make something that was just a domestic family drama and he didn’t get any takers. And when he repackaged a lot of his ideas into a horror format, he found that people were much more interested in making the movie. And I think that helps explain a bunch of what is in Boe was afraid and why when he got the opportunity to take a big swing, this is the movie he made.
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Sometimes, big swings are big misses. I think got a lot of strikeouts in the Major League Baseballies Alright. That’s it for this episode. We can’t really thumbs up and thumbs down everything. I will give the definitive ranking though, however.
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It’s evil dead rise. Is better than Super Mario Bros. Movie, which is better than Bo is afraid. This Super Mario Bros. Movie is somehow better than the Art House a twenty four movie.
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Don’t know. I can’t explain it. It’s it, but it’s it’s math.
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Alright. That is it for this week’s show. Make sure to head over to Bulwark Plus for our bonus episode on Friday. Buy tickets to the live show. It’s Tuesday, May sixteenth at the Crystal City Draft House.
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week.
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