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Aug. 4, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:03
1969 Rachel Getting Married' - The Freedomain Radio Movie Conference

Contains spoilers!

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This is a conversation about a movie with Anne Hathaway called Rachel Getting Married from 2008.
And it has spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film, be aware of that.
But I think it was a very, very important film and well worth talking about philosophically.
So what did you think? Oh my god.
Awkward! Excellent.
Well, I guess we're done. Which is how it turns together and we're set.
Awkward! Good.
Yeah, no, so let's...
Was it worth watching?
Yeah, definitely. I thought so.
I thought it was a really well-made movie.
Yes. Yes.
Yeah, it seemed really thoughtful.
I was commenting that they spent a lot of time, and I thought it was good, just making it as awkward as possible during the wedding scenes and during the party scenes.
There was a 20-minute montage of the wedding party.
It was almost atmospheric in a way, just setting that atmosphere.
I liked that. I liked the way they did that.
Right, right, right.
James, are we streaming this, baby?
Yeah, we are. Okay.
Streaming, recording, all business.
So I thought I'd start off by boring everyone with a few thoughts that I had about the film, and then we can just take it from there.
Sound good? Sounds great.
So, okay, I thought the music was cool.
But Jesus fucking Christ, will those people put those instruments down after a while?
I was going to club the violinist after a while.
It's like, okay, we get it.
You can saw yourself some mean cat string, but put that goddamn thing down and talk to people.
And did you also get the feeling with the soldier from Iraq too, right?
It's like, put the camera...
And they even made a joke about that later.
And... I think Anne Hathaway felt the same, at least as I did, because I was reading about the film, that the scene where she said, basically, shut that bloody bazooka off!
Where she just said, can you guys, can you tone it down for just a fucking minute?
It wasn't in the script.
She just did that as an actress.
And I thought that was actually quite good, and I think appropriate.
because people were using the music to keep distant from people, right?
So we're together, we're collaborating, we're doing music, but nobody's actually talking about anything.
It's not like music's bad, but you understand, right?
I mean, it was just the whole time.
That would just drive me nuts after a while.
It's like going to a party and everyone's got headphones on.
It's like, well, we're all enjoying music, but nobody's talking to each other.
So that drove me a little batty.
I thought, and I don't think I understood this, and I don't even know if the director understood this, which is a pompous thing to say, but I'll say it anyway, that they spent a lot of time on the speeches, right?
The wedding speeches.
Even the really awkward one given by Anne Hathaway's character.
What was her name again? Kim.
Kim, right, right.
But I thought that was really interesting because there seems to be a lot of truth, right?
So people were saying a lot of stuff, but there was only one conversation that mattered in the whole film, and it was about 20 seconds long.
And it was completely ignored afterwards, right?
There was all this noise, all this bickering, all this music, all this money spent, all this celebration, all of this was going on.
And there was that one 20-second conversation that Kim had with her mother, asking the most essential question in the family.
Why did you leave me with him?
For which she got...
Punched, pretty much. Slapped hard, hard enough, right?
And then I couldn't understand, at least initially, why she drove the car into the tree.
And then it made sense.
So that the bruises and cut lip that her mother left her could be explained away.
Oh, wow.
Right. Right?
So that nobody...
Would say, what happened to your face?
Mom hit me. Why did she hit you?
And then open that, right?
And that's just heartbreaking.
You know, that's a conversation that that whole family needed to have.
Not bickering about, well, you didn't tell the truth in your recovery and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Right. Yeah. But the stuff she described to her mom, you know, I weighed 90 pounds.
I stole from you.
I stole from everyone.
I was high up.
All the time.
I lied.
I was sick for years and you left me to babysit and drive a little boy.
That is a very powerful question and I was...
I mean I thought the acting was great and I liked that sort of home movie feel to it but when that question came up and then the violence that erupted From there, I thought, wow, this has really opened the movie up.
And then, quick as a flash, quick as a ceiling tower and an old wound, it just closed it off again, right?
And nothing was said about it again, and that's why she just goes back to rehab.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah, that's what I was referencing when I said that they just spent so much time making it as awkward as possible.
Was that deliberate, do you think, that they made it as awkward as possible during the wedding?
Well, tell me what you mean by awkward, because I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing.
Oh, sure. Well, like you said, the speeches that were all awkward, every one of them was.
There was... The dishwasher contest?
Oh, yeah, the dishwasher contest.
We were all cringing for, like, five minutes, like, why are they doing this?
This is weird. And the, like you said, the constant music, and then the, like...
I mean, the whole wedding even was just themed really weird.
It was like, why is it this weird...
None of them seem...
Hindu or whatever, but they're doing this weird Indian-y thing, and it's just all very weird.
Like, it was just... How deliberate do you think that was?
Because that was what I got through.
It was, wow, they must have spent a lot of effort making this just awkward.
Well, the dishwasher scene...
Sidney Lumet is a famous American director, of course, and this is his granddaughter's script.
It's a first-produced script.
And this scene...
Actually occurred in real life between Sidney May and some other guy, this dishwasher test, right?
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah. And, I mean, this is...
That, to me, is a weird way, you know, to sit there and cheer people for some innocuous, inane, stupid, macho task, like, who can stack a dishwasher better?
I mean, that is so inane, right?
That is such a... A time waste.
Like I've been watching some of these shows, these British comedies called Outnumbered, which someone posted the cute kids stuff for the cute sort of really smart kids improv on the message board.
And they're always fighting, they're always bickering, but every now and then they'll play charades and everything's great.
But charades is bullshit.
And the wedding is bullshit.
And the music is bullshit.
Right. Because nobody's talking about the truth of the family.
Why? Well, because everyone thinks it's about whether Kim is going to get better.
So she's the identified patient, right?
She's the dysfunctional one in the family who acts out the dysfunction, right?
Nobody asks about the mom.
Nobody asks why did she become a drug addict in the first place, right?
Because the moment she asked an honest question of her mother, she got pretty much beaten up.
I mean, isn't that the entire answer as to why she became a drug addict in the first place?
because she faced this volcanic rage from her mother her whole childhood, and any legitimate question was met with violence, and then wallpapered over as if it never happened, and she couldn't talk to anyone about it, and she had to self-mutilate to make up for her mother's violence by crashing the car so nobody and she had to self-mutilate to make up for her mother's violence by crashing the car So the whole noise and everything was just massive amounts
Everyone dealing with all these surface symptoms and nobody actually going to any kind of core.
What did you think about the part where she said that she had been molested by her uncle and that there was a...
Then she said that she lied or her sister said it never happened.
Well... That was really weird, but...
She said that she and her sister had been molested, right?
Right. Yeah, that happened.
And that she said her sister was anorexic and everything.
Well, I don't doubt that she was anorexic, right?
Because she said to her mom, I weighed 90 pounds, and her mom didn't correct her.
So I have no doubt that she was anorexic.
I personally don't believe that sexual molestation was the case, or was true.
But what is...
Interesting, I mean fascinating and just heartbreaking about it all is that what happens is so the identified patient within the family, the person who's the most obviously dysfunctional, is put at arm's length and criticized and worried about, right? She becomes a massive distraction for the true dysfunction or at least the original dysfunction which is the mom and of course consequently the dad who married her and didn't intervene or perhaps even participated in this situation of neurotic violence.
So, nobody, of course, says, why did she lie about this?
Why did she place the source of her dysfunction outside the immediate family when that wasn't true?
Well, of course, that's the same reason that she drove into the tree, right?
It's to mask the violence coming from the mom.
So, she lied in recovery so that she wouldn't have to talk in recovery about the violence she faced at home.
Right. That makes sense.
So she comes up with something shocking that surprises, shocks, and moves people, and then nobody says, well, maybe it's really about your mom.
Because it's like, oh, well, the uncle who molested her, well, that makes sense, right?
Right, and she can keep herself at an emotional distance to that, right?
She can tell this fake fictional story and not feel any pain or not feel any, or in the moment, right, when she's telling that.
Maybe in the moment, but I wouldn't say, because she does show enormous strength of character in going to talk to her mom.
Right. No, I meant in rehab.
Well, in rehab, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that it was herself that she was protecting.
Right. Oh, okay.
Right. Right, because the commandment for the mom is very clear after the beating or after the slap.
I mean, it seemed pretty savage.
I mean, to me, it seemed like more than a slap.
It seemed really savage. But the message from the mom afterwards was entirely clear.
I don't want to see you.
I'm going away.
And this is not to be spoken of to anyone.
Right. And you know for a fact that this was not the first time this had happened.
They tried to...
I mean, they tried to make the mother a little bit more sympathetic.
There was, I think, a great flash right after the mom hit Kim, where the mom was like, you know, like, what did I do?
But I didn't believe that for a moment.
Because if there was that, then there would have been an, oh my heavens, I'm so sorry, let's talk, rather than letting her, obviously self-destructive and self-mutilating daughter, go out and do what?
Drive again! Oh, right.
The same thing that caused the death of the boy, right?
She's really upset, she's really freaked out, she's out of rehab, I just hit her, let's let her drive!
It's murderous, right?
It's a murderous...
For me, it was a murderous impulse.
I mean, it's murderous to leave your kid with a strung-out drug addict who's driving while high.
I mean, that's a murderous impulse, right?
That's carelessness to the point of murderousness.
And then to do the same thing again.
To strike your daughter viciously when she's asking a very honest, vulnerable, and legitimate question.
When she's out trying to heal...
From rehab and then let her go driving, which was the same thing that happened last time, that to me is also murderous.
Now, of course, that's not discussed.
There's only one place where I remember the murderousness of the mother being discussed, and that was in The Sopranos.
It felt important that the mother left early, but I couldn't quite figure out why it was important.
Did you have any thoughts on that? That the mom left early from the wedding?
Yeah, yeah. Well, what did you think?
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I'll tell you what I thought about it and tell me if it makes any sense.
Yeah. If I've done someone a grave wrong, And the mom would have known, I'm sure, at this point, about the fact that Kim crashed the car right after she hit her.
If I've done someone grave wrong, and then I say, basically, I have to leave your environment, I have to leave where you are, what I'm saying is that you are the source of my problem.
Hmm... If I leave you, I'm good.
So it wasn't me hitting you that caused the problem.
But it's me in the presence of you that is causing me the problem.
You are the problem. Right, right.
Because if I've done something that I'm guilty about, leaving the environment, what the hell good does that do?
I'm still carrying my guilt.
Right? But if I leave a person, I'm, I think, pretty unconsciously, but whatever, right, saying...
Well, it's you who is the problem.
I have to leave where you are, Kim, because you make me feel bad.
And if I leave you, then I leave the bad thing behind.
In other words, I don't have a guilty conscience, because if I had a guilty conscience, it wouldn't matter where I went.
My guilty conscience would follow me.
But if I leave you, then I feel better.
Therefore, you are the problem.
Right. That makes sense.
And that's what she did originally with the divorce, right?
Presumably? I mean...
Right. And this, of course, was the great tragedy of the family discussion.
I thought it was a bit about the death of the boy who drowned.
Of course, she tells the truth In a vulnerable way to people outside her family when she's at the meeting, but she doesn't tell the truth inside her family.
That's pretty important. And everybody keeps insisting that it was an accident.
An accident. And that's to protect the mom, right?
And the dad. Yeah, the dad's role in the movie was really...
Oh, go on. No, you go ahead.
Oh, I was just saying the dad was...
I couldn't quite figure him out either.
Like, it was... He was...
We were all like, he's kind of...
Well, he's the one who got away, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Because he seemed amiable in the movie.
Like, he was kind of nice and then kind of cold and then...
It was just on and off, right?
Right, and it was pretty subtle, his sort of hovering around, worrying if she was eating or whatever, right?
But then, see, that's the issue, right?
Everybody's managing the symptoms.
Well, she lied. Well, lying is a symptom.
Well, she's not eating. Well, not eating is a symptom.
Is she taking drugs? Well, that's a symptom.
Is she being promiscuous?
Well, that's a symptom. So let's manage the symptoms.
And there's just that one flash where Kim asks her mom the important question to try and deal with the causes.
And there was none of that in the family.
And so that's why she goes back to rehab.
There's no healing, right? The dad was also, I mean, his...
When the blow-up was happening about...
Like when Rachel was getting all mad at him for killing Ethan, like the dad was the one, the first one to jump on.
Oh, it was an accident, and it was an accident.
Right, right. Because of his own guilty conscience, right?
Right. Because where the hell was he when his son was being driven around by his drug-addled anorexic daughter?
Well, something I found interesting, and I commented on it during the movie, but during his speech, he commented about the dad's role in a wedding is to grin and write the checks, and I just got the sense that that was his role in their lives as well, just to kind of, I'll pay the bills, I'm going to be the provider, and I'm just going to grin and bear it, right?
I think he was talking about more than just planning a wedding.
Right, right, to be absent and just to provide resources for whoever needs it.
Yeah, and just be happy and smile and grin.
I think he said, like, grin like a jack-o'-lantern, which I also found an interesting reference because that's not...
He could have said grin like anything, but he chose, like, kind of a creepy...
I don't know. Empty-headed.
Yeah, ominous type thing.
Halloween thing, right? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I thought the bit with the mom, when the mom was telling Kim...
Basically, I gave Ethan to you because Ethan made you better.
Ethan was your medicine.
Yeah. I thought that was a fascinating, fascinating line that you could spend a lot of time unpacking and I just, you know, wanted to touch on it.
Because again, Kim is sick and Ethan had to be given to Kim to make him better because she was better when she was around him.
Now, if... Better.
And she's saying, look, I was still 90 pounds.
I was still strung out on drugs.
I was still stealing and lying.
And this is what you call better.
But the patient is still Kim.
The dysfunctional person is still Kim.
And that also makes her responsible for the death.
Because Ethan was the medicine that she had to have because she was so sick and then she killed him.
But he wouldn't have had to be there if she wasn't so sick and needed him as medicine.
It's another way of putting the responsibility for his death on a 16-year-old drug addict.
They also, I mean, to avoid the responsibility in their own, you know, their own actions being responsible for Kim, there were, like, two or three times in the movie where, like, they really made a point of Kim's disease, you know?
Yeah. Like, it's just this natural thing that happened and she was this bad apple that just got this disease.
And, like, in that scene that you were just talking about, the mom said that, you know, it was like you were a disease, this made you better.
It was very...
I was annoyed by that.
I'm just annoyed in general by the idea that these symptoms of abuse are diseases.
Like, alcoholism is a disease.
Well, I mean, maybe, but it doesn't really help solve the problem.
Well, if it's a disease, then stop bitching at the person.
Right. Because this is the annoying thing, right?
This is where the responsibility pendulum just kept smashing Kim over.
Because whenever she'd say there's something wrong with the family, they'd say, no, you just have a disease.
Well, and there was the moment...
Sorry, but then, whenever she did something that they didn't like, they would criticize her personally and morally.
Yeah. Like, you ruined...
My dinner because you gave a speech and it was then that you decided to apologize to me.
Like, you did something wrong.
You were being selfish. You were being this, right?
It's like, wait, wait, wait.
It's a disease. If you say to someone you have Tourette's syndrome, then you don't get mad when they cuss, right?
It's one or the other, right?
And speaking of that scene, what the fuck was that about?
Like... They're arguing and fighting about the disease and it being about Kim and all this stuff, and then all of a sudden it's like, and I'm pregnant. Well, but Kim jumped in.
I love how Kim said that.
She was a truth teller and then got blasted for it again, right?
The same as with her mom. And her sister was playing that mom role there where, like, you aren't going to congratulate me if you were so selfish.
You're not going to congratulate me for having a baby.
And it's like, no, no, no.
You don't get to start another conversation before we finish this last one.
She said we were all, like, applauded at that line, right?
Yeah. I mean, does that really happen in families?
Like, that was so weird.
So weird. Well, can you imagine how much Kim must have hated her sister at some level?
Because the sister was studying to be a psychologist, right?
Right. So she's studying to be a psychologist, which means she's an expert on family dysfunction.
And the only person she ever criticizes is Kim, not their mom.
What the fuck is Psychology 101 other than, first you look to the parents for the dysfunction within a family.
That's, I mean, that's not even 101.
That's fucking dear Abby, right?
Right, so there's this massive expert on mental health and dysfunction and abuse and this and that who never points a finger at her mom the whole movie, but only Meh, meh, meh, meh, meh at Kim, right?
So of course Kim hates her.
I mean, she's a fucking psychologist.
Yeah.
Who's completely colluding?
Sorry. I thought that was a great, just a great comment on the state of psychology, like in general.
That the only person who knows anything about psychology is completely clueless about what's going on, or probably not clueless, but avoidant, you know?
Nobody's clueless. Nobody's clueless because everybody is avoiding the same thing, right?
They all just wave it away with, oh, the death was an accident.
How many things had to go wrong in that family to the point where Ethan had to die and they still didn't wise the fuck up?
Ethan was like the last domino in a whole series of things that went wrong, where no one addressed the violence of the mom in the family.
So things keep getting worse and keep getting worse, and then a kid dies, and they're all still waving it away as unimportant, until Kim, with the heart of a warrior, goes to the mom and says, why did you leave me in charge of that child?
And that's the essential question, and of course, it can't ever be answered with the family.
And the mom knows that she can hit Kim, and Kim's going to go find some way to cover it up, and it's never going to be raised, right?
Kim's not going to pick up the phone and say, oh my god, dad, mom just hit me for asking this question.
Let's all sit down and figure out what the fuck is going on.
No, she knew that her daughter was like a little...
Bomb in the brain robot, gonna go crash a car, create a big drama, big distraction, and no one was ever gonna talk about it again, and she was just gonna go back into rehab, which is also murderous.
I'll send my daughter back into rehab rather than talk about the truth of my motivations, or at least allow the question to arise.
I don't think I understood that.
At the end, when she was going back to rehab, was that not planned?
Well, it was planned. It was planned, but she wasn't going to rehab cured.
She wasn't going a step forward than where she came in.
She wasn't like, I feel better, I think, I mean, you wouldn't say it this cheesily, but you'd find some way.
So imagine if she'd had the conversation with her mom, and the family had come together, and they'd looked at it, and they'd gone, oh my god, we're all dysfunctional.
You've been carrying the burden, but we've been ignoring it.
We've been attacking you rather than dealing with the parents.
Would she not feel a great relief?
Would she not feel some sort of great easing?
Some of the load would have been lifted.
Some of the load would have been lifted.
But did you think that they actually gave one crap about her?
Her real life. I mean, I got the sense that they were just bringing her into this wedding just for the weekend.
It was almost like a kind of a court of appearances, you know, just bring her back for the weekend and we'll have this wedding and then we'll look like a normal family and then she can go back to rehab.
That was sort of the sense, the overall sense of it.
Right, which puts her, I mean, in some sort of psychological way, puts her in the same category as Ethan, which is a child to be sacrificed for the sake of the Of protecting the parent's illusions.
Sure. I didn't...
I missed something when the sister, Kim's sister, they had a hug at the...
I don't know why that happened.
Or was that just, well, you're going back, so we have to hug?
Right. And then our sister goes to watch everyone playing music in this blissful, like...
Yeah, she hugs, they go back, and there was that kind of catty blonde who she sees in her underwear, and they give a little wave, like, okay, I guess we're not enemies.
But there seemed to be this sort of strange resolution at the end that didn't have anything to do with anything, as far as I could tell.
And just goes back to, well, I guess we just need to drop our grudges and grow up.
It's like, no, no, no, no. Hold on to your grudges and use them to dig deeper.
My God. Your grudges shovels.
I'm sorry? I say your grudges are shovels.
Yeah, yeah. Dig in.
Hooks. Whatever.
And I almost didn't make it through the film because I just found those dancing scenes and this and that.
It was just, I mean, it's like, dear God in heaven, you know?
Endless. The music and the dancing and it's like, okay, you're having fun.
That's good, you know?
It's like porn after you're done, you know?
It's like, okay. And I'm still at a bit of a loss as to why an editor wouldn't say, you know, hack this thing down a bit.
You know, you need more than nine pages of dialogue in a two-hour film.
You know, they've seen people dancing before.
It's okay. But I thought, I mean, sort of what it recreated in me was just a boredom and frustration.
Right, and that's why I started at the beginning of the call and I said I actually liked those scenes because like obviously I didn't like them but I liked the emotional effect that they caused in me which was like boredom and frustration.
And I think that's probably why they didn't hack it out, because to empathize with how she felt, kind of on the outside, not understanding why this is fun, like, because that was...
Well, and that's, like, everyone's experience with those kind of family things, no?
Right. Maybe just projecting onto the world, but, like...
I've always found family gatherings like that kind of uncomfortable in the way that the movie was uncomfortable the entire time.
Yeah, so I thought that was actually a good...
It felt like a good cinematic device, but I'm not sure.
I'm not sure the degree to which it was conscious.
Okay. I don't know.
We'll see. If it was conscious, then kudos on them.
If not, then... I don't know if it really matters if it was conscious or not for me.
It had a great effect.
That's true. If I remember rightly, what was weird about the dancing was it was reggae music with all these Indian dresses, which I found a bit strange.
I just found out old, you know.
We had a few comments about that during the movie, I think.
One or two, maybe.
Yeah, I think if it had been conscious, though, I think there would have been less of a strange resolution at the end.
Right! The sister was suddenly nice, and then there was this weird...
I did not like the ending.
Except she did jump up and down when her sister left.
I didn't see that as, like, yes, I'm glad she's gone.
I just thought, like, I'm going to jump up.
I don't know, maybe it was...
I think she was relieved. Okay, maybe, yeah.
I'm sure she was relieved that this truth teller's gone, right?
Yeah, although Kim certainly would be.
I mean, she was pretty hard to take, I thought.
I mean, I sort of sympathized with her family at times.
I mean, I thought she was pretty heroic to do what she did with her mom, but it was just like, oh my god.
She would be pretty hard to take, I think.
I think it was fake niceness in the end, like in the beginning.
People were just too tired to be passive-aggressive.
It was a long weekend or something.
Sorry, can you just repeat that?
Well, all the niceness in the beginning between the sisters were so passive-aggressive and horrible.
And in the end, the fake niceness was just...
It was the same, I think, but they were just too tired to be cruel to each other.
Right, right. Right, and I mean, that's the family after...
I think the sister looks to be about 30, so that's the family after...
You know, a divorce, a death, a drug addiction, like so much has gone wrong, that to me is like, well, where would you even start, right?
I mean, you can't rewind that much, I think.
That's quite a lot to ask for.
But I, yeah, so I thought it was a very interesting film just in terms of a big step forward, right, in that There was just, the whole film for me was worth it for just those 20 seconds of Q&A between Kim and her mom, who, I mean, Deborah Wing, it was just, I thought, fantastic as that mom.
I mean, the acting as a whole was just stellar and just great, great all around.
And... I mean, the details down, to me, of dysfunctional families, right?
Where, you know, they started telling funny stories, and everyone's like, hey, a funny story, and they sort of go into that role.
And then there's the music, and then there's the dancing, and then there's, you know, everybody stands up and does their little speech, and that's right.
Everything, everything, everything to avoid contact, because contact is so murderous.
That, to me, is those lives of quiet desperation.
And... You know, there was only one thing that struck me as kind of false in the movie, which was at the end of the dishwasher scene when Kim hands her dad a plate, which I guess was the plate that the little boy ate off.
I just, that was, to me, really cheesy.
Like, badly done.
Because, I mean, come on, they're just leaving that plate lying around?
You don't leave that stuff lying around in the kitchen if it's the dead boy's plate.
I mean, and then she's the one who happens to hand it, the one who killed him.
And I mean, that to me was, you know, oh, and this is the problem that you have when you write, you know, the writing teachers always say, write what you know.
And so I guess the writer was like, well, this happened to my granddad and I remember this scene, so let's put it in a movie.
Well, how do we end it? Well, she hands the plate and that breaks everyone down.
I just thought that was kind of cheesy.
And that she wouldn't notice that that was his plate.
I don't know. It was just...
It wouldn't be lying around.
That plate would not be lying around in the midst of a social gathering.
So I just thought that was a little bit cheesy.
But I guess they didn't really know how to end that scene.
And they needed some more filler to show how everything was all filler, right?
Does anyone have any recommendations?
if there's anything else that people wanted to say about this film.
Does anyone have any recommendations to watch for next time?
I think Greg made several recommendations in the board, in the post.
Oh, okay. We can check those out and maybe we can get together a week or two.
I mean, it's an interesting thing to do.
Is it a fun idea? Oh, I like it a lot.
If they're all as rich with reality as this one.
I mean, not that it was all reality, but even the things that weren't real in it really pointed out how fucking bullshit so many people are.
So I'd love to do more movies like that.
Good. Okay, well, I'll keep my eyes peeled.
And this is certainly one that I wanted to discuss with intelligent folk because I found it very interesting.
Very rich and very well-made, whether consciously or not, as you say, it doesn't really matter.
But there was a lot in there that I thought was really quite powerful.
And, you know, it's one of the films where you kind of want to know what happens to the people afterwards.
And that, to me, is always a good sign of a well-made film.
And I've been quite a fan of the director for a while, so I'm glad that he put it together.
What else has this director done?
Oh, gosh, let me look him up.
Jonathan Dam? Silence of the Lambs.
Silence of the Lambs, yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
I was just saying Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia.
Oh, okay. Cousin Bobby.
I'm usually not familiar with the records.
Yeah, he's done 43 films.
Wow. The Manchurian Candidate.
He did the remake, I guess, of that.
What else did he do?
Red Heart. Married to the Mob.
I've never seen that one. Swimming to Cambodia.
That's a very interesting film with a guy who later committed suicide, actually.
With Spalding Gray.
It's interesting. Sorry?
Sorry, just one thing I wanted to add.
Did any of you guys see the interviews with the cast and anything about this particular film?
No, I haven't.
Right, because one of the things I particularly noted, I listened to a few of them, and it was very much blaming, I can't remember the lead girl's name in there.
Kim? Kim, yeah.
And they were very much blaming her for everything, even just describing the story, saying she was this dysfunctional lady and girl and stuff.
And even the woman who played Kim was even suggesting that.
I found that quite insightful given the content of the movie and how I felt about it and how I guess you guys have felt about it.
Yeah, I agree.
I don't think that it was a very conscious thing in the movie.
I think that they were like, well, here's a happy family with a bad apple.
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, that's very tragic.
It was horrible to watch from the beginning, I thought.
I'm sorry? It was horrible to watch for me, even from the beginning.
In what way? Well, just the way she goes up to her sister in the beginning and how they're really cruel to each other and talk to each other and then the only thing they can be sisters about is when they start becoming cruel to someone from the new in the past or something like that.
It's just very... Yeah, it's dysfunctional and horrible.
Yeah, so they can sort of band together against an external enemy hero.
Yeah, that was the only thing they could really enjoy together.
It was always like taking shots at each other until they found someone else to shoot at.
Right. Yeah, I mean, there was so much buried hostility and conflict in that film.
Nobody was talking about anything except for the 20 or 30 seconds that Kim was talking to her mom.
It's interesting because it's one of the few films where there's a name of a character in the film, but it's not the lead character's name.
The name of the film is Rachel Getting Married, but the lead character is Kim.
Normally it'd be like Kim's story or Kim goes to a wedding or something like that, right?
But she wasn't even in the title of the film that was about her, which I thought was kind of interesting too.
Well, did you read what the working title of the film was?
No. Dancing with Shiva.
Dancing with Shiva. Yeah, because she announced...
Oh, Goddess of Destruction?
Yeah, I remember she announced at the party that she was the Goddess of Destruction.
Right, right, right. And of course, it's not the mom who hit her.
It's... Just her, mysteriously.
Right. She's the goddess of destruction.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that really is...
That's awful. I mean, what a terrible burden to bear.
And the tragedy, of course, is that the sister's going to go and be a psychologist and treat all of these people, right?
With no clue about her own family.
And how could she be any good?
Well, she'll probably have unnegotiable rates, so we'll be fine.
Right, go work for the government.
No refunds.
yeah laughter I'm sorry.
All right.
Well, listen, dudes, I better boogie because...
I got up early and we started a little late.
But yeah, I'm really glad that people enjoyed it.
I'm really glad that people enjoyed the film.
It was more of a thought-provoking film than an enjoyable film, if that makes any sense.
But I'm glad that people found some value in it.
And let's do it again.
Yeah, thanks for the recommendation.
I'm glad you guys liked it.
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