Tola and Tim discuss (yet another Denis Villeneuve film) Blade Runner 2049. Tim struggles to make connections from Tola’s list of actors to Blade Runner and 2001. The guys discuss sequels, opening text, Vangelis, Ryan Gosling’s eyes, Dave Bautista’s tiny glasses, Princess Buttercup, Nabokov (thanks to Priscilla Page’s excellent essay for this connection The Poetry of Blade Runner 2049), miming vs feeling humanity, AI girlfriends, the Joi of Ana de Armas, Jared Leto’s Elon Musk-ian scene-chewing and monologues on slavery, the joy of an Edward James Olmos cameo, the complicated ickiness of consent in Blade Runner (thanks to El Zee’s essay The Impossibility of Consent), questions about production lines for replicants, why we choose to watch movies that recapitulate terribleness, Sorry to Bother You, Manic Pixie Dream Sexbots, Take Your AI Girlfriend To Work Day, junkyard kite harpoons, failure modes of hovercars, implanted memories, extra creepy holographic sexbots, Chekhov’s hard drive, Minneapolis’s Somali theater contingent, the emotions of a murderbot, radioactive Las Vegas and its giant statues of sex workers, Roger Deakins’ amazing cinematography, more objectification and commoditization of women, Deckard’s bees, feeding whiskey to a dog, drinks over fistfights, changes in how we interpret films over time, fighting in the sea while a car slowly goes underwater, and tears in snow.
Final score: science 65%, fiction 73%, film 91%.
Next up: Project Hail Mary (more Gosling!)

It's the Fantastic Four! We recorded this so long ago that we don't have a helpful description to write here.
Many many thanks to Paul Zastrow for audio engineering this episode.
Final score: science 50%, fiction 60%, film 80%
Next up: Blade Runner 2049

Tola and Tim welcome our long time collaborator Guy Ellis, composer and performer of our theme and outro songs, to discuss "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," including being homesick, Balok's All Hour Disco and Discount Delicatessen, Guy eating his dessert before dinner, Disco Versions of Theme Songs, Bob Balaban vs Wallace Shawn, saying "Present Day" in a film, the Raiders Connection, teasing the audience visually, fearless three year olds, the director putting his finger on the scale, the great character actor Roberts Blossom, the ubiquity of the Close Encounters theme, all the people who turned down the role that defined Richard Dreyfuss' career, manifesting what you see in your artist's inner eye, Douglas Trumbull's mist machine, Guy's band Cloud Cover, the Kodály music language, the challenge of interspecies communication, solving everything w/ LLMs, the baud rate of baleen whales, the Deep Space Network, cartography's moment in the sun, the pure awesomeness of Devil's Tower National Monument, Tola forgets the name of amazing author N. Scott Momaday (who Tola heard lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1997 and who recently passed away), Tola's love for Melinda Dillon as an actress and incredulity that she didn't become a giant movie star, Kraftwerk cover bands, speculation that having a competent government would be nice, faking a plague (D'oh!), embarrassing your spouse in front of the neighbors, reminiscing about when there were only four news channels, competent investigators, Tim's grandfather and Rockwell International, Merle Haggard, sneaking the Jaws theme into the sound mix, floating oil refineries, musical communication, the refreshing lack of a sequel to this movie, capturing and bottling up pure concentrated wonder, "Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox" by Stephen Webb, debating the existence of aliens, living in the celestial equivalent of North Dakota, and seeing movies when you're young versus later in life.

Final score: science 60%, fiction 87%, and film 96%.
Next time on the Monte Hall Effect: the 2025 film "The Fantastic Four: First Steps."

Special Guest: Guy Ellis.