Wesley Morris

Yeah.

I'm Wesley Morris.

I'm a critic for The New York Times, and I'm the host of a podcast called Cannonball.

We're going to talk about that song you can't get out of your head, that TV show you watched and can't stop thinking about, and the movie that you saw when you were a kid that made you who you are, whether you like it or not.

I was so embarrassed the whole time because it's a bad film, and I still love it.

You can find Cannonball on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.

Of course.

I mean, I'm sad that it has to be under these circumstances.

He was the sort of director who was really interested in pleasing people, right?

He wanted to make movies that made people happy.

Even when they were like dark movies, he was looking for a way to find the pleasure centers that we as moviegoers needed met when we went to a movie theater.

Or, you know, because a lot of the times with Reiner, you would be watching these movies at home over and over and over again.

Oh, yeah.

Whether you went to a video store and pulled one of those movies off the shelf or it was just on cable all the time.

The thing about them that is so wonderful is also the thing that made Rob Reiner kind of, um...

He wasn't a critic's director, right?

In a lot of ways, you go back and read the reviews of his movies, and it would always be, the charge would be the movies didn't go far enough.

They didn't go deep enough.

They weren't getting into, like, the nitty-gritty of human relationships in the way that they probably could have.

I mean, I think the thing about Rob Reiner that's important to make the distinction between is a question of what the greatest movies are.