The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast from patreon

The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast patreon

The B.E.E. Podcast - 5/3/22 - Solo Recs + Timewarp - SILVER

🕑 Added 2022-05-04 00:23:36 +0000 UTC

Comments

Neil G.

you are a pseudo intellectual POS which is exactly the decline of western culture in the last 100 years...what do you mean cheesy fluff like E.T.?? A FORMALLY spiritual, transcendent experience...as opposed to more powerful, inventive movies like the over the top Shining/TOTALLY un-emotional Blade Runner??? 😂😂😂 The Shining is over the top, so you could say that's immature and Blade Runner is an emotional film so you could say overly emotional...not saying that about either one but this lack of tangible, formal analysis is simply pseudo intellectual retardation and makes no sense...slick pop to a terrific art flick??? The Batman was A METHODICALLY PACED, EPIC DRAMA with a superhero; how is The Lighthouse an art film??? And The Batman is not??? Does that make any sense??? A thing like you should sit in a certain chair with a certain electric shock so BASIC LOGIC can take over 😂😂😂...and you call yourself an expert on what is art or isn't...things like you are called "pretentious" by idiots when you lack basic logic and basic functioning...which makes the "layman" look like a genius because even your whole way of looking at stuff is BASICALLY wrong 😂😂👎👎

Jefferson

I watched Batman on Bret's recommendation and I think Bret reviewed the film he created in his head, as opposed to the actual one on screen. The actual one on screen only hinted at and flirted with the ideas of the "darkness" of Batman - it never went all the way, and by the end of the film, actually fully retreated from them. Left me disappointed because I wanted it to go further. Joker was far superior to this, IMO.

mia

Brad renfro may be one of my favorite actors to exist,I think his career would have been bigger if he hadn’t had that very sad childhood & essentially no guardians. Just Hollywood ppl watching over him. I actually found this podcast through trying to find any interviews I could about brad renfro, & found your episode with Larry Clark. Love how that happens.

Sven Safarow

but you never do, don't you?

Eric Macom

it doesn’t feel like 3 hours. It goes really quick. Highly recommended.

Klondike

Great show as always. Bret, you'd said that you've gotten to a point in life where you don't mind pretention. I'd be interested in hearing more about that. What consitutes pretentiousness for you and why is it acceptable now? Why wasn't it acceptable before? (If this has been addressed in other episodes, sorry, and I'd be appreciate a link.) Thanks!

Nicholas Vinocur

Would it be too much trouble to put the names of every guest interviewed in the notes or tags or whatever below the podcast player ?

AshSebash

AJLT was a steaming pile. I’m surprised you liked this - I couldn’t make it past the second episode. Interesting that Kristen Davis was the first choice for Carrie. I thought it was Dana Delaney which I feel like you might have discusses on a former pod w/ DD. Enjoyed your thoughts on SATC - it’s always fun to revisitfrom time to time. I need to see The Batman. The 3 hour run time keeps putting me off, but will see it.

Tom Jennings

My girlfriend actually cried at 'youth is wasted on the young' and then proceeded to listen to the entire thing again just so she could cry again at that bit.

Thomas Matich

“THIS IS THE RIDDLER SPEAKING”

Collin Myers

thought the conversation with nick jarecki was actually really interesting: seeing the evolution of he and bret adapting the informers and then how the hollywood machinery kind of destroys a great idea. i cant imagine, corporate shill that i am, how deflating it must be working on a novel, then a script, creating something you love, and then "they" make it into a bad movie. My stomach also drops when i hear reference to "studio notes" and getting "notes" back from the suits. what a freaking nightmare. i would have such a hard time playing the game. but id rather play that game than work one more day in the rat race in which i currently reside. love the podcast. happy subscriber. plan to buy everyone i know a first edition of shards. hard for the shards right here.

Mary Walker

I rewatched Sex and the City recently too. It does hold up. I found myself nostalgic but mostly it was just really funny and well done. I also discovered a podcast Sentimental Garbage, that does a great series of episodes on the original SATC. The author of Promising Young Woman. Is the host. She would be a great guest.

Joseph A Aisenberg

I’m less interested in what you had to say about The Batman—though it was well done and integrated your Kaelisms to an individual end—and more intrigued by your preferring slick pop to say a terrific art flick like Lighthouse which was a hypnotic mix of Welles and Kubrick and Melville anything but empty. Also Defoe had the great performance while Pattinson was uneasy with the accent. I bring this up because what you seem to want in American movies is a mix of slick and sleek with pop emotional directness, whereas at first one is surprised by your general lack of sympathy for visual expertise taken to the point of alienation one from the characters, which is what I first figured you would be drawn to considering your books. I think this is why what strikes me as cheesy fluff like ET can be called by you a masterpiece while far more cinematically powerful and inventive movies like The Shinning and Blade Runner don’t work for you and is what underlies your notion of “emptiness”. You seem to like that kind of thing more in foreign movies

Limitless

Would love to read that early Informers script! Any chance of posting it?

Nicholas Vinocur

From the Informers. Everything about that story - the failure to connect over music, the sexual competitiveness (how else is the dad meant to relate to a young male? He has no clue) was just crystalline and dead true. Some of the other stories (the kid in the cage) are just too grotesque for me now.

Nicholas Vinocur

That story about the kid and the dad going to Hawaii and not being able to communicate is - to me - one of the most powerful things I’ve read from Bret.

David Ware

As a fan of noir and Batman who is a character who comes from that literary tradition and has somehow maintained enough relevance from that era to still have a major studio spending hundreds of millions of dollars telling it’s stories, I really wanted to like this movie. And for about the first hour or so I really did. But somewhere in the second act it begins collapsing under its own weight and the lack of chops of Matt Reeves reveals itself and he can no longer keep pace with his “homage” to the infinitely superior David Fincher’s infinitely superior ‘Seven’. The writing becomes quite bad and the pacing even worse. Everything that happens after Falcone gets shot belongs to a completely different movie and I was just laughing at how dumb and lazy it became and wanting it to be over. Overall, the movie plays like a longer and even worse episode of ‘Gotham’.

Knokkel knokkel

Youth is wasted on the young !

Jesse Dykstra

Bret's thoughts on The Batman are interesting, but "traveling back" (read: replaying) to an old podcast (released on Podcast One), about a long-forgotten, poorly reviewed film that Amber Heard co-starred in fourteen years ago -- and posting this DURING the epic Depp-Heard trial -- scans as opportunistic, super-predictable and very, very lazy, at least to those who "donate" money for new content.

Seneca Garcia

If it’s not as good as Dark Knight, I cannot take serious - too Samsung commercial conventional aesthetic - maybe I’ll try again, couldn’t get past five minutes, looks like everything I’ve seen (minus Dark Knight)

Christopher Webster

And Just Like That was cringe AF

Alex Waller

I think stating The Batman took from Fincher is a little chicken or the egg. When I watched Seven, I thought it was basically Gotham without Batman and thought Batman comics were an influence somewhere in there even if its coming from the screenwriter. Maybe the story has some similar beats, but I believe they took much more from Batman: The Long Halloween , Batman: Dark Victory, and Batman: Year One. The first two deal with a serial killer who kills mobsters on holidays, with the obvious homage in The Batman being the Riddler's first killing on Halloween. Year One deals with Batman's first year as he and Gordon battle all the corruption within law enforcement and city government as well as their relations with Falcone.

Paul Richardson

I binge watched SATC at the beginning of this year and agree with everything BEE says. Really interesting to hear his insider knowledge of the show's creation.

Jeremy goodwin

The Batman was a solid entertainment. It looks fantastic. It has an analog look as opposed to most other recent comic book flicks, which is refreshing for this codger. I didn’t mind the Fincher homages so much. I imagine many viewers younger than me won’t have a clue. Anyway. Some of the individual performances are great. But the narrative is really all over the place. I could’ve ignored that until the last maybe 40 minutes. It just tries to squeeze too much in, even in a 3 hr movie. I suppose it’s setting up future installments. Batman’s character arc, though, is really lame. He realizes, he has to “do better”? I mean, I realize that is the entire mantra of this Batman’s generation, but come on man. I’m looking forward to seeing Robin in the next one, and since he most likely will have to be gay, hopefully he’s played like a 22 year old, right wing, Zoomer version of Rick Grenell, incessantly calling Batman a millennial pussy, and mockingly telling him to “do better” throughout it. It might make for an interesting story arc. Millennials have done little to save the world, it’s gotten worse on their watch, so it’s up to generation Robin to clean up the mess.

Austin Keith Franks

The Batman is a great looking film, but why hasn’t any critic ( that I’ve seen ) expressed how it’s such a blatant rip-off or homage of Se7en. The look, the atmosphere, several scenes, the surrendering of the riddler in the coffee house plays like John Doe giving himself up in the police precinct. The montage of journals in his apartment, almost identical to John doe’s collection of writings, but Se7en is a far superior film. It just took me out of the film, because I am such a huge fan of Se7en. I’ve only watched The Batman once, so maybe I should give it a second viewing. I do like Dano as an actor, but his performance seemed overdone, so was Sarsgaard’s, who also seemed to be channeling the exact performance of Leland Orser in Se7en as the crazed man in the massage parlor. Too many similarities for no critics to have mentioned.