Ethan Hawke gets an initial no; the alternative apex offered is Before Sunset, the second one, which came after Training Day, with Before Midnight and Before Sunrise also liked, Reality Bites arguable as his movie-star apex, and Boyhood, where he is amazing but not on screen much.
Whether who you are married to counts prompts the ruling, deferred to the person who invented the show and the category, that it is only about performance, not life; still, the case for 2001 is made, a hot celebrity couple and a respected actor newly proven in action, and one host switches their pick to 01 while another stays with Before Sunset.
Hawke's turn in Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest, basically playing Alonzo, gets a shout-out as an idea hatched at 2:30 in the morning after eight beers.
Antoine Fuqua is a yes: a good career, but how do you top directing Denzel at his peak performance, something to tell your grandkids; The Equalizer 2 is the most anticipated movie of the year for one host's father, Dr. Bill, who loves Denzel and The Equalizer and should have been on the episode, and of the four Denzel-Fuqua movies this is by far the best.
Eva Mendes and the other supporting people are not at their peaks here; Scott Glenn's apex is The Right Stuff, when in the 80s he looked like a potential top-tier actor.
Denzel gets a yes from one host; others answer Malcolm X, a movie about one man featuring three primary characters played by the same actor, a 19-year-old gangster, a 25-year-old militant and a 30-year-old spiritual leader; the Training Day case is that Denzel, already America's most beloved actor with a unanimous approval rating, lacked an Oscar and a Michael Jordan 1992 Finals moment and then played a part nobody else could in a movie that should not have worked; it is called neck and neck, a total coin flip.
Favorite recent Denzel: Flight is growing on one host, the two Travolta movies are liked and Unstoppable is called better with a fun Chris Pine; Denzel inhabits characters for better and worse, probably smoking for three months here and drinking through Flight, and he struggles only when he tries something smaller that recesses from essential Denzel-ness, as with Roman J. Israel.
On the phone, the acting apex is Malcolm X for a single performance, but the cultural apex, the Denzel moment, is Training Day for sure: everyone followed along waiting for the Oscar, Halle won the same year right before him, and his two-birds-with-one-stone comment played out perfectly.
Woven through the ZipRecruiter read: casting Tobey Maguire in the Ethan Hawke role would have been disastrous; Maguire spent two months on undercover narcotics runs, lost weight and got in crazy shape, but Anton Fuqua (as transcribed) was never 100% sold; he would have crushed Smiley in the poker scene holding pocket rockets.
Davis Guggenheim was set to direct with Sam Jackson and Matt Damon as the stars; that movie wins no Oscar, and Jackson would have been almost a parody of Denzel, red meat and meta where Denzel feels real and cinematic, though one host would have watched it and thinks it could have worked.
Eminem and Christian Bale allegedly turned down Jake Hoyt; Eminem is really good in 8 Mile and very funny in Funny People, and his career would differ if he had gone Will Smith and left music, but he could not have played this role, and it is hard to imagine him punked for 90 minutes or fighting Denzel, since he is pretty skinny.
The Dr. Dre needle drop and the film's L.A. feel; the two lead performances; the anti-hero crime storytelling that anticipated The Shield; Fuqua's modern, propulsive direction; Ethan Hawke's career moment
Hearing the Dr. Dre song takes one host straight back to 2001, the second decade of hip hop, with Dre then turning up in the movie later; the music and the legitimately L.A. feel are that host's pick.
The two performances discussed for thirty minutes still work perfectly; the film sits close to where TV was heading, the anti-hero era of The Shield that became consistent in cop and drug-dealer stories, and the Denzel performance splits the difference between that and the Sidney Lumet and French Connection documentary grit of the 70s, in a period with fewer crime movies than anyone in the room would like.
The direction is totally modern with nothing dated, like Fight Club; Fuqua is slick and bright, Hollywood dirty, with great pace and propulsive movies even when they are not good, a cross between Michael Bay and William Friedkin, and the locations are authentic even though parts of this movie do not hang together.
Ethan Hawke has aged nicely, this being the next step after Reality Bites, Before Sunrise and Gattaca; they will give him an Oscar at 70 for a grand old man performance even though he deserved one for six or seven movies, like a player who never won the MVP but could have.
The new category is introduced as something these podcasts have circled before; it is expected to be really funny for a Roadhouse episode, with a case that Ben Gazzara was robbed in 1989 and for the Jeff Healy Band (as transcribed) for Best Original Song.
Several of those nominees are liked, In the Bedroom a lot and Gosford Park pretty good, but Fuqua and Training Day should have been nominated; Lord of the Rings was a tough hang that soaked up nominations for years in a way Star Wars never could, even though one host would take Star Wars a hundred times.
Early validation from a nomination might have set Fuqua on a different course, since the movies he made after this resemble Training Day; Denzel's Best Actor win over Russell Crowe, Sean Penn in I Am Sam, Will Smith in Ali and Tom Wilkinson in In the Bedroom is fine, and Halle Berry won for Monsters Ball (as transcribed).
As in Rain Man, where Tom Cruise is the best person in the movie but Dustin Hoffman won, the performer who blows everyone away obscures how good the other one was; Hawke had to avoid being blown away by Denzel, be on PCP for half an hour and be believable in the fight scenes, which is likened to Chris Paul playing on a hamstring.
Nobody here would pick Kingsley in Sexy Beast over Hawke, though he is good in it; two-hander movies like Butch and Sundance, The Sting, The Color of Money and Rain Man raise the question of how filmmakers present the straight man, and Redford is seen as more important than Hoffman in All the President's Men.
Hawke is in more scenes and the movie starts in his house, so he could be argued as the lead with Denzel supporting, but really both were best actors, and doing it otherwise is like making Geena Davis supporting in Thelma and Louise.
Later, on the phone, the Hawke loss to Jim Broadbent is called terrible and one of the few times an actor was right there with Denzel, alongside Viola in Fences, Morgan Freeman in Glory and Hanks in Philadelphia; he should have gotten that award.
Earlier, the hosts note Denzel had only a supporting Oscar before this, having been passed over for Malcolm X, He Got Game, The Hurricane and Remember the Titans.
Four candidates are laid out: Denzel bullying Ethan Hawke into smoking pot that turns out to be PCP, an amazing mental chess match of challenging somebody's manhood; the nine-minute robbery of Scott Glenn, where the crew goes back to shoot him and take his money and the guy in the bulletproof vest really does get shot, which Jake refuses to join; the poker scene with the Latino gang at Smiley's house, which has no Denzel in it; and the final Denzel-versus-Hawke shootout in the house.
Their first meeting in the diner, the 'tell me a story' scene, is one host's favorite and makes it five candidates; the 'this is a newspaper' beat is recited.
Asked whether any character in a lifetime of watching movies resembles Alonzo, the answer is that he resembles older guys on a high school team: charismatic but terrifying, guys who could kick your ass but whom you might also die for, messing with you while trying to indoctrinate you, leaving a younger man completely confused; as a younger man this host thought that way about Dave Jacoby. — Chris Ryan
Another voice objects that Jacoby is not threatening and is told they did not know him back then; picks then split, with one host going diner scene alongside Sean and reciting the 'tell me a story' exchange, and another going poker scene for the Latino street gang's crude 'shit pushed in' question.
Revisiting it during the nitpicks, one host thinks the most rewatchable scene might be the one after the diner where Alonzo makes Jake take the drugs, with Alonzo pulling a gun on another motorist who just stays cool and stopping in the middle of intersections.
Asked for a favorite scene seventeen years later, the phoned-in answer is the table scene, the best scene in the movie even though it does not involve Denzel; another voice says that was their case too and that the boys picked the diner scene.
The diner scene is called good, but the poker scene is an incredible nine minutes that left one viewer tense, back knotted and stomach nervous, not knowing how Jake gets out; the escalation is laid out from gangsters taking your gun, to your ride leaving, to being asked a crude question, which is the end of the line.
