good evening and welcome to another episode of a fistful of popcorn princeton's movies and view show i'm marilyn campbell and i'm going to be the moderator tonight and with me are two of our favorite people bob brown and janet stor and tonight we're going to be discussing a couple of movies that are presently in the theaters and that are probably going to have some oscar nominations or golden globe nominations in between them for acting maybe especially but maybe for some other things too they are ladybird which is the first feature both written and directed by gretta gerwig and starring sure sure ronan the irish actress and the other is three billboards outside ending misery starring of course frances mcdormand of the not speaking of the irish connection written and directed by martin mcdonagh who is an irish playwright so first we're going to start off talking about lady bird and janet stern will do the summary ok as you said it was its credit girl it's first directorial effort she has written scripts before but she's also written this and it's really largely autobiographical about her growing up in sacramento california and around two thousand to two thousand and three and her relationship primarily not just with her friends and usual high school tribulations she's in a catholic school but primarily with her mother who is marvelously played by laurie metcalf and they can be in each other's embrace one second to the next second they're biting off each other's heads and let it go it has said that you know mother daughter relationships that are really authentic don't get into films that much and she senior and she's about to leave and she wants to go to a college in the east because she really wants to become the person she thinks she legally is and so a lot of the trials tribulations come from her being sort of thinks that if their california hedonistic has not spent christmas in sacramento and i think that one of the interesting things about this film is that it's set in california but it's set in sacramento which is not what we easterners think of as typical california it's much more middle of the road it's almost like middle america rather than like the west coast where do you think about that where do you think she you think the you think in the end when when the character ladybird finally gets to the east coast do you think her attitude towards california changers yes well what i'm about to say is not original with me i read it in the new york times review but i think he's absolutely right scott review said that one of the nuns the head of the school said to her your college essay is about sacramento and you seem to like it very much and she said well i pay attention and the nun says aren't those the same things and so i think yes that the law of the uncritical love well critical love but not judg love of sacramento is deeply deeply within her there are a lot of scenes in there with a couple of her in a car and she and her mother seem to like driving around sacramento and i think it's very very much a part of her so by the time she hits new well to even say she it's i right by the time she hits new york she is finally understanding sacramento is really what made her and all the things the strength that she has but can't be extricated from her family and and her and her and he it's kind of like the graduate for a young woman at an earlier age because she is going off to college instead of graduating from college and she has i was there was those tussles with her mother but also her father there's a very interesting combination of economic problems along with personal problems which she has to resolve within herself and she's always accused of being too far reaching that  reaching beyond her capabilities and you're never going to make enough money to do what you want to do this sort of thing so economics are kind of like an underpinning here i think and she as you say in sacramento that's capital of california but really it's on the edge of hicksville if you've ever been to sacramento wants north if it really is like the midwest you had up into the gold country a little but hills there it's really kind of rural nowhere compared to what most people think of a southern california  and i think there's also the point of it's being called ladybird because she said ladybird and she says that she gave that name to herself she's ladybird and i heard an interview with good girl again which she said that in the back of her transcend to sacramento being able to get away is partly what characterizes the relationship between her and her mother because her mother can't go her mother can't leave her mother is very stressed out so especially because they have new economic problems like you referred to and so the mother is like a little bit envious jealous ideally yes i think that the mother is it has a totally contradictory attitude which i understand as a mother and as a daughter in that the mother wants one point says to her daughter i want you to be the best you can be but in the other hand she doesn't really want her to leave home she doesn't want her to be different it isn't want her to be  to look at her parents and say i'm not like and she wants to keep or close and she wants the best for her in other ways so this is sort of this push pull going on she also  also i think it should be said that her comment on that was that her mother was terrorized terror ride by terrified of  ladybirds not becoming better than she is so she never wanted to say to her you did that well or you know i'm really proud to be that never came out because she was so afraid that if she said that lady bird wouldn't keep so ok there is a mother daughter relationship there where the exact opposite happens the mother praises the daughter so much and she feel smothered by praying that seems to be sort of an underhanded way of criticizing her because her mother is a great singer and she aspires to be a singer but she's feel she's not up to her mother standards or one of her mother sister that was great she feels oh yeah right i coming of age movie and then there's this other strand that says it's not a typical coming of age movie because it's about a mother and a daughter and not a father and son and what makes what makes that different you think you both think what makes about the mother daughter coming of age different from my father's time coming of age story or other i don't know but i would say that a coming of age story with a father traditionally has been they go off and something together yet this action involved hunting fishing and running taking a road trip here it's really a matter of lady bird having to use just stay and she has a certain degree of integrity and she has to stay with it regardless of how she's being battered by her mother's not being very demonstrative there's a battle going on there's a struggle going on oh yes but if you want to point to a much more than once your mother why do you hate me yeah but it's not action related now it's emotionally related i don't know about bob probably has a better idea about what the father son coming of age film is like tried i do activities together they go shopping together that's y relationships with their peer group well she she's very typical in that she is very quick to disassociate herself from her best friend when a cooler person enters her life and also with a boy who is sexually active she has a boyfriend although certain things happen there but she has it's a more innocent relationship yeah much more so i think that there are some very t things her friend yells at her you always have to be the center of attention all of this is all very typical i think but she's in a catholic school so i think there's a lot of influence that she's reacting against she just doesn't want to be boxed she knows deep inside that she is something not quite yet knows what it is but she's something she doesn't want to be put in this box that people tend to do but the but the a typical sort of a typical high school i'm sorry to have to keep bringing up this interview but it was interesting again gretta girl it said that she attended catholic school but as a unitarian so she was able to get the best of it because she loved the ritual she love this shit and she and the police have have not come up with a suspect even so she has three billboards put up outside within eyeshot of her front porch apparently within actually the site of the murder right but it's on a street a road that's hardly ever traversed so when the first cop goes by and he sees sam rockwell plays the cop he sees as he wants to get to the bottom of it and the francis of the reasons for doing this and explain to her why they haven't actually captured the person yet and they're really working on it and besides which he wants to do this before he dies because he's terminal so we get by this right place very different character in there yes not quite as key but interesting and the to filmmaker apparently loves to use dwarfs in his films at least  about it seems to me this is almost like a shakespearean movie that emotions are so large yet they're so intense and and and martin mcdona mcdormand character takes action she interrupts the status quo and things start to change the whole town changes in gradual ways for the worse some for the better the dentist didn't come out well but a lot of people in town feel that putting up these billboards is unfair and sad at least and they're very it's a small town and they know the police and most of them are very supportive of the police except that there seems to have been an incident before the beginning of the film where officer dixon was accused of torturing a black prisoner so the black people in town  not very supportive of the police and so there's this this conflict that she exacerbates the thing and i really interesting i'm glad you brought that up because this is typical mcdonough there's there's violence there's comedy there's violence there's comedy and she said frances mcdormand as i recall she says to dixon and here i have to use the word i think she used how's the nigger torturing business around doing right and he said you know i'll have you know it's people of color torturing the people in but anyway my point was that because she has done something which is interrupted the status enough that everything has been sort of just the same and because she's done something she's been that trigger that can't help but have ramifications and so each person kind of does change i think i think people decide they need to take sides because there's there's conflict and once the police chief does die i think then then people are even more open he was the only seems to be the only policeman in town who was actually popular and so once that happened she finds that she gets more so porton and more people are willing to come out and and say she's right it info though that the actual death of her daughter wasn't very traumatic for the town why her refusing to just wait for something to happen which didn't happen and of i have a theory about that oh but and i think your theory will know because just because martin mcdonagh is a playwright because words are incredibly important i was fascinated by the fact that this was three billboards outside not in ending the story outside and i think it's because she was an outsider there are outsiders and i don't think they were as involved in the town as as the others were so i don't know if they were probably regarded with some distance to begin with the boy seems even though his mother has made him in barest i think he was a little bit a little bit on the outside of things to begin with anyway so i think that word is significant she i get the sense that there's a backstory for her that precedes the murder of her daughter oh yeah she's always been a kind of out if mourning the side of anybody in town yeah so there's there's there's a there's a speaking of the mother daughter relationship there is a very it's been a very a very very unfriendly divorce between mildred and her husband charlie and the one flashback where we see the daughter the daughter taunts her with saying that she'd she hates you and that you know i want to live with dad rather than you and i'm you know i'm she's rebellious and then she goes off and this i just have to ask you both something there's a scene in which dixon is getting his rifle and he's about to do something and his mother who is a real big deal yeah a good old gal but really kind of also also a bit o that come about that a turtle is her pet i don't know though i think i don't know there's an unusual pets in a lot of yeah my family on it's own and there's also of course there's also many many films where people blow their heads off with it it reminded me in in some ways of shakespeare because of course shakespeare has a lot of a lot of his plays involved he's brought family relationships where families are are are tearing at one another the relationship between dixon and his mother is a very sick relationship the relationship between mildred and her daughter what little we see of it is it is very bad she can't see her ex husband without driving him into a frenzy by saying the exactly thing that she knows will infuriate him so all of these and then but then in town you get some other the relationship between the he's dying he's like the dying king in the green world so what do you what do you guys think of these two films now we have a little time to pair them in contrast them and sum u as far as whether or not you think that they are going to be contenders for oscars in any particular categories come come they don't you know you're going to be contenders best actress for both of them running a lot of best supporting actors script screenplays are going to be you know that lady bird got the highest rating you know history of rotten to me yes one hundred percent i think it's an extremely likable film and then that's the difference between these two films there's that is that ladybird is a very likeable because she said although she thinks she's unique she is typical and that conflicts with well there are are not going to end up with dead people lying about you know it's not going to resolve that way so so it's it's it's it's a pleasant night out of the theatre where it's three billboards is more  friendly movie i thought that when you think about the the first film ladybird i thought it was great until about the last ten minutes i felt it dragged a little bit i'm i'm sorry to say i  good looking guy who's the one i referred to before is being sort of sexually active comes and picks her up with his friends and hark honks the horn and her father and she her father says to her you're not going to go you know right now you guys want me to come to their door and she says yes i am and she gets into the car but that thought remains with her she can't really just she can't discount her parents influence well especially when they're right well i mean i didn't know you could you could we act in an all altogether different way you could say dammit yes i am and go along with everything she didn't she didn't yeah and i think that's very true oh yes yes as i said if this  is for all over the ladybird thing that she is she fears rebel years in just the way that a lot of teenagers are a lot of teenagers who are sensitive and creative and don't want to follow their roles and one more one more thing from gregory she's very entertaining she she was asked whether she really did fling herself out of a moving car after getting into an argument with her mother and she said well the car  the outline of the story of community it's descent in her community it's set in a catholic school which she went to you know and certainly a lot of those those things that  happen one of the things i liked about it was that your father was the school year yeah and so you can these these sort of milestones in sr and here come up and you're going to kind of kind of anticipated it's almost like meet me in st louis going from yeah of course that goes from being missouri as a mother daughter comparison i had never even occurred to me because i thought that everything was or it was so many so fill filled with so many other things i never saw that as yet but i think that the that the spring of the project is the daughter's murder and the mother's gild about perhaps b c i don't think that i think it's about a town well that's why it's in the title ok well i'm sorry