The Family That’s Prey Together, Pt. 2 — The End of Oak Street

0:01 It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being? We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us!

0:19 Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a Movie of the Week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Keith Phipps, here again with.

0:27 Tasha Robinson and Genevieve Kosky.

0:29 In our last episode, we discussed Steven Spielberg's 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds. We'll return to it, but first we need to talk about The End of Oak Street, the new film in our pairing. Set in the Detroit suburbs of 1982, the film starts Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as, respectively, Denise and Greg Platt, a couple whose marriage has hit some hard times. Greg's lost his job, not that he's told his family, and now delivers pizzas to make ends meet. Denise is an aspiring writer whose in-progress novel revolves around a woman who wants to flee her marriage. Their two kids, Audrey, played by Macy Stella, and Brian, played by Christian Convery, are starting to sense something is wrong even before something goes really wrong. A

1:08 fluke cosmic accident that draws the Platts and their neighbors into the distant past where they have to fight for their survival as they try to find their way back to the present. The film is written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, who is best known for his 2014 horror film, It Follows, but if you haven't seen his follow-up, Under the Silver Lake, I highly recommend it, and our episode pairing it with Chinatown. The end of Oak Street also consciously brings to mind the blockbuster films of the era in which it's set. Too consciously? We'll talk it over.

1:35 Flintstones, meet the Flintstones.

1:39 They're a modern, stunning family. When you're... Run! Get inside now! Mom, look! What the hell's going on? Mom! I think that our neighborhood has moved. We're in the past, aren't we? How the hell is that even possible? What are we gonna do?

2:20 We're gonna survive. All right, everybody, what did you think of the end of Oak Street? I kind of know what Tasha thinks. Genevieve, I want to hear from you.

2:26 Why are we jumping straight to the end? Aren't we going to talk about any of the rest of Oak Street?

2:32 No, we will need to talk about the end of the end of Oak Street, but just generally speaking. I think you guys lowered my expectations sufficiently that I had a grand old time with the end of Oak Street. I also saw it at the drive-in, which I think is a great venue for a movie of this scope and tenor. So yeah, I mean, I'm not going to claim it as great cinema, nor am I going to claim that Ewan McGregor has a good handle on his.

2:58 Accents throughout the film.

3:00 I was waiting for someone to say that.

3:03 But, you know, just as sort of a family adventure movie of the era it's referencing, I had a good time with it. And it was a nice blend of like action, humor, pathos. None of them were like really... Top-notch, you know, they're all like B-level versions of those things But it all came together into a B movie, you know And I think this does very much feel like a B movie in a complimentary sense of the word at least coming from me Maybe not so much from you guys.

3:33 No, I mean, here's the thing I left this movie slightly disappointed because I liked I like Mitchell's other films I still haven't seen his first show. I need to see that the myth of the American sleepover but I liked it okay, and it's pretty much still where I am. I gave it three stars at the reveal, but I'm glad.

3:51 I've warmed to it. I've developed an affection for it, I guess. But it's also the weird thing where I saw some people were over the moon for it, and some people hated it, and it's a real stop. You're both wrong situation for me. I don't think there's anything to praise this as a great movie, but it's also perfectly fine. I enjoyed it. I do. And it's something I want to get into is like, there's so much subtext to our other film we're going to talk about, but, I don't know that there's anything beneath the surface of this movie beyond perhaps the marital drama as such. But whatever. Dinosaurs. Tasha, how about you? Where are you with this movie? A week later, I guess?

4:32 I think the two of you have summed it up. I would also say B-movie, but I think actually drive-in movie is an even better description. I could see this playing, you know, great fun. In my tease for it in the last episode, I called it an Amblin Entertainment style movie. And that's what it reminded me of more than anything.

4:50 It's just something, you know, an adventure that would be, like, okay to watch with your kids, apart from a little very slightly gnarly dinosaur-eating people action.

5:00 It's... And the sex scene.

5:02 And yes, and don't forget dinosaurs banging against a house. Immortalized in the family photo in the end.

5:11 I guess. I was exposed to animals banging in zoos. Like I grew up in the greater Washington area. We went to the National Zoo all the time. And I learned more about sex from watching giraffes and elephants and whatnot going at it. like at age seven than I learned anywhere else. So I find it hard to take a couple of CG dinosaurs having very slow, decorous sex as something that.

5:39 It is decorous, you're right.

5:41 Again, I don't have kids. So, you know, don't listen to me on this.

5:44 If you don't want your children exposed to the facts of dinosaur life, And there's.

5:52 A dinosaur sex scene in the most recent Jurassic World movies, I believe. I mean, it involves all.

5:59 That one just slid right out of the old memory, I'm afraid.

6:02 Or in the first one, which I saw much, much later than everybody else did.

6:06 I don't know.

6:07 Not the point. The point is, no, I think you're right. My big feeling about this film was it was kind of a slick surface and nothing going on underneath. And that was fine, but I have been describing it to people as entirely okay. You know, it's kind of slick and efficient at what it needs to do, and it's not something that you need to think about five minutes later, which makes it difficult to talk about it for half an hour, you know, a week later.

6:33 But I want to come back to the dinosaurs banging, because I think in addition to being like a laugh line, and this movie does make several gestures at humor, whether they are, you know, successful or not is a your mileage may vary situation. But I did like the dinosaurs banging scene for what it brought out in the marriage between Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, which felt like Very perfunctory throughout the movie. It's a very tell-don't-show, troubled marriage, I feel like. They have a couple harried conversations. But then like once stuff starts going down, it feels like not relevant to the movie anymore until he gets eaten, which we should also talk about. But that moment where, yeah, sorry,

7:28 someone gets eaten in the dinosaur movie. Actually, the spoiler is what happens later, which we do need to talk about as well. But to go back to the dinosaurs banging, just like kind of the the way they connect in that moment with her like finding it funny and him being kind of scandalized and it just felt like the most human moment of that marriage or the most real moment of that marriage where there was some actual personality to it and it didn't just feel like mom and dad figurines being ported around this movie. So, yeah, I guess I'm just saying like that scene to me kind of felt like when all the parts of this movie or all the things this movie was trying to do coalesced in a way that worked for me.

8:09 I was distracted by how furry the dinosaurs were. Furry or feathery.

8:14 Feathery.

8:14 Yeah.

8:16 I definitely did not. They look like woolly mammoths. They look like brontosauruses wearing mole woolly mammoth costumes.

8:22 Yeah.

8:23 And I'm, I guess I'm not up on my, is it paleontology when we're talking about what they looked like when they were alive? Like, I was around for the revolution where they started saying, you know, there's no reason they all had to be gray or green. Like reptiles today are many, many bright colors. Maybe they were very, very bright and colorful. I was around for the revolution when they started saying, you know, they might have all had feathers. Fur is a new one for me. Wooly mammoth fur.

8:52 I just saw feathers. I think there's just like really downy feathers.

8:56 Yeah, I know what you're talking about, though, Tasha.

8:58 Long, shaggy, matted feathers?

9:01 Yes.

9:03 Okay, then.

9:05 Everybody who sees End of Oak Street after this in the theater, pay very close attention to the dinosaur banging scene. We've already focused most of the podcast on it, so you're going to want to pay attention. It is the emotional crux of the movie. But also, we need reports on whether those dinosaurs are furry or feathery.

9:25 Or both.

9:25 Feathery. I mean, a lot of the other dinosaurs in this movie are feathery and we could talk about some of them just in terms of some of the designs here are honestly kind of cartoonish.

9:38 But I respect that like it's doing something different.

9:41 Sure.

9:41 You know, especially being so Amblin inspired. I respect that it didn't, you know, use the Jurassic Park slash world models, even of the velociraptors. that I believe are the first dinosaurs.

9:56 Big rooster looking things? Yeah. Yeah.

9:58 And, you know, probably at, this point aside from the t-rex which does not appear in this movie we get an allosaurus but uh aside from the t-rex probably like the most iconic movie dinosaur of the last several decades so i i appreciate that it didn't just kind of shorthand it into the version of that dinosaur that we are all familiar with Yeah.

10:20 Strong agree. Anything that this movie does that distinguishes it from, I honestly go kind of going back to what is this movie? What does it feel like? How do we feel about it? It also feels like an overlong classic Twilight Zone episode in color.

10:37 But Twilight Zone episodes have some sort of reason for existing, you know, beyond like there there's, there's always like a, they're morality tales essentially. And, and, and, I'm not sure what the moral of this is other than, you know, memorize your neighbor's phone numbers in case you ever need to call them in an emergency. But I don't know.

10:59 I don't know that I feel like a lot of classic Twilight Zone tales are morality tales. Like, you know, Terror at 10,000 Feet is. Definitely saying something about the human experience, but is there a moral to it? Is time enough at last? Is there a moral there besides don't marry a horrible person who abuses you, you know, or read all the books you can while you can? Or carry a spare set of glasses. Like, I don't know that I see.

11:25 Those morality tales. Yeah, but with that one, it's a matter of him, his misanthropic behavior coming back to haunt him. But, wait, this is not a Twilight Zone podcast. Maybe we should start one.

11:38 I was going to say, that sounds like something you should do, Keith.

11:41 I have enough podcasts as it is.

11:44 I guess one of the things that reminded me of Twilight Zone here is just sort of the feeling, which... This is also a connection with War of the Worlds. And maybe one of the stronger ones when I suggested this pairing is just sort of the feeling of something inexplicable and maybe ineffable is happening. And it's outside of everybody's control or understanding. And it's really about what they do and how they react to it. And I sort of see that in a lot of the more supernatural early Twilight Zone episodes. It's just sort of the sense of like this person now has the ability to stop time.

12:17 We're not going to really explore how that happened or why. It's just the result that matters. So sort of the mentality here felt very Twilight Zone-y to me.

12:27 It's wormholes, Tasha. What more explanation do you need?

12:32 Something, something, science wormholes.

12:34 She was reading that Carl Sagan book. It was right there.

12:38 There is a point where the characters in this movie find something inexplicable and yet very important to the later action in somebody's house. I was really expecting them in that moment to find a Professor Falcon from War Games slash Christopher Lloyd with all of his hair up from Back to the Future person who had been messing around with wormhole generators. I was expecting an explanation of And what we get instead is there's no explanation for this.

13:06 It just happened.

13:08 Sometimes entire neighborhoods like drop into the Paleolithic and vice versa. It's just, you know, what you're going to do. But I feel like maybe just there is not an explanation for the following creature in It Follows. You don't need that. Part of the terror of it is... it's inexplicable. It's ineffable.

13:29 It's coming for you. You know what to do to stop it, but you, you know what to do to evade it, but there's no way to stop it. A story where things happen without explanation, you know, can be a story about all of the unknowns that we face every day, you know, the, the things that are beyond us. And I'm fine with that. But in this particular movie, I don't know, stuff happens. It just feels like, indicative of the movie's overall lack of depth than indicative of kind of the overall, there's exactly one painted layer to this entire story and there's nothing beneath it.

14:04 I have at least one more topic I want to talk about, a question specifically for Genevieve, but we'll get to that after the break. We'll be right back.

14:11 What is that? What is that? What?

14:22 So this film was set in 1982. Did that seem like purely for nostalgic reasons for you? And also, I know this is slightly before your time or just at the dawn of the Genevieve era, but Genevieve, you're from this part of the world. How well did it capture its setting?

14:42 I mean, not at all. It's the Detroit suburbs in name only. But David Robert Mitchell is originally from Claussen, which is just 10 miles up the road from where I live. And this is set in Flowervale, which is nomenclaturely close to where I live in Ferndale. And there's the bus stop scene. There's a map. that shows like Woodward Avenue and John R and like these like familiar street names. There's like a Detroit Tigers magnet at one point.

15:19 There's just like these sort of like winks. But as far as like the neighborhood itself is, There's nothing particularly Michigan or even Midwest about it. And I know there's one scene where they see something in a house on the top of a hill in the distance. And there are no hills like that in this area. It is a very... flat. There are hills in Michigan, but not in this particular part of it. And certainly not within neighborhoods like like this. So you know, this was I didn't look up where this is filmed. But if it's not either Vancouver or California, I would be shocked.

16:00 Nope. You'll be shocked. It's Atlanta. Oh, of course. Which is basically the Vancouver of the 2020s. Of course. Although I think Stranger Things faked Indiana more convincingly in Atlanta than this does. Although it's not bad. It's just sort of like suburban everywhere.

16:15 Why is this movie set in 1982? Because it was.

16:18 Sort of the height of the 80s blockbuster era?

16:21 I mean, maybe the height of Amblin Entertainment. Usually these days, if a movie is set in a period and it's not because it's specifically about, you know, Prohibition or Al Capone or, you know, some historical event or figure, I assume that it's to solve the cell phone problem. But here, the cell phones wouldn't work anyway because, you know, very few Paleolithic cell towers.

16:50 Or satellites exist.

16:52 And, you know, being able to use the phone actually becomes a big plot point anyway. So I just don't understand why the very specific setting, time-wise and location-wise, in a movie that draws on neither of those things in any meaningful way, as far as I can tell.

17:11 I think it's pure nostalgia. Although it occurred to me, given that we have Feathery.

17:16 But, Keith, nostalgia for what? For an extremely white suburb where everything looks like mayonnaise, there's no visual specificity, human specificity.

17:28 For a period in which the director grew up, basically. I'm not sure there's much more to it than that. You get to do clothes and songs from when you were a kid, and that's fun, right?

17:41 I mean, it's also like going back to a pre-Jurassic Park era too, like both the movie and the book. So this is way beyond the movie's scope or concern, but sort of like as a viewer, I think you can position it as a world where dinosaur mayhem hasn't been codified in that way yet.

18:02 Yeah. Yeah.

18:04 And the other thing also, and this kind of gets a little spoilery, but we're going to talk about the end at some point. But I actually want to maybe wait to talk about the end of this movie when we talk about the end of War of the Worlds. But spoiler, they get back to 1982. And it occurred to me that it wasn't established science that dinosaurs might have had feathers at this point. So they emerge with this great scientific breakthrough that had not– I don't think– well, maybe it had been– suggest it, but perhaps not as widely accepted as it is now.

18:35 I'm stealing this observation from Sedan Tadlanka, who's previously guested on the show and wrote a very fun sort of ending questions piece about the end of Oak Street over at Vulture. And he noted that, again, to sort of be vague about spoilers when our heroes get back to the present and have to warn people what's coming. They don't yet have the shorthand of Back to the Future, the cultural shorthand of Back to the Future to explain it.

19:07 And he also made a similar point about it being sort of a pre-Jurassic Park moment too. So something about, you know, just kind of predating the obvious cultural touchstones by just a few years. feels, if not purposeful, at least interesting in the context of such an homage-y movie.

19:28 So the two big names in the cast are Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway. I want a quick aside here. I do love it whenever P.J. Byrne shows up in a movie. He plays the obnoxious neighbor in this one because you're going to get a first-class jerk. I'm sure he's a lovely person in real life. All right. So it's been a big year for Anne Hathaway. She was in the David Lowery movie Mother Mary, which I still need to see. Devil Wears Prada 2, which I watched on that plane. I talked about in the previous episode. See, there's a lot of connections right there. The Odyssey and the end of Oak Street. And then she co-stars as Ewan McGregor. She's in this, who is no stranger to effects-driven blockbusters. How do those performances work for you?

20:12 I love Ewan McGregor. I've been such a huge fan of his since Trainspotting. And here, he's entirely fine. He showed up. I will say, this is perhaps an important note, I'm a very visually and narratively focused person. I am much less likely to notice audio. And very frequently when people start talking about how bad somebody's accent is in a thing, it went completely over my head. I did not particularly notice here. Like it really does have to be like a Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis level of weird accent for me to even notice. So I did not notice that. But what I did notice is just, you know, he's a nuanced actor. He's a really good actor.

20:58 And here he kind of seems to have two settings, you know, kind of peeved and kind of scared. And that's about it.

21:04 Yeah, I think Anne Hathaway gives the richer performance, such as it is, as rich a performance as this film invites. But obviously, she's doing so much this year. But it was kind of fun to see her in action mode. I feel like that's something we don't see her do a whole lot of. I don't think of Anne Hathaway toting a shotgun, you know?

21:30 And she gets dirty and bloody by the end of this movie.

21:33 Yeah.

21:34 This is really kind of a wreck looking.

21:36 Yeah.

21:37 You get just a picture. At one point, there's just sort of a pan across a bunch of pictures on the wall. And one of the pictures is a younger version of her grinning and holding up a rifle. It's established that You know, she's comfortable with firearms. And I actually just really like that. It is after she has picked up the rifle and fired it for the first time.

21:59 It is not like a character introduction beat. But the fact that she's kind of the firearms person in this relationship, I just really appreciate it as a small character touch and a small nod to modernity in a movie that's kind of aiming to be an 80s throwback. But I agree that she does give the richer performance here. And I think it's in part just because she has a richer character on the page. The moment where she realizes the basement is flooded and what that means to the work she's been doing is one of the few moments in the movie that really feels like an authentic emotional moment as opposed to a running scared from monsters kind of moment. Just like something relatable and painful. And it

22:41 is wild, I think, that I felt worse for her having lost the novel that she had worked on and workshopped so much than I felt for her when Ewan McGregor gets very quickly and summarily eaten by a dinosaur.

22:59 It kind of gets eaten in two parts. It gets his leg and then the rest of him.

23:03 It still happens very quickly and summarily, though.

23:05 That's grisly, though. I was surprised by how graphic and seemingly final that moment was.

23:13 Yeah. As you said, I think we need to talk about the ending in the context of War of the Worlds because it's one of the things they have in common, but in very different ways. So maybe we can move into Connections.

23:25 Sounds like we're heading in that direction. So let's take a short break and we'll be right back with Connections.

23:30 Denise! Get out of there! Run!

23:54 Now it's time for connections. When we bring these two films together and talk about all the things they have in common. I mean, the most obvious thing is like it's fractured families and children in peril. These are Genevieve's phrasing here on our list of connections. But yeah, they're family dramas, and they're about dramas about keeping families not just together, but alive, right?

24:12 Yeah, I mean, it's a family survival narrative. And the actual makeup of the families are different. And in War of the Worlds, we are dealing with an already broken family, but maybe a family that is figuring out its next phase in the face of an alien invasion. whereas End of Oak Street is more about bringing a fractured family, repairing the cracks in a fractured family, specifically in the marriage between Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor. And again, I think we really need to move to the ending here in order to fully talk about this connection. So maybe should we... I.

25:00 Feel like we could leave that for the end. I feel like there's a little more to explore here just in terms of I mean, there is the difference between Ray and Marianne's marriage is kaput. There is no sense in the movie that we're waiting for them to get back together or that Tim is the bad guy Baxter that needs to be overcome. Whereas I think we're supposed to be rooting for Greg and Denise. Are we in Oak Street?

25:27 I didn't care a whole lot about that.

25:29 I think so.

25:30 Any failure to not have that feeling probably has more to do with the film's shortcomings than your own.

25:37 Yeah, and I mean, I think one of the film's shortcomings is that it just kind of expects you to want these people not to break up. It's like, you know... I mean, for a Spielbergian as this film is like, I feel like that's kind of another element of it. Just like the assumption that a broken family is bad, regardless of the specifics of the people in that marriage.

26:01 I think the interesting thing there, though, is I mean, it is partially broken because Ewan McGregor's character has lost his job and is lying about it and is dealing with a lot of anxiety that he's not sharing with his partner. He's, you know, keeping secrets that he's keeping out of pride, effectively. And in the process, he's like not letting his life partner help. And he's adding a lot of stress to the relationship. But Denise, Anne Hathaway's character, we don't really know why. Like, we know that she wants out. She's writing this novel that is like the story of somebody stuck in a suburban life and marriage with kids who is constantly fantasizing about and kind of secretly planning an escape. And we never really get a

26:46 lot of perspective into what that means for her, how far her personal frustration goes. Is she actually fantasizing about this? Given how much the analysis, the neighbor's analysis of her novel centered on that image of an already packed yellow suitcase, I kept waiting for the reveal where it turns out that she's got such a suitcase, but No, maybe it's all just a fantasy. Hell, maybe it's just a novel.

27:15 It's unclear what she's expressing.

27:17 You don't know that she doesn't have a suitcase like that, though.

27:20 Well, and now that you pointed out the photo of her earlier in life with the gun, now I am kind of grafting a backstory that we do not get onto this character of her being someone who maybe has a little bit of a danger drive or a craving for adventure or whatever. whatever, and she gets it through this experience, you know, and again, the movie doesn't really explicate this in any way. And maybe if it had, it would have felt a little richer than it does.

27:51 But I can squint and see a reading of that character. just feeling really confined by her safe suburban existence and desiring a little excitement and adventure and getting it in this really wild way. And that being what allows her to kind of return to her marriage, feeling more fulfilled.

28:14 So a thing that interests me about the marriages in these two movies is that everything I said about Rey being a kind of doubtful figure in terms of not necessarily being the best parent, in terms of possibly wanting to escape responsibility, not knowing how to relate to or deal with his children, especially when they're frightened. We get a little bit of that with her character through this fantasy of wanting to leave for reasons we don't know.

28:43 And it's a lot less pronounced, but there is sort of the implication that somewhere in the back of her mind, she's kind of prioritizing her own freedom and independence and fantasizing about her or desiring or burying the desire to abandon her husband and her children and her life. And I think in the same way, it complicates that character a bit for us in terms of sympathies. Like, again, I don't have any burning desire to see her and Greg stay together, but I do think that especially in the eighties to have a, a mother character who, Who on some levels fantasizing about not being a mother is saying that maybe there's something wrong with her and maybe she's a bad person because she's willing to abandon these

29:31 children who love her and depend on her in order to prioritize their own freedom. It's just a very Kramer versus Kramer kind of idea of the mother who could abandon her children has obviously a damaged mother. And it's not very pronounced. It's not very well detailed. But it's a little undercurrent there that kind of connects these two movies.

29:50 I think another connection also is in both films, the kids are very perceptive as to what's going on or becoming perceptive, I guess, more. In the case of End of Oak Street, there's sort of like, you know, they can't pinpoint exactly what is wrong. They know something is wrong in that film. Also, we should do a quick shout out to those kids. I think they're both really good.

30:12 Christian Convery is the younger son. And Maisie Stella, who's not a kid. She's actually a fully grown adult, even though she's played a teenager here. But she's the star of a movie I like to push on people, which is called My Old Ass by Megan Park. Another time travel movie in some ways as well.

30:29 And Chris Convery is the star of Netflix's series, Sweet Tooth.

30:34 I knew I knew the name from somewhere.

30:37 Sort of a little just funny sub-connection, speaking of Christian Convery. I found it amusing that the sons in both of these films, Brian and Robbie, both keep running off after something that they that they want and uh at uh with no sense of self-preservation uh in war of the worlds that's you know robbie kind of going after vengeance or revenge or wanting to join the military you know which is a little more fraught than uh brian just running after starbuck the family talk the whole time but it did uh kind of give me a similar feeling of like Guys, settle down. Your sister and parents need you right now.

31:23 Yeah, I think I'm really interesting. Come on, you're a dog person. How would you feel?

31:27 I am a dog person, but I will say I thought this was a pretty blatant use of a movie dog. It didn't really do much for me here, maybe just because it felt very personal. I don't know. It never felt like the dog was not going to make it out of the movie alive.

31:46 It feels a bit manipulative, but it's also it's just a plot convenience thing. I mean, Robbie's drive in War of the Worlds to help in some way works. which we talked a bit about how his, you know, his desire to go strike back against the alien terrorists kind of represents the people who joined the military after 9-11.

32:09 But I think even more so he represents the people who didn't or couldn't for whatever reason, including because they were too young and who just have a kind of inchoate desire to strike back in some way. you know, hurt the people who hurt us, take control of the situation by making the people who made me feel bad, feel bad. And the fact that he's, you know, so young and he doesn't have a really good way to do that is a little bit of a tragedy because it's like an understandable thing. Whereas Brian's like just sort of single-minded, I'm going to rescue my dog, while maybe understandable and relatable, also is just the primary thing that keeps pulling them out of shelter. We see over and over and over in War of the Worlds that Ray

32:55 and his kids cannot stay in a shelter because the disaster is everywhere except this one neighborhood in Boston. You know, they keep going to ground and then the ground literally crumbles out from underneath them. But there's not much reason in End of Oak Street that that family couldn't have just like stayed in that house, maybe scavenged their awful PJ Byrne neighbor and his house for you know, more food to eat or whatever. But there's no reason that they couldn't just hunker down, except that Brian keeps running off and they keep having to chase him down. So it's one of the reasons that the dog thing feels bad is because it's manipulative. You know, it's just a plot convenience.

33:34 Well, I'll push back on that slightly more by way of just broaching another small connection that I have written down here, which is it's inside the house. Because in End of Oak Street, there are a couple instances of the dinosaurs or the prehistoric eel snake creature.

33:53 I'm not sure what that was.

33:57 Yeah, coming and invading the house. And that snake-like creature in particular felt very reminiscent of the tentacle. Sorry, I forget the exact phrasing already. Yes, the Russian water tentacle in War of the Worlds, both visually and the way it's kind of just stalking them through the house. And it does kind of evoke a similar feeling of you should be safe inside. This is where you should be able to hide from the thing. And then once it's no longer a safe hiding space, it feels like an escalation. Like, oh, the danger really is everywhere.

34:36 I did enjoy the snake home invasion, if only because... It was a break from chasing, screaming, slamming through walls and windows and doors and whatnot. The silentness of it really had the theater I saw it in going. There was just a lot of very muffled noise from people processing the terror of something that moves silently but is also that big and horrifying. So, you know, I will allow giant prehistoric albino eel snakes if it gets me a sequence like that instead of a 14th feathered velociraptor chase.

35:15 Also another fun Anne Hathaway action star moment of just stabbing that thing over and over and over again, seemingly futilely. Yeah, you know, she gets to play with a gun, she gets to play with knives, she gets to do it all.

35:31 I'm on a subreddit, a dinosaur subreddit, where apparently no one can really nail down what that thing is. So perhaps it is a A little bit of poetic license about what kind of creature might have slithered its way into the house.

35:46 Nothing more poetic than a giant megafauna of albino eel snake, I always say. I've lost track of how many times I've said that on this particular podcast.

35:56 It's basically the motto of this podcast at this point.

36:01 I claimed it should be the title of the podcast and I was roundly voted down. So one thing that just really struck me about the connection between these two movies is in both cases, you have a boy, girl, sibling, children pair who turn to each other for comfort because their parents are falling apart or absent or even just like slightly away trying to protect them or, you know, focused on somehow driving through a giant mob of people or, you know, whatever, whatever it is. Those siblings are the fallback for each other. And in both of these cases, that kind of, you know, contentious, one of them is older than the other, like they're different genders, they're different ages, they're different interests, they have their own lives. They're just

36:51 very different people and they don't get along in very petty sibling-y ways. But when the crisis comes, you know, they love each other and they protect each other. I saw those two connections as very similar. Obviously, in World of Worlds, Robbie is older and has very clearly been responsible for like helping Rachel through panic attacks in the past.

37:13 And that makes it a little different from Oak Street where they're closer to the same age. And it feels a little more like the older sibling, Audrey, might have had to babysit Brian from time to time. But still, it feels very authentic to children of divorce in particular to have to lean on each other because they can't necessarily trust either mom or dad to have their best interests at heart when they're focused more on each other and the split in the marriage. And also to just have to lean on each other as the one other person that knows what they're going through. There is a heartbreaking moment. I wrote this down because it was one of the biggest kick in the teeth of the entirety of War of the Worlds. There's a moment where Rachel

37:57 says to Robbie, don't go with the army men, because if you do, who's going to look after me? And Ray is standing right there when she says it. And I was just like, oh, my God, that's brutal.

38:07 Dakota Fanning, man. Always good. Yeah, yeah. Just really, that's a knockout performance in that movie.

38:14 A lot is asked of her. She is basically doing Drew Barrymore, you know, in E.T.

38:18 And beyond.

38:19 There's a lot of screaming that she has to do in this movie, but there's also a lot of nuance to it, and she is really good.

38:26 But also a lot of silent emoting, too, you know.

38:29 There's a lot of silent terror.

38:30 Family and family, talented people.

38:37 Another thing I wanted to bring up, which as is my want, I phrased cutely in our script as puny humans, big survival instinct, because I wanted to talk about the comparative scale of these two threats, because in both cases, you know, obviously, these are larger than human threats that that they are dealing with. But the war machines in War of the World, the tripods, are just hundreds of times bigger than even the biggest house-sized dinosaur in End of Oak Street. And the way its destructive capability is just so much more. It can laser an entire street of people away in a second, whereas the dino mayhem is a little more one on one, you know, it can fit inside your house. In War of the Worlds,

39:29 I guess we do get to spend a brief amount of time with the aliens themselves, which are a little more human size, but we don't really interact with them in a violent way, the way that we do with the tripods or the dinosaurs. And yeah, I guess I just kind of wanted to talk through the relative sense of fear that comes with the different scales of these two threats. And if one feels more real or visceral than the other, or am I overthinking this?

40:01 They're both big and single-minded and surprisingly, in the Tripod's case, but also some of the Dinosaur's case, surprisingly nimble as well and precise in their actions. they're targeting and they'll both consume you we haven't even really talked about the um or the world's orifice whatever it is that draws people in it's it's really quite it does.

40:22 Eat them you know in a in a way because yeah because i was just thinking about it in terms of like the lasers blasting people to ash but there is also this more visceral body horror element to them as well.

40:34 The baskets of people they're going to recycle, which I think is what's going on there. It's a little fuzzy on that.

40:42 There's a definite human fascination with what it would be like to be prey that extends through both of these movies.

40:51 Say more.

40:54 Just I mean, it's it's something I go back to Spielberg's Jaws. You know, we're used to thinking ourselves of ourselves as the apex predator and a lot of horror movies, particularly, you know, creature features your your, you know, shark to pusses and your crawls and whatnot. are about that kind of like instinctive fear of something bigger and faster than you that wants to eat you. To me, though, the tripods are scarier because they're so alien, you know? The dinosaurs are just big lizards, which might be feathery or hairy or busy boffing and not paying any attention to you. Or, you know, vegetarians in some ways. But one way or the other, There's just been so much dinosaur media. It's a known factor. They're fast and destructive and very, very

41:43 good at predation, but they're not unknown in the ways that the tripods are unknown. And especially on a first watch, War of the Worlds, I find it very unnerving because if you're not familiar with the source material, the stages of what is this? What does it want? Oh, it wants to vaporize us and it can vaporize. But it also wants to mulch human bodies and grow horrific, you know, alien plants out of them to Mars a form the planet like that series of discoveries like each one of them is a kind of a new kind of horror and comes with a new kind of helplessness like. As we've pointed out, Ewan McGregor getting eaten by a dinosaur happens very, very quickly. It doesn't look fun. It looks painful.

42:32 It looks terrifying. But it happens very quickly compared to being grabbed by an alien, stuffed in a basket, carried around for who knows how long until you're pulled out and stuffed into an alien orifice and turned into mulch, which looks painful and terrifying and also very protracted comparatively.

42:50 There's also a special kind of horror in knowing something's coming and that there's nothing you can do about it which you know oak street is all about running and shooting and stabbing and and survival and not that inevitability of being like a captive in a cage waiting to be turned into ground cover basically so i don't know i think war of the worlds is a lot scarier as a movie personally.

43:16 And there's also the sense that they are operating from a plan, whereas the dinosaurs are just operating from instinct.

43:24 Yeah, prey opportunities. Suddenly being dropped into a food-rich environment.

43:29 Having a food-rich environment dropped on them, maybe more accurately.

43:33 Yeah, well, speaking of getting eaten, I think we officially have to talk about the ending now.

43:39 The end of the end of Oak Street.

43:40 Yeah, so it's big spoilers. Well, obviously, we always said that Ewan McGregor gets eaten, but does he? All right, so the end of this movie, the last 10 minutes of this movie had me puzzled. So I kind of want to walk through it. Correct me if I'm wrong, Harris, but basically, Denise and her children, Audrey and Brian, escape through a wormhole.

44:03 And Jeanette.

44:04 And Jeanette, their neighbor, who... Brian had a crush on, but actually might be better suited for Audrey. They're making eyes at each other. Escape through a wormhole and find themselves back in a different part of their neighborhood shortly before they're just.

44:20 It's like 20 minutes before the clock stopped.

44:22 Right, almost immediately before the events that drew them back to the past. So at which point, Denise orders a pizza so that Greg will deliver it to her. and thus be safe from going back. And then she calls all the neighbors whose numbers she knows by memory, I assume. And then they are later drawn away. There's a time.

44:44 Period where I knew a lot of people's phone numbers.

44:46 There was probably a neighborhood phone tree. This feels like a phone tree neighborhood.

44:51 PTA, possibly, connection.

44:54 But we're left to do so for ourselves. And so basically, those people get out. Their other selves, like the other Denise, Audrey, and Brian people, presumably are sucked back into the past along with the other neighbors whose phone numbers that she doesn't know, and it's a happy ending. Oh, but Jeanette goes back, and then there's two Jeanettes.

45:17 Yeah, yes.

45:18 It's very confusing. Am I wrong? It's a little confusing?

45:22 No, you are correct that it is confusing, and you are not wrong about the sequence of events. I just simply want to underline that the Greg that is alive at the end, at the happy ending and has seemingly reconciled with Denise, uh, has not gone through any of the events that the rest of his family has. He just kind of like gets, uh, forgiven because a different version of himself got eaten, I guess. So that's weird, especially as it pertains to, like I said, him and Denise reconciling and kind of seems to put all the weight of their relationship falling apart and coming back together on her in a really odd way. And then, yes, there also appear to be two Jeanettes at the end of the movie because she ran off to save her

46:14 parents and presumably herself as well. So I guess it's like, kind of like the flip side of, uh, Denise, Audrey and Brian one prime.

46:24 Yeah.

46:24 Yeah.

46:25 Uh, they, they disappear and I guess, and, but then Jeanette, we don't have doubles of them the way we do with Jeanette.

46:34 But presumably they died at the dinosaur and that's fine.

46:39 Especially because if they went back without, uh, Greg or the neighbor lady, the librarian who saves them at one point, like presumably without those characters having traveled back, they would not have survived. So we see them survive in the movie.

46:55 Okay.

46:55 Indulge me here though. So there's two Jeanette's at the end. They both seem perfectly happy. That means that there could have been two Denise's, two Audrey's and two Bryant who also been happy, but those potentially happy people are now dead.

47:10 Yes.

47:12 I don't think they're dead. I mean, this is sort of the paradox of time travel, but they escaped into the past. They are still those people.

47:21 Yeah, they've got to get rid of dinosaurs. Tasha, you know that's what happened to them.

47:26 I mean, I think Denise on her own would have a much better chance of protecting those two kids and getting them out alive than Greg on his own. The problem would be when two shotgun-toting Denise's face off for who gets to be the real Denise. There's a Karen Gillan movie called Duel where that happens, and I rather like it. We can learn from that sort of how things would have gone down. I think the fact that we get to see the second Jeanette is, you know, Mitchell acknowledging that this is a thing that had happened.

47:58 You know, it's not a loophole. It's just, as you say, kind of a little Easter egg almost.

48:03 But it raises so many questions.

48:06 Yeah, but he wants those questions there. Whereas Denise and the family, like, yeah, there is sort of the causal effect of time travel and, like, how they survived the librarian's house if the librarian had already escaped question. But there isn't another... iteration of them because that iteration of them escaped is how I would see how time travel works.

48:29 But regardless, I don't think this movie is necessarily asking you to think about anything along these lines.

48:36 Well, the reason we want to talk about the ending anyway is because it is in some ways also a cop-out ending, just as War of the Worlds is a cop-out ending. In some ways, it almost feels like it's where they're closest.

48:47 Yeah.

48:47 And the sort of last minute resurrection as part of that ending. So is Greg getting to survive and avoid all of the trauma the rest of his family went through? Is that more or less infuriating than Robbie popping back up at the end of War of the Worlds?

49:06 Well, I think also, wouldn't you resent your dad if he skipped all that?

49:10 Yeah.

49:12 I think they're just glad to have him back. I think you guys are mean. I think if I watched my husband be devoured by dinosaur in front of me, and then I got him back through time travel shenanigans, like, if our marriage was already on the rocks, that that might continue.

49:29 And I mean, in the moment, I would certainly be happy. But like the long tail trauma of this situation, I feel you don't know what we went through, Greg.

49:39 I mean, sure, my book, honestly, given what we see in where the world it might be better to have, you know, if one of your parents is deeply traumatized by an incredibly like violent, horrific experience that they went through. Maybe it's good if the other one isn't. So, you know, now that I think about it, something that these two movies do very much have in common is Greg and Ray, the fathers, both engage in that kind of magical thinking.

50:08 Like they're they both keep telling the kids like it's going to be fine. Ray less so, especially towards the beginning. He does a lot of like, I don't know, or just stonewalling any answer and especially about what's going on. Why are we running? But, you know, towards the end, he's like, oh, Robbie's going to meet up with us later, which turns out to be true. Oh, your mother's alive.

50:30 It's going to be OK, which turns out to be true. We'll just meet up with them in Boston where they were going, which turns out to be true. So maybe he maybe has prophetic powers. And this movie isn't about what I thought about at all. But in the moment where he's saying those things, it it feels like, you know, desperate lies to keep a kid going, but also kind of overreaching. You know, I just might. prime example for this is uh of all things team america uh when the love interest tells the lead like if you you know i've been too much trauma through too much trauma i've lost too many people if you tell me you will never die and never leave me we will have sex right now and he's like i promise i will

51:10 never die and that's what i hear in both greg and ray um you know, saying these, you know, everything is going to be fine. This specific thing is going to happen. The fact that Spielberg and Cap let Ray get away with all of that by making it all true is a little frustrating. But with Greg, I think it's meant to be just kind of an important like plot thing is like he thinks nothing of saying Everything's going to be fine. Those people that are going to shoot on by dinosaurs right now, they're going to be they're going to be OK. We will get out of this.

51:42 And meanwhile, Denise is kind of saying, why are you saying all of these things that aren't true? Like she feels that it's keeping him from dealing with the situation at all. So I feel like he's just sort of a more blithe and positive character. And he's going to come out of this with a continuing like, oh, yeah, everything worked out. It's all OK. And it might be better for the kids to have some of that in their lives instead of both of their parents being completely traumatized by a night of dino fighting.

52:13 Well, that's a nice spin to put on it, Tasha. I appreciate that.

52:17 How do you feel about the dog surviving?

52:19 I mean, I'm always glad when a dog survives, but I don't know. I didn't get it. Starbuck didn't give me a whole lot.

52:25 I will say, except for the moment where he rushes in heroically at the last moment, he does behave very much like a dumb dog, right?

52:33 Yeah, yeah. I forgot he did have a hero moment. So yeah, good job, Starbuck. I'm glad you survived.

52:43 Well, we survived.

52:45 I'm not traumatized at all.

52:49 I'm a little traumatized. I'm still thinking about the end of Oak Street.

52:53 Keith's just going to wake up in the middle of the night going.

52:54 Two Jeanettes!

52:57 It doesn't make sense. So if you want to watch War of the Worlds, it's available on DVD and Blu-ray. It's also streaming on Paramount Plus and MGM Plus. It's widely available for digital rental on other services. The end of Oak Street is in theaters now, and we'll be right back with your next picture show. Finally, it's time to recommend a film or film-related item that complements this set of episodes. We call it Your Next Picture Show in the hopes it'll put some interesting choices on your radar.

53:28 This time we have two interesting choices, one from Genevieve and one from Tasha. And they both are kind of like movies we could have done, maybe. I think we chose the right one, but I can see these episodes working. Tasha, what's yours?

53:40 Well, this honestly didn't occur to me until I was writing the preview text for this pairing and was kind of like laying out the shared plot line with both of these movies of a small neighborhood coming under attack by, you know, unknown mysterious forces and ordinary people having to band together in kind of unforeseen ways in order to deal with these things and survive. And as I was writing that, I was thinking I'm basically summing up Joe Cornish's Attack the Block, which is a film that we haven't done on the podcast, but we have talked up in the past as just a very enjoyable. You want to talk about a movie that maybe doesn't have layer upon layer upon layer, but is just a really fun, good action time, kind of an action adventure and is

54:27 maybe just different from all of these movies in that the setting just feels so different. It's a southern London street gang. coming together to fight back against, uh, alien attackers and, uh, stars John Boyega in, I don't recall if it's his first role. I don't think it is, but very early and, uh, kind of, if not breakout breakout adjacent John Boyega role, he's really great in this movie.

54:54 Mostly what I remember is just thinking about seeing this movie is just sort of a feeling of this is a familiar tale told in a different way and told well and told with a lot of flavor that I was not necessarily expecting from this kind of, you know, particular kind of 80s feeling throwback movie. Also, it's very low budget, but the way that aliens are done is very cheaply creative in a way that I think is quite fun. And then I'm certainly not going to spoil.

55:25 So just overall, I think Attack the Black doesn't connect in the same kind of ways in terms of, yeah, it was his first feature film. He was in a TV series before that, but this was his feature debut. I feel like it doesn't have a lot of the parallels in terms of like actual bio family stuff. And in terms of the very specific relationships between husband and wife, between the two siblings, between the optimist and the pessimist, between the particular kind of attackers and the particular kind of responses. But it does kind of fit the same pattern.

56:02 And I certainly think it's a better, more fun and more lively and more textured and nuanced film than End of Oak Street, as this very specific plot line goes. Genevieve, what about you?

56:13 The film that came to mind for me when watching End of Oak Street is one that has a lot, a lot of direct connections, but is maybe one that is harder to designate a classic film. Although I would perhaps argue for Jurassic Park 3, one of the most maligned entries in that franchise, as being underrated. It's one that I like to revisit more than most other of the Jurassic Park's. And as far as like how it aligns with End of Oak Street, just sort of on a meta level, this was the first Jurassic Park movie that Spielberg was not involved with. So it does kind of feel similar to David Robert Mitchell doing a Spielberg homage, you know, with dinosaurs. So kind of on a meta level reminded me of that. But then on like a

57:06 pure connections level, it also involves a broken family, a divorced couple played by William H. Macy and Taylor Leone, trying to save their son, their imperiled child, who ends up stranded on Isla Sorna, the second island, I believe. I get confused on all the different Jurassic Park islands, but it is sort of like the B-movie version of Jurassic Park. So on that level, on the kind of character relationships level, obviously on the dinosaurs level, and it kind of has, it's a little more focused in its setting.

57:42 You know, it just takes place on this island that feels kind of similar to taking place in the neighborhood of End of Oak Street. So like I said, a lot of people talk down on Jurassic Park 3, and I'm not like going to, you know, make any grand claims for it. as the best Jurassic Park, but I think we could have had fun talking about it. Have either of you revisited it?

58:06 No, I saw it a couple years ago when I was watching all those movies, re-watching them all with my kid. Yeah, no, it's fine. It's not my favorite, but I'll take it over almost all the Jurassic World movies, although I have a soft spot for Fallen Kingdom. I do too. Which kind of turns it into a haunted house movie with dinosaurs instead.

58:24 Which is kind of similar to Jurassic Park 3. Those two feel like kind of like echoes across the franchise to me.

58:33 You know, there have been so many Jurassics under the bridge at this point. I really don't pick out a lot of the plot points between them. I haven't revisited three, I think, since it came out. And a lot of the worlds blur together for me. So not exactly a Jurassic go-to expert.

58:50 I believe it's the only Jurassic Park movie that could claim to be co-written by Alexander Payne. So there is.

58:58 That. There is that. Well, with that bit of trivia, I think we can wind down this edition of The Next Picture Show. Genevieve, can you tell us about our next pairing?

59:05 It Ends is technically a horror movie. Written and directed by Alexander Ulm. starts with a group of friends in their 20s who go on a road trip, head down a mysterious side road, and are accosted by zombie-like humans when they pull over to turn around. But when it becomes clear that the road itself appears to be infinite and the roadside attacks are predictable... It stops being a conventional horror movie and starts being more like a variation on Jean-Paul Sartre's existential play No Exit. The idea of using a genre setup to more philosophical ends calls to mind Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 science fiction classic about the psychotic breakdown of space station astronauts who are orbiting a

59:42 distant planet. Both films suggest that being in a seemingly hopeless situation really makes you think.

59:49 For now, we welcome your feedback on War of the Worlds, The End of Oak Street, and anything else film related you'd like to talk about. Email us at comments at nextpictureshow.net or leave us a voicemail at 773-234-9730. Before we close out this episode, where can we find everyone these days, Tasha?

1:00:04 I mean, you can barely find me these days. I'm still recapping Game Changer over at Vulture. Otherwise, kind of taking a little break, including from social media. But I am on Blue Sky at Tasha Robinson.

1:00:16 And you're here. And I'm here. We get a Toshirova exclusive or near exclusive.

1:00:21 Yes, you can find me here. However, what am I, HBO to be teasing the thing that you're listening to, advertising the thing that you're listening to to you as you're listening to it? No. People strangely seem to be already aware that I'm here. Genevieve, what about you?

1:00:38 Oh, same old, same old. Behind the scenes at Vulture, not posting at Blue Sky at Genevieve Kosky.

1:00:45 Keith.

1:00:47 Tell us about The Reveal.

1:00:48 Sorry we're boring. Our absent co-host, Scott Tobias, contributes to such publications as Vulture, The Guardian, The New York Times. But you can find him most regularly at The Reveal. It's thereal.film. Or you can also find me. We co-write that movies newsletter. And it's a good one. I like it. You can also find me. I'm one of the co-hosts of Ford Focus, a Harrison Ford podcast with Mike Ryan, where we talk about the films of Harrison Ford, and we do bonus episodes, and it's fun. We're having fun doing that. And you can stay updated on The Next Picture Show at nextpictureshow.net and on Blue Sky at The Next Picture Show. You can get bonus content and open discussion at patreon.com slash nextpictureshow. And as always, we appreciate

1:01:31 your rating and reviews on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to the show. Thanks to Dan that baked chicks for his assistance producing this podcast. The next picture show is probably part of the film spotting and family podcast. Please tune in next time.

1:01:46 That was a good movie.

1:01:55 Yeah.

1:01:56 Seen here before once.