2:00

and more. Poor Things is in

2:02

theaters now. Glenn, I'm gonna start with

2:04

you. I know you liked this one.

2:07

I like this one. I mean, are we still saying

2:09

inject this into my veins? Is that the thing the

2:11

kids are saying anymore? Um, this is probably my favorite

2:13

film of the year and I say that even accounting

2:15

for recency bias and something

2:17

else I worry about the longer I do

2:20

this job which is novelty bias because I

2:22

recognize in myself a tendency to give not

2:24

not to give more weight to but certainly

2:26

to get more excited about films that do

2:28

things I haven't seen before in ways

2:30

I haven't seen done before You see

2:32

as many films as we do. There's a thing you

2:35

have to account for it can be very beguiling But

2:37

if it is all just slick or cynical, you

2:40

know stylishness that can mislead you I do think

2:42

this film is about something and I think this

2:45

film is a perfect marriage of its highly

2:48

idiosyncratic form with its

2:50

function and because the artifice of this film

2:52

is a key component of this film Because

2:55

we are in the realm of fables and fables

2:57

are where lessons get imparted and this film is

2:59

about those lessons Which a lot

3:02

of people might find didactic I mean

3:04

I'm aware that I happen to agree with the

3:06

lessons this film is so carefully and doggedly

3:08

imparting which are about a woman's life in the

3:10

world and sexual oppression and the

3:13

plight of the poor Amid you

3:15

know obscene wealth. I do not think

3:17

this film is saying anything particularly subversive

3:19

or sly or even controversial about those

3:22

things This film is just

3:24

declaring what I find to be self-evident truths

3:26

I think the appeal of this film is

3:28

that it's putting those self-evident truths in the

3:30

mouth in the mind of a person Who

3:32

is removed from society who is coming to these

3:35

conclusions under her own power? Which

3:37

underscores their self-evident quality? So I

3:40

love this. I wanted more I could

3:42

live in this film All right. How about you Walter?

3:44

Did this work for you? Yeah, I adore this movie.

3:46

I've already seen it a couple of times I hope

3:48

to see it a couple of times more. It just

3:50

is kind of everything that I like You

3:53

know, I think it works as a sort

3:55

of smart sequel to Ex Machina. It's the

3:57

version of Barbie. That's good Oh, I love

3:59

how it's pushed I

6:00

think there's something about her being

6:02

kind of handed from man to

6:04

man in terms of how that affects

6:07

her. I did respect it so

6:09

much for, as you mentioned, the production design.

6:12

I love the kind of super stark use

6:14

of black and white photography and color

6:16

photography. And this Emma Stone

6:18

performance, right from her kind

6:21

of extremely dark

6:23

eyebrows, she's really going for

6:25

an out there kind of

6:27

performance, which I really liked. If

6:29

you ever wavered, I think, in

6:32

this character or tried

6:34

to wink at the audience,

6:36

if you weren't completely committed to who she is,

6:38

I don't think it would work. I

6:40

think it's a great Emma Stone performance. I

6:43

don't think I've ever seen Mark Ruffalo be

6:45

purely funny to this degree in

6:47

a movie. He's pretty much exclusively

6:49

funny. I thought their scenes together

6:51

were very funny, but I do get

6:53

what you're saying that the

6:55

whole thing is that coming into yourself as a

6:57

woman is all about wanting sex, which

6:59

is not necessarily true, but that's sort of

7:02

the metaphor that the movie goes for over

7:04

and over and over again. I

7:07

mean, look, it's valid because sexual repression

7:09

specifically is a thing, right? But

7:12

it's not necessarily a complete

7:14

portrait of what maybe it's

7:17

aspiring to, but I just think the form is

7:19

so interesting that I would love to see the collection

7:21

of lenses on this movie because there

7:24

are distorting lenses, there are kind

7:26

of like super wide lenses. I

7:29

admire the form of it enormously. Yeah,

7:31

the Emma Stone performance, I mean, it's such a

7:33

big acting job, as you say, and it's

7:35

such a big ask because we have to see her

7:38

arrive at her understanding of the world pretty

7:40

much in real time, like she's creating herself

7:43

before our eyes. That is a

7:45

unique acting challenge. And I also like that

7:47

the film, the screenplay at least, supplies every

7:50

character with nuance. And as

7:52

you refer to, not every actor reaches for

7:54

it. Of course. Yusef, right, playing

7:57

the sweet, sensitive medical student who falls in love

7:59

with Bella. The smart thing

8:01

about the film is that he's just as controlling

8:03

in a different way than a lot of the

8:05

other people I mean even the default character gets

8:07

to have a teeny tiny arc little clique of

8:09

understanding The great

8:11

Catherine Hunter plays a madam a Parisian

8:14

madam and ever since I saw Catherine

8:16

Hunter in the Denzel Macbeth As the

8:18

three witches I have just been seeking

8:20

out her stuff. She's Amazing. That's

8:22

where I know her from that's where you know, it

8:24

takes a while For the

8:26

nuance to show up on the ruffle-up performance, but he's

8:28

not really reaching for it He's having a great time.

8:30

He is just hurling himself

8:33

at that British accent like a moth against a

8:35

screen door and he He'll

8:37

hit it eventually but you do see

8:40

that this guy is a self regard to

8:42

the lost little boy You know not also

8:44

throughout there that it isn't I didn't feel

8:46

like it was just quirky, you know I

8:48

know that's not really what's being said about

8:50

her character, but she does go out there

8:52

She does leave it all, you know on

8:54

the mat as they say But she also

8:56

I think demonstrates a lot of evolution from

8:59

the beginning where she's completely solipsistic It was

9:01

just what she wants and she's completely internal to

9:03

the end where she's almost scientific about it She

9:05

says, you know, I've made some comparisons. This is

9:07

my access to the world now This is what

9:09

I most experienced with then I would like to

9:11

say good news. You're better than some

9:14

of these Strangers that I'm meeting

9:16

in the brothel that I'm working at

9:18

now And so our relationship can resume

9:20

isn't that great news and not understanding

9:22

how the male ego and male sexual

9:24

Jealousy works especially for someone as fragile

9:26

as the Mark Ruffalo character, but yeah,

9:28

there's some growth I think in

9:31

Emma Stone's performance in her character. I

9:33

agree for me I'm really fascinated by

9:35

this idea that this year we have

9:37

three or four Frankenstein stories and the

9:39

three that are in film There's bemani

9:42

stories the angry black girl in her

9:44

monster and Laura Moss's birth rebirth That

9:47

they're all dealing with women monsters in a way

9:49

and they're dealing with reproductive rights

9:51

and social injustice and Frankenstein originally

9:54

was just the most woke novel,

9:56

you know, all of

9:58

these things happening in Mary Shelley's book

10:00

already. Finding a different kind of outrage

10:03

in 2023 I think is not

10:05

coincidental. The sort of pushback, as

10:07

repetitive as it might be between

10:09

this film or even three films,

10:11

I think is sort of a

10:13

warning blast or a drum regaling

10:15

the powers that be and saying,

10:18

we're pretty angry about this

10:20

stuff. We're pretty angry about this repression and

10:22

this committed campaign

10:24

to control women's sexuality. And all of these

10:27

movies seem to be addressing that all at

10:29

the same time using the same source material.

10:31

That's really kind of fascinating from a cultural

10:33

perspective. I think that's why the parts

10:36

of the film that I found most compelling

10:38

are Bella's conversations with these other older

10:40

female characters about what they've lived

10:43

through and what they prioritize. Glenn,

10:45

you mentioned Katherine Hunter, who I

10:47

know from Andor, shout out, best

10:50

show. And she is this like

10:52

really fascinating madam you said, right? And

10:54

it's in these moments that Bella is

10:56

sort of learning about socialism and the

10:59

means of production and your body being

11:01

your labor. So that stuff was really

11:03

interesting to me. The most

11:05

I laughed is when this is

11:07

sort of a companion piece to

11:10

Gerard Carmichael's Harry character. There's an

11:12

older female character named Martha, played

11:14

by Hannah Shugela. And she

11:16

talks about like, I haven't had sex in 20 years because

11:18

I have other stuff to do. You know,

11:20

so in those moments, I sort of was

11:22

most compelled by what the film was trying

11:24

to say about like, what is

11:26

it to be a woman? What matters

11:28

to you? What choices do you make? And

11:31

I wish there was just a little bit more

11:34

of that stuff amid

11:37

everything that this movie is doing otherwise.

11:39

Yeah, I really respected

11:41

the fact that I think, you

11:44

know, as we've been talking about the madam for

11:46

a period of time, Bella is doing sex work.

11:48

And one of the things I think is so interesting

11:50

about that is it is not

11:52

either presented as like a horrible thing for

11:54

her, nor is it presented as

11:56

something she wants to do forever. And it's not

11:58

that she's doing sex work. work that

12:01

necessarily contributes to her growth

12:03

as a person. It's that she's

12:05

having a lot of sex that she

12:07

hasn't gotten to have without

12:09

any real investment in it,

12:12

without a lot of risk

12:14

to herself, especially emotionally speaking,

12:16

she's getting to kind of try out, here's

12:18

what I like, here's what I don't like.

12:21

I think that's the one of the roles

12:23

that that chapter in her story plays without

12:25

being either, you know, sex

12:28

work specifically is like how

12:30

she learns womanhood, or

12:32

sex work is this terrible dark period

12:35

that indicates that something's wrong. They

12:37

really do treat it like a job in which

12:39

she learns a lot about that job. And interestingly,

12:41

I don't think in any of those sex scenes

12:44

is she subservient,

12:46

which I think is a really interesting wrinkle.

12:48

We don't like we see her in these

12:50

positions, but we don't see her in a

12:53

way where she is being demeaned by the

12:55

men. And I did appreciate that. I mean,

12:57

that does go back to this being like

13:00

a story of empowerment

13:02

and resistance rather than

13:05

let's punish this character for what she wants.

13:07

Right. I would say she even tries to

13:10

reform the brothel. She tries to make it

13:12

the system different. And she is just

13:15

rules in her own encounters that there has to

13:17

be some kind of interaction

13:19

before the interaction, if

13:21

you will, there has to be a telling

13:24

of a joke. There needs to be a

13:26

revelation of a childhood secret. And then we

13:28

can proceed. These little changes that prevent her

13:30

humiliation and give her power even in scenes

13:32

that are traditionally shot from a male point

13:34

of view is powerless and maybe eroticized.

13:37

You know, for all the sex and I didn't

13:39

find any of it to be erotic or exploitative,

13:41

but you know, I found it to be very

13:44

empowering and funny in

13:46

many ways. And I think we don't see sex enough

13:48

as funny. Yeah, I think that's right.

13:50

The cinematography at the beginning to me

13:52

is clearly very intentionally calling

13:54

to Frankenstein. I'm curious

13:56

what your thoughts are about what

13:59

your go slant the most and everybody else

14:01

working on the movie is kind of doing

14:04

formally with the way the movie is shot.

14:06

I don't know. I think in

14:08

a movie about points of view and shifting

14:11

points of view, it's pointed whenever you use

14:13

lenses to present literally a different perspective or

14:15

a different point of view. How

14:17

Bella sees the world initially will be very

14:19

focused in on the sort of fished eye

14:21

to distort it because of the confusion, perhaps

14:23

of where she is, and then it becomes

14:26

more traditionally framed, I would say,

14:28

as it moves on. But he

14:30

also does intertitles where each

14:32

section of the story is split

14:34

by like a avant-garde art piece

14:36

where Bella is in the eye of

14:39

the hurricane or riding on the back of

14:41

some kind of mythological sea creature. I find

14:43

that throughout the film, the storytelling and the

14:45

way that it physically looks, does

14:48

reflect a little bit of maybe the

14:50

evolution of perspective that we all have

14:52

that aren't able to articulate in a

14:54

visual way. This is Lanfonos' Attempting. To

14:57

me, I love that it begins as this really kind of

15:00

distorted, weird, funhouse-looking thing,

15:03

which is in Portugal. It's

15:05

this really brightly lit, beautifully

15:07

production-designed. You begin to see the

15:09

world as a very different thing, and then

15:11

it becomes very sedate and severe almost in

15:13

Paris when she's learning about production and she's

15:16

learning about her body. I

15:18

wonder if there's a way that we can look at

15:20

it as a planned thing and not just a stylistic

15:22

thing as a way to tell a character. I

15:25

also think the color story. To

15:27

start in London with

15:29

this very riotous, bold,

15:32

saturated color, to spend

15:35

most of our time in London in black

15:37

and white, and then to

15:39

return there later with this same

15:41

full, like very luxurious palette, I

15:44

do think so much of it

15:46

is like storybook logic, which is

15:48

like when she is in charge

15:50

of her own decisions and when

15:52

she has a grasp of her

15:54

own sense of place. I think that

15:57

is when the colors at least become most

16:00

bold. And I think that's when we

16:02

lose most of the distortion, right? Because

16:04

the movie has been able to trust

16:06

her perspective to give these things to

16:08

us while still being in this

16:10

like imaginative kind of space.

16:12

That is very helpful. Yeah, when it

16:14

does go to color. To me,

16:16

there were these particularly early on, like

16:19

when she's in Paris, there

16:21

are these deep, deep,

16:23

deep colors that look to me

16:25

like they don't just look like any color.

16:27

They look like colors from like a

16:29

Technicolor movie from like 1952. Weirdly,

16:32

it still has a stylistic connection to

16:35

the early black and white stuff because

16:37

there is a continuity of it seems

16:39

like out of time, which makes sense

16:41

because it's just sort of a not

16:44

in the real world kind of thing. There's

16:47

a sequence where she is looking

16:49

over a wall and I

16:51

was like, well, this is not a literal

16:53

world. This is a particular

16:56

kind of world. All of

16:58

the locations that she's in,

17:00

the artifice that

17:03

they all look like vaguely

17:05

fakie fakie is clearly

17:07

intentional. It's supposed to look movie

17:11

set-ish. Yeah, I mean, I think the filmmaker

17:13

wants you to see this as a film

17:15

that is carefully wrought. There are no

17:17

accidents on screen. There is no ad

17:19

libbing. There is no happenstance. This

17:23

is all very pointed

17:25

and very directed and you might not

17:27

like where it goes, but it's doing

17:29

everything it's doing very intentionally. There's

17:32

a moment where the Mark Ruffalo

17:34

character gives Bella essentially an ultimatum and

17:37

she says, so my choices are that

17:39

you murder me or I marry you.

17:42

That's the choice that you're presenting me because you're so

17:44

much in love with me essentially. Again,

17:46

this is a good version of Barbie. This

17:48

is a version that is not going to

17:50

give you a three minute speech about it,

17:52

but it will repeat these themes over and

17:54

over in different contexts to say even here,

17:57

even lovely understanding Max is in some

17:59

way trying to control it. over and over

18:01

and over again, because this is just how our society

18:03

is written. I think what I'll say in

18:05

defense of Barbie, and as someone who cried

18:07

during that speech, is that

18:09

that speech felt to me written

18:12

from lived female experience. I

18:15

just think that parts of this movie

18:17

feel to me written

18:19

by someone who like

18:21

broadly understands gender

18:23

relationships and feminist studies, but hasn't

18:25

figured out necessarily like the nuances

18:28

of what that is like day

18:30

to day. And I

18:32

think both films serve

18:34

different functions and different audiences.

18:37

This is more of like

18:39

a Wes Anderson meets David

18:41

Lynch, freakout dream. And I

18:43

love that. Very interesting. It's all

18:45

very interesting. Well, I cannot

18:48

wait to hear what you all think about

18:50

poor things. Find us on Facebook at

18:52

facebook.com/PCHH up next. What's

18:54

making us happy this week? Hey,

18:58

it's Linda Holmes with a quick but

19:00

very sincere thank you to our pop

19:02

culture happy hour plus supporters, and anyone

19:05

listening who donates to public media. After

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now, laptops, software, whatever amount

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you can pitch in makes a

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real difference. So please give today

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at donate.npr.org. Now it's time for

20:01

our favorite segment of this week and

20:03

every week what's making us happy

20:12

this week. Walter Chow was making you happy

20:14

this week. I am proud

20:16

to tell you to report that

20:18

it is my annual reviewing of

20:20

Solitary, the reality television show from

20:22

2006 to 2010. It

20:25

is about a group of contestants who are

20:27

put into solitary pods completely isolated

20:30

from each other in the world. Their

20:32

only interaction with the outside world is

20:34

sort of a howl like supercomputer AI

20:36

who puts them through

20:38

their pieces and makes them do silly

20:41

eating contests or walking contests or

20:43

balancing things and the dark tea

20:45

times of the soul that they

20:47

share on their private diaries and

20:49

they're coming to terms with

20:52

their own trauma and their senses of

20:54

self-worth. Every year I find time to

20:56

rewatch these 36 episodes

20:58

of just brilliant. It scratches

21:00

every itch for me and I find

21:03

every year around Christmas time is when

21:05

I want to watch Solitary again. Fabulous.

21:08

You can get it through Amazon Prime, Apple TV

21:10

has it. They're episodes available

21:12

for purchase. Thank

21:14

you very much Walter. Roxanna was making

21:16

you happy this week. What is making

21:18

me happy this week is a feeling that I am constantly

21:21

chasing is the feeling

21:24

of watching a Jeremy Saulnier movie. I

21:26

love Blue Ruin, I love Green Room,

21:28

I love Hold the Dark. So in

21:31

my continued what books are available on

21:33

the digital library at 3am when I

21:35

can't sleep. I stumbled

21:37

upon the works of Southern noir

21:39

crime writer S.A. Cosby.

21:42

He is from Virginia. He

21:44

is writing these like very

21:47

bloody vengeful thrillers

21:50

that make me feel like I'm watching a

21:52

Saulnier film. The one that I'm reading

21:54

right now is called Razor Blade Tears. It

21:57

is about a gay couple who

21:59

are basically killed execution style

22:02

and their respective fathers,

22:05

neither of whom was okay with

22:07

their sons homosexuality, or

22:09

ex-convicts, and they team up to investigate

22:11

this case because the cops won't.

22:14

That's a lot of stuff I love. I love like

22:17

father-child dynamics. I

22:19

love a torture sequence and a

22:21

book. That's been really fun. So

22:24

I've been making my way through the works of

22:26

S.A. Cosby. Thank you very much, Roxanna. Excellent pick.

22:28

I always love it when we can bring in

22:30

a book. Glenn Weldon, what is making you happy

22:32

this week? Well, I love the

22:35

Assassin's Creed games. I've played each and

22:37

every one, even the very bad ones,

22:39

because the good ones, like Black Flag,

22:41

where you're a pirate assassin, and Valhalla,

22:43

where you're a Viking assassin, are so

22:45

rich and so satisfying. The latest is

22:47

Assassin's Creed Mirage, and it's a return

22:50

to old-school Assassin's Creed, which means a

22:52

lot of the open-world RPG stuff is

22:54

gone. It's a much more classic stealth

22:56

game. There is a lot of

22:58

running away in this game, lots of hiding in

23:00

haystacks and flower beds, which can't

23:02

help but reframe kind of the vibe of the series,

23:05

because I come to these games to be a

23:07

cool badass assassin who strikes from the shadows, and

23:09

I spend a lot of these games crouching in

23:11

the middle of the goings, you can't see me,

23:13

I'm in the flowers. The setting

23:16

of this particular game is 9th Century

23:18

Baghdad, and there's so much to do

23:20

and see and learn about. I said

23:22

it, yes, this game is history homework

23:25

with a lot more disemboweling.

23:27

This game did not make NPR's list

23:29

of the best games of 2023, which

23:32

is this amazing searchable kind

23:34

of mini-site where you can filter your preferences. Think

23:36

of it as a very scaled-down version of Books

23:38

We Love. I've already found four

23:40

games I would never have heard of if it

23:42

hadn't been for that list, so my personal wreck

23:44

is Assassin's Creed Mirage, but my universal recommendation is

23:47

to check out NPR's best games of 2023. Absolutely.

23:50

Way to get that plug in there, buddy. There you

23:52

go. What is making me happy

23:54

this week? I am the person who watches

23:57

all the True Crime miniseries.

23:59

Right. But most of them I would

24:01

not go out of my way to

24:03

say really good television. But

24:05

they are airing one on

24:07

HBO on Monday nights called

24:09

Murder in Boston, Roots, Rampage

24:12

and Reckoning, which is about

24:14

the 1989 case in which a guy shot his wife

24:16

in their car and then

24:21

claimed that a black carjacker

24:23

had been responsible for her

24:25

death. This set

24:27

off a manhunt for

24:29

this random black carjacker

24:31

who did not exist, as it

24:34

turned out, that created

24:36

a terrible, terrible environment

24:38

of police harassment

24:40

for young black men. And here's

24:43

what I like about this. And this series

24:45

is made by Jason Hare, who's the guy

24:47

who made the Michael Jordan series, The Last

24:50

Dance. He's really good.

24:52

And out of three episodes, they

24:54

spend essentially the first episode talking

24:57

about race in Boston,

24:59

getting into like how that

25:02

took root in the city, the

25:04

history of housing segregation,

25:07

the history of school segregation

25:09

and subsequently busing and how

25:11

by the time this happened,

25:13

conditions had been created for

25:16

a monstrous happening sort of

25:18

like this. And what I like

25:20

about it is it's much more about everybody

25:23

else than it is about

25:25

this guy who killed his wife. As

25:28

we tape this, they've aired one episode. There

25:30

are three total. Again, they're

25:32

airing on on Mondays on HBO.

25:35

And obviously this will stream

25:37

on wherever you get

25:40

your max content. Again,

25:43

it's called Murder in Boston,

25:45

Roots, Rampage and Reckoning and

25:48

highly recommended. And that is what is

25:50

making me happy this week. If

25:53

you want links for what we recommended,

25:55

plus some additional recommendations, sign up for

25:57

our newsletter. That's at npr.org slash pop

25:59

culture. newsletter. That brings us to the end

26:01

of our show, Roxanna Haddadi, Walter Chow, Glenn

26:03

Weldon. Thank you so much for being here.

26:05

Thank you. Thank you. Thanks

26:08

everybody. This episode is produced by Huff's

26:10

Apothema and edited by Mike Cassis. Our

26:12

supervising producer is Jessica Reedy and Hello

26:14

Come In provides our theme music. Thanks

26:16

for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour

26:18

from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes and we'll

26:20

see you all next week.