good evening and welcome to another episode of fistful of popcorn princeton's movie discussion show i'm looking at i don't know what tamar look i guess it is now so i'm bob brown i'm the moderator tonight and with me  two of our regular panelists to my right is janet stern and to my left is marilyn campbell i am left of center and we have a ghost chair for carol who's on with us tonight but she'll be back at a later time we have two films we're discussing today they may or may not be in the theaters by now both are quite different so we're going to discuss them separately the first is i in the sky which is about a certain attack on a terrorist cell shall we put it that way just will find out more in december and the next is a bigger splash which is not about that  it's more a love story gone wrong several love stories so let's start out with a summary of i and this guy marilyn well i and this guy as bob said is about a drone strike on a terrorist location intelligence of the united kingdom and the united states has discovered that there is a house in the middle of this city where someone they have been looking for is is going to arrive and going to the house and they have the opportunity to take this person out with a drone strike and the moral dilemma is that outside the house and within the collateral damage area is a little girl selling bread so the film recounts how the different players people that people at the foreign office and when the united states secretary of state on little box sort of you know making people on the street in in this town who are have little tiny little tiny cameras but they were there doing surveillance on the place for and and the moral dilemmas that come with with trying to make the decision the sort of classic philosophical decision about whether taking one innocent life is is better than having lots of other innocent people also die if these terrorists managed to put on their suicide vest and go into a large collection of people that's right you know that's called the classic trolley around the driveway rollie was really bright yes keeps popping up yes yes but imagine with there i don't think there's a single moral philosopher in the film nobody's on staff to provide to provide and some guy thinks they are right now not in the united states however i think what we become aware of the set to know if we didn't know it already the military has its own goals is to do this efficiently get it over with do it right do it precisely take out as few people as possible but then they have to keep putting it out to their superiors and superior other goals which are diplomatic if this little girl who is and little and political this little girl is killed in a diplomatic crisis coming soon and that's what they iraq's the foreign secretaries know that's what they have to worry about so it's a very to them it's a lot of tension between the two there's actually even more than that because at the very beginning of the film if you recall they say that they were just one of the supposed to be surveilling this this person a british nationality who is converted radical islam that and that they just want to go in and grab her right and then it becomes an assassination once they realize that they're and he attacked they start shows them that they're laying out all these weapons and has around richmond who is the general in england says this changes things that's right that now becomes from capture to kill the other thing it covers is a classic military procedure which is which is called sea way another is cover your ass don't be the one who's responsible especially if you're not higher up the food chain or somewhere in the middle so that your career is ruined so in the end it's bumped very curious about this did you feel that it was absurd that they kept were worrying about who was going to have to take responsibility or do you feel i was feeling wow this is these things are not done just like this they really thought out i was kicking it up stairs and the further they could get up stairs it seemed to me feel less involved the people seem to be the lesser moral dilemma that people seem to feel oh it's like well what are you waiting for yes exactly and when that apparently all these great yeah yeah he was marvelous and he seemed to be about to cry and certain points or he just he he's not the first to say this but he seated almost the whole time in his face has such range of the other aspect of it is that if they do whatever happens there's going to be a huge propaganda effect from this and we that's why covering harass is important here because you don't want to be the one holding the bag when the headlines hit and little girl is killed right if that if you were little vision they're going to make ellen yeah yeah so that's that's part of the problem but it is that it is the trolley problem of course you know those of you watching don't know what the trolley problem is if it's you are on a bridge and you see a trolley heading for a crash and you have a choice of swift kick flipping a switch and saving the trolley it's full of people but if you do one man sort of standing on the tracks oblivious and will be killed and this is a sort of a moral problem that's that's and that's been given to people and then of course there's and most people will flip the switch to save more people rather than except if the other problem is not flicking a switch but taking a bystander and throwing him because of the wonderful surveillance possibilities of the people who are in the bunker in las vegas deciding whether or not to push the button to blow up this house get very close to a little girl  close as the people who are well i think that you're right in the center part of someone's message is that you know with all of the technical advantages and some point and create credible advancements it's the human interaction the problem because this little girl is the old little girl and the general has just been seen buying a doll or a granddaughter there is that that was a little bit trite i think but nevertheless the things that really become insurmountable as a human part yes and that is something that that certain people have argued that is lost when we go to these remote remote to sort of you know push a button and halfway around the world something w blow up and whether or not anyone feels any moral complicity when that is true and i think i think this movie argues against that because they are saying that these people who are who are using drones are actually close shoved off on the stand the guy who does the statistics who's forced to jigger the numbers so that it will come out the way they want it to and then it's as it does and as it happens he's the fall guy  anything any other observations about i know that one of the things i wanted to say about this was that it seemed like the the dice is constantly being reloaded throughout the film so that the eddy is always up to you have like one of the little the little drones that look or be observer things suddenly the electronics go higher and so i can see yes whether these guys have actually left the building that right so it's  that the most effective line is at the very end given to alan rickman who this is the last film his last film role where he's been rated by the bleeding heart liberal in the situation room in london about about okaying this and he says don't ever tell a soldier that they don't know the cost of this war on your buck let's go on to the next film janet do you want to summarize a bigger very gregarious and refight energy he made five who has really come back he was the music producer for the rolling stones and she was involved in all of that she was a singer of the same time and  i guess he's kind of brought his daughter with him his newfound daughter and they are there to do something which i won't reveal and there for once in his beard to break up that what he wants him back i is this this was a question as i was sitting through this film i don't know how you felt about it but my first impressions of this were that it was quite a mess and i was not very happy with it but as it evolved and developed i thought oh ok i see where things are going and why they are the way they are how did you kind of felt exactly like you and i thought why am i here i see refugees in the background is the point that they're supposed to have a guilty conscience all of a sudden this sort of luxury getaway sort of thing becomes so tense and it seemed to me that that if you i'm not going to spoil any of it for anything but i think it just would have been better we don't get this ok we're going to we're going to go and watch the charlie rose program only still disappointed and then rate lines and the director in here because we didn't see it now we're going to watch it and let that explain everything to us i have to admit i didn't get also thought that rock and roll despite the fact of that tilda swinton was supposed to be recently i mean the operations recent she really originally supposed to be filling stadiums yeah and twenty years earlier well that's because she was very much associated with harry he was her lover at the time that he was a producer for the rolling stones and that was a good deal really so when we were talking about this for our friends so i mean that was one bu and especially at the end when all of a sudden we find out that she's totally fluent in italian although she has kept so someone has suggested well this is really a film about lack of communication ye mouthing off that you don't really see the the the poignancy inside until much later i guess so if it's about lack of communication did that come through  feeling the seal and maybe that's why now you start to think that this was great because you start to see harry reid for his character become quite different you start to see a real desperate this desperation in there yes that's right because he's trying to start really one of the other things they said on charlie rose was that it's very difficult to have a fight with someone when you are the only one who can  talk and that was actually true you see a sense that she's not she's not jumping in to any of these things as she can't but she doesn't and that gives her an incredible amount of control it doesn't it doesn't it gives her control weakness wife is very passive that is she's unhappy but she doesn't know what to do with her unhappiness she doesn't know what direction to go and i think that you don't get that feeling with til always seems like she is perfectly in control but the control may be that she's denying certain certain undercurrents of maybe this isn't the  relationship she's in but she does not want to hear about it anyway and she has and that's a powerful thing she says to him which is she says to harry when he sort of trying to get her back she says i can't thank you enough for giving me a regular thriller and they turned out to be very thought provoking i think making gives too much credit to how carefully people decide to order drone strikes that hasn't been my interpretation of what's been going on  they're not nearly as surgical as they're supposed to be but i did think it least it raised the issue of what are our values and and who are we delegated it's from june ninth which is thursday to saturday june eleventh and often we have them on our show to talk with the organizer of the storm but tonight we're just going to say that this is i know marilyn has often been to some of these and they are really good films you get to see them here when often they have not shown anywhere else and they will show and then you can say i saw a compelling funny poignant  films from around the world then tickets are now on sale you can have a festival pass which cost twenty five dollars and you can see as many as you like a regular ticket is eight dollars they're also doing that had great success with a double feature last of their last festival and they're going to do it again on saturday they're going to have a double feature and in between will be a reception that everybody can join in on and then the curator of the film festival jed raffle will do a q and a with the director of the second of those films which is called short stay parking again is easy on front street and at the art works parking lot of stockton and again it's june ni