Esther Zuckerman

John Spencer's, like, single card?

I just want to do this soft pivot off of what we were talking about of this kind of modality of rom-com that is one that's really hard to execute.

And especially now we live in a fucking desert where we're only getting like the dumbest, most synthetic rom-coms or they have to also be gun movies, right?

Like either they're like $2 movies.

Our buddy Amanda Dobbins on Big Picture was making this case recently where I think they were talking about the people we meet on vacation.

And was saying how like Hallmark and Netflix have made people think that rom-coms are designed to be really cheap programmers, right?

And she was like, you know, there are entire Instagram accounts now with millions and millions of followers based off of travel and based off of look at how nice the sweater I bought was and this face cream I'm using was, right?

If it's just about the access to the luxury of

events, locations, items.

Like, people can get that.

They don't need it delivered to them in a movie.

And yet, if you're not actually putting that level of like production value on screen, and those things are production value tantamount to like a Marvel movie not investing enough in CGI, then you're like, then what the fuck am I doing here?

I think it even goes beyond that, which is just like, for me, it's the magic act of the chemistry that two people are creating.

And then when that's working in tandem with the writing, with the location, with the supporting cast, all that stuff, when it feels like you've created an ecosystem, but I do agree with you, it needs to feel like it is grounded in the specific.

And the specific can't just be the tropes of the characters or the plot beats.

It also needs to be like a sense of place.

Even if that place is made up

or heightened and I feel like we're stuck in a lot of like streaming movies that are based around vacations where the characters have no relationship to the place they're in and the place is being rendered very artificially which is like the worst of all worlds we're in a fake Maui

and they just happen to meet here, you know?

And it's like, great, so now you get a fucking surfing sequence?