BONUS Marc on Movies - Amsterdam
Hello.
So I brought something up on the podcast on the podcast on Monday about having seen Amsterdam and having felt bad about sort of dismissing it before I knew anything about it.
It's a very strange thing that happens in the culture we live in right now, whereas...
huge undertakings in the form of movies, books, anything creative or artistic in a lot of ways can just kind of go away.
I mean, it's always there, but it can just sort of like you hear about it and then you don't hear about it.
But then I started to think to myself, well, how am I hearing about anything?
Who am I really talking to?
What am I really doing?
What algorithms am I locked into on my phone because of the preferences I've made or the selections I've made that is giving me some sort of
curated information flow that is limited.
All this to say...
like I said on the show, is that Amsterdam, the film, the David O. Russell film starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, just kind of was there.
I saw promotions for it.
I saw trailers for it in the movie theater.
And then it just went away.
I don't know.
Maybe the publicity campaign just crapped out.
I didn't talk to anybody who saw it.
But then again, I don't talk to many people, especially in that way.
Like, dude, did you see this movie?
Doesn't happen that often in my life.
I guess my life is smaller than it used to be.
Or I'm not talking to enough people or everybody watches different things.
Some I've never heard of and some I just never kind of register.
But this should have been a kind of an exciting movie for me to go watch.
I'm a fan of David O. Russell.
There's no question that guy's a great filmmaker.
But again, I just let it go.
I dismissed it.
I decided on information that I can't even track that it was a horrendous movie.
And I'm a guy who sat through Babylon.
And that was a horrendous movie.
And a tremendous waste of money and time and talent.
So finally, it took an airplane ride for me to kind of decide to watch Amsterdam.
Now, again, I'm a David O. Russell fan.
I interviewed that guy.
I don't know if any of you know this, and I don't know if I've talked about it.
And if I have, I haven't talked about it in a long time.
Years ago, when...
Greg Kinnear hosted the show later.
He was leaving and they were doing a series of auditions of people to replace him to to take that gig.
I guess I don't know.
Did Craig Ferguson get it directly after him?
How did that work?
I don't remember what happened.
All this stuff was very important at a time, but it is not important now.
But I guest hosted, I guess, four episodes.
And they were shot two in a day, two different days.
And the guests that I interviewed were Roger Ebert, Lisa Ann Walter.
She was a comedian that had a network show on briefly.
And then, I don't know, she shows up here and there.
I think she's actually on...
Abbott Elementary.
Is that possible?
I believe she is.
But I knew her years ago as a comic.
And so I was excited to talk to her.
And Robert Loggia.
Oh, and David O. Russell.
That's what I'm getting at.
Now, at that time, I had no real idea.
as to how to host a talk show program.
I just knew that I wanted to talk.
I knew that with Robert Loggia, I really wanted to talk about Scarface.
I knew that Lisa Ann Walter was a comic and that, you know, we could do that thing.
I can't remember exactly what I talked to her about.
Roger Ebert, I was very excited to talk to because he had a book on basically on film criticism.
It was a book, a collection, an edited collection of bits and pieces, essays and fragments of film critics.
And I'd studied film history as a minor, film studies, so I was excited to engage with him.
And David O. Russell, I was excited to talk to him about Spanking the Monkey.
I can't remember what the movie he would have been promoting.
It might have been...
I don't know.
What order did they come in?
Yeah, it might have been for flirting with disaster because this goes back a ways.
It was either spanking the monkey or flirting with disaster.
I'd like to think it was spanking the monkey.
I don't know, but I knew I needed to talk to him about that.
Now, the way it all went was Roger Ebert was a complete asshole to me because I was trying to sort of position myself as somebody who knew how to talk about film, and he wasn't having it.
I remember him being snarky and kind of dickish because I brought up Roger Manville, a guy I studied with in college, and I just wanted to connect.
This is something that I think I've mastered on WTF, but back then I was nobody and doing nothing.
And Loja was great because I remember just kind of wanting to talk about Scarface.
I can't even remember what he was promoting, but I was excited to see him because he was in Scarface.
And I remember writing comedy bits with a couple of the writers there.
Dave Cross helped me out.
Lisa Ann Walters was fine.
But I remember the thing about David O. Russell was that...
I think he had, in my recollection, it was a meeting with Steven Spielberg.
And we were shooting, I guess, here in Los Angeles.
It must have been the mid-90s.
And we had to wait like two and a half, three hours for David O. Russell to show up after his meeting with Steven Spielberg.
And I don't know what that could have been about.
I don't remember what I talked to him about.
But I do remember...
being very impressed with the guy.
You know, I didn't really understand show business at that point.
And everybody was a goddamn star to me.
And I remember realizing at the time that Spanking the Monkey is a ballsy movie.
It's an insane fucking movie where...
the movie unfolds in a very naturalistic way, and it moves towards the third act where a kid who's basically home from college has drunken sex with his mother.
And I know that sounds gnarly and disturbing, but it actually was handled somewhat comedically, and it was disturbing, and it was sort of a tragic, heavy movie, but, you know, the fucking...
The stones of that guy, to make a movie about that, I found impressive.
And there was definitely comedy in it.
And then Flirting with Disaster, I thought was kind of a great movie as well.
It had a lot of people that we know in it, but I thought it was...
You know, his sort of attempt at a kind of ensemble comedy piece.
Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette, Tia Leone, Alan Alda, Mary Tyler Moore, George Segal, Lily Tomlin, Richard Jenkins.
I think Josh Brolin also played Richard Jenkins, his boyfriend.
They were cops.
But that was a great movie.
Another ballsy movie.
And then Three Kings, which arguably a fucking masterpiece.
Now, after that, from what I remember, I heart Huckabees, which I believe I was confounded by, but I thought there was genius to it.
It reminded me of college and watching a Eugene Ionesco play.
It was an absurd farce, but I enjoyed it.
I thought that Mark Wahlberg was very funny.
And then 2010, The Fighter, a movie that I will watch again and again and again.
If it's on TV, I'll watch it.
Sometimes if I'm just home, I'll be like, I feel like watching that on an airplane when it was on airplanes.
I watched it two or three times.
Great, great movie.
Christian Bale, Mark Wahlberg again.
Then Silver Linings Playbook, another movie I will watch almost any time.
Robert De Niro's The Father, great movie, uplifting movie.
Emotionally provocative.
Loved it.
I've watched.
I'll watch it whenever it's on.
Sometimes I'll watch it just to watch it.
OK, so I am a fan of David O. Russell.
Then American Hustle comes.
I don't know what that movie was about or why it didn't quite land, but it didn't for me.
And then Joy.
I don't I don't I didn't understand that movie.
I remember, I thought Jennifer Lawrence was amazing in American Hustle.
And she was good in Joy.
And Bradley Cooper was very interesting in Joy.
It was the first time I really noticed him making profound choices to deaden his charisma in order to play a part.
But I didn't really get the movie.
So maybe because of those two, but I doubt it.
But Amsterdam comes out.
It looks like a period piece.
It clearly is.
I don't know what it's about, but I don't go see it.
The fuck is wrong with me?
So now I got to watch it again.
I watched it on the plane.
And...
It just is a very layered movie that David O. Russell wrote.
I don't know anything about the process of writing it, but I knew within minutes that it was a lens through which to see our current predicament socially and culturally around fascism, around Nazism, around corporate interests, around politics,
you know, healthcare to a degree.
I mean, it is a loaded up layered movie that kind of plays out, not really comedically, but I would say that Christian Bale's, the dynamic with Christian Bale and John David Washington, Margot Robbie's in it, Chris Rock is in it.
A lot of it is played, not broadly, but there's a clip to the
to the language of it that implies comedy of a period.
It's not unlike Hail Caesar to me.
These are very similar movies in tone and in patter.
But this movie, Amsterdam, is really about the first...
Nazi sympathizers in America and the first attempt for Nazism to take hold in America.
That is what Amsterdam is about, you know, in the midst of all this comedy and in these very well-defined characters.
brilliantly played by the actors who played them.
It deals with the horrors of war because this is in between the world wars and Christian Bale is a veteran who lost his eye.
He's also a doctor who specializes in repairing the faces of the disfigured faces of world war one veterans.
And I don't know, most of you may know that that is actually when plastic surgery was invented was to deal with the horrible disfigurement of world war one veterans.
And,
Now, Margot Robbie plays.
You don't realize it at the time, but she is sort of a a free spirit.
They're all hanging out in Amsterdam before he before we see it starts stateside.
But Christian Bale and John David Washington are veterans from the same regiment that fought in France.
In World War One, they were forced to wear the uniforms of French soldiers because I don't know if there was a shortage or it was sort of a I got to watch it again.
And Margot Robbie played a nurse.
And then it turns out she's this artistic free spirit of the time.
They're all states.
Well, but John David Washington is an attorney.
He's a and Christian Bale is this doctor and they are united.
They are brothers because of the regiment they were in and they were and they were active in Veterans Affairs and they are approached for some reason by.
This woman who's played by Tara Swift, Elizabeth Meekins, and she she her father has died and she believes he was murdered.
And it turns out her father was kind of this benevolent, wealthy benefactor of veterans organizations.
And it gets sort of layered and very complicated very quickly.
Christian Bale's character is a half-Jewish guy who is married to a non-Jewish socialite who is the daughter of a prominent Wall Street doctor who is, you know, who kind of
talks Christian Bale into going to war ostensibly so he will get killed there and he doesn't have to muddy up his gene pool or his social status with a half Jew.
And then Margot Robbie and John David Washington start a romance in Amsterdam that they can't sort of manifest in the United States because of the racial violence
laws of the United States.
So this is, again, layer upon layer.
And it turns out that, yes, that I don't want to spoil anything for anybody, but but, you know, the the the murder of old man Meekins is dubious and
And there is a secret society that is revealed that is behind eugenics clinics in the United States and in Europe.
And then there are these corporate forces that are trying to buy out
Robert De Niro's character, he plays Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who is based on a real character.
It turns out that Margot Robbie's character, who is this artist, you know, is the sister of a very wealthy man, a wealthy family.
who's Rami Malek plays, and he's married to Anya Taylor-Joy, and they turn out to be... Well, I don't want to ruin the movie for anybody, but what it's really exploring is the non-political interests, other than money, of corporate...
I mean, I think there's some reference to Henry Ford in here, but there's other corporate entities that have sort of a secret society.
And I think it's a very important sort of historical film in exploring the idea that capitalism and fascism partner up often.
And then just exploit whoever they can, assuming it doesn't matter.
Democracy is not important to fascism, obviously, but it's also really not that important to capitalism if it doesn't serve it.
And this is, you know, post just post World War One.
And you see, you know, Hitler hasn't risen to power, but he exists and Nazism exists.
And there are factions within America.
some veterans of World War I that are pro-Nazi.
And there's this big event that is sort of the kind of the peak of the third act around this regimen that was a biracial regimen that Christian Bale's character was in and John David Washington's character was in and Chris Rock was in.
And they're doing some sort of gala to benefit this veterans organization to help veterans, which is what Bale's character is all about.
And they try to co-opt
the speaker who is Robert De Niro to, to, to play a party line around eugenics and Nazism.
And he refuses to do it.
Now, what this whole thing has instigated me to kind of be curious about is the real history behind this movie, but also the fact that David O. Russell created a, a, a small masterpiece, you know, involving, uh,
Racial elements involving corporate elements involving cultural elements involving the the rise of fascism involving the compromise of democracy involving involving a a whodunit involving The idea of for sterilization and eugenics And all this is is set as a period piece in between the world wars now
This is ambitious as fuck.
And the script is funny and deep and complex.
And the characters are as well.
And Christian Bale is fucking amazing.
But I had no idea from any of the advertising or any of the feedback, which was not much that I heard, or not knowing anything about this movie, which should have been a huge movie.
Why wasn't it?
I don't know.
Maybe it was marketing, but it's also...
It's heavy and it's relevant.
And it plays in a sort of, not a glib way, but kind of a frolicky way in a period piece around some of the biggest issues that we're dealing with in culture today.
And I just would have missed it.
And now I've got to watch it again because I watched it on a plane.
But I guess what this has kind of forced me to do
Is is rethink a lot of these movies that are getting by me.
And I also should always realize that, look, man, if a guy can make a movie and, you know, he's he's he's created genius work before, you know, give him the fucking benefit of the doubt, because Amsterdam is a it's actually a great film.
So I just wanted to go a little deeper with something I said in passing on the podcast.
And why not use the bonus content like that?
And I guess, bottom line, if you haven't seen Amsterdam, I would take a look at that.
And I actually think it'd be a pretty good double feature with Hail Caesar, which is a Coen Brothers movie, which is one of their best.
And I would put this up there with one of David O. Russell's best.
And I will get pushback on saying those things from a lot of people.
But you know what?
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
We'll be right back.