 I'm scared. I'm Rick. And you can follow us on Instagram and Twitter for more juicy content. Maybe we're supposed to have some patron. Close to me. Is it disconcerting? Yes. Yes, as it should be. You smell. My friend. Don't touch me. Um, and we are in a random space, I know, so the aesthetic, the very secret layer, the very secret hideaway. It's probably off right now. Yeah. Which is not in my house right now. I wanted to get this out ASAP now, so we're doing it. That's just the way we roll. Ah, hopefully that doesn't bother you too much. You know what we could do? We could do like a pop-up stupid reaction booth, just like that shows up somewhere. And we're doing reactions and have people come in. I like that idea. Anyway. Yeah, we'll probably go to jail. Ah, but today we're doing another movie review. Two in one week. Who to thunk? Newtom. Fig. Newtom. Yes. It's just cookies and a very tasty person. Newman. Everybody get that reference? Come on, you better get that reference. Eat the broccoli. Eat the broccoli, Newman. 47th, I don't know. First, unless he was in a small cameo and something. Oh yeah. First Rajkumar Rao film. Correct. I wanted to get into him and I took a poll and it was very difficult to find out which one we should start with because I think they all got like 25%. Yeah, it was pretty well spread out. It was great. I think it is. But this is, I want to read these. Sure. It says that this is a government clerk on election duty in the conflict-ridden jungle of central India. Tries his best to conduct free and fair voting despite the apathy of security forces and the looming fear of guerrilla attacks by communist rebels. That's a mouthful. It is. And it's true. And I remember, do you remember the trailer? I do remember the trailer. We were impressed. We loved it. We enjoyed the trailer. Yep. And I couldn't wait to watch it. Yeah. Amit. Massacre. Massacre. Starring Rajkumar Rao and a couple other people. Yes. In particular. This guy's from Lagann. Yes. We're going to talk about her. I know I am. What do we know? Anjali Patel. What do we know her from though? Newton. I hate you. But yes, obviously 100% spoiler. Spoiler. If you haven't seen it, go see it. And please, seriously, don't. We're going to talk about everything in the film right now. But. If you haven't seen it, go see it. So here we go. One of the things that drew me to this film for one, obviously the trailer was phenomenal. Yeah, the trailer was great. But also that people were telling us that one, obviously it's performance obviously. We can talk about that in a minute. They say this is very educational about certain things that India doesn't really want to talk about. And so it's kind of educational in that aspect. It delivered on that because there's a bunch of stuff that it was kind of almost shocking of what was going on. But you could tell us exactly what's correct and what is not. But for the most part, I've heard a lot of it's pretty accurate. Correct. You've got rebels in the jungle. And then also, you know, almost police corruption. Now I'm wanting to give certain people that have the right to vote. The right to vote. Not that they think they care that they need to vote. Right. Also those people don't seem to care to want to vote. Yeah. Why would they? They've got a voter card. But they don't even know who they're voting for. Yeah. And so that's one of my favorite films. This was also an official selection of the 2016. Oscar did not make it. I think it was 2016. Yeah. But I'd love to know what made it instead. Yeah. I think it was the year that the one about, I think it was a Colombian woman, but she was a transgender. Remember that one? Oh yeah. That one was phenomenal. I watched that one. But I don't know what else was nominated. So I know. But I just know how I felt about this one. Yeah. How do you go ahead? First film. First of all, the film is a whole. This is one of my favorite films that we've seen. It's at way. I would probably place this and the larger, it's got the importance level. Yes. Which always has to have for a great film. For us to say a film is truly great. It has to have an importance level. Something where it's educating you about something going on in the world that you need to know about because it needs to change. Or it needs to never happen again, that kind of thing. The importance level, the script, the direction, the music, and the ensemble acting. This was the best ensemble acting that I've seen since Header. As far as every single person I saw. This was believable and felt like I was seeing a documentary at many times. This was very comparable in a very different way. Totally different. We just saw Kahani. Yes. And I said this would be one of the first films I would recommend to any American. Yes. That has never seen an Indian film. Yes. That could watch this. You'll still enjoy it. I do that for certain people if they enjoy Oscar-type films. Correct. Because that's the only negative. And I don't even like saying that. But that's not a negative for the Indians. It's a negative for Oscar films in general. Exactly. And for audiences in general. Because the people who are not educated in cinema and artistry. I don't have a mirror. This is the kind of film that if you don't love the subtle nuances of filmmaking and acting that are the stillnesses. And just letting things breathe. It's like fly on the wall. The quintessential moment for me that depicts what the whole movie is about is the ending. I don't talk about that in a minute. I want to talk about the ending. I totally agree with you. Right? I totally agree with you. And everybody is rapturously average. Nobody's trying to do a thing. I know. They're just... And the director is letting them just do nothing. I loved it. Long shots of nothing. I know. And it was grand. You were talking about the directing right now. The shots were just utterly gorgeous. Gorgeous. Every single shot was just beautiful. And obviously we say a bunch of different shots are beautiful by different directors. Sanjay and Vishal. Yeah, but we mean it differently. No. This is just naturally just beautifully simple. Exactly. I've got the chills thinking about it. Because for example, when we talk about the beauty of someone like Sanjay, what we're talking about is the aesthetic wonder that he's presenting to us that is master cinematography and filming. You freeze frame and go, look at the gorgeousness of that work of art. And then Vishal is more like a Quentin kind of very creative. We've compared them to Mozart and Beethoven. But this is equally brilliant. But it's just utterly simple. Very, very, very painfully difficult. And painful. Good. In the best of ways. I just was. I felt, remember when we reviewed Heather, I was telling you as I approached the ending, I had the sense of hope of, please don't screw with the delicacy you've created here. And it's so fragile that if you blow this at the end here, and I had that same feeling watching Newton. I'm like, please stay simple. I guess we could talk about the end here. Please stay small. Yeah, because I really like the film, but the end made me absolutely love it. I applauded. Yeah. When it ended, I stood up and I applauded. It made me so happy because this whole film, it's almost like a Seinfeld episode. Yeah. Almost, I mean, there's important things happening since you know about the bigger picture and all that kind of stuff. In terms of Newton's perspective, almost nothing really happened. It's like from the beginning. Yeah. The blackout. Yeah. And we're just listening to the mom talk and they're going down to flip the switches. We're just following this guy. Following this guy who has a rigid code of doing everything by the book. Yeah. Almost to a point of being a flaw. Right. I love that line that the guy gives him at the beginning who says to him, it's not your honesty, it's your arrogance about your honesty. That was in the trailer, if I remember correctly. But anyway. And so we went through this whole thing and obviously stuff happened and he was really trying to make everyone follow his code and even the police and all his other employees. Do it the right way. And all that kind of stuff. And usually in a film, you see somebody with these flaws and they'll kind of develop and change and they're like, oh, maybe I just need to relax with you. No. He went through all that and he's the exact same person. Yep. The character arc on this guy is pretty much, he ends it the way he started. And I love it. Me too. I love that they didn't really, no, he didn't learn a thing. Yeah. And I loved that it ended. I'm watching and I'm just totally enamored with these two actors in the scene and I have been the whole film, the two him and her. I'm just enamored with them as I am everybody in the film. The guy who's playing the main cop that's guiding them. Yeah, he did it for himself. He's absolutely brilliant to watch. Everybody, even the smaller roles of the people who were helping him in the voting office. Yeah. Every single one of them was so well cast that I kept thinking over and over again how the ensemble, even really tiny roles, a shot of a soldier when Newton had the gun and the tension, right? I loved that. And the director chose to get some shots of the other soldiers who never have a line. But I got this very scorsese-esque kind of sense and Clint Eastwood's sense. If you know those directors and what they do, they're very attentive to acting and actors and reality and they will take their time. Clint Eastwood doesn't say action. He just says whenever you're ready to let the actors breathe and have space and he'll be rolling and he may use some of that before they even started for the film. Everybody was believable at every single moment. Everybody. And that says a lot about how much he let people go, captured them. There's one shot of this little boy. They get into this room and they pull the thing off and an older gentleman was hiding behind a thing and the director gets one shot of this boy who's just like this, just watching. And I thought, I bet that boy didn't even know camera was rolling. He just wanted to capture. He probably did it with a lot of people. That's probably my favorite thing but I don't have anything bad to say about the film. In any way. The only bad thing you can say about this film is people that, it's not anything bad about the film. It's just not for certain audiences. Correct. If you don't enjoy just a really slow burn of a film that's just about the performance of... It's the neighbor doing the after he kills people. He's gotta chop the body parts. At the area. And he does it during the day when people hear the sound and don't think. He did it at night. He doesn't have enough storage for all that. That's all so true. Yeah. Sorry about that. But, yeah, if you don't like, like just slow, like there's no action in it. There's some tension, but it's almost comedic tension. Like when he's, as the gun, he's like, bro, why do you have a gun? It's two minutes. Yeah. And he's like, nope, I'm waiting two minutes. I'm waiting two more minutes. And he's like, go, go, go, go. Please just put down the gun. Yeah. And he puts down the gun. And then I'm like, they jump on him. I know. This was brilliantly hilarious. And it's not like hilarious, like Anchorman hilarious. No, no, no, no, no. Real life hilarious. Yes. And I, from the moment she came on screen, I was just, and the table had been set for when she arrived. You were talking about, Anjali, if you're pronouncing that, that's the way you pronounce her name. Anjali. Yeah. Patel. The only woman really in the film. Yeah. When she first showed up and her, just her smallness and her availability to just be throughout the whole film and the very, very, very quiet romance that was going on. Very, very quiet. Not even registered on the Richter scale other than an occasional, you know, really, which is what made that last scene. It reminded me, remember how Piku ends? Mm-hmm. Very similar in the fact of, yeah, these guys are going to be together. These guys are going to, there's something going on here. But I like it that it went well. But I like that it didn't do anything other. It may not. No definite. It may not happen. It was like, I have to finish five minutes? Yeah. Okay. I'm going to do that. That breaks in five minutes. And I watched her when he did that. He's typing and I watched her and my thought was, how long is the director, he's going to let it sit a while, didn't he? And she just let it sit and she looks out the window, not indicating anything, not trying to look like she's waiting in an office. She was just waiting at a desk. Brilliant. He was typing. If that, if I had been in an acting class and I saw two actors doing that moment, if I had said to them, I want you two to just show me what it looks like to be waiting in an office. Do you know how hard that is to do as an actor? To do nothing. To be told, just sit up there because everybody starts to do stuff. Look at their phone. Look at the watch. How much time is it? I'm going to chew my gum. I'll take a phone call versus, just, just, it's hard. I want to see more of her work and his work. And we can talk about him now. Because we haven't yet. I know we haven't. And he's, I'm very, very excited because I know we haven't seen his other work. But you, but I, we've seen his trailers and I've seen the different characters he's played. So I know how different this is. And the, the, the amazing thing is the subtle little nuances he gave his character. It's not that just these guys. Do you think that blink was part of it? Yeah. I do too. Yeah. Which was brilliant. I just, because it's, it's one thing to just be like this, rigid, go by the code and there's almost nothing there. But he gave him a certain wall. Sure did. He gave him a certain kind of way he, he talked or didn't talk. Yeah. And he gave him a way of different staring. It's just different because we saw him in the omertar, I don't know. Yeah. Sorry. It's Corbinized. Um, and we've seen him in like the, the one with, we've often not recognized him. Yeah. And gotten called out for it. Do you realize who that is? It was like, well, no, I guess he's that good of an actor. Anyway, he's coming in that, that film that's about to come out the judgmental. Right. One. Yes. He's probably, he's playing. Um, and it's very different, uh, from this. And so I'm very excited to see, because this was a brilliant performance. Brilliant performance. Small, but also not like a small GC play, like Casey Affleck and the Menchist by the sea. He's very small. And I know you don't like the film, but I'm talking to, that, that type of performance is small, but this is also small and unique. Very. Which is difficult to do, because obviously you have different characters, kind of like a, a Ranvier and Badmavat. Correct. Which is amazing character. Right. So fun. Right. And he has all these little corky things, but then you also just have regular people. As was she, as was she. They both did. And I would, we haven't seen her in other things, but yeah, the, the nuances of the work that they have done in their own instruments is really, really clear. It's harder to be smaller and memorable. Always. Always. Yeah. It's much harder than to, I mean, not to say that what like Ranvier did in Badmavat is not hard, because it is. No, it is. But it's very, very different. Yeah. And the roles are different, so it's obviously not a fair comparison in that regard. But even, and the gentleman who's, we haven't said his name, the man who plays the, the officer who is escorting them. I believe it's this guy. Pankaj Tripathi. Yes, it is. 100% that's him. He's from gangs as well. Yeah. Um, he equally as strong. Everybody was just a real character. Yeah. Somebody you would and probably have encountered in your life. Um, and then just the totally believable. All the, I believed every moment, every frame of film. I can't wait to see. I believe these people were doing what they were doing and we were just watching them do it. I know. All the time. Yeah. Just beautiful, beautiful work. It was very familiar in the ways that it was shot, which is why, like if you see people are into the Oscars and those types of films, I would 100% recommend this film. 100% in the top three. Yeah. This is an Oscar level kind of film. Yeah. There's no musical numbers. Yep. There's no crazy side characters that are over the top. This is a great film. This is a great film. Great film. Anybody in the world can enjoy as long as you enjoy great film making. Great film making. And not, like you're not, the trailer even alluded to that it was going to be more action than it was. Did you remember that? 100%. Because I was expecting a little more action. I was like, dear, not, not, not nothing. There's, there's certain times where they think they're getting shot at, which is one of the genius parts of the film and one of the parts that, like, it's talking about some of the problems India has. Yeah. In terms of the police and right. Like that moment they just realized as the ambush was fake. Yeah. And I called that and I was like, I was hoping that's what it was. And I was like, forget it for a second. I guess what? I was like, you should go home and start walking back. Yeah. Yes, he is? Yes, he is. You bet he is. And it did no faltering in this character. I remember it from the trailer, but at the moments of seeing the people with the ink on their finger signifying that they had voted that felt, that reminded me a lot of things that Scorsese will do when he's wanting, because Scorsese films almost always have some kind of a social message that he's wanting life boring. When it came time for that anxious the gorillas are coming, I felt it. And I felt that anxiousness. And you also feel the reality. I thought it was gonna start changing. Me too. I thought we're gonna watch somebody die. This is gonna suck. And then the tension when he gets the gun. When you've got real life boring going on and then a moment comes up like that where somebody who doesn't use a gun as a gun, you feel what you would feel in real life. You feel the angst of someone's gonna get shot, someone's gonna get hurt versus in an action movie when everyone's getting blown up. Just great, great at every level. The story, the script, the use of the music. Again, reminded me a lot of the way Scorsese pays so much. The attention to acting, storytelling importance, and music composition to accompany the conveyance of the film. It's Oscar level. Yeah, 100% agree. I just wish I knew exactly. I think it was 2016, but I could be wrong, so I don't want to look it up. As far as it's being, but it was intense. So I love it now. I was gonna say something and I just forgot what I was gonna say. You know what that's a sign of? Oh, no. What? Eminent death. And now I just forgot it again. What was it, Rick? I don't know. What were you just talking about? The movie Newton. No, but like specifically? The guns and the boring. No, the boring. Oh, no, no, no. I got nothing about that. This performance by Rajkumar Rao is, I think, going to be very similar, except now that we just, it's different because like a member of Ranveer and Gully Boy. Yes, we were like, we said this, if you haven't seen it in a while, we said he wasn't bad, but he was the weakest of the bunch. He was fine, having no idea who the man was and how small he had to go. We're morons. Yeah. But stupid us. Obviously, we hadn't seen any of his other trailers or nothing about the man. Maybe actually, maybe we had seen his trailer. We were even more stupid back then. We really knew nothing about the man. But having seen this other guys, I think it's going to be very similar performance, except obviously very different. But his other stuff, that you're going to be able to appreciate a small, even though this is not, it's a small performance. It's a very quirky and unique performance. I think we're going to be able to appreciate even more once we see all his other stuff and how much he changes. It would be like, it would be comparable to example if your first exposure to Heath Ledger was Brokeback Mountain. I'm not comparing Rajkumar Rao and Ranveer. We're not, guys. God. I know. We're talking about our exposure to their work and the order in which we get it. And here's what I'm saying. It reminds me of if somebody didn't know Heath Ledger and their first exposure to him was Brokeback Mountain, their thought would be, oh, this must be a quiet, reserved guy who probably plays similar characters all the time and does nice, nuanced, small stuff. And then you'd see his body of work and go, okay, guys freak. I'm sure. Because what we've heard from you beautiful stupid babies is that this is one of the preeminent actors of our time. He actually could very well be a very similar if Heath was able to keep his career going and not pass away. A very similar type of actor. Right, I think. Because I have no doubt from what I've seen that Rajkumar Rao could play kind of a Joker type character that's very almost not him. Right. In terms of having to be that. Just become fully immersed in his character. He's like a method actor and he can do so many different, because like if you've seen Heath, you get Monsters Ball, you got Night's Tale, Ten Things That About You, and then you get into his work work. Even in the Patriot when he plays Gibson Son, yeah. A Joker. And then his final film with the imaginary with Dr. Parnassus. He's just playing so different. Obviously he didn't have time to flesh it out. But I think he could be a very similar style of actor. Rajkumar Rao. Yeah, I see that. Which is a high, high compliment. A high, high compliment. Because you really, the only differences that you get at that level. Yeah, the only differences you get at that level of artistry is simply the nuances that come from the person themselves. You don't get any better in terms of the actualization of the art form in its presentation. You know what I mean? Heath and Daniel Day-Lewis are not similar to watch. They bring their own perfection to the art form. And in that way, you can't compare them. You can only say they're both as good as it gets. And they're as good as it gets in their own ways, which is what is so beautiful about acting. Is that each actor brings their own thing to it. As long as they're honest. Like Tom Hanks could never be Heath Ledger or Daniel Day-Lewis. He's got to do it the way he does it. And even like example, we've talked so much about Nawazidin. Nawazidin and Rajkumar Rao would be comparable in terms of their mastery. But very, very different in what you see in the finished work. And they're both thin gangs of wasp or two. I know. Sorry. We're gonna get to that one. So thumbs up, A plus, Oscar level. One of the best films we've seen, period. Loved it. Yeah, this film is phenomenal. Please recommend our next Rajkumar Rao film. Yeah. I'm sure it's going to be 25, 25, 25, because everybody just says he has everything he has to say in a bad film. Right. It means we've seen with the new one, but that's one's getting also really good reviews in the theater. Right. So please let us know. And her work. I want to see more of her. She's more unknown, I think. Well, she is... But you can let us know what her best work is. And I would love to see some behind the scenes stuff with the actors working with the director. I really would love to know what things we're like on location and on set as he's directing and doing the things that they're doing and how much... What are his other films as well? Man, yeah. Because it's just... Beautiful.