good evening and welcome to our four hundred second shell of a fistful of popcorn and we've been going for twenty years for straggling into our twenty first i think at this point and we're at the end getting toward the end of the year where we're seeing a lot of oscar bait films tonight we're going to be discussing one film where there is a lot of talk about a best actress award and that is a film called can you ever forgive me with melissa mccarthy to discuss this film tonight i am the moderator janet stern and i'm delighted to be joined by all of our regular panelists carol welch mar campbell and bob brown and to get us started on this discussion marilyn would you like to do a summary of can you ever forgive me or can you ever give me is based on a memoir by a woman named lee israel who was a regular popular biographies and then popular biographies that she was writing started feel less popular and she couldn't get a contract for another book and she wished running out of money and so she find stumbles into literary forgery she has a real letter to her from katharine hepburn because she did a biography of had burned and she tearfully parts with it and then finds out that perhaps there's a market for such things and they've she since she has literary gifts could perhaps write letters  it works for a while and then she starts stealing letters from archives and substituting forged letters for being made for the ones that she stole him and eventually the f b i gets involved and he is caught and that's about once she gets know in the rare book trade as a possible forger she ropes him into being her front person right so there's a there are and they have a peculiar friendship i guess i wanted to ask you my own feeling when watching the film was i never felt in any way that i was judging her i felt that i thought she wasn't even guilty of anything don't think so either and yes and i just wondered if you also if you how you felt about why did you why do we take the side of someone who's actually doing criminal things i think it's because there's a lot you approach it and i thought she was committing crimes but i thought that the secret of the movie was this rather other sympathetic character you feel tremendous sympathy for and it's not just because committing crimes that she's unsympathetic she's also a misanthrope she's grouchy that everybody she keeps everybody at arm's length she's really kind of a visible person and a lovely person but but somehow both the script and the pre trained as either fools or greedy or anything they're just and i think another day in the business another reason why we may not have come we might not come down hard on her be someone else she is she's creating these but it's not easy to do no it's very hard to do you really have to know these off i always internally so i think we feel that there might be a literary art form here that she's you know and the i  to get a long way and a british accent and a british accent yeah yeah yeah i do feel that one of the reasons you're sympathetic to his first it's not all that apparent in the movie she did do a huge amount of research to make the letters believable you know making sure that people were in the place where she was writing a letter and i'm she was reading a letter and she had something like thirty typewriters all period correct  make it authentic looking and and it shows you that that in fact what she says is that she is a better she said at one point i would better dorothy parker than during the darker because she wrote letters that people wanted the this place to her strength and she is genuinely would be in these letters so it is a skill and she has it is a skill and i think that's part of why we forgive her the irony may be as it has occurred in the world be in demand and they're not and finally another reason why i think we're kinder to her is that she seems always to be herself even though as you said she's pretty not being or so she's being other people but the and she may have may have felt some sort of fellow feeling with the people who she was for and i think that in a sense she wasn't she wasn't herself that she was feel kindly toward this criminal but the judge also the judge who sentences her seems particularly lenient and she gives a very interesting speech i think the judge just sort of a representative of the audience a judge is hearing this as we hear this but i just wanted to quote one thing she said in her her speech before the judge she said to allocute what she's pleading guilty so she she says quote in many ways this has been the best time of my life why do you think why do you think that is i have my own ideas but that is that is an intern very interesting thing to traverse time for her own work with although the fact that people don't know it's her work she's proud of something she's created and all she's gone before that is jane curtain as her agent just giving her the brush off so here is finally a time where she's able to sit down create not get an agent in the way and get direct response and money why wouldn't you feel great about that and she may have had a imitating people's voices who had much more interesting lives than her own that's and i think that in that she kind of a dame defied with them that that was what's made her letters good is that she could feel herself into that character  way an actor or an actress does oh my god see her acting that way though i mean this is a business after all when she gets her go between the go between her it's strictly business with this guy i mean she's had it with them they've had a falling out and it's you know it's not a case where it's become the joy of creation and being met with that jewel ation at that point it's yes but that is that's the point where she stops and reading the letters from scratch and start stealing letter but carol i think that i was going to say this i think i think the reason she says it in madness might be a stretch is because she's actually developed a friendship you know and she's not only developed a friendship with jack which is very meaningful and it is fun even though it is in retrospect that she realizes it but she's also developed she's on the brink of intimacy with anna who was in the bookstore or used bookstore owner who buys his who is a very sincere person yeah and who is very that we forgot to say she she and she's a lesbian yes so and i must be too but there seems to be a coming together of these two very very close to developing something she when they dance to that point though she's hands off she has a distance she said many drinking but she can't do it because she's so afraid of intimacy i think she's a sexual actually for overachieving she really is flattered and happy that someone has possibly say well you write very well and really enjoy your book and that's you know wonderful and then you know after they they start to have a relationship then she figures oh this is this is dangerous that i don't i don't want to involve her you know because she if she finds out and doesn't blow the whistle and she could also be a conspirator right right right if she stops going to that store too that is all good points that well why do you think that the right of by the way the writer one of the writers of this is a man named j who is a friend of ours son in law's brother and yeah he wrote ave and various other things oh yeah that mission is nicole nicole of center was a wonderful writer yeah she was supposed to one and they're elderly and why now what make this i think it's i think in there i saw an interview with the director which was very interesting of course name is melissa who is this is her second film her first film she made about adolescence teenagers and she said i don't want to make a movie about teenagers again because that's the over scripts he was being offered were more stories about teenagers  and so she wanted to pick i'm likable characters and different age groups and i think that that it is becoming especially at oscar season that a lot of movies are into that age group older older people and that there aren't a lot of summer movies that are targeted at older people but once you get into this season the friends bookstore and the public library with a lot of other people who are up there pricing books and someone said she had seen this movie and she said wasn't it wonderful to see so many nice bookstores because there are ahead left anymore they're so so few left and wasn't it nice not to hear a cell phone ringing or hearing people talk on the phone yeah i think that's the charm of this era yeah and it's funny because i think ninety nine when i'm not used to seeing period movies where it's well it's so easy i just wondered i got a sense that you liked this movie so i'm going to ask you if you'd like to sum up here all your feelings about it was a delightful moon i really did accomplishment well i agree with all of you except that as you were all talking i realize that if i had been at that literary party and i saw her coming i probably would move the other way so maybe i didn't like her or maybe i just probably wouldn't want to spend much time with her but appreciated what she did i don't know anyway well thank you that was all very insightful comments and i invite our audience to see this film it's still playing in our area and also to