I

don't remember the name of it. It's somewhere here in Los Angeles. Did

she write it? No,

but she's in it. I believe this was the last weekend.

Is it like a streetcar named Desire?

No, I think it was some new theater. Kyger was taking risks, okay? Okay, wow. In the literary and theatrical space. Absolutely. She has so much to lose. But honestly, the parents of the boyfriend went to the theater this week. And I just thought that was notable. I enjoy

Lewis Pullman's work. I would say that's an impressive pull for him, Gaia Gerber. And maybe Thunderbolts will be equally impressive. Maybe not. I think it's pretty funny. No

one knows what to do anymore. I like it. Like, it's funny. They're like in on the joke. And then A24 retweeted it with like a euphoria meme that I had to Google. But I laughed at that, too. No feedback on the cake, but that's okay. Oh, they haven't hit you up on the materialist cake? I haven't heard from anyone at A24 about the materialist cake. What do you think that's about? I mean, I really don't know. Maybe they're baking it, you know? Yeah, for sure. A lot of layers. Absolutely. And so that does take time.

That classic 96-hour bake. We know about those. That's all the news I have for you. I'm sure something between when this episode is finished recording and we publish, something meaningful will happen. But otherwise, let's just dive right back into Mickey 17. Okay. Bong Joon-ho was on the show last week talking about all the things he did to make this movie.

I don't know why I'm allowed on the same episode as Bong Joon-ho. I really don't. It was

great. It was great. Bong was great. Sharon Choi, his longtime translator on these American stints, was great. This is Bong's eighth feature film. It is written by him and solely by him, I should note. It's an adaptation of the 2021 novel Mickey 7 by Edward Ashton. Stars Robert Pattinson. Perhaps you've heard of him. Naomi Ackie, Stephen Yeun, Tony Collette, Mark Ruffalo, Holiday Granger, Anna Marie, Bartolome, Patsy Farron. Big international cast. He's gotten really good at assembling these huge international casts, especially as I've gone back and looked back at his movies recently. This is kind of something that he really likes to do with these American productions. The movie's story is very simple and yet very complex. A classic sci-fi comedy cloning tale about a human expedition to colonize the ice world called Niflheim. After one iteration of Mickey dies, a new body is generated with most of his memories intact and his body is fully 3D printed so that he may be exposed to the terrors of Niflheim to test vaccines on him to explore the world and make him the crash test dummy for this expedition what'd you think of Mickey 17?

I was practicing the setup to this on the way in. I really, I liked it and didn't get it and don't care. Does that make any sense? Sure, yeah. Yeah. And we're such an interesting time in terms of, I mean, movies, but also big budget filmmaking and things with money where it's like, I would like to see this, a movie like this. And then every week compared to what we are offered. And it feels like it is in such a different category and so cool. And once again, as we often say with Steven Soderbergh, I just like it when people try things. Some of this totally works and was really exciting for me. Some of it I didn't follow, as I said. I think that given the baggage of this movie in particular and its release, and then we'll talk about some of the politics of it, and just, you know, the big idea of Oscar-winning directors, like, next movie from Warner Brothers and concern trolling about how he should or should not do whatever, I'm hesitant to even say, like, well, I didn't get all of it. But that's okay. Like, you know, it would be nice to live in a world where we could just talk about how cool and interesting movies from great filmmakers do and don't work all of the time without all of the context. But we can't because of everything that is surrounding this movie.

Yeah, I think it would be an interesting blind taste test or if you showed this movie to audiences who were fond of Bong but didn't know he made it, whether they would be able to locate that, I think that they would. Yes,

absolutely.

I think it has a lot of his signatures and hallmarks as a filmmaker and you know how they feel about it versus your general moviegoer who maybe doesn't isn't like a cinephile doesn't know as much about a director like him I think people are always going to be willing to afford more grace to a director taking chances like this when they have this body of work that supports it and it also feels very thematically coherent I think with a lot of the stuff that he's done um I liked it I liked it uh I didn't love it I think it's kind of in a quartile of Bong movies that we'll talk about as we get into the rankings where it's like, he doesn't have any bad films. All of his films, I think, are engaging and smart and beautifully made. I think this is kind of that second tier where he's reaching for something that he maybe doesn't totally have his arms around or he's like reaching for something and grabbing it and holding it a little too tight. Yeah.

But

I think as post Oscar blank checks go, this is a very funny one.

Yeah, that's the I mean, everything about it is cool. And what he does in terms of world building genre, directing actors, honestly, like creatures and sci-fi stuff is all so like next level and accomplished uh and the i think a thing that we'll take for granted in this conversation but like we shouldn't because you and i see so much dreck where none of that is nailed down at all yeah and we have to talk about like oh well like why did they forget the water bottle in that shot or whatever? And we're not doing that. So we're able to talk about like things like themes and pacing and the idea of satire. And, you know, and that's that's awesome. But I my hesitance is like it just it feels like it is an on level playing field because his bar is higher. Yeah, his bar is higher. but I feel protective of it also. Right, right, right. Because, you know, I don't want us... These conversations kind of like go out into the world and then suddenly it's like, oh, you know, we're dissecting it at the same level that we're dissecting Captain America, whatever the fuck. Well,

okay, I want to talk about the details of the movie, but this prompt popped into my head as you were talking, which is that the movie didn't have a great box office over the weekend. Not terribly surprising when you consider the circumstances in full. But if the movie had made $80 million over the weekend instead of $18 million, would you feel differently about how you're characterizing your sort of semi-support of the movie because then you'd feel like well it's a it's a hit so it doesn't need me to be like this is okay like please studios keep trying to make movies like this this stuff really matters to us i

guess so though would 80 million be enough you know like is there like we live we live in hell right so there there is no enough and you know the com conversation already this Monday morning was about like why do you care about corporate box office like bottom lines and all the stuff which like I I fucking don't you know um I have to agree with Todd Phillips on that one which is the only time I'll ever say that sentence um but it things are so dire in terms of filmmakers and like artists actually having means to do something big. And so to even criticize it a little, like it just kind of seems like we're missing the not miss like people are going to interpret it differently. Do you know what I mean? And that's a bummer. Yeah,

I think it is, but. What are you going to do? We'll be honest, you know, this is a really cool movie that is also very flawed. And we can talk about that. The interesting balance of tone, I think it's really challenging. It reminded me a lot of Terry Gilliam movies and Paul Verhoeven movies and a little bit of John Carpenter. He's talked a lot about The Thing in the run-up to this movie, at least in terms of the setting. This feels very close to The Thing, but The Thing is, despite the kind of gore and extravagance of the gore of that movie, a dead serious movie. This movie is not really very serious. It's very daffy.

Yes. It's almost slapstick-y at times. Right. So, this movie a comedy?

I kept writing satire and you kept writing notes like, is this a satire? And asking whether it's a farce. And I think it's somewhere in between.

Yeah. And I think like our inability to answer that question is sort of, you know, what we're circling around. And in terms of it's trying to do a lot of different tones and trying to nail down a lot of different types of comedies and every kind of not every character but there are sort of two to three movies within it that are operating on slightly different wavelengths yeah

i think like uh this is this film is not nearly as good as the movie i'm going to cite but ernst lubich's to be or not to be which is about a small group of people inside of a big international story that is very silly on the small part, but very serious on the big part. It feels like a little bit of a model for this, and I think you would call To Be or Not To Be a satire. is farcical in terms of the way that the story is told, but the big ideas of this movie, which is essentially about a church slash corporation that is funding this expedition to seemingly terraform an alien planet and make it a new destination for humanity in the somewhat near future. 2051, I want to say, is the year that this movie is set. And this expedition requires manpower and bodies to make it happen. And so Kenneth Marshall, who is a former elected figure in the U.S. government, who has now lost two consecutive elections, has shifted his allegiances to this company. And he is the leader of this new expedition and has fancied himself a kind of godhead figure. And so he's assembling all of these people to do this work. But the movie is very tightly focused on Mickey. And Mickey volunteers to be one of these expendables, is what they're called, somebody who will be killed over and over and over again and reprinted over and over and over again to help the expedition in some ways. But also, he has love in his heart, and he has sex with a companion, and he makes friends, and he goes on journeys, and he's also running from something, which is one of the reasons why he volunteers himself. And so, Robert Pattinson is doing a kind of like Buster Keaton slash Jim Carrey-esque physical performance inside of a movie that has like a lot of gray, dark shadow and serious political implications. And so there's a purposeful clash of tone, but that doesn't always work as well as you want it to in the movie.

Yeah.