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Several people have brought up the question of the handwriting at the end. I think this movie is pulling a brilliant Minority Report style ambiguous ending: if you want the handwriting to show that the daughter has gained a new respect for her deceased mother, then you can walk away without thinking about it any further. Stop reading if that sounds nice to you. However, if you want to think about the real consequences of a grown woman who has been trapped in her dead daughter's body, keep reading. So you have just been busted doing drugs by your husband/dad who is having his own emotional breakdown over the question of what is going to happen to his family. You've just had a vision in which you see your own dead body fading out of existence. You now realize there is no going back. You finally understand your daughter's life, and you finally understand that she is gone. What do you do? Do you try to convince your husband to face this fact? He has rejected your attempts to remain a wife, and he has rejected your attempts to find a new life for yourself with this new body. He'll only accept one way out: the daughter's return. Conveniently, this is an outcome in which he: Accepts your life choices Doesn't try to bang you Supports you financially while you restart your life Trying to be honest with him would just result in a bizarre divorce, and he would probably try to have you committed to an institution. So, you convince your hus-dad that the daughter is back. You don't get hit by car, or struck by lightning, or anything. You just wake up one morning and pretend to faint dramatically. He wants to believe you, anyway. And then you carry on with your new life. It's a little tricky that you can't help but use your old-style handwriting, but you pass it off as an homage to your late mother. But at least you can bang that hot photography teacher on the regs.

Just wanted to drop in to say I’m really annoyed I haven’t had time to listen to the episode yet. I watched this fucking thing, and I need catharsis

Grabbed from Paul's Instastory

I had mostly quit listening to the podcast because of past frustration with Paul--you obviously need to love his personality to be a regular listener. I should have remembered that the worst time to listen to any podcast is when it's talking about a favorite movie! I kept wanting to hit my head against my car window. I think the movie is perfect in accomplishing what it's trying to do. It might not be everyone's taste but I love the whole thing. So many classic/talented actors. Jane Alexander is a particular favorite. Movies about investigative reporters are in my wheelhouse in general. And classic 70s movies tend to be my taste. I love that they don't spoon feed the viewer. I love the grinding pace, it fits what they're trying to show. And the reporters have different personalities but they are both so ambitious and they figure out how to work together. My mom was obsessed with Watergate, she watched it on TV all day long, read every book, and my parents argued about some of the key players for years over the dinner table. Over the years, I've read many of the participants' books. As well as other Watergate books, including a bio of the Jack Warden character. But I'd never read a Woodward and Bernstein one until recently. I don't like what Woodward turned into, which started right after the Watergate success. Then because it's come up often in discussing Trump, I've been reading The Final Days, and I had recently read about a third of All the President's Men. I've seen the movie many times and I recognized that most scenes in the beginning the movie track surprisingly closely to the book. From the first appearance in court, and the other character' discussion of the background given to the two authors, and Woodward's phone call with Dahlberg -- dialogue is the same. The book also contains a footnote about the kidnapping Dahlberg mentions in the call (which is a famous one in MN). During the podcast, they said the director's name over and over and they pronounced it in a way I'd never heard before, then the guest came in and said it the usual way. That sort of thing wouldn't usually bother me but it probably hurt me more because they didn't properly appreciate the movie. I liked the guest. I feel a little bad that I didn't love The Post. It was hard to get around Tom Hanks, and I'll never be sure whether it is because I'm tired of Tom Hanks in general, because the real Ben Bradlee is so well known, or whether it's the Jason Robards Ben Bradlee I like even better than the real one. There was no way Tom Hanks was going to be able to please me.

I would love for Cam to read this book only now and see how he feels.

I forgot to mention the great line where mom-in-daughter and Duchovny pull up to the school and she says something like I can't do this and Duchovny says, "You've read all her books. You're ready." As if she has crammed that in during all this hectic time.

It seemed that there were several missing connections which were not shown that would have made more of a movie out of this. The guidance counselor is definitely hitting on Duchovny, which could have made for a jealous 'daughter' plot. The mom-in-daughter could have sowed her wild oats with either of the two losers (both giving intense I want you stares) or with the photography/journalism teacher who invited her over to his house for 'studies' which was then promptly dropped and never revisited. The French title "Si J'etais Toi" translates to "If I Were You" which makes for a better title. I ran across the blog of a guy who reviews movies made in or set in Montreal which brings yet another country into this United Nations of what was created where. (He also had a suspiciously similarly titled podcast called "Why Does It Exist"). The original movie "Himitsu" is on Netflix in case anyone wants to check it out.

I thought that was supposed to show that there was a remnant of the mom in her that she will never lose. The previous comment on how the original Japanese movie has the mom tricking would make your interpretation make sense except that it wasn't really hinted at during the movie.

Cam Bert, you are a true hero for sitting through this without having seen any other Twilight movie.

I can't wait for Charles Barkley to take em to the paint

Yeah I came to talk about the Dreamland episodes as well because Duchovny and MIchael McKean were perfect as the swapped characters. Oddly enoughMulder is kinda pervy in those episodes as well because he drive's to McKean's house, goes to the living room, turns on the Spice Channel, and falls asleep. This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the fact that there are toys all over the room showing McKean's kids are playing in there constantly, a point which his wife makes when she wakes him up the next morning as the hardcore porn is still playing loudly on the TV and if I recall Duchovny's hand is down is pants. My one question about this movie concerns the idea if they went full tilt and had the dad sleep with the wife in the daughter's body. Does anyone else think that the makers of the film would try and have the characters conceive a child in order to see if the daughter's spirit would inhabit the child? I mean in the spectrum of bizarre movies covered by this show and those that haven't, would that idea be out of place in comparison to movies like Adore?

I love 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.

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.”

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.

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.

Absolutely. I can enjoy films about movie star and gunslingers, but I don’t always see myself in those films. This film quietly honors all the bookkeepers and secretaries and people who spend their days typing at a keyboard and poring through documents. After eight hours of staring at a screen, transferring documents from this email to that database, over and over again...it’s kind of nice to see people like me, represented onscreen. It’s like, you don’t have to be a rockstar for your life to have meaning and purpose.

I agree that Amy and Paul seemed to have a strange view of this film. First, the claim that there's not enough to distinguish between Woodward and Bernstein is ludicrous. For starters, so much of their personalities are revealed with hair, makeup, and wardrobe, without a word of dialogue. Woodward is the perfectionist, with his hair immaculately in place, his shirt perfectly pressed, and his tie in a more perfect knot than I've ever been able to achieve in my life. Bernstein is the creative, whose extremely wrinkled dress shirt suggests he only wears one because he has to, and whose long hair suggests he feels some connection to 60s counter-culture even as he managed to work a desk job through it all. When they deal with people, either in person or on the phone, Woodward is a bit tense and wants to be precisely understood and to precisely understand the other party. Bernstein is loose and doesn't particularly care what the other party thinks of him as long as he gets what he wants. Woodward's manner of reasoning is much more deductive, where he'll reach a conclusion only if the facts lead there. Bernstein's reasoning is more inductive, where he's willing to make a leap of logic based on patterns and assume that as fact, which ends up fine in this situation because his instincts were always correct. And yeah, sure, Woodward is a bit WASPy, and Bernstein is clearly Jewish, but if that's the only thing you can point to in order to distinguish them, I don't understand what movie you were watching. I don't see how clearer they could make the differences between these guys without hitting us over the head with it (and some might argue that they do hit us over the head with it, like in the scene where Bernstein has his notes on napkins and tiny pieces of paper while Woodward disapprovingly chides him). This is an interesting question. I think at the time, and possible up to today, the fact that this actually happened makes it more interesting, and thus affects it in a positive way. I can see this changing over time for a couple of reasons, the first of which is a diminishing knowledge of the event. Now, as a product of a rural American public school, I know no history, and the only name from the administration mentioned in the film that I knew was Nixon himself. (This is the second time I've seen this film, and it's the second time I had to google whether Gordon Liddy is the same person as Scooter Libby. Answer: He's not.) But I still knew the broad strokes of the scandal: Nixon's men attempt to burgle the DNC, Nixon was aware of the cover-up, and he had to resign the presidency as a result. In 50 years, it's possible that viewers will know as much about the Watergate scandal as I do about the Teapot Dome scandal (which I assume had something to do with teapots...and domes). The term "Watergate" will no longer be synonymous with Nixon, but just with some type of scandal, or even more diluted, simply some type of controversy (I read that applications to journalism programs skyrocketed after this film, so I suppose it's those bozos we have to blame for idiotically using -gate as a suffix for everything). And the second reason I fear this might change over time is due to the declining civility in politics. I can imagine a 16-year-old who grew up indoctrinated in Trump country watching this film and thinking, "So Nixon sought to use any means necessary to bring down his political rivals, and then lied about it and covered it up. Isn't that what the President is supposed to do?" After all, Fox News would (and does) forgive Trump for far worse than what Nixon did. (Speaking of Fox News, I was figuratively yelling at the podcast when Amy and Paul were discussing 1976 films and neglected to mention the other film on the AFI list, Network.) Now, judging by the Letterboxd reviews I read, I'm probably not as high on this film as others on this board, although I have it in the top third of AFI films so far. I can see the argument that it's a vanilla in a freezer full of more novel flavors, but that's overlooking the fact that for a vanilla, the taste and texture are perfect, and who wouldn't want that perfect vanilla to have a place in their freezer? For those who say take it or leave it, I'd happily take it.

I agree! I was kind of taken aback by their overall apathy. I’ve seen this movie twice now and I liked it even more this time. I also agree that we didn’t really need to get into the nitty-gritty of Woodward and Bernstein’s backgrounds. I never really even thought about needing anything more. I feel like the movie gives us just enough, but doesn’t bog us down too much. I actually don’t think there’s that much more to say. These guys ARE their jobs. That’s what they do — non-stop. I don’t think a dinner scene with them discussing why they became journalists in the first place would really add anything to either the movie or their characters.

Completely surprised at the indifference Paul and Amy had to this movie. I also disagree that Pakula's direction is "unshowy." There's a lot of interesting creativity in there, and the ability to make clear sense of this story is also terrific, let alone to make it so entertaining. It does lead me to something I was wondering: does being a "true" story affect your views on its greatness (either positively or negatively)? I personally do tend to lean to fiction in movie preferences, in general, though I do think this movie is amazing and one of my favorites of this series so far. We're all used to these AFI movies now, and they all have a certain conceit of drama and I was vastly entertained by this one not having some of those things. Not getting typical drama stuff like Woodward and Bernstein's personal lives or whatnot really made this stand-out among the bunch we've seen.

I couldn't believe that Scott wasn't familiar with the term "spon-con", but then I realized that he probably just calls it "sored-tent".

Holy cow this movie was pretty fun. Lord of the Flies meets Mad Max with a dash of the prison island from Face/Off. I really enjoyed Stuart Wilson as the over-the-top villain. The cast is filled with a lot of memorable character actors. There are more "Oh it's that guy" moments in this movie than anything I've seen lately. Plus, stuff blows up real good--this is a Big Dumb Movie. Makes total sense that this is the director of Goldeneye, Vertical Limit, Mask of Zorro, and Green Lantern. It's a too bad a good copy is hard to find in the U.S.

the Vimeo link for A Night in Heaven isn't up yet (as far as I can tell) but a 240p res version is on youtube. Haven't watched it all the way through, but it seems to be complete. I've replaced the link with a DVD resolution version. enjoy.