Duel Media Reviews - Kinds of Kindness : Explained

or kinds of kindness take the only we went to the movies once again and we will tell you all that we understood of it yes he will tell you movies film [Music] art what did we watch we watched kinds of kindness uh-huh and this is a Yos Lanos movie Yes famously now of poor things but before that we knew him before he was cool I think I have seen all of his like widely released movies I'm not sure if exactly all of them not the favorite have you seen the favorite I have seen the favorite never I watched it on an airplane it's my least favorite I know I don't know if you've seen dog tooth no I haven't seen I'll tell you it's easier if I tell you what which ones I have seen I've seen poor things I have seen the lobster and I have seen killing of a sacred deer yes and now this one so that's my Yos Lanos experience whereas he is much more accustomed to it this is very much his gig he is very uh an art homosexual an art cigarette what is this movie your ghost Lanos Loosely connects three stories in an anthology film detailing forms of devotion in absurdist disturbing and experimental fashion [Music] I don't know how else to describe it this I feel like this is another going to be uh this is going to be another shorish review side much more on the spoiler side because these are all three short films so you can't really like talk much about it without like going into like what happens in each of them because they're relatively quick although I don't know they're actually kind of long short films it's three like 45 minute movies yes um and they all open up like in media's rest basically we don't know how things to this but yes we are in a situation that's often a little bit weird it's true that it's very difficult to speak of them without speaking of spoilers because there's a lot hanging on the turn the twist of each one of them a lot of the things that happened in this film are very like symbolic metaphorical yeah it's very much an art film you can't really discuss in like general terms cheers honey and without like really getting into like anything worth discussing so yeah I would say that it almost doesn't operate in a literal level yeah I will preface this by saying that this is probably very difficult to talk about it's a difficult movie in general and a lot of people that I've heard think that this is just [ __ ] so it just might be these are my interpretations I think it's interesting to like investigate and analyze movies like this but it is sometimes a little bit like grasping at straws sure it's a complicated movie I I I am fully aware that this is just my observations of it but yeah tell I mean tell us what because quickly what did you think right yeah I I'll first tell you sort of the basic of each one of the stories the same cast of actors acting in three different stories with one character that exists in all three of them like American Horror Story yeah that's the connective tissue of it but it's also a very unimportant character it seems Jesse plem is probably the more significant main character for most of them uh but Emma Stone and William defo are pretty significant as well William defo is always in a sort of Father Figure I mean what I will say to me the way I saw it I don't know how much this matters but Jesse plens is clearly the main character in the first story in the Second Story him and Emma Stone share a sort of like lead a shared lead and in the third story Emma Stone takes the lead yeah so in the first movie Jesse plens is basically an office man a worker uh it seems that way Su we don't really know what he does uh it's an office he's a suit yeah yeah he goes to construction sites he says but he works under William defo and we soon learned that William defo basically gives him instructions to everything that he needs to do in his life every single detail and he's sort of happy to comply until he is given an order that he's uncomfortable with and that's basically the setup of the story The Second Story Jesse plem is a cop whose wife has been lost for we don't know how long a long time like enough for it to be like it's over yeah everyone thinks that she might be dead she's a mar marine biologist and there was a storm and she seems to be lost at sea he struggles at work with this I mean dramatic situation and it seems like his life is really falling apart because she's gone and she returns and that's basically the the setup as well she they find her and in the third short movie Jesse plims and em and stone play members of a cult of a sex water cult we don't really know the specifics of the cult sex and mysticism and what they're tasked with is searching for their Messiah and they know that this Messiah needs to accomplish different like prophecies kind of thing yes they're just searching for it what did I think of the movie honestly I have had mixed experiences with yogos Lanos I was one of the few that was not a big fan of poor things I did not love that movie as much as everyone else did I lik it I thought it was a little bit blunt although it was quite clear and it was very imaginative visually I found that the actual message of it yeah fell felt a little bit basic for how Wild and imaginative the world was and I did like the favor it a lot more but I also felt like it was it didn't feel like it had his seal because we had previously seen killing of a sacred deer and the lobster together and I actually did not love those movies I thought that they were very weird very weird and a in a way that I didn't understand them and I didn't feel like there was enough for me to grasp onto if I were to watch those movies again today maybe that' be different because I do think that maybe there were aspects of like comedy of absurdism that I do appreciate today but this movie started in the same vein it actually is created by the same and him so it's it's him going back to this team that he had previously I know it was at least the killing of the sa deer team it was not like the people who did poor things or favorite yeah so it's his his favorite writer they go yeah they go together they they used to work together all the time so it's back to that I was expecting sort of similar and I will say that through half of the first short I was not fully feeling it but there was a moment a very specific moment that we can talk about in the spoilers where it kind of clicked for me and it really changed my perception of what this was going to be and I really enjoyed it I I got I was fascinated by this mix of sort of magic realism but Extreme grounded absurdism it just drew me in I can't say much more a lot of people said that their first segment was their favorite the best one I kind of loved the third one the most although the acting was the weirdest in that one I still enjoyed it a lot mhm but yeah overall I think that there's so many fascinating Concepts that you can glean out of this movie I I was thoroughly impressed I would almost give it a 10 but I mean there are a few things that are just simply too self-indulgent for me to go all the way up to a 10 so I am going to give this one a nine what about you so I liked poor things M uh I'm a much more Normy movie goer I guess and um I've been like on a bit of a yoro the's journey and I'm not sure how much of it is me like attuning to his wavelength or like maybe his later work speaking to me more but I also like this movie mhm um not quite as much as poor things I kind of think that the like the weirdness but with just enough of of a foot in reality or relability to be like the ideal mix although of course I can deal with absurdity it was clear to me that it was trying to say certain things maybe things like on a like a religious or like psychological level mhm about Humanity that I was more or less getting MH and that made me kind of also feel somewhat intelligent watching this I don't feel that happen often but I do think so dumb he is so himble but I do I do think it was like way too self-indulgent often of course that's undeniable yeah like and like it was like oh my gosh like this is this thing keeps going it was hard for me to weigh how successful it is with how much it also feels like it is stroking its own ego MH while it's happening MH so for me it is a seven right uh yeah still quite liked it it also kind of made me have to like sit on it afterwards to really like understand how I feel about it I absolutely like enjoyed it the whole way through my favorite was the Second Story which kind of delves into like somewhat horror realm which is more my vibe um and the movie also like does a pretty good job of easing you in with the absurdity because like I feel like the second story is like the most upsetting but it feels like something you might have seen before whereas the third one really kind of goes into like these aren't in people anymore these aren't human beings I think that the the ramp is is pretty well like stationed I think they're like they were placed properly for audiences yeah um but I do think a lot of people most General audiences will get off like this train on like the third one so they won't like it do you think I think so a lot of people have mentioned that they think that the third one is the worst I think most people can deal with the first one the second one will lose quite a few people and I think the third one will lose a majority of people but if you could deal with like yeah the art film aour thing cuz this is very much one of those I I think there's plenty to mine out of it which I think gives value I do think like if I were to recommend I find it very difficult to recommend this movie to be honest I don't know who I would recommend this movie too you have to know if you know you know yeah yeah yeah if you were like a like like a film School kind of geek or just yeah a huge copile and you know who yoro Lanos is and his filmography you know what you're getting into then you know that you might like this or not yeah no one in my family would even appreciate this movie that's for sure it's a weird one yeah put your finger for me [Music] honey so you have your your fancy little no notebook here what do you want to talk about well I would say that this movie again because of the structure of it because of how difficult it is it's more effective to speak of it in terms of concept we have seen with yoro Lanos previously I've seen a lot of mentions of how he kind of gives these stories this sort of mythological kind of Greco Roman tragedy aspects to them absolutely and this feels very strongly throughout the movie and it almost gives us that this feeling of if we were to analyze our own religious and everyday practices through the lenses of Mythology how weird would they be like Catholicism just to start with like their focus and the fetishism in blood [Music] that Catholicism have has like blood and and meat of the body and that is sort of explored as well here yeah violence suffering you there's a yeah there's a real suffer porn quality to it as well MH and so I find that these ones the three stories that we have I actually after analyzing them I feel like they speak to to three different aspects of not just devotion but aspirations of human nature the first one is speaks to the concept of power the second one speaks to the concept of love and relationships and the third one speaks of concept of Enlightenment and religious exploration or Spiritual Awakening yeah um the the first one with Jesse pl's being so willing to do anything thing to have this this successful comfortable it seems perfect idilic life even though he's always subjugated to William def's character I love you he is really willing to give all of his lives control away all of his agency I mean it's very old testament God Abraham yeah Parable mhm because I mean like everything that he owns yeah we mentioned it everything he owns is given to him by William def his house his wife was even chosen for him like when he can have a baby cuz he's forcing them to like not be able to have children by giving her like abortion pills and stuff and crazy things cars but like you know what that's a crazy thing but I was thinking back in not not very long ago and even today nowadays if you're a woman in the workforce you're often encouraged not to have a baby because that will in like that'll make it very difficult for you to get into higher positions of power so it is an absurdity to have your boss just specifically like abort your babies but it's not that weird for a a job to have the requirements to really control your life and prevent you from doing things that you want to do yeah and it does go into a micro level also just real quickly like he even tells him today you're going to have a cheese a bacon cheeseburger for lunch with with a t of french fries you need to get weight and you're going to read this you're going to read anakar from this time to this time yeah you will not have sex you will have sex in the morning it's a power trip for William Defoe I personally of the opinion that William defo is not really a human character in this story he's just a force he is basically the force telling uh Jesse plens to give up his principles his control in order to achieve power and how much he's willing to to give up so when it comes to killing someone else that is maybe Jesse pem's point in which he says like no I can't do this and so he's his own he's like abandoned he's blacklisted from all other jobs there's he basically becomes nobody because he's not willing to do this for power but then when he meets Emma Stone he realizes that she is willing to do it even though in his mind she was kind of an ideal character that maybe he could aspire to again because his wife has had left him um him realizing that she's just another person doing all of these things for for the power for the clout for the ability to have a comfortable life he gives in and kills RMF for the the the possibility of belonging again of feeling like he's got a place and William defo and Marg Margaret quy Margaret quy uh accept him back and yeah it's a very weird scene where they kind of all hug it out yeah there's a whole there's a whole theme throughout the entire film of like a shared Comm communal love yeah which is often sexualized yeah but it's also I find it very interesting that it's often sexualized but it's also never portrayed as something taboo or or dark yeah it it's often something shared mhm uh in fact I I have a theory later on that we can go into that is about somewhat of uh an aspect of original sin here totally yeah that's what I was going to go for yeah yeah it's like disobedience is his sin here yeah and also just like opening the eyes and seeing the sex as something dirty is something corrupting actually corrupts in the second one to me it becomes very clear that the there is an obsessive love in the second story in what's it called RMF is flying the wife left for a moment disappeared again in this situation I think that The Disappearance of the wife to me is just a metaphor again yeah it seems to me that the wife just has gone somewhere else and has forbidden fruit it seems like she consumed flesh in the movie it is seen as if she's a cannibal yeah and like the literal sense it's like she was lost so she had to eat like human for survival but like that is supposed to be I guess taboo forbidden thing she did something she was not supposed to do yeah exactly and when she comes back Jesse PLS becomes completely obsessed with the fact that she's changed and she has changed but she hasn't really changed she seems to feel very much in love with him still she defends him fully against his father cuz the father's critical of Jesse plem and seems to think that he's a bit of a dead beat um and she's always saying he's always been there for me and defends every step of the way one thing that I wanted to mention is that the score of the movie is actually very interesting it's a very dissonant piano that plays throughout it makes it quite unsettling for a lot of the time in the movie but there are two situations in the movie where the score changes into something very hopeful and sort of uplifting a little bit melancholic and that the first situation comes in the second short William Theo is criticizing Jessie plens and Emma Stone is defending the love that he has always had for her and how much she has they've both been supporting each other um even though Jesse plens is as a monster mhm and there that's her kind of first uh hint at things not being right there like she is willing to defend anything from him so that's where I find that this second story operates in a very metaphorical sense as well of this person Jesse plens seems to be obsessed with a wife that he lost like as if their relationships is is maybe growing apart but he cannot withstand it he is stuck to a person that simply does not exist anymore so he keeps on finding evidence of her just not being the same person you could take it literally but it seems to me that what happens is that he just is out of love he's fallen out of love and he's just in love with the idea of the wife that he once had and that her success her moving away her advancing progressing life is actually leaving him behind mhm and so when he asks for nourishment is basically hey stop stop your life and feed me and look at me mhm and eventually when she kills herself she dies feeding him doing what he wanted yeah he is visited by his true wife which is the ideal of what he thought his wife was yeah and so yeah I think that it's a pretty sad story I I I suppose yeah I don't know if it operates in any sort of literal level again no of course not and I think I've seen other people I guess like he like hallucinates has a vision of his of his wife coming back and it's like that's I don't think that's it at all of course it is the fact that she give up everything she had to service him is when he finally saw the wife he that he was looking for all along that she was denying that she was her until she proved that she was the woman he thought she was yeah but even even more so I think that like that he is fully gone yeah he is living in a fantasy yeah absolutely in this case your loved one will never be enough will never give enough and the third one which which is probably the more complicated story the one where Jesse PLS and Emma Stone are the the cult members the idea to me is that they are definitely searching for enlightenment searching for something to give meaning to their lives in the third movie it is very clear that there's much more of a search for meaning a search for an Enlightenment a holer calling it seems like these people it's interesting because we often see members of a cult as people as the enemy it's one of the few times that we've ever seen I feel members of a cult as the people that we're supposed to feel somewhat sympathetic for the way that it painted Emma Stone's character we don't know much about it but we know that she is constantly going back to her family and blessing her daughter's bed and kind of watching over them even though he left she left them and she's pretty convinced that she's looking for a different Messiah for something completely different that they cannot provide she's still going back with that sort of motherly attitude it's very heartbreaking when the husband it seems maybe that he wants her back but the way in which he he does it is by drugging her and raping her yeah and it made me think that even though of course we are presented with this idea that this is a cult that maybe there was a point that the outside world had this corruption this corrupting effect in people and these were people that maybe were broken and had been brought into the cult where sexuality was not a not an issue was not something dirty to be like ashamed of I totally saw this yeah yeah absolutely this is exactly what I was thinking they are willing to speak to each other they're open to speak about everything to each other in this cult they're willing to to speak to each other they're willing to be open to each other about everything but the one thing that is presented in a very ridiculous way is that when someone leaves the commun when someone has sex outside they have this sauna where they heat them up they basically make them sweat sweat until they're passed out of heat stroke and then they lick them to know if they're contaminated what's her name no tortilla that's her name these are tortillas tortillas yeah when Hong Chow licks them she knows if they've actually been corrupted for good and what made me think of this is the fact that when she goes out and she gets raped this is such a trauma such a big hit that it would break you so when you come down back to a commune that's open and it doesn't have that concept of sin of darkness and it shares everything this could be a destructive force and she becomes someone that's willing to do anything for her purpose beyond what was allowed in their in their group MH so she is in fact corrupted by this external Force this rape MH there's nothing she can do and not only that but she's she is willing to hurt an animal she's willing to kidnap this girl and not only that but she ends up killing her their Messiah she destroys their religion really she kills the Messiah yeah so it it kind of made me feel like maybe the the the point of this was how we lose this innocence and this commune actually was innocent searching for this Enlightenment with such desperation that we end up destroying it yeah it's yeah it's a very dark idea to yeah to parse but I think that it's really interesting so there's a distinct L lack of satisfaction in this movie but especially in that last story yeah it's it's supposed to be a bummer it's it's the negation of the hope that you had kind of cultivated throughout it is very much in keeping with his tone yeah but anyway yeah I I I loved those ideas in many ways I don't really know if those are the ideas in the movie is it's what we came up came up with together we came up this together and it's pretty airtight um I think but I don't know if that's what yorgos Lanos was thinking but if it is you can totally just say it was me and my friend yorgos we talked about it this is what he meant over hus and I don't know what do Greek people eat over Sai Sai over love toi we didn't obviously [ __ ] I don't know it's a difficult recommendation but what did you think do do any of these theories seem interesting to you what theories do you have did you hate it and tell us why did we convince you anything else to think differently about the movie yeah or do you think we're stupid I mean it could be kind of kindness explained honestly that'd be a good breakout for this yeah actually explain not like the people who just exactly tell you what happened it's so bad so stupid like subscribe let us know what you think talk about it we love you yes [Music] [Music]