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The adaptation of this novel is so much different from the Japanese movie and from the novel itself and is more bonkers then the American adaptation. I will try my best with this convoluted story line. It does play into Japanese tropes of Lolita complex and repression of outward feelings. The mother persona never leaves the daughter body like in the American adaptation and the mother takes it as her chance to have a second chance at life and do things should didn't do in her previous life. The mother persona in the daughters starts dating the son of the bus driver that caused their car accident and end up dating him!! Knowing that their relationship wont work with her husband while living in her daughter's body. She fakes a split personality disorder and pretends her daughters persona is coming back and taking back the daughters body so she can then date said son and marry him. The husband realizes that the mother persona never left and was faking the daughter persona so they can both move on with their different lives. This becomes the secret they keep not telling the other what the other one knows. Wikipedia did it better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoko_(novel) I love the author Keigo Higashino, since he is one of the few English translated works I could read while I was living in Niigata, Japan. he is a really great murder mystery novelist (Devotion of Suspect X is really good and won many awards and I recommend reading or listening on Audible) and the book The Secret is based on Naoko is based on Japanese surrealism like any Murakami novel. Thanks Paul, June and Jason, I have been listening to you since Burlesque and it helped when I was living in Japan during the 3/11 quake .

As a fan of the early X Files I remember the episode when Mulder and another guy switched bodies, and the fake Mulder tried to sleep with Scully but she handcuffed him to the bed. De ja voux for David Duchovney I guess.

I drove me crazy how little Lili Taylor and David Duchovny seemed to care about their daughter. They took their daughter's absence so lightly that I almost forgot she was a character sometimes. They should both be heartbroken that their daughter was so close yet so far away. I also don't get why both of them just assumed that their daughter would come back one day as if it was a given. Should Lili Taylor just decide what college her daughter is going to? What happens when their daughter gets back? She'll be in a major she never wanted! Lili Taylor was so careless with her daughter's life it was crazy!

I have a question about the end of the movie that they didn't bring up on the podcast. Was the reveal that Sam was writing in her mother's handwriting supposed to read only as a sweet tribute to her mother? Or was it supposed to raise doubt about which persona was actually controlling Sam's body? I would say tonally at that point it didn't feel sinister. But it also felt like the only reason to bring up the handwriting earlier in the movie was to go out on an ambiguous ending that leaves the audience guessing. But maybe I am the only one guessing.

Reminder

And then that reminded me of something. I can't remember the last time I looked at the alphabet. I mean I see it all scrambled up on a daily basis via keyboards and the like, but it's been years since I've looked at it A to Z style. The way it was intended to be seen. Everyone, do yourselves a favor and write the alphabet out beginning to end, take a long look, and remember the good old days before we had all these gadgets that make you think the alphabet starts with Q.

I loved this episode. Them explaining the movie to June may be one of my favorite parts ant episodes. I hope it becomes a thing for all of the movies that June misses, or at least all of the crazy ones like this.

seeing robotam talking about Daredevil makes me think of the mini vacuum cleaner Dirt Devil, and how i thought it was some sort of game when i was very small because the box kinda looked like it was a game. i dunno, i was a weird kid.

Full disclosure: I haven't listened to the episode yet, but when did that ever stop someone on the internet from giving an an opinion? I wonder if someone's opinion of All the President's Men can be affected by their age. I absolutely love this movie - it's one of a handful that I watch about once a year (others include Pulp Fiction, Mad Max: Fury Road, JFK, Apocalypse Now, Lone Star, The Seven Samurai). Maybe not the greatest movies ever, but ones that hit me on a personal level in some way. I was in elementary school when Watergate happened, but I remember the way it absolutely dominated public conversation. I even remember arguing about whether Nixon was guilty or not with my classmates (I was pro-Nixon at the time). My earliest political memory is my mom watching the Watergate hearings on T.V. during the summer. And I vividly remember Nixon resigning, even though I was only 9 years old. My family was camping in Canada, but we ran into friends who told us Nixon was about to quit. We actually gathered around the car radio to listen to Nixon's farewell. It's hard to understate the way Watergate dominated the public consciousness back then. So I wonder if my enthusiasm for All the President's Men partly grows from my coming of age during and just after Watergate. Plus, I was pretty aware of what happened with Nixon, so I didn't need a lot of background about when I first watched the movie - probably when it first aired on TV, maybe in the late 70s or early 80s? I could see where someone growing up later might not engage with the film quite as much. That said, I still think Pakula does a lot with a very minimalist approach. As some have noted earlier, his storytelling is super-economical, but he manages to give the audience just enough to understand what is going on and to be caught up in the excitement and drama. Credit has to go to Redford and Hoffman too. I noticed when I watched the film last week how spot on their performances are for delivering information through tone of voice, expressions, and body language. Regarding nothing distinguishing the two, I can't agree with that, but notice when Ben Bradlee refers to the pair as "Woodstein." I've read that it was a running joke at the Washington Post for staffers to get the two mixed up.

This movie sounds like a gross version of “All Of Me”

After The first time she tries to sleep with him I think Duchovny should’ve just called an exorcist. ”I’m glad to see there is an afterlife, I will see you there one day, but the power of Christ compels you.”

I'm a huge fan of Unspooled and Paul & Amy, but I had a hard time with the dismissiveness of this episode. All The President's Men is a movie that requires patience, and I wonder if that's why the hosts found it frustrating. I've noticed that Unspooled has a sometimes less than critical enthusiasm for directors like Spielberg and Disney, brilliant artists whose seminal works are sentimental and deeply manipulative. At any given moment of Snow White and E.T., the viewer is told exactly how to feel and when to feel it. No patience is required and nothing is left to chance. The central promise of Spielberg and Disney is the escape of an eternal childhood. All The President's Men is about being a grown-up, how mundane and ordinary efforts can - with tremendous persistence - achieve extraordinary, historical results. Pakula forces us to spend a couple of hours being Woodward and Bernstein as they slog through mountains of lies and paper in a quest to get to the truth. All The President's Men is that rare mainstream Hollywood film that pulls back from conventionally obvious dramatic tropes as it asks its audience to work. That's not to say that Paul, Amy, or anyone else should pretend to like the movie if they don't. But I noticed that the cultural significance of this film - X Files, Zodiac, just about any police procedural on TV, the list goes on - got shorter shrift this time around, and received a less than fair hearing. Paul was right: Snow White is a kids' movie: it appeals to the eternal child in all of us. That's a beautiful thing, but it would be nice to see a movie like All The President's Men get credit for being brave enough to ask us to be grown-ups.

I did not watch this movie. I read the summary and was like nope. I am surprised, from listening to the episode, how little attention is given to the teenage girl. Not only do the parents not seem to care she is dead. But also, like, would a teenage girl WANT David Duchovny? Because I remember having crushes on boys and feeling like I couldn't control it. (Memorably I worked at a movie theater slinging popcorn and I had a crush on a co-worker who was tall and dumb and hot. It was so annoying and distracting. Eventually he dyed his hair that terrible blonde and it was such a relief because I didn't have to crush on him anymore.) It would be more interesting if the wife has an emotional connection to the husband but is physically attracted to Just-In or something. But maybe DD doesn't do projects that don't have every character wanting to fuck him? That is all I can figure. The Japanese version sounds much more interesting. ETA: I do agree with June that teenage girls aren't usually (some are) horny. For me, obviously, it was more crush related. Admiring guys and kissing and such. It is also weird that she'd be so confident in her sexuality to wear lingerie and such? I suppose that is the mom's influence but I would just be in crush-love with boys and NEVER speak to them. Obviously, this goes without saying but this would NEVER get made with the genders switched, as June proved.

Ugh, this movie was gross. My wife and I watched it last night. We are very open people sexually, both bi and part of the LGBT community. We also have a significant age difference and understand how people can be into that sexually. In the kink community there are all kinds of ways that people explore and challenge power dynamics, with an emphasis on safety and consent. But. Honestly, this movie feels like a screenwriter wanted to make a thoughtful movie about incest but the only way he could get it made is by inventing a Freaky-Friday-meets-Lars-von-Trier premise. It has all the classic hebephile fantasies where a teenaged girl aggressively pursues an older man/her own father. Meanwhile the dad is sexually jealous of her peers. It might have actually been a thoughtful exploration of the subject if they had just dropped the device, had the daughter survive the accident as herself and go through an inappropriate attraction to her father as part of her trauma before leveling out and returning to a healthy relationship. Instead it feels like someone watched The Lover and Lolita a bunch of times and said to themselves, "these are great films but the endings are such a bummer!" So, in summary, fuck this movie. It is very unpleasant to watch, and not really fun in any way.

I once saw a transcript for a sermon in which the pastor was using the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team as a metaphor but he was really just outlining the plot of Cool Runnings beat for beat. Not that I necessarily have an issue with that, but he was trying to pass off what happens in the movie as historical fact. I like to think that maybe it was Saturday night and he was watching the Disney Channel and thought, “Oh fuck! I forgot to write a sermon this week!”

I thought the early scenes used humor really well to flesh out the family and their relationships to each other.

I think I tend to have a bit of a negative few of "true" stories because I know how often the truth is stretched thin. Some stories are interesting and important but they lack a typical story structure or easy entry point for the audience. So the writers start to move events around, put people where they weren't or even create false moments. People then watch the movie and take it as the truth. Most people don't become interested and then research, they saw the movie so they know what happened. As a result I think I always view a lot of "true" stories through a lens of healthy disbelief which ultimately sometimes hampers my enjoyment of a film. That said films like this, Zodiac, Dog Day Afternoon, etc. are all films I really love that are based on true events. Overall I would say I prefer fiction.

Again this movie says all you need to say and know about the characters it just doesn't "say" it. You get that they are young and hungry reporters. That much is said. What is not said you get from their attire, desks, apartments, mannerisms and actions. Going back to the old film adage of show don't tell, this movie shows us a lot about these characters and paints a very detailed picture of them. Just think about these facts: we know that they are young, Bernstein has long hair, he has a bike wheel at his desk, he has a picture of a cyclist at his desk as well, Woodward is the only one seen driving. Put that all together we get a young guy with liberal leanings, possible early environmentalist, that bikes in the city. Do we need him to tell us these things? Do we need a scene in which he tells why he chooses to bike? No. We have all the information we need to put those bits together ourselves. In the end does knowing more about him or why he chooses to bike enrich the story or tell us more about the Watergate scandal and its investigation? No, so why should we spend time with backstories?

It also works as a 15 minute short

I was reading an article on Variety about Peele's choice in music for that scene, and the NWA song was added in post. The rumor is originally, it was going to be "Every breath you take" by the Police. I definitely think NWA was the better choice.

Fade in.... A silver haired prison guard carrying a tray of food pushes open a door with the words 'Cell Block 14 - Extra High Security" printed on it. He walks down a metal corridor. Dying florescents flicker overhead. "Hmph! Only two more weeks til retirement" He continues down the corridor. "Mr Scott! Dinner is served. Mr Scott!" He turns the corner and his eyes widen. "Mr Scott???....." We see a small empty cell. The bars on the only window have been filed away. A makeshift rope made of bedsheets hangs through the opening. "Good God...no, please, no..." The guard drops the tray and faints in slow motion. Fade to black.

I have a personal vendetta against this song now that it is played at every wedding I've photographed ever.