Speaker 1: We're Tomy Lorenzo and this is the Pop Style Opinion
Fest Elegans. Welcome back to another edition of the Pso
I am the Tea and you're til Tom Fitzgerald and
I'm here with the Low and your Telo Lorenzo.
Speaker 2: We are back from Palin. No I'm missing.
Speaker 1: No, we're three days back from Paris and still dealing
with the jet lag. I gotta say, god, yeah, it
hit us hard.
Speaker 2: It was a short trip.
Speaker 1: It was a short trip. It was a five day
trip to Paris. We wanted it that short. Our last
few trips to Europe had been in the two week range,
and we felt like that was just too much.
Speaker 2: Because we have cats and we missed him, and then
we have to find someone to take care of them,
and then we missed him again. It's not just that
we have to work. We have to work to work.
So it's two.
Speaker 1: Weeks of working at a hotel rooms and that's that
tends to be not fun. So we settled on that.
We said, let's try this. Let's try a five day
vacation and see if we can do that. That's enough time.
And it did work. But the kind of vacationing we
do I think we've talked about this before. We'll you
were being city and then the entire time we're there,
we get up at seven am every single day, hit
the hotel breakfast, and then we work. We usually work
for two to three hours in our.
Speaker 2: Hotel room tick advantage to time.
Speaker 1: Difference, and then around ten am we're out, and we're
out until at least eight pm. It's NonStop, never stop.
Speaker 2: How we do it. It's how we do it. Like it.
Speaker 1: It's not how everyone likes to do it, but it's
how we like to do it because we feel like
we're packing in as many experiences as we can into
this into the and now this time, because it was
a short trip and because it was Paris, I put
my foot down and said, we're going to limit the
amount of destinations we have because I really just want
to sit and have wine or or espresso or whatever
at various cafes and just watch Paris go by. And
I think that was the right call, right and the reason.
Speaker 2: And you, you know, you can say, well, I still
saw a bunch of places, you know, historical places on
your Instagram account. It's because we happened to best buy them. Anyway, Yeah,
I'm a lot of them. Ye. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Our plan trips were a Notre Dame because we wanted
to see the inside of it since it's been refurbished,
and top of the Eiffel Tower because we'd been to
Paris before but we had never been to the Eiffel Tower.
I wanted to go to the Muse Torsa because again,
again we had been there before, and.
Speaker 2: It's just a lovely, lovely.
Speaker 1: Believe you can do the muc and you see a
in in an afternoon, in a long afternoon, but you
can do it, and it's.
Speaker 2: A lot more pleasant than than the Louver booked. That was,
and we talked about it because of the Sergeant exhibit.
Uh it was.
Speaker 1: There was a John Singer sergeant exhibit that we didn't
even know about, but our best new friend in Paris
told us all about Nicholas. On our first or second
night in Paris, we were having dinner at a at
a cafe. We were sitting outside and this lovely young
frenchman walked by, very cute and said, excuse me, are
you Tom and Lorenzo, and we just erupted until after
the thing is, I don't know what people think about us,
but we we don't actually live the life of famous people.
It's not there's nothing about our life. We never get
stopped on the street. It is not a thing that
happens to us.
Speaker 2: It's a coming is of two things. I think, to
be honest, we're very happy. We're very humble. Number one,
we're not famous. We're not famous, and we take everything.
We never take anything for granted. We really appreciate, we
have always appreciate the support reading our site, listening to
our podcast, buying your book. I mean, we really thank
you for this. Yeah, so when we meet you guys
in person, I mean, we're happy.
Speaker 1: But he's truly bizarre to us because that's not what
our day to day life is like. Strangely, I just said,
we never get stopped. No one ever stops us on
the street. And ass are you Tom and Lorenzo. I mean,
when the blogging craze was big and everything, there was
a lot. I mean, there were a lot of profiles
of us in newspapers back then, and so it happened
a little bit more, maybe ten or fifteen years ago,
but it hasn't happened with any frequency except in Europe.
I have to stop for a second, in Lisbon, in
Central Portugal, in Amsterdam, and in Dublin right and now Paris.
We were we were recognized and stopped in all of
those places. Now, the guy in Paris, Nicholas, he's actually
the first European that stopped us. Everybody else was Americans
who were also vacationing. But it's so strange to me
that this keeps happening. I think part of it is
that we announced where we're going on vacation, and then
people who are well Nicholas told us that he said.
Speaker 2: You were in town. Yeah, he listened to.
Speaker 1: The podcast and he knew that we were coming in town.
And so I don't think he was wandering the streets
looking for us, but he just happened to stumble across us.
Speaker 2: He is so charming, so nice, so intelligent, so culture.
We love him. We needed told him to sit down,
let's talk, let's chat.
Speaker 1: He sat with us for a little bit and it
was just lovely. It was just nice to meet someone.
Speaker 2: It was nice.
Speaker 1: And believe me, I don't mean it was nice to
meet someone who like fawned all over us, because that's
not what he did. He was just a lovely person
who asked us who told us things about Paris.
Speaker 2: He gave suggestion to us. Yeah, and it was nice
to talk to a local person about Nowtu Dam and
also what happened at the Louver at the Louver, So
it was nice to talk to someone local and how
people reacted and how he felt and all that. So
it was lovely, lovely. I wish we had had more time,
but we were about to leave, and.
Speaker 1: But we exchanged emails and I did tell him, I said,
you know, if we I wish we could stop and
have a drink with you sometime, but we're just very busy. However,
Nicholas were, this will not be your last time, and
if you.
Speaker 2: Ever come to Philadelphia, New York, please yes. So that
it was just a lovely interlude. Yeah. I think that
was our first night.
Speaker 1: No second, maybe, but it was just remember it kicked
off our trip and it was just it was like
it was very nice.
Speaker 2: Nicholas. Thank you.
Speaker 1: We we followed your advice and we saw the Sergeant
exhibit and we went to the.
Speaker 2: Uh the restaurant. Yeah, we'll talk about you. Let's just
get the Sergeant exhibit out of the way. Uh. I'm
a huge fan. I love his work. H was not
expecting at all to see so many paintings. It's comprehensive.
I didn't.
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure Madame Max is going to be there,
or that that that painting of that doctor who I
can't remember the name of in the red Verse. It's
more famous stuff. But it was all there back they
had studies of Madame x and original versions of it,
and it was it was comprehensive.
Speaker 2: And it's there until I got knows when next year
something was Yeah, it was, it was packed. It was
you know, any you just have to be patient and
wait until his return to stare at something. But it's
it's a beautiful if you never been to the say,
it's a gorgeous, very.
Speaker 1: Welcoming nineteenth century train station that was turned into a
museum in Yeah, and.
Speaker 2: The exhibit is perfection, just gorgeous. I posted a bunch
of pictures on Instagram, Uh, some of the paintings if
you want to take a look at it. But yeah,
it was a surprise and I'm glad we we we went. Yeah,
it's beautiful.
Speaker 1: I going into it because I know he was he
was a portrait artist, and I thought, well, how how
interesting can an entire show about port Be But it
was a lovely overview of his entire life and his
various influences and the various schools of art that he
moved through.
Speaker 2: He's traveling and his saying.
Speaker 1: A lot of it dealt with his time in Paris.
He spent an awful lot or not Paris, in France.
He spent an awful lot of time in France during
his career, studying, as almost every nineteenth century artist of
any worth ever did. But I think when you see
someone's portraiture laid out, years and years and years of it,
which I had never done. I had never seen a
comprehensive show of Sergeant's work. You see the motifs that
rise again and again. You see what he brings to
a portraiture that other people didn't bring. And I'm really,
I really, I walked out of that exhibit with a
better understanding of the way, the slightly revolutionary ways that
he portrayed body language, the way he portrayed gaze, the
way people looked at the camera, quote unquote camera and hands.
There were so much attention plan and pay attention to
anytime you encounter as a Sergeant portrait, right, look at
the hands. He he's always.
Speaker 2: He.
Speaker 1: I feel like he understood that. You know, portraiture, especially
of that era, is very presentational. It's very artificial, and
you're you're whoever this person is. They're hoping to present
the best version of themselves. And routinely he will place
all this tension in their hands, right, and it just
lets you know in every instance, this is a pose.
There's so much tension going on in the way there,
and it's I never realized until this exhibit pointed it out.
And then every single picture I immediately stopped and looked
at the hands, and.
Speaker 2: It's very unusual.
Speaker 1: You look at classic portraiture and the hands are very
graceful and they're very relaxed and everything, but these hands
are gripping things and holding onto things, and they're they're
white knuckling certain at certain points. And it was a
fascinating glimpse into that.
Speaker 2: But they did a very job. It was a great exhibit.
Painting that Tom was talking about is to doctor posey
uh painting. It's just incredible painting.
Speaker 1: I guess dandalis kind of cologists who had a lot
of lovers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had, I had seen pictures, but to see
it in person, and it's just massive and very colorful,
like this incredible red jumping out and it was just beautiful.
Speaker 1: And there's so much sensuality in his work. Uh, it's
very obvious in Madame X, but it's also extremely obvious
in the Doctor's Portrait.
Speaker 2: And Doctor Doctor and and did there were say museum,
it's it's as you said, it's one of our favorite museums.
Absolutely wonderful to just walk around, just gorgeous music.
Speaker 1: I loved returning to it. And that was the thing.
This was us returning to a lot of places we
had been to many many, many many years ago that
we have not been back to since. So there was
a certain like we went to Paris when we were
a young couple. We weren't even living together.
Speaker 2: It was our first trip trip. Yeah, so young.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was some poignancy to it because I I'm
not gonna lie. I felt my age, I felt the
passage of the years. Like looking at something that you
haven't seen for a quarter century, you feel that quarter century.
Speaker 2: But it feels very special to look for places and
look look for you know, corners here and there that
you took a picture had some sort of meaning to restaurant.
We went back to a restaurant that we loved.
Speaker 1: That we loved and it's still there. And it really
was very touching to be back on that street again.
Notre Dame. I had seen God now when Notre Dame burned,
I actually cried that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we were very I was very, very upset.
Speaker 1: And then I saw the pictures of the refurbished Notre Dame,
and I honestly I recoiled from them. I thought everything
looked gleaming, Everything looked like a Trump hotel. It all
looked so new that it just I was like, that's
not what a European cathedral is supposed to look like
on the inside. But we definitely wanted to go, and
I have to say I was wrong. I found that
deeply emotional. The work they did is unbelievably beautiful, just
beautiful on the inside, and it doesn't feel it's jarring
when you see the pictures, because, like I said, everything
is so clean and bright. But first off, I believe
most of the stained glass was saved. I mean it
was all original stained glass that I was looking at,
all original stature. It's not like the whole place crumbled.
It didn't feel new when I was, you still feel
the weight and the age of the place. And in
terms of the parts where they had to redo or repaint,
I thought they were very respectful. There are touches that
are modern but that esthetically feel correct. For yeah, it
blends in very bad.
Speaker 2: Well, and the outside looks kind of just the same.
Speaker 1: And I mean there's the idea that these are still
living churches, these are still places of worship and they're
not stuck in seventeen hundred or whatever.
Speaker 2: That's something that always shocked me because you are there
as a tourist, you walking around taking pictures, but you
look around and people are there and you see this
a lot.
Speaker 1: Especially we'll do this when we're walking around in Europe,
and we did it in Paris, where if there's some
big church and the doors open and it's okay to
go in, we'll go in and like an old church, obviously,
that's what we're looking at. And those smaller, less cathedral,
those bigleases and stuff, those are the ones where you'll
walk in and see all the touches that have been
made over the centuries that are modern. You'll see stuff
that you're like that was clearly putting there in the
nineteen forties or that's because they're living churches and they're
not museums. So I take back my original assessment of
Notre Dame. It is quite beautiful, and it was quite
emotional on the inside to see the beauty of all
that restoration, to see modern artists and their work. I
believe the frescoes on the walls were stufing in.
Speaker 2: All those little sideshcommend that now that it's finally opened
them saying it. I think you if you go to
Paris and you decide to visit, it's beautiful. I've said
this for it.
Speaker 1: Before, and I said it on this trip to Lorenzo
that I'm I'm I'm not of the faith, not really anymore.
I was raised Catholic, but I'm not a religious person.
But I find touring churches in Europe far more gratifying than,
for instance, touring we went to Versailles the last time
we were in France, and I and you know, we
went to various palaces and stuff like that. But you
go to palaces, or you go and you look at
crown jewels or whatever. This is why I was a
little flipping about the Louver robbery and all I all
I can say is a history of exploitation, a history
of of inequality, and the fact that people were living
and dying in the mud while queens were wearing these
massive gems on their heads. I don't disregard it. I
want to be exposed to that part of history. But
you know, you feel that sense of exploitation, And of
course you go into a cathedral or an old church,
and yeah, I mean the church has I'm not here
to but to the people who went to that church,
to the people in that community over hundreds and hundreds
of years, that building actually meant something. And to them
it didn't mean I'm being exploited. It meant I'm touching
the face of God. I a lonely person, am able
to sit here and look at the face of God.
And to me, those places are more beautiful, more poignant.
I tend to think of not the kings and queens,
not the cardinals and priests, but the peasants that were
allowed to sit in the back, you know, or actually
stand in the back. They weren't even allowed to sit.
So I enjoy going to old churches for that reason.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we posted a bunch of pictures and
people were asking, did you guys go inside the loop? No,
we didn't. What happened was we decided to walk along,
you know, walk and uh. That started around the Plus
de la Concord and then Ms Del and then we
end up walking through the tula He Gardens and ended
up you know, at the.
Speaker 1: Loop at the Loo and just walked around. But we
didn't walk around, but we.
Speaker 2: Didn't go in. We just took pictures outside. Yeah, it
was crazy, was busy, and and you know, like we
mentioned to our friend David, you need day to see
the Louver.
Speaker 1: And what we're planning on doing is Lorenzo's brother lives
in Harlem and it's a fairly easy train ride to
Paris from Harlem. So the next time we're at his
brothers for an extended visit, I would want to put
a side a day.
Speaker 2: Right and and then just do that, take.
Speaker 1: The train to Paris overnight and and spend a day
and a half in the Louver seeing what we want
to see.
Speaker 2: But it was nice to visit some of the places
we visit before.
Speaker 1: Like the the I believe.
Speaker 2: They were all beautiful and we were there the first
time and it was just nice to walk around relax. Uh.
We went to several restaurants and enjoyed all of them.
Just sit there and have some coffee and just walk walk.
I look for a hotel. The first time we stayed
around the Luxembourg Garden, uh, and we didn't want to
stay there again, so I was looking for a different hotel.
And I'm you know, I wasn't looking for a view
of the Eiffel Tower. I wasn't because they're usually expensive. Uh.
The hotels are very expensive. They can get like very expensive.
I was just like looking for a boutique hotel because
we tend to like small hotels. So I found this hotel.
It's called Liza they Fell, which is the gardens of
the the Eiffel. Very small hotel, not expensive at all,
and you can choose a room with a view, and
I did because we booked the hotel a long time ago,
so I did. I was not expecting to be a
fantastic view.
Speaker 1: My god, I mean the Eiffel Tower was dead center,
and I did. We did take pictures, and the pictures
don't deal with justice, no, because when you're looking at
it it's right next to you, it looks really far
away in pictures but it's so large, it's like having
the Statue of Liberty right outside your hotel window.
Speaker 2: So it was like you would get up and the
tower was right there. In the morning, it.
Speaker 1: Was not wrinkling all night on the hour.
Speaker 2: It was an incredible experience. I highly recommend not an
expensive hotel. People were very friendly, The staff was wonderful.
They helped us a lot.
Speaker 1: Take Lorenzo speaks French. But I have to say, as
opposed to when we went there a long time ago,
it's not that hard to get by you. There are
a lot of shopkeepers and hotel people who will speak
English to you.
Speaker 2: I noticed that if you I know, first thing I
noticed is that a lot more people are speaking English
or are willing to speak English to you. I guess
if you were tourists, they you know, even when you
started in French, they switch to English, which is fine
by me. Germans do the same. And although I speak
German really well, but you start with German and they
switch to English. French people do the same, which is
fine by me. But they were very friendly, very nice.
And you know, I follow someone on TikTok and people
tend to say, you know, French people are rude. Maybe
they were more rude than now. I don't know. I'm
talking about my experience, but also in my experience, I
never had someone to be very very rude. I think
because I follow someone on TikTok, I forget her name.
I'm so sorry I forget her name. She's very funny.
She's American from Brooklyn. She lives in France, and she
has a TikTok account, and she talked about Paris and
she says that, you know, you have to do the
French sandwich. You start with bon jous and you end
with Mercy. You can insert the English in the in between,
that's exactly, but you have to start with with you know,
bonjous and then ends with Missy. And even if you
can of wha, because they say what to you. So
if you do that, I think, you know, things go
a lot more easier. I think, uh, And that's what happened.
Most of the time I feel about the language and
about meaning French people in person.
Speaker 1: But it was a lovely time fall We picked up
great week.
Speaker 2: Yeah beautiful. Really hit Paris.
Speaker 1: Hard the week we were there, and all the leaves
were falling all over us, and it was very colorful
and just lovely, just so we once in a while
we'd stop and say, what about this place, sit and
have an espresso, or just order a glass of wine
whatever its parents.
Speaker 2: Of course you're gonna do that. It depends on what
you're looking for. First time we went in July August,
I can't remember, and it was very sunny and bright
and hot. I was looking at the old pictures and
and the soccer care for example, looks very very bright
and sunny. Now the pictures now they look, you know,
gloomy and full, which is fine because we like that too.
But it was a wonderful trip, really really, I mean,
you know, it's funny. I forgot how much I love Paris.
It's it's, you know, say what you want. It's such
a cliche to say this. It's such a pretty city
that it just is. There's so much history, there's there's
so much you feel so much. There's such a great
vibe I feel. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We saw the tomb of Napoleon again under the Domets unbelieved,
which it's not my culture, but it's really grow to
I mean, I'm glad I went. But the whole building
is grotesque on the inside, but you know, it's also beautiful,
but it is. Yeah, and also at the concierge, Arie
like there's a gift there where they're selling little Marie
Antoinette Christmas ornaments and they're really cute, and Lorenzo held
one up and I was like, okay, this is where
they beheadedor you know, like this is really what you
want from here. But they have, like, pardon me, her
whole cell where she was kept, and it's it's essentially
a chapel in her honor. At this point, it is
again not my culture, not my history, but it's very
weird to be in there where this okay, well she
was tortured and her life was horrible and then she
was marched out of this cell and they cut her
head off, but you turned it into this very very
pretty room and tribute to her.
Speaker 2: But of course, and it's not just her, all the
women at the time revolutionary, you know, and that ended.
Speaker 1: So you get it's so boring to visit there because
it actually is pretty the building itself, that little courtyard
where all the female prisoners were kept.
Speaker 2: It's pretty talked about this.
Speaker 1: You know, we also went to kill Maine and jail
in Dublin, which also has a long and brutal history
to it. And I don't think they prettified kill Maine in.
Speaker 2: But it is.
Speaker 1: It is spotlessly clean and well painted, and let's face it,
that's not what it was like for the prisoner's back, right,
So so you know, yeah, prettified prisons.
Speaker 2: Now, we wanted to do a nice restaurant and uh,
and I thought about something that we have posted on
on the on our site as a lounge. So I
thought about the The Blue Train, which is a fantastic,
gorgeous museum restaurant looks like a museum. Uh. And I
thought about it, but it's a little too touristy, uh
and too much sometimes I feel like when I look
at the picture. But that was option number one. Number
two was the which is a very traditional Parisian like
kind of like a brasserie slash Broth place, and I
post I have posted the pictures of the twice on
the site because I loved the place so much. And
then the last time I posted was a Monday, the
day we we flew to Parrots, and Nicholas commented and
he said, oh, you guys should go there at least
just to see it even if you don't eat there.
So we decided to go. My god, let me tell
you guys, Oh my god, what a place. Yeah. It's beautiful, stunny,
stundying side, absolutely gorgeous. This beautiful, uh decor inside just incredible, incredible. Uh.
I posted pictures on Instagram. I mean it's just insane.
Is that the tan sah and ma. Uh, it's like
this area. You can tell that the rest's been there
for a long time because it's not I wouldn't say
it's not a nice area, but it's more like a
commercial area but beautiful inside. The food was incredible and uh,
I am shocked. It was not expensive at all. But
apparently the restn has this policy of like, you know,
good food and cheap food, you know, inexpensive food, and
it was. It was not expensive at all. Uh, and
just the most amazing restaurning experience. I highly highly recommend it.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I believe that's it.
Speaker 2: For reasons I can't. I can't. I can't wait to
go back. Really, I mean, I I think, yeah, it's
funny because sometimes I was like, oh, Perrys, you know
everybody talks about Perry's. But yeah, that's the reason why
everybody talked about parent It is a fantastic place.
Speaker 1: It is really Tela recommended. All right, we'll be right
back and we're going to launch into We have much
to discuss this week. We are back. Oh my goodness,
we have so much. Well, first off, we're back forty
minutes later because as soon as we went on a break,
I know, the very hot men with jackhammers outside of
our window started using their jackhammer.
Speaker 2: But they're done.
Speaker 1: And now that we've bored you with our vacation snaps,
we have a lot to cover this week, which is
good because we feel like we've let you down. We
have not been putting out weekly podcasts over the last month,
so it's a heavy one this month.
Speaker 2: So strap yourselves in.
Speaker 1: You might want to take breaks, and you might be
listening to this over more than one session. But we
want to talk about several television shows. All's Fair with
Kim Kardashian, but trust we will not be too much
about that Death by Lightning ploribus on Apple TV. And
we're also going to talk about Gierma del Toros Frankenstein,
which debuted on Netflix this week. Uh, when it comes
to this, I don't know Ploribus. Yes, there will be
spoilers in that. Death by Lightning is a historical drama,
so Andrew James Garfield dies at the end. It's it's
about the assassination of a president. So I mean, sure
there will be spoilers, but it's not the kind of
series where you should have to worry about spoilers. Same
with Frankenstein. We're just going to dive into that movie.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: What are the spoilers in terms of who dies in
the movie. Maybe I'll leave that part out. You have
to assume some people are dying. Uh, But I'm just
giving you warning that we're going to do deep dives
into these. There's probably not going to be much of
a spoiler warning on anything except for Ploribus, because I
do think that one if you and we're gonna wait until.
Speaker 2: The Yeah, I mean it hinges in one thing.
Speaker 1: But I am going to do it, and I'll give
people warning. Pluribus on Apple TV. We're going to debate this.
I don't think Lorenzo likes it.
Speaker 2: I loved it.
Speaker 1: We'll get into why the critics love it. So you're
absolutely wrong.
Speaker 2: Oh no, they're wrong. I'm always right.
Speaker 1: Now, but it is it does hinge on a major twist.
Having said that, the twist is revealed in the first episode,
So if you don't want to know, I'll give you
warning and you can skip past ploribus. However, before we
get into any of that, I did want to give
kittens who care about what's going on in Telow's life
a little update about something we've been working on from
quite some time.
Speaker 2: We're having a baby.
Speaker 1: We're not having a baby, although it feels like it.
But if you've wondered, for instance, why we haven't talked
about writing any more books after the success of Legendary Children, understand.
Speaker 2: To write non.
Speaker 1: Fiction culture based books in twenty twenty five requires quite
the hook, quite the pitch, and quite a lot of
work to get it done. We have been for the
past several years, I mean since twenty twenty two. Yeah,
the past several years we've spent you know, Legendary Children
came out and our agent, Monica asked us not long
after that came out, did we have any ideas for
other books? And we did, but because of COVID and
all that, we really felt we weren't going to push
for the next book. Because we really felt that we
needed to do everything we could to promote legendary children
because our book tour had been cut short and so on.
So we spent two years completely focused on legendary children.
And then since twenty twenty two we have been working
back and forth on two different proposals, both of which
I feel have tremendous potential. But when it comes to
these proposals, they have got to be molded in such
a way that an editor will look at them and say, yes,
there's an audience for this book. So that's where we are,
that's where we have been. And at the same time,
the publishing industry is rapidly changing. It's getting more and
more difficult to get things like nonfiction pop culture books sold.
There's a huge contracting in the publishing world right now,
where they're just not handing out a lot of money,
not handing out a lot of contracts. There's a reason
I'm telling all this just to satisfy any curiosity. One
of the book proposals, I don't mind telling you all this.
One of the book proposals centers around an examination of
movie costumes that we have been working on for quite
some time. And if you're a teloap fan. That probably
excites you a lot, and that's going to happen. That's
going to happen, But it's very much about pitching it,
finding the right hook. And we have been caressing this
proposal for many, many years, and we'll see where that goes.
The other one that we are very very excited about
is that we and this will be a huge if
we can pull this off, it'll be an enormous career.
Coup I think for the two of us is that
we are working on a biography. Actually, if you have
been listening to this podcast for any length of time,
you may remember that a couple of years back, we
did a podcast. We devoted part of a podcast to
a legendary drag queen trans woman named Harlow who had
a very interesting career here in Philadelphia. She was introduced
to the world in the seminal nineteen sixty eight documentary
The Queen. We mentioned her in a book or mentioned
in our book in The Queen. She is the blonde
beauty queen who Crystal of Beijia tears into for winning
the pageant.
Speaker 2: That's Harlow.
Speaker 1: Harlow went on and we devoted the podcast over several
years back without knowing her. Harlowe was kind of living
in seclusion, but she was living a private life. No
one knew where she was. And we did a podcast
several years back talking about our our understanding of her,
how much we admired her, how much we were fascinated
by her story. Real short after, I mean spoiler, we're
working on Harlow's biography. We finally tracked her down. We
finally tracked Rachel Harlowe down, and for the last two
years we have conducted about sixty hours worth of interviews
with this woman. And she has a fascinating, fascinating life.
She was a South Philly teenager who got snatched up
into the drag world. She was assigned Mail at birth.
She had a male name, and she was winsomely beautiful.
She was very, very feminine, very beautiful in the mode
of the late nineteen sixties, blonde, blue eyed, thin. She
actually resembled Twiggy and Sharon Tate. There was sort of
a blending there, and she got snatched up. She went
to New York. She won the pageant in the Queen,
and the producers of The Queen were so taken by
her that they sent her to promote the film at
the Can Film Festival when it was entered into consideration
at the Can Film Festival, because she won well, because
she won it, because because she was, by the standards
of the day, the most feminine, the one who most
could quote unquote pass and so she made a great,
you know, image for the producers to promote. And I mean,
let's face it, it's nineteen sixty eight. They probably weren't
going to book Crystal Lebajor or any of the black
queens on the posters. They were going to put the blonde,
blue eyed, pretty queen. Although Crystal was gorgeous, so they
sent Rachel. They sent Harlowe to cann to the Can
Film Festival, where she dined with True mcapode and Orson
Wells and True mccapody later wrote about her and his
book Answered Prayers, naming her one of the twentieth most beauty,
one of the most beautiful women of the twentieth century.
He was enraptured by her. Andy Warhol wasn't raptured by her.
David Bowie named her in an Interview Magazine interview as
one of the inspirations for his androgeny period. After Can,
she danced with Sharon Tate at the can Film Festival.
She became friends with Sharon. After that, they she traveled
to London and then she went to Hollywood. She lived
in Hollywood for a year auditioning. Now again she's still
perceived as Mail. Through all of this, she is passing
as a woman, but she had not transitioned yet, and
she was still going by a male name. But even so,
Hollywood was so fascinated by her that she was being
given auditions, she was meeting with people. She eventually did
do a film called A Safe Place in nineteen seventy
one with starring Jack Nicholson and Orson Wells and Tuesday World,
and she actually shared pictures of us back stage at
the world premiere. It's her and Jack Nicholson canoodling on
a couch together. And again she was going by at
this time, even though she pas this FEMA. Sharon Tay
got murdered and Harlowe had been at her house at
a party only like a week before, and she found
that so jarring and so upsetting that she immediately skipped down.
She left Hollywood, immediately, left all of those of those
opportunities behind her. I'm giving you the very briefest version
of her life in Philadelphia, she opened a discotheque at
the first one in Philadelphia in nineteen seventy two, Harlowe's.
She became a queen of nightlife. People from all over
the country. Celebrities would come, Mick Jagger came, Trim Capodi Halston.
They used to come to her nightclub. And then she
became famous a second time because she entered into a
very public relationship with Jack Kelly, who was Grace Kelly,
Princess Grace's brother, and a local city councilman, and it
made all the papers, and she met Grace Kelly. I mean,
there's a lot. I'm leaving so much out of this
story because you know, we're trying to write a book,
but it's difficult to convince New York editors, for instance,
that a story about this legendary trans woman from Philadelphia
is worth a book. And that is where we are
at the moment, is where we're trying to craft this
book in the correct way so that we can get
the correct offer for it. To that end, we were
approached by an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer over the
summer who had known that we had some interest in Harlow,
but didn't know that we were actually working with her
at this time. And this editor who we had briefly
worked with before, had said, listen, I know you were
interested in doing something about Harlow. Are you interested in
coming back to that? And like I said, we're at
a moment where we're trying to convince people that this
is a story we're telling. And part of the problem
with Rachel Harlowe's story is that it all occurred in
the seventies and eighties, and then, for reasons that will
be clearer in the book, around nineteen ninety she walked
away from public life completely and she entered a life
of and nobody knew where she was. And because of
the timing there, I mean, when in her heyday in
the seventies and eighties, there were hundreds and hundreds of
articles written about Harlow. They were and not just in
local newspapers. She was in the New York Times, in
Rolling Stone, in Allure magazine, in Interview magazine. But most
of that stuff did not make it to the internet.
Articles that old are not easily searched on the internet.
So if you were to do a Rachel Harlow Google search,
you find almost nothing like our podcast about her is
I think still on the first page of search results.
There's just not a lot. She's this elusive legendary figure.
Drag queens know all about her. That people know about Harlow,
she's legendary. Trans women, especially trans women of a certain age,
have always talked about her as an inspiration because she
was a very very public trans woman in the nineteen seventies,
and at.
Speaker 2: Some point Harlow Rachel Hollow helped a lot of women,
helped them through their own transition. There's a lot. There's
a lot there.
Speaker 1: She had a very painful childhood that we're not getting
into here. So anyway, long story short, We've been working
since July with The Inquirer on this feature article, which
has exploded. It's gotten much bigger than we originally than
the editor originally.
Speaker 2: Planned for it. But I.
Speaker 1: Was very excited when this opportunity came because I said,
you know, we're going to be able to put Rachel
back on the internet, and if we do it right,
it'll be comprehensive. So I really pitched to the inquire
two things I pitched to them. One is that the
Inquirer covered her extensively, nearly on a weekly basis. Through
the seventies. She was constantly being covered. And I had
all of those references. I had gone into archives, I
had paid to go into archives to find all of
these stories. And I said to the editor, we should
we should use those clips because first off, it really
illustrates how she was written about at the time, and
that she was written about period and that and yes,
and it also makes the inquir kind of look good
because most of the covers back and was not problematic,
not even by modern standards. She really was elevated as
a leading light of the city. Her gender confirmation surgery
was covered in the papers. This was in like nineteen
seventy two. So the Inquirer agreed they and they loved
the idea. And then they asked for photos because I
had all of these pictures that of her that had
appeared in the Inquiry. So I gave them all these references.
And it looks like they're running a whole package. It
should run around November twenty second. That's the last I
heard from the editor. We have meetings ahead of us,
and I know Lorenzo, and I said to the Inquirer
that we would be available to do like social media
videos to promote this. Our goal is to get Rachel's
story told and out there so that when we are
shopping around this proposal, we can point to this.
Speaker 2: Here. Here she is in a nutshell. It's a great
way to get started. It's out there. It's going to
be available for everybody. Yeah, and you can read the
article and then you know, read the book later cited
about it. We're very excited.
Speaker 1: This has consumed us for over two years now. It's
there's our site and then there's this. And there are
times when this has overwhelmed even the site or the podcast.
And I've said it before to Lorenzo, there are times
when I She's the first person I think of when
I wake up in the morning, and she's the last
person I think of when I go to bed. Rachel
and I and us we talk on the phone almost
every week. It has been an honor to meet her.
She's seventy eight years old now. She's as filly as
a tasty cake, but she's classy. She has so many
stories to tell, Like she'd just be talking and then
she'll talk about the time she ran into Andy Warhol
at Maxis Kansas City, you know, stuff like that.
Speaker 2: And this is a very person an interesting experience because
you know, there's the whole story about you when you
were a kid that you.
Speaker 1: Yes, i've told this story before. I think I might
have told it, which is a lovely story. But my
first exposure to Harlowe was I saw her. I was
a kid, I couldn't have been more than ten years old,
and I saw a picture of her in the local
paper and I stopped and looked at it because she
was so beautiful and so glamorous. So I was like, oh,
is that beautiful, glamorous woman. I was a little baby, gay,
of course, And then I read whatever description of her
was that, and I was shocked to find out that
a she lived in Philly, because I should assume she
was some Hollywood star or some New York star, which
to me was like, why why is she in Philly?
And then the second thing that obviously this is what's
stuck in my head, is that she was described in
the manner of the day as a boy in address,
and that rocked my world. At ten, I just couldn't
even comprehend that that was boy. She wasn't at that point.
She was you know, and she was never a boy
in address, obviously by modern understanding. But I couldn't process
what that meant. I couldn't articulate what that meant. But
as I told Rachel years later, when I finally met her,
I said, that was the moment that I realized there
was some other kind of life out there, right other
than and you know, if you're a gay, if you're
a queer kid, period, trans, gay, whatever, non binary, you're
you long before you understand what you are, you understand
that there's something quote unquote wrong with you. Right, we
all get that is the one commonality that all queer
people have is that there is that moment in their
childhood where they're like, what's wrong with me? Why am
I not like my peers? And so I didn't know
what I was at that point, and I didn't know
what I was after reading that, but I did know
that whatever she represented, I think that was. I understood
that as that that's the direction I'm supposed to go in.
And it wasn't confusing to me. It wasn't like, oh,
I'm supposed to start wear wearing dresses or anything like that.
That's not what it was. It was simply whatever you
think you know about the world, there is there's a
lot more out there. There is a whole lot more out
there with people like that exists.
Speaker 2: And that's why representation means so much, because when you
see yourself out there, then you understand that it's it's
okay to beat you right, right, and it's not going
to be easy, but it's okay. You know, it's not
an om, you know, and something normal to the point
that you know you shouldn't exist. I should. I'm sorry,
go ahead, No, that's it. I mean, that's why it's important.
Speaker 1: I should also mention that Rachel's story has been picked
up an option for a movie. Right, we have nothing
to do with this movie, but there's a script, there
is a director, and there is a producer. The producer
is Christine Baschan, who is you know, an OSCAR nominated
producer who I can't even begin to list. She did
Boys Don't Cry, and on and on and on.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot. There's a lot about Rachel going
on right now, about to explode, and then we're part
of it. We're part of it.
Speaker 1: Yes, the movie is going to be about her relationship
with Jack Kelly, which was tumultuous and her. But the
book that we've been working on is a more holistic take.
We're looking at her childhood, We're looking at her parentage,
We're looking at her the various love affairs other than
Jack Kelly in her life. Anyway, that's what's going on
with us. That will be coming out before the end
of November. We will be extensively from voting it both
on our site and on our socials. I've already asked
Rachel if she would do a short podcast with us,
and she said she would, And I told her, I
was like, let's just do light style. We'll talk about
you and talk about the celebrities. You know, Warren Batty
and Jack Nichole. She knew all these people back in
the sixties in Hollywood. Anyway, that's where we are. It's
kind of nice to just get this off my chest
because we have been working on this so much. I
don't people next question when we to say this is
when's the book coming out?
Speaker 2: There is no book.
Speaker 1: We still are in proposal stage. That's why these things
take so long, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, there is a book, but there's not a
date that well, there's no publisher. Yeah, I mean there's
the publishing world is so yeah.
Speaker 1: If you're an editor or publisher and you listen to us,
and I know some of you, goddamn, do contact us
because we've got killer proposal for you. Anyway, The article's
coming out soon and I can't wait to share it
with you all. Now moving on, we let's move into
pop culture and television with Kim Kardashian. And it doesn't
really matter who else is in it. Kim Kardashian, but yes,
Naomi watch Rotten Center, Glen Claus. She is front and
center and the entire show, from what I can tell,
is structured around her. I didn't want to do anything
with this show, but Lorenzo was like, why don't we
watch it and maybe we can make fun of it
or something, and I was like, fine, okay, because.
Speaker 2: Everyone is talking about it. It's always it has.
Speaker 1: A zero Rotten Tomatoes rating. It is the worst rated shit.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter. It's millions of people watching it, and
we'll get to that.
Speaker 1: I think they're over selling how many people are watching it.
It broke a scripted record for Hulu, but Hulu doesn't
have that many scripted originals anyway, so big deal. So
we sat down last night and we were like, fine,
we'll watch it and we didn't even make it fifteen minutes.
I don't think it is really really bad. It's so
awful that it's shockingly bad.
Speaker 2: And the thing is that I went online because I
always go to you know, I always tried to find
out what people were saying. And a lot of people,
because they're fans, they're fans, fans the fans, they will say,
oh my god, it's funny. You know, it's not funny.
It's entertainment. We need entertainment right now, and you know
it's just fun.
Speaker 1: There is no lack of entertainment out there. No, there's
no lack. We're not entertainment.
Speaker 2: What does that mean?
Speaker 1: Are you working in the mindshul day up?
Speaker 2: That is so true. Anyway, it's absolutely awful. And you
can't even call it camp because if you do, O
be offended. It's not camp.
Speaker 1: Everyone is smirking as if they're creating camp. They think
that's what they're doing. And this gets to the you know,
that's not how camp works. Camp is an inadvertent thing.
Camp is the people in Bob don't realize they're making camp.
Speaker 2: And it's always clever, it's always witty, and this is
none of that.
Speaker 1: I'll just say this to no one's surprise, Kim Kardashian
can't act her way out of the paperback. She can't
even make it through more than three or four words
at a time. Subsequently, the entire show is structured around that.
If you notice, nobody gives a long speech. There are
no like long periods of dialogue between each other. It's
very common in the fifteen minutes that I saw for
three characters to complete a sentence. One will say one phrase,
one will say the next phrase, and one will because
the Kardashian cannot complete a sentence. So every other actress
is just giving little quips surrounding her.
Speaker 2: And I'm sorry, I'll still red hot.
Speaker 1: I went into this thinking, oh my god, that's I
feel so bad for those actresses.
Speaker 2: I do not. They all know what they're doing.
Speaker 1: They all know that they are bringing their own talent
down to her level, which means they're all giving these
bizarrely juvenile line readings.
Speaker 2: The thing is that, first of all, it's so absurd.
The whole thing is that these women are lawyers and
they're fed up with the men and the male lawyers
treating them like shit, and they decided to help women
girl power, and then we're going to open an hour.
They open a new office. In one sentis Yeah, it's
a five minute scene. They made the decision to move
to another office. And then two minutes later it's ten
years later and they have their millionaires, private jets, successful,
very successful, and even the black person in it, it's
supposed to be the assistant whatever, but she's working. She's
trying to be a lawyer too, and we're going to
give you the opportunity of Yet it's so horrible, and
they're all of course, Kim Kardish, she's married to a
is it a football player or something like that, with
a lot of money, so her house is insane. They
fly private jets, clothes are insane, jewelry everything, it's so olden.
Speaker 1: There's a way to do that where it's fun. Yeah,
And there's nothing fun. There's no joy in this show.
It's cynical. And I you know, we've gone upon this
for a long time about Ryan Murphy, but part of
the reason I get so annoyed with him is because
we are roughly contemporaries, and you, I understand your obsessions
because I'm of the same generation as you. But if
all you can you're all obsessed with, like you know,
bitchy women and designer clothes and private jets, that's it.
Speaker 2: You shallow.
Speaker 1: That's so shallow, anything funny to say, anything interesting that
you just want to show that stuff on screen and
you think that's I don't.
Speaker 2: Know, entertaining. I don't know. I guess for some.
Speaker 1: People it is, but it is my numbingly stupid.
Speaker 2: Listen, that's a gay man. I'm going to speak as
a gay man only I watched. I love old movies.
I love glammer women and old icons and clothes and
jewelry and all that. I think, you know, it's part
of me as a gay man. But I expect more
than that of a show. You know. It's just way too.
Speaker 1: Shallows, bitches and tight dresses. That's the entire show.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely horrible, and it's sad to see all these women.
I'm not sad they picked, but you can see that
they're they're very, very patient throughout the whole thing because
they can't complain. I mean, they gotta. They said yes
to the job, and they're they're just it's it's absolutely horrible.
And it's funny because I was when we did the
Red Carpet. I was wondering, why is christ Janna on
the red cover all the time. Now I know she's
exactly a Producderr. That's why her daughter is there probably,
and that's why she was on the red cover. So
it's gross. It's a Kardashian you know, again, one more
thing that these women have to touch and they have
to be part of. And it's really I mean, one
of the first scenes, her husband, uh forgets their anniversary
or whatever, and then gives her jewelry and of course
it's an Elizabeth Taylor a piece of jewelry, of course,
because it's Kim Kardashian. It's not a character, it's Kim Kardashian.
It's just gross. The whole thing is gross. And I
go online, that's.
Speaker 1: The diamond to Elizabeth Taylor, like that's our line reading.
It's I think about no, I think we'd last at
another minute after that, it's don't I don't like telling
people don't watch the shut don't watch this shit.
Speaker 2: It's absolutely grotesque, it's offensive. I find it horrible and
I don't understand. And you can say yeah, go ahead
and say it's entertainment. You know, it's fun, it's light.
We need this right now. Well, there are other things
out there you can watch and still be light. And
you know it's just bad, bad, bad, It's Yeah. It
makes me so annoyed because it's again this family touching
everything and I don't understand what is behind supporting this.
I mean, come on, but at some point you have
to wake up and realize that these people have zero talent.
Speaker 1: And on that note, let's take a break and we'll
be back. I don't think we have more to say that. No,
it was horrible, and we try, and we'll be back
in a minute to talk about Death by Lightning. We're
back and we're done ranting about Kim Kardashian and now
we're gonna praise Death by Lightning, the limited series that
dropped on Netflix last week, surrounding and with dealing with
the election and then eventual assassination of President James Garfield
in I think eighteen eighty.
Speaker 2: I have to say I didn't know much about it.
I knew some about it, but I didn't know.
Speaker 1: Well, the Garfield is nobody knows anything about him. He
was a forgotten He's one of those forgotten presidents, you know,
post Lincoln, pre Theodore Roosevelt presidents. There's a whole stretch
of them there, and I think the series starts from
that assumption that you don't know who he is and
you don't know who is his story, that he was
a forgotten member, you know, forgotten president.
Speaker 2: Incredible Cass, I mean, stacked.
Speaker 1: Cass, Matthew McFadden, Michael Shannon, Betty Gilpin, Shay Wigham, Bradley Whitberd,
Nick Offerman.
Speaker 2: It's just everybody doing their best.
Speaker 1: It's an excellent, excellent series.
Speaker 2: I have a couple of critique, but the opening scene
it's insanely gorgeous, the cinematography and everything where he goes
and he gets pretty much elected, you know, nominated at
the convention. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, it's a beautiful you know, it's set in the
eighteen eighties. It's it's it's beautifully costumed. The production values
are very very high, and there are you know, scenes
where they would have had to use digital effects to
create you know, a New York City street in eighteen
eighty or whatever, and most of it is most of
that stuff is pretty well done. The scene and the
Republican National Convention. It's insane that would have had to
have been There's no way that was an actual location.
And it was well done. It was actually really really
well done.
Speaker 2: But to think that that what they had at the time,
it's just incredible. Yeah, absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 1: I all, I can I mean, I can say more,
but my main thing here is it's just recommended. It's
everybody doing very very good work. One of the things
that is appealing about it is that it's only four episodes.
It's four hours long total, which is it's like an
old school mini series from like the nineteen eighties. And
that's fine, that's uh, that's great because you know, there's
so much Netflix bloat out there. There's so much stuff
that gets shoved into these shows to expand them, and
it was nice to see someone something short, someone take
a more restrained approach. Having said that, I feel like
it glosses over a lot of things because of its
short time, and I had I did, and I'm not
going to get into it, but I did go and
look James Garfield up because I honestly wasn't clear on
certain things and I was like, what's this part about?
What's this part about so.
Speaker 2: Played by Michael Shannon. You know, I went and.
Speaker 1: Looked up his history, which is great. I mean, that's
a point in the show's favor that it inspired me
to go look up more about him. About Roscoe Conkling,
Who'shay Wigham played. But the more you read, You're like, Okay, well,
why wasn't that in the movie? In the in the piece,
why wasn't that You know, there were certain aspects of it,
like Shay Wiggham's you know, Roscoe Conkling is having an
affair with this the governor's wife, right, and it is
a plot point. But I couldn't understand why we kept
focusing on this and why we kept focusing on her.
Speaker 2: It is based on a book.
Speaker 1: Middleton plays the care and I'm like, why would you
cast Tuppence Middleton, who was you know, in the Dalton
Appy movies.
Speaker 2: It is based on a book. I don't know if
they were getting just sticking to the book, you know.
Speaker 1: Well, no, they were pulling things out. I think my
point is with that, in that instance, there were long
standing rumors that President Garfield had an affair with the
same woman. And if you know that, all of those
scenes actually make more sense. There's a scene where that
where his wife meets her at the inauguration, and it's
very weird and oh yeah, right. He does say at
one point to his wife when she says he's such
an you know, he's a good man, and he says
something like, you of all people know, I'm not a
perfect man. So's they implied that they had had some
marriage problems in the past. But this that was a
weird thing to keep out. I'm not gonna harp on that.
I'm just saying the story is very, very rich, but
I think they did. I think they might have. I
think it would have been a good idea to have
another hour to it, to just give a little bit
more explanation. It's all wheeling, dealing. It's all eighteen eighties
machine politics, which is fascinating to watch because it's it
illustrates both how different that world is from today, but
also at the same time, so little has changed in
American politics. Michael Shannon is a great actor. He is
very well cast as Garfield. I have to say he
looks fantastic. He should wear a full beard more often
because it really frames his face well. But I did
feel that that character was a cipher. He was just
this nearly perfect man who was who just sort of
stumbled into the presidency. And that's the other thing that's
overstated because, like in his writings later it found it,
he gave that speech knowing full well that he was
gonna wind up getting nominated.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: He was ambitious, and the show presents him as this
sort of like unambitious person who got shoved into the presidency. Anyway,
these are not criticisms. It is highly entertaining. It is
surprisingly very very funny.
Speaker 2: It's t witty.
Speaker 1: It's I mean Nick Offerman, who honestly, oh, I wanted
to get to this point. Michael Shannon is basically the
lead character, but honestly, it's like Shay Wigham and Nick
Offferman's show from beginning to end. They are the ones.
And Nick Offerman, I really think deserves an Emmy nomination
for this. He plays Chester Arthur, who was Garfield's vice
president and then succeeded him as president. And I mean,
the Kiston could not be more perfect. He looks just like.
Speaker 2: Him, and he's hysterical.
Speaker 1: He's really funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The other one that absolutely deserves Awards consideration is Matthew
McFadden who plays Charles Gattow, who is the man who
assassinates him, And you know, I don't know that. Excuse me,
I don't know that. I've seen an assassination story that
weights the assassin's tale as much as the victim's tale. So,
in other words, it's as much Charles Gato's story as
it is James Barfield.
Speaker 2: And I agree, and I think he does a fantastic
job going through everything that goes in his head at
the time and why he got to that point. There's
a lot there. It's sad, it's very sad, and it's.
Speaker 1: Maybe it is dark of me to say, because Charles
Gattow was severely mentally unstable. He had a lot of
mental health issues. But there are parts of that performance
that are actually funny. And I don't feel that he's
like making fun of the mentally ill so much as
the absurdity of that man's life, the constant running from
the law, the constant lying and everything. There are times
Matthew McFadden is really good at playing these desperate losers. Yes,
which is funny because he looks like such a leading
man to me. But the just the sadness in that
portrayal that the desperation of that man to mean something
and his inability to mean anything because of his illness.
Speaker 2: I think that the most interesting thing about the show
is that, you know, it's that you go through life
and in one split of a second, you know everything
changes for you, for your family, for everyone around you,
for the expectations around you, everything right, and then all
of a sudden, bullying's done. Nobody thinks about it anymore,
or nobody even talked about it more or remembers right.
And there's a I'm not going to give anything away,
but there's a scene with Betty Gildman Guilpi, the wife
and childs when she confounded to him and and and
it's just amazing scene. It's a very good dialogue.
Speaker 1: And again Betty Gelpin is one of those people where
you're like, why would she be kissed in this because
she had almost nothing to do. She was good, but
she had almost nothing to do. And then there's that scene.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's why you cass, Wow, that's why you're here now, Yeah, that's.
Speaker 1: Why you can Yeah.
Speaker 2: Uh it's touching. I was I said, I thought it
was incredible but also very very depressing in a way.
Speaker 1: Because the man's life was cut shortened because of the
circumstances of his assassination were so stupid.
Speaker 2: It was just everybody.
Speaker 1: Involved was so dumb and the whole thing was so avoidable.
And that's what's frustrating to watch it tries to spin
a a story of meaning out of his presidency, and
sometimes I think it's a little thin, Like he quote
unquote broke the New York machine politics. That's that's basically
what they're saying he did to sum up because it
was only president for like three months.
Speaker 2: But it's thin. Uh.
Speaker 1: My only other criticism is and it's a minor one,
it's a nitpicky one. But I do pay attention to
costume design. And again I went because I didn't know
a lot of these people. I went and wound up
looking them up afterwards, reading their stories and everything.
Speaker 2: And I got a little.
Speaker 1: Annoyed because Shaye Wagam's character, for instance, is Roscoe Conkling,
this senator, he's this machine politician. He's apparently very corrupt.
His costumes are beautiful, absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 2: Looking for him.
Speaker 1: Pictures of him, of Roscoe Conkling. Rosco Concoring was a
very good looking man. He was known to be good looking.
He was a bodybuilder, which was strange for the time.
But if you look at the clothes he was wearing
in all those pictures, that's I mean. You'll see this
sometimes on the guilded Age as well, and maybe to
a certain extent on Doubt Navy. But no, I actually
wouldn't say that's true on Dealt Navvy because everybody on
those shows had valets and ladies maids that actually dressed them,
and their entire job was to make sure their clothes
were impeccable. Someone like Roscoe Conkling, maybe he had a
la I don't know. My point is Shaye Wigem's he
was wearing like these unbelievably fitted jekrd waistcoats and these
old metallic ascot ties with a with like a gem
pin in this, I mean just dandyism upon dandyism. Everything
is exquisite, everything is fitted perfectly, everything of the highest quality.
And then you go look up up Roscoe Conkling pictures
of him, and he's very presentable clothing, but nothing as
flashy as that, because honestly, a senator would not have
dressed that way back then, respectable men did not dress
in flashy clothes and he was.
Speaker 2: Corrupt as he was.
Speaker 1: And I do think sometimes, like on the guilded Age,
they take it too far.
Speaker 2: At the end of the.
Speaker 1: Day, those people were rich, but they still had to
put their clothes on like. They were not dressed by
a costume designer. They were not stitched into these outfits
the way costume design tends to do well.
Speaker 2: They did get the beer and the hair right, and
it does.
Speaker 1: Conkling, Yeah, he had that weird haircut.
Speaker 2: I had to look it up. I was like, why
is his hair so weird?
Speaker 1: But Conckling had hair like that. Anyway, it's I loved it.
Speaker 2: It's four hours.
Speaker 1: It can be very sad, yes, but there are times
when you'll laugh. Actually it's it's actually not that dark.
It's about machine politics. Bradley Whitford is in it as
a senator and he's he's right in the middle of
his you know, his sweet spot of acting where he's
just walking around wheeling and dealing and doing politics and
that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: I thought it was extremely interesting.
Speaker 1: I think it's going to get any consideration. I think
across the board. I mean, I probably costume design and
direction and you know, most of the I can't imagine
Offerman isn't going to get nominated. I can't imagine McFadden isn't.
I maybe Shannon, oh I shay wig him because that
guy deserves it. I mean, he puts in the work.
That guy is all over everything, and he has never
ever been anything but completely charismatic and watchable.
Speaker 2: I just thought it was classy, elegant, just a beautiful show.
Speaker 1: Just a nice old school period drama that taught you
a little bit of history. And it looked great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the graphics opening, everything's just beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. And
it's a period something about our history that I didn't
know much about that I win a lie and check
and you know, it helps, it helps.
Speaker 1: Should we take a break or should we launch right in?
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's up to you. Let's go on, Yeah,
let's go on.
Speaker 1: I feel like we're but we're going to talk about
Florabus now. Plorabis is on Apple TV Plus. It is
the creation of Vince Gilligan. The show run, a creator
of Breaking Bed and Better Call Saul, who also cut
his teeth on The Classic X Files as a producer
writer on that show. So the man has the bona fides.
He knows how to create a television show, and he
knows how to do an interesting spin on science fiction,
and he takes all of that to bear here in
the creation of this show. The press was very, very
cagey about talking about the show. There was an awful
lot of secrecy surrounding what it was about. I don't
feel that that's necessary. I don't feel you need to
be shielded from what the show is absolutely is about.
Speaker 2: But didn't want to tell me when I wanted.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see what your reaction would be to
not knowing. I didn't know when I want. I mean,
I had a sense there were some.
Speaker 2: There we was.
Speaker 1: There was some indication in the first off in the
trailer that the whole world is in a very happy state,
and the lead character is the one person who was
not so Obviously, something happens to make everybody that way.
If you don't want to know, then I would, I
will say right now. Lorenzo says he doesn't he didn't
like it, and I don't know what his criticisms are yet,
but I like it. I feel that it is intelligent,
and I feel that Gilligan is someone who I can
put faith in he is going to take this somewhere.
He's going to create a story that is going to
be complex and thought provoking and full of very colorful characters.
So I don't think it's there yet, but okay. So
it stars Rayes Seahorn, who was feature was a featured
player in Better Call Saul for many years, and he
Gilligan said, he created the show entirely around her, and
you can feel that, you can feel that she is
very much the center of the story. In fact, there
is nobody else in the story about her. In a
certain sense, there is nobody else in the story but her.
It's a science fiction story, but it's really, you know,
like the best science fiction stories. What Happens is a mcguffin,
because it's really just a way of unpacking larger things
about community, about about you know, misanthropy, about people who
go through a world cynical and not liking other human beings,
which the lead character is very much of that. So
what Happens is and this is all outlined in the beginning.
It's one of the things that I really really love
about the show is you think it's a mystery box
show like Lost or something like that, and right from
the jump he's like, no, I'm going to show you everything.
I'm going to answer every question you have as you
have it. So the you know, the inciting incident is
that a bunch of astronomers find a signal coming from
space and eventually they figure out that it is a
formula and a RNA formula, and they synthesize it and
through a series of mishaps, they're doing experiments with it
and a human gets infected by it, and instantaneously she
starts infecting other humans because what it does when they
become infected it links all people up to They're all
linked up to one hive mind and eventually, in the
first half hour or so of the first episode, the
entire world gets converted in this miss event well entirely
against their will. And it's fascinating the way that is
played out. You've seen so many apocalyptic things, You've seen
so many contagion stories and zombie stories and how did
this break containment kind of thing, and this one actually
has fresh original takes on how all of that would
play out. It's entertaining to watch. It's also a little
disturbing to watch, but it's clever as hell. I'm going
to stop and let you talk about some of your
objections before I go further into the plot and what
I liked about it. Why don't you tell me what
you didn't like about it?
Speaker 2: I didn't like anything about it. Honestly, I thought it
was not believable. Number one, I don't believe it at all.
I thought it looked cheap for some reason. I don't know.
I guess because there's not a lot of sound going on.
But I felt like everything felt like stagy to me.
I don't know. I didn't like it, didn't find it believable,
don't believe the fact that only one person right now
is the one going on with everything. Can we keep
some of them? Can we talk about something?
Speaker 1: Let me unpack a few things. So, the main character
is Carol. She's played by ray Seahorn. She is a
romanticy author in the sort of outlanders mode kind of thing,
and we meet her on a book tour with her partner.
She's a lesbian and her partner travels with her and
they're like partners in crime. This is the part that
I'm like, Actually, I'm a little surprised you didn't respond
well to this because I responded so much to those
opening scenes because it was a.
Speaker 2: Gay couple on a book tour.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, and it was all like, you know, they
got in the limo and the guy was like, so
have I ever heard of anything you read? Like that
sort of stuff is exactly what it's like. Yeah, And
I liked that. And you know, I can't say I
identify with Carol because she is way more of a
misanthrope than I am. She she really doesn't like the world.
But I did identify with those scenes, and I did,
like we've said this before, like when it came to
that episode of The Last of Us with Nick Offerman
and Murray Bartlett, that you know, it's interesting when someone
takes on the Apocalypse and puts us a gay character
at the center of it, and thinks about what that
might mean to have a gay character at the center
of it. And you know, here's where I'm going to
get into a spoiler. Although again, it happens half hour
into the first episode. So there's a mass event where
people get converted, and what happens is they go into
a catatonic state and then they have convulsions and when
they wake up, they're all high minds linked and happy
because of it, pleasant happy people who are all reading
each other's minds. But because this happens against their will,
some people die during the conversion. Their planes crash, cars crashed,
that sort of thing. And Carol's partner wife dies in
the first night. She never wakes up from her well,
she does briefly.
Speaker 2: And then she dies.
Speaker 1: It's not made clear what she died from, but a
could have been anything my heart attack to a head injury.
Because she needed to die based on how the story worked, well,
she wasn't one of the only ones. I mean, I
won't get into what's revealed later, but the number of
people who died during the transition, it's bad. It's shockingly bad.
So uh, Carol, uh, for whatever reason, is immune to
this conversion, and everybody knows it because everybody has a
shared mind immediately afterwards, and they.
Speaker 2: Know who's not shared.
Speaker 1: There's no aggression towards her, there's nothing, because everyone's empathetic
and pleasant and they can't harm other people. It's just
incredibly creepy, and she's very much alone in the world.
Later in the one of the things I did really
really like, as I said, is that he Gilligan just
he knows what questions you're going to ask, and he
has the characters ask them. So when she finds out
what happens, because everyone tells her, there's you know, everyone's
friendly and they know her name being they tell her
what's happened, and she asks if there were any other
people like her who were immune to it, which is, yeah,
that's what I would ask.
Speaker 2: Am the only one?
Speaker 1: Or is there anyone else? And it turns out there's
twelve other people, but they're spread out all over the
world and only five of them speak English. She asks
for a meeting with five of them, because again, you're
the only person in the world who has this issue,
and everybody in the world has a linked mind. They
give her anything she wants, like anything she wants, you know,
any airplane, any helicopter, whatever. They're all there to make
Carol's life more pleasant. So she goes to this meeting
in bill bel Spain. And that's the other thing I
want to address. I don't think this thing looked cheap
at all. Apple TV spends money on their stuff and
there are a scene there was a scene set in
I don't know what country it was, in it was
some country in the Middle East, and then there was
another scene set in Bill Bel's Spain, and they shot
them both on location. I don't think it looks cheap
at all. And that's again, you know, you see these
apocalyptic stories, these whatever, zombie, contagion, whatever, and they tend
to be small. There, tend to be within one community
and the people in it don't know what's happening. But
she gets answers to anything almost immediately. So by the
second episode, and only two episodes have dropped, it'll be
weekly after that, she gets the lay of the land
for the entire world. She gets to hear what happened
to the rest of the world, how the rest of
the world is dealing with it, and she gets to
meet other people who were not infected. And that scene
in particular, that was when I was like, Okay, now
I get why we have a gay character at the
center of this, because she needs to be completely alone.
And that doesn't mean that gay people are alone. But
she's at this luncheon with these other survivors who all
brought their family members with hot spouses, children, sisters, and aunts,
and she's there alone and they don't understand why she's
so intent on fixing this or correcting this because they're like, well,
my family members are right here, but they're not really there.
And it all comes down to the only person who
can see what's wrong here is the the misanthropic gay
woman who doesn't have anyone in her life.
Speaker 2: That's when I actually love that. See, that's when they
really lost me because I was not loving the show.
And then when they got to meet the the other
five people who you know, survived the thing, they're all idiots.
And I understand you. You're you're traumatized, you're with your family,
but you I acting like idiots. So I was hoping
when she said, well, I'm going to meet four, you know,
five people, I was like, great, now we're gonna have
more people talking and and you know, discussing this. But no,
they're all idiots. They're happy with everything. So she's going
to be the one. So it's it's a little exhausting
for me as a viewer to just have her the
entire time.
Speaker 1: I'm I find the direction what what what these first
two episodes implied. I find it really tantalizing because he
has been skill again. He's going to spin out a
complex story with a lot of characters. As these things
stand right now, you can't do that because every other
person in the in the world is a pleasant, zombified
you know, you can't really have a real conversation with it,
and you can't construct an entire show just around Carol.
So what's going to happen next? And there is a
moment which I won't give away, but it is literally
the last scene in the second episode that indicates to
me that the people who have been changed are not
completely gone.
Speaker 2: They're faking or something.
Speaker 1: Now I think they're reachable, I see, And that's going
to be the story, And I mean you need to
watch it to see what I mean. But what these
people are like they are They will stand there and
tell you that they are the person that they always were.
But at the same time, every single mind on the
world is being filtered through them.
Speaker 2: So and one of the.
Speaker 1: Other things that I think is interesting to unpack is
because everyone's so pleasant and everyone's so happy, and all
bad feelings racism, sexism have all been eliminated. And is
this RNA sequence responsible for making them happy or is
the fact that their minds are all linked making them
unusually empathetic. You can't be racist if you're attached to
every black mind on the planet. You can't be sexist
if you are communicating telepathically with every woman on the plane.
I think that's what they're implying, is that these people
are not artificially happy, they are artificially empathetic.
Speaker 2: I think I'm not that I want to, but I
think I need to see more and see how it goes,
you know, a little more.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm a little more likely to look at a
science fiction setup and think, Wow, there's a lot of
implications here than you are, just because I'm more in
tune with us.
Speaker 2: Having said that, I love Anna. A character Anna, I
don't know who that is, the woman who with her
the whole time with the you mean, no Anna, her
name is Anna? Is the person they chose to be
with Carol. The entire name is Sasha, is it. Yeah?
Speaker 1: I won't get into that, because again, I think her
introduction is so freaking clever. Uh, there's they introduced this
character in a manner that it's silent, there's no words
being said. It's about a five minute sequence on the
opening of the second episode, and it's like, oh yeah,
that that is how people would act if all of
their minds were linked. That this is exactly and these
are the solutions they would come up with. Which the
reason they chose that woman to be Carol's companion is yeah, okay,
it was funny actually, but it was also sinister. I
like the actress too, and I do think she is
going to be Carol's companion going forward. And even though
she's linked to every mind on the planet. Again, there's
this indication at the end of the second second episode
that she's not entirely but there's still a person in there.
The thing is that the first two episodes set this up,
and they set up a question of is this something
she should fight or not because everyone's happy and there's
no hunger or whatever. And then you realize by the
end of the second episode that because they're so fatally empathetic,
they can't kill any animals, so the food supply is
going to get completely disrupted. At some point, they have
let all the animals free from all of the zoos,
and there have been some maulings, and they cannot choose
to hurt any of the uninfected people. So there becomes
a moment where one of the uneffected people wants to
have sex with one of these women and another one
doesn't think it's correct to do that, and the person
she says, she's like, we can't choose, we're not allowed
to choose. And I'm like, okay, well right there, they
can't give consent to sex. That's not utopia, that's really
really be so. And again, none of this is stated.
You have to sit there and unpack what people are
telling you and see where things are going. So, yes,
I understand your frustration with it. I won't make you
watch it going forward, but I have every faith in
the world that this is, this story is going to
go somewhere. It's a great performance on her part. She
can be very, very funny and she can be very
you know, hard to take, but that is the character.
I don't know if I would recommend this to just
about anybody. I think it is after years and years
and years of all of these zombie contagion stories.
Speaker 2: This is a different story. This is different.
Speaker 1: This is very, very different, and it's it's bringing up
questions of what is happiness, what is empathy, and where
does consent fall into all of that Because none of
these people consented to have this done to them, even
though they all say that it's the best thing that
ever happened to them.
Speaker 2: I agree.
Speaker 1: So Pluribus on Apple TV Plus very recommended. I don't
think it's Lorenzo's cup of tea, but check it.
Speaker 2: Check it.
Speaker 1: It's smart and interesting and it does things.
Speaker 2: Listen.
Speaker 1: I'll say this, I watched the first two episodes two
or three times, and it wasn't until the third time
I watched it how meticulously certain things are being set up.
And if you watch that scene in the parking lot
where everything goes bad, it is so meticulously set up
in the first few minutes that they're scene, the sandwich
board in the background, the guy getting into his truck,
the Keem Turrell's overhead, everything, the breathalyzer in her own car.
Everything has been meticulously set up so that scene plays
out exactly the way it should. And I'm watching it
and I'm going, damn, that is such good script writing.
That is really good television. It's subtle, it's smart, and
don't be fooled by the zombiesque implications of it, because
I think it's going somewhere completely different. Nobody's I mean,
people did die in this accident, but the world is
the world. There is no apocalypse, And I'm actually fascinated
by well what are all these people doing, because that's
the other thing she's wondering Albuquerque and it's completely empty.
Well where are they? What are these people doing? So
that to me is where is where the interest lies? Anyway,
Ploribus on Apple TV Plus highly recommended. We're going to
take a break and then we're going to come back
and tear into Frankenstein. We are back and we're going
to talk about Giama del Torros Frankenstein, which dropped on
Netflix this week and very buzz heavy movies starring Oscar
Isaac Mihagoth and Jacob Elordi as the creature.
Speaker 2: I was very curious, I have to say, because we
posted so many things on our site, you know, and
everything looks so beautiful. And I absolutely adore gillianmo der
Tour as a filmmaker. I think he's incredible. I will
never recover from Pan's Labyrinth. That is just one of
the most beautiful movies I've ever seen in my life.
Speaker 1: I think Del Toro is an extremely talented filmmaker and
an important one of his generation. I think anything he
makes is well considered and worth seeing. However, Yes, I
had similar problems with this that I have had with
several of his other movies in the past, and mostly
the Shape of Water and a little bit of Crimson Peak.
His movies are meticulously constructed. They are beautiful to look at.
Speaker 2: They are.
Speaker 1: Tragic and poetic and lyrical and just love stories to
the characters that he is creating or talking about. But
he sometimes gets a wash in his own sentimentality. He
gets a little overwhelmed by it, and his film subsequent
can get very messy. They just start that's just not
holding together as well. And I saw this in Shape
of Water. I saw this in Crimson Peak. There was
a little bit of this in Nightmare Alley, although I
do think that was a more meticulously constructed film. Yeah,
and then I saw it here in Frankenstein, where it's
beautiful but it's a little messy. Uh, And he makes
choices to the change the original story. And listen, I'm
not someone who's like, oh my god, how dare you
change the original frant whatever Frankenstein's been once they made
him Abbott and Castella movies with Frankenstein in them, Like,
I'm not really gonna defend Mary Shelley's honor. It's a
two hundred year old book. He's an iconic literary character
that has been reinterpreted in so many different ways. However,
this particular production had had a certain air of you know,
he's going back to Shelley's original, you know it's going
to be And in many ways he did, and he
is very faithful to the book in a lot of ways.
But I don't think the changes he made. I understood
why he made a lot of them, but I don't
think they were necessarily I don't think they necessarily helped
the story. The biggest one being Elizabeth Miagous's character, who
is in the book, she is Victor Frankenstein's fiance, and
that's a very straightforward role for her, but in the
movie she's William Frankenstein, her his brother's fiance. But then
she also kind of is flirting with Victor through the
whole movie, and there's there's a love affair going on there.
And then when the creature arrives, she has this very erotic,
romantic response to the creature, and the result is to
make this woman look pretty damn flighty and inconsistent and unintelligent.
It's just unintelligent. Like when she's first introduced Elizabeth, it's like, oh,
she has an interest in science, an interest in butterflies,
and she's in and me a goth is Like, I mean,
she's beautiful, but she's so unsettlingly weird on camera, and
that's her great strength as an actress. And I loved
her casting in My God, her costumes, I mean.
Speaker 2: The jury, the Tiffany ridiculous, the beetle angel dress.
Speaker 1: But I feel like she was not used well she
she hear. You have this unbelievably charismatic, weird, unsettling actress.
She's perfect for this, and you make her into this
flighty love interest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I hated the idea was to use
her characters as a woman who's unhappy with life and
trying to, you know, search for more or want more.
Speaker 1: You're layering stuff on the Frankis camp like.
Speaker 2: It felt like a lot that, you know, a little
distracting in a way.
Speaker 1: I also just didn't love the the You know, we're
getting into the movie, so if you really don't want
it's Frankenstein, what do you think happens in the story
when they her carrying her down the steps in her
wedding gown, and I'm like, this is Dracula. This is
not Frankenstein. This is Dracula like Frankenstein. I'm not saying
you cannot do an erotic Frankenstein or you Frankenstein's Monster
or a romantic Frankenstein.
Speaker 2: All the creature.
Speaker 1: I think you are confusing that monster with other more
romantic characters. And this is my problem with him as
a director, his whole persona. He loves horror. He loves monsters,
but I mean he literally loves monsters. He is in
love with his monsters. So he always makes these very empathetic,
sympathetic portrayals of his monsters. He always at the end
I find them not very interesting.
Speaker 2: I think he always wants to give more to the creature,
like a brain and a soul and a horror and
a lot.
Speaker 1: He was articulate in the book. He was able to
read and everything, So I mean he was an articulate.
Speaker 2: You can see that he wants a creature to have
a soul. You know, I'm not opposed to that. I
have a heart, and I understand all that. And I
think Jacob Elord did a fantastic job. Yeah, he really did,
he really did. You felt with this character you sympathize.
I don't know, I mean you just you know you
you were with him the entire time.
Speaker 1: Like I said, Del Toro falls in love with his monsters,
and he is only capable of giving them the most
sympathetic portrayals. And the creature in Frankenstein is you know,
he's not an ambiguous character, not really. He he is
articulate and intelligent, and he does have a soul, and
he is a tragic, tragic figure and a victim of
the you know, Baron Frankenstein's madness. At the same time,
he is violent and he he he kills people, he
murders people, and he he frames someone else for murder
in the book. Like, he's not a good character. He's
very much in that sort of Doctor Jekyl mister Hyde
nineteenth century version of a monster, which is there are
parts of him that are likable and and maybe even tragic,
but in the end, he's still a monster. And I
do think sometimes Del Toro was limited as a horror
director because at some point you need to let your
monster be monsters. And the most violent thing we saw
that creature do was kill a bunch of wolves. I
know he kills people in the movie, and I know
that the gore gets a little out of hand sometimes
in this movie, but he's so romanticized he's and del
Torro is so in love with his beautiful version of
the creature that I think sometimes it just it gets
in the way of telling a particularly clear story. That's
del Toro's that and that's a lot of the narrative stuff.
And if you can get past or or if that
stuff doesn't matter to you, it's stunning.
Speaker 2: It's gorgeous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nobody gives I mean, Mia Gotha isn't given enough
to do. But nobody gives a bad performance in this
except for maybe Christoph Waltz, who I think was just
completely on. That was a character again that was added
to the story, not in the books. Complicates the background,
and I didn't really feel there was any reason for it.
Speaker 2: Dance.
Speaker 1: I mean again, that is another edition from the books,
is that Victor Frankenstein has given this abusive father, and
all of these changes, including making Elizabeth's romantic history much
more complicated, was to basically to support the idea that
Victor Frankenstein is an asshole, a complete Asshayle, I actually
enjoyed that, and an abusive father try to enjoy his creature.
I think all of that is interesting. But you didn't
need to give Victor Frankenstein an abusive father. You didn't
need to give Elizabeth Frankenstein. That's very complicated romantic history.
You could have just made Victor an asshole. It is
a great portrayal of Victor Frankenstein. Oscar Isaac is fantastic
in it. When he first breaks out the English accent,
I'm like, is this really plain time? What I cast
Oscar Isaac as this character? And they do make some
commentary about his dark haired mother, and I think there's
some implication that there's romany in his background or whatever.
But the whole time I was watching it and I was like,
you know, I would have just made him Spanish, like
I would have just made his mother Spanish and have him,
you know, speak with that accent instead of an English accent.
If you're going to make those changes, these are little
nitpicky things. One more thing, I will.
Speaker 2: Say that.
Speaker 1: The production design is insane, but it's also insane, not
in a good way.
Speaker 2: I get it.
Speaker 1: I get that he loved and you know, Crimson Peak
was like this as well, where the house is simply
not believable as a structure.
Speaker 2: It's just not.
Speaker 1: It's the laboratory with the giant hole in the center
that makes zero, zero sense. Accept The minute they showed it,
I was like, well, someone's dying, someone's going down that hole.
That's the only reason it's there. And of course someone did.
And the big massive Medusa face on the back what No.
I was not to sound pretentious, but I'm like, I
just got back from Europe. They don't do stuff like
that on castles. That's not something. It just looked weird,
and I get it. It's the same thing with the costumes.
They are not period accurate. They're not accurate to anything.
They're completely fanciful. All those women with veils over their faces.
Speaker 2: And do a little research on the coffins because I
thought that was interesting that they have a face in
their clyssto clear? Is that real? Yes? They were beautiful
people with a lot of money. I mean it cost
a fortune. In what country? Were they in sweats? I
don't remember, but but it was way before we started
the wooden ones, so sort of and then they had money.
I don't know. All the details. But I went and
I was like, we was that real? Yes? And they
cost a fortune. I mean only people with a lot
of money could affoid them. I so that was that
was an interesting piece.
Speaker 1: Great listen, I'm not treasuring this movie. It's highly recommended.
I think a lord he probably should get a nomination. Yeah,
he's the way he uses his body, Yes, his body
language and everything and and and when he's pre verbal
as a character that it's just beautiful work.
Speaker 2: It's really beautiful, so freaking tall number one and they
play into that. Yeah. So and he's he I was
reading interviews and watching interviews with him on TikTok. First
of all, they all praise him for have so much
patience because he took like hours and hours and hours
to do all that making. He's naked when he and
the costume design, everybody makeup. People were saying that he
never complained. He was, you know, doing his best because
he really believed in the part and want to do
his best, and he did. He did a very good job.
I thought he was incredible. And he's so young and
he's having a very hot career right now, but I
thought he did a good job. It looked beautiful. Yes, uh.
And in the beginning, I have to say I have
to say that honestly, in the beginning, I was a
little confused with what's going on. Yeah, I wasn't expecting
the movie to start the way he did, but it
was an interesting way.
Speaker 1: And then I'm just going to get into the one
part that I really hated, and it's not a small part,
and I loathed it because I was like, this is
a change that fundamentally alters the entire story, and I
just don't understand why it was necessary. Frankenstein is superpowered.
Frankenstein's monster. I mean, the creature is he's as strong
as Superman. He could lift up a boat, and he's
like got a healing factor like Wolverine or Deadpool. Like
at a certain point, at one point, the creature is
holding a lit stick of dynamite, which he completely when
the smoke clears, He's just standing there and I'm like, what,
there's still physics involved that would blow a body apartart.
You made a body, it's human body, and none of
this is explained. You used human body parts and you
stitch them together and now they have superpowers.
Speaker 2: I like, I guess all the electricity. I don't know what,
it just isn't needed. Was right.
Speaker 1: The creature does not have superpowers. The creature is not
an immortal creature that can survive anything. And this was
a story point. It kept coming up that, oh, Victor
wants to kill him, but he's this unkillable monster.
Speaker 2: Okay, what I hated it.
Speaker 1: It's adding super At one point where he basically lifts
the boat out of the water, I was like, oh.
Speaker 2: No, because point when when you're that invincible, in my
mind always just like all right, nothing matters, nothing matters
what you do. Just kill Victor and go wander out
Like that's the frustration.
Speaker 1: Hero's story. It's not supposed to be a superhero story.
It's it's supposed to be the story of a monster
who was abused by a father, and you know that
sort of thing that to me was one of those
things where I'm sorry, that's not defensible. It was a
bad choice. It does not ruin the film, but it does,
like a lot of the other like the Elizabeth stuff,
it alters the story in a way that just makes
it a different story.
Speaker 2: It's a the time he spent with the old man,
he's at party in the book.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's in the book. And that's exactly how
it plays out in the book, is that he his
family members go away for the winter and he spends
it with the old man learning I read, and they
show up and all of that is directly from the book.
Speaker 2: Maybe I should read the book.
Speaker 1: It's I do want to read the book. I've never
read it, but I did look it up a lot
to get the plot Summery, because I knew certain things
weren't right, especially the Elizabeth stuff. Just doesn't You're just
turning her into like Lucy Weston Row from Dracula. She's
in a bridal gown with blood and you're carrying her
down the stairs and she's just incredibly and I'm like, no,
that's not what that guy. I just I think you're
confusing what Frankenstein is. And it's not that you cannot
layer sexual aspects onto that character, but I do think
romantic doesn't quite fly. That's not a romantic character. It's
a bunch of body parts. It's a violent bunch of
body parts, you know what I mean. At least Dracula
was a guy in a tuxedo in a cape. I
just didn't agree with it, and I this was the
problem I had with the Shape of Water because I
thought that story was fucking stupid, Like, what the hell
she's given up her life for a fish?
Speaker 2: No, that's dumb.
Speaker 1: And in that movie, every other character was such a
cliche that it was offensive to me. The sassy black
maid and the tragic, right, middle aged gay character.
Speaker 2: And I think that's when he turns every creature into
a human being kind of thing.
Speaker 1: He's too sympathetic with these creatures, like make a creature
that I'm scared of, right, because ultimately, you know, the
creature is supposed to be scary. The story of Frankenstein
is the story of science run a monk and man
playing god and something that's that's unnatural and should not happen,
whereas in del Toro's it's like, well, why can't we
leave this beautiful creature alone to live his life?
Speaker 2: And that's not the story. That's why I like the
way they depicted a victor Frankenstein because he's an asshole. Yeah,
and he clearly doesn't give a shit about.
Speaker 1: The no no, he's he regrets the fact that they
absolutely nailed that.
Speaker 2: That was good.
Speaker 1: It was good, and he gave a great performance. I
did hate that his brother said you're the monster Victor.
I was like, we really didn't need that laid out
for us. We know, thank you. You may die now,
but it's worth your time. My god, it's on Netflix.
It's cunning, and I have to admit a lot of
critics who saw it in the festival said please catch
just before in the theater before it goes to Netflix,
and I kind of wish I had because you can tell,
you can tell this must have looked amazing on a
big string.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all these scenes.
Speaker 1: YEA highly recommended, although I find his change is problematic
because I don't necessarily agree with del Toro's take on monsters.
He thinks they're all angels, and I'm like, well, that's
a very limited view of this genre.
Speaker 2: I think I agree, but I do want to watch
it again because I feel like I'm a lot of stuff.
It's beautiful, It is so beautiful to look at.
Speaker 1: The costume design is just I mean, Mia gots just insane.
Speaker 2: It is inane. When she shows up, it's just like, it's.
Speaker 1: Not astackerate, it's not accurate to any part of history
or any culture. It's it's pretty fanciful, much like the architecture.
Speaker 2: But it works.
Speaker 1: Like I said, she's so weird and unsettling that I mean,
I love when they.
Speaker 2: Thought and everything.
Speaker 1: I love her and I was so looking forward to
this role and and I don't want to give anything away.
I thought she was going to be the bride, literally
the Bride of Frankenstein, and they actually alluded to it,
but it never went in that direction.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: I will say this, strangely, I feel like he left
it open for a sequel.
Speaker 2: Could be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's not big on sequels, but I mean, you
could actually do a Bride of Frankenstein based off this movie.
Speaker 2: Oh interesting, yeah, well he asked for.
Speaker 1: Well, Victor's dead at the end of it, things away.
Speaker 2: The cruture as for a partner.
Speaker 1: He does, but and then the book Frankenstein makes one
for him, and then the stories are that's that's the
story of the Bride of Frankenstein. Anyway, I think we've yes, uh,
you know, bored you enough. I thank you for sitting through.
How long is this one? This might be the long everyone?
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, and thank you for all the
lovely comments on the Instagram when we posted all the
pictures of our trip. We had the most wonderful time.
And if you haven't seen them yet, go to our
Instagram account. Look at all of them. Tom and Lorenzo Official.
Yes that's the one, not Tomal Lorenzo anymore. Tom Lorenzo Official.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that one got hacked and now we haven't been
able to update it for months. So go to Tom
Lorenzo Official on Instagram follow us. Yes, all right, we'll
be back next week with whatever crosses our eyes or
acrosses our desks. Until then, take care of yourselves, love
you mean it.
Speaker 2: Bye bye bye.
Speaker 1: Resac Riek and Advice and cielk in ad Fanshak Creek
and the grafan hild To Satanson