Kermode & Mayo’s Take - Alien: Romulus – Mess or Masterpiece?

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

This week we have an extra special treat, as Take fave Sanjeev Bhaskar joins Mark in the host’s seat to deliver a funny and insightful episode. Mark reviews various new releases, including ‘Only the River Flows’, a Chinese neo-noir crime thriller, which sees an ambitious police detective attempt to solve a series of murders from a disused cinema; ‘Swan Song’, an immersive documentary following The National Ballet of Canada as it mounts a legacy-defining new production of Swan Lake; and ‘Alien: Romulus’, a new addition to the sci-fi horror franchise, which sees space colonisers come face-to-face with the most terrifying life-form in the universe while scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station. Will Mark like it, love it, hate it? Listen to find out! Timecodes (relevant only for the Vanguard - who are also ad-free!): Only The River Flows Review – 06:46 Box Office Top Ten – 13:14 Swan Song Review – 35:53 Alien: Romulus – 45:33 You can contact the show by emailing [e-mail] or you can find us on social media, @KermodeandMayo EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/take Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts To advertise on this show contact: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Simon, I've been thinking about the great collaborations of cinema. Do go on. Well, John Ford and John Wayne, Francis McDormand and the Coen's, Hanks and Spielberg. NordVPN and Take listeners. Thank you, Bodden. Oh, you know what I'm talking about. This is a subscription to NordVPN. It's essential if you want to access all your TV shows and films on streaming services from

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description box. Convinced Mark? It's like Eastwood and Leone all over again. So on with the show. Hey, moviegoers, after tonight's feature, why not take your taste buds on a culinary journey? We offer you the authentic taste of England right here in India. Let our English chef delight you with his traditionally prepared dishes, including potatoes, chicken and also peas. All at......Betton's English restaurant 222 by Troy Place in the London Bay, just around the corner from this cinema.

Well, yes. Funny every time, funny every time. An earlier incarnation, we see my love of cinema went back to that sketch. So that is, for people who would not recognise that bit, because that's not the famous bit, is the Going for English sketch that we did on Goodness Gracious Me. And for those people who don't know about that, that was a South Asian sketch show on the BBC 25 years ago, 26 years ago. Hello Sanjeev, incidentally.

Hello. Hello, Mark. I'm, as yet listeners, Sanjeev not as great as Simon, as Mark quite rightly pointed out last week. Did I? Which I was in agreement with. No, I did. I think twice.

Excuse me. Look, I was massaging his ego. You have to be very careful. I was in agreement. You have to be very careful. If he's off a show and then somebody else sits in, he always goes, how were they? And I have to go, they were good. Not as good as you, obviously,

otherwise he's just in assault for the rest of the week. Well, now you can at least report back to him that I agreed with you. There you go, so there we go. So Mark, delightful to be with you, of course. Yes, lovely. And you were on a late train last night when you were heading back.

I was on the train down to Penzance, which is my usual, which gets into Penzance at midnight 30. And then you and I were texting each other about something which will come up in take two, which is on the subject of best, it was started out as best cover versions, cover versions that have changed your view of a song. And then you completely destroyed my evening by sending me something by- Mambo Kurt. Mambo Kurt. I think. So if anyone out there has heard of him, or indeed you are Mambo Kurt, maybe you could

get in touch with the program and just explain why. Because I was going, yeah, yeah, you know, Chabrel and Badfinger and all these really good... and then you just, it was just, that was on the table and that was the end of that. And by that point I was only at like Taunton. And so I had the ability to listen to a lot more of Mambo Kerr before he finally pulled into Penzance, which is genuinely the end of the line in so many ways. Well, that will be explained later. But as for today, the films we're looking at today, Mark? Swan Song, which is a documentary, Only the River Flows, which is an existential thriller,

and Alien Romulus. Alien Romulus and premium reviews, Mark? Premium reviews of Hollywood Gate, which is again a very interesting documentary. And then we have reissues of Caroline, the stop motion animation, and Lone Star, the absolutely brilliant John Sayles film from the 90s, which was pretty much considered to be the definitive independent movie of the 90s. I'm a huge John Sayles fan, I love Lone Star. Recommendation feature, weekend watch list, weekend not list, the best and worst movies

to watch over the next three days. Alien Romulus is released this week, as you've just heard, so we're asking you for your best angry Alien films on One Frame Back. You get ad-free episodes of Ben Baby Smith and the most terrific Shrink the Box, the best in depth character analysis dropping each week. It'll also be guest presenting next week with Mark, not as good a Simon, in the critics chair, or rather just his own chair. Plus we answer your film and on film related queries and quandaries in questions or submissions. You can get all of that via Apple podcasts or head to extratakes.com

for non-fruit related devices. And if you're already a Vanguardista, as always, we salute you. I'm saluting myself because I am one. We have an email from America. Can you salute yourself? I don't think so. I just saluted myself. Sounds like a carry on. It's a very Trumpy thing to do, isn't it? I'm saluting myself. I'm saluting myself, dude. An email.

Dear Simon and Mark, LTL and ST, I am sure you will have had plenty of your American listeners point out that in the US, many chocolate boxes do not include a guide or map, as I believe the trade calls it. Oh. So when Forrest Gump quotes his mother with the famous line, she would have been correct. Many Americans did not know what they were going to get. Thank you, Mark Haynes. America is so far behind the world. Seriously.

Maybe they have it now. Also, that was set. When he's a kid, when he's relating that story, what year is it supposed to be? Well, yeah, it's a wave because he starts off, yeah, because it goes through his life story, doesn't it? But by the time he's sitting on the park bench, it's pretty much contemporary. Had he bought a new set of chocolates or was it an old one that his mum had? No, I think it's... He offers it to the people sitting next to him on the bench. Well, that's an honest question.

I mean, I think it was one that he found in his mother's old possessions. Another email we have is, Dear Totoro and Yubaba, I couldn't help but send an emergency mail about the mishearing of your own name due to the minor mental scar I have from when I was a child. These days, my name, Alistair Campbell, is associated with a certain former spin doctor. However, back in the 80s when I was in Cub Scouts, aged about seven, I didn't know the song Alice the Camel. You can probably hear where this is going. Imagine 100 cubs standing in a large circle at the end of a camp,

all singing Alice the Camel has one hump. Me standing there thinking it was my name and even joining in by singing, Alice the Camel has one hump. Wondering why everyone thought I had humps. To this day, I've never felt the same combination of embarrassment and confusion, thankfully followed by relief when I found out the song really wasn't about me. But it was a long song. They did several rounds. Hail to the redactor, Tinkety Tonk, et cetera. Alastair Campbell, no, not that one. Not that one. Very good.

Now, we've been asking for some positive takes on the take. Here are a few that tickled us this week. Grease 2 said Mark Kermode is one of the few people who knows the truth about Grease 2. It is the superior Grease film. For that and that alone, this podcast is worth five stars. Absolutely. Absolutely. I listen to this because the contributor's quite good. A genuine review here.

If you're lonely down in the dumps or just fancy a respite, try this warm, funny, intelligent, and everyone is welcome. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Very good. Rate us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, et cetera, anywhere else if you get a chance. We're loving reading them. And as ever, it's correspondence at KermodeMayo.com. Shall we have a review, Mark? Yes. So, Only the River Flows, which is a Chinese neo-noir crime thriller by Wei Shujun, who made Striding into the Wind and Ripples of Life.

Also, he co-wrote the screenplay for this, which is based on Yuehua's short novel, Mistakes by the River, which I haven't read. This played in the Uncertain Regard category last year and went on to become one of China's most successful independent movies. It opens with a quote from Camus. The quote is, we do not understand destiny. That is why I have made myself destiny. I have assumed the foolish and incomprehensible face of the gods. So this tells us right from the beginning, this isn't just going to be a murder mystery or a police procedural. It's going to be about fake destiny, power, powerlessness. So Zhu Yilong is police chief Mojie, who is investigating a series of murders. I mean, there's one murder at the beginning and then there are more in a rural town in

China in the 90s. And at first, the case seems fairly clear cut and there's an obvious suspect and there's an early arrest and this pleases his superiors. But things soon start to unravel in a very sort of existential fashion. Firstly, he has his own personal issues. His partner is pregnant yet he's more consumed by his work than he is by his home life. But he also seems to be having some kind of quasi-Nietzschean breakdown. You know that thing about if you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks back into you. And there's a bit right at the beginning when this kid says to him, if you find the baddie, can you show me to him, show him to me so I can see what he looks like?

And there's this whole thing about what is the face of the baddie. And so also the office that he's working in is a now derelict cinema, which adds another layer of sort of self-reflexivity to the whole thing. So the director said of the source novel that it deals with, this is a quote, the excessive weight of the collective spirit weighing on the individual and the solitude of the latter in the face of an absurd world, which actually weirdly enough is a pretty good description of the film, which he also talks about the way in which it subverts the traditional detective narrative. Because the mystery of who the killer is isn't really the center of the story. There's a much more sort of avant-garde thing going on. And actually,

so it starts as a kind of what looks like a police procedural. And it is a genre film, but it then becomes something far more arty and hallucinatory. Actually, weirdly enough, I've been watching Twin Peaks again recently. Do you remember the original Twin Peaks, the first two series of Twin Peaks? Did you watch it when it was first on television? I did, yeah. Well, there's that whole weird thing that Cooper is doing, this Buddhist thing alongside, there's the throwing the stones and there's the visitations from the giant and there's the understanding his dreams. Well, there is a bit of that going on in this. I was reminded of that same atmosphere

of kind of disorientation. There's also a scene towards the end of it, which you know the French connection, the William Friedkin film, the French connection. At the end of the French connection, it's like, again, the French connection. At the end of the French connection, it's like again, that starts as a procedural and then the Popeye Doyle character just becomes so obsessed with the crime that he ends up chasing himself. There's an element of that in this as well. I mean, I thought it was really fascinating. It is about the way that the more you try and outfox destiny,

the more it will end up biting you. The director said this thing about it's about the more you try to discover the meaning of life, the more likely you are to miss it. I thought it was really good. I knew nothing about the story before. As I said, I haven't read the source novella. I thought it was really atmospheric,

really melancholy and visually arresting. It was a real pleasure because I knew nothing about it before I saw it. I was really drawn into it in that Angel Heart way that you think you're watching one thing. I mean, it's not quite like Angel Heart, which of course is a supernatural thriller. It's not supernatural, but it is about that thing. If you look long enough into the abyss, the abyss will look back into you. At least that's what I thought it was about. I really enjoyed it. It's called Only the River Flows. Yeah, I have to say, I enjoyed it very much as well. It's also interesting that it's set

in the late 80s. It's 90s. I think it's 90s, but it's in the past, isn't it? Yeah, because it's pre the internet and all that kind of stuff. So there's a different time thing, the way that people dealt with things and investigate things was very different. It was kind of analog at that time. And so I thought that was an interesting time at which to set up. I was forgetting when I was reviewing it that of course you've seen it. What did you think it was about, Sanj?

Initially I thought it was a police procedural. Then the more it went on, the more I realized that wasn't the point of the film. Actually, it was much more about the elusiveness of answers. Whether you get an answer or not, in a time, life, destiny moves on. I thought that was the river metaphor. So much of it happens around this river in this kind of small town. With the cinema thing, setting it at the cinema as well, his hallucinations become more cinematic as they go along.

There's one sequence when you actually see that thing about the frame of film burning out, which is a kind of classic image that I suppose actually there's now a whole audience who actually wouldn't know what that is. But it's when the film jams in the gate of a projector and it burns. I thought that was really beautifully done. I thought those sort of dream sequences were absolutely brilliant. Did you get the twin peaksy thing that I got? Do you think that's just me? Yeah, I did. I did, yeah. Because once it went into hallucinatory territory, then almost that's such a benchmark for doing that cinematically. I thought of that as well. So, two thumbs up?

Two thumbs up. At least a thumb and a half. I salute myself. He can salute himself. Anyway, we have two more films to come, Mark. Yeah, we have Swan Song, which is a documentary, and Alien Romulus, which is the seventh in the official Alien canon. And we'll be back after this. This episode is brought to you by Mubi, a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema. Mubi is the place to discover ambitious films by visionary filmmakers, all carefully handpicked. Now, Simon, you are a literary fellow.

I am a Doctor of Letters because it was one of those Warwick University... Buy one, get one free. Yeah, put a hat on, wear a cape. Well, you will be delighted to hear about the latest issue of Mubi's Notebook magazine. Notebook is a print-only magazine that's devoted to the art and culture of cinema. Created, prepared and published by Mubi comes out twice a year, and a yearly subscription includes a surprise just for Notebook subscribers, and shipping is always free. Issue five, a do-it-yourself themed edition is available now with a beautiful cover

designed by How To's John Wilson. Try Mubi free for 30 days at mubi.com slash Kermode and Mayo. That's m-u-b-i dot com slash Kermode and Mayo for a whole month of great cinema for free. Everything to play for is taking on its biggest challenge yet. We've had two-parters, we've even had three-parters. This is a four parter, and the reason why we're given the four podcasts is it's probably the greatest individual rivalry in Premier League history. Yes, Arsene Wenger versus Alex Ferguson, we've bitten off more than we can chew.

To what it reminds me of, I saw a video on social media the other day of a python having swallowed a duvet. And the vets were trying to get the duvet out of the python. I thought that is like me and Colin having to skip over FA Cup finals because there's so much to talk about when it comes to Wenger and Ferguson. Doubles, trebles, pizza round the face, it has everything. If you want to listen to the podcast equivalent of a python swallowing a duvet, follow everything to play for on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge seasons early and ad free right now on Wondry Plus.

And we're back. We're back. Oh, we never went away. Which I never went away. No, we were, we,. No, we were here. Whether or not people weren't. But anyway, so before the top 10, this was UK number nine last week as an email here,

Mark on Kansuke's Kingdom. Dear Mark and Simon, I'm a long-term listener and first-time emailer. I just wanted to email regarding two films that I recently saw at the cinema. The first was Kansuke's Kingdom. I'm 17 years old and don't watch much animation. However, on the strength of Mark's praise, I felt I should see this film. Oh, great.

And I'm glad I did. Good. This film is some sort of a masterpiece. Yes, it is. An utterly beautifully animated film that manages to capture both the unique danger and beauty of nature. I urge anyone listening and or reading to see it because I feel we could certainly do with more movies like this. The other was Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2, which I hadn't seen

in the cinema before. But watching a superhero film with personality on a big screen was a real breath of fresh air compared some recent offerings. Up with beautifully shot animated movies and down with movies that think spectacle comes from gratuitous cameos or CGI effects. Thank you. That's from Samuel Barber. Fantastic. Well, we're on the same page about the character. I'm so glad you like Kensuke's Kingdom because I just loved it and I'm so pleased you went to see it. Well, and here's another one. Dear Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo, thanks so much for your lovely review last week for our film, Kensuke's Kingdom. For an independent film struggling to be heard above the noise of big studio pictures, a review like that means so much to us.

For years, my favorite film review ever was yours, Mark, your legendary headbanging assessment of Transformers 2, which I passed on to every filmmaker and film fan in my entire address book. But now my affections have transferred to your wonderful Kansuke review. Many thanks and keep doing the wonderful and eloquent work you both do in sharing your love of cinema. My best wishes, Neil Boyle, co-director of Kansuke's Kingdom. Oh, wow.

Okay. Well, that's made my week. That's fantastic. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. That's how lovely, how really lovely. If anyone's listening who hasn't gone to see Ken's Case Kingdom yet, go and see it. It's such a joy. There was also a lovely interview that Simon did with Frank Cottrell-Boys talking about doing the screenplay for the adaptation. That's well worth listening to. That's what a couple of weeks ago on the pod.

I completely concur. Go back and find that one. It was good. So the UK top 10, number 10 and not charted in the US is Spider-Man 2, the reissue. As we just established, how lovely to see characters in superhero films. Whoever thought it would work. UK number nine, US number 10 is Long Legs.

Which I really liked. I thought Long Legs was really creepy and kind of smart and funny and cheeky in some ways, but had a real atmosphere of dread, genuinely properly unsettling fare. UK 8, US 8, Harold and the Purple Crayon. Now this I haven't seen because we prerec a program, so Simon and I were actually away last week. So I haven't seen this, it's a fancy comedy based on the book by Crockett Johnson. I haven't seen the film, I haven't read the book. If anyone has any opinions, let us know.

UK number seven and US number seven, Inside Out 2. Which I think is good and I didn't think it was as good as Inside Out, but clearly from all the correspondence we've had, it has absolutely found its audience. And we've had so many brilliant letters from people who were really moved going to see it with either their children or their parents and Finding that it started conversations that they might not have had had they not seen the film So it's yeah, it it's clearly hit that sweet spot, which when I saw it I wasn't sure that it had done but hey critics. What do they know? Well, I mean, I mean I went to see that and I didn't think it was as good as the first one

but then again, I wonder how many families have watched the first one at home and watched it, rewatched it and rewatched it. And so therefore coming into this one, this was that sense of familiarity in the next bit of the story and their kids would have been, you know, maybe a couple of years older. I mean, my point would be that because this is dealing with adolescence, the personification of the emotions is not as clear cut as it is in Inside Out. In a way, that's right because adolescence is so much more complicated and so much more messy and perhaps doesn't lend itself quite so easily to the personification of those ideas. I've only seen it once, whereas Inside

Out I've seen nine, 10 times, I think. UK number six, US number three is twisters. Yeah. Well, so there's a bunch of twisters and they are going to run towards them. Oh, they're dangerous or run away. Just, I mean, really. UK number five, US number four is borderlands. Now we have two comments on Borderlands. Go ahead. Richard Purden. He said, like someone bought Guardians of the Galaxy from Tmoo. Quite good. And Rich Senior said, you know what, my 11 year old son enjoyed it and that's all right by me.

I'm glad that that's the case. I don't know what, I don't know what Cate Blanchett and you know that are all doing in this. Here's the most encouraging thing from my point of view. This is notwithstanding the 11 year old enjoying it. It costs something like 110, 120 million and then I think they must have spent like, you know, 2030 on advertising. And as of yesterday, Deadline Hollywood had it on track to lose 20 million. So that means they probably won't do it again, which I'm glad about that. UK number four, US number six is Trap. Right. Okay.

So if you were listening to last week's show, there was an interview with which Simon did with M. Night Shyamalan. And as you probably figured out, the interview was done after we recorded the program and the film was screened after we recorded the program, which is why we didn't have a review. So, Trap, which I've seen. Sand, you've seen Trap as well, right? I have indeed seen it. Yep. So here's the week late review of it. So this is a said latest film by Shyamalan who pitched it apparently as Silence of the Lambs at a Taylor Swift concert, which sounds like fun.

If somebody pitched that to you in an elevator, you go, okay, that's an interesting film. So Josh Hartner is the dad who takes his daughter to see her favorite pop star at a concert. And the pop star is Lady Raven, who is played by Sleek and I, Shyamalan. Again, it's keeping things in the family as he has done before. At the concert, it transpires as a bunch of cops, and the cops are there because they've discovered that the serial killer who has been committing all these terrible crimes, is going to be at the concert,

and they are going to trap him at the concert. The whole concert is a trap for the serial killer. It also turns out that the serial killer is, which I think is evident because as M. Night Shyamalan said, we set up who the killer is very, very early on and then the whole thing is kind of cat and mouse. I thought the initial setup was kind of fun. I thought it owed a huge debt to that Brian DePalma film Snake Eyes, which has got Nick Cage as a detective investigating a political assassination in Atlantic City.

It's kind of a boxing match, but most of it plays out in a casino. It's like this thing going on in the middle of a big crowd. I thought that movie was fun for most of its 98-minute running time. This movie is fun for half of its running time. The first half of it, okay, fine, yeah, pop concert, serial killer, lots of cops, how's he going to get away? Then I thought the second half of it was absolute baloney,

tooth grinding, eye rolling, patience testing rubbish. Weirdly enough, for me, the wheels really came off at the moment when M. Night Shyamalan made a cameo appearance, as he often does, as a kind of avuncular uncle. After that, it just went to pieces. I thought it was, I mean, I liked Glass and I liked Old and I still get a bit of a tingle every time there's a new Shyamalan film because, I don't know, is it going to be unbreakable or is it going to be an after earth? I thought this is both and

neither. It's not as good as his best work. It's not as bad as his worst work, but it does encapsulate the thing that makes him so infuriating because there's a good bit and then there's a bad bit. Unfortunately, the bad bit is the second half. So you come out of the film thinking what you remember is the second half. Now, Sanj, I respect your opinion hugely. Give me your take on Traff. I mean, I mostly agree with you, actually. I mean, I think that, I mean, the performances were kind of fine, given what it was. I think Josh Hartland was well cast, I thought. And particularly in that first half, I believe him. I believe him as a doting dad. I believe him as this other character within it.

That was interesting. It was in a different place. I thought the songs and Saliko who plays Lady Raven, I thought was quite believable as a pop star. Well, she is a pop star. Oh, that's what makes her so believable then. You mean less believable as an actor.

No, no, no. But I mean, it's like, you know, it's just. So that, you know, that I kind of bought that, that was kind of great. And so there was, there was a strange lack of tension through the film. And that was the main problem for me because it was building at the beginning, and then that tension dissipates once, effectively they leave the arena. But performance is good,

I thought the songs were good. It's always lovely to see. Josh Hartner, I've worked with very briefly in a 24-hour play at the Old Vic many years ago. He's lovely. He's absolutely lovely. And Hayley Mills was in there as well. In a slightly odd role, I have to say. I'm not quite sure what the role was, but anyway, the doctor exposition, I think. That's right. Literally Basil. they could have called it Basil.

But yeah, I agree with you. I think that it started off building and then sort of dissipates a little bit. The second half, Sanj, is rubbish. The second half is, I mean, I know, I know, you know, it's, I'm putting you in a difficult position, but I'll say what I know that is going on in your head. The first half of the second half is absolute rubbish. It's stand up and shout at the screen, no, no, no, get back into that arena.

Sorry, no. It's interesting that any sense of claustrophobia came from a place where there were meant to be 20,000 people. And actually there was less claustrophobia when they were in a room. They get in a car. Yeah. Yeah. But there you go. Anyway, we've got an email. This is from Paul Madden and Kent. He says, hi Simon and Mark and possibly Sanjeev, which I, you know, in the old game of, you know, but and with an and, we've never had a but and possibly. Possibly.

Yeah. I think I quite like that in all of my future appearances as an actor. I've gone and done it yet again. I went and broke the M. Night rule. I went to see Trap. I vowed to myself and my husband that we would never, ever, ever, like never, go and see another M. Night Shyamalan movie again. This vow was made in 2008 while we were in a packed screening of The Happening.

Halfway through this terrible film, the projector broke down. I have never heard such a groan of unhappiness from a crowd when they finally and unfortunately got the projector working again. Trap was certainly not his worst film and I was excited after hearing Simon's great interview with the director. The idea that we are with the killer and know how he is, who he is from the start and that the people chasing are more mysterious. There were glimpses of this, but he broke the rule of too much by telling rather than just showing. Trust is that we would get it. That's all straight. My final rant is the bit in the car. The whole film is explained for the hard of thinking.

It's literally, just sit there a minute, I'll just tell you everything that's going on. I know you've been watching the film, I know you know all this, but just in case you don't. Well, it's a little bit like, kind of like, this is happening. Now this is happening. Hold on a second. Hayley. Hayley Mills. We need you.

My final rant is the bit in the car with learned wisdom from the white head profiler. This was a complete ripoff of the closing scenes between Ed Norton and Rafe. Don't call me Ralph Fiennes in Red Dragon. This is not the sixth sense or unbreakable, but it is definitely not Lady in the Water. I pledge you both this, as a vanguardista, I vow never to go to another M. Night Shyamalan movie again. But you see, I still think that there is enough that's interesting, even in this, that makes you think, I don't know, maybe the next one will be good. And I did like Glass. And I, you know, I know a lot of people didn't, but I did like Old.

I see I'm with you. I think his next film comes out. I'm going to see it. Yeah people didn't, but I did like Old. I see, I'm with you. I think his next film comes out. I'm going to see it. Yeah. And that's the thing. Hope Springs Eternal. Yeah, precisely so. There's always the possibility that he'll hit the sweet spot again.

UK number three, US number five is Despicable Me 4. You know, I mean, the minions are really, really funny and then there's all the other stuff, but the minions just make me laugh all the time. Not enough minions. UK number two, US number one, Deadpool and Wolverine, which has obviously taken over a billion at the box office worldwide. Yeah. Which is kind of depressing because it's just stuff.

I mean, you know, it's, as I said, it is a film made in the wreckage of a civilization where people sitting around picking bits of that civilization up and smashing them on the floor and going, you know, it's yeah, oh well. Although I have to say, I mean, I enjoyed it more than you did. But it is as I think M. Night said in the interview last week, you know, sometimes some people just want a cheeseburger. And I think it's that. I think it's but also there's nothing else like it in a cinema.

I mean, I laughed because so many of the jokes, I mean, I laughed a lot. Did you? Okay. I did. I did. Didn't you laugh more than six times? Yeah, I did. I mean, I laughed more than six times. But there are plenty of things that, I mean, Chuck Chuck, baby, I laughed more than six times and it cost thrumpence. When you consider just the sheer scale of this thing, it's not enough that six times I laughed. And incidentally, I'm a cheap laugh, right? I laugh when people say rude words for bum. It's like, I'm a really, really cheap laugh.

Mason- I think that, I mean, there are a lot of, again, I was talking to a friend the other day about it, who's also an actor, and he kind of said, what was the plot? And I said, no, there isn't a plot. I mean, I think there was even a joke at one point where Deadpool goes, what's this MacGuffin? And so, I mean, there are kind of like, there's so many in references to it. I know, but Sange, it is not just... Okay, fine, fine. You know, fine. But also, you know, it's not a great film.

Yeah. Not a great film. But it's also brought a lot of people into the cinema. When you say sometimes people want a cheeseburger, I don't think it's a cheeseburger. I think it's the stuff on the floor of a hamburger restaurant, you know, all just put up and just fried together and go, yeah, there's a bit, there's that bit, you like that bit, and you like that bit, and now he's going to say bum, there we go, there we are. Or worse that fact. Sometimes the stuff off the floor is all right. UK number one and US number two is It Ends

With Us. Yeah, which is an adaptation of this 2016 novel that became really big sensation, sold millions of copies. The authors said it was the hardest thing to write because it was based on their own mother and father's relationship. So, Blake Lively is in an abusive relationship which she finds mirrors the traumas of previous generations. That's the thing about it ends with us. Does this end with us? I thought it was actually a fairly decent attempt to do an inverted commas romantic movie with a serious message about domestic abuse. After I saw it, I went to the BBFC site. They are very interesting. The BBFC site says that it contains sexual violence

and domestic abuse. They're talking about the 15th certificate, which they said, despite the challenging scenes, the theme of domestic abuse is handled responsibly and sensitively, which I think it is. They said the sexual violence scene is without graphic detail, but sustained and with some emphasis on the woman's distress and later repeated in flashback. I know that one criticism that I heard is that some people thought it was too frothy for the subject matter, but there's a really smart review of it by Wendy Ide, my colleague Wendy Ide, who I'm a huge fan of, in The Observer, in which she sort of says something on the lines of, from the outside, abusive relationships can look happy.

In a way, the way in which the movie is sold is that same thing. From the outside outside it looks like a romantic movie, but actually it's this much darker thing. It starts with us as apparently in the problem. I'm a big Blake Lively fan. I like her very much and so I thought this was perfectly fine. Have you come across this? I haven't seen this. I read about it, but also I think it's the first time certainly that I can remember that a husband and wife are number one and number two in the box office, Blake Lively and Deadpool. That hasn't even occurred to me. That is how out of step with popular culture I am. That

thought had not even occurred to me. More importantly, the other thing that crossed my mind actually just going back to the Deadpool thing is that when your kids were little, did you have the food on the floor 10 second rule? Yeah, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah, yes. That's what that film is. Sand, everybody has that rule.

Depending on what it is, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why, yes. Avoid the soup on the floor. If indeed it be soup. Okay, that's your top 10. It's the ads in a minute, but first it's time once again to step into our laughter lift. This time presented by an actual comedian.

It's not going to help. Well, I've been at the Olympics, Mark. I competed in the take version of the modern pentathlon. It was new for this year in recognition of the global trend this podcast has spawned. But keeping a few traditional sporting elements came fourth in the Commodian rant seventh in the Flappy Hands. Next up was running. Imagine my delight when I discovered I had broken the world record for 800 meters. Sadly, the judges informed me that it was the 100 and I'd come a resounding last.

And finally, fencing. I shifted to Louis Vuitton Original, the Mona Lisa, and a load of these gold round things I found lying around in the upper-right-leaf bedrooms, all for a pretty penny, kept a few for myself. Ended up coming first in canoeing, trampolining, and taekwondo. Done with the Olympics, off on holiday. Paris is a fantastic hub for travelling further afield, so I thought I'd head to the beautiful city of Prague.

Imagine my dismay when I got to the airport and realised the check-in was closed. Hey! See, it didn't help, didn't help. But I've got experience in these things. Mark, what's still to come? Still to come, reviews of the documentary Swan Song and Alien Romulus. And we're back after this. I'm Paul Scoffoar and I want to introduce you to my podcast, This Is Powerful. I come clean about my own sobriety and the journey it took me to get here. So across

this series I'll sit down with a variety of professionals in the addiction field as well as some special guests. I drank 11 tequilas and um blacked out. Well I got sober in prison it was because I was dying inside. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts this is powerful. When you're faced with a challenge, you don't back down. So when it comes time to level up your financial game, you'll know what to do. Rise to it. And reward your good financial habits with the new BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. The credit card that takes you from bill payer to reward slayer. Get rewarded for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month.

Terms and conditions apply, click the banner or visit bemo.com slash rise to learn more. And we're back. An email. Dear Mulder and Scully, medium term listener, first time emailer, on the subject of films you saw one way and now see another, like Mark, mine is also close encounters of the third kind. However, when I recently saw it for the first time in around 15 years, I saw it in a way I'd not considered the first time.

The first half of the film, until, mild spoilers, Roy's wife and family leave, you could read the film as a representation of post Vietnam PTSD. Roy has been through something and it has clearly affected him in ways that not only do his family not understand, but neither does he. He cannot articulate to them why dad is weird now, and it starts to break apart his relationships and loses him his job. Given the film was both released and set in 1977, I came away from the film this time wondering how many other fathers, brothers, uncles and sons in America were going through the same confusion and feelings as Roy, and how many families like his just couldn't understand what had happened.

The scene where Roy is sat in the bath fully dressed, shower running, and with no idea how to cope with his family literally crying out for a reason could have been in any film about veterans of that era. PTSD was so misunderstood back then that it may have seemed to some families just as confusing as your dad telling you he saw a UFO. I know this wasn't Spielberg's intention, but it was just something that popped into my head as I was watching. Love the show, Steve, down with misunderstanding trauma, up with therapy. Rob from Brentford. Well, I think that's really interesting. It had not occurred to me before, but I think you make a very strong case for it. I think that like all great movies, they kind of give to you what you bring to them.

We talked about the fact that Close Encounters is a different film. Spielberg himself said when he made Close Encounters, he didn't have kids. If he'd made it when he did have kids, he wouldn't have allowed the father to go off on the spaceship. But I think that's a really interesting take. You're right, as far as the time period is concerned, that is the time that other films were dealing with that as well. So, yeah, a very convincing argument.

As you say, nothing the filmmaker intended, probably, although whoever knows what filmmaker intends. But yes, you can indeed read it like that. I think it's a very smart reading and yes, up with therapy. It's interesting, isn't it? Because I was thinking about the films that were made in the late 50s, mid to late 50s in America. So much of them were dealing with the Red Menace, as they called it at the time,

which all the monster movies and the them and all that kind of stuff. It just seeps into your brain. You're bound to be impacted by whatever social events are going on. Yeah, yeah. I know it's almost a cliche, but in terms of the 50 science fiction films, the red blob arrives in your small town and then creates things that infiltrate your community. Yeah, that's, and then of course, the people who are then behind those stories say, no, no, no, no, that's not what I meant. To which the answer is, it doesn't matter whether it's what you meant.

It's in the thing anyway. I mean, body snatch is, it was always the great Jack Finney argument about, did you have to mean it for it to be the case? It just kind of is. Anyway, on to another film. Yeah, and again, it's so brilliant, Sanch, because you've done your homework, because you've actually seen this as well. Swan Song, this is a documentary by Chelsea McMillan and Sean O'Neill, follows

ballet icon, and instantly what I know about ballet wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp, Karen Kane stepping for the first time into the director's chair on the eve of her retirement, mounting a new and in some ways groundbreaking production of Swan Lake. So we get her own personal story and a backstory intertwined with those of her collaborators, designers, choreographers, dancers from the National Ballet of Canada. We learn how the world of ballet is changing and how radical it can be to suggest that the dancers dance without tights, showing the colour of their own skin, which is a major step forward in a world in which, you know, white legs are always the norm. Here's a quick clip of Swan Song.

Karen Kane is one of the biggest international ballet stars ever. I am directing for the first time. Left side, left arm. ballet stars ever. I am directing for the first time. Left side, left arm. I have to feel so brave to do this. Swamling has definitely been always somehow my ballet. I do expect to dance as a swan queen. Everyone wants to honor the tradition,

but racism isn't a good tradition. Ballet, it's like my angel, but it's also like my demon. See, I think that line about it's my angel, but also my demon, it's, you know, there's somebody who loves and lives for ballet, but it's also the thing that makes them think that they're not good enough. The whole film was shot over a lengthy period. The production originally started pre-COVID, then shut down, and then started again. By that point, they had all the access they needed.

There's a director statement that says, we were determined to shoot the project with a rigorous commitment to cinema verite. We wanted the viewers to feel utter immersion and intimacy. We wanted the action to unfold before their eyes. And they also talk about how in documenting a production of Swan Lake, they find within that an allegory for the world of ballet. Because one of the things about this production is that, quote, the swans would not be birds in perfect formation. They would be women trapped by a monstrous predator helping each other survive and seeking transcendence. Now,

look, here's the thing. I love dance, but I don't really understand it. Ballet is a particular mystery to me because there's that incredible tension between the sight of people apparently weightlessly flying around on stage. The tension between that and what's actually happening with their bodies, the sheer bone-breaking, muscle-wrenching, weightlifting exertion of it. I don't understand how anyone can become a ballerina. To me, that is like a superpower that I do not understand.

I found this very engrossing, not least because, as I said, I look at ballet and it's like a magic trick because the contrast between the beauty, the grace, the, you know what I mean by the weightlessness and the fact that these are people whose toes and ankles and every part of them is like they're in a boxing match. The way the film plays, it's almost like as it plays, gun comes up to opening night. Opening night is almost like the battle. It's like a war film with a battle at the end and are they going to win?

I was very engrossed. Sanj, what did you think? Sanj Siddaramanian Yeah. As a study of passion, why people do something, why are they driven to do it, I thought it was really interesting. People come from different angles. I've done musicals on stage in the West End and the people in the chorus were fantastic. I mean, they were all brilliant.

They were brilliant singers, they were brilliant dancers. But I can't imagine any of them went into it thinking, well, what I'd really like to be is kind of like fifth swan. So your passion for doing it is the thing that drives you through the pain and literally the pain, whether it's physical pain, emotional pain, I mean, every kind. I thought it was really interesting in that sense. But also I thought that the stakes in terms of that opening night, I could have been a little higher. They could have been set a little higher for me.

Okay. But everything's going wrong in the lead up. They've got the lousy, the dress rehearsal is a disaster. Everyone keeps using the word chaos right up until the curtain goes up. Didn't you think that was what I'd been intending? But I've been in so many things where it kind of is. It is chaos. Today is a perfect example. You hope it will come together on the night. But a study of those kind of passions and the

journeys to it and what the girls that were featured had gone through to get to that point, I thought it was fascinating. But also it's Dogworth, whose litany of documentaries are brilliant. I think I'll always check their stuff out anyway. What did you think of the discussion of the thing about the tights and the skin color and the broadening of that? What did you think of that? I thought that was fascinating. I was really surprised. It never even occurred to me. This was the first major, yeah. Because also, well, you know, traditions run deep and changing tradition is always a challenge. It's challenged to authority in some way and someone's got to do it.

So I didn't realize that had been the case until I saw that was my moment. Yeah, same as me. That was one of the things I found most interesting about it was it hadn't even occurred to me. And then you go, oh, of course that that's incredibly important. Why had that not? Do you go to watch ballet? Have you watched ballet? I've seen a few. I mean, I get taken to them because I don't really understand it. No, I mean, it's true. And I just sit there. But do you enjoy it? You got taken to it. I'm almost horrified because if you see ballet live, it's mesmerizing, but it almost makes me want to cry

because the physical rigor of it, it's like a boxing match. It is like the most stress you can put your body under and I just don't understand how they do it. And they do it, you know. I just always, like opera, I just always avoided it because I just thought it's just not for me. I don't really get it. You know, the frilly tights and the comedy bulges. I just don't get it. And then I went to see some Matthew Boyer stuff. And that absolutely kind of transfixed me and I was a convert. I mean, I'll go and see any of his stuff. It's just amazing. So that is Swan Song.

And we'll be back after this for our last review, Mark, which is Alien Romulus. Back in a sec. OK. Welcome back. An email. Dear Ben Herr and hardly know her. FTE and LTL dating back to my undergraduate university days in 2008. I'd like to give special words to my local

multiplex in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have some vague recollection of Mark having referenced either a prior visit or an intended visit to Canaan. An intended visit. Yeah, an intended visit that was then clobbered by COVID, sadly. Well, it's where, as you know, so many famous Westerns were filmed. But whether past or future, I hope his travels might opportune him to visit the magnificent Broadway Center Cinema in the heart of downtown Salt Lake. Having moved to this state with zero local connections but only the interest in following the career path of my now spouse, the good lady environmental protection attorney, Eurin Dawes. I had been concerned that a state with as conservative and stuffy a reputation as Utah

would have an adequate independent multiplex. I needn't have worried. Six screens and staff supported by devoted and friendly volunteer base from the Salt Lake Film Society. They run a tidy operation and a wonderfully eclectic mix of contemporary non-mainstream fare and classics, including a special summer run in which I had the delight of seeing the remastered Lost Highway last night and David Kronenberg's crash tonight. No alcohol served, but an array of tasty carbonated beverages, quieter food options

like fresh steamed endermami, and buy the sliced pizza from a local shop, and top quality projection every time I've been. Not only that, I can walk there from my office after a long day. And those days can be long. Working as a public defender, as I do, I often have difficulty shaking off the stress and frustration that comes with representing the troubled souls that churn through our famously overzealous criminal legal system. Your podcast and the encouragement it gives me to re-engage with the cinema since the pandemic have been

a poultice on an inflamed and overstimulated mind. I thank you and the good members of Salt Lake Film Society for all that you do. Tinkety-tonk and up with water conservation, lest my new home city become a mad Maxian wasteland. Marcus in Salt Lake. Wow. Well, that's a lovely email. Let me leave you with this in that case on the subject of you just saw the lost highway thing. I interviewed David Lynch in Paris about lost

highway when it came out. The story was that lost highway had been press screened the day before, and the reviews had arrived in the morning of the thing. It was some of the best reviews that Lost Highway got, which as David Lynch pointed out, was particularly impressive since they'd screened the film with the reels in the wrong order. So literally, the best reviews that film got were when they scrambled all the reels up and put them out of sequence.

The lesson for all the filmmakers there. So next it's Mark's review of Alien Romulus after this clip. Are you sure you want to do this? There she is. You want to break in and steal highly regulated equipment? This could be our only ticket out of here. Should be in and out in 30 minutes. Welcome to the Ragnarok space station.

Yes, so this is the seventh Alien film and it's, as I understand, a sequel to Alien but a prequel to Aliens in as much as it happens somewhere in between those two films. So co-written directed by Fede Alvarez who made the the 2013 Evil Dead, and Don't Breathe 2016, to which this owes something of a debt. Sometime after the events of Alien, the remnants of a spaceship are floating in space and are picked up by a Weyland-Yutani vessel. Meanwhile, on a grim, daylightless mining colony, young rain caridine played by Kayleigh Spaney, who was so brilliant in Priscilla.

Did you see Priscilla, Sange? I haven't seen it yet. She's great. I mean, you'd love it. Being the Elvis fan that you are, I think it's really interesting. She's fabulous in Priscilla. So she discovers that the company aren't going to let her leave anytime soon, and she wants to go somewhere where there's actually sunlight.

However, is that a group of young colonists have spotted a disused Weyland-Yutani spaceship floating above the planet. Their plan is for Reign and her companion, Andy, who is a once-junct synthetic person played by David Johnson, who's so brilliant in Rye Lane, which I absolutely loved. His prime directive is to protect Reign. He was reconfigured by her now absent father to join them in breaking into the ship, stealing its cryopods, and then making off for a new world. But when they get there, they discover that the thing that's floating above

is not quite the ship they thought. It appears to be this kind of bisected, Romulus Remus outpost. And rather than being decommissioned, it appears to have been ravaged from the inside. So we're off again. So firstly, the plus points, okay? Kayleigh Spaniard is very, very adept at being a kind of standin cipher for Sigourney Weaver. In fact, the film does plenty of visual callbacks to moments from Weaver's turn as Ripley. Also, the film relies pretty heavily on impressively squishy physical effects.

So if you think that when we first saw Alien, it was all pre-CG and it was a real delight to see those Giga designs. Then one of the great disappointments of Alien 3 was that it looked so CG. I mean, it just didn't look physical enough. Here there is quite a lot of drooly, slimy, practical stuff that you feel like you can feel it and touch it. The the bbfc certificate is 15 for strong horror gore and language. Johnson has real fun with the the role of a gentle synthetic soul who then completely changes due to an upgrade. So it's

that idea of playing two characters in the same body which is always a bit of a challenge for an actor and I think does it very well. And there are a couple of neat new ideas that we haven't seen really done before in the series. One of them, which we have dealt with some extent, is the problem of how do you kill an alien that's got acid for blood, that if you kill it, the acid will drip through the outside of the spacecraft and kill everybody. They do do an interesting thing with that. They've also got, there's quite a lot of business about turning the gravity on and turning the gravity off, and that

works quite well as a device. And there is a sequence which is very don't-breathy about when they're figuring out how it is that the facehuggers can detect humans. And there's a way of, huggers can detect humans and there's a way of kind of, you know, oh well they can't detect us if the following thing is true. Okay, so all those are plus points. On the downside, it doesn't make any sense, although you know, how much of an issue that is. I mean, particularly the stuff at the beginning about the retrieval of the bits of blown up space, I mean that just doesn't make any sense at all, but that's fine.

Secondly, the decision to revive a key character through the miracle of digital effects simply proves that digital effects haven't yet figured out how to do mouths properly. It's particularly bothersome since in the particular case of the revived character, they could just have done a melted messed up mask and it would have been fine. I mean, it's one of those effects that weirdly enough, you probably just should have, you should have just done a William Shatner mask, but you know, it's so distracting. It's so distracting, it's so, so distracting. Also, with the exception of the anti-gravity stuff and the, I suppose to some extent, the acid blood thing, this is very much a compendium of familiar rifts.

So at one point a character says, very self-referentially, get away from her, you B-word. There's a callback to the famous scene of Ripley slipping into the spacesuit at the end of Alien. There's a kind of callback to the thing from Aliens in which Ripley is shown how to use the the Whammo blaster and you know and then in the final half hour of the film, maybe the final 20 minutes, but when the film goes completely mad, I mean, the last half an hour it goes completely nuts, and you get a cross between the weirdest scene from Alien Resurrection and the silliest scene from Prometheus. And there's also a kind of strange, there's a strange thing, but you remember in Alien

3, it's a bunch of Brit actors who all swear a lot, and you can't really, you know, and then they get picked off by the end. I mean, in the case of this, the characters you care about most often aren't the humans. So there is a sense of kind of shut up and play the hits and it doesn't make any sense, but I was never bored. There is some fun stuff in there. It is tense at times because the director knows how to do tension. There is some very likable monster goo. Unlike some of the other alien movies, we don't have to put up with a bunch of fatuous myth building nonsense in which Michael Fassbender discusses the meaning of life or there's a droning thing about the stupid idea of cosmic engineers, which I never understood why Ridley Scott became enamored

of that stuff. It's not bad. It's not great, but it's not bad. I mean, overall, it's better than Covenant and Prometheus, and of course, all the rubbish alien Predator films which don't count. It's not a patch on alien or aliens, but it is at the top of the pile of those mid-range, flawed but interesting alien movies, which is Alien 3, Alien Resurrection, which I always liked more than most people.

Most people think Alien Resurrection is terrible. I don't think it is actually. I think it's kind of, I mean, Giga hated Alien Resurrection. I interviewed him and he hated it. I wasn't ever scared, but I did think that there were very tense sequences in it because Venedavel does know how to do tension. Generally fine, a solid, entertaining alien film and the top of the pile of that mid-range flawed but interesting, but nothing like as good as Alien or Aliens and nothing like as good as alien or aliens and nothing like as bad as all the myth building

guff that we've had to put up with recently in which people explain the whole point about the alien. No, it's an alien and it's a xenomorph and as Ian Holmes says in the first one, it's perfect because it just kills things and that's what it does. So, you know, pleasantly surprised, but it's, like I said, not great, but not bad. Does Hayley Mills turn up to explain to us what's going on? No, no, but I definitely feel that she would have had a job explaining away the, you know,

there are holes that you could literally fly the Nostromo through, really. And the B word that you referred to, of course, for those who aren't sure is bungalow. Bungalow. That's right. That's the end of take one. We're back next week with Ben Bailey-Smith in the chair alongside Mark. This has been a Sony Music Entertainment production. This week's team was Lily, Gulliver, Vicky, Zachy, Matthias and Beth. The producer was Jem. The redactor was Simon Paul. Mark, your film of the week.

Well, I think all things considered, I think it is Alien Romulus. Because if you get a half decent alien movie with some good scrungy goo, I think that's probably a good thing. Thanks very much. We'll see you in take two.