Reveling in 'The Drama'

I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So, what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothie. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood? I think it's laminate. Okay, yeah, that's good. That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. Hey sweetie, your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm going to give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check. Anyway, Carvana, give it a whirl. Love ya. So good, you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up these, man. Apply. Welcome back to this Tuesday's Across the Movie Aisle. I'm your host, Sunny Bunch. I'm joined, as always, by Alyssa Rosenberg and Peter Suderman. Alyssa, Peter, how are you today? I'm so happy. I got to meet my baby nephew, and he's adorable. So, yeah. I'm just like, if I'm super cheesy this episode, just like maybe Snuggles. He's a good dude. I'm really happy to be talking about movies with friends. Okay. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. All right. Many thanks, as always, to everybody who is listening on Tuesday as you are helping to keep this thing afloat. I will say this is a... I have high hopes for this episode. We were discussing this before we started because we're going to be discussing the drama, which is the sort of kind of hot-button adult-oriented drama drama that benefits from nice discussion afterwards. I hope folks chime in in the comments. If you go see the movie, talk about it afterwards. And I just want to put a spoiler warning right here now. I'll do another one before we start, but this is we're going to be talking about the movie. We're going to be talking about things that happened in the movie and that as such, you know, maybe you want to go see the movie before you listen to this. You don't have to, I don't think, but if you want to see the movie, you should. And I will just say that I liked it, so I recommend checking it out. But anyway, again, you want to go and call. I didn't even watch the trailer for it. You want to go in cold, but it's going to be fun. It's going to be a fun one to discuss. I'm curious to see what you all make of it as well. If you are, if you're listening to this on Tuesday, you can comment. You should should be in the comments. Stop in there. We love to love to hear from you. Anyway, on to controversies and non-troversies. The biggest movie at the box office this weekend, of course, was not the drama, but Super Mario Galaxy, which took in around $190 million at the domestic box office. And it is the latest in a series of video game releases to do very well at the box office. The first Super Mario Brothers, of course, was the second highest grossing film of 2023 after Barbie, while a Minecraft movie was the second highest grossing film of 2025 after Zootopia 2. Super Mario Galaxy is the second highest grossing film of the year so far after Project Hail Mary. It's going to blow past that at some point in, I don't know, probably Tuesday or Wednesday to take the top spot. Whether or not anything else will come along to dethrone it, I think Spider-Man Brand New Day might, Avengers Doomsday perhaps, I don't know, we'll see. Who knows? The point is, video game adaptations are hot. They're the hot thing. But will Hollywood mess it up? That's the eternal question about all such things. And the track record prior to this recent run has been spotty at best, of course. who can forget 1993 Super Mario Brothers, legendary misfires like House of the Dead. I've long been a defender of the original Mortal Kombat and some of the Resident Evil movies on Paul W.S. Anderson all tourism grounds. But the truth is they are kind of hit and miss. Even recently, the film Borderlands lost like $150 million last year, or two years ago, it was 2024. Maybe more than that. Which is funny because it only cost $100 million to make. it costs a little more than that but you know with advertising and everything that's a I think it grossed like 20 million dollars or something it was just a nightmare they should have been paying the audience to watch that one is that the one where Walton Goggins was like an animate skull no that's the Fallout show on Amazon sorry I can't keep track anyway as the New York Times noted in a piece last week gamers are getting nervous that Hollywood's going to kill this golden goose before it lays all of the eggs that we could then collect and trade for Pokemon cards. The gamers are part of Hollywood now. Gamers are part of Hollywood now, though. The next generation of filmmakers, they grew up with Nintendo and PlayStation and Xbox and MMORPGs, right? Here's a funny little anecdote from this Big Times piece. I'll link to it in the email. You can check it out. But quote, Zach Kreger, who is directing this year's Resident Evil after breaking through with Barbarian and Weapons, said in an email that he warily crosses his arms whenever he hears of a project inspired by a game he loves. I'm like, don't ruin this for me, Kreger said, end quote. The question is one of fidelity. Gamers want to see their beloved projects reflected on screen accurately. And yes, OK, there's something to that. Why adapt a thing if you're going to do it poorly or in a way that doesn't make any sense for the source material? Why even bother? But shouldn't we want something more than simple pandering? Pandering. It's not that great. Then again, judging by the box office grossest, Peter, maybe not. We're currently running 25% ahead of last year's box office. This is the best year to date so far since the pandemic. And that's largely because of Super Mario Galaxy. Also, Project Hail Mary, which was very faithful to its source material. People just want to see the things that they've read and played before, right? Well, sure, that's why you adapt it is because people liked it. And if you're going to adapt it, you do have to retain a lot of what people liked. There's it doesn't make any sense to adapt something that was popular and do so in a way that discards what people liked about it. Sonny, did you see the new Super Mario? I've only seen the first one. I didn't see the second one. I'm not. I didn't see the second one. New one. My son is going to see it on Monday. I may be going with him. We'll see. I thought about it and because I didn't hate the first one, I didn't love it either. But every single review I read of the new one said this isn't a great movie. It's mostly concerned, not with the characters, not with the story, not with the emotional arc. Right. Which again, it's a video. But like these things, adaptations of kiddie properties can, in fact, deliver on on character story, emotional arc. What they said was every single review was just like, yeah, this is basically just a bunch of each Easter eggs for fans. Bunch of member berries. Hey, you remember that from the game? You remember that from the game? Didn't appeal to me very much. And there's a balance that you have to strike because we grew up in an era. Sonny, you remember this. Alyssa, maybe I don't know whether you sort of have as much of a kind of memory of this. But if you were a geek fan, a fan of nerd properties in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, when they were adapted to screen, if they started somewhere else, I'm not talking about Star Wars, different thing. But if they started somewhere else, there was this sense in Hollywood that, well, you can't do the thing that the nerds liked because that's just a bunch of nerds. And we're trying to talk to normal people. And we need to change this so that we can make it accessible to normal people. And I actually think that was probably a reasonable theory in 1985 or even through the 1990s in some ways, right? Especially if you were trying to make something that was super accessible rather than just narrowly targeted at the audience that liked the original thing. But then something happened in the late 90s and the early aughts. And the two things that happened very specifically were Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaptations, both of which were adapted by people who loved the original properties and wanted to give the fans to some degree or another the thing that they had always had in their own heads when they were reading Spider-Man comics, when they were reading Lord of the Rings. And Hollywood realized, oh, you can make things that are critically acclaimed and also loved by fans and also quite well reviewed and make a ton of money. if you just deliver on the core, sort of the satisfaction of the original thing. And so I don't like, you know, there's, you can definitely take this too far. And I think probably based on every review I've read, the new Super Mario Brothers movie, again, I've seen the first one, so I kind of know what this is about. You can take this too far. I think the Uncharted movie was pretty mediocre. And in part, and one of the reasons it was mediocre was it was just sort of a series of, hey, remember this from the games kind of strung together without really being a very good story, without really visually it wasn't even all that interesting. And that's and I argued on this on this podcast that those games are actually really good story games, that they are meaningful, emotional. They have like better writing and better characters than the movie did. So it's pretty funny there. And you but then you see something like The Last of Us, which came from the same studio, the same head writer, director of the Uncharted games. And The Last of Us on HBO is pretty great in part because it just follows the games, delivers, right? Like some of the scenes are just are nearly identical kind of shot for shot remakes. And so I think like there is going to be, you know, you read that piece and I like, I understand people having the reaction of, oh, look, you don't look, this is just a bunch of nerds wanting to control, you know, the pop culture and not understanding what other people want and that you have to make this stuff accessible. At the same time, over the last 25 or 30 years since Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man, basically, I think what you have consistently seen is that the best adaptations of nerd geek properties really do try to deliver like just the sort of specific stuff that fans want to see, but also to capture, to truly capture the imaginative spirit of the original thing in a way that, you know, like in a, in a, a big cinematic way. And that's what that piece is about. That is, it's about, yeah, Zach Kregor is, is like, doesn't want to watch something where he goes to a movie based on a video game he liked. And then he sees something that's like, yeah, but I didn't like that. I didn't like the game. yeah i mean alissa i like to have a respect for the property uh this is i agree i it's one of these things where it's like i feel like this is a silly thing even to argue about because i i this is this is a constant fight throughout adaptation history right like this is the constant complaint like they got the book wrong or they didn't keep this part of the book i liked um uh it seems like such common sense like if you want to adapt a thing like a video game even if it's a not plot heavy game like a super mario brothers or whatever just just make it like the thing that people already like this seems pretty straightforward can i ask so i am very much not a gamer right like the only games i i think the only video game i've ever played successfully through to its conclusion is Oregon Trail. Like as a more adult, you know, as, as an adult, my video game experience is basically limited to like messing around with various iterations of Myst and Portal and then being like, I'm terrible at this and I don't enjoy it and walking away. And so maybe this is counterintuitive to what you've said about this sort of the desire for kind of shot by shot remakes, But is part of the problem with adapting video game movies, do you two think, that people who have played these games have the experience of sort of co-directing these scenarios? And so are, you know, sort of see themselves as co-authors. They've already had this sort of immersive experience of making the world expand. and even if what they want is sort of to see these iconic moments played out exactly as they experience them, is there an extent to which every video game fan is like sort of, you know, in the position of a frustrated director who is booted from a property who is then going to see the final thing in theaters So let me That interesting I don know It a good question And I think one way to answer is not exactly because video game fans are a lot like fans of novels. When you are reading a novel, you're directing the movie in your head. Okay, not everyone sees it like I do. I'm very visual when I read novels. We've talked about this. I'm just watching the movie. I almost don't remember the text, even if I appreciate the sentences. And this is just a common problem in adaptation, even in comic books. Right. You've got all of these panels and you want the the, you know, and all these different artists and writers who have contributed. Right. Like and sort of you have stitched together your head canon of the Fantastic Four. If you've been reading them for 10 years. But are video games different in the sense that like you've actually you like you're playing as a character. Right. Like you get to. explore different corners of the world, you literally control the action in a way that is, like, a novel exists even if you're not reading it in the moment, right? But like your version of gameplay does not exist unless you're doing it. Some games are much more linear and some games are much more kind of choose your own adventure. A lot of video games. You can think of something like Bioshock or Call of Duty, the first person parts of Call of Duty, right? The campaigns is what they call them. they're extremely linear almost everybody is going to have a pretty similar experience even if like maybe you take a slightly different turn or kill one guy first but like it's a very similar like it's you know these games are uh gamers will use the term on rails right and that's a way to think about it it's a train ride and sure train ride from dc to new york a little bit different sometimes if you stop or go a different speed but it's basically the same for everybody and I would, but there's some games that are much more choose your own, like really have a lot of player choice in them. It's interesting though, because I would actually push back against this a little bit in the sense that like, I think reading a novel where you, that's not a graphic novel, reading, reading a thing and like imagining the things that are happening on the page and kind of building the building Hogwarts castle in your head is, is is inherently more creative and you are more like a director than you are playing a video game where like it's just because you're reading a script essentially like you're you're just like you're uh the you are the director's pawn you are being moved around really and and like it's all there it's all designed it's like the images like super mario looks like super mario like that's that's what he looks like no and i'm i'm less you know expressing an opinion than just asking a question. And so that's interesting to think about. But it does make me wonder, you know, because if you look at the success of Wuthering Heights, right, I mean, that is very much not a literal interpretation of the original text. Like, you know, it in fact cuts off half of the story. But part of the reason people have enjoyed it is because they enjoy arguing over the interpretation. And I don't know if there is, you know, maybe it's just the maturity of the audience, the maturity of the art form. But there does seem to be something different, right? Like every generation of female moviegoers gets their own little women in part. And you can see them sort of generation after generation and appreciate the different choices that are made along the way. Same is true with Pride and Prejudice, right? There are just some of these novels that I think even, you know, readers who love those books, who've read them multiple times, can still enjoy the really different interpretations. And it doesn't, you know, that is sort of part of the fun as opposed to a chance, you know, for someone to commit heresy or to interpret the text correctly. I don't know. I don't know. I think it's interesting. I mean, look, again, this is such a... It's both like a weirdly unique moment where like, yes, we're finally getting the good comic book or we're finally getting the good video game adaptations, but we've seen this so many times before. It's like, yes, we're finally getting the good comic book adaptations. Yes, we're finally getting the good, you know, novel adaptations. You know, we're not we're not letting the studio system butcher these classics anymore. We're going to get the whole thing. It's going to be great. And like, I don't know. Well, it's just it feels like it feels like we've been here before and it's all worked out fine. And I don't think video game fans have anything really to worry about here. Also, the video games will always be there. Also, video gaming just in and of itself is such a larger industry at this point than film that it's like one of these things where like, why are we why are you even worried about this? I don't know. All right. I want to get to the thing just very quickly is is what happens is people become the directors get into their mid 40s and whatever they grew up with, they're good at adapting. and you just had to have a certain amount of time between video games taking over the culture and directors becoming old enough. Zach Kregor is 45. And so that's the time when we start to get the good video game adaptations. Yeah. All right. What do we think? Is the I don't know, is any of this a controversy or an controversy, Peter? It's a little bit of a controversy. You go back to the Halo adaptation days, right? It's been a TV show, but if you go back and read the great wired feature from, I don't know, a decade, 15 years ago about the original adaptation, they were just like, we didn't want to do the really interesting movie version because what we wanted was just a bunch of member berries. And we thought that like we didn't want to ruin the brand. And it's there's always a kind of push and pull in a negotiation between, you know, these sort of pop culture forms that become popular and then get adapted. and we're seeing that once again happen with games. Alyssa? Non-troversy for the same reasons. Yeah, non-troversy. I don't know. Like, the movies will be good or they will be bad, and that's just all movies. That's how it always is. All right. Make sure to swing by for our bonus episode on Thursday. We're going to be talking about Lena Dunham. Lena Dunham, she had a big essay out in The New Yorker. It's collected from her forthcoming memoir, which I'm actually kind of excited. I, like, have a real soft spot for Lena Dunham. like she, well, we'll discuss this on Thursday. We'll discuss this on Thursday. So swing by then. And now on to the main event. Mom, can you tell me a story? Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car. Was she brave? She was tired, mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required. Did you have to find a dragon? Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually. Was it scary? Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be. Did the car have a sunroof? It did, actually. Okay, good story. Car buying you'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on... Carvana! Delivery fees may apply. The drama. Again, spoilers coming up. And you should see this movie before listening to this discussion about it. If you're interested in seeing the movie, I do think you're going to want to be surprised by what happens about 20 minutes into it to get the full effect, I think. I don't know. Maybe not. but I'm just throwing that. I want to throw that out there. You've had plenty of time to turn off your phone. I don't want to hear any complaints. No complaints. Don't come to me. Don't come to Sonny and complain. All right. The drama starts off as kind of a standard rom-com, right? Almost a parody of a rom-com. They're going over his wedding day speech. We hear Charlie, who is played by Robert Pattinson, describing the ridiculous ruse he used to trick Emma, played by Zendaya, into going on a date with him. then talks about their first kiss and their first date and they're getting ready to get married. It's a stressful time for everybody, but, you know, they're they're just a cool, hip couple. They're they're fine. They're having a good time with it. While at a tasting for the dinner and after several bottles of wine, maid of honor, Rachel, who's played by Alana Haim, forces everyone to tell their darkest secret. Best man, Mike, who's played by Mamadou Ati. Apologies if I've messed that up. admits to having used a former girlfriend as a human shield against a dog during a dog attack, while Rachel admits to locking a special needs kid up in a closet in an abandoned RV in the woods and then leaving him there, not telling anyone where he is. Charlie admits to doing some cyberbullying or something relatively minor, and then Emma drops a bombshell. She had planned on doing a school shooting, but backed out of it. This is the titular drama. Rachel freaks out. She becomes outraged on behalf of a cousin who was paralyzed in an episode of gun violence. Well, Charlie starts to wonder if this is a person he can spend the rest of his life with. What other secrets is she hiding? How judgmental can we be about somebody who simply thought about doing something terrible, even if they didn't actually do it? writer, director and co-editor Christopher Borgley is interested in the idea of, for lack of a better word, thought crime and social sanction for things imagined but not done. This was very much the point of his previous film, Dream Scenario. I can't remember. Did we do Dream Scenario? Did we? No, we did not. I reviewed it, but I don't think we did an episode on it. Maybe we'll revisit that one. But anyway, Nicolas Cage in this movie, he winds up in everybody's dreams and his students wind up getting him canceled when those dreams turn scary. They don't want their they don't want him around them and they he gets fired and like goes viral on the Internet. It's crazy. Anyway, this film is less surreal than that one. But I do think it's a little bit better for being slightly less ham handed in its treatment of the subject matter. It's also strikingly confident in how it is edited. Borgly moves us from reality to memory to conjecture to dream time with real skill and a real trust in the audience's ability both to understand what's real and what's imagined and also to feel slightly off kilter to not be sure when we should be thing. Is this real or is this imagined? I like I have not seen a better edited movie in some time. It's very darkly funny. there's a section in which they're meeting their wedding photographer and the wedding photographer is like grinning like a horse and she's talking about the order of shooting people it's like we're gonna all right we're gonna shoot mom we're gonna shoot dad uh a grandma's not gonna be there all right shooting grandma tbd it's very funny it killed with my audience um and i don't know how it played for your guys audience but my my audience was very into it uh zendaya and pattinson are quite good. He plays overwhelmed loser. Well, I've always liked that mode from him. And despite like being, you know, like a literal model, Zendaya always has this really good ability to play a person who is like kind of awkward and not entirely sure of her place in the world. This is a movie that is designed to spark discussions. And discussions, it is sparking. Critics like Justin Chang and Angelica Jade Bastion believe it's improper to cast Zendaya in a role like this because school shootings are done by white men and we are tired of having Zendaya put in situations where she is abused by directors. It's like the weirdest argument I've read in a long time. Anyway, the anti-gun group March for Our Lives called the movie's marketing deeply misaligned, which sounds like something Alana Himes' character would say, frankly. It's such ridiculous corporate millennial speak that it made me laugh to read that. Alyssa, I think you texted us, oh boy, or something to that effect after getting out of the movie. What did you make of the drama? So like four days after seeing it, I feel like I still don't know, which is interesting. And I have these very disparate reactions to it. My first reaction is that this is a couple that needs a day of coordinator or at least a wedding planner because the amount of logistical nonsense that they should have decided on way before their wedding that they're suddenly getting caught up in, obvious narrative contrivance, but like as someone who is very organized, I was very stressed out for them throughout the entire movie. Second, I really love this as a Boston movie and it is a very different kind of Boston movie than the ones that we normally see and that, you know, might be broadly grouped under the, like, the Ben and Matt-averse, right? Where, like, it's a version of Boston that is, like, white, ethnic, blue-collar. There's, like, a shocking amount of crime. And this is a version of Boston that absolutely exists and that shows up in this movie in the form of a replacement wedding DJ who is so perfectly Bostonian as a character down to the cap the slightly too big leather jacket. It was like he was teleported into the movie sort of directly from one of my middle school dances. I'm sorry, Roberto Rulo, if you're out there and listen to this podcast, but like you just flashed into my head when I saw this character in this movie. It was just, it's like, so sort of Boston suburbs to me. It was amazing. But this movie is about the, um, the sort of academic and culture of Boston that is, um, I think actually, you know, a sort of much more significant driver of the city's economy than, uh, the sort of blue collar characters that we you know are in the affleck day metaverse um and it really nails it like even down to like i i would need to check if they actually shot in boston but they like perfectly recreate the look of certain like street corners in downtown um you know and the like their apartment is perfect right like it's very much like a beacon hill apartment with a you know a sort of rounded front facade as opposed to like the flatter ones that you often see in New York. And, you know, I mean, Charlie is clearly a speaker at like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Here it's the Cambridge Art Museum. But like it really nails the milieu. Like it actually looks like they're having the wedding in the Harvard Faculty Club or like one of the other university faculty clubs. And it very much captures that sort of creative, somewhat, you know, somewhat reserved, but like strongly opinionated progressive milieu among sort of creative professionals in New England. And I just, the details of the movie were just so familiar to me and sort of the way I grew up and the environs that like certain members of my family are still in, that it was really just sort of a pleasure to watch because that is a part of Boston that is just almost, you know, and when I say Boston, I'm talking about, like, Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, the area known as sort of Camerville. Not the suburbs, but it, like, really captures a certain kind of, you know, just a very specific milieu extremely well um i don't know what i think about the central drama and how it's handled and partially that's just i had an insanely busy weekend and like maybe it just hasn't settled in my brain yet but um i i think you know the movie never really answers the question of how emma gets from not just being like an awkward, you know, an awkward, miserable teenager who planned a school shooting and like would have carried it out if not for a coincidence into the person that she is today, right? And to a certain extent, I think that just, you know, that's partially because I think like Charlie is actually the real main character of the movie. And the movie is concerned with the question of whether he still wants to marry her. But I still feel like without answering that question, like how did Emma become who she is? Like who did she, where is that missing sort of, I don't know, 15, 20 years? It's just, you know, there's this lingering question about her essential self, right? And like, it's clear that she remains kind of different in some ways, right? I mean, when she meets Charlie, you know, she's talking about how he is not just her first love, but like he's her first crush, right? Like at 30, at 28, maybe. um like she's just a little bit different and the movie never it's just not that interested in her in a way that makes me feel like it is very enamored with its provocation without being interested in sort of the deeper psychological question and you know to the extent that i am disturbed by this use of mass shootings like i actually think the movie is somewhat like it's probably more psychologically acute than some of its critics give it credit for right like one of the things you know i don't know how much you both have read about sort of the ways that the culture of mass shootings has evolved right but like there really is this sort of online driven pathway to radicalization. You have, you know, the self-dubbed true crime community where people essentially become fans of mass shooters. You have, you know, sort of groups like the Order of the Nine Angles that kind of are focused on, you know, nihilistic gore as a kind of provocation you know you have incel inspired shooters and so to a certain extent what the movie depicts younger emma going through like is a real pathway to this kind of self radicalization um and i don't think the movie has to be realistic necessarily to be morally engaged um but it it definitely felt very enamored of its own cleverness in finding you know something so shocking um to have as emma's reveal and it just to a certain extent it felt to me like the movie never advanced beyond that self-delight um i do think like i i agree with everything Sonny said about sort of the editing the trust in the audience um really like Alana Hayman this like her just sort of kind of poisoned combination of self-righteousness but also the extent to which like maybe she's kind of correct um is interesting um as is a performance by it I totally forget her name the actress who plays a co-worker of Charlie's who is sort of pulled into his emotional service without having a real sense of what's going on um but yeah i just it it the movie just feels kind of fractured in my brain um and i don't like coming to this show and being like i just don't know what i think right i'm supposed to know what i think um but that's all right no but i think this is i think this is a movie that is intentionally very slippery and i what's interesting you you describe you describe something i think essential about um zendaya's character emma here which is that she does not have a kind of strong idea of herself which i think is kind of the point of the character right the the point of the character is that she is she she moves around as a kid she starts being bullied she finds a community online that happens to like glorify uh to glorify you know violence in schools to glorify mass shootings and like gets really wrapped up in the aesthetics of it and that's what i found that's what i found interesting about her and its treatment of this subject is that this is not like there's a version of this movie where like her parents are really into guns right and that's how she kind of gets into it but they're not they just happen to own a rifle one like rifle um but she is very into the aesthetics of it she's very into this this idea of being unusual as a female as a black woman shooter like those don't like the the number of mass shootings committed by black was zero i think basically is is is what and so she has this idea and the movie does point this out right like the movie anticipates this objection it's and it's very and there's a whole scene about how this is quite unusual and she and then and then she she then moves into her professional life which is like weirdly amorphous we don't know anything about it because like I don't think she has a good sense of what she wants to do or who she wants to be or who she is and that is ultimately what the film is about and this is again this goes back to some of the stuff that that he he covered in dream scenario which is this this kind of unease with the whole universe of social media and not quite understanding where everybody's place is in the world. I don't know. Peter, Alyssa's singled out Alana Haynes character, who I think Rachel, who I think is is is both. It's funny because she's both the villain of this piece in a very like I think I think she's intended to be the villain of this piece as the kind of preening moral millennial scold, right? But also basically possibly right. Like it, she's not wrong. She's not wrong to be freaked out about this. She's not wrong to like kind of want to, to push Charlie to like reconsider this relationship. She's not wrong to want to maybe back out of this wedding, right? Like I don't, I don't like she, she, she's got some points. I didn't read it that way. Okay. I read it as she is all too certain. And Alyssa, your response here several days, we talked about the movie after we walked out. You were uncertain about it, sort of had, it wasn't like you hated it. It wasn't like you loved it. You just were sort of rolling it over in your mind. And it sounds like that's still what's happening. And I think that's the point of the movie. It is a movie that is very calibrated to stress me out, right? I could see you being stressed in the theater. I sat next to Alyssa while we were watching this, and I could feel the stress. I think my shoulders are still a little tight from watching this with you. I mean, as Peter can tell people, I get like, I basically turtle in movies where I don't feel so good. Like I, my shoulders roll in, like if we're in a theater with reclining seats, like my knees kind of go up a little bit. And this was a, this was a, I don't know, this was like a three of five turtles movie, maybe a four or five turtles movie. oh we need it we now need a turtle ranking and uh what was the thing we had the other week um the uh worse than worse than uh uh the spider woman uh the the oh the madame web yeah the madame madame web ranking right we now need a series of rankings here oh no not even the rankings we have the we have our approval matrix like madame web and turtle rankings i'm gonna draw this up sorry All right. No, no, this is great. So I read this movie, the more I thought about it, as something that was intended to make you uncomfortable and to not know how to react. That is what this movie is about. This movie is about how Alana Haym's character, who knows exactly how to react, who is totally certain in her judgment, is obviously wrong. And it is a movie about how those situations, there are situations in the world in which it's really unclear what to do. And we have and it's coming out of an era in which sort of socially like it's clearly in response to the kind of social media 2010s, right, sort of pandemic era of it's absolutely clear how you should respond to this if you are a good person. because what does this movie do? It gives us that incredible, incredibly awkward and uncomfortable sequence where they're at that, you know, having dinner, doing the tasting menu for their wedding. And Zendaya finally reveals this. So everybody else has revealed that they did something bad, actually did something. Robert Pattinson's bad is the least bad. And Alana Hames is the worst, to be clear, of the things. And she actually did it. She locked that kid in the closet. And then didn't didn't come back. And she actually did it. And Zendaya is sorry. I'm going to just use the actor's name. So everybody can remember here. But the Zendaya Emma's character. Reveals that she thought about something. Reveals. Yeah, she planted in her head. OK, and we see. Like she took concrete actions towards doing it. And like very much intended to concrete actions in the sense of she tried to film a video She acquired the gun She put on the face paint but it was never it was all in the planning stage She brought no other human No other human actually ever experienced it. Her actions were entirely in essentially in her head, even if, yes, they were real actions in the world. There were not actions that anybody else had that had any impact on another human being. So far as we know, the actions that she actually took that had impact on other human beings was that she became an anti-gun violence advocate immediately afterwards, which is very funny. Again, this is, this is, this is part of what I was mentioning earlier about her finding community, trying to find a reason, trying to like, it's very funny that she slides from like being a potential mass shooter into being one of these kids who works for, you know, I don't know, whatever the, the group was making fun. but that whole that bit that you mentioned sonny with the photographer that's so funny because the photographer is just like right oh we're gonna shoot mom we're gonna shoot dad we're gonna shoot the family we're gonna do all this right like if i recall correctly that comes either immediately after or nearly immediately after the scene in which zendaya reveals this thing right it's within a couple of minutes yeah afterwards yeah it's very close and so what is that what is the movie doing in that juxtaposition there. It's saying school shootings. This is the, if you want to come up with the number one thing that you absolutely cannot joke and laugh about, that is the most serious that you have. School shootings, let's just be clear, let's not joke about them. They're horrible. They're solemn. And the movie is saying, oh, but maybe there's a way. Could you find this funny? Could I make you laugh at this? Could I make it? And then what? And then you're thinking through that whole scene. Should I be even laughing here? Am I a bad person for laughing, for holding this thought in my head that this is funny, this bizarre juxtaposition that you've come up with? You feel bad about laughing at that scene, even though it is, in fact, very funny. And the movie is constantly moving the viewer through these motions of thinking, on the one hand, this is funny. on the other hand this is awkward and on the other hand this is truly tragic and horrible we literally get a scene later on first of all anaheim's character says her her like her most her strongest reaction strongest point i should say in the the dinner scene where it's revealed is my cousin was paralyzed by a shooter i don't know if she says mass shooter but in a shooting we literally meet that character later and the scene is supposed to be kind of funny right now it's also extremely awkward and almost i mean quite difficult and sort of cringy to watch right like you you want to you want to run from that scene but it's testing you it's testing can this be both funny and also horrific and tragic and awful all at the same time? Can it possibly be that there are situations for which there is not one clear and easily prescribable response? And that's why Ilana Haym is the villain is because she just knows exactly how to respond to this. There's no there's no complication in her worldview. And this movie is about how that worldview, the worldview in which, oh, we just know. And you can just say that's bad and you're bad. Well, OK, yes, of course, it's bad to plan a school shooting. On the other hand, every single person at that table had done something actually bad. Not just thought about it, had actually done it. And the one person whose worst thing was simply thinking and yeah, OK, planning, right? Yes. Great. Like a little more than a little more than simply thinking, but never taking it to the point of doing the thing that is bad that hurts the hurts. Any other person. You are. And also, you are very calculatedly downplaying this. I think this is a you know, I think you're I you're supposed I think there is a way you can understand her. You could there is a way that you can understand her character as simply being the same as all the other characters because all the other characters there did that thing the their bad thing when they were a kid teenager going through some stuff in their life right in that awkward formative time when we're all well i don't know maybe maybe you guys were just totally socially right like perfectly formed and it was easy for you i don't know uh but like when you're a teenager it's tough and you get weird thoughts in your head and you might do some strange stuff and this movie is like yeah that and some people go through with it and zendaya never went through with it in fact she immediately changed she immediately changed and became an anti-gun activist but realized this was the wrong thing yeah i mean but isn't that she actually think does she actually realize it's the wrong thing or does she find a click that accepts her and she wants to be friends with like I like you're you're ascribing a lot of decisions to her that I don't know I'm not can make I'm not ascribing those decisions I'm saying the part of the movie's point is you can't make clear confident singular judgments about these things in part because they are so contingent and one reason why they're contingent is because you're a teenager who can't know yourself but to turn this back on you a little bit peter isn't it possible that the movie leaves a bunch of blank space around who emma actually becomes in the intervening years to create the kind of interpretive space that both you and to a certain extent Charlie make, but also that Alana Haim's character makes, right? Like there is room in the deliberate space created by Emma's lack of development as a character where you can both come to the conclusion that Emma is a monster or you can come to the conclusion that emma is a teenager and that active interpretation ends up saying much more about the person doing it than about emma herself and to a certain extent i think that means that the movie is just like it's a funky little thought experiment right it's like it's meant to like it's meant to be a talker um and it's you know again it's very clever right because like all of the jokes about school shootings and stuff are not about they're not about the act itself right it's like haha wouldn't it be itself is obviously horrific right totally but it means that no but i what i mean to say though is that like part of the reason the fill-in dj is so funny is that he's like an extended audio guy joke right and like his obsession with a particular i know i turned to peter and was like this is your people but it ends up like it's all a setup for another funny thing where like the feedback produces sound like a gunshot um and so all of the jokes like there is there is a reluctance to look at the mindset of a mass shooter in a way like there would be something interesting about humor that directly engage with like whether these whether the people who you know in the true crime community or who are getting inspired by these online communities like there is a hesitancy to just like make fun of that or to i don't know there's again there's like a cleverness there's a cuteness to this movie that is disengaged with the actual act and that ends up making the moral exercise feel much less serious to me but that's because that's because the movie's not like it's not serious yeah well I mean, I, I agree with you that the movie is not, does not treat school shootings with like a great seriousness because it's not, it is explicitly not about a school shooting. It's about a school shooting that doesn't happen. And that's to Peter's point. Like the thing doesn't happen. She chooses not to do it. Which I think is, but I don't think that actually, I don't think that actually limits the point of the film because the point of the film again is the reaction to it's like how do we how do we how do we talk about these things how do we think about these things how do we think about the image that we present to ourselves in the world right this is i think what blows all of their minds is that she would tell this story like think this was like imagine tweeting something what would happen if you tweeted this peter what would happen what would happen if you tweeted when i was a kid i went through some stuff, man. I planned a school shooting and I didn't. Could you imagine what would happen? I can't imagine. Like I know people who've tweeted things that are quite revealing and have gotten pylons. And yeah, right. So look, Alyssa, I actually agree. There is the weakness of this movie is the semi blankness of the Zendaya character, right? Like there's a bunch of stuff we don't know. It doesn't really track with what we know about actual school school shooters, right? It's hard to kind of map the psychology that we are familiar with, sadly and unfortunately, with people who actually go through with the act onto her character. It's a weakness of the movie, but it is a strength of the metaphor and the big idea of the movie, which is in part about how when we find out about these about situations that kind of track this, which are not actual acts, but maybe a confession of a thought, a confession of an impulse. we often don't know when it's social media, everything about that person. And so we then interpolate and add on and build our own profile of that person because that person is, in some sense, a little bit of a blank. We know just enough to be dangerous about that person. But then the other thing that we haven't talked about, and I'll just like end very quickly here, is this movie kind of fundamentally resolves itself not as a school shooter movie, not as a social media movie, but as a movie about marriage. And a movie about knowing other people. And I loved this movie's last scene. The final scene in this movie is about how if you know someone for a long time, you are in an intimate relationship with them. You are close. You're always reintroducing yourself. And that's the nature of knowing another person. You think you know them really well. And then someday you find out some new thing. Or you find out that they've changed. And that is, that's friendship. That's marriage. that's every long lasting and beautiful relationship in this world. And this is, I think, why I came away from this actually really loving this movie is because, you know, at the end, it's like, yeah, sure. We're going to make all of this sort of twisty, clever points about social media and cultural taboos. But what we're really going to say is this is not about any of that. This is about knowing another person, how difficult it is, but how beautiful that project can be if you accept that every day you have to get to know and love them anew. And on that note, after we finish taping this and they have to tell you guys. I'll just say I'll just say it's very it is to Peter's point. It is very funny that the movie opens with like essentially a joke about meet cutes. And then we find out 105 minutes later that it is actually just one long meet cute. That is kind of what structurally it's a very neat little trick. All right. So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on the drama? Peter. Thumbs up. Alyssa. Thumbs up mostly because I want more people to go see it. So I have more people to discuss it with so I can maybe make up my mind someday. Okay. Thumbs up. It's a pretty good movie. It's a thinker. It's a talker. When I was coming out of the theater, I heard somebody behind me say something to the effect of, you know, I love movies that make you think I never would have thought about that. So it was a that's a that's the kind of movie this is. All right. That is it for today's show. Many thanks to our subscribers on Substack at movie aisle dot Substack dot com. Check out our merch at our Dash ReStore. Tell your friends. Strong recommendation from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences. But don't grow, we'll die. If you did not love today's episode, please complain to me on Twitter, at SunnyBunch. I'll give you a chance to see you guys on Thursday, hopefully.