Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by HBO's Silicon Valley, from Executive Producers Mike Judge and Alec Berg, the Emmy-nominated comedy series Silicon Valley returns for its fourth season this Sunday at 10 PM on HBO. Silicon Valley has been lauded as one of the top comedy series on television by major publications like Entertainment Weekly, Slate and Variety, and this season, changes in the air as the Pi Piper guys pursue their video chat app, Piper Chat. Join them as they fumble along the road to success and attempt to leave their mark this Sunday, April 23rd at 10 PM only on HBO. I need sports to have to clear the room.
Stand up and walk. Now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan.
I'm the editor at TheRigger.com and joining me in the studio. It's my more successful twin. It's Andy Greewalls. Fun fact, the Stussies are not twins.
What is it? What is it? What is it? Elder Brother?
What is it? We're going to talk about Fargo. We're going to talk about Veep today, man. Also at the end of this podcast, you can hear a chat that I had with Rare contributor Adam Neiman.
We talked about Ben Wheatley, who's one of the most exciting filmmakers working, director of Kill List, Cite Seers, High Rise, and the new Free Fire, which I very highly recommend to anybody who is interested in a really fun, irreverent, dark shoot-em-up. It starts Brie Larson and Armie Hammer. I'm one of those people. It's a really good, excellent movie.
It should be in most major metroposes this weekend. So Adam and I talked about Ben Wheatley. You should also check out Sean Fennese. He has his podcast on Channel 33 where he talks to filmmakers.
He has an excellent conversation with Ben Wheatley. That's also going up on Channel 33. So you should check that out. That's a lot of content.
I'm coming in hot today. First of all, you're fucking swole. Can I talk about this? Andy is lapping me in the Chiseled Dude department now?
Is that a weird thing to say? Yeah, because it's not true. Yeah, you look good in this T-shirt. It's a big chisel.
Wow, diesel. But that's doing the runs. I run now. Here's to all you need to know about this.
Chris and I are both becoming more active now that we live in California. And our producers, Zach and I were talking to Chris about stretching before you run. And Chris asked if you have to stretch before golfing. So I just feel like we're going in different directions.
I'm taking a more athletic track and you're taking a more presidential one. I definitely played golf the other weekend and half of the time talked about Turner Classic movies. So I've defied it. I am.
Which one of us has kids? Moving past a certain generational marker. Thank you. I am coming in hot in non-physical ways too because on the way here, Chris, I was listening to a little record called Only Build for Cuban Links.
Oh, interesting. And we are of an age now, I think to be honest. You can say, oh, that's one of my favorite albums of all time. And realize you just messed around and didn't listen to it for like seven years.
Is that the case of Cuban Links? Yeah, I just hadn't listened to it. And God, you know, first of all, that's a real record. It sounds pretty good when you're trying to just drive a Subaru through traffic.
I mean, it's really, it moves with you as context moves. I feel like that's how you got to listen. But anyway, what I wanted to say was it's very interesting to revisit the classic rap records of our youth, something we can do in this podcast. Because they age differently than pop or rock songs.
What I mean is let's say, let's say the Beatles, Young Group from Liverpool. They had a song called, I want to hold your hand. That sounds quaint even now, but it sounded quaint then. It actually could be metaphorical or something else, right?
Our man Ray Quan on this record says that he is the black Trump. That didn't age well. You know what I mean? That's just not, that doesn't age so good.
And it's like, took me out of incarcerated scar faces. That's what took you out of incarcerated scar faces. That's not what took me out. What took me out was this.
Our man was trying to say that like his vision is clear, right? Are you really taking him literally? No, no, I want to tell you what his analogy was. Okay.
He's like, my vision is clear now. Like I can see better than I've ever seen before. And what he says to relate that in a way that the men and women and the people of 1995 would appreciate that. What is so clear?
What he says is my vision is clear and extremely Jonas era New York time staff photo as a 27 inches in a. Wow. Yeah. That's not that clear, man.
Yeah, I know. Like imagine we lived in a world where we were like, if we could only have the clarity. If I get that 27 inch, I know I'm arrived. That's just the same.
I know. That's not that. That's not dated itself. You know what?
I was going to ask you about this. This is interesting to bring you up. Not. I was going to ask about Wu-Tang.
But I was we both were exchanging text messages about. And we talked about Wu-Tang on Monday with David. We talked about Wu-Tang with David. So this weekend, this weekend was announced that there was going to be this big festival in Chicago called Riot Fest.
And among the artists playing is Jawbreaker, which is a very exciting thing for me. I'm a huge Jawbreaker fan. I have people in my life who are even bigger Jawbreaker fans. I'm much bigger but Jawbreaker fans.
I am but still love them. But weirdly that news that Jawbreaker was getting back together was sort of over clouded by the return of Paramore. Wow. You're like waiting your own?
Not in my life. But it was like almost just like the Jawbreaker is like the last of the 90s bands that hasn't gotten back together. No. They were basically we're never going to.
Yeah. But Paramore, who's Riot album came out 10 years ago. That's crazy. They're going back together too.
Well, they never went away. They just took my question. It took a break. Which one matters more to me?
Oh. You know, I've written about both bands, Chris. That's not an answer. I like Jawbreaker more than Paramore.
Good answer. Good answer. But in terms of a going concern. That's what you get by Paramore, the best Jawbreaker song.
It's a really good song. I mean, one of them is reforming for all the old feels and one of them maybe made a good album. Yeah. But you sent me a very, very teenage text about Paramore.
You were excited. I think that's what you get is like an all-time song. It's great. Let's talk a little bit.
Let's do Fargo first. Let's do it a few seconds. Fargo premiered. Last night.
First episode of the third season. You can read about it. Al's I remember sitting on these mics back when I used to fly an airplane and see movies. One of the movies I watched was the Tom Hardy Cray Brothers movie.
Yeah. I didn't like that either. You did see it. Yeah.
He was great as twins. I like that. Yeah. Twins is one thing.
But the fact that these guys aren't even twins. I mean, it is a bit. It's a thing, right? Like you want to get a star.
That's the problem with the show. Okay. So it's just a little. This is Fargo syndrome.
Every season of Fargo starts out the same way for me where I am a little bit like what's going on here. These things seem deliberately slow in a way that doesn't actually have any like meat to it. There's like setting up weight like a lot of storylines and a lot of characters to eventually have a payoff down the line. So I will say all this by saying like I've expected season of Fargo to be good and get better as it goes along.
But the idea of having this like everything in this is just like a little bit too cute for me. Yes. In the first episode. So the one actor playing two parts, the parole officer and ex con who are actually like in love with each other is a great bridge players.
Like everything in it is just a little too like perfect. Yes. And it's in its like instruction. Yeah.
It's cleverness. I feel that way also about like the music supervision like the cues of like constantly like having a song and every it used to be like I feel like that has just become really overdone in prestige television in general where like there used to be like a song played in the last episode of Ramantaj at the end of the season. You were like, oh yeah. And I think you know obviously like grays and stuff like that that had very heavy use of pop music.
But now I feel like there's just like a squirce easy school of like in and out of every scene needs to have a pop song. Yeah. And it just seems it's like super confusing and also like way too intrusive emotionally. Yeah.
I find it very manipulative in general the overuse of pop music on the soundtrack of shows particularly in the end of seasons particularly when when the words go silent and the show is not telling us how to feel about something with the song you're basically outsourcing the hard part of the writing the song to capture the emotion. I agree with that. Here's what I think so far and I've only watched one episode of season three I did not say since. I really like the first one.
They sent critics and former critics to episodes I only watched one. It was interesting to see the reviews because they were remarkably uniform in saying well it's starting to feel a little bit familiar now and they're good things in this but you know it's we're starting to the cracks are starting to show. I thought actually to my mind the best review based on again the only episode I've seen was Jim Pano was in the Times who basically said yes it's familiar but procedural is familiar and this is sort of what. Procedural generally have the same characters though.
Right but the idea being the characters that carry over are that cleverness is that vibe is that the accents you know like that is what the show does it'll tell you a different story sets of the same melody basically. So in his point was that's not the worst thing in the world and I agree with that. I'm a little bit churlish but I think it's because I have pretty high expectations. Well I think a couple things I think that so I think those reviews were generally right but I also think that it is especially unfair for Fargo and this is also a situation FX has put everybody in to be honest because they have rushed this onto the air not saying there's any different quality because of it but they're very much still filming the show and only began filming the show in December January and so to contrast that with leftovers season three the show we've given the belt to well Fargo while having seen this episode we decided this for now anyway.
The leftovers gave critics seven episodes and you could sort of get a sense for the whole thing. The one constant other than the accents and the mishaps and the cleverness across the two existing seasons of Fargo is that I think they both started a little slow. Yeah but they're also both about greed stupidity impulsiveness and virtue in the Midwest. I mean like there's not like that is sort of the other.
Allison touched on this and she was talking more about the relationship with the television show to the movie and how when you like take a step back in the first two seasons you're looking at sort of a prequel in a sequel in a way but for this even the setup even introducing us to another virtuous law enforcement character even introducing us to another satanic sort of dark prince of the underworld though I'm a huge David Thulest fan so it's not like his performance is like I'm not like I don't want this I'm just saying like it's very interesting to watch them go back and forth between this idea of continuity in a universe because it's a it's still sort of happening all in the same world having repeated beats that you feel like you've seen before or character setups or whatever but I'm sure that as the season goes on the karaoke character and the Allison Tolman character will have a lot of separation as they both wound up did they're not more interested necessarily yeah they might not and reading an interview with Noah about the season I think it was the one that was in vulture this week he basically said well to his mind Carrie Coon's character Gloria Burgle is quite different than Allison Tolman's character because Allison Tolman's character is basically very innocent to the world in the beginning and Carrie Coon's character begins from a place of already having had the world from that but again even the way he's describing it is well I did it this way so now I'm doing it this way right it is very very hard for your brand to be quirky unexpected surprise oh yeah be surprising you gotta be surprising if you do it and I also wonder and I say this with no knowledge of where this season is going whatsoever much of what I mean I think season one was absolutely excellent particularly after the first three I think it took off at the floor season two I think is a modern marvel and masterpiece of television just across the board but what I know about season two and this is not really coming from having worked for Noah but coming from what he thinks he's said very much publicly a lot of season two felt chaotic while it's being made a lot of it was things that they stumbled into I mean in the very beginning of season two there was a very dramatic visual style with the wipes you know very 70s and that wasn't intentional when they filmed it it was that he wanted to fix things that he didn't think worked and so he chose that to cover up that whatever he also stumbled into something deeply emotional with season two both in the relationships between Ted Danson and Patrick Wilson and Chris and Eliade but also the fact that they had the establishment we know what happens to to his Alderson and we know what happens to his wife because of the first season so we're already emotionally invested coming into season three I had two feelings one was I was dazzled again by that opening it's so funny and it's so weird and I love what Noah does at TV where he's just like I'm having fun come on buses leaving yeah but there was also a feeling of okay I'm pretty I don't know but there wasn't Elmo I don't know why we're back here yet because there's nothing connecting while I saw before I mean it's like there's like a winess to it then I think lingered over the first few ups of the first season if I remember correctly I thought all of her plats stuff is mostly in the first half that season and you just remember sort of being like where's this going and I think I think this because of the second season and because of you know I know that Noah's are good a great television maker there should be a degree of trust and I think that this is probably a product of there just being a lot on and there's like a lot of you know and there's a lot of expectations for the show but other than I think it's fair to say the performances are just stellar across the board I mean Shout to our repeat is good Mary glad to come play for Mary Elizabeth Winston has always been good and she's she's on fire in this role David Lewis is just awesome still bar still bar just doing stool bar Ian things it's that is really good but it's just it was just one of those things where it was the that gimmick the over and the and the music you're struggling with the accent a little bit I can't even tell me really I felt a little bit not that he's not getting the accent right but you still a little Scottish around the edges yeah I mean like I mean like but if it's good enough it's it's just gonna be like multi-embaltant what it's not gonna bother me I know I guess I would just say that it would it doesn't have yet is and and maybe it'll come but like even in the beginning of season two we had a game would bunch of it and you're like holy shit what is this you know there was something that was gleeful and exciting about it and I don't know what is Jean Smart Shop in season two very beginning very yeah she's there from the beginning and it's you know and again you're like okay season the thing that was so risky and crazy about season two is that it set up such distinct storylines because Jean Smart and the whole family and John and John and every Donovan there and one there literally in one they're in a different state than where Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plimman's are and how is how are all these things gonna track but it gives a lot of things to look at in the beginning so it felt more it felt busier do you look at this as do you go to Fargo to be emotionally stimulated you just sort of marvel at it's like chilly heart at its construction and the kind of like the veneer that has well I think maybe we're spoiled I think that's where we are I mean I don't think I was as emotionally invested in season one Emily Nussbaum from the New Yorker was probably the loudest one of the few critics of season one for that reason I think she was impressed with it left her cold because this is in the Cohen Brothers got to for sure but I but I actually never bought into and think is like a complete misread of what they do actually I completely agree to I think that the Cohen's in their filmmaking I mean they're very very cynical and they're very funny and think and they can be arch but all these characters are basically like we are lost in an unfeeling ununstable universe and there's some deep they're channeling some weird deep almost alien pathos when everything whenever they do anything and I wonder if Fargo is a victim of its own success in season two because for whatever reason it synthesized that but also added the emotion that we come to expect from TV I mean remember in season two there's the it's Rachel Keller who starred in Legion she plays the daughter of one of the different Donovan's character from the crime family and the show basically recreates Miller's Crossing yeah yeah Miller's Crossing one of the more that scene that we're talking about is just rented out to her scene yeah unbelievable scene but the way they played it in Fargo because Fargo is a TV show and because was a young woman that we come to care about in other ways was in some ways more emotional I felt I'm not saying it's a better scene but it was everything the Cohen Brothers did plus TV on top of it yeah and I think that that also speaks to just the different way that you have to tell stories episodically rather than like you've got somebody's attention for 90 minutes to two and a half hours if it's the Avengers major Ultron it's an interesting first episode I wonder if we had been I would like to go back and hear the first few episodes of the podcast that we did about season one of Fargo yeah well I wrote the piece that was pretty critical of the very beginning of it for coming around I mean it's it needs you basically need a mariano to come through like most seasons have like a really really big bench player who takes like whether it was Billy Bob in the first season whether it'll be Thoulis in the season and was Bo Keem in the second season who really like make up for any of the distractions that are going on also second season you have Ted Hansen just like the steady bass drum and it's just like you love him you know it doesn't matter to Danson I also wonder other thing to watch here is are we seeing the limits of the anthology format which is become incredibly popular and is it go to for a lot of people because of the possibilities if you had to guess you think that this third season will eventually tie together the first two my guess is I think I think Noah likes I think he's playful I think that they're almost will have to be something I don't know whether it'll be in and I have no knowledge of whether it would be major or the smallest small C's right that someone might find you but what I mean is think about how everyone gets very excited about the anthology season because oh you just changed everything and you can tell a whole story in one season but you also have to remember you've taken away the one thing that has helped TV creators for half a century which is you can't bring characters with you can't build on the back of the success that you've had from the year before you have to make people fall in love again every time out and that is extremely hard and it might be hard when the place you're starting from the only constant is this jilliness and all senses. Okay let's take a quick break from and hear from our sponsors and we'll come back and talk a little bit about you. Hey guys today's episode of The Watch is also brought to you by Sonos. Do you want to experience television movies and music with sound that you can feel from a speaker you'll hardly notice?
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Everything sounds better on Play Bass. See for yourself at Sonos.com to learn more that's S-O-N-O-S.com. Today's episode of The Watch is also brought to you by Amazon's Bosch. Amazon's acclaimed crime series Bosch is back for a third season Titus Welliver stars as Detective Harry Bosch an honest cop driven by a dark past who is obsessed with punishing criminals no matter what the cost.
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Based on the best-selling novels by Michael Conley, Stream Season 3 on Amazon Prime starting April 21st. Okay let's quickly talk a little bit about Veep. You know with these kinds of comedies especially when this is consistently enjoyable as Veep. It's hard to avoid anything other than listing jokes that we thought were funny.
I do think that this is a worthwhile conversation just because it's not strictly in the halls of power anymore in fact it is what it's like to be in the genital closet of power or like way outside of the building. The level of like I cackled through this episode even though there wasn't the rise and fall part of it that was quite as enjoyable where you're kind of watching her in the Oval Office. But the Jonah stuff, the Amy stuff, the Dan stuff on CBS this morning. Do you think Kevin Dunne and Uber?
Yeah. What did you think of the Selena stuff? Here's what I think about the show in this current iteration. First of all it is, it must have been so fun to get the writers back together and be like okay what are each of them doing?
It must have been so fun and they nailed it across the board. Jonah's fake cancer school dessert like five is amazing. I like Danny Egan on TV. What I think is the last season was kind of a miracle but it also showed the very key differences between David Mandel and who's the show runner now who came from Seinfeld and Armando Enucci who created the show and has a very I use would have said in the Middable Voice except the show was thrived in one Emmy after he left.
It's truly amazing. I think Enucci pound for pound when he was running the show and some of his writers still work on the show. The jokes and the christness of the dialogue was perfection and was better. What I think Mandel is on the thing is really smart is he has made it in many ways more traditional comedy and a little bit more serialized and it builds off the ensemble towards a place.
I remember watching the first episode of last season being like this feels a little bit like Veebe karaoke. You can't just say swears and have it be poetry the same way. It's like that a Veebe curse word generator. But then it fell a little off and then it built and it built and then you get to this beautiful chaos like classic farce like the thing about it we have the fake meeting after the meeting and then two episodes later they run it back to the third fake meeting and it was gleeful and blissful and it was also deeply serialized.
You were caring about it in a different way week to week. Yeah. The julialy that we drive is Hugh Laurie showdown. Exactly.
I think we now know what their particular skill sets are. So I thought this episode was very funny. I thought it was BB minus as a Veebe episode. But as a reset towards wherever we're going this season, I thought it was terrific.
I love just and I'm not even talking jokes about stalking structure. I loved that no one wants her to run. I love that she has no money and that's the big part. I think the interesting curveball with that is her obviously having a nervous breakdown and like this sort of underlying trauma that is very real to like what that must be like but also not quite.
It's not she's always been third or fourth in command depending on where she is and she's always been right around there and showed some level of like at least other people think she's competent enough to do with the job. And now it's just kind of like oh is this going to be like is she going to be on a pre-protecial state of nervous breakdown? It's interesting that I did get a vibe and maybe this is where my head is. The show definitely does play differently in our current era and current administration.
Well it's almost good that she is out of the White House because it would be strange to be watching this like. Yes. Yeah. But what's strange about it for me it isn't like well things are crazier in real life now things are so much stupider in real life now.
What I mean is all the characters on Veepe are snakes and sharks but they're smart and they're clever and they're too clever for their own good. They're not they don't show how good they are by drafting good policy but it is in terms of like being being sharks they're very good at that. And so it was never going to succeed if people are turning to it as like well this could be a successful satire of the trumpet. No it's just not that at all because now we are through the looking glass and we're totally different as our world.
Yeah I agree. Well we'll check in on Veepe as the season goes along. Now we'll stop. We have my interview with Adam Naaman of contributor to the Ring or Ritz about film for the site.
We're talking about Ben Wheatley free fire opens tomorrow Andy and I will be back on Monday with a very special episode. We talked to Damon Lindeloff about leftovers and the first two episodes of the third season. And we tank. He's a big fan.
And yeah that's a really exciting episode and we'll be back next week for the Reel. So take care. Okay right now I'm joined by one of my favorite film writers and I'm lucky enough to have him writing over at the Ring or it's Adam Naaman. Adam is a film critic and also a source of withering Toronto Raptors criticism on Twitter and he has written a new book about Ben Wheatley one of my favorite filmmakers called Confusion and Carnage which you can get on Amazon.
Adam I don't know if there's like a preferred source you want us to go to for this? No I would say go with go with Amazon go with Barnes and Noble you can order from the critical press website there's a number of other good new film books under that imprint under that imprint as well. So Ben Wheatley has. Or just tweet at me.
Just just at Adam at Adam and at Dwayne Casey and you can probably get a book out of them. Adam that's a whole other podcast. When you sit down and you're like I want to write about a critical appreciation of one single film maker especially one who's still in like in relatively in the infancy of their career. What is it about Ben Wheatley and Ben Wheatley's films that you notice that was like this is a rich enough text to write another text about.
I remember when I saw his film Kill List which is his only pure horror film. It's a second feature it's from 2011 I thought at the Toronto Film Festival that year and had that sensation that the movie kind of followed me out of the theater. It was sort of like sitting on my shoulder for the rest of the day and I knew that I really wanted to interview this filmmaker. I knew that I had a lot to say about that film because even though it was a very visceral and upsetting experience watching it I just felt really activated intellectually by it too.
There was just so much going on in it. And so those first two films of his Kill List and then his debut down Terrace were extremely promising. And then like a lot of other critics I kind of just started following him forward at that point made sure to see each new film either when it came out or before it came out if possible to try and write about it. And I would say that that initial promise did not disappoint going forward.
He's made six films since 2010. Each of them in its way is fascinating. Riffs on genre, riffs on tropes that might be familiar to horror fans or action movie fans or midnight movie fans but always with a tremendous amount of style and personality and I think a great deal of substance there as well. One of the things that's really cool about Wheatley I remember when I was working on this Blumhouse piece a couple of months ago one of the guys who works over there Cooper Sandelson was sort of lamenting the fact that a lot of our best filmmakers simply don't make enough movies.
And Wheatley is obviously different. I mean like you said he's made several films just since Kill List. And I was just thinking about the film with Free Fire and High Rise these last two. He is sort of not I wouldn't quite say dipping his toe in the mainstream waters as much as pissing in them a little bit.
And I was wondering do you think that Wheatley's prolific nature is part of what makes him an interesting filmmaker that he just the sheer amount that we get to chew on? Yeah I think that's a great question because it does come up a lot. You get these kind of I don't want to say like not reclusive genius filmmakers but you know the long I remember in the 2000s a lot of people's money was on some of like I'm Night Shyamalan becoming I remember Newsweek called him the next Spielberg right. So I think that's the way that he was this five or six year period between films you know Tarantino almost made a joke out of how long people had to wait between Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and Jackie Brown and and Kill List.
And I've always been really fond of those directors like Steven Soderberg who sort of keep working and get something out of their system and then put something else in and then get something out of their system again. Obviously Soderberg's now you know pseudo or claims we were tired from future filmmaking. But I think with Wheatley that pace and that restlessness some of it's making up for lost time because he became a feature director a little later in his career. This is not a guy who was like a 20 year old you know all the big Hollywood ten bulls now are being directed by these 20-something you know fresh out of Sundance.
Wheatley started a little later in his career in his late 30s. But I also just think he and his filmmaking partner Amy Jump just keep having ideas or just keep attaching to projects that are good outlets for what they're doing. And I think that the pace is connected to what's exciting about his movies. They're filled with ideas.
They're filled with energy. They don't waste moments. They don't waste time. And so I think speed is one of the common denominators in his work for sure.
It definitely impacts how I appreciate them. I'm watching Free Fire and it's such a blast of literally and psychically and emotionally. And you but it felt cool to just be like you know what this guy did high rise last year? You did Free Fire this year?
He's got something else in the pipe I'm sure. They feel like short essays rather than these belabored you know I love Paul Tom Sanders movies but they take three to four years to make and release. And you kind of like if you get something like Inherent Vice which I quite loved. But if Inherent Vice had come right after the master I think it would have been you know it would just be like oh cool cool like he's working he's just trying stuff out.
That's a good point where you're saying about like how it relates to the energy. So for people who aren't familiar with Wheatley's films. Are you primarily attracted to him for the thematic content of the movies? Is there something about him visually that draws you to him?
Is it just his worldview that you find compelling? What is it if you would try to convince somebody to watch their first Ben Wheatley movie? What would you tell them about? Well if it's a view and I don't know how that reflects on me.
Yeah and a cynicism to the work but I think also a great degree of emotion in there too. If you know how to look for it. I mean for somebody who hasn't seen the films if you start with something like down terrace in outline when you describe it you say like all these low rent British gangsters. If this family in Brighton it's a little bit like the Sopranos and people's mind might immediately go to that cycle of British gangster films you had in the 2000s like that sort of gangster number one or the Guy Richie stuff.
And if you read the reviews of down terrace all the British critics invoke them too but not as a comparison they said that this was some kind of crazy contrast. Because even working on an absolutely tiny micro budget and you know shooting a film in eight days if you read he's talked in interviews that that film is made with a stopwatch just blocking off chunks of time for scenes and then moving on to the next thing. You know it simultaneously has more energy and zip and pace than all those you know highly praised more expensive British gangster movies but it also has such a huge amount of soul in it where it's really a film about a couple of paris and 360s who are really having to turn the family business over to their sort of and there's a great fear of mortality there and something incredibly perverse about these older people who don't want to feed the future to their kids. And in a way it's like these opposite of what parents are supposed to do you're supposed to want to make way for the next generation in here it's like the parents are almost you know trying to choke that generation off.
And I thought that there's a lot of soul there and there's a lot of feeling and a lot of incredible fear connected to family dynamics and then that carries through in a movie like Killist which I wouldn't dream of spoiling here but even though it's in a cult horror film and people compare it to the Wicker Man and I in my book compare it very closely to Don't Look Now. It's absolutely a study of a family and then fight fear is what she made afterwards is one of I think the money again it's bleak but it's one of us incisive movies about a relationship particularly a new relationship that I've ever seen where you meet someone and you hit it off with them and you have shared interests and then immediately that becomes kind of competitive or paranoid the more time you spend together. And it's an outrageous idea because it's about this couple taking a road trip through Northern England and you know one of them reveals that he's kind of a serial killer on the side and then the other is you know she's very excited by that but there's a very insightful study of relationship dynamics underneath that surface. So when you ask what I like about the films I guess the answer is kind of all of it because I don't think you really have to compartmentalize I think that the interest and excitement of the aesthetics is connected to the depth of the ideas and the myth entropy and the bleakness of the movies is pretty bracing but you know that can also be what turns some people off about them and he's been very polarizing for critics so far.
Yeah I mean I think that you made a passing comment about people in their late 20s and early 30s being pushed into franchise filmmaking whether it's Ryan Coogler or Denis Villanue who's a little bit older but I think that one of the things that happens when like a talented filmmaker gets sucked into that kind of franchise world where they have a lot of responsibilities outside of just the simple story that they want to tell and the way they want to tell it is that you start to get a very like tunnel vision view of what that filmmaker is capable of whereas with Wheatley like whenever the lights go down in a weekly movie I'm just like I have no idea what's gonna happen this is so exciting you know and it's because he's just working in his own mind like and you just don't know he's not responsible for Logan or Black Panther or even Creed you know an Apollo Creed character to connect dots that like a megacorporation needs them to connect. No and even when he makes something that within his career arc is the equivalent of what you're talking about which is High Rise where there's a certain responsibility to a bigger budget and producer Jeremy Thomas who's worked with David Cronenberg who worked with Nick Rode, a kind of first movie star cast that he has where he has Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Moss and then responsibility to the source material because J.G. Ballard is obviously you know considered one of the great 20th century novelists what's amazing about High Rise is that he simultaneously I think understands and honors Ballard and makes a movie that a lot of I guess balladians or Ballard scholars have liked and responded to more than some film critics have but he and Amy jumped his screenwriter to his wife's filmmaking partner. And you're very unafraid to change aspects of the book and make it sort of their own just the ingeniousness there of making an apocalyptic film set in the past right yeah making a film that's sort of at the end of everything set in 1975 it's not just evocative of how Ballard at that time would have been looking forward it's very resonant to sort of see them looking back and see the 70s as a kind of hinge point whether you want to see it politically on the even Margaret Thatcher's election or or socially and culturally the beginning of the 80s and that that period of late capitalism like they are simultaneously respectful of Ballard and really willing to get their hands dirty putting their own stuff in there and you know I make a joke in the book that the title of down terrace refers to a tiny house on a tiny street and high-rise is this big vertically integrated structure yeah so there is a upward motion of Wheatley's career but we're not talking about moving from down terrace to Kong Skull Island we're talking about moving from down terrace to a still fairly obscure film like high-rise or even something like free fire which is a fascinating response to high-rise because instead of a vertically integrated space it all takes place on a single horizontal plane yeah and free fire could have been called warehouse and you know yeah because that is ultimately and one of the things you talk about in your book especially in the free fire chapter is the relationship that Wheatley has often with his with his setting and with the way that the settings of his films and you can tell it from the titles alone of Field in England high-rise you know free fires warehouse is almost as deep of a character as any of the people who are in the film yeah absolutely I mean even I would just talk about his titles I think my favorite of his title is Cite's ears because there's something so innocuous about tourism but it also indicates that kind of visionary aspect that that movie has yeah we managed to make a caravan to return northern England hallucinatory at times it's an incredibly dynamic movie to look at but yeah with free fire the space is kind of remarkable I mean I just think the idea of the film is so strangely ambitious which is to take something that is typically a chunk of an action film like a shootout you know whether you're watching a John Woo movie or Rindelam or or or any American actually you can name the shootout is like a building block and he's taking the building block and just chiseling an entire movie out of it like essentially what if you had a 90 minute movie and 75 minutes of that movie was the gunfight yeah and then you know what problems does that create in terms of actually being able to tell a story and actually being able to keep things spatially coherent and dramatically coherent narratively coherent so even though I think a lot of the people writing about free fire are saying that it's almost like this this crowd pleaser after high rise which really was a divisive film and a difficult film I think yeah on the one hand free fire goes down a little easier but there's still something very ambitious and strange and unusual about it which is not even really represented well in the ad campaign yeah you were saying no no I mean you were talking about high rise and high rise being this and now almost this sort of like reflexive analysis where it's Ballard's vision of the future which is you know now even more even more prescient there's something about free fire that I'm still and this is the best thing about Wheatley is that like you just get it stuck in your in your crawl and you can't kind of figure out it's a lot of fun to unpack his movies and there's been something about free fire that I've been trying to get my head around with the way in which and from here on out we can just kind of have a spoiler discussion of free fire so I highly recommend you see it if you want to save this part of the conversation for after you see it you should do so I've been thinking a lot about how all these you know for the most part beautiful movie stars Brie Larson are hammer shelter cokeley get killing Murphy like get shot in the arm and the leg and then these sort of like flesh wounds that don't really actually affect them at all except they just level them out so that they have to crawl everywhere and the extension which that's like a kind of commentary on shoot them up movies in general and how we what we expect from movie stars in those movies and who's gonna live in who's gonna die and who's gonna be able to continue fighting even though they shouldn't be able to because they've been shot and that all this stuff that's happening on that side of things I was wondering if you if you've noticed that as well yeah the film really sort of seems to humble everybody yeah and there's things that are just restarting I mean like Brie Larson who I mean granted she wasn't an Oscar winning actress when she was cast but seeing Brie Larson who's now this kind of big you know American movie star cinja sort of be shot in the leg and crawling around sort of on the same level as all these other actors you know there is something to it there's also something to the I mean I don't want to overstate it not geopolitical but just the international aspect of the story which is it's we these first movies set in the states and the showdown is sort of between these two groups of characters one of whom has a sort of background in Ireland that set during that period of the troubles in the 70s it comes to America to get weapons and so there's this interaction between the Irish visitors and you know the American hosts in the middle there's the South African Armistillo played the first performance of it for enjoyed which is Charlton Copley I think is quite hilarious sort of doing a version of Robert Carlisle on those but he's funny and so there is underneath all of that this sort of different ideas of aggression and violence and even gun culture like we lose a British filmmaker and he's when he finally makes a movie that's not shot in the state set in the state it's where everybody is shooting at each other all the time yeah and I'm curious to see if the film's reception is if anybody is going to pick up on that and I don't want to say criticize for the film for it but consider whether or not the film is a critique of gun violence or just a celebration of it not that I'm a fan of reading movies this way but it seems like if the movie is going to have a critical reception in the state it might do with the fact that it basically imagine America is a warehouse book yeah everybody's just chasing each other around the whole time it was it was interesting it was interesting to watch Free Fire almost immediately after seeing Atomic Blonde which is the David Leach movie with Charlie Stone basically playing I mean it's it's a David Leach directed John Wick or co-directed it and this is basically a Cold War born movie with John Wick violence and it's actually there's some incredible set pieces and it's really entertaining but there's a brief moment where you're like oh is this going to be a Hong Kong shoot him up or is this going to be Ben Leatly does the raid and it just turns into this incredible physical comedy with a lot of knowing Armie Hammer having this sort of like playing this almost self-conscious one-liner machine like he's the one character shipped in from a Shane Black movie or something and I just loved the contrast of that and the idea of that Wheatley can kind of apply almost like an obstacle course for characters that he's going to put them through to any genre that he does whether it's Hy-Rise he's going to take this movie star and put him through just an absolute sewer of depravity or he's going to take these gorgeous movie stars and just have them crawl around on their chests for so long you could just feel the movie theater like kind of like are these guys ever going to get up I mean I think that it's a longer conversation to have in general about whether movies are designed to work with an audience or you know what you can watch a movie on your own I think that in some ways Wheatley's movies there are a couple of them that I think work extremely well in isolation I mean I've only ever seen a field in England kind of by myself I've never seen it in a theater I kind of can't imagine what that would feel like to watch in a midnight movie which is sort of how it's designed but I think Free Fire is absolutely a movie to see with an audience not necessarily because it's a crowd just because of that energy that it has but I love that phrase you just used earlier talking about an obstacle course because that's one of the things that's unique about him and he's not the only filmmaker I would say this about but I feel very strongly in his case that there's challenge and difficulty in the work and then that challenge and difficulty is rewarded so I think in some ways it's kind of his most remarkable film he and the title is not a metaphor it's clearly said in a field in England in the midst of the English Civil War it's kind of difficult to understand the character relationships to one another there's a lot of historical context that American viewers might sort of miss but when you push through that and push through the static filtered aspect of the first 45 minutes you're rewarded with like just about the most kinetic mind-fucking extended passage in a recent movie that I can even think of and I think for some people that might not be a reward that might be a punishment and that's kind of necessarily a movie for them but for people who get on that film is way for the way that it finally just lets itself go and pulls itself apart is really something so I guess I would say I've never been underwhelmed by one of his movies no and I think that your description of leaving a movie theater after seeing one of his films especially you know leaving Killist and just you just don't have the same reaction you do to 75 to 85 percent of the movies you see where you're like okay I am here's my take you're literally left haunted by him and you can kill it yeah yeah and I didn't sleep afterwards yeah we I did a launch for this book I was really grateful and lucky to do it at the museum of the moving image their program and there's also I just think one of the best American song critics there are times actually got a print of it to show and I was I saw my wife had seen the movie before and there was something about seeing it on on on film the images were so intense the images were so brutal even though it was a small audience seeing it there and one of the theaters I had a rarely had that feeling in a movie theater before this would be I'd seen like 10 times before this yeah it felt like the screen was attacking the audience it felt like when the movie is at its absolute highest fever pitch or at its absolute most dislocating because that film has a really elliptical editing structure and the time it cuts all over the place it's like the editing has been weaponized the the audience that was watching it they were tremendously uncomfortable not restless not bored not even offended just kind of on edge and that included people who've seen it before and I think that to make a film that can get that kind of visceral response even from a horror movie audience that claims that they've seen it all it's not negligible because it also doesn't feel gratuitous I don't feel like killers is a movie that's sort of trying to break taboos or to or to push limits or to set records there's something about the tone and the feeling and the subtext of it that you just can not get out from under it while you're watching it I wanted to finish off by talking about Wheatley within like a sort of larger context of British filmmaking and I want to talk a little bit about Alice Lowe obviously who's got a film called Prevenge that will have been out for I think a little while once we release this podcast one of the coolest things about what is happening in England right now to me is you know Andy and I when we do the watch we often kind of like marvel over like Kerry Frobenhaga is gonna make a television show or Steven Soderbergh's gonna make a tell this has been happening in England for 20 years now almost you know I mean these and Alice Lowe's somebody who has worked in television on a variety of different kinds of shows on BBC and Channel 4 and Wheatley's done television too Alice Lowe is one of the stars of Cite's years and she's got this movie Prevenge out can you tell me a little bit about what you're seeing from some of these British filmmakers and some of the work they're doing in genre and coming in and out of television sure another guy who's movie you've seen and I haven't and I'm talking to see it right yeah is one of the epicenters of this too because you know he did space and worked on a couple of other British TV shows and that's the same orbit as people like Wheatley Richard AOD who even made the double and blanking on the title and so yeah there is that sort of cohort that the TV wasn't like just in a print to ship to filmmaking the slippage between them was I think a lot you know more even kind of even ground it's not like Ben Wheatley made cheap you know small TV shows and all of a sudden they gave him the keys to make a big movie I mean he made down Paris kind of spare time I was self-financed right so you know that little movement that you're talking about you know you know right as one of the progenitors of it Wheatley has sort of become a center of it he's also a producer on a film by the actor Gareth Tundley who's in a couple of his movies directed this thriller called the duel which came out last year it is very effective a kind of a really low-fi lynchian detective procedural thriller but I mean my money is on Alice Lowe because this is just such a phenomenally talented actress her performance in Insights Ears which she also co-wrote is just amazing like the gamut from kind of meekness just absolutely terrifying intensity she's so funny and then she wrote and directed and stars in the film called Prevenge which showed last fall in Venice and at TIFF and is getting a release earlier this year which is a very funny idea which is about a woman who's pregnant and the father's not in the picture and the fetus inside of her is sort of compelling her to commit these these murders and the question is you know not really whether this is supernatural or not but what is the film saying about the life force of pregnancy versus this kind of death drive and how much is she's satirizing to picture the pregnancy on screen but the attention that it's gotten it just showed it's out by Southwest I think is really rewarding and it shows that in addition to being a really fabulous actress she's got some chops as a filmmaker as well so whether or not this is going to be like a blip or whether or not there's going to be another big group of filmmakers who comes out of this is a sort of exciting thing to to speculate about yeah it's one of the most fascinating scenes out there right now um Adam thank you so much for joining uh joining me your book is called Ben Wheatley Confusion and Carnage it's available now from pretty much you know Amazon Barnes and All Anyone Else You can also get it through the critical press um and FreeFire is out now and people should definitely check that out as well as all of Ben Wheatley's movies and we'll have you on again sometime soon we'll talk more movies on what a pleasure thanks for having me thanks man thanks to Sonos for sponsoring this episode of the watch for sound you can feel from a speaker you'll hardly notice you need playbase from Sonos it's low profile design practically disappears beneath your TV while filling your entire room with epic audio playbase adds pulse pounding sound to whatever's playing for movies and sports to TV and games and music and you don't even need to read the mandolus Sonos app guides you through every step of setup one power cord and one optical cord is all it takes everything sounds better on playbase see for yourself at sonos.com that's S-O-N-O-S dot com quick reminder that Bosch returns to Amazon for a third season Titus Welliver stars as Harry Bosch an honest cop driven by a dark pastor who's obsessed with punishing criminals no matter what the cost based on the best-selling novels by Michael Conley those are awesome stream season three of Amazon Prime starting April 21st