How Santa Barbara Impacts the Oscar Race; "Wuthering Heights" Isn't Sexy Enough; Plus "Crime 101" & "Send Help"

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0:00

Welcome to Screen Talk, Indiewire's weekly podcast, bringing you up to speed on the latest goings on in Hollywood. I'm Ann Thompson, tuning in from the Santa Barbara Film Festival, where I just moderated a tribute to Oscar nominee Stellan Skarsgard, which was really fun. And coming up is my annual nominated writers panel, which I always love.

0:36

This is Ryan Lattanzio in New York. I am not at the Berlin Film Festival this year, though I will dive into some of the films to look out for for the people on the ground in Germany. Weirdly, actually, the movies I'm seeing at home, it's like better than when I was there in person last year.

0:59

They're sending you links to review, right?

1:15

Yeah, yeah. And there's, and there's been a couple in person screenings here on that front. We're also gonna finally properly review Wuthering Heights now that the embargo has lifted and other critics reviews are out there. Plus there's another new release that we've both seen called Crime 101, which boasts a great cast and is coming out from Amazon, MGM this weekend. But Anne, you went to the Oscar nominees luncheon this week, so I'm also here eager to hear from you how that went.

1:17

That was really fun. It's always one of the highlights of the year because what's going on is that all the nominees are taking advantage of what to them is shooting fish in a barrel. In other words, they can just work the room. And Timothee Chalamet came over to my table. I had a great table. He was next to me. I had Rose Byrne and Ron Bronstein, who wrote Marty supreme, and his wife Mary is the writer director of if I had Legs, I'd kick you. So they're old buds. And then I had the wonderful Yorgos Lanthimos and I sat next to the wonderful Delroy Lindo. And so I had a fine old time. And it was the kind of table that people came over to. So Timothee Chalamet came over to hang out with Yorgos Lanthimos, obviously someone he might be willing to Work with. And I underst. You know, he also worked Paul Thomas Anderson. You know, everybody, Paul Thomas Anderson, you could tell, was the sort of alpha male of the room. I mean, Steven Spielberg was there, obviously, and Delroy Lindo was just high as a kite because he got to talk to Stephen and have him say nice things to him. And he was just floating. He was so happy. But it's a very ebullient mood. Everybody's happy. There's no winners and losers. And they set it up in such a way that at the end of the class photo, I could see that this was happening. By the way, the other table, Timothee Chalamet was at one table, Emma Stone was at one table, and Ryan Coogler was nearby. And I saw him leap right before he was going to be called, leap up, run to the bathroom and get back in his chair in the nick of time before they called him.

1:44

Maybe he didn't wash his hands for 20 seconds.

3:32

And he was like, you know, just. He had to go. He had to go. And so they called these people at the last minute. Del Toro and Timothy and you know, the big stars, the Paul Thomas Anderson, Jesse Buckley, they all went up to be right in the middle of the center of the front of the photo. And Del Toro had the idea of spreading his arms and duplicating the shining photo. You know, the Jack Nicholson picture. Yes.

3:36

At the Overlook, of course.

4:06

Yes. So that was why he did that. So I think that's very cool. Yeah. The other event was the director's panel, which I didn't see myself, but Marcus covered it, so they had everybody pretty much assembled for that. And I'm going to be putting up a story soon where James Cameron interviews Chloe Zhao. So that'll be an interesting contrast. Compare and contrast, what they talk about. This is the phase two of Oscar campaigning and it's just a whole another ball game. And Santa Barbara's part of it. They have tributes, they have panels. They have. And then my writers panel will be this Saturday. That'll be fun.

4:08

Well, I do enjoy Santa Barbara. I am sorry to miss it, though. Speaking of Santa Barbara, this movie that we both saw called crime 101, there are some on location moments in Santa Barbara and all over la. And actually, I felt that it used LA very well. This movie is directed by a guy named Bart Layton, who. He's a Brit, if you remember. It's funny. Completely unrelated to this. I just watched this documentary finally called the Imposter.

4:55

What?

5:24

The imposter from 2012. And this is that same guy. And then he did a movie called American Animals that I didn't see. And now this is a crime thriller set in Los Angeles. The title, Crime 101. It's not like Intro to Murder. It's not meant to be like a pun on that. It's because Chris Hemsworth plays a jewel thief who operates up and down the 101 freeway. And then you got Mark Ruffalo, you got Halle Berry, Monica Barbaro, who's very much just playing someone's girlfriend. But it's her first.

5:24

She's good.

5:56

She's good in that.

5:57

She's arresting. It's a good cast. It's a very good cast.

5:58

Very Keoghanish. Blonde hair and exposed roots.

6:01

I know, I know. She was a little trashy, but I liked her. So the trick here is, how do you make a sort of 70s throwback police thriller interesting enough to pull people into theaters? And that's my question. I enjoyed the movie. I had a good time. Although there were some confusing elements in the exposition that I found hard to. There's a. There's a body in a trunk and then there's another body in a trunk. Did you figure that one out?

6:06

There were a number of editorial gaffes, I think that I had to. I reviewed this film that I had to write around and, you know, I hadn't even heard of this movie until a few weeks ago when I got the assignment to review it, which. There we go, there's Amazon again, not marketing its films.

6:40

Me too. I happened to be a friend invited me to a screening. I wasn't even invited to a screening.

6:54

I assumed it was some sort of straight to vodka play to be avoided. But it actually wasn't bad.

6:58

No, it's fun. It was good to go in with no expectations. I think he's a good director. But you're right, there was some real weird editorial decisions made. And he's cramming a lot of plot into it. And it would have been fun to have a little more character development, a little more of what's going on with Chris Hemsworth. He's a good actor. I like him. I think he did a good job with this. Mark Ruffalo's always good.

7:05

And he's always either a detective, a drunk or a divorcee. And this one, he's just two of them. Yeah, or all three. Exactly. Grizzled.

7:34

And they always make fun of him as if he's paunchy. And he's not paunchy, he's just middle Aged, you know, he just has a down bod.

7:44

You know, I remember the Mark Ruffalo who definitely wasn't paunchy, you know, back in the day, such as in Jane Campion's in the Cut. But I digress.

7:51

Well, hello there. Yes.

7:59

He was also a drunk detective in that. Yeah.

8:01

He's also here soon. Mr. Ruffalo. We like that. He's a hairy guy.

8:04

Yes.

8:08

So that's a good no. If you don't go in with Super. But that's the question, Ryan, is there an audience for that movie? First of all, Chris Hemsworth, outside of Marvel, does he have a following? Mark Ruffalo brings quality, but I don't think he's like, you have to go see a movie because Mark Ruffalo's in it. Monica, Barbara, same thing. She's just coming up. Do you go to. What makes you go to see this movie in theaters?

8:10

It's certainly not Chris Hemsworth. He doesn't open a movie. If he opens a movie, he's in Marvel and it's Marvel that's opening the movie. Right. Even though I haven't seen. I've seen a paucity of Chris Hemsworth led Marvel movies. No, I don't think you go to see this in the theater, you watch it on a plane, or you stream it on prime video in a month. That's what this movie is. And I think it'll do really well in those environments, even though the experience of seeing it in a theater. But it does feel like theatrical is not the play for this one.

8:35

That's the thing that's worrying me because this is supposedly the kind of movie we want them to make. And they're saying, oh, it's original. I think it's based on the short story. But in their minds, yeah, in their minds, it's original. It's an interesting question of. I don't think it's super expensive, but yes, I want them to make movies like this, but I think they need to make them in such a way that they're urgently must see movies. And I just don't think this one rises to that kind of level. A movie that does deliver at the box office, that does give the audience enough. And the other one is the Housemaid is Sam Raimi's Send Help. And these movies are bigger and more satisfying, I think, than Crime 101 will be for audiences, partly because Crime 101 is. So I think it will play better for adults. So Send Help. Rachel McAdams is portrayed at the beginning of the movie as A very sad sack, droopy, not very fashionable nerd who is trying to get ahead at her company. And she's a math whiz and everybody knows how good she is. But the new boss, who's played by Dylan o', Brien, is from Twinless from the Sundance movie. He's very good in this as someone that you just absolutely despise. He's the corporate scion. He's soulless and wants to just respond to beautiful women and so forth. They end up on a desert island. Okay. And the idea here. We've seen this trope many times from Swept Away. Lena Vernon movie. Yeah. And then you have, you know any. There's any number of versions of Triangle of Sadness. Part of that movie is the same idea that she's more competent at playing the game of Survivor than the boss is and that he becomes dependent on her. And then the whole thing devolves and we see how they turn out. And it's fun. It's a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. It gets a little bit horrifying at the end.

9:06

I'm really excited about this one. It just Sundance then. I've been doing Blur Berlin stuff. I just haven't gotten to it. But I'm trying to get in there. And it's done really well. And I think it's got to be some kind of a creative respite for Sam Raimi at this point, getting him back to the days of Drag Me To Hell from 2009 with Alison Loman, which is one of my favorite B horror movies. And as I found out when I was 19, I've really fun one to see super High. But then he made some real esthetic turkeys. So that's. We're talking about Oz the Great and powerful, and then Dr. Strange in the multiverse of madness. That made some of us feel like we were losing that director of the Evil Dead films or A Simple Plan or something like Spider man movies. Yeah, me too. So I'm excited. This one's doing well and I can't wait to see it.

11:27

He's capable. He's a capable director. He knows what he's doing. Let's do Wuthering Hides.

12:17

Yeah. So we can finally talk about. About Wuthering Heights, which actually. So the reviews came out this week and they've been pretty sharply mixed. I would lean closer to the mix for all of you.

12:22

It's in the 60s on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, and 60s is just fair.

12:33

Crime 101, the other day was above Wuthering Heights.

12:41

I'm not surprised. Well, what did you think? Ryan, you go first.

12:44

I feel probably similar way to you. Okay, look, I am not. I am never a person who says, you must have fealty to the original text. Obviously, there's a lot of Bronte devotees that are gonna feel like Emerald Fennell totally mangled that book. Look, if you really want to adapt a book as miserable and cruel as Wuthering Heights, you get Catherine Brayat or Lars von Trier on the horn. So that's not what this movie is. Look, I think for all the costuming, the production design, everything that's thrown at these actors, you know, she's in this ridiculous latex dress at one point. Margot. Margot Robbie. You know, there's a wall that's made to look like her own flesh, complete with her. Her veins and her wrinkles.

12:50

And her freckles.

13:34

And her freckle, exactly. Yeah. Not her wrinkles. She doesn't have any wrinkles because she's supposed to be a teenage girl.

13:35

We're sure that she doesn't. Yes.

13:41

Yeah, but I know, we know Margot doesn't know. But I have to say that it's not as sexy and hot as it thinks it is. And I don't think there's very much even chemistry between Belardi and Marco Robbie. And also this switch flip that Heathcliff makes into becoming this dom, sexual master. It really doesn't make sense in the context of the movie, though. I know it's torn from the pages, sort of this one part of the book. And I would say the movie is often telling you how to feel, but it's not making you feel those things. There is a swelling soundtrack and these sort of bombastic Charlie XX pop songs, sweeping vistas of the moors. But the emotional spark isn't there between the actors. But I don't think it's there the filmmaker and the audience either.

13:43

I think this is a real filmmaking snafu. I think she doesn't understand how to build that kind of longing, yearning. I mean, she makes them into childhood friends. They get torn apart. First of all, Catherine never was and never will be a particularly likable character. She behaves really badly. Heathcliff isn't anything to write home about either. And the book isn't about sex at all. It's about separation and abandonment and all sorts of messed up things. And it's dark and it's brooding and it's miserable. So she doesn't do the work of creating a sexual feeling between these two characters. She doesn't set it up. And she doesn't deliver it. She shows us things, but she doesn't make us feel anything for the characters. And I have to give it to. God forbid I should bring this up yet again. Heated rivalry. Heated rivalry. You get so invested in those characters that you're hot for them. You're very, very responsive to them. And I'm not alone. I happen to. I can say this confidently that that's one of the things that they did so effectively in that series. Right away, by the way, just in the first episode, sitting in a gym, looking at each other, you feel more than you ever feel between Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering hats. And then you go into the question of her. This is the way Emerald Fennell is. She's always been over the top, always excessive, and she's been rewarded for it. That's the problem. So she keeps doing it. And it's a latex dress. Are you kidding me? And all of the giant strawberry and all the set design. And I also couldn't understand why the house that she's living in, the wealthy house, the luxurious mansion, why in some scenes it's got furniture and rugs and tapestries and paintings, and then in other scenes it's completely empty. Did that make sense to you?

14:28

No. The other moment that stuck out to me, I won't spoil the context of it, is that suddenly there are these, like, Christmas tree shaped piles of green bottles of gin. That really threw me out of me thinking, are we in the register of a dream here? Where in reality am I situated? A lot of these moments, they feel like they're out of, like. Well, we'll talk about Sam Raimi later. But it's like the Sam Raimi Oz movie or the Burton Alice in Wonderland movies, right?

16:53

Yeah. No, you're not wrong. I mean, it's a heightened reality, obviously, which is, okay, you can make that work if you want to. But they're selling sex here. That's what they're selling, and they're not delivering it. And I'm curious to see what happens. I still think audiences are gonna fall for it, you know, but I wonder how it holds up on the second weekend.

17:21

Yeah, I mean, the actors are, I think, more inhibited than maybe we've seen them before. Obviously, these are major stars that are coming in with nudity writers or whatever you want to call them. But it's like, I have seen each of these actors participate in much hotter scenes in earlier projects. And, you know, a lot of the sex scenes in this movie are basically shot from the neck Up. And as a contrast to Heated Rivalry, where the sex scenes and the progression of sex that they're having over time, the two hockey players, that's telling a story, and it's telling you about where they are, but, you know, in relation to each other and also in themselves. The sex scenes in this movie aren't telling me anything other than here's we're trying to give your money's worth by putting Jacob Elordi's tongue on the screen.

17:42

It's very disappointing, I have to say. It is disappointing.

18:24

So, Anne, we also got to discuss what happened over the past weekend, which there were a number of trailers that appeared during the Super Bowl. I didn't watch it. I couldn't tell you anything about it.

18:28

Other than did you watch the halftime show?

18:40

Of course, but I watch it on YouTube the next day, as I always do.

18:42

That's what I did.

18:45

Yeah. Yeah.

18:46

And I also enjoyed all the commentary on it, because all the commentary explained Bad Bunny and explained what the context was. I couldn't have gotten it on my own.

18:47

Yeah, I, I, I got to do some reading myself. So, obviously, during the show, we got a first look at David Fincher's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel. Hopefully it didn't share the title of the movie, so it could be anything. No, we, we know it's this, of course, but the title of the movie was not shown. And the other thing that was kind of quirky that happened in it is that all the cigarettes and the nudity and the guns and the alcohol, they were literally scribbled out to avoid the censors. Anne, what did you think of this trailer?

18:56

I couldn't see it, and I found out at the Academy lunch that it wasn't. In fact, what we're looking at is a copy of what was shown on tv. They haven't given an official version of this to people, so we're going to see a better version of it later. It's dark, it's hard to look at. And I talked to Leonardo DiCaprio at the lunch. He's about to start the new Martin Scorsese movie with Jennifer Lawrence in about two weeks. And he loved the trailer, of course, and he's looking forward to it. And he wanted to know what those scratch outs were. He was asking me, but he thought it was a great trailer. He was into it. We'll see.

19:23

All these things you're saying about it being dark, these might be true to the movie. If you've seen since Fincher, he's always this kind of Faustian bargain with Netflix. His movies are getting even darker, like the killer. And I don't doubt that the cinematographer, who's Eric Messer Schmidt, knows what he's doing, even though I actually find Mank to be quite harsh on the eyes. But that's. We don't need to go there. Yeah. But I do think some of these Netflix movies have brought a downgrade, at least in the esthetic quality of some of the Fincher movies. This is a kind of lighting that is designed to look good on every possible screen, and then it winds up looking not good on any of them. And so.

20:11

Well, we're not, as I said, we haven't seen the official version of it yet, but it does look bad.

20:50

It's close to it. This is how a lot of these Netflix movies are look because they're mastered for an HDR screen. So then by the time they're compressed for a smaller screen or streaming, a lot of the detail gets lost. So I wouldn't be surprised if the movie still kind of looks like adjacent to this once it comes out.

20:54

And I also asked Spielberg about Disclosure Day, and he wouldn't say anything until I've seen it. But he did tell me some other things about TCM classic movies. You know, that he and PTA are in cahoots. There's a group of them trying to save, you know, keep it on the straight and narrow. And he said that the moment that David Zaslav moved TCM away from the sort of CNN group and into the Pam and Mike group, it was saved. In effect, they're in charge of it and they're protecting it, and they'll continue to do so as long as they're there. He wasn't going to get into the whole question of who's going to buy that. But he did say that he and his gang have renewed their deal at TCM for the next two years.

21:11

Well, that's great. And there's a rumor that David Zaslav likes to have TCM on in the background. So why would he want to kill it?

22:03

That's a sign of age.

22:12

Yeah, exactly. Needing that in the background.

22:13

Well, let's hear from you. You put up a story today about some of the must see movies in Berlin. What do you think? Think we should be looking forward? Let me ask you a different question. What's going to come back here? What are we going to end up seeing? Anything.

22:15

Yeah, that's true. It's like the ones that I picked are, of course, the ones that probably won't make it back here. The ones that'll. That'll certainly get distribution, such as at the Sea with Amy Adams. She's another one like Mark Ruffalo. It's like she's like a recovering alcoholic or she's coming back to her hometown. She's a recovering alcoholic coming back to her hometown.

22:31

Mental disorder.

22:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. In this movie, at the Sea by Cornell Mondrusco, who was the director of Pieces of a Woman and White God, I don't know much about this one other than it was finished shooting several years ago. And so it's worrying that it's only playing at this festival. There's another one in a similar situation that we also will see here, which is a movie called Rosebush Pruning, directed by Kareem Ainuz, who did Invisible Life, which was Oscar nominated for international feature a few years ago. This is his first proper English language movie and it is a kind of remake of Marco Bellocchio's Fists in the Pocket. And the actors, it's got Riley Keough and Jamie Bell, but they are replaced. They have replaced Kristen Stewart and Josh o', Connor, so that could be a little worrying too. But those that. Those will make it back here. A couple that I just wanted to flag. Another director who's returning is. Do you remember a movie called ballast from 2008? Yeah. Which was up for a bunch of Spirit Awards and Gotham Awards. That director hasn't done anything since then. Now he's back with a movie called Queen at Sea with Juliette Binoch and Tom Courtenay. And it is quite devastating. I think it's a movie you'll like Anne. It's in the world of amor and away from her. It's dealing with a woman and her mother has dementia. It's very upsetting, but it's very well done. There's a San Sandra Huller movie called Rose by the director Markus Schleinzer, who is the director of. Do you remember a movie from 2011 called Michael?

22:54

So this is a German. A German film.

24:30

He's Austrian, but yeah, I mean, German language, obviously, so that could. That could see some. Some play here. Other than that, it's a lot of international obscurities. You know, one that I'm really excited about is called Everybody Digs Bill Evans, which has the wonderful, adorable Norwegian actor and doctor Anders Danielson Lee playing Bill Evans. Right around the time that. Yeah, the jazz pianist. Right around the time where he's in the throw of doing a lot of drugs and he's just formed the trio and one of that trio members dies. So it's a black and white movie, and I'm looking forward to that one.

24:32

That sounds good.

25:09

Yeah. Finally, the other one that I think that we'll make it over here is the new movie by Ilker Chaduk, the guy who did Teachers Lounge. And this is called Yellow Letters, and it's set in Turkey, and it's about a Turkish artist couple who, on the eve of their play premiering, are being persecuted by their state for potential pushing propaganda on their audience and their students because one of them is an academic. It's never quite clear what the charges are in this very Kafkas way, but it forces them to relocate to Istanbul and try and rebuild their life. I think that'll get. That'll get picked up. That'll play here as well.

25:10

Berlin is fun. I went once. I would love to go back. It's always before the Oscars, except this one year that I went when it was after the Oscars. So I got to go, and I had a great time. It's now under the direction of Tricia Tuttle, who used to be at the British Film Festival, London Film Festival. So it seems to be coming back into some kind of prominence.

25:47

Yeah, they had some issues in 2024 about their response to protests over Gaza and their kind of vague messaging that they put out that upset a lot of filmmakers. I mean, it was early on, and so a lot of people didn't know what to say. But anyway, that they've rebounded from that. And this lineup seems even stronger than last year, which was my first and only time that I have gone.

26:15

Okey dokey. All right. Well, in the future, Ryan, hopefully we will be in Cannes. That's. That's when we'll get to a Go to a festival together.

26:37

Yes, at last.

26:46

I know. All right, so until next week, we will talk again.

26:48

Talk to you then.

26:54

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