Required Viewing 00: Syllabus

Hello everyone, and welcome to required viewing, a little uh sub podcast within the Culture Cast. I am the host of the Culture Cast, Christashu, and I'm joined by my good friend. He's the co host of this show. He can now put that on his resume along with all the other things like having been on The Daily Show and teaching at Texas Tech. He is the professor of Media and Communications over there.

He is a very close friend of mine, and he and I have been podcasting together for god a couple of years now, just several, like four or five, Your friend of mine, doctor David Peerlmutter. Thank you, Chris. I'm very happy to be aboard this exciting new venture. So, if you've clicked on this episode, which is the only way you're hearing this now, you are either wondering or aware as to what this is. So if you're wondering, we'll tell you, and if you're aware, just hang out for a second while we let everybody else know.

So what this is is a sub podcast within the Culture Cast. It's easier to do it that way on my end, and it takes advantage of a pre existing podcast feed. Just a little how the sausage is made moment for everyone who just loves to hear podcasting technical talk. And on this show it will be doctor Pearlmutter and I primarily. We will have guests from time to time, sometimes frequently, sometimes infrequently, and we will be posting this show once a week, every Thursday, as opposed to Wednesday, when the Normal Culture Cast comes out.

The Normal Culture Cast will still be coming out every Wednesday, but this will be an additional little bonus show. Every week. We'll be talking about the themes of this show a little bit more broadly than just the kind of specific I would say, like housekeeping information. But expect that every episode we'll be talking about a movie, or sometimes we'll be talking about ideas of movies or genres. We haven't kind of decided how narrow we want to be, but we're starting out with is talking about specific movies, but what and why and how is going to be kind of the conversation for today.

But in terms of the specifics, this will be a movie podcast where we will be talking about movies, but we will not just be talking about films subjectively. This would be more an objective conversation and that's kind of I think where we have our conversation. Now we want to do kind of an episode zero for our show, because this is a show that does need a little not explanation, but a little clarification. Because doctor Perlmutter with a name like required viewing, one must assume that all these movies need to be watched immediately, and if you don't watch them, you can't have an opinion about film, right right. Well, I guess it is pretty cheeky to use the required, but we do that obviously in classes all the time.

We say that they're required readings and optional readings. And typically the case for why something is required is that if you want to have an understanding of whatever the general topic of the class is, and it could be accounting one oh one, or it could be the origins of World War One, or it could be Italian cinema of the nineteen fifties, these are the texts, and they could be books and movies and television shows maybe or video games, digital games that you really should look at. They're sort of pillars or seminal. That's not a statement that they are necessarily the best, but that we can learn a lot from them and that you can take away so that when you're doing on your studies for the class, but hopefully when you are on your own, you've still taken those away with you.

And I'm going to refer a couple of times here to sort of my not heroes journey, but my journey to becoming somebody who makes a living understanding media that I grew to appreciate that in my college career, going through my under raedugree, my master's degree, and my PhD. About like how these texts, whether it's any kind that you can approach them with what I like to call sort of professional three sixty A take That is, that is, you can look at them so many different ways and maybe just one viewing or two viewings. These are the kind of movies that probably you could watch more and get more and more from it each time. And a lot of them are ones that I bet you and I probably would agree are quote good, like watchable, very interesting.

Movies, subjective good. I think it's subjective good. Yeah, subjective. My first sort of metapoint that I make to my students is that we live in the world of likes, right, and we live in the world where whether somebody likes something or doesn't like it, up votes it or down votes. It seems to be the sort of binary understanding of culture, and I want to get away from that because I don't think it can make your day fun to downvote something or to say I love this and I hate this.

But at the end, educationally and in terms of self improvement of making us good astute critics of things, it's it's just one piece of data. So if I go to a movie and I really love the movie, like, I enjoy the movie, and maybe I even figure out, oh gosh, you know, I am the target audience of this movie. Although I'm getting to an age now where I don't think that many movies are saying why we sure hope we get those people to the theater. But like, that's just another piece of data that I enjoyed it, and it shouldn't be the determining factor for me defending or attacking any part of the movie. So as you're going to kind of talk about your journey to this point, I'll parallel with my own journey because I have not spoken about it very often.

And what an opportunity like now, especially in this setting, and especially given the people that I know that are going to be hearing this, especially, you know people in your courses, you can come at being a critic or a film critic, or someone who's critical of film or talks about film broadly. And I don't know what I would consider myself because I hate the term critic because that then makes me in the same group of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who are people that I think you spoke to just now boiled down movies to thumbs up or thumbs down, And those two words thumbs up or thumbs down were for the long time defining phrases for cinema in terms of how people broadly in the mass world interpreted and received film criticism, which is literally boiling it down to a binary zero or one.

And I think that, as you've clearly alluded to, it is very hard in this day and age to boil anything down to zeros and ones. And if you live in a binary world, I kind of feel bad for you, because the world's not binary at all. And I'm not just saying that as someone who's non binary. I'm saying that as someone who understands that the world has a level of gray to it, that is, it's not easy to receive it because it doesn't fit within the narrative of everything that we've been taught and told about. And that's where I think art is so important, because art is that space in between the black and the white where people are allowed to have conversations about things openly and broadly that you wouldn't otherwise than that you can't otherwise.

I mean, there are so many films that allow you to have conversations about things that people would have no ability to have a conversation about otherwise. And that's just to talk about the things that the film's talking about, not to talk about the film itself. There are plenty of movie podcasts that don't even talk about the film. They just talk about what the film talks about, which has nothing to do with the subjective feelings on the film. I am with you so so so much that in this day and age, there is a time and place for subjectivity, and I have talked about this with you, where people have opinions about me and my feelings on new movies that seem to be based on the fact that I did not like a new movie.

But I mentioned this at the beginning of every episode of a new movie, that there is a transactional nature to going to a theater, and especially in a day and age where everything is so expensive, I don't understand how someone could not look at a thirteen dollars movie ticket, and especially if you have a significant other or a fan, that's a large amount of money to spend, and you should spend the money on a movie that isn't treating the audience like idiots. And there are plenty of movies that are not treating the audience like they are smart, even now in a time and place where we are so connected as we are with the Internet and everything else. So it's very hard for me to only look at films subjectively now because I try to be as objective as possible, because objectivity is very hard in a world of film criticism when subjectivity seems to be the thing that, like you said, most people want.

And I have spent a lifetime being called a contrarian, but yet every time I'm called a contrarian, my response is always the same. But yet I can explain to you why I didn't like it, so it's not a contrarian. You just don't like what I have to say, which is fine. I can accept that because if you don't like what I have to say. There's the part of the equation is you don't like what I have to say.

It's you that has an issue with what I'm saying, not the world broadly or anything else. And that getting out of one's own way is very hard in this line of work, and there are a lot of podcasts that don't even try to do it, which is fine. There are some podcasts that think that they're doing it and they're not, and then there are plenty of podcasts that try to tread the line in between. Mike White's podcast, The Projection Boost, is the one that I kind of look to as the gold standard for movie podcasts, which features a little bit of both. It's both very objective because it talks to the people that made the film.

It goes into the processes which go into the filmmaking and everything else. But then also we talk subjectively on there about how we feel about the film, and that's the subjective issue, and that's a thing that I don't like the film, But I, as a film critic or whatever you want to call me, understand that being able to get out of my own way to suggest a film is probably the most important thing I, as a critic can do, which is not allow who I am to get in the way of someone else's enjoyment of something, because how I appreciate something is not going to effect and should not affect someone else's enjoyment at all. Yeah, and the other part about it is that I am. I have my own demographics right and including maybe thirty five years of discussing culture.

But when I engage students, and of course nowadays we like to say there's no such thing as a typical college student, because I'm very lucky that I might have an eighteen year old as a student. I might also have a sixty two year old who was in the army for twenty five years. So there's a lot of experience sets coming into the classroom. And so that I studied film or read about film, or have written about television shows and digital gaming or things like that, I am coming with a particular point of view, but like I learn a lot with a legitimate engagement where somebody really wants to engage, and they are. They come with their own points of view and have their own develop arguments.

And so I'm just making the case to my students, you should learn how to develop your own authentic argument, and it may differ from mine, like we may come to a completely different conclusion. But there is such a thing as having a very good method. And over the years, the scientific method, the journalistic method, the historical method, the police investigation method. That's the ideal method is that you go where the evidence points you to. We would not want scientists who wrote the conclusion sections of their medical studies before they actually went into the lab or with a clinical trial and did the work right.

Likewise, we've talked about some lawyers and legal system in the show. Lawyers often start a case and discover something literally, discover something that they didn't know before they started, right. So that is the process here. It's like, I've enjoyed our interaction because like, oh gosh, Chris and Richard had him and Susan Lambert and some of the other people you've had on the show discussing. They're making a point I had never thought of.

That's great, and it's based off of all kinds of different things. It's not any one thing. And I think that you put it so aptly, and I think that's why you and I are so I think engaged with one another. In a mental space of kind of criticism and discussion around film is I am just as interested as you are at looking at it from both a micro and macro view, because the microview is just as important as the macroview, and the microview is the film, and the macro view is the world in which the film existed and exists now. And there's so many conversations you can have in so many directions on all of those topics.

And oh, by the way, so much of it has nothing to do with whether, Like I've mentioned this to you before in conversation, I've mentioned this to other people, and I don't know if I've ever said it in a podcast. I probably have at some point, But saying I liked the film or I didn't like a film is the equivalent of a conversational cul de sac. Where do you go Now? You got to back your car up or turn around and go the other way and find another road to go down, if and when you choose to do that. Because if you just say I didn't like the movie, and that's it, all right, I mean, like, what do you say to that, there's no engaging conversation.

And I think that that kind of applies at a macro level at this point with everything, I think the ability to have a discourse without opinion is hard. And I understand why it's hard, because again we've seen film being used for all kinds of reasons. In film being used in a way that's people doing a certain thing because of a film, or expecting a certain thing because of a film. And film is political statement, film is art, Film can be any number of things. Film contains multitudes, but the thing that film is not is singular in nature, like film is MULTIFA have an.

Example of because we've been talking sort of at a broad level, but let me let's give some film examples of what you're saying what I'm saying here. So just a little bit into of my journey, and I've mentioned this before, I'll compact it here. So I'm taking my first film class and it's taught by this amazing professor called Amos Vogel. He has this book that everybody should read that I'll require reading of other people's books, not my own, but this book, Film is a subversive art. Don't leave it within the reach of children.

It's about experimental film, film that pushes the boundaries and also international films that at that time in the nineteen eighties weren't as popular as now nowadays. If you said, hey, I'm going to go watch a Korean movie, nobody would blink, right, But at that time it was sort of a big deal. Like we were getting obviously movies from Britain and Japan, but like anything else besides a few countries was odd. And then experimental films like today on YouTube you can watch nine one hundred million short films. But anyway, so I'm watching this and he's throwing some films at me that like whoa, Like I've never seen a film like that before, Like wow, I can't believe you're allowed to do that in a film, And it's shocking me.

But it's also aweing me, like because he's making this case. And then he also and here's the example I want to give where he will say, you know, these boundary pushers were pioneers in an empty land where Hollywood and the big movie world, the big video game world, the big world followed. And the example was I watched this French film by Chris Marker called La Jettick, which was this odd, mostly silent, experimental film with mostly subtitles about a post apocalyptic future in Paris where a guy goes back in time to try to prevent the disaster the Flick of the World, and I'm watching this film, going wow, amazing black and white shorts, experimental film. A couple of years later, there's Bruce Willis in The Twelve Monkeys doing this.

That's where it came from, right, So it's interesting to talk about different variations on filmmaking that are revolutions and influential and we can identify them, and then we can also talk about like what's very common and how subversion of something can work. I do think it's very funny you mentioned the idea of film as subversive art, and obviously, like you mentioned living in the day and age we live in now, I think anyone, myself included. Obviously, I'm not just like, oh, shaking my cane at the clouds eh old Man yells at cloud I always think of that from The Simpsons with Abe Simpson, just like on the cover of the newspaper from The Simpsons, which dates me immediately. Apparently there are people that are alive now that have not seen a good season at the Simpsons because it's been on for almost forty years as an old man shaking his cane at the cloud.

It is really hard to understand the idea that there was not a democratic place to post whatever you wanted in terms of whatever it is that you can create, and then you get that turned into a movie and you become the darling of the industry a Lahkane Parsons and Curry Barker, who are now having brins trucks of money backed up to their houses. Which is the old which is such an old school way of doing things. It using the technology of now, because it's no different than seeing an indie film in the nineties and taking that person and giving them a franchise film. But we live in a time now where YouTube is so democratic, the level of subversion kind of varies, and even YouTube has its own guidelines and restrictions.

And I'm not sure how subversive YouTube even is anymore. I mean, there's conversations you can have about what platform does allow for the most subversion as art or even art adjacent. Maybe something like live leak or TikTok even I don't know. YouTube maybe is two pass in terms of even having that subversive art conversation, And I don't know if a I don't know if you can and again, maybe you know a gain interesting direction to go with the conversation. In terms of required viewing, I'm not sure you can even have something be considered subversive art if it's a major motion picture directed by a studio that is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make it.

We talked about that. I forget what movie we were talking where it's like, oh, they're really Oh it's Mickey seventeen. It's like fight the Man, but this is like a three hundred million dollar movie, like get out of here. Come on, It's like fight the man? What you are the man?

Like it's it's it's one level of the man fighting another level of the man. But the rest of us are down here and you guys are it's you know, it's it's the it's the royals fighting over the last you know, scrap of cake while the rest of us are eating you know, rice. Like it's like, okay, like what are we supposed to do here? And it's that It's that weird conversation where again, like it's hard to it's hard to look at any of this anymore as subversive it's all. I think the nature of film being subversive in a broadly popular way has kind of come and gone.

I think the places to see it are different, which is why the conversations that we are going to have on this podcast may not focus on new films broadly. It may focus on older films, films that came out in the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies. There are time and places to still be subversive. I just think in this day and age it's much harder to be subversive in a genuine capacity. If the budget of the film is five hundred million dollars, I'm not sure how subversive we can really claim to be.

Like that's if there was craft service and catering. Are we really subversive? Come on? That is a test. The other aspect of this that I like to talk about is that there are ways of judging a film, and today it's interesting to me how we have criteria for a film being quote unquote successful that we're relevant in when I was growing up and watching movies, and some that don't seem to be relevant anymore.

So. For example, yes, when I was growing up, like in something called a newspaper and something called a magazine and a radio television show and a TV show, there might be people mentioning this film Star Wars, Jaws, Raiders the Lost Dark was a big hit, like lots of people are watching it. And I remember you would have these street interviews outside a theater where people are coming out of Raiders of the Lost Dark and they'd be interviewing. They'd be a family, a mom and dad and like two seventeen year old six year old daughters and whatever, and they're saying, oh, yeah, we really love this film. This was this was fantastic.

So there today even today that is, you know, making lots of money, like having a lot of viewers is considered a success. We have also commented on how some things no longer seemed to be in the Hollywood calculation, like, for example, that in my day, a film was supposed to open to a certain amount of success, and then the way it really proved it was successful was that it would keep growing for many, many weeks. And you can go back and look at these famous the films that established the blockbuster as a standard, the Jaws, the Raiders, a Lost Art, the Star Wars, just all the big successful movies that sort of changed Hollywood's ambitions of what a film could do. There they would go up every week because of something which I guess Hollywood doesn't take into account anymore called word of mouth, like people would go watch a movie and then tell ten of their friends, you got to go watch this movie with me.

Now, studios seem to be managing the expectations of the downward trend and trying to get the maximum bock office the first weekend, the first forty eight or maybe a longer weekend. So that in itself is interesting about what movie studios for. Maybe it's slightly different for games and for television series where you're you know, you do want people coming back and more people coming. But it comes down to asking even if again, even if you don't quote unquote like a movie, was the movie successful and money is certainly one criterion of success, but also was it successful in what it was setting out to do? Like, for example, if it's if it's in the genre of comedy, okay, was it funny?

Right? Did? Did? Did? And now now it might be a comedy aimed at ten year old boys.

So like Minecraft, which we will never review in this shot, maybe. I mean I would assume not but you know, maybe maybe if we had literally nothing else to talk about. Minecraft was a work of genius targeted for its target of ten year old boys. It was like a smash hit success and we can't We could watch Minecraft and go like, oh, this is what they did to successfully appeal to its target demographic, and we can appreciate professionally that they pulled that off while agreeing that we probably aren't in the target demographic of being in the theater throwing things at the screen. Right.

I forgot about that. Oh wow, the chicken jockey thing right where people are like throwing chicken. Yeah, oh my god. Wow. Well, but here's the thing, and I think for me again, you know, we did to use Minecraft movie as kind of an example, I think, and an interesting example of that.

Like you said, I think success is so hard to manage anymore because so many things have such a long lifespan on streaming, and we'll never know the streaming numbers for anything. I think you can the things you can assume with streaming numbers are why did we get more x files? Well, it wasn't because the world asked for more x files. It was because the world was watching the x files on repeat on streaming platforms like Netflix and Who and everything else. And they were like, well, I guess people want more of that, and so they went and ruined it.

But that wasn't a bad idea. They saw an opportunity, they saw a want, they saw people watching it all the time. I'm surprised we have not seen a Friend's reboot or remake or an Office reboot or remake in terms of backing up money and brings truck to these actors, because again, those streaming platforms like Peacock are making money hand over fist because people just watch The Office on repeat because it's a culturally significant show to them. And that's not a thing for a lot of over a lot of things. I mean, that's another success right, multi is something multi.

Generation right right, which again is hard perception of. The Office is. And this is a show that I watched live, I mean I watched since like when it came out. Like two thousand and six. It's got a huge audience of people under thirty who connect to it and know the characters.

This is this there's two things going on there, which again I think is interesting, especially when we talk about older movies that have been repackaged, and we talked about memization where people are sort of familiar with the movie without actually having watched it because there's so many clips. Maybe somebody hasn't watched the entire Office. Now they have the super fan episodes of the Office. Talk about repackaging the same product, but like with new new things, and they're making money off of I know, Hollywood doesn't. It doesn't seem to like to make money off of physical media, but like they are making money off of the Superfan episodes.

That are all the deleted scenes in there, right right there, so we can talk. This is another part of required viewing, is that how how is it that certain things seem to have a success only at one place at one time for one audience, and other things seem eternal and TRANSI have a transitional success carried to the next generation. You know, was to go back to something like the Office, don't. I don't know what causes that, because I don't think if I think if there was any one answer, someone would have just exploited that equation over and over again. There have been certain people who have done it.

Sort of a Norman Lear type I think comes to mind in terms of like shows that are generationally successful and are transcendent, I think in their pop culture significance. But then there are things that, like you said, are popular for a while and then stop being popular, but they were really popular for a while. And is that unsuccessful to be popular for a while and then never popular again. It's the equivalent of a one hit wonder in music, But I think again it's harder to judge it in film because amuse, a song is like three minutes and a film is never going to be that short. So there's always and a film is so kind of not insular in its creation, but sometimes it's one person, sometimes it's a band, but rarely is it hundreds of people.

Are thousands of people like it is on a film? And with film it's just it's really hard to always say, well, it was successful because X, or it wasn't successful because of why, Like there's I think that in terms of success or unsuccess, it's hard to measure it and is something unsuccessful because it wasn't successful long term? I mean, Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story has not been culturally relevant for a decade, but man, it was successful for those first couple of years that it was a show. I mean, it was Gangbusters. They were just like Shonda Rhymes, is, what is anything Shonda Rhyme's working on right now as impactful as Scandal?

I'm not really not nearly as impactful as Scandal, or I guess Gray's Anatomy was the other show she did, But Scandal and Gray's Anatomy, Like, there's nothing that's been as long term or impactful as those shows for those creators. But they were immensely successful and they're still utilizing that success now. So success and failure in this industry, like, I don't know if it's failure, Like failure is a hard phrase to you, because if a film gets to come out in a theater, is it really a failure? Like it got further than It's like calling someone who's an athlete in the NFL a failure. They got further than like ninety nine percent of people did.

And if a film comes out in a theater in a wide audience and it bombs, then okay, maybe is it a failure? Not really, because it actually got to come out to a wide audience. So success in failure is not binary of films. And I think John Carpenter's original The Thing is All is always like a prime example of I again, I'm old enough to remember the only time I only used that once per show. I'm old enough to remember.

I went to see The Thing in the theater with some friends of mine and we thought, like, oh my god, that's an amazing film. Did you see those effects. I don't think we call them specially, just the effects, you know, they're and like we were, we were scared, we were puzzled, blown away. Think then I would read newspapers reviews, and I saw Cisco and Ebert and they were way thumbs down, Like they thought John Carpenter should be arrested. Not quite that, I mean they said that for Nimer on Elmstreet three, they were like, this film should be NC seventy and the director should be arrested for pornography, and like it was like subversive violence, like really really, and it was.

It was almost universally panned, and it turned out that, I mean, it just didn't the fans, I mean, there was no fan base for it. Then over time it's become this transcendent classic over and over again. It benefited from DVDs, it benefited from cable, it benefited from from from from streaming. So that's also interesting in terms of required viewing about looking at films, films that were successful at one time and then maybe they just don't seem to have that cultural resonance past their time. Especially this is fair especially true, and we'll talk about this about something that's so top like I would have trouble.

I would show All the President's Men with Robert Redfirst in a specialty film class about like journalism and film, But like man, I would have to do too much work to explain the cultural circumstances political circumstances of that film today to an audience to show it anywhere else. And it really hasn't survived in the culture as something people I never hear it referred to, even by people who are are sort of high brow culture critics or something like that. So a film can just make sense in its time and then essentially be forgotten, and other ones can come out of nowhere universally panned and be remembered. And that's that's something else we should be looking at. And it's very interesting.

Well, I was going to say the other example that I think of when I think of the films that are critically panned but then have you know, find life the law longer time goes on. Blade Runner is another example. Blade Runner came out and was just like The Thing, like it found its audience after the fact. It found its audience the longer the film existed out in the public space and it found its audience. It was you know, there was a director's cut and then there was another one, and it's like, okay, now is it a success?

Is it a success now that it's had a sequel and a TV show and another sequel possibly, like does that make it a success in everybody's mind? You originally thought that it was you know, sci fi Drek or high brown nonsense, like, is that a success? Now? It's weird because Blade Runner is a I don't know if it's culturally important. I don't know who finds it culturally important in this day and age.

But I think what's interesting about something like Blade Runner or The Thing is there have been sequels that have come out in the last twenty years, so it must be culturally significant to some data minor somewhere or someone looking at the numbers going well, we can make money off of this in xyz capacity, and we see financial viability here. Does that make it a success? It's weird because the thing I think the needle we're trying to thread here with required viewing is what does that mean? Well, it means any It could mean a whole host of different things at for any one film. But I think the thing that we want to unpack with this show is can you have a conversation about a film and touch all those bases and have that conversation without letting subjectivity get in the way, which is a hard thing to do as a critic because, like you already talked about with Ciskel and Ebert, they were not immune to it, and they frankly did it all the time, and by the time that the show was as popular as it was, that's what people were wanting.

People were there for the banter between the two of them and their own opinions getting in the way of people's ability to just enjoy something to begin with, as opposed to Oh, Ciskel and Ebert said two thumbs up, so I'm not going to go see it, like I get it, But at the same time, like that's to boil down cinema to that up and down binary is just in this day and age it's not a great way to have a conversation because we don't live in a un informed day and age. Maybe when you didn't know the things that happened making the movie, or you couldn't watch things or read things about movies, maybe, but now it's like, I feel like we almost need to do better in terms of our criticism, because making an informed decision should be the most important thing here.

And the other part about is that, especially when we're focusing on film Professor Vogel, I remember one of the points that he kept making to us he was not a big believer in the auteur theory. He was not a big proponent that there was an author of a film that especially was a major production. Yeah, you could imagine a student in fact, as a student, I made my little film, and I actually worked with two or three other people, and you know, all of our names were on top there. But generally, for let's just say a Hollywood production film, you see the credits run at the beginning and at the end, and yes, there may be one person and you may not don't even know which person it is. And maybe, I mean there are films there studio cuts, right, like there was one producer at back at Disney who really drove what ended up being the final film.

Sometimes it is somebody directed by Denise Villeneuve or Christoph Drunaulan who had the most effect. But then other times you're watching a film and you're going, wow, that performance really made the film. The particular actor's presence did it. And we part of what we're doing here in required viewing is saying, hey, those things don't always have to agree with each other. And I'm just going to give an example that I gave before we started, where I thoroughly enjoyed watching Project Hail Mary.

I thought it was a great traditional Hollywood film. You could take the whole family and there'd be something there for the grandparents and something there for five year olds, and something there for mom and dad, and they could enjoy the film. I was irritated that they chose to have a soaring soundtrack while people were speaking softly, and I realized that may have been an artifact of that. I did not watch the film in the theater. I watched it on my screen at home, and maybe in the theater with like ninety six speakers, that wasn't as problematic, but like, yeah, it a great film, but like they could have turned the music down when people were whispering to each other.

So does that make me attacking this successful film by every measure? No, I'm just saying we can look at hundreds of different elements in the film and talk about whether one was successful or not. That doesn't take away from the entire assessment of the whole movie. Well, and like you mentioned, with something like Project Hail Mary and the mixing, you and I had talked before we started recording about the Odyssey and the Imax versus non imax in a seventy millimeter, and it's like, well, if you can't afford to spend a lot of money on an IMAX ticket, or there's literally no theater showing it near you, you're missing out and the true experience as seen by the director, which I would consider to be a failure on the director's part for thinking that the only way to view his movie is through one myopic lens of the way I wanted you to see it.

I appreciate that, but you cannot expect that that is going to be everybody's viewing experience. And if you expect that in this day and age, I just I don't know. I guess I have, Like we've already alluded to, I have a very different view of what success and failure are because I think a success should be something that, within reason, allows as many people as possible to see it, as opposed to assuming that the only way to see it is the most restrictive way possible. And again, the movie's been immensely successful in every other regard, but I think the biggest failure is something of making it approachable for everyone, which in a micro view that's just a singular film, but in a macro view that's the industry at large.

It has normally, for the most part, no issue with making everything available, but then you have the idea that forth as available as they are, somehow that has made the viewing experience lesser by the way and which and spot and how you view it, which should not lessen the impact of the art that you're enjoying. I understand how someone could see that it does, but I don't think that that's a reasonable expectation. Yes, And what I'd add to that is that this goes to this question of like, the film going experience today is so radically different than I experienced in my youth and the probably you've experienced. It's different than it was ten years ago, really. And part of it is you just imagine, when I went to see a movie, I may not have read or heard anything whatsoever about the movie before I saw it.

I had it. Doctor Vogel, I always remembered had this comment, and it came from art history analysis about whether somebody had an innocent eye. That is, like you go to a just to say, you visit another country and you go to an art museum and you they have paintings in a particular local folk style that you've never seen before, and like you've seen paintings before, but you've never seen this style of painting before, and you're going and it's so it's a novel experience to you. But today I was just thinking, before The Odyssey came out, before Disclosure Day came out, before it's you've unless you shut yourself down, like turn off the internet, you know, turn off all electronics, don't speak to anybody, don't don't listen to anything.

It's impossible to get you have maybe two or three months of chatter, especially big films. And obviously to me, since the studio is going to be spending what the equivalent of the entire budget of the film on marketing the film. Then somebody on what YouTube also has the right to make an early critique based on, say, what the actors or actresses have said or the trailer. So if the DUDO is allowed to have a marketing budget, the ordinary people are allowed to say something. But the point is that by the time we get to the film, it's almost like we've been lobbied, where like politicians coming to vote, and we've had a whole hall full of lobbyists and taking us out to dinner and wooing us and trying to tell us you will have this opinion when you see the movie.

And I think part of what we argue here in require viewing is that's natural today. You can't avoid it. But try to what's going back to what I said earlier, try to follow the evidence, try to look at what's actually on the screen, and don't be affected by other people's opinion. Well, and I would even go with my you know, an example of my own kind of changing of opinion on something like drastically. So I when I watched it and there's a culture cast episode many moons ago and several lifetimes ago, pre pandemic, but pre a whole lot of other things in my own personal life.

Going sideways, I went and saw at the Alamo Draft House the Luca Guadanino remake that came out. I don't even remember when twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and I could not stand that movie. The first time I watched it, I really disliked it. I didn't get it. I really disliked it.

It was not for me, and I on the episode talked about how much I disliked it. In the years subsequent, I have watched it several times, and I have enjoyed it immensely every time I've rewatched it because I went and did the work afterwards, because again it was not a movie that I could have really prepared for because I saw it in theaters. In terms of how I was going to feel about it, I didn't get to see it three times and then form an opinion. That's the problem with movies and theaters for the most part, unless you're getting a hold of them ahead of time through whatever means, you can only see it once and form an opinion on that one viewing, and film benefits from seeing it multiple times at the not at the same time, but in a span of time.

But it also benefits from repeated viewings after the fact, especially if it's something that you know. There are some movies that don't really hit at a certain time in life because it's hard to even understand the experiences of the characters in the movie. And so you know, like I said with Suspiria, it's not a movie that I liked the first time I watched it, but I've enjoyed it immensely. Now, another example something that you and I talked about, The Witch. Not a movie I enjoyed the first time I watched it, not a movie I enjoyed the second time I watched it.

But as I've watched it more and more with a certain eye and skew and kind of slant and looking at it the way the director intended, I've enjoyed it more and more. But it has taken me also allowing myself a moment to look at something and say, it's not that I was wrong, it's just my taste can change. And I'm allowed that even as someone who has watched a movie and talked about it publicly in a podcast, I'm allowed to change my opinion? What is this? Like the Spanish inquisition, We're not allowed to change our opinion on things.

We're not like what is like? What is? What is that sentiment? On top of everything else, because again, in a world where subjectivity and objectivity have had the line blurred between them, now in a post objectivity world, it feels like the line has been blurred so much. I don't know why we wouldn't be allowed to change our opinion, because I think in a world where you're allowed to change your opinion and actually say, oh, I've watched something and I feel differently about it now than I did five years ago, that shows growth if you just watch it from the same viewpoint.

I'm not sure that it shows any growth or learning or anything in terms of you as the viewer. And like so many other things, a film does not stand alone. It is synthesized through the viewer, and then the viewer's output comes from a whole host of things that are not easily identifiable, either by the person externally or sometimes even the person themselves. Some of us don't know why we like certain things. Not everybody asks why about themselves, and that's not a failing of anybody.

Else. Some people just don't have the capacity needing or wanting or care, and I get it, but that should not discount the rest of us, or those of us who want to do that is my point. And that really gets to the sort of self improvement. I think it's good for your career, it's good for your personal life. It's good for your being a citizen of the republic to have the critical capacity to look past propaganda, look past disinformation, misinformation, look past even the opinion of people around you, and make your own decision based upon facts or what you and then actually do a deep dive into like what are facts?

Of course, and in a movie, it could be this acceptance that, yeah, the movie, that I'm not the eighteen year old who saw this movie, right, I'm a new person and I retain some of what I was eighteen, but like, I'm coming at it from a new direction, and that evolution is perfectly reasonable. This goes back to I guess something else that I try to make a case to my students is that it's okay to enjoy and learn from something a movie that you might find reprehensible or that you might disagree with, which might be half of all movies out there. I mean, everybody's walking into a movie with different perceptions. And the example I'll wrap up on for my filmgoing Journey was that fast forward a number of years, I go back to the same program to get my master's degree, and I end up being a teaching assistant.

I'd become a teaching associate, like the lead teaching assistant for this Amos Vogel in his film class. So it was like it was like such a dream come true for me to sit at the hand the feet of the great band. And of course, you know, I was doing grading and like checking students in to make sure, so I was doing a live bureaucracy. But then one day he tells me it in a month, I'm going out of town for a conference. I don't want to cancel the class.

I'd like you to teach the class. What you mean, like me, get in front of four hundred undergraduate students and teach the class. The film was Lenny Reefinstall's Triumph of the Will. So I'm going to be the first experience film. This is subversive art.

It isn't all goods. You approved subversion, right, I today consider and I don't mind saying it, although if anybody's going to be angry about it, please write to me. First. I consider Lenny Reefinstall's Triumph of the Will to be one of the most brilliant works of propaganda movie making in the history of the world. And brilliant they've done just many different levels.

It was done in service of evil. Those two things don't cancel each other out. Techniques that Lenny Reefinstall did not necessarily always invent, but pioneered in that film. You can see in a hundred Hollywood movie when Indiana Jones goes to a Nazi rally, it is right out of Triumph of the Will and Steven Spielberg, I don't know whether he'd used the word homage too felt, but like he's taking his view of what a Nazi giganto rally with Hitler looked like from Lenny reefinstyle. So it's still influential in many ways.

So I that was but it forced me because I had a very stressful one month preparing for this. I've never prepared for anything more in my entire life. Maybe fatherhood I've read more about to prepare, But but I I made a case to the students, what you're about to watch is the darkest evil imaginable. You will learn a lot from it, and it's okay to actually enjoy it in the sense of like, wow, that was so powerful it moved me. How can I learn about myself that I found this sequence of Hitler moving right right, and and so that's that's also what we're trying to say here is the power of movie.

We love movies. We love the power of movies, of great movies to convince us of things, to give us feelings and ideas in sympathies like at the end of I mean, it sounds like a huge switch. But just my last point on this is going back to Project Hail Mary. Oh. By the end of that film, Oh my gosh, I wanted that little Rocky alien to live, Please please Rocky live.

You know, I was so caught up in the fate of that little Rocky creature, which you know, I'm sure is making a trillion dollars in toys there. How did that happen? Right? It isn't because I'm dumb or gullible. It's because the film did a really good job of building that up.

The example that I would go to is grogu or Minions or I guess Grogu and Minions are probably like the two most recency bias examples that I can go to. And again it's the you mentioned it. It's the memification of things. I mean, there's you know, there was a time and place on Facebook where you couldn't go two seconds without seeing a Grogu meme or a Minions meme. We are thankfully long past that time, but Grogu and Minions were a meme for a very long time, and that is because of the cultural significance and cultural proliferation of those two like iconographic things.

And you know, I think there was I think it was a supersize me that super talk about again in it not in bad taste, but definitely subversive, non honest documentary with a one hundred percent bias and agenda. As we found out in the years subsequent to the film coming out that at the beginning of the film, they show a group of children a picture of Jesus and Ronald McDonald and people don't know who Jesus is, but they could tell you Ronald McDonald is. It's that the level of proliferation with cinema can go beyond normal things, and it's because of the visual element of cinema. And again that's why I always refer to something like Star Wars or Star Trek as modern day mythology. I mean it's for some people it's close to, if not religion.

I mean you have people that are essentially now like Star Wars scholars. Dave Filoni, I think, is probably the person I would look to as like, maybe not like a christ like figure in terms of Star Wars, but in terms of like he has a knowledge of all of the heretical texts of Star Wars, which I don't know what you would call that in a non religious capacity, but in a religious capacity. There are names for that kind of person, and there are people that feel that strongly about things now and when culture has gotten to that point with people where it affects everything that you do. Like, I think it's important to have a conversation about the entire holistic nature of things, because, as you've already talked about, I did not go to school to be a film critic.

I did not go to school for film appreciation. I went to school for journalism and then finished my degree path with a master's in business. So I don't have the technical art background on paper, I just like you mentioned him, someone who has watched films my entire life and thought about films my entire life. Because having conversations about film, like you've already alluded to, I had them by myself. I didn't have them with other people other than my closest of close friends would talk about movies, but not a lot of my friends and family would sit and talk about movies.

It was a specific group of people, and that's still the case now. The people I want to have the genuine film conversations with is not everybody, because not everybody can have those conversations, because not everybody has the capacity or interest to have those conversations. Because sometimes it is just Okay, I didn't like the movie, moving on, and there is nowhere to go with that, Which is why this show will not be that as much as we can make it that. But our subjective feelings will come into play from time to time. It's hard to expect that they won't.

But at the same time, as I sit here as someone who preaches the kind of gospel of cinema as it were, in terms of like I think cinema is a really important like the filmic language is really important too, like you said, be in some way cases manipulative intentionally. Like if a film is manipulative intentionally, you give it a pass because it works. If a film manipulates you and it's not successful, then you feel like it was a cheat or a dodge. But if it's successful, nobody complains. I mean, I think about so many Ron Howard films.

They're intentionally manipulative emotionally, but yet they're immensely successful. Because that's the expectation with a Ron Howard movie is it's going to be an uplifting story. But uplifting stories or tend to be emotionally manipulative intentionally, but we look at it as a positive and a successful thing. But like you said, with something like Triumph of the Will, like it's a negative but it was successful. And so it's in this day and age we have to have those conversations in a way that are here and there and bridging the gap between the two because so many people have never even been allowed to have the conversation.

On the other hand, it's always been did you like the movie? Yes or no? Okay, if you didn't like it, I don't want to talk anymore with you about it because I liked it. It's like, wait a second, Like why is at the end of the conversation, like that I can talk about why I didn't like it, or what about the film elicited, what reaction. It's like if you're if you're only wanting to hear if I liked something or not, and you don't care why, this show is not for you.

But if you want to hear why and how and the ins and outs of things in terms of a more holistic approach to film discussion, you are in the right place and have come to the right place. We agree. The only time we agree though, right right. The only time in the run of this show that you and I will be agreeing is right now on episode zero, and that's it. So, speaking of being in agreement with one another, I think in terms of the first film that we're doing, I think we're in agreement that it's the first film that we're doing.

I make a joke because we agreed ahead of time. That's how this works. On the next and technical first episode of Required Viewing, Doctor Pearl Mutter and I will be talking about a film with two guys who go to drink wine together. A Napa Valley. We're gonna be talking about Sideways, which the conversation we have will be much more than the joky nonsense I just Radio Morning zooed for everybody.

But on the surface, it's a film about two men who go and drink wine in Napa Valley, and there's a lot more going on. If you've never seen it, you should definitely watch it ahead of time. Maybe some other Alexander Payne films. I don't know, maybe maybe not. I have not discussed his films on podcasts before, so I'm looking forward to it.

But I'm always looking forward to a conversation that I get to have with you, doctor Pearl Mutter, especially one about a film that's a little bit more fun than the movies we normally talk about. Normally we're talking about a very serious thing. This it's serious, put serious in a different way. So until then, you can find me over at the Culture Cast, which is on weirding Way Media, where this show and all the other shows I work on can be found. Doctor Pearl Mutter joins me there on the Culture Cast, and obviously for this show once a week, if not sometimes twice a week, depending on what Culture Cast episode it is, so yeah, that's where you can find myself and Doctor Pearl Mutter.

If you want to find other shows like Mike White's The Projection Booth, Or's Susan Lambert Adams eight tv Ladies, weirding Way Media is also where you can go, so head on over there, like rate and review this show on iTunes or Spotify in that order. Please it helps in that order more than it does anything else. And if you're interested in contributing financially, patreon dot com slash culture cast is where you can do that. You support this show and that show and all the shows financially by doing so. If you want to hear never tell Me the odds the upcoming Harrison Ford podcast a month early without ads, that's where you would go as well the Patreon.

So Doctor Pearl Mutter, thank you for agreeing to do this. I know that this has been a long time coming, and now you get to put podcast host on your CV, which I know it will be before everything else now intentionally, not because it's the most recent thing, but it's the thing you're most proud of. So I kid, but I know that we're both very excited to kind of create something here that has a lasting legacy for film discussion, I think in a positive context. So thank you. I'm looking forward to every moment And as always, we'll catch you on the next episod seven.