i have some questions um about movies in general and specifically a bunch around dune
and some other science fiction movies that are coming out and here comes patrick casey with
this great question ghostbusters afterlife he said had a great ending i totally agree
um for me exactly the right amount of fan service uh and i i know that's
kind of a dirty word at this point i think it's i'm sad about that because
i i you know we're just in the middle of a cultural discourse i think that was started
by star wars and abram's star wars sequels and has continued to today and there are
some aspects of that conversation about what is and isn't fan service i don't think is that
useful um i mean my metric is did i enjoy the movie and i love afterlife um but what patrick
wants to know is what movie and scene has had the biggest emotional impact on me um and i
thought about this for a second and i'm like okay biggest emotional impact right like raiders has
had an emotional impact on me but that's more of the totality of the movie patrick casey wants to
know about a movie and scene and then when i thought about it from that vantage point
it's the um it's the resuscitation scene from the abyss
yeah a whole bunch of people watching are nodding right now yeah um if you haven't seen the abyss
i just watched it again for probably like my 30th time i've seen that movie a couple dozen times
if i've seen it in a if i've seen it once and it is even better every single time than i remember
spoiler coming up in the middle of the movie mary elizabeth master antonio who plays uh ed
harris ed harris's ex-wife in the film virgil bregman's ex-wife um she dies and that's part
of the plan to rescue her and she gets dragged while drowned back to safety and then her husband
her ex-husband virgil uh works to resuscitate her and it is one of the most brutally intense scenes
but what's amazing when you watch it is how long cameron james cameron lets the scene play out
it is always longer than i expect it's going to be it always takes so long i'm sure she's
dead even though i've seen the movie a million times and when again spoiler when she wakes up
i burst into tears every single time i watch the movie it never ceases to just hit me super hard
uh and that is a testament to the writing and the cinematography and also the incredible ensemble
cast that is in the abyss um seriously i sometimes call up that scene just because i want a good like
a good hit a good dose of some excellent filmmaking with a high emotionality and low
stakes for me uh patrick that's a lovely question and i liked the exercise of thinking about it
um charles white asks a really interesting question in broad strokes to avoid spoilers what
was your favorite part about the art direction in dune did it meet your mind's eye i know for
me everything was exactly was practically how i envisioned it um it's been a long time
since i've read dune so i did not have a lot of preconceived notions i attempted to watch the
shush i attempted to watch the david lynch dune in preparation for denis villeneuve's dune um
uh reader i was not able to complete it not because it's terrible although you
know there's a lot of aspects about it that totally don't work there are aspects about the
lynch version that are so beautiful and so weird and like weird is what's necessary when you're
doing deep science fiction i think and i'll talk about that in a minute i had to stop watching the
lynch dune because the baron harkonnen scenes are actually almost too brutal for me i i'm
weird in my old age and there are certain kinds of gore and exploitation i find really upsetting and
when harkonnen pulls the heart plug and kills this kid by drinking is like direct venus blood it's
disgusting it's awful i couldn't i literally had to turn it up i felt physically ill it's unlike
me and i was surprised it happened but there it is um so all that is the longest way of saying i did
not have any really preconceived notions about how dune should look i did note when i watched
sicario which i have also watched like half a dozen times now that
villain of shoots it almost like it's a science fiction movie like the cities and the places and
the the landscapes that he covers in that film he covers like almost like there are another planet
and i think there's a real parity between the real world locations he's filming in sicario
and the completely artificial worlds that he's built for dune they both feel equally as real
seriously um and in that vein i think the art direction in dune is some of the best
science fiction movie art direction i have yet seen um first of all it feels cohesive
each of the each of the aesthetic silos i.e the different families the harkonnens the treaties etc
have very specific looks to them that are held to very carefully
but more than that there's a majesty in the master shots where you see giant landscapes
of ships taking off and you know where the spice is gathered that for the first time in memory in
a film none of them feel like matte paintings to me there's small bits of movement in every one but
there's a classic difficulty i think that happens with directors of science fiction movies which is
that they spend a lot of money getting people to build them a master shot and then they want to
show it off because that's a natural human impulse uh and when you talk to the guys at a workshop
about working with neil blomkamp the thing they were amazed about working with him on chappie and
uh uh district nine and other films is that neil has no sentimentality about having you
build something and tossing it or filming it just in passing because he wants these
things to be treated like real world objects it doesn't matter how much energy the team spent
making them look right he still wants to film it as if it's just a pair of scissors
uh and that's that's the correct way to do it and i just think there's a few examples of
scale and scope being communicated in a science fiction movie to the degree that it is shown in
june the other thing i love is how shape is the is the shape of the chips they're like
it's just like he i felt like one of their axioms in the creation of the ships and the designs
was just take away all preconceived notions about a progression from here to there
like this is this is magic it's indistinguishable from magic so these things float and when this
giant ship that is nothing but a sphere with legs lands and this ramp comes down boot and
it's covered with carpet like you just take it all in but there's a simplicity to the
shape of the ships their spheres and their triangles and they're they're they're planar
um that is lovely and the ornithopters holy cow the ornithopters i mean
in science fiction history we have a bunch of ornithopters but the best ones up until
now have all been miyazaki they've they're in castle in the sky they're in uh nausicaa
valley of the winds uh and i think there's one other but i can't remember it right now um
the ornithopters in dune are incredible they feel everything about them feels right from
their sound to the way they vibrate to the way they fail to the way they operate again it just
you feel like you're watching real objects you don't feel like you're watching someone show you a
simulacrum of objects and that that sounds like to me when i say that out loud that sounds ludicrous
of course that's the goal but it is a really hard goal to hit um and i don't think there's anyone
better at it right now than denny villanova um carrie shanahan says which shows or movies or
which show shows would you love to have a memory wipe off so you could go back and watch from the
beginning completely fresh to be fair any show that i watch more than once oh interesting i was
going to say any show i watch more than once is absolutely a show i'd love to watch from scratch
but that's not exactly true because i found watching breaking bad a second time through all
i think it's 59 hours the second pass through breaking bad was way better than the first pass
because once you once you have a bead on the ark the story is so much more shakespearean it's so
much more intense it's so beautiful um there were ways in which every character that would show up
in breaking bad i would see their eventual death spoiler some of the characters from
breaking bad die um i would see their death the brother-in-law would see him and it was like i
was unstuck in time each character would come in and i'd see their whole history laid out in front
of them all the way to its end and that made it bittersweet and intense in a in a brand new way
but you asked about shows i'd want a memory wipe on um it's hard to top how exciting it was to
watch sports night the first time aaron sorkin's first big network show he and tommy schlammy
um wrote sports night with felicity and felicity starred felicity huffman josh charles peter krause
uh robert guillaume uh uh uh and josh molina an incredible cast i loved that show so much
when it came out i recorded it on vhs somewhere in storage i still have a vhs tape with the entirety
of season one on two six hour tapes um i think i was managed to fit at all on two extended extended
uh vhs cassettes um so i loved it back then and i have since watched it another three times both
seasons um it's one of my favorite shows it's some amazing writing boy is there a slowdown in
the middle of season two a real a real funk of a slowdown in terms of where everything is going but
it's an incredible show i mean anything that i loved i loved the idea of getting to see it
you know when i when i first met my wife uh she had never seen gross point blank and i was like
oh my god i get to show you this movie for your first time what a treat uh she had never seen a
thing she had never seen the thing i was like oh i'm not gonna say anything let's just watch
so in a way to be honest i'm not sure i ever want a full i mean i
always say to people i'm jealous you get to watch it for the first time
because i mean gross point blank is a revelation the first time you see it it is a movie my wife
pointed out to me it is a movie without subtext everything that would normally be emotional
subtext in a film is actually stated outright and verbalized as text in gross point blank
that is from a uh from a storytelling and screenwriting standpoint that's kind of thrilling