Lived It

Main: Amy Adams + Hitchcock + Alexei’s yiayia = ???

Episode Summary

Premiere pick ‘The Woman in the Window’, nosy neighbours, and a new generation of Hitchcockian thrillers. All in this episode with Alexei Toliopoulos and Gen Fricker.

Episode Notes

Premiere pick ‘The Woman in the Window’, nosy neighbours, and a new generation of Hitchcockian thrillers. All in this episode with Alexei Toliopoulos and Gen Fricker.

Diners, tell us the worst thing you’ve seen your neighbours do at @netflixanz on Instagram and Twitter, or tag #thebigfilmbuffet.

Episode Transcription

Gen Fricker:
I feel like if this was made in the Nineties, it would star Ashley Judd.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh, this would be a Judd-sterpiece, dude. This would be an absolute Judd-sterpiece.

Gen Fricker:
It's Judd-tacular.

Gen Fricker:
I'm so sorry to startle you, but it's me, Gen Fricker. And who's this over here?

Alexei Toliopoulos:
It's me, Alexei Toliopoulos, and we're the hosts of The Big Film Buffet. What do we do on this podcast?

Gen Fricker:
Me, you, we talk about, on a weekly basis, some pop culture recommendations, including what the best thing is for you to spend your time on this weekend from Netflix.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
We are previewing the films on Netflix that are coming out, and the one that we're going to be talking about today is one I'm excited to dive into. We're talking about the new film from director Joe Wright, it's called The Woman in the Window.

The Woman in the Window:
I'm agoraphobic. I can't go outside.

The Woman in the Window:
So what do you do all day?

The Woman in the Window:
911, what's your emergency?

The Woman in the Window:
Dr. Fox said nothing's happened.

The Woman in the Window:
No, I know what I saw!

The Woman in the Window:
Everybody's okay.

Gen Fricker:
This is one of the most hotly anticipated film releases of this year. So many stars in this, it's based on one of the biggest selling books of 2018, The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn. Alexei, what's it about?

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Well, this movie for me is all about Amy Adams.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
This is the Amy Adams show, and on this podcast, we simply adore Amy Adams in everything that she does. We could not be bigger fans of her work. This movie places Amy Adams in a gorgeous New York brownstone. She's trapped in there because she has been suffering a severe bout of agoraphobia. She's afraid to go outside, she's locked herself in, she's manically watching classic 1950s black-and-white Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, so I'm relating to this character quite a lot. She befriends Julianne Moore, who is her neighbour another brownstone across the road. Their lives become a little bit entwined, she becomes intrigued with her life. The son from across the road also comes over. Gary Oldman is the dad across the road.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
And then one day, or one evening, rather, Julianne Moore's character disappears. And Amy Adams sees something transpire through the window where she sits, as a titular woman in the window, looking to another window where Julianne Moore, who also could be the titular woman in the window, disappears. And she begins to suspect that something foul is afoot, and she becomes embroiled in the mystery.

Gen Fricker:
It's as dramatic as that description of it from Alexei.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I really think I channelled the movie really, really well.

Gen Fricker:
You sold it, yeah. You were like, "Ooh, and then this!" It is an adaptation of A.J. Finn's book by Tracy Letts, who wrote the screenplay for August: Osage Country.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
He wrote the play as well, and he's in the fricking movie!

Gen Fricker:
Yeah, he is!

Alexei Toliopoulos:
He's her psychologist.

Gen Fricker:
Oh my gosh, no one's going to care about this except us.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Lexi loves Lettsy! Lexi love Lettsy!

Gen Fricker:
It is so hotly anticipated, this film, because it is based on a huge book that came out back in 2018. But it's for fans of books and movies like Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, Behind Her Eyes.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh, big time.

Gen Fricker:
It's all framed around these female lead characters who are basically caught in the wrong place, in the wrong time. It's absolutely a movie for thriller fans, crime fans, it's tense.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Very tense movie, and it really hearkens back, for me, to a period of like the late 1980s, 1990s, all the way up to like early 2000s, of thrillers that are usually female led or female focused, that have like this really strong, ratcheting energy. And a lot of that is due, in part, to this fabulous performance from Amy Adams, that is, like you were saying, totally turbo. I've not really seen her like this. This is such a different type of performance from her, because so much of her is about trying to create naturalism. This is not that. This is about creating perspective. This is about showing the world from her point of view. It reminds me of so many of those thrillers that I really love, like Gone Girl, Fatal Attraction, even something like Basic Instinct where there's all this bubbling tension everywhere.

Gen Fricker:
Yes. It's so campy in a way. I do feel like, you're so right with those Nineties thrillers, because I feel like if this was made in the nineties, it would star Ashley Judd.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh, this would be a Judd-sterpiece, dude. This would be an absolute Judd-sterpiece.

Gen Fricker:
It's Judd-tacular. It's so funny because it is so heightened, and as you were saying, Amy Adams is not giving you a natural performance. She's giving you opera. Same with Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, they're all giving you 10 from the beginning.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Yeah. They start at 10 from the beginning, and then by the time we're about halfway through these guys are inventing numbers.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah. These numbers don't exist.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
They're going up to dwelve and twenty-nine-jeen and stuff.

Gen Fricker:
A grillion. It's a lot, this movie. It is a lot. There's a lot going on visually. There's a lot of movement with the camera. The colours of everything, that's this kind of really rich, blood-red tones, which are obviously very ominous. There's these cool blues, and then a lot of darkness. And you get the sense that this house is closing in on this woman. It is so tense, and because it is so heightened, because it's so operatic, it really reminds me of Baz Luhrmann.

Gen Fricker:
And I wonder if Joe Wright is inspired that much by Baz Luhrmann, because it really feels like... Baz Luhrmann only deals in epic, you know? And so it kind of feels like Baz Luhrmann walked so Joe Wright could run, you know?

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Well, run while screaming across the room.

Gen Fricker:
Run while screaming and pulling his hair out.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
For me, it woke up so many feelings of just like being trapped in and staring out your window, and you know, the nosy neighbour, these are such archetypes that I feel like close to home. These remind me so much of my [Yaya 00:06:19] , who is my grandmother. I used to live with my mum and my grandma growing up, and we lived in like this townhouse complex. And my Yaya was basically the neighbourhood watch for the whole place, because she's there all the time. She was such a busybody, like staring out the window all the time. I remember one time when I was walking home down the hill and I could see our balcony, I could see her like hundreds of metres away. I could just see through the curtain, [inaudible 00:06:46], and I just saw the little glint of binoculars.

Gen Fricker:
Oh my god!

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I think she knew I was walking home from school and just tried to catch me to make sure I was coming home. But you know, that's the thing, it's like there's this old joke that I just use all the time, which is Greeks don't get married, they get worried. And it's just that's how they love each other. It's all through this idea of like, oh, I love you so much, but I'm so worried about you all the time when I'm not around you.

Gen Fricker:
Aww!

Alexei Toliopoulos:
And this movie gave me a lot of that Yaya energy for me.

Gen Fricker:
Oh my gosh. I kind of sympathise with the Wyatt Russell character.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh, who plays her like tenant, downstairs neighbour?

Gen Fricker:
Yeah. And having like a kooky, fruity landlord who just likes to drop by.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh no, this is a nightmare.

Gen Fricker:
My first share house I ever lived in, we had a bit of a personality on our landlord, and she'd love to drop in.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I love a local character.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah. She'd love to drop in on her 20-year-old tenants and just see how they were going. And it wasn't in a way that was judgy, it was just in a way of like, "Hey, kids. [crosstalk 00:07:50] Partying-"

Alexei Toliopoulos:
This is like Octavia Spencer in Ma.

Gen Fricker:
Oh my gosh. Oh no! Well, I'm all right. Spoiler alert.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Yeah, you made it through. But she'd come party with you guys?

Gen Fricker:
Well, she would be like, "Oh, are we partying today, kids?" And we'd be like, "No, we're poor."

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh my gosh.

Gen Fricker:
We'd save up all our coins for the week, and then go buy one goon bag at the end of the week and then mix it with cordial that we bought.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh my god, Gen. You're painting a vivid portrait that only Amy Adams could bring to life right now.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah. It was very funny though, watching this movie and just being like, oh, it's funny that all these people think this shut-in woman is a bit, you know, not with it or whatever, when it's like, that's been my experience on a bad day.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Absolutely. When I first moved out of home, years and years and years ago now, there was a neighbour that everyone was like, oh, she's the busybody in the building. She'll always complain about something. We moved in, me and my partner had a little dinner party. We got a knock immediately going, "Excuse me, you're being too loud. You're laughing too much." I was like, oh god. Oh no, no, no. And I felt so embarrassed. I'm like, I got to go give her a gift or something to apologise. I was so embarrassed by it, I'm going to make something. I'm going to make her donuts or something to bring over. But then the next day she knocked on the door again, and she was like, "Is this your inflatable pool that you've left out?" I was like, "Firstly, no. I don't even know the last time I submerged myself in water, so it's definitely not mine."

Gen Fricker:
He's a shower man, damn it!

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I'm a shower boy. I don't go swimming, okay? The closest I get to submerged is yes, maybe I'll use a foot spa once a year.

Gen Fricker:
Yes. It's Christmas. You have to live your best life.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
You sound like you're encouraging me, but let the record show Gen recoiled while doing encouraging voices.

Gen Fricker:
Foot spa is yuck. Somebody once bought one for my mother for Mothers' Day. It is yucko.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Yeah, the tragic thing is I actually used my mum's one, so it's even grosser. But she's like, "Is that your kiddie pool that you've left to be taken away?" In my head, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to win this person over. I'm going to win this Amy Adams character over. And then I just started engaging, asking her questions about her life and stuff like that. By the end of the conversation, she loves me. She's smiling. And for years I'm like, oh, I'm the only one in the building that she loves. And I was like, I did it, I got in, I won the Amy Adams over. So it was kind of a reverse of what this movie really is about.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah. You were man in the doorway, you weren't woman in the window.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I was man in the doorway, and the doorway was to the heart of the people in the community of my village. Okay?

Alexei Toliopoulos:
This movie as well that we're talking about today, The Woman in the Window, is in this long lineage of films I do believe come from the inspiration of Alfred Hitchcock's classic movie Rear Window, starring Jimmy Stewart and the fantastic Grace Kelly.

Gen Fricker:
The wickedly talented-

Alexei Toliopoulos:
The wickedly talented and extremely royal Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco. And that's one of my favourite movies of all time. It's a movie I've watched a lot and studied a lot, and also kind of become obsessed with the lineage of it in those like single location thrillers that have a big thematic element of voyeurism kind of permeating throughout them, of like witnessing a crime through your window and then becoming embroiled in it in some way.

Gen Fricker:
Totally. Complicit, or trying to get to the bottom of it. The ordinary person becoming the detective.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Absolutely. And so people may not have seen Rear Window, but they probably have seen the Simpsons episode where Bart breaks his legs in the, I believe a kiddie pool of all things. And then he looks out his window and sees stuff happening, and captures what he believes to be a murder, if you will, which is what happens in this movie as well. But I think that's where those single location thrillers come from, is from that.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
And this movie does something that I love so much from that Alfred Hitchcock movie, that I think a lot of the other descendants of that film don't do, is we get a little moment where we see her first looking out the window for the first time. And we see her kind of seeing little different stories going on around the brownstone houses in New York City around her, from her perspective, like you see a kid playing piano, you see a family together, and I think it does something really good to ground this movie in some sort of reality, theatrical or otherwise. It's a reality that we start in, and then when we go to the bigger places with bigger personalities coming through these big performances, we are able to still find ourselves held by this movie.

Gen Fricker:
Hmm. You felt held by it?

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I felt absolutely held by it, and I felt shook by it while it was holding me.

Gen Fricker:
It's got some incredible stars in it. The titular woman in the window, Amy Adams, you've got Julianne Moore.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh my gosh. I love Julianne Moore.

Gen Fricker:
You've got Gary Oldman.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I love Gary Oldman.

Gen Fricker:
What's your favourite Gary Oldman performance?

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh gosh. I would have to say, I love Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element, because he is big, and I love it when Gary Oldman goes big. So you know I'm going to have a lot to say about this movie in particular.

Gen Fricker:
Yes. It is a turbo film. You think it's going to be this very small, quiet, intimate drama. There's only two settings, really, for this film. It's the street outside, and then Amy Adams' character's house. That's it. So you think there's not going to be a lot, but then you get a director like Joe Wright involved, and if you don't know his films, he directed Atonement.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Atonement, he did the Pride and Prejudice adaptation with Keira Knightley, I believe.

Gen Fricker:
Yes he did. Anna Karenina.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh, very sumptuous production, design-heavy movie.

Gen Fricker:
Yes. Lots of period costumes, huge cast. He goes big.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
He goes real big. I think that he is someone that kind of like takes exciting material and elevates it in a way with kind of like a camp energy. There's a certain inherent cabinets in the way, like how he ratchets up the melodrama while ratcheting up the thriller energy as well. I think he's done that really well in a movie called Hanna with Saoirse Ronan and Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett, which is for me one of my favourite thrillers in the last couple of decades. Very cool, stylistic movie. And also he's done the movie Pan, which I think about all the time, which is a Peter Pan movie starring Hugh Jackman, and of course The Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman's finest hour where he gets the Oscar nomination and the win.

Gen Fricker:
He loves big sweeping set pieces. The camera is kind of used as another element, another character in a way. The way he frames things up, there's movement to it, and you can see that in The Darkest Hour, there's some really iconic sequences where there's planes flying over war fields and things like that. So he is a director with a huge vision.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
He makes kind of close to modern-day epic cinema, at points.

Gen Fricker:
Yes. Epic dramas, for sure.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Big time.

Gen Fricker:
So to take all of that and put it into this tiny, tense, small story that is really about how we project our frustrations and our ideas of identity onto other people, and how that can really hurt some people, it's a lot. It's like a powder keg. It's just ready to explode. It's got this score by Danny Elfman, who is the iconic composer of The Simpsons theme.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
And of course, Tim Burton movies, and of course, the Batman 1989 soundtrack.

Gen Fricker:
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. So his score is just relentless. It's constantly going. There's sharp stings of strings everywhere, like Joe Wright's obviously referencing Hitchcock and that kind of comes through in the campiness as well, in the cinematography, in these kind of bordering on hysterical performances where these women are just like, you don't know whether they're going to explode.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I think you nailed it talking about Danny Elfman's score, because it does feel so in line with those Bernard Herrmann scores, who did Psycho, he did North by Northwest, he even did Taxi Driver, and I believe Citizen Kane itself.

Gen Fricker:
Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
But he's done lots of big scores that utilise like a full orchestra to kind of really brew up tension between things, and to become overwhelming, to become operatic, and I think that's what Joe Wright's really going for here.

Gen Fricker:
I feel like this film is almost the antithesis of something like Uncut Gems, where Uncut Gems is so tense for two hours, two and a half hours, but the score is so minimal.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
It's like, cosmic.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah. And it's just the synths and that's kind of it. The speech is really naturalistic, there's a lot of mumbling, a lot of talking over, and this is not that. This is highly stylized. This is extremely big. It's like theatre.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Oh, it's so theatre. I'm so delighted by this movie. I feel like every two or three years there's a discovery for me where something is not exactly what I anticipated it to be, because I do love Joe Wright, I love the entire cast of this movie, I love a single location thriller, but I did not know what this was going into. This one is one of those movies that I discover every couple of years and I get hooked into and I get so excited about, because this feels like a throwback, but feels like a completely new energy going into one of those things. But more so, I'm talking about how truly bonkers this movie is. Like, it is big. It is audacious. It's unrelenting, it's overwhelming.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
And I watched this at midnight to prepare for this. I've seen it twice since then as well. But the first time I watched it, I was like, oh, I've got to watch this before this, before we have our initial chat about it, and I was like, I'll start a little bit now, and maybe I'll catch the rest in the morning. I stayed up till like 2:00 AM, because I could not stop watching this film.

Gen Fricker:
Oh my gosh.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I became obsessed with this film, because it really is like this movie is about obsession, because so much of it is Amy Adams staring out the window and then being engulfed into this story that she's kind of constructing herself, that is also being thrown at her, perhaps, to like put her on the path to things, in that kind of like, you know, Girl on the Train kind of way, perhaps.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah. She finds herself, it's almost like wrong place, wrong time.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Wrong place, wrong time, wrong person. I'm so sorry to you, Amy, but you're stuck in this world now.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah, it's so true. It's like you as a viewer as well, because she kind of has this tragic backstory, she is an unreliable narrator. And so she's questioning herself, and you're questioning her decisions and her choices. It is a perfect, pure thriller. There's red herrings-

Alexei Toliopoulos:
There's herrings of multiple colours in this movie.

Gen Fricker:
There are herrings of every shade!

Alexei Toliopoulos:
But I think it's so much that Alfred Hitchcock, classic thriller idea of someone's descent into their own mania while the film ascends in theatricality and operatic-ness.

Gen Fricker:
If I was writing a year 12 HSC essay about it, I would say the shadows of her house represent the shadows of her mind.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Wow. And this is that kind of thing. This is a HSC drama text.

Gen Fricker:
This is exactly it. It's a fun movie. It's definitely one of those ones where you will pop it on over a weekend, and you'll settle in and you'll have a good time.

Gen Fricker:
Who do you reckon this movie is for, Alexei?

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I think it's for Alexei, big time. I had such a fun, enjoyable time with this movie, so I think that this is not only for people that enjoy like big thriller book adaptations, which this really is. It's going to capture those people. But I really think this is people who are like myself, that want to be surprised by the heights a movie will go to.

Gen Fricker:
Yeah, for sure. That's such a good way to put it.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
And also, if you're someone like me, this is one of those rare films that comes along every now and then where I just completely sink into being overwhelmed by great actresses going really big and going completely ham. I adore Amy Adams doing this. I love seeing her go this big and go this wild with a performance and get so teary-eyed and so, like, snotty. I'm like, aw, Amy, keep going, keep going.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Julianne Moore, one of my all time heroes, I love seeing her go big in this like she did back in Magnolia. I've been dying for a big Julianne Moore performance like this, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, she's a sneaky one. She's a sneaky one in this movie, the way that she kind of underplays everything. So I think if you're like us, an actress guy, this is one for you. This comes on once every three years, you're going to get something like this, so it's a big old treat for you.

Gen Fricker:
Yes. I'm with you 100%. I also think as well, I'm not necessarily a thrillers person, like for instance, I was quite scared of watching Gone Girl.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
You get spooked.

Gen Fricker:
I get spooked very easily. I don't love a big jump scare.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gen Fricker:
This is not necessarily the same amount of tension as Gone Girl, which I find more enjoyable to watch. The melodrama of it, the visuals of it all kind of take away that. So if you're someone who's like, I don't want to be spooked in my own home, you'll have a good time. I think it's one of those films as well where if you invited your friends over and opened a bottle of wine, you would have a lot of fun. It kind of reminds me of like a midday movie drama.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Yes. This is perfect. This is only happening at 12. I'm talking midday and midnight. This is a rare movie that's a midday and a midnight movie. Now there are some other movies that kind of fall into this area as well on Netflix, we've got some further recommendations if you're still feeling a little hungry for some big old thriller energy. Gen, what are some of your favourites?

Gen Fricker:
This really reminds me a lot of A Simple Favour. If you had fun watching that, you'll have fun watching this. It's very stylish, lots of stars.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Lots of actresses.

Gen Fricker:
Yes, exactly. Lots of actresses. It's a bit bigger than your average kind of thriller, and yeah, you'll have a lot of fun watching.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
I love that movie. So I'm going to recommend a movie that was like my Rear Window when I was a teenager, which is Disturbia. So it's kind of like a teenage boy version of this type of thing from the mid 2000s. He's got house arrest, he's got a little bracelet on him. He can't leave the house, and he thinks he might be living across the road from a serial killer. And man, I've got a soft spot for that movie, I really do.

Gen Fricker:
The Woman in the Window is out this weekend on Netflix. Make sure you check it out, and if you love this podcast, please subscribe on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a cutie little review, and we do appreciate it.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
We love it.

Gen Fricker:
And next week, on the Snack episode, Alexei, we're going on the road, baby.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Ooh, we're rolling the dice and making it nice.

Gen Fricker:
Where bright light city is going to set our souls on fire.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
We are talking about Vegas, baby. It's money, baby. We're talking about Vegas. All the things that we love when Vegas is portrayed in the fine art of cinema

Gen Fricker:
We're going to Vegas, baby.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Yeah, baby.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
This episode was hosted by me, Alexei Toliopoulos, and Gen Fricker.

Gen Fricker:
Produced by Michael Sun and Anu Hasbold.

Alexei Toliopoulos:
Edited by Geoffrey O'Connor.

Gen Fricker:
Executive produced by Tony Broderick and Melanie Mahony.