Movie HighLow

Movie HighLow | Movie Reviews & Film Analysis
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Movie HighLow is a movie review and film analysis podcast about the best, worst, and weirdest movies cinema has to offer. Each episode, we revisit iconic films, cult classics, Hollywood disasters, bad movie masterpieces, and misunderstood flops to find the HIGHS, the LOWS, and the moments that deserve a second look. Some movies are great. Some are terrible. Some are both. From iconic classics to fascinating disasters, we’re here to figure out why. Film analysis • Movie breakdowns • Movie reviews • High vs Low • Film podcast

  1. 1d ago

    THE SHINING (1980) | Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King and the Perfect Adaptation (High)

    We went High on The Shining, and this is not just a High because it is one of the most famous horror movies ever made. For us, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a masterpiece because it understands something essential about fear: the scariest place in the world is not always the haunted hotel. Sometimes it is the family you are trapped inside. That is the central argument of this episode. Kubrick takes Stephen King’s novel, strips away explanation, changes the characters, changes the ending, and turns a supernatural story into something colder, stranger, and more psychologically suffocating. This is not adaptation as transcription. It is adaptation as transformation. Kubrick understands that sometimes respecting the source material means knowing exactly when to leave it behind. In this episode, we finally check into the Overlook Hotel and talk about The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance, Danny Lloyd as Danny, and Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran. This is one of Dom’s favorite horror movies, favorite Kubrick movies, and maybe favorite movies, period. It is the kind of film that feels less like something you simply watch and more like something you enter. We begin with the opening aerial shots, because the movie announces itself immediately. The music is dissonant and ominous, the landscape is massive, and the car looks tiny against the mountains. Before anyone says anything scary, the movie has already told us we are going somewhere wrong. A major part of the episode is the difference between King’s novel and Kubrick’s film. King’s version is warmer, more emotional, and more explicit about Jack Torrance as a man being corrupted by the Overlook. Kubrick’s version is colder. His Jack feels dangerous before the hotel ever gets its hooks into him. That has always been one of the big criticisms of the movie, but we argue that it is exactly why this version works. Kubrick is not telling a story about a good man who becomes evil. He is telling a story about a resentful, volatile man who is already standing at the edge and only needs a little push. We also dig into the idea that Jack may have the Shining too. Danny clearly shines. Halloran clearly shines. But Jack’s relationship with the hotel suggests that he may also be receptive to its energy, only he does not understand what he is receiving. Danny and Halloran know there is a signal. Jack mistakes the signal for himself. That may be why the Overlook gets to him so quickly. He is an open door that does not know something is passing through it. One of the biggest Highs is Shelley Duvall as Wendy, a performance that deserves far more respect than it has historically received. It is easy to reduce Wendy to someone who spends the movie crying and terrified, but that misses what Duvall is actually doing. Her Wendy is fragile, yes, but she is also deeply human. She is a woman who has spent years managing Jack’s rage, trying to hold the family together, trying to stay cheerful, trying to keep Danny safe, and slowly realizing that the person she has been protecting the family from is inside the family. We talk about how much information is buried in Wendy’s early conversation with the doctor. Jack injured Danny years earlier, but he has only been sober for five months. That detail tells us everything. This is not one isolated mistake. This is a pattern. Wendy is not naive because she does not know who Jack is. She is exhausted because she knows exactly who he is and has been trying to survive him. Jack Nicholson is, of course, one of the movie’s defining forces. His performance is huge, funny, terrifying, theatrical, and completely iconic. From the first interview with Ullman, Jack Torrance feels wrong. The smile is too wide. The charm is too forced. The resentment is too close to the surface. By the time he reaches the Gold Room and talks to Lloyd, it feels less like a man suddenly going insane and more like a man finally giving himself permission to stop pretending. Another major High is Dick Halloran, played by Scatman Crothers. He is the movie’s clearest force of warmth and goodness. His conversation with Danny about the Shining is one of the only scenes where an adult genuinely meets Danny on his level. He explains the gift, warns him about room 237, and takes him seriously. When Halloran senses Danny’s distress and fights his way back to the hotel, the movie trains us to believe he is the rescue. Then Kubrick brutally rips that hope away. One of the episode’s biggest adaptation discussions is fire versus ice. King’s novel ends with the boiler exploding and the Overlook burning. Kubrick throws that away and gives us the hedge maze, the snow, and Jack freezing to death alone. For this version of Jack Torrance, it is the perfect ending. He does not get redeemed. He does not fight his way back. He gets lost inside the maze, literally and psychologically, while Danny survives because he understands the pattern well enough to escape it. The maze is the movie. The Overlook is a maze. Jack’s mind is a maze. His resentment is a maze. His obsession is a maze. Danny does not overpower his father. He outthinks him. We do find a couple of tiny Lows. Halloran’s psychic ability has one very convenient blind spot when he walks into the hotel and does not sense Jack standing nearby with an axe. We also talk about “Here’s Johnny,” which is iconic, funny, and terrifying, but also one of the only moments that dates the movie because the Johnny Carson reference will not land the same way forever. But those are tiny objections in a movie we consider close to perfect. The Shining is a High because Kubrick creates something colder, stranger, and more enduring than a straightforward haunted hotel movie. He takes King’s material and turns it into a film about abuse, addiction, isolation, psychic sensitivity, inherited violence, and the way evil can become part of a place’s history.  Topics Discussed The Shining 1980 review Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining Stephen King vs Stanley Kubrick Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance Danny Lloyd as Danny Torrance Scatman Crothers as Dick Halloran The Overlook Hotel Room 237 Does Jack Torrance have the Shining? The Shining ending explained The hedge maze ending The Shining book vs movie Jack Torrance and alcoholism Wendy Torrance performance defense Dick Halloran’s death The Gold Room and Lloyd the bartender “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” “Here’s Johnny” The Shining as psychological horror

  2. Oct 13

    DREAMCATCHER (2003) | A Stephen King Mixtape Gone Wrong (Low)

    We went Low on Dreamcatcher, but this is a very particular kind of Low. This is not a boring bad movie. This is a wildly overstuffed, deeply strange, completely unfiltered bad movie that somehow has talented actors, a major Stephen King source, Lawrence Kasdan directing, William Goldman on the screenplay, a reported $68 million budget, and an alien that crawls out of somebody’s ass before Jason Lee fights it with a toilet brush. That is the central fascination of Dreamcatcher (2003). It often feels less like a new Stephen King story and more like somebody fed all of Stephen King’s previous work into a machine and asked it to generate the ultimate Stephen King mixtape: childhood friends, Maine, psychic powers, bullies, aliens, body horror, military quarantine, Derry, snow, telepathy, trauma, and alien ass monsters. In this episode, we revisit Dreamcatcher, directed by Lawrence Kasdan and based on the novel by Stephen King, as one of the strangest studio horror failures of the early 2000s. The movie stars Thomas Jane as Henry, Damian Lewis as Jonesy, Jason Lee as Beaver, Timothy Olyphant as Pete, Donnie Wahlberg as Duddits, Morgan Freeman as Colonel Curtis, and Tom Sizemore as Owen Underhill. That is a real cast. There is real money on screen. There are real filmmakers involved. And somehow all of that talent produced a movie where the phrase “shit weasel” becomes central to the mythology. The setup is not bad. Four lifelong friends reunite for their annual hunting trip in the Maine woods. Since childhood, they have shared a mysterious psychic connection tied to Duddits, a boy they defended from bullies when they were young. This year, something is different. A sick, disoriented stranger stumbles into their cabin, the woods go under military quarantine, and soon the group is dealing with alien parasites, telepathic possession, and an entity called Mr. Gray taking over Jonesy’s body. The first High is that the first act almost tricks us into thinking this might be a good movie. We meet each of the guys separately and immediately understand that something unusual connects them. Henry is using some kind of psychic ability with a patient. Jonesy shows empathy toward a student who cheated because he can sense there is more going on. Pete uses his strange gift to help a woman find her keys and tries to turn it into a date. Beaver is writing “SSDD,” same shit, different day, which becomes one of the movie’s repeated psychic signals. There is a real sense that something cosmic is pulling these guys back together. The cabin material also works better than it should. The guys irritate each other in believable ways. They have history. They talk like middle-aged friends who have been repeating the same jokes and rhythms for decades. There is a version of Dreamcatcher that stays with these four guys reconnecting in a cabin while something supernatural slowly closes in, and I would absolutely watch that movie. The biggest High, though, is the memory warehouse. Once Mr. Gray takes over Jonesy’s body, Jonesy retreats inside his own mind, which the movie visualizes as a warehouse filled with files, drawers, rooms, and stored memories. That is a genuinely cool idea. Jonesy is not gone. He is trapped inside the architecture of his own brain, watching Mr. Gray pilot his body from the inside. The movie suddenly becomes a psychological possession story, and for a little while, it feels like it has found something original. And honestly, we have to give Dreamcatcher credit for having no shame. Timothy Olyphant almost gets bitten by an alien that crawled out of a woman while he is writing his friend’s name in the snow with his own piss. There is something admirable about a studio movie this expensive being this weird. The biggest Low is obvious: shit weasels. The moment the movie reveals a monster in the toilet, everything changes. The first bathroom sequence is staged like horror, with Beaver holding the toilet lid shut while waiting for Jonesy to get tape. But then the toothpick drops, the compulsion kicks in, and suddenly Jason Lee is fighting a CGI ass snake with a toilet brush. What should be disgusting becomes silly. The movie’s larger problem is that it has too many ideas and no filter. It wants to be Stand by Me, It, The Tommyknockers, Alien, The Thing, a military quarantine thriller, a psychic drama, a gross-out comedy, and a sentimental friendship story all at once. Every 20 minutes, it shows us a version of itself that could have worked, then abandons it for another movie. Morgan Freeman’s military storyline is another major issue. The second he enters, Dreamcatcher transforms again. Suddenly we are in helicopters, quarantine camps, mass executions, speeches about alien infections, and a completely different tone. It is not that a military alien containment movie cannot work. It is that this one keeps elbowing the cabin movie, the body horror movie, and the memory warehouse movie out of the frame. The CGI also does the movie no favors. The creatures, the woodland animals, the explosions, the final alien confrontation, so much of it looks too fake to create the dread the movie clearly wants. And then there is the ending, which just stops. After more than two hours of psychic powers, alien parasites, Duddits, Mr. Gray, military conspiracy, childhood trauma, and Boston’s water supply, the movie smash cuts to black like it is fleeing the scene. By the end, Dreamcatcher is still a Low, but it is more interesting than we remembered. It is not a movie with nothing in its head. It is a memory warehouse full of better movies, better Stephen King ideas, and one great concept that deserved a cleaner film around it. The problem is that nobody decided which movie they were actually making. Dreamcatcher 2003 review Lawrence Kasdan’s Dreamcatcher Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher Thomas Jane as Henry Damian Lewis as Jonesy Jason Lee as Beaver Timothy Olyphant as Pete Donnie Wahlberg as Duddits Morgan Freeman in Dreamcatcher Mr. Gray explained Dreamcatcher memory warehouse Dreamcatcher shit weasels Dreamcatcher bathroom scene Stephen King movie adaptations Dreamcatcher and Stand by Me comparisons Dreamcatcher and The Thing comparisons Dreamcatcher CGI problems Dreamcatcher ending explained Why Dreamcatcher failed Dreamcatcher as a guilty pleasure Low

  3. Sep 29

    THE BABADOOK (2014) | The Monster You Keep In The Basement (High)

    We went High on The Babadook, because this is the kind of horror movie that gets scarier the more you sit with it. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) is not just about a monster in a top hat with long fingers and a creepy children’s book. It is about the thing you lock in the basement, the thing you refuse to name, and the thing that gets stronger the longer you deny it. That is the central argument of this episode: there is the thing coming for you, and then there is the thing coming from you. The Babadook works because it collapses those two horrors into one. If you want to watch it as a literal boogeyman movie, you can. But for us, it becomes much scarier as a psychological horror story about grief, parental rage, resentment, exhaustion, and the terrifying thoughts good people are not supposed to admit they have. In this episode, we revisit The Babadook, written and directed by Jennifer Kent, starring Essie Davis as Amelia and Noah Wiseman as Samuel. Released in 2014, this is a movie that critics embraced but audiences have always seemed split on. We understand why. This is not comfort horror. This is not a funhouse ride. This is a movie that asks you to sit inside a house with a mother and child who are both drowning in grief, fear, loneliness, and emotional neglect. The story follows Amelia, a widow still haunted by the death of her husband Oscar, who died in a car accident while driving her to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. Six years later, Amelia is barely functioning. Samuel is intense, imaginative, loud, frightened, and obsessed with building weapons to fight monsters. Then a disturbing pop-up book called Mister Babadook appears on their shelf, and once they read it, the thing that has been buried in the house starts clawing its way out. One of our biggest conversations is whether the Babadook is real or whether it is inside Amelia. Our answer is basically yes. The movie is powerful because it refuses to make that separation clean. There may be a supernatural force in the house, but the monster also represents everything Amelia has spent six years refusing to feel: grief, anger, resentment toward her child, exhaustion, guilt, and the taboo thoughts that motherhood does not allow her to say out loud. We talk a lot about Jennifer Kent’s vision and how specific it feels. There is a lesser version of this story that could have been a straightforward domestic drama about an overwhelmed widow on the verge of hurting herself and her child. Instead, Kent gives that internal horror the shape of an old silent-film nightmare: the top hat, the cloak, the long fingers, the stop-motion movement, the German expressionist look. The Babadook feels like something ancient, like a monster that has always existed because the feelings it represents have always existed. The children’s book is one of the movie’s smartest choices. Amelia and Samuel do not buy it. It is not gifted to them. It is just there, sitting on the shelf like it was always in the house. That is the metaphor. The grief was already there. The rage was already there. The book just opens it. The biggest High of the movie is Essie Davis, who gives one of the great modern horror performances. In the first half, she is performing “good mother” with every ounce of strength she has left. She is gentle, patient, soft-spoken, and clearly decaying underneath the mask. We can see the effort it takes to keep the monster down. As the movie goes on, that mask starts cracking. Her line readings become sharper. Her face changes. Her body changes. There are moments where she feels like she is channeling Jack Nicholson in The Shining, especially once the Babadook is fully inside her. But the performance never becomes empty horror-movie madness. It stays rooted in the terrible truth of the character: Amelia loves Samuel, and she is also furious at what his birth is tied to. That contradiction is the movie. We also defend Noah Wiseman as Samuel, because the criticism that he is too loud, shrill, or irritating misses the point. Samuel has to be difficult. If he were a sweet, quiet movie child, the story would not work. His behavior is part of the horror, but it is also a symptom of the house he has grown up in. He is the carbon monoxide detector going off while everyone else keeps blaming the noise. He knows something is wrong before anyone else will admit it. And beneath the screaming, weapons, tantrums, and chaos, Samuel is heartbreaking. He loves his mother. He wants to protect her. The scene where Amelia is choking him and he strokes her face instead of fighting back is devastating. That moment only works because the movie understands Samuel as more than an annoying child. He is scared, traumatized, and still trying to save the only parent he has. We also talk about the importance of Amelia’s support system. Robbie, her coworker, and Mrs. Roach, her neighbor, are small but crucial points of light. Mrs. Roach especially breaks our hearts. She sees Amelia and Samuel with more compassion than Amelia’s own sister does, and her late-night speech, telling Amelia that she loves them and would do anything for them, is one of the few genuinely warm moments in the movie. Our one Low is that the metaphor may become too literal in the third act. When the movie starts behaving more like a possession film, with black sludge, physical attacks, and more conventional supernatural imagery, we can understand why some viewers might feel the internal logic gets shaky. The Babadook is scariest when it is hard to define. But even that Low opens up an interesting question: whose reality are we watching? If the movie shifts between Amelia’s point of view and Samuel’s, the more literal monster imagery starts to make more sense. Maybe Amelia is not literally vomiting black sludge. Maybe that is Samuel’s way of understanding that the bad thing inside his mother is finally coming out. The ending is why this movie becomes great. The Babadook is not destroyed. Amelia feeds it worms in the basement. She manages it. She acknowledges it. She stops pretending it is not there. That is what makes the ending both hopeful and haunting. The monster is still in the house. It just is not in control right now. The Babadook 2014 review Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook Essie Davis as Amelia Noah Wiseman as Samuel Mister Babadook children’s book The Babadook ending explained Is the Babadook real or a metaphor? The Babadook and grief Parental rage in horror movies Motherhood and resentment in The Babadook The Babadook as psychological horror Samuel’s behavior and trauma Amelia’s breakdown The basement symbolism The Babadook and The Shining comparisons Mrs. Roach in The Babadook “The more you deny me” meaning Why The Babadook is still scary

  4. Sep 22

    VIRTUOSITY (1995) | Denzel vs. Russell Crowe in Cyber Hell (Low)

    We went Low on Virtuosity, but this is one of those Lows where the movie is bad in ways that are still weirdly entertaining. Virtuosity (1995) is mid-’90s techno-thriller anxiety blasted through a Windows 95 screensaver: virtual reality, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, serial killer databases, cyber gobbledygook, regenerative glass skin, and Russell Crowe grinning like he has decided to personally drag the whole movie into cyber hell. That is the central appeal of the episode. Denzel Washington is trying to ground this thing in grief, trauma, guilt, and redemption, while Russell Crowe is playing a homicidal computer program like a theater kid version of Agent Smith. They do not feel like they are in the same movie, and somehow, that is the best thing about the movie. Virtuosity is not good, but it has the kind of cable-movie energy where, if it is on, we are probably not changing the channel. In this episode, we revisit Virtuosity, directed by Brett Leonard and released in 1995, as part of that strange mid-’90s wave of technology thrillers that seemed equally fascinated and terrified by where computers, virtual reality, and the internet were going. This came out the same year as The Net, Hackers, Johnny Mnemonic, and Strange Days, and you can feel that cultural anxiety all over it. The movie is goofy, dated, and often incoherent, but there is something interesting about watching a 1995 movie panic about artificial intelligence escaping its own parameters. The setup is pure high-concept nonsense in the best and worst ways. Denzel Washington plays Parker Barnes, a former cop serving prison time after killing the man who murdered his wife and daughter. He gets pulled into a virtual reality police training program built around SID 6.7, played by Russell Crowe. SID is not just one killer. He is an artificial criminal made from hundreds of murderers, terrorists, psychopaths, and serial killers, including the man who destroyed Parker’s family. Then, through a beautiful pile of mid-’90s nanotech mumbo jumbo, SID gets a synthetic body and escapes into Los Angeles. The biggest High is Russell Crowe. He is enormous in this movie. He preens, dances, grins, poses, and devours every scene like he knows the only way to save Virtuosity is to make it more ridiculous. And honestly, he is right. SID should be over the top. He is artificial. He has no restraint. He is made out of other people’s violence and programmed to treat murder like play. When he says he could kill Parker but likes to play, that is the whole character. He is not trying to win. He is trying to keep the game going. The other High is Denzel Washington, for the exact opposite reason. Denzel does not wink at the material. He does not play Parker Barnes like a man trapped in a goofy sci-fi action movie. He plays him straight, as a guy whose life has been wrecked by real violence and who is now being used by a system that does not care whether he survives. That contrast is where the better version of Virtuosity lives: an artificial villain who only understands violence as entertainment colliding with a real man whose entire life has been shaped by grief. The problem is that the movie never fully builds itself around that collision. It keeps falling back into generic mid-’90s action beats instead of digging into the most interesting idea it has. SID entering the real world should be the movie’s turning point. When he comes out of that strange snake-egg birth pod and says “whoa, gravity,” we get a glimpse of a better movie. He was a digital god inside a simulation, and now he has to deal with weight, pain, temperature, balance, hunger, fear, and maybe even mortality. That could have been fascinating. Instead, the movie cannot decide what SID is once he becomes real. Is he bound by physical reality, forced to learn the rules of the human world? Or is he a cartoon cyber demon with supervillain powers? Virtuosity wants both, which means the rules get fuzzy fast. The movie needed to pick a lane: make him a real serial killer in a real world, or let the entire movie become Russell Crowe’s cyber circus. The biggest Low is how much Virtuosity feels like it is cribbing from Demolition Man. We have a theatrical super-criminal who does not fit the current system, law enforcement dragging a disgraced former cop back into service because he is uniquely equipped to stop him, a near-future bureaucracy overwhelmed by its own technology, and a villain treating the modern world like a playground. The difference is that Demolition Man knows exactly what kind of movie it is. It is confident, satirical, broad, and specific. Virtuosity keeps reaching for that energy without having the same clarity. We also talk about how underwritten the Kelly Lynch character feels, especially the half-hearted attempt to create romantic or emotional tension between her and Parker. The movie gestures toward a surrogate family dynamic with her daughter, played by a young Kaley Cuoco, but it never really earns it. By the end, Parker saving them feels more like genre math than emotional payoff. Another Low is the movie’s vague attempt at media satire. SID takes over a news station, murders people on the air, and the movie tries to say something about audiences being unable to look away from televised violence. That idea should land, especially with a villain made from humanity’s worst impulses. But Virtuosity does not have much to say beyond “people watch violence,” and the live demographic meters tracking viewers by age and income are hilariously silly. By the final act, the movie is borrowing from everything: Demolition Man, The Terminator, Jurassic Park, The Matrix before The Matrix even existed, Last Action Hero, The Lawnmower Man, and whatever Windows 95 visual effects package was lying around. But that is also part of its strange charm. Virtuosity is derivative, messy, and frequently dumb, but Russell Crowe understands the assignment, Denzel gives it a human center, and the contrast between them makes the movie more watchable than it probably deserves to be. Virtuosity 1995 review Brett Leonard’s Virtuosity Denzel Washington as Parker Barnes Russell Crowe as SID 6.7 Virtuosity as a Low episode Mid-’90s technology thrillers Virtual reality in 1990s movies Artificial intelligence in Virtuosity SID 6.7 villain performance Denzel Washington action movies Virtuosity and Demolition Man comparisons Russell Crowe as a cyber serial killer Parker Barnes grief and trauma Nanotechnology in Virtuosity SID 6.7 glass regeneration Virtuosity train hostage scene Kelly Lynch as Madison Carter Kaley Cuoco in Virtuosity Virtuosity news station scene Windows 95 movie aesthetics Virtuosity ending explained Why Virtuosity is a guilty pleasure

  5. Sep 15

    NINE DAYS (2021) | The Masterpiece Nobody Saw (High)

    We went High on Nine Days, but this is a very different kind of High for us. This is not a massive cultural touchstone, a blockbuster, or one of those movies everyone already agrees is a classic. Nine Days (2021) is a small, quiet, underseen film with an enormous idea: what if, before you were born, you had to interview for the chance to live? That premise could have turned into something overly abstract or painfully sentimental, but Edson Oda’s Nine Days does something much more powerful. It uses tube TVs, VHS tapes, one isolated house, and a vast salt flat to ask one of the biggest questions a movie can ask: what makes life worth living? And instead of answering with speeches about destiny or meaning, it answers through small human moments: a peach, a bike ride, a joke at dinner, a scream from the top of a mountain, someone seeing you clearly before you disappear. In this episode, we talk about Nine Days, written and directed by Edson Oda, as one of the best movies almost nobody talks about. The film stars Winston Duke as Will, Zazie Beetz as Emma, Benedict Wong as Kyo, Bill Skarsgård as Kane, Tony Hale as Alexander, Arianna Ortiz as Maria, and David Rysdahl as Mike. It is a high-concept drama with an indie-scale approach, and that combination is exactly why it works. The setup is simple and devastating. Will lives in an isolated house surrounded by salt flats, watching human lives unfold through old television screens. When one of those lives ends, several unborn souls arrive at his door and compete for the chance to be born. Over nine days, Will interviews them, tests them, studies them, and decides which one gets to enter the world. But the longer the process goes on, the more the movie shifts away from the question of who deserves life and toward the question of whether Will can remember why life mattered to him in the first place. We spend a lot of time talking about how original this premise feels, especially now. This is the kind of small, high-concept adult drama that used to have more room in the movie landscape. Today, it feels like films either get made for very little or get inflated into giant franchise products, with almost nothing in the middle. Nine Days feels like it belongs to that missing middle: thoughtful, emotional, strange, ambitious, and built for adults who want a movie to sit with them after it ends. One of the biggest Highs is the movie’s minimalism. It could have buried itself in explanations about heaven, purgatory, angels, souls, or the mechanics of the afterlife. Instead, it keeps the world grounded and almost mundane. Will and Kyo have a job. There are groceries. There are reports. There are tapes. There are TVs stacked in a little house. That normalcy makes the otherworldly elements feel more haunting, not less. The movie does not need glowing portals or enormous visual effects. Its mystery works because it stays intimate. We also talk about the POV footage on the televisions. The idea that Will watches lives from the inside, through each person’s direct experience, is beautiful and immersive. It makes life feel both ordinary and miraculous. The movie finds meaning in the images that pass by quietly in the background, which is really the whole point. Most of life is not the big defining event. Most of life is the stuff we barely notice while it is happening. The performances are another huge High. Winston Duke has to play Will as buttoned-up, clinical, wounded, and deeply compassionate all at once. He is detached because he has to be, but we can feel how much the work is destroying him. Every time he recreates a final wish for one of the souls who is not selected, the movie becomes almost unbearably tender. He is there to comfort them before they disappear, and then he breaks when they are gone. Zazie Beetz as Emma is the soul of the movie. Emma represents the thing Will has forgotten: curiosity, presence, openness, and awe. She shows up late because she is probably looking at the sky, the ground, the light, the air, and everything around her. She does not play the interview game the way Will wants her to. She asks questions. She notices things. She eats a peach not because she is hungry, but because she can. That is the whole movie right there. The central debate of the episode is whether Will makes the right choice. He chooses Kane because he believes Kane is better equipped to survive the harshness of the world. Will sees Emma’s openness as a kind of vulnerability, maybe even a fatal one. He is not trying to be cruel. He is trying to protect the world from swallowing another person like him. But that is what makes the choice so heartbreaking. Emma may not be armored, but she might be exactly what the world needs more of. She refuses to argue why someone else should not live. She refuses to turn existence into a competition built on tearing another person down. To Will, that means she is not ready. To us, it might mean she understands life better than anyone else in the room. We also talk about the ending, which is perfect. Emma’s final request is not for Will to create a fantasy for her. It is for him to perform the monologue from the one moment in his own life when he felt seen. When he recites Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” across the salt flats, the movie reveals that Emma’s gift to him is remembrance. She reminds him of the joy he once had, the art he once loved, and the life he has spent years reducing to a job. Our one Low is small but worth discussing. Late in the movie, another interviewer arrives with information that confirms Amanda’s death was suicide. We understand why the movie does it, because it gives Will a clear trigger for his spiral, but part of us thinks the uncertainty might have been stronger. Not knowing would have left Will trapped in the same painful space the audience is in: trying to make peace with something that cannot be fully explained. Still, Nine Days is a High because it is generous in a way very few movies are. It deals with grief, suicide, loneliness, and the terror of not getting the life you hoped for, but it is not really a movie about death. It is a movie about why life matters. It asks us to sit with pain, then gives us gratitude. Nine Days 2021 review Edson Oda’s Nine Days Winston Duke as Will Zazie Beetz as Emma Benedict Wong as Kyo Bill Skarsgård as Kane Tony Hale as Alexander Nine Days movie ending explained Nine Days as an underseen indie film Auditioning for life in Nine Days Tube TVs and VHS tapes in Nine Days Salt flats cinematography Nine Days and the meaning of life Emma’s final request Walt Whitman Song of Myself scene Will and Amanda’s death Grief and suicide in Nine Days Why life is worth living Small moments in Nine Days Nine Days as a high-concept adult drama

  6. Sep 8

    THE PRESTIGE (2006) | Nolan's Secret Hiding in Plain Sight (High)

    We went High on The Prestige, and this is one of those Highs where the movie almost feels built for this podcast. Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006) is not just a movie about magic. It is a movie constructed like a magic trick, and the more you watch it, the more you realize Nolan has been showing you the secret from the beginning. He tells you what the trick is, puts the evidence in front of your face, and then waits for you to notice. That is why this movie keeps getting better every time we return to it. The secret impresses no one. It is the trick you use it for. That line is the whole philosophy of the movie. The Prestige is about obsession, performance, sacrifice, ego, grief, rivalry, and the terrible things people will do to be the one left standing when the audience applauds. In this episode, we revisit The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Christian Bale as Alfred Borden, Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier, Michael Caine as Cutter, Rebecca Hall as Sarah, Scarlett Johansson as Olivia, and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. This is one of Dom’s favorite Nolan movies, and honestly, the case is not hard to make. It has everything Nolan does best: fractured timelines, obsessed protagonists, nested mysteries, a final reveal that changes the whole movie, and an ending that does not stop asking questions after the credits roll. The first big idea we talk about is that The Prestige is Christopher Nolan’s love letter to filmmaking. The three parts of a magic trick, the pledge, the turn, and the prestige, are basically the three acts of a movie. You show the audience something ordinary. You transform it into something impossible. Then you bring it back in a way that makes them wonder how you did it. Nolan understands endings better than almost anyone, and this movie is almost entirely built around the power of a final act that makes you immediately want to start the movie over. We also talk about how the opening image of the top hats in the woods becomes a perfect bookend with the final image of Angier’s bodies in the tanks. The movie begins with duplicates, death, and a mystery we do not yet understand. Then it slowly teaches us how to read what we have already seen. That is the magic trick. The movie is not hiding the secret so much as daring us to look closely enough. The performances are a huge High. Christian Bale has one of the most difficult jobs in the film because, on first viewing, he has to play Borden as a man divided by his own nature. On rewatch, once you know the truth, you realize he is playing two different men sharing one life. That makes every scene with Sarah more painful. When she says, “You don’t mean it today,” the line works one way the first time and a completely different way once you understand the trick. She is not married to a complicated man. She is married to a lie that keeps changing shape. That is where the movie’s emotional cost really lands. Sarah is not part of the trick by choice. She is collateral damage. She knows something is wrong, even if she cannot name it. The tragedy is that the person she loves is only partly available to her, and sometimes not even the right person at all. The same goes for Julia, Angier’s wife, whose death becomes the wound that drives the rivalry. These women are where the men’s obsession lands, and the movie is very clear that the cost of greatness, ego, and secrecy is not only paid by the men chasing applause. Hugh Jackman is just as strong as Angier because his performance shifts so carefully. At first, Angier feels like the more sympathetic character. He loses his wife in a horrible accident, and his anger at Borden makes emotional sense. But as the movie goes on, he becomes the more frightening figure. He is the showman who cannot invent the trick, so he steals, sabotages, and eventually builds his entire life around beating Borden. Jackman also gets to play Root, the drunken double, and that performance lets the movie show its own form of cinematic magic right on screen. We also get into Michael Caine as Cutter, who functions as the engineer, the conscience, and the father figure of the movie. His final confrontation with Angier is devastating because he realizes how deeply he has been used. When he tells Angier that the sailor who almost drowned lied, that drowning was not peaceful, that it was agony, the line reframes every version of Angier’s trick. It is one thing to build an illusion. It is another thing to build it out of repeated death. Then there is David Bowie as Tesla, which is almost too perfect. Tesla feels mythical before he even appears, and Bowie brings exactly the right strangeness to him. The Tesla and Edison rivalry mirrors Borden and Angier beautifully. Borden is the craftsman and illusionist. Angier is the showman. Tesla is the visionary. Edison is the man who knows how to sell the future. The whole movie is about incomplete men trying to steal the missing piece from someone else. The biggest debate in the episode is not whether the movie works. It clearly works. The real question is how many secrets the movie is actually carrying. Every rewatch turns into a game of figuring out which Borden we are watching, what Sarah truly understands, how much Cutter knows, and whether Angier ever really understood the cost of what he was doing. Our one Low is barely a Low. It is a nitpick about Tesla’s machine. The movie seems to establish that the machine creates a duplicate roughly 50 yards away, with the hats and the cat appearing outside the workshop. But when Angier first uses it, the duplicate appears close enough for him to shoot at point-blank range. It is probably done for visual clarity and storytelling economy, but in a movie this carefully built, even a tiny rule inconsistency stands out. Still, that is us looking for a flaw because we legally have to pretend the movie has one. The Prestige is a High because it is not just clever. It is emotional, cruel, elegant, and endlessly rewatchable. It is a movie about incomplete people, and maybe that is why it never feels completely finished in your head. Nolan shows us the trick. He tells us the secret. Then he leaves us wondering why we still wanted to be fooled. The Prestige 2006 review Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige Christian Bale as Alfred Borden Hugh Jackman as Robert Angier Michael Caine as Cutter Rebecca Hall as Sarah Scarlett Johansson as Olivia David Bowie as Nikola Tesla The Prestige ending explained The pledge, the turn and the prestige “Are you watching closely?” Borden and Fallon twist Angier and the Tesla machine Robert Angier’s clones The Transported Man trick Borden vs Angier rivalry Sarah and the cost of obsession Cutter’s “it was agony” reveal Tesla and Edison rivalry The Prestige as Nolan’s best movie Movie magic and magic tricks Why The Prestige gets better on rewatch

  7. Aug 28

    DISTURBING BEHAVIOR (1998) | Fisher-Price Clockwork Orange (Low)

    We went Low on Disturbing Behavior, but this is exactly the kind of Low we like having around. Disturbing Behavior (1998) is not a great movie, but it is absolutely a late ’90s guilty pleasure: brainwashed preppies, creepy adults, Pacific Northwest fog, alternative rock needle drops, weird cafeteria tribes, mind control surgery, and James Marsden drinking a carton of milk like the world’s oldest high school student. The episode’s central argument is that this movie has a much better idea than its final cut knows how to handle. It is a story about adults underestimating teenagers, dismissing their fear, and trying to surgically remove everything messy, rebellious, hormonal, and individual about them. Then the studio seems to have made the most thematically perfect bad decision possible: cut out the meat of the story and get to the end faster. In this episode, we revisit Disturbing Behavior, directed by David Nutter and released in 1998, as a movie that lives on a very specific shelf: flawed, compromised, overcooked, underwritten, but somehow still alive. It stars James Marsden as Steve Clark, Katie Holmes as Rachel Wagner, Nick Stahl as Gavin Strick, Bruce Greenwood as Dr. Caldicott, and William Sadler as Newberry. It is one part teen thriller, one part suburban conspiracy movie, one part watered-down A Clockwork Orange, and one part vulgar episode of Dawson’s Creek with brainwashing. The premise is genuinely creepy. After a family tragedy, Steve moves to Cradle Bay, a town where the lawns are too clean, the adults are too calm, and the popular kids, known as the Blue Ribbons, act less like high school students and more like honor roll cult members. They are polite, athletic, well dressed, academically successful, and deeply punchable. At first, they just seem like overachieving suburban nightmares. But Gavin, the local conspiracy-minded outsider, knows something worse is happening. In Cradle Bay, teenage rebellion is not treated like a phase. It is treated like a defect. That is the idea that makes the movie worth talking about. The real villain is not just Dr. Caldicott. The real villain is conformity. We talk about how much this movie reflects a late ’90s fear of being processed into sameness. This was an era obsessed with nonconformity, individuality, outsider identity, and not joining the pack, even while corporations were selling that rebellion back to teenagers through Hot Topic, soundtracks, and movie marketing. Disturbing Behavior accidentally captures that contradiction perfectly. The biggest High is Nick Stahl as Gavin. He is the standout because he understands exactly what kind of movie he is in. Gavin gets a lot of stylized, overwritten late ’90s dialogue, and in the wrong hands it could have been unbearable. Stahl makes it work. He plays Gavin as a sarcastic wiseass who is smarter and more capable than anyone gives him credit for, including maybe himself. His lunchroom breakdown of all the high school tribes is a very familiar ’90s teen movie scene, but this version works because Gavin and U.V. make it funny, specific, and weirdly memorable. Another major High is William Sadler as Newberry, who might be the movie’s most interesting character. He is funny, strange, and hiding in plain sight, a janitor who clearly understands much more than anyone realizes. His rat-killing obsession feels like a metaphor for what is happening in the school, and Sadler gives the movie the kind of weirdo character-actor energy that makes it more fun than it probably has any right to be. We also give credit to the atmosphere. The Pacific Northwest setting gives the movie a cold, eerie, almost Twin Peaks quality. The cinematography has some legitimately great images: the opening cliff overlook, the Blue Ribbons silhouetted on the docks, and the smoky high school hangout spaces. The score is cheesy, but the soundtrack is a time capsule. The Flys’ “Got You Where I Want You” is still a banger, and the music video feels like its own little late ’90s cultural artifact. The biggest Low is studio interference. The theatrical cut runs only 84 minutes, and you can feel the missing material. Deleted scenes apparently filled in Steve’s brother’s suicide, the backstory of Cradle Bay, and the larger sociology behind why the town would accept Caldicott’s Blue Ribbon program. Without that context, the movie feels stitched together. It has the shape of a sharper satire, but not all the connective tissue. The missing Cradle Bay backstory especially hurts. If the movie had shown that the town was traumatized by out-of-control teenagers causing a fatal crash, then the adult conspiracy would make more sense. Instead, the parents mostly come off like passive participants with plausible deniability. Are they knowingly sacrificing their kids’ individuality, or are they just looking the other way because the Blue Ribbon kids get good grades and stop causing trouble? The movie never fully decides. We also debate the implant rules. Are the Blue Ribbons supposed to be docile Stepford kids whose hormones trigger violence, or are they more like an invasive Body Snatchers group that protects itself and expands its reach? The movie seems confused. Sometimes they are smiling yogurt-shop preppies. Other times they are basically a prison gang in letterman jackets. By the third act, everything goes completely off the cliff, literally and figuratively. The asylum sequence is over the top, the operating room feels like Jacob’s Ladder crossed with A Clockwork Orange, and Bruce Greenwood shouting “Science is God” is hilarious. But even when it is ridiculous, Disturbing Behavior stays watchable. It is not secretly a masterpiece, but it is not disposable either. It has real late ’90s thriller juice, a creepy premise, a killer soundtrack, and enough strange choices to keep us talking. Disturbing Behavior 1998 review David Nutter’s Disturbing Behavior James Marsden as Steve Clark Katie Holmes as Rachel Wagner Nick Stahl as Gavin Strick Bruce Greenwood as Dr. Caldicott William Sadler as Newberry Disturbing Behavior as a guilty pleasure Blue Ribbons and teen conformity Cradle Bay conspiracy Late ’90s teen thriller movies Disturbing Behavior soundtrack The Flys “Got You Where I Want You” Pacific Northwest horror atmosphere Disturbing Behavior and Twin Peaks comparisons Fisher Price Clockwork Orange Studio interference and deleted scenes Gavin’s original ending Disturbing Behavior implant rules “Science is God” Why Disturbing Behavior still works

  8. Aug 21

    PSYCHO (1998) | Copied Hitchcock Shot For Shot. What Went Wrong? (Low)

    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. Topics Discussed Psycho 1998 review Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake Psycho 1998 vs Psycho 1960 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 Robert Forster psychiatrist scene Shot-for-shot remake experiment Why Psycho 1998 failed Psycho remake in color Green symbolism in Psycho 1998 Psycho 1998 shower scene Norman Bates peephole scene Bates Motel remake comparison Anthony Perkins vs Vince Vaughn Gus Van Sant after Good Will Hunting Psycho remake box office bomb Copying Hitchcock without understanding him

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Movie HighLow is a movie review and film analysis podcast about the best, worst, and weirdest movies cinema has to offer. Each episode, we revisit iconic films, cult classics, Hollywood disasters, bad movie masterpieces, and misunderstood flops to find the HIGHS, the LOWS, and the moments that deserve a second look. Some movies are great. Some are terrible. Some are both. From iconic classics to fascinating disasters, we’re here to figure out why. Film analysis • Movie breakdowns • Movie reviews • High vs Low • Film podcast

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    Movie HighLow | Movie Reviews & Film Analysis
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    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    34
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    Explicit
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