Pete Wright:
Hey, come on in. No, it’s fine. Why don’t you have a seat right over there? Let me tell you what I know. You pressed play on a podcast, a monthly round-table podcast, part of The Next Reel family, about new movies in theaters. You knew that. It was right there in the notes. And you came anyway. I’ve got the episode description right here. Quote, “Full spoilers,” end quote. You saw that, and you’re still here.

So I have to ask you: what did you think was going to happen here tonight? Steve Sarmento is here, Tommy Metz III is here, Ocean Murff is here, and tonight we’re talking about Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s fever dream, starring Robert Pattinson as the man who made “have a seat” a household phrase. The real Chris Hansen has seen it. He gave it a D. We have a few more thoughts than that. I’m Pete Wright, and you’re on The Film Board.

We are talking about Primetime.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah. What do we want to do?

Pete Wright:
I admit it, we put this movie on the schedule, and who amongst you thought, really? Primetime’s gonna be our movie of the month?

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah, I think it’s a good one.

Pete Wright:
Who thought that? Anybody?

Tommy Metz III:
You mean in a sarcastic way?

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
No, I think it was my suggestion.

Pete Wright:
It was. In a universe where Resident Evil exists in the same month, we ended up with Primetime. I kind of feel like we lucked out with this movie.

I’m gonna go ahead and say it. I had a blast. I don’t quite understand how to put words to it yet, so I am eager for this conversation to help me wrap my head around what I just saw. Let us begin with the fair opening thoughts. Steve Sarmento.

Steve Sarmento:
Hi. There’s this movie, and I really liked sitting next to you while we watched it.

Pete Wright:
So gross. It’s so gross already.

Steve Sarmento:
That’s how I felt coming out of this movie. I felt gross, but there was something compelling about it, and the more it has sat with me, it has given me a lot to really think about what I watched. It’s unsettling from the opening lines to its closing frame. There are some amazing visual choices that are made here, lighting, all kinds, and just some really strong performances. It’s not a film that I expected we would be discussing or that I would have this type of reaction to. I don’t want to say it’s an enjoyable experience, because for me it’s not, but it is artfully made, and I think it gives people a lot to think about in the stories that we see, not only of the show but of the people that were involved in making To Catch a Predator, and the arcs that we see them take. It was really powerful, compelling storytelling for me.

Pete Wright:
Okay, so far, so good. Ocean, I’m gonna say you’re the only one on the panel tonight that I don’t feel like I can predict.

Ocean Murff:
Well, I’m going to smile, because they can hear the smile in your voice when you’re talking. And I’m going to start with: the acting is amazing in this movie. I really did appreciate the performances that I saw. Other than that, I don’t know what this is. As the movie went along, I was looking for a point. What is this movie trying to say? And I found that at the end of it, I don’t know what it was trying to say.

It was like I was watching people make bad decisions throughout the movie. Well-acted bad decisions, mind you, but just a bunch of bad decisions, and then they rolled the credits. So really, I am very much looking forward to this conversation to see what points other people got out of this. I watched it very, very recently, and so I’m trying to find meaning in it, and I’m trying to see: is the meaning there, or am I trying to force meaning and definition into something that is nebulous? Am I looking at a cloud and seeing a face, even though it’s just a cloud?

Pete Wright:
Yeah. And now it’s Chris Hansen’s face, isn’t it?

Ocean Murff:
Exactly, exactly, exactly. So yeah, I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Pete Wright:
Okay, all right. Tom?

Tommy Metz III:
I love a big swing, and that’s what this movie is. It’s a relatively small story, but blown up into operatic fashion. And I think that makes a ton of sense because, A, it keeps the movie alive, and B, more importantly, my take on it is this is how these people, especially Chris Hansen, saw themselves: this cinematic, this huge, this important.

As far as a point, for me it was just about when fame-hungry narcissists collide with justice, both social justice and real justice, what happens, and who loses their soul in the mix. I thought it was a fascinating character study.

And then I loved the acting and the filmmaking. I was an enormous, enormous fan of a movie that is very uncomfortable and at times hard to watch, but I could never take my eyes away from it.

Pete Wright:
That was my experience too. I found it riveting, and I totally share Ocean’s sense of disjointedness. Like, I walked out of the movie… I almost regret that you just saw it today, coming into this show, right?

Ocean Murff:
Yes, yes.

Pete Wright:
I felt that way yesterday when I saw the movie. I walked out and I did not know what to make of it. And today I feel better that what we have in this movie is at least the presentation of a question: who’s the predator?

Right? We’ve created a cultural norm in which predation is a standard, and we make entertainment about it, and we try to protect our kids from it. And everybody’s doing it in some way, shape, or form, whether we’re looking for a new job, or on the job we have, or whether we’re producing a show that we’re trying to get eyes on, or whether we’re Jeff Zucker playing Jeff Zucker, doing the real thing in his office. I feel like everybody in this movie is a predator, and that’s one of the things that made me walk out and feel like I need a shower. Because this feels like we’re putting a microscope on the little daily buckle shuffle of getting attention. And that felt really dark.

And this is one of the best movies about that that I remember seeing in a very long time.

Can we start a little bit with Pattinson’s Hansen? Because I think Ocean said it, right? So much of this movie is built into the performances, and I’m gonna have a hard time, because there was no one in here that I felt wasn’t giving a bravura performance. Everybody was fantastic.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
Phoebe Bridgers, for crying out loud. We’ll get there. But Chris Hansen is almost the biggest, most broken predator of the batch.

I should also say I have very little background on the show. I’ve never watched a single episode. I don’t have an attachment to it. I always felt kind of dirty that it existed. And so walking into this movie felt like it could have just as easily been a fiction, a commentary like The Hunger Games. And yet here we are. Turns out we’re trying to tell a true story. Give me a sense of your thoughts on Pattinson’s performance.

Is he impressionistic? Is it a meme? Or is he really playing just a monster? What’s your sense of Pattinson? We like our Pats generally, yeah?

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, I’ll just jump in. I thought he was great. I thought he got the voice really well. And the interesting thing, that I was chalking up to the performance and not just a break with the dialect coach, was he did the voice that you would expect to hear when they were doing promos and the shows and stuff like that. But then when he was just being Chris Hansen talking to a regular person, the voice sounded more like how Robert Pattinson just sounds.

And having never spoken to Chris Hansen personally, that might be like he puts on an affect when he’s doing the show, and then his normal voice is different. So I thought he did a great job of that. I felt that he also did a good job of portraying Chris Hansen as someone who really believed he was a social justice warrior… not social justice, that’s the wrong type, but a justice warrior.

It was a mission and a calling as much as it was a show. I think that was his primary motivation, but then it seemed that the attention and getting it on primetime and trying to compete with Stone Phillips and being the most popular was also there as well. So you have these two truths that you could argue conflict with each other. And I think it did a great job of showing both sides of that, because two things about a person can be true.

Tommy Metz III:
I love that, because I think his interpretation of Chris Hansen is so deep and varied that I came to slightly the opposite order. I think that this portrayal is someone who is incredibly jealous and fame-hungry and is using the excuse of “I’m saving the children, I am an avenging angel.” He keeps using that because I think part of him knows how exploitative and how weird this show is. I mean, not that I’m sticking up for the people that would show up in those houses, but we’re watching people’s lives end to a certain extent, whether or not they end up being arrested.

There’s a documentary called Predators, which I’m an enormous fan of, and they reveal that very few of these convictions ever went through. But that doesn’t matter, because it was televised and they were found guilty in the court of public opinion.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, because the fact that it was televised is the only thing that matters.

Tommy Metz III:
It’s the only thing, yeah, even though, like, what? You invited them over and nothing happened. It’s just a weird line. But either way, I thought that he was using that as a shield in order to prop himself up and make himself feel better for what he was doing. So I like that Ocean sort of had it the other way around, and I think both are equally valid.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah, it’s an interesting arc that he takes. One moment that stands out for me is when he takes Decoy Dan out to dinner, and there’s the bracelet from India. Dan asks, “Oh, is that an acting totem?” And he’s like, “No, there’s no acting here.” And I’m like, but there is. There is so much performance to that. Is he deluding himself? Is that the story he needs to tell himself and to tell Dan to justify everything that they’re doing?

There are so many layers to him. The story about India, again, that justification. I have to question what type of man creates this show and then wakes his kids, his young boys, up in the middle of the night to show them this. Like, “We’re gonna go to primetime with this.” No, that’s not about protecting your kids. It’s not.

There’s so much about that. And Pattinson is such a recognizable face. There’s always that grappling of, “Oh, I’m watching Robert Pattinson.” But I think there was enough there where I could see the Chris Hansen coming through, where I’m like, okay, this is a very distinct person and personality, and I thought it came through really, really well through those ups and downs, the fixation on what type of attention he’s getting.

Refreshing the National Enquirer website for that information. He’s very aware of how he’s being perceived at all times. And I thought that just really fed into where this ultimately goes, and how high the stakes are at the end when things really go wrong, to the point where he’s basically incapacitated on the floor of the house: “I’m not getting up ’til we get the whale.” It was all or nothing on that. And for him to have gotten to that point, the stakes being so high, I thought his performance really enthralled me and pulled me into that fully with him.

Tommy Metz III:
And being on the floor after the call from the executive. It’s not, “Oh no, we’re not going to get the big bad guy.” It’s because his show is going to be pulled.

Steve Sarmento:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
Because he’s getting his ass kicked by polar bears on Lost.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah. Did you guys get the opening ad from Chris Hansen? The TruBlu ad?

Ocean Murff:
No, no, no, no.

Steve Sarmento:
No, did not see that.

Pete Wright:
So he apparently bought… I didn’t get it either, but I was late to the movie.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, I didn’t, but I heard about it, yeah.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, I heard about that, but I didn’t see it.

Pete Wright:
You can find it on YouTube. I watched it this morning. It’s thirty seconds of the real Chris Hansen standing in a kitchen where you might expect him to share a pizza with some sort of perceived pervert, I guess, and he is pitching his streaming network, TruBlu. And there was something about watching him in the context of watching Pattinson that suddenly made sense. I think what Pattinson’s performance captures is a guy who is contextually courageous, right? When he is tracking down perceived predators, when he’s tracking down people that he has convinced himself are the worst people… and maybe they are, but we don’t ever really know.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
We just know the story that he makes up. But then he stands in the elevator area in the lobby and is confronted by Stone Phillips, and he looks like Gollum being confronted by a brave Gandalf, right? He shrinks, his shoulders go down, he speaks only from the side. He looks like a henchman of some sort. He is out of his context and he is broken.

I love that you brought up the phone call when he ends up on the floor saying, “I’m not leaving this house until we get the whale.” He is non-functional. He’s not even able to do his job, and Decoy Dan has to do his job, and arguably does it better than he does. That’s one of the things that I really want to highlight out of my experience with this movie: man, Robert Pattinson captured the spirit of the most incredibly fragile entertainment ego in a really unique way, and I just found it super incisive.

Whether it’s Chris Hansen or not, it’s a really incisive portrayal of this archetype. I think it’s up there with watching Network. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore,” Mr. Beale. That’s the caliber of performance I saw in this guy.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, I think what we’re seeing him portray is a narcissist suffering ego death. He’s having a narcissistic breakdown, and it’s terrifying. And then to pair him with the always, always excellent Merritt Wever, I hope I’m getting that name right…

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Because she slow-plays and low-plays a lot of things, and then letting her unleash at him finally, because she needs him. She needs him to finally do his job, actually. The one thing that he promised he would do. Fantastic. Hard to watch, but fantastic.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. She’s not all great either, his producing partner, right?

Steve Sarmento:
Oh no.

Ocean Murff:
No, but she owns it.

Pete Wright:
She’s not all A-pluses.

Tommy Metz III:
She’s got a job to do.

Ocean Murff:
Like in the meeting when they’re pitching it to her, she’s like, “Yeah, I’m basically a horrible person, and I make TV about horrible events. And so therefore your feel-good show does not interest me.”

Pete Wright:
Right.

Ocean Murff:
And I think she was only interested in it when she was thinking that she would be getting pushed out of the show she was in now. So then she’s like, “Well, I don’t want to be unemployed. I need to maintain some level of power here.” But then when she saw that in the ending, we have a new horrible situation where we need to make horrible TV, “Let’s put cameras on the guns.” With her, I think it’s much less so than what you have with Chris Hansen, where it’s a more complicated character. I think she’s more straightforward. “This is what I am, this is what I do, deal with it.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
But it’s just as interesting of an arc, I find. For me, what really hit it home was after we see the first round of things, we get that sequence where we see her prepping the house for the next day. “I gotta clean up the kitchen. I’m getting Chris’s papers there.” It’s like she’s mom cleaning up the house after the boys have left the party. But this is her gig. Later on, we start to see Xavier step up, and things are slipping out of her control. She’s got to grapple with being the woman in the boys’ club.

So there’s that overarching factor as well of how she manages that, and how she advocates for herself. Again, as Ocean points out: “I’ve got to figure out how to stay alive. I’m riding this for as long as I can. It feels strong. Oh crap, it’s not. It’s a sinking ship, I’m gonna get out of here. Then, oh, we’ve got a whale.” ABC calls, and she’s like, “No, no, no, I’m gonna stay here.”

She’s blown by the wind of wherever success is. She is chasing success just as much as Chris Hansen is. I think her internal motivation is probably very different, the type of person she is. But for me, I saw that nice parallel in that arc of people chasing success, and, as Ocean pointed out, people making bad decisions. I think that gets to the root of at least these two characters’ bad decisions, because the reason that they’re making them isn’t based on the right thing or the good thing. It’s selfish self-interest, selfish self-promotion, all of those things. And her story, I think, is just as compelling. I’m curious: is this character an actual person? Is this an amalgam of several other characters?

Possibly, but I think it’s an interesting arc to see where she goes and where that character would end up after this, because we’re left sort of wondering where everybody goes. We know it’s disappointment, but I’m curious to see how each of them would land on their feet after facing this.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah, her legacy is kind of sealed after the gentleman commits suicide. I was waiting for a turn, and the last thing that we ever hear her say is, “I think we can make this work. We just have to interview some of the police officers.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah. And I feel that your definition of bad and my definition of bad are very different.

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, yes.

Ocean Murff:
I don’t know. I get seeing it as a movie where they are looking for fame and attention and success and all that, but I really feel that Merritt Wever’s character, Andie, more so than even Chris… for her, I don’t really believe she’s chasing success. I believe she’s chasing something that is what she is. She wants to make this type of television. The fact that people are watching it is great.

That’s an extra bonus. That’s awesome and amazing. But I think that even when she was waffling on the other end, it was mostly just to not be unemployed. You can’t get to the shows you want to make if you don’t have a job, if you’re nowhere. And the second that she saw this, even with the tragedy that was being displayed with the DA killing himself and everything going on, she’s like, “Yeah, I can make it work,” because she understood, “All right, this is more of what I want to do, and I can make this work so I can make more of what I want to do.” I thought it was really more that she was just going for what she was, versus whatever success was. Because success, in this case, she could have easily still taken the other job.

The other job was at ABC, up and rising, a lot more promises. She was already going to be a part of this or that, because it was already happening day of. So she could have had both. I think this show was just more an outlet of her actual personality.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, and she says it, right? She says it out loud in that voicemail. She says, “I just don’t think doing good is really my style.” I’m grossly paraphrasing, but the line was something about how she admits that she’s in her home right now. She knows the kind of television that she can produce when she’s at her best. And I think there is a certain honesty to that level of opportunism, and self-awareness, that is really appealing on stage. And of course Merritt Wever is just magnetic, and you get that sequence when she stops the room full of Texas sheriffs and is able to almost whisper what they’re about to do. “We’re running out of time. We’re going to get this interview.”

And she says it so soft. That contrast between the noise and chaos of these guys getting their guns and getting all saddled up, and her being able to silence them, is just a real testament to her own intensity. She’s incredible at this stuff. I did hear an interview with her this morning where she says, “I sure am excited to do comedy again,” because after this and Severance, she needs a break. She’s wonderful. Okay. Opportunism. I just said that word and I realized, oh, right.

I’ve been using “predator” for “opportunist,” and it’s kind of one and the same in this movie. Can we talk about Skyler Gisondo, who is certainly on my list of best friends who have never met me yet? What a funny, fun actor to end up in this role as Decoy Dan. What do we think of Skyler?

Tommy Metz III:
I thought he was incredible. I’m a really big fan of his, and I love how he can do really broad comedy, like in Bookworm… Booksmart…

Pete Wright:
Booksmart, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, the sequel, Bookworm.

Pete Wright:
Bookworm, right, right.

Tommy Metz III:
No, it’s Booksmart. Yeah, Booksmart. And I thought he was really… in Vacation, yeah.

Pete Wright:
Oh, he did Vacation. So funny.

Tommy Metz III:
Where they have to cover him up with gross shirts because he’s actually the most jacked person in the world, but he’s being bullied by a four-year-old.

Pete Wright:
I know.

Tommy Metz III:
I think he’s remarkable. He’s kind of both the audience surrogate, the willing participant, and the most human person here. He pays a price for what he ends up doing, as everyone does.

But the thing that I loved most, not just about his performance but about the choice that the director and the crew made, and I don’t think this is a breakthrough, I think it’s very on purpose: the moments he has with Robert Pattinson where it’s just the two of them have all the tropes of a seduction scene.

Pete Wright:
Yes.

Tommy Metz III:
Meeting him at the bar for a drink, walking him to his hotel room, giving him a gift. There’s nothing seductive about it, but I think it’s very purposeful. If he was a little bit younger or something, you would see this pair in these situations and you would raise an eyebrow. And I think that’s really smart. I really enjoyed that.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, it was very obviously seductive. I thought he was grooming him. I mean, not really knowing everything. Not being fully immersed in the true story of all of this, I’m watching this super uncomfortable movie, and I’m going, “Oh, does Chris Hansen eventually…” not molest, because he’s an adult, right? But I’m like, is this the other shoe that drops? Because Dan is so stupid as a character, right? It is beyond naivete. Naivete would be cute and endearing.

He’s just a downright idiot. So there’s part of it where I’m going, not only do I think Chris Hansen was seducing him to sleep with him later, I was like, “Oh, he’s gonna get him.” And when that doesn’t happen, then I’m kind of like, all right, so now I don’t really know. Is he just a bumbling idiot? Is he like Gilligan from Gilligan’s Island, where he just kind of bumbles around like an idiot and ends up somewhere? Because he ended up where he…

Tommy Metz III:
I didn’t see him as that dumb, though. I just thought he was in over his head. He’s in a situation where he thinks that hotel room is dope.

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
And it’s like the most basic hotel room.

Ocean Murff:
Exactly.

Tommy Metz III:
He’s from a different city, and LA is bright lights. He just got off the bus. I don’t think he’s dumb. I think he’s just really out of his depth, personally.

Ocean Murff:
Oh, okay. Well, I found him to be incredibly, infuriatingly dumb and stupid and idiotic, and he just bumbled his way into where he wanted to go anyway.

He had no personality of his own. He was just trying to imbue himself into being an actor, which is trying to pretend to be somebody else, because he had no center core of who he was, because who he is is just some idiot. And so he’s treating this like an acting role. He wants to immerse himself in it and be that. That’s all that he is. He didn’t have anything else.

But he ended up where he wanted to be. He got a SAG card. So I was like, good for him. I honestly thought he ended on a positive note. So I’m curious what the cost is that we’re referencing.

Tommy Metz III:
No. What are you talking about? The cost is he’s back in Mesa, Arizona. He’s not acting. He can’t get an acting role.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Dan Plumb is a real person. He’s in Predators. And you can’t get an acting role after having been on national television, on the biggest show in America at that time, playing a decoy, playing a young child.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
His career is over before it even begins. That’s the problem.

Pete Wright:
And we should say his name is Dan Schrack in real life. He’s the guy in Predators, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
My apologies. My apologies.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, but I didn’t get that from the movie. And what you said, yeah, that does sound bad. But in the movie, that isn’t the case. In the movie, he ends with his SAG card.

Tommy Metz III:
But he’s in Arizona.

Ocean Murff:
It was just what he wanted.

Tommy Metz III:
He’s in Arizona in an apartment.

Steve Sarmento:
It’s not working, yeah.

Ocean Murff:
They can make movies in Arizona. They make movies everywhere. So there are no actors that live in Mesa, Arizona, of any stripe?

Steve Sarmento:
Not in Arizona, no. Well, they go to LA to work. I can tell you there’s no film industry here.

Pete Wright:
All the great Arizona stories are filmed in New Mexico anyway.

Steve Sarmento:
Yes.

Ocean Murff:
Well, you can get there from there, you know.

Steve Sarmento:
Sure.

Ocean Murff:
So he has a SAG card, and then he could go where he wants. I mean, in the context of the movie, it really does seem like his ending is positive. He got the thing he wanted.

Tommy Metz III:
I think it’s at what cost. But did you see how reluctant he was to even talk to that guy, to the one person that we see?

Ocean Murff:
He wanted that SAG card. He wanted to be an actor. He is.

Tommy Metz III:
We don’t see inside his apartment. We see that it is just one apartment in a tract of apartments. So he does not have money. He’s living in Mesa, Arizona, and he’s shy about talking to this person.

Ocean Murff:
Right.

Tommy Metz III:
If he was an actor, he would be confident. He wouldn’t be weirded out by just talking to another human being.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, but he’s like that the whole movie.

Tommy Metz III:
I think he is afraid of the world.

Steve Sarmento:
No, no, no. I disagree. Because I think he got his SAG card. I mean, yes, that was his driving ambition. But if we look at the choices he makes to get there, for me, it’s that conversation with his friend who’s like, “Yeah, we saw it, and you’re in it for like one second. Great. I’m proud of you as an actor. You got this gig, you’re paid, but if I’m a general member of the public, I won’t remember you.” And then that pushes him to step in when Chris Hansen is completely non-functional. It’s like, “Here’s what I can do.”

Maybe I can leverage this opportunity to become a face, to become a memorable entity. And it’s leaning into that: “I’m gonna go further into this show.” That’s his path. That’s his choice to get his SAG card. Everything is about that. And again, he’s making choices selfishly, ultimately, as he’s sitting in that car. Yes, ultimately he gets what he wants, but I think the path he took to get there is not a positive one. It’s not a redeeming one.

I don’t think it’s a happy ending. I think it’s, “I made a bunch of bad choices to get this, and this is worthless and meaningless to me, because the price I’ve had to pay, the things that this has cost me to get here, isn’t worth this SAG card.” And that’s sort of how I took it. Again, that overarching ambition.

Tommy Metz III:
Me too, it’s the same.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, you’re giving him credit for way more brain power than I am.

Tommy Metz III:
The whole movie is a tale about what are you willing to do to get to your personal primetime.

Ocean Murff:
No, I agree with that.

Pete Wright:
I delight in this conversation, because I think you’re all right.

Tommy Metz III:
And they all pay a price.

Pete Wright:
I think he came into this kind of an empty shell, and that’s part of what’s so interesting.

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, yeah.

Pete Wright:
All he was was ambition. He was his own form of predator. He didn’t have a whole lot of himself. He just found out who he was by trying to pretend to be an actor, and he didn’t know what that destination was gonna look like.

And he ended up being such an easy mark for Chris Hansen, right? Even after his first engagement, where the first guy comes in and drops his pants in front of him on camera after “we’re gonna film the rehearsal.” Totally unprepared for this gig, and realizing only when it was way too late that he wasn’t gonna be that guy.

That scene where he steps up and takes over the interview when Chris is writhing on the floor and he says, “What did you think was going to happen?” is yet another data point that he was an empty shell trying to pretend his way into an identity.

And I found that so heartbreakingly sad, because when he gets out of the van at the very end and walks away into shallow focus, right? All we have is that foreboding sense of end of line, end of career.

Tommy Metz III:
Right. He’s walking away from Hollywood.

Pete Wright:
He tried so hard to manifest something that he did not understand, and he lost. And now what do you do with it? That’s the thing. It is a success.

From a certain point of view, it’s an absolute success. It is a milestone on a highway that ends in the middle of the desert. That’s the sad part.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
The cool part is he got the card, and now he’s gonna put it on his wall as a trophy, as an acting artifact.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah. And I think the other part, and I don’t know how heavily this weighs into it, is the scene he has with Del, where Del says, “Oh, I got a confirmation call to do this,” and explains to him, “You gotta smile when you’re talking, but also you can’t act your way through this. This isn’t about acting. You have to be this person.” So for me, bringing that to this, there wasn’t a distinct separation of, “Oh, I’m acting.” He’s having to put himself into this so much. So does he even deserve the SAG card? Was he really acting, or was he having to become this decoy in these situations himself, not playing a part? And for me that’s the other layer of complexity to Decoy Dan: he doesn’t know who he is.

He’s not a really strong actor. So he’s had to become like a chameleon. He’s had to become these decoys over and over again to play these parts, and the price that takes on somebody. And perhaps my view is tainted because, like Tommy, I did see the documentary Predators. To see that interview with Dan, for him to say in that interview, looking back, “If you had given me $4 million to do this again, I would not take a dime of that. I would have walked away. I would never do this again for any amount of money.” That’s how much this destroyed him.

That, to me, is powerful. And I may be bringing that baggage to this.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
But I felt like, at least in this portrayal, I got that sense of not knowing who he is, but “I’m gonna take on different parts for this goal of myself.” And for me that’s tied into what we were talking about with Chris Hansen: “I’m going to be this person. I can be the strong person when I’m in charge of the show. I’m this cowering side person in front of the bigwigs at NBC.” People becoming who they are, or who they think they need to be, to achieve the goal, and a lack of sense of self.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah. I think he only really cowered around Stone Phillips, which I found to be interesting. Pete, you were talking about how he did kind of shrink and went to the side when Stone Phillips was there, because it’s like he looked up to and wants to be Stone Phillips. But then when they had the meeting with Jeff Zucker, he’s late because he’s calling a vending machine helpline. The actual power in the company, he doesn’t care about at all. He’s like, “Well, I’m still the big deal. I’m gonna make you wait for me, even though you run the company and you hold the fate of my show in the palm of your hands. I don’t care about any of that stuff. But I do care about Stone Phillips,” because it’s this hero-worship thing that he has.

So there are pieces of that where I think it was more that Chris Hansen’s intent, at least the character in the movie, was like, “Oh, I want to be this, and I idolize this. For that, I’m going to cower and wince away.” But for anything else, I think he felt that he was more powerful than anyone else in the room. And that included the very short-shrift relationships he had with his wife and the girlfriend and really anyone else. He seemed to be like, “No, I’m the biggest deal for everything else. But for Stone Phillips, no, I’m sorry, I’m not that great.”

Tommy Metz III:
I think Stone Phillips is the one that breaks through the shell that he has. When he’s breaking up with his mistress, he’s incapable of being human about it. He covers her face and goes, “Happy face, peekaboo, happy face.” He just needs it to go away, because it’s messing up his personal view of himself.

Pete Wright:
It’s so gross.

Tommy Metz III:
And I don’t know if he was really on purpose showing power to Jeff Zucker as much as he was being petty. “Your machine stole from me. I’m Chris Hansen. That Rice Krispie treat is mine.” Whatever’s right in front of his face that’s stealing his attention is whatever he’s going to be petty about, or try to make go away, or lie about.

“I didn’t wake up the kids. They just wandered in here.” Whatever it takes to make his personal view of himself stay there.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
And then Stone Phillips is the one, without saying anything, or with that great line: “I’m so engrossed in your show, I’ll be watching it from Afghanistan.”

Pete Wright:
From Afghanistan. You bring up that scene where he’s trying to break up with the woman he’s having an affair with. We should note she is 30 years old, whatever, right? She’s not a child. And yet his strategy to keep her quiet is to physically infantilize her, to make her a child with his hands and his voice and everything.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
And I think you add that to the sort of grooming-adjacent conversations that he has with Dan, and you really see that this is a guy whose own show is holding up a weird kind of perv mirror to his own darkest, maybe unintended behavior. And that, I think, is another thing Pattinson gets really, really well. The other character of note, if we can speak briefly about him, is Xavier Von Erck, the Perverted-Justice warrior.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, yeah.

Pete Wright:
What do you imagine the film’s perspective is on the warriors of Perverted-Justice after watching this movie?

Ocean Murff:
I don’t think it gives them enough time. They weren’t there enough for me to have a very informed opinion. I think they were just a means to an end. They already existed to do this task, and the show glommed onto them because it was like, “Okay, you guys are set up to get the people on film that we want, so we’ll have this symbiotic relationship with you. You’re actually trying to stop predators online, and we’re just trying to make a TV show that is going to be popular.” There’s a symbiotic relationship with that.

Tommy Metz III:
But it is damning, though, that that main guy, especially when he’s trying to wrest control away from Merritt Wever, is guilty of the same thing. None of the real people involved in this, quote unquote, news are… they’re lost. They’re not really people in this attempt to have more power.

Pete Wright:
Right.

Tommy Metz III:
He wants to be a producer. He wants to be Merritt Wever, obviously. He doesn’t want to do what he’s doing. He’s not in it for the justice anymore, once he sees what Merritt Wever can do. And so he pressures. He knows how to push Chris Hansen’s buttons when Chris Hansen is at his weakest, with the National Enquirer over here and the network over here.

He’s losing it. His facade is crumbling. And so he pushes, and he does a terrible job producing.

Pete Wright:
All right.

Tommy Metz III:
Everyone’s running around. They’re out of time. It’s a night shoot. They immediately drop a camera in the pool, and it stays in the pool for the duration.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, that was great.

Tommy Metz III:
Later, at the end, it’s still in the pool. He can’t do what Merritt Wever does. It’s just, again, that blind ambition.

Ocean Murff:
Really? I guess I don’t really see him that way. I see him more as having deceived himself about this whale being… I mean, he was talking about it being the president. I’m like, it ain’t the president. The idea of the capture…

Pete Wright:
But in the scope of who they’re usually getting, it’s pretty close.

Tommy Metz III:
Chris Hansen thought it was the president.

Ocean Murff:
Well, right, but that is his motivation. His whole thing is, “I feel that I’ve found someone that is such a challenge to me. Normally they’re idiots, and I found a smart one. These are the real predators I’m trying to hunt down. That’s what I’m trying to do.” I never felt that he was trying to wrest control of the show as much as he was trying to make sure that the direction was aimed at this one.

Tommy Metz III:
Except that he didn’t go to Merritt Wever.

Ocean Murff:
And Chris Hansen was on board.

Tommy Metz III:
He went around Merritt Wever and then complained when Merritt Wever came into the room. He’s trying to take over.

Pete Wright:
That was his opportunism.

Ocean Murff:
So you think he’s trying to take over the entire show, not just get that one?

Pete Wright:
Oh yeah, a hundred percent.

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, absolutely.

Tommy Metz III:
Correct. That one is just a big whale, but the whale doesn’t have a personality. They’re not thinking about the whale as a person, more as an authority figure, which will be a big person to take down.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah. Well, and again, it’s gonna shine the spotlight on him.

Tommy Metz III:
In my opinion.

Steve Sarmento:
And back to Pete’s original question: how do you get good at this? What type of person spends all of this time… when they come to his room and it’s just disarray, hiding stuff or whatever. I’m like, what is going on there? You can get into the psychology of people like this. Why is he spending so much time doing this? Why is he so good at this?

Why does he know this lingo? How does he know to lure them? How do you develop that skill set? What type of person spends hours and hours in that type of engagement? It just creeps me out, makes me feel disgusting and gross. And then when he tries the power play, I’m like, this is a guy of just corrupt morals and values. It was a giant ick for me, really, what he was in all aspects of everything.

Pete Wright:
I think that’s where I was landing on that too, Steve. That moment you mentioned when Hansen goes to his room and bangs on the door, and Xavier doesn’t open the door, and he bangs on the door again, and finally Xavier opens the door only slightly, and you realize that he’s answering the door in his underwear, shirtless and sweaty, with his headset and all his stuff. Clearly he’s been doing the work.

Tommy Metz III:
Well, you can hear the pornography in the background also.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right, right. So that’s why I asked the question. What do you think the movie thinks of these people? Because I don’t think the movie has a very high opinion of the people who are volunteer vigilantes entrapping other people on the internet with no authority to do so.

Tommy Metz III:
I agree.

Pete Wright:
And I think the fact that the movie is presenting this guy as somebody who conveniently landed in a job where he could be paid to exercise his own demons is a fascinating perspective in the context of this movie. He is very much exercising his own predatorial sort of instincts. That’s where I go with this guy.

And we should say, this is one of the characters that’s completely amalgamated from many Perverted-Justice volunteers and decoys and all of that. I think Matthew Maher does a fantastic job of portraying some really stereotypical nerdery.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, I love the lisp.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, the lisp. You’d turn the camera 45 degrees and you’d see just a stack of Hot Pockets.

Ocean Murff:
The lisp was great. The lisp was a great add, yeah.

Pete Wright:
They really leaned in on that. But also the fact that his perversion was his job was yet another layer of darkness for me.

Tommy Metz III:
There really is only one character… well, I guess two. I’m sorry, I don’t know her name or the actress’s name. I think you said it. I think it’s Phoebe…

Pete Wright:
Phoebe Bridgers, yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
Phoebe Bridgers, yeah. When she walks away, they’re literally at a crossroads, but the crossroads is up and down, vertical in the frame. And Skyler walks towards us, because we’re with him. And then she walks out of the movie in the same way that later he walks out of the movie.

Again, it does go to softhoe, because we then jump ahead with him, because we stay with him. It’s interesting how he uses the camera to say who are we following, or who is able to live their life once they’re out of frame.

Ocean Murff:
Well, so then you feel that the Del character is more sympathetic or forthright than the Xavier character, instead of seeing them as really just two parts of the same coin, right?

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, she’s completely different.

Ocean Murff:
Because you need one for the other. You need them both. Yes, he’s online finding them and doing all that. Someone has to do that dirty work, right? But then she’s the one that’s talking to them, calling them, telling them what to bring, being a boy or a girl, depending upon whatever they want. She’s the honeypot, or the honey trap, whatever that is, to get them in there. So it’s a one-two combination. You need the first one online to get them interested, and then you need her to bring them in.

So I’m curious, because I would see them as the same, and I really kind of do. I see them as two of the same. They both have this vision in their minds of what they’re trying to do. They are removing predators from the streets. They are saving children. And they have different skill sets in order to accomplish that goal. So I guess I’m curious how you view one differently than the other, when they’re both required to accomplish this.

Tommy Metz III:
Part of it, for me, is what we already said: the power hungriness. I believe he’s doing it for that reason, especially in the context of this movie. He wants the whale, wants all that stuff. He wants to take control. And then there’s the ultimate decision of why she walks away. She goes, “We don’t go to them. They come to us.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
They’re stepping over an enormous line, and no one is thinking, except Merritt Wever also, until she makes her deal with the devil to give that little whispery speech. You don’t know how she’s gonna go. I was expecting her to walk away too. And then I was like, “Oh, right, what’s this movie about?” There’s only room for one character to walk down the other way of the hallway. Everyone else is on the train.

Ocean Murff:
I don’t know if she’s doing a deal with the devil. She might be the devil, right? Because she’s the little whisperer in there.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, right.

Ocean Murff:
Sorry. Sorry, I interrupted you, Steve. What were you saying?

Steve Sarmento:
No, I think Del, of everyone, knows her part, and she does that well. She’s not trying to be something else. She’s not trying to take over. She knows her place.

Tommy Metz III:
Get a SAG card, become an actor. You don’t get that feeling from her.

Steve Sarmento:
Right. She’s very good at what she does, and she has clear boundaries, as we see. Like, “No, we don’t do that.” She knows what the job is. Again, she walks into Decoy Dan’s room like, “I’m gonna show you how we do this.” It’s very businesslike. I think there’s a separation of personal ambition and goals versus “This is the job I do, it has certain rules, and this is how I operate.” That’s how I see it.

Pete Wright:
She goes home at night and writes music. Xavier goes home at night and does the same thing that he does all day. He can’t crawl out of that.

Ocean Murff:
Well, yeah. That’s how you make a good team. But the thing too that I find interesting, as far as the differences in how we see that: I did not view her saying “We don’t go to them” as standing up on any moral basis. I viewed it as, “Look, this honey trap doesn’t work if we go to them.” Right? There’s no case. Because we’ve now gone to you. We’ve now involved the police and gone to you. That is classic entrapment. And even though we are also doing entrapment by having you come to us, since we’re not the police, it’s not the same under the law.

So therefore it would work to convict this person. Whereas going to his house makes it where, well, he hasn’t done anything. You’ve gone to him. You have no evidence of anything, so it won’t work. You won’t be able to get a conviction out of it. I thought that was her line. Not anything about righteousness, just that the honey trap doesn’t work this way.

Pete Wright:
That’s so interesting. I didn’t see that at all. I totally see it hearing you talk about it. My sense is still, structurally for the movie, I don’t know that that convinces me that hers isn’t an important perspective counter to everybody else’s. The heart of the movie, if there is one, is that, like Tommy said, there’s one person who gets to walk away, and for whatever reason, that person has to be on some sort of a pedestal.

Ocean Murff:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
I want to pivot and talk a little bit about the production team. Who knows what about Lance Oppenheim as a filmmaker? A prolific filmmaker, but not one that I have been familiar with until right now.

Tommy Metz III:
I’ve seen Some Kind of Heaven, I believe, is what it’s called.

Pete Wright:
Yes. And so many shorts.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah. It takes place in a retirement home, for lack of a better phrase, and he makes all of these different… oh, no, I saw Ren Faire also.

Pete Wright:
So, so many shorts.

Tommy Metz III:
Ren Faire is almost like this psychodrama of royalty and Game of Thrones-ish, but taking place at a Renaissance fair. He’s really good at finding these incredibly human, deep… It’s kind of like how he uses the lighting in this movie to show the inner feelings. He’s taking these very mundane places and showing how everyone believes that they are the main character and worth a movie about them. And he finds these incredibly deep, interesting, twisty stories in an old folks’ home and a Renaissance fair, and you wouldn’t think to look there for those. It’s really neat.

Pete Wright:
And don’t forget Spermworld…

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, I didn’t see that.

Pete Wright:
…which is now at the top of my watch list. He goes in and explores the online fora where sperm donors meet with potential recipients. And I guess the idea is that this is a private exchange, so to speak, so they don’t have to go through the big-money sperm banks. And he apparently finds, guess what, some complications in those kinds of relationships. You’ll be surprised to hear.

Anyway, a fascinating filmmaker. So interesting. Just watching the trailers of these other properties, you can see that this is somebody with a huge opinion on style and visual narrative. Thoughts on how this thing was presented? Tom?

Tommy Metz III:
I thought it was thrilling. “Operatic” was the word that I kept coming back to, because the music doesn’t match what we’re seeing, and the lighting doesn’t match what we’re seeing. I think this movie’s gonna be crazy polarizing if you’re not on board for that kind of weird, hyper-unrealistic filming, and everything has that TV sheen to it.

But I thought it was thrilling, because it really seemed to magnify what was going on inside. As if they were directing this moment in their heads, this is what it would look like. When someone’s getting darker, the light would actually go all the way out, and then come back up when “I’ve decided that I’m going to go forward.” It’s really, really interesting.

I thought it was beautiful in its ugliness. It is an ugly, beautiful film, if that’s a possibility.

Ocean Murff:
Well, look, first off, you know way more about making movies than I do. You’ve forgotten more about it than I have. I agree with everything you said. But I felt like I was watching a television show. It felt small to me. It felt like I should be watching this on NBC.

Pete Wright:
Which you should have been. That’s the point.

Tommy Metz III:
Is it the aspect ratio? Is that part of it?

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, just that I thought it was very well made and incredible, but it felt like you were taking a movie and you wanted to make it look like a TV documentary.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Ocean Murff:
So while I appreciate the craft and what I’m being presented with, because there’s a lot of great stuff, like I said, the great acting, the sets, the choices, everything looks great, right?

But when I’m in the theater, it felt too small. It felt like, given the content, maybe Paramount Plus could put this on. Or HBO Max. I don’t know if it’s HBO Max good, because they got dragons. But a streaming service thing. Maybe Peacock. There it is. It should have been on Peacock. That’s what it felt like. It just felt really small.

Tommy Metz III:
Phew, we got there.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, yeah. I got there. I got there.

That I thought was odd. When I was done watching it, even though it gave me all those uncomfortable feelings, and clearly we saw these movie characters in different lights, part of me felt like, “Oh, well, this should have been on television.” It felt too small to be in a theater.

Steve Sarmento:
But the egos of these characters need a large screen to contain them.

Tommy Metz III:
Hm, that’s fun.

Steve Sarmento:
And the close-ups. There were so many sweaty close-ups. We’re in on faces up close, and to me the large screen really helps with that. Otherwise it’s just a face pressed up against my TV screen.

So for me, I agree. There are so many things that make this feel like TV. The video, just the beginning, it’s putting us in TV land. No doubt about that. I see that.

Ocean Murff:
And I honestly feel that part of that was a creative choice, right?

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, absolutely, yeah.

Ocean Murff:
Because the grayness and how it looked, I think it was meant to look that way.

Pete Wright:
Oh yes, yeah.

Ocean Murff:
But then the problem, for me anyway as a viewer, becomes, “Well, you made this to look like a TV show, so now I think I should be watching it on television,” because it doesn’t look like a movie. It looks like they were trying to portray all this as if the whole thing was a documentary. And it looks great. It’s a great-looking documentary.

Pete Wright:
Well, reportedly, and I have some paywalled sources that I can’t actually get behind just now, but my understanding is that David Bolen shot this on digital video, which is what they were using at the time to make the show.

And then they did a video-out to 16 millimeter, which is what gives you the grain, and then back to digital to do the edit. So I don’t think any of that grain, any of that texture, was done in post. I think that was all film. And it was all intended to give you the feeling that you were watching a TV show just like To Catch a Predator. I think that was what they were going for.

And to give it the four-by-three aspect ratio with the pillar bars. All of that is to give you a sense that you’re just watching a giant TV show. The degree to which it worked is to be debated. But I don’t think there was anything unintentional about it, Tom.

Tommy Metz III:
When I called it ugly-beautiful, for me thematically it works, because if you take a small story about people with oversized egos and blow it up massively, you’re gonna see the grain. You’re gonna see the grossness under the gloss that they see in themselves. They see themselves fully with gloss, and that’s when it’s smaller. But when you blow it up in a theater, you can see the actual grossness underneath.

Pete Wright:
The pores, right?

Tommy Metz III:
So thematically, yeah, the pores. It works for me.

Ocean Murff:
Nice.

Pete Wright:
The fact that they call out the pores, I thought, was fantastic. He flares his nose.

Steve Sarmento:
Oh yeah. Nose, yes.

Pete Wright:
We gotta get to wrapping up, but I cannot do this. I can’t believe we didn’t mention Alex Winter, who is the peak of conflicted perversion. He was the DA, yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, my gosh.

Tommy Metz III:
Who is Alex Winter? Is that the DA?

Ocean Murff:
The DA, the DA.

Pete Wright:
And he was also, of course, of Bill and Ted.

Tommy Metz III:
Wow, that was him.

Ocean Murff:
Oh my goodness, I didn’t realize that was him. Is it Bill?

Pete Wright:
Yeah. Alex Winter has been a fantastic performer all of his career. And I sometimes have to be slapped around and reminded that he’s more than Bill and Ted.

He has been writing and directing and performing for many years. He’s fantastic. And he presents maybe one of the most human characters here, who is suffering at the cost of his own darkness. It’s sad. He plays a very, very sad character, a very, very real sad character.

Ocean Murff:
Really? So you found that character to be empathetic?

Pete Wright:
Yeah, no… but I think there is a humanity in it.

Ocean Murff:
I was like, no, you’re a DA trying to diddle kids, man. You get what you get. I didn’t. So yeah.

Tommy Metz III:
I don’t think empathetic, but sympathetic.

Pete Wright:
That’s all I’m saying. Sympathetic. Very sympathetic to this guy, because I found he’s a very sad person who meets a very sad end.

And does that make any of his behavior okay? Nope. No, it does not. But there is some climactic humanity in that tragedy.

Tommy Metz III:
And he never left. He didn’t get in his car. He made the choice to not… and that’s not absolving him. But again, the fact is that they went to him. He made the choice to not give in to his demons, at least that night.

Steve Sarmento:
Well, you see him grappling with it.

Tommy Metz III:
And they made the choice for him. Yeah?

Steve Sarmento:
He really wrestles. The laptop is in the microwave. He’s ready to nuke the laptop, right? But then it’s, “Okay, no.” You see that struggle. It’s not just pure depravity. We have that opportunity with that person to see him pausing, hesitating, pondering his decisions, the regret after making decisions, where all the other ones we just see face after face walking through the door, walking right into this sexual encounter. With him, we see a little bit more. We get his story. We see his background.

Pete Wright:
Yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
And I think the filmmakers are giving us that opportunity to humanize him a little bit, to show that there’s something more to this. And, to Pete’s point, that leads into the sadness and the tragedy of it, to really show how far this show went and how destructive it was to people. With the others, okay, they may get arrested, they’re gone. That’s last week’s episode. Here there is someone well known and respected in the community, and it’s going to send ripples throughout, as the sheriff says: “I can’t believe it’s this guy. We had dinner together.”

Tommy Metz III:
“He’s met my wife.”

Steve Sarmento:
“This is somebody that I know.” Yes.

Pete Wright:
Well, and that’s it. Humanizing not just this character, but humanizing the rift that this will cause in the community.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah, yes.

Pete Wright:
And I think that’s the part. There’s just such great sorrow in the fact that this guy’s darkness got the better of him at any level, and I find that really sad. And I will say, and this may be a comment on the movie, we’ll see, I scrubbed through one full episode that is on YouTube. It was an episode where Chris Hansen confronts a guy who brings pizza, and during the confrontation the guy actually eats pizza and offers Chris Hansen a piece. And at the end of this episode, Chris Hansen is doing his final control-room pitch, and he says, “In all my years of doing this show, in three hundred-plus investigations, no one has ever offered me a slice of pizza.”

And that number, the 300-plus investigations, was shocking, because this movie is such a compression of time and pain. You never get a sense of the true scope of this show, right? You just get these little hints that it was a big deal when it’s going up against Lost and replacing Studio 60, and it is a big deal in the network. I don’t even know if the movie is intending to show how big a deal it was culturally, because of that compression. At least as somebody who didn’t watch the show, I didn’t get any of that.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, well, I think as far as the big deal goes, the movie’s relying on the fact that most people have heard of it. Right? Just the fact that you’ve heard of it. Most people couldn’t name another Dateline show, but they know that one. So it had a big impact.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, yeah.

Ocean Murff:
But yeah, anyway, that’s all I’ll say about that. I was still stuck on the DA. I see the exact opposite of what you guys see when it comes to that character. Even the humanizing of him with the… what is it, not the cross-exam, it’s closing arguments… “This guy is still a person, even though he did a bad thing,” right?

And I get what you’re going for with that. Look, I’m like, “Look, movie, I see what you’re trying to do, but I’m not falling for it,” because basically what you’re doing is putting this DA in that same boat. And then the whole back and forth of him putting the computer in the microwave or pulling it out. He’s struggling and battling with it. But what he’s struggling and battling with is, “Am I or am I not gonna diddle some kids?” And so I don’t feel any sympathy for him when it comes to that, because that is not the same thing as almost anything anybody else does. So on that front, I just did not feel sympathy for him in any way. It is sad when you step out and think about how that would affect the community. But the community wasn’t really a character in the movie.

As the movie portrayed it, to me, he was the worst person in the movie. And everyone else was like, all right, I can kind of see where some of your motivations are.

Pete Wright:
Well, I feel a little bit like your commentary is somehow geared toward me trying to make him a better person. And really, my sadness about him is the same sadness that goes for all of these people, which is: the movie does an apt job, I think, of reminding me how horrible it is to get to this point in your life, and to have to live with the sorrow and the regret of these urges that you cannot not execute. That’s sad to me in this movie. And I think the movie actually portrays that pretty, pretty adeptly.

Tommy Metz III:
All right.

Pete Wright:
We gotta wrap it up, but that means we have to actually get to rating and giving it our stars at letterboxd.com/thenextreel. That’s where you can find all of the films that we’ve talked about across The Next Reel family of film shows. Oh my goodness. What do we even do? Give this five stars, or some variant of it, and a heart? Ocean, why don’t you go first? Let’s just pull the Band-Aid off.

Ocean Murff:
Sure. I will go first. This movie is well acted and well made. And honestly, I have really enjoyed this conversation with you guys about this movie, because it’s like, all right, we can, as intelligent adults, look at this thing and see vastly different things in it, which I really think is a testament to the movie, that you could have an audience that would see very different things in it. And so while I do think it was very well done and it’s a good movie, I still have some quibbles with it in terms of, what did I see? But I’m not seeing how I felt about that. So I’m gonna give it three stars because I think it’s really good. But I’m not going to give it a heart, because I don’t ever want to see this again.

Pete Wright:
Oh, okay.

Ocean Murff:
I’ve seen it once, I’m good. I may check out this documentary you guys are talking about, though. That sounds very interesting.

Pete Wright:
That sounds like it’s much more your vibe.

Ocean Murff:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Wright:
All right, Steve.

Steve Sarmento:
Oof. Yeah, I sort of agree with Ocean. I don’t know that I want to experience this movie again. It’s not a rewarding experience. I was in a weird state of mind driving home last night after watching this.

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
It’s like, what else can I put in my head after this? But it’s a piece of art I’ve gotta respect. I really do. It’s really well done, and I think it’s really important.

But I think, Ocean, as you said, it’s gonna divide people in so many different ways: what it’s saying, how it’s constructed, what we’re bringing to it, what it’s expecting of us. But for that, I end up with four stars and a heart because, to Tommy’s point, it takes some big swings. I love something that’s going to push me and challenge me a lot. So that’s where I am. Four and a heart.

Pete Wright:
All right, four and a heart. Thomas?

Tommy Metz III:
Just to follow along with the idea of how divisive and polarizing and interesting the ways are that you can take this movie: I’m going to own this movie at some point. I found the experience so magnetic and so repulsive and so intriguing and so fascinating that I’m definitely going to watch this movie again. Every night before bed. No, I just mean I don’t want to… And so for me, I’m giving it four stars and a heart.

Pete Wright:
That’s where I am too, and I think it is mostly weighted on the production choices and the performances. Whatever the story is, these people brought an incredibly complicated suite of darknesses to life for me in a way that still seemed, unfortunately, very real. It just felt so grounded and so of its time and of our time.

And I appreciated that they made this thing and it didn’t take me out of the movie at all. I didn’t come away saying, “Well, that’s not true.” It just felt horribly true, every one of these perspectives. And so for that, it’s a four-star.

And could it go up? It always could go up. I can’t watch it again soon, but I’m gonna watch it again. I’m like Tom, I’ll own this movie one day. And first thing out of the gate, I called my son in film school and I said, “I don’t care what you know about Chris Hansen. This is a film school movie. You need to watch this because of how it was put together.”

Tommy Metz III:
Yeah.

Steve Sarmento:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
This is one to take apart. So, fascinating experience. Yikes. How gross.

You guys, thank you so much. I’m so glad we did this movie. This was a wonderful experience, as dark as it was. And I hope others have a chance to see the movie, talk about the movie, think about the movie. It’s trending very well right now in terms of its performance, especially against something like Pattinson’s last, The Drama, which cost more money and made money, but not as much money as this movie is making.

Movies make money, money’s movie make.

Tommy Metz III:
Okay. All right. Why don’t you have a seat right here? Why don’t you have a cookie, Pete?

Pete Wright:
I truly don’t have any idea what’s going to happen here tonight. We need to tell a little bit about what’s going on next month, because it’s coming actually kind of soon. What are we doing next month? Steve?

Steve Sarmento:
Oh, what are we doing next month? Oh, I know what it is, because I’m here with all my friends that I met online. We’re doing Aaron Sorkin’s sort of follow-up to The Social Network, The Social Reckoning.

Tommy Metz III:
Oh, that’s right.

Pete Wright:
If anything’s gonna make us feel better about Primetime, is it The Social Reckoning? We’ll see.

Tommy Metz III:
I know. This is during our run of creeps in media. Great.

Steve Sarmento:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
Thank you, everybody. If this conversation has sent you down a rabbit hole or reminded you of other films circling the same ideas, sorry. We unfortunately do a significant amount of work on that over at The Next Reel. Wow, this season is just full of real winners, if you’re into horrible people doing horrible things. We love to talk about this stuff, though, and you can find everything we do as part of The Next Reel family of film podcasts at thenextreel.com. And if this is your first time here because of this movie, wow, stick around. Subscribe to the show.

Make sure you stay subscribed. We only do this once a month, and we’re picky on purpose. On behalf of Ocean Murff and Steve Sarmento and Tommy Metz III, I’m Pete Wright. Meeting adjourned.