The Letterboxd Show 3.09: Selome Hailu
[clip of Saint s plays]
MAN AT PARTY How ’bout you? What do you do?
BRIDGET I’m a server... at a restaurant.
MAN AT PARTY Oh, that’s cool. You’re in your twenties. It gets better.
BRIDGET Actually, I’m 34.
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
SLIM Hello and welcome to Gemma...
GEMMA Hello!
SLIM This week’s guest is a true friend, a deep friend, briefly a member of our own crew even until a tiny-indie-film-mag called Variety stole her away for an internship followed by a full-fledged reporter on the TV Awards beat and the Hollywood community.
SELOME Hello friends! It’s so good to be back with you. [Gemma & Selome laugh] Though I was given a painful intro... [Gemma & Slim & Selome laugh]
GEMMA Yeah, it’s true. All the way from Los Angeles by way of Austin, Texas, we’re excited to have Selome Hailu on the pod! As Slim said, you were briefly—too briefly—part of our editorial team. We love Selome. God forbid anyone who puts an apostrophe out of place in her presence... [Selome laughs] Selome has agreed to slum it with their old friends, The Letterboxd Show and your four faves we’re going to be discussing are… Holes, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, The Young Girls of Rochefort and Saint s. What a lineup.
SELOME Thank you! I think that I was looking at this when you guys invited me to do this, and I was like, “Should I change things out? Are these what I want to talk about?” Because I feel like I am definitely showing my age as a baby in this industry by having two 2019 films on there. But 2019 was a pivotal year for me as a film viewer and a journalist, so I decided to stick to my guns and and show my face as a small child. [Slim & Selome laugh]
SLIM I mean, one of them is an older movie. It’s an older musical.
SELOME That’s what made me feel better about it, is that I have one old movie there, so I can say I know some things, but...
SLIM So your Letterboxd profile explicitly states that your page is only for people who Holes being your number-one movie. Can you elaborate just before we even get into Holes? I mean, that’s a pretty strict rule on your profile.
SELOME Yeah, that has been my bio I think since the day I made my Letterboxd . It took me a long time to have like what I felt was a definitive taste in film. I didn’t really know what I liked a ton, at first, I think actually ing Letterboxd kind of helped me become the movie watcher that I am now. But the one thing I was competent in the beginning was that I love, love that movie. It’s been, you know, a favorite for basically as long as I can , because I was three when it came out. And for my entire life, I’ve watched it consistently. When I was, you know, watching the Disney Channel ively in the background as a child, if it came on, I would drop everything to watch it with commercial breaks despite that we own the DVD. [Gemma laughs] And people tend to laugh when I tell them that it’s my favorite movie and they’re like, “Oh, that’s a joke that you’re telling...” Especially now that I’m like, I guess, a “professional” film journalist and film and TV journalist. But it’s so unironic, it’s not a meme for me. I was a die-hard fan of the film before its kind of resurgence as a meme in the past couple of years. And I think that if you can’t appreciate the love and care and intellect put into good children’s cinema... I don’t know! Those aren’t the kinds of people I want to be in community with. So, it doesn’t have to be your favorite movie, but you do have to appreciate that it’s my favorite movie. [Selome laughs]
[music from Holes plays]
GEMMA Let’s dive deeply into your unironic non-memed fave, Selome. It’s… Andrew Davis directed this 2003 adaptation of Louis Sachar 1998 novel. And is it a Texas teen rite of age to have read Holes in high school? Or even middle school?
SELOME Yeah, actually, it was elementary school that I read it. I think most of us read it in elementary school. And, you know, it’s like since I grew up in Texas, I guess I don’t know if everybody else to read it as much as we did. But yeah, Louis... I believe Sachar? Louis Sachar, he lives in Austin. And I was so enthused by that, actually, I I have a very distinct memory of checking out Holes at the library at my elementary school. And the librarian, Miss Mec, was like, “Oh, Louis lives down the street from me.” And I was like, “This is the most important piece of information I’ve ever been given.” So yeah, I read Holes in elementary school. I think everybody read it. I also read the sequel, Small Steps—or it’s like more of a spin off, because it focuses on Armpit after he leaves the camp, Stanley isn’t there.
GEMMA Aw...
SELOME But yes, it was like a huge, definitely like a huge piece of pop culture that all of us indulged in at the time.
GEMMA So the story, the basic synopsis is, there’s a kid called Stanley, he’s played by... eh uh... Shia LaBeouf. Stanley Yelnats—which is Stanley backwards, it’s all part of the comedy, right? So Stanley as a teenager in a family that’s been cursed with bad luck. And the curse has hit Stanley, he’s caught a pair of sneakers that have flown off a bridge, the police have arrested him, he’s been sent to this Camp Green Lake, which is not a green lake at all, but just like a vast desert full of holes... And the holes are the exact size that you would make if you were a teenage boy with a shovel of a certain length. So it’s like, that’s the width of the hole, and it’s the height of the hole. And they just have to keep digging these holes, and that’s their punishment. And what they don’t know... is that the holes they’re digging is in order to search for lost treasure for somebody who we meet later in the movie, who is like the head of the camp. What a set-up for a teen kind of adventure, punishment movie, and it’s so dark! But I have to say, my six-year-old sat down and watched it with me and he was there from start to finish. And got every single part of the theme. It’s so cool! And we also see flashbacks, right, to previous ancestors of Stanley’s and of Zero, who’s a little mate that he makes it the camp. So there’s the kind of setup, don’t want to sort of give too much else away. Let’s talk about... meeting this camp for the first time.
SELOME It looks like it’s shot in Texas—the film was actually shot in California. But we get this insane desert cinematography, like kind of waves in the air of like, oh god, you can tell it’s 9,000 degrees in front of this camera.
[clip of Holes plays]
SELOME These super, super wide landscapes that will definitely amp up your trypophobia if that’s you, with like where all the holes are. And they just kind of sprawling further and further out into the desert, as the boys continue to dig them as their punishment. And they’re always asking, “Why are we digging? What is the point? What are we looking for?” And they’re told it’s to build character. Although as we, you know, begin to find out that isn’t necessarily the case. It’s so striking visually and looking back on it now as an adult—I mean, I learn something new from it every time that I watch, but I feel that visually, it is maybe one of the most striking of the films that I gravitated to, at least the live-action films that I gravitated to as a kid. I think it’s a bit of a testament to how kids can tell when you’re taking them seriously. And I think that’s why this movie meant a lot to me, was because they all set out to to make a really good film. I actually—here’s a Letterboxd tidbit—it’s my mission that to make Andrew Davis’s most popular film Holes on Letterboxd. [Slim laughs] It’s outranked by The Fugitive, which like, yeah, yeah, yeah... Super cool, but...
SLIM I was about to say, Andrew Davis’s filmography is wild. The Fugitive, Holes... So here’s the top four: The Fugitive, Holes, Under Siege, A Perfect Murder, Collateral Damage, and then down the line, another Seagal, Above the Law. What a... what a strange, interesting filmography. So when you think about Holes, you’re like, “Oh...” you don’t think about The Fugitive. You know, probably most people who watch this movie for the first time, it’s not the first thing that comes to mind.
SELOME No, but I love they brought in a filmmaker who was very serious about the craft to do this film!
GEMMA One of the funny things when you look at the lists that this film is in, I have to say from the outset, as Jack’s Facts pulled out a whole lot of lists this is in, a lot of people make the same dirty joke in their lists due to the title of the film. So just a little note about the disrespect there... But here are the ones that I think Sel, you will wholeheartedly agree with... [Selome laughs] I’m Just a Kid and Life is a Nightmare. [Selome laughs] Movies that destroyed me, in which I replied by saying to them love me...
SELOME Yeah...
GEMMA movies where a character reacts badly to the appearance of an iguana or some iguanas. There are fifteen films on that list. [Gemma laughs]
SLIM Geez...
SELOME Yeah, we’ve got some major lizards in this film.
GEMMA And finally, you mentioned that you would watch this on the television with commercials, no matter that you had the DVD, so you know, you’ve got to follow this list: DVD menus burned into your brain because you’re the last one up at the sleepover and you don’t know how to turn off the weird TV at your friends house. [Selome laughs]
SELOME That’s so funny! I don’t think I had that experience specifically. But—well, maybe I did, though, because I did make my family put this on a lot. I can’t even separate viewings of this movie in my head from each other, at least the viewings I had as a child. The other movies that we’ll talk about, I have very specific viewing experiences that are tied to my love of the film. But with Holes I watched it so much and made my family watch it so much that I genuinely couldn’t tell you of any of the specific times, it just felt like I was always watching Holes...
SLIM Aydan Nolan says: “The Shawshank Redemption walked so Holes could run.”
GEMMA This is true.
SELOME The reviews make me proud. I definitely—I’ve been through them and I’m like this is why this is the app for me, because people on Letterboxd get it in a way that—because there’s people on Twitter also love Holes, but ironically. And I’m like, no, on Letterboxd they appreciate it as cool cinema.
GEMMA Yeah... people on Twitter don’t love Holes as much as Grace b-p writes, “I’m just a humble girl who’s easily amused by a character’s name being Stanley Yelnats.” [Selome laughs]
SLIM You did talk about about your goal making this the most popular of his filmography, Jack points out that the rating has steadily grown over the years for this movie, from around a 3.1 to 3.5 where it stands now. So... slowly but surely...
GEMMA 3.5...
SLIM It’s getting the sweet spot.
GEMMA 3.5, the perfect rating. Selome, are you on board with the fact that 3.5 is the perfect rating?
SELOME I do have—there is something in my heart that like a 3.5—hmm, how do I phrase this? Gemma and I have discussed this about how a 3.5 can mean so much. It’s hard for me here because I find Holes to be a five-star film. [Gemma laughs] Because there are movies that I watch and I’m like, “Oh, this is so valuable to me, despite that it’s not a perfect film like it means so much, 3.5 and a heart.” That’s not what Holes is. Holes is a perfect film. [Selome & Gemma laugh]
GEMMA We have joked about the fact that one day you are going to write that, you know, the great Big Picture essay on Holes. But I mean, I guess if you were pitching that essay now, what is the ground you would want to cover that Letterboxd reviews of Holes, such as Nicole’s who writes: “not to be dramatic but the romance between kissin’ kate and sam has solved every problem plaguing my existence since i was born.”
[clip of Holes plays]
SAM I can fix that.
KISSIN’ KATE Sam... are you gonna try to tell me now that your onions are a cure for a leaky roof?
SAM Nah... I’m just good with my hands. I built my own boat, ya know? I needed to get across the lake to my onion field.
KISSIN’ KATE Well then I guess you’d be in real trouble if your boat leaked...
SAM I tell you what... I’ll fix that roof, in exchange for three jars of your spiced peaches.
KISSIN’ KATE It’s a deal.
GEMMA You know, like what could you possibly write in addition to what’s already been written? Roman Richards review: “Ironic, because the plot has none” about the title of this film. Right? So what would you want to, you know, dive into? How would you want to go deep on this film?
SELOME I agree completely with everything that you’re saying. It’s not—the piece that I would write, I don’t even think at this point would be an analysis or critique or anything. I feel like I want to write the definitive oral history of the movie. Because actually to circle back to Louis Sachar being the screenwriter, I’ve read a bit about that, and he was very reluctant to do that. The movie got optioned, and he was like, “Great! Excited to see what you guys do with it!” And Andrew Davis and the studio brought on several very experienced screenwriters, who I don’t think that they’ve named or maybe they have, who took es at it, and we’re continually dissatisfied. And it looked like the movie was going to be shelved for a bit because nobody could capture what was so exciting about the book. And so Andrew Davis, I think had asked Louis to write a screenplay. And he was like, “No, that’s not my thing. You keep searching...” And then it kind of came to a point where it was like, “Either you write it or this isn’t happening.” And he was like, “Okay, I’ll write it, but I don’t think it’ll be good.” And then it was the movie that it became. So there’s a lot there and putting this incredible cast together... I mean... like you said, there’s Patricia Arquette and Dulé Hill, there’s Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Eartha Kitt!
GEMMA Eartha Kitt!
SELOM Like can you believe it that there’s Eartha Kitt in this movie?!
GEMMA That was my entire review at this film: Eartha Kitt. But also Tim Blake Nelson... I mean, you cannot have any kind of Western without Tim Blake Nelson somewhere in there.
SELOME But yes, watch this space for an oral history of the film. And also, I think there’s a lot to say about its continued and... the relevance of themes that were made for the adults watching the films with their kids. Because now that I, like when I watched them over and over again as an adult, I’m so struck by everything that it has to say about incarceration and how the boys in the camp—I mean, it’s presented as an alternative to a prison, basically, and that they’re being told that they’re going to be rehabilitated by doing this pointless activity. When really, it’s just because they’re searching for something that the people who run the camp can profit off of. And that says so much about the way the system of incarceration operates in America and a lot of the rest of the world. And I want to have that conversation, because I don’t think that in 2003—I mean, it was well loved by critics when it came out. It did, it performed well. But I don’t think that the critical conversation that I’ve at least what I’ve been able to access now, because I wasn’t reading a ton of criticism as a three-year-old... [Gemma & Slim laugh] Wasn’t ready to get into all of the thinking that this movie is doing about incarceration, about race and interracial marriage, about lynching. I mean, it gets really, really dark, but manages to do that in a way that’s approachable to children but also compelling to the adults who watch it with them.
[music from The Last Black Man in San Francisco plays]
SLIM Let’s continue onward with some of those themes with our next film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which I might add, I think on your Letterboxd, you have that four stars according to your last viewing. So directed by Joe Talbot, written by Joe and his bestie Jimmy Fails, 4.1 average, 2,000 fans. “Fight for your land. Fight for your home.” is the tagline for this film. But Gemma, you’re historically... you don’t love those.
GEMMA I don’t know. No, no, I think we should just use the Letterboxd one today, because actually, it is not... This is... maybe it’s a 2019 thing. You know, its recency. “Jimmy Fails dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco, ed on his quest by his best friend Mont, Jimmy searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind.” I mean, apart from not saying in the synopsis that there is a GOAT-level soundtrack by Emile Mosseri...
SLIM My god.
GEMMA I think that’s, I think that’s pretty spot on! I think this synopsis wins points for the first time.
SLIM Gemma’s podcast history, that gets the stamp of approval. Where does this film slot for you? Why does it make it into your four faves?
SELOME So let’s talk about my rating. Because... so the first time that I watched it, in theaters in 2019, I gave it a four. I was transfixed by so much of it—the writing, the acting, the music, Jesus Christ. It was the movie that turned me on to Emile Mosseri, who I’m now completely obsessed with. And I have like the melody of every single one of his scores memorized, I have on vinyl. I have this score, the Minari score and the Kajillionaire score all on vinyl, I’m obsessed with them. But that score was what was on my mind as I left the theater, I played it on the car ride home afterwards. And then consistently as I wrote about it—I was in college at the time, so in all my essays I was writing for school and all the journalism I was doing, I was constantly listening to the score. Then, when I decided to rewatch it for the first time, I wanted to show it to my parents, and having every note of the score memorized, completely transformed the film for me. So I actually I rated a five my second time because those moments where I felt lost or where I drifted away from it, I was completely glued in a way that I wasn’t the first time. And it became so immersive in a way that like I had internalized this film into my bones without noticing it. And I think that some of the moments that didn’t sit all the way with me the first time, were some of my favorite beats of the score. And so I couldn’t look away and I was having this very physical experience of this movie, that immediately I was like, “Okay, this is something I’ve never experienced with a film before.” I’ve never felt such a large—I mean, despite that I loved it the first time, still I’ve never felt such a large disparity between my first and second viewing of something. And so that is why it’s one of my four favorites...
[music from The Last Black Man in San Francisco plays]
GEMMA Amazing. Hey, so I saw it back when it first came out too. But Slim, was this a first-time watch for you?
SLIM This was a first-time watch for me. [Gemma gasps] And I have to say that first five or ten minutes with them just skateboarding, it’s like a religious experience with that music playing...
GEMMA Right?
SELOME Yeah!
SLIM I was like, what am I watching right now? And that this was like his first feature directorial debut... I mean, there’s a lot of flexing going on in this entire production that I was pretty blown away on my first viewing.
GEMMA Yeah... So much flexing. And I got obsessed with the production details of this film. Because, first of all, it felt to me like one of those, it was one of the first films in sort of modern Letterboxd history where we got access to the filmmaker to talk about the film in ways that we’ve never had before. You know, you get these, you get on the junket circuit, and you get these five- or ten-minute, you know, moments. But Jack, actually, Jack’s Facts Jack, got on the call, the tiny allotted time, and Joe Talbot just started talking and was like, “Oh, I’ve talked too much, you’re out of time. Let’s just continue this via email and then a bunch of texts.” And then Joe’s just sort of become one of those filmmakers who emails both of us from time to time going, “Hey, guys, what’s up? This is what I’ve been doing. What are you doing?” Which I love! I love that for Joe. And I think that it points to how Joe and Jimmy built this film from the ground up using a sense of community. So there was a short that came before it. And then there was the Kickstarter. And then, you know, they did a lot of, they did a lot of work to show what it was that they wanted to make and that’s what sort of what brought A24 on board. But I just love—my god, I love this film for how weirdly, it’s a sort of contemporary, mystical, magic, fairy tale, where Jimmy’s just like... he is literally breaking into this Victorian mansion in the center of San Francisco, a city that we know, has, the house prices have gotten completely out of control, partly because of Silicon Valley—well, you know, mostly because of Silicon Valley. And he’s living out in the suburbs. And he’s got this idea that his family belongs right in the center of the city in one of these beautiful Victorians with the witch’s hat. And he is going to reclaim that house, essentially by squatting in it and doing it up. And, you know, we can’t, like, there’s sort of spoiler territory in here. But... is it—I’m not going to spoil it. But I also kind of want to say that even maybe the spoilers may or may not be true... Like there’s a lot of room for interpretation in The Last Black Man in San Francisco, isn’t there?
[clip of The Last Black Man in San Francisco plays]
TOUR GUIDE And this beauty here, which was built clear back in the 1800s, before the black thing... this was all Japanese, till FDR’s Storm Troopers rounded ’em up into camps...
JIMMY This house was built in the 1940s!
TOUR GUIDE Say hi to our neighbor here everybody... That would actually be about 100 years late for this style. We can see from his gingerbread trim, this was built sometime in the 1850s...
JIMMY Uh, 1946.
TOUR GUIDE I’m gonna have to disagree with you there dude-man. No architect in the 1940s was building in this style!
JIMMY That’s probably true... but this wasn’t built by an architect. My grandfather built this... He came here in World War II, he bought this lot and he built this house. The stairs... these windows... the columns... the archways... the witch hat, the balustrade, the fish scales... this balcony... that wall to keep you all the fuck out. All of it... by Jimmy Fails the First with his own two hands in 1946.
TOUR GUIDE Wow... that’s pretty amazing. Well... let’s move onto to our next stop... [clip fades out]
SELOME And I love that you bring up this kind of mystical quality of it. That was something I was hoping to talk about at some point during this whole episode, because I’ve found that a lot of my favorite movies, or the ones that resonate with me a ton, are films like this that are not fantasies or science-fiction or supernatural in any way. But when you come away from them, you’re like, you have to kind of go back through it and say, “Wait, was there a magic element? Was there something supernatural happening? Oh, no, there wasn’t it just felt like that.” I think all the movies that we’re going to talk about today have an element of that, in some way, despite all of them, more or less, you know, are stories that could happen in real life. Yeah, something, it’s so—the cinematography, we kind of start with a lot of these low angles, everything you were saying about the skating sequence at the beginning, there’s so much world-building happening. It’s all the strategies that you see in a fantasy or a sci-fi film. But it’s not Hogwarts, it’s San Francisco. And it’s their version of San Francisco and the way that they move through it. And the specificity of that, I think this is one of the best examples of how we can find the universal in the specific. I’ve been to San Francisco before a couple of times, but I don’t have a huge personal history there. But this movie made me feel and think so much about place, and the places that I do have strong personal relationships to and my hometown of Austin and where my family is from in Ethiopia. And I just found myself rethinking a lot about the sights and sounds and feelings of ownership about the places we all interact with.
SLIM You talked about the emotion that it left you with, it might track with the list that is on here: films that remind you you’re alive. You know, maybe there are some other films on that list as well.
SELOME I think the “reminder of being alive” is a perfect way to describe what I was experiencing on that rewatch, where I was, you know, I was sitting on the couch with my parents, my mom will fall asleep if we turn off the lights while watching movies. [Slim laughs] So we have to keep the lights on anytime we watch a movie together.
GEMMA Love your mum.
SELOME It was less than ideal circumstances. And yet, I was having this like very spiritual, physical, like my skin was buzzing and I was like, “Oh my god, yeah!” This is why I like movies. And this is why I like art and talking and thinking and being.
SLIM My wife notices anytime I lay on my left side, if we’re watching a movie, she’s like, “Should we turn this movie off? Should I pause it? Or...” I’ll just be asleep in like two minutes if I’m on my left side when I watch movies. [Selome laughs]
GEMMA Your left side—wait, what is that? That’s the side... Is that the side that your heart is on? That’s so...
SLIM I don’t know.
GEMMA Wow!
SLIM I’ll have to get a doctor on to discuss what that means for me. I’ll talk to my therapist to see if that has a double meaning. [Gemma & Slim laugh]
GEMMA I mean, obviously, you’d approve of the list that is film scores that bury themselves into your skin, this film is on that. This film was also on a list light-hearted movies with black characters in them because we deserve movies that aren’t about slavery, racism, police brutality, and the like
SELOME Yeah, I find that an interesting categorization because I feel like you can’t say this movie isn’t about racism, because it’s very much there in—
GEMMA And you can’t say that there isn’t some rubbing up against violence-slash-gangs-slash... you know?
SELOME Right. But at the same time, I do find that everything we did here is a testament that you can have those conversations without being... you can be visceral without being graphic. Because again, this is one of the most physical movies I’ve ever seen. But the level of pain we see here, gives so much agency to its characters. What they say to each other, and what they choose not to say to each other, the truth and the lies that they tell, give so much to I think anybody that is watching movies and trying to strategize on how they can tell stories about pain that aren’t gratuitous, I think it’s such a textbook on how to talk about race or other social issues in a way that’s smart, and strong and specific and impactful without shock value.
GEMMA Yes, and this movie really landed at a time when there was a growing conversation in and around Hollywood that’s obviously ongoing about how to tell stories with authenticity, when white people are involved in the above-the-line roles. And this is a perfect example of how to do it. In that, Joe Talbot and Jimmy Fails are such close friends and Jimmy is the co-writer of the film and plays a character called Jimmy Fails. And there’s sort of story-sovereignty embedded throughout, right?
SELOME Yes, when I—so I went and saw the movie based on the trailer alone, but I didn’t do too much research beforehand. I didn’t know who Joe and Jimmy were. And so afterwards, when I was reading about it, I was surprised to find out that it was made by someone white. But as I kind of went to read their story and the short film and the Kickstarter and everything, it answered all my questions. Because often when you see a piece made about race by a white person, or in general at-large, a piece made about some marginalized community by someone who was not from that community, there’s kind of the question of like, “Why would you do this? Why you?” And that question is answered here, because he does have a tie to the material, in being from this area, in wanting to help his friend tell a story. And based on all the interviews that I’ve read of his and the film itself and just studying the film as a text, you can tell that he doesn’t think he’s just telling his own story, and that he has offered himself and his skills in service of the magic of his city and the magic of his relationship with his best friend. And I think that that is like so much of what this kind of moviemaking is about.
SLIM Lily’s review: “I want every frame of this film injected into my veins.” [Gemma & Selome laugh] Karen writes: “An Oscar for Jonathan Majors please.”
GEMMA Oh my god, yes. Anyone who thinks Jonathan Majors came just completely out of nowhere needs to see this film. This was definitely my first Jonathan Majors and I was like, “This guy is going far.”
SELOME It was my first time seeing him too.
GEMMA In your exciting new life at Variety, have you managed to interview Jonathan Majors yet?
SELOME I haven’t. Not yet. But he’s definitely somebody that I will be looking to in his projects. Yeah, he’s so incredible, everything that he does. He has such an expressive face. Yeah, I’m obsessed with him.
GEMMA Who’s the most exciting person you’ve interviewed so far that’s like, you know, who have you landed that was like a lifetime dream?
SELOME Well, okay. I’ll tell you. The bucket-list interview that I’ve done has been Mark Brown, the creator of Arthur.
SLIM Oh yeah, I read that.
SELOME Who wrote the books and created the TV series, which concluded its 25 year run earlier this year. Arthur has a similar place in my heart as Holes does, where it’s something that I will sit down and watch as an adult and find so much intellectual value in. And so I cried talking to him. It was incredible. And then, the most famous person I’ve spoken to happened because of the Arthur interview in a weird way. So the day after the Arthur interview went up, Variety’s executive editor, Ramin Setoodeh, asked me to co-write a cover story on Magic Johnson with him.
GEMMA What!
SELOME And at the time, I didn’t even really know Ramin too well, but he said that he asked me because he read my Arthur interview and loved it. And I was like, “I don’t really know what one thing has to do with the other. I don’t know where the beloved aardvark and this like giant of the Los Angeles Lakers come together, but I’ll take it.” And so those two figures live together in a weird and wonderful place in my head now. [Selome & Slim laugh]
GEMMA As we record this, it is the month of May—hello to my fellow Gemini girls. Shall we talk about the best Gemini girls in all of cinema history? The Garnier twins: Delphine and Solange...
SELOME I love that we’re starting there, because I’m not a Gemini, but you guys are so often unfairly maligned. I have much love for Geminis. I have so many wonderful Gemini women in my heart. Not least, the Garnier twins and The Young Girls of Rochefort.
GEMMA That is so funny because I don’t care if Geminis are unfairly maligned, because we don’t care because we’re not thinking about what you think ... [Selome & Gemma laugh]
SLIM What are Geminis maligned for? For those of us who are not familiar with the stars and reading into what Geminis are about?
SELOME Gemini, the sign of Gemini is represented by twins, so...
GEMMA Oh god, I’m scared. I’m scared.
SELOME So all the different signs have a different like mascot of sorts. I’m a Leo, which is a lion. Gemini is twins and so they’re known for being two-faced...
SLIM Duplicitous...
SELOM Yes, there is duplicity stereotyped onto them.
GEMMA And that is 100% wrong. Basically what it means to be a Gemini with, you know, twins at your center, is that you’ve got twice as much energy and you’re twice as much fun and parties are, you know, always themed, cocktails are always themed to the party, to the occasion. [Selome laughs]
SLIM That’s just what a Gemini would say, though. That’s just what a Gemini would say to get out of this corner that they’re in.
GEMMA Everything’s just twice as awesome. And speaking of, I think one of the things I appreciated the most in The Young Girls of Rochefort, is how they managed to make the skirts, the costumes, the skirts, twice as skirty by just adding in a perfect pleat. There are so many pleats in this film. Like there is not a film in the history of cinema better at showing off the power of the pleat than Jacques Demy’s 1967 musical with a 4.2 average on Letterboxd—only 1.6 thousand fans and I think that’s just because everyone’s little slow to the candy-colored romance of The Young Girls of Rochefort... So yeah, we’ve got Delphine and Solange, two sisters who are played by two real-life sisters, Catherine Deneuve and her late sister Françoise Dorléac, who tragically died in a car crash like within the year of this film being made, which is just... glad I didn’t know that before I watched. I feel like I got to watch this with sort of pure enjoyment and no sadness as a result. But anyway, you’ve got the this entire film is set over a weekend in this gorgeous small town that’s overrun with naval Marines. And there’s a fair that’s come to town, a couple of carnies come to town, and then Delphine and Solange’s mum Yvonne has a café at the center of town and everything kind of revolves around this.
SELOME This is one of the movies, I should make a formal Letterboxd list about this, but I have this experience rarely, where about five minutes into a movie, I’m like, “Oh god, I’m so sad this is going to end eventually! I just want to live here. I don’t want to leave. I hope that this plot goes on and on for a million years.” I feel this way about all of the films on my four favorites, but especially this one where I wish I had been a film journalist when the movie came out, because there’s so much to do. I wish I could talk to the costume designer, the production designer, Michel Legrand, the composer, Jacques Demy obviously, all of the actors. I mean, there’s so, so, so much here I don’t even know where to begin.
GEMMA I just wish I could work in that music store. I just... what a... that is the most luxurious shop I’ve ever seen in a movie and I just want to work there forever handing out sheet music to Gene Kelly. [Selome laughs]
SLIM I was gonna say, Gene, so I went into this movie, you know, we looked at your four favorites and I kind of like give myself a little list of movies to watch. So I didn’t even know this is a musical before I started watching it. So I went in totally blind, I’d never heard of this movie. I went in and then they like, you know, they’re bringing over their trucks over on their like bridge...
GEMMA Incredible like, flying ferry, boat, thing... [Slim laughs]
SLIM Yeah, the ferry. And then it starts to turn into like the musical and I was like, “Oh shit, this is a musical, we’re really getting started here. I’m out of the loop.”
GEMMA And just to cut in, that was the point at which my six-year-old stuck his head out of the bedroom no longer—like he was supposed to be asleep, saw that flying ferry boat and was like “I’m not sleeping. I’m coming in and lying on you and watching this.”
SELOME Aw... [Slim & Selome laugh]
GEMMA And honestly, he watched the entire film and I’m so proud.
SLIM Wow.
GEMMA This is one of my proudest Letterboxd mom moments of all time: “It’s the Singin’ in the Rain guy!”
SELOME Oh wow!
SLIM Oh nice!
GEMMA Yes, yes. Sorry Slim...
SELOME You’ve done so well!
GEMMA Ah, thank you very much. Thank you very much. [Slim laughs] Definitely a proud moment. Carry on, Slim.
SLIM I was going to say, yeah, so I didn’t even obviously Gene Kelly, you know, was in this. We had just recently watched Singin’ in the Rain for the show. And I was really enthralled by that. And then I see Gene Kelly, I was like, “Oh my god, Gene Kelly is in this French movie? What is going on here?” He speaks great French. But he does not sing in this movie. It’s not his voice! [Gemma & Selome laugh]
SELOME Right.
SLIM Right? Mind blowing.
GEMMA I know, it’s not anybody’s voice, except the actress who plays Yvonne, the mum of the twins, which I found out afterwards. So Danielle Darrieux, the great Danielle who was in like, over 100 films and also lived to 100. And it’s the only singing voice in this film is hers. But Slim, just on Gene Kelly, I have to point out Chris’s Letterboxd review: “this was aggressively heterosexual but gene kelly turned me gay so it balances out” [Selome & Slim laugh]
SLIM One of the—I don’t know if this is true, but Wikipedia said that they simultaneously filmed an English-language version. But it has never been released on home video. And I think that it was released to theaters in the US. So can you imagine getting your hands on that copy?
GEMMA Whoa...
SELOME I did not know that. But I now want to hunt it down.
GEMMA I don’t think I would want that. [Slim laughs] We also, we ignored a very important plot point when I talking about the synopsis, which comes from this review by Truman: “tag yourself i’m everyone pining for romance and focusing on melodrama while there’s a serial killer on the loose.” [Slim & Gemma laugh]
SELOME I knew from the first two words of that... which review you were talking about because I read it and I love it. It’s so insane. The axe-murder subplot that happens in this movie. You never see any axe murderer, you get a glimpse of the murderer, but not while he’s murdering. And... [Selome laughs] It’s so beyond absurd. And the first time that I watched it, I was like, “Okay...” I wasn’t upset at it. But I was like, “I truly have no idea why this axe murderer is here.” The second time I watched it, I really sat with it. And I ended up finding it so emblematic of what the whole movie is. Because I think that, it’s so... every part of this movie is so aggressive about being what it is, if that makes sense.
GEMMA Yes!
SELOME Like the first song, the lyrics of the first song, we have Solange and Delphine looking straight into the camera telling you “We are a pair of twins born in the sign of Gemini,” and then just start singing. And they’re like “We like to dance! We like puns!”
[clip of The Young Girls of Rochefort plays]
GEMMA Yeah, was it like, yeah, “We like catchy tunes, silly puns and repartee!”
SELOME Yes.
GEMMA And it’s like, we ask you nothing more. We ask of you nothing more than that. That’s awesome. [Gemma laughs]
SELOME I love tracking their facial expressions in that first number, because they’re grinning when they’re saying the more serious stuff, like they talk about how they’re, oh, their father abandoned them and their mother raised them single. And they’re kind of grinning and laughing at that. But then at the funny parts, they’re pretty deadpan. They’re like, “We like puns. We like to laugh. We have crushes on boys.” [Gemma laughs] It’s so serious and so just unabashed in what it is. And I think the axe murderer, now to me, it just reads as Jacques Demy being like, “I think I can get away with this. I think I can put an axe murderer in this delightful little musical and it will still be the most joyful piece of film you’ve ever seen.”
GEMMA Right? And also, in a way it sort of does the thing or it goes, yeah, let’s once again acknowledge that women... live their lives in fear of being killed by men. But also live their lives and hope of meeting the perfect man. So let’s just throw both of those things in, add some singing and dancing. And oh, by the way, the thing I love the most about the crazed conversation about the, you know, GOAT-level Spielberg shots that he put in his West Side Story—and... he did. You ain’t seen nothing yet, folks, until you have seen the way that Jacques Demy introduces Solange and her sister in this film. And I will say no more, because that shot is just... Do you , Slim?
SELOME Yes. I also think—I also hesitate to say anything because I think it’s just, there’s so much about this movie that I had my jaw open for about fifteen minutes, I think, watching it for the first time, before I was like, okay, everything’s gonna be this crazy. [Selome laughs]
GEMMA I know. I know. I was just gleefully giggling by that point. I was like, is he doing that? He’s doing that. Ah, yep, they’re doing that with the camera. Okay. Oh yeah, they’re doing it! Okay, cool. This is awesome!
SELOME There’s also that lyric with Etienne and Bill. And we should point out that Etienne is played by George Chakiris, which is also nuts.
GEMMA Oh my god, West Side Story. Yes.
SELOME Both him and Gene Kelly, I was like, “What are you guys doing here?” [Gemma laughs] But they have a lyric where they say, I mean, this is just the translation of the version that I watched. But they say something about like, “We prefer joy to misery. We prefer intelligence to stupidity. We prefer straight talk to hypocrisy.” Very, like, it’s just like, so deadpan and earnest and they’re just like, “This is how we live our lives.” And so much of the film I think is about joy being a choice and how at a certain point, despite how absurd the world is, you have to just sing a little song about it. And all of the reviews about how the axe-murderer thing comes out of nowhere, I’m with them. But now I’m just kind of like, you know, like... if you were to make a movie about the next week of my life, and you observed me doing the things that I do in my day-to-day life, some of those things would be finding out insane news stories that make me want to scream.
GEMMA Yeah!
SELOME But that’s not what my whole week is going to be, at a certain point, I’m just gonna have to sing a little song. [Selome & Slim laugh]
GEMMA Yeah, well, I mean, taking this last week as an example, you know, when the Supreme Court draft-decision leak happened, and we walk around—I don’t know about you, but I walked around with horror in my veins, whilst also, you know, doing the fun things for the next few days. It’s... this is how we live. It’s a weird... duality and that’s how we build resilience, I guess, is the decision.
SELOME I’m actually glad you bring that up because I had the most insane moment. It’s so serendipitous with the timing of this podcast, because I found out... [Selome laughs] I found out about the insane Roe v. Wade decision leak, while I was literally at Disneyland while my best friend was visiting me from New York.
SLIM My god.
GEMMA Oh my god.
SELOME She had come in, she’s a huge Disney person. And we decided to spend all day at the park. We were there from 8am to 10pm. And in middle of it, I looked at my phone and I was like, “Oh, abortion is about to become illegal in the US. I’m now going to get on the teacups...” Like, it was... [Selome laughs] And I think it ties very well to everything happening in this movie.
GEMMA Oh my god. Wait, we will bookmark that topic and come back to it in the last film, I think. There was another lyric, and I can’t who was singing it. But the English translation was “time is love” and they kept singing it and kept coming back to it. And it made me think a lot about how this point keeps coming up a lot lately, we had Demi on the show, one of his four favorites is Lady Bird, Demi Adejuyigbe, and one of the reasons he loves that film, in fact, the principal reason is learning through the themes of that film, the notion that attention is love—more than any gifts, more than words we say in the moment, but the idea that just attention and spending time is love. And the same thing came up with the Daniels when we had them on to talk about Everything Everywhere All at Once. You know, there’s a lot there in the character of Evelyn about learning to pay attention to the people who love you, and that giving them that attention and that time, you are giving them your love. So I just think, shall we all take some time to spend time with the people we love watching The Young Girls of Rochefort?
SELOME If that is what people take away from this episode of the podcast, I guess besides everything that I said about Holes, I would be satisfied. [Slim & Selome laugh]
SLIM Let’s all go to Disneyland together. [Gemma & Selome laugh]
GEMMA I’m gonna take away from this that are 163 films on a list that this film is also included in called can I get a uhhhh hot old man? [Selome & Slim laugh]
SELOME Yeah, there’s beautiful people in this film, absolutely beautiful people.
SLIM Gene’s still got it in this movie. He had never lost it!
SELOME My jaw dropped for more reasons than one. It was like, “Oh my god, Gene Kelly’s in this movie,” but it’s also like “god, look at Gene Kelly!” [Selome & Gemma laugh]
GEMMA There’s this other beautiful aspect to the romance that like, yeah, we’re talking about how sort of unabashedly romantic this film is, and the idea that these three couples are going to eventually end up together. But what I love about it is that all of the women in those partnerships that the mum Yvonne and the daughters, once they get together with these guys, and that’s often the case with the rom-com is that you know, there’s a happily-ever-after somewhere, which generally you kind of think involves the woman then, if not subjugating herself to her male partner, at the very least marrying, having children becoming domesticated. There’s a sense that in this, we know that Solange and Delphine who are a dancer and a composer, are going to keep doing those things on of the men that they will eventually fall in love with, who will I believe them in their careers. And the same with Yvonne, you know, finding her man at sort of, again, at sort of the right time in her life. There’s just something really... robust, I think, for me, in the idea of who they’re falling in love with, which makes me just, like, if I wasn’t already completely on board with the candy colors and the songs themselves and the beautiful town they live in, that, you know, there’s a sort of underpinning in of who they are and who they don’t have to change themselves to be when they fall in love.
SELOME Yeah, that brings me back to what you were saying about just time being love. I think that was, it was Solange that to her, the boyfriend she’s with in the beginning of the film, who she breaks up with very quickly. But I believe that part of the song she’s talking about how “Oh, you say you love me, you say you adore me, you want to marry me. But... when I talk, you get bored...”
GEMMA That’s it!
SELOME “You tell me that, you ask me to stop by saying ‘Time is money’. And I disagree. I think time is love.”
GEMMA Ah! Thank you!
SELOME And there’s so—and of course that’s not the, she’s singing and it rhymes and it’s French. That’s not how she says it. But, yeah, they’re just, they’re so... unafraid to ask for attention, which I think is kind of a primary conceit of being a performer, which these girls are. And from the beginning, they introduce themselves, you know, as they’re teaching piano and dance to a school of kids. And it’s just from the beginning, you know that they’re artists, and they’re performers and that comes first, despite how desperately they’re looking for love. And so their lovers coming in the form of these artists, I think does… underscores that really well.
GEMMA Well from women who know exactly what they want to do with their lives, to 35-year-old Bridget, who lives in Evanston, Illinois—well, she lands a job and the affluent Evanston, Illinois nannying a six-year-old, s, and s’s mums are expecting a new baby. So Bridget’s stepping in to help out while that’s all happening. This is Alex Thompson’s stunning 2019 character-study, Saint s. It has only 37 fans.
SLIM Ridiculous.
GEMMA 37 people, including you Selome, have it in their four favourites, but it does have a 3.7 average. And I think for very, very good reason. So tell us why this beautiful, quiet—it sits in a Letterboxd list called quiet little female character studies. Tell us why it’s in your top four.
SELOME So this is another one that I have a bit of a transformative experience, theater experience, tied to. So I saw it at SXSW when it premiered. I don’t think it was at the first screening but I was at one of the first screenings at South By, and it was 2019. I was a sophomore in college. I went to school at UT Austin, I’m from Austin. So it’s a hometown festival for me. And usually our Spring Break would align perfectly with South By, but that year it didn’t. So I was in the middle of mid, I was writing like five different papers while also running back and forth between my apartment and downtown to see movies at the festival—by myself, none of my friends wanted to come. And I sat down for this movie, and it was kind of at a time when I was beginning to lean heavier into the student journalism I was doing but was also like, I don’t really know if I know enough about film to try to pursue this... I don’t know if I know enough about art and music for anyone to care what I have to say. And just while watching this film and knowing that it was debut filmmakers and that how ecstatic they were to be in Austin sharing this with such an enthusiastic crowd was so affirming for me, and I just I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I left. I burst into tears in the final five minutes of the movie, when there’s this really wonderful pivotal scene between Bridget and s. And I thought about it for the rest of the week. I thought about it for the rest of the month. I continued, like it was just for the rest of the year, I was just continue to think and think and think about it. And it really crystallized for me that I wanted to spend a lot of time for the rest of my life looking for things that made me feel that way. So yeah, I love how it’s a movie about abortion that isn’t melodramatic, but at the same time validates the melodramatic feelings people can have about it, if they’re experiencing it themselves. So we see Bridget get pregnant from somebody that she’s dating very casually. Early in the movie, she decides to abort because she doesn’t isn’t ready to be a mom. She’s 34, has been serving at a restaurant for a long time, hates that, decides to nanny even though she doesn’t really like kids. So she’s feeling very lost in life and is like, the kid is the last thing I need to bring into this. And we have these lovely scenes with the person she’s dating who feels quite strongly about her but that she kind of wants to keep at a distance. And he’s having complicated feelings where he s her completely, but is like, “I would like to think and talk about the possibility of what this might have looked like.” And she isn’t ready for that.
GEMMA And she rolls over in bed and he carries on writing in his feelings journal.
SLIM I love that. I love that journal! [Selome & Gemma laugh] He was so, he was more in touch with his emotions than 99% of men out there. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Aw, I love Chase.
SELOME 99% of anyone out there. [Slim laughs]
SLIM Yes!
GEMMA Chase is honestly the best character ever in 2019 and Max Lipchitz plays him so beautifully.
SELOME I just find it so smartly done how Bridget’s feminist leanings make her feel like, “Okay, if I’ve decided I want to have an abortion, then that’s not complicated, and no one can challenge me on it.” And that should be true, but at the same time, she’s suppressing these feelings that she has and how the pregnancy has caused her to think more dramatically about how she’s of childbearing age and hasn’t accomplished the things that she thought she would accomplish. And like those are okay things to be thinking about. If your abortion brings that up for you, that’s perfectly fine. It’s a time to explore those complicated feelings if that’s what comes up for you.
GEMMA Yeah, and it’s also very, very normal in society for one person’s abortion to also be accompanied by the presence of children in one way or another.
SELOME Right.
GEMMA Whether it’s through nannying, or through friends having babies. And so there’s never, there’s never a right time for any of this stuff. And it’s always, always going to be added to by the presence of other small humans. And I love the way that this film explores that, because you also have Franny’s family who are two mums, both non-white mums, which comes into play later on and in parts of conversations and in a particular showdown in a playground, with a white mother having issues about Franny’s mum breastfeeding, which, you know, I appreciated, given that I’ve recently done a deep-dive feature for Read Me on breastfeeding and movies. And I just, you know, so you’ve got this couple who are great parents and who have another baby on the way and there’s obviously a whole lot that they’ve been through before the movie started to even get to their fertility journey. And these are not women who can get accidentally pregnant, like Bridget. They have to intentionally get children, you know, some way or another. And so there’s a whole, I love, but I love how non-judgmental Saint s as a film is about all of the ways in which the people in this film choose to be or not to be parents.
SELOME And we would be remiss not to talk about Saint s herself.
GEMMA Oh yeah.
SELOME This amazing child, played by Ramona Edith Williams. So she is the kid that Bridget is nannying while she’s going through all of this, who is so smart and fiery and just like has a lot to say.
[clip of Saint s plays]
FRANNY You’re on your period a lot. Mommy uses tampons. But Mama uses a clear cup, which is more better and natural for the environment. I have to find something most comfortable for my body, because every woman’s body is different.
SELOME I think this movie does, in such a funny and smart way, thinks about what raising a feminist child or parenting yourself as a feminist looks like and kind of the disparity between what we’re supposed to be as feminists and then what are our emotions actually lead us to. So Franny has all of these like smart things to say about like having her period, despite that she’s five years old and doesn’t fully know what a period is. But I think it’s like “Oh, Mama uses tampons and mommy uses pads and when I get my period, it’s my choice what I use.” And she doesn’t really know what that means, but she knows it’s the right answer. And there’s so much humor in that. And the way that Franny’s intelligence is honored, and how Bridget’s kind of adult coming-of-age journey really crystallizes around the fact that this five- or six-year-old kid sees her and sees the value that she brings to the world and to her own life is so special to me. I mean, I think we’ve established over and over again while in this conversation, just how much I value the way that we, in entertainment, look at and think about and interact with children and I think that this movie does that in my favorite way of anything that I’ve seen that is an adult movie that features a child.
GEMMA Slim’s face is absolutely glowing during this whole segment on Ramona Edith Williams.
SLIM She was so—how did she not get an Oscar nod in this movie? She’s so good. She’s one of the best child actress I’ve ever seen! I had an amazing time watching this. I love this movie. This is a first-time viewing for me. I was thinking about, what were some of those movies that have come out in the early 2000s? Was it Judd Apatow who’d done the like—
GEMMA Oh, Knocked Up? Ugh.
SLIM Knocked Up. Like, this is a good Knocked Up. This is a Knocked Up that won’t feel dated in twenty years.
GEMMA Obvious Child, have you seen Obvious Child?
SLIM No, I haven’t seen that one.
GEMMA Oh my god, there are so many—I’m gonna say it—there are so many good abortion films out at the moment. Like the last ten years has really brought out the storytellers who are prepared to explore the nuance and the ridiculousness and the sublime of being able to make that choice and reset your life. Yeah! We’re doing so well, filmmakers.
SLIM We’re on a run right now.
GEMMA We’re not doing so well with the Supreme Court, but we’re doing well with the movies. [Slim & Gemma laugh]
SLIM In of the actual laws, we’re doing pretty poorly right now. But...
SELOME But the art, c’mon! [Slim & Selome & Gemma laugh]
SLIM The art is banging right now. I was gonna write like snarkily in my Letterboxd review, that like this is my Lady Bird. I didn’t love Lady Bird, but man I loved this. This touched on all those moments in relationships. I was cracking up where, you know, they’re having a conversation with their boyfriend who she’s dating-ish, about how it’s not fair, like “I got an abortion, you should have to do something too. Like maybe you can get food poisoning. We can kind of even this out.” [Gemma & Selome & Slim laugh] Also the roommate who was playing video games and like yelling the whole time.
SELOME Yes.
SLIM I actually saw myself in that roommate a lot. I almost like started cringing. [Selome laugh]
GEMMA Are we are we going to talk about the guitar teacher or not talking about the guitar teacher?
SLIM Oh my god. Creepo.
GEMMA The red flags. “I want to want to come over.” That line. Oh my god.
SELOME Gutting.
GEMMA “The songs I’ve written just arrive. It feels weird taking credit for them.” Oh my god, then when he insists on her, on the Venmo after the—yeah. Just... [Selome laughs] Just... red flags.
SLIM She was like smitten with him in that first meeting, like when she saw him sitting with that guitar. I was like, come on. You can do better than that guy. C’mon. [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Yeah, Bridget didn’t know what she was looking for...
SLIM That’s true.
GEMMA And even when she tried to, you know, as you say, Selome, when she tried to exercise her feminism by teaching Franny about Joan Jett, and then Franny’s mum Annie is just like, “Have you googled what happened to The Runaways when they recorded their album?” [Slim & Gemma & Selome laugh]
SELOME Yeah, the whole guitar-teacher subplot is so frustrating, but it has to be there because it’s... it’s a real thing that happens. People date people that they know are shitty to distance themselves from their real feelings. Like Chase was too real an option. He was too ready to reflect to her who she was. And so when you date somebody shitty, who only wants to talk about themselves, you don’t have to think about where you are in life. So it’s a really uncomfortable and frustrating plot line. But I think it serves who Bridget becomes really, really nicely.
GEMMA Totally. Sophie has a beautiful list on Letterboxd called Films about people who don’t have their shit together, and this is obviously on it along with a lot of films: Boyhood, Everything Must Go, Chef, Amélie. Of course. The Apartment, of course. Obvious Child, which I mentioned is on there. Yeah, that’s a beautiful—and oh, I’m just looking at it... organized by poster color scheme. We do like to see it. [Slim & Selome laugh] This is a beautiful, beautiful film. Look, we’ve done the work. We’ve gone into selomeee-slash-stats. And we found out a few things about you and your relationship to films compared to other Letterboxd .
SELOME I’m getting very scared.
GEMMA I know, we usually only focus on the positive. We like to look at what you’ve rated higher than the average, but...
SLIM Gemma’s pissed right now. She’s so pissed.
SELOME Oh no, what did I do? What did I do?
GEMMA I think we need to have a little talk about Babe: Pig in the City. [Selome laughs]
SLIM One star on your profile right now.
SELOME Okay... But did you read what I said about it?
GEMMA No, I just looked at the star and judged you on that basis. [Slim & Gemma laugh] So explain yourself. Explain yourself.
SELOME Can I read my Letterboxd review?
SLIM Let’s hear it. Let’s hear it.
SELOME Because I think it will allow me to explain myself. Let me pull it up right now.
SLIM We’re conceding the floor right now for this Babe: Pig in the City review. [Selome laughs]
SELOME I’m pulling it up and I think it will at least a little bit mitigate.
GEMMA And honestly, anyone who has listened to every episode of The Letterboxd Show will know that this, you will be so far the first guest to have rated this film, pretty much anything lower than a five. [Selome laughs] This is one of those standout sequels that people just seem to love.
SELOME So for context, my friends and I had never seen Babe. I think we saw, it might have been Demi’s, we saw some glowing review of Babe: Pig in the City. And it seemed really fun, chaotic and interesting. And so we were like let’s do a double feature of Babe and Babe: Pig in the City together, back-to-back, we did it virtually during Covid. So we watch Babe, it’s this very sweet children’s movie about this pig. It’s very warm and comforting.
GEMMA The best film ever made. Yeah.
SELOME Babe: Pig in the City is not what you would call warm and comforting. [Gemma laughs] It’s I think the only film I can think of, in which its sequel is the weirdest possible movie to pair with it for a double feature. They’re so, so different. So what I said about Babe: Pig in the City, is that “I have never been more disoriented or overstimulated in my life. Nothing made any sense. If I didn’t live with my parents right now, I would suspect that I had somehow been drugged today because I literally can’t make sense of anything I just saw. Do I hate this movie? Do I love this movie? I’ve decided to go with one star with a heart. But I think my feelings might be more accurately conveyed if I could give it five stars and a dislike. It’s kind of perfect. It’s kind of the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I think I sustained some level of trauma tonight.” That is my Letterboxd review.
SLIM Wow.
SELOME So I don’t, I don’t want to let you leave this conversation thinking that I don’t see the cinematic value in this movie, because I do. But I think I watched this October 2020. I was doing, I was finishing my last year of college on Zoom in my childhood bedroom. I’d had a few glasses of wine. I was like, this is the only way I can hang out my friends by syncing up a movie together and texting each other as it happens. And it’s just not... it’s just not what I was prepared for that night. [Slim laughs]
SLIM I’d love to know what other movies on Letterboxd who’ve been rated one star with a heart. [Selome laughs] That probably deserves its own list on Letterboxd.
GEMMA Oh... Not just its on list...
SELOME There are a lot of Cats reviews. There are a lot Cats reviews that are half a star or a one star with the heart, including my own.
GEMMA I think you would probably find that that is the top of the list, but I feel like that’s more than just a list, Slim. That’s an entire editorial commission. So...
SLIM That’s a Journal article.
GEMMA So, somebody call me. [Slim laughs] That’s a [email protected]. [Slim & Selome laugh] Tell me why you should be the one to write about one-star-heart movies. One-star movies that have your heart... [Slim laughs]
SELOME But, Gemma, as a Letteboxd overlord, if you create a feature that allows me to dislike a film I will change this to five stars with a thumbs down. [Slim & Selome laugh]
[The Letterboxd Show theme music Vampiros Dancoteque by Moniker fades in, plays alone, fades down]
GEMMA Thanks for listening to The Letterboxd Show and thanks again to Selome for bringing her Holes-self... to... the show. [Slim laughs]
SLIM Amazing.
GEMMA I worked hard on that one. So good to hear her voice again around these parts. You can follow Variety on Letterboxd too. And there’s a link to the list of the films discussed in this episode.
SLIM Be sure to queue up our other podcast Weekend Watchlist—new episodes drop Thursdays with Sophie Shin for the episode transcript. And to you, for listening. The Letterboxd Show is a Tapedeck production.
GEMMA I want to want to come back next week, Slim... [Slim laughs]
SLIM But will you? [Slim laughs]
GEMMA Hmm... Stay tuned...
[clip of The Last Black Man in San Francisco plays]
This city blows.
Big time.
I mean, I’m not above living in a former crack house. You know, but, I came here for Janice and the Airplane. Not to work at a fucking startup.
Dude, I’ve been saying for months, let’s just move to East LA. This city’s dead.
Yeah, seriously fuck this city.
Excuse me? You don’t get to hate San Francisco.
Sorry, what?
Yeah, dude, I mean... sorry but I’ll hate what I want.
Do you love it?
It’s... I mean, yeah, I’m... here. But do I have to love it?
You don’t get to hate it unless you love it.
[Tapedeck bumper plays] This is a Tapedeck podcast.