Movie HighLow

We went High on Nine Days, but this is a very different kind of High for us. This is not a massive cultural touchstone, a blockbuster, or one of those movies everyone already agrees is a classic. Nine Days (2021) is a small, quiet, underseen film with an enormous idea: what if, before you were born, you had to interview for the chance to live? That premise could have turned into something overly abstract or painfully sentimental, but Edson Oda’s Nine Days does something much more powerful. It uses tube TVs, VHS tapes, one isolated house, and a vast salt flat to ask one of the biggest questions a movie can ask: what makes life worth living? And instead of answering with speeches about destiny or meaning, it answers through small human moments: a peach, a bike ride, a joke at dinner, a scream from the top of a mountain, someone seeing you clearly before you disappear. In this episode, we talk about Nine Days, written and directed by Edson Oda, as one of the best movies almost nobody talks about. The film stars Winston Duke as Will, Zazie Beetz as Emma, Benedict Wong as Kyo, Bill Skarsgård as Kane, Tony Hale as Alexander, Arianna Ortiz as Maria, and David Rysdahl as Mike. It is a high-concept drama with an indie-scale approach, and that combination is exactly why it works. The setup is simple and devastating. Will lives in an isolated house surrounded by salt flats, watching human lives unfold through old television screens. When one of those lives ends, several unborn souls arrive at his door and compete for the chance to be born. Over nine days, Will interviews them, tests them, studies them, and decides which one gets to enter the world. But the longer the process goes on, the more the movie shifts away from the question of who deserves life and toward the question of whether Will can remember why life mattered to him in the first place. We spend a lot of time talking about how original this premise feels, especially now. This is the kind of small, high-concept adult drama that used to have more room in the movie landscape. Today, it feels like films either get made for very little or get inflated into giant franchise products, with almost nothing in the middle. Nine Days feels like it belongs to that missing middle: thoughtful, emotional, strange, ambitious, and built for adults who want a movie to sit with them after it ends. One of the biggest Highs is the movie’s minimalism. It could have buried itself in explanations about heaven, purgatory, angels, souls, or the mechanics of the afterlife. Instead, it keeps the world grounded and almost mundane. Will and Kyo have a job. There are groceries. There are reports. There are tapes. There are TVs stacked in a little house. That normalcy makes the otherworldly elements feel more haunting, not less. The movie does not need glowing portals or enormous visual effects. Its mystery works because it stays intimate. We also talk about the POV footage on the televisions. The idea that Will watches lives from the inside, through each person’s direct experience, is beautiful and immersive. It makes life feel both ordinary and miraculous. The movie finds meaning in the images that pass by quietly in the background, which is really the whole point. Most of life is not the big defining event. Most of life is the stuff we barely notice while it is happening. The performances are another huge High. Winston Duke has to play Will as buttoned-up, clinical, wounded, and deeply compassionate all at once. He is detached because he has to be, but we can feel how much the work is destroying him. Every time he recreates a final wish for one of the souls who is not selected, the movie becomes almost unbearably tender. He is there to comfort them before they disappear, and then he breaks when they are gone. Zazie Beetz as Emma is the soul of the movie. Emma represents the thing Will has forgotten: curiosity, presence, openness, and awe. She shows up late because she is probably looking at the

We went High on The Prestige, and this is one of those Highs where the movie almost feels built for this podcast. Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) is not just a movie about magic. It is a movie constructed like a magic trick, and the more you watch it, the more you realize Nolan has been showing you the secret from the beginning. He tells you what the trick is, puts the evidence in front of your face, and then waits for you to notice. That is why this movie keeps getting better every time we return to it. The secret impresses no one. It is the trick you use it for. That line is the whole philosophy of the movie. The Prestige is about obsession, performance, sacrifice, ego, grief, rivalry, and the terrible things people will do to be the one left standing when the audience applauds. In this episode, we revisit The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Christian Bale as Alfred Borden, Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier, Michael Caine as Cutter, Rebecca Hall as Sarah, Scarlett Johansson as Olivia, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. This is one of Dom’s favorite Nolan movies, and honestly, the case is not hard to make. It has everything Nolan does best: fractured timelines, obsessed protagonists, nested mysteries, a final reveal that changes the whole movie, and an ending that does not stop asking questions after the credits roll. The first big idea we talk about is that The Prestige is Christopher Nolan’s love letter to filmmaking. The three parts of a magic trick, the pledge, the turn, and the prestige, are basically the three acts of a movie. You show the audience something ordinary. You transform it into something impossible. Then you bring it back in a way that makes them wonder how you did it. Nolan understands endings better than almost anyone, and this movie is almost entirely built around the power of a final act that makes you immediately want to start the movie over. We also talk about how the opening image of the top hats in the woods becomes a perfect bookend with the final image of Angier’s bodies in the tanks. The movie begins with duplicates, death, and a mystery we do not yet understand. Then it slowly teaches us how to read what we have already seen. That is the magic trick. The movie is not hiding the secret so much as daring us to look closely enough. The performances are a huge High. Christian Bale has one of the most difficult jobs in the film because, on first viewing, he has to play Borden as a man divided by his own nature. On rewatch, once you know the truth, you realize he is playing two different men sharing one life. That makes every scene with Sarah more painful. When she says, “You don’t mean it today,” the line works one way the first time and a completely different way once you understand the trick. She is not married to a complicated man. She is married to a lie that keeps changing shape. That is where the movie’s emotional cost really lands. Sarah is not part of the trick by choice. She is collateral damage. She knows something is wrong, even if she cannot name it. The tragedy is that the person she loves is only partly available to her, and sometimes not even the right person at all. The same goes for Julia, Angier’s wife, whose death becomes the wound that drives the rivalry. These women are where the men’s obsession lands, and the movie is very clear that the cost of greatness, ego, and secrecy is not only paid by the men chasing applause. Hugh Jackman is just as strong as Angier because his performance shifts so carefully. At first, Angier feels like the more sympathetic character. He loses his wife in a horrible accident, and his anger at Borden makes emotional sense. But as the movie goes on, he becomes the more frightening figure. He is the showman who cannot invent the trick, so he steals, sabotages, and eventually builds his entire life around beating Borden. Jackman also gets to play Root, the drunken double, and that performance lets the movie show its own form

We went Low on Disturbing Behavior, but this is exactly the kind of Low we like having around. Disturbing Behavior (1998) is not a great movie, but it is absolutely a late ’90s guilty pleasure: brainwashed preppies, creepy adults, Pacific Northwest fog, alternative rock needle drops, weird cafeteria tribes, mind control surgery, and James Marsden drinking a carton of milk like the world’s oldest high school student. The episode’s central argument is that this movie has a much better idea than its final cut knows how to handle. It is a story about adults underestimating teenagers, dismissing their fear, and trying to surgically remove everything messy, rebellious, hormonal, and individual about them. Then the studio seems to have made the most thematically perfect bad decision possible: cut out the meat of the story and get to the end faster. In this episode, we revisit Disturbing Behavior, directed by David Nutter and released in 1998, as a movie that lives on a very specific shelf: flawed, compromised, overcooked, underwritten, but somehow still alive. It stars James Marsden as Steve Clark, Katie Holmes as Rachel Wagner, Nick Stahl as Gavin Strick, Bruce Greenwood as Dr. Caldicott, and William Sadler as Newberry. It is one part teen thriller, one part suburban conspiracy movie, one part watered-down A Clockwork Orange, and one part vulgar episode of Dawson’s Creek with brainwashing. The premise is genuinely creepy. After a family tragedy, Steve moves to Cradle Bay, a town where the lawns are too clean, the adults are too calm, and the popular kids, known as the Blue Ribbons, act less like high school students and more like honor roll cult members. They are polite, athletic, well dressed, academically successful, and deeply punchable. At first, they just seem like overachieving suburban nightmares. But Gavin, the local conspiracy-minded outsider, knows something worse is happening. In Cradle Bay, teenage rebellion is not treated like a phase. It is treated like a defect. That is the idea that makes the movie worth talking about. The real villain is not just Dr. Caldicott. The real villain is conformity. We talk about how much this movie reflects a late ’90s fear of being processed into sameness. This was an era obsessed with nonconformity, individuality, outsider identity, and not joining the pack, even while corporations were selling that rebellion back to teenagers through Hot Topic, soundtracks, and movie marketing. Disturbing Behavior accidentally captures that contradiction perfectly. The biggest High is Nick Stahl as Gavin. He is the standout because he understands exactly what kind of movie he is in. Gavin gets a lot of stylized, overwritten late ’90s dialogue, and in the wrong hands it could have been unbearable. Stahl makes it work. He plays Gavin as a sarcastic wiseass who is smarter and more capable than anyone gives him credit for, including maybe himself. His lunchroom breakdown of all the high school tribes is a very familiar ’90s teen movie scene, but this version works because Gavin and U.V. make it funny, specific, and weirdly memorable. Another major High is William Sadler as Newberry, who might be the movie’s most interesting character. He is funny, strange, and hiding in plain sight, a janitor who clearly understands much more than anyone realizes. His rat-killing obsession feels like a metaphor for what is happening in the school, and Sadler gives the movie the kind of weirdo character-actor energy that makes it more fun than it probably has any right to be. We also give credit to the atmosphere. The Pacific Northwest setting gives the movie a cold, eerie, almost Twin Peaks quality. The cinematography has some legitimately great images: the opening cliff overlook, the Blue Ribbons silhouetted on the docks, and the smoky high school hangout spaces. The score is cheesy, but the soundtrack is a time capsule. The Flys’ “Got You Where I Want You” is still a banger, and the music video feels like its

We went Low on Psycho (1998), and not in a fun, “this is secretly fascinating” way. This might be the most frustrating Low we have covered, because Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is not just a bad remake. It is a remake that keeps copying the body of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while missing the soul. The problem is not that remakes are automatically inferior. Some of the best genre movies ever made are remakes. The problem is that this movie breaks the one rule a remake has to follow: add something without taking away what already worked. That is the central argument of the episode. Everything this version attempts to add, from color to extra shock imagery to Norman Bates masturbating at the peephole, actively makes the original feel smarter by comparison. It copies Hitchcock’s choices while removing the reasons those choices mattered. In this episode, we talk about Psycho, directed by Gus Van Sant and released in 1998, as one of the strangest remake experiments in studio history. This is the infamous almost shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1960), now in color, set in the late ’90s, and starring Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, Anne Heche as Marion Crane, Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis, Julianne Moore as Lila Crane, William H. Macy as Arbogast, and Robert Forster as the psychiatrist. We start by making something clear: remakes are not the problem. John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and different versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers prove that remakes can be brilliant when a filmmaker has a new angle, a new nightmare, or a new reason to revisit the material. But Psycho (1998) does not feel like a movie with a new idea. It feels like a post-Good Will Hunting vanity experiment that somehow became a major studio release. There are a few highs, and we give the movie credit where we can. The casting is at least interesting. Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis is probably an improvement over the original version of the character. Making Sam more rugged, blue collar, and believable as a hardware store owner gives him a little more texture. Anne Heche is also better than her Razzie nomination suggests. In the early scenes, she finds a way to take the original dialogue and make it feel more modern, sharper, and less melodramatic. Her Marion has a harder edge, which makes sense for a late-’90s version of the character. We also liked Robert Forster as the psychiatrist. In the original Psycho, the psychiatrist explanation at the end is one of the weakest parts of the movie because it goes on too long and feels too theatrical. Forster plays it much cleaner, faster, and flatter, almost like he is reading the facts instead of performing a lecture. That is one of the few places where the remake finds a small way to improve a specific piece of the original. The opening shot is another technical high. Hitchcock wanted to move from the city into a hotel room in a way that 1960 technology could not fully support. Van Sant can actually execute that idea more fluidly. We also noticed the little detail of the fly buzzing in the opening hotel room, which creates a subtle bookend with the ending and Mother’s “I wouldn’t even harm a fly.” That is the kind of addition that works: small, connected, non-destructive. But then the movie gets to the Bates Motel, and the whole thing starts falling apart. The first major problem is the decision to shoot in color. Hitchcock could have used color in 1960, but black and white was a defining part of Psycho’s visual identity. Removing it means the remake needs a new visual idea, and Van Sant seems to land on green: green dress, green sheets, green credits, green everywhere. But what does it actually mean? Greed? Envy? Rot? Money? The movie keeps underlining the color without turning it into a real idea. Then there is Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, which becomes one of the episode’s biggest debates. We respect the swing. Coming off Swingers, it is interesting that Vaughn wanted to show another side o

We went High on Psycho, because this is one of those movies that is not just important because film history tells us it is important. Psycho (1960) still has teeth. It still feels dangerous. It still knows how to get under your skin, not just by scaring you, but by making you question where your sympathy is going while you watch it. That is the real genius of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It does not simply show us a murder and ask us to be horrified. It moves us through the story in a way that makes us complicit. First, we understand why Marion Crane steals the money. Then we feel her panic on the road. Then she is murdered in the shower. And somehow, only a few minutes later, we are watching Norman Bates try to sink her car into the swamp and quietly thinking, please go down. That is the trick. Hitchcock does not just kill the person we thought the movie was about. He starts moving our morals around. In this episode, we revisit Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1960, as one of the most groundbreaking horror-thrillers ever made. The film stars Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Vera Miles as Lila Crane, John Gavin as Sam Loomis, and Martin Balsam as Detective Arbogast. We talk about why the movie still works even when you already know the twist, and how the second viewing becomes a completely different experience from the first. The first major High is Bernard Herrmann’s score, which somehow did not even get nominated for an Oscar. That feels insane now, because the music is inseparable from the movie’s identity. The score attacks before the story even begins. The strings feel like guilt, panic, split identity, and violence all at once. It sounds like the movie is being cut into pieces, which is exactly what Hitchcock is about to do to the audience’s trust. We also talk about how much Hitchcock lets the camera tell the story. Psycho is full of visual storytelling that does not need dialogue to explain itself. Marion does not have to announce that she is going to steal the $40,000. Hitchcock pushes in on the envelope, pans toward the suitcase, and we understand the decision forming in her mind. The opening shot does something similar on a larger scale: the camera moves toward Phoenix, toward a hotel window, toward a private room where people are doing things they maybe should not be doing. From the beginning, the movie makes us feel like we are watching something we are not supposed to see. That becomes one of the episode’s biggest ideas: Hitchcock makes us complicit before Norman ever enters the movie. Marion is wrong to steal the money, but the movie gives us just enough context to understand her desperation. She is trapped in a life that feels too small. She wants a future with Sam Loomis, but money keeps standing in the way. The man flashing the cash is a creep who treats $40,000 like disposable “buying off unhappiness” money. So when Marion runs, we know it is wrong, but we are already leaning toward her side. Then Anthony Perkins enters the movie, and everything changes. Perkins as Norman Bates is the biggest High of the episode. He does not play Norman like a monster. He plays him as shy, boyish, awkward, wounded, and almost sweet. That is what makes him terrifying. His harmlessness is the disguise. The stammer, the smile that hangs a beat too long, the nervous posture, the way he seems both eager for connection and afraid of what connection might awaken in him, all of it makes Norman feel like a new kind of screen monster. The parlor scene is where the whole movie starts to reveal itself. Marion and Norman sit among the stuffed birds, talking about his mother, but really talking about him. When Norman says his mother is “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds,” the movie is basically telling us the ending if we know how to listen. The birds matter. The framing matters. Norman’s fixation on preserving passive things matters. He wants to control what might leave h