The End of Oak Street (2026)

Hold your ears, folks. It's showtime. People pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

Turn it off. Turn it off. Turn it off. Anybody else see that weird light last night? What weird light?

The wind was blowing all crazy. Starboard was freaked out and barking. There'd been lights from a helicopter. Or a UFO. Aliens.

Shut up, Dad. Water's not working. Looks like the whole neighborhood's lost power. What the hell is that? We can't leave.

I think that our neighborhood, our house, our whole street has moved. How the hell is that even possible? Get out of there run what the hell's going on get inside. Now i just heard. A gunshot gather supplies grab anything you can use as a weapon.

What are we gonna do. We're gonna survive. God's not gonna let us die here. Rick, you only go to church at Christmas and now you're telling the kids God's looking out for us? What about the people who are out there getting eaten?

Get back! Kids! Hello everyone and welcome to the CultureCast and the Projection Booth, a crossover. Once again, this time with 100% less Marvel or DC. I am the host of the CultureCast, Chris Tashew, and I am joined by the host of the Projection Booth.

He loves a good film based on a Spielberg thing or Spielbergian vibe, Mike White. Yes, I certainly do. And yes, this certainly is. On this episode of The Projection Booth X, The Culture Cast, we are going to be talking about David Robert Mitchell's 2026 summer blockbuster sci-fi film, sci-fi action film, The End of Oak Street. So the film is written and directed by David Robert Mitchell.

It is produced by J.J. Abrams. I say that because you can't miss the bad robot at the beginning of the movie. Yes, at least it's a decent logo. I have to say the Domain Entertainment logo is one of the worst logos I've ever seen.

Is it worse than Miramax, though? Asking for a friend. Well, I mean, Miramax carries a lot of baggage. I don't think Domain carries that much baggage, but it just looks like this is my first time I've ever used a 3D program in my life. It's shocking that it's not papyrus for the text.

Yes, yeah. Good God, yeah. The film stars Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisie Stella, and Christian Convery as a family, the Platt family, who are on Oak Street one night and Oak Street disappears. and reappears in the past, maybe, or on a different planet. Who knows? But where they are is definitely somewhere that dinosaurs are running around.

Dinosaurs with feathers, even, which is someone who was a dinosaur nerd as a kid. I was applauding for that minor detail alone. Mike, you and I decided to watch this movie because it seemed like an interesting movie coming out over the summer. Why not kind of break up the Marvel and the DC of it all? So we will be talking spoilers at some point, but pre-spoilers, should someone go and spend money to watch this movie?

Because again, that's the transactional nature of all of this now. It's not cheap to go see movies. That's why we give our opinions on these kinds of movies, because you have to pay money to go see these. At least $ 10, maybe even more. I would absolutely recommend people spend their money on this movie.

I had a lot of fun with this. I agree 100%. I think this movie checked a lot of boxes that other movies I was expecting this summer to do that didn't. And this movie did. I think we will probably talk about that movie a fair amount when we talk spoilers.

But I enjoyed this movie immensely. And I can also say with absolute certainty, David Robert Mitchell... I have not been a big fan of the thing he's known for, which is It Follows. Under the Silver Lake is pretty good, but I was not a big fan of It Follows, so I was filled with trepidation going to see this movie because I didn't know where it was going to land in kind of his scheme of making movies. But I enjoyed this immensely.

I would say this has a certain feel to it, and if you are into, let's say, probably a cross-section of, if you're into Stranger Things, 80s movies, or Spielberg films, this is probably in your wheelhouse of things you're going to enjoy. I enjoyed it, yeah. Yeah, I would add Zemeckis in there, and I feel like Zemeckis is kind of Spielberg-adjacent. We will be talking about spoilers, but I will just say up front, the end of this movie felt very Zemeckis-y. I don't know if that's the proper adjective for Zemeckis.

Zemeckiosius. A very specific Zemeckis film, one might even say. Absolutely, absolutely. I don't know. I don't see that many trailers on TV, commercials for movies that much.

I saw a trailer for this in front of something that we watched a few months ago. I don't even remember which movie it was. I said, oh, well, this looks interesting. At first, I thought it was straight-up horror, the way that they were playing this. Something creepy is on the end of Oak Street.

You know, I kept thinking of the monsters on Maple Street type of title. Something weird is here. Oh my gosh, something is going to happen. What is this creature? Is it aliens?

I don't understand. And then I saw dinosaurs and I was just like, oh, dinosaurs, what a fun movie. I'm going to take my wife to this because if it was alien creatures or ghosts or demons or anything like that, no, not taking my wife. But as soon as I saw the dinosaurs, I said, Well, this looks fun. Let's check this out.

And kind of fits that bill. It is very fun. There's one moment in the movie where I actually said, oh, my God. But other than. That, same moment, I said, oh, my God, I wager I'll give you my left foot that it is.

I liked Under the Silver Lake probably more than you did. No, I liked Under the Silver Lake a lot. I did not like It Follows at all. Under the Silver Lake's amazing. No, I'm not a big It Follows fan either.

I have to say, he's really a big fan of split diopters in this film. A lot of split diopters. There's one sequence in the middle-ish of the film where all the family's in the living room talking about And it is just split diopter after split diopter. And even like some of the framing with Anne Hathaway when she's talking to her older neighbor and you've got the window outside. I'm just like, I don't think they are here, but just some of the framing is very interesting.

But I would say very competently made. And I really like the chemistry between Anne Hathaway and her kids and Ewan McGregor. I love Anne Hathaway so much. I mean, she ugly cries like nobody, and there's a lot of good ugly crying in this, but she's just fantastic. I just think that she's such a very sweet presence in movies, and I like that she's kind of the protagonist of this.

I mean, I think it's kind of split between her and Ewan McGregor, but I'm down with that, and I really like him as well. He's just so charming. And these kids did not bother me at all, because normally it's just like, oh, fuck, man, what is this kid's problem? And I like that they talk really upfront, that the kids know what's going on with their parents, that they're not having a good time, and you can see how that's affecting them. I was just like, yeah, this is nice.

This is very well-made, very smart. I mean, I did... could almost feel the screenwriting book as i was watching this just like okay now this has to happen now this has to happen but it just all came together very well for me. We should have also mentioned i think in that kind of convergence chart here toby hooper's poltergeist because i think it's also kind of in here it this is this is like sci-fi that's more horror but again like poltergeist is a like i would say i wouldn't say like baby's first horror movie it is up there though like it is very much like a horror movie that you could watch with your kids or with your family there's a couple moments of like horror in that movie i would say the way that there are kind of horrifying moments in this movie But for the most part, and I think in that movie, same with this one, we have a film that by the conclusion is there were stakes, the stakes have been resolved, and there is a happy ending.

And if this had been something based on a Stephen King story, there would be no happy ending. But because it's a Spielbergian thing, which I think similarly to Stephen King, they're so good at crafting a vibe around a family. Stephen King and Spielberg, I think, are very similar in that regard. Like, so much of Stephen King's books are about families that are broken or are becoming broken or have been broken. I mean, I think of The Shining, obviously, as a big example.

And then I think of E.T. with Spielberg, which I think this movie reminds me of a lot of E.T. as well, just the family dynamic. Obviously, there's no dad in E.T., but in this movie, like, We have, I mean, E.T. is the dad in E.T. in a lot of ways, but Ewan McGregor, I think, in this movie and Anne Hathaway are so good together in terms of their chemistry. I think, as you put it so aptly, Ewan McGregor is really charming. And he is very charismatic. He still struggles with an American accent.

Yeah. It's been like this since he was on Tales from the Crypt back in the 90s. But you know what? Yes, I say my R's just like this. But at the same time, I overlook it because he is so goddamn charming as an actor.

And so is Anne Hathaway. She's not for everybody. Uh, when I was watching the film, my girlfriend was like, I just don't like her. And I was like, I get it. She's a little divisive.

Like as an actress, I think her vibe and presence tend to always be in the same quadrant maybe. And if you're not into that, I get it. I like Anne Hathaway. I think she's great here. I do like that as someone who's grown up with her, I have gone from seeing her play the teenager role to now playing the adult mom role.

In a movie that she, if this was her when she was that age, she could have played the kid actor in this movie. Because again, she came from Princess Diaries, where she was like in her early teens. I like Anne Hathaway. I think I like the movie overall. I do think that we have this pastiche of Steven Spielberg that's like laid on thick in this movie.

But it has worked in the past. And so why wouldn't you do that? And we can have this discussion, I think. as the episode goes on, nobody else has really been able to nail this the way that David Robert Mitchell has with this movie. This is the closest in a long time that we've had someone doing the Spielberg thing. And I'll go back to, because again, you made me think about it by putting the bad robot logo at the front of this movie.

Super 8 wishes it was this movie. Like, this movie is what Super 8 wishes it was. This movie is the movie J.J. Abrams wishes he had made when he made Super 8, because this is that Spielbergian tribute that Super 8 tried so hard to do and failed so miserably. Like, Super 8 is a movie where I will...

Saw it in theaters, I'm probably good. I don't think I missed anything about it the first time I saw it. I think I got what I needed to. This movie, I think, has a little bit of nuance to it, a little bit more than just a Spielberg tribute to offer something to come back as an audience member, because I enjoyed this a lot, even though it is wearing its influences very openly on its sleeve. That's for sure.

I. Other than the over-sexualization of Al Fanning, I don't remember very much about Super 8 at all. I think that guy who was in a lot of the Godzilla movies was in it, too. The dad, right, and the lanterns. True detective, but in the DC universe, okay?

Yeah, I mean, okay, like, yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if Matthew McConaughey was in it, he'd probably be too on the nose, I guess. But yeah, I totally agree that this is such a pastiche. And it's very funny that you brought up Poltergeist.

That was on my mind as well. And you brought up Stephen King, also on my mind. And it was on my mind at a certain point in this movie where I was just thinking, this reminds me a lot of Stephen King. I hope that they don't fuck up the ending. And I think...

Right. I... I was reminded a lot of Under the Dome because of the whole, like, the dome comes down, nobody knows what happened. Nobody knows why this came about. Same thing with this.

The entire neighborhood moves 200,000 or 200 million years in the past. Then they, yeah, and I'm just like, oh, I wonder if that piece of land moved, you know, if they flip-flopped kind of thing. Yeah. I like that there's the premise. I like that there's the little flashes of those things, like the neighbor lady who's got the old plant in her yard, or the very not nice neighbor.

Who's got the big pile of shit in his yard. I was waiting for the Ian Malcolm delivery on that line. That is one big pile of shit. I was wondering myself, and I was kind of wondering if they were going to dig through it and they'd find like weird shit inside of the show. I assumed it was, I assumed that that's what they were.

Again, there's some imagery in this movie that is evocative of a certain thing. And the whole idea of, you said poltergeist. Yes. Same year that this is set. And, I like that David Robert Mitchell is from Michigan.

He really tries to put Michigan in his movies. He fails so hard in this one because this is so Southern California. And I'm just like, we don't have hills like that. We do not have... It's supposed to be Michigan because you hear the...

They talk about the tigers on the radio. They're talking about Alan Trammell. She's got a Michigan... magnet on their refrigerator there's a lot of michigan stuff. I just i'm sorry i just watched the frighteners so i just figured it's one of these like okay sure just like this is supposed to be southern california but it's new zealand like this just looks like socal looks like they filmed it like 20 minutes up the road from the 20th century fox studio or something. Absolutely i was waiting for like i mean this neighborhood so looks like the poltergeist neighborhood so looks like it yeah Yeah, it was pretty funny when I was just like, oh yeah, this is supposed to be Michigan.

This is so not Michigan at all. When they can look up and see the houses going up the hill to basically, to me, a small mountain. I'm just like, yeah, no, Michigan is flat. We are so flat. I'm sure you're familiar with very flat lands where you're at.

We are very flat over here as well. So it was actually filmed in Atlanta, so... Still on the coast, still on the coast, though. So still coastal weather, I guess a different coast, but it doesn't it doesn't look like the Midwest, which which I mean, again, like I again, regardless of whether or not that's a thing that needed to be successful, I will say they do evoke exactly what they are going for, which is a neighborhood right out of the 80s. I think the problem that is the comparative, obviously, is when I think of something that was doing this better.

I already mentioned Stranger Things. Stranger Things nailed that thing specifically. Early seasons, maybe not so much in the later seasons. When I talk about Stranger Things, let's just pretend there's nothing past the third season, essentially, in terms of what the show's trying to do. But It nailed that more than this does, but I will say, because this is not an extended period of time we're spending here, it's just a film, it's perfectly, I think, acceptable.

But yeah, if you're going to set your movie in the Midwest in the 80s, in this day and age, post-Stranger Things, you've got to nail it a little bit more. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I'll take it. I was just like, okay, that's kind of a nice little thing that they're making these Michigan references. when she goes to Cornell at the end, I was like, okay, I was hoping for more like State or U of M, but she wants to be like Carl Sagan. And I was so happy to hear a Carl Sagan name drop because I freaking love that guy and I love Cosmos.

I want to ask you, do you think that the daughter is lesbian? There's no love interest for her in the movie, which feels intentional, obviously. I don't know. It So it's not the girl that they rescue? It's not the one that the brother is ogling?

The Jeanette Christensen character? I don't know. She's talking pretty hardcore to that blonde when they're doing the whole tossing of the water balloon back and forth. And then she gets real wet. Jesus, Mike White.

I was like, wow, is this going somewhere? But no, I was curious because the brother is... Literally spying on this girl. And that was, again, reminded me of Super 8 with that over-sexualization of Elle Fanning, who really shouldn't have been sexualized until like Alien Badlands or Predator Badlands, where she looks smoking hot and is fantastic. Thank you.

Absolutely. She's so good in that movie and playing a double role. Oh, so good. By the way, talk about a movie I'm bummed we did not talk about when it came out. What a great film.

Yeah, I watched it recently. It was just like, holy shit. Like, look, again, I appreciate and am someone who I think, and this is me personally, I know you have a different feeling on it, but I hated Prometheus when I saw it. Prometheus and same with Covenant. Prometheus and Covenant are two movies I go back to a lot now.

And that's because Romulus is really bad. And Romulus is not a movie that I have any interest in returning to. And so if there is a more alien that can be returned to, I'm okay with it. being something more like Prometheus and Covenant because it's kind of the Star Wars prequel thing where at least those were original ideas with Prometheus and Covenant in a way. In Romulus, it was just Alien again. And that, I mean, I've seen some reviews about this movie having that issue where it's like, this is a Spielberg, like, AI Spielberg vibe.

And it's like, nah. I mean, yeah, of course it is, but I'm okay with that. But why is it Spielberg's, why is Spielberg the only one allowed to do it? Right, right. To look at, and this is kind of the thing I was talking about in my opening thesis here, was Spielberg can't even do it anymore.

You know how I know? Because we watched him not being able to do it with a movie that he should have been able to do it with. A Spielberg alien movie, the first time he's returned to aliens since Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and it's that? Really? Yeah.

I would really be curious to see what Spielberg returning to dinosaurs looked like, because if it was something like this, I would get it. But I don't think it would be this good. I think that this is a vibe. This is a total tone overlay of your movie. And if you're able to nail it, I think you doing that is overlooked because it adds to what we're watching as opposed to being the whole reason we're watching it.

Stranger Things did so much without like it did so much. It didn't just hang its hat on the 80s nostalgia. By the end of the show, it did. But early on, it was like it was doing its own thing and wasn't letting the 80s of it all get in the way. That was just incidental.

Same with this movie. Like these kind of movies work better being set in the 80s. They just do like that tone and expectation. The kids feel like it's all a stereotype, but it's a stereotype that I think work. One, it's nice that the TV, you know, you've got the love boat, you've got the three stooges, you've got some other stuff on there.

It's not, you know, totally awesome 80s kind of thing. And I mean, to the point where there are a few times where I'm like, well, why didn't she, like when she sees the plant in the old lady's yard, I'm like, why doesn't she just take a picture of the plant and use AI to drive it? And I was like, oh, wait, wait, wait. Our times now are so boring, aren't they? Just like, they're the worst, the absolute worst.

Yeah. And then I would lie to her and just be like, no, no, it's this thing. It's a it's a totally a pineapple plant. It's like, what? No, what?

Well, that's the question I have. Like, if this were to take place now, what in God's name would I how would I react to that? If you took a picture that you were just like, I have found this out in the real world, I would just be like, I'm reporting this to the FBI. It would be like, I don't know, it'd be like if you found a body that had a thing that said Jimmy Hoffa on it, it'd be like, I'm taking a picture of this and uploading this to Claw, it'd be like, I'm having to inform the CIA, FBI, and NSA all at once about this. I think what's funny is we live in a time now that feels just so technologically advanced that the pastoral nature of just not being able to look up something on your phone is just mind-boggling.

Yeah, no, it's setting this in 82 is a very smart move. And having these characters with these complications, like the whole thing of how Ewan McGregor's character is supposed to be working at Chrysler, but he actually hasn't been. So he's been delivering pizzas on the side to try to make ends meet. her with her whole writing and that she's actually a really good writer is fantastic. And the moment when they find that the basement's flooded and she's lost everything because this is not uploading to the cloud. There are no backups.

There are no flash drives. There is a fucking paper that she was typing on. And that was it. I feel like a movie not as well written as this one would have spent more time on that scene. But this movie, because of the pace, and it feeling just like a constant ball in motion, it doesn't allow the characters that long to sit in that moment.

And I appreciate that about the movie. Like it's, there's a lot of forward momentum in this movie. And in another movie, it could be a bad thing because we don't get to spend a lot of time with the characters, but I don't need to, like, I understand the characters more or less immediately because again, like they're a 80s stereotype. Like this is like, oh, they're having family problems. In the 80s, it was, I didn't have a job.

Like that's, Come on. You know how pastoral that feels now? Right. Or a bully that, you know, like, I like that the kid. He crashed my bike.

Like, okay, that's all we have to worry about. And it's kind of serious. The one kid's like, you could have killed that guy. You know, like, he flew off his fucking bicycle and broke his arm. That's not funny, man.

So, like, I'm okay with the older brother wanting to protect his younger brother and beat the shit out of this kid. And I like that he's kind of a threat, but then when the threat actually happens, it's like, what are we doing? We're in a whole different world now. We just need to stop what we're doing. We could get eaten by dinosaurs.

And I really, to go back to the Spielberg of it all, I really think that the dinosaurs look really good in this. And did it take me aback that they are furry and feathery? Yes, it sure did, because I grew up in a different time than you. And my dinosaurs. To be fair, so did I.

Jurassic Park was no feather dinosaurs. And that's the bar for. Yeah, sure. But but that's the bar that I think anyone my age is setting is Jurassic Park. Like and those are the that's the last vestige of those kinds of dinosaurs, because now it's now they have feathers because that's, you know, if you're going to make a movie about scientifically accurate dinosaurs anymore.

Mm hmm. I felt so bad for my poor little Ankylosaurus. He's just out there just chewing on some grass or whatever and gets eaten up by a big old Diplodocus or something. And I'm just like, I'm having a great time watching these dinosaurs. I really liked the big turtle dinosaurs that they had.

I think the jump scares that they have throughout this are very well-timed and they do what they need to do. I just felt like this was really running on all cylinders. Yeah, occasionally I was just like, oh, this is kind of like that movie. But I wasn't sitting there stewing in my own juices, just being like, oh, damn, this is a fucking Spielberg pastiche. This is terrible.

I was just like, oh, this is nice. I like the way that the story is running. I really like all of these characters. Like I said, the kids aren't awful, and you get to follow them through quite a bit of it. But I like that you're more following the parents and just seeing their reactions to things.

I think that these two kids are so much... better than those two kids in that Jurassic, I think it was the first Jurassic World one, where I'm just like, I don't care if these. Kids live or die. Well, and again, to juxtapose it against the kind of the stressors in that story are the same ones in this one. We just don't see it there. We see it here, which is our parents are getting divorced.

Yeah, which is, yeah, very apropos comparison. I think for me, does that better and this is the whole movie like we're dealing with it directly because we're seeing the ewan mcgregor and anne hathaway character interacting but i like that the film actually because again like because it's a spielberg and not a king thing it's going to have a a happy ending not a downer of an ending though there was a downer ending originally for the movie which really oh yeah look. Should we branch into spoiler territory here I guess, yeah. I think this is a movie worth checking out in theaters. I don't, yeah, I think go and see it in theaters because I think at this point, if this is completely just a transactional way of doing things, support people whose movies are worth supporting that are original movies, because yes, this is a Steven Spielberg thing, but it's still an original movie.

It's not a Marvel thing. It's not a DC thing. And it, I think, deserves to have People go out and see it in theaters because it needs to make more money because these kinds of movies should be existing more often, especially from directors who, if able to, would probably work on other much bigger things. But this is like how you get there in some ways is kind of cutting your teeth on something like this that you make yourself. And now if this movie is financially successful, back the Brinks truck up to David Robert Mitchell's house and let him make something with an IP pre-attached or something, like not just a thing of something else.

But yeah, go see this for sure. If we want to talk spoilers, let's do it. All right. Yeah. So tell me about the original ending to this.

So the original ending is, and again, I don't know if it's one of these, like we saw army of darkness one too many times thing, but I think, you know, by me just mentioning that what it is, they jump through the portal and they just, you know, end up in early settler time. I was wondering, like, when they were jumping into that portal, like, they don't know where this is going to go. Where is this going? Well, and that's the romantic sci-fi of it. Like, that's the Spielberg of it.

There's that, like, the little, the wind chimes, the little xylophone playing. Like, that's the Spielberg of it, right? And that's the thing. Like, I know that people hate that, but this is one of those movies where when Ewan McGregor's character dies, even I was like, oh, shit. Right.

It's an earned moment in a movie where I know by the end of it, he will be fine because it's a Steven Spielberg thing. And in those movies, nothing bad things happen, but for a transformative reason. which is why bad things happen like bad things in these universes where it's an exterior bad thing bearing down on the characters not a villainous bad thing because even in E.T. by the end of it Peter Coyote is as a changed man at least that's the the feeling you get by the end of the movie and And that's a Spielberg thing. But man, I wanted to hear your thoughts because that scene is just wild to me. Holy shit. So when the dinosaur bites his fucking leg off, that's when I yelled in the theater.

I was just like, oh my god! I did not think that I was going to be seeing Ewan McGregor have his leg bit off. And then I thought for sure, like, wow, he's going to spend the rest of this movie... with his leg in a tourniquet, and this is going to be awful. Like, how are they going to do this? No, no worries.

Yeah, for about two seconds, and then he's just breakfast food for the dinosaur. Yeah, I was wondering about that portal, and I was wondering where it's going to go back to and everything, but yeah, it's a nice romantic thing, and it leads us right into a Robert Zemeckis ending with that, but I want to talk a little bit more about the movie now that we're kind of freed up. The whole idea, though, of... So, the Ewan McGregor that we see all up, kind of a branched-off version of the Ewan McGregor who delivers a pizza at the end of the movie, who hasn't gone through this harrowing experience. Yeah, that's the fuckaroo of the whole movie, unfortunately, right?

It's like. Yeah, so now his arc. Isn't an arc anymore. It dead ends and then it loops back around. Right.

We haven't gotten far enough in The Sopranos for this, but the thing that always comes to mind is, where's my arc, Tony? Where's my arc? What if I don't have an arc? Which is a much later in the show thing. But I think about that because it's, he runs into a wall.

His character dies. The character that we see. So it's what we have to then believe is that Anne Hathaway, because I think you already alluded to this, is the main character, which means that he is filled in with what happens by her and the story that she writes. And I think that we, as the audience, again, romantically, are led to believe that he reads it and goes, okay. And here's the thing, though, to be fair, and this is where I come in again as someone who goes to therapy and is emotionally kind of not in tune with myself, but I think that's the best way of putting it, just sounds kind of I don't know, deep, I think is a word that gets used in a negative way.

And I think this movie is about Anne Hathaway's character having that emotional change. Because to Ewan McGregor's point, he's like, you were going to leave us, me and the kids, which is really awful. And, you know, she talks, we hear early on the story because she's a writer that she's going to, she has this yellow suitcase always ready and waiting. I kept waiting for that yellow suitcase to show up in the movie. And it shows up in the flooding scene, where she, like, seizes it.

And it's okay, so metaphorically, your, you know, your kind of, like, magic carpet, your golden parachute, again, yellow, is gone now, and you have, like, no choice other than to accept the fact that Ewan McGregor was right, and that you are just trying to shirk responsibilities and be... present the way again yes he's a goofball but he's it's not like he's not working he is going and like doing the thing with the pizza which is better than nothing he's drinking though which is again like that's the kind of spielbergian thing where he's a flawed character who has to learn the error of his own ways but that's right he's yeah he's secondary to anne hathaway's character like actually accepting responsibility and like owning up to stuff and it sounds like like being an adult and being present.

And I think that if you look at it that way, Ewan McGregor's character not ultimately having an arc doesn't matter that much because Anne Hathaway is the main character, but it is kind of goofy. Because you're like, oh, well, now he's going to have to be filled in. It's like that thing with Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates, but that's the point of the movie. It's like, here, I'm going to have to watch this VHS every day. That's funny because that's the conceit of the movie having to be played out.

Here, it's like, okay, I guess I believe you. There are dinosaurs. I guess that's the redeeming thing. It's like, they're not full of it. There are the dinosaurs.

Right. And at least there's photo evidence of him with that sledgehammer, which I love that he uses a sledgehammer in this movie. It felt like they were, I don't know, like everybody had like their own weapons. They're like a D & D party or something, except for the girl. The girl didn't have anything.

But Ewan McGregor's always got a bat or a sledgehammer. The kid's got the bow and arrow, the most useless bow and arrow in the world. And then Anne Hathaway's got the, yeah, that's true. And I love her just stabbing that bow so much. That was really good.

She gets some really good hits in this movie, which I appreciate, and uses the shotgun that the old lady has from across the street. I like that they bring back the librarian at the end, though, man, oh man, that librarian's husband must be making bank, because I don't think she's making that much in the library to own that house. That crazy Elvira or Rocky Horror Picture Show house. Yeah, it's like, what the hell? I was going to say, you know, because we have these like really wide shots and you mentioned it like under the dome, which that was a television adaptation at one point on like Amazon, wasn't it?

I think with the guy. God in heaven, okay. A lesser one, I guess. You want to talk about something where it's like, okay, what's an IP? You could do so much with this IP now.

Their story is over. But what if people jumped out of the thing? What about the people that didn't get away? You just tell the story of all the people that are running around in the jungle with the dinosaurs. Right.

I have no idea. So much of this is not explained in the best way that you could just, if you really wanted to, and if this is financially successful, you could do more of these movies without any of these people. And there you go. There's an IP that has dinosaurs that isn't just Jurassic Park. Because man, that's the thing I really wanted to talk about for a second with this movie.

How bad dinosaur movies kind of have been since Jurassic Park. And this is, again, I think this is an interesting side tangent for 30 to 40 seconds. Jurassic Park gets bad after You Tell Me, I'll Tell You, where you come in at this. I have probably a different answer than you do. And then side question, does it come back at any point?

Okay. I get, yeah, okay. It gets bad after the first one. I despise the second movie. I really like the third movie.

And that's about it. We have watched the last Jurassic World, not Dominion, birth. Oh, right. Because that's not the last one anymore. The last one that I thought was the last one isn't the last one anymore.

Yeah. It's the Xenomorph one now. Which, with Colin Trevorrow, another Spielberg acolyte behind the camera... that movie is just filled with Spielberg references. To the point where they put the river ride from the original movie that they didn't put in the original movie that made it into the most recent movie, which then answers why they didn't do it in the original movie, because it's really bad and not, I wouldn't say dumb, but it's just logically such a leap that a T-Rex can just eat you through a raft. Yeah, it's very goofy.

Yeah. But some of the stuff with the boat at the beginning, I was just like, okay, this is the orca from Jaws, and then they're just using that Williams cue of the Jurassic Park music like crazy. There's a shot at the end where somebody's got a flare, and they're moving the flare, and I'm just like, okay, yeah. It's like an homage to Spielberg movies, but mostly an homage to the first Jurassic Park movie. It's really weird how it's kind of like a remix of itself.

But yeah, so anyway, that's where I land when it comes to dinosaurs. I'm okay with this latest Rebirth movie, but all of the Jurassic worlds with Chris Pratt, not a big fan of. All the. Stuff that went on in the second one, especially, I mean, I was okay with the movie until the end of the movie when Spielberg was just like, oh, I'm going to do Godzilla now. That was awful to me.

I just cannot stand that. So yours like a sine wave. It's like up, then down, then up again, then down and just down. Very, very down. There's a little like dead cat bounce at the end, which is appropriate for this movie because they kill so many cats in it.

Yeah, man. Yeah. My girlfriend and I were joking. I was like, cause she, she's one of those. People that, and I get it, like, really sensitive to that in movies, which I feel for because I've been able to divorce myself from it long ago because just, you see so many movies, but, like, they do that thing in this movie so well, it's like, cat moves in one shot, next shot, okay, cat must be dead.

Right, and you even. Get those little compies or whatever, like, I think they're eating the other cat that you see, because there's the cat that's also in the house that they go into. and the cat leaves with them. And then later on, you see those little dinosaurs. I think they're the same ones that ate John Hammond. Right, right.

Oh yeah, I forgot that he lived in the movie. I almost said in real life. I was going to say, Peter Stormare was the one that they ate in the movie. No, you're absolutely right. That was kind of my problem too, was just Being a fan of the book first and having, like, Ian Malcolm live and then how, like, Creighton had to rewrite his own stuff and be like, oh, no, no, he's not actually dead.

They answered it in the first, like, couple lines of the second book. They're like, hey, they thought I was dead and I looked dead, but I wasn't dead. Like, oh, my God. Yeah. So funny.

Yeah. But yeah, I still, in my mind, it's still John Hammond dies. So it's a better movie for me. I think. For me, it goes Jurassic Park 1 up, Lost World up.

I think for me, it probably starts getting bad because I've gone back and watched those Jurassic World movies. Man, they are rotten. And it's not just because Chris Pratt, like the, I would say the public discourse around Chris Pratt has soured. It's probably a nice way of putting it. Does he even act anymore in movies that matter?

Or does he just make things that are like, look like either they're made by Ben Shapiro or Amazon prime or both. It's just weird. Cause he wasn't even that like AI movie where it's like, you're in a AI simulator. I don't, I'm not, just not interested. Mercy, I think it was called.

And then of course, don't forget all the wonderful voice work of Italian director, actor Chris Pratt. It's a me, Mario. I am here. Let's a go. It's a let's a go, Chris.

Yeah, let's a go indeed. I think that those Jurassic World movies were good at the time because people wanted a good dinosaur movie to come out because nothing good had come out since Jurassic Park, let's call it, For most people, probably two, maybe three. But for a lot of people, it's just one. And definitely, you know, for I think financially, one is like the cornerstone of things. But.

Jurassic World, I think retroactively, if you go back and watch them, are not movies that hold up very well, especially Jurassic World, which just feels like a kind of lazy Jurassic Park pastiche, if we want to use that word that's being leveled against this movie. I think that Jurassic World 2, the one that has cloning, which is just so bizarre to me, And then, Jesus, the last one that's just like three hours long, I think, and it's about grasshoppers. It's again, dinosaurs are out in the world and it's about grasshoppers and Henry Wu. All right. What really gets me is that Andrea had to explain to me that the Campbell Scott character is the guy that Nedry's talking to.

I'm just like, what? Who's in the second book, too? I mean, he goes to the island in the second book and dies. in the book. Yeah, it's, you know, Rebirth, I think for me, like you said, dead cat bounce. I think for me, Rebirth is that kind of like, okay, it's weird.

And there's a lot of weird stuff. There's like xenomorph T-Rex thing. And Scarlett Johansson is somehow uncharming, which is weird because she's really charming and practically everything. And she's just playing She saw aliens and was like, that's what I'm doing. Like, I'm going to do that.

And it's like, OK, like it's I don't know. It's not that easy, I guess, in my mind, because that kind of stoic female presence doesn't always work. And that's not Scarlett Johansson's strong suit. Like, she's very charismatic. She's a lot like Ewan McGregor.

Like, she's a really charismatic actress. So just like Anne Hathaway, like, you know, you put her in most things and she's OK. Anne Hathaway was one of the better parts of that Batman movie. I think the reason I ask is because since the original Jurassic Park, there hasn't been a good dinosaur movie. I think that this might actually be the first one.

Well, don't forget about 65, Chris. Come on, Adam Driver would be very upset if he forgot that that movie existed. No, 65, you know that. After Earth as well. Yeah, another dinosaur.

Yeah, I remember 65. The Adam Driver dinosaur movie? Yeah, okay. Yeah, that was a thing that happened. It did.

It was a thing. It did happen. And then, of course, you've got all of the Asylum films. But I would say that something that we were talking about a little bit before we started recording, I think the closest you're getting is, to go back to Mr. Spielberg, Godzilla.

Like, that's the dinosaur now that we are judging a lot against. And the whole thing of how much... Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, but I forget that there are even dinosaurs in there.

I remember when he breaks that dinosaur's mouth open. Yeah, which was, well, it's very similar to the original thing in the 33 movie with the snake and the way that. Yeah. Which was my favorite part of the 76 movie of King Kong. So I really enjoyed that movie.

Yeah, I guess to your point, Godzilla has kind of taken up the mantle of the dinosaur movie. I mean, and again, I know that it is going to get some eye rolls, but I have... zero chill when it comes to voicing my opinion. I unabashedly love the 1999 Godzilla. I don't see the problem with that movie, especially in the face of super serious Godzilla where we can't have fun with things anymore because Godzilla is the transgressions of the Americans. We know that he was the transgressions of the Americans against Japan.

That was the original Godzilla movie. It came out the same year as one of your other favorite films, The Avengers. Yeah, that's true. That's right. It I look at that Godzilla movie, and it's like a Jurassic Park ripoff in a lot of ways.

It's trying to do Jurassic Park stuff, and that Godzilla, in quotations, I'll give it that, is more T-Rex than anything else. And then you have the baby raptors running around in Madison Square Garden. I would say that that movie... In a lot of ways, again, yes, is it a Godzilla movie? Sure.

But is it a Jurassic Park thing? Yes. Again, dinosaurs just haven't really been done well since Jurassic Park. Even when people try to force something else into a dinosaur mold with that Godzilla movie. Or trying to do movies in the Jurassic Park universe.

It took forever to get a. Well, I'll tell you what this also brings up is another movie that not a lot of people talk about, which was big at the time, and also at J.J. Abrams' property, which was Cloverfield, which I feel is like the Godzilla film for the United States because of it coming about from the tragedy of 9-11. I mean, the image of the Statue of Liberty's head rolling down the avenue and just the people walking across the bridge and everything, it was so... 9-11 for me.

So the way that Godzilla was an answer to the atomic bomb, as Cloverfield was for 9-11. And it's a shame what's happened after 10 Cloverfield Lane. You could almost call this a Cloverfield movie if you wanted to, because why not? Well, it didn't have to be dinosaurs, that's why. It could have literally just been weird creazoid monsters of undetermined origin, race, and species.

And again, like you said with the trailer, until it was dinosaurs, it could have been anything. Was I excited it was dinosaurs? Yes, because like I've already kind of gone on this tangent, I don't think good dinosaur movies are a thing that exist in our kind of... In a lot of ways, it reminds me of what now would be considered like Pirate movies, because remember, pirate movies were really hot for a while. And I'm not talking about Pirates of the Caribbean.

I'm talking about pirate movies of like the 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s where they're like big epic films. They made a lot of money and then they've been attempted to be made since in the same way and they fail. Cutthroat Island is one of them. And, you know, hook even a Spielberg thing to speak about that. But dinosaur movies are very did in this, you know, Spielberg's case, make the one movie.

It's the one movie that people have been trying to ape forever. And it's one movie. But it was so immensely successful and such a cornerstone in so many ways, not to just speak to the fact Sam Neill just passed away, which I think that's like the only thing most people know him from. It was such a big deal. I don't know.

We have this movie because of Jurassic Park. Oh, absolutely. And yeah, we have these good special effects because of Jurassic Park as well. I just wanted to remind you of a really awful movie that I saw last year, which is Primitive War. Did you see that one?

Oh my God. It was so bad. And it felt, you were talking about how long that that one movie felt felt so long and i just couldn't get over how how how dragged out it felt i want to say it might have been one of tom size last films so that's the quality uh that you're dealing with here. Let me see i'm looking at like there's so many asylum films that have dinosaurs. Jeremy piven is one of the leads in here i don't see i don't see tom sizemore i thought for sure that he was but yeah this was a really bad let's see vietnam 1968 so this is skull island a recon unit known as vulture squad is sent to an isolated jungle valley to uncover the fate of a missing green beret platoon they soon discovered they are not alone it felt like this movie was made in russia like it just like i kept way for like a slots now commercial to come up in the middle of it because it just looks so fucking.

Bad why i i made a a kind of a i would say a cranky comment on on my social media earlier in the week. Cause I finally watched evil dead burn. And I, I said like, I think the thing, the nicest thing I can say about this movie is that it was filmed indoors. So I don't have to be reminded about the fact that it's being filmed in Romania. Because anytime they go outdoors, I'm convinced that there's going to be a woman selling, like, unleavened bread in a cart on the side of the road.

I have a case full of leeks. It's just, and it was so funny because, like, oh, the whole movie takes place inside of a house. Yeah, because if they filmed outdoors, you'd be able to tell they're filming in a farm in, you know, Bulgaria somewhere. Up the road is where Mr. Seagal came to film his great movie film, and he sat in a chair for four hours.

Yeah, that's what he did in the movie, too. We were joking early on that this movie doesn't look like it takes place in Michigan, but at least it doesn't feel like it takes place on a soundstage. True. Which, in this day and age, so much of everything feels like it. Oh, yeah.

No, the indoor-outdoor that they're doing, I don't know if these were sets. I imagine they have to be, but it looks so good and so seamless when. They go indoors and outdoors. Some of it was filmed in London, so I would assume so, yeah. That makes sense.

I mean, it used to be such a tell when it was like, oh, well, those don't look like natural lights outside. But they have mastered that, you know, over the years and especially in the later part of the film when they've got the boards and everything. So like they're the natural light outside is muted. So I think some of that stuff, you know, even despite the overuse of the diopter in that scene. I feel like he really has a good sense of when to bring the action indoors and when to put it outdoors.

And even though this is a society that has collapsed so quickly because of fucking dinosaurs, like you would, that still when they go inside of a house that isn't theirs, there's a danger to it. Like when she goes into the house of her neighbor, the woman that was married to the writer, I'm just like, oh shit, poor Anne Hathaway could get killed right now because not from a dinosaur, but from a person who's paranoid. I'm just like, yes, it's all stand your grounders all around here. I was afraid that the librarian was going to accidentally shoot one of them. He said, She does that great headshot to the to the before she gets fucking eight.

Oh, my God. I was going to say, like, we've been conditioned, Mike, by Night of the Living Dead too much to expect movies to just be mean to the main characters. You know, what. Happens to McGregor is very mean, very mean. It is.

It is. Oh, yeah. When I saw their neighbor getting picked up by the pterodactyls and stuff. I was just like, oh, that totally reminds me of, well, it actually reminded me of, I think, Skull Island, where you see a guy picked up and he gets pulled apart and you see the arms go and stuff, but it reminded me also of The people at the Jurassic World park, especially that fucking, that poor lady, the assistant. That poor assistant.

Jesus, speaking of a mean movie. A mean movie. Good God. Swallowed whole by the damn pic. Yeah, it's awful.

It's just so mean. But again, I think that I would go back to the intention of the filmmakers. Why that scene feels mean in a movie it shouldn't is because they didn't didn't understand what they were doing with Jurassic Park. Like, that's not a Jurassic Park thing. That's a movie like this thing.

And that's why I appreciated this movie. This movie has a little bit of an edge to it. That, look, the original Jurassic Park is more of a family movie than this is. Like, one person dies in the original Jurassic Park that you see. And then, like, okay, you have a clever girl.

He gets eaten in a bush. Sam Jackson dies offscreen. Nedry dies in a car. It's all very... Again, Spielbergian, it's suggested.

We fill in the gaps just like with Bruce the Shark all those years earlier in Jaws. We don't see the shark for that much in Jaws, not because we don't want to, but because it looked like shit. And it didn't work very well, but it works well enough to make it be a movie that is still a perfect movie to this day. Like genuinely, every time I watch it, I'm just like, this is a perfect movie. Everything about this movie hums along in a way because it's made by someone who just understands this kind of story.

And I would not say that this is a perfect movie, but I would say if you asked me who directed this movie, I would not say the guy who directed It Follows. That's for sure. But not just the guy who directed It Follows, the guy who direct and wrote It Follows, because that's the other thing. He wrote and directed this movie, which is impressive. Yeah, I was very curious who the writer was when I was watching this.

I was also very curious who the composer was because it is so John Williams. Holy cow. It's almost like it's modern day John Williams. I mean, there are so many harps on the soundtrack, which is amazing. And I'm just like, OK, so Michael Giacoccio or Giacino?

Michael Giacoccio is the guy who did Cloverfield and the Incredibles and all. Yeah. Oh, I thought, Oh, Michael Giacchino did a star Wars. Like he's, he has. Been, he's been heir to the throne, huh?

Yeah. He is really in a lot of ways, like the modern way. If someone was like, who would you say is the modern day John Williams? I think in terms of the things he's worked on, it's Michael Giacchino, you know? He worked on the MCU.

He's worked with Reeves and Brad Bird and J.J. Abrams and just a lot of people, people that are, you know, I would say pretenders to the throne, but all of a ilk. Yeah. Yeah. OK, well, that makes sense.

Yeah. And I was very impressed that David Robert Mitchell wrote this. I do kind of want to go back and try to find the myth of the American sleepover from 2010, which was his freshman film. because it's also set in Michigan. And this one that's actually shot in Michigan back when he was living here. So it's like, okay, cool.

It's funny because when he, he's very place centric. Like if, you know, like into the description of the myth of the American sleepover, it talks about, you know, four teens from Detroit or from Michigan. It follows very, very Michigan under the silver Lake though. Just, you know, so interesting. Silver Lake area, and just so specific to that.

Yeah, just like, you know, like, I'll be talking about Inherent Vice later on this year, and just like that, and under the Silver Lake, to me, kind of drink from the same, they're drinking from the same milkshake, to put it one way. And that milkshake is, this is an LA story, and you cannot do this anyplace else. Also, kind of like the Big Lebowski, the whole LA-ness of that. Thank you. Thank you.

I was going to say, man, Under the Silver Lake, for me, if someone was like, what is a spiritual successor to the Big Lebowski, I would genuinely be like, Under the Silver Lake. It has that same feel of like, there is something else, and again, in the Big Lebowski, they It's not the case. They're talking about it possibly being the case, but it's not the case. And under the silver, it's like Big Lebowski, if it turned out that the Lebowski had in fact captured and taken his own wife hostage, which is what they're talking about at that one point in the car, where he's like, no, dude, he took his own wife, whatever. If that turned out to be true, the paranoids would prove that's under the silver.

Like, I don't even want to say any more about it because there's so many things in that movie that similarly to this movie benefit from you not knowing about it going in. Right, right. Like, if you know Ewan McGregor dies but then comes back to life at the end of this movie, like, that moment doesn't work as well. Because. you are invested in the character in this movie so much because again, it is a subversion of the expectation. We do expect, Oh, he's the drinking dad.

So he's going to be the one that's the problem. But then halfway through the movie, no, it turns out to actually end halfway. That's the one that is like the issue as it were. And that like little like turn of the screw of a usual thing that we see in these kinds of movies, but not being the case. I don't know, again, like, It's just that little it's a step to the right that I think makes us more than just a pastiche of Spielberg.

Like if you were just doing Super 8, that's a pastiche of Spielberg and not a successful one at that. We have to talk about another Spielberg adjacent film, something he produced back to the future. You've got at the end of this movie, the characters coming back to the future. The rainstorm, I thought for sure Joe Flaherty was going to pull up on his motorbike and have a telegram for them. But no, they're in the rain and.

I just love this so much. This convenient bus stop with the big clock on it. And it might as well have been like the Twin Pines bus stop, bus line or something, you know? I wanted that. The little, the little, the sting.

I wanted the sting in this movie from Back to the Future so badly. Or their version of like a, like the little, yeah, yeah, just give it to me. Oh, so good. Telling me that dinosaurs become assholes? Yes.

Ordering the pizza, getting the pizza, such a great family moment. And then when she becomes the fucking writer, I'm like, that's fucking George McFly right there, who's becoming the writer. Or Stephen King, or the main characters and so i mean even the mist isn't the isn't tom jane in the mist an artist which again like in the create well oh he is an artist because remember at the beginning of the mist he's doing it. A frank enough yeah it's not frank fanzetta what's that guy's name that does all those beautiful posters No. I don't.

You're talking about the guy who does the artwork for the Dark Tower, right? Well, I thought that he was supposed to be the guy who does, like, the... Struzan, Drew Struzan type. Oh, he's literally working on, like, the artwork of the Dark Tower, like, the... I forget what his name is.

The character that Idris Elba plays in that really good movie. I'd like to point out, Super 8 is written and directed by J.J. Abrams. Which is the thing that, again, like, just to use it as the closest comparative, because I don't really know what else you would compare this movie to. In terms of tone, if you were like, I don't want to compare it to Spielberg directly, what is it like?

It's kind of like Super 8. It's kind of like In a Quiet Place, that Krasinski-Emily Blunt movie to go to the Disclosure Day connection of it all. That's kind of a Spielberg-y thing, maybe a little bit more horror than Spielberg, but they're kind of doing that same thing. This has that Spielberg tone so much more than Disclosure Day did. which for me is the crazy part, because that's a Spielberg movie. That's his bread and butter.

He's working with David Koepp, of all people. You know, just go back to the Jurassic Park. Yeah, go back to the Jurassic Park of it all. This movie hits that tone so much more. And I think that, you know, the more I watch this movie, because only getting to see it once and then, you know, halfway through another time, just because the internet and for Rob bet or such giving and kind hosts on the internet, you can watch it right now.

It's a cam version online. Like the more I get a chance to watch this movie and enjoy it, I feel like I will kind of appreciate the price subtler things that I missed the first time I saw it in terms of the Spielberg stuff or the non Spielberg stuff. Because again, like this movie doesn't exist in a vacuum, not saying this movie couldn't exist in a vacuum, but it's, It's much better because it understands that it doesn't have to pretend it exists in a vacuum. Super 8 was from J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg.

But yet it's like it was it was not that it was embarrassed, but it was trying to be Cloverfield while being a Steven Spielberg thing, which I would think to your point, even like Cloverfield is more of a Spielberg thing than Super 8 is. Oh, yeah, I could see that. Yeah, he's never done a found footage movie, but again, that movie has those similar kind of notes. It ends on too much of a downer to be a Spielberg movie. That's the thing.

Spielberg movies don't normally end on a big. Yes, you're very... I'm trying to think of one that does, and really, I'm not thinking of a whole lot. I mean, even David gets to be a real boy at the end of A.I. They're not even the parents of the kids at the end of Jurassic Park.

But by the end of the movie, you think that Dr. Grant and Ellie Sattler are going to be those kids' parents. Like that's, you know, again, like it's, it's so earned. Spielberg just, again, like it's a romanticization of the family unit. And that like what, you know, it's the, oh, the film that, the Scorsese film.

The one where it's like the one crazy night changes his life. The Griffin Dunn film. Yeah. It's the same thing where it's like one crazy night, one crazy thing will get my mom and dad back together. And that's, you know, I don't want to boil it down to like, this is a movie where the dinosaurs are the divorce.

But it is. But it is. Like, it is. Like, in a lot of ways, E.T. is, and again, the dad's not in the picture in E.T. because he's dead or he left. I don't, do they ever even say?

I'm no, I don't know. I don't know if they do. He is the dad in that movie. Right. Like, and in this movie, it brings them together.

Yeah. Right. And in this movie, the dinosaurs are the the, you know, dinosaurs serve as the divorce. So it's it's, you know, one crazy thing happening brings my family back together. And yeah, everything, like you said, with the back to future of it all of it all. they end up all succeeding in the end.

She gets into Cornell. She becomes an author. The family, you know, Ewan McGregor is no longer an alcoholic. The family is saved. Oh, look, there's the other family coming in.

Like all of that feels just so Spielberg without having to beat you over the head with it. And I think if we want to talk about like the real modern day successors to Spielberg, I mentioned that King Kong movie. I would say Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro are probably the ones that I would put up there as like the closest in terms of doing their own thing in the same vein as Spielberg, but being different enough that they have kind of have people in their own downline now doing a Guillermo del Toro thing. And I think Guillermo del Toro is probably in my mind more of Verhoeven and Spielberg because he's a little bit kind of darker and I think for me, Peter Jackson is Spielberg and Raimi mixed together.

It's kind of that like the weirdness of Raimi mixed with the kind of the charmingness of Spielberg. But this is like pretty very much distilled Spielberg. Almost I would say like millennial Spielberg in a way. Like the parents feel real and well thought out. The kids aren't like bickering and fighting with each other.

They're more well thought out than that. Like there's that moment where we haven't mentioned it, the two sloths are having sex up against the building. Like, It's just a fucking strange thing that feels like it could have been on the cutting room floor in another movie. But in this one, it just adds to the kind of harming tone of the film because it feels like someone who likes Spielberg and wants to do their own thing, not just ape him directly. Absolutely.

Yeah. It's funny that you brought up Del Toro because when it comes to the more family movies, those to me are his best work. The stuff that he did with Kronos, with the little girl and the grandfather. The stuff he did in Devil's Backbone, which I think still, to me, is my favorite of all of his films. And the most genuinely scary and just so effective.

And then, of course, Pan's Labyrinth, with the little girl and her mother, and then this surrogate father who's a literal terrorist, this horrible fascist guy. those are the movies that really count for me. Like, the rest of it, like, yeah, sure, I enjoy some Hellboy and this and that, but. Hellboy's about the found family, though. Like, that's why, you know, like, it is, like, yeah. Like, I love Hellboy because the found.

It's all about the father, yeah. And, like, yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Yeah, making the family. But, like, the rest of them, I'm like, okay, yeah, whatever. I don't ever really need to see Nightmare Alley again, you know?

And I still haven't seen Crimson, whatchamacallit, I wanted to say Crimson Tide, Crimson Peak. Yes. One of these days I will, but I'm not rushing out to see it. And Frankenstein, you know, you're again, you're getting back into the family stuff. So I think that's why that was effective.

And I think that, you know, Del Toro and Jackson have really cemented themselves. And it's not just winning Oscars, but that helps in terms of like, genuine notoriety amongst a large portion of people who watch movies. And look, I can't pretend like people watch movies the way that I do or you do. We are atypical in that regard intentionally. Most people will just go watch a movie and that's it.

And they'll enjoy it based on whether or not they enjoyed it, which is a valid way of liking movies. I'm not saying it's not. which is why Spielberg's movies are so effective, is because they understand that people don't want to go home on a downer. They want to go out enjoying the experience that they had. Sure, they'll be challenged a little bit. There will be some stakes, but ultimately, this movie has no stakes, ultimately.

Like, we know Ewan McGregor's going to be fine. We hope he'll be fine, and we have put ourselves in the hands of the filmmaker knowing that if this is the kind of movie you're making, you will have some trick at the end to make this all work. Just like, and you know, I think for a lot of people, the best Harry Potter movie, I think for most people, is the third one. the Alfonso Cuarón film, which, at the end of the movie, it has this fun little bait-and-switch where everything bad happens, and then they time-turn her, and they fix everything. And that, for me, is so Spielberg in that moment. And this has that same thing of, like, everything turned out bad, but you know what?

There's deus ex machina. Because, of course, there is. Because it's a Spielberg movie. And you know what? I'm not too cynical to not enjoy that.

Because in this day and age, like, if I want a movie that's like this, but more cynical, I'll go watch The Mist. Which, I mean, but it is like it's Spielberg through a darker lens in a lot of ways, like it has a lot of those notes, but it like it perverts it in a really kind of fun way where if that's the movie you want to watch, which I'm not saying I don't want to watch it, but it's a downer of a movie. I know where to go. But if I want to watch a movie where by the end of it, like I went on a journey with the characters, but I'm OK leaving this here and they all die. got what they wanted in the end, back to the future, one and two and three style. I'm okay with that.

There's nothing wrong with that. I'm not so cynical to not be able to enjoy it because that's, I think, where the movie wants me to be. I'll tell you how cynical I am, Chris. I'm so cynical that when at the end of the movie, David Robert Mitchell has a nice picture of his dad and it's dedicated to his father. I'm the guy in the theater that said, eaten by a dinosaur.

Yeah. Was this based on your father being eaten by a dinosaur in real life? When he gets picked up by his leg, I was like, oh, he's just going to get thrown around a la Bloodlow in, I think, Jurassic Park 2, where he gets picked up for a while and played with by the dinosaur. When he's dropped on the ground and he's just like full, gone below the knee. Yeah.

Jesus. Right in the middle of his fucking thigh, man. I know. Yeah. And you know what?

You said it before. I want to mention this again. Like Anne Hathaway, she is a actor with a capital A and it's, you know what? I love getting to see actors like her being a fun movie. Cause this is a fun movie that this is, I'm not saying this is like, this is a lark, but this is a fun, uh, popcorn movie that I think is exactly what it needs to be.

And my hope is like, yeah, would David Robert Mitchell like to go make it follows again? Sure. But maybe make something else like this. I would love to see another one of these or something else like this that gets him excited. That's something that he clearly loves and resonates with.

Well, I just remembered that Anne Hathaway was in a Kaiju film, which I still haven't seen, but I want to colossal. Remember that one where she controls the beast? Yeah. Yeah, because David Robert Mitchell's like your age. He's 51.

He's not a contemporary of mine. He's a contemporary of yours, which makes sense given this movie. This is not the experience I had growing up. This is the experience that you would have had, like the Duffer brothers of Stranger Things. They're maybe a little younger than David Robert Mitchell, but We haven't gotten to the point where people my age are making movies nostalgically like this about our experience yet, because to be fair, the 80s is such a fertile ground for this kind of stuff.

They're continuing to milk it. Like we might even, depending on how successful this movie is, get a kind of secondary wave of these kinds of movies making money. I don't know. This movie so far hasn't made a ton of money. So, you know, we've talked recently when we talked about the Avengers recently, we talked about The old August is the dumping ground.

And then when we talked last week about Spider-Man, it was like, oh, farthest thing from it. Also, I think it might have been like July 30th that came out. But yeah, right now it's like this does feel like it was just dumped here. And I'm like, this is really good, guys. Like, don't I don't want to sound like fucking Bill Harris from Hollywood or something or Gene Shalit.

Don't sleep on this movie. It was a lot of fun. So, I mean, maybe, yeah, you don't have to pay for it at the theater. You watch it on streaming. But the effects were really good.

Other than maybe the dog sometimes. I think that Starbuck had some issues with being an animated dog. But at least they used a real dog through the rest of it. I will say, maybe my only criticism of the movie is, how hard of hearing are these people? Oh, I know, and that one dinosaur sticks right up on them.

Or when the snake is just sneaking through the house, too. I mean, I get it, but here's the thing I have a hard time believing. Yes, those animals are not making a lot of noise, but just by the sheer volume of how big they are, they'd be making noise in that space. Like that's a giant dinosaur and a giant snake, a snake, the size of effectively the inside of your house. So I was just watching that scene.

I was like, but the flying fuck is this? Like the snake's huge. It's just like, well, you guys hear anything here? It just the weight on the steps. I was thinking at one point when it was kind of thrashing around, I was like, it's going to break their house.

Right? Yeah. And that, that for me is my point. I'm just like, I don't understand. Like I appreciate some of this, but it's, In my mind, a film that did something like this better is like Annihilation, where it's just, we're using it coming up the stairs, making the noise as the scary thing, not the fact that they can't hear it.

Like, this thing's huge. They'd hear it. Like, it's the size of a house, literally. Yeah. Yeah.

And I do like that we don't just have dinosaurs. We have like Titan boas and other things, like giant sloths. Because it is, again, I guess we didn't mention what the twist of the movie is, but yes, they can go back in time and then forward in time again. through the use of wormholes. Because of Carl Sagan. Yeah, which is fine.

I don't need any more explanation than that. I don't need all the characters standing around a whiteboard going, did you know that the Upside Down is a wormhole? Like, who cares? Jesus Christ, who cares? Like this has no bearing on anything.

You know how I know that because you haven't done anything with it up until this point. And this movie doesn't need to like the wormholes are there. They are, I wouldn't say magical realism, but wormholes do exist. It's not like this. So I guess you could say magical realism to some fantastical realism.

And it makes the most of it without it being, like, belaboring the point, without having to cut away to the TV and doctor who's at what's talking about wormholes for five minutes. I think Weapons did that, where it's like, the fungus is a thing that takes over, it's parasitical, and it's like, oh, get it, you're explaining that, like. Well, That's that whole Jordan Peterson thing where you introduce the metaphor up front, like the hands across America. And you're just like, oh, what is this? How is this going to play into it?

And then it's like, oh, this is how it's going to play into it. And it's like, ah, very clever. I wish I was that clever. Here I am making fun of him for that because it's a little too clever. But I could never write something like that.

And it was nice that he does that. But at the same time, it's like, pay attention, kids. This means something. Yeah, it's a little on the nose. And because you're putting it as the cold open for the movie, it's just too, I don't know.

Again, I don't want to sound like I'm the smartest guy in the room because that's not the case. It's just I've probably watched too many movies. That's what it is. And that is a uniquely me problem because I appreciate that there are people out there that watch maybe one or two movies a year. I've heard that.

And my response is just like, I watched one movie since yesterday like you know in the last since since the last time i talked to you i've probably watched double digit movies because i've been watching all these godzilla movies like because i just have them on when i'm doing something else and i am watching them but i you know they are on like most people just i don't know what they have on when they're doing things maybe nothing which is They just walk around the house cleaning with nothing on. Jesus, that's... Who are these psychopaths? I can hear myself thinking. Okay.

Yes. It's like those people that don't have an inner monologue. Yeah, right? Those people exist, folks. Are you one of them?

Yeah. I'm excited to see what David Robert Mitchell does next. I think it's very funny, and that was maybe the thing that I wanted to mention, because, again, the it follows of it all is the reason I wasn't initially excited about this movie, because that movie wasn't my bag. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

His contemporaries, I would say, are Ari Aster and Robert Eggers, because they all had horror movies that came out that same time. It's funny. I was thinking Jane Schoenberg for some reason, just because... I think I might have watched Under the Silver Lake and. Why am I forgetting their biggest movie?

I saw the TV Glow. Feels like I watched those in succession, so I always feel like there's a spiritual tie between those movies for whatever reason. I would say that they're a contemporary of those horror directors as well. It's this breed of horror director that's doing... Not like the scariest movie ever made, but they're trying to elevate it and do a little bit more with it.

Yeah, I am talking elevated horror. Now that's a term everybody knows because of Scary Movie 7, which I think is very funny. Or Scary Movie 6, whichever the one that just came out is. People now know the term elevated horror as a joke term. Wow.

Which it always has been to me. Right. Well, that's the thing. To talk about dinosaurs as divorce, the movie is... Again, like the it follows of it all, I was expecting David Robert Mitchell, because of how successful it follows, was to do like Ari Aster and Robert Eggers did, which is continue to make these elevated horror movies.

And Ari Aster made Midsommar, which is one of my favorite movies. And Robert Eggers made The Lighthouse, which I don't know if you've seen it, but it is amazingly gay in the best way possible. And Willem Dafoe's farting and burping is just the greatest thing, frankly. There's something to be said for being able to really pivot into a genre that I would never have guessed would have been so successful for the director of It Follows to Nail. But this movie is just, like I said, it's really the best kind of these movies that's been made.

And J.J. Abrams, who we both know this because we've been around for a while, that's who people were talking about as like the next Spielberg. Bro, he never got there. He, and you know what? No one's ever going to be the next Spielberg.

Spielberg is like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He is singular in presence and he is singular in, he is singular. He really is. And there, you know, he's an iconic class for a reason. And I don't think that there is ever going to be another Spielberg because he, if you made one of the movies he made, you'd be happy, let alone all of them.

I don't feel like, well, tell me if there's a generational difference here. So many people of my generation, and probably yours too, grew up on Spielberg movies, but it feels like it's the thing now where you shit on Spielberg. And you're just like, no, no, he's not a real auteur. He just makes people happy with his cinema. I like literally people of my generation.

So I mean, like, but you're you're a pretty cynical generation. I mean, you're the you're the 90s apathy grunge generation. Like you guys, you guys made apathy cool. Yeah, you guys made apathy cool. That was like the thing.

And like apathy is not as cool as it used to be. Like being we are very unapathetic podcasters. If we were apathetic podcasters, we would not be doing a very good job here and we would not be putting our best foot forward. We are very unapathetic in terms of the level of work that we're putting into our podcast i i could see people of your generation that are still apathetic and kind of not bitter but just feel that apathy still towards certain things and cynicism i get was souring on spielberg because the world didn't work out the way spielberg wanted but that's not the point of his movies. They're like modern day fairy tales in a lot of ways.

Spielberg is, I wouldn't say he's Hans Christian Andersen, but for a lot of kids growing up in the 80s, Spielberg was telling the kinds of stories that kids were getting read to them at bedtime. Hundreds of years before. And that's because Spielberg understands that kind of the narrative structure and what it means to have, you know, oh, the dad dies, but then he comes back at the end. Or, you know, E.T. dies, but then he comes back at the end. It's like poetry.

It rhymes. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know. I'm surprised.

People my age don't shit on Spielberg. But I also don't know if anybody younger than me really thinks about Steven Spielberg. Because Steven Spielberg hasn't really made a movie for people younger than me. I can't even... I don't even know... what someone like me would say that movie is.

Maybe Minority Report? Ready Player One? I don't know. Yeah. I had successfully driven that title out of my head to the point where there was a Jeopardy question about it the other night, and I couldn't think of the name.

And I was like, I'm kind of glad. Kind of glad. And I want to point something out as the final coda to this. Steven Spielberg did not produce this movie. Steven Spielberg produced Super 8.

And I think if you want to talk about a movie that is the Spielberg film that didn't need his involvement, it's this movie. I'm not sure Steven Spielberg's involvement did anything for Super 8 at all. Like, genuinely. But, man, this movie, I think, stands on its own. Super 8 made $ 290 million.

If this movie doesn't make five times its budget back, what the hell? Have we really... I mean, hey... If people soured that much on it to this point, I get it. But man, like, this is a fun movie.

This is a summer blockbuster popcorn. Like, they don't... It's not that they don't make movies like this anymore, but like, this is... unfranchised. This is just a thing. I don't know.

People used to just go see movies like. This, I guess. I was getting kind of mad at you, Chris, when you were just like, oh, they could spin this off. What about the people that go out there? What about the people that do that?

Oh, how about that at the end of, you know, Farvale Street? You know, and I'm like, no, no, stop it. I'm just saying if we want to use it as an opportunity to make more money, because that's all anybody actually cares about. Right. That's what I'm saying.

Like, oh, we could turn this into a thing if it made more money, but if it doesn't make any money, they're not going to do that. So, It's a shame. I like this movie a lot. Thank you for being the one to kind of pick this one because it's just kind of... You were like, oh, End of Oak Street.

That sounds like a good one. It's a good movie. It's a fun movie. I think people... who like the things we've talked about, Ghostbusters, stuff like that. You're going to enjoy a movie like this, and it hits those notes better than the most recent Ghostbusters movie did, or any of the kinds of, I don't know, maybe just not having a franchise tied to it allowed them to do something a little bit more interesting, because while Super 8 wasn't Cloverfield, it still was kind of in the mix of those things.

Yeah, had a great time. Glad we got to see this. So until the next time Mike and I talk about a new movie, which will be a while because like Mike said, August and September are apparently dumping grounds for new movies. So we're not going to be going to see a whole lot of new things for a while. We'll be back in our respective lanes talking about movies that are, I guess, what people actually want to hear us talk about, not the things that they just hate us for talking about.

We will be talking about Digger here in a couple months, the Tom Cruise movie, which is apparently everybody forgot Tom Cruise was under makeup in Tropic Thunder. They're like, look at how weird and unrecognizable he is. Yeah, Les Grossman is raising his fat, weird arms over somewhere, like dancing around. I'm excited to watch it, but it'll be a while until we do a new movie between the two of us. So until then, you can find Mike and I over at weirdingwaymedia.com where this show whichever show you're listening to, be it The Projection Booth or The Culture Cast, can be found along with Midnight Viewing, Film Entries, The Feminine Critique, 80s TV Ladies, Required Viewing, which is on my sub-feed.

There's a whole lot of new things coming out too. Podcast of Power is coming back for the second season of Lord of the Rings and the third season of Lord of the Rings. Yes, there's still a Lord of the Rings TV show on and a new season is coming. One other person who listens to it, whose name is Mike White, who happens to be here right now. They're just making it for us, Mike, and nobody else.

Just for us, and we are the ones that podcast about it, the only ones. It's almost like we're being paid to do our job, which would be funny if that were the case, but it's not. But yeah, that's where you can find that show and also Never Tell Me the Odds, our show on Harrison Ford, which we are doing with our friend Richard Haddam of Richard Haddam's Paranormal Bookshelf. So if you want to hear those shows, weirdingwaymedia.com is where you can go. If you want to kick a couple dollars to Mike or I, patreon.com slash projectionbooth, patreon.com slash culturecast is where you can go at respective levels to get Never Tell Me the Odds a month early and ad-free.

If that's something you're into, that's where you can go like and rate the shows on iTunes, then Spotify, in that order. That's the order that helps. And as always, we'll catch you on the next episode. So I'm standing there With. Her hands in her hair I can't help remember Just when she touched me.

There's still no. Face Here in her place So cool She was like Jazz on a summer's day Music High and sweet Then she just flew away Now she can't Be that one. With the wind in her arms. Valerie, call on me. Call on me, Valerie.

Come and see me. I'm the same boy as the beat. Love songs fill the. Night But they don't tell it all Night high Loveless crying Just like that dying No, it can't be that long. In her arms, Valerie Call on me, call on me Valerie, come and see.

Me I'm the same boy I. Used to be So cool, she was like a desert on a summer's day. Music, high and sweet, then she just flew away. Now she can't be that warm. me I'm the same boy I used To be I'm the same boy I used to be