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Just about to start the episode, but in case nobody mentioned BAKER DILL = BAD KILLER

This is great but it makes me wonder about the nature of the game. Did the kid always mean for Matthew McConaughey to kill his step dad in the game? Because it seems like the game started as just hanging with his dad and fishing. If the rules changed to kill his step dad, having an anagram name for Bad Killer makes no sense. That would mean the anagram is just for the audience and it's a complete coincidence on the part of the kid.

Wow I can't believe I have been calling John "Paul" all this time and no one corrected me. I sort of thought when the son showed up in the video game that it meant he was also dead? (I wasn't sure if he had killed himself or perhaps had been killed for his crimes?) I'll admit to checking out towards the end. Mostly my take away from this is that maybe I should take a vacation to Florida. And then I googled if it was filmed in Florida and it was not. It was filmed in Mauritius, and I was like, Oh I should go there. But it's kind of far and then I ended up looking in the Caribbean. Long story short, I went to Antigua in May.

I don't have the time now, and I don't want to just repeat what everybody has been saying but I have had strong feelings about this being on the list and maybe this is the episode I was looking forward to the most. I will give the TL;DR of it all now, and hopefully tonight bang out a tirade but to me everything that is wrong with the AFI Top 100 is summed up with this movie being on the list. It shows that a) series/trilogies are singularly represented to stand for the franchise, b) first is always best and nothing else is considered unless you are a well known or respected name c) "cultural importance" and actual pop culture impact are often different and d) genre token representation. Should a computer animated movie be on the list? It the grand scheme if it truly is one of the best movies then yes, if it's there to just represent "advancements in CGI" then maybe because it did kill traditional animation in a way. If you have to include one, should it be Toy Story. No.

Addressing Baker Dill being sentient: He does seemingly start to become sentient when he pulls the knife on the 2 drunk guys in the beginning. That's the beginning of things starting to go awry. I assume that when Baker pulled the knife, this could also be the moment that the kid got the knife in meatspace? We as the audience know something is off because that's when the salesman first misses Baker, he's very confused as to why Baker isn't there at the coast. He should have been there according to the strict predictability of video game timing. Something changed. I guess you could assume this is when the kid started to code the game into the new game: killing the stepdad. ? Before this time, it was just Baker being the player in the fishing game. I don't think Baker has the literal spirit of the kid's father, but I do think this is the "eaten the forbidden fruit" moment. Whether he has free will is unclear and doubtful, but I do think he became sentient.

But that’s raclette noob

I mean, the twist of this movie is just the final episode of St. Elsewhere. It traded an autistic boy looking into a snow globe and reimagining the people in his life, to an autistic boy looking into computer code and reimagining the people in his life. I know that they don't specifically say that he has autism spectrum disorder, but he's definitely written that way. The stepfather calls him a 'creepy weirdo' who stays in his room all day with his video game, but that his teacher says he's a genius. His mother gets super defensive when he's mentioned. His bedroom is still very childlike. Doesn’t seem to want or have any friends. He's hyper-focused on the world he's created and that world only. He has a strong sense of justice. Having him actually commit murder was the nail in the coffin for me. After sitting with the movie for a bit I thought maybe I was just reading into things, but then I read some Tweets from a few other people with ASD who felt similarly. I just couldn't enjoy this one. The cat(s) were adorable though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You can if you want but why would you? Blue cheese all day every day. Wings it's a must. Salad not a must but a good blue cheese dressing or the real deal crumbled in. Give me blue cheese all the time!* *Cam Bert is well known to have very unpopular tastes in food.

I started with 2! In fact, I didn’t see the first one until relatively recently. It was right around the time 3 came out and I figured I should actually sit down and watch it. And you’re right. I didn’t watch these in order, and I had no trouble jumping right in. Furthermore, it removed me from having any particular nostalgia for the first one. And I felt then as I do now: I like it fine, but it’s not my favorite (I think 3 is). That’s not to diminish its achievements or place in history. And it’s not to say it isn’t effective. It just doesn’t grab me the way the others do or how I feel a “great” movie should. I remember feeling wrecked after seeing the third one, the first just doesn’t stick with me. After watching it, I’m not thinking much of it at all beyond, “That was pretty good.”

I think this is a fair point and it is something I often think of. Being a big comic nerd there was a philosophy that Stan Lee use to have and that is every comic book is somebody's first comic book. Meaning that a new reader can pop in at anytime, so an issue (again this is before the Michael Bendis write for the graphic novel era) should be somewhat approachable to them. I feel this way about movie sequels. Naturally you should watch them in order but a part 2 or 3 could be somebody's first. That movie should be able to stand on its own as a movie regardless of knowledge of the other parts. As much as I love the Marvel films I think they don't do this well, but they are a bit of a unique exception with their story telling structure. Anyway, what I wanted to say why I agree with you about Toy Story lying the foundation for the universe, but I come down on the other side of the question. I think if somebody had never seen Toy Story that Toy Story 3 still holds up. Now, maybe the emotional impact of it might not be as great and there are maybe a few things that aren't so obvious (I think people would be wondering why Woody is in charge). Case in point, the ending is still as effective because the movie does re-enforce this idea of Woody being Andy's favourite childhood toy. If we've seen from the start we know this and is maybe that much more tragic, but 3 goes a long way in letting the audience know that Woody and Andy do have this special bond. I do agree that 3 probably wouldn't be as successful if it wasn't a sequel, but I think the quality of the movie would be. I am genuinely curious now to hear from somebody that started with 2 or 3 and their thoughts on the matter.

The way they served up the step-dad to be killed was particularly hilarious to me. Here they were, alone on a boat...He had been beat up all to hell, was drunk as shit, was being a complete belligerent asshole, talked direct shit about Dill's kid, and there was even a line somewhere about the only police being out of town. The only thing that would have made it better was for him to have gotten accidentally covered in chum while counting a huge wad of cash and spouting off about having no parents or siblings.

Typical Ranch-ist attitude

In the (psychic, question mark?) phone call at the end, Dill gestures at the moral of the story, which is that the murder wasn't a good thing to do but it was the right thing to do. But if Dill is ultimately the product of a deterministic universe created by the kid, this is really just a post hoc justification for a decision the kid has already made. Are we as an audience supposed think he made the right or wrong choice? Both the Dill construct and the kid are ostensibly rewarded for their parallel murders by being virtually reunited, so I'm guessing Knight's intention was to convey the former but wow is it a mess.

Right, but let's look at the criteria this way. Out of the 52 films, I've only rated like 10 of these 5 stars. And I feel like a lot of us are doing similar. The criteria of the AFI isn't particularly working. Sure, we're a vastly smaller sample than the AFI voters, but that criteria gives an unnecessary bias to the list. My guess is that the 100 movies on the list, most of them are all really good... but how many truly are truly GREAT? Every week we're seeing that it's not nearly as many as we think. So all that criteria is being rendered silly. And honestly I'd bet most of the actual voters haven't seen, say, Intolerance anyway, they're just echoing whoever. That's another problem with critics and awards, they create an echo chamber. The methodology is there for the creation of the AFI list, fine, but I don't see why I or we should follow it or even consider it. When I think about whether a movie is great, I definitely don't go "well how many Oscars did it win?" or "what do critics think of it?" That's a weird way to think about art if you ask me.

The nerdlinger salesman guy says that, at one point, the game was just about fishing but then became about killing the virtual stepfather. So, my original take is that the salesman represents a character in the game whose role became obsolete as the focus of the game's critical path changed. The salesman seems to also become sentient because he is constantly showing up late to meet Dill when meeting Dill is his only purpose in the game, so the fact that they keep missing each other confuses him, he somehow starts to question why this is the case, and BAM! nerdlinger comes online as a sentient being. But the movie also portrays nerdlinger as a "The Architect" from the Matrix type, in that he says "I am the rules" and somehow knows what the overall objective of the game is ... or at least, what it used to be when it was just a fishing simulator. Placing him in both roles -- a standard NPC for Dill to interact with and also the embodiment of the game's overall AI -- is perhaps the worst aspect of the way this movie was written.

There's a lot to unpack in @Cam Bert's post, and I agree with most of what he says (/you say. I used the third person here because the second person felt confrontational, but the third person feels a little condescending? Suffice it to say that I mean neither of those emotions ), even if I still reach the conclusion that Toy Story should be on the list. (Maybe I just think it's a better movie than everyone else here?) I particularly agree with the absurdity of token genre representation, and I'd say further that it goes beyond just genre to include companies or filmmakers as well, like how we have a token Buster Keaton film and a token Fred Astaire film. One of the worst examples of how stupid the list is with regards to this tokenism is that Birth of a Nation was #44 on the 1998 list and Intolerance wasn't on it at all, and then Intolerance became #49 on the 2007 list and Birth of a Nation got removed completely. It certainly has the optics that voters felt a D.W. Griffith film was a must, but then realized how racist Birth of a Nation was between 1998 and 2007 and had to sub it out for their next choice. I absolutely think that this tokenism is wrong for the list, and I would say that it even goes against the criteria that AFI developed for this list (however flawed you think those criteria may be, which I'll get to later). After all, the AFI criteria all ask you to consider the film, not the filmmaker. D.W. Griffith's historical significance is not what should be considered at all, nor the significance of Disney as a company, or the significance of CG animation as a subgenre. What should be considered by the AFI criteria are the merits of Birth of a Nation, Snow White, and Toy Story as individual films. I didn't think Snow White was a good film (even weighing the historical significance), so I voted no. I think Toy Story is a good film (even separated from its "historical significance"), so I voted yes. So to this tokenism point: would people feel better about having Toy Story at #99 on the list if, say, WALL-E and Toy Story 3 were both also on the list? Next, to point B, which I think relates really well with point D -- should being the first of something important make it a good choice for the list? Again, even by the AFI criteria, the answer is no, since historical significance is only one of the five things that jurors were instructed to consider. Unfortunately, I think jurors weighed this criterion too heavily, which is how The Jazz Singer ended up on the 1998 list. Yeah, it was the first feature with synchronized sound. But I don't see any merit besides that, and I think the jurors were right to bounce it off the 2007 list. But I'd also say the same thing about Snow White. So in that sense, I again agree that being the first CG animated feature is not enough to warrant inclusion, and is at most 1/5 of what is needed. I want to push back just a bit on pieces of his other two points (respectfully of course, because I do think he laid out a wonderful argument all-around). In point A, he argues against the idea that the first film in a series/franchise should get preferential treatment. In my other post, I argued why it should get at least a little preferential treatment. I won't rehash everything again, but in short, the work done in introducing a new world with 100% new characters is something that a sequel gets to take for granted. Can you tell Toy Story 3 without Toy Story? Without changing a millisecond of content, if Toy Story 3 had been released in 2010 as The Toys or Toys Inc. or A Toy's Life and Toy Story and Toy Story 2 never existed, would it still be a great movie? I don't have a definitive answer, but my instinct is no. Toy Story created a fantastic universe, and Toy Story 3 told the best story within that universe. I think the former is the greater achievement. Next, cultural impact. I think his argument that the push to CG animated features was more an inevitability than a brilliant insight or gamble is one I hadn't considered, but it's really true. So I'm willing to set aside the importance of the "first CG feature" tag. But I just disagree with the statement that Toy Story affected culture no more than any other animated film. What other animated film franchise spans 25 years like this? (I'm not counting direct-to-video sequels, sorry Land Before Time.) I think Woody and Buzz are by far the most recognizable Pixar characters, even with the higher marketing push put into Cars. They're probably the most recognizable animated film characters of the last 25 years, with only maybe Shrek as competition. And to compare with Die Hard, in that so many action/terrorism films are thought of using Die Hard as a reference point, I think that's a better comparison than was intended. Every time someone talks about an inanimate object as having human feelings, you hear "sounds like a Pixar movie." "I feel like my copy of War and Peace is judging me for not reading it yet." "That sounds like the next Pixar movie." But when Pixar gets cited for anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, it might get overlooked that the only Pixar franchises that feature this are Toy Story and Cars. And the Pixar guys should get credit for basically being the only game in town in anthropomorphized inanimate objects. No Disney film before had ever done it, and as far as I know, the only animated feature to do it at all before Toy Story was The Brave Little Toaster, which was also made by the original members of Pixar. (I'm torn on how much mentioning The Brave Little Toaster helps or hurts my argument. On one hand, it shows that Toy Story was not as groundbreaking in anthropomorphized inanimate objects as I'd like to be able to argue it was, but on the other hand, it reminds people that much of the plot of Toy Story 3 was a clear ripoff of Brave Little Toaster.) But my point is, just like people make the connection of "Die Hard in a bus", so too do people make the connection "Toy Story but with books" or "Toy Story but with food" even if they often attribute it more to the studio than to the film, which I sort of see as a synecdoche. I'll end by going back to the AFI criteria, which are critical recognition, major award competition, popularity over time, historical significance, and cultural impact. AlmostAGhost questioned whether a self-proclaimed list of greatest movies should be using these criteria, as their relevance towards a movie's greatness is perhaps questionable. But three of the five criteria are about a movie's greatness! Critical recognition asks, did critics (at the time and over the following years) think the movie is great? Major award competition asks, did industry professionals (at the time) think the movie is great? Popularity over time asks, do fans (over the following years) still think the movie is great? All of this is meant to imbue this inherently subjective process with as much objectivity as possible. If we just wanted people to vote for the films they liked the best, we'd get a different list. (We have a list like that; it's the IMDb top 250 and it says that Shawshank Redemption is the greatest film ever made.) Now, the purpose of this podcast isn't to revote based on all five criteria, but more to update the film in context of the last three criteria, since popularity over time, historical significance, and cultural impact can all change vastly in hindsight. And in that regard, Toy Story is absolutely one that deserves to be reexamined, since we're as far removed from the 2007 list as the 2007 list was removed from the release of Toy Story. Only looking back 12 years, it's hard to judge the staying power of something, but I mostly understand why the AFI would put it on the list. 12 years later, I think that its cultural impact has only grown, and that it's still a well-scripted, smart, tight film.

This was my interpretation, and I think it's borne out by some of that out-of-nowhere voiceover that gestures at how consciousness might be an emergent property of this kind o code. But as the gang touched on several times — and what was really at the heart of June's confusion whether this was a video game at all — it's not clear whether the son is playing his own game. Like, when you see screenshots that are anything but code, it appears to be a relatively simple-looking first-person view of a person fishing off a boat, which suggests he's playing as Baker Dill. But if you take everything that's happening in Plymouth as how it appears to Baker Dill, and not how the kid sees it, you're positing that Dill is an AI consciousness, not as an avatar the kid is merely piloting around. That distinction is super important because it's the answer to the question of "who makes the decision to kill Abusive Greek Dad?" It seems to me that the kid has already made up his mind and is guiding Dill to that conclusion. Which means Dill doesn't have agency and there really are no consequences for the moral dilemma he's placed in (especially the last minute wrinkle with Lucky Gas Pumper, as you said earlier). But all this really goes back to what Jason said at the top of the audience Q&A — if the questions are about the internal logic of the video game world, we can just stop right now because there simply aren't answers to be found.

But then they couldn't have given us the gem: "a hooker who can't afford hooks."

Team Blue Cheese is grooooossssssss

So basically as I said to me if you want to point to the fault of the AFI Top 100 the easiest example of what is wrong with it all is Toy Story. Now I should say, I like Toy Story. I think it's a good, not wholly original, story with some at the time state of the art visuals. However, if I want to watch a Pixar movie, if I want to cry, if I want to entertain a child, etc. Toy Story is not going to be the one I pick. If I wanted to show somebody who's never seen a computer animated film, it's not the one I would show. This doesn't make it bad but it makes it confusing as to why it's on this list, because I bet the majority of people feel similar. The simple answer is if you ask any of the critics or filmmakers who put it on the list the answer will be "When I saw it in 1995 my mind was blown! The use of technology was incredible." These say nothing about the actual movie itself. However, I think there are four main areas in which this film raises questions about the whole list and what gets on it. So I'll break it down bit by bit. A. ) The first film in the series represents the whole series/movement, regardless if it is truly the best. So the AFI has a few movie series on its list. You have Indian Jones, Star Wars, Jaws, Lord of the Rings, Psycho, etc. and other films like Snow White that aren't actually part of a literal series but the first in a line of something. While some of the series like Jaws and Psycho are clearly diminishing returns in which the first cannot be topped, others like Star Wars or Lord of the Rings are debatable. We've had the Lord of the Rings discussion and we had some of the Star Wars one in here already, we know there is contention to which one is the best. With Lord of the Rings, Return of the King was the big award winner and Two Towers is the most critically praised. However, the first film in these series set the tone for what the movies were. It established the technology to achieve the visuals. It made the look and tone of what to follow, and therefore the first film in the serues is included regardless if it truly is the best. However, with Toy Story clearly nobody considers the first the best. The 100% Rotten Tomato score was discussed but 2 achieved this feat as well and Armond White was the only thing holding 3 back. If you go to any ranked list of Pixar movies parts 2 and 3 are often higher than 1. They expand on the story and the world and find new stories and often more complex stories to tell. To default to putting Toy Story on the list over 2 or 3 is another example of "Well, this film represent the Toy Story series" but on top of that it is also ticking off my second point. B. ) The first is always best and nothing else is considered unless you are a well known or respected name One of the things you'll read about Toy Story is that it is the first fully computer animated feature film. That's impressive. I remember being impressed as a child as well. However, I might have been more impressed if not for a year early I was watching Re:Boot. Re:Boot for those not in the know was the first fully computer animated TV show. Now, the level in quality between the two is different. Then again with one they are working on a 90 minute movie and the other 12 episodes of a weekly series. I only bring this up to point out that Toy Story wasn't miles ahead. Animation was moving in that direction. Pixar themselves had made short films. Tin Toy was talked about and then of course Luxo Jr. People in the animation world had seen these and with the push of computer visual effects in movies the animation world was moving in that way anyway. So yes Toy Story got the be the first feature length film to be entirely computer animated, but that's a historical note, not a stamp of quality on the film. Do you know who the first fully computer generated character in a live action film was? It's Jar Jar Binks. Now, if you are into animation and that you can look at the technical skill that went into making him. However, is he the best computer generated character? No, because people don't care so much about the skill that made him, they care more about his annoying character, accent, stale humor, etc. So if we can look past it there, why not here? As discussed the people in the film are a bit of nightmare fuel. They couldn't do it and it shows. So if humans are so hard, shouldn't we praise the first one with good looking humans more? The fact that it was it's first of it kind kinda of puts the blinders on people. It makes a film important but that doesn't necessarily make it the greatest. Basically, it is easy for us to divorce "first" from "greatest" when the end product is clearly lacking. However, for something like Toy Story and many other films on the list when the end result is actually good but not perfect it gets harder to separate first and greatest. I fully predict Avatar to be on the next AFI list. A lot will be said about it's 3D technology, but that's because it's James Cameron and made money. They're not going to go back through the history of 3D schlock just "this was the first digital 3D film that started a multiyear trend." Again, being first doesn't make something great in and of itself. C. ) "Cultural importance" and actual pop culture impact are often different If you think of an animated film these days the first thing that comes to mind for most is a 3D computer animated movie. For the large majority of animated films in America that is the way these days. Now it's easy to say that's because of Toy Story but is it really? This is where things fall into a bit of the "what if" game territory. If Toy Story was a failure would have animation gone back to traditional 2D? Probably not. As I said, the trend wheel was already moving on this. If Toy Story wasn't a success the next or third one would have been. Pixar did start out grossing Disney animated films, but this also coincides with the end of the Disney Renaissance. However, if you want to talk about Box Office gross the real story is with Pixar's 5th film Finding Nemo. Until The Incredibles 2 last year, Finding Nemo (adjusted for inflation) was the highest grossing Pixar movie. It was a true phenomenon. Also between those film there was another very successful computer animated franchise starting movie called Shrek that came out. Now, to we attribute all that success to Toy Story and saying it "kicked off the trend of computer animated movies" is a bit misplaced. Yet, going back to my second point it is easy to point to the first of something and be like "All this because of that" whether the connection is fully there or not. How about pop culture? Yes, the characters are known. Then again, most Disney characters are. If you want to look at merchandising, the Cars movies are king there with Toy Story barely making a blip. Award recognition? Special achievement Oscar, but no best picture. It's sequel Toy Story 3 did get one so again feeding back into point A. I guess what I want to say is if the film is really culturally important we should have had movies trying to ape it and scenes that are parodied. We get beloved characters and a catchphrase but those things are par for the course in most Disney movies. Now take something like Die Hard that inspired so many knock off film, mimicked scenes, etc. and is so well known and accepted in our culture that the phrase "Die Hard on a/in a..." is accepted and understood short hand. Die Hard to this day referenced, Toy Story references not as much. Which of these films had more of an impact? Toy Story to me didn't do anything more so in effect culture than any other animated film. Tying back to point B, it gets a lot of create for paving the way for future computer animated films, yet if it was truly impactful movie it wouldn't just be the technology it would be the film itself. D. ) Token genre representation This is going to be brief because I'm tired and a lot of this I covered in the other points. When thinking of movies for the AFI 100 there is almost a check list of things that need to be covered. Need a silent film, check, need a comedy, check, need a horror, check, okay good let's get back to real movies. The form this takes circles back to point A of just picking one film to represent a larger thing. Film is a wide array of things, and comparing a comedy against a drama can be like apples and oranges. Yet at the end of the day the drama is seen as legit while something a bit more genre is seen as a specialty. To touch upon point C animated films are a huge part of our culture. Many of us grew up in an era of yearly animated Disney films. We watched Saturday morning cartoons. It's part of our culture and the history of film. So what do we get? Snow White and Toy Story, the first 2D and the first 3D. These are huge genres with many films to choose from, but going back to point B, it's the first so it's the best and point A "what we mean by this is, all Disney animated films are great." It is a bit of just short hand ease of recognizing something as important to history of film but still treating it as a side thing and not giving it real though. I'm sure if I tried I could make this points better and there is still a lot rattling around in my head. As I said I see these four point as the major flaws of the whole AFI List and to me Toy Story has so much in it that speaks to these points to me. To see Toy Story on this list just reads as a bit lazy. It feels like you wanted to put a type of film on without having to think about it. Up, first fully computer animated film to be nominated for best picture with a huge cultural impact (how many times has the opening few minutes been referenced) seems like a logical choice but it came out after the list was made. Does that mean it'll replace Toy Story on the next list? I doubt it. As time goes on I hope it will be replaced with another film, but the fact that Snow White is still on the list leaves doubt in my mind.

I wish they will make a podcast or youtube series about June playing video games that either don't fit her perceptions of video games in general (i.e. Firewatch, What remains of Edith Finch, Stardew Valley) or have a tear-jerking story/ending (i.e. The Last of Us, Telltale's Walking Dead: Season One) and her reactions to those games. If this game/simulation is sort of being an escape and grief-dealing mechanism for the son, why does he make Baker Dill's life miserable? Baker is constantly strapped for cash, and forced to serve asshole customers. Baker doesn't have to live like a king. Just give him a quiet and idyllic island life that doesn't require him to be constantly worry about money. And why in the end, after knowing everything is a simulation, does Baker try to make the murder seem like an accident? Why is he so afraid getting seen by the gas station kid? Even the man in glasses, which I assume to be a monitoring AI for the game, basically says, okay, let's murder the man. So even Baker just kills the step dad in front of everyone, no-one is going to arrest or punish him. The "world" literally on his side.

Or stuff that burger with some!