Movie HighLow

We went Low on Virtuosity, but this is one of those Lows where the movie is bad in ways that are still weirdly entertaining. Virtuosity (1995) is mid-’90s techno-thriller anxiety blasted through a Windows 95 screensaver: virtual reality, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, serial killer databases, cyber gobbledygook, regenerative glass skin, and Russell Crowe grinning like he has decided to personally drag the whole movie into cyber hell.
That is the central appeal of the episode. Denzel Washington is trying to ground this thing in grief, trauma, guilt, and redemption, while Russell Crowe is playing a homicidal computer program like a theater kid version of Agent Smith. They do not feel like they are in the same movie, and somehow, that is the best thing about the movie. Virtuosity is not good, but it has the kind of cable-movie energy where, if it is on, we are probably not changing the channel.
In this episode, we revisit Virtuosity, directed by Brett Leonard and released in 1995, as part of that strange mid-’90s wave of technology thrillers that seemed equally fascinated and terrified by where computers, virtual reality, and the internet were going. This came out the same year as The Net, Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, and Strange Days, and you can feel that cultural anxiety all over it. The movie is goofy, dated, and often incoherent, but there is something interesting about watching a 1995 movie panic about artificial intelligence escaping its own parameters.
The setup is pure high-concept nonsense in the best and worst ways. Denzel Washington plays Parker Barnes, a former cop serving prison time after killing the man who murdered his wife and daughter. He gets pulled into a virtual reality police training program built around SID 6.7, played by Russell Crowe. SID is not just one killer. He is an artificial criminal made from hundreds of murderers, terrorists, psychopaths, and serial killers, including the man who destroyed Parker’s family. Then, through a beautiful pile of mid-’90s nanotech mumbo jumbo, SID gets a synthetic body and escapes into Los Angeles.
The biggest High is Russell Crowe. He is enormous in this movie. He preens, dances, grins, poses, and devours every scene like he knows the only way to save Virtuosity is to make it more ridiculous. And honestly, he is right. SID should be over the top. He is artificial. He has no restraint. He is made out of other people’s violence and programmed to treat murder like play. When he says he could kill Parker but likes to play, that is the whole character. He is not trying to win. He is trying to keep the game going.
The other High is Denzel Washington, for the exact opposite reason. Denzel does not wink at the material. He does not play Parker Barnes like a man trapped in a goofy sci-fi action movie. He plays him straight, as a guy whose life has been wrecked by real violence and who is now being used by a system that does not care whether he survives. That contrast is where the better version of Virtuosity lives: an artificial villain who only understands violence as entertainment colliding with a real man whose entire life has been shaped by grief.
The problem is that the movie never fully builds itself around that collision. It keeps falling back into generic mid-’90s action beats instead of digging into the most interesting idea it has. SID entering the real world should be the movie’s turning point. When he comes out of that strange snake-egg birth pod and says “whoa, gravity,” we get a glimpse of a better movie. He was a digital god inside a simulation, and now he has to deal with weight, pain, temperature, balance, hunger, fear, and maybe even mortality. That could have been fascinating.
Instead, the movie cannot decide what SID is once he becomes real. Is he bound by physical reality, forced to learn the rules of the human world? Or is he a cartoon cyber demon with supervillain powers? Virtuosity wants both, which means the rules get fuzzy fast. The movie needed to pick a lane: make him a real serial killer in a real world, or let the entire movie become Russell Crowe’s cyber circus.
The biggest Low is how much Virtuosity feels like it is cribbing from Demolition Man. We have a theatrical super-criminal who does not fit the current system, law enforcement dragging a disgraced former cop back into service because he is uniquely equipped to stop him, a near-future bureaucracy overwhelmed by its own technology, and a villain treating the modern world like a playground. The difference is that Demolition Man knows exactly what kind of movie it is. It is confident, satirical, broad, and specific. Virtuosity keeps reaching for that energy without having the same clarity.
We also talk about how underwritten the Kelly Lynch character feels, especially the half-hearted attempt to create romantic or emotional tension between her and Parker. The movie gestures toward a surrogate family dynamic with her daughter, played by a young Kaley Cuoco, but it never really earns it. By the end, Parker saving them feels more like genre math than emotional payoff.
Another Low is the movie’s vague attempt at media satire. SID takes over a news station, murders people on the air, and the movie tries to say something about audiences being unable to look away from televised violence. That idea should land, especially with a villain made from humanity’s worst impulses. But Virtuosity does not have much to say beyond “people watch violence,” and the live demographic meters tracking viewers by age and income are hilariously silly.
By the final act, the movie is borrowing from everything: Demolition Man, The Terminator, Jurassic Park, The Matrix before The Matrix even existed, Last Action Hero, The Lawnmower Man, and whatever Windows 95 visual effects package was lying around. But that is also part of its strange charm. Virtuosity is derivative, messy, and frequently dumb, but Russell Crowe understands the assignment, Denzel gives it a human center, and the contrast between them makes the movie more watchable than it probably deserves to be.
Virtuosity 1995 review
Brett Leonard’s Virtuosity
Denzel Washington as Parker Barnes
Russell Crowe as SID 6.7
Virtuosity as a Low episode
Mid-’90s technology thrillers
Virtual reality in 1990s movies
Artificial intelligence in Virtuosity
SID 6.7 villain performance
Denzel Washington action movies
Virtuosity and Demolition Man comparisons
Russell Crowe as a cyber serial killer
Parker Barnes grief and trauma
Nanotechnology in Virtuosity
SID 6.7 glass regeneration
Virtuosity train hostage scene
Kelly Lynch as Madison Carter
Kaley Cuoco in Virtuosity
Virtuosity news station scene
Windows 95 movie aesthetics
Virtuosity ending explained
Why Virtuosity is a guilty pleasure

We went High on Nine Days, but this is a very different kind of High for us. This is not a massive cultural touchstone, a blockbuster, or one of those movies everyone already agrees is a classic. Nine Days (2021) is a small, quiet, underseen film with an enormous idea: what if, before you were born, you had to interview for the chance to live?
That premise could have turned into something overly abstract or painfully sentimental, but Edson Oda’s Nine Days does something much more powerful. It uses tube TVs, VHS tapes, one isolated house, and a vast salt flat to ask one of the biggest questions a movie can ask: what makes life worth living? And instead of answering with speeches about destiny or meaning, it answers through small human moments: a peach, a bike ride, a joke at dinner, a scream from the top of a mountain, someone seeing you clearly before you disappear.
In this episode, we talk about Nine Days, written and directed by Edson Oda, as one of the best movies almost nobody talks about. The film stars Winston Duke as Will, Zazie Beetz as Emma, Benedict Wong as Kyo, Bill Skarsgård as Kane, Tony Hale as Alexander, Arianna Ortiz as Maria, and David Rysdahl as Mike. It is a high-concept drama with an indie-scale approach, and that combination is exactly why it works.
The setup is simple and devastating. Will lives in an isolated house surrounded by salt flats, watching human lives unfold through old television screens. When one of those lives ends, several unborn souls arrive at his door and compete for the chance to be born. Over nine days, Will interviews them, tests them, studies them, and decides which one gets to enter the world. But the longer the process goes on, the more the movie shifts away from the question of who deserves life and toward the question of whether Will can remember why life mattered to him in the first place.
We spend a lot of time talking about how original this premise feels, especially now. This is the kind of small, high-concept adult drama that used to have more room in the movie landscape. Today, it feels like films either get made for very little or get inflated into giant franchise products, with almost nothing in the middle. Nine Days feels like it belongs to that missing middle: thoughtful, emotional, strange, ambitious, and built for adults who want a movie to sit with them after it ends.
One of the biggest Highs is the movie’s minimalism. It could have buried itself in explanations about heaven, purgatory, angels, souls, or the mechanics of the afterlife. Instead, it keeps the world grounded and almost mundane. Will and Kyo have a job. There are groceries. There are reports. There are tapes. There are TVs stacked in a little house. That normalcy makes the otherworldly elements feel more haunting, not less. The movie does not need glowing portals or enormous visual effects. Its mystery works because it stays intimate.
We also talk about the POV footage on the televisions. The idea that Will watches lives from the inside, through each person’s direct experience, is beautiful and immersive. It makes life feel both ordinary and miraculous. The movie finds meaning in the images that pass by quietly in the background, which is really the whole point. Most of life is not the big defining event. Most of life is the stuff we barely notice while it is happening.
The performances are another huge High. Winston Duke has to play Will as buttoned-up, clinical, wounded, and deeply compassionate all at once. He is detached because he has to be, but we can feel how much the work is destroying him. Every time he recreates a final wish for one of the souls who is not selected, the movie becomes almost unbearably tender. He is there to comfort them before they disappear, and then he breaks when they are gone.
Zazie Beetz as Emma is the soul of the movie. Emma represents the thing Will has forgotten: curiosity, presence, openness, and awe. She shows up late because she is probably looking at the sky, the ground, the light, the air, and everything around her. She does not play the interview game the way Will wants her to. She asks questions. She notices things. She eats a peach not because she is hungry, but because she can. That is the whole movie right there.
The central debate of the episode is whether Will makes the right choice. He chooses Kane because he believes Kane is better equipped to survive the harshness of the world. Will sees Emma’s openness as a kind of vulnerability, maybe even a fatal one. He is not trying to be cruel. He is trying to protect the world from swallowing another person like him.
But that is what makes the choice so heartbreaking. Emma may not be armored, but she might be exactly what the world needs more of. She refuses to argue why someone else should not live. She refuses to turn existence into a competition built on tearing another person down. To Will, that means she is not ready. To us, it might mean she understands life better than anyone else in the room.
We also talk about the ending, which is perfect. Emma’s final request is not for Will to create a fantasy for her. It is for him to perform the monologue from the one moment in his own life when he felt seen. When he recites Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” across the salt flats, the movie reveals that Emma’s gift to him is remembrance. She reminds him of the joy he once had, the art he once loved, and the life he has spent years reducing to a job.
Our one Low is small but worth discussing. Late in the movie, another interviewer arrives with information that confirms Amanda’s death was suicide. We understand why the movie does it, because it gives Will a clear trigger for his spiral, but part of us thinks the uncertainty might have been stronger. Not knowing would have left Will trapped in the same painful space the audience is in: trying to make peace with something that cannot be fully explained.
Still, Nine Days is a High because it is generous in a way very few movies are. It deals with grief, suicide, loneliness, and the terror of not getting the life you hoped for, but it is not really a movie about death. It is a movie about why life matters. It asks us to sit with pain, then gives us gratitude.
Nine Days 2021 review
Edson Oda’s Nine Days
Winston Duke as Will
Zazie Beetz as Emma
Benedict Wong as Kyo
Bill Skarsgård as Kane
Tony Hale as Alexander
Nine Days movie ending explained
Nine Days as an underseen indie film
Auditioning for life in Nine Days
Tube TVs and VHS tapes in Nine Days
Salt flats cinematography
Nine Days and the meaning of life
Emma’s final request
Walt Whitman Song of Myself scene
Will and Amanda’s death
Grief and suicide in Nine Days
Why life is worth living
Small moments in Nine Days
Nine Days as a high-concept adult drama

We went High on The Prestige, and this is one of those Highs where the movie almost feels built for this podcast. Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) is not just a movie about magic. It is a movie constructed like a magic trick, and the more you watch it, the more you realize Nolan has been showing you the secret from the beginning. He tells you what the trick is, puts the evidence in front of your face, and then waits for you to notice.
That is why this movie keeps getting better every time we return to it. The secret impresses no one. It is the trick you use it for. That line is the whole philosophy of the movie. The Prestige is about obsession, performance, sacrifice, ego, grief, rivalry, and the terrible things people will do to be the one left standing when the audience applauds.
In this episode, we revisit The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Christian Bale as Alfred Borden, Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier, Michael Caine as Cutter, Rebecca Hall as Sarah, Scarlett Johansson as Olivia, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. This is one of Dom’s favorite Nolan movies, and honestly, the case is not hard to make. It has everything Nolan does best: fractured timelines, obsessed protagonists, nested mysteries, a final reveal that changes the whole movie, and an ending that does not stop asking questions after the credits roll.
The first big idea we talk about is that The Prestige is Christopher Nolan’s love letter to filmmaking. The three parts of a magic trick, the pledge, the turn, and the prestige, are basically the three acts of a movie. You show the audience something ordinary. You transform it into something impossible. Then you bring it back in a way that makes them wonder how you did it. Nolan understands endings better than almost anyone, and this movie is almost entirely built around the power of a final act that makes you immediately want to start the movie over.
We also talk about how the opening image of the top hats in the woods becomes a perfect bookend with the final image of Angier’s bodies in the tanks. The movie begins with duplicates, death, and a mystery we do not yet understand. Then it slowly teaches us how to read what we have already seen. That is the magic trick. The movie is not hiding the secret so much as daring us to look closely enough.
The performances are a huge High. Christian Bale has one of the most difficult jobs in the film because, on first viewing, he has to play Borden as a man divided by his own nature. On rewatch, once you know the truth, you realize he is playing two different men sharing one life. That makes every scene with Sarah more painful. When she says, “You don’t mean it today,” the line works one way the first time and a completely different way once you understand the trick. She is not married to a complicated man. She is married to a lie that keeps changing shape.
That is where the movie’s emotional cost really lands. Sarah is not part of the trick by choice. She is collateral damage. She knows something is wrong, even if she cannot name it. The tragedy is that the person she loves is only partly available to her, and sometimes not even the right person at all. The same goes for Julia, Angier’s wife, whose death becomes the wound that drives the rivalry. These women are where the men’s obsession lands, and the movie is very clear that the cost of greatness, ego, and secrecy is not only paid by the men chasing applause.
Hugh Jackman is just as strong as Angier because his performance shifts so carefully. At first, Angier feels like the more sympathetic character. He loses his wife in a horrible accident, and his anger at Borden makes emotional sense. But as the movie goes on, he becomes the more frightening figure. He is the showman who cannot invent the trick, so he steals, sabotages, and eventually builds his entire life around beating Borden. Jackman also gets to play Root, the drunken double, and that performance lets the movie show its own form of cinematic magic right on screen.
We also get into Michael Caine as Cutter, who functions as the engineer, the conscience, and the father figure of the movie. His final confrontation with Angier is devastating because he realizes how deeply he has been used. When he tells Angier that the sailor who almost drowned lied, that drowning was not peaceful, that it was agony, the line reframes every version of Angier’s trick. It is one thing to build an illusion. It is another thing to build it out of repeated death.
Then there is David Bowie as Tesla, which is almost too perfect. Tesla feels mythical before he even appears, and Bowie brings exactly the right strangeness to him. The Tesla and Edison rivalry mirrors Borden and Angier beautifully. Borden is the craftsman and illusionist. Angier is the showman. Tesla is the visionary. Edison is the man who knows how to sell the future. The whole movie is about incomplete men trying to steal the missing piece from someone else.
The biggest debate in the episode is not whether the movie works. It clearly works. The real question is how many secrets the movie is actually carrying. Every rewatch turns into a game of figuring out which Borden we are watching, what Sarah truly understands, how much Cutter knows, and whether Angier ever really understood the cost of what he was doing.
Our one Low is barely a Low. It is a nitpick about Tesla’s machine. The movie seems to establish that the machine creates a duplicate roughly 50 yards away, with the hats and the cat appearing outside the workshop. But when Angier first uses it, the duplicate appears close enough for him to shoot at point-blank range. It is probably done for visual clarity and storytelling economy, but in a movie this carefully built, even a tiny rule inconsistency stands out.
Still, that is us looking for a flaw because we legally have to pretend the movie has one. The Prestige is a High because it is not just clever. It is emotional, cruel, elegant, and endlessly rewatchable. It is a movie about incomplete people, and maybe that is why it never feels completely finished in your head. Nolan shows us the trick. He tells us the secret. Then he leaves us wondering why we still wanted to be fooled.
The Prestige 2006 review
Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige
Christian Bale as Alfred Borden
Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier
Michael Caine as Cutter
Rebecca Hall as Sarah
Scarlett Johansson as Olivia
David Bowie as Nikola Tesla
The Prestige ending explained
The pledge, the turn and the prestige
“Are you watching closely?”
Borden and Fallon twist
Angier and the Tesla machine
Robert Angier’s clones
The Transported Man trick
Borden vs Angier rivalry
Sarah and the cost of obsession
Cutter’s “it was agony” reveal
Tesla and Edison rivalry
The Prestige as Nolan’s best movie
Movie magic and magic tricks
Why The Prestige gets better on rewatch

We went Low on Disturbing Behavior, but this is exactly the kind of Low we like having around. Disturbing Behavior (1998) is not a great movie, but it is absolutely a late ’90s guilty pleasure: brainwashed preppies, creepy adults, Pacific Northwest fog, alternative rock needle drops, weird cafeteria tribes, mind control surgery, and James Marsden drinking a carton of milk like the world’s oldest high school student.
The episode’s central argument is that this movie has a much better idea than its final cut knows how to handle. It is a story about adults underestimating teenagers, dismissing their fear, and trying to surgically remove everything messy, rebellious, hormonal, and individual about them. Then the studio seems to have made the most thematically perfect bad decision possible: cut out the meat of the story and get to the end faster.
In this episode, we revisit Disturbing Behavior, directed by David Nutter and released in 1998, as a movie that lives on a very specific shelf: flawed, compromised, overcooked, underwritten, but somehow still alive. It stars James Marsden as Steve Clark, Katie Holmes as Rachel Wagner, Nick Stahl as Gavin Strick, Bruce Greenwood as Dr. Caldicott, and William Sadler as Newberry. It is one part teen thriller, one part suburban conspiracy movie, one part watered-down A Clockwork Orange, and one part vulgar episode of Dawson’s Creek with brainwashing.
The premise is genuinely creepy. After a family tragedy, Steve moves to Cradle Bay, a town where the lawns are too clean, the adults are too calm, and the popular kids, known as the Blue Ribbons, act less like high school students and more like honor roll cult members. They are polite, athletic, well dressed, academically successful, and deeply punchable. At first, they just seem like overachieving suburban nightmares. But Gavin, the local conspiracy-minded outsider, knows something worse is happening. In Cradle Bay, teenage rebellion is not treated like a phase. It is treated like a defect.
That is the idea that makes the movie worth talking about. The real villain is not just Dr. Caldicott. The real villain is conformity. We talk about how much this movie reflects a late ’90s fear of being processed into sameness. This was an era obsessed with nonconformity, individuality, outsider identity, and not joining the pack, even while corporations were selling that rebellion back to teenagers through Hot Topic, soundtracks, and movie marketing. Disturbing Behavior accidentally captures that contradiction perfectly.
The biggest High is Nick Stahl as Gavin. He is the standout because he understands exactly what kind of movie he is in. Gavin gets a lot of stylized, overwritten late ’90s dialogue, and in the wrong hands it could have been unbearable. Stahl makes it work. He plays Gavin as a sarcastic wiseass who is smarter and more capable than anyone gives him credit for, including maybe himself. His lunchroom breakdown of all the high school tribes is a very familiar ’90s teen movie scene, but this version works because Gavin and U.V. make it funny, specific, and weirdly memorable.
Another major High is William Sadler as Newberry, who might be the movie’s most interesting character. He is funny, strange, and hiding in plain sight, a janitor who clearly understands much more than anyone realizes. His rat-killing obsession feels like a metaphor for what is happening in the school, and Sadler gives the movie the kind of weirdo character-actor energy that makes it more fun than it probably has any right to be.
We also give credit to the atmosphere. The Pacific Northwest setting gives the movie a cold, eerie, almost Twin Peaks quality. The cinematography has some legitimately great images: the opening cliff overlook, the Blue Ribbons silhouetted on the docks, and the smoky high school hangout spaces. The score is cheesy, but the soundtrack is a time capsule. The Flys’ “Got You Where I Want You” is still a banger, and the music video feels like its own little late ’90s cultural artifact.
The biggest Low is studio interference. The theatrical cut runs only 84 minutes, and you can feel the missing material. Deleted scenes apparently filled in Steve’s brother’s suicide, the backstory of Cradle Bay, and the larger sociology behind why the town would accept Caldicott’s Blue Ribbon program. Without that context, the movie feels stitched together. It has the shape of a sharper satire, but not all the connective tissue.
The missing Cradle Bay backstory especially hurts. If the movie had shown that the town was traumatized by out-of-control teenagers causing a fatal crash, then the adult conspiracy would make more sense. Instead, the parents mostly come off like passive participants with plausible deniability. Are they knowingly sacrificing their kids’ individuality, or are they just looking the other way because the Blue Ribbon kids get good grades and stop causing trouble? The movie never fully decides.
We also debate the implant rules. Are the Blue Ribbons supposed to be docile Stepford kids whose hormones trigger violence, or are they more like an invasive Body Snatchers group that protects itself and expands its reach? The movie seems confused. Sometimes they are smiling yogurt-shop preppies. Other times they are basically a prison gang in letterman jackets.
By the third act, everything goes completely off the cliff, literally and figuratively. The asylum sequence is over the top, the operating room feels like Jacob’s Ladder crossed with A Clockwork Orange, and Bruce Greenwood shouting “Science is God” is hilarious. But even when it is ridiculous, Disturbing Behavior stays watchable. It is not secretly a masterpiece, but it is not disposable either. It has real late ’90s thriller juice, a creepy premise, a killer soundtrack, and enough strange choices to keep us talking.
Disturbing Behavior 1998 review
David Nutter’s Disturbing Behavior
James Marsden as Steve Clark
Katie Holmes as Rachel Wagner
Nick Stahl as Gavin Strick
Bruce Greenwood as Dr. Caldicott
William Sadler as Newberry
Disturbing Behavior as a guilty pleasure
Blue Ribbons and teen conformity
Cradle Bay conspiracy
Late ’90s teen thriller movies
Disturbing Behavior soundtrack
The Flys “Got You Where I Want You”
Pacific Northwest horror atmosphere
Disturbing Behavior and Twin Peaks comparisons
Fisher Price Clockwork Orange
Studio interference and deleted scenes
Gavin’s original ending
Disturbing Behavior implant rules
“Science is God”
Why Disturbing Behavior still works

We went Low on Psycho (1998), and not in a fun, “this is secretly fascinating” way. This might be the most frustrating Low we have covered, because Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is not just a bad remake. It is a remake that keeps copying the body of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while missing the soul. The problem is not that remakes are automatically inferior. Some of the best genre movies ever made are remakes. The problem is that this movie breaks the one rule a remake has to follow: add something without taking away what already worked.
That is the central argument of the episode. Everything this version attempts to add, from color to extra shock imagery to Norman Bates masturbating at the peephole, actively makes the original feel smarter by comparison. It copies Hitchcock’s choices while removing the reasons those choices mattered.
In this episode, we talk about Psycho, directed by Gus Van Sant and released in 1998, as one of the strangest remake experiments in studio history. This is the infamous almost shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1960), now in color, set in the late ’90s, and starring Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, Anne Heche as Marion Crane, Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis, Julianne Moore as Lila Crane, William H. Macy as Arbogast, and Robert Forster as the psychiatrist.
We start by making something clear: remakes are not the problem. John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and different versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers prove that remakes can be brilliant when a filmmaker has a new angle, a new nightmare, or a new reason to revisit the material. But Psycho (1998) does not feel like a movie with a new idea. It feels like a post-Good Will Hunting vanity experiment that somehow became a major studio release.
There are a few highs, and we give the movie credit where we can. The casting is at least interesting. Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis is probably an improvement over the original version of the character. Making Sam more rugged, blue collar, and believable as a hardware store owner gives him a little more texture. Anne Heche is also better than her Razzie nomination suggests. In the early scenes, she finds a way to take the original dialogue and make it feel more modern, sharper, and less melodramatic. Her Marion has a harder edge, which makes sense for a late-’90s version of the character.
We also liked Robert Forster as the psychiatrist. In the original Psycho, the psychiatrist explanation at the end is one of the weakest parts of the movie because it goes on too long and feels too theatrical. Forster plays it much cleaner, faster, and flatter, almost like he is reading the facts instead of performing a lecture. That is one of the few places where the remake finds a small way to improve a specific piece of the original.
The opening shot is another technical high. Hitchcock wanted to move from the city into a hotel room in a way that 1960 technology could not fully support. Van Sant can actually execute that idea more fluidly. We also noticed the little detail of the fly buzzing in the opening hotel room, which creates a subtle bookend with the ending and Mother’s “I wouldn’t even harm a fly.” That is the kind of addition that works: small, connected, non-destructive.
But then the movie gets to the Bates Motel, and the whole thing starts falling apart.
The first major problem is the decision to shoot in color. Hitchcock could have used color in 1960, but black and white was a defining part of Psycho’s visual identity. Removing it means the remake needs a new visual idea, and Van Sant seems to land on green: green dress, green sheets, green credits, green everywhere. But what does it actually mean? Greed? Envy? Rot? Money? The movie keeps underlining the color without turning it into a real idea.
Then there is Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, which becomes one of the episode’s biggest debates. We respect the swing. Coming off Swingers, it is interesting that Vaughn wanted to show another side of himself. He can play nervous, awkward, wounded, and strange. But physically, he feels wrong for Norman. He is too tall, too imposing, too capable of overwhelming the room. Norman Bates should not look like he could reach across a desk and fold Sam Loomis in half.
The parlor scene shows the problem most clearly. In Hitchcock’s version, the scene works because of stillness and restraint. Anthony Perkins hides Norman’s rage under politeness. Van Sant moves the camera, and Vaughn plays the scene more aggressively. Suddenly, Marion does not seem like she has had a revealing conversation with a troubled man. She seems like she wants to get out of the room before he kills her.
The biggest Low, hands down, is the peephole scene. In the original, Norman watching Marion is disturbing because of implication: voyeurism, repression, shame, desire, control. Van Sant turns the implication into text by showing Norman masturbating while watching her. We hated it, not because it is disturbing, but because it is stupid. It takes subtext and flattens it into shock value. The mystery disappears, the nuance disappears, and the scene becomes awkward in a way it should never be.
We also get into the extra imagery Van Sant adds to the movie’s most famous sequences: clouds during the shower scene, a masked woman and a lamb during Arbogast’s death, live birds during the fruit cellar reveal. These additions feel like insecurity. If the experiment is to remake Psycho shot for shot, then do it. Let the scenes stand. Do not flinch. But the movie does flinch.
By the end, Psycho (1998) feels less like a remake made out of need and more like a dare. As a private film school exercise, it might make sense. As a theatrical release, it feels baffling. You can copy the blocking, the dialogue, the camera angles, and the structure. But you cannot copy tension by tracing a chalk outline around the original.
Topics Discussed
Psycho 1998 review
Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake
Psycho 1998 vs Psycho 1960
Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates
Anne Heche as Marion Crane
Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis
Julianne Moore as Lila Crane
William H. Macy as Arbogast
Robert Forster psychiatrist scene
Shot-for-shot remake experiment
Why Psycho 1998 failed
Psycho remake in color
Green symbolism in Psycho 1998
Psycho 1998 shower scene
Norman Bates peephole scene
Bates Motel remake comparison
Anthony Perkins vs Vince Vaughn
Gus Van Sant after Good Will Hunting
Psycho remake box office bomb
Copying Hitchcock without understanding him

We went High on Psycho, because this is one of those movies that is not just important because film history tells us it is important. Psycho (1960) still has teeth. It still feels dangerous. It still knows how to get under your skin, not just by scaring you, but by making you question where your sympathy is going while you watch it.
That is the real genius of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It does not simply show us a murder and ask us to be horrified. It moves us through the story in a way that makes us complicit. First, we understand why Marion Crane steals the money. Then we feel her panic on the road. Then she is murdered in the shower. And somehow, only a few minutes later, we are watching Norman Bates try to sink her car into the swamp and quietly thinking, please go down. That is the trick. Hitchcock does not just kill the person we thought the movie was about. He starts moving our morals around.
In this episode, we revisit Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1960, as one of the most groundbreaking horror-thrillers ever made. The film stars Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Vera Miles as Lila Crane, John Gavin as Sam Loomis, and Martin Balsam as Detective Arbogast. We talk about why the movie still works even when you already know the twist, and how the second viewing becomes a completely different experience from the first.
The first major High is Bernard Herrmann’s score, which somehow did not even get nominated for an Oscar. That feels insane now, because the music is inseparable from the movie’s identity. The score attacks before the story even begins. The strings feel like guilt, panic, split identity, and violence all at once. It sounds like the movie is being cut into pieces, which is exactly what Hitchcock is about to do to the audience’s trust.
We also talk about how much Hitchcock lets the camera tell the story. Psycho is full of visual storytelling that does not need dialogue to explain itself. Marion does not have to announce that she is going to steal the $40,000. Hitchcock pushes in on the envelope, pans toward the suitcase, and we understand the decision forming in her mind. The opening shot does something similar on a larger scale: the camera moves toward Phoenix, toward a hotel window, toward a private room where people are doing things they maybe should not be doing. From the beginning, the movie makes us feel like we are watching something we are not supposed to see.
That becomes one of the episode’s biggest ideas: Hitchcock makes us complicit before Norman ever enters the movie. Marion is wrong to steal the money, but the movie gives us just enough context to understand her desperation. She is trapped in a life that feels too small. She wants a future with Sam Loomis, but money keeps standing in the way. The man flashing the cash is a creep who treats $40,000 like disposable “buying off unhappiness” money. So when Marion runs, we know it is wrong, but we are already leaning toward her side.
Then Anthony Perkins enters the movie, and everything changes. Perkins as Norman Bates is the biggest High of the episode. He does not play Norman like a monster. He plays him as shy, boyish, awkward, wounded, and almost sweet. That is what makes him terrifying. His harmlessness is the disguise. The stammer, the smile that hangs a beat too long, the nervous posture, the way he seems both eager for connection and afraid of what connection might awaken in him, all of it makes Norman feel like a new kind of screen monster.
The parlor scene is where the whole movie starts to reveal itself. Marion and Norman sit among the stuffed birds, talking about his mother, but really talking about him. When Norman says his mother is “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds,” the movie is basically telling us the ending if we know how to listen. The birds matter. The framing matters. Norman’s fixation on preserving passive things matters. He wants to control what might leave him.
And then there is the shower scene. We talk about it not just as an iconic horror moment, but as a scene built around vulnerability. Marion has no chance. She is naked, exposed, defenseless, and attacked in a place where people are supposed to be safe. Like Jaws made people afraid of the ocean, Psycho made people afraid of the shower.
One of our biggest debates is whether the second half of Psycho is as strong as the first. The movie famously restarts after Marion’s murder, and historically that is one of its great shocks. But we talk about how Marion and Norman feel like modern movie characters, while Sam and Lila feel more like characters from an older era trying to solve a movie that has already moved past them.
That connects to our biggest Lows. Sam Loomis feels like the weakest link, not because he ruins the movie, but because next to Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins, he feels less alive. The $40,000 math clue is also clunky in a movie that is usually so elegant visually. And the psychiatrist explanation at the end goes on way too long, explaining the monster after the movie has already shown us everything we need to know.
But then Hitchcock and Perkins almost redeem that speech with the final Norman scene. Norman sits in the blanket, barely moving, while Mother’s voice takes over. The eyes, the tiny smile, the “I wouldn’t even harm a fly” moment, and the superimposition of Mother’s skull over Norman’s face are still chilling. The psychiatrist explains the monster. Anthony Perkins becomes the monster.
By the end, Psycho is a High because it is more than a landmark. It is alive. It lies to us about whose story we are watching, turns us into accomplices, and then asks what kind of people we were while we watched.
Psycho 1960 review
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
Janet Leigh as Marion Crane
Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates
Vera Miles as Lila Crane
John Gavin as Sam Loomis
Martin Balsam as Arbogast
Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score
Psycho shower scene
Norman Bates and Mother
Bates Motel
Marion Crane steals $40,000
Psycho car sinking scene
Hitchcock visual storytelling
Psycho parlor scene
Stuffed birds symbolism in Psycho
Psycho ending explained
Psycho psychiatrist scene
Norman Bates final shot
Why Psycho changed horror movies

We went LOW on Madame Web, and this is not one of those sneaky affectionate Lows where we secretly want to defend the movie. This is a real LOW. Madame Web (2024) has psychic spiders, future Spider-Women, a villain trying to prevent his own death, a 2003 setting, Pepsi product placement, Uncle Ben, Peter Parker’s birth, and Dakota Johnson as a clairvoyant paramedic who can see time fold in on itself. That should at least be interesting.
Instead, Madame Web feels like a movie that is not interested in being a movie. It is interested in being phase one of a cinematic universe rollout. It does not tell a complete story so much as scatter breadcrumbs for possible future stories that, after this thing landed, nobody seemed especially excited to see. Coming right after our Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse episode made the contrast even worse. One movie says anyone can wear the mask. This one says nobody gets to wear the mask yet because Sony’s calendar has not approved it.
In this episode, we talk about Madame Web, directed by S.J. Clarkson, as a movie with a handful of workable ingredients and almost no idea how to turn them into a meal. The film stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb, a New York paramedic who develops premonitions after a near-death accident. She ends up protecting three teenage girls, Julia Cornwall, Anya Corazon, and Mattie Franklin, played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor, from Ezekiel Sims, played by Tahar Rahim, a spider-powered villain who believes they will eventually kill him.
That is not the worst setup in the world. In fact, we try to be generous early on and point out that Cassandra’s power could have worked. The idea that she does not just have a traditional Spider-Sense, but instead experiences fragments of the future before snapping back into the present, is actually a decent cinematic hook. There is a version of this movie where her powers feel less like a gift and more like a panic attack. She sees terrible things, does not fully understand them, and has only seconds to change the outcome.
The problem is that the movie keeps using that idea as a substitute for action instead of a way to create action. A good set piece should escalate. It should have geography, cause and effect, danger, improvisation, and momentum. In Madame Web, too many scenes play like rehearsal footage for something that has not happened yet. We see the bad version, time snaps back, and then Cassandra avoids it. After a while, the premonitions stop building suspense and start draining it.
The train sequence is the first time the movie almost works. Cassandra is trying to protect the girls, Ezekiel is hunting them, and her visions give her just enough information to move them out of danger. For a couple of minutes, we can see the shape of a better thriller. We compare it to Minority Report, where Samantha Morton’s character guides Tom Cruise through a mall using flashes of what is about to happen. That is the best version of what Madame Web is trying to do. This movie gets maybe ten percent of the way there and then gives up.
The 2003 setting is another idea that could have been interesting. If the movie wanted to use that period to avoid smartphones, explore post-9/11 New York, or build some specific cultural texture, that could work. Instead, it mostly drives past a Blockbuster Video and hopes millennials clap. Worse, the movie keeps making choices that do not even feel right for 2003. Information moves too quickly. The period details feel shallow. The setting becomes another ingredient the movie refuses to cook.
Then there is Dakota Johnson’s performance, which becomes the most visible problem because she is at the center of everything. To be fair, the script gives nobody good dialogue, emotional reality, or a playable arc. But Johnson’s line readings are so flat and detached that it starts to feel less like Cassandra Webb is emotionally guarded and more like Dakota Johnson is angry she has to be in Madame Web. The movie seems to want Cassandra to be closed off, but there is a difference between character detachment and actor detachment.
We also get into how strange it is that Cassandra is a paramedic. Her job is literally to save and connect with people, but the movie presents her as someone who barely seems to understand basic human interaction. Kids draw her thank-you pictures and she reacts like she has been handed a parking ticket. If the movie wanted her to be cold, technical, isolated, or emotionally removed, there were probably better professions to give her.
The biggest Low is the script. The dialogue is radioactive. “Don’t do dumb things” feels like placeholder text that accidentally survived every draft. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m hangry” is both a bad joke and a questionable 2003 period detail. The Christmas Carol references are so on the nose that the movie might as well be holding up flash cards that say “future” on them.
We also talk about Ezekiel Sims, who should have been a pulpy, comic-book villain but ends up being a total nothing. His motivation is simple enough: he sees a future where the three girls kill him, so he tries to kill them first. That could create a fun self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, he mostly wanders through the movie in a Spider-Man-adjacent costume because the plot needs someone to chase people.
The product placement is another major Low, especially the Pepsi integration. Product placement does not automatically ruin a movie, but when your final action sequence is built around a giant Pepsi sign, it becomes impossible to ignore. It feels connected to the larger problem: everything in Madame Web is hedged. It hedges toward a sequel, toward Spider-Man, toward future heroines, toward mythology, toward brand integration. Everything except the actual story.
By the end, Madame Web is exhausting because it is franchise homework. It asks us to care about Cassandra, the girls, Ezekiel, Ben Parker, Peter Parker, future Spider-Women, magical spiders, and a cinematic universe that never justifies itself. Into the Spider-Verse takes franchise material and turns it into emotion. Madame Web takes franchise material and turns it into obligation.
Madame Web 2024 review
S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web
Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb
Tahar Rahim as Ezekiel Sims
Adam Scott as Ben Parker
Madame Web as a Low episode
Madame Web and Sony’s Spider-Man universe
Why Madame Web failed
Madame Web premonition powers
Cassandra Webb as a paramedic
Madame Web train scene
Madame Web vs Minority Report
Ezekiel Sims villain problem
Madame Web 2003 setting
Pepsi product placement in Madame Web
Madame Web dialogue problems
Spider-Women setup with no payoff
Peter Parker’s birth in Madame Web
Madame Web as franchise homework
Madame Web vs Into the Spider-Verse

We went High on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and honestly, this might be the easiest High we have done in a while. Not because there is nothing to talk about, but because the movie knows exactly what it is doing. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is not just a great animated superhero movie. It is the best Spider-Man movie because it understands Spider-Man as an idea: anyone can wear the mask, everyone gets knocked down, and nobody knows they are ready until they jump.
That is what makes this movie feel so fresh. It takes one of the most rebooted, reworked, overexposed characters in pop culture and somehow makes him feel brand new without betraying what Spider-Man means. Miles Morales is not a gimmick, a replacement, or a remix for the sake of it. He is the perfect way into the story because his whole journey is about realizing that being Spider-Man is not about being Peter Parker. It is about choosing to get back up.
In this episode, we revisit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, and talk about why it still feels like such a major turning point for superhero movies and animated films. Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, the movie stars Shameik Moore as Miles Morales, Jake Johnson as Peter B. Parker, Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy, Mahershala Ali as Uncle Aaron, Brian Tyree Henry as Jefferson Davis, Luna Lauren Vélez as Rio Morales, Liev Schreiber as Kingpin, and Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir. That is a stacked cast, but the movie never feels overcrowded. Somehow, it throws the whole Spider-Man toy box at the screen and keeps the emotional center completely clear.
The biggest thing we talk about is the movie’s three core themes. The first is the most obvious: anyone can wear the mask. That line could have been corny, but the movie earns it. Miles is a Brooklyn kid dealing with school, parents, expectations, awkwardness, fear, and the terrifying realization that he has been handed a responsibility he does not know how to carry. The randomness of the Spider-Man origin matters. A normal kid gets bitten, gets power, and has to decide what kind of person he is going to be.
The second theme is that whatever you are going through, someone else understands. That is why the multiverse works so well here. In a lot of modern superhero stories, the multiverse feels like a machine for references and cameos. In Into the Spider-Verse, it is a machine for empathy. Miles thinks he is alone, and then the universe literally breaks open to show him that he is not. Peter B. Parker, Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man Noir, Peni Parker, and Spider-Ham are all different, but they share the same loss, weirdness, isolation, and responsibility. They all know what it feels like to be the only one, until they realize they are not.
The third theme is the one that makes the movie really land: Spider-Man always gets back up. We talk about how the movie uses that idea over and over until it becomes the emotional spine of the story. The final fight, with Miles down and his father yelling, “Get up, Spider-Man,” works because the whole movie has been building to that moment. It is not about whether Miles is strong enough. It is about whether he can believe he is ready before anyone can prove it to him.
We also spend a lot of time on the animation, because this movie looks incredible. It does not just look like animation inspired by comic books. It looks like a comic book came alive: halftone dots, paneling, motion smears, texture, color, frame-rate choices, and images that feel printed instead of polished into plastic. The style has become more common since, but this movie still feels like the one that blew the doors open.
The heart of the episode, though, is the relationship between Miles Morales and Peter B. Parker. Middle-aged, divorced, sweatpants Spider-Man is a perfect idea, but the movie is smart enough not to turn him into a bitter joke. Peter B. is tired, out of shape, and emotionally bruised, but he still loves being Spider-Man. That is what makes his mentorship with Miles so satisfying. The “leap of faith” idea pays off twice: first when Peter tells Miles he will not know when he is ready, and later when Miles sends Peter home with the same lesson. In that moment, they both save each other.
One of the biggest takeaways from this episode is that Into the Spider-Verse uses intellectual property as imagination, not obligation. After talking about Ghostbusters (2016), this felt like the opposite end of the spectrum. That movie used a beloved brand like a reheated meal. Spider-Verse takes one of the most famous superheroes ever and expands the mythology in a way that feels generous, emotional, funny, and necessary.
We also talk about how the movie handles villains better than most superhero films with crowded casts. Kingpin has a simple but effective motivation rooted in grief. The Prowler works because the reveal that he is Uncle Aaron gives Miles a personal stake that hurts. Even with multiple Spider-people and multiple villains, the story never loses focus because everything comes back to Miles.
The one Low is barely a Low. If we are really digging for a nitpick, Gwen Stacy’s arrival in Miles’ school before he even gets bitten feels a little sweaty. Compared with how cleanly the other Spider-variants are introduced, Gwen being blown into last week and enrolling at Visions Academy is maybe the one loose thread. But that is us looking for a flaw in a very clean sweater.
By the end, this is an easy High. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is funny, beautiful, emotional, stylish, and completely alive. It understands that Spider-Man is not one person. Spider-Man is the moment you are scared, unready, overwhelmed, and still choose to jump.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse review
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2018
Miles Morales as Spider-Man
Shameik Moore as Miles Morales
Jake Johnson as Peter B. Parker
Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy
Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir
Mahershala Ali as Uncle Aaron
Brian Tyree Henry as Jefferson Davis
Liev Schreiber as Kingpin
Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman
Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman screenplay
Anyone can wear the mask
Spider-Man always gets back up
Into the Spider-Verse animation style
Best use of the multiverse in superhero movies
Miles Morales and Peter B. Parker relationship
What’s Up Danger scene
Leap of faith scene
Stan Lee cameo in Into the Spider-Verse
Prowler reveal and Uncle Aaron
Kingpin’s collider and multiverse plan
Spider-Gwen origin
Why Into the Spider-Verse is the best Spider-Man movie

We went Low on Ghostbusters (2016), but not for the reason the internet spent a decade screaming about. The problem was never that women were the Ghostbusters. Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones are all funny performers, and there is absolutely a version of this cast that could have worked. The problem is that this movie never feels like it has a strong reason to exist beyond the fact that Ghostbusters is a valuable brand.
That is the real issue we keep coming back to in this episode. Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters does not feel like a movie made from love, enthusiasm, or a killer comic idea. It feels like intellectual property karaoke: a studio taking a song everyone already knows, handing the mic to talented people, and hoping recognition will do half the work. The result is not offensive so much as frustratingly forgettable. It has proton packs, ghosts, slime, cameos, the logo, the car, and the song, but very little of what made the original stick.
Main Discussion
In this episode, we finally watched Ghostbusters (2016), directed by Paul Feig and released in 2016, after talking about Bridesmaids the week before. That comparison matters, because a lot of the same creative energy that works beautifully in Bridesmaids works against this movie. Bridesmaids thrives on looseness, riffing, escalation, and performers finding comedy inside emotionally clear scenes. Ghostbusters tries to use a similar improvisational approach, but this is a bigger genre machine. It needs a stronger spine.
The movie follows Erin Gilbert, played by Kristen Wiig, who is trying to be taken seriously in academia when an old paranormal book reconnects her with Abby Yates, played by Melissa McCarthy. Abby is working with eccentric engineer Jillian Holtzmann, played by Kate McKinnon, and eventually the team is joined by Patty Tolan, played by Leslie Jones, an MTA worker with a deep knowledge of New York history. Together, they uncover supernatural activity tied to Rowan, a lonely hotel janitor trying to open a portal between the living and the dead.
That sounds like enough for a fun sci-fi horror comedy, but the movie never really builds momentum. We talk a lot about the baggage this movie carried before it even came out. Fans had spent years hearing rumors about a real Ghostbusters 3 with the original team. Then Harold Ramis passed away in 2014, and that version of the dream died with him. When this reboot arrived with a new cast, new continuity, and no real continuation of the original story, it was always going to face resistance.
The discourse around the movie got ugly fast, and we do not excuse the sexist, racist, or misogynistic backlash. But we also think that backlash created a shield around the movie, where it became harder to say the simpler truth: the movie just did not look very good, and then it was not very good. You cannot guilt people into liking a blockbuster. You have to make it undeniable.
There are highs, though. The biggest is Kate McKinnon as Holtzmann, who comes closest to creating something that feels new and specific to this version. She has the energy of a lab goblin in goggles, a mad scientist who may or may not understand normal human behavior. The Pringles “salty parabolas” line, the mannequin bit, the gun lick, the sideways delivery, all of that gives the movie some actual comic texture. The problem is that Holtzmann is mostly a vibe. She is funny to watch, but the movie never gives her a real arc or builds anything around her.
We also talk about Chris Hemsworth as Kevin, the impossibly beautiful and impossibly stupid receptionist. There is a funny inversion in taking Thor and making him the bimbo secretary, and Hemsworth commits to the bit. The “Michael Hat” joke works, and some of the physical comedy lands. But even that joke gets pushed too far. Kevin starts as a funny reversal and slowly becomes another sketch character the movie keeps returning to without enough variation.
The real Low is the structure. This movie mistakes riffing for construction. A good comedy scene is not just funny people saying funny things. It needs setup, escalation, reversal, and payoff. That is why the food poisoning scene in Bridesmaids works: there is a clear internal logic, and the comedy escalates from the situation. In Ghostbusters, too many scenes feel like the camera was pointed at talented performers long enough in the hope that something would happen.
Key Debates & Takeaways
The biggest debate in the episode is whether this needed to be a Ghostbusters movie at all. The cast has chemistry. Paul Feig knows how to direct comedy. The performers are talented. So why chain them to a beloved franchise if the movie is not going to justify that choice with a fresh point of view?
We also get into the team dynamic, which never fully clicks. The original Ghostbusters had clear roles: Venkman was the cynical hustler, Ray was the enthusiastic believer, Egon was the deadpan brain, and Winston was the working-class audience entry point. In the 2016 version, everyone has traits, but the group never becomes a fully defined team. Erin and Abby have a friendship backstory, Holtzmann is weird, Patty knows New York, but the emotional and comic engine never locks in.
The cameos are another major Low. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and Sigourney Weaver showing up should be fun, but instead the cameos keep reminding us of the better, more iconic movie we are not watching. Dan Aykroyd quoting “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts” as a cab driver is not a victory lap. It just makes us want to turn this off and watch the original.
By the end, Ghostbusters (2016) is not the worst movie we have covered. It is worse in a different way: it evaporates. It has motion, noise, effects, and a few decent jokes, but almost no residue. The original gave us proton packs, traps, Slimer, Stay Puft, Ecto-1, “This man has no dick,” and “We came, we saw, we kicked its ass.” This one gives us flashes of talent trapped inside a reheated franchise meal with 40% of the flavor.
Topics Discussed
Ghostbusters 2016 review
Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot
Kristen Wiig as Erin Gilbert
Melissa McCarthy as Abby Yates
Kate McKinnon as Holtzmann
Leslie Jones as Patty Tolan
Chris Hemsworth as Kevin
Ghostbusters 2016 backlash
Ghostbusters 3 and Harold Ramis
Why Ghostbusters 2016 failed
Ghostbusters as IP karaoke
Ghostbusters 2016 vs Ghostbusters 1984
Ghostbusters 2016 cameos
Bill Murray Ghostbusters 2016 cameo
Dan Aykroyd cab driver cameo
Rowan Ghostbusters villain
Holtzmann gun lick scene
Wonton soup joke
Ghostbusters reboot box office bomb
Why Ghostbusters 2016 is forgettable

We went High on Bridesmaids, because this is the kind of studio comedy we just do not get enough of anymore. It is loud, gross, awkward, emotional, over-the-top, and built around the kind of female friendship that movies still do not explore as often as they should. Bridesmaids (2011) is not just “women doing a Hangover.” That undersells what makes it work. This is a movie about watching your best friend move into a new phase of life while your own life is actively falling apart.
That is the real engine of the movie. Annie Walker, played by Kristen Wiig, is not simply jealous that Lillian is getting married. She is grieving the version of their friendship where she was the first call, the default person, the one who mattered most. The wedding is the MacGuffin. The actual story is what happens when adulthood starts pulling a friendship apart, and one person is not ready to let go.
In this episode, we revisit Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig and written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, as one of the last great mid-budget studio comedies of its era. It came out in 2011, right near the end of a run where movies like this could still become huge cultural events: big cast, big set pieces, quotable lines, emotional core, and enough room for performers to actually play.
The movie stars Kristen Wiig as Annie, Maya Rudolph as Lillian, Rose Byrne as Helen, Melissa McCarthy as Megan, Wendi McLendon-Covey as Rita, Ellie Kemper as Becca, Jon Hamm as Ted, and Chris O’Dowd as Rhodes. That cast is loaded, and the movie knows how to use them. It has the rhythm of sketch comedy, the looseness of the Judd Apatow comedy era, and the emotional structure of a friendship breakup movie.
What makes Bridesmaids special is that it treats female friendship with the same insecurity and arrested development that male friendship comedies had been mining for decades. Annie and Lillian are not polished movie-women sipping wine and dispensing life advice. They are goofy. They put chocolate on their teeth in a restaurant. They do weird voices. They make each other laugh in the way only people with years of shared history can. The movie needs that early coffee shop scene because it proves the friendship before Helen shows up and starts threatening it.
Helen, played perfectly by Rose Byrne, is one of the smartest parts of the movie. On the surface, she is Annie’s nightmare: rich, composed, elegant, socially polished, and seemingly designed in a lab to replace her. But the episode gets into how Helen is not just a villain. She is lonely too. Her perfect life is a performance, and by the end, when she admits she does not really have female friends and barely sees her husband, the movie lets her become human instead of just leaving her as the rich mean-girl obstacle.
Then there is Melissa McCarthy as Megan, which is still one of the funniest breakout comedy performances of the 2010s. It is easy to forget now how fresh that performance felt at the time, because so many later movies tried to turn McCarthy into some version of Megan again. But here, it works because Megan is not just random chaos. She ends up having the clearest emotional function in the movie. When Annie is at her lowest, Megan is the one who tells her the truth. She does not coddle her. She calls her out. “You’re your problem, Annie. And you’re also your solution.” That is real friendship.
We also spend a lot of time on the movie’s set pieces, because Bridesmaids has several all-timers. The engagement party speech scene is brilliant because it keeps going past the point of comfort. Annie and Helen keep taking the microphone, escalating the emotional warfare, and the longer it lasts, the funnier and more painful it gets.
The food poisoning dress fitting is probably the scene most people remember, and for good reason. It is gross, obviously, but it is not just gross to prove that women can do bodily-function comedy too. The joke has structure. Helen refuses the sketchy restaurant food, everyone else gets sick, and Annie’s denial makes it even funnier. She is sweating through the lie, insisting everything is fine while the whole bridal party is falling apart around her.
The airplane scene is another huge High. Kristen Wiig mixing fear, pills, alcohol, jealousy, and sabotage into one public meltdown is exactly the kind of performance this movie is built to showcase. And the bridal shower scene might be the best expression of Annie’s total emotional collapse. Helen steals Annie’s Paris idea, turns it into an absurdly expensive fantasy, and by the time Annie screams, “Are you kidding me?” the whole movie has become a volcano waiting to erupt.
The biggest Low we had is Rhodes, played by Chris O’Dowd. He is charming, and O’Dowd does a lot to make him work, but the character feels less like a fully written person and more like a narrative safety net for Annie. He is the nicest emotional support cop in the world, always available when the plot needs him, always patient, always kind, always there to help Annie rediscover the version of herself she has lost.
There is an interesting way to read that, though. Maybe Rhodes is written like the reverse of how women are often written in male-driven comedies: supportive, emotionally available, and mostly there to help the lead grow. That does not completely fix the issue, but it makes the character more interesting to talk about.
We also touch on the movie’s filmmaking style, which is not especially visual. This is not Jaws, Taxi Driver, or Hook in terms of camera language. It is more functional, almost sitcom-like at times. But that may be the right choice. The camera is not the star here. The performers are. Bridesmaids works because the cast can take clear emotional situations and spin them into comic chaos.
By the end, this is a High because it still makes us laugh, but also because it understands something real: female friendship can be messy, competitive, immature, loving, painful, and ridiculous all at once. And yes, women can be just as big of goofballs as anyone else.
Bridesmaids 2011 review
Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids
Kristen Wiig as Annie Walker
Maya Rudolph as Lillian
Rose Byrne as Helen
Melissa McCarthy as Megan
Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig screenplay
Bridesmaids female friendship
Bridesmaids and adult friendship breakups
Bridesmaids mid-budget studio comedy
Judd Apatow comedy influence
Bridesmaids engagement party speech scene
Bridesmaids food poisoning dress fitting
Bridesmaids airplane scene
Bridesmaids bridal shower meltdown
Jon Hamm as Ted
Chris O’Dowd as Rhodes
“You’re your problem, Annie"
Why Bridesmaids still works

On this week's Movie HighLow, we went Low on Hook, but this is one of those Lows that comes with a lot of affection. We love so much of this movie. We love Robin Williams as Peter Banning slowly finding his way back to Peter Pan. We love Dustin Hoffman chewing through every syllable as Captain Hook. We love Rufio, Smee, the Lost Boys, the practical Neverland sets, the John Williams score, and the fact that this movie has lived rent-free in the heads of an entire generation.
The problem is that Hook (1991) is not lacking magic. It has too much of it. This is Steven Spielberg turned all the way up: big feelings, big music, big sets, big reaction shots, big sentimental buttons on top of other sentimental buttons. The heart of the movie works. Sometimes it works beautifully. But then Spielberg keeps underlining it, circling it, adding one more speech, one more tear, one more “Mommy,” one more floating old man, until the movie starts giving itself a toothache.
In this episode, we revisit Hook, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1991, as a movie that feels almost impossible to judge cleanly. It is technically a Low, but it is also a movie with images, performances, and emotional beats that still absolutely work. The big argument is that Hook could have been close to a perfect kids’ adventure movie if someone had been willing to trim the fat.
The setup is strong: Peter Banning, played by Robin Williams, is a work-obsessed corporate lawyer who has forgotten that he was once Peter Pan. He misses his son Jack’s baseball game, takes business calls during his daughter Maggie’s play, and treats family time like an interruption. When Captain Hook kidnaps his children and drags him back to Neverland, Peter has to rediscover imagination, play, and the part of himself he abandoned when he grew up.
That idea is great. It is simple, emotional, and very Spielberg. The movie works best when it connects Peter becoming Pan again with Peter becoming a better father. The scene where Moira, played by Caroline Goodall, tells Peter that his children still want to play with him but will not want that forever is one of the best scenes in the film. Watching it as a parent makes it hit even harder. It is not just a speech about “work less, love your kids more.” It is about how quickly childhood disappears while adults are busy convincing themselves that everything else is urgent.
We also spend a lot of time on the things Hook gets absolutely right. Rufio, played by Dante Basco, is the biggest High. He was created for this movie, but he feels instantly iconic: the hair, the chant, the rivalry with Peter, the moment he kneels and gives the sword back. He makes complete sense as the teenager the Lost Boys would rally around after Pan disappeared. His death still hits, maybe too hard, but the character himself is one of the movie’s great inventions.
Bob Hoskins as Smee is another huge High. Every time he shows up, the movie gets funnier. He and Hoffman have a perfect rhythm together, and Hoffman’s Captain Hook might be the definitive live-action version of the character for a lot of people who grew up with this movie. He is theatrical, pathetic, vain, dangerous, funny, and totally obsessed with the rematch he has been waiting decades to get.
The Lost Boys scenes are where Hook feels most alive. Their practical sets, basketball courts, skate ramps, ragtag costumes, and late ’80s / early ’90s energy give Neverland a tactile quality that would probably be flattened into green-screen sludge today. We talk about how the sets look like sets, but in a way that works. Neverland feels like a giant playground built out of memory, fantasy, and production design money.
And then there are the three scenes we think are almost perfect. The Moira speech. The “Oh, there you are, Peter” scene, where Pockets stretches Peter’s face until he sees the boy underneath. And the imaginary dinner scene, where Peter finally learns to play again and the empty plates fill with food. That dinner scene is the whole movie in miniature: funny, emotional, imaginative, and completely clear. Peter gets it. The Lost Boys get it. We get it.
Then Spielberg adds more.
The biggest Low in the episode is not one performance or one scene. It is the runtime and the sentimentality overload. Hook is nearly two and a half hours long, and it should not be anywhere near that. The cell phone quick draw scene, the mermaids, the extended Hook suicide bit, Maggie’s song, the oversized Tinkerbell romance scene, the overexplained happy thought flashback, these are the moments where the movie starts putting a hat on a hat.
We also get into the strange obsession with “Mommy” in the second half. Maggie keeps invoking her mother, Hook dies asking for his mommy, and the ending keeps pushing the mother imagery until it starts feeling bizarrely overdone. The emotional idea makes sense, but the repetition gets weird.
The Rufio death is another complicated debate. It is effective, and it devastated us as kids, but tonally it sits in the middle of a goofy battle where pirates are being defeated by eggs, marbles, and Lost Boy nonsense. A kid gets stabbed in the chest, says he wishes he had a dad like Peter, and then the movie moves on almost immediately. That tonal whiplash is part of why the ending feels so messy.
Still, the final verdict is not that Hook is bad in a boring way. It is a movie full of great pieces that needed more discipline. The things that work work so well that they have lasted for decades. The problem is that Spielberg keeps adding sugar after the cake is already sweet enough.
Hook 1991 review
Steven Spielberg’s Hook
Robin Williams as Peter Pan
Robin Williams as Peter Banning
Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook
Julia Roberts as Tinkerbell
Bob Hoskins as Smee
Dante Basco as Rufio
Maggie Smith as Wendy Darling
Hook as a Low episode
Why Hook still works for ’90s kids
Hook runtime and sentimentality problems
“Oh, there you are, Peter” scene
Hook imaginary dinner scene
Rufio death scene
Lost Boys in Hook
John Williams Hook score
Hook mermaid scene
Tinkerbell human-size scene
“To live would be an awfully big adventure”
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We went High on Jaws, because of course we did. But the reason Jaws (1975) still works is not just “the shark is scary.” The shark is barely in the first half of the movie. What makes Steven Spielberg’s Jaws an American classic is restraint: character, geography, patience, silence, dread, and the confidence to let the audience imagine more than the movie actually shows.
That is the whole argument of this episode. Jaws became the modern blockbuster, but what modern blockbusters often forget is that this movie is not great because it is big. It is great because it knows exactly when to be small. The broken shark did not ruin the movie. It saved it. Spielberg had to withhold the monster, shoot from its point of view, lean on John Williams’ score, and build suspense out of what we cannot see. Limitation forced creativity, and the result is one of the most perfectly constructed thrillers ever made.
In this episode, we revisit Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1975, as the movie that changed summer movies forever while also teaching a lesson Hollywood mostly misunderstood. It stars Roy Scheider as Police Chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as Quint, Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody, and Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn. Yes, it is a shark movie. But more importantly, it is a movie about a town, a family, a local economy, fear, denial, responsibility, and three men who all understand the shark differently.
We start with the thing everyone knows: the John Williams Jaws theme. There is no way to talk about this movie without talking about those two notes. But what we focus on is how simple the theme is, and why that simplicity matters. The shark is not a complicated villain. It swims. It eats. It keeps coming. The music becomes the shark’s identity long before we actually see the creature. It is not overworked or overexplained. It is primal, repetitive, and inevitable.
That simplicity carries into Spielberg’s direction. We talk a lot about Jaws as a “less is more” movie, especially compared to the kind of overstuffed spectacle that followed in its wake. Spielberg does not show the shark too early. He builds Amity Island first: the beach, the politics, the holiday weekend, the local business panic, the normal rhythms of a community that does not want to believe something monstrous is in the water.
That is why Chief Brody works so well as the center of the movie. He is not a superhero. He is a nervous police chief afraid of the water, trying to do the right thing while everyone around him tells him not to overreact. We get into how Brody knows, almost immediately, that something is wrong after Chrissie’s death. He wants to close the beaches. The mayor stops him. And when Alex Kintner is killed, the guilt lands on Brody in a way that feels deeply human.
One of our favorite scenes in the whole movie is not a shark attack. It is Brody sitting at the kitchen table after Mrs. Kintner slaps him, completely wrecked, while his young son Sean imitates him. Brody starts making faces back at him, then asks for a kiss “because I need it.” That moment is why Jaws is not just a monster movie. It is grounded in family, shame, fear, and love.
We also dig into Matt Hooper, who arrives as science, money, expertise, and impatience with small-town nonsense. Hooper is arrogant, but he is right. He validates what Brody already knows. When he examines Chrissie’s remains, the whole scene plays on his face, because his reaction tells us everything we need to know.
Then there is Quint, one of the greatest character introductions in movie history. Before he even speaks, his nails on the chalkboard cut through the chaos of the town meeting. Robert Shaw makes Quint feel like a man carved out of salt, trauma, and stubbornness. He is not just hunting a shark. He is hunting something that has been chasing him since the USS Indianapolis.
The movie’s second half is where we really light up. Once the Orca leaves Amity, Jaws basically restarts as a new movie. Everything before that is the town: beaches, politics, denial, capitalism, community fear. Everything after that is Brody, Hooper, and Quint on a boat, trapped with each other and with the thing they have been circling the whole time. Brody is responsibility. Hooper is science. Quint is trauma. The shark tests all three.
The biggest High of the episode might be the USS Indianapolis monologue. In a movie famous for shark attacks, the best scene is a man sitting at a table telling a story. That says everything about how good Jaws is. The scene works because of Robert Shaw’s delivery, Richard Dreyfuss’s reaction, and the way it suddenly reframes Quint. His line about never putting on a life jacket again is horrifying because it tells us that, for him, drowning would be better than facing sharks again.
We also talk about the ending and why it is so satisfying. Quint is gone. Hooper appears to be gone. Brody is alone on a sinking boat, facing the water and the shark he has feared the entire movie. When he blows it up, it is not just spectacle. It is character payoff. The guy who wanted to close the beaches from the beginning has to solve the problem himself.
Our one Low is not really inside Jaws. It is what came after it. Jaws helped create the modern blockbuster, but Hollywood often learned the wrong lesson. The lesson should have been restraint, character, geography, suspense, and emotion. Too often, the lesson became: big concept, summer release, massive marketing, keep making sequels until nothing is left. The tragedy is that one of the most elegant popular films ever made became the template for a lot of much less elegant business decisions.
Jaws 1975 review
Steven Spielberg’s Jaws
Roy Scheider as Chief Brody
Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper
Robert Shaw as Quint
Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody
Mayor Vaughn and the Amity beaches
John Williams’ Jaws score
The two-note Jaws theme
Why the shark barely appears in Jaws
The broken shark and Spielberg’s restraint
Chrissie Watkins opening attack
Alex Kintner shark attack scene
Brody’s fear of water
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat”
Brody, Hooper and Quint on the Orca
USS Indianapolis monologue
Quint’s death in Jaws
Jaws ending explained
How Jaws created the modern blockbuster

On this week's Movie HighLow, we went Low on Super Mario Bros., but with a pretty major asterisk: this movie never deserved the hate it got. We won't argue that Super Mario Bros. (1993) is a great adaptation, or that it cleanly captures the spirit of the Nintendo games, or that the story makes sense in any normal way. It is messy, compromised, weird, overdesigned, and occasionally completely insane.
But that is also what makes it so much fun to watch. 
In 1993, Mario did not really have a movie-ready story. He had a brother, a princess, a turtle monster, coins, pipes, mushrooms, Goombas, and a lot of jumping. So directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton had to invent a live-action movie from a video game that was basically pure iconography. What they invented is bonkers, but it is also far more creative than people give it credit for.
In this episode, we revisit Super Mario Bros., starring Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi Mario, Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy, and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa. The movie was a box office disaster, got hammered by critics, and became the go-to example for why live-action video game movies were supposedly doomed. But watching it now, the story is a lot more complicated than that.
The first big argument we make is that the usual complaint against this movie, that it is too different from the games, does not totally hold up. Different from what, exactly? By 1993, Super Mario Bros. was a beloved franchise, but it was not some dense cinematic mythology. There was not a sacred three-act Mario text waiting to be adapted. The movie takes the basic material and turns it into a parallel-universe dinosaur dystopia where a meteor split reality in two, mammals evolved in our world, reptiles evolved in Dinohattan, and a missing meteorite shard could merge both dimensions. That is not faithful in a literal sense, but it is an actual idea.
Honestly, Super Mario Bros. was doing the multiverse before the multiverse became every studio’s favorite emergency button. Dinohattan is basically Jurassic New York, and the movie’s weirdness is part of what makes it interesting. It is not the Mushroom Kingdom from the games, but it has its own grimy, steampunk, fungus-covered personality. We talk a lot about the Blade Runner comparisons, but what stood out on this rewatch was how much the movie also feels like it is chasing the shadow of Tim Burton’s Batman. It takes something bright, silly, and childish, then tries to make it darker, stranger, and more adult.
That approach clearly did not work for everyone, but we have a lot of affection for it. Kids’ movies in the ’80s and early ’90s were just different. They were allowed to be creepy, gross, inappropriate, and occasionally traumatizing. Super Mario Bros. fits right into that era alongside things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Batman, and The NeverEnding Story. The movie has strippers, fascist cops, fungus rebellion, de-evolution machines, and Goombas with tiny heads and giant bodies. Is that a weird fit for Mario? Absolutely. Is it boring? Not even for a minute. 
We also give the movie credit for how many game references it actually does work in. The rocket boots turn Mario’s jumping into something that can function in live action. Big Bertha becomes a human version of the giant red fish. The Shy Guy influence shows up in the masked construction-site goons. The flamethrowers nod toward the fire flower. The fungus becomes a strange version of the Mushroom Kingdom. Even the idea of the king being transformed into fungus feels like it has roots in Super Mario Bros. 3, where kings are magically turned into other creatures. The movie is not accurate, but it is not careless.
The casting is another place where the movie works better than its reputation. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo actually have a believable older brother / younger brother rhythm. Hoskins has that gruff, working-class warmth, and Leguizamo gives Luigi an earnest romantic energy that makes the Daisy storyline work better than it probably should. We talk about how the movie shifts the romantic focus from Mario to Luigi, which is technically a departure from the games, but it makes sense for this version. Luigi is younger and more openly swept up in the adventure.
And then there is Dennis Hopper as King Koopa, who is operating on his own frequency the entire time. He is not a giant turtle monster, but he is slimy, vain, germophobic, reptilian, and weirdly charismatic. There is a little Jack Nicholson Joker energy in the performance, especially in the way he treats villainy like a campaign speech. The mud bath, the “monkey” obsession, the de-evolution chamber, Iggy and Spike, the Goombas, all of it is ridiculous, but it gives the movie texture.
The real debate of this episode is whether the things people call LOWS are actually the movie’s HIGHS. The darkness, the weirdness, the bizarre production design, the loose relationship to the games, these are the same things that make Super Mario Bros. (1993) worth revisiting. We'd rather watch a failed movie with imagination than a safe movie with no pulse.
That said, we do get into the real lows. The opening animation feels weak for a movie based on a video game. There is a lot of obvious ADR, with lines stuffed into wide shots and reaction shots to patch the story together. Some studio edits are painfully visible, especially around the de-evolution scenes. Toad getting set on fire feels mean in a way the movie does not really need. “Hail Koopa” is probably a little too blunt. And the ending is rushed, with Koopa’s final dinosaur form looking especially rough.
The biggest low, emotionally, is that we never got the sequel. The cliffhanger with Daisy coming back in full commando mode is cheesy, but we'd have absolutely shown up for Super Mario Bros. 2. That is the strange legacy of this movie. It is not a great Mario movie, but it is a fascinating one. It is messy, creative, creepy, funny, and way more memorable than its reputation suggests.
Super Mario Bros. 1993 review
Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario
John Leguizamo as Luigi Mario
Dennis Hopper as King Koopa
Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy
Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton
Super Mario Bros. live-action adaptation
Why Super Mario Bros. was hated
Super Mario Bros. movie box office flop
Dinohattan and Jurassic New York
Super Mario Bros. multiverse story
Super Mario Bros. video game references
Rocket boots and Mario jumping
Big Bertha and the Shy Guys
Goombas practical effects
King Koopa de-evolution chamber
Tim Burton Batman influence
Blade Runner influence on Dinohattan
“Trust the fungus”
Super Mario Bros. sequel that never happened
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On this week's Movie HighLow, we go High on Whiplash because it is one of the rare movies about greatness that does not let greatness off the hook. It looks like an inspirational story about a young jazz drummer pushing past his limits, but the more we talk about it, the darker it gets. Whiplash (2014) is not just asking whether Andrew Neiman becomes great. It is asking what he has to cut out of himself to get there.
That is the real question of the episode: does Andrew become great in spite of Fletcher, or because of him? And the uncomfortable answer we keep circling is that it might be because of him. That does not make Fletcher right. It does not make his abuse noble. But it does make Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash a much more complicated movie than a simple mentor-from-hell story. This is a movie about ambition, control, humiliation, obsession, and the cost of becoming the person you think you’re supposed to be.
In this episode, we dig into Whiplash, written and directed by Damien Chazelle, and why it still hits like a snare drum to the face. The movie stars Miles Teller as Andrew Neiman, a young jazz drummer at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory, and J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher, the terrifying conductor who treats music education like psychological warfare. The movie won Oscars for Simmons, editing, and sound mixing, and honestly, all three wins make perfect sense. This thing is built like a pressure cooker.
The central debate is Andrew’s transformation. By the time we get to the final performance at Carnegie Hall, Andrew does become something different. He takes control of the stage, pushes past Fletcher’s sabotage, and turns “Caravan” into a declaration of war. But we also talk about how even in that moment of victory, he still hands control back to Fletcher. That final exchange of looks between them is thrilling, but it is not cleanly triumphant. Andrew gets Fletcher’s approval, and that might be exactly the problem.
We spend a lot of time on Fletcher because J.K. Simmons gives one of those performances that feels almost unfair to everyone else in the movie. He is part jazz instructor, part drill sergeant, part horror villain. The “not my tempo” scene is the obvious centerpiece, but what makes Fletcher so scary is not just that he screams. It is that he knows exactly when to lower his voice, when to charm, when to humiliate, and when to make an entire room afraid to breathe wrong. He does not simply teach through fear. He builds a world where fear is the tempo.
The episode also gets into Fletcher’s philosophy, especially the idea that there are “no two words in the English language more harmful than good job.” We do not dismiss that line outright, which is part of what makes the conversation interesting. There is something seductive about Fletcher’s argument. Maybe comfort does kill greatness. Maybe some people only reach their full potential when someone refuses to let them settle. But the movie also gives us Sean Casey, the former student whose story reveals the human wreckage behind Fletcher’s method. For every Andrew who might become Bird, there may be someone else who gets destroyed.
Miles Teller’s performance as Andrew is another major High. He has to start the movie with this open, almost boyish hunger and then slowly harden into someone who has internalized Fletcher’s cruelty. We talk about the family dinner scene as one of the clearest examples of that shift. Andrew is patronized by relatives who do not understand what he is chasing, and he finally snaps back with the kind of contempt Fletcher has been teaching him. The “Lincoln Center” gut check from his father is brutal because it cuts through Andrew’s self-mythology for just a second.
That father-son relationship, with Paul Reiser as Andrew’s dad, becomes one of the most emotional parts of the discussion. His father is not trying to crush him. He is trying to keep him human. The movie theater scene with the Raisinets is small, but it says so much about Andrew’s willingness to tolerate discomfort, to eat around the thing he does not want, to subtract pieces from his life if that is what the goal requires. By the final performance, watching Andrew through his father’s eyes changes the scene. From inside the music, it feels like triumph. From the hallway, through his dad’s face, it looks like losing him.
We also talk about Nicole, played by Melissa Benoist, and why that relationship matters more than it first appears. Andrew’s breakup with her is not just a young guy being arrogant. It is the movie showing us that he has already accepted self-erasure as the price of greatness. Later, when he calls her before the Carnegie Hall performance and realizes she has moved on, the scene lands because it shows what he chose. He wanted greatness so badly that he made himself unavailable to ordinary happiness.
The biggest question we wrestle with is whether Whiplash is an inspirational movie or a horror movie wearing the skin of one. We both come down on the idea that Fletcher is probably the reason Andrew reaches that final level, but that does not mean Fletcher is justified. That is the uncomfortable brilliance of the movie. It refuses to make the moral math easy.
We also get into the missing chart scene near the end and whether Fletcher sabotaged Carl, whether Andrew panicked, or whether it was all just another test. The movie leaves just enough room for doubt, which keeps the tension alive. Our one real Low is more of a nitpick: what exactly was Fletcher’s plan if Andrew did not come back onstage? The finale is incredible, but the logic of Fletcher’s revenge depends on Andrew reacting in the most insane, perfect way possible.
Still, that final scene is why Whiplash remains such a monster. The editing, music, cinematography, sound, and performances all lock together. It is exhilarating and upsetting at the same time. Andrew may become great, but we are not convinced he is okay. If anything, the ending feels less like happily ever after and more like the beginning of a very lonely life played at double time.
Whiplash 2014 review
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash
Miles Teller as Andrew Neiman
J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher
Terence Fletcher abuse and teaching methods
Andrew Neiman ambition and obsession
Whiplash ending explained
In spite of Fletcher or because of Fletcher
“Not my tempo” scene
“Were you rushing or dragging?”
“There are no two words more harmful than good job”
Whiplash final performance
Caravan at Carnegie Hall
Andrew and Fletcher final scene
Paul Reiser as Andrew’s father
Whiplash family dinner scene
Nicole and Andrew breakup
Whiplash missing chart scene
Jazz, perfectionism, and self-destruction
Whiplash as a horror movie about greatness
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The Happening is a bad movie with a genuinely good idea trapped inside it, which might be the most frustrating kind of bad movie. On paper, M. Night Shyamalan making an R-rated eco-horror film about nature turning against humanity should at least be creepy. The planet mounting a defense against us? Plants communicating through airborne neurotoxins? Mass panic spreading through the Northeast? There is a real movie in there somewhere.
But The Happening (2008) keeps finding the least frightening version of every possible choice. Wind blows through trees. Grass sways. People stare blankly. Mark Wahlberg says science words like a man who has never been inside a classroom voluntarily. And somehow, a movie built around mass suicide, environmental collapse, and social breakdown becomes funny in ways it absolutely does not seem to understand.
That is why this episode goes Low. Not because the concept is worthless, but because the execution is so bizarre that the movie becomes less of a thriller and more of an accidental comedy about hot dogs, lawnmowers, lemon drinks, and the least convincing science teacher in film history.
In this episode, we try to answer the obvious question: is The Happening still terrible, or has time been kinder to it? After rewatching it, the answer is that it is still terrible, but in a way that is almost impossible to look away from. This is not some forgettable bad movie where nothing happens. Too much happens. People jump off buildings, feed themselves to lions, lie down in front of lawnmowers, and deliver lines like they are speaking a language recently invented by aliens.
We spend a lot of time talking about where The Happening sits in M. Night Shyamalan’s career. This is not a lazy “Shyamalan was never good” conversation. He had already made The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village, so we know he understands suspense, dread, silence, and atmosphere. That is part of what makes this movie so confusing. He takes a concept that could work and then builds it around one of the least cinematic villains possible: the wind.
And that becomes one of our biggest problems with the movie. Wind, trees, and grass are not automatically scary just because the score says they are. You can only cut to ominous leaves so many times before the threat starts to feel like aggressive landscaping. Because the plants themselves cannot do much visually, the movie leans on the suicide imagery, and the best version of that comes right at the beginning. The construction worker scene is probably the movie’s strongest sequence. It is eerie, simple, and genuinely upsetting. Bodies falling one after another from a building is an image that actually works.
But after that, the movie keeps trying to escalate, and the deaths start getting more ridiculous than horrifying. The lion scene. The lawnmower scene. The shotgun house. The movie clearly wants these moments to be shocking, but they often play like slapstick with blood.
We also get into the whole neurotoxin explanation, which sounds science-adjacent until you think about it for more than five seconds. If the toxin shuts off self-preservation, does it also shut off pain? Reflexes? Panic? The basic human instinct to move when something horrible is happening to your body? The movie wants the rules to sound scientific, but every new death makes the logic feel shakier.
Then there is Mark Wahlberg as Elliot Moore, one of the strangest pieces of casting in modern studio horror. We talk a lot about how hard it is to buy him as a gentle, thoughtful science teacher. It is not just that he feels miscast. It is that every line seems to become more awkward once he says it. “Be scientific, douchebag” basically becomes the thesis statement for the whole performance.
Zooey Deschanel as Alma has her own problems too. While she is not inherently a bad actress, this movie gives her almost nothing that works. Her relationship drama with Elliot is supposed to give the story emotional weight, but it mostly feels like filler. The whole marriage subplot, the guy calling her, the tiramisu betrayal, the tension between them, none of it feels urgent or real. John Leguizamo’s Julian basically has to explain their marriage problems to us because the movie cannot make us feel them.
We also talk about Julian handing off his daughter Jess, including the very weird “don’t take my daughter’s hand unless you mean it” moment. In theory, it should be emotional. In practice, it feels like one more example of characters saying things no human being would say in that exact situation.
And then there is the hot dog guy. Wow. Somehow, he is the first character to seriously suggest that plants might be behind everything, but he also cannot stop talking about how hot dogs have a cool shape and protein. That is The Happening in one scene: useful exposition wrapped in total nonsense.
One of the biggest questions we keep coming back to is whether The Happening is secretly supposed to be a B movie. Shyamalan has talked about it that way, and though that explanation is tempting, we do not fully buy it. If it is supposed to be funny, the movie is too stiff. If it is supposed to be scary, it is too funny. The tone never settles, and that is what makes the whole thing so strange.
That said, we do find a few highs. The premise is strong. The opening scene works. And the Mrs. Jones section near the end is probably the closest the movie gets to matching its own weird energy. By the time we get to “you eyeing my lemon drink?” the movie has become so bizarre that the creepy old lady sequence almost feels right. It is awkward, uncomfortable, funny, and unsettling in a way the rest of the movie keeps trying and failing to be.
The ending is another major discussion point. Elliot and Alma walk into the wind, the threat just stops, the news explains the movie, Alma is pregnant, and then the Happening starts again in Paris. It is abrupt, convenient, and weirdly underwhelming. We even end up workshopping a better explanation than the movie gives us, which is never a great sign.
By the end, The Happening is not just a bad environmental horror movie. It is a movie full of interesting ideas, terrible dialogue, miscast leads, accidental comedy, and moments so strange they deserve to be preserved. It fails, but at least it fails memorably.
Topics Discussed
The Happening 2008 review
M. Night Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie
Mark Wahlberg as Elliot Moore
Zooey Deschanel as Alma Moore
John Leguizamo as Julian
The Happening killer plant theory
Airborne neurotoxins in The Happening
Environmental horror movies
Why The Happening is unintentionally funny
“Be scientific, douchebag” scene
The Happening construction worker opening
The Happening lawnmower scene
The zookeeper lion death scene
The shotgun house scene
Hot dog guy plant explanation
Mrs. Jones lemon drink scene
“You eyeing my lemon drink?”
The Happening ending explained
The Paris ending in The Happening
M. Night Shyamalan career low points
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Taxi Driver is not great because Travis Bickle is cool, misunderstood, or secretly right. It is great because Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Robert De Niro, and Bernard Herrmann drag us close enough to understand him without ever letting us feel safe around him. That is the central tension of this Movie HighLow episode: Taxi Driver (1976) still feels disturbingly alive because the movie understands loneliness before it becomes ideology, isolation before it becomes violence, and fantasy before it becomes a headline.
Fifty years later, Scorsese’s film still has a pulse because it does not flatter the audience. It asks us to sit in Travis’s cab, hear his thoughts, absorb his disgust, watch him mistake obsession for purpose, and then deal with the fact that the world might reward him anyway. That is why this one goes High. Not because it is easy to watch, but because it gets harder to shake every time you revisit it.
This episode digs into Taxi Driver as one of those movies that may not fully hit the first time you see it. The argument here is that good movies provide answers, but great movies ask questions, and Taxi Driver is nothing but questions. What does Travis Bickle actually want? Is he trying to save anyone, or just looking for somewhere to aim all that rage? Is the ending real, fantasy, afterlife, media mythmaking, or some nightmare combination of all of it?
A huge part of the conversation centers on how Paul Schrader’s script builds Travis through voiceover without using it as a shortcut. The journal entries are not just exposition. They are a trapdoor into Travis’s head. Lines like “my life needed a sense of someplace to go” become the key to the whole character. Travis is not tethered to anything. He has no politics, no real relationships, no taste, no emotional vocabulary, and no understanding of how to live among other people. So when Betsy, played by Cybill Shepherd, appears to him as an angel in the filth, he turns her into a symbol before he ever sees her as a person.
That failed date with Betsy gets a lot of attention here because it is one of the most tragic and uncomfortable scenes in the movie. Travis has the right impulse at first. He works up the courage to speak to her, asks her out, and somehow gets further than he has any right to get. But then he takes her to a porn theater because that is the only version of “the movies” he knows. The episode’s take is that this is what makes Travis so disturbing and sad at the same time. He is not trying to offend her. He simply has no idea how warped his own normal is.
The discussion also spends time on the movie’s split structure: the first half built around Travis’s fixation on Betsy, the second around his fixation on Iris, played by Jodie Foster. Foster’s performance is described as especially upsetting because she is both performing adulthood and visibly still a child. The diner scene, where Iris behaves like a kid while trying to act like someone much older, becomes one of the clearest examples of how finely tuned the film’s supporting performances are.
And then there is Harvey Keitel as Sport, a character who is charismatic for about half a second before the horror of what he represents takes over. The episode points out how strange and important the scene between Sport and Iris is because it is the one major moment that steps outside Travis’s direct point of view. In a movie so locked into Travis’s head, that break matters.
The biggest High, though, is Scorsese’s direction. The episode keeps coming back to how subjective the filmmaking is: the Alka-Seltzer fizzing like pressure in Travis’s skull, the cab being washed by fire hydrant water like some failed baptism, the camera drifting away from Travis during his painful phone call because even the movie can barely stand to watch him. Taxi Driver is not just about a man losing his grip. It is shot like the grip is already gone.
Bernard Herrmann’s score also gets singled out as essential. It moves between smoky noir romance and pure psychological dread, almost like it is scoring two versions of Travis at once: the lonely guy who thinks he is in an old detective story, and the unstable man who might turn any street corner into a horror movie.
The biggest debate in the episode is the ending. One read is that Travis survives the shootout, gets turned into a hero by newspapers and public narrative, and returns to the cab still dangerous, still unresolved, still waiting for the next demon in the rearview mirror. The other read is that everything after the shootout has the quality of wish fulfillment: Betsy back in the cab, Travis admired, the world finally seeing him the way he sees himself.
The episode does not flatten that ambiguity. It leans into it. The rearview mirror sting is treated as the perfect final note because it suggests that whatever Travis experienced, he has not been cured, redeemed, or understood. He has only been rebranded.
Even the one Low is complicated: the desaturated shootout. Scorsese had to mute the blood to avoid an X rating, and while that compromise is frustrating, the episode admits the washed-out, pinkish, grimy look may accidentally make the scene feel even more nightmarish. That is the kind of conversation this episode has with Taxi Driver: not just “great movie,” but why the damage, compromises, contradictions, and unresolved questions are part of what make it one of Scorsese’s most disturbing masterpieces.
Taxi Driver 1976 review
Martin Scorsese’s direction in Taxi Driver
Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay
Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle
Travis Bickle loneliness and male isolation
Taxi Driver and the incel reading
Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver score
Betsy and Travis’s failed date
Cybill Shepherd as Betsy
Jodie Foster as Iris
Harvey Keitel as Sport
Albert Brooks in Taxi Driver
Peter Boyle as Wizard
Scorsese’s Taxi Driver cameo
“You talkin’ to me?” mirror scene
Taxi Driver ending explained
Rearview mirror final shot
Taxi Driver shootout and X rating
New York City decay in 1970s cinema
Is Taxi Driver Scorsese’s best movie?
Previous listeners: we know it’s been a while. One of these days we’re gonna get organ-iz-ized.
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Movie HighLow is back.
After a very reasonable, not-at-all-concerning multi-year pause, Dom and Dee return June 5 with new episodes about the best and worst that cinema has to offer.
Some episodes are HIGH episodes: classics, masterpieces, and movies worth revisiting. Some episodes are LOW episodes: disasters, trainwrecks, and movies where you start wondering if anyone on set knew they were making a movie.
And sometimes, the best movies have lows, the worst movies have highs, and a few movies leave us completely confused by both.
Subscribe now so the first new episode is waiting for you when Movie HighLow returns June 5.
Send your HIGHS and LOWS to MovieHighLow@gmail.com.

This movie never decides what it wants to be.
In The Fanatic, you’ve got a character study, a thriller, and a dark comedy all fighting each other… and none of them really win.
And somehow, that’s what makes it so... fascinating?
 
We break down:
Why the tone is completely all over the placeThe strange (but committed) performance from John TravoltaHow the movie keeps undercutting its own serious momentsAnd why this story almost works… but never quite gets there
 
👉 It wants to be disturbing👉 It ends up being confusing👉 And sometimes… accidentally funny
 
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Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/movie-highlow/id1494972813
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5F6GMoqeJcahbZtk592a9a
 
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moviehighlow