good evening welcome to another edition of a fistful of popcorn i am tonight's moderator janet stern and i'm thrilled to be joined by two of our regular panelists bob brown and alan campbell well tonight we're going to be discussing a movie that just opened in our area it's called brad status and it was written and directed by mike white somebody we have discussed before on this show recently he wrote the film we discussed the film he wrote beatrice a dinner and i got to be interesting for us to now see what happens when he directs as well as rights so to get us started bob how about you doing a summary ok ok since i just saw owns and operates all by himself a nonprofit that tries to link wealthy donors with worthy causes and he's just had his only employee quit to join a hedge fund or something where he'll make lots of money and do better in something in finance where he can do better by giving lots of money like a bill gates rather than trying to pull money people together so brad is now in a crisis where his son is applying to colleges and he's going to take a road trip with his son and meanwhile there's a lot of musing and voiceovers as to where am i in my life he's  his own college days when he was a tough and he had several classmates of his who have all done much much better they're all very wealthy and very spoiled and he has occasion to talk to each of them because he's in need of a connection and have it so his boy can get in in interview where he just sort of locked himself out by missing the first appointment and that turns into a whole series of  humiliations for the boy's new status to pressuring and there's a chit chat back and forth between brad and his wife and who seems to be a very nice very pliant person which is it also a little he needs a couple of hobbit girls who are women who are friends of his son for one reason or another and he has a heart to heart talk with one of them and and spills his heart out about his regret i thought if i had not seen this film and i listen to bob summary i would think this was a totally dislikable person and i certainly didn't feel that way during the film as a matter of fact the kinds of things you described that he did about trying to get  not i don't think what he would have done had he not somehow been catapulted into this crisis i believe in what you say that he was was catapulted by the revisit nation of this lone employee who made him question everything you know he invested so much time in this person he said he had yeah mentored him and then all this part of this very you know very often says you know and the other thing is of course money for college so this was a the big chill the return of the so called secaucus seven came out at the same time and they were both similar not midlife but similar past youth friends getting together and wondering what happened to their useful ideals and in fact one i was struck by the fact that in the big chill all of the friends had become tremendously successful in the ten years after college one was a big time lawyer one was a owner of a very successful business one was a doctor one was a t v star one was a sort of a beverly hills high school housewife married to a very rich man and there was one you know drug dealer thro one and a writer for people magazine whereas in the return of the secaucus sent seven they were a schoolteacher and a congressional aide and they had like sort of normal think my friends we had ideals in the sixty's and we went into non profits and school teaching and other kinds of helping professions and we didn't you know take our youthful ideals and become corporate lawyers and it just didn't strike me as believable and that's when it didn't strike me to believe that he had a group of friends and were poor for friends and they all became tremendously successful and he is perfectly fine as the young woman tells him that this is a burst world problem right and he's there's nothing wrong with his life i like the quote she said i wrote it down because i liked it she said your fifty years old and you still think the world was made for you and he says  that's great and it did seem to me a little contrived to have all of his friends so glamour magazine sort of successful rather than what you know my five best friend well it's not in the past thirty years they've they've all kind of ignored him after they've gotten their success so he's not invited to a party he's not invited to a crucial few role he's not invited to any because nobody's in touch with them and why should they be because his even hear about it yeah it's true that those things happened but they may have happened for reasons that he's not i mean he's not traveling in those circles but you know may have been other friends that test he's not thinking about who didn't do that yes and he's not clear in the movie whether these were his or best friends or whether they were just the friends that he remembers from college because they have become successful in their in the news and on t v and otherwise make a splash in the world where his other five friends are probably like him or worse but that's not what he's focusing on yes exactly he's going to you know i don't take it that way i took it that this is a clique he was part of a competitive clique you know i think  he came out as gay his father his father and kind of had a breakdown because he could no longer keep this up and then he did take mike white on a college tour and all my plate i could think of was i don't want to be anywhere near this you so you see he was make in making this film it really was a tribute to his father because he wanted to say i really didn't appreciate you then and so one of the last sentences one of the last lines in the film is the son saying to ben stiller's character nobody really cares about what you did because they're not thinking about doing one thinking about you is me you know and i love you and that was a really m but that was nice because there's some in the film is actually your ideal son absolutely not only is he harvard material but he's very sort of laid back and unpretentious answers when he's spoken to right and he's actually ok with toft so if it's tough yeah well he is did you happen to stay through the whole credit yes yes you see the very end yes i think that puts a very different twist in the film and you know in the theater father does to get his son an interview is probably was probably counterproductive however much it seemed yet worked out within the movie it's about the worst thing you can emissions officer not fond of getting calls from  characters and we discussed this the last time when we were talking about beatrice at dinner which i mentioned he wrote but did not direct his characters certainly beatrice but also in chuck and buck and in lightened which was character who's who's you don't you don't want to be mean to her she's awfully annoying so there are like bundles of conflicting personality traits in each of these people and in the case of brett i wanted to know if you felt but actually ben stiller was doing a good job of characterizing that since he his tenseness and his intensity is annoying but you think he's a good soul did you because i think a lot of people didn't sympathize with him so much yeah from what i was reading and i i know i found him misguided to say the least and that his priorities during this baby short period of time in his life were all wrong that he was in fact ignoring his son while he was worrying about all kinds of other things and this is it was billed when he went off with his son for the college visit this was going to be the time they'd have together before he goes off and he's no longer a child and he's no longer the same kind of relationship is they've had as father and son before they've said it's a state the character played by ben stiller would be in charge of a nonprofit fundraiser because he didn't it doesn't have the immigration dating characteristics that you have to have to be a very successful well no yes i think it's interesting that when one of the reasons he becomes so annoying at the point where his son is applying for college is he's never really connected with his son his wife has been the one  he realizes this is catch up time and i'm going to make up for everything that i didn't do before and oh my god i'm also kind of in competition i mean this guy is going to do out shine me and i'm a little uncomfortable right yes those kind of a comparing his his and his son's relationship to let's say ethan hawke and his son in boyhood or casey affleck the own goal and his nephew in manchester by the sea those were some really triffitt portrayals of your other son relationships how do you think this one this is probably more ordinary as a mother son relationship i i don't think it's unusual  for parents for for mothers and fathers for the mother to be the one who is the sort of caretaker of the relationships and the father is supposed to be you know even now the father is supposed to be the breadwinner and th sort of outside face of the family and the mothers the inside space even in places now we're almost all mothers of high school age children are probably working  and it seemed to me that he may have been obsessing too much with this project of his and the paying attention because he had no idea what his caucus times college prospects were i mean he said if you said something like your son says or the guidance counselor think i have a shot at harvard and he goes really this mom no no you got no mom no yeah yeah i've been discussing it with mom and mom maybe being the guidance counselor or he's not even that involved and just shortly after that he gets really annoying in a scene in which he was really annoying as in the harvard admissions lounge where he says to a woman he starts to brag about his son now he's bolstered now you think but i i find that irritating but i also find it extremely realistic oh yes that is you you hit the nail on the head when you said ordinary this is ordinary lots of things that happen in this are very ordinary does that make them not feel material no not at all but i do think that bad for me the more irritating part was when he starts thinking about hitting on his think of all the women i could have loved and he he places her in that right right right kind of oh well but he spent his fantasies are that like his yeah his drug dealin has two young girls as companions to his early retirement that he could also have this two young women as companion he fantasizes about and whether or not he acted on it i mean any ways that the women were aware of it if it isn't different here i you're absolutely right he does fantasize it and about it and at the very end of the fantasy those two girls go running off with his son right in her own fantasy right so it does bring him back to  d his son is somewhat annoyed in a very understated way that his father went down after he went to father went out to the bar where the girls were partying yeah and joined them ye himself to explain himself to somebody because people aren't listening and he had to tell her why you know how you know what what got him to this point of disaffection and she  from from what you say your question about you know why did she stay with us a lot of people whose blood you know posts i've read have said that this is trivial there's a lot going on in the world who wants to do well on this kind of stuff do you think she was in there to point out what's going on in the world i think it's not because she talks about her mother and i really never having invented no work no near her mother in delhi regular people oh yeah right ahead and she in fact is a very privileged person herself and i mean it seemed to me in fact somewhat hypocritical for her you say you have first world problems right and you shouldn't you're nothing to complain about because you're not a starving indian in from delhi and untouchable living in the gutter because that isn't what people compare themselves to know and that's why i thought the film was good because he they probably had backaches to you know that's what i mean i'm going to look at what's going on there and they had no power they have nowhere to they have a backache so but that's fine for five or ten seconds it doesn't know exactly no it's that it's exactly true you don't compare of day of these little details of life and he's also got a lot of humor and i think he's a really really good writer but i felt i wondered if that was a sort of schematic i think jessica a little bit of balance schematic in a completely trash right all of their other friends and call them you know say oh you know so one so his a is a cocaine addict and so and so is a crook and so and so is gayer than ever keeps getting gay every year paradigm contrasted with the extremely idealistic person he may have been when he was in college to the more much more extremely cynical person would he hasn't become right he's somewhere in the middle yeah he on by humoresque because music can do that and when you go back to your hotel room it doesn't yet change your life he starts to weep in the concert because all these things are welling up now and that he's encounter d but you think momentarily music has i think shown him the light as it were but when he goes back to his hotel room it's so hard for music to sustain that when you're in the moment it can do it but when you go back that this was an interesting movie i didn't really enjoy it because i didn't read it brad very much and i thought he did have first world problems and he was a sort of a whiner but it was interesting it made me think about that sort of midlife crisis and i think a lot of people i know i did came to a point where i said all my dreams of being katie kirk when i was young are not going to come to pass and it's a little disappointing but you know you say well i look back on my life and i certainly didn't accomplish what i thought i was going to accomplish when i was eighteen but you know what are you go i was a little know it is the voice over technique throughout the whole thing but i guess this is the only way he could kind of convey that all of that stuff my wife didn't see the film but i described it to her and she said sounds sort of of redemption meant anyway so that's it for brad status and our status for tonight and we hope that you will join us next time when we discuss another film that's just thank you