00:00:00.820How can we describe this for viewers who might not have seen it?
00:00:04.780I think for viewers who've seen the original Mean Girls movie, imagine if you fed that movie to an AI and asked it to like rewrite the movie with 2023 jokes in it for like Zoomer kids.
00:00:20.820And also like aesthetic choices. And I'm not just talking about fashion more like there's a couple different places where it's obvious that people are making like TikToks about the events that have transpired.
00:00:34.160Which I think is a really fascinating choice because one of the things about the original Mean Girls movie that's so striking if you watch it now is it came out in 2004. So it predated social media almost entirely. I think Facebook had been around for like two months when that movie came out.
00:00:49.400Yeah. And so in the movie, this like burn book is so crucial because, you know, that was like literally how people recorded rumors in this pre social media age. But now with TikTok, it's like, how are we meshing these digital and analog forms of bullying together in a way that's going to make sense to kids today?
00:01:10.700Right. And so the other thing about the trailer, it's like all the different characters have been updated in some capacity. But Tina Fey is still there.
00:01:20.060Yeah. And how would you describe what Tina Fey looks like?
00:01:23.540Tina Fey looks like she did in the first movie. She's, I think, wearing the same outfits. And she has the same lines. Like, they could have just stitched in scenes from the first movie for Tina Fey.
00:01:36.360She didn't update her wardrobe or her character or her dialogue.
00:03:58.540But even at the time, I remember, there's many jokes about it that feel like they were dated or, like, kind of jarring then, that on a contemporary view watch are, like, shocking.
00:04:11.300like there's a joke in the movie about how the gym teacher is having an affair with two like
00:04:20.080Vietnamese students who are fighting over him do you remember that he's like their boyfriend and
00:04:25.380they find out that they're both dating him and they're like hitting each other and yelling in
00:04:28.720Vietnamese and this is seen as like really funny wow and also just like having like fighting over
00:04:34.320having a relationship with a gym teacher like just wholly inappropriate and there's a lot of
00:04:40.400kind of homophobic jokes that you know the idea like it's okay to call your friend gay0.96
00:04:46.540if you're doing it in a loving way yeah and the whole like he's too gay to function joke
00:04:52.240at the time wow it's really wild to think back on it and be like yeah this is this is 2004 well0.63
00:04:59.660and the whole way that they play lindsey lohan coming from africa is really the joke that she's
00:05:06.940from africa but she's white yeah like that's the joke like that's the duration of the joke
00:05:11.880it's just that she's white and that as a white teenager coming from africa she approaches the0.65
00:05:16.860black students in the cafeteria and assumes that they speak swahili like there's there's many
00:05:23.060layers to that i think it's and there's like all sorts of weight stuff going on right yeah i wonder
00:05:30.020how that's gonna play in 2024 the the whole big prank being making regina george gain five pounds0.83
00:05:36.920right and hate herself and totally that she doesn't fit into her prom dress so that she's
00:05:42.060like too fat to wear her size four dress okay my relation is that I think since I was coming out
00:05:50.120of college like I think that I thought that it was like funny I feel like I've always had this
00:05:55.300interesting relationship with Tina Fey where like I understood that she was supposed to
00:05:59.400somehow be like the avatar of white feminist humor but then there was something weird about1.00
00:06:08.280her like she was just too she didn't seem to have um any sort of mode of like self-interrogation
00:06:16.340or growth and I think that this is something that we're going to talk about is like I don't
00:06:20.240think that her humor has grown in any capacity yeah or evolved I think that's a fair assessment
00:06:25.580And so I think that something felt weird about that at the time. I also knew about that book that the original is, quote unquote, based on queen bees and wannabes. Because social order is something that has always been really fascinating to me. And that, in fact, I felt like I was a student of social order when I was in middle school and in high school.
00:06:45.600And so that idea that something was like laying it out so clearly and the difficulties of it, like that was interesting to me. But then I don't know that they make the movie so like satirical when it comes to these different groups and how they function and like how obviously bad the plastics are in all these different ways that I don't I don't think that it actually resonated with me or that I found it that interesting.
00:07:10.580but I thought it was funny and obviously Lindsay Lohan is a charisma machine too yeah it's really
00:07:16.740like peak Lindsay Lohan she's so charming she's so good she's like so believable in that role
00:07:23.480because I think she was a teenager when they filmed it she's younger than her co-stars and
00:07:29.220you know it makes it very like sad in retrospect when you watch it and you know how poorly she's
00:07:35.180going to be treated by the media in you know coming out of a generation of teen stars who
00:07:39.920were really like cannibalized by a media that loved to devour its young I feel like this is
00:07:45.880the last moment that she had before that happened and so it is it's it's like watching early Britney
00:07:51.540Spears in that capacity too yeah and then this is a more difficult question so I really wanted to
00:07:58.940have you on the show and I was like what could we talk about that's interesting and this was
00:08:03.260your suggestion so why do you think that you wanted to talk about this when did you first
00:08:07.760see the trailer uh I think I saw the trailer probably like two days before you sent me that
00:08:14.540dm and I was like this is what's been on my mind for the last 48 hours because I think that I'm not
00:08:20.140alone in having this experience as like a millennial who's moving into midlife where I
00:08:26.040can no longer tell reliably how long ago something happened because my like personal sense of time
00:08:33.360is moving at a different rate than reality so it was similarly like very jarring to me to learn that
00:08:40.000lord's album pure heroin came out a decade ago i was like no stop lying yeah 2013
00:08:46.680and it's similarly like this week i've been trying to wrap my head around the fact that
00:08:54.180you've got mail is having its 25th anniversary which means that movie and mean girls are only
00:09:00.220five years apart. No, they're not. And yet those films feel like they're from different
00:09:04.620generations to me. One is my generation, one feels older. And so I think it's just, you know,
00:09:11.160this movie to me feels like it's really capturing the millennial midlife crisis that occurs every
00:09:16.420time something like low rise jeans or Uggs become popular again. And we're like, hang on. No,
00:09:22.660what's happening. And, and it's fascinating because, you know, I asked some of my friends
00:09:28.260what they thought about this movie and by far the overwhelming reaction is like why are they
00:09:33.180remaking this who is this for like is this supposed to be for us because it feels insulting
00:09:39.280we're gonna get to that with the tag yeah okay so so i mean it's it's disorienting definitely
00:09:45.340to see to realize that like you've lived so long that the things that were original in your youth
00:09:50.760are being repurposed uh for a new generation that has like no cultural context for them
00:09:56.180and and it really makes you feel in a very visceral way like you're old yeah and just
00:10:03.400that entire understanding of like what does it mean to occupy oldness I saw someone post the
00:10:08.240other day about like how what we can do as millennials is like especially people who've
00:10:14.360entered into their 40s is instead of feeling like an old young you can feel like a young old
00:10:20.140and that's a more interesting place to be interesting distinction yeah so a young old
00:10:26.100is like you're you're young at heart but you're old and yeah in body and memory uh-huh like
00:10:32.360all right if you're if you've like already seen mean girls cycle through and be regenerated
00:10:39.680then you are old at heart but if you can like i don't know if you are game to question some of
00:10:46.240what's going on in it and also immediately recognize the Olivia Rodrigo song you're also
00:10:51.640young so we are young old yeah I mean it's wild it's uh it's funny that like having children
00:10:58.580didn't make me feel as old as seeing a mean girl's reboot and we'd be like wait a second
00:11:04.360didn't that movie just come out it's great didn't Lorde's pure heroine just come out yes exactly
00:11:11.180Yes. I think it also has to do just generally with millennials. We're somehow still doing all
00:11:17.960of the things like my student debt load is somehow still the amount that I thought it
00:11:24.260should have been at 30. So shouldn't I be young if I still have this much student debt or for like
00:11:29.800as a as a population like oh I'm still living in an apartment shouldn't I be young. Yeah I was
00:11:36.600recently doing a rewatch of girls which also came out 10 years ago wow if you can believe it and
00:11:43.640when girls came out I was the same age as the characters in that show and I remember it was
00:11:48.940supposed to be this kind of like you know encapsulation of how a certain contingent of
00:11:54.360like privileged white young women were living in their 20s and rewatching it now in my 30s I was
00:12:00.540like well I still feel like a lot of this applies to the experience of my friends in our 30s like
00:12:05.260you know people are moving all the time they're trying to figure out their careers they're
00:12:08.180changing careers they're like flailing their way through relationships they're you know sorting
00:12:13.460through their relationships with their parents as adults and you watch something like sex in the
00:12:18.020city which was supposed to be about women in their 30s when it came out and i was like i don't know1.00
00:12:21.260anyone living like this like no you know miranda hobbs is supposed to be the loser of this cohort1.00
00:12:25.600and she's like a partner in a law firm who just bought a very expensive apartment everyone has1.00
00:12:30.580like very expensive clothes they're going to the hamptons like you know the way i think our
00:12:35.240generation is aging is out of step with the depictions of that generation in a lot of media
00:12:39.720and that's a disorienting experience too absolutely okay so our first question and this is the you
00:12:46.560know i i kind of previewed this that this was the question that we received en masse when i first
00:12:52.320asked for questions and it's about the specific way that this movie is portrayed or not portrayed
00:12:57.500in the trailer so let's go this is from lily i saw the trailer for the new mean girls film when
00:13:03.120it went viral towards the end of 2023 and it gave absolutely no indication that this was a film of
00:13:10.980the musical version and i then saw the full trailer in the pre-roll for the eras tour film
00:13:17.480which was great targeting and it was much much more obvious that it's a film of the musical
00:13:23.460not just a remake of the original film and i'd love to hear you discuss the musical theater
00:13:30.720ness of it all okay so i vaguely knew that there was a musical of mean girls and i think i knew
00:13:38.700that because a lot of films have been adapted into musicals in order to like uh because it's
00:13:44.960more of a sure bet on broadway than an original production did you know that i didn't know that
00:13:50.340until I looked up, I read the Wikipedia page for this reboot. And in there, it says adapted from
00:13:57.720the musical. And I guess the the actress playing Regina George, Renee Rapp is originated the role
00:14:05.660on Broadway. So that was a revelation to me, but it does feel like it was obscured deliberately,
00:14:12.900maybe in the ads for this movie. And I found a very interesting article on Deadline about
00:14:20.260how studios do this they apparently test audiences do not like musicals so they don't want anyone to
00:14:28.320know that they're going in to see a musical they want them to buy a ticket and maybe they enjoy
00:14:32.180the musical experience maybe they hate it but they've already bought their ticket uh it's the
00:14:37.120same with the Wonka movie with Timothee Chalamet is also apparently a musical and they didn't make
00:14:43.180that clear in the ads either and the color purple the new color purple is an adaptation of the
00:14:47.880musical i will also say that what's interesting this is straight from the wikipedia page is that
00:14:54.520the the musical version of this it started to be developed in 2013 so it wasn't even like that long
00:15:03.360after the movie came out i mean a little bit but like not that long after and then it debuted in
00:15:10.9202017 and now we have this movie in 2024 so we have this long like gestating like Mean Girls
00:15:21.200is just always pregnant like it's just about to always have a baby and so I don't think like
00:15:27.260someone woke up like in 2023 and was like oh you know what it's time for like you know everything
00:15:32.820else is rebooting let's reboot Mean Girls instead it's just been like this gradual trickle almost
00:15:38.680like Star Wars or something like that which I think is is more common so okay when you re-watch
00:15:45.160the trailer with this knowledge that it's a musical I think you can kind of tell it's a
00:15:50.760musical did you notice any tells yes I mean one is that there's a character saying dance break and
00:15:56.700then the characters break out into choreographed dances which happens I guess at least two or
00:16:01.240three times in the trailer and that really took me back to do you remember like teen movies when
00:16:06.100were younger always had some sequence where characters would do a choreographed dance yes
00:16:10.420like and it's just like going on 30 13 going on 30 um what's that movie with melissa joan hart
00:16:17.880and adrian granier i i only know because it was like drive me crazy yes because drive me crazy
00:16:23.440was the single from that movie i mean this was like a very 90s 2000s iteration of like a musical
00:16:29.940where they wanted to have a single that they could market from the movie and how do you get the
00:16:35.880song in the movie it's like a dance break in some way right yeah exactly and so that i mean that
00:16:43.020brings us back to the question of why not use one of the songs from the movie in the trailer why use
00:16:48.920olivia rodrigo you know blessed that we are to have her maybe the songs in the movie are not that
00:16:54.180cool that could be it like this but in that case well and that's the difference right so you have
00:17:01.540like musical theater type songs versus pop songs so like the version of musicals that we grew up
00:17:09.160with that were popular when we were growing up in like the late 90s early 2000s were movies with
00:17:15.860soundtracks integrated very forcefully like the soundtrack was a feature in and of itself
00:17:22.060both to be marketed but then also as a vessel to allow characters to dance or to express emotion
00:17:28.660in some way and i think that what we've seen whether it's through like this like trying to
00:17:34.980milk everything that you can get out of the ip or just like the repopularization of like disney
00:17:42.140movies as musicals right like the um the live versions and all that sort of thing or even just
00:17:47.640the popularity of hamilton is that now they're actual musicals but maybe the like that form is
00:17:56.900less palatable than the top 40 version of a musical yeah i think that's that's a very good
00:18:04.620theory and my dumber theory is that by sort of trying to sneak the musical element past viewers
00:18:12.220what they're trying to capture is people who are like oh mean girls i remember that i'll go see
00:18:15.920that again with right with my kids and and people who know it's a musical who are like they're trying
00:18:21.280to bring these two groups together without one another's knowledge and maximize like the audience
00:18:26.600and the revenue for this sort of mutated frankenstein piece of ip yeah i think that
00:18:32.860there's also like this nostalgia to some extent for those movies from the early 2000s like i've
00:18:39.500seen on tiktok a couple of people being like do you remember the bonkers dance movies from this
00:18:44.340time and specifically citing like the julia the last dance which is like not a good dancer
00:18:51.660but i just saw that snl there's an snl skit performing the unforgettable dance that julia0.98
00:19:01.420stiles does in like the climactic scene of that movie which is mostly just like shuffling her
00:19:06.080arms around because it's supposed to be modern dance right yeah yeah i i think that that was
00:19:12.680like a revelation for every millennial who watched that movie and then later looked back
00:19:17.060and thought wait a second why didn't they cast somebody who could dance why didn't they even
00:19:20.600get her a body double like poor julia i will say there is a really good dance movie from the late
00:19:26.40090s early 2000s and that's center stage which is cast entirely with dancers and very few of them
00:19:33.480can act but and zoe saldana and zoe saldana both i guess act and dance plausibly yeah so i think
00:19:41.280that like what we're kind of talking around here is that they wanted to like evoke all of these
00:19:47.620feelings around movies that we as an audience as millennials like things that would make us want to
00:19:57.740watch a movie even like leave our houses to watch a movie which is a tall order for many people in
00:20:03.620this demographic but then they also want to attract this other audience like they're trying
00:20:09.260to they're trying to attract every audience it's trying to be more universal but then i think they
00:20:13.900kind of like what's that phrase split the baby like yeah and you know it it's interesting to0.70
00:20:22.500like look at this mean girls like kind of marketing plan side by side with barbie because0.94
00:20:29.000it feels very similar in some ways right they're trying to create this like viral sensation0.59
00:20:34.800that's very unabashedly feminine that's kind of like supposedly subversive or sardonic and that
00:20:43.500that captures a lot of nostalgia that's that's like the formula they're going for but it doesn't
00:20:49.240really work the way barbie worked like barbie had this enormously successful marketing campaign
00:20:54.000people were so excited about that movie in like a very uncynical way yeah and mean girls feels
00:21:00.340sort of like it's in this uncanny valley where it's like you know it's not close enough to the
00:21:05.460original it's not the original it's like jarring to those who remember the original because it's
00:21:10.140like a little bit wrong in every respect yeah and and I think for people who aren't familiar
00:21:15.220with Mean Girls like if you're 21 and Mean Girls came out when you were a baby you know does this
00:21:20.000scan for you does it like does it feel like it's evoking an experience or a point of view that's
00:21:26.900like authentic to your adolescence I don't know that it does it's so it feels like it's you know
00:21:32.380it's kind of a an awkward like dark twin of the Barbie effort and it both of them feel like their
00:21:39.340their studio is trying to figure out like how do we how do we market to women like what do women
00:21:44.020want to see how do we get all those girls in the theater and you can see in the parallels between
00:21:48.880the experience how sort of condescending that strategy really is like how they how they're
00:21:53.540pandering yep more so with with Mean Girls than with Barbie I think it kind of makes me feel
00:21:58.380offended as an audience member to be like this is what you think I want right well and even what
00:22:03.440you think of me when I think about the trailer for Barbie at least the one the first one that
00:22:07.080i saw was the like hi barbie hi barbie right um which is a weird trailer like it does not follow
00:22:13.980the rules of a trailer and i think sort of like how the reason that the barbie movie was so
00:22:21.000successful is because they let greta gerwig just kind of like go be weird right yeah like both
00:22:27.000mattel did and the studio did like and and margot robbie did as a producer and the star like they
00:22:33.900figured out like we can we trust the audience to kind of roll with some of our weirdness here
00:22:38.860which to be clear I'm not saying like Barbie is like avant-garde I'm just saying it's like it's
00:22:43.920a little off kilter in a way that I think is actually works really well but this movie doesn't
00:22:50.140do that yeah and part of that is you know Greta Gerwig brought with her the cachet of being Greta
00:22:55.480Gerwig and being a filmmaker and an actress who's like cultivated you know a career being a little
00:23:01.680bit weird and a little bit off kilter and being a really interesting original filmmaker. And what
00:23:07.280Mean Girls is bringing us is Tina Fey. It's Tina Fey again. And like, does Tina Fey have that1.00
00:23:11.700effect on audiences? You know, I think we're really seeing the limits of the Tina Fey marketability.
00:23:17.760Do you think, though, that there is a hunger? You know, you were saying like it doesn't really speak
00:23:21.100to, I think, like teens experience of the world necessarily, because it's so retrofitted on
00:23:26.720millennials experience of the world but i do think that there is a big hunger amongst that age group
00:23:32.960for various aspects of like y2k culture right but is that just the fashion you know we just taped
00:23:40.660an episode about the resurgence of early 2000s music and how part of the reason that that music
00:23:46.660is coming back there's many different reasons that you can explain certain songs but part of it is
00:23:51.900like those songs are easy to dance to like they're fun to dance to in a way that not a lot of music
00:23:58.260from right now is as fun to dance to and sometimes you dance to board genius that's a question that
00:24:04.420was exactly like can you dance to what you really eilish like you can't like there's just like a
00:24:09.140downbeat on a lot of stuff then dua lipa is like the the rare exception there which to me dua lipa
00:24:16.100sounds like it could come straight out of 2003 oh i agree yeah like it is sort of just that cyclical
00:24:23.100trend energy right where like it's always inevitable that people get nostalgic or or
00:24:29.700rediscover something that was popular in the past and it becomes popular again because it was good
00:24:33.70020 or 30 years ago and whatever qualities made it good then are still appealing yeah when i was in
00:24:39.160university we listened to fleetwood mac and that that was like very appealing to us because those
00:24:44.940albums are still great but I think where it gets sloppy is like you see sort of these big
00:24:50.080commercial ambitions for like throwing everything at the wall and and trying to make it sell yeah
00:24:55.500and that's where you start to feel pandered to I think like you can only revive things if they're
00:25:02.020worth resurrecting out of the ground and I don't know that everything is I don't know that this
00:25:07.400particular franchise is well and I think you touch on something that's really crucial which is that
00:25:12.140But I think that younger audiences might discover Mean Girls and love Mean Girls as Mean Girls, but that does not make millions and millions of dollars for the studio.
00:25:23.640Exactly. And you have to, you know, this is the like the marvelification of every sort of filmmaking endeavor now where it's it's less about filmmaker ambitions or audience desires and more about, I think, like these studio ambitions to have these big, meaty, endlessly replicable.
00:25:42.140pieces of IP that you can churn out every couple years. And I think that something I didn't know
00:25:49.020until I was doing some reading in preparation for this episode was there was a Mean Girls sequel
00:25:53.740that came out a couple years after the original that had Tina Fey in it. And I think it was kind
00:25:58.760of a flop. It got bad reviews. It went direct to video in the parlance of the time. And so it's
00:26:05.940like, this is always sort of the ambition of a film if it does well. It's like, how can we do
00:26:10.920more of this thing how can we how can we multiply it and that can be sequels that can be sort of a
00:26:17.300fast and the furious style universe building or it can be i think this like effort to sort of
00:26:22.960retool the original for a contemporary sensibility in a way that kind of reveals like the limitations
00:26:29.040of the original right like you can't just layer more diverse characters and like contemporary
00:26:33.840jokes onto a scaffolding that's kind of fundamentally regressive right from from a
00:26:39.960contemporary cultural perspective i'm trying to think now of anything that has done that
00:26:44.160successfully i did not watch the babysitter's club reboot but i think that people really appreciated
00:26:50.180it from my sense um like something that has reimagined it in a way that is not just like
00:26:57.580repeating the regression yeah i watched the first season of the babysitter's club reboot and i found
00:27:02.840it very charming and i think it actually channels some of the millennial and nostalgia well there's
00:27:08.180like really good stunt casting of alicia silverstone as one of the moms uh that's great
00:27:14.700but but you know that's that's sort of the the same problem with the sex in the city
00:27:20.200reboot too is they've attempted to like retrofit diversity and inclusivity onto a show that was
00:27:28.000like fundamentally about very privileged white women and it's it's bizarre to see the results
00:27:33.680It's like you can't just sort of glue these things on top and and hope that audiences will accept it.
00:27:39.000And like so bizarre that that becomes the reason to watch it is to watch how bizarre it is as they attempt to retrofit it.
00:27:46.000Melody just came into the chat and mentioned the League of Our Own, a League of Our Own that reboot, which I think works.0.74
00:27:53.460I don't think that the race element of that reboot works as well as they want it to work.0.80
00:27:58.780right they're like oh let's have a subplot where we have a black baseball star who is trying to0.66
00:28:04.480like be part of this league and can't be what works really well is the very explicit queerness
00:28:10.600which was there in the you know it was implicit in the original movie and they're like oh yeah0.99
00:28:16.080all these girls are probably gay right and they're like okay let's female baseball team probably has1.00
00:28:21.600some queers yes true even in the 1940s can you imagine um and so i think that that part actually1.00
00:28:28.440worked well because they were making something that was implicit explicit yeah well and often0.94
00:28:34.740I mean something that I found jarring thinking about remakes is how often they're not more
00:28:40.900progressive or more feminist than the original like the one that drives me wild is Jurassic Park
00:28:46.440which was an important movie in my childhood and Laura Dern is a great character in that movie
00:28:51.360you know she's like a scientist she runs around in hiking boots she has like a wild adventure in1.00
00:28:56.480that movie and meanwhile for male yes great style great perpetual halloween costume potential there
00:29:02.380and meanwhile sam neill is forced into this role of caregiver he's shepherding these two children
00:29:07.040around he's like discovering whether he wants to be a father he embodies this role that's usually
00:29:11.860played by women in movies and then when they remade that you know 20 years later we get
00:29:16.540bryce dallas howard in a white skirt suit and high heels like learning how to embrace her femininity1.00
00:29:22.900yeah and like Chris Pratt's like teaching her that maybe she wants to just be like a girlfriend
00:29:27.740and a mom maybe it was wrong of her to focus on her career and that that feels like an example
00:29:33.100of you know sometimes we're going backwards with these remakes so like what are we trying to do
00:29:37.800here so I want to like segue here into an explicit line from the beginning of the trailer we talked
00:29:46.940about some of the stuff to do with this but I think this is like we should address it head-on
00:29:52.080Can we talk about the decision to include the line,
00:29:54.860this isn't your mother's mean girls in the trailer?0.81
00:29:57.780I feel like half the audience for this movie will be women in their 30s
00:30:01.680who loved the original movie when they were in high school, myself included.
00:30:05.980Of course, there are people in their 30s who have teenage children now,
00:30:09.780but it honestly just feels like we're being called old and out of touch.
00:30:13.640So why risk alienating half your audience before the movie even comes out?
00:30:18.120So I wanted to do this question because I think it allows us to talk about who is this movie even for and how studios oftentimes make these movies or create content just generally where you're like, who are they thinking of?
00:35:24.740This is a question I have about a lot of white female comedians and actors in their resilient uncancellability.1.00
00:35:35.940I mean, Amy Schumer's comments of late about Israel Gaza is another example of a kind of public conduct that I think would not be tolerated by anyone who wasn't white.0.96
00:35:49.320And I think this is the kind of like white feminism plague of the early 2000s that maybe, you know, is the specific nostalgia that Mean Girls, the reboot is dusting off, which is that this like insulation wrapped around white women, you know, that they've been oppressed on the basis of gender.
00:36:05.100So they have a license to be edgy, you know, that kind of like raunch feminism idea that like we're just doing what men have done for ages.
00:36:12.760And if you reprimand us for it, then that's just sexism.0.97
00:36:15.420And I think Tina Fey has has really like ridden that wave for most of her career. And I am a little bit surprised it hasn't run out for her yet.1.00
00:36:25.280And unapologetically, too. I think that's actually part of the reason why she has remained uncancellable. She doesn't actually address people's critiques of her.
00:36:35.920Yes, I think that's a big piece of it, too, is, you know, this idea of cancel culture. I always find is a little bit disconnected from the reality because many people just, you know, they ignore the criticisms and they keep working. And at a certain point, the narrative changes, it like evolves to be focused on what they're doing now, or it picks a different target. And really, by not responding, she's she's managed to control that narrative or keep it focused where she wants it to be focused.
00:37:02.840In a way that I think actually resembles how most white men and some men of color, but have negotiated different criticisms of them. So thinking about like Mel Gibson, who like, should be so canceled, like should never, he should be so far down the hole of cancelability, like that there's no way that he could climb out. And yet, here he is appearing in like mainstream movies, like, I don't know.
00:37:27.820And I think so much of it has to do with, do you make money and do you have the protection of other people in power in Hollywood?
00:37:36.480And so Tina Fey's really strong connection to Lorne Michaels, who I know was a producer of this stage play, and I am guessing still has a producer credit on this, on the film production.
00:37:47.700Like, she's always going to be able to get this made.
00:37:50.920She has this connection and the protection of Lorne.
00:37:54.660Though it's also interesting to consider like what behaviors, especially in, you know, in female celebrities are considered condemnable. And I feel like racist jokes is not one of them. But like, think of Winona Ryder's shoplifting scandal that daunt her for years.
00:38:10.680and like canceled yeah she was canceled for doing a little shoplifting which you know arguably a
00:38:17.120victimless crime against a large corporation and and certainly I would say like a lesser harm than
00:38:23.680propagating racist jokes in your right racist jokes and then like also just her like for me
00:38:30.200the I think the difficult thing with Tina Fey or the reason why why she's so resilient is a lot of0.83
00:38:35.920the ideologies that she's promoting are a little bit more pernicious like it isn't as
00:38:40.860obvious some of it's obvious like in kimmy schmidt and like in in 30 rock especially when you revisit
00:38:47.16030 rock but then some of it too what is the name of the movie she was in um when she's a journalist
00:38:54.440in the middle east oh uh whiskey whiskey tango fox trot totally forgettable
00:39:02.060and it's all about her going to like be a journalist in afghanistan in 2003 like of0.52
00:39:10.080course this movie is going to be kind of fucked up right and that's the sort of thing that like
00:39:16.140no one is there is no enduring conversation around this movie and all of the different0.87
00:39:20.600ways that it was fucked up i wrote about it at the time and i would have to go back and like
00:39:24.740read the article to remember all of these ways but i just remember that like this movie is not0.80
00:39:30.140so offensive that it's causing an uproar but that doesn't mean that it's still not offensive
00:39:35.600yeah well and something that is disorienting you know I think we've talked about like the
00:39:41.240disorientation of seeing artifacts of your youth dusted off for a new generation realizing the time
00:39:47.020that's elapsed but something that's unsettling from like this point in your life when you're
00:39:52.440looking back on cultural conversations is realizing that there's this narrative that like things used
00:39:56.980to be different you know that we're in this woke culture now where like certain kinds of jokes are
00:40:01.640not okay but it didn't used to be like that in the early 2000s which is the kind of thing I
00:40:06.020remember hearing in the early 2000s about like racist jokes in the 90s and it's this eternally
00:40:10.620renewable argument that like you know back in the day we didn't know this was offensive or like
00:40:15.360people had a better sense of humor they could take a joke and I don't I don't actually think
00:40:20.420that was true like I think in 2004 people were capable of you know noticing and condemning when
00:40:25.600something was like homophobic or racist and so it's this sort of useful defense that's trotted
00:40:31.760out and it is a little bit unsettling sometimes to see you know people who are in their teens or
00:40:36.400early 20s now who are who are sort of believing that things are different than you know the other
00:40:41.200example that I keep seeing people talk about lately is this nostalgia about cultural unity
00:40:47.340after 9-11 right and how you know how the whole country came together which is such a revisionist
00:40:52.420narrative that excludes the experience of um you know in particular muslims and and arab americans
00:40:59.100who were not part of that unity and who were really targeted in that period and and in this
00:41:05.340current period but you know it's it's really weird to see i guess things that you remember happening
00:41:10.760and like conversations you remember having then sort of erased for the convenience of saying
00:41:16.500you know what i did then was was fine it was all good it's not fair to retroactively critique
00:41:22.340me for something that was acceptable it's a real revisionist history this is actually a great way
00:41:29.500to talk about our next question which is all about like why reboots why this nostalgia for
00:41:35.820especially I think this particular time period right now but a lot of different time periods
00:41:41.160as well like the 90s so okay this is from Anna there are so many throwbacks for millennials
00:41:46.620and I don't think other generations had this trend what is happening with us to drive this
00:41:51.600I would just say that it's easy and understandable that we as millennials think that there are a lot of throwbacks for us. You know who had the most throwbacks in the whole world is boomers. There is so much boomer throwback content that happened over the course of the 1980s and 90s. And we don't realize it. We didn't understand it because it wasn't our stuff. Right.0.59
00:42:15.420A lot of it, I think, was slightly rejiggered.
00:42:17.880So something like You've Got Mail, which is a remake of content that maybe might have been part of various boomers growing up understanding or like even nostalgia for things like, I don't know, like Happy Days.
00:42:32.460In my mind, I thought Happy Days was like made in the 50s.
00:42:39.020Well, and I mean, part of Mean Girls, Lindsay Loren's two biggest roles arguably were remakes, right?
00:42:44.080freaky friday was a remake and the parent trap was a remake and she's fabulous in both those
00:42:50.340movies but those were also remakes of sort of like gen x era films and so i think like reboots
00:42:57.380are a timeless a timeless cultural phenomenon but maybe what makes them feel more frequent now is
00:43:03.280also just like the pace of remakes like what's happened in studio filmmaking feels like it's
00:43:08.680changed a lot where there's this like sort of frantic pace of like recycling IP in order to
00:43:15.300like maximize its value so that's why we get like a new Spider-Man movie every two years
00:43:19.940and a new Marvel movie like every time I turn around there's a new one and so it feels like
00:43:26.340it's happening more frequently maybe because it is happening more frequently but the phenomenon
00:43:30.940itself is is not unique to millennials I think it's just that we're seeing it happen on this
00:43:36.860like really rapid iteration. Yeah. And it's risk minimalization as well. Right. I think a lot of
00:43:45.400studios, because of the way that Hollywood is organized now, only want to pour money into
00:43:50.940projects that they feel like have a guaranteed audience in some capacity. And blockbusters are
00:43:57.560one of those things. And then the other thing that they're willing to, quote unquote, risk money on
00:44:03.500is stuff that is oriented towards women but with existing ip so barbie makes sense here
00:44:11.960and mean girls make sense but like it's just to me it just feels very condescending it feels very
00:44:20.040like pedantic like that we wouldn't like people wouldn't embrace new stories in any way and i
00:44:26.940think that's you know you see sort of a similar phenomenon in publishing too where there's a lot
00:44:32.580of emphasis on promoting like a few big titles every year and then there is you know all these
00:44:38.940other books that get basically no promotion but maybe once in a while one of them reaches some
00:44:43.780kind of like mainstream success like bottoms was a real breakout i think and a great movie for women
00:44:49.400um or that reached a lot of women but didn't get that kind of studio support and and so you know
00:44:56.360you have these like few big films that get all the resources and then a bunch that are kind of left
00:45:02.240to fend for themselves that that might just endure because an audience discovers them but what
00:45:07.720Hollywood has lost and I think what a lot of creative industries have lost is that middle
00:45:11.820layer you know yeah like a movie like you got mail the whole rom-com genre is kind of depleted now
00:45:19.560because there are these mid-budget mid-tier movies that are not big enough to justify sinking
00:45:25.440that kind of money into a marketing budget but they're not small enough to get made maybe by
00:45:31.380like an indie director so yeah i think a lot of that that energy has been moved into streaming
00:45:39.200for better and for worse and it makes me sad because i love going to the movie theater
00:45:44.120right i love going to see a mid-budget movie that's not a blockbuster that's not necessarily
00:45:51.040a prestige picture because that's the other thing it's like i don't not everything needs to be like
00:45:55.480something that has these like blockbuster performances where people wear a lot of
00:45:59.760makeup in order for me to like it like i want that middle tier and it feels like no one is
00:46:06.840listening to the millions of us who are so hungry for it well and i think again that's that's sort
00:46:13.360of what energy mean girls and you know it's it's kind of parallel barbie we're trying to do is get
00:46:19.760people to go to the movies by promising them like a moment like a really yes um a really experience
00:46:26.200based you know movie going trip because it's true that the movie theaters and the studios are
00:46:33.160competing against the the comfort of streaming where you can be at home on your couch you know
00:46:37.820looking at your phone without anyone giving you a dirty look in the theater um you can be like a0.56
00:46:42.940total slob with no respect for the conduct of society at home but at theater hopefully you're0.54
00:46:48.680still muting your phone and and so you have to be like promising people not just a great movie but0.81
00:46:53.880like an experience that makes it worth dressing up going to the theater going with your friends
00:46:58.280like planning a date around it and I mean I think the other movie that did that well
00:47:03.380in the past I don't know if the third one was successful as much but Magic Mike as a franchise
00:47:08.540was a cinematic experience like I've never been in a theater where so many people were
00:47:13.760hooting and hollering at the screen I know well and that movie too I think took women's pleasure
00:47:19.220seriously and like took some risks in terms of like the jokes and even like the cinematography
00:47:26.940and like the first one particularly is dark and i kind of like how it's like oh like there's all0.92
00:47:34.820this like sexiness and then also this is dark as shit because like the life is dark these are0.68
00:47:40.460movies about the first one i think is about the 2008 recession in particular and and the newest0.98
00:47:47.980This one is also about, like, the current recession and, like, the economic challenges of being, like, in some ways an aging creative in a depleting industry.
00:47:55.340I think that there are great movies about the economy that are also about women's pleasure.
00:47:59.960We should do an episode that's just a – like, we could just watch all three and just go, like, deep.