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Unknown A
Hon Nora is truly an awful film. Like truly a very very bad film. I don't think it's anything special. It is the wokest most horrible film ever. Perhaps allghty folks. So of course the Oscars are this weekend and we're gonna go through the various categories. I'm gonn handicap the Oscars for you. I have actually seen virtually all of the best picture films at this point. I know I suffer so that you don't have to. I'm be joined in this journey by producer Phil who's sort of our in house film expert and actually Phil is quite good at this. How many of these films have you actually seen that're nominating for best picture?
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Unknown B
Phil? I have not seen Wicked. I have not seen I'm still here and I have not finished the substance yet.
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Unknown A
Okay, so this is good cause our crossover here is not super high. The only ones that I've actually not seen are a complete unknown. I haven't seen Conclave, I've read the book so I figured I didn't need to see the movie and I haven't seen I'm still here all the others I've seen. So be this should be a good crossover. I think the only one neither of rest have seen here is probably I'm still here. So. Okay, between the two of us I think we can do this.
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Unknown B
So let's try.
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Unknown A
What's bizarre about this Oscars is how many nominations. First of all Amelia Perez racked up Amelia Perez were recked up an enormous Number of nominations. 13 nominations. The brutalist react up 10 and and Wicked racked up 10 and Emelia Perez started off this happens now almost every year at the Oscars where Emilia Perez was the front runner and then there was woke blowback and then Emelia Perz was not the front runner. We've seen this so many times. This with Greenro Room just is La La land. This sort of stuff tends to happen a lot. What's bizarre about the anti woke blowback on Emelia Perez is that it is the wakesest most horrible film ever perhaps. And yet somehow there's anti woke blowback because the person who was nominated for best actress, a dude had a bunch of bad old tweets that apparently mean the entire film that has to be thrown out entirely now the film should have been thrown out entirely in the first place because it sucks.
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Unknown A
But that blowback has now led to a sort of race for who is going to replace Emilia Perz as the Frontnner Right now my understanding Phil, is that the Front Runner is in aura. Is that right?
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Unknown B
Yes, it is. It got the Pal De'ore and it has won pretty much every single best picture award you can think of, except for the SAG Ensemble Award, which went to Conclave.
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Unknown A
So I'mnna go through each of these. We'll do, like, some capsule reviews of these particular films. So Honora, as we say, is now the Front Runner, is directed by Seawn Baker. Seann Baker did the Florida Project, which actually I kind of likedah and also did Red Rocket, which I did not like, and Tangerine, which I did not like. And Sean Baker is kind of this auteur director who apparently has no capacity to write ca Because Honora is truly an awful film. Like, truly a very, very bad film. The plot of the film is sex worker, meaning a prostitute. It meets Russian oligarch son. Russian oligarch son really likes this girl that he is paying to have sex with him routinely while he plays video games and marries her almost on a whim. And then Russian family is like, this isn't happening. Nothing happens for about an hour.
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Unknown A
And then they kind of chase him around town. He disappears. They chase him around town. Finally, they uncover him. She realizes, as she should have from the beginning, that he's a douchebag. And they give her a little bit of money to go away. She takes some money to go away, and she flirts with one of the henchmen who's been sent to separate them. I think that's a fair summation of the plot.
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Unknown B
Yeah, that's pretty fair. And can you believe that? I guess the director one time liked one Tulsi Gabbard tweet, and they're trying to cancel him for that.
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Unknown A
That's hysterical. First of all, again, it is amazing. These movies are terrible, awful film. It offers no character development. I think my favorite part of the film is there's a scene where Honora, who's the prostitute, is being confronted by the henchmen of the Russian oligarchs parents. The Russian oligarch parents and the henchmen call her a prostitute in front of her. And she can speak Russian. And she starts screaming at them. And all I could think of is, well, you are. I don't understand your objection. Literally, the whole movie is supposed to be an almost unapologetic look at sex work. Meaning, like, girls love it. It's super fun. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't damage your soul or you in any serious way. Even though, again, sor. The underlying thematic is what she's actually looking for is to be a married woman in a normal relationship.
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Unknown A
And then she can't have that because she is a prostitute. And so the film is in conflict with itself. On the one hand, it wants to glorify sex work. On the other hand, the thing that she actually is looking for is to not be a sex worker, but to actually be like a traditional housewife who's taken care of, which is kind of hilarious. And I think perhaps the most fascinating part about this film is that it's been characterized as a Cinderella'story the problem is you can't have a Cinderela story where Cinderel is utterly unsympathetic.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown A
I mean, Cinderella in this particular film is again a sex worker who basically takes advantage of what appears to be a 70 IQ 18 year old kid in order to get to his money. And somehow this makes her a heroine of the story and a victim of the evils of a society that won't accept the sex workers. So that was my take. Itus 93% on Ron's made, then 90% from the audience. So I don't know what the audience is thinking other than their only fans log in was lost or something. So the Brutalist has also been nominated for 10 Academy Awards. I have many, many thoughts on the Brutalist. Actually I will say it's at least interesting. Like there's some things that are going on. I don't like the political take of the film. I think there is one move that is made near the end of the film.
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Unknown A
And again, spoiler alerts all over, guys. Like if we're going through the films, you're gonna have to actually deal with it. The Brutalist is beautifully shot, it's really well directed, the acting is across the board, excellentink. Guy Pierce particularly is terrific in this film. It makes no political sense at all. So the entire basis of the Brutalist, for those who haven't seen it, is a Holocaust refugee arrives in the United States. It turns out that he is a sort of master architect from the Bauau School. And he ends up doing the library for a very rich magnate played by Guy Pierce. Guy Pierce originally doesn't appreciate it and yells at him and doesn't pay him. And then Adrian Brodie's character, who is this Hungarian artist, eventually he finds the Hungarian artist, tracks him down and says, I realize what you did. Here's a masterpiece. I wanna commission you to make a giant community center in honor of my mother.
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Unknown A
And so the whole movie is about the conflict between these two characters where Guy Pierce is trying to get this thing built. He respects the talent of the Hungarian, but he doesn't like the Hungarian, but he kind of loves the Hungarian. It's like this bizarre love hate relationship that he has with the Adrian Brody character. And the whole kind of thematic of the film is America is xenophobic. There's sort of a weird, badly done Zionist plot in the brutalist. The big problem is, number one, the case for Zionism is not only that the Jews need a place to go because everybody is constantly persecuting the Jews, which is true. But the case for Zionism is also, I mean, just as a Zionist, the case for Zionism is that there is a biblical basis to it. The Judaism actually believes that there is a holy land promised by gods who the Jewish people.
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Unknown A
That's never dealt with in the film. And so what you end up with is Israel is sort of repository of almost anti American hatred. That basically what Israel is, a place for people to run away from America. Now if you're gonna set it up that way, then what you have to do is basically show that Adrian Brody and his entire family are deeply mistreated by America. And so from the very outset, this is the director Brady Corbett's job is to show that America is not all that it's cracked up to be. From literally the first shot in the film, which is this big shot where you see the Statue of Liberty coming upside down, you see Adrian Burdy scramble up to the surface of the ship that's taking him from Europe to the United States. And then the camera swivels upside down and you get the upside down Statue of Liberty, you know, right from these outside'is gonna be an America sucks movie.
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Unknown A
And by the end, you also have a cross upside downce. So it turns out that America's rooted in Christianity and Christianity sucks, which is why Jews apparently are victims are something. The problem is Adrian Brody is not a victim in this movie until about three quarters of the way through the movie. Meaning that Guy Piers streets him badly at first. And then there's a read on this movie where Guy Pierce is actually for most of the movie, the hero of the film. Meaning he is a very rich person who finds an impoverished European immigrant, recognizes his talent, pays him an enormous sum of money to make him a monument on a hill that serves no purpose other than the charitable. And in honor of his mother, brings like, hires a Jewish lawyer to bring his family from Europe and get them out of a DP camp in Austria, have them live on his property, Right?
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Unknown A
These are not the actions of Like a typical movie villain. And so the entire movie is based around the idea that Guy Pierces a villain. But then the first 3ths of the movie don't set that up. So what do they do? They add in a scene in which guy, P.S. literally Adrian Brody's character. Now by this point in the film, Guy here is supposed to be probably 60 and Adrian Brody's supposed to be probably 50 in the film at this point. And it's just. It's absolutely bizarre. Except that they had to do it. Cause otherwise Guy Pierce can't be portrayed as the villain. And so they're making flesh the implication of the movie, which is that basically America, immigrant population for its talents and then treats them badly. So much so that they wanna leave. The politics are really perverse and disgusting. It's a very well directed film.
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Unknown A
But because the politics are so perverse and because again, the vast majority of the plots does not support the conclusion, all of this feels very shoehorned in the last quarter of the movie is kind of my take on it, I.
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Unknown B
Think circling back to this scene you were just talking about with Guy Pierce and Adrian Brody. I feel like that was the least subtle thing possible. I feel like 99% of the audience was able to understand the allegory and the metaphor that he was going for. And then he just had to have that scene and have Guy Pierce explicitly say the things that you knew that he was thinking. Whereas just like 40 minutes ago they had that scene between Harry and Zofia that implied something similar. But it was a much higher degree of subtlety that I think worked cinematically because it was showing, not telling.
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Unknown A
And again, I think that Brady Corbett had to do that. The question becomes, why do they even do that? I think the reason you had to do that is because otherwise the setup is Adrian Brody's being really, really over sensitive here, right? He's like, okay, fine, so the Guy doesn't like you. How many people like their boss? How many people like the people who pay? I mean, aside from obviously all of our employees, like Phil loves me, but aside from that, I mean, clearly it's not that we pay him to say that he actually does, but most people don't feel like that they have to love the person who's paying them to do a thing. And so the problem is that unless you set up that Adrian Brody is literally a physical victim, then you cannot actually set up the rest of the sort of moral of the film, which is again made perfectly obvious in the last part of the film.
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Unknown A
Cause they Fast forward to 1980 and now there's a big tribute scene to Adrian Brody's character, and they explicate that when he created this bizarre monument on the top of a hill in Pennsylvania, that actually it was supposed to be taking elements from Dachau and Birkenau. So the idea was there's some sort of continuity between Nazism and American industrial capitalism, which is just, I'm sorry, sick and perverse in every way that it is possible to be sick and perverse. And anybody who takes away from world history that there is a similarity between people shoving you into a gas chamber and murdering you and your entire family and people commissioning you to build a tower on a hill in Pennsylvania. I don't know how far you have to have your head up your ass to come to that conclusion, but apparently that's about as far as Brady Corbet has his head up his ass.
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Unknown A
We'll get more on this in a moment. First, you know that creepy feeling you get sometimes like you're being watched when you're browsing online? Well, here's the thing. That's not just a feeling. You're actually being watched when you're browsing online. Every time you hop on the Internet, your service provider can see literally everything you do. And get this, in the United States, they can legally sell your entire browsing history. Yep, even that incognito browsing is not so private after all. Who would'thunk? That's why I started using ExpressVPN. It's this brilliant app that encrypts everything I do online and routes it through secure servers. Since I started using it, my ISP can't see any of my browsing history. And that means they've got nothing to sell because they've got nothing on me. But here's what I really love about ExpressVPN. It also hides my IP address so those annoying data brokers can't build a profile about me to sell the advertisers.
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Unknown A
Plus, it is unbelievably user friendly. You don't have to be a tech wizard to use it. It made it so simple even your kids could figure it out. All you have to do is tap one button and get protected. They've got apps for all your devices. It's rated number one by cnet, the Verge, and other major tech reviewers. Find out how you can get four months for free by scanning the QR code on screen, clicking the link in the description box below, or by going to express@vpn.com BenShapeiroShow Again, that's ExpressVPN.com BenShapeiroShow okay. Conclave. I read the book, and so I could not put myself through the movie. The book was interminable enough, and I say that as a fan of Robert Harris, the guy who wrote the book. I've read a bunch of his books. So for those who missed it, I did, like, a little capsule review of Conclave, the book as well, before the movie even came out, telling you what it was going to be.
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Unknown A
And indeed, it is that thing, because the movie is the book, basically. Pope dies. Time to appoint new pope. College of Cardinals all get together. Winner. Spoiler Intersex person. Because it turns out that all the cardinals who find this out after the person is made Pope, it turns out they all decide that it's important to violate all the vows they've ever taken in order to maintain the fiction that this person is actually just a genetic male as opposed to an intersex person who's actually female. So you have a lady pope is sort of. Sort of the idea of this film.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I felt like I was watching a Shyamalan movie in a way, because it was like this political thriller about who is gonna ascend to the seat of the pope. And then all of a sudden, the Pope has ovaries. It's like you're watching Split. It's about multiple personality disorder. And then all of a sudden, he becomes the Hulk. Bruce Willis is dead at the end of Success, right?
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Unknown A
Exactly, exactly. And so I think, like, the reason. And so this is. The Catholic Church is mean and too conservative and needs to liberalize movie.
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Unknown B
I think my biggest issue, too, is that they don't really process that revelation that he has ovaries in a uterus. He kind of just says it, and then the film ends a minute later.
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Unknown A
Yeah, well, I mean, that's true. In the book also, there's like, a brief kind of internal monologue that the main character, who's played by Ralph Fnes in the movie, does where the main character is like, well, I could say something, but I really shouldn't say something. Okay, I guess I won't say something, and. Which is really stupid because really, the entire debate, theoretically, should be about that thing. Right? You should have a whole movie about them debating. We just appointed a poll. What do we do now? There's, like, the legality. Can you, like, I don't know, any of those procedures. Is that revocable? How exactly does that work in this way? The sort of surprise ending? Conclave is very Much like Nickel Boys. So Nickel Boys is a movie about a school. It's based on an actual real school in Florida that was a reform school in which apparently students were abused for decades.
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Unknown A
Some of them were killed and apparently buried in a field. And like bodies have actually been found. There have been reparations that have been paid to some of the families in the state of Florida over all of this. There's some confronce over whether this was just a generalized evil reform school that basically victimized all the people who went there, or whether it was particularly racist. It as one of the controversies over the Florida school Nickel Boys novelization by Colulson Whitehead that turned into a movie. And the movie is fine, but it's not particularly revelatory. The kind of. The reason I'm comparing it to Conclave is because the twist ending is that the character you think you've been watching the whole time, who's kind of in the future in the late 1980s, who's deciding whether or not to go and reveal what happened at the school, that character you think is one character the whole time, and it turns out it's another character, the character you think it is was actually killed earlier in the film.
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Unknown A
This person took that person's name and lived out his life, basically. That doesn't change anything fundamentally in the film. This is one of my problems with some twist endings in films, at least in Conclave, you can make a case that actually has some impact. In Nickel Boys, it really wouldn't have mattered at all whether the switch ever took place. And if one of the boys were been killed and the other boy had lived, that would'made no difference to the actual plot of the film. I think it's more of an explanation for why the kid didn't come forward because he was actually inhabiting somebody else's life. Maybe that's the explanation, but there's nothing particularly that changes what happened during the story. That one character lived in, the other died. You could easily have just left it alone. And I think the shock value of the switch is supposed to be like the big revelation and just didn't do anything for me as far as it being directed.
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Unknown A
Well, yeah, I mean, I. It's directed fine. I think it's interestingly directed Nickel Boys because it kind of takes various perspectives. It's done from first person. So you see the camera in the place of the person for one character. And then you see it switch and you see the same scene from the character of the other person. And so it's kind of a cool directorial trick. But we've also seen that with things like, for example, 1917. So I don't think there was anything particularly new about that, per se. It's fine. I don't think it's an amazing film by any stretch of the imagination. The Substance, okay, so I did not hate the substance as much as I thought I would hate the substance. I don't think it's anything special. I think it's a body horror film. I think that it's being given all sorts oflaud.
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Unknown A
It's just because Demi Moore gets naked. And the entire plot of the Substance is. Demi Moore is an aging actress. And she's fired from her job by close ups of Dennis quit eating shrimp. And then at a certain point, she's given notice. She gets in a car crash. And at the hospital, somebody gives her notice of a thing called the substance. That allows her basically to separate into two beings. One of them is a young version of Demi Moore. Like a young, hot Margaret Queleey version of Demiore. And one is older Demi Moore. And they have to switch off week to week. So the basic idea is that her soul or brain, whatever she is, inhabits one body and then inhabits the other body week to week. And then, of course, there starts to be tension because she wants to stay in the younger body.
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Unknown A
But then every time she goes back to the older body, her older body is more depleted. Because the younger body has essentially been drawing life force from that. The end of it is, of course, as with most horror films, some sort of sick horror explosion involving lots of blood. The movie kind of peters out around an hour 15. And then for 45 minutes, it just kind of hovers there. Nothing really happens between an hour 15 and kind of two hours. This movie, at an hour and a half, would have been a nice little horror flick. At two hours, it's really, really over long.
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Unknown B
It's interesting that you told me that this film is about the evils of sexism in America. Because Vanity Fair told me it was a stealthy trans allegory.
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Unknown A
Yeahanity aff. Fair is high on their own supply. And that was, of course, by a person I believe, named Emily St. John or something, who is a trans person.
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Unknown B
St. James.
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Unknown A
Yeah, St. James. Emily St. John is the novelist. Emily St. James is a trans person who believes that every movie is about him. And the substance is absolutely not a trans allegory. It is about women aging in Hollywood and how they feel a lack of self because they're aging and because everybody is mean. To them because they're older. Which is clearly not true of Demi Moore, who's getting more work now than she's had in 20 years. By the way, the thing that works in Late Night with the Devil doesn't work for me here. In the substance, just thematically, is that the very basis of the substance is that fulfillment is to be found in sort of youth and beauty for women. And so when she goes back to being Margaretwyy and now she's young, instead of utilizing her youth and beauty to actually do productive and interesting things, she basically FS around.
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Unknown A
I mean, that's essentially what she does as a young woman, right? She parties and she has sex with the idea that, like what a woman wants most out of life, the fulfilling thing that is gonna cause her to want to relive her life, is to essentially act like a teenager, is really, really stupid. And so I don't think the movie flows in that way. And you know what would've been useful actually is if she'd gone back and said, I wanna relive my life. You know what actually worked? If she'd gone back and said, I wanna live my life as a young woman. I wanna get married and have kids. Right. That would've actually created some real dramatic attsion. Cause then you would've had sympathy for the idea that she wants to stay a young woman and not be an old woman again. Like she has to relive her life cause she made some bad choices.
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Unknown A
But it's none of that. Because of course, Hollywood could never possibly think that a young woman would wanna get married, have kids.
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Unknown B
That sounds like a Daily Wire plus original.
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Unknown A
It does, it does. So we're scripting it in real time. And finally there's Wicked. If you want t see my view of that, then you can. Obviously that did a lot of traffic. Cause I liked Wicked. So of these pictures, the best picture, the only one that people are gonna be watching ten years from now is Juneune Part two. The rest of these. The rest of these kinda suck. Wicked as.
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Unknown B
So you think in an ideal world, Dune Part 2 would win best Picture?
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Who's gonna win?
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Unknown A
I think given the momentum, I think an Nora will probably win. I think there's too much controversy with the others. And somehow the movie about prostitution work with enormous amounts of pornography is the least controversial nominee on this list. But it just shows you where Hollyood is, right? And Nora is the America is evil because it doesn't like to work. The brutalist is America, xenophobic, a complete unkowns just walked the line. Conclave is the Catholic Church is transphobic. Emelia Perez Society is transphobic. Nicel boys is America is racist. The subst is America is sexist the.
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Unknown B
Top three contenders are Honora, the Brutalist and Conclave. Out of the three, which one do you think deserves to win?
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Unknown A
I mean, I think all three are bad and again, out. I'm speaking out of turn here cause I haven't seen Conclave. I've only read the book. But my assumption is that the most interesting of those three is the Brutalist which at least'attempting to do something thematically and at least as well directed and well acted. Well folks, there is your rundown on everything Oscars related. I know it'a bit lengthy, but there are a lot of films there and we'll give you, I'm sure, our full review of the Oscars themselves on Monday. Well, that's all for now folks. Don't forget to like subscribe and comment your thoughts down below. Be sure to check out all of the other great content on my channel. I'll see you here next time.