Weekend Watchlist: The Whale, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio and Empire of Light
MIA Hi! Welcome to Weekend Watchlist, a look at what’s screening and streaming brought to you by The Letterboxd Show. I’m Mia, he’s Slim…
SLIM Yello!
MIA And together we’ll dig through what’s dropping this weekend, last weekend, recent trends on Letterboxd and we’ll also take a peek at our own watchlists—all under 30 minutes or your money back.
SLIM Mia, before we even get into the full show, we have to mention that this episode is brought to you by our friends at Searchlight Pictures. They’re presenting the new film Empire of Light, written and directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes and starring Olivia Coleman, Michael Ward, Toby Jones and Colin Firth.
MIA Oh, it has always been my dream to be sponsored by Colin Firth. Empire of Light has been named one of Vanity Fair’s Ten Best Films of the Year. Mendes’s drama features cinematography from Oscar winner Roger Deakins and an original score by Oscar winners, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It is in select theaters December 9.
SLIM Not only will we be talking about that, Empire of Light later in the show, but we’ll chat about Brendon Fraser’s big comeback movie The Whale, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio on Netflix, your community reviews tagged Weekend Watchlist, what that same community thought of last week’s movies, and we’ll shuffle our own watchlist together forever later in the show.
MIA Speaking of watchlists, The Whale is on a whopping 193,000 of them.
SLIM My god.
MIA Yeah, so for reference, this is a higher number then another very lonely creature, The Batman. So The Batman had 81 thousand.
SLIM Retire Batman.
MIA Like The Whale trounced The Batman, The Whale outsold The Batman on every level. It’s so interesting and unexpected.
SLIM So how do you feel about your boy Pattinson getting trounced here? I guess if it’s anyone, it might as well be Brendan Fraser.
MIA Exactly. If it were anyone else, it might have to come to fisticuffs, but it’s Brendan Fraser I concede to to him. So The Whale is directed by Darren Aronofsky who we may from Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, Mother!. So The Whale centers on a reclusive English teacher who’s suffering from severe obesity and he attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.
SLIM One last chance for Brendan. It’s the big comeback movie. People are over the moon, rightfully about Brendan coming back into the limelight, well=deserved. So I actually was at a fancy-pants screening a couple of weeks ago, felt like Mia Vicino getting into these screenings. I was wearing my sunglasses, I had my hood up trying to get in there. It was actually the same place that I saw Men, the early screening for Men, and funnily enough, someone was snoring in the first ten minutes of both of those screenings. So I wonder which local Philadelphia film critic has a tendency to fall asleep during screenings. I thought Brendan was amazing. I thought Sadie was amazing. The ending was amazing in my opinion, the stuff in between, I didn’t love too much. I am pretty glad that Brendan is is back. And he’s witnessing the praise that I think so many film fans have had for Brendan for so long. But he’s been out of that spotlight for quite a bit of time. So that’s the main thing for me is that Brendan is getting the praise, well-deserved stuff. So I’m happy that that’s happening. I didn’t love the movie, but that’s okay. I think a lot of people do love it.
MIA I am in a similar boat, Slim. I am also rooting for Brendan. I’m happy for him. I’m also a sucker for movies adapted from plays. I love when characters are in one location, and all they’re doing is talking for the most part. I love that shit. I go crazy for that, as a former theater kid. Films like that really, really rely on a strong, strong script, which I’m not quite sure if this one is up to par considering the intense material. But Brendan and Hong Chau in particular, I really love their performances. We also, I believe we have a clip...
SLIM Oh my god. You’re right! Our own Brian Formo, Senior Producer, sat down with Brendan and Sam Hunter, the writer, and he asked Brendan, about what the most challenging aspect of this role was. So here’s Brendan’s answer...
BRENDAN FRASER The biggest challenge was connecting with Sadie and Hong and Ty in a way that was meaningful and authentic and didn’t fall into sentimentality or mockish-ness, that let the man be a man, be so much more than who he is as he appears, and to play him in a way that would allow you to see him for who he is as he presents, and make up your own mind about if or not he, like so many others, in our world are easily dismissed. And you need to see him for the person that he is. He’s an educator, he is. He was a husband, a father, he’s flawed. He loves intensely, he’s eternally optimistic. He has a sense of hope, and has almost like a secret superpower, he can see the good in others, and bring that out in them. He’s an educator. When they can’t see that in themselves, and the tragedy is, he can’t do that for himself. But if he can connect with his daughter and the little amount of time he has left, maybe just, maybe he can turn that around. But you have to see the film to see where Charlie goes.
SLIM Quite a pitch from Brendan.
MIA He’s also burying the lead. He’s burying the lead that the whale is gay. This is a queer film. And I think people should know that because I was surprised and I was pleasantly surprised.
SLIM Mr Spork left a review: “It's the fucking Brenaissance baby, let's fucking go.”
MIA Yes. Thank you, Mr. Spork!
SLIM It’s all fun and games until you have to say a Letterboxd name out loud, and then all bets are off.
MIA We were in such a somber mood and then Mr. Spork comes in. No, we love you, Mr. Spork. Thank you.
SLIM Should we move into Pinocchio? Is it time for Del Toro’s Pinocc?
MIA I would love to move into Pinocc, I would love to.
SLIM It’s time for Pinocc. Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, on 67,000 watchlists. This is going to be on Netflix in the luxury of your own home, however luxurious that might be. “During the rise of fascism in Mussolini’s Italy, a wooden boy brought magically to life struggles to live up to his father’s expectations.” I have not seen this, I’m very jealous of all the pros in the press line that have seen this. Mia, I’m just going to have to guess to think that you did see this in advance.
MIA I did. It’s true. It’s true. I did but I had to really finagle my way in there. I had to, I waited in line for hours in the rush line to get into Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio and it was well worth it because they put me in the front row, five seats down from GDT himself.
SLIM Oh my god.
MIA So yes, not to brag, but I was at that premiere. I really enjoyed this Pinocchio, it blows the ten million other Pinocchio movies that came out recently, for some reason out of the water. GDT is such a master at world building. He totally refreshed this story that we’ve seen and heard so many times. And he’s translated into his own signature style. He lets people sing original songs. It’s a musical. So we got Christoph Waltz singing, Ewan McGregor singing. Yeah, yes, yes. And then Lydia Tar is a monkey. She plays a monkey in this.
SLIM No…
MIA Yeah. Yes, Lydio Tar, Cate Blanchett, is the monkey. But yes, Lydia Tar is real.
SLIM Lydia Tar, the character from the movie TÁR, plays the monkey in Pinocchio.
MIA Yeah.
SLIM Ewan McGregor famously sang in Moulin Rouge! Right?
MIA Ohhh, yes he did.
SLIM Which I did not, we don’t have to get into my thoughts on Moulin Rouge!
MIA We have to stay civil.
SLIM We have to remain civil at all times. This must also be a treat for Moulin Rougies, is that what the fans are called? Rougies?
MIA Yes, we’re called Moulin Rougies, yes, that is the term. It’s a huge treat for us because he has such a beautiful voice, but you know, Hollywood doesn’t often let him use it. He was able to use it in Beauty and the Beast was the last time. But this—I don’t know if you saw the Beauty and the Beast film?
SLIM No he was in the live-action Beauty and the Beast?
MIA He plays the sexy candle—I mean, the candle. He plays the candle. [Slim laughs]
SLIM I do not that. I have seen it but that was a long time ago.
MIA Yeah, yes. In the live-action when he plays the candle, they make him dab as the candle, so this is a big step up from that.
SLIM The only thing I from the Beauty and the Beast is the memes that were of the Beast walking down the steps and in his CGI uniform with his legs, his like freak legs.
MIA I can’t even think about it. Oh my god, I haven’t thought about that movie.
SLIM Sorry to derail everyone. Jay left a review: “All rise for the Anti Fascist Pinocchio.” So, they’re coming in hot.
MIA That is another exciting factor, is that they straight up put Pinocchio in World War Two fascist Italy, so it’s like modernized the fable, not completely, it’s not now times, but it’s still more modern than whenever the Italians made it. I don’t know when that was, I’m not a history expert.
SLIM Did you give this four stars?
MIA I gave it four stars and a heart, I did.
SLIM Tessa left review: “Cried my eyes out. Had a great time.” So the buzz is very nuclear for Pinocchio. It’s nuclear buzz for this wooden boy.
MIA Speaking of nuclear and light, I don’t know... Empire of Light? That sounds like it could be a bomb of some sort.
SLIM Yes, a love bomb.
MIA It’s a love bomb to the power of cinema. There we go. That’s an excellent transition. Empire of Light is directed by Sam Mendes of American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, a million Broadway plays. This is on 24,000 watchlists and it is coming out in theaters. This is a love story set in and around an old cinema on the south coast of England in the 1980s.
SLIM I guess the modern Mendes that I’m aware of is like the Bond movies and 1917 and Road to Perdition. So I haven’t seen some of his other stuff and I think you mentioned like the Broadway or the play stuff, that’s like completely unknown to me. So him and Deakins combining for this, it’s like a different, different vibe that I’m not familiar with. So I’m interested to see the response to this movie.
MIA Yeah, Sam Mendes is an excellent dramaturge, I believe the word is. Yes, exciting to use it and I hope I’m using it correctly. But the cast and crew that he’s assembled for this thing is so wild because yeah, you’ve got Roger Deakins, who’s amazing. You have a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score, the guys of The Social Network and Gone Girl, they’re amazing. I listen to their scores all the time. And then for me personally, they got Olivia Coleman and Colin Firth, two of Britain’s finest exports? Imports? They’re not products, I shouldn’t refer to them as that.
SLIM The finest human products that have ever come out of that area.
MIA Yes, but I love them deeply. They’re always compelling to watch and Colin Firth particularly I’m very interested in where his career is going right now because he’s kind of in like his horny cheater era. I don’t know if anybody here watched The Staircase on HBO, but he’s playing horny cheater in that, he’s playing a horny cheater in this. It’s like he switched personalities with Hugh Grant’s character in Bridget Jones’s Diary, Daniel Cleaver, which Slim one day you will understand what that means when I make you watch Bridget Jones. But it is very interesting to see him like this because we know him is this you know, like very posh and polite British man and he’s kind of been a bad boy. I like bad boy Colin!
SLIM Hashtag horny cheater on Twitter if you’re watching these Colin movies. I was trying to think of Olivia Coleman, obviously Olivia Coleman is one of the best actors in the game. And I was thinking about the first time I saw her. I think it was Broadchurch. that TV show Broadchurch with David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker—oh my god Phoebe Waller-Bridge is in that?
MIA It’s English excellence.
SLIM I completely blocked out that she was in it. But yeah, that TV show revolutionized my brain as to like what television could be and her performance was a huge part of that.
MIA We have some reviews of Zoe Rose Bryant: “It’s a simple story, and maybe it bites off a bit more than it can chew, but it’s just so sincere - and so soulfully shot and scored. A good old-fashioned prestige pic aimed squarely at adults, and I ate it up.” Yes, we need more mid-budget adult dramas. They’re weirdly scarce. Empire of Light leading the charge. Thank you.
SLIM I feel like I need to at reply our Twitter and say let me log Broadchurch on Letterboxd, if they haven’t blocked me already. Please don’t block me Twitter team. Let’s look back at last week. Community reviews we want to spotlight, see what everyone is tagging in their reviews for the movies that dropped last week. So BurtonMacReady left a review: “David Harbour is of course amazing, adding heart and melancholy to the hammer swinging action hero and selling one-liners with glee. Considering this opened to #1 at the box office on his back and the fact that when he takes off his shirt in the middle of this to reveal his muscled burly physique, the woman next to me said out loud “damn, he is sexy”, I’m wondering if he’s our last true movie star.” Is it true? You think he’s our last true movie star?
MIA I think that’s reserved for Colin Farrell.
SLIM I thought you were gonna say Colin Firth.
MIA There are so many Colin F’s out there that I am deeply connected to. But I respect that. Again, the sexification of Santa is real, I said this in the last episode and this further proves my thesis. So, thank you, Burton McCready. Thank you.
SLIM I got a lot of anonymous DMs about the sexification of Santa last week after that episode dropped, people were praising the need to discuss Santa in that way.
MIA Because we’re not talking about it.
SLIM We’re not talking about it at all.
MIA We as a society are not having the correct discussions.
SLIM We need to amp it up.
MIA I also just want to say that we have The Eternal Daughter by Joanna Hogg is also at a 3.4 average, which I think is very interesting that that and Violent Night are both tied, because they’re both kind of aimed at opposite audiences. I’m more of an Eternal Daughter. Are you a Violent Night?
SLIM I think a more of a Violent Night. My son saw the trailer for that on his YouTube and asked to see it. So we will be watching that once it hits VOD, for sure.
MIA There are two Americas for sure. *Eternal Daughter*r America, Violent Night America.
SLIM Emancipation is going wide on Apple TV+ this week, that’s sitting at a 2.9 average from the last week. So going downward a little bit. One thing I do want to point out for the next, for I think two weeks from now, is we’re going to be doing a holiday watchlist segment, spoilers, right before we take a month off. But we’ll be talking about holiday watchlists, our own holiday watchlist. So if you are watching your holiday picks, or making your own lists about suggestions for holiday movies, tag it weekend watchlist, so maybe we can spotlight it in two weeks once we go through our own and I’m already gonna say that Christmas Vacation is on my list. So get ready, Mia.
MIA Okay, I will get ready. I already dropped in this episode, which film I will be talking about. So if you were paying attention, you already know but I’m not gonna say it again. So you’ll have to—
SLIM Rewind. You need to rewind.
MIA Pay more attention next time if you missed it!
SLIM One of the things I’m doing, I’m actually, spoilers before we get to the segment later in the show, I’ve been culling my watchlist. I got it down to I think 150 movies, because I realized that I needed to start going through some of these oldies that I don’t even adding. So one of them that I actually started watching is a movie that’s been there for a while but wasn’t streaming forever. It was Judgment at Nuremberg , 1961 directed by Stanley Kramer. It’s like a fictional version of the trials against four prosecutors with Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland’s in it, William Shatner, it’s streaming on Pluto and Hoopla. So I rented it from my local library and I watched it. It’s actually three hours long. I watched the first hour, it’s incredible so far, so I’m excited to finish it.
MIA Now it is time to check in on the Letterboxd Top 50 of 2022 list. Let’s see what is at the top of the list for 2022 releases. So, Jordan’s submission to the Best International feature category at the Oscars this year, Farha , enters at number eighteen. It follows a fourteen-year-old girl in 1948 Palestine who watches from a locked pantry as catastrophe consumes her home. Jack notes that there is a big political push for this one. And lots of our reviews are simply Free Palestine. It premiered at TIFF last year and was released on Netflix on December 1.
SLIM I mean we’re in the throes of the year, we’re almost at the end of Jack’s Letterboxd Top 50 of 2022 which is updated weekly. And who knows maybe it’s set in stone, maybe he predicted it pretty much like the first month that he didn’t think The Beatles: Get Back with leave the number one spot. So we’ll see, we’re almost at the end.
MIA We’re running out of time. So get your votes in.
SLIM Let’s go to our watchlists. We shuffled every week, we get a different movie from our own watchlist that we have to watch before we record next. And two weeks ago when I was last on this show, I got U.S. Seals II and there was there was like a thud, you could hear a pin drop in that episode when I got that shuffle. Actually, it’s not bad. It felt like a lower budget The Expendables and I liked the first The Expendables to be honest, it’s fun. But this felt like I had like a lower budget and accordingly, a cast. I was recognizing faces from the original Mortal Kombat movie. So oldies like me might that and also Street Fighter with Jean-Claude Van Damme. There was actually some big time style in the movie. When I looked at the director’s filmography, I realized he had also done [Ninja: Shadow of a Tear] and like a bunch of Scott Adkins movies, so like those direct-to-video, martial arts thriller type films. So if this movie had been made a few years later, I feel like Scott Adkins would have been the star. But it was pretty good. Not bad.
MIA I saw you gave it three and a half. That’s a stellar rating for U.S. Seals II.
SLIM People were stunned by that rating in the feed. Gave them pause in the Activity Feed.
MIA Because the poster looks fake. It did not look like a real movie.
SLIM It looks like an ad for someone to the Seals or the military, fight for your country. I did not want to the military out of the movie, but I thought I had a good time.
MIA That’s good. That’s all we can ask for. You know, I watched something that ended up on the Sight and Sound poll, funnily enough. Yes, yes, you may have heard about this Sight and Sound poll that is reverberating around the film sphere of the internet. So for those who don’t know, Sight and Sound is a British monthly film magazine by BFI, every ten years, they poll an international group of film professionals. And then they compiled this list of the 100 greatest films of all time. And Kill of Sheep just debuted on the list at number 44, kind of exciting, this list was not out when I shuffled last week, to be clear. So this is just kind of a fun little coincidence. So now I can see I’ve seen 49 out of the 100 films on the list. So I still have quite a bit of work to go, but almost halfway there. So this film, I actually put on the watchlist because it was in James Gray’s Four Faves on his episode, that was one of his faves, made me added to the watchlist. I’m so glad I did. So this one came out in 1977, which I believe to be the best year for cinema. And this one further proves it. So I thought it was going to be like a slaughterhouse movie going in because it’s called Killer of Sheep and it has slaughterhouse in the description. So I was ready for a lot of violence. And there is there is some but not as much. It’s more, it’s very like Italian neorealist slash French New Wave-y. And you know, it’s like kind of unfair to compare this film to these very white sub genres, because it should just stand on its own without comparison. But you know what, we are building a new canon. Okay, thank you to the to the S and S poll. I mean, I’m just gonna come out and say I loved the S and S poll results. If I’m allowed to say...
SLIM The discourse has moved to this podcast, it’s left Twitter now we are running the discourse on this Sight and Sound. To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what the Sight and Sound poll was before people were like showing the voting results. And I was like, what the hell is this?
MIA That’s because there are two Americas, there’s Violent Night and The Eternal Daughter.
SLIM The *Journal article where we discussed about how like the watchlist additions, what were they up by? Like 3500% after the poll came out, so we’ll have a link to the list, the full list. It’s a great list. I mean, the goal, one of the many goals of Letterboxd is to just have people watch more movies and this list pushes that, so we’ll have a link in the episode notes to add these movies to your watchlist, discover something new, like I did with Jeanne Dielman. It’s like six hours long—it’s not six hours long, it’s like three hours.
MIA I also have to say another thing about Killer of Sheep. So when the credits rolled, someone in the cast was named Slim. Just Slim. No last name.
SLIM I was a key grip on that set maybe. I was getting people coffee on that set.
MIA Yeah, but my jaw dropped. I was like just Slim? No last name?
SLIM It’s a sign. We have the Sight and Sound poll that you pick the movie from without even being out and now this. It’s a sign. But our community is also shuffling their watchlist as well. Robert left a review for Roma, which blew my mind when I saw last year. “The world is burning, men ain't shit, and I've completely emptied my tear ducts.”
MIA Oh my god, I cried so much in the theater for Becky reviewed Mad God, which was one of the best of the year. “You know that feeling when you watch your FIRST David Lynch movie but your brain hasn’t fully formed yet and you’re just like “WHAT?!” …that’s me watching this film. I don’t know what happened, I know it meant something, it made me uncomfortable, and I really enjoyed it. Need a rewatch for sure.” Yep.
SLIM Yeah, it’s an effed-up movie. Jessica left a review for The Game, Michael Douglas, my sweet prince. “Sean Penn could've just had three ghosts visit Michael Douglas on Christmas Eve but instead went with this expensive, elaborate, incredibly fucked up, and very entertaining ploy.” I love The Game. I gave it five stars when I just watched it again, a couple weeks ago. Loved it.
MIA I listened to that episode. You do love The Game.
SLIM I mean, anything with Michael Douglas from that era just tickles me for some reason. It’s such a strange era in filmmaking where you get this like rich, snotty, horny, Michael Douglas and people were eating it up in that timeframe, it was crazy.
MIA And you know, Catherine Zeta Jones is still eating it up, or vice versa. Oh my god. I can’t say that on air.
SLIM That’s staying in, that is staying in. The Mia puns must be left in and protected at all costs.
MIA Thank you! Someone is saying it. Oh my god, do we have to shuffle our own? Is it time?
SLIM We have to shuffle our own. We have to. We have to go back.
MIA Okay, let’s do it. Let’s see what’s going on in here.
SLIM I’m going on my watchlist, I’m going to filter by stream only, make it easy for me, you can filter by whatever you want. And I’m going to sort by shuffle, the first movie on my list I have to watch—oh hell yeah. Hell yeah. Christopher Lambert, streaming on Tubi and Crackle, Fortress, 1992 directed by Stuart Gordon. “Welcome to the future where punishment is the ultimate crime.” So this is actually the same director from your Re-Animator that you shuffled and got so now we can have a better idea of what I’m getting into. I’m excited, the average is 2.9 on Letterboxd, but, you know, that’s right up my alley.
MIA Yeah. That’s gonna be yucky. Re-Animator was—and that’s a good thing. That’s not, oh my god. Yucky is a compliment. I love yucky. Man. Reanimator was yucky. Not derogatory.
SLIM What about you? What did you what did you shuffle and get? [shuffle sound plays]
MIA The sound I just made. You guys are gonna think I’m lying when I say what this is. This is another film from 1977, the best year for cinema.
SLIM Are the only movies on your watchlist 1977 movies? They have to be.
MIA That’s the only year where movies came out it seems. This is Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas.
SLIM What?
MIA Have you heard of this? I had not heard of this. Somebody, multiple people have begged me to watch this movie about otters at Christmas. It’s made by Jim Henson. It’s a Muppet Movie, but it’s Emmett Otter and he has a band.
SLIM These guys are adorable.
MIA They’re so cute. And I had never heard of them.
SLIM “A poor otter family risks everything for the chance to win a cash prize of a talent contest for Christmas.” I’m adding this to my watchlist. It’s on Prime and Peacock right now, these adorable little otters.
MIA So cute. Only 53 minutes? Oh my god. This is going to be the easiest ever.
SLIM What a win! A double win for you.
MIA Wow, wow, they’re so cute! I’m gonna have so much to say. You better slot out like twenty minutes for Emmet Otter talk next week.
[theme music ramps up, plays alone, fades out]
SLIM Thanks so much for listening to Weekend Watchlist, brought to you by The Letterboxd Show. You can follow Mia, slim—that’s me—and our HQ page on Letterboxd using the links in our episode notes and if you have the time, consider rating the podcasts on Spotify or leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It does help spread the word about the show.
MIA Thanks to our crew and thanks to Letterboxd member tTent Walton for the theme music, Izon, thanks to Jack for the facts and Sophie Shin for the episode transcript and to you for listening. Weekend Watchlist is a Tapedeck production.
[Tapedeck bumper plays] This is a Tapedeck podcast.