hello and welcome to a fistful of pop my name is carol welsh moderator for tonight's show as you may know from seeing previous shows fistful of popcorn is taped in princeton new jersey and rather than just reviewing movies we like to think that we have a more in depth discussion and with me tonight on two of our regular panelists marilyn campbell and janet stern and we're good tonight we're going to be discussing a new movie that's out by the writer director tom mccarthy by the name of when when it of attorney other of their just regulation legal work and he also coaches the high school wrestling team was with a c p a who shares his office space and  he was a high school wrestler and so he knows a little bit about wrestling but the team is hopeless and into this mix comes a young man who is a relative of one of the elderly people who is the client of  mike and he's run away from home and he seems to have run away from a pretty dysfunctional home so they don't see anything that they can do cept mike and his wife jackie taking the kid in would be wholly comes to hang out with the wrestling team and it turns out he's a fabulous wrestler he was almost a state champion in ohio where he comes from and he rejuvenated the team  and then some complications arise which was a discussion thank you maryland we reviewed on the show the two other movies that tom mccarthy made  a really learned question and i said this is already out looking forward to this because i think station agent is one of my all time favorite films i've seen it several times and anybody who hasn't seen it i urge you to see it didn't it was it was lovely but it wasn't the station agent and it wasn't the visitor and i was a little disappointed and why do you think it was one of the things is i too i'm going to say two things people i shut up one is don't shut up i am not your to talk i am very disconcerted by movies in which the cell phone play such a big role someone is always answering it's always ringing their own and when your with a person in real life and that person gets a call and they say i have to take this you stand there you get annoyed i can wait isn't the audience member i'm just as tired i'm just as i'm just as to aggravated watching a character in a film get so phone calls as i am in real life and there i know that there will get into the paddock of every day life but i really thought that every time he got a cell phone call which was plenty of course or picked up someone's cell phone or someone else's and said my calling whatever it really stopped the film in its tracks that's number one number two the acting is great and i loved his report with bobby kahn of the i don't know if you mentioned that he has a friend terry who yes who also was a wrestler who also is a wrestler and the three of them he and the c p a and terry have this sort of funny kind of camaraderie and sometimes they try to one up each other and it's very it's very clever and terry is a very much a a child and so this brings out the the springs out he's so excited by all this but because he wants to join as a wrestling coach but because he's so low on money and he's thinking about why he's doing it for the right reasons his family and everything else but this man he's the guardian of is very wealthy he pursues and paul giamatti as the guardian and the lawyer persuades the judge to let him be the guardian  can get without saying this to the judge the fifteen hundred dollars a month that this comes with but is soon and promising that this man will stay in his home which is what the man wants as soon as he gets the money that's already changed the man who takes the man to a nursing home now i mean to a an assisted living but the thing is you want paul giamatti to do the right thing and the movie makes you feel at the end like he has done the right thing but he would have done the right thing if he hadn't been caught  true and i and i just think that's a huge disconnect between the way the movie wants you to feel and what's really going on there i think that it was a lesser film and both other films also especially along the trajectory from the station agent which is about unusual quirky people with personal problems but the visitor is actually about people it's about people with personal problems but it addresses certain larger issues which is the status of undocumented immigrants in the united states and how they're not treated in a humane way and that that it doesn't actually make sense the way we treat people who have been here for many many years and are really americans except for some paperwork and in this movie i think it starts out with you're thinking that this movie is going to address this a certain problem which is which is that a person  a lawyer of which there are too many now is certainly our overabundance of lawyers and although we think of them as you know rich and and and not needy at all actually if you're doing this kind of a little practice in a small town and what you're doing as well as in and real estate maybe a little real estate lawyer you're not making a lot of money you know you know and in this economy that's the sort of thing where you see a good person a decent person made a sort of a gray area moral judgment in order just in order what he does with the money what you hear him on the phone doing because i'm not bothered by the phone calls i'm bothered a little bit about the plot but not the phone calls per se is is paid the house insurance bill for the family this is not something they would not if not you know as i said he didn't do it for malicious reason no he did it for very good reasons but he still very well because it right it sets up this dilemma and then it brings in the boys of sort of day if they're smoking out that the boy sets off certain feelings in him that he feels now committed to that family in a way that he wouldn't have committed if it was just the demented older person in the nursing home and back you say that he gets caught but what he does is get involved emotionally in the family and station agent and the visitor were kind of smoothed over so that all the women is solved in ways that seem a little easier in a nice way i mean it seems so pat i mean another moral dilemma is what do you do with this kid that shows up on your doorstep and they do the right thing at after you know some soul searching and and of course the wife is very reluctant at first but it turning out that he's a championship wrestler all the sudden makes it much easier you know if you could say in a way it's another way word to grey area morally exactly because what he would be so enthusiastic about keeping the kid right right if the kid were not suddenly rejuvenating his wrestling team not only rejuvenating his team but him and his friend terry and his partner vick they all a come to life over this s that bad his and that's that's why he's a sort of a day of sex marking me is not quite real because you would think that a child who supposedly came from back kind of a background would have more serious problems then he has nothing he doesn't well i wanted an interview with tom mccarthy about just that point and i think it's worth saying i don't know if you heard this you know but it is worth mentioning that he chose wrestling not only because he himself had been a wrestler and so had the coast ory writer but also because it's it's a sport with exists so many rules and exact rights and wrongs and it's very appealing to a kid who comes from a background which is so so troubled and  and also it's it takes he said there's just no way you can fake wrestling you have to have a wrestler in there so it's not right and that that kid we might say not only was  disciplined if you wessel you can do just about anything and this kid even to do that he needed to and also it brings out a certain aggression which his abusive background may have forced on him i just think it to a little difficult to believe oh they do say in the movie that he he's had a year off from wrestling because he couldn't sustain the discipline and well actually  it turns out he stole a car right right around up the team he was thrown off yes yes that's why he took he took a year off because he couldn't wrestling couldn't save him keep everything both th he needed to keep body down and me feeling like he is athletic to bolton everything down i mean he had a real team name yes yes which which covered a multitude of crises i think you know just answering the way he did yeah no two year old or something like that and he's he's nice to them in fact one of the president has a real good observation on the director's part one of the when the mother of the boy appears from ohio one of the first things amy ryan says to her is our daughters like him and that is so that would be a mother's point of view like the rest of the hell but my daughter our daughters let's bring our daughters into the conversation because of course the world central you know centers around them and he has a very very well observed yeah you can tell her did i guess my it might explanation of why i liked this movie less than the other two so i felt less surprised by it was less if the plot felt very predictable to me in a lot of this is the kind of sports film that as you say is is very predictable troubled kid finds himself through sport and rejuvenate himself and then fits into the community and becomes a happy citizen this is you know this plot of many many films and in this film i think the fact that they used a real kid and a real athlete instead of a child actor and the sort of realism of the writing made it a little less cliches a little less power than i thought yeah and i thought the kid was good i mean he really was he got that you know slightly disaffected youth down very well i mean he might not have much range as an actor but he did what he did yeah really well you amazing for a kid who's never acted before yes another interesting thing about film since we've already lambasted it now we can praise it a little character who is terry who is mike's friend from school they were wrestlers bad wrestlers together seems to be incredibly wealthy yeah but doesn't do much but there's a whole subplot there that you could create in your own mind they don't they just sort of let you fill in things for example his wife is having an affair with the contractor he hired to build their mcmansion and he's stocking that he's been thrown on but you begin to wonder what was his role in this breakup did he have it if we can because he doesn't seem to be stocking her all that assiduously and so there's a there are all these other little things that are yes and that's why you made my why he made money right and i think mike is trying to say that he thinks of himself as someone who is not just in it to make money he really wants to be part of the community he's volunteering  to you know give up the wife and live at the office so that there's a level and that's the dilemma and he's chosen the family and having a life and having a little you know jogging and it's turned out in this economy to be extremely stressful yes to try to have an un stressful life good point myself going to see this as a big group and my son my daughter my daughter's boyfriend i thought they would really love it luke warm my son said nobody referring to terry can join on as an assistant coach at a high school without all kinds of checks and you know that i have very background yes i'm a fingerprint and a lawyer would know that the young wrestler has become a sort of central part of this team and more and more kids are hanging out with him and then you see one scene where the doorway to the basement where he's been residing in mike's house opens and he comes out and then a kid comes out and then another kid and about five or six and then terry the last one to come out is terry who has been playing mean grown up child has found its friends well it's funny as i'm watching this film i'm thinking it's kind of unlikely you know that this this very troubled youth would be a championship wrestler i thought of my friend who has recently become a foster parent to two children she desperately wants to be a parent this was her way she's hoping to adopt and has fallen in love with these children and they have full no love with her and these are older children six seven to my friend two yeah she's going to an option right now yeah and how the girls blossoming into a championship gym this and i'm thinking ok so miracles do happen and you know this is not something right well as well as i think you know scott said in his review success and integrity can go together yes and that is the american demand to see where bad bad locations were and they were very disappointed that only the high school or new providence high school with the setting for the high school seemed to another high school in new jersey i guess with us high westchester and the rest was long island long rock and wester you that has nothing to do with new jersey well i'm i'm afraid that a lot of people don't think like you abroad everybody thinks it is new jersey and that's what i'm comparing it with be for that that what other people think and i think that this is like the station agent it was almost a paradise yeah that was shot near sparta and newfoundland it was new found and it was called and again it was a  twice yeah to see the station agent a little depot which is still there and what's the name of the town itself and you thought it's not too far from sparta it's very sad it's a very you know full part of new jersey and it certainly doesn't you know the answer to your question it isn't the new jersey people think of them separate they think of new jersey as the suburbs and i think the bad part of the milieu of this is this this is the suburbs this is this is middle class middle america and boy comes from columbus with a drug addict mother and he's living there probably living high turnover and and this to him is what he's looking for is a sort of stability yes he's looking for somewhere where he  twenty first but they are now asking for entries from young people ages fourteen to twenty four and you should submit all you young people out there you should submit your d v d s to the princeton library by the twenty first i think june twenty first is a marathon did you want to have anything about the festival oh well it's been running i think six or seven years now eight year and it's grown and grown there are sometimes international entries from from all over the country but we welcome people from everywhere and you can go to the princeton public library website and look up  young adult berrien on the show a little later to maybe show us some clips of some of the filmfare going to be shown that would be great and you can get more details about the festival at princeton library dot org and i want to thank you for joining us on the tenth i don't have the information for that right now but i will on a future show let's talk about that there it's a trend film festival not not quite legal which i believe is