I love this.

I, I, I just never believed him as, i- in terms of the themes, and sometimes when you'd get an idea, the ideas.

I just, 'cause they're not successfully or fr- or fulfillingly, at least for me, explored enough.

And, you know, a smart person can do the work of connecting something like what is happening in his version of The Odyssey to other depictions of war and war as we've experienced it, you know, in the last 3,000 years.

And I'm not saying that those things are not there, these ideas.

Some of them are very, are quite obvious.

I've only seen it once.

[laughs]

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think he might be a mirrorer in some way.

I don't, I don't know.

Like, he doesn't, his ambitions are not grand.

He doesn't want to be the greatest or the best.

He just wants to work, right? To me, a, this is a wild way to think about a film career, but this is a guy who is essentially like, "I build houses for a living.

I love building houses.

Get up, Dorothy

yes you lied to me all these years you told me to wash and clean my ears and talk real fine just like a lady and you'd stop calling me sister sadie

every time i hear this song i'm always astonished by A couple of things.

One is the force of her...

This is a common Nina Simone response.

It's not just me.

There's such a force.

Every syllable gets hit hard.

Do we know, Wesley, whether that was a predominantly white or black band behind her?

Mm.

Right? And the question that I, that I, that I...

The thing that excited me so much watching it that first time, which I'll never, ever forget, I just was so exhilarated and watched it in IMAX and it looked so good and felt like it weighed 4,000 pounds, was the sheer fact of Teyonah Parris as, as an elemental energy and a physical presence, right? Um, I felt like he was giving a Black woman the treatment that he gives these white men in his movies.

He was-- He'd invented a character, and you know, you, Pynchon has a lot to do with this.

Thomas Pynchon who wrote Vineland, the movie that this movie, the book that this movie's based on.

Um, he came up with a character who is, in this, in the world of this movie, a Black woman, who has as much weirdness and complication and like wrongness [laughs] as the white guys do.

Yeah.

Um, you know, cha- a Chase Infinity picture [laughs] and a chase picture, um, between, you know, two white men for a Black woman.

Yeah.

You, they are, they are fucking with how we develop as a culture, how we come to understand ourselves as a people.

What, what this country ought to or should look like 40 years from now.

You know, I'm in the middle of, y'all have heard me talk about this for 11 years, but like I'm, I'm almost finished.

And, you know, like I've been using this, this opportunity to, to work on this book to understand the, the history of our country.

Pretty much the entire history of our country can be told through American movies between like 1915 and like formerly today.

Mm-hmm.

Where the priorities have just completely shifted.

Mm-hmm.

Like, also, yes, keep in mind though, that, like, there are people being disappeared.

Keep in mind though, that, you know, he's about to take over another, you know, American city with a predominantly...

With a, with a m- significant Black population.

Um, so I don't know.

It's tough.

Like, you know, I'm a person who loves to try to figure out and unpack cultural figures, including presidents, but, you know, it kinda runs aground.

Yes, yes, yes.

But somehow.

Yeah, you had seen them in things before.

And, you know, Billy Crystal was a well-known comic, and Meg Ryan was somebody who'd been in other movies as, like, a supporting character.

And you also had in Harry Met Sally this great script by Nora Ephron.

Nora Ephron, William Goldman, Aaron Sorkin, they wrote the great Rob Reiner movies.

And he knew what to do with a good screenplay and good actors.

And part of the pleasure of watching them all congeal, just come together and, you know, transmogrify into this, like, amazing experience of just feeling, right? I mean, you watch The Princess Bride and it's all exuberance.

Mm

And this book is documentation of that.

(cheers) (applause) So with that, give it up for Michelle Obama! (cheers)

Okay.

"Depending on whatever she's doing later that day, I might add to that and then use some concealer." This is about the foundation.

Um, this is a parenthetical.

"She inherited amazing skin from her mother and has passed it on to her girls.

I set her face with powder, which allows everything else to apply smoothly, and often I do a little, quote, 'baking,' unquote, by applying extra powder beneeth her e- beneath, beneath her eyes, down her nose, and on her chin and forehead.

We then finish with a setting spray.

Uh-oh.

And, um, I think, you know, there, there's a lot of conversation about being, you know, disappointed in this movie, wanting better for the women in it.

Um, mostly, that conversation is happening around Teyana Taylor, but, you know, there's also an entire history of black women in (sighs) American movies, just to leave it at that, um, th- this film is correspondent with, but also contributing to the problem of in some way, um, goes, goes the c- goes some of the conversation.

And I think that one of the uncomfortable things is just, uh, one of the uncomfortable things for some people, I'm gonna extrapolate here, is a problem of this chemistry question, and how the two of them, th- that is, that is real energy happening in those scenes.

Yeah.

... greed, selfishness, blindness.

Uh, like what...

How...

(laughs)

Like, I don't really wanna talk shit about, about, about those, those recordings, those field recordings.

But, like, I think that there's an aspect of...

And, and this movie understands that a lot of the history of the creation of Black art has had to, in some way, if it's going to proliferate through a sys- through an economic system, it's gonna need a white person because they control the system.

And I think that there's some balance.

I mean, this isn't even about...

This is as much about it, about artists, but it's really not about white artists and Black artists, it's about white business and Black artists.

The, the, the relationship that, even from a chemistry standpoint, that grounded this movie to me was Smoke and Annie.

And then they try to make the movie for the next six years.

She's convinced by the, er, by the eventual screenwriters that this is a good idea and they can do it.

Um, but in the story, and also in the movie, but to read how Ennis responds to Jack's grabbing his hand, and in the story, putting it on his dick.

Like he grabs his hand and puts it on his cock in the, in the story.

In the movie, he just puts it around his chest.

And Ennis stirs, wakes up, and is like, "Wha- wha-" But there's something so, like I got, I get, like it takes my breath away thinking about what Heath Ledger does as an actor in that moment, and what's, you know, what the s- what the directions for him are to do in that moment.

Which is basically to like take his cock out and start fucking Jake Gyllenhaal.

(laughs)

Yeah.

But, they don't...

Like, on your way to bringing up the midterms, you mentioned that we aren't really dealing with the actual thing that we need to be dealing with.

And we have not been dealing with the actual thing this whole time.

(laughs) We're talking about four centuries of not dealing with the actual thing.

We are so predisposed to keep moving on, even as we endorse the policies, politics and culture of a person who really is just interested in dragging us back.

And I really... (laughs) I mean, I, I find it really fascinating, this turn to the midterms every time something goes wrong for somebody in this country, politically, you know, with the, with, with respect to the, the election, the presidential election.

This is real commitment.

Hmm.

And it, like, all those portraits correspond at least, at least in my brain, they corresponded to some moment in Demi Moore's cultural life and her movie star life. And then she gets to the bathroom, and I believe there's, like somebody's cleaning the women's room. So what does she have to do? She goes into the men's bathroom. That is the Demi Moore shot or sequence, maybe ever. And this movie is so dialed in, in its way, 'cause it's not about America. It's not about, it's like set in, in a, in a kind of fictionalized Hollywood. We can talk about the kind of Europeanification and the, the sort of, the ways in which non-American filmmakers and ideas have officially made an inexorable, um, mark on the Academy Awards and, and the, and the Academy itself, that I don't, it's just not going anywhere anytime soon. So we have to think about what the Oscars even are, going forward. But anyway, um, this movie, to me, like, and once she gets into the bathroom, you have the Dennis Quaid character in the bathroom talking about how over the hill Demi Moore is as an actress.

Please do.

There's this one scene. Felicity Jones is his wife.She is- she eventually makes her way over to the United States. They wind up living together in this- in this smallish apartment with her cousin, and these three Holocaust survivors in this little apartment, they haven't s- th- the husband and wife have not seen each other in a long time, and there is an expectation from her that they're gonna do it. And this is truly, this- this scene between these two actors and between these two characters is... Like, I'm getting chills just thinking about it. It is one of the most loaded sexual encounters that also is freighted by, you know, watching it in 2024, '25, you know, 60 years, you know, 70 years of history, and the history that these characters have with each other, where like they're just different people now. This- this- the Holocaust has changed them. The time they've spent apart has changed them. Her body's different. His- his interest in her body is different. It- it is... (sighs) I'm not even gonna r- I can't be more detailed about the scene, because-