Hell or High Water (2016) — "150 years ago, all of this was my ancestors' land. Everything you could see."

Weird way. That's a big banks, big, that's what she said. August critics rave Hell or high Water. He's the best movie I've seen this year. Those banks alone the least they could so they could swape your mama's land, painting him back with that own money, but with that name textan, I don't know what it.

Is to brothers, I'm crown to raise a certain amount. That's my death justice. We're gonna let me board that he's not a crime. It's a good thing. Or does more known?

Very step of the way. Hell or high Water in it are select cities. August twelfth, Hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am your host, Christashio, and I'm joined by my good friend all the way from well, in this case, all the way from the dusty plains of West Texas, where this movie is set, not shot, but set. Your friend of mine, he is well.

He works over at Texas Tech, in charge of he's a professor of media and communications. Your friend of mine, doctor David Promutter. Hello, Chris, glad to be back. We're gonna go on a journey in West Texas. That's right, that's right, supposedly West Texas, though it's clearly no.

It is clearly New Mexico. On this episode of the Culture Cast, we are talking about the twenty sixteen film written by Yellowstone Zone, Taylor Sheridan, directed by David Mackenzie. Film is called Hell or High Water. So, like I mentioned, it's directed by David Mackenzie, written by Yellowstone Zone, Taylor Sheridan, and it stars Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, and Gil Birmingham. And that's really about it.

There are some other people in the mix, but for the most part, those are the four main principal actors in the film. Jeff Bridges plays a Texas ranger task with hunting down two brothers played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster, who are robbing banks in West Texas for possibly less than nefarious reasons, at least in one of their cases. It is a Western. It is a neo noir Western. It is a it's a Western.

Let's just go. Let's just go with that. As always, Doctor Pearl Munder, you picked the film, since we are together talking about it as often the case that you picked it, so I'm going to kick it to you first. As always. Whyy oh, why are we talking about Hell or high Water.

Well, let's start out by saying that this is one of the films that established Taylor Sheridan as probably one of the most successful film writers of our time in terms of like numbers of films acclaim, and then going on to do a series of television shows Yellowstone most prominently, but now Landsman and the different Yellowstone adjacent or spinoffs. Having a billion dollar contract. I mean, he's everybody's dream of going to Hollywood and writing a screenplay and then becoming a triple threat, auteur, mega star, everything including playing in his own series sometimes he famously does in Yellowstone. So first, this is one building block in probably the most prominent career right now in the world of creative filmmaking.

And it's also a film about sort of my backyard. It's set here in West Texas. I'm going to put a couple of asterisks there because at West Texas is pretty large. So this is the equivalent of saying this film is set in New England, but it's actually in northern Canada. I mean, there's a lot of space that West Texas covers.

You could stuff quite a number of New England states or small small Midwestern States into West Texas. You were saying something interesting. I think, like a lot of films, it's easy to say of any film that, oh, the geography, the topography, the scenery is a character in the film. But definitely this is true here. So this is one of those small number of films in the modern day set in West Texas where definitely you get a sense like West Texas is one of a very small band of people.

You mentioned that that really we only have five or six roles of any consequence, like main characters. This is not one of the There are other Taale of Sheridan films like Ciicario, where we will cut away to larger interests and bigger, wider, more people being going on wind River is more localized. So this is supposed to be part of I mean, if you look it up online, it'll say Taylor Sheridan's American Frontier Trilogy. I think that's more of a statement of like he made these three films, that they are a coherent like volume one, Volume two, Volume three of Lord of the Rings or something that That's not what trilogy has meant. It's just he spiritually connected to one another, that's right.

It seems very similar characters you could pull Gil Birmingham, who played expertly and now is playing again in another Yellostone. He was in Yellowstone as the elected chief of the local Indian tribe, and so was in a lot of episodes and was going back and forth fighting with the Dundon family for we don't go completely Yellowstone here, but then I mean, the show is already over. So became at the end sort of an ally fantastic actor dignity, honor, cleverness, and he plays it a somewhat different character here he almost played I mean, he is younger, but he plays sort of a I think a younger version of If he lived in this film, he would have learned some of the things that came up. So I just think in terms of setting theme ideas, it's a very very interesting film and it's worth talking about and learning about, especially the relationship of place and storytelling and characterization.

I think what's very funny to me and I think, you know, I have heard people talk about this, and I have I have. I said it initially myself when I saw the film. This movie is I think what people who went to see No Country for Old Men, I think this is what they wanted from No Country for Old Men. I think this film is more kind of what one would expect from a film like No Country for Old Men in terms of the way it plays out, in terms of kind of the narrative expectations. I think this movie is a lot more narratively straightforward than No Country for Old Men or I always know and in this is not me saying this, I just I know this from other people that No Country for Old Men's ending does not work very well on screen.

I am, I. Am and will always be inclined to agree as someone who has read the book No Country for Old Men, I think the ending works much better on the page than it does on the screen because cutting away to Tommy Lee Jones talking about his father lighting torches along the way for him makes sense in a narrative literary sense, but in a film makes sense, it doesn't really work, and I think it kind of it's kind of a dud of an ending. This movie, I think fixes those issues. This movie has. A similar theme, similar tone.

It's about you know, what, does what does the West, the last vestiges of the West, look like now in modern day? And No Country had that same vibe to it. I think this movie just I think this movie. Nails it more. I think Tyler, you know, I think you know for me, And this is the only other Taylor Sheridan thing I've seen, other than Sacario, which you had asked about initially if we could do Sacario.

This is the only other Taylor Sheridan thing I've seen. I have not seen Yellowstone, I have not seen wind River, so those are those are not things I have seen. So this is kind of the second or first Taylor Sheridan thing that I've seen. Now that he's kind of become this massive you know, he's got the first look with I forget who, like you said, he is a massive contract he in a lot of ways has become I would say, every you know, five to ten years, we get someone in the industry like this. I would say, before before Taylor Sheridan, it was Shonda Rhymes, and before Shonda Rhymes, it was Ryan Murphy.

I mean those, you know, it's kind of been Ryan Murphy, Shonda Rhymes, Taylor Sheridan in terms of like their ability to be so big, ubiquitous and successful that whatever they're doing is successful. They're having companies, you know, streaming networks in other places, backing up brink trucks to their house with money, asking for them to write the next Yellowstone. And Taylor Sheridan, to his credit, has like he wrote Yellowstone and then he wrote like two more Yellowstones prequel sequel things, spinoffs. He wrote land Man. I mean like he's saying busy, but he's also staying busy with what would seem to be quality projects.

I mean Ryan Murphy, not to his credit, has pretty much made the same damn thing for the last fifteen years, just American horror story or something adjacent to that. In terms of theme and tone, I'm not saying Taylor sheridan stuff is not adjacent in theme in tone. It's just I think what he's doing has a little bit more upward ceiling, and I think what Ryan Murphy has done is just kind of keep it within this one band here. I think Taylor Sheridan has bigger, loftier goals for what he's writing. And I say all that because High Water, While yes, it is a Western or a kind of thriller drama crime film, I think the more interesting aspect of the movie for me is commenting on, commenting on and being a character study on the kinds of people you would find in West Texas and the reasons and why people are doing what they're doing.

But it's also very indicative of I think, and it's very much an American story in terms of the you know, you know, Chris Pine says it at the end of the film, you know, being poor is like a sickness, and it gets passed on to every single one of us. And you know, it's initially it's just a thing, and it becomes a sickness the more and more it happens. Like you know, there are people in this country who read things and read things that believe those kinds of things as well, and I'm not sure that they're wrong in a way, because you know, in this country, the divide between the haves and the have nots has never been more obvious than it is now. And in you know, this movie came out in twenty sixteen, so this is ten years ago that this movie came out.

And I think it's interesting that the entire premise of the movie hinges on you know, people robbing the banks, because the banks are robbing us by their approximation in the film, And I love that that is the hill that this movie is dying on is it's a Western. But it turns out that the good guys aren't really the bad guys aren't really the bad guys. They're the good guys because the bad guys in the movie are nameless, faceless companies, which feels very apropos in twenty twenty six if they were writing it, But twenty sixteen it felt a little ahead of the curve. So I think Taylor Sheridan, you know, just as an opening here, I think Taylor Sheridan wrote a movie that probably deserved to win a lot more than it did because it was only nominated.

For four Oscars, which seems like. A And again, I'm not an oscar guy by any stretch of the imagination, but four doesn't seem like enough. Given this is also the best thing I think I've ever seen Chris Pine. It like hard stop. Yeah.

Let me start out out by giving an academic lecture here on Taylor Sheridan and the Western that I promise won't be longer than what's necessary. Taylor Sheridan is as I allude to, and you there's no question in terms of influence, power and breadth of work. Nobody has done more in the last ten years to define what is the West across all of his syries. The New West anyways, Yeah, yeah, the West of the twenty first century. So you have these mixtures of like black helicopters and mercenaries and machine gun battles in the streets of Bozeman in Yellowstone, along with so many familiar tropes of the cowboys and the rustlers and fighting over land.

And he has created something that probably very few Westerns have done before with Yellowstone, which is a lore and legend which we usually connect with fantasy and science fiction, but most Western films have a lore in the sense that like, yeah, he killed my father and I'm going to kill him or something like that. It's very basic. I like Robbing Banks. I mean, whenever you want. You can watch this film at twenty years old.

And I talked to my students about this because we talk about West Texas films based films. You can watch this film at twenty years old and have never watched Busch, Cassidy and The Sun Dance Kid, have never watched The Wild Bunch, never watched any of the classic West john Ford westerns. You could have never seen any of those and you can still enjoy this film as a hard noir, rough bank robber compox layers of characterization, adventure action film. You don't need that lore. In Yellowstone he created a lore.

I mean he created an eighteen eighty the same family eighteen eighty three, nineteen twenty three. I posted a joke today on read at April Fool saying twenty forty three is now shooting on the Moon. Cowboys on the Moon. That's a Ryan that's a Ryan Murphy premise. That's not Taylor Shardon.

Taylor Shardan, I feel like is a little bit more grounded. That's something Ryan Murphy. I think the Duttons get abducted by aliens. Like all right, all. Right, Ryan Murphy, we see you.

Like all right, the Sea of Tranquility is dutton Land, and nobody's going to. Touch it, I guess. So so let's start out by saying that this is the we can use the old word, auteur who has put his imprint on the West in fiction, in film, in visualization more than any other single person in the last twenty years. So whatever he does is important. Now that said, there are some issues here, you know, like in my notes, my notes to him like, if I were a studio executive would be this is a great film.

I'm not going to change anything your script. Let's go with it. I do want to bring up a couple of things going back to what you said. The plot of the film starts out, Okay, there's these two brothers, right, Toby and Tanner played by Chris Pine and Ben Foster. Okay, and uh, there's like a lot of films about brothers.

There's this sort of good instincts brother and then there's the shitty the bed. It's very leak out, but like the brother who you get you get a sense that if the circumstances had been a little different, he would be an honest guy and make good living and take care of his family and so and the other guy just wants to see the world bird like he enjoys. Like yeah, so we've very John wu. Very like I don't know, Like it's a tale as old as time set up, like you know, it's literally like there's no more basic siblings set up than this. One, like good cop back.

But it's yeah, it's yeah, it's biblical. It's very biblical. It's it's very ancient story myth there, and of course that's what the the West was the canvas. Uh getting more academic now. Frederick Jackson Turner famous for writing the frontier hypothesis, the idea that the America's character was built by the conquest in every sense of that word, of this frontier, of the West, of driving west, manifest destiny to the West.

And it's important that that's been rejected. Are you know, reconstructed deconstructed? But the fact is that in culture, in our x hundred years of a film industry and TV and movies, the Western was one of the most dominant forms. It disappeared almost completely, and then Taylor Sheridan came in and reinvented the Western, and now it's one of the most what you call a Western. Takario a great film, you know, wind River, a great film I have.

I had some issues with the way Yellowstone turned out that the fact was that it was probably one of the most popular series that we had. I mean, it's one of the most popular series the last ten years when it's getting mentioned in the same the way Yellowstone was pitched to me because I've never had any interest in watching it, only because I think kind of the subculture surrounding it has kind of put me off to it, which is fine. I mean, I. Think the same could be said about a show like Rick and Morty. It doesn't devalue or disqualify the show itself.

It just made me a little apprehensive to get involved initially because of the subculture surrounding it. But for me, Taylor Sheridan always understood his place in things. And the dead giveaway in this movie was he mentioned Archer City, where it's like, Okay, I know what's in Archer City. You know what's in Archer City. That's where Larry McMurtry's massive bookstore that he used to have that is no longer there anymore, is But you wouldn't mention Archer City in this movie for any other reason other than to evoke the class the name of the classic Western.

And I love that Taylor Sheridan, even in that moment, knows that's something worth mentioning to not and it's up. It doesn't feel like it's paid flip service either. That's the other thing, like, no, none of it feels like. Throughout this there's these references. Let me just bring up one that's a very interesting cultural reference, which is never developed, but it's there in the background.

Gil Hamilton Birmingham Gil Gil Birmingham plays Texas Ranger and of course Texas Rangers talk about something iconic, right that the Texas Rangers are the equivalent of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the sense that like just visually, anybody who's ever watched the Western or thought of a Western, it's like the Texas Ranger. I want to tell one Texas Ranger story, since I think your listenership probably skews a little young and may not have heard this story. There's a famous tale of there was some sort of unrest going on in some tam in the either of the eighteenth and it's such a don't forget which one, and they say, we got to call in the Texas Rangers. So the train pulls up and one ranger gets out and like the town elders say, wait a minute, we got a huge riot fighting, everything's going on.

You only send this one ranger. And the ranger says, well, you only had one riot, right, So you know the Texas Range. If you come here, you can visit the Texas Ranger Museum. They are absolutely iconic now they are, and they are also an investigated for us. That's very important to know, Like they're they're sort of like our local are a local state FBI, and many states have a version of the FBI, so they investigate crimes which are perceived as like this is getting too big for a local.

It's going multi jurisdictional, like if somebody's robbing a bank in three or four counties for example. So anyway, and then. Wear cowboy hats when they go out there, which is the other that's part, and that is one hundred sent part of this because if it had been local cops, the iconography would not have worked. The iconography here, Like Sheridan knows what he's doing. He's like, well, if they were cops, I wouldn't It would feel shoehorned in to have them having cowboy hats on.

So I'm just going to make it Texas Rangers because then it makes perfect sense why they have cowboy hats, and it leans once again, like you said, into the iconography of the West or the Western more apt. Yes, and by the way, people do wear cowboy hats. I had the honor of being a speaker. We had a panel on the media and police. You know, I wrote a book years ago on police in the media at the Texas Sheriff's Association, and I can vouch every sheriff in Texas, the sheriff of a county with two million people and a sheriff of a collie with fifty thousand people, were's a big cowboy hat.

It's really interesting to be there and be the only one in the room. You didn't take that as an opportunity to wear one of your own. I have some pretty nice boots. Okay, nice boots, yeah, but I don't feel I've earned the cowboy hat. Yeah, we'll see I have.

I have two cowboy hats, and I wore one to my sister's wedding. I actually showed up in a suit and tie and everything with a brown cowboy hat on. So I think every Texan should. Wear a cowboy hat once in their life because I think it is it does there is a level of power with it that comes from wearing it. And I also think just seeing someone wearing it, like a Jeff Bridges type in a movie or a Gil Birmingham, it adds like a level of I don't know that the profile, the level of kind of importance surrounding the character just it adds a level to it, you know, like you said, in your perception, you have to earn the cowboy hat.

Literally, there's nothing about earning a cowboy hat anywhere, except for it would seem in all of fiction that he who wears the cowboy hat like there's a level of importance too. Yeah, and there's there. It's funny. It's become so much part of the colloquial culture in references like, for example, a phrase that is often used. I've heard it the first time I came to Lubbock was he's all hat and no cattle.

That's right, I mean somebody who's all talk and doesn't really have anything to back it up. So let's talk about the name of the Gil Birmingham character, Alberto Parker. Now in Texas, Alberto obviously signifies Hispanic, and here, for example, in Lubbo County, we're a fifty to fifty two percent Hispanic. The culture of West Texas is and has always been pretty divided by ethnicity, not necessarily by race. They are very small numbers of African Americans.

They played a prominent role. They're small numbers of Asian Americans. But basically, if you go to most of the counties of West Texas and New Mexico and Arizona. The split unless you go to a major city like Phoenix or Albuquerque, the split is Hispanic Anglo and that's been the cult for hundreds of year ever since, you know, before before white people came. Now there's always been and now there have been always been also a Native American population, an indigenous population before the white Europeans came, and before the Mexican and Spanish Europeans came.

Yeah, so Parker is probably the most famous last name, Kuana Parker. When everybody this will be the homework assignment on the exam. Quana Parker fascinating. He was the son of a European woman who was kidnapped in a battle called the Fort Parker Fort Parker Massacre, and she married the a commancie chief and they had a son, Quana, who became a commanche chief. He lived from the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, twenty eleven, I think he passed away, and he's probably the most famous chief, at least within white culture.

You know, like you like anybody in West Texas, Oh, Quanta Parker. There's biographies. I don't think there's really been a great movie about this. It fascinating biography. Again, you know, you grew up and from at that time, you know that mixture was like a huge deal, and to rise to prominence and be respected by both peoples was also a huge deal.

So it's not it's not a coincidence that it would be Alberto Parker with the mixture of the Hispanic herritage. And of course a lot of Native Americans do have Hispanic names right because they've they grew up, you know, conquered by first by Mexico and then you know, having their own independence next to Mexican Spanish colonialism and eventually settlements. So it's complicated, but I just I wanted to put that in there because just like the other reference that you gave, this is like a little reading like, hey, this is part of West Texas heritage here Alberto Parker there, So something else I want to bring up. Poverty. Let's talk about poverty.

West Texas definitely has a history of like every place on earth, like there's poverty. Obviously, you go down downtown Los Angeles and you see a lot of poor people, even though you'd look it up and you'd go Wow, it's a rich area, right or New York City, there's poor people and there's rich people everywhere. West Texas has one advantage and that made me a little bit skeptical about the conceit of the film and the plot of the film, and that is we have a tremendous amount of mineral wealth. A lot of these small counties, if you drove through you would go like, oh, there's not too many people here, and a couple of the buildings are run down and things like that. But I can tell you that, for example, when we get kids here at Texas Tech and they're majoring in media and communication, well, yeah, they had a high school with a Hollywood level media lap.

Because they're high schools, their schools are supported by oil wealth. We've always had a challenge in Texas and New Mexico to some extent, but mostly Texas because the Permium Basin, if you just look up on a map, the Permium Basin, this is one of the largest oil fields in the entire world, has produced incredible amount of wealth, now wealth for oil companies, but also wealth for individuals because, as is revealed at the end of this thing, if you're the farmer who owns the land and you've got mineral rights, then you're doing really well. I mean if you go down to Midland ODESA, the bank here is listened as Texas Midlands Bank, So that is like probably except for Saudi Arabia, like some of the wealthiest place on earth, and it has been channeled back into public everything, right, so like like it's not quite as plausible this thing about the the mother and the reverse mortgage and poverty.

And by the way, they just found oil because they've done a lot of expiration, right, Yeah. It's like it's meant to be twenty sixteen if this the one thing I do I will say is I think it should have been set a little bit like it should have been more of a period piece and it didn't need I know why it wasn't, but yeah, the we just discovered oil rights, Like yo, what come on? Like you saw how rich everybody else was getting around you or near you. Unless you're completely inept, which Chris Pine's character is made out to not be inept, I find it hard to believe that you're you've waited until twenty sixteen to figure out the oil mineral rights situation. Come on, if you drive from Lubbock.

If you take a look at a map down to Midland, Odessa, keep going to l Passo, right through the heart of the Permian basin, you are going to see everywhere. Sometimes you'll see thirty at a time. Those classic there will be blood oil wells. You know thenk kachunk kachunk I mean actually from Rogue Warrior, the same the same one there. Yeah, the the sort of low scale but still popping right out of the ground.

And those those people who owned those mineral rights. You know, there was a family and they had a ranch and they were doing okay. Uh. Here at Texas Tech we if you visit, we have an amazing Texas Ranching Heritage Museum where they have actually moved physically these ranch houses from all over Texas and you can see what. You know, people did live pretty challenging lives that looked like something out of a john Ford Western before oil wealth.

But after oil wealth it's a little less plausible. The central plot about the poverty part, let's just put it that way. Not completely implausible, but a little plausible. That's fifty thousand dollars a month at the end of the movie. By what they're saying.

Is a lot of money to do nothing, to do nothing. Right that I I that is not a weird thing. That that well, the weird thing is. Six yeah, no, I'm with you, Like it's, they would have known what the They would have known what the upper level of the money they could have gotten is. And for Chris Pine's character, who is as smart as he is to plan all of this and do all of this, I find it hard to believe that he would look to robbing banks before being.

Like, well, there's clearly oil on. Our land, like it's. It is the one conceit that the movie forces you to like go with. But also to your point, you have to also know about mineral rights, like and I only know about it because my family has mineral rights to some land in eastern Oklahoma that we have had in our you know, my dad's mom's side of the family forever. It's nowhere near as profitable as this land is, so nobody really cares.

But I only know about mineral rights because that I'm going to go out and a limb and assume that Taylor Sheridan was assuming that a lot of people didn't know about mineral rights or wouldn't find it weird that they were waiting this long, but you and I clearly are on this same page. Like, I would not believe that they'd wait until twenty sixteen. They would have known in the seventies at probably the list I. Feel like, yeah, I mean the boom began. You know, you watch Martin Scorsese's Killer of the Flower Moon.

The boom began back at beginning of the thirties, right, right, right, Yeah, So anyway, there's another part about this film that really I want to say, I'm okay with every decision made here. I wouldn't have said, okay, Taylor, you got to change a couple of script items here. I would because you got to tell a movie. It's got to be an exaggeration. You can't have everybody doing something logical and reasonable.

The other part that I think people in West Texas went like, I'm not sure about that, mister Sheridan. And that was the bank robbery part. Because now, the funny thing is that they actually deal with this issue was which would be a criticism of plausibility. They actually have an entire scene in the film which I think is one of the funniest violent scenes in the history of film, and also one that this sort of sums up something that when I first went in the film and I was in the theater and I was going like, wait a minute, they're going to do bank robberies in West Texas. Everybody is armed, right, everybody has a good in rural Texas, a lot of people have weapons, and a lot.

Of in rural anywhere. Really, but yeah, and that the supposition is Texas. No, I mean, it is just it is part of the culture. And so the now they bring it up right like their their goal. They try to rob banks like in the morning when there's there's not going to be a big crowd there.

That's sort of set up as they're a rule. But of course these Chris Pine plays a pretty intelligent guy. Again, you could just imagine he would be a manager on an oil field very successfully. In fact, why he doesn't have a good chi, I mean a good living, I don't know. This is something else that has to be brought up, is that if you are a hard working, responsible, blue collar oriented man in West Texas for the last sixty years, you can get a really good job working on an oil field, working on a ranch, working on one of the big spreads, working in trades.

You don't have to be poor in West Texas unless there are you know, lots of circumstances happen to people. But I'm just saying that that one of the one of the issues we universities have for attracting young males is that there you could get a job driving a truck or working on an oil field for a spectacular rate of pay. So I'm going to upper education. What's even that? So, I mean, we make the case you know that that there are there if you want something.

I was I never tried tell students not to do something. I'm just we just have to make our case. There are every boddy where to drive trucks, yeah, or or and these are these are dangerous, very difficult jobs, just like you know, working as a pumber is a dangerous difficult to our roofer or whatever. But the point is that that that's a little bit harder to sell. The poverty part.

That was easy to sell for Butch Cassidy and the sun Dance kid that you know, the poor pressed farmers and the rich railroad it's harder to sell in twenty sixteen, let's put it that way. But it's okay, we go ahead with the plot. But then then we go back to the gun issue, which they deal with in a hilarious, you know, violent tragic way, which is that at some point they're they're following this rule of like, let's not rob the bank when there's a lot of people there, they get delayed. Now I if I were Crispine, I would say, screw getting delayed, We're not going to do it. We're going to follow our original plan, right, But they don't, and they walk in basically at lunchtime.

And the scene which I was expecting to happen, which definitely would have happened if you tried to rob a West Texas bank at lunch time, was that there are twenty guys there, and I'd say about half of them are open carrying and the other half are concealed carrying. And so two robbers walk in with guns and every single one of these guys I have. You know, I've always thought, Chris, and I think I mentioned this on one of our previous shows, there should be an Academy Award for tiny performance, like for an extra who just does one thing, and man, those people in the bank. And Taylor Sheridan has always been very good and I think the director here was very good at getting people in crowds to It's very hard to get a crowd to act right.

How many times do you watch the film you can see somebody laughing or you know, doing something weird, and they're not like racting well. Getting extras to be convincingly doing things like mostly it's mostly in a film. If you look asked one or two extras in, you begin to notice that there are people that are just kind of there but aren't adding anything. Yeah, I was really am impressed in those films where there's crowd shots in New York where the main actor is like walking through the streets of New York and everybody looks like they're just walking through the streets. Nobody's like looking at the camera or right right doing something goofy or something.

So pretty much what I'm saying is most films shot in the seventies in New York. Yeah, I mean even today. I mean I watched the television show Succession, which I hope we'll discuss at some point, and they had a lot of crap of scenes in New York where their characters were walking along having dialogue, and they did a really good job of having New York street scenes not be unintentionally hilarious there. But anyway, they walk into that bank, the Texas Bank. I think it's noon during lunchtime, and oh, my gosh, all of these people who I encounter every day, These these people, good people have just grown up up here, mostly guys.

You know, they're cashing their paycheck or they're coming in to get some extra money at the end of the. Week, bringing in their old coins. And yeah, and they're they're thinking two things. One, they're thinking, these are the dumbest bank robbers on planet Earth. And they're thinking, Okay, you're not taking my money.

I have a choice here. I'm not a helpless victim here. And so there is a shootout. Now there is a little bit of unrealism in that Ben Foster ends up killing some of these people who they jump into their car and chase the robbers. So it's not just a shootout at the bank, like literally a whole bunch of people, which I don't think would happen in many other cities.

That is, I would say that that's realistic, though I think if this were to happen. Realistic, that twenty guys would jump in their cars and. Temporarily deputize themselves. Now, the unrealistic part is that Ben Foster has a rifle and kill some of those because he has a rifle and they have handguns. I think a lot of these guys would have a rifle in their car, so they would be a rifle shoot a long distance shootout too.

But it's a fantastic scene. It's a fantastic scene in a fantastic action sequence. And then something happens which really took me by surprise. And I love it when I'm surprised in the movie when the plot takes a turn that I didn't see coming, but still as plausible. It isn't like just ridiculous.

Gil Hamilton's character is shot and killed and that was a big I don't know why I keep doing that, Gil bermeham I'm sorry. Gil. Next time I see you, I'll apologize. He's shot and killed and unceremoniously. One might would say, right.

Yeah, you know, this wasn't a heroic shootout at noon. This is just you know, a shot got him, Ben Foster, I think it was. I think that's a character. Yeah, definitely him. We don't even know.

We don't see him do it either, which I think is a very smart choice because we're meant to empathize with his character a little bit, and I think if we saw him doing that, I think that would take away any level of empathy would have for that character in the kind of final moments there. Yeah, I have no empathy for the Ben Foster character whatsoever. That Yeah, I mean I don't have it for reasons I'll discuss later. I don't have any empathy for the Chris Pine character whatsoever either. But but like Ben Foster is definitely we're supposed to read him as the badder brother of the brothers.

Yeah, but Gil Birmingham's character dies now we have to we're off. Obviously we're doing some spoilers for a ten year old film. But but Jeff Bridget, oh my gosh, what an actor. Right, he has been until this moment, He's not been a very attractive character. He's been bluff He's smart, he's obviously a very like a good ranger, a good investigator, he's clever.

But he's a racist buffoon. There's no other way to put it. He says a lot of things did demean ALBERTA. Parker. Gil Birmingham's character racial slurs and epithets and the sort of you know, I don't know, Like the Sopranos they had that phrase breaking balls, where like it led to killing, like one out of every five times somebody was murdered because of that.

You're gonna take that, Tommy, You're gonna take that. You're gonna do. I mean, it always makes me think a good Fellas. I mean, you know with Michael Imperioli and Joe Peshi, you're gonna take that. You're going to take that.

From him, and it's like, you know, yeah, he's dead now, like I killed him. Yeah, I'm just I'm just breaking this phrase. But that's the phrase that they use. And I think he so in his defense, he grew up in this culture where men would constantly test each other by saying whatever slur popped into their head with no andelocutor. Right, But Gil Birmingham's character is portrayed as like, first of all, he's a generation younger and he's hurt.

He's genuinely hurt by these remarks. There's a scene in the Motel. It's a beautiful scene where Jeff Bridges is going on and again you get a sense Jeff Bridges does like this guy, he's his partner, but that's just the way he does. And this is this might even just be a quote on his expect He's meeting the expectation where he is expecting it to be met, which is, like you said, I'm going to give this guy a hard time because that's the expectation in our culture, or in that subculture, even that's the expectation. So I'm going to meet it, even if the other guy has no interest in meeting me there, or he even wants to be there with that expectation.

He's coolest that Alberto Parker does not want to participate in this right. By the way, I was thinking also of the Seinfeld reference. If you remember an episode of Seinfeld, George ends up doing some business with some guys from Houston, and the guys from Houston are stereotypes. They're wearing cowboy and they're always saying, well, this bastard told me that you're you bastard, And so George takes that and starts using it in his daily New York conversation. It doesn't work at all, amazing.

So anyway, this scene is a beautiful scene. It's a beautifully written scene. It's a beautifully directed scene. They're in a motel room. They're doing the investigation.

Jeff Bridges is just doing his stuff. And you see a close up of Gil Birmingham facing you, lying on a motel bed because they're in a room with two beds and he's lying facing you and he's there's tears welling up, and you're thinking, Wow, this is different than the regular Western, you know, which Cassidy would not like take take offense right yea at something that Sundance kids said to him, and like have tears in his eyes. They were calling each other yellow all the time. They were calling each other all kinds of things in those movies, and you never saw anybody bulk at them once. The Wild Bunch, which is definitely referred to here in the sense of like some of the forms and tropes of the Wild Bunch.

By the way, we're talking about Westerns, like you know, the Wild Bunch was famously described as the last Western, and the Western that was intent because it used the machine gun, and you know, this was the end of the era of the one man against each other. All the men in the Wild Bunch are hard men that you could never imagine crying themselves to sleep in bed. Especially and especially not because of another what another man said. Absolutely to me, that was an Oscar winning moment for gil Birmingham. There should have there.

And also you gotta get Taylor Sheridan gets some criticism for some of the you know, the goofy stuff that did happen in Yellowstone and elsewhere, and some of the other things that he's done in shows anybody who's written as much as he is always going to have something people can criticize. But that moment, I was thinking, man, you just reinvented a Western character that I have never seen before. They've been one hundred thousand Westerns and no one has ever done this in my living memory. Now I'm not, you know, an ultimate scholar of all Westerns since the dawn of time. But is there a scene where one cowboy's teasing of another drives the other one into tears?

Not in a film that's meant to be taken seriously. Yeah, maybe in a comedy parody, but it's done so well. And then of course at the end, Marcus Hamilton Jeff Bridges is devastated by the death of his partner. Now again, this is so clever. How many cop movies have we seen lethal weapon whatever?

I mean, how many cop movies have we seen where a guy's partner is killed forty eight hours I'm thinking of, excuse me, forty eight hours somebody's partner is killed, and then the cop gets even you know, revenge and stracks down the murderer. The trope is completely subverted in over here because what happens he realizes he was partly responsible. He is. He suddenly realizes also, man, this guy died thinking i'mant a jerk, you know, I treated him so badly, and then there's no resolution in the film. There's no there's no like final, final, final, final shootout.

Now. Well, I would contend that Taylor shared I means smartest, Well, it's it's a I would say that the smartest thing that Taylor Sharedan did, on top of all the other smart things he did, was give us you said, like the first time a cowboy has ever made another cowboy come to tears. I think he's also given us what I would describe the first mental shootout verbal shootout between characters, because at the end of the movie, instead of there being a you know, guns at noon, it's words at you know words at half past five. You know there's no like you said, there's no actual shootout in the movie. The actual shootout of the movie comes thirty minutes before the end of the movie.

But what we get at the end of the movie is a war of words in a way that is much more devastating than any bullet to the heart or head could ever be, because the person who hears those words often has to live with the consequences of what they've heard. And that's kind of the implication at the end of the movie is if Jeff Bridges and Crispine do or don't get back into the same room and talk to one another, they at least know what side of the page and what side of the river they're standing on at the end of the movie, even if they're not pointing guns at each other, they're pointing two ideological. Opposites at one another. And that's enough for Taylor Sheridan to kind of get it over the hump of a war of words taking the place of a final shootout at a movie and it and unlike No Country for Old Men, where nothing in that last ten minutes of that movie really works.

Here, it works like Gangbusters, because, like you've already talked about, Taylor Sheridan does such a good job of letting us know I'm going to upend your expectations almost entirely. I mean, I don't think it's a bad comparison to make. And I've heard Yellowstone described as the Sopranos in the West, and I'm sure you'll say it's probably like that in some capacity. I would say it's not surprising that the comparison is made to the Sopranos when that show. One of the things I love about that show and David Chase as a showrunner is constantly subverting expectations at every opportunity, at every opportunity, and Taylor Sheridan, I see the same in him as an aw tour Like he has a specific idea and mindset and way of thinking about things, and it goes through everything.

It doesn't just stop at one thing. And you see that, like you said in the movie with with Gil Birmingham's character, you see it in that later moment at the hotel or at the motel where Jeff Ridges and him are sitting outside and they're having a conversation about the way the West used to be and they talk about how we were all Indians at one point, and I think that again, that's Taylor Sheridan being very smart about the way he's writing things and ignor knowledging the history of the genre and of the West as a whole, but also saying we're past that in a way where we need to move past our kind of older ways of doing things and move into this kind of newer, more acceptable Gil Birmingham way of doing things.

As I think Taylor Sheridan is very smart in really challenging expectations and saying I am only not not only going to upend your expectations, but in upending them, I will also continue down that path and not really make mention of it. I'm not going to do like you know in Casino Royale that James bond reboo, where they make like they really linger on the up ending of expectations. Here, they don't really linger on it. It just kind of goes. And I appreciate that as well, because that means I think you have faith in you have ultimate faith in what you're doing.

They don't have to hang a lantern on every up ending of expectations you do the sopranos just ended. David Chase knew what he was doing. And he has really never hung a lantern and on it since he did it, and he never will because, like Taylor Sheridan, he's the kind of person who expects that if you've watched the show, where you've watched the movie, and you followed me all the way to the end, then you are exactly where I want you to be. If you've been paying attention and playing along and giving yourself over to the thing that I've created, which Taylor Sheridan, if you do that, it really works like Gangbusters. Clearly.

Yes, I always have a problem with simple, and I know that's not what you're doing. Like simple compare here, since you were doing a very complex tiered comparison of two creators. And I hate it when people on the website so who was a better Western director, John Vord or William Wiler. Well, they did different movies at different times, and let's talk about their different elements. I feel it just on the criterion that you listed there, of the subversion of expectations, I felt that Taylor Sheridan in this movie did a better job because it did feel very heavy handed and purposive.

There are some things that have come out about the Sopranos where apparently David Chase became angrier and angrier at the fans right because he kept he kept making Tony Soprano and the Soprano crew into more and more evil people, like they would do more and more horrible things. And yet the fans were like, Hey, did you just see Tony whacked that guy last night? That was that was great, And David Chase was sort of feeling like his fan the fan base was not appreciating what he was doing, and I think that affected the work and it became sort of a checklist of all the things we can do have Tony Soprano do to alienate the audience, which they he never did. But here I felt was more organic. Right, Like Jeff Bridge's character starts out, you can see if you view him comprehensively, he is effective as a Texas ranger.

He is a very smart investigator. He's probably great in the gun battle. You know, he's probably physically strong. He checks a lot of boxes. But he is not He is too antiquarian in his social attitudes and his treatment of his fellow officers.

And it doesn't help. It doesn't put help the investigation and he comes to realize that. And Gil Birmingham plays somebody who is the future is the new generation of effective because he's just as effective. He's not a poor Texas Ranger, a good Texas ranger. He's probably going to be more effective because he's more sensitive and aware of people's feelings and understanding.

Look, we can't say this anymore, we can't do this or something like that. So it's a generational conflict that has resolved in the favor of the person who dies in the line of duty as a hero. So to me, the Alberto Parker character is sort of sacrificing himself for the future, not just dying in a gunfight there. And it just felt organic much more. It's felt like a natural evolution arc.

You know, people often say any kind of character changes they call it an arc. I think there's very few character arcs that are done very well. Actually, it's more I mean, to me, just somebody acts differently in the See seven that they didn't eat too. It doesn't necessarily mean there's an arc. It just means bad writing sometimes right right.

Well, And I would say arcs take a while, like arcs I think should almost be. I wouldn't say, like you know, solely used when talking about television, but in immedia needs time to build a character up so that they can go on a believable journey to your point, and you know you can't just to be able to subvert expectations, you have to set things up, and setting things up takes a while. I mean, to go back to The Sopranos, took six season to get to the end of that show for where they're able to do what they did. You know, Yellowstone went on for how many seasons? Five or six seasons.

Yeah, it's it's one of these things where I think if if you go into a movie like this with the expectation that's going to be one way, Taylor Sheridan, I think takes you on this journey that rewards you for sticking with it and giving yourself over to the. To the to the writer. I would say the other thing about the Gil Birmingham character, that's interesting and you know, just the optics of it or kind of the Western iconography of it. You have two cowboys again for visually two cowboys, Jeff Bridges. And Gil Berming.

But then you take it back and you look at what they're really trying to play at, which is the age old story of cowboys end quote indians unquote. And we have you know, the the the white man with the Native man, and the native man is the one in tune with things and the white man is the one who's out of touch with things. And you know, we have Alberto Parker saying multiple times like well you just got lucky, or you know, you know, we should do. This, or we should do this. And Jeff Bridges is going off of the old you know, stakeouts and other things, and Gil Birmingham's character is going off of the new ways, and I like, I like to your point that they don't do the thing you expect, which is Jeff Bridges sacrificing himself for the new ways, you know, so that the old ways may die and the new ways may take over, but the character of the new ways sacrifices himself for the old ways to change, because it would stand to reason Jeff Bridges' character wouldn't have gone on that journey two thirds of the way through the movie.

If he had not died. So it's, you know, like you said, the sacrificial piere he throws himself on is one to progress the story, but also to cause a change, a genuine believable change within Jeff Bridges' character, where after that moment in the film, he is no longer the kind of amiable buffoon that he has played. To be earlier on. Throughout the movie, he becomes very sad and dour, more like a cowboy of the old Western story, kind of the old grizzled you know, law man who's just looking to be done with his days, which I mean, obviously it's smart that he you expect he's the one who's going to die, because it's been coded into the script that he's he's just just a year away from retirement, you know, I you know, like tomorrow is my last day.

You know. They make fun of it in The Simpsons, they make fun of it in National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon. They make fun of it in Last Action Hero. They're like, I was one day away from retirement, like and then you die. You know, that's always that's always the gag.

That's always the joke, and Taylor Sheridan traffics in it, and it's it's you know, it's funny. It's a joke. You know, I sound like one of these people in Room two three seven, Like you know, Kubrick was making a very serious joke here, like Sheridan is making a very fun play on your expectations here if you're willing to meet him where he wants to be met, which is understanding iconography of the West and Western because it's you know, Tonto and Lone Ranger. Ultimately, but what if the Lone Ranger was a moron? Like that's essentially the setup of this movie.

But the question always becomes in those movies anyways, who was actually doing leading? Was it Tonto or was it the Lone Ranger. It would always almost seem to reason that Tonto was the one leading the Lone Ranger just by pure happenstance and sheer existence that that was Tonto's expectation from the Lone Ranger, was he was going to lead him. And they trafficked in that here because it's again it's we get these kind of oscillating levels of who is in charge, who was in the lead, who was the one who we should be empathizing and sympathizing with. And I think the movie makes the case that by the end of the movie.

It was meant to be both, but the movie was doing a very good job and kind of juggling the balls with your expectation. Yes, and absolutely praise to Jeff Bridges, because Jeff Bridges, I think is at a point of his career It certainly was in twenty sixteen where he doesn't have to take a role, right, nothing left to prove at this point. Now, yeah, he's proved that he's one of the great living actors of our time. He's done a lot of different kinds of roles. So he gets to the script, and at that time, Taylor Sheridan was not the giant.

Now I mean, now any agent would like run to an actor's home like waving a script too. Sherdan's then us right right to anyone. Uh, there's very few people would not read a script right there. He was not as famous at that time ten years ago. So Jeff Bridges, if you just imagine reading the script and going like, well, I think I know you were, you were exaggerating for effect.

He actually is very competent. He he's a moron in his way. He treats his fellow co worker and and his just on his lack of self awareness in the damage that he's doing, not just to a human being, but also like ultimately it probably hurts their effectiveness as a team. Yeah so so, But so Jeff Bridges is reading, so I'm going to be this callous, racist old guy. But oh my gosh, I what well what happens here?

Oh? What? You can see the actors opportunity in this. He realizes that his habits of a lifetime were wrong, and he's trying to make amends in a tone for it. But he's frustrated in that, and he has to make a decision about whether he spent his whole career upholding the law.

And again, we don't know what's going to happen a week later. Uh. I know what if this had been written by a lesser writer, created by a lesser director, Yeah, there would have been Jeff Bridges would have gone to Crispine's house and shot him right. There would have been a shootout, Yeah, there would there would have been. They would have been a Western shootout.

Now, the last scene of the film would have been a low Western shooterot. As you say, the shootout is half an hour before the end. There's there's some other stuff there that's a little bit again, just my little implausible. In good films, implausibilities we just look past them because everything is flowing so nicely, we just don't want to stop. And in bad films they become And then I think the casino money laundering, that's something out of the seventies.

Every dime is accounted for. You can't just you know, do that. And the Texas Rangers are like an FBI like organization, so they would have been able to go to a casino and like get Crispine on video and see this and that, and then the the whole thing where a bank helps cover up and refuses to help in the investigation. I'm sorry, there's no possibility the Texas Rangers would hold a press conference and say Texas Midland Bank is refusing to cooperate in the investigation of a death death of a Texas Ranger. That's that is unbelievably crist big, big deal, Like the Governor of Texas would throw a task force with four hundred people on it to solve that crime.

That that that so the idea that the Texas Middleland he would the president of that bank would get a phone call from the Governor of Texas saying, what the hell are you doing down there? Right? So so that that doesn't work, but it But it's a great example again, kids, if you're writing a screenplay, you are allowed in plausibilities. You're allowed quote unquote plot holes. If everything around it is transcendently great and moving the plot forward, it's okay, right.

It literally doesn't matter like it It matters so little that it, Like you said, the only reason you're bringing it up is to highlight how good of a thing this is. That it does not detract, hamper, harm or do anything other than exist at the same time as those things. Those two things can be true at. The same time. This can be an amazing thing that has some kind of wonky logic, but the wonky logic serves the plot in such a way that I don't really care, because the movie does, like you said, such a good job in writing its name and cursive effectively that I'm impressed by the way it did it that I don't necessarily need to know that.

You know, maybe it wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it all hangs together, and that's I think. The thing with Taylor Sheridan clearly as a writer is he is thoughtful and purposeful in what he does, and not everyone who writes is thoughtful and purposeful, and sometimes they're neither. I think it's important that Taylor Sheridan kind of commits to the bit, as it were. When given an opportunity to pay homage or reference West Texas or previous Western things, he does that, he takes that upon himself. He makes sure to do it in a way that is also not just, you know, like we've said, paying lip service.

There's that scene between Ben Foster and the Comanche man at the casino table that I think is also very indicative of Taylor Shardan's ability to write a scene that works, that speaks more or less to the entire film's premise in one moment. Yeah, and I think he's really summed up what Taylor Sheridan has demonstrated himself to be one of the great artists of our time in the probably one of the most important media we have for expressing art, film and television. I mean, you could say digital games now are obviously part of that different palettes that you can express art just as much as traditional oil painting or music. But he does not make these references just to check a box, right, It isn't like you can imagine two cowboys in big cowboy hats driving their Mercedes down a Texas highway and by the side of the road is a man dressed in traditional Indian garb and he's has one tier.

This is harkening back to the famous commercials about stopping pollution in the seventies. But that would be like so heavy handed. I guess we've learned in our time together. And this is what I try to get across to my students is that great art does not hammer you over the head and tell you it's great art. You yeah, yeah, it does, doesn't say and by the way, in case you missed it, the mean it doesn't have like a play by play and a color commentary saying like and by the way, the meaning of this scene is I oppose racism.

Does everybody get it? Did everybody get it? I want, you know, I want the clap, the slow clapping to begin now right right, yeah, this that moment in the motel. I just go back to it because I really think it, like like if you asked me my top fifty scenes in movies where I felt a point was being made. So brilliantly without heavy handedness underlining, you know, spotlights.

That was it about the cost of racism, the cost of ethnic you know, identism, where you're you're making people feel terrible for who they are. It just just beautiful, absolutely beautiful. A great film deserves attention, deserves rewatch. If you haven't seen. It before, we hope we haven't spoiled it for you.

But like, you don't have to be a tailor shirt. I think the thing I want to add is that there there are people who watch films like, oh, I'm a Stanley Kubrick fan, so I'll watch all the Stanley Kubrick films. That's not the reason to watch it. This is stands alone. You don't have to have watched any any other American trilogy or.

Other than Sacario. And I honestly forgot that. I forgot that he wrote Sacario because I just look at that as a DNA evil neve thing like and you know, obviously. You can see now yeah, yeah, I mean we can go off on the direct a great screenplay. We've said this before.

This is my rant. I get to say it every episode. Hollywood can throw money at a film project and the lighting will be good, although weirdly sometimes it's not. But the acting can be good, although weirdly sometimes it's not. But you know, the props are good.

But like no amount of money can produce a good screenplay. It just is or it isn't right right, So, uh, this is a great screenplay. And I would say everything I've seen of Taylor Sheridan's in terms of his films, which is Sacario in this film. Both have great screenplays because yes, great directors are involved, but that doesn't necessarily mean the screenplay is going to be and well and also to be fair, you know. And this is the other thing I will say about Taylor Sheridan, Like, like we've talked about subtlety and nuance, the two characters in this movie are riding in a car that's a what at some point they're in a bronco at one point driving around, which again the iconography of the West, and driving around and you're riding on horses.

That the fact that Taylor Sheridan is able to make me think of men riding on horses while two men are in a car is something that a writer, only a writer could get away with in terms of the subtlety and nuance. The director obviously has to be able to understand what the writer's going for. But the fact that Taylor Sheridan was able to evoke horse riding with cars is. Something that is that, isn't it? That isn't an innate ability of a great if not, like again, like you said, a tour level writer, and I think Taylor Sheridan is, and I think you know, to your point of like the yellowstone of it all, I've seen no yellows and so I'm the perfect person to speak to.

I have no idea what that show is about. I know nothing about it other than like I've said, it's the sopranos on the on the planes, is what I have been led to believe by the things that I've read. That's probably being dismissive, and uh, you know, like very I wouldn't say dismissive, but like you know, simplistic, I'm sure, which is unfortunate, and I would like to get around to watching it at some point. So all of that to say, I'm the right person to have watched this because I have no affiliation to Taylor Sheridan whatsoever. And like I said, forgot that he even wrote Sakaria, I would say that this is, like, you know, one of the best westerns I've seen, and probably one of the best movies I've seen in a really long time.

I would put this up there for me with a writer director like Martin McDonough, whoever, every time he releases something, I go and try to see it in theater because I think Martin McDonough is one of the best living writers in terms of film right now, and I would put Taylor Sheridan in that same group now, Like you know, I would say that, like you said, I parsed over the script for Heller high Water and the script for Hell or High Water is amazing, just the way all of the scripts for Martin McDonough's films are, because the writer has such a unique and specific voice that it comes through on the page in every word that they write it, and it's it's you know, sometimes a script is a guideline. Sometimes a script is an outline.

Sometimes a script is a step by step way of doing things. Taylor Sheridan's scripts are just again, it's like you said, like he's an auteur for a reason. He gets exactly, he gets exactly across what he wants you to understand with his words on the page, and then a director can execute that easier than others because Taylor Sheridan is telling you exactly what he needs. And like I said, that those shots behind the shots behind the car shots with the cars jostling on the road making them look like horses, and then utilizing just the one usage of the word bronco very again smartly but not hanging a lantern on it. I think, as you know, if indicative of a writer who I wish I could write like that.

I think anyone who wants to write professionally in film would hope that they could ever achieve the levels of what he achieved with this script, because, like I said, I think this is one of there's a reason this movie is nominated. For Best Picture. It's because it's a. Really good movie with a lot of nuance and depth and thoughtfulness to it that most movies don't even have in one scene, let alone every scene in this movie has. Yeah, I guess the way I'd like to end on this movie is that one of the qualities I felt that came through on the script, which is something again, people who want to learn or want to write stories is the effortlessness of it.

The idea that like, this is an organic story and organic characters who develop. While some of the technical like how they get from A to B plausibility questions come up just as an aside, just as fun to talk about for a few seconds, but like the character development, what people do and say feels so natural, and this is this great challenge. Right. We have a lot of properties now, you know, two hundred million dollar television series where I did not feel for one moment that I wasn't hearing the words of for California screenwriters, right, and they're by their pool typing or to or Uffer brothers, you know, just just I didn't feel that they understood whether it's you know, a space colony or it's a Western crime drama.

I watch a lot of stuff where I don't feel the those people have understood their own characters, right, right, right, I agree with you, and I'll tell you Taylor Sheridan has whatever is that magical ability that you may disagree with his characters. You may disagree with what they do, you may disagree with some of his choices, but man, he knows his people right and what they do. He He's created It's one of those things where a when a really good writer does what they do well, they create a sandbox where within that sandbox everything is so clearly defined yet wide open that it's less about well, I don't understand what you know. I don't understand what Tony Soprano would do if he went to, you know, the toy store with his son.

No, I actually do know, because David Chase and the writers he surrounded himself with created and characterized Tony Soprano in such a way that he's essentially a wind up toy that you already have seen been built and it just goes. You just have to figure out what direction to point it in, and it will interact with the things the way it always has, because it's so clearly defined to begin with, and the world is so clearly defined, but it's wide open. And that's the sign of a good writer is that they're able to, like you said, craft a world that seems at times real, believable, plausible, but also wide open to things happening that, like you know, I would say, subverting expectations is just a writer attempting to inject a level of reality into their script that's hard to do, because you know when we talk, you know, we've you know, you and I are friends, and we've talked outside of this, you know, in a non professional capacity, and you know, I've talked about my personal life and my personal life for eighteen years almost after I graduated high school was pretty drama free and without any subverting of my expectations, as one might say.

But a couple of years ago, my expectations were subverted in a way that's hard for me to still. I mean now, as I've processed it therapy and other things, I understand better now. But I would say that the term subverting expectations really, in a lot of ways, just means something happened in this that is reflective of real life's unpredictability in a way that is believable. And you know, Gil Birmingham's character dying while he's just sitting there aiming down the sites of a gun at Ben Foster hasn't even shot at him and just dies is pretty realistic. That's subverting of your expectations.

But that happens all the time in real life. Someone just dies on the job, especially in a dangerous job like that, And I think it's interesting. Taylor Sheridan, I think, is able to create a world where things are believably happening, but then the subverting of expectation moments are still as believable and real, but they also hit really hard because you understand the weight of them in the world that he's created. Because the world that he's created is so just thoughtful and well thought out that it you care about the things that are happening, and you are following along with the story or the plot, but you're also aware that this writer is willing to inject something into their stories that is reflective of the real life that we all live, and that's dangerous in a way, that's transgressive and subversive in a way, because movies for a lot of people are a safe space you go to where the expectations and the genre kind of tropes are lived within.

I mean again to speak to the Western, a genre that has so many tropes, or the mobster genre that has so many tropes, and David Chase and Taylor Sheridan have taken it upon themselves as writers to upend those expectations. Not intentionally, I would say, but just because their way of writing and their unique voice that they each have is just more about hewing close to what we all live as a human experience. I think they as writers actually speak to the human experience much more than most writers do, because, like you just said, I watch so many things and I just hear four people sitting in a room together, not on a bone, collectively passing it around, going well, do we think this character should live?

Do we think that this character should die? It's like, you know what, I think the story actually dictates that you guys are just the shepherds of the story. The story has dictated the expectations. And when I hear those kinds of things, like you said, all I can think is just a bunch of people sitting in a room together, be it in La or New York or where have you, and it's just it's not true to the world and the characters they've created. And that's such a shame because anymore, that's what I want, That's what I resonate with, is a writer is wanting to speak truth to power in terms of the human experience.

And I don't really if I want to go be entertained by something, there are plenty of things I can go entertain myself with. But if I want to watch something and really have something to chew on. Like this movie, I want the writer to take it upon themselves to speak to the human experience in a way that feels real as opposed to just a put on. Well, i think I'm going to give you an a plus for this class, Chris Dang. Well, yet again, thank you, and you you've done well with the pick as well.

I would say, you know, we've we've been you know, just kind of chatting outside of these podcasts and and picking up things to watch. And you know, the thing that we were originally going to watch was a lot more out there than this, a little less narratively straightforward. Is a time travel movie with Sam Rockwell, uh, this is not that. And I'm actually glad that this wasn't that because I I could stand to have watched a little straightforward cinema for once, because I do try to keep myself in the weirder side of things. So thank you for the good pick this.

This is a film that I'm I'm going to definitely suggest to people and rewatch you know, on on on several occasions with other people so I can talk with them about it. Because I know my dad who's a huge fan of Westerns, went to Archer City de Larry McMurtry's like bookstore when it was still open. Like, my dad loves westerns, like this is right in his wheelhouse, and so you know I would be excited to watch this with him. So thank you for another good suggestion. You know we're you're as to use a baseball parlance.

You're batting. You know you're batting in the point four point five, may even higher than that. I don't think you've had a bad suggestion yet. Every at bat has been a success, no strikeouts yet. Well again, something I try to put forge in my students.

I'm a big fan of Mystery Science thereto three thousand and you know it's been renewed by Netflix and they injected a big budget into it. It's really being well done now, I mean it always was. I'm old enough to remember the original show. And you see films there which, let's put it this way, they are technically terrible, right, acting, plot, the photography, everything is pretty bad. But you know you learn something from them, right, And so nobody should ever watch a movie or a TV show and go like boy, I mean you can say that was a waste of your time, that's reasonable to say.

But if if you're interested in making culture or critiquing appreciating culture, and at least you learned something from the good, the bad, and the ugly, and this was definitely the good, so well, I would say. That, I would say even more than good, I would say that this is transcendent. I would say that I rarely watch perfect films, but this is the closest thing I've seen to a perfect film in a while, so no, I really enjoyed it. So if you want to hear more discussion with the doctor Peerlmutter and I talking about film and other well just film really, I mean, I like he's alluded to, I'd like to expand a little bit more into other things. And that's a discussion for another time.

But if you want to hear me talking primarily about television, it's not going to be here. It's going to be on several other specific podcasts that talk about television shows specifically, not broadly, but for movie discussion, head on over to the Culture Cast, which is this show you're listening to now, which is part of the Weirdingway Media network, which you can find over at weirdingwaymedia dot com, where this show so many other great shows like Midnight Viewing, Rejection Booth, eighty CV Ladies, and plenty of other shows that I'm probably forgetting because there's a lot of them. Just go listen to those. Stop listening to me, and listen to those. It's that part of the show.

Like, rate and review this show on iTunes and Spotify. Those are the only two places I would prefer you find the show. If you're finding it elsewhere, cool, leave a like, I guess on YouTube. Doctor Pearl Mutter, thank you so much for the candor and the film pick again. I always appreciate it.

Thank you, and as always, we'll catch you on the next episode. H