We went Low on Psycho (1998), and not in a fun, “this is secretly fascinating” way. This might be the most frustrating Low we have covered, because Gus Van Sant’s Psycho is not just a bad remake. It is a remake that keeps copying the body of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while missing the soul. The problem is not that remakes are automatically inferior. Some of the best genre movies ever made are remakes. The problem is that this movie breaks the one rule a remake has to follow: add something without taking away what already worked.

That is the central argument of the episode. Everything this version attempts to add, from color to extra shock imagery to Norman Bates masturbating at the peephole, actively makes the original feel smarter by comparison. It copies Hitchcock’s choices while removing the reasons those choices mattered.

In this episode, we talk about Psycho, directed by Gus Van Sant and released in 1998, as one of the strangest remake experiments in studio history. This is the infamous almost shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1960), now in color, set in the late ’90s, and starring Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, Anne Heche as Marion Crane, Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis, Julianne Moore as Lila Crane, William H. Macy as Arbogast, and Robert Forster as the psychiatrist.

We start by making something clear: remakes are not the problem. John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and different versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers prove that remakes can be brilliant when a filmmaker has a new angle, a new nightmare, or a new reason to revisit the material. But Psycho (1998) does not feel like a movie with a new idea. It feels like a post-Good Will Hunting vanity experiment that somehow became a major studio release.

There are a few highs, and we give the movie credit where we can. The casting is at least interesting. Viggo Mortensen as Sam Loomis is probably an improvement over the original version of the character. Making Sam more rugged, blue collar, and believable as a hardware store owner gives him a little more texture. Anne Heche is also better than her Razzie nomination suggests. In the early scenes, she finds a way to take the original dialogue and make it feel more modern, sharper, and less melodramatic. Her Marion has a harder edge, which makes sense for a late-’90s version of the character.

We also liked Robert Forster as the psychiatrist. In the original Psycho, the psychiatrist explanation at the end is one of the weakest parts of the movie because it goes on too long and feels too theatrical. Forster plays it much cleaner, faster, and flatter, almost like he is reading the facts instead of performing a lecture. That is one of the few places where the remake finds a small way to improve a specific piece of the original.

The opening shot is another technical high. Hitchcock wanted to move from the city into a hotel room in a way that 1960 technology could not fully support. Van Sant can actually execute that idea more fluidly. We also noticed the little detail of the fly buzzing in the opening hotel room, which creates a subtle bookend with the ending and Mother’s “I wouldn’t even harm a fly.” That is the kind of addition that works: small, connected, non-destructive.

But then the movie gets to the Bates Motel, and the whole thing starts falling apart.

The first major problem is the decision to shoot in color. Hitchcock could have used color in 1960, but black and white was a defining part of Psycho’s visual identity. Removing it means the remake needs a new visual idea, and Van Sant seems to land on green: green dress, green sheets, green credits, green everywhere. But what does it actually mean? Greed? Envy? Rot? Money? The movie keeps underlining the color without turning it into a real idea.

Then there is Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates, which becomes one of the episode’s biggest debates. We respect the swing. Coming off Swingers, it is interesting that Vaughn wanted to show another side of himself. He can play nervous, awkward, wounded, and strange. But physically, he feels wrong for Norman. He is too tall, too imposing, too capable of overwhelming the room. Norman Bates should not look like he could reach across a desk and fold Sam Loomis in half.

The parlor scene shows the problem most clearly. In Hitchcock’s version, the scene works because of stillness and restraint. Anthony Perkins hides Norman’s rage under politeness. Van Sant moves the camera, and Vaughn plays the scene more aggressively. Suddenly, Marion does not seem like she has had a revealing conversation with a troubled man. She seems like she wants to get out of the room before he kills her.

The biggest Low, hands down, is the peephole scene. In the original, Norman watching Marion is disturbing because of implication: voyeurism, repression, shame, desire, control. Van Sant turns the implication into text by showing Norman masturbating while watching her. We hated it, not because it is disturbing, but because it is stupid. It takes subtext and flattens it into shock value. The mystery disappears, the nuance disappears, and the scene becomes awkward in a way it should never be.

We also get into the extra imagery Van Sant adds to the movie’s most famous sequences: clouds during the shower scene, a masked woman and a lamb during Arbogast’s death, live birds during the fruit cellar reveal. These additions feel like insecurity. If the experiment is to remake Psycho shot for shot, then do it. Let the scenes stand. Do not flinch. But the movie does flinch.

By the end, Psycho (1998) feels less like a remake made out of need and more like a dare. As a private film school exercise, it might make sense. As a theatrical release, it feels baffling. You can copy the blocking, the dialogue, the camera angles, and the structure. But you cannot copy tension by tracing a chalk outline around the original.

We went High on Psycho, because this is one of those movies that is not just important because film history tells us it is important. Psycho (1960) still has teeth. It still feels dangerous. It still knows how to get under your skin, not just by scaring you, but by making you question where your sympathy is going while you watch it.

That is the real genius of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It does not simply show us a murder and ask us to be horrified. It moves us through the story in a way that makes us complicit. First, we understand why Marion Crane steals the money. Then we feel her panic on the road. Then she is murdered in the shower. And somehow, only a few minutes later, we are watching Norman Bates try to sink her car into the swamp and quietly thinking, please go down. That is the trick. Hitchcock does not just kill the person we thought the movie was about. He starts moving our morals around.

In this episode, we revisit Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1960, as one of the most groundbreaking horror-thrillers ever made. The film stars Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Vera Miles as Lila Crane, John Gavin as Sam Loomis, and Martin Balsam as Detective Arbogast. We talk about why the movie still works even when you already know the twist, and how the second viewing becomes a completely different experience from the first.

The first major High is Bernard Herrmann’s score, which somehow did not even get nominated for an Oscar. That feels insane now, because the music is inseparable from the movie’s identity. The score attacks before the story even begins. The strings feel like guilt, panic, split identity, and violence all at once. It sounds like the movie is being cut into pieces, which is exactly what Hitchcock is about to do to the audience’s trust.

We also talk about how much Hitchcock lets the camera tell the story. Psycho is full of visual storytelling that does not need dialogue to explain itself. Marion does not have to announce that she is going to steal the $40,000. Hitchcock pushes in on the envelope, pans toward the suitcase, and we understand the decision forming in her mind. The opening shot does something similar on a larger scale: the camera moves toward Phoenix, toward a hotel window, toward a private room where people are doing things they maybe should not be doing. From the beginning, the movie makes us feel like we are watching something we are not supposed to see.

That becomes one of the episode’s biggest ideas: Hitchcock makes us complicit before Norman ever enters the movie. Marion is wrong to steal the money, but the movie gives us just enough context to understand her desperation. She is trapped in a life that feels too small. She wants a future with Sam Loomis, but money keeps standing in the way. The man flashing the cash is a creep who treats $40,000 like disposable “buying off unhappiness” money. So when Marion runs, we know it is wrong, but we are already leaning toward her side.

Then Anthony Perkins enters the movie, and everything changes. Perkins as Norman Bates is the biggest High of the episode. He does not play Norman like a monster. He plays him as shy, boyish, awkward, wounded, and almost sweet. That is what makes him terrifying. His harmlessness is the disguise. The stammer, the smile that hangs a beat too long, the nervous posture, the way he seems both eager for connection and afraid of what connection might awaken in him, all of it makes Norman feel like a new kind of screen monster.

The parlor scene is where the whole movie starts to reveal itself. Marion and Norman sit among the stuffed birds, talking about his mother, but really talking about him. When Norman says his mother is “as harmless as one of those stuffed birds,” the movie is basically telling us the ending if we know how to listen. The birds matter. The framing matters. Norman’s fixation on preserving passive things matters. He wants to control what might leave him.

And then there is the shower scene. We talk about it not just as an iconic horror moment, but as a scene built around vulnerability. Marion has no chance. She is naked, exposed, defenseless, and attacked in a place where people are supposed to be safe. Like Jaws made people afraid of the ocean, Psycho made people afraid of the shower.

One of our biggest debates is whether the second half of Psycho is as strong as the first. The movie famously restarts after Marion’s murder, and historically that is one of its great shocks. But we talk about how Marion and Norman feel like modern movie characters, while Sam and Lila feel more like characters from an older era trying to solve a movie that has already moved past them.

That connects to our biggest Lows. Sam Loomis feels like the weakest link, not because he ruins the movie, but because next to Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins, he feels less alive. The $40,000 math clue is also clunky in a movie that is usually so elegant visually. And the psychiatrist explanation at the end goes on way too long, explaining the monster after the movie has already shown us everything we need to know.

But then Hitchcock and Perkins almost redeem that speech with the final Norman scene. Norman sits in the blanket, barely moving, while Mother’s voice takes over. The eyes, the tiny smile, the “I wouldn’t even harm a fly” moment, and the superimposition of Mother’s skull over Norman’s face are still chilling. The psychiatrist explains the monster. Anthony Perkins becomes the monster.

By the end, Psycho is a High because it is more than a landmark. It is alive. It lies to us about whose story we are watching, turns us into accomplices, and then asks what kind of people we were while we watched.

We went LOW on Madame Web, and this is not one of those sneaky affectionate Lows where we secretly want to defend the movie. This is a real LOW. Madame Web (2024) has psychic spiders, future Spider-Women, a villain trying to prevent his own death, a 2003 setting, Pepsi product placement, Uncle Ben, Peter Parker’s birth, and Dakota Johnson as a clairvoyant paramedic who can see time fold in on itself. That should at least be interesting.

Instead, Madame Web feels like a movie that is not interested in being a movie. It is interested in being phase one of a cinematic universe rollout. It does not tell a complete story so much as scatter breadcrumbs for possible future stories that, after this thing landed, nobody seemed especially excited to see. Coming right after our Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse episode made the contrast even worse. One movie says anyone can wear the mask. This one says nobody gets to wear the mask yet because Sony’s calendar has not approved it.

In this episode, we talk about Madame Web, directed by S.J. Clarkson, as a movie with a handful of workable ingredients and almost no idea how to turn them into a meal. The film stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb, a New York paramedic who develops premonitions after a near-death accident. She ends up protecting three teenage girls, Julia Cornwall, Anya Corazon, and Mattie Franklin, played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor, from Ezekiel Sims, played by Tahar Rahim, a spider-powered villain who believes they will eventually kill him.

That is not the worst setup in the world. In fact, we try to be generous early on and point out that Cassandra’s power could have worked. The idea that she does not just have a traditional Spider-Sense, but instead experiences fragments of the future before snapping back into the present, is actually a decent cinematic hook. There is a version of this movie where her powers feel less like a gift and more like a panic attack. She sees terrible things, does not fully understand them, and has only seconds to change the outcome.

The problem is that the movie keeps using that idea as a substitute for action instead of a way to create action. A good set piece should escalate. It should have geography, cause and effect, danger, improvisation, and momentum. In Madame Web, too many scenes play like rehearsal footage for something that has not happened yet. We see the bad version, time snaps back, and then Cassandra avoids it. After a while, the premonitions stop building suspense and start draining it.

The train sequence is the first time the movie almost works. Cassandra is trying to protect the girls, Ezekiel is hunting them, and her visions give her just enough information to move them out of danger. For a couple of minutes, we can see the shape of a better thriller. We compare it to Minority Report, where Samantha Morton’s character guides Tom Cruise through a mall using flashes of what is about to happen. That is the best version of what Madame Web is trying to do. This movie gets maybe ten percent of the way there and then gives up.

The 2003 setting is another idea that could have been interesting. If the movie wanted to use that period to avoid smartphones, explore post-9/11 New York, or build some specific cultural texture, that could work. Instead, it mostly drives past a Blockbuster Video and hopes millennials clap. Worse, the movie keeps making choices that do not even feel right for 2003. Information moves too quickly. The period details feel shallow. The setting becomes another ingredient the movie refuses to cook.

Then there is Dakota Johnson’s performance, which becomes the most visible problem because she is at the center of everything. To be fair, the script gives nobody good dialogue, emotional reality, or a playable arc. But Johnson’s line readings are so flat and detached that it starts to feel less like Cassandra Webb is emotionally guarded and more like Dakota Johnson is angry she has to be in Madame Web. The movie seems to want Cassandra to be closed off, but there is a difference between character detachment and actor detachment.

We also get into how strange it is that Cassandra is a paramedic. Her job is literally to save and connect with people, but the movie presents her as someone who barely seems to understand basic human interaction. Kids draw her thank-you pictures and she reacts like she has been handed a parking ticket. If the movie wanted her to be cold, technical, isolated, or emotionally removed, there were probably better professions to give her.

The biggest Low is the script. The dialogue is radioactive. “Don’t do dumb things” feels like placeholder text that accidentally survived every draft. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m hangry” is both a bad joke and a questionable 2003 period detail. The Christmas Carol references are so on the nose that the movie might as well be holding up flash cards that say “future” on them.

We also talk about Ezekiel Sims, who should have been a pulpy, comic-book villain but ends up being a total nothing. His motivation is simple enough: he sees a future where the three girls kill him, so he tries to kill them first. That could create a fun self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, he mostly wanders through the movie in a Spider-Man-adjacent costume because the plot needs someone to chase people.

The product placement is another major Low, especially the Pepsi integration. Product placement does not automatically ruin a movie, but when your final action sequence is built around a giant Pepsi sign, it becomes impossible to ignore. It feels connected to the larger problem: everything in Madame Web is hedged. It hedges toward a sequel, toward Spider-Man, toward future heroines, toward mythology, toward brand integration. Everything except the actual story.

By the end, Madame Web is exhausting because it is franchise homework. It asks us to care about Cassandra, the girls, Ezekiel, Ben Parker, Peter Parker, future Spider-Women, magical spiders, and a cinematic universe that never justifies itself. Into the Spider-Verse takes franchise material and turns it into emotion. Madame Web takes franchise material and turns it into obligation.

Madame Web 2024 review

S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web

Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Webb

Tahar Rahim as Ezekiel Sims

Adam Scott as Ben Parker

Madame Web as a Low episode

Madame Web and Sony’s Spider-Man universe

Why Madame Web failed

Madame Web premonition powers

Cassandra Webb as a paramedic

Madame Web train scene

Madame Web vs Minority Report

Ezekiel Sims villain problem

Madame Web 2003 setting

Pepsi product placement in Madame Web

Madame Web dialogue problems

Spider-Women setup with no payoff

Peter Parker’s birth in Madame Web

Madame Web as franchise homework

Madame Web vs Into the Spider-Verse

We went High on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and honestly, this might be the easiest High we have done in a while. Not because there is nothing to talk about, but because the movie knows exactly what it is doing. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is not just a great animated superhero movie. It is the best Spider-Man movie because it understands Spider-Man as an idea: anyone can wear the mask, everyone gets knocked down, and nobody knows they are ready until they jump.

That is what makes this movie feel so fresh. It takes one of the most rebooted, reworked, overexposed characters in pop culture and somehow makes him feel brand new without betraying what Spider-Man means. Miles Morales is not a gimmick, a replacement, or a remix for the sake of it. He is the perfect way into the story because his whole journey is about realizing that being Spider-Man is not about being Peter Parker. It is about choosing to get back up.

In this episode, we revisit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, and talk about why it still feels like such a major turning point for superhero movies and animated films. Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, the movie stars Shameik Moore as Miles Morales, Jake Johnson as Peter B. Parker, Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy, Mahershala Ali as Uncle Aaron, Brian Tyree Henry as Jefferson Davis, Luna Lauren Vélez as Rio Morales, Liev Schreiber as Kingpin, and Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir. That is a stacked cast, but the movie never feels overcrowded. Somehow, it throws the whole Spider-Man toy box at the screen and keeps the emotional center completely clear.

The biggest thing we talk about is the movie’s three core themes. The first is the most obvious: anyone can wear the mask. That line could have been corny, but the movie earns it. Miles is a Brooklyn kid dealing with school, parents, expectations, awkwardness, fear, and the terrifying realization that he has been handed a responsibility he does not know how to carry. The randomness of the Spider-Man origin matters. A normal kid gets bitten, gets power, and has to decide what kind of person he is going to be.

The second theme is that whatever you are going through, someone else understands. That is why the multiverse works so well here. In a lot of modern superhero stories, the multiverse feels like a machine for references and cameos. In Into the Spider-Verse, it is a machine for empathy. Miles thinks he is alone, and then the universe literally breaks open to show him that he is not. Peter B. Parker, Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man Noir, Peni Parker, and Spider-Ham are all different, but they share the same loss, weirdness, isolation, and responsibility. They all know what it feels like to be the only one, until they realize they are not.

The third theme is the one that makes the movie really land: Spider-Man always gets back up. We talk about how the movie uses that idea over and over until it becomes the emotional spine of the story. The final fight, with Miles down and his father yelling, “Get up, Spider-Man,” works because the whole movie has been building to that moment. It is not about whether Miles is strong enough. It is about whether he can believe he is ready before anyone can prove it to him.

We also spend a lot of time on the animation, because this movie looks incredible. It does not just look like animation inspired by comic books. It looks like a comic book came alive: halftone dots, paneling, motion smears, texture, color, frame-rate choices, and images that feel printed instead of polished into plastic. The style has become more common since, but this movie still feels like the one that blew the doors open.

The heart of the episode, though, is the relationship between Miles Morales and Peter B. Parker. Middle-aged, divorced, sweatpants Spider-Man is a perfect idea, but the movie is smart enough not to turn him into a bitter joke. Peter B. is tired, out of shape, and emotionally bruised, but he still loves being Spider-Man. That is what makes his mentorship with Miles so satisfying. The “leap of faith” idea pays off twice: first when Peter tells Miles he will not know when he is ready, and later when Miles sends Peter home with the same lesson. In that moment, they both save each other.

One of the biggest takeaways from this episode is that Into the Spider-Verse uses intellectual property as imagination, not obligation. After talking about Ghostbusters (2016), this felt like the opposite end of the spectrum. That movie used a beloved brand like a reheated meal. Spider-Verse takes one of the most famous superheroes ever and expands the mythology in a way that feels generous, emotional, funny, and necessary.

We also talk about how the movie handles villains better than most superhero films with crowded casts. Kingpin has a simple but effective motivation rooted in grief. The Prowler works because the reveal that he is Uncle Aaron gives Miles a personal stake that hurts. Even with multiple Spider-people and multiple villains, the story never loses focus because everything comes back to Miles.

The one Low is barely a Low. If we are really digging for a nitpick, Gwen Stacy’s arrival in Miles’ school before he even gets bitten feels a little sweaty. Compared with how cleanly the other Spider-variants are introduced, Gwen being blown into last week and enrolling at Visions Academy is maybe the one loose thread. But that is us looking for a flaw in a very clean sweater.

By the end, this is an easy High. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is funny, beautiful, emotional, stylish, and completely alive. It understands that Spider-Man is not one person. Spider-Man is the moment you are scared, unready, overwhelmed, and still choose to jump.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse review

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2018

Miles Morales as Spider-Man

Shameik Moore as Miles Morales

Jake Johnson as Peter B. Parker

Hailee Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy

Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir

Mahershala Ali as Uncle Aaron

Brian Tyree Henry as Jefferson Davis

Liev Schreiber as Kingpin

Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman

Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman screenplay

Anyone can wear the mask

Spider-Man always gets back up

Into the Spider-Verse animation style

Best use of the multiverse in superhero movies

Miles Morales and Peter B. Parker relationship

What’s Up Danger scene

Leap of faith scene

Stan Lee cameo in Into the Spider-Verse

Prowler reveal and Uncle Aaron

Kingpin’s collider and multiverse plan

Spider-Gwen origin

Why Into the Spider-Verse is the best Spider-Man movie

We went Low on Ghostbusters (2016), but not for the reason the internet spent a decade screaming about. The problem was never that women were the Ghostbusters. Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones are all funny performers, and there is absolutely a version of this cast that could have worked. The problem is that this movie never feels like it has a strong reason to exist beyond the fact that Ghostbusters is a valuable brand.

That is the real issue we keep coming back to in this episode. Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters does not feel like a movie made from love, enthusiasm, or a killer comic idea. It feels like intellectual property karaoke: a studio taking a song everyone already knows, handing the mic to talented people, and hoping recognition will do half the work. The result is not offensive so much as frustratingly forgettable. It has proton packs, ghosts, slime, cameos, the logo, the car, and the song, but very little of what made the original stick.

In this episode, we finally watched Ghostbusters (2016), directed by Paul Feig and released in 2016, after talking about Bridesmaids the week before. That comparison matters, because a lot of the same creative energy that works beautifully in Bridesmaids works against this movie. Bridesmaids thrives on looseness, riffing, escalation, and performers finding comedy inside emotionally clear scenes. Ghostbusters tries to use a similar improvisational approach, but this is a bigger genre machine. It needs a stronger spine.

The movie follows Erin Gilbert, played by Kristen Wiig, who is trying to be taken seriously in academia when an old paranormal book reconnects her with Abby Yates, played by Melissa McCarthy. Abby is working with eccentric engineer Jillian Holtzmann, played by Kate McKinnon, and eventually the team is joined by Patty Tolan, played by Leslie Jones, an MTA worker with a deep knowledge of New York history. Together, they uncover supernatural activity tied to Rowan, a lonely hotel janitor trying to open a portal between the living and the dead.

That sounds like enough for a fun sci-fi horror comedy, but the movie never really builds momentum. We talk a lot about the baggage this movie carried before it even came out. Fans had spent years hearing rumors about a real Ghostbusters 3 with the original team. Then Harold Ramis passed away in 2014, and that version of the dream died with him. When this reboot arrived with a new cast, new continuity, and no real continuation of the original story, it was always going to face resistance.

The discourse around the movie got ugly fast, and we do not excuse the sexist, racist, or misogynistic backlash. But we also think that backlash created a shield around the movie, where it became harder to say the simpler truth: the movie just did not look very good, and then it was not very good. You cannot guilt people into liking a blockbuster. You have to make it undeniable.

There are highs, though. The biggest is Kate McKinnon as Holtzmann, who comes closest to creating something that feels new and specific to this version. She has the energy of a lab goblin in goggles, a mad scientist who may or may not understand normal human behavior. The Pringles “salty parabolas” line, the mannequin bit, the gun lick, the sideways delivery, all of that gives the movie some actual comic texture. The problem is that Holtzmann is mostly a vibe. She is funny to watch, but the movie never gives her a real arc or builds anything around her.

We also talk about Chris Hemsworth as Kevin, the impossibly beautiful and impossibly stupid receptionist. There is a funny inversion in taking Thor and making him the bimbo secretary, and Hemsworth commits to the bit. The “Michael Hat” joke works, and some of the physical comedy lands. But even that joke gets pushed too far. Kevin starts as a funny reversal and slowly becomes another sketch character the movie keeps returning to without enough variation.

The real Low is the structure. This movie mistakes riffing for construction. A good comedy scene is not just funny people saying funny things. It needs setup, escalation, reversal, and payoff. That is why the food poisoning scene in Bridesmaids works: there is a clear internal logic, and the comedy escalates from the situation. In Ghostbusters, too many scenes feel like the camera was pointed at talented performers long enough in the hope that something would happen.

The biggest debate in the episode is whether this needed to be a Ghostbusters movie at all. The cast has chemistry. Paul Feig knows how to direct comedy. The performers are talented. So why chain them to a beloved franchise if the movie is not going to justify that choice with a fresh point of view?

We also get into the team dynamic, which never fully clicks. The original Ghostbusters had clear roles: Venkman was the cynical hustler, Ray was the enthusiastic believer, Egon was the deadpan brain, and Winston was the working-class audience entry point. In the 2016 version, everyone has traits, but the group never becomes a fully defined team. Erin and Abby have a friendship backstory, Holtzmann is weird, Patty knows New York, but the emotional and comic engine never locks in.

The cameos are another major Low. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, and Sigourney Weaver showing up should be fun, but instead the cameos keep reminding us of the better, more iconic movie we are not watching. Dan Aykroyd quoting “I ain’t afraid of no ghosts” as a cab driver is not a victory lap. It just makes us want to turn this off and watch the original.

By the end, Ghostbusters (2016) is not the worst movie we have covered. It is worse in a different way: it evaporates. It has motion, noise, effects, and a few decent jokes, but almost no residue. The original gave us proton packs, traps, Slimer, Stay Puft, Ecto-1, “This man has no dick,” and “We came, we saw, we kicked its ass.” This one gives us flashes of talent trapped inside a reheated franchise meal with 40% of the flavor.

We went High on Bridesmaids, because this is the kind of studio comedy we just do not get enough of anymore. It is loud, gross, awkward, emotional, over-the-top, and built around the kind of female friendship that movies still do not explore as often as they should. Bridesmaids (2011) is not just “women doing a Hangover.” That undersells what makes it work. This is a movie about watching your best friend move into a new phase of life while your own life is actively falling apart.

That is the real engine of the movie. Annie Walker, played by Kristen Wiig, is not simply jealous that Lillian is getting married. She is grieving the version of their friendship where she was the first call, the default person, the one who mattered most. The wedding is the MacGuffin. The actual story is what happens when adulthood starts pulling a friendship apart, and one person is not ready to let go.

In this episode, we revisit Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig and written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, as one of the last great mid-budget studio comedies of its era. It came out in 2011, right near the end of a run where movies like this could still become huge cultural events: big cast, big set pieces, quotable lines, emotional core, and enough room for performers to actually play.

The movie stars Kristen Wiig as Annie, Maya Rudolph as Lillian, Rose Byrne as Helen, Melissa McCarthy as Megan, Wendi McLendon-Covey as Rita, Ellie Kemper as Becca, Jon Hamm as Ted, and Chris O’Dowd as Rhodes. That cast is loaded, and the movie knows how to use them. It has the rhythm of sketch comedy, the looseness of the Judd Apatow comedy era, and the emotional structure of a friendship breakup movie.

What makes Bridesmaids special is that it treats female friendship with the same insecurity and arrested development that male friendship comedies had been mining for decades. Annie and Lillian are not polished movie-women sipping wine and dispensing life advice. They are goofy. They put chocolate on their teeth in a restaurant. They do weird voices. They make each other laugh in the way only people with years of shared history can. The movie needs that early coffee shop scene because it proves the friendship before Helen shows up and starts threatening it.

Helen, played perfectly by Rose Byrne, is one of the smartest parts of the movie. On the surface, she is Annie’s nightmare: rich, composed, elegant, socially polished, and seemingly designed in a lab to replace her. But the episode gets into how Helen is not just a villain. She is lonely too. Her perfect life is a performance, and by the end, when she admits she does not really have female friends and barely sees her husband, the movie lets her become human instead of just leaving her as the rich mean-girl obstacle.

Then there is Melissa McCarthy as Megan, which is still one of the funniest breakout comedy performances of the 2010s. It is easy to forget now how fresh that performance felt at the time, because so many later movies tried to turn McCarthy into some version of Megan again. But here, it works because Megan is not just random chaos. She ends up having the clearest emotional function in the movie. When Annie is at her lowest, Megan is the one who tells her the truth. She does not coddle her. She calls her out. “You’re your problem, Annie. And you’re also your solution.” That is real friendship.

We also spend a lot of time on the movie’s set pieces, because Bridesmaids has several all-timers. The engagement party speech scene is brilliant because it keeps going past the point of comfort. Annie and Helen keep taking the microphone, escalating the emotional warfare, and the longer it lasts, the funnier and more painful it gets.

The food poisoning dress fitting is probably the scene most people remember, and for good reason. It is gross, obviously, but it is not just gross to prove that women can do bodily-function comedy too. The joke has structure. Helen refuses the sketchy restaurant food, everyone else gets sick, and Annie’s denial makes it even funnier. She is sweating through the lie, insisting everything is fine while the whole bridal party is falling apart around her.

The airplane scene is another huge High. Kristen Wiig mixing fear, pills, alcohol, jealousy, and sabotage into one public meltdown is exactly the kind of performance this movie is built to showcase. And the bridal shower scene might be the best expression of Annie’s total emotional collapse. Helen steals Annie’s Paris idea, turns it into an absurdly expensive fantasy, and by the time Annie screams, “Are you kidding me?” the whole movie has become a volcano waiting to erupt.

The biggest Low we had is Rhodes, played by Chris O’Dowd. He is charming, and O’Dowd does a lot to make him work, but the character feels less like a fully written person and more like a narrative safety net for Annie. He is the nicest emotional support cop in the world, always available when the plot needs him, always patient, always kind, always there to help Annie rediscover the version of herself she has lost.

There is an interesting way to read that, though. Maybe Rhodes is written like the reverse of how women are often written in male-driven comedies: supportive, emotionally available, and mostly there to help the lead grow. That does not completely fix the issue, but it makes the character more interesting to talk about.

We also touch on the movie’s filmmaking style, which is not especially visual. This is not Jaws, Taxi Driver, or Hook in terms of camera language. It is more functional, almost sitcom-like at times. But that may be the right choice. The camera is not the star here. The performers are. Bridesmaids works because the cast can take clear emotional situations and spin them into comic chaos.

By the end, this is a High because it still makes us laugh, but also because it understands something real: female friendship can be messy, competitive, immature, loving, painful, and ridiculous all at once. And yes, women can be just as big of goofballs as anyone else.

On this week's Movie HighLow, we went Low on Hook, but this is one of those Lows that comes with a lot of affection. We love so much of this movie. We love Robin Williams as Peter Banning slowly finding his way back to Peter Pan. We love Dustin Hoffman chewing through every syllable as Captain Hook. We love Rufio, Smee, the Lost Boys, the practical Neverland sets, the John Williams score, and the fact that this movie has lived rent-free in the heads of an entire generation.

The problem is that Hook (1991) is not lacking magic. It has too much of it. This is Steven Spielberg turned all the way up: big feelings, big music, big sets, big reaction shots, big sentimental buttons on top of other sentimental buttons. The heart of the movie works. Sometimes it works beautifully. But then Spielberg keeps underlining it, circling it, adding one more speech, one more tear, one more “Mommy,” one more floating old man, until the movie starts giving itself a toothache.

In this episode, we revisit Hook, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1991, as a movie that feels almost impossible to judge cleanly. It is technically a Low, but it is also a movie with images, performances, and emotional beats that still absolutely work. The big argument is that Hook could have been close to a perfect kids’ adventure movie if someone had been willing to trim the fat.

The setup is strong: Peter Banning, played by Robin Williams, is a work-obsessed corporate lawyer who has forgotten that he was once Peter Pan. He misses his son Jack’s baseball game, takes business calls during his daughter Maggie’s play, and treats family time like an interruption. When Captain Hook kidnaps his children and drags him back to Neverland, Peter has to rediscover imagination, play, and the part of himself he abandoned when he grew up.

That idea is great. It is simple, emotional, and very Spielberg. The movie works best when it connects Peter becoming Pan again with Peter becoming a better father. The scene where Moira, played by Caroline Goodall, tells Peter that his children still want to play with him but will not want that forever is one of the best scenes in the film. Watching it as a parent makes it hit even harder. It is not just a speech about “work less, love your kids more.” It is about how quickly childhood disappears while adults are busy convincing themselves that everything else is urgent.

We also spend a lot of time on the things Hook gets absolutely right. Rufio, played by Dante Basco, is the biggest High. He was created for this movie, but he feels instantly iconic: the hair, the chant, the rivalry with Peter, the moment he kneels and gives the sword back. He makes complete sense as the teenager the Lost Boys would rally around after Pan disappeared. His death still hits, maybe too hard, but the character himself is one of the movie’s great inventions.

Bob Hoskins as Smee is another huge High. Every time he shows up, the movie gets funnier. He and Hoffman have a perfect rhythm together, and Hoffman’s Captain Hook might be the definitive live-action version of the character for a lot of people who grew up with this movie. He is theatrical, pathetic, vain, dangerous, funny, and totally obsessed with the rematch he has been waiting decades to get.

The Lost Boys scenes are where Hook feels most alive. Their practical sets, basketball courts, skate ramps, ragtag costumes, and late ’80s / early ’90s energy give Neverland a tactile quality that would probably be flattened into green-screen sludge today. We talk about how the sets look like sets, but in a way that works. Neverland feels like a giant playground built out of memory, fantasy, and production design money.

And then there are the three scenes we think are almost perfect. The Moira speech. The “Oh, there you are, Peter” scene, where Pockets stretches Peter’s face until he sees the boy underneath. And the imaginary dinner scene, where Peter finally learns to play again and the empty plates fill with food. That dinner scene is the whole movie in miniature: funny, emotional, imaginative, and completely clear. Peter gets it. The Lost Boys get it. We get it.

Then Spielberg adds more.

The biggest Low in the episode is not one performance or one scene. It is the runtime and the sentimentality overload. Hook is nearly two and a half hours long, and it should not be anywhere near that. The cell phone quick draw scene, the mermaids, the extended Hook suicide bit, Maggie’s song, the oversized Tinkerbell romance scene, the overexplained happy thought flashback, these are the moments where the movie starts putting a hat on a hat.

We also get into the strange obsession with “Mommy” in the second half. Maggie keeps invoking her mother, Hook dies asking for his mommy, and the ending keeps pushing the mother imagery until it starts feeling bizarrely overdone. The emotional idea makes sense, but the repetition gets weird.

The Rufio death is another complicated debate. It is effective, and it devastated us as kids, but tonally it sits in the middle of a goofy battle where pirates are being defeated by eggs, marbles, and Lost Boy nonsense. A kid gets stabbed in the chest, says he wishes he had a dad like Peter, and then the movie moves on almost immediately. That tonal whiplash is part of why the ending feels so messy.

Still, the final verdict is not that Hook is bad in a boring way. It is a movie full of great pieces that needed more discipline. The things that work work so well that they have lasted for decades. The problem is that Spielberg keeps adding sugar after the cake is already sweet enough.

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We went High on Jaws, because of course we did. But the reason Jaws (1975) still works is not just “the shark is scary.” The shark is barely in the first half of the movie. What makes Steven Spielberg’s Jaws an American classic is restraint: character, geography, patience, silence, dread, and the confidence to let the audience imagine more than the movie actually shows.

That is the whole argument of this episode. Jaws became the modern blockbuster, but what modern blockbusters often forget is that this movie is not great because it is big. It is great because it knows exactly when to be small. The broken shark did not ruin the movie. It saved it. Spielberg had to withhold the monster, shoot from its point of view, lean on John Williams’ score, and build suspense out of what we cannot see. Limitation forced creativity, and the result is one of the most perfectly constructed thrillers ever made.

In this episode, we revisit Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1975, as the movie that changed summer movies forever while also teaching a lesson Hollywood mostly misunderstood. It stars Roy Scheider as Police Chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as Quint, Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody, and Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn. Yes, it is a shark movie. But more importantly, it is a movie about a town, a family, a local economy, fear, denial, responsibility, and three men who all understand the shark differently.

We start with the thing everyone knows: the John Williams Jaws theme. There is no way to talk about this movie without talking about those two notes. But what we focus on is how simple the theme is, and why that simplicity matters. The shark is not a complicated villain. It swims. It eats. It keeps coming. The music becomes the shark’s identity long before we actually see the creature. It is not overworked or overexplained. It is primal, repetitive, and inevitable.

That simplicity carries into Spielberg’s direction. We talk a lot about Jaws as a “less is more” movie, especially compared to the kind of overstuffed spectacle that followed in its wake. Spielberg does not show the shark too early. He builds Amity Island first: the beach, the politics, the holiday weekend, the local business panic, the normal rhythms of a community that does not want to believe something monstrous is in the water.

That is why Chief Brody works so well as the center of the movie. He is not a superhero. He is a nervous police chief afraid of the water, trying to do the right thing while everyone around him tells him not to overreact. We get into how Brody knows, almost immediately, that something is wrong after Chrissie’s death. He wants to close the beaches. The mayor stops him. And when Alex Kintner is killed, the guilt lands on Brody in a way that feels deeply human.

One of our favorite scenes in the whole movie is not a shark attack. It is Brody sitting at the kitchen table after Mrs. Kintner slaps him, completely wrecked, while his young son Sean imitates him. Brody starts making faces back at him, then asks for a kiss “because I need it.” That moment is why Jaws is not just a monster movie. It is grounded in family, shame, fear, and love.

We also dig into Matt Hooper, who arrives as science, money, expertise, and impatience with small-town nonsense. Hooper is arrogant, but he is right. He validates what Brody already knows. When he examines Chrissie’s remains, the whole scene plays on his face, because his reaction tells us everything we need to know.

Then there is Quint, one of the greatest character introductions in movie history. Before he even speaks, his nails on the chalkboard cut through the chaos of the town meeting. Robert Shaw makes Quint feel like a man carved out of salt, trauma, and stubbornness. He is not just hunting a shark. He is hunting something that has been chasing him since the USS Indianapolis.

The movie’s second half is where we really light up. Once the Orca leaves Amity, Jaws basically restarts as a new movie. Everything before that is the town: beaches, politics, denial, capitalism, community fear. Everything after that is Brody, Hooper, and Quint on a boat, trapped with each other and with the thing they have been circling the whole time. Brody is responsibility. Hooper is science. Quint is trauma. The shark tests all three.

The biggest High of the episode might be the USS Indianapolis monologue. In a movie famous for shark attacks, the best scene is a man sitting at a table telling a story. That says everything about how good Jaws is. The scene works because of Robert Shaw’s delivery, Richard Dreyfuss’s reaction, and the way it suddenly reframes Quint. His line about never putting on a life jacket again is horrifying because it tells us that, for him, drowning would be better than facing sharks again.

We also talk about the ending and why it is so satisfying. Quint is gone. Hooper appears to be gone. Brody is alone on a sinking boat, facing the water and the shark he has feared the entire movie. When he blows it up, it is not just spectacle. It is character payoff. The guy who wanted to close the beaches from the beginning has to solve the problem himself.

Our one Low is not really inside Jaws. It is what came after it. Jaws helped create the modern blockbuster, but Hollywood often learned the wrong lesson. The lesson should have been restraint, character, geography, suspense, and emotion. Too often, the lesson became: big concept, summer release, massive marketing, keep making sequels until nothing is left. The tragedy is that one of the most elegant popular films ever made became the template for a lot of much less elegant business decisions.

On this week's Movie HighLow, we went Low on Super Mario Bros., but with a pretty major asterisk: this movie never deserved the hate it got. We won't argue that Super Mario Bros. (1993) is a great adaptation, or that it cleanly captures the spirit of the Nintendo games, or that the story makes sense in any normal way. It is messy, compromised, weird, overdesigned, and occasionally completely insane.

But that is also what makes it so much fun to watch. 

In 1993, Mario did not really have a movie-ready story. He had a brother, a princess, a turtle monster, coins, pipes, mushrooms, Goombas, and a lot of jumping. So directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton had to invent a live-action movie from a video game that was basically pure iconography. What they invented is bonkers, but it is also far more creative than people give it credit for.

In this episode, we revisit Super Mario Bros., starring Bob Hoskins as Mario Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi Mario, Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy, and Dennis Hopper as King Koopa. The movie was a box office disaster, got hammered by critics, and became the go-to example for why live-action video game movies were supposedly doomed. But watching it now, the story is a lot more complicated than that.

The first big argument we make is that the usual complaint against this movie, that it is too different from the games, does not totally hold up. Different from what, exactly? By 1993, Super Mario Bros. was a beloved franchise, but it was not some dense cinematic mythology. There was not a sacred three-act Mario text waiting to be adapted. The movie takes the basic material and turns it into a parallel-universe dinosaur dystopia where a meteor split reality in two, mammals evolved in our world, reptiles evolved in Dinohattan, and a missing meteorite shard could merge both dimensions. That is not faithful in a literal sense, but it is an actual idea.

Honestly, Super Mario Bros. was doing the multiverse before the multiverse became every studio’s favorite emergency button. Dinohattan is basically Jurassic New York, and the movie’s weirdness is part of what makes it interesting. It is not the Mushroom Kingdom from the games, but it has its own grimy, steampunk, fungus-covered personality. We talk a lot about the Blade Runner comparisons, but what stood out on this rewatch was how much the movie also feels like it is chasing the shadow of Tim Burton’s Batman. It takes something bright, silly, and childish, then tries to make it darker, stranger, and more adult.

That approach clearly did not work for everyone, but we have a lot of affection for it. Kids’ movies in the ’80s and early ’90s were just different. They were allowed to be creepy, gross, inappropriate, and occasionally traumatizing. Super Mario Bros. fits right into that era alongside things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Batman, and The NeverEnding Story. The movie has strippers, fascist cops, fungus rebellion, de-evolution machines, and Goombas with tiny heads and giant bodies. Is that a weird fit for Mario? Absolutely. Is it boring? Not even for a minute. 

We also give the movie credit for how many game references it actually does work in. The rocket boots turn Mario’s jumping into something that can function in live action. Big Bertha becomes a human version of the giant red fish. The Shy Guy influence shows up in the masked construction-site goons. The flamethrowers nod toward the fire flower. The fungus becomes a strange version of the Mushroom Kingdom. Even the idea of the king being transformed into fungus feels like it has roots in Super Mario Bros. 3, where kings are magically turned into other creatures. The movie is not accurate, but it is not careless.

The casting is another place where the movie works better than its reputation. Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo actually have a believable older brother / younger brother rhythm. Hoskins has that gruff, working-class warmth, and Leguizamo gives Luigi an earnest romantic energy that makes the Daisy storyline work better than it probably should. We talk about how the movie shifts the romantic focus from Mario to Luigi, which is technically a departure from the games, but it makes sense for this version. Luigi is younger and more openly swept up in the adventure.

And then there is Dennis Hopper as King Koopa, who is operating on his own frequency the entire time. He is not a giant turtle monster, but he is slimy, vain, germophobic, reptilian, and weirdly charismatic. There is a little Jack Nicholson Joker energy in the performance, especially in the way he treats villainy like a campaign speech. The mud bath, the “monkey” obsession, the de-evolution chamber, Iggy and Spike, the Goombas, all of it is ridiculous, but it gives the movie texture.

The real debate of this episode is whether the things people call LOWS are actually the movie’s HIGHS. The darkness, the weirdness, the bizarre production design, the loose relationship to the games, these are the same things that make Super Mario Bros. (1993) worth revisiting. We'd rather watch a failed movie with imagination than a safe movie with no pulse.

That said, we do get into the real lows. The opening animation feels weak for a movie based on a video game. There is a lot of obvious ADR, with lines stuffed into wide shots and reaction shots to patch the story together. Some studio edits are painfully visible, especially around the de-evolution scenes. Toad getting set on fire feels mean in a way the movie does not really need. “Hail Koopa” is probably a little too blunt. And the ending is rushed, with Koopa’s final dinosaur form looking especially rough.

The biggest low, emotionally, is that we never got the sequel. The cliffhanger with Daisy coming back in full commando mode is cheesy, but we'd have absolutely shown up for Super Mario Bros. 2. That is the strange legacy of this movie. It is not a great Mario movie, but it is a fascinating one. It is messy, creative, creepy, funny, and way more memorable than its reputation suggests.

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On this week's Movie HighLow, we go High on Whiplash because it is one of the rare movies about greatness that does not let greatness off the hook. It looks like an inspirational story about a young jazz drummer pushing past his limits, but the more we talk about it, the darker it gets. Whiplash (2014) is not just asking whether Andrew Neiman becomes great. It is asking what he has to cut out of himself to get there.

That is the real question of the episode: does Andrew become great in spite of Fletcher, or because of him? And the uncomfortable answer we keep circling is that it might be because of him. That does not make Fletcher right. It does not make his abuse noble. But it does make Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash a much more complicated movie than a simple mentor-from-hell story. This is a movie about ambition, control, humiliation, obsession, and the cost of becoming the person you think you’re supposed to be.

In this episode, we dig into Whiplash, written and directed by Damien Chazelle, and why it still hits like a snare drum to the face. The movie stars Miles Teller as Andrew Neiman, a young jazz drummer at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory, and J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher, the terrifying conductor who treats music education like psychological warfare. The movie won Oscars for Simmons, editing, and sound mixing, and honestly, all three wins make perfect sense. This thing is built like a pressure cooker.

The central debate is Andrew’s transformation. By the time we get to the final performance at Carnegie Hall, Andrew does become something different. He takes control of the stage, pushes past Fletcher’s sabotage, and turns “Caravan” into a declaration of war. But we also talk about how even in that moment of victory, he still hands control back to Fletcher. That final exchange of looks between them is thrilling, but it is not cleanly triumphant. Andrew gets Fletcher’s approval, and that might be exactly the problem.

We spend a lot of time on Fletcher because J.K. Simmons gives one of those performances that feels almost unfair to everyone else in the movie. He is part jazz instructor, part drill sergeant, part horror villain. The “not my tempo” scene is the obvious centerpiece, but what makes Fletcher so scary is not just that he screams. It is that he knows exactly when to lower his voice, when to charm, when to humiliate, and when to make an entire room afraid to breathe wrong. He does not simply teach through fear. He builds a world where fear is the tempo.

The episode also gets into Fletcher’s philosophy, especially the idea that there are “no two words in the English language more harmful than good job.” We do not dismiss that line outright, which is part of what makes the conversation interesting. There is something seductive about Fletcher’s argument. Maybe comfort does kill greatness. Maybe some people only reach their full potential when someone refuses to let them settle. But the movie also gives us Sean Casey, the former student whose story reveals the human wreckage behind Fletcher’s method. For every Andrew who might become Bird, there may be someone else who gets destroyed.

Miles Teller’s performance as Andrew is another major High. He has to start the movie with this open, almost boyish hunger and then slowly harden into someone who has internalized Fletcher’s cruelty. We talk about the family dinner scene as one of the clearest examples of that shift. Andrew is patronized by relatives who do not understand what he is chasing, and he finally snaps back with the kind of contempt Fletcher has been teaching him. The “Lincoln Center” gut check from his father is brutal because it cuts through Andrew’s self-mythology for just a second.

That father-son relationship, with Paul Reiser as Andrew’s dad, becomes one of the most emotional parts of the discussion. His father is not trying to crush him. He is trying to keep him human. The movie theater scene with the Raisinets is small, but it says so much about Andrew’s willingness to tolerate discomfort, to eat around the thing he does not want, to subtract pieces from his life if that is what the goal requires. By the final performance, watching Andrew through his father’s eyes changes the scene. From inside the music, it feels like triumph. From the hallway, through his dad’s face, it looks like losing him.

We also talk about Nicole, played by Melissa Benoist, and why that relationship matters more than it first appears. Andrew’s breakup with her is not just a young guy being arrogant. It is the movie showing us that he has already accepted self-erasure as the price of greatness. Later, when he calls her before the Carnegie Hall performance and realizes she has moved on, the scene lands because it shows what he chose. He wanted greatness so badly that he made himself unavailable to ordinary happiness.

The biggest question we wrestle with is whether Whiplash is an inspirational movie or a horror movie wearing the skin of one. We both come down on the idea that Fletcher is probably the reason Andrew reaches that final level, but that does not mean Fletcher is justified. That is the uncomfortable brilliance of the movie. It refuses to make the moral math easy.

We also get into the missing chart scene near the end and whether Fletcher sabotaged Carl, whether Andrew panicked, or whether it was all just another test. The movie leaves just enough room for doubt, which keeps the tension alive. Our one real Low is more of a nitpick: what exactly was Fletcher’s plan if Andrew did not come back onstage? The finale is incredible, but the logic of Fletcher’s revenge depends on Andrew reacting in the most insane, perfect way possible.

Still, that final scene is why Whiplash remains such a monster. The editing, music, cinematography, sound, and performances all lock together. It is exhilarating and upsetting at the same time. Andrew may become great, but we are not convinced he is okay. If anything, the ending feels less like happily ever after and more like the beginning of a very lonely life played at double time.

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