Breakfast All Day Podcast 3/13/20
We’re giving you all a virtual hug while still maintaining proper social distancing on this week’s Breakfast All Day. Matt and I spend a big chunk of our latest episode discussing the impact of the coronavirus on the entertainment industry in general and our lives specifically. But because we are indeed a film review podcast, we play catch-up with Pixar’s “Onward” from last week, and we discuss the supposedly controversial satire “The Hunt,” which was delayed several months from its original opening date. And over at our Patreon, we recap the final two episodes of both “The Outsider” and “McMillions” on HBO. We hope this all helps you somewhat, or at least provides a bit of a distraction or a pick-me-up during these scary, stressful times. Stay indoors, stay safe and thanks for staying with us.
are you gonna review the ben affleck movie from last week the way back?
I would also like to hear your take on The Way Back! If you can’t record a review for it, I understand- you’re a busy gal!
Re: It is Saint Patrick’s Day in Ireland
Christy,
It is Saint Patrick’s Day in Ireland and the streets are empty in Dublin. Normally it’s the day of the year in Dublin, where you almost have to reserve ‘standing space’ in advance. And not inside of the pubs in Dublin, but literally outside in the street. I’ve seen photographs of those same places in Dublin today, where I know that that standing space in the middle of pedestrian streets would almost be earning rent. And there is nobody from one end of the street to the other. Literally. That is not to say that this whole latest episode in Ireland has not been for nothing. We’ve learned a tonne of stuff about ourselves that we never knew before. In the run-up to when all of the European governments began to enforce travel restrictions and so on. And believe me, it is very rich movie script material. Expect to observe the impact of this on the work of writers in drama and in film for quite a while. I catch up when I can at present on the latest episodes of ‘Homeland’ for example. And it’s a show that many of the new female empowered generation here would consider part of their staple diet of television viewing. But here is the thing.
We were having a conversation at work a while back. After the recession here in Ireland it altered stuff in weird kinds of ways. Much of the generation of Christy Lemire and the ones immediately after that who needed to find employment left the country (in fact many of those have been broadcasting from countries such as America, who are qualified medical professionals). And they have asked to be allowed to return in order to assist in the healthcare recruitment crisis here. In fact, before the Coronavirus even started, most of our medical professionals had left ‘Austerity’ Ireland and haven’t been back since (even if that only meant moving across the Irish Sea as far as London or Manchester). It still feels like they have ‘left’. And then ‘Brexit’ happened in the middle of that, it came into effect only just before the Coronavirus hit. And now some of those have offered to return and help the professionals in Ireland. So we’re having to do Brexit negotiations with the United Kingdom, with a side helping of viral emergence. Where many folks had left originally, because the country was broke after the banks in Ireland had all gone bankrupt in 2008.
The truth actually is, if one wrote a ‘movie script’ like this, the film studios would laugh at you. That could never happen. What do you think this is? The end of the world? Get a life. Getting back to ‘Homeland’ television series. It’s an interesting example of a drama concept. Because it came out of something that many of the older teenagers and young women in their twenties now can scarcely remember. They weren’t conscious of what was going on in the world when the twin towers collapsed on live television. Yet is it a corner stone of the characters in the ‘Homeland’ television series. In fact, it is integral to many memorable characters that have been written for the page of broadcast and theatrical ‘large projection’ dramas and movies over the last two decades. However, much of the young audience today will view the television show as something about female empowerment and gender balance. The park about Manhattan island covered in dust and smoke on a summer’s day, kind of flies over some peoples’ heads. That’s the great thing about being young though. Being young in one’s late teens or early twenties is confusing and difficult as hell. It’s hard to know where to fit into the wider world. If people of that age group did not throw overboard a lot of things, including common sense some times, then life would just become too hard. I can understand it.
Drama can be written and can be interpreted on multiple levels. I was in my mid twenties when the Twin Towers collapsed, and the most interesting thing about that I remember. Was that it affect different people in different ways. And not just in mildly different ways. It affect different people that I knew in astonishingly different and divergent ways. To an extent which many of my generation still don’t understand that. Literally people that I knew in the 1990’s, became different people after 2001. Different people. They were always people who were going to transform anyways. Always. The events around the world, which they had only witnessed on television did act as a catalyst however. There was a before and there was an after. What that event in 2001 did demonstrate to me more than anything, is how ‘different’ people are as individuals. I began to understand people as individuals in a different way from that point onward. And that is what I gather when I watch the main characters go through this journey they are on, on a television series such as ‘Homeland’. I understand them as individuals with different kinds of motivations. That is something that is successfully achieved by the writing. In the case of Coronavirus I think that how it will affect dramatic writing is as follows. I think that it will enable writers and observers to understand how people behave in groups.
The events in New York city in September 2001 happened very far away from many people. Even in the country in which it happened, it was far away for many. The other side of a gigantic continent. However it had the affect of bringing people of that one continent ‘together’ in ways they had not felt as much together, before. It is implicit even in the name of the television show. Homeland. That is what was so striking about that event. It could be far away, and some people could feel very distant from it. To some people who were very far away, to them it felt very close. That is impossible to explain. Coronavirus is different. Coronavirus isn’t really a spectacle on television in the same way as the Twin Towers. Coronavirus though is in everybody’s home. And yet, there is something about Coronavirus which makes me believe, there will be a ‘before’ and an ‘after’. Maybe twenty years from this point, there will be a television program such as ‘Homeland’, and a new iteration of the female empowerment movement. And that television show will have it’s foundations made on to of the virus outbreak. It will have traveled far away from that starting point though, as ‘Homeland’ as done. And a new and younger audience group will have taken possession over it, and claimed it for their own purposes. Maybe not even seeing or knowing what the origin point actually was.
Re: Rugby games and Horse Racing – the simple Irish pleasures
Christy,
So while I am here, I will let you know that I did something bold yesterday and it did involve watching a movie. I was warned by somebody not to watch the movie ‘Contagion’ (2011). So I went off and I watched the movie ‘Contagion’ (2011), because the warning had made me curios. I really wanted to know, having seen the thing a number of years ago, if it was any way accurate or not. ‘Contagion’ (2011) falls into those category of movies, where people who are experts at some discipline, such as infectious disease health protection, could easily find holes in the characters, the story, the general premise. I realized after watching ‘Contagion’ (2011) yesterday just why they are warning everyone ‘not to watch it’. Having lived through a real life situation for a couple of weeks in Ireland now, it was frightening the extent to which the writers of that ‘average’ quality movie drama from several years ago, had actually gone and studied this. They had all of the right terminology, they had a good handle on the science and the general dynamics of a disease outbreak. The whole thing is shockingly realistic. However, I believe the makers of that film that was released in 2011, would have had a hard job getting people who provide the backing for such a project, to actually believe in it at all. There was every reason in the world, that in a movie such as ‘Contagion’ (2011), that movie ought to have been high-jacked. As so many of those kinds of movies are. There should at least have been a ‘car chase’, or a fight scene, or something bordering on a Hollywood cliche that should have found it’s way in there. Shoe-horned into it, by some ‘executive producer’ on a power trip and grossly over paranoid that he wouldn’t make his bonus, if he didn’t take control over the project. You know the thing you’ve probably seen happen to many cinematic projects. Even some projects made by the best film makers of all.
In the case of ‘Contagion’ (2011), nah. That wasn’t there. Somehow or other, they managed to make a good movie with ‘conceptual integrity’ to it. The only problem was, one could not see how well developed and researched the plot, the characters and the overall drama was. Unless one had lived through something like this. And let’s all face it. How many apocalyptic events that are shown in films that come from Hollywood, does something happen where the whole world almost gets to partake in the real thing? It never happens. I’ve never tried to escape from a burning building and succeeded. I’ve never been on a bus on a freeway in Los Angeles that needed to maintain it’s speed of over 50 miles per hour, even after the bus driver had been shot and was been driven by an actress. Co-piloted by a Los Angeles cop who was even better looking than the actress doing the driving. Who admits around twenty years later that secretly he had fancied this actress. Intrigue inside of intrigue, inside of intrigue. The kind of character though in the movie ‘Contagion’ (2011) that really scared the pants off of me, was the one that is played Jude Law. Wow. Here in Ireland now all of the authorities are going around the place screaming, stop spreading ‘fake news’, stop spreading ‘fake news’. It’s like everyone has got to become a mini U.S. President for a week, in their own country. And using the same lines, to hurl abuse at people that they know. Many here in Ireland have gotten a lot more concerned and worked up about the spreading of ‘fake news’ than the actual spreading of the virus. There is a rush to the microphone at the moment, or the ‘mega’ phone. And that is what I mean about this event in 2020, as opposed to the one that happened in September 2001, being all about the dynamics within the group. We’re seeing things about group dynamics here in Ireland, that we never knew even existed. It had always existed, it was just underneath some other stuff. What Coronavirus if nothing else has done, is it has kicked over whatever stuff, had been burying the stuff that was underneath. And now we’re all seeing things in a whole new way for the first time. A whole new way.
There are a whole lot of things that one could say. Some of it very funny, and some of it not. The thing for me from a writing and drama perspective that was revealed to me though in a new light was peoples’ greed. In a way that I had never fully understood before. It wasn’t the greed though of the ‘masters of the universe’. It was the appeal of comfort and for minor rewards or treats that everyday people fell helpless to overcome. Sort of like the guy who cheats a bit at board games, or playing cards. The minnow, not the monster. The person who waits for the other person to finish playing the slot machine. And then swoops in with a small bundle of coins, to find out what happens when they pull the handle a few more times. The small things, not the big things. The opportunistic people. Expect to find more and more of that character development in the writing of the best drama and television writers in the near future. In one instance, in a school in a small town in the west of Ireland a group of high school kids had flown to Lombardy in northern Italy. And had returned after the news of the outbreak in Ireland had hit the head lines here. There was massive controversy in the small town in which the school children who had been on holiday to northern Italy had returned to Ireland and started back taking their classes as per normal. The parents of the children who’s children had not been abroad started protesting to the parents of the other ones, to isolate their children and have them all tested. At which the parents of the ski holiday kids had become insulted and relationships had suddenly broken down between parents in a small town. And the children were all getting dragged between the two factions. And that was a full fortnight, before the Coronavirus cases in that part of Ireland were confirmed as having come from children returning from Italy. That is when the pot so to speak in the small Irish town, boiled over it’s own edges altogether. A nearby university was also closed, and ‘the less that was said the better’.
And then, after the government had managed to bury the identity of the school and the outbreak of the virus very early on in this cycle. I was sitting having breakfast with a group of tradesmen that I worked with. And he told me that the children in his school in the midlands part of Ireland had all left on an airplane and gone to Lombardy in northern Italy to go on a different ski holiday over there. And as we put all of the pieces of our jigsaw collectively together around the breakfast table, you could instantly and visible notice the ‘social distancing’ that was happening in cafe between four working class tradesmen. We all began to get a strange feeling and wonder to ourselves, where is this all going to end? That was a fortnight ago, when the country was still ‘catching up’ with the news – whether real, fake or indifferent. I remember at one stage looking at the website of the national broadcasting service here in Ireland. We had just had a general election in the country on February the 8th. Just before the Coronavirus outbreak had become a thing. And the election results had returned a ‘three-way’ dead heat between three different political parties. None of whom had wanted to speak to the other one. Did I mention that you couldn’t even ‘make this up’, if you tried? So there we were in Ireland, will airplanes full of school children flying back and forth to northern Italy in order to go on ski holidays in February 2020. And we’re all sitting looking at each other over bacon and eggs. On the national broadcast (non-fake) news website I looked at it. On one side it said, do social distancing and take precautions. And on the same web page, there was another story just as big. The latest results from Cheltenham English Horse Racing Festival (that is where lots of Irish folk go across to England and get jammed up together in bars and restaurants for a whole week of horse racing fun). If you’re doing well in life, that’s where you want to be for a week each year in order to celebrate the ‘end of winter time’. It is good work if you can get it. And the guys who were sitting around and had just demolished the plates of bacon and eggs that morning in Ireland, were wondering as we looked at the ‘real’ as opposed to the ‘fake’ news. What’s wrong with this picture, and who is actually confusing who? Is it possible on the one hand to get all merry and happy about horse racing, and at the same time get all worried about a global pandemic virus? Well the truth is, if you’re ‘Irish’ then it probably is. But then again, a little Austrian dude named Sigmund Freud had another thing to say about the Irish, and maybe he had a point too. And to top it all over, the Italy rugby team were due to fly into Dublin city in the middle of all of this, and play and international rugby game in a huge stadium seating tens of thousands of supporters. Which did get cancelled, but the Italians all came to Dublin anyhow for a holiday which defeated the whole thing. And they were disco-ing and partying all night around nightclubs in Dublin that weekend. Yes, as they say, the Chinese curse and all of that. Never a dull moment in Dublin, that is for sure. Good luck trying to sell this tall story though, which just happens to be true, to a movie studio. They’d laugh you straight back out the door.
Re: The Last Straw
Christy,
By the way, the last straw probably was when the government (that we still don’t have), in Ireland had announced some day last week, that the country was going to shut down until the end of March. At that point, an Irish man or woman would be forgiven for wondering, if we had actually tried any harder could we have found a bigger way to make a mess of this? Well you never need to wonder for long in Dublin that is for sure. The kids were all off college and they decided, now is a good time to have ‘Corona Parties’. I think that was the final straw. You always can depend on some wild bunch of teenagers in Dublin though, to provide one with the very last, of the all of ‘the last straws’. Corona Parties, Yep.
I mean, did someone mention about giving the deplore-ables a run for their money. The one thing that some Irish writer did once say about Dubliners. They will never be short of a word. Whatever it is, give the Dubliners a little bit of time and they’ll nail whatever it is on the head. And in the most alarming fashion too. There is a tonne load as I explained of new creative drama material that is available, and will get used in long form or feature film length production. It is going to provide writers of drama for a long time to come. From the movie critics’ point of view, you will be tested to get your ‘Corona’ analytical goggles on. It should be good. All the best.
Re: Missing Scene
Christy,
I forgot to add in this scene. It makes sense of everything else above, because I think it paints a picture about post-financial crisis societies and economies, in a place like Ireland in 2020. If you like you can look for Irish prime minister ‘statement to the nation’ on Saint Patrick’s Day in 2020. If you imagined it being like a scene from a Gerard Bulter ‘straight to video’ movie, then I would not argue with you. That is exactly what it sounded like. The ‘end is coming’ and we’re all in this together sort of script. Yet it wasn’t fake, it actually happened.
The picture of a scene that I want to paint however, is a different one. It ‘might’ be helpful in 2020, on foot of the arrival of the virus to get some of our trained and experienced staff home from America or England, in order to help out here. That’s basically where we’re at at this moment on Saint Patrick’s Day. The Irish in America in hospitals over there are tied into contracts that prevent them going home, even if for a short break. Because they’d have no job or contract to return to in the United States afterwards. What I’m trying to do is to paint a picture about how things are in various ‘Post Financial Crisis’ pockets around Europe. Where we’ve just starting to ‘climb out of the bucket’ after the crash. And now, it feels something like sliding back down into the bucket all over again. What I need to do is to build up a picture, to paint a scene. In an otherwise normally looking workplace somewhere in Ireland in the not so distant past. Where everyone is sitting having a coffee break. So you have Margot Robbie, Charlize Theron, Nichole Kidman and a couple of Irish dudes just hanging around (at least, that is in my imagination).
We were sitting having coffee with a number of the senior engineers working the company who were extremely young. However, there were a number of our ‘age group’ who had been lucky enough to be re-employed in Ireland back into industry. It was a weird thing, because we’d borne the worst brunt of the financial crisis. We’d lost our careers and our employment, and were the most heavily indebted generation that had ever lived in the country. And there we sat around this coffee table sipped out of cups. Our managers now were these twenty something year old, straight out of graduate school (and if the truth be told, some were still attending graduate school whilst working). But they were cheap and they made the place look busy. And businesses in Ireland after the financial crisis, they like cheap a lot. What they certainly didn’t seem to want were middle aged, expensive professionals who might actually have something called ‘experience’ underneath their belt. A bit of a death knell really, kind of like a fashion model with a forty inch waste like my own. No way, man.
The pyramid had strangely sort of inverted here in Ireland. Where the twenty something year old engineers were calling themselves ‘senior’ staff and were given job titles. Those of us with multiple decades of working at the same problems and the same tasks were given something called a ‘FTC’. I had no idea what it was when I was asked to sign it. It is called a ‘fixed term contract’. What used to happen is that all of us forty somethings were ‘churned’. Where we were hired for a while and worked hard. Then our ‘FTC’ was not renewed, and you found yourself out again after several months. I think that it is also known as the ‘gig economy’. But this kind of thing came in very quickly after ‘the crash’. Very quickly. So there you were having borrowed money up your ears before the crash, when you were advised to. To ‘get on the property ladder’. It should have been called the ‘Iron Maiden’, would be more apt. We were stretched out on the Iron Maiden, and given an FTC to keep it all going. Yeah.
There was one individual of my own age though at the table present. She was lucky, she had managed to remain in employment. A lovely person, I liked her a lot. Very outgoing and vivacious (sort of like a Christy Lemire in a lot of ways). So you can imagine yourself sitting at this coffee dock in Ireland, surrounded by your twenty something year old bosses. And the subject changes to the soccer and the World Cup. Well what could be dangerous about talking about soccer and sport? I mean, how does one manage to stand in dog puddle while doing that? Bearing in mind, that we’re all walking around on egg shells in this context. With our FTC’s visibly showing out of our rear pockets, which might have been pasted across our foreheads anyway. Because these bunch of graduate students weren’t dummies that’s for sure. Heck, I started as a freshman in 1992. Who even knew what kind of popular music had existed back then, or if popular music had even been invented then. We’re busy walking around on our egg shells and the nice forty something lady asks her twenty something year old boss, remember when we got into the World Cup for the first time in soccer in 1990? Her twenty something year old boss politely said no. And then Christy gives the the youngster a friendly nudge as asks, why don’t you remember? That’s what you call putting your foot in it right there. The twenty something replies to the older woman, I wasn’t born yet in 1990. I wasn’t born yet in 1990. The other girls there had been, but still could barely walk. I looked at Christy as she looked back at me, across the fresh cappuchio’s and as slow as I was, I had got an impression that break time was over. I’ll never forget the expression on her face of absolute and utter horror. What the hell are we? The grandparents or what?
This is why in Ireland now in 2020, we have our doctors and all of our healthcare professionals skype-ing home from all across the globe. Asking to be facilitated so that they can return in order to do something to help out. This is what I mean I guess when I talk about ‘writing material’. Yeah, myself and a bunch of plumbing tradesman I was hanging out with more recently. Me and a bunch of other dudes (and I was still the ‘elderly gentlemen’ believe it or not, at the age of forty five), we installed the heating and plumbing system for a movie production studio for Apple TV nearby in Ireland. I remember there was a major push going on over this, to erect the seventy feet height sound stage here, to supplement the one they all ready had. All needed in order to expand the capacity that was already available in Wicklow for various Apple TV productions. We had finished the plumbing and things were starting to go ahead. Last week, the production of that show was cancelled for the moment, put on the back burner. The dream of bringing Hollywood to the west of Ireland for the first time, killed dead in it’s track by a virus? Yeah, now the movie studio company and it’s movie script buyers are looking at this ‘based on reality’ story of my, and they don’t believe a single word I say. Now I’m really going to get shown the exit, because this kind of thing can’t happen in real life. Can it, or not?