Jean Reno Episodes

The Bad Dads head underwater for Luc Besson’s The Big Blue, or Le Grand Bleu if you want to sound sophisticated while drowning slowly in late-80s synth. The discussion starts with the film’s scale: 168 minutes in the director’s cut, which immediately becomes one of the main charges against it. Dan chose the film and remembers liking it years ago, but even he admits this is a very long movie — the sort of film you watch over several evenings because holding your breath for the full running time would be medically inadvisable. The dads work through the black-and-white childhood opening in Greece, where young Jacques Mayol and Enzo Molinari are established as boys shaped by the sea in very different ways. Enzo is cocky, competitive and already built around status; Jacques is quieter, gentler and more emotionally fused with the water. Jacques’ father dies in a diving accident, an early trauma that seems to bind Jacques to the ocean rather than drive him away from it. As adults, t…

The premise (simple, but the film isn’t): A privileged but messy NYC teenager, Lisa (Anna Paquin), causes a moment of distraction that leads to a bus hitting and killing a woman (Allison Janney). In the immediate aftermath she lies to the police—claiming the light was green—helping the driver (Mark Ruffalo) avoid consequences. The rest of the film is Lisa spiralling through guilt, grief, anger, and a need to “make it right,” while the city and everyone around her keep moving. What we talked a...