Nuremberg (2025) flops with a $6M opening week, blending Hermann Göring’s trial (Russell Crowe) with psychiatrist Douglas Kelly’s (Robbie Mollick) fictionalized ambitions—ignoring real stakes like the 1941 "final solution" memo. Critics dismiss its "Gentile savior narrative," weak Holocaust context, and Rocky Balboa-style drug subplot as absurd, preferring Judgment at Nuremberg’s sharper focus on complicity. The film’s 2h28 runtime fails to justify its sprawl, leaving key figures like Speer and Hess sidelined while oversimplifying parallels to U.S. politics, which may already be repeating history’s darkest patterns. [Automatically generated summary]
So we normally kind of chat about what we're going to chat about before we start chatting about the movies.
And then it turned out we just kind of did it already.
so here's that recording um you know where's my drink Where's my drink?
There it is.
Good.
That one.
Yeah, I just got some water myself.
So you doing something harder?
Kidding.
Oh, no, no, no.
Well, I am.
I have been drinking a bit more.
I very rarely drink for the most part.
Very rarely drink alcohol these days anyway.
But for the last little while, I've really fancied the odd beer.
So I've been getting some beer in to have a to have a beer in the evening.
What have you been having?
It's nice.
Oh, just like supermarket stuff.
Oh, sure.
The stuff I'm drinking is called Peroni at the moment.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I know Peroni.
We get to here.
It's Italian.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's all right.
It's nice.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not, you know, I have no sort of palate at all when it comes to food and drink.
So.
No, no, no.
I wasn't.
I'm curious.
I'm curious just as a friend and as a, you know, as it's, it's a hobby, but, you know, it's not.
Yeah.
You know, I used to be that kind of, I don't know if I would ever would have really said beer snob, but, you know, I probably leaned into that a little bit more in my like late 20s, early 30s.
But, you know, at this point, it's like, you drink what you like, you know, it's fine.
Yeah.
I have no idea if it's good or not, but it tastes nice to me.
So Peroni is a perfectly serviceable European lager.
You know, it is, you know, it is completely, it is exactly the thing that it is.
Yeah.
I've, well, it's really been, it's been a while.
You know, I, I drink one.
I think usually you can only get it in green bottles and they, uh, you get the skunkiness from green bottles.
I don't know.
I had to look at that.
Maybe it's in brown bottles now.
Well, I've got it in green bottles.
So okay.
Yeah, there's a, you don't care.
It's fine.
There's a chemical reaction that creates comes from ultraviolet light that can break down some of the hot compounds and create that skunky smell and that skunky flavor.
So you try I try to avoid anything that comes in a green bottle.
I would drink pilster recoil more often, except unless you can get it in cans, it's universally in green bottles here.
It's in brown bottles and check ya.
It's in green bottles here because we can kind of start at the craze of, you know, European beers belong in green bottles.
Green bottles.
And, you know, that was the height of sophisticated height of class before in the, you know, in the 70s and 80s.
It's how you, you know, there's a line coming.
Yeah.
Sorry.
We don't have any sort of color coding as far as I can know anyway.
No, I mean Budweiser's in brown bottles here.
So yeah, yeah.
No, Budweiser is in brown bottles here too.
Yeah.
No, it was like it's a mark of like European imports here.
So at least it was like 40 years ago.
I mean, it's, it's less so.
You know, the world has changed, but sorry, this is my, this is my old hobby.
I don't even follow.
I don't even do this stuff anymore.
It's just, you know, it's just a thing.
It's like.
Well, this is it.
I had no idea that there was any sort of semiotics attached to the color of the bottles.
This is news to me.
So.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There was even an ad campaign in like the, yeah, like Austin Powers.
There was like a, so even in 99, you know, when Austin Powers 2 came out, there was a, there was an ad that kind of emphasized the green, like the Heineken green bottle.
It was like, it was like a big advertising gimmick, you know.
See, and, you know, I think the line was get your hands off my Heiney because it's Austin Powers and it's got to be a double entendre, you know?
Yeah.
But yeah, I know.
Sorry, I haven't thought about that in a long time.
I know.
I was just, I was just curious.
I was like, does Pironi come in?
Like, I haven't, I haven't even thought about buying a Pironi in a long time.
I again, I don't turn my nose up at it, but actually, I've been drinking Mexican lagers a little bit more.
I mean, I think it's just, you know, eating a lot of Mexican food and speaking Spanish has kind of put me in that headspace of like, you know, and uh, I was drinking some Corona as well.
I think that comes in clear bottles.
That one comes in clear bottles.
So, um, Corona is a uh and Heineken or um Prony maybe as well, but um, nowadays there's an international conglomerate called SAB Miller, South American Brewing Miller.
It's a you know, Miller Brewing, it's like Middle Light in the U.S.
And then SAB, they merged like 15, 20 years ago or something like that.
Um, and so they're one of the greatest.
It's like them and Anheuser-Bush are the two biggest, you know, beer manufacturers on the planet.
Um, SAB Miller products typically use a hot, they don't use real hops, they use hop extract, and that extract does not have that particular compound that causes the skunking qualities.
Um, and so you can get Miller products, and uh, I'm just gonna Google this shit.
I don't, I don't care, but still, I do.
It's interesting, it's a whole new world.
I could, I could show you, I could uhrony brewing rony is owned by a sahi.
So, Miller's parent used to own Pironi.
Okay, so all right, I was just curious if they would be one of those products that does not use the uh and I don't think it's universal across all Miller products, but it is that's the particular reason why Middle Light you could always buy in a clear bottle or a uh like coronal light you could buy in a uh in a clear bottle and you don't get the skunk because they're not they're they're using an extract, you know, but um yeah, I've been drinking Modelo Especial, which is actually um, it has a prominent place in one battle after another, and so I was like, it literally like the it uh it spoke to me.
Yeah, yeah, I was like, okay, I'm gonna buy one, and I'm like, hey, it's a pretty good little thing to have in the fridge, you know, that's not what I drink, I don't drink it every day, it's not my favorite beer, but it's like, oh, yeah, you know, I just want a little, you know, something small because I normally drink bigger beers, I normally drink like 7.5% alcohol, IPAs and stuff.
Um, that's kind of my go-to stuff, and um, you know, sometimes you don't want that, you want like the four and a half percent, you know, something a little more relaxing and it's cheap too.
So, you know, um, it's not cheap, cheap, but it's inexpensive and it's decent quality.
And so I'm like, yeah, no, I enjoy that.
It's fine.
Yeah.
Sorry, I did a beer reference in our last episode.
Now I'm talking about beer with you.
You get a headache if it's got too much alcohol concentration.
So yeah, the lower concentrations suit me just fine.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I like taste.
Although, as I say, I have no palate, so I'm no way of knowing.
That's good.
I mean, if I promise you, I promise you, if you wanted to, we could go on a pub crawl and I could talk you through all this stuff.
You could, you could explain it to me.
Yeah.
I could.
I mean, you know, I've done it.
I used to do it all the time.
I used to, you know, I worked at a like a high-end beer store for like five years.
I was like their beer guy, like, you know, like a sommalier of beer kind of thing.
I just, I, I, I knew, I knew them all.
I tasted them all.
I knew everything.
Um, so God, I was making like $10 an hour, you know, but you know, I got a lot of street cred around town because it was around the time when like beer started being like the boom, the micro, the boom happened, you know, so we had this, um, and uh, people start drinking a lot, but don't drink as much as they used to, yeah.
Um, yeah, and the kids, they all drink uh like hard seltzers now.
They don't drink, uh, they don't drink beer, they drink hard, you know, like uh, like, well, they used to call them alternatives, like the Max Hard Lemonade and stuff.
They're just seltzers, but they're alcoholic.
Um, I, I will never taste one of those because that just sounds horrible.
That just sounds horrible.
That sounds ghastly.
Yeah, they're like fruit-flavored and all kinds.
It's like, oh, yeah, no.
Oh, no.
That reminds me of Alco Pops.
I don't know if you had that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's the multiples.
It's kind of the similar, it's the similar concept.
Yeah.
It might even be the same term for in two different, but yeah, no.
Yeah, no, I, I, I've had a couple of those.
I mean, you know, somebody hands me one.
You know, somebody hands you one, you're going to drink it, but you know, like, yeah, no.
Yeah.
I bought a couple just to have said I like a single just to have said I tried it.
But, you know, but you know, it is, it is what it is.
It's, you know, I could, I could say, I mean, we're talking Germany today.
I mean, we could talk German beer.
I could talk about that for a while.
Anyway, we don't have to.
I like Bex.
Bex is nice.
Bex is good.
Yep.
Weinstefaner.
It's a very long German name.
Weihin Stefaner.
I could type it out for you if you want.
Pauliner and Schpaten are probably the three, you know, kind of classic brands.
Don't, yeah, not going to encounter those in the shops around here.
I wouldn't have thought.
Yeah.
They just, I, you know, don't recognize the names.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's sort of one of those.
That's a more, I mean, Bex is Bex is Germany has actual purity laws, the Reinheitsgebolt, which yours, your German is better than mine.
So, you know, the German, the purity law in 1516, I think it was.
And they decreed that only certain types of ingredients could be used in beer.
And at the time, the ingredients were water, barley, and hops.
Hops, yeah.
So you can't use adjuncts like you can't use corn.
You can't use those sorts of things.
You can't even, you know.
But then later on, I believe they admitted it to where you could use wheat.
Most German wheat beers are some of the best in the world.
And it's a mix of barley and wheat.
It's about 40% wheat, 30% wheat, depending on the brewer.
I used to homebrew as well.
So I've even made these beers for myself.
I got pretty good at it for a while.
And then the thing they didn't include in that, which is a necessary ingredient, the thing that makes beer beer is yeast because yeast had not been discovered.
The fermentation process had not been described at that point scientifically.
So nobody knew.
You just knew, oh, you stir it with this particular spoon that you always stir it with that already has the yeast infection in it.
And it brews.
But if you don't use that spoon, and nobody knew why, it was just magic until like Louis Pasteur in the 18th century.
Yeah.
No.
And then they had to get like skirts to go, oh, yeah, you can add yeast.
It's fine.
You're good.
I mean, it has been modified over the centuries, but they're very proud of it.
And so like your, you know, your Budweisers and a lot of the American lagers and like cheap Mexican lagers and stuff will often have like a corn adjunct.
So it's just corn is cheaper than barley.
And so they put a certain produce of corn in it to boost the sugars you can get to it.
So you can boost the alcohol and make it a thinner body and make it cheaper.
And so like that's that's so like the American adjunct lager and adjunct is in Germany then it's literally not allowed.
Legally, it's not allowed.
You can't sell it as beer if it has any of those other, which is why in Germany, ironically enough, you would know it as a shandy, but it's a Rodler in Germany.
And these are mixes.
It's like a lemonade beer mix or you know, and they're sold on shelves.
And I assume you can get them if you if you I mean, I don't know if they're, I don't know how widely available they are in grocery stores there, but I'm sure you know in England, they are known as shandies and it's also common in England.
And England didn't have that same kind of purity law.
Sure brewing in England is also a fascinating subject.
I man, I have long wanted to come to come to Britain and just pub crawl for a week.
I think that would be a great time.
There's a lot fewer pubs than there used to be.
Even in when I was a student going to college, I would walk from the bus station to the college and it was like a 20-minute walk and I'd walk past, God, I don't know, 10 pubs on the way.
Yeah.
It's not like that now.
They're all gone.
Not nearly all of them anyway.
Yeah.
It's all coffee shops to the to the extent that there's any businesses in any of the premises in the town center.
They're mostly coffee shops and phone stores and shit like that.
Well, here they're all dispensaries.
All the old breweries closed in their dispensaries.
I was, oh my God.
I was talking to my sister.
So, uh, weed has been legal here for a long time.
I mean, it's just openly sold.
Um, you know, um, it's federally legal, but the feds don't prosecute it.
It's like it's so it's it's fully legal.
Um, although some of the some of the uh something that was signed in the latest package, I think, is going to make certain products illegal, which is there's anti-temp laws in there, isn't there?
Yeah, there are, yeah, um, yeah, because Mitch McConnell and so on are all being trade by the Chuck Schumer, Chuck Schumer, yeah, Chuck Schumer, yeah, yeah, God, you just Chuck Schumer, they won Democrats like just completely cleaned house, and then a week later, like, no, we're turning our, look at our little bellies now, we have our bellies, look over, we just pet our bellies, and we will, oh, Jesus Christ, guys, you had it.
Yeah, I was thinking about doing a right-wing response to the Mondani Mamdani win, but uh, I think the um, other people have already done that about as well as I could, so there's no reason for us to do it now, but it was it was pretty glorious in the days after just watching like Megan Kelly lose her fucking mind implode and the show up boys being ecstatically happy because it meant Republicans were getting screwed, yeah, because they're they see the Republican Party as the is the thing standing in their way, you know.
So, the weaker the Republican Party is, the better.
The weaker MAGA is, the better it is for white nationalists, or at least for in terms of they'll be able to step in and yeah, yeah, well, you just have to destroy that thing and the fake thing that's being held up by the Jews, you have to get rid of that thing, and then something else can happen.
William Shatner's Nuremberg Role00:05:24
But until that structure is gone, as long as people have that to have faith in, uh, there is no moving forward.
A lot of the way that a lot of people, you know, leftist vanguardists think about the Democratic Party, you know, um, yeah, or here in the Labor Party, yeah, yeah, no, very much so.
Um, step one, collect underpants, step two, question mark, yeah, no, you have you have threatened to do a an episode about that one day.
We maybe we will, maybe we will, maybe we'll do that one of these days.
Yeah, that is a that is a fascinating text, that episode.
I think you and I are just avoiding discussing Nuremberg at this point.
Inflated sense of self.
Charming.
Speaks English.
What?
Oh, what?
What?
What?
The way he looked at me when I called him fat.
He understood me.
He's been playing you.
No, no, why would he pretend?
Translation gives him more time to consider his answers.
He thinks that gives him an advantage.
Wait, hold on.
You're saying I spent the last three months mumbling to myself.
Well, he understood every word.
Pretty much.
Are you going to tell him that you know?
No, no.
No, he's going to tell me when he's ready.
What's that?
When he determines I'm not a threat.
Yeah, should we start?
Should we start discussing Nuremberg?
Yeah, I guess we should.
I basically, so I watched, I re-watched a little bit of the movie.
I did a little bit of reading, but not a ton.
And I did Judgment at Nuremberg for the first time last week as well.
And so, I mean, I don't know that there's a necessary, I don't know.
So you didn't re-watch Judgment at Nerby?
No, I didn't get a chance to re-watch it.
I'll probably reference it a couple of times, but like there's no reason to do both this and Judgment at Nuremberg.
I mean, it's kind of the, I would have a lot of the same criticisms, honestly.
Although I think, obviously, Judgment and Nuremberg is the better film.
Yeah.
If only, I mean, it's got Burt Lancaster and Spencer Tracy.
And yeah.
And William Shatner.
Man, William Shattle.
William Shatner pops up.
Yeah.
That's almost the only thing I remember about it is that William Shatner pops up.
Yeah.
William Shatner's in it quite a bit.
He's in it more than I thought.
I thought he was going to, you know, like how Harrison Ford is in.
What was it?
Harrison Ford is in the conversation and Apocalypse Now.
Yeah, I was thinking about the conversation where he's in that like one scene and stuff.
If you don't know he's coming, it's like, holy shit, there's Harrison Ford.
Then he's gone because he wasn't a star at that point.
You know, um, or Arnold Schwarzenegger is uh is in uh the long goodbye, the long goodbye.
Yeah, yeah.
Um, I thought this was gonna be like that.
No, he's in he's gonna get third of the film.
I mean, he's he's a you know, you know, third see in the uh IMDb cast list.
He's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
He's eighth down the line.
Um, in terms of an IMDb is obviously not authoritative, but I'm not, I'm um, Wikipedia is not authoritative, but yeah, no, it's like, yeah, no, he's he's in the movie, like he's, you know, he's right there, pretty, pretty front and center.
That is a star.
I mean, that is just a list of stars.
You know, it's like, you know, literally everybody's in that fucking movie.
Um, anyway, everybody wanted to be in those Stanley Kramer movies because they were they were serious movies, weren't they?
Yeah, if you were in one of those, it meant you were you were doing serious work.
Yes, yes, you were in a message picture, yeah, that's it.
That's right, yeah, and I did, you know, I mean, it's parts of it have not aged well, um, but you know, I think uh overall, I thought it was, I thought it was interesting.
I thought it was, you know, I would, I would see it again.
Yeah, this one, it's it's fictionalized, isn't it?
It's not about the it's not about the actual the big trial of the big war criminals, it's kind of a fictional secondary trial, isn't it?
I think, yeah, yeah, it's it's it's one of the later because the Nuremberg trials in reality, they were a series of trials that took place over a course of three years, I think, you know, um, several years.
The big one that we know of is the first one, in which, well, it's the subject of this film, but the other ones are, you know, judgment at Nuremberg is more about like it's one of the later ones and it's fictionalized and it's about, you know, it's more about the concept of you know, the good German, et cetera.
You know, it's kind of a, it's kind of interrogating, you know, general question of complicity rather than, you know, kind of making the case for like these particular people and these particular crimes, if you know what I'm saying.
Yeah.
And boy, watching the, we're doing it before we do it, but you know, watching Judgment Nuremberg and then watching Nuremberg 2025, it's like, oh, you ripped a ton off from that movie there.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Like, you know, basically, most of what's good about Nuremberg 2025 is straight from Judgment at Nuremberg.
Well, it's a funny thing because I was watching the movie, the 2025 movie, Nuremberg, and I was thinking very, I was having very similar thoughts about it and its relationship to the 2000s mini-series with Brian Cox as Goering.
Okay.
And I have not seen it.
Well, it's much better than Nuremberg 2025.
I mean, you know, it's not difficult to be better than this.
But they, yeah, they took a lot from that.
I think somebody obviously saw that.
We'll talk about that.
And maybe, I don't know, maybe we'll come back to it.
I just, I don't want to do more Nuremberg after this.
Yeah.
Tom Wilkinson's Films00:07:40
Yeah.
At least not immediately.
Let's get all the Nuremberg done in this one.
Yeah.
And you can talk about the mini-series.
I can talk about the film if you want.
You know, we can just reference it and stuff, but no, it'll be fine.
I just kept thinking about a few good men.
It was a movie I really like, maybe because I just saw it when I was 13.
And it's just one of those movies that I loved.
It was one of the first adult, like movies made for adults that I found like as a young teenager and connected to.
And so I just have a love for that movie.
I understand just how nonsense it all is.
I just like it.
I just like it.
I like it when, and Nuremberg borrows liberally from alone.
It's like it's a few good men, which was judgment at Nuremberg mixed with, you know, like the king's speech, you know, like that kind of, you know, period.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Clearly, the whole point is Russell Crowe wants another Oscar.
So, you know, you know, hold on.
How many?
A few German.
That's oh, that's a good one.
That's a good one.
Well, let's see.
That's the, that's the response you want to a joke.
No laugh, but that's good.
Uh well, you often do that to me.
So you know, you don't even go, that's good, you just move on.
You just kind of roll your eyes and move on.
I always figure oh, that was, that was funny, that was funny, I liked that, that was good.
And uh, you know, Jack Jack, Jack Jack does not approve.
So yeah, we're good.
Cold silence from from the Uk.
End of the conversation.
Oh yeah, no.
So Russell Crowe has been nominated three times and won once for best actor.
And I, what did he win for?
I thought it was a Beautiful Mind.
But he won for Gladiator, all right, and he was nominated for the Insider.
So he hasn't been nominated in you know 20 odd years.
So what was he up against?
Who won in his picture was a Beautiful Mind?
Oh, he's up against Dinzo Washing for Training Day.
Okay, that makes sense.
Oh god, I don't get it.
I don't get the Russell Crow thing.
I mean, I I get when he was young and hot, but I don't get it.
Oh, you will.
You will never hear me not go to back for Ellie Confidential, for Russell Crowd Ellie Confidential.
That is mesmerizing for me.
Um oh, he's great in that that's.
That's the only Russell Crowe performance I like.
Yeah, let me look.
I haven't seen the Insider.
I should see the Insider sometime really that year looking at 2002.
Best actor, um, it's Dinzel watching for training day.
Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind, Sean Penn, for I Am Sam, oh my god, oh my god Will Smith and Ali and Tom Wilkinson, and in the bedroom, and of those five, like that is a very easy choice it's Tom Wilkinson, by a mile, it's always Tom.
You know, if Tom Wilkinson's in any list, it's probably him.
Yeah, he passed, didn't he?
He passed a few years ago, didn't he?
Yes, he did 2023.
Yeah, I mean, probably the best thing in Batman Begins is the best thing.
A lot of things he's in, although you know mysterious casting.
I don't know why you would cast Tom Wilkinson for that role, but he does okay with it.
No no no yeah, very strange.
Russell Crow, what else?
I mean, I just don't like Gladiator in general.
So you know why isn't Tom Wilkinson playing Alfred?
Anyway, let's not do the Batman movies again.
Yeah we uh, you know, i've been thinking about the new Robert Pattinson ones.
I've been thinking about seeing that.
I haven't seen it yet.
I've seen the first one and it is genuinely one of the worst films i've ever seen.
Okay, it is, it's.
It's one of those films that's so bad you can't even hate it.
It's just boring and it's so stupid.
The the writing is so dumb, it's beyond belief.
Man, he's just a bastard commander.
That's another.
I liked him in that.
Oh no yeah, I beg your pardon, he's good in that.
Yeah, have I seen.
I've seen the original many times.
Have I seen the remake?
I don't remember.
I don't remember him.
Sorry, i'm just looking at his list of man he did, he's just done a lot of stuff.
I mean, obviously he's in Man Of Steel.
Oh, I like him in that as well.
He's a good Jorel.
I'll give him that.
Yeah okay, all right, fair enough.
Yeah, I never did.
I never did get why people like Gladiator.
It was just such a boring film.
Well, and that's the same year as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and if you're gonna do like action film nominated for an Oscar, Crouching Tiger is like a thousand times the film that Gladiator is never seen it.
Oh, but i'll take your word for it.
It's very good.
Um, it's very.
I think maybe it would be difficult to get into now, like it, like that, like context of the time, you know, because it's like doing like the Matrix kind of waifu stuff, but it's doing it in a much more kind of authentic, you know, to Chinese cinema way.
And so it does have to have a little bit of knowledge of that, that kind of era of, you know, yeah, again, I reckon I love the movie.
I re-watch it, you know, I re-watch it every couple of years, you know, and I think of it regularly, but I don't know how well you would respond to it like now.
Like if you just sat down and started decided to watch it, I don't know how, you know, he's he's done a ton of stuff and just nothing that has ever interested me.
You know, my God.
What about his greatest role, Dr. Jekyll in the mummy with Tom Cruise?
I vaguely remember that existed.
I did not know.
I never saw it.
I never saw it.
And I never, I never planned to.
I just remember they announced like we're going to do the dark universe.
We're going to make one movie.
It crashes instantly and everybody forgets it exists.
That's the, that was the way that was that movie is inexplicably terrible.
It's like, it's one of those films where it's like somebody's doing a parody of a Hollywood film.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's clearly, I mean, it's made by, it's painted by numbers.
Like that was the thing that was obvious about it.
It's like, no, like, you know, similar to what, particularly the later Marvel movies, but the whole idea of like, we're going to, you know, kind of introduce these kind of second tier characters and then eventually get to the larger characters and, you know, really give directors like a chance to breathe with the material.
That first, you know, that first couple of waves of Marvel movies are like, I mean, I still go to bat for a lot of those movies.
I think there's a lot of great stuff there.
There are some stinkers, but there's some really interesting stuff.
And they built it like authentically.
They built it organically.
And then DC goes in and it's like, no, we have Superman.
We just got to make, we're going to build a whole thing around Superman.
And that failed utterly.
They made five movies, but it failed utterly.
And then like Tom Cruise, and they're going to do, we're doing the dark universe.
We're going to do the new universal monster movies, but we're going to give them $200 million budgets.
And it's like, this is not going to happen, guys.
No.
I mean, it could have worked.
It could have worked.
You know, they're well-known.
I get the logic.
They're well-known characters.
They're properties that you own because you're universal.
They can be made to exist in the same universe.
And in fact, there's a precedent for that.
Abbott and Costello meet the Wolfman and Dracula and all that.
Yeah, I get it.
It's just badly done.
It's just really badly like the Marvel movies, they are what they are, but they're competently made.
Well, at least the first, you know, 10 of them or so are very well made.
Yeah.
Eventually they turn into slot.
And, you know, as it becomes more corporatized, as it becomes, you know, you're, you're putting, you're turning it into baby food, essentially, you know.
But they don't, you know, I mean, they do, but they don't annoy you as they're going on.
The mummy just, it was like being, it was like sitting there being flicked on the nose, which is what it felt like.
Should we do, should we do the mummy there, Jack?
Is this something that you're, you're, uh, you're leaning into?
Like, God.
Well, I mean, if you want to talk about one of the worst films ever made, I mean, sure.
Oh, well, you know, we try, we try to, you know, I really thought this might be an interesting like nerve.
Oh, let's do it.
Let's do a movie that's actually in theaters right now.
It'll be, and it's like totally consistent with what we're already doing, et cetera.
And then, like, man, like, again, not to, I was just bored by this.
Why We Paid Money00:15:16
It was just, I, I wasn't even defending.
I was just like, yeah, this, I was checking my watch.
I was literally like, how long is this movie?
I got, okay.
Yeah, no, it was, and I actually saw it.
I actually paid money.
I saw it theatrically.
Um, because I've been trying to do that more.
Even just going to see a movie alone, I think it's, it's worthwhile.
Oh, I saw the running man, and boy, that is a mess.
The new running man.
Yeah.
Oh, that's a shame.
I mean, the story's by Edgar Wright and a lot of the Edgar Wrightness of it.
Well, it's just not there.
I mean, the trailer, like I re-watched the trailer, the trailer sells it as like, this is going to be a thrill ride.
This is going to be Edgar Wright, like, directing the shit out of like this classic Stephen King property.
It's going to be more authentic to the novel, et cetera, et cetera.
And then it's like, and where that stuff exists, it's great, but it's very few and far between.
It's very clear that like which sections of this movie that like Edgar Wright really likes directing and which parts he did not.
And it's like, I mean, it's obviously it's meant to be this dystopic future, et cetera, but it's also like, it's a really depressing, like it's not like you can do the depressing like slice of life, you know, the little girl needs her flu medicine and stuff, or you can do the over-the-top zany antics of, you know, crazy guy going out there and trying to win this competition or win this, you know, get to survive the 30 days, but you kind of can't do both at the same time.
And, you know, it's, yeah, no, it's, it's kind of a, you know, I was really looking forward to it.
I'm like Edgar Wright doing the running man.
I'm opening day.
I was literally there opening day.
Well, I was, I was there opening weekend.
But yeah, no, it, it did not work for me at all.
It was, it's just, I mean, again, parts of it did.
I mean, honestly, parts of Nuremberg, I mean, we'll talk about this.
I think I, I might like parts of Nuremberg more than you did.
Um, but I think there are parts I'm going to dislike even more than you did.
So, you know, um, well, shall we, shall we, shall we transition into it, yeah?
You know more about them than anybody on earth.
Yeah, that's right.
I do.
I spent thousands of hours with him.
I run hundreds of tests.
You know what sets him apart from us?
Nothing.
I know.
You know.
Because I'm one of them.
What are you talking about?
I'm German.
Doc.
I grew up in Munich.
You grew up in Detroit.
You said your mom spoke German.
She did.
So did my father.
Because I was raised here.
You're an American soldier.
Why'd you leave?
Why do you think?
But yeah, Nuremberg.
A few Nazi men, a few German, as I call it.
Yes.
It made me think loads of guys, loads of white guys, very right-wing sat there wearing sunglasses and headphones.
I thought that's a bunch of podcasters.
But no, actually, Nazi war criminals on trial in the movie Nuremberg in theaters as we speak.
Yeah, well, for now, it is not doing well.
I think it made about $6 million in its opening week, and it's up in two weeks or something like that.
So yeah, not it has basically already left theaters where I live.
Oh, okay.
Well, not in theaters as we speak.
Yeah, because it's not very good.
Spoilers, everybody.
In fact, I hated it.
I hated this movie.
That's just terrible.
Yeah.
Daniel, your thoughts about Nuremberg 2025.
Okay.
Let's.
I suffer from the fact that I had four.
This is going to be a loose one, I think.
It's going to be a loose one.
Yeah.
I think I like it better than Jack does.
But I was.
You like everything more than I do.
Actually, when you really like something, you like it a lot more than I do.
Do not do not.
You like Copenhagen better than I do.
So I tend to like new things better than you do, but I think that's because you hate all new things.
So, you know, I hate everything new.
Yeah.
In the last 10 years, is Jack Jet just turns his nose up at it.
I've seen this better in 1973.
No, it's fine.
I get it.
I'm with you.
I'm with you.
90% of the time I'm with you.
I get to be the old man in so many conversations lately.
Anyway, all right, Nuremberg.
This is a story of Herman Goring, who surrenders himself to the Allies in the final days of World War II and is imprisoned and put on trial.
And he gets to have its sending conversations in the film, at least, with his psychiatrist by the last name of Kelly.
What's the first name?
Douglas.
Douglas Kelly.
Okay.
Real guy.
This is at least loosely based on a real story.
I did a little bit of looking into that.
It is, you know, parts of this movie are very accurate, parts of it are not.
I think we'll get into that a little bit.
And it's the story of trying to convict Herman Goring during the first Nuremberg trial.
I think Robbie Mollick plays plays Kelly.
I thought, I'll say this, like, there's kind of multiple movies happening at once here.
And that's part of the problem.
I feel like there was like, this was based on a book.
I might be interested in reading the book and seeing what captivated people to want to do this.
I mean, I think, you know, obviously a lot of Lily, the reason a lot of these movies happen is because the lead actor wants to win another Oscar.
And that's probably what happened here.
People are kind of talking about Russell Crowe as possibly being an Oscar contender for this.
Personally, if there's any justice, he is shit out of luck.
Well, I happen to, I happen to have certain feelings about a certain other movie that's going to just demolish all its competition this year.
So I don't think we have a lot to worry about there.
But, you know, given that Leonardo DiCaprio is probably going to win that, deservedly or not.
I think Leonardo DiCaprio is probably going to crush that.
But yeah, it's got it's, it's got, it borrows heavily.
So I did re-watch or I did watch for the first time Judgment in Nuremberg.
I'd seen bits of it in the past, but I did watch it.
Great classic old Hollywood movie, Hollywood Message Picture from the early 60s.
I think we decided to do this one, or I kind of mentioned it because while I was looking at movies relating to, because after we did Mother Night as the bonus, I started looking at other, you know, this just kind of came up in my like Wikipedia searches.
And I was like, oh, there's a brand new movie about Nuremberg.
We should do it.
We should do something current in theaters and put it out to people.
Maybe it'll be good.
Readers, it was not good.
But I was saying to you then, you know, like Nick Nulty, I mean, clearly this was kind of Nick Nulty wanted an Oscar.
And this was a couple of years before.
And this is how you get an Oscar is you play a bad guy.
You know, you play an evil fucker in a movie about World War II.
And suddenly, you know, people just spew Oscars at you.
And I can't imagine that's not part of what's happening in this movie.
So whether Crowe kind of like was the initiator of this or whether he kind of, you know, that's how they pitched to him.
I think that's what that's what Russell Crowe wants out of this.
He wants he wants a second Oscar.
Jack and I were talking about this before we started recording.
And he hasn't even been nominated in over 20 years.
So, you know, then again, he's been in a lot of stuff.
Anyway, so it's partly this kind of like very dry, serious drama about this relationship between these two men and the complicity of the German, of the German people, et cetera, in terms of perpetuating the Holocaust, the responsibility of Germany itself, you know, like the German character.
It's about this psychiatrist who's kind of coming in and his motives are a little bit unclear, but it's clear that, you know, he wants to write a book.
He wants to make, he wants to make his name off this.
He wants to be a big person based on, you know, being the guy who interviewed, you know, who interviewed Goring and got him to talk, et cetera.
And I'm going to write a book and I'm going to, it's going to be like a tell-all.
And then it's also a story about Robert Jackson about Michael Shannon.
I think the best performance in the film, or at least one of the best performances in the film, I really like to Michael Shannon in this.
I like Michael Shannon and pretty much everything.
I love Michael Shannon.
Yeah.
Really good in this.
Arguably should have been the lead character, but then you don't get the psychiatrist.
The real story.
The real history sorry, i'm kind of babbling, but it's, this is going to be a loose one um, real story is.
I mean the story should be the story of Michael Shannon, and then the psychiatrist is like he's a bit character who shows up for 15 minutes in the middle or something um, any realistic version of like, if you want to hear the story of the prosecution of Herman Goring at the at the Nuremberg Trials, it's Michael Shannon is your, is your main protagonist of that story.
That's, you know that's, that's how it is.
In the 2000 mini series, Alec Goldwin plays Jackson.
Jackson is the main character.
Uh, Goring is the antagonist.
Uh, Kelly is not in that at all.
Yeah yeah, you see, you watched the 2000s mini series with Alec Baldwin and I watched Spencer Tracy and uh, STAR CITY casting the Judy Garland Of All People.
You got the.
You got the best deal.
I got the best deal out of that.
I guess you know although although, although I will say the 2000 mini series does have a very good performance from Brian Cox as Goering oh, and it has another amazing performance in a, in a small cameo role as one of the witnesses from Charlotte Gainsburg.
So there is some very good acting.
Yeah, there is some very good acting in it.
Yeah yeah um, it's.
You know part Judgment At Nuremberg.
In fact, large sections of the?
Uh, you know the the, the whole thing about, like the shirt, you know um Romy Molick, you know befriending uh Goring's wife, and you know that that sort of sequence of like look at how nice people they are, etc.
A lot of that stuff comes directly from judgment at Nuremberg.
Um, the uh playing of the atrocities during a long stretch of the film, that's directly from judgment at Nuremberg.
Um, in fact, it in some cases even the same footage, I think similar, I think it's similar to the footage that was actually shown at the actual Nuremberg trials.
Um yeah, that's in the mini series too and it's it's an extended clip of an actual movie called The Nazi Plan, which is about three hours long.
Um, and it was direct, it was sort of stitched together from from lots of other movies and and some new material at the behest of the International WAR Crimes Tribunal and it was shown at the trial.
So that's historically accurate.
And then in the last, like third, when the trial actually starts, because the bulk of this film is really just Romy Molick and Russell Crowe like paling it up in the prison cells like he's yeah, you know really, he's saying very much, he's teaching him magic tricks.
You know like yeah, because uh Kelly, Kelly was a magician, he had uh, he had, you know, he knew magic tricks and uh, you know what a great bit for it for for an actor to get, to get to learn to do magic.
You to really show the academy what, how skillful you are.
You know, Russell Crow, he puts on some money or he puts on a fat suit and suddenly like, and he speaks a little German, my god virtuoso, acting.
Clearly, one of the best things you could possibly do for yourself is to is to is to slum it up as one of the fatties like me.
You know, you know, and speak a little bit of German.
Yeah no I, I get that, you know, yeah.
Or you, you do the inspiring story of, you know, a genius who has mental health struggles but overcomes them to win.
Oh, he did that as well.
He did that as well yes yeah, and we talked about that movie and it sucks.
It does.
It really does.
You don't know how much a beautiful mind sucks until you watch it with modern eyes.
And boy, you know, that is a, that is a bad.
I remember really kind of being displused by it.
Like, I liked bits of it when I saw it originally.
I saw it theatrically in 2001 or whatever.
And boy, that did, but I was weirded out by a whole lot of it.
I thought like, and then once you know the real story, it's like, oh, yeah, that is, that is.
We're going to use a term here, a term of endearment, a term of art, term of Hollywood horseshit.
And I got this term from William Goldman, from one of William Goldman's books, Adventures in the Screen Trade.
William Goldman being the screenwriter and the writer of the book.
He wrote The Princess Bride.
He wrote Butche, Kelsey and the Sundance Kid.
He wrote a bunch of stuff.
He wrote the classic Hollywood screenwriter going by Back.
And he described Hollywood horseshit as like, Hollywood horseshit is fine.
You know, you're making Hollywood horseshit.
You know, it's got, you know, the standard, you know, the hero has to win at the end, you know, the whole, you know, people love it.
It's what, it's what gets asses in seats.
That's your Hollywood horseshit.
When you're doing this kind of movie and you're trying to do something like a serious depiction of an examination, something that's pretending to this examination of the complicity of the German people or of, you know, Germany at large in the atrocities of World War II, in the atrocities of the Holocaust.
And then you mirror it with basically it becomes a few good men in the final third.
And, you know, you can't handle the truth.
You know, except it's in a bad German accent.
In a bad German accent.
Yes, exactly.
And so, yeah, I don't know.
I'm just, I mean, I kind of express it.
Like, there are bits that I like.
I really thought bits of Malik, like the thing it's reaching for of how much is Kelly being influenced by this, like the, like the, like the magnetism of the Nazi idea and the magnetism of his own, his own desires to write this book and to be famous, et cetera.
How much is he, is he overly humanizing the Nazis?
Because I think humanizing the Nazis is an important thing to do.
But I thought it was reaching for something interesting in that kind of in the very earliest stuff.
When Malik is our Kelly, Malik Malik, I think, you know, I think Malik is, he's good, he's good.
And I think when he's good here is when he is kind of being more vital and more self-obsessed and a little bit more money hungry.
And, you know, when he's, when he's kind of being an asshole, I really like him when that's when he's trying when he's being an asshole.
But it's just hard to square with.
And then suddenly he's the unsung hero at the end who did basically nothing to actually evacuate anything regarding convicting Herman Göring.
So I don't know.
It's a big mess.
And commits the fatal sin, in my opinion, is that as I was checking my watch through a whole bunch of this, I was I was actively bored during big chunks of this movie.
And that's just not, you know, you never, you never want to be in that place where I'm like, okay, when, when do, when do I get to say I'm done with this movie?
I, I did not almost walk out.
I knew I was, but I was, you know, I was close.
And then I did not end up rewatching it.
I was planning to re-watch it.
And I paid money for this.
I saw it theatrically.
Not the worst $10 I've ever spent, but definitely up there.
Anyway, your thoughts?
What do you have to say about any of that?
I mean, I agree with most of what you said.
It is just tedious.
And it has a fundamental dramatic problem, which it shares with the mini-series, which is that it, you know, there really aren't stakes.
The big Nazi war criminals were never in any danger of being found not guilty and released.
Right.
Germany was in ruins.
The Nazi party had gone down in flames.
For all that people try to talk us into believing it throughout the film, there's no imminent danger of a Nazi resurgence in Germany.
Jewish Zodiac Debate00:14:54
It's not going to happen.
The country is literally occupied by three massive foreign powers that are, you know, and Goering is not going to talk his way out of the courtroom or anything like that.
And everybody knew that.
And so the film desperately tries to persuade you that there's something at stake.
You know, like Goering might win the case and be found not guilty and walk out of the courtroom and lead the German people to the Fourth Reich instantly and stuff.
And that's, you know, it's not, it's not going to happen.
Obviously, it's not going to happen.
We're watching something essentially predetermined just unfold as it was always going to unfold.
So there really aren't dramatic stakes, except. to do with people's careers.
Well, and except for the Hollywood horseshit of it, like you have to, in the movie, it has to seem that way because it heightens the stakes.
If you know the real history, you know, this is nonsense.
But yes.
There are some interesting moments in it.
It goes some places at a couple of times.
There's, you know, Goering is allowed to raise Hiroshima, for instance.
And I mean, Kelly instantly comes back with, well, you know, we were at war and we were bombing weapons factories and we killed some civilians as collateral damage.
That's different to what you did, which without wanting to sound like I'm equivocating about the Holocaust, because, you know, the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust were completely incommensurable.
No, that's not.
That's not true.
But of course, the movie sort of, it does raise it and it raises the complicity of the Catholic Church before the war.
I don't know historicity of, you know, Justice Jackson going to talk personally with the Pope.
The trial doesn't happen.
I don't think that.
I don't.
These trials are not actually something I know very much about, but I doubt that happened.
But it does raise some issues.
You know, you have the speech at the end where the army translator who turns out to have been born in Germany and to be Jewish.
In the least surprising, the very least expected third act twist imaginable in a film that the German-speaking American soldier, who we have been, you know, continually subjected to as the friendship that he has with and the antagonism that he has towards one of our main characters turns out to be, oh, no, no, I was born in Germany.
I grew up here.
My family was victims of the Holocaust.
Oh, it gives our stunning lead the moral strength to actually do what's right.
It was just such.
Yeah, no, that's a, I mean, it's, I think that young actor is very good.
I really liked his performance here.
I think he's a great.
He does.
He's doing what he's doing what he can with the material.
But boy, that was especially the scene there in like, you know, late at night in the library and they're like searching around with flashlights.
The kids couldn't have waited till seven.
I mean, seriously.
Anyway, you know, they're hunting around with flashlights in this burnt out husk of a library.
And Romy Malik is, as Douglas Kelly says something like, you know, we have to, we have to figure out what's wrong with the Germans.
At first, he's talking about like the German, like these particular individuals and this, you know, the psychosis, the psychology that led to this horror.
And then he starts to just casually talk about them as Germans.
It's like, oh, we have to know what's wrong with the Germans.
And you get a nice good cut to this character.
And it's like, oh, yeah, I know where this is going.
But that's kind of the movie, Good and Bad, in a nutshell.
Yeah, no, exactly.
You do get that speech from that guy who says, at one point, he says, you know, my family were trying to get out.
We're Jewish and we're being persecuted and we're trying to get out.
And no other countries would take us.
And it's interesting for a movie like this to go there, to bring that up.
That, you know, loads of countries across Europe just wouldn't take Jewish refugees or didn't take very many, et cetera, including my own refused to take very many Jewish refugees.
That's interesting.
That's not the sort of thing that gets raised in stuff like this that I'm accustomed to.
Also, that bit you just mentioned, where early on the Kelly character is talking about working out how this happened.
And what he says is, indeed, you know, what's wrong with the Germans?
Well, that's that's interesting as well, because that's kind of a thing that's been forgotten about in our way we remember this.
That a lot of people at the time, there was this thing called this called the Zonderweg hypothesis, which was basically that Germany had somehow departed from Western civilization.
You know, it had lost its connection with the normal, obviously, you know, the noble, law-abiding civilization of Europe somehow.
Germans had just gone wrong somehow.
And part of the rationale behind this entire process of the trials was they were consciously, people like Jackson, they were consciously thinking in terms of we need to put Germany back into the West.
We need to reintegrate them into Western civilization.
So it's sort of, it's raising some interesting things here and there.
Yeah, no, no.
I mean, it's, and I think that like, even the idea of like, what is your complicity in terms of understanding these people?
And what is the, you know, the fact that Goring and other, you know, other people are raising the things of like, well, what, what about the bobbings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
It's like, yeah, also a war crime.
Yes, I agree.
What about the attorney cast?
Also a war crime.
I agree.
You are correct.
I agree with Goring in the exact opposite direction.
Yes.
And Churchill starving Bengal and the French in Algeria and the Soviet Union starving Ukraine.
Yes.
Yes, absolutely.
Heavy duty hypocrisy at work here.
No doubt at all.
Yeah.
It was interesting the film went there.
And I was like, I'm really, I really thought the film was going to do something with that.
I really was kind of in the thing of like, yeah, we're in a Hollywood structure.
We're doing this.
But the film is raising this.
It has to do something with this idea.
No, it absolutely drops it completely at a certain point.
Really that scene.
Yeah.
Really that scene where.
Sorry, I wanted to give the actor credit.
Aleo Woodall there is a Sergeant Howie Triest.
He's the German-speaking soldier that we befriend early in the film.
Again, liked that performance quite a bit.
Howie Trieste.
Howie Trieste lived into lived to be 90 something years old.
He died in 2016.
Beloved by his extended family.
I don't know, just really nice to see when a Holocaust survivor gets that.
Sorry.
It's just one of those things that like I looked into it.
But yeah, no, that, that moment, that scene is really when anything that is at all maddesting or anything that is all anything that's gesturing at an idea of there is some nuance here.
There is some ambiguity here goes completely out the window.
And then some for the end when we get to convict Goring, we get the big speeches, we get, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And Roman Mollet gets to be the hero for some reason.
I don't know.
Like, yeah, it's completely incoherent at that point.
But there's, there's, it's a lot of Hollywood war shit.
There's a lot of Halloween warship before that, but there's something interesting.
And I really thought the film was going to do something.
And then it just completely did not.
So anyway, it's also, it's also a Gentile savior narrative.
Yes.
It's, you know, the Jewish chap has to say to the Gentile, punish Goering for me, please.
You can save us.
Having just talked about how nobody saved the Jews of Europe, it switches instantly to good Gentiles, save me.
And he does.
And that's pretty distasteful, I have to say, particularly when, as far as I can tell, Douglas Kelly had no role whatsoever in helping Jackson or the prosecution nail Goering or anything like that.
Gilbert, who is Gilbert, who is the other army psychologist there, played by Colin Hanks.
Yes, that's accurate.
They were both there and they did work together.
I don't know if they ever hated each other and fought.
I don't, I don't know if that's what I'm saying.
I think that bit is all living horseshit.
They were originally planning to write the book together, I think.
And then Kelly just ran off with it and went, no, fuck it.
I'm doing it by myself.
Yeah.
Kelly was a bit of a mess.
You know, some sympathy for him in some respects.
But yeah, he did apparently agree to co-write the book with Gilbert and then just renege on it.
And what he does apparently is he just fucks off.
He just says, yes, I've been here too long and I want to get back to my wife and I want to start work on the book.
And he just leaves.
He just ditches the trial, the defendants and everything.
And it's Gilbert, who is depicted quite anti-Semitically in the film, I think.
He's depicted according to some quite nasty anti-Semitic stereotypes.
The Jewish character, Gustav Gilbert, an Austrian Jewish man, or of that extraction anyway, he's depicted quite insultingly in the film.
He was the one who did more to at least try to help the prosecution with his insights, according to the historical record that I know of.
So, yeah, it's pretty icky, to be honest.
Yes, absolutely.
But Jack, doesn't it just completely overwhelm all those conflicts?
Because Rami Malik himself is not white.
Clearly, there's no criticism is allowed.
According to values that you and I both hold as fervent members of the left, no brown person can do anything wrong or be portrayed as doing anything wrong ever.
Yes, as the right wants us to think.
You might have heard my phone buzzing there.
I've just got a text from George Soros chastising me for criticizing a person of color and telling me never to do it again because apparently that's against the rules of my Antifa membership and my next check will be will be withheld as punishment.
So damn.
They're going to revoke your Antifa membership card, Jackie.
Yes, they are.
They're going to recall it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't like the way the film focuses almost entirely on Goering.
I understand why they want to do a battle of wits thing or a sort of the seductiveness of evil thing.
And of course, as you say, they're giving Crowe the big juicy role and so on.
There's a lot more to that trial than just Goering.
I mean, there's so many other fascinating things happening in that trial.
You also have Speer.
He was at the same trial.
Speer is a fascinating.
Hess is a actually, there's a British, there's a BBC documentary, drama documentary series from a few years back, which is, I think, probably the best dramatized depiction of the Nuremberg trials.
If you don't worry about all the British actors doing terrible American accents, where they do three episodes of it, three hour-long episodes, and one focuses on Goering, one focuses on Hess, and one focuses on Speer.
And that has loads of stuff in there about Gilbert and Kelly pops up in that as a character and so on.
But yeah, it's a shame because there's so much more.
I mean, some of the other characters, characters, some of the other defendants are in it as characters.
You have a little bit about Stryker.
You have a little bit about Robert Lai and so on.
But Speer isn't even mentioned.
Hess is in it to an extent.
You mentioned it before.
The movie's trying to do too many different things.
So it brings Hess in for a little bit.
You get some flashbacks and stuff, but it just makes the film feel muddled.
So it falls completely between those stools.
It tries to do too much at once.
And also, it doesn't do anything like justice to the material.
Yeah, no, it's it's also, you know, two hours, right about two and a half hours long.
So yeah, two and two hours, 28 minutes.
So right about two and a half hours.
And yeah, it really is like for this kind of film, you either need to cut that down to an hour, 45, two hours.
You know, you either need to really like trim back the fat on this and really tell us like one coherent, cohesive story, or you need to expand all that and really get into all of this.
But I mean, no, it's, it's, it's just one of those things.
I don't know.
Like to me, I was like, so this is written and directed by James Vanderbilt.
Zodiac.
Zodiac.
And boy, like there must have been a very different kind of production process behind Zodiac.
I mean, if that Zodiac's, you know, for all my issues with it, it's a much better film.
Zodiac is a much more interesting film and a much more interesting script.
It really is trying to get at something.
It really is trying to like, you know, eat away at like dig at this knot of like who these characters are and what's going on and what it knows about the world.
And it's just, you know, what about did Fincher?
Did Fincher just come in and demand rewrites?
I mean, you know, there was similarities.
Zodiac is about a slightly obsessive, slightly unscrupulous writer who becomes unhealthily obsessed with the Zodiac killings to the point of sabotaging much of his own life and harming the people around him and so on.
And there's something similar going on in this, the idea of the slightly unstable, slightly unscrupulous person who is basically on the right side, but is far too attracted to the darkness, far too attracted to evil.
It's the same story in some respects.
Yeah, yeah, no, it's, I mean, you know, clearly, I mean, you know, and it is completely fair for, you know, a filmmaker, for a writer, for a writer director to have like continuing themes.
We, we certainly, it's just like when you find out, oh, you wrote Zodiac, so you can do better than this.
Like there was no reason for this movie to be this gormless, to be this aimless, to just be like, you know, I mean, I saw it Saturday.
Yeah, I saw it Saturday night or Saturday.
I saw Matt Down Saturday.
And we were recording this on Monday.
And I am literally like, you know, you know, the movie just completely whispered away in my brain.
I even like was sitting there, I was like taking mental notes about things I was going to say.
And I've kind of said them all in this conversation now.
But boy, just, you know, I mean, we've said it.
We've said, you know, we've said what we have to say about this.
You know, it does.
I mean, again, all the great stuff in it, it just ripped directly from Judgment at Nuremberg.
I think a lot of its flaws are kind of ripped from Judgment at Nuremberg as well.
But at least 1961 was the time in which, you know, melodrama was a little bit more expected in your big, you know, such pictures, you know.
Crowe's Performance Falls Short00:05:53
You know, it's just, it's just hard to get much out of this at all.
I just suddenly realized that Michael Shannon and Russell Crowe have acted together before in Man of Steel.
that's right um which is probably a better film than this even though it's not very good which is probably true at least you know there's stuff i will i i don't think i'm ever revisiting much of this again You know, I mean, again, like there really was a thing.
There really was something going on here that they really can reach for something.
And the talent, you know, James Vandervelt is not a director, I guess, or not a hugely well-known guy.
There was something there, you know.
Thank God, I'm looking at, he wrote the amazing Spider-Man.
Well, he did the story.
He did the first Amazing Spider-Man.
That's the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies.
He did, he, he wrote the first one.
And I, I mean, there's a little lot of problems with that, but, you know, it's not bad because I mean, they did a lot of things with the backstory that made it bad.
But again, like he's had a like extended screenwriter.
He's directed a couple of things.
You know, he's not.
He's not untalented.
It's just, I don't know.
Just this, it feels like everybody's kind of phoning it in, a little bit, like everybody's just kind of you're just going through the motions because I guess you wanted Oscar or you know it was a paycheck or whatever, and boy, this movie is not, is not doing well, like so.
So I can't imagine this is going to be in any way successful for anybody.
But um, I think um, it's, looking at the trailer, it's pitching it as here's Russell Crowe, the character actor, playing a, you know, a fascinating, exciting villain.
Uh it's, it's, it's kind of pitching it along the lines of the, the oh, i'm doing it again the Dark Knight trailer, you know, showing you Heathledger as the Joker, it's, it's.
You know uh, Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.
It's trying to bring you in on that and i'm afraid Crowe's performance is just not up to it.
It's, it's not.
There's nothing exciting or interesting about that performance.
Well, there's nothing.
I mean, you know, I think the big thing is like oh, i'm gonna play.
Goring is charming.
You know like yeah, nobody thought of that before.
You know he could be charming nobody exactly, exactly.
And nobody thought that, like evil guy is actually secretly charming or, you know, he gets away with his crimes because of his charm.
I mean, i'd almost rather like, if you want to have Russell Crowe play Goring and play him in this way, there's almost the, I would almost say, choosing to do it at his trial is the absolute wrong decision.
You want to see like the wartime Goring?
You want to see that Goring played by Russell Crowe.
That would be a much more dynamic and interesting portrayal and then that movie might actually go to some interesting places.
But same it well, the shift, it ain't it.
You know, the interesting thing would be, I think, sort of particularly Pre-Nazi uh takeover, it would be the years leading up to it.
Um, because you'd be able to, you'd be able to show the, the duality of Goering, which is that he could be this urbane, bon viveu charming, you know, type who'd go to dinner parties with his upper class wife and and stuff like that, and and then he would don his Nazi uniform and he'd be an absolute brutal thug in the streets.
You know that, I mean, he's a bit old to do it, but a movie about the beer hall push would be better.
Um well gee if um if uh, if the Russell Crowe of LA Confidential and Romper Stopper, you know, had that material to work with, that would be uh, that would have been a really great movie, wouldn't it?
That would be better.
Yeah god, who can do that today?
Who has that kind of energy?
Now geez, I don't know.
It's hard to, I don't know.
You don't know any young actors though, so I don't, I don't know any of them, but you know, I don't know any young actors.
Uh, the irony is that um Shannon because, of course, by the time he was, the movie depicts Goring as going cold turkey on his drugs and yes losing, choosing to lose, like the rocky sequence, you know yeah, that's right, 30 seconds like, you know, the old man pushing himself up, going cold turkey because he's got to like really, I mean, it really does feel like a rocky Balboa in training sequence, like what are we doing?
It does, it does uh, I expected the music yeah, and he did own Tigers, by the way, so that would work.
No, yeah, I mean, it seems almost inappropriate to talk about historical reality, given that this is a movie set during the Nuremberg trials where characters have dialogue, like it's a lot to process and word as an expression of agreement.
But even so, I miss that one.
I miss that one.
Even so, the historical truth is that Goering was forcibly deprived.
He was weaned off his pills and put on a diet by the Allies.
By the time he gets to the trial, he's quite thin and skeletal.
So, the irony that made me laugh when I realized was that Michael Shannon actually looks more like Goering at the time of the trial than Russell Crowe does.
It would be more interesting.
I mean, I would love to see Michael Shannon try to take that on.
I think that, you know, Shannon might have, yeah, no, it's just tough.
I mean, to me, most of the problems are just with the script here.
I mean, you know, like, I even think that sometimes when you see like these poor, you know, these kind of not great performances or, you know, it often comes from, you know, everybody's phoning it in because the scriptures isn't there, you know.
I think Brian Cranston said is something to the effect of, you know, if you give me a B script, I can make it a B plus.
I can perform it to be a B plus.
But if you give me, you know, if you give me an A script, I can make it an A plus.
I can, I can really bring my gay game, but I can't make a B script to an A just based on acting.
And I think a lot of times actors don't even really try.
And I don't know, like, it's just, it's hard for me to, he's going to look at this as like, oh, the great Russell Crowe performance.
Thoughts on Neck Deep Immigration00:11:39
It's just, yeah.
No, it's not good.
There's nothing thrilling about it, nothing challenging about it.
Yeah.
And I, I, it, it, one of the things that it does try to do is at the end, you have the scene where Kelly is doing some sort of radio debate program.
Um, and it's actually, it's actually the only bit of Malik's performance in the film that I like because he really captures that sort of semi-drunk, truculent guy having an argument while holding a cigarette around a radio microphone in the 1950s thing.
He gets it in that scene, and I like that.
No, it's the one time it really seems like he's alive.
He was actually awake.
He's actually awake.
It's very over the top, but it feels authentic.
Yeah.
But he's sort of expressing.
He's like sitting there after he's like, they go to commercial or whatever.
And he's sitting there.
And then, you know, his agent or whatever comes up to him is like, yeah, they're not going to invite you to the next segment.
And then he walks out and then we just like roll credits.
It's like, you know, he took his life 17 years later or whatever.
It's like one of those.
But the reason that they don't want him, again, I'm sure this didn't actually happen, but the reason that they don't want him to continue on the show is that he's been saying things like the Nazis that I talked to at Nuremberg, they were not, you know, in contrast to what he thinks at the start of the film, this is his journey.
The Nazis I talked to were not fundamentally different.
They were, you know, and I think this sort of the banality of evil thing is overstated, but they, you know, his, his thesis seems to be that they're, they're just, they're not ordinary, but they're not fundamentally different or alien or mad or anything like that.
And so things like this could happen anywhere, including here in the United States.
And I quite liked the depiction of, you know, there he is in the United States on the radio and he says that.
And it's just, no, fuck off.
We don't want to hear this.
We don't want to know.
And I think one of the things the movie is going for that I like is it is trying to, you know, it is trying to comment on what's happening in the United States today.
Yeah.
Well, the trouble is.
Go ahead, go to Nicaragua.
The trouble is, just to finish the thought, is that the rest of the movie contradicts that idea because it shows Goering as this incredibly clever and cunning and charismatic supervillain, which is a direct contradiction of what Kelly is saying.
Also, if we're going to draw the direct comparison, it's like, yes, Herman Goring, you know, talented, man of war, erudite, highly, highly sophisticated, just like Donald Trump.
They're like the same man, the same man.
No.
I don't know.
There are some similarities, but yeah, I think Goering actually, you know, he did fight in the war bravely, you know, which Donald Trump would never do.
Yes.
Mr. Bonespurs himself.
Yes, I agree.
No, I actually really, I was non-plussed with like trying to like directly comment as if we're commenting directly on American politics, like at the end of the film.
I thought it was, but I like that it goes for it.
Well, I thought it was completely unearned.
I thought it was completely like, you know, it is, it's like, it's this tacked on bit.
And they're trying to do it as if, I mean, you know, you see other, you know, even movies I like, you know, kind of have this, kind of have this quality of, you know, they to the end and then they want to say something about what's going on now, but then they want to have kind of have their cake and eat it too.
It's like, well, no, this is just a generic statement and they could be said about lots of different things.
And of course we want Republicans to come see this movie, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's like, yeah, no, I think you've already said what you meant to say.
Anyway, I don't know.
I thought the movie didn't earn it at all.
And I thought it was like, it took me out of the moment because what otherwise could have been a movie, like this is set in a specific time and place.
It is set in the immediate couple of years after, you know, months and years after World War II in this very specific political situation.
And it's reaching for all kinds of things.
Like, well, we have to get the Russians on board.
And well, actually, we need to Germans kind of heal because our new enemies are the communists, et cetera, et cetera.
And it's making motions in that direction.
It's like making it saying the right things at times.
It is kind of questioning the complicity of the U.S. government in some of these crimes.
And the Vatican itself, it is like deliberately making.
And that's pretty pointed.
That's pretty, there's some real juice there.
And it just, it, it motions to it.
It thought it was going to kind of talk about that.
And then it just, it, it drops the ball entirely.
It's very disappointing.
Very disappointing.
Yeah.
It is ultimately just a kind of theatrical display of the, you know, American moral superiority or allied side moral superiority, which is kind of what the trials themselves were, even at the time.
To be a bit cynical about it, it's, I mean, there's plenty of stories to be told about how incredibly lenient, actually, incredibly leniently most of these people were treated.
Yeah, no, there's, I was going to mention this.
I don't know if you've seen it, but there's a great video essay by Jacob Geller discussing, I think it's of Nuremberg.
I re-watched it before we got on the call.
And it's very good.
It's much better than this film at really getting at what the Nuremberg trials were and what they weren't.
So if you haven't watched that and you don't know a whole lot about the history of the Nuremberg trials, it's definitely worth a watch.
I'll put a link to it in the show notes.
All the German Nazi industrialists and capitalists were basically completely let off for their complicity in the regime.
You do have the Krupp trial.
They're found guilty.
They're let out after two years, stuff like that.
And then, of course, you have the Far East war crimes trials in Japan, where basically the American government sabotages it because they want to turn Japan into an ally against the communists.
So you have almost a complete mothballing of any sort of attempt to hold Japanese imperial war criminals to any sort of account, including the royal family, their involvement let off completely and stuff like that.
Yeah.
It leaves a kind of a bad taste in the mouth to just have this same trite, you know, particularly not long after Peter Watkins died.
It's a bit galling to be watching this just absolute perfect demonstration of what he called the mono form in cinema, just coming out with something this trite and sort of sentimental and morally smug.
But I don't suppose you can expect anything else.
You know, it is what it is.
It was always going to be this.
I mean, the basic, there was some interesting stuff here.
And that's what makes it so frustrating that most of it doesn't go there because it keeps on sort of sort of almost going there.
And then, nah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
All right.
That's about all I have to say about this one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, that was a bonus episode.
That was a bonus episode of sorts.
Yes.
I think we found the film guilty.
It will be hung by neck until it dies.
Yes.
It will be hung from the news cycle until it is immediately forgotten.
Yes, indeed.
All right.
That's it.
Okay.
That's it.
Well, thanks for listening to this bonus episode.
Listen to the next bonus episode and listen to the non-bonus episodes as well, if you know what's good for you.
I just got interested in that sort of key piece of evidence.
And that's really emphasized in the mini series.
It's really emphasized in the mini-series as well, the memo, whatever it is that's from Goering to Heydrich saying, come up with a with a final solution.
And it's presented as, you know, the smoking gun.
And Goering supposedly comes, you know, he supposedly scores a point against Jackson.
I think it's kind of true that Jackson didn't do terribly well in the cross-examination.
But he supposedly scores this touch where he says, no, it's about immigration.
Look, it says there at the top.
And I became fascinated by it.
That's the exact same thing that these fucking Nazis do today.
No, no, that document.
No.
But I became fascinated by that because the movie leaves that open.
And I thought, well, what is that?
What does that mean?
I don't like that it leaves that open.
It depicts Goering as being caught out by Maxwell Fife, who's an interesting guy in himself.
Probably responsible for Alan Turing dying.
Lovely.
Obsessive homophobe who stepped up entrapment of gay men while he was home secretary.
So although he was also involved in setting up the European Court of Human Rights, so you know, mixed bag there.
But no, it depicts Goering as being defeated, but it leaves that point standing about the emigration document.
And I looked into that and that is actually interesting.
It's probably true that Goering thought that was about immigration because at that time, they hadn't actually decided to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
This is early 1941.
According to the historians that I tend to agree with, the decision to actually launch the total extermination is probably taken in late 1941.
So Goering is kind of being honest there, where he says, no, it's about immigration.
The thing is, not only did he know full well about the decision to turn it into extermination after that decision was taken, one of the guys at the Vansei conference is one of his secretaries.
And he's at loads of other meetings where they talk about the extermination, etc.
So, you know, it's not the case that he didn't know anything.
He was up to his neck in it.
But the other thing is that, yes, at this point, they're talking about emigration.
And none of them seem to be entirely clear about exactly what that means.
They know, by march 1941 that it means sending all the expelling, all the Jews of Europe from Europe to the east, to the conquered territories in Russia, where they will be used as slave labor and they will be allowed to starve to death.
So he, you know he yes, it's about immigration.
Well, it's also genocide.
Already before they've set up the death camps, it's already genocide.
It's something.
It's something, god.
Now we got to include all this in the episode, so I guess we're just doing it again.
Okay um, this is the actually interesting stuff.
You're right yeah I I, they get it now.
Yeah no, we're good.
Um no, what I uh, what I land on is what I always say.
And the more I studied holocaust denial because I haven't studied the holocaust as much as i've studied holocaust denial like the techniques of holocaust denial um, and historicity of everything, the issue that you run into is that the holocaust was not an event, it was a process, it was a thing.
Yeah, it started off one way and it evolves, but the stage was always available.
It was always available in nucleated form and the, the chrysalis of the holocaust, was always there from the very beginning.
The, the logic, the murderous logic, was always there, and whether you're talking about exporting people, you're talking about, you know, eliminating people.
Holocaust As A Process00:02:09
You're talking about sermoning people the, the.
The language changes but the intent does not.
Um, the last line of judgment in Nureberg, if you don't remember um, because it's a BURT Lancaster AND Spitzer Tracy, at BURT Lancaster, a place that Ernst Johnnings or something like that I forget the exact name, but he's a, he plays this guy who was like um, you know, these are like lower level functionaries in the Holocaust and this is self-fictionalized.
But he says something to the effect of, if I had known what this was going to turn into, you know, I would never have, I would never have done it, I would never have been a part of it.
And uh, Tracy says, like you know, it was the first time you sent someone, you sent someone to prison that you knew was innocent.
That was, that was it in total, that was the whole thing, that was, that was.
You know, you committed the crime and you committed the worst of the crimes in that moment.
And um, I really, I really agree with that.
Like the second, you start to um, the second, use your power, because it's not just using the power, it's not just lying, it's not it's, it's.
You're using the law, you're making proclamations on behalf of the state, you're using state power fraudulently.
And to the degree that state power can ever be real um, you know, can ever be, not be used fraudulently is a question we will leave aside for now.
That is a more complicated, uh rhetorical point.
Yes um, it often defines on how we want to define the state, etc etc etc.
I tend to be very skeptical of those kinds of ideas, to put it mildly.
However however, to the degree that we have a system of laws, we have a system of rules and regulations under which we are supposed to abide, And to the degree that you start to bend those rules for political purposes, in the ways of convicting people of crimes that they are not actually guilty of, for whatever purpose, you are by definition doing the thing that leads that.
And that's what's happening in the U.S. right now.
That's what's happening in my country right now.
Yes.
It's in the chrysalis stage.
It's in its infancy, but it is happening.
And it is absolutely the cruelty is already here.
And the question is, how far does it have to go before something puts a stop to it?
And this is much bigger than Donald Trump at this point.